14 files changed, 134179 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/.gitattributes b/.gitattributes
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6833f05
--- /dev/null
+++ b/.gitattributes
@@ -0,0 +1,3 @@
+* text=auto
+*.txt text
+*.md text
diff --git a/14052-0.txt b/14052-0.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..e07f071
--- /dev/null
+++ b/14052-0.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,19420 @@
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 14052 ***
+
+ROUSSEAU
+
+BY
+
+JOHN MORLEY
+
+
+VOLUMES I. and II.
+
+
+
+London
+MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
+NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
+1905
+
+_All rights reserved_
+
+_First printed in this form 1886_
+_Reprinted 1888, 1891, 1896, 1900, 1905_
+
+
+
+
+
+VOL. I.
+
+
+
+NOTE TO THE FIRST EDITION.
+
+
+This work differs from its companion volume in offering something more
+like a continuous personal history than was necessary in the case of
+such a man as Voltaire, the story of whose life may be found in more
+than one English book of repute. Of Rousseau there is, I believe, no
+full biographical account in our literature, and even France has nothing
+more complete under this head than Musset-Pathay's _Histoire de la Vie
+et des Ouvrages de J.J. Rousseau_ (1821). This, though a meritorious
+piece of labour, is extremely crude and formless in composition and
+arrangement, and the interpreting portions are devoid of interest.
+
+The edition of Rousseau's works to which the references have been made
+is that by M. Auguis, in twenty-seven volumes, published in 1825 by
+Dalibon. In 1865 M. Streckeisen-Moultou published from the originals,
+which had been deposited in the library of Neuchâtel by Du Peyrou, the
+letters addressed to Rousseau by various correspondents. These two
+interesting volumes, which are entitled _Rousseau, ses Amis et ses
+Ennemis_, are mostly referred to under the name of their editor.
+
+_February_, 1873.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The second edition in 1878 was revised; some portions were considerably
+shortened, and a few additional footnotes inserted. No further changes
+have been made in the present edition.
+
+_January_, 1886.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS OF VOL. I.
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+PRELIMINARY.
+                                                           PAGE
+
+The Revolution                                                1
+Rousseau its most direct speculative precursor                2
+His distinction among revolutionists                          4
+His personality                                               5
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+YOUTH.
+
+Birth and descent                                             8
+Predispositions                                              10
+First lessons                                                11
+At M. Lambercier's                                           15
+Early disclosure of sensitive temperament                    19
+Return to Geneva                                             20
+Two apprenticeships                                          26
+Flight from Geneva                                           30
+Savoyard proselytisers                                       31
+Rousseau sent to Anncey, and thence to Turin                 34
+Conversion to Catholicism                                    35
+Takes service with Madame de Vercellis                       39
+Then with the Count de Gouvon                                42
+Returns to vagabondage                                       43
+And to Madame de Warens                                      45
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+SAVOY.
+
+Influence of women upon Rousseau                             46
+Account of Madame de Warens                                  48
+Rousseau takes up his abode with her                         54
+His delight in life with her                                 54
+The seminarists                                              57
+To Lyons                                                     58
+Wanderings to Freiburg, Neuchâtel, and elsewhere             60
+Through the east of France                                   62
+Influence of these wanderings upon him                       67
+Chambéri                                                     69
+Household of Madame de Warens                                70
+Les Charmettes                                               73
+Account of his feeling for nature                            79
+His intellectual incapacity at this time                     83
+Temperament                                                  84
+Literary interests, and method                               85
+Joyful days with his benefactress                            90
+To Montpellier: end of an episode                            92
+Dates                                                        94
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+THERESA LE VASSEUR.
+
+Tutorship at Lyons                                           95
+Goes to Paris in search of fortune                           97
+His appearance at this time                                  98
+Made secretary to the ambassador at Venice                  100
+His journey thither and life there                          103
+Return to Paris                                             106
+Theresa Le Vasseur                                          107
+Character of their union                                    110
+Rousseau's conduct towards her                              113
+Their later estrangements                                   115
+Rousseau's scanty means                                     119
+Puts away his five children                                 120
+His apologies for the crime                                 122
+Their futility                                              126
+Attempts to recover the children                            128
+Rousseau never married to Theresa                           129
+Contrast between outer and inner life                       130
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+THE DISCOURSES.
+
+Local academies in France                                   132
+Circumstances of the composition of the first Discourse     133
+How far the paradox was original                            135
+His visions for thirteen years                              136
+Summary of the first Discourse                          138-145
+Obligations to Montaigne                                    145
+And to the Greeks                                           145
+Semi-Socratic manner                                        147
+Objections to the Discourse                                 148
+Ways of stating its positive side                           149
+Dangers of exaggerating this positive side                  151
+Its excess                                                  152
+Second Discourse                                            154
+Ideas of the time upon the state of nature                  155
+Their influence upon Rousseau                               156
+Morelly, as his predecessor                                 156
+Summary of the second Discourse                         159-170
+Criticism of its method                                     171
+Objection from its want of evidence                         172
+Other objections to its account of primitive nature         173
+Takes uniformity of process for granted                     176
+In what the importance of the second Discourse consisted    177
+Its protest against the mockery of civilisation             179
+The equality of man, how true, and how false                180
+This doctrine in France, and in America                     182
+Rousseau's Discourses, a reaction against the historic
+    method                                                  183
+Mably, and socialism                                        184
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+PARIS.
+
+Influence of Geneva upon Rousseau                           187
+Two sides of his temperament                                191
+Uncongenial characteristics of Parisian society             191
+His associates                                              195
+Circumstances of a sudden moral reform                      196
+Arising from his violent repugnance for the manners of
+    the time                                                202
+His assumption of a seeming cynicism                        207
+Protests against atheism                                    209
+The Village Soothsayer at Fontainebleau                     212
+Two anedotes of his moral singularity                       214
+Revisits Geneva                                             216
+End of Madame de Warens                                     217
+Rousseau's re-conversion to Protestantism                   220
+The religious opinions then current in Geneva               223
+Turretini and other rationalisers                           226
+Effect upon Rousseau                                        227
+Thinks of taking up his abode in Geneva                     227
+Madame d'Epinay offers him the Hermitage                    229
+Retires thither against the protests of his friends         231
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+THE HERMITAGE.
+
+Distinction between the old and the new anchorite           234
+Rousseau's first days at the Hermitage                      235
+Rural delirium                                              237
+Dislike of society                                          242
+Meditates work on Sensitive Morality                        243
+Arranges the papers of the Abbé de Saint Pierre             244
+His remarks on them                                         246
+Violent mental crisis                                       247
+First conception of the New Heloïsa                         250
+A scene of high morals                                      254
+Madame d'Houdetot                                           255
+Erotic mania becomes intensified                            256
+Interviews with Madame d'Houdetot                           258
+Saint Lambert interposes                                    262
+Rousseau's letter to Saint Lambert                          264
+Its profound falsity                                        265
+Saint Lambert's reply                                       267
+Final relations with him and with Madame d'Houdetot         268
+Sources of Rousseau's irritability                          270
+Relations with Diderot                                      273
+With Madame d'Epinay                                        276
+With Grimm                                                  279
+Grimm's natural want of sympathy with Rousseau              282
+Madame d'Epinay's journey to Geneva                         284
+Occasion of Rousseau's breach with Grimm                    285
+And with Madame d'Epinay                                    288
+Leaves the Hermitage                                        289
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+MUSIC.
+
+General character of Rousseau's aim in music                291
+As composer                                                 292
+Contest on the comparative merits of French and Italian
+    music                                                   293
+Rousseau's Letter on French Music                           293
+His scheme of musical notation                              296
+Its chief element                                           298
+Its practical value                                         299
+His mistake                                                 300
+Two minor objections                                        300
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+VOLTAIRE AND D'ALEMBERT.
+
+Position of Voltaire                                        302
+General differences between him and Rousseau                303
+Rousseau not the profounder of the two                      305
+But he had a spiritual element                              305
+Their early relations                                       308
+Voltaire's poem on the Earthquake of Lisbon                 309
+Rousseau's wonder that he should have written it            310
+His letter to Voltaire upon it                              311
+Points to the advantages of the savage state                312
+Reproduces Pope's general position                          313
+Not an answer to the position taken by Voltaire             314
+Confesses the question insoluble, but still argues          316
+Curious close of the letter                                 318
+Their subsequent relations                                  319
+D'Alembert's article on Geneva                              321
+The church and the theatre                                  322
+Jeremy Collier: Bossuet                                     323
+Rousseau's contention on stage plays                        324
+Rude handling of commonplace                                325
+The true answer to Rousseau as to theory of dramatic
+    morality                                                326
+His arguments relatively to Geneva                          327
+Their meaning                                               328
+Criticism on the Misanthrope                                328
+Rousseau's contrast between Paris and an imaginary Geneva   329
+Attack on love as a poetic theme                            332
+This letter, the mark of his schism from the party of the
+    philosophers                                            336
+
+
+
+
+JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU
+
+Born                                                     1712
+Fled from Geneva                           _March_, 1728
+Changes religion at Turin                  _April_,  "
+With Madame de Warens, including various
+    intervals, until                       _April_, 1740
+Goes to Paris with musical schemes                       1741
+Secretary at Venice                       _Spring_, 1743
+
+Paris, first as secretary to M. Francueil, then  {       1744
+    as composer, and copyist                     {        to
+                                                 {       1756
+The Hermitage                            _April 9_, 1756
+Montmorency                              _Dec. 15_, 1757
+Yverdun                                  _June 14_, 1762
+Motiers-Travers                          _July 10_, 1762
+Isle of St. Peter                          _Sept._, 1765
+Strasburg                                   _Nov._,  "
+Paris                                   _December_,  "
+Arrives in England                       _Jan. 13_, 1766
+Leaves Dover                              _May 22_, 1767
+Fleury                                      _June_,  "
+Trye                                        _July_,  "
+Dauphiny                                    _Aug._, 1768
+Paris                                       _June_, 1770
+Death                                     _July 2_, 1778
+
+PRINCIPAL WRITINGS.
+
+Discourse on the Influence of Learning and
+    Art                                           PUBLISHED 1750
+Discourse on Inequality                               "     1754
+Letter to D'Alembert                                  "     1758
+New Heloïsa (began 1757, finished in winter
+    of 1759-60)                                       "     1761
+Social Contract                                       "     1762
+Emilius                                               "     1762
+Letters from the Mountain                             "     1764
+Confessions (written 1766-70)                     {  Pt. I  1781
+                                                  {  Pt. II 1788
+Rêveries (written 1777-78).
+
+     _Comme dans les étangs assoupis sous les bois,
+     Dans plus d'une âme on voit deux choses à la fois:
+     Le ciel, qui teint les eaux à peine remuées
+     Avec tous ses rayons et toutes ses nueés;
+     Et la vase, fond morne, affreux, sombre et dormant,
+     Où des reptiles noirs fourmillent vaguement._
+                                                 HUGO.
+
+
+
+
+ROUSSEAU.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+PRELIMINARY.
+
+
+Christianity is the name for a great variety of changes which took place
+during the first centuries of our era, in men's ways of thinking and
+feeling about their spiritual relations to unseen powers, about their
+moral relations to one another, about the basis and type of social
+union. So the Revolution is now the accepted name for a set of changes
+which began faintly to take a definite practical shape first in America,
+and then in France, towards the end of the eighteenth century; they had
+been directly prepared by a small number of energetic thinkers, whose
+speculations represented, as always, the prolongation of some old lines
+of thought in obedience to the impulse of new social and intellectual
+conditions. While one movement supplied the energy and the principles
+which extricated civilisation from the ruins of the Roman empire, the
+other supplies the energy and the principles which already once, between
+the Seven Years' War and the assembly of the States General, saved
+human progress in face of the political fatuity of England and the
+political nullity of France; and they are now, amid the distraction of
+the various representatives of an obsolete ordering, the only forces to
+be trusted at once for multiplying the achievements of human
+intelligence stimulated by human sympathy, and for diffusing their
+beneficent results with an ampler hand and more far-scattering arm.
+Faith in a divine power, devout obedience to its supposed will, hope of
+ecstatic, unspeakable reward, these were the springs of the old
+movement. Undivided love of our fellows, steadfast faith in human
+nature, steadfast search after justice, firm aspiration towards
+improvement, and generous contentment in the hope that others may reap
+whatever reward may be, these are the springs of the new.
+
+There is no given set of practical maxims agreed to by all members of
+the revolutionary schools for achieving the work of release from the
+pressure of an antiquated social condition, any more than there is one
+set of doctrines and one kind of discipline accepted by all Protestants.
+Voltaire was a revolutionist in one sense, Diderot in another, and
+Rousseau in a third, just as in the practical order, Lafayette, Danton,
+Robespierre, represented three different aspirations and as many
+methods. Rousseau was the most directly revolutionary of all the
+speculative precursors, and he was the first to apply his mind boldly to
+those of the social conditions which the revolution is concerned by one
+solution or another to modify. How far his direct influence was
+disastrous in consequence of a mischievous method, we shall have to
+examine. It was so various that no single answer can comprehend an
+exhaustive judgment. His writings produced that glow of enthusiastic
+feeling in France, which led to the all-important assistance rendered by
+that country to the American colonists in a struggle so momentous for
+mankind. It was from his writings that the Americans took the ideas and
+the phrases of their great charter, thus uniting the native principles
+of their own direct Protestantism with principles that were strictly
+derivative from the Protestantism of Geneva. Again, it was his work more
+than that of any other one man, that France arose from the deadly decay
+which had laid hold of her whole social and political system, and found
+that irresistible energy which warded off dissolution within and
+partition from without. We shall see, further, that besides being the
+first immediately revolutionary thinker in politics, he was the most
+stirring of reactionists in religion. His influence formed not only
+Robespierre and Paine, but Chateaubriand, not only Jacobinism, but the
+Catholicism of the Restoration. Thus he did more than any one else at
+once to give direction to the first episodes of revolution, and force to
+the first episode of reaction.
+
+There are some teachers whose distinction is neither correct thought,
+nor an eye for the exigencies of practical organisation, but simply
+depth and fervour of the moral sentiment, bringing with it the
+indefinable gift of touching many hearts with love of virtue and the
+things of the spirit. The Christian organisations which saved western
+society from dissolution owe all to St. Paul, Hildebrand, Luther,
+Calvin; but the spiritual life of the west during all these generations
+has burnt with the pure flame first lighted by the sublime mystic of the
+Galilean hills. Aristotle acquired for men much knowledge and many
+instruments for gaining more; but it is Plato, his master, who moves the
+soul with love of truth and enthusiasm for excellence. There is peril in
+all such leaders of souls, inasmuch as they incline men to substitute
+warmth for light, and to be content with aspiration where they need
+direction. Yet no movement goes far which does not count one of them in
+the number of its chiefs. Rousseau took this place among those who
+prepared the first act of that revolutionary drama, whose fifth act is
+still dark to us.
+
+At the heart of the Revolution, like a torrid stream flowing
+undiscernible amid the waters of a tumbling sea, is a new way of
+understanding life. The social changes desired by the various assailants
+of the old order are only the expression of a deeper change in moral
+idea, and the drift of the new moral idea is to make life simpler. This
+in a sense is at the bottom of all great religious and moral movements,
+and the Revolution emphatically belongs to the latter class. Like such
+movements in the breast of the individual, those which stir an epoch
+have their principle in the same craving for disentanglement of life.
+This impulse to shake off intricacies is the mark of revolutionary
+generations, and it was the starting-point of all Rousseau's mental
+habits, and of the work in which they expressed themselves. His mind
+moved outwards from this centre, and hence the fact that he dealt
+principally with government and education, the two great agencies which,
+in an old civilisation with a thousand roots and feelers, surround
+external life and internal character with complexity. Simplification of
+religion by clearing away the overgrowth of errors, simplification of
+social relations by equality, of literature and art by constant return
+to nature, of manners by industrious homeliness and thrift,--this is the
+revolutionary process and ideal, and this is the secret of Rousseau's
+hold over a generation that was lost amid the broken maze of
+fallen systems.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The personality of Rousseau has most equivocal and repulsive sides. It
+has deservedly fared ill in the esteem of the saner and more rational of
+those who have judged him, and there is none in the history of famous
+men and our spiritual fathers that begat us, who make more constant
+demands on the patience or pity of those who study his life. Yet in no
+other instance is the common eagerness to condense all predication about
+a character into a single unqualified proposition so fatally inadequate.
+If it is indispensable that we should be for ever describing, naming,
+classifying, at least it is well, in speaking of such a nature as his,
+to enlarge the vocabulary beyond the pedantic formulas of unreal ethics,
+and to be as sure as we know how to make ourselves, that each of the
+sympathies and faculties which together compose our power of spiritual
+observation, is in a condition of free and patient energy. Any less open
+and liberal method, which limits our sentiments to absolute approval or
+disapproval, and fixes the standard either at the balance of common
+qualities which constitutes mediocrity, or at the balance of uncommon
+qualities which is divinity as in a Shakespeare, must leave in a cloud
+of blank incomprehensibleness those singular spirits who come from time
+to time to quicken the germs of strange thought and shake the quietness
+of the earth.
+
+We may forget much in our story that is grievous or hateful, in
+reflecting that if any man now deems a day basely passed in which he has
+given no thought to the hard life of garret and hovel, to the forlorn
+children and trampled women of wide squalid wildernesses in cities, it
+was Rousseau who first in our modern time sounded a new trumpet note for
+one more of the great battles of humanity. He makes the poor very proud,
+it was truly said. Some of his contemporaries followed the same vein of
+thought, as we shall see, and he was only continuing work which others
+had prepared. But he alone had the gift of the golden mouth. It was in
+Rousseau that polite Europe first hearkened to strange voices and faint
+reverberation from out of the vague and cavernous shadow in which the
+common people move. Science has to feel the way towards light and
+solution, to prepare, to organise. But the race owes something to one
+who helped to state the problem, writing up in letters of flame at the
+brutal feast of kings and the rich that civilisation is as yet only a
+mockery, and did furthermore inspire a generation of men and women with
+the stern resolve that they would rather perish than live on in a world
+where such things can be.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+YOUTH.
+
+
+Jean Jacques Rousseau was born at Geneva, June 28, 1712. He was of old
+French stock. His ancestors had removed from Paris to the famous city of
+refuge as far back as 1529, a little while before Farel came thither to
+establish the principles of the Reformation, and seven years before the
+first visit of the more extraordinary man who made Geneva the mother
+city of a new interpretation of Christianity, as Rome was the mother
+city of the old. Three generations in a direct line separated Jean
+Jacques from Didier Rousseau, the son of a Paris bookseller, and the
+first emigrant.[1] Thus Protestant tradition in the Rousseau family
+dates from the appearance of Protestantism in Europe, and seems to have
+exerted the same kind of influence upon them as it did, in conjunction
+with the rest of the surrounding circumstances, upon the other citizens
+of the ideal state of the Reformation. It is computed by the historians
+that out of three thousand families who composed the population of
+Geneva towards the end of the seventeenth century, there were hardly
+fifty who before the Reformation had acquired the position of
+burgess-ship. The curious set of conditions which thus planted a colony
+of foreigners in the midst of a free polity, with a new doctrine and
+newer discipline, introduced into Europe a fresh type of character and
+manners. People declared they could recognise in the men of Geneva
+neither French vivacity, nor Italian subtlety and clearness, nor Swiss
+gravity. They had a zeal for religion, a vigorous energy in government,
+a passion for freedom, a devotion to ingenious industries, which marked
+them with a stamp unlike that of any other community.[2] Towards the
+close of the seventeenth century some of the old austerity and rudeness
+was sensibly modified under the influence of the great neighbouring
+monarchy. One striking illustration of this tendency was the rapid
+decline of the Savoyard patois in popular use. The movement had not gone
+far enough when Rousseau was born, to take away from the manners and
+spirit of his country their special quality and individual note.
+
+The mother of Jean Jacques, who seems to have been a simple, cheerful,
+and tender woman, was the daughter of a Genevan minister; her maiden
+name, Bernard. The birth of her son was fatal to her, and the most
+touching and pathetic of all the many shapes of death was the fit
+beginning of a life preappointed to nearly unlifting cloud. "I cost my
+mother her life," he wrote, "and my birth was the first of my woes."[3]
+Destiny thus touches us with magical finger, long before consciousness
+awakens to the forces that have been set to work in our personality,
+launching us into the universe with country, forefathers, and physical
+predispositions, all fixed without choice of ours. Rousseau was born
+dying, and though he survived this first crisis by the affectionate care
+of one of his father's sisters, yet his constitution remained infirm and
+disordered.
+
+Inborn tendencies, as we perceive on every side, are far from having
+unlimited irresistible mastery, if they meet early encounter from some
+wise and patient external will. The father of Rousseau was unfortunately
+cast in the same mould as his mother, and the child's own morbid
+sensibility was stimulated and deepened by the excessive sensibility of
+his first companion. Isaac Rousseau, in many of his traits, was a
+reversion to an old French type. In all the Genevese there was an
+underlying tendency of this kind. "Under a phlegmatic and cool air,"
+wrote Rousseau, when warning his countrymen against the inflammatory
+effects of the drama, "the Genevese hide an ardent and sensitive
+character, that is more easily moved than controlled."[4] And some of
+the episodes in their history during the eighteenth century might be
+taken for scenes from the turbulent dramas of Paris. But Isaac
+Rousseau's restlessness, his eager emotion, his quick and punctilious
+sense of personal dignity, his heedlessness of ordered affairs, were not
+common in Geneva, fortunately for the stability of her society and the
+prosperity of her citizens. This disorder of spirit descended in
+modified form to the son; it was inevitable that he should be indirectly
+affected by it. Before he was seven years old he had learnt from his
+father to indulge a passion for the reading of romances. The child and
+the man passed whole nights in a fictitious world, reading to one
+another in turn, absorbed by vivid interest in imaginary situations,
+until the morning note of the birds recalled them to a sense of the
+conditions of more actual life, and made the elder cry out in confusion
+that he was the more childish of the two.
+
+The effect of this was to raise passion to a premature exaltation in the
+young brain. "I had no idea of real things," he said, "though all the
+sentiments were already familiar to me. Nothing had come to me by
+conception, everything by sensation. These confused emotions, striking
+me one after another, did not warp a reason that I did not yet possess,
+but they gradually shaped in me a reason of another cast and temper,
+and gave me bizarre and romantic ideas of human life, of which neither
+reflection nor experience has ever been able wholly to cure me."[5] Thus
+these first lessons, which have such tremendous influence over all that
+follow, had the direct and fatal effect in Rousseau's case of deadening
+that sense of the actual relations of things to one another in the
+objective world, which is the master-key and prime law of sanity.
+
+In time the library of romances came to an end (1719), and Jean Jacques
+and his father fell back on the more solid and moderated fiction of
+history and biography. The romances had been the possession of the
+mother; the more serious books were inherited from the old minister, her
+father. Such books as Nani's History of Venice, and Le Sueur's History
+of the Church and the Empire, made less impression on the young Rousseau
+than the admirable Plutarch; and he used to read to his father during
+the hours of work, and read over again to himself during all hours,
+those stories of free and indomitable souls which are so proper to
+kindle the glow of generous fire. Plutarch was dear to him to the end of
+his life; he read him in the late days when he had almost ceased to
+read, and he always declared Plutarch to be nearly the only author to
+whom he had never gone without profit."[6] "I think I see my father now,"
+he wrote when he had begun to make his mark in Paris, "living by the
+work of his hands, and nourishing his soul on the sublimest truths. I
+see Tacitus, Plutarch, and Grotius, lying before him along with the
+tools of his craft. I see at his side a cherished son receiving
+instruction from the best of fathers, alas, with but too little
+fruit."[7] This did little to implant the needed impressions of the
+actual world. Rousseau's first training continued to be in an excessive
+degree the exact reverse of our common method; this stirs the
+imagination too little, and shuts the young too narrowly within the
+strait pen of present and visible reality. The reader of Plutarch at the
+age of ten actually conceived himself a Greek or a Roman, and became the
+personage whose strokes of constancy and intrepidity transported him
+with sympathetic ecstasy, made his eyes sparkle, and raised his voice to
+heroic pitch. Listeners were even alarmed one day as he told the tale of
+Scaevola at table, to see him imitatively thrust forth his arm over a
+hot chafing-dish.[8]
+
+Rousseau had one brother, on whom the spirit of the father came down in
+ample measure, just as the sensibility of the mother descended upon Jean
+Jacques. He passed through a boyhood of revolt, and finally ran away
+into Germany, where he was lost from sight and knowledge of his kinsmen
+for ever. Jean Jacques was thus left virtually an only child,[9] and he
+commemorates the homely tenderness and care with which his early years
+were surrounded. Except in the hours which he passed in reading by the
+side of his father, he was always with his aunt, in the self-satisfying
+curiosity of childhood watching her at work with the needle and busy
+about affairs of the house, or else listening to her with contented
+interest, as she sang the simple airs of the common people. The
+impression of this kind and cheerful figure was stamped on his memory to
+the end; her tone of voice, her dress, the quaint fashion of her hair.
+The constant recollection of her shows, among many other signs, how he
+cherished that conception of the true unity of a man's life, which
+places it in a closely-linked chain of active memories, and which most
+of us lose in wasteful dispersion of sentiment and poor fragmentariness
+of days. When the years came in which he might well say, I have no
+pleasure in them, and after a manhood of distress and suspicion and
+diseased sorrows had come to dim those blameless times, he could still
+often surprise himself unconsciously humming the tune of one of his
+aunt's old songs, with many tears in his eyes.[10]
+
+This affectionate schooling came suddenly to an end. Isaac Rousseau in
+the course of a quarrel in which he had involved himself, believed that
+he saw unfairness in the operation of the law, for the offender had
+kinsfolk in the Great Council. He resolved to leave his country rather
+than give way, in circumstances which compromised his personal honour
+and the free justice of the republic. So his house was broken up, and
+his son was sent to school at the neighbouring village of Bossey (1722),
+under the care of a minister, "there to learn along with Latin all the
+medley of sorry stuff with which, under the name of education, they
+accompany Latin."[11] Rousseau tells us nothing of the course of his
+intellectual instruction here, but he marks his two years' sojourn under
+the roof of M. Lambercier by two forward steps in that fateful
+acquaintance with good and evil, which is so much more important than
+literary knowledge. Upon one of these fruits of the tree of nascent
+experience, men usually keep strict silence. Rousseau is the only person
+that ever lived who proclaimed to the whole world as a part of his own
+biography the ignoble circumstances of the birth of sensuality in
+boyhood. Nobody else ever asked us to listen while he told of the
+playmate with which unwarned youth takes its heedless pleasure, which
+waxes and strengthens with years, until the man suddenly awakens to find
+the playmate grown into a master, grotesque and foul, whose unclean grip
+is not to be shaken off, and who poisons the air with the goatish fume
+of the satyr. It is on this side that the unspoken plays so decisive a
+part, that most of the spoken seems but as dust in the balance; it is
+here that the flesh spreads gross clouds over the firmament of the
+spirit. Thinking of it, we flee from talk about the high matters of will
+and conscience, of purity of heart and the diviner mind, and hurry to
+the physician. Manhood commonly saves itself by its own innate
+healthiness, though the decent apron bequeathed to us in the old legend
+of the fall, the thick veil of a more than legendary reserve, prevents
+us from really measuring the actual waste of delicacy and the finer
+forces. Rousseau, most unhappily for himself, lacked this innate
+healthiness; he never shook off the demon which would be so ridiculous,
+if it did not hide such terrible power. With a moral courage, that it
+needs hardly less moral courage in the critic firmly to refrain from
+calling cynical or shameless, he has told the whole story of this
+lifelong depravation. In the present state of knowledge, which in the
+region of the human character the false shamefacedness of science, aided
+and abetted by the mutilating hand of religious asceticism, has kept
+crude and imperfect, there is nothing very profitable to be said on all
+this. When the great art of life has been more systematically conceived
+in the long processes of time and endeavour, and when more bold,
+ffective, and far-reaching advance has been made in defining those
+pathological manifestations which deserve to be seriously studied, as
+distinguished from those of a minor sort which are barely worth
+registering, then we should know better how to speak, or how to be
+silent, in the present most unwelcome instance. As it is, we perhaps do
+best in chronicling the fact and passing on. The harmless young are
+allowed to play without monition or watching among the deep open graves
+of temperament; and Rousseau, telling the tale of his inmost experience,
+unlike the physician and the moralist who love decorous surfaces of
+things, did not spare himself nor others a glimpse of the ignominies to
+which the body condemns its high tenant, the soul.[12]
+
+The second piece of experience which he acquired at Bossey was the
+knowledge of injustice and wrongful suffering as things actual and
+existent. Circumstances brought him under suspicion of having broken the
+teeth of a comb which did not belong to him. He was innocent, and not
+even the most terrible punishment could wring from him an untrue
+confession of guilt. The root of his constancy was not in an abhorrence
+of falsehood, which is exceptional in youth, and for which he takes no
+credit, but in a furious and invincible resentment against the violent
+pressure that was unjustly put upon him. "Picture a character, timid and
+docile in ordinary life, but ardent, impetuous, indomitable in its
+passions; a child always governed by the voice of reason, always treated
+with equity, gentleness, and consideration, who had not even the idea of
+injustice, and who for the first time experiences an injustice so
+terrible, from the very people whom he most cherishes and respects! What
+a confusion of ideas, what disorder of sentiments, what revolution in
+heart, in brain, in every part of his moral and intellectual being!" He
+had not learnt, any more than other children, either to put himself in
+the place of his elders, or to consider the strength of the apparent
+case against him. All that he felt was the rigour of a frightful
+chastisement for an offence of which he was innocent. And the
+association of ideas was permanent. "This first sentiment of violence
+and injustice has remained so deeply engraved in my soul, that all the
+ideas relating to it bring my first emotion back to me; and this
+sentiment, though only relative to myself in its origin, has taken such
+consistency, and become so disengaged from all personal interest, that
+my heart is inflamed at the sight or story of any wrongful action, just
+as much as if its effect fell on my own person. When I read of the
+cruelties of some ferocious tyrant, or the subtle atrocities of some
+villain of a priest, I would fain start on the instant to poniard such
+wretches, though I were to perish a hundred times for the deed.... This
+movement may be natural to me, and I believe it is so; but the profound
+recollection of the first injustice I suffered was too long and too fast
+bound up with it, not to have strengthened it enormously."[13]
+
+To men who belong to the silent and phlegmatic races like our own, all
+this may possibly strike on the ear like a false or strained note. Yet a
+tranquil appeal to the real history of one's own strongest impressions
+may disclose their roots in facts of childish experience, which
+remoteness of time has gradually emptied of the burning colour they once
+had. This childish discovery of the existence in his own world of that
+injustice which he had only seen through a glass very darkly in the
+imaginary world of his reading, was for Rousseau the angry dismissal
+from the primitive Eden, which in one shape and at one time or another
+overtakes all men. "Here," he says, "was the term of the serenity of my
+childish days. From this moment I ceased to enjoy a pure happiness, and
+I feel even at this day that the reminiscence of the delights of my
+infancy here comes to an end.... Even the country lost in our eyes that
+charm of sweetness and simplicity which goes to the heart; it seemed
+sombre and deserted, and was as if covered by a veil, hiding its
+beauties from our sight. We no longer tended our little gardens, our
+plants, our flowers. We went no more lightly to scratch the earth,
+shouting for joy as we discovered the germ of the seed we had sown."
+
+Whatever may be the degree of literal truth in the Confessions, the
+whole course of Rousseau's life forbids us to pass this passionate
+description by as overcharged or exaggerated. We are conscious in it of
+a constitutional infirmity. We perceive an absence of healthy power of
+reaction against moral shock. Such shocks are experienced in many
+unavoidable forms by all save the dullest natures, when they first come
+into contact with the sharp tooth of outer circumstance. Indeed, a man
+must be either miraculously happy in his experiences, or exceptionally
+obtuse in observing and feeling, or else be the creature of base and
+cynical ideals, if life does not to the end continue to bring many a
+repetition of that first day of incredulous bewilderment. But the urgent
+demands for material activity quickly recall the mass of men to normal
+relations with their fellows and the outer world. A vehement objective
+temperament, like Voltaire's, is instantly roused by one of these
+penetrative stimuli into angry and tenacious resistance. A proud and
+collected soul, like Goethe's, loftily follows its own inner aims,
+without taking any heed of the perturbations that arise from want of
+self-collection in a world still spelling its rudiments. A sensitive and
+depressed spirit, like Rousseau's or Cowper's, finds itself without any
+of these reacting kinds of force, and the first stroke of cruelty or
+oppression is the going out of a divine light.
+
+Leaving Bossey, Rousseau returned to Geneva, and passed two or three
+years with his uncle, losing his time for the most part, but learning
+something of drawing and something of Euclid, for the former of which he
+showed special inclination.[14] It was a question whether he was to be
+made a watchmaker, a lawyer, or a minister. His own preference, as his
+after-life might have led us to suppose, was in favour of the last of
+the three; "for I thought it a fine thing," he says, "to preach." The
+uncle was a man of pleasure, and as often happens in such
+circumstances, his love of pleasure had the effect of turning his wife
+into a pietist. Their son was Rousseau's constant comrade. "Our
+friendship filled our hearts so amply, that if we were only together,
+the simplest amusements were a delight." They made kites, cages, bows
+and arrows, drums, houses; they spoiled the tools of their grandfather,
+in trying to make watches like him. In the same cheerful imitative
+spirit, which is the main feature in childhood when it is not disturbed
+by excess of literary teaching, after Geneva had been visited by an
+Italian showman with a troop of marionettes, they made puppets and
+composed comedies for them; and when one day the uncle read aloud an
+elegant sermon, they abandoned their comedies, and turned with blithe
+energy to exhortation. They had glimpses of the rougher side of life in
+the biting mockeries of some schoolboys of the neighbourhood. These
+ended in appeal to the god of youthful war, who pronounced so plainly
+for the bigger battalions, that the release of their enemies from school
+was the signal for the quick retreat of our pair within doors. All this
+is an old story in every biography written or unwritten. It seldom fails
+to touch us, either in the way of sympathetic reminiscence, or if life
+should have gone somewhat too hardly with a man, then in the way of
+irony, which is not less real and poetic than the eironeia of a Greek
+dramatist, for being concerned with more unheroic creatures.
+
+And this rough play of the streets always seemed to Rousseau a manlier
+schooling than the effeminate tendencies which he thought he noticed in
+Genevese youth in after years. "In my time," he says admiringly,
+"children were brought up in rustic fashion and had no complexion to
+keep.... Timid and modest before the old, they were bold, haughty,
+combative among themselves; they had no curled locks to be careful of;
+they defied one another at wrestling, running, boxing. They returned
+home sweating, out of breath, torn; they were true blackguards, if you
+will, but they made men who have zeal in their heart to serve their
+country and blood to shed for her. May we be able to say as much one day
+of our fine little gentlemen, and may these men at fifteen not turn out
+children at thirty."[15]
+
+Two incidents of this period remain to us, described in Rousseau's own
+words, and as they reveal a certain sweetness in which his life
+unhappily did not afterwards greatly abound, it may help our equitable
+balance of impressions about him to reproduce them. Every Sunday he used
+to spend the day at Pâquis at Mr. Fazy's, who had married one of his
+aunts, and who carried on the production of printed calicoes. "One day I
+was in the drying-room, watching the rollers of the hot press; their
+brightness pleased my eye; I was tempted to lay my fingers on them, and
+I was moving them up and down with much satisfaction along the smooth
+cylinder, when young Fazy placed himself in the wheel and gave it a
+half-quarter turn so adroitly, that I had just the ends of my two
+longest fingers caught, but this was enough to crush the tips and tear
+the nails. I raised a piercing cry; Fazy instantly turned back the
+wheel, and the blood gushed from my fingers. In the extremity of
+consternation he hastened to me, embraced me, and besought me to cease
+my cries, or he would be undone. In the height of my own pain, I was
+touched by his; I instantly fell silent, we ran to the pond, where he
+helped me to wash my fingers and to staunch the blood with moss. He
+entreated me with tears not to accuse him; I promised him that I would
+not, and Ï kept my word so well that twenty years after no one knew the
+origin of the scar. I was kept in bed for more than three weeks, and for
+more than two months was unable to use my hand. But I persisted that a
+large stone had fallen and crushed my fingers."[16]
+
+The other story is of the same tenour, though there is a new touch of
+sensibility in its concluding words. "I was playing at ball at Plain
+Palais, with one of my comrades named Plince. We began to quarrel over
+the game; we fought, and in the fight he dealt me on my bare head a
+stroke so well directed, that with a stronger arm it would have dashed
+my brains out. I fell to the ground, and there never was agitation like
+that of this poor lad, as he saw the blood in my hair. He thought he had
+killed me. He threw himself upon me, and clasped me eagerly in his arms,
+while his tears poured down his cheeks, and he uttered shrill cries. I
+returned his embrace with all my force, weeping like him, in a state of
+confused emotion which was not without a kind of sweetness. Then he
+tried to stop the blood which kept flowing, and seeing that our two
+handkerchiefs were not enough, he dragged me off to his mother's; she
+had a small garden hard by. The good woman nearly fell sick at sight of
+me in this condition; she kept strength enough to dress my wound, and
+after bathing it well, she applied flower-de-luce macerated in brandy,
+an excellent remedy much used in our country. Her tears and those of her
+son, went to my very heart, so that I looked upon them for a long while
+as my mother and my brother."[17]
+
+If it were enough that our early instincts should be thus amiable and
+easy, then doubtless the dismal sloughs in which men and women lie
+floundering would occupy a very much more insignificant space in the
+field of human experience. The problem, as we know, lies in the
+discipline of this primitive goodness. For character in a state of
+society is not a tree that grows into uprightness by the law of its own
+strength, though an adorable instance here and there of rectitude and
+moral loveliness that seem intuitive may sometimes tempt us into a
+moment's belief in a contrary doctrine. In Rousseau's case this serious
+problem was never solved; there was no deliberate preparation of his
+impulses, prepossessions, notions; no foresight on the part of elders,
+and no gradual acclimatisation of a sensitive and ardent nature in the
+fixed principles which are essential to right conduct in the frigid zone
+of our relations with other people. It was one of the most elementary of
+Rousseau's many perverse and mischievous contentions, that it is their
+education by the older which ruins or wastes the abundant capacity for
+virtue that subsists naturally in the young. His mind seems never to
+have sought much more deeply for proof of this, than the fact that he
+himself was innocent and happy so long as he was allowed to follow
+without disturbance the easy simple proclivities of his own temperament.
+Circumstances were not indulgent enough to leave the experiment to
+complete itself within these very rudimentary conditions.
+
+Rousseau had been surrounded, as he is always careful to protest, with a
+religious atmosphere. His father, though a man of pleasure, was
+possessed also not only of probity but of religion as well. His three
+aunts were all in their degrees gracious and devout. M. Lambercier at
+Bossey, "although Churchman and preacher," was still a sincere believer
+and nearly as good in act as in word. His inculcation of religion was so
+hearty, so discreet, so reasonable, that his pupils, far from being
+wearied by the sermon, never came away without being touched inwardly
+and stirred to make virtuous resolutions. With his Aunt Bernard devotion
+was rather more tiresome, because she made a business of it.[18] It
+would be a distinct error to suppose that all this counted for nothing,
+for let us remember that we are now engaged with the youth of the one
+great religious writer of France in the eighteenth century. When after
+many years Rousseau's character hardened, the influences which had
+surrounded his boyhood came out in their full force and the historian of
+opinion soon notices in his spirit and work a something which had no
+counterpart in the spirit and work of men who had been trained in Jesuit
+colleges. At the first outset, however, every trace of religious
+sentiment was obliterated from sight, and he was left unprotected
+against the shocks of the world and the flesh.
+
+At the age of eleven Jean Jacques was sent into a notary's office, but
+that respectable calling struck him in the same repulsive and
+insufferable way in which it has struck many other boys of genius in all
+countries. Contrary to the usual rule, he did not rebel, but was
+ignominiously dismissed by his master[19] for dulness and inaptitude;
+his fellow-clerks pronounced him stupid and incompetent past hope. He
+was next apprenticed to an engraver,[20] a rough and violent man, who
+seems to have instantly plunged the boy into a demoralised stupefaction.
+The reality of contact with this coarse nature benumbed as by touch of
+torpedo the whole being of a youth who had hitherto lived on pure
+sensations and among those ideas which are nearest to sensations. There
+were no longer heroic Romans in Rousseau's universe. "The vilest
+tastes, the meanest bits of rascality, succeeded to my simple
+amusements, without even leaving the least idea behind. I must, in spite
+of the worthiest education, have had a strong tendency to degenerate."
+The truth was that he had never had any education in its veritable
+sense, as the process, on its negative side, of counteracting the
+inborn. There are two kinds, or perhaps we should more correctly say two
+degrees, of the constitution in which the reflective part is weak. There
+are the men who live on sensation, but who do so lustily, with a certain
+fulness of blood and active energy of muscle. There are others who do so
+passively, not searching for excitement, but acquiescing. The former by
+their sheer force and plenitude of vitality may, even in a world where
+reflection is a first condition, still go far. The latter succumb, and
+as reflection does nothing for them, and as their sensations in such a
+world bring them few blandishments, they are tolerably early surrounded
+with a self-diffusing atmosphere of misery. Rousseau had none of this
+energy which makes oppression bracing. For a time he sank.
+
+It would be a mistake to let the story of the Confessions carry us into
+exaggerations. The brutality of his master and the harshness of his life
+led him to nothing very criminal, but only to wrong acts which are
+despicable by their meanness, rather than in any sense atrocious. He
+told lies as readily as the truth. He pilfered things to eat. He
+cunningly found a means of opening his master's private cabinet, and of
+using his master's best instruments by stealth. He wasted his time in
+idle and capricious tasks. When the man, with all the ravity of an adult
+moralist, describes these misdeeds of the boy, they assume a certain
+ugliness of mien, and excites a strong disgust which, when the misdeeds
+themselves are before us in actual life, we experience in a far more
+considerate form. The effect of calm, retrospective avowal is to create
+a kind of feeling which is essentially unlike our feeling at what is
+actually avowed. Still it is clear that his unlucky career as apprentice
+brought out in Rousseau slyness, greediness, slovenliness,
+untruthfulness, and the whole ragged regiment of the squalider vices.
+The evil of his temperament now and always was of the dull smouldering
+kind, seldom breaking out into active flame. There is a certain
+sordidness in the scene. You may complain that the details which
+Rousseau gives of his youthful days are insipid. Yet such things are the
+web and stuff of life, and these days of transition from childhood to
+full manhood in every case mark a crisis. These insipidities test the
+education of home and family, and they presage definitely what is to
+come. The roots of character, good or bad, are shown for this short
+space, and they remain unchanged, though most people learn from their
+fellows the decent and useful art of covering them over with a little
+dust, in the shape of accepted phrases and routine customs and a silence
+which is not oblivion.
+
+After a time the character of Jean Jacques was absolutely broken down.
+He says little of the blows with which his offences were punished by his
+master, but he says enough to enable us to discern that they were
+terrible to him. This cowardice, if we choose to give the name to an
+overmastering physical horror, at length brought his apprentice days to
+an end. He was now in his sixteenth year. He was dragged by his comrades
+into sports for which he had little inclination, though he admits that
+once engaged in them he displayed an impetuosity that carried him beyond
+the others. Such pastimes naturally led them beyond the city walls, and
+on two occasions Rousseau found the gates closed on his return. His
+master when he presented himself in the morning gave him such greeting
+as we may imagine, and held out things beyond imagining as penalty for a
+second sin in this kind. The occasion came, as, alas, it nearly always
+does. "Half a league from the town," says Rousseau, "I hear the retreat
+sounded, and redouble my pace; I hear the drum beat, and run at the top
+of my speed: I arrive out of breath, bathed in sweat; my heart beats
+violently, I see from a distance the soldiers at their post, and call
+out with choking voice. It was too late. Twenty paces from the outpost
+sentinel, I saw the first bridge rising. I shuddered, as I watched those
+terrible horns, sinister and fatal augury of the inevitable lot which
+that moment was opening for me."[21]
+
+In manhood when we have the resource of our own will to fall back upon,
+we underestimate the unsurpassed horror and anguish of such moments as
+this in youth, when we know only the will of others, and that this will
+is inexorable against us. Rousseau dared not expose himself to the
+fulfilment of his master's menace, and he ran away (1728). But for this,
+wrote the unhappy man long years after, "I should have passed, in the
+bosom of my religion, of my native land, of my family, and my friends, a
+mild and peaceful life, such as my character required, in the uniformity
+of work which suited my taste, and of a society after my heart. I should
+have been a good Christian, good citizen, good father of a family, good
+friend, good craftsman, good man in all. I should have been happy in my
+condition, perhaps I might have honoured it; and after living a life
+obscure and simple, but even and gentle, I should have died peacefully
+in the midst of my own people. Soon forgotten, I should at any rate have
+been regretted as long as any memory of me was left."[22]
+
+As a man knows nothing about the secrets of his own individual
+organisation, this illusory mapping out of a supposed Possible need
+seldom be suspected of the smallest insincerity. The poor madman who
+declares that he is a king kept out of his rights only moves our pity,
+and we perhaps owe pity no less to those in all the various stages of
+aberration uncertificated by surgeons, down to the very edge of most
+respectable sanity, who accuse the injustice of men of keeping them out
+of this or that kingdom, of which in truth their own composition
+finally disinherited them at the moment when they were conceived in a
+mother's womb. The first of the famous Five Propositions of Jansen,
+which were a stumbling-block to popes and to the philosophy of the
+eighteenth-century foolishness, put this clear and permanent truth into
+a mystic and perishable formula, to the effect that there are some
+commandments of God which righteous and good men are absolutely unable
+to obey, though ever so disposed to do them, and God does not give them
+so much grace that they are able to observe them.
+
+If Rousseau's sensations in the evening were those of terror, the day
+and its prospect of boundless adventures soon turned them into entire
+delight. The whole world was before him, and all the old conceptions of
+romance were instantly revived by the supposed nearness of their
+realisation. He roamed for two or three days among the villages in the
+neighbourhood of Geneva, finding such hospitality as he needed in the
+cottages of friendly peasants. Before long his wanderings brought him to
+the end of the territory of the little republic. Here he found himself
+in the domain of Savoy, where dukes and lords had for ages been the
+traditional foes of the freedom and the faith of Geneva, Rousseau came
+to the village of Confignon, and the name of the priest of Confignon
+recalled one of the most embittered incidents of the old feud. This feud
+had come to take new forms; instead of midnight expeditions to scale the
+city walls, the descendants of the Savoyard marauders of the sixteenth
+century were now intent with equivocal good will on rescuing the souls
+of the descendants of their old enemies from deadly heresy. At this time
+a systematic struggle was going on between the priests of Savoy and the
+ministers of Geneva, the former using every effort to procure the
+conversion of any Protestant on whom they could lay hands.[23] As it
+happened, the priest of Confignon was one of the most active in this
+good work.[24] He made the young Rousseau welcome, spoke to him of the
+heresies of Geneva and of the authority of the holy Church, and gave him
+some dinner. He could hardly have had a more easy convert, for the
+nature with which he had to deal was now swept and garnished, ready for
+the entrance of all devils or gods. The dinner went for much. "I was too
+good a guest," writes Rousseau in one of his few passages of humour, "to
+be a good theologian, and his Frangi wine, which struck me as excellent,
+was such a triumphant argument on his side, that I should have blushed
+to oppose so capital a host."[25] So it was agreed that he should be put
+in a way to be further instructed of these matters. We may accept
+Rousseau's assurance that he was not exactly a hypocrite in this rapid
+complaisance. He admits that any one who should have seen the artifices
+to which he resorted, might have thought him very false. But, he
+argues, "flattery, or rather concession, is not always a vice; it is
+oftener a virtue, especially in the young. The kindness with which a man
+receives us, attaches us to him; it is not to make a fool of him that we
+give way, but to avoid displeasing him, and not to return him evil for
+good." He never really meant to change his religion; his fault was like
+the coquetting of decent women, who sometimes, to gain their ends,
+without permitting anything or promising anything, lead men to hope more
+than they mean to hold good.[26] Thereupon follow some austere
+reflections on the priest, who ought to have sent him back to his
+friends; and there are strictures even upon the ministers of all
+dogmatic religions, in which the essential thing is not to do but to
+believe; their priests therefore, provided that they can convert a man
+to their faith, are wholly indifferent alike as to his worth and his
+worldly interests. All this is most just; the occasion for such a strain
+of remark, though so apposite on one side, is hardly well chosen to
+impress us. We wonder, as we watch the boy complacently hoodwinking his
+entertainer, what has become of the Roman severity of a few months back.
+This nervous eagerness to please, however, was the complementary element
+of a character of vague ambition, and it was backed by a stealthy
+consciousness of intellectual superiority, which perhaps did something,
+though poorly enough, to make such ignominy less deeply degrading.
+
+The die was cast. M. Pontverre despatched his brand plucked from the
+burning to a certain Madame de Warens, a lady living at Annecy, and
+counted zealous for the cause of the Church. In an interview whose
+minutest circumstances remained for ever stamped in his mind (March 21,
+1728), Rousseau exchanged his first words with this singular personage,
+whose name and character he has covered with doubtful renown. He
+expected to find some gray and wrinkled woman, saving a little remnant
+of days in good works. Instead of this, there turned round upon him a
+person not more than eight-and-twenty years old, with gentle caressing
+air, a fascinating smile, a tender eye. Madame de Warens read the
+letters he brought, and entertained their bearer cheerfully. It was
+decided after consultation that the heretic should be sent to a
+monastery at Turin, where he might be brought over in form to the true
+Church. At the monastery not only would the spiritual question of faith
+and the soul be dealt with, but at the same time the material problem of
+shelter and subsistence for the body would be solved likewise. Elated
+with vanity at the thought of seeing before any of his comrades the
+great land of promise beyond the mountains, heedless of those whom he
+had left, and heedless of the future before him and the object which he
+was about, the young outcast made his journey over the Alps in all
+possible lightness of heart. "Seeing country is an allurement which
+hardly any Genevese can ever resist. Everything that met my eye seemed
+the guarantee of my approaching happiness. In the houses I imagined
+rustic festivals; in the fields, joyful sports; along the streams,
+bathing and fishing; on the trees, delicious fruits; under their shade,
+voluptuous interviews; on the mountains, pails of milk and cream, a
+charming idleness, peace, simplicity, the delight of going forward
+without knowing whither."[27] He might justly choose out this interval
+as more perfectly free from care or anxiety than any other of his life.
+It was the first of the too rare occasions when his usually passive
+sensuousness was stung by novelty and hope into an active energy.
+
+The seven or eight days of the journey came to an end, and the youth
+found himself at Turin without money or clothes, an inmate of a dreary
+monastery, among some of the very basest and foulest of mankind, who
+pass their time in going from one monastery to another through Spain and
+Italy, professing themselves Jews or Moors for the sake of being
+supported while the process of their conversion was going slowly
+forward. At the Hospice of the Catechumens the work of his conversion
+was begun in such earnest as the insincerity of at least one of the
+parties to it might allow. It is needless to enter into the
+circumstances of Rousseau's conversion to Catholicism. The mischievous
+zeal for theological proselytising has led to thousands of such hollow
+and degrading performances, but it may safely be said that none of them
+was ever hollower than this. Rousseau avows that he had been brought up
+in the heartiest abhorrence of the older church, and that he never lost
+this abhorrence. He fully explains that he accepted the arguments with
+which he was not very energetically plied, simply because he could not
+bear the idea of returning to Geneva, and he saw no other way out of his
+present destitute condition. "I could not dissemble from myself that the
+holy deed I was about to do, was at the bottom the action of a bandit."
+"The sophism which destroyed me," he says in one of those eloquent
+pieces of moralising, which bring ignoble action into a relief that
+exaggerates our condemnation, "is that of most men, who complain of lack
+of strength when it is already too late for them to use it. It is only
+through our own fault that virtue costs us anything; if we could be
+always sage, we should rarely feel the need of being virtuous. But
+inclinations that might be easily overcome, drag us on without
+resistance; we yield to light temptations of which we despise the
+hazard. Insensibly we fall into perilous situations, against which we
+could easily have shielded ourselves, but from which we can afterwards
+only make a way out by heroic efforts that stupefy us, and so we sink
+into the abyss, crying aloud to God, Why hast thou made me so weak? But
+in spite of ourselves, God gives answer to our conscience, 'I made thee
+too weak to come out from the pit, because I made thee strong enough to
+avoid falling into it.'"[28] So the hopeful convert did fall in, not as
+happens to the pious soul "too hot for certainties in this our life,"
+to find rest in liberty of private judgment and an open Bible, but
+simply as a means of getting food, clothing, and shelter.[29] The boy
+was clever enough to make some show of resistance, and he turned to good
+use for this purpose the knowledge of Church history and the great
+Reformation controversy which he had picked up at M. Lambercier's. He
+was careful not to carry things too far, and exactly nine days after his
+admission into the Hospice, he "abjured the errors of the sect."[30] Two
+days after that he was publicly received into the kindly bosom of the
+true Church with all solemnity, to the high edification of the devout of
+Turin, who marked their interest in the regenerate soul by contributions
+to the extent of twenty francs in small money.
+
+With that sum and formal good wishes the fathers of the Hospice of the
+Catechumens thrust him out of their doors into the broad world. The
+youth who had begun the day with dreams of palaces, found himself at
+night sleeping in a den where he paid a halfpenny for the privilege of
+resting in the same room with the rude woman who kept the house, her
+husband, her five or six children, and various other lodgers. This rough
+awakening produced no consciousness of hardship in a nature which,
+beneath all fantastic dreams, always remained true to its first sympathy
+with the homely lives of the poor. The woman of the house swore like a
+carter, and was always dishevelled and disorderly: this did not prevent
+Rousseau from recognising her kindness of heart and her staunch
+readiness to befriend. He passed his days in wandering about the streets
+of Turin, seeing the wonders of a capital, and expecting some adventure
+that should raise him to unknown heights. He went regularly to mass,
+watched the pomp of the court, and counted upon stirring a passion in
+the breast of a princess. À more important circumstance was the effect
+of the mass in awakening in his own breast his latent passion for music;
+a passion so strong that the poorest instrument, if it were only in
+tune, never failed to give him the liveliest pleasure. The king of
+Sardinia was believed to have the best performers in Europe; less than
+that was enough to quicken the musical susceptibility which is perhaps
+an invariable element in the most completely sensuous natures.
+
+When the end of the twenty francs began to seem a thing possible, he
+tried to get work as an engraver. A young woman in a shop took pity on
+him, gave him work and food, and perhaps permitted him to make dumb and
+grovelling love to her, until her husband returned home and drove her
+client away from the door with threats and the waving of a wand not
+magical.[31] Rousseau's self-love sought an explanation in the natural
+fury of an Italian husband's jealousy; but we need hardly ask for any
+other cause than a shopkeeper's reasonable objection to vagabonds.
+
+The next step of this youth, who was always dreaming of the love of
+princesses, was to accept with just thankfulness the position of lackey
+or footboy in the household of a widow. With Madame de Vercellis he
+passed three months, and at the end of that time she died. His stay here
+was marked by an incident that has filled many pages with stormful
+discussion. When Madame de Vercellis died, a piece of old rose-coloured
+ribbon was missing; Rousseau had stolen it, and it was found in his
+possession. They asked him whence he had taken it. He replied that it
+had been given to him by Marion, a young and comely maid in the house.
+In her presence and before the whole household he repeated his false
+story, and clung to it with a bitter effrontery that we may well call
+diabolic, remembering how the nervous terror of punishment and exposure
+sinks the angel in man. Our phrase, want of moral courage, really
+denotes in the young an excruciating physical struggle, often so keen
+that the victim clutches after liberation with the spontaneous tenacity
+and cruelty of a creature wrecked in mastering waters. Undisciplined
+sensations constitute egoism in the most ruthless of its shapes, and at
+this epoch, owing either to the brutalities which surrounded his
+apprentice life at Geneva, or to that rapid tendency towards
+degeneration which he suspected in his own character, Rousseau was the
+slave of sensations which stained his days with baseness. "Never," he
+says, in his account of this hateful action, "was wickedness further
+from me than at this cruel moment; and when I accused the poor girl, it
+is contradictory and yet it is true that my affection for her was the
+cause of what I did. She was present to my mind, and I threw the blame
+from myself on to the first object that presented itself. When I saw her
+appear my heart was torn, but the presence of so many people was too
+strong for my remorse. I feared punishment very little; I only feared
+disgrace, but I feared that more than death, more than crime, more than
+anything in the world. I would fain have buried myself in the depths of
+the earth; invincible shame prevailed over all, shame alone caused my
+effrontery, and the more criminal I became, the more intrepid was I made
+by the fright of confessing it. I could see nothing but the horror of
+being recognised and declared publicly to my face a thief, liar, and
+traducer."[32] When he says that he feared punishment little, his
+analysis of his mind is most likely wrong, for nothing is clearer than
+that a dread of punishment in any physical form was a peculiarly strong
+feeling with him at this time. However that may have been, the same
+over-excited imagination which put every sense on the alarm and led him
+into so abominable a misdemeanour, brought its own penalties. It led him
+to conceive a long train of ruin as having befallen Marion in
+consequence of his calumny against her, and this dreadful thought
+haunted him to the end of his life. In the long sleepless nights he
+thought he saw the unhappy girl coming to reproach him with a crime that
+seemed as fresh to him as if it had been perpetrated the day before.[33]
+Thus the same brooding memory which brought back to him the sweet pain
+of his gentle kinswoman's household melody, preserved the darker side of
+his history with equal fidelity and no less perfect continuousness.
+Rousseau expresses a hope and belief that this burning remorse would
+serve as expiation for his fault; as if expiation for the destruction of
+another soul could be anything but a fine name for self-absolution. We
+may, however, charitably and reasonably think that the possible
+consequences of his fault to the unfortunate Marion were not actual, but
+were as much a hallucination as the midnight visits of her reproachful
+spirit. Indeed, we are hardly condoning evil, in suggesting that the
+whole story from its beginning is marked with exaggeration, and that we
+who have our own lives to lead shall find little help in criticising at
+further length the exact heinousness of the ignoble falsehood of a boy
+who happened to grow up into a man of genius.[34]
+
+After an interval of six weeks, which were passed in the garret or
+cellar of his rough patroness with kind heart and ungentle tongue,
+Rousseau again found himself a lackey in the house of a Piedmontese
+person of quality. This new master, the Count of Gouvon, treated him
+with a certain unusual considerateness, which may perhaps make us doubt
+the narrative. His son condescended to teach the youth Latin, and
+Rousseau presumed to entertain a passion for one of the daughters of the
+house, to whom he paid silent homage in the odd shape of attending to
+her wants at table with special solicitude. In this situation he had, or
+at least he supposed that he had, an excellent chance of ultimate
+advancement. But advancement here or elsewhere means a measure of
+stability, and Rousseau's temperament in his youth was the archtype of
+the mutable. An old comrade from Geneva visited him,[35] and as almost
+any incident is stimulating enough to fire the restlessness of
+imaginative youth, the gratitude which he professed to the Count of
+Gouvon and his family, the prudence with which he marked his prospects,
+the industry with which he profited by opportunity, all faded quickly
+into mere dead and disembodied names of virtues. His imagination again
+went over the journey across the mountains; the fields, the woods, the
+streams, began to absorb his whole life. He recalled with delicious
+satisfaction how charming the journey had seemed to him, and thought how
+far more charming it would be in the society of a comrade of his own age
+and taste, without duty, or constraint, or obligation to go or stay
+other than as it might please them. "It would be madness to sacrifice
+such a piece of good fortune to projects of ambition, which were slow,
+difficult, doubtful of execution, and which, even if they should one day
+be realised, were not with all their glory worth a quarter of an hour of
+true pleasure and freedom in youth."[36]
+
+On these high principles he neglected his duties so recklessly that he
+was dismissed from his situation, and he and his comrade began their
+homeward wanderings with more than apostolic heedlessness as to what
+they should eat or wherewithal they should be clothed. They had a toy
+fountain; they hoped that in return for the amusement to be conferred by
+this wonder they should receive all that they might need. Their hopes
+were not fulfilled. The exhibition of the toy fountain did not excuse
+them from their reckoning. Before long it was accidentally broken, and
+to their secret satisfaction, for it had lost its novelty. Their naked,
+vagrancy was thus undisguised. They made their way by some means or
+other across the mountains, and their enjoyment of vagabondage was
+undisturbed by any thought of a future. "To understand my delirium at
+this moment," Rousseau says, in words which shed much light on darker
+parts of his history than fits of vagrancy, "it is necessary to know to
+what a degree my heart is subject to get aflame with the smallest
+things, and with what force it plunges into the imagination of the
+object that attracts it, vain as that object may be. The most grotesque,
+the most childish, the maddest schemes come to caress my favourite idea,
+and to show me the reasonableness of surrendering myself to it."[37] It
+was this deep internal vehemence which distinguished Rousseau all
+through his life from the commonplace type of social revolter. A vagrant
+sensuous temperament, strangely compounded with Genevese austerity; an
+ardent and fantastic imagination, incongruously shot with threads of
+firm reason; too little conscience and too much; a monstrous and
+diseased love of self, intertwined with a sincere compassion and keen
+interest for the great fellowship of his brothers; a wild dreaming of
+dreams that were made to look like sanity by the close and specious
+connection between conclusions and premisses, though the premisses
+happened to have the fault of being profoundly unreal:--this was the
+type of character that lay unfolded in the youth who, towards the autumn
+of 1729, reached Annecy, penniless and ragged, throwing himself once
+more on the charity of the patroness who had given him shelter eighteen
+months before. Few figures in the world at that time were less likely to
+conciliate the favour or excite the interest of an observer, who had not
+studied the hidden convolutions of human character deeply enough to know
+that a boy of eighteen may be sly, sensual, restless, dreamy, and yet
+have it in him to say things one day which may help to plunge a world
+into conflagration.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] Here is the line:--
+
+Didier Rousseau. | Jean | ----------------------- | | David. Noah. | |
+Isaac (b. 1680-5, d. 1745-7). Jean François. | | | -------------- | |
+| JEAN JACQUES. Jean. Theodore.
+
+(_Musset-Pathay_, ii. 283.)
+
+[2] Picot's _Hist. de Genève_, iii. 114.
+
+[3] _Conf._, i. 7.
+
+[4] _Lettre à D'Alembert_, p. 187. Also _Nouv. Hél._, VI. v. 239.
+
+[5] _Conf._, i. 9. Also Second Letter to M. de Malesherbes, p. 356.
+
+[6] _Rêveries_, iv. p. 189. "My master and counsellor, Plutarch," he
+says, when he lends a volume to Madame d'Epinay in 1756. _Corr._, i.
+265.
+
+[7] Dedication of the _Discours sur l'Origine de l'Inégalité_, p. 201.
+(June, 1754.)
+
+[8] _Conf._, i. 1.
+
+[9] _Ib_, i. 12.
+
+[10] The tenacity of this grateful recollection is shown in letters to
+her (Madame Gonceru)--one in 1754 (_Corr._, i. 204), another as late
+as 1770 (vi. 129), and a third in 1762 (_Oeuvr. et Corr. Inéd._, 392).
+
+[11] _Conf._, i. 17-32.
+
+[12] See also _Conf._, i. 43; iii. 185; vii. 73; xii. 188, _n._ 2.
+
+[13] _Conf._, i. 27-31.
+
+[14] _Conf._, i. 38-47.
+
+[15] _Lettre à D'Alembert_(1758), 178, 179.
+
+[16] _Rêveries_, iv. 211, 212.
+
+[17] _Conf._ 212, 213.
+
+[18] _Conf._, ii. 102, 103.
+
+[19] M. Masseron.
+
+[20] M. Ducommun.
+
+[21] _Conf._, i. 69.
+
+[22] _Conf._, i. 72.
+
+[23] J. Gaberel's _Histoire de l'Église de Genève_ (Geneva, 1853-62),
+vol. iii. p. 285.
+
+[24] There is a minute in the register of the company of ministers, to
+the effect that the Sieur de Pontverre "is attracting many young men
+from this town, and changing their religion, and that the public ought
+to be warned." (Gaberel, iii. 224.)
+
+[25] _Conf._, ii. 76.
+
+[26] _Conf._, ii. 77.
+
+[27] _Conf._, ii. 90-97.
+
+[28] _Conf._, ii. 107
+
+[29] See _Émile_, iv. 124, 125, where the youth who was born a
+Calvinist, finding himself a stranger in a strange land, without
+resource, "changed his religion to get bread."
+
+[30] In the _Confessions_ (ii. 115) he has grace enough to make the
+period a month; but the extract from the register of his baptism
+(Gaberel's _Hist. de l'Église de Genève_, iii. 224), which has been
+recently published, shows that this is untrue: "Jean Jacques Rousseau,
+de Genève (Calviniste), entré à l'hospice à l'âge de 16 ans, le 12
+avril, 1728. Abjura les erreurs de la secte le 21; et le 23 du même
+mois lui fut administré le saint baptême, ayant pour parrain le sieur
+André Ferrero et pour marraine Françoise Christine Rora (ou Rovea)."
+
+A little further on (p. 119) he speaks of having been shut up "for two
+months," but this is not true even on his own showing.
+
+[31] Madame Basile. _Conf._, ii. 121-135.
+
+[32] _Conf._ ii. ad finem.
+
+[33] _Conf._, ii. 144.
+
+[34] Another version of the story mentioned by Musset-Pathay (i. 7)
+makes the object of the theft a diamond, but there is really no
+evidence in the matter beyond that given by Rousseau himself.
+
+[35] Bacle, by name.
+
+[36] _Conf._, iii. 168.
+
+[37] _Conf._, iii. 170. A slightly idealised account of the situation
+is given in _Émile_, Bk. iv. 125.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+SAVOY.
+
+
+The commonplace theory which the world takes for granted as to the
+relations of the sexes, makes the woman ever crave the power and
+guidance of her physically stronger mate. Even if this be a true account
+of the normal state, there is at any rate a kind of temperament among
+the many types of men, in which it seems as if the elements of character
+remain mere futile and dispersive particles, until compelled into unity
+and organisation by the creative shock of feminine influence. There are
+men, famous or obscure, whose lives might be divided into a number of
+epochs, each defined and presided over by the influence of a woman. For
+the inconstant such a calendar contains many divisions, for the constant
+it is brief and simple; for both alike it marks the great decisive
+phases through which character has moved.
+
+Rousseau's temperament was deeply marked by this special sort of
+susceptibility in one of its least agreeable forms. His sentiment was
+neither robustly and courageously animal, nor was it an intellectual
+demand for the bright and vivacious sympathies in which women sometimes
+excel. It had neither bold virility, nor that sociable energy which
+makes close emotional companionship an essential condition of freedom of
+faculty and completeness of work. There is a certain close and sickly
+air round all his dealings with women and all his feeling for them. We
+seem to move not in the star-like radiance of love, nor even in the
+fiery flames of lust, but among the humid heats of some unknown abode of
+things not wholesome or manly. "I know a sentiment," he writes, "which
+is perhaps less impetuous than love, but a thousand times more
+delicious, which sometimes is joined to love, and which is very often
+apart from it. Nor is this sentiment friendship only; it is more
+voluptuous, more tender; I do not believe that any one of the same sex
+could be its object; at least I have been a friend, if ever man was, and
+I never felt this about any of my friends."[38] He admits that he can
+only describe this sentiment by its effects; but our lives are mostly
+ruled by elements that defy definition, and in Rousseau's case the
+sentiment which he could not describe was a paramount trait of his
+mental constitution. It was as a voluptuous garment; in it his
+imagination was cherished into activity, and protected against that
+outer air of reality which braces ordinary men, but benumbs and
+disintegrates the whole vital apparatus of such an organisation as
+Rousseau's. If he had been devoid of this feeling about women, his
+character might very possibly have remained sterile. That feeling was
+the complementary contribution, without which could be no fecundity.
+
+When he returned from his squalid Italian expedition in search of bread
+and a new religion, his mind was clouded with the vague desire, the
+sensual moodiness, which in such natures stains the threshold of
+manhood. This unrest, with its mysterious torments and black delights,
+was banished, or at least soothed into a happier humour, by the
+influence of a person who is one of the most striking types to be found
+in the gallery of fair women.
+
+
+I.
+
+A French writer in the eighteenth century, in a story which deals with a
+rather repulsive theme of action in a tone that is graceful, simple, and
+pathetic, painted the portrait of a creature for whom no moralist with a
+reputation to lose can say a word; and we may, if we choose, fool
+ourselves by supposing her to be without a counterpart in the
+better-regulated world of real life, but, in spite of both these
+objections, she is an interesting and not untouching figure to those who
+like to know all the many-webbed stuff out of which their brothers and
+sisters are made. The Manon Lescaut of the unfortunate Abbé Prevost,
+kindly, bright, playful, tender, but devoid of the very germ of the idea
+of that virtue which is counted the sovereign recommendation of woman,
+helps us to understand Madame de Warens. There are differences enough
+between them, and we need not mistake them for one and the same type.
+Manon Lescaut is a prettier figure, because romance has fewer
+limitations than real life; but if we think of her in reading of
+Rousseau's benefactress, the vision of the imaginary woman tends to
+soften our judgment of the actual one, as well as to enlighten our
+conception of a character that eludes the instruments of a commonplace
+analysis.[39]
+
+She was born at Vevai in 1700; she married early, and early disagreed
+with her husband, from whom she eventually went away, abandoning family,
+religion, country, and means of subsistence, with all gaiety of heart.
+The King of Sardinia happened to be keeping his court at a small town on
+the southern shores of the lake of Geneva, and the conversion of Madame
+de Warens to Catholicism by the preaching of the Bishop of Annecy,[40]
+gave a zest to the royal visit, as being a successful piece of sport in
+that great spiritual hunt which Savoy loved to pursue at the expense of
+the reformed church in Switzerland. The king, to mark his zeal for the
+faith of his house, conferred on the new convert a small pension for
+life; but as the tongues of the scandalous imputed a less pure motive
+for such generosity in a parsimonious prince, Madame de Warens removed
+from the court and settled at Annecy. Her conversion was hardly more
+serious than Rousseau's own, because seriousness was no condition of her
+intelligence on any of its sides or in any of its relations. She was
+extremely charitable to the poor, full of pity for all in misfortune,
+easily moved to forgiveness of wrong or ingratitude; careless, gay,
+open-hearted; having, in a word, all the good qualities which spring in
+certain generous soils from human impulse, and hardly any of those which
+spring from reflection, or are implanted by the ordering of society. Her
+reason had been warped in her youth by an instructor of the devil's
+stamp;[41] finding her attached to her husband and to her duties, always
+cold, argumentative, and impregnable on the side of the senses, he
+attacked her by sophisms, and at last persuaded her that the union of
+the sexes is in itself a matter of the most perfect indifference,
+provided only that decorum of appearance be preserved, and the peace of
+mind of persons concerned be not disturbed.[42] This execrable lesson,
+which greater and more unselfish men held and propagated in grave books
+before the end of the century, took root in her mind. If we accept
+Rousseau's explanation, it did so the more easily as her temperament was
+cold, and thus corroborated the idea of the indifference of what public
+opinion and private passion usually concur in investing with such
+enormous weightiness. "I will even dare to say," Rousseau declares,
+"that she only knew one true pleasure in the world, and that was to give
+pleasure to those whom she loved."[43] He is at great pains to protest
+how compatible this coolness of temperament is with excessive
+sensibility of character; and neither ethological theory nor practical
+observation of men and women is at all hostile to what he is so anxious
+to prove. The cardinal element of character is the speed at which its
+energies move; its rapidity or its steadiness, concentration or
+volatility; whether the thought and feeling travel as quickly as light
+or as slowly as sound. A rapid and volatile constitution like that of
+Madame de Warens is inconsistent with ardent and glowing warmth, which
+belongs to the other sort, but it is essentially bound up with
+sensibility, or readiness of sympathetic answer to every cry from
+another soul. It is the slow, brooding, smouldering nature, like
+Rousseau's own, in which we may expect to find the tropics.
+
+To bring the heavy artillery of moral reprobation to bear upon a poor
+soul like Madame de Warens is as if one should denounce flagrant want
+of moral purpose in the busy movements of ephemera. Her activity was
+incessant, but it ended in nothing better than debt, embarrassment, and
+confusion. She inherited from her father a taste for alchemy, and spent
+much time in search after secret elixirs and the like. "Quacks, taking
+advantage of her weakness, made themselves her master, constantly
+infested her, ruined her, and wasted, in the midst of furnaces and
+chemicals, intelligence, talents, and charms which would have made her
+the delight of the best societies."[44] Perhaps, however, the too
+notorious vagrancy of her amours had at least as much to do with her
+failure to delight the best societies as her indiscreet passion for
+alchemy. Her person was attractive enough. "She had those points of
+beauty," says Rousseau, "which are desirable, because they reside rather
+in expression than in feature. She had a tender and caressing air, a
+soft eye, a divine smile, light hair of uncommon beauty. You could not
+see a finer head or bosom, finer arms or hands."[45] She was full of
+tricks and whimsies. She could not endure the first smell of the soup
+and meats at dinner; when they were placed on the table she nearly
+swooned, and her disgust lasted some time, until at the end of half an
+hour or so she took her first morsel.[46] On the whole, if we accept the
+current standard of sanity, Madame de Warens must be pronounced ever so
+little flighty; but a monotonous world can afford to be lenient to
+people with a slight craziness, if it only has hearty benevolence and
+cheerfulness in its company, and is free from egoism or
+rapacious vanity.
+
+This was the person within the sphere of whose attraction Rousseau was
+decisively brought in the autumn of 1729, and he remained, with certain
+breaks of vagabondage, linked by a close attachment to her until 1738.
+It was in many respects the truly formative portion of his life. He
+acquired during this time much of his knowledge of books, such as it
+was, and his principles of judging them. He saw much of the lives of the
+poor and of the world's ways with them. Above all his ideal was
+revolutionised, and the recent dreams of Plutarchian heroism, of
+grandeur, of palaces, princesses, and a glorious career full in the
+world's eye, were replaced by a new conception of blessedness of life,
+which never afterwards faded from his vision, and which has held a front
+place in the imagination of literary Europe ever since. The notions or
+aspirations which he had picked up from a few books gave way to notions
+and aspirations which were shaped and fostered by the scenes of actual
+life into which he was thrown, and which found his character soft for
+their impression. In one way the new pictures of a future were as
+dissociated from the conditions of reality as the old had been, and the
+sensuous life of the happy valley in Savoy as little fitted a man to
+compose ideals for our gnarled and knotted world as the mental life
+among the heroics of sentimental fiction had done.
+
+Rousseau's delight in the spot where Madame de Warens lived at Annecy
+was the mark of the new ideal which circumstances were to engender in
+him, and after him to spread in many hearts. His room looked over
+gardens and a stream, and beyond them stretched a far landscape. "It was
+the first time since leaving Bossey that I had green before my windows.
+Always shut in by walls, I had nothing under my eye but house-tops and
+the dull gray of the streets. How moving and delicious this novelty was
+to me! It brightened all the tenderness of my disposition. I counted the
+landscape among the kindnesses of my dear benefactress; it seemed as if
+she had brought it there expressly for me. I placed myself there in all
+peacefulness with her; she was present to me everywhere among the
+flowers and the verdure; her charms and those of spring were all mingled
+together in my eyes. My heart, which had hitherto been stifled, found
+itself more free in this ample space, and my sighs had more liberal vent
+among these orchard gardens."[47] Madame de Warens was the semi-divine
+figure who made the scene live, and gave it perfect and harmonious
+accent. He had neither transports nor desires by her side, but existed
+in a state of ravishing calm, enjoying without knowing what. "I could
+have passed my whole life and eternity itself in this way, without an
+instant of weariness. She is the only person with whom I never felt that
+dryness in conversation, which turns the duty of keeping it up into a
+torment. Our intercourse was not so much conversation as an
+inexhaustible stream of chatter, which never came to an end until it was
+interrupted from without. I only felt all the force of my attachment for
+her when she was out of my sight. So long as I could see her I was
+merely happy and satisfied, but my disquiet in her absence went so far
+as to be painful. I shall never forget how one holiday, while she was at
+vespers, I went for a walk outside the town, my heart full of her image
+and of an eager desire to pass all my days by her side. I had sense
+enough to see that for the present this was impossible, and that the
+bliss which I relished so keenly must be brief. This gave to my musing a
+sadness which was free from everything sombre, and which was moderated
+by pleasing hope. The sound of the bells, which has always moved me to a
+singular degree, the singing of the birds, the glory of the weather, the
+sweetness of the landscape, the scattered rustic dwellings in which my
+imagination placed our common home;--all this so struck me with a vivid,
+tender, sad, and touching impression that I saw myself as in an ecstasy
+transported into the happy time and the happy place where my heart,
+possessed of all the felicity that could bring it delight, without even
+dreaming of the pleasures of sense, should share joys
+inexpressible."[48]
+
+There was still, however, a space to be bridged between the doubtful now
+and this delicious future. The harshness of circumstance is ever
+interposing with a money question, and for a vagrant of eighteen the
+first of all problems is a problem of economics. Rousseau was submitted
+to the observation of a kinsman of Madame de Warens,[49] and his verdict
+corresponded with that of the notary of Geneva, with whom years before
+Rousseau had first tried the critical art of making a living. He
+pronounced that in spite of an animated expression, the lad was, if not
+thoroughly inept, at least of very slender intelligence, without ideas,
+almost without attainments, very narrow indeed in all respects, and that
+the honour of one day becoming a village priest was the highest piece of
+fortune to which he had any right to aspire.[50] So he was sent to the
+seminary, to learn Latin enough for the priestly offices. He began by
+conceiving a deadly antipathy to his instructor, whose appearance
+happened to be displeasing to him. A second was found,[51] and the
+patient and obliging temper, the affectionate and sympathetic manner of
+his new teacher made a great impression on the pupil, though the
+progress in intellectual acquirement was as unsatisfactory in one case
+as in the other. It is characteristic of that subtle impressionableness
+to physical comeliness, which in ordinary natures is rapidly effaced by
+press of more urgent considerations, but which Rousseau's strongly
+sensuous quality retained, that he should have remembered, and thought
+worth mentioning years afterwards, that the first of his two teachers at
+the seminary of Annecy had greasy black hair, a complexion as of
+gingerbread, and bristles in place of beard, while the second had the
+most touching expression he ever saw in his life, with fair hair and
+large blue eyes, and a glance and a tone which made you feel that he was
+one of the band predestined from their birth to unhappy days. While at
+Turin, Rousseau had made the acquaintance of another sage and benevolent
+priest,[52] and uniting the two good men thirty years after he conceived
+and drew the character of the Savoyard Vicar.[53]
+
+Shortly the seminarists reported that, though not vicious, their pupil
+was not even good enough for a priest, so deficient was he in
+intellectual faculty. It was next decided to try music, and Rousseau
+ascended for a brief space into the seventh heaven of the arts. This was
+one of the intervals of his life of which he says that he recalls not
+only the times, places, persons, but all the surrounding objects, the
+temperature of the air, its odour, its colour, a certain local
+impression only felt there, and the memory of which stirs the old
+transports anew. He never forgot a certain tune, because one Advent
+Sunday he heard it from his bed being sung before daybreak on the steps
+of the cathedral; nor an old lame carpenter who played the counter-bass,
+nor a fair little abbé who played the violin in the choir.[54] Yet he
+was in so dreamy, absent, and distracted a state, that neither his
+good-will nor his assiduity availed, and he could learn nothing, not
+even music. His teacher, one Le Mâitre, belonged to that great class of
+irregular and disorderly natures with which Rousseau's destiny, in the
+shape of an irregular and disorderly temperament of his own, so
+constantly brought him into contact. Le Mâitre could not work without
+the inspiration of the wine cup, and thus his passion for his art landed
+him a sot. He took offence at a slight put upon him by the precentor of
+the cathedral of which he was choir-master, and left Annecy in a furtive
+manner along with Rousseau, whom the too comprehensive solicitude of
+Madame de Warens despatched to bear him company. They went together as
+far as Lyons; here the unfortunate musician happened to fall into an
+epileptic fit in the street. Rousseau called for help, informed the
+crowd of the poor man's hotel, and then seizing a moment when no one was
+thinking about him, turned the street corner and finally disappeared,
+the musician being thus "abandoned by the only friend on whom he had a
+right to count."[55] It thus appears that a man maybe exquisitely moved
+by the sound of bells, the song of birds, the fairness of smiling
+gardens, and yet be capable all the time without a qualm of misgiving of
+leaving a friend senseless in the road in a strange place. It has ceased
+to be wonderful how many ugly and cruel actions are done by people with
+an extraordinary sense of the beauty and beneficence of nature. At the
+moment Rousseau only thought of getting back to Annecy and Madame de
+Warens. "It is not," he says in words of profound warning, which many
+men have verified in those two or three hours before the tardy dawn that
+swell into huge purgatorial æons,--"it is not when we have just done a
+bad action, that it torments us; it is when we recall it long after, for
+the memory of it can never be thrust out."[56]
+
+
+II.
+
+When he made his way homewards again, he found to his surprise and
+dismay that his benefactress had left Annecy, and had gone for an
+indefinite time to Paris. He never knew the secret of this sudden
+departure, for no man, he says, was ever so little curious as to the
+private affairs of his friends. His heart, completely occupied with the
+present, filled its whole capacity and entire space with that, and
+except for past pleasures no empty corner was ever left for what was
+done with.[57] He says he was too young to take the desertion deeply to
+heart. Where he found subsistence we do not know. He was fascinated by a
+flashy French adventurer,[58] in whose company he wasted many hours, and
+the precious stuff of youthful opportunity. He passed a summer day in
+joyful rustic fashion with two damsels whom he hardly ever saw again,
+but the memory of whom and of the holiday that they had made with him
+remained stamped in his brain, to be reproduced many a year hence in
+some of the traits of the new Heloïsa and her friend Claire.[59] Then he
+accepted an invitation from a former waiting-woman of Madame de Warens
+to attend her home to Freiburg. On this expedition he paid an hour's
+visit to his father, who had settled and remarried at Nyon. Returning
+from Freiburg, he came to Lausanne, where, with an audacity that might
+be taken for the first presage of mental disturbance, he undertook to
+teach music. "I have already," he says, "noted some moments of
+inconceivable delirium, in which I ceased to be myself. Behold me now a
+teacher of singing, without knowing how to decipher an air. Without the
+least knowledge of composition, I boasted of my skill in it before all
+the world; and without ability to score the slenderest vaudeville, I
+gave myself out for a composer. Having been presented to M. de
+Treytorens, a professor of law, who loved music and gave concerts at his
+house, I insisted on giving him a specimen of my talent, and I set to
+work to compose a piece for his concert with as much effrontery as if I
+knew all about it." The performance came off duly, and the strange
+impostor conducted it with as much gravity as the profoundest master.
+Never since the beginning of opera has the like charivari greeted the
+ears of men.[60] Such an opening was fatal to all chance of scholars,
+but the friendly tavern-keeper who had first taken him in did not lack
+either hope or charity. "How is it," Rousseau cried, many years after
+this, "that having found so many good people in my youth, I find so few
+in my advanced life? Is their stock exhausted? No; but the class in
+which I have to seek them now is not the same as that in which I found
+them then. Among the common people, where great passions only speak at
+intervals, the sentiments of nature make themselves heard oftener. In
+the higher ranks they are absolutely stifled, and under the mask of
+sentiment it is only interest or vanity that speaks."[61]
+
+From Lausanne he went to Neuchâtel, where he had more success, for,
+teaching others, he began himself to learn. But no success was marked
+enough to make him resist a vagrant chance. One day in his rambles
+falling in with an archimandrite of the Greek church, who was traversing
+Europe in search of subscriptions for the restoration of the Holy
+Sepulchre, he at once attached himself to him in the capacity of
+interpreter. In this position he remained for a few weeks, until the
+French minister at Soleure took him away from the Greek monk, and
+despatched him to Paris to be the attendant of a young officer.[62] A
+few days in the famous city, which he now saw for the first time, and
+which disappointed his expectations just as the sea and all other
+wonders disappointed them,[63] convinced him that here was not what he
+sought, and he again turned his face southwards in search of Madame de
+Warens and more familiar lands.
+
+The interval thus passed in roaming over the eastern face of France, and
+which we may date in the summer of 1732,[64] was always counted by
+Rousseau among the happy epochs of his life, though the weeks may seem
+grievously wasted to a generation which is apt to limit its ideas of
+redeeming the time to the two pursuits of reading books or making money.
+He travelled alone and on foot from Soleure to Paris and from Paris back
+again to Lyons, and this was part of the training which served him in
+the stead of books. Scarcely any great writer since the revival of
+letters has been so little literary as Rousseau, so little indebted to
+literature for the most characteristic part of his work. He was formed
+by life; not by life in the sense of contact with a great number of
+active and important persons, or with a great number of persons of any
+kind, but in the rarer sense of free surrender to the plenitude of his
+own impressions. A world composed of such people, all dispensing with
+the inherited portion of human experience, and living independently on
+their own stock, would rapidly fall backwards into dissolution. But
+there is no more rash idea of the right composition of a society than
+one which leads us to denounce a type of character for no better reason
+than that, if it were universal, society would go to pieces. There is
+very little danger of Rousseau's type becoming common, unless lunar or
+other great physical influences arise to work a vast change in the
+cerebral constitution of the species. We may safely trust the prodigious
+_vis inertioe_ of human nature to ward off the peril of an eccentricity
+beyond bounds spreading too far. At present, however, it is enough,
+without going into the general question, to notice the particular fact
+that while the other great exponents of the eighteenth century movement,
+Hume, Voltaire, Diderot, were nourishing their natural strength of
+understanding by the study and practice of literature, Rousseau, the
+leader of the reaction against that movement, was wandering a beggar and
+an outcast, craving the rude fare of the peasant's hut, knocking at
+roadside inns, and passing nights in caves and holes in the fields, or
+in the great desolate streets of towns.
+
+If such a life had been disagreeable to him, it would have lost all the
+significance that it now has for us. But where others would have found
+affliction, he had consolation, and where they would have lain desperate
+and squalid, he marched elate and ready to strike the stars. "Never," he
+says, "did I think so much, exist so much, be myself so much, as in the
+journeys that I have made alone and on foot. Walking has something about
+it which animates and enlivens my ideas. I can hardly think while I am
+still; my body must be in motion, to move my mind. The sight of the
+country, the succession of agreeable views, open air, good appetite, the
+freedom of the alehouse, the absence of everything that could make me
+feel dependence, or recall me to my situation--all this sets my soul
+free, gives me a greater boldness of thought. I dispose of all nature as
+its sovereign lord; my heart, wandering from object to object, mingles
+and is one with the things that soothe it, wraps itself up in charming
+images, and is intoxicated by delicious sentiment. Ideas come as they
+please, not as I please: they do not come at all, or they come in a
+crowd, overwhelming me with their number and their force. When I came to
+a place I only thought of eating, and when I left it I only thought of
+walking. I felt that a new paradise awaited me at the door, and I
+thought of nothing but of hastening in search of it."[65]
+
+Here again is a picture of one whom vagrancy assuredly did not
+degrade:--"I had not the least care for the future, and I awaited the
+answer [as to the return of Madame de Warens to Savoy], lying out in the
+open air, sleeping stretched out on the ground or on some wooden bench,
+as tranquilly as on a bed of roses. I remember passing one delicious
+night outside the town [Lyons], in a road which ran by the side of
+either the Rhone or the Saône, I forget which of the two. Gardens raised
+on a terrace bordered the other side of the road. It had been very hot
+all day, and the evening was delightful; the dew moistened the parched
+grass, the night was profoundly still, the air fresh without being cold;
+the sun in going down had left red vapours in the heaven, and they
+turned the water to rose colour; the trees on the terrace sheltered
+nightingales, answering song for song. I went on in a sort of ecstasy,
+surrendering my heart and every sense to the enjoyment of it all, and
+only sighing for regret that I was enjoying it alone. Absorbed in the
+sweetness of my musing, I prolonged my ramble far into the night,
+without ever perceiving that I was tired. At last I found it out. I lay
+down luxuriously on the shelf of a niche or false doorway made in the
+wall of the terrace; the canopy of my bed was formed by overarching
+tree-tops; a nightingale was perched exactly over my head, and I fell
+asleep to his singing. My slumber was delicious, my awaking more
+delicious still. It was broad day, and my opening eyes looked on sun and
+water and green things, and an adorable landscape. I rose up and gave
+myself a shake; I felt hungry and started gaily for the town, resolved
+to spend on a good breakfast the two pieces of money which I still had
+left. I was in such joyful spirits that I went along the road singing
+lustily."[66]
+
+There is in this the free expansion of inner sympathy; the natural
+sentiment spontaneously responding to all the delicious movement of the
+external world on its peaceful and harmonious side, just as if the world
+of many-hued social circumstance which man has made for himself had no
+existence. We are conscious of a full nervous elation which is not the
+product of literature, such as we have seen so many a time since, and
+which only found its expression in literature in Rousseau's case by
+accident. He did not feel in order to write, but felt without any
+thought of writing. He dreamed at this time of many lofty destinies,
+among them that of marshal of France, but the fame of authorship never
+entered into his dreams. When the time for authorship actually came,
+his work had all the benefit of the absence of self-consciousness, it
+had all the disinterestedness, so to say, with which the first fresh
+impressions were suffered to rise in his mind.
+
+One other picture of this time is worth remembering, as showing that
+Rousseau was not wholly blind to social circumstances, and as
+illustrating, too, how it was that his way of dealing with them was so
+much more real and passionate, though so much less sagacious in some of
+its aspects, than the way of the other revolutionists of the century.
+One day, when he had lost himself in wandering in search of some site
+which he expected to find beautiful, he entered the house of a peasant,
+half dead with hunger and thirst. His entertainer offered him nothing
+more restoring than coarse barley bread and skimmed milk. Presently,
+after seeing what manner of guest he had, the worthy man descended by a
+small trap into his cellar, and brought up some good brown bread, some
+meat, and a bottle of wine, and an omelette was added afterwards. Then
+he explained to the wondering Rousseau, who was a Swiss, and knew none
+of the mysteries of the French fisc, that he hid away his wine on
+account of the duties, and his bread on account of the _taille_, and
+declared that he would be a ruined man if they suspected that he was not
+dying of hunger. All this made an impression on Rousseau which he never
+forgot. "Here," he says, "was the germ of the inextinguishable hatred
+which afterwards grew up in my heart against the vexations that harass
+the common people, and against all their oppressors. This man actually
+did not dare to eat the bread which he had won by the sweat of his brow,
+and only avoided ruin by showing the same misery as reigned
+around him."[67]
+
+It was because he had thus seen the wrongs of the poor, not from without
+but from within, not as a pitying spectator but as of their own company,
+that Rousseau by and by brought such fire to the attack upon the old
+order, and changed the blank practice of the elder philosophers into a
+deadly affair of ball and shell. The man who had been a servant, who had
+wanted bread, who knew the horrors of the midnight street, who had slept
+in dens, who had been befriended by rough men and rougher women, who saw
+the goodness of humanity under its coarsest outside, and who above all
+never tried to shut these things out from his memory, but accepted them
+as the most interesting, the most touching, the most real of all his
+experiences, might well be expected to penetrate to the root of the
+matter, and to protest to the few who usurp literature and policy with
+their ideas, aspirations, interests, that it is not they but the many,
+whose existence stirs the heart and fills the eye with the great prime
+elements of the human lot.
+
+
+III.
+
+It was, then, some time towards the middle of 1732 that Rousseau arrived
+at Chambéri, and finally took up his residence with Madame de Warens, in
+the dullest and most sombre room of a dull and sombre house. She had
+procured him employment in connection with a land survey which the
+government of Charles Emmanuel III. was then executing. It was only
+temporary, and Rousseau's function was no loftier than that of clerk,
+who had to copy and reduce arithmetical calculations. We may imagine how
+little a youth fresh from nights under the summer sky would relish eight
+hours a day of surly toil in a gloomy office, with a crowd of dirty and
+ill-smelling fellow-workers.[68] If Rousseau was ever oppressed by any
+set of circumstances, his method was invariable: he ran away from them.
+So now he threw up his post, and again tried to earn a little money by
+that musical instruction in which he had made so many singular and
+grotesque endeavours. Even here the virtues which make ordinary life a
+possible thing were not his. He was pleased at his lessons while there,
+but he could not bear the idea of being bound to be there, nor the
+fixing of an hour. In time this experiment for a subsistence came to the
+same end as all the others. He next rushed to Besançon in search of the
+musical instruction which he wished to give to others, but his baggage
+was confiscated at the frontier, and he had to return.[69] Finally he
+abandoned the attempt, and threw himself loyally upon the narrow
+resources of Madame de Warens, whom he assisted in some singularly
+indefinite way in the transaction of her very indefinite and
+miscellaneous affairs,--if we are here, as so often, to give the name of
+affairs to a very rapid and heedless passage along a shabby road
+to ruin.
+
+The household at this time was on a very remarkable footing. Madame de
+Warens was at its head, and Claude Anet, gardener, butler, steward, was
+her factotum. He was a discreet person, of severe probity and few words,
+firm, thrifty, and sage. The too comprehensive principles of his
+mistress admitted him to the closest intimacy, and in due time, when
+Madame de Warens thought of the seductions which ensnare the feet of
+youth, Rousseau was delivered from them in an equivocal way by
+solicitous application of the same maxims of comprehension. "Although
+Claude Anet was as young as she was, he was so mature and so grave, that
+he looked upon us as two children worthy of indulgence, and we both
+looked upon him as a respectable man, whose esteem it was our business
+to conciliate. Thus there grew up between us three a companionship,
+perhaps without another example like it upon earth. All our wishes, our
+cares, our hearts were in common; nothing seemed to pass outside our
+little circle. The habit of living together, and of living together
+exclusively, became so strong that if at our meals one of the three was
+absent, or there came a fourth, all was thrown out; and in spite of our
+peculiar relations, a _tête-à-tête_ was less sweet than a meeting of all
+three."[70] Fate interfered to spoil this striking attempt after a new
+type of the family, developed on a duandric base. Claude Anet was seized
+with illness, a consequence of excessive fatigue in an Alpine expedition
+in search of plants, and he came to his end.[71] In him Rousseau always
+believed that he lost the most solid friend he ever possessed, "a rare
+and estimable man, in whom nature served instead of education, and who
+nourished in obscure servitude all the virtues of great men."[72] The
+day after his death, Rousseau was speaking of their lost friend to
+Madame de Warens with the liveliest and most sincere affliction, when
+suddenly in the midst of the conversation he remembered that he should
+inherit the poor man's clothes, and particularly a handsome black coat.
+A reproachful tear from his Maman, as he always somewhat nauseously
+called Madame de Warens, extinguished the vile thought and washed away
+its last traces.[73] After all, those men and women are exceptionally
+happy, who have no such involuntary meanness of thought standing against
+themselves in that unwritten chapter of their lives which even the most
+candid persons keep privately locked up in shamefast recollection.
+
+Shortly after his return to Chambéri, a wave from the great tide of
+European affairs surged into the quiet valleys of Savoy. In the February
+of 1733, Augustus the Strong died, and the usual disorder followed in
+the choice of a successor to him in the kingship of Poland. France was
+for Stanislaus, the father-in-law of Lewis XV., while the Emperor
+Charles VI. and Anne of Russia were for August III., elector of Saxony.
+Stanislaus was compelled to flee, and the French Government, taking up
+his quarrel, declared war against the Emperor (October 14, 1733). The
+first act of this war, which was to end in the acquisition of Naples and
+the two Sicilies by Spanish Bourbons, and of Lorraine by France, was the
+despatch of a French expedition to the Milanese under Marshall Villars,
+the husband of one of Voltaire's first idols. This took place in the
+autumn of 1733, and a French column passed through Chambéri, exciting
+lively interest in all minds, including Rousseau's. He now read the
+newspapers for the first time, with the most eager sympathy for the
+country with whose history his own name was destined to be so
+permanently associated. "If this mad passion," he says, "had only been
+momentary, I should not speak of it; but for no visible reason it took
+such root in my heart, that when I afterwards at Paris played the stern
+republican, I could not help feeling in spite of myself a secret
+predilection for the very nation that I found so servile, and the
+government I made bold to assail."[74] This fondness for France was
+strong, constant, and invincible, and found what was in the eighteenth
+century a natural complement in a corresponding dislike of England.[75]
+
+Rousseau's health began to show signs of weakness. His breath became
+asthmatic, he had palpitations, he spat blood, and suffered from a slow
+feverishness from which he never afterwards became entirely free.[76]
+His mind was as feverish as his body, and the morbid broodings which
+active life reduces to their lowest degree in most young men, were left
+to make full havoc along with the seven devils of idleness and vacuity.
+An instinct which may flow from the unrecognised animal lying deep down
+in us all, suggested the way of return to wholesomeness. Rousseau
+prevailed upon Madame de Warens to leave the stifling streets for the
+fresh fields, and to deliver herself by retreat to rural solitude from
+the adventurers who made her their prey. Les Charmettes, the modest
+farm-house to which they retired, still stands. The modern traveller,
+with a taste for relieving an imagination strained by great historic
+monuments and secular landmarks, with the sight of spots associated with
+the passion and meditation of some far-shining teacher of men, may walk
+a short league from where the gray slate roofs of dull Chambéri bake in
+the sun, and ascending a gently mounting road, with high leafy bank on
+the right throwing cool shadows over his head, and a stream on the left
+making music at his feet, he sees an old red housetop lifted lonely
+above the trees. The homes in which men have lived now and again lend
+themselves to the beholder's subjective impression; they seemed to be
+brooding in forlorn isolation like some life-wearied gray-beard over
+ancient and sorrow-stricken memories. At Les Charmettes a pitiful
+melancholy penetrates you. The supreme loveliness of the scene, the
+sweet-smelling meadows, the orchard, the water-ways, the little vineyard
+with here and there a rose glowing crimson among the yellow stunted
+vines, the rust-red crag of the Nivolet rising against the sky far
+across the broad valley; the contrast between all this peace, beauty,
+silence, and the diseased miserable life of the famous man who found a
+scanty span of paradise in the midst of it, touches the soul with a
+pathetic spell. We are for the moment lifted out of squalor, vagrancy,
+and disorder, and seem to hear some of the harmonies which sounded to
+this perturbed spirit, soothing it, exalting it, and stirring those
+inmost vibrations which in truth make up all the short divine part of a
+man's life.[77]
+
+"No day passes," he wrote in the very year in which he died, "in which
+I do not recall with joy and tender effusion this single and brief time
+in my life, when I was fully myself, without mixture or hindrance, and
+when I may say in a true sense that I lived. I may almost say, like the
+prefect when disgraced and proceeding to end his days tranquilly in the
+country, 'I have passed seventy years on the earth, and I have lived but
+seven of them.' But for this brief and precious space, I should perhaps
+have remained uncertain about myself; for during all the rest of my life
+I have been so agitated, tossed, plucked hither and thither by the
+passions of others, that, being nearly passive in a life so stormy, I
+should find it hard to distinguish what belonged to me in my own
+conduct,--to such a degree has harsh necessity weighed upon me. But
+during these few years I did what I wished to do, I was what I wished to
+be."[78] The secret of such rare felicity is hardly to be described in
+words. It was the ease of a profoundly sensuous nature with every sense
+gratified and fascinated. Caressing and undivided affection within
+doors, all the sweetness and movement of nature without, solitude,
+freedom, and the busy idleness of life in gardens,--these were the
+conditions of Rousseau's ideal state. "If my happiness," he says, in
+language of strange felicity, "consisted in facts, actions, or words, I
+might then describe and represent it in some way; but how say what was
+neither said nor done nor even thought, but only enjoyed and felt
+without my being able to point to any other object of my happiness than
+the very feeling itself? I arose with the sun and I was happy; I went
+out of doors and I was happy; I saw Maman and I was happy; I left her
+and I was happy; I went among the woods and hills, I wandered about in
+the dells, I read, I was idle, I dug in the garden, I gathered fruit, I
+helped them indoors, and everywhere happiness followed me. It was not in
+any given thing, it was all in myself, and could never leave me for a
+single instant."[79] This was a true garden of Eden, with the serpent in
+temporary quiescence, and we may count the man rare since the fall who
+has found such happiness in such conditions, and not less blessed than
+he is rare. The fact that he was one of this chosen company was among
+the foremost of the circumstances which made Rousseau seem to so many
+men in the eighteenth century as a spring of water in a thirsty land.
+
+All innocent and amiable things moved him. He used to spend hours
+together in taming pigeons; he inspired them with such confidence that
+they would follow him about, and allow him to take them wherever he
+would, and the moment that he appeared in the garden two or three of
+them would instantly settle on his arms or his head. The bees, too,
+gradually came to put the same trust in him, and his whole life was
+surrounded with gentle companionship. He always began the day with the
+sun, walking on the high ridge above the slope on which the house lay,
+and going through his form of worship. "It did not consist in a vain
+moving of the lips, but in a sincere elevation of heart to the author of
+the tender nature whose beauties lay spread out before my eyes. This act
+passed rather in wonder and contemplation than in requests; and I always
+knew that with the dispenser of true blessings, the best means of
+obtaining those which are needful for us, is less to ask than to deserve
+them."[80] These effusions may be taken for the beginning of the
+deistical reaction in the eighteenth century. While the truly scientific
+and progressive spirits were occupied in laborious preparation for
+adding to human knowledge and systematising it, Rousseau walked with his
+head in the clouds among gods, beneficent authors of nature, wise
+dispensers of blessings, and the like. "Ah, madam," he once said,
+"sometimes in the privacy of my study, with my hands pressed tight over
+my eyes or in the darkness of the night, I am of his opinion that there
+is no God. But look yonder (pointing with his hand to the sky, with head
+erect, and an inspired glance): the rising of the sun, as it scatters
+the mists that cover the earth and lays bare the wondrous glittering
+scene of nature, disperses at the same moment all cloud from my soul. I
+find my faith again, and my God, and my belief in him. I admire and
+adore him, and I prostrate myself in his presence."[81] As if that
+settled the question affirmatively, any more than the absence of such
+theistic emotion in many noble spirits settles it negatively. God became
+the highest known formula for sensuous expansion, the synthesis of all
+complacent emotions, and Rousseau filled up the measure of his delight
+by creating and invoking a Supreme Being to match with fine scenery and
+sunny gardens. We shall have a better occasion to mark the attributes of
+this important conception when we come to _Emilius_, where it was
+launched in a panoply of resounding phrases upon a Europe which was
+grown too strong for Christian dogma, and was not yet grown strong
+enough to rest in a provisional ordering of the results of its own
+positive knowledge. Walking on the terrace at Les Charmettes, you are at
+the very birth-place of that particular Être Suprême to whom Robespierre
+offered the incense of an official festival.
+
+Sometimes the reading of a Jansenist book would make him unhappy by the
+prominence into which it brought the displeasing idea of hell, and he
+used now and then to pass a miserable day in wondering whether this
+cruel destiny should be his. Madame de Warens, whose softness of heart
+inspired her with a theology that ought to have satisfied a seraphic
+doctor, had abolished hell, but she could not dispense with purgatory
+because she did not know what to do with the souls of the wicked, being
+unable either to damn them, or to instal them among the good until they
+had been purified into goodness. In truth it must be confessed, says
+Rousseau, that alike in this world and the other the wicked are
+extremely embarrassing.[82] His own search after knowledge of his fate
+is well known. One day, amusing himself in a characteristic manner by
+throwing stones at trees, he began to be tormented by fear of the
+eternal pit. He resolved to test his doom by throwing a stone at a
+particular tree; if he hit, then salvation; if he missed, then
+perdition. With a trembling hand and beating heart he threw; as he had
+chosen a large tree and was careful not to place himself too far away,
+all was well.[83] As a rule, however, in spite of the ugly phantoms of
+theology, he passed his days in a state of calm. Even when illness
+brought it into his head that he should soon know the future lot by more
+assured experiment, he still preserved a tranquillity which he justly
+qualifies as sensual.
+
+In thinking of Rousseau's peculiar feeling for nature, which acquired
+such a decisive place in his character during his life at Les
+Charmettes, it is to be remembered that it was entirely devoid of that
+stormy and boisterous quality which has grown up in more modern
+literature, out of the violent attempt to press nature in her most awful
+moods into the service of the great revolt against a social and
+religious tradition that can no longer be endured. Of this revolt
+Rousseau was a chief, and his passion for natural aspects was connected
+with this attitude, but he did not seize those of them which the poet of
+_Manfred_, for example, forced into an imputed sympathy with his own
+rebellion. Rousseau always loved nature best in her moods of quiescence
+and serenity, and in proportion as she lent herself to such moods in
+men. He liked rivulets better than rivers. He could not bear the sight
+of the sea; its infertile bosom and blind restless tumblings filled him
+with melancholy. The ruins of a park affected him more than the ruins of
+castles.[84] It is true that no plain, however beautiful, ever seemed so
+in his eyes; he required torrents, rocks, dark forests, mountains, and
+precipices.[85] This does not affect the fact that he never moralised
+appalling landscape, as post-revolutionary writers have done, and that
+the Alpine wastes which throw your puniest modern into a rapture, had no
+attraction for him. He could steep himself in nature without climbing
+fifteen thousand feet to find her. In landscape, as has been said by one
+with a right to speak, Rousseau was truly a great artist, and you can,
+if you are artistic too, follow him with confidence in his wanderings;
+he understood that beauty does not require a great stage, and that the
+effect of things lies in harmony.[86] The humble heights of the Jura,
+and the lovely points of the valley of Chambéri, sufficed to give him
+all the pleasure of which he was capable. In truth a man cannot escape
+from his time, and Rousseau at least belonged to the eighteenth century
+in being devoid of the capacity for feeling awe, and the taste for
+objects inspiring it. Nature was a tender friend with softest bosom, and
+no sphinx with cruel enigma. He felt neither terror, nor any sense of
+the littleness of man, nor of the mysteriousness of life, nor of the
+unseen forces which make us their sport, as he peered over the precipice
+and heard the water roaring at the bottom of it; he only remained for
+hours enjoying the physical sensation of dizziness with which it turned
+his brain, with a break now and again for hurling large stones, and
+watching them roll and leap down into the torrent, with as little
+reflection and as little articulate emotion as if he had been a
+child.[87]
+
+Just as it is convenient for purposes of classification to divide a man
+into body and soul, even when we believe the soul to be only a function
+of the body, so people talk of his intellectual side and his emotional
+side, his thinking quality and his feeling quality, though in fact and
+at the roots these qualities are not two but one, with temperament for
+the common substratum. During this period of his life the whole of
+Rousseau's true force went into his feelings, and at all times feeling
+predominated over reflection, with many drawbacks and some advantages of
+a very critical kind for subsequent generations of men. Nearly every one
+who came into contact with him in the way of testing his capacity for
+being instructed pronounced him hopeless. He had several excellent
+opportunities of learning Latin, especially at Turin in the house of
+Count Gouvon, and in the seminary at Annecy, and at Les Charmettes he
+did his best to teach himself, but without any better result than a very
+limited power of reading. In learning one rule he forgot the last; he
+could never master the most elementary laws of versification; he learnt
+and re-learnt twenty times the Eclogues of Virgil, but not a single word
+remained with him.[88] He was absolutely without verbal memory, and he
+pronounces himself wholly incapable of learning anything from masters.
+Madame de Warens tried to have him taught both dancing and fencing; he
+could never achieve a minuet, and after three months of instruction he
+was as clumsy and helpless with his foil as he had been on the first
+day. He resolved to become a master at the chessboard; he shut himself
+up in his room, and worked night and day over the books with
+indescribable efforts which covered many weeks. On proceeding to the
+café to manifest his powers, he found that all the moves and
+combinations had got mixed up in his head, he saw nothing but clouds on
+the board, and as often as he repeated the experiment he only found
+himself weaker than before. Even in music, for which he had a genuine
+passion and at which he worked hard, he never could acquire any facility
+at sight, and he was an inaccurate scorer, even when only copying the
+score of others.[89]
+
+Two things nearly incompatible, he writes in an important passage, are
+united in me without my being able to think how; an extremely ardent
+temperament, lively and impetuous passions, along with ideas that are
+very slow in coming to birth, very embarrassed, and which never arise
+until after the event. "One would say that my heart and my intelligence
+do not belong to the same individual.... I feel all, and see nothing; I
+am carried away, but I am stupid.... This slowness of thinking, united
+with such vivacity of feeling, possesses me not only in conversation,
+but when I am alone and working. My ideas arrange themselves in my head
+with incredible difficulty; they circulate there in a dull way and
+ferment until they agitate me, fill me with heat, and give me
+palpitations; in the midst of this stir I see nothing clearly, I could
+not write a single word. Insensibly the violent emotion grows still, the
+chaos is disentangled, everything falls into its place, but very slowly
+and after long and confused agitation."[90]
+
+So far from saying that his heart and intelligence belonged to two
+persons, we might have been quite sure, knowing his heart, that his
+intelligence must be exactly what he describes its process to have been.
+The slow-burning ecstasy in which he knew himself at his height and was
+most conscious of fulness of life, was incompatible with the rapid and
+deliberate generation of ideas. The same soft passivity, the same
+receptiveness, which made his emotions like the surface of a lake under
+sky and breeze, entered also into the working of his intellectual
+faculties. But it happens that in this region, in the attainment of
+knowledge, truth, and definite thoughts, even receptiveness implies a
+distinct and active energy, and hence the very quality of temperament
+which left him free and eager for sensuous impressions, seemed to muffle
+his intelligence in a certain opaque and resisting medium, of the
+indefinable kind that interposes between will and action in a dream. His
+rational part was fatally protected by a non-conducting envelope of
+sentiment; this intercepted clear ideas on their passage, and even cut
+off the direct and true impress of those objects and their relations,
+which are the material of clear ideas. He was no doubt right in his
+avowal that objects generally made less impression on him than the
+recollection of them; that he could see nothing of what was before his
+eyes, and had only his intelligence in cases where memories were
+concerned; and that of what was said or done in his presence, he felt
+and penetrated nothing.[91] In other words, this is to say that his
+material of thought was not fact but image. When he plunged into
+reflection, he did not deal with the objects of reflection at first hand
+and in themselves, but only with the reminiscences of objects, which he
+had never approached in a spirit of deliberate and systematic
+observation, and with those reminiscences, moreover, suffused and
+saturated by the impalpable but most potent essences of a fermenting
+imagination. Instead of urgently seeking truth with the patient energy,
+the wariness, and the conscience, with the sharpened instruments, the
+systematic apparatus, and the minute feelers and tentacles of the
+genuine thinker and solid reasoner, he only floated languidly on a
+summer tide of sensation, and captured premiss and conclusion in a
+succession of swoons. It would be a mistake to contend that no work can
+be done for the world by this method, or that truth only comes to those
+who chase her with logical forceps. But one should always try to
+discover how a teacher of men came by his ideas, whether by careful
+toil, or by the easy bequest of generous phantasy.
+
+To give a zest to rural delight, and partly perhaps to satisfy the
+intellectual interest which must have been an instinct in one who became
+so consummate a master in the great and noble art of composition,
+Rousseau, during the time when he lived with Madame de Warens, tried as
+well as he knew how to acquire a little knowledge of what fruit the
+cultivation of the mind of man had hitherto brought forth. According to
+his own account, it was Voltaire's Letters on the English which first
+drew him seriously to study, and nothing which that illustrious man
+wrote at this time escaped him. His taste for Voltaire inspired him with
+the desire of writing with elegance, and of imitating "the fine and
+enchanting colour of Voltaire's style"[92]--an object in which he cannot
+be held to have in the least succeeded, though he achieved a superb
+style of his own. On his return from Turin Madame de Warens had begun in
+some small way to cultivate a taste for letters in him, though he had
+lost the enthusiasm of his childhood for reading. Saint Evremond,
+Puffendorff, the Henriade, and the Spectator happened to be in his room,
+and he turned over their pages. The Spectator, he says, pleased him
+greatly and did him much good.[93] Madame de Warens was what he calls
+protestant in literary taste, and would talk for ever of the great
+Bayle, while she thought more of Saint Evremond than she could ever
+persuade Rousseau to think. Two or three years later than this he began
+to use his own mind more freely, and opened his eyes for the first time
+to the greatest question that ever dawns upon any human intelligence
+that has the privilege of discerning it, the problem of a philosophy and
+a body of doctrine.
+
+His way of answering it did not promise the best results. He read an
+introduction to the Sciences, then he took an Encyclopædia and tried to
+learn all things together, until he repented and resolved to study
+subjects apart. This he found a better plan for one to whom long
+application was so fatiguing, that he could not with any effect occupy
+himself for half an hour on any one matter, especially if following the
+ideas of another person.[94] He began his morning's work, after an hour
+or two of dispersive chat, with the Port-Royal Logic, Locke's Essay on
+the Human Understanding, Malebranche, Leibnitz, Descartes.[95] He found
+these authors in a condition of such perpetual contradiction among
+themselves, that he formed the chimerical design of reconciling them
+with one another. This was tedious, so he took up another method, on
+which he congratulated himself to the end of his life. It consisted in
+simply adopting and following the ideas of each author, without
+comparing them either with one another or with those of other writers,
+and above all without any criticism of his own. Let me begin, he said,
+by collecting a store of ideas, true or false, but at any rate clear,
+until my head is well enough stocked to enable me to compare and choose.
+At the end of some years passed "in never thinking exactly, except after
+other people, without reflecting so to speak, and almost without
+reasoning," he found himself in a state to think for himself. "In spite
+of beginning late to exercise my judicial faculty, I never found that it
+had lost its vigour, and when I came to publish my own ideas, I was
+hardly accused of being a servile disciple."[96]
+
+To that fairly credible account of the matter, one can only say that
+this mutually exclusive way of learning the thoughts of others, and
+developing thoughts of your own, is for an adult probably the most
+mischievous, where it is not the most impotent, fashion in which
+intellectual exercise can well be taken. It is exactly the use of the
+judicial faculty, criticising, comparing, and defining, which is
+indispensable in order that a student should not only effectually
+assimilate the ideas of a writer, but even know what those ideas come to
+and how much they are worth. And so when he works at ideas of his own, a
+judicial faculty which has been kept studiously slumbering for some
+years, is not likely to revive in full strength without any preliminary
+training. Rousseau was a man of singular genius, and he set an
+extraordinary mark on Europe, but this mark would have been very
+different if he had ever mastered any one system of thought, or if he
+had ever fully grasped what systematic thinking means. Instead of this,
+his debt to the men whom he read was a debt of piecemeal, and his
+obligation an obligation for fragments; and this is perhaps the worst
+way of acquiring an intellectual lineage, for it leaves out the vital
+continuity of temper and method. It is a small thing to accept this or
+that of Locke's notions upon education or the origin of ideas, if you do
+not see the merit of his way of coming by his notions. In short,
+Rousseau has distinctions in abundance, but the distinction of knowing
+how to think, in the exact sense of that term, was hardly among them,
+and neither now nor at any other time did he go through any of that
+toilsome and vigorous intellectual preparation to which the ablest of
+his contemporaries, Diderot, Voltaire, D'Alembert, Turgot, Condorcet,
+Hume, all submitted themselves. His comfortable view was that "the
+sensible and interesting conversations of a woman of merit are more
+proper to form a young man than all the pedantical philosophy of
+books."[97]
+
+Style, however, in which he ultimately became such a proficient, and
+which wrought such marvels as only style backed by passion can work,
+already engaged his serious attention. We have already seen how Voltaire
+implanted in him the first root idea, which so many of us never perceive
+at all, that there is such a quality of writing as style. He evidently
+took pains with the form of expression and thought about it, in
+obedience to some inborn harmonious predisposition which is the source
+of all veritable eloquence, though there is no strong trace now nor for
+many years to come of any irresistible inclination for literary
+composition. We find him, indeed, in 1736 showing consciousness of a
+slight skill in writing,[98] but he only thought of it as a possible
+recommendation for a secretaryship to some great person. He also appears
+to have practised verses, not for their own sake, for he always most
+justly thought his own verses mediocre, and they are even worse; but on
+the ground that verse-making is a rather good exercise for breaking
+one's self to elegant inversions, and learning a greater ease in
+prose.[99] At the age of one and twenty he composed a comedy, long
+afterwards damned as _Narcisse_. Such prelusions, however, were of small
+importance compared with the fact of his being surrounded by a moral
+atmosphere in which his whole mind was steeped. It is not in the study
+of Voltaire or another, but in the deep soft soil of constant mood and
+old habit that such a style as Rousseau's has its growth.
+
+It was the custom to return to Chambéri for the winter, and the day of
+their departure from Les Charmettes was always a day blurred and tearful
+for Rousseau; he never left it without kissing the ground, the trees,
+the flowers; he had to be torn away from it as from a loved companion.
+At the first melting of the winter snows they left their dungeon in
+Chambéri, and they never missed the earliest song of the nightingale.
+Many a joyful day of summer peace remained vivid in Rousseau's memory,
+and made a mixed heaven and hell for him long years after in the
+stifling dingy Paris street, and the raw and cheerless air of a
+Derbyshire winter.[100] "We started early in the morning," he says,
+describing one of these simple excursions on the day of St. Lewis, who
+was the very unconscious patron saint of Madame de Warens, "together and
+alone; I proposed that we should go and ramble about the side of the
+valley opposite to our own, which we had not yet visited. We sent our
+provisions on before us, for we were to be out all day. We went from
+hill to hill and wood to wood, sometimes in the sun and often in the
+shade, resting from time to time and forgetting ourselves for whole
+hours; chatting about ourselves, our union, our dear lot, and offering
+unheard prayers that it might last. All seemed to conspire for the bliss
+of this day. Rain had fallen a short time before; there was no dust, and
+the little streams were full; a light fresh breeze stirred the leaves,
+the air was pure, the horizon without a cloud, and the same serenity
+reigned in our own hearts. Our dinner was cooked in a peasant's cottage,
+and we shared it with his family. These Savoyards are such good souls!
+After dinner we sought shade under some tall trees, where, while I
+collected dry sticks for making our coffee, Maman amused herself by
+botanising among the bushes, and the expedition ended in transports of
+tenderness and effusion."[101] This is one of such days as the soul
+turns back to when the misery that stalks after us all has seized it,
+and a man is left to the sting and smart of the memory of
+irrecoverable things.
+
+He was resolved to bind himself to Madame de Warens with an inalterable
+fidelity for all the rest of his days; he would watch over her with all
+the dutiful and tender vigilance of a son, and she should be to him
+something dearer than mother or wife or sister. What actually befell was
+this. He was attacked by vapours, which he characterises as the disorder
+of the happy. One symptom of his disease was the conviction derived from
+the rash perusal of surgeon's treatises, that he was suffering from a
+polypus in the heart. On the not very chivalrous principle that if he
+did not spend Madame de Warens' money, he was only leaving it for
+adventurers and knaves, he proceeded to Montpellier to consult the
+physicians, and took the money for his expenses out of his
+benefactress's store, which was always slender because it was always
+open to any hand. While on the road, he fell into an intrigue with a
+travelling companion, whom critics have compared to the fair Philina of
+Wilhelm Meister. In due time, the Montpellier doctor being unable to
+discover a disease, declared that the patient had none. The scenery was
+dull and unattractive, and this would have counterbalanced the
+weightiest prudential reasons with him at any time. Rousseau debated
+whether he should keep tryst with his gay fellow-traveller, or return to
+Chambéri. Remorse and that intractable emptiness of pocket which is the
+iron key to many a deed of ingenuous-looking self-denial and Spartan
+virtue, directed him homewards. Here he had a surprise, and perhaps
+learnt a lesson. He found installed in the house a personage whom he
+describes as tall, fair, noisy, coxcombical, flat-faced, flat-souled.
+Another triple alliance seemed a thing odious in the eyes of a man whom
+his travelling diversions had made a Pharisee for the hour. He
+protested, but Madame de Warens was a woman of principle, and declined
+to let Rousseau, who had profited by the doctrine of indifference, now
+set up in his own favour the contrary doctrine of a narrow and churlish
+partiality. So a short, delicious, and never-forgotten episode came to
+an end: this pair who had known so much happiness together were happy
+together no more, and the air became peopled for Rousseau with wan
+spectres of dead joys and fast gathering cares.
+
+The dates of the various events described in the fifth and sixth books
+of the Confessions are inextricable, and the order is evidently inverted
+more than once. The inversion of order is less serious than the
+contradictions between the dates of the Confessions and the more
+authentic and unmistakable dates of his letters. For instance, he
+describes a visit to Geneva as having been made shortly before Lautrec's
+temporary pacification of the civic troubles of that town; and that
+event took place in the spring of 1738. This would throw the Montpellier
+journey, which he says came after the visit to Geneva, into 1738, but
+the letters to Madame de Warens from Grenoble and Montpellier are dated
+in the autumn and winter of 1737.[102] Minor verifications attest the
+exactitude of the dates of the letters,[103] and we may therefore
+conclude that he returned from Montpellier, found his place taken and
+lost his old delight in Les Charmettes, in the early part of 1738. In
+the tenth of the Rêveries he speaks of having passed "a space of four or
+five years" in the bliss of Les Charmettes, and it is true that his
+connection with it in one way and another lasted from the middle of 1736
+until about the middle of 1741. But as he left for Montpellier in the
+autumn of 1737, and found the obnoxious Vinzenried installed in 1738,
+the pure and characteristic felicity of Les Charmettes perhaps only
+lasted about a year or a year and a half. But a year may set a deep mark
+on a man, and give him imperishable taste of many things bitter
+and sweet.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[38] _Conf._, iii. 177.
+
+[39] Lamartine in _Raphael_ defies "a reasonable man to recompose with
+any reality the character that Rousseau gives to his mistress, out of
+the contradictory elements which he associates in her nature. One of
+these elements excludes the other." It is worth while for any who care
+for this kind of study to compare Madame de Warens with the Marquise
+de Courcelles, whom Sainte-Beuve has well called the Manon Lescaut of
+the seventeenth century.
+
+[40] Described by Rousseau in a memorandum for the biographer of M. de
+Bernex, printed in _Mélanges_, pp. 139-144.
+
+[41] De Tavel, by name. Disorderly ideas as to the relations of the
+sexes began to appear in Switzerland along with the reformation of
+religion. In the sixteenth century a woman appeared at Geneva with the
+doctrine that it is as inhuman and as unjustifiable to refuse the
+gratification of this appetite in a man as to decline to give food and
+drink to the starving. Picot's _Hist. de Genève_, vol. ii.
+
+[42] _Conf._, v. 341. Also ii. 83; and vi. 401.
+
+[43] _Conf._, v. 345.
+
+[44] _Conf._, ii. 83.
+
+[45] _Ib._ ii. 82.
+
+[46] _Ib._ iii. 179. See also 200.
+
+[47] _Conf._, iii. 177, 178.
+
+[48] _Conf._, iii. 183.
+
+[49] M. d'Aubonne.
+
+[50] _Conf._, iii 192.
+
+[51] M. Gatier.
+
+[52] M. Gaime.
+
+[53] _Conf._, iii. 204.
+
+[54] _Ib._ iii. 209, 210.
+
+[55] _Conf._, iii. 217-222.
+
+[56] _Conf._, iv. 227.
+
+[57] _Ib._ iii. 224.
+
+[58] One Venture de Villeneuve, who visited him years afterwards
+(1755) in Paris, when Rousseau found that the idol of old days was a
+crapulent debauchee. _Ib._ viii. 221.
+
+[59] Mdlles. de Graffenried and Galley. _Conf._, iv. 231.
+
+[60] _Ib._ iv. 254-256.
+
+[61] _Conf._, iv. 253.
+
+[62] While in the ambassador's house at Soleure, he was lodged in a
+room which had once belonged to his namesake, Jean Baptiste Rousseau
+(_b. 1670--d. 1741_), whom the older critics astonishingly insist on
+counting the first of French lyric poets. There was a third Rousseau,
+Pierre [_b. 1725--d. 1785_], who wrote plays and did other work now
+well forgotten. There are some lines imperfectly commemorative of the
+trio--
+
+Trois auteurs que Rousseau l'on nomme, Connus de Paris jusqu'à Rome,
+Sont différens; voici par où; Rousseau de Paris fut grand homme;
+Rousseau de Genève est un fou; Rousseau de Toulouse un atome.
+
+Jean Jacques refers to both his namesakes in his letter to Voltaire,
+Jan. 30, 1750. _Corr._, i. 145.
+
+[63] The only object which ever surpassed his expectation was the
+great Roman structure near Nismes, the Pont du Gard. _Conf._, vi. 446.
+
+[64] Rousseau gives 1732 as the probable date of his return to
+Chambéri, after his first visit to Paris [_Conf._, v. 305], and the
+only objection to this is his mention of the incident of the march of
+the French troops, which could not have happened until the winter of
+1733, as having taken place "some months" after his arrival.
+Musset-Pathay accepts this as decisive, and fixes the return in the
+spring of 1733 [i. 12]. My own conjectural chronology is this: Returns
+from Turin towards the autumn of 1729; stays at Annecy until the
+spring of 1731; passes the winter of 1731-2 at Neuchâtel; first visits
+Paris in spring of 1732; returns to Savoy in the early summer of 1732.
+But a precise harmonising of the dates in the Confessions is
+impossible; Rousseau wrote them three and thirty years after our
+present point [in 1766 at Wootton], and never claimed to be exact in
+minuteness of date. Fortunately such matters in the present case are
+absolutely devoid of importance.
+
+[65] _Conf._, iv. 279, 280.
+
+[66] _Conf._, iv. 290, 291,
+
+[67] _Conf._, iv. 281-283.
+
+[68] _Conf._, v. 325.
+
+[69] _Conf._, v. 360-364. _Corr._, i. 21-24.
+
+[70] _Conf._, v. 349, 350.
+
+[71] Apparently in the summer of 1736, though, the reference to the
+return of the French troops at the peace [_Ib._ v. 365] would place it
+in 1735.
+
+[72] _Ib._ v. 356
+
+[73] _Ib._
+
+[74] _Conf._, v. 315, 316.
+
+[75] _Ib._ iv. 276. _Nouv. Hél._, II. xiv. 381, etc.
+
+[76] He refers to the ill-health of his youth, _Conf._, vii. 32, and
+describes an ominous head seizure while at Chambéri, _Ib._ vi. 396.
+
+[77] Rousseau's description of Les Charmettes is at the end of the
+fifth book. The present proprietor keeps the house arranged as it used
+to be, and has gathered one or two memorials of its famous tenant,
+including his poor _clavecin_ and his watch. In an outside wall,
+Hérault de Sechelles, when Commissioner from the Convention in the
+department of Mont Blanc, inserted a little white stone with two most
+lapidary stanzas inscribed upon it, about _génie, solitude, fierté,
+gloire, vérité, envie_, and the like.
+
+[78] _Rêveries_, x. 336 (1778).
+
+[79] _Conf._, vi. 393.
+
+[80] _Conf._, vi. 412.
+
+[81] _Mém. de Mdme. d'Epinay_, i. 394. (M. Boiteau's edition:
+Charpentier. 1865.)
+
+[82] _Conf._, vi. 399.
+
+[83] _Ib._ vi. 424. Goethe made a similar experiment; see Mr. Lewes's
+_Life_, p. 126.
+
+[84] Bernardin de Saint Pierre tells us this. _Oeuvres_ (Ed. 1818),
+xii. 70, etc.
+
+[85] _Conf._, iv. 297. See also the description of the scenery of the
+Valais, in the _Nouv. Hél._, Pt. I. Let. xxiii.
+
+[86] George Sand in _Mademoiselle la Quintinie_ (p. 27), a book
+containing some peculiarly subtle appreciations of the Savoy
+landscape.
+
+[87] _Conf._, iv. 298.
+
+[88] _Conf._, vi. 416, 422, etc.; iii. 164; iii. 203; v. 347; v. 383,
+384. Also vii. 53.
+
+[89] _Conf._, v. 313, 367; iv. 293; ix. 353. Also _Mém. de Mdme.
+d'Epinay_, ii. 151.
+
+[90] _Ib._ iii. 192, 193.
+
+[91] _Conf._, iv. 301; iii. 195.
+
+[92] _Conf._, v. 372, 373. The mistaken date assigned to the
+correspondence between Voltaire and Frederick is one of many instances
+how little we can trust the Confessions for minute accuracy, though
+their substantial veracity is confirmed by all the collateral evidence
+that we have.
+
+[93] _Ib._ iii. 188. For his debt in the way of education to Madame de
+Warens, see also _Ib._ vii. 46.
+
+[94] _Conf._, vi. 409.
+
+[95] _Ib._ vi. 413. He adds a suspicious-looking "_et cetera_."
+
+[96] _Conf._, vi. 414
+
+[97] _Conf._, iv. 295. See also v. 346.
+
+[98] _Corr._, 1736, pp. 26, 27.
+
+[99] _Conf._, iv. 271, where he says further that he never found
+enough attraction in French poetry to make him think of pursuing it.
+
+[100] The first part of the Confessions was written in Wootton in
+Derbyshire, in the winter of 1766-1767.
+
+[101] _Conf._, vi. 422.
+
+[102] _Corr._, i. 43, 46, 62, etc.
+
+[103] Musset-Pathay, i. 23, _n._
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+THERESA LE VASSEUR.
+
+
+Men like Rousseau, who are most heedless in letting their delight
+perish, are as often as not most loth to bury what they have slain, or
+even to perceive that life has gone out of it. The sight of simple
+hearts trying to coax back a little warm breath of former days into a
+present that is stiff and cold with indifference, is touching enough.
+But there is a certain grossness around the circumstances in which
+Rousseau now and too often found himself, that makes us watch his
+embarrassment with some composure. One cannot easily think of him as a
+simple heart, and we feel perhaps as much relief as he, when he resolves
+after making all due efforts to thrust out the intruder and bring Madame
+de Warens over from theories which had become too practical to be
+interesting, to leave Les Charmettes and accept a tutorship at Lyons.
+His new patron was a De Mably, elder brother of the philosophic abbé of
+the same name (1709-85), and of the still more notable Condillac
+(1714-80).
+
+The future author of the most influential treatise on education that has
+ever been written, was not successful in the practical and far more
+arduous side of that master art.[104] We have seen how little training
+he had ever given himself in the cardinal virtues of collectedness and
+self-control, and we know this to be the indispensable quality in all
+who have to shape young minds for a humane life. So long as all went
+well, he was an angel, but when things went wrong, he is willing to
+confess that he was a devil. When his two pupils could not understand
+him, he became frantic; when they showed wilfulness or any other part of
+the disagreeable materials out of which, along with the rest, human
+excellence has to be ingeniously and painfully manufactured, he was
+ready to kill them. This, as he justly admits, was not the way to render
+them either well learned or sage. The moral education of the teacher
+himself was hardly complete, for he describes how he used to steal his
+employer's wine, and the exquisite draughts which he enjoyed in the
+secrecy of his own room, with a piece of cake in one hand and some dear
+romance in the other. We should forgive greedy pilferings of this kind
+more easily if Rousseau had forgotten them more speedily. These are
+surely offences for which the best expiation is oblivion in a throng of
+worthier memories.
+
+It is easy to understand how often Rousseau's mind turned from the
+deadly drudgery of his present employment to the beatitude of former
+days. "What rendered my present condition insupportable was the
+recollection of my beloved Charmettes, of my garden, my trees, my
+fountain, my orchard, and above all of her for whom I felt myself born
+and who gave life to it all. As I thought of her, of our pleasures, our
+guileless days, I was seized by a tightness in my heart, a stopping of
+my breath, which robbed me of all spirit."[105] For years to come this
+was a kind of far-off accompaniment, thrumming melodiously in his ears
+under all the discords of a miserable life. He made another effort to
+quicken the dead. Throwing up his office with his usual promptitude in
+escaping from the irksome, after a residence of something like a year at
+Lyons (April, 1740--spring of 1741), he made his way back to his old
+haunts. The first half-hour with Madame de Warens persuaded him that
+happiness here was really at an end. After a stay of a few months, his
+desolation again overcame him. It was agreed that he should go to Paris
+to make his fortune by a new method of musical notation which he had
+invented, and after a short stay at Lyons, he found himself for the
+second time in the famous city which in the eighteenth century had
+become for the moment the centre of the universe.[106]
+
+It was not yet, however, destined to be a centre for him. His plan of
+musical notation was examined by a learned committee of the Academy, no
+member of whom was instructed in the musical art. Rousseau, dumb,
+inarticulate, and unready as usual, was amazed at the ease with which
+his critics by the free use of sounding phrases demolished arguments and
+objections which he perceived that they did not at all understand. His
+experience on this occasion suggested to him the most just reflection,
+how even without breadth of intelligence, the profound knowledge of any
+one thing is preferable in forming a judgment about it, to all possible
+enlightenment conferred by the cultivation of the sciences, without
+study of the special matter in question. It astonished him that all
+these learned men, who knew so many things, could yet be so ignorant
+that a man should only pretend to be a judge in his own craft.[107]
+
+His musical path to glory and riches thus blocked up, he surrendered
+himself not to despair but to complete idleness and peace of mind. He
+had a few coins left, and these prevented him from thinking of a future.
+He was presented to one or two great ladies, and with the blundering
+gallantry habitual to him he wrote a letter to one of the greatest of
+them, declaring his passion for her. Madame Dupin was the daughter of
+one, and the wife of another, of the richest men in France, and the
+attentions of a man whose acquaintance Madame Beuzenval had begun by
+inviting him to dine in the servants' hall, were not pleasing to
+her.[108] She forgave the impertinence eventually, and her stepson, M.
+Francueil, was Rousseau's patron for some years.[109] On the whole,
+however, in spite of his own account of his social ineptitude, there
+cannot have been anything so repulsive in his manners as this account
+would lead us to think. There is no grave anachronism in introducing
+here the impression which he made on two fine ladies not many years
+after this. "He pays compliments, yet he is not polite, or at least he
+is without the air of politeness. He seems to be ignorant of the usages
+of society, but it is easily seen that he is infinitely intelligent. He
+has a brown complexion, while eyes that overflow with fire give
+animation to his expression. When he has spoken and you look at him, he
+appears comely; but when you try to recall him, his image is always
+extremely plain. They say that he has bad health, and endures agony
+which from some motive of vanity he most carefully conceals. It is
+this, I fancy, which gives him from time to time an air of
+sullenness."[110] The other lady, who saw him at the same time, speaks
+of "the poor devil of an author, who's as poor as Job for you, but with
+wit and vanity enough for four.... They say his history is as queer as
+his person, and that is saying a good deal.... Madame Maupeou and I
+tried to guess what it was. 'In spite of his face,' said she (for it is
+certain he is uncommonly plain), 'his eyes tell that love plays a great
+part in his romance.' 'No,' said I, 'his nose tells me that it is
+vanity.' 'Well then, 'tis both one and the other.'"[111]
+
+One of his patronesses took some trouble to procure him the post of
+secretary to the French ambassador at Venice, and in the spring of 1743
+our much-wandering man started once more in quest of meat and raiment in
+the famous city of the Adriatic. This was one of those steps of which
+there are not a few in a man's life, that seem at the moment to rank
+foremost in the short line of decisive acts, and then are presently seen
+not to have been decisive at all, but mere interruptions conducting
+nowhither. In truth the critical moments with us are mostly as points in
+slumber. Even if the ancient oracles of the gods were to regain their
+speech once more on the earth, men would usually go to consult them on
+days when the answer would have least significance, and could guide
+them least far. That one of the most heedless vagrants in Europe, and as
+it happened one of the men of most extraordinary genius also, should
+have got a footing in the train of the ambassador of a great government,
+would naturally seem to him and others as chance's one critical stroke
+in his life. In reality it was nothing. The Count of Montaigu, his
+master, was one of the worst characters with whom Rousseau could for his
+own profit have been brought into contact. In his professional quality
+he was not far from imbecile. The folly and weakness of the government
+at Versailles during the reign of Lewis XV., and its indifference to
+competence in every department except perhaps partially in the fisc, was
+fairly illustrated in its absurd representative at Venice. The
+secretary, whose renown has preserved his master's name, has recorded
+more amply than enough the grounds of quarrel between them. Rousseau is
+for once eager to assert his own efficiency, and declares that he
+rendered many important services for which he was repaid with
+ingratitude and persecution.[112] One would be glad to know what the
+Count of Montaigu's version of matters was, for in truth Rousseau's
+conduct in previous posts makes us wonder how it was that he who had
+hitherto always been unfaithful over few things, suddenly touched
+perfection when he became lord over many.
+
+There is other testimony, however, to the ambassador's morbid quality,
+of which, after that general imbecility which was too common a thing
+among men in office to be remarkable, avarice was the most striking
+trait. For instance, careful observation had persuaded him that three
+shoes are equivalent to two pairs, because there is always one of a pair
+which is more worn than its fellow; and hence he habitually ordered his
+shoes in threes.[113] It was natural enough that such a master and such
+a secretary should quarrel over perquisites. That slightly cringing
+quality which we have noticed on one or two occasions in Rousseau's
+hungry youthful time, had been hardened out of him by circumstance or
+the strengthening of inborn fibre. He would now neither dine in a
+servants' hall because a fine lady forgot what was due to a musician,
+nor share his fees with a great ambassador who forgot what was due to
+himself. These sordid disputes are of no interest now to anybody, and we
+need only say that after a period of eighteen months passed in
+uncongenial company, Rousseau parted from his count in extreme dudgeon,
+and the diplomatic career which he had promised to himself came to the
+same close as various other careers had already done.
+
+He returned to Paris towards the end of 1744, burning with indignation
+at the unjust treatment which he believed himself to have suffered, and
+laying memorial after memorial before the minister at home. He assures
+us that it was the justice and the futility of his complaints, that left
+in his soul the germ of exasperation against preposterous civil
+institutions, "in which the true common weal and real justice are always
+sacrificed to some seeming order or other, which is in fact destructive
+of all order, and only adds the sanction of public authority to the
+oppression of the weak and the iniquity of the strong."[114]
+
+One or two pictures connected with the Venetian episode remain in the
+memory of the reader of the Confessions, and among them perhaps with
+most people is that of the quarantine at Genoa in Rousseau's voyage to
+his new post. The travellers had the choice of remaining on board the
+felucca, or passing the time in an unfurnished lazaretto. This, we may
+notice in passing, was his first view of the sea; he makes no mention of
+the fact, nor does the sight or thought of the sea appear to have left
+the least mark in any line of his writings. He always disliked it, and
+thought of it with melancholy. Rousseau, as we may suppose, found the
+want of space and air in the boat the most intolerable of evils, and
+preferred to go alone to the lazaretto, though it had neither
+window-sashes nor tables nor chairs nor bed, nor even a truss of straw
+to lie down upon. He was locked up and had the whole barrack to himself.
+"I manufactured," he says, "a good bed out of my coats and shirts,
+sheets out of towels which I stitched together, a pillow out of my old
+cloak rolled up. I made myself a seat of one trunk placed flat, and a
+table of the other. I got out some paper and my writing-desk, and
+arranged some dozen books that I had by way of library. In short I made
+myself so comfortable, that, with the exception of curtains and windows,
+I was nearly as well off in this absolutely naked lazaretto as in my
+lodgings in Paris. My meals were served with much pomp; two grenadiers,
+with bayonets at their musket-ends, escorted them; the staircase was my
+dining-room, the landing did for table and the lower step for a seat,
+and when my dinner was served, they rang a little bell as they withdrew,
+to warn me to seat myself at table. Between my meals, when I was neither
+writing nor reading, nor busy with my furnishing, I went for a walk in
+the Protestant graveyard, or mounted into a lantern which looked out on
+to the port, and whence I could see the ships sailing in and out. I
+passed a fortnight in this way, and I could have spent the whole three
+weeks of the quarantine without feeling an instant's weariness."[115]
+
+These are the occasions when we catch glimpses of the true Rousseau; but
+his residence in Venice was on the whole one of his few really sociable
+periods. He made friends and kept them, and there was even a certain
+gaiety in his life. He used to tell people their fortunes in a way that
+an earlier century would have counted unholy.[116] He rarely sought
+pleasure in those of her haunts for which the Queen of the Adriatic had
+a guilty renown, but he has left one singular anecdote, showing the
+degree to which profound sensibility is capable of doing the moralist's
+work in a man, and how a stroke of sympathetic imagination may keep one
+from sin more effectually than an ethical precept.[117] It is pleasanter
+to think of him as working at the formation of that musical taste which
+ten years afterwards led him to amaze the Parisians by proving that
+French melody was a hollow idea born of national self-delusion. A
+Venetian experiment, whose evidence in the special controversy is less
+weighty perhaps than Rousseau supposed, was among the facts which
+persuaded him that Italian is the language of music. An Armenian who had
+never heard any music was invited to listen first of all to a French
+monologue, and then to an air of Galuppi's. Rousseau observed in the
+Armenian more surprise than pleasure during the performance of the
+French piece. The first notes of the Italian were no sooner struck, than
+his eyes and whole expression softened; he was enchanted, surrendered
+his whole soul to the ravishing impressions of the music, and could
+never again be induced to listen to the performance of any
+French air.[118]
+
+More important than this was the circumstance that the sight of the
+defects of the government of the Venetian Republic first drew his mind
+to political speculation, and suggested to him the composition of a
+book that was to be called Institutions Politiques.[119] The work, as
+thus designed and named, was never written, but the idea of it, after
+many years of meditation, ripened first in the Discourse on Inequality,
+and then in the Social Contract.
+
+If Rousseau's departure for Venice was a wholly insignificant element in
+his life, his return from it was almost immediately followed by an event
+which counted for nothing at the moment, which his friends by and by
+came to regard as the fatal and irretrievable disaster of his life, but
+which he persistently described as the only real consolation that heaven
+permitted him to taste in his misery, and the only one that enabled him
+to bear his many sore burdens.[120]
+
+He took up his quarters at a small and dirty hotel not far from the
+Sorbonne, where he had alighted on the occasion of his second arrival in
+Paris.[121] Here was a kitchen-maid, some two-and-twenty years old, who
+used to sit at table with her mistress and the guests of the house. The
+company was rough, being mainly composed of Irish and Gascon abbés, and
+other people to whom graces of mien and refinement of speech had come
+neither by nature nor cultivation. The hostess herself pitched the
+conversation in merry Rabelaisian key, and the apparent modesty of her
+serving-woman gave a zest to her own licence. Rousseau was moved with
+pity for a maid defenceless against a ribald storm, and from pity he
+advanced to some warmer sentiment, and he and Theresa Le Vasseur took
+each other for better for worse, in a way informal but sufficiently
+effective. This was the beginning of a union which lasted for the length
+of a generation and more, down to the day of Rousseau's most tragical
+ending.[122] She thought she saw in him a worthy soul; and he was
+convinced that he saw in her a woman of sensibility, simple and free
+from trick, and neither of the two, he says, was deceived in respect of
+the other. Her intellectual quality was unique. She could never be
+taught to read with any approach to success. She could never follow the
+order of the twelve months of the year, nor master a single arithmetical
+figure, nor count a sum of money, nor reckon the price of a thing. A
+month's instruction was not enough to give knowledge of the hours of the
+day on the dial-plate. The words she used were often the direct
+opposites of the words that she meant to use.[123]
+
+The marriage choice of others is the inscrutable puzzle of those who
+have no eye for the fact that such choice is the great match of cajolery
+between purpose and invisible hazard; the blessedness of many lives is
+the stake, as intention happens to cheat accident or to be cheated by
+it. When the match is once over, deep criticism of a game of pure chance
+is time wasted. The crude talk in which the unwise deliver their
+judgments upon the conditions of success in the relations between men
+and women, has flowed with unprofitable copiousness as to this not very
+inviting case. People construct an imaginary Rousseau out of his
+writings, and then fetter their elevated, susceptible, sensitive, and
+humane creation, to the unfortunate woman who could never be taught that
+April is the month after March, or that twice four and a half are nine.
+Now we have already seen enough of Rousseau to know for how infinitely
+little he counted the gift of a quick wit, and what small store he set
+either on literary varnish or on capacity for receiving it. He was
+touched in people with whom he had to do, not by attainment, but by
+moral fibre or his imaginary impression of their moral fibre. Instead of
+analysing a character, bringing its several elements into the balance,
+computing the more or less of this faculty or that, he loved to feel its
+influence as a whole, indivisible, impalpable, playing without sound or
+agitation around him like soft light and warmth and the fostering air.
+The deepest ignorance, the dullest incapacity, the cloudiest faculties
+of apprehension, were nothing to him in man or woman, provided he could
+only be sensible of that indescribable emanation from voice and eye and
+movement, that silent effusion of serenity around spoken words, which
+nature has given to some tranquillising spirits, and which would have
+left him free in an even life of indolent meditation and unfretted
+sense. A woman of high, eager, stimulating kind would have been a more
+fatal mate for him than the most stupid woman that ever rivalled the
+stupidity of man. Stimulation in any form always meant distress to
+Rousseau. The moist warmth of the Savoy valleys was not dearer to him
+than the subtle inhalations of softened and close enveloping
+companionship, in which the one needful thing is not intellectual
+equality, but easy, smooth, constant contact of feeling about the
+thousand small matters that make up the existence of a day. This is not
+the highest ideal of union that one's mind can conceive from the point
+of view of intense productive energy, but Rousseau was not concerned
+with the conditions of productive energy. He only sought to live, to be
+himself, and he knew better than any critics can know for him, what kind
+of nature was the best supplement for his own. As he said in an
+apophthegm with a deep melancholy lying at the bottom of it,--you never
+can cite the example of a thoroughly happy man, for no one but the man
+himself knows anything about it.[124] "By the side of people we love,"
+he says very truly, "sentiment nourishes the intelligence as well as the
+heart, and we have little occasion to seek ideas elsewhere. I lived with
+my Theresa as pleasantly as with the finest genius in the
+universe."[125]
+
+Theresa Le Vasseur would probably have been happier if she had married a
+stout stable-boy, as indeed she did some thirty years hence by way of
+gathering up the fragments that were left; but there is little reason to
+think that Rousseau would have been much happier with any other mate
+than he was with Theresa. There was no social disparity between the two.
+She was a person accustomed to hardship and coarseness, and so was he.
+And he always systematically preferred the honest coarseness of the
+plain people from whom he was sprung and among whom he had lived, to the
+more hateful coarseness of heart which so often lurks under fine manners
+and a complete knowledge of the order of the months in the year and the
+arithmetical table. Rousseau had been a serving-man, and there was no
+deterioration in going with a serving-woman.[126] However this may be,
+it is certain that for the first dozen years or so of his
+partnership--and many others as well as he are said to have found in
+this term a limit to the conditions of the original contract,--Rousseau
+had perfect and entire contentment in the Theresa whom all his friends
+pronounced as mean, greedy, jealous, degrading, as she was avowedly
+brutish in understanding. Granting that she was all these things, how
+much of the responsibility for his acts has been thus shifted from the
+shoulders of Rousseau himself, whose connection with her was from
+beginning to end entirely voluntary? If he attached himself deliberately
+to an unworthy object by a bond which he was indisputably free to break
+on any day that he chose, were not the effects of such a union as much
+due to his own character which sought, formed, and perpetuated it, as to
+the character of Theresa Le Vasseur? Nothing, as he himself said in a
+passage to which he appends a vindication of Theresa, shows the true
+leanings and inclinations of a man better than the sort of attachments
+which he forms.[127]
+
+It is a natural blunder in a literate and well-mannered society to
+charge a mistake against a man who infringes its conventions in this
+particular way. Rousseau knew what he was about, as well as politer
+persons. He was at least as happy with his kitchen wench as Addison was
+with his countess, or Voltaire with his marchioness, and he would not
+have been what he was, nor have played the part that he did play in the
+eighteenth century, if he had felt anything derogatory or unseemly in a
+kitchen wench. The selection was probably not very deliberate; as it
+happened, Theresa served as a standing illustration of two of his most
+marked traits, a contempt for mere literary culture, and a yet deeper
+contempt for social accomplishments and social position. In time he
+found out the grievous disadvantages of living in solitude with a
+companion who did not know how to think, and whose stock of ideas was so
+slight that the only common ground of talk between them was gossip and
+quodlibets. But her lack of sprightliness, beauty, grace, refinement,
+and that gentle initiative by which women may make even a sombre life so
+various, went for nothing with him. What his friends missed in her, he
+did not seek and would not have valued; and what he found in her, they
+were naturally unable to appreciate, for they never were in the mood for
+detecting it. "I have not seen much of happy men," he wrote when near
+his end, "perhaps nothing; but I have many a time seen contented hearts,
+and of all the objects that have struck me, I believe it is this which
+has always given most contentment to myself."[128] This moderate
+conception of felicity, which was always so characteristic with him, as
+an even, durable, and rather low-toned state of the feelings, accounts
+for his prolonged acquiescence in a companion whom men with more elation
+in their ideal would assuredly have found hostile even to the most
+modest contentment.
+
+"The heart of my Theresa," he wrote long after the first tenderness had
+changed into riper emotion on his side, and, alas, into indifference on
+hers, "was that of an angel; our attachment waxed stronger with our
+intimacy, and we felt more and more each day that we were made for one
+another. If our pleasures could be described, their simplicity would
+make you laugh; our excursions together out of town, in which I would
+munificently expend eight or ten halfpence in some rural tavern; our
+modest suppers at my window, seated in front of one another on two small
+chairs placed on a trunk that filled up the breadth of the embrasure.
+Here the window did duty for a table, we breathed the fresh air, we
+could see the neighbourhood and the people passing by, and though on the
+fourth story, could look down into the street as we ate. Who shall
+describe, who shall feel the charms of those meals, consisting of a
+coarse quartern loaf, some cherries, a tiny morsel of cheese, and a pint
+of wine which we drank between us? Ah, what delicious seasoning there is
+in friendship, confidence, intimacy, gentleness of soul! We used
+sometimes to remain thus until midnight, without once thinking of the
+time."[129]
+
+Men and women are often more fairly judged by the way in which they bear
+the burden of what they have done, than by the prime act which laid the
+burden on their lives.[130] The deeper part of us shows in the manner of
+accepting consequences. On the whole, Rousseau's relations with this
+woman present him in a better light than those with any other person
+whatever. If he became with all the rest of the world suspicious, angry,
+jealous, profoundly diseased in a word, with her he was habitually
+trustful, affectionate, careful, most long-suffering. It sometimes even
+occurs to us that his constancy to Theresa was only another side of the
+morbid perversity of his relations with the rest of the world. People of
+a certain kind not seldom make the most serious and vital sacrifices for
+bare love of singularity, and a man like Rousseau was not unlikely to
+feel an eccentric pleasure in proving that he could find merit in a
+woman who to everybody else was desperate. One who is on bad terms with
+the bulk of his fellows may contrive to save his self-respect and
+confirm his conviction that they are all in the wrong, by preserving
+attachment to some one to whom general opinion is hostile; the private
+argument being that if he is capable of this degree of virtue and
+friendship in an unfavourable case, how much more could he have
+practised it with others, if they would only have allowed him. Whether
+this kind of apology was present to his mind or not, Rousseau could
+always refer those who charged him with black caprice, to his steady
+kindness towards Theresa Le Vasseur. Her family were among the most
+odious of human beings, greedy, idle, and ill-humoured, while her mother
+had every fault that a woman could have in Rousseau's eyes, including
+that worst fault of setting herself up for a fine wit. Yet he bore with
+them all for years, and did not break with Madame Le Vasseur until she
+had poisoned the mind of her daughter, and done her best by rapacity and
+lying to render him contemptible to all his friends.
+
+In the course of years Theresa herself gave him unmistakable signs of a
+change in her affections. "I began to feel," he says, at a date of
+sixteen or seventeen years from our present point, "that she was no
+longer for me what she had been in our happy years, and I felt it all
+the more clearly as I was still the same towards her."[131] This was in
+1762, and her estrangement grew deeper and her indifference more open,
+until at length, seven years afterwards, we find that she had proposed a
+separation from him. What the exact reasons for this gradual change may
+have been we do not know, nor have we any right in ignorance of the
+whole facts to say that they were not adequate and just. There are two
+good traits recorded of the woman's character. She could never console
+herself for having let her father be taken away to end his days
+miserably in a house of charity.[132] And the repudiation of her
+children, against which the glowing egoism of maternity always rebelled,
+remained a cruel dart in her bosom as long as she lived. We may suppose
+that there was that about household life with Rousseau which might have
+bred disgusts even in one as little fastidious as Theresa was. Among
+other things which must have been hard to endure, we know that in
+composing his works he was often weeks together without speaking a word
+to her.[133] Perhaps again it would not be difficult to produce some
+passages in Rousseau's letters and in the Confessions, which show traces
+of that subtle contempt for women that lurks undetected in many who
+would blush to avow it. Whatever the causes may have been, from
+indifference she passed to something like aversion, and in the one
+place where a word of complaint is wrung from him, he describes her as
+rending and piercing his heart at a moment when his other miseries were
+at their height. His patience at any rate was inexhaustible; now old,
+worn by painful bodily infirmities, racked by diseased suspicion and the
+most dreadful and tormenting of the minor forms of madness, nearly
+friendless, and altogether hopeless, he yet kept unabated the old
+tenderness of a quarter of a century before, and expressed it in words
+of such gentleness, gravity, and self-respecting strength, as may touch
+even those whom his books leave unmoved, and who view his character with
+deepest distrust. "For the six-and-twenty years, dearest, that our union
+has lasted, I have never sought my happiness except in yours, and have
+never ceased to try to make you happy; and you saw by what I did
+lately,[134] that your honour and happiness were one as dear to me as
+the other. I see with pain that success does not answer my solicitude,
+and that my kindness is not as sweet to you to receive, as it is sweet
+to me to show. I know that the sentiments of honour and uprightness with
+which you were born will never change in you; but as for those of
+tenderness and attachment which were once reciprocal between us, I feel
+that they now only exist on my side. Not only, dearest of all friends,
+have you ceased to find pleasure in my company, but you have to tax
+yourself severely even to remain a few minutes with me out of
+complaisance. You are at your ease with all the world but me. I do not
+speak to you of many other things. We must take our friends with their
+faults, and I ought to pass over yours, as you pass over mine. If you
+were happy with me I could be content, but I see clearly that you are
+not, and this is what makes my heart sore. If I could do better for your
+happiness, I would do it and hold my peace; but that is not possible. I
+have left nothing undone that I thought would contribute to your
+felicity. At this moment, while I am writing to you, overwhelmed with
+distress and misery, I have no more true or lively desire than to finish
+my days in closest union with you. You know my lot,--it is such as one
+could not even dare to describe, for no one could believe it. I never
+had, my dearest, other than one single solace, but that the sweetest; it
+was to pour out all my heart in yours; when I talked of my miseries to
+you, they were soothed; and when you had pitied me, I needed pity no
+more. My every resource, my whole confidence, is in you and in you only;
+my soul cannot exist without sympathy, and cannot find sympathy except
+with you. It is certain that if you fail me and I am forced to live
+alone, I am as a dead man. But I should die a thousand times more
+cruelly still, if we continued to live together in misunderstanding, and
+if confidence and friendship were to go out between us. It would be a
+hundred times better to cease to see each other; still to live, and
+sometimes to regret one another. Whatever sacrifice may be necessary on
+my part to make you happy, be so at any cost, and I shall be content.
+We have faults to weep over and to expiate, but no crimes; let us not
+blot out by the imprudence of our closing days the sweetness and purity
+of those we have passed together."[135] Think ill as we may of
+Rousseau's theories, and meanly as we may of some parts of his conduct,
+yet to those who can feel the pulsing of a human life apart from a man's
+formulæ, and can be content to leave to sure circumstance the tragic
+retaliation for evil behaviour, this letter is like one of the great
+master's symphonies, whose theme falls in soft strokes of melting pity
+on the heart. In truth, alas, the union of this now diverse pair had
+been stained by crimes shortly after its beginning. In the estrangement
+of father and mother in their late years we may perhaps hear the rustle
+and spy the pale forms of the avenging spectres of their lost children.
+
+At the time when the connection with Theresa Le Vasseur was formed,
+Rousseau did not know how to gain bread. He composed the musical
+diversion of the Muses Galantes, which Rameau rightly or wrongly
+pronounced a plagiarism, and at the request of Richelieu he made some
+minor re-adaptations in Voltaire's Princesse de Navarre, which Rameau
+had set to music--that "farce of the fair" to which the author of Zaïre
+owed his seat in the Academy.[136] But neither task brought him money,
+and he fell back on a sort of secretaryship, with perhaps a little of
+the valet in it, to Madame Dupin and her son-in-law, M. de Francueil,
+for which he received the too moderate income of nine hundred francs. On
+one occasion he returned to his room expecting with eager impatience the
+arrival of a remittance, the proceeds of some small property which came
+to him by the death of his father.[137] He found the letter, and was
+opening it with trembling hands, when he was suddenly smitten with shame
+at his want of self-control; he placed it unopened on the chimney-piece,
+undressed, slept better than usual, and when he awoke the next morning,
+he had forgotten all about the letter until it caught his eye. He was
+delighted to find that it contained his money, but "I can swear," he
+adds, "that my liveliest delight was in having conquered myself." An
+occasion for self-conquest on a more considerable scale was at hand. In
+these tight straits, he received grievous news from the unfortunate
+Theresa. He made up his mind cheerfully what to do; the mother
+acquiesced after sore persuasion and with bitter tears; and the new-born
+child was dropped into oblivion in the box of the asylum for foundlings.
+Next year the same easy expedient was again resorted to, with the same
+heedlessness on the part of the father, the same pain and reluctance on
+the part of the mother. Five children in all were thus put away, and
+with such entire absence of any precaution with a view to their
+identification in happier times, that not even a note was kept of the
+day of their birth.[138]
+
+People have made a great variety of remarks upon this transaction, from
+the economist who turns it into an illustration of the evil results of
+hospitals for foundlings in encouraging improvident unions, down to the
+theologian who sees in it new proof of the inborn depravity of the human
+heart and the fall of man. Others have vindicated it in various ways,
+one of them courageously taking up the ground that Rousseau had good
+reason to believe that the children were not his own, and therefore was
+fully warranted in sending the poor creatures kinless into the
+universe.[139] Perhaps it is not too transcendental a thing to hope that
+civilisation may one day reach a point when a plea like this shall count
+for an aggravation rather than a palliative; when a higher conception of
+the duties of humanity, familiarised by the practice of adoption as well
+as by the spread of both rational and compassionate considerations as to
+the blameless little ones, shall have expelled what is surely as some
+red and naked beast's emotion of fatherhood. What may be an excellent
+reason for repudiating a woman, can never be a reason for abandoning a
+child, except with those whom reckless egoism has made willing to think
+it a light thing to fling away from us the moulding of new lives and the
+ensuring of salutary nurture for growing souls.
+
+We are, however, dispensed from entering into these questions of the
+greater morals by the very plain account which the chief actor has given
+us, almost in spite of himself. His crime like most others was the
+result of heedlessness, of the overriding of duty by the short dim-eyed
+selfishness of the moment. He had been accustomed to frequent a tavern,
+where the talk turned mostly upon topics which men with much
+self-respect put as far from them, as men with little self-respect will
+allow them to do. "I formed my fashion of thinking from what I perceived
+to reign among people who were at bottom extremely worthy folk, and I
+said to myself, Since it is the usage of the country, as one lives here,
+one may as well follow it. So I made up my mind to it cheerfully, and
+without the least scruple."[140] By and by he proceeded to cover this
+nude and intelligible explanation with finer phrases, about preferring
+that his children should be trained up as workmen and peasants rather
+than as adventurers and fortune-hunters, and about his supposing that in
+sending them to the hospital for foundlings he was enrolling himself a
+citizen in Plato's Republic.[141] This is hardly more than the talk of
+one become famous, who is defending the acts of his obscurity on the
+high principles which fame requires. People do not turn citizens of
+Plato's Republic "cheerfully and without the least scruple," and if a
+man frequents company where the despatch of inconvenient children to the
+hospital was an accepted point of common practice, it is superfluous to
+drag Plato and his Republic into the matter. Another turn again was
+given to his motives when his mind had become clouded by suspicious
+mania. Writing a year or two before his death he had assured himself
+that his determining reason was the fear of a destiny for his children a
+thousand times worse than the hard life of foundlings, namely, being
+spoiled by their mother, being turned into monsters by her family, and
+finally being taught to hate and betray their father by his plotting
+enemies.[142] This is obviously a mixture in his mind of the motives
+which led to the abandonment of the children and justified the act to
+himself at the time, with the circumstances that afterwards reconciled
+him to what he had done; for now he neither had any enemies plotting
+against him, nor did he suppose that he had. As for his wife's family,
+he showed himself quite capable, when the time came, of dealing
+resolutely and shortly with their importunities in his own case, and he
+might therefore well have trusted his power to deal with them in the
+case of his children. He was more right when in 1770, in his important
+letter to M. de St. Germain, he admitted that example, necessity, the
+honour of her who was dear to him, all united to make him entrust his
+children to the establishment provided for that purpose, and kept him
+from fulfilling the first and holiest of natural duties. "In this, far
+from excusing, I accuse myself; and when my reason tells me that I did
+what I ought to have done in my situation, I believe that less than my
+heart, which bitterly belies it."[143] This coincides with the first
+undisguised account given in the Confessions, which has been already
+quoted, and it has not that flawed ring of cant and fine words which
+sounds through nearly all his other references to this great stain upon
+his life, excepting one, and this is the only further document with
+which we need concern ourselves. In that,[144] which was written while
+the unholy work was actually being done, he states very distinctly that
+the motives were those which are more or less closely connected with
+most unholy works, motives of money--the great instrument and measure of
+our personal convenience, the quantitative test of our self-control in
+placing personal convenience behind duty to other people. "If my misery
+and my misfortunes rob me of the power of fulfilling a duty so dear,
+that is a calamity to pity me for, rather than a crime to reproach me
+with. I owe them subsistence, and I procured a better or at least a
+surer subsistence for them than I could myself have provided; this
+condition is above all others." Next comes the consideration of their
+mother, whose honour must be kept. "You know my situation; I gained my
+bread from day to day painfully enough; how then should I feed a family
+as well? And if I were compelled to fall back on the profession of
+author, how would domestic cares and the confusion of children leave me
+peace of mind enough in my garret to earn a living? Writings which
+hunger dictates are hardly of any use, and such a resource is speedily
+exhausted. Then I should have to resort to patronage, to intrigue, to
+tricks ... in short to surrender myself to all those infamies, for which
+I am penetrated with such just horror. Support myself, my children, and
+their mother on the blood of wretches? No, madame, it were better for
+them to be orphans than to have a scoundrel for their father.... Why
+have I not married, you will ask? Madame, ask it of your unjust laws. It
+was not fitting for me to contract an eternal engagement; and it will
+never be proved to me that my duty binds me to it. What is certain is
+that I have never done it, and that I never meant to do it. But we ought
+not to have children when we cannot support them. Pardon me, madame;
+nature means us to have offspring, since the earth produces sustenance
+enough for all; but it is the rich, it is your class, which robs mine of
+the bread of my children.... I know that foundlings are not delicately
+nurtured; so much the better for them, they become more robust. They
+have nothing superfluous given to them, but they have everything that is
+necessary. They do not make gentlemen of them, but peasants or
+artisans.... They would not know how to dance, or ride on horseback, but
+they would have strong unwearied legs. I would neither make authors of
+them, nor clerks; I would not practise them in handling the pen, but the
+plough, the file, and the plane, instruments for leading a healthy,
+laborious, innocent life.... I deprived myself of the delight of seeing
+them, and I have never tasted the sweetness of a father's embrace. Alas,
+as I have already told you, I see in this only a claim on your pity, and
+I deliver them from misery at my own expense."[145] We may see here that
+Rousseau's sophistical eloquence, if it misled others, was at least as
+powerful in misleading himself, and it may be noted that this letter,
+with its talk of the children of the rich taking bread out of the mouths
+of the children of the poor, contains the first of those socialistic
+sentences by which the writer in after times gained so famous a name. It
+is at any rate clear from this that the real motive of the abandonment
+of the children was wholly material. He could not afford to maintain
+them, and he did not wish to have his comfort disturbed by
+their presence.
+
+There is assuredly no word to be said by any one with firm reason and
+unsophisticated conscience in extenuation of this crime. We have only to
+remember that a great many other persons in that lax time, when the
+structure of the family was undermined alike in practice and
+speculation, were guilty of the same crime; that Rousseau, better than
+they, did not erect his own criminality into a social theory, but was
+tolerably soon overtaken by a remorse which drove him both to confess
+his misdeed, and to admit that it was inexpiable; and that the atrocity
+of the offence owes half the blackness with which it has always been
+invested by wholesome opinion, to the fact that the offender was by and
+by the author of the most powerful book by which parental duty has been
+commended in its full loveliness and nobility. And at any rate, let
+Rousseau be a little free from excessive reproach from all clergymen,
+sentimentalists, and others, who do their worst to uphold the common and
+rather bestial opinion in favour of reckless propagation, and who, if
+they do not advocate the despatch of children to public institutions,
+still encourage a selfish incontinence which ultimately falls in burdens
+on others than the offenders, and which turns the family into a scene of
+squalor and brutishness, producing a kind of parental influence that is
+far more disastrous and demoralising than the absence of it in public
+institutions can possibly be. If the propagation of children without
+regard to their maintenance be either a virtue or a necessity, and if
+afterwards the only alternatives are their maintenance in an asylum on
+the one hand, and their maintenance in the degradation of a
+poverty-stricken home on the other, we should not hesitate to give
+people who act as Rousseau acted, all that credit for self-denial and
+high moral courage which he so audaciously claimed for himself. It
+really seems to be no more criminal to produce children with the
+deliberate intention of abandoning them to public charity, as Rousseau
+did, than it is to produce them in deliberate reliance on the besotted
+maxim that he who sends mouths will send meat, or any other of the
+spurious saws which make Providence do duty for self-control, and add to
+the gratification of physical appetite the grotesque luxury of
+religious unction.
+
+In 1761 the Maréchale de Luxembourg made efforts to discover Rousseau's
+children, but without success. They were gone beyond hope of
+identification, and the author of _Emitius_ and his sons and daughters
+lived together in this world, not knowing one another. Rousseau with
+singular honesty did not conceal his satisfaction at the fruitlessness
+of the charitable endeavours to restore them to him. "The success of
+your search," he wrote, "could not give me pure and undisturbed
+pleasure; it is too late, too late.... In my present condition this
+search interested me more for another person [Theresa] than myself; and
+considering the too easily yielding character of the person in question,
+it is possible that what she had found already formed for good or for
+evil, might turn out a sorry boon to her."[146] We may doubt, in spite
+of one or two charming and graceful passages, whether Rousseau was of a
+nature to have any feeling for the pathos of infancy, the bright blank
+eye, the eager unpurposed straining of the hand, the many turns and
+changes in murmurings that yet can tell us nothing. He was both too
+self-centred and too passionate for warm ease and fulness of life in all
+things, to be truly sympathetic with a condition whose feebleness and
+immaturity touch us with half-painful hope.
+
+Rousseau speaks in the Confessions of having married Theresa
+five-and-twenty years after the beginning of their acquaintance,[147]
+but we hardly have to understand that any ceremony took place which
+anybody but himself would recognise as constituting a marriage. What
+happened appears to have been this. Seated at table with Theresa and two
+guests, one of them the mayor of the place, he declared that she was his
+wife. "This good and seemly engagement was contracted," he says, "in all
+the simplicity but also in all the truth of nature, in the presence of
+two men of worth and honour.... During the short and simple act, I saw
+the honest pair melted in tears."[148] He had at this time whimsically
+assumed the name of Renou, and he wrote to a friend that of course he
+had married in this name, for he adds, with the characteristic insertion
+of an irrelevant bit of magniloquence, "it is not names that are
+married; no, it is persons." "Even if in this simple and holy ceremony
+names entered as a constituent part, the one I bear would have sufficed,
+since I recognise no other. If it were a question of property to be
+assured, then it would be another thing, but you know very well that is
+not our case."[149] Of course, this may have been a marriage according
+to the truth of nature, and Rousseau was as free to choose his own rites
+as more sacramental performers, but it is clear from his own words about
+property that there was no pretence of a marriage in law. He and Theresa
+were on profoundly uncomfortable terms about this time,[150] and
+Rousseau is not the only person by many thousands who has deceived
+himself into thinking that some form of words between man and woman must
+magically transform the substance of their characters and lives, and
+conjure up new relations of peace and steadfastness.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We have, however, been outstripping slow-footed destiny, and have now to
+return to the time when Theresa did not drink brandy, nor run after
+stable-boys, nor fill Rousseau's soul with bitterness and suspicion, but
+sat contentedly with him in an evening taking a stoic's meal in the
+window of their garret on the fourth floor, seasoning it with
+"confidence, intimacy, gentleness of soul," and that general comfort of
+sensation which, as we know to our cost, is by no means an invariable
+condition either of duty done externally or of spiritual growth within.
+It is perhaps hard for us to feel that we are in the presence of a great
+religious reactionist; there is so little sign of the higher graces of
+the soul, there are so many signs of the lowering clogs of the flesh.
+But the spirit of a man moves in mysterious ways, and expands like the
+plants of the field with strange and silent stirrings. It is one of the
+chief tests of worthiness and freedom from vulgarity of soul in us, to
+be able to have faith that this expansion is a reality, and the most
+important of all realities. We do not rightly seize the type of Socrates
+if we can never forget that he was the husband of Xanthippe, nor David's
+if we can only think of him as the murderer of Uriah, nor Peter's if we
+can simply remember that he denied his master. Our vision is only
+blindness, if we can never bring ourselves to see the possibilities of
+deep mystic aspiration behind the vile outer life of a man, or to
+believe that this coarse Rousseau, scantily supping with his coarse
+mate, might yet have many glimpses of the great wide horizons that are
+haunted by figures rather divine than human.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[104] In theory he was even now curiously prudent and almost
+sagacious; witness the Projet pour l'Education, etc., submitted to M.
+de Mably, and printed in the volume of his Works entitled _Mélanges_,
+pp. 106-136. In the matter of Latin, it may be worth noting that
+Rousseau rashly or otherwise condemns the practice of writing it, as a
+vexatious superfluity (p. 132).
+
+[105] _Conf._, vi. 471.
+
+[106] _Ib._, vi. 472-475; vii. 8.
+
+[107] _Conf._, vii. 18, 19.
+
+[108] Musset-Pathay (ii. 72) quotes the passage from Lord
+Chesterfield's Letters, where the writer suggests Madame Dupin as a
+proper person with whom his son might in a regular and business-like
+manner open the elevating game of gallant intrigue.
+
+[109] M. Dupin deserves honourable mention as having helped the
+editors of the Encyclopædia by procuring information for them as to
+salt-works (D'Alembert's _Discours Préliminaire_). His son M. Dupin de
+Francueil, it may be worth noting, is a link in the genealogical chain
+between two famous personages. In 1777, the year before Rousseau's
+death, he married (in the chapel of the French embassy in London)
+Aurora de Saxe, a natural daughter of the marshal, himself the natural
+son of August the Strong, King of Poland. From this union was born
+Maurice Dupin, and Maurice Dupin was the father of Madame George Sand.
+M. Francueil died in 1787.
+
+[110] _Mém. de Mdme. d'Epinay_, vol. i. ch. iv. p. 176.
+
+[111] _Ib._ vol. i. ch. iv. pp. 178, 179.
+
+[112] _Conf._, vii. 46, 51, 52, etc. A diplomatic piece in Rousseau's
+handwriting has been found in the archives of the French consulate at
+Constantinople, as M. Girardin informs us. Voltaire unworthily spread
+the report that Rousseau had been the ambassador's private attendant.
+For Rousseau's reply to the calumny, see _Corr._, v. 75 (Jan. 5,
+1767); also iv. 150.
+
+[113] Bernardin de St. Pierre, _Oeuv._, xii. 55 _seq._
+
+[114] _Conf._, vii. 92.
+
+[115] _Conf._, vii. 38, 39.
+
+[116] _Lettres de la Montagne_, iii. 266.
+
+[117] _Conf._, vii. 75-84. Also a second example, 84-86. For Byron's
+opinion of one of these stories, see Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, vi.
+132. (Ed. 1837.)
+
+[118] _Lettre sur la Musique Française_ (1753), p. 186.
+
+[119] _Conf._, ix. 232.
+
+[120] _Ib._ vii. 97.
+
+[121] Hôtel St. Quentin, rue des Cordiers, a narrow street running
+between the rue St. Jacques and the rue Victor Cousin. The still
+squalid hostelry is now visible as Hôtel J.J. Rousseau. There is some
+doubt whether he first saw Theresa in 1743 or 1745. The account in Bk.
+vii. of the _Confessions_ is for the latter date (see also _Corr._,
+ii. 207), but in the well-known letter to her in 1769 (_Ib._ vi. 79),
+he speaks of the twenty-six years of their union. Their so-called
+marriage took place in 1768, and writing in that year he speaks of the
+five-and-twenty years of their attachment (_Ib._ v. 323), and in the
+_Confessions_ (ix. 249) he fixes their marriage at the same date; also
+in the letter to Saint-Germain (vi. 152). Musset-Pathay, though giving
+1745 in one place (i. 45), and 1743 in another (ii. 198), has with
+less than his usual care paid no attention to the discrepancy.
+
+[122] _Conf._, vii. 97-100.
+
+[123] _Conf._, vii. 101. A short specimen of her composition may be
+interesting, at any rate to hieroglyphic students: "Mesiceuras ancor
+mien re mies quan geu ceures o pres deu vous, e deu vous temoes tous
+la goies e latandres deu mon querque vous cones ces que getou gour e
+rus pour vous, e qui neu finiraes quotobocs ces mon quere qui vous
+paleu ces paes mes le vre ... ge sui avestous lamities e la reu conec
+caceu posible e la tacheman mon cher bonnamies votreau enble e bon
+amiess theress le vasseur." Of which dark words this is the
+interpretation:--"Mais il sera encore mieux remis quand je sera auprès
+de vous, et de vous témoigner toute la joie et la tendresse de mon
+coeur que vous connaissez que j'ai toujours eue pour vous, et qui ne
+finira qu'au tombeau; c'est mon coeur qui vous parle, c'est pas mes
+lèvres.... Je suis avec toute l'amitié et la reconnaissance possibles,
+et l'attachement, mon cher bon ami, votre humble et bonne amie,
+Thérèse Le Vasseur." (_Rousseau, ses Amis et ses Ennemis_, ii. 450.)
+Certainly it was not learning and arts which hindered Theresa's
+manners from being pure.
+
+[124] _Oeuv. et Corr. Inéd._, 365.
+
+[125] _Conf._, vii. 102. See also _Corr._, v. 373 (Oct. 10, 1768). On
+the other hand, _Conf._, ix. 249.
+
+[126] M. St. Marc Girardin, in one of his admirable papers on
+Rousseau, speaks of him as "a bourgeois unclassed by an alliance with
+a tavern servant" (_Rev. des Deux Mondes_, Nov. 1852, p. 759); but
+surely Rousseau had unclassed himself long before, in the houses of
+Madame Vercellis, Count Gouvon, and even Madame de Warens, and by his
+repudiation, from the time when he ran away from Geneva, of nearly
+every bourgeois virtue and bourgeois prejudice.
+
+[127] _Conf._, vii. 11. Also footnote.
+
+[128] _Rêveries_, ix. 309.
+
+[129] _Conf._, viii. 142, 143.
+
+[130] The other day I came for the first time upon the following in
+the sayings of Madame de Lambert:--"Ce ne sont pas toujours les fautes
+qui nous perdent; c'est la manière de se conduire aprés les avoir
+faites." [1877.]
+
+[131] _Conf._, xii. 187, 188.
+
+[132] _Ib._, viii. 221.
+
+[133] Bernardin de St. Pierre, _Oeuv._, xii. 103. See _Conf._, xii
+188, and _Corr._, v. 324.
+
+[134] Referring, no doubt, to the ceremony which he called their
+marriage, and which had taken place in 1768.
+
+[135] _Corr._, vi. 79-86. August 12, 1769.
+
+[136] Composed in 1745. The _Fêtes de Ramire_ was represented at
+Versailles at the very end of this year.
+
+[137] Some time in 1746-7. _Conf._, vii. 113, 114.
+
+[138] Probably in the winter of 1746-7. _Corr._, ii. 207. _Conf._,
+vii. 120-124. _Ib._, viii. 148. _Corr._, ii. 208. June 12, 1761, to
+the Maréchale de Luxembourg.
+
+[139] George Sand,--in an eloquent piece entitled _À Propos des
+Charmettes (Revue des Deux Mondes_, November 15, 1863), in which she
+expresses her own obligations to Jean Jacques. In 1761 Rousseau
+declares that he had never hitherto had the least reason to suspect
+Theresa's fidelity. _Corr._, ii. 209
+
+[140] _Conf._, vii. 123.
+
+[141] _Ib._, viii. 145-151.
+
+[142] _Rêveries_, ix. 313. The same reason is given, _Conf._, ix. 252;
+also in Letter to Madame B., January 17, 1770 (_Corr._, vi. 117).
+
+[143] _Corr._, vi. 152, 153. Feb. 27, 1770.
+
+[144] Letter to Madame de Francueil, April 20, 1751. _Corr._, i. 151.
+
+[145] _Corr._, i. 151-155
+
+[146] August 10, 1761. _Corr._, ii. 220. The Maréchale de Luxembourg's
+note on the subject, to which this is a reply, is given in _Rousseau,
+ses Amis et ses Ennemis_, i. 444.
+
+[147] _Conf._, x. 249. See above, p. 106, _n._
+
+[148] To Lalliaud, Aug 31, 1768. _Corr._, v. 324. See also D'Escherny,
+quoted in Musset-Pathay, i. 169, 170.
+
+[149] To Du Peyrou, Sept. 26, 1768. _Corr._, v. 360.
+
+[150] To Mdlle. Le Vasseur, July 25, 1768. _Corr._, v. 116-119.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+THE DISCOURSES.
+
+
+The busy establishment of local academies in the provincial centres of
+France only preceded the outbreak of the revolution by ten or a dozen
+years; but one or two of the provincial cities, such as Bordeaux, Rouen,
+Dijon, had possessed academies in imitation of the greater body of Paris
+for a much longer time. Their activity covered a very varied ground,
+from the mere commonplaces of literature to the most practical details
+of material production. If they now and then relapsed into inquiries
+about the laws of Crete, they more often discussed positive and
+scientific theses, and rather resembled our chambers of agriculture than
+bodies of more learned pretension. The academy of Dijon was one of the
+earliest of these excellent institutions, and on the whole the list of
+its theses shows it to have been among the most sensible in respect of
+the subjects which it found worth thinking about. Its members, however,
+could not entirely resist the intellectual atmosphere of the time. In
+1742 they invited discussion of the point, whether the natural law can
+conduct society to perfection without the aid of political laws.[151]
+In 1749 they proposed this question as a theme for their prize essay:
+_Has the restoration of the sciences contributed to purify or to corrupt
+manners?_ Rousseau was one of fourteen competitors, and in 1750 his
+discussion of the academic theme received the prize.[152] This was his
+first entry on the field of literature and speculation. Three years
+afterwards the same academy propounded another question: _What is the
+origin of inequality among men, and is it authorised by the natural
+law?_ Rousseau again competed, and though his essay neither gained the
+prize, nor created as lively an agitation as its predecessor had done,
+yet we may justly regard the second as a more powerful supplement to
+the first.
+
+It is always interesting to know the circumstances under which pieces
+that have moved a world were originally composed, and Rousseau's account
+of the generation of his thoughts as to the influence of enlightenment
+on morality, is remarkable enough to be worth transcribing. He was
+walking along the road from Paris to Vincennes one hot summer afternoon
+on a visit to Diderot, then in prison for his Letter on the Blind
+(1749), when he came across in a newspaper the announcement of the theme
+propounded by the Dijon academy. "If ever anything resembled a sudden
+inspiration, it was the movement which began in me as I read this. All
+at once I felt myself dazzled by a thousand sparkling lights; crowds of
+vivid ideas thronged into my mind with a force and confusion that threw
+me into unspeakable agitation; I felt my head whirling in a giddiness
+like that of intoxication. A violent palpitation oppressed me; unable to
+walk for difficulty of breathing, I sank under one of the trees of the
+avenue, and passed half an hour there in such a condition of excitement,
+that when I arose I saw that the front of my waistcoat was all wet with
+my tears, though I was wholly unconscious of shedding them. Ah, if I
+could ever have written the quarter of what I saw and felt under that
+tree, with what clearness should I have brought out all the
+contradictions of our social system; with what simplicity I should have
+demonstrated that man is good naturally, and that by institutions only
+is he made bad."[153] Diderot encouraged him to compete for the prize,
+and to give full flight to the ideas which had come to him in this
+singular way.[154]
+
+People have held up their hands at the amazing originality of the idea
+that perhaps sciences and arts have not purified manners. This sentiment
+is surely exaggerated, if we reflect first that it occurred to the
+academicians of Dijon as a question for discussion, and second that, if
+you are asked whether a given result has or has not followed from
+certain circumstances, the mere form of the question suggests No quite
+as readily as Yes. The originality lay not in the central contention,
+but in the fervour, sincerity, and conviction of a most unacademic sort
+with which it was presented and enforced. There is less originality in
+denouncing your generation as wicked and adulterous than there is in
+believing it to be so, and in persuading the generation itself both that
+you believe it and that you have good reasons to give. We have not to
+suppose that there was any miracle wrought by agency celestial or
+infernal in the sudden disclosure of his idea to Rousseau. Rousseau had
+been thinking of politics ever since the working of the government of
+Venice had first drawn his mind to the subject. What is the government,
+he had kept asking himself, which is most proper to form a sage and
+virtuous nation? What government by its nature keeps closest to the law?
+What is this law? And whence?[155] This chain of problems had led him to
+what he calls the historic study of morality, though we may doubt
+whether history was so much his teacher as the rather meagrely nourished
+handmaid of his imagination. Here was the irregular preparation, the
+hidden process, which suddenly burst into light and manifested itself
+with an exuberance of energy, that passed to the man himself for an
+inward revolution with no precursive sign.
+
+Rousseau's ecstatic vision on the road to Vincennes was the opening of a
+life of thought and production which only lasted a dozen years, but
+which in that brief space gave to Europe a new gospel. Emilius and the
+Social Contract were completed in 1761, and they crowned a work which if
+you consider its origin, influence, and meaning with due and proper
+breadth, is marked by signal unity of purpose and conception. The key to
+it is given to us in the astonishing transport at the foot of the
+wide-spreading oak. Such a transport does not come to us of cool and
+rational western temperament, but more often to the oriental after
+lonely sojourning in the wilderness, or in violent reactions on the road
+to Damascus and elsewhere. Jean Jacques detected oriental quality in his
+own nature,[156] and so far as the union of ardour with mysticism, of
+intense passion with vague dream, is to be defined as oriental, he
+assuredly deserves the name. The ideas stirred in his mind by the Dijon
+problem suddenly "opened his eyes, brought order into the chaos in his
+head, revealed to him another universe. From the active effervescence
+which thus began in his soul, came sparks of genius which people saw
+glittering in his writings through ten years of fever and delirium, but
+of which no trace had been seen in him previously, and which would
+probably have ceased to shine henceforth, if he should have chanced to
+wish to continue writing after the access was over. Inflamed by the
+contemplation of these lofty objects, he had them incessantly present to
+his mind. His heart, made hot within him by the idea of the future
+happiness of the human race, and by the honour of contributing to it,
+dictated to him a language worthy of so high an enterprise ... and for a
+moment, he astonished Europe by productions in which vulgar souls saw
+only eloquence and brightness of understanding, but in which those who
+dwell in the ethereal regions recognised with joy one of their
+own."[157]
+
+This was his own account of the matter quite at the end of his life, and
+this is the only point of view from which we are secure against the
+vulgarity of counting him a deliberate hypocrite and conscious
+charlatan. He was possessed, as holier natures than his have been, by an
+enthusiastic vision, an intoxicated confidence, a mixture of sacred rage
+and prodigious love, an insensate but absolutely disinterested revolt
+against the stone and iron of a reality which he was bent on melting in
+a heavenly blaze of splendid aspiration and irresistibly persuasive
+expression. The last word of this great expansion was Emilius, its first
+and more imperfectly articulated was the earlier of the two Discourses.
+
+Rousseau's often-repeated assertion that here was the instant of the
+ruin of his life, and that all his misfortunes flowed from that unhappy
+moment, has been constantly treated as the word of affectation and
+disguised pride. Yet, vain as he was, it may well have represented his
+sincere feeling in those better moods when mental suffering was strong
+enough to silence vanity. His visions mastered him for these thirteen
+years, _grande mortalis oevi spatium_. They threw him on to that turbid
+sea of literature for which he had so keen an aversion, and from which,
+let it be remarked, he fled finally away, when his confidence in the
+ease of making men good and happy by words of monition had left him. It
+was the torment of his own enthusiasm which rent that veil of placid
+living, that in his normal moments he would fain have interposed between
+his existence and the tumult of a generation with which he was
+profoundly out of sympathy. In this way the first Discourse was the
+letting in of much evil upon him, as that and the next and the Social
+Contract were the letting in of much evil upon all Europe.
+
+Of this essay the writer has recorded his own impression that, though
+full of heat and force, it is absolutely wanting in logic and order, and
+that of all the products of his pen, it is the feeblest in reasoning and
+the poorest in numbers and harmony. "For," as he justly adds, "the art
+of writing is not learnt all at once."[158] The modern critic must be
+content to accept the same verdict; only a generation so in love as
+this was with anything that could tickle its intellectual curiousness,
+would have found in the first of the two Discourses that combination of
+speculative and literary merit which was imputed to Rousseau on the
+strength of it, and which at once brought him into a place among the
+notables of an age that was full of them.[159] We ought to take in
+connection with it two at any rate of the vindications of the Discourse,
+which the course of controversy provoked from its author, and which
+serve to complete its significance. It is difficult to analyse, because
+in truth it is neither closely argumentative, nor is it vertebrate, even
+as a piece of rhetoric. The gist of the piece, however, runs somewhat in
+this wise:--
+
+Before art had fashioned our manners, and taught our passions to use a
+too elaborate speech, men were rude but natural, and difference of
+conduct announced at a glance difference of character. To-day a vile and
+most deceptive uniformity reigns over our manners, and all minds seem as
+if they had been cast in a single mould. Hence we never know with what
+sort of person we are dealing, hence the hateful troop of suspicions,
+fears, reserves, and treacheries, and the concealment of impiety,
+arrogance, calumny, and scepticism, under a dangerous varnish of
+refinement. So terrible a set of effects must have a cause. History
+shows that the cause here is to be found in the progress of sciences and
+arts. Egypt, once so mighty, becomes the mother of philosophy and the
+fine arts; straightway behold its conquest by Cambyses, by Greeks, by
+Romans, by Arabs, finally by Turks. Greece twice conquered Asia, once
+before Troy, once in its own homes; then came in fatal sequence the
+progress of the arts, the dissolution of manners, and the yoke of the
+Macedonian. Rome, founded by a shepherd and raised to glory by
+husbandmen, began to degenerate with Ennius, and the eve of her ruin was
+the day when she gave a citizen the deadly title of arbiter of good
+taste. China, where letters carry men to the highest dignities of the
+state, could not be preserved by all her literature from the conquering
+power of the ruder Tartar. On the other hand, the Persians, Scythians,
+Germans, remain in history as types of simplicity, innocence, and
+virtue. Was not he admittedly the wisest of the Greeks, who made of his
+own apology a plea for ignorance, and a denunciation of poets, orators,
+and artists? The chosen people of God never cultivated the sciences, and
+when the new law was established, it was not the learned, but the simple
+and lowly, fishers and workmen, to whom Christ entrusted his teaching
+and its ministry.[160]
+
+This, then, is the way in which chastisement has always overtaken our
+presumptuous efforts to emerge from that happy ignorance in which
+eternal wisdom placed us; though the thick veil with which that wisdom
+has covered all its operations seemed to warn us that we were not
+destined to fatuous research. All the secrets that Nature hides from us
+are so many evils against which she would fain shelter us.
+
+Is probity the child of ignorance, and can science and virtue be really
+inconsistent with one another? These sounding contrasts are mere
+deceits, because if you look nearly into the results of this science of
+which we talk so proudly, you will perceive that they confirm the
+results of induction from history. Astronomy, for instance, is born of
+superstition; geometry from the desire of gain; physics from a futile
+curiosity; all of them, even morals, from human pride. Are we for ever
+to be the dupes of words, and to believe that these pompous names of
+science, philosophy, and the rest, stand for worthy and profitable
+realities?[161] Be sure that they do not.
+
+How many errors do we pass through on our road to truth, errors a
+thousandfold more dangerous than truth is useful? And by what marks are
+we to know truth, when we think that we have found it? And above all, if
+we do find it, who of us can be sure that he will make good use of it?
+If celestial intelligences cultivated science, only good could result;
+and we may say as much of great men of the stamp of Socrates, who are
+born to be the guides of others.[162] But the intelligences of common
+men are neither celestial nor Socratic.
+
+Again, every useless citizen may be fairly regarded as a pernicious man;
+and let us ask those illustrious philosophers who have taught us what
+insects reproduce themselves curiously, in what ratio bodies attract
+one another in space, what curves have conjugate points, points of
+inflection or reflection, what in the planetary revolutions are the
+relations of areas traversed in equal times--let us ask those who have
+attained all this sublime knowledge, by how much the worse governed,
+less flourishing, or less perverse we should have been if they had
+attained none of it? Now if the works of our most scientific men and
+best citizens lead to such small utility, tell us what we are to think
+of the crowd of obscure writers and idle men of letters who devour the
+public substance in pure loss.
+
+Then it is in the nature of things that devotion to art leads to luxury,
+and luxury, as we all know from our own experience, no less than from
+the teaching of history, saps not only the military virtues by which
+nations preserve their independence, but also those moral virtues which
+make the independence of a nation worth preserving. Your children go to
+costly establishments where they learn everything except their duties.
+They remain ignorant of their own tongue, though they will speak others
+not in use anywhere in the world; they gain the faculty of composing
+verses which they can barely understand; without capacity to distinguish
+truth from error, they possess the art of rendering them
+indistinguishable to others by specious arguments. Magnanimity, equity,
+temperance, courage, humanity, have no real meaning to them; and if they
+hear speak of God, it breeds more terror than awful fear.
+
+Whence spring all these abuses, if not from the disastrous inequality
+introduced among men by the distinction of talents and the cheapening of
+virtue?[163] People no longer ask of a man whether he has probity, but
+whether he is clever; nor of a book whether it is useful, but whether it
+is well written. And after all, what is this philosophy, what are these
+lessons of wisdom, to which we give the prize of enduring fame? To
+listen to these sages, would you not take them for a troop of
+charlatans, all bawling out in the market-place, Come to me, it is only
+I who never cheat you, and always give good measure? One maintains that
+there is no body, and that everything is mere representation; the other
+that there is no entity but matter, and no God but the universe: one
+that moral good and evil are chimeras; the other that men are wolves and
+may devour one another with the easiest conscience in the world. These
+are the marvellous personages on whom the esteem of contemporaries is
+lavished so long as they live, and to whom immortality is reserved after
+their death. And we have now invented the art of making their
+extravagances eternal, and thanks to the use of typographic characters
+the dangerous speculations of Hobbes and Spinoza will endure for ever.
+Surely when they perceive the terrible disorders which printing has
+already caused in Europe, sovereigns will take as much trouble to
+banish this deadly art from their states as they once took to
+introduce it.
+
+If there is perhaps no harm in allowing one or two men to give
+themselves up to the study of sciences and arts, it is only those who
+feel conscious of the strength required for advancing their subjects,
+who have any right to attempt to raise monuments to the glory of the
+human mind. We ought to have no tolerance for those compilers who rashly
+break open the gate of the sciences, and introduce into their sanctuary
+a populace that is unworthy even to draw near to it. It may be well that
+there should be philosophers, provided only and always that the people
+do not meddle with philosophising.[164]
+
+In short, there are two kinds of ignorance: one brutal and ferocious,
+springing from a bad heart, multiplying vices, degrading the reason, and
+debasing the soul: the other "a reasonable ignorance, which consists in
+limiting our curiosity to the extent of the faculties we have received;
+a modest ignorance, born of a lively love for virtue, and inspiring
+indifference only for what is not worthy of filling a man's heart, or
+fails to contribute to its improvement; a sweet and precious ignorance,
+the treasure of a pure soul at peace with itself, which finds all its
+blessedness in inward retreat, in testifying to itself its own
+innocence, and which feels no need of seeking a warped and hollow
+happiness in the opinion of other people as to its enlightenment."[165]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Some of the most pointed assaults in this Discourse, such for instance
+as that on the pedantic parade of wit, or that on the excessive
+preponderance of literary instruction in the art of education, are due
+to Montaigne; and in one way, the Discourse might be described as
+binding together a number of that shrewd man's detached hints by means
+of a paradoxical generalisation. But the Rousseau is more important than
+the Montaigne in it. Another remark to be made is that its vigorous
+disparagement of science, of the emptiness of much that is called
+science, of the deadly pride of intellect, is an anticipation in a very
+precise way of the attitude taken by the various Christian churches and
+their representatives now and for long, beginning with De Maistre, the
+greatest of the religious reactionaries after Rousseau. The vilification
+of the Greeks is strikingly like some vehement passages in De Maistre's
+estimate of their share in sophisticating European intellect. At last
+Rousseau even began to doubt whether "so chattering a people could ever
+have had any solid virtues, even in primitive times."[166] Yet
+Rousseau's own thinking about society is deeply marked with opinions
+borrowed exactly from these very chatterers. His imagination was
+fascinated from the first by the freedom and boldness of Plato's social
+speculations, to which his debt in a hundred details of his political
+and educational schemes is well known. What was more important than any
+obligation of detail was the fatal conception, borrowed partly from the
+Greeks and partly from Geneva, of the omnipotence of the Lawgiver in
+moulding a social state after his own purpose and ideal. We shall
+presently quote the passage in which he holds up for our envy and
+imitation the policy of Lycurgus at Sparta, who swept away all that he
+found existing and constructed the social edifice afresh from foundation
+to roof.[167] It is true that there was an unmistakable decay of Greek
+literary studies in France from the beginning of the eighteenth century,
+and Rousseau seems to have read Plato only through Ficinus's
+translation. But his example and its influence, along with that of Mably
+and others, warrant the historian in saying that at no time did Greek
+ideas more keenly preoccupy opinion than during this century.[168]
+Perhaps we may say that Rousseau would never have proved how little
+learning and art do for the good of manners, if Plato had not insisted
+on poets being driven out of the Republic. The article on Political
+Economy, written by him for the Encyclopædia (1755), rings with the
+names of ancient rulers and lawgivers; the project of public education
+is recommended by the example of Cretans, Lacedæmonians, and Persians,
+while the propriety of the reservation of a state domain is suggested
+by Romulus.
+
+It may be added that one of the not too many merits of the essay is the
+way in which the writer, more or less in the Socratic manner, insists on
+dragging people out of the refuge of sonorous general terms, with a
+great public reputation of much too well-established a kind to be
+subjected to the affront of analysis. It is true that Rousseau himself
+contributed nothing directly to that analytic operation which Socrates
+likened to midwifery, and he set up graven images of his own in place of
+the idols which he destroyed. This, however, did not wholly efface the
+distinction, which he shares with all who have ever tried to lead the
+minds of men into new tracks, of refusing to accept the current coins of
+philosophical speech without test or measurement. Such a treatment of
+the great trite words which come so easily to the tongue and seem to
+weigh for so much, must always be the first step towards bringing
+thought back into the region of real matter, and confronting phrases,
+terms, and all the common form of the discussion of an age, with the
+actualities which it is the object of sincere discussion to penetrate.
+
+The refutation of many parts of Rousseau's main contention on the
+principles which are universally accepted among enlightened men in
+modern society is so extremely obvious that to undertake it would merely
+be to draw up a list of the gratulatory commonplaces of which we hear
+quite enough in the literature and talk of our day. In this direction,
+perhaps it suffices to say that the Discourse is wholly one-sided,
+admitting none of the conveniences, none of the alleviations of
+suffering of all kinds, nothing of the increase of mental stature, which
+the pursuit of knowledge has brought to the race. They may or may not
+counterbalance the evils that it has brought, but they are certainly to
+be put in the balance in any attempt at philosophic examination of the
+subject. It contains no serious attempt to tell us what those alleged
+evils really are, or definitely to trace them one by one, to abuse of
+the thirst for knowledge and defects in the method of satisfying it. It
+omits to take into account the various other circumstances, such as
+climate, government, race, and the disposition of neighbours, which must
+enter equally with intellectual progress into whatever demoralisation
+has marked the destinies of a nation. Finally it has for the base of its
+argument the entirely unsupported assumption of there having once been
+in the early history of each society a stage of mild, credulous, and
+innocent virtue, from which appetite for the fruit of the forbidden tree
+caused an inevitable degeneration. All evidence and all scientific
+analogy are now well known to lead to the contrary doctrine, that the
+history of civilisation is a history of progress and not of decline from
+a primary state. After all, as Voltaire said to Rousseau in a letter
+which only showed a superficial appreciation of the real drift of the
+argument, we must confess that these thorns attached to literature are
+only as flowers in comparison with the other evils that have deluged the
+earth. "It was not Cicero nor Lucretius nor Virgil nor Horace, who
+contrived the proscriptions of Marius, of Sulla, of the debauched
+Antony, of the imbecile Lepidus, of that craven tyrant basely surnamed
+Augustus. It was not Marot who produced the St. Bartholomew massacre,
+nor the tragedy of the Cid that led to the wars of the Fronde. What
+really makes, and always will make, this world into a valley of tears,
+is the insatiable cupidity and indomitable insolence of men, from Kouli
+Khan, who did not know how to read, down to the custom-house clerk, who
+knows nothing but how to cast up figures. Letters nourish the soul, they
+strengthen its integrity, they furnish a solace to it,"--and so on in
+the sense, though without the eloquence, of the famous passage in
+Cicero's defence of Archias the poet.[169] All this, however, in our
+time is in no danger of being forgotten, and will be present to the mind
+of every reader. The only danger is that pointed out by Rousseau
+himself: "People always think they have described what the sciences do,
+when they have in reality only described what the sciences ought
+to do."[170]
+
+What we are more likely to forget is that Rousseau's piece has a
+positive as well as a negative side, and presents, in however vehement
+and overstated a way, a truth which the literary and speculative
+enthusiasm of France in the eighteenth century, as is always the case
+with such enthusiasm whenever it penetrates either a generation or an
+individual, was sure to make men dangerously ready to forget.[171] This
+truth may be put in different terms. We may describe it as the
+possibility of eminent civic virtue existing in people, without either
+literary taste or science or speculative curiosity. Or we may express it
+as the compatibility of a great amount of contentment and order in a
+given social state, with a very low degree of knowledge. Or finally, we
+may give the truth its most general expression, as the subordination of
+all activity to the promotion of social aims. Rousseau's is an elaborate
+and roundabout manner of saying that virtue without science is better
+than science without virtue; or that the well-being of a country depends
+more on the standard of social duty and the willingness of citizens to
+conform to it, than on the standard of intellectual culture and the
+extent of its diffusion. In other words, we ought to be less concerned
+about the speculative or scientific curiousness of our people than about
+the height of their notion of civic virtue and their firmness and
+persistency in realising it. It is a moralist's way of putting the
+ancient preacher's monition, that they are but empty in whom is not the
+wisdom of God. The importance of stating this is in our modern era
+always pressing, because there is a constant tendency on the part of
+energetic intellectual workers, first, to concentrate their energies on
+a minute specialty, leaving public affairs and interests to their own
+course. Second, they are apt to overestimate their contributions to the
+stock of means by which men are made happier, and what is more serious,
+to underestimate in comparison those orderly, modest, self-denying,
+moral qualities, by which only men are made worthier, and the continuity
+of society is made surer. Third, in consequence of their greater command
+of specious expression and their control of the organs of public
+opinion, they both assume a kind of supreme place in the social
+hierarchy, and persuade the majority of plain men unsuspectingly to take
+so very egregious an assumption for granted. So far as Rousseau's
+Discourse recalled the truth as against this sort of error it was full
+of wholesomeness.
+
+Unfortunately his indignation against the overweening pretensions of the
+verse-writer, the gazetteer, and the great band of socialists at large,
+led him into a general position with reference to scientific and
+speculative energy, which seems to involve a perilous misconception of
+the conditions of this energy producing its proper results. It is easy
+now, as it was easy for Rousseau in the last century, to ask in an
+epigrammatical manner by how much men are better or happier for having
+found out this or that novelty in transcendental mathematics, biology,
+or astronomy; and this is very well as against the discoverer of small
+marvels who shall give himself out for the benefactor of the human
+race. But both historical experience and observation of the terms on
+which the human intelligence works, show us that we can only make sure
+of intellectual activity on condition of leaving it free to work all
+round, in every department and in every remotest nook of each
+department, and that its most fruitful epochs are exactly those when
+this freedom is greatest, this curiosity most keen and minute, and this
+waste, if you choose to call the indispensable superfluity of force in a
+natural process waste, most copious and unsparing. You will not find
+your highest capacity in statesmanship, nor in practical science, nor in
+art, nor in any other field where that capacity is most urgently needed
+for the right service of life, unless there is a general and vehement
+spirit of search in the air. If it incidentally leads to many
+industrious futilities and much learned refuse, this is still the sign
+and the generative element of industry which is not futile, and of
+learning which is something more than mere water spilled upon
+the ground.
+
+We may say in fine that this first Discourse and its vindications were a
+dim, shallow, and ineffective feeling after the great truth, that the
+only normal state of society is that in which neither the love of virtue
+has been thrust far back into a secondary place by the love of
+knowledge, nor the active curiosity of the understanding dulled,
+blunted, and made ashamed by soft, lazy ideals of life as a life only of
+the affections. Rousseau now and always fell into the opposite extreme
+from that against which his whole work was a protest. We need not
+complain very loudly that while remonstrating against the restless
+intrepidity of the rationalists of his generation, he passed over the
+central truth, namely that the full and ever festal life is found in
+active freedom of curiosity and search taking significance, motive,
+force, from a warm inner pulse of human love and sympathy. It was not
+given to Rousseau to see all this, but it was given to him to see the
+side of it for which the most powerful of the men living with him had no
+eyes, and the first Discourse was only a moderately successful attempt
+to bring his vision before Europe. It was said at the time that he did
+not believe a word of what he had written.[172] It is a natural
+characteristic of an age passionately occupied with its own set of
+ideas, to question either the sincerity or the sanity of anybody who
+declares its sovereign conceptions to be no better than foolishness. We
+cannot entertain such a suspicion. Perhaps the vehemence of controversy
+carries him rather further than he quite meant to go, when he declares
+that if he were a chief of an African tribe, he would erect on his
+frontier a gallows, on which he would hang without mercy the first
+European who should venture to pass into his territory, and the first
+native who should dare to pass out of it.[173] And there are many other
+extravagances of illustration, but the main position is serious enough,
+as represented in the emblematic vignette with which the essay was
+printed--the torch of science brought to men by Prometheus, who warns a
+satyr that it burns; the satyr, seeing fire for the first time and being
+fain to embrace it, is the symbol of the vulgar men who, seduced by the
+glitter of literature, insist on delivering themselves up to its
+study.[174] Rousseau's whole doctrine hangs compactly together, and we
+may see the signs of its growth after leaving his hands in the crude
+formula of the first Discourse, if we proceed to the more audacious
+paradox of the second.
+
+
+II.
+
+The Discourse on the Origin of Inequality among men opens with a
+description of the natural state of man, which occupies considerably
+more than half of the entire performance. It is composed in a vein which
+is only too familiar to the student of the literature of the time,
+picturing each habit and thought, and each step to new habits and
+thoughts, with the minuteness, the fulness, the precision, of one who
+narrates circumstances of which he has all his life been the close
+eye-witness. The natural man reveals to us every motive, every process
+internal and external, every slightest circumstance of his daily life,
+and each element that gradually transformed him into the non-natural
+man. One who had watched bees or beetles for years could not give us a
+more full or confident account of their doings, their hourly goings in
+and out, than it was the fashion in the eighteenth century to give of
+the walk and conversation of the primeval ancestor. The conditions of
+primitive man were discussed by very incompetent ladies and gentlemen at
+convivial supper parties, and settled with complete assurance.[175]
+
+Rousseau thought and talked about the state of nature because all his
+world was thinking and talking about it. He used phrases and formulas
+with reference to it which other people used. He required no more
+evidence than they did, as to the reality of the existence of the
+supposed set of conditions to which they gave the almost sacramental
+name of state of nature. He never thought of asking, any more than
+anybody else did in the middle of the eighteenth century, what sort of
+proof, how strong, how direct, was to be had, that primeval man had such
+and such habits, and changed them in such a way and direction, and for
+such reasons. Physical science had reached a stage by this time when its
+followers were careful to ask questions about evidence, correct
+description, verification. But the idea of accurate method had to be
+made very familiar to men by the successes of physical science in the
+search after truths of one kind, before the indispensableness of
+applying it in the search after truths of all kinds had extended to the
+science of the constitution and succession of social states. In this
+respect Rousseau was not guiltier than the bulk of his contemporaries.
+Voltaire's piercing common sense, Hume's deep-set sagacity,
+Montesquieu's caution, prevented them from launching very far on to this
+metaphysical sea of nature and natural laws and states, but none of them
+asked those critical questions in relation to such matters which occur
+so promptly in the present day to persons far inferior to them in
+intellectual strength. Rousseau took the notion of the state of nature
+because he found it to his hand; he fitted to it his own characteristic
+aspirations, expanding and vivifying a philosophic conception with all
+the heat of humane passion; and thus, although, at the end of the
+process when he had done with it, the state of nature came out blooming
+as the rose, it was fundamentally only the dry, current abstraction of
+his time, artificially decorated to seduce men into embracing a strange
+ideal under a familiar name.
+
+Before analysing the Discourse on Inequality, we ought to make some
+mention of a remarkable man whose influence probably reached Rousseau in
+an indirect manner through Diderot; I mean Morelly.[176] In 1753 Morelly
+published a prose poem called the Basiliade, describing the corruption
+of manners introduced by the errors of the lawgiver, and pointing out
+how this corruption is to be amended by return to the empire of nature
+and truth. He was no doubt stimulated by what was supposed to be the
+central doctrine of Montesquieu, then freshly given to the world, that
+it is government and institutions which make men what they are. But he
+was stimulated into a reaction, and in 1754 he propounded his whole
+theory, in a piece which in closeness, consistency, and thoroughness is
+admirably different from Rousseau's rhetoric.[177] It lacked the
+sovereign quality of persuasiveness, and so fell on deaf ears. Morelly
+accepts the doctrine that men are formed by the laws, but insists that
+moralists and statesmen have always led us wrong by legislating and
+prescribing conduct on the false theory that man is bad, whereas he is
+in truth a creature endowed with natural probity. Then he strikes to the
+root of society with a directness that Rousseau could not imitate, by
+the position that "these laws by establishing a monstrous division of
+the products of nature, and even of their very elements--by dividing
+what ought to have remained entire, or ought to have been restored to
+entireness if any accident had divided them, aided and favoured the
+break-up of all sociability." All political and all moral evils are the
+effects of this pernicious cause--private property. He says of
+Rousseau's first Discourse that the writer ought to have seen that the
+corruption of manners which he set down to literature and art really
+came from this venomous principle of property, which infects all that
+it touches.[178] Christianity, it is true, assailed this principle and
+restored equality or community of possessions, but Christianity had the
+radical fault of involving such a detachment from earthly affections, in
+order to deliver ourselves to heavenly meditation, as brought about a
+necessary degeneration in social activity. The form of government is a
+matter of indifference, provided you can only assure community of goods.
+Political revolutions are at bottom the clash of material interests, and
+until you have equalised the one you will never prevent the other.[179]
+
+Let us turn from this very definite position to one of the least
+definite productions to be found in all literature.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It will seem a little odd that more than half of a discussion on the
+origin of inequality among men should be devoted to a glowing imaginary
+description, from which no reader could conjecture what thesis it was
+designed to support. But we have only to remember that Rousseau's object
+was to persuade people that the happier state is that in which
+inequality does not subsist, that there had once been such a state, and
+that this was first the state of nature, and then the state only one
+degree removed from it, in which we now find the majority of savage
+tribes. At the outset he defines inequality as a word meaning two
+different things; one, natural or physical inequality, such as
+difference of age, of health, of physical strength, of attributes of
+intelligence and character; the other, moral or political inequality,
+consisting in difference of privileges which some enjoy to the detriment
+of the rest, such as being richer, more honoured, more powerful. The
+former differences are established by nature, the latter are authorised,
+if they were not established, by the consent of men.[180] In the state
+of nature no inequalities flow from the differences among men in point
+of physical advantage and disadvantage, and which remain without
+derivative differences so long as the state of nature endures
+undisturbed. Nature deals with men as the law of Sparta dealt with the
+children of its citizens; she makes those who are well constituted
+strong and robust, and she destroys all the rest.
+
+The surface of the earth is originally covered by dense forest, and
+inhabited by animals of every species. Men, scattered among them,
+imitate their industry, and so rise to the instinct of the brutes, with
+this advantage that while each species has only its own, man, without
+anything special, appropriates the instincts of all. This admirable
+creature, with foes on every side, is forced to be constantly on the
+alert, and hence to be always in full possession of all his faculties,
+unlike civilised man, whose native force is enfeebled by the mechanical
+protections with which he has surrounded himself. He is not afraid of
+the wild beasts around him, for experience has taught him that he is
+their master. His health is better than ours, for we live in a time when
+excess of idleness in some, excess of toil in others, the heating and
+over-abundant diet of the rich, the bad food of the poor, the orgies and
+excesses of every kind, the immoderate transport of every passion, the
+fatigue and strain of spirit,--when all these things have inflicted more
+disorders upon us than the vaunted art of medicine has been able to keep
+pace with. Even if the sick savage has only nature to hope from, on the
+other hand he has only his own malady to be afraid of. He has no fear of
+death, for no animal can know what death is, and the knowledge of death
+and its terrors is one of the first of man's terrible acquisitions
+after abandoning his animal condition.[181] In other respects, such as
+protection against weather, such as habitation, such as food, the
+savage's natural power of adaptation, and the fact that his demands are
+moderate in proportion to his means of satisfying them, forbid us to
+consider him physically unhappy. Let us turn to the intellectual and
+moral side.
+
+If you contend that men were miserable, degraded, and outcast during
+these primitive centuries because the intelligence was dormant, then do
+not forget, first, that you are drawing an indictment against
+nature,--no trifling blasphemy in those days--and second, that you are
+attributing misery to a free creature with tranquil spirit and healthy
+body, and that must surely be a singular abuse of the term. We see
+around us scarcely any but people who complain of the burden of their
+lives; but who ever heard of a savage in full enjoyment of his liberty
+ever dreaming of complaint about his life or of self-destruction?
+
+With reference to virtues and vices in a state of nature, Hobbes is
+wrong in declaring that man in this state is vicious, as not knowing
+virtue. He is not vicious, for the reason that he does not know what
+being good is. It is not development of enlightenment nor the
+restrictions of law, but the calm of the passions and ignorance of vice,
+which keep them from doing ill. _Tanto plus in illis profitcit vitiorum
+ignoratio, quam in his cognitio virtutis._
+
+Besides man has one great natural virtue, that of pity, which precedes
+in him the use of reflection, and which indeed he shares with some of
+the brutes. Mandeville, who was forced to admit the existence of this
+admirable quality in man, was absurd in not perceiving that from it flow
+all the social virtues which he would fain deny. Pity is more energetic
+in the primitive condition than it is among ourselves. It is reflection
+which isolates one. It is philosophy which teaches the philosopher to
+say secretly at sight of a suffering wretch, Perish if it please thee; I
+am safe and sound. They may be butchering a fellow-creature under your
+window; all you have to do is to clap your hands to your ears, and argue
+a little with yourself to hinder nature in revolt from making you feel
+as if you were in the case of the victim.[182] The savage man has not
+got this odious gift. In the state of nature it is pity that takes the
+place of laws, manners, and virtue. It is in this natural sentiment
+rather than in subtle arguments that we have to seek the reluctance that
+every man would feel to do ill, even without the precepts of
+education.[183]
+
+Finally, the passion of love, which produces such disasters in a state
+of society, where the jealousy of lovers and the vengeance of husbands
+lead each day to duels and murders, where the duty of eternal fidelity
+only serves to occasion adulteries, and where the law of continence
+necessarily extends the debauching of women and the practice of
+procuring abortion[184]--this passion in a state of nature, where it is
+purely physical, momentary, and without any association of durable
+sentiment with the object of it, simply leads to the necessary
+reproduction of the species and nothing more.
+
+"Let us conclude, then, that wandering in the forests, without industry,
+without speech, without habitation, without war, without connection of
+any kind, without any need of his fellows or without any desire to harm
+them, perhaps even without ever recognising one of them individually,
+savage man, subject to few passions and sufficing to himself, had only
+the sentiments and the enlightenment proper to his condition. He was
+only sensible of his real wants, and only looked because he thought he
+had an interest in seeing; and his intelligence made no more progress
+than his vanity. If by chance he hit on some discovery, he was all the
+less able to communicate it; as he did not know even his own children.
+An art perished with its inventor. There was neither education nor
+progress; generations multiplied uselessly; and as each generation
+always started from the same point, centuries glided away in all the
+rudeness of the first ages, the race was already old, the individual
+remained always a child."
+
+This brings us to the point of the matter. For if you compare the
+prodigious diversities in education and manner of life which reign in
+the different orders of the civil condition, with the simplicity and
+uniformity of the savage and animal life, where all find nourishment in
+the same articles of food, live in the same way, and do exactly the same
+things, you will easily understand to what degree the difference between
+man and man must be less in the state of nature than in that of
+society.[185] Physical inequality is hardly perceived in the state of
+nature, and its indirect influences there are almost non-existent.
+
+Now as all the social virtues and other faculties possessed by man
+potentially were not bound by anything inherent in him to develop into
+actuality, he might have remained to all eternity in his admirable and
+most fitting primitive condition, but for the fortuitous concurrence of
+a variety of external changes. What are these different changes, which
+may perhaps have perfected human reason, while they certainly have
+deteriorated the race, and made men bad in making them sociable?
+
+What, then, are the intermediary facts between the state of nature and
+the state of civil society, the nursery of inequality? What broke up the
+happy uniformity of the first times? First, difference in soil, in
+climate, in seasons, led to corresponding differences in men's manner of
+living. Along the banks of rivers and on the shores of the sea, they
+invented hooks and lines, and were eaters of fish. In the forests they
+invented bows and arrows, and became hunters. In cold countries they
+covered themselves with the skins of beasts. Lightning, volcanoes, or
+some happy chance acquainted them with fire, a new protection against
+the rigours of winter. In company with these natural acquisitions, grew
+up a sort of reflection or mechanical prudence, which showed them the
+kind of precautions most necessary to their security. From this
+rudimentary and wholly egoistic reflection there came a sense of the
+existence of a similar nature and similar interests in their
+fellow-creatures. Instructed by experience that the love of well-being
+and comfort is the only motive of human actions, the savage united with
+his neighbours when union was for their joint convenience, and did his
+best to blind and outwit his neighbours when their interests were
+adverse to his own, and he felt himself the weaker. Hence the origin of
+certain rude ideas of mutual obligation.[186]
+
+Soon, ceasing to fall asleep under the first tree, or to withdraw into
+caves, they found axes of hard stone, which served them to cut wood, to
+dig the ground, and to construct hovels of branches and clay. This was
+the epoch of a first revolution, which formed the establishment and
+division of families, and which introduced a rough and partial sort of
+property. Along with rudimentary ideas of property, though not
+connected with them, came the rudimentary forms of inequality. When men
+were thrown more together, then he who sang or danced the best, the
+strongest, the most adroit, or the most eloquent, acquired the most
+consideration--that is, men ceased to take uniform and equal place. And
+with the coming of this end of equality there passed away the happy
+primitive immunity from jealousy, envy, malice, hate.
+
+On the whole, though men had lost some of their original endurance, and
+their natural pity had already undergone a certain deterioration, this
+period of the development of the human faculties, occupying a just
+medium between the indolence of the primitive state and the petulant
+activity of our modern self-love, must have been at once the happiest
+and the most durable epoch. The more we reflect, the more evident we
+find it that this state was the least subject to revolutions and the
+best for man. "So long as men were content with their rustic hovels, so
+long as they confined themselves to stitching their garments of skin
+with spines or fish bones, to decking their bodies with feathers and
+shells and painting them in different colours, to perfecting and
+beautifying their bows and arrows--in a word, so long as they only
+applied themselves to works that one person could do, and to arts that
+needed no more than a single hand, then they lived free, healthy, good,
+and happy, so far as was compatible with their natural constitution, and
+continued to enjoy among themselves the sweetness of independent
+intercourse. But from the moment that one man had need of the help of
+another, as soon as they perceived it to be useful for one person to
+have provisions for two, then equality disappeared, property was
+introduced, labour became necessary, and the vast forests changed into
+smiling fields, which had to be watered by the sweat of men, and in
+which they ever saw bondage and misery springing up and growing ripe
+with the harvests."[187]
+
+The working of metals and agriculture have been the two great agents in
+this revolution. For the poet it is gold and silver, but for the
+philosopher it is iron and corn, that have civilised men and undone the
+human race. It is easy to see how the latter of the two arts was
+suggested to men by watching the reproducing processes of vegetation. It
+is less easy to be sure how they discovered metal, saw its uses, and
+invented means of smelting it, for nature had taken extreme precautions
+to hide the fatal secret. It was probably the operation of some volcano
+which first suggested the idea of fusing ore. From the fact of land
+being cultivated its division followed, and therefore the institution of
+property in its full shape. From property arose civil society. "The
+first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, could think of saying,
+_This is mine_, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the
+real founder of civil society. How many crimes, wars, murders, miseries,
+and horrors would not have been spared to the human race by one who,
+plucking up the stakes, or filling in the trench, should have called out
+to his fellows: Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if
+you forget that the earth belongs to no one, and that its fruits are for
+all."[188]
+
+Things might have remained equal even in this state, if talents had only
+been equal, and if for example the employment of iron and the
+consumption of agricultural produce had always exactly balanced one
+another. But the stronger did more work; the cleverer got more advantage
+from his work; the more ingenious found means of shortening his labour;
+the husbandman had more need of metal, or the smith more need of grain;
+and while working equally, one got much gain, and the other could
+scarcely live. This distinction between Have and Have-not led to
+confusion and revolt, to brigandage on the one side and constant
+insecurity on the other.
+
+Hence disorders of a violent and interminable kind, which gave rise to
+the most deeply designed project that ever entered the human mind. This
+was to employ in favour of property the strength of the very persons who
+attacked it, to inspire them with other maxims, and to give them other
+institutions which should be as favourable to property as natural law
+had been contrary to it. The man who conceived this project, after
+showing his neighbours the monstrous confusion which made their lives
+most burdensome, spoke in this wise: "Let us unite to shield the weak
+from oppression, to restrain the proud, and to assure to each the
+possession of what belongs to him; let us set up rules of justice and
+peace, to which all shall be obliged to conform, without respect of
+persons, and which may repair to some extent the caprices of fortune, by
+subjecting the weak and the mighty alike to mutual duties. In a word,
+instead of turning our forces against one another, let us collect them
+into one supreme power to govern us by sage laws, to protect and defend
+all the members of the association, repel their common foes, and
+preserve us in never-ending concord." This, and not the right of
+conquest, must have been the origin of society and laws, which threw new
+chains round the poor and gave new might to the rich; and for the profit
+of a few grasping and ambitious men, subjected the whole human race
+henceforth and for ever to toil and bondage and wretchedness
+without hope.
+
+The social constitution thus propounded and accepted was radically
+imperfect from the outset, and in spite of the efforts of the sagest
+lawgivers, it has always remained imperfect, because it was the work of
+chance, and because, inasmuch as it was ill begun, time, while revealing
+defects and suggesting remedies, could never repair its vices; _people
+went on incessantly repairing and patching, instead of which it was
+indispensable to begin by making a clean surface and by throwing aside
+all the old materials, just as Lycurgus did in Sparta_.
+
+Put shortly, the main positions are these. In the state of nature each
+man lived in entire isolation, and therefore physical inequality was as
+if it did not exist. After many centuries, accident, in the shape of
+difference of climate and external natural conditions, enforcing for the
+sake of subsistence some degree of joint labour, led to an increase of
+communication among men, to a slight development of the reasoning and
+reflective faculties, and to a rude and simple sense of mutual
+obligation, as a means of greater comfort in the long run. The first
+state was good and pure, but the second state was truly perfect. It was
+destroyed by a fresh succession of chances, such as the discovery of the
+arts of metal-working and tillage, which led first to the institution of
+property, and second to the prominence of the natural or physical
+inequalities, which now began to tell with deadly effectiveness. These
+inequalities gradually became summed up in the great distinction between
+rich and poor; and this distinction was finally embodied in the
+constitution of a civil society, expressly adapted to consecrate the
+usurpation of the rich, and to make the inequality of condition between
+them and the poor eternal.
+
+We thus see that the Discourse, unlike Morelly's terse exposition,
+contains no clear account of the kind of inequality with which it deals.
+Is it inequality of material possession or inequality of political
+right? Morelly tells you decisively that the latter is only an accident,
+flowing from the first; that the key to renovation lies in the abolition
+of the first. Rousseau mixes the two confusedly together under a single
+name, bemoans each, but shrinks from a conclusion or a recommendation
+as to either. He declares property to be the key to civil society, but
+falls back from any ideas leading to the modification of the institution
+lying at the root of all that he deplores.
+
+The first general criticism, which in itself contains and covers nearly
+all others, turns on Method. "Conjectures become reasons when they are
+the most likely that you can draw from the nature of things," and "it is
+for philosophy in lack of history to determine the most likely facts."
+In an inductive age this royal road is rigorously closed. Guesses drawn
+from the general nature of things can no longer give us light as to the
+particular nature of the things pertaining to primitive men, any more
+than such guesses can teach us the law of the movement of the heavenly
+bodies, or the foundations of jurisprudence. Nor can deduction from
+anything but propositions which have themselves been won by laborious
+induction, ever lead us to the only kind of philosophy which has fair
+pretension to determine the most probable of the missing facts in the
+chain of human history. That quantitative and differentiating knowledge
+which is science, was not yet thought of in connection with the
+movements of our own race upon the earth. It is to be said, further,
+that of the two possible ways of guessing about the early state, the
+conditions of advance from it, and the rest, Rousseau's guess that all
+movement away from it has been towards corruption, is less supported by
+subsequent knowledge than the guess of his adversaries, that it has
+been a movement progressive and upwards.
+
+This much being said as to incurable vice of method, and there are
+fervent disciples of Rousseau now living who will regard one's craving
+for method in talking about men as a foible of pedantry, we may briefly
+remark on one or two detached objections to Rousseau's story. To begin
+with, there is no certainty as to there having ever been a state of
+nature of a normal and organic kind, any more than there is any one
+normal and typical state of society now. There are infinitely diverse
+states of society, and there were probably as many diverse states of
+nature. Rousseau was sufficiently acquainted with the most recent
+metaphysics of his time to know that you cannot think of a tree in
+general, nor of a triangle in general, but only of some particular tree
+or triangle.[189] In a similar way he might have known that there never
+was any such thing as a state of nature in the general and abstract,
+fixed, typical, and single. He speaks of the savage state also, which
+comes next, as one, identical, normal. It is, of course, nothing of the
+kind. The varieties of belief and habit and custom among the different
+tribes of savages, in reference to every object that can engage their
+attention, from death and the gods and immortality down to the uses of
+marriage and the art of counting and the ways of procuring subsistence,
+are infinitely numerous; and the more we know about this vast diversity,
+the less easy is it to think of the savage state in general. When
+Rousseau extols the savage state as the veritable youth of the world, we
+wonder whether we are to think of the negroes of the Gold Coast, or the
+Dyaks of Borneo, Papuans or Maoris, Cheyennes or Tierra-del-Fuegians or
+the fabled Troglodytes; whether in the veritable youth of the world they
+counted up to five or only to two; whether they used a fire-drill, and
+if so what kind of drill; whether they had the notion of personal
+identity in so weak a shape as to practise the couvade; and a hundred
+other points, which we should now require any writer to settle, who
+should speak of the savage state as sovereign, one, and indivisible, in
+the way in which Rousseau speaks of it, and holds it up to our vain
+admiration.
+
+Again, if the savage state supervened upon the state of nature in
+consequence of certain climatic accidents of a permanent kind, such as
+living on the banks of a river or in a dense forest, how was it that the
+force of these accidents did not begin to operate at once? How could the
+isolated state of nature endure for a year in face of them? Or what was
+the precipitating incident which suddenly set them to work, and drew the
+primitive men from an isolation so profound that they barely recognised
+one another, into that semi-social state in which the family
+was founded?
+
+We cannot tell how the state of nature continued to subsist, or, if it
+ever subsisted, how and why it ever came to an end, because the agencies
+which are alleged to have brought it to an end must have been coeval
+with the appearance of man himself. If gods had brought to men seed,
+fire, and the mechanical arts, as in one of the Platonic myths,[190] we
+could understand that there was a long stage preliminary to these
+heavenly gifts. But if the gods had no part nor lot in it, and if the
+accidents that slowly led the human creature into union were as old as
+that nature, of which indeed they were actually the component elements,
+then man must have quitted the state of nature the very day on which he
+was born into it. And what can be a more monstrous anachronism than to
+turn a flat-headed savage into a clever, self-conscious, argumentative
+utilitarian of the eighteenth century; working the social problem out in
+his flat head with a keenness, a consistency, a grasp of first
+principles, that would have entitled him to a chair in the institute of
+moral sciences, and entering the social union with the calm and
+reasonable deliberation of a great statesman taking a critical step in
+policy? Aristotle was wiser when he fixed upon sociability as an
+ultimate quality of human nature, instead of making it, as Rousseau and
+so many others have done, the conclusion of an unimpeachable train of
+syllogistic reasoning.[191] Morelly even, his own contemporary, and
+much less of a sage than Aristotle, was still sage enough to perceive
+that this primitive human machine, "though composed of intelligent
+parts, generally operates independently of its reason; its deliberations
+are forestalled, and only leave it to look on, while sentiment does its
+work."[192] It is the more remarkable that Rousseau should have fallen
+into this kind of error, as it was one of his distinctions to have
+perceived and partially worked out the principle, that men guide their
+conduct rather from passion and instinct than from reasoned
+enlightenment.[193] The ultimate quality which he named pity is, after
+all, the germ of sociability, which is only extended sympathy. But he
+did not firmly adhere to this ultimate quality, nor make any effort
+consistently to trace out its various products.
+
+We do not find, however, in Rousseau any serious attempt to analyse the
+composition of human nature in its primitive stages. Though constantly
+warning his readers very impressively against confounding domesticated
+with primitive men, he practically assumes that the main elements of
+character must always have been substantially identical with such
+elements and conceptions as are found after the addition of many ages of
+increasingly complex experience. There is something worth considering in
+his notion that civilisation has had effects upon man analogous to those
+of domestication upon animals, but he lacked logical persistency enough
+to enable him to adhere to his own idea, and work out conclusions
+from it.
+
+It might further be pointed out in another direction that he takes for
+granted that the mode of advance into a social state has always been one
+and the same, a single and uniform process, marked by precisely the same
+set of several stages, following one another in precisely the same
+order. There is no evidence of this; on the contrary, evidence goes to
+show that civilisation varies in origin and process with race and other
+things, and that though in all cases starting from the prime factor of
+sociableness in man, yet the course of its development has depended on
+the particular sets of circumstances with which that factor has had to
+combine. These are full of variety, according to climate and racial
+predisposition, although, as has been justly said, the force of both
+these two elements diminishes as the influence of the past in giving
+consistency to our will becomes more definite, and our means of
+modifying climate and race become better known. There is no sign that
+Rousseau, any more than many other inquirers, ever reflected whether the
+capacity for advance into the state of civil society in any highly
+developed form is universal throughout the species, or whether there are
+not races eternally incapable of advance beyond the savage state.
+Progress would hardly be the exception which we know it to be in the
+history of communities if there were not fundamental diversities in the
+civilisable quality of races. Why do some bodies of men get on to the
+high roads of civilisation, while others remain in the jungle and
+thicket of savagery; and why do some races advance along one of these
+roads, and others advance by different roads?
+
+Considerations of this sort disclose the pinched frame of trim theory
+with which Rousseau advanced to set in order a huge mass of boundlessly
+varied, intricate, and unmanageable facts. It is not, however, at all
+worth while to extend such criticism further than suffices to show how
+little his piece can stand the sort of questions which may be put to it
+from a scientific point of view. Nothing that Rousseau had to say about
+the state of nature was seriously meant for scientific exposition, any
+more than the Sermon on the Mount was meant for political economy. The
+importance of the Discourse on Inequality lay in its vehement
+denunciation of the existing social state. To the writer the question
+of the origin of inequality is evidently far less a matter at heart,
+than the question of its results. It is the natural inclination of one
+deeply moved by a spectacle of depravation in his own time and country,
+to extol some other time or country, of which he is happily ignorant
+enough not to know the drawbacks. Rousseau wrote about the savage state
+in something of the same spirit in which Tacitus wrote the Germania. And
+here, as in the Discourse on the influence of science and art upon
+virtue, there is a positive side. To miss this in resentment of the
+unscientific paradox that lies about it, is to miss the force of the
+piece, and to render its enormous influence for a generation after it
+was written incomprehensible. We may always be quite sure that no set of
+ideas ever produced this resounding effect on opinion, unless they
+contained something which the social or spiritual condition of the men
+whom they inflamed made true for the time, and true in an urgent sense.
+Is it not tenable that the state of certain savage tribes is more
+normal, offers a better balance between desire and opportunity, between
+faculty and performance, than the permanent state of large classes in
+western countries, the broken wreck of civilisation?[194] To admit this
+is not to conclude, as Rousseau so rashly concluded, that the movement
+away from the primitive stages has been productive only of evil and
+misery even to the masses of men, the hewers of wood and the drawers of
+water; or that it was occasioned, and has been carried on by the
+predominance of the lower parts and principles of human nature. Our
+provisional acquiescence in the straitness and blank absence of outlook
+or hope of the millions who come on to the earth that greets them with
+no smile, and then stagger blindly under dull burdens for a season, and
+at last are shovelled silently back under the ground,--our acquiescence
+can only be justified in the sight of humanity by the conviction that
+this is one of the temporary conditions of a vast process, working
+forwards through the impulse and agency of the finer human spirits, but
+needing much blood, many tears, uncounted myriads of lives, and
+immeasurable geologic periods of time, for its high and beneficent
+consummation. There is nothing surprising, perhaps nothing deeply
+condemnable, in the burning anger for which this acquiescence is often
+changed in the more impatient natures. As against the ignoble host who
+think that the present ordering of men, with all its prodigious
+inequalities, is in foundation and substance the perfection of social
+blessedness, Rousseau was almost in the right. If the only alternative
+to the present social order remaining in perpetuity were a retrogression
+to some such condition as that of the islanders of the South Sea, a
+lover of his fellow-creatures might look upon the result, so far as it
+affected the happiness of the bulk of them, with tolerably complete
+indifference. It is only the faith that we are moving slowly away from
+the existing order, as our ancestors moved slowly away from the old want
+of order, that makes the present endurable, and makes any tenacious
+effort to raise the future possible.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+An immense quantity of nonsense has been talked about the equality of
+man, for which those who deny that doctrine and those who assert it may
+divide the responsibility. It is in reality true or false, according to
+the doctrines with which it is confronted. As against the theory that
+the existing way of sharing the laboriously acquired fruits and delights
+of the earth is a just representation and fair counterpart of natural
+inequalities among men in merit and capacity, the revolutionary theory
+is true, and the passionate revolutionary cry for equality of external
+chance most righteous and unanswerable. But the issues do not end here.
+Take such propositions as these:--there are differences in the capacity
+of men for serving the community; the well-being of the community
+demands the allotment of high function in proportion to high faculty;
+the rights of man in politics are confined to a right of the same
+protection for his own interests as is given to the interests of others.
+As against these principles, the revolutionary deductions from the
+equality of man are false. And such pretensions as that every man could
+be made equally fit for every function, or that not only each should
+have an equal chance, but that he who uses his chance well and sociably
+should be kept on a level in common opinion and trust with him who uses
+it ill and unsociably, or does not use it at all,--the whole of this is
+obviously most illusory and most disastrous, and in whatever decree any
+set of men have ever taken it up, to that degree they have paid
+the penalty.
+
+What Rousseau's Discourse meant, what he intended it to mean, and what
+his first direct disciples understood it as meaning, is not that all men
+are born equal. He never says this, and his recognition of natural
+inequality implies the contrary proposition. His position is that the
+artificial differences, springing from the conditions of the social
+union, do not coincide with the differences in capacity springing from
+original constitution; that the tendency of the social union as now
+organised is to deepen the artificial inequalities, and make the gulf
+between those endowed with privileges and wealth and those not so
+endowed ever wider and wider. It would have been very difficult a
+hundred years ago to deny the truth of this way of stating the case. If
+it has to some extent already ceased to be entirely true, and if violent
+popular forces are at work making it less and less true, we owe the
+origin of the change, among other causes and influences, not least to
+the influence of Rousseau himself, and those whom he inspired. It was
+that influence which, though it certainly did not produce, yet did as
+certainly give a deep and remarkable bias, first to the American
+Revolution, and a dozen years afterwards to the French Revolution.
+
+It would be interesting to trace the different fortunes which awaited
+the idea of the equality of man in America and in France. In America it
+has always remained strictly within the political order, and perhaps
+with the considerable exception of the possibles share it may have had,
+along with Christian notions of the brotherhood of man, and
+statesmanlike notions of national prosperity, in leading to the
+abolition of slavery, it has brought forth no strong moral sentiment
+against the ethical and economic bases of any part of the social order.
+In France, on the other hand, it was the starting-point of movements
+that have had all the fervour and intensity of religions, and have made
+men feel about social inequalities the burning shame and wrath with
+which a Christian saw the flourishing temples of unclean gods. This
+difference in the interpretation and development of the first doctrine
+may be explained in various ways,--by difference of material
+circumstance between America and France; difference of the political and
+social level from which the principle of equality had to start; and not
+least by difference of intellectual temperament. This last was itself
+partly the product of difference in religion, which makes the English
+dread the practical enforcement of logical conclusions, while the French
+have hitherto been apt to dread and despise any tendency to stop
+short of that.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Let us notice, finally, the important fact that the appearance of
+Rousseau's Discourses was the first sign of reaction against the
+historic mode of inquiry into society that had been initiated by
+Montesquieu. The Spirit of Laws was published in 1748, with a truly
+prodigious effect. It coloured the whole of the social literature in
+France during the rest of the century. A history of its influence would
+be a history of one of the most important sides of speculative activity.
+In the social writings of Rousseau himself there is hardly a chapter
+which does not contain tacit reference to Montesquieu's book. The
+Discourses were the beginning of a movement in an exactly opposite
+direction; that is, away from patient collection of wide multitudes of
+facts relating to the conditions of society, towards the promulgation of
+arbitrary systems of absolute social dogmas. Mably, the chief dogmatic
+socialist of the century, and one of the most dignified and austere
+characters, is an important example of the detriment done by the
+influence of Rousseau to that of Montesquieu, in the earlier stages of
+the conflict between the two schools. Mably (1709-1785), of whom the
+remark is to be made that he was for some years behind the scenes of
+government as De Tencin's secretary and therefore was versed in affairs,
+began his inquiries with Greece and Rome. "You will find everything in
+ancient history," he said.[195] And he remained entirely in this groove
+of thought until Rousseau appeared. He then gradually left Montesquieu.
+"To find the duties of a legislator," he said, "I descend into the
+abysses of my heart, I study my sentiments." He opposed the Economists,
+the other school that was feeling its way imperfectly enough to a
+positive method. "As soon as I see landed property established," he
+wrote, "then I see unequal fortunes; and from these unequal fortunes
+must there not necessarily result different and opposed interests, all
+the vices of riches, all the vices of poverty, the brutalisation of
+intelligence, the corruption of civil manners?" and so forth.[196] In
+his most important work, published in 1776, we see Rousseau's notions
+developed, with a logic from which their first author shrunk, either
+from fear, or more probably from want of firmness and consistency as a
+reasoner. "It is to equality that nature has attached the preservation
+of our social faculties and happiness: and from this I conclude that
+legislation will only be taking useless trouble, unless all its
+attention is first of all directed to the establishment of equality in
+the fortune and condition of citizens."[197] That is to say not only
+political equality, but economic communism. "What miserable folly, that
+persons who pass for philosophers should go on repeating after one
+another that without property there can be no society. Let us leave
+illusion. It is property that divides us into two classes, rich and
+poor; the first will alway prefer their fortune to that of the state,
+while the second will never love a government or laws that leave them in
+misery."[198] This was the kind of opinion for which Rousseau's diffuse
+and rhetorical exposition of social necessity had prepared France some
+twenty years before. After powerfully helping the process of general
+dissolution, it produced the first fruits specifically after its own
+kind some twenty years later in the system of Baboeuf.[199]
+
+The unflinching application of principles is seldom achieved by the men
+who first launch them. The labour of the preliminary task seems to
+exhaust one man's stock of mental force. Rousseau never thought of the
+subversion of society or its reorganisation on a communistic basis.
+Within a few months of his profession of profound lament that the first
+man who made a claim to property had not been instantly unmasked as the
+arch foe of the race, he speaks most respectfully of property as the
+pledge of the engagements of citizens and the foundation of the social
+pact, while the first condition of that pact is that every one should be
+maintained in peaceful enjoyment of what belongs to him.[200] We need
+not impute the apparent discrepancy to insincerity. Rousseau was always
+apt to think in a slipshod manner. He sensibly though illogically
+accepted wholesome practical maxims, as if they flowed from theoretical
+premisses that were in truth utterly incompatible with them.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[151] Delandine's _Couronnes Académiques, ou Recueil de prix proposés
+par les Sociétés Savantes_. (Paris, 2 vols., 1787.)
+
+[152] Musset-Pathay has collected the details connected with the award
+of the prize, ii. 365-367.
+
+[153] Second Letter to M. de Malesherbes, p. 358. Also _Conf._, viii.
+135.
+
+[154] Diderot's account (_Vie de Sénèque_, sect. 66, _Oeuv._, iii. 98;
+also ii. 285) is not inconsistent with Rousseau's own, so that we may
+dismiss as apocryphal Marmontel's version of the story (_Mém._ VIII.),
+to the effect that Rousseau was about to answer the question with a
+commonplace affirmative, until Diderot persuaded him that a paradox
+would attract more attention. It has been said also that M. de
+Francueil, and various others, first urged the writer to take a
+negative line of argument. To suppose this possible is to prove one's
+incapacity for understanding what manner of man Rousseau was.
+
+[155] _Conf._, ix. 232, 233.
+
+[156] _Rousseau Juge de Jean Jacques, Dialogues_, i. 252.
+
+[157] _Dialogues_, i. 275, 276.
+
+[158] _Conf._, viii. 138.
+
+[159] "It made a kind of revolution in Paris," says Grimm. _Corr.
+Lit._, i. 108.
+
+[160] _Rép. au Roi de Pologne_, p. 111 and p. 113.
+
+[161] _Rép. à M. Bordes_, 138.
+
+[162] _Ib._ 137.
+
+[163] "The first source of the evil is inequality; from inequality
+come riches ... from riches are born luxury and idleness; from luxury
+come the fine arts, and from idleness the sciences." _Rép. au Roi de
+Pologne_, 120, 121.
+
+[164] _Rép. à M. Bordes_, 147. In the same spirit he once wrote the
+more wholesome maxim, "We should argue with the wise, and never with
+the public." _Corr._, i. 191.
+
+[165] _Rép. au Roi de Pologne_, 128, 129.
+
+[166] _Rép. à M. Bordes_, 150-161.
+
+[167] P. 174.
+
+[168] Egger's _Hellénisme en France_, 28ième leçon, p. 265.
+
+[169] Voltaire to J.J.R. Aug. 30, 1755.
+
+[170] _Rép. au Roi de Pologne_, 105.
+
+[171] In 1753 the French Academy, by way no doubt of summoning a
+counter-blast to Rousseau, boldly offered as the subject of their
+essay the thesis that "The love of letters inspires the love of
+virtue," and the prize was won fitly enough by a Jesuit professor of
+rhetoric. See Delandine, i. 42.
+
+[172] Preface to _Narcisse_, 251.
+
+[173] _Rép. à M. Bordes_, 167.
+
+[174] P. 187.
+
+[175] See for instance a strange discussion about _morale universelle_
+and the like in _Mém. de Mdme. d'Epinay_, i. 217-226.
+
+[176] Often described as Morelly the Younger, to distinguish him from
+his father, who wrote an essay on the human heart, and another on the
+human intelligence.
+
+[177] _Code de la Nature, ou le véritable esprit de ses loix, de tout
+tems négligé ou méconnu._
+
+[178] P. 169. Rousseau did not see it then, but he showed himself on
+the track.
+
+[179] At the end of the _Code de la Nature_ Morelly places a complete
+set of rules for the organisation of a model community. The base of it
+was the absence of private property--a condition that was to be
+preserved by vigilant education of the young in ways of thinking, that
+should make the possession of private property odious or
+inconceivable. There are to be sumptuary laws of a moderate kind. The
+government is to be in the hands of the elders. The children are to be
+taken away from their parents at the age of five; reared and educated
+in public establishments; and returned to their parents at the age of
+sixteen or so when they will marry. Marriage is to be dissoluble at
+the end of ten years, but after divorce the woman is not to marry a
+man younger than herself, nor is the man to marry a woman younger than
+the wife from whom he has parted. The children of a divorced couple
+are to remain with the father, and if he marries again, they are to be
+held the children of the second wife. Mothers are to suckle their own
+children (p. 220). The whole scheme is fuller of good ideas than such
+schemes usually are.
+
+[180] P. 218.
+
+[181] This is obviously untrue. Animals do not know death in the sense
+of scientific definition, and probably have no abstract idea of it as
+a general state; but they know and are afraid of its concrete
+phenomena, and so are most savages.
+
+[182] This is one of the passages in the Discourse, the harshness of
+which was afterwards attributed by Rousseau to the influence of
+Diderot. _Conf._, viii. 205, _n._
+
+[183] P. 261.
+
+[184] As if sin really came by the law in this sense; as if a law
+defining and prohibiting a malpractice were the cause of the
+commission of the act which it constituted a malpractice. As if giving
+a name and juristic classification to any kind of conduct were adding
+to men's motives for indulging in it.
+
+[185] P. 269.
+
+[186] P. 278.
+
+[187] Pp. 285-287.
+
+[188] P. 273.
+
+[189] P. 250.
+
+[190] _Politicus_, 268 D-274 E.
+
+[191] Here for instance is D'Alembert's story:--"The necessity of
+shielding our own body from pain and destruction leads us to examine
+among external objects those which are useful and those which are
+hurtful, so that we may seek the one and flee the others. But we
+hardly begin our search into such objects before we discover among
+them a great number of beings which strike us as exactly like
+ourselves; that is, whose form is just like our own, and who, so far
+as we can judge at the first glance, appear to have the same
+perceptions. Everything therefore leads us to suppose that they have
+also the same wants, and consequently the same interest in satisfying
+them, whence it results that we must find great advantage in joining
+with them for the purpose of distinguishing in nature what has the
+power of preserving us from what has the power of hurting us. The
+communication of ideas is the principle and the stay of this union,
+and necessarily demands the invention of signs; such is the origin of
+the formation of societies." _Discours Préliminaire de
+l'Encyclopédie._ Contrast this with Aristotle's sensible statement
+(_Polit._ I. ii. 15) that "there is in men by nature a strong impulse
+to enter into such union."
+
+[192] _Code de la Nature._
+
+[193] See, for example, his criticism on the Abbé de St. Pierre.
+_Conf._, viii. 264. And also in the analysis of this very Discourse,
+above, vol. i. p. 163.
+
+[194] "I have lived with communities of savages in South America and
+in the East, who have no laws or law courts but the public opinion of
+the visage freely expressed. Each man scrupulously respects the rights
+of his fellow, and any infraction of those rights rarely or never
+takes place. In such a community all are nearly equal. There are none
+of those wide distinctions of education and ignorance, wealth and
+poverty, master and servant, which are the products of our
+civilisation; there is none of that widespread division of labour
+which, while it increases wealth, produces also conflicting interests;
+there is not that severe competition and struggle for existence, or
+for wealth, which the dense population of civilised countries
+inevitably creates. All incitements to great crimes are thus wanting,
+and petty ones are repressed, partly by the influence of public
+opinion, but chiefly by that natural sense of justice and of his
+neighbour's right, which seems to be in some degree inherent in every
+race of man. Now, although we have progressed vastly beyond the savage
+state in intellectual achievements, we have not advanced equally in
+morals. It is true that among those classes who have no wants that
+cannot be easily supplied, and among whom public opinion has great
+influence, the rights of others are fully respected. It is true, also,
+that we have vastly extended the sphere of those rights, and include
+within them all the brotherhood of man. But it is not too much to say,
+that the mass of our populations have not at all advanced beyond the
+savage code of morals, and have in many cases sunk below it."
+Wallace's _Malay Archipelago_, vol. ii. pp. 460-461.
+
+[195] So too Bougainville, a brother of the navigator, said in 1760,
+"For an attentive observer who sees nothing in events of the utmost
+diversity of appearance but the natural effects of a certain number of
+causes differently combined, Greece is the universe in small, and the
+history of Greece an excellent epitome of universal history." (Quoted
+in Egger's _Hellénisme en France_, ii. 272.) The revolutionists of the
+next generation, who used to appeal so unseasonably to the ancients,
+were only following a literary fashion set by their fathers.
+
+[196] _Doutes sur l'Ordre Naturel_; _Oeuv._, xi. 80. (Ed. 1794, 1795.)
+
+[197] _La Législation_, I. i.
+
+[198] _Ibid._
+
+[199] It is not within our province to examine the vexed question
+whether the Convention was fundamentally socialist, and not merely
+political. That socialist ideas were afloat in the minds of some
+members, one can hardly doubt. See Von Sybel's _Hist. of the French
+Revolution_, Bk. II. ch. iv., on one side, and Quinet's _La
+Révolution_, ii. 90-107, on the other.
+
+[200] _Economie Politique_, pp. 41, 53, etc.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+PARIS.
+
+
+I.
+
+By what subtle process did Rousseau, whose ideal had been a summer life
+among all the softnesses of sweet gardens and dappled orchards, turn
+into panegyrist of the harsh austerity of old Cato and grim Brutus's
+civic devotion? The amiability of eighteenth century France--and France
+was amiable in spite of the atrocities of White Penitents at Toulouse,
+and black Jansenists at Paris, and the men and women who dealt in
+_lettres-de-cachet_ at Versailles--was revolted by the name of the cruel
+patriot who slew his son for the honour of discipline.[201] How came
+Rousseau of all men, the great humanitarian of his time, to rise to the
+height of these unlovely rigours?
+
+The answer is that he was a citizen of Geneva transplanted. He had been
+bred in puritan and republican tradition, with love of God and love of
+law and freedom and love of country all penetrating it, and then he had
+been accidentally removed to a strange city that was in active ferment
+with ideas that were the direct abnegation of all these. In Paris the
+idea of a God was either repudiated along with many other ancestral
+conceptions, or else it was fatally entangled with the worst
+superstition and not seldom with the vilest cruelties. The idea of
+freedom was unknown, and the idea of law was benumbed by abuses and
+exceptions. The idea of country was enfeebled in some and displaced in
+others by a growing passion for the captivating something styled
+citizenship of the world. If Rousseau could have ended his days among
+the tranquil lakes and hills of Savoy, Geneva might possibly never have
+come back to him. For it depends on circumstance, which of the chances
+that slumber within us shall awake, and which shall fall unroused with
+us into the darkness. The fact of Rousseau ranking among the greatest of
+the writers of the French language, and the yet more important fact that
+his ideas found their most ardent disciples and exploded in their most
+violent form in France, constantly make us forget that he was not a
+Frenchman, but a Genevese deeply imbued with the spirit of his native
+city. He was thirty years old before he began even temporarily to live
+in France: he had only lived there some five or six years when he wrote
+his first famous piece, so un-French in all its spirit; and the ideas of
+the Social Contract were in germ before he settled in France at all.
+
+There have been two great religious reactions, and the name of Geneva
+has a fundamental association with each of them. The first was that
+against the paganised Catholicism of the renaissance, and of this
+Calvin was a prime leader; the second was that against the materialism
+of the eighteenth century, of which the prime leader was Rousseau. The
+diplomatist was right who called Geneva the fifth part of the world. At
+the congress of Vienna, some one, wearied at the enormous place taken by
+the hardly visible Geneva in the midst of negotiations involving
+momentous issues for the whole habitable globe, called out that it was
+after all no more than a grain of sand. But he was not wrong who made
+bold to reply, "Geneva is no grain of sand; 'tis a grain of musk that
+perfumes all Europe."[202] We have to remember that it was at all events
+as a grain of musk ever pervading the character of Rousseau. It happened
+in later years that he repudiated his allegiance to her, but however
+bitterly a man may quarrel with a parent, he cannot change blood, and
+Rousseau ever remained a true son of the city of Calvin. We may perhaps
+conjecture without excessive fancifulness that the constant spectacle
+and memory of a community, free, energetic, and prosperous, whose
+institutions had been shaped and whose political temper had been
+inspired by one great lawgiver, contributed even more powerfully than
+what he had picked up about Lycurgus and Lacedæmon, to give him a turn
+for Utopian speculation, and a conviction of the artificiality and easy
+modifiableness of the social structure. This, however, is less certain
+than that he unconsciously received impressions in his youth from the
+circumstances of Geneva, both as to government and religion, as to
+freedom, order, citizenship, manners, which formed the deepest part of
+him on the reflective side, and which made themselves visible whenever
+he exchanged the life of beatified sense for moods of speculative
+energy, "Never," he says, "did I see the walls of that happy city, I
+never went into it, without feeling a certain faintness at my heart, due
+to excess of tender emotion. At the same time that the noble image of
+freedom elevated my soul, those of equality, of union, of gentle
+manners, touched me even to tears."[203] His spirit never ceased to
+haunt city and lake to the end, and he only paid the debt of an owed
+acknowledgment in the dedication of his Discourse on Inequality to the
+republic of Geneva.[204] It was there it had its root. The honour in
+which industry was held in Geneva, the democratic phrases that
+constituted the dialect of its government, the proud tradition of the
+long battle which had won and kept its independence, the severity of its
+manners, the simplicity of its pleasures,--all these things awoke in his
+memory as soon as ever occasion drew him to serious thought. More than
+that, he had in a peculiar manner drawn in with the breath of his
+earliest days in this theocratically constituted city, the vital idea
+that there are sacred things and objects of reverence among men. And
+hence there came to him, though with many stains and much misdirection,
+the most priceless excellence of a capacity for devout veneration.
+
+There is certainly no real contradiction between the quality of
+reverence and the more equivocal quality of a sensuous temperament,
+though a man may well seem on the surface, as the first succeeds the
+second in rule over him, to be the contradiction to his other self. The
+objects of veneration and the objects of sensuous delight are externally
+so unlike and so incongruous, that he who follows both in their turns is
+as one playing the part of an ironical chorus in the tragi-comic drama
+of his own life. You may perceive these two to be mere imperfect or
+illusory opposites, when you confront a man like Rousseau with the true
+opposite of his own type; with those who are from their birth analysts
+and critics, keen, restless, urgent, inexorably questioning. That
+energetic type, though not often dead or dull on the side of sense, yet
+is incapable of steeping itself in the manifold delights of eye and ear,
+of nostril and touch, with the peculiar intensity of passive absorption
+that seeks nothing further nor deeper than unending continuance of this
+profound repose of all filled sensation, just as it is incapable of the
+kindred mood of elevated humility and joyful unasking devoutness in the
+presence of emotions and dim thoughts that are beyond the compass
+of words.
+
+The citizen of Geneva with this unseen fibre of Calvinistic veneration
+and austerity strong and vigorous within him, found a world that had
+nothing sacred and took nothing for granted; that held the past in
+contempt, and ever like old Athenians asked for some new thing; that
+counted simplicity of life an antique barbarism, and literary
+curiousness the master virtue. There were giants in this world, like the
+panurgic Diderot. There were industrious, worthy, disinterested men, who
+used their minds honestly and actively with sincere care for truth, like
+D'Holbach. There was poured around the whole, like a high stimulating
+atmosphere to the stronger, and like some evil mental aphrodisiac to the
+weaker, the influence of Voltaire, the great indomitable chieftain of
+them all. Intellectual size half redeems want of perfect direction by
+its generous power and fulness. It was not the strong men, atheists and
+philosophisers as they were, who first irritated Rousseau into revolt
+against their whole system of thought in all its principles. The dissent
+between him and them was fundamental and enormous, and in time it flamed
+out into open war. Conflict of theory, however, was brought home to him
+first by slow-growing exasperation at the follies in practice of the
+minor disciples of the gospel of knowing and acting, as distinguished
+from his own gospel of placid being. He craved beliefs that should
+uphold men in living their lives, substantial helps on which they might
+lean without examination and without mistrust: his life in Paris was
+thrown among people who lived in the midst of open questions, and
+revelled in a reflective and didactic morality, which had no root in the
+heart and so made things easy for the practical conscience. He sought
+tranquillity and valued life for its own sake, not as an arena and a
+theme for endless argument and debate: he found friends who knew no
+higher pleasure than the futile polemics of mimic philosophy over
+dessert, who were as full of quibble as the wrong-headed interlocutors
+in a Platonic dialogue, and who babbled about God and state of nature,
+about virtue and the spirituality of the soul, much as Boswell may have
+done when Johnson complained of him for asking questions that would make
+a man hang himself. The highest things were thus brought down to the
+level of the cheapest discourse, and subjects which the wise take care
+only to discuss with the wise, were here everyday topics for all comers.
+
+The association with such high themes of those light qualities of tact,
+gaiety, complaisance, which are the life of the superficial commerce of
+men and women of the world, probably gave quite as much offence to
+Rousseau as the doctrines which some of his companions had the honest
+courage or the heedless fatuity to profess. It was an outrage to all the
+serious side of him to find persons of quality introducing materialism
+as a new fashion, and atheism as the liveliest of condiments. The
+perfume of good manners only made what he took for bad principles the
+worse, and heightened his impatience at the flippancy of pretensions to
+overthrow the beliefs of a world between two wines.
+
+Doctrine and temperament united to set him angrily against the world
+around him. The one was austere and the other was sensuous, and the
+sensuous temperament in its full strength is essentially solitary. The
+play of social intercourse, its quick transitions, and incessant
+demands, are fatal to free and uninterrupted abandonment to the flow of
+soft internal emotions. Rousseau, dreaming, moody, indolently,
+meditative, profoundly enwrapped in the brooding egoism of his own
+sensations, had to mix with men and women whose egoism took the contrary
+form of an eager desire to produce flashing effects on other people. We
+may be sure that as the two sides of his character--his notions of
+serious principle, and his notions of personal comfort--both went in the
+same direction, the irritation and impatience with which they inspired
+him towards society did not lessen with increased communication, but
+naturally deepened with a more profoundly settled antipathy.
+
+Rousseau lived in Paris for twelve years, from his return from Venice in
+1744 until his departure in 1756 for the rustic lodge in a wood which
+the good-will of Madame d'Epinay provided for him. We have already seen
+one very important side of his fortunes during these years, in the
+relations he formed with Theresa, and the relations which he repudiated
+with his children. We have heard too the new words with which during
+these years he first began to make the hearts of his contemporaries wax
+hot within them. It remains to examine the current of daily circumstance
+on which his life was embarked, and the shores to which it was
+bearing him.
+
+His patrons were at present almost exclusively in the circle of
+finance. Richelieu, indeed, took him for a moment by the hand, but even
+the introduction to him was through the too frail wife of one of the
+greatest of the farmers general.[205] Madame Dupin and Madame d'Epinay,
+his two chief patronesses, were also both of them the wives of magnates
+of the farm. The society of the great people of this world was marked by
+all the glare, artificiality, and sentimentalism of the epoch, but it
+had also one or two specially hollow characteristics of its own. As is
+always the case when a new rich class rises in the midst of a community
+possessing an old caste, the circle of Parisian financiers made it their
+highest social aim to thrust and strain into the circle of the
+Versailles people of quality. They had no normal life of their own, with
+independent traditions and self-respect; and for the same reason that an
+essentially worn-out aristocracy may so long preserve a considerable
+degree of vigour and even of social utility under certain circumstances
+by means of tenacious pride in its own order, a new plutocracy is
+demoralised from the very beginning of its existence by want of a
+similar kind of pride in itself, and by the ignoble necessity of craving
+the countenance of an upper class that loves to despise and humiliate
+it. Besides the more obvious evils of a position resting entirely on
+material opulence, and maintaining itself by coarse and glittering
+ostentation, there is a fatal moral hollowness which infects both
+serious conduct and social diversion. The result is seen in imitative
+manners, affected culture, and a mixture of timorous self-consciousness
+within and noisy self-assertion without, which completes the most
+distasteful scene that any collected spirit can witness.
+
+Rousseau was, as has been said, the secretary of Madame Dupin and her
+stepson Francueil. He occasionally went with them to Chenonceaux in
+Touraine, one of Henry the Second's castles built for Diana of Poitiers,
+and here he fared sumptuously every day. In Paris his means, as we know,
+were too strait. For the first two years he had a salary of nine hundred
+francs; then his employers raised it to as much as fifty louis. For the
+first of the Discourses the publisher gave him nothing, and for the
+second he had to extract his fee penny by penny, and after long waiting.
+His comic opera, the Village Soothsayer, was a greater success; it
+brought him the round sum of two hundred louis from the court, and some
+five and twenty more from the bookseller, and so, he says, "the
+interlude, which cost me five or six weeks of work, produced nearly as
+much money as Emilius afterwards did, which had cost me twenty years of
+meditation and three years of composition."[206] Before the arrival of
+this windfall, M. Francueil, who was receiver-general, offered him the
+post of cashier in that important department, and Rousseau attended for
+some weeks to receive the necessary instructions. His progress was tardy
+as usual, and the complexities of accounts were as little congenial to
+him as notarial complexities had been three and twenty years previously.
+It is, however, one of the characteristics of times of national break-up
+not to be peremptory in exacting competence, and Rousseau gravely sat at
+the receipt of custom, doing the day's duty with as little skill as
+liking. Before he had been long at his post, his official chief going on
+a short journey left him in charge of the chest, which happened at the
+moment to contain no very portentous amount. The disquiet with which the
+watchful custody of this moderate treasure harassed and afflicted
+Rousseau, not only persuaded him that nature had never designed him to
+be the guardian of money chests, but also threw him into a fit of very
+painful illness. The surgeons let him understand that within six months
+he would be in the pale kingdoms. The effect of such a hint on a man of
+his temper, and the train of reflections which it would be sure to set
+aflame, are to be foreseen by us who know Rousseau's fashion of dealing
+with the irksome. Why sacrifice the peace and charm of the little
+fragment of days left to him, to the bondage of an office for which he
+felt nothing but disgust? How reconcile the austere principles which he
+had just adopted in his denunciation of sciences and arts, and his
+panegyric on the simplicity of the natural life, with such duties as he
+had to perform? And how preach disinterestedness and frugality from amid
+the cashboxes of a receiver-general? Plainly it was his duty to pass in
+independence and poverty the little time that was yet left to him, to
+bring all the forces of his soul to bear in breaking the fetters of
+opinion, and to carry out courageously whatever seemed best to himself,
+without suffering the judgment of others to interpose the slightest
+embarrassment or hindrance.[207]
+
+With Rousseau, to conceive a project of this kind for simplifying his
+life was to hasten urgently towards its realisation, because such
+projects harmonised with all his strongest predispositions. His design
+mastered and took whole possession of him. He resolved to earn his
+living by copying music, as that was conformable to his taste, within
+his capacity, and compatible with entire personal freedom. His patron
+did as the world is so naturally ready to do with those who choose the
+stoic's way; he declared that Rousseau was gone mad.[208] Talk like this
+had no effect on a man whom self-indulgence led into a path that others
+would only have been forced into by self-denial. Let it be said,
+however, that this is a form of self-indulgence of which society is
+never likely to see an excess, and meanwhile we may continue to pay it
+some respect as assuredly leaning to virtue's side. Rousseau's many
+lapses from grace perhaps deserve a certain gentleness of treatment,
+after the time when with deliberation and collected effort he set
+himself to the hard task of fitting his private life to his public
+principles. Anything that heightens the self-respect of the race is good
+for us to behold, and it is a permanent source of comfort to all who
+thirst after reality in teachers, whether their teaching happens to be
+our own or not, to find that the prophet of social equality was not a
+fine gentleman, nor the teacher of democracy a hanger-on to the silly
+skirts of fashion.
+
+Rousseau did not merely throw up a post which would one day have made
+him rich. Stoicism on the heroic, peremptory scale is not so difficult
+as the application of the same principle to trifles. Besides this
+greater sacrifice, he gave up the pleasant things for which most men
+value the money that procures them, and instituted an austere sumptuary
+reform in truly Genevese spirit. His sword was laid aside; for flowing
+peruke was substituted the small round wig; he left off gilt buttons and
+white stockings, and he sold his watch with the joyful and singular
+thought that he would never again need to know the time. One sacrifice
+remained to be made. Part of his equipment for the Venetian embassy had
+been a large stock of fine linen, and for this he retained a particular
+affection, for both now and always Rousseau had a passion for personal
+cleanliness, as he had for corporeal wholesomeness. He was seasonably
+delivered from bondage to his fine linen by aid from without. One
+Christmas Eve it lay drying in a garret in the rather considerable
+quantity of forty-two shirts, when a thief, always suspected to be the
+brother of Theresa, broke open the door and carried off the treasure,
+leaving Rousseau henceforth to be the contented wearer of coarser
+stuffs.[209]
+
+We may place this reform towards the end of the year 1750, or the
+beginning of 1751, when his mind was agitated by the busy discussion
+which his first Discourse excited, and by the new ideas of literary
+power which its reception by the public naturally awakened in him. "It
+takes," wrote Diderot, "right above the clouds; never was such a
+success."[210] We can hardly have a surer sign of a man's fundamental
+sincerity than that his first triumph, the first revelation to him of
+his power, instead of seducing him to frequent the mischievous and
+disturbing circle of his applauders, should throw him inwards upon
+himself and his own principles with new earnestness and refreshed
+independence. Rousseau very soon made up his mind what the world was
+worth to him; and this, not as the ordinary sentimentalist or satirist
+does, by way of set-off against the indulgence of personal foibles, but
+from recognition of his own qualities, of the bounds set to our capacity
+of life, and of the limits of the world's power to satisfy us. "When my
+destiny threw me into the whirlpool of society," he wrote in his last
+meditation on the course of his own life, "I found nothing there to
+give a moment's solace to my heart. Regret for my sweet leisure followed
+me everywhere; it shed indifference or disgust over all that might have
+been within my reach, leading to fortune and honours. Uncertain in the
+disquiet of my desires, I hoped for little, I obtained less, and I felt
+even amid gleams of prosperity that if I obtained all that I supposed
+myself to be seeking, I should still not have found the happiness for
+which my heart was greedily athirst, though without distinctly knowing
+its object. Thus everything served to detach my affections from society,
+even before the misfortunes which were to make me wholly a stranger to
+it. I reached the age of forty, floating between indigence and fortune,
+between wisdom and disorder, full of vices of habit without any evil
+tendency at heart, living by hazard, distracted as to my duties without
+despising them, but often without much clear knowledge what they
+were."[211]
+
+A brooding nature gives to character a connectedness and unity that is
+in strong contrast with the dispersion and multiformity of the active
+type. The attractions of fame never cheated Rousseau into forgetfulness
+of the commanding principle that a man's life ought to be steadily
+composed to oneness with itself in all its parts, as by mastery of an
+art of moral counterpoint, and not crowded with a wild mixture of aim
+and emotion like distracted masks in high carnival. He complains of the
+philosophers with whom he came into contact, that their philosophy was
+something foreign to them and outside of their own lives. They studied
+human nature for the sake of talking learnedly about it, not for the
+sake of self-knowledge; they laboured to instruct others, not to
+enlighten themselves within. When they published a book, its contents
+only interested them to the extent of making the world accept it,
+without seriously troubling themselves whether it were true or false,
+provided only that it was not refuted. "For my own part, when I desired
+to learn, it was to know things myself, and not at all to teach others.
+I always believed that before instructing others it was proper to begin
+by knowing enough for one's self; and of all the studies that I have
+tried to follow in my life in the midst of men, there is hardly one that
+I should not have followed equally if I had been alone, and shut up in a
+desert island for the rest of my days."[212]
+
+When we think of Turgot, whom Rousseau occasionally met among the
+society which he denounces, such a denunciation sounds a little
+outrageous. But then Turgot was perhaps the one sane Frenchman of the
+first eminence in the eighteenth century. Voltaire chose to be an exile
+from the society of Paris and Versailles as pertinaciously as Rousseau
+did, and he spoke more bitterly of it in verse than Rousseau ever spoke
+bitterly of it in prose.[213] It was, as has been so often said, a
+society dominated by women, from the king's mistress who helped to ruin
+France, down to the financier's wife who gave suppers to flashy men of
+letters. The eighteenth century salon has been described as having three
+stages; the salon of 1730, still retaining some of the stately
+domesticity, elegance, dignity of the age of Lewis XIV.; that of 1780,
+grave, cold, dry, given to dissertation; and between the two, the salon
+of 1750, full of intellectual stir, brilliance, frivolous originality,
+glittering wastefulness.[214] Though this division of time must not be
+pressed too closely, it is certain that the era of Rousseau's advent in
+literature with his Discourses fell in with the climax of social
+unreality in the surface intercourse of France, and that the same date
+marks the highest point of feminine activity and power.
+
+The common mixture of much reflective morality in theory with much
+light-hearted immorality in practice, never entered so largely into
+manners. We have constantly to wonder how they analysed and defined the
+word Virtue, to which they so constantly appealed in letters,
+conversation, and books, as the sovereign object for our deepest and
+warmest adoration. A whole company of transgressors of the marriage law
+would melt into floods of tears over a hymn to virtue, which they must
+surely have held of too sacred an essence to mix itself with any one
+virtue in particular, except that very considerable one of charitably
+letting all do as they please. It is much, however, that these tears,
+if not very burning, were really honest. Society, though not believing
+very deeply in the supernatural, was not cursed with an arid, parching,
+and hardened scepticism about the genuineness of good emotions in a man,
+and so long as people keep this baleful poison out of their hearts,
+their lives remain worth having.
+
+It is true that cynicism in the case of some women of this time
+occasionally sounded in a diabolic key, as when one said, "It is your
+lover to whom you should never say that you don't believe in God; to
+one's husband that does not matter, because in the case of a lover one
+must reserve for one's self some door of escape, and devotional scruples
+cut everything short."[215] Or here: "I do not distrust anybody, for
+that is a deliberate act; but I do not trust anybody, and there is no
+trouble in this."[216] Or again in the word thrown to a man vaunting the
+probity of some one: "What! can a man of intelligence like you accept
+the prejudice of _meum_ and _tuum_?"[217] Such speech, however, was
+probably most often a mere freak of the tongue, a mode and fashion, as
+who should go to a masked ball in guise of Mephistopheles, without
+anything more Mephistophelian about him than red apparel and peaked
+toes. "She was absolutely charming," said one of a new-comer; "she did
+not utter one single word that was not a paradox."[218] This was the
+passing taste. Human nature is able to keep itself wholesome in
+fundamentals even under very great difficulties, and it is as wise as it
+is charitable in judging a sharp and cynical tone to make large
+allowances for mere costume and assumed character.
+
+In respect of the light companionship of common usage, however, it is
+exactly the costume which comes closest to us, and bad taste in that is
+most jarring and least easily forgiven. There is a certain stage in an
+observant person's experience of the heedlessness, indolence, and native
+folly of men and women--and if his observation be conducted in a
+catholic spirit, he will probably see something of this not merely in
+others--when the tolerable average sanity of human arrangements strikes
+him as the most marvellous of all the fortunate accidents in the
+universe. Rousseau could not even accept the fact of this miraculous
+result, the provisional and temporary sanity of things, and he
+confronted society with eyes of angry chagrin. A great lady asked him
+how it was that she had not seen him for an age. "Because when I wish to
+see you, I wish to see no one but you. What do you want me to do in the
+midst of your society? I should cut a sorry figure in a circle of
+mincing tripping coxcombs; they do not suit me." We cannot wonder that
+on some occasion when her son's proficiency was to be tested before a
+company of friends, Madame d'Epinay prayed Rousseau to be of them, on
+the ground that he would be sure to ask the child outrageously absurd
+questions, which would give gaiety to the affair.[219] As it happened,
+the father was unwise. He was a man of whom it was said that he had
+devoured two million francs, without either saying or doing a single
+good thing. He rewarded the child's performance with the gift of a
+superb suit of cherry-coloured velvet, extravagantly trimmed with costly
+lace; the peasant from whose sweat and travail the money had been wrung,
+went in heavy rags, and his children lived as the beasts of the field.
+The poor youth was ill dealt with. "That is very fine," said rude
+Duclos, "but remember that a fool in lace is still a fool." Rousseau, in
+reply to the child's importunity, was still blunter: "Sir, I am no judge
+of finery, I am only a judge of man; I wished to talk with you a little
+while ago, but I wish so no longer."[220]
+
+Marmontel, whose account may have been coloured by retrospection in
+later years, says that before the success of the first Discourse,
+Rousseau concealed his pride under the external forms of a politeness
+that was timid even to obsequiousness; in his uneasy glance you
+perceived mistrust and observant jealousy; there was no freedom in his
+manner, and no one ever observed more cautiously the hateful precept to
+live with your friends as though they were one day to be your
+enemies.[221] Grimm's description is different and more trustworthy.
+Until he began to affect singularity, he says, Rousseau had been gallant
+and overflowing with artificial compliment, with manners that were
+honeyed and even wearisome in their soft elaborateness. All at once he
+put on the cynic's cloak, and went to the other extreme. Still in spite
+of an abrupt and cynical tone he kept much of his old art of elaborate
+fine speeches, and particularly in his relations with women.[222] Of his
+abruptness, he tells a most displeasing tale. "One day Rousseau told us
+with an air of triumph, that as he was coming out of the opera where he
+had been seeing the first representation of the Village Soothsayer, the
+Duke of Zweibrücken had approached him with much politeness, saying,
+'Will you allow me to pay you a compliment?' and that he replied, 'Yes,
+if it be very short.' Everybody was silent at this, until I said to him
+laughingly, 'Illustrious citizen and co-sovereign of Geneva, since there
+resides in you a part of the sovereignty of the republic, let me
+represent to you that, for all the severity of your principles, you
+should hardly refuse to a sovereign prince the respect due to a
+water-carrier, and that if you had met a word of good-will from a
+water-carrier with an answer as rough and brutal as that, you would have
+had to reproach yourself with a most unseasonable piece of
+impertinence.'"[223]
+
+There were still more serious circumstances when exasperation at the
+flippant tone about him carried him beyond the ordinary bounds of that
+polite time. A guest at table asked contemptuously what was the use of a
+nation like the French having reason, if they did not use it. "They mock
+the other nations of the earth, and yet are the most credulous of all."
+ROUSSEAU: "I forgive them for their credulity, but not for condemning
+those who are credulous in some other way." Some one said that in
+matters of religion everybody was right, but that everybody should
+remain in that in which he had been born. ROUSSEAU, with warmth: "Not
+so, by God, if it is a bad one, for then it can do nothing but harm."
+Then some one contended that religion always did some good, as a kind of
+rein to the common people who had no other morality. All the rest cried
+out at this in indignant remonstrance, one shrewd person remarking that
+the common people had much livelier fear of being hanged than of being
+damned. The conversation was broken off for a moment by the hostess
+calling out, "After all, one must nourish the tattered affair we call
+our body, so ring and let them bring us the joint." This done, the
+servants dismissed, and the door shut, the discussion was resumed with
+such vehemence by Duclos and Saint Lambert, that, says the lady who
+tells us the story, "I feared they were bent on destroying all religion,
+and I prayed for some mercy to be shown at any rate to natural
+religion." There was not a whit more sympathy for that than for the
+rest. Rousseau declared himself _paullo infirmior_, and clung to the
+morality of the gospel as the natural morality which in old times
+constituted the whole and only creed. "But what is a God," cried one
+impetuous disputant, "who gets angry and is appeased again?" Rousseau
+began to murmur between grinding teeth, and a tide of pleasantries set
+in at his expense, to which came this: "If it is a piece of cowardice to
+suffer ill to be spoken of one's friend behind his back, 'tis a crime to
+suffer ill to be spoken of one's God, who is present; and for my part,
+sirs, I believe in God." "I admit," said the atheistic champion, "that
+it is a fine thing to see this God bending his brow to earth and
+watching with admiration the conduct of a Cato. But this notion is, like
+many others, very useful in some great heads, such as Trajan, Marcus
+Aurelius, Socrates, where it can only produce heroism, but it is the
+germ of all madnesses." ROUSSEAU: "Sirs, I leave the room if you say
+another word more," and he was rising to fulfil his threat, when the
+entry of a new-comer stopped the discussion.[224]
+
+His words on another occasion show how all that he saw helped to keep up
+a fretted condition of mind, in one whose soft tenacious memory turned
+daily back to simple and unsophisticated days among the green valleys,
+and refused to acquiesce in the conditions of changed climate. So
+terrible a thing is it to be the bondsman of reminiscence. Madame
+d'Epinay was suspected, wrongfully as it afterwards proved, of having
+destroyed some valuable papers belonging to a dead relative. There was
+much idle and cruel gossip in an ill-natured world. Rousseau, her
+friend, kept steadfast silence: she challenged his opinion. "What am I
+to say?" he answered; "I go and come, and all that I hear outrages and
+revolts me. I see the one so evidently malicious and so adroit in their
+injustice; the other so awkward and so stupid in their good intentions,
+that I am tempted (and it is not the first time) to look on Paris as a
+cavern of brigands, of whom every traveller in his turn is the victim.
+What gives me the worst idea of society is to see how eager each person
+is to pardon himself, by reason of the number of the people who are like
+him."[225]
+
+Notwithstanding his hatred of this cavern of brigands, and the little
+pains he took to conceal his feelings from any individual brigand,
+whether male or female, with whom he had to deal, he found out that "it
+is not always so easy as people suppose to be poor and independent."
+Merciless invasion of his time in every shape made his life weariness.
+Sometimes he had the courage to turn and rend the invader, as in the
+letter to a painter who sent him the same copy of verses three times,
+requiring immediate acknowledgment. "It is not just," at length wrote
+the exasperated Rousseau, "that I should be tyrannised over for your
+pleasure; not that my time is precious, as you say; it is either passed
+in suffering or it is lost in idleness; but when I cannot employ it
+usefully for some one, I do not wish to be hindered from wasting it in
+my own fashion. A single minute thus usurped is what all the kings of
+the universe could not give me back, and it is to be my own master that
+I flee from the idle folk of towns,--people as thoroughly wearied as
+they are thoroughly wearisome,--who, because they do not know what to do
+with their own time, think they have a right to waste that of
+others."[226] The more abruptly he treated visitors, persecuting
+dinner-givers, and all the tribe of the importunate, the more obstinate
+they were in possessing themselves of his time. In seizing the hours
+they were keeping his purse empty, as well as keeping up constant
+irritation in his soul. He appears to have earned forty sous for a
+morning's work, and to have counted this a fair fee, remarking modestly
+that he could not well subsist on less.[227] He had one chance of a
+pension, which he threw from him in a truly characteristic manner.
+
+When he came to Paris he composed his musical diversion of the Muses
+Galantes, which was performed (1745) in the presence of Rameau, under
+the patronage of M. de la Popelinière. Rameau apostrophised the unlucky
+composer with much violence, declaring that one-half of the piece was
+the work of a master, while the other was that of a person entirely
+ignorant of the musical rudiments; the bad work therefore was
+Rousseau's own, and the good was a plagiarism.[228] This repulse did not
+daunt the hero. Five or six years afterwards on a visit to Passy, as he
+was lying awake in bed, he conceived the idea of a pastoral interlude
+after the manner of the Italian comic operas. In six days the Village
+Soothsayer was sketched, and in three weeks virtually completed. Duclos
+procured its rehearsal at the Opera, and after some debate it was
+performed before the court at Fontainebleau. The Plutarchian stoic, its
+author, went from Paris in a court coach, but his Roman tone deserted
+him, and he felt shamefaced as a schoolboy before the great world, such
+divinity doth hedge even a Lewis XV., and even in a soul of Genevan
+temper. The piece was played with great success, and the composer was
+informed that he would the next day have the honour of being presented
+to the king, who would most probably mark his favour by the bestowal of
+a pension.[229] Rousseau was tossed with many doubts. He would fain have
+greeted the king with some word that should show sensibility to the
+royal graciousness, without compromising republican severity, "clothing
+some great and useful truth in a fine and deserved compliment." This
+moral difficulty was heightened by a physical one, for he was liable to
+an infirmity which, if it should overtake him in presence of king and
+courtiers, would land him in an embarrassment worse than death. What
+would become of him if mind or body should fail, if either he should be
+driven into precipitate retreat, or else there should escape him,
+instead of the great truth wrapped delicately round in veracious
+panegyric, a heavy, shapeless word of foolishness? He fled in terror,
+and flung up the chance of pension and patronage. We perceive the born
+dreamer with a phantasmagoric imagination, seizing nothing in just
+proportion and true relation, and paralysing the spirit with terror of
+unrealities; in short, with the most fatal form of moral cowardice,
+which perhaps it is a little dangerous to try to analyse into
+finer names.
+
+When Rousseau got back to Paris he was amazed to find that Diderot spoke
+to him of this abandonment of the pension with a fire that he could
+never have expected from a philosopher, Rousseau plainly sharing the
+opinion of more vulgar souls that philosopher is but fool writ large.
+"He said that if I was disinterested on my own account, I had no right
+to be so on that of Madame Le Vasseur and her daughter, and that I owed
+it to them not to let pass any possible and honest means of giving them
+bread.... This was the first real dispute I had with him, and all our
+quarrels that followed were of the same kind; he laying down for me what
+he insisted that I should do, and I refusing because I thought that I
+ought not to do it."[230]
+
+Let us abstain, at this and all other points, from being too sure that
+we easily see to the bottom of our Rousseau. When we are most ready to
+fling up the book and to pronounce him all selfishness and sophistry,
+some trait is at hand to revive moral interest in him, and show him
+unlike common men, reverent of truth and human dignity. There is a
+slight anecdote of this kind connected with his visit to Fontainebleau.
+The day after the representation of his piece, he happened to be taking
+his breakfast in some public place. An officer entered, and, proceeding
+to describe the performance of the previous day, told at great length
+all that had happened, depicted the composer with much minuteness, and
+gave a circumstantial account of his conversation. In this story, which
+was told with equal assurance and simplicity, there was not a word of
+truth, as was clear from the fact that the author of whom he spoke with
+such intimacy sat unknown and unrecognised before his eyes. The effect
+on Rousseau was singular enough. "The man was of a certain age; he had
+no coxcombical or swaggering air; his expression bespoke a man of merit,
+and his cross of St. Lewis showed that he was an old officer. While he
+was retailing his untruths, I grew red in the face, I lowered my eyes, I
+sat on thorns; I tried to think of some means of believing him to have
+made a mistake in good faith. At length trembling lest some one should
+recognise me and confront him, I hastened to finish my chocolate without
+saying a word; and stooping down as I passed in front of him, I went
+out as fast as possible, while the people present discussed his tale. I
+perceived in the street that I was bathed in sweat, and I am sure that
+if any one had recognised me and called me by name before I got out,
+they would have seen in me the shame and embarrassment of a culprit,
+simply from a feeling of the pain the poor man would have had to suffer
+if his lie had been discovered."[231] One who can feel thus vividly
+humiliated by the meanness of another, assuredly has in himself the
+wholesome salt of respect for the erectness of his fellows; he has the
+rare sentiment that the compromise of integrity in one of them is as a
+stain on his own self-esteem, and a lowering of his own moral stature.
+There is more deep love of humanity in this than in giving many alms,
+and it was not the less deep for being the product of impulse and
+sympathetic emotion, and not of a logical sorites.
+
+Another scene in a café is worth referring to, because it shows in the
+same way that at this time Rousseau's egoism fell short of the
+fatuousness to which disease or vicious habit eventually depraved it. In
+1752 he procured the representation of his comedy of Narcisse, which he
+had written at the age of eighteen, and which is as well worth reading
+or playing as most comedies by youths of that amount of experience of
+the ways of the world and the heart of man. Rousseau was amazed and
+touched by the indulgence of the public, in suffering without any sign
+of impatience even a second representation of his piece. For himself,
+he could not so much as sit out the first; quitting the theatre before
+it was over, he entered the famous café de Procope at the other side of
+the street, where he found critics as wearied as himself. Here he called
+out, "The new piece has fallen flat, and it deserved to fall flat; it
+wearied me to death. It is by Rousseau of Geneva, and I am that very
+Rousseau."[232] The relentless student of mental pathology is very
+likely to insist that even this was egoism standing on its head and not
+on its feet, choosing to be noticed for an absurdity, rather than not be
+noticed at all. It may be so, but this inversion of the ordinary form of
+vanity is rare enough to be not unrefreshing, and we are very loth to
+hand Rousseau wholly over to the pathologist before his hour has come.
+
+
+II.
+
+In the summer of 1754 Rousseau, in company with his Theresa, went to
+revisit the city of his birth, partly because an exceptionally
+favourable occasion presented itself, but in yet greater part because he
+was growing increasingly weary of the uncongenial world in which he
+moved. On his road he turned aside to visit her who had been more than
+even his birth-place to him. He felt the shock known to all who cherish
+a vision for a dozen years, and then suddenly front the changed reality.
+He had not prepared himself by recalling the commonplace which we only
+remember for others, how time wears hard and ugly lines into the face
+that recollection at each new energy makes lovelier with an added
+sweetness. "I saw her," he says, "but in what a state, O God, in what
+debasement! Was this the same Madame de Warens, in those days so
+brilliant, to whom the priest of Pontverre had sent me! How my heart was
+torn by the sight!" Alas, as has been said with a truth that daily
+experience proves to those whom pity and self-knowledge have made most
+indulgent, as to those whom pinched maxims have made most
+rigorous,--_morality is the nature of things_.[233] We may have a humane
+tenderness for our Manon Lescaut, but we have a deep presentiment all
+the time that the poor soul must die in a penal settlement. It is partly
+a question of time; whether death comes fast enough to sweep you out of
+reach of the penalties which the nature of things may appoint, but which
+in their fiercest shape are mostly of the loitering kind. Death was
+unkind to Madame de Warens, and the unhappy creature lived long enough
+to find that morality does mean something after all; that the old hoary
+world has not fixed on prudence in the outlay of money as a good thing,
+out of avarice or pedantic dryness of heart; nor on some continence and
+order in the relations of men and women as a good thing, out of
+cheerless grudge to the body, but because the breach of such virtues is
+ever in the long run deadly to mutual trust, to strength, to freedom, to
+collectedness, which are the reserve of humanity against days of ordeal.
+
+Rousseau says that he tried hard to prevail upon his fallen benefactress
+to leave Savoy, to come and take up her abode peacefully with him, while
+he and Theresa would devote their days to making her happy. He had not
+forgotten her in the little glimpse of prosperity; he had sent her money
+when he had it.[234] She was sunk in indigence, for her pension had long
+been forestalled, but still she refused to change her home. While
+Rousseau was at Geneva she came to see him. "She lacked money to
+complete her journey; I had not enough about me; I sent it to her an
+hour afterwards by Theresa. Poor Maman! Let me relate this trait of her
+heart. The only trinket she had left was a small ring; she took it from
+her finger to place it on Theresa's, who instantly put it back, as she
+kissed the noble hand and bathed it with her tears." In after years he
+poured bitter reproaches upon himself for not quitting all to attach his
+lot to hers until her last hour, and he professes always to have been
+haunted by the liveliest and most enduring remorse.[235] Here is the
+worst of measuring duty by sensation instead of principle; if the
+sensations happen not to be in right order at the critical moment, the
+chance goes by, never to return, and then, as memory in the best of
+such temperaments is long though not without intermittence, old
+sentiment revives and drags the man into a burning pit. Rousseau appears
+not to have seen her again, but the thought of her remained with him to
+the end, like a soft vesture fragrant with something of the sweet
+mysterious perfume of many-scented night in the silent garden at
+Charmettes. She died in a hovel eight years after this, sunk in disease,
+misery, and neglect, and was put away in the cemetery on the heights
+above Chambéri.[236] Rousseau consoled himself with thoughts of another
+world that should reunite him to her and be the dawn of new happiness;
+like a man who should illusorily confound the last glistening of a
+wintry sunset seen through dark yew-branches, with the broad-beaming
+strength of the summer morning. "If I thought," he said, "that I should
+not see her in the other life, my poor imagination would shrink from the
+idea of perfect bliss, which I would fain promise myself in it."[237] To
+pluck so gracious a flower of hope on the edge of the sombre unechoing
+gulf of nothingness into which our friend has slid silently down, is a
+natural impulse of the sensitive soul, numbing remorse and giving a
+moment's relief to the hunger and thirst of a tenderness that has been
+robbed of its object. Yet would not men be more likely to have a deeper
+love for those about them, and a keener dread of filling a house with
+aching hearts, if they courageously realised from the beginning of their
+days that we have none of this perfect companionable bliss to promise
+ourselves in other worlds, that the black and horrible grave is indeed
+the end of our communion, and that we know one another no more?
+
+The first interview between Rousseau and Madame de Warens was followed
+by his ludicrous conversion to Catholicism (1728); the last was
+contemporary with his re-conversion to the faith in which he had been
+reared. The sight of Geneva gave new fire to his Republican enthusiasm;
+he surrendered himself to transports of patriotic zeal. The thought of
+the Parisian world that he had left behind, its frivolity, its
+petulance, its disputation over all things in heaven and on the earth,
+its profound deadness to all civic activity, quickened his admiration
+for the simple, industrious, and independent community from which he
+never forgot that he was sprung. But no Catholic could enjoy the rights
+of citizenship. So Rousseau proceeded to reflect that the Gospel is the
+same for all Christians, and the substance of dogma only differs,
+because people interposed with explanations of what they could not
+understand; that therefore it is in each country the business of the
+sovereign to fix both the worship and the amount and quality of
+unintelligible dogma; that consequently it is the citizen's duty to
+admit the dogma, and follow the worship by law appointed. "The society
+of the Encyclopædists, far from shaking my faith, had confirmed it by my
+natural aversion for partisanship and controversy. The reading of the
+Bible, especially of the Gospel, to which I had applied myself for
+several years, had made me despise the low and childish interpretation
+put upon the words of Christ by the people who were least worthy to
+understand him. In a word, philosophy by drawing me towards the
+essential in religion, had drawn me away from that stupid mass of
+trivial formulas with which men had overlaid and darkened it."[238] We
+may be sure that if Rousseau had a strong inclination towards a given
+course of action, he would have no difficulty in putting his case in a
+blaze of the brightest light, and surrounding it with endless emblems
+and devices of superlative conviction. In short, he submitted himself
+faithfully to the instruction of the pastor of his parish; was closely
+catechised by a commission of members of the consistory; received from
+them a certificate that he had satisfied the requirements of doctrine in
+all points; was received to partake of the Communion, and finally
+restored to all his rights as a citizen.[239]
+
+This was no farce, such as Voltaire played now and again at the expense
+of an unhappy bishop or unhappier parish priest; nor such as Rousseau
+himself had played six-and-twenty years before, at the expense of those
+honest Catholics of Turin whose helpful donation of twenty francs had
+marked their enthusiasm over a soul that had been lost and was found
+again. He was never a Catholic, any more than he was ever an atheist,
+and if it might be said in one sense that he was no more a Protestant
+than he was either of these two, yet he was emphatically the child of
+Protestantism. It is hardly too much to say that one bred in Catholic
+tradition and observance, accustomed to think of the whole life of men
+as only a manifestation of the unbroken life of the Church, and of all
+the several communities of men as members of that great organisation
+which binds one order to another, and each generation to those that have
+gone before and those that come after, would never have dreamed that
+monstrous dream of a state of nature as a state of perfection. He would
+never have held up to ridicule and hate the idea of society as an
+organism with normal parts and conditions of growth, and never have left
+the spirit of man standing in bald isolation from history, from his
+fellows, from a Church, from a mediator, face to face with the great
+vague phantasm. Nor, on the other hand, is it likely that one born and
+reared in the religious school of authority with its elaborately
+disciplined hierarchy, would have conceived that passion for political
+freedom, that zeal for the rights of peoples against rulers, that
+energetic enthusiasm for a free life, which constituted the fire and
+essence of Rousseau's writing. As illustration of this, let us remark
+how Rousseau's teaching fared when it fell upon a Catholic country like
+France: so many of its principles were assimilated by the revolutionary
+schools as were wanted for violent dissolvents, while the rest dropped
+away, and in this rejected portion was precisely the most vital part of
+his system. In other words, in no country has the power of collective
+organisation been so pressed and exalted as in revolutionised France,
+and in no country has the free life of the individual been made to count
+for so little. With such force does the ancient system of temporal and
+spiritual organisation reign in the minds of those who think most
+confidently that they have cast it wholly out of them. The use of reason
+may lead a man far, but it is the past that has cut the groove.
+
+In re-embracing the Protestant confession, therefore, Rousseau was not
+leaving Catholicism, to which he had never really passed over; he was
+only undergoing in entire gravity of spirit a formality which reconciled
+him with his native city, and reunited those strands of spiritual
+connection with it which had never been more than superficially parted.
+There can be little doubt that the four months which he spent in Geneva
+in 1754 marked a very critical time in the formation of some of the most
+memorable of his opinions. He came from Paris full of inarticulate and
+smouldering resentment against the irreverence and denial of the
+materialistic circle which used to meet at the house of D'Holbach. What
+sort of opinions he found prevailing among the most enlightened of the
+Genevese pastors we know from an abundance of sources. D'Alembert had
+three or four years later than this to suffer a bitter attack from
+them, but the account of the creed of some of the ministers which he
+gave in his article on Geneva in the Encyclopedia, was substantially
+correct. "Many of them," he wrote, "have ceased to believe in the
+divinity of Jesus Christ. Hell, one of the principal points in our
+belief, is no longer one with many of the Genevese pastors, who contend
+that it is an insult to the Divinity to imagine that a being full of
+goodness and justice can be capable of punishing our faults by an
+eternity of torment. In a word, they have no other creed than pure
+Socinianism, rejecting everything that they call mysteries, and
+supposing the first principle of a true religion to be that it shall
+propose nothing for belief which clashes with reason. Religion here is
+almost reduced to the adoration of one single God, at least among nearly
+all who do not belong to the common people; and a certain respect for
+Jesus Christ and the Scriptures is nearly the only thing that
+distinguishes the Christianity of Geneva from pure Deism."[240] And it
+would be easy to trace the growth of these rationalising tendencies.
+Throughout the seventeenth century men sprang up who anticipated some of
+the rationalistic arguments of the eighteenth, in denying the Trinity,
+and so forth,[241] but the time was not then ripe. The general
+conditions grew more favourable. Burnet, who was at Geneva in 1685-6,
+says that though there were not many among the Genevese of the first
+form of learning, "yet almost everybody here has a good tincture of a
+learned education."[242] The pacification of civic troubles in 1738 was
+followed by a quarter of a century of extreme prosperity and
+contentment, and it is in such periods that the minds of men previously
+trained are wont to turn to the great matters of speculation. There was
+at all times a constant communication, both public and private, going on
+between Geneva and Holland, as was only natural between the two chief
+Protestant centres of the Continent. The controversy of the seventeenth
+century between the two churches was as keenly followed in Geneva as at
+Leyden, and there is more than one Genevese writer who deserves a place
+in the history of the transition in the beginning of the eighteenth
+century from theology proper to that metaphysical theology, which was
+the first marked dissolvent of dogma within the Protestant bodies. To
+this general movement of the epoch, of course, Descartes supplied the
+first impulse. The leader of the movement in Geneva, that is of an
+attempt to pacify the Christian churches on the basis of some such Deism
+as was shortly to find its passionate expression in the Savoyard
+Vicar's Confession of Faith, was John Alphonse Turretini (1661-1737). He
+belonged to a family of Italian refugees from Lucca, and his grandfather
+had been sent on a mission to Holland for aid in defence of Geneva
+against Catholic Savoy. He went on his travels in 1692; he visited
+Holland, where he saw Bayle, and England, where he saw Newton, and
+France, where he saw Bossuet. Chouet initiated him into the mysteries of
+Descartes. All this bore fruit when he returned home, and his eloquent
+exposition of rationalistic ideas aroused the usual cry of heresy from
+the people who justly insist that Deism is not Christianity. There was
+much stir for many years, but he succeeded in holding his own and in
+finding many considerable followers.[243] For example, some three years
+or so after his death, a work appeared in Geneva under the title of _La
+Religion Essentielle a l'Homme_, showing that faith in the existence of
+a God suffices, and treating with contempt the belief in the
+inspiration of the Gospels.[244]
+
+Thus we see what vein of thought was running through the graver and more
+active minds of Geneva about the time of Rousseau's visit. Whether it be
+true or not that the accepted belief of many of the preachers was a pure
+Deism, it is certain that the theory was fully launched among them, and
+that those who could not accept it were still pressed to refute it, and
+in refuting, to discuss. Rousseau's friendships were according to his
+own account almost entirely among the ministers of religion and the
+professors of the academy, precisely the sort of persons who would be
+most sure to familiarise him, in the course of frequent conversations,
+with the current religious ideas and the arguments by which they were
+opposed or upheld. We may picture the effect on his mind of the
+difference in tone and temper in these grave, candid, and careful men,
+and the tone of his Parisian friends in discussing the same high themes;
+how this difference would strengthen his repugnance, and corroborate his
+own inborn spirit of veneration; how he would here feel himself in his
+own world. For as wise men have noticed, it is not so much difference of
+opinion that stirs resentment in us, at least in great subjects where
+the difference is not trivial but profound, as difference in gravity of
+humour and manner of moral approach. He returned to Paris (Oct. 1754)
+warm with the resolution to give up his concerns there, and in the
+spring go back once and for all to the city of liberty and virtue, where
+men revered wisdom and reason instead of wasting life in the frivolities
+of literary dialectic.[245]
+
+The project, however, grew cool. The dedication of his Discourse on
+Inequality to the Republic was received with indifference by some and
+indignation by others.[246] Nobody thought it a compliment, and some
+thought it an impertinence. This was one reason which turned his purpose
+aside. Another was the fact that the illustrious Voltaire now also
+signed himself Swiss, and boasted that if he shook his wig the powder
+flew over the whole of the tiny Republic. Rousseau felt certain that
+Voltaire would make a revolution in Geneva, and that he should find in
+his native country the tone, the air, the manners which were driving him
+from Paris. From that moment he counted Geneva lost. Perhaps he ought to
+make head against the disturber, but what could he do alone, timid and
+bad talker as he was, against a man arrogant, rich, supported by the
+credit of the great, of brilliant eloquence, and already the very idol
+of women and young men?[247] Perhaps it would not be uncharitable to
+suspect that this was a reason after the event, for no man was ever so
+fond as Rousseau, or so clever a master in the art, of covering an
+accident in a fine envelope of principle, and, as we shall see, he was
+at this time writing to Voltaire in strains of effusive panegyric. In
+this case he almost tells us that the one real reason why he did not
+return to Geneva was that he found a shelter from Paris close at hand.
+Even before then he had begun to conceive characteristic doubts whether
+his fellow-citizens at Geneva would not be nearly as hostile to his love
+of living solitarily and after his own fashion as the good people
+of Paris.
+
+Rousseau has told us a pretty story, how one day he and Madame d'Epinay
+wandering about the park came upon a dilapidated lodge surrounded by
+fruit gardens, in the skirts of the forest of Montmorency; how he
+exclaimed in delight at its solitary charm that here was the very place
+of refuge made for him; and how on a second visit he found that his good
+friend had in the interval had the old lodge pulled down, and replaced
+by a pretty cottage exactly arranged for his own household. "My poor
+bear," she said, "here is your place of refuge; it was you who chose it,
+'tis friendship offers it; I hope it will drive away your cruel notion
+of going from me."[248] Though moved to tears by such kindness,
+Rousseau did not decide on the spot, but continued to waver for some
+time longer between this retreat and return to Geneva.
+
+In the interval Madame d'Epinay had experience of the character she was
+dealing with. She wrote to Rousseau pressing him to live at the cottage
+in the forest, and begging him to allow her to assist him in assuring
+the moderate annual provision which he had once accidentally declared to
+mark the limit of his wants.[249] He wrote to her bitterly in reply,
+that her proposition struck ice into his soul, and that she could have
+but sorry appreciation of her own interests in thus seeking to turn a
+friend into a valet. He did not refuse to listen to what she proposed,
+if only she would remember that neither he nor his sentiments were for
+sale.[250] Madame d'Epinay wrote to him patiently enough in return, and
+then Rousseau hastened to explain that his vocabulary needed special
+appreciation, and that he meant by the word valet "the degradation into
+which the repudiation of his principles would throw his soul. The
+independence I seek is not immunity from work; I am firm for winning my
+own bread, I take pleasure in it; but I mean not to subject myself to
+any other duty, if I can help it. I will never pledge any portion of my
+liberty, either for my own subsistence or that of any one else. I intend
+to work, but at my own will and pleasure, and even to do nothing, if it
+happens to suit me, without any one finding fault except my
+stomach."[251] We may call this unamiable, if we please, but in a
+frivolous world amiability can hardly go with firm resolve to live an
+independent life after your own fashion. The many distasteful sides of
+Rousseau's character ought not to hinder us from admiring his
+steadfastness in refusing to sacrifice his existence to the first person
+who spoke him civilly. We may wish there had been more of rugged
+simplicity in his way of dealing with temptations to sell his birthright
+for a mess of pottage; less of mere irritability. But then this
+irritability is one side of soft temperament. The soft temperament is
+easily agitated, and this unpleasant disturbance does not stir up true
+anger nor lasting indignation, but only sends quick currents of eager
+irritation along the sufferer's nerves. Rousseau, quivering from head to
+foot with self-consciousness, is sufficiently unlike our plain Johnson,
+the strong-armoured; yet persistent withstanding of the patron is as
+worthy of our honour in one instance as in the other. Indeed, resistance
+to humiliating pressure is harder for such a temper as Rousseau's, in
+which deliberate endeavour is needed, than it is for the naturally
+stoical spirit which asserts itself spontaneously and rises
+without effort.
+
+When our born solitary, wearied of Paris and half afraid of the too
+friendly importunity of Geneva, at length determined to accept Madame
+d'Epinay's offer of the Hermitage on conditions which left him an
+entire sentiment of independence of movement and freedom from all sense
+of pecuniary obligation, he was immediately exposed to a very copious
+torrent of pleasantry and remonstrance from the highly social circle who
+met round D'Holbach's dinner-table. They deemed it sheer midsummer
+madness, or even a sign of secret depravity, to quit their cheerful
+world for the dismal solitude of woods and fields. "Only the bad man is
+alone," wrote Diderot in words which Rousseau kept resentfully in his
+memory as long as he lived. The men and women of the eighteenth century
+had no comprehension of solitude, the strength which it may impart to
+the vigorous, the poetic graces which it may shed about the life of
+those who are less than vigorous; and what they did not comprehend, they
+dreaded and abhorred, and thought monstrous in the one man who did
+comprehend it. They were all of the mind of Socrates when he said to
+Phædrus, "Knowledge is what I love, and the men who dwell in the town
+are my teachers, not trees and landscape."[252] Sarcasms fell on him
+like hail, and the prophecies usual in cases where a stray soul does not
+share the common tastes of the herd. He would never be able to live
+without the incense and the amusements of the town; he would be back in
+a fortnight; he would throw up the whole enterprise within three
+months.[253] Amid a shower of such words, springing from men's perverse
+blindness to the binding propriety of keeping all propositions as to
+what is the best way of living in respect of place, hours,
+companionship, strictly relative to each individual case, Rousseau
+stubbornly shook the dust of the city from off his feet, and sought new
+life away from the stridulous hum of men. Perhaps we are better pleased
+to think of the unwearied Diderot spending laborious days in factories
+and quarries and workshops and forges, while friendly toilers patiently
+explained to him the structure of stocking looms and velvet looms, the
+processes of metal-casting and wire-drawing and slate-cutting, and all
+the other countless arts and ingenuities of fabrication, which he
+afterwards reproduced to a wondering age in his spacious and magnificent
+repertory of human thought, knowledge, and practical achievement. And it
+is yet more elevating to us to think of the true stoic, the great
+high-souled Turgot, setting forth a little later to discharge beneficent
+duty in the hard field of his distant Limousin commissionership,
+enduring many things and toiling late and early for long years, that the
+burden of others might be lighter, and the welfare of the land more
+assured. But there are many paths for many men, and if only magnanimous
+self-denial has the power of inspiration, and can move us with the deep
+thrill of the heroic, yet every truthful protest, even of excessive
+personality, against the gregarious trifling of life in the social
+groove, has a side which it is not ill for us to consider, and perhaps
+for some men and women in every generation to seek to imitate.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[201] _Rép. à M. Bordes_, 163.
+
+[202] Pictet de Sergy., i. 18.
+
+[203] _Conf._, iv. 248.
+
+[204] _Ib._ ix. 279. Also _Economie Politique_.
+
+[205] Madame de la Popelinière, whose adventures and the misadventures
+of her husband are only too well known to the reader of Marmontel's
+Memoirs.
+
+[206] The passages relating to income during his first residence in
+Paris (1744-1756) are at pp. 119, 145, 153, 165, 200, 227, in Books
+vii.-ix. of the _Confessions_. Rousseau told Bernardin de St. Pierre
+(_Oeuv._, xii. 74) that Emile was sold for 7000 livres. In the
+_Confessions_ (xi. 126), he says 6000 livres, and one or two hundred
+copies. It may be worth while to add that Diderot and D'Alembert
+received 1200 livres a year apiece for editing the Encyclopædia.
+Sterne received £650 for two volumes of _Tristram Shandy_ in 1780.
+Walpole's _Letters_, in. 298.
+
+[207] _Conf._, viii. 154-157.
+
+[208] _Ib._ viii. 160.
+
+[209] _Conf._, viii. 160, 161.
+
+[210] _Ib._ viii. 159.
+
+[211] _Réveries_, iii 168.
+
+[212] _Rêveries_, iii. 166.
+
+[213] See the _Epître à Mdme. la Marquise du Châtelet, sur la
+Calomnie_.
+
+[214] _La Femme au 18ième siècle_, par MM. de Goncourt, p. 40.
+
+[215] Madame d'Epinay's _Mém._, i. 295.
+
+[216] Quoted in Goncourt's _Femme au 18ième siècle_, p. 378.
+
+[217] _Ib._, p. 337.
+
+[218] Mdlle. L'Espinasse's _Letters_, ii. 89.
+
+[219] Madame d'Epinay's _Mém._, ii. 47, 48.
+
+[220] _Ib._, ii. 55.
+
+[221] _Mém._, Bk. iv. 327.
+
+[222] _Corr. Lit._, iii. 58.
+
+[223] _Ib._, 54.
+
+[224] Madame d'Epinay's _Mém._, i. 378-381. Saint Lambert formulated
+his atheism afterwards in the _Catéchisme Universel_.
+
+[225] Madame d'Epinay's _Mém._, i. 443.
+
+[226] _Corr._, i. 317. Sept. 14, 1756.
+
+[227] Letter to Madame de Créqui, 1752. _Corr._, i. 171.
+
+[228] _Conf_,., vii. 104.
+
+[229] The _Devin du Village_ was played at Fontainebleau on October
+18, 1752, and at the Opera in Paris in March 1753. Madame de Pompadour
+took a part in it in a private performance. See Rousseau's note to
+her, _Corr._, i. 178.
+
+[230] _Conf._, viii. 190.
+
+[231] _Conf._, viii. 183.
+
+[232] _Conf._, viii. 202; and Musset-Pathay, ii. 439. When in
+Strasburg, in 1765, he could not bring himself to be present at its
+representation. _Oeuv. et Corr. Inéd._, p. 434.
+
+[233] Madame de Staël insisted that her father said this, and Necker
+insisted that it was his daughter's.
+
+[234] _Corr._, i. 176. Feb. 13, 1753.
+
+[235] _Conf._, viii. 208-210.
+
+[236] She died on July 30, 1762, aged "about sixty-three years."
+Arthur Young, visiting Chambéri in 1789, with some trouble procured
+the certificate of her death, which may be found in his _Travels_, i.
+272. See a letter of M. de Conzié to Rousseau, in M.
+Streckeisen-Moultou's collection, ii. 445.
+
+[237] _Conf._, xii. 233.
+
+[238] _Conf._, viii. 210.
+
+[239] Gaberel's _Rousseau et les Genevois_, p. 62. _Conf._, viii. 212.
+
+[240] The venerable Company of Pastors and Professors of the Church
+and Academy of Geneva appointed a committee, as in duty bound, to
+examine these allegations, and the committee, equally in duty bound,
+reported (Feb. 10, 1758) with mild indignation, that they were
+unfounded, and that the flock was untainted by unseasonable use of its
+mind. See on this Rousseau's _Lettres écrites de la Montagne_, ii.
+231.
+
+[241] See Picot's _Hist. de Genève_, ii. 415.
+
+[242] _Letters containing an account of Switzerland, Italy, etc., in
+1685-86._ By G. Burnet, p. 9.
+
+[243] J.A. Turretini's complete works were published as late as 1776,
+including among much besides that no longer interests men, an _Oratio
+de Scientiarum Vanitate et Proestantia_ (vol. iii. 437), not at all in
+the vein of Rousseau's Discourse, and a treatise in four parts, _De
+Legibus Naturalibus_, in which, among other matters, he refutes Hobbes
+and assails the doctrine of Utility (i. 173, etc.), by limiting its
+definition to [Greek: to pros heauton] in its narrowest sense. He
+appears to have been a student of Spinoza (i. 326). Francis Turretini,
+his father, took part in the discussion as to the nature of the treaty
+or contract between God and man, in a piece entitled _Foedus Naturæ a
+primo homine ruptum, ejusque Proevaricationem posteris imputatam_
+(1675).
+
+[244] Gaberel's _Eglise de Genève_, iii. 188.
+
+[245] _Corr._, i. 223 (to Vernes, April 5, 1755).
+
+[246] _Conf._, viii. 215, 216. _Corr._, i. 218 (to Perdriau, Nov. 28,
+1754).
+
+[247] _Conf._, viii. 218.
+
+[248] _Conf._, viii. 217. It is worth noticing as bearing on the
+accuracy of the Confessions, that Madame d'Epinay herself (_Mém._, ii.
+115) says that when she began to prepare the Hermitage for Rousseau he
+had never been there, and that she was careful to lead him to believe
+that the expense had not been incurred for him. Moreover her letter to
+him describing it could only have been written to one who had not seen
+it, and though her Memoirs are full of sheer imagination and romance,
+the documents in them are substantially authentic, and this letter is
+shown to be so by Rousseau's reply to it.
+
+[249] _Mém._, ii. 116.
+
+[250] _Corr._ (1755), i. 242.
+
+[251] _Corr._, i. 245.
+
+[252] _Phædrus_, 230.
+
+[253] _Conf._, viii. 221, etc.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+THE HERMITAGE.
+
+
+It would have been a strange anachronism if the decade of the
+Encyclopædia and the Seven Years' War had reproduced one of those scenes
+which are as still resting-places amid the ceaseless forward tramp of
+humanity, where some holy man turned away from the world, and with
+adorable seriousness sought communion with the divine in mortification
+of flesh and solitude of spirit. Those were the retreats of firm hope
+and beatified faith. The hope and faith of the eighteenth century were
+centred in action, not in contemplation, and the few solitaries of that
+epoch, as well as of another nearer to our own, fled away from the
+impotence of their own will, rather than into the haven of satisfied
+conviction and clear-eyed acceptance. Only one of them--Wordsworth, the
+poetic hermit of our lakes--impresses us in any degree like one of the
+great individualities of the ages when men not only craved for the
+unseen, but felt the closeness of its presence over their heads and
+about their feet. The modern anchorite goes forth in the spirit of the
+preacher who declared all the things that are under the sun to be
+vanity, not in the transport of the saint who knew all the things that
+are under the sun to be no more than the shadow of a dream in the light
+of a celestial brightness to come.
+
+Rousseau's mood, deeply tinged as it was by bitterness against society
+and circumstance, still contained a strong positive element in his
+native exultation in all natural objects and processes, which did not
+leave him vacantly brooding over the evil of the world he had quitted.
+The sensuousness that penetrated him kept his sympathy with life
+extraordinarily buoyant, and all the eager projects for the disclosure
+of a scheme of wisdom became for a time the more vividly desired, as the
+general tide of desire flowed more fully within him. To be surrounded
+with the simplicity of rural life was with him not only a stimulus, but
+an essential condition to free intellectual energy. Many a time, he
+says, when making excursions into the country with great people, "I was
+so tired of fine rooms, fountains, artificial groves and flower beds,
+and the still more tiresome people who displayed all these; I was so
+worn out with pamphlets, card-playing, music, silly jokes, stupid airs,
+great suppers, that as I spied a poor hawthorn copse, a hedge, a
+farmstead, a meadow, as in passing through a hamlet I snuffed the odour
+of a good chervil omelette, as I heard from a distance the rude refrain
+of the shepherd's songs, I used to wish at the devil the whole tale of
+rouge and furbelows."[254] He was no anchorite proper, one weary of the
+world and waiting for the end, but a man with a strong dislike for one
+kind of life and a keen liking for another kind. He thought he was now
+about to reproduce the old days of the Charmettes, true to his
+inveterate error that one may efface years and accurately replace a
+past. He forgot that instead of the once vivacious and tender
+benefactress who was now waiting for slow death in her hovel, his
+house-mates would be a poor dull drudge and her vile mother. He forgot,
+too, that since those days the various processes of intellectual life
+had expanded within him, and produced a busy fermentation which makes a
+man's surroundings very critical. Finally, he forgot that in proportion
+as a man suffers the smooth course of his thought to depend on anything
+external, whether on the greenness of the field or the gaiety of the
+street or the constancy of friends, so comes he nearer to chance of
+making shipwreck. Hence his tragedy, though the very root of the tragedy
+lay deeper,--in temperament.
+
+
+I.
+
+Rousseau's impatience drove him into the country almost before the walls
+of his little house were dry (April 9, 1756). "Although it was cold, and
+snow still lay upon the ground, the earth began to show signs of life;
+violets and primroses were to be seen; the buds on the trees were
+beginning to shoot; and the very night of my arrival was marked by the
+first song of the nightingale. I heard it close to my window in a wood
+that touched the house. After a light sleep I awoke, forgetting that I
+was transplanted; I thought myself still in the Rue de Grenelle, when in
+an instant the warbling of the birds made me thrill with delight. My
+very first care was to surrender myself to the impression of the rustic
+objects about me. Instead of beginning by arranging things inside my
+quarters, I first set about planning my walks, and there was not a path
+nor a copse nor a grove round my cottage which I had not found out
+before the end of the next day. The place, which was lonely rather than
+wild, transported me in fancy to the end of the world, and no one could
+ever have dreamed that we were only four leagues from Paris."[255]
+
+This rural delirium, as he justly calls it, lasted for some days, at the
+end of which he began seriously to apply himself to work. But work was
+too soon broken off by a mood of vehement exaltation, produced by the
+stimulus given to all his senses by the new world of delight in which he
+found himself. This exaltation was in a different direction from that
+which had seized him half a dozen years before, when he had discarded
+the usage and costume of politer society, and had begun to conceive an
+angry contempt for the manners, prejudices, and maxims of his time.
+Restoration to a more purely sensuous atmosphere softened this
+austerity. No longer having the vices of a great city before his eyes,
+he no longer cherished the wrath which they had inspired in him. "When I
+did not see men, I ceased to despise them; and when I had not the bad
+before my eyes, I ceased to hate them. My heart, little made as it is
+for hate, now did no more than deplore their wretchedness, and made no
+distinction between their wretchedness and their badness. This state, so
+much more mild, if much less sublime, soon dulled the glowing enthusiasm
+that had long transported me."[256] That is to say, his nature remained
+for a moment not exalted but fairly balanced. It was only for a moment.
+And in studying the movements of impulse and reflection in him at this
+critical time of his life, we are hurried rapidly from phase to phase.
+Once more we are watching a man who lived without either intellectual or
+spiritual direction, swayed by a reminiscence, a passing mood, a
+personality accidentally encountered, by anything except permanent aim
+and fixed objects, and who would at any time have surrendered the most
+deliberately pondered scheme of persistent effort to the fascination of
+a cottage slumbering in a bounteous landscape. Hence there could be no
+normally composed state for him; the first soothing effect of the rich
+life of forest and garden on a nature exasperated by the life of the
+town passed away, and became transformed into an exaltation that swept
+the stoic into space, leaving sensuousness to sovereign and uncontrolled
+triumph, until the delight turned to its inevitable ashes and
+bitterness.
+
+At first all was pure and delicious. In after times when pain made him
+gloomily measure the length of the night, and when fever prevented him
+from having a moment of sleep, he used to try to still his suffering by
+recollection of the days that he had passed in the woods of Montmorency,
+with his dog, the birds, the deer, for his companions. "As I got up with
+the sun to watch his rising from my garden, if I saw the day was going
+to be fine, my first wish was that neither letters nor visits might come
+to disturb its charm. After having given the morning to divers tasks
+which I fulfilled with all the more pleasure that I could put them off
+to another time if I chose, I hastened to eat my dinner, so as to escape
+from the importunate and make myself a longer afternoon. Before one
+o'clock, even on days of fiercest heat, I used to start in the blaze of
+the sun, along with my faithful Achates, hurrying my steps lest some one
+should lay hold of me before I could get away. But when I had once
+passed a certain corner, with what beating of the heart, with what
+radiant joy, did I begin to breathe freely, as I felt myself safe and my
+own master for the rest of the day! Then with easier pace I went in
+search of some wild and desert spot in the forest, where there was
+nothing to show the hand of man, or to speak of servitude and
+domination; some refuge where I could fancy myself its discoverer, and
+where no inopportune third person came to interfere between nature and
+me. She seemed to spread out before my eyes a magnificence that was
+always new. The gold of the broom and the purple of the heather struck
+my eyes with a glorious splendour that went to my very heart; the
+majesty of the trees that covered me with their shadow, the delicacy of
+the shrubs that surrounded me, the astonishing variety of grasses and
+flowers that I trod under foot, kept my mind in a continual alternation
+of attention and delight.... My imagination did not leave the earth thus
+superbly arrayed without inhabitants. I formed a charming society, of
+which I did not feel myself unworthy; I made a golden age to please my
+own fancy, and filling up these fair days with all those scenes of my
+life that had left sweet memories behind, and all that my heart could
+yet desire or hope in scenes to come, I waxed tender even to shedding
+tears over the true pleasures of humanity, pleasures so delicious, so
+pure, and henceforth so far from the reach of men. Ah, if in such
+moments any ideas of Paris, of the age, of my little aureole as author,
+came to trouble my dreams, with what disdain did I drive them out, to
+deliver myself without distraction to the exquisite sentiments of which
+I was so full. Yet in the midst of it all, the nothingness of my
+chimeras sometimes broke sadly upon my mind. Even if every dream had
+suddenly been transformed into reality, it would not have been enough;
+I should have dreamed, imagined, yearned still." Alas, this deep
+insatiableness of sense, the dreary vacuity of soul that follows fulness
+of animal delight, the restless exactingness of undirected imagination,
+was never recognised by Rousseau distinctly enough to modify either his
+conduct or his theory of life. He filled up the void for a short space
+by that sovereign aspiration, which changed the dead bones of old
+theology into the living figure of a new faith. "From the surface of the
+earth I raised my ideas to all the existences in nature, to the
+universal system of things, to the incomprehensible Being who embraces
+all. Then with mind lost in that immensity, I did not think, I did not
+reason, I did not philosophise; with a sort of pleasure I felt
+overwhelmed by the weight of the universe, I surrendered myself to the
+ravishing confusion of these vast ideas. I loved to lose myself in
+imagination in immeasurable space; within the limits of real existences
+my heart was too tightly compressed; in the universe I was stifled; I
+would fain have launched myself into the infinite. I believe that if I
+had unveiled all the mysteries of nature, I should have found myself in
+a less delicious situation than that bewildering ecstasy to which my
+mind so unreservedly delivered itself, and which sometimes transported
+me until I cried out, 'O mighty Being! O mighty Being!' without power of
+any other word or thought."[257]
+
+It is not wholly insignificant that though he could thus expand his
+soul with ejaculatory delight in something supreme, he could not endure
+the sight of one of his fellow-creatures. "If my gaiety lasted the whole
+night, that showed that I had passed the day alone; I was very different
+after I had seen people, for I was rarely content with others and never
+with myself. Then in the evening I was sure to be in taciturn or
+scolding humour." It is not in every condition that effervescent passion
+for ideal forms of the religious imagination assists sympathy with the
+real beings who surround us. And to this let us add that there are
+natures in which all deep emotion is so entirely associated with the
+ideal, that real and particular manifestations of it are repugnant to
+them as something alien; and this without the least insincerity, though
+with a vicious and disheartening inconsistency. Rousseau belonged to
+this class, and loved man most when he saw men least. Bad as this was,
+it does not justify us in denouncing his love of man as artificial; it
+was one side of an ideal exaltation, which stirred the depths of his
+spirit with a force as genuine as that which is kindled in natures of
+another type by sympathy with the real and concrete, with the daily walk
+and conversation and actual doings and sufferings of the men and women
+whom we know. The fermentation which followed his arrival at the
+Hermitage, in its first form produced a number of literary schemes. The
+idea of the Political Institutions, first conceived at Venice, pressed
+upon his meditations. He had been earnestly requested to compose a
+treatise on education. Besides this, his thoughts wandered confusedly
+round the notion of a treatise to be called Sensitive Morality, or the
+Materialism of the Sage, the object of which was to examine the
+influence of external agencies, such as light, darkness, sound, seasons,
+food, noise, silence, motion, rest, on our corporeal machine, and thus
+indirectly upon the soul also. By knowing these and acquiring the art of
+modifying them according to our individual needs, we should become surer
+of ourselves and fix a deeper constancy in our lives. An external system
+of treatment would thus be established, which would place and keep the
+soul in the condition most favourable to virtue.[258] Though the
+treatise was never completed, and the sketch never saw the light, we
+perceive at least that Rousseau would have made the means of access to
+character wide enough, and the material influences that impress it and
+produce its caprices, multitudinous enough, instead of limiting them
+with the medical specialist to one or two organs, and one or two of the
+conditions that affect them. Nor, on the other hand, do the words in
+which he sketches his project in the least justify the attribution to
+him of the doctrine of the absolute power of the physical constitution
+over the moral habits, whether that doctrine would be a credit or a
+discredit to his philosophical thoroughness of perception. No one denies
+the influence of external conditions on the moral habits, and Rousseau
+says no more than that he proposed to consider the extent and the
+modifiableness of this influence. It was not then deemed essential for a
+spiritualist thinker to ignore physical organisation.
+
+A third undertaking of a more substantial sort was to arrange and edit
+the papers and printed works of the Abbé de Saint Pierre (1658-1743),
+confided to him through the agency of Saint Lambert, and partly also of
+Madame Dupin, the warm friend of that singular and good man.[259] This
+task involved reading, considering, and picking extracts from
+twenty-three diffuse and chaotic volumes, full of prolixity and
+repetition. Rousseau, dreamer as he was, yet had quite keenness of
+perception enough to discern the weakness of a dreamer of another sort;
+and he soon found out that the Abbé de Saint Pierre's views were
+impracticable, in consequence of the author's fixed idea that men are
+guided rather by their lights than by their passions. In fact, Saint
+Pierre was penetrated with the eighteenth-century faith to a peculiar
+degree. As with Condorcet afterwards, he was led by his admiration for
+the extent of modern knowledge to adopt the principle that perfected
+reason is capable of being made the base of all institutions, and would
+speedily terminate all the great abuses of the world. "He went wrong,"
+says Rousseau, "not merely in having no other passion but that of
+reason, but by insisting on making all men like himself, instead of
+taking them as they are and as they will continue to be." The critic's
+own error in later days was not very different from this, save that it
+applied to the medium in which men live, rather than to themselves, by
+refusing to take complex societies as they are, even as starting-points
+for higher attempts at organisation. Rousseau had occasionally seen the
+old man, and he preserved the greatest veneration for his memory,
+speaking of him as the honour of his age and race, with a fulness of
+enthusiasm very unusual towards men, though common enough towards
+inanimate nature. The sincerity of this respect, however, could not make
+the twenty-three volumes which the good man had written, either fewer in
+number or lighter in contents, and after dealing as well as he could
+with two important parts of Saint Pierre's works, he threw up the
+task.[260] It must not be supposed that Rousseau would allow that
+fatigue or tedium had anything to do with a resolve which really needed
+no better justification. As we have seen before, he had amazing skill in
+finding a certain ingeniously contrived largeness for his motives. Saint
+Pierre's writings were full of observations on the government of France,
+some of them remarkably bold in their criticism, but he had not been
+punished for them because the ministers always looked upon him as a
+kind of preacher rather than a genuine politician, and he was allowed to
+say what he pleased, because it was observed that no one listened to
+what he said. Besides, he was a Frenchman, and Rousseau was not, and
+hence the latter, in publishing Saint Pierre's strictures on French
+affairs, was exposing himself to a sharp question why he meddled with a
+country that did not concern him. "It surprised me," says Rousseau,
+"that the reflection had not occurred to me earlier," but this
+coincidence of the discovery that the work was imprudent, with the
+discovery that he was weary of it, will surprise nobody versed in study
+of a man who lives in his sensations, and yet has vanity enough to
+dislike to admit it.
+
+The short remarks which Rousseau appended to his abridgment of Saint
+Pierre's essays on Perpetual Peace, and on a Polysynodia, or Plurality
+of Councils, are extremely shrewd and pointed, and would suffice to show
+us, if there were nothing else to do so, the right kind of answer to
+make to the more harmful dreams of the Social Contract. Saint Pierre's
+fault is said, with entire truth, to be a failure to make his views
+relative to men, to times, to circumstances; and there is something that
+startles us when we think whose words we are reading, in the declaration
+that, "whether an existing government be still that of old times, or
+whether it have insensibly undergone a change of nature, it is equally
+imprudent to touch it: if it is the same, it must be respected, and if
+it has degenerated, that is due to the force of time and circumstance,
+and human sagacity is powerless." Rousseau points to France, asking his
+readers to judge the peril of once moving by an election the enormous
+masses comprising the French monarchy; and in another place, after a
+wise general remark on the futility of political machinery without men
+of a certain character, he illustrates it by this scornful question:
+When you see all Paris in a ferment about the rank of a dancer or a wit,
+and the affairs of the academy or the opera making everybody forget the
+interest of the ruler and the glory of the nation, what can you hope
+from bringing political affairs close to such a people, and removing
+them from the court to the town?[261] Indeed, there is perhaps not one
+of these pages which Burke might not well have owned.[262]
+
+A violent and prolonged crisis followed this not entirely unsuccessful
+effort after sober and laborious meditation. Rousseau was now to find
+that if society has its perils, so too has solitude, and that if there
+is evil in frivolous complaisance for the puppet-work of a world that is
+only a little serious, so there is evil in a passionate tenderness for
+phantoms of an imaginary world that is not serious at all. To the pure
+or stoical soul the solitude of the forest is strength, but then the
+imagination must know the yoke. Rousseau's imagination, in no way of the
+strongest either as receptive or inventive, was the free accomplice of
+his sensations. The undisciplined force of animal sensibility gradually
+rose within him, like a slowly welling flood. The spectacle does not
+either brighten or fortify the student's mind, yet if there are such
+states, it is right that those who care to speak of human nature should
+have an opportunity of knowing its less glorious parts. They may be
+presumed to exist, though in less violent degree, in many people whom we
+meet in the street and at the table, and there can be nothing but danger
+in allowing ourselves to be so narrowed by our own virtuousness,
+viciousness being conventionally banished to the remoter region of the
+third person, as to forget the presence of "the brute brain within the
+man's." In Rousseau's case, at any rate, it was no wicked broth nor
+magic potion that "confused the chemic labour of the blood," but the too
+potent wine of the joyful beauty of nature herself, working misery in a
+mental structure that no educating care nor envelope of circumstance had
+ever hardened against her intoxication. Most of us are protected against
+this subtle debauch of sensuous egoism by a cool organisation, while
+even those who are born with senses and appetites of great strength and
+keenness, are guarded by accumulated discipline of all kinds from
+without, especially by the necessity for active industry which brings
+the most exaggerated native sensibility into balance. It is the constant
+and rigorous social parade which keeps the eager regiment of the senses
+from making furious rout. Rousseau had just repudiated all social
+obligation, and he had never gone through external discipline. He was at
+an age when passion that has never been broken in has the beak of the
+bald vulture, tearing and gnawing a man; but its first approach is in
+fair shapes.
+
+Wandering and dreaming "in the sweetest season of the year, in the month
+of June, under the fresh groves, with the song of the nightingale and
+the soft murmuring of the brooks in his ear," he began to wonder
+restlessly why he had never tasted in their plenitude the vivid
+sentiments which he was conscious of possessing in reserve, or any of
+that intoxicating delight which he felt potentially existent in his
+soul. Why had he been created with faculties so exquisite, to be left
+thus unused and unfruitful? The feeling of his own quality, with this of
+a certain injustice and waste superadded, brought warm tears which he
+loved to let flow. Visions of the past, from girl playmates of his youth
+down to the Venetian courtesan, thronged in fluttering tumult into his
+brain. He saw himself surrounded by a seraglio of houris whom he had
+known, until his blood was all aflame and his head in a whirl. His
+imagination was kindled into deadly activity. "The impossibility of
+reaching to the real beings plunged me into the land of chimera; and
+seeing nothing actual that rose to the height of my delirium, I
+nourished it in an ideal world, which my creative imagination had soon
+peopled with beings after my heart's desire. In my continual ecstasies,
+I made myself drunk with torrents of the most delicious sentiments that
+ever entered the heart of man. Forgetting absolutely the whole human
+race, I invented for myself societies of perfect creatures, as heavenly
+for their virtues as their beauties; sure, tender, faithful friends,
+such as I never found in our nether world. I had such a passion for
+haunting this empyrean with all its charming objects, that I passed
+hours and days in it without counting them as they went by; and losing
+recollection of everything else, I had hardly swallowed a morsel in hot
+haste, before I began to burn to run off in search of my beloved groves.
+If, when I was ready to start for the enchanted world, I saw unhappy
+mortals coming to detain me on the dull earth, I could neither moderate
+nor hide my spleen, and, no longer master over myself, I used to give
+them greeting so rough that it might well be called brutal."[263]
+
+This terrific malady was something of a very different kind from the
+tranquil sensuousness of the days in Savoy, when the blood was young,
+and life was not complicated with memories, and the sweet freshness of
+nature made existence enough. Then his supreme expansion had been
+attended with a kind of divine repose, and had found edifying voice in
+devout acknowledgment in the exhilaration of the morning air of the
+goodness and bounty of a beneficent master. In this later and more
+pitiable time the beneficent master hid himself, and creation was only
+not a blank because it was veiled by troops of sirens not in the flesh.
+Nature without the association of some living human object, like Madame
+de Warens, was a poison to Rousseau, until the advancing years which
+slowly brought decay of sensual force thus brought the antidote. At our
+present point we see one stricken with an ugly disease. It was almost
+mercy when he was laid up with a sharp attack of the more painful, but
+far less absorbing and frightful disorder, to which Rousseau was subject
+all his life long. It gave pause to what he misnames his angelic loves.
+"Besides that one can hardly think of love when suffering anguish, my
+imagination, which is animated by the country and under the trees,
+languishes and dies in a room and under roof-beams." This interval he
+employed with some magnanimity, in vindicating the ways and economy of
+Providence, in the letter to Voltaire which we shall presently examine.
+The moment he could get out of doors again into the forest, the
+transport returned, but this time accompanied with an active effort in
+the creative faculties of his mind to bring the natural relief to these
+over-wrought paroxysms of sensual imagination. He soothed his emotions
+by associating them with the life of personages whom he invented, and by
+introducing into them that play and movement and changing relation which
+prevented them from bringing his days to an end in malodorous fever. The
+egoism of persistent invention and composition was at least better than
+the egoism of mere unreflecting ecstasy in the charm of natural
+objects, and took off something from the violent excess of sensuous
+force. His thought became absorbed in two female figures, one dark and
+the other fair, one sage and the other yielding, one gentle and the
+other quick, analogous in character but different, not handsome but
+animated by cheerfulness and feeling. To one of these he gave a lover,
+to whom the other was a tender friend. He planted them all, after much
+deliberation and some changes, on the shores of his beloved lake at
+Vevay, the spot where his benefactress was born, and which he always
+thought the richest and loveliest in all Europe.
+
+This vicarious or reflected egoism, accompanied as it was by a certain
+amount of productive energy, seemed to mark a return to a sort of moral
+convalescence. He walked about the groves with pencil and tablets,
+assigning this or that thought or expression to one or other of the
+three companions of his fancy. When the bad weather set in, and he was
+confined to the house (the winter of 1756-7), he tried to resume his
+ordinary indoor labour, the copying of music and the compilation of his
+Musical Dictionary. To his amazement he found that this was no longer
+possible. The fever of that literary composition of which he had always
+such dread had strong possession of him. He could see nothing on any
+side but the three figures and the objects about them made beautiful by
+his imagination. Though he tried hard to dismiss them, his resistance
+was vain, and he set himself to bringing some order into his thoughts
+"so as to produce a kind of romance." We have a glimpse of his mental
+state in the odd detail, that he could not bear to write his romance on
+anything but the very finest paper with gilt edges; that the powder with
+which he dried the ink was of azure and sparkling silver; and that he
+tied up the quires with delicate blue riband.[264] The distance from all
+this to the state of nature is obviously very great indeed. It must not
+be supposed that he forgot his older part as Cato, Brutus, and the other
+Plutarchians. "My great embarrassment," he says honestly, "was that I
+should belie myself so clearly and thoroughly. After the severe
+principles I had just been laying down with so much bustle, after the
+austere maxims I had preached so energetically, after so many biting
+invectives against the effeminate books that breathed love and soft
+delights, could anything be imagined more shocking, more unlooked-for,
+than to see me inscribe myself with my own hand among the very authors
+on whose books I had heaped this harsh censure? I felt this
+inconsequence in all its force, I taxed myself with it, I blushed over
+it, and was overcome with mortification; but nothing could restore me to
+reason."[265] He adds that perhaps on the whole the composition of the
+New Heloïsa was turning his madness to the best account. That may be
+true, but does not all this make the bitter denunciation, in the Letter
+to D'Alembert, of love and of all who make its representation a
+considerable element in literature or the drama, at the very time when
+he was composing one of the most dangerously attractive romances of his
+century, a rather indecent piece of invective? We may forgive
+inconsistency when it is only between two of a man's theories, or two
+self-concerning parts of his conduct, but hardly when it takes the form
+of reviling in others what the reviler indulgently permits to himself.
+
+We are more edified by the energy with which Rousseau refused connivance
+with the public outrages on morality perpetrated by a patron. M.
+d'Epinay went to pay him a visit at the Hermitage, taking with him two
+ladies with whom his relations were less than equivocal, and for whom
+among other things he had given Rousseau music to copy. "They were
+curious to see the eccentric man," as M. d'Epinay afterwards told his
+scandalised wife, for it was in the manners of the day on no account to
+parade even the most notorious of these unblessed connections. "He was
+walking in front of the door; he saw me first; he advanced cap in hand;
+he saw the ladies; he saluted us, put on his cap, turned his back, and
+stalked off as fast as he could. Can anything be more mad?"[266] In the
+miserable and intricate tangle of falsity, weakness, sensuality, and
+quarrel, which make up this chapter in Rousseau's life, we are glad of
+even one trait of masculine robustness. We should perhaps be still more
+glad if the unwedded Theresa were not visible in the background of this
+scene of high morals.
+
+
+II.
+
+The New Heloïsa was not to be completed without a further extension of
+morbid experience of a still more burning kind than the sufferings of
+compressed passion. The feverish torment of mere visions of the air
+swarming impalpable in all his veins, was replaced when the earth again
+began to live and the sap to stir in plants, by the more concentred fire
+of a consuming passion for one who was no dryad nor figure of a dream.
+In the spring of 1757 he received a visit from Madame d'Houdetot, the
+sister-in-law of Madame d'Epinay.[267] Her husband had gone to the war
+(we are in the year of Rossbach), and so had her lover, Saint Lambert,
+whose passion had been so fatal to Voltaire's Marquise du Châtelet eight
+years before. She rode over in man's guise to the Hermitage from a house
+not very far off, where she was to pass her retreat during the absence
+of her two natural protectors. Rousseau had seen her before on various
+occasions; she had been to the Hermitage the previous year, and had
+partaken of its host's homely fare.[268] But the time was not ripe; the
+force of a temptation is not from without but within. Much, too,
+depended with our hermit on the temperature; one who would have been a
+very ordinary mortal to him in cold and rain, might grow to Aphrodite
+herself in days when the sun shone hot and the air was aromatic. His
+fancy was suddenly struck with the romantic guise of the female
+cavalier, and this was the first onset of a veritable intoxication,
+which many men have felt, but which no man before or since ever invited
+the world to hear the story of. He may truly say that after the first
+interview with her in this disastrous spring, he was as one who had
+thirstily drained a poisoned bowl. A sort of palsy struck him. He lay
+weeping in his bed at night, and on days when he did not see the
+sorceress he wept in the woods.[269] He talked to himself for hours, and
+was of a black humour to his house-mates. When approaching the object of
+this deadly fascination, his whole organisation seemed to be dissolved.
+He walked in a dream that filled him with a sense of sickly torture,
+commixed with sicklier delight.
+
+People speak with precisely marked division of mind and body, of will,
+emotion, understanding; the division is good in logic, but its
+convenient lines are lost to us as we watch a being with soul all
+blurred, body all shaken, unstrung, poisoned, by erotic mania, rising in
+slow clouds of mephitic steam from suddenly heated stagnancies of the
+blood, and turning the reality of conduct and duty into distant
+unmeaning shadows. If such a disease were the furious mood of the brute
+in spring-time, it would be less dreadful, but shame and remorse in the
+ever-struggling reason of man or woman in the grip of the foul thing,
+produces an aggravation of frenzy that makes the mental healer tremble.
+Add to all this lurking elements of hollow rage that his passion was not
+returned; of stealthy jealousy of the younger man whose place he could
+not take, and who was his friend besides; of suspicion that he was a
+little despised for his weakness by the very object of it, who saw that
+his hairs were sprinkled with gray,--and the whole offers a scene of
+moral humiliation that half sickens, half appals, and we turn away with
+dismay as from a vision of the horrid loves of heavy-eyed and scaly
+shapes that haunted the warm primeval ooze.
+
+Madame d'Houdetot, the unwilling enchantress bearing in an unconscious
+hand the cup of defilement, was not strikingly singular either in
+physical or mental attraction. She was now seven-and-twenty. Small-pox,
+the terrible plague of the country, had pitted her face and given a
+yellowish tinge to her complexion; her features were clumsy and her brow
+low; she was short-sighted, and in old age at any rate was afflicted by
+an excessive squint. This homeliness was redeemed by a gentle and
+caressing expression, and by a sincerity, a gaiety of heart, and free
+sprightliness of manner, that no trouble could restrain. Her figure was
+very slight, and there was in all her movements at once awkwardness and
+grace. She was natural and simple, and had a fairly good judgment of a
+modest kind, in spite of the wild sallies in which her spirits sometimes
+found vent. Capable of chagrin, she was never prevented by it from
+yielding to any impulse of mirth. "She weeps with the best faith in the
+world, and breaks out laughing at the same moment; never was anybody so
+happily born," says her much less amiable sister-in-law.[270] Her
+husband was indifferent to her. He preserved an attachment to a lady
+whom he knew before his marriage, whose society he never ceased to
+frequent, and who finally died in his arms in 1793. Madame d'Houdetot
+found consolation in the friendship of Saint Lambert. "We both of us,"
+said her husband, "both Madame d'Houdetot and I, had a vocation for
+fidelity, only there was a mis-arrangement." She occasionally composed
+verses of more than ordinary point, but she had good sense enough not to
+write them down, nor to set up on the strength of them for poetess and
+wit.[271] Her talk in her later years, and she lived down to the year of
+Leipsic, preserved the pointed sententiousness of earlier time. One day,
+for instance, in the era of the Directory, a conversation was going on
+as to the various merits and defects of women; she heard much, and then
+with her accustomed suavity of voice contributed this light
+summary:--"Without women, the life of man would be without aid at the
+beginning, without pleasure in the middle, and without solace at the
+end."[272]
+
+We may be sure that it was not her power of saying things of this sort
+that kindled Rousseau's flame, but rather the sprightly naturalness,
+frankness, and kindly softness of a character which in his opinion
+united every virtue except prudence and strength, the two which Rousseau
+would be least likely to miss. The bond of union between them was
+subtle. She found in Rousseau a sympathetic listener while she told the
+story of her passion for Saint Lambert, and a certain contagious force
+produced in him a thrill which he never felt with any one else before or
+after. Thus, as he says, there was equally love on both sides, though it
+was not reciprocal. "We were both of us intoxicated with passion, she
+for her lover, I for her; our sighs and sweet tears mingled. Tender
+confidants, each of the other, our sentiments were of such close kin
+that it was impossible for them not to mix; and still she never forgot
+her duty for a moment, while for myself, I protest, I swear, that if
+sometimes drawn astray by my senses, still"--still he was a paragon of
+virtue, subject to rather new definition. We can appreciate the author
+of the New Heloïsa; we can appreciate the author of Emilius; but this
+strained attempt to confound those two very different persons by
+combining tearful erotics with high ethics, is an exhibition of
+self-delusion that the most patient analyst of human nature might well
+find hard to suffer. "The duty of privation exalted my soul. The glory
+of all the virtues adorned the idol of my heart in my sight; to soil its
+divine image would have been to annihilate it," and so forth.[273]
+Moon-lighted landscape gave a background for the sentimentalist's
+picture, and dim groves, murmuring cascades, and the soft rustle of the
+night air, made up a scene which became for its chief actor "an immortal
+memory of innocence and delight." "It was in this grove, seated with her
+on a grassy bank, under an acacia heavy with flowers, that I found
+expression for the emotions of my heart in words that were worthy of
+them. 'Twas the first and single time of my life; but I was sublime, if
+you can use the word of all the tender and seductive things that the
+most glowing love can bring into the heart of a man. What intoxicating
+tears I shed at her knees, what floods she shed in spite of herself! At
+length in an involuntary transport, she cried out, 'Never was man so
+tender, never did man love as you do! But your friend Saint Lambert
+hears us, and my heart cannot love twice.'"[274] Happily, as we learn
+from another source, a breath of wholesome life from without brought the
+transcendental to grotesque end. In the climax of tears and
+protestations, an honest waggoner at the other side of the park wall,
+urging on a lagging beast launched a round and far-sounding oath out
+into the silent night. Madame d'Houdetot answered with a lively
+continuous peal of young laughter, while an angry chill brought back the
+discomfited lover from an ecstasy that was very full of peril.[275]
+
+Rousseau wrote in the New Heloïsa very sagely that you should grant to
+the senses nothing when you mean to refuse them anything. He admits that
+the saying was falsified by his relations with Madame d'Houdetot.
+Clearly the credit of this happy falsification was due to her rather
+than to himself. What her feelings were, it is not very easy to see.
+Honest pity seems to have been the strongest of them. She was idle and
+unoccupied, and idleness leaves the soul open for much stray generosity
+of emotion, even towards an importunate lover. She thought him mad, and
+she wrote to Saint Lambert to say so. "His madness must be very strong,"
+said Saint Lambert, "since she can perceive it."[276]
+
+Character is ceaselessly marching, even when we seem to have sunk into a
+fixed and stagnant mood. The man is awakened from his dream of passion
+by inexorable event; he finds the house of the soul not swept and
+garnished for a new life, but possessed by demons who have entered
+unseen. In short, such profound disorder of spirit, though in its first
+stage marked by ravishing delirium, never escapes a bitter sequel. When
+a man lets his soul be swept away from the narrow track of conduct
+appointed by his relations with others, still the reality of such
+relations survives. He may retreat to rural lodges; that will not save
+him either from his own passion, or from some degree of that kinship
+with others which instantly creates right and wrong like a wall of brass
+around him. Let it be observed that the natures of finest stuff suffer
+most from these forced reactions, and it was just because Rousseau had
+innate moral sensitiveness, and a man like Diderot was without it, that
+the first felt his fall so profoundly, while the second was unconscious
+of having fallen at all.
+
+One day in July Rousseau went to pay his accustomed visit. He found
+Madame d'Houdetot dejected, and with the flush of recent weeping on her
+cheeks. A bird of the air had carried the matter. As usual, the matter
+was carried wrongly, and apparently all that Saint Lambert suspected was
+that Rousseau's high principles had persuaded Madame d'Houdetot of the
+viciousness of her relations with her lover.[277] "They have played us
+an evil turn," cried Madame d'Houdetot; "they have been unjust to me,
+but that is no matter. Either let us break off at once, or be what you
+ought to be."[278] This was Rousseau's first taste of the ashes of
+shame into which the lusciousness of such forbidden fruit, plucked at
+the expense of others, is ever apt to be transformed. Mortification of
+the considerable spiritual pride that was yet alive after this lapse,
+was a strong element in the sum of his emotion, and it was pointed by
+the reflection which stung him so incessantly, that his monitress was
+younger than himself. He could never master his own contempt for the
+gallantry of grizzled locks.[279] His austerer self might at any rate
+have been consoled by knowing that this scene was the beginning of the
+end, though the end came without any seeking on his part and without
+violence. To his amazement, one day Saint Lambert and Madame d'Houdetot
+came to the Hermitage, asking him to give them dinner, and much to the
+credit of human nature's elasticity, the three passed a delightful
+afternoon. The wronged lover was friendly, though a little stiff, and he
+passed occasional slights which Rousseau would surely not have forgiven,
+if he had not been disarmed by consciousness of guilt. He fell asleep,
+as we can well imagine that he might do, while Rousseau read aloud his
+very inadequate justification of Providence against Voltaire.[280]
+
+In time he returned to the army, and Rousseau began to cure himself of
+his mad passion. His method, however, was not unsuspicious, for it
+involved the perilous assistance of Madame d'Houdetot. Fortunately her
+loyalty and good sense forced a more resolute mode upon him. He found,
+or thought he found her distracted, emharrassed, indifferent. In despair
+at not being allowed to heal his passionate malady in his own fashion,
+he did the most singular thing that he could have done under the
+circumstances. He wrote to Saint Lambert.[281] His letter is a prodigy
+of plausible duplicity, though Rousseau in some of his mental states had
+so little sense of the difference between the actual and the imaginary,
+and was moreover so swiftly borne away on a flood of fine phrases, that
+it is hard to decide how far this was voluntary, and how far he was his
+own dupe. Voluntary or not, it is detestable. We pass the false whine
+about "being abandoned by all that was dear to him," as if he had not
+deliberately quitted Paris against the remonstrance of every friend he
+had; about his being "solitary and sad," as if he was not ready at this
+very time to curse any one who intruded on his solitude, and hindered
+him of a single half-hour in the desert spots that he adored.
+Remembering the scenes in moon-lighted groves and elsewhere, we read
+this:--"Whence comes her coldness to me? Is it possible that you can
+have suspected me of wronging you with her, and of turning perfidious in
+consequence of an unseasonably rigorous virtue? A passage in one of your
+letters shows a glimpse of some such suspicion. No, no, Saint Lambert,
+the breast of J.J. Rousseau never held the heart of a traitor, and I
+should despise myself more than you suppose, if I had ever tried to rob
+you of her heart.... Can you suspect that her friendship for me may hurt
+her love for you? Surely natures endowed with sensibility are open to
+all sorts of affections, and no sentiment can spring up in them which
+does not turn to the advantage of the dominant passion. Where is the
+lover who does not wax the more tender as he talks to his friend of her
+whom he loves? And is it not sweeter for you in your banishment that
+there should be some sympathetic creature to whom your mistress loves to
+talk of you, and who loves to hear?"
+
+Let us turn to another side of his correspondence. The way in which the
+sympathetic creature in the present case loved to hear his friend's
+mistress talk of him, is interestingly shown in one or two passages from
+a letter to her; as when he cries, "Ah, how proud would even thy lover
+himself be of thy constancy, if he only knew how much it has
+surmounted.... I appeal to your sincerity. You, the witness and the
+cause of this delirium, these tears, these ravishing ecstasies, these
+transports which were never made for mortal, say, have I ever tasted
+your favours in such a way that I deserve to lose them?... Never once
+did my ardent desires nor my tender supplications dare to solicit
+supreme happiness, without my feeling stopped by the inner cries of a
+sorrow-stricken soul.... O Sophie, after moments so sweet, the idea of
+eternal privation is too frightful for one who groans that he cannot
+identify himself with thee. What, are thy tender eyes never again to be
+lowered with a delicious modesty, intoxicating me with pleasure? What,
+are my burning lips never again to lay my very soul on thy heart along
+with my kisses? What, may I never more feel that heavenly shudder, that
+rapid and devouring fire, swifter than lightning?"[282].... We see a
+sympathetic creature assuredly, and listen to the voice of a nature
+endowed with sensibility even more than enough, but with decency,
+loyalty, above all with self-knowledge, far less than enough.
+
+One more touch completes the picture of the fallen desperate man. He
+takes great trouble to persuade Saint Lambert that though the rigour of
+his principles constrains him to frown upon such breaches of social law
+as the relations between Madame d'Houdetot and her lover, yet he is so
+attached to the sinful pair that he half forgives them. "Do not
+suppose," he says, with superlative gravity, "that you have seduced me
+by your reasons; I see in them the goodness of your heart, not your
+justification. I cannot help blaming your connection: you can hardly
+approve it yourself; and so long as you both of you continue dear to me,
+I will never leave you in careless security as to the innocence of your
+state. Yet love such as yours deserves considerateness.... I feel
+respect for a union so tender, and cannot bring myself to attempt to
+lead it to virtue along the path of despair" (p. 401).
+
+Ignorance of the facts of the case hindered Saint Lambert from
+appreciating the strange irony of a man protesting about leading to
+virtue along the path of despair a poor woman whom he had done as much
+as he could to lead to vice along the path of highly stimulated sense.
+Saint Lambert was as much a sentimentalist as Rousseau was, but he had a
+certain manliness, acquired by long contact with men, which his
+correspondent only felt in moods of severe exaltation. Saint Lambert
+took all the blame on himself. He had desired that his mistress and his
+friend should love one another; then he thought he saw some coolness in
+his mistress, and he set the change down to his friend, though not on
+the true grounds. "Do not suppose that I thought you perfidious or a
+traitor; I knew the austerity of your principles; people had spoken to
+me of it; and she herself did so with a respect that love found hard to
+bear." In short, he had suspected Rousseau of nothing worse than being
+over-virtuous, and trying in the interest of virtue to break off a
+connection sanctioned by contemporary manners, but not by law or
+religion. If Madame d'Houdetot had changed, it was not that she had
+ceased to honour her good friend, but only that her lover might be
+spared a certain chagrin, from suspecting the excess of scrupulosity and
+conscience in so austere an adviser.[283]
+
+It is well known how effectively one with a germ of good principle in
+him is braced by being thought better than he is. With this letter in
+his hands and its words in his mind, Rousseau strode off for his last
+interview with Madame d'Houdetot. Had Saint Lambert, he says, been less
+wise, less generous, less worthy, I should have been a lost man. As it
+was, he passed four or five hours with her in a delicious calm,
+infinitely more delightful than the accesses of burning fever which had
+seized him before. They formed the project of a close companionship of
+three, including the absent lover; and they counted on the project
+coming more true than such designs usually do, "since all the feelings
+that can unite sensitive and upright hearts formed the foundation of it,
+and we three united talents enough as well as knowledge enough to
+suffice to ourselves, without need of aid or supplement from others."
+What happened was this. Madame d'Houdetot for the next three or four
+months, which were among the most bitter in Rousseau's life, for then
+the bitterness which became chronic was new and therefore harder to be
+borne, wrote him the wisest, most affectionate, and most considerate
+letters that a sincere and sensible woman ever wrote to the most
+petulant, suspicious, perverse, and irrestrainable of men. For patience
+and exquisite sweetness of friendship some of these letters are
+matchless, and we can only conjecture the wearing querulousness of the
+letters to which they were replies. If through no fault of her own she
+had been the occasion of the monstrous delirium of which he never shook
+off the consequences, at least this good soul did all that wise counsel
+and grave tenderness could do, to bring him out of the black slough of
+suspicion and despair into which he was plunged.[284] In the beginning
+of 1758 there was a change. Rousseau's passion for her somehow became
+known to all the world; it reached the ears of Saint Lambert, and was
+the cause of a passing disturbance between him and his mistress. Saint
+Lambert throughout acted like a man who is thoroughly master of himself.
+At first, we learn, he ceased for a moment to see in Rousseau the virtue
+which he sought in him, and which he was persuaded that he found in him.
+"Since then, however," wrote Madame d'Houdetot, "he pities you more for
+your weakness than he reproaches you, and we are both of us far from
+joining the people who wish to blacken your character; we have and
+always shall have the courage to speak of you with esteem."[285] They
+saw one another a few times, and on one occasion the Count and Countess
+d'Houdetot, Saint Lambert, and Rousseau all sat at table together,
+happily without breach of the peace.[286] One curious thing about this
+meeting was that it took place some three weeks after Rousseau and Saint
+Lambert had interchanged letters on the subject of the quarrel with
+Diderot, in which each promised the other contemptuous oblivion.[287]
+Perpetuity of hate is as hard as perpetuity of love for our poor
+short-spanned characters, and at length the three who were once to have
+lived together in self-sufficing union, and then in their next mood to
+have forgotten one another instantly and for ever, held to neither of
+the extremes, but settled down into an easier middle path of indifferent
+good-will. The conduct of all three, said the most famous of them, may
+serve for an example of the way in which sensible people separate, when
+it no longer suits them to see one another.[288] It is at least certain
+that in them Rousseau lost two of the most unimpeachably good friends
+that he ever possessed.
+
+
+III.
+
+The egoistic character that loves to brood and hates to act, is big with
+catastrophe. We have now to see how the inevitable law accomplished
+itself in the case of Rousseau. In many this brooding egoism produces a
+silent and melancholy insanity; with him it was developed into something
+of acridly corrosive quality. One of the agents in this disastrous
+process was the wearing torture of one of the most painful of disorders.
+This disorder, arising from an internal malformation, harassed him from
+his infancy to the day of his death. Our fatuous persistency in reducing
+man to the spiritual, blinds the biographer to the circumstance that the
+history of a life is the history of a body no less than that of a soul.
+Many a piece of conduct that divides the world into two factions of
+moral assailants and moral vindicators, provoking a thousand ingenuities
+of ethical or psychological analysis, ought really to have been nothing
+more than an item in a page of a pathologist's case-book. We are not to
+suspend our judgment on action; right and wrong can depend on no man's
+malformations. In trying to know the actor, it is otherwise; here it is
+folly to underestimate the physical antecedents of mental phenomena. In
+firm and lofty character, pain is mastered; in a character so little
+endowed with cool tenacious strength as Rousseau's, pain such as he
+endured was enough to account, not for his unsociality, which flowed
+from temperament, but for the bitter, irritable, and suspicious form
+which this unsociality now first assumed. Rousseau was never a saintly
+nature, but far the reverse, and in reading the tedious tale of his
+quarrels with Grimm and Madame d'Epinay and Diderot--a tale of
+labyrinthine nightmares--let us remember that we may even to this point
+explain what happened, without recourse to the too facile theory of
+insanity, unless one defines that misused term so widely as to make many
+sane people very uncomfortable.
+
+His own account was this: "In my quality of solitary, I am more
+sensitive than another; if I am wrong with a friend who lives in the
+world, he thinks of it for a moment, and then a thousand distractions
+make him forget it for the rest of the day; but there is nothing to
+distract me as to his wrong towards me; deprived of my sleep, I busy
+myself with him all night long; solitary in my walks, I busy myself with
+him from sunrise until sunset; my heart has not an instant's relief, and
+the harshness of a friend gives me in one day years of anguish. In my
+quality of invalid, I have a title to the considerateness that humanity
+owes to the weakness or irritation of a man in agony. Who is the friend,
+who is the good man, that ought not to dread to add affliction to an
+unfortunate wretch tormented with a painful and incurable malady?"[289]
+We need not accept this as an adequate extenuation of perversities, but
+it explains them without recourse to the theory of uncontrollable
+insanity. Insanity came later, the product of intellectual excitation,
+public persecution, and moral reaction after prolonged tension.
+Meanwhile he may well be judged by the standards of the sane; knowing
+his temperament, his previous history, his circumstances, we have no
+difficulty in accounting for his conduct. Least of all is there any need
+for laying all the blame upon his friends. There are writers whom
+enthusiasm for the principles of Jean Jacques has driven into fanatical
+denigration of every one whom he called his enemy, that is to say,
+nearly every one whom he ever knew.[290] Diderot said well, "Too many
+honest people would be wrong, if Jean Jacques were right."
+
+The first downright breach was with Grimm, but there were angry passages
+during the year 1757, not only with him, but with Diderot and Madame
+d'Epinay as well. Diderot, like many other men of energetic nature
+unchastened by worldly wisdom, was too interested in everything that
+attracted his attention to keep silence over the indiscretion of a
+friend. He threw as much tenacity and zeal into a trifle, if it had once
+struck him, as he did into the Encyclopædia. We have already seen how
+warmly he rated Jean Jacques for missing the court pension. Then he
+scolded and laughed at him for turning hermit. With still more
+seriousness he remonstrated with him for remaining in the country
+through the winter, thus endangering the life of Theresa's aged mother.
+This stirred up hot anger in the Hermitage, and two or three bitter
+letters were interchanged,[291] those of Diderot being pronounced by a
+person who was no partisan of Rousseau decidedly too harsh.[292] Yet
+there is copious warmth of friendship in these very letters, if only the
+man to whom they were written had not hated interference in his affairs
+as the worst of injuries. "I loved Diderot tenderly, I esteemed him
+sincerely," says Rousseau, "and I counted with entire confidence upon
+the same sentiments in him. But worn out by his unwearied obstinacy in
+everlastingly thwarting my tastes, my inclinations, my ways of living,
+everything that concerned myself only; revolted at seeing a younger man
+than myself insist with all his might on governing me like a child;
+chilled by his readiness in giving his promise and his negligence in
+keeping it; tired of so many appointments which he made and broke, and
+of his fancy for repairing them by new ones to be broken in their turn;
+provoked at waiting for him to no purpose three or four times a month on
+days which he had fixed, and of dining alone in the evening, after going
+on as far as St. Denis to meet him and waiting for him all day,--I had
+my heart already full of a multitude of grievances."[293] This
+irritation subsided in presence of the storms that now rose up against
+Diderot. He was in the thick of the dangerous and mortifying
+distractions stirred up by the foes of the Encyclopædia. Rousseau in
+friendly sympathy went to see him; they embraced, and old wrongs were
+forgotten until new arose.[294]
+
+There is a less rose-coloured account than this. Madame d'Epinay assigns
+two motives to Rousseau: a desire to find an excuse for going to Paris,
+in order to avoid seeing Saint Lambert; secondly, a wish to hear
+Diderot's opinion of the two first parts of the New Heloïsa. She says
+that he wanted to borrow a portfolio in which to carry the manuscripts
+to Paris; Rousseau says that they had already been in Diderot's
+possession for six months.[295] As her letters containing this very
+circumstantial story were written at the moment, it is difficult to
+uphold the Confessions as valid authority against them. Thirdly,
+Rousseau told her that he had not taken his manuscripts to Paris (p.
+302), whereas Grimm writing a few days later (p. 309) mentions that he
+has received a letter from Diderot, to the effect that Rousseau's visit
+had no other object than the revision of these manuscripts. The scene is
+characteristic. "Rousseau kept him pitilessly at work from Saturday at
+ten o'clock in the morning till eleven at night on Monday, hardly giving
+him time to eat and drink. The revision at an end, Diderot chats with
+him about a plan he has in his head, and begs Rousseau to help him in
+contriving some incident which he cannot yet arrange to his taste. 'It
+is too difficult,' replies the hermit coldly, 'it is late, and I am not
+used to sitting up. Good night; I am off at six in the morning, and 'tis
+time for bed.' He rises from his chair, goes to bed, and leaves Diderot
+petrified at his behaviour. The day of his departure, Diderot's wife saw
+that her husband was in bad spirits, and asked the reason. 'It is that
+man's want of delicacy,' he replied, 'which afflicts me; he makes me
+work like a slave, but I should never have found that out, if he had not
+so drily refused to take an interest in me for a quarter of an hour.'
+'You are surprised at that,' his wife answered; 'do you not know him? He
+is devoured with envy; he goes wild with rage when anything fine appears
+that is not his own. You will see him one day commit some great crime
+rather than let himself be ignored. I declare I would not swear that he
+will not join the ranks of the Jesuits, and undertake their
+vindication.'"
+
+Of course we cannot be sure that Grimm did not manipulate these letters
+long after the event, but there is nothing in Rousseau's history to make
+us perfectly sure that he was incapable either of telling a falsehood to
+Madame d'Epinay, or of being shamelessly selfish in respect of Diderot.
+I see no reason to refuse substantial credit to Grimm's account, and the
+points of coincidence between that and the Confessions make its truth
+probable.[296]
+
+Rousseau's relations with Madame d'Epinay were more complex, and his
+sentiments towards her underwent many changes. There was a prevalent
+opinion that he was her lover, for which no real foundation seems to
+have existed.[297] Those who disbelieved that he had reached this
+distinction, yet made sure that he had a passion for her, which may or
+may not have been true.[298] Madame d'Epinay herself was vain enough to
+be willing that this should be generally accepted, and it is certain
+that she showed a friendship for him which, considering the manners of
+the time, was invitingly open to misconception. Again, she was jealous
+of her sister-in-law, Madame d'Houdetot, if for no other reason than
+that the latter, being the wife of a Norman noble, had access to the
+court, and this was unattainable by the wife of a farmer-general. Hence
+Madame d'Epinay's barely-concealed mortification when she heard of the
+meetings in the forest, the private suppers, the moonlight rambles in
+the park. When Saint Lambert first became uneasy as to the relations
+between Rousseau and his mistress, and wrote to her to say that he was
+so, Rousseau instantly suspected that Madame d'Epinay had been his
+informant. Theresa confirmed the suspicion by tales of baskets and
+drawers ransacked by Madame d'Epinay in search of Madame d'Houdetot's
+letters to him. Whether these tales were true or not, we can never know;
+we can only say that Madame d'Epinay was probably not incapable of these
+meannesses, and that there is no reason to suppose that she took the
+pains to write directly to Saint Lambert a piece of news which she was
+writing to Grimm, knowing that he was then in communication with Saint
+Lambert. She herself suspected that Theresa had written to Saint
+Lambert,[299] but it may be doubted whether Theresa's imagination could
+have risen to such feat as writing to a marquis, and a marquis in what
+would have seemed to her to be remote and inaccessible parts of the
+earth. All this, however, has become ghostly for us; a puzzle that can
+never be found out, nor be worth finding out. Rousseau was persuaded
+that Madame d'Epinay was his betrayer, and was seized by one of his
+blackest and most stormful moods. In reply to an affectionate letter
+from her, inquiring why she had not seen him for so long, he wrote thus:
+"I can say nothing to you yet. I wait until I am better informed, and
+this I shall be sooner or later. Meanwhile, be certain that accused
+innocence will find a champion ardent enough to make calumniators
+repent, whoever they may be." It is rather curious that so strange a
+missive as this, instead of provoking Madame d'Epinay to anger, was
+answered by a warmer and more affectionate letter than the first. To
+this Rousseau replied with increased vehemence, charged with dark and
+mysteriously worded suspicion. Still Madame d'Epinay remained willing to
+receive him. He began to repent of his imprudent haste, because it would
+certainly end by compromising Madame d'Houdetot, and because, moreover,
+he had no proof after all that his suspicions had any foundation. He
+went instantly to the house of Madame d'Epinay; at his approach she
+threw herself on his neck and melted into tears. This unexpected
+reception from so old a friend moved him extremely; he too wept
+abundantly. She showed no curiosity as to the precise nature of his
+suspicions or their origin, and the quarrel came to an end.[300]
+
+Grimm's turn followed. Though they had been friends for many years,
+there had long been a certain stiffness in their friendship. Their
+characters were in fact profoundly antipathetic. Rousseau we
+know,--sensuous, impulsive, extravagant, with little sense of the
+difference between reality and dreams. Grimm was exactly the opposite;
+judicious, collected, self-seeking, coldly upright. He was a German
+(born at Ratisbon), and in Paris was first a reader to the Duke of Saxe
+Gotha, with very scanty salary. He made his way, partly through the
+friendship of Rousseau, into the society of the Parisian men of letters,
+rapidly acquired a perfect mastery of the French language, and with the
+inspiring help of Diderot, became an excellent critic. After being
+secretary to sundry high people, he became the literary correspondent of
+various German sovereigns, keeping them informed of what was happening
+in the world of art and letters, just as an ambassador keeps his
+government informed of what happens in politics. The sobriety,
+impartiality, and discrimination of his criticism make one think highly
+of his literary judgment; he had the courage, or shall we say he
+preserved enough of the German, to defend both Homer and Shakespeare
+against the unhappy strictures of Voltaire.[301] This is not all,
+however; his criticism is conceived in a tone which impresses us with
+the writer's integrity. And to this internal evidence we have to add the
+external corroboration that in the latter part of his life he filled
+various official posts, which implied a peculiar confidence in his
+probity on the part of those who appointed him. At the present moment
+(1756-57), he was acting as secretary to Marshal d'Estrées, commander of
+the French army in Westphalia at the outset of the Seven Years' War. He
+was an able and helpful man, in spite of his having a rough manner,
+powdering his face, and being so monstrously scented as to earn the name
+of the musk-bear. He had that firmness and positivity which are not
+always beautiful, but of which there is probably too little rather than
+too much in the world, certainly in the France of his time, and of which
+there was none at all in Rousseau. Above all things he hated
+declamation. Apparently cold and reserved, he had sensibility enough
+underneath the surface to go nearly out of his mind for love of a singer
+at the opera who had a thrilling voice. As he did not believe in the
+metaphysical doctrine about the freedom of the will, he accepted from
+temperament the necessity which logic confirmed, of guiding the will by
+constant pressure from without. "I am surprised," Madame d'Epinay said
+to him, "that men should be so little indulgent to one another." "Nay,
+the want of indulgence comes of our belief in freedom; it is because the
+established morality is false and bad, inasmuch as it starts from this
+false principle of liberty." "Ah, but the contrary principle, by making
+one too indulgent, disturbs order." "It does nothing of the kind. Though
+man does not wholly change, he is susceptible of modification; you can
+improve him; hence it is not useless to punish him. The gardener does
+not cut down a tree that grows crooked; he binds up the branch and keeps
+it in shape; that is the effect of public punishment."[302] He applied
+the same doctrine, as we shall see, to private punishment for social
+crookedness.
+
+It is easy to conceive how Rousseau's way of ordering himself would
+gradually estrange so hard a head as this. What the one thought a
+weighty moral reformation, struck the other as a vain desire to attract
+attention. Rousseau on the other hand suspected Grimm of intriguing to
+remove Theresa from him, as well as doing his best to alienate all his
+friends. The attempted alienation of Theresa consisted in the secret
+allowance to her mother and her by Grimm and Diderot of some sixteen
+pounds a year.[303] Rousseau was unaware of this, but the whisperings
+and goings and comings to which it gave rise, made him darkly uneasy.
+That the suspicions in other respects were in a certain sense not wholly
+unfounded, is shown by Grimm's own letters to Madame d'Epinay. He
+disapproved of her installing Rousseau in the Hermitage, and warned her
+in a very remarkable prophecy that solitude would darken his
+imagination.[304] "He is a poor devil who torments himself, and does not
+dare to confess the true subject of all his sufferings, which is in his
+cursed head and his pride; he raises up imaginary matters, so as to have
+the pleasure of complaining of the whole human race."[305] More than
+once he assures her that Rousseau will end by going mad, it being
+impossible that so hot and ill-organised a head should endure
+solitude.[306] Rousseauite partisans usually explain all this by
+supposing that Grimm was eager to set a woman for whom he had a passion,
+against a man who was suspected of having a passion for her; and it is
+possible that jealousy may have stimulated the exercise of his natural
+shrewdness. But this shrewdness, added to entire want of imagination and
+a very narrow range of sympathy, was quite enough to account for Grimm's
+harsh judgment, without the addition of any sinister sentiment. He was
+perfectly right in suspecting Rousseau of want of loyalty to Madame
+d'Epinay, for we find our hermit writing to her in strains of perfect
+intimacy, while he was writing of her to Madame d'Houdetot as "your
+unworthy sister."[307] On the other hand, while Madame d'Epinay was
+overwhelming him with caressing phrases, she was at the same moment
+describing him to Grimm as a master of impertinence and intractableness.
+As usual where there is radical incompatibility of character, an
+attempted reconciliation between Grimm and Rousseau (some time in the
+early part of October 1757) had only made the thinly veiled antipathy
+more resolute. Rousseau excused himself for wrongs of which in his heart
+he never thought himself guilty. Grimm replied by a discourse on the
+virtues of friendship and his own special aptitude for practising them.
+He then conceded to the impetuous penitent the kiss of peace, in a
+slight embrace which was like the accolade given by a monarch to new
+knights.[308] The whole scene is ignoble. We seem to be watching an
+unclean cauldron, with Theresa's mother, a cringing and babbling crone,
+standing witch-like over it and infusing suspicion, falsehood, and
+malice. When minds are thus surcharged, any accident suffices to
+release the evil creatures that lurk in an irritated imagination.
+
+One day towards the end of the autumn of 1757, Rousseau learned to his
+unbounded surprise that Madame d'Epinay had been seized with some
+strange disorder, which made it advisable that she should start without
+any delay for Geneva, there to place herself under the care of Tronchin,
+who was at that time the most famous doctor in Europe. His surprise was
+greatly increased by the expectation which he found among his friends
+that he would show his gratitude for her many kindnesses to him, by
+offering to bear her company on her journey, and during her stay in a
+town which was strange to her and thoroughly familiar to him. It was to
+no purpose that he protested how unfit was one invalid to be the nurse
+of another; and how great an incumbrance a man would be in a coach in
+the bad season, when for many days he was absolutely unable to leave his
+chamber without danger. Diderot, with his usual eagerness to guide a
+friend's course, wrote him a letter urging that his many obligations,
+and even his grievances in respect of Madame d'Epinay, bound him to
+accompany her, as he would thus repay the one and console himself for
+the other. "She is going into a country where she will be like one
+fallen from the clouds. She is ill; she will need amusement and
+distraction. As for winter, are you worse now than you were a month
+back, or than you will be at the opening of the spring? For me, I
+confess that if I could not bear the coach, I would take a staff and
+follow her on foot."[309] Rousseau trembled with fury, and as soon as
+the transport was over, he wrote an indignant reply, in which he more or
+less politely bade the panurgic one to attend to his own affairs, and
+hinted that Grimm was making a tool of him. Next he wrote to Grimm
+himself a letter, not unfriendly in form, asking his advice and
+promising to follow it, but hardly hiding his resentment. By this time
+he had found out the secret of Madame d'Epinay's supposed illness and
+her anxiety to pass some months away from her family, and the share
+which Grimm had in it. This, however, does not make many passages of his
+letter any the less ungracious or unseemly. "If Madame d'Epinay has
+shown friend' ship to me, I have shown more to her.... As for benefits,
+first of all I do not like them, I do not want them, and I owe no thanks
+for any that people may burden me with by force. Madame d'Epinay, being
+so often left alone in the country, wished me for company; it was for
+that she had kept me. After making one sacrifice to friendship, I must
+now make another to gratitude. A man must be poor, must be without a
+servant, must be a hater of constraint, and he must have my character,
+before he can know what it is for me to live in another person's house.
+For all that, I lived two years in hers, constantly brought into bondage
+with the finest harangues about liberty, served by twenty domestics, and
+cleaning my own shoes every morning, overloaded with gloomy indigestion,
+and incessantly sighing for my homely porringer.... Consider how much
+money an hour of the life and the time of a man is worth; compare the
+kindnesses of Madame d'Epinay with the sacrifice of my native country
+and two years of serfdom; and then tell me whether the obligation is
+greater on her side or mine." He then urges with a torrent of impetuous
+eloquence the thoroughly sound reasons why it was unfair and absurd for
+him, a beggar and an invalid, to make the journey with Madame d'Epinay,
+rich and surrounded by attendants. He is particularly splenetic that the
+philosopher Diderot, sitting in his own room before a good fire and
+wrapped in a well-lined dressing-gown, should insist on his doing his
+five and twenty leagues a day on foot, through the mud in winter.[310]
+
+The whole letter shows, as so many incidents in his later life showed,
+how difficult it was to do Rousseau a kindness with impunity, and how
+little such friends as Madame d'Epinay possessed the art of soothing
+this unfortunate nature. They fretted him by not leaving him
+sufficiently free to follow his own changing moods, while he in turn
+lost all self-control, and yielded in hours of bodily torment to angry
+and resentful fancies. But let us hasten to an end. Grimm replied to his
+eloquent manifesto somewhat drily, to the effect that he would think the
+matter over, and that meanwhile Rousseau had best keep quiet in his
+hermitage. Rousseau burning with excitement at once conceived a thousand
+suspicions, wholly unable to understand that a cold and reserved German
+might choose to deliberate at length, and finally give an answer with
+brevity. "After centuries of expectation in the cruel uncertainty in
+which this barbarous man had plunged me"--that is after eight or ten
+days, the answer came, apparently not without a second direct
+application for one.[311] It was short and extremely pointed, not
+complaining that Rousseau had refused to accompany Madame d'Epinay but
+protesting against the horrible tone of the apology which he had sent to
+him for not accompanying her. "It has made me quiver with indignation;
+so odious are the principles it contains, so full is it of blackness and
+duplicity. You venture to talk to me of your slavery, to me who for more
+than two years have been the daily witness of all the marks of the
+tenderest and most generous friendship that you have received at the
+hands of that woman. If I could pardon you, I should think myself
+unworthy of having a single friend. I will never see you again while I
+live, and I shall think myself happy if I can banish the recollection of
+your conduct from my mind."[312] A flash of manly anger like this is
+very welcome to us, who have to thread a tedious way between morbid
+egoistic irritation on the one hand, and sly pieces of equivocal
+complaisance on the other. The effect on Rousseau was terrific. In a
+paroxysm he sent Grimm's letter back to him, with three or four lines in
+the same key. He wrote note after note to Madame d'Houdetot, in
+shrieks. "Have I a single friend left, man or woman? One word, only one
+word, and I can live." A day or two later: "Think of the state I am in.
+I can bear to be abandoned by all the world, but you! You who know me so
+well! Great God! am I a scoundrel? a scoundrel, I!"[313] And so on,
+raving. It was to no purpose that Madame d'Houdetot wrote him soothing
+letters, praying him to calm himself, to find something to busy himself
+with, to remain at peace with Madame d'Epinay, "who had never appeared
+other than the most thoughtful and warm-hearted friend to him."[314] He
+was almost ready to quarrel with Madame d'Houdetot herself because she
+paid the postage of her letters, which he counted an affront to his
+poverty.[315] To Madame d'Epinay he had written in the midst of his
+tormenting uncertainty as to the answer which Grimm would make to his
+letter. It was an ungainly assertion that she was playing a game of
+tyranny and intrigue at his cost. For the first time she replied with
+spirit and warmth. "Your letter is hardly that of a man who, on the eve
+of my departure, swore to me that he could never in his life repair the
+wrongs he had done me." She then tersely remarks that it is not natural
+to pass one's life in suspecting and insulting one's friends, and that
+he abuses her patience. To this he answered with still greater terseness
+that friendship was extinct between them, and that he meant to leave the
+Hermitage, but as his friends desired him to remain there until the
+spring he would with her permission follow their counsel. Then she, with
+a final thrust of impatience, in which we perhaps see the hand of Grimm:
+"Since you meant to leave the Hermitage, and felt you ought to do so, I
+am astonished that your friends could detain you. For me, I don't
+consult mine as to my duties, and I have nothing more to say to you as
+to yours." This was the end. Rousseau returned for a moment from ignoble
+petulance to dignity and self-respect. He wrote to her that if it is a
+misfortune to make a mistake in the choice of friends, it is one not
+less cruel to awake from so sweet an error, and two days before he
+wrote, he left her house. He found a cottage at Montmorency, and
+thither, nerved with fury, through snow and ice he carried his scanty
+household goods (Dec. 15, 1757).[316]
+
+We have a picture of him in this fatal month. Diderot went to pay him a
+visit (Dec. 5). Rousseau was alone at the bottom of his garden. As soon
+as he saw Diderot, he cried in a voice of thunder and with his eyes all
+aflame: "What have you come here for?" "I want to know whether you are
+mad or malicious." "You have known me for fifteen years; you are well
+aware how little malicious I am, and I will prove to you that I am not
+mad: follow me." He then drew Diderot into a room, and proceeded to
+clear himself, by means of letters, of the charge of trying to make a
+breach between Saint Lambert and Madame d'Houdetot. They were in fact
+letters that convicted him, as we know, of trying to persuade Madame
+d'Houdetot of the criminality of her relations with her lover, and at
+the same time to accept himself in the very same relation. Of all this
+we have heard more than enough already. He was stubborn in the face of
+Diderot's remonstrance, and the latter left him in a state which he
+described in a letter to Grimm the same night. "I throw myself into your
+arms, like one who has had a shock of fright: that man intrudes into my
+work; he fills me with trouble, and I am as if I had a damned soul at my
+side. May I never see him again; he would make me believe in devils and
+hell."[317] And thus the unhappy man who had began this episode in his
+life with confident ecstasy in the glories and clear music of spring,
+ended it looking out from a narrow chamber upon the sullen crimson of
+the wintry twilight and over fields silent in snow, with the haggard
+desperate gaze of a lost spirit.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[254] _Conf._, ix. 247.
+
+[255] _Conf._, ix. 230. Madame d'Epinay (_Mém._, ii. 132) has given an
+account of the installation, with a slight discrepancy of date. When
+Madame d'Epinay's son-in-law emigrated at the Revolution, the
+Hermitage--of which nothing now stands--along with the rest of the
+estate became national property, and was bought after other purchasers
+by Robespierre, and afterwards by Grétry the composer, who paid 10,000
+livres for it.
+
+[256] _Conf._, ix. 255.
+
+[257] Third letter to Malesherbes, 364-368.
+
+[258] _Conf._, ix. 239.
+
+[259] _Conf._, ix. 237, 238, and 263, etc.
+
+[260] The extract from the Project for Perpetual Peace and the
+Polysynodia, together with Rousseau's judgments on them, are found at
+the end of the volume containing the Social Contract. The first, but
+without the judgment, was printed separately without Rousseau's
+permission, in 1761, by Bastide, to whom he had sold it for twelve
+louis for publication in his journal only. _Conf._, xi. 107. _Corr._,
+ii. 110, 128.
+
+[261] P. 485.
+
+[262] For a sympathetic account of the Abbé de Saint Pierre's life and
+speculations, see M. Léonce de Lavergne's _Economistes français du
+18ième siècle_ (Paris: 1870). Also Comte's _Lettres à M. Valat_, p.
+73.
+
+[263] _Conf._, ix. 270-274.
+
+[264] _Conf._, ix. 289.
+
+[265] _Ib._ ix. 286.
+
+[266] D'Epinay, ii. 153.
+
+[267] Madame d'Houdetot, (_b._ 1730--_d._ 1813) was the daughter of M.
+de Bellegarde, the father of Madame d'Epinay's husband. Her marriage
+with the Count d'Houdetot, of high Norman stock, took place in 1748.
+The circumstances of the marriage, which help to explain the lax view
+of the vows common among the great people of the time, are given with
+perhaps a shade too much dramatic colouring in Madame d'Epinay's
+_Mém._, i 101.
+
+[268] _Conf._, ix. 281.
+
+[269] D'Epinay, ii. 246.
+
+[270] D'Epinay, ii. 269.
+
+[271] Musset-Pathay has collected two or three trifles of her
+composition, ii. 136-138. Heal so quotes Madame d'Allard's account of
+her, pp. 140, 141.
+
+[272] Quoted by M. Girardin, _Rev. des Deux Mondes_, Sept. 1853, p.
+1080.
+
+[273] _Conf._, ix. 304.
+
+[274] _Ib._ ix. 305. Slightly modified version in _Corr._, i. 377.
+
+[275] M. Boiteau's note to Madame d'Epinay, ii. 273.
+
+[276] Grimm, to Madame d'Epinay, ii. 305.
+
+[277] This is shown partly by Saint Lambert's letter to Rousseau, to
+which we come presently, and partly by a letter of Madame d'Houdetot
+to Rousseau in May, 1758 (Streckeisen-Moultou, i. 411-413), where she
+distinctly says that she concealed his mad passion for her from Saint
+Lambert, who first heard of it in common conversation.
+
+[278] _Conf._, ix. 311.
+
+[279] Besides the many hints of reference to this in the Confessions,
+see the phrenetic Letters to Sarah, printed in the _Mélanges_, pp.
+347-360.
+
+[280] _Conf._, ix. 337.
+
+[281] _Corr._, i. 398. Sept. 4, 1757.
+
+[282] To Madame d'Houdetot. _Corr._, i. 376-387. June 1757.
+
+[283] Saint Lambert to Rousseau, from Wolfenbuttel, Oct. 11, 1757.
+Streckeisen-Moultou, i. 415.
+
+[284] These letters are given in M. Streckeisen-Moultou's first volume
+(pp. 354-414). The thirty-second of them (Jan. 10, 1758) is perhaps
+the one best worth turning to.
+
+[285] Streckeisen-Moultou, i. 412. May 6, 1768. _Conf._, x. 15.
+
+[286] _Ib._ x. 22.
+
+[287] _Ib._ x. 18. Streckeisen, i. 422.
+
+[288] _Conf._, x. 24.
+
+[289] To Madame d'Epinay, 1757. _Corr._, i. 362, 353. See also
+_Conf._, ix. 307.
+
+[290] One of the most unflinching in this kind is an _Essai sur la vie
+et le caractère de J.J. Rousseau_, by G.H. Morin (Paris: 1851): the
+laborious production of a bitter advocate, who accepts the
+Confessions, Dialogues, Letters, etc., with the reverence due to
+verbal inspiration, and writes of everybody who offended his hero,
+quite in the vein of Marat towards aristocrats.
+
+[291] _Corr._, i. 327-335. D'Epinay, ii. 165-182
+
+[292] D'Epinay, ii. 173.
+
+[293] _Conf._, ix. 325.
+
+[294] _Ib._, ix. 334.
+
+[295] _Mém._, ii. 297. She also places the date many mouths later than
+Rousseau, and detaches the reconciliation from the quarrel in the
+winter of 1756-1757.
+
+[296] The same story is referred to in Madame de Vandeul's _Mém. de
+Diderot, _p. 61.
+
+[297] _Conf._, ix. 245, 246.
+
+[298] Grimm to Madame d'Epinay, ii. 259, 269, 313, 326. _Conf._, x.
+17.
+
+[299] _Mém._, ii. 318.
+
+[300] _Conf._, ix. 322. Madame d'Epinay (_Mém._, ii. 326), writing to
+Grimm, gives a much colder and stiffer colour to the scene of
+reconciliation, but the nature of her relations with him would account
+for this. The same circumstance, as M. Girardin has pointed out (_Rev.
+des Deux Mondes_, Sept. 1853), would explain the discrepancy between
+her letters as given in the Confessions, and the copies of them sent
+to Grimm, and printed in her Memoirs. M. Sainte Beuve, who is never
+perfectly master of himself in dealing with the chiefs of the
+revolutionary schools, as might indeed have been expected in a writer
+with his predilections for the seventeenth century, rashly hints
+(_Causeries_, vii. 301) that Rousseau was the falsifier. The
+publication from the autograph originals sets this at rest.
+
+[301] For Shakespeare, see _Corr. Lit._, iv. 143, etc.
+
+[302] D'Epinay, ii. 188.
+
+[303] D'Epinay, ii. 150. Also Vandeul's _Mém. de Diderot_, p. 61.
+
+[304] _Mém._ ii. 128.
+
+[305] P. 258. See also p. 146.
+
+[306] Pp. 282, 336, etc.
+
+[307] _Corr._, i. 386. June 1757.
+
+[308] _Conf._, ix. 355. For Madame d'Epinay's equally credible
+version, assigning all the stiffness and arrogance to Rousseau, see
+_Mém._, ii. 355-358. Saint Lambert refers to the momentary
+reconciliation in his letter to Rousseau of Nov. 21 (Streckeisen, i.
+418), repeating what he had said before (p. 417), that Grimm always
+spoke of Mm in amicable terms, though complaining of Rousseau's
+injustice.
+
+[309] _Conf._, ix. 372.
+
+[310] _Corr._, i. 404-416. Oct 19, 1757.
+
+[311] Grimm to Diderot, in Madame d'Epinay's _Mém._ ii. 386. Nov. 3,
+1757.
+
+[312] D'Epinay, ii. 387. Nov. 3.
+
+[313] _Corr._, i. 425. Nov. 8. _Ib._ 426.
+
+[314] Streckeisen-Moultou, i. 381-383.
+
+[315] _Ib._ 387. Many years after, Rousseau told Bernardin de St.
+Pierre (_Oeuv._, xii. 57) that one of the reasons which made him leave
+the Hermitage was the indiscretion of friends who insisted on sending
+him letters by some conveyance that cost 4 francs, when it might
+equally well have been sent for as many sous.
+
+[316] The sources of all this are in the following places. _Corr._, i.
+416. Oct. 29. Streckeisen, i. 349. Nov. 12. _Conf._, ix. 377. _Corr._,
+i. 427. Nov. 23. _Conf._, ix. 381. Dec. 1. _Ib._, ix. 383. Dec. 17.
+
+[317] Diderot to Grimm; D'Epinay, ii. 397. Diderot's _Oeuv._, xix.
+446. See also 449 and 210.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+MUSIC.
+
+
+Simplification has already been used by us as the key-word to Rousseau's
+aims and influence. The scheme of musical notation with which he came to
+try his fortune in Paris in 1741, his published vindication of it, and
+his musical compositions afterwards all fall under this term. Each of
+them was a plea for the extrication of the simple from the cumbrousness
+of elaborated pedantry, and for a return to nature from the unmeaning
+devices of false art. And all tended alike in the popular direction,
+towards the extension of enjoyment among the common people, and the
+glorification of their simple lives and moods, in the art designed for
+the great.
+
+The Village Soothsayer was one of the group of works which marked a
+revolution in the history of French music, by putting an end to the
+tyrannical tradition of Lulli and Rameau, and preparing the way through
+a middle stage of freshness, simplicity, naturalism, up to the noble
+severity of Gluck (1714-1787). This great composer, though a Bohemian by
+birth, found his first appreciation in a public that had been trained
+by the Italian pastoral operas, of which Rousseau's was one of the
+earliest produced in France. Grétri, the Fleming (1741-1813), who had a
+hearty admiration for Jean Jacques, and out of a sentiment of piety
+lived for a time in his Hermitage, came in point of musical excellence
+between the group of Rousseau, Philidor, Duni, and the rest, and Gluck.
+"I have not produced exaltation in people's heads by tragical
+superlative," Grétri said, "but I have revealed the accent of truth,
+which I have impressed deeper in men's hearts."[318] These words express
+sufficiently the kind of influence which Rousseau also had. Crude as the
+music sounds to us who are accustomed to more sumptuous schools, we can
+still hear in it the note which would strike a generation weary of
+Rameau. It was the expression in one way of the same mood which in
+another way revolted against paint, false hair, and preposterous costume
+as of savages grown opulent. Such music seems without passion or
+subtlety or depth or magnificence. Thus it had hardly any higher than a
+negative merit, but it was the necessary preparation for the acceptance
+of a more positive style, that should replace both the elaborate false
+art of the older French composers and the too colourless realism of the
+pastoral comic opera, by the austere loveliness and elevation of _Orfeo_
+and _Alceste_.
+
+In 1752 an Italian company visited Paris, and performed at the Opera a
+number of pieces by Pergolese, and other composers of their country. A
+violent war arose, which agitated Paris far more intensely than the
+defeat of Rossbach and the loss of Canada did afterwards. The quarrel
+between the Parliament and the Clergy was at its height. The Parliament
+had just been exiled, and the gravest confusion threatened the State.
+The operatic quarrel turned the excitement of the capital into another
+channel. Things went so far that the censor was entreated to prohibit
+the printing of any work containing the damnable doctrine and position
+that Italian music is good. Rousseau took part enthusiastically with the
+Italians.[319] His Letter on French Music (1753) proved to the great
+fury of the people concerned, that the French had no national music, and
+that it would be so much the worse for them if they ever had any. Their
+language, so proper to be the organ of truth and reason, was radically
+unfit either for poetry or music. All national music must derive its
+principal characteristics from the language. Now if there is a language
+in Europe fit for music, it is certainly the Italian, for it is sweet,
+sonorous, harmonious, and more accentuated than any other, and these are
+precisely the four qualities which adapt a language to singing. It is
+sweet because the articulations are not composite, because the meeting
+of consonants is both infrequent and soft, and because a great number of
+the syllables being only formed of vowels, frequent elisions make its
+pronunciation more flowing. It is sonorous because most of the vowels
+are full, because it is without composite diphthongs, because it has
+few or no nasal vowels. Again, the inversions of the Italian are far
+more favourable to true melody than the didactic order of French. And so
+onwards, with much close grappling of the matter. French melody does not
+exist; it is only a sort of modulated plain-song which has nothing
+agreeable in itself, which only pleases with the aid of a few capricious
+ornaments, and then only pleases those who have agreed to find it
+beautiful.[320]
+
+The letter contains a variety of acute remarks upon music, and includes
+a vigorous protest against fugues, imitations, double designs, and the
+like. Scarcely any one succeeds in them, and success even when obtained
+hardly rewards the labour. As for counterfugues, double fugues, and
+"other difficult fooleries that the ear cannot endure nor the reason
+justify," they are evidently relics of barbarism and bad taste which
+only remain, like the porticoes of our gothic churches, to the disgrace
+of those who had patience enough to construct them.[321] The last
+phrase-and both Voltaire and Turgot used gothic architecture as the
+symbol for the supreme of rudeness and barbarism--shows that even a man
+who seems to run counter to the whole current of his time yet does not
+escape its influence.
+
+Grimm, after remarking on the singularity of a demonstration of the
+impossibility of setting melody to French words on the part of a writer
+who had just produced the Village Soothsayer, informs us that the letter
+created a furious uproar, and set all Paris in a blaze. He had himself
+taken the side of the Italians in an amusing piece of pleasantry, which
+became a sort of classic model for similar facetiousness in other
+controversies of the century. The French, as he said, forgive everything
+in favour of what makes them laugh, but Rousseau talked reason and
+demolished the pretensions of French music with great sounding strokes
+as of an axe.[322] Rousseau expected to be assassinated, and gravely
+assures us that there was a plot to that effect, as well as a design to
+put him in the Bastille. This we may fairly surmise to have been a
+fiction of his own imagination, and the only real punishment that
+overtook him was the loss of his right to free admission to the Opera.
+After what he had said of the intolerable horrors of French music, the
+directors of the theatre can hardly be accused of vindictiveness in
+releasing him from them.[323] Some twenty years after (1774), when Paris
+was torn asunder by the violence of the two great factions of the
+Gluckists and Piccinists, Rousseau retracted his opinion as to the
+impossibility of wedding melody to French words.[324] He went as often
+as he could to hear the works both of Grétri and Gluck, and _Orfeo_
+delighted him, while the _Fausse magie_ of the former moved him to say
+to the composer, "Your music stirs sweet sensations to which I thought
+my heart had long been closed."[325] This being so, and life being as
+brief as art is long, we need not further examine the controversy. It
+may be worth adding that Rousseau wrote some of the articles on music
+for the Encyclopædia, and that in 1767 he published a not inconsiderable
+Musical Dictionary of his own.
+
+His scheme of a new musical notation and the principles on which he
+defended it are worth attention, because some of the ideas are now
+accepted as the base of a well-known and growing system of musical
+instruction. The aim of the scheme, let us say to begin with, was at
+once practical and popular; to reduce the difficulty of learning music
+to the lowest possible point, and so to bring the most delightful of the
+arts within the reach of the largest possible number of people. Hence,
+although he maintains the fitness of his scheme for instrumental as well
+as vocal performances, it is clearly the latter which he has most at
+heart, evidently for the reason that this is the kind of music most
+accessible to the thousands, and it was always the thousands of whom
+Rousseau thought. This is the true distinction of music, it is for the
+people; and the best musical notation is that which best enables persons
+to sing at sight. The difficulty of the old notation had come
+practically before him as a teacher. The quantity of details which the
+pupil was forced to commit to memory before being able to sing from the
+open book, struck him then as the chief obstacle to anything like
+facility in performance, and without some of this facility he rightly
+felt that music must remain a luxury for the few. So genuine was his
+interest in the matter, that he was not very careful to fight for the
+originality of his own scheme. Our present musical signs, he said, are
+so imperfect and so inconvenient that it is no wonder that several
+persons have tried to re-cast or amend them; nor is it any wonder that
+some of them should have hit upon the same device in selecting the signs
+most natural and proper, such as numerical figures. As much, however,
+depends on the way of dealing with these figures, as with their
+adoption, and here he submitted that his own plan was as novel as it was
+advantageous.[326] Thus we have to bear in mind that Rousseau's scheme
+was above all things a practical device, contrived for making the
+teaching and the learning of musical elements an easier process.[327]
+
+The chief element of the project consists in the substitution of a
+relative series of notes or symbols in place of an absolute series. In
+the common notation any given note, say the A of the treble clef, is
+uniformly represented by the same symbol, namely, the position of second
+space in the clef, whatever key it may belong to. Rousseau, insisting on
+the varying quality impressed on any tone of a given pitch by the
+key-note of the scale to which it belongs, protested against the same
+name being given to the tone, however the quality of it might vary. Thus
+Re or D, which is the second tone in the key of C, ought, according to
+him, to have a different name when found as the fifth in the key of G,
+and in every case the name should at once indicate the interval of a
+tone from its key-note. His mode of effecting this change is as follows.
+The names _ut, re_, and the rest, are kept for the fixed order of the
+tones, C, D, E, and the rest. The key of a piece is shown by prefixing
+one of these symbols, and this determines the absolute quality of the
+melody as to pitch. That settled, every tone is expressed by a number
+bearing a relation to the key-note. This tonic note is represented by
+one, the other six tones of the scale are expressed by the numbers from
+two to seven. In the popular Tonic Sol-Fa notation, which corresponds
+so closely to Rousseau's in principle, the key-note is always styled Do,
+and the other symbols, _mi_, _la_, and the rest, indicate at once the
+relative position of these tones in their particular key or scale. Here
+the old names were preserved as being easily sung; Rousseau selected
+numbers because he supposed that they best expressed the generation of
+the sounds.[328]
+
+Rousseau attempted to find a theoretic base for this symbolic
+establishment of the relational quality of tones, and he dimly guessed
+that the order of the harmonics or upper tones of a given tonic would
+furnish a principle for forming the familiar major scale,[329] but his
+knowledge of the order was faulty. He was perhaps groping after the idea
+by which Professor Helmholtz has accounted for the various mental
+effects of the several intervals in a key--namely, the degree of natural
+affinity, measured by means of the upper tones, existing between the
+given tone and its tonic. Apart from this, however, the practical value
+of his ideas in instruction in singing is clearly shown by the
+circumstance that at any given time many thousands of young children are
+now being taught to read melody in the Sol-Fa notation in a few weeks.
+This shows how right Rousseau was in continually declaring the ease of
+hitting a particular tone, when the relative position of the tone in
+respect to the key-note is clearly manifested. A singer in trying to hit
+the tone is compelled to measure the interval between it and the
+preceding tone, and the simplest and easiest mode of doing this is to
+associate every tone with the tonics, thus constituting it a term of a
+relation with this fundamental tone.
+
+Rousseau made a mistake when he supposed that his ideas were just as
+applicable to instrumental as they were to vocal music. The requirements
+of the singer are not those of the player. To a performer on the piano,
+who has to light rapidly and simultaneously on a number of tones, or to
+a violinist who has to leap through several octaves with great rapidity,
+the most urgent need is that of a definite and fixed mark, by which the
+absolute pitch of each successive tone may be at once recognised.
+Neither of these has any time to think about the melodious relation of
+the tones; it is quite as much as they can do to find their place on the
+key-board or the string. Rousseau's scheme, or any similar one, fails to
+supply the clear and obvious index to pitch supplied by the old system.
+Old Rameau pointed this out to Rousseau when the scheme was laid before
+him, and Rousseau admitted that the objection was decisive,[330] though
+his admission was not practically deterrent.
+
+His device for expressing change of octave by means of points would
+render the rapid seizing of a particular tone by the performer still
+more difficult, and it is strange that he should have preferred this to
+the other plan suggested, of indicating height of octave by visible
+place above or below a horizontal line. Again, his attempt to simplify
+the many varieties of musical time by reducing them all to the two modes
+of double and triple time, though laudable enough, yet implies an
+imperfect recognition of the full meaning of time, by omitting all
+reference to the distribution of accent and to the average time value of
+the tones in a particular movement.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[318] Quoted in Martin's _Hist. de France_, xvi. 158.
+
+[319] _Conf._, viii. 197. Grimm, _Corr. Lit._, i. 27.
+
+[320] _Lettre sur la Musique Française_, 178, etc., 187.
+
+[321] P. 197.
+
+[322] _Corr. Lit._, i. 92. His own piece was _Le petit prophète de
+Boehmischbroda_, the style of which will be seen in a subsequent
+footnote.
+
+[323] He was burnt in effigy by the musicians of the Opera. Grimm,
+_Corr. Lit._, i. 113.
+
+[324] This is Turgot's opinion on the controversy (Letter to Caillard,
+_Oeuv._, ii. 827):--"Tous avez donc vu Jean-Jacques; la musique est un
+excellent passe-port auprès de lui. Quant à l'impossibilité de faire
+de la musique française, je ne puis y croire, et votre raison ne me
+paraît pas bonne; car il n'est point vrai que l'essence de la langue
+française est d'être sans accent. Point de conversation animée sans
+beaucoup d'accent; mais l'accent est libre et déterminé seulement par
+l'affection de celui qui parle, sans être fixé par des conventions sur
+certaines syllabes, quoique nous ayons aussi dans plusieurs mots des
+syllabes dominantes qui seules peuvent être accentuées."
+
+[325] Musset-Pathay, i. 289.
+
+[326] Preface to _Dissertation sur la Musique Moderne_, pp. 32, 33.
+
+[327] I am indebted to Mr. James Sully, M.A., for furnishing me with
+notes on a technical subject with which I have too little
+acquaintance.
+
+[328] _Dissertation_, p. 42.
+
+[329] P. 52.
+
+[330] _Conf._, vii. 18, 19. Also _Dissertation_, pp. 74, 75.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+VOLTAIRE AND D'ALEMBERT.
+
+
+Everybody in the full tide of the eighteenth century had something to do
+with Voltaire, from serious personages like Frederick the Great and
+Turgot, down to the sorriest poetaster who sent his verses to be
+corrected or bepraised. Rousseau's debt to him in the days of his
+unformed youth we have already seen, as well as the courtesies with
+which they approached one another, when Richelieu employed the
+struggling musician to make some modifications in the great man's
+unconsidered court-piece. Neither of them then dreamed that their two
+names were destined to form the great literary antithesis of the
+century. In the ten years that elapsed between their first interchange
+of letters and their first fit of coldness, it must have been tolerably
+clear to either of them, if either of them gave thought to the matter,
+that their dissidence was increasing and likely to increase. Their
+methods were different, their training different, their points of view
+different, and above all these things, their temperaments were different
+by a whole heaven's breadth.
+
+A great number of excellent and pointed half-truths have been uttered
+by various persons in illustration of all these contrasts. The
+philosophy of Voltaire, for instance, is declared to be that of the
+happy, while Rousseau is the philosopher of the unhappy. Voltaire steals
+away their faith from those who doubt, while Rousseau strikes doubt into
+the mind of the unbeliever. The gaiety of the one saddens, while the
+sadness of the other consoles. If we pass from the marked divergence in
+tendencies, which is imperfectly hinted at in such sayings as these, to
+the divergence between them in all the fundamental conditions of
+intellectual and moral life, then the variation which divided the
+revolutionary stream into two channels, flowing broadly apart through
+unlike regions and climates down to the great sea, is intelligible
+enough. Voltaire was the arch-representative of all those elements in
+contemporary thought, its curiosity, irreverence, intrepidity,
+vivaciousness, rationality, to which, as we have so often had to say,
+Rousseau's temperament and his Genevese spirit made him profoundly
+antipathetic. Voltaire was the great high priest, robed in the dazzling
+vestments of poetry and philosophy and history, of that very religion of
+knowledge and art which Rousseau declared to be the destroyer of the
+felicity of men. The glitter has faded away from Voltaire's philosophic
+raiment since those days, and his laurel bough lies a little leafless.
+Still this can never make us forget that he was in his day and
+generation one of the sovereign emancipators, because he awoke one
+dormant set of energies, just as Rousseau presently came to awake
+another set. Each was a power, not merely by virtue of some singular
+preeminence of understanding or mysterious unshared insight of his own,
+but for a far deeper reason. No partial and one-sided direction can
+permanently satisfy the manifold aspirations and faculties of the human
+mind in the great average of common men, and it is the common average of
+men to whom exceptional thinkers speak, whom they influence, and by whom
+they are in turn influenced, depressed, or buoyed up, just as a painter
+or a dramatist is affected. Voltaire's mental constitution made him
+eagerly objective, a seeker of true things, quivering for action,
+admirably sympathetic with all life and movement, a spirit restlessly
+traversing the whole world. Rousseau, far different from this, saw in
+himself a reflected microcosm of the outer world, and was content to
+take that instead of the outer world, and as its truest version. He made
+his own moods the premisses from which he deduced a system of life for
+humanity, and so far as humanity has shared his moods or some parts of
+them, his system was true, and has been accepted. To him the bustle of
+the outer world was only a hindrance to that process of self-absorption
+which was his way of interpreting life. Accessible only to interests of
+emotion and sense, he was saved from intellectual sterility, and made
+eloquent, by the vehemence of his emotion and the fire of his senses. He
+was a master example of sensibility, as Voltaire was a master example
+of clear-eyed penetration.
+
+This must not be taken for a rigid piece of mutually exclusive division,
+for the edges of character are not cut exactly sharp, as words are.
+Especially when any type is intense, it seems to meet and touch its
+opposite. Just as Voltaire's piercing activity and soundness of
+intelligence made him one of the humanest of men, so Rousseau's
+emotional susceptibility endowed him with the gift of a vision that
+carried far into the social depths. It was a very early criticism on the
+pair, that Voltaire wrote on more subjects, but that Rousseau was the
+more profound. In truth one was hardly much more profound than the
+other. Rousseau had the sonorousness of speech which popular confusion
+of thought is apt to identify with depth. And he had seriousness. If
+profundity means the quality of seeing to the heart of subjects,
+Rousseau had in a general way rather less of it than the shrewd-witted
+crusher of the Infamous. What the distinction really amounts to is that
+Rousseau had a strong feeling for certain very important aspects of
+human life, which Voltaire thought very little about, or never thought
+about at all, and that while Voltaire was concerned with poetry,
+history, literature, and the more ridiculous parts of the religious
+superstition of his time, Rousseau thought about social justice and duty
+and God and the spiritual consciousness of men, with a certain attempt
+at thoroughness and system. As for the substance of his thinking, as we
+have already seen in the Discourses, and shall soon have an opportunity
+of seeing still more clearly, it was often as thin and hollow as if he
+had belonged to the company of the epigrammatical, who, after all, have
+far less of a monopoly of shallow thinking than is often supposed. The
+prime merit of Rousseau, in comparing him with the brilliant chief of
+the rationalistic school of the time, is his reverence; reverence for
+moral worth in however obscure intellectual company, for the dignity of
+human character and the loftiness of duty, for some of those cravings of
+the human mind after the divine and incommensurable, which may indeed
+often be content with solutions proved by long time and slow experience
+to be inadequate, but which are closely bound up with the highest
+elements of nobleness of soul.
+
+It was this spiritual part of him which made Rousseau a third great
+power in the century, between the Encyclopædic party and the Church. He
+recognised a something in men, which the Encyclopædists treated as a
+chimera imposed on the imagination by theologians and others for their
+own purposes. And he recognised this in a way which did not offend the
+rational feeling of the times, as the Catholic dogmas offended it. In a
+word he was religious. In being so, he separated himself from Voltaire
+and his school, who did passably well without religion. Again, he was a
+puritan. In being this, he was cut off from the intellectually and
+morally unreformed church, which was then the organ of religion in
+France. Nor is this all. It was Rousseau, and not the feeble
+controversialists put up from time to time by the Jesuits and other
+ecclesiastical bodies, who proved the effective champion of religion,
+and the only power who could make head against the triumphant onslaught
+of the Voltaireans. He gave up Christian dogmas and mysteries, and,
+throwing himself with irresistible ardour upon the emotions in which all
+religions have their root and their power, he breathed new life into
+them, he quickened in men a strong desire to have them satisfied, and he
+beat back the army of emancipators with the loud and incessantly
+repeated cry that they were not come to deliver the human mind, but to
+root out all its most glorious and consolatory attributes. This immense
+achievement accomplished,--the great framework of a faith in God and
+immortality and providential government of the world thus preserved, it
+was an easy thing by and by for the churchmen to come back, and once
+more unpack and restore to their old places the temporarily discredited
+paraphernalia of dogma and mystery. How far all this was good or bad for
+the mental elevation of France and Europe, we shall have a better
+opportunity of considering presently.
+
+We have now only to glance at the first skirmishes between the religious
+reactionist, on the one side, and, on the other, the leader of the
+school who believed that men are better employed in thinking as
+accurately, and knowing as widely, and living as humanely, as all those
+difficult processes are possible, than in wearying themselves in futile
+search after gods who dwell on inaccessible heights.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Voltaire had acknowledged Rousseau's gift of the second Discourse with
+his usual shrewd pleasantry: "I have received your new book against the
+human race, and thank you for it. Never was such cleverness used in the
+design of making us all stupid. One longs in reading your book to walk
+on all fours. But as I have lost that habit for more than sixty years, I
+feel unhappily the impossibility of resuming it. Nor can I embark in
+search of the savages of Canada, because the maladies to which I am
+condemned render a European surgeon necessary to me; because war is
+going on in those regions; and because the example of our actions has
+made the savages nearly as bad as ourselves. So I content myself with
+being a very peaceable savage in the solitude which I have chosen near
+your native place, where you ought to be too." After an extremely
+inadequate discussion of one or two points in the essay,[331] he
+concludes:--"I am informed that your health is bad; you ought to come to
+set it up again in your native air, to enjoy freedom, to drink with me
+the milk of our cows and browse our grass."[332] Rousseau replied to all
+this in a friendly way, recognising Voltaire as his chief, and actually
+at the very moment when he tells us that the corrupting presence of the
+arrogant and seductive man at Geneva helped to make the idea of
+returning to Geneva odious to him, hailing him in such terms as
+these:--"Sensible of the honour you do my country, I share the gratitude
+of my fellow-citizens, and hope that it will increase when they have
+profited by the lessons that you of all men are able to give them.
+Embellish the asylum you have chosen; enlighten a people worthy of your
+instruction; and do you who know so well how to paint virtue and
+freedom, teach us to cherish them in our walls."[333]
+
+Within a year, however, the bright sky became a little clouded. In 1756
+Voltaire published one of the most sincere, energetic, and passionate
+pieces to be found in the whole literature of the eighteenth century,
+his poem on the great earthquake of Lisbon (November 1755). No such word
+had been heard in Europe since the terrible images in which Pascal had
+figured the doom of man. It was the reaction of one who had begun life
+by refuting Pascal with doctrines of cheerfulness drawn from the
+optimism of Pope and Leibnitz, who had done Pope's Essay on Man
+(1732-34) into French verse as late as 1751,[334] and whose imagination,
+already sombred by the triumphant cruelty and superstition which raged
+around him, was suddenly struck with horror by a catastrophe which, in a
+world where whatever is is best, destroyed hundreds of human creatures
+in the smoking ashes and engulfed wreck of their city. How, he cried,
+can you persist in talking of the deliberate will of a free and
+benevolent God, whose eternal laws necessitated such an appalling climax
+of misery and injustice as this? Was the disaster retributive? If so,
+why is Lisbon in ashes, while Paris dances? The enigma is desperate and
+inscrutable, and the optimist lives in the paradise of the fool. We ask
+in vain what we are, where we are, whither we go, whence we came. We are
+tormented atoms on a clod of earth, whom death at last swallows up, and
+with whom destiny meanwhile makes cruel sport. The past is only a
+disheartening memory, and if the tomb destroys the thinking creature,
+how frightful is the present!
+
+Whatever else we may say of Voltaire's poem, it was at least the first
+sign of the coming reaction of sympathetic imagination against the
+polished common sense of the great Queen Anne school, which had for more
+than a quarter of a century such influence in Europe.[335] It is a
+little odd that Voltaire, the most brilliant and versatile branch of
+this stock, should have broken so energetically away from it, and that
+he should have done so, shows how open and how strong was the feeling in
+him for reality and actual circumstance.
+
+Rousseau was amazed that a man overwhelmed as Voltaire was with
+prosperity and glory, should declaim against the miseries of this life
+and pronounce that all is evil and vanity. "Voltaire in seeming always
+to believe in God, never really believed in anybody but the devil, since
+his pretended God is a maleficent being who according to him finds all
+his pleasure in working mischief. The absurdity of this doctrine is
+especially revolting in a man crowned with good things of every sort,
+and who from the midst of his own happiness tries to fill his
+fellow-creatures with despair, by the cruel and terrible image of the
+serious calamities from which he is himself free."[336]
+
+As if any doctrine could be more revolting than this which Rousseau so
+quietly takes for granted, that if it is well with me and I am free from
+calamities, then there must needs be a beneficent ruler of the universe,
+and the calamities of all the rest of the world, if by chance they catch
+the fortunate man's eye, count for nothing in our estimate of the method
+of the supposed divine government. It is hard to imagine a more
+execrable emotion than the complacent religiosity of the prosperous.
+Voltaire is more admirable in nothing than in the ardent humanity and
+far-spreading lively sympathy with which he interested himself in all
+the world's fortunes, and felt the catastrophe of Lisbon as profoundly
+as if the Geneva at his gates had been destroyed. He relished his own
+prosperity keenly enough, but his prosperity became ashes in his mouth
+when he heard of distress or wrong, and he did not rest until he had
+moved heaven and earth to soothe the distress and repair the wrong. It
+was his impatience in the face of the evils of the time which wrung from
+him this desperate cry, and it is precisely because these evils did not
+touch him in his own person, that he merits the greater honour for the
+surpassing energy and sincerity of his feeling for them.
+
+Rousseau, however, whose biographer has no such stories to tell as those
+of Calas and La Barre, Sirven and Lally, but only tales of a maiden
+wrongfully accused of theft, and a friend left senseless on the pavement
+of a strange town, and a benefactress abandoned to the cruelty of her
+fate, still was moved in the midst of his erotic visions in the forest
+of Montmorency to speak a jealous word in vindication of the divine
+government of our world. For him at any rate life was then warm and the
+day bright and the earth very fair, and he lauded his gods accordingly.
+It was his very sensuousness, as we are so often saying, that made him
+religious. The optimism which Voltaire wished to destroy was to him a
+sovereign element of comfort. "Pope's poem," he says, "softens my
+misfortunes and inclines me to patience, while yours sharpens all my
+pains, excites me to murmuring, and reduces me to despair. Pope and
+Leibnitz exhort me to resignation by declaring calamities to be a
+necessary effect of the nature and constitution of the universe. You
+cry, Suffer for ever, unhappy wretch; if there be a God who created
+thee, he could have stayed thy pains if he would: hope for no end to
+them, for there is no reason to be discerned for thy existence, except
+to suffer and to perish."[337] Rousseau then proceeds to argue the
+matter, but he says nothing really to the point which Pope had not said
+before, and said far more effectively. He begins, however, originally
+enough by a triumphant reference to his own great theme of the
+superiority of the natural over the civil state. Moral evil is our own
+work, the result of our liberty; so are most of our physical evils,
+except death, and that is mostly an evil only from the preparations that
+we make for it. Take the case of Lisbon. Was it nature who collected the
+twenty thousand houses, all seven stories high? If the people of Lisbon
+had been dispersed over the face of the country, as wild tribes are,
+they would have fled at the first shock, and they would have been seen
+the next day twenty leagues away, as gay as if nothing had happened. And
+how many of them perished in the attempt to rescue clothes or papers or
+money? Is it not true that the person of a man is now, thanks to
+civilisation, the least part of himself, and is hardly worth saving
+after loss of the rest? Again, there are some events which lose much of
+their horror when we look at them closely. A premature death is not
+always a real evil and may be a relative good; of the people crushed to
+death under the ruins of Lisbon, many no doubt thus escaped still worse
+calamities. And is it worse to be killed swiftly than to await death in
+prolonged anguish?[338]
+
+The good of the whole is to be sought before the good of the part.
+Although the whole material universe ought not to be dearer to its
+Creator than a single thinking and feeling being, yet the system of the
+universe which produces, preserves, and perpetuates all thinking and
+feeling beings, ought to be dearer to him than any one of them, and he
+may, notwithstanding his goodness, or rather by reason of his goodness,
+sacrifice something of the happiness of individuals to the preservation
+of the whole. "That the dead body of a man should feed worms or wolves
+or plants is not, I admit, a compensation for the death of such a man;
+but if in the system of this universe, it is necessary for the
+preservation of the human race that there should be a circulation of
+substance between men, animals, vegetables, then the particular mishap
+of an individual contributes to the general good. I die, I am eaten by
+worms; but my children, my brothers, will live as I have lived; my body
+enriches the earth of which they will consume the fruits; and so I do,
+by the order of nature and for all men, what Codrus, Curtius, the Decii,
+and a thousand others, did of their own free will for a small part of
+men." (p. 305.)
+
+All this is no doubt very well said, and we are bound to accept it as
+true doctrine. Although, however, it may make resignation easier by
+explaining the nature of evil, it does not touch the point of Voltaire's
+outburst, which is that evil exists, and exists in shapes which it is a
+mere mockery to associate with the omnipotence of a benevolent
+controller of the world's forces. According to Rousseau, if we go to the
+root of what he means, there is no such thing as evil, though much that
+to our narrow and impatient sight has the look of it. This may be true
+if we use that fatal word in an arbitrary and unreal sense, for the
+avoidable, the consequent without antecedent, or antecedent without
+consequent. If we consent to talk in this way, and only are careful to
+define terms so that there is no doubt as to their meaning, it is hardly
+deniable that evil is a mere word and not a reality, and whatever is is
+indeed right and best, because no better is within our reach. Voltaire,
+however, like the man of sense that he was, exclaimed that at any rate
+relatively to us poor creatures the existence of pain, suffering, waste,
+whether caused or uncaused, whether in accordance with stern immutable
+law or mere divine caprice, is a most indisputable reality: from our
+point of view it is a cruel puerility to cry out at every calamity and
+every iniquity that all is well in the best of possible worlds, and to
+sing hymns of praise and glory to the goodness and mercy of a being of
+supreme might, who planted us in this evil state and keeps us in it.
+Voltaire's is no perfect philosophy; indeed it is not a philosophy at
+all, but a passionate ejaculation; but it is perfect in comparison with
+a cut and dried system like this of Rousseau's, which rests on a mocking
+juggle with phrases, and the substitution by dexterous sleight of hand
+of one definition for another.
+
+Rousseau really gives up the battle, by confessing frankly that the
+matter is beyond the light of reason, and that, "if the theist only
+founds his sentiment on probabilities, the atheist with still less
+precision only founds his on the alternative possibilities." The
+objections on both sides are insoluble, because they turn on things of
+which men can have no veritable idea; "yet I believe in God as strongly
+as I believe any other truth, because believing and not believing are
+the last things in the world that depend on me." So be it. But why take
+the trouble to argue in favour of one side of an avowedly insoluble
+question? It was precisely because he felt that the objections on both
+sides cannot be answered, that Voltaire, hastily or not, cried out that
+he faced the horrors of such a catastrophe as the Lisbon earthquake
+without a glimpse of consolation. The upshot of Rousseau's remonstrance
+only amounted to this, that he could not furnish one with any
+consolation out of the armoury of reason, that he himself found this
+consolation, but in a way that did not at all depend upon his own effort
+or will, and was therefore as incommunicable as the advantage of having
+a large appetite or being six feet high. The reader of Rousseau becomes
+accustomed to this way of dealing with subjects of discussion. We see
+him using his reason as adroitly as he knows how for three-fourths of
+the debate, and then he suddenly flings himself back with a triumphant
+kind of weariness into the buoyant waters of emotion and sentiment. "You
+sir, who are a poet," once said Madame d'Epinay to Saint Lambert, "will
+agree with me that the existence of a Being, eternal, all powerful, and
+of sovereign intelligence, is at any rate the germ of the finest
+enthusiasm."[339] To take this position and cleave to it may be very
+well, but why spoil its dignity and repose by an unmeaning and
+superfluous flourish of the weapons of the reasoner?
+
+With the same hasty change of direction Rousseau says the true question
+is not whether each of us suffers or not, but whether it is good that
+the universe should be, and whether our misfortunes were inevitable in
+its constitution. Then within a dozen lines he admits that there can be
+no direct proof either way; we must content ourselves with settling it
+by means of inference from the perfections of God. Of course, it is
+clear that in the first place what Rousseau calls the true question
+consists of two quite distinct questions. Is the universe in its present
+ordering on the whole good relatively either to men, or to all sentient
+creatures? Next was evil an inevitable element in that ordering? Second,
+this way of putting it does not in the least advance the case against
+Voltaire, who insisted that no fine phrases ought to hide from us the
+dreadful power and crushing reality of evil and the desolate plight in
+which we are left. This is no exhaustive thought, but a deep cry of
+anguish at the dark lot of men, and of just indignation against the
+philosophy which to creatures asking for bread gave the brightly
+polished stone of sentimental theism. Rousseau urged that Voltaire
+robbed men of their only solace. What Voltaire really did urge was that
+the solace derived from the attribution of humanity and justice to the
+Supreme Being, and from the metaphysical account of evil, rests on too
+narrow a base either to cover the facts, or to be a true solace to any
+man who thinks and observes. He ought to have gone on, if it had only
+been possible in those times, to persuade his readers that there is no
+solace attainable, except that of an energetic fortitude, and that we do
+best to go into life not in a softly lined silken robe, but with a sharp
+sword and armour thrice tempered. As between himself and Rousseau, he
+saw much the more keenly of the two, and this was because he approached
+the matter from the side of the facts, while the latter approached it
+from the side of his own mental comfort and the preconceptions
+involved in it.
+
+The most curious part of this curious letter is the conclusion, where
+Rousseau, loosely wandering from his theme, separates Voltaire from the
+philosopher, and beseeches him to draw up a moral code or profession of
+civil faith that should contain positively the social maxims that
+everybody should be bound to admit, and negatively the intolerant maxims
+that everybody should be forced to reject as seditious. Every religion
+in accord with the code should be allowed, and every religion out of
+accord with it proscribed, or a man might be free to have no other
+religion but the code itself.
+
+Voltaire was much too clear-headed a person to take any notice of
+nonsense like this. Rousseau's letter remained unanswered, nor is there
+any reason to suppose that Voltaire ever got through it, though Rousseau
+chose to think that _Candide_ (1759) was meant for a reply to him.[340]
+He is careful to tell us that he never read that incomparable satire,
+for which one would be disposed to pity any one except Rousseau, whose
+appreciation of wit, if not of humour also, was probably more deficient
+than in any man who ever lived, either in Geneva or any other country
+fashioned after Genevan guise. Rousseau's next letter to Voltaire was
+four years later, and by that time the alienation which had no
+definitely avowed cause, and can be marked by no special date, had
+become complete. "I hate you, in fact," he concluded, "since you have so
+willed it; but I hate you like a man still worthier to have loved you,
+if you had willed it. Of all the sentiments with which my heart was full
+towards you, there only remains the admiration that we cannot refuse to
+your fine genius, and love for your writings. If there is nothing in you
+which I can honour but your talents, that is no fault of mine."[341] We
+know that Voltaire did not take reproach with serenity, and he behaved
+with bitter violence towards Rousseau in circumstances when silence
+would have been both more magnanimous and more humane. Rousseau
+occasionally, though not very often, retaliated in the same vein.[342]
+On the whole his judgment of Voltaire, when calmly given, was not meant
+to be unkind. "Voltaire's first impulse," he said, "is to be good; it is
+reflection that makes him bad."[343] Tronchin had said in the same way
+that Voltaire's heart was the dupe of his understanding. Rousseau is
+always trying to like him, he always recognises him as the first man of
+the time, and he subscribed his mite for the erection of a statue to
+him. It was the satire and mockery in Voltaire which irritated Rousseau
+more than the doctrines or denial of doctrine which they cloaked; in his
+eyes sarcasm was always the veritable dialect of the evil power. It says
+something for the sincerity of his efforts after equitable judgment,
+that he should have had the patience to discern some of the fundamental
+merit of the most remorseless and effective mocker that ever made
+superstition look mean, and its doctors ridiculous.
+
+
+II.
+
+Voltaire was indirectly connected with Rousseau's energetic attack upon
+another great Encyclopædist leader, the famous Letter to D'Alembert on
+Stage Plays. "There," Rousseau said afterwards, "is my favourite book,
+my Benjamin, because I produced it without effort, at the first
+inspiration, and in the most lucid moments of my life."[344] Voltaire,
+who to us figures so little as a poet and dramatist, was to himself and
+to his contemporaries of this date a poet and dramatist before all else,
+the author of _Zaïre_ and _Mahomet_, rather than of _Candide_ and the
+_Philosophical Dictionary_. D'Alembert was Voltaire's staunchest
+henchman. He only wrote his article on Geneva for the Encyclopædia to
+gratify the master. Fresh from a visit to him when he composed it, he
+took occasion to regret that the austerity of the tradition of the city
+deprived it of the manifold advantages of a theatre. This suggestion had
+its origin partly in a desire to promote something that would please the
+eager vanity of the dramatist whom Geneva now had for so close a
+neighbour, and who had just set her the example by setting up a theatre
+of his own; and partly, also, because it gave the writer an opportunity
+of denouncing the intolerant rigour with which the church nearer home
+treated the stage and all who appeared on it. Geneva was to set an
+example that could not be resisted, and France would no longer see
+actors on the one hand pensioned by the government, and on the other an
+object of anathema, excommunicated by priests and regarded with contempt
+by citizens.[345]
+
+The inveterate hostility of the church to the theatre was manifested by
+the French ecclesiastics in the full eighteenth century as bitterly as
+ever. The circumstance that Voltaire was the great play-writer of the
+time would not tend to soften their traditional prejudice, and the
+persecution of players by priests was in some sense an episode of the
+war between the priest and the philosophers. The latter took up the
+cause of the stage partly because they hoped to make the drama an
+effective rival to the teaching of pulpit and confessional, partly from
+their natural sympathy with an elevated form of intellectual
+manifestation, and partly from their abhorrence of the practical
+inhumanity with which the officers of the church treated stage
+performers. While people of quality eagerly sought the society of those
+who furnished them as much diversion in private as in public, the church
+refused to all players the marriage blessing; when an actor or actress
+wished to marry, they were obliged to renounce the stage, and the
+Archbishop of Paris diligently resisted evasion or subterfuge.[346] The
+atrocities connected with the refusal of burial, as well in the case of
+players as of philosophers, are known to all readers in a dozen
+illustrious instances, from Molière and Adrienne Lecouvreur downwards.
+
+Here, as along the whole line of the battle between new light and old
+prejudice, Rousseau took part, if not with the church, at least against
+its adversaries. His point of view was at bottom truly puritanical.
+Jeremy Collier in his _Short View of the Profaneness and Immorality of
+the English Stage_ (1698) takes up quite a different position. This once
+famous piece was not a treatment of the general question, but an attack
+on certain specific qualities of the plays of his time--their indecency
+of phrase, their oaths, their abuse of the clergy, the gross libertinism
+of the characters. One can hardly deny that this was richly deserved by
+the English drama of the Restoration, and Collier's strictures were not
+applicable, nor meant to apply, either to the ancients, for he has a
+good word even for Aristophanes, or to the French drama. Bossuet's
+loftier denunciation, like Rousseau's, was puritanical, and it extended
+to the whole body of stage plays. He objected to the drama as a school
+of concupiscence, as a subtle or gross debaucher of the gravity and
+purity of the understanding, as essentially a charmer of the senses, and
+therefore the most equivocal and untrustworthy of teachers. He appeals
+to the fathers, to Scripture, to Plato, and even to Christ, who cried,
+_Woe unto you that laugh_.[347] There is a fine austerity about
+Bossuet's energetic criticism; it is so free from breathless eagerness,
+and so severe without being thinly bitter. The churchmen of a generation
+or two later had fallen from this height into gloomy peevishness.
+
+Rousseau's letter on the theatre, it need hardly be said, is meant to be
+an appeal to the common sense and judgment of his readers, and not
+conceived in the ecclesiastical tone of unctuous anathema and fulgurant
+menace. It is no bishop's pastoral, replete with solecisms of thought
+and idiom, but a piece of firm dialectic in real matter. His position is
+this: that the moral effect of the stage can never be salutary in
+itself, while it may easily be extremely pernicious, and that the habit
+of frequenting the theatre, the taste for imitating the style of the
+actors, the cost in money, the waste in time, and all the other
+accessory conditions, apart from the morality of the matter represented,
+are bad things in themselves, absolutely and in every circumstance.
+Secondly, these effects in all kinds are specially bad in relation to
+the social condition and habits of Geneva.[348] The first part of the
+discussion is an ingenious answer to some of the now trite pleas for
+the morality of the drama, such as that tragedy leads to pity through
+terror, that comedy corrects men while amusing them, that both make
+virtue attractive and vice hateful.[349] Rousseau insists with abundance
+of acutely chosen illustration that the pity that is awaked by tragedy
+is a fleeting emotion which subsides when the curtain falls; that comedy
+as often as not amuses men at the expense of old age, uncouth virtue,
+paternal carefulness, and other objects which we should be taught rather
+to revere than to ridicule; and that both tragedy and comedy, instead of
+making vice hateful, constantly win our sympathy for it. Is not the
+French stage, he asks, as much the triumph of great villains, like
+Catilina, Mahomet, Atreus, as of illustrious heroes?
+
+This rude handling of accepted commonplace is always one of the most
+interesting features in Rousseau's polemic. It was of course a
+characteristic of the eighteenth century always to take up the ethical
+and high prudential view of whatever had to be justified, and Rousseau
+seems from this point to have been successful in demolishing arguments
+which might hold of Greek tragedy at its best, but which certainly do
+not hold of any other dramatic forms. The childishness of the old
+criticism which attaches the label of some moral from the copybook to
+each piece, as its lesson and point of moral aim, is evident. In
+repudiating this Rousseau was certainly right.[350] Both the assailants
+and the defenders of the stage, however, commit the double error, first
+of supposing that the drama is always the same thing, from the Agamemnon
+down to the last triviality of a London theatre, and next of pitching
+the discussion in too high a key, as if the effect or object of a stage
+play in the modern era, where grave sentiment clothes itself in other
+forms, were substantially anything more serious than an evening's
+amusement. Apart from this, and in so far as the discussion is confined
+to the highest dramatic expression, the true answer to Rousseau is now a
+very plain one. The drama does not work in the sphere of direct
+morality, though like everything else in the world it has a moral or
+immoral aspect. It is an art of ideal presentation, not concerned with
+the inculcation of immediate practical lessons, but producing a stir in
+all our sympathetic emotions, quickening the imagination, and so
+communicating a wider life to the character of the spectator. This is
+what the drama in the hands of a worthy master does; it is just what
+noble composition in music does, and there is no more directly
+moralising effect in the one than in the other. You must trust to the
+sum of other agencies to guide the interest and sympathy thus quickened
+into channels of right action. Rousseau, like most other
+controversialists, makes an attack of which the force rests on the
+assumption that the special object of the attack is the single
+influencing element and the one decisive instrument in making men had or
+good. What he says about the drama would only be true if the public went
+to the play all day long, and were accessible to no other moral force
+whatever, modifying and counteracting such lessons as they might learn
+at the theatre. He failed here as in the wider controversy on the
+sciences and arts, to consider the particular subject of discussion in
+relation to the whole of the general medium in which character moves,
+and by whose manifold action and reaction it is incessantly affected and
+variously shaped.
+
+So when he passed on from the theory of dramatic morality to the matter
+which he had more at heart, namely, the practical effects of introducing
+the drama into Geneva, he keeps out of sight all the qualities in the
+Genevese citizen which would protect him against the evil influence of
+the stage, though it is his anxiety for the preservation of these very
+qualities that gives all its fire to his eloquence. If the citizen
+really was what Rousseau insisted that he was, then his virtues would
+surely neutralise the evil of the drama; if not, the drama would do him
+no harm. We need not examine the considerations in which Rousseau
+pointed out the special reasons against introducing a theatre into his
+native town. It would draw the artisans away from their work, cause
+wasteful expenditure of money in amusements, break up the harmless and
+inexpensive little clubs of men and the social gatherings of women. The
+town was not populous enough to support a theatre, therefore the
+government would have to provide one, and this would mean increased
+taxation. All this was the secondary and merely colourable support by
+argumentation, of a position that had been reached and was really held
+by sentiment. Rousseau hated the introduction of French plays in the
+same way that Cato hated the introduction of fine talkers from Greece.
+It was an innovation, and so habitual was it with Rousseau to look on
+all movement in the direction of what the French writers called taste
+and cultivation as depraving, that he cannot help taking for granted
+that any change in manners associated with taste must necessarily be a
+change for the worse. Thus the Letter to D'Alembert was essentially a
+supplement to the first Discourse; it was an application of its
+principles to a practical case. It was part of his general reactionary
+protest against philosophers, poets, men of letters, and all their
+works, without particular apprehension on the side of the drama. Hence
+its reasoning is much less interesting than its panegyric on the
+simplicity, robust courage, and manliness of the Genevese, and its
+invective against the effeminacy and frivolity of the Parisian. One of
+the most significant episodes in the discussion is the lengthy criticism
+on the immortal Misanthrope of Molière. Rousseau admits it for the
+masterpiece of the comic muse, though with characteristic perversity he
+insists that the hero is not misanthropic enough, nor truly misanthropic
+at all, because he flies into rage at small things affecting himself,
+instead of at the large follies of the race. Again, he says that Molière
+makes Alceste ridiculous, virtuous as he is, in order to win the
+applause of the pit. It is for the character of Philinte, however, that
+Rousseau reserves all his spleen. He takes care to describe him in terms
+which exactly hit Rousseau's own conception of his philosophic enemies,
+who find all going well because they have no interest in anything going
+better; who are content with everybody, because they do not care for
+anybody; who round a full table maintain that it is not true that the
+people are hungry. As criticism, one cannot value this kind of analysis.
+D'Alembert replied with a much more rational interpretation of the great
+comedy, but finding himself seized with the critic's besetting
+impertinence of improving masterpieces, he suddenly stopped with the
+becoming reflection--"But I perceive, sir, that I am giving lessons to
+Molière."[351]
+
+The constant thought of Paris gave Rousseau an admirable occasion of
+painting two pictures in violent contrast, each as over-coloured as the
+other by his mixed conceptions of the Plutarchian antique and imaginary
+pastoral. We forget the depravation of the stage and the ill living of
+comedians in magnificent descriptions of the manly exercises and
+cheerful festivities of the free people on the shores of the Lake of
+Geneva, and in scornful satire on the Parisian seraglios, where some
+woman assembles a number of men who are more like women than their
+entertainers. We see on the one side the rude sons of the republic,
+boxing, wrestling, running, in generous emulation, and on the other the
+coxcombs of cultivated Paris imprisoned in a drawing-room, "rising up,
+sitting down, incessantly going and coming to the fire-place, to the
+window, taking up a screen and putting it down again a hundred times,
+turning over books, flitting from picture to picture, turning and
+pirouetting about the room, while the idol stretched motionless on a
+couch all the time is only alive in her tongue and eyes" (p. 161). If
+the rough patriots of the Lake are less polished in speech, they are all
+the weightier in reason; they do not escape by a pleasantry or a
+compliment; each feeling himself attacked by all the forces of his
+adversary, he is obliged to employ all his own to defend himself, and
+this is how a mind acquires strength and precision. There may be here
+and there a licentious phrase, but there is no ground for alarm in that.
+It is not the least rude who are always the most pure, and even a rather
+clownish speech is better than that artificial style in which the two
+sexes seduce one another, and familiarise themselves decently with vice.
+'Tis true our Swiss drinks too much, but after all let us not calumniate
+even vice; as a rule drinkers are cordial and frank, good, upright,
+just, loyal, brave, and worthy folk. Wherever people have most
+abhorrence of drunkenness, be sure they have most reason to fear lest
+its indiscretion should betray intrigue and treachery. In Switzerland it
+is almost thought well of, while at Naples they hold it in horror; but
+at bottom which is the more to be dreaded, the intemperance of the Swiss
+or the reserve of the Italian? It is hardly surprising to learn that the
+people of Geneva were as little gratified by this well-meant panegyric
+on their jollity as they had been by another writer's friendly eulogy on
+their Socinianism.[352]
+
+The reader who was not moved to turn brute and walk on all fours by the
+pictures of the state of nature in the Discourses, may find it more
+difficult to resist the charm of the brotherly festivities and simple
+pastimes which in the Letter to D'Alembert the patriot holds up to the
+admiration of his countrymen and the envy of foreigners. The writer is
+in Sparta, but he tempers his Sparta with a something from Charmettes.
+Never before was there so attractive a combination of martial austerity
+with the grace of the idyll. And the interest of these pictures is much
+more than literary; it is historic also. They were the original version
+of those great gatherings in the Champ de Mars and strange suppers of
+fraternity during the progress of the Revolution in Paris, which have
+amused the cynical ever since, but which pointed to a not unworthy
+aspiration. The fine gentlemen whom Rousseau did so well to despise had
+then all fled, and the common people under Rousseauite leaders were
+doing the best they could to realise on the banks of the Seine the
+imaginary joymaking and simple fellowship which had been first dreamed
+of for the banks of Lake Leman, and commended with an eloquence that
+struck new chords in minds satiated or untouched by the brilliance of
+mere literature. There was no real state of things in Geneva
+corresponding to the gracious picture which Rousseau so generously
+painted, and some of the citizens complained that his account of their
+social joys was as little deserved as his ingenious vindication of their
+hearty feeling for barrel or bottle was little founded.[353]
+
+The glorification of love of country did little for the Genevese for
+whom it was meant, but it penetrated many a soul in the greater nation
+that lay sunk in helpless indifference to its own ruin. Nowhere else
+among the writers who are the glory of France at this time, is any
+serious eulogy of patriotism. Rousseau glows with it, and though he
+always speaks in connection with Geneva, yet there is in his words a
+generous breadth and fire which gave them an irresistible
+contagiousness. There are many passages of this fine persuasive force in
+the Letter to D'Alembert; perhaps this, referring to the citizens of
+Geneva who had gone elsewhere in search of fortune, is as good as
+another. Do you think that the opening of a theatre, he asks, will bring
+them back to their mother city? No; "each of them must feel that he can
+never find anywhere else what he has left behind in his own land; an
+invincible charm must call him back to the spot that he ought never to
+have quitted; the recollection of their first exercises, their first
+pleasures, their first sights, must remain deeply graven in their
+hearts; the soft impressions made in the days of their youth must abide
+and grow stronger with advancing years, while a thousand others wax dim;
+in the midst of the pomp of great cities and all their cheerless
+magnificence, a secret voice must for ever cry in the depth of the
+wanderer's soul, Ah, where are the games and holidays of my youth? Where
+is the concord of the townsmen, where the public brotherhood? Where is
+pure joy and true mirth? Where are peace, freedom, equity? Let us hasten
+to seek all these. With the heart of a Genevese, with a city as smiling,
+a landscape as full of delight, a government as just, with pleasures so
+true and so pure, and all that is needed to be able to relish them, how
+is it that we do not all adore our birth-land? It was thus in old times
+that by modest feasts and homely games her citizens were called back by
+that Sparta which I can never quote often enough as an example for us;
+thus in Athens in the midst of fine art, thus in Susa in the very bosom
+of luxury and soft delights, the wearied Spartan sighed after his coarse
+pastimes and exhausting exercises" (p. 211).[354]
+
+Any reference to this powerfully written, though most sophistical
+piece, would be imperfect which should omit its slightly virulent
+onslaught upon women and the passion which women inspire. The modern
+drama, he said, being too feeble to rise to high themes, has fallen back
+on love; and on this hint he proceeds to a censure of love as a poetic
+theme, and a bitter estimate of women as companions for men, which might
+have pleased Calvin or Knox in his sternest mood. The same eloquence
+which showed men the superior delights of the state of nature, now shows
+the superior fitness of the oriental seclusion of women; it makes a
+sympathetic reader tremble at the want of modesty, purity, and decency,
+in the part which women are allowed to take by the infatuated men of a
+modern community.
+
+All this, again, is directed against "that philosophy of a day, which is
+born and dies in the corner of a city, and would fain stifle the cry of
+nature and the unanimous voice of the human race" (p. 131). The same
+intrepid spirits who had brought reason to bear upon the current notions
+of providence, inspiration, ecclesiastical tradition, and other
+unlighted spots in the human mind, had perceived that the subjection of
+women to a secondary place belonged to the same category, and could not
+any more successfully be defended by reason. Instead of raging against
+women for their boldness, their frivolousness, and the rest, as our
+passionate sentimentalist did, the opposite school insisted that all
+these evils were due to the folly of treating women with gallantry
+instead of respect, and to the blindness of refusing an equally vigorous
+and masculine education to those who must be the closest companions of
+educated man. This was the view forced upon the most rational observers
+of a society where women were so powerful, and so absolutely unfit by
+want of intellectual training for the right use of social power.
+D'Alembert expressed this view in a few pages of forcible pleading in
+his reply to Rousseau,[355] and some thirty-two years later, when all
+questions had become political (1790), Condorcet ably extended the same
+line of argument so as to make it cover the claims of women to all the
+rights of citizenship.[356] From the nature of the case, however, it is
+impossible to confute by reason a man who denies that the matter in
+dispute is within the decision and jurisdiction of reason, and who
+supposes that his own opinion is placed out of the reach of attack when
+he declares it to be the unanimous voice of the human race. We may
+remember that the author of this philippic against love was at the very
+moment brooding over the New Heloïsa, and was fresh from strange
+transports at the feet of the Julie whom we know.
+
+The Letter on the Stage was the definite mark of Rousseau's schism from
+the philosophic congregation. Has Jean Jacques turned a father of the
+church? asked Voltaire. Deserters who fight against their country ought
+to be hung. The little flock are falling to devouring one another. This
+arch-madman, who might have been something, if he would only have been
+guided by his brethren of the Encyclopædia, takes it into his head to
+make a band of his own. He writes against the stage, after writing a bad
+play of his own. He finds four or five rotten staves of Diogenes' tub,
+and instals himself therein to bark at his friends.[357] D'Alembert was
+more tolerant, but less clear-sighted. He insisted that the little flock
+should do its best to heal divisions instead of widening them. Jean
+Jacques, he said, "is a madman who is very clever, and who is only
+clever when he is in a fever; it is best therefore neither to cure nor
+to insult him."
+
+Rousseau made the preface to the Letter on the Stage an occasion for a
+proclamation of his final breach with Diderot. "I once," he said,
+"possessed a severe and judicious Aristarchus; I have him no longer, and
+wish for him no longer." To this he added in a footnote a passage from
+Ecclesiasticus, to the effect that if you have drawn a sword on a friend
+there still remains a way open, and if you have spoken cheerless words
+to him concord is still possible, but malicious reproach and the
+betrayal of a secret--these things banish friendship beyond return. This
+was the end of his personal connection with the men whom he always
+contemptuously called the Holbachians. After 1760 the great stream
+divided into two; the rationalist and the emotional schools became
+visibly antipathetic, and the voice of the epoch was no longer single or
+undistracted.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[331] See above p. 149.
+
+[332] Voltaire to Rousseau. Aug. 30, 1755.
+
+[333] _Corr._, i. 237. Sept. 10, 1755.
+
+[334] _La Loi Naturelle._
+
+[335] In 1754 the Berlin Academy proposed for a prize essay, An
+Examination of Pope's System, and Lessing the next year wrote a
+pamphlet to show that Pope had no system, but only a patchwork. See
+Mr. Pattison's _Introduction to Pope's Essay on Man_, p. 12. Sime's
+_Lessing_, i. 128.
+
+[336] _Conf._ ix. 276.
+
+[337] _Corr._, i. 289-316. Aug. 18, 1756.
+
+[338] Joseph De Maistre put all this much more acutely; _Soirées_, iv.
+
+[339] Madame d'Epinay, _Mém._, i. 380.
+
+[340] _Conf._, ix. 277. Also _Corr._, iii. 326. March 11, 1764.
+Tronchin's long letter, to which Rousseau refers in this passage, is
+given in M. Streckeisen-Moultou's collection, i. 323, and is
+interesting to people who care to know how Voltaire looked to a doctor
+who saw him closely.
+
+[341] _Corr._, ii. 132. June 17, 1760. Also _Conf._, x. 91.
+
+[342] Some other interesting references to Voltaire in Rousseau's
+letters are--ii. 170 (Nov. 29, 1760), denouncing Voltaire as "that
+trumpet of impiety, that fine genius, and that low soul," and so
+forth; iii. 29 (Oct. 30, 1762), accusing Voltaire of malicious
+intrigues against him in Switzerland; iii. 168 (Mar. 21, 1763), that
+if there is to be any reconciliation, Voltaire must make first
+advances; iii. 280 (Dec., 1763), described a trick played by Voltaire;
+iv. 40 (Jan. 31, 1765) 64; _Corr._, v. 74 (Jan. 5, 1767), replying to
+Voltaire's calumnious account of his early life; note on this subject
+giving Voltaire the lie direct, iv. 150 (May 31, 1765); the _Lettre à
+D'Almbert_, p. 193, etc.
+
+[343] Bernardin St. Pierre, xii. 96. In the same sense, in Dusaulx,
+_Mes Rapports avec J.J.R._, (Paris: 1798), p. 101. See also _Corr._,
+iv. 254. Dec. 30, 1765. And again, iv. 276, Feb. 28, 1766, and p. 356.
+
+[344] Dusaulx, p. 102.
+
+[345] This part of D'Alembert's article is reproduced in Rousseau's
+preface, and the whole is given at the end of the volume in M.
+Auguis's edition, p. 409.
+
+[346] Goncourt, _Femme au 18ième siècle_, p. 256. Grimm, _Corr. Lit._,
+vi. 248.
+
+[347] _Maximes sur la Comédie_, §15, etc. They were written in reply
+to a plea for Comedy by Caffaro, a Jesuit father.
+
+[348] The letter may be conveniently divided into three parts: I. pp.
+1-89, II. pp. 90-145, III. pp. 146 to the end. Of course if Rousseau
+in saying that tragedy leads to pity through terror, was thinking of
+the famous passage in the sixth chapter of Aristotle's _Poetics_, he
+was guilty of a shocking mistranslation.
+
+[349] Some of the arguments seem drawn from Plato; see, besides the
+well-known passages in the _Republic_, the _Laws_, iv. 719, and still
+more directly, _Gorgias_, 502.
+
+[350] Yet D'Alembert in his very cool and sensible reply (p. 245)
+repeats the old saws, as that in _Catilina_ we learn the lesson of the
+harm which may be done to the human race by the abuse of great
+talents, and so forth.
+
+[351] _Lettre à M. J.J. Rousseau_, p. 258.
+
+[352] D'Alembert's _Lettre à J.J. Rousseau_, p. 277. Rousseau has a
+passage to the same effect, that false people are always sober, in the
+_Nouv. Hél., _Pt. I. xxiii. 123.
+
+[353] Tronchin, for instance, in a letter to Rousseau, in M.
+Streckeisen-Moultou's collection, i. 325.
+
+[354] A troop of comedians had been allowed to play for a short time
+in Geneva, with many protests, during the mediation of 1738. In 1766,
+eight years after Rousseau's letter, the government gave permission
+for the establishment of a theatre in the town. It was burnt down in
+1768, and Voltaire spitefully hinted that the catastrophe was the
+result of design, instigated by Rousseau (_Corr._ v. 299, April 26,
+1768). The theatre was not re-erected until 1783, when the oligarchic
+party regained the ascendancy and brought back with them the drama,
+which the democrats in their reign would not permit.
+
+[355] _Lettre à J.J. Rousseau_, pp. 265-271.
+
+[356] _Oeuv._, x. 121.
+
+[357] To Thieriot, Sept. 17, 1758. To D'Alembert, Oct. 20, 1761. _Ib._
+March 19, 1761.
+
+
+END OF VOL. I.
+
+
+_Printed by_ R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, _Edinburgh_
+
+
+
+                       *  *  *  *  *
+
+
+
+ROUSSEAU
+
+
+BY
+
+JOHN MORLEY
+
+
+VOL. II.
+
+
+London
+MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
+NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
+1905
+
+_All rights reserved_
+
+_First printed in this form 1886_
+_Reprinted 1888, 1891, 1896, 1900, 1905_
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS OF VOL. II.
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+MONTMORENCY--THE NEW HELOÏSA.
+
+Conditions preceding the composition of the New Heloïsa 1
+
+The Duke and Duchess of Luxembourg 2
+
+Rousseau and his patrician acquaintances 4
+
+Peaceful life at Montmorency 9
+
+Equivocal prudence occasionally shown by Rousseau 12
+
+His want of gratitude for commonplace service 13
+
+Bad health, and thoughts of suicide 16
+
+Episode of Madame Latour de Franqueville 17
+
+Relation of the New Heloïsa to Rousseau's general doctrine 20
+
+Action of the first part of the story 25
+
+Contrasted with contemporary literature 25
+
+And with contemporary manners 27
+
+Criticism of the language and principal actors 28, 29
+
+Popularity of the New Heloïsa 31
+
+Its reactionary intellectual direction 33
+
+Action of the second part 35, 36
+
+Its influence on Goethe and others 38
+
+Distinction between Rousseau and his school 40
+
+Singular pictures of domesticity 42
+
+Sumptuary details 44
+
+The slowness of movement in the work justified 46
+
+Exaltation of marriage 47
+
+Equalitarian tendencies 49
+
+Not inconsistent with social quietism 51
+
+Compensation in the political consequences of the triumph of sentiment
+54
+
+Circumstances of the publication of the New Heloïsa 55
+
+Nature of the trade in books 57
+
+Malesherbes and the printing of Emilius 61
+
+Rousseau's suspicions 62
+
+The great struggle of the moment 64
+
+Proscription of Emilius 67
+
+Flight of the author 67
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+PERSECUTION.
+
+Rousseau's journey from Switzerland 69
+
+Absence of vindictiveness 70
+
+Arrival at Yverdun 72
+
+Repairs to Motiers 73
+
+Relations with Frederick the Great 74
+
+Life at Motiers 77
+
+Lord Marischal 79
+
+Voltaire 81
+
+Rousseau's letter to the Archbishop of Paris 83
+
+Its dialectic 86
+
+The ministers of Neuchâtel 90
+
+Rousseau's singular costume 92
+
+His throng of visitors 93
+
+Lewis, prince of Würtemberg 95
+
+Gibbon 96
+
+Boswell 98
+
+Corsican affairs 99
+
+The feud at Geneva 102
+
+Rousseau renounces his citizenship 105
+
+The Letters from the Mountain 106
+
+Political side 107
+
+Consequent persecution at Motiers 107
+
+Flight to the isle of St. Peter 108
+
+The fifth of the _Rêveries_ 109
+
+Proscription by the government of Berne 116
+
+Rousseau's singular request 116
+
+His renewed flight 117
+
+Persuaded to seek shelter in England 118
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+THE SOCIAL CONTRACT.
+
+Rousseau's reaction against perfectibility 119
+
+Abandonment of the position of the Discourses 121
+
+Doubtful idea of equality 121
+
+The Social Contract, a repudiation of the historic method 124
+
+Yet it has glimpses of relativity 127
+
+Influence of Greek examples 129
+
+And of Geneva 131
+
+Impression upon Robespierre and Saint Just 132
+
+Rousseau's scheme implied a small territory 135
+
+Why the Social Contract made fanatics 137
+
+Verbal quality of its propositions 138
+
+The doctrine of public safety 143
+
+The doctrine of the sovereignty of peoples 144
+
+Its early phases 144
+
+Its history in the sixteenth century 146
+
+Hooker and Grotius 148
+
+Locke 149
+
+Hobbes 151
+
+Central propositions of the Social Contract--
+
+  1. Origin of society in compact 154
+     Different conception held by the Physiocrats 156
+
+  2. Sovereignty of the body thus constituted 158
+     Difference from Hobbes and Locke 159
+     The root of socialism 160
+     Republican phraseology 161
+
+  3. Attributes of sovereignty 162
+
+  4. The law-making power 163
+     A contemporary illustration 164
+     Hints of confederation 166
+
+  5. Forms of government 168
+     Criticism on the common division 169
+     Rousseau's preference for elective aristocracy 172
+
+  6. Attitude of the state to religion 173
+     Rousseau's view, the climax of a reaction 176
+     Its effect at the French Revolution 179
+     Its futility 180
+
+Another method of approaching the philosophy of government--
+
+  Origin of society not a compact 183
+
+  The true reason of the submission of a minority to a majority 184
+
+  Rousseau fails to touch actual problems 186
+
+  The doctrine of resistance, for instance 188
+
+  Historical illustrations 190
+
+  Historical effect of the Social Contract in France and Germany 193
+
+  Socialist deductions from it 194
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+EMILIUS.
+
+Rousseau touched by the enthusiasm of his time 197
+
+Contemporary excitement as to education, part of the revival of
+  naturalism 199
+
+I.--Locke, on education 202
+    Difference between him and Rousseau 204
+    Exhortations to mothers 205
+    Importance of infantile habits 208
+    Rousseau's protest against reasoning with children 209
+    Criticised 209
+    The opposite theory 210
+    The idea of property 212
+    Artificially contrived incidents 214
+    Rousseau's omission of the principle of authority 215
+    Connected with his neglect of the faculty of sympathy 219
+
+II.--Rousseau's ideal of living 221
+    The training that follows from it 222
+    The duty of knowing a craft 223
+    Social conception involved in this moral conception 226
+
+III.--Three aims before the instructor 229
+      Rousseau's omission of training for the social conscience 230
+      No contemplation of society as a whole 232
+      Personal interest, the foundation of the morality of Emilius 233
+      The sphere and definition of the social conscience 235
+
+IV.--The study of history 237
+     Rousseau's notions upon the subject 239
+
+V.--Ideals of life for women 241
+    Rousseau's repudiation of his own principles 242
+    His oriental and obscurantist position 243
+    Arising from his want of faith in improvement 244
+    His reactionary tendencies in this region eventually
+      neutralised 248
+
+VI.--Sum of the merits of Emilius 249
+     Its influence in France and Germany 251
+     In England 252
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+THE SAVOYARD VICAR.
+
+Shallow hopes entertained by the dogmatic atheists 256
+
+The good side of the religious reaction 258
+
+Its preservation of some parts of Christian influence 259
+
+Earlier forms of deism 260
+
+The deism of the Savoyard Vicar 264
+
+The elevation of man, as well as the restoration of a divinity 265
+
+A divinity for fair weather 268
+
+Religious self-denial 269
+
+The Savoyard Vicar's vital omission 270
+
+His position towards Christianity 272
+
+Its effectiveness as a solvent 273
+
+Weakness of the subjective test 276
+
+The Savoyard Vicar's deism not compatible with growing intellectual
+  conviction 276
+
+The true satisfaction of the religious emotion 277
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+ENGLAND.
+
+Rousseau's English portrait 281
+
+His reception in Paris 282
+
+And in London 283
+
+Hume's account of him 284
+
+Settlement at Wootton 286
+
+The quarrel with Hume 287
+
+Detail of the charges against Hume 287-291
+
+Walpole's pretended letter from Frederick 291
+
+Baselessness of the whole delusion 292
+
+Hume's conduct in the quarrel 293
+
+The war of pamphlets 295
+
+Common theory of Rousseau's madness 296
+
+Preparatory conditions 297
+
+Extension of disorder from the affective life to the intelligence 299
+
+The Confessions 301
+
+His life at Wootton 306
+
+Flight from Derbyshire 306
+
+And from England 308
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+THE END.
+
+The elder Mirabeau 309
+
+Shelters Rousseau at Fleury 311
+
+Rousseau at Trye 312
+
+In Dauphiny 314
+
+Return to Paris 314
+
+The _Rêveries_ 315
+
+Life in Paris 316
+
+Bernardin de St. Pierre's account of him 317
+
+An Easter excursion 320
+
+Rousseau's unsociality 322
+
+Poland and Spain 324
+
+Withdrawal to Ermenonville 326
+
+His death 326
+
+
+
+
+ROUSSEAU.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+MONTMORENCY--THE NEW HELOÏSA.
+
+
+The many conditions of intellectual productiveness are still hidden in
+such profound obscurity that we are unable to explain why a period of
+stormy moral agitation seems to be in certain natures the
+indispensable antecedent of their highest creative effort. Byron is
+one instance, and Rousseau is another, in which the current of
+stimulating force made this rapid way from the lower to the higher
+parts of character, and only expended itself after having traversed
+the whole range of emotion and faculty, from their meanest, most
+realistic, most personal forms of exercise, up to the summit of what
+is lofty and ideal. No man was ever involved in such an odious
+complication of moral maladies as beset Rousseau in the winter of
+1758. Yet within three years of this miserable epoch he had completed
+not only the New Heloïsa, which is the monument of his fall, but the
+Social Contract, which was the most influential, and Emilius, which
+was perhaps the most elevated and spiritual, of all the productions of
+the prolific genius of France in the eighteenth century. A poor
+light-hearted Marmontel thought that the secret of Rousseau's success
+lay in the circumstance that he began to write late, and it is true
+that no other author, so considerable as Rousseau, waited until the
+age of fifty for the full vigour of his inspiration. No tale of years,
+however, could have ripened such fruit without native strength and
+incommunicable savour. Nor can the mechanical movement of those better
+ordered characters which keep the balance of the world even, impart to
+literature that peculiar quality, peculiar but not the finest, that
+comes from experience of the black unlighted abysses of the soul.
+
+The period of actual production was externally calm. The New Heloïsa
+was completed in 1759, and published in 1761. The Social Contract was
+published in the spring of 1762, and Emilius a few weeks later.
+Throughout this period Rousseau was, for the last time in his life, at
+peace with most of his fellows. Though he never relented from his
+antipathy to the Holbachians, for the time it slumbered, until a more
+real and serious persecution than any which he imputed to them,
+transformed his antipathy into a gloomy frenzy.
+
+The new friends whom he made at Montmorency were among the greatest
+people in the kingdom. The Duke of Luxembourg (1702-64) was a marshal
+of France, and as intimate a friend of the king as the king was
+capable of having. The Maréchale de Luxembourg (1707-87) had been one
+of the most beautiful, and continued to be one of the most brilliant
+leaders of the last aristocratic generation that was destined to sport
+on the slopes of the volcano. The former seems to have been a loyal
+and homely soul; the latter, restless, imperious, penetrating,
+unamiable. Their dealings with Rousseau were marked by perfect
+sincerity and straightforward friendship. They gave him a convenient
+apartment in a small summer lodge in the park, to which he retreated
+when he cared for a change from his narrow cottage. He was a constant
+guest at their table, where he met the highest personages in France.
+The marshal did not disdain to pay him visits, or to walk with him, or
+to discuss his private affairs. Unable as ever to shine in
+conversation, yet eager to show his great friends that they had to do
+with no common mortal, Rousseau bethought him of reading the New
+Heloïsa aloud to them. At ten in the morning he used to wait upon the
+maréchale, and there by her bedside he read the story of the love, the
+sin, the repentance of Julie, the distraction of Saint Preux, the
+wisdom of Wolmar, and the sage friendship of Lord Edward, in tones
+which enchanted her both with his book and its author for all the rest
+of the day, as all the women in France were so soon to be
+enchanted.[1] This, as he expected, amply reconciled her to the
+uncouthness and clumsiness of his conversation, which was at least as
+maladroit and as spiritless in the presence of a duchess as it was in
+presences less imposing.
+
+One side of character is obviously tested by the way in which a man
+bears himself in his relations with those of greater social
+consideration. Rousseau was taxed by some of his plebeian enemies with
+a most unheroic deference to his patrician friends. He had a dog whose
+name was _Duc_. When he came to sit at a duke's table, he changed his
+dog's name to _Turc_.[2] Again, one day in a transport of tenderness
+he embraced the old marshal--the duchess embraced Rousseau ten times a
+day, for the age was effusive--"Ah, monsieur le maréchal, I used to
+hate the great before I knew you, and I hate them still more, since
+you make me feel so strongly how easy it would be for them to have
+themselves adored."[3] On another occasion he happened to be playing
+at chess with the Prince of Conti, who had come to visit him in his
+cottage.[4] In spite of the signs and grimaces of the attendants, he
+insisted on beating the prince in a couple of games. Then he said with
+respectful gravity, "Monseigneur, I honour your serene highness too
+much not to beat you at chess always."[5] A few days after, the
+vanquished prince sent him a present of game which Rousseau duly
+accepted. The present was repeated, but this time Rousseau wrote to
+Madame de Boufflers that he would receive no more, and that he loved
+the prince's conversation better than his gifts.[6] He admits that
+this was an ungracious proceeding, and that to refuse game "from a
+prince of the blood who throws such good feeling into the present, is
+not so much the delicacy of a proud man bent on preserving his
+independence, as the rusticity of an unmannerly person who does not
+know his place."[7] Considering the extreme virulence with which
+Rousseau always resented gifts even of the most trifling kind from his
+friends, one may perhaps find some inconsistency in this condemnation
+of a sort of conduct to which he tenaciously clung on all other
+occasions. If the fact of the donor being a prince of the blood is
+allowed to modify the quality of the donation, that is hardly a
+defensible position in the austere citizen of Geneva. Madame de
+Boufflers,[8] the intimate friend of our sage Hume, and the yet more
+intimate friend of the Prince of Conti, gave him a judicious warning
+when she bade him beware of laying himself open to a charge of
+affectation, lest it should obscure the brightness of his virtue and
+so hinder its usefulness. "Fabius and Regulus would have accepted such
+marks of esteem, without feeling in them any hurt to their
+disinterestedness and frugality."[9] Perhaps there is a flutter of
+self-consciousness that is not far removed from this affectation, in
+the pains which Rousseau takes to tell us that after dining at the
+castle, he used to return home gleefully to sup with a mason who was
+his neighbour and his friend.[10] On the whole, however, and so far as
+we know, Rousseau conducted himself not unworthily with these high
+people. His letters to them are for the most part marked by
+self-respect and a moderate graciousness, though now and again he
+makes rather too much case of the difference of rank, and asserts his
+independence with something too much of protestation.[11] Their
+relations with him are a curious sign of the interest which the
+members of the great world took in the men who were quietly preparing
+the destruction both of them and their world. The Maréchale de
+Luxembourg places this squalid dweller in a hovel on her estate in the
+place of honour at her table, and embraces his Theresa. The Prince of
+Conti pays visits of courtesy and sends game to a man whom he employs
+at a few sous an hour to copy manuscript for him. The Countess of
+Boufflers, in sending him the money, insists that he is to count her
+his warmest friend.[12] When his dog dies, the countess writes to
+sympathise with his chagrin, and the prince begs to be allowed to
+replace it.[13] And when persecution and trouble and infinite
+confusion came upon him, they all stood as fast by him as their own
+comfort would allow. Do we not feel that there must have been in the
+unhappy man, besides all the recorded pettinesses and perversities
+which revolt us in him, a vein of something which touched men, and
+made women devoted to him, until he splenetically drove both men and
+women away from him? With Madame d'Epinay and Madame d'Houdetot, as
+with the dearer and humbler patroness of his youth, we have now parted
+company. But they are instantly succeeded by new devotees. And the
+lovers of Rousseau, in all degrees, were not silly women led captive
+by idle fancy. Madame de Boufflers was one of the most distinguished
+spirits of her time. Her friendship for him was such, that his
+sensuous vanity made Rousseau against all reason or probability
+confound it with a warmer form of emotion, and he plumes himself in a
+manner most displeasing on the victory which he won over his own
+feelings on the occasion.[14] As a matter of fact he had no feelings
+to conquer, any more than the supposed object of them ever bore him
+any ill-will for his indifference, as in his mania of suspicion he
+afterwards believed.
+
+There was a calm about the too few years he passed at Montmorency,
+which leaves us in doubt whether this mania would ever have afflicted
+him, if his natural irritation had not been made intense and
+irresistible by the cruel distractions that followed the publication
+of Emilius. He was tolerably content with his present friends. The
+simplicity of their way of dealing with him contrasted singularly, as
+he thought, with the never-ending solicitudes, as importunate as they
+were officious, of the patronising friends whom he had just cast
+off.[15] Perhaps, too, he was soothed by the companionship of persons
+whose rank may have flattered his vanity, while unlike Diderot and his
+old literary friends in Paris, they entered into no competition with
+him in the peculiar sphere of his own genius. Madame de Boufflers,
+indeed, wrote a tragedy, but he told her gruffly enough that it was a
+plagiarism from Southerne's Oroonoko.[16] That Rousseau was
+thoroughly capable of this pitiful emotion of sensitive literary
+jealousy is proved, if by nothing else, by his readiness to suspect
+that other authors were jealous of him. No one suspects others of a
+meanness of this kind unless he is capable of it himself. The
+resounding success which followed the New Heloïsa and Emilius put an
+end to these apprehensions. It raised him to a pedestal in popular
+esteem as high as that on which Voltaire stood triumphant. That very
+success unfortunately brought troubles which destroyed Rousseau's last
+chance of ending his days in full reasonableness.
+
+Meanwhile he enjoyed his final interval of moderate wholesomeness and
+peace. He felt his old healthy joy in the green earth. One of the
+letters commemorates his delight in the great scudding south-west
+winds of February, soft forerunners of the spring, so sweet to all who
+live with nature.[17] At the end of his garden was a summer-house, and
+here even on wintry days he sat composing or copying. It was not music
+only that he copied. He took a curious pleasure in making transcripts
+of his romance, and he sold them to the Duchess of Luxembourg and
+other ladies for some moderate fee.[18] Sometimes he moved from his
+own lodging to the quarters in the park which his great friends had
+induced him to accept. "They were charmingly neat; the furniture was
+of white and blue. It was in this perfumed and delicious solitude, in
+the midst of woods and streams and choirs of birds of every kind,
+with the fragrance of the orange-flower poured round me, that I
+composed in a continual ecstasy the fifth book of Emilius. With what
+eagerness did I hasten every morning at sunrise to breathe the balmy
+air! What good coffee I used to make under the porch in company with
+my Theresa! The cat and the dog made up the party. That would have
+sufficed me for all the days of my life, and I should never have known
+weariness." And so to the assurance, so often repeated under so many
+different circumstances, that here was a true heaven upon earth, where
+if fates had only allowed he would have known unbroken innocence and
+lasting happiness.[19]
+
+Yet he had the wisdom to warn others against attempting a life such as
+he craved for himself. As on a more memorable occasion, there came to
+him a young man who would fain have been with him always, and whom he
+sent away exceeding sorrowful. "The first lesson I should give you
+would be not to surrender yourself to the taste you say you have for
+the contemplative life. It is only an indolence of the soul, to be
+condemned at any age, but especially so at yours. Man is not made to
+meditate, but to act. Labour therefore in the condition of life in
+which you have been placed by your family and by providence: that is
+the first precept of the virtue which you wish to follow. If residence
+at Paris, joined to the business you have there, seems to you
+irreconcilable with virtue, do better still, and return to your own
+province. Go live in the bosom of your family, serve and solace your
+honest parents. There you will be truly fulfilling the duties that
+virtue imposes on you."[20] This intermixture of sound sense with
+unutterable perversities almost suggests a doubt how far the
+perversities were sincere, until we remember that Rousseau even in the
+most exalted part of his writings was careful to separate immediate
+practical maxims from his theoretical principles of social
+philosophy.[21]
+
+Occasionally his good sense takes so stiff and unsympathetic a form as
+to fill us with a warmer dislike for him than his worst paradoxes
+inspire. A correspondent had written to him about the frightful
+persecutions which were being inflicted on the Protestants in some
+district of France. Rousseau's letter is a masterpiece in the style of
+Eliphaz the Temanite. Our brethren must surely have given some pretext
+for the evil treatment to which they were subjected. One who is a
+Christian must learn to suffer, and every man's conduct ought to
+conform to his doctrine. Our brethren, moreover, ought to remember
+that the word of God is express upon the duty of obeying the laws set
+up by the prince. The writer cannot venture to run any risk by
+interceding in favour of our brethren with the government. "Every one
+has his own calling upon the earth; mine is to tell the public harsh
+but useful truths. I have preached humanity, gentleness, tolerance, so
+far as it depended upon me; 'tis no fault of mine if the world has not
+listened. I have made it a rule to keep to general truths; I produce
+no libels, no satires; I attack no man, but men; not an action, but a
+vice."[22] The worst of the worthy sort of people, wrote Voltaire, is
+that they are such cowards: a man groans over a wrong, he holds his
+tongue, he takes his supper, and he forgets all about it.[23] If
+Voltaire could not write like Fénelon, at least he could never talk
+like Tartufe; he responded to no tale of wrong with words about his
+mission, with strings of antitheses, but always with royal anger and
+the spring of alert and puissant endeavour. In an hour of oppression
+one would rather have been the friend of the saviour of the Calas and
+of Sirven, than of the vindicator of theism.
+
+Rousseau, however, had good sense enough in less equivocal forms than
+this. For example, in another letter he remonstrates with a
+correspondent for judging the rich too harshly. "You do not bear in
+mind that having from their childhood contracted a thousand wants
+which we are without, then to bring them down to the condition of the
+poor, would be to make them more miserable than the poor. We should be
+just towards all the world, even to those who are not just to us. Ah,
+if we had the virtues opposed to the vices which we reproach in them,
+we should soon forget that such people were in the world. One word
+more. To have any right to despise the rich, we ought ourselves to be
+prudent and thrifty, so as to have no need of riches."[24] In the
+observance of this just precept Rousseau was to the end of his life
+absolutely without fault. No one was more rigorously careful to make
+his independence sure by the fewness of his wants and by minute
+financial probity. This firm limitation of his material desires was
+one cause of his habitual and almost invariable refusal to accept
+presents, though no doubt another cause was the stubborn and
+ungracious egoism which made him resent every obligation.
+
+It is worth remembering in illustration of the peculiar susceptibility
+and softness of his character where women were concerned--it was not
+quite without exception--that he did not fly into a fit of rage over
+their gifts, as he did over those of men. He remonstrated, but in
+gentler key. "What could I do with four pullets?" he wrote to a lady
+who had presented them to him. "I began by sending two of them to
+people to whom I am indifferent. That made me think of the difference
+there is between a present and a testimony of friendship. The first
+will never find in me anything but a thankless heart; the second....
+Ah, if you had only given me news of yourself without sending me
+anything else, how rich and how grateful you would have made me;
+instead of that the pullets are eaten, and the best thing I can do is
+to forget all about them; let us say no more."[25] Rude and repellent
+as this may seem, and as it is, there is a rough kind of playfulness
+about it, when compared with the truculence which he was not slow to
+exhibit to men. If a friend presumed to thank him for any service, he
+was peremptorily rebuked for his ignorance of the true qualities of
+friendship, with which thankfulness has no connection. He
+ostentatiously refused to offer thanks for services himself, even to a
+woman whom he always treated with so much consideration as the
+Maréchale de Luxembourg. He once declared boldly that modesty is a
+false virtue,[26] and though he did not go so far as to make gratitude
+the subject of a corresponding formula of denunciation, he always
+implied that this too is really one of the false virtues. He confessed
+to Malesherbes, without the slightest contrition, that he was
+ungrateful by nature.[27] To Madame d'Epinay he once went still
+further, declaring that he found it hard not to hate those who had
+used him well.[28] Undoubtedly he was right so far as this, that
+gratitude answering to a spirit of exaction in a benefactor is no
+merit; a service done in expectation of gratitude is from that fact
+stripped of the quality which makes gratitude due, and is a mere piece
+of egoism in altruistic disguise. Kindness in its genuine forms is a
+testimony of good feeling, and conventional speech is perhaps a little
+too hard, as well as too shallow and unreal, in calling the recipient
+evil names because he is unable to respond to the good feeling.
+Rousseau protested against a conception of friendship which makes of
+what ought to be disinterested helpfulness a title to everlasting
+tribute. His way of expressing this was harsh and unamiable, but it
+was not without an element of uprightness and veracity. As in his
+greater themes, so in his paradoxes upon private relations, he hid
+wholesome ingredients of rebuke to the unquestioning acceptance of
+common form. "I am well pleased," he said to a friend, "both with thee
+and thy letters, except the end, where thou say'st thou art more mine
+than thine own. For there thou liest, and it is not worth while to
+take the trouble to _thee_ and _thou_ a man as thine intimate, only to
+tell him untruths."[29] Chesterfield was for people with much
+self-love of the small sort, probably a more agreeable person to meet
+than Doctor Johnson, but Johnson was the more wholesome companion for
+a man.
+
+Occasionally, though not very often, he seems to have let spleen take
+the place of honest surliness, and so drifted into clumsy and
+ill-humoured banter, of a sort that gives a dreary shudder to one
+fresh from Voltaire. "So you have chosen for yourself a tender and
+virtuous mistress! I am not surprised; all mistresses are that. You
+have chosen her in Paris! To find a tender and virtuous mistress in
+Paris is to have not such bad luck. You have made her a promise of
+marriage? My friend, you have made a blunder; for if you continue to
+love, the promise is superfluous, and if you do not, then it is no
+avail. You have signed it with your blood? That is all but tragic; but
+I don't know that the choice of the ink in which he writes, gives
+anything to the fidelity of the man who signs."[30]
+
+We can only add that the health in which a man writes may possibly
+excuse the dismal quality of what he writes, and that Rousseau was now
+as always the prey of bodily pain which, as he was conscious, made him
+distraught. "My sufferings are not very excruciating just now," he
+wrote on a later occasion, "but they are incessant, and I am not out
+of pain a single moment day or night, and this quite drives me mad. I
+feel bitterly my wrong conduct and the baseness of my suspicions; but
+if anything can excuse me, it is my mournful state, my loneliness,"
+and so on.[31] This prolonged physical anguish, which was made more
+intense towards the end of 1761 by the accidental breaking of a
+surgical instrument,[32] sometimes so nearly wore his fortitude away
+as to make him think of suicide.[33] In Lord Edward's famous letter on
+suicide in the New Heloïsa, while denying in forcible terms the right
+of ending one's days merely to escape from intolerable mental
+distress, he admits that inasmuch as physical disorders only grow
+incessantly worse, violent and incurable bodily pain may be an excuse
+for a man making away with himself; he ceases to be a human being
+before dying, and in putting an end to his life he only completes his
+release from a body that embarrasses him, and contains his soul no
+longer.[34] The thought was often present to him in this form.
+Eighteen months later than our last date, the purpose grew very
+deliberate under an aggravation of his malady, and he seriously looked
+upon his own case as falling within the conditions of Lord Edward's
+exception.[35] It is difficult, in the face of outspoken declarations
+like these, to know what writers can be thinking of when, with respect
+to the controversy on the manner of Rousseau's death, they pronounce
+him incapable of such a dereliction of his own most cherished
+principles as anything like self-destruction would have been.
+
+As he sat gnawed by pain, with surgical instruments on his table, and
+sombre thoughts of suicide in his head, the ray of a little episode of
+romance shone in incongruously upon the scene. Two ladies in Paris,
+absorbed in the New Heloïsa, like all the women of the time,
+identified themselves with the Julie and the Claire of the novel that
+none could resist. They wrote anonymously to the author, claiming
+their identification with characters fondly supposed to be immortal.
+"You will know that Julie is not dead, and that she lives to love you;
+I am not this Julie, you perceive it by my style; I am only her
+cousin, or rather her friend, as Claire was." The unfortunate Saint
+Preux responded as gallantly as he could be expected to do in the
+intervals of surgery. "You do not know that the Saint Preux to whom
+you write is tormented with a cruel and incurable disorder, and that
+the very letter he writes to you is often interrupted by distractions
+of a very different kind."[36] He figures rather uncouthly, but the
+unknown fair were not at first disabused, and one of them never was.
+Rousseau was deeply suspicious. He feared to be made the victim of a
+masculine pleasantry. From women he never feared anything. His letters
+were found too short, too cold. He replied to the remonstrance by a
+reference of extreme coarseness. His correspondents wrote from the
+neighbourhood of the Palais Royal, then and for long after the haunt
+of mercenary women. "You belong to your quarter more than I thought,"
+he said brutally.[37] The vulgarity of the lackey was never quite
+obliterated in him, even when the lackey had written Emilius. This
+was too much for the imaginary Claire. "I have given myself three good
+blows on my breast for the correspondence that I was silly enough to
+open between you," she wrote to Julie, and she remained implacable.
+The Julie, on the contrary, was faithful to the end of Rousseau's
+life. She took his part vehemently in the quarrel with Hume, and wrote
+in defence of his memory after he was dead. She is the most remarkable
+of all the instances of that unreasoning passion which the New Heloïsa
+inflamed in the breasts of the women of that age. Madame Latour
+pursued Jean Jacques with a devotion that no coldness could repulse.
+She only saw him three times in all, the first time not until 1766,
+when he was on his way through Paris to England. The second time, in
+1772, she visited him without mentioning her name, and he did not
+recognise her; she brought him some music to copy, and went away
+unknown. She made another attempt, announcing herself: he gave her a
+frosty welcome, and then wrote to her that she was to come no more.
+With a strange fidelity she bore him no grudge, but cherished his
+memory and sorrowed over his misfortunes to the day of her death. He
+was not an idol of very sublime quality, but we may think kindly of
+the idolatress.[38] Worshippers are ever dearer to us than their
+graven images. Let us turn to the romance which touched women in this
+way, and helped to give a new spirit to an epoch.
+
+
+II.
+
+As has been already said, it is the business of criticism to separate
+what is accidental in form, transitory in manner, and merely local in
+suggestion, from the general ideas which live under a casual and
+particular literary robe. And so we have to distinguish the external
+conditions under which a book like the New Heloïsa is produced, from
+the living qualities in the author which gave the external conditions
+their hold upon him, and turned their development in one direction
+rather than another. We are only encouraging poverty of spirit, when
+we insist on fixing our eyes on a few of the minutiæ of construction,
+instead of patiently seizing larger impressions and more durable
+meanings; when we stop at the fortuitous incidents of composition,
+instead of advancing to the central elements of the writer's
+character.
+
+These incidents in the case of the New Heloïsa we know; the sensuous
+communion with nature in her summer mood in the woods of Montmorency,
+the long hours and days of solitary expansion, the despairing passion
+for the too sage Julie of actual experience. But the power of these
+impressions from without depended on secrets of conformation within.
+An adult with marked character is, consciously or unconsciously, his
+own character's victim or sport. It is his whole system of impulses,
+ideas, pre-occupations, that make those critical situations ready,
+into which he too hastily supposes that an accident has drawn him. And
+this inner system not only prepares the situation; it forces his
+interpretation of the situation. Much of the interest of the New
+Heloïsa springs from the fact that it was the outcome, in a sense of
+which the author himself was probably unconscious, of the general
+doctrine of life and conduct which he only professed to expound in
+writings of graver pretension. Rousseau generally spoke of his romance
+in phrases of depreciation, as the monument of a passing weakness. It
+was in truth as entirely a monument of the strength, no less than the
+weakness, of his whole scheme, as his weightiest piece. That it was
+not so deliberately, only added to its effect. The slow and musing air
+which underlies all the assumption of ardent passion, made a way for
+the doctrine into sensitive natures, that would have been untouched by
+the pretended ratiocination of the Discourses, and the didactic manner
+of the Emilius.
+
+Rousseau's scheme, which we must carefully remember was only present
+to his own mind in an informal and fragmentary way, may be shortly
+described as an attempt to rehabilitate human nature in as much of the
+supposed freshness of primitive times, as the hardened crust of civil
+institutions and social use might allow. In this survey, however
+incoherently carried out, the mutual passion of the two sexes was the
+very last that was likely to escape Rousseau's attention. Hence it was
+with this that he began. The Discourses had been an attack upon the
+general ordering of society, and an exposition of the mischief that
+society has done to human nature at large. The romance treated one set
+of emotions in human nature particularly, though it also touches the
+whole emotional sphere indirectly. And this limitation of the field
+was accompanied by a total revolution in the method. Polemic was
+abandoned; the presence of hostility was forgotten in appearance, if
+not in the heart of the writer; instead of discussion, presentation;
+instead of abstract analysis of principles, concrete drawing of
+persons and dramatic delineation of passion. There is, it is true, a
+monstrous superfluity of ethical exposition of most doubtful value,
+but then that, as we have already said, was in the manners of the
+time. All people in those days with any pretensions to use their
+minds, wrote and talked in a superfine ethical manner, and violently
+translated the dictates of sensibility into formulas of morality. The
+important thing to remark is not that this semi-didactic strain is
+present, but that there is much less of it, and that it takes a far
+more subordinate place, than the subject and the reigning taste would
+have led us to expect. It is true, also, that Rousseau declared his
+intention in the two characters of Julie and of Wolmar, who eventually
+became Julie's husband, of leading to a reconciliation between the two
+great opposing parties, the devout and the rationalistic; of teaching
+them the lesson of reciprocal esteem, by showing the one that it is
+possible to believe in a God without being a hypocrite, and the other
+that it is possible to be an unbeliever without being a scoundrel.[39]
+This intention, if it was really present to Rousseau's mind while he
+was writing, and not an afterthought characteristically welcomed for
+the sake of giving loftiness and gravity to a composition of which he
+was always a little ashamed, must at any rate have been of a very pale
+kind. It would hardly have occurred to a critic, unless Rousseau had
+so emphatically pointed it out, that such a design had presided over
+the composition, and contemporary readers saw nothing of it. In the
+first part of the story, which is wholly passionate, it is certainly
+not visible, and in the second part neither of the two contending
+factions was likely to learn any lesson with respect to the other.
+Churchmen would have insisted that Wolmar was really a Christian
+dressed up as an atheist, and philosophers would hardly have accepted
+Julie as a type of the too believing people who broke Calas on the
+wheel, and cut off La Barre's head.
+
+French critics tell us that no one now reads the New Heloïsa in France
+except deliberate students of the works of Rousseau, and certainly few
+in this generation read it in our own country.[40] The action is very
+slight, and the play of motives very simple, when contrasted with the
+ingenuity of invention, the elaborate subtleties of psychological
+analysis, the power of rapid change from one perturbing incident or
+excited humour to another, which mark the modern writer of sentimental
+fiction. As the title warns us, it is a story of a youthful tutor and
+a too fair disciple, straying away from the lessons of calm philosophy
+into the heated places of passion. The high pride of Julie's father
+forbade all hope of their union, and in very desperation the unhappy
+pair lost the self-control of virtue, and threw themselves into the
+pit that lies so ready to our feet. Remorse followed with quick step,
+for Julie had with her purity lost none of the other lovelinesses of a
+dutiful character. Her lover was hurried away from the country by the
+generous solicitude of an English nobleman, one of the bravest,
+tenderest, and best of men. Julie, left undisturbed by her lover's
+presence, stricken with affliction at the death of a sweet and
+affectionate mother, and pressed by the importunities of a father whom
+she dearly loved, in spite of all the disasters which his will had
+brought upon her, at length consented to marry a foreign baron from
+some northern court. Wolmar was much older than she was; a devotee of
+calm reason, without a system and without prejudices, benevolent,
+orderly, above all things judicious. The lover meditated suicide, from
+which he was only diverted by the arguments of Lord Edward, who did
+more than argue; he hurried the forlorn man on board the ship of
+Admiral Anson, then just starting for his famous voyage round the
+world. And this marks the end of the first episode.
+
+Rousseau always urged that his story was dangerous for young girls,
+and maintained that Richardson was grievously mistaken in supposing
+that they could be instructed by romances. It was like setting fire to
+the house, he said, for the sake of making the pumps play.[41] As he
+admitted so much, he is not open to attack on this side, except from
+those who hold the theory that no books ought to be written which may
+not prudently be put into the hands of the young,--a puerile and
+contemptible doctrine that must emasculate all literature and all art,
+by excluding the most interesting of human relations and the most
+powerful of human passions. There is not a single composition of the
+first rank outside of science, from the Bible downwards, that could
+undergo the test. The most useful standard for measuring the
+significance of a book in this respect is found in the manners of the
+time, and the prevailing tone of contemporary literature. In trying to
+appreciate the meaning of the New Heloïsa and its popularity, it is
+well to think of it as a delineation of love, in connection not only
+with such a book as the Pucelle, where there is at least wit, but with
+a story like Duclos's, which all ladies both read and were not in the
+least ashamed to acknowledge that they had read; or still worse, such
+an abomination as Diderot's first stories; or a story like Laclos's,
+which came a generation later, and with its infinite briskness and
+devilry carried the tradition of artistic impurity to as vigorous a
+manifestation as it is capable of reaching.[42] To a generation whose
+literature is as pure as the best English, American, and German
+literature is in the present day, the New Heloïsa might without doubt
+be corrupting. To the people who read Crébillon and the Pucelle, it
+was without doubt elevating.
+
+The case is just as strong if we turn from books to manners. Without
+looking beyond the circle of names that occur in Rousseau's own
+history, we see how deep the depravity had become. Madame d'Epinay's
+gallant sat at table with the husband, and the husband was perfectly
+aware of the relations between them. M. d'Epinay had notorious
+relations with two public women, and was not ashamed to refer to them
+in the presence of his wife, and even to seek her sympathy on an
+occasion when one of them was in some trouble. Not only this, but
+husband and lover used to pursue their debaucheries in the town
+together in jovial comradeship. An opera dancer presided at the table
+of a patrician abbé in his country house, and he passed weeks in her
+house in the town. As for shame, says Barbier on one occasion, "'tis
+true the king has a mistress, but who has not?--except the Duke of
+Orleans; he has withdrawn to Ste. Geneviève, and is thoroughly
+despised in consequence, and rightly."[43] Reeking disorder such as
+all this illustrates, made the passion of the two imaginary lovers of
+the fair lake seem like a breath from the garden of Eden. One virtue
+was lost in that simple paradise, but even that loss was followed by
+circumstances of mental pain and far circling distress, which banished
+the sin into a secondary place; and what remained to strike the
+imagination of the time were delightful pictures of fast union between
+two enchanting women, of the patience and compassionateness of a grave
+mother, of the chivalrous warmth and helpfulness of a loyal friend.
+Any one anxious to pick out sensual strokes and turns of grossness
+could make a small collection of such defilements from the New Heloïsa
+without any difficulty. They were in Rousseau's character, and so they
+came out in his work. Saint Preux afflicts us with touches of this
+kind, just as we are afflicted with similar touches in the
+Confessions. They were not noticed at that day, when people's ears did
+not affect to be any chaster than the rest of them.
+
+A historian of opinion is concerned with the general effect that was
+actually produced by a remarkable book, and with the causes that
+produced it. It is not his easy task to produce a demonstration that
+if the readers had all been as wise and as virtuous as the moralist
+might desire them to be, or if they had all been discriminating and
+scientific critics, not this, but a very different impression would
+have followed. Today we may wonder at the effect of the New Heloïsa.
+A long story told in letters has grown to be a form incomprehensible
+and intolerable to us. We find Richardson hard to be borne, and he put
+far greater vivacity and wider variety into his letters than Rousseau
+did, though he was not any less diffuse, and he abounds in repetitions
+as Rousseau does not. Rousseau was absolutely without humour; that
+belongs to the keenly observant natures, and to those who love men in
+the concrete, not only humanity in the abstract. The pleasantries of
+Julie's cousin, for instance, are heavy and misplaced. Thus the whole
+book is in one key, without the dramatic changes of Richardson, too
+few even as those are. And who now can endure that antique fashion of
+apostrophising men and women, hot with passion and eager with all
+active impulses, in oblique terms of abstract qualities, as if their
+passion and their activity were only the inconsiderable embodiment of
+fine general ideas? We have not a single thrill, when Saint Preux
+being led into the chamber where his mistress is supposed to lie
+dying, murmurs passionately, "What shall I now see in the same place
+of refuge where once all breathed the ecstasy that intoxicated my
+soul, in this same object who both caused and shared my transports!
+the image of death, virtue unhappy, beauty expiring!"[44] This
+rhetorical artificiality of phrase, so repulsive to the more realistic
+taste of a later age, was as natural then as that facility of shedding
+tears, which appears so deeply incredible a performance to a
+generation that has lost that particular fashion of sensibility,
+without realising for the honour of its ancestors the physiological
+truth of the power of the will over the secretions.
+
+The characters seem as stiff as some of the language, to us who are
+accustomed to an Asiatic luxuriousness of delineation. Yet the New
+Heloïsa was nothing less than the beginning of that fresh, full,
+highly-coloured style which has now taught us to find so little charm
+in the source and original of it. Saint Preux is a personage whom no
+widest charity, literary, philosophic, or Christian, can make
+endurable. Egoism is made thrice disgusting by a ceaseless redundance
+of fine phrases. The exaggerated conceits of love in our old poets
+turn graciously on the lover's eagerness to offer every sacrifice at
+the feet of his mistress. Even Werther, stricken creature as he was,
+yet had the stoutness to blow his brains out, rather than be the
+instrument of surrounding the life of his beloved with snares. Saint
+Preux's egoism is unbrightened by a single ray of tender abnegation,
+or a single touch of the sweet humility of devoted passion. The slave
+of his sensations, he has no care beyond their gratification. With
+some rotund nothing on his lips about virtue being the only path to
+happiness, his heart burns with sickly desire. He writes first like a
+pedagogue infected by some cantharidean philter, and then like a
+pedagogue without the philter, and that is the worse of the two.
+Lovelace and the Count of Valmont are manly and hopeful characters in
+comparison. Werther, again, at least represents a principle of
+rebellion, in the midst of all his self-centred despair, and he
+retains strength enough to know that his weakness is shameful. His
+despair, moreover, is deeply coloured with repulsed social
+ambition.[45] He feels the world about him. His French prototype, on
+the contrary, represents nothing but the unalloyed selfishness of a
+sensual love for which there is no universe outside of its own fevered
+pulsation.
+
+Julie is much less displeasing, partly perhaps for the reason that she
+belongs to the less displeasing sex. At least, she preserves
+fortitude, self-control, and profound considerateness for others. At a
+certain point her firmness even moves a measure of enthusiasm. If the
+New Heloïsa could be said to have any moral intention, it is here
+where women learn from the example of Julie's energetic return to
+duty, the possibility and the satisfaction of bending character back
+to comeliness and honour. Excellent as this is from a moral point of
+view, the reader may wish that Julie had been less of a preacher, as
+well as less of a sinner. And even as sinner, she would have been more
+readily forgiven if she had been less deliberate. A maiden who
+sacrifices her virtue in order that the visible consequences may force
+her parents to consent to a marriage, is too strategical to be
+perfectly touching. As was said by the cleverest, though not the
+greatest, of all the women whose youth was fascinated by Rousseau,
+when one has renounced the charms of virtue, it is at least well to
+have all the charms that entire surrender of heart can bestow.[46] In
+spite of this, however, Julie struck the imagination of the time, and
+struck it in a way that was thoroughly wholesome. The type taught men
+some respect for the dignity of women, and it taught women a firmer
+respect for themselves. It is useless, even if it be possible, to
+present an example too lofty for the comprehension of an age. At this
+moment the most brilliant genius in the country was filling France
+with impish merriment at the expense of the greatest heroine that
+France had then to boast. In such an atmosphere Julie had almost the
+halo of saintliness.
+
+We may say all we choose about the inconsistency, the excess of
+preaching, the excess of prudence, in the character of Julie. It was
+said pungently enough by the wits of the time.[47] Nothing that could
+be said on all this affected the fact, that the women between 1760
+and the Revolution were intoxicated by Rousseau's creation to such a
+pitch that they would pay any price for a glass out of which Rousseau
+had drunk, they would kiss a scrap of paper that contained a piece of
+his handwriting, and vow that no woman of true sensibility could
+hesitate to consecrate her life to him, if she were only certain to be
+rewarded by his attachment.[48] The booksellers were unable to meet
+the demand. The book was let out at the rate of twelve sous a volume,
+and the volume could not be detained beyond an hour. All classes
+shared the excitement, courtiers, soldiers, lawyers, and
+bourgeois.[49] Stories were told of fine ladies, dressed for the ball,
+who took the book up for half an hour until the time should come for
+starting; they read until midnight, and when informed that the
+carriage waited, answered not a word, and when reminded by and by that
+it was two o'clock, still read on, and then at four, having ordered
+the horses to be taken out of the carriage, disrobed, went to bed, and
+passed the remainder of the night in reading. In Germany the effect
+was just as astonishing. Kant only once in his life failed to take his
+afternoon walk, and this unexampled omission was due to the witchery
+of the New Heloïsa. Gallantry was succeeded by passion, expansion,
+exaltation; moods far more dangerous for society, as all enthusiasm is
+dangerous, but also far higher and pregnant with better hopes for
+character. To move the sympathetic faculties is the first step towards
+kindling all the other energies which make life wiser and more
+fruitful. It is especially worth noticing that nothing in the
+character of Julie concentrates this outburst of sympathy in
+subjective broodings. Julie is the representative of one recalled to
+the straight path by practical, wholesome, objective sympathy for
+others, not of one expiring in unsatisfied yearnings for the sympathy
+of others for herself, and in moonstruck subjective aspirations. The
+women who wept over her romance read in it the lesson of duty, not of
+whimpering introspection. The danger lay in the mischievous
+intellectual direction which Rousseau imparted to this effusion.
+
+The stir which the Julie communicated to the affections in so many
+ways, marked progress, but in all the elements of reason she was the
+most perilous of reactionaries. So hard it is with the human mind,
+constituted as it is, to march forward a space further to the light,
+without making some fresh swerve obliquely towards old darkness. The
+great effusion of natural sentiment was in the air before the New
+Heloïsa appeared, to condense and turn it into definite channels. One
+beautiful character, Vauven argues (1715-1747), had begun to teach the
+culture of emotional instinct in some sayings of exquisite sweetness
+and moderation, as that "Great thoughts come from the heart." But he
+came too soon, and, alas for us all, he died young, and he made no
+mark. Moderation never can make a mark in the epochs when men are
+beginning to feel the urgent spirit of a new time. Diderot strove with
+more powerful efforts, in the midst of all his herculean labours for
+the acquisition and ordering of knowledge, in the same direction
+towards the great outer world of nature, and towards the great inner
+world of nature in the human breast. His criticisms on the paintings
+of each year, mediocre as the paintings were, are admirable even now
+for their richness and freshness. If Diderot had been endowed with
+emotional tenacity, as he was with tenacity of understanding and of
+purpose, the student of the eighteenth century would probably have
+been spared the not perfectly agreeable task of threading a way along
+the sinuosities of the character and work of Rousseau. But Rousseau
+had what Diderot lacked--sustained ecstatic moods, and fervid trances;
+his literary gesture was so commanding, his apparel so glistening, his
+voice so rich in long-drawn notes of plangent vibration. His words
+are the words of a prophet; a prophet, it is understood, who had lived
+in Paris, and belonged to the eighteenth century, and wrote in French
+instead of Hebrew. The mischief of his work lay in this, that he
+raised feeling, now passionate, now quietest, into the supreme place
+which it was to occupy alone, and not on an equal throne and in equal
+alliance with understanding. Instead of supplementing reason, he
+placed emotion as its substitute. And he made this evil doctrine come
+from the lips of a fictitious character, who stimulated fancy and
+fascinated imagination. Voltaire laughed at the _baisers âcres_ of
+Madame de Wolmar, and declared that a criticism of the Marquis of
+Ximénès had crushed the wretched romance.[50] But Madame de Wolmar was
+so far from crushed, that she turned the flood of feeling which her
+own charms, passion, remorse, and conversion had raised, in a
+direction that Voltaire abhorred, and abhorred in vain.
+
+It is after the marriage of Julie to Wolmar that the action of the
+story takes the turn which sensible men like Voltaire found laughable.
+Saint Preux is absent with Admiral Anson for some years. On his return
+to Europe he is speedily invited by the sage Wolmar, who knows his
+past history perfectly well, to pay them a visit. They all meet with
+leapings on the neck and hearty kisses, the unprejudiced Wolmar
+preserving an open, serene, and smiling air. He takes his young friend
+to a chamber, which is to be reserved for him and for him only. In a
+few days he takes an opportunity of visiting some distant property,
+leaving his wife and Saint Preux together, with the sublime of
+magnanimity. At the same time he confides to Claire his intention of
+entrusting to Saint Preux the education of his children. All goes
+perfectly well, and the household presents a picture of contentment,
+prosperity, moderation, affection, and evenly diffused happiness,
+which in spite of the disagreeableness of the situation is even now
+extremely charming. There is only one cloud. Julie is devoured by a
+source of hidden chagrin. Her husband, "so sage, so reasonable, so far
+from every kind of vice, so little under the influence of human
+passions, is without the only belief that makes virtue precious, and
+in the innocence of an irreproachable life he carries at the bottom of
+his heart the frightful peace of the wicked."[51] He is an atheist.
+Julie is now a pietest, locking herself for hours in her chambers,
+spending days in self-examination and prayer, constantly reading the
+pages of the good Fénelon.[52] "I fear," she writes to Saint Preux,
+"that you do not gain all you might from religion in the conduct of
+your life, and that philosophic pride disdains the simplicity of the
+Christian. You believe prayers to be of scanty service. That is not,
+you know, the doctrine of Saint Paul, nor what our Church professes.
+We are free, it is true, but we are ignorant, feeble, prone to ill.
+And whence should light and force come, if not from him who is their
+very well-spring?... Let us be humble, to be sage; let us see our
+weakness, and we shall be strong."[53] This was the opening of the
+deistical reaction; it was thus, associated with everything that
+struck imagination and moved the sentiment of his readers, that
+Rousseau brought back those sophistical conclusions which Pascal had
+drawn from premisses of dark profound truth, and that enervating
+displacement of reason by celestial contemplation, which Fénelon had
+once made beautiful by the persuasion of virtuous example. He was
+justified in saying, as he afterwards did, that there was nothing in
+the Savoyard Vicar's Profession of Faith which was not to be found in
+the letters of Julie. These were the effective preparations for that
+more famous manifesto; they surrounded belief with all the attractions
+of an interesting and sympathetic preacher, and set it to a harmony of
+circumstance that touched softer fibres.
+
+For, curiously enough, while the first half of the romance is a scene
+of disorderly passion, the second is the glorification of the family.
+A modern writer of genius has inveighed with whimsical bitterness
+against the character of Wolmar,--supposed, we may notice in passing,
+to be partially drawn from D'Holbach,--a man performing so long an
+experiment on these two souls, with the terrible curiosity of a
+surgeon engaged in vivisection.[54] It was, however, much less
+difficult for contemporaries than it is for us to accept so
+unwholesome and prurient a situation. They forgot all the evil that
+was in it, in the charm of the account of Wolmar's active, peaceful,
+frugal, sunny household. The influence of this was immense.[55] It may
+be that the overstrained scene where Saint Preux waits for Julie in
+her room, suggested the far lovelier passage of Faust in the chamber
+of the hapless Margaret. But we may, at least, be sure that Werther
+(1774) would not have found Charlotte cutting bread and butter, if
+Saint Preux had not gone to see Julie take cream and cakes with her
+children and her female servants. And perhaps the other and nobler
+Charlotte of the _Wahlverwandtschaften_ (1809) would not have detained
+us so long with her moss hut, her terrace, her park prospect, if Julie
+had not had her elysium, where the sweet freshness of the air, the
+cool shadows, the shining verdure, flowers diffusing fragrance and
+colour, water running with soft whisper, and the song of a thousand
+birds, reminded the returned traveller of Tinian and Juan Fernandez.
+There is an animation, a variety, an accuracy, a realistic brightness
+in this picture, which will always make it enchanting, even to those
+who cannot make their way through any other letter in the New
+Heloïsa.[56] Such qualities place it as an idyllic piece far above
+such pieces in Goethe's two famous romances. They have a clearness
+and spontaneous freshness which are not among the bountiful gifts of
+Goethe. There are other admirable landscapes in the New Heloïsa,
+though not too many of them, and the minute and careful way in which
+Rousseau made their features real to himself, is accidentally shown in
+his urgent prayer for exactitude in the engraving of the striking
+scene where Saint Preux and Julie visit the monuments of their old
+love for one another.[57] "I have traversed all Rousseau's ground with
+the Heloïsa before me," said Byron, "and am struck to a degree I
+cannot express, with the force and accuracy of his descriptions and
+the beauty of their reality."[58] They were memories made true by long
+dreaming, by endless brooding. The painter lived with these scenes
+ever present to the inner eye. They were his real world, of which the
+tamer world of meadow and woodland actually around him only gave
+suggestion. He thought of the green steeps, the rocks, the mountain
+pines, the waters of the lake, "the populous solitude of bees and
+birds," as of some divine presence, too sublime for personality. And
+they were always benign, standing in relief with the malignity or
+folly of the hurtful insect, Man. He was never a manichæan towards
+nature. To him she was all good and bounteous. The demon forces that
+so fascinated Byron were to Rousseau invisible. These were the
+compositions that presently inspired the landscapes of _Paul and
+Virginia_ (1788), of _Atala_ and _René_ (1801), and of _Obermann_
+(1804), as well as those punier imitators who resemble their masters
+as the hymns of a methodist negro resemble the psalms of David. They
+were the outcome of eager and spontaneous feeling for nature, and not
+the mere hackneyed common-form and inflated description of the
+literary pastoral.[59]
+
+This leads to another great and important distinction to be drawn
+between Rousseau and the school whom in other respects he inspired.
+The admirable Sainte Beuve perplexes one by his strange remark, that
+the union of the poetry of the family and the hearth with the poetry
+of nature is essentially wanting to Rousseau.[60] It only shows that
+the great critic had for the moment forgotten the whole of the second
+part of the New Heloïsa, and his failure to identify Cowper's allusion
+to the _matinée à l'anglaise_ certainly proves that he had at any rate
+forgotten one of the most striking and delicious scenes of the hearth
+in French literature.[61] The tendency to read Rousseau only in the
+Byronic sense is one of those foregone conclusions which are
+constantly tempting the critic to travel out of his record. Rousseau
+assuredly had a Byronic side, but he is just as often a Cowper done
+into splendid prose. His pictures are full of social animation and
+domestic order. He had exalted the simplicity of the savage state in
+his Discourses, but when he came to constitute an ideal life, he found
+it in a household that was more, and not less, systematically
+disciplined than those of the common society around him. The paradise
+in which his Julie moved with Wolmar and Saint Preux, was no more and
+no less than an establishment of the best kind of the rural
+middle-class, frugal, decorous, wholesome, tranquilly austere. No most
+sentimental savage could have found it endurable, or could himself
+without profound transformation of his manners have been endured in
+it. The New Heloïsa ends by exalting respectability, and putting the
+spirit of insurrection to shame. Self-control, not revolt, is its last
+word.
+
+This is what separates Rousseau here and throughout from Sénancour,
+Byron, and the rest. He consummates the triumph of will, while their
+reigning mood is grave or reckless protest against impotence of will,
+the little worth of common aims, the fretting triviality of common
+rules. Franklin or Cobbett might have gloried in the regularity of
+Madame de Wolmar's establishment. The employment of the day was marked
+out with precision. By artful adjustment of pursuits, it was contrived
+that the men-servants should be kept apart from the maid-servants,
+except at their repasts. The women, namely, a cook, a housemaid, and a
+nurse, found their pastime in rambles with their mistress and her
+children, and lived mainly with them. The men were amused by games for
+which their master made regulated provision, now for summer, now for
+winter, offering prizes of a useful kind for prowess and adroitness.
+Often on a Sunday night all the household met in an ample chamber,
+and passed the evening in dancing. When Saint Preux inquired whether
+this was not a rather singular infraction of puritan rule, Julie
+wisely answered that pure morality is so loaded with severe duties,
+that if you add to them the further burden of indifferent forms, it
+must always be at the cost of the essential.[62] The servants were
+taken from the country, never from the town. They entered the
+household young, were gradually trained, and never went away except to
+establish themselves.
+
+The vulgar and obvious criticism on all this is that it is utopian,
+that such households do not generally exist, because neither masters
+nor servants possess the qualities needed to maintain these relations
+of unbroken order and friendliness. Perhaps not; and masters and
+servants will be more and more removed from the possession of such
+qualities, and their relations further distant from such order and
+friendliness, if writers cease to press the beauty and serviceableness
+of a domesticity that is at present only possible in a few rare cases,
+or to insist on the ugliness, the waste of peace, the deterioration of
+character, that are the results of our present system. Undoubtedly it
+is much easier for Rousseau to draw his picture of semi-patriarchal
+felicity, than for the rest of us to realise it. It was his function
+to press ideals of sweeter life on his contemporaries, and they may be
+counted fortunate in having a writer who could fulfil this function
+with Rousseau's peculiar force of masterly persuasion. His scornful
+diatribes against the domestic police of great houses, and the
+essential inhumanity of the ordinary household relations, are both
+excellent and of permanent interest. There is the full breath of a new
+humaneness in them. They were the right way of attacking the
+decrepitude of feudal luxury and insolence, and its imitation among
+the great farmers-general. This criticism of the conditions of
+domestic service marks a beginning of true democracy, as distinguished
+from the mere pulverisation of aristocracy. It rests on the claim of
+the common people to an equal consideration, as equally useful and
+equally capable of virtue and vice; and it implies the essential
+priority of social over political reform.
+
+The story abounds in sumptuary detail. The table partakes of the
+general plenty, but this plenty is not ruinous. The senses are
+gratified without daintiness. The food is common, but excellent of its
+kind. The service is simple, yet exquisite. All that is mere show, all
+that depends on vulgar opinion, all fine and elaborate dishes whose
+value comes of their rarity, and whose names you must know before
+finding any goodness in them, are banished without recall. Even in
+such delicacies as they permit themselves, our friends abstain every
+day from certain things which are reserved for feasts on special
+occasions, and which are thus made more delightful without being more
+costly. What do you suppose these delicacies are? Rare game, or fish
+from the sea, or dainties from abroad? Better than all that; some
+delicious vegetable of the district, one of the savoury things that
+grow in our garden, some fish from the lake dressed in a peculiar way,
+some cheese from our mountains. The service is modest and rustic, but
+clean and smiling. Neither gold-laced liveries in sight of which you
+die of hunger, nor tall crystals laden with flowers for your only
+dessert, here take the place of honest dishes. Here people have not
+the art of nourishing the stomach through the eyes, but they know how
+to add grace to good cheer, to eat heartily without inconvenience, to
+drink merrily without losing reason, to sit long at table without
+weariness, and always to rise from it without disgust.[63]
+
+One singularity in this ideal household was the avoidance of those
+middle exchanges between production and consumption, which enrich the
+shopkeeper but impoverish his customers. Not one of these exchanges is
+made without loss, and the multiplication of these losses would weaken
+even a man of fortune. Wolmar seeks those real exchanges in which the
+convenience of each party to the bargain serves as profit for both.
+Thus the wool is sent to the factories, from which they receive cloth
+in exchange; wine, oil, and bread are produced in the house; the
+butcher pays himself in live cattle; the grocer receives grain in
+return for his goods; the wages of the labourers and the
+house-servants are derived from the produce of the land which they
+render valuable.[64] It was reserved for Fourier, Cabet, and the rest,
+to carry to its highest point this confusion of what is so
+fascinating in a book with what is practicable in society.
+
+The expatiation on the loveliness of a well-ordered interior may
+strike the impatient modern as somewhat long, and the movement as very
+slow, just as people complain of the same things in Goethe's
+_Wahlverwandtschaften_. Such complaint only proves inability, which is
+or is not justifiable, to seize the spirit of the writer. The
+expatiation was long and the movement slow, because Rousseau was full
+of his thoughts; they were a deep and glowing part of himself, and did
+not merely skim swiftly and lightly through his mind. Anybody who
+takes the trouble may find out the difference between this expression
+of long mental brooding, and a merely elaborated diction.[65] The
+length is an essential part of the matter. The whole work is the
+reflection of a series of slow inner processes, the many careful
+weavings of a lonely and miserable man's dreams. And Julie expressed
+the spirit and the joy of these dreams when she wrote, "People are
+only happy before they are happy. Man, so eager and so feeble, made to
+desire all and obtain little, has received from heaven a consoling
+force which brings all that he desires close to him, which subjects it
+to his imagination, which makes it sensible and present before him,
+which delivers it over to him. The land of chimera is the only one in
+this world that is worth dwelling in, and such is the nothingness of
+the human lot, that except the being who exists in and by himself,
+there is nothing beautiful except that which does not exist."[66]
+
+Closely connected with the vigorous attempt to fascinate his public
+with the charm of a serene, joyful, and ordered house, is the
+restoration of marriage in the New Heloïsa to a rank among high and
+honourable obligations, and its representation as the best support of
+an equable life of right conduct and fruitful harmonious emotion.
+Rousseau even invested it with the mysterious dignity as of some
+natural sacrament. "This chaste knot of nature is subject neither to
+the sovereign power nor to paternal authority," he cried, "but only to
+the authority of the common Father." And he pointed his remark by a
+bitter allusion to a celebrated case in which a great house had
+prevailed on the courts to annul the marriage of an elder son with a
+young actress, though her character was excellent, and though she had
+befriended him when he was abandoned by everybody else.[67] This was
+one of the countless democratic thrusts in the book. In the case of
+its heroine, however, the author associated the sanctity of marriage
+not only with equality but with religion. We may imagine the spleen
+with which the philosophers, with both their hatred of the faith, and
+their light esteem of marriage bonds, read Julie's eloquent account of
+her emotions at the moment of her union with Wolmar. "I seemed to
+behold the organ of Providence and to hear the voice of God, as the
+minister gravely pronounced the words of the holy service. The purity,
+the dignity, the sanctity of marriage, so vividly set forth in the
+words of scripture; its chaste and sublime duties, so important to the
+happiness, order, and peace of the human race, so sweet to fulfil even
+for their own sake--all this made such an impression on me that I
+seemed to feel within my breast a sudden revolution. An unknown power
+seemed all at once to arrest the disorder of my affections, and to
+restore them to accordance with the law of duty and of nature. The
+eternal eye that sees everything, I said to myself, now reads to the
+depth of my heart."[68] She has all the well-known fervour of the
+proselyte, and never wearies of extolling the peace of the wedded
+state. Love is no essential to its perfection. "Worth, virtue, a
+certain accord not so much in condition and age as in character and
+temper, are enough between husband and wife; and this does not prevent
+the growth from such a union of a very tender attachment, which is
+none the less sweet for not being exactly love, and is all the more
+lasting."[69] Years after, when Saint Preux has returned and is
+settled in the household, she even tries to persuade him to imitate
+her example, and find contentment in marriage with her cousin. The
+earnestness with which she presses the point, the very sensible but
+not very delicate references to the hygienic drawbacks of celibacy,
+and the fact that the cousin whom she would fain have him marry, had
+complaisantly assisted them in their past loves, naturally drew the
+fire of Rousseau's critical enemies.
+
+Such matters did not affect the general enthusiasm. When people are
+weary of a certain way of surveying life, and have their faces eagerly
+set in some new direction, they read in a book what it pleases them to
+read; they assimilate as much as falls in with their dominant mood,
+and the rest passes away unseen. The French public were bewitched by
+Julie, and were no more capable of criticising her than Julie was
+capable of criticising Saint Preux in the height of her passion for
+him. When we say that Rousseau was the author of this movement, all we
+mean is that his book and its chief personage awoke emotion to
+self-consciousness, gave it a dialect, communicated an impulse in
+favour of social order, and then very calamitously at the same moment
+divorced it from the fundamental conditions of progress, by divorcing
+it from disciplined intelligence and scientific reason.
+
+Apart from the general tendency of the New Heloïsa in numberless
+indirect ways to bring the manners of the great into contempt, by the
+presentation of the happiness of a simple and worthy life, thrifty,
+self-sufficing, and homely, there is one direct protest of singular
+eloquence and gravity. Julie's father is deeply revolted at the bare
+notion of marrying his daughter to a teacher. Rousseau puts his
+vigorous remonstrance against pride of birth into the mouth of an
+English nobleman. This is perhaps an infelicitous piece of
+prosopopoeia, but it is interesting as illustrative of the idea of
+England in the eighteenth century as the home of stout-hearted
+freedom. We may quote one piece from the numerous bits of very
+straightforward speaking in which our representative expressed his
+mind as to the significance of birth. "My friend has nobility," cried
+Lord Edward, "not written in ink on mouldering parchments, but graven
+in his heart in characters that can never be effaced. For my own part,
+by God, I should be sorry to have no other proof of my merit but that
+of a man who has been in his grave these five hundred years. If you
+know the English nobility, you know that it is the most enlightened,
+the best informed, the wisest, the bravest in Europe. That being so, I
+don't care to ask whether it is the oldest or not. We are not, it is
+true, the slaves of the prince, but his friends; nor the tyrants of
+the people, but their leaders. We hold the balance true between
+people, and monarch. Our first duty is towards the nation, our second
+towards him who governs; it is not his will but his right that we
+consider.... We suffer no one in the land to say _God and my sword_,
+nor more than this, _God and my right_."[70] All this was only
+putting Montesquieu into heroics, it is true, but a great many people
+read the romance who were not likely to read the graver book. And
+there was a wide difference between the calm statement of a number of
+political propositions about government, and their transformation into
+dramatic invective against the arrogance of all social inequality that
+does not correspond with inequalities of worth.
+
+There is no contradiction between this and the social quietism of
+other parts of the book. Moral considerations and the paramount place
+that they hold in Rousseau's way of thinking, explain at once his
+contempt for the artificial privileges and assumptions of high rank,
+and his contempt for anything like discontent with the conditions of
+humble rank. Simplicity of life was his ideal. He wishes us to despise
+both those who have departed from it, and those who would depart from
+it if they could. So Julie does her best to make the lot of the
+peasants as happy as it is capable of being made, without ever helping
+them to change it for another. She teaches them to respect their
+natural condition in respecting themselves. Her prime maxim is to
+discourage change of station and calling, but above all to dissuade
+the villager, whose life is the happiest of all, from leaving the true
+pleasures of his natural career for the fever and corruption of
+towns.[71] Presently a recollection of the sombre things that he had
+seen in his rambles through France crossed Rousseau's pastoral
+visions, and he admitted that there were some lands in which the
+publican devours the fruits of the earth; where the misery that covers
+the fields, the bitter greed of some grasping farmer, the inflexible
+rigour of an inhuman master, take something from the charm of his
+rural scenes. "Worn-out horses ready to expire under the blows they
+receive, wretched peasants attenuated by hunger, broken by weariness,
+clad in rags, hamlets all in ruins--these things offer a mournful
+spectacle to the eye: one is almost sorry to be a man, as we think of
+the unhappy creatures on whose blood we have to feed."[72]
+
+Yet there is no hint in the New Heloïsa of the socialism which Morelly
+and Mably flung themselves upon, as the remedy for all these desperate
+horrors. Property, in every page of the New Heloïsa, is held in full
+respect; the master has the honourable burden of patriarchal duty; the
+servant the not less honourable burden of industry and faithfulness;
+disobedience or vice is promptly punished with paternal rigour and
+more than paternal inflexibility. The insurrectionary quality and
+effect of Rousseau's work lay in no direct preaching or vehement
+denunciation of the abuses that filled France with cruelty on the one
+hand and sodden misery on the other. It lay in pictures of a social
+state in which abuses and cruelty cannot exist, nor any miseries save
+those which are inseparable from humanity. The contrast between the
+sober, cheerful, prosperous scenes of romance, and the dreariness of
+the reality of the field life of France,--this was the element that
+filled generous souls with an intoxicating transport.
+
+Rousseau's way of dealing with the portentous questions that lay about
+that tragic scene of deserted fields, ruined hamlets, tottering
+brutes, and hunger-stricken men, may be gathered from one of the many
+traits in Julie which endeared her to that generation, and might
+endear her even to our own if it only knew her. Wolmar's house was
+near a great high-road, and so was daily haunted by beggars. Not one
+of these was allowed to go empty away. And Julie had as many excellent
+reasons to give for her charity, as if she had been one of the
+philosophers of whom she thought so surpassingly ill. If you look at
+mendicancy merely as a trade, what is the harm of a calling whose end
+is to nourish feelings of humanity and brotherly love? From the point
+of view of talent, why should I not pay the eloquence of a beggar who
+stirs my pity, as highly as that of a player who makes me shed tears
+over imaginary sorrows? If the great number of beggars is burdensome
+to the state, of how many other professions that people encourage, may
+you not say the same? How can I be sure that the man to whom I give
+alms is not an honest soul, whom I may save from perishing? In short,
+whatever we may think of the poor wretches, if we owe nothing to the
+beggar, at least we owe it to ourselves to pay honour to suffering
+humanity or to its image.[73] Nothing could be more admirably
+illustrative of the author's confidence that the first thing for us to
+do is to satisfy our fine feelings, and that then all the rest shall
+be added unto us. The doctrine spread so far, that Necker,--a sort of
+Julie in a frock-coat, who had never fallen, the incarnation of this
+doctrine on the great stage of affairs,--was hailed to power to ward
+off the bankruptcy of the state by means of a good heart and moral
+sentences, while Turgot with science and firmness for his resources
+was driven away as an economist and a philosopher.
+
+At a first glance, it may seem that there was compensation for the
+triumph of sentiment over reason, and that if France was ruined by the
+dreams in which Rousseau encouraged the nation to exult, she was saved
+by the fervour and resoluteness of the aspirations with which he
+filled the most generous of her children. No wide movement, we may be
+sure, is thoroughly understood until we have mastered both its
+material and its ideal sides. Materially, Rousseau's work was
+inevitably fraught with confusion because in this sphere not to be
+scientific, not to be careful in tracing effects to their true causes,
+is to be without any security that the causes with which we try to
+deal will lead to the effects that we desire. A Roman statesman who
+had gone to the Sermon on the Mount for a method of staying the
+economic ruin of the empire, its thinning population, its decreasing
+capital, would obviously have found nothing of what he sought. But the
+moral nature of man is redeemed by teaching that may have no bearing
+on economics, or even a bearing purely mischievous, and which has to
+be corrected by teaching that probably goes equally far in the
+contrary direction of moral mischief. In the ideal sphere, the
+processes are very complex. In measuring a man's influence within it
+we have to balance. Rousseau's action was undoubtedly excellent in
+leading men and women to desire simple lives, and a more harmonious
+social order. Was this eminent benefit more than counterbalanced by
+the eminent disadvantage of giving a reactionary intellectual
+direction? By commending irrational retrogression from active use of
+the understanding back to dreamy contemplation?
+
+To one teacher is usually only one task allotted. We do not reproach
+want of science to the virtuous and benevolent Channing; his goodness
+and effusion stirred women and the young, just as Rousseau did, to
+sentimental but humane aspiration. It was this kind of influence that
+formed the opinion which at last destroyed American slavery. We owe a
+place in the temple that commemorates human emancipation, to every man
+who has kindled in his generation a brighter flame of moral
+enthusiasm, and a more eager care for the realisation of good and
+virtuous ideals.
+
+
+III.
+
+The story of the circumstances of the publication of Emilius and the
+persecution which befell its author in consequence, recalls us to the
+distinctively evil side of French history in this critical epoch, and
+carries us away from light into the thick darkness of political
+intrigue, obscurantist faction, and a misgovernment which was at once
+tyrannical and decrepit. It is almost impossible for us to realise the
+existence in the same society of such boundless license of thought,
+and such unscrupulous restraint upon its expression. Not one of
+Rousseau's three chief works, for instance, was printed in France. The
+whole trade in books was a sort of contraband, and was carried on with
+the stealth, subterfuge, daring, and knavery that are demanded in
+contraband dealings. An author or a bookseller was forced to be as
+careful as a kidnapper of coolies or the captain of a slaver would be
+in our own time. He had to steer clear of the court, of the
+parliament, of Jansenists, of Jesuits, of the mistresses of the king
+and the minister, of the friends of the mistresses, and above all of
+that organised hierarchy of ignorance and oppression in all times and
+places where they raise their masked heads,--the bishops and
+ecclesiastics of every sort and condition. Palissot produced his
+comedy to please the devout at the expense of the philosophers (1760).
+Madame de Robecq, daughter of Rousseau's marshal of Luxembourg,
+instigated and protected him, for Diderot had offended her.[74]
+Morellet replied in a piece in which the keen vision of feminine spite
+detected a reference to Madame de Robecq. Though dying, she still had
+relations with Choiseul, and so Morellet was flung into the
+Bastile.[75] Diderot was thrown for three months into Vincennes, where
+we saw him on a memorable occasion, for his Letter on the Blind
+(1748), nominally because it was held to contain irreligious doctrine,
+really because he had given offence to D'Argenson's mistress by
+hinting that she might be very handsome, but that her judgment on
+scientific experiment was of no value.[76]
+
+The New Heloïsa could not openly circulate in France so long as it
+contained the words, "I would rather be the wife of a charcoal-burner
+than the mistress of a king." The last word was altered to "prince,"
+and then Rousseau was warned that he would offend the Prince de Conti
+and Madame de Boufflers.[77] No work of merit could appear without
+more or less of slavish mutilation, and no amount of slavish
+mutilation could make the writer secure against the accidental grudge
+of people who had influence in high quarters.[78]
+
+If French booksellers in the stirring intellectual time of the
+eighteenth century needed all the craft of a smuggler, their morality
+was reduced to an equally low level in dealing not only with the
+police, but with their own accomplices, the book-writers. They excused
+themselves from paying proper sums to authors, on the ground that they
+were robbed of the profits that would enable them to pay such sums, by
+the piracy of their brethren in trade. But then they all pirated the
+works of one another. The whole commerce was a mass of fraud and
+chicane, and every prominent author passed his life between two fires.
+He was robbed, his works were pirated, and, worse than robbery and
+piracy, they were defaced and distorted by the booksellers. On the
+other side he was tormented to death by the suspicion and timidity,
+alternately with the hatred and active tyranny of the administration.
+As we read the story of the lives of all these strenuous men, their
+struggles, their incessant mortifications, their constantly reviving
+and ever irrepressible vigour and interest in the fight, we may wish
+that the shabbiness and the pettiness of the daily lives of some of
+them had faded away from memory, and left us nothing to think of in
+connection with their names but the alertness, courage, tenacity,
+self-sacrifice, and faith with which they defended the cause of human
+emancipation and progress. Happily the mutual hate of the Christian
+factions, to which liberty owes at least as much as charity owes to
+their mutual love, prevented a common union for burning the
+philosophers as well as their books. All torments short of this they
+endured, and they had the great merit of enduring them without any
+hope of being rewarded after their death, as truly good men must
+always be capable of doing.
+
+Rousseau had no taste for martyrdom, nor any intention of courting it
+in even its slightest forms. Holland was now the great printing press
+of France, and when we are counting up the contributions of
+Protestantism to the enfranchisement of Europe, it is just to remember
+the indispensable services rendered by the freedom of the press in
+Holland to the dissemination of French thought in the eighteenth
+century, as well as the shelter that it gave to the French thinkers in
+the seventeenth, including Descartes, the greatest of them all. The
+monstrous tediousness of printing a book at Amsterdam or the Hague,
+the delay, loss, and confusion in receiving and transmitting the
+proofs, and the subterranean character of the entire process,
+including the circulation of the book after it was once fairly
+printed, were as grievous to Rousseau as to authors of more impetuous
+temper. He agreed with Rey, for instance, the Amsterdam printer, to
+sell him the Social Contract for 1000 francs. The manuscript had then
+to be cunningly conveyed to Amsterdam. Rousseau wrote it out in very
+small characters, sealed it carefully up, and entrusted it to the care
+of the chaplain of the Dutch embassy, who happened to be a native of
+Vaud. In passing the barrier, the packet fell into the hands of the
+officials. They tore it open and examined it, happily unconscious that
+they were handling the most explosive kind of gunpowder that they had
+ever meddled with. It was not until the chaplain claimed it in the
+name of ambassadorial privilege, that the manuscript was allowed to go
+on its way to the press.[79] Rousseau repeats a hundred times, not
+only in the Confessions, but also in letters to his friends, how
+resolutely and carefully he avoided any evasion of the laws of the
+country in which he lived. The French government was anxious enough on
+all grounds to secure for France the production of the books of which
+France was the great consumer, but the severity of its censorship
+prevented this.[80] The introduction of the books, when printed, was
+tolerated or connived at, because the country would hardly have
+endured to be deprived of the enjoyment of its own literature. By a
+greater inconsistency the reprinting of a book which had once found
+admission into the country, was also connived at. Thus M. de
+Malesherbes, out of friendship for Rousseau, wished to have an edition
+of the New Heloïsa printed in France, and sold for the benefit of the
+author. That he should have done so is a curious illustration of the
+low morality engendered by a repressive system imperfectly carried
+out. For Rousseau had sold the book to Rey. Rey had treated with a
+French bookseller in the usual way, that is, had sent him half the
+edition printed, the bookseller paying either in cash or other books
+for all the copies he received. Therefore to print an independent
+edition in Paris was to injure, not Rey the foreigner, but the French
+bookseller who stood practically in Rey's place. It was setting two
+French booksellers to ruin one another. Rousseau emphatically declined
+to receive any profit from such a transaction. But, said Malesherbes,
+you sold to Rey a right which you had not got, the right of sole
+proprietorship, excluding the competition of a pirated reprint. Then,
+answered Rousseau, if the right which I sold happens to prove less
+than I thought, it is clear that far from taking advantage of my
+mistake, I owe to Rey compensation for any loss that he may
+suffer.[81]
+
+The friendship of Malesherbes for the party of reason was shown on
+numerous occasions. As director of the book trade he was really the
+censor of the literature of the time.[82] The story of his service to
+Diderot is well known--how he warned Diderot that the police were
+about to visit his house and overhaul his papers, and how when Diderot
+despaired of being able to put them out of sight in his narrow
+quarters, Malesherbes said, "Then send them all to me," and took care
+of them until the storm was overpast. The proofs of the New Heloïsa
+came through his hands, and now he made himself Rousseau's agent in
+the affairs relative to the printing of Emilius. Rousseau entrusted
+the whole matter to him and to Madame de Luxembourg, being confident
+that, in acting through persons of such authority and position, he
+should be protected against any unwitting illegality. Instead of being
+sent to Rey, the manuscript was sold to a bookseller in Paris for six
+thousand francs.[83] A long time elapsed before any proofs reached the
+author, and he soon perceived that an edition was being printed in
+France as well as in Holland. Still, as Malesherbes was in some sort
+the director of the enterprise, the author felt no alarm. Duclos came
+to visit him one day, and Rousseau read aloud to him the Savoyard
+Vicar's Profession of Faith. "What, citizen," he cried, "and that is
+part of a book that they are printing at Paris! Be kind enough not to
+tell any one that you read this to me."[84] Still Rousseau remained
+secure. Then the printing came to a standstill, and he could not find
+out the reason, because Malesherbes was away, and the printer did not
+take the trouble to answer his letters. "My natural tendency," he
+says, and as the rest of his life only too abundantly proved, "is to
+be afraid of darkness; mystery always disturbs me, it is utterly
+antipathetic to my character, which is open even to the pitch of
+imprudence. The aspect of the most hideous monster would alarm me
+little, I verily believe; but if I discern at night a figure in a
+white sheet, I am sure to be terrified out of my life."[85] So he at
+once fancied that by some means the Jesuits had got possession of his
+book, and knowing him to be at death's door, designed to keep the
+Emilius back until he was actually dead, when they would publish a
+truncated version of it to suit their own purposes.[86] He wrote
+letter upon letter to the printer, to Malesherbes, to Madame de
+Luxembourg, and if answers did not come, or did not come exactly when
+he expected them, he grew delirious with anxiety. If he dropped his
+conviction that the Jesuits were plotting the ruin of his book and the
+defilement of his reputation, he lost no time in fastening a similar
+design upon the Jansenists, and when the Jansenists were acquitted,
+then the turn of the philosophers came. We have constantly to remember
+that all this time the unfortunate man was suffering incessant pain,
+and passing his nights in sleeplessness and fever. He sometimes threw
+off the black dreams of unfathomable suspicion, and dreamed in their
+stead of some sunny spot in pleasant Touraine, where under a mild
+climate and among a gentle people he should peacefully end his
+days.[87] At other times he was fond of supposing M. de Luxembourg
+not a duke, nor a marshal of France, but a good country squire living
+in some old mansion, and himself not an author, not a maker of books,
+but with moderate intelligence and slight attainment, finding with the
+squire and his dame the happiness of his life, and contributing to the
+happiness of theirs.[88] Alas, in spite of all his precautions, he had
+unwittingly drifted into the stream of great affairs. He and his book
+were sacrificed to the exigencies of faction; and a persecution set
+in, which destroyed his last chance of a composed life, by giving his
+reason, already disturbed, a final blow from which it never recovered.
+
+Emilius appeared in the crisis of the movement against the Jesuits.
+That formidable order had offended Madame de Pompadour by a refusal to
+recognise her power and position,--a manly policy, as creditable to
+their moral vigour as it was contrary to the maxims which had made
+them powerful. They had also offended Choiseul by the part they had
+taken in certain hostile intrigues at Versailles. The parliaments had
+always been their enemies. This was due first to the jealousy with
+which corporations of lawyers always regard corporations of
+ecclesiastics, and next to their hatred of the bull Unigenitus, which
+had been not only an infraction of French liberties, but the occasion
+of special humiliation to the parliaments. Then the hostility of the
+parliaments to the Jesuits was caused by the harshness with which the
+system of confessional tickets was at this time being carried out.
+Finally, the once powerful house of Austria, the protector of all
+retrograde interests, was now weakened by the Seven Years' War; and
+was unable to bring effective influence to bear on Lewis XV. At last
+he gave his consent to the destruction of the order. The commercial
+bankruptcy of one of their missions was the immediate occasion of
+their fall, and nothing could save them. "I only know one man," said
+Grimm, "in a position to have composed an apology for the Jesuits in
+fine style, if it had been in his way to take the side of that tribe,
+and this man is M. Rousseau." The parliaments went to work with
+alacrity, but they were quite as hostile to the philosophers as they
+were to the Jesuits, and hence their anxiety to show that they were no
+allies of the one even when destroying the other.
+
+Contemporaries seldom criticise the shades and variations of
+innovating speculation with any marked nicety. Anything with the stamp
+of rationality on its phrases or arguments was roughly set down to the
+school of the philosophers, and Rousseau was counted one of their
+number, like Voltaire or Helvétius. The Emilius appeared in May 1762.
+On the 11th of June the parliament of Paris ordered the book to be
+burnt by the public executioner, and the writer to be arrested. For
+Rousseau always scorned the devices of Voltaire and others; he
+courageously insisted on placing his name on the title-page of all his
+works,[89] and so there was none of the usual difficulty in
+identifying the author. The grounds of the proceedings were alleged
+irreligious tendencies to be found in the book.[90]
+
+The indecency of the requisition in which the advocate-general
+demanded its proscription, was admitted even by people who were least
+likely to defend Rousseau.[91] The author was charged with saying not
+only that man may be saved without believing in God, but even that the
+Christian religion does not exist--paradox too flagrant even for the
+writer of the Discourse on Inequality. No evidence was produced either
+that the alleged assertions were in the book, or that the name of the
+author was really the name on its title-page. Rousseau fared no worse,
+but better, than his fellows, for there was hardly a single man of
+letters of that time who escaped arbitrary imprisonment.
+
+The unfortunate author had news of the ferment which his work was
+creating in Paris, and received notes of warning from every hand, but
+he could not believe that the only man in France who believed in God
+was to be the victim of the defenders of Christianity.[92] On the 8th
+of June he spent a merry day with two friends, taking their dinner in
+the fields. "Ever since my youth I had a habit of reading at night in
+my bed until my eyes grew heavy. Then I put out the candle, and tried
+to fall asleep for a few minutes, but they seldom lasted long. My
+ordinary reading at night was the Bible, and I have read it
+continuously through at least five or six times in this way. That
+night, finding myself more wakeful than usual, I prolonged my reading,
+and read through the whole of the book which ends with the Levite of
+Ephraim, and which if I mistake not is the book of Judges. The story
+affected me deeply, and I was busy over it in a kind of dream, when
+all at once I was roused by lights and noises."[93]
+
+It was two o'clock in the morning. A messenger had come in hot haste
+to carry him to Madame de Luxembourg. News had reached her of the
+proposed decree of the parliament. She knew Rousseau well enough to be
+sure that if he were seized and examined, her own share and that of
+Malesherbes in the production of the condemned book would be made
+public, and their position uncomfortably compromised. It was to their
+interest that he should avoid arrest by flight, and they had no
+difficulty in persuading him to fall in with their plans. After a
+tearful farewell with Theresa, who had hardly been out of his sight
+for seventeen years, and many embraces from the greater ladies of the
+castle, he was thrust into a chaise and despatched on the first stage
+of eight melancholy years of wandering and despair, to be driven from
+place to place, first by the fatuous tyranny of magistrates and
+religious doctors, and then by the yet more cruel spectres of his own
+diseased imagination, until at length his whole soul became the home
+of weariness and torment.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] _Conf._, x. 62.
+
+[2] _Conf._, x.
+
+[3] _Ib._ x. 70.
+
+[4] Louis François de Bourbon, Prince de Conti (1717-1776), was
+great-grandson of the brother of the Great Condé. He performed
+creditable things in the war of the Austrian Succession (in Piedmont
+1744, in Belgium 1745); had a scheme of foreign policy as director of
+the secret diplomacy of Lewis XV. (1745-1756), which was to make
+Turkey, Poland, Sweden, Prussia, a barrier against Russia primarily,
+and Austria secondarily; lastly went into moderate opposition to the
+court, protesting against the destruction of the _parlements_ (1771),
+and afterwards opposing the reforms of Turgot (1776). Finally he had
+the honour of refusing the sacraments of the church on his deathbed.
+See Martin's _Hist. de France_, xv. and xvi.
+
+[5] _Conf._, 97. _Corr._, v. 215.
+
+[6] _Corr._, ii. 144. Oct. 7, 1760.
+
+[7] _Conf._, x. 98.
+
+[8] The reader will distinguish this correspondent of Rousseau's,
+_Comtesse_ de Boufflers-Rouveret (1727-18--), from the _Duchesse_ de
+Boufflers, which was the title of Rousseau's Maréchale de Luxembourg
+before her second marriage. And also from the _Marquise_ de Boufflers,
+said to be the mistress of the old king Stanislaus at Lunéville, and
+the mother of the Chevalier de Boufflers (who was the intimate of
+Voltaire, sat in the States General, emigrated, did homage to
+Napoleon, and finally died peaceably under Lewis XVIII.). See Jal's
+_Dict. Critique_, 259-262. Sainte Beuve has an essay on our present
+Comtesse de Boufflers (_Nouveaux Lundis_, iv. 163). She is the Madame
+de Boufflers who was taken by Beauclerk to visit Johnson in his Temple
+chambers, and was conducted to her coach by him in a remarkable manner
+(Boswell's _Life_, ch. li. p. 467). Also much talked of in H.
+Walpole's Letters. See D'Alembert to Frederick, April 15, 1768.
+
+[9] Streckeisen, ii. 32.
+
+[10] _Conf._, x. 71.
+
+[11] For instance, _Corr._ ii. 85, 90, 92, etc. 1759.
+
+[12] Streckeisen, ii. 28, etc.
+
+[13] _Ib._, 29.
+
+[14] _Conf._, x. 99.
+
+[15] _Ib._, x. 57.
+
+[16] _Ib._, xi. 119.
+
+[17] _Corr._, ii. 196. Feb. 16, 1761.
+
+[18] _Ib._, ii. 102, 176, etc.
+
+[19] _Conf._, x. 60.
+
+[20] _Corr._, ii. 12.
+
+[21] As M. St. Marc Girardin has put it: "There are in all Rousseau's
+discussions two things to be carefully distinguished from one another;
+the maxims of the discourse, and the conclusions of the controversy.
+The maxims are ordinarily paradoxical; the conclusions are full of
+good sense." _Rev. des Deux Mondes_, Aug. 1852, p. 501.
+
+[22] _Corr._, ii. 244-246. Oct. 24, 1761.
+
+[23] _Ib._, 1766. _Oeuv._, lxxv. 364.
+
+[24] _Corr._, ii. 32. (1758.)
+
+[25] _Corr._, ii. 63. Jan. 15, 1779.
+
+[26] Bernardin de St. Pierre, xii. 102.
+
+[27] 4th Letter, p. 375.
+
+[28] _Mém._, ii. 299.
+
+[29] _Corr._, ii. 98. July 10, 1759.
+
+[30] _Corr._, ii. 106. Nov. 10, 1759.
+
+[31] _Ib._, ii. 179. Jan. 18, 1761.
+
+[32] _Ib._, ii. 268. Dec. 12, 1761.
+
+[33] _Ib._, ii. 28. Dec. 23, 1761.
+
+[34] _Nouv. Hél._, III. xxii. 147. In 1784 Hume's suppressed essays on
+"Suicide and the Immortality of the Soul" were published in
+London:--"With Remarks, intended as an Antidote to the Poison
+contained in these Performances, by the Editor; to which is added, Two
+Letters on Suicide, from Rousseau's Eloisa." In the preface the reader
+is told that these "two very masterly letters have been much
+celebrated." See Hume's _Essays_, by Green and Grose, i. 69, 70.
+
+[35] _Corr._, iii. 235. Aug. 1, 1763.
+
+[36] _Corr._, ii. 226. Sept. 29, 1761.
+
+[37] P. 294. Jan. 11, 1762.
+
+[38] Madame Latour (Nov. 7, 1730-Sept. 6, 1789) was the wife of a man
+in the financial world, who used her ill and dissipated as much of her
+fortune as he could, and from whom she separated in 1775. After that
+she resumed her maiden name and was known as Madame de Franqueville.
+Musset-Pathay, ii. 182, and Sainte Beuve, _Causeries_, ii. 63.
+
+[39] _Corr._, ii. 214. _Conf._, ix. 289.
+
+[40] English translations of Rousseau's works appeared very speedily
+after the originals. A second edition of the Heloïsa was called for as
+early as May 1761. See _Corr._ ii. 223. A German translation of the
+Heloïsa appeared at Leipzig in 1761, in six duodecimos.
+
+[41] For instance, _Corr._, ii. 168. Nov. 19, 1762.
+
+[42] Choderlos de La Clos: 1741-1803.
+
+[43] Journal, iv. 496. (Ed. Charpentier, 1857.)
+
+[44] _Nouv. Hél._, III. xiv. 48.
+
+[45] _E.g._ Letters, 40-46.
+
+[46] Madame de Staël (1765-1817), in her _Lettres sur les écrits et le
+caractère de J.J. Rousseau_, written when she was twenty, and her
+first work of any pretensions. _Oeuv._, i. 41. Ed. 1820.
+
+[47] Nowhere more pungently than in a little piece of some half-dozen
+pages, headed, _Prédiction tirée d'un vieux Manuscrit_, the form of
+which is borrowed from Grimm's squib in the dispute about French
+music, _Le petit Prophète de Boehmischbroda_, though it seems to me to
+be superior to Grimm in pointedness. Here are a few verses from the
+supposed prophecy of the man who should come--and of what he should
+do. "Et la multitude courra sur ses pas et plusieurs croiront en lui.
+Et il leur dira: Vous êtes des scélérats et des fripons, vos femmes
+sont toutes des femmes perdues, et je viens vivre parmi vous. Et il
+ajoutera tous les hommes sont vertueux dans le pays où je suis né, et
+je n'habiterai jamais le pays où je suis né.... Et il dira aussi qu'il
+est impossible d'avoir des moeurs, et de lire des Romans, et il fera
+un Roman; et dans son Roman le vice sera en action et la vertu en
+paroles, et ses personages seront forcenés d'amour et de philosophie.
+Et dans son Roman on apprendra l'art de suborner philosophiquement une
+jeune fille. Et l'Ecolière perdra toute honte et toute pudeur, et elle
+fera avec son maître des sottises et des maximes.... Et le bel Ami
+étant dans un Bateau seul avec sa Maîtresse voudra le jetter dans
+l'eau et se précipiter avec elle. Et ils appelleront tout cela de la
+Philosophie et de la Vertu," and so on, humorously enough in its way.
+
+[48] See passages in Goncourt's _La Femme au 18ième siècle_, p. 380.
+
+[49] Musset-Pathay, II. 361. See Madame Roland's _Mém._, i. 207.
+
+[50] _Corr._, March 3, and March 19, 1761. The criticisms of Ximénès,
+a thoroughly mediocre person in all respects, were entirely literary,
+and were directed against the too strained and highly coloured quality
+of the phrases--"baisers âcres"--among them.
+
+[51] _Nouv. Hél._, V. v. 115.
+
+[52] VI. vii.
+
+[53] VI. vi.
+
+[54] Michelet's _Louis XV. et Louis XVI._, p. 58.
+
+[55] See Hettner's _Literaturgeschichte_, II. 486.
+
+[56] IV. xi.
+
+[57] IV. xvii. See vol. iii. 423.
+
+[58] In 1816. Moore's _Life_, iii. 247; also 285. And the note to the
+stanzas in the Third Canto,--a note curious for a slight admixture of
+transcendentalism, so rare a thing with Byron, who, sentimental though
+he was, usually rejoiced in a truly Voltairean common sense.
+
+[59] "The present fashion in France, of passing some time in the
+country, is new; at this time of the year, and for many weeks past,
+Paris is, comparatively speaking, empty. Everybody who has a country
+seat is at it, and such as have none visit others who have. This
+remarkable revolution in the French manners is certainly one of the
+best customs they have taken from England; and its introduction was
+effected the easier, being assisted by the magic of Rousseau's
+writings. Mankind are much indebted to that splendid genius, who, when
+living, was hunted from country to country, to seek an asylum, with as
+much venom as if he had been a mad dog; thanks to the vile spirit of
+bigotry, which has not received its death wound. Women of the first
+fashion in France are now ashamed of not nursing their own children;
+and stays are universally proscribed from the bodies of the poor
+infants, which were for so many ages torture to them, as they are
+still in Spain. The country residence may not have effects equally
+obvious; but they will be no less sure in the end, and in all respects
+beneficial to every class in the state." Arthur Young's _Travels_, i.
+72.
+
+[60] _Causeries_, xi. 195.
+
+[61] _Nouv. Hél._, V. iii. "You remember Rousseau's description of an
+English morning: such are the mornings I spend with these good
+people."--Cowper to Joseph Hill, Oct. 25, 1765. _Works_, iii. 269. In
+a letter to William Unwin (Sept. 21, 1779), speaking of his being
+engaged in mending windows, he says, "Rousseau would have been charmed
+to have seen me so occupied, and would have exclaimed with rapture
+that he had found the Emilius who, he supposed, had subsisted only in
+his own idea." For a description illustrative of the likeness between
+Rousseau and Cowper in their feeling for nature, see letter to Newton
+(Sept. 18, 1784, v. 78), and compare it with the description of Les
+Charmettes, making proper allowance for the colour of prose.
+
+[62] IV. x. 260.
+
+[63] V. ii. 37.
+
+[64] V. ii. 47-52.
+
+[65] Rousseau considered that the Fourth and Sixth parts of the New
+Heloïsa were masterpieces of diction. _Conf._ ix. 334.
+
+[66] VI. viii.. 298. _Conf._, xi. 106.
+
+[67] The La Bédoyère case, which began in 1745. See Barbier, iv. 54,
+59, etc.
+
+[68] III. xviii. 84.
+
+[69] III. xx. 116. In the letter to Christopher de Beaumont (p. 102),
+he fires a double shot against the philosophers on the one hand, and
+the church on the other; exalting continence and purity, of which the
+philosophers in their reaction against asceticism thought lightly, and
+exalting marriage over the celibate state, which the churchmen
+associated with mysterious sanctity.
+
+[70] I. lxii.
+
+[71] V. ii.
+
+[72] V. vii. 141.
+
+[73] V. ii. 31-33.
+
+[74] For the Robecq family, see Saint Simon, xviii. 58.
+
+[75] Morellet's _Mém._, i. 89-93. Rousseau, _Conf._, x. 85, etc. This
+_Vision_ is also in the style of Grimm's _Pétit Prophète_, like the
+piece referred to in a previous note, vol. ii. p. 31.
+
+[76] Madame de Vandeul's _Mém. sur Diderot_, p. 27. Rousseau, _Conf._,
+vii. 130.
+
+[77] _Nouv. Hél._, V. xiii. 194. _Conf._, x. 43.
+
+[78] The reader will find a fuller mention of the French book trade in
+my _Diderot_, ch. vi.
+
+[79] _Conf._, xi. 127.
+
+[80] See a letter from Rousseau to Malesherbes, Nov. 5, 1760. _Corr._,
+ii. 157.
+
+[81] _Corr._, ii. 157.
+
+[82] C.G. de Lamoignon de Malesherbes (p. 1721--guillotined, 1794),
+son of the chancellor, and one of the best instructed and most
+enlightened men of the century--a Turgot of the second rank--was
+Directeur de la Librairie from 1750-1763. The process was this: a book
+was submitted to him; he named a censor for it; on the censor's report
+the director gave or refused permission to print, or required
+alterations. Even after these formalities were complied with, the book
+was liable to a decree of the royal council, a decree of the
+parliament, or else a _lettre-de-cachet_ might send the author to the
+Bastile. See Barbier, vii. 126.
+
+After Lord Shelburne saw Malesherbes, he said, "I have seen for the
+first time in my life what I never thought could exist--a man whose
+soul is absolutely free from hope or fear, and yet who is full of life
+and ardour." Mdlle. Lespinasse's _Lettres_, 90.
+
+[83] See note, p. 132.
+
+[84] _Conf._, xi. 134.
+
+[85] _Conf._, xi. 139.
+
+[86] _Ib._, xi. 139. _Corr._, ii. 270, etc. Dec. 12, 1761, etc.
+
+[87] _Conf._, xi. 150.
+
+[88] Fourth Letter to Malesherbes, p. 377.
+
+[89] With one trifling exception, the Letter to Grimm on the Opera of
+Omphale (1752): _Écrits sur la Musique_, p. 337.
+
+[90] See Barbier's Journal, viii. 45 (Ed. Charpentier, 1857). A
+succinct contemporary account of the general situation is to be found
+in D'Alembert's little book, the _Destruction des Jésuites_.
+
+[91] Grimm, for instance: _Corr. Lit._, iii. 117.
+
+[92] _Corr._, ii. 337. June 7, 1672. _Conf._, xi. 152, 162.
+
+[93] _Conf._, xi. 162. The Levite's story is to be read in _Judges_,
+ch. xix.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+PERSECUTION.[94]
+
+
+Those to whom life consists in the immediate consciousness of
+their own direct relations with the people and circumstances that are
+in close contact with them, find it hard to follow the moods of a man
+to whom such consciousness is the least part of himself, and such
+relations the least real part of his life. Rousseau was no sooner in
+the post-chaise which was bearing him away towards Switzerland, than
+the troubles of the previous day at once dropped into a pale and
+distant past, and he returned to a world where was neither parliament,
+nor decree for burning books, nor any warrant for personal arrest. He
+took up the thread where harassing circumstances had broken it, and
+again fell musing over the tragic tale of the Levite of Ephraim. His
+dream absorbed him so entirely as to take specific literary form, and
+before the journey was at an end he had composed a long impassioned
+version of the Bible story. Though it has Rousseau's usual fine
+sonorousness in a high degree, no man now reads it; the author himself
+always preserved a certain tenderness for it.[95] The contrast
+between this singular quietism and the angry stir that marked
+Voltaire's many flights in post-chaises, points like all else to the
+profound difference between the pair. Contrast with Voltaire's shrill
+cries under any personal vexation, this calm utterance:--"Though the
+consequences of this affair have plunged me into a gulf of woes from
+which I shall never come up again so long as I live, I bear these
+gentlemen no grudge. I am aware that their object was not to do me any
+harm, but only to reach ends of their own. I know that towards me they
+have neither liking nor hate. I was found in their way, like a pebble
+that you thrust aside with the foot without even looking at it. They
+ought not to say they have performed their duty, but that they have
+done their business."[96] A new note from a persecuted writer.
+
+Rousseau, in spite of the belief which henceforth possessed him that
+he was the victim of a dark unfathomable plot, and in spite of passing
+outbreaks of gloomy rage, was incapable of steady glowing and active
+resentments. The world was not real enough to him for this. A throng
+of phantoms pressed noiselessly before his sight, and dulled all sense
+of more actual impression. "It is amazing," he wrote, "with what ease
+I forget past ill, however fresh it may be. In proportion as the
+anticipation of it alarms and confuses me when I see it coming, so
+the memory of it returns feebly to my mind and dies out the moment
+after it has arrived. My cruel imagination, which torments itself
+incessantly in anticipating woes that are still unborn, makes a
+diversion for my memory, and hinders me from recalling those which
+have gone. I exhaust disaster beforehand. The more I have suffered in
+foreseeing it, the more easily do I forget it; while on the contrary,
+being incessantly busy with my past happiness, I recall it and brood
+and ruminate over it, so as to enjoy it over again whenever I
+wish."[97] The same turn of humour saved him from vindictiveness. "I
+concern myself too little with the offence, to feel much concern about
+the offender. I only think of the hurt that I have received from him,
+on account of the hurt that he may still do me; and if I were sure he
+would do me no more, what he had already done would be forgotten
+straightway." Though he does not carry the analysis any further, we
+may easily perceive that the same explanation covers what he called
+his natural ingratitude. Kindness was not much more vividly understood
+by him than malice. It was only one form of the troublesome
+interposition of an outer world in his life; he was fain to hurry back
+from it to the real world of his dreams. If any man called practical
+is tempted to despise this dreaming creature, as he fares in his
+chaise from stage to stage, let him remember that one making that
+journey through France less than thirty years later might have seen
+the castles of the great flaring in the destruction of a most
+righteous vengeance, the great themselves fleeing ignobly from the
+land to which their selfishness, and heedlessness, and hatred of
+improvement, and inhuman pride had been a curse, while the legion of
+toilers with eyes blinded by the oppression of ages were groping with
+passionate uncertain hand for that divine something which they thought
+of as justice and right. And this was what Rousseau both partially
+foresaw and helped to prepare,[98] while the common politicians, like
+Choiseul or D'Aiguillon, played their poor game--the elemental forces
+rising unseen into tempest around them.
+
+He reached the territory of the canton of Berne, and alighted at the
+house of an old friend at Yverdun,[99] where native air, the beauty of
+the spot, and the charms of the season, immediately repaired all
+weariness and fatigue.[100] Friends at Geneva wrote letters of sincere
+feeling, joyful that he had not followed the precedent of Socrates too
+closely by remaining in the power of a government eager to destroy
+him.[101] A post or two later brought worse news. The Council at
+Geneva ordered not only Emilius, but the Social Contract also, to be
+publicly burnt, and issued a warrant of arrest against their author,
+if he should set foot in the territory of the republic (June
+19).[102] Rousseau could hardly believe it possible that the free
+Government which he had held up to the reverence of Europe, could have
+condemned him unheard, but he took occasion in a highly characteristic
+manner to chide severely a friend at Geneva who had publicly taken his
+part.[103] Within a fortnight this blow was followed by another. His
+two books were reported to the senate of Berne, and Rousseau was
+informed by one of the authorities that a notification was on its way
+admonishing him to quit the canton within the space of fifteen
+days.[104] This stroke he avoided by flight to Motiers, a village in
+the principality of Neuchâtel (July 10), then part of the dominions of
+the King of Prussia.[105] Rousseau had some antipathy to Frederick,
+both because he had beaten the French, whom Rousseau loved, and
+because his maxims and his conduct alike seemed to trample under foot
+respect for the natural law and not a few human duties. He had
+composed a verse to the effect that Frederick thought like a
+philosopher and acted like a king, philosopher and king notoriously
+being words of equally evil sense in his dialect. There was also a
+passage in Emilius about Adrastus, King of the Daunians, which was
+commonly understood to mean Frederick, King of the Prussians. Still
+Rousseau was acute enough to know that mean passions usually only rule
+the weak, and have little hold over the strong. He boldly wrote both
+to the king and to Lord Marischal, the governor of the principality,
+informing them that he was there, and asking permission to remain in
+the only asylum left for him upon the earth.[106] He compared himself
+loftily to Coriolanus among the Volscians, and wrote to the king in a
+vein that must have amused the strong man. "I have said much ill of
+you, perhaps I shall still say more; yet, driven from France, from
+Geneva, from the canton of Berne, I am come to seek shelter in your
+states. Perhaps I was wrong in not beginning there; this is eulogy of
+which you are worthy. Sire, I have deserved no grace from you, and I
+seek none, but I thought it my duty to inform your majesty that I am
+in your power, and that I am so of set design. Your majesty will
+dispose of me as shall seem good to you."[107] Frederick, though no
+admirer of Rousseau or his writings,[108] readily granted the required
+permission. He also, says Lord Marischal, "gave me orders to furnish
+him his small necessaries if he would accept them; and though that
+king's philosophy be very different from that of Jean Jacques, yet he
+does not think that a man of an irreproachable life is to be
+persecuted because his sentiments are singular. He designs to build
+him a hermitage with a little garden, which I find he will not accept,
+nor perhaps the rest, which I have not yet offered him."[109] When the
+offer of the flour, wine, and firewood was at length made in as
+delicate terms as possible, Rousseau declined the gift on grounds
+which may raise a smile, but which are not without a rather touching
+simplicity.[110] "I have enough to live on for two or three years," he
+said, "but if I were dying of hunger, I would rather in the present
+condition of your good prince, and not being of any service to him, go
+and eat grass and grub up roots, than accept a morsel of bread from
+him."[111] Hume might well call this a phenomenon in the world of
+letters, and one very honourable for the person concerned.[112] And we
+recognise its dignity the more when we contrast it with the baseness
+of Voltaire, who drew his pension from the King of Prussia while
+Frederick was in his most urgent straits, and while the poet was
+sportively exulting to all his correspondents in the malicious
+expectation that he would one day have to allow the King of Prussia
+himself a pension.[113] And Rousseau was a poor man, living among the
+poor and in their style. His annual outlay at this time was covered by
+the modest sum of sixty louis.[114] What stamps his refusal of
+Frederick's gifts as true dignity, is the fact that he not only did
+not refuse money for any work done, but expected and asked for it.
+Malesherbes at this very time begged him to collect plants for him.
+Joyfully, replied Rousseau, "but as I cannot subsist without the aid
+of my own labour, I never meant, in spite of the pleasure that it
+might otherwise have been to me, to offer you the use of my time for
+nothing."[115] In the same year, we may add, when the tremendous
+struggle of the Seven Years' War was closing, the philosopher wrote a
+second terse epistle to the king, and with this their direct
+communication came to an end. "Sire, you are my protector and my
+benefactor; I would fain repay you if I can. You wish to give me
+bread; is there none of your own subjects in want of it? Take that
+sword away from my sight, it dazzles and pains me. It has done its
+work only too well; the sceptre is abandoned. Great is the career for
+kings of your stuff, and you are still far from the term; time
+presses, you have not a moment to lose. Fathom well your heart, O
+Frederick! Can you dare to die without having been the greatest of
+men? Would that I could see Frederick, the just and the redoubtable,
+covering his states with multitudes of men to whom he should be a
+father; then will J.J. Rousseau, the foe of kings, hasten to die at
+the foot of his throne."[116] Frederick, strong as his interest was in
+all curious persons who could amuse him, was too busy to answer this,
+and Rousseau was not yet recognised as Voltaire's rival in power and
+popularity.
+
+Motiers is one of the half-dozen decent villages standing in the flat
+bottom of the Val de Travers, a widish valley that lies between the
+gorges of the Jura and the Lake of Neuchâtel, and is famous in our day
+for its production of absinthe and of asphalt. The flat of the valley,
+with the Reuss making a bald and colourless way through the midst of
+it, is nearly treeless, and it is too uniform to be very pleasing. In
+winter the climate is most rigorous, for the level is high, and the
+surrounding hills admit the sun's rays late and cut them off early.
+Rousseau's description, accurate and recognisable as it is,[117]
+strikes an impartial tourist as too favourable. But when a piece of
+scenery is a home to a man, he has an eye for a thousand outlines,
+changes of light, soft variations of colour; the landscape lives for
+him with an unspoken suggestion and intimate association, to all of
+which the swift passing stranger is very cold.
+
+His cottage, which is still shown, was in the midst of the other
+houses, and his walks, which were at least as important to him as the
+home in which he dwelt, lay mostly among woody heights with streaming
+cascades. The country abounded in natural curiosities of a humble
+sort, and here that interest in plants which had always been strong in
+him, began to grow into a passion. Rousseau had so curious a feeling
+about them, that when in his botanical expeditions he came across a
+single flower of its kind, he could never bring himself to pluck it.
+His sight, though not good for distant objects, was of the very finest
+for things held close; his sense of smell was so acute and subtle
+that, according to a good witness, he might have classified plants by
+odours, if language furnished as many names as nature supplies
+varieties of fragrance.[118] He insisted in all botanising and other
+walking excursions on going bareheaded, even in the heat of the
+dog-days; he declared that the action of the sun did him good. When
+the days began to turn, the summer was straightway at an end for him:
+"My imagination," he said, in a phrase which went further through his
+life than he supposed, "at once brings winter." He hated rain as much
+as he loved sun, so he must once have lost all the mystic fascination
+of the green Savoy lakes gleaming luminous through pale showers, and
+now again must have lost the sombre majesty of the pines of his valley
+dripping in torn edges of cloud, and all those other sights in
+landscape that touch subtler parts of us than comforted sense.
+
+One of his favourite journeys was to Colombier, the summer retreat of
+Lord Marischal. For him he rapidly conceived the same warm friendship
+which he felt for the Duke of Luxembourg, whom he had just left. And
+the sagacious, moderate, silent Scot had as warm a liking for the
+strange refugee who had come to him for shelter, or shall we call it a
+kind of shaggy compassion, as of a faithful inarticulate creature. His
+letters, which are numerous enough, abound in expressions of hearty
+good-will. These, if we reflect on the genuine worth, veracity,
+penetration, and experience of the old man who wrote them, may fairly
+be counted the best testimony that remains to the existence of
+something sterling at the bottom of Rousseau's character.[119] It is
+here no insincere fine lady of the French court, but a homely and
+weather-beaten Scotchman, who speaks so often of his refugee's
+rectitude of heart and true sensibility.[120]
+
+He insisted on being allowed to settle a small sum on Theresa, who
+had joined Rousseau at Motiers, and in other ways he showed a true
+solicitude and considerateness both for her and for him.[121] It was
+his constant dream, that on his return to Scotland, Jean Jacques
+should accompany him, and that with David Hume, they would make a trio
+of philosophic hermits; that this was no mere cheery pleasantry is
+shown by the pains he took in settling the route for the journey.[122]
+The plan only fell through in consequence of Frederick's cordial
+urgency that his friend should end his days with him; he returned to
+Prussia and lived at Sans Souci until the close, always retaining
+something of his good-will for "his excellent savage," as he called
+the author of the Discourses. They had some common antipathies,
+including the fundamental one of dislike to society, and especially to
+the society of the people of Neuchâtel, the Gascons of Switzerland.
+"Rousseau is gay in company," Lord Marischal wrote to Hume, "polite,
+and what the French call _aimable_, and gains ground daily in the
+opinion of even the clergy here. His enemies elsewhere continue to
+persecute him, and he is pestered with anonymous letters."[123]
+
+Some of these were of a humour that disclosed the master hand.
+Voltaire had been universally suspected of stirring up the feeling of
+Geneva against its too famous citizen,[124] though for a man of less
+energy the affair of the Calas, which he was now in the thick of,
+might have sufficed. Voltaire's letters at this time show how hard he
+found it in the case of Rousseau to exercise his usual pity for the
+unfortunate. He could not forget that the man who was now tasting
+persecution had barked at philosophers and stage-plays; that he was a
+false brother, who had fatuously insulted the only men who could take
+his part; that he was a Judas who had betrayed the sacred cause.[125]
+On the whole, however, we ought probably to accept his word, though
+not very categorically given,[126] that he had nothing to do with the
+action taken against Rousseau. That action is quite adequately
+explained, first by the influence of the resident of France at Geneva,
+which we know to have been exerted against the two fatal books,[127]
+and second by the anxiety of the oligarchic party to keep out of their
+town a man whose democratic tendencies they now knew so well and so
+justly dreaded.[128] Moultou, a Genevese minister, in the full tide
+of devotion and enthusiasm for the author of Emilius, met Voltaire at
+the house of a lady in Geneva. All will turn out well, cried the
+patriarch; "the syndics will say M. Rousseau, you have done ill to
+write what you have written; promise for the future to respect the
+religion of your country. Jean Jacques will promise, and perhaps he
+will say that the printer took the liberty of adding a sheet or two to
+his book." "Never," cried the ardent Moultou; "Jean Jacques never puts
+his name to works to disown them after."[129] Voltaire disowned his
+own books with intrepid and sustained mendacity, yet he bore no grudge
+to Moultou for his vehemence. He sent for him shortly afterwards,
+professed an extreme desire to be reconciled with Rousseau, and would
+talk of nothing else. "I swear to you," wrote Moultou, "that I could
+not understand him the least in the world; he is a marvellous actor; I
+could have sworn that he loved you."[130] And there really was no
+acting in it. The serious Genevese did not see that he was dealing
+with "one all fire and fickleness, a child."
+
+Rousseau soon found out that he had excited not only the band of
+professed unbelievers, but also the tormenting wasps of orthodoxy. The
+doctors of the Sorbonne, not to be outdone in fervour for truth by the
+lawyers of the parliament, had condemned Emilius as a matter of
+course. In the same spirit of generous emulation, Christopher de
+Beaumont, "by the divine compassion archbishop of Paris, Duke of Saint
+Cloud, peer of France, commander of the order of the Holy Ghost," had
+issued (Aug. 20, 1762) one of those hateful documents in which
+bishops, Catholic and Protestant, have been wont for the last century
+and a half to hide with swollen bombastic phrase their dead and
+decomposing ideas. The windy folly of these poor pieces is usually in
+proportion to the hierarchic rank of those who promulgate them, and an
+archbishop owes it to himself to blaspheme against reason and freedom
+in superlatives of malignant unction. Rousseau's reply (Nov. 18, 1762)
+is a masterpiece of dignity and uprightness. Turning to it from the
+mandate which was its provocative, we seem to grasp the hand of a man,
+after being chased by a nightmare of masked figures. Rousseau never
+showed the substantial quality of his character more surely and
+unmistakably than in controversy. He had such gravity, such austere
+self-command, such closeness of grip. Most of us feel pleasure in
+reading the matchless banter with which Voltaire assailed his
+theological enemies. Reading Rousseau's letter to De Beaumont we
+realise the comparative lowness of the pleasure which Voltaire had
+given us. We understand how it was that Rousseau made fanatics, while
+Voltaire only made sceptics. At the very first words, the mitre, the
+crosier, the ring, fall into the dust; the Archbishop of Paris, the
+Duke of Saint Cloud, the peer of France, the commander of the Holy
+Ghost, is restored from the disguises of his enchantment, and becomes
+a human being. We hear the voice of a man hailing a man. Voltaire
+often sank to the level of ecclesiastics. Rousseau raised the
+archbishop to his own level, and with magnanimous courtesy addressed
+him as an equal. "Why, my lord, have I anything to say to you? What
+common tongue can we use? How are we to understand one another? And
+what is there between me and you?" And he persevered in this distant
+lofty vein, hardly permitting himself a single moment of acerbity. We
+feel the ever-inspiring breath of seriousness and sincerity. This was
+because, as we repeat so often, Rousseau's ideas, all engendered of
+dreams as they were, yet lived in him and were truly rooted in his
+character. He did not merely say, as any of us can say so fluently,
+that he craved reality in human relations, that distinctions of rank
+and post count for nothing, that our lives are in our own hands and
+ought not to be blown hither and thither by outside opinion and words
+heedlessly scattered; that our faith, whatever it may be, is the most
+sacred of our possessions, organic, indissoluble, self-sufficing; that
+our passage across the world, if very short, is yet too serious to be
+wasted in frivolous disrespect for ourselves, and angry disrespect for
+others. All this was actually his mind. And hence the little
+difficulty he had in keeping his retort to the archbishop, as to his
+other antagonists, on a worthy level.
+
+Only once or twice does his sense of the reckless injustice with which
+he had been condemned, and of the persecution which was inflicted on
+him by one government after another, stir in him a blaze of high
+remonstrance. "You accuse me of temerity," he cried; "how have I
+earned such a name, when I only propounded difficulties, and even that
+with so much reserve; when I only advanced reasons, and even that with
+so much respect; when I attacked no one, nor even named one? And you,
+my lord, how do you dare to reproach with temerity a man of whom you
+speak with such scanty justice and so little decency, with so small
+respect and so much levity? You call me impious, and of what impiety
+can you accuse me--me who never spoke of the Supreme Being except to
+pay him the honour and glory that are his due, nor of man except to
+persuade all men to love one another? The impious are those who
+unworthily profane the cause of God by making it serve the passions of
+men. The impious are those who, daring to pass for the interpreters of
+divinity, and judges between it and man, exact for themselves the
+honours that are due to it only. The impious are those who arrogate to
+themselves the right of exercising the power of God upon earth, and
+insist on opening and shutting the gates of heaven at their own good
+will and pleasure. The impious are those who have libels read in the
+church. At this horrible idea my blood is enkindled, and tears of
+indignation fall from my eyes. Priests of the God of peace, you shall
+render an account one day, be very sure, of the use to which you have
+dared to put his house.... My lord, you have publicly insulted me:
+you are now convicted of heaping calumny upon me. If you were a
+private person like myself, so that I could cite you before an
+equitable tribunal, and we could both appear before it, I with my
+book, and you with your mandate, assuredly you would be declared
+guilty; you would be condemned to make reparation as public as the
+wrong was public. But you belong to a rank that relieves you from the
+necessity of being just, and I am nothing. Yet you who profess the
+gospel, you, a prelate appointed to teach others their duty, you know
+what your own duty is in such a case. Mine I have done: I have nothing
+more to say to you, and I hold my peace."[131]
+
+The letter was as good in dialectic as it was in moral tone. For this
+is a little curious, that Rousseau, so diffuse in expounding his
+opinions, and so unscientific in his method of coming to them, should
+have been one of the keenest and most trenchant of the
+controversialists of a very controversial time. Some of his strokes in
+defence of his first famous assault on civilisation are as hard, as
+direct, and as effective as any in the records of polemical
+literature. We will give one specimen from the letter to the
+Archbishop of Paris; it has the recommendation of touching an argument
+that is not yet quite universally recognised for slain. The Savoyard
+Vicar had dwelt on the difficulty of accepting revelation as the voice
+of God, on account of the long distance of time between us, and the
+questionableness of the supporting testimony. To which the archbishop
+thus:--"But is there not then an infinity of facts, even earlier than
+those of the Christian revelation, which it would be absurd to doubt?
+By what way other than that of human testimony has our author himself
+known the Sparta, the Athens, the Rome, whose laws, manners, and
+heroes he extols with such assurance? How many generations of men
+between him and the historians who have preserved the memory of these
+events?" First, says Rousseau in answer, "it is in the order of things
+that human circumstances should be attested by human evidence, and
+they can be attested in no other way. I can only know that Rome and
+Sparta existed, because contemporaries assure me that they existed. In
+such a case this intermediate communication is indispensable. But why
+is it necessary between God and me? Is it simple or natural that God
+should have gone in search of Moses to speak to Jean Jacques Rousseau?
+Second, nobody is obliged to believe that Sparta once existed, and
+nobody will be devoured by eternal flames for doubting it. Every fact
+of which we are not witnesses is only established by moral proofs, and
+moral proofs have various degrees of strength. Will the divine justice
+hurl me into hell for missing the exact point at which a proof becomes
+irresistible? If there is in the world an attested story, it is that
+of vampires; nothing is wanting for judicial proof,--reports and
+certificates from notables, surgeons, clergy, magistrates. But who
+believes in vampires, and shall we all be damned for not believing?
+Third, _my constant experience and that of all men is stronger in
+reference to prodigies than the testimony of some men_."
+
+He then strikes home with a parable. The Abbé Pâris had died in the
+odour of Jansenist sanctity (1727), and extraordinary doings went on
+at his tomb; the lame walked, men and women sick of the palsy were
+made whole, and so forth. Suppose, says Rousseau, that an inhabitant
+of the Rue St. Jacques speaks thus to the Archbishop of Paris, "My
+lord, I know that you neither believe in the beatitude of St. Jean de
+Pâris, nor in the miracles which God has been pleased publicly to work
+upon his tomb in the sight of the most enlightened and most populous
+city in the world; but I feel bound to testify to you that I have just
+seen the saint in person raised from the dead in the spot where his
+bones were laid." The man of the Rue St. Jacques gives all the detail
+of such a circumstance that could strike a beholder. "I am persuaded
+that on hearing such strange news, you will begin by interrogating him
+who testifies to its truth, as to his position, his feelings, his
+confessor, and other such points; and when from his air, as from his
+speech, you have perceived that he is a poor workman, and when having
+no confessional ticket to show you, he has confirmed your notion that
+he is a Jansenist, Ah, ah, you will say to him, you are a
+convulsionary, and have seen Saint Pâris resuscitated. There is
+nothing wonderful in that; you have seen so many other wonders!" The
+man would insist that the miracle had been seen equally by a number of
+other people, who though Jansenists, it is true, were persons of sound
+sense, good character, and excellent reputation. Some would send the
+man to Bedlam, "but you after a grave reprimand, will be content with
+saying: I know that two or three witnesses, good people and of sound
+sense, may attest the life or the death of a man, but I do not know
+how many more are needed to establish the resurrection of a Jansenist.
+Until I find that out, go, my son, and try to strengthen your brain: I
+give you a dispensation from fasting, and here is something for you to
+make your broth with. That is what you would say, and what any other
+sensible man would say in your place. Whence I conclude that even
+according to you and to every other sensible man, the moral proofs
+which are sufficient to establish facts that are in the order of moral
+possibilities, are not sufficient to establish facts of another order
+and purely supernatural."[132]
+
+Perhaps, however, the formal denunciation by the Archbishop of Paris
+was less vexatious than the swarming of the angrier hive of ministers
+at his gates. "If I had declared for atheism," he says bitterly, "they
+would at first have shrieked, but they would soon have left me in
+peace like the rest. The people of the Lord would not have kept watch
+over me; everybody would not have thought he was doing me a high
+favour in not treating me as a person cut off from communion, and I
+should have been quits with all the world. The holy women in Israel
+would not have written me anonymous letters, and their charity would
+not have breathed devout insults. They would not have taken the
+trouble to assure me in all humility of heart that I was a castaway,
+an execrable monster, and that the world would have been well off if
+some good soul had been at the pains to strangle me in my cradle.
+Worthy people on their side would not torment themselves and torment
+me to bring me back to the way of salvation; they would not charge at
+me from right and left, nor stifle me under the weight of their
+sermons, nor force me to bless their zeal while I cursed their
+importunity, nor to feel with gratitude that they are obeying a call
+to lay me in my very grave with weariness."[133]
+
+He had done his best to conciliate the good opinion of his vigilant
+neighbours. Their character for contentious orthodoxy was well known.
+It was at Neuchâtel that the controversy as to the eternal punishment
+of the wicked raged with a fury that ended in a civil outbreak. The
+peace of the town was violently disturbed, ministers were suspended,
+magistrates were interdicted, life was lost, until at last Frederick
+promulgated his famous bull:--"Let the parsons who make for themselves
+a cruel and barbarous God, be eternally damned as they desire and
+deserve; and let those parsons who conceive God gentle and merciful,
+enjoy the plenitude of his mercy."[134] When Rousseau came within the
+territory, preparations were made to imitate the action of Paris,
+Geneva, and Berne. It was only the king's express permission that
+saved him from a fourth proscription. The minister at Motiers was of
+the less inhuman stamp, and Rousseau, feeling that he could not,
+without failing in his engagements and his duty as a citizen, neglect
+the public profession of the faith to which he had been restored eight
+years before, attended the religious services with regularity. He even
+wrote to the pastor a letter in vindication of his book, and
+protesting the sincerity of his union with the reformed
+congregation.[135] The result of this was that the pastor came to tell
+him how great an honour he held it to count such a member in his
+flock, and how willing he was to admit him without further examination
+to partake of the communion.[136] Rousseau went to the ceremony with
+eyes full of tears and a heart swelling with emotion. We may respect
+his mood as little or as much as we please, but it was certainly more
+edifying than the sight of Voltaire going through the same rite,
+merely to harass a priest and fill a bishop with fury.
+
+In all other respects he lived a harmless life during the three years
+of his sojourn in the Val de Travers. As he could never endure what he
+calls the inactive chattering of the parlour--people sitting in front
+of one another with folded hands and nothing in motion except the
+tongue--he learnt the art of making laces; he used to carry his pillow
+about with him, or sat at his own door working like the women of the
+village, and chatting with the passers-by. He made presents of his
+work to young women about to marry, always on the condition that they
+should suckle their children when they came to have them. If a little
+whimsical, it was a harmless and respectable pastime. It is pleasanter
+to think of a philosopher finding diversion in weaving laces, than of
+noblemen making it the business of their lives to run after ribands. A
+society clothed in breeches was incensed about the same time by
+Rousseau's adoption of the Armenian costume, the vest, the furred
+bonnet, the caftan, and the girdle. There was nothing very wonderful
+in this departure from use. An Armenian tailor used often to visit
+some friends at Montmorency. Rousseau knew him, and reflected that
+such a dress would be of singular comfort to him in the circumstances
+of his bodily disorder.[137] Here was a solid practical reason for
+what has usually been counted a demonstration of a turned brain.
+Rousseau had as good cause for going about in a caftan as Chatham had
+for coming to the House of Parliament wrapped in flannel. Vanity and a
+desire to attract notice may, we admit, have had something to do with
+Rousseau's adoption of an uncommon way of dressing. Shrewd wits like
+the Duke of Luxembourg and his wife did not suppose that it was so.
+We, living a hundred years after, cannot possibly know whether it was
+so or not, and our estimate of Rousseau's strange character would be
+very little worth forming, if it only turned on petty singularities of
+this kind. The foolish, equivocally gifted with the quality of
+articulate speech, may, if they choose, satisfy their own self-love by
+reducing all action out of the common course to a series of variations
+on the same motive in others. Men blessed by the benignity of
+experience will be thankful not to waste life in guessing evil about
+unknowable trifles.
+
+During his stay at Motiers Rousseau's time was hardly ever his own.
+Visitors of all nations, drawn either by respect for his work or by
+curiosity to see a man who had been prescribed by so many governments,
+came to him in throngs. His partisans at Geneva insisted on sending
+people to convince themselves how good a man they were persecuting. "I
+had never been free from strangers for six weeks," he writes. "Two
+days after, I had a Westphalian gentleman and one from Genoa; six days
+later, two persons from Zurich, who stayed a week; then a Genevese,
+recovering from an illness, and coming for change of air, fell ill
+again, and he has only just gone away."[138] One visitor, writing home
+to his wife of the philosopher to whom he had come on a pilgrimage,
+describes his manners in terms which perhaps touch us with
+surprise:--"Thou hast no idea how charming his society is, what true
+politeness there is in his manners, what a depth of serenity and
+cheerfulness in his talk. Didst thou not expect quite a different
+picture, and figure to thyself an eccentric creature, always grave and
+sometimes even abrupt? Ah, what a mistake! To an expression of great
+mildness he unites a glance of fire, and eyes of a vivacity the like
+of which never was seen. When you handle any matter in which he takes
+an interest, then his eyes, his lips, his hands, everything about him
+speaks. You would be quite wrong to picture in him an everlasting
+grumbler. Not at all; he laughs with those who laugh, he chats and
+jokes with children, he rallies his housekeeper."[139] He was not so
+civil to all the world, and occasionally turned upon his pursuers with
+a word of most sardonic roughness.[140] But he could also be very
+generous. We find him pressing a loan from his scanty store on an
+outcast adventurer, and warning him, "When I lend (which happens
+rarely enough), 'tis my constant maxim never to count on repayment,
+nor to exact it."[141] He received hundreds of letters, some seeking
+an application of his views on education to a special case, others
+craving further exposition of his religious doctrines. Before he had
+been at Motiers nine months he had paid ten louis for the postage of
+letters, which after all contained little more than reproaches,
+insults, menaces, imbecilities.[142]
+
+Not the least curious of his correspondence at this time is that with
+the Prince of Würtemberg, then living near Lausanne.[143] The prince
+had a little daughter four months old, and he was resolved that her
+upbringing should be carried on as the author of Emilius might please
+to direct. Rousseau replied courteously that he did not pretend to
+direct the education of princes or princesses.[144] His undaunted
+correspondent sent him full details of his babe's habits and
+faculties, and continued to do so at short intervals, with the
+fondness of a young mother or an old nurse. Rousseau was interested,
+and took some trouble to draw up rules for the child's nurture and
+admonition. One may smile now and then at the prince's ingenuous zeal,
+but his fervid respect and devotion for the teacher in whom he thought
+he had found the wisest man that ever lived, and who had at any rate
+spoken the word that kindled the love of virtue and truth in him, his
+eagerness to know what Rousseau thought right, and his equal eagerness
+in trying to do it, his care to arrange his household in a simple and
+methodical way to please his master, his discipular patience when
+Rousseau told him that his verses were poor, or that he was too fond
+of his wife,--all this is a little uncommon in a prince, and deserves
+a place among the ample mass of other evidence of the power which
+Rousseau's pictures of domestic simplicity and wise and humane
+education had in the eighteenth century. It gives us a glimpse, close
+and direct, of the naturalist revival reaching up into high places.
+But the trade of philosopher in such times is perhaps an irksome one,
+and Rousseau was the private victim of his public action. His prince
+sent multitudes of Germans to visit the sage, and his letters, endless
+with their details of the nursery, may well have become a little
+tedious to a worn-out creature who only wanted to be left alone.[145]
+The famous Prince Henry, Frederick's brother, thought a man happy who
+could have the delight of seeing Rousseau as often as he chose.[146]
+People forgot the other side of this delight, and the unlucky
+philosopher found in a hundred ways alike from enemies and the friends
+whose curiosity makes them as bad as enemies, that the pedestal of
+glory partakes of the nature of the pillory or the stocks.
+
+It is interesting to find the famous English names of Gibbon and
+Boswell in the list of the multitudes with whom he had to do at this
+time.[147] The former was now at Lausanne, whither he had just
+returned from that memorable visit to England which persuaded him that
+his father would never endure his alliance with the daughter of an
+obscure Swiss pastor. He had just "yielded to his fate, sighed as a
+lover, and obeyed as a son." "How sorry I am for our poor Mademoiselle
+Curchod," writes Moultou to Rousseau; "Gibbon whom she loves, and to
+whom she has sacrificed, as I know, some excellent matches, has come
+to Lausanne, but cold, insensible, and as entirely cured of his old
+passion as she is far from cure. She has written me a letter that
+makes my heart ache." He then entreats Rousseau to use his influence
+with Gibbon, who is on the point of starting for Motiers, by extolling
+to him the lady's worth and understanding.[148] "I hope Mr. Gibbon
+will not come," replied the sage; "his coldness makes me think ill of
+him. I have been looking over his book again [the _Essai sur l'étude
+de la littérature_, 1761]; he runs after brilliance too much, and is
+strained and stilted. Mr. Gibbon is not the man for me, and I do not
+think he is the man for Mademoiselle Curchod either."[149] Whether
+Gibbon went or not, we do not know. He knew in after years what had
+been said of him by Jean Jacques, and protested with mild pomp that
+this extraordinary man should have been less precipitate in
+condemning the moral character and the conduct of a stranger.[150]
+
+Boswell, as we know, had left Johnson "rolling his majestic frame in
+his usual manner" on Harwich beach in 1763, and was now on his
+travels. Like many of his countrymen, he found his way to Lord
+Marischal, and here his indomitable passion for making the personal
+acquaintance of any one who was much talked about, naturally led him
+to seek so singular a character as the man who was now at Motiers.
+What Rousseau thought of one who was as singular a character as
+himself in another direction, we do not know.[151] Lord Marischal
+warned Rousseau that his visitor is of excellent disposition, but full
+of visionary ideas, even having seen spirits--a serious proof of
+unsoundness to a man who had lived in the very positive atmosphere of
+Frederick's court at Berlin. "I only hope," says the sage Scot, of the
+Scot who was not sage, "that he may not fall into the hands of people
+who will turn his head: he was very pleased with the reception you
+gave him."[152] As it happens, he was the means of sending Boswell to
+a place where his head was turned, though not very mischievously.
+Rousseau was at that time full of Corsican projects, of which this is
+the proper place for us very briefly to speak.
+
+The prolonged struggles of the natives of Corsica to assert their
+independence of the oppressive administration of the Genoese, which
+had begun in 1729, came to end for a moment in 1755, when Paoli
+(1726-1807) defeated the Genoese, and proceeded to settle the
+government of the island. In the Social Contract Rousseau had said,
+"There is still in Europe one country capable of legislation, and that
+is the island of Corsica. The valour and constancy with which this
+brave people has succeeded in recovering and defending its liberty,
+entitle it to the good fortune of having some wise man to teach them
+how to preserve it. I have a presentiment that this little isle will
+one day astonish Europe,"[153]--a presentiment that in a sense came
+true enough long after Rousseau was gone, in a man who was born on the
+little island seven years later than the publication of this passage.
+Some of the Corsican leaders were highly flattered, and in August
+1764, Buttafuoco entered into correspondence with Rousseau for the
+purpose of inducing him to draw up a set of political institutions and
+a code of laws. Paoli himself was too shrewd to have much belief in
+the application of ideal systems, and we are assured that he had no
+intention of making Rousseau the Solon of his island, but only of
+inducing him to inflame the gallantry of its inhabitants by writing a
+history of their exploits.[154] Rousseau, however, did not understand
+the invitation in this narrower sense. He replied that the very idea
+of such a task as legislation transported his soul, and he entered
+into it with the liveliest ardour. He resolved to quarter himself with
+Theresa in a cottage in some lonely district in the island; in a year
+he would collect the necessary information as to the manners and
+opinions of the inhabitants, and three years afterwards he would
+produce a set of institutions that should be fit for a free and
+valorous people.[155] In the midst of this enthusiasm (May 1765) he
+urged Boswell to visit Corsica, and gave him a letter to Paoli, with
+results which we know in the shape of an Account of Corsica (1768),
+and in a feverishness of imagination upon the subject for many a long
+day afterwards. "Mind your own affairs," at length cried Johnson
+sternly to him, "and leave the Corsicans to theirs; I wish you would
+empty your head of Corsica."[156] At the end of 1765, the immortal
+hero-worshipper on his return expected to come upon his hero at
+Motiers, but finding that he was in Paris wrote him a wonderful letter
+in wonderful French. "You will forget all your cares for many an
+evening, while I tell you what I have seen. I owe you the deepest
+obligation for sending me to Corsica. The voyage has done me
+marvellous good. It has made me as if all the lives of Plutarch had
+sunk into my soul.... I am devoted to the Corsicans heart and soul; if
+you, illustrious Rousseau, the philosopher whom they have chosen to
+help them by your lights to preserve and enjoy the liberty which they
+have acquired with so much heroism--if you have cooled towards these
+gallant islanders, why then I am sorry for you, that is all I can
+say."[157]
+
+Alas, by this time the gallant islanders had been driven out of
+Rousseau's mind by personal mishaps. First, Voltaire or some other
+enemy had spread the rumour that the invitation to become the Lycurgus
+of Corsica was a practical joke, and Rousseau's suspicious temper
+found what he took for confirmation of this in some trifling incidents
+with which we certainly need not concern ourselves.[158] Next, a very
+real storm had burst upon him which drove him once more to seek a new
+place of shelter, other than an island occupied by French troops. For
+France having begun by despatching auxiliaries to the assistance of
+the Genoese (1764), ended by buying the island from the Genoese
+senate, with a sort of equity of redemption (1768)--an iniquitous
+transaction, as Rousseau justly called it, equally shocking to
+justice, humanity, reason, and policy.[159] Civilisation would have
+been saved one of its sorest trials if Genoa could have availed
+herself of her equity, and so have delivered France from the
+acquisition of the most terrible citizen that ever scourged a
+state.[160]
+
+The condemnation of Rousseau by the Council in 1762 had divided Geneva
+into two camps, and was followed by a prolonged contention between his
+partisans and his enemies. The root of the contention was political
+rather than theological. To take Rousseau's side was to protest
+against the oligarchic authority which had condemned him, and the
+quarrel about Emilius was only an episode in the long war between the
+popular and aristocratic parties. This strife, after coming to a
+height for the first time in 1734, had abated after the pacification
+of 1738, but the pacification was only effective for a time, and the
+roots of division were still full of vitality. The lawfulness of the
+authority and the regularity of the procedure by which Rousseau had
+been condemned, offered convenient ground for carrying on the dispute,
+and its warmth was made more intense by the suggestion on the popular
+side that perhaps the religion of the book which the oligarchs had
+condemned was more like Christianity than the religion of the
+oligarchs who condemned it.
+
+Rousseau was too near the scene of the quarrel, too directly involved
+in its issues, too constantly in contact with the people who were
+engaged in it, not to feel the angry buzzings very close about his
+ears. If he had been as collected and as self-possessed as he loved to
+fancy, they would have gone for very little in the life of the day.
+But Rousseau never stood on the heights whence a strong man surveys
+with clear eye and firm soul the unjust or mean or furious moods of
+the world. Such achievement is not hard for the creature who is
+wrapped up in himself; who is careless of the passions of men about
+him, because he thinks they cannot hurt him, and not because he has
+measured them, and deliberately assigned them a place among the
+elements in which a man's destiny is cast. It is only hard for one who
+is penetrated by true interest in the opinion and action of his
+fellows, thus to keep both sympathy warm and self-sufficience true.
+The task was too hard for Rousseau, though his patience under long
+persecution far surpassed that of any of the other oppressed teachers
+of the time. In the spring of 1763 he deliberately renounced in all
+due forms his rights of burgess-ship and citizenship in the city and
+republic of Geneva.[161] And at length he broke forth against his
+Genevese persecutors in the Letters from the Mountain (1764), a long
+but extremely vigorous and adroit rejoinder to the pleas which his
+enemies had put forth in Tronchin's Letters from the Country. If any
+one now cares to satisfy himself how really unjust and illegal the
+treatment was, which Rousseau received at the hands of the authorities
+of his native city, he may do so by examining these most forcible
+letters. The second part of them may interest the student of political
+history by its account of the working of the institutions of the
+little republic. We seem to be reading over again the history of a
+Greek city; the growth of a wealthy class in face of an increasing
+number of poor burgesses, the imposition of burdens in unfair
+proportions upon the metoikoi, the gradual usurpation of legislative
+and administrative function (including especially the judicial) by the
+oligarchs, and the twisting of democratic machinery to oligarchic
+ends; then the growth of staseis or violent factions, followed by
+metabolé or overthrow of the established constitution, ending in
+foreign intervention. The Four Hundred at Athens would have treated
+any Social Contract that should have appeared in their day, just as
+sternly as the Two Hundred or the Twenty-five treated the Social
+Contract that did appear, and for just the same reasons.
+
+Rousseau proved his case with redundancy of demonstration. A body of
+burgesses had previously availed themselves (Nov. 1763) of a legal
+right, and made a technical representation to the Lesser Council that
+the laws had been broken in his case. The Council in return availed
+itself of an equally legal right, its _droit négatif_, and declined to
+entertain the representation, without giving any reasons.
+Unfortunately for Rousseau's comfort, the ferment which his new
+vindication of his cause stirred up, did not end with the condemnation
+and burning of his manifesto. For the parliament of Paris ordered the
+Letters from the Mountain to be burned, and the same decree and the
+same faggot served for that and for Voltaire's Philosophical
+Dictionary (April 1765).[162] It was also burned at the Hague (Jan.
+22). An observer by no means friendly to the priests noticed that at
+Paris it was not the fanatics of orthodoxy, but the encyclopædists and
+their flock, who on this occasion raised the storm and set the zeal of
+the magistrates in motion.[163] The vanity and egoism of rationalistic
+sects can be as fatal to candour, justice, and compassion as the
+intolerant pride of the great churches.
+
+Persecution came nearer to Rousseau and took more inconvenient shapes
+than this. A terrible libel appeared (Feb. 1765), full of the coarsest
+calumnies. Rousseau, stung by their insolence and falseness, sent it
+to Paris to be published there with a prefatory note, stating that it
+was by a Genevese pastor whom he named. This landed him in fresh
+mortification, for the pastor disavowed the libel, Rousseau declined
+to accept the disavowal, and sensible men were wearied by acrimonious
+declarations, explanations, protests.[164] Then the clergy of
+Neuchâtel were not able any longer to resist the opportunity of
+inflicting such torments as they could, upon a heretic whom they might
+more charitably have left to those ultimate and everlasting torments
+which were so precious to their religious imagination. They began to
+press the pastor of the village where Rousseau lived, and with whom he
+had hitherto been on excellent terms. The pastor, though he had been
+liberal enough to admit his singular parishioner to the communion, in
+spite of the Savoyard Vicar, was not courageous enough to resist the
+bigotry of the professional body to which he belonged. He warned
+Rousseau not to present himself at the next communion. The philosopher
+insisted that he had a right to do this, until formally cast out by
+the consistory. The consistory, composed mainly of a body of peasants
+entirely bound to their minister in matters of religion, cited him to
+appear, and answer such questions as might test his loyalty to the
+faith. Rousseau prepared a most deliberate vindication of all that he
+had written, which he intended to speak to his rustic judges. The eve
+of the morning on which he had to appear, he knew his discourse by
+heart; when morning came he could not repeat two sentences. So he fell
+back on the instrument over which he had more mastery than he had over
+tongue or memory, and wrote what he wished to say. The pastor, in whom
+irritated egoism was probably by this time giving additional heat to
+professional zeal, was for fulminating a decree of excommunication,
+but there appears to have been some indirect interference with the
+proceedings of the consistory by the king's officials at Neuchâtel,
+and the ecclesiastical bolt was held back.[165] Other weapons were not
+wanting. The pastor proceeded to spread rumours among his flock that
+Rousseau was a heretic, even an atheist, and most prodigious of all,
+that he had written a book containing the monstrous doctrine that
+women have no souls. The pulpit resounded with sermons proving to the
+honest villagers that antichrist was quartered in their parish in very
+flesh. The Armenian apparel gave a high degree of plausibleness to
+such an opinion, and as the wretched man went by the door of his
+neighbours, he heard cursing and menace, while a hostile pebble now
+and again whistled past his ear. His botanising expeditions were
+believed to be devoted to search for noxious herbs, and a man who
+died in the agonies of nephritic colic, was supposed to have been
+poisoned by him.[166] If persons went to the post-office for letters
+for him, they were treated with insult.[167] At length the ferment
+against him grew hot enough to be serious. A huge block of stone was
+found placed so as to kill him when he opened his door; and one night
+an attempt was made to stone him in his house.[168] Popular hate shown
+with this degree of violence was too much for his fortitude, and after
+a residence of rather more than three years (September 8-10, 1765), he
+fled from the inhospitable valley to seek refuge he knew not where.
+
+In his rambles of a previous summer he had seen a little island in the
+lake of Bienne, which struck his imagination and lived in his memory.
+Thither he now, after a moment of hesitation, turned his steps, with
+something of the same instinct as draws a child towards a beam of the
+sun. He forgot or was heedless of the circumstance that the isle of
+St. Peter lay in the jurisdiction of the canton of Berne, whose
+government had forbidden him their territory. Strong craving for a
+little ease in the midst of his wretchedness extinguished thought of
+jurisdictions and proscriptive decrees.
+
+The spot where he now found peace for a brief space usually
+disappoints the modern hunter for the picturesque, who after wearying
+himself with the follies of a capital seeks the most violent tonic
+that he can find in the lonely terrors of glacier and peak, and sees
+only tameness in a pygmy island, that offers nothing sublimer than a
+high grassy terrace, some cool over-branching avenues, some mimic
+vales, and meadows and vineyards sloping down to the sheet of blue
+water at their feet. Yet, as one sits here on a summer day, with tired
+mowers sleeping on their grass heaps in the sun, in a stillness
+faintly broken by the timid lapping of the water in the sedge, or the
+rustling of swift lizards across the heated sand, while the Bernese
+snow giants line a distant horizon with mysterious solitary shapes, it
+is easy to know what solace life in such a scene might bring to a man
+distracted by pain of body and pain and weariness of soul. Rousseau
+has commemorated his too short sojourn here in the most perfect of all
+his compositions.[169]
+
+     "I found my existence so charming, and led a life so
+     agreeable to my humour, that I resolved here to end my days.
+     My only source of disquiet was whether I should be allowed
+     to carry my project out. In the midst of the presentiments
+     that disturbed me, I would fain have had them make a
+     perpetual prison of my refuge, to confine me in it for all
+     the rest of my life. I longed for them to cut off all chance
+     and all hope of leaving it; to forbid me holding any
+     communication with the mainland, so that, knowing nothing
+     of what was going on in the world, I might have forgotten
+     the world's existence, and people might have forgotten mine
+     too. They only suffered me to pass two months in the island,
+     but I could have passed two years, two centuries, and all
+     eternity, without a moment's weariness, though I had not,
+     with my companion, any other society than that of the
+     steward, his wife, and their servants. They were in truth
+     honest souls and nothing more, but that was just what I
+     wanted.... Carried thither in a violent hurry, alone and
+     without a thing, I afterwards sent for my housekeeper, my
+     books, and my scanty possessions, of which I had the delight
+     of unpacking nothing, leaving my boxes and chests just as
+     they had come, and dwelling in the house where I counted on
+     ending my days, exactly as if it were an inn whence I must
+     needs set forth on the morrow. All things went so well, just
+     as they were, that to think of ordering them better were to
+     spoil them. One of my greatest joys was to leave my books
+     safely fastened up in their boxes, and to be without even a
+     case for writing. When any luckless letter forced me to take
+     up a pen for an answer, I grumblingly borrowed the steward's
+     inkstand, and hurried to give it back to him with all the
+     haste I could, in the vain hope that I should never have
+     need of the loan any more. Instead of meddling with those
+     weary quires and reams and piles of old books, I filled my
+     chamber with flowers and grasses, for I was then in my first
+     fervour for botany. Having given up employment that would be
+     a task to me, I needed one that would be an amusement, nor
+     cause me more pains than a sluggard might choose to take. I
+     undertook to make the _Flora petrinsularis_, and to describe
+     every single plant on the island, in detail enough to occupy
+     me for the rest of my days. In consequence of this fine
+     scheme, every morning after breakfast, which we all took in
+     company, I used to go with a magnifying glass in my hand and
+     my Systema Naturæ under my arm, to visit some district of
+     the island. I had divided it for that purpose into small
+     squares, meaning to go through them one after another in
+     each season of the year. At the end of two or three hours I
+     used to return laden with an ample harvest, a provision for
+     amusing myself after dinner indoors, in case of rain. I
+     spent the rest of the morning in going with the steward, his
+     wife, and Theresa, to see the labourers and the harvesting,
+     and I generally set to work along with them; many a time
+     when people from Berne came to see me, they found me perched
+     on a high tree, with a bag fastened round my waist; I kept
+     filling it with fruit and then let it down to the ground
+     with a rope. The exercise I had taken in the morning and the
+     good humour that always comes from exercise, made the repose
+     of dinner vastly pleasant to me. But if dinner was kept up
+     too long, and fine weather invited me forth, I could not
+     wait, but was speedily off to throw myself all alone into a
+     boat, which, when the water was smooth enough, I used to
+     pull out to the middle of the lake. There, stretched at full
+     length in the boat's bottom, with my eyes turned up to the
+     sky, I let myself float slowly hither and thither as the
+     water listed, sometimes for hours together, plunged in a
+     thousand confused delicious musings, which, though they had
+     no fixed nor constant object, were not the less on that
+     account a hundred times dearer to me than all that I had
+     found sweetest in what they call the pleasures of life.
+     Often warned by the going down of the sun that it was time
+     to return, I found myself so far from the island that I was
+     forced to row with all my might to get in before it was
+     pitch dark. At other times, instead of losing myself in the
+     midst of the waters, I had a fancy to coast along the green
+     shores of the island, where the clear waters and cool
+     shadows tempted me to bathe. But one of my most frequent
+     expeditions was from the larger island to the less; there I
+     disembarked and spent my afternoon, sometimes in mimic
+     rambles among wild elders, persicaries, willows, and shrubs
+     of every species, sometimes settling myself on the top of a
+     sandy knoll, covered with turf, wild thyme, flowers, even
+     sainfoin and trefoil that had most likely been sown there in
+     old days, making excellent quarters for rabbits. They might
+     multiply in peace without either fearing anything or harming
+     anything. I spoke of this to the steward. He at once had
+     male and female rabbits brought from Neuchâtel, and we went
+     in high state, his wife, one of his sisters, Theresa, and I,
+     to settle them in the little islet. The foundation of our
+     colony was a feast-day. The pilot of the Argonauts was not
+     prouder than I, as I bore my company and the rabbits in
+     triumph from our island to the smaller one....
+
+     When the lake was too rough for me to sail, I spent my
+     afternoon in going up and down the island, gathering plants
+     to right and left; seating myself now in smiling lonely
+     nooks to dream at my ease, now on little terraces and
+     knolls, to follow with my eyes the superb and ravishing
+     prospect of the lake and its shores, crowned on one side by
+     the neighbouring hills, and on the other melting into rich
+     and fertile plains up to the feet of the pale blue mountains
+     on their far-off edge.
+
+     As evening drew on, I used to come down from the high ground
+     and sit on the beach at the water's brink in some hidden
+     sheltering place. There the murmur of the waves and their
+     agitation, charmed all my senses and drove every other
+     movement away from my soul; they plunged it into delicious
+     dreamings, in which I was often surprised by night. The flux
+     and reflux of the water, its ceaseless stir-swelling and
+     falling at intervals, striking on ear and sight, made up for
+     the internal movements which my musings extinguished; they
+     were enough to give me delight in mere existence, without
+     taking any trouble of thinking. From time to time arose some
+     passing thought of the instability of the things of this
+     world, of which the face of the waters offered an image; but
+     such light impressions were swiftly effaced in the
+     uniformity of the ceaseless motion, which rocked me as in a
+     cradle; it held me with such fascination that even when
+     called at the hour and by the signal appointed, I could not
+     tear myself away without summoning all my force.
+
+     After supper, when the evening was fine, we used to go all
+     together for a saunter on the terrace, to breathe the
+     freshness of the air from the lake. We sat down in the
+     arbour, laughing, chatting, or singing some old song, and
+     then we went home to bed, well pleased with the day, and
+     only craving another that should be exactly like it on the
+     morrow....
+
+     All is in a continual flux upon the earth. Nothing in it
+     keeps a form constant and determinate; our affections,
+     fastening on external things, necessarily change and pass
+     just as they do. Ever in front of us or behind us, they
+     recall the past that is gone, or anticipate a future that in
+     many a case is destined never to be. There is nothing solid
+     to which the heart can fix itself. Here we have little more
+     than a pleasure that comes and passes away; as for the
+     happiness that endures, I cannot tell if it be so much as
+     known among men. There is hardly in the midst of our
+     liveliest delights a single instant when the heart could
+     tell us with real truth--"_I would this instant might last
+     for ever_." And how can we give the name of happiness to a
+     fleeting state that all the time leaves the heart unquiet
+     and void, that makes us regret something gone, or still long
+     for something to come?
+
+     But if there is a state in which the soul finds a situation
+     solid enough to comport with perfect repose, and with the
+     expansion of its whole faculty, without need of calling back
+     the past, or pressing on towards the future; where time is
+     nothing for it, and the present has no ending; with no mark
+     for its own duration and without a trace of succession;
+     without a single other sense of privation or delight, of
+     pleasure or pain, of desire or apprehension, than this
+     single sense of existence--so long as such a state endures,
+     he who finds himself in it may talk of bliss, not with a
+     poor, relative, and imperfect happiness such as people find
+     in the pleasures of life, but with a happiness full,
+     perfect, and sufficing, that leaves in the soul no conscious
+     unfilled void. Such a state was many a day mine in my
+     solitary musings in the isle of St. Peter, either lying in
+     my boat as it floated on the water, or seated on the banks
+     of the broad lake, or in other places than the little isle
+     on the brink of some broad stream, or a rivulet murmuring
+     over a gravel bed.
+
+     What is it that one enjoys in a situation like this? Nothing
+     outside of one's self, nothing except one's self and one's
+     own existence.... But most men, tossed as they are by
+     unceasing passion, have little knowledge of such a state;
+     they taste it imperfectly for a few moments, and then retain
+     no more than an obscure confused idea of it, that is too
+     weak to let them feel its charm. It would not even be good
+     in the present constitution of things, that in their
+     eagerness for these gentle ecstasies, they should fall into
+     a disgust for the active life in which their duty is
+     prescribed to them by needs that are ever on the increase.
+     But a wretch cut off from human society, who can do nothing
+     here below that is useful and good either for himself or for
+     other people, may in such a state find for all lost human
+     felicities many recompenses, of which neither fortune nor
+     men can ever rob him.
+
+     'Tis true that these recompenses cannot be felt by all
+     souls, nor in all situations. The heart must be in peace,
+     nor any passion come to trouble its calm. There must be in
+     the surrounding objects neither absolute repose nor excess
+     of agitation, but a uniform and moderated movement without
+     shock, without interval. With no movement, life is only
+     lethargy. If the movement be unequal or too strong, it
+     awakes us; by recalling us to the objects around, it
+     destroys the charm of our musing, and plucks us from within
+     ourselves, instantly to throw us back under the yoke of
+     fortune and man, in a moment to restore us to all the
+     consciousness of misery. Absolute stillness inclines one to
+     gloom. It offers an image of death: then the help of a
+     cheerful imagination is necessary, and presents itself
+     naturally enough to those whom heaven has endowed with such
+     a gift. The movement which does not come from without then
+     stirs within us. The repose is less complete, it is true;
+     but it is also more agreeable when light and gentle ideas,
+     without agitating the depths of the soul, only softly skim
+     the surface. This sort of musing we may taste whenever there
+     is tranquillity about us, and I have thought that in the
+     Bastile, and even in a dungeon where no object struck my
+     sight, I could have dreamed away many a thrice pleasurable
+     day.
+
+     But it must be said that all this came better and more
+     happily in a fruitful and lonely island, where nothing
+     presented itself to me save smiling pictures, where nothing
+     recalled saddening memories, where the fellowship of the few
+     dwellers there was gentle and obliging, without being
+     exciting enough to busy me incessantly, where, in short, I
+     was free to surrender myself all day long to the promptings
+     of my taste or to the most luxurious indolence.... As I came
+     out from a long and most sweet musing fit, seeing myself
+     surrounded by verdure and flowers and birds, and letting my
+     eyes wander far over romantic shores that fringed a wide
+     expanse of water bright as crystal, I fitted all these
+     attractive objects into my dreams; and when at last I slowly
+     recovered myself and recognised what was about me, I could
+     not mark the point that cut off dream from reality, so
+     equally did all things unite to endear to me the lonely
+     retired life I led in this happy spot! Why can that life not
+     come back to me again? Why can I not go finish my days in
+     the beloved island, never to quit it, never again to see in
+     it one dweller from the mainland, to bring back to me the
+     memory of all the woes of every sort that they have
+     delighted in heaping on my head for all these long years?...
+     Freed from the earthly passions engendered by the tumult of
+     social life, my soul would many a time lift itself above
+     this atmosphere, and commune beforehand with the heavenly
+     intelligences, into whose number it trusts to be ere long
+     taken."
+
+The exquisite dream, thus set to words of most soothing music, came
+soon to its end. The full and perfect sufficience of life was abruptly
+disturbed. The government of Berne gave him notice to quit the island
+and their territory within fifteen days. He represented to the
+authorities that he was infirm and ill, that he knew not whither to
+go, and that travelling in wintry weather would be dangerous to his
+life. He even made the most extraordinary request that any man in
+similar straits ever did make. "In this extremity," he wrote to their
+representative, "I only see one resource for me, and however frightful
+it may appear, I will adopt it, not only without repugnance, but with
+eagerness, if their excellencies will be good enough to give their
+consent. It is that it should please them for me to pass the rest of
+my days in prison in one of their castles, or such other place in
+their states as they may think fit to select. I will there live at my
+own expense, and I will give security never to put them to any cost. I
+submit to be without paper or pen, or any communication from without,
+except so far as may be absolutely necessary, and through the channel
+of those who shall have charge of me. Only let me have left, with the
+use of a few books, the liberty to walk occasionally in a garden, and
+I am content. Do not suppose that an expedient, so violent in
+appearance, is the fruit of despair. My mind is perfectly calm at this
+moment; I have taken time to think about it, and it is only after
+profound consideration that I have brought myself to this decision.
+Mark, I pray you, that if this seems an extraordinary resolution, my
+situation is still more so. The distracted life that I have been made
+to lead for several years without intermission would be terrible for a
+man in full health; judge what it must be for a miserable invalid worn
+down with weariness and misfortune, and who has now no wish save only
+to die in a little peace."[170]
+
+That the request was made in all sincerity we may well believe. The
+difference between being in prison and being out of it was really not
+considerable to a man who had the previous winter been confined to his
+chamber for eight months without a break.[171] In other respects the
+world was as cheerless as any prison could be. He was an exile from
+the only places he knew, and to him a land unknown was terrible. He
+had thought of Vienna, and the Prince of Würtemburg had sought the
+requisite permission for him, but the priests were too strong in the
+court of the house of Austria.[172] Madame d'Houdetot offered him a
+resting-place in Normandy, and Saint Lambert in Lorraine.[173] He
+thought of Potsdam. Rey, the printer, pressed him to go to Holland. He
+wondered if he should have strength to cross the Alps and make his way
+to Corsica. Eventually he made up his mind to go to Berlin, and he
+went as far as Strasburg on his road thither.[174] Here he began to
+fear the rude climate of the northern capital; he changed his plans,
+and resolved to accept the warm invitations that he had received to
+cross over to England. His friends used their interest to procure a
+passport for him,[175] and the Prince of Conti offered him an
+apartment in the privileged quarter of the Temple, on his way through
+Paris. His own purpose seems to have been irresolute to the last, but
+his friends acted with such energy and bustle on his behalf that the
+English scheme was adopted, and he found himself in Paris (Dec. 17,
+1765), on his way to London, almost before he had deliberately
+realised what he was doing. It was a step that led him into many fatal
+vexations, as we shall presently see. Meanwhile we may pause to
+examine the two considerable books which had involved his life in all
+this confusion and perplexity.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[94] June, 1762-December, 1765.
+
+[95] _Conf._, xi. 175. It is generally printed in the volume of his
+works entitled _Mélanges_.
+
+[96] _Corr._, iii. 416.
+
+[97] _Conf._, xi. 172.
+
+[98] For a remarkable anticipation of the ruin of France, see _Conf._,
+xi. 136.
+
+[99] M. Roguin. June 14, 1762.
+
+[100] _Corr._, ii. 347.
+
+[101] Streckeisen, i. 35.
+
+[102] His friend Moultou wrote him the news, Streckeisen, i. 43.
+Geneva was the only place at which the Social Contract was burnt. Here
+there were peculiar reasons, as we shall see.
+
+[103] _Corr._, ii. 356.
+
+[104] _Ib._, ii. 358, 369, etc.
+
+[105] The principality of Neuchâtel had fallen by marriage (1504) to
+the French house of Orleans-Longueville, which with certain
+interruptions retained it until the extinction of the line by the
+death of Marie, Duchess of Nemours (1707). Fifteen claimants arose
+with fifteen varieties of far-off title, as well as a party for
+constituting Neuchâtel a Republic and making it a fourteenth canton.
+(Saint Simon, v. 276.) The Estates adjudged the sovereignty to the
+Protestant house of Prussia (Nov. 3, 1707). Lewis XIV., as heir of the
+pretensions of the extinct line, protested. Finally, at the peace of
+Utrecht (1713), Lewis surrendered his claim in exchange for the
+cession by Prussia of the Principality of Orange, and Prussia held it
+until 1806. The disturbed history of the connection between Prussia
+and Neuchâtel from 1814, when it became the twenty-first canton of the
+Swiss Confederation, down to 1857, does not here concern us.
+
+[106] _Corr._, ii. 370.
+
+[107] _Corr._, ii. 371. July 1762.
+
+[108] D'Alembert, who knew Frederick better than any of the
+philosophers, to Voltaire, Nov. 22, 1765.
+
+[109] Letter to Hume; Burton's _Life of Hume_, ii. 105, corroborating
+_Conf._, xii. 196.
+
+[110] Marischal to J.J.R.; Streckeisen, ii. 70.
+
+[111] _Corr._, iii. 40. Nov. 1, 1762.
+
+[112] Burton's _Life_, ii. 113.
+
+[113] Voltaire's _Corr._ (1758). _Oeuv._, lxxv. pp. 31 and 80.
+
+[114] _Conf._, xii. 237.
+
+[115] _Corr._, iii. 41. Nov. 11, 1762.
+
+[116] _Corr._, iii. 38. Oct. 30, 1762.
+
+[117] _Ib._, iii. 110-115. Jan. 28, 1763.
+
+[118] Bernardin de St. Pierre, xii. 103, 59, etc.
+
+[119] George Keith (1685-1778) was elder brother of Frederick's famous
+field-marshal, James Keith. They had taken part in the Jacobite rising
+of 1715, and fled abroad on its failure. James Keith brought his
+brother into the service of the King of Prussia, who sent him as
+ambassador to Paris (1751), afterwards made him Governor of Neuchâtel
+(1754), and eventually prevailed on the English Government to
+reinstate him in the rights which he had forfeited by his share in the
+rebellion (1763).
+
+[120] Streckeisen, ii. 98, etc.
+
+[121] One of Rousseau's chief distresses hitherto arose from the
+indigence in which Theresa would be placed in case of his death. Rey,
+the bookseller, gave her an annuity of about £16 a year, and Lord
+Marischal's gift seems to have been 300 louis, the only money that
+Rousseau was ever induced to accept from any one in his life. See
+Streckeisen, ii. 99; _Corr._, iii. 336. The most delicate and sincere
+of the many offers to provide for Theresa was made by Madame de
+Verdelin (Streckeisen, ii. 506). The language in which Madame de
+Verdelin speaks of Theresa in all her letters is the best testimony to
+character that this much-abused creature has to produce.
+
+[122] _Ib._, 90, 92, etc. Summer of 1763.
+
+[123] Burton's _Life of Hume_, ii. 105. Oct. 2, 1762.
+
+[124] The Confessions are not our only authority for this. See
+Streckeisen, ii. 64; also D'Alembert to Voltaire, Sept. 8, 1762.
+
+[125] Voltaire's _Corr._ _Oeuv._, lxvii. 458, 459, 485, etc.
+
+[126] To D'Alembert, Sept. 15, 1762.
+
+[127] Moultou to Rousseau, Streckeisen, i. 85, 87.
+
+[128] Moultou to Rousseau, Streckeisen, i. 85, 87.
+
+[129] Streckeisen, i. 50.
+
+[130] _Ib._, i. 76.
+
+[131] _Lettre à Christophe de Beaumont_, pp. 163-166.
+
+[132] _Lettre à Christophe de Beaumont_, pp. 130-135.
+
+[133] _Lettre à Christophe de Beaumont_, p. 93.
+
+[134] Carlyle's _Frederick_, Bk. xxi. ch. iv. Rousseau, _Corr._, iii.
+102.
+
+[135] _Corr._, iii. 57. Nov. 1762. To M. Montmollin.
+
+[136] _Conf._, xii. 206.
+
+[137] _Conf._, xii. 198.
+
+[138] _Corr._, iii. 295. Dec. 25, 1763.
+
+[139] Quoted in Musset-Pathay, ii. 500.
+
+[140] For instance, _Corr._, iii. 249.
+
+[141] _Ib._, iii. 364, 381.
+
+[142] _Corr._, iii. 181-186, etc.
+
+[143] Prince Lewis Eugene, son of Charles Alexander (reigning duke
+from 1733 to 1737); a younger brother of Charles Eugene, known as
+Schiller's Duke of Würtemberg, who reigned up to 1793. Frederick
+Eugene, known in the Seven Years' War, was another brother. Rousseau's
+correspondent became reigning duke in 1793, but only lived a year and
+a half afterwards.
+
+[144] _Corr._, iii. 250. Sept. 29, 1763.
+
+[145] The prince's letters are given in the Streckeisen collection,
+vol. ii.
+
+[146] Streckeisen, ii. 202.
+
+[147] Possibly Wilkes also; _Corr._, iv. 200.
+
+[148] Streckeisen, i. 89. June 1, 1763.
+
+[149] _Corr._, iii. 202. June 4, 1763.
+
+[150] _Memoirs of my Life_, p. 55, _n._ (Ed. 1862). Necker
+(1732-1804), whom Mdlle. Curchod ultimately married, was an eager
+admirer of Rousseau. "Ah, how close the tender, humane, and virtuous
+soul of Julie," he wrote to her author, "has brought me to you. How
+the reading of those letters gratified me! how many good emotions did
+they stir or fortify! How many sublimities in a thousand places in
+these six volumes; not the sublimity that perches itself in the
+clouds, but that which pushes everyday virtues to their highest
+point," and so on. Feb. 16, 1761. Streckeisen, i. 333.
+
+[151] Boswell's name only occurs twice in Rousseau's letters, I
+believe; once (_Corr._, iv. 394) as the writer of a letter which Hume
+was suspected of tampering with, and previously (iv. 70) as the bearer
+of a letter. See also Streckeisen, i. 262.
+
+[152] Streckeisen, ii. 111. Jan. 18, 1765.
+
+[153] Bk. ii. ch. x.
+
+[154] Boswell's _Account of Corsica_, p. 367.
+
+[155] The correspondence between Rousseau and Buttafuoco has been
+published in the _Oeuvres et Corr. Inédites de J.J.R._, 1861. See pp.
+35, 43, etc.
+
+[156] Boswell's _Life_, 179, 193, etc. (Ed. 1866).
+
+[157] _"Je suis tout homme de pouvoir vous regarder avec pitié!"_
+Letter dated Jan. 4, 1766, and given by Musset-Pathay as from a Scotch
+lord, unnamed. Boswell had the honour of conducting Theresa to
+England, after Hume had taken Rousseau over. "This young gentleman,"
+writes Hume, "very good-humoured, very agreeable, and very mad--has
+such a rage for literature that I dread some circumstance fatal to our
+friend's honour. You remember the story of Terentia, who was first
+married to Cicero, then to Sallust, and at last in her old age married
+a young nobleman, who imagined that she must possess some secret which
+would convey to him eloquence and genius." Burton's _Life_, ii. 307,
+308. Boswell mentions that he met Rousseau in England (_Account of
+Corsica_, p. 340), and also gives Rousseau's letter introducing him to
+Paoli (p. 266).
+
+[158] To Buttafuoco, p. 48, etc.
+
+[159] _Corr._, vi. 176. Feb. 26, 1770.
+
+[160] It may be worth noticing, as a link between historic personages,
+that Napoleon Bonaparte's first piece was a _Lettre à Matteo
+Buttafuoco_ (1791), the same Buttafuoco with whom Rousseau
+corresponded, who had been Choiseul's agent in the union of the island
+to France, was afterwards sent as deputy to the Constituent, and
+finally became the bitterest enemy of Paoli and the patriotic party.
+
+[161] _Corr._, iii. 190. To the First Syndic, May 12, 1763.
+
+[162] Grimm's _Corr. Lit._, iv. 235. For Rousseau's opinion of his
+book's companion at the stake, see _Corr._, iii. 442.
+
+[163] Streckeisen, ii. 526.
+
+[164] There appears to be no doubt that Rousseau was wrong in
+attributing to Vernes the _Sentimens des Citoyens_.
+
+[165] _Corr._, iv. 116, 122 (April 1765), 165-196 (August); also
+_Conf._, xii. 245.
+
+[166] Note to M. Auguis's edition, _Corr._, v. 395.
+
+[167] _Corr._, iv. 204.
+
+[168] _Conf._, xii. 259. This lapidation has sometimes been doubted,
+and treated as an invention of Rousseau's morbid suspicion. The
+official documents prove that his account was substantially true (see
+Musset-Pathay, ii. 559.)
+
+[169] The fifth of the _Rêveries_. See also _Conf._, 262-279, and
+_Corr._, iv. 206-224. His stay in the island was from the second week
+in September down to the last in October, 1765.
+
+[170] _Corr._, iv. 221. Oct. 20, 1765.
+
+[171] _Ib._, iv. 136, etc. April 27, 1765.
+
+[172] Streckeisen-Moultou, ii. 209, 212.
+
+[173] _Ib._, ii. 554.
+
+[174] He arrived at Strasburg on the 2d or 3d of November, left it
+about the end of the first week in December, and arrived in Paris on
+the 16th of December 1765. A sort of apocryphal tradition is said to
+linger in the island about Rousseau's last evening on the island, how
+after supper he called for a lute, and sang some passably bad verses.
+See M. Bougy's _J.J. Rousseau_, p. 179 (Paris: 1853.)
+
+[175] Madame de Verdelin to J.J.R. Streckeisen, ii. 532. The minister
+even expressed his especial delight at being able to serve Rousseau,
+so little seriousness was there now in the formalities of absolution.
+_Ib._ 547.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+THE SOCIAL CONTRACT.
+
+
+The dominant belief of the best minds of the latter half of
+the eighteenth century was a passionate faith in the illimitable
+possibilities of human progress. Nothing short of a general overthrow
+of the planet could in their eyes stay the ever upward movement of
+human perfectibility. They differed as to the details of the
+philosophy of government which they deduced from this philosophy of
+society, but the conviction that a golden era of tolerance,
+enlightenment, and material prosperity was close at hand, belonged to
+them all. Rousseau set his face the other way. For him the golden era
+had passed away from our globe many centuries ago. Simplicity had fled
+from the earth. Wisdom and heroism had vanished from out of the minds
+of leaders. The spirit of citizenship had gone from those who should
+have upheld the social union in brotherly accord. The dream of human
+perfectibility which nerved men like Condorcet, was to Rousseau a sour
+and fantastic mockery. The utmost that men could do was to turn their
+eyes to the past, to obliterate the interval, to try to walk for a
+space in the track of the ancient societies. They would hardly
+succeed, but endeavour might at least do something to stay the plague
+of universal degeneracy. Hence the fatality of his system. It placed
+the centre of social activity elsewhere than in careful and rational
+examination of social conditions, and in careful and rational effort
+to modify them. As we began by saying, it substituted a retrograde
+aspiration for direction, and emotion for the discovery of law. We can
+hardly wonder, when we think of the intense exaltation of spirit
+produced both by the perfectibilitarians and the followers of
+Rousseau, and at the same time of the political degradation and
+material disorder of France, that so violent a contrast between the
+ideal and the actual led to a great volcanic outbreak. Alas, the
+crucial difficulty of political change is to summon new force without
+destroying the sound parts of a structure which it has taken so many
+generations to erect. The Social Contract is the formal denial of the
+possibility of successfully overcoming the difficulty.
+
+"Although man deprives himself in the civil state of many advantages
+which he holds from nature, yet he acquires in return others so great,
+his faculties exercise and develop themselves, his ideas extend, his
+sentiments are ennobled, his whole soul is raised to such a degree,
+that if the abuses of this new condition did not so often degrade him
+below that from which he has emerged, he would be bound to bless
+without ceasing the happy moment which rescued him from it for ever,
+and out of a stupid and blind animal made an intelligent being and a
+man."[176] The little parenthesis as to the frequent degradation
+produced by the abuses of the social condition, does not prevent us
+from recognising in the whole passage a tolerably complete surrender
+of the main position which was taken up in the two Discourses. The
+short treatise on the Social Contract is an inquiry into the just
+foundations and most proper form of that very political society, which
+the Discourses showed to have its foundation in injustice, and to be
+incapable of receiving any form proper for the attainment of the full
+measure of human happiness.
+
+Inequality in the same way is no longer denounced, but accepted and
+defined. Locke's influence has begun to tell. The two principal
+objects of every system of legislation are declared to be liberty and
+equality. By equality we are warned not to understand that the degrees
+of power and wealth should be absolutely the same, but that in respect
+of power, such power should be out of reach of any violence, and be
+invariably exercised in virtue of the laws; and in respect of riches,
+that no citizen should be wealthy enough to buy another, and none poor
+enough to sell himself. Do you say this equality is a mere chimera? It
+is precisely because the force of things is constantly tending to
+destroy equality, that the force of legislation ought as constantly to
+be directed towards upholding it.[177] This is much clearer than the
+indefinite way of speaking which we have already noticed in the second
+Discourse. It means neither more nor less than that equality before
+the law which is one of the elementary marks of a perfectly free
+community.
+
+The idea of the law being constantly directed to counteract the
+tendencies to violent inequalities in material possessions among
+different members of a society, is too vague to be criticised. Does it
+cover and warrant so sweeping a measure as the old _seisachtheia_ of
+Solon, voiding all contracts in which the debtor had pledged his land
+or his person; or such measures as the agrarian laws of Licinius and
+the Gracchi? Or is it to go no further than to condemn such a law as
+that which in England gives unwilled lands to the eldest son? We can
+only criticise accurately a general idea of this sort in connection
+with specific projects in which it is applied. As it stands, it is no
+more than the expression of what the author thinks a wise principle of
+public policy. It assumes the existence of property just as completely
+as the theory of the most rigorous capitalist could do; it gives no
+encouragement, as the Discourse did, to the notion of an equality in
+being without property. There is no element of communism in a
+principle so stated, but it suggests a social idea, based on the moral
+claim of men to have equality of opportunity. This ideal stamped
+itself on the minds of Robespierre and the other revolutionary
+leaders, and led to practical results in the sale of the Church and
+other lands in small lots, so as to give the peasant a market to buy
+in. The effect of the economic change thus introduced happened to work
+in the direction in which Rousseau pointed, for it is now known that
+the most remarkable and most permanent of the consequences of the
+revolution in the ownership of land was the erection, between the two
+extreme classes of proprietors, of an immense body of middle-class
+freeholders. This state is not equality, but gradation, and there is
+undoubtedly an immense difference between the two. Still its origin is
+an illustration on the largest scale in history of the force of
+legislation being exerted to counteract an irregularity that had
+become unbearable.[178]
+
+Notwithstanding the disappearance of the more extravagant elements of
+the old thesis, the new speculation was far from being purged of the
+fundamental errors that had given such popularity to its predecessors.
+"If the sea," he says in one place, "bathes nothing but inaccessible
+rocks on your coasts, remain barbarous ichthyophagi; you will live all
+the more tranquilly for it, better perhaps, and assuredly more
+happily."[179] Apart from an outburst like this, the central idea
+remained the same, though it was approached from another side and with
+different objects. The picture of a state of nature had lost none of
+its perilous attraction, though it was hung in a slightly changed
+light. It remained the starting-point of the right and normal
+constitution of civil society, just as it had been the starting-point
+of the denunciation of civil society as incapable of right
+constitution, and as necessarily and for ever abnormal. Equally with
+the Discourses, the Social Contract is a repudiation of that historic
+method which traces the present along a line of ascertained
+circumstances, and seeks an improved future in an unbroken
+continuation of that line. The opening words, which sent such a thrill
+through the generation to which they were uttered in two continents,
+"Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains," tell us at the
+outset that we are as far away as ever from the patient method of
+positive observation, and as deeply buried as ever in deducing
+practical maxims from a set of conditions which never had any other
+than an abstract and phantasmatic existence. How is a man born free?
+If he is born into isolation, he perishes instantly. If he is born
+into a family, he is at the moment of his birth committed to a state
+of social relation, in however rudimentary a form; and the more or
+less of freedom which this state may ultimately permit to him, depends
+upon circumstances. Man was hardly born free among Romans and
+Athenians, when both law and public opinion left a father at perfect
+liberty to expose his new-born infant. And the more primitive the
+circumstances, the later the period at which he gains freedom. A child
+was not born free in the early days of the Roman state, when the
+_patria potestas_ was a vigorous reality. Nor, to go yet further back,
+was he born free in the times of the Hebrew patriarchs, when Abraham
+had full right of sacrificing his son, and Jephthah of sacrificing his
+daughter.
+
+But to speak thus is to speak what we do know. Rousseau was not open
+to such testimony. "My principles," he said in contempt of Grotius,
+"are not founded on the authority of poets; they come from the nature
+of things and are based on reason."[180] He does indeed in one place
+express his reverence for the Judaic law, and administers a just
+rebuke to the philosophic arrogance which saw only successful
+impostors in the old legislators.[181] But he paid no attention to
+the processes and usages of which this law was the organic expression,
+nor did he allow himself to learn from it the actual conditions of the
+social state which accepted it. It was Locke, whose essay on civil
+government haunts us throughout the Social Contract, who had taught
+him that men are born free, equal, and independent. Locke evaded the
+difficulty of the dependence of childhood by saying that when the son
+comes to the estate that made his father a free man, he becomes a free
+man too.[182] What of the old Roman use permitting a father to sell
+his son three times? In the same metaphysical spirit Locke had laid
+down the absolute proposition that "conjugal society is made by a
+voluntary compact between man and woman."[183] This is true of a small
+number of western societies in our own day, but what of the primitive
+usages of communal marriages, marriages by capture, purchase, and the
+rest? We do not mean it as any discredit to writers upon government in
+the seventeenth century that they did not make good out of their own
+consciousness the necessary want of knowledge about primitive
+communities. But it is necessary to point out, first, that they did
+not realise all the knowledge within their reach, and next that, as a
+consequence of this, their propositions had a quality that vitiated
+all their speculative worth. Filmer's contention that man is not
+naturally free was truer than the position of Locke and Rousseau, and
+it was so because Filmer consulted and appealed to the most authentic
+of the historic records then accessible.[184]
+
+It is the more singular that Rousseau should have thus deliberately
+put aside all but the most arbitrary and empirical historical lessons,
+and it shows the extraordinary force with which men may be mastered by
+abstract prepossessions, even when they have a partial knowledge of
+the antidote; because Rousseau in several places not only admits, but
+insists upon, the necessity of making institutions relative to the
+state of the community, in respect of size, soil, manners, occupation,
+morality, character. "It is in view of such relations as these that we
+must assign to each people a particular system, which shall be the
+best, not perhaps in itself, but for the state for which it is
+destined."[185] In another place he calls attention to manners,
+customs, above all to opinion, as the part of a social system on which
+the success of all the rest depends; particular rules being only the
+arching of the vault, of which manners, though so much tardier in
+rising, form a key-stone that can never be disturbed.[186] This was
+excellent so far as it went, but it was one of the many great truths,
+which men may hold in their minds without appreciating their full
+value. He did not see that these manners, customs, opinions, have old
+roots which must be sought in a historic past; that they are connected
+with the constitution of human nature, and that then in turn they
+prepare modifications of that constitution. His narrow, symmetrical,
+impatient humour unfitted him to deal with the complex tangle of the
+history of social growths. It was essential to his mental comfort that
+he should be able to see a picture of perfect order and logical system
+at both ends of his speculation. Hence, he invented, to begin with,
+his ideal state of nature, and an ideal mode of passing from that to
+the social state. He swept away in his imagination the whole series of
+actual incidents between present and past; and he constructed a system
+which might be imposed upon all societies indifferently by a
+legislator summoned for that purpose, to wipe out existing uses, laws,
+and institutions, and make afresh a clear and undisturbed beginning of
+national life. The force of habit was slowly and insensibly to be
+substituted for that of the legislator's authority, but the existence
+of such habits previously as forces to be dealt with, and the
+existence of certain limits of pliancy in the conditions of human
+nature and social possibility, are facts of which the author of the
+Social Contract takes not the least account.
+
+Rousseau knew hardly any history, and the few isolated pieces of old
+fact which he had picked up in his very slight reading were exactly
+the most unfortunate that a student in need of the historic method
+could possibly have fallen in with. The illustrations which are
+scantily dispersed in his pages,--and we must remark that they are no
+more than illustrations for conclusions arrived at quite independently
+of them, and not the historical proof and foundations of his
+conclusions,--are nearly all from the annals of the small states of
+ancient Greece, and from the earlier times of the Roman republic. We
+have already pointed out to what an extent his imagination was struck
+at the time of his first compositions by the tale of Lycurgus. The
+influence of the same notions is still paramount. The hopelessness of
+giving good laws to a corrupt people is supposed to be demonstrated by
+the case of Minos, whose legislation failed in Crete because the
+people for whom he made laws were sunk in vices; and by the further
+example of Plato, who refused to give laws to the Arcadians and
+Cyrenians, knowing that they were too rich and could never suffer
+equality.[187] The writer is thinking of Plato's Laws, when he says
+that just as nature has fixed limits to the stature of a well-formed
+man, outside of which she produces giants and dwarfs, so with
+reference to the best constitution for a state, there are bounds to
+its extent, so that it may be neither too large to be capable of good
+government, nor too small to be independent and self-sufficing. The
+further the social bond is extended, the more relaxed it becomes, and
+in general a small state is proportionally stronger than a large
+one.[188] In the remarks with which he proceeds to corroborate this
+position, we can plainly see that he is privately contrasting an
+independent Greek community with the unwieldy oriental monarchy
+against which at one critical period Greece had to contend. He had
+never realised the possibility of such forms of polity as the Roman
+Empire, or the half-federal dominion of England which took such
+enormous dimensions in his time, or the great confederation of states
+which came to birth two years before he died. He was the servant of
+his own metaphor, as the Greek writers so often were. His argument
+that a state must be of a moderate size because the rightly shapen man
+is neither dwarf nor giant, is exactly on a par with Aristotle's
+argument to the same effect, on the ground that beauty demands size,
+and there must not be too great nor too small size, because a ship
+sails badly if it be either too heavy or too light.[189] And when
+Rousseau supposes the state to have ten thousand inhabitants, and
+talks about the right size of its territory,[190] who does not think
+of the five thousand and forty which the Athenian Stranger prescribed
+to Cleinias the Cretan as the exactly proper number for the perfectly
+formed state?[191] The prediction of the short career which awaits a
+state that is cursed with an extensive and accessible seaboard,
+corresponds precisely with the Athenian Stranger's satisfaction that
+the new city is to be eighty stadia from the coast.[192] When Rousseau
+himself began to think about the organisation of Corsica, he praised
+the selection of Corte as the chief town of a patriotic
+administration, because it was far from the sea, and so its
+inhabitants would long preserve their simplicity and uprightness.[193]
+And in later years still, when meditating upon a constitution for
+Poland, he propounded an economic system essentially Spartan; the
+people were enjoined to think little about foreigners, to give
+themselves little concern about commerce, to suppress stamped paper,
+and to put a tithe upon the land.[194]
+
+The chapter on the Legislator is in the same region. We are again
+referred to Lycurgus; and to the circumstance that Greek towns usually
+confided to a stranger the sacred task of drawing up their laws. His
+experience in Venice and the history of his native town supplemented
+the examples of Greece. Geneva summoned a stranger to legislate for
+her, and "those who only look on Calvin as a theologian have a scanty
+idea of the extent of his genius; the preparation of our wise edicts,
+in which he had so large a part, do him as much honour as his
+Institutes."[195] Rousseau's vision was too narrow to let him see the
+growth of government and laws as a co-ordinate process, flowing from
+the growth of all the other parts and organs of society, and advancing
+in more or less equal step along with them. He could begin with
+nothing short of an absolute legislator, who should impose a system
+from without by a single act, a structure hit upon once for all by his
+individual wisdom, not slowly wrought out by many minds, with popular
+assent and co-operation, at the suggestion of changing social
+circumstances and need.[196]
+
+All this would be of very trifling importance in the history of
+political literature, but for the extraordinary influence which
+circumstances ultimately bestowed upon it. The Social Contract was the
+gospel of the Jacobins, and much of the action of the supreme party in
+France during the first months of the year 1794 is only fully
+intelligible when we look upon it as the result and practical
+application of Rousseau's teaching. The conception of the situation
+entertained by Robespierre and Saint Just was entirely moulded on all
+this talk about the legislators of Greece and Geneva. "The transition
+of an oppressed nation to democracy is like the effort by which nature
+rose from nothingness to existence. You must entirely refashion a
+people whom you wish to make free--destroy its prejudices, alter its
+habits, limit its necessities, root up its vices, purify its desires.
+The state therefore must lay hold on every human being at his birth,
+and direct his education with powerful hand. Solon's weak confidence
+threw Athens into fresh slavery, while Lycurgus's severity founded the
+republic of Sparta on an immovable basis."[197] These words, which
+come from a decree of the Committee of Public Safety, might well be
+taken for an excerpt from the Social Contract. The fragments of the
+institutions by which Saint Just intended to regenerate his country,
+reveal a man with the example of Lycurgus before his eyes in every
+line he wrote.[198] When on the eve of the Thermidorian revolution
+which overthrew him and his party, he insisted on the necessity of a
+dictatorship, he was only thinking of the means by which he should at
+length obtain the necessary power for forcing his regenerating
+projects on the country; for he knew that Robespierre, whom he named
+as the man for the dictatorship, accepted his projects, and would lend
+the full force of the temporal arm to the propagation of ideas which
+they had acquired together from Jean Jacques, and from the Greeks to
+whom Jean Jacques had sent them for example and instruction.[199] No
+doubt the condition of France after 1792 must naturally have struck
+any one too deeply imbued with the spirit of the Social Contract to
+look beneath the surface of the society with which the Convention had
+to deal, as urgently inviting a lawgiver of the ancient stamp. The old
+order in church and state had been swept away, no organs for the
+performance of the functions of national life were visible, the moral
+ideas which had bound the social elements together in the extinct
+monarchy seemed to be permanently sapped. A politician who had for
+years been dreaming about Minos and Lycurgus and Calvin, especially if
+he lived in a state with such a tradition of centralisation as ruled
+in France, was sure to suppose that here was the scene and the moment
+for a splendid repetition on an immense scale of those immortal
+achievements. The futility of the attempt was the practical and ever
+memorable illustration of the defect of Rousseau's geometrical method.
+It was one thing to make laws for the handful of people who lived in
+Geneva in the sixteenth century, united in religious faith, and
+accepting the same form and conception of the common good. It was a
+very different thing to try to play Calvin over some twenty-five
+millions of a heterogeneously composed nation, abounding in variations
+of temperament, faith, laws, and habits and weltering in unfathomable
+distractions. The French did indeed at length invite a heaven-sent
+stranger from Corsica to make laws for them, but not until he had set
+his foot upon their neck; and even Napoleon Bonaparte, who had begun
+life like the rest of his generation by writing Rousseauite essays,
+made a swift return to the historic method in the equivocal shape of
+the Concordat.
+
+Not only were Rousseau's schemes of polity conceived from the point of
+view of a small territory with a limited population. "You must not,"
+he says in one place, "make the abuses of great states an objection to
+a writer who would fain have none but small ones."[200] Again, when he
+said that in a truly free state the citizens performed all their
+services to the community with their arms and none by money, and that
+he looked upon the corvée (or compulsory labour on the public roads)
+as less hostile to freedom than taxes,[201] he showed that he was
+thinking of a state not greatly passing the dimensions of a parish.
+This was not the only defect of his schemes. They assumed a sort of
+state of nature in the minds of the people with whom the lawgiver had
+to deal. Saint Just made the same assumption afterwards, and trusted
+to his military school to erect on these bare plots whatever
+superstructure he might think fit to appoint. A society that had for
+so many centuries been organised and moulded by a powerful and
+energetic church, armed with a definite doctrine, fixing the same
+moral tendencies in a long series of successive generations, was not
+in the naked mental state which the Jacobins postulated. It was not
+prepared to accept free divorce, the substitution of friendship for
+marriage, the displacement of the family by the military school, and
+the other articles in Saint Just's programme of social renovation. The
+twelve apostles went among people who were morally swept and
+garnished, and they went armed with instruments proper to seize the
+imagination of their hearers. All moral reformers seek the ignorant
+and simple, poor fishermen in one scene, labourers and women in
+another, for the good reason that new ideas only make way on ground
+that is not already too heavily encumbered with prejudices. But France
+in 1793 was in no condition of this kind. Opinion in all its spheres
+was deepened by an old and powerful organisation, to a degree which
+made any attempt to abolish the opinion, as the organisation appeared
+to have been abolished, quite hopeless until the lapse of three or
+four hundred years had allowed due time for dissolution. After all it
+was not until the fourth century of our era that the work of even the
+twelve apostles began to tell decisively and quickly. As for the
+Lycurgus of whom the French chattered, if such a personality ever
+existed out of the region of myth, he came to his people armed with an
+oracle from the gods, just as Moses did, and was himself regarded as
+having a nature touched with divinity. No such pretensions could well
+be made by any French legislator within a dozen years or so of the
+death of Voltaire.
+
+Let us here remark that it was exactly what strikes us as the
+desperate absurdity of the assumptions of the Social Contract, which
+constituted the power of that work, when it accidentally fell into the
+hands of men who surveyed a national system wrecked in all its parts.
+The Social Contract is worked out precisely in that fashion which, if
+it touches men at all, makes them into fanatics. Long trains of
+reasoning, careful allegation of proofs, patient admission on every
+hand of qualifying propositions and multitudinous limitations, are
+essential to science, and produce treatises that guide the wise
+statesman in normal times. But it is dogma that gives fervour to a
+sect. There are always large classes of minds to whom anything in the
+shape of a vigorously compact system is irresistibly fascinating, and
+to whom the qualification of a proposition, or the limitation of a
+theoretic principle is distressing or intolerable. Such persons always
+come to the front for a season in times of distraction, when the party
+that knows its own aims most definitely is sure to have the best
+chance of obtaining power. And Rousseau's method charmed their
+temperament. A man who handles sets of complex facts is necessarily
+slow-footed, but one who has only words to deal with, may advance with
+a speed, a precision, a consistency, a conclusiveness, that has a
+magical potency over men who insist on having politics and theology
+drawn out in exact theorems like those of Euclid.
+
+Rousseau traces his conclusions from words, and develops his system
+from the interior germs of phrases. Like the typical schoolman, he
+assumes that analysis of terms is the right way of acquiring new
+knowledge about things; he mistakes the multiplication of propositions
+for the discovery of fresh truth. Many pages of the Social Contract
+are mere logical deductions from verbal definitions: the slightest
+attempt to confront them with actual fact would have shown them to be
+not only valueless, but wholly meaningless, in connection with real
+human nature and the visible working of human affairs. He looks into
+the word, or into his own verbal notion, and tells us what is to be
+found in that, whereas we need to be told the marks and qualities that
+distinguish the object which the word is meant to recall. Hence arises
+his habit of setting himself questions, with reference to which we
+cannot say that the answers are not true, but only that the questions
+themselves were never worth asking. Here is an instance of his method
+of supposing that to draw something from a verbal notion is to find
+out something corresponding to fact. "We can distinguish in the
+magistrate three essentially different wills: 1st, the will peculiar
+to him as an individual, which only tends to his own particular
+advantage; 2nd, the common will of the magistrates, which refers only
+to the advantage of the prince [_i.e._ the government], and this we
+may name corporate will, which is general in relation to the
+government, and particular in relation to the state of which the
+government is a part; 3rd, the will of the people or sovereign will,
+which is general, as well in relation to the state considered as a
+whole, as in relation to the government considered as part of the
+whole."[202] It might be hard to prove that all this is not true, but
+then it is unreal and comes to nothing, as we see if we take the
+trouble to turn it into real matter. Thus a member of the British
+House of Commons, who is a magistrate in Rousseau's sense, has three
+essentially different wills: first, as a man, Mr. So-and-so; second,
+his corporate will, as member of the chamber, and this will is general
+in relation to the legislature, but particular in relation to the
+whole body of electors and peers; third, his will as a member of the
+great electoral body, which is a general will alike in relation to the
+electoral body and to the legislature. An English publicist is
+perfectly welcome to make assertions of this kind, if he chooses to do
+so, and nobody will take the trouble to deny them. But they are
+nonsense. They do not correspond to the real composition of a member
+of parliament, nor do they shed the smallest light upon any part
+either of the theory of government in general, or the working of our
+own government in particular. Almost the same kind of observation
+might be made of the famous dogmatic statements about sovereignty.
+"Sovereignty, being only the exercise of the general will, can never
+be alienated, and the sovereign, who is only a collective being, can
+only be represented by himself: the power may be transmitted, but not
+the will;"[203] sovereignty is indivisible, not only in principle, but
+in object;[204] and so forth. We shall have to consider these remarks
+from another point of view. At present we refer to them as
+illustrating the character of the book, as consisting of a number of
+expansions of definitions, analysed as words, not compared with the
+facts of which the words are representatives. This way of treating
+political theory enabled the writer to assume an air of certitude and
+precision, which led narrow deductive minds completely captive. Burke
+poured merited scorn on the application of geometry to politics and
+algebraic formulas to government, but then it was just this seeming
+demonstration, this measured accuracy, that filled Rousseau's
+disciples with a supreme and undoubting confidence which leaves the
+modern student of these schemes in amazement unspeakable. The thinness
+of Robespierre's ideas on government ceases to astonish us, when we
+remember that he had not trained himself to look upon it as the art of
+dealing with huge groups of conflicting interests, of hostile
+passions, of hardly reconcilable aims, of vehemently opposed forces.
+He had disciplined his political intelligence on such meagre and
+unsubstantial argumentation as the following:--"Let us suppose the
+state composed of ten thousand citizens. The sovereign can only be
+considered collectively and as a body; but each person, in his quality
+as subject, is considered as an individual unit; thus the sovereign is
+to the subject as ten thousand is to one; in other words, each member
+of the state has for his share only the ten-thousandth part of the
+sovereign authority, though he is submitted to it in all his own
+entirety. If the people be composed of a hundred thousand men, the
+condition of the subjects does not change, and each of them bears
+equally the whole empire of the laws, while his suffrage, reduced to a
+hundred-thousandth, has ten times less influence in drawing them up.
+Then, the subject remaining still only one, the relation of the
+sovereign augments in the ratio of the number of the citizens. Whence
+it follows that, the larger the state becomes, the more does liberty
+diminish."[205]
+
+Apart from these arithmetical conceptions, and the deep charm which
+their assurance of expression had for the narrow and fervid minds of
+which England and Germany seem to have got finally rid in Anabaptists
+and Fifth Monarchy men, but which still haunted France, there were
+maxims in the Social Contract of remarkable convenience for the
+members of a Committee of Public Safety. "How can a blind multitude,"
+the writer asks in one place, "which so often does not know its own
+will, because it seldom knows what is good for it, execute of itself
+an undertaking so vast and so difficult as a system of
+legislation?"[206] Again, "as nature gives to each man an absolute
+power over all his members, so the social pact gives to the body
+politic an absolute power over all its members; and it is this same
+power which, when directed by the general will, bears, as I have said,
+the name of sovereignty."[207] Above all, the little chapter on a
+dictatorship is the very foundation of the position of the
+Robespierrists in the few months immediately preceding their fall. "It
+is evidently the first intention of the people that the state should
+not perish," and so on, with much criticism of the system of
+occasional dictatorships, as they were resorted to in old Rome.[208]
+Yet this does not in itself go much beyond the old monarchic doctrine
+of Prerogative, as a corrective for the slowness and want of immediate
+applicability of mere legal processes in cases of state emergency; and
+it is worth noticing again and again that in spite of the shriekings
+of reaction, the few atrocities of the Terror are an almost invisible
+speck compared with the atrocities of Christian churchmen and lawful
+kings, perpetrated in accordance with their notion of what constituted
+public safety. So far as Rousseau's intention goes, we find in his
+writings one of the strongest denunciations of the doctrine of public
+safety that is to be found in any of the writings of the century. "Is
+the safety of a citizen," he cries, "less the common cause than the
+safety of the state? They may tell us that it is well that one should
+perish on behalf of all. I will admire such a sentence in the mouth of
+a virtuous patriot, who voluntarily and for duty's sake devotes
+himself to death for the salvation of his country. But if we are to
+understand that it is allowed to the government to sacrifice an
+innocent person for the safety of the multitude, I hold this maxim for
+one of the most execrable that tyranny has ever invented, and the most
+dangerous that can be admitted."[209] It may be said that the
+Terrorists did not sacrifice innocent life, but the plea is frivolous
+on the lips of men who proscribed whole classes. You cannot justly
+draw a capital indictment against a class. Rousseau, however, cannot
+fairly be said to have had a share in the responsibility for the more
+criminal part of the policy of 1793, any more than the founder of
+Christianity is responsible for the atrocities that have been
+committed by the more ardent worshippers of his name, and justified by
+stray texts caught up from the gospels. Helvétius had said, "All
+becomes legitimate and even virtuous on behalf of the public safety."
+Rousseau wrote in the margin, "The public safety is nothing unless
+individuals enjoy security."[210] The author of a theory is not
+answerable for the applications which may be read into it by the
+passions of men and the exigencies of a violent crisis. Such
+applications show this much and no more, that the theory was
+constructed with an imperfect consideration of the qualities of human
+nature, with too narrow a view of the conditions of society, and
+therefore with an inadequate appreciation of the consequences which
+the theory might be drawn to support.
+
+It is time to come to the central conception of the Social Contract,
+the dogma which made of it for a time the gospel of a nation, the
+memorable doctrine of the sovereignty of peoples. Of this doctrine
+Rousseau was assuredly not the inventor, though the exaggerated
+language of some popular writers in France leads us to suppose that
+they think of him as nothing less. Even in the thirteenth century the
+constitution of the Orders, and the contests of the friars with the
+clergy, had engendered faintly democratic ways of thinking.[211] Among
+others the great Aquinas had protested against the juristic doctrine
+that the law is the pleasure of the prince. The will of the prince, he
+says, to be a law, must be directed by reason; law is appointed for
+the common good, and not for a special or private good: it follows
+from this that only the reason of the multitude, or of a prince
+representing the multitude, can make a law.[212] A still more
+remarkable approach to later views was made by Marsilio of Padua,
+physician to Lewis of Bavaria, who wrote a strong book on his master's
+side, in the great contest between him and the pope (1324). Marsilio
+in the first part of his work not only lays down very elaborately the
+proposition that laws ought to be made by the "_universitas civium_";
+he places this sovereignty of the people on the true basis (which
+Rousseau only took for a secondary support to his original compact),
+namely, the greater likelihood of laws being obeyed in the first
+place, and being good laws in the second, when they are made by the
+body of the persons affected. "No one knowingly does hurt to himself,
+or deliberately asks what is unjust, and on that account all or a
+great majority must wish such law as best suits the common interest of
+the citizens."[213] Turning from this to the Social Contract, or to
+Locke's essay on Government, the identity in doctrine and
+correspondence in dialect may teach us how little true originality
+there can he among thinkers who are in the same stage; how a
+metaphysician of the thirteenth century and a metaphysician of the
+eighteenth hit on the same doctrine; and how the true classification
+of thinkers does not follow intervals of time, but is fixed by
+differences of method. It is impossible that in the constant play of
+circumstances and ideas in the minds of different thinkers, the same
+combinations of form and colour in a philosophic arrangement of such
+circumstances and ideas should not recur. Signal novelties in thought
+are as limited as signal inventions in architectural construction. It
+is only one of the great changes in method, that can remove the limits
+of the old combinations, by bringing new material and fundamentally
+altering the point of view.
+
+In the sixteenth century there were numerous writers who declared the
+right of subjects to depose a bad sovereign, but this position is to
+be distinguished from Rousseau's doctrine. Thus, if we turn to the
+great historic event of 1581, the rejection of the yoke of Spain by
+the Dutch, we find the Declaration of Independence running, "that if a
+prince is appointed by God over the land, it is to protect them from
+harm, even as a shepherd to the guardianship of his flock. The
+subjects are not appointed by God for the behoof of the prince, but
+the prince for his subjects, without whom he is no prince." This is
+obviously divine right, fundamentally modified by a popular
+principle, accepted to meet the exigencies of the occasion, and to
+justify after the event a measure which was dictated by urgent need
+for practical relief. Such a notion of the social compact was still
+emphatically in the semi-patriarchal stage, and is distinct as can be
+from the dogma of popular sovereignty as Rousseau understood it. But
+it plainly marked a step on the way. It was the development of
+Protestant principles which produced and necessarily involved the
+extreme democratic conclusion. Time was needed for their full
+expansion in this sense, but the result could only have been avoided
+by a suppression of the Reformation, and we therefore count it
+inevitable. Bodin (1577) had defined sovereignty as residing in the
+supreme legislative authority, without further inquiry as to the
+source or seat of that authority, though he admits the vague position
+which even Lewis XIV. did not deny, that the object of political
+society is the greatest good of every citizen or the whole state. In
+1603 a Protestant professor of law in Germany, Althusen by name,
+published a treatise of Politics, in which the doctrine of the
+sovereignty of peoples was clearly formulated, to the profound
+indignation both of Jesuits and of Protestant jurists.[214] Rousseau
+mentions his name;[215] it does not appear that he read Althusen's
+rather uncommon treatise, but its teaching would probably have a place
+in the traditions of political theorising current at Geneva, to the
+spirit of whose government it was so congenial. Hooker, vindicating
+episcopacy against the democratic principles of the Puritans, had
+still been led, apparently by way of the ever dominant idea of a law
+natural, to base civil government on the assent of the governed, and
+had laid down such propositions as these: "Laws they are not, which
+public approbation hath not made so. Laws therefore human, of what
+kind soever, are available by consent," and so on.[216] The views of
+the Ecclesiastical Polity were adopted by Locke, and became the
+foundation of the famous essay on Civil Government, from which popular
+leaders in our own country drew all their weapons down to the outbreak
+of the French Revolution. Grotius (1625) starting from the principle
+that the law of nature enjoins that we should stand by our agreements,
+then proceeded to assume either an express, or at any rate a tacit and
+implied, promise on the part of all who become members of a community,
+to obey the majority of the body, or a majority of those to whom
+authority has been delegated.[217] This is a unilateral view of the
+social contract, and omits the element of reciprocity which in
+Rousseau's idea was cardinal.
+
+Locke was Rousseau's most immediate inspirer, and the latter affirmed
+himself to have treated the same matters exactly on Locke's
+principles. Rousseau, however, exaggerated Locke's politics as greatly
+as Condillac exaggerated his metaphysics. There was the important
+difference that Locke's essay on Civil Government was the
+justification in theory of a revolution which had already been
+accomplished in practice, while the Social Contract, tinged as it was
+by silent reference in the mind of the writer to Geneva, was yet a
+speculation in the air. The circumstances under which it was written
+gave to the propositions of Locke's piece a reserve and moderation
+which savour of a practical origin and a special case. They have not
+the wide scope and dogmatic air and literary precision of the
+corresponding propositions in Rousseau. We find in Locke none of those
+concise phrases which make fanatics. But the essential doctrine is
+there. The philosopher of the Revolution of 1688 probably carried its
+principles further than most of those who helped in the Revolution had
+any intention to carry them, when he said that "the legislature being
+only a fiduciary power to act for certain ends, there remains still in
+the people a supreme power to remove or alter the legislative."[218]
+It may be questioned how many of the peers of that day would have
+assented to the proposition that the people--and did Locke mean by the
+people the electors of the House of Commons, or all males over
+twenty-one, or all householders paying rates?--could by any expression
+of their will abolish the legislative power of the upper chamber, or
+put an end to the legislative and executive powers of the crown. But
+Locke's statements are direct enough, though he does not use so terse
+a label for his doctrine as Rousseau affixed to it.
+
+Again, besides the principle of popular sovereignty, Locke most likely
+gave to Rousseau the idea of the origin of this sovereignty in the
+civil state in a pact or contract, which was represented as the
+foundation and first condition of the civil state. From this naturally
+flowed the connected theory, of a perpetual consent being implied as
+given by the people to each new law. We need not quote passages from
+Locke to demonstrate the substantial correspondence of assumption
+between him and the author of the Social Contract. They are found in
+every chapter.[219] Such principles were indispensable for the defence
+of a Revolution like that of 1688, which was always carefully marked
+out by its promoters, as well as by its eloquent apologist and
+expositor a hundred years later, the great Burke, as above all things
+a revolution within the pale of the law or the constitution. They
+represented the philosophic adjustment of popular ideas to the
+political changes wrought by shifting circumstances, as distinguished
+from the biblical or Hebraic method of adjusting such ideas, which had
+prevailed in the contests of the previous generation.
+
+Yet there was in the midst of those contests one thinker of the first
+rank in intellectual power, who had constructed a genuine philosophy
+of government. Hobbes's speculations did not fit in with the theory of
+either of the two bodies of combatants in the Civil War. They were
+each in the theological order of ideas, and neither of them sought or
+was able to comprehend the application of philosophic principles to
+their own case or to that of their adversaries.[220] Hebrew precedents
+and bible texts, on the one hand; prerogative of use and high church
+doctrine, on the other. Between these was no space for the acceptance
+of a secular and rationalistic theory, covering the whole field of a
+social constitution. Now the influence of Hobbes upon Rousseau was
+very marked, and very singular. There were numerous differences
+between the philosopher of Geneva and his predecessor of Malmesbury.
+The one looked on men as good, the other looked on them as bad. The
+one described the state of nature as a state of peace, the other as a
+state of war. The one believed that laws and institutions had depraved
+man, the other that they had improved him.[221] But these differences
+did not prevent the action of Hobbes on Rousseau. It resulted in a
+curious fusion between the premisses and the temper of Hobbes and the
+conclusions of Locke. This fusion produced that popular absolutism of
+which the Social Contract was the theoretical expression, and Jacobin
+supremacy the practical manifestation. Rousseau borrowed from Hobbes
+the true conception of sovereignty, and from Locke the true conception
+of the ultimate seat and original of authority, and of the two
+together he made the great image of the sovereign people. Strike the
+crowned head from that monstrous figure which is the frontispiece of
+the Leviathan, and you have a frontispiece that will do excellently
+well for the Social Contract. Apart from a multitude of other
+obligations, good and bad, which Rousseau owed to Hobbes, as we shall
+point out, we may here mention that of the superior accuracy of the
+notion of law in the Social Contract over the notion of law in
+Montesquieu's work. The latter begins, as everybody knows, with a
+definition inextricably confused: "Laws are necessary relations
+flowing from the nature of things, and in this sense all beings have
+their laws, divinity has its laws, the material world has its laws,
+the intelligences superior to men have their laws, the beasts have
+their laws, man has his laws.... There is a primitive reason, and laws
+are the relations to be found between that and the different beings,
+and the relations of these different beings among one another."[222]
+Rousseau at once put aside these divergent meanings, made the proper
+distinction between a law of nature and the imperative law of a state,
+and justly asserted that the one could teach us nothing worth knowing
+about the other.[223] Hobbes's phraseology is much less definite than
+this, and shows that he had not himself wholly shaken off the same
+confusion as reigned in Montesquieu's account a century later. But
+then Hobbes's account of the true meaning of sovereignty was so clear,
+firm, and comprehensive, as easily to lead any fairly perspicuous
+student who followed him, to apply it to the true meaning of law. And
+on this head of law not so much fault is to be found with Rousseau, as
+on the head of larger constitutional theory. He did not look long
+enough at given laws, and hence failed to seize all their distinctive
+qualities; above all he only half saw, if he saw at all, that a law is
+a command and not a contract, and his eyes were closed to this,
+because the true view was incompatible with his fundamental assumption
+of contract as the base of the social union.[224] But he did at all
+events grasp the quality of generality as belonging to laws proper,
+and separated them justly from what he calls decrees, which we are now
+taught to name occasional or particular commands.[225] This is worth
+mentioning, because it shows that, in spite of his habits of
+intellectual laxity, Rousseau was capable, where he had a clear-headed
+master before him, of a very considerable degree of precision of
+thought, however liable it was to fall into error or deficiency for
+want of abundant comparison with bodies of external fact. Let us now
+proceed to some of the central propositions of the Social Contract.
+
+1. The origin of society dates from the moment when the obstacles
+which impede the preservation of men in a state of nature are too
+strong for such forces as each individual can employ in order to keep
+himself in that state. At this point they can only save themselves by
+aggregation. Problem: to find a form of association which defends and
+protects with the whole common force the person and property of each
+associate, and by which, each uniting himself to all, still only obeys
+himself, and remains as free as he was before. Solution: a social
+compact reducible to these words, "Each of us places in common his
+person and his whole power under the supreme direction of the general
+will; and we further receive each member as indivisible part of the
+whole." This act of association constitutes a moral and collective
+body, a public person.
+
+The practical importance and the mischief of thus suffering society to
+repose on conventions which the human will had made, lay in the
+corollary that the human will is competent at any time to unmake them,
+and also therefore to devise all possible changes that fell short of
+unmaking them. This was the root of the fatal hypothesis of the
+dictator, or divinely commissioned lawgiver. External circumstance and
+human nature alike were passive and infinitely pliable; they were the
+material out of which the legislator was to devise conventions at
+pleasure, without apprehension as to their suitableness either to the
+conditions of society among which they were to work, or to the
+passions and interests of those by whom they were to be carried out,
+and who were supposed to have given assent to them. It would be unjust
+to say that Rousseau actually faced this position and took the
+consequences. He expressly says in more places than one that the
+science of Government is only a science of combinations, applications,
+and exceptions, according to time, place, and circumstance.[226] But
+to base society on conventions is to impute an element of
+arbitrariness to these combinations and applications, and to make them
+independent, as they can never be, of the limits inexorably fixed by
+the nature of things. The notion of compact is the main source of all
+the worst vagaries in Rousseau's political speculation.
+
+It is worth remarking in the history of opinion, that there was at
+this time in France a little knot of thinkers who were nearly in full
+possession of the true view of the limits set by the natural ordering
+of societies to the power of convention and the function of the
+legislators. Five years after the publication of the Social Contract,
+a remarkable book was written by one of the economic sect of the
+Physiocrats, the later of whom, though specially concerned with the
+material interests of communities, very properly felt the necessity of
+connecting the discussion of wealth with the assumption of certain
+fundamental political conditions. They felt this, because it is
+impossible to settle any question about wages or profits, for
+instance, until you have first settled whether you are assuming the
+principles of liberty and property. This writer with great consistency
+found the first essential of all social order in conformity of
+positive law and institution to those qualities of human nature, and
+their relations with those material instruments of life, which, and
+not convention, were the true origin, as they are the actual grounds,
+of the perpetuation of our societies.[227] This was wiser than
+Rousseau's conception of the lawgiver as one who should change human
+nature, and take away from man the forces that are naturally his own,
+to replace them by others comparatively foreign to him.[228] Rousseau
+once wrote, in a letter about Rivière's book, that the great problem
+in politics, which might be compared with the quadrature of the circle
+in geometry, is to find a form of government which shall place law
+above man.[229] A more important problem, and not any less difficult
+for the political theoriser, is to mark the bounds at which the
+authority of the law is powerless or mischievous in attempting to
+control the egoistic or non-social parts of man. This problem Rousseau
+ignored, and that he should do so was only natural in one who
+believed that man had bound himself by a convention, strictly to
+suppress his egoistic and non-social parts, and who based all his
+speculation on this pact as against the force, or the paternal
+authority, or the will of a Supreme Being, in which other writers
+founded the social union.
+
+2. The body thus constituted by convention is the sovereign. Each
+citizen is a member of the sovereign, standing in a definite relation
+to individuals _qua_ individuals; he is also as an individual a member
+of the state and subject to the sovereign, of which from the first
+point of view he is a component element. The sovereign and the body
+politic are one and the same thing.[230]
+
+Of the antecedents and history of this doctrine enough has already
+been said. Its general truth as a description either of what is, or
+what ought to be and will be, demands an ampler discussion than there
+is any occasion to carry on here. We need only point out its place as
+a kind of intermediate dissolvent for which the time was most ripe. It
+breaks up the feudal conception of political authority as a property
+of land-ownership, noble birth, and the like, and it associates this
+authority widely and simply with the bare fact of participation in any
+form of citizenship in the social union. The later and higher idea of
+every share of political power as a function to be discharged for the
+good of the whole body, and not merely as a right to be enjoyed for
+the advantage of its possessor, was a form of thought to which
+Rousseau did not rise. That does not lessen the effectiveness of the
+blow which his doctrine dealt to French feudalism, and which is its
+main title to commemoration in connection with his name.
+
+The social compact thus made is essentially different from the social
+compact which Hobbes described as the origin of what he calls
+commonwealths by institution, to distinguish them from commonwealths
+by acquisition, that is to say, states formed by conquest or resting
+on hereditary rule. "A commonwealth," Hobbes says, "is said to be
+instituted when a multitude of men do agree and covenant, every one
+with every one, that to whatsoever man or assembly of men shall be
+given by the major part the right to present the person of them all,
+that is to say, to be their representative; every one ... shall
+authorise all the actions and judgments of that man or assembly of
+men, in the same manner as if they were his own, to the end to live
+peaceably among themselves, and be protected against other men."[231]
+But Rousseau's compact was an act of association among equals, who
+also remained equals. Hobbes's compact was an act of surrender on the
+part of the many to one or a number. The first was the constitution of
+civil society, the second was the erection of a government. As nobody
+now believes in the existence of any such compact in either one form
+or the other, it would be superfluous to inquire which of the two is
+the less inaccurate. All we need do is to point out that there was
+this difference. Rousseau distinctly denied the existence of any
+element of contract in the erection of a government; there is only one
+contract in the state, he said, and it is that of association.[232]
+Locke's notion of the compact which was the beginning of every
+political society is indefinite on this point; he speaks of it
+indifferently as an agreement of a body of free men to unite and
+incorporate into a society, and an agreement to set up a
+government.[233] Most of us would suppose the two processes to be as
+nearly identical as may be; Rousseau drew a distinction, and from this
+distinction he derived further differences.
+
+Here, we may remark, is the starting-point in the history of the ideas
+of the revolution, of one of the most prominent of them all, that of
+Fraternity. If the whole structure of society rests on an act of
+partnership entered into by equals on behalf of themselves and their
+descendants for ever, the nature of the union is not what it would be,
+if the members of the union had only entered it to place their
+liberties at the feet of some superior power. Society in the one case
+is a covenant of subjection, in the other a covenant of social
+brotherhood. This impressed itself deeply on the feelings of men like
+Robespierre, who were never so well pleased as when they could find
+for their sentimentalism a covering of neat political logic. The same
+idea of association came presently to receive a still more remarkable
+and momentous extension, when it was translated from the language of
+mere government into that of the economic organisation of communities.
+Rousseau's conception went no further than political association, as
+distinct from subjection. Socialism, which came by and by to the front
+place, carried the idea to its fullest capacity, and presented all the
+relations of men with one another as fixed by the same bond. Men had
+entered the social union as brethren, equal, and co-operators, not
+merely for purposes of government, but for purposes of mutual succour
+in all its aspects. This naturally included the most important of all,
+material production. They were not associated merely as equal
+participants in political sovereignty; they were equal participants in
+all the rest of the increase made to the means of human happiness by
+united action. Socialism is the transfer of the principle of fraternal
+association from politics, where Rousseau left it, to the wider sphere
+of industrial force.
+
+It is perhaps worth notice that another famous revolutionary term
+belongs to the same source. All the associates of this act of union,
+becoming members of the city, are as such to be called Citizens, as
+participating in the sovereign authority.[234] The term was in
+familiar use enough among the French in their worst days, but it was
+Rousseau's sanction which marked it in the new times with a sort of
+sacramental stamp. It came naturally to him, because it was the name
+of the first of the two classes which constituted the active portion
+of the republic of Geneva, and the only class whose members were
+eligible to the chief magistracies.
+
+3. We next have a group of propositions setting forth the attributes
+of sovereignty. It is inalienable.[235] It is indivisible.
+
+These two propositions, which play such a part in the history of some
+of the episodes of the French Revolution, contain no more than was
+contended for by Hobbes, and has been accepted in our own times by
+Austin. When Hobbes says that "to the laws which the sovereign maketh,
+the sovereign is not subject, for if he were subject to the civil laws
+he were subject to himself, which were not subjection but freedom,"
+his notion of sovereignty is exactly that expressed by Rousseau in his
+unexplained dogma of the inalienableness of sovereignty. So Rousseau
+means no more by the dogma that sovereignty is indivisible, than
+Austin meant when he declared of the doctrine that the legislative
+sovereign powers and the executive sovereign powers belong in any
+society to distinct parties, that it is a supposition too palpably
+false to endure a moment's examination.[236] The way in which this
+account of the indivisibleness of sovereignty was understood during
+the revolution, twisted it into a condemnation of the dreaded idea of
+Federalism. It might just as well have been interpreted to condemn
+alliances between nations; for the properties of sovereignty are
+clearly independent of the dimensions of the sovereign unit. Another
+effect of this doctrine was the rejection by the Constituent Assembly
+of the balanced parliamentary system, which the followers of
+Montesquieu would fain have introduced on the English model. Whether
+that was an evil or a good, publicists will long continue to dispute.
+
+4. The general will of the sovereign upon an object of common interest
+is expressed in a law. Only the sovereign can possess this law-making
+power, because no one but the sovereign has the right of declaring the
+general will. The legislative power cannot be exerted by delegation or
+representation. The English fancy that they are a free nation, but
+they are grievously mistaken. They are only free during the election
+of members of parliament; the members once chosen, the people are
+slaves, nay, as people they have ceased to exist.[237] It is
+impossible for the sovereign to act, except when the people are
+assembled. Besides such extraordinary assemblies as unforeseen events
+may call for, there must be fixed periodical meetings that nothing can
+interrupt or postpone. Do you call this chimerical? Then you have
+forgotten the Roman comitia, as well as such gatherings of the people
+as those of the Macedonians and the Franks and most other nations in
+their primitive times. What has existed is certainly possible.[238]
+
+It is very curious that Rousseau in this part of his subject should
+have contented himself with going back to Macedonia and Rome, instead
+of pointing to the sovereign states that have since become confederate
+with his native republic. A historian in our own time has described
+with an enthusiasm that equals that of the Social Contract, how he saw
+the sovereign people of Uri and the sovereign people of Appenzell
+discharge the duties of legislation and choice of executive, each in
+the majesty of its corporate person.[239] That Rousseau was influenced
+by the free sovereignty of the states of the Swiss confederation, as
+well as by that of his own city, we may well believe. Whether he was
+or not, it must always be counted a serious misfortune that a writer
+who was destined to exercise such power in a crisis of the history of
+a great nation, should have chosen his illustrations from a time and
+from societies so remote, that the true conditions of their political
+system could not possibly be understood with any approach to reality,
+while there were, within a few leagues of his native place,
+communities where the system of a sovereign public in his own sense
+was actually alive and flourishing and at work. From them the full
+meaning of his theories might have been practically gathered, and
+whatever useful lessons lay at the bottom of them might have been made
+plain. As it was, it came to pass singularly enough that the effect of
+the French Revolution was the suppression, happily only for a time, of
+the only governments in Europe where the doctrine of the favourite
+apostle of the Revolution was a reality. The constitution of the
+Helvetic Republic in 1798 was as bad a blow to the sovereignty of
+peoples in a true sense, as the old house of Austria or Charles of
+Burgundy could ever have dealt. That constitution, moreover, was
+directly opposed to the Social Contract in setting up what it called
+representative democracy, for representative democracy was just what
+Rousseau steadily maintained to be a nullity and a delusion.
+
+The only lesson which the Social Contract contained for a statesman
+bold enough to take into his hands the reconstruction of France,
+undoubtedly pointed in the direction of confederation. At one place,
+where he became sensible of the impotence which his assumption of a
+small state inflicted on his whole speculation, Rousseau said he would
+presently show how the good order of a small state might be united to
+the external power of a great people. Though he never did this, he
+hints in a footnote that his plan belonged to the theory of
+confederations, of which the principles were still to be
+established.[240] When he gave advice for the renovation of the
+wretched constitution of Poland, he insisted above all things that
+they should apply themselves to extend and perfect the system of
+federate governments, "the only one that unites in itself all the
+advantages of great and small states."[241] A very few years after the
+appearance of his book, the great American union of sovereign states
+arose to point the political moral. The French revolutionists missed
+the force alike of the practical example abroad, and of the theory of
+the book which they took for gospel at home. How far they were driven
+to this by the urgent pressure of foreign war, or whether they would
+have followed the same course without that interference, merely in
+obedience to the catholic and monarchic absolutism which had sunk so
+much deeper into French character than people have been willing to
+admit, we cannot tell. The fact remains that the Jacobins, Rousseau's
+immediate disciples, at once took up the chain of centralised
+authority where it had been broken off by the ruin of the monarchy.
+They caught at the letter of the dogma of a sovereign people, and lost
+its spirit. They missed the germ of truth in Rousseau's scheme,
+namely, that for order and freedom and just administration the unit
+should not be too large to admit of the participation of the persons
+concerned in the management of their own public affairs. If they had
+realised this and applied it, either by transforming the old monarchy
+into a confederacy of sovereign provinces, or by some less sweeping
+modification of the old centralised scheme of government, they might
+have saved France.[242] But, once more, men interpret a political
+treatise on principles which either come to them by tradition; or
+else spring suddenly up from roots of passion.[243]
+
+5. The government is the minister of the sovereign. It is an
+intermediate body set up between sovereign and subjects for their
+mutual correspondence, charged with the execution of the laws and the
+maintenance of civil and political freedom. The members comprising it
+are called magistrates or kings, and to the whole body so composed,
+whether of one or of more than one, is given the name of prince. If
+the whole power is centred in the hands of a single magistrate, from
+whom all the rest hold their authority, the government is called a
+monarchy. If there are more persons simply citizens than there are
+magistrates, this is an aristocracy.[244] If more citizen magistrates
+than simple private citizens, that is a democracy. The last government
+is as a general rule best fitted for small states, and the first for
+large ones--on the principle that the number of the supreme
+magistrates ought to be in the inverse ratio of that of the citizens.
+But there is a multitude of circumstances which may furnish reasons
+for exceptions to this general rule.
+
+This common definition of the three forms of governments according to
+the mere number of the participants in the chief magistracy, though
+adopted by Hobbes and other writers, is certainly inadequate and
+uninstructive, without some further qualification. Aristotle, for
+instance, furnishes such a qualification, when he refers to the
+interests in which the government is carried on, whether the interest
+of a small body or of the whole of the citizens.[245] Montesquieu's
+well-known division, though logically faulty, still has the merit of
+pointing to conditions of difference among forms of government,
+outside of and apart from the one fact of the number of the sovereign.
+To divide governments, as Montesquieu did, into republics, monarchies,
+and despotisms, was to use two principles of division, first the
+number of the sovereign, and next something else, namely, the
+difference between a constitutional and an absolute monarch. Then he
+returned to the first principle of division, and separated a republic
+into a government of all, which is a democracy, and a government by a
+part, which is aristocracy.[246] Still, to have introduced the element
+of law-abidingness in the chief magistracy, whether of one or more,
+was to have called attention to the fact that no single distinction is
+enough to furnish us with a conception of the real and vital
+differences which may exist between one form of government and
+another.[247]
+
+The important fact about a government lies quite as much in the
+qualifying epithet which is to be affixed to any one of the three
+names, as in the name itself. We know nothing about a monarchy, until
+we have been told whether it is absolute or constitutional; if
+absolute, whether it is administered in the interests of the realm,
+like that of Prussia under Frederick the Great, or in the interests of
+the ruler, like that of an Indian principality under a native prince;
+if constitutional, whether the real power is aristocratic, as in Great
+Britain a hundred years ago, or plutocratic, as in Great Britain
+to-day, or popular, as it may be here fifty years hence. And so with
+reference to each of the other two forms; neither name gives us any
+instruction, except of a merely negative kind, until it has been made
+precise by one or more explanatory epithets. What is the common
+quality of the old Roman republic, the republics of the Swiss
+confederation, the republic of Venice, the American republic, the
+republic of Mexico? Plainly the word republic has no further effect
+beyond that of excluding the idea of a recognised dynasty.
+
+Rousseau is perhaps less open to this kind of criticism than other
+writers on political theory, for the reason that he distinguishes the
+constitution of the state from the constitution of the government. The
+first he settles definitely. The whole body of the people is to be
+sovereign, and to be endowed alone with what he conceived as the only
+genuinely legislative power. The only question which he considers open
+is as to the form in which the _delegated executive authority_ shall
+be organised. Democracy, the immediate government of all by all, he
+rejects as too perfect for men; it requires a state so small that each
+citizen knows all the others, manners so simple that the business may
+be small and the mode of discussion easy, equality of rank and fortune
+so general as not to allow of the overriding of political equality by
+material superiority, and so forth.[248] Monarchy labours under a
+number of disadvantages which are tolerably obvious. "One essential
+and inevitable defect, which must always place monarchic below
+republican government, is that in the latter the public voice hardly
+ever promotes to the first places any but capable and enlightened men
+who fill them with honour; whereas those who get on in monarchies, are
+for the most part small busybodies, small knaves, small intriguers, in
+whom the puny talents which are the secret of reaching substantial
+posts in courts, only serve to show their stupidity to the public as
+soon as they have made their way to the front. The people is far less
+likely to make a blunder in a choice of this sort, than the prince,
+and a man of true merit is nearly as rare in the ministry, as a fool
+at the head of the government of a republic."[249] There remains
+aristocracy. Of this there are three sorts: natural, elective, and
+hereditary. The first can only thrive among primitive folk, while the
+third is the worst of all governments. The second is the best, for it
+is aristocracy properly so called. If men only acquire rule in virtue
+of election, then purity, enlightenment, experience, and all the other
+grounds of public esteem and preference, become so many new guarantees
+that the administration shall be wise and just. It is the best and
+most natural order that the wisest should govern the multitude,
+provided you are sure that they will govern the multitude for its
+advantage, and not for their own. If aristocracy of this kind requires
+one or two virtues less than a popular executive, it also demands
+others which are peculiar to itself, such as moderation in the rich
+and content in the poor. For this form comports with a certain
+inequality of fortune, for the reason that it is well that the
+administration of public affairs should be confided to those who are
+best able to give their whole time to it. At the same time it is of
+importance that an opposite choice should occasionally teach the
+people that in the merit of men there are more momentous reasons of
+preference than wealth.[250] Rousseau, as we have seen, had pronounced
+English liberty to be no liberty at all, save during the few days once
+in seven years when the elections to parliament take place. Yet this
+scheme of an elective aristocracy was in truth a very near approach
+to the English form as it is theoretically presented in our own day,
+with a suffrage gradually becoming universal. If the suffrage were
+universal, and if its exercise took place once a year, our system, in
+spite of the now obsolescent elements of hereditary aristocracy and
+nominal monarchy, would be as close a realisation of the scheme of the
+Social Contract as any representative system permits. If Rousseau had
+further developed his notions of confederation, the United States
+would most have resembled his type.
+
+6. What is to be the attitude of the state in respect of religion?
+Certainly not that prescribed by the policy of the middle ages. The
+separation of the spiritual from the temporal power, indicated by
+Jesus Christ, and developed by his followers in the course of many
+subsequent generations, was in Rousseau's eyes most mischievous,
+because it ended in the subordination of the temporal power to the
+spiritual, and that is incompatible with an efficient polity. Even the
+kings of England, though they style themselves heads of the church,
+are really its ministers and servants.[251]
+
+The last allegation evinces Rousseau's usual ignorance of history, and
+need not be discussed, any more than his proposition on which he lays
+so much stress, that Christians cannot possibly be good soldiers, nor
+truly good citizens, because their hearts being fixed upon another
+world, they must necessarily be indifferent to the success or failure
+of such enterprises as they may take up in this.[252] In reading the
+Social Contract, and some other of the author's writings besides, we
+have constantly to interpret the direct, positive, categorical form of
+assertion into something of this kind--"Such and such consequences
+ought logically to follow from the meaning of the name, or the
+definition of a principle, or from such and such motives." The change
+of this moderate form of provisional assertion into the unconditional
+statement that such and such consequences have actually followed,
+constantly lands the author in propositions which any reader who tests
+them by an appeal to the experience of mankind, written and unwritten,
+at once discovers to be false and absurd. Rousseau himself took less
+trouble to verify his conclusions by such an appeal to experience than
+any writer that ever lived in a scientific age. The other remark to be
+made on the above section is that the rejection of the Christian or
+ecclesiastical division of the powers of the church and the powers of
+the state, is the strongest illustration that could be found of the
+debt of Rousseau's conception of a state to the old pagan conception.
+It was the main characteristic of the polities which Christian
+monotheism and feudalism together succeeded in replacing, to recognise
+no such division as that between church and state, pope and emperor.
+Rousseau resumed the old conception. But he adjusted it in a certain
+degree to the spirit of his own time, and imposed certain
+philosophical limitations upon it. His scheme is as follows.
+
+Religion, he says, in its relation to the state, may be considered as
+of three kinds. First, natural religion, without temple, altar, or
+rite, the true and pure theism of the natural conscience of man.
+Second, local, civil, or positive religion, with dogmas, rites,
+exercises; a theology of a primitive people, exactly co-extensive with
+all the rights and all the duties of men. Third, a religion like the
+Christianity of the Roman church, which gives men two sets of laws,
+two chiefs, two countries, submits them to contradictory duties, and
+prevents them from being able to be at once devout and patriotic. The
+last of these is so evidently pestilent as to need no discussion. The
+second has the merit of teaching men to identify duty to their gods
+with duty to their country; under this to die for the land is
+martyrdom, to break its laws impiety, and to subject a culprit to
+public execration is to devote him to the anger of the gods. But it is
+bad, because it is at bottom a superstition, and because it makes a
+people sanguinary and intolerant. The first of all, which is now
+styled a Christian theism, having no special relation with the body
+politic, adds no force to the laws. There are many particular
+objections to Christianity flowing from the fact of its not being a
+kingdom of this world, and this above all, that Christianity only
+preaches servitude and dependence.[253] What then is to be done? The
+sovereign must establish a purely civil profession of faith. It will
+consist of the following positive dogmas:--the existence of a
+divinity, powerful, intelligent, beneficent and foreseeing; the life
+to come; the happiness of the just, the chastisement of the wicked;
+the sanctity of the social contract and the laws. These articles of
+belief are imposed, not as dogmas of religion exactly, but as
+sentiments of sociability. If any one declines to accept them, he
+ought to be exiled, not for being impious, but for being unsociable,
+incapable of sincere attachment to the laws, or of sacrificing his
+life to his duty. If any one, after publicly recognising these dogmas,
+carries himself as if he did not believe them, let him be punished by
+death, for he has committed the worst of crimes, he has lied before
+the laws.[254]
+
+Rousseau thus, unconsciously enough, brought to its climax that
+reaction against the absorption of the state in the church which had
+first taken a place in literature in the controversy between legists
+and canonists, and had found its most famous illustration in the De
+Monarchiâ of the great poet of catholicism. The division of two
+co-equal realms, one temporal, the other spiritual, was replaced in
+the Genevese thinker by what he admitted to be "pure Hobbism." This,
+the rigorous subordination of the church to the state, was the end, so
+far as France went, of the speculative controversy which had occupied
+Europe for so many ages, as to the respective powers of pope and
+emperor, of positive law and law divine. The famous civil constitution
+of the clergy (1790), which was the expression of Rousseau's principle
+as formulated by his disciples in the Constituent Assembly, was the
+revolutionary conclusion to the world-wide dispute, whose most
+melodramatic episode had been the scene in the courtyard of Canossa.
+
+Rousseau's memorable prescription, banishing all who should not
+believe in God, or a future state, or in rewards and punishments for
+the deeds done in the body, and putting to death any who, after
+subscribing to the required profession, should seem no longer to hold
+it, has naturally created a very lively horror in a tolerant
+generation like our own, some of whose finest spirits have rejected
+deliberately and finally the articles of belief, without which they
+could not have been suffered to exist in Rousseau's state. It seemed
+to contemporaries, who were enthusiastic above all things for humanity
+and infinite tolerance, these being the prizes of the long conflict
+which they hoped they were completing, to be a return to the horrors
+of the Holy Office. Men were as shocked as the modern philosopher is,
+when he finds the greatest of the followers of Socrates imposing in
+his latest piece the penalty of imprisonment for five years, to be
+followed in case of obduracy by death, on one who should not believe
+in the gods set up for the state by the lawmaker.[255] And we can
+hardly comfort ourselves, as Milton did about Plato, who framed laws
+which no city ever yet received, and "fed his fancy with making many
+edicts to his airy burgomasters, which they who otherwise admire him,
+wish had been rather buried and excused in the genial cups of an
+academic night-sitting."[256] Rousseau's ideas fell among men who were
+most potent and corporeal burgomasters. In the winter of 1793 two
+parties in Paris stood face to face; the rationalistic, Voltairean
+party of the Commune, named improperly after Hébert, but whose best
+member was Chaumette, and the sentimental, Rousseauite party, led by
+Robespierre. The first had industriously desecrated the churches, and
+consummated their revolt against the gods of the old time by the
+public worship of the Goddess of Reason, who was prematurely set up
+for deity of the new time. Robespierre retaliated with the mummeries
+of the Festival of the Supreme Being, and protested against atheism as
+the crime of aristocrats. Presently the atheistic party succumbed.
+Chaumette was not directly implicated in the proceedings which led to
+their fall, but he was by and by accused of conspiring with Hébert,
+Clootz, and the rest, "to destroy all notion of Divinity and base the
+government of France on atheism." "They attack the immortality of the
+soul," cried Saint Just, "the thought which consoled Socrates in his
+dying moments, and their dream is to raise atheism into a worship."
+And this was the offence, technically and officially described, for
+which Chaumette and Clootz were sent to the guillotine (April 1794),
+strictly on the principle which had been laid down in the Social
+Contract, and accepted by Robespierre.[257]
+
+It would have been odd in any writer less firmly possessed with the
+infallibility of his own dreams than Rousseau was, that he should not
+have seen the impossibility in anything like the existing conditions
+of human nature, of limiting the profession of civil faith to the
+three or four articles which happened to constitute his own belief.
+Having once granted the general position that a citizen may be
+required to profess some religious faith, there is no speculative
+principle, and there is no force in the world, which can fix any bound
+to the amount or kind of religious faith which the state has the right
+thus to exact. Rousseau said that a man was dangerous to the city who
+did not believe in God, a future state, and divine reward and
+retribution. But then Calvin thought a man dangerous who did not
+believe both that there is only one God, and also that there are
+three Gods. And so Chaumette went to the scaffold, and Servetus to the
+stake, on the one common principle that the civil magistrate is
+concerned with heresy. And Hébert was only following out the same
+doctrine in a mild and equitable manner, when he insisted on
+preventing the publication of a book in which the author professed his
+belief in a God. A single step in the path of civil interference with
+opinion leads you the whole way.
+
+The history of the Protestant churches is enough to show the pitiable
+futility of the proviso for religious tolerance with which Rousseau
+closed his exposition. "If there is no longer an exclusive national
+religion, then every creed ought to be tolerated which tolerates other
+creeds, so long as it contains nothing contrary to the duties of the
+citizen. But whoever dares to say, _Out of the church, no salvation_,
+ought to be banished from the state." The reason for which Henry IV.
+embraced the Roman religion--namely, that in that he might be saved,
+in the opinion alike of Protestants and Catholics, whereas in the
+reformed faith, though he was saved according to Protestants, yet
+according to Catholics he was necessarily damned,--ought to have made
+every honest man, and especially every prince, reject it. It was the
+more curious that Rousseau did not see the futility of drawing the
+line of tolerance at any given set of dogmas, however simple and
+slight and acceptable to himself they might be, because he invited
+special admiration for D'Argenson's excellent maxim that "in the
+republic everybody is perfectly free in what does not hurt
+others."[258] Surely this maxim has very little significance or value,
+unless we interpret it as giving entire liberty of opinion, because no
+opinion whatever can hurt others, until it manifests itself in act,
+including of course speech, which is a kind of act. Rousseau admitted
+that over and above the profession of civil faith, a citizen might
+hold what opinions he pleased, in entire freedom from the sovereign's
+cognisance or jurisdiction; "for as the sovereign has no competence in
+the other world, the fate of subjects in that other world is not his
+affair, provided they are good citizens in this." But good citizenship
+consists in doing or forbearing from certain actions, and to punish
+men on the inference that forbidden action is likely to follow from
+the rejection of a set of opinions, or to exact a test oath of
+adherence to such opinions on the same principle, is to concede the
+whole theory of civil intolerance, however little Rousseau may have
+realised the perfectly legitimate applications of his doctrine. It was
+an unconscious compromise. He was thinking of Calvin in practice and
+Hobbes in theory, and he was at the same time influenced by the
+moderate spirit of his time, and the comparatively reasonable
+character of his personal belief. He praised Hobbes as the only author
+who had seen the right remedy for the conflict of the spiritual and
+temporal jurisdictions, by proposing to unite the two heads of the
+eagle, and reducing all to political unity, without which never will
+either state or government be duly constituted. But Hobbes was
+consistent without flinching. He refused to set limits to the
+religious prescriptions which a sovereign might impose, for "even when
+the civil sovereign is an infidel, every one of his own subjects that
+resisteth him, sinneth against the laws of God (for such are the laws
+of nature), and rejecteth the counsel of the apostles, that
+admonisheth all Christians to obey their princes.... And for their
+faith, it is internal and invisible: they have the licence that Naaman
+had, and need not put themselves into danger for it; but if they do,
+they ought to expect their reward in heaven, and not complain of their
+lawful sovereign."[259] All this flowed from the very idea and
+definition of sovereignty, which Rousseau accepted from Hobbes, as we
+have already seen. Such consequences, however, stated in these bold
+terms, must have been highly revolting to Rousseau; he could not
+assent to an exercise of sovereignty which might be atheistic,
+Mahometan, or anything else unqualifiedly monstrous. He failed to see
+the folly of trying to unite the old notions of a Christian
+commonwealth with what was fundamentally his own notion of a
+commonwealth after the ancient type. He stripped the pagan republics,
+which he took for his model, of their national and official
+polytheism, and he put on in its stead a scanty remnant of theism
+slightly tinged with Christianity.
+
+Then he practically accepted Hobbes's audacious bidding to the man who
+should not be able to accept the state creed, to go courageously to
+martyrdom, and leave the land in peace. For the modern principle,
+which was contained in D'Argenson's saying previously quoted, that the
+civil power does best absolutely and unreservedly to ignore
+spirituals, he was not prepared either by his emancipation from the
+theological ideas of his youth, or by his observation of the working
+and tendencies of systems, which involved the state in some more or
+less close relations with the church, either as superior, equal, or
+subordinate. Every test is sure to insist on mental independence
+ending exactly where the speculative curiosity of the time is most
+intent to begin.
+
+Let us now shortly confront Rousseau's ideas with some of the
+propositions belonging to another method of approaching the philosophy
+of government, that have for their key-note the conception of
+expediency or convenience, and are tested by their conformity to the
+observed and recorded experience of mankind. According to this method,
+the ground and origin of society is not a compact; that never existed
+in any known case, and never was a condition of obligation either in
+primitive or developed societies, either between subjects and
+sovereign, or between the equal members of a sovereign body. The true
+ground is an acceptance of conditions which came into existence by the
+sociability inherent in man, and were developed by man's spontaneous
+search after convenience. The statement that while the constitution
+of man is the work of nature, that of the state is the work of
+art,[260] is as misleading as the opposite statement that governments
+are not made but grow.[261] The truth lies between them, in such
+propositions as that institutions owe their existence and development
+to deliberate human effort, working in accordance with circumstances
+naturally fixed both in human character and in the external field of
+its activity. The obedience of the subject to the sovereign has its
+root not in contract but in force,--the force of the sovereign to
+punish disobedience. A man does not consent to be put to death if he
+shall commit a murder, for the reason alleged by Rousseau, namely, as
+a means of protecting his own life against murder.[262] There is no
+consent in the transaction. Some person or persons, possessed of
+sovereign authority, promulgated a command that the subject should not
+commit murder, and appointed penalties for such commission and it was
+not a fictitious assent to these penalties, but the fact that the
+sovereign was strong enough to enforce them, which made the command
+valid.
+
+Supposing a law to be passed in an assembly of the sovereign people by
+a majority; what binds a member of the minority to obedience?
+Rousseau's answer is this:--When the law is proposed, the question
+put is not whether they approve or reject the proposition, but whether
+it is conformable to the general will: the general will appears from
+the votes: if the opinion contrary to my own wins the day, that only
+proves that I was mistaken, and that what I took for the general will
+was not really so.[263] We can scarcely imagine more nonsensical
+sophistry than this. The proper answer evidently is, that either
+experience or calculation has taught the citizens in a popular
+government that in the long run it is most expedient for the majority
+of votes to decide the law. In other words, the inconvenience to the
+minority of submitting to a law which they dislike, is less than the
+inconvenience of fighting to have their own way, or retiring to form a
+separate community. The minority submit to obey laws which were made
+against their will, because they cannot avoid the necessity of
+undergoing worse inconveniences than are involved in this submission.
+The same explanation partially covers what is unfortunately the more
+frequent case in the history of the race, the submission of the
+majority to the laws imposed by a minority of one or more. In both
+these cases, however, as in the general question of the source of our
+obedience to the laws, deliberate and conscious sense of convenience
+is as slight in its effect upon conduct here, as it is in the rest of
+the field of our moral motives. It is covered too thickly over and
+constantly neutralised by the multitudinous growths of use, by the
+many forms of fatalistic or ascetic religious sentiment, by physical
+apathy of race, and all other conditions that interpose to narrow or
+abrogate the authority of pure reason over human conduct. Rousseau,
+expounding his conception of a normal political state, was no doubt
+warranted in leaving these complicating conditions out of account,
+though to do so is to rob any treatise on government of much of its
+possible value. The same excuse cannot warrant him in basing his
+political institutions upon a figment, instead of upon the substantial
+ground of propositions about human nature, which the average of
+experience in given races and at given stages of advancement has shown
+to be true within those limits. There are places in his writings where
+he reluctantly admits that men are only moved by their interests, and
+he does not even take care to qualify this sufficiently.[264] But
+throughout the Social Contract we seem to be contemplating the
+erection of a machine which is to work without reference to the only
+forces that can possibly impart movement to it.
+
+The consequence of this is that Rousseau gives us not the least help
+towards the solution of any of the problems of actual government,
+because these are naturally both suggested and guided by
+considerations of expediency and improvement. It is as if he had never
+really settled the ends for which government exists, beyond the
+construction of the symmetrical machine of government itself. He is a
+geometer, not a mechanician; or shall we say that he is a mechanician,
+and not a biologist concerned with the conditions of a living
+organism. The analogy of the body politic to the body natural was as
+present to him as it had been to all other writers on society, but he
+failed to seize the only useful lessons which such an analogy might
+have taught him--diversity of structure, difference of function,
+development of strength by exercise, growth by nutrition--all of which
+might have been serviceably translated into the dialect of political
+science, and might have bestowed on his conception of political
+society more of the features of reality. We see no room for the free
+play of divergent forces, the active rivalry of hostile interests, the
+regulated conflict of multifarious personal aims, which can never be
+extinguished, except in moments of driving crisis, by the most sincere
+attachment to the common causes of the land. Thus the modern question
+which is of such vital interest for all the foremost human societies,
+of the union of collective energy with the encouragement of individual
+freedom, is, if not wholly untouched, at least wholly unillumined by
+anything that Rousseau says. To tell us that a man on entering a
+society exchanges his natural liberty for civil liberty which is
+limited by the general will,[265] is to give us a phrase, where we
+seek a solution. To say that if it is the opposition of private
+interests which made the establishment of societies necessary, it is
+the accord of those interests which makes them possible,[266] is to
+utter a truth which feeds no practical curiosity. The opposition of
+private interests remains, in spite of the yoke which their accord has
+imposed upon it, but which only controls and does not suppress such an
+opposition. What sort of control? What degree? What bounds?
+
+So again let us consider the statement that the instant the government
+usurps the sovereignty, then the social pact is broken, and all the
+citizens, restored by right to their natural liberty, are forced but
+not morally obliged to obey.[267] He began by telling his readers that
+man, though born free, is now everywhere in chains; and therefore it
+would appear that in all existing cases the social pact has been
+broken, and the citizens living under the reign of force, are free to
+resume their natural liberty, if they are only strong enough to do so.
+This declaration of the general duty of rebellion no doubt had its
+share in generating that fervid eagerness that all other peoples
+should rise and throw off the yoke, which was one of the most
+astonishing anxieties of the French during their revolution. That was
+not the worst quality of such a doctrine. It made government
+impossible, by basing the right or duty of resistance on a question
+that could not be reached by positive evidence, but must always be
+decided by an arbitrary interpretation of an arbitrarily imagined
+document. The moderate proposition that resistance is lawful if a
+government is a bad one, and if the people are strong enough to
+overthrow it, and if their leaders have reason to suppose they can
+provide a less bad one in its place, supplies tests that are capable
+of application. Our own writers in favour of the doctrine of
+resistance partly based their arguments upon the historic instances of
+the Old Testament, and it is one of the most striking contributions of
+Protestantism to the cause of freedom, that it sent people in an
+admiring spirit to the history of the most rebellious nation that ever
+existed, and so provided them in Hebrew insurgency with a corrective
+for the too submissive political teaching of the Gospel. But these
+writers have throughout a tacit appeal to expediency, as writers might
+always be expected to have, who were really meditating on the
+possibility of their principles being brought to the test of practice.
+There can be no evidence possible, with a test so vague as the fact of
+the rupture of a compact whose terms are authentically known to nobody
+concerned. Speak of bad laws and good, wise administration or unwise,
+just government or unjust, extravagant or economical, civically
+elevating or demoralising; all these are questions which men may apply
+themselves to settle with knowledge, and with a more or less definite
+degree of assurance. But who can tell how he is to find out whether
+sovereignty has been usurped, and the social compact broken? Was there
+a usurpation of sovereignty in France not many years ago, when the
+assumption of power by the prince was ratified by many millions of
+votes?
+
+The same case, we are told, namely, breach of the social compact and
+restoration of natural liberty, occurs when the members of the
+government usurp separately the power which they ought only to
+exercise in a body.[268] Now this description applies very fairly to
+the famous episode in our constitutional history, connected with
+George the Third's first attack of madness in 1788. Parliament cannot
+lawfully begin business without a declaration of the cause of summons
+from the crown. On this occasion parliament both met and deliberated
+without communication from the crown. What was still more important
+was a vote of the parliament itself, authorising the passing of
+letters patent under the great seal for opening parliament by
+commission, and for giving assent to a Regency Bill. This was a
+distinct usurpation of regal authority. Two members of the government
+(in Rousseau's sense of the term), namely the houses of parliament,
+usurped the power which they ought only to have exercised along with
+the crown.[269] The Whigs denounced the proceeding as a fiction, a
+forgery, a phantom, but if they had been readers of the Social
+Contract, and if they had been bitten by its dogmatic temper, they
+would have declared the compact of union violated, and all British
+citizens free to resume their natural rights. Not even the bitter
+virulence of faction at that time could tempt any politician to take
+up such a line, though within half a dozen years each of the
+democratic factions in France had worked at the overthrow of every
+other in turn, on the very principle which Rousseau had formulated and
+Robespierre had made familiar, that usurped authority is a valid
+reason for annihilating a government, no matter under what
+circumstances, nor how small the chance of replacing it by a better,
+nor how enormous the peril to the national well-being in the process.
+The true opposite to so anarchic a doctrine is assuredly not that of
+passive obedience either to chamber or monarch, but the right and duty
+of throwing off any government which inflicts more disadvantages than
+it confers advantages. Rousseau's whole theory tends inevitably to
+substitute a long series of struggles after phrases and shadows in the
+new era, for the equally futile and equally bloody wars of dynastic
+succession which have been the great curse of the old. Men die for a
+phrase as they used to die for a family. The other theory, which all
+English politicians accept in their hearts, and so many commanding
+French politicians have seemed in their hearts to reject, was first
+expounded in direct view of Rousseau's teaching by Paley.[270] Of
+course the greatest, widest, and loftiest exposition of the bearings
+of expediency on government and its conditions, is to be found in the
+magnificent and immortal pieces of Burke, some of them suggested by
+absolutist violations of the doctrine in our own affairs, and some of
+them by anarchic violation of it in the affairs of France, after the
+seed sown by Rousseau had brought forth fruit.
+
+We should, however, be false to our critical principle, if we did not
+recognise the historical effect of a speculation scientifically
+valueless. There has been no attempt to palliate either the
+shallowness or the practical mischievousness of the Social Contract.
+But there is another side to its influence. It was the match which
+kindled revolutionary fire in generous breasts throughout Europe. Not
+in France merely, but in Germany as well, its phrases became the
+language of all who aspired after freedom. Schiller spoke of Rousseau
+as one who "converted Christians into human beings," and the _Robbers_
+(1778) is as if it had been directly inspired by the doctrine that
+usurped sovereignty restores men to their natural rights. Smaller men
+in the violent movement which seized all the youth of Germany at that
+time, followed the same lead, if they happened to have any feeling
+about the political condition of their enslaved countries.
+
+There was alike in France and Germany a craving for a return to nature
+among the whole of the young generation.[271] The Social Contract
+supplied a dialect for this longing on one side, just as the Emilius
+supplied it on another. Such parts in it as people did not understand
+or did not like, they left out. They did not perceive its direction
+towards that "perfect Hobbism," which the author declared to be the
+only practical alternative to a democracy so austere as to be
+intolerable. They grasped phrases about the sovereignty of the people,
+the freedom for which nature had destined man, the slavery to which
+tyrants and oppressors had brought him. Above all they were struck by
+the patriotism which shines so brightly in every page, like the fire
+on the altar of one of those ancient cities which had inspired the
+writer's ideal.
+
+Yet there is a marked difference in the channels along which
+Rousseau's influence moved in the two countries. In France it was
+drawn eventually into the sphere of direct politics. In Germany it
+inspired not a great political movement, but an immense literary
+revival. In France, as we have already said, the patriotic flame
+seemed extinct. The ruinous disorder of the whole social system made
+the old love of country resemble love for a phantom, and so much of
+patriotic speech as survived was profoundly hollow. Even a man like
+Turgot was not so much a patriot as a passionate lover of improvement,
+and with the whole school of which this great spirit was the noblest
+and strongest, a generous citizenship of the world had replaced the
+narrower sentiment which had inflamed antique heroism. Rousseau's
+exaltation of the Greek and Roman types in all their concentration and
+intensity, touches mortals of commoner mould. His theory made the
+native land what it had been to the citizens of earlier date, a true
+centre of existence, round which all the interests of the community,
+all its pursuits, all its hopes, grouped themselves with entire
+singleness of convergence, just as religious faith is the centre of
+existence to a church. It was the virile and patriotic energy thus
+evoked which presently saved France from partition.
+
+We complete the estimate of the positive worth and tendencies of the
+Social Contract by adding to this, which was for the time the cardinal
+service, of rekindling the fire of patriotism, the rapid deduction
+from the doctrine of the sovereignty of peoples of the great truth,
+that a nation with a civilised polity does not consist of an order or
+a caste, but of the great body of its members, the army of toilers who
+make the most painful of the sacrifices that are needed for the
+continuous nutrition of the social organisation. As Condorcet put it,
+and he drew inspiration partly from the intellectual school of
+Voltaire, and partly from the social school of Rousseau, all
+institutions ought to have for their aim the physical, intellectual,
+and moral amelioration of the poorest and most numerous class.[272]
+This is the People. Second, there gradually followed from the
+important place given by Rousseau to the idea of equal association, as
+at once the foundation and the enduring bond of a community, those
+schemes of Mutualism, and all the other shapes of collective action
+for a common social good, which have possessed such commanding
+attraction for the imagination of large classes of good men in France
+ever since. Hitherto these forms have been sterile and deceptive, and
+they must remain so, until the idea of special function has been
+raised to an equal level of importance with that of united forces
+working together to a single end.
+
+In these ways the author of the Social Contract did involuntarily and
+unconsciously contribute to the growth of those new and progressive
+ideas, in which for his own part he lacked all faith. Præ-Newtonians
+knew not the wonders of which Newton was to find the key; and so we,
+grown weary of waiting for the master intelligence who may effect the
+final combination of moral and scientific ideas needed for a new
+social era, may be inclined to lend a half-complacent ear to the arid
+sophisters who assume that the last word of civilisation has been
+heard in existing arrangements. But we may perhaps take courage from
+history to hope that generations will come, to whom our system of
+distributing among a few the privileges and delights that are procured
+by the toil of the many, will seem just as wasteful, as morally
+hideous, and as scientifically indefensible, as that older system
+which impoverished and depopulated empires, in order that a despot or
+a caste might have no least wish ungratified, for which the lives or
+the hard-won treasure of others could suffice.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[176] _Cont. Soc._, I. viii.
+
+[177] _Cont. Soc._, II. xi. He had written in much the same sense in
+his article on Political Economy in the Encyclopædia, p. 34.
+
+[178] Robespierre disclaimed the intention of attacking property, and
+took up a position like that of Rousseau--teaching the poor contempt
+for the rich, not envy. "I do not want to touch your treasures," he
+cried, on one occasion, "however impure their source. It is far more
+an object of concern to me to make poverty honourable, than to
+proscribe wealth; the thatched hut of Fabricius never need envy the
+palace of Crassus. I should be at least as content, for my own part,
+to be one of the sons of Aristides, brought up in the Prytaneium at
+the public expense, as the heir presumptive of Xerxes, born in the
+mire of royal courts, to sit on a throne decorated by the abasement of
+the people, and glittering with the public misery." Quoted in Malon's
+_Exposé des Ecoles Socialistes françaises_, 15. Baboeuf carried
+Rousseau's sentiments further towards their natural conclusion by such
+propositions as these: "The goal of the revolution is to destroy
+inequality, and to re-establish the happiness of all." "The revolution
+is not finished, because the rich absorb all the property, and hold
+exclusive power; while the poor toil like born slaves, languish in
+wretchedness, and are nothing in the state." _Exposé des Ecoles
+Socialistes françaises_, p. 29.
+
+[179] _Cont. Soc._, II. xi.
+
+[180] _Cont. Soc._, I. iv.
+
+[181] _Ib._, II. vii.
+
+[182] Ch. vi. (vol. v. 371; edit. 1801).
+
+[183] Ch. vii. (p. 383.)
+
+[184] Goguet, in his _Origine des Lois, des Arts, et des Sciences_
+(1758), really attempted as laboriously as possible to carry out a
+notion of the historical method, but the fact that history itself at
+that time had never been subjected to scientific examination made his
+effort valueless. He accumulates testimony which would be excellent
+evidence, if only it had been sifted, and had come out of the process
+substantially undiminished. Yet even Goguet, who thus carefully
+followed the accounts of early societies given in the Bible and other
+monuments, intersperses abstract general statements about man being
+born free and independent (i. 25), and entering society as the result
+of deliberate reflection.
+
+[185] _Cont. Soc._, II. xi. Also III. viii.
+
+[186] II. xi. Also ch. viii.
+
+[187] II. viii.
+
+[188] II. ix.
+
+[189] _Politics_, VII. iv. 8, 10.
+
+[190] _Cont. Soc._, II. x.
+
+[191] Plato's _Laws_, v. 737.
+
+[192] _Ib._, iv. 705.
+
+[193] _Projet de Constitution pour la Corse_, p. 75.
+
+[194] _Gouvernement de Pologne_, ch. xi.
+
+[195] _Cont. Soc._, II. vii.
+
+[196] Goguet was much nearer to a true conception of this kind; see,
+for instance, _Origine des Lois_, i. 46.
+
+[197] Decree of the Committee, April 20, 1794, reported by
+Billaud-Varennes. Compare ch. iv. of Rousseau's _Considérations sur le
+Gouvernement de Pologne_.
+
+[198] Here are some of Saint Just's regulations:--No servants, nor
+gold or silver vessels; no child under 16 to eat meat, nor any adult
+to eat meat on three days of the decade; boys at the age of 7 to be
+handed over to the school of the nation, where they were to be brought
+up to speak little, to endure hardships, and to train for war; divorce
+to be free to all; friendship ordained a public institution, every
+citizen on coming to majority being bound to proclaim his friends, and
+if he had none, then to be banished; if one committed a crime, his
+friends were to be banished. Quoted in Von Sybel's _Hist. French
+Rev._, iv. 49. When Morelly dreamed his dream of a model community in
+1754 (see above, vol. i. p. 158) he little supposed, one would think,
+that within forty years a man would be so near trying the experiment
+in France as Saint Just was. Baboeuf is pronounced by La Harpe to have
+been inspired by the Code de la Nature, which La Harpe impudently set
+down to Diderot, on whom every great destructive piece was
+systematically fathered.
+
+[199] I forget where I have read the story of some member of the
+Convention being very angry because the library contained no copy of
+the laws which Minos gave to the Cretans.
+
+[200] III. xiii.
+
+[201] III. xv. He actually recommended the Poles to pay all public
+functionaries in kind, and to have the public works executed on the
+system of corvée. _Gouvernement de Pologne_, ch. xi.
+
+[202] _Cont. Soc._, III. ii.
+
+[203] II. i.
+
+[204] II. ii.
+
+[205] III. i.
+
+[206] II. vi.
+
+[207] II. iv.
+
+[208] IV. vi.
+
+[209] _Economie Politique_, p. 30.
+
+[210] _Mélanges_, p. 310.
+
+[211] See for instance Green's _History of the English People_, i.
+266.
+
+[212] _Summa_, xc.-cviii. (1265-1273). See Maurice's _Moral and
+Metaphysical Philosophy_, i. 627, 628. Also Franck's _Réformateurs et
+Publicistes de l'Europe_, p. 48, etc.
+
+[213] _Defensor Pacis_, Pt. I., ch. xii. This, again, is an example of
+Marsilio's position:--"Convenerunt enim homines ad civilem
+communicationem propter commodum et vitæ sufficientiam consequendam,
+et opposita declinandum. Quæ igitur omnium tangere possunt commodum et
+incommodum, ab omnibus sciri debent et audiri, ut commodum assequi et
+oppositum repellere possint." The whole chapter is a most interesting
+anticipation, partly due to the influence of Aristotle, of the notions
+of later centuries.
+
+[214] See Bayle's Dict., s.v. _Althusius_.
+
+[215] _Lettres de la Montagne_, I. vi. 388.
+
+[216] _Eccles. Polity_, Bk. i.; bks. i.-iv., 1594; bk. v., 1597; bks.
+vi.-viii., 1647,--being forty-seven years after the author's death.
+
+[217] Goguet (_Origine des Lois_, i. 22) dwells on tacit conventions
+as a kind of engagement to which men commit themselves with extreme
+facility. He was thus rather near the true idea of the spontaneous
+origin and unconscious acceptance of early institutions.
+
+[218] Of Civil Government, ch. xiii. See also ch. xi. "This
+legislative is not only the supreme power of the commonwealth, but
+sacred and unalterable in the hands where the community have once
+placed it; nor can any edict of anybody else, in what form soever
+conceived, or by what power soever backed, have the force and
+obligation of a law, which has not its sanction from that legislative
+which the public has chosen and appointed; for without this the law
+could not have that which is absolutely necessary to its being a
+law--the consent of the society; over whom nobody can have a power to
+make laws, but by their own consent, and by authority received from
+them." If Rousseau had found no neater expression for his doctrine
+than this, the Social Contract would assuredly have been no explosive.
+
+[219] See especially ch. viii.
+
+[220] Hence the antipathy of the clergy, catholic, episcopalian, and
+presbyterian, to which, as Austin has pointed out (_Syst. of
+Jurisprudence_, i. 288, _n._), Hobbes mainly owes his bad repute.
+
+[221] See Diderot's article on _Hobbisme_ in the Encyclopædia,
+_Oeuv._, xv. 122.
+
+[222] _Esprit des Lois_, I. i.
+
+[223] _Cont. Soc._, II. vi. 50.
+
+[224] Goguet has the merit of seeing distinctly that command is the
+essence of law.
+
+[225] _Cont. Soc._, II. vi. 51-53. See Austin's _Jurisprudence_, i.
+95, etc.; also _Lettres écrites de la Montagne_, I. vi. 380, 381.
+
+[226] See, for instance, letter to Mirabeau (_l'ami des hommes_), July
+26, 1767. _Corr._, v. 179. The same letter contains his criticism on
+the good despot of the Economists.
+
+[227] _L'Ordre Naturel et Essentiel des Sociétés Politiques_ (1767).
+By Mercier de la Rivière. One episode in the life of Mercier de la
+Rivière is worth recounting, as closely connected with the subject we
+are discussing. Just as Corsicans and Poles applied to Rousseau,
+Catherine of Russia, in consequence of her admiration for Rivière's
+book, summoned him to Russia to assist her in making laws. "Sir," said
+the Czarina, "could you point out to me the best means for the good
+government of a state?" "Madame, there is only one way, and that is
+being just; in other words, in keeping order and exacting obedience to
+the laws." "But on what base is it best to make the laws of an empire
+repose?" "There is only one base, Madame: the nature of things and of
+men." "Just so; but when you wish to give laws to a people, what are
+the rules which indicate most surely such laws as are most suitable?"
+"To give or make laws, Madame, is a task that God has left to none.
+Ah, who is the man that should think himself capable of dictating laws
+for beings that he does not know, or knows so ill? And by what right
+can he impose laws on beings whom God has never placed in his hands?"
+"To what, then, do you reduce the science of government?" "To studying
+carefully; recognising and setting forth the laws which God has graven
+so manifestly in the very organisation of men, when he called them
+into existence. To wish to go any further would be a great misfortune
+and a most destructive undertaking." "Sir, I am very pleased to have
+heard what you have to say; I wish you good day." Quoted from
+Thiébault's _Souvenirs de Berlin_, in M. Daire's edition of the
+_Physiocrates_, ii. 432.
+
+[228] _Cont. Soc._, II. vii.
+
+[229] _Corr._, v. 181.
+
+[230] _Cont. Soc._, I. v., vi., vii.
+
+[231] _Leviathan_, II., ch. xviii. vol. iii. 159 (Molesworth's
+edition).
+
+[232] _Cont. Soc._, III. xvi.
+
+[233] _Civil Government_, ch. viii. § 99.
+
+[234] I. vi. Especially the footnote.
+
+[235] _Cont. Soc._, II. i.
+
+[236] _Syst. of Jurisprudence_, i. 256.
+
+[237] _Cont. Soc._, III. xv. 137. It was not long, however, before
+Rousseau found reason to alter his opinion in this respect. The
+champions of the Council at Geneva compared the _droit négatif_, in
+the exercise of which the Council had refused to listen to the
+representations of Rousseau's partisans (see above, vol. ii. p. 105)
+to the right of veto possessed by the crown in Great Britain. Rousseau
+seized upon this egregious blunder, which confused the power of
+refusing assent to a proposed law, with the power of refusing justice
+under law already passed. He at once found illustrations of the
+difference, first in the case of the printers of No. 45 of the _North
+Briton_, who brought actions for false imprisonment (1763), and next
+in the proceedings against Wilkes at the same time. If Wilkes, said
+Rousseau, had written, printed, published, or said, one-fourth against
+the Lesser Council at Geneva of what he said, wrote, printed, and
+published openly in London against the court and the government, he
+would have been heavily punished, and most likely put to death. And so
+forth, until he has proved very pungently how different degrees of
+freedom are enjoyed in Geneva and in England. _Lettres écrites de la
+Montague_, ix. 491-500. When he wrote this he was unaware that the
+Triennial Act had long been replaced by the Septennial Act of the 1
+Geo. I. On finding out, as he did afterwards, that a parliament could
+sit for seven years, he thought as meanly of our liberty as ever.
+_Considérations sur les gouvernement de Pologne_, ch. vii. 253-260. In
+his _Projet de Constitution pour la Corse_, p. 113, he says that "the
+English do not love liberty for itself, but because it is most
+favourable to money-making."
+
+[238] III., xi., xii., and xiii.
+
+[239] Mr. Freeman's _Growth of the English Constitution_, c. i.
+
+[240] _Cont. Soc._, III. xv. 140. A small manuscript containing his
+ideas on confederation was given by Rousseau to the Count d'Antraigues
+(afterwards an _émigré_), who destroyed it in 1789, lest its arguments
+should be used to sap the royal authority. See extract from his
+pamphlet, prefixed to M. Auguis's edition of the Social Contract, pp.
+xxiii, xxiv.
+
+[241] _Gouvernement de Pologne_, v. 246.
+
+[242] Of course no such modification as that proposed by Comte
+(_Politique Positive_, iv. 421) would come within the scope of the
+doctrine of the Social Contract. For each of the seventeen Intendances
+into which Comte divides France, is to be ruled by a chief, "always
+appointed and removed by the central power." There is no room for the
+sovereignty of the people here, even in things parochial.
+
+[243] There was one extraordinary instance during the revolution of
+attempting to make popular government direct on Rousseau's principle,
+in the scheme (1790) of which Danton was a chief supporter, for
+reorganising the municipal administration of Paris. The assemblies of
+sections were to sit permanently; their vote was to be taken on
+current questions; and action was to follow the aggregate of their
+degrees. See Von Sybel's _Hist. Fr. Rev._ i. 275; M. Louis Blanc's
+_History_, Bk. III. ch. ii.
+
+[244] This was also Bodin's definition of an aristocratic state; "si
+minor pars civium cæteris imperat."
+
+[245] _Politics_, III. vi.-vii.
+
+[246] _Esprit des Lois_, II. i. ii.
+
+[247] Rousseau gave the name of _tyrant_ to a usurper of royal
+authority in a kingdom, and _despot_ to a usurper of the sovereign
+authority (_i.e._ [Greek: tyrannos] in the Greek sense). The former
+might govern according to the laws, but the latter placed himself
+above the laws (_Cont. Soc._, III. x.) This corresponded to Locke's
+distinction: "As usurpation is the exercise of power which another
+hath a right to, so tyranny is the exercise of a power beyond right,
+which nobody can have a right to." _Civil Gov._, ch. xviii.
+
+[248] III. iv.
+
+[249] III. vi.
+
+[250] III. v.
+
+[251] _Cont. Soc._, IV. viii.
+
+[252] _Cont. Soc._, IV. viii. 197-201.
+
+[253] This is not unlike what Tocqueville says somewhere, that
+Christianity bids you render unto Cæsar the things that are Cæsar's,
+but seems to discourage any inquiry whether Cæsar is an usurper or a
+lawful ruler.
+
+[254] _Cont. Soc._, IV. viii. 203. As we have already seen, he had
+entreated Voltaire, of all men in the world, to draw up a civil
+profession of faith. See vol. i. 326.
+
+In the New Heloïsa (V. v. 117, _n._) Rousseau expresses his opinion
+that "no true believer could be intolerant or a persecutor. _If I were
+a magistrate, and if the law pronounced the penalty of death against
+atheists, I would begin by burning as such whoever should come to
+inform against another._"
+
+[255] Plato's _Laws_, Bk. x. 909, etc.
+
+[256] _Areopagitica_, p. 417. (Edit. 1867.)
+
+[257] See a speech of his, which is Rousseau's "civil faith" done into
+rhetoric, given in M. Louis Blanc's _Hist. de la Rév. Française_, Bk.
+x. c. xiv.
+
+[258] _Considérations sur le gouvernement ancien et présent de la
+France_ (1764). Quoted by Rousseau from a manuscript copy.
+
+[259] _Leviathan_, ch. xliii. 601. Also ch. xlii.
+
+[260] _Cont. Soc._, III. xi. Borrowed from Hobbes, who said, "Magnus
+ille Leviathan quæ civitas appellatur, opificium artis est."
+
+[261] Mackintosh's.
+
+[262] _Cont. Soc._, II. v.
+
+[263] IV. ii.
+
+[264] For instance, _Gouvernement de la Pologne_, ch. xi. p. 305. And
+_Corr._, v. 180.
+
+[265] _Cont. Soc._, I. viii.
+
+[266] _Cont. Soc._, II. i.
+
+[267] _Ib._, III. x. "Let every individual who may usurp the
+sovereignty be instantly put to death by free men." Robespierre's
+_Déclaration des droits de l'homme_, § 27. "When the government
+violates the rights of the people, insurrection becomes for the people
+the most sacred of rights and the most indispensable of duties." § 35.
+
+[268] _Cont. Soc._, III. x.
+
+[269] See May's _Constitutional Hist. of England_, ch. iii; and Lord
+Stanhope's _Life of Pitt_, vol. ii. ch. xii.
+
+[270] In the 6th book of the _Moral Philosophy_ (1785), ch. iii., and
+elsewhere. In the preface he refers to the effect which Rousseau's
+political theory was supposed to have had in the civil convulsions of
+Geneva, as one of the reasons which encouraged him to publish his own
+book.
+
+[271] One side of this was the passion for geographical exploration
+which took possession of Europe towards the middle of the eighteenth
+century. See the _Life of Humboldt_, i. 28, 29. (_Eng. Trans._ by
+Lassell.)
+
+[272] Rousseau's influence on Condorcet is seen in the latter's maxim,
+which has found such favour in the eyes of socialist writers, that
+"not only equality of right, but equality of fact, is the goal of the
+social art."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+EMILIUS.
+
+
+One whose most intense conviction was faith in the goodness
+of all things and creatures as they are first produced by nature, and
+so long as they remain unsophisticated by the hand and purpose of man,
+was in some degree bound to show a way by which this evil process of
+sophistication might be brought to the lowest possible point, and the
+best of all natural creatures kept as near as possible to his high
+original. Rousseau, it is true, held in a sense of his own the
+doctrine of the fall of man. That doctrine, however, has never made
+people any more remiss in the search after a virtue, which if they
+ought to have regarded it as hopeless according to strict logic, is
+still indispensable in actual life. Rousseau's way of believing that
+man had fallen was so coloured at once by that expansion of sanguine
+emotion which marked his century, and by that necessity for repose in
+idyllic perfection of simplicity which marked his own temperament,
+that enthusiasm for an imaginary human creature effectually shut out
+the dogma of his fatal depravation. "How difficult a thing it is,"
+Madame d'Epinay once said to him, "to bring up a child." "Assuredly
+it is," answered Rousseau; "because the father and mother are not made
+by nature to bring it up, nor the child to be brought up."[273] This
+cynical speech can only have been an accidental outbreak of spleen. It
+was a contradiction to his one constant opinion that nature is all
+good and bounteous, and that the inborn capacity of man for reaching
+true happiness knows no stint.
+
+In writing Emilius, he sat down to consider what man is, and what can
+be made of him. Here, as in all the rest of his work, he only obeyed
+the tendencies of his time in choosing a theme. An age touched by the
+spirit of hope inevitably turns to the young; for with the young lies
+fulfilment. Such epochs are ever pressing with the question, how is
+the future to be shaped? Our answer depends on the theory of human
+disposition, and in these epochs the theory is always optimistic.
+Rousseau was saved, as so many thousands of men have been alike in
+conduct and speculation, by inconsistency, and not shrinking from two
+mutually contradictory trains of thought. Society is corrupt, and
+society is the work of man. Yet man, who has engendered this corrupted
+birth, is good and whole. The strain in the argument may be pardoned
+for the hopefulness of the conclusion. It brought Rousseau into
+harmony with the eager effort of the time to pour young character into
+finer mould, and made him the most powerful agent in giving to such
+efforts both fervour and elevation. While others were content with
+the mere enunciation of maxims and precepts, he breathed into them the
+spirit of life, and enforced them with a vividness of faith that
+clothed education with the augustness and unction of religion. The
+training of the young soul to virtue was surrounded with something of
+the awful holiness of a sacrament; and those who laboured in this
+sanctified field were exhorted to a constancy of devotion, and were
+promised a fulness of recompense, that raised them from the rank of
+drudges to a place of highest honour among the ministers of nature.
+
+Everybody at this time was thinking about education, partly perhaps on
+account of the suppression of the Jesuits, the chief instructors of
+the time, and a great many people were writing about it. The Abbé de
+Saint Pierre had had new ideas on education, as on all the greater
+departments of human interest. Madame d'Epinay wrote considerations
+upon the bringing up of the young.[274] Madame de Grafigny did the
+same in a less grave shape.[275] She received letters from the
+precociously sage Turgot, abounding in the same natural and sensible
+precepts which ten years later were commended with more glowing
+eloquence in the pages of Emilius.[276] Grimm had an elaborate scheme
+for a treatise on education.[277] Helvétius followed his exploration
+of the composition of the human mind, by a treatise on the training
+proper for the intellectual and moral faculties. Education by these
+and other writers was being conceived in a wider sense than had been
+known to ages controlled by ecclesiastical collegians. It slowly came
+to be thought of in connection with the family. The improvement of
+ideas upon education was only one phase of that great general movement
+towards the restoration of the family, which was so striking a
+spectacle in France after the middle of the century. Education now
+came to comprehend the whole system of the relations between parents
+and their children, from earliest infancy to maturity. The direction
+of this wider feeling about such relations tended strongly towards an
+increased closeness in them, more intimacy, and a more continuous
+suffusion of tenderness and long attachment. All this was part of the
+general revival of naturalism. People began to reflect that nature was
+not likely to have designed infants to be suckled by other women than
+their own mothers, nor that they should be banished from the society
+of those who are most concerned in their well-being, from the cheerful
+hearth and wise affectionate converse of home, to the frigid
+discipline of colleges and convents and the unamiable monition of
+strangers.
+
+Then the rising rebellion against the church and its faith perhaps
+contributed something towards a movement which, if it could not break
+the religious monopoly of instruction, must at least introduce the
+parent as a competitor with the priestly instructor for influence over
+the ideas, habits, and affections of his children. The rebellion was
+aimed against the spirit as well as the manner of the established
+system. The church had not fundamentally modified the significance of
+the dogma of the fall and depravity of man; education was still
+conceived as a process of eradication and suppression of the mystical
+old Adam. The new current flowed in channels far away from that black
+folly of superstition. Men at length ventured once more to look at one
+another with free and generous gaze. The veil of the temple was rent,
+and the false mockeries of the shrine of the Hebrew divinity made
+plain to scornful eyes. People ceased to see one another as guilty
+victims cowering under a divine curse. They stood erect in
+consciousness of manhood. The palsied conception of man, with his
+large discourse of reason looking before and after, his lofty and
+majestic patience in search for new forms of beauty and new secrets of
+truth, his sense of the manifold sweetness and glory and awe of the
+universe, above all, his infinite capacity of loyal pity and love for
+his comrades in the great struggle, and his high sorrow for his own
+wrong-doing,--the palsied and crushing conception of this excellent
+and helpful being as a poor worm, writhing under the vindictive and
+meaningless anger of an omnipotent tyrant in the large heavens, only
+to be appeased by sacerdotal intervention, was fading back into those
+regions of night, whence the depth of human misery and the
+obscuration of human intelligence had once permitted its escape, to
+hang evilly over the western world for a season. So vital a change in
+the point of view quickly touched the theory and art of the upbringing
+of the young. Education began to figure less as the suppression of the
+natural man, than his strengthening and development; less as a process
+of rooting out tares, more as the grateful tending of shoots abounding
+in promise of richness. What had been the most drearily mechanical of
+duties, was transformed into a task that surpassed all others in
+interest and hope. If man be born not bad but good, under no curse,
+but rather the bestower and receiver of many blessings, then the
+entire atmosphere of young life, in spite of the toil and the peril,
+is made cheerful with the sunshine and warmth of the great folded
+possibilities of excellence, happiness, and well-doing.
+
+
+I.
+
+Locke in education, as in metaphysics and in politics, was the pioneer
+of French thought. In education there is less room for scientific
+originality. The sage of a parish, provided only she began her trade
+with an open and energetic mind, may here pass philosophers. Locke was
+nearly as sage, as homely, as real, as one of these strenuous women.
+The honest plainness of certain of his prescriptions for the
+preservation of physical health perhaps keeps us somewhat too near the
+earth. His manner throughout is marked by the stout wisdom of the
+practical teacher, who is content to assume good sense in his hearers,
+and feels no necessity for kindling a blaze or raising a tempest. He
+gives us a practical manual for producing a healthy, instructed,
+upright, well-mannered young English squire, who shall be rightly
+fitted to take his own life sensibly in hand, and procure from it a
+fair amount of wholesome satisfaction both for himself and the people
+with whom he is concerned. Locke's treatise is one of the most
+admirable protests in the world against effeminacy and pedantry, and
+parents already moved by grave desire to do their duty prudently to
+their sons, will hardly find another book better suited to their ends.
+Besides Locke, we must also count Charron, and the amazing educator of
+Gargantua, and Montaigne before either, among the writers whom
+Rousseau had read, with that profit and increase which attends the
+dropping of the good ideas of other men into fertile minds.
+
+There is an immense class of natures, and those not the lowest, which
+the connection of duty with mere prudence does not carry far enough.
+They only stir when something has moved their feeling for the ideal,
+and raised the mechanical offices of the narrow day into association
+with the spaciousness and height of spiritual things. To these
+Rousseau came. For both the tenour and the wording of the most
+striking precepts of the Emilius, he owes much to Locke. But what was
+so realistic in him becomes blended in Rousseau with all the power and
+richness and beauty of an ideal that can move the most generous parts
+of human character. The child is treated as the miniature of humanity;
+it thus touches the whole sphere of our sympathies, warms our
+curiosity as to the composition of man's nature, and becomes the very
+eye and centre of moral and social aspirations.
+
+Accordingly Rousseau almost at once begins by elaborating his
+conception of the kind of human creature which it is worth while to
+take the trouble to rear, and the only kind which pure nature will
+help you in perfecting. Hence Emilius, besides being a manual for
+parents, contains the lines of a moral type of life and character for
+all others. The old thought of the Discourses revives in full vigour.
+The artifices of society, the perverting traditions of use, the feeble
+maxims of indolence, convention, helpless dependence on the aid or the
+approval of others, are routed at the first stroke. The old regimen of
+accumulated prejudice is replaced, in dealing alike with body and
+soul, by the new system of liberty and nature. In saying this we have
+already said that the exaltation of Spartan manners which runs through
+Rousseau's other writings has vanished, and that every trace of the
+much-vaunted military and public training has yielded before the
+attractive thought of tender parents and a wisely ruled home. Public
+instruction, we learn, can now no longer exist, because there is no
+longer such a thing as country, and therefore there can no longer be
+citizens. Only domestic education can now help us to rear the man
+according to nature,--the man who knows best among us how to bear
+the mingled good and ill of our life.
+
+The artificial society of the time, with its aspirations after a
+return to nature, was moved to the most energetic enthusiasm by
+Rousseau's famous exhortations to mothers to nourish their own little
+ones. Morelly, as we have seen, had already enjoined the adoption of
+this practice. So too had Buffon. But Morelly's voice had no
+resonance, Buffon's reasons were purely physical, and children were
+still sent out to nurse, until Rousseau's more passionate moral
+entreaties awoke maternal conscience. "Do these tender mothers," he
+exclaimed, "who, when they have got rid of their infants, surrender
+themselves gaily to all the diversions of the town, know what sort of
+usage the child in the village is receiving, fastened in his swaddling
+band? At the least interruption that comes, they hang him up by a nail
+like a bundle of rags, and there the poor creature remains thus
+crucified, while the nurse goes about her affairs. Every child found
+in this position had a face of purple; as the violent compression of
+the chest would not allow the blood to circulate, it all went to the
+head, and the victim was supposed to be very quiet, just because it
+had not strength enough to cry out."[278] But in Rousseau, as in
+Beethoven, a harsh and rugged passage is nearly always followed by
+some piece of exquisite and touching melody. The force of these
+indignant pictures was heightened and relieved by moving appeal to
+all the tender joys of maternal solicitude, and thoughts of all that
+this solicitude could do for the happiness of the home, the father,
+and the young. The attraction of domestic life is pronounced the best
+antidote to the ill living of the time. The bustle of children, which
+you now think so importunate, gradually becomes delightful; it brings
+father and mother nearer to one another; and the lively animation of a
+family added to domestic cares, makes the dearest occupation of the
+wife, and the sweetest of all his amusements to the husband. If women
+will only once more become mothers again, men will very soon become
+fathers and husbands.[279]
+
+The physical effect of this was not altogether wholesome. Rousseau's
+eloquence excited women to an inordinate pitch of enthusiasm for the
+duty of suckling their infants, but his contemptuous denunciation of
+the gaieties of Paris could not extinguish the love of amusement.
+
+    Quid quod libelli Stoici inter sericos
+      Jacere pulvillos amant?
+
+So young mothers tried as well as they could to satisfy both desires,
+and their babes were brought to them at all unseasonable hours, while
+they were full of food and wine, or heated with dancing or play, and
+there received the nurture which, but for Rousseau, they would have
+drawn in more salutary sort from a healthy foster-mother in the
+country. This, however, was only an incidental drawback to a movement
+which was in its main lines full of excellent significance. The
+importance of giving freedom to the young limbs, of accustoming the
+body to rudeness and vicissitude of climate, of surrounding youth with
+light and cheerfulness and air, and even a tiny detail such as the
+propriety of substituting for coral or ivory some soft substance
+against which the growing teeth might press a way without irritation,
+all these matters are handled with a fervid reality of interest that
+gives to the tedium of the nursery a genuine touch of the poetic.
+Swathings, bandages, leading-strings, are condemned with a warmth like
+that with which the author had denounced comedy.[280] The city is held
+up to indignant reprobation as the gulf of infant life, just as it had
+been in his earlier pieces as the gulf of all the loftiest energies of
+the adult life. Every child ought to be born and nursed in the
+country, and it would be all the better if it remained in the country
+to the last day of its existence. You must accustom it little by
+little to the sight of disagreeable objects, such as toads and snakes;
+also in the same gradual manner to the sound of alarming noises,
+beginning with snapping a cap in a pistol. If the infant cries from
+pain which you cannot remove, make no attempt to soothe it; your
+caresses will not lessen the anguish of its colic, while the child
+will remember what it has to do in order to be coaxed and to get its
+own way. The nurse may amuse it by songs and lively cries, but she is
+not to din useless words into its ears; the first articulations that
+come to it should be few, easy, distinct, frequently repeated, and
+only referring to objects which may be shown to the child. "Our
+unlucky facility in cheating ourselves with words that we do not
+understand, begins earlier than we suppose." Let there be no haste in
+inducing the child to speak articulately. The evil of precipitation in
+this respect is not that children use and hear words without sense,
+but that they use and hear them in a different sense from our own,
+without our perceiving it. Mistakes of this sort, committed thus
+early, have an influence, even after they are cured, over the turn of
+the mind for the rest of the creature's life. Hence it is a good thing
+to keep a child's vocabulary as limited as possible, lest it should
+have more words than ideas, and should say more than it can possibly
+realise in thought.[281]
+
+In moral as in intellectual habits, the most perilous interval in
+human life is that between birth and the age of twelve. The great
+secret is to make the early education purely negative; a process of
+keeping the heart, naturally so good, clear of vice, and the
+intelligence, naturally so true, clear of error. Take for first,
+second, and third precept, to follow nature and leave her free to the
+performance of her own tasks. Until the age of reason, there can be no
+idea of moral beings or social relations. Therefore, says Rousseau, no
+moral discussion. Locke's maxim in favour of constantly reasoning with
+children was a mistake. Of all the faculties of man, reason, which is
+only a compound of the rest, is that which is latest in development,
+and yet it is this which we are to use to develop those which come
+earliest of all. Such a course is to begin at the end, and to turn the
+finished work into an instrument. "In speaking to children in these
+early years a language which they do not comprehend, we accustom them
+to cheat themselves with words, to criticise what is said to them, to
+think themselves as wise as their masters, to become disputatious and
+mutinous." If you forget that nature meant children to be children
+before growing into men, you only force a fruit that has neither
+ripeness nor savour, and must soon go bad; you will have youthful
+doctors and old infants.
+
+To all this, however, there is certainly another side which Rousseau
+was too impetuous to see. Perfected reason is truly the tardiest of
+human endowments, but it can never be perfected at all unless the
+process be begun, and, within limits, the sooner the beginning is
+made, the earlier will be the ripening. To know the grounds of right
+conduct is, we admit, a different thing from feeling a disposition to
+practise it. But nobody will deny the expediency of an intelligent
+acquaintance with the reasons why one sort of conduct is bad, and its
+opposite good, even if such an acquaintance can never become a
+substitute for the spontaneous action of thoroughly formed habit. For
+one thing, cases are constantly arising in a man's life that demand
+the exercise of reason, to settle the special application of
+principles which may have been acquired without knowledge of their
+rational foundation. In such cases, which are the critical and testing
+points of character, all depends upon the possession of a more or less
+justly trained intelligence, and the habit of using it. Now, as we
+have said, it is one of the great merits of the Emilius that it calls
+such attention to the early age at which mental influences begin to
+operate. Why should the gradual formation of the master habit of using
+the mind be any exception?
+
+Belief in the efficacy of preaching is the bane of educational
+systems. Verbal lessons seem as if they ought to be so deeply
+effective, if only the will and the throng of various motives which
+guide it, instantly followed impression of a truth upon the
+intelligence. And they are, moreover, so easily communicated, saving
+the parent a lifetime of anxious painstaking in shaping his own
+character, after such a pattern as shall silently draw all within its
+influence to pursuit of good and honourable things. The most valuable
+of Rousseau's notions about education, though he by no means
+consistently adhered to them, was his urgent contempt for this
+fatuous substitution of spoken injunctions and prohibitions, for the
+deeper language of example, and the more living instruction of visible
+circumstance. The vast improvements that have since taken place in the
+theory and the art of education all over Europe, and of which he has
+the honour of being the first and most widely influential promoter,
+may all be traced to the spread of this wise principle, and its
+adoption in various forms. The change in the up-bringing of the young
+exactly corresponds to the change in the treatment of the insane. We
+may look back to the old system of endless catechisms, apophthegms,
+moral fables, and the rest of the paraphernalia of moral didactics,
+with the same horror with which we regard the gags, strait-waistcoats,
+chains, and dark cells, of poor mad people before the intervention of
+Pinel.
+
+It is clear now to everybody who has any opinion on this most
+important of all subjects, that spontaneousness is the first quality
+in connection with right doing, which you can develop in the young,
+and this spontaneousness of habit is best secured by associating it
+with the approval of those to whom the child looks. Sympathy, in a
+word, is the true foundation from which to build up the structure of
+good habit. The young should be led to practise the elementary parts
+of right conduct from the desire to please, because that is a securer
+basis than the conclusions of an embryo reason, applied to the most
+complex conditions of action, while the grounds on which action is
+justified or condemned may be made plain in the fulness of time, when
+the understanding is better able to deal with the ideas and terms
+essential to the matter. You have two aims to secure, each without
+sacrifice of the other. These are, first, that the child shall grow up
+with firm and promptly acting habit; second, that it shall retain
+respect for reason and an open mind. The latter may be acquired in the
+less immature years, but if the former be not acquired in the earlier
+times, a man grows up with a drifting unsettledness of will, that
+makes his life either vicious by quibbling sophistries, or helpless
+for want of ready conclusions.
+
+The first idea which is to be given to a child, little as we might
+expect such a doctrine from the author of the Second Discourse, is
+declared to be that of property. And he can only acquire this idea by
+having something of his own. But how are we to teach him the
+significance of a thing being one's own? It is a prime rule to attempt
+to teach nothing by a verbal lesson; all instruction ought to be left
+to experience.[282] Therefore you must contrive some piece of
+experience which shall bring this notion of property vividly into a
+child's mind; the following for instance. Emilius is taken to a piece
+of garden; his instructor digs and dresses the ground for him, and the
+boy takes possession by sowing some beans. "We come every day to water
+them, and see them rise out of the ground with transports of joy. I
+add to this joy by saying, This belongs to you. Then explaining the
+term, I let him feel that he has put into the ground this time,
+labour, trouble, his person in short; that there is in this bit of
+ground something of himself which he may maintain against every comer,
+as he might withdraw his own arm from the hand of another man who
+would fain retain it in spite of him." One day Emilius comes to his
+beloved garden, watering-pot in hand, and finds to his anguish and
+despair that all the beans have been plucked up, that the ground has
+been turned over, and that the spot is hardly recognisable. The
+gardener comes up, and explains with much warmth that he had sown the
+seed of a precious Maltese melon in that particular spot long before
+Emilius had come with his trumpery beans, and that therefore it was
+his land; that nobody touches the garden of his neighbour, in order
+that his own may remain untouched; and that if Emilius wants a piece
+of garden, he must pay for it by surrendering to the owner half the
+produce.[283] Thus, says Rousseau, the boy sees how the notion of
+property naturally goes back to the right of the first occupant as
+derived from labour. We should have thought it less troublesome, as it
+is certainly more important, to teach a boy the facts of property
+positively and imperatively. This rather elaborate ascent to origins
+seems an exaggerated form of that very vice of over-instructing the
+growing reason in abstractions, which Rousseau had condemned so short
+a time before.
+
+Again, there is the very strong objection to conveying lessons by
+artificially contrived incidents, that children are nearly always
+extremely acute in suspecting and discovering such contrivances. Yet
+Rousseau recurs to them over and over again, evidently taking delight
+in their ingenuity. Besides the illustration of the origin and
+significance of property, there is the complex fancy in which a
+juggler is made to combine instruction as to the properties of the
+magnet with certain severe moral truths.[284] The tutor interests
+Emilius in astronomy and geography by a wonderful stratagem indeed.
+The poor youth loses his way in a wood, is overpowered by hunger and
+weariness, and then is led on by his cunning tutor to a series of
+inferences from the position of the sun and so forth, which convince
+him that his home is just over the hedge, where it is duly found to
+be.[285] Here, again, is the way in which the instructor proposes to
+stir activity of limb in the young Emilius. "In walking with him of an
+afternoon, I used sometimes to put in my pocket two cakes of a sort he
+particularly liked; we each of us ate one. One day he perceived that I
+had three cakes; he could easily have eaten six; he promptly
+despatches his own, to ask me for the third. Nay, I said to him, I
+could well eat it myself, or we would divide it, but I would rather
+see it made the prize of a running match between the two little boys
+there." The little boys run their race, and the winner devours the
+cake. This and subsequent repetitions of the performance at first
+only amused Emilius, but he presently began to reflect, and perceiving
+that he also had two legs, he began privately to try how fast he could
+run. When he thought he was strong enough, he importuned his tutor for
+the third cake, and on being refused, insisted on being allowed to
+compete for it. The habit of taking exercise was not the only
+advantage gained. The tutor resorted to a variety of further
+stratagems in order to induce the boy to find out and practise visual
+compass, and so forth.[286] If we consider, as we have said, first the
+readiness of children to suspect a stratagem wherever instruction is
+concerned, and next their resentment on discovering artifice of that
+kind, all this seems as little likely to be successful as it is
+assuredly contrary to Rousseau's general doctrine of leaving
+circumstances to lead.
+
+In truth Rousseau's appreciation of the real nature of spontaneousness
+in the processes of education was essentially inadequate, and that it
+was so, arose from a no less inadequate conception of the right
+influence upon the growing character, of the great principle of
+authority. His dread lest the child should ever be conscious of the
+pressure of a will external to its own, constituted a fundamental
+weakness of his system. The child, we are told with endless
+repetition, ought always to be led to suppose that it is following its
+own judgment or impulses, and has only them and their consequences to
+consider. But Rousseau could not help seeing, as he meditated on the
+actual development of his Emilius, that to leave him thus to the
+training of accident would necessarily end in many fatal gaps and
+chasms. Yet the hand and will of the parent or the master could not be
+allowed to appear. The only alternative, therefore, was the secret
+preparation of artificial sets of circumstances, alike in work and in
+amusement. Jean Paul was wiser than Jean Jacques. "Let not the teacher
+after the work also order and regulate the games. It is decidedly
+better not to recognise or make any order in games, than to keep it up
+with difficulty and send the zephyrets of pleasure through artistic
+bellows and air-pumps to the little flowers."[287]
+
+The spontaneousness which we ought to seek, does not consist in
+promptly willing this or that, independently of an authority imposed
+from without, but in a self-acting desire to do what is right under
+all its various conditions, including what the child finds pleasant to
+itself on the one hand, and what it has good reason to suppose will be
+pleasant to its parents on the other. "You must never," Rousseau
+gravely warns us, "inflict punishment upon children as punishment; it
+should always fall upon them as a natural consequence of their
+ill-behaviour."[288] But why should one of the most closely following
+of all these consequences be dissembled or carefully hidden from
+sight, namely, the effect of ill-behaviour upon the contentment of the
+child's nearest friend? Why are the effects of conduct upon the
+actor's own physical well-being to be the only effects honoured with
+the title of being natural? Surely, while we leave to the young the
+widest freedom of choice, and even habitually invite them to decide
+for themselves between two lines of conduct, we are bound afterwards
+to state our approval or disapproval of their decision, so that on the
+next occasion they may take this anger or pleasure in others into
+proper account in their rough and hasty forecast, often less hasty
+than it seems, of the consequences of what they are about to do. One
+of the most important of educating influences is lost, if the young
+are not taught to place the feelings of others in a front place, when
+they think in their own simple way of what will happen to them from
+yielding to a given impulse. Rousseau was quite right in insisting on
+practical experience of consequences as the only secure foundation for
+self-acting habit; he was fatally wrong in mutilating this experience
+by the exclusion from it of the effects of perceiving, resisting,
+accepting, ignoring, all will and authority from without. The great,
+and in many respects so admirable, school of Rousseauite
+philanthropists, have always been feeble on this side, alike in the
+treatment of the young by their instructors, and the treatment of
+social offenders by a government.
+
+Again, consider the large group of excellent qualities which are
+associated with affectionate respect for a more fully informed
+authority. In a world where necessity stands for so much, it is no
+inconsiderable gain to have learnt the lesson of docility on easy
+terms in our earliest days. If in another sense the will of each
+individual is all-powerful over his own destinies, it is best that
+this idea of firm purpose and a settled energy that will not be
+denied, should grow up in the young soul in connection with a riper
+wisdom and an ampler experience than its own; for then, when the time
+for independent action comes, the force of the association will
+continue. Finally, although none can be vicariously wise, none sage by
+proxy, nor any pay for the probation of another, yet is it not a
+puerile wastefulness to send forth the young all bare to the ordeal,
+while the armour of old experience and tempered judgment hangs idle on
+the wall? Surely it is thus by accumulation of instruction from
+generation to generation, that the area of right conduct in the world
+is extended. Such instruction must with youth be conveyed by military
+word of command as often as by philosophical persuasion of its worth.
+Nor is the atmosphere of command other than bracing, even to those who
+are commanded. If education is to be mainly conducted by force of
+example, it is a dreadful thing that the child is ever to have before
+its eyes as living type and practical exemplar the pale figure of
+parents without passions, and without a will as to the conduct of
+those who are dependent on them. Even a slight excess of anger,
+impatience, and the spirit of command, would be less demoralising to
+the impressionable character than the constant sight of a man
+artificially impassive. Rousseau is perpetually calling upon men to
+try to lay aside their masks; yet the model instructor whom he has
+created for us is to be the most artfully and elaborately masked of
+all men; unless he happens to be naturally without blood and without
+physiognomy.
+
+Rousseau, then, while he put away the old methods which imprisoned the
+young spirit in injunctions and over-solicitous monitions, yet did
+none the less in his own scheme imprison it in a kind of hothouse,
+which with its regulated temperature and artificially contrived access
+of light and air, was in many respects as little the method of nature,
+that is to say it gave as little play for the spontaneous working and
+growth of the forces of nature in the youth's breast, as that regimen
+of the cloister which he so profoundly abhorred. Partly this was the
+result of a ludicrously shallow psychology. He repeats again and again
+that self-love is the one quality in the youthful embryo of character,
+from which you have to work. From this, he says, springs the desire of
+possessing pleasure and avoiding pain, the great fulcrum on which the
+lever of experience rests. Not only so, but from this same
+unslumbering quality of self-love you have to develop regard for
+others. The child's first affection for his nurse is a result of the
+fact that she serves his comfort, and so down to his passion in later
+years for his mistress. Now this is not the place for a discussion as
+to the ultimate atom of the complex moral sentiments of men and women,
+nor for an examination of the question whether the faculty of
+sympathy has or has not an origin independent of self-love. However
+that may be, no one will deny that sympathy appears in good natures
+extremely early, and is susceptible of rapid cultivation from the very
+first. Here is the only adequate key to that education of the
+affections, from their rudimentary expansion in the nursery, until
+they include the complete range of all the objects proper to them.
+
+One secret of Rousseau's omission of this, the most important of all
+educating agencies, from the earlier stages of the formation of
+character, was the fact which is patent enough in every page, that he
+was not animated by that singular tenderness and almost mystic
+affection for the young, which breathes through the writings of some
+of his German followers, of Richter above all others, and which
+reveals to those who are sensible of it, the hold that may so easily
+be gained for all good purposes upon the eager sympathy of the
+youthful spirit. The instructor of Emilius speaks the words of a wise
+onlooker, sagely meditating on the ideal man, rather than of a parent
+who is living the life of his child through with him. Rousseau's
+interest in children, though perfectly sincere, was still æsthetic,
+moral, reasonable, rather than that pure flood of full-hearted feeling
+for them, which is perhaps seldom stirred except in those who have
+actually brought up children of their own. He composed a vindication
+of his love for the young in an exquisite piece;[289] but it has none
+of the yearnings of the bowels of tenderness.
+
+
+II.
+
+Education being the art of preparing the young to grow into
+instruments of happiness for themselves and others, a writer who
+undertakes to speak about it must naturally have some conception of
+the kind of happiness at which his art aims. We have seen enough of
+Rousseau's own life to know what sort of ideal he would be likely to
+set up. It is a healthier epicureanism, with enough stoicism to make
+happiness safe in case that circumstances should frown. The man who
+has lived most is not he who has counted most years, but he who has
+most felt life.[290] It is mere false wisdom to throw ourselves
+incessantly out of ourselves, to count the present for nothing, ever
+to pursue without ceasing a future which flees in proportion as we
+advance, to try to transport ourselves from whence we are not, to some
+place where we shall never be.[291] He is happiest who suffers fewest
+pains, and he is most miserable who feels fewest pleasures. Then we
+have a half stoical strain. The felicity of man here below is only a
+negative state, to be measured by the more or less of the ills he
+undergoes. It is in the disproportion between desires and faculties
+that our misery consists. Happiness, therefore, lies not in
+diminishing our desires, nor any more in extending our faculties, but
+in diminishing the excess of desire over faculty, and in bringing
+power and will into perfect balance.[292] Excepting health, strength,
+respect for one's self, all the goods of this life reside in opinion;
+excepting bodily pain and remorse of conscience, all our ills are in
+imagination. Death is no evil; it is only made so by half-knowledge
+and false wisdom. "Live according to nature, be patient, and drive
+away physicians; you will not avoid death, but you will only feel it
+once, while they on the other hand would bring it daily before your
+troubled imagination, and their false art, instead of prolonging your
+days, only hinders you from enjoying them. Suffer, die, or recover;
+but above all things live, live up to your last hour." It is
+foresight, constantly carrying us out of ourselves, that is the true
+source of our miseries.[293] O man, confine thy existence within
+thyself, and thou wilt cease to be miserable. Thy liberty, thy power,
+reach exactly as far as thy natural forces, and no further; all the
+rest is slavery and illusion. The only man who has his own will is he
+who does not need in order to have it the arms of another person at
+the end of his own.[294]
+
+The training that follows from this is obvious. The instructor has
+carefully to distinguish true or natural need from the need which is
+only fancied, or which only comes from superabundance of life.
+Emilius, who is brought up in the country, has nothing in his room to
+distinguish it from that of a peasant.[295] If he is taken to a
+luxurious banquet, he is bidden, instead of heedlessly enjoying it, to
+reflect austerely how many hundreds or thousands of hands have been
+employed in preparing it.[296] His preference for gay colours in his
+clothes is to be consulted, because this is natural and becoming to
+his age, but the moment he prefers a stuff merely because it is rich,
+behold a sophisticated creature.[297] The curse of the world is
+inequality, and inequality springs from the multitude of wants, which
+cause us to be so much the more dependent. What makes man essentially
+good is to have few wants, and to abstain from comparing himself with
+others; what makes him essentially bad, is to have many wants, and to
+cling much to opinion.[298] Hence, although Emilius happened to have
+both wealth and good birth, he is not brought up to be a gentleman,
+with the prejudices and helplessness and selfishness too naturally
+associated with that abused name.
+
+This cardinal doctrine of limitation of desire, with its corollary of
+self-sufficience, contains in itself the great maxim that Emilius and
+every one else must learn some trade. To work is an indispensable duty
+in the social man. Rich or poor, powerful or weak, every idle citizen
+is a knave. And every boy must learn a real trade, a trade with his
+hands. It is not so much a matter of learning a craft for the sake of
+knowing one, as for the sake of conquering the prejudices which
+despise it. Labour for glory, if you have not to labour from
+necessity. Lower yourself to the condition of the artisan, so as to be
+above your own. In order to reign in opinion, begin by reigning over
+it. All things well considered, the trade most to be preferred is
+that of carpenter; it is clean, useful, and capable of being carried
+on in the house; it demands address and diligence in the workman, and
+though the form of the work is determined by utility, still elegance
+and taste are not excluded.[299] There are few prettier pictures than
+that where Sophie enters the workshop, and sees in amazement her young
+lover at the other end, in his white shirt-sleeves, his hair loosely
+fastened back, with a chisel in one hand and a mallet in the other,
+too intent upon his work to perceive even the approach of his
+mistress.[300]
+
+When the revolution came, and princes and nobles wandered in indigent
+exile, the disciples of Rousseau pointed in unkind triumph to the
+advantage these unfortunate wretches would have had if they had not
+been too puffed up with the vanity of feudalism to follow the prudent
+example of Emilius in learning a craft. That Rousseau should have laid
+so much stress on the vicissitudes of fortune, which might cause even
+a king to be grateful one day that he had a trade at the end of his
+arms, is sometimes quoted as a proof of his foresight of troublous
+times. This, however, goes too far, because, apart from the instances
+of such vicissitudes among the ancients, the King of Syracuse keeping
+school at Corinth, or Alexander, son of Perseus, becoming a Roman
+scrivener, he actually saw Charles Edward, the Stuart pretender,
+wandering from court to court in search of succour and receiving only
+rebuffs; and he may well have known that after the troubles of 1738 a
+considerable number of the oligarchs of his native Geneva had gone
+into exile, rather than endure the humiliation of their party.[301]
+Besides all this, the propriety of being able to earn one's bread by
+some kind of toil that would be useful in even the simplest societies,
+flowed necessarily from every part of his doctrine of the aims of life
+and the worth of character. He did, however, say, "We approach a state
+of crisis and an age of revolutions," which proved true, but he added
+too much when he pronounced it impossible that the great monarchies of
+Europe could last long.[302] And it is certain that the only one of
+the great monarchies which did actually fall would have had a far
+better chance of surviving if Lewis XVI. had been as expert in the
+trade of king as he was in that of making locks and bolts.
+
+From this semi-stoical ideal there followed certain social notions,
+of which Rousseau had the distinction of being the most powerful
+propagator. As has so often been said, his contemporaries were willing
+to leave social questions alone, provided only the government would
+suffer the free expression of opinion in literature and science.
+Rousseau went deeper. His moral conception of individual life and
+character contained in itself a social conception, and he did not
+shrink from boldly developing it. The rightly constituted man suffices
+for himself and is free from prejudices. He has arms, and knows how to
+use them; he has few wants, and knows how to satisfy them. Nurtured in
+the most absolute freedom, he can think of no worse ill than
+servitude. He attaches himself to the beauty which perishes not,
+limiting his desires to his condition, learning to lose whatever may
+be taken away from him, to place himself above events, and to detach
+his heart from loved objects without a pang.[303] He pities miserable
+kings, who are the bondsmen of all that seems to obey them; he pities
+false sages, who are fast bound in the chains of their empty renown;
+he pities the silly rich, martyrs to their own ostentation.[304] All
+the sympathies of such a man therefore naturally flow away from these,
+the great of the earth, to those who lead the stoic's life perforce.
+"It is the common people who compose the human race; what is not the
+people is hardly worth taking into account. Man is the same in all
+ranks; that being so, the ranks which are most numerous deserve most
+respect. Before one who reflects, all civil distinctions vanish: he
+marks the same passions and the same feelings in the clown as in the
+man covered with reputation; he can only distinguish their speech, and
+a varnish more or less elaborately laid on. Study people of this
+humble condition; you will perceive that under another sort of
+language, they have as much intelligence as you, and more good sense.
+Respect your species: reflect that it is essentially made up of the
+collection of peoples; that if every king and every philosopher were
+cut off from among them, they would scarcely be missed, and the world
+would go none the worse."[305] As it is, the universal spirit of the
+law in every country is invariably to favour the strong against the
+weak, and him who has, against him who has not. The many are
+sacrificed to the few. The specious names of justice and subordination
+serve only as instruments for violence and arms for iniquity. The
+ostentatious orders who pretend to be useful to the others, are in
+truth only useful to themselves at the expense of the others.[306]
+
+This was carrying on the work which had already been begun in the New
+Heloïsa, as we have seen, but in the Emilius it is pushed with a
+gravity and a directness, that could not be imparted to the picture of
+a fanciful and arbitrarily chosen situation. The only writer who has
+approached Rousseau, so far as I know, in fulness and depth of
+expression in proclaiming the sorrows and wrongs of the poor blind
+crowd, who painfully drag along the car of triumphant civilisation
+with its handful of occupants, is the author of the Book of the
+People. Lamennais even surpasses Rousseau in the profundity of his
+pathos; his pictures of the life of hut and hovel are as sincere and
+as touching; and there is in them, instead of the anger and bitterness
+of the older author, righteous as that was, a certain heroism of pity
+and devoted sublimity of complaint, which lift the soul up from
+resentment into divine moods of compassion and resolve, and stir us
+like a tale of noble action.[307] It was Rousseau, however, who first
+sounded the note of which the religion that had once been the champion
+and consoler of the common people, seemed long to have lost even the
+tradition. Yet the teaching was not constructive, because the ideal
+man was not made truly social. Emilius is brought up in something of
+the isolation of the imaginary savage of the state of nature. He
+marries, and then he and his wife seem only fitted to lead a life of
+detachment from the interests of the world in which they are placed.
+Social or political education, that is the training which character
+receives from the medium in which it grows, is left out of account,
+and so is the correlative process of preparation for the various
+conditions and exigencies which belong to that medium, until it is too
+late to take its natural place in character. Nothing can be clumsier
+than the way in which Rousseau proposes to teach Emilius the existence
+and nature of his relations with his fellows. And the reason of this
+was that he had never himself in the course of his ruminations,
+willingly thought of Emilius as being in a condition of active social
+relation, the citizen of a state.
+
+
+III.
+
+There appear to be three dominant states of mind, with groups of
+faculties associated with each of them, which it is the business of
+the instructor firmly to establish in the character of the future man.
+The first is a resolute and unflinching respect for Truth; for the
+conclusions, that is to say, of the scientific reason, comprehending
+also a constant anxiety to take all possible pains that such
+conclusions shall be rightly drawn. Connected with this is the
+discipline of the whole range of intellectual faculties, from the
+simple habit of correct observation, down to the highly complex habit
+of weighing and testing the value of evidence. This very important
+branch of early discipline, Rousseau for reasons of his own which we
+have already often referred to, cared little about, and he throws very
+little light upon it, beyond one or two extremely sensible precepts of
+the negative kind, warning us against beginning too soon and forcing
+an apparent progress too rapidly. The second fundamental state in a
+rightly formed character is a deep feeling for things of the spirit
+which are unknown and incommensurable; a sense of awe, mystery,
+sublimity, and the fateful bounds of life at its beginning and its
+end. Here is the Religious side, and what Rousseau has to say of this
+we shall presently see. It is enough now to remark that Emilius was
+never to hear the name of a God or supreme being until his reason was
+fairly ripened. The third state, which is at least as difficult to
+bring to healthy perfection as either of the other two, is a passion
+for Justice.
+
+The little use which Rousseau made of this momentous and
+much-embracing word, which names the highest peak of social virtue, is
+a very striking circumstance. The reason would seem to be that his
+sense of the relations of men with one another was not virile enough
+to comprehend the deep austerer lines which mark the brow of the
+benignant divinity of Justice. In the one place in his writings where
+he speaks of justice freely, he shows a narrowness of idea, which was
+perhaps as much due to intellectual confusion as to lack of moral
+robustness. He says excellently that "love of the human race is
+nothing else in us but love of justice," and that "of all the virtues,
+justice is that which contributes most to the common good of men."
+While enjoining the discipline of pity as one of the noblest of
+sentiments, he warns us against letting it degenerate into weakness,
+and insists that we should only surrender ourselves to it when it
+accords with justice.[308] But that is all. What constitutes justice,
+what is its standard, what its source, what its sanction, whence the
+extraordinary holiness with which its name has come to be invested
+among the most highly civilised societies of men, we are never told,
+nor do we ever see that our teacher had seen the possibility of such
+questions being asked. If they had been propounded to him, he would,
+it is most likely, have fallen back upon the convenient mystery of the
+natural law. This was the current phrase of that time, and it was
+meant to embody a hypothetical experience of perfect human relations
+in an expression of the widest generality. If so, this would have to
+be impressed upon the mind of Emilius in the same way as other
+mysteries. As a matter of fact, Emilius was led through pity up to
+humanity, or sociality in an imperfect signification, and there he was
+left without a further guide to define the marks of truly social
+conduct.
+
+This imperfection was a necessity, inseparable from Rousseau's
+tenacity in keeping society in the background of the picture of life
+which he opened to his pupil. He said, indeed, "We must study society
+by men, and men by society; those who would treat politics and
+morality apart will never understand anything about either one or the
+other."[309] This is profoundly true, but we hardly see in the
+morality which is designed for Emilius the traces of political
+elements. Yet without some gradually unfolded presentation of society
+as a whole, it is scarcely possible to implant the idea of justice
+with any hope of large fertility. You may begin at a very early time
+to develop, even from the primitive quality of self-love, a notion of
+equity and a respect for it, but the vast conception of social justice
+can only find room in a character that has been made spacious by
+habitual contemplation of the height and breadth and close
+compactedness of the fabric of the relations that bind man to man, and
+of the share, integral or infinitesimally fractional, that each has in
+the happiness or woe of other souls. And this contemplation should
+begin when we prepare the foundation of all the other maturer habits.
+Youth can hardly recognise too soon the enormous unresting machine
+which bears us ceaselessly along, because we can hardly learn too soon
+that its force and direction depend on the play of human motives, of
+which our own for good or evil form an inevitable part when the ripe
+years come. To one reared with the narrow care devoted to Emilius, or
+with the capricious negligence in which the majority are left to grow
+to manhood, the society into which they are thrown is a mere moral
+wilderness. They are to make such way through it as they can, with
+egotism for their only trusty instrument. This egotism may either be a
+bludgeon, as with the most part, or it may be a delicately adjusted
+and fastidiously decorated compass, as with an Emilius. In either case
+is no perception that the gross outer contact of men with another is
+transformed by worthiness of common aim and loyal faith in common
+excellences, into a thing beautiful and generous. It is our business
+to fix and root the habit of thinking of that _moral_ union, into
+which, as Kant has so admirably expressed it, the _pathological_
+necessities of situation that first compelled social concert, have
+been gradually transmuted. Instead of this, it is exactly the
+primitive pathological conditions that a narrow theory of education
+brings first into prominence; as if knowledge of origins were
+indispensable to a right attachment to the transformed conditions of a
+maturer system.
+
+It has been said that Rousseau founds all morality upon personal
+interest, perhaps even more specially than Helvétius himself. The
+accusation is just. Emilius will enter adult life without the germs of
+that social conscience, which animates a man with all the associations
+of duty and right, of gratitude for the past and resolute hope for the
+future, in face of the great body of which he finds himself a part. "I
+observe," says Rousseau, "that in the modern ages men have no hold
+upon one another save through force and interest, while the ancients
+on the other hand acted much more by persuasion and the affections of
+the soul."[310] The reason was that with the ancients, supposing him
+to mean the Greeks and Romans, the social conscience was so much wider
+in its scope than the comparatively narrow fragment of duty which is
+supposed to come under the sacred power of conscience in the more
+complex and less closely contained organisation of a modern state. The
+neighbours to whom a man owed duty in those times comprehended all the
+members of his state. The neighbours of the modern preacher of duty
+are either the few persons with whom each of us is brought into actual
+and palpable contact, or else the whole multitude of dwellers on the
+earth,--a conception that for many ages to come will remain with the
+majority of men and women too vague to exert an energetic and
+concentrating influence upon action, and will lead them no further
+than an uncoloured and nerveless cosmopolitanism.
+
+What the young need to have taught to them in this too little
+cultivated region, is that they are born not mere atoms floating
+independent and apart for a season through a terraqueous medium, and
+sucking up as much more than their share of nourishment as they can
+seize; nor citizens of the world with no more definite duty than to
+keep their feelings towards all their fellows in a steady simmer of
+bland complacency; but soldiers in a host, citizens of a polity whose
+boundaries are not set down in maps, members of a church the
+handwriting of whose ordinances is not in the hieroglyphs of idle
+mystery, nor its hope and recompense in the lands beyond death. They
+need to be taught that they owe a share of their energies to the great
+struggle which is in ceaseless progress in all societies in an endless
+variety of forms, between new truth and old prejudice, between love of
+self or class and solicitous passion for justice, between the
+obstructive indolence and inertia of the many and the generous mental
+activity of the few. This is the sphere and definition of the social
+conscience. The good causes of enlightenment and justice in all
+lands,--here is the church militant in which we should early seek to
+enrol the young, and the true state to which they should be taught
+that they owe the duties of active and arduous citizenship. These are
+the struggles with which the modern instructor should associate those
+virtues of fortitude, tenacity, silent patience, outspoken energy,
+readiness to assert ourselves and readiness to efface ourselves,
+willingness to suffer and resolution to inflict suffering, which men
+of old knew how to show for their gods or their sovereign. But the
+ideal of Emilius was an ideal of quietism; to possess his own soul in
+patience, with a suppressed intelligence, a suppressed sociality,
+without a single spark of generous emulation in the courses of
+strong-fibred virtue, or a single thrill of heroical pursuit after so
+much as one great forlorn cause.
+
+"If it once comes to him, in reading these parallels of the famous
+ancients, to desire to be another rather than himself, were this other
+Socrates, were he Cato, you have missed the mark; he who begins to
+make himself a stranger to himself, is not long before he forgets
+himself altogether."[311] But if a man only nurses the conception of
+his own personality, for the sake of keeping his own peace and
+self-contained comfort at a glow of easy warmth, assuredly the best
+thing that can befall him is that he should perish, lest his example
+should infect others with the same base contagion. Excessive
+personality when militant is often wholesome, excessive personality
+that only hugs itself is under all circumstances chief among unclean
+things. Thus even Rousseau's finest monument of moral enthusiasm is
+fatally tarnished by the cold damp breath of isolation, and the very
+book which contained so many elements of new life for a state, was at
+bottom the apotheosis of social despair.
+
+
+IV.
+
+The great agent in fostering the rise to vigour and uprightness of a
+social conscience, apart from the yet more powerful instrument of a
+strong and energetic public spirit at work around the growing
+character, must be found in the study of history rightly directed with
+a view to this end. It is here, in observing the long processes of
+time and appreciating the slowly accumulating sum of endeavour, that
+the mind gradually comes to read the great lessons how close is the
+bond that links men together. It is here that he gradually begins to
+acquire the habit of considering what are the conditions of wise
+social activity, its limits, its objects, its rewards, what is the
+capacity of collective achievement, and of what sort is the
+significance and purport of the little span of time that cuts off the
+yesterday of our society from its to-morrow.
+
+Rousseau had very rightly forbidden the teaching of history to young
+children, on the ground that the essence of history lies in the moral
+relations between the bare facts which it recounts, and that the terms
+and ideas of these relations are wholly beyond the intellectual grasp
+of the very young.[312] He might have based his objections equally
+well upon the impossibility of little children knowing the meaning of
+the multitude of descriptive terms which make up a historical manual,
+or realising the relations between events in bare point of time,
+although childhood may perhaps be a convenient period for some
+mechanical acquisition of dates. According to Rousseau, history was to
+appear very late in the educational course, when the youth was almost
+ready to enter the world. It was to be the finishing study, from which
+he should learn not sociality either in its scientific or its higher
+moral sense, but the composition of the heart of man, in a safer way
+than through actual intercourse with society. Society might make him
+either cynical or frivolous. History would bring him the same
+information, without subjecting him to the same perils. In society you
+only hear the words of men; to know man you must observe his actions,
+and actions are only unveiled in history.[313] This view is hardly
+worth discussing. The subject of history is not the heart of man, but
+the movements of societies. Moreover, the oracles of history are
+entirely dumb to one who seeks from them maxims for the shaping of
+daily conduct, or living instruction as to the motives, aims,
+caprices, capacities of self-restraint, self-sacrifice, of those with
+whom the occasions of life bring us into contact.
+
+It is true that at the close of the other part of his education,
+Emilius was to travel and there find the comment upon the completed
+circle of his studies.[314] But excellent as travel is for some of the
+best of those who have the opportunity, still for many it is
+valueless for lack of the faculty of curiosity. For the great
+majority it is impossible for lack of opportunity. To trust so much as
+Rousseau did to the effect of travelling, is to leave a large chasm in
+education unbridged.
+
+It is interesting, however, to notice some of Rousseau's notions about
+history as an instrument for conveying moral instruction, a few of
+them are so good, others are so characteristically narrow. "The worst
+historians for a young man," he says, "are those who judge. The facts,
+the facts; then let him judge for himself. If the author's judgment is
+for ever guiding him, he is only seeing with the eye of another, and
+as soon as this eye fails him, he sees nothing." Modern history is not
+fit for instruction, not only because it has no physiognomy, all our
+men being exactly like one another, but because our historians, intent
+on brilliance above all other things, think of nothing so much as
+painting highly coloured portraits, which for the most part represent
+nothing at all.[315] Of course such a judgment as this implies an
+ignorance alike of the ends and meaning of history, which, considering
+that he was living in the midst of a singular revival of historical
+study, is not easy to pardon. If we are to look only to perfection of
+form and arrangement, it may have been right for one living in the
+middle of the last century to place the ancients in the first rank
+without competitors. But the author of the Discourse upon literature
+and the arts might have been expected to look beyond composition, and
+the contemporary of Voltaire's _Essai sur les Moeurs_ (1754-1757)
+might have been expected to know that the profitable experience of the
+human race did not close with the fall of the Roman republic. Among
+the ancient historians, he counted Thucydides to be the true model,
+because he reports facts without judging, and omits none of the
+circumstances proper for enabling us to judge of them for
+ourselves--though how Rousseau knew what facts Thucydides has omitted,
+I am unable to divine. Then come Cæsar's Commentaries and Xenophon's
+Retreat of the Ten Thousand. The good Herodotus, without portraits and
+without maxims, but abounding in details the most capable of
+interesting and pleasing, would perhaps be the best of historians, if
+only these details did not so often degenerate into puerilities. Livy
+is unsuited to youth, because he is political and a rhetorician.
+Tacitus is the book of the old; you must have learnt the art of
+reading facts, before you can be trusted with maxims.
+
+The drawback of histories such as those of Thucydides and Cæsar,
+Rousseau admits to be that they dwell almost entirely on war, leaving
+out the true life of nations, which belongs to the unwritten
+chronicles of peace. This leads him to the equally just reflection
+that historians while recounting facts omit the gradual and
+progressive causes which led to them. "They often find in a battle
+lost or won the reason of a revolution, which even before the battle
+was already inevitable. War scarcely does more than bring into full
+light events determined by moral causes, which historians can seldom
+penetrate."[316] A third complaint against the study which he began by
+recommending as a proper introduction to the knowledge of man, is that
+it does not present men but actions, or at least men only in their
+parade costume and in certain chosen moments, and he justly reproaches
+writers alike of history and biography, for omitting those trifling
+strokes and homely anecdotes, which reveal the true physiognomy of
+character. "Remain then for ever, without bowels, without nature;
+harden your hearts of cast iron in your trumpery decency, and make
+yourselves despicable by force of dignity."[317] And so after all, by
+a common stroke of impetuous inconsistency, he forsakes history, and
+falls back upon the ancient biographies, because, all the low and
+familiar details being banished from modern style, however true and
+characteristic, men are as elaborately tricked out by our authors in
+their private lives as they were tricked out upon the stage of the
+world.
+
+
+V.
+
+As women are from the constitution of things the educators of us all
+at the most critical periods, and mainly of their own sex from the
+beginning to the end of education, the writer of the most imperfect
+treatise on this world-interesting subject can hardly avoid saying
+something on the upbringing of women. Such a writer may start from
+one of three points of view; he may consider the woman as destined to
+be a wife, or a mother, or a human being; as the companion of a man,
+as the rearer of the young, or as an independent personality, endowed
+with gifts, talents, possibilities, in less or greater number, and
+capable, as in the case of men, of being trained to the worst or the
+best uses. Of course to every one who looks into life, each of these
+three ideals melts into the other two, and we can only think of them
+effectively when they are blended. Yet we test a writer's appreciation
+of the conditions of human progress by observing the function which he
+makes most prominent. A man's whole thought of the worth and aim of
+womanhood depends upon the generosity and elevation of the ideal which
+is silently present in his mind, while he is specially meditating the
+relations of woman as wife or as mother. Unless he is really capable
+of thinking of them as human beings, independently of these two
+functions, he is sure to have comparatively mean notions in connection
+with them in respect of the functions which he makes paramount.
+
+Rousseau breaks down here. The unsparing fashion in which he developed
+the theory of individualism in the case of Emilius, and insisted on
+man being allowed to grow into the man of nature, instead of the man
+of art and manufacture, might have led us to expect that when he came
+to speak of women, he would suffer equity and logic to have their way,
+by giving equally free room in the two halves of the human race, for
+the development of natural force and capacity. If, as he begins by
+saying, he wishes to bring up Emilius, not to be a merchant nor a
+physician nor a soldier nor to the practice of any other special
+calling, but to be first and above all a man, why should not Sophie
+too be brought up above all to be a human being, in whom the special
+qualifications of wifehood and motherhood may be developed in their
+due order? Emilius is a man first, a husband and a father afterwards
+and secondarily. How can Sophie be a companion for him, and an
+instructor for their children, unless she likewise has been left in
+the hands of nature, and had the same chances permitted to her as were
+given to her predestined mate? Again, the pictures of the New Heloïsa
+would have led us to conceive the ideal of womanly station not so much
+in the wife, as in the house-mother, attached by esteem and sober
+affection to her husband, but having for her chief functions to be the
+gentle guardian of her little ones, and the mild, firm, and prudent
+administrator of a cheerful and well-ordered household. In the last
+book of the Emilius, which treats of the education of girls, education
+is reduced within the compass of an even narrower ideal than this. We
+are confronted with the oriental conception of women. Every principle
+that has been followed in the education of Emilius is reversed in the
+education of women. Opinion, which is the tomb of virtue among men, is
+among women its high throne. The whole education of women ought to be
+relative to men; to please them, to be useful to them, to make
+themselves loved and honoured by them, to console them, to render
+their lives agreeable and sweet to them,--these are the duties which
+ought to be taught to women from their childhood. Every girl ought to
+have the religion of her mother, and every wife that of her husband.
+Not being in a condition to judge for themselves, they ought to
+receive the decision of fathers and husbands as if it were that of the
+church. And since authority is the rule of faith for women, it is not
+so much a matter of explaining to them the reasons for belief, as for
+expounding clearly to them what to believe. Although boys are not to
+hear of the idea of God until they are fifteen, because they are not
+in a condition to apprehend it, yet girls who are still less in a
+condition to apprehend it, are _therefore_ to have it imparted to them
+at an earlier age. Woman is created to give way to man, and to suffer
+his injustice. Her empire is an empire of gentleness, mildness, and
+complaisance. Her orders are caresses, and her threats are tears.
+Girls must not only be made laborious and vigilant; they must also
+very early be accustomed to being thwarted and kept in restraint. This
+misfortune, if they feel it one, is inseparable from their sex, and if
+ever they attempt to escape from it, they will only suffer misfortunes
+still more cruel in consequence.[318]
+
+After a series of oriental and obscurantist propositions of this kind,
+it is of little purpose to tell us that women have more intelligence
+and men more genius; that women observe, while men reason; that men
+will philosophise better upon the human heart, while women will be
+more skilful in reading it.[319] And it is a mere mockery to end the
+matter by a fervid assurance, that in spite of prejudices that have
+their origin in the manners of the time, the enthusiasm for what is
+worthy and noble is no more foreign to women than it is to men, and
+that there is nothing which under the guidance of nature may not be
+obtained from them as well as from ourselves.[320] Finally there is a
+complete surrender of the obscurantist position in such a sentence as
+this: "I only know for either sex two really distinct classes; one the
+people who think, the other the people who do not think, and this
+difference comes almost entirely from education. A man of the first of
+these classes ought not to marry into the other; for the greatest
+charm of companionship is wanting, when in spite of having a wife he
+is reduced to think by himself. It is only a cultivated spirit that
+provides agreeable commerce, and 'tis a cheerless thing for a father
+of a family who loves his home, to be obliged to shut himself up
+within himself, and to have no one about him who understands him.
+Besides, how is a woman who has no habits of reflection to bring up
+her children?"[321] Nothing could be more excellently urged. But how
+is a woman to have habits of reflection, when she has been constantly
+brought up in habits of the closest mental bondage, trained always to
+consider her first business to be the pleasing of some man, and her
+instruments not reasonable persuasion but caressing and crying?
+
+This pernicious nonsense was mainly due, like nearly all his most
+serious errors, to Rousseau's want of a conception of improvement in
+human affairs. If he had been filled with that conception as Turgot,
+Condorcet, and others were, he would have been forced as they were, to
+meditate upon changes in the education and the recognition accorded to
+women, as one of the first conditions of improvement. For lack of
+this, he contributed nothing to the most important branch of the
+subject that he had undertaken to treat. He was always taunting the
+champions of reigning systems of training for boys, with the vicious
+or feeble men whom he thought he saw on every hand around him. The
+same kind of answer obviously meets the current idea, which he adopted
+with a few idyllic decorations of his own, of the type of the
+relations between men and women. That type practically reduces
+marriage in ninety-nine cases out of every hundred to a dolorous
+parody of a social partnership. It does more than any one other cause
+to keep societies back, because it prevents one half of the members of
+a society from cultivating all their natural energies. Thus it
+produces a waste of helpful quality as immeasurable as it is
+deplorable, and besides rearing these creatures of mutilated faculty
+to be the intellectually demoralising companions of the remaining half
+of their own generation, makes them the mothers and the earliest and
+most influential instructors of the whole of the generation that comes
+after.[322] Of course, if any one believes that the existing
+arrangements of a western community are the most successful that we
+can ever hope to bring into operation, we need not complain of
+Rousseau. If not, then it is only reasonable to suppose that a
+considerable portion of the change will be effected in the hitherto
+neglected and subordinate half of the race. That reconstitution of the
+family, which Rousseau and others among his contemporaries rightly
+sought after as one of the most pressing needs of the time, was
+essentially impossible, so long as the typical woman was the adornment
+of a semi-philosophic seraglio, a sort of compromise between the
+frowzy ideal of an English bourgeois and the impertinent ideal of a
+Parisian gallant. Condorcet and others made a grievous mistake in
+defending the free gratification of sensual passion, as one of the
+conditions of happiness and making the most of our lives.[323] But
+even this was not at bottom more fatal to the maintenance and order of
+the family, than Rousseau's enervating notion of keeping women in
+strict intellectual and moral subjection was fatal to the family as
+the true school of high and equal companionship, and the fruitful
+seed-ground of wise activities and new hopes for each fresh
+generation.
+
+This was one side of Rousseau's reactionary tendencies. Fortunately
+for the revolution of thirty years later, which illustrated the
+gallery of heroic women with some of its most splendid names, his
+power was in this respect neutralised by other stronger tendencies in
+the general spirit of the age. The aristocracy of sex was subjected to
+the same destructive criticism as the aristocracy of birth. The same
+feeling for justice which inspired the demand for freedom and equality
+of opportunity among men, led to the demand for the same freedom and
+equality of opportunity between men and women. All this was part of
+the energy of the time, which Rousseau disliked with undisguised
+bitterness. It broke inconveniently in upon his quietest visions. He
+had no conception, with his sensuous brooding imagination, never
+wholly purged of grossness, of that high and pure type of women whom
+French history so often produced in the seventeenth century, and who
+were not wanting towards the close of the eighteenth, a type in which
+devotion went with force, and austerity with sweetness, and divine
+candour and transparent innocence with energetic loyalty and
+intellectual uprightness and a firmly set will. Such thoughts were not
+for Rousseau, a dreamer led by his senses. Perhaps they are for none
+of us any more. When we turn to modern literature from the pages in
+which Fénelon speaks of the education of girls, who does not feel that
+the world has lost a sacred accent, as if some ineffable essence has
+passed out from our hearts?
+
+The fifth book of Emilius is not a chapter on the education of women,
+but an idyll. We have already seen the circumstances under which
+Rousseau composed it, in a profound and delicious solitude, in the
+midst of woods and streams, with the fragrance of the orange-flower
+poured around him, and in continual ecstasy. As an idyll it is
+delicious; as a serious contribution to the hardest of problems it is
+naught. The sequel, by a stroke of matchless whimsicality, unless it
+be meant, as it perhaps may have been, for a piece of deep tragic
+irony, is the best refutation that Rousseau's most energetic adversary
+could have desired. The Sophie who has been educated on the oriental
+principle, has presently to confess a flagrant infidelity to the
+blameless Emilius, her lord.[324]
+
+
+VI.
+
+Yet the sum of the merits of Emilius as a writing upon education is
+not to be lightly counted. Its value lies, as has been said of the New
+Heloïsa, in the spirit which animates it and communicates itself with
+vivid force to the reader. It is one of the seminal books in the
+history of literature, and of such books the worth resides less in the
+parts than in the whole. It touched the deeper things of character. It
+filled parents with a sense of the dignity and moment of their task.
+It cleared away the accumulation of clogging prejudices and obscure
+inveterate usage, which made education one of the dark formalistic
+arts. It admitted floods of light and air into the tightly closed
+nurseries and schoolrooms. It effected the substitution of growth for
+mechanism. A strong current of manliness, wholesomeness, simplicity,
+self-reliance, was sent by it through Europe, while its eloquence was
+the most powerful adjuration ever addressed to parental affection to
+cherish the young life in all love and considerate solicitude. It was
+the charter of youthful deliverance. The first immediate effect of
+Emilius in France was mainly on the religious side. It was the
+Christian religion that needed to be avenged, rather than education
+that needed to be amended, and the press overflowed with replies to
+that profession of faith which we shall consider in the next chapter.
+Still there was also an immense quantity of educational books and
+pamphlets, which is to be set down, first to the suppression of the
+Jesuits, the great educating order, and the vacancy which they left;
+and next to the impulse given by the Emilius to a movement from which
+the book itself had originally been an outcome.[325] But why try to
+state the influence of Emilius on France in this way? To strike the
+account truly would be to write the history of the first French
+Revolution.[326] All mothers, as Michelet says, were big with
+Emilius. "It is not without good reason that people have noted the
+children born at this glorious moment, as animated by a superior
+spirit, by a gift of flame and genius. It is the generation of
+revolutionary Titans: the other generation not less hardy in science.
+It is Danton, Vergniaud, Desmoulins; it is Ampère, La Place, Cuvier,
+Geoffroy Saint Hilaire."[327]
+
+In Germany Emilius had great power. There it fell in with the
+extraordinary movement towards naturalness and freedom of which we
+have already spoken.[328] Herder, whom some have called the Rousseau
+of the Germans, wrote with enthusiasm to his then beloved Caroline of
+the "divine Emilius," and he never ceased to speak of Rousseau as his
+inspirer and his master.[329] Basedow (1723), that strange, restless,
+and most ill-regulated person, was seized with an almost phrenetic
+enthusiasm for Rousseau's educational theories, translated them into
+German, and repeated them in his works over and over again with an
+incessant iteration. Lavater (1741-1801), who differed from Basedow in
+being a fervent Christian of soft mystic faith, was thrown into
+company with him in 1774, and grew equally eager with him in the cause
+of reforming education in the Rousseauite sense.[330] Pestalozzi
+(1746-1827), the most systematic, popular, and permanently successful
+of all the educational reformers, borrowed his spirit and his
+principles mainly from the Emilius, though he gave larger extension
+and more intelligent exactitude to their application. Jean Paul the
+Unique, in the preface to his Levana, or Doctrine of Education (1806),
+one of the most excellent of all books on the subject, declares that
+among previous works to which he owes a debt, "first and last he names
+Rousseau's Emilius; no preceding work can be compared to his; in no
+previous work on education was the ideal so richly combined with the
+actual," and so forth.[331] It was not merely a Goethe, a Schiller, a
+Herder, whom Rousseau fired with new thoughts. The smaller men, such
+as Fr. Jacobi, Heinse, Klinger, shared the same inspiration. The
+worship of Rousseau penetrated all classes, and touched every degree
+of intelligence.[332]
+
+In our own country Emilius was translated as soon as it appeared, and
+must have been widely read, for a second version of the translation
+was called for in a very short time. So far as a cursory survey gives
+one a right to speak, its influence here in the field of education is
+not very perceptible. That subject did not yet, nor for some time to
+come, excite much active thought in England. Rousseau's speculations
+on society both in the Emilius and elsewhere seem to have attracted
+more attention. Reference has already been made to Paley.[333] Adam
+Ferguson's celebrated Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) has
+many allusions, direct and indirect, to Rousseau.[334] Kames's
+Sketches of the History of Man (1774) abounds still more copiously in
+references to Emilius, sometimes to controvert its author, more often
+to cite him as an authority worthy of respect, and Rousseau's crude
+notions about women are cited with special acceptance.[335] Cowper was
+probably thinking of the Savoyard Vicar when he wrote the energetic
+lines in the Task, beginning "Haste now, philosopher, and set him
+free," scornfully defying the deist to rescue apostate man.[336] Nor
+should we omit what was counted so important a book in its day as
+Godwin's Enquiry concerning Political Justice (1793). It is perhaps
+more French in its spirit than any other work of equal consequence in
+our literature of politics, and in its composition the author was
+avowedly a student of Rousseau, as well as of the members of the
+materialistic school.
+
+In fine we may add that Emilius was the first expression of that
+democratic tendency in education, which political and other
+circumstances gradually made general alike in England, France, and
+Germany; a tendency, that is, to look on education as a process
+concerning others besides the rich and the well-born. As has often
+been remarked, Ascham, Milton, Locke, Fénelon, busy themselves about
+the instruction of young gentlemen and gentlewomen. The rest of the
+world are supposed to be sufficiently provided for by the education of
+circumstance. Since the middle of the eighteenth century this
+monopolising conception has vanished, along with and through the same
+general agencies as the corresponding conception of social monopoly.
+Rousseau enforced the production of a natural and self-sufficing man
+as the object of education, and showed, or did his best to show, the
+infinite capacity of the young for that simple and natural
+cultivation. This easily and directly led people to reflect that such
+a capacity was not confined to the children of the rich, nor the hope
+of producing a natural and sufficing man narrowed to those who had
+every external motive placed around them for being neither natural nor
+self-sufficing.
+
+Voltaire pronounced Emilius a stupid romance, but admitted that it
+contained fifty pages which he would have bound in morocco. These, we
+may be sure, concerned religion; in truth it was the Savoyard Vicar's
+profession of faith which stirred France far more than the upbringing
+of the natural man in things temporal. Let us pass to that eloquent
+document which is inserted in the middle of the Emilius, as the
+expression of the religious opinion that best befits the man of
+nature--a document most hyperbolically counted by some French
+enthusiasts for the spiritualist philosophy and the religion of
+sentiment, as the noblest monument of the eighteenth century.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[273] _Mém. de Mdme. d'Epinay_, ii. 276, 278.
+
+[274] _Lettres à mon Fils_ (1758), and _Les Conversations d'Emilie_
+(1783).
+
+[275] _Lettres Péruviennes._
+
+[276] _Oeuv._, ii. 785-794.
+
+[277] _Corr. Lit._, iii. 65.
+
+[278] _Emile_, I. 27.
+
+[279] It is interesting to recall a similar movement in the Roman
+society of the second century of our era. See the advice of Favorinus
+to mothers, in Aulus Gellius, xii. 1. M. Boissier, contrasting the
+solicitude of Tacitus and Marcus Aurelius for the infant young with
+the brutality of Cicero, remarks that in the time of Seneca men
+discussed in the schools the educational theories of Rousseau's
+Emilius. (_La Relig. Romaine_, ii. 202.)
+
+[280] See also his diatribe against whalebone and tight-lacing for
+girls, V. 27.
+
+[281] _Emile_, I. 93, etc.
+
+[282] _Emile_, II. 141.
+
+[283] _Emile_, II. 156-160.
+
+[284] _Emile_, III. 338-345.
+
+[285] III. 358, etc.
+
+[286] _Emile_, II. 263-267.
+
+[287] _Levana_, ch. iii. § 54.
+
+[288] _Emile_, II. 163.
+
+[289] The Ninth Promenade (_Rêveries_, 309).
+
+[290] _Emile_, I. 23.
+
+[291] II. 109.
+
+[292] II. 111.
+
+[293] _Emile_, II. 113-117.
+
+[294] II. 121.
+
+[295] II. 143.
+
+[296] _Emile_, III. 382.
+
+[297] II. 227.
+
+[298] IV. 10.
+
+[299] _Emile_, III. 394.
+
+[300] V. 199.
+
+[301] The reader will not forget the famous supper-party of princes in
+_Candide_.
+
+[302] _Emile_, III. 392, and note. A still more remarkable passage, as
+far as it goes, is that in the _Confessions_ (xi. 136):--"The
+disasters of an unsuccessful war, all of which came from the fault of
+the government, the incredible disorder of the finances, the continual
+dissensions of the administration, divided as it was among two or
+three ministers at open war with one another, and who for the sake of
+hurting one another dragged the kingdom into ruin; the general
+discontent of the people, and of all the orders of the state; the
+obstinacy of a wrong-headed woman, who, always sacrificing her better
+judgment, if indeed she had any, to her tastes, dismissed the most
+capable from office, to make room for her favourites ... all this
+prospect of a coming break-up made me think of seeking shelter
+elsewhere."
+
+[303] _Emile_, V. 220.
+
+[304] IV. 85.
+
+[305] _Emile_, IV. 38, 39. Hence, we suppose, the famous reply to
+Lavoisier's request that his life might be spared from the guillotine
+for a fortnight, in order that he might complete some experiments,
+that the Republic has no need of chemists.
+
+[306] IV. 65. Jefferson, who was American minister in France from 1784
+to 1789, and absorbed a great many of the ideas then afloat, writes in
+words that seem as if they were borrowed from Rousseau:--"I am
+convinced that those societies (as the Indians) which live without
+government, enjoy in their general mass an infinitely greater degree
+of happiness than those who live under European governments. Among the
+former public opinion is in the state of law, and restrains morals as
+powerfully as laws ever did anywhere. Among the latter, under pretence
+of governing, they have divided their nation into two classes, wolves
+and sheep. I do not exaggerate; this is a true picture of Europe."
+Tucker's _Life of Jefferson_, i. 255.
+
+[307] Lamennais was influenced by Rousseau throughout. In the _Essay
+on Indifference_ he often appeals to him as the vindicator of the
+religious sentiment (_e.g._ i. 21, 52, iv. 375, etc. Ed. 1837). The
+same influence is seen still more markedly in the _Words of a
+Believer_ (1835), when dogma had departed, and he was left with a kind
+of dual deism, thus being less estranged from Rousseau than in the
+first days (_e.g._ § xix. "Tous naissent égaux," etc., § xxi., etc.)
+The _Book of the People_ is thoroughly Rousseauite.
+
+[308] _Emile_, IV. 105.
+
+[309] _Emile_, IV. 63.
+
+[310] _Emile_, IV. 273.
+
+[311] _Emile_, IV. 83.
+
+[312] _Emile_, II. 185. See the previous page for some equally prudent
+observations on the folly of teaching geography to little children.
+
+[313] _Emile_, IV. 68.
+
+[314] V. 231, etc.
+
+[315] _Emile_, IV. 71.
+
+[316] _Emile_, IV. 73.
+
+[317] IV. 77.
+
+[318] _Emile_, V. 22, 53, 54, 101, 128-132.
+
+[319] _Emile_, V. 78.
+
+[320] V. 122.
+
+[321] V. 129, 130.
+
+[322] Well did Jean Paul say, "If we regard all life as an educational
+institution, a circumnavigator of the world is less influenced by all
+the nations he has seen than by his nurse."--_Levana._
+
+[323] _Tableau des Progrès de l'Esprit Humain._ _Oeuv._, vi. pp. 264,
+523-526, and elsewhere. [Ed. 1847-1849.]
+
+[324] _Emile et Sophie_, i.
+
+[325] For an account of some of these, see Grimm's _Corr. Lit._, iii.
+211, 252, 347, etc. Also _Corr. Inéd._, p. 143.
+
+[326] For the early date at which Rousseau's power began to meet
+recognition, see D'Alembert to Voltaire, July 31, 1762.
+
+[327] _Louis xv. et xvi._, p. 226.
+
+[328] See above, vol. ii. p. 193.
+
+[329] Hettner, III. iii., 2, p. 27, _s.v._ Herder.
+
+[330] The suggestion of the speculation with which Lavater's name is
+most commonly associated, is to be found in the Emilius. "It is
+supposed that physiognomy is only a development of features already
+marked by nature. For my part, I should think that besides this
+development, the features of a man's countenance form themselves
+insensibly and take their expression from the frequent and habitual
+wearing into them of certain affections of the soul. These affections
+mark themselves in the countenance, nothing is more certain; and when
+they grow into habits, they must leave durable impressions upon it."
+IV. 49, 50.
+
+[331] Author's Preface, x.
+
+[332] See an excellent page in M. Joret's _Herder_, 322.
+
+[333] See above, vol. ii. p. 191.
+
+[334] _E.g._ pp. 8, 198, 204, 205.
+
+[335] _E.g._ Bk. I. § 5, p. 279. § 6, p. 406, 419, etc. (the portion
+concerning the female sex).
+
+[336] Vv. 670-703. We have already seen (above, vol. ii. p. 41, _n._)
+that Cowper had read Emilius, and the mocking reference to the Deist
+as "an Orpheus and omnipotent in song," coincides with Rousseau's
+comparison of the Savoyard Vicar to "the divine Orpheus singing the
+first hymn" (_Emile_, IV. 205).
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+THE SAVOYARD VICAR.
+
+
+The band of dogmatic atheists who met round D'Holbach's
+dinner-table indulged a shallow and futile hope, if it was not an
+ungenerous one, when they expected the immediate advent of a
+generation with whom a humane and rational philosophy should displace,
+not merely the superstitions which had grown around the Christian
+dogma, but every root and fragment of theistic conception. A hope of
+this kind implied a singularly random idea, alike of the hold which
+Christianity had taken of the religious emotion in western Europe, and
+of the durableness of those conditions in human character, to which
+some belief in a deity with a greater or fewer number of good
+attributes brings solace and nourishment. A movement like that of
+Christianity does not pass through a group of societies, and then
+leave no trace behind. It springs from many other sources besides that
+of adherence to the truth of its dogmas. The stream of its influence
+must continue to flow long after adherence to the letter has been
+confined to the least informed portions of a community. The
+Encyclopædists knew that they had sapped religious dogma and shaken
+ecclesiastical organisation. They forgot that religious sentiment on
+the one hand, and habit of respect for authority on the other, were
+both of them still left behind. They had convinced themselves by a
+host of persuasive analogies that the universe is an automatic
+machine, and man only an industrious particle in the stupendous whole;
+that a final cause is not cognisable by our limited intelligence; and
+that to make emotion in this or any other respect a test of objective
+truth and a ground of positive belief, is to lower both truth and the
+reason which is its single arbiter. They forgot that imagination is as
+active in man as his reason, and that a craving for mental peace may
+become much stronger than passion for demonstrated truth. Christianity
+had given to this craving in western Europe a definite mould, which
+was not to be effaced in a day, and one or two of its lines mark a
+permanent and noble acquisition to the highest forces of human nature.
+There will have to be wrought a profounder and more far-spreading
+modification than any which the French atheists could effect, before
+all debilitating influences in the old creed can be effaced, its
+elevating influences finally separated from them, and then permanently
+preserved in more beneficent form and in an association less
+questionable to the understanding.
+
+Neither a purely negative nor a direct attack can ever suffice. There
+must be a coincidence of many silently oppugnant forces, emotional,
+scientific, and material. And, above all, there must be the slow
+steadfast growth of some replacing faith, which shall retain all the
+elements of moral beauty that once gave light to the old belief that
+has disappeared, and must still possess a living force in the new.
+
+Here we find the good side of a religious reaction such as that which
+Rousseau led in the last century, and of which the Savoyard Vicar's
+profession of faith was the famous symbol. Evil as this reaction was
+in many respects, and especially in the check which it gave to the
+application of positive methods and conceptions to the most important
+group of our beliefs, yet it had what was the very signal merit under
+the circumstances of the time, of keeping the religious emotions alive
+in association with a tolerant, pure, lofty, and living set of
+articles of faith, instead of feeding them on the dead superstitions
+which were at that moment the only practical alternative. The deism of
+Rousseau could not in any case have acquired the force of the
+corresponding religious reaction in England, because the former never
+acquired a compact and vigorous external organisation, as the latter
+did, especially in Wesleyanism and Evangelicalism, the most remarkable
+of its developments. In truth the vague, fluid, purely subjective
+character of deism disqualifies it from forming the doctrinal basis of
+any great objective and visible church, for it is at bottom the
+sublimation of individualism. But in itself it was a far less
+retrogressive, as well as a far less powerful, movement. It kept fewer
+of those dogmas which gradual change of intellectual climate had
+reduced to the condition of rank superstitions. It preserved some of
+its own, which a still further extension of the same change is
+assuredly destined to reduce to the same condition; but, nevertheless,
+along with them it cherished sentiments which the world will never
+willingly let die.
+
+The one cardinal service of the Christian doctrine, which is of course
+to be distinguished from the services rendered to civilisation in
+early times by the Christian church, has been the contribution to the
+active intelligence of the west, of those moods of holiness, awe,
+reverence, and silent worship of an Unseen not made with hands, which
+the Christianising Jews first brought from the east. Of the fabric
+which four centuries ago looked so stupendous and so enduring, with
+its magnificent whole and its minutely reticulated parts of belief and
+practice, this gradual creation of a new temperament in the religious
+imagination of Western Europe and the countries that take their mental
+direction from her, is perhaps the only portion that will remain
+distinctly visible, after all the rest has sunk into the repose of
+histories of opinion. Whether this be the case or not, the fact that
+these deeper moods are among the richest acquisitions of human nature,
+will not be denied either by those who think that Christianity
+associates them with objects destined permanently to awake them in
+their loftiest form, or by others who believe that the deepest moods
+of which man is capable, must ultimately ally themselves with
+something still more purely spiritual than the anthropomorphised
+deities of the falling church. And if so, then Rousseau's deism, while
+intercepting the steady advance of the rationalistic assault and
+diverting the current of renovating energy, still did something to
+keep alive in a more or less worthy shape those parts of the slowly
+expiring system which men have the best reasons for cherishing.
+
+Let us endeavour to characterise Rousseau's deism with as much
+precision as it allows. It was a special and graceful form of a
+doctrine which, though susceptible, alike in theory and in the
+practical history of religious thought, of numberless wide varieties
+of significance, is commonly designated by the name of deism, without
+qualification. People constantly speak as if deism only came in with
+the eighteenth century. It would be impossible to name any century
+since the twelfth, in which distinct and abundant traces could not be
+found within the dominion of Christianity of a belief in a
+supernatural power apart from the supposed disclosure of it in a
+special revelation.[337] A præter-christian deism, or the principle of
+natural religion, was inevitably contained in the legal conception of
+a natural law, for how can we dissociate the idea of law from the idea
+of a definite lawgiver? The very scholastic disputations themselves,
+by the sharpness and subtlety which they gave to the reasoning
+faculty, set men in search of novelties, and these novelties were not
+always of a kind which orthodox views of the Christian mysteries could
+have sanctioned. It has been said that religion is at the cradle of
+every nation, and philosophy at its grave; it is at least true that
+the cradle of philosophy is the open grave of religion. Wherever there
+is argumentation, there is sure to be scepticism. When people begin to
+reason, a shadow has already fallen across faith, though the reasoners
+might have shrunk with horror from knowledge of the goal of their
+work, and though centuries may elapse before the shadow deepens into
+eclipse. But the church was strong and alert in the times when free
+thought vainly tried to rear a dangerous head in Italy. With the
+Protestant revolution came slowly a wider freedom, while the prolonged
+and tempestuous discussion between the old church and the reformed
+bodies, as well as the manifold variations among those bodies at
+strife with one another, stimulated the growth of religious thought in
+many directions that tended away from the exclusive pretensions of
+Christianity to be the oracle of the divine Spirit. The same feeling
+which thrust aside the sacerdotal interposition between the soul of
+man and its sovereign creator and inspirer, gradually worked towards
+the dethronement of those mediators other than sacerdotal, in whom the
+moral timidity of a dark and stricken age had once sought shade from
+the too dazzling brightness of the All-powerful and the Everlasting.
+The assertion of the rights and powers of the individual reason within
+the limits of the sacred documents, began in less than a hundred years
+to grow into an assertion of the same rights and powers beyond those
+limits. The rejection of tradition as a substitute for independent
+judgment, in interpreting or supplementing the records of revelation,
+gradually impaired the traditional authority both of the records
+themselves, and of the central doctrines which all churches had in one
+shape or another agreed to accept. The Trinitarian controversy of the
+sixteenth century must have been a stealthy solvent. The deism of
+England in the eighteenth century, which Voltaire was the prime agent
+in introducing in its negative, colourless, and essentially futile
+shape into his own country, had its main effect as a process of
+dissolution.
+
+All this, however, down to the deistical movement which Rousseau found
+in progress at Geneva in 1754,[338] was distinctly the outcome in a
+more or less marked way of a rationalising and philosophic spirit, and
+not of the religious spirit. The sceptical side of it with reference
+to revealed religion, predominated over the positive side of it with
+reference to natural religion. The wild pantheism of which there were
+one or two extraordinary outbursts during the latter part of the
+middle ages, to mark the mystical influence which Platonic studies
+uncorrected by science always exert over certain temperaments, had
+been full of religiosity, such as it was. These had all passed away
+with a swift flash. There were, indeed, mystics like the author of the
+immortal _De Imitatione_, in whom the special qualities of Christian
+doctrine seem to have grown pale in a brighter flood of devout
+aspiration towards the perfections of a single Being. But this was not
+the deism with which either Christianity on the one side, or atheism
+on the other, had ever had to deal in France. Deism, in its formal
+acceptation, was either an idle piece of vaporous sentimentality, or
+else it was the first intellectual halting-place for spirits who had
+travelled out of the pale of the old dogmatic Christianity, and lacked
+strength for the continuance of their onward journey. In the latter
+case, it was only another name either for the shrewd rough conviction
+of the man of the world, that his universe could not well be imagined
+to go on without a sort of constitutional monarch, reigning but not
+governing, keeping evil-doers in order by fear of eternal punishment,
+and lending a sacred countenance to the indispensable doctrines of
+property, the gradation of rank and station, and the other moral
+foundations of the social structure. Or else it was a name for a
+purely philosophic principle, not embraced with fervour as the basis
+of a religion, but accepted with decorous satisfaction as the
+alternative to a religion; not seized upon as the mainspring of
+spiritual life, but held up as a shield in a controversy.
+
+The deism which the Savoyard Vicar explained to Emilius in his
+profession of faith was pitched in a very different tone from this.
+Though the Vicar's conception of the Deity was lightly fenced round
+with rationalistic supports of the usual kind, drawn from the
+evidences of will and intelligence in the vast machinery of the
+universe, yet it was essentially the product not of reason, but of
+emotional expansion, as every fundamental article of a faith that
+touches the hearts of many men must always be. The Savoyard Vicar did
+not believe that a God had made the great world, and rules it with
+majestic power and supreme justice, in the same way in which he
+believed that any two sides of a triangle are greater than the third
+side. That there is a mysterious being penetrating all creation with
+force, was not a proposition to be demonstrated, but only the poor
+description in words of an habitual mood going far deeper into life
+than words can ever carry us. Without for a single moment falling off
+into the nullities of pantheism, neither did he for a single moment
+suffer his thought to stiffen and grow hard in the formal lines of a
+theological definition or a systematic credo. It remains firm enough
+to give the religious imagination consistency and a centre, yet
+luminous enough to give the spiritual faculty a vivifying
+consciousness of freedom and space. A creed is concerned with a number
+of affirmations, and is constantly held with honest strenuousness by
+multitudes of men and women who are unfitted by natural temperament
+for knowing what the glow of religious emotion means to the human
+soul,--for not every one that saith, Lord, Lord, enters the kingdom of
+heaven. The Savoyard Vicar's profession of faith was not a creed, and
+so has few affirmations; it was a single doctrine, melted in a glow of
+contemplative transport. It is impossible to set about disproving it,
+for its exponent repeatedly warns his disciple against the idleness of
+logomachy, and insists that the existence of the Divinity is traced
+upon every heart in letters that can never be effaced, if we are only
+content to read them with lowliness and simplicity. You cannot
+demonstrate an emotion, nor prove an aspiration. How reason, asks the
+Savoyard Vicar, about that which we cannot conceive? Conscience is the
+best of all casuists, and conscience affirms the presence of a being
+who moves the universe and ordains all things, and to him we give the
+name of God.
+
+"To this name I join the ideas of intelligence, power, will, which I
+have united in one, and that of goodness, which is a necessary
+consequence flowing from them. But I do not know any the better for
+this the being to whom I have given the name; he escapes equally from
+my senses and my understanding; the more I think of him, the more I
+confound myself. I have full assurance that he exists, and that he
+exists by himself. I recognise my own being as subordinate to his and
+all the things that are known to me as being absolutely in the same
+case. I perceive God everywhere in his works; I feel him in myself; I
+see him universally around me. But when I fain would seek where he is,
+what he is, of what substance, he glides away from me, and my troubled
+soul discerns nothing."[339]
+
+"In fine, the more earnestly I strive to contemplate his infinite
+essence, the less do I conceive it. But it is, and that suffices me.
+The less I conceive it, the more I adore. I bow myself down, and say
+to him, O being of beings, I am because thou art; to meditate
+ceaselessly on thee by day and night, is to raise myself to my
+veritable source and fount. The worthiest use of my reason is to make
+itself as naught before thee. It is the ravishment of my soul, it is
+the solace of my weakness, to feel myself brought low before the awful
+majesty of thy greatness."[340]
+
+Souls weary of the fierce mockeries that had so long been flying like
+fiery shafts against the far Jehovah of the Hebrews, and the silent
+Christ of the later doctors and dignitaries, and weary too of the
+orthodox demonstrations that did not demonstrate, and leaden
+refutations that could not refute, may well have turned with ardour to
+listen to this harmonious spiritual voice, sounding clear from a
+region towards which their hearts yearned with untold aspiration, but
+from which the spirit of their time had shut them off with brazen
+barriers. It was the elevation and expansion of man, as much as it was
+the restoration of a divinity. To realise this, one must turn to such
+a book as Helvétius's, which was supposed to reveal the whole inner
+machinery of the heart. Man was thought of as a singular piece of
+mechanism principally moved from without, not as a conscious organism,
+receiving nourishment and direction from the medium in which it is
+placed, but reacting with a life of its own from within. It was this
+free and energetic inner life of the individual which the Savoyard
+Vicar restored to lawful recognition, and made once more the centre of
+that imaginative and spiritual existence, without which we live in a
+universe that has no sun by day nor any stars by night. A writer in
+whom learning has not extinguished enthusiasm, compares this to the
+advance made by Descartes, who had given certitude to the soul by
+turning thought confidently upon itself; and he declares that the
+Savoyard Vicar is for the emancipation of sentiment what the Discourse
+upon Method was for the emancipation of the understanding.[341] There
+is here a certain audacity of panegyric; still the fact that Rousseau
+chose to link the highest forms of man's ideal life with a fading
+projection of the lofty image which had been set up in older days,
+ought not to blind us to the excellent energies which, notwithstanding
+defect of association, such a vindication of the ideal was certain to
+quicken. And at least the lines of that high image were nobly traced.
+
+Yet who does not feel that it is a divinity for fair weather?
+Rousseau, with his fine sense of a proper and artistic setting,
+imagined the Savoyard Vicar as leading his youthful convert at break
+of a summer day to the top of a high hill, at whose feet the Po flowed
+between fertile banks; in the distance the immense chain of the Alps
+crowned the landscape; the rays of the rising sun projected long level
+shadows from the trees, the slopes, the houses, and accented with a
+thousand lines of light the most magnificent of panoramas.[342] This
+was the fitting suggestion, so serene, warm, pregnant with power and
+hope, and half mysterious, of the idea of godhead which the man of
+peace after an interval of silent contemplation proceeded to expound.
+Rousseau's sentimental idea at least did not revolt moral sense; it
+did not afflict the firmness of intelligence; nor did it silence the
+diviner melodies of the soul. Yet, once more, the heavens in which
+such a deity dwells are too high, his power is too impalpable, the
+mysterious air which he has poured around his being is too awful and
+impenetrable, for the rays from the sun of such majesty to reach more
+than a few contemplative spirits, and these only in their hours of
+tranquillity and expansion. The thought is too vague, too far, to
+bring comfort and refreshment to the mass of travailing men, or to
+invest duty with the stern ennobling quality of being done, "if I have
+grace to use it so as ever in the great Taskmaster's eye."
+
+The Savoyard Vicar was consistent with the sublimity of his own
+conception. He meditated on the order of the universe with a reverence
+too profound to allow him to mingle with his thoughts meaner desires
+as to the special relations of that order to himself. "I penetrate all
+my faculties," he said, "with the divine essence of the author of the
+world; I melt at the thought of his goodness, and bless all his gifts,
+but I do not pray to him. What should I ask of him? That for me he
+should change the course of things, and in my favour work miracles?
+Could I, who must love above all else the order established by his
+wisdom and upheld by his providence, presume to wish such order
+troubled for my sake? Nor do I ask of him the power of doing
+righteousness; why ask for what he has given me? Has he not bestowed
+on me conscience to love what is good, reason to ascertain it, freedom
+to choose it? If I do ill, I have no excuse; I do it because I will
+it. To pray to him to change my will, is to seek from him what he
+seeks from me; it is to wish no longer to be human, it is to wish
+something other than what is, it is to wish disorder and evil."[343]
+We may admire both the logical consistency of such self-denial and the
+manliness which it would engender in the character that were strong
+enough to practise it. But a divinity who has conceded no right of
+petition is still further away from our lives than the divinities of
+more popular creeds.
+
+Even the fairest deism is of its essence a faith of egotism and
+complacency. It does not incorporate in the very heart of the
+religious emotion the pitifulness and sorrow which Christianity first
+clothed with associations of sanctity, and which can never henceforth
+miss their place in any religious system to be accepted by men. Why is
+this? Because a religion that leaves them out, or thrusts them into a
+hidden corner, fails to comprehend at least one half, and that the
+most touching and impressive half, of the most conspicuous facts of
+human life. Rousseau was fuller of the capacity of pity than ordinary
+men, and this pity was one of the deepest parts of himself. Yet it did
+not enter into the composition of his religious faith, and this shows
+that his religious faith, though entirely free from suspicion of
+insincerity or ostentatious assumption, was like deism in so many
+cases, whether rationalistic or emotional, a kind of gratuitously
+adopted superfluity, not the satisfaction of a profound inner craving
+and resistless spiritual necessity. He speaks of the good and the
+wicked with the precision and assurance of the most pharisaic
+theologian, and he begins by asking of what concern it is to him
+whether the wicked are punished with eternal torment or not, though he
+concludes more graciously with the hope that in another state the
+wicked, delivered from their malignity, may enjoy a bliss no less than
+his own.[344] But the divine pitifulness which we owe to
+Christianity, and which will not be the less eagerly cherished by
+those who repudiate Christian tradition and doctrines, enjoins upon us
+that we should ask, Who are the wicked, and which is he that is
+without sin among us? Rousseau answered this glibly enough by some
+formula of metaphysics, about the human will having been left and
+constituted free by the creator of the world; and that man is the bad
+man who abuses his freedom. Grace, fate, destiny, force of
+circumstances, are all so many names for the protests which the frank
+sense of fact has forced from man against this miserably inadequate
+explanation of the foundations of moral responsibility.
+
+Whatever these foundations may be, the theories of grace and fate had
+at any rate the quality of connecting human conduct with the will of
+the gods. Rousseau's deism, severing the influence of the Supreme
+Being upon man, at the very moment when it could have saved him from
+the guilt that brings misery,--that is at the moment when conduct
+begins to follow the preponderant motives or the will,--did thus
+effectually cut off the most admirable and fertile group of our
+sympathies from all direct connection with religious sentiment.
+Toiling as manfully as we may through the wilderness of our seventy
+years, we are to reserve our deepest adoration for the being who has
+left us there, with no other solace than that he is good and just and
+all-powerful, and might have given us comfort and guidance if he
+would. This was virtually the form which Pelagius had tried to impose
+upon Christianity in the fifth century, and which the souls of men,
+thirsting for consciousness of an active divine presence, had then
+under the lead of Augustine so energetically cast away from them. The
+faith to which they clung while rejecting this great heresy, though
+just as transcendental, still had the quality of satisfying a
+spiritual want. It was even more readily to be accepted by the human
+intelligence, for it endowed the supreme power with the father's
+excellence of compassion, and presented for our reverence and
+gratitude and devotion a figure who drew from men the highest love for
+the God whom they had not seen, along with the warmest pity and love
+for their brethren whom they had seen.
+
+The Savoyard Vicar's own position to Christianity was one of
+reverential scepticism. "The holiness of the gospel," he said, "is an
+argument that speaks to my heart and to which I should even be sorry
+to find a good answer. Look at the books of the philosophers with all
+their pomp; how puny they are by the side of that! Is there here the
+tone of an enthusiast or an ambitious sectary? What gentleness, what
+purity, in his manners, what touching grace in his teaching, what
+loftiness in his maxims! Assuredly there was something more than human
+in such teaching, such a character, such a life, such a death. If the
+life and death of Socrates were those of a sage, the life and death
+of Jesus are those of a god. Shall we say that the history of the
+gospels is invented at pleasure? My friend, that is not the fashion of
+invention; and the facts about Socrates are less attested than the
+facts about Christ.[345] Yet with all that, this same gospel abounds
+in things incredible, which are repugnant to reason, and which it is
+impossible for any sensible man to conceive or admit. What are we to
+do in the midst of all these contradictions? To be ever modest and
+circumspect, my son; to respect in silence what one can neither reject
+nor understand, and to make one's self lowly before the great being
+who alone knows the truth."[346]
+
+"I regard all particular religions as so many salutary institutions,
+which prescribe in every country a uniform manner of honouring God by
+public worship. I believe them all good, so long as men serve God
+fittingly in them. The essential worship is the worship of the heart.
+God never rejects this homage, under whatever form it be offered to
+him. In other days I used to say mass with the levity which in time
+infects even the gravest things, when we do them too often. Since
+acquiring my new principles I celebrate it with more veneration; I am
+overwhelmed by the majesty of the Supreme Being, by his presence, by
+the insufficiency of the human mind, which conceives so little what
+pertains to its author. When I approach the moment of consecration, I
+collect myself for performing the act with all the feelings required
+by the church, and the majesty of the sacrament; I strive to
+annihilate my reason before the supreme intelligence, saying, 'Who art
+thou, that thou shouldest measure infinite power?'"[347]
+
+A creed like this, whatever else it may be, is plainly a powerful
+solvent of every system of exclusive dogma. If the one essential to
+true worship, the worship of the heart and the inner sentiment, be
+mystic adoration of an indefinable Supreme, then creeds based upon
+books, prophecies, miracles, revelations, all fall alike into the
+second place among things that may be lawful and may be expedient, but
+that can never be exacted from men by a just God as indispensable to
+virtue in this world or to bliss in the next. No better answer has
+ever been given to the exclusive pretensions of sect, Christian,
+Jewish, or Mahometan, than that propounded by the Savoyard Vicar with
+such energy, closeness, and most sarcastic fire.[348] It was turning
+an unexpected front upon the presumptuousness of all varieties of
+theological infallibilists, to prove to them that if you insist upon
+acceptance of this or that special revelation, over and above the
+dictates of natural religion, then you are bound not only to grant,
+but imperatively to enjoin upon all men, a searching inquiry and
+comparison, that they may spare no pains in an affair of such
+momentous issue in proving to themselves that this, and none of the
+competing revelations, is the veritable message of eternal safety.
+"Then no other study will be possible but that of religion: hardly
+shall one who has enjoyed the most robust health, employed his time
+and used his reason to best purpose, and lived the greatest number of
+years, hardly shall such an one in his extreme age be quite sure what
+to believe, and it will be a marvel if he finds out before he dies, in
+what faith he ought to have lived." The superiority of the sceptical
+parts of the Savoyard Vicar's profession, as well as those of the
+Letters from the Mountain to which we referred previously, over the
+biting mockeries which Voltaire had made the fashionable method of
+assault, lay in this fact. The latter only revolted and irritated all
+serious temperaments to whom religion is a matter of honest concern,
+while the former actually appealed to their religious sense in support
+of his doubts; and the more intelligent and sincere this sense
+happened to be, the more surely would Rousseau's gravely urged
+objections dissolve the hard particles of dogmatic belief. His
+objections were on a moral level with the best side of the religion
+that they oppugned. Those of Voltaire were only on a level with its
+lowest side, and that was the side presented by the gross and
+repulsive obscurantism of the functionaries of the church.
+
+Unfortunately Rousseau had placed in the hands of the partisans of
+every exclusive revelation an instrument which was quite enough to
+disperse all his objections to the winds, and which was the very
+instrument that defended his own cherished religion. If he was
+satisfied with replying to the atheist and the materialist, that he
+knew there is a supreme God, and that the soul must have here and
+hereafter an existence apart from the body, because he found these
+truths ineffaceably written upon his own heart, what could prevent the
+Christian or the Mahometan from replying to Rousseau that the New
+Testament or the Koran is the special and final revelation from the
+Supreme Power to his creatures? If you may appeal to the voice of the
+heart and the dictate of the inner sentiment in one case, why not in
+the other also? A subjective test necessarily proves anything that any
+man desires, and the accident of the article proved appearing either
+reasonable or monstrous to other people, cannot have the least bearing
+on its efficacy or conclusiveness.
+
+Deism like the Savoyard Vicar's opens no path for the future, because
+it makes no allowance for the growth of intellectual conviction, and
+binds up religion with mystery, with an object whose attributes can
+neither be conceived nor defined, with a Being too all-embracing to be
+able to receive anything from us, too august, self-contained, remote,
+to be able to bestow on us the humble gifts of which we have need. The
+temperature of thought is slowly but without an instant's recoil
+rising to a point when a mystery like this, definite enough to be
+imposed as a faith, but too indefinite to be grasped by understanding
+as a truth, melts away from the emotions of religion. Then those
+instincts of holiness, without which the world would be to so many of
+its highest spirits the most dreary of exiles, will perhaps come to
+associate themselves less with unseen divinities, than with the long
+brotherhood of humanity seen and unseen. Here we shall move with an
+assurance that no scepticism and no advance of science can ever shake,
+because the benefactions which we have received from the strenuousness
+of human effort can never be doubted, and each fresh acquisition in
+knowledge or goodness can only kindle new fervour. Those who have the
+religious imagination struck by the awful procession of man from the
+region of impenetrable night, by his incessant struggle with the
+hardness of the material world, and his sublimer struggle with the
+hard world of his own egotistic passions, by the pain and sacrifice by
+which generation after generation has added some small piece to the
+temple of human freedom or some new fragment to the ever incomplete
+sum of human knowledge, or some fresh line to the types of strong or
+beautiful character,--those who have an eye for all this may indeed
+have no ecstasy and no terror, no heaven nor hell, in their religion,
+but they will have abundant moods of reverence, deep-seated gratitude,
+and sovereign pitifulness.
+
+And such moods will not end in sterile exaltation, or the deathly
+chills of spiritual reaction. They will bring forth abundant fruit in
+new hope and invigorated endeavour. This devout contemplation of the
+experience of the race, instead of raising a man into the clouds,
+brings him into the closest, loftiest, and most conscious relations
+with his kind, to whom he owes all that is of value in his own life,
+and to whom he can repay his debt by maintaining the beneficent
+tradition of service, by cherishing honour for all the true and sage
+spirits that have shone upon the earth, and sorrow and reprobation for
+all the unworthier souls whose light has gone out in baseness. A man
+with this faith can have no foul spiritual pride, for there is no
+mysteriously accorded divine grace in which one may be a larger
+participant than another. He can have no incentives to that mutilation
+with which every branch of the church, from the oldest to the youngest
+and crudest, has in its degree afflicted and retarded mankind, because
+the key-note of his religion is the joyful energy of every faculty,
+practical, reflective, creative, contemplative, in pursuit of a
+visible common good. And he can be plunged into no fatal and
+paralysing despair by any doctrine of mortal sin, because active faith
+in humanity, resting on recorded experience, discloses the many
+possibilities of moral recovery, and the work that may be done for men
+in the fragment of days, redeeming the contrite from their burdens by
+manful hope. If religion is our feeling about the highest forces that
+govern human destiny, then as it becomes more and more evident how
+much our destiny is shaped by the generation of the dead who have
+prepared the present, and by the purport of our hopes and the
+direction of our activity for the generations that are to fill the
+future, the religious sentiment will more and more attach itself to
+the great unseen host of our fellows who have gone before us and who
+are to come after. Such a faith is no rag of metaphysic floating in
+the sunshine of sentimentalism, like Rousseau's faith. It rests on a
+positive base, which only becomes wider and firmer with the widening
+of experience and the augmentation of our skill in interpreting it.
+Nor is it too transcendent for practical acceptance. One of the most
+scientific spirits of the eighteenth century, while each moment
+expecting the knock of the executioner at his door, found as religious
+a solace as any early martyr had ever found in his barbarous
+mysteries, when he linked his own efforts for reason and freedom with
+the eternal chain of the destinies of man. "This contemplation," he
+wrote and felt, "is for him a refuge into which the rancour of his
+persecutors can never follow him; in which, living in thought with man
+reinstated in the rights and the dignity of his nature, he forgets man
+tormented and corrupted by greed, by base fear, by envy; it is here
+that he truly abides with his fellows, in an elysium that his reason
+has known how to create for itself, and that his love for humanity
+adorns with all purest delights."[349]
+
+This, to the shame of those wavering souls who despair of progress at
+the first moment when it threatens to leave the path that they have
+marked out for it, was written by a man at the very close of his days,
+when every hope that he had ever cherished seemed to one without the
+eye of faith to be extinguished in bloodshed, disorder, and barbarism.
+But there is a still happier season in the adolescence of generous
+natures that have been wisely fostered, when the horizons of the
+dawning life are suddenly lighted up with a glow of aspiration towards
+good and holy things. Commonly, alas, this priceless opportunity is
+lost in a fit of theological exaltation, which is gradually choked out
+by the dusty facts of life, and slowly moulders away into dry
+indifference. It would not be so, but far different, if the Savoyard
+Vicar, instead of taking the youth to the mountain-top, there to
+contemplate that infinite unseen which is in truth beyond
+contemplation by the limited faculties of man, were to associate these
+fine impulses of the early prime with the visible, intelligible, and
+still sublime possibilities of the human destiny,--that imperial
+conception, which alone can shape an existence of entire proportion in
+all its parts, and leave no natural energy of life idle or athirst. Do
+you ask for sanctions! One whose conscience has been strengthened from
+youth in this faith, can know no greater bitterness than the stain
+cast by wrong act or unworthy thought on the high memories with which
+he has been used to walk, and the discord wrought in hopes that have
+become the ruling harmony of his days.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[337] See Hallam's _Literature of Europe_, Pt. I. ch. ii. § 64. Again
+(for the 16th century), Pt. II. ch. ii. § 53. See also for mention of
+a sect of deists at Lyons about 1560, Bayle's Dictionary, _s.v._
+Viret.
+
+[338] See above, vol. i. pp. 223-227.
+
+[339] _Emile_, IV. 163.
+
+[340] IV. 183-185.
+
+[341] M. Henri Martin's _Hist. de France_, xvi. 101, where there is an
+interesting, but, as it seems to the present writer, hardly a
+successful attempt, to bring the Savoyard Vicar's eloquence into
+scientific form.
+
+[342] _Emile_, IV. 135.
+
+[343] _Emile_, IV. 204.
+
+[344] _Emile_, IV. 181, 182. In a letter to Vernes (Feb. 18, 1758.
+_Corr._, ii. 9) he expresses his suspicion that possibly the souls of
+the wicked may be annihilated at their death, and that being and
+feeling may prove the first reward of a good life. In this letter he
+asks also, with the same magnanimous security as the Savoyard Vicar,
+"of what concern the destiny of the wicked can be to him."
+
+[345] A similar disparagement of Socrates, in comparison with the
+Christ of the Gospels, is to be found in the long letter of Jan. 15,
+1769 (_Corr._, vi. 59, 60), to M----, accompanied by a violent
+denigration of the Jews, conformably to the philosophic prejudice of
+the time.
+
+[346] _Emile_, IV. 241, 242.
+
+[347] _Emile_, IV. 243.
+
+[348] IV. 210-236.
+
+[349] Condorcet's _Progrès de l'Esprit Humain_ (1794). _Oeuv._, vi.
+276.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+ENGLAND.[350]
+
+
+There is in an English collection a portrait of Jean Jacques,
+which was painted during his residence in this country by a provincial
+artist. Singular and displeasing as it is, yet this picture lights up
+for us many a word and passage in Rousseau's life here and elsewhere,
+which the ordinary engravings, and the trim self-complacency of the
+statue on the little island at Geneva, would leave very
+incomprehensible. It is almost as appalling in its realism as some of
+the dark pits that open before the reader of the Confessions. Hard
+struggles with objective difficulty and external obstacle wear deep
+furrows in the brow; they throw into the glance a solicitude, half
+penetrating and defiant, half dejected. When a man's hindrances have
+sprung up from within, and the ill-fought battle of his days has been
+with his own passions and morbid broodings and unchastened dreams, the
+eye and the facial lines tell the story of that profound moral defeat
+which is unlighted by the memories of resolute combat with evil and
+weakness, and leaves only eternal desolation and the misery that is
+formless. Our English artist has produced a vision from that prose
+Inferno which is made so populous in the modern epoch by impotence of
+will. Those who have seen the picture may easily understand how
+largely the character of the original must have been pregnant with
+harassing confusion and distress.
+
+Four years before this (1762), Hume, to whom Lord Marischal had told
+the story of Rousseau's persecutions, had proffered his services, and
+declared his eagerness to help in finding a proper refuge for him in
+England. There had been an exchange of cordial letters,[351] and then
+the matter had lain quiet, until the impossibility of remaining longer
+in Neuchâtel had once more set his friends on procuring a safe
+establishment for their rather difficult refugee. Rousseau's
+appearance in Paris had created the keenest excitement. "People may
+talk of ancient Greece as they please," wrote Hume from Paris, "but no
+nation was ever so proud of genius as this, and no person ever so much
+engaged their attention as Rousseau! Voltaire and everybody else are
+quite eclipsed by him." Even Theresa Le Vasseur, who was declared very
+homely and very awkward, was more talked of than the Princess of
+Morocco or the Countess of Egmont, on account of her fidelity towards
+him. His very dog had a name and reputation in the world.[352]
+Rousseau is always said to have liked the stir which his presence
+created, but whether this was so or not, he was very impatient to be
+away from it as soon as possible.
+
+In company with Hume, he left Paris in the second week of January
+1766. They crossed from Calais to Dover by night in a passage that
+lasted twelve hours. Hume, as the orthodox may be glad to know, was
+extremely ill, while Rousseau cheerfully passed the whole night upon
+deck, taking no harm, though the seamen were almost frozen to
+death.[353] They reached London on the thirteenth of January, and the
+people of London showed nearly as lively an interest in the strange
+personage whom Hume had brought among them, as the people of Paris had
+done. A prince of the blood at once went to pay his respects to the
+Swiss philosopher. The crowd at the playhouse showed more curiosity
+when the stranger came in than when the king and queen entered. Their
+majesties were as interested as their subjects, and could scarcely
+keep their eyes off the author of Emilius. George III., then in the
+heyday of his youth, was so pleased to have a foreigner of genius
+seeking shelter in his kingdom, that he readily acceded to Conway's
+suggestion, prompted by Hume, that Rousseau should have a pension
+settled on him. The ever illustrious Burke, then just made member of
+Parliament, saw him nearly every day, and became persuaded that "he
+entertained no principle either to influence his heart, or guide his
+understanding, but vanity."[354] Hume, on the contrary, thought the
+best things of his client; "He has an excellent warm heart, and in
+conversation kindles often to a degree of heat which looks like
+inspiration; I love him much, and hope that I have some share in his
+affections.... He is a very modest, mild, well-bred, gentle-spirited
+and warm-hearted man, as ever I knew in my life. He is also to
+appearance very sociable. I never saw a man who seems better
+calculated for good company, nor who seems to take more pleasure in
+it." "He is a very agreeable, amiable man; but a great humorist. The
+philosophers of Paris foretold to me that I could not conduct him to
+Calais without a quarrel; but I think I could live with him all my
+life in mutual friendship and esteem. I believe one great source of
+our concord is that neither he nor I are disputatious, which is not
+the case with any of them. They are also displeased with him, because
+they think he over-abounds in religion; and it is indeed remarkable
+that the philosopher of this age who has been most persecuted, is by
+far the most devout."[355]
+
+What the Scotch philosopher meant by calling his pupil a humorist, may
+perhaps be inferred from the story of the trouble he had in prevailing
+upon Rousseau to go to the play, though Garrick had appointed a
+special occasion and set apart a special box for him. When the hour
+came, Rousseau declared that he could not leave his dog behind him.
+"The first person," he said, "who opens the door, Sultan will run into
+the streets in search of me and will be lost." Hume told him to lock
+Sultan up in the room, and carry away the key in his pocket. This was
+done, but as they proceeded downstairs, the dog began to howl; his
+master turned back and avowed he had not resolution to leave him in
+that condition. Hume, however, caught him in his arms, told him that
+Mr. Garrick had dismissed another company in order to make room for
+him, that the king and queen were expecting to see him, and that
+without a better reason than Sultan's impatience it would be
+ridiculous to disappoint them. Thus, a little by reason, but more by
+force, he was carried off.[356] Such a story, whatever else we may
+think of it, shows at least a certain curious and not untouching
+simplicity. And singularity which made Rousseau like better to keep
+his dog company at home, than to be stared at by a gaping pit, was too
+private in its reward to be the result of that vanity and affectation
+with which he was taxed by men who lived in another sphere of motive.
+
+There was considerable trouble in settling Rousseau. He was eager to
+leave London almost as soon as he arrived in it. Though pleased with
+the friendly reception which had been given him, he pronounced London
+to be as much devoted to idle gossip and frivolity as other capitals.
+He spent a few weeks in the house of a farmer at Chiswick, thought
+about fixing himself in the Isle of Wight, then in Wales, then
+somewhere in our fair Surrey, whose scenery, one is glad to know,
+greatly attracted him. Finally arrangements were made by Hume with Mr.
+Davenport for installing him in a house belonging to the latter, at
+Wootton, near Ashbourne, in the Peak of Derbyshire.[357] Hither
+Rousseau proceeded with Theresa, at the end of March. Mr. Davenport
+was a gentleman of large property, and as he seldom inhabited this
+solitary house, was very willing that Rousseau should take up his
+abode there without payment. This, however, was what Rousseau's
+independence could not brook, and he insisted that his entertainer
+should receive thirty pounds a year for the board of himself and
+Theresa.[358] So here he settled, in an extremely bitter climate,
+knowing no word of the language of the people about him, with no
+companionship but Theresa's, and with nothing to do but walk when the
+weather was fair, play the harpsicord when it rained, and brood over
+the incidents which had occurred to him since he had left Switzerland
+six months before. The first fruits of this unfortunate leisure were a
+bitter quarrel with Hume, one of the most famous and far-resounding of
+all the quarrels of illustrious men, but one about which very little
+needs now be said. The merits of it are plain, and all significance
+that may ever have belonged to it is entirely dead. The incubation of
+his grievances began immediately after his arrival at Wootton, but two
+months elapsed before they burst forth in full flame.[359]
+
+The general charge against Hume was that he was a member of an
+accursed triumvirate; Voltaire and D'Alembert were the other partners;
+and their object was to blacken the character of Rousseau and render
+his life miserable. The particular acts on which this belief was
+established were the following:--
+
+(1) While Rousseau was in Paris, there appeared a letter nominally
+addressed to him by the King of Prussia, and written in an ironical
+strain, which persuaded Jean Jacques himself that it was the work of
+Voltaire.[360] Then he suspected D'Alembert. It was really the
+composition of Horace Walpole, who was then in Paris. Now Hume was the
+friend of Walpole, and had given Rousseau a card of introduction to
+him for the purpose of entrusting Walpole with the carriage of some
+papers. Although the false letter produced the liveliest amusement at
+Rousseau's cost, first in Paris and then in London, Hume, while
+feigning to be his warm friend and presenting him to the English
+public, never took any pains to tell the world that the piece was a
+forgery, nor did he break with its wicked author.[361] (2) When
+Rousseau assured Hume that D'Alembert was a cunning and dishonourable
+man, Hume denied it with an amazing heat, although he well knew the
+latter to be Rousseau's enemy.[362] (3) Hume lived in London with the
+son of Tronchin, the Genevese surgeon, and the most mortal of all the
+foes of Jean Jacques.[363] (4) When Rousseau first came to London, his
+reception was a distinguished triumph for the victim of persecution
+from so many governments. England was proud of being his place of
+refuge, and justly vaunted the freedom of her laws and administration.
+Suddenly and for no assignable cause the public tone changed, the
+newspapers either fell silent or else spoke unfavourably, and Rousseau
+was thought of no more. This must have been due to Hume, who had much
+influence among people of credit, and who went about boasting of the
+protection which he had procured for Jean Jacques in Paris.[364] (5)
+Hume resorted to various small artifices for preventing Rousseau from
+making friends, for procuring opportunities of opening Rousseau's
+letters, and the like.[365] (6) A violent satirical letter against
+Rousseau appeared in the English newspapers, with allusions which
+could only have been supplied by Hume. (7) On the first night after
+their departure from Paris, Rousseau, who occupied the same room with
+Hume, heard him call out several times in the middle of the night in
+the course of his dreams, _Je tiens Jean Jacques Rousseau_, with
+extreme vehemence--which words, in spite of the horribly sardonic tone
+of the dreamer, he interpreted favourably at the time, but which later
+event proved to have been full of malign significance.[366] (8)
+Rousseau constantly found Hume eyeing him with a glance of sinister
+and diabolic import that filled him with an astonishing disquietude,
+though he did his best to combat it. On one of these occasions he was
+seized with remorse, fell upon Hume's neck, embraced him warmly, and,
+suffocated with sobs and bathed in tears, cried out in broken accents,
+_No, no, David Hume is no traitor_, with many protests of affection.
+The phlegmatic Hume only returned his embrace with politeness, stroked
+him gently on the back, and repeated several times in a tranquil
+voice, _Quoi, mon cher monsieur! Eh! mon cher monsieur! Quoi donc, mon
+cher monsieur!_[367] (9) Although for many weeks Rousseau had kept a
+firm silence to Hume, neglecting to answer letters that plainly called
+for answer, and marking his displeasure in other unmistakable ways,
+yet Hume had never sought any explanation of what must necessarily
+have struck him as so singular, but continued to write as if nothing
+had happened. Was not this positive proof of a consciousness of
+perfidy?
+
+Some years afterwards he substituted another shorter set of
+grievances, namely, that Hume would not suffer Theresa to sit at table
+with him; that he made a show of him; and that Hume had an engraving
+executed of himself, which made him as beautiful as a cherub, while in
+another engraving, which was a pendant to his own, Jean Jacques was
+made as ugly as a bear.[368]
+
+It would be ridiculous for us to waste any time in discussing these
+charges. They are not open to serious examination, though it is
+astonishing to find writers in our own day who fully believe that Hume
+was a traitor, and behaved extremely basely to the unfortunate man
+whom he had inveigled over to a barbarous island. The only part of the
+indictment about which there could be the least doubt, was the
+possibility of Hume having been an accomplice in Walpole's very small
+pleasantry. Some of his friends in Paris suspected that he had had a
+hand in the supposed letter from the King of Prussia. Although the
+letter constituted no very malignant jest, and could not by a sensible
+man have been regarded as furnishing just complaint against one who,
+like Walpole, was merely an impudent stranger, yet if it could be
+shown that Hume had taken an active part either in the composition or
+the circulation of a spiteful bit of satire upon one towards whom he
+was pretending a singular affection, then we should admit that he
+showed such a want of sense of the delicacy of friendship as amounted
+to something like treachery. But a letter from Walpole to Hume sets
+this doubt at rest. "I cannot be precise as to the time of my writing
+the King of Prussia's letter, but ... I not only suppressed the letter
+while you stayed there, out of delicacy to you, but it was the reason
+why, out of delicacy to myself, I did not go to see him as you often
+proposed to me, thinking it wrong to go and make a cordial visit to a
+man, with a letter in my pocket to laugh at him."[369]
+
+With this all else falls to the ground. It would be as unwise in us,
+as it was in Rousseau himself, to complicate the hypotheses. Men do
+not act without motives, and Hume could have no motive in entering
+into any plot against Rousseau, even if the rival philosophers in
+France might have motives. We know the character of our David Hume
+perfectly well, and though it was not faultless, its fault certainly
+lay rather in an excessive desire to make the world comfortable for
+everybody, than in anything like purposeless malignity, of which he
+never had a trace. Moreover, all that befell Rousseau through Hume's
+agency was exceedingly to his advantage. Hume was not without vanity,
+and his letters show that he was not displeased at the addition to his
+consequence which came of his patronage of a man who was much talked
+about and much stared at. But, however this was, he did all for
+Rousseau that generosity and thoughtfulness could do. He was at great
+pains in establishing him; he used his interest to procure for him the
+grant of a pension from the king; when Rousseau provisionally refused
+the pension rather than owe anything to Hume, the latter, still
+ignorant of the suspicion that was blackening in Rousseau's mind,
+supposed that the refusal came from the fact of the pension being kept
+private, and at once took measures with the minister to procure the
+removal of the condition of privacy. Besides undeniable acts like
+these, the state of Hume's mind towards his curious ward is abundantly
+shown in his letters to all his most intimate friends, just as
+Rousseau's gratitude to him is to be read in all his early letters
+both to Hume and other persons. In the presence of such facts on the
+one side, and in the absence of any particle of intelligible evidence
+to neutralise them on the other, to treat Rousseau's charges with
+gravity is irrational.
+
+If Hume had written back in a mild and conciliatory strain, there can
+be no doubt that the unfortunate victim of his own morbid imagination
+would, for a time at any rate, have been sobered and brought to a
+sense of his misconduct. But Hume was incensed beyond control at what
+he very pardonably took for a masterpiece of atrocious ingratitude. He
+reproached Rousseau in terms as harsh as those which Grimm had used
+nine years before. He wrote to all his friends, withdrawing the kindly
+words he had once used of Rousseau's character, and substituting in
+their place the most unfavourable he could find. He gave the
+philosophic circle in Paris exquisite delight by the confirmation
+which his story furnished of their own foresight, when they had warned
+him that he was taking a viper to his bosom. Finally, in spite of the
+advice of Adam Smith, of one of the greatest of men, Turgot, and one
+of the smallest, Horace Walpole, he published a succinct account of
+the quarrel, first in French, and then in English. This step was
+chiefly due to the advice of the clique of whom D'Alembert was the
+spokesman, though it is due to him to mention that he softened various
+expressions in Hume's narrative, which he pronounced too harsh. It may
+be true that a council of war never fights; a council of men of
+letters always does. The governing committee of a literary,
+philosophical, or theological clique form the very worst advisers any
+man can have.
+
+Much must be forgiven to Hume, stung as he was by what appeared the
+most hateful ferocity in one on whom he had heaped acts of affection.
+Still, one would have been glad on behalf of human dignity, if he had
+suffered with firm silence petulant charges against which the
+consciousness of his own uprightness should have been the only answer.
+That high pride, of which there is too little rather than too much in
+the world, and which saves men from waste of themselves and others in
+pitiful accusations, vindications, retaliations, should have helped
+humane pity in preserving him from this poor quarrel. Long afterwards
+Rousseau said, "England, of which they paint such fine pictures in
+France, has so cheerless a climate; my soul, wearied with many shocks,
+was in a condition of such profound melancholy, that in all that
+passed I believe I committed many faults. But are they comparable to
+those of the enemies who persecuted me, supposing them even to have
+done no more than published our private quarrels?"[370] An ampler
+contrition would have been more seemly in the first offender, but
+there is a measure of justice in his complaint. We need not, however,
+reproach the good Hume. Before six months were over, he admits that he
+is sometimes inclined to blame his publication, and always to regret
+it.[371] And his regret was not verbal merely. When Rousseau had
+returned to France, and was in danger of arrest, Hume was most urgent
+in entreating Turgot to use his influence with the government to
+protect the wretched wanderer, and Turgot's answer shows both how
+sincere this humane interposition was, and how practically
+serviceable.[372]
+
+Meanwhile there ensued a horrible fray in print. Pamphlets appeared in
+Paris and London in a cloud. The Succinct Exposure was followed by
+succinct rejoinders. Walpole officiously printed his own account of
+his own share in the matter. Boswell officiously wrote to the
+newspapers defending Rousseau and attacking Walpole. King George
+followed the battle with intense curiosity. Hume with solemn
+formalities sent the documents to the British Museum. There was
+silence only in one place, and that was at Wootton. The unfortunate
+person who had done all the mischief printed not a word.
+
+The most prompt and quite the least instructive of the remarks
+invariably made upon any one who has acted in an unusual manner, is
+that he must be mad. This universal criticism upon the unwonted really
+tells us nothing, because the term may cover any state of mind from a
+warranted dissent from established custom, down to absolute dementia.
+Rousseau was called mad when he took to wearing convenient clothes and
+living frugally. He was called mad when he quitted the town and went
+to live in the country. The same facile explanation covered his
+quarrel with importunate friends at the Hermitage. Voltaire called him
+mad for saying that if there were perfect harmony of taste and
+temperament between the king's daughter and the executioner's son, the
+pair ought to be allowed to marry. We who are not forced by
+conversational necessities to hurry to a judgment, may hesitate to
+take either taste for the country, or for frugal living, or even for
+democratic extravagances, as a mark of a disordered mind.[373] That
+Rousseau's conduct towards Hume was inconsistent with perfect mental
+soundness is quite plain. But to say this with crude trenchancy,
+teaches us nothing. Instead of paying ourselves with phrases like
+monomania, it is more useful shortly to trace the conditions which
+prepared the way for mental derangement, because this is the only
+means of understanding either its nature, or the degree to which it
+extended. These conditions in Rousseau's case are perfectly simple and
+obvious to any one who recognises the principle, that the essential
+facts of such mental disorder as his must be sought not in the
+symptoms, but from the whole range of moral and intellectual
+constitution, acted on by physical states and acting on them in turn.
+
+Rousseau was born with an organisation of extreme sensibility. This
+predisposition was further deepened by the application in early youth
+of mental influences specially calculated to heighten juvenile
+sensibility. Corrective discipline from circumstance and from formal
+instruction was wholly absent, and thus the particular excess in his
+temperament became ever more and more exaggerated, and encroached at a
+rate of geometrical progression upon all the rest of his impulses and
+faculties; these, if he had been happily placed under some of the many
+forms of wholesome social pressure, would then on the contrary have
+gradually reduced his sensibility to more normal proportion. When the
+vicious excess had decisively rooted itself in his character, he came
+to Paris, where it was irritated into further activity by the
+uncongeniality of all that surrounded him. Hence the growth of a
+marked unsociality, taking literary form in the Discourses, and
+practical form in his retirement from the town. The slow depravation
+of the affective life was hastened by solitude, by sensuous expansion,
+by the long musings of literary composition. Well does Goethe's
+Princess warn the hapless Tasso:--
+
+                                   Dieser Pfad
+    Verleitet uns, durch einsames Gebüsch,
+    Durch stille Thäler fortzuwandern; mehr
+    Und mehr verwöhnt sich das Gemüth und strebt
+    Die goldne Zeit, die ihm von aussen mangelt,
+    In seinem Innern wieder herzustellen,
+    So wenig der Versuch gelingen will.
+
+Then came harsh and unjust treatment prolonged for many months, and
+this introduced a slight but genuinely misanthropic element of
+bitterness into what had hitherto been an excess of feeling about
+himself, rather than any positive feeling of hostility or suspicion
+about others. Finally and perhaps above all else, he was the victim of
+tormenting bodily pain, and of sleeplessness which resulted from it.
+The agitation and excitement of the journey to England, completed the
+sum of the conditions of disturbance, and as soon as ever he was
+settled at Wootton, and had leisure to brood over the incidents of
+the few weeks since his arrival in England, the disorder which had
+long been spreading through his impulses and affections, suddenly but
+by a most natural sequence extended to the faculties of his
+intelligence, and he became the prey of delusion, a delusion which was
+not yet fixed, but which ultimately became so.
+
+"He has only _felt_ during the whole course of his life," wrote Hume
+sympathetically; "and in this respect his sensibility rises to a pitch
+beyond what I have seen any example of; but it still gives him a more
+acute feeling of pain than of pleasure. He is like a man who was
+stripped not only of his clothes, but of his skin, and turned out in
+that situation to combat with the rude and boisterous elements."[374]
+A morbid affective state of this kind and of such a degree of
+intensity, was the sure antecedent of a morbid intellectual state,
+general or partial, depressed or exalted. One who is the prey of
+unsound feelings, if they are only marked enough and persistent
+enough, naturally ends by a correspondingly unsound arrangement of all
+or some of his ideas to match. The intelligence is seduced into
+finding supports in misconception of circumstances, for a
+misconception of human relation which had its root in disordered
+emotion. This completes the breach of correspondence between the man's
+nature and the external facts with which he has to deal, though the
+breach may not, and in Rousseau's case certainly did not, extend along
+the whole line of feeling and judgment. Rousseau's delusion about
+Hume's sinister feeling and designs, which was the first definite
+manifestation of positive unsoundness in the sphere of the
+intelligence, was a last result of the gradual development of an
+inherited predisposition to affective unsoundness, which unhappily for
+the man's history had never been counteracted either by a strenuous
+education, or by the wholesome urgencies of life.
+
+We have only to remember that with him, as with the rest of us, there
+was entire unity of nature, without cataclysm or marvel or
+inexplicable rupture of mental continuity. All the facts came in an
+order that might have been foretold; they all lay together, with their
+foundations down in physical temperament; the facts which made
+Rousseau's name renowned and his influence a great force, along with
+those which made his life a scandal to others and a misery to himself.
+The deepest root of moral disorder lies in an immoderate expectation
+of happiness, and this immoderate unlawful expectation was the mark
+both of his character and his work. The exaltation of emotion over
+intelligence was the secret of his most striking production; the same
+exaltation, by gaining increased mastery over his whole existence, at
+length passed the limit of sanity and wrecked him. The tendency of the
+dominant side of a character towards diseased exaggeration is a fact
+of daily observation. The ruin which the excess of strong religious
+imagination works in natures without the quality of energetic
+objective reaction, was shown in the case of Rousseau's contemporary,
+Cowper. This gentle poet's delusions about the wrath of God were
+equally pitiable and equally a source of torment to their victim, with
+Rousseau's delusions about the malignity of his mysterious plotters
+among men. We must call such a condition unsound, but the important
+thing is to remember that insanity was only a modification of certain
+specially marked tendencies of the sufferer's sanity.
+
+The desire to protect himself against the defamation of his enemies
+led him at this time to compose that account of his own life, which is
+probably the only one of his writings that continues to be generally
+read. He composed the first part of the Confessions at Wootton, during
+the autumn and winter of 1766. The idea of giving his memoirs to the
+public was an old one, originally suggested by one of his publishers.
+To write memoirs of one's own life was one of the fancies of the time,
+but like all else, it became in Rousseau's hand something more
+far-reaching and sincere than a passing fashion. Other people wrote
+polite histories of their outer lives, amply coloured with romantic
+decorations. Rousseau with unquailing veracity plunged into the inmost
+depths, hiding nothing that would be likely to make him either
+ridiculous or hateful in common opinion, and inventing nothing that
+could attract much sympathy or much admiration. Though, as has been
+pointed out already, the Confessions abound in small inaccuracies of
+date, hardly to be avoided by an oldish man in reference to the facts
+of his boyhood, whether a Rousseau or a Goethe, and though one or two
+of the incidents are too deeply coloured with the hues of sentimental
+reminiscence, and one or two of them are downright impossible, yet
+when all these deductions have been made, the substantial truthfulness
+of what remains is made more evident with every addition to our
+materials for testing them. When all the circumstances of Rousseau's
+life are weighed, and when full account has been taken of his proved
+delinquencies, we yet perceive that he was at bottom a character as
+essentially sincere, truthful, careful of fact and reality, as is
+consistent with the general empire of sensation over untrained
+intelligence.[375] As for the egotism of the Confessions, it is hard
+to see how a man is to tell the story of his own life without egotism.
+And it may be worth adding that the self-feeling which comes to the
+surface and asserts itself, is in a great many cases far less vicious
+and debilitating than the same feeling nursed internally with a
+troglodytish shyness. But Rousseau's egotism manifested itself
+perversely. This is true to a certain small extent, and one or two of
+the disclosures in the Confessions are in very nauseous matter, and
+are made moreover in a very nauseous manner. There are some vices
+whose grotesqueness stirs us more deeply than downright atrocities,
+and we read of certain puerilities avowed by Rousseau, with a livelier
+impatience than old Benvenuto Cellini quickens in us, when he
+confesses to a horrible assassination. This morbid form of
+self-feeling is only less disgusting than the allied form which
+clothes itself in the phrases of religious exaltation. And there is
+not much of it. Blot out half a dozen pages from the Confessions, and
+the egotism is no more perverted than in the confessions of Augustine
+or of Cardan.
+
+These remarks are not made to extenuate Rousseau's faults, or to raise
+the popular estimate of his character, but simply in the interests of
+a greater precision of criticism. In England criticism has nearly
+always been of the most vulgar superficiality in respect to Rousseau,
+from the time of Horace Walpole downwards. The Confessions in their
+least agreeable parts, or rather especially in those parts, are the
+expression on a new side and in a peculiar way of the same notion of
+the essential goodness of nature and the importance of understanding
+nature and restoring its reign, which inspired the Discourses and
+Emilius. "I would fain show to my fellows," he began, "a man in all
+the truth of nature," and he cannot be charged with any failure to
+keep his word. He despised opinion, and hence was careless to observe
+whether or no this revelation of human nakedness was likely to add to
+the popular respect for nature and the natural man. After all,
+considering that literature is for the most part a hollow and
+pretentious phantasmagoria of mimic figures posing in breeches and
+peruke, we may try to forgive certain cruel blows to the dignified
+assumptions, solemn words, and high heels of convention, in one who
+would not lie, nor dissemble kinship with the four-footed. Intense
+subjective preoccupations in markedly emotional natures all tend to
+come to the same end. The distance from Rousseau's odious erotics to
+the glorified ecstasies of many a poor female saint is not far. In any
+case, let us know the facts about human nature, and the pathological
+facts no less than the others. These are the first thing, and the
+second, and the third also.
+
+The exaltation of the opening page of the Confessions is shocking. No
+monk nor saint ever wrote anything more revolting in its blasphemous
+self-feeling. But the exaltation almost instantly became calm, when
+the course of the story necessarily drew the writer into dealings with
+objective facts, even muffled as they were by memory and imagination.
+The broodings over old reminiscence soothed him, the labour of
+composition occupied him, and he forgot, as the modern reader would
+never know from internal evidence, that he was preparing a vindication
+of his life and character against the infamies with which Hume and
+others were supposed to be industriously blackening them. While he was
+writing this famous composition, severed by so vast a gulf from the
+modes of English provincial life, he was on good terms with one or two
+of the great people in his neighbourhood, and kept up a gracious and
+social correspondence with them. He was greatly pleased by a
+compliment that was paid to him by the government, apparently through
+the interest of General Conway. The duty that had been paid upon
+certain boxes forwarded to Rousseau from Switzerland was recouped by
+the treasury,[376] and the arrangements for the annual pension of one
+hundred pounds were concluded and accepted by him, after he had duly
+satisfied himself that Hume was not the indirect author of the
+benefaction.[377] The weather was the worst possible, but whenever it
+allowed him to go out of doors, he found delight in climbing the
+heights around him in search of curious mosses; for he had now come to
+think the discovery of a single new plant a hundred times more useful
+than to have the whole human race listening to your sermons for half a
+century.[378] "This indolent and contemplative life that you do not
+approve," he wrote to the elder Mirabeau, "and for which I pretend to
+make no excuses, becomes every day more delicious to me: to wander
+alone among the trees and rocks that surround my dwelling; to muse or
+rather to extravagate at my ease, and as you say to stand gaping in
+the air; when my brain gets too hot, to calm it by dissecting some
+moss or fern; in short, to surrender myself without restraint to my
+phantasies, which, heaven be thanked, are all under my own
+control,--all that is for me the height of enjoyment, to which I can
+imagine nothing superior in this world for a man of my age and in my
+condition."[379]
+
+This contentment did not last long. The snow kept him indoors. The
+excitement of composition abated. Theresa harassed him by ignoble
+quarrels with the women in the kitchen. His delusions returned with
+greater force than before. He believed that the whole English nation
+was in a plot against him, that all his letters were opened before
+reaching London and before leaving it, that all his movements were
+closely watched, and that he was surrounded by unseen guards to
+prevent any attempt at escape.[380] At length these delusions got such
+complete mastery over him, that in a paroxysm of terror he fled away
+from Wootton, leaving money, papers, and all else behind him. Nothing
+was heard of him for a fortnight, when Mr. Davenport received a letter
+from him dated at Spalding in Lincolnshire. Mr. Davenport's conduct
+throughout was marked by a humanity and patience that do him the
+highest honour. He confesses himself "quite moved to read poor
+Rousseau's mournful epistle." "You shall see his letter," he writes to
+Hume, "the first opportunity; but God help him, I can't for pity give
+a copy; and 'tis so much mixed with his own poor little private
+concerns, that it would not be right in me to do it."[381] This is
+the generosity which makes Hume's impatience and that of his
+mischievous advisers in Paris appear petty. Rousseau had behaved quite
+as ill to Mr. Davenport as he had done to Hume, and had received at
+least equal services from him.[382] The good man at once sent a
+servant to Spalding in search of his unhappy guest, but Rousseau had
+again disappeared. The parson of the parish had passed several hours
+of each day in his company, and had found him cheerful and
+good-humoured. He had had a blue coat made for himself, and had
+written a long letter to the lord chancellor, praying him to appoint a
+guard, at Rousseau's own expense, to escort him in safety out of the
+kingdom where enemies were plotting against his life.[383] He was next
+heard of at Dover (May 18), whence he wrote a letter to General
+Conway, setting forth his delusion in full form.[384] He is the victim
+of a plot; the conspirators will not allow him to leave the island,
+lest he should divulge in other countries the outrages to which he has
+been subjected here; he perceives the sinister manoeuvres that will
+arrest him if he attempts to put his foot on board ship. But he warns
+them that his tragical disappearance cannot take place without
+creating inquiry. Still if General Conway will only let him go, he
+gives his word of honour that he will not publish a line of the
+memoirs he has written, nor ever divulge the wrongs which he has
+suffered in England. "I see my last hour approaching," he concluded;
+"I am determined, if necessary, to advance to meet it, and to perish
+or be free; there is no longer any other alternative." On the same
+evening on which he wrote this letter (about May 20-22), the forlorn
+creature took boat and landed at Calais, where he seems at once to
+have recovered his composure and a right mind.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[350] Jan. 1766--May 1767.
+
+[351] Streckeisen, ii. 275, etc. _Corr._, iii.
+
+[352] Burton, ii. 299.
+
+[353] The materials for this chapter are taken from Rousseau's
+_Correspondence_ (vols. iv. and v.), and from Hume's letters to
+various persons, given in the second volume of Mr. Burton's _Life of
+Hume_. Everybody who takes an interest in Rousseau is indebted to Mr.
+Burton for the ample documents which he has provided. Yet one cannot
+but regret the satire on Rousseau with which he intersperses them, and
+which is not always felicitous. For one instance, he implies (p. 295)
+that Rousseau invented the story given in the Confessions, of Hume's
+correcting the proofs of Wallace's book against himself. The story may
+be true or not, but at any rate Rousseau had it very circumstantially
+from Lord Marischal; see letter from Lord M. to J.J.R., in
+Streckeisen, ii. 67. Again, such an expression as Rousseau's
+"_occasional_ attention to small matters" (p. 321) only shows that the
+writer has not read Rousseau's letters, which are indeed not worth
+reading, except by those who wish to have a right to speak about
+Rousseau's character. The numerous pamphlets on the quarrel between
+Hume and Rousseau, if I may judge from those of them which I have
+turned over, really shed no light on the matter, though they added
+much heat. For the journey, see _Corr._, iv. 307; Burton, ii. 304.
+
+[354] _Letter to a Member of the National Assembly._ The same passage
+contains some strong criticism on Rousseau's style.
+
+[355] Burton, 304, 309, 310.
+
+[356] _Ib._ ii. 309, _n._
+
+[357] Mr. Howitt has given an account of Rousseau's quarters at
+Wootton, in his _Visits to Remarkable Places_. One or two aged
+peasants had some confused memory of "old Ross-hall." For Rousseau's
+own description, see his letters to Mdme. de Luze, May 10, 1766.
+_Corr._, iv. 326.
+
+[358] Burton, 313. It has been stated that Rousseau never paid this;
+at any rate when he fled, he left between thirty and forty pounds in
+Mr. Davenport's hands. See Davenport to Hume; Burton, 367. Rousseau's
+accurate probity in affairs of money is absolutely unimpeachable.
+
+[359] _Corr._ iv. 312. April 9, 1766.
+
+[360] Here is a translation of this rather poor piece of sarcasm:--"My
+dear Jean Jacques--You have renounced Geneva, your native place. You
+have caused your expulsion from Switzerland, a country so extolled in
+your writings; France has issued a warrant against you; so do you come
+to me. I admire your talents; I am amused by your dreamings, though
+let me tell you they absorb you too much and for too long. You must at
+length be sober and happy; you have caused enough talk about yourself
+by oddities which in truth are hardly becoming a really great man.
+Prove to your enemies that you can now and then have common sense.
+That will annoy them and do you no harm. My states offer you a
+peaceful retreat. I wish you well, and will treat you well, if you
+will let me. But if you persist in refusing my help, do not reckon
+upon my telling any one that you did so. If you are bent on tormenting
+your spirit to find new misfortunes, choose whatever you like best. I
+am a king, and can procure them for you at your pleasure; and what
+will certainly never happen to you in respect of your enemies, I will
+cease to persecute you as soon as you cease to take a pride in being
+persecuted. Your good friend, FREDERICK."
+
+[361] _Corr._, iv. 313, 343, 388, 398.
+
+[362] _Ib._ 395.
+
+[363] _Ib._ 389, etc.
+
+[364] _Ib._ 384.
+
+[365] _Ib._ 343, 344, 387, etc.
+
+[366] _Corr._, iv. 346.
+
+[367] _Ib._ 390. A letter from Hume to Blair, long before the rupture
+overt, shows the former to have been by no means so phlegmatic on this
+occasion as he may have seemed. "I hope," he writes, "you have not so
+bad an opinion of me as to think I was not melted on this occasion; I
+assure you I kissed him and embraced him twenty times, with a
+plentiful effusion of tears. I think no scene of my life was ever more
+affecting." Burton, ii. 315. The great doubters of the eighteenth
+century could without fear have accepted the test of the ancient
+saying, that men without tears are worth little.
+
+[368] Bernardin de St. Pierre, _Oeuv._, xii. 79.
+
+[369] Walpole's _Letters_, v. 7 (Cunningham's edition). For other
+letters from the shrewd coxcomb on the same matter, see pp. 23-28. A
+corroboration of the statement that Hume knew nothing of the letter
+until he was in England, may be inferred from what he wrote to Madame
+de Boufflers; Burton, ii. 306, and _n._ 2.
+
+[370] Bernardin de St. Pierre, _Oeuv._, xii. 79.
+
+[371] To Adam Smith. Burton, 380.
+
+[372] Burton, 381.
+
+[373] A very common but random opinion traces Rousseau's insanity to
+certain disagreeable habits avowed in the Confessions. They may have
+contributed in some small degree to depression of vital energies,
+though for that matter Rousseau's strength and power of endurance were
+remarkable to the end. But they certainly did not produce a mental
+state in the least corresponding to that particular variety of
+insanity, which possesses definitely marked features.
+
+[374] Burton, ii. 314.
+
+[375] For an instructive and, as it appears to me, a thoroughly
+trustworthy account of the temper in which the Confessions were
+written, see the 4th of the _Rêveries_.
+
+[376] Letter to the Duke of Grafton, Feb. 27, 1767. _Corr._, v. 98:
+also 118.
+
+[377] _Ib._ v. 133; also to General Conway (March 26), p. 137, etc.
+
+[378] _Corr._, v. 37.
+
+[379] _Corr._, v. 88.
+
+[380] See the letters to Du Peyrou, of the 2d and 4th of April 1767.
+_Corr._, v. 140-147.
+
+[381] Davenport to Hume; Burton, 367-371.
+
+[382] J.J.R. to Davenport, Dec. 22, 1766, and April 30, 1767. _Corr._,
+v. 66, 152.
+
+[383] Burton, 369, 375.
+
+[384] _Corr._, v. 153.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+THE END.
+
+
+Before leaving England, Rousseau had received more than one
+long and rambling letter from a man who was as unlike the rest of
+mankind as he was unlike them himself. This was the Marquis of
+Mirabeau (1715-89), the violent, tyrannical, pedantic, humoristic sire
+of a more famous son. Perhaps we might say that Mirabeau and Rousseau
+were the two most singular originals then known to men, and Mirabeau's
+originality was in some respects the more salient of the two. There is
+less of the conventional tone of the eighteenth century Frenchman in
+him than in any other conspicuous man of the time, though like many
+other headstrong and despotic souls he picked up the current notions
+of philanthropy and human brotherhood. He really was by very force of
+temperament that rebel against the narrowness, trimness, and moral
+formalism of the time which Rousseau only claimed and attempted to be,
+with the secondary degree of success that follows vehemence without
+native strength. Mirabeau was a sort of Swift, who had strangely taken
+up the trade of friendship for man and adopted the phrases of
+perfectibility; while Rousseau on the other hand was meant for a
+Fénelon, save that he became possessed of unclean devils.
+
+Mirabeau, like Jean Jacques himself, was so impressed by the marked
+tenor of contemporary feeling, its prudential didactics, its
+formulistic sociality, that his native insurgency only found vent in
+private life, while in public he played pedagogue to the human race.
+Friend of Quesnai and orthodox economist as he was, he delighted in
+Rousseau's books: "I know no morality that goes deeper than yours; it
+strikes like a thunderbolt, and advances with the steady assurance of
+truth, for you are always true, according to your notions for the
+moment." He wrote to tell him so, but he told him at the same time at
+great length, and with a caustic humour and incoherency less academic
+than Rabelaisian, that he had behaved absurdly in his quarrel with
+Hume. There is nothing more quaint than the appearance of a few of the
+sacramental phrases of the sect of the economists, floating in the
+midst of a copious stream of egoistic whimsicalities. He concludes
+with a diverting enumeration of all his country seats and demesnes,
+with their respective advantages and disadvantages, and prays Rousseau
+to take up his residence in whichever of them may please him
+best.[385]
+
+Immediately on landing at Calais Rousseau informed Mirabeau, and
+Mirabeau lost no time in conveying him stealthily, for the warrant of
+the parliament of Paris was still in force, to a house at Fleury. But
+the Friend of Men, to use his own account of himself, "bore letters as
+a plum-tree bears plums," and wrote to his guest with strange
+humoristic volubility and droll imperturbable temper, as one who knew
+his Jean Jacques. He exhorts him in many sheets to harden himself
+against excessive sensibility, to be less pusillanimous, to take
+society more lightly, as his own light estimate of its worth should
+lead him to do. "No doubt its outside is a shifting surface-picture,
+nay even ridiculous, if you will; but if the irregular and ceaseless
+flight of butterflies wearies you in your walk, it is your own fault
+for looking continuously at what was only made to adorn and vary the
+scene. But how many social virtues, how much gentleness and
+considerateness, how many benevolent actions, remain at the bottom of
+it all."[386] Enormous manifestoes of the doctrine of perfectibility
+were not in the least degree either soothing or interesting to
+Rousseau, and the thrusts of shrewd candour at his expense might touch
+his fancy on a single occasion, but not oftener. Two humorists are
+seldom successful in amusing one another. Besides, Mirabeau insisted
+that Jean Jacques should read this or that of his books. Rousseau
+answered that he would try, but warned him of the folly of it. "I do
+not engage always to follow what you say, because it has always been
+painful to me to think, and fatiguing to follow the thoughts of other
+people, and at present I cannot do so at all."[387] Though they
+continued to be good friends, Rousseau only remained three or four
+weeks at Fleury. His old acquaintance at Montmorency, the Prince of
+Conti, partly perhaps from contrition at the rather unchivalrous
+fashion in which his great friends had hustled the philosopher away at
+the time of the decree of the parliament of Paris, offered him refuge
+at one of his country seats at Trye near Gisors. Here he installed
+Rousseau under the name of Renou, either to silence the indiscreet
+curiosity of neighbours, or to gratify a whim of Rousseau himself.
+
+Rousseau remained for a year (June 1767-June 1768), composing the
+second part of the Confessions, in a condition of extreme mental
+confusion. Dusky phantoms walked with him once more. He knew the
+gardener, the servants, the neighbours, all to be in the pay of Hume,
+and that he was watched day and night with a view to his
+destruction.[388] He entirely gave up either reading or writing, save
+a very small number of letters, and he declared that to take up the
+pen even for these was like lifting a load of iron. The only interest
+he had was botany, and for this his passion became daily more intense.
+He appears to have been as contented as a child, so long as he could
+employ himself in long expeditions in search of new plants, in
+arranging a herbarium, in watching the growth of the germ of some rare
+seed which needed careful tending. But the story had once more the
+same conclusion. He fled from Trye, as he had fled from Wootton. He
+meant apparently to go to Chambéri, drawn by the deep magnetic force
+of old memories that seemed long extinct. But at Grenoble on his way
+thither he encountered a substantial grievance. A man alleged that he
+had lent Rousseau a few francs seven years previously. He was
+undoubtedly mistaken, and was fully convicted of his mistake by proper
+authorities, but Rousseau's correspondents suffered none the less for
+that. We all know when monomania seizes a man, how adroitly and how
+eagerly it colours every incident. The mistaken claim was proof
+demonstrative of that frightful and tenebrous conspiracy, which they
+might have thought a delusion hitherto, but which, alas, this showed
+to be only too tragically real; and so on, through many pages of
+droning wretchedness.[389] Then we find him at Bourgoin, where he
+spent some months in shabby taverns, and then many months more at
+Monquin on adjoining uplands.[390] The estrangement from Theresa, of
+which enough has been said already,[391] was added to his other
+torments. He resolved, as so many of the self-tortured have done
+since, to go in search of happiness to the western lands beyond the
+Atlantic, where the elixir of bliss is thought by the wearied among us
+to be inexhaustible and assured. Almost in the same page he turns his
+face eastwards, and dreams of ending his days peacefully among the
+islands of the Grecian archipelago. Next he gravely, not only
+designed, but actually took measures, to return to Wootton. All was no
+more than the momentary incoherent purpose of a sick man's dream, the
+weary distraction of one who had deliberately devoted himself to
+isolation from his fellows, without first sitting down carefully to
+count the cost, or to measure the inner resources which he possessed
+to meet the deadly strain that isolation puts on every one of a man's
+mental fibres. Geographical loneliness is to some a condition of their
+fullest strength, but most of the few who dare to make a moral
+solitude for themselves, find that they have assuredly not made peace.
+Such solitude, as South said of the study of the Apocalypse, either
+finds a man mad, or leaves him so. Not all can play the stoic who
+will, and it is still more certain that one who like Rousseau has lain
+down with the doctrine that in all things imaginable it is impossible
+for him to do at all what he cannot do with pleasure, will end in a
+condition of profound and hopeless impotence in respect to pleasure
+itself.
+
+In July 1770, he made his way to Paris, and here he remained eight
+years longer, not without the introduction of a certain degree of
+order into his outer life, though the clouds of vague suspicion and
+distrust, half bitter, half mournful, hung heavily as ever upon his
+mind. The Dialogues, which he wrote at this period (1775-76) to
+vindicate his memory from the defamation that was to be launched in a
+dark torrent upon the world at the moment of his death, could not
+possibly have been written by a man in his right mind. Yet the best of
+the Musings, which were written still nearer the end, are masterpieces
+in the style of contemplative prose. The third, the fifth, the
+seventh, especially abound in that even, full, mellow gravity of tone
+which is so rare in literature, because the deep absorption of spirit
+which is its source is so rare in life. They reveal Rousseau to us
+with a truth beyond that attained in any of his other pieces--a
+mournful sombre figure, looming shadowily in the dark glow of sundown
+among sad and desolate places. There is nothing like them in the
+French tongue, which is the speech of the clear, the cheerful, or the
+august among men; nothing like this sonorous plainsong, the strangely
+melodious expression in the music of prose of a darkened spirit which
+yet had imaginative visions of beatitude.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It is interesting to look on one or two pictures of the last waste and
+obscure years of the man, whose words were at this time silently
+fermenting for good and for evil in many spirits--a Schiller, a
+Herder, a Jeanne Phlipon, a Robespierre, a Gabriel Mirabeau, and many
+hundreds of those whose destiny was not to lead, but ingenuously to
+follow. Rousseau seems to have repulsed nearly all his ancient
+friends, and to have settled down with dogged resolve to his old trade
+of copying music. In summer he rose at five, copied music until
+half-past seven; munched his breakfast, arranging on paper during the
+process such plants as he had gathered the previous afternoon; then he
+returned to his work, dined at half-past twelve, and went forth to
+take coffee at some public place. He would not return from his walk
+until nightfall, and he retired at half-past ten. The pavements of
+Paris were hateful to him because they tore his feet, and, said he,
+with deeply significant antithesis, "I am not afraid of death, but I
+dread pain." He always found his way as fast as possible to one of the
+suburbs, and one of his greatest delights was to watch Mont Valérien
+in the sunset. "Atheists," he said calumniously, "do not love the
+country; they like the environs of Paris, where you have all the
+pleasures of the city, good cheer, books, pretty women; but if you
+take these things away, then they die of weariness." The note of every
+bird held him attentive, and filled his mind with delicious images. A
+graceful story is told of two swallows who made a nest in Rousseau's
+sleeping-room, and hatched the eggs there. "I was no more than a
+doorkeeper for them," he said, "for I kept opening the window for them
+every moment. They used to fly with a great stir round my head, until
+I had fulfilled the duties of the tacit convention between these
+swallows and me."
+
+In January 1771, Bernardin de St. Pierre, author of the immortal _Paul
+and Virginia_ (1788), finding himself at the Cape of Good Hope, wrote
+to a friend in France just previously to his return to Europe,
+counting among other delights that of seeing two summers in one
+year.[392] Rousseau happened to see the letter, and expressed a desire
+to make the acquaintance of a man who in returning home should think
+of that as one of his chief pleasures. To this we owe the following
+pictures of an interior from St. Pierre's hand:--
+
+     In the month of June in 1772, a friend having offered to
+     take me to see Jean Jacques Rousseau, he brought me to a
+     house in the Rue Plâtrière, nearly opposite to the Hôtel de
+     la Poste. We mounted to the fourth story. We knocked, and
+     Madame Rousseau opened the door. "Come in, gentlemen," she
+     said, "you will find my husband." We passed through a very
+     small antechamber, where the household utensils were neatly
+     arranged, and from that into a room where Jean Jacques was
+     seated in an overcoat and a white cap, busy copying music.
+     He rose with a smiling face, offered us chairs, and resumed
+     his work, at the same time taking a part in conversation. He
+     was thin and of middle height. One shoulder struck me as
+     rather higher than the other ... otherwise he was very well
+     proportioned. He had a brown complexion, some colour on his
+     cheek-bones, a good mouth, a well-made nose, a rounded and
+     lofty brow, and eyes full of fire. The oblique lines falling
+     from the nostrils to the extremity of the lips, and marking
+     a physiognomy, in his case expressed great sensibility and
+     something even painful. One observed in his face three or
+     four of the characteristics of melancholy--the deep receding
+     eyes and the elevation of the eyebrows; you saw profound
+     sadness in the wrinkles of the brow; a keen and even caustic
+     gaiety in a thousand little creases at the corners of the
+     eyes, of which the orbits entirely disappeared when he
+     laughed.... Near him was a spinette on which from time to
+     time he tried an air. Two little beds of blue and white
+     striped calico, a table, and a few chairs, made the stock of
+     his furniture. On the walls hung a plan of the forest and
+     park of Montmorency, where he had once lived, and an
+     engraving of the King of England, his old benefactor. His
+     wife was sitting mending linen; a canary sang in a cage hung
+     from the ceiling; sparrows came for crumbs on to the sills
+     of the windows, which on the side of the street were open;
+     while in the window of the antechamber we noticed boxes and
+     pots filled with such plants as it pleases nature to sow.
+     There was in the whole effect of his little establishment an
+     air of cleanness, peace, and simplicity, which was
+     delightful.
+
+A few days after, Rousseau returned the visit. "He wore a round wig,
+well powdered and curled, carrying a hat under his arm, and in a full
+suit of nankeen. His whole exterior was modest, but extremely neat."
+He expressed his passion for good coffee, saying that this and ice
+were the only two luxuries for which he cared. St. Pierre happened to
+have brought some from the Isle of Bourbon, so on the following day he
+rashly sent Rousseau a small packet, which at first produced a polite
+letter of thanks; but the day after the letter of thanks came one of
+harsh protest against the ignominy of receiving presents which could
+not be returned, and bidding the unfortunate donor to choose between
+taking his coffee back or never seeing his new friend again. A fair
+bargain was ultimately arranged, St. Pierre receiving in exchange for
+his coffee some curious root or other, and a book on ichthyology.
+Immediately afterwards he went to dine with his sage. He arrived at
+eleven in the forenoon, and they conversed until half-past twelve.
+
+     Then his wife laid the cloth. He took a bottle of wine, and
+     as he put it on the table, asked whether we should have
+     enough, or if I was fond of drinking. "How many are there of
+     us," said I. "Three," he said; "you, my wife, and myself."
+     "Well," I went on, "when I drink wine and am alone, I drink
+     a good half-bottle, and I drink a trifle more when I am with
+     friends." "In that case," he answered, "we shall not have
+     enough; I must go down into the cellar." He brought up a
+     second bottle. His wife served two dishes, one of small
+     tarts, and another which was covered. He said, showing me
+     the first, "That is your dish and the other is mine." "I
+     don't eat much pastry," I said, "but I hope to be allowed to
+     taste what you have got." "Oh, they are both common," he
+     replied; "but most people don't care for this. 'Tis a Swiss
+     dish; a compound of lard, mutton, vegetables, and
+     chestnuts." It was excellent. After these two dishes, we had
+     slices of beef in salad; then biscuits and cheese; after
+     which his wife served the coffee.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+     One morning when I was at his house, I saw various domestics
+     either coming for rolls of music, or bringing them to him to
+     copy. He received them standing and uncovered. He said to
+     some, "The price is so much," and received the money; to
+     others, "How soon must I return my copy?" "My mistress would
+     like to have it back in a fortnight." "Oh, that's out of the
+     question: I have work, I can't do it in less than three
+     weeks." I inquired why he did not take his talents to better
+     market. "Ah," he answered, "there are two Rousseaus in the
+     world; one rich, or who might have been if he had chosen; a
+     man capricious, singular, fantastic; this is the Rousseau of
+     the public; the other is obliged to work for his living, the
+     Rousseau whom you see."[393]
+
+They often took long rambles together, and all proceeded most
+harmoniously, unless St. Pierre offered to pay for such refreshment as
+they might take, when a furious explosion was sure to follow. Here is
+one more picture, without explosion.
+
+     _An Easter Monday Excursion to Mont Valérien._
+
+     We made an appointment at a café in the Champs Elysées. In
+     the morning we took some chocolate. The wind was westerly,
+     and the air fresh. The sun was surrounded by white clouds,
+     spread in masses over an azure sky. Reaching the Bois de
+     Boulogne by eight o'clock, Jean Jacques set to work
+     botanising. As he collected his little harvest, we kept
+     walking along. We had gone through part of the wood, when in
+     the midst of the solitude we perceived two young girls, one
+     of whom was arranging the other's hair.--[Reminded them of
+     some verses of Virgil.]....
+
+     Arrived on the edge of the river, we crossed the ferry with
+     a number of people whom devotion was taking to Mont
+     Valérien. We climbed an extremely stiff slope, and were
+     hardly on the top before hunger overtook us and we began to
+     think of dining. Rousseau then led the way towards a
+     hermitage, where he knew we could make sure of hospitality.
+     The brother who opened to us, conducted us to the chapel,
+     where they were reciting the litanies of providence, which
+     are extremely beautiful.... When we had prayed, Jean Jacques
+     said to me with genuine feeling: "Now I feel what is said in
+     the gospel, 'Where several of you are gathered together in
+     my name, there will I be in the midst of them.' There is a
+     sentiment of peace and comfort here that penetrates the
+     soul." I replied, "If Fénelon were alive, you would be a
+     Catholic." "Ah," said he, the tears in his eyes, "if Fénelon
+     were alive, I would seek to be his lackey."
+
+     Presently we were introduced into the refectory; we seated
+     ourselves during the reading. The subject was the injustice
+     of the complainings of man: God has brought him from
+     nothing, he oweth him nothing. After the reading, Rousseau
+     said to me in a voice of deep emotion: "Ah, how happy is the
+     man who can believe...." We walked about for some time in
+     the cloister and the gardens. They command an immense
+     prospect. Paris in the distance reared her towers all
+     covered with light, and made a crown to the far-spreading
+     landscape. The brightness of the view contrasted with the
+     great leaden clouds that rolled after one another from the
+     west, and seemed to fill the valley.... In the afternoon
+     rain came on, as we approached the Porte Maillot. We took
+     shelter along with a crowd of other holiday folk under some
+     chestnut-trees whose leaves were coming out. One of the
+     waiters of a tavern perceiving Jean Jacques, rushed to him
+     full of joy, exclaiming, "What, is it you, _mon bonhomme_?
+     Why, it is a whole age since we have seen you." Rousseau
+     replied cheerfully, "'Tis because my wife has been ill, and
+     I myself have been out of sorts." "_Mon pauvre bonhomme_,"
+     replied the lad, "you must not stop here; come in, come in,
+     and I will find room for you." He hurried us along to a room
+     upstairs, where in spite of the crowd he procured for us
+     chairs and a table, and bread and wine. I said to Jean
+     Jacques, "He seems very familiar with you." He answered,
+     "Yes, we have known one another some years. We used to come
+     here in fine weather, my wife and I, to eat a cutlet of an
+     evening."[394]
+
+Things did not continue to go thus smoothly. One day St. Pierre went
+to see him, and was received without a word, and with stiff and gloomy
+mien. He tried to talk, but only got monosyllables; he took up a book,
+and this drew a sarcasm which sent him forth from the room. For more
+than two months they did not meet. At length they had an accidental
+encounter at a street corner. Rousseau accosted St. Pierre, and with a
+gradually warming sensibility proceeded thus: "There are days when I
+want to be alone and crave privacy. I come back from my solitary
+expeditions so calm and contented. There I have not been wanting to
+anybody, nor has anybody been wanting to me," and so on.[395] He
+expressed this humour more pointedly on some other occasion, when he
+said that there were times in which he fled from the eyes of men as
+from Parthian arrows. As one said who knew from experience, the fate
+of his most intimate friend depended on a word or a gesture.[396]
+Another of them declared that he knew Rousseau's style of discarding a
+friend by letter so thoroughly, that he felt confident he could supply
+Rousseau's place in case of illness or absence.[397] In much of this
+we suspect that the quarrel was perfectly justified. Sociality meant a
+futile display before unworthy and condescending curiosity. "It is not
+I whom they care for," he very truly said, "but public opinion and
+talk about me, without a thought of what real worth I may have." Hence
+his steadfast refusal to go out to dine or sup. The mere impertinence
+of the desire to see him was illustrated by some coxcombs who insisted
+with a famous actress of his acquaintance, that she should invite the
+strange philosopher to meet them. She was aware that no known force
+would persuade Rousseau to come, so she dressed up her tailor as
+philosopher, bade him keep a silent tongue, and vanish suddenly
+without a word of farewell. The tailor was long philosophically
+silent, and by the time that wine had loosened his tongue, the rest of
+the company were too far gone to perceive that the supposed Rousseau
+was chattering vulgar nonsense.[398] We can believe that with admirers
+of this stamp Rousseau was well pleased to let tailors or others stand
+in his place. There were some, however, of a different sort, who
+flitted across his sight and then either vanished of their own accord,
+or were silently dismissed, from Madame de Genlis up to Grétry and
+Gluck. With Gluck he seems to have quarrelled for setting his music to
+French words, when he must have known that Italian was the only tongue
+fit for music.[399] Yet it was remarked that no one ever heard him
+speak ill of others. His enemies, the figures of his delusion, were
+vaguely denounced in many dronings, but they remained in dark shadow
+and were unnamed. When Voltaire paid his famous last visit to the
+capital (1778), some one thought of paying court to Rousseau by making
+a mock of the triumphal reception of the old warrior, but Rousseau
+harshly checked the detractor. It is true that in 1770-71 he gave to
+some few of his acquaintances one or more readings of the Confessions,
+although they contained much painful matter for many people still
+living, among the rest for Madame d'Epinay. She wrote justifiably
+enough to the lieutenant of police, praying that all such readings
+might be prohibited, and it is believed that they were so
+prohibited.[400]
+
+In 1769, when Polish anarchy was at its height, as if to show at once
+how profound the anarchy was, and how profound the faith among many
+minds in the power of the new French theories, an application was made
+to Mably to draw up a scheme for the renovation of distracted Poland.
+Mably's notions won little esteem from the persons who had sought for
+them, and in 1771 a similar application was made to Rousseau in his
+Parisian garret. He replied in the Considerations on the Government of
+Poland, which are written with a good deal of vigour of expression,
+but contain nothing that needs further discussion. He hinted to the
+Poles with some shrewdness that a curtailment of their territory by
+their neighbours was not far off,[401] and the prediction was rapidly
+fulfilled by the first partition of Poland in the following year.
+
+He was asked one day of what nation he had the highest opinion. He
+answered, the Spanish. The Spanish nation, he said, has a character;
+if it is not rich, it still preserves all its pride and self-respect
+in the midst of its poverty; and it is animated by a single spirit,
+for it has not been scourged by the conflicting opinions of
+philosophy.[402]
+
+He was extremely poor for these last eight years of his life. He seems
+to have drawn the pension which George III. had settled on him, for
+not more than one year. We do not know why he refused to receive it
+afterwards. A well-meaning friend, when the arrears amounted to
+between six and seven thousand francs, applied for it on his behalf,
+and a draft for the money was sent. Rousseau gave the offender a
+vigorous rebuke for meddling in affairs that did not concern him, and
+the draft was destroyed. Other attempts to induce him to draw this
+money failed equally.[403] Yet he had only about fifty pounds a year
+to live on, together with the modest amount which he earned by copying
+music.[404]
+
+The sting of indigence began to make itself felt towards 1777. His
+health became worse and he could not work. Theresa was waxing old, and
+could no longer attend to the small cares of the household. More than
+one person offered them shelter and provision, and the old
+distractions as to a home in which to end his days began once again.
+At length M. Girardin prevailed upon him to come and live at
+Ermenonville, one of his estates some twenty miles from Paris. A dense
+cloud of obscure misery hangs over the last months of this forlorn
+existence.[405] No tragedy had ever a fifth act so squalid. Theresa's
+character seems to have developed into something truly bestial.
+Rousseau's terrors of the designs of his enemies returned with great
+violence. He thought he was imprisoned, and he knew that he had no
+means of escape. One day (July 2, 1778), suddenly and without a single
+warning symptom, all drew to an end; the sensations which had been the
+ruling part of his life were affected by pleasure and pain no more,
+the dusky phantoms all vanished into space. The surgeons reported that
+the cause of his death was apoplexy, but a suspicion has haunted the
+world ever since, that he destroyed himself by a pistol-shot. We
+cannot tell. There is no inherent improbability in the fact of his
+having committed suicide. In the New Heloïsa he had thrown the
+conditions which justified self-destruction into a distinct formula.
+Fifteen years before, he declared that his own case fell within the
+conditions which he had prescribed, and that he was meditating
+action.[406] Only seven years before, he had implied that a man had
+the right to deliver himself of the burden of his own life, if its
+miseries were intolerable and irremediable.[407] This, however, counts
+for nothing in the absence of some kind of positive evidence, and of
+that there is just enough to leave the manner of his end a little
+doubtful.[408] Once more, we cannot tell.
+
+By the serene moonrise of a summer night, his body was put under the
+ground on an island in the midst of a small lake, where poplars throw
+shadows over the still water, silently figuring the destiny of
+mortals. Here it remained for sixteen years. Then amid the roar of
+cannon, the crash of trumpet and drum, and the wild acclamations of a
+populace gone mad in exultation, terror, fury, it was ordered that the
+poor dust should be transported to the national temple of great men.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[385] Streckeisen, ii. 315-328.
+
+[386] Streckeisen, ii. 337.
+
+[387] June 19, 1767. _Corr._, v. 172.
+
+[388] _Corr._, v. 267, 375.
+
+[389] _Corr._, v. 330-381, 408, etc.
+
+[390] Bourgoin, Aug. 1768, to March, 1769. Monquin, to July 1770.
+
+[391] See above, vol. i. chap. iv.
+
+[392] The life of Bernardin de St. Pierre (1737-1814) was nearly as
+irregular as that of his friend and master. But his character was
+essentially crafty and selfish, like that of many other
+sentimentalists of the first order.
+
+[393] _Oeuv._, xii. 69, 73.
+
+[394] _Oeuv._, xii. 104, etc.; and also the _Préambule de l'Arcadie_,
+_Oeuv._, vii. 64, 65.
+
+[395] St. Pierre, xii. 81-83.
+
+[396] Dusaulx, p. 81. For his quarrel with Rousseau, see pp. 130, etc.
+
+[397] Rulhières in Dusaulx, p. 179. For a strange interview between
+Rulhières and Rousseau, see pp. 185-186.
+
+[398] Musset-Pathay, i. 181.
+
+[399] _Ib._
+
+[400] Musset-Pathay, i. 209. Rousseau gave a copy of the Confessions
+to Moultou, but forbade the publication before the year 1800.
+Notwithstanding this, printers procured copies surreptitiously,
+perhaps through Theresa, ever in need of money; the first part was
+published four years, and the second part with many suppressions
+eleven years, after his death, in 1782 and 1789 respectively. See
+Musset-Pathay, ii. 464.
+
+[401] Ch. v. Such a curtailment, he says, "would no doubt be a great
+evil for the parts dismembered, but it would be a great advantage for
+the body of the nation." He urged federation as the condition of any
+solid improvement in their affairs.
+
+[402] Bernardin de St. Pierre, xii. 37. Comte had a similar admiration
+for Spain and for the same reason.
+
+[403] Corancez, quoted in Musset-Pathay, i. 239. Also _Corr._, vi.
+295.
+
+[404] _Corr._, vi. 303.
+
+[405] Robespierre, then a youth, is said to have invited him here. See
+Hamel's _Robespierre_, i. 22.
+
+[406] See above, vol. i. pp. 16, 17.
+
+[407] _Corr._, vi. 264.
+
+[408] The case stands thus:--(1) There was the certificate of five
+doctors, attesting that Rousseau had died of apoplexy. (2) The
+assertion of M. Girardin, in whose house he died, that there was no
+hole in his head, nor poison in the stomach or viscera, nor other sign
+of self-destruction. (3) The assertion of Theresa to the same effect.
+On the other hand, we have the assertion of Corancez, that on his
+journey to Ermenonville on the day of Rousseau's burial a horse-master
+on the road had said, "Who would have supposed that M. Rousseau would
+have destroyed himself!"--and a variety of inferences from the wording
+of the certificate, and of Theresa's letter. Musset-Pathay believes in
+the suicide, and argued very ingeniously against M. Girardin. But his
+arguments do not go far beyond verbal ingenuity, showing that suicide
+was possible, and was consistent with the language of the documents,
+rather than adducing positive testimony. See vol. i. of his _History_,
+pp. 268, etc. The controversy was resumed as late as 1861, between the
+_Figaro_ and the _Monde Illustré_. See also M. Jal's _Dict. Crit. de
+Biog. et d'Hist._, p. 1091.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX.
+
+
+ACADEMIES (French) local, i. 132.
+
+Academy, of Dijon, Rousseau writes essays for, i. 133;
+  French, prize essay against Rousseau's Discourse, i. 150, _n._
+
+Actors, how regarded in France in Rousseau's time, i. 322.
+
+Althusen, teaches doctrine of sovereignty of the people, ii. 147.
+
+America (U.S.), effects in, of the doctrine of the equality of men,
+     i. 182.
+
+American colonists indebted in eighteenth century to Rousseau's
+     writings, i. 3.
+
+Anchorite, distinction between the old and the new, i. 234.
+
+Annecy, i. 34, 50;
+  Rousseau's room at, i. 54;
+  Rousseau's teachers at, i. 56;
+  seminary at, i. 82.
+
+Aquinas, protest against juristical doctrine of law being the
+     pleasure of the prince, ii. 144, 145.
+
+Aristotle on Origin of Society, i. 174.
+
+Atheism, Rousseau's protest against, i. 208;
+  St. Lambert on, i. 209, _n._;
+  Robespierre's protest against, ii. 178;
+  Chaumette put to death for endeavouring to base the government of
+     France on, ii. 180.
+
+Augustine (of Hippo), ii. 272, 303.
+
+Austin, John, ii. 151, _n._;
+  on Sovereignty, ii. 162.
+
+Authors, difficulties of, in France in the eighteenth century, ii.
+     55-61.
+
+
+BABOEUF, on the Revolution, ii. 123, _n._
+
+Barbier, ii. 26.
+
+Basedow, his enthusiasm for Rousseau's educational theories, ii. 251.
+
+Beaumont, De, Archbishop of Paris, mandate against Rousseau issued
+     by, ii. 83;
+  argument from, ii. 86.
+
+Bernard, maiden name of Rousseau's mother, i. 10.
+
+Bienne, Rousseau driven to take refuge in island in lake of, ii.
+     108;
+  his account of, ii. 109-115.
+
+Bodin, on Government, ii. 147;
+  his definition of an aristocratic state, ii. 168, _n._
+
+Bonaparte, Napoleon, ii. 102, _n._
+
+Bossuet, on Stage Plays, i. 321.
+
+Boswell, James, ii. 98;
+  visits Rousseau, ii. 98, also _ib._ _n._;
+  urged by Rousseau to visit Corsica, ii. 100;
+  his letter to Rousseau, ii. 101.
+
+Boufflers, Madame de, ii. 5, _ib._ _n._
+
+Bougainville (brother of the navigator), i. 184, _n._
+
+Brutus, how Rousseau came to be panegyrist of, i. 187.
+
+Buffon, ii. 205.
+
+Burke, ii. 140, 192.
+
+Burnet, Bishop, on Genevese, i. 225.
+
+Burton, John Hill, his _Life of Hume_ (on Rousseau), ii. 283,
+     _n._
+
+Byron, Lord, antecedents of highest creative efforts, ii. 1;
+  effect of nature upon, ii. 40;
+  difference between and Rousseau, ii. 41.
+
+
+CALAS, i. 312.
+
+Calvin, i. 4, 189;
+  Rousseau on, as a legislator, ii. 131;
+  and Servetus, ii. 180;
+  mentioned, ii. 181.
+
+_Candide_, thought by Rousseau to be meant as a reply to him,
+     i. 319.
+
+Cardan, ii. 303.
+
+Cato, how Rousseau came to be his panegyrist, i. 187.
+
+Chambéri, probable date of Rousseau's return to, i. 62, _n._;
+  takes up his residence there, i. 69;
+  effect on his mind of a French column of troops passing through,
+     i. 72, 73;
+  his illness at, i. 73, _n._
+
+Charmettes, Les, Madame de Warens's residence, i. 73;
+  present condition of, i. 74, 75, _n._;
+  time spent there by Rousseau, i. 94.
+
+Charron, ii. 203.
+
+Chateaubriand, influenced by Rousseau, i. 3.
+
+Chatham, Lord, ii. 92.
+
+Chaumette, ii. 178;
+  guillotined on charge of endeavouring to establish atheism in
+     France, ii. 179.
+
+Chesterfield, Lord, ii. 15.
+
+Choiseul, ii. 57, 64, 72.
+
+Citizen, revolutionary use of word, derived from Rousseau, ii. 161.
+
+Civilisation, variety of the origin and process of, i. 176;
+  defects of, i. 176;
+  one of the worst trials of, ii. 102.
+
+Cobbett, ii. 42.
+
+Collier, Jeremy, on the English Stage, i. 323.
+
+Condillac, i. 95.
+
+Condorcet, i. 89;
+  on Social Position of Women, i. 335;
+  human perfectibility, ii. 119;
+  inspiration of, drawn from the school of Voltaire and Rousseau,
+     ii. 194;
+  belief of, in the improvement of humanity, ii. 246;
+  grievous mistake of, ii. 247.
+
+Confessions, the, not to be trusted for minute accuracy, i. 86,
+     _n._;
+  or for dates, i. 93;
+  first part written 1766, ii. 301;
+  their character, ii. 303;
+  published surreptitiously, ii. 324, _n._;
+  readings from, prohibited by police, ii. 324.
+
+Conti, Prince of, ii. 4-7;
+  receives Rousseau at Trye, ii. 118.
+
+Contract, Social, i. 136.
+
+Corsica, struggles for independence of, ii. 99;
+  Rousseau invited to legislate for, ii. 99-102;
+  bought by France, ii. 102.
+
+Cowper, i. 20;
+  ii. 41;
+  on Rousseau, ii. 41 _n._;
+  lines in the Task, ii. 253;
+  his delusions, ii. 301.
+
+Cynicism, Rousseau's assumption of, i. 206.
+
+
+D'AIGUILLON, ii. 72.
+
+D'Alembert, i. 89;
+  Voltaire's staunchest henchman, i. 321;
+  his article on Geneva, i. 321;
+  on Stage Plays, i. 326, _n._;
+  on Position of Women in Society, i. 335;
+  on Rousseau's letter on the Theatre, i. 336;
+  suspected by Rousseau of having written the pretended letter from
+     Frederick of Prussia, ii. 288;
+  advises Hume to publish account of Rousseau's quarrel with him,
+     ii. 294.
+
+D'Argenson, ii. 180.
+
+Dates of Rousseau's letters to be relied on, not those of the
+     Confessions, i. 93.
+
+Davenport, Mr., provides Rousseau with a home at Wootton, ii. 286;
+  his kindness to Rousseau, ii. 306.
+
+Deism, Rousseau's, ii. 260-275;
+  that of others, ii. 262-265;
+  shortcomings of Rousseau's, ii. 270.
+
+Democracy defined, ii. 168;
+  rejected by Rousseau, as too perfect for men, ii. 171.
+
+D'Epinay, Madame, i. 194, 195, 205;
+  gives the Hermitage to Rousseau, i. 229, _n._;
+  his quarrels with, i. 271;
+  his relations with, i. 273, 276;
+  journey to Geneva of, i. 284;
+  squabbles arising out of, between, and Rousseau, Diderot, and
+     Grimm, i. 285-290;
+  mentioned, ii. 7, 26, 197;
+  wrote on education, ii. 199;
+  applies to secretary of police to prohibit Rousseau's readings
+     from his Confessions, ii. 324.
+
+D'Epinay, Monsieur, i. 254; ii. 26.
+
+Descartes, i. 87, 225; ii. 267.
+
+Deux Ponts, Duc de, Rousseau's rude reply to, i. 207.
+
+D'Holbach, i. 192;
+  Rousseau's dislike of his materialistic friends, i. 223;
+     ii. 37, 256.
+
+D'Houdetot, Madame, i. 255-270;
+  Madame d'Epinay's jealousy of, i. 278;
+  mentioned, ii. 7;
+  offers Rousseau a home in Normandy, ii. 117.
+
+Diderot, i. 64, 89, 133;
+  tries to manage Rousseau, i. 213;
+  his domestic misconduct, i. 215;
+  leader of the materialistic party, i. 223;
+  on Solitary Life, i. 232;
+  his active life, i. 233;
+  without moral sensitiveness, i. 262;
+  mentioned, i. 262, 269, 271;
+     ii. 8;
+  his relations with Rousseau, i. 271;
+  accused of pilfering Goldoni's new play, i. 275;
+  his relations and contentions with Rousseau, i. 275, 276;
+  lectures Rousseau about Madame d'Epinay, i. 284;
+  visits Rousseau after his leaving the Hermitage, i. 289;
+  Rousseau's final breach with, i. 336;
+  his criticism, and plays, ii. 34;
+  his defects, ii. 34;
+  thrown into prison, ii. 57;
+  his difficulties with the Encyclopædists, ii. 57;
+  his papers saved from the police by Malesherbes, ii. 62.
+
+Dijon, academy of, i. 132.
+
+Discourses, The, Circumstances of the composition of the first
+     Discourse, i. 133-136;
+  summary of it, i. 138-145
+     disastrous effect of the progress of sciences and arts, i.
+          140, 141;
+     error more dangerous than truth useful, i. 141;
+     uselessness of learning and art, i. 141, 142;
+     terrible disorders caused in Europe by the art of printing, i.
+          143;
+     two kinds of ignorance, i. 144;
+  the relation of this Discourse to Montaigne, i. 145;
+  its one-sidedness and hollowness, i. 148;
+  shown by Voltaire, i. 148;
+  its positive side, i. 149, 150;
+  second Discourse, origin of the Inequality of Man, i. 154;
+  summary of it, i. 159, 170;
+     state of nature, i. 150, 162;
+     Hobbes's mistake, i. 161;
+     what broke up the "state of nature," i. 164;
+     its preferableness, i. 166, 167;
+     origin of society and laws, i. 168;
+     "new state of nature," i. 169;
+     main position of the Discourse, i. 169;
+  its utter inclusiveness, i. 170;
+  criticism on its method, i. 170;
+  on its matter, i. 172;
+  wanting in evidence, i. 172;
+  further objections to it, i. 173;
+  assumes uniformity of process, i. 176;
+  its unscientific character, i. 177;
+  its real importance, i. 178;
+  its protest against the mockery of civilisation, i. 178;
+  equality of man, i. 181;
+  different effects of this doctrine in France and the United States
+     explained, i. 182, 183;
+  discovers a reaction against the historical method of Montesquieu,
+     i. 183, 184;
+  pecuniary results of, i. 196;
+  Diderot's praise of first Discourse, i. 200;
+  Voltaire's acknowledgement of gift of second Discourse, i. 308;
+  the, an attack on the general ordering of society, ii. 22;
+  referred to, ii. 41.
+
+Drama, its proper effect, i. 326;
+  what would be that of its introduction into Geneva, i. 327;
+  true answer to Rousseau's contentions, i. 329.
+
+Dramatic morality, i. 326.
+
+Drinkers, Rousseau's estimate of, i. 330.
+
+Drunkenness, how esteemed in Switzerland and Naples, i. 331.
+
+Duclos, i. 206;
+  ii. 62.
+
+Duni, i. 292.
+
+Dupin, Madame de, Rousseau secretary to, i. 120;
+  her position in society, i. 195;
+  Rousseau's country life with, i. 196;
+  friend of the Abbé de Saint Pierre, i. 244.
+
+
+EDUCATION, interest taken in, in France in Rousseau's time, ii. 193,
+     194;
+  its new direction ii. 195;
+  Locke, the pioneer of, ii. 202, 203;
+  Rousseau's special merit in connection with, ii. 203;
+  his views on (see Emilius, _passim_, as well as for general
+     consideration of) what it is, ii. 219;
+  plans of, of Locke and others, designed for the higher class, ii.
+     254;
+  Rousseau's for all, ii. 254.
+
+_Emile_, i. 136, 196.
+
+Emilius, character of, ii. 2, 3;
+  particulars of the publication of, ii. 59, 60;
+  effect of, on Rousseau's fortunes, ii. 62-64;
+  ordered to be burnt by public executioner at Paris, ii. 65;
+  at Geneva, ii. 72;
+  condemned by the Sorbonne, ii. 82;
+  supplied (as also did the Social Contract) dialect for the longing
+     in France and Germany to return to nature, ii. 193;
+  substance of, furnished by Locke, ii. 202;
+  examination of, ii. 197-280;
+  mischief produced by its good advice, ii. 206, 207;
+  training of young children, ii. 207, 208;
+  constantly reasoning with them a mistake of Locke's, ii. 209;
+  Rousseau's central idea, disparagement of the reasoning faculty,
+     ii. 209, 210;
+  theories of education, practice better than precept, ii. 211;
+  the idea of property, the first that Rousseau would have given to
+     a child, ii. 212;
+  modes of teaching, ii. 214, 215;
+  futility of such methods, ii. 215, 216;
+  where Rousseau is right, and where wrong, ii. 219, 220;
+  effect of his own want of parental love, ii. 220;
+  teaches that everybody should learn a trade, ii. 223;
+  no special foresight, ii. 224, 225;
+  supremacy of the common people insisted upon, ii. 226, 227;
+  three dominant states of mind to be established by the instructor,
+     ii. 229, 230;
+  Rousseau's incomplete notion of justice, ii. 231;
+  ideal of Emilius, ii. 232, 233;
+  forbids early teaching of history, ii. 237, 238;
+  disparages modern history, ii. 239;
+  criticism on the old historians, ii. 240;
+  education of women, ii. 241;
+     Rousseau's failure here, ii. 242, 243;
+  inconsistent with himself, ii. 244, 245;
+  worthlessness of his views, ii. 249;
+  real merits of the work, ii. 249;
+  its effect in Germany, ii. 251, 252;
+  not much effect on education in England, ii. 252;
+  Emilius the first expression of democratic teaching in education,
+     ii. 254;
+  Rousseau's deism, ii. 258, 260, 264-267, 269, 270, 276;
+  its inadequacy for the wants of men, ii. 267-270;
+  his position towards Christianity, ii. 270-276;
+  real satisfaction of the religious emotions, ii. 275-280.
+
+Encyclopædia, The, D'Alembert's article on Geneva in, i. 321.
+
+Encyclopædists, the society of, confirms Rousseau's religious
+     faith, i. 221;
+  referred to, ii. 257.
+
+Evil, discussions on Rousseau's, Voltaire's, and De Maistre's
+     teachings concerning, i. 313, _n._, 318;
+  different effect of existence of, on Rousseau and Voltaire, i. 319.
+
+
+FÉNELON, ii. 37, 248;
+  Rousseau's veneration for, ii. 321.
+
+Ferguson, Adam, ii. 253.
+
+Filmer contends that a man is not naturally free, ii. 126.
+
+Foundling Hospital, Rousseau sends his children to the, i. 120.
+
+France, debt of, to Rousseau, i. 3;
+  Rousseau the one great religious writer of, in the eighteenth
+     century, i. 26;
+  his wanderings in the east of, i. 61;
+  his fondness for, i. 62-72;
+  establishment of local academies in, i. 132;
+  decay in, of Greek literary studies, i. 146;
+  effects in, of doctrine of equality of man, i. 182;
+  effects in, of Montesquieu's "Spirit of Laws," i. 183;
+  amiability of, in the eighteenth century, i. 187;
+  effect of Rousseau's writings in, i. 187;
+  collective organisation in, i. 222;
+  St. Pierre's strictures on government of, i. 244;
+  Rousseau on government of, i. 246;
+  effect of Rousseau's spiritual element on, i. 306;
+  patriotism wanting in, i. 332;
+  difficulties of authorship in, ii. 55-64;
+  buys Corsica from the Genoese, ii. 102;
+  state of, after 1792, apparently favourable to the carrying out of
+     Rousseau's political views, ii. 131, 132;
+  in 1793, ii. 135;
+  haunted by narrow and fervid minds, ii. 142.
+
+Francueil, Rousseau's patron, i. 99;
+  grandfather of Madame George Sand, i. 99, _n._;
+  Rousseau's salary from, i. 120;
+  country-house of, i. 196.
+
+Franklin, Benjamin, ii. 42.
+
+Frederick of Prussia, relations between, and Rousseau, ii. 73-78;
+  "famous bull" of, ii. 90.
+
+Freeman on Growth of English Constitution, ii. 164.
+
+French, principles of, revolution, i. 1, 2, 3;
+  process and ideas of, i. 4;
+  Rousseau of old, stock, i. 8;
+  poetry, Rousseau on, i. 90, _ib. n._;
+  melody, i. 105;
+  academy, thesis for prize, i. 150, _n._;
+  philosophers, i. 202,
+  music, i. 291;
+  music, its pretensions demolished by Rousseau, i. 294;
+  ecclesiastics opposed to the theatre, ii. 322;
+  stage, Rousseau on, i. 325;
+  morals, depravity of, ii. 26, 27;
+  Barbier on, ii. 26;
+  thought, benefit, or otherwise of revolution on, ii. 54;
+  history, evil side of, in Rousseau's time, ii. 56;
+  indebted to Holland for freedom of the press, ii. 59;
+  catholic and monarchic absolutism sunk deep into the character of
+     the, ii. 167.
+
+French Convention, story of member of the, ii. 134, _n._
+
+
+GALUPPI, effect of his music, i. 105.
+
+Geneva, i. 8;
+  characteristics of its people, i. 9;
+  Rousseau's visit to, i. 93;
+  influence of, on Rousseau, i. 94;
+  he revisits it in 1754, i. 186-190, 218;
+  turns Protestant again there, i. 220;
+  religious opinion in, i. 223 (also i. 224, _n._);
+  Rousseau thinks of taking up his abode in, i. 228;
+  Voltaire at, i. 308;
+  D'Alembert's article on, in Encyclopædia, i. 321;
+  Rousseau's notions of effect of
+  introducing the drama at, i. 327;
+  council of, order public burning of Emilius and the Social
+     Contract, and arrest of the author if he came there, ii. 72;
+  the only place where the Social Contract was actually burnt, ii. 73,
+     _n._;
+  Voltaire suspected to have had a hand in the matter, ii. 81;
+  council of, divided into two camps by Rousseau's condemnation, in
+     1762, ii. 102;
+  Rousseau renounces his citizenship in, ii. 104;
+  working of the republic, ii. 104.
+
+Genevese, Bishop Burnet on, i. 225;
+  Rousseau's distrust of, i. 228;
+  his panegyric on, i. 328;
+  manners of, according to Rousseau, i. 330;
+  their complaint of it, i. 331.
+
+Genlis, Madame de, ii. 323.
+
+Genoa, Rousseau in quarantine at, i. 103;
+  Corsica sold to France by, ii. 102.
+
+Germany, sentimental movements in, ii. 33.
+
+Gibbon, Edward, at Lausanne, ii. 96.
+
+Girardin, St. Marc, on Rousseau, i. 111, _n._;
+  on Rousseau's discussions, ii. 11, _n._;
+  offers Rousseau a home, ii. 326.
+
+Gluck, i. 291, 296;
+  Rousseau quarrels with, for setting his music to French words, ii.
+     323.
+
+Goethe, i. 20.
+
+Goguet on Society, ii. 127, _n._;
+  on tacit conventions, ii. 148, _n._;
+  on law, ii. 153, _n._
+
+Goldoni, Diderot accused of pilfering his new play, i. 275.
+
+Gothic architecture denounced by Voltaire and Turgot, i. 294.
+
+Gouvon, Count, Rousseau servant to, i. 42.
+
+Government, disquisitions on, ii. 131-206;
+  remarks on, ii. 131-141;
+  early democratic ideas of, ii. 144-148;
+  Hobbes' philosophy of, ii. 151;
+  Rousseau's science of, ii. 155, 156;
+  De la Rivière's science of, ii. 156, _n._;
+  federation recommended by Rousseau to the Poles, ii. 166;
+  three forms of government defined, ii. 169;
+  definition inadequate, ii. 169;
+  Montesquieu's definition, ii. 169;
+  Rousseau's distinction between _tyrant_ and _despot_, ii.
+     169, _n._;
+  his objection to democracy, ii. 172;
+  to monarchy, ii. 173;
+  consideration of aristocracy, ii. 174;
+  his own scheme, ii. 175;
+  Hobbes's "Passive Obedience," ii. 181, 182;
+  social conscience theory, ii. 183-187;
+  government made impossible by Rousseau's doctrine of social
+     contract, ii. 188-192;
+  Burke on expediency in, ii. 192;
+  what a civilised nation is, ii. 194;
+  Jefferson on, ii. 227, 228, _n._
+
+Governments, earliest, how composed, i. 169.
+
+Graffigny, Madame de, ii. 199.
+
+Gratitude, Rousseau on, ii. 14, 15;
+  explanation of his want of, ii. 70.
+
+Greece, importance of history of, i. 184, and _ib._ _n._
+
+Greek ideas, influence of, in France in the eighteenth century, i.
+     146.
+
+Grenoble, i. 93.
+
+Grétry, i. 292, 296; ii. 323.
+
+Grimm,
+  description of Rousseau by, i. 206;
+  Rousseau's quarrels with, i. 279;
+  letter of, about Rousseau and Diderot, i. 275;
+  relations of, with Rousseau, i. 279;
+  some account of his life, i. 279;
+  his conversation with Madame d'Epinay, i. 281;
+  criticism on Rousseau, i. 281;
+  natural want of sympathy between the two, i. 282;
+  Rousseau's quarrel with, i. 285-290; ii. 65, 199.
+
+Grotius, on Government, ii. 148.
+
+
+HÉBERT, ii. 178;
+  prevents publication of a book in which the author professed his
+     belief in a god, ii. 179.
+
+Helmholtz, i. 299.
+
+Helvétius, i. 191; ii. 65, 199.
+
+Herder, ii. 251;
+  Rousseau's influence on, ii. 315.
+
+Hermitage, the, given to Rousseau by Madame d'Epinay, i. 229 (also
+     _ib._ _n._);
+  what his friends thought of it, i. 231;
+  sale of, after the Revolution, i. 237, _n._;
+  reasons for Rousseau's leaving, i. 286.
+
+Hildebrand, i. 4.
+
+Hobbes, i. 143, 161;
+  his "Philosophy of Government," ii. 151;
+  singular influence of, upon Rousseau, ii. 151, 183;
+  essential difference between his views and those of Rousseau, ii.
+     159;
+  on Sovereignty, ii. 162;
+  Rousseau's definition of the three forms of government adopted
+     by, inadequate, ii. 168;
+   would reduce spiritual and temporal jurisdiction to one political
+     unity, ii. 183.
+
+Holbachians, i. 337; ii. 2.
+
+Hooker, on Civil Government, ii. 148.
+
+Hôtel St. Quentin, Rousseau at, i. 106.
+
+Hume, David, i. 64, 89;
+  his deep-set sagacity, i. 156, ii. 6, 75;
+  suspected of tampering with Boswell's letter, ii. 98, _n._;
+  on Boswell, ii. 101, _n._;
+  his eagerness to find Rousseau a refuge in England, ii. 282, 283;
+  his account of Rousseau, ii. 284;
+  finds him a home at Wootton, ii. 286;
+  Rousseau's quarrel with, ii. 286-291 (also ii. 290, _n._);
+  his innocence of Walpole's letter, ii. 292;
+  his conduct in the quarrel, ii. 293;
+  saves Rousseau from arrest of French Government, ii. 295;
+  on Rousseau's sensitiveness, ii. 299.
+
+
+IMAGINATION, Rousseau's, i. 247.
+
+
+JACOBINS, the, Rousseau's Social Contract, their gospel, ii. 132,
+     133;
+  their mistake, ii. 136;
+  convenience to them of some of the maxims of the Social Contract,
+     ii. 142;
+  Jacobin supremacy and Hobbism, ii. 152;
+  how they might have saved France, ii. 167.
+
+Jansen, his propositions, i. 81.
+
+Jansenists, Rousseau's suspicions of, ii. 63;
+  mentioned, ii. 89.
+
+Jean Paul, ii. 216, 252.
+
+Jefferson, ii. 227, _n._
+
+Jesuits, Rousseau's suspicions of the, ii. 64;
+  the, and parliaments, ii. 65;
+  movement against, ii. 65;
+  suppression of the, leads to increased thought about education,
+     ii. 199.
+
+Johnson, ii. 15, 98.
+
+
+KAMES, Lord, ii. 253.
+
+
+LAMENNAIS, influenced by Rousseau, ii. 228.
+
+Language, origin of, i. 161.
+
+Latour, Madame, ii. 19, _ib. n._
+
+Lavater favourable to education on Rousseau's plan, ii. 251 (also
+     _ib._ _n._)
+
+Lavoisier, reply to his request for a fortnight's respite, ii. 227,
+     _n._
+
+Law, not a contract, ii. 153.
+
+Lecouvreur, Adrienne, refused Christian burial on account of her
+     being an actress, i. 323.
+
+Leibnitz, i. 87;
+  his optimism, i. 309;
+  on the constitution of the universe, i. 312.
+
+Lessing, on Pope, i. 310, _n._
+
+"Letters from the Mountain," ii. 104;
+  burned, by command, at Paris and the Hague, ii. 105.
+
+Liberty, English, Rousseau's notion of, ii. 163, _n._
+
+Life, Rousseau's condemnation of the contemplative, i. 10;
+  his idea of household, i. 41;
+  easier for him to preach than for others to practise, i. 43.
+
+Lisbon, earthquake of, Voltaire on, i. 310;
+  Rousseau's letter to Voltaire on, i. 310, 311.
+
+Locke, his Essay, i. 87;
+  his notions, i. 87;
+  his influence upon Rousseau, ii. 121-126;
+  on Marriage, ii. 126;
+  on Civil Government, ii. 149, 150, _n._;
+  indefiniteness of his views, ii. 160;
+  the pioneer of French thought on education, ii. 202, 203;
+  Rousseau's indebtedness to, ii. 203;
+  his mistake in education, ii. 209;
+  subjects of his theories, ii. 254.
+
+Lulli (music), i. 291.
+
+Luther, i. 4.
+
+Luxembourg, the Duke of, gives Rousseau a home, ii. 2-7, 9.
+
+Luxembourg, the Maréchale de, in vain seeks Rousseau's children,
+     i. 128;
+  helps to get Emilius published, ii. 63-64, 67.
+
+Lycurgus, ii. 129, 131;
+  influence of, upon Saint Just, ii. 133.
+
+Lyons, Rousseau a tutor at, i. 95-97.
+
+
+MABLY, De, i. 95;
+  his socialism, i. 184;
+  applied to for scheme for the government of Poland, ii. 324.
+
+Maistre, De, i. 145;
+  on Optimism, i. 314.
+
+Maitre, Le, teaches Rousseau music, i. 58.
+
+Malebranche, i. 87.
+
+Malesherbes, Rousseau confesses his ungrateful nature to, ii. 14;
+  his dishonest advice to Rousseau, ii. 60;
+  helps Diderot, ii. 62;
+  and Rousseau in the publishing of Emilius, ii. 62, 63;
+  endangered by it, ii. 67;
+  asks Rousseau to collect plants for him, ii. 76.
+
+Man, his specific distinction from other animals, i. 161;
+  his state of nature, i. 161;
+  Hobbes wrong concerning this, i. 161;
+  equality of, i. 180;
+  effects of this doctrine in France and in the United States, i.
+     182;
+  not naturally free, ii. 126.
+
+Mandeville, i. 162.
+
+Manners, Rousseau's, Marmontel, and Grimm on, i. 205, 206;
+  Rousseau on Swiss, i. 329, 330;
+  depravity of French, in the eighteenth century, ii. 25, 26.
+
+Marischal, Lord, friendship between, and Rousseau, ii. 79-81;
+  account of, ii. 80;
+  on Boswell, ii. 98
+
+Marmontel, on Rousseau's manners, i. 206;
+  on his success, ii. 2.
+
+Marriage, design of the New Heloïsa to exalt, ii. 46-48, _ib._
+     _n._
+
+Marsilio, of Padua, on Law, ii. 145.
+
+Men, inequality of, Rousseau's second Discourse (see Discourses),
+     dedicated to the republic of Geneva, i. 190;
+  how received there, i. 228.
+
+Mirabeau the elder, Rousseau's letter to, from Wootton, ii. 305, 306;
+  his character, ii. 309-312;
+  receives Rousseau at Fleury, ii. 311.
+
+Mirabeau, Gabriel, Rousseau's influence on, ii. 315.
+
+Molière (Misanthrope of), Rousseau's criticism on, i. 329;
+  D'Alembert on, i. 329.
+
+Monarchy, Rousseau's objection to, ii. 171.
+
+Montaigu, Count de, avarice of, i. 101, 102.
+
+Montaigne, Rousseau's obligations to, i. 145;
+  influence of, on Rousseau, ii. 203.
+
+Montesquieu, "incomplete positivity" of, i. 156;
+  on Government, i. 157;
+  effect of his Spirit of Laws on Rousseau, i. 183;
+  confused definition of laws, ii. 153;
+  balanced parliamentary system of, ii. 163;
+  his definition of forms of government, ii. 169.
+
+Montmorency, Rousseau goes to live there, i. 229;
+  his life at, ii. 2-9.
+
+Montpellier, i. 92.
+
+Morals, state of, in France in the eighteenth century, ii. 26.
+
+Morellet, thrown into the Bastile, ii. 57.
+
+Morelly, his indirect influence on Rousseau, i. 156;
+  his socialistic theory, i. 157, 158;
+  his rules for organising a model community, i. 158, _n._;
+  his terse exposition of inequality contrasted with that of Rousseau,
+     i. 170;
+  on primitive human nature, i. 175;
+  his socialism, ii. 52;
+  influence of his "model community" upon St. Just, ii. 133,
+     _n._;
+  advice to mothers, ii. 205.
+
+Motiers, Rousseau's home there, ii. 77;
+  attends divine service at, ii. 91;
+  life at, ii. 91, 93.
+
+Moultou (pastor of Motiers), his enthusiasm for Rousseau, ii. 82.
+
+Music, Rousseau undertakes to teach, i. 60;
+  Rousseau's opinion concerning Italian, i. 105;
+  effect of Galuppi's, i. 105;
+  Rousseau earns his living by copying, i. 196; ii. 315;
+  Rameau's criticism on Rousseau's _Muses Galantes_, i. 211;
+  French, i. 291;
+  Rousseau's letter on, i. 292;
+  Italian, denounced at Paris, i. 292;
+  Rousseau utterly condemns French, i. 294;
+  quarrels with Gluck for setting his, to French words, ii. 323.
+
+Musical notation, Rousseau's, i. 291;
+  his Musical Dictionary, i. 296;
+  his notation explained, i. 296-301;
+  his system inapplicable to instruments, i. 301.
+
+
+NAPLES, drunkenness, how regarded in, i. 331.
+
+_Narcisse_, Rousseau's condemnation of his own comedy of, i.
+     215.
+
+Nature, Rousseau's love of, i. 234-241; ii. 39;
+  state of, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Hume on, i. 156-158;
+  Rousseau's, in Second Discourse, i. 171-180;
+  his starting-point of right, and normal constitution of civil
+     society, ii. 124. See State of Nature.
+
+Necker, ii. 54, 98, _n._
+
+Neuchâtel, flight to principality of, by Rousseau, ii. 73;
+  history of, ii. 73, _n._;
+  outbreak at, arising from religious controversy, ii. 90;
+  preparations for driving Rousseau out of, defeated by Frederick of
+     Prussia, ii. 90;
+  clergy of, against Rousseau, ii. 106.
+
+New Heloïsa, first conception of, i. 250;
+  monument of Rousseau's fall, ii. 1;
+  when completed and published, ii. 2;
+  read aloud to the Duchess de Luxembourg, ii. 3;
+  letter on suicide in, ii. 16;
+  effects upon Parisian ladies of reading the, ii. 18, 19;
+  criticism on, ii. 20-55;
+  his scheme proposed in it, ii. 21;
+  its story, ii. 24;
+  its purity, contrasted with contemporary and later French
+     romances, ii. 24;
+  its general effect, ii. 27;
+  Rousseau absolutely without humour, ii. 27;
+  utter selfishness of hero of, ii. 30;
+  its heroine, ii. 30;
+  its popularity, ii. 231, 232;
+  burlesque on it, ii. 31, _n._;
+  its vital defect, ii. 35;
+  difference between Rousseau, Byron, and others, ii. 42;
+  sumptuary details of the story, ii. 44, 45;
+  its democratic tendency, ii. 49, 50;
+  the bearing of its teaching, ii. 54;
+  hindrances to its circulation in France, ii. 57;
+  Malesherbes's low morality as to publishing, ii. 61.
+
+
+OPTIMISM of Pope and Leibnitz, i. 309-310;
+  discussed, ii. 128-130.
+
+Origin of inequality among men, i. 156. See also Discourses.
+
+
+PALEY, ii. 191, _n._
+
+Palissot, ii. 56.
+
+Paris, Rousseau's first visit to, i. 61;
+  his second, i. 63, 97, 102;
+  third visit, i. 106;
+  effect in, of his first Discourse, i. 139, _n._;
+  opinions in, on religion, laws, etc., i. 185;
+  "mimic philosophy" there, i. 193;
+  society in, in Rousseau's time, i. 202-211;
+  his view of it, i. 210;
+  composes there his _Muses Galantes_, i. 211;
+  returns to, from Geneva, i. 228;
+  his belief of the unfitness of its people for political affairs,
+     i. 246;
+  goes to, in 1741, with his scheme of musical notation, i. 291;
+  effect there of his letter on music, i. 295;
+  Rousseau's imaginary contrast between, and Geneva, i. 329;
+  Emilius ordered to be publicly burnt in, ii. 65;
+  parliament of, orders "Letters from the Mountain" to be burnt,
+     ii. 295;
+  also Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary, ii. 295;
+  Danton's scheme for municipal administration of, ii. 168,
+     _n._;
+  two parties (those of Voltaire and of Rousseau) in, in 1793, ii.
+     178;
+  excitement in, at Rousseau's appearance in 1765, ii. 283;
+  he goes to live there in 1770, ii. 314;
+  Voltaire's last visit to, ii. 323, 324.
+
+Pâris, Abbé, miracles at his tomb, ii. 88.
+
+Parisian frivolity, i. 193, 220, 329.
+
+Parliament and Jesuits, ii. 64.
+
+Pascal, ii. 37.
+
+Passy, Rousseau composes the "Village Soothsayer" at, i. 212.
+
+Paul, St., effect of, on western society, i. 4.
+
+Peasantry, French, oppression of, i. 67, 68.
+
+Pedigree of Rousseau, i. 8, _n._
+
+Pelagius, ii. 272.
+
+Peoples, sovereignty of, Rousseau not the inventor of doctrine of,
+     ii. 144-148;
+  taught by Althusen, i. 147;
+  constitution of Helvetic Republic in 1798, a blow at, ii. 165.
+
+Pergolese, i. 292.
+
+Pestalozzi indebted to Emilius, ii. 252.
+
+Philidor, i. 292.
+
+Philosophers, of Rousseau's time, contradicting each other, i. 87;
+  Rousseau's complaint of the, i. 202;
+  war between the, and the priests, i. 322;
+  Rousseau's reactionary protest against, i. 328;
+  troubles of, ii. 59;
+  parliaments hostile to, ii. 64.
+
+Philosophy, Rousseau's disgust at mimic, at Paris, i. 193;
+  drew him to the essential in religion, i. 220;
+  Voltaire's no perfect, i. 318.
+
+Phlipon, Jean Marie, Rousseau's influence on, ii. 315.
+
+Plato, his republic, i. 122;
+  his influence on Rousseau, i. 146, 325, _n._;
+  Milton on his Laws, ii. 178.
+
+Plays (stage), Rousseau's letter on, to D'Alembert, i. 321;
+  his views of, i. 323;
+  Jeremy Collier and Bossuet on, i. 323;
+  in Geneva, i. 333, 334, _n._;
+  Rousseau, Voltaire, and D'Alembert on, i. 332-337.
+
+Plutarch, Rousseau's love for, i. 13.
+
+Plutocracy, new, faults of, i. 195.
+
+Pompadour, Madame de, and the Jesuits, ii. 64.
+
+Pontverre (priest) converts Rousseau to Romanism, i. 31-35.
+
+Pope, his Essay on Man translated by Voltaire, i. 309;
+  Berlin Academy and Lessing on it, i. 310, _n._;
+  criticism on it by Rousseau, i. 312;
+  its general position reproduced by Rousseau, i. 315.
+
+Popelinière, M. de, i. 211.
+
+Positive knowledge, i. 78.
+
+Press, freedom of the, ii. 59.
+
+Prévost, Abbé, i. 48.
+
+_Projet pour l'Education_, i. 96, _n._
+
+Property, private, evils ascribed to i. 157, 185;
+  Robespierre disclaimed the intention of attacking, i. 123,
+     _n._
+
+Protestant principles, effect of development of, ii. 146-147.
+
+Protestantism, his conversion to, i. 220;
+  its influence on Rousseau, i. 221.
+
+
+RAMEAU on Rousseau's _Muses Galantes_, i. 119, 211;
+  mentioned, i. 291.
+
+Rationalism, i. 224, 225;
+  influence of Descartes on, i. 225.
+
+Reason, De Saint Pierre's views of, i. 244.
+
+Reform, essential priority of social over political, ii. 43.
+
+Religion, simplification of, i. 3;
+  ideas of, in Paris, i. 186, 187, 207, 208;
+  Rousseau's view of, i. 220;
+  doctrines of, in Geneva, i. 223-227, also _n._;
+  curious project concerning it, by Rousseau, i. 317;
+  separation of spiritual and temporal powers deemed mischievous by
+     Rousseau, ii. 173;
+  in its relation to the state may be considered as of three kinds,
+     ii. 175;
+  duty of the sovereign to establish a civil confession of faith,
+     ii. 176, 177;
+  positive dogmas of this, ii. 176;
+  Rousseau's "pure Hobbism," ii. 177.
+  See Savoyard Vicar (Emilius), ii. 256, 281.
+
+Renou, Rousseau assumes name of, i. 129; ii. 312.
+
+Revelation, Christian, Rousseau's controversy on, with Archbishop of
+     Paris, ii. 86-91.
+
+_Rêveries_, Rousseau's relinquishing society, i. 199;
+  description of his life in the isle of St. Peter, in the, ii.
+     109-115;
+  their style ii. 314.
+
+Revolution, French, principles of, i. 1, 2;
+  benefits of, or otherwise, ii. 54;
+  Baboeuf on, ii. 123, 124, _n._;
+  the starting point in the history of its ideas, ii. 160.
+
+Revolutionary process and ideal i. 4, 5.
+
+Revolutionists, difference among, i. 2.
+
+Richardson (the novelist), ii. 25, 28.
+
+Richelieu's brief patronage of Rousseau, i. 195, 302.
+
+Rivière, de la, origin of society, ii. 156, 157;
+  anecdote of, ii. 156, 157, _n._
+
+Robecq, Madame de, ii. 56.
+
+Robespierre, ii. 123, 134, 160, 178, 179;
+  his "sacred right of insurrection," ii. 188, _n._;
+  Rousseau's influence on, ii. 315.
+
+Rousseau, Didier, i. 8.
+
+Rousseau, Jean Baptiste, i. 61, _n._
+
+Rousseau, Jean Jacques, influence of his writings on France and the
+     American colonists, i. 1, 2;
+  on Robespierre, Paine, and Chateaubriand, i. 3;
+  his place as a leader, i. 3;
+  starting-point, of his mental habits, i. 4;
+  personality of, i. 4;
+  influence on the common people, i. 5;
+  his birth and ancestry, i. 8;
+  pedigree, i. 8, _n._;
+  parents, i. 10, 11;
+  influence upon him of his father's character, i. 11, 12;
+  his reading in childhood, i. 12, 13;
+  love of Plutarch, i. 13;
+  early years, i. 13, 14;
+  sent to school at Bossey, i. 15;
+  deterioration of his moral character there, i. 17;
+  indignation at an unjust punishment, i. 17, 18;
+  leaves school, i. 20;
+  youthful life at Geneva, i. 21, 22;
+  his remarks on its character, i. 24;
+  anecdotes of it, i. 22, 24;
+  his leading error as to the education of the young, i. 25, 26;
+  religious training, i. 25;
+  apprenticeship, i. 26;
+  boyish doings, i. 27;
+  harshness of his master, i. 27;
+  runs away, i. 29;
+  received by the priest of Confignon, i. 31;
+  sent to Madame de Warens, i. 84;
+  at Turin, i. 35;
+  hypocritical conversion to Roman Catholicism, i. 37;
+  motive, i. 38;
+  registry of his baptism, i. 38, _n._;
+  his forlorn condition, i. 39;
+  love of music, i. 39;
+  becomes servant to Madame de Vercellis, i. 39;
+  his theft, lying, and excuses for it, i. 39, 40;
+  becomes servant to Count of Gouvon, i. 42;
+  dismissed, i. 43;
+  returns to Madame de Warens, i. 45;
+  his temperament, i. 46, 47;
+  in training for the priesthood, but pronounced too stupid, i. 57;
+  tries music, i. 57;
+  shamelessly abandons his companion, i. 58;
+  goes to Freiburg, Neuchâtel, and Paris, i. 61, 62;
+  conjectural chronology of his movements about this time. i. 62,
+     _n._;
+  love of vagabond life, i. 62-68;
+  effect upon him of his intercourse with the poor, i. 68;
+  becomes clerk to a land surveyor at Chambéri, i. 69;
+  life there, i. 69-72;
+  ill-health and retirement to Les Charmettes, i. 73;
+  his latest recollection of this time, i. 75-77;
+  his "form of worship," i. 77;
+  love of nature, i. 77, 78;
+  notion of deity, i. 77;
+  peculiar intellectual feebleness, i. 81;
+  criticism on himself, i. 83;
+  want of logic in his mental constitution, i. 85;
+  effect on him of Voltaire's Letters on the English, i. 85;
+  self-training, i. 86;
+  mistaken method of it, i. 86, 87;
+  writes a comedy, i. 89;
+  enjoyment of rural life at Les Charmettes, i. 91, 92;
+  robs Madame de Warens, i. 92;
+  leaves her, i. 93;
+  discrepancy between dates of his letters and the Confessions, i.
+     93;
+  takes a tutorship at Lyons, i. 95;
+  condemns the practice of writing Latin, i. 96, _n._;
+  resigns his tutorship, and goes to Paris, i. 97;
+  reception there, i. 98-100;
+  appointed secretary to French Ambassador at Venice, i. 100-106;
+  in quarantine at Genoa, i. 104;
+  his estimate of French melody, i. 105;
+  returns to Paris, i. 106;
+  becomes acquainted with Theresa Le Vasseur, i. 106;
+  his conduct criticised, i. 107-113;
+  simple life, i. 113;
+  letter to her, i. 115-119;
+  his poverty, i. 119;
+  becomes secretary to Madame Dupin and her son-in-law, M. de
+     Francueil, i. 119;
+  sends his children to the foundling hospital, i. 120, 121;
+  paltry excuses for the crime, i. 121-126;
+  his pretended marriage under the name of Renou, i. 129;
+  his Discourses, i. 132-186 (see Discourses);
+  writes essays for academy of Dijon, i. 132;
+  origin of first essay, i. 133-137;
+  his "visions" for thirteen years, i. 138;
+  evil effect upon himself of the first Discourse, i. 138;
+  of it, the second Discourse and the Social Contract upon Europe,
+     i. 138;
+  his own opinion of it, i. 138, 139;
+  influence of Plato upon him, i. 146;
+  second Discourse, i. 154;
+  his "State of Nature," i. 159;
+  no evidence for it, i. 172;
+  influence of Montesquieu on him, i. 183;
+  inconsistency of his views, i. 124;
+  influence of Geneva upon him, i. 187, 188;
+  his disgust at Parisian philosophers, i. 191, 192;
+  the two sides of his character, i. 193;
+  associates in Paris, i. 193;
+  his income, i. 196, 197, _n._;
+  post of cashier, i. 196;
+  throws it up, i. 197, 198;
+  determines to earn his living by copying music, i. 198, 199;
+  change of manners, i. 201;
+  dislike of the manners of his time, i. 202, 203;
+  assumption of a seeming cynicism, i. 206;
+  Grimm's rebuke of it, i. 206;
+  Rousseau's protest against atheism, i. 208, 209;
+  composes a musical interlude, the Village Soothsayer, i. 212;
+  his nervousness loses him the chance of a pension, i. 213;
+  his moral simplicity, i. 214, 215;
+  revisits Geneva, i. 216;
+  re-conversion to Protestantism, i. 220;
+  his friends at Geneva, i. 227;
+  their effect upon him, i. 227;
+  returns to Paris, i. 227;
+  the Hermitage offered him by Madame d'Epinay, i. 229, 230 (and
+     _ib. n._);
+  retires to it against the protests of his friends, i. 231;
+  his love of nature, i. 234, 235, 236;
+  first days at the Hermitage, i. 237;
+  rural delirium, i. 237;
+  dislike of society, i. 242;
+  literary scheme, i. 242, 243;
+  remarks on Saint Pierre, i. 246;
+  violent mental crisis, i. 247;
+  employs his illness in writing to Voltaire on Providence, i. 250,
+     251;
+  his intolerance of vice in others, i. 254;
+  acquaintance with Madame de Houdetot, i. 255-269;
+  source of his irritability, i. 270, 271;
+  blind enthusiasm of his admirers, i. 273, also _ib. n._;
+  quarrels with Diderot, i. 275;
+  Grimm's account of them, i. 276;
+  quarrels with Madame d'Epinay, i. 276, 288;
+  relations with Grimm, i. 279;
+  want of sympathy between the two, i. 279;
+  declines to accompany Madame d'Epinay to Geneva, i. 285;
+  quarrels with Grimm, i. 285;
+  leaves the Hermitage, i. 289, 290;
+  aims in music, i. 291;
+  letter on French music, i. 293, 294;
+  writes on music in the Encyclopædia, i. 296;
+  his Musical Dictionary, i. 296;
+  scheme and principles of his new musical notation, i. 269;
+  explained, i. 298, 299;
+  its practical value, i. 299;
+  his mistake, i. 300;
+  minor objections, i. 300;
+  his temperament and Genevan spirit, i. 303;
+  compared with Voltaire, i. 304, 305;
+  had a more spiritual element than Voltaire, i. 306;
+  its influence in France, i. 307;
+  early relations with Voltaire, i. 308;
+  letter to him on his poem on the earthquake at Lisbon, i. 312,
+     313, 314;
+  reasons in a circle, i. 316;
+  continuation of argument against Voltaire, i. 316, 317;
+  curious notion about religion, i. 317;
+  quarrels with Voltaire, i. 318, 319;
+  denounces him as a "trumpet of impiety," i. 320, _n._;
+  letter to D'Alembert on Stage Plays, i. 321;
+  true answer to his theory, i. 323, 324;
+  contrasts Paris and Geneva, i. 327, 328;
+  his patriotism, i. 329, 330, 331;
+  censure of love as a poetic theme, i. 334, 335;
+  on Social Position of Women, i. 335;
+  Voltaire and D'Alembert's criticism on his Letter on Stage Plays,
+     i. 336, 337;
+  final break with Diderot, i. 336;
+  antecedents of his highest creative efforts, ii. 1;
+  friends at Montmorency, ii. 2;
+  reads the New Heloïsa to the Maréchale de Luxembourg, ii. 2;
+  unwillingness to receive gifts, ii. 5;
+  his relations with the Duke and Duchess de Luxembourg, ii. 7;
+  misunderstands the friendliness of Madame de Boufflers, ii. 7;
+  calm life at Montmorency, ii. 8;
+  literary jealousy, ii. 8;
+  last of his peaceful days, ii. 9;
+  advice to a young man against the contemplative life, ii. 10;
+  offensive form of his "good sense" concerning persecution of
+     Protestants, ii. 11, 12;
+  cause of his unwillingness to receive gifts, ii. 13, 14;
+  owns his ungrateful nature, ii. 15;
+  ill-humoured banter, ii. 15;
+  his constant bodily suffering, ii. 16;
+  thinks of suicide, ii. 16;
+  correspondence with the readers of the New Heloïsa, ii. 19, 20;
+  the New Heloïsa, criticism on, ii. 20-55 (see New Heloïsa);
+  his publishing difficulties, ii. 56;
+  no taste for martyrdom, ii. 59, 60;
+  curious discussion between, ii. 59;
+  and Malesherbes, ii. 60;
+  indebted to Malesherbes in the publication of Emilius, ii. 61, 62;
+  suspects Jesuits, Jansenists, and philosophers of plotting to
+     crush the book, ii. 63;
+  himself counted among the latter, ii. 65;
+  Emilius ordered to be burnt by public executioner, on the charge
+     of irreligious tendency, and its author to be arrested, ii. 65;
+  his flight, ii. 67;
+  literary composition on the journey to Switzerland, ii. 69;
+  contrast between him and Voltaire, ii. 70;
+  explanation of his "natural ingratitude," ii. 71;
+  reaches the canton of Berne, and ordered to quit it, ii. 72;
+  Emilius and Social Contract condemned to be publicly burnt at
+     Geneva, and author arrested if he came there, ii. 72, 73;
+  takes refuge at Motiers, in dominions of Frederick of Prussia, ii.
+     73;
+  characteristic letters to the king, ii. 74, 77;
+  declines pecuniary help from him, ii. 75;
+  his home and habits at Motiers, ii. 77, 78;
+  Voltaire supposed to have stirred up animosity against him at
+     Geneva, ii. 81;
+  Archbishop of Paris writes against him, ii. 83;
+  his reply, and character as a controversialist, ii. 83-90;
+  life at Val de Travers (Motiers), ii. 91-95;
+  his generosity, ii. 93;
+  corresponds with the Prince of Würtemberg on the education of the
+     prince's daughter, ii. 95, 96;
+  on Gibbon, ii. 96;
+  visit from Boswell, ii. 98;
+  invited to legislate for Corsica, ii. 99, _n._;
+  urges Boswell to go there, ii. 100;
+  denounces its sale by the Genoese, ii. 102;
+  renounces his citizenship of Geneva, ii. 103;
+  his Letters from the Mountain, ii. 104;
+  the letters condemned to be burned at Paris and the Hague, ii.
+     105;
+  libel upon, ii. 105;
+  religious difficulties with his pastor, ii. 106;
+  ill-treatment of, in parish, ii. 106;
+  obliged to leave it, ii. 108;
+  his next retreat, ii. 108;
+  account in the _Rêveries_ of his short stay there, ii. 109-115;
+  expelled by government of Berne, ii. 116;
+  makes an extraordinary request to it, ii. 116, 117;
+  difficulties in finding a home, ii. 117;
+  short stay at Strasburg, ii. 117, _n._;
+  decides on going to England, ii. 118;
+  his Social Contract, and criticism on, ii. 119, 196 (see Social
+     Contract);
+  scanty acquaintance with history, ii. 129;
+  its effects on his political writings, ii. 129, 136;
+  his object in writing Emilius, ii. 198;
+  his confession of faith, under the character of the Savoyard Vicar
+     (see Emilius), ii. 257-280;
+  excitement caused by his appearance in Paris in 1765, ii. 282;
+  leaves for England in company with Hume, ii. 283;
+  reception in London, ii. 283, 284;
+  George III. gives him a pension, ii. 284;
+  his love for his dog, ii. 286;
+  finds a home at Wootton, ii. 286;
+  quarrels with Hume, ii. 287;
+  particulars in connection with it, ii. 287-296;
+  his approaching insanity at this period, ii. 296;
+  the preparatory conditions of it, ii. 297-301;
+  begins writing the Confessions, ii. 301;
+  their character, ii. 301-304;
+  life at Wootton, ii. 305, 306;
+  sudden flight thence, ii. 306;
+  kindness of Mr. Davenport, ii. 306, 307;
+  his delusion, ii. 307;
+  returns to France, ii. 308;
+  received at Fleury by the elder Mirabeau, ii. 310, 311;
+  the prince of Conti next receives him at Trye, ii. 312;
+  composes the second part of the Confessions here, ii. 312;
+  delusion returns, ii. 312, 313;
+  leaves Trye, and wanders about the country, ii. 312, 313;
+  estrangement from Theresa, ii. 313;
+  goes to Paris, ii. 314;
+  writes his Dialogues there, ii. 314;
+  again earns his living by copying music, ii. 315;
+  daily life in, ii. 315, 316;
+  Bernardin St. Pierre's account of him, ii. 317-321;
+  his veneration for Fénelon, ii. 321;
+  his unsociality, ii. 322;
+  checks a detractor of Voltaire, ii. 324;
+  draws up his Considerations on the Government of Poland, ii. 324;
+  estimate of the Spanish, ii. 324;
+  his poverty, ii. 325;
+  accepts a home at Ermenonville from M. Girardin, ii. 326;
+  his painful condition, ii. 326;
+  sudden death, ii. 326;
+  cause of it unknown, ii. 326 (see also _ib. n._);
+  his interment, ii. 326;
+  finally removed to Paris, ii. 328.
+
+
+SAINTE BEUVE on Rousseau and Madame d'Epinay, i. 279, _n._;
+  on Rousseau, ii. 40.
+
+Saint Germain, M. de, Rousseau's letter to, i. 123.
+
+Saint Just, ii. 132, 133;
+  his political regulations, ii. 133, _n._;
+  base of his system, ii. 136;
+  against the atheists, ii. 179.
+
+Saint Lambert, i. 244;
+  offers Rousseau a home in Lorraine, ii. 117.
+
+Saint Pierre, Abbé de, Rousseau arranges papers of, i. 244;
+  his views concerning reason, _ib._;
+  boldness of his observations, i. 245.
+
+Saint Pierre, Bernardin de, account of his visit to Rousseau at
+     Paris, ii. 317-321.
+
+Sand, Madame G., i. 81, _n._;
+  Savoy landscape, i. 99, _n._;
+  ancestry of, i. 121, _n._
+
+Savages, code of morals of, i. 178-179, _n._
+
+Savage state, advantages of, Rousseau's letter to Voltaire, i. 312.
+
+Savoy, priests of, proselytisers, i. 30, 31, 33 (also _ib._ _n._)
+
+Savoyard Vicar, the, origin of character of, ii. 257-280 (see
+     Emilius).
+
+Schiller on Rousseau, ii. 192 (also _ib._ _n._);
+  Rousseau's influence on, ii. 315.
+
+Servetus, ii. 180.
+
+Simplification, the revolutionary process and ideal of, i. 4;
+  in reference to Rousseau's music, i. 291.
+
+Social conscience, theory and definition of, ii. 234, 235;
+  the great agent in fostering, ii. 237.
+
+Social Contract, the, ill effect of, on Europe, i. 138;
+  beginning of its composition, i. 177;
+  ideas of, i. 188;
+  its harmful dreams, i. 246;
+  influence of, ii. 1;
+  price of, and difficulties in publishing, ii. 59;
+  ordered to be burnt at Geneva, ii. 72, 73, 104;
+  detailed criticism of, ii. 119-196;
+  Rousseau diametrically opposed to the dominant belief of his day
+     in human perfectibility, ii. 119;
+  object of the work, ii. 120;
+  main position of the two Discourses given up in it, ii. 120;
+  influenced by Locke, ii. 120;
+  its uncritical, illogical principles, ii. 123, 124;
+  its impracticableness, ii. 128;
+  nature of his illustrations, ii. 128-133;
+  the "gospel of the Jacobins," ii. 132, 133;
+  the desperate absurdity of its assumptions gave it power in the
+     circumstances of the times, ii. 135-141;
+  some of its maxims very convenient for ruling Jacobins, ii. 142;
+  its central conception, the sovereignty of peoples, ii. 144;
+  Rousseau not its inventor, ii. 144, 145;
+  this to be distinguished from doctrine of right of subjects to
+     depose princes, ii. 146;
+  Social Contract idea of government, probably derived from Locke,
+     ii. 150;
+  falseness of it, ii. 153, 154;
+  origin of society, ii. 154;
+  ill effects on Rousseau's political speculation, ii. 155;
+  what constitutes the sovereignty, ii. 158;
+  Rousseau's Social Contract different from that of Hobbes, ii. 159;
+  Locke's indefiniteness on, ii. 160;
+  attributes of sovereignty, ii. 163;
+  confederation, ii. 164, 165;
+  his distinction between _tyrant_ and _despot_, ii. 169,
+     _n._;
+  distinguishes constitution of the state from that of the government,
+     ii. 170;
+  scheme of an elective aristocracy, ii. 172;
+  similarity to the English form of government, ii. 173;
+  the state in respect to religion, ii. 173;
+  habitually illogical form of his statements, ii. 173, 174;
+  duty of sovereign to establish civil profession of faith, ii. 175,
+     176;
+  infringement of it to be punished, even by death, ii. 176;
+  Rousseau's Hobbism, ii. 177;
+  denial of his social compact theory, ii. 183, 184;
+  futility of his disquisitions on, ii. 185, 186;
+  his declaration of general duty of rebellion (arising out of the
+     universal breach of social compact) considered, ii. 188;
+  it makes government impossible, ii. 188;
+  he urges that usurped authority is another valid reason for
+     rebellion, ii. 190;
+  practical evils of this, ii. 192;
+  historical effect of the Social Contract, ii. 192-195.
+
+Social quietism of some parts of New Heloïsa, ii. 49.
+
+Socialism: Morelly, and De Mably, ii. 52;
+  what it is, ii. 159.
+
+Socialistic theory of Morelly, i. 158, 159 (also i. 158, _n._)
+
+Society, Aristotle on, i. 174;
+  D'Alembert's statements on, i. 174, _n._;
+  Parisian, Rousseau on, i. 209;
+  dislike of, i. 242;
+  Rousseau's origin of, ii. 153;
+  true grounds of, ii. 155, 156.
+
+Socrates, i. 131, 140, 232; ii. 72, 273.
+
+Solitude, eighteenth century notions of, i. 231, 232.
+
+Solon, ii. 133.
+
+Sorbonne, the, condemns Emilius, ii. 82.
+
+Spectator, the, Rousseau's liking for, i. 86.
+
+Spinoza, dangerous speculations of, i. 143.
+
+Staël, Madame de, i. 217, _n._
+
+Stage players, how treated in France, i. 322.
+
+Stage plays (see Plays).
+
+State of Nature, Rousseau's, i. 159, 160;
+  Hobbes on, i. 161 (see Nature).
+
+Suicide, Rousseau on, ii. 16;
+  a mistake to pronounce him incapable of, ii. 19.
+
+Switzerland, i. 330.
+
+
+TACITUS, i. 177.
+
+Theatre, Rousseau's letter, objecting to the, i. 133;
+  his error in the matter, i. 134.
+
+Theology, metaphysical, Descartes' influence on, i. 226.
+
+Theresa (see Le Vasseur).
+
+Thought, school of, division between rationalists and emotionalists,
+     i. 337.
+
+Tonic Sol-fa notation, close correspondence of the, to Rousseau's
+     system, i. 299.
+
+Tronchin on Voltaire, i. 319, _n._, 321.
+
+Turgot, i. 89;
+  his discourses at the Sorbonne in 1750, i. 155;
+  the one sane eminent Frenchman of eighteenth century, i. 202;
+  his unselfish toil, i. 233; ii. 193;
+  mentioned, ii. 246, 294.
+
+Turin, Rousseau at, i. 34-43;
+  leaves it, i. 45;
+  tries to learn Latin at, i. 91.
+
+Turretini and other rationalisers, i. 226;
+  his works, i. 226, _n._
+
+
+UNIVERSE, constitution of, discussion on, i. 311-317.
+
+
+VAGABOND life, Rousseau's love of, i. 63, 68.
+
+Val de Travers, ii. 77; Rousseau's life in, ii. 91-95.
+
+Vasseur, Theresa Le, Rousseau's first acquaintance with, i. 106,
+     107, also _ib._ _n._;
+  their life together, i. 110-113;
+  well befriended, ii. 80, _n._;
+  her evil character, ii. 326.
+
+Vauvenargues on emotional instinct, ii. 34.
+
+Venice, Rousseau at, i. 100-106.
+
+Vercellis, Madame de, Rousseau servant to, i. 39.
+
+Verdelin, Madame de, her kindness to Theresa, ii. 80, _n._;
+  to Rousseau, ii. 118, _n._
+
+Village Soothsayer, the (_Devin du Village_), composed at
+     Passy, performed at Fontainebleau and Paris, i. 212;
+  marked a revolution in French Music, i. 291.
+
+Voltaire, i. 2, 21, 63;
+  effect on Rousseau of his Letters on the English, i. 86;
+  spreads a derogatory report about Rousseau, i. 101, _n._;
+  his "Princesse de Navarre," i. 119;
+  criticism on Rousseau's first Discourse, i. 147;
+  effect on his work of his common sense, i. 155;
+  avoids the society of Paris, i. 202;
+  his conversion to Romanism, i. 220, 221;
+  strictures on Homer and Shakespeare, i. 280;
+  his position in the eighteenth century, i. 301;
+  general difference between, and Rousseau, i. 301;
+  clung to the rationalistic school of his day, i. 305;
+  on Rousseau's second Discourse, i. 308;
+  his poem on the earthquake of Lisbon, i. 309, 310;
+  his sympathy with suffering, i. 311, 312;
+  entreated by Rousseau to draw up a civil profession of religious
+     faith, i. 317;
+  denounced by Rousseau as a "trumpet of impiety," i. 317, 320,
+     _n._;
+  his satire and mockery irritated Rousseau, i. 319;
+  what he was to his contemporaries, i. 321;
+  the great play-writer of the time, i. 321;
+  his criticism of Rousseau's Letter on the Theatre, i. 336;
+  his indignation at wrong, ii. 11;
+  ridicule of the New Heloïsa, ii. 34;
+  less courageous than Rousseau, ii. 65;
+  contrast between the two, i. 99, ii. 75;
+  supposed to have stirred up animosity at Geneva against Rousseau,
+     ii. 81;
+  denies it, ii. 81;
+  his notion of how the matter would end, ii. 81;
+  his fickleness, ii. 83;
+  on Rousseau's connection with Corsica, ii. 101;
+  his Philosophical Dictionary burnt by order at Paris, ii. 105;
+  his opinion of Emilius, ii. 257;
+  prime agent in introducing English deism into France, ii. 262;
+  suspected by Rousseau of having written the pretended letter from
+     the King of Prussia, ii. 288;
+  last visit to Paris, ii. 324.
+
+
+WALKING, Rousseau's love of, i. 63.
+
+Walpole, Horace, writer of the pretended letter from the King of
+     Prussia, ii. 288, _n._;
+  advises Hume not to publish his account of Rousseau's quarrel with
+     him, ii. 295.
+
+War arising out of the succession to the crown of Poland, i. 72.
+
+Warens, Madame de, Rousseau's introduction to, i. 34;
+  her personal appearance, i. 34;
+  receives Rousseau into her house, i. 43;
+  her early life, i. 48;
+  character of, i. 49-51;
+  goes to Paris, i. 59;
+  receives Rousseau at Chambéri, and gets him employment, i. 69;
+  her household, i. 70;
+  removes to Les Charmettes, i. 73;
+  cultivates Rousseau's taste for letters, i. 85;
+  Saint Louis, her patron saint, i. 91;
+  revisited by Rousseau in 1754, i. 216;
+  her death in poverty and wretchedness, i. 217, 218 (also i. 219,
+     _n._)
+
+Wesleyanism, ii. 258.
+
+Women, Condorcet on social position of, i. 335;
+  D'Alembert and Condorcet on, i. 335.
+
+Wootton, Rousseau's home at, ii. 286.
+
+World, divine government of, Rousseau vindicates, i. 312.
+
+Würtemberg, correspondence between Prince of, and Rousseau, on the
+     education of the little princess, ii. 95;
+  becomes reigning duke, ii. 95, _n._;
+  seeks permission for Rousseau to live in Vienna, ii. 117.
+
+
+THE END.
+
+
+_Printed by_ R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, _Edinburgh._
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Rousseau, by John Morley
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 14052 ***
diff --git a/14052-h/14052-h.htm b/14052-h/14052-h.htm
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..b0827a4
--- /dev/null
+++ b/14052-h/14052-h.htm
@@ -0,0 +1,26675 @@
+<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
+
+<!DOCTYPE html
+   PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
+   "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd" >
+
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
+  <head>
+    <title>
+      The Project Gutenberg eBook of Rousseau, Vol. 1 and 2, by John Morley.
+    </title>
+    <style type="text/css" xml:space="preserve">
+    p {  margin-top: .75em;
+         text-align: justify;
+         margin-bottom: .75em;
+         }
+    h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6 {
+         text-align: center; /* all headings centered */
+         clear: both;
+         }
+    hr { width: 33%;
+	 margin-top: 2em;
+	 margin-bottom: 2em;
+         margin-left: auto;
+         margin-right: auto;
+         clear: both;
+       }
+
+    table {margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;}
+
+    body{margin-left: 10%;
+         margin-right: 10%;
+        }
+
+    .pagenum  { /* uncomment the next line for invisible page numbers */
+            /*  visibility: hidden;  */
+                position: absolute;
+                left: 92%;
+                font-size: smaller;
+                text-align: right;
+              } /* page numbers */
+
+    .linenum  {position: absolute; top: auto; left: 4%;} /* poetry number */
+    .blockquot{margin-left: 5%; margin-right: 10%;}
+    .sidenote {width: 20%; padding-bottom: .5em; padding-top: .5em;
+               padding-left: .5em; padding-right: .5em; margin-left: 1em;
+               float: right; clear: right; margin-top: 1em;
+               font-size: smaller; color: black; background: #eeeeee; border: dashed 1px;}
+
+    .bb       {border-bottom: solid 2px;}
+    .bl       {border-left: solid 2px;}
+    .bt       {border-top: solid 2px;}
+    .br       {border-right: solid 2px;}
+    .bbox     {border: solid 2px;}
+
+    .center   {text-align: center;}
+    .smcap    {font-variant: small-caps;}
+    .u        {text-decoration: underline;}
+
+    .caption  {font-weight: bold;}
+
+    .figcenter   {margin: auto; text-align: center;}
+
+    .figleft     {float: left; clear: left; margin-left: 0; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top:
+                 1em; margin-right: 1em; padding: 0; text-align: center;}
+
+    .figright    {float: right; clear: right; margin-left: 1em; margin-bottom: 1em;
+                 margin-top: 1em; margin-right: 0; padding: 0; text-align: center;}
+
+    .poem             {margin-left:10%; margin-right:10%; text-align: left;}
+    .poem br          {display: none;}
+    .poem .stanza     {margin: 1em 0em 1em 0em;}
+    .poem span.i0     {display: block; margin-left: 0em; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;}
+    .poem span.i2     {display: block; margin-left: 2em; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;}
+    .poem span.i4     {display: block; margin-left: 4em; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;}
+    .poem span.i20     {display: block; margin-left: 20em; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;}
+    .poem span.i31     {display: block; margin-left: 31em; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;}
+    </style>
+  </head>
+  <body>
+<div>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 14052 ***</div>
+    <h1>
+      ROUSSEAU
+    </h1>
+    <h3>
+      BY
+    </h3>
+    <h2>
+      JOHN MORLEY
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      VOL. I and II.
+    </h3>
+    <hr style="width: 35%;" />
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      London<br /> MACMILLAN AND CO., <span class="smcap">Limited</span><br /> NEW
+      YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY<br /> 1905<br />
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      <i>All rights reserved</i>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      <i>First printed in this form 1886<br /> Reprinted 1888, 1891, 1896, 1900,
+      1905</i><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr style="width: 65%;" />
+    <h2>
+      NOTE TO THE FIRST EDITION.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      This work differs from its companion volume in offering something more
+      like a continuous personal history than was necessary in the case of such
+      a man as Voltaire, the story of whose life may be found in more than one
+      English book of repute. Of Rousseau there is, I believe, no full
+      biographical account in our literature, and even France has nothing more
+      complete under this head than Musset-Pathay's <i>Histoire de la Vie et des
+      Ouvrages de J.J. Rousseau</i> (1821). This, though a meritorious piece of
+      labour, is extremely crude and formless in composition and arrangement,
+      and the interpreting portions are devoid of interest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The edition of Rousseau's works to which the references have been made is
+      that by M. Auguis, in twenty-seven volumes, published in 1825 by Dalibon.
+      In 1865 M. Streckeisen-Moultou published from the originals, which had
+      been deposited in the library of Neuch&#226;tel by Du Peyrou, the letters
+      addressed to Rousseau by various correspondents. These two interesting
+      volumes, which are entitled <i>Rousseau, ses Amis et ses Ennemis</i>, are
+      mostly referred to under the name of their editor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>February, 1873.</i>
+    </p>
+    <hr style="width: 25%;" />
+    <p>
+      The second edition in 1878 was revised; some portions were considerably
+      shortened, and a few additional footnotes inserted. No further changes
+      have been made in the present edition.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>January, 1886.</i>
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      <a href="#volume1">VOLUME I.</a>
+    </h3>
+    <h3>
+      <a href="#volume2">VOLUME II.</a>
+    </h3>
+    <hr style="width: 65%;" />
+    <h2>
+      <a name="CONTENTS_I" id="CONTENTS_I">CONTENTS</a> OF VOL. I.
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      <a href="#CHAPTER_I.">CHAPTER I.</a>
+    </h3>
+    <h4>
+      <span class="smcap">Preliminary</span>.
+    </h4>
+    <table summary="">
+      <tbody>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            &#160;
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            PAGE
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            The Revolution
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.1">1</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Rousseau its most direct speculative precursor
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.2">2</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            His distinction among revolutionists
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.4">4</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            His personality
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.5">5</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+      </tbody>
+    </table>
+    <p>
+      &#160;
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      <a href="#CHAPTER_II">CHAPTER II.</a>
+    </h3>
+    <h4>
+      <span class="smcap">Youth</span>.
+    </h4>
+    <table summary="">
+      <tbody>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            &#160;
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            PAGE
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Birth and descent
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.8">8</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Predispositions
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.10">10</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            First lessons
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.11">11</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            At M. Lambercier's
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.15">15</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Early disclosure of sensitive temperament
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.19">19</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Return to Geneva
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.20">20</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Two apprenticeships
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.26">26</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Flight from Geneva
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.30">30</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Savoyard proselytisers
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.31">31</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Rousseau sent to Anncey, and thence to Turin
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.34">34</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Conversion to Catholicism
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.35">35</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Takes service with Madame de Vercellis
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.39">39</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Then with the Count de Gouvon
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.42">42</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Returns to vagabondage
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.43">43</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            And to Madame de Warens
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.45">45</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+      </tbody>
+    </table>
+    <p>
+      &#160;
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      <a href="#CHAPTER_III.">CHAPTER III.</a>
+    </h3>
+    <h4>
+      <span class="smcap">Savoy</span>.
+    </h4>
+    <table summary="">
+      <tbody>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            &#160;
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            PAGE
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Influence of women upon Rousseau
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.46">46</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Account of Madame de Warens
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.48">48</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Rousseau takes up his abode with her
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.54">54</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            His delight in life with her
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.54">54</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            The seminarists
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.57">57</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            To Lyons
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.58">58</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Wanderings to Freiburg, Neuch&#226;tel, and elsewhere
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.60">60</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Through the east of France
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.62">62</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Influence of these wanderings upon him
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.67">67</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Chamb&#233;ri
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.69">69</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Household of Madame de Warens
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.70">70</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Les Charmettes
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.73">73</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Account of his feeling for nature
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.79">79</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            His intellectual incapacity at this time
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.83">83</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Temperament
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.84">84</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Literary interests, and method
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.85">85</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Joyful days with his benefactress
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.90">90</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            To Montpellier: end of an episode
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.92">92</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Dates
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.94">94</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+      </tbody>
+    </table>
+    <p>
+      &#160;
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      <a href="#CHAPTER_IV.">CHAPTER IV.</a>
+    </h3>
+    <h4>
+      <span class="smcap">Theresa Le Vasseur</span>.
+    </h4>
+    <table summary="">
+      <tbody>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            &#160;
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            PAGE
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Tutorship at Lyons
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.95">95</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Goes to Paris in search of fortune
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.97">97</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            His appearance at this time
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.98">98</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Made secretary to the ambassador at Venice
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.100">100</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            His journey thither and life there
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.103">103</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Return to Paris
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.106">106</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Theresa Le Vasseur
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.107">107</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Character of their union
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.110">110</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Rousseau's conduct towards her
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.113">113</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Their later estrangements
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.115">115</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Rousseau's scanty means
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.119">119</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Puts away his five children
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.120">120</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            His apologies for the crime
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.122">122</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Their futility
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.126">126</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Attempts to recover the children
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.128">128</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Rousseau never married to Theresa
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.129">129</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Contrast between outer and inner life
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.130">130</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+      </tbody>
+    </table>
+    <p>
+      &#160;
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      <a href="#CHAPTER_V.">CHAPTER V.</a>
+    </h3>
+    <h4>
+      <span class="smcap">The Discourses</span>.
+    </h4>
+    <table summary="">
+      <tbody>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            &#160;
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            PAGE
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Local academies in France
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.132">132</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Circumstances of the composition of the first Discourse
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.133">133</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            How far the paradox was original
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.135">135</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            His visions for thirteen years
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.136">136</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Summary of the first Discourse
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.138">138</a>-145
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Obligations to Montaigne
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.145">145</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            And to the Greeks
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.145">145</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Semi-Socratic manner
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.147">147</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Objections to the Discourse
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.148">148</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Ways of stating its positive side
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.149">149</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Dangers of exaggerating this positive side
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.151">151</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Its excess
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.152">152</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Second Discourse
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.154">154</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Ideas of the time upon the state of nature
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.155">155</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Their influence upon Rousseau
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.156">156</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Morelly, as his predecessor
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.156">156</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Summary of the second Discourse
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.159">159</a>-170
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Criticism of its method
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.171">171</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Objection from its want of evidence
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.172">172</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Other objections to its account of primitive nature
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.173">173</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Takes uniformity of process for granted
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.176">176</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            In what the importance of the second Discourse consisted
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.177">177</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Its protest against the mockery of civilisation
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.179">179</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            The equality of man, how true, and how false
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.180">180</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            This doctrine in France, and in America
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.182">182</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Rousseau's Discourses, a reaction against the historic method
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.183">183</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Mably, and socialism
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.184">184</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+      </tbody>
+    </table>
+    <p>
+      &#160;
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      <a href="#CHAPTER_VI.">CHAPTER VI.</a>
+    </h3>
+    <h4>
+      <span class="smcap">Paris</span>.
+    </h4>
+    <table summary="">
+      <tbody>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            &#160;
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            PAGE
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Influence of Geneva upon Rousseau
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.187">187</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Two sides of his temperament
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.191">191</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Uncongenial characteristics of Parisian society
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.191">191</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            His associates
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.195">195</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Circumstances of a sudden moral reform
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.196">196</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Arising from his violent repugnance for the manners of the time
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.202">202</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            His assumption of a seeming cynicism
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.207">207</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Protests against atheism
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.209">209</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            The Village Soothsayer at Fontainebleau
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.212">212</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Two anedotes of his moral singularity
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.214">214</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Revisits Geneva
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.216">216</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            End of Madame de Warens
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.217">217</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Rousseau's re-conversion to Protestantism
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.220">220</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            The religious opinions then current in Geneva
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.223">223</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Turretini and other rationalisers
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.226">226</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Effect upon Rousseau
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.227">227</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Thinks of taking up his abode in Geneva
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.227">227</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Madame d'Epinay offers him the Hermitage
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.229">229</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Retires thither against the protests of his friends
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.231">231</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+      </tbody>
+    </table>
+    <p>
+      &#160;
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      <a href="#CHAPTER_VII.">CHAPTER VII.</a>
+    </h3>
+    <h4>
+      <span class="smcap">The Hermitage</span>.
+    </h4>
+    <table summary="">
+      <tbody>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            &#160;
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            PAGE
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Distinction between the old and the new anchorite
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.234">234</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Rousseau's first days at the Hermitage
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.235">235</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Rural delirium
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.237">237</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Dislike of society
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.242">242</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Meditates work on Sensitive Morality
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.243">243</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Arranges the papers of the Abb&#233; de Saint Pierre
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.244">244</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            His remarks on them
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.246">246</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Violent mental crisis
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.247">247</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            First conception of the New Helo&#239;sa
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.250">250</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            A scene of high morals
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.254">254</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Madame d'Houdetot
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.255">255</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Erotic mania becomes intensified
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.256">256</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Interviews with Madame d'Houdetot
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.258">258</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Saint Lambert interposes
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.262">262</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Rousseau's letter to Saint Lambert
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.264">264</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Its profound falsity
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.265">265</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Saint Lambert's reply
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.267">267</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Final relations with him and with Madame d'Houdetot
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.268">268</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Sources of Rousseau's irritability
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.270">270</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Relations with Diderot
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.273">273</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            With Madame d'Epinay
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.276">276</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            With Grimm
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.279">279</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Grimm's natural want of sympathy with Rousseau
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.282">282</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Madame d'Epinay's journey to Geneva
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.284">284</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Occasion of Rousseau's breach with Grimm
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.285">285</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            And with Madame d'Epinay
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.288">288</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Leaves the Hermitage
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.289">289</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+      </tbody>
+    </table>
+    <p>
+      &#160;
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      <a href="#CHAPTER_VIII.">CHAPTER VIII.</a>
+    </h3>
+    <h4>
+      <span class="smcap">Music</span>.
+    </h4>
+    <table summary="">
+      <tbody>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            &#160;
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            PAGE
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            General character of Rousseau's aim in music
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.291">291</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            As composer
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.292">292</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Contest on the comparative merits of French and Italian music
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.293">293</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Rousseau's Letter on French Music
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.293">293</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            His scheme of musical notation
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.296">296</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Its chief element
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.298">298</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Its practical value
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.299">299</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            His mistake
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.300">300</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Two minor objections
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.300">300</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+      </tbody>
+    </table>
+    <p>
+      &#160;
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      <a href="#CHAPTER_IX.">CHAPTER IX.</a>
+    </h3>
+    <h4>
+      <span class="smcap">Voltaire And D'Alembert</span>.
+    </h4>
+    <table summary="">
+      <tbody>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            &#160;
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            PAGE
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Position of Voltaire
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.302">302</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            General differences between him and Rousseau
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.303">303</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Rousseau not the profounder of the two
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.305">305</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            But he had a spiritual element
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.305">305</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Their early relations
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.308">308</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Voltaire's poem on the Earthquake of Lisbon
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.309">309</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Rousseau's wonder that he should have written it
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.310">310</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            His letter to Voltaire upon it
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.311">311</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Points to the advantages of the savage state
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.312">312</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Reproduces Pope's general position
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.313">313</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Not an answer to the position taken by Voltaire
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.314">314</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Confesses the question insoluble, but still argues
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.316">316</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Curious close of the letter
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.318">318</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Their subsequent relations
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.319">319</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            D'Alembert's article on Geneva
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.321">321</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            The church and the theatre
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.322">322</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Jeremy Collier: Bossuet
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.323">323</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Rousseau's contention on stage plays
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.324">324</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Rude handling of commonplace
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.325">325</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            The true answer to Rousseau as to theory of dramatic morality
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.326">326</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            His arguments relatively to Geneva
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.327">327</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Their meaning
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.328">328</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Criticism on the Misanthrope
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.328">328</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Rousseau's contrast between Paris and an imaginary Geneva
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.329">329</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Attack on love as a poetic theme
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.332">332</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            This letter, the mark of his schism from the party of the
+            philosophers
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.336">336</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+      </tbody>
+    </table>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr style="width: 65%;" />
+    <h2>
+      <a name="CONTENTS_II" id="CONTENTS_II">CONTENTS</a> OF VOL. II.
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      <a href="#volume2">VOLUME II.</a>
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      &#160;
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      <a href="#CHAPTER_I">CHAPTER I.</a>
+    </h3>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      <span class="smcap">Montmorency&#8212;The New Helo&#239;sa.</span>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Conditions preceding the composition of the New Helo&#239;sa <a
+      href="#Page_1">1</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      The Duke and Duchess of Luxembourg <a href="#Page_2">2</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Rousseau and his patrician acquaintances <a href="#Page_3">4</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Peaceful life at Montmorency <a href="#Page_9">9</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Equivocal prudence occasionally shown by Rousseau <a href="#Page_12">12</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      His want of gratitude for commonplace service <a href="#Page_13">13</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Bad health, and thoughts of suicide <a href="#Page_16">16</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Episode of Madame Latour de Franqueville <a href="#Page_17">17</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Relation of the New Helo&#239;sa to Rousseau's general doctrine <a
+      href="#Page_20">20</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Action of the first part of the story <a href="#Page_25">25</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Contrasted with contemporary literature <a href="#Page_25">25</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      And with contemporary manners <a href="#Page_27">27</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Criticism of the language and principal actors <a href="#Page_28">28</a>,
+      <a href="#Page_29">29</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Popularity of the New Helo&#239;sa <a href="#Page_31">31</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Its reactionary intellectual direction <a href="#Page_33">33</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Action of the second part <a href="#Page_35">35</a>, <a href="#Page_36">36</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Its influence on Goethe and others <a href="#Page_38">38</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Distinction between Rousseau and his school <a href="#Page_40">40</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Singular pictures of domesticity <a href="#Page_42">42</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Sumptuary details <a href="#Page_44">44</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      The slowness of movement in the work justified <a href="#Page_46">46</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Exaltation of marriage <a href="#Page_47">47</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Equalitarian tendencies <a href="#Page_49">49</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Not inconsistent with social quietism <a href="#Page_51">51</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Compensation in the political consequences of the triumph of sentiment <a
+      href="#Page_54">54</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Circumstances of the publication of the New Helo&#239;sa <a href="#Page_55">55</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Nature of the trade in books <a href="#Page_57">57</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Malesherbes and the printing of Emilius <a href="#Page_61">61</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Rousseau's suspicions <a href="#Page_62">62</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      The great struggle of the moment <a href="#Page_64">64</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Proscription of Emilius <a href="#Page_67">67</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Flight of the author <a href="#Page_67">67</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      &#160;
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      <a href="#CHAPTER_II">CHAPTER II.</a>
+    </h3>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      <span class="smcap">Persecution.</span>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Rousseau's journey from Switzerland <a href="#Page_69">69</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Absence of vindictiveness <a href="#Page_70">70</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Arrival at Yverdun <a href="#Page_72">72</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Repairs to Motiers <a href="#Page_73">73</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Relations with Frederick the Great <a href="#Page_74">74</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Life at Motiers <a href="#Page_77">77</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Lord Marischal <a href="#Page_79">79</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Voltaire <a href="#Page_81">81</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Rousseau's letter to the Archbishop of Paris <a href="#Page_83">83</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Its dialectic <a href="#Page_86">86</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      The ministers of Neuch&#226;tel <a href="#Page_90">90</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Rousseau's singular costume <a href="#Page_92">92</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      His throng of visitors <a href="#Page_93">93</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Lewis, prince of W&#252;rtemberg <a href="#Page_95">95</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Gibbon <a href="#Page_96">96</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Boswell <a href="#Page_98">98</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Corsican affairs <a href="#Page_99">99</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      The feud at Geneva <a href="#Page_102">102</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Rousseau renounces his citizenship <a href="#Page_105">105</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      The Letters from the Mountain <a href="#Page_106">106</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Political side <a href="#Page_107">107</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Consequent persecution at Motiers <a href="#Page_107">107</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Flight to the isle of St. Peter <a href="#Page_108">108</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      The fifth of the <i>R&#234;veries</i> <a href="#Page_109">109</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Proscription by the government of Berne <a href="#Page_116">116</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Rousseau's singular request <a href="#Page_116">116</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      His renewed flight <a href="#Page_117">117</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Persuaded to seek shelter in England <a href="#Page_118">118</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      &#160;
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      <a href="#CHAPTER_III">CHAPTER III.</a>
+    </h3>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      <span class="smcap">The Social Contract.</span>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Rousseau's reaction against perfectibility <a href="#Page_119">119</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Abandonment of the position of the Discourses <a href="#Page_121">121</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Doubtful idea of equality <a href="#Page_121">121</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      The Social Contract, a repudiation of the historic method <a
+      href="#Page_124">124</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Yet it has glimpses of relativity <a href="#Page_127">127</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Influence of Greek examples <a href="#Page_129">129</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      And of Geneva <a href="#Page_131">131</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Impression upon Robespierre and Saint Just <a href="#Page_132">132</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Rousseau's scheme implied a small territory <a href="#Page_135">135</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Why the Social Contract made fanatics <a href="#Page_137">137</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Verbal quality of its propositions <a href="#Page_138">138</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      The doctrine of public safety <a href="#Page_143">143</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      The doctrine of the sovereignty of peoples <a href="#Page_144">144</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Its early phases <a href="#Page_144">144</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Its history in the sixteenth century <a href="#Page_146">146</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Hooker and Grotius <a href="#Page_148">148</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Locke <a href="#Page_149">149</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Hobbes <a href="#Page_151">151</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Central propositions of the Social Contract&#8212;<br /> <br /> 1. Origin of
+      society in compact <a href="#Page_154">154</a><br /> Different conception
+      held by the Physiocrats <a href="#Page_156">156</a><br /> <br /> 2.
+      Sovereignty of the body thus constituted <a href="#Page_158">158</a><br />
+      Difference from Hobbes and Locke <a href="#Page_159">159</a><br /> The root
+      of socialism <a href="#Page_160">160</a><br /> Republican phraseology <a
+      href="#Page_161">161</a><br /> <br /> 3. Attributes of sovereignty <a
+      href="#Page_162">162</a><br /> <br /> 4. The law-making power <a
+      href="#Page_163">163</a><br /> A contemporary illustration <a
+      href="#Page_164">164</a><br /> Hints of confederation <a href="#Page_166">166</a><br />
+      <br /> 5. Forms of government <a href="#Page_168">168</a><br /> Criticism on
+      the common division <a href="#Page_169">169</a><br /> Rousseau's preference
+      for elective aristocracy <a href="#Page_172">172</a><br /> <br /> 6.
+      Attitude of the state to religion <a href="#Page_173">173</a><br />
+      Rousseau's view, the climax of a reaction <a href="#Page_176">176</a><br />
+      Its effect at the French Revolution <a href="#Page_179">179</a><br /> Its
+      futility <a href="#Page_180">180</a><br /> <br /> Another method of
+      approaching the philosophy of government&#8212;<br /> <br /> Origin of
+      society not a compact <a href="#Page_183">183</a><br /> <br /> The true
+      reason of the submission of a minority to a majority <a href="#Page_184">184</a><br />
+      <br /> Rousseau fails to touch actual problems <a href="#Page_186">186</a><br />
+      <br /> The doctrine of resistance, for instance <a href="#Page_188">188</a><br />
+      <br /> Historical illustrations <a href="#Page_190">190</a><br /> <br />
+      Historical effect of the Social Contract in France and Germany <a
+      href="#Page_193">193</a><br /> <br /> Socialist deductions from it <a
+      href="#Page_194">194</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      <a href="#CHAPTER_IV">CHAPTER IV.</a>
+    </h3>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      <span class="smcap">Emilius.</span>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Rousseau touched by the enthusiasm of his time <a href="#Page_197">197</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Contemporary excitement as to education, part of the revival of naturalism
+      <a href="#Page_199">199</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      I.&#8212;Locke, on education <a href="#Page_202">202</a><br /> Difference
+      between him and Rousseau <a href="#Page_204">204</a><br /> Exhortations to
+      mothers <a href="#Page_205">205</a><br /> Importance of infantile habits <a
+      href="#Page_208">208</a><br /> Rousseau's protest against reasoning with
+      children <a href="#Page_209">209</a><br /> Criticised <a href="#Page_209">209</a><br />
+      The opposite theory <a href="#Page_210">210</a><br /> The idea of property
+      <a href="#Page_212">212</a><br /> Artificially contrived incidents <a
+      href="#Page_214">214</a><br /> Rousseau's omission of the principle of
+      authority <a href="#Page_215">215</a><br /> Connected with his neglect of
+      the faculty of sympathy <a href="#Page_219">219</a><br /> <br /> II.&#8212;Rousseau's
+      ideal of living <a href="#Page_221">221</a><br /> The training that follows
+      from it <a href="#Page_222">222</a><br /> The duty of knowing a craft <a
+      href="#Page_223">223</a><br /> Social conception involved in this moral
+      conception <a href="#Page_226">226</a><br /> <br /> III.&#8212;Three aims
+      before the instructor <a href="#Page_229">229</a><br /> Rousseau's omission
+      of training for the social conscience <a href="#Page_230">230</a><br /> No
+      contemplation of society as a whole <a href="#Page_232">232</a><br />
+      Personal interest, the foundation of the morality of Emilius <a
+      href="#Page_233">233</a><br /> The sphere and definition of the social
+      conscience <a href="#Page_235">235</a><br /> <br /> IV.&#8212;The study of
+      history <a href="#Page_237">237</a><br /> Rousseau's notions upon the
+      subject <a href="#Page_239">239</a><br /> <br /> V.&#8212;Ideals of life for
+      women <a href="#Page_241">241</a><br /> Rousseau's repudiation of his own
+      principles <a href="#Page_242">242</a><br /> His oriental and obscurantist
+      position <a href="#Page_243">243</a><br /> Arising from his want of faith
+      in improvement <a href="#Page_244">244</a><br /> His reactionary tendencies
+      in this region eventually neutralised <a href="#Page_248">248</a><br />
+      <br /> VI.&#8212;Sum of the merits of Emilius <a href="#Page_249">249</a><br />
+      Its influence in France and Germany <a href="#Page_251">251</a><br /> In
+      England <a href="#Page_252">252</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &#160;
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      <a href="#CHAPTER_V">CHAPTER V.</a>
+    </h3>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      <span class="smcap">The Savoyard Vicar.</span>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Shallow hopes entertained by the dogmatic atheists <a href="#Page_256">256</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      The good side of the religious reaction <a href="#Page_258">258</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Its preservation of some parts of Christian influence <a href="#Page_259">259</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Earlier forms of deism <a href="#Page_260">260</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      The deism of the Savoyard Vicar <a href="#Page_264">264</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      The elevation of man, as well as the restoration of a divinity <a
+      href="#Page_265">265</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      A divinity for fair weather <a href="#Page_268">268</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Religious self-denial <a href="#Page_269">269</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      The Savoyard Vicar's vital omission <a href="#Page_270">270</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      His position towards Christianity <a href="#Page_272">272</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Its effectiveness as a solvent <a href="#Page_273">273</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Weakness of the subjective test <a href="#Page_276">276</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      The Savoyard Vicar's deism not compatible with growing intellectual
+      conviction <a href="#Page_276">276</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      The true satisfaction of the religious emotion <a href="#Page_277">277</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &#160;
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      <a href="#CHAPTER_VI">CHAPTER VI.</a>
+    </h3>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      <span class="smcap">England.</span>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Rousseau's English portrait <a href="#Page_281">281</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      His reception in Paris <a href="#Page_282">282</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      And in London <a href="#Page_283">283</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Hume's account of him <a href="#Page_284">284</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Settlement at Wootton <a href="#Page_286">286</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      The quarrel with Hume <a href="#Page_287">287</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Detail of the charges against Hume <a href="#Page_287">287</a>-291
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Walpole's pretended letter from Frederick <a href="#Page_291">291</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Baselessness of the whole delusion <a href="#Page_292">292</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Hume's conduct in the quarrel <a href="#Page_293">293</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      The war of pamphlets <a href="#Page_295">295</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Common theory of Rousseau's madness <a href="#Page_296">296</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Preparatory conditions <a href="#Page_297">297</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Extension of disorder from the affective life to the intelligence <a
+      href="#Page_299">299</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      The Confessions <a href="#Page_301">301</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      His life at Wootton <a href="#Page_306">306</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Flight from Derbyshire <a href="#Page_306">306</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      And from England <a href="#Page_308">308</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &#160;
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      <a href="#CHAPTER_VII">CHAPTER VII.</a>
+    </h3>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      <span class="smcap">The End.</span>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      The elder Mirabeau <a href="#Page_309">309</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Shelters Rousseau at Fleury <a href="#Page_311">311</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Rousseau at Trye <a href="#Page_312">312</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      In Dauphiny <a href="#Page_314">314</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Return to Paris <a href="#Page_314">314</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      The <i>R&#234;veries</i> <a href="#Page_315">315</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Life in Paris <a href="#Page_316">316</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Bernardin de St. Pierre's account of him <a href="#Page_317">317</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      An Easter excursion <a href="#Page_320">320</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Rousseau's unsociality <a href="#Page_322">322</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Poland and Spain <a href="#Page_324">324</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Withdrawal to Ermenonville <a href="#Page_326">326</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      His death <a href="#Page_326">326</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      <a href="#INDEX"><b>INDEX</b></a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="volume1" id="volume1"></a>
+    </p>
+    <h1>
+      ROUSSEAU
+    </h1>
+    <h3>
+      BY
+    </h3>
+    <h2>
+      JOHN MORLEY
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      VOL. I.
+    </h3>
+    <hr style="width: 35%;" />
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      London<br /> MACMILLAN AND CO., <span class="smcap">Limited</span><br /> NEW
+      YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY<br /> 1905<br />
+    </p>
+    <hr style="width: 45%;" />
+    <h2>
+      JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU
+    </h2>
+    <table summary="">
+      <tbody>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Born
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            1712
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Fled from Geneva
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <i>March</i>, 1728
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Changes religion at Turin
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <i>April</i>,&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&quot;&#160;&#160;&#160;
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            With Madame de Warens, including various intervals, until
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <i>April</i>, 1740
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Goes to Paris with musical schemes
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            1741
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Secretary at Venice
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <i>Spring</i>, 1743
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Paris, first as secretary to M. Francueil, then
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            {&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; 1744
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            &#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;as composer, and copyist
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            {&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; &#160;&#160;to&#160;&#160;&#160;
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            &#160;
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            {&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; 1756
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            The Hermitage
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <i>April 9</i>, 1756
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Montmorency
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <i>Dec. 15</i>, 1757
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Yverdun
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <i>June 14</i>, 1762
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Motiers-Travers
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <i>July 10</i>, 1762
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Isle of St. Peter
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <i>Sept.</i>, 1765
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Strasburg
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <i>Nov.</i>,&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&quot;&#160;&#160;&#160;
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Paris
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <i>December</i>,&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&quot;&#160;&#160;&#160;
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Arrives in England
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <i>Jan. 13</i>, 1766
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Leaves Dover
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <i>May 22</i>, 1767
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Fleury
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <i>June</i>,&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&quot;&#160;&#160;&#160;
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Trye
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <i>July</i>,&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&quot;&#160;&#160;&#160;
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Dauphiny
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <i>Aug.</i>, 1768
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Paris
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <i>June</i>, 1770
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Death
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <i>July 2</i>, 1778
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+      </tbody>
+    </table>
+    <p>
+      &#160;
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      PRINCIPAL WRITINGS.
+    </h3>
+    <table summary="">
+      <tbody>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Discourse on the Influence of Learning and Art
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <span class="smcap">Published</span> 1750
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Discourse on Inequality
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            &quot;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; 1754
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Letter to D'Alembert
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            &quot;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; 1758
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            New Helo&#239;sa (began 1757, finished in winter of 1759-60
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            &quot;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; 1761
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Social Contract
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            &quot;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; 1762
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Emilius
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            &quot;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; 1762
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Letters from the Mountain
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            &quot;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; 1764
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Confessions (written 1766-70)
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            { Pt. I 1781
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            &#160;
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            { Pt. II 1788
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            R&#234;veries (written 1777-78).
+          </td>
+          <td>
+            &#160;
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+      </tbody>
+    </table>
+    <hr style="width: 45%;" />
+    <div class="poem">
+      <div class="stanza">
+        <span class="i0"><i>Comme dans les &#233;tangs assoupis sous les bois,<br /></i></span><i>
+        <span class="i0">Dans plus d'une &#226;me on voit deux choses &#224; la
+        fois:<br /></span> <span class="i0">Le ciel, qui teint les eaux &#224;
+        peine remu&#233;es<br /></span> <span class="i0">Avec tous ses rayons et
+        toutes ses nue&#233;s;<br /></span> <span class="i0">Et la vase, fond
+        morne, affreux, sombre et dormant,<br /></span> <span class="i0">O&#249;
+        des reptiles noirs fourmillent vaguement.</span></i><span class="i0"><br /></span>
+        <span class="i20"><span class="smcap">Hugo</span>.<br /></span>
+      </div>
+    </div>
+    <hr style="width: 65%;" />
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.1" id="Page_i.1">[i.1]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <h1>
+      ROUSSEAU.
+    </h1>
+    <p>
+      &#160;
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      <a name="CHAPTER_I." id="CHAPTER_I."></a>CHAPTER I.
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      PRELIMINARY.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <span class="smcap">Christianity</span> is the name for a great variety of
+      changes which took place during the first centuries of our era, in men's
+      ways of thinking and feeling about their spiritual relations to unseen
+      powers, about their moral relations to one another, about the basis and
+      type of social union. So the Revolution is now the accepted name for a set
+      of changes which began faintly to take a definite practical shape first in
+      America, and then in France, towards the end of the eighteenth century;
+      they had been directly prepared by a small number of energetic thinkers,
+      whose speculations represented, as always, the prolongation of some old
+      lines of thought in obedience to the impulse of new social and
+      intellectual conditions. While one movement supplied the energy and the
+      principles which extricated civilisation from the ruins of the Roman
+      empire, the other supplies the energy and the principles which already
+      once, between the Seven Years'<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.2"
+      id="Page_i.2">[i.2]</a></span> War and the assembly of the States General,
+      saved human progress in face of the political fatuity of England and the
+      political nullity of France; and they are now, amid the distraction of the
+      various representatives of an obsolete ordering, the only forces to be
+      trusted at once for multiplying the achievements of human intelligence
+      stimulated by human sympathy, and for diffusing their beneficent results
+      with an ampler hand and more far-scattering arm. Faith in a divine power,
+      devout obedience to its supposed will, hope of ecstatic, unspeakable
+      reward, these were the springs of the old movement. Undivided love of our
+      fellows, steadfast faith in human nature, steadfast search after justice,
+      firm aspiration towards improvement, and generous contentment in the hope
+      that others may reap whatever reward may be, these are the springs of the
+      new.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is no given set of practical maxims agreed to by all members of the
+      revolutionary schools for achieving the work of release from the pressure
+      of an antiquated social condition, any more than there is one set of
+      doctrines and one kind of discipline accepted by all Protestants. Voltaire
+      was a revolutionist in one sense, Diderot in another, and Rousseau in a
+      third, just as in the practical order, Lafayette, Danton, Robespierre,
+      represented three different aspirations and as many methods. Rousseau was
+      the most directly revolutionary of all the speculative precursors, and he
+      was the first to apply his mind boldly to those of the social conditions
+      which the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.3" id="Page_i.3">[i.3]</a></span>
+      revolution is concerned by one solution or another to modify. How far his
+      direct influence was disastrous in consequence of a mischievous method, we
+      shall have to examine. It was so various that no single answer can
+      comprehend an exhaustive judgment. His writings produced that glow of
+      enthusiastic feeling in France, which led to the all-important assistance
+      rendered by that country to the American colonists in a struggle so
+      momentous for mankind. It was from his writings that the Americans took
+      the ideas and the phrases of their great charter, thus uniting the native
+      principles of their own direct Protestantism with principles that were
+      strictly derivative from the Protestantism of Geneva. Again, it was his
+      work more than that of any other one man, that France arose from the
+      deadly decay which had laid hold of her whole social and political system,
+      and found that irresistible energy which warded off dissolution within and
+      partition from without. We shall see, further, that besides being the
+      first immediately revolutionary thinker in politics, he was the most
+      stirring of reactionists in religion. His influence formed not only
+      Robespierre and Paine, but Chateaubriand, not only Jacobinism, but the
+      Catholicism of the Restoration. Thus he did more than any one else at once
+      to give direction to the first episodes of revolution, and force to the
+      first episode of reaction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There are some teachers whose distinction is neither correct thought, nor
+      an eye for the exigencies of practical organisation, but simply depth and
+      fervour<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.4" id="Page_i.4">[i.4]</a></span>
+      of the moral sentiment, bringing with it the indefinable gift of touching
+      many hearts with love of virtue and the things of the spirit. The
+      Christian organisations which saved western society from dissolution owe
+      all to St. Paul, Hildebrand, Luther, Calvin; but the spiritual life of the
+      west during all these generations has burnt with the pure flame first
+      lighted by the sublime mystic of the Galilean hills. Aristotle acquired
+      for men much knowledge and many instruments for gaining more; but it is
+      Plato, his master, who moves the soul with love of truth and enthusiasm
+      for excellence. There is peril in all such leaders of souls, inasmuch as
+      they incline men to substitute warmth for light, and to be content with
+      aspiration where they need direction. Yet no movement goes far which does
+      not count one of them in the number of its chiefs. Rousseau took this
+      place among those who prepared the first act of that revolutionary drama,
+      whose fifth act is still dark to us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the heart of the Revolution, like a torrid stream flowing undiscernible
+      amid the waters of a tumbling sea, is a new way of understanding life. The
+      social changes desired by the various assailants of the old order are only
+      the expression of a deeper change in moral idea, and the drift of the new
+      moral idea is to make life simpler. This in a sense is at the bottom of
+      all great religious and moral movements, and the Revolution emphatically
+      belongs to the latter class. Like such movements in the breast of the
+      individual, those which stir an epoch have their principle in<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.5" id="Page_i.5">[i.5]</a></span> the same
+      craving for disentanglement of life. This impulse to shake off intricacies
+      is the mark of revolutionary generations, and it was the starting-point of
+      all Rousseau's mental habits, and of the work in which they expressed
+      themselves. His mind moved outwards from this centre, and hence the fact
+      that he dealt principally with government and education, the two great
+      agencies which, in an old civilisation with a thousand roots and feelers,
+      surround external life and internal character with complexity.
+      Simplification of religion by clearing away the overgrowth of errors,
+      simplification of social relations by equality, of literature and art by
+      constant return to nature, of manners by industrious homeliness and
+      thrift,&#8212;this is the revolutionary process and ideal, and this is the
+      secret of Rousseau's hold over a generation that was lost amid the broken
+      maze of fallen systems.
+    </p>
+    <hr style="width: 25%;" />
+    <p>
+      The personality of Rousseau has most equivocal and repulsive sides. It has
+      deservedly fared ill in the esteem of the saner and more rational of those
+      who have judged him, and there is none in the history of famous men and
+      our spiritual fathers that begat us, who make more constant demands on the
+      patience or pity of those who study his life. Yet in no other instance is
+      the common eagerness to condense all predication about a character into a
+      single unqualified proposition so fatally inadequate. If it is
+      indispensable that we should be for ever describing, naming, classifying,
+      at least it is well, in speaking of such a<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.6" id="Page_i.6">[i.6]</a></span> nature as his, to enlarge
+      the vocabulary beyond the pedantic formulas of unreal ethics, and to be as
+      sure as we know how to make ourselves, that each of the sympathies and
+      faculties which together compose our power of spiritual observation, is in
+      a condition of free and patient energy. Any less open and liberal method,
+      which limits our sentiments to absolute approval or disapproval, and fixes
+      the standard either at the balance of common qualities which constitutes
+      mediocrity, or at the balance of uncommon qualities which is divinity as
+      in a Shakespeare, must leave in a cloud of blank incomprehensibleness
+      those singular spirits who come from time to time to quicken the germs of
+      strange thought and shake the quietness of the earth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We may forget much in our story that is grievous or hateful, in reflecting
+      that if any man now deems a day basely passed in which he has given no
+      thought to the hard life of garret and hovel, to the forlorn children and
+      trampled women of wide squalid wildernesses in cities, it was Rousseau who
+      first in our modern time sounded a new trumpet note for one more of the
+      great battles of humanity. He makes the poor very proud, it was truly
+      said. Some of his contemporaries followed the same vein of thought, as we
+      shall see, and he was only continuing work which others had prepared. But
+      he alone had the gift of the golden mouth. It was in Rousseau that polite
+      Europe first hearkened to strange voices and faint reverberation from out
+      of the vague and cavernous<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.7"
+      id="Page_i.7">[i.7]</a></span> shadow in which the common people move.
+      Science has to feel the way towards light and solution, to prepare, to
+      organise. But the race owes something to one who helped to state the
+      problem, writing up in letters of flame at the brutal feast of kings and
+      the rich that civilisation is as yet only a mockery, and did furthermore
+      inspire a generation of men and women with the stern resolve that they
+      would rather perish than live on in a world where such things can be.
+    </p>
+    <hr style="width: 65%;" />
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.8" id="Page_i.8">[i.8]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      <a name="CHAPTER_II" id="CHAPTER_II"></a>CHAPTER II
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      YOUTH.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <span class="smcap">Jean Jacques Rousseau</span> was born at Geneva, June
+      28, 1712. He was of old French stock. His ancestors had removed from Paris
+      to the famous city of refuge as far back as 1529, a little while before
+      Farel came thither to establish the principles of the Reformation, and
+      seven years before the first visit of the more extraordinary man who made
+      Geneva the mother city of a new interpretation of Christianity, as Rome
+      was the mother city of the old. Three generations in a direct line
+      separated Jean Jacques from Didier Rousseau, the son of a Paris
+      bookseller, and the first emigrant.<a name="FNanchor1" id="FNanchor1"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_1">[1]</a> Thus Protestant tradition in the Rousseau
+      family dates<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.9" id="Page_i.9">[i.9]</a></span>
+      from the appearance of Protestantism in Europe, and seems to have exerted
+      the same kind of influence upon them as it did, in conjunction with the
+      rest of the surrounding circumstances, upon the other citizens of the
+      ideal state of the Reformation. It is computed by the historians that out
+      of three thousand families who composed the population of Geneva towards
+      the end of the seventeenth century, there were hardly fifty who before the
+      Reformation had acquired the position of burgess-ship. The curious set of
+      conditions which thus planted a colony of foreigners in the midst of a
+      free polity, with a new doctrine and newer discipline, introduced into
+      Europe a fresh type of character and manners. People declared they could
+      recognise in the men of Geneva neither French vivacity, nor Italian
+      subtlety and clearness, nor Swiss gravity. They had a zeal for religion, a
+      vigorous energy in government, a passion for freedom, a devotion to
+      ingenious industries, which marked them with a stamp unlike that of any
+      other community.<a name="FNanchor2" id="FNanchor2"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_2">[2]</a> Towards the close of the seventeenth century
+      some of the old austerity and rudeness was sensibly modified under the
+      influence of the great neighbouring monarchy. One striking illustration of
+      this tendency was the rapid decline of the Savoyard patois in popular use.
+      The movement had not gone far enough when Rousseau was born, to take away
+      from the manners and spirit of his country their special quality and
+      individual note.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.10" id="Page_i.10">[i.10]</a></span>
+      The mother of Jean Jacques, who seems to have been a simple, cheerful, and
+      tender woman, was the daughter of a Genevan minister; her maiden name,
+      Bernard. The birth of her son was fatal to her, and the most touching and
+      pathetic of all the many shapes of death was the fit beginning of a life
+      preappointed to nearly unlifting cloud. &quot;I cost my mother her life,&quot;
+      he wrote, &quot;and my birth was the first of my woes.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor3" id="FNanchor3"></a><a href="#Footnote_3">[3]</a> Destiny
+      thus touches us with magical finger, long before consciousness awakens to
+      the forces that have been set to work in our personality, launching us
+      into the universe with country, forefathers, and physical predispositions,
+      all fixed without choice of ours. Rousseau was born dying, and though he
+      survived this first crisis by the affectionate care of one of his father's
+      sisters, yet his constitution remained infirm and disordered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Inborn tendencies, as we perceive on every side, are far from having
+      unlimited irresistible mastery, if they meet early encounter from some
+      wise and patient external will. The father of Rousseau was unfortunately
+      cast in the same mould as his mother, and the child's own morbid
+      sensibility was stimulated and deepened by the excessive sensibility of
+      his first companion. Isaac Rousseau, in many of his traits, was a
+      reversion to an old French type. In all the Genevese there was an
+      underlying tendency of this kind. &quot;Under a phlegmatic and cool air,&quot;
+      wrote Rousseau, when warning his countrymen against the<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.11" id="Page_i.11">[i.11]</a></span>
+      inflammatory effects of the drama, &quot;the Genevese hide an ardent and
+      sensitive character, that is more easily moved than controlled.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor4" id="FNanchor4"></a><a href="#Footnote_4">[4]</a> And some
+      of the episodes in their history during the eighteenth century might be
+      taken for scenes from the turbulent dramas of Paris. But Isaac Rousseau's
+      restlessness, his eager emotion, his quick and punctilious sense of
+      personal dignity, his heedlessness of ordered affairs, were not common in
+      Geneva, fortunately for the stability of her society and the prosperity of
+      her citizens. This disorder of spirit descended in modified form to the
+      son; it was inevitable that he should be indirectly affected by it. Before
+      he was seven years old he had learnt from his father to indulge a passion
+      for the reading of romances. The child and the man passed whole nights in
+      a fictitious world, reading to one another in turn, absorbed by vivid
+      interest in imaginary situations, until the morning note of the birds
+      recalled them to a sense of the conditions of more actual life, and made
+      the elder cry out in confusion that he was the more childish of the two.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The effect of this was to raise passion to a premature exaltation in the
+      young brain. &quot;I had no idea of real things,&quot; he said, &quot;though
+      all the sentiments were already familiar to me. Nothing had come to me by
+      conception, everything by sensation. These confused emotions, striking me
+      one after another, did not warp a reason that I did not yet possess, but
+      they gradually shaped in me a reason of another cast and<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.12" id="Page_i.12">[i.12]</a></span>
+      temper, and gave me bizarre and romantic ideas of human life, of which
+      neither reflection nor experience has ever been able wholly to cure me.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor5" id="FNanchor5"></a><a href="#Footnote_5">[5]</a> Thus
+      these first lessons, which have such tremendous influence over all that
+      follow, had the direct and fatal effect in Rousseau's case of deadening
+      that sense of the actual relations of things to one another in the
+      objective world, which is the master-key and prime law of sanity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In time the library of romances came to an end (1719), and Jean Jacques
+      and his father fell back on the more solid and moderated fiction of
+      history and biography. The romances had been the possession of the mother;
+      the more serious books were inherited from the old minister, her father.
+      Such books as Nani's History of Venice, and Le Sueur's History of the
+      Church and the Empire, made less impression on the young Rousseau than the
+      admirable Plutarch; and he used to read to his father during the hours of
+      work, and read over again to himself during all hours, those stories of
+      free and indomitable souls which are so proper to kindle the glow of
+      generous fire. Plutarch was dear to him to the end of his life; he read
+      him in the late days when he had almost ceased to read, and he always
+      declared Plutarch to be nearly the only author to whom he had never gone
+      without profit.<a name="FNanchor6" id="FNanchor6"></a><a href="#Footnote_6">[6]</a>
+      &quot;I think I see my father now,&quot; he wrote<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.13" id="Page_i.13">[i.13]</a></span> when he had begun to
+      make his mark in Paris, &quot;living by the work of his hands, and
+      nourishing his soul on the sublimest truths. I see Tacitus, Plutarch, and
+      Grotius, lying before him along with the tools of his craft. I see at his
+      side a cherished son receiving instruction from the best of fathers, alas,
+      with but too little fruit.&quot;<a name="FNanchor7" id="FNanchor7"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_7">[7]</a> This did little to implant the needed
+      impressions of the actual world. Rousseau's first training continued to be
+      in an excessive degree the exact reverse of our common method; this stirs
+      the imagination too little, and shuts the young too narrowly within the
+      strait pen of present and visible reality. The reader of Plutarch at the
+      age of ten actually conceived himself a Greek or a Roman, and became the
+      personage whose strokes of constancy and intrepidity transported him with
+      sympathetic ecstasy, made his eyes sparkle, and raised his voice to heroic
+      pitch. Listeners were even alarmed one day as he told the tale of Scaevola
+      at table, to see him imitatively thrust forth his arm over a hot
+      chafing-dish.<a name="FNanchor8" id="FNanchor8"></a><a href="#Footnote_8">[8]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rousseau had one brother, on whom the spirit of the father came down in
+      ample measure, just as the sensibility of the mother descended upon Jean
+      Jacques. He passed through a boyhood of revolt, and finally ran away into
+      Germany, where he was lost from sight and knowledge of his kinsmen for
+      ever. Jean Jacques was thus left virtually an only child,<a
+      name="FNanchor9" id="FNanchor9"></a><a href="#Footnote_9">[9]</a> and he
+      com<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.14" id="Page_i.14">[i.14]</a></span>memorates
+      the homely tenderness and care with which his early years were surrounded.
+      Except in the hours which he passed in reading by the side of his father,
+      he was always with his aunt, in the self-satisfying curiosity of childhood
+      watching her at work with the needle and busy about affairs of the house,
+      or else listening to her with contented interest, as she sang the simple
+      airs of the common people. The impression of this kind and cheerful figure
+      was stamped on his memory to the end; her tone of voice, her dress, the
+      quaint fashion of her hair. The constant recollection of her shows, among
+      many other signs, how he cherished that conception of the true unity of a
+      man's life, which places it in a closely-linked chain of active memories,
+      and which most of us lose in wasteful dispersion of sentiment and poor
+      fragmentariness of days. When the years came in which he might well say, I
+      have no pleasure in them, and after a manhood of distress and suspicion
+      and diseased sorrows had come to dim those blameless times, he could still
+      often surprise himself unconsciously humming the tune of one of his aunt's
+      old songs, with many tears in his eyes.<a name="FNanchor10" id="FNanchor10"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_10">[10]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This affectionate schooling came suddenly to an end. Isaac Rousseau in the
+      course of a quarrel in which he had involved himself, believed that he saw<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.15" id="Page_i.15">[i.15]</a></span>
+      unfairness in the operation of the law, for the offender had kinsfolk in
+      the Great Council. He resolved to leave his country rather than give way,
+      in circumstances which compromised his personal honour and the free
+      justice of the republic. So his house was broken up, and his son was sent
+      to school at the neighbouring village of Bossey (1722), under the care of
+      a minister, &quot;there to learn along with Latin all the medley of sorry
+      stuff with which, under the name of education, they accompany Latin.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor11" id="FNanchor11"></a><a href="#Footnote_11">[11]</a>
+      Rousseau tells us nothing of the course of his intellectual instruction
+      here, but he marks his two years' sojourn under the roof of M. Lambercier
+      by two forward steps in that fateful acquaintance with good and evil,
+      which is so much more important than literary knowledge. Upon one of these
+      fruits of the tree of nascent experience, men usually keep strict silence.
+      Rousseau is the only person that ever lived who proclaimed to the whole
+      world as a part of his own biography the ignoble circumstances of the
+      birth of sensuality in boyhood. Nobody else ever asked us to listen while
+      he told of the playmate with which unwarned youth takes its heedless
+      pleasure, which waxes and strengthens with years, until the man suddenly
+      awakens to find the playmate grown into a master, grotesque and foul,
+      whose unclean grip is not to be shaken off, and who poisons the air with
+      the goatish fume of the satyr. It is on this side that the unspoken plays
+      so decisive a part, that most of the<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.16" id="Page_i.16">[i.16]</a></span> spoken seems but as dust
+      in the balance; it is here that the flesh spreads gross clouds over the
+      firmament of the spirit. Thinking of it, we flee from talk about the high
+      matters of will and conscience, of purity of heart and the diviner mind,
+      and hurry to the physician. Manhood commonly saves itself by its own
+      innate healthiness, though the decent apron bequeathed to us in the old
+      legend of the fall, the thick veil of a more than legendary reserve,
+      prevents us from really measuring the actual waste of delicacy and the
+      finer forces. Rousseau, most unhappily for himself, lacked this innate
+      healthiness; he never shook off the demon which would be so ridiculous, if
+      it did not hide such terrible power. With a moral courage, that it needs
+      hardly less moral courage in the critic firmly to refrain from calling
+      cynical or shameless, he has told the whole story of this lifelong
+      depravation. In the present state of knowledge, which in the region of the
+      human character the false shamefacedness of science, aided and abetted by
+      the mutilating hand of religious asceticism, has kept crude and imperfect,
+      there is nothing very profitable to be said on all this. When the great
+      art of life has been more systematically conceived in the long processes
+      of time and endeavour, and when more bold, effective, and far-reaching
+      advance has been made in defining those pathological manifestations which
+      deserve to be seriously studied, as distinguished from those of a minor
+      sort which are barely worth registering, then we should know better how to
+      speak, or how to be<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.17" id="Page_i.17">[i.17]</a></span>
+      silent, in the present most unwelcome instance. As it is, we perhaps do
+      best in chronicling the fact and passing on. The harmless young are
+      allowed to play without monition or watching among the deep open graves of
+      temperament; and Rousseau, telling the tale of his inmost experience,
+      unlike the physician and the moralist who love decorous surfaces of
+      things, did not spare himself nor others a glimpse of the ignominies to
+      which the body condemns its high tenant, the soul.<a name="FNanchor12"
+      id="FNanchor12"></a><a href="#Footnote_12">[12]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The second piece of experience which he acquired at Bossey was the
+      knowledge of injustice and wrongful suffering as things actual and
+      existent. Circumstances brought him under suspicion of having broken the
+      teeth of a comb which did not belong to him. He was innocent, and not even
+      the most terrible punishment could wring from him an untrue confession of
+      guilt. The root of his constancy was not in an abhorrence of falsehood,
+      which is exceptional in youth, and for which he takes no credit, but in a
+      furious and invincible resentment against the violent pressure that was
+      unjustly put upon him. &quot;Picture a character, timid and docile in
+      ordinary life, but ardent, impetuous, indomitable in its passions; a child
+      always governed by the voice of reason, always treated with equity,
+      gentleness, and consideration, who had not even the idea of injustice, and
+      who for the first time experiences an injustice so terrible, from the very
+      people whom he most cherishes and respects! What a con<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.18" id="Page_i.18">[i.18]</a></span>fusion of ideas, what
+      disorder of sentiments, what revolution in heart, in brain, in every part
+      of his moral and intellectual being!&quot; He had not learnt, any more
+      than other children, either to put himself in the place of his elders, or
+      to consider the strength of the apparent case against him. All that he
+      felt was the rigour of a frightful chastisement for an offence of which he
+      was innocent. And the association of ideas was permanent. &quot;This first
+      sentiment of violence and injustice has remained so deeply engraved in my
+      soul, that all the ideas relating to it bring my first emotion back to me;
+      and this sentiment, though only relative to myself in its origin, has
+      taken such consistency, and become so disengaged from all personal
+      interest, that my heart is inflamed at the sight or story of any wrongful
+      action, just as much as if its effect fell on my own person. When I read
+      of the cruelties of some ferocious tyrant, or the subtle atrocities of
+      some villain of a priest, I would fain start on the instant to poniard
+      such wretches, though I were to perish a hundred times for the deed....
+      This movement may be natural to me, and I believe it is so; but the
+      profound recollection of the first injustice I suffered was too long and
+      too fast bound up with it, not to have strengthened it enormously.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor13" id="FNanchor13"></a><a href="#Footnote_13">[13]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To men who belong to the silent and phlegmatic races like our own, all
+      this may possibly strike on the ear like a false or strained note. Yet a
+      tranquil appeal to the real history of one's own strongest im<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.19" id="Page_i.19">[i.19]</a></span>pressions
+      may disclose their roots in facts of childish experience, which remoteness
+      of time has gradually emptied of the burning colour they once had. This
+      childish discovery of the existence in his own world of that injustice
+      which he had only seen through a glass very darkly in the imaginary world
+      of his reading, was for Rousseau the angry dismissal from the primitive
+      Eden, which in one shape and at one time or another overtakes all men.
+      &quot;Here,&quot; he says, &quot;was the term of the serenity of my
+      childish days. From this moment I ceased to enjoy a pure happiness, and I
+      feel even at this day that the reminiscence of the delights of my infancy
+      here comes to an end.... Even the country lost in our eyes that charm of
+      sweetness and simplicity which goes to the heart; it seemed sombre and
+      deserted, and was as if covered by a veil, hiding its beauties from our
+      sight. We no longer tended our little gardens, our plants, our flowers. We
+      went no more lightly to scratch the earth, shouting for joy as we
+      discovered the germ of the seed we had sown.&quot;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Whatever may be the degree of literal truth in the Confessions, the whole
+      course of Rousseau's life forbids us to pass this passionate description
+      by as overcharged or exaggerated. We are conscious in it of a
+      constitutional infirmity. We perceive an absence of healthy power of
+      reaction against moral shock. Such shocks are experienced in many
+      unavoidable forms by all save the dullest natures, when they first come
+      into contact with the sharp tooth of outer cir<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.20" id="Page_i.20">[i.20]</a></span>cumstance. Indeed, a man
+      must be either miraculously happy in his experiences, or exceptionally
+      obtuse in observing and feeling, or else be the creature of base and
+      cynical ideals, if life does not to the end continue to bring many a
+      repetition of that first day of incredulous bewilderment. But the urgent
+      demands for material activity quickly recall the mass of men to normal
+      relations with their fellows and the outer world. A vehement objective
+      temperament, like Voltaire's, is instantly roused by one of these
+      penetrative stimuli into angry and tenacious resistance. A proud and
+      collected soul, like Goethe's, loftily follows its own inner aims, without
+      taking any heed of the perturbations that arise from want of
+      self-collection in a world still spelling its rudiments. A sensitive and
+      depressed spirit, like Rousseau's or Cowper's, finds itself without any of
+      these reacting kinds of force, and the first stroke of cruelty or
+      oppression is the going out of a divine light.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Leaving Bossey, Rousseau returned to Geneva, and passed two or three years
+      with his uncle, losing his time for the most part, but learning something
+      of drawing and something of Euclid, for the former of which he showed
+      special inclination.<a name="FNanchor14" id="FNanchor14"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_14">[14]</a> It was a question whether he was to be made a
+      watchmaker, a lawyer, or a minister. His own preference, as his after-life
+      might have led us to suppose, was in favour of the last of the three;
+      &quot;for I thought it a fine thing,&quot; he says, &quot;to preach.&quot;
+      The uncle was a man<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.21" id="Page_i.21">[i.21]</a></span>
+      of pleasure, and as often happens in such circumstances, his love of
+      pleasure had the effect of turning his wife into a pietist. Their son was
+      Rousseau's constant comrade. &quot;Our friendship filled our hearts so
+      amply, that if we were only together, the simplest amusements were a
+      delight.&quot; They made kites, cages, bows and arrows, drums, houses;
+      they spoiled the tools of their grandfather, in trying to make watches
+      like him. In the same cheerful imitative spirit, which is the main feature
+      in childhood when it is not disturbed by excess of literary teaching,
+      after Geneva had been visited by an Italian showman with a troop of
+      marionettes, they made puppets and composed comedies for them; and when
+      one day the uncle read aloud an elegant sermon, they abandoned their
+      comedies, and turned with blithe energy to exhortation. They had glimpses
+      of the rougher side of life in the biting mockeries of some schoolboys of
+      the neighbourhood. These ended in appeal to the god of youthful war, who
+      pronounced so plainly for the bigger battalions, that the release of their
+      enemies from school was the signal for the quick retreat of our pair
+      within doors. All this is an old story in every biography written or
+      unwritten. It seldom fails to touch us, either in the way of sympathetic
+      reminiscence, or if life should have gone somewhat too hardly with a man,
+      then in the way of irony, which is not less real and poetic than the
+      eironeia of a Greek dramatist, for being concerned with more unheroic
+      creatures.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And this rough play of the streets always seemed<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.22" id="Page_i.22">[i.22]</a></span> to Rousseau a manlier
+      schooling than the effeminate tendencies which he thought he noticed in
+      Genevese youth in after years. &quot;In my time,&quot; he says admiringly,
+      &quot;children were brought up in rustic fashion and had no complexion to
+      keep.... Timid and modest before the old, they were bold, haughty,
+      combative among themselves; they had no curled locks to be careful of;
+      they defied one another at wrestling, running, boxing. They returned home
+      sweating, out of breath, torn; they were true blackguards, if you will,
+      but they made men who have zeal in their heart to serve their country and
+      blood to shed for her. May we be able to say as much one day of our fine
+      little gentlemen, and may these men at fifteen not turn out children at
+      thirty.&quot;<a name="FNanchor15" id="FNanchor15"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_15">[15]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Two incidents of this period remain to us, described in Rousseau's own
+      words, and as they reveal a certain sweetness in which his life unhappily
+      did not afterwards greatly abound, it may help our equitable balance of
+      impressions about him to reproduce them. Every Sunday he used to spend the
+      day at P&#226;quis at Mr. Fazy's, who had married one of his aunts, and
+      who carried on the production of printed calicoes. &quot;One day I was in
+      the drying-room, watching the rollers of the hot press; their brightness
+      pleased my eye; I was tempted to lay my fingers on them, and I was moving
+      them up and down with much satisfaction along the smooth cylinder, when
+      young Fazy placed himself in the wheel and gave it a half-quarter<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.23" id="Page_i.23">[i.23]</a></span> turn
+      so adroitly, that I had just the ends of my two longest fingers caught,
+      but this was enough to crush the tips and tear the nails. I raised a
+      piercing cry; Fazy instantly turned back the wheel, and the blood gushed
+      from my fingers. In the extremity of consternation he hastened to me,
+      embraced me, and besought me to cease my cries, or he would be undone. In
+      the height of my own pain, I was touched by his; I instantly fell silent,
+      we ran to the pond, where he helped me to wash my fingers and to staunch
+      the blood with moss. He entreated me with tears not to accuse him; I
+      promised him that I would not, and &#207; kept my word so well that twenty
+      years after no one knew the origin of the scar. I was kept in bed for more
+      than three weeks, and for more than two months was unable to use my hand.
+      But I persisted that a large stone had fallen and crushed my fingers.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor16" id="FNanchor16"></a><a href="#Footnote_16">[16]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The other story is of the same tenour, though there is a new touch of
+      sensibility in its concluding words. &quot;I was playing at ball at Plain
+      Palais, with one of my comrades named Plince. We began to quarrel over the
+      game; we fought, and in the fight he dealt me on my bare head a stroke so
+      well directed, that with a stronger arm it would have dashed my brains
+      out. I fell to the ground, and there never was agitation like that of this
+      poor lad, as he saw the blood in my hair. He thought he had killed me. He
+      threw himself upon me, and clasped me eagerly in his arms, while his tears
+      poured down his cheeks, and he uttered<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.24" id="Page_i.24">[i.24]</a></span> shrill cries. I returned
+      his embrace with all my force, weeping like him, in a state of confused
+      emotion which was not without a kind of sweetness. Then he tried to stop
+      the blood which kept flowing, and seeing that our two handkerchiefs were
+      not enough, he dragged me off to his mother's; she had a small garden hard
+      by. The good woman nearly fell sick at sight of me in this condition; she
+      kept strength enough to dress my wound, and after bathing it well, she
+      applied flower-de-luce macerated in brandy, an excellent remedy much used
+      in our country. Her tears and those of her son, went to my very heart, so
+      that I looked upon them for a long while as my mother and my brother.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor17" id="FNanchor17"></a><a href="#Footnote_17">[17]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If it were enough that our early instincts should be thus amiable and
+      easy, then doubtless the dismal sloughs in which men and women lie
+      floundering would occupy a very much more insignificant space in the field
+      of human experience. The problem, as we know, lies in the discipline of
+      this primitive goodness. For character in a state of society is not a tree
+      that grows into uprightness by the law of its own strength, though an
+      adorable instance here and there of rectitude and moral loveliness that
+      seem intuitive may sometimes tempt us into a moment's belief in a contrary
+      doctrine. In Rousseau's case this serious problem was never solved; there
+      was no deliberate preparation of his impulses, prepossessions, notions; no
+      foresight on the part of elders, and no gradual<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.25" id="Page_i.25">[i.25]</a></span> acclimatisation of a
+      sensitive and ardent nature in the fixed principles which are essential to
+      right conduct in the frigid zone of our relations with other people. It
+      was one of the most elementary of Rousseau's many perverse and mischievous
+      contentions, that it is their education by the older which ruins or wastes
+      the abundant capacity for virtue that subsists naturally in the young. His
+      mind seems never to have sought much more deeply for proof of this, than
+      the fact that he himself was innocent and happy so long as he was allowed
+      to follow without disturbance the easy simple proclivities of his own
+      temperament. Circumstances were not indulgent enough to leave the
+      experiment to complete itself within these very rudimentary conditions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rousseau had been surrounded, as he is always careful to protest, with a
+      religious atmosphere. His father, though a man of pleasure, was possessed
+      also not only of probity but of religion as well. His three aunts were all
+      in their degrees gracious and devout. M. Lambercier at Bossey, &quot;although
+      Churchman and preacher,&quot; was still a sincere believer and nearly as
+      good in act as in word. His inculcation of religion was so hearty, so
+      discreet, so reasonable, that his pupils, far from being wearied by the
+      sermon, never came away without being touched inwardly and stirred to make
+      virtuous resolutions. With his Aunt Bernard devotion was rather more
+      tiresome, because she made a business of it.<a name="FNanchor18"
+      id="FNanchor18"></a><a href="#Footnote_18">[18]</a> It would be a distinct<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.26" id="Page_i.26">[i.26]</a></span> error
+      to suppose that all this counted for nothing, for let us remember that we
+      are now engaged with the youth of the one great religious writer of France
+      in the eighteenth century. When after many years Rousseau's character
+      hardened, the influences which had surrounded his boyhood came out in
+      their full force and the historian of opinion soon notices in his spirit
+      and work a something which had no counterpart in the spirit and work of
+      men who had been trained in Jesuit colleges. At the first outset, however,
+      every trace of religious sentiment was obliterated from sight, and he was
+      left unprotected against the shocks of the world and the flesh.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the age of eleven Jean Jacques was sent into a notary's office, but
+      that respectable calling struck him in the same repulsive and insufferable
+      way in which it has struck many other boys of genius in all countries.
+      Contrary to the usual rule, he did not rebel, but was ignominiously
+      dismissed by his master<a name="FNanchor19" id="FNanchor19"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_19">[19]</a> for dulness and inaptitude; his fellow-clerks
+      pronounced him stupid and incompetent past hope. He was next apprenticed
+      to an engraver,<a name="FNanchor20" id="FNanchor20"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_20">[20]</a> a rough and violent man, who seems to have
+      instantly plunged the boy into a demoralised stupefaction. The reality of
+      contact with this coarse nature benumbed as by touch of torpedo the whole
+      being of a youth who had hitherto lived on pure sensations and among those
+      ideas which are nearest to sensations. There were no longer heroic Romans
+      in Rousseau's universe. &quot;The vilest<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.27" id="Page_i.27">[i.27]</a></span> tastes, the meanest bits
+      of rascality, succeeded to my simple amusements, without even leaving the
+      least idea behind. I must, in spite of the worthiest education, have had a
+      strong tendency to degenerate.&quot; The truth was that he had never had
+      any education in its veritable sense, as the process, on its negative
+      side, of counteracting the inborn. There are two kinds, or perhaps we
+      should more correctly say two degrees, of the constitution in which the
+      reflective part is weak. There are the men who live on sensation, but who
+      do so lustily, with a certain fulness of blood and active energy of
+      muscle. There are others who do so passively, not searching for
+      excitement, but acquiescing. The former by their sheer force and plenitude
+      of vitality may, even in a world where reflection is a first condition,
+      still go far. The latter succumb, and as reflection does nothing for them,
+      and as their sensations in such a world bring them few blandishments, they
+      are tolerably early surrounded with a self-diffusing atmosphere of misery.
+      Rousseau had none of this energy which makes oppression bracing. For a
+      time he sank.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It would be a mistake to let the story of the Confessions carry us into
+      exaggerations. The brutality of his master and the harshness of his life
+      led him to nothing very criminal, but only to wrong acts which are
+      despicable by their meanness, rather than in any sense atrocious. He told
+      lies as readily as the truth. He pilfered things to eat. He cunningly
+      found a means of opening his master's private cabinet, and of<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.28" id="Page_i.28">[i.28]</a></span> using
+      his master's best instruments by stealth. He wasted his time in idle and
+      capricious tasks. When the man, with all the ravity of an adult moralist,
+      describes these misdeeds of the boy, they assume a certain ugliness of
+      mien, and excites a strong disgust which, when the misdeeds themselves are
+      before us in actual life, we experience in a far more considerate form.
+      The effect of calm, retrospective avowal is to create a kind of feeling
+      which is essentially unlike our feeling at what is actually avowed. Still
+      it is clear that his unlucky career as apprentice brought out in Rousseau
+      slyness, greediness, slovenliness, untruthfulness, and the whole ragged
+      regiment of the squalider vices. The evil of his temperament now and
+      always was of the dull smouldering kind, seldom breaking out into active
+      flame. There is a certain sordidness in the scene. You may complain that
+      the details which Rousseau gives of his youthful days are insipid. Yet
+      such things are the web and stuff of life, and these days of transition
+      from childhood to full manhood in every case mark a crisis. These
+      insipidities test the education of home and family, and they presage
+      definitely what is to come. The roots of character, good or bad, are shown
+      for this short space, and they remain unchanged, though most people learn
+      from their fellows the decent and useful art of covering them over with a
+      little dust, in the shape of accepted phrases and routine customs and a
+      silence which is not oblivion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After a time the character of Jean Jacques was<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.29" id="Page_i.29">[i.29]</a></span> absolutely broken down.
+      He says little of the blows with which his offences were punished by his
+      master, but he says enough to enable us to discern that they were terrible
+      to him. This cowardice, if we choose to give the name to an overmastering
+      physical horror, at length brought his apprentice days to an end. He was
+      now in his sixteenth year. He was dragged by his comrades into sports for
+      which he had little inclination, though he admits that once engaged in
+      them he displayed an impetuosity that carried him beyond the others. Such
+      pastimes naturally led them beyond the city walls, and on two occasions
+      Rousseau found the gates closed on his return. His master when he
+      presented himself in the morning gave him such greeting as we may imagine,
+      and held out things beyond imagining as penalty for a second sin in this
+      kind. The occasion came, as, alas, it nearly always does. &quot;Half a
+      league from the town,&quot; says Rousseau, &quot;I hear the retreat
+      sounded, and redouble my pace; I hear the drum beat, and run at the top of
+      my speed: I arrive out of breath, bathed in sweat; my heart beats
+      violently, I see from a distance the soldiers at their post, and call out
+      with choking voice. It was too late. Twenty paces from the outpost
+      sentinel, I saw the first bridge rising. I shuddered, as I watched those
+      terrible horns, sinister and fatal augury of the inevitable lot which that
+      moment was opening for me.&quot;<a name="FNanchor21" id="FNanchor21"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_21">[21]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In manhood when we have the resource of our own will to fall back upon, we
+      underestimate the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.30" id="Page_i.30">[i.30]</a></span>
+      unsurpassed horror and anguish of such moments as this in youth, when we
+      know only the will of others, and that this will is inexorable against us.
+      Rousseau dared not expose himself to the fulfilment of his master's
+      menace, and he ran away (1728). But for this, wrote the unhappy man long
+      years after, &quot;I should have passed, in the bosom of my religion, of
+      my native land, of my family, and my friends, a mild and peaceful life,
+      such as my character required, in the uniformity of work which suited my
+      taste, and of a society after my heart. I should have been a good
+      Christian, good citizen, good father of a family, good friend, good
+      craftsman, good man in all. I should have been happy in my condition,
+      perhaps I might have honoured it; and after living a life obscure and
+      simple, but even and gentle, I should have died peacefully in the midst of
+      my own people. Soon forgotten, I should at any rate have been regretted as
+      long as any memory of me was left.&quot;<a name="FNanchor22"
+      id="FNanchor22"></a><a href="#Footnote_22">[22]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As a man knows nothing about the secrets of his own individual
+      organisation, this illusory mapping out of a supposed Possible need seldom
+      be suspected of the smallest insincerity. The poor madman who declares
+      that he is a king kept out of his rights only moves our pity, and we
+      perhaps owe pity no less to those in all the various stages of aberration
+      uncertificated by surgeons, down to the very edge of most respectable
+      sanity, who accuse the injustice of men of keeping them out of this or
+      that kingdom, of which in truth<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.31"
+      id="Page_i.31">[i.31]</a></span> their own composition finally
+      disinherited them at the moment when they were conceived in a mother's
+      womb. The first of the famous Five Propositions of Jansen, which were a
+      stumbling-block to popes and to the philosophy of the eighteenth-century
+      foolishness, put this clear and permanent truth into a mystic and
+      perishable formula, to the effect that there are some commandments of God
+      which righteous and good men are absolutely unable to obey, though ever so
+      disposed to do them, and God does not give them so much grace that they
+      are able to observe them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If Rousseau's sensations in the evening were those of terror, the day and
+      its prospect of boundless adventures soon turned them into entire delight.
+      The whole world was before him, and all the old conceptions of romance
+      were instantly revived by the supposed nearness of their realisation. He
+      roamed for two or three days among the villages in the neighbourhood of
+      Geneva, finding such hospitality as he needed in the cottages of friendly
+      peasants. Before long his wanderings brought him to the end of the
+      territory of the little republic. Here he found himself in the domain of
+      Savoy, where dukes and lords had for ages been the traditional foes of the
+      freedom and the faith of Geneva, Rousseau came to the village of
+      Confignon, and the name of the priest of Confignon recalled one of the
+      most embittered incidents of the old feud. This feud had come to take new
+      forms; instead of midnight expeditions to scale the city walls, the
+      descendants of the Savoyard marauders of the sixteenth century were<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.32" id="Page_i.32">[i.32]</a></span> now
+      intent with equivocal good will on rescuing the souls of the descendants
+      of their old enemies from deadly heresy. At this time a systematic
+      struggle was going on between the priests of Savoy and the ministers of
+      Geneva, the former using every effort to procure the conversion of any
+      Protestant on whom they could lay hands.<a name="FNanchor23"
+      id="FNanchor23"></a><a href="#Footnote_23">[23]</a> As it happened, the
+      priest of Confignon was one of the most active in this good work.<a
+      name="FNanchor24" id="FNanchor24"></a><a href="#Footnote_24">[24]</a> He
+      made the young Rousseau welcome, spoke to him of the heresies of Geneva
+      and of the authority of the holy Church, and gave him some dinner. He
+      could hardly have had a more easy convert, for the nature with which he
+      had to deal was now swept and garnished, ready for the entrance of all
+      devils or gods. The dinner went for much. &quot;I was too good a guest,&quot;
+      writes Rousseau in one of his few passages of humour, &quot;to be a good
+      theologian, and his Frangi wine, which struck me as excellent, was such a
+      triumphant argument on his side, that I should have blushed to oppose so
+      capital a host.&quot;<a name="FNanchor25" id="FNanchor25"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_25">[25]</a> So it was agreed that he should be put in a
+      way to be further instructed of these matters. We may accept Rousseau's
+      assurance that he was not exactly a hypocrite in this rapid complaisance.
+      He admits that any one who should have seen the artifices<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.33" id="Page_i.33">[i.33]</a></span> to
+      which he resorted, might have thought him very false. But, he argues,
+      &quot;flattery, or rather concession, is not always a vice; it is oftener
+      a virtue, especially in the young. The kindness with which a man receives
+      us, attaches us to him; it is not to make a fool of him that we give way,
+      but to avoid displeasing him, and not to return him evil for good.&quot;
+      He never really meant to change his religion; his fault was like the
+      coquetting of decent women, who sometimes, to gain their ends, without
+      permitting anything or promising anything, lead men to hope more than they
+      mean to hold good.<a name="FNanchor26" id="FNanchor26"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_26">[26]</a> Thereupon follow some austere reflections on
+      the priest, who ought to have sent him back to his friends; and there are
+      strictures even upon the ministers of all dogmatic religions, in which the
+      essential thing is not to do but to believe; their priests therefore,
+      provided that they can convert a man to their faith, are wholly
+      indifferent alike as to his worth and his worldly interests. All this is
+      most just; the occasion for such a strain of remark, though so apposite on
+      one side, is hardly well chosen to impress us. We wonder, as we watch the
+      boy complacently hoodwinking his entertainer, what has become of the Roman
+      severity of a few months back. This nervous eagerness to please, however,
+      was the complementary element of a character of vague ambition, and it was
+      backed by a stealthy consciousness of intellectual superiority, which
+      perhaps did something, though poorly enough, to make such ignominy less
+      deeply degrading.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.34" id="Page_i.34">[i.34]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The die was cast. M. Pontverre despatched his brand plucked from the
+      burning to a certain Madame de Warens, a lady living at Annecy, and
+      counted zealous for the cause of the Church. In an interview whose
+      minutest circumstances remained for ever stamped in his mind (March 21,
+      1728), Rousseau exchanged his first words with this singular personage,
+      whose name and character he has covered with doubtful renown. He expected
+      to find some gray and wrinkled woman, saving a little remnant of days in
+      good works. Instead of this, there turned round upon him a person not more
+      than eight-and-twenty years old, with gentle caressing air, a fascinating
+      smile, a tender eye. Madame de Warens read the letters he brought, and
+      entertained their bearer cheerfully. It was decided after consultation
+      that the heretic should be sent to a monastery at Turin, where he might be
+      brought over in form to the true Church. At the monastery not only would
+      the spiritual question of faith and the soul be dealt with, but at the
+      same time the material problem of shelter and subsistence for the body
+      would be solved likewise. Elated with vanity at the thought of seeing
+      before any of his comrades the great land of promise beyond the mountains,
+      heedless of those whom he had left, and heedless of the future before him
+      and the object which he was about, the young outcast made his journey over
+      the Alps in all possible lightness of heart. &quot;Seeing country is an
+      allurement which hardly any Genevese can ever resist. Everything that met
+      my eye seemed<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.35" id="Page_i.35">[i.35]</a></span>
+      the guarantee of my approaching happiness. In the houses I imagined rustic
+      festivals; in the fields, joyful sports; along the streams, bathing and
+      fishing; on the trees, delicious fruits; under their shade, voluptuous
+      interviews; on the mountains, pails of milk and cream, a charming
+      idleness, peace, simplicity, the delight of going forward without knowing
+      whither.&quot;<a name="FNanchor27" id="FNanchor27"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_27">[27]</a> He might justly choose out this interval as
+      more perfectly free from care or anxiety than any other of his life. It
+      was the first of the too rare occasions when his usually passive
+      sensuousness was stung by novelty and hope into an active energy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The seven or eight days of the journey came to an end, and the youth found
+      himself at Turin without money or clothes, an inmate of a dreary
+      monastery, among some of the very basest and foulest of mankind, who pass
+      their time in going from one monastery to another through Spain and Italy,
+      professing themselves Jews or Moors for the sake of being supported while
+      the process of their conversion was going slowly forward. At the Hospice
+      of the Catechumens the work of his conversion was begun in such earnest as
+      the insincerity of at least one of the parties to it might allow. It is
+      needless to enter into the circumstances of Rousseau's conversion to
+      Catholicism. The mischievous zeal for theological proselytising has led to
+      thousands of such hollow and degrading performances, but it may safely be
+      said that none of them was ever hollower than this. Rousseau avows that he
+      had been<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.36" id="Page_i.36">[i.36]</a></span>
+      brought up in the heartiest abhorrence of the older church, and that he
+      never lost this abhorrence. He fully explains that he accepted the
+      arguments with which he was not very energetically plied, simply because
+      he could not bear the idea of returning to Geneva, and he saw no other way
+      out of his present destitute condition. &quot;I could not dissemble from
+      myself that the holy deed I was about to do, was at the bottom the action
+      of a bandit.&quot; &quot;The sophism which destroyed me,&quot; he says in
+      one of those eloquent pieces of moralising, which bring ignoble action
+      into a relief that exaggerates our condemnation, &quot;is that of most
+      men, who complain of lack of strength when it is already too late for them
+      to use it. It is only through our own fault that virtue costs us anything;
+      if we could be always sage, we should rarely feel the need of being
+      virtuous. But inclinations that might be easily overcome, drag us on
+      without resistance; we yield to light temptations of which we despise the
+      hazard. Insensibly we fall into perilous situations, against which we
+      could easily have shielded ourselves, but from which we can afterwards
+      only make a way out by heroic efforts that stupefy us, and so we sink into
+      the abyss, crying aloud to God, Why hast thou made me so weak? But in
+      spite of ourselves, God gives answer to our conscience, 'I made thee too
+      weak to come out from the pit, because I made thee strong enough to avoid
+      falling into it.'&quot;<a name="FNanchor28" id="FNanchor28"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_28">[28]</a> So the hopeful convert did fall in, not as
+      happens to the pious soul<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.37"
+      id="Page_i.37">[i.37]</a></span> &quot;too hot for certainties in this our
+      life,&quot; to find rest in liberty of private judgment and an open Bible,
+      but simply as a means of getting food, clothing, and shelter.<a
+      name="FNanchor29" id="FNanchor29"></a><a href="#Footnote_29">[29]</a> The
+      boy was clever enough to make some show of resistance, and he turned to
+      good use for this purpose the knowledge of Church history and the great
+      Reformation controversy which he had picked up at M. Lambercier's. He was
+      careful not to carry things too far, and exactly nine days after his
+      admission into the Hospice, he &quot;abjured the errors of the sect.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor30" id="FNanchor30"></a><a href="#Footnote_30">[30]</a> Two
+      days after that he was publicly received into the kindly bosom of the true
+      Church with all solemnity, to the high edification of the devout of Turin,
+      who marked their interest in the regenerate soul by contributions to the
+      extent of twenty francs in small money.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With that sum and formal good wishes the fathers of the Hospice of the
+      Catechumens thrust him out of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.38"
+      id="Page_i.38">[i.38]</a></span> their doors into the broad world. The
+      youth who had begun the day with dreams of palaces, found himself at night
+      sleeping in a den where he paid a halfpenny for the privilege of resting
+      in the same room with the rude woman who kept the house, her husband, her
+      five or six children, and various other lodgers. This rough awakening
+      produced no consciousness of hardship in a nature which, beneath all
+      fantastic dreams, always remained true to its first sympathy with the
+      homely lives of the poor. The woman of the house swore like a carter, and
+      was always dishevelled and disorderly: this did not prevent Rousseau from
+      recognising her kindness of heart and her staunch readiness to befriend.
+      He passed his days in wandering about the streets of Turin, seeing the
+      wonders of a capital, and expecting some adventure that should raise him
+      to unknown heights. He went regularly to mass, watched the pomp of the
+      court, and counted upon stirring a passion in the breast of a princess.
+      &#192; more important circumstance was the effect of the mass in awakening
+      in his own breast his latent passion for music; a passion so strong that
+      the poorest instrument, if it were only in tune, never failed to give him
+      the liveliest pleasure. The king of Sardinia was believed to have the best
+      performers in Europe; less than that was enough to quicken the musical
+      susceptibility which is perhaps an invariable element in the most
+      completely sensuous natures.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When the end of the twenty francs began to seem<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.39" id="Page_i.39">[i.39]</a></span> a thing possible, he
+      tried to get work as an engraver. A young woman in a shop took pity on
+      him, gave him work and food, and perhaps permitted him to make dumb and
+      grovelling love to her, until her husband returned home and drove her
+      client away from the door with threats and the waving of a wand not
+      magical.<a name="FNanchor31" id="FNanchor31"></a><a href="#Footnote_31">[31]</a>
+      Rousseau's self-love sought an explanation in the natural fury of an
+      Italian husband's jealousy; but we need hardly ask for any other cause
+      than a shopkeeper's reasonable objection to vagabonds.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The next step of this youth, who was always dreaming of the love of
+      princesses, was to accept with just thankfulness the position of lackey or
+      footboy in the household of a widow. With Madame de Vercellis he passed
+      three months, and at the end of that time she died. His stay here was
+      marked by an incident that has filled many pages with stormful discussion.
+      When Madame de Vercellis died, a piece of old rose-coloured ribbon was
+      missing; Rousseau had stolen it, and it was found in his possession. They
+      asked him whence he had taken it. He replied that it had been given to him
+      by Marion, a young and comely maid in the house. In her presence and
+      before the whole household he repeated his false story, and clung to it
+      with a bitter effrontery that we may well call diabolic, remembering how
+      the nervous terror of punishment and exposure sinks the angel in man. Our
+      phrase, want of moral courage, really denotes in the young<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.40" id="Page_i.40">[i.40]</a></span> an
+      excruciating physical struggle, often so keen that the victim clutches
+      after liberation with the spontaneous tenacity and cruelty of a creature
+      wrecked in mastering waters. Undisciplined sensations constitute egoism in
+      the most ruthless of its shapes, and at this epoch, owing either to the
+      brutalities which surrounded his apprentice life at Geneva, or to that
+      rapid tendency towards degeneration which he suspected in his own
+      character, Rousseau was the slave of sensations which stained his days
+      with baseness. &quot;Never,&quot; he says, in his account of this hateful
+      action, &quot;was wickedness further from me than at this cruel moment;
+      and when I accused the poor girl, it is contradictory and yet it is true
+      that my affection for her was the cause of what I did. She was present to
+      my mind, and I threw the blame from myself on to the first object that
+      presented itself. When I saw her appear my heart was torn, but the
+      presence of so many people was too strong for my remorse. I feared
+      punishment very little; I only feared disgrace, but I feared that more
+      than death, more than crime, more than anything in the world. I would fain
+      have buried myself in the depths of the earth; invincible shame prevailed
+      over all, shame alone caused my effrontery, and the more criminal I
+      became, the more intrepid was I made by the fright of confessing it. I
+      could see nothing but the horror of being recognised and declared publicly
+      to my face a thief, liar, and traducer.&quot;<a name="FNanchor32"
+      id="FNanchor32"></a><a href="#Footnote_32">[32]</a> When he says that he<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.41" id="Page_i.41">[i.41]</a></span>
+      feared punishment little, his analysis of his mind is most likely wrong,
+      for nothing is clearer than that a dread of punishment in any physical
+      form was a peculiarly strong feeling with him at this time. However that
+      may have been, the same over-excited imagination which put every sense on
+      the alarm and led him into so abominable a misdemeanour, brought its own
+      penalties. It led him to conceive a long train of ruin as having befallen
+      Marion in consequence of his calumny against her, and this dreadful
+      thought haunted him to the end of his life. In the long sleepless nights
+      he thought he saw the unhappy girl coming to reproach him with a crime
+      that seemed as fresh to him as if it had been perpetrated the day before.<a
+      name="FNanchor33" id="FNanchor33"></a><a href="#Footnote_33">[33]</a> Thus
+      the same brooding memory which brought back to him the sweet pain of his
+      gentle kinswoman's household melody, preserved the darker side of his
+      history with equal fidelity and no less perfect continuousness. Rousseau
+      expresses a hope and belief that this burning remorse would serve as
+      expiation for his fault; as if expiation for the destruction of another
+      soul could be anything but a fine name for self-absolution. We may,
+      however, charitably and reasonably think that the possible consequences of
+      his fault to the unfortunate Marion were not actual, but were as much a
+      hallucination as the midnight visits of her reproachful spirit. Indeed, we
+      are hardly condoning evil, in suggesting that the whole story from its
+      beginning is marked with exag<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.42"
+      id="Page_i.42">[i.42]</a></span>geration, and that we who have our own
+      lives to lead shall find little help in criticising at further length the
+      exact heinousness of the ignoble falsehood of a boy who happened to grow
+      up into a man of genius.<a name="FNanchor34" id="FNanchor34"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_34">[34]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After an interval of six weeks, which were passed in the garret or cellar
+      of his rough patroness with kind heart and ungentle tongue, Rousseau again
+      found himself a lackey in the house of a Piedmontese person of quality.
+      This new master, the Count of Gouvon, treated him with a certain unusual
+      considerateness, which may perhaps make us doubt the narrative. His son
+      condescended to teach the youth Latin, and Rousseau presumed to entertain
+      a passion for one of the daughters of the house, to whom he paid silent
+      homage in the odd shape of attending to her wants at table with special
+      solicitude. In this situation he had, or at least he supposed that he had,
+      an excellent chance of ultimate advancement. But advancement here or
+      elsewhere means a measure of stability, and Rousseau's temperament in his
+      youth was the archtype of the mutable. An old comrade from Geneva visited
+      him,<a name="FNanchor35" id="FNanchor35"></a><a href="#Footnote_35">[35]</a>
+      and as almost any incident is stimulating enough to fire the restlessness
+      of imaginative youth, the gratitude which he professed to the Count of
+      Gouvon and his family, the prudence with which he marked his prospects,
+      the industry<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.43" id="Page_i.43">[i.43]</a></span>
+      with which he profited by opportunity, all faded quickly into mere dead
+      and disembodied names of virtues. His imagination again went over the
+      journey across the mountains; the fields, the woods, the streams, began to
+      absorb his whole life. He recalled with delicious satisfaction how
+      charming the journey had seemed to him, and thought how far more charming
+      it would be in the society of a comrade of his own age and taste, without
+      duty, or constraint, or obligation to go or stay other than as it might
+      please them. &quot;It would be madness to sacrifice such a piece of good
+      fortune to projects of ambition, which were slow, difficult, doubtful of
+      execution, and which, even if they should one day be realised, were not
+      with all their glory worth a quarter of an hour of true pleasure and
+      freedom in youth.&quot;<a name="FNanchor36" id="FNanchor36"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_36">[36]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On these high principles he neglected his duties so recklessly that he was
+      dismissed from his situation, and he and his comrade began their homeward
+      wanderings with more than apostolic heedlessness as to what they should
+      eat or wherewithal they should be clothed. They had a toy fountain; they
+      hoped that in return for the amusement to be conferred by this wonder they
+      should receive all that they might need. Their hopes were not fulfilled.
+      The exhibition of the toy fountain did not excuse them from their
+      reckoning. Before long it was accidentally broken, and to their secret
+      satisfaction, for it had lost its novelty. Their naked, vagrancy was thus
+      undisguised. They made<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.44"
+      id="Page_i.44">[i.44]</a></span> their way by some means or other across
+      the mountains, and their enjoyment of vagabondage was undisturbed by any
+      thought of a future. &quot;To understand my delirium at this moment,&quot;
+      Rousseau says, in words which shed much light on darker parts of his
+      history than fits of vagrancy, &quot;it is necessary to know to what a
+      degree my heart is subject to get aflame with the smallest things, and
+      with what force it plunges into the imagination of the object that
+      attracts it, vain as that object may be. The most grotesque, the most
+      childish, the maddest schemes come to caress my favourite idea, and to
+      show me the reasonableness of surrendering myself to it.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor37" id="FNanchor37"></a><a href="#Footnote_37">[37]</a> It
+      was this deep internal vehemence which distinguished Rousseau all through
+      his life from the commonplace type of social revolter. A vagrant sensuous
+      temperament, strangely compounded with Genevese austerity; an ardent and
+      fantastic imagination, incongruously shot with threads of firm reason; too
+      little conscience and too much; a monstrous and diseased love of self,
+      intertwined with a sincere compassion and keen interest for the great
+      fellowship of his brothers; a wild dreaming of dreams that were made to
+      look like sanity by the close and specious connection between conclusions
+      and premisses, though the premisses happened to have the fault of being
+      profoundly unreal:&#8212;this was the type of character that lay unfolded
+      in the youth who, towards the autumn of 1729, reached Annecy, penni<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.45" id="Page_i.45">[i.45]</a></span>less
+      and ragged, throwing himself once more on the charity of the patroness who
+      had given him shelter eighteen months before. Few figures in the world at
+      that time were less likely to conciliate the favour or excite the interest
+      of an observer, who had not studied the hidden convolutions of human
+      character deeply enough to know that a boy of eighteen may be sly,
+      sensual, restless, dreamy, and yet have it in him to say things one day
+      which may help to plunge a world into conflagration.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &#160;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <b>FOOTNOTES:</b>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_1" id="Footnote_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor1">[1]</a> Here
+      is the line:&#8212;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &#160;
+    </p>
+    <div class="blockquot">
+      <p>
+        &#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;
+        Didier Rousseau.<br /> &#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;|<br />
+        &#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;Jean<br />
+        &#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;|<br />
+        &#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;
+        -----------------------<br /> &#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;
+        |&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;
+        &#160;&#160;&#160; |<br /> &#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;
+        David.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;
+        Noah.<br /> &#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;
+        |&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;
+        |<br /> Isaac (b. 1680-5, d. 1745-7). Jean Fran&#231;ois.<br /> &#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;
+        |&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;
+        |<br /> &#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;
+        |&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;
+        &#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; &#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;
+        --------------<br /> &#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;
+        |&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;
+        &#160;|&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; &#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;|<br />
+        &#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; <span
+        class="smcap">Jean Jacques</span>.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;
+        Jean.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;Theodore.<br />
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        &#160;
+      </p>
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      (<i>Musset-Pathay</i>, ii. 283.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_2" id="Footnote_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor2">[2]</a>
+      Picot's <i>Hist. de Gen&#232;ve</i>, iii. 114.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_3" id="Footnote_3"></a><a href="#FNanchor3">[3]</a> <i>Conf.</i>,
+      i. 7.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_4" id="Footnote_4"></a><a href="#FNanchor4">[4]</a> <i>Lettre
+      &#224; D'Alembert</i>, p. 187. Also <i>Nouv. H&#233;l.</i>, VI. v. 239.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_5" id="Footnote_5"></a><a href="#FNanchor5">[5]</a> <i>Conf.</i>,
+      i. 9. Also Second Letter to M. de Malesherbes, p. 356.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_6" id="Footnote_6"></a><a href="#FNanchor6">[6]</a> <i>R&#234;veries</i>,
+      iv. p. 189. &quot;My master and counsellor, Plutarch,&quot; he says, when
+      he lends a volume to Madame d'Epinay in 1756. <i>Corr.</i>, i. 265.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_7" id="Footnote_7"></a><a href="#FNanchor7">[7]</a>
+      Dedication of the <i>Discours sur l'Origine de l'In&#233;galit&#233;</i>,
+      p. 201. (June, 1754.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_8" id="Footnote_8"></a><a href="#FNanchor8">[8]</a> <i>Conf.</i>,
+      i. 1.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_9" id="Footnote_9"></a><a href="#FNanchor9">[9]</a> <i>Ib</i>,
+      i. 12.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_10" id="Footnote_10"></a><a href="#FNanchor10">[10]</a>
+      The tenacity of this grateful recollection is shown in letters to her
+      (Madame Gonceru)&#8212;one in 1754 (<i>Corr.</i>, i. 204), another as late
+      as 1770 (vi. 129), and a third in 1762 (<i>Oeuvr. et Corr. In&#233;d.</i>,
+      392).
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_11" id="Footnote_11"></a><a href="#FNanchor11">[11]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, i. 17-32.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_12" id="Footnote_12"></a><a href="#FNanchor12">[12]</a>
+      See also <i>Conf.</i>, i. 43; iii. 185; vii. 73; xii. 188, <i>n.</i> 2.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_13" id="Footnote_13"></a><a href="#FNanchor13">[13]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, i. 27-31.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_14" id="Footnote_14"></a><a href="#FNanchor14">[14]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, i. 38-47.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_15" id="Footnote_15"></a><a href="#FNanchor15">[15]</a>
+      <i>Lettre &#224; D'Alembert</i>(1758), 178, 179.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_16" id="Footnote_16"></a><a href="#FNanchor16">[16]</a>
+      <i>R&#234;veries</i>, iv. 211, 212.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_17" id="Footnote_17"></a><a href="#FNanchor17">[17]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i> 212, 213.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_18" id="Footnote_18"></a><a href="#FNanchor18">[18]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, ii. 102, 103.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_19" id="Footnote_19"></a><a href="#FNanchor19">[19]</a>
+      M. Masseron.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_20" id="Footnote_20"></a><a href="#FNanchor20">[20]</a>
+      M. Ducommun.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_21" id="Footnote_21"></a><a href="#FNanchor21">[21]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, i. 69.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_22" id="Footnote_22"></a><a href="#FNanchor22">[22]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, i. 72.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_23" id="Footnote_23"></a><a href="#FNanchor23">[23]</a>
+      J. Gaberel's <i>Histoire de l'&#201;glise de Gen&#232;ve</i> (Geneva,
+      1853-62), vol. iii. p. 285.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_24" id="Footnote_24"></a><a href="#FNanchor24">[24]</a>
+      There is a minute in the register of the company of ministers, to the
+      effect that the Sieur de Pontverre &quot;is attracting many young men from
+      this town, and changing their religion, and that the public ought to be
+      warned.&quot; (Gaberel, iii. 224.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_25" id="Footnote_25"></a><a href="#FNanchor25">[25]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, ii. 76.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_26" id="Footnote_26"></a><a href="#FNanchor26">[26]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, ii. 77.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_27" id="Footnote_27"></a><a href="#FNanchor27">[27]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, ii. 90-97.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_28" id="Footnote_28"></a><a href="#FNanchor28">[28]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, ii. 107
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_29" id="Footnote_29"></a><a href="#FNanchor29">[29]</a>
+      See <i>&#201;mile</i>, iv. 124, 125, where the youth who was born a
+      Calvinist, finding himself a stranger in a strange land, without resource,
+      &quot;changed his religion to get bread.&quot;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_30" id="Footnote_30"></a><a href="#FNanchor30">[30]</a>
+      In the <i>Confessions</i> (ii. 115) he has grace enough to make the period
+      a month; but the extract from the register of his baptism (Gaberel's <i>Hist.
+      de l'&#201;glise de Gen&#232;ve</i>, iii. 224), which has been recently
+      published, shows that this is untrue: &quot;Jean Jacques Rousseau, de Gen&#232;ve
+      (Calviniste), entr&#233; &#224; l'hospice &#224; l'&#226;ge de 16 ans, le
+      12 avril, 1728. Abjura les erreurs de la secte le 21; et le 23 du m&#234;me
+      mois lui fut administr&#233; le saint bapt&#234;me, ayant pour parrain le
+      sieur Andr&#233; Ferrero et pour marraine Fran&#231;oise Christine Rora
+      (ou Rovea).&quot;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A little further on (p. 119) he speaks of having been shut up &quot;for
+      two months,&quot; but this is not true even on his own showing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_31" id="Footnote_31"></a><a href="#FNanchor31">[31]</a>
+      Madame Basile. <i>Conf.</i>, ii. 121-135.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_32" id="Footnote_32"></a><a href="#FNanchor32">[32]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i> ii. ad finem.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_33" id="Footnote_33"></a><a href="#FNanchor33">[33]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, ii. 144.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_34" id="Footnote_34"></a><a href="#FNanchor34">[34]</a>
+      Another version of the story mentioned by Musset-Pathay (i. 7) makes the
+      object of the theft a diamond, but there is really no evidence in the
+      matter beyond that given by Rousseau himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_35" id="Footnote_35"></a><a href="#FNanchor35">[35]</a>
+      Bacle, by name.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_36" id="Footnote_36"></a><a href="#FNanchor36">[36]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, iii. 168.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_37" id="Footnote_37"></a><a href="#FNanchor37">[37]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, iii. 170. A slightly idealised account of the situation is
+      given in <i>&#201;mile</i>, Bk. iv. 125.
+    </p>
+    <hr style="width: 65%;" />
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.46" id="Page_i.46">[i.46]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      <a name="CHAPTER_III." id="CHAPTER_III."></a>CHAPTER III.
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      SAVOY.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <span class="smcap">The</span> commonplace theory which the world takes
+      for granted as to the relations of the sexes, makes the woman ever crave
+      the power and guidance of her physically stronger mate. Even if this be a
+      true account of the normal state, there is at any rate a kind of
+      temperament among the many types of men, in which it seems as if the
+      elements of character remain mere futile and dispersive particles, until
+      compelled into unity and organisation by the creative shock of feminine
+      influence. There are men, famous or obscure, whose lives might be divided
+      into a number of epochs, each defined and presided over by the influence
+      of a woman. For the inconstant such a calendar contains many divisions,
+      for the constant it is brief and simple; for both alike it marks the great
+      decisive phases through which character has moved.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rousseau's temperament was deeply marked by this special sort of
+      susceptibility in one of its least agreeable forms. His sentiment was
+      neither robustly and courageously animal, nor was it an intellectual
+      demand for the bright and vivacious sympathies in<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.47" id="Page_i.47">[i.47]</a></span> which women sometimes
+      excel. It had neither bold virility, nor that sociable energy which makes
+      close emotional companionship an essential condition of freedom of faculty
+      and completeness of work. There is a certain close and sickly air round
+      all his dealings with women and all his feeling for them. We seem to move
+      not in the star-like radiance of love, nor even in the fiery flames of
+      lust, but among the humid heats of some unknown abode of things not
+      wholesome or manly. &quot;I know a sentiment,&quot; he writes, &quot;which
+      is perhaps less impetuous than love, but a thousand times more delicious,
+      which sometimes is joined to love, and which is very often apart from it.
+      Nor is this sentiment friendship only; it is more voluptuous, more tender;
+      I do not believe that any one of the same sex could be its object; at
+      least I have been a friend, if ever man was, and I never felt this about
+      any of my friends.&quot;<a name="FNanchor38" id="FNanchor38"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_38">[38]</a> He admits that he can only describe this
+      sentiment by its effects; but our lives are mostly ruled by elements that
+      defy definition, and in Rousseau's case the sentiment which he could not
+      describe was a paramount trait of his mental constitution. It was as a
+      voluptuous garment; in it his imagination was cherished into activity, and
+      protected against that outer air of reality which braces ordinary men, but
+      benumbs and disintegrates the whole vital apparatus of such an
+      organisation as Rousseau's. If he had been devoid of this feeling about
+      women, his character might very possibly have remained sterile.<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.48" id="Page_i.48">[i.48]</a></span> That
+      feeling was the complementary contribution, without which could be no
+      fecundity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When he returned from his squalid Italian expedition in search of bread
+      and a new religion, his mind was clouded with the vague desire, the
+      sensual moodiness, which in such natures stains the threshold of manhood.
+      This unrest, with its mysterious torments and black delights, was
+      banished, or at least soothed into a happier humour, by the influence of a
+      person who is one of the most striking types to be found in the gallery of
+      fair women.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      I.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      A French writer in the eighteenth century, in a story which deals with a
+      rather repulsive theme of action in a tone that is graceful, simple, and
+      pathetic, painted the portrait of a creature for whom no moralist with a
+      reputation to lose can say a word; and we may, if we choose, fool
+      ourselves by supposing her to be without a counterpart in the
+      better-regulated world of real life, but, in spite of both these
+      objections, she is an interesting and not untouching figure to those who
+      like to know all the many-webbed stuff out of which their brothers and
+      sisters are made. The Manon Lescaut of the unfortunate Abb&#233; Prevost,
+      kindly, bright, playful, tender, but devoid of the very germ of the idea
+      of that virtue which is counted the sovereign recommendation of woman,
+      helps us to understand Madame de Warens. There are differ<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.49" id="Page_i.49">[i.49]</a></span>ences
+      enough between them, and we need not mistake them for one and the same
+      type. Manon Lescaut is a prettier figure, because romance has fewer
+      limitations than real life; but if we think of her in reading of
+      Rousseau's benefactress, the vision of the imaginary woman tends to soften
+      our judgment of the actual one, as well as to enlighten our conception of
+      a character that eludes the instruments of a commonplace analysis.<a
+      name="FNanchor39" id="FNanchor39"></a><a href="#Footnote_39">[39]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was born at Vevai in 1700; she married early, and early disagreed with
+      her husband, from whom she eventually went away, abandoning family,
+      religion, country, and means of subsistence, with all gaiety of heart. The
+      King of Sardinia happened to be keeping his court at a small town on the
+      southern shores of the lake of Geneva, and the conversion of Madame de
+      Warens to Catholicism by the preaching of the Bishop of Annecy,<a
+      name="FNanchor40" id="FNanchor40"></a><a href="#Footnote_40">[40]</a> gave
+      a zest to the royal visit, as being a successful piece of sport in that
+      great spiritual hunt which Savoy loved to pursue at the expense of the
+      reformed church in Switzerland. The king, to mark his zeal for the faith
+      of his house, conferred on<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.50"
+      id="Page_i.50">[i.50]</a></span> the new convert a small pension for life;
+      but as the tongues of the scandalous imputed a less pure motive for such
+      generosity in a parsimonious prince, Madame de Warens removed from the
+      court and settled at Annecy. Her conversion was hardly more serious than
+      Rousseau's own, because seriousness was no condition of her intelligence
+      on any of its sides or in any of its relations. She was extremely
+      charitable to the poor, full of pity for all in misfortune, easily moved
+      to forgiveness of wrong or ingratitude; careless, gay, open-hearted;
+      having, in a word, all the good qualities which spring in certain generous
+      soils from human impulse, and hardly any of those which spring from
+      reflection, or are implanted by the ordering of society. Her reason had
+      been warped in her youth by an instructor of the devil's stamp;&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor41" id="FNanchor41"></a><a href="#Footnote_41">[41]</a>
+      finding her attached to her husband and to her duties, always cold,
+      argumentative, and impregnable on the side of the senses, he attacked her
+      by sophisms, and at last persuaded her that the union of the sexes is in
+      itself a matter of the most perfect indifference, provided only that
+      decorum of appearance be preserved, and the peace of mind of persons
+      concerned be not disturbed.<a name="FNanchor42" id="FNanchor42"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_42">[42]</a><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.51"
+      id="Page_i.51">[i.51]</a></span> This execrable lesson, which greater and
+      more unselfish men held and propagated in grave books before the end of
+      the century, took root in her mind. If we accept Rousseau's explanation,
+      it did so the more easily as her temperament was cold, and thus
+      corroborated the idea of the indifference of what public opinion and
+      private passion usually concur in investing with such enormous
+      weightiness. &quot;I will even dare to say,&quot; Rousseau declares,
+      &quot;that she only knew one true pleasure in the world, and that was to
+      give pleasure to those whom she loved.&quot;<a name="FNanchor43"
+      id="FNanchor43"></a><a href="#Footnote_43">[43]</a> He is at great pains
+      to protest how compatible this coolness of temperament is with excessive
+      sensibility of character; and neither ethological theory nor practical
+      observation of men and women is at all hostile to what he is so anxious to
+      prove. The cardinal element of character is the speed at which its
+      energies move; its rapidity or its steadiness, concentration or
+      volatility; whether the thought and feeling travel as quickly as light or
+      as slowly as sound. A rapid and volatile constitution like that of Madame
+      de Warens is inconsistent with ardent and glowing warmth, which belongs to
+      the other sort, but it is essentially bound up with sensibility, or
+      readiness of sympathetic answer to every cry from another soul. It is the
+      slow, brooding, smouldering nature, like Rousseau's own, in which we may
+      expect to find the tropics.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To bring the heavy artillery of moral reprobation to bear upon a poor soul
+      like Madame de Warens is<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.52"
+      id="Page_i.52">[i.52]</a></span> as if one should denounce flagrant want
+      of moral purpose in the busy movements of ephemera. Her activity was
+      incessant, but it ended in nothing better than debt, embarrassment, and
+      confusion. She inherited from her father a taste for alchemy, and spent
+      much time in search after secret elixirs and the like. &quot;Quacks,
+      taking advantage of her weakness, made themselves her master, constantly
+      infested her, ruined her, and wasted, in the midst of furnaces and
+      chemicals, intelligence, talents, and charms which would have made her the
+      delight of the best societies.&quot;<a name="FNanchor44" id="FNanchor44"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_44">[44]</a> Perhaps, however, the too notorious vagrancy
+      of her amours had at least as much to do with her failure to delight the
+      best societies as her indiscreet passion for alchemy. Her person was
+      attractive enough. &quot;She had those points of beauty,&quot; says
+      Rousseau, &quot;which are desirable, because they reside rather in
+      expression than in feature. She had a tender and caressing air, a soft
+      eye, a divine smile, light hair of uncommon beauty. You could not see a
+      finer head or bosom, finer arms or hands.&quot;<a name="FNanchor45"
+      id="FNanchor45"></a><a href="#Footnote_45">[45]</a> She was full of tricks
+      and whimsies. She could not endure the first smell of the soup and meats
+      at dinner; when they were placed on the table she nearly swooned, and her
+      disgust lasted some time, until at the end of half an hour or so she took
+      her first morsel.<a name="FNanchor46" id="FNanchor46"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_46">[46]</a> On the whole, if we accept the current
+      standard of sanity, Madame de Warens must be pronounced ever so little
+      flighty; but a monotonous<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.53"
+      id="Page_i.53">[i.53]</a></span> world can afford to be lenient to people
+      with a slight craziness, if it only has hearty benevolence and
+      cheerfulness in its company, and is free from egoism or rapacious vanity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This was the person within the sphere of whose attraction Rousseau was
+      decisively brought in the autumn of 1729, and he remained, with certain
+      breaks of vagabondage, linked by a close attachment to her until 1738. It
+      was in many respects the truly formative portion of his life. He acquired
+      during this time much of his knowledge of books, such as it was, and his
+      principles of judging them. He saw much of the lives of the poor and of
+      the world's ways with them. Above all his ideal was revolutionised, and
+      the recent dreams of Plutarchian heroism, of grandeur, of palaces,
+      princesses, and a glorious career full in the world's eye, were replaced
+      by a new conception of blessedness of life, which never afterwards faded
+      from his vision, and which has held a front place in the imagination of
+      literary Europe ever since. The notions or aspirations which he had picked
+      up from a few books gave way to notions and aspirations which were shaped
+      and fostered by the scenes of actual life into which he was thrown, and
+      which found his character soft for their impression. In one way the new
+      pictures of a future were as dissociated from the conditions of reality as
+      the old had been, and the sensuous life of the happy valley in Savoy as
+      little fitted a man to compose ideals for our gnarled and knotted world as
+      the mental life among the heroics of sentimental fiction had done.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.54" id="Page_i.54">[i.54]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rousseau's delight in the spot where Madame de Warens lived at Annecy was
+      the mark of the new ideal which circumstances were to engender in him, and
+      after him to spread in many hearts. His room looked over gardens and a
+      stream, and beyond them stretched a far landscape. &quot;It was the first
+      time since leaving Bossey that I had green before my windows. Always shut
+      in by walls, I had nothing under my eye but house-tops and the dull gray
+      of the streets. How moving and delicious this novelty was to me! It
+      brightened all the tenderness of my disposition. I counted the landscape
+      among the kindnesses of my dear benefactress; it seemed as if she had
+      brought it there expressly for me. I placed myself there in all
+      peacefulness with her; she was present to me everywhere among the flowers
+      and the verdure; her charms and those of spring were all mingled together
+      in my eyes. My heart, which had hitherto been stifled, found itself more
+      free in this ample space, and my sighs had more liberal vent among these
+      orchard gardens.&quot;<a name="FNanchor47" id="FNanchor47"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_47">[47]</a> Madame de Warens was the semi-divine figure
+      who made the scene live, and gave it perfect and harmonious accent. He had
+      neither transports nor desires by her side, but existed in a state of
+      ravishing calm, enjoying without knowing what. &quot;I could have passed
+      my whole life and eternity itself in this way, without an instant of
+      weariness. She is the only person with whom I never felt that dryness in
+      conversation, which turns<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.55"
+      id="Page_i.55">[i.55]</a></span> the duty of keeping it up into a torment.
+      Our intercourse was not so much conversation as an inexhaustible stream of
+      chatter, which never came to an end until it was interrupted from without.
+      I only felt all the force of my attachment for her when she was out of my
+      sight. So long as I could see her I was merely happy and satisfied, but my
+      disquiet in her absence went so far as to be painful. I shall never forget
+      how one holiday, while she was at vespers, I went for a walk outside the
+      town, my heart full of her image and of an eager desire to pass all my
+      days by her side. I had sense enough to see that for the present this was
+      impossible, and that the bliss which I relished so keenly must be brief.
+      This gave to my musing a sadness which was free from everything sombre,
+      and which was moderated by pleasing hope. The sound of the bells, which
+      has always moved me to a singular degree, the singing of the birds, the
+      glory of the weather, the sweetness of the landscape, the scattered rustic
+      dwellings in which my imagination placed our common home;&#8212;all this
+      so struck me with a vivid, tender, sad, and touching impression that I saw
+      myself as in an ecstasy transported into the happy time and the happy
+      place where my heart, possessed of all the felicity that could bring it
+      delight, without even dreaming of the pleasures of sense, should share
+      joys inexpressible.&quot;<a name="FNanchor48" id="FNanchor48"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_48">[48]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was still, however, a space to be bridged between the doubtful now
+      and this delicious future.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.56"
+      id="Page_i.56">[i.56]</a></span> The harshness of circumstance is ever
+      interposing with a money question, and for a vagrant of eighteen the first
+      of all problems is a problem of economics. Rousseau was submitted to the
+      observation of a kinsman of Madame de Warens,<a name="FNanchor49"
+      id="FNanchor49"></a><a href="#Footnote_49">[49]</a> and his verdict
+      corresponded with that of the notary of Geneva, with whom years before
+      Rousseau had first tried the critical art of making a living. He
+      pronounced that in spite of an animated expression, the lad was, if not
+      thoroughly inept, at least of very slender intelligence, without ideas,
+      almost without attainments, very narrow indeed in all respects, and that
+      the honour of one day becoming a village priest was the highest piece of
+      fortune to which he had any right to aspire.<a name="FNanchor50"
+      id="FNanchor50"></a><a href="#Footnote_50">[50]</a> So he was sent to the
+      seminary, to learn Latin enough for the priestly offices. He began by
+      conceiving a deadly antipathy to his instructor, whose appearance happened
+      to be displeasing to him. A second was found,<a name="FNanchor51"
+      id="FNanchor51"></a><a href="#Footnote_51">[51]</a> and the patient and
+      obliging temper, the affectionate and sympathetic manner of his new
+      teacher made a great impression on the pupil, though the progress in
+      intellectual acquirement was as unsatisfactory in one case as in the
+      other. It is characteristic of that subtle impressionableness to physical
+      comeliness, which in ordinary natures is rapidly effaced by press of more
+      urgent considerations, but which Rousseau's strongly sensuous quality
+      retained, that he should have remembered, and thought worth mentioning
+      years afterwards, that the first of his two teachers at the seminary<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.57" id="Page_i.57">[i.57]</a></span> of
+      Annecy had greasy black hair, a complexion as of gingerbread, and bristles
+      in place of beard, while the second had the most touching expression he
+      ever saw in his life, with fair hair and large blue eyes, and a glance and
+      a tone which made you feel that he was one of the band predestined from
+      their birth to unhappy days. While at Turin, Rousseau had made the
+      acquaintance of another sage and benevolent priest,<a name="FNanchor52"
+      id="FNanchor52"></a><a href="#Footnote_52">[52]</a> and uniting the two
+      good men thirty years after he conceived and drew the character of the
+      Savoyard Vicar.<a name="FNanchor53" id="FNanchor53"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_53">[53]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Shortly the seminarists reported that, though not vicious, their pupil was
+      not even good enough for a priest, so deficient was he in intellectual
+      faculty. It was next decided to try music, and Rousseau ascended for a
+      brief space into the seventh heaven of the arts. This was one of the
+      intervals of his life of which he says that he recalls not only the times,
+      places, persons, but all the surrounding objects, the temperature of the
+      air, its odour, its colour, a certain local impression only felt there,
+      and the memory of which stirs the old transports anew. He never forgot a
+      certain tune, because one Advent Sunday he heard it from his bed being
+      sung before daybreak on the steps of the cathedral; nor an old lame
+      carpenter who played the counter-bass, nor a fair little abb&#233; who
+      played the violin in the choir.<a name="FNanchor54" id="FNanchor54"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_54">[54]</a> Yet he was in so dreamy, absent, and
+      distracted a state, that neither his good-will nor his assiduity availed,
+      and he could learn nothing, not<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.58"
+      id="Page_i.58">[i.58]</a></span> even music. His teacher, one Le M&#226;itre,
+      belonged to that great class of irregular and disorderly natures with
+      which Rousseau's destiny, in the shape of an irregular and disorderly
+      temperament of his own, so constantly brought him into contact. Le M&#226;itre
+      could not work without the inspiration of the wine cup, and thus his
+      passion for his art landed him a sot. He took offence at a slight put upon
+      him by the precentor of the cathedral of which he was choir-master, and
+      left Annecy in a furtive manner along with Rousseau, whom the too
+      comprehensive solicitude of Madame de Warens despatched to bear him
+      company. They went together as far as Lyons; here the unfortunate musician
+      happened to fall into an epileptic fit in the street. Rousseau called for
+      help, informed the crowd of the poor man's hotel, and then seizing a
+      moment when no one was thinking about him, turned the street corner and
+      finally disappeared, the musician being thus &quot;abandoned by the only
+      friend on whom he had a right to count.&quot;<a name="FNanchor55"
+      id="FNanchor55"></a><a href="#Footnote_55">[55]</a> It thus appears that a
+      man maybe exquisitely moved by the sound of bells, the song of birds, the
+      fairness of smiling gardens, and yet be capable all the time without a
+      qualm of misgiving of leaving a friend senseless in the road in a strange
+      place. It has ceased to be wonderful how many ugly and cruel actions are
+      done by people with an extraordinary sense of the beauty and beneficence
+      of nature. At the moment Rousseau only thought of getting back to Annecy
+      and Madame de Warens. &quot;It is not,&quot; he<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.59" id="Page_i.59">[i.59]</a></span> says in words of
+      profound warning, which many men have verified in those two or three hours
+      before the tardy dawn that swell into huge purgatorial &#230;ons,&#8212;&quot;it
+      is not when we have just done a bad action, that it torments us; it is
+      when we recall it long after, for the memory of it can never be thrust
+      out.&quot;<a name="FNanchor56" id="FNanchor56"></a><a href="#Footnote_56">[56]</a>
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      II.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      When he made his way homewards again, he found to his surprise and dismay
+      that his benefactress had left Annecy, and had gone for an indefinite time
+      to Paris. He never knew the secret of this sudden departure, for no man,
+      he says, was ever so little curious as to the private affairs of his
+      friends. His heart, completely occupied with the present, filled its whole
+      capacity and entire space with that, and except for past pleasures no
+      empty corner was ever left for what was done with.<a name="FNanchor57"
+      id="FNanchor57"></a><a href="#Footnote_57">[57]</a> He says he was too
+      young to take the desertion deeply to heart. Where he found subsistence we
+      do not know. He was fascinated by a flashy French adventurer,<a
+      name="FNanchor58" id="FNanchor58"></a><a href="#Footnote_58">[58]</a> in
+      whose company he wasted many hours, and the precious stuff of youthful
+      opportunity. He passed a summer day in joyful rustic fashion with two
+      damsels whom he hardly ever saw again, but the memory of whom and of the
+      holiday that they had made with him remained stamped in<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.60" id="Page_i.60">[i.60]</a></span> his
+      brain, to be reproduced many a year hence in some of the traits of the new
+      Helo&#239;sa and her friend Claire.<a name="FNanchor59" id="FNanchor59"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_59">[59]</a> Then he accepted an invitation from a former
+      waiting-woman of Madame de Warens to attend her home to Freiburg. On this
+      expedition he paid an hour's visit to his father, who had settled and
+      remarried at Nyon. Returning from Freiburg, he came to Lausanne, where,
+      with an audacity that might be taken for the first presage of mental
+      disturbance, he undertook to teach music. &quot;I have already,&quot; he
+      says, &quot;noted some moments of inconceivable delirium, in which I
+      ceased to be myself. Behold me now a teacher of singing, without knowing
+      how to decipher an air. Without the least knowledge of composition, I
+      boasted of my skill in it before all the world; and without ability to
+      score the slenderest vaudeville, I gave myself out for a composer. Having
+      been presented to M. de Treytorens, a professor of law, who loved music
+      and gave concerts at his house, I insisted on giving him a specimen of my
+      talent, and I set to work to compose a piece for his concert with as much
+      effrontery as if I knew all about it.&quot; The performance came off duly,
+      and the strange impostor conducted it with as much gravity as the
+      profoundest master. Never since the beginning of opera has the like
+      charivari greeted the ears of men.<a name="FNanchor60" id="FNanchor60"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_60">[60]</a> Such an opening was fatal to all chance of
+      scholars, but the friendly tavern-keeper who had first taken him in did
+      not lack either hope or charity.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.61"
+      id="Page_i.61">[i.61]</a></span> &quot;How is it,&quot; Rousseau cried,
+      many years after this, &quot;that having found so many good people in my
+      youth, I find so few in my advanced life? Is their stock exhausted? No;
+      but the class in which I have to seek them now is not the same as that in
+      which I found them then. Among the common people, where great passions
+      only speak at intervals, the sentiments of nature make themselves heard
+      oftener. In the higher ranks they are absolutely stifled, and under the
+      mask of sentiment it is only interest or vanity that speaks.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor61" id="FNanchor61"></a><a href="#Footnote_61">[61]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From Lausanne he went to Neuch&#226;tel, where he had more success, for,
+      teaching others, he began himself to learn. But no success was marked
+      enough to make him resist a vagrant chance. One day in his rambles falling
+      in with an archimandrite of the Greek church, who was traversing Europe in
+      search of subscriptions for the restoration of the Holy Sepulchre, he at
+      once attached himself to him in the capacity of interpreter. In this
+      position he remained for a few weeks, until the French minister at Soleure
+      took him away from the Greek monk, and despatched him to Paris to be the
+      attendant of a young officer.<a name="FNanchor62" id="FNanchor62"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_62">[62]</a> A few days in the famous city, which he now
+      saw for the first time, and which disappointed his expecta<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.62" id="Page_i.62">[i.62]</a></span>tions
+      just as the sea and all other wonders disappointed them,<a
+      name="FNanchor63" id="FNanchor63"></a><a href="#Footnote_63">[63]</a>
+      convinced him that here was not what he sought, and he again turned his
+      face southwards in search of Madame de Warens and more familiar lands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The interval thus passed in roaming over the eastern face of France, and
+      which we may date in the summer of 1732,<a name="FNanchor64"
+      id="FNanchor64"></a><a href="#Footnote_64">[64]</a> was always counted by
+      Rousseau<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.63" id="Page_i.63">[i.63]</a></span>
+      among the happy epochs of his life, though the weeks may seem grievously
+      wasted to a generation which is apt to limit its ideas of redeeming the
+      time to the two pursuits of reading books or making money. He travelled
+      alone and on foot from Soleure to Paris and from Paris back again to
+      Lyons, and this was part of the training which served him in the stead of
+      books. Scarcely any great writer since the revival of letters has been so
+      little literary as Rousseau, so little indebted to literature for the most
+      characteristic part of his work. He was formed by life; not by life in the
+      sense of contact with a great number of active and important persons, or
+      with a great number of persons of any kind, but in the rarer sense of free
+      surrender to the plenitude of his own impressions. A world composed of
+      such people, all dispensing with the inherited portion of human
+      experience, and living independently on their own stock, would rapidly
+      fall backwards into dissolution. But there is no more rash idea of the
+      right composition of a society than one which leads us to denounce a type
+      of character for no better reason than that, if it were universal, society
+      would go to pieces. There is very little danger of Rousseau's type
+      becoming common, unless lunar or other great physical influences arise to
+      work a vast change in the cerebral constitution of the species. We may
+      safely trust the prodigious <i>vis inertioe</i> of human nature to ward
+      off the peril of an eccentricity beyond bounds spreading too far. At
+      present, however, it is enough, without going into the general<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.64" id="Page_i.64">[i.64]</a></span>
+      question, to notice the particular fact that while the other great
+      exponents of the eighteenth century movement, Hume, Voltaire, Diderot,
+      were nourishing their natural strength of understanding by the study and
+      practice of literature, Rousseau, the leader of the reaction against that
+      movement, was wandering a beggar and an outcast, craving the rude fare of
+      the peasant's hut, knocking at roadside inns, and passing nights in caves
+      and holes in the fields, or in the great desolate streets of towns.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If such a life had been disagreeable to him, it would have lost all the
+      significance that it now has for us. But where others would have found
+      affliction, he had consolation, and where they would have lain desperate
+      and squalid, he marched elate and ready to strike the stars. &quot;Never,&quot;
+      he says, &quot;did I think so much, exist so much, be myself so much, as
+      in the journeys that I have made alone and on foot. Walking has something
+      about it which animates and enlivens my ideas. I can hardly think while I
+      am still; my body must be in motion, to move my mind. The sight of the
+      country, the succession of agreeable views, open air, good appetite, the
+      freedom of the alehouse, the absence of everything that could make me feel
+      dependence, or recall me to my situation&#8212;all this sets my soul free,
+      gives me a greater boldness of thought. I dispose of all nature as its
+      sovereign lord; my heart, wandering from object to object, mingles and is
+      one with the things that soothe it, wraps itself up in charming images,
+      and is intoxi<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.65" id="Page_i.65">[i.65]</a></span>cated
+      by delicious sentiment. Ideas come as they please, not as I please: they
+      do not come at all, or they come in a crowd, overwhelming me with their
+      number and their force. When I came to a place I only thought of eating,
+      and when I left it I only thought of walking. I felt that a new paradise
+      awaited me at the door, and I thought of nothing but of hastening in
+      search of it.&quot;<a name="FNanchor65" id="FNanchor65"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_65">[65]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Here again is a picture of one whom vagrancy assuredly did not degrade:&#8212;&quot;I
+      had not the least care for the future, and I awaited the answer [as to the
+      return of Madame de Warens to Savoy], lying out in the open air, sleeping
+      stretched out on the ground or on some wooden bench, as tranquilly as on a
+      bed of roses. I remember passing one delicious night outside the town
+      [Lyons], in a road which ran by the side of either the Rhone or the Sa&#244;ne,
+      I forget which of the two. Gardens raised on a terrace bordered the other
+      side of the road. It had been very hot all day, and the evening was
+      delightful; the dew moistened the parched grass, the night was profoundly
+      still, the air fresh without being cold; the sun in going down had left
+      red vapours in the heaven, and they turned the water to rose colour; the
+      trees on the terrace sheltered nightingales, answering song for song. I
+      went on in a sort of ecstasy, surrendering my heart and every sense to the
+      enjoyment of it all, and only sighing for regret that I was enjoying it
+      alone. Absorbed in the sweetness of my musing, I prolonged<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.66" id="Page_i.66">[i.66]</a></span> my
+      ramble far into the night, without ever perceiving that I was tired. At
+      last I found it out. I lay down luxuriously on the shelf of a niche or
+      false doorway made in the wall of the terrace; the canopy of my bed was
+      formed by overarching tree-tops; a nightingale was perched exactly over my
+      head, and I fell asleep to his singing. My slumber was delicious, my
+      awaking more delicious still. It was broad day, and my opening eyes looked
+      on sun and water and green things, and an adorable landscape. I rose up
+      and gave myself a shake; I felt hungry and started gaily for the town,
+      resolved to spend on a good breakfast the two pieces of money which I
+      still had left. I was in such joyful spirits that I went along the road
+      singing lustily.&quot;<a name="FNanchor66" id="FNanchor66"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_66">[66]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is in this the free expansion of inner sympathy; the natural
+      sentiment spontaneously responding to all the delicious movement of the
+      external world on its peaceful and harmonious side, just as if the world
+      of many-hued social circumstance which man has made for himself had no
+      existence. We are conscious of a full nervous elation which is not the
+      product of literature, such as we have seen so many a time since, and
+      which only found its expression in literature in Rousseau's case by
+      accident. He did not feel in order to write, but felt without any thought
+      of writing. He dreamed at this time of many lofty destinies, among them
+      that of marshal of France, but the fame of authorship never entered into
+      his dreams.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.67" id="Page_i.67">[i.67]</a></span>
+      When the time for authorship actually came, his work had all the benefit
+      of the absence of self-consciousness, it had all the disinterestedness, so
+      to say, with which the first fresh impressions were suffered to rise in
+      his mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One other picture of this time is worth remembering, as showing that
+      Rousseau was not wholly blind to social circumstances, and as
+      illustrating, too, how it was that his way of dealing with them was so
+      much more real and passionate, though so much less sagacious in some of
+      its aspects, than the way of the other revolutionists of the century. One
+      day, when he had lost himself in wandering in search of some site which he
+      expected to find beautiful, he entered the house of a peasant, half dead
+      with hunger and thirst. His entertainer offered him nothing more restoring
+      than coarse barley bread and skimmed milk. Presently, after seeing what
+      manner of guest he had, the worthy man descended by a small trap into his
+      cellar, and brought up some good brown bread, some meat, and a bottle of
+      wine, and an omelette was added afterwards. Then he explained to the
+      wondering Rousseau, who was a Swiss, and knew none of the mysteries of the
+      French fisc, that he hid away his wine on account of the duties, and his
+      bread on account of the <i>taille</i>, and declared that he would be a
+      ruined man if they suspected that he was not dying of hunger. All this
+      made an impression on Rousseau which he never forgot. &quot;Here,&quot; he
+      says, &quot;was the germ of the inextinguishable hatred which afterwards<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.68" id="Page_i.68">[i.68]</a></span> grew
+      up in my heart against the vexations that harass the common people, and
+      against all their oppressors. This man actually did not dare to eat the
+      bread which he had won by the sweat of his brow, and only avoided ruin by
+      showing the same misery as reigned around him.&quot;<a name="FNanchor67"
+      id="FNanchor67"></a><a href="#Footnote_67">[67]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was because he had thus seen the wrongs of the poor, not from without
+      but from within, not as a pitying spectator but as of their own company,
+      that Rousseau by and by brought such fire to the attack upon the old
+      order, and changed the blank practice of the elder philosophers into a
+      deadly affair of ball and shell. The man who had been a servant, who had
+      wanted bread, who knew the horrors of the midnight street, who had slept
+      in dens, who had been befriended by rough men and rougher women, who saw
+      the goodness of humanity under its coarsest outside, and who above all
+      never tried to shut these things out from his memory, but accepted them as
+      the most interesting, the most touching, the most real of all his
+      experiences, might well be expected to penetrate to the root of the
+      matter, and to protest to the few who usurp literature and policy with
+      their ideas, aspirations, interests, that it is not they but the many,
+      whose existence stirs the heart and fills the eye with the great prime
+      elements of the human lot.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.69" id="Page_i.69">[i.69]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      III.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      It was, then, some time towards the middle of 1732 that Rousseau arrived
+      at Chamb&#233;ri, and finally took up his residence with Madame de Warens,
+      in the dullest and most sombre room of a dull and sombre house. She had
+      procured him employment in connection with a land survey which the
+      government of Charles Emmanuel III. was then executing. It was only
+      temporary, and Rousseau's function was no loftier than that of clerk, who
+      had to copy and reduce arithmetical calculations. We may imagine how
+      little a youth fresh from nights under the summer sky would relish eight
+      hours a day of surly toil in a gloomy office, with a crowd of dirty and
+      ill-smelling fellow-workers.<a name="FNanchor68" id="FNanchor68"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_68">[68]</a> If Rousseau was ever oppressed by any set of
+      circumstances, his method was invariable: he ran away from them. So now he
+      threw up his post, and again tried to earn a little money by that musical
+      instruction in which he had made so many singular and grotesque
+      endeavours. Even here the virtues which make ordinary life a possible
+      thing were not his. He was pleased at his lessons while there, but he
+      could not bear the idea of being bound to be there, nor the fixing of an
+      hour. In time this experiment for a subsistence came to the same end as
+      all the others. He next rushed to Besan&#231;on in search of the musical
+      instruction which he wished to give to others, but his baggage was<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.70" id="Page_i.70">[i.70]</a></span>
+      confiscated at the frontier, and he had to return.<a name="FNanchor69"
+      id="FNanchor69"></a><a href="#Footnote_69">[69]</a> Finally he abandoned
+      the attempt, and threw himself loyally upon the narrow resources of Madame
+      de Warens, whom he assisted in some singularly indefinite way in the
+      transaction of her very indefinite and miscellaneous affairs,&#8212;if we
+      are here, as so often, to give the name of affairs to a very rapid and
+      heedless passage along a shabby road to ruin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The household at this time was on a very remarkable footing. Madame de
+      Warens was at its head, and Claude Anet, gardener, butler, steward, was
+      her factotum. He was a discreet person, of severe probity and few words,
+      firm, thrifty, and sage. The too comprehensive principles of his mistress
+      admitted him to the closest intimacy, and in due time, when Madame de
+      Warens thought of the seductions which ensnare the feet of youth, Rousseau
+      was delivered from them in an equivocal way by solicitous application of
+      the same maxims of comprehension. &quot;Although Claude Anet was as young
+      as she was, he was so mature and so grave, that he looked upon us as two
+      children worthy of indulgence, and we both looked upon him as a
+      respectable man, whose esteem it was our business to conciliate. Thus
+      there grew up between us three a companionship, perhaps without another
+      example like it upon earth. All our wishes, our cares, our hearts were in
+      common; nothing seemed to pass outside our little circle. The habit of
+      living together, and of living together<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.71" id="Page_i.71">[i.71]</a></span> exclusively, became so
+      strong that if at our meals one of the three was absent, or there came a
+      fourth, all was thrown out; and in spite of our peculiar relations, a <i>t&#234;te-&#224;-t&#234;te</i>
+      was less sweet than a meeting of all three.&quot;<a name="FNanchor70"
+      id="FNanchor70"></a><a href="#Footnote_70">[70]</a> Fate interfered to
+      spoil this striking attempt after a new type of the family, developed on a
+      duandric base. Claude Anet was seized with illness, a consequence of
+      excessive fatigue in an Alpine expedition in search of plants, and he came
+      to his end.<a name="FNanchor71" id="FNanchor71"></a><a href="#Footnote_71">[71]</a>
+      In him Rousseau always believed that he lost the most solid friend he ever
+      possessed, &quot;a rare and estimable man, in whom nature served instead
+      of education, and who nourished in obscure servitude all the virtues of
+      great men.&quot;<a name="FNanchor72" id="FNanchor72"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_72">[72]</a> The day after his death, Rousseau was
+      speaking of their lost friend to Madame de Warens with the liveliest and
+      most sincere affliction, when suddenly in the midst of the conversation he
+      remembered that he should inherit the poor man's clothes, and particularly
+      a handsome black coat. A reproachful tear from his Maman, as he always
+      somewhat nauseously called Madame de Warens, extinguished the vile thought
+      and washed away its last traces.<a name="FNanchor73" id="FNanchor73"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_73">[73]</a> After all, those men and women are
+      exceptionally happy, who have no such involuntary meanness of thought
+      standing against themselves in that unwritten chapter of their<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.72" id="Page_i.72">[i.72]</a></span> lives
+      which even the most candid persons keep privately locked up in shamefast
+      recollection.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Shortly after his return to Chamb&#233;ri, a wave from the great tide of
+      European affairs surged into the quiet valleys of Savoy. In the February
+      of 1733, Augustus the Strong died, and the usual disorder followed in the
+      choice of a successor to him in the kingship of Poland. France was for
+      Stanislaus, the father-in-law of Lewis XV., while the Emperor Charles VI.
+      and Anne of Russia were for August III., elector of Saxony. Stanislaus was
+      compelled to flee, and the French Government, taking up his quarrel,
+      declared war against the Emperor (October 14, 1733). The first act of this
+      war, which was to end in the acquisition of Naples and the two Sicilies by
+      Spanish Bourbons, and of Lorraine by France, was the despatch of a French
+      expedition to the Milanese under Marshall Villars, the husband of one of
+      Voltaire's first idols. This took place in the autumn of 1733, and a
+      French column passed through Chamb&#233;ri, exciting lively interest in
+      all minds, including Rousseau's. He now read the newspapers for the first
+      time, with the most eager sympathy for the country with whose history his
+      own name was destined to be so permanently associated. &quot;If this mad
+      passion,&quot; he says, &quot;had only been momentary, I should not speak
+      of it; but for no visible reason it took such root in my heart, that when
+      I afterwards at Paris played the stern republican, I could not help
+      feeling in spite of myself a secret predilection for the very<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.73" id="Page_i.73">[i.73]</a></span>
+      nation that I found so servile, and the government I made bold to assail.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor74" id="FNanchor74"></a><a href="#Footnote_74">[74]</a> This
+      fondness for France was strong, constant, and invincible, and found what
+      was in the eighteenth century a natural complement in a corresponding
+      dislike of England.<a name="FNanchor75" id="FNanchor75"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_75">[75]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rousseau's health began to show signs of weakness. His breath became
+      asthmatic, he had palpitations, he spat blood, and suffered from a slow
+      feverishness from which he never afterwards became entirely free.<a
+      name="FNanchor76" id="FNanchor76"></a><a href="#Footnote_76">[76]</a> His
+      mind was as feverish as his body, and the morbid broodings which active
+      life reduces to their lowest degree in most young men, were left to make
+      full havoc along with the seven devils of idleness and vacuity. An
+      instinct which may flow from the unrecognised animal lying deep down in us
+      all, suggested the way of return to wholesomeness. Rousseau prevailed upon
+      Madame de Warens to leave the stifling streets for the fresh fields, and
+      to deliver herself by retreat to rural solitude from the adventurers who
+      made her their prey. Les Charmettes, the modest farm-house to which they
+      retired, still stands. The modern traveller, with a taste for relieving an
+      imagination strained by great historic monuments and secular landmarks,
+      with the sight of spots associated with the passion and meditation of some
+      far-shining teacher of men, may walk a short league from where the gray<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.74" id="Page_i.74">[i.74]</a></span> slate
+      roofs of dull Chamb&#233;ri bake in the sun, and ascending a gently
+      mounting road, with high leafy bank on the right throwing cool shadows
+      over his head, and a stream on the left making music at his feet, he sees
+      an old red housetop lifted lonely above the trees. The homes in which men
+      have lived now and again lend themselves to the beholder's subjective
+      impression; they seemed to be brooding in forlorn isolation like some
+      life-wearied gray-beard over ancient and sorrow-stricken memories. At Les
+      Charmettes a pitiful melancholy penetrates you. The supreme loveliness of
+      the scene, the sweet-smelling meadows, the orchard, the water-ways, the
+      little vineyard with here and there a rose glowing crimson among the
+      yellow stunted vines, the rust-red crag of the Nivolet rising against the
+      sky far across the broad valley; the contrast between all this peace,
+      beauty, silence, and the diseased miserable life of the famous man who
+      found a scanty span of paradise in the midst of it, touches the soul with
+      a pathetic spell. We are for the moment lifted out of squalor, vagrancy,
+      and disorder, and seem to hear some of the harmonies which sounded to this
+      perturbed spirit, soothing it, exalting it, and stirring those inmost
+      vibrations which in truth make up all the short divine part of a man's
+      life.<a name="FNanchor77" id="FNanchor77"></a><a href="#Footnote_77">[77]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.75" id="Page_i.75">[i.75]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &quot;No day passes,&quot; he wrote in the very year in which he died,
+      &quot;in which I do not recall with joy and tender effusion this single
+      and brief time in my life, when I was fully myself, without mixture or
+      hindrance, and when I may say in a true sense that I lived. I may almost
+      say, like the prefect when disgraced and proceeding to end his days
+      tranquilly in the country, 'I have passed seventy years on the earth, and
+      I have lived but seven of them.' But for this brief and precious space, I
+      should perhaps have remained uncertain about myself; for during all the
+      rest of my life I have been so agitated, tossed, plucked hither and
+      thither by the passions of others, that, being nearly passive in a life so
+      stormy, I should find it hard to distinguish what belonged to me in my own
+      conduct,&#8212;to such a degree has harsh necessity weighed upon me. But
+      during these few years I did what I wished to do, I was what I wished to
+      be.&quot;<a name="FNanchor78" id="FNanchor78"></a><a href="#Footnote_78">[78]</a>
+      The secret of such rare felicity is hardly to be described in words. It
+      was the ease of a profoundly sensuous nature with every sense gratified
+      and fascinated. Caressing and undivided affection within doors, all the
+      sweetness and movement of nature without, solitude, freedom, and the busy
+      idleness of life in gardens,&#8212;these were the conditions of Rousseau's
+      ideal state. &quot;If my happiness,&quot; he says, in language of strange<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.76" id="Page_i.76">[i.76]</a></span>
+      felicity, &quot;consisted in facts, actions, or words, I might then
+      describe and represent it in some way; but how say what was neither said
+      nor done nor even thought, but only enjoyed and felt without my being able
+      to point to any other object of my happiness than the very feeling itself?
+      I arose with the sun and I was happy; I went out of doors and I was happy;
+      I saw Maman and I was happy; I left her and I was happy; I went among the
+      woods and hills, I wandered about in the dells, I read, I was idle, I dug
+      in the garden, I gathered fruit, I helped them indoors, and everywhere
+      happiness followed me. It was not in any given thing, it was all in
+      myself, and could never leave me for a single instant.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor79" id="FNanchor79"></a><a href="#Footnote_79">[79]</a> This
+      was a true garden of Eden, with the serpent in temporary quiescence, and
+      we may count the man rare since the fall who has found such happiness in
+      such conditions, and not less blessed than he is rare. The fact that he
+      was one of this chosen company was among the foremost of the circumstances
+      which made Rousseau seem to so many men in the eighteenth century as a
+      spring of water in a thirsty land.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All innocent and amiable things moved him. He used to spend hours together
+      in taming pigeons; he inspired them with such confidence that they would
+      follow him about, and allow him to take them wherever he would, and the
+      moment that he appeared in the garden two or three of them would instantly
+      settle on his arms or his head. The bees, too, gradually came to<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.77" id="Page_i.77">[i.77]</a></span> put
+      the same trust in him, and his whole life was surrounded with gentle
+      companionship. He always began the day with the sun, walking on the high
+      ridge above the slope on which the house lay, and going through his form
+      of worship. &quot;It did not consist in a vain moving of the lips, but in
+      a sincere elevation of heart to the author of the tender nature whose
+      beauties lay spread out before my eyes. This act passed rather in wonder
+      and contemplation than in requests; and I always knew that with the
+      dispenser of true blessings, the best means of obtaining those which are
+      needful for us, is less to ask than to deserve them.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor80" id="FNanchor80"></a><a href="#Footnote_80">[80]</a>
+      These effusions may be taken for the beginning of the deistical reaction
+      in the eighteenth century. While the truly scientific and progressive
+      spirits were occupied in laborious preparation for adding to human
+      knowledge and systematising it, Rousseau walked with his head in the
+      clouds among gods, beneficent authors of nature, wise dispensers of
+      blessings, and the like. &quot;Ah, madam,&quot; he once said, &quot;sometimes
+      in the privacy of my study, with my hands pressed tight over my eyes or in
+      the darkness of the night, I am of his opinion that there is no God. But
+      look yonder (pointing with his hand to the sky, with head erect, and an
+      inspired glance): the rising of the sun, as it scatters the mists that
+      cover the earth and lays bare the wondrous glittering scene of nature,
+      disperses at the same moment all cloud from my soul. I find my faith
+      again, and my God, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.78"
+      id="Page_i.78">[i.78]</a></span> my belief in him. I admire and adore him,
+      and I prostrate myself in his presence.&quot;<a name="FNanchor81"
+      id="FNanchor81"></a><a href="#Footnote_81">[81]</a> As if that settled the
+      question affirmatively, any more than the absence of such theistic emotion
+      in many noble spirits settles it negatively. God became the highest known
+      formula for sensuous expansion, the synthesis of all complacent emotions,
+      and Rousseau filled up the measure of his delight by creating and invoking
+      a Supreme Being to match with fine scenery and sunny gardens. We shall
+      have a better occasion to mark the attributes of this important conception
+      when we come to <i>Emilius</i>, where it was launched in a panoply of
+      resounding phrases upon a Europe which was grown too strong for Christian
+      dogma, and was not yet grown strong enough to rest in a provisional
+      ordering of the results of its own positive knowledge. Walking on the
+      terrace at Les Charmettes, you are at the very birth-place of that
+      particular &#202;tre Supr&#234;me to whom Robespierre offered the incense
+      of an official festival.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sometimes the reading of a Jansenist book would make him unhappy by the
+      prominence into which it brought the displeasing idea of hell, and he used
+      now and then to pass a miserable day in wondering whether this cruel
+      destiny should be his. Madame de Warens, whose softness of heart inspired
+      her with a theology that ought to have satisfied a seraphic doctor, had
+      abolished hell, but she could not dispense with purgatory because she did
+      not know what to do with the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.79"
+      id="Page_i.79">[i.79]</a></span> souls of the wicked, being unable either
+      to damn them, or to instal them among the good until they had been
+      purified into goodness. In truth it must be confessed, says Rousseau, that
+      alike in this world and the other the wicked are extremely embarrassing.<a
+      name="FNanchor82" id="FNanchor82"></a><a href="#Footnote_82">[82]</a> His
+      own search after knowledge of his fate is well known. One day, amusing
+      himself in a characteristic manner by throwing stones at trees, he began
+      to be tormented by fear of the eternal pit. He resolved to test his doom
+      by throwing a stone at a particular tree; if he hit, then salvation; if he
+      missed, then perdition. With a trembling hand and beating heart he threw;
+      as he had chosen a large tree and was careful not to place himself too far
+      away, all was well.<a name="FNanchor83" id="FNanchor83"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_83">[83]</a> As a rule, however, in spite of the ugly
+      phantoms of theology, he passed his days in a state of calm. Even when
+      illness brought it into his head that he should soon know the future lot
+      by more assured experiment, he still preserved a tranquillity which he
+      justly qualifies as sensual.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In thinking of Rousseau's peculiar feeling for nature, which acquired such
+      a decisive place in his character during his life at Les Charmettes, it is
+      to be remembered that it was entirely devoid of that stormy and boisterous
+      quality which has grown up in more modern literature, out of the violent
+      attempt to press nature in her most awful moods into the service of the
+      great<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.80" id="Page_i.80">[i.80]</a></span>
+      revolt against a social and religious tradition that can no longer be
+      endured. Of this revolt Rousseau was a chief, and his passion for natural
+      aspects was connected with this attitude, but he did not seize those of
+      them which the poet of <i>Manfred</i>, for example, forced into an imputed
+      sympathy with his own rebellion. Rousseau always loved nature best in her
+      moods of quiescence and serenity, and in proportion as she lent herself to
+      such moods in men. He liked rivulets better than rivers. He could not bear
+      the sight of the sea; its infertile bosom and blind restless tumblings
+      filled him with melancholy. The ruins of a park affected him more than the
+      ruins of castles.<a name="FNanchor84" id="FNanchor84"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_84">[84]</a> It is true that no plain, however beautiful,
+      ever seemed so in his eyes; he required torrents, rocks, dark forests,
+      mountains, and precipices.<a name="FNanchor85" id="FNanchor85"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_85">[85]</a> This does not affect the fact that he never
+      moralised appalling landscape, as post-revolutionary writers have done,
+      and that the Alpine wastes which throw your puniest modern into a rapture,
+      had no attraction for him. He could steep himself in nature without
+      climbing fifteen thousand feet to find her. In landscape, as has been said
+      by one with a right to speak, Rousseau was truly a great artist, and you
+      can, if you are artistic too, follow him with confidence in his
+      wanderings; he understood that beauty does not require a great stage, and
+      that the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.81" id="Page_i.81">[i.81]</a></span>
+      effect of things lies in harmony.<a name="FNanchor86" id="FNanchor86"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_86">[86]</a> The humble heights of the Jura, and the
+      lovely points of the valley of Chamb&#233;ri, sufficed to give him all the
+      pleasure of which he was capable. In truth a man cannot escape from his
+      time, and Rousseau at least belonged to the eighteenth century in being
+      devoid of the capacity for feeling awe, and the taste for objects
+      inspiring it. Nature was a tender friend with softest bosom, and no sphinx
+      with cruel enigma. He felt neither terror, nor any sense of the littleness
+      of man, nor of the mysteriousness of life, nor of the unseen forces which
+      make us their sport, as he peered over the precipice and heard the water
+      roaring at the bottom of it; he only remained for hours enjoying the
+      physical sensation of dizziness with which it turned his brain, with a
+      break now and again for hurling large stones, and watching them roll and
+      leap down into the torrent, with as little reflection and as little
+      articulate emotion as if he had been a child.<a name="FNanchor87"
+      id="FNanchor87"></a><a href="#Footnote_87">[87]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Just as it is convenient for purposes of classification to divide a man
+      into body and soul, even when we believe the soul to be only a function of
+      the body, so people talk of his intellectual side and his emotional side,
+      his thinking quality and his feeling quality, though in fact and at the
+      roots these qualities are not two but one, with temperament for the common
+      substratum. During this period of his life the whole of<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.82" id="Page_i.82">[i.82]</a></span>
+      Rousseau's true force went into his feelings, and at all times feeling
+      predominated over reflection, with many drawbacks and some advantages of a
+      very critical kind for subsequent generations of men. Nearly every one who
+      came into contact with him in the way of testing his capacity for being
+      instructed pronounced him hopeless. He had several excellent opportunities
+      of learning Latin, especially at Turin in the house of Count Gouvon, and
+      in the seminary at Annecy, and at Les Charmettes he did his best to teach
+      himself, but without any better result than a very limited power of
+      reading. In learning one rule he forgot the last; he could never master
+      the most elementary laws of versification; he learnt and re-learnt twenty
+      times the Eclogues of Virgil, but not a single word remained with him.<a
+      name="FNanchor88" id="FNanchor88"></a><a href="#Footnote_88">[88]</a> He
+      was absolutely without verbal memory, and he pronounces himself wholly
+      incapable of learning anything from masters. Madame de Warens tried to
+      have him taught both dancing and fencing; he could never achieve a minuet,
+      and after three months of instruction he was as clumsy and helpless with
+      his foil as he had been on the first day. He resolved to become a master
+      at the chessboard; he shut himself up in his room, and worked night and
+      day over the books with indescribable efforts which covered many weeks. On
+      proceeding to the caf&#233; to manifest his powers, he found that all the
+      moves and combinations had got mixed up in his head, he saw nothing but<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.83" id="Page_i.83">[i.83]</a></span>
+      clouds on the board, and as often as he repeated the experiment he only
+      found himself weaker than before. Even in music, for which he had a
+      genuine passion and at which he worked hard, he never could acquire any
+      facility at sight, and he was an inaccurate scorer, even when only copying
+      the score of others.<a name="FNanchor89" id="FNanchor89"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_89">[89]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Two things nearly incompatible, he writes in an important passage, are
+      united in me without my being able to think how; an extremely ardent
+      temperament, lively and impetuous passions, along with ideas that are very
+      slow in coming to birth, very embarrassed, and which never arise until
+      after the event. &quot;One would say that my heart and my intelligence do
+      not belong to the same individual.... I feel all, and see nothing; I am
+      carried away, but I am stupid.... This slowness of thinking, united with
+      such vivacity of feeling, possesses me not only in conversation, but when
+      I am alone and working. My ideas arrange themselves in my head with
+      incredible difficulty; they circulate there in a dull way and ferment
+      until they agitate me, fill me with heat, and give me palpitations; in the
+      midst of this stir I see nothing clearly, I could not write a single word.
+      Insensibly the violent emotion grows still, the chaos is disentangled,
+      everything falls into its place, but very slowly and after long and
+      confused agitation.&quot;<a name="FNanchor90" id="FNanchor90"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_90">[90]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So far from saying that his heart and intelligence belonged to two
+      persons, we might have been quite<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.84"
+      id="Page_i.84">[i.84]</a></span> sure, knowing his heart, that his
+      intelligence must be exactly what he describes its process to have been.
+      The slow-burning ecstasy in which he knew himself at his height and was
+      most conscious of fulness of life, was incompatible with the rapid and
+      deliberate generation of ideas. The same soft passivity, the same
+      receptiveness, which made his emotions like the surface of a lake under
+      sky and breeze, entered also into the working of his intellectual
+      faculties. But it happens that in this region, in the attainment of
+      knowledge, truth, and definite thoughts, even receptiveness implies a
+      distinct and active energy, and hence the very quality of temperament
+      which left him free and eager for sensuous impressions, seemed to muffle
+      his intelligence in a certain opaque and resisting medium, of the
+      indefinable kind that interposes between will and action in a dream. His
+      rational part was fatally protected by a non-conducting envelope of
+      sentiment; this intercepted clear ideas on their passage, and even cut off
+      the direct and true impress of those objects and their relations, which
+      are the material of clear ideas. He was no doubt right in his avowal that
+      objects generally made less impression on him than the recollection of
+      them; that he could see nothing of what was before his eyes, and had only
+      his intelligence in cases where memories were concerned; and that of what
+      was said or done in his presence, he felt and penetrated nothing.<a
+      name="FNanchor91" id="FNanchor91"></a><a href="#Footnote_91">[91]</a> In
+      other words, this is to say that his material of thought was not fact but
+      image.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.85" id="Page_i.85">[i.85]</a></span>
+      When he plunged into reflection, he did not deal with the objects of
+      reflection at first hand and in themselves, but only with the
+      reminiscences of objects, which he had never approached in a spirit of
+      deliberate and systematic observation, and with those reminiscences,
+      moreover, suffused and saturated by the impalpable but most potent
+      essences of a fermenting imagination. Instead of urgently seeking truth
+      with the patient energy, the wariness, and the conscience, with the
+      sharpened instruments, the systematic apparatus, and the minute feelers
+      and tentacles of the genuine thinker and solid reasoner, he only floated
+      languidly on a summer tide of sensation, and captured premiss and
+      conclusion in a succession of swoons. It would be a mistake to contend
+      that no work can be done for the world by this method, or that truth only
+      comes to those who chase her with logical forceps. But one should always
+      try to discover how a teacher of men came by his ideas, whether by careful
+      toil, or by the easy bequest of generous phantasy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To give a zest to rural delight, and partly perhaps to satisfy the
+      intellectual interest which must have been an instinct in one who became
+      so consummate a master in the great and noble art of composition,
+      Rousseau, during the time when he lived with Madame de Warens, tried as
+      well as he knew how to acquire a little knowledge of what fruit the
+      cultivation of the mind of man had hitherto brought forth. According to
+      his own account, it was Voltaire's Letters on the English which first drew
+      him seriously to study, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.86"
+      id="Page_i.86">[i.86]</a></span> nothing which that illustrious man wrote
+      at this time escaped him. His taste for Voltaire inspired him with the
+      desire of writing with elegance, and of imitating &quot;the fine and
+      enchanting colour of Voltaire's style&quot;<a name="FNanchor92"
+      id="FNanchor92"></a><a href="#Footnote_92">[92]</a>&#8212;an object in
+      which he cannot be held to have in the least succeeded, though he achieved
+      a superb style of his own. On his return from Turin Madame de Warens had
+      begun in some small way to cultivate a taste for letters in him, though he
+      had lost the enthusiasm of his childhood for reading. Saint Evremond,
+      Puffendorff, the Henriade, and the Spectator happened to be in his room,
+      and he turned over their pages. The Spectator, he says, pleased him
+      greatly and did him much good.<a name="FNanchor93" id="FNanchor93"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_93">[93]</a> Madame de Warens was what he calls protestant
+      in literary taste, and would talk for ever of the great Bayle, while she
+      thought more of Saint Evremond than she could ever persuade Rousseau to
+      think. Two or three years later than this he began to use his own mind
+      more freely, and opened his eyes for the first time to the greatest
+      question that ever dawns upon any human intelligence that has the
+      privilege of discerning it, the problem of a philosophy and a body of
+      doctrine.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His way of answering it did not promise the best results. He read an
+      introduction to the Sciences,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.87"
+      id="Page_i.87">[i.87]</a></span> then he took an Encyclop&#230;dia and
+      tried to learn all things together, until he repented and resolved to
+      study subjects apart. This he found a better plan for one to whom long
+      application was so fatiguing, that he could not with any effect occupy
+      himself for half an hour on any one matter, especially if following the
+      ideas of another person.<a name="FNanchor94" id="FNanchor94"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_94">[94]</a> He began his morning's work, after an hour or
+      two of dispersive chat, with the Port-Royal Logic, Locke's Essay on the
+      Human Understanding, Malebranche, Leibnitz, Descartes.<a name="FNanchor95"
+      id="FNanchor95"></a><a href="#Footnote_95">[95]</a> He found these authors
+      in a condition of such perpetual contradiction among themselves, that he
+      formed the chimerical design of reconciling them with one another. This
+      was tedious, so he took up another method, on which he congratulated
+      himself to the end of his life. It consisted in simply adopting and
+      following the ideas of each author, without comparing them either with one
+      another or with those of other writers, and above all without any
+      criticism of his own. Let me begin, he said, by collecting a store of
+      ideas, true or false, but at any rate clear, until my head is well enough
+      stocked to enable me to compare and choose. At the end of some years
+      passed &quot;in never thinking exactly, except after other people, without
+      reflecting so to speak, and almost without reasoning,&quot; he found
+      himself in a state to think for himself. &quot;In spite of beginning late
+      to exercise my judicial faculty, I never found that it had lost its<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.88" id="Page_i.88">[i.88]</a></span>
+      vigour, and when I came to publish my own ideas, I was hardly accused of
+      being a servile disciple.&quot;<a name="FNanchor96" id="FNanchor96"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_96">[96]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To that fairly credible account of the matter, one can only say that this
+      mutually exclusive way of learning the thoughts of others, and developing
+      thoughts of your own, is for an adult probably the most mischievous, where
+      it is not the most impotent, fashion in which intellectual exercise can
+      well be taken. It is exactly the use of the judicial faculty, criticising,
+      comparing, and defining, which is indispensable in order that a student
+      should not only effectually assimilate the ideas of a writer, but even
+      know what those ideas come to and how much they are worth. And so when he
+      works at ideas of his own, a judicial faculty which has been kept
+      studiously slumbering for some years, is not likely to revive in full
+      strength without any preliminary training. Rousseau was a man of singular
+      genius, and he set an extraordinary mark on Europe, but this mark would
+      have been very different if he had ever mastered any one system of
+      thought, or if he had ever fully grasped what systematic thinking means.
+      Instead of this, his debt to the men whom he read was a debt of piecemeal,
+      and his obligation an obligation for fragments; and this is perhaps the
+      worst way of acquiring an intellectual lineage, for it leaves out the
+      vital continuity of temper and method. It is a small thing to accept this
+      or that of Locke's notions upon education or the origin of ideas, if you
+      do not see the merit of his way of coming by his<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.89" id="Page_i.89">[i.89]</a></span> notions. In short,
+      Rousseau has distinctions in abundance, but the distinction of knowing how
+      to think, in the exact sense of that term, was hardly among them, and
+      neither now nor at any other time did he go through any of that toilsome
+      and vigorous intellectual preparation to which the ablest of his
+      contemporaries, Diderot, Voltaire, D'Alembert, Turgot, Condorcet, Hume,
+      all submitted themselves. His comfortable view was that &quot;the sensible
+      and interesting conversations of a woman of merit are more proper to form
+      a young man than all the pedantical philosophy of books.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor97" id="FNanchor97"></a><a href="#Footnote_97">[97]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Style, however, in which he ultimately became such a proficient, and which
+      wrought such marvels as only style backed by passion can work, already
+      engaged his serious attention. We have already seen how Voltaire implanted
+      in him the first root idea, which so many of us never perceive at all,
+      that there is such a quality of writing as style. He evidently took pains
+      with the form of expression and thought about it, in obedience to some
+      inborn harmonious predisposition which is the source of all veritable
+      eloquence, though there is no strong trace now nor for many years to come
+      of any irresistible inclination for literary composition. We find him,
+      indeed, in 1736 showing consciousness of a slight skill in writing,<a
+      name="FNanchor98" id="FNanchor98"></a><a href="#Footnote_98">[98]</a> but
+      he only thought of it as a possible recommendation for a secretaryship to
+      some great person. He also appears to have practised verses, not for their<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.90" id="Page_i.90">[i.90]</a></span> own
+      sake, for he always most justly thought his own verses mediocre, and they
+      are even worse; but on the ground that verse-making is a rather good
+      exercise for breaking one's self to elegant inversions, and learning a
+      greater ease in prose.<a name="FNanchor99" id="FNanchor99"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_99">[99]</a> At the age of one and twenty he composed a
+      comedy, long afterwards damned as <i>Narcisse</i>. Such prelusions,
+      however, were of small importance compared with the fact of his being
+      surrounded by a moral atmosphere in which his whole mind was steeped. It
+      is not in the study of Voltaire or another, but in the deep soft soil of
+      constant mood and old habit that such a style as Rousseau's has its
+      growth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was the custom to return to Chamb&#233;ri for the winter, and the day
+      of their departure from Les Charmettes was always a day blurred and
+      tearful for Rousseau; he never left it without kissing the ground, the
+      trees, the flowers; he had to be torn away from it as from a loved
+      companion. At the first melting of the winter snows they left their
+      dungeon in Chamb&#233;ri, and they never missed the earliest song of the
+      nightingale. Many a joyful day of summer peace remained vivid in
+      Rousseau's memory, and made a mixed heaven and hell for him long years
+      after in the stifling dingy Paris street, and the raw and cheerless air of
+      a Derbyshire winter.<a name="FNanchor100" id="FNanchor100"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_100">[100]</a> &quot;We started early in the morning,&quot;<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.91" id="Page_i.91">[i.91]</a></span> he
+      says, describing one of these simple excursions on the day of St. Lewis,
+      who was the very unconscious patron saint of Madame de Warens, &quot;together
+      and alone; I proposed that we should go and ramble about the side of the
+      valley opposite to our own, which we had not yet visited. We sent our
+      provisions on before us, for we were to be out all day. We went from hill
+      to hill and wood to wood, sometimes in the sun and often in the shade,
+      resting from time to time and forgetting ourselves for whole hours;
+      chatting about ourselves, our union, our dear lot, and offering unheard
+      prayers that it might last. All seemed to conspire for the bliss of this
+      day. Rain had fallen a short time before; there was no dust, and the
+      little streams were full; a light fresh breeze stirred the leaves, the air
+      was pure, the horizon without a cloud, and the same serenity reigned in
+      our own hearts. Our dinner was cooked in a peasant's cottage, and we
+      shared it with his family. These Savoyards are such good souls! After
+      dinner we sought shade under some tall trees, where, while I collected dry
+      sticks for making our coffee, Maman amused herself by botanising among the
+      bushes, and the expedition ended in transports of tenderness and effusion.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor101" id="FNanchor101"></a><a href="#Footnote_101">[101]</a>
+      This is one of such days as the soul turns back to when the misery that
+      stalks after us all has seized it, and a man is left to the sting and
+      smart of the memory of irrecoverable things.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was resolved to bind himself to Madame de<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.92" id="Page_i.92">[i.92]</a></span> Warens with an
+      inalterable fidelity for all the rest of his days; he would watch over her
+      with all the dutiful and tender vigilance of a son, and she should be to
+      him something dearer than mother or wife or sister. What actually befell
+      was this. He was attacked by vapours, which he characterises as the
+      disorder of the happy. One symptom of his disease was the conviction
+      derived from the rash perusal of surgeon's treatises, that he was
+      suffering from a polypus in the heart. On the not very chivalrous
+      principle that if he did not spend Madame de Warens' money, he was only
+      leaving it for adventurers and knaves, he proceeded to Montpellier to
+      consult the physicians, and took the money for his expenses out of his
+      benefactress's store, which was always slender because it was always open
+      to any hand. While on the road, he fell into an intrigue with a travelling
+      companion, whom critics have compared to the fair Philina of Wilhelm
+      Meister. In due time, the Montpellier doctor being unable to discover a
+      disease, declared that the patient had none. The scenery was dull and
+      unattractive, and this would have counterbalanced the weightiest
+      prudential reasons with him at any time. Rousseau debated whether he
+      should keep tryst with his gay fellow-traveller, or return to Chamb&#233;ri.
+      Remorse and that intractable emptiness of pocket which is the iron key to
+      many a deed of ingenuous-looking self-denial and Spartan virtue, directed
+      him homewards. Here he had a surprise, and perhaps learnt a lesson. He
+      found installed in the house a personage whom<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.93" id="Page_i.93">[i.93]</a></span> he describes as tall,
+      fair, noisy, coxcombical, flat-faced, flat-souled. Another triple alliance
+      seemed a thing odious in the eyes of a man whom his travelling diversions
+      had made a Pharisee for the hour. He protested, but Madame de Warens was a
+      woman of principle, and declined to let Rousseau, who had profited by the
+      doctrine of indifference, now set up in his own favour the contrary
+      doctrine of a narrow and churlish partiality. So a short, delicious, and
+      never-forgotten episode came to an end: this pair who had known so much
+      happiness together were happy together no more, and the air became peopled
+      for Rousseau with wan spectres of dead joys and fast gathering cares.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The dates of the various events described in the fifth and sixth books of
+      the Confessions are inextricable, and the order is evidently inverted more
+      than once. The inversion of order is less serious than the contradictions
+      between the dates of the Confessions and the more authentic and
+      unmistakable dates of his letters. For instance, he describes a visit to
+      Geneva as having been made shortly before Lautrec's temporary pacification
+      of the civic troubles of that town; and that event took place in the
+      spring of 1738. This would throw the Montpellier journey, which he says
+      came after the visit to Geneva, into 1738, but the letters to Madame de
+      Warens from Grenoble and Montpellier are dated in the autumn and winter of
+      1737.<a name="FNanchor102" id="FNanchor102"></a><a href="#Footnote_102">[102]</a>
+      Minor verifications attest the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.94"
+      id="Page_i.94">[i.94]</a></span> exactitude of the dates of the letters,<a
+      name="FNanchor103" id="FNanchor103"></a><a href="#Footnote_103">[103]</a>
+      and we may therefore conclude that he returned from Montpellier, found his
+      place taken and lost his old delight in Les Charmettes, in the early part
+      of 1738. In the tenth of the R&#234;veries he speaks of having passed
+      &quot;a space of four or five years&quot; in the bliss of Les Charmettes,
+      and it is true that his connection with it in one way and another lasted
+      from the middle of 1736 until about the middle of 1741. But as he left for
+      Montpellier in the autumn of 1737, and found the obnoxious Vinzenried
+      installed in 1738, the pure and characteristic felicity of Les Charmettes
+      perhaps only lasted about a year or a year and a half. But a year may set
+      a deep mark on a man, and give him imperishable taste of many things
+      bitter and sweet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &#160;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <b>FOOTNOTES:</b>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_38" id="Footnote_38"></a><a href="#FNanchor38">[38]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, iii. 177.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_39" id="Footnote_39"></a><a href="#FNanchor39">[39]</a>
+      Lamartine in <i>Raphael</i> defies &quot;a reasonable man to recompose
+      with any reality the character that Rousseau gives to his mistress, out of
+      the contradictory elements which he associates in her nature. One of these
+      elements excludes the other.&quot; It is worth while for any who care for
+      this kind of study to compare Madame de Warens with the Marquise de
+      Courcelles, whom Sainte-Beuve has well called the Manon Lescaut of the
+      seventeenth century.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_40" id="Footnote_40"></a><a href="#FNanchor40">[40]</a>
+      Described by Rousseau in a memorandum for the biographer of M. de Bernex,
+      printed in <i>M&#233;langes</i>, pp. 139-144.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_41" id="Footnote_41"></a><a href="#FNanchor41">[41]</a>
+      De Tavel, by name. Disorderly ideas as to the relations of the sexes began
+      to appear in Switzerland along with the reformation of religion. In the
+      sixteenth century a woman appeared at Geneva with the doctrine that it is
+      as inhuman and as unjustifiable to refuse the gratification of this
+      appetite in a man as to decline to give food and drink to the starving.
+      Picot's <i>Hist. de Gen&#232;ve</i>, vol. ii.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_42" id="Footnote_42"></a><a href="#FNanchor42">[42]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, v. 341. Also ii. 83; and vi. 401.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_43" id="Footnote_43"></a><a href="#FNanchor43">[43]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, v. 345.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_44" id="Footnote_44"></a><a href="#FNanchor44">[44]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, ii. 83.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_45" id="Footnote_45"></a><a href="#FNanchor45">[45]</a>
+      <i>Ib.</i> ii. 82.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_46" id="Footnote_46"></a><a href="#FNanchor46">[46]</a>
+      <i>Ib.</i> iii. 179. See also 200.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_47" id="Footnote_47"></a><a href="#FNanchor47">[47]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, iii. 177, 178.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_48" id="Footnote_48"></a><a href="#FNanchor48">[48]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, iii. 183.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_49" id="Footnote_49"></a><a href="#FNanchor49">[49]</a>
+      M. d'Aubonne.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_50" id="Footnote_50"></a><a href="#FNanchor50">[50]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, iii 192.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_51" id="Footnote_51"></a><a href="#FNanchor51">[51]</a>
+      M. Gatier.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_52" id="Footnote_52"></a><a href="#FNanchor52">[52]</a>
+      M. Gaime.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_53" id="Footnote_53"></a><a href="#FNanchor53">[53]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, iii. 204.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_54" id="Footnote_54"></a><a href="#FNanchor54">[54]</a>
+      <i>Ib.</i> iii. 209, 210.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_55" id="Footnote_55"></a><a href="#FNanchor55">[55]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, iii. 217-222.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_56" id="Footnote_56"></a><a href="#FNanchor56">[56]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, iv. 227.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_57" id="Footnote_57"></a><a href="#FNanchor57">[57]</a>
+      <i>Ib.</i> iii. 224.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_58" id="Footnote_58"></a><a href="#FNanchor58">[58]</a>
+      One Venture de Villeneuve, who visited him years afterwards (1755) in
+      Paris, when Rousseau found that the idol of old days was a crapulent
+      debauchee. <i>Ib.</i> viii. 221.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_59" id="Footnote_59"></a><a href="#FNanchor59">[59]</a>
+      Mdlles. de Graffenried and Galley. <i>Conf.</i>, iv. 231.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_60" id="Footnote_60"></a><a href="#FNanchor60">[60]</a>
+      <i>Ib.</i> iv. 254-256.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_61" id="Footnote_61"></a><a href="#FNanchor61">[61]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, iv. 253.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_62" id="Footnote_62"></a><a href="#FNanchor62">[62]</a>
+      While in the ambassador's house at Soleure, he was lodged in a room which
+      had once belonged to his namesake, Jean Baptiste Rousseau (<i>b. 1670&#8212;d.
+      1741</i>), whom the older critics astonishingly insist on counting the
+      first of French lyric poets. There was a third Rousseau, Pierre [<i>b.
+      1725&#8212;d. 1785</i>], who wrote plays and did other work now well
+      forgotten. There are some lines imperfectly commemorative of the trio&#8212;
+    </p>
+    <div class="blockquot">
+      <p>
+        Trois auteurs que Rousseau l'on nomme,<br /> Connus de Paris jusqu'&#224;
+        Rome,<br /> Sont diff&#233;rens; voici par o&#249;;<br /> Rousseau de
+        Paris fut grand homme;<br /> Rousseau de Gen&#232;ve est un fou;<br />
+        Rousseau de Toulouse un atome.
+      </p>
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      Jean Jacques refers to both his namesakes in his letter to Voltaire, Jan.
+      30, 1750. <i>Corr.</i>, i. 145.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_63" id="Footnote_63"></a><a href="#FNanchor63">[63]</a>
+      The only object which ever surpassed his expectation was the great Roman
+      structure near Nismes, the Pont du Gard. <i>Conf.</i>, vi. 446.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_64" id="Footnote_64"></a><a href="#FNanchor64">[64]</a>
+      Rousseau gives 1732 as the probable date of his return to Chamb&#233;ri,
+      after his first visit to Paris [<i>Conf.</i>, v. 305], and the only
+      objection to this is his mention of the incident of the march of the
+      French troops, which could not have happened until the winter of 1733, as
+      having taken place &quot;some months&quot; after his arrival.
+      Musset-Pathay accepts this as decisive, and fixes the return in the spring
+      of 1733 [i. 12]. My own conjectural chronology is this: Returns from Turin
+      towards the autumn of 1729; stays at Annecy until the spring of 1731;
+      passes the winter of 1731-2 at Neuch&#226;tel; first visits Paris in
+      spring of 1732; returns to Savoy in the early summer of 1732. But a
+      precise harmonising of the dates in the Confessions is impossible;
+      Rousseau wrote them three and thirty years after our present point [in
+      1766 at Wootton], and never claimed to be exact in minuteness of date.
+      Fortunately such matters in the present case are absolutely devoid of
+      importance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_65" id="Footnote_65"></a><a href="#FNanchor65">[65]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, iv. 279, 280.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_66" id="Footnote_66"></a><a href="#FNanchor66">[66]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, iv. 290, 291,
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_67" id="Footnote_67"></a><a href="#FNanchor67">[67]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, iv. 281-283.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_68" id="Footnote_68"></a><a href="#FNanchor68">[68]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, v. 325.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_69" id="Footnote_69"></a><a href="#FNanchor69">[69]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, v. 360-364. <i>Corr.</i>, i. 21-24.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_70" id="Footnote_70"></a><a href="#FNanchor70">[70]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, v. 349, 350.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_71" id="Footnote_71"></a><a href="#FNanchor71">[71]</a>
+      Apparently in the summer of 1736, though, the reference to the return of
+      the French troops at the peace [<i>Ib.</i> v. 365] would place it in 1735.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_72" id="Footnote_72"></a><a href="#FNanchor72">[72]</a>
+      <i>Ib.</i> v. 356
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_73" id="Footnote_73"></a><a href="#FNanchor73">[73]</a>
+      <i>Ib.</i>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_74" id="Footnote_74"></a><a href="#FNanchor74">[74]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, v. 315, 316.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_75" id="Footnote_75"></a><a href="#FNanchor75">[75]</a>
+      <i>Ib.</i> iv. 276. <i>Nouv. H&#233;l.</i>, II. xiv. 381, etc.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_76" id="Footnote_76"></a><a href="#FNanchor76">[76]</a>
+      He refers to the ill-health of his youth, <i>Conf.</i>, vii. 32, and
+      describes an ominous head seizure while at Chamb&#233;ri, <i>Ib.</i> vi.
+      396.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_77" id="Footnote_77"></a><a href="#FNanchor77">[77]</a>
+      Rousseau's description of Les Charmettes is at the end of the fifth book.
+      The present proprietor keeps the house arranged as it used to be, and has
+      gathered one or two memorials of its famous tenant, including his poor <i>clavecin</i>
+      and his watch. In an outside wall, H&#233;rault de Sechelles, when
+      Commissioner from the Convention in the department of Mont Blanc, inserted
+      a little white stone with two most lapidary stanzas inscribed upon it,
+      about <i>g&#233;nie, solitude, fiert&#233;, gloire, v&#233;rit&#233;,
+      envie</i>, and the like.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_78" id="Footnote_78"></a><a href="#FNanchor78">[78]</a>
+      <i>R&#234;veries</i>, x. 336 (1778).
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_79" id="Footnote_79"></a><a href="#FNanchor79">[79]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, vi. 393.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_80" id="Footnote_80"></a><a href="#FNanchor80">[80]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, vi. 412.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_81" id="Footnote_81"></a><a href="#FNanchor81">[81]</a>
+      <i>M&#233;m, de Mdme. d'Epinay</i>, i. 394. (M. Boiteau's edition:
+      Charpentier. 1865.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_82" id="Footnote_82"></a><a href="#FNanchor82">[82]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, vi. 399.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_83" id="Footnote_83"></a><a href="#FNanchor83">[83]</a>
+      <i>Ib.</i> vi. 424. Goethe made a similar experiment; see Mr. Lewes's <i>Life</i>,
+      p. 126.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_84" id="Footnote_84"></a><a href="#FNanchor84">[84]</a>
+      Bernardin de Saint Pierre tells us this. <i>Oeuvres</i> (Ed. 1818), xii.
+      70, etc.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_85" id="Footnote_85"></a><a href="#FNanchor85">[85]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, iv. 297. See also the description of the scenery of the
+      Valais, in the <i>Nouv. H&#233;l.</i>, Pt. I. Let. xxiii.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_86" id="Footnote_86"></a><a href="#FNanchor86">[86]</a>
+      George Sand in <i>Mademoiselle la Quintinie</i> (p. 27), a book containing
+      some peculiarly subtle appreciations of the Savoy landscape.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_87" id="Footnote_87"></a><a href="#FNanchor87">[87]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, iv. 298.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_88" id="Footnote_88"></a><a href="#FNanchor88">[88]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, vi. 416, 422, etc.; iii. 164; iii. 203; v. 347; v. 383, 384.
+      Also vii. 53.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_89" id="Footnote_89"></a><a href="#FNanchor89">[89]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, v. 313, 367; iv. 293; ix. 353. Also <i>M&#233;m. de Mdme.
+      d'Epinay</i>, ii. 151.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_90" id="Footnote_90"></a><a href="#FNanchor90">[90]</a>
+      <i>Ib.</i> iii. 192, 193.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_91" id="Footnote_91"></a><a href="#FNanchor91">[91]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, iv. 301; iii. 195.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_92" id="Footnote_92"></a><a href="#FNanchor92">[92]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, v. 372, 373. The mistaken date assigned to the
+      correspondence between Voltaire and Frederick is one of many instances how
+      little we can trust the Confessions for minute accuracy, though their
+      substantial veracity is confirmed by all the collateral evidence that we
+      have.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_93" id="Footnote_93"></a><a href="#FNanchor93">[93]</a>
+      <i>Ib.</i> iii. 188. For his debt in the way of education to Madame de
+      Warens, see also <i>Ib.</i> vii. 46.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_94" id="Footnote_94"></a><a href="#FNanchor94">[94]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, vi. 409.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_95" id="Footnote_95"></a><a href="#FNanchor95">[95]</a>
+      <i>Ib.</i> vi. 413. He adds a suspicious-looking &quot;<i>et cetera</i>.&quot;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_96" id="Footnote_96"></a><a href="#FNanchor96">[96]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, vi. 414
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_97" id="Footnote_97"></a><a href="#FNanchor97">[97]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, iv. 295. See also v. 346.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_98" id="Footnote_98"></a><a href="#FNanchor98">[98]</a>
+      <i>Corr.</i>, 1736, pp. 26, 27.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_99" id="Footnote_99"></a><a href="#FNanchor99">[99]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, iv. 271, where he says further that he never found enough
+      attraction in French poetry to make him think of pursuing it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_100" id="Footnote_100"></a><a href="#FNanchor100">[100]</a>
+      The first part of the Confessions was written in Wootton in Derbyshire, in
+      the winter of 1766-1767.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_101" id="Footnote_101"></a><a href="#FNanchor101">[101]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, vi. 422.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_102" id="Footnote_102"></a><a href="#FNanchor102">[102]</a>
+      <i>Corr.</i>, i. 43, 46, 62, etc.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_103" id="Footnote_103"></a><a href="#FNanchor103">[103]</a>
+      Musset-Pathay, i. 23, <i>n.</i>
+    </p>
+    <hr style="width: 65%;" />
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.95" id="Page_i.95">[i.95]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      <a name="CHAPTER_IV." id="CHAPTER_IV."></a>CHAPTER IV.
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      THERESA LE VASSEUR.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <span class="smcap">Men</span> like Rousseau, who are most heedless in
+      letting their delight perish, are as often as not most loth to bury what
+      they have slain, or even to perceive that life has gone out of it. The
+      sight of simple hearts trying to coax back a little warm breath of former
+      days into a present that is stiff and cold with indifference, is touching
+      enough. But there is a certain grossness around the circumstances in which
+      Rousseau now and too often found himself, that makes us watch his
+      embarrassment with some composure. One cannot easily think of him as a
+      simple heart, and we feel perhaps as much relief as he, when he resolves
+      after making all due efforts to thrust out the intruder and bring Madame
+      de Warens over from theories which had become too practical to be
+      interesting, to leave Les Charmettes and accept a tutorship at Lyons. His
+      new patron was a De Mably, elder brother of the philosophic abb&#233; of
+      the same name (1709-85), and of the still more notable Condillac
+      (1714-80).
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The future author of the most influential treatise on education that has
+      ever been written, was not<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.96"
+      id="Page_i.96">[i.96]</a></span> successful in the practical and far more
+      arduous side of that master art.<a name="FNanchor104" id="FNanchor104"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_104">[104]</a> We have seen how little training he had
+      ever given himself in the cardinal virtues of collectedness and
+      self-control, and we know this to be the indispensable quality in all who
+      have to shape young minds for a humane life. So long as all went well, he
+      was an angel, but when things went wrong, he is willing to confess that he
+      was a devil. When his two pupils could not understand him, he became
+      frantic; when they showed wilfulness or any other part of the disagreeable
+      materials out of which, along with the rest, human excellence has to be
+      ingeniously and painfully manufactured, he was ready to kill them. This,
+      as he justly admits, was not the way to render them either well learned or
+      sage. The moral education of the teacher himself was hardly complete, for
+      he describes how he used to steal his employer's wine, and the exquisite
+      draughts which he enjoyed in the secrecy of his own room, with a piece of
+      cake in one hand and some dear romance in the other. We should forgive
+      greedy pilferings of this kind more easily if Rousseau had forgotten them
+      more speedily. These are surely offences for which the best expiation is
+      oblivion in a throng of worthier memories.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.97" id="Page_i.97">[i.97]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is easy to understand how often Rousseau's mind turned from the deadly
+      drudgery of his present employment to the beatitude of former days. &quot;What
+      rendered my present condition insupportable was the recollection of my
+      beloved Charmettes, of my garden, my trees, my fountain, my orchard, and
+      above all of her for whom I felt myself born and who gave life to it all.
+      As I thought of her, of our pleasures, our guileless days, I was seized by
+      a tightness in my heart, a stopping of my breath, which robbed me of all
+      spirit.&quot;<a name="FNanchor105" id="FNanchor105"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_105">[105]</a> For years to come this was a kind of
+      far-off accompaniment, thrumming melodiously in his ears under all the
+      discords of a miserable life. He made another effort to quicken the dead.
+      Throwing up his office with his usual promptitude in escaping from the
+      irksome, after a residence of something like a year at Lyons (April, 1740&#8212;spring
+      of 1741), he made his way back to his old haunts. The first half-hour with
+      Madame de Warens persuaded him that happiness here was really at an end.
+      After a stay of a few months, his desolation again overcame him. It was
+      agreed that he should go to Paris to make his fortune by a new method of
+      musical notation which he had invented, and after a short stay at Lyons,
+      he found himself for the second time in the famous city which in the
+      eighteenth century had become for the moment the centre of the universe.<a
+      name="FNanchor106" id="FNanchor106"></a><a href="#Footnote_106">[106]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was not yet, however, destined to be a centre<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.98" id="Page_i.98">[i.98]</a></span> for him. His plan of
+      musical notation was examined by a learned committee of the Academy, no
+      member of whom was instructed in the musical art. Rousseau, dumb,
+      inarticulate, and unready as usual, was amazed at the ease with which his
+      critics by the free use of sounding phrases demolished arguments and
+      objections which he perceived that they did not at all understand. His
+      experience on this occasion suggested to him the most just reflection, how
+      even without breadth of intelligence, the profound knowledge of any one
+      thing is preferable in forming a judgment about it, to all possible
+      enlightenment conferred by the cultivation of the sciences, without study
+      of the special matter in question. It astonished him that all these
+      learned men, who knew so many things, could yet be so ignorant that a man
+      should only pretend to be a judge in his own craft.<a name="FNanchor107"
+      id="FNanchor107"></a><a href="#Footnote_107">[107]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His musical path to glory and riches thus blocked up, he surrendered
+      himself not to despair but to complete idleness and peace of mind. He had
+      a few coins left, and these prevented him from thinking of a future. He
+      was presented to one or two great ladies, and with the blundering
+      gallantry habitual to him he wrote a letter to one of the greatest of
+      them, declaring his passion for her. Madame Dupin was the daughter of one,
+      and the wife of another, of the richest men in France, and the attentions
+      of a man whose acquaintance Madame Beuzenval had begun by inviting him to
+      dine in the servants' hall, were<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.99"
+      id="Page_i.99">[i.99]</a></span> not pleasing to her.<a name="FNanchor108"
+      id="FNanchor108"></a><a href="#Footnote_108">[108]</a> She forgave the
+      impertinence eventually, and her stepson, M. Francueil, was Rousseau's
+      patron for some years.<a name="FNanchor109" id="FNanchor109"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_109">[109]</a> On the whole, however, in spite of his own
+      account of his social ineptitude, there cannot have been anything so
+      repulsive in his manners as this account would lead us to think. There is
+      no grave anachronism in introducing here the impression which he made on
+      two fine ladies not many years after this. &quot;He pays compliments, yet
+      he is not polite, or at least he is without the air of politeness. He
+      seems to be ignorant of the usages of society, but it is easily seen that
+      he is infinitely intelligent. He has a brown complexion, while eyes that
+      overflow with fire give animation to his expression. When he has spoken
+      and you look at him, he appears comely; but when you try to recall him,
+      his image is always extremely plain. They say that he has bad health, and
+      endures agony which from<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.100"
+      id="Page_i.100">[i.100]</a></span> some motive of vanity he most carefully
+      conceals. It is this, I fancy, which gives him from time to time an air of
+      sullenness.&quot;<a name="FNanchor110" id="FNanchor110"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_110">[110]</a> The other lady, who saw him at the same
+      time, speaks of &quot;the poor devil of an author, who's as poor as Job
+      for you, but with wit and vanity enough for four.... They say his history
+      is as queer as his person, and that is saying a good deal.... Madame
+      Maupeou and I tried to guess what it was. 'In spite of his face,' said she
+      (for it is certain he is uncommonly plain), 'his eyes tell that love plays
+      a great part in his romance.' 'No,' said I, 'his nose tells me that it is
+      vanity.' 'Well then, 'tis both one and the other.'&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor111" id="FNanchor111"></a><a href="#Footnote_111">[111]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One of his patronesses took some trouble to procure him the post of
+      secretary to the French ambassador at Venice, and in the spring of 1743
+      our much-wandering man started once more in quest of meat and raiment in
+      the famous city of the Adriatic. This was one of those steps of which
+      there are not a few in a man's life, that seem at the moment to rank
+      foremost in the short line of decisive acts, and then are presently seen
+      not to have been decisive at all, but mere interruptions conducting
+      nowhither. In truth the critical moments with us are mostly as points in
+      slumber. Even if the ancient oracles of the gods were to regain their
+      speech once more on the earth, men would usually go to consult them on
+      days when the answer would have least significance,<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.101" id="Page_i.101">[i.101]</a></span> and could guide them
+      least far. That one of the most heedless vagrants in Europe, and as it
+      happened one of the men of most extraordinary genius also, should have got
+      a footing in the train of the ambassador of a great government, would
+      naturally seem to him and others as chance's one critical stroke in his
+      life. In reality it was nothing. The Count of Montaigu, his master, was
+      one of the worst characters with whom Rousseau could for his own profit
+      have been brought into contact. In his professional quality he was not far
+      from imbecile. The folly and weakness of the government at Versailles
+      during the reign of Lewis XV., and its indifference to competence in every
+      department except perhaps partially in the fisc, was fairly illustrated in
+      its absurd representative at Venice. The secretary, whose renown has
+      preserved his master's name, has recorded more amply than enough the
+      grounds of quarrel between them. Rousseau is for once eager to assert his
+      own efficiency, and declares that he rendered many important services for
+      which he was repaid with ingratitude and persecution.<a name="FNanchor112"
+      id="FNanchor112"></a><a href="#Footnote_112">[112]</a> One would be glad
+      to know what the Count of Montaigu's version of matters was, for in truth
+      Rousseau's conduct in previous posts makes us wonder how it was that he
+      who had hitherto always<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.102"
+      id="Page_i.102">[i.102]</a></span> been unfaithful over few things,
+      suddenly touched perfection when he became lord over many.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is other testimony, however, to the ambassador's morbid quality, of
+      which, after that general imbecility which was too common a thing among
+      men in office to be remarkable, avarice was the most striking trait. For
+      instance, careful observation had persuaded him that three shoes are
+      equivalent to two pairs, because there is always one of a pair which is
+      more worn than its fellow; and hence he habitually ordered his shoes in
+      threes.<a name="FNanchor113" id="FNanchor113"></a><a href="#Footnote_113">[113]</a>
+      It was natural enough that such a master and such a secretary should
+      quarrel over perquisites. That slightly cringing quality which we have
+      noticed on one or two occasions in Rousseau's hungry youthful time, had
+      been hardened out of him by circumstance or the strengthening of inborn
+      fibre. He would now neither dine in a servants' hall because a fine lady
+      forgot what was due to a musician, nor share his fees with a great
+      ambassador who forgot what was due to himself. These sordid disputes are
+      of no interest now to anybody, and we need only say that after a period of
+      eighteen months passed in uncongenial company, Rousseau parted from his
+      count in extreme dudgeon, and the diplomatic career which he had promised
+      to himself came to the same close as various other careers had already
+      done.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He returned to Paris towards the end of 1744, burning with indignation at
+      the unjust treatment which he believed himself to have suffered, and
+      laying<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.103" id="Page_i.103">[i.103]</a></span>
+      memorial after memorial before the minister at home. He assures us that it
+      was the justice and the futility of his complaints, that left in his soul
+      the germ of exasperation against preposterous civil institutions, &quot;in
+      which the true common weal and real justice are always sacrificed to some
+      seeming order or other, which is in fact destructive of all order, and
+      only adds the sanction of public authority to the oppression of the weak
+      and the iniquity of the strong.&quot;<a name="FNanchor114" id="FNanchor114"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_114">[114]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One or two pictures connected with the Venetian episode remain in the
+      memory of the reader of the Confessions, and among them perhaps with most
+      people is that of the quarantine at Genoa in Rousseau's voyage to his new
+      post. The travellers had the choice of remaining on board the felucca, or
+      passing the time in an unfurnished lazaretto. This, we may notice in
+      passing, was his first view of the sea; he makes no mention of the fact,
+      nor does the sight or thought of the sea appear to have left the least
+      mark in any line of his writings. He always disliked it, and thought of it
+      with melancholy. Rousseau, as we may suppose, found the want of space and
+      air in the boat the most intolerable of evils, and preferred to go alone
+      to the lazaretto, though it had neither window-sashes nor tables nor
+      chairs nor bed, nor even a truss of straw to lie down upon. He was locked
+      up and had the whole barrack to himself. &quot;I manufactured,&quot; he
+      says, &quot;a good bed out of my coats and shirts, sheets out of towels
+      which I stitched together,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.104"
+      id="Page_i.104">[i.104]</a></span> a pillow out of my old cloak rolled up.
+      I made myself a seat of one trunk placed flat, and a table of the other. I
+      got out some paper and my writing-desk, and arranged some dozen books that
+      I had by way of library. In short I made myself so comfortable, that, with
+      the exception of curtains and windows, I was nearly as well off in this
+      absolutely naked lazaretto as in my lodgings in Paris. My meals were
+      served with much pomp; two grenadiers, with bayonets at their musket-ends,
+      escorted them; the staircase was my dining-room, the landing did for table
+      and the lower step for a seat, and when my dinner was served, they rang a
+      little bell as they withdrew, to warn me to seat myself at table. Between
+      my meals, when I was neither writing nor reading, nor busy with my
+      furnishing, I went for a walk in the Protestant graveyard, or mounted into
+      a lantern which looked out on to the port, and whence I could see the
+      ships sailing in and out. I passed a fortnight in this way, and I could
+      have spent the whole three weeks of the quarantine without feeling an
+      instant's weariness.&quot;<a name="FNanchor115" id="FNanchor115"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_115">[115]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These are the occasions when we catch glimpses of the true Rousseau; but
+      his residence in Venice was on the whole one of his few really sociable
+      periods. He made friends and kept them, and there was even a certain
+      gaiety in his life. He used to tell people their fortunes in a way that an
+      earlier century would have counted unholy.<a name="FNanchor116"
+      id="FNanchor116"></a><a href="#Footnote_116">[116]</a> He rarely sought
+      pleasure in those of her haunts for which the Queen of the Adri<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.105" id="Page_i.105">[i.105]</a></span>atic
+      had a guilty renown, but he has left one singular anecdote, showing the
+      degree to which profound sensibility is capable of doing the moralist's
+      work in a man, and how a stroke of sympathetic imagination may keep one
+      from sin more effectually than an ethical precept.<a name="FNanchor117"
+      id="FNanchor117"></a><a href="#Footnote_117">[117]</a> It is pleasanter to
+      think of him as working at the formation of that musical taste which ten
+      years afterwards led him to amaze the Parisians by proving that French
+      melody was a hollow idea born of national self-delusion. A Venetian
+      experiment, whose evidence in the special controversy is less weighty
+      perhaps than Rousseau supposed, was among the facts which persuaded him
+      that Italian is the language of music. An Armenian who had never heard any
+      music was invited to listen first of all to a French monologue, and then
+      to an air of Galuppi's. Rousseau observed in the Armenian more surprise
+      than pleasure during the performance of the French piece. The first notes
+      of the Italian were no sooner struck, than his eyes and whole expression
+      softened; he was enchanted, surrendered his whole soul to the ravishing
+      impressions of the music, and could never again be induced to listen to
+      the performance of any French air.<a name="FNanchor118" id="FNanchor118"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_118">[118]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      More important than this was the circumstance that the sight of the
+      defects of the government of the Venetian Republic first drew his mind to
+      political<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.106" id="Page_i.106">[i.106]</a></span>
+      speculation, and suggested to him the composition of a book that was to be
+      called Institutions Politiques.<a name="FNanchor119" id="FNanchor119"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_119">[119]</a> The work, as thus designed and named, was
+      never written, but the idea of it, after many years of meditation, ripened
+      first in the Discourse on Inequality, and then in the Social Contract.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If Rousseau's departure for Venice was a wholly insignificant element in
+      his life, his return from it was almost immediately followed by an event
+      which counted for nothing at the moment, which his friends by and by came
+      to regard as the fatal and irretrievable disaster of his life, but which
+      he persistently described as the only real consolation that heaven
+      permitted him to taste in his misery, and the only one that enabled him to
+      bear his many sore burdens.<a name="FNanchor120" id="FNanchor120"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_120">[120]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He took up his quarters at a small and dirty hotel not far from the
+      Sorbonne, where he had alighted on the occasion of his second arrival in
+      Paris.<a name="FNanchor121" id="FNanchor121"></a><a href="#Footnote_121">[121]</a>
+      Here was a kitchen-maid, some two-and-twenty years old, who used to sit at
+      table with her mistress and the guests<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.107" id="Page_i.107">[i.107]</a></span> of the house. The
+      company was rough, being mainly composed of Irish and Gascon abb&#233;s,
+      and other people to whom graces of mien and refinement of speech had come
+      neither by nature nor cultivation. The hostess herself pitched the
+      conversation in merry Rabelaisian key, and the apparent modesty of her
+      serving-woman gave a zest to her own licence. Rousseau was moved with pity
+      for a maid defenceless against a ribald storm, and from pity he advanced
+      to some warmer sentiment, and he and Theresa Le Vasseur took each other
+      for better for worse, in a way informal but sufficiently effective. This
+      was the beginning of a union which lasted for the length of a generation
+      and more, down to the day of Rousseau's most tragical ending.<a
+      name="FNanchor122" id="FNanchor122"></a><a href="#Footnote_122">[122]</a>
+      She thought she saw in him a worthy soul; and he was convinced that he saw
+      in her a woman of sensibility, simple and free from trick, and neither of
+      the two, he says, was deceived in respect of the other. Her intellectual
+      quality was unique. She could never be taught to read with any approach to
+      success. She could never follow the order of the twelve months of the
+      year, nor master a single arithmetical figure, nor count a sum of money,
+      nor reckon the price of a thing. A month's instruction was not enough to
+      give knowledge of the hours of the day on the dial-plate. The words<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.108" id="Page_i.108">[i.108]</a></span>
+      she used were often the direct opposites of the words that she meant to
+      use.<a name="FNanchor123" id="FNanchor123"></a><a href="#Footnote_123">[123]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The marriage choice of others is the inscrutable puzzle of those who have
+      no eye for the fact that such choice is the great match of cajolery
+      between purpose and invisible hazard; the blessedness of many lives is the
+      stake, as intention happens to cheat accident or to be cheated by it. When
+      the match is once over, deep criticism of a game of pure chance is time
+      wasted. The crude talk in which the unwise deliver their judgments upon
+      the conditions of success in the relations between men and women, has
+      flowed with unprofitable copiousness as to this not very inviting case.
+      People construct an imaginary Rousseau out of his writings, and then
+      fetter their elevated, susceptible,<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.109" id="Page_i.109">[i.109]</a></span> sensitive, and humane
+      creation, to the unfortunate woman who could never be taught that April is
+      the month after March, or that twice four and a half are nine. Now we have
+      already seen enough of Rousseau to know for how infinitely little he
+      counted the gift of a quick wit, and what small store he set either on
+      literary varnish or on capacity for receiving it. He was touched in people
+      with whom he had to do, not by attainment, but by moral fibre or his
+      imaginary impression of their moral fibre. Instead of analysing a
+      character, bringing its several elements into the balance, computing the
+      more or less of this faculty or that, he loved to feel its influence as a
+      whole, indivisible, impalpable, playing without sound or agitation around
+      him like soft light and warmth and the fostering air. The deepest
+      ignorance, the dullest incapacity, the cloudiest faculties of
+      apprehension, were nothing to him in man or woman, provided he could only
+      be sensible of that indescribable emanation from voice and eye and
+      movement, that silent effusion of serenity around spoken words, which
+      nature has given to some tranquillising spirits, and which would have left
+      him free in an even life of indolent meditation and unfretted sense. A
+      woman of high, eager, stimulating kind would have been a more fatal mate
+      for him than the most stupid woman that ever rivalled the stupidity of
+      man. Stimulation in any form always meant distress to Rousseau. The moist
+      warmth of the Savoy valleys was not dearer to him than the subtle
+      inhalations of softened and close enveloping<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.110" id="Page_i.110">[i.110]</a></span> companionship, in
+      which the one needful thing is not intellectual equality, but easy,
+      smooth, constant contact of feeling about the thousand small matters that
+      make up the existence of a day. This is not the highest ideal of union
+      that one's mind can conceive from the point of view of intense productive
+      energy, but Rousseau was not concerned with the conditions of productive
+      energy. He only sought to live, to be himself, and he knew better than any
+      critics can know for him, what kind of nature was the best supplement for
+      his own. As he said in an apophthegm with a deep melancholy lying at the
+      bottom of it,&#8212;you never can cite the example of a thoroughly happy
+      man, for no one but the man himself knows anything about it.<a
+      name="FNanchor124" id="FNanchor124"></a><a href="#Footnote_124">[124]</a>
+      &quot;By the side of people we love,&quot; he says very truly, &quot;sentiment
+      nourishes the intelligence as well as the heart, and we have little
+      occasion to seek ideas elsewhere. I lived with my Theresa as pleasantly as
+      with the finest genius in the universe.&quot;<a name="FNanchor125"
+      id="FNanchor125"></a><a href="#Footnote_125">[125]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theresa Le Vasseur would probably have been happier if she had married a
+      stout stable-boy, as indeed she did some thirty years hence by way of
+      gathering up the fragments that were left; but there is little reason to
+      think that Rousseau would have been much happier with any other mate than
+      he was with Theresa. There was no social disparity between the two. She
+      was a person accustomed to hardship<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.111" id="Page_i.111">[i.111]</a></span> and coarseness, and
+      so was he. And he always systematically preferred the honest coarseness of
+      the plain people from whom he was sprung and among whom he had lived, to
+      the more hateful coarseness of heart which so often lurks under fine
+      manners and a complete knowledge of the order of the months in the year
+      and the arithmetical table. Rousseau had been a serving-man, and there was
+      no deterioration in going with a serving-woman.<a name="FNanchor126"
+      id="FNanchor126"></a><a href="#Footnote_126">[126]</a> However this may
+      be, it is certain that for the first dozen years or so of his partnership&#8212;and
+      many others as well as he are said to have found in this term a limit to
+      the conditions of the original contract,&#8212;Rousseau had perfect and
+      entire contentment in the Theresa whom all his friends pronounced as mean,
+      greedy, jealous, degrading, as she was avowedly brutish in understanding.
+      Granting that she was all these things, how much of the responsibility for
+      his acts has been thus shifted from the shoulders of Rousseau himself,
+      whose connection with her was from beginning to end entirely voluntary? If
+      he attached himself deliberately to an unworthy object by a bond which he
+      was indisputably free to break on any day that he chose, were not the<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.112" id="Page_i.112">[i.112]</a></span>
+      effects of such a union as much due to his own character which sought,
+      formed, and perpetuated it, as to the character of Theresa Le Vasseur?
+      Nothing, as he himself said in a passage to which he appends a vindication
+      of Theresa, shows the true leanings and inclinations of a man better than
+      the sort of attachments which he forms.<a name="FNanchor127"
+      id="FNanchor127"></a><a href="#Footnote_127">[127]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is a natural blunder in a literate and well-mannered society to charge
+      a mistake against a man who infringes its conventions in this particular
+      way. Rousseau knew what he was about, as well as politer persons. He was
+      at least as happy with his kitchen wench as Addison was with his countess,
+      or Voltaire with his marchioness, and he would not have been what he was,
+      nor have played the part that he did play in the eighteenth century, if he
+      had felt anything derogatory or unseemly in a kitchen wench. The selection
+      was probably not very deliberate; as it happened, Theresa served as a
+      standing illustration of two of his most marked traits, a contempt for
+      mere literary culture, and a yet deeper contempt for social
+      accomplishments and social position. In time he found out the grievous
+      disadvantages of living in solitude with a companion who did not know how
+      to think, and whose stock of ideas was so slight that the only common
+      ground of talk between them was gossip and quodlibets. But her lack of
+      sprightliness, beauty, grace, refinement, and that gentle initiative by
+      which women may make even a sombre life so various,<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.113" id="Page_i.113">[i.113]</a></span> went for nothing with
+      him. What his friends missed in her, he did not seek and would not have
+      valued; and what he found in her, they were naturally unable to
+      appreciate, for they never were in the mood for detecting it. &quot;I have
+      not seen much of happy men,&quot; he wrote when near his end, &quot;perhaps
+      nothing; but I have many a time seen contented hearts, and of all the
+      objects that have struck me, I believe it is this which has always given
+      most contentment to myself.&quot;<a name="FNanchor128" id="FNanchor128"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_128">[128]</a> This moderate conception of felicity, which
+      was always so characteristic with him, as an even, durable, and rather
+      low-toned state of the feelings, accounts for his prolonged acquiescence
+      in a companion whom men with more elation in their ideal would assuredly
+      have found hostile even to the most modest contentment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &quot;The heart of my Theresa,&quot; he wrote long after the first
+      tenderness had changed into riper emotion on his side, and, alas, into
+      indifference on hers, &quot;was that of an angel; our attachment waxed
+      stronger with our intimacy, and we felt more and more each day that we
+      were made for one another. If our pleasures could be described, their
+      simplicity would make you laugh; our excursions together out of town, in
+      which I would munificently expend eight or ten halfpence in some rural
+      tavern; our modest suppers at my window, seated in front of one another on
+      two small chairs placed on a trunk that filled up the breadth of the
+      embrasure. Here the window did duty for a table,<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.114" id="Page_i.114">[i.114]</a></span> we breathed the fresh
+      air, we could see the neighbourhood and the people passing by, and though
+      on the fourth story, could look down into the street as we ate. Who shall
+      describe, who shall feel the charms of those meals, consisting of a coarse
+      quartern loaf, some cherries, a tiny morsel of cheese, and a pint of wine
+      which we drank between us? Ah, what delicious seasoning there is in
+      friendship, confidence, intimacy, gentleness of soul! We used sometimes to
+      remain thus until midnight, without once thinking of the time.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor129" id="FNanchor129"></a><a href="#Footnote_129">[129]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Men and women are often more fairly judged by the way in which they bear
+      the burden of what they have done, than by the prime act which laid the
+      burden on their lives.<a name="FNanchor130" id="FNanchor130"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_130">[130]</a> The deeper part of us shows in the manner
+      of accepting consequences. On the whole, Rousseau's relations with this
+      woman present him in a better light than those with any other person
+      whatever. If he became with all the rest of the world suspicious, angry,
+      jealous, profoundly diseased in a word, with her he was habitually
+      trustful, affectionate, careful, most long-suffering. It sometimes even
+      occurs to us that his constancy to Theresa was only another side of the
+      morbid perversity of his relations with the rest of the world. People of a
+      certain kind not seldom make the most serious and vital sacrifices for
+      bare love<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.115" id="Page_i.115">[i.115]</a></span>
+      of singularity, and a man like Rousseau was not unlikely to feel an
+      eccentric pleasure in proving that he could find merit in a woman who to
+      everybody else was desperate. One who is on bad terms with the bulk of his
+      fellows may contrive to save his self-respect and confirm his conviction
+      that they are all in the wrong, by preserving attachment to some one to
+      whom general opinion is hostile; the private argument being that if he is
+      capable of this degree of virtue and friendship in an unfavourable case,
+      how much more could he have practised it with others, if they would only
+      have allowed him. Whether this kind of apology was present to his mind or
+      not, Rousseau could always refer those who charged him with black caprice,
+      to his steady kindness towards Theresa Le Vasseur. Her family were among
+      the most odious of human beings, greedy, idle, and ill-humoured, while her
+      mother had every fault that a woman could have in Rousseau's eyes,
+      including that worst fault of setting herself up for a fine wit. Yet he
+      bore with them all for years, and did not break with Madame Le Vasseur
+      until she had poisoned the mind of her daughter, and done her best by
+      rapacity and lying to render him contemptible to all his friends.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the course of years Theresa herself gave him unmistakable signs of a
+      change in her affections. &quot;I began to feel,&quot; he says, at a date
+      of sixteen or seventeen years from our present point, &quot;that she was
+      no longer for me what she had been in our happy years,<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.116" id="Page_i.116">[i.116]</a></span> and I felt it all the
+      more clearly as I was still the same towards her.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor131" id="FNanchor131"></a><a href="#Footnote_131">[131]</a>
+      This was in 1762, and her estrangement grew deeper and her indifference
+      more open, until at length, seven years afterwards, we find that she had
+      proposed a separation from him. What the exact reasons for this gradual
+      change may have been we do not know, nor have we any right in ignorance of
+      the whole facts to say that they were not adequate and just. There are two
+      good traits recorded of the woman's character. She could never console
+      herself for having let her father be taken away to end his days miserably
+      in a house of charity.<a name="FNanchor132" id="FNanchor132"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_132">[132]</a> And the repudiation of her children,
+      against which the glowing egoism of maternity always rebelled, remained a
+      cruel dart in her bosom as long as she lived. We may suppose that there
+      was that about household life with Rousseau which might have bred disgusts
+      even in one as little fastidious as Theresa was. Among other things which
+      must have been hard to endure, we know that in composing his works he was
+      often weeks together without speaking a word to her.<a name="FNanchor133"
+      id="FNanchor133"></a><a href="#Footnote_133">[133]</a> Perhaps again it
+      would not be difficult to produce some passages in Rousseau's letters and
+      in the Confessions, which show traces of that subtle contempt for women
+      that lurks undetected in many who would blush to avow it. Whatever the
+      causes may have been, from indifference she passed to something like
+      aversion, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.117" id="Page_i.117">[i.117]</a></span>
+      in the one place where a word of complaint is wrung from him, he describes
+      her as rending and piercing his heart at a moment when his other miseries
+      were at their height. His patience at any rate was inexhaustible; now old,
+      worn by painful bodily infirmities, racked by diseased suspicion and the
+      most dreadful and tormenting of the minor forms of madness, nearly
+      friendless, and altogether hopeless, he yet kept unabated the old
+      tenderness of a quarter of a century before, and expressed it in words of
+      such gentleness, gravity, and self-respecting strength, as may touch even
+      those whom his books leave unmoved, and who view his character with
+      deepest distrust. &quot;For the six-and-twenty years, dearest, that our
+      union has lasted, I have never sought my happiness except in yours, and
+      have never ceased to try to make you happy; and you saw by what I did
+      lately,<a name="FNanchor134" id="FNanchor134"></a><a href="#Footnote_134">[134]</a>
+      that your honour and happiness were one as dear to me as the other. I see
+      with pain that success does not answer my solicitude, and that my kindness
+      is not as sweet to you to receive, as it is sweet to me to show. I know
+      that the sentiments of honour and uprightness with which you were born
+      will never change in you; but as for those of tenderness and attachment
+      which were once reciprocal between us, I feel that they now only exist on
+      my side. Not only, dearest of all friends, have you ceased to find
+      pleasure in my company, but you have to tax yourself severely even to
+      remain a few minutes<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.118"
+      id="Page_i.118">[i.118]</a></span> with me out of complaisance. You are at
+      your ease with all the world but me. I do not speak to you of many other
+      things. We must take our friends with their faults, and I ought to pass
+      over yours, as you pass over mine. If you were happy with me I could be
+      content, but I see clearly that you are not, and this is what makes my
+      heart sore. If I could do better for your happiness, I would do it and
+      hold my peace; but that is not possible. I have left nothing undone that I
+      thought would contribute to your felicity. At this moment, while I am
+      writing to you, overwhelmed with distress and misery, I have no more true
+      or lively desire than to finish my days in closest union with you. You
+      know my lot,&#8212;it is such as one could not even dare to describe, for
+      no one could believe it. I never had, my dearest, other than one single
+      solace, but that the sweetest; it was to pour out all my heart in yours;
+      when I talked of my miseries to you, they were soothed; and when you had
+      pitied me, I needed pity no more. My every resource, my whole confidence,
+      is in you and in you only; my soul cannot exist without sympathy, and
+      cannot find sympathy except with you. It is certain that if you fail me
+      and I am forced to live alone, I am as a dead man. But I should die a
+      thousand times more cruelly still, if we continued to live together in
+      misunderstanding, and if confidence and friendship were to go out between
+      us. It would be a hundred times better to cease to see each other; still
+      to live, and sometimes to regret one another. Whatever sacrifice may be
+      necessary on<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.119" id="Page_i.119">[i.119]</a></span>
+      my part to make you happy, be so at any cost, and I shall be content. We
+      have faults to weep over and to expiate, but no crimes; let us not blot
+      out by the imprudence of our closing days the sweetness and purity of
+      those we have passed together.&quot;<a name="FNanchor135" id="FNanchor135"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_135">[135]</a> Think ill as we may of Rousseau's theories,
+      and meanly as we may of some parts of his conduct, yet to those who can
+      feel the pulsing of a human life apart from a man's formul&#230;, and can
+      be content to leave to sure circumstance the tragic retaliation for evil
+      behaviour, this letter is like one of the great master's symphonies, whose
+      theme falls in soft strokes of melting pity on the heart. In truth, alas,
+      the union of this now diverse pair had been stained by crimes shortly
+      after its beginning. In the estrangement of father and mother in their
+      late years we may perhaps hear the rustle and spy the pale forms of the
+      avenging spectres of their lost children.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the time when the connection with Theresa Le Vasseur was formed,
+      Rousseau did not know how to gain bread. He composed the musical diversion
+      of the Muses Galantes, which Rameau rightly or wrongly pronounced a
+      plagiarism, and at the request of Richelieu he made some minor
+      re-adaptations in Voltaire's Princesse de Navarre, which Rameau had set to
+      music&#8212;that &quot;farce of the fair&quot; to which the author of Za&#239;re
+      owed his seat in the Academy.<a name="FNanchor136" id="FNanchor136"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_136">[136]</a> But neither<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.120" id="Page_i.120">[i.120]</a></span> task brought him
+      money, and he fell back on a sort of secretaryship, with perhaps a little
+      of the valet in it, to Madame Dupin and her son-in-law, M. de Francueil,
+      for which he received the too moderate income of nine hundred francs. On
+      one occasion he returned to his room expecting with eager impatience the
+      arrival of a remittance, the proceeds of some small property which came to
+      him by the death of his father.<a name="FNanchor137" id="FNanchor137"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_137">[137]</a> He found the letter, and was opening it
+      with trembling hands, when he was suddenly smitten with shame at his want
+      of self-control; he placed it unopened on the chimney-piece, undressed,
+      slept better than usual, and when he awoke the next morning, he had
+      forgotten all about the letter until it caught his eye. He was delighted
+      to find that it contained his money, but &quot;I can swear,&quot; he adds,
+      &quot;that my liveliest delight was in having conquered myself.&quot; An
+      occasion for self-conquest on a more considerable scale was at hand. In
+      these tight straits, he received grievous news from the unfortunate
+      Theresa. He made up his mind cheerfully what to do; the mother acquiesced
+      after sore persuasion and with bitter tears; and the new-born child was
+      dropped into oblivion in the box of the asylum for foundlings. Next year
+      the same easy expedient was again resorted to, with the same heedlessness
+      on the part of the father, the same pain and reluctance on the part of the
+      mother. Five children in all were thus put away, and with such entire
+      absence of any precaution with a view to their<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.121" id="Page_i.121">[i.121]</a></span> identification in
+      happier times, that not even a note was kept of the day of their birth.<a
+      name="FNanchor138" id="FNanchor138"></a><a href="#Footnote_138">[138]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      People have made a great variety of remarks upon this transaction, from
+      the economist who turns it into an illustration of the evil results of
+      hospitals for foundlings in encouraging improvident unions, down to the
+      theologian who sees in it new proof of the inborn depravity of the human
+      heart and the fall of man. Others have vindicated it in various ways, one
+      of them courageously taking up the ground that Rousseau had good reason to
+      believe that the children were not his own, and therefore was fully
+      warranted in sending the poor creatures kinless into the universe.<a
+      name="FNanchor139" id="FNanchor139"></a><a href="#Footnote_139">[139]</a>
+      Perhaps it is not too transcendental a thing to hope that civilisation may
+      one day reach a point when a plea like this shall count for an aggravation
+      rather than a palliative; when a higher conception of the duties of
+      humanity, familiarised by the practice of adoption as well as by the
+      spread of both rational and compassionate considerations as to the
+      blameless little ones, shall have expelled what is surely as some red and
+      naked beast's emotion of fatherhood. What may be an excellent reason for
+      repudiating a woman, can<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.122"
+      id="Page_i.122">[i.122]</a></span> never be a reason for abandoning a
+      child, except with those whom reckless egoism has made willing to think it
+      a light thing to fling away from us the moulding of new lives and the
+      ensuring of salutary nurture for growing souls.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We are, however, dispensed from entering into these questions of the
+      greater morals by the very plain account which the chief actor has given
+      us, almost in spite of himself. His crime like most others was the result
+      of heedlessness, of the overriding of duty by the short dim-eyed
+      selfishness of the moment. He had been accustomed to frequent a tavern,
+      where the talk turned mostly upon topics which men with much self-respect
+      put as far from them, as men with little self-respect will allow them to
+      do. &quot;I formed my fashion of thinking from what I perceived to reign
+      among people who were at bottom extremely worthy folk, and I said to
+      myself, Since it is the usage of the country, as one lives here, one may
+      as well follow it. So I made up my mind to it cheerfully, and without the
+      least scruple.&quot;<a name="FNanchor140" id="FNanchor140"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_140">[140]</a> By and by he proceeded to cover this nude
+      and intelligible explanation with finer phrases, about preferring that his
+      children should be trained up as workmen and peasants rather than as
+      adventurers and fortune-hunters, and about his supposing that in sending
+      them to the hospital for foundlings he was enrolling himself a citizen in
+      Plato's Republic.<a name="FNanchor141" id="FNanchor141"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_141">[141]</a> This is hardly more than the talk of one
+      become famous, who is defending the acts of his<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.123" id="Page_i.123">[i.123]</a></span> obscurity on the high
+      principles which fame requires. People do not turn citizens of Plato's
+      Republic &quot;cheerfully and without the least scruple,&quot; and if a
+      man frequents company where the despatch of inconvenient children to the
+      hospital was an accepted point of common practice, it is superfluous to
+      drag Plato and his Republic into the matter. Another turn again was given
+      to his motives when his mind had become clouded by suspicious mania.
+      Writing a year or two before his death he had assured himself that his
+      determining reason was the fear of a destiny for his children a thousand
+      times worse than the hard life of foundlings, namely, being spoiled by
+      their mother, being turned into monsters by her family, and finally being
+      taught to hate and betray their father by his plotting enemies.<a
+      name="FNanchor142" id="FNanchor142"></a><a href="#Footnote_142">[142]</a>
+      This is obviously a mixture in his mind of the motives which led to the
+      abandonment of the children and justified the act to himself at the time,
+      with the circumstances that afterwards reconciled him to what he had done;
+      for now he neither had any enemies plotting against him, nor did he
+      suppose that he had. As for his wife's family, he showed himself quite
+      capable, when the time came, of dealing resolutely and shortly with their
+      importunities in his own case, and he might therefore well have trusted
+      his power to deal with them in the case of his children. He was more right
+      when in 1770, in his important letter to M. de St. Germain, he admitted
+      that example,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.124" id="Page_i.124">[i.124]</a></span>
+      necessity, the honour of her who was dear to him, all united to make him
+      entrust his children to the establishment provided for that purpose, and
+      kept him from fulfilling the first and holiest of natural duties. &quot;In
+      this, far from excusing, I accuse myself; and when my reason tells me that
+      I did what I ought to have done in my situation, I believe that less than
+      my heart, which bitterly belies it.&quot;<a name="FNanchor143"
+      id="FNanchor143"></a><a href="#Footnote_143">[143]</a> This coincides with
+      the first undisguised account given in the Confessions, which has been
+      already quoted, and it has not that flawed ring of cant and fine words
+      which sounds through nearly all his other references to this great stain
+      upon his life, excepting one, and this is the only further document with
+      which we need concern ourselves. In that,<a name="FNanchor144"
+      id="FNanchor144"></a><a href="#Footnote_144">[144]</a> which was written
+      while the unholy work was actually being done, he states very distinctly
+      that the motives were those which are more or less closely connected with
+      most unholy works, motives of money&#8212;the great instrument and measure
+      of our personal convenience, the quantitative test of our self-control in
+      placing personal convenience behind duty to other people. &quot;If my
+      misery and my misfortunes rob me of the power of fulfilling a duty so
+      dear, that is a calamity to pity me for, rather than a crime to reproach
+      me with. I owe them subsistence, and I procured a better or at least a
+      surer subsistence for them than I could myself have provided; this condi<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.125" id="Page_i.125">[i.125]</a></span>tion
+      is above all others.&quot; Next comes the consideration of their mother,
+      whose honour must be kept. &quot;You know my situation; I gained my bread
+      from day to day painfully enough; how then should I feed a family as well?
+      And if I were compelled to fall back on the profession of author, how
+      would domestic cares and the confusion of children leave me peace of mind
+      enough in my garret to earn a living? Writings which hunger dictates are
+      hardly of any use, and such a resource is speedily exhausted. Then I
+      should have to resort to patronage, to intrigue, to tricks ... in short to
+      surrender myself to all those infamies, for which I am penetrated with
+      such just horror. Support myself, my children, and their mother on the
+      blood of wretches? No, madame, it were better for them to be orphans than
+      to have a scoundrel for their father.... Why have I not married, you will
+      ask? Madame, ask it of your unjust laws. It was not fitting for me to
+      contract an eternal engagement; and it will never be proved to me that my
+      duty binds me to it. What is certain is that I have never done it, and
+      that I never meant to do it. But we ought not to have children when we
+      cannot support them. Pardon me, madame; nature means us to have offspring,
+      since the earth produces sustenance enough for all; but it is the rich, it
+      is your class, which robs mine of the bread of my children.... I know that
+      foundlings are not delicately nurtured; so much the better for them, they
+      become more robust. They have nothing superfluous given to them, but they
+      have everything that is<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.126"
+      id="Page_i.126">[i.126]</a></span> necessary. They do not make gentlemen
+      of them, but peasants or artisans.... They would not know how to dance, or
+      ride on horseback, but they would have strong unwearied legs. I would
+      neither make authors of them, nor clerks; I would not practise them in
+      handling the pen, but the plough, the file, and the plane, instruments for
+      leading a healthy, laborious, innocent life.... I deprived myself of the
+      delight of seeing them, and I have never tasted the sweetness of a
+      father's embrace. Alas, as I have already told you, I see in this only a
+      claim on your pity, and I deliver them from misery at my own expense.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor145" id="FNanchor145"></a><a href="#Footnote_145">[145]</a>
+      We may see here that Rousseau's sophistical eloquence, if it misled
+      others, was at least as powerful in misleading himself, and it may be
+      noted that this letter, with its talk of the children of the rich taking
+      bread out of the mouths of the children of the poor, contains the first of
+      those socialistic sentences by which the writer in after times gained so
+      famous a name. It is at any rate clear from this that the real motive of
+      the abandonment of the children was wholly material. He could not afford
+      to maintain them, and he did not wish to have his comfort disturbed by
+      their presence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is assuredly no word to be said by any one with firm reason and
+      unsophisticated conscience in extenuation of this crime. We have only to
+      remember that a great many other persons in that lax time, when the
+      structure of the family was undermined alike in<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.127" id="Page_i.127">[i.127]</a></span> practice and
+      speculation, were guilty of the same crime; that Rousseau, better than
+      they, did not erect his own criminality into a social theory, but was
+      tolerably soon overtaken by a remorse which drove him both to confess his
+      misdeed, and to admit that it was inexpiable; and that the atrocity of the
+      offence owes half the blackness with which it has always been invested by
+      wholesome opinion, to the fact that the offender was by and by the author
+      of the most powerful book by which parental duty has been commended in its
+      full loveliness and nobility. And at any rate, let Rousseau be a little
+      free from excessive reproach from all clergymen, sentimentalists, and
+      others, who do their worst to uphold the common and rather bestial opinion
+      in favour of reckless propagation, and who, if they do not advocate the
+      despatch of children to public institutions, still encourage a selfish
+      incontinence which ultimately falls in burdens on others than the
+      offenders, and which turns the family into a scene of squalor and
+      brutishness, producing a kind of parental influence that is far more
+      disastrous and demoralising than the absence of it in public institutions
+      can possibly be. If the propagation of children without regard to their
+      maintenance be either a virtue or a necessity, and if afterwards the only
+      alternatives are their maintenance in an asylum on the one hand, and their
+      maintenance in the degradation of a poverty-stricken home on the other, we
+      should not hesitate to give people who act as Rousseau acted, all that
+      credit for self-denial and high moral courage which he so<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.128" id="Page_i.128">[i.128]</a></span>
+      audaciously claimed for himself. It really seems to be no more criminal to
+      produce children with the deliberate intention of abandoning them to
+      public charity, as Rousseau did, than it is to produce them in deliberate
+      reliance on the besotted maxim that he who sends mouths will send meat, or
+      any other of the spurious saws which make Providence do duty for
+      self-control, and add to the gratification of physical appetite the
+      grotesque luxury of religious unction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In 1761 the Mar&#233;chale de Luxembourg made efforts to discover
+      Rousseau's children, but without success. They were gone beyond hope of
+      identification, and the author of <i>Emitius</i> and his sons and
+      daughters lived together in this world, not knowing one another. Rousseau
+      with singular honesty did not conceal his satisfaction at the
+      fruitlessness of the charitable endeavours to restore them to him. &quot;The
+      success of your search,&quot; he wrote, &quot;could not give me pure and
+      undisturbed pleasure; it is too late, too late.... In my present condition
+      this search interested me more for another person [Theresa] than myself;
+      and considering the too easily yielding character of the person in
+      question, it is possible that what she had found already formed for good
+      or for evil, might turn out a sorry boon to her.&quot;<a name="FNanchor146"
+      id="FNanchor146"></a><a href="#Footnote_146">[146]</a> We may doubt, in
+      spite of one or two charming and graceful passages, whether Rousseau<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.129" id="Page_i.129">[i.129]</a></span>
+      was of a nature to have any feeling for the pathos of infancy, the bright
+      blank eye, the eager unpurposed straining of the hand, the many turns and
+      changes in murmurings that yet can tell us nothing. He was both too
+      self-centred and too passionate for warm ease and fulness of life in all
+      things, to be truly sympathetic with a condition whose feebleness and
+      immaturity touch us with half-painful hope.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rousseau speaks in the Confessions of having married Theresa
+      five-and-twenty years after the beginning of their acquaintance,<a
+      name="FNanchor147" id="FNanchor147"></a><a href="#Footnote_147">[147]</a>
+      but we hardly have to understand that any ceremony took place which
+      anybody but himself would recognise as constituting a marriage. What
+      happened appears to have been this. Seated at table with Theresa and two
+      guests, one of them the mayor of the place, he declared that she was his
+      wife. &quot;This good and seemly engagement was contracted,&quot; he says,
+      &quot;in all the simplicity but also in all the truth of nature, in the
+      presence of two men of worth and honour.... During the short and simple
+      act, I saw the honest pair melted in tears.&quot;<a name="FNanchor148"
+      id="FNanchor148"></a><a href="#Footnote_148">[148]</a> He had at this time
+      whimsically assumed the name of Renou, and he wrote to a friend that of
+      course he had married in this name, for he adds, with the characteristic
+      insertion of an irrelevant bit of magniloquence, &quot;it is not names
+      that are married; no, it is persons.&quot; &quot;Even<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.130" id="Page_i.130">[i.130]</a></span> if in this simple and
+      holy ceremony names entered as a constituent part, the one I bear would
+      have sufficed, since I recognise no other. If it were a question of
+      property to be assured, then it would be another thing, but you know very
+      well that is not our case.&quot;<a name="FNanchor149" id="FNanchor149"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_149">[149]</a> Of course, this may have been a marriage
+      according to the truth of nature, and Rousseau was as free to choose his
+      own rites as more sacramental performers, but it is clear from his own
+      words about property that there was no pretence of a marriage in law. He
+      and Theresa were on profoundly uncomfortable terms about this time,<a
+      name="FNanchor150" id="FNanchor150"></a><a href="#Footnote_150">[150]</a>
+      and Rousseau is not the only person by many thousands who has deceived
+      himself into thinking that some form of words between man and woman must
+      magically transform the substance of their characters and lives, and
+      conjure up new relations of peace and steadfastness.
+    </p>
+    <hr style="width: 25%;" />
+    <p>
+      We have, however, been outstripping slow-footed destiny, and have now to
+      return to the time when Theresa did not drink brandy, nor run after
+      stable-boys, nor fill Rousseau's soul with bitterness and suspicion, but
+      sat contentedly with him in an evening taking a stoic's meal in the window
+      of their garret on the fourth floor, seasoning it with &quot;confidence,
+      intimacy, gentleness of soul,&quot; and that general comfort of sensation
+      which, as we know to our cost, is by no means an invariable condition
+      either of duty done externally<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.131"
+      id="Page_i.131">[i.131]</a></span> or of spiritual growth within. It is
+      perhaps hard for us to feel that we are in the presence of a great
+      religious reactionist; there is so little sign of the higher graces of the
+      soul, there are so many signs of the lowering clogs of the flesh. But the
+      spirit of a man moves in mysterious ways, and expands like the plants of
+      the field with strange and silent stirrings. It is one of the chief tests
+      of worthiness and freedom from vulgarity of soul in us, to be able to have
+      faith that this expansion is a reality, and the most important of all
+      realities. We do not rightly seize the type of Socrates if we can never
+      forget that he was the husband of Xanthippe, nor David's if we can only
+      think of him as the murderer of Uriah, nor Peter's if we can simply
+      remember that he denied his master. Our vision is only blindness, if we
+      can never bring ourselves to see the possibilities of deep mystic
+      aspiration behind the vile outer life of a man, or to believe that this
+      coarse Rousseau, scantily supping with his coarse mate, might yet have
+      many glimpses of the great wide horizons that are haunted by figures
+      rather divine than human.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &#160;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <b>FOOTNOTES:</b>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_104" id="Footnote_104"></a><a href="#FNanchor104">[104]</a>
+      In theory he was even now curiously prudent and almost sagacious; witness
+      the Projet pour l'Education, etc., submitted to M. de Mably, and printed
+      in the volume of his Works entitled <i>M&#233;langes</i>, pp. 106-136. In
+      the matter of Latin, it may be worth noting that Rousseau rashly or
+      otherwise condemns the practice of writing it, as a vexatious superfluity
+      (p. 132).
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_105" id="Footnote_105"></a><a href="#FNanchor105">[105]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, vi. 471.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_106" id="Footnote_106"></a><a href="#FNanchor106">[106]</a>
+      <i>Ib.</i>, vi. 472-475; vii. 8.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_107" id="Footnote_107"></a><a href="#FNanchor107">[107]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, vii. 18, 19.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_108" id="Footnote_108"></a><a href="#FNanchor108">[108]</a>
+      Musset-Pathay (ii. 72) quotes the passage from Lord Chesterfield's
+      Letters, where the writer suggests Madame Dupin as a proper person with
+      whom his son might in a regular and business-like manner open the
+      elevating game of gallant intrigue.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_109" id="Footnote_109"></a><a href="#FNanchor109">[109]</a>
+      M. Dupin deserves honourable mention as having helped the editors of the
+      Encyclop&#230;dia by procuring information for them as to salt-works
+      (D'Alembert's <i>Discours Pr&#233;liminaire</i>). His son M. Dupin de
+      Francueil, it may be worth noting, is a link in the genealogical chain
+      between two famous personages. In 1777, the year before Rousseau's death,
+      he married (in the chapel of the French embassy in London) Aurora de Saxe,
+      a natural daughter of the marshal, himself the natural son of August the
+      Strong, King of Poland. From this union was born Maurice Dupin, and
+      Maurice Dupin was the father of Madame George Sand. M. Francueil died in
+      1787.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_110" id="Footnote_110"></a><a href="#FNanchor110">[110]</a>
+      <i>M&#233;m. de Mdme. d'Epinay</i>, vol. i. ch. iv. p. 176.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_111" id="Footnote_111"></a><a href="#FNanchor111">[111]</a>
+      <i>Ib.</i> vol. i. ch. iv. pp. 178, 179.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_112" id="Footnote_112"></a><a href="#FNanchor112">[112]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, vii. 46, 51, 52, etc. A diplomatic piece in Rousseau's
+      handwriting has been found in the archives of the French consulate at
+      Constantinople, as M. Girardin informs us. Voltaire unworthily spread the
+      report that Rousseau had been the ambassador's private attendant. For
+      Rousseau's reply to the calumny, see <i>Corr.</i>, v. 75 (Jan. 5, 1767);
+      also iv. 150.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_113" id="Footnote_113"></a><a href="#FNanchor113">[113]</a>
+      Bernardin de St. Pierre, <i>Oeuv.</i>, xii. 55 <i>seq.</i>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_114" id="Footnote_114"></a><a href="#FNanchor114">[114]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, vii. 92.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_115" id="Footnote_115"></a><a href="#FNanchor115">[115]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, vii. 38, 39.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_116" id="Footnote_116"></a><a href="#FNanchor116">[116]</a>
+      <i>Lettres de la Montagne</i>, iii. 266.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_117" id="Footnote_117"></a><a href="#FNanchor117">[117]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, vii. 75-84. Also a second example, 84-86. For Byron's
+      opinion of one of these stories, see Lockhart's <i>Life of Scott</i>, vi.
+      132. (Ed. 1837.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_118" id="Footnote_118"></a><a href="#FNanchor118">[118]</a>
+      <i>Lettre sur la Musique Fran&#231;aise</i> (1753), p. 186.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_119" id="Footnote_119"></a><a href="#FNanchor119">[119]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, ix. 232.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_120" id="Footnote_120"></a><a href="#FNanchor120">[120]</a>
+      <i>Ib.</i> vii. 97.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_121" id="Footnote_121"></a><a href="#FNanchor121">[121]</a>
+      H&#244;tel St. Quentin, rue des Cordiers, a narrow street running between
+      the rue St. Jacques and the rue Victor Cousin. The still squalid hostelry
+      is now visible as H&#244;tel J.J. Rousseau. There is some doubt whether he
+      first saw Theresa in 1743 or 1745. The account in Bk. vii. of the <i>Confessions</i>
+      is for the latter date (see also <i>Corr.</i>, ii. 207), but in the
+      well-known letter to her in 1769 (<i>Ib.</i> vi. 79), he speaks of the
+      twenty-six years of their union. Their so-called marriage took place in
+      1768, and writing in that year he speaks of the five-and-twenty years of
+      their attachment (<i>Ib.</i> v. 323), and in the <i>Confessions</i> (ix.
+      249) he fixes their marriage at the same date; also in the letter to
+      Saint-Germain (vi. 152). Musset-Pathay, though giving 1745 in one place
+      (i. 45), and 1743 in another (ii. 198), has with less than his usual care
+      paid no attention to the discrepancy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_122" id="Footnote_122"></a><a href="#FNanchor122">[122]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, vii. 97-100.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_123" id="Footnote_123"></a><a href="#FNanchor123">[123]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, vii. 101. A short specimen of her composition may be
+      interesting, at any rate to hieroglyphic students: &quot;Mesiceuras ancor
+      mien re mies quan geu ceures o pres deu vous, e deu vous temoes tous la
+      goies e latandres deu mon querque vous cones ces que getou gour e rus pour
+      vous, e qui neu finiraes quotobocs ces mon quere qui vous paleu ces paes
+      mes le vre ... ge sui avestous lamities e la reu conec caceu posible e la
+      tacheman mon cher bonnamies votreau enble e bon amiess theress le vasseur.&quot;
+      Of which dark words this is the interpretation:&#8212;&quot;Mais il sera
+      encore mieux remis quand je sera aupr&#232;s de vous, et de vous t&#233;moigner
+      toute la joie et la tendresse de mon coeur que vous connaissez que j'ai
+      toujours eue pour vous, et qui ne finira qu'au tombeau; c'est mon coeur
+      qui vous parle, c'est pas mes l&#232;vres.... Je suis avec toute l'amiti&#233;
+      et la reconnaissance possibles, et l'attachement, mon cher bon ami, votre
+      humble et bonne amie, Th&#233;r&#232;se Le Vasseur.&quot; (<i>Rousseau,
+      ses Amis et ses Ennemis</i>, ii. 450.) Certainly it was not learning and
+      arts which hindered Theresa's manners from being pure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_124" id="Footnote_124"></a><a href="#FNanchor124">[124]</a>
+      <i>Oeuv. et Corr. In&#233;d.</i>, 365.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_125" id="Footnote_125"></a><a href="#FNanchor125">[125]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, vii. 102. See also <i>Corr.</i>, v. 373 (Oct. 10, 1768). On
+      the other hand, <i>Conf.</i>, ix. 249.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_126" id="Footnote_126"></a><a href="#FNanchor126">[126]</a>
+      M. St. Marc Girardin, in one of his admirable papers on Rousseau, speaks
+      of him as &quot;a bourgeois unclassed by an alliance with a tavern servant&quot;
+      (<i>Rev. des Deux Mondes</i>, Nov. 1852, p. 759); but surely Rousseau had
+      unclassed himself long before, in the houses of Madame Vercellis, Count
+      Gouvon, and even Madame de Warens, and by his repudiation, from the time
+      when he ran away from Geneva, of nearly every bourgeois virtue and
+      bourgeois prejudice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_127" id="Footnote_127"></a><a href="#FNanchor127">[127]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, vii. 11. Also footnote.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_128" id="Footnote_128"></a><a href="#FNanchor128">[128]</a>
+      <i>R&#234;veries</i>, ix. 309.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_129" id="Footnote_129"></a><a href="#FNanchor129">[129]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, viii. 142, 143.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_130" id="Footnote_130"></a><a href="#FNanchor130">[130]</a>
+      The other day I came for the first time upon the following in the sayings
+      of Madame de Lambert:&#8212;&quot;Ce ne sont pas toujours les fautes qui
+      nous perdent; c'est la mani&#232;re de se conduire apr&#233;s les avoir
+      faites.&quot; [1877.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_131" id="Footnote_131"></a><a href="#FNanchor131">[131]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, xii. 187, 188.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_132" id="Footnote_132"></a><a href="#FNanchor132">[132]</a>
+      <i>Ib.</i>, viii. 221.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_133" id="Footnote_133"></a><a href="#FNanchor133">[133]</a>
+      Bernardin de St. Pierre, <i>Oeuv.</i>, xii. 103. See <i>Conf.</i>, xii
+      188, and <i>Corr.</i>, v. 324.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_134" id="Footnote_134"></a><a href="#FNanchor134">[134]</a>
+      Referring, no doubt, to the ceremony which he called their marriage, and
+      which had taken place in 1768.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_135" id="Footnote_135"></a><a href="#FNanchor135">[135]</a>
+      <i>Corr.</i>, vi. 79-86. August 12, 1769.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_136" id="Footnote_136"></a><a href="#FNanchor136">[136]</a>
+      Composed in 1745. The <i>F&#234;tes de Ramire</i> was represented at
+      Versailles at the very end of this year.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_137" id="Footnote_137"></a><a href="#FNanchor137">[137]</a>
+      Some time in 1746-7. <i>Conf.</i>, vii. 113, 114.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_138" id="Footnote_138"></a><a href="#FNanchor138">[138]</a>
+      Probably in the winter of 1746-7. <i>Corr.</i>, ii. 207. <i>Conf.</i>,
+      vii. 120-124. <i>Ib.</i>, viii. 148. <i>Corr.</i>, ii. 208. June 12, 1761,
+      to the Mar&#233;chale de Luxembourg.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_139" id="Footnote_139"></a><a href="#FNanchor139">[139]</a>
+      George Sand,&#8212;in an eloquent piece entitled <i>&#192; Propos des
+      Charmettes (Revue des Deux Mondes</i>, November 15, 1863), in which she
+      expresses her own obligations to Jean Jacques. In 1761 Rousseau declares
+      that he had never hitherto had the least reason to suspect Theresa's
+      fidelity. <i>Corr.</i>, ii. 209
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_140" id="Footnote_140"></a><a href="#FNanchor140">[140]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, vii. 123.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_141" id="Footnote_141"></a><a href="#FNanchor141">[141]</a>
+      <i>Ib.</i>, viii. 145-151.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_142" id="Footnote_142"></a><a href="#FNanchor142">[142]</a>
+      <i>R&#234;veries</i>, ix. 313. The same reason is given, <i>Conf.</i>, ix.
+      252; also in Letter to Madame B., January 17, 1770 (<i>Corr.</i>, vi.
+      117).
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_143" id="Footnote_143"></a><a href="#FNanchor143">[143]</a>
+      <i>Corr.</i>, vi. 152, 153. Feb. 27, 1770.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_144" id="Footnote_144"></a><a href="#FNanchor144">[144]</a>
+      Letter to Madame de Francueil, April 20, 1751. <i>Corr.</i>, i. 151.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_145" id="Footnote_145"></a><a href="#FNanchor145">[145]</a>
+      <i>Corr.</i>, i. 151-155
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_146" id="Footnote_146"></a><a href="#FNanchor146">[146]</a>
+      August 10, 1761. <i>Corr.</i>, ii. 220. The Mar&#233;chale de Luxembourg's
+      note on the subject, to which this is a reply, is given in <i>Rousseau,
+      ses Amis et ses Ennemis</i>, i. 444.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_147" id="Footnote_147"></a><a href="#FNanchor147">[147]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, x. 249. See above, p. <a href="#Page_i.106">106</a>, <i>n.</i>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_148" id="Footnote_148"></a><a href="#FNanchor148">[148]</a>
+      To Lalliaud, Aug 31, 1768. <i>Corr.</i>, v. 324. See also D'Escherny,
+      quoted in Musset-Pathay, i. 169, 170.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_149" id="Footnote_149"></a><a href="#FNanchor149">[149]</a>
+      To Du Peyrou, Sept. 26, 1768. <i>Corr.</i>, v. 360.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_150" id="Footnote_150"></a><a href="#FNanchor150">[150]</a>
+      To Mdlle. Le Vasseur, July 25, 1768. <i>Corr.</i>, v. 116-119.
+    </p>
+    <hr style="width: 65%;" />
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.132" id="Page_i.132">[i.132]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      <a name="CHAPTER_V." id="CHAPTER_V."></a>CHAPTER V.
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      THE DISCOURSES.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <span class="smcap">The</span> busy establishment of local academies in
+      the provincial centres of France only preceded the outbreak of the
+      revolution by ten or a dozen years; but one or two of the provincial
+      cities, such as Bordeaux, Rouen, Dijon, had possessed academies in
+      imitation of the greater body of Paris for a much longer time. Their
+      activity covered a very varied ground, from the mere commonplaces of
+      literature to the most practical details of material production. If they
+      now and then relapsed into inquiries about the laws of Crete, they more
+      often discussed positive and scientific theses, and rather resembled our
+      chambers of agriculture than bodies of more learned pretension. The
+      academy of Dijon was one of the earliest of these excellent institutions,
+      and on the whole the list of its theses shows it to have been among the
+      most sensible in respect of the subjects which it found worth thinking
+      about. Its members, however, could not entirely resist the intellectual
+      atmosphere of the time. In 1742 they invited discussion of the point,
+      whether the natural law can conduct society to perfection<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.133" id="Page_i.133">[i.133]</a></span>
+      without the aid of political laws.<a name="FNanchor151" id="FNanchor151"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_151">[151]</a> In 1749 they proposed this question as a
+      theme for their prize essay: <i>Has the restoration of the sciences
+      contributed to purify or to corrupt manners?</i> Rousseau was one of
+      fourteen competitors, and in 1750 his discussion of the academic theme
+      received the prize.<a name="FNanchor152" id="FNanchor152"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_152">[152]</a> This was his first entry on the field of
+      literature and speculation. Three years afterwards the same academy
+      propounded another question: <i>What is the origin of inequality among
+      men, and is it authorised by the natural law?</i> Rousseau again competed,
+      and though his essay neither gained the prize, nor created as lively an
+      agitation as its predecessor had done, yet we may justly regard the second
+      as a more powerful supplement to the first.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is always interesting to know the circumstances under which pieces that
+      have moved a world were originally composed, and Rousseau's account of the
+      generation of his thoughts as to the influence of enlightenment on
+      morality, is remarkable enough to be worth transcribing. He was walking
+      along the road from Paris to Vincennes one hot summer afternoon on a visit
+      to Diderot, then in prison for his Letter on the Blind (1749), when he
+      came across in a newspaper the announcement of the theme propounded by the
+      Dijon academy. &quot;If ever anything resembled<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.134" id="Page_i.134">[i.134]</a></span> a sudden inspiration,
+      it was the movement which began in me as I read this. All at once I felt
+      myself dazzled by a thousand sparkling lights; crowds of vivid ideas
+      thronged into my mind with a force and confusion that threw me into
+      unspeakable agitation; I felt my head whirling in a giddiness like that of
+      intoxication. A violent palpitation oppressed me; unable to walk for
+      difficulty of breathing, I sank under one of the trees of the avenue, and
+      passed half an hour there in such a condition of excitement, that when I
+      arose I saw that the front of my waistcoat was all wet with my tears,
+      though I was wholly unconscious of shedding them. Ah, if I could ever have
+      written the quarter of what I saw and felt under that tree, with what
+      clearness should I have brought out all the contradictions of our social
+      system; with what simplicity I should have demonstrated that man is good
+      naturally, and that by institutions only is he made bad.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor153" id="FNanchor153"></a><a href="#Footnote_153">[153]</a>
+      Diderot encouraged him to compete for the prize, and to give full flight
+      to the ideas which had come to him in this singular way.<a
+      name="FNanchor154" id="FNanchor154"></a><a href="#Footnote_154">[154]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.135" id="Page_i.135">[i.135]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      People have held up their hands at the amazing originality of the idea
+      that perhaps sciences and arts have not purified manners. This sentiment
+      is surely exaggerated, if we reflect first that it occurred to the
+      academicians of Dijon as a question for discussion, and second that, if
+      you are asked whether a given result has or has not followed from certain
+      circumstances, the mere form of the question suggests No quite as readily
+      as Yes. The originality lay not in the central contention, but in the
+      fervour, sincerity, and conviction of a most unacademic sort with which it
+      was presented and enforced. There is less originality in denouncing your
+      generation as wicked and adulterous than there is in believing it to be
+      so, and in persuading the generation itself both that you believe it and
+      that you have good reasons to give. We have not to suppose that there was
+      any miracle wrought by agency celestial or infernal in the sudden
+      disclosure of his idea to Rousseau. Rousseau had been thinking of politics
+      ever since the working of the government of Venice had first drawn his
+      mind to the subject. What is the government, he had kept asking himself,
+      which is most proper to form a sage and virtuous nation? What government
+      by its nature keeps closest to the law? What is this law? And whence?<a
+      name="FNanchor155" id="FNanchor155"></a><a href="#Footnote_155">[155]</a>
+      This chain of problems had led him to what he calls the historic study of
+      morality, though we may doubt whether history was so much his teacher as
+      the rather meagrely nourished handmaid of his<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.136" id="Page_i.136">[i.136]</a></span> imagination. Here was
+      the irregular preparation, the hidden process, which suddenly burst into
+      light and manifested itself with an exuberance of energy, that passed to
+      the man himself for an inward revolution with no precursive sign.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rousseau's ecstatic vision on the road to Vincennes was the opening of a
+      life of thought and production which only lasted a dozen years, but which
+      in that brief space gave to Europe a new gospel. Emilius and the Social
+      Contract were completed in 1761, and they crowned a work which if you
+      consider its origin, influence, and meaning with due and proper breadth,
+      is marked by signal unity of purpose and conception. The key to it is
+      given to us in the astonishing transport at the foot of the wide-spreading
+      oak. Such a transport does not come to us of cool and rational western
+      temperament, but more often to the oriental after lonely sojourning in the
+      wilderness, or in violent reactions on the road to Damascus and elsewhere.
+      Jean Jacques detected oriental quality in his own nature,<a
+      name="FNanchor156" id="FNanchor156"></a><a href="#Footnote_156">[156]</a>
+      and so far as the union of ardour with mysticism, of intense passion with
+      vague dream, is to be defined as oriental, he assuredly deserves the name.
+      The ideas stirred in his mind by the Dijon problem suddenly &quot;opened
+      his eyes, brought order into the chaos in his head, revealed to him
+      another universe. From the active effervescence which thus began in his
+      soul, came sparks of genius which people saw glittering in his writings
+      through ten years of fever<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.137"
+      id="Page_i.137">[i.137]</a></span> and delirium, but of which no trace had
+      been seen in him previously, and which would probably have ceased to shine
+      henceforth, if he should have chanced to wish to continue writing after
+      the access was over. Inflamed by the contemplation of these lofty objects,
+      he had them incessantly present to his mind. His heart, made hot within
+      him by the idea of the future happiness of the human race, and by the
+      honour of contributing to it, dictated to him a language worthy of so high
+      an enterprise ... and for a moment, he astonished Europe by productions in
+      which vulgar souls saw only eloquence and brightness of understanding, but
+      in which those who dwell in the ethereal regions recognised with joy one
+      of their own.&quot;<a name="FNanchor157" id="FNanchor157"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_157">[157]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This was his own account of the matter quite at the end of his life, and
+      this is the only point of view from which we are secure against the
+      vulgarity of counting him a deliberate hypocrite and conscious charlatan.
+      He was possessed, as holier natures than his have been, by an enthusiastic
+      vision, an intoxicated confidence, a mixture of sacred rage and prodigious
+      love, an insensate but absolutely disinterested revolt against the stone
+      and iron of a reality which he was bent on melting in a heavenly blaze of
+      splendid aspiration and irresistibly persuasive expression. The last word
+      of this great expansion was Emilius, its first and more imperfectly
+      articulated was the earlier of the two Discourses.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rousseau's often-repeated assertion that here was<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.138" id="Page_i.138">[i.138]</a></span> the instant of the
+      ruin of his life, and that all his misfortunes flowed from that unhappy
+      moment, has been constantly treated as the word of affectation and
+      disguised pride. Yet, vain as he was, it may well have represented his
+      sincere feeling in those better moods when mental suffering was strong
+      enough to silence vanity. His visions mastered him for these thirteen
+      years, <i>grande mortalis oevi spatium</i>. They threw him on to that
+      turbid sea of literature for which he had so keen an aversion, and from
+      which, let it be remarked, he fled finally away, when his confidence in
+      the ease of making men good and happy by words of monition had left him.
+      It was the torment of his own enthusiasm which rent that veil of placid
+      living, that in his normal moments he would fain have interposed between
+      his existence and the tumult of a generation with which he was profoundly
+      out of sympathy. In this way the first Discourse was the letting in of
+      much evil upon him, as that and the next and the Social Contract were the
+      letting in of much evil upon all Europe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of this essay the writer has recorded his own impression that, though full
+      of heat and force, it is absolutely wanting in logic and order, and that
+      of all the products of his pen, it is the feeblest in reasoning and the
+      poorest in numbers and harmony. &quot;For,&quot; as he justly adds, &quot;the
+      art of writing is not learnt all at once.&quot;<a name="FNanchor158"
+      id="FNanchor158"></a><a href="#Footnote_158">[158]</a> The modern critic
+      must be content to accept the same verdict; only a generation so in love<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.139" id="Page_i.139">[i.139]</a></span> as
+      this was with anything that could tickle its intellectual curiousness,
+      would have found in the first of the two Discourses that combination of
+      speculative and literary merit which was imputed to Rousseau on the
+      strength of it, and which at once brought him into a place among the
+      notables of an age that was full of them.<a name="FNanchor159"
+      id="FNanchor159"></a><a href="#Footnote_159">[159]</a> We ought to take in
+      connection with it two at any rate of the vindications of the Discourse,
+      which the course of controversy provoked from its author, and which serve
+      to complete its significance. It is difficult to analyse, because in truth
+      it is neither closely argumentative, nor is it vertebrate, even as a piece
+      of rhetoric. The gist of the piece, however, runs somewhat in this wise:&#8212;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Before art had fashioned our manners, and taught our passions to use a too
+      elaborate speech, men were rude but natural, and difference of conduct
+      announced at a glance difference of character. To-day a vile and most
+      deceptive uniformity reigns over our manners, and all minds seem as if
+      they had been cast in a single mould. Hence we never know with what sort
+      of person we are dealing, hence the hateful troop of suspicions, fears,
+      reserves, and treacheries, and the concealment of impiety, arrogance,
+      calumny, and scepticism, under a dangerous varnish of refinement. So
+      terrible a set of effects must have a cause. History shows that the cause
+      here is to be found in the progress of sciences and arts. Egypt, once so
+      mighty,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.140" id="Page_i.140">[i.140]</a></span>
+      becomes the mother of philosophy and the fine arts; straightway behold its
+      conquest by Cambyses, by Greeks, by Romans, by Arabs, finally by Turks.
+      Greece twice conquered Asia, once before Troy, once in its own homes; then
+      came in fatal sequence the progress of the arts, the dissolution of
+      manners, and the yoke of the Macedonian. Rome, founded by a shepherd and
+      raised to glory by husbandmen, began to degenerate with Ennius, and the
+      eve of her ruin was the day when she gave a citizen the deadly title of
+      arbiter of good taste. China, where letters carry men to the highest
+      dignities of the state, could not be preserved by all her literature from
+      the conquering power of the ruder Tartar. On the other hand, the Persians,
+      Scythians, Germans, remain in history as types of simplicity, innocence,
+      and virtue. Was not he admittedly the wisest of the Greeks, who made of
+      his own apology a plea for ignorance, and a denunciation of poets,
+      orators, and artists? The chosen people of God never cultivated the
+      sciences, and when the new law was established, it was not the learned,
+      but the simple and lowly, fishers and workmen, to whom Christ entrusted
+      his teaching and its ministry.<a name="FNanchor160" id="FNanchor160"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_160">[160]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This, then, is the way in which chastisement has always overtaken our
+      presumptuous efforts to emerge from that happy ignorance in which eternal
+      wisdom placed us; though the thick veil with which that wisdom has covered
+      all its operations seemed to warn us that we were not destined to fatuous
+      research.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.141" id="Page_i.141">[i.141]</a></span>
+      All the secrets that Nature hides from us are so many evils against which
+      she would fain shelter us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Is probity the child of ignorance, and can science and virtue be really
+      inconsistent with one another? These sounding contrasts are mere deceits,
+      because if you look nearly into the results of this science of which we
+      talk so proudly, you will perceive that they confirm the results of
+      induction from history. Astronomy, for instance, is born of superstition;
+      geometry from the desire of gain; physics from a futile curiosity; all of
+      them, even morals, from human pride. Are we for ever to be the dupes of
+      words, and to believe that these pompous names of science, philosophy, and
+      the rest, stand for worthy and profitable realities?<a name="FNanchor161"
+      id="FNanchor161"></a><a href="#Footnote_161">[161]</a> Be sure that they
+      do not.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      How many errors do we pass through on our road to truth, errors a
+      thousandfold more dangerous than truth is useful? And by what marks are we
+      to know truth, when we think that we have found it? And above all, if we
+      do find it, who of us can be sure that he will make good use of it? If
+      celestial intelligences cultivated science, only good could result; and we
+      may say as much of great men of the stamp of Socrates, who are born to be
+      the guides of others.<a name="FNanchor162" id="FNanchor162"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_162">[162]</a> But the intelligences of common men are
+      neither celestial nor Socratic.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Again, every useless citizen may be fairly regarded as a pernicious man;
+      and let us ask those illustrious philosophers who have taught us what
+      insects repro<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.142" id="Page_i.142">[i.142]</a></span>duce
+      themselves curiously, in what ratio bodies attract one another in space,
+      what curves have conjugate points, points of inflection or reflection,
+      what in the planetary revolutions are the relations of areas traversed in
+      equal times&#8212;let us ask those who have attained all this sublime
+      knowledge, by how much the worse governed, less flourishing, or less
+      perverse we should have been if they had attained none of it? Now if the
+      works of our most scientific men and best citizens lead to such small
+      utility, tell us what we are to think of the crowd of obscure writers and
+      idle men of letters who devour the public substance in pure loss.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then it is in the nature of things that devotion to art leads to luxury,
+      and luxury, as we all know from our own experience, no less than from the
+      teaching of history, saps not only the military virtues by which nations
+      preserve their independence, but also those moral virtues which make the
+      independence of a nation worth preserving. Your children go to costly
+      establishments where they learn everything except their duties. They
+      remain ignorant of their own tongue, though they will speak others not in
+      use anywhere in the world; they gain the faculty of composing verses which
+      they can barely understand; without capacity to distinguish truth from
+      error, they possess the art of rendering them indistinguishable to others
+      by specious arguments. Magnanimity, equity, temperance, courage, humanity,
+      have no real meaning to them; and if they hear speak of God, it breeds
+      more terror than awful fear.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.143" id="Page_i.143">[i.143]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Whence spring all these abuses, if not from the disastrous inequality
+      introduced among men by the distinction of talents and the cheapening of
+      virtue?<a name="FNanchor163" id="FNanchor163"></a><a href="#Footnote_163">[163]</a>
+      People no longer ask of a man whether he has probity, but whether he is
+      clever; nor of a book whether it is useful, but whether it is well
+      written. And after all, what is this philosophy, what are these lessons of
+      wisdom, to which we give the prize of enduring fame? To listen to these
+      sages, would you not take them for a troop of charlatans, all bawling out
+      in the market-place, Come to me, it is only I who never cheat you, and
+      always give good measure? One maintains that there is no body, and that
+      everything is mere representation; the other that there is no entity but
+      matter, and no God but the universe: one that moral good and evil are
+      chimeras; the other that men are wolves and may devour one another with
+      the easiest conscience in the world. These are the marvellous personages
+      on whom the esteem of contemporaries is lavished so long as they live, and
+      to whom immortality is reserved after their death. And we have now
+      invented the art of making their extravagances eternal, and thanks to the
+      use of typographic characters the dangerous speculations of Hobbes and
+      Spinoza will endure for ever. Surely when they perceive the terrible
+      disorders which printing has<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.144"
+      id="Page_i.144">[i.144]</a></span> already caused in Europe, sovereigns
+      will take as much trouble to banish this deadly art from their states as
+      they once took to introduce it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If there is perhaps no harm in allowing one or two men to give themselves
+      up to the study of sciences and arts, it is only those who feel conscious
+      of the strength required for advancing their subjects, who have any right
+      to attempt to raise monuments to the glory of the human mind. We ought to
+      have no tolerance for those compilers who rashly break open the gate of
+      the sciences, and introduce into their sanctuary a populace that is
+      unworthy even to draw near to it. It may be well that there should be
+      philosophers, provided only and always that the people do not meddle with
+      philosophising.<a name="FNanchor164" id="FNanchor164"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_164">[164]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In short, there are two kinds of ignorance: one brutal and ferocious,
+      springing from a bad heart, multiplying vices, degrading the reason, and
+      debasing the soul: the other &quot;a reasonable ignorance, which consists
+      in limiting our curiosity to the extent of the faculties we have received;
+      a modest ignorance, born of a lively love for virtue, and inspiring
+      indifference only for what is not worthy of filling a man's heart, or
+      fails to contribute to its improvement; a sweet and precious ignorance,
+      the treasure of a pure soul at peace with itself, which finds all its
+      blessedness in inward retreat, in testifying to itself its own innocence,
+      and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.145" id="Page_i.145">[i.145]</a></span>
+      which feels no need of seeking a warped and hollow happiness in the
+      opinion of other people as to its enlightenment.&quot;<a name="FNanchor165"
+      id="FNanchor165"></a><a href="#Footnote_165">[165]</a>
+    </p>
+    <hr style="width: 25%;" />
+    <p>
+      Some of the most pointed assaults in this Discourse, such for instance as
+      that on the pedantic parade of wit, or that on the excessive preponderance
+      of literary instruction in the art of education, are due to Montaigne; and
+      in one way, the Discourse might be described as binding together a number
+      of that shrewd man's detached hints by means of a paradoxical
+      generalisation. But the Rousseau is more important than the Montaigne in
+      it. Another remark to be made is that its vigorous disparagement of
+      science, of the emptiness of much that is called science, of the deadly
+      pride of intellect, is an anticipation in a very precise way of the
+      attitude taken by the various Christian churches and their representatives
+      now and for long, beginning with De Maistre, the greatest of the religious
+      reactionaries after Rousseau. The vilification of the Greeks is strikingly
+      like some vehement passages in De Maistre's estimate of their share in
+      sophisticating European intellect. At last Rousseau even began to doubt
+      whether &quot;so chattering a people could ever have had any solid
+      virtues, even in primitive times.&quot;<a name="FNanchor166"
+      id="FNanchor166"></a><a href="#Footnote_166">[166]</a> Yet Rousseau's own
+      thinking about society is deeply marked with opinions borrowed exactly
+      from these very chatterers. His imagination<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.146" id="Page_i.146">[i.146]</a></span> was fascinated from
+      the first by the freedom and boldness of Plato's social speculations, to
+      which his debt in a hundred details of his political and educational
+      schemes is well known. What was more important than any obligation of
+      detail was the fatal conception, borrowed partly from the Greeks and
+      partly from Geneva, of the omnipotence of the Lawgiver in moulding a
+      social state after his own purpose and ideal. We shall presently quote the
+      passage in which he holds up for our envy and imitation the policy of
+      Lycurgus at Sparta, who swept away all that he found existing and
+      constructed the social edifice afresh from foundation to roof.<a
+      name="FNanchor167" id="FNanchor167"></a><a href="#Footnote_167">[167]</a>
+      It is true that there was an unmistakable decay of Greek literary studies
+      in France from the beginning of the eighteenth century, and Rousseau seems
+      to have read Plato only through Ficinus's translation. But his example and
+      its influence, along with that of Mably and others, warrant the historian
+      in saying that at no time did Greek ideas more keenly preoccupy opinion
+      than during this century.<a name="FNanchor168" id="FNanchor168"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_168">[168]</a> Perhaps we may say that Rousseau would
+      never have proved how little learning and art do for the good of manners,
+      if Plato had not insisted on poets being driven out of the Republic. The
+      article on Political Economy, written by him for the Encyclop&#230;dia
+      (1755), rings with the names of ancient rulers and lawgivers; the project
+      of public education is recommended by the example of Cretans,<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.147" id="Page_i.147">[i.147]</a></span>
+      Laced&#230;monians, and Persians, while the propriety of the reservation
+      of a state domain is suggested by Romulus.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It may be added that one of the not too many merits of the essay is the
+      way in which the writer, more or less in the Socratic manner, insists on
+      dragging people out of the refuge of sonorous general terms, with a great
+      public reputation of much too well-established a kind to be subjected to
+      the affront of analysis. It is true that Rousseau himself contributed
+      nothing directly to that analytic operation which Socrates likened to
+      midwifery, and he set up graven images of his own in place of the idols
+      which he destroyed. This, however, did not wholly efface the distinction,
+      which he shares with all who have ever tried to lead the minds of men into
+      new tracks, of refusing to accept the current coins of philosophical
+      speech without test or measurement. Such a treatment of the great trite
+      words which come so easily to the tongue and seem to weigh for so much,
+      must always be the first step towards bringing thought back into the
+      region of real matter, and confronting phrases, terms, and all the common
+      form of the discussion of an age, with the actualities which it is the
+      object of sincere discussion to penetrate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The refutation of many parts of Rousseau's main contention on the
+      principles which are universally accepted among enlightened men in modern
+      society is so extremely obvious that to undertake it would merely be to
+      draw up a list of the gratulatory common<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.148" id="Page_i.148">[i.148]</a></span>places of which we
+      hear quite enough in the literature and talk of our day. In this
+      direction, perhaps it suffices to say that the Discourse is wholly
+      one-sided, admitting none of the conveniences, none of the alleviations of
+      suffering of all kinds, nothing of the increase of mental stature, which
+      the pursuit of knowledge has brought to the race. They may or may not
+      counterbalance the evils that it has brought, but they are certainly to be
+      put in the balance in any attempt at philosophic examination of the
+      subject. It contains no serious attempt to tell us what those alleged
+      evils really are, or definitely to trace them one by one, to abuse of the
+      thirst for knowledge and defects in the method of satisfying it. It omits
+      to take into account the various other circumstances, such as climate,
+      government, race, and the disposition of neighbours, which must enter
+      equally with intellectual progress into whatever demoralisation has marked
+      the destinies of a nation. Finally it has for the base of its argument the
+      entirely unsupported assumption of there having once been in the early
+      history of each society a stage of mild, credulous, and innocent virtue,
+      from which appetite for the fruit of the forbidden tree caused an
+      inevitable degeneration. All evidence and all scientific analogy are now
+      well known to lead to the contrary doctrine, that the history of
+      civilisation is a history of progress and not of decline from a primary
+      state. After all, as Voltaire said to Rousseau in a letter which only
+      showed a superficial appreciation of the real drift of the argument, we
+      must confess<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.149" id="Page_i.149">[i.149]</a></span>
+      that these thorns attached to literature are only as flowers in comparison
+      with the other evils that have deluged the earth. &quot;It was not Cicero
+      nor Lucretius nor Virgil nor Horace, who contrived the proscriptions of
+      Marius, of Sulla, of the debauched Antony, of the imbecile Lepidus, of
+      that craven tyrant basely surnamed Augustus. It was not Marot who produced
+      the St. Bartholomew massacre, nor the tragedy of the Cid that led to the
+      wars of the Fronde. What really makes, and always will make, this world
+      into a valley of tears, is the insatiable cupidity and indomitable
+      insolence of men, from Kouli Khan, who did not know how to read, down to
+      the custom-house clerk, who knows nothing but how to cast up figures.
+      Letters nourish the soul, they strengthen its integrity, they furnish a
+      solace to it,&quot;&#8212;and so on in the sense, though without the
+      eloquence, of the famous passage in Cicero's defence of Archias the poet.<a
+      name="FNanchor169" id="FNanchor169"></a><a href="#Footnote_169">[169]</a>
+      All this, however, in our time is in no danger of being forgotten, and
+      will be present to the mind of every reader. The only danger is that
+      pointed out by Rousseau himself: &quot;People always think they have
+      described what the sciences do, when they have in reality only described
+      what the sciences ought to do.&quot;<a name="FNanchor170" id="FNanchor170"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_170">[170]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What we are more likely to forget is that Rousseau's piece has a positive
+      as well as a negative side, and presents, in however vehement and
+      overstated a way, a truth which the literary and speculative enthu<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.150" id="Page_i.150">[i.150]</a></span>siasm
+      of France in the eighteenth century, as is always the case with such
+      enthusiasm whenever it penetrates either a generation or an individual,
+      was sure to make men dangerously ready to forget.<a name="FNanchor171"
+      id="FNanchor171"></a><a href="#Footnote_171">[171]</a> This truth may be
+      put in different terms. We may describe it as the possibility of eminent
+      civic virtue existing in people, without either literary taste or science
+      or speculative curiosity. Or we may express it as the compatibility of a
+      great amount of contentment and order in a given social state, with a very
+      low degree of knowledge. Or finally, we may give the truth its most
+      general expression, as the subordination of all activity to the promotion
+      of social aims. Rousseau's is an elaborate and roundabout manner of saying
+      that virtue without science is better than science without virtue; or that
+      the well-being of a country depends more on the standard of social duty
+      and the willingness of citizens to conform to it, than on the standard of
+      intellectual culture and the extent of its diffusion. In other words, we
+      ought to be less concerned about the speculative or scientific curiousness
+      of our people than about the height of their notion of civic virtue and
+      their firmness and persistency in realising it. It is a moralist's way of
+      putting the ancient preacher's monition, that they are but empty in whom
+      is not the wisdom of God. The importance of stating this is in<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.151" id="Page_i.151">[i.151]</a></span>
+      our modern era always pressing, because there is a constant tendency on
+      the part of energetic intellectual workers, first, to concentrate their
+      energies on a minute specialty, leaving public affairs and interests to
+      their own course. Second, they are apt to overestimate their contributions
+      to the stock of means by which men are made happier, and what is more
+      serious, to underestimate in comparison those orderly, modest,
+      self-denying, moral qualities, by which only men are made worthier, and
+      the continuity of society is made surer. Third, in consequence of their
+      greater command of specious expression and their control of the organs of
+      public opinion, they both assume a kind of supreme place in the social
+      hierarchy, and persuade the majority of plain men unsuspectingly to take
+      so very egregious an assumption for granted. So far as Rousseau's
+      Discourse recalled the truth as against this sort of error it was full of
+      wholesomeness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Unfortunately his indignation against the overweening pretensions of the
+      verse-writer, the gazetteer, and the great band of socialists at large,
+      led him into a general position with reference to scientific and
+      speculative energy, which seems to involve a perilous misconception of the
+      conditions of this energy producing its proper results. It is easy now, as
+      it was easy for Rousseau in the last century, to ask in an epigrammatical
+      manner by how much men are better or happier for having found out this or
+      that novelty in transcendental mathematics, biology, or astronomy; and
+      this is very well as against the discoverer of small<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.152" id="Page_i.152">[i.152]</a></span> marvels who shall
+      give himself out for the benefactor of the human race. But both historical
+      experience and observation of the terms on which the human intelligence
+      works, show us that we can only make sure of intellectual activity on
+      condition of leaving it free to work all round, in every department and in
+      every remotest nook of each department, and that its most fruitful epochs
+      are exactly those when this freedom is greatest, this curiosity most keen
+      and minute, and this waste, if you choose to call the indispensable
+      superfluity of force in a natural process waste, most copious and
+      unsparing. You will not find your highest capacity in statesmanship, nor
+      in practical science, nor in art, nor in any other field where that
+      capacity is most urgently needed for the right service of life, unless
+      there is a general and vehement spirit of search in the air. If it
+      incidentally leads to many industrious futilities and much learned refuse,
+      this is still the sign and the generative element of industry which is not
+      futile, and of learning which is something more than mere water spilled
+      upon the ground.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We may say in fine that this first Discourse and its vindications were a
+      dim, shallow, and ineffective feeling after the great truth, that the only
+      normal state of society is that in which neither the love of virtue has
+      been thrust far back into a secondary place by the love of knowledge, nor
+      the active curiosity of the understanding dulled, blunted, and made
+      ashamed by soft, lazy ideals of life as a life only of the affections.<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.153" id="Page_i.153">[i.153]</a></span>
+      Rousseau now and always fell into the opposite extreme from that against
+      which his whole work was a protest. We need not complain very loudly that
+      while remonstrating against the restless intrepidity of the rationalists
+      of his generation, he passed over the central truth, namely that the full
+      and ever festal life is found in active freedom of curiosity and search
+      taking significance, motive, force, from a warm inner pulse of human love
+      and sympathy. It was not given to Rousseau to see all this, but it was
+      given to him to see the side of it for which the most powerful of the men
+      living with him had no eyes, and the first Discourse was only a moderately
+      successful attempt to bring his vision before Europe. It was said at the
+      time that he did not believe a word of what he had written.<a
+      name="FNanchor172" id="FNanchor172"></a><a href="#Footnote_172">[172]</a>
+      It is a natural characteristic of an age passionately occupied with its
+      own set of ideas, to question either the sincerity or the sanity of
+      anybody who declares its sovereign conceptions to be no better than
+      foolishness. We cannot entertain such a suspicion. Perhaps the vehemence
+      of controversy carries him rather further than he quite meant to go, when
+      he declares that if he were a chief of an African tribe, he would erect on
+      his frontier a gallows, on which he would hang without mercy the first
+      European who should venture to pass into his territory, and the first
+      native who should dare to pass out of it.<a name="FNanchor173"
+      id="FNanchor173"></a><a href="#Footnote_173">[173]</a> And there are many
+      other extravagances of illustration, but the main position is serious
+      enough, as represented in the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.154"
+      id="Page_i.154">[i.154]</a></span> emblematic vignette with which the
+      essay was printed&#8212;the torch of science brought to men by Prometheus,
+      who warns a satyr that it burns; the satyr, seeing fire for the first time
+      and being fain to embrace it, is the symbol of the vulgar men who, seduced
+      by the glitter of literature, insist on delivering themselves up to its
+      study.<a name="FNanchor174" id="FNanchor174"></a><a href="#Footnote_174">[174]</a>
+      Rousseau's whole doctrine hangs compactly together, and we may see the
+      signs of its growth after leaving his hands in the crude formula of the
+      first Discourse, if we proceed to the more audacious paradox of the
+      second.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      II.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      The Discourse on the Origin of Inequality among men opens with a
+      description of the natural state of man, which occupies considerably more
+      than half of the entire performance. It is composed in a vein which is
+      only too familiar to the student of the literature of the time, picturing
+      each habit and thought, and each step to new habits and thoughts, with the
+      minuteness, the fulness, the precision, of one who narrates circumstances
+      of which he has all his life been the close eye-witness. The natural man
+      reveals to us every motive, every process internal and external, every
+      slightest circumstance of his daily life, and each element that gradually
+      transformed him into the non-natural man. One who had watched bees or
+      beetles for years could not give us a more full or<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.155" id="Page_i.155">[i.155]</a></span> confident account of
+      their doings, their hourly goings in and out, than it was the fashion in
+      the eighteenth century to give of the walk and conversation of the
+      primeval ancestor. The conditions of primitive man were discussed by very
+      incompetent ladies and gentlemen at convivial supper parties, and settled
+      with complete assurance.<a name="FNanchor175" id="FNanchor175"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_175">[175]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rousseau thought and talked about the state of nature because all his
+      world was thinking and talking about it. He used phrases and formulas with
+      reference to it which other people used. He required no more evidence than
+      they did, as to the reality of the existence of the supposed set of
+      conditions to which they gave the almost sacramental name of state of
+      nature. He never thought of asking, any more than anybody else did in the
+      middle of the eighteenth century, what sort of proof, how strong, how
+      direct, was to be had, that primeval man had such and such habits, and
+      changed them in such a way and direction, and for such reasons. Physical
+      science had reached a stage by this time when its followers were careful
+      to ask questions about evidence, correct description, verification. But
+      the idea of accurate method had to be made very familiar to men by the
+      successes of physical science in the search after truths of one kind,
+      before the indispensableness of applying it in the search after truths of
+      all kinds had extended to the science of the constitution and succession
+      of social<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.156" id="Page_i.156">[i.156]</a></span>
+      states. In this respect Rousseau was not guiltier than the bulk of his
+      contemporaries. Voltaire's piercing common sense, Hume's deep-set
+      sagacity, Montesquieu's caution, prevented them from launching very far on
+      to this metaphysical sea of nature and natural laws and states, but none
+      of them asked those critical questions in relation to such matters which
+      occur so promptly in the present day to persons far inferior to them in
+      intellectual strength. Rousseau took the notion of the state of nature
+      because he found it to his hand; he fitted to it his own characteristic
+      aspirations, expanding and vivifying a philosophic conception with all the
+      heat of humane passion; and thus, although, at the end of the process when
+      he had done with it, the state of nature came out blooming as the rose, it
+      was fundamentally only the dry, current abstraction of his time,
+      artificially decorated to seduce men into embracing a strange ideal under
+      a familiar name.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Before analysing the Discourse on Inequality, we ought to make some
+      mention of a remarkable man whose influence probably reached Rousseau in
+      an indirect manner through Diderot; I mean Morelly.<a name="FNanchor176"
+      id="FNanchor176"></a><a href="#Footnote_176">[176]</a> In 1753 Morelly
+      published a prose poem called the Basiliade, describing the corruption of
+      manners introduced by the errors of the lawgiver, and pointing out how
+      this corruption is to be amended by return to<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.157" id="Page_i.157">[i.157]</a></span> the empire of nature
+      and truth. He was no doubt stimulated by what was supposed to be the
+      central doctrine of Montesquieu, then freshly given to the world, that it
+      is government and institutions which make men what they are. But he was
+      stimulated into a reaction, and in 1754 he propounded his whole theory, in
+      a piece which in closeness, consistency, and thoroughness is admirably
+      different from Rousseau's rhetoric.<a name="FNanchor177" id="FNanchor177"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_177">[177]</a> It lacked the sovereign quality of
+      persuasiveness, and so fell on deaf ears. Morelly accepts the doctrine
+      that men are formed by the laws, but insists that moralists and statesmen
+      have always led us wrong by legislating and prescribing conduct on the
+      false theory that man is bad, whereas he is in truth a creature endowed
+      with natural probity. Then he strikes to the root of society with a
+      directness that Rousseau could not imitate, by the position that &quot;these
+      laws by establishing a monstrous division of the products of nature, and
+      even of their very elements&#8212;by dividing what ought to have remained
+      entire, or ought to have been restored to entireness if any accident had
+      divided them, aided and favoured the break-up of all sociability.&quot;
+      All political and all moral evils are the effects of this pernicious cause&#8212;private
+      property. He says of Rousseau's first Discourse that the writer ought to
+      have seen that the corruption of manners which he set down to literature
+      and art really came from this venomous principle of<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.158" id="Page_i.158">[i.158]</a></span> property, which
+      infects all that it touches.<a name="FNanchor178" id="FNanchor178"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_178">[178]</a> Christianity, it is true, assailed this
+      principle and restored equality or community of possessions, but
+      Christianity had the radical fault of involving such a detachment from
+      earthly affections, in order to deliver ourselves to heavenly meditation,
+      as brought about a necessary degeneration in social activity. The form of
+      government is a matter of indifference, provided you can only assure
+      community of goods. Political revolutions are at bottom the clash of
+      material interests, and until you have equalised the one you will never
+      prevent the other.<a name="FNanchor179" id="FNanchor179"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_179">[179]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Let us turn from this very definite position to one<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.159" id="Page_i.159">[i.159]</a></span> of the least definite
+      productions to be found in all literature.
+    </p>
+    <hr style="width: 25%;" />
+    <p>
+      It will seem a little odd that more than half of a discussion on the
+      origin of inequality among men should be devoted to a glowing imaginary
+      description, from which no reader could conjecture what thesis it was
+      designed to support. But we have only to remember that Rousseau's object
+      was to persuade people that the happier state is that in which inequality
+      does not subsist, that there had once been such a state, and that this was
+      first the state of nature, and then the state only one degree removed from
+      it, in which we now find the majority of savage tribes. At the outset he
+      defines inequality as a word meaning two different things; one, natural or
+      physical inequality, such as difference of age, of health, of physical
+      strength, of attributes of intelligence and character; the other, moral or
+      political inequality, consisting in difference of privileges which some
+      enjoy to the detriment of the rest, such as being richer, more honoured,
+      more powerful. The former differences are established by nature, the
+      latter are authorised, if they were not established, by the consent of
+      men.<a name="FNanchor180" id="FNanchor180"></a><a href="#Footnote_180">[180]</a>
+      In the state of nature no inequalities flow from the differences among men
+      in point of physical advantage and disadvantage, and which remain without
+      derivative differences so long as the state of nature endures undisturbed.
+      Nature deals with men as the law of<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.160" id="Page_i.160">[i.160]</a></span> Sparta dealt with the
+      children of its citizens; she makes those who are well constituted strong
+      and robust, and she destroys all the rest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The surface of the earth is originally covered by dense forest, and
+      inhabited by animals of every species. Men, scattered among them, imitate
+      their industry, and so rise to the instinct of the brutes, with this
+      advantage that while each species has only its own, man, without anything
+      special, appropriates the instincts of all. This admirable creature, with
+      foes on every side, is forced to be constantly on the alert, and hence to
+      be always in full possession of all his faculties, unlike civilised man,
+      whose native force is enfeebled by the mechanical protections with which
+      he has surrounded himself. He is not afraid of the wild beasts around him,
+      for experience has taught him that he is their master. His health is
+      better than ours, for we live in a time when excess of idleness in some,
+      excess of toil in others, the heating and over-abundant diet of the rich,
+      the bad food of the poor, the orgies and excesses of every kind, the
+      immoderate transport of every passion, the fatigue and strain of spirit,&#8212;when
+      all these things have inflicted more disorders upon us than the vaunted
+      art of medicine has been able to keep pace with. Even if the sick savage
+      has only nature to hope from, on the other hand he has only his own malady
+      to be afraid of. He has no fear of death, for no animal can know what
+      death is, and the knowledge of death and its terrors is one of the first
+      of man's terrible<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.161" id="Page_i.161">[i.161]</a></span>
+      acquisitions after abandoning his animal condition.<a name="FNanchor181"
+      id="FNanchor181"></a><a href="#Footnote_181">[181]</a> In other respects,
+      such as protection against weather, such as habitation, such as food, the
+      savage's natural power of adaptation, and the fact that his demands are
+      moderate in proportion to his means of satisfying them, forbid us to
+      consider him physically unhappy. Let us turn to the intellectual and moral
+      side.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If you contend that men were miserable, degraded, and outcast during these
+      primitive centuries because the intelligence was dormant, then do not
+      forget, first, that you are drawing an indictment against nature,&#8212;no
+      trifling blasphemy in those days&#8212;and second, that you are
+      attributing misery to a free creature with tranquil spirit and healthy
+      body, and that must surely be a singular abuse of the term. We see around
+      us scarcely any but people who complain of the burden of their lives; but
+      who ever heard of a savage in full enjoyment of his liberty ever dreaming
+      of complaint about his life or of self-destruction?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With reference to virtues and vices in a state of nature, Hobbes is wrong
+      in declaring that man in this state is vicious, as not knowing virtue. He
+      is not vicious, for the reason that he does not know what being good is.
+      It is not development of enlightenment nor the restrictions of law, but
+      the calm of the passions and ignorance of vice, which keep<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.162" id="Page_i.162">[i.162]</a></span>
+      them from doing ill. <i>Tanto plus in illis profitcit vitiorum ignoratio,
+      quam in his cognitio virtutis.</i>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Besides man has one great natural virtue, that of pity, which precedes in
+      him the use of reflection, and which indeed he shares with some of the
+      brutes. Mandeville, who was forced to admit the existence of this
+      admirable quality in man, was absurd in not perceiving that from it flow
+      all the social virtues which he would fain deny. Pity is more energetic in
+      the primitive condition than it is among ourselves. It is reflection which
+      isolates one. It is philosophy which teaches the philosopher to say
+      secretly at sight of a suffering wretch, Perish if it please thee; I am
+      safe and sound. They may be butchering a fellow-creature under your
+      window; all you have to do is to clap your hands to your ears, and argue a
+      little with yourself to hinder nature in revolt from making you feel as if
+      you were in the case of the victim.<a name="FNanchor182" id="FNanchor182"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_182">[182]</a> The savage man has not got this odious
+      gift. In the state of nature it is pity that takes the place of laws,
+      manners, and virtue. It is in this natural sentiment rather than in subtle
+      arguments that we have to seek the reluctance that every man would feel to
+      do ill, even without the precepts of education.<a name="FNanchor183"
+      id="FNanchor183"></a><a href="#Footnote_183">[183]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Finally, the passion of love, which produces such disasters in a state of
+      society, where the jealousy of lovers and the vengeance of husbands lead
+      each day<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.163" id="Page_i.163">[i.163]</a></span>
+      to duels and murders, where the duty of eternal fidelity only serves to
+      occasion adulteries, and where the law of continence necessarily extends
+      the debauching of women and the practice of procuring abortion<a
+      name="FNanchor184" id="FNanchor184"></a><a href="#Footnote_184">[184]</a>&#8212;this
+      passion in a state of nature, where it is purely physical, momentary, and
+      without any association of durable sentiment with the object of it, simply
+      leads to the necessary reproduction of the species and nothing more.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &quot;Let us conclude, then, that wandering in the forests, without
+      industry, without speech, without habitation, without war, without
+      connection of any kind, without any need of his fellows or without any
+      desire to harm them, perhaps even without ever recognising one of them
+      individually, savage man, subject to few passions and sufficing to
+      himself, had only the sentiments and the enlightenment proper to his
+      condition. He was only sensible of his real wants, and only looked because
+      he thought he had an interest in seeing; and his intelligence made no more
+      progress than his vanity. If by chance he hit on some discovery, he was
+      all the less able to communicate it; as he did not know even his own
+      children. An art perished with its inventor. There was neither education
+      nor progress; generations multiplied uselessly; and as each generation
+      always started from the same<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.164"
+      id="Page_i.164">[i.164]</a></span> point, centuries glided away in all the
+      rudeness of the first ages, the race was already old, the individual
+      remained always a child.&quot;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This brings us to the point of the matter. For if you compare the
+      prodigious diversities in education and manner of life which reign in the
+      different orders of the civil condition, with the simplicity and
+      uniformity of the savage and animal life, where all find nourishment in
+      the same articles of food, live in the same way, and do exactly the same
+      things, you will easily understand to what degree the difference between
+      man and man must be less in the state of nature than in that of society.<a
+      name="FNanchor185" id="FNanchor185"></a><a href="#Footnote_185">[185]</a>
+      Physical inequality is hardly perceived in the state of nature, and its
+      indirect influences there are almost non-existent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now as all the social virtues and other faculties possessed by man
+      potentially were not bound by anything inherent in him to develop into
+      actuality, he might have remained to all eternity in his admirable and
+      most fitting primitive condition, but for the fortuitous concurrence of a
+      variety of external changes. What are these different changes, which may
+      perhaps have perfected human reason, while they certainly have
+      deteriorated the race, and made men bad in making them sociable?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What, then, are the intermediary facts between the state of nature and the
+      state of civil society, the nursery of inequality? What broke up the happy
+      uniformity of the first times? First, difference in soil,<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.165" id="Page_i.165">[i.165]</a></span> in
+      climate, in seasons, led to corresponding differences in men's manner of
+      living. Along the banks of rivers and on the shores of the sea, they
+      invented hooks and lines, and were eaters of fish. In the forests they
+      invented bows and arrows, and became hunters. In cold countries they
+      covered themselves with the skins of beasts. Lightning, volcanoes, or some
+      happy chance acquainted them with fire, a new protection against the
+      rigours of winter. In company with these natural acquisitions, grew up a
+      sort of reflection or mechanical prudence, which showed them the kind of
+      precautions most necessary to their security. From this rudimentary and
+      wholly egoistic reflection there came a sense of the existence of a
+      similar nature and similar interests in their fellow-creatures. Instructed
+      by experience that the love of well-being and comfort is the only motive
+      of human actions, the savage united with his neighbours when union was for
+      their joint convenience, and did his best to blind and outwit his
+      neighbours when their interests were adverse to his own, and he felt
+      himself the weaker. Hence the origin of certain rude ideas of mutual
+      obligation.<a name="FNanchor186" id="FNanchor186"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_186">[186]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soon, ceasing to fall asleep under the first tree, or to withdraw into
+      caves, they found axes of hard stone, which served them to cut wood, to
+      dig the ground, and to construct hovels of branches and clay. This was the
+      epoch of a first revolution, which formed the establishment and division
+      of families, and which introduced a rough and partial sort of property.<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.166" id="Page_i.166">[i.166]</a></span>
+      Along with rudimentary ideas of property, though not connected with them,
+      came the rudimentary forms of inequality. When men were thrown more
+      together, then he who sang or danced the best, the strongest, the most
+      adroit, or the most eloquent, acquired the most consideration&#8212;that
+      is, men ceased to take uniform and equal place. And with the coming of
+      this end of equality there passed away the happy primitive immunity from
+      jealousy, envy, malice, hate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the whole, though men had lost some of their original endurance, and
+      their natural pity had already undergone a certain deterioration, this
+      period of the development of the human faculties, occupying a just medium
+      between the indolence of the primitive state and the petulant activity of
+      our modern self-love, must have been at once the happiest and the most
+      durable epoch. The more we reflect, the more evident we find it that this
+      state was the least subject to revolutions and the best for man. &quot;So
+      long as men were content with their rustic hovels, so long as they
+      confined themselves to stitching their garments of skin with spines or
+      fish bones, to decking their bodies with feathers and shells and painting
+      them in different colours, to perfecting and beautifying their bows and
+      arrows&#8212;in a word, so long as they only applied themselves to works
+      that one person could do, and to arts that needed no more than a single
+      hand, then they lived free, healthy, good, and happy, so far as was
+      compatible with their natural constitution, and continued to enjoy among
+      themselves the sweetness<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.167"
+      id="Page_i.167">[i.167]</a></span> of independent intercourse. But from
+      the moment that one man had need of the help of another, as soon as they
+      perceived it to be useful for one person to have provisions for two, then
+      equality disappeared, property was introduced, labour became necessary,
+      and the vast forests changed into smiling fields, which had to be watered
+      by the sweat of men, and in which they ever saw bondage and misery
+      springing up and growing ripe with the harvests.&quot;<a name="FNanchor187"
+      id="FNanchor187"></a><a href="#Footnote_187">[187]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The working of metals and agriculture have been the two great agents in
+      this revolution. For the poet it is gold and silver, but for the
+      philosopher it is iron and corn, that have civilised men and undone the
+      human race. It is easy to see how the latter of the two arts was suggested
+      to men by watching the reproducing processes of vegetation. It is less
+      easy to be sure how they discovered metal, saw its uses, and invented
+      means of smelting it, for nature had taken extreme precautions to hide the
+      fatal secret. It was probably the operation of some volcano which first
+      suggested the idea of fusing ore. From the fact of land being cultivated
+      its division followed, and therefore the institution of property in its
+      full shape. From property arose civil society. &quot;The first man who,
+      having enclosed a piece of ground, could think of saying, <i>This is mine</i>,
+      and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of
+      civil society. How many crimes, wars, murders, miseries, and horrors would
+      not have been spared to the human<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.168"
+      id="Page_i.168">[i.168]</a></span> race by one who, plucking up the
+      stakes, or filling in the trench, should have called out to his fellows:
+      Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you forget that
+      the earth belongs to no one, and that its fruits are for all.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor188" id="FNanchor188"></a><a href="#Footnote_188">[188]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Things might have remained equal even in this state, if talents had only
+      been equal, and if for example the employment of iron and the consumption
+      of agricultural produce had always exactly balanced one another. But the
+      stronger did more work; the cleverer got more advantage from his work; the
+      more ingenious found means of shortening his labour; the husbandman had
+      more need of metal, or the smith more need of grain; and while working
+      equally, one got much gain, and the other could scarcely live. This
+      distinction between Have and Have-not led to confusion and revolt, to
+      brigandage on the one side and constant insecurity on the other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Hence disorders of a violent and interminable kind, which gave rise to the
+      most deeply designed project that ever entered the human mind. This was to
+      employ in favour of property the strength of the very persons who attacked
+      it, to inspire them with other maxims, and to give them other institutions
+      which should be as favourable to property as natural law had been contrary
+      to it. The man who conceived this project, after showing his neighbours
+      the monstrous confusion which made their lives most burdensome, spoke in
+      this wise: &quot;Let us unite to shield the<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.169" id="Page_i.169">[i.169]</a></span> weak from oppression,
+      to restrain the proud, and to assure to each the possession of what
+      belongs to him; let us set up rules of justice and peace, to which all
+      shall be obliged to conform, without respect of persons, and which may
+      repair to some extent the caprices of fortune, by subjecting the weak and
+      the mighty alike to mutual duties. In a word, instead of turning our
+      forces against one another, let us collect them into one supreme power to
+      govern us by sage laws, to protect and defend all the members of the
+      association, repel their common foes, and preserve us in never-ending
+      concord.&quot; This, and not the right of conquest, must have been the
+      origin of society and laws, which threw new chains round the poor and gave
+      new might to the rich; and for the profit of a few grasping and ambitious
+      men, subjected the whole human race henceforth and for ever to toil and
+      bondage and wretchedness without hope.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The social constitution thus propounded and accepted was radically
+      imperfect from the outset, and in spite of the efforts of the sagest
+      lawgivers, it has always remained imperfect, because it was the work of
+      chance, and because, inasmuch as it was ill begun, time, while revealing
+      defects and suggesting remedies, could never repair its vices; <i>people
+      went on incessantly repairing and patching, instead of which it was
+      indispensable to begin by making a clean surface and by throwing aside all
+      the old materials, just as Lycurgus did in Sparta</i>.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Put shortly, the main positions are these. In the state of nature each man
+      lived in entire isolation, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.170"
+      id="Page_i.170">[i.170]</a></span> therefore physical inequality was as if
+      it did not exist. After many centuries, accident, in the shape of
+      difference of climate and external natural conditions, enforcing for the
+      sake of subsistence some degree of joint labour, led to an increase of
+      communication among men, to a slight development of the reasoning and
+      reflective faculties, and to a rude and simple sense of mutual obligation,
+      as a means of greater comfort in the long run. The first state was good
+      and pure, but the second state was truly perfect. It was destroyed by a
+      fresh succession of chances, such as the discovery of the arts of
+      metal-working and tillage, which led first to the institution of property,
+      and second to the prominence of the natural or physical inequalities,
+      which now began to tell with deadly effectiveness. These inequalities
+      gradually became summed up in the great distinction between rich and poor;
+      and this distinction was finally embodied in the constitution of a civil
+      society, expressly adapted to consecrate the usurpation of the rich, and
+      to make the inequality of condition between them and the poor eternal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We thus see that the Discourse, unlike Morelly's terse exposition,
+      contains no clear account of the kind of inequality with which it deals.
+      Is it inequality of material possession or inequality of political right?
+      Morelly tells you decisively that the latter is only an accident, flowing
+      from the first; that the key to renovation lies in the abolition of the
+      first. Rousseau mixes the two confusedly together under a single<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.171" id="Page_i.171">[i.171]</a></span>
+      name, bemoans each, but shrinks from a conclusion or a recommendation as
+      to either. He declares property to be the key to civil society, but falls
+      back from any ideas leading to the modification of the institution lying
+      at the root of all that he deplores.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The first general criticism, which in itself contains and covers nearly
+      all others, turns on Method. &quot;Conjectures become reasons when they
+      are the most likely that you can draw from the nature of things,&quot; and
+      &quot;it is for philosophy in lack of history to determine the most likely
+      facts.&quot; In an inductive age this royal road is rigorously closed.
+      Guesses drawn from the general nature of things can no longer give us
+      light as to the particular nature of the things pertaining to primitive
+      men, any more than such guesses can teach us the law of the movement of
+      the heavenly bodies, or the foundations of jurisprudence. Nor can
+      deduction from anything but propositions which have themselves been won by
+      laborious induction, ever lead us to the only kind of philosophy which has
+      fair pretension to determine the most probable of the missing facts in the
+      chain of human history. That quantitative and differentiating knowledge
+      which is science, was not yet thought of in connection with the movements
+      of our own race upon the earth. It is to be said, further, that of the two
+      possible ways of guessing about the early state, the conditions of advance
+      from it, and the rest, Rousseau's guess that all movement away from it has
+      been towards corruption, is less supported by subsequent knowledge than
+      the guess<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.172" id="Page_i.172">[i.172]</a></span>
+      of his adversaries, that it has been a movement progressive and upwards.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This much being said as to incurable vice of method, and there are fervent
+      disciples of Rousseau now living who will regard one's craving for method
+      in talking about men as a foible of pedantry, we may briefly remark on one
+      or two detached objections to Rousseau's story. To begin with, there is no
+      certainty as to there having ever been a state of nature of a normal and
+      organic kind, any more than there is any one normal and typical state of
+      society now. There are infinitely diverse states of society, and there
+      were probably as many diverse states of nature. Rousseau was sufficiently
+      acquainted with the most recent metaphysics of his time to know that you
+      cannot think of a tree in general, nor of a triangle in general, but only
+      of some particular tree or triangle.<a name="FNanchor189" id="FNanchor189"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_189">[189]</a> In a similar way he might have known that
+      there never was any such thing as a state of nature in the general and
+      abstract, fixed, typical, and single. He speaks of the savage state also,
+      which comes next, as one, identical, normal. It is, of course, nothing of
+      the kind. The varieties of belief and habit and custom among the different
+      tribes of savages, in reference to every object that can engage their
+      attention, from death and the gods and immortality down to the uses of
+      marriage and the art of counting and the ways of procuring subsistence,
+      are infinitely numerous; and the more we know about this vast diversity,
+      the less easy is it to think of the<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.173" id="Page_i.173">[i.173]</a></span> savage state in
+      general. When Rousseau extols the savage state as the veritable youth of
+      the world, we wonder whether we are to think of the negroes of the Gold
+      Coast, or the Dyaks of Borneo, Papuans or Maoris, Cheyennes or
+      Tierra-del-Fuegians or the fabled Troglodytes; whether in the veritable
+      youth of the world they counted up to five or only to two; whether they
+      used a fire-drill, and if so what kind of drill; whether they had the
+      notion of personal identity in so weak a shape as to practise the couvade;
+      and a hundred other points, which we should now require any writer to
+      settle, who should speak of the savage state as sovereign, one, and
+      indivisible, in the way in which Rousseau speaks of it, and holds it up to
+      our vain admiration.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Again, if the savage state supervened upon the state of nature in
+      consequence of certain climatic accidents of a permanent kind, such as
+      living on the banks of a river or in a dense forest, how was it that the
+      force of these accidents did not begin to operate at once? How could the
+      isolated state of nature endure for a year in face of them? Or what was
+      the precipitating incident which suddenly set them to work, and drew the
+      primitive men from an isolation so profound that they barely recognised
+      one another, into that semi-social state in which the family was founded?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We cannot tell how the state of nature continued to subsist, or, if it
+      ever subsisted, how and why it ever came to an end, because the agencies
+      which are<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.174" id="Page_i.174">[i.174]</a></span>
+      alleged to have brought it to an end must have been coeval with the
+      appearance of man himself. If gods had brought to men seed, fire, and the
+      mechanical arts, as in one of the Platonic myths,<a name="FNanchor190"
+      id="FNanchor190"></a><a href="#Footnote_190">[190]</a> we could understand
+      that there was a long stage preliminary to these heavenly gifts. But if
+      the gods had no part nor lot in it, and if the accidents that slowly led
+      the human creature into union were as old as that nature, of which indeed
+      they were actually the component elements, then man must have quitted the
+      state of nature the very day on which he was born into it. And what can be
+      a more monstrous anachronism than to turn a flat-headed savage into a
+      clever, self-conscious, argumentative utilitarian of the eighteenth
+      century; working the social problem out in his flat head with a keenness,
+      a consistency, a grasp of first principles, that would have entitled him
+      to a chair in the institute of moral sciences, and entering the social
+      union with the calm and reasonable deliberation of a great statesman
+      taking a critical step in policy? Aristotle was wiser when he fixed upon
+      sociability as an ultimate quality of human nature, instead of making it,
+      as Rousseau and so many others have done, the conclusion of an
+      unimpeachable train of syllogistic reasoning.<a name="FNanchor191"
+      id="FNanchor191"></a><a href="#Footnote_191">[191]</a><span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.175" id="Page_i.175">[i.175]</a></span> Morelly even, his own
+      contemporary, and much less of a sage than Aristotle, was still sage
+      enough to perceive that this primitive human machine, &quot;though
+      composed of intelligent parts, generally operates independently of its
+      reason; its deliberations are forestalled, and only leave it to look on,
+      while sentiment does its work.&quot;<a name="FNanchor192" id="FNanchor192"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_192">[192]</a> It is the more remarkable that Rousseau
+      should have fallen into this kind of error, as it was one of his
+      distinctions to have perceived and partially worked out the principle,
+      that men guide their conduct rather from passion and instinct than from
+      reasoned enlightenment.<a name="FNanchor193" id="FNanchor193"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_193">[193]</a> The ultimate quality which he named pity
+      is, after all, the germ of sociability, which is only extended sympathy.
+      But he did not firmly adhere to this ultimate quality, nor make any effort
+      consistently to trace out its various products.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.176" id="Page_i.176">[i.176]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We do not find, however, in Rousseau any serious attempt to analyse the
+      composition of human nature in its primitive stages. Though constantly
+      warning his readers very impressively against confounding domesticated
+      with primitive men, he practically assumes that the main elements of
+      character must always have been substantially identical with such elements
+      and conceptions as are found after the addition of many ages of
+      increasingly complex experience. There is something worth considering in
+      his notion that civilisation has had effects upon man analogous to those
+      of domestication upon animals, but he lacked logical persistency enough to
+      enable him to adhere to his own idea, and work out conclusions from it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It might further be pointed out in another direction that he takes for
+      granted that the mode of advance into a social state has always been one
+      and the same, a single and uniform process, marked by precisely the same
+      set of several stages, following one another in precisely the same order.
+      There is no evidence of this; on the contrary, evidence goes to show that
+      civilisation varies in origin and process with race and other things, and
+      that though in all cases starting from the prime factor of sociableness in
+      man, yet the course of its development has depended on the particular sets
+      of circumstances with which that factor has had to combine. These are full
+      of variety, according to climate and racial predisposition, although, as
+      has been justly said, the force of both these two elements<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.177" id="Page_i.177">[i.177]</a></span>
+      diminishes as the influence of the past in giving consistency to our will
+      becomes more definite, and our means of modifying climate and race become
+      better known. There is no sign that Rousseau, any more than many other
+      inquirers, ever reflected whether the capacity for advance into the state
+      of civil society in any highly developed form is universal throughout the
+      species, or whether there are not races eternally incapable of advance
+      beyond the savage state. Progress would hardly be the exception which we
+      know it to be in the history of communities if there were not fundamental
+      diversities in the civilisable quality of races. Why do some bodies of men
+      get on to the high roads of civilisation, while others remain in the
+      jungle and thicket of savagery; and why do some races advance along one of
+      these roads, and others advance by different roads?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Considerations of this sort disclose the pinched frame of trim theory with
+      which Rousseau advanced to set in order a huge mass of boundlessly varied,
+      intricate, and unmanageable facts. It is not, however, at all worth while
+      to extend such criticism further than suffices to show how little his
+      piece can stand the sort of questions which may be put to it from a
+      scientific point of view. Nothing that Rousseau had to say about the state
+      of nature was seriously meant for scientific exposition, any more than the
+      Sermon on the Mount was meant for political economy. The importance of the
+      Discourse on Inequality lay in its vehement denunciation of the existing
+      social state.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.178" id="Page_i.178">[i.178]</a></span>
+      To the writer the question of the origin of inequality is evidently far
+      less a matter at heart, than the question of its results. It is the
+      natural inclination of one deeply moved by a spectacle of depravation in
+      his own time and country, to extol some other time or country, of which he
+      is happily ignorant enough not to know the drawbacks. Rousseau wrote about
+      the savage state in something of the same spirit in which Tacitus wrote
+      the Germania. And here, as in the Discourse on the influence of science
+      and art upon virtue, there is a positive side. To miss this in resentment
+      of the unscientific paradox that lies about it, is to miss the force of
+      the piece, and to render its enormous influence for a generation after it
+      was written incomprehensible. We may always be quite sure that no set of
+      ideas ever produced this resounding effect on opinion, unless they
+      contained something which the social or spiritual condition of the men
+      whom they inflamed made true for the time, and true in an urgent sense. Is
+      it not tenable that the state of certain savage tribes is more normal,
+      offers a better balance between desire and opportunity, between faculty
+      and performance, than the permanent state of large classes in western
+      countries, the broken wreck of civilisation?<a name="FNanchor194"
+      id="FNanchor194"></a><a href="#Footnote_194">[194]</a> To admit this is
+      not to conclude, as<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.179"
+      id="Page_i.179">[i.179]</a></span> Rousseau so rashly concluded, that the
+      movement away from the primitive stages has been productive only of evil
+      and misery even to the masses of men, the hewers of wood and the drawers
+      of water; or that it was occasioned, and has been carried on by the
+      predominance of the lower parts and principles of human nature. Our
+      provisional acquiescence in the straitness and blank absence of outlook or
+      hope of the millions who come on to the earth that greets them with no
+      smile, and then stagger blindly under dull burdens for a season, and at
+      last are shovelled silently back under the ground,&#8212;our acquiescence
+      can only be justified in the sight of humanity by the conviction<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.180" id="Page_i.180">[i.180]</a></span>
+      that this is one of the temporary conditions of a vast process, working
+      forwards through the impulse and agency of the finer human spirits, but
+      needing much blood, many tears, uncounted myriads of lives, and
+      immeasurable geologic periods of time, for its high and beneficent
+      consummation. There is nothing surprising, perhaps nothing deeply
+      condemnable, in the burning anger for which this acquiescence is often
+      changed in the more impatient natures. As against the ignoble host who
+      think that the present ordering of men, with all its prodigious
+      inequalities, is in foundation and substance the perfection of social
+      blessedness, Rousseau was almost in the right. If the only alternative to
+      the present social order remaining in perpetuity were a retrogression to
+      some such condition as that of the islanders of the South Sea, a lover of
+      his fellow-creatures might look upon the result, so far as it affected the
+      happiness of the bulk of them, with tolerably complete indifference. It is
+      only the faith that we are moving slowly away from the existing order, as
+      our ancestors moved slowly away from the old want of order, that makes the
+      present endurable, and makes any tenacious effort to raise the future
+      possible.
+    </p>
+    <hr style="width: 25%;" />
+    <p>
+      An immense quantity of nonsense has been talked about the equality of man,
+      for which those who deny that doctrine and those who assert it may divide
+      the responsibility. It is in reality true or false, according to the
+      doctrines with which it is confronted. As<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.181" id="Page_i.181">[i.181]</a></span> against the theory
+      that the existing way of sharing the laboriously acquired fruits and
+      delights of the earth is a just representation and fair counterpart of
+      natural inequalities among men in merit and capacity, the revolutionary
+      theory is true, and the passionate revolutionary cry for equality of
+      external chance most righteous and unanswerable. But the issues do not end
+      here. Take such propositions as these:&#8212;there are differences in the
+      capacity of men for serving the community; the well-being of the community
+      demands the allotment of high function in proportion to high faculty; the
+      rights of man in politics are confined to a right of the same protection
+      for his own interests as is given to the interests of others. As against
+      these principles, the revolutionary deductions from the equality of man
+      are false. And such pretensions as that every man could be made equally
+      fit for every function, or that not only each should have an equal chance,
+      but that he who uses his chance well and sociably should be kept on a
+      level in common opinion and trust with him who uses it ill and unsociably,
+      or does not use it at all,&#8212;the whole of this is obviously most
+      illusory and most disastrous, and in whatever decree any set of men have
+      ever taken it up, to that degree they have paid the penalty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What Rousseau's Discourse meant, what he intended it to mean, and what his
+      first direct disciples understood it as meaning, is not that all men are
+      born equal. He never says this, and his recognition of natural inequality
+      implies the contrary proposition.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.182"
+      id="Page_i.182">[i.182]</a></span> His position is that the artificial
+      differences, springing from the conditions of the social union, do not
+      coincide with the differences in capacity springing from original
+      constitution; that the tendency of the social union as now organised is to
+      deepen the artificial inequalities, and make the gulf between those
+      endowed with privileges and wealth and those not so endowed ever wider and
+      wider. It would have been very difficult a hundred years ago to deny the
+      truth of this way of stating the case. If it has to some extent already
+      ceased to be entirely true, and if violent popular forces are at work
+      making it less and less true, we owe the origin of the change, among other
+      causes and influences, not least to the influence of Rousseau himself, and
+      those whom he inspired. It was that influence which, though it certainly
+      did not produce, yet did as certainly give a deep and remarkable bias,
+      first to the American Revolution, and a dozen years afterwards to the
+      French Revolution.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It would be interesting to trace the different fortunes which awaited the
+      idea of the equality of man in America and in France. In America it has
+      always remained strictly within the political order, and perhaps with the
+      considerable exception of the possibles share it may have had, along with
+      Christian notions of the brotherhood of man, and statesmanlike notions of
+      national prosperity, in leading to the abolition of slavery, it has
+      brought forth no strong moral sentiment against the ethical and economic
+      bases of any part of the social order. In France, on the other<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.183" id="Page_i.183">[i.183]</a></span>
+      hand, it was the starting-point of movements that have had all the fervour
+      and intensity of religions, and have made men feel about social
+      inequalities the burning shame and wrath with which a Christian saw the
+      flourishing temples of unclean gods. This difference in the interpretation
+      and development of the first doctrine may be explained in various ways,&#8212;by
+      difference of material circumstance between America and France; difference
+      of the political and social level from which the principle of equality had
+      to start; and not least by difference of intellectual temperament. This
+      last was itself partly the product of difference in religion, which makes
+      the English dread the practical enforcement of logical conclusions, while
+      the French have hitherto been apt to dread and despise any tendency to
+      stop short of that.
+    </p>
+    <hr style="width: 25%;" />
+    <p>
+      Let us notice, finally, the important fact that the appearance of
+      Rousseau's Discourses was the first sign of reaction against the historic
+      mode of inquiry into society that had been initiated by Montesquieu. The
+      Spirit of Laws was published in 1748, with a truly prodigious effect. It
+      coloured the whole of the social literature in France during the rest of
+      the century. A history of its influence would be a history of one of the
+      most important sides of speculative activity. In the social writings of
+      Rousseau himself there is hardly a chapter which does not contain tacit
+      reference to Montesquieu's book. The Discourses were the beginning of a
+      movement in an exactly opposite<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.184"
+      id="Page_i.184">[i.184]</a></span> direction; that is, away from patient
+      collection of wide multitudes of facts relating to the conditions of
+      society, towards the promulgation of arbitrary systems of absolute social
+      dogmas. Mably, the chief dogmatic socialist of the century, and one of the
+      most dignified and austere characters, is an important example of the
+      detriment done by the influence of Rousseau to that of Montesquieu, in the
+      earlier stages of the conflict between the two schools. Mably (1709-1785),
+      of whom the remark is to be made that he was for some years behind the
+      scenes of government as De Tencin's secretary and therefore was versed in
+      affairs, began his inquiries with Greece and Rome. &quot;You will find
+      everything in ancient history,&quot; he said.<a name="FNanchor195"
+      id="FNanchor195"></a><a href="#Footnote_195">[195]</a> And he remained
+      entirely in this groove of thought until Rousseau appeared. He then
+      gradually left Montesquieu. &quot;To find the duties of a legislator,&quot;
+      he said, &quot;I descend into the abysses of my heart, I study my
+      sentiments.&quot; He opposed the Economists, the other school that was
+      feeling its way imperfectly enough to a positive method. &quot;As soon as
+      I see landed property established,&quot; he wrote, &quot;then I see<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.185" id="Page_i.185">[i.185]</a></span>
+      unequal fortunes; and from these unequal fortunes must there not
+      necessarily result different and opposed interests, all the vices of
+      riches, all the vices of poverty, the brutalisation of intelligence, the
+      corruption of civil manners?&quot; and so forth.<a name="FNanchor196"
+      id="FNanchor196"></a><a href="#Footnote_196">[196]</a> In his most
+      important work, published in 1776, we see Rousseau's notions developed,
+      with a logic from which their first author shrunk, either from fear, or
+      more probably from want of firmness and consistency as a reasoner. &quot;It
+      is to equality that nature has attached the preservation of our social
+      faculties and happiness: and from this I conclude that legislation will
+      only be taking useless trouble, unless all its attention is first of all
+      directed to the establishment of equality in the fortune and condition of
+      citizens.&quot;<a name="FNanchor197" id="FNanchor197"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_197">[197]</a> That is to say not only political equality,
+      but economic communism. &quot;What miserable folly, that persons who pass
+      for philosophers should go on repeating after one another that without
+      property there can be no society. Let us leave illusion. It is property
+      that divides us into two classes, rich and poor; the first will alway
+      prefer their fortune to that of the state, while the second will never
+      love a government or laws that leave them in misery.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor198" id="FNanchor198"></a><a href="#Footnote_198">[198]</a>
+      This was the kind of opinion for which Rousseau's diffuse and rhetorical
+      exposition of social necessity had prepared France some twenty years
+      before. After powerfully helping the process of general dis<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.186" id="Page_i.186">[i.186]</a></span>solution,
+      it produced the first fruits specifically after its own kind some twenty
+      years later in the system of Baboeuf.<a name="FNanchor199" id="FNanchor199"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_199">[199]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The unflinching application of principles is seldom achieved by the men
+      who first launch them. The labour of the preliminary task seems to exhaust
+      one man's stock of mental force. Rousseau never thought of the subversion
+      of society or its reorganisation on a communistic basis. Within a few
+      months of his profession of profound lament that the first man who made a
+      claim to property had not been instantly unmasked as the arch foe of the
+      race, he speaks most respectfully of property as the pledge of the
+      engagements of citizens and the foundation of the social pact, while the
+      first condition of that pact is that every one should be maintained in
+      peaceful enjoyment of what belongs to him.<a name="FNanchor200"
+      id="FNanchor200"></a><a href="#Footnote_200">[200]</a> We need not impute
+      the apparent discrepancy to insincerity. Rousseau was always apt to think
+      in a slipshod manner. He sensibly though illogically accepted wholesome
+      practical maxims, as if they flowed from theoretical premisses that were
+      in truth utterly incompatible with them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &#160;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <b>FOOTNOTES:</b>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_151" id="Footnote_151"></a><a href="#FNanchor151">[151]</a>
+      Delandine's <i>Couronnes Acad&#233;miques, ou Recueil de prix propos&#233;s
+      par les Soci&#233;t&#233;s Savantes</i>. (Paris, 2 vols., 1787.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_152" id="Footnote_152"></a><a href="#FNanchor152">[152]</a>
+      Musset-Pathay has collected the details connected with the award of the
+      prize, ii. 365-367.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_153" id="Footnote_153"></a><a href="#FNanchor153">[153]</a>
+      Second Letter to M. de Malesherbes, p. 358. Also <i>Conf.</i>, viii 135.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_154" id="Footnote_154"></a><a href="#FNanchor154">[154]</a>
+      Diderot's account (<i>Vie de S&#233;n&#232;que</i>, sect. 66, <i>Oeuv.</i>,
+      iii. 98; also ii. 285) is not inconsistent with Rousseau's own, so that we
+      may dismiss as apocryphal Marmontel's version of the story (<i>M&#233;m.</i>
+      VIII.), to the effect that Rousseau was about to answer the question with
+      a commonplace affirmative, until Diderot persuaded him that a paradox
+      would attract more attention. It has been said also that M. de Francueil,
+      and various others, first urged the writer to take a negative line of
+      argument. To suppose this possible is to prove one's incapacity for
+      understanding what manner of man Rousseau was.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_155" id="Footnote_155"></a><a href="#FNanchor155">[155]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, ix. 232, 233.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_156" id="Footnote_156"></a><a href="#FNanchor156">[156]</a>
+      <i>Rousseau Juge de Jean Jacques, Dialogues</i>, i. 252.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_157" id="Footnote_157"></a><a href="#FNanchor157">[157]</a>
+      <i>Dialogues</i>, i. 275, 276.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_158" id="Footnote_158"></a><a href="#FNanchor158">[158]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, viii. 138.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_159" id="Footnote_159"></a><a href="#FNanchor159">[159]</a>
+      &quot;It made a kind of revolution in Paris,&quot; says Grimm. <i>Corr.
+      Lit.</i>, i. 108.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_160" id="Footnote_160"></a><a href="#FNanchor160">[160]</a>
+      <i>R&#233;p. au Roi de Pologne</i>, p. 111 and p. 113.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_161" id="Footnote_161"></a><a href="#FNanchor161">[161]</a>
+      <i>R&#233;p. &#224; M. Bordes</i>, 138.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_162" id="Footnote_162"></a><a href="#FNanchor162">[162]</a>
+      <i>Ib.</i> 137.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_163" id="Footnote_163"></a><a href="#FNanchor163">[163]</a>
+      &quot;The first source of the evil is inequality; from inequality come
+      riches ... from riches are born luxury and idleness; from luxury come the
+      fine arts, and from idleness the sciences.&quot; <i>R&#233;p. au Roi de
+      Pologne</i>, 120, 121.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_164" id="Footnote_164"></a><a href="#FNanchor164">[164]</a>
+      <i>R&#233;p. &#224; M. Bordes</i>, 147. In the same spirit he once wrote
+      the more wholesome maxim, &quot;We should argue with the wise, and never
+      with the public.&quot; <i>Corr.</i>, i. 191.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_165" id="Footnote_165"></a><a href="#FNanchor165">[165]</a>
+      <i>R&#233;p. au Roi de Pologne</i>, 128, 129.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_166" id="Footnote_166"></a><a href="#FNanchor166">[166]</a>
+      <i>R&#233;p. &#224; M. Bordes</i>, 150-161.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_167" id="Footnote_167"></a><a href="#FNanchor167">[167]</a>
+      P. 174.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_168" id="Footnote_168"></a><a href="#FNanchor168">[168]</a>
+      Egger's <i>Hell&#233;nisme en France</i>, 28i&#232;me le&#231;on, p. 265.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_169" id="Footnote_169"></a><a href="#FNanchor169">[169]</a>
+      Voltaire to J.J.R. Aug. 30, 1755.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_170" id="Footnote_170"></a><a href="#FNanchor170">[170]</a>
+      <i>R&#233;p. au Roi de Pologne</i>, 105.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_171" id="Footnote_171"></a><a href="#FNanchor171">[171]</a>
+      In 1753 the French Academy, by way no doubt of summoning a counter-blast
+      to Rousseau, boldly offered as the subject of their essay the thesis that
+      &quot;The love of letters inspires the love of virtue,&quot; and the prize
+      was won fitly enough by a Jesuit professor of rhetoric. See Delandine, i.
+      42.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_172" id="Footnote_172"></a><a href="#FNanchor172">[172]</a>
+      Preface to <i>Narcisse</i>, 251.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_173" id="Footnote_173"></a><a href="#FNanchor173">[173]</a>
+      <i>R&#233;p. &#224; M. Bordes</i>, 167.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_174" id="Footnote_174"></a><a href="#FNanchor174">[174]</a>
+      P. 187.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_175" id="Footnote_175"></a><a href="#FNanchor175">[175]</a>
+      See for instance a strange discussion about <i>morale universelle</i> and
+      the like in <i>M&#233;m. de Mdme. d'Epinay</i>, i. 217-226.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_176" id="Footnote_176"></a><a href="#FNanchor176">[176]</a>
+      Often described as Morelly the Younger, to distinguish him from his
+      father, who wrote an essay on the human heart, and another on the human
+      intelligence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_177" id="Footnote_177"></a><a href="#FNanchor177">[177]</a>
+      <i>Code de la Nature, ou le v&#233;ritable esprit de ses loix, de tout
+      tems n&#233;glig&#233; ou m&#233;connu.</i>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_178" id="Footnote_178"></a><a href="#FNanchor178">[178]</a>
+      P. 169. Rousseau did not see it then, but he showed himself on the track.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_179" id="Footnote_179"></a><a href="#FNanchor179">[179]</a>
+      At the end of the <i>Code de la Nature</i> Morelly places a complete set
+      of rules for the organisation of a model community. The base of it was the
+      absence of private property&#8212;a condition that was to be preserved by
+      vigilant education of the young in ways of thinking, that should make the
+      possession of private property odious or inconceivable. There are to be
+      sumptuary laws of a moderate kind. The government is to be in the hands of
+      the elders. The children are to be taken away from their parents at the
+      age of five; reared and educated in public establishments; and returned to
+      their parents at the age of sixteen or so when they will marry. Marriage
+      is to be dissoluble at the end of ten years, but after divorce the woman
+      is not to marry a man younger than herself, nor is the man to marry a
+      woman younger than the wife from whom he has parted. The children of a
+      divorced couple are to remain with the father, and if he marries again,
+      they are to be held the children of the second wife. Mothers are to suckle
+      their own children (p. 220). The whole scheme is fuller of good ideas than
+      such schemes usually are.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_180" id="Footnote_180"></a><a href="#FNanchor180">[180]</a>
+      P. 218.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_181" id="Footnote_181"></a><a href="#FNanchor181">[181]</a>
+      This is obviously untrue. Animals do not know death in the sense of
+      scientific definition, and probably have no abstract idea of it as a
+      general state; but they know and are afraid of its concrete phenomena, and
+      so are most savages.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_182" id="Footnote_182"></a><a href="#FNanchor182">[182]</a>
+      This is one of the passages in the Discourse, the harshness of which was
+      afterwards attributed by Rousseau to the influence of Diderot. <i>Conf.</i>,
+      viii. 205, <i>n.</i>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_183" id="Footnote_183"></a><a href="#FNanchor183">[183]</a>
+      P. 261.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_184" id="Footnote_184"></a><a href="#FNanchor184">[184]</a>
+      As if sin really came by the law in this sense; as if a law defining and
+      prohibiting a malpractice were the cause of the commission of the act
+      which it constituted a malpractice. As if giving a name and juristic
+      classification to any kind of conduct were adding to men's motives for
+      indulging in it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_185" id="Footnote_185"></a><a href="#FNanchor185">[185]</a>
+      P. 269.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_186" id="Footnote_186"></a><a href="#FNanchor186">[186]</a>
+      P. 278.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_187" id="Footnote_187"></a><a href="#FNanchor187">[187]</a>
+      Pp. 285-287.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_188" id="Footnote_188"></a><a href="#FNanchor188">[188]</a>
+      P. 273.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_189" id="Footnote_189"></a><a href="#FNanchor189">[189]</a>
+      P. 250.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_190" id="Footnote_190"></a><a href="#FNanchor190">[190]</a>
+      <i>Politicus</i>, 268 D-274 E.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_191" id="Footnote_191"></a><a href="#FNanchor191">[191]</a>
+      Here for instance is D'Alembert's story:&#8212;&quot;The necessity of
+      shielding our own body from pain and destruction leads us to examine among
+      external objects those which are useful and those which are hurtful, so
+      that we may seek the one and flee the others. But we hardly begin our
+      search into such objects before we discover among them a great number of
+      beings which strike us as exactly like ourselves; that is, whose form is
+      just like our own, and who, so far as we can judge at the first glance,
+      appear to have the same perceptions. Everything therefore leads us to
+      suppose that they have also the same wants, and consequently the same
+      interest in satisfying them, whence it results that we must find great
+      advantage in joining with them for the purpose of distinguishing in nature
+      what has the power of preserving us from what has the power of hurting us.
+      The communication of ideas is the principle and the stay of this union,
+      and necessarily demands the invention of signs; such is the origin of the
+      formation of societies.&quot; <i>Discours Pr&#233;liminaire de l'Encyclop&#233;die</i>.
+      Contrast this with Aristotle's sensible statement (<i>Polit.</i> I. ii.
+      15) that &quot;there is in men by nature a strong impulse to enter into
+      such union.&quot;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_192" id="Footnote_192"></a><a href="#FNanchor192">[192]</a>
+      <i>Code de la Nature.</i>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_193" id="Footnote_193"></a><a href="#FNanchor193">[193]</a>
+      See, for example, his criticism on the Abb&#233; de St. Pierre. <i>Conf.</i>,
+      viii. 264. And also in the analysis of this very Discourse, above, vol. i.
+      p. <a href="#Page_i.163">163</a>.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_194" id="Footnote_194"></a><a href="#FNanchor194">[194]</a>
+      &quot;I have lived with communities of savages in South America and in the
+      East, who have no laws or law courts but the public opinion of the visage
+      freely expressed. Each man scrupulously respects the rights of his fellow,
+      and any infraction of those rights rarely or never takes place. In such a
+      community all are nearly equal. There are none of those wide distinctions
+      of education and ignorance, wealth and poverty, master and servant, which
+      are the products of our civilisation; there is none of that widespread
+      division of labour which, while it increases wealth, produces also
+      conflicting interests; there is not that severe competition and struggle
+      for existence, or for wealth, which the dense population of civilised
+      countries inevitably creates. All incitements to great crimes are thus
+      wanting, and petty ones are repressed, partly by the influence of public
+      opinion, but chiefly by that natural sense of justice and of his
+      neighbour's right, which seems to be in some degree inherent in every race
+      of man. Now, although we have progressed vastly beyond the savage state in
+      intellectual achievements, we have not advanced equally in morals. It is
+      true that among those classes who have no wants that cannot be easily
+      supplied, and among whom public opinion has great influence, the rights of
+      others are fully respected. It is true, also, that we have vastly extended
+      the sphere of those rights, and include within them all the brotherhood of
+      man. But it is not too much to say, that the mass of our populations have
+      not at all advanced beyond the savage code of morals, and have in many
+      cases sunk below it.&quot; Wallace's <i>Malay Archipelago</i>, vol. ii.
+      pp. 460-461.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_195" id="Footnote_195"></a><a href="#FNanchor195">[195]</a>
+      So too Bougainville, a brother of the navigator, said in 1760, &quot;For
+      an attentive observer who sees nothing in events of the utmost diversity
+      of appearance but the natural effects of a certain number of causes
+      differently combined, Greece is the universe in small, and the history of
+      Greece an excellent epitome of universal history.&quot; (Quoted in Egger's
+      <i>Hell&#233;nisme en France</i>, ii. 272.) The revolutionists of the next
+      generation, who used to appeal so unseasonably to the ancients, were only
+      following a literary fashion set by their fathers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_196" id="Footnote_196"></a><a href="#FNanchor196">[196]</a>
+      <i>Doutes sur l'Ordre Naturel</i>; <i>Oeuv.</i>, xi. 80. (Ed. 1794, 1795.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_197" id="Footnote_197"></a><a href="#FNanchor197">[197]</a>
+      <i>La L&#233;gislation</i>, I. i.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_198" id="Footnote_198"></a><a href="#FNanchor198">[198]</a>
+      <i>Ibid.</i>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_199" id="Footnote_199"></a><a href="#FNanchor199">[199]</a>
+      It is not within our province to examine the vexed question whether the
+      Convention was fundamentally socialist, and not merely political. That
+      socialist ideas were afloat in the minds of some members, one can hardly
+      doubt. See Von Sybel's <i>Hist. of the French Revolution</i>, Bk. II. ch.
+      iv., on one side, and Quinet's <i>La R&#233;volution</i>, ii. 90-107, on
+      the other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_200" id="Footnote_200"></a><a href="#FNanchor200">[200]</a>
+      <i>Economie Politique</i>, pp. 41, 53, etc.
+    </p>
+    <hr style="width: 65%;" />
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.187" id="Page_i.187">[i.187]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      <a name="CHAPTER_VI." id="CHAPTER_VI."></a>CHAPTER VI.
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      PARIS.
+    </h3>
+    <h3>
+      I.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <span class="smcap">By</span> what subtle process did Rousseau, whose
+      ideal had been a summer life among all the softnesses of sweet gardens and
+      dappled orchards, turn into panegyrist of the harsh austerity of old Cato
+      and grim Brutus's civic devotion? The amiability of eighteenth century
+      France&#8212;and France was amiable in spite of the atrocities of White
+      Penitents at Toulouse, and black Jansenists at Paris, and the men and
+      women who dealt in <i>lettres-de-cachet</i> at Versailles&#8212;was
+      revolted by the name of the cruel patriot who slew his son for the honour
+      of discipline.<a name="FNanchor201" id="FNanchor201"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_201">[201]</a> How came Rousseau of all men, the great
+      humanitarian of his time, to rise to the height of these unlovely rigours?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The answer is that he was a citizen of Geneva transplanted. He had been
+      bred in puritan and republican tradition, with love of God and love of law
+      and freedom and love of country all penetrating it, and then he had been
+      accidentally removed to a strange city that was in active ferment with
+      ideas that were the direct abnegation of all these. In<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.188" id="Page_i.188">[i.188]</a></span> Paris the idea of a
+      God was either repudiated along with many other ancestral conceptions, or
+      else it was fatally entangled with the worst superstition and not seldom
+      with the vilest cruelties. The idea of freedom was unknown, and the idea
+      of law was benumbed by abuses and exceptions. The idea of country was
+      enfeebled in some and displaced in others by a growing passion for the
+      captivating something styled citizenship of the world. If Rousseau could
+      have ended his days among the tranquil lakes and hills of Savoy, Geneva
+      might possibly never have come back to him. For it depends on
+      circumstance, which of the chances that slumber within us shall awake, and
+      which shall fall unroused with us into the darkness. The fact of Rousseau
+      ranking among the greatest of the writers of the French language, and the
+      yet more important fact that his ideas found their most ardent disciples
+      and exploded in their most violent form in France, constantly make us
+      forget that he was not a Frenchman, but a Genevese deeply imbued with the
+      spirit of his native city. He was thirty years old before he began even
+      temporarily to live in France: he had only lived there some five or six
+      years when he wrote his first famous piece, so un-French in all its
+      spirit; and the ideas of the Social Contract were in germ before he
+      settled in France at all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There have been two great religious reactions, and the name of Geneva has
+      a fundamental association with each of them. The first was that against
+      the paganised Catholicism of the renaissance, and of this<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.189" id="Page_i.189">[i.189]</a></span>
+      Calvin was a prime leader; the second was that against the materialism of
+      the eighteenth century, of which the prime leader was Rousseau. The
+      diplomatist was right who called Geneva the fifth part of the world. At
+      the congress of Vienna, some one, wearied at the enormous place taken by
+      the hardly visible Geneva in the midst of negotiations involving momentous
+      issues for the whole habitable globe, called out that it was after all no
+      more than a grain of sand. But he was not wrong who made bold to reply,
+      &quot;Geneva is no grain of sand; 'tis a grain of musk that perfumes all
+      Europe.&quot;<a name="FNanchor202" id="FNanchor202"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_202">[202]</a> We have to remember that it was at all
+      events as a grain of musk ever pervading the character of Rousseau. It
+      happened in later years that he repudiated his allegiance to her, but
+      however bitterly a man may quarrel with a parent, he cannot change blood,
+      and Rousseau ever remained a true son of the city of Calvin. We may
+      perhaps conjecture without excessive fancifulness that the constant
+      spectacle and memory of a community, free, energetic, and prosperous,
+      whose institutions had been shaped and whose political temper had been
+      inspired by one great lawgiver, contributed even more powerfully than what
+      he had picked up about Lycurgus and Laced&#230;mon, to give him a turn for
+      Utopian speculation, and a conviction of the artificiality and easy
+      modifiableness of the social structure. This, however, is less certain
+      than that he unconsciously received impressions in his youth from the
+      circum<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.190" id="Page_i.190">[i.190]</a></span>stances
+      of Geneva, both as to government and religion, as to freedom, order,
+      citizenship, manners, which formed the deepest part of him on the
+      reflective side, and which made themselves visible whenever he exchanged
+      the life of beatified sense for moods of speculative energy, &quot;Never,&quot;
+      he says, &quot;did I see the walls of that happy city, I never went into
+      it, without feeling a certain faintness at my heart, due to excess of
+      tender emotion. At the same time that the noble image of freedom elevated
+      my soul, those of equality, of union, of gentle manners, touched me even
+      to tears.&quot;<a name="FNanchor203" id="FNanchor203"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_203">[203]</a> His spirit never ceased to haunt city and
+      lake to the end, and he only paid the debt of an owed acknowledgment in
+      the dedication of his Discourse on Inequality to the republic of Geneva.<a
+      name="FNanchor204" id="FNanchor204"></a><a href="#Footnote_204">[204]</a>
+      It was there it had its root. The honour in which industry was held in
+      Geneva, the democratic phrases that constituted the dialect of its
+      government, the proud tradition of the long battle which had won and kept
+      its independence, the severity of its manners, the simplicity of its
+      pleasures,&#8212;all these things awoke in his memory as soon as ever
+      occasion drew him to serious thought. More than that, he had in a peculiar
+      manner drawn in with the breath of his earliest days in this
+      theocratically constituted city, the vital idea that there are sacred
+      things and objects of reverence among men. And hence there came to him,
+      though with many stains and much misdirection, the most priceless
+      excellence of a capacity for devout veneration.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.191" id="Page_i.191">[i.191]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is certainly no real contradiction between the quality of reverence
+      and the more equivocal quality of a sensuous temperament, though a man may
+      well seem on the surface, as the first succeeds the second in rule over
+      him, to be the contradiction to his other self. The objects of veneration
+      and the objects of sensuous delight are externally so unlike and so
+      incongruous, that he who follows both in their turns is as one playing the
+      part of an ironical chorus in the tragi-comic drama of his own life. You
+      may perceive these two to be mere imperfect or illusory opposites, when
+      you confront a man like Rousseau with the true opposite of his own type;
+      with those who are from their birth analysts and critics, keen, restless,
+      urgent, inexorably questioning. That energetic type, though not often dead
+      or dull on the side of sense, yet is incapable of steeping itself in the
+      manifold delights of eye and ear, of nostril and touch, with the peculiar
+      intensity of passive absorption that seeks nothing further nor deeper than
+      unending continuance of this profound repose of all filled sensation, just
+      as it is incapable of the kindred mood of elevated humility and joyful
+      unasking devoutness in the presence of emotions and dim thoughts that are
+      beyond the compass of words.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The citizen of Geneva with this unseen fibre of Calvinistic veneration and
+      austerity strong and vigorous within him, found a world that had nothing
+      sacred and took nothing for granted; that held the past in contempt, and
+      ever like old Athenians asked<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.192"
+      id="Page_i.192">[i.192]</a></span> for some new thing; that counted
+      simplicity of life an antique barbarism, and literary curiousness the
+      master virtue. There were giants in this world, like the panurgic Diderot.
+      There were industrious, worthy, disinterested men, who used their minds
+      honestly and actively with sincere care for truth, like D'Holbach. There
+      was poured around the whole, like a high stimulating atmosphere to the
+      stronger, and like some evil mental aphrodisiac to the weaker, the
+      influence of Voltaire, the great indomitable chieftain of them all.
+      Intellectual size half redeems want of perfect direction by its generous
+      power and fulness. It was not the strong men, atheists and philosophisers
+      as they were, who first irritated Rousseau into revolt against their whole
+      system of thought in all its principles. The dissent between him and them
+      was fundamental and enormous, and in time it flamed out into open war.
+      Conflict of theory, however, was brought home to him first by slow-growing
+      exasperation at the follies in practice of the minor disciples of the
+      gospel of knowing and acting, as distinguished from his own gospel of
+      placid being. He craved beliefs that should uphold men in living their
+      lives, substantial helps on which they might lean without examination and
+      without mistrust: his life in Paris was thrown among people who lived in
+      the midst of open questions, and revelled in a reflective and didactic
+      morality, which had no root in the heart and so made things easy for the
+      practical conscience. He sought tranquillity and valued life for its own
+      sake,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.193" id="Page_i.193">[i.193]</a></span>
+      not as an arena and a theme for endless argument and debate: he found
+      friends who knew no higher pleasure than the futile polemics of mimic
+      philosophy over dessert, who were as full of quibble as the wrong-headed
+      interlocutors in a Platonic dialogue, and who babbled about God and state
+      of nature, about virtue and the spirituality of the soul, much as Boswell
+      may have done when Johnson complained of him for asking questions that
+      would make a man hang himself. The highest things were thus brought down
+      to the level of the cheapest discourse, and subjects which the wise take
+      care only to discuss with the wise, were here everyday topics for all
+      comers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The association with such high themes of those light qualities of tact,
+      gaiety, complaisance, which are the life of the superficial commerce of
+      men and women of the world, probably gave quite as much offence to
+      Rousseau as the doctrines which some of his companions had the honest
+      courage or the heedless fatuity to profess. It was an outrage to all the
+      serious side of him to find persons of quality introducing materialism as
+      a new fashion, and atheism as the liveliest of condiments. The perfume of
+      good manners only made what he took for bad principles the worse, and
+      heightened his impatience at the flippancy of pretensions to overthrow the
+      beliefs of a world between two wines.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Doctrine and temperament united to set him angrily against the world
+      around him. The one was austere and the other was sensuous, and the
+      sensuous<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.194" id="Page_i.194">[i.194]</a></span>
+      temperament in its full strength is essentially solitary. The play of
+      social intercourse, its quick transitions, and incessant demands, are
+      fatal to free and uninterrupted abandonment to the flow of soft internal
+      emotions. Rousseau, dreaming, moody, indolently, meditative, profoundly
+      enwrapped in the brooding egoism of his own sensations, had to mix with
+      men and women whose egoism took the contrary form of an eager desire to
+      produce flashing effects on other people. We may be sure that as the two
+      sides of his character&#8212;his notions of serious principle, and his
+      notions of personal comfort&#8212;both went in the same direction, the
+      irritation and impatience with which they inspired him towards society did
+      not lessen with increased communication, but naturally deepened with a
+      more profoundly settled antipathy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rousseau lived in Paris for twelve years, from his return from Venice in
+      1744 until his departure in 1756 for the rustic lodge in a wood which the
+      good-will of Madame d'Epinay provided for him. We have already seen one
+      very important side of his fortunes during these years, in the relations
+      he formed with Theresa, and the relations which he repudiated with his
+      children. We have heard too the new words with which during these years he
+      first began to make the hearts of his contemporaries wax hot within them.
+      It remains to examine the current of daily circumstance on which his life
+      was embarked, and the shores to which it was bearing him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His patrons were at present almost exclusively in<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.195" id="Page_i.195">[i.195]</a></span> the circle of
+      finance. Richelieu, indeed, took him for a moment by the hand, but even
+      the introduction to him was through the too frail wife of one of the
+      greatest of the farmers general.<a name="FNanchor205" id="FNanchor205"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_205">[205]</a> Madame Dupin and Madame d'Epinay, his two
+      chief patronesses, were also both of them the wives of magnates of the
+      farm. The society of the great people of this world was marked by all the
+      glare, artificiality, and sentimentalism of the epoch, but it had also one
+      or two specially hollow characteristics of its own. As is always the case
+      when a new rich class rises in the midst of a community possessing an old
+      caste, the circle of Parisian financiers made it their highest social aim
+      to thrust and strain into the circle of the Versailles people of quality.
+      They had no normal life of their own, with independent traditions and
+      self-respect; and for the same reason that an essentially worn-out
+      aristocracy may so long preserve a considerable degree of vigour and even
+      of social utility under certain circumstances by means of tenacious pride
+      in its own order, a new plutocracy is demoralised from the very beginning
+      of its existence by want of a similar kind of pride in itself, and by the
+      ignoble necessity of craving the countenance of an upper class that loves
+      to despise and humiliate it. Besides the more obvious evils of a position
+      resting entirely on material opulence, and maintaining itself by coarse
+      and glittering osten<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.196"
+      id="Page_i.196">[i.196]</a></span>tation, there is a fatal moral
+      hollowness which infects both serious conduct and social diversion. The
+      result is seen in imitative manners, affected culture, and a mixture of
+      timorous self-consciousness within and noisy self-assertion without, which
+      completes the most distasteful scene that any collected spirit can
+      witness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rousseau was, as has been said, the secretary of Madame Dupin and her
+      stepson Francueil. He occasionally went with them to Chenonceaux in
+      Touraine, one of Henry the Second's castles built for Diana of Poitiers,
+      and here he fared sumptuously every day. In Paris his means, as we know,
+      were too strait. For the first two years he had a salary of nine hundred
+      francs; then his employers raised it to as much as fifty louis. For the
+      first of the Discourses the publisher gave him nothing, and for the second
+      he had to extract his fee penny by penny, and after long waiting. His
+      comic opera, the Village Soothsayer, was a greater success; it brought him
+      the round sum of two hundred louis from the court, and some five and
+      twenty more from the bookseller, and so, he says, &quot;the interlude,
+      which cost me five or six weeks of work, produced nearly as much money as
+      Emilius afterwards did, which had cost me twenty years of meditation and
+      three years of composition.&quot;<a name="FNanchor206" id="FNanchor206"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_206">[206]</a><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.197"
+      id="Page_i.197">[i.197]</a></span> Before the arrival of this windfall, M.
+      Francueil, who was receiver-general, offered him the post of cashier in
+      that important department, and Rousseau attended for some weeks to receive
+      the necessary instructions. His progress was tardy as usual, and the
+      complexities of accounts were as little congenial to him as notarial
+      complexities had been three and twenty years previously. It is, however,
+      one of the characteristics of times of national break-up not to be
+      peremptory in exacting competence, and Rousseau gravely sat at the receipt
+      of custom, doing the day's duty with as little skill as liking. Before he
+      had been long at his post, his official chief going on a short journey
+      left him in charge of the chest, which happened at the moment to contain
+      no very portentous amount. The disquiet with which the watchful custody of
+      this moderate treasure harassed and afflicted Rousseau, not only persuaded
+      him that nature had never designed him to be the guardian of money chests,
+      but also threw him into a fit of very painful illness. The surgeons let
+      him understand that within six months he would be in the pale kingdoms.
+      The effect of such a hint on a man of his temper, and the train of
+      reflections which it would be sure to set aflame, are to be foreseen by us
+      who know Rousseau's fashion of dealing with the irksome. Why sacrifice the
+      peace and charm of the little fragment of days<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.198" id="Page_i.198">[i.198]</a></span> left to him, to the
+      bondage of an office for which he felt nothing but disgust? How reconcile
+      the austere principles which he had just adopted in his denunciation of
+      sciences and arts, and his panegyric on the simplicity of the natural
+      life, with such duties as he had to perform? And how preach
+      disinterestedness and frugality from amid the cashboxes of a
+      receiver-general? Plainly it was his duty to pass in independence and
+      poverty the little time that was yet left to him, to bring all the forces
+      of his soul to bear in breaking the fetters of opinion, and to carry out
+      courageously whatever seemed best to himself, without suffering the
+      judgment of others to interpose the slightest embarrassment or hindrance.<a
+      name="FNanchor207" id="FNanchor207"></a><a href="#Footnote_207">[207]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With Rousseau, to conceive a project of this kind for simplifying his life
+      was to hasten urgently towards its realisation, because such projects
+      harmonised with all his strongest predispositions. His design mastered and
+      took whole possession of him. He resolved to earn his living by copying
+      music, as that was conformable to his taste, within his capacity, and
+      compatible with entire personal freedom. His patron did as the world is so
+      naturally ready to do with those who choose the stoic's way; he declared
+      that Rousseau was gone mad.<a name="FNanchor208" id="FNanchor208"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_208">[208]</a> Talk like this had no effect on a man whom
+      self-indulgence led into a path that others would only have been forced
+      into by self-denial. Let it be said, however, that this is a form of
+      self-indulgence of which society is never likely to see an excess,<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.199" id="Page_i.199">[i.199]</a></span>
+      and meanwhile we may continue to pay it some respect as assuredly leaning
+      to virtue's side. Rousseau's many lapses from grace perhaps deserve a
+      certain gentleness of treatment, after the time when with deliberation and
+      collected effort he set himself to the hard task of fitting his private
+      life to his public principles. Anything that heightens the self-respect of
+      the race is good for us to behold, and it is a permanent source of comfort
+      to all who thirst after reality in teachers, whether their teaching
+      happens to be our own or not, to find that the prophet of social equality
+      was not a fine gentleman, nor the teacher of democracy a hanger-on to the
+      silly skirts of fashion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rousseau did not merely throw up a post which would one day have made him
+      rich. Stoicism on the heroic, peremptory scale is not so difficult as the
+      application of the same principle to trifles. Besides this greater
+      sacrifice, he gave up the pleasant things for which most men value the
+      money that procures them, and instituted an austere sumptuary reform in
+      truly Genevese spirit. His sword was laid aside; for flowing peruke was
+      substituted the small round wig; he left off gilt buttons and white
+      stockings, and he sold his watch with the joyful and singular thought that
+      he would never again need to know the time. One sacrifice remained to be
+      made. Part of his equipment for the Venetian embassy had been a large
+      stock of fine linen, and for this he retained a particular affection, for
+      both now and always Rousseau had a passion for personal cleanliness, as he
+      had for cor<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.200" id="Page_i.200">[i.200]</a></span>poreal
+      wholesomeness. He was seasonably delivered from bondage to his fine linen
+      by aid from without. One Christmas Eve it lay drying in a garret in the
+      rather considerable quantity of forty-two shirts, when a thief, always
+      suspected to be the brother of Theresa, broke open the door and carried
+      off the treasure, leaving Rousseau henceforth to be the contented wearer
+      of coarser stuffs.<a name="FNanchor209" id="FNanchor209"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_209">[209]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We may place this reform towards the end of the year 1750, or the
+      beginning of 1751, when his mind was agitated by the busy discussion which
+      his first Discourse excited, and by the new ideas of literary power which
+      its reception by the public naturally awakened in him. &quot;It takes,&quot;
+      wrote Diderot, &quot;right above the clouds; never was such a success.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor210" id="FNanchor210"></a><a href="#Footnote_210">[210]</a>
+      We can hardly have a surer sign of a man's fundamental sincerity than that
+      his first triumph, the first revelation to him of his power, instead of
+      seducing him to frequent the mischievous and disturbing circle of his
+      applauders, should throw him inwards upon himself and his own principles
+      with new earnestness and refreshed independence. Rousseau very soon made
+      up his mind what the world was worth to him; and this, not as the ordinary
+      sentimentalist or satirist does, by way of set-off against the indulgence
+      of personal foibles, but from recognition of his own qualities, of the
+      bounds set to our capacity of life, and of the limits of the world's power
+      to satisfy us. &quot;When my destiny threw me into the whirlpool of
+      society,&quot; he wrote in his last<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.201" id="Page_i.201">[i.201]</a></span> meditation on the
+      course of his own life, &quot;I found nothing there to give a moment's
+      solace to my heart. Regret for my sweet leisure followed me everywhere; it
+      shed indifference or disgust over all that might have been within my
+      reach, leading to fortune and honours. Uncertain in the disquiet of my
+      desires, I hoped for little, I obtained less, and I felt even amid gleams
+      of prosperity that if I obtained all that I supposed myself to be seeking,
+      I should still not have found the happiness for which my heart was
+      greedily athirst, though without distinctly knowing its object. Thus
+      everything served to detach my affections from society, even before the
+      misfortunes which were to make me wholly a stranger to it. I reached the
+      age of forty, floating between indigence and fortune, between wisdom and
+      disorder, full of vices of habit without any evil tendency at heart,
+      living by hazard, distracted as to my duties without despising them, but
+      often without much clear knowledge what they were.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor211" id="FNanchor211"></a><a href="#Footnote_211">[211]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A brooding nature gives to character a connectedness and unity that is in
+      strong contrast with the dispersion and multiformity of the active type.
+      The attractions of fame never cheated Rousseau into forgetfulness of the
+      commanding principle that a man's life ought to be steadily composed to
+      oneness with itself in all its parts, as by mastery of an art of moral
+      counterpoint, and not crowded with a wild mixture of aim and emotion like
+      distracted masks in high carnival. He complains of the philosophers with<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.202" id="Page_i.202">[i.202]</a></span>
+      whom he came into contact, that their philosophy was something foreign to
+      them and outside of their own lives. They studied human nature for the
+      sake of talking learnedly about it, not for the sake of self-knowledge;
+      they laboured to instruct others, not to enlighten themselves within. When
+      they published a book, its contents only interested them to the extent of
+      making the world accept it, without seriously troubling themselves whether
+      it were true or false, provided only that it was not refuted. &quot;For my
+      own part, when I desired to learn, it was to know things myself, and not
+      at all to teach others. I always believed that before instructing others
+      it was proper to begin by knowing enough for one's self; and of all the
+      studies that I have tried to follow in my life in the midst of men, there
+      is hardly one that I should not have followed equally if I had been alone,
+      and shut up in a desert island for the rest of my days.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor212" id="FNanchor212"></a><a href="#Footnote_212">[212]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When we think of Turgot, whom Rousseau occasionally met among the society
+      which he denounces, such a denunciation sounds a little outrageous. But
+      then Turgot was perhaps the one sane Frenchman of the first eminence in
+      the eighteenth century. Voltaire chose to be an exile from the society of
+      Paris and Versailles as pertinaciously as Rousseau did, and he spoke more
+      bitterly of it in verse than Rousseau ever spoke bitterly of it in prose.<a
+      name="FNanchor213" id="FNanchor213"></a><a href="#Footnote_213">[213]</a>
+      It was, as has been so<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.203"
+      id="Page_i.203">[i.203]</a></span> often said, a society dominated by
+      women, from the king's mistress who helped to ruin France, down to the
+      financier's wife who gave suppers to flashy men of letters. The eighteenth
+      century salon has been described as having three stages; the salon of
+      1730, still retaining some of the stately domesticity, elegance, dignity
+      of the age of Lewis XIV.; that of 1780, grave, cold, dry, given to
+      dissertation; and between the two, the salon of 1750, full of intellectual
+      stir, brilliance, frivolous originality, glittering wastefulness.<a
+      name="FNanchor214" id="FNanchor214"></a><a href="#Footnote_214">[214]</a>
+      Though this division of time must not be pressed too closely, it is
+      certain that the era of Rousseau's advent in literature with his
+      Discourses fell in with the climax of social unreality in the surface
+      intercourse of France, and that the same date marks the highest point of
+      feminine activity and power.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The common mixture of much reflective morality in theory with much
+      light-hearted immorality in practice, never entered so largely into
+      manners. We have constantly to wonder how they analysed and defined the
+      word Virtue, to which they so constantly appealed in letters,
+      conversation, and books, as the sovereign object for our deepest and
+      warmest adoration. A whole company of transgressors of the marriage law
+      would melt into floods of tears over a hymn to virtue, which they must
+      surely have held of too sacred an essence to mix itself with any one
+      virtue in particular, except that very considerable one of charitably<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.204" id="Page_i.204">[i.204]</a></span>
+      letting all do as they please. It is much, however, that these tears, if
+      not very burning, were really honest. Society, though not believing very
+      deeply in the supernatural, was not cursed with an arid, parching, and
+      hardened scepticism about the genuineness of good emotions in a man, and
+      so long as people keep this baleful poison out of their hearts, their
+      lives remain worth having.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is true that cynicism in the case of some women of this time
+      occasionally sounded in a diabolic key, as when one said, &quot;It is your
+      lover to whom you should never say that you don't believe in God; to one's
+      husband that does not matter, because in the case of a lover one must
+      reserve for one's self some door of escape, and devotional scruples cut
+      everything short.&quot;<a name="FNanchor215" id="FNanchor215"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_215">[215]</a> Or here: &quot;I do not distrust anybody,
+      for that is a deliberate act; but I do not trust anybody, and there is no
+      trouble in this.&quot;<a name="FNanchor216" id="FNanchor216"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_216">[216]</a> Or again in the word thrown to a man
+      vaunting the probity of some one: &quot;What! can a man of intelligence
+      like you accept the prejudice of <i>meum</i> and <i>tuum</i>?&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor217" id="FNanchor217"></a><a href="#Footnote_217">[217]</a>
+      Such speech, however, was probably most often a mere freak of the tongue,
+      a mode and fashion, as who should go to a masked ball in guise of
+      Mephistopheles, without anything more Mephistophelian about him than red
+      apparel and peaked toes. &quot;She was absolutely charming,&quot; said one
+      of a new-comer; &quot;she did<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.205"
+      id="Page_i.205">[i.205]</a></span> not utter one single word that was not
+      a paradox.&quot;<a name="FNanchor218" id="FNanchor218"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_218">[218]</a> This was the passing taste. Human nature is
+      able to keep itself wholesome in fundamentals even under very great
+      difficulties, and it is as wise as it is charitable in judging a sharp and
+      cynical tone to make large allowances for mere costume and assumed
+      character.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In respect of the light companionship of common usage, however, it is
+      exactly the costume which comes closest to us, and bad taste in that is
+      most jarring and least easily forgiven. There is a certain stage in an
+      observant person's experience of the heedlessness, indolence, and native
+      folly of men and women&#8212;and if his observation be conducted in a
+      catholic spirit, he will probably see something of this not merely in
+      others&#8212;when the tolerable average sanity of human arrangements
+      strikes him as the most marvellous of all the fortunate accidents in the
+      universe. Rousseau could not even accept the fact of this miraculous
+      result, the provisional and temporary sanity of things, and he confronted
+      society with eyes of angry chagrin. A great lady asked him how it was that
+      she had not seen him for an age. &quot;Because when I wish to see you, I
+      wish to see no one but you. What do you want me to do in the midst of your
+      society? I should cut a sorry figure in a circle of mincing tripping
+      coxcombs; they do not suit me.&quot; We cannot wonder that on some
+      occasion when her son's proficiency was to be tested before a company of
+      friends, Madame d'Epinay<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.206"
+      id="Page_i.206">[i.206]</a></span> prayed Rousseau to be of them, on the
+      ground that he would be sure to ask the child outrageously absurd
+      questions, which would give gaiety to the affair.<a name="FNanchor219"
+      id="FNanchor219"></a><a href="#Footnote_219">[219]</a> As it happened, the
+      father was unwise. He was a man of whom it was said that he had devoured
+      two million francs, without either saying or doing a single good thing. He
+      rewarded the child's performance with the gift of a superb suit of
+      cherry-coloured velvet, extravagantly trimmed with costly lace; the
+      peasant from whose sweat and travail the money had been wrung, went in
+      heavy rags, and his children lived as the beasts of the field. The poor
+      youth was ill dealt with. &quot;That is very fine,&quot; said rude Duclos,
+      &quot;but remember that a fool in lace is still a fool.&quot; Rousseau, in
+      reply to the child's importunity, was still blunter: &quot;Sir, I am no
+      judge of finery, I am only a judge of man; I wished to talk with you a
+      little while ago, but I wish so no longer.&quot;<a name="FNanchor220"
+      id="FNanchor220"></a><a href="#Footnote_220">[220]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Marmontel, whose account may have been coloured by retrospection in later
+      years, says that before the success of the first Discourse, Rousseau
+      concealed his pride under the external forms of a politeness that was
+      timid even to obsequiousness; in his uneasy glance you perceived mistrust
+      and observant jealousy; there was no freedom in his manner, and no one
+      ever observed more cautiously the hateful precept to live with your
+      friends as though they were one day to be your enemies.<a
+      name="FNanchor221" id="FNanchor221"></a><a href="#Footnote_221">[221]</a>
+      Grimm's description is different and<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.207" id="Page_i.207">[i.207]</a></span> more trustworthy.
+      Until he began to affect singularity, he says, Rousseau had been gallant
+      and overflowing with artificial compliment, with manners that were honeyed
+      and even wearisome in their soft elaborateness. All at once he put on the
+      cynic's cloak, and went to the other extreme. Still in spite of an abrupt
+      and cynical tone he kept much of his old art of elaborate fine speeches,
+      and particularly in his relations with women.<a name="FNanchor222"
+      id="FNanchor222"></a><a href="#Footnote_222">[222]</a> Of his abruptness,
+      he tells a most displeasing tale. &quot;One day Rousseau told us with an
+      air of triumph, that as he was coming out of the opera where he had been
+      seeing the first representation of the Village Soothsayer, the Duke of
+      Zweibr&#252;cken had approached him with much politeness, saying, 'Will
+      you allow me to pay you a compliment?' and that he replied, 'Yes, if it be
+      very short.' Everybody was silent at this, until I said to him laughingly,
+      'Illustrious citizen and co-sovereign of Geneva, since there resides in
+      you a part of the sovereignty of the republic, let me represent to you
+      that, for all the severity of your principles, you should hardly refuse to
+      a sovereign prince the respect due to a water-carrier, and that if you had
+      met a word of good-will from a water-carrier with an answer as rough and
+      brutal as that, you would have had to reproach yourself with a most
+      unseasonable piece of impertinence.'&quot;<a name="FNanchor223"
+      id="FNanchor223"></a><a href="#Footnote_223">[223]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There were still more serious circumstances when exasperation at the
+      flippant tone about him carried<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.208"
+      id="Page_i.208">[i.208]</a></span> him beyond the ordinary bounds of that
+      polite time. A guest at table asked contemptuously what was the use of a
+      nation like the French having reason, if they did not use it. &quot;They
+      mock the other nations of the earth, and yet are the most credulous of
+      all.&quot; ROUSSEAU: &quot;I forgive them for their credulity, but not for
+      condemning those who are credulous in some other way.&quot; Some one said
+      that in matters of religion everybody was right, but that everybody should
+      remain in that in which he had been born. ROUSSEAU, with warmth: &quot;Not
+      so, by God, if it is a bad one, for then it can do nothing but harm.&quot;
+      Then some one contended that religion always did some good, as a kind of
+      rein to the common people who had no other morality. All the rest cried
+      out at this in indignant remonstrance, one shrewd person remarking that
+      the common people had much livelier fear of being hanged than of being
+      damned. The conversation was broken off for a moment by the hostess
+      calling out, &quot;After all, one must nourish the tattered affair we call
+      our body, so ring and let them bring us the joint.&quot; This done, the
+      servants dismissed, and the door shut, the discussion was resumed with
+      such vehemence by Duclos and Saint Lambert, that, says the lady who tells
+      us the story, &quot;I feared they were bent on destroying all religion,
+      and I prayed for some mercy to be shown at any rate to natural religion.&quot;
+      There was not a whit more sympathy for that than for the rest. Rousseau
+      declared himself <i>paullo infirmior</i>, and clung to the morality of the<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.209" id="Page_i.209">[i.209]</a></span>
+      gospel as the natural morality which in old times constituted the whole
+      and only creed. &quot;But what is a God,&quot; cried one impetuous
+      disputant, &quot;who gets angry and is appeased again?&quot; Rousseau
+      began to murmur between grinding teeth, and a tide of pleasantries set in
+      at his expense, to which came this: &quot;If it is a piece of cowardice to
+      suffer ill to be spoken of one's friend behind his back, 'tis a crime to
+      suffer ill to be spoken of one's God, who is present; and for my part,
+      sirs, I believe in God.&quot; &quot;I admit,&quot; said the atheistic
+      champion, &quot;that it is a fine thing to see this God bending his brow
+      to earth and watching with admiration the conduct of a Cato. But this
+      notion is, like many others, very useful in some great heads, such as
+      Trajan, Marcus Aurelius, Socrates, where it can only produce heroism, but
+      it is the germ of all madnesses.&quot; ROUSSEAU: &quot;Sirs, I leave the
+      room if you say another word more,&quot; and he was rising to fulfil his
+      threat, when the entry of a new-comer stopped the discussion.<a
+      name="FNanchor224" id="FNanchor224"></a><a href="#Footnote_224">[224]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His words on another occasion show how all that he saw helped to keep up a
+      fretted condition of mind, in one whose soft tenacious memory turned daily
+      back to simple and unsophisticated days among the green valleys, and
+      refused to acquiesce in the conditions of changed climate. So terrible a
+      thing is it to be the bondsman of reminiscence. Madame d'Epinay was
+      suspected, wrongfully as it afterwards proved, of<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.210" id="Page_i.210">[i.210]</a></span> having destroyed some
+      valuable papers belonging to a dead relative. There was much idle and
+      cruel gossip in an ill-natured world. Rousseau, her friend, kept steadfast
+      silence: she challenged his opinion. &quot;What am I to say?&quot; he
+      answered; &quot;I go and come, and all that I hear outrages and revolts
+      me. I see the one so evidently malicious and so adroit in their injustice;
+      the other so awkward and so stupid in their good intentions, that I am
+      tempted (and it is not the first time) to look on Paris as a cavern of
+      brigands, of whom every traveller in his turn is the victim. What gives me
+      the worst idea of society is to see how eager each person is to pardon
+      himself, by reason of the number of the people who are like him.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor225" id="FNanchor225"></a><a href="#Footnote_225">[225]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Notwithstanding his hatred of this cavern of brigands, and the little
+      pains he took to conceal his feelings from any individual brigand, whether
+      male or female, with whom he had to deal, he found out that &quot;it is
+      not always so easy as people suppose to be poor and independent.&quot;
+      Merciless invasion of his time in every shape made his life weariness.
+      Sometimes he had the courage to turn and rend the invader, as in the
+      letter to a painter who sent him the same copy of verses three times,
+      requiring immediate acknowledgment. &quot;It is not just,&quot; at length
+      wrote the exasperated Rousseau, &quot;that I should be tyrannised over for
+      your pleasure; not that my time is precious, as you say; it is either
+      passed in suffering<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.211"
+      id="Page_i.211">[i.211]</a></span> or it is lost in idleness; but when I
+      cannot employ it usefully for some one, I do not wish to be hindered from
+      wasting it in my own fashion. A single minute thus usurped is what all the
+      kings of the universe could not give me back, and it is to be my own
+      master that I flee from the idle folk of towns,&#8212;people as thoroughly
+      wearied as they are thoroughly wearisome,&#8212;who, because they do not
+      know what to do with their own time, think they have a right to waste that
+      of others.&quot;<a name="FNanchor226" id="FNanchor226"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_226">[226]</a> The more abruptly he treated visitors,
+      persecuting dinner-givers, and all the tribe of the importunate, the more
+      obstinate they were in possessing themselves of his time. In seizing the
+      hours they were keeping his purse empty, as well as keeping up constant
+      irritation in his soul. He appears to have earned forty sous for a
+      morning's work, and to have counted this a fair fee, remarking modestly
+      that he could not well subsist on less.<a name="FNanchor227"
+      id="FNanchor227"></a><a href="#Footnote_227">[227]</a> He had one chance
+      of a pension, which he threw from him in a truly characteristic manner.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When he came to Paris he composed his musical diversion of the Muses
+      Galantes, which was performed (1745) in the presence of Rameau, under the
+      patronage of M. de la Popelini&#232;re. Rameau apostrophised the unlucky
+      composer with much violence, declaring that one-half of the piece was the
+      work of a master, while the other was that of a person entirely ignorant
+      of the musical rudiments; the bad work therefore<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.212" id="Page_i.212">[i.212]</a></span> was Rousseau's own,
+      and the good was a plagiarism.<a name="FNanchor228" id="FNanchor228"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_228">[228]</a> This repulse did not daunt the hero. Five
+      or six years afterwards on a visit to Passy, as he was lying awake in bed,
+      he conceived the idea of a pastoral interlude after the manner of the
+      Italian comic operas. In six days the Village Soothsayer was sketched, and
+      in three weeks virtually completed. Duclos procured its rehearsal at the
+      Opera, and after some debate it was performed before the court at
+      Fontainebleau. The Plutarchian stoic, its author, went from Paris in a
+      court coach, but his Roman tone deserted him, and he felt shamefaced as a
+      schoolboy before the great world, such divinity doth hedge even a Lewis
+      XV., and even in a soul of Genevan temper. The piece was played with great
+      success, and the composer was informed that he would the next day have the
+      honour of being presented to the king, who would most probably mark his
+      favour by the bestowal of a pension.<a name="FNanchor229" id="FNanchor229"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_229">[229]</a> Rousseau was tossed with many doubts. He
+      would fain have greeted the king with some word that should show
+      sensibility to the royal graciousness, without compromising republican
+      severity, &quot;clothing some great and useful truth in a fine and
+      deserved compliment.&quot; This moral difficulty was heightened by a
+      physical one, for he was liable to an infirmity which, if it should
+      overtake him in presence of king<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.213"
+      id="Page_i.213">[i.213]</a></span> and courtiers, would land him in an
+      embarrassment worse than death. What would become of him if mind or body
+      should fail, if either he should be driven into precipitate retreat, or
+      else there should escape him, instead of the great truth wrapped
+      delicately round in veracious panegyric, a heavy, shapeless word of
+      foolishness? He fled in terror, and flung up the chance of pension and
+      patronage. We perceive the born dreamer with a phantasmagoric imagination,
+      seizing nothing in just proportion and true relation, and paralysing the
+      spirit with terror of unrealities; in short, with the most fatal form of
+      moral cowardice, which perhaps it is a little dangerous to try to analyse
+      into finer names.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When Rousseau got back to Paris he was amazed to find that Diderot spoke
+      to him of this abandonment of the pension with a fire that he could never
+      have expected from a philosopher, Rousseau plainly sharing the opinion of
+      more vulgar souls that philosopher is but fool writ large. &quot;He said
+      that if I was disinterested on my own account, I had no right to be so on
+      that of Madame Le Vasseur and her daughter, and that I owed it to them not
+      to let pass any possible and honest means of giving them bread.... This
+      was the first real dispute I had with him, and all our quarrels that
+      followed were of the same kind; he laying down for me what he insisted
+      that I should do, and I refusing because I thought that I ought not to do
+      it.&quot;<a name="FNanchor230" id="FNanchor230"></a><a href="#Footnote_230">[230]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.214" id="Page_i.214">[i.214]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Let us abstain, at this and all other points, from being too sure that we
+      easily see to the bottom of our Rousseau. When we are most ready to fling
+      up the book and to pronounce him all selfishness and sophistry, some trait
+      is at hand to revive moral interest in him, and show him unlike common
+      men, reverent of truth and human dignity. There is a slight anecdote of
+      this kind connected with his visit to Fontainebleau. The day after the
+      representation of his piece, he happened to be taking his breakfast in
+      some public place. An officer entered, and, proceeding to describe the
+      performance of the previous day, told at great length all that had
+      happened, depicted the composer with much minuteness, and gave a
+      circumstantial account of his conversation. In this story, which was told
+      with equal assurance and simplicity, there was not a word of truth, as was
+      clear from the fact that the author of whom he spoke with such intimacy
+      sat unknown and unrecognised before his eyes. The effect on Rousseau was
+      singular enough. &quot;The man was of a certain age; he had no coxcombical
+      or swaggering air; his expression bespoke a man of merit, and his cross of
+      St. Lewis showed that he was an old officer. While he was retailing his
+      untruths, I grew red in the face, I lowered my eyes, I sat on thorns; I
+      tried to think of some means of believing him to have made a mistake in
+      good faith. At length trembling lest some one should recognise me and
+      confront him, I hastened to finish my chocolate without saying a word; and
+      stooping<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.215" id="Page_i.215">[i.215]</a></span>
+      down as I passed in front of him, I went out as fast as possible, while
+      the people present discussed his tale. I perceived in the street that I
+      was bathed in sweat, and I am sure that if any one had recognised me and
+      called me by name before I got out, they would have seen in me the shame
+      and embarrassment of a culprit, simply from a feeling of the pain the poor
+      man would have had to suffer if his lie had been discovered.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor231" id="FNanchor231"></a><a href="#Footnote_231">[231]</a>
+      One who can feel thus vividly humiliated by the meanness of another,
+      assuredly has in himself the wholesome salt of respect for the erectness
+      of his fellows; he has the rare sentiment that the compromise of integrity
+      in one of them is as a stain on his own self-esteem, and a lowering of his
+      own moral stature. There is more deep love of humanity in this than in
+      giving many alms, and it was not the less deep for being the product of
+      impulse and sympathetic emotion, and not of a logical sorites.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Another scene in a caf&#233; is worth referring to, because it shows in
+      the same way that at this time Rousseau's egoism fell short of the
+      fatuousness to which disease or vicious habit eventually depraved it. In
+      1752 he procured the representation of his comedy of Narcisse, which he
+      had written at the age of eighteen, and which is as well worth reading or
+      playing as most comedies by youths of that amount of experience of the
+      ways of the world and the heart of man. Rousseau was amazed and touched by
+      the indulgence of the public, in suffering without any sign<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.216" id="Page_i.216">[i.216]</a></span> of
+      impatience even a second representation of his piece. For himself, he
+      could not so much as sit out the first; quitting the theatre before it was
+      over, he entered the famous caf&#233; de Procope at the other side of the
+      street, where he found critics as wearied as himself. Here he called out,
+      &quot;The new piece has fallen flat, and it deserved to fall flat; it
+      wearied me to death. It is by Rousseau of Geneva, and I am that very
+      Rousseau.&quot;<a name="FNanchor232" id="FNanchor232"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_232">[232]</a> The relentless student of mental pathology
+      is very likely to insist that even this was egoism standing on its head
+      and not on its feet, choosing to be noticed for an absurdity, rather than
+      not be noticed at all. It may be so, but this inversion of the ordinary
+      form of vanity is rare enough to be not unrefreshing, and we are very loth
+      to hand Rousseau wholly over to the pathologist before his hour has come.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      II.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      In the summer of 1754 Rousseau, in company with his Theresa, went to
+      revisit the city of his birth, partly because an exceptionally favourable
+      occasion presented itself, but in yet greater part because he was growing
+      increasingly weary of the uncongenial world in which he moved. On his road
+      he turned aside to visit her who had been more than even his birth-place
+      to him. He felt the shock known to all<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.217" id="Page_i.217">[i.217]</a></span> who cherish a vision
+      for a dozen years, and then suddenly front the changed reality. He had not
+      prepared himself by recalling the commonplace which we only remember for
+      others, how time wears hard and ugly lines into the face that recollection
+      at each new energy makes lovelier with an added sweetness. &quot;I saw
+      her,&quot; he says, &quot;but in what a state, O God, in what debasement!
+      Was this the same Madame de Warens, in those days so brilliant, to whom
+      the priest of Pontverre had sent me! How my heart was torn by the sight!&quot;
+      Alas, as has been said with a truth that daily experience proves to those
+      whom pity and self-knowledge have made most indulgent, as to those whom
+      pinched maxims have made most rigorous,&#8212;<i>morality is the nature of
+      things</i>.<a name="FNanchor233" id="FNanchor233"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_233">[233]</a> We may have a humane tenderness for our
+      Manon Lescaut, but we have a deep presentiment all the time that the poor
+      soul must die in a penal settlement. It is partly a question of time;
+      whether death comes fast enough to sweep you out of reach of the penalties
+      which the nature of things may appoint, but which in their fiercest shape
+      are mostly of the loitering kind. Death was unkind to Madame de Warens,
+      and the unhappy creature lived long enough to find that morality does mean
+      something after all; that the old hoary world has not fixed on prudence in
+      the outlay of money as a good thing, out of avarice or pedantic dryness of
+      heart; nor on some continence and order in the relations of men and<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.218" id="Page_i.218">[i.218]</a></span>
+      women as a good thing, out of cheerless grudge to the body, but because
+      the breach of such virtues is ever in the long run deadly to mutual trust,
+      to strength, to freedom, to collectedness, which are the reserve of
+      humanity against days of ordeal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rousseau says that he tried hard to prevail upon his fallen benefactress
+      to leave Savoy, to come and take up her abode peacefully with him, while
+      he and Theresa would devote their days to making her happy. He had not
+      forgotten her in the little glimpse of prosperity; he had sent her money
+      when he had it.<a name="FNanchor234" id="FNanchor234"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_234">[234]</a> She was sunk in indigence, for her pension
+      had long been forestalled, but still she refused to change her home. While
+      Rousseau was at Geneva she came to see him. &quot;She lacked money to
+      complete her journey; I had not enough about me; I sent it to her an hour
+      afterwards by Theresa. Poor Maman! Let me relate this trait of her heart.
+      The only trinket she had left was a small ring; she took it from her
+      finger to place it on Theresa's, who instantly put it back, as she kissed
+      the noble hand and bathed it with her tears.&quot; In after years he
+      poured bitter reproaches upon himself for not quitting all to attach his
+      lot to hers until her last hour, and he professes always to have been
+      haunted by the liveliest and most enduring remorse.<a name="FNanchor235"
+      id="FNanchor235"></a><a href="#Footnote_235">[235]</a> Here is the worst
+      of measuring duty by sensation instead of principle; if the sensations
+      happen not to be in right order at the critical moment, the chance goes
+      by, never to return, and then, as memory<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.219" id="Page_i.219">[i.219]</a></span> in the best of such
+      temperaments is long though not without intermittence, old sentiment
+      revives and drags the man into a burning pit. Rousseau appears not to have
+      seen her again, but the thought of her remained with him to the end, like
+      a soft vesture fragrant with something of the sweet mysterious perfume of
+      many-scented night in the silent garden at Charmettes. She died in a hovel
+      eight years after this, sunk in disease, misery, and neglect, and was put
+      away in the cemetery on the heights above Chamb&#233;ri.<a
+      name="FNanchor236" id="FNanchor236"></a><a href="#Footnote_236">[236]</a>
+      Rousseau consoled himself with thoughts of another world that should
+      reunite him to her and be the dawn of new happiness; like a man who should
+      illusorily confound the last glistening of a wintry sunset seen through
+      dark yew-branches, with the broad-beaming strength of the summer morning.
+      &quot;If I thought,&quot; he said, &quot;that I should not see her in the
+      other life, my poor imagination would shrink from the idea of perfect
+      bliss, which I would fain promise myself in it.&quot;<a name="FNanchor237"
+      id="FNanchor237"></a><a href="#Footnote_237">[237]</a> To pluck so
+      gracious a flower of hope on the edge of the sombre unechoing gulf of
+      nothingness into which our friend has slid silently down, is a natural
+      impulse of the sensitive soul, numbing remorse and giving a moment's
+      relief to the hunger and thirst of a tenderness that has been robbed of
+      its object. Yet would<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.220"
+      id="Page_i.220">[i.220]</a></span> not men be more likely to have a deeper
+      love for those about them, and a keener dread of filling a house with
+      aching hearts, if they courageously realised from the beginning of their
+      days that we have none of this perfect companionable bliss to promise
+      ourselves in other worlds, that the black and horrible grave is indeed the
+      end of our communion, and that we know one another no more?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The first interview between Rousseau and Madame de Warens was followed by
+      his ludicrous conversion to Catholicism (1728); the last was contemporary
+      with his re-conversion to the faith in which he had been reared. The sight
+      of Geneva gave new fire to his Republican enthusiasm; he surrendered
+      himself to transports of patriotic zeal. The thought of the Parisian world
+      that he had left behind, its frivolity, its petulance, its disputation
+      over all things in heaven and on the earth, its profound deadness to all
+      civic activity, quickened his admiration for the simple, industrious, and
+      independent community from which he never forgot that he was sprung. But
+      no Catholic could enjoy the rights of citizenship. So Rousseau proceeded
+      to reflect that the Gospel is the same for all Christians, and the
+      substance of dogma only differs, because people interposed with
+      explanations of what they could not understand; that therefore it is in
+      each country the business of the sovereign to fix both the worship and the
+      amount and quality of unintelligible dogma; that consequently it is the
+      citizen's duty to admit the dogma, and follow the worship by law<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.221" id="Page_i.221">[i.221]</a></span>
+      appointed. &quot;The society of the Encyclop&#230;dists, far from shaking
+      my faith, had confirmed it by my natural aversion for partisanship and
+      controversy. The reading of the Bible, especially of the Gospel, to which
+      I had applied myself for several years, had made me despise the low and
+      childish interpretation put upon the words of Christ by the people who
+      were least worthy to understand him. In a word, philosophy by drawing me
+      towards the essential in religion, had drawn me away from that stupid mass
+      of trivial formulas with which men had overlaid and darkened it.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor238" id="FNanchor238"></a><a href="#Footnote_238">[238]</a>
+      We may be sure that if Rousseau had a strong inclination towards a given
+      course of action, he would have no difficulty in putting his case in a
+      blaze of the brightest light, and surrounding it with endless emblems and
+      devices of superlative conviction. In short, he submitted himself
+      faithfully to the instruction of the pastor of his parish; was closely
+      catechised by a commission of members of the consistory; received from
+      them a certificate that he had satisfied the requirements of doctrine in
+      all points; was received to partake of the Communion, and finally restored
+      to all his rights as a citizen.<a name="FNanchor239" id="FNanchor239"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_239">[239]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This was no farce, such as Voltaire played now and again at the expense of
+      an unhappy bishop or unhappier parish priest; nor such as Rousseau himself
+      had played six-and-twenty years before, at the expense of those honest
+      Catholics of Turin whose helpful dona<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.222" id="Page_i.222">[i.222]</a></span>tion of twenty francs
+      had marked their enthusiasm over a soul that had been lost and was found
+      again. He was never a Catholic, any more than he was ever an atheist, and
+      if it might be said in one sense that he was no more a Protestant than he
+      was either of these two, yet he was emphatically the child of
+      Protestantism. It is hardly too much to say that one bred in Catholic
+      tradition and observance, accustomed to think of the whole life of men as
+      only a manifestation of the unbroken life of the Church, and of all the
+      several communities of men as members of that great organisation which
+      binds one order to another, and each generation to those that have gone
+      before and those that come after, would never have dreamed that monstrous
+      dream of a state of nature as a state of perfection. He would never have
+      held up to ridicule and hate the idea of society as an organism with
+      normal parts and conditions of growth, and never have left the spirit of
+      man standing in bald isolation from history, from his fellows, from a
+      Church, from a mediator, face to face with the great vague phantasm. Nor,
+      on the other hand, is it likely that one born and reared in the religious
+      school of authority with its elaborately disciplined hierarchy, would have
+      conceived that passion for political freedom, that zeal for the rights of
+      peoples against rulers, that energetic enthusiasm for a free life, which
+      constituted the fire and essence of Rousseau's writing. As illustration of
+      this, let us remark how Rousseau's teaching fared when it fell upon a
+      Catholic country like France: so<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.223"
+      id="Page_i.223">[i.223]</a></span> many of its principles were assimilated
+      by the revolutionary schools as were wanted for violent dissolvents, while
+      the rest dropped away, and in this rejected portion was precisely the most
+      vital part of his system. In other words, in no country has the power of
+      collective organisation been so pressed and exalted as in revolutionised
+      France, and in no country has the free life of the individual been made to
+      count for so little. With such force does the ancient system of temporal
+      and spiritual organisation reign in the minds of those who think most
+      confidently that they have cast it wholly out of them. The use of reason
+      may lead a man far, but it is the past that has cut the groove.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In re-embracing the Protestant confession, therefore, Rousseau was not
+      leaving Catholicism, to which he had never really passed over; he was only
+      undergoing in entire gravity of spirit a formality which reconciled him
+      with his native city, and reunited those strands of spiritual connection
+      with it which had never been more than superficially parted. There can be
+      little doubt that the four months which he spent in Geneva in 1754 marked
+      a very critical time in the formation of some of the most memorable of his
+      opinions. He came from Paris full of inarticulate and smouldering
+      resentment against the irreverence and denial of the materialistic circle
+      which used to meet at the house of D'Holbach. What sort of opinions he
+      found prevailing among the most enlightened of the Genevese pastors we
+      know from an abundance of sources. D'Alembert had three or four years
+      later<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.224" id="Page_i.224">[i.224]</a></span>
+      than this to suffer a bitter attack from them, but the account of the
+      creed of some of the ministers which he gave in his article on Geneva in
+      the Encyclopedia, was substantially correct. &quot;Many of them,&quot; he
+      wrote, &quot;have ceased to believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ. Hell,
+      one of the principal points in our belief, is no longer one with many of
+      the Genevese pastors, who contend that it is an insult to the Divinity to
+      imagine that a being full of goodness and justice can be capable of
+      punishing our faults by an eternity of torment. In a word, they have no
+      other creed than pure Socinianism, rejecting everything that they call
+      mysteries, and supposing the first principle of a true religion to be that
+      it shall propose nothing for belief which clashes with reason. Religion
+      here is almost reduced to the adoration of one single God, at least among
+      nearly all who do not belong to the common people; and a certain respect
+      for Jesus Christ and the Scriptures is nearly the only thing that
+      distinguishes the Christianity of Geneva from pure Deism.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor240" id="FNanchor240"></a><a href="#Footnote_240">[240]</a>
+      And it would be easy to trace the growth of these rationalising
+      tendencies. Throughout the seventeenth century men sprang up who
+      anticipated some of the rationalistic arguments of the eighteenth, in
+      denying<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.225" id="Page_i.225">[i.225]</a></span>
+      the Trinity, and so forth,<a name="FNanchor241" id="FNanchor241"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_241">[241]</a> but the time was not then ripe. The general
+      conditions grew more favourable. Burnet, who was at Geneva in 1685-6, says
+      that though there were not many among the Genevese of the first form of
+      learning, &quot;yet almost everybody here has a good tincture of a learned
+      education.&quot;<a name="FNanchor242" id="FNanchor242"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_242">[242]</a> The pacification of civic troubles in 1738
+      was followed by a quarter of a century of extreme prosperity and
+      contentment, and it is in such periods that the minds of men previously
+      trained are wont to turn to the great matters of speculation. There was at
+      all times a constant communication, both public and private, going on
+      between Geneva and Holland, as was only natural between the two chief
+      Protestant centres of the Continent. The controversy of the seventeenth
+      century between the two churches was as keenly followed in Geneva as at
+      Leyden, and there is more than one Genevese writer who deserves a place in
+      the history of the transition in the beginning of the eighteenth century
+      from theology proper to that metaphysical theology, which was the first
+      marked dissolvent of dogma within the Protestant bodies. To this general
+      movement of the epoch, of course, Descartes supplied the first impulse.
+      The leader of the movement in Geneva, that is of an attempt to pacify the
+      Christian churches on the basis of some such Deism as was shortly to find
+      its passionate ex<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.226" id="Page_i.226">[i.226]</a></span>pression
+      in the Savoyard Vicar's Confession of Faith, was John Alphonse Turretini
+      (1661-1737). He belonged to a family of Italian refugees from Lucca, and
+      his grandfather had been sent on a mission to Holland for aid in defence
+      of Geneva against Catholic Savoy. He went on his travels in 1692; he
+      visited Holland, where he saw Bayle, and England, where he saw Newton, and
+      France, where he saw Bossuet. Chouet initiated him into the mysteries of
+      Descartes. All this bore fruit when he returned home, and his eloquent
+      exposition of rationalistic ideas aroused the usual cry of heresy from the
+      people who justly insist that Deism is not Christianity. There was much
+      stir for many years, but he succeeded in holding his own and in finding
+      many considerable followers.<a name="FNanchor243" id="FNanchor243"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_243">[243]</a> For example, some three years or so after
+      his death, a work appeared in Geneva under the title of <i>La Religion
+      Essentielle a l'Homme</i>, showing that faith in the existence of a God
+      suffices, and treating<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.227"
+      id="Page_i.227">[i.227]</a></span> with contempt the belief in the
+      inspiration of the Gospels.<a name="FNanchor244" id="FNanchor244"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_244">[244]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thus we see what vein of thought was running through the graver and more
+      active minds of Geneva about the time of Rousseau's visit. Whether it be
+      true or not that the accepted belief of many of the preachers was a pure
+      Deism, it is certain that the theory was fully launched among them, and
+      that those who could not accept it were still pressed to refute it, and in
+      refuting, to discuss. Rousseau's friendships were according to his own
+      account almost entirely among the ministers of religion and the professors
+      of the academy, precisely the sort of persons who would be most sure to
+      familiarise him, in the course of frequent conversations, with the current
+      religious ideas and the arguments by which they were opposed or upheld. We
+      may picture the effect on his mind of the difference in tone and temper in
+      these grave, candid, and careful men, and the tone of his Parisian friends
+      in discussing the same high themes; how this difference would strengthen
+      his repugnance, and corroborate his own inborn spirit of veneration; how
+      he would here feel himself in his own world. For as wise men have noticed,
+      it is not so much difference of opinion that stirs resentment in us, at
+      least in great subjects where the difference is not trivial but profound,
+      as difference in gravity of humour and manner of moral approach. He
+      returned to Paris (Oct. 1754) warm with the resolution to give up his
+      concerns<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.228" id="Page_i.228">[i.228]</a></span>
+      there, and in the spring go back once and for all to the city of liberty
+      and virtue, where men revered wisdom and reason instead of wasting life in
+      the frivolities of literary dialectic.<a name="FNanchor245"
+      id="FNanchor245"></a><a href="#Footnote_245">[245]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The project, however, grew cool. The dedication of his Discourse on
+      Inequality to the Republic was received with indifference by some and
+      indignation by others.<a name="FNanchor246" id="FNanchor246"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_246">[246]</a> Nobody thought it a compliment, and some
+      thought it an impertinence. This was one reason which turned his purpose
+      aside. Another was the fact that the illustrious Voltaire now also signed
+      himself Swiss, and boasted that if he shook his wig the powder flew over
+      the whole of the tiny Republic. Rousseau felt certain that Voltaire would
+      make a revolution in Geneva, and that he should find in his native country
+      the tone, the air, the manners which were driving him from Paris. From
+      that moment he counted Geneva lost. Perhaps he ought to make head against
+      the disturber, but what could he do alone, timid and bad talker as he was,
+      against a man arrogant, rich, supported by the credit of the great, of
+      brilliant eloquence, and already the very idol of women and young men?<a
+      name="FNanchor247" id="FNanchor247"></a><a href="#Footnote_247">[247]</a>
+      Perhaps it would not be uncharitable to suspect that this was a reason
+      after the event, for no man was ever so fond as Rousseau, or so clever a
+      master in the art, of covering an accident in a fine envelope of
+      principle, and, as we shall see,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.229"
+      id="Page_i.229">[i.229]</a></span> he was at this time writing to Voltaire
+      in strains of effusive panegyric. In this case he almost tells us that the
+      one real reason why he did not return to Geneva was that he found a
+      shelter from Paris close at hand. Even before then he had begun to
+      conceive characteristic doubts whether his fellow-citizens at Geneva would
+      not be nearly as hostile to his love of living solitarily and after his
+      own fashion as the good people of Paris.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rousseau has told us a pretty story, how one day he and Madame d'Epinay
+      wandering about the park came upon a dilapidated lodge surrounded by fruit
+      gardens, in the skirts of the forest of Montmorency; how he exclaimed in
+      delight at its solitary charm that here was the very place of refuge made
+      for him; and how on a second visit he found that his good friend had in
+      the interval had the old lodge pulled down, and replaced by a pretty
+      cottage exactly arranged for his own household. &quot;My poor bear,&quot;
+      she said, &quot;here is your place of refuge; it was you who chose it,
+      'tis friendship offers it; I hope it will drive away your cruel notion of
+      going from me.&quot;<a name="FNanchor248" id="FNanchor248"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_248">[248]</a><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.230"
+      id="Page_i.230">[i.230]</a></span> Though moved to tears by such kindness,
+      Rousseau did not decide on the spot, but continued to waver for some time
+      longer between this retreat and return to Geneva.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the interval Madame d'Epinay had experience of the character she was
+      dealing with. She wrote to Rousseau pressing him to live at the cottage in
+      the forest, and begging him to allow her to assist him in assuring the
+      moderate annual provision which he had once accidentally declared to mark
+      the limit of his wants.<a name="FNanchor249" id="FNanchor249"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_249">[249]</a> He wrote to her bitterly in reply, that her
+      proposition struck ice into his soul, and that she could have but sorry
+      appreciation of her own interests in thus seeking to turn a friend into a
+      valet. He did not refuse to listen to what she proposed, if only she would
+      remember that neither he nor his sentiments were for sale.<a
+      name="FNanchor250" id="FNanchor250"></a><a href="#Footnote_250">[250]</a>
+      Madame d'Epinay wrote to him patiently enough in return, and then Rousseau
+      hastened to explain that his vocabulary needed special appreciation, and
+      that he meant by the word valet &quot;the degradation into which the
+      repudiation of his principles would throw his soul. The independence I
+      seek is not immunity from work; I am firm for winning my own bread, I take
+      pleasure in it; but I mean not to subject myself to any other duty, if I
+      can help it. I will never pledge any portion of my liberty, either for my
+      own subsistence or that of any one else. I intend to work, but at my own
+      will and pleasure, and even to do nothing, if it happens to<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.231" id="Page_i.231">[i.231]</a></span>
+      suit me, without any one finding fault except my stomach.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor251" id="FNanchor251"></a><a href="#Footnote_251">[251]</a>
+      We may call this unamiable, if we please, but in a frivolous world
+      amiability can hardly go with firm resolve to live an independent life
+      after your own fashion. The many distasteful sides of Rousseau's character
+      ought not to hinder us from admiring his steadfastness in refusing to
+      sacrifice his existence to the first person who spoke him civilly. We may
+      wish there had been more of rugged simplicity in his way of dealing with
+      temptations to sell his birthright for a mess of pottage; less of mere
+      irritability. But then this irritability is one side of soft temperament.
+      The soft temperament is easily agitated, and this unpleasant disturbance
+      does not stir up true anger nor lasting indignation, but only sends quick
+      currents of eager irritation along the sufferer's nerves. Rousseau,
+      quivering from head to foot with self-consciousness, is sufficiently
+      unlike our plain Johnson, the strong-armoured; yet persistent withstanding
+      of the patron is as worthy of our honour in one instance as in the other.
+      Indeed, resistance to humiliating pressure is harder for such a temper as
+      Rousseau's, in which deliberate endeavour is needed, than it is for the
+      naturally stoical spirit which asserts itself spontaneously and rises
+      without effort.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When our born solitary, wearied of Paris and half afraid of the too
+      friendly importunity of Geneva, at length determined to accept Madame
+      d'Epinay's offer of the Hermitage on conditions which left him an<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.232" id="Page_i.232">[i.232]</a></span>
+      entire sentiment of independence of movement and freedom from all sense of
+      pecuniary obligation, he was immediately exposed to a very copious torrent
+      of pleasantry and remonstrance from the highly social circle who met round
+      D'Holbach's dinner-table. They deemed it sheer midsummer madness, or even
+      a sign of secret depravity, to quit their cheerful world for the dismal
+      solitude of woods and fields. &quot;Only the bad man is alone,&quot; wrote
+      Diderot in words which Rousseau kept resentfully in his memory as long as
+      he lived. The men and women of the eighteenth century had no comprehension
+      of solitude, the strength which it may impart to the vigorous, the poetic
+      graces which it may shed about the life of those who are less than
+      vigorous; and what they did not comprehend, they dreaded and abhorred, and
+      thought monstrous in the one man who did comprehend it. They were all of
+      the mind of Socrates when he said to Ph&#230;drus, &quot;Knowledge is what
+      I love, and the men who dwell in the town are my teachers, not trees and
+      landscape.&quot;<a name="FNanchor252" id="FNanchor252"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_252">[252]</a> Sarcasms fell on him like hail, and the
+      prophecies usual in cases where a stray soul does not share the common
+      tastes of the herd. He would never be able to live without the incense and
+      the amusements of the town; he would be back in a fortnight; he would
+      throw up the whole enterprise within three months.<a name="FNanchor253"
+      id="FNanchor253"></a><a href="#Footnote_253">[253]</a> Amid a shower of
+      such words, springing from men's perverse blindness to the binding
+      propriety of keeping all propositions as to what<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.233" id="Page_i.233">[i.233]</a></span> is the best way of
+      living in respect of place, hours, companionship, strictly relative to
+      each individual case, Rousseau stubbornly shook the dust of the city from
+      off his feet, and sought new life away from the stridulous hum of men.
+      Perhaps we are better pleased to think of the unwearied Diderot spending
+      laborious days in factories and quarries and workshops and forges, while
+      friendly toilers patiently explained to him the structure of stocking
+      looms and velvet looms, the processes of metal-casting and wire-drawing
+      and slate-cutting, and all the other countless arts and ingenuities of
+      fabrication, which he afterwards reproduced to a wondering age in his
+      spacious and magnificent repertory of human thought, knowledge, and
+      practical achievement. And it is yet more elevating to us to think of the
+      true stoic, the great high-souled Turgot, setting forth a little later to
+      discharge beneficent duty in the hard field of his distant Limousin
+      commissionership, enduring many things and toiling late and early for long
+      years, that the burden of others might be lighter, and the welfare of the
+      land more assured. But there are many paths for many men, and if only
+      magnanimous self-denial has the power of inspiration, and can move us with
+      the deep thrill of the heroic, yet every truthful protest, even of
+      excessive personality, against the gregarious trifling of life in the
+      social groove, has a side which it is not ill for us to consider, and
+      perhaps for some men and women in every generation to seek to imitate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &#160;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <b>FOOTNOTES:</b>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_201" id="Footnote_201"></a><a href="#FNanchor201">[201]</a>
+      <i>R&#233;p. &#224; M. Bordes</i>, 163.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_202" id="Footnote_202"></a><a href="#FNanchor202">[202]</a>
+      Pictet de Sergy., i. 18.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_203" id="Footnote_203"></a><a href="#FNanchor203">[203]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, iv. 248.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_204" id="Footnote_204"></a><a href="#FNanchor204">[204]</a>
+      <i>Ib.</i> ix. 279. Also <i>Economie Politique</i>.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_205" id="Footnote_205"></a><a href="#FNanchor205">[205]</a>
+      Madame de la Popelini&#232;re, whose adventures and the misadventures of
+      her husband are only too well known to the reader of Marmontel's Memoirs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_206" id="Footnote_206"></a><a href="#FNanchor206">[206]</a>
+      The passages relating to income during his first residence in Paris
+      (1744-1756) are at pp. 119, 145, 153, 165, 200, 227, in Books vii.-ix. of
+      the <i>Confessions</i>. Rousseau told Bernardin de St. Pierre (<i>Oeuv.</i>,
+      xii. 74) that Emile was sold for 7000 livres. In the <i>Confessions</i>
+      (xi. 126), he says 6000 livres, and one or two hundred copies. It may be
+      worth while to add that Diderot and D'Alembert received 1200 livres a year
+      apiece for editing the Encyclop&#230;dia. Sterne received &#163;650 for
+      two volumes of <i>Tristram Shandy</i> in 1780. Walpole's <i>Letters</i>,
+      in. 298.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_207" id="Footnote_207"></a><a href="#FNanchor207">[207]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, viii. 154-157.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_208" id="Footnote_208"></a><a href="#FNanchor208">[208]</a>
+      <i>Ib.</i> viii. 160.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_209" id="Footnote_209"></a><a href="#FNanchor209">[209]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, viii. 160, 161.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_210" id="Footnote_210"></a><a href="#FNanchor210">[210]</a>
+      <i>Ib.</i> viii. 159.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_211" id="Footnote_211"></a><a href="#FNanchor211">[211]</a>
+      <i>R&#233;veries</i>, iii 168.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_212" id="Footnote_212"></a><a href="#FNanchor212">[212]</a>
+      <i>R&#234;veries</i>, iii. 166.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_213" id="Footnote_213"></a><a href="#FNanchor213">[213]</a>
+      See the <i>Ep&#238;tre &#224; Mdme. la Marquise du Ch&#226;telet, sur la
+      Calomnie</i>.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_214" id="Footnote_214"></a><a href="#FNanchor214">[214]</a>
+      <i>La Femme au 18i&#232;me si&#232;cle</i>, par MM. de Goncourt, p. 40.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_215" id="Footnote_215"></a><a href="#FNanchor215">[215]</a>
+      Madame d'Epinay's <i>M&#233;m.</i>, i. 295.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_216" id="Footnote_216"></a><a href="#FNanchor216">[216]</a>
+      Quoted in Goncourt's <i>Femme au 18i&#232;me si&#232;cle</i>, p. 378.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_217" id="Footnote_217"></a><a href="#FNanchor217">[217]</a>
+      <i>Ib.</i>, p. 337.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_218" id="Footnote_218"></a><a href="#FNanchor218">[218]</a>
+      Mdlle. L'Espinasse's <i>Letters</i>, ii. 89.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_219" id="Footnote_219"></a><a href="#FNanchor219">[219]</a>
+      Madame d'Epinay's <i>M&#233;m.</i>, ii. 47, 48.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_220" id="Footnote_220"></a><a href="#FNanchor220">[220]</a>
+      <i>Ib.</i>, ii. 55.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_221" id="Footnote_221"></a><a href="#FNanchor221">[221]</a>
+      <i>M&#233;m.</i>, Bk. iv. 327.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_222" id="Footnote_222"></a><a href="#FNanchor222">[222]</a>
+      <i>Corr. Lit.</i>, iii. 58.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_223" id="Footnote_223"></a><a href="#FNanchor223">[223]</a>
+      <i>Ib.</i>, 54.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_224" id="Footnote_224"></a><a href="#FNanchor224">[224]</a>
+      Madame d'Epinay's <i>M&#233;m.</i>, i. 378-381. Saint Lambert formulated
+      his atheism afterwards in the <i>Cat&#233;chisme Universel</i>.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_225" id="Footnote_225"></a><a href="#FNanchor225">[225]</a>
+      Madame d'Epinay's <i>M&#233;m.</i>, i. 443.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_226" id="Footnote_226"></a><a href="#FNanchor226">[226]</a>
+      <i>Corr.</i>, i. 317. Sept. 14, 1756.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_227" id="Footnote_227"></a><a href="#FNanchor227">[227]</a>
+      Letter to Madame de Cr&#233;qui, 1752. <i>Corr.</i>, i. 171.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_228" id="Footnote_228"></a><a href="#FNanchor228">[228]</a>
+      <i>Conf</i>,., vii. 104.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_229" id="Footnote_229"></a><a href="#FNanchor229">[229]</a>
+      The <i>Devin du Village</i> was played at Fontainebleau on October 18,
+      1752, and at the Opera in Paris in March 1753. Madame de Pompadour took a
+      part in it in a private performance. See Rousseau's note to her, <i>Corr.</i>,
+      i. 178.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_230" id="Footnote_230"></a><a href="#FNanchor230">[230]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, viii. 190.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_231" id="Footnote_231"></a><a href="#FNanchor231">[231]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, viii. 183.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_232" id="Footnote_232"></a><a href="#FNanchor232">[232]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, viii. 202; and Musset-Pathay, ii. 439. When in Strasburg, in
+      1765, he could not bring himself to be present at its representation. <i>Oeuv.
+      et Corr. In&#233;d.</i>, p. 434.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_233" id="Footnote_233"></a><a href="#FNanchor233">[233]</a>
+      Madame de Sta&#235;l insisted that her father said this, and Necker
+      insisted that it was his daughter's.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_234" id="Footnote_234"></a><a href="#FNanchor234">[234]</a>
+      <i>Corr.</i>, i. 176. Feb. 13, 1753.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_235" id="Footnote_235"></a><a href="#FNanchor235">[235]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, viii. 208-210.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_236" id="Footnote_236"></a><a href="#FNanchor236">[236]</a>
+      She died on July 30, 1762, aged &quot;about sixty-three years.&quot;
+      Arthur Young, visiting Chamb&#233;ri in 1789, with some trouble procured
+      the certificate of her death, which may be found in his <i>Travels</i>, i.
+      272. See a letter of M. de Conzi&#233; to Rousseau, in M.
+      Streckeisen-Moultou's collection, ii. 445.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_237" id="Footnote_237"></a><a href="#FNanchor237">[237]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, xii. 233.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_238" id="Footnote_238"></a><a href="#FNanchor238">[238]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, viii. 210.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_239" id="Footnote_239"></a><a href="#FNanchor239">[239]</a>
+      Gaberel's <i>Rousseau et les Genevois</i>, p. 62. <i>Conf.</i>, viii. 212.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_240" id="Footnote_240"></a><a href="#FNanchor240">[240]</a>
+      The venerable Company of Pastors and Professors of the Church and Academy
+      of Geneva appointed a committee, as in duty bound, to examine these
+      allegations, and the committee, equally in duty bound, reported (Feb. 10,
+      1758) with mild indignation, that they were unfounded, and that the flock
+      was untainted by unseasonable use of its mind. See on this Rousseau's <i>Lettres
+      &#233;crites de la Montagne</i>, ii. 231.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_241" id="Footnote_241"></a><a href="#FNanchor241">[241]</a>
+      See Picot's <i>Hist. de Gen&#232;ve</i>, ii. 415.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_242" id="Footnote_242"></a><a href="#FNanchor242">[242]</a>
+      <i>Letters containing an account of Switzerland, Italy, etc., in 1685-86.</i>
+      By G. Burnet, p. 9.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_243" id="Footnote_243"></a><a href="#FNanchor243">[243]</a>
+      J.A. Turretini's complete works were published as late as 1776, including
+      among much besides that no longer interests men, an <i>Oratio de
+      Scientiarum Vanitate et Proestantia</i> (vol. iii. 437), not at all in the
+      vein of Rousseau's Discourse, and a treatise in four parts, <i>De Legibus
+      Naturalibus</i>, in which, among other matters, he refutes Hobbes and
+      assails the doctrine of Utility (i. 173, etc.), by limiting its definition
+      to <span lang="el" title="Greek: to pros heauton">&#964;&#959; &#960;&#961;&#959;&#962;
+      &#949;&#945;&#965;&#964;&#959;&#957;</span> in its narrowest sense. He
+      appears to have been a student of Spinoza (i. 326). Francis Turretini, his
+      father, took part in the discussion as to the nature of the treaty or
+      contract between God and man, in a piece entitled <i>Foedus Natur&#230; a
+      primo homine ruptum, ejusque Proevaricationem posteris imputatam</i>
+      (1675).
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_244" id="Footnote_244"></a><a href="#FNanchor244">[244]</a>
+      Gaberel's <i>Eglise de Gen&#232;ve</i>, iii. 188.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_245" id="Footnote_245"></a><a href="#FNanchor245">[245]</a>
+      <i>Corr.</i>, i. 223 (to Vernes, April 5, 1755).
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_246" id="Footnote_246"></a><a href="#FNanchor246">[246]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, viii. 215, 216. <i>Corr.</i>, i. 218 (to Perdriau, Nov. 28,
+      1754).
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_247" id="Footnote_247"></a><a href="#FNanchor247">[247]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, viii. 218.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_248" id="Footnote_248"></a><a href="#FNanchor248">[248]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, viii. 217. It is worth noticing as bearing on the accuracy
+      of the Confessions, that Madame d'Epinay herself (<i>M&#233;m.</i>, ii.
+      115) says that when she began to prepare the Hermitage for Rousseau he had
+      never been there, and that she was careful to lead him to believe that the
+      expense had not been incurred for him. Moreover her letter to him
+      describing it could only have been written to one who had not seen it, and
+      though her Memoirs are full of sheer imagination and romance, the
+      documents in them are substantially authentic, and this letter is shown to
+      be so by Rousseau's reply to it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_249" id="Footnote_249"></a><a href="#FNanchor249">[249]</a>
+      <i>M&#233;m.</i>, ii. 116.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_250" id="Footnote_250"></a><a href="#FNanchor250">[250]</a>
+      <i>Corr.</i> (1755), i. 242.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_251" id="Footnote_251"></a><a href="#FNanchor251">[251]</a>
+      <i>Corr.</i>, i. 245.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_252" id="Footnote_252"></a><a href="#FNanchor252">[252]</a>
+      <i>Ph&#230;drus</i>, 230.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_253" id="Footnote_253"></a><a href="#FNanchor253">[253]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, viii. 221, etc.
+    </p>
+    <hr style="width: 65%;" />
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.234" id="Page_i.234">[i.234]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      <a name="CHAPTER_VII." id="CHAPTER_VII."></a>CHAPTER VII.
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      THE HERMITAGE.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <span class="smcap">It</span> would have been a strange anachronism if the
+      decade of the Encyclop&#230;dia and the Seven Years' War had reproduced
+      one of those scenes which are as still resting-places amid the ceaseless
+      forward tramp of humanity, where some holy man turned away from the world,
+      and with adorable seriousness sought communion with the divine in
+      mortification of flesh and solitude of spirit. Those were the retreats of
+      firm hope and beatified faith. The hope and faith of the eighteenth
+      century were centred in action, not in contemplation, and the few
+      solitaries of that epoch, as well as of another nearer to our own, fled
+      away from the impotence of their own will, rather than into the haven of
+      satisfied conviction and clear-eyed acceptance. Only one of them&#8212;Wordsworth,
+      the poetic hermit of our lakes&#8212;impresses us in any degree like one
+      of the great individualities of the ages when men not only craved for the
+      unseen, but felt the closeness of its presence over their heads and about
+      their feet. The modern anchorite goes forth in the spirit of the preacher
+      who declared all<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.235" id="Page_i.235">[i.235]</a></span>
+      the things that are under the sun to be vanity, not in the transport of
+      the saint who knew all the things that are under the sun to be no more
+      than the shadow of a dream in the light of a celestial brightness to come.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rousseau's mood, deeply tinged as it was by bitterness against society and
+      circumstance, still contained a strong positive element in his native
+      exultation in all natural objects and processes, which did not leave him
+      vacantly brooding over the evil of the world he had quitted. The
+      sensuousness that penetrated him kept his sympathy with life
+      extraordinarily buoyant, and all the eager projects for the disclosure of
+      a scheme of wisdom became for a time the more vividly desired, as the
+      general tide of desire flowed more fully within him. To be surrounded with
+      the simplicity of rural life was with him not only a stimulus, but an
+      essential condition to free intellectual energy. Many a time, he says,
+      when making excursions into the country with great people, &quot;I was so
+      tired of fine rooms, fountains, artificial groves and flower beds, and the
+      still more tiresome people who displayed all these; I was so worn out with
+      pamphlets, card-playing, music, silly jokes, stupid airs, great suppers,
+      that as I spied a poor hawthorn copse, a hedge, a farmstead, a meadow, as
+      in passing through a hamlet I snuffed the odour of a good chervil
+      omelette, as I heard from a distance the rude refrain of the shepherd's
+      songs, I used to wish at the devil the whole tale of rouge and furbelows.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor254" id="FNanchor254"></a><a href="#Footnote_254">[254]</a>
+      He was no anchorite proper,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.236"
+      id="Page_i.236">[i.236]</a></span> one weary of the world and waiting for
+      the end, but a man with a strong dislike for one kind of life and a keen
+      liking for another kind. He thought he was now about to reproduce the old
+      days of the Charmettes, true to his inveterate error that one may efface
+      years and accurately replace a past. He forgot that instead of the once
+      vivacious and tender benefactress who was now waiting for slow death in
+      her hovel, his house-mates would be a poor dull drudge and her vile
+      mother. He forgot, too, that since those days the various processes of
+      intellectual life had expanded within him, and produced a busy
+      fermentation which makes a man's surroundings very critical. Finally, he
+      forgot that in proportion as a man suffers the smooth course of his
+      thought to depend on anything external, whether on the greenness of the
+      field or the gaiety of the street or the constancy of friends, so comes he
+      nearer to chance of making shipwreck. Hence his tragedy, though the very
+      root of the tragedy lay deeper,&#8212;in temperament.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      I.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      Rousseau's impatience drove him into the country almost before the walls
+      of his little house were dry (April 9, 1756). &quot;Although it was cold,
+      and snow still lay upon the ground, the earth began to show signs of life;
+      violets and primroses were to be seen; the buds on the trees were
+      beginning to shoot; and the very night of my arrival was marked by the
+      first<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.237" id="Page_i.237">[i.237]</a></span>
+      song of the nightingale. I heard it close to my window in a wood that
+      touched the house. After a light sleep I awoke, forgetting that I was
+      transplanted; I thought myself still in the Rue de Grenelle, when in an
+      instant the warbling of the birds made me thrill with delight. My very
+      first care was to surrender myself to the impression of the rustic objects
+      about me. Instead of beginning by arranging things inside my quarters, I
+      first set about planning my walks, and there was not a path nor a copse
+      nor a grove round my cottage which I had not found out before the end of
+      the next day. The place, which was lonely rather than wild, transported me
+      in fancy to the end of the world, and no one could ever have dreamed that
+      we were only four leagues from Paris.&quot;<a name="FNanchor255"
+      id="FNanchor255"></a><a href="#Footnote_255">[255]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This rural delirium, as he justly calls it, lasted for some days, at the
+      end of which he began seriously to apply himself to work. But work was too
+      soon broken off by a mood of vehement exaltation, produced by the stimulus
+      given to all his senses by the new world of delight in which he found
+      himself. This exaltation was in a different direction from that which had
+      seized him half a dozen years before, when he had discarded the usage and
+      costume of politer<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.238"
+      id="Page_i.238">[i.238]</a></span> society, and had begun to conceive an
+      angry contempt for the manners, prejudices, and maxims of his time.
+      Restoration to a more purely sensuous atmosphere softened this austerity.
+      No longer having the vices of a great city before his eyes, he no longer
+      cherished the wrath which they had inspired in him. &quot;When I did not
+      see men, I ceased to despise them; and when I had not the bad before my
+      eyes, I ceased to hate them. My heart, little made as it is for hate, now
+      did no more than deplore their wretchedness, and made no distinction
+      between their wretchedness and their badness. This state, so much more
+      mild, if much less sublime, soon dulled the glowing enthusiasm that had
+      long transported me.&quot;<a name="FNanchor256" id="FNanchor256"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_256">[256]</a> That is to say, his nature remained for a
+      moment not exalted but fairly balanced. It was only for a moment. And in
+      studying the movements of impulse and reflection in him at this critical
+      time of his life, we are hurried rapidly from phase to phase. Once more we
+      are watching a man who lived without either intellectual or spiritual
+      direction, swayed by a reminiscence, a passing mood, a personality
+      accidentally encountered, by anything except permanent aim and fixed
+      objects, and who would at any time have surrendered the most deliberately
+      pondered scheme of persistent effort to the fascination of a cottage
+      slumbering in a bounteous landscape. Hence there could be no normally
+      composed state for him; the first soothing effect of the rich life of
+      forest and garden on a nature exasperated<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.239" id="Page_i.239">[i.239]</a></span> by the life of the
+      town passed away, and became transformed into an exaltation that swept the
+      stoic into space, leaving sensuousness to sovereign and uncontrolled
+      triumph, until the delight turned to its inevitable ashes and bitterness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At first all was pure and delicious. In after times when pain made him
+      gloomily measure the length of the night, and when fever prevented him
+      from having a moment of sleep, he used to try to still his suffering by
+      recollection of the days that he had passed in the woods of Montmorency,
+      with his dog, the birds, the deer, for his companions. &quot;As I got up
+      with the sun to watch his rising from my garden, if I saw the day was
+      going to be fine, my first wish was that neither letters nor visits might
+      come to disturb its charm. After having given the morning to divers tasks
+      which I fulfilled with all the more pleasure that I could put them off to
+      another time if I chose, I hastened to eat my dinner, so as to escape from
+      the importunate and make myself a longer afternoon. Before one o'clock,
+      even on days of fiercest heat, I used to start in the blaze of the sun,
+      along with my faithful Achates, hurrying my steps lest some one should lay
+      hold of me before I could get away. But when I had once passed a certain
+      corner, with what beating of the heart, with what radiant joy, did I begin
+      to breathe freely, as I felt myself safe and my own master for the rest of
+      the day! Then with easier pace I went in search of some wild and desert
+      spot in the forest, where there was nothing to show the hand of man,<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.240" id="Page_i.240">[i.240]</a></span> or
+      to speak of servitude and domination; some refuge where I could fancy
+      myself its discoverer, and where no inopportune third person came to
+      interfere between nature and me. She seemed to spread out before my eyes a
+      magnificence that was always new. The gold of the broom and the purple of
+      the heather struck my eyes with a glorious splendour that went to my very
+      heart; the majesty of the trees that covered me with their shadow, the
+      delicacy of the shrubs that surrounded me, the astonishing variety of
+      grasses and flowers that I trod under foot, kept my mind in a continual
+      alternation of attention and delight.... My imagination did not leave the
+      earth thus superbly arrayed without inhabitants. I formed a charming
+      society, of which I did not feel myself unworthy; I made a golden age to
+      please my own fancy, and filling up these fair days with all those scenes
+      of my life that had left sweet memories behind, and all that my heart
+      could yet desire or hope in scenes to come, I waxed tender even to
+      shedding tears over the true pleasures of humanity, pleasures so
+      delicious, so pure, and henceforth so far from the reach of men. Ah, if in
+      such moments any ideas of Paris, of the age, of my little aureole as
+      author, came to trouble my dreams, with what disdain did I drive them out,
+      to deliver myself without distraction to the exquisite sentiments of which
+      I was so full. Yet in the midst of it all, the nothingness of my chimeras
+      sometimes broke sadly upon my mind. Even if every dream had suddenly been
+      transformed into reality, it would not<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.241" id="Page_i.241">[i.241]</a></span> have been enough; I
+      should have dreamed, imagined, yearned still.&quot; Alas, this deep
+      insatiableness of sense, the dreary vacuity of soul that follows fulness
+      of animal delight, the restless exactingness of undirected imagination,
+      was never recognised by Rousseau distinctly enough to modify either his
+      conduct or his theory of life. He filled up the void for a short space by
+      that sovereign aspiration, which changed the dead bones of old theology
+      into the living figure of a new faith. &quot;From the surface of the earth
+      I raised my ideas to all the existences in nature, to the universal system
+      of things, to the incomprehensible Being who embraces all. Then with mind
+      lost in that immensity, I did not think, I did not reason, I did not
+      philosophise; with a sort of pleasure I felt overwhelmed by the weight of
+      the universe, I surrendered myself to the ravishing confusion of these
+      vast ideas. I loved to lose myself in imagination in immeasurable space;
+      within the limits of real existences my heart was too tightly compressed;
+      in the universe I was stifled; I would fain have launched myself into the
+      infinite. I believe that if I had unveiled all the mysteries of nature, I
+      should have found myself in a less delicious situation than that
+      bewildering ecstasy to which my mind so unreservedly delivered itself, and
+      which sometimes transported me until I cried out, 'O mighty Being! O
+      mighty Being!' without power of any other word or thought.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor257" id="FNanchor257"></a><a href="#Footnote_257">[257]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is not wholly insignificant that though he could<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.242" id="Page_i.242">[i.242]</a></span> thus expand his soul
+      with ejaculatory delight in something supreme, he could not endure the
+      sight of one of his fellow-creatures. &quot;If my gaiety lasted the whole
+      night, that showed that I had passed the day alone; I was very different
+      after I had seen people, for I was rarely content with others and never
+      with myself. Then in the evening I was sure to be in taciturn or scolding
+      humour.&quot; It is not in every condition that effervescent passion for
+      ideal forms of the religious imagination assists sympathy with the real
+      beings who surround us. And to this let us add that there are natures in
+      which all deep emotion is so entirely associated with the ideal, that real
+      and particular manifestations of it are repugnant to them as something
+      alien; and this without the least insincerity, though with a vicious and
+      disheartening inconsistency. Rousseau belonged to this class, and loved
+      man most when he saw men least. Bad as this was, it does not justify us in
+      denouncing his love of man as artificial; it was one side of an ideal
+      exaltation, which stirred the depths of his spirit with a force as genuine
+      as that which is kindled in natures of another type by sympathy with the
+      real and concrete, with the daily walk and conversation and actual doings
+      and sufferings of the men and women whom we know. The fermentation which
+      followed his arrival at the Hermitage, in its first form produced a number
+      of literary schemes. The idea of the Political Institutions, first
+      conceived at Venice, pressed upon his meditations. He had been earnestly
+      requested to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.243" id="Page_i.243">[i.243]</a></span>
+      compose a treatise on education. Besides this, his thoughts wandered
+      confusedly round the notion of a treatise to be called Sensitive Morality,
+      or the Materialism of the Sage, the object of which was to examine the
+      influence of external agencies, such as light, darkness, sound, seasons,
+      food, noise, silence, motion, rest, on our corporeal machine, and thus
+      indirectly upon the soul also. By knowing these and acquiring the art of
+      modifying them according to our individual needs, we should become surer
+      of ourselves and fix a deeper constancy in our lives. An external system
+      of treatment would thus be established, which would place and keep the
+      soul in the condition most favourable to virtue.<a name="FNanchor258"
+      id="FNanchor258"></a><a href="#Footnote_258">[258]</a> Though the treatise
+      was never completed, and the sketch never saw the light, we perceive at
+      least that Rousseau would have made the means of access to character wide
+      enough, and the material influences that impress it and produce its
+      caprices, multitudinous enough, instead of limiting them with the medical
+      specialist to one or two organs, and one or two of the conditions that
+      affect them. Nor, on the other hand, do the words in which he sketches his
+      project in the least justify the attribution to him of the doctrine of the
+      absolute power of the physical constitution over the moral habits, whether
+      that doctrine would be a credit or a discredit to his philosophical
+      thoroughness of perception. No one denies the influence of external
+      conditions on the moral habits, and Rousseau says no more than that he<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.244" id="Page_i.244">[i.244]</a></span>
+      proposed to consider the extent and the modifiableness of this influence.
+      It was not then deemed essential for a spiritualist thinker to ignore
+      physical organisation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A third undertaking of a more substantial sort was to arrange and edit the
+      papers and printed works of the Abb&#233; de Saint Pierre (1658-1743),
+      confided to him through the agency of Saint Lambert, and partly also of
+      Madame Dupin, the warm friend of that singular and good man.<a
+      name="FNanchor259" id="FNanchor259"></a><a href="#Footnote_259">[259]</a>
+      This task involved reading, considering, and picking extracts from
+      twenty-three diffuse and chaotic volumes, full of prolixity and
+      repetition. Rousseau, dreamer as he was, yet had quite keenness of
+      perception enough to discern the weakness of a dreamer of another sort;
+      and he soon found out that the Abb&#233; de Saint Pierre's views were
+      impracticable, in consequence of the author's fixed idea that men are
+      guided rather by their lights than by their passions. In fact, Saint
+      Pierre was penetrated with the eighteenth-century faith to a peculiar
+      degree. As with Condorcet afterwards, he was led by his admiration for the
+      extent of modern knowledge to adopt the principle that perfected reason is
+      capable of being made the base of all institutions, and would speedily
+      terminate all the great abuses of the world. &quot;He went wrong,&quot;
+      says Rousseau, &quot;not merely in having no other passion but that of
+      reason, but by insisting on making all men like himself, instead of taking
+      them as they are and as they will continue to be.&quot; The critic's own
+      error<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.245" id="Page_i.245">[i.245]</a></span>
+      in later days was not very different from this, save that it applied to
+      the medium in which men live, rather than to themselves, by refusing to
+      take complex societies as they are, even as starting-points for higher
+      attempts at organisation. Rousseau had occasionally seen the old man, and
+      he preserved the greatest veneration for his memory, speaking of him as
+      the honour of his age and race, with a fulness of enthusiasm very unusual
+      towards men, though common enough towards inanimate nature. The sincerity
+      of this respect, however, could not make the twenty-three volumes which
+      the good man had written, either fewer in number or lighter in contents,
+      and after dealing as well as he could with two important parts of Saint
+      Pierre's works, he threw up the task.<a name="FNanchor260" id="FNanchor260"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_260">[260]</a> It must not be supposed that Rousseau would
+      allow that fatigue or tedium had anything to do with a resolve which
+      really needed no better justification. As we have seen before, he had
+      amazing skill in finding a certain ingeniously contrived largeness for his
+      motives. Saint Pierre's writings were full of observations on the
+      government of France, some of them remarkably bold in their criticism, but
+      he had not been punished for them because the ministers always looked upon<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.246" id="Page_i.246">[i.246]</a></span>
+      him as a kind of preacher rather than a genuine politician, and he was
+      allowed to say what he pleased, because it was observed that no one
+      listened to what he said. Besides, he was a Frenchman, and Rousseau was
+      not, and hence the latter, in publishing Saint Pierre's strictures on
+      French affairs, was exposing himself to a sharp question why he meddled
+      with a country that did not concern him. &quot;It surprised me,&quot; says
+      Rousseau, &quot;that the reflection had not occurred to me earlier,&quot;
+      but this coincidence of the discovery that the work was imprudent, with
+      the discovery that he was weary of it, will surprise nobody versed in
+      study of a man who lives in his sensations, and yet has vanity enough to
+      dislike to admit it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The short remarks which Rousseau appended to his abridgment of Saint
+      Pierre's essays on Perpetual Peace, and on a Polysynodia, or Plurality of
+      Councils, are extremely shrewd and pointed, and would suffice to show us,
+      if there were nothing else to do so, the right kind of answer to make to
+      the more harmful dreams of the Social Contract. Saint Pierre's fault is
+      said, with entire truth, to be a failure to make his views relative to
+      men, to times, to circumstances; and there is something that startles us
+      when we think whose words we are reading, in the declaration that, &quot;whether
+      an existing government be still that of old times, or whether it have
+      insensibly undergone a change of nature, it is equally imprudent to touch
+      it: if it is the same, it must be respected, and if it has degenerated,
+      that is due to the force of time and<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.247" id="Page_i.247">[i.247]</a></span> circumstance, and
+      human sagacity is powerless.&quot; Rousseau points to France, asking his
+      readers to judge the peril of once moving by an election the enormous
+      masses comprising the French monarchy; and in another place, after a wise
+      general remark on the futility of political machinery without men of a
+      certain character, he illustrates it by this scornful question: When you
+      see all Paris in a ferment about the rank of a dancer or a wit, and the
+      affairs of the academy or the opera making everybody forget the interest
+      of the ruler and the glory of the nation, what can you hope from bringing
+      political affairs close to such a people, and removing them from the court
+      to the town?<a name="FNanchor261" id="FNanchor261"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_261">[261]</a> Indeed, there is perhaps not one of these
+      pages which Burke might not well have owned.<a name="FNanchor262"
+      id="FNanchor262"></a><a href="#Footnote_262">[262]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A violent and prolonged crisis followed this not entirely unsuccessful
+      effort after sober and laborious meditation. Rousseau was now to find that
+      if society has its perils, so too has solitude, and that if there is evil
+      in frivolous complaisance for the puppet-work of a world that is only a
+      little serious, so there is evil in a passionate tenderness for phantoms
+      of an imaginary world that is not serious at all. To the pure or stoical
+      soul the solitude of the forest is strength, but then the imagination must
+      know the yoke. Rousseau's imagination, in no way of the strongest either
+      as<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.248" id="Page_i.248">[i.248]</a></span>
+      receptive or inventive, was the free accomplice of his sensations. The
+      undisciplined force of animal sensibility gradually rose within him, like
+      a slowly welling flood. The spectacle does not either brighten or fortify
+      the student's mind, yet if there are such states, it is right that those
+      who care to speak of human nature should have an opportunity of knowing
+      its less glorious parts. They may be presumed to exist, though in less
+      violent degree, in many people whom we meet in the street and at the
+      table, and there can be nothing but danger in allowing ourselves to be so
+      narrowed by our own virtuousness, viciousness being conventionally
+      banished to the remoter region of the third person, as to forget the
+      presence of &quot;the brute brain within the man's.&quot; In Rousseau's
+      case, at any rate, it was no wicked broth nor magic potion that &quot;confused
+      the chemic labour of the blood,&quot; but the too potent wine of the
+      joyful beauty of nature herself, working misery in a mental structure that
+      no educating care nor envelope of circumstance had ever hardened against
+      her intoxication. Most of us are protected against this subtle debauch of
+      sensuous egoism by a cool organisation, while even those who are born with
+      senses and appetites of great strength and keenness, are guarded by
+      accumulated discipline of all kinds from without, especially by the
+      necessity for active industry which brings the most exaggerated native
+      sensibility into balance. It is the constant and rigorous social parade
+      which keeps the eager regiment of the senses from making furious rout.<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.249" id="Page_i.249">[i.249]</a></span>
+      Rousseau had just repudiated all social obligation, and he had never gone
+      through external discipline. He was at an age when passion that has never
+      been broken in has the beak of the bald vulture, tearing and gnawing a
+      man; but its first approach is in fair shapes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Wandering and dreaming &quot;in the sweetest season of the year, in the
+      month of June, under the fresh groves, with the song of the nightingale
+      and the soft murmuring of the brooks in his ear,&quot; he began to wonder
+      restlessly why he had never tasted in their plenitude the vivid sentiments
+      which he was conscious of possessing in reserve, or any of that
+      intoxicating delight which he felt potentially existent in his soul. Why
+      had he been created with faculties so exquisite, to be left thus unused
+      and unfruitful? The feeling of his own quality, with this of a certain
+      injustice and waste superadded, brought warm tears which he loved to let
+      flow. Visions of the past, from girl playmates of his youth down to the
+      Venetian courtesan, thronged in fluttering tumult into his brain. He saw
+      himself surrounded by a seraglio of houris whom he had known, until his
+      blood was all aflame and his head in a whirl. His imagination was kindled
+      into deadly activity. &quot;The impossibility of reaching to the real
+      beings plunged me into the land of chimera; and seeing nothing actual that
+      rose to the height of my delirium, I nourished it in an ideal world, which
+      my creative imagination had soon peopled with beings after my heart's
+      desire. In my continual ecstasies, I<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.250" id="Page_i.250">[i.250]</a></span> made myself drunk
+      with torrents of the most delicious sentiments that ever entered the heart
+      of man. Forgetting absolutely the whole human race, I invented for myself
+      societies of perfect creatures, as heavenly for their virtues as their
+      beauties; sure, tender, faithful friends, such as I never found in our
+      nether world. I had such a passion for haunting this empyrean with all its
+      charming objects, that I passed hours and days in it without counting them
+      as they went by; and losing recollection of everything else, I had hardly
+      swallowed a morsel in hot haste, before I began to burn to run off in
+      search of my beloved groves. If, when I was ready to start for the
+      enchanted world, I saw unhappy mortals coming to detain me on the dull
+      earth, I could neither moderate nor hide my spleen, and, no longer master
+      over myself, I used to give them greeting so rough that it might well be
+      called brutal.&quot;<a name="FNanchor263" id="FNanchor263"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_263">[263]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This terrific malady was something of a very different kind from the
+      tranquil sensuousness of the days in Savoy, when the blood was young, and
+      life was not complicated with memories, and the sweet freshness of nature
+      made existence enough. Then his supreme expansion had been attended with a
+      kind of divine repose, and had found edifying voice in devout
+      acknowledgment in the exhilaration of the morning air of the goodness and
+      bounty of a beneficent master. In this later and more pitiable time the
+      beneficent master hid himself, and creation was<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.251" id="Page_i.251">[i.251]</a></span> only not a blank
+      because it was veiled by troops of sirens not in the flesh. Nature without
+      the association of some living human object, like Madame de Warens, was a
+      poison to Rousseau, until the advancing years which slowly brought decay
+      of sensual force thus brought the antidote. At our present point we see
+      one stricken with an ugly disease. It was almost mercy when he was laid up
+      with a sharp attack of the more painful, but far less absorbing and
+      frightful disorder, to which Rousseau was subject all his life long. It
+      gave pause to what he misnames his angelic loves. &quot;Besides that one
+      can hardly think of love when suffering anguish, my imagination, which is
+      animated by the country and under the trees, languishes and dies in a room
+      and under roof-beams.&quot; This interval he employed with some
+      magnanimity, in vindicating the ways and economy of Providence, in the
+      letter to Voltaire which we shall presently examine. The moment he could
+      get out of doors again into the forest, the transport returned, but this
+      time accompanied with an active effort in the creative faculties of his
+      mind to bring the natural relief to these over-wrought paroxysms of
+      sensual imagination. He soothed his emotions by associating them with the
+      life of personages whom he invented, and by introducing into them that
+      play and movement and changing relation which prevented them from bringing
+      his days to an end in malodorous fever. The egoism of persistent invention
+      and composition was at least better than the egoism of mere unreflecting
+      ecstasy<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.252" id="Page_i.252">[i.252]</a></span>
+      in the charm of natural objects, and took off something from the violent
+      excess of sensuous force. His thought became absorbed in two female
+      figures, one dark and the other fair, one sage and the other yielding, one
+      gentle and the other quick, analogous in character but different, not
+      handsome but animated by cheerfulness and feeling. To one of these he gave
+      a lover, to whom the other was a tender friend. He planted them all, after
+      much deliberation and some changes, on the shores of his beloved lake at
+      Vevay, the spot where his benefactress was born, and which he always
+      thought the richest and loveliest in all Europe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This vicarious or reflected egoism, accompanied as it was by a certain
+      amount of productive energy, seemed to mark a return to a sort of moral
+      convalescence. He walked about the groves with pencil and tablets,
+      assigning this or that thought or expression to one or other of the three
+      companions of his fancy. When the bad weather set in, and he was confined
+      to the house (the winter of 1756-7), he tried to resume his ordinary
+      indoor labour, the copying of music and the compilation of his Musical
+      Dictionary. To his amazement he found that this was no longer possible.
+      The fever of that literary composition of which he had always such dread
+      had strong possession of him. He could see nothing on any side but the
+      three figures and the objects about them made beautiful by his
+      imagination. Though he tried hard to dismiss them, his resistance was
+      vain, and he set<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.253" id="Page_i.253">[i.253]</a></span>
+      himself to bringing some order into his thoughts &quot;so as to produce a
+      kind of romance.&quot; We have a glimpse of his mental state in the odd
+      detail, that he could not bear to write his romance on anything but the
+      very finest paper with gilt edges; that the powder with which he dried the
+      ink was of azure and sparkling silver; and that he tied up the quires with
+      delicate blue riband.<a name="FNanchor264" id="FNanchor264"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_264">[264]</a> The distance from all this to the state of
+      nature is obviously very great indeed. It must not be supposed that he
+      forgot his older part as Cato, Brutus, and the other Plutarchians. &quot;My
+      great embarrassment,&quot; he says honestly, &quot;was that I should belie
+      myself so clearly and thoroughly. After the severe principles I had just
+      been laying down with so much bustle, after the austere maxims I had
+      preached so energetically, after so many biting invectives against the
+      effeminate books that breathed love and soft delights, could anything be
+      imagined more shocking, more unlooked-for, than to see me inscribe myself
+      with my own hand among the very authors on whose books I had heaped this
+      harsh censure? I felt this inconsequence in all its force, I taxed myself
+      with it, I blushed over it, and was overcome with mortification; but
+      nothing could restore me to reason.&quot;<a name="FNanchor265"
+      id="FNanchor265"></a><a href="#Footnote_265">[265]</a> He adds that
+      perhaps on the whole the composition of the New Helo&#239;sa was turning
+      his madness to the best account. That may be true, but does not all this
+      make the bitter denunciation, in the Letter to D'Alembert, of love and of
+      all who make its repre<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.254"
+      id="Page_i.254">[i.254]</a></span>sentation a considerable element in
+      literature or the drama, at the very time when he was composing one of the
+      most dangerously attractive romances of his century, a rather indecent
+      piece of invective? We may forgive inconsistency when it is only between
+      two of a man's theories, or two self-concerning parts of his conduct, but
+      hardly when it takes the form of reviling in others what the reviler
+      indulgently permits to himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We are more edified by the energy with which Rousseau refused connivance
+      with the public outrages on morality perpetrated by a patron. M. d'Epinay
+      went to pay him a visit at the Hermitage, taking with him two ladies with
+      whom his relations were less than equivocal, and for whom among other
+      things he had given Rousseau music to copy. &quot;They were curious to see
+      the eccentric man,&quot; as M. d'Epinay afterwards told his scandalised
+      wife, for it was in the manners of the day on no account to parade even
+      the most notorious of these unblessed connections. &quot;He was walking in
+      front of the door; he saw me first; he advanced cap in hand; he saw the
+      ladies; he saluted us, put on his cap, turned his back, and stalked off as
+      fast as he could. Can anything be more mad?&quot;<a name="FNanchor266"
+      id="FNanchor266"></a><a href="#Footnote_266">[266]</a> In the miserable
+      and intricate tangle of falsity, weakness, sensuality, and quarrel, which
+      make up this chapter in Rousseau's life, we are glad of even one trait of
+      masculine robustness. We should perhaps be still more glad if the unwedded
+      Theresa were not visible in the background of this scene of high morals.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.255" id="Page_i.255">[i.255]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      II.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      The New Helo&#239;sa was not to be completed without a further extension
+      of morbid experience of a still more burning kind than the sufferings of
+      compressed passion. The feverish torment of mere visions of the air
+      swarming impalpable in all his veins, was replaced when the earth again
+      began to live and the sap to stir in plants, by the more concentred fire
+      of a consuming passion for one who was no dryad nor figure of a dream. In
+      the spring of 1757 he received a visit from Madame d'Houdetot, the
+      sister-in-law of Madame d'Epinay.<a name="FNanchor267" id="FNanchor267"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_267">[267]</a> Her husband had gone to the war (we are in
+      the year of Rossbach), and so had her lover, Saint Lambert, whose passion
+      had been so fatal to Voltaire's Marquise du Ch&#226;telet eight years
+      before. She rode over in man's guise to the Hermitage from a house not
+      very far off, where she was to pass her retreat during the absence of her
+      two natural protectors. Rousseau had seen her before on various occasions;
+      she had been to the Hermitage the previous year, and had partaken of its
+      host's homely fare.<a name="FNanchor268" id="FNanchor268"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_268">[268]</a> But the time was not ripe; the<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.256" id="Page_i.256">[i.256]</a></span>
+      force of a temptation is not from without but within. Much, too, depended
+      with our hermit on the temperature; one who would have been a very
+      ordinary mortal to him in cold and rain, might grow to Aphrodite herself
+      in days when the sun shone hot and the air was aromatic. His fancy was
+      suddenly struck with the romantic guise of the female cavalier, and this
+      was the first onset of a veritable intoxication, which many men have felt,
+      but which no man before or since ever invited the world to hear the story
+      of. He may truly say that after the first interview with her in this
+      disastrous spring, he was as one who had thirstily drained a poisoned
+      bowl. A sort of palsy struck him. He lay weeping in his bed at night, and
+      on days when he did not see the sorceress he wept in the woods.<a
+      name="FNanchor269" id="FNanchor269"></a><a href="#Footnote_269">[269]</a>
+      He talked to himself for hours, and was of a black humour to his
+      house-mates. When approaching the object of this deadly fascination, his
+      whole organisation seemed to be dissolved. He walked in a dream that
+      filled him with a sense of sickly torture, commixed with sicklier delight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      People speak with precisely marked division of mind and body, of will,
+      emotion, understanding; the division is good in logic, but its convenient
+      lines are lost to us as we watch a being with soul all blurred, body all
+      shaken, unstrung, poisoned, by erotic mania, rising in slow clouds of
+      mephitic steam from suddenly heated stagnancies of the blood, and turning
+      the reality of conduct and duty into distant unmeaning<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.257" id="Page_i.257">[i.257]</a></span> shadows. If such a
+      disease were the furious mood of the brute in spring-time, it would be
+      less dreadful, but shame and remorse in the ever-struggling reason of man
+      or woman in the grip of the foul thing, produces an aggravation of frenzy
+      that makes the mental healer tremble. Add to all this lurking elements of
+      hollow rage that his passion was not returned; of stealthy jealousy of the
+      younger man whose place he could not take, and who was his friend besides;
+      of suspicion that he was a little despised for his weakness by the very
+      object of it, who saw that his hairs were sprinkled with gray,&#8212;and
+      the whole offers a scene of moral humiliation that half sickens, half
+      appals, and we turn away with dismay as from a vision of the horrid loves
+      of heavy-eyed and scaly shapes that haunted the warm primeval ooze.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Madame d'Houdetot, the unwilling enchantress bearing in an unconscious
+      hand the cup of defilement, was not strikingly singular either in physical
+      or mental attraction. She was now seven-and-twenty. Small-pox, the
+      terrible plague of the country, had pitted her face and given a yellowish
+      tinge to her complexion; her features were clumsy and her brow low; she
+      was short-sighted, and in old age at any rate was afflicted by an
+      excessive squint. This homeliness was redeemed by a gentle and caressing
+      expression, and by a sincerity, a gaiety of heart, and free sprightliness
+      of manner, that no trouble could restrain. Her figure was very slight, and
+      there was in all her movements at once awkwardness and grace. She was<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.258" id="Page_i.258">[i.258]</a></span>
+      natural and simple, and had a fairly good judgment of a modest kind, in
+      spite of the wild sallies in which her spirits sometimes found vent.
+      Capable of chagrin, she was never prevented by it from yielding to any
+      impulse of mirth. &quot;She weeps with the best faith in the world, and
+      breaks out laughing at the same moment; never was anybody so happily born,&quot;
+      says her much less amiable sister-in-law.<a name="FNanchor270"
+      id="FNanchor270"></a><a href="#Footnote_270">[270]</a> Her husband was
+      indifferent to her. He preserved an attachment to a lady whom he knew
+      before his marriage, whose society he never ceased to frequent, and who
+      finally died in his arms in 1793. Madame d'Houdetot found consolation in
+      the friendship of Saint Lambert. &quot;We both of us,&quot; said her
+      husband, &quot;both Madame d'Houdetot and I, had a vocation for fidelity,
+      only there was a mis-arrangement.&quot; She occasionally composed verses
+      of more than ordinary point, but she had good sense enough not to write
+      them down, nor to set up on the strength of them for poetess and wit.<a
+      name="FNanchor271" id="FNanchor271"></a><a href="#Footnote_271">[271]</a>
+      Her talk in her later years, and she lived down to the year of Leipsic,
+      preserved the pointed sententiousness of earlier time. One day, for
+      instance, in the era of the Directory, a conversation was going on as to
+      the various merits and defects of women; she heard much, and then with her
+      accustomed suavity of voice contributed this light summary:&#8212;&quot;Without<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.259" id="Page_i.259">[i.259]</a></span>
+      women, the life of man would be without aid at the beginning, without
+      pleasure in the middle, and without solace at the end.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor272" id="FNanchor272"></a><a href="#Footnote_272">[272]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We may be sure that it was not her power of saying things of this sort
+      that kindled Rousseau's flame, but rather the sprightly naturalness,
+      frankness, and kindly softness of a character which in his opinion united
+      every virtue except prudence and strength, the two which Rousseau would be
+      least likely to miss. The bond of union between them was subtle. She found
+      in Rousseau a sympathetic listener while she told the story of her passion
+      for Saint Lambert, and a certain contagious force produced in him a thrill
+      which he never felt with any one else before or after. Thus, as he says,
+      there was equally love on both sides, though it was not reciprocal. &quot;We
+      were both of us intoxicated with passion, she for her lover, I for her;
+      our sighs and sweet tears mingled. Tender confidants, each of the other,
+      our sentiments were of such close kin that it was impossible for them not
+      to mix; and still she never forgot her duty for a moment, while for
+      myself, I protest, I swear, that if sometimes drawn astray by my senses,
+      still&quot;&#8212;still he was a paragon of virtue, subject to rather new
+      definition. We can appreciate the author of the New Helo&#239;sa; we can
+      appreciate the author of Emilius; but this strained attempt to confound
+      those two very different persons by combining tearful erotics with<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.260" id="Page_i.260">[i.260]</a></span>
+      high ethics, is an exhibition of self-delusion that the most patient
+      analyst of human nature might well find hard to suffer. &quot;The duty of
+      privation exalted my soul. The glory of all the virtues adorned the idol
+      of my heart in my sight; to soil its divine image would have been to
+      annihilate it,&quot; and so forth.<a name="FNanchor273" id="FNanchor273"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_273">[273]</a> Moon-lighted landscape gave a background
+      for the sentimentalist's picture, and dim groves, murmuring cascades, and
+      the soft rustle of the night air, made up a scene which became for its
+      chief actor &quot;an immortal memory of innocence and delight.&quot;
+      &quot;It was in this grove, seated with her on a grassy bank, under an
+      acacia heavy with flowers, that I found expression for the emotions of my
+      heart in words that were worthy of them. 'Twas the first and single time
+      of my life; but I was sublime, if you can use the word of all the tender
+      and seductive things that the most glowing love can bring into the heart
+      of a man. What intoxicating tears I shed at her knees, what floods she
+      shed in spite of herself! At length in an involuntary transport, she cried
+      out, 'Never was man so tender, never did man love as you do! But your
+      friend Saint Lambert hears us, and my heart cannot love twice.'&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor274" id="FNanchor274"></a><a href="#Footnote_274">[274]</a>
+      Happily, as we learn from another source, a breath of wholesome life from
+      without brought the transcendental to grotesque end. In the climax of
+      tears and protestations, an honest waggoner at the other side of the park
+      wall, urging<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.261" id="Page_i.261">[i.261]</a></span>
+      on a lagging beast launched a round and far-sounding oath out into the
+      silent night. Madame d'Houdetot answered with a lively continuous peal of
+      young laughter, while an angry chill brought back the discomfited lover
+      from an ecstasy that was very full of peril.<a name="FNanchor275"
+      id="FNanchor275"></a><a href="#Footnote_275">[275]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rousseau wrote in the New Helo&#239;sa very sagely that you should grant
+      to the senses nothing when you mean to refuse them anything. He admits
+      that the saying was falsified by his relations with Madame d'Houdetot.
+      Clearly the credit of this happy falsification was due to her rather than
+      to himself. What her feelings were, it is not very easy to see. Honest
+      pity seems to have been the strongest of them. She was idle and
+      unoccupied, and idleness leaves the soul open for much stray generosity of
+      emotion, even towards an importunate lover. She thought him mad, and she
+      wrote to Saint Lambert to say so. &quot;His madness must be very strong,&quot;
+      said Saint Lambert, &quot;since she can perceive it.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor276" id="FNanchor276"></a><a href="#Footnote_276">[276]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Character is ceaselessly marching, even when we seem to have sunk into a
+      fixed and stagnant mood. The man is awakened from his dream of passion by
+      inexorable event; he finds the house of the soul not swept and garnished
+      for a new life, but possessed by demons who have entered unseen. In short,
+      such profound disorder of spirit, though in its first stage marked by
+      ravishing delirium, never escapes a bitter<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.262" id="Page_i.262">[i.262]</a></span> sequel. When a man
+      lets his soul be swept away from the narrow track of conduct appointed by
+      his relations with others, still the reality of such relations survives.
+      He may retreat to rural lodges; that will not save him either from his own
+      passion, or from some degree of that kinship with others which instantly
+      creates right and wrong like a wall of brass around him. Let it be
+      observed that the natures of finest stuff suffer most from these forced
+      reactions, and it was just because Rousseau had innate moral
+      sensitiveness, and a man like Diderot was without it, that the first felt
+      his fall so profoundly, while the second was unconscious of having fallen
+      at all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One day in July Rousseau went to pay his accustomed visit. He found Madame
+      d'Houdetot dejected, and with the flush of recent weeping on her cheeks. A
+      bird of the air had carried the matter. As usual, the matter was carried
+      wrongly, and apparently all that Saint Lambert suspected was that
+      Rousseau's high principles had persuaded Madame d'Houdetot of the
+      viciousness of her relations with her lover.<a name="FNanchor277"
+      id="FNanchor277"></a><a href="#Footnote_277">[277]</a> &quot;They have
+      played us an evil turn,&quot; cried Madame d'Houdetot; &quot;they have
+      been unjust to me, but that is no matter. Either let us break off at once,
+      or be what you ought to be.&quot;<a name="FNanchor278" id="FNanchor278"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_278">[278]</a> This was Rousseau's first<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.263" id="Page_i.263">[i.263]</a></span>
+      taste of the ashes of shame into which the lusciousness of such forbidden
+      fruit, plucked at the expense of others, is ever apt to be transformed.
+      Mortification of the considerable spiritual pride that was yet alive after
+      this lapse, was a strong element in the sum of his emotion, and it was
+      pointed by the reflection which stung him so incessantly, that his
+      monitress was younger than himself. He could never master his own contempt
+      for the gallantry of grizzled locks.<a name="FNanchor279" id="FNanchor279"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_279">[279]</a> His austerer self might at any rate have
+      been consoled by knowing that this scene was the beginning of the end,
+      though the end came without any seeking on his part and without violence.
+      To his amazement, one day Saint Lambert and Madame d'Houdetot came to the
+      Hermitage, asking him to give them dinner, and much to the credit of human
+      nature's elasticity, the three passed a delightful afternoon. The wronged
+      lover was friendly, though a little stiff, and he passed occasional
+      slights which Rousseau would surely not have forgiven, if he had not been
+      disarmed by consciousness of guilt. He fell asleep, as we can well imagine
+      that he might do, while Rousseau read aloud his very inadequate
+      justification of Providence against Voltaire.<a name="FNanchor280"
+      id="FNanchor280"></a><a href="#Footnote_280">[280]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In time he returned to the army, and Rousseau began to cure himself of his
+      mad passion. His method, however, was not unsuspicious, for it in<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.264" id="Page_i.264">[i.264]</a></span>volved
+      the perilous assistance of Madame d'Houdetot. Fortunately her loyalty and
+      good sense forced a more resolute mode upon him. He found, or thought he
+      found her distracted, emharrassed, indifferent. In despair at not being
+      allowed to heal his passionate malady in his own fashion, he did the most
+      singular thing that he could have done under the circumstances. He wrote
+      to Saint Lambert.<a name="FNanchor281" id="FNanchor281"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_281">[281]</a> His letter is a prodigy of plausible
+      duplicity, though Rousseau in some of his mental states had so little
+      sense of the difference between the actual and the imaginary, and was
+      moreover so swiftly borne away on a flood of fine phrases, that it is hard
+      to decide how far this was voluntary, and how far he was his own dupe.
+      Voluntary or not, it is detestable. We pass the false whine about &quot;being
+      abandoned by all that was dear to him,&quot; as if he had not deliberately
+      quitted Paris against the remonstrance of every friend he had; about his
+      being &quot;solitary and sad,&quot; as if he was not ready at this very
+      time to curse any one who intruded on his solitude, and hindered him of a
+      single half-hour in the desert spots that he adored. Remembering the
+      scenes in moon-lighted groves and elsewhere, we read this:&#8212;&quot;Whence
+      comes her coldness to me? Is it possible that you can have suspected me of
+      wronging you with her, and of turning perfidious in consequence of an
+      unseasonably rigorous virtue? A passage in one of your letters shows a
+      glimpse of some such suspicion. No, no, Saint Lambert, the breast of J.J.
+      Rousseau never<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.265" id="Page_i.265">[i.265]</a></span>
+      held the heart of a traitor, and I should despise myself more than you
+      suppose, if I had ever tried to rob you of her heart.... Can you suspect
+      that her friendship for me may hurt her love for you? Surely natures
+      endowed with sensibility are open to all sorts of affections, and no
+      sentiment can spring up in them which does not turn to the advantage of
+      the dominant passion. Where is the lover who does not wax the more tender
+      as he talks to his friend of her whom he loves? And is it not sweeter for
+      you in your banishment that there should be some sympathetic creature to
+      whom your mistress loves to talk of you, and who loves to hear?&quot;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Let us turn to another side of his correspondence. The way in which the
+      sympathetic creature in the present case loved to hear his friend's
+      mistress talk of him, is interestingly shown in one or two passages from a
+      letter to her; as when he cries, &quot;Ah, how proud would even thy lover
+      himself be of thy constancy, if he only knew how much it has
+      surmounted.... I appeal to your sincerity. You, the witness and the cause
+      of this delirium, these tears, these ravishing ecstasies, these transports
+      which were never made for mortal, say, have I ever tasted your favours in
+      such a way that I deserve to lose them?... Never once did my ardent
+      desires nor my tender supplications dare to solicit supreme happiness,
+      without my feeling stopped by the inner cries of a sorrow-stricken
+      soul.... O Sophie, after moments so sweet, the idea of eternal privation
+      is too frightful for one who groans<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.266" id="Page_i.266">[i.266]</a></span> that he cannot
+      identify himself with thee. What, are thy tender eyes never again to be
+      lowered with a delicious modesty, intoxicating me with pleasure? What, are
+      my burning lips never again to lay my very soul on thy heart along with my
+      kisses? What, may I never more feel that heavenly shudder, that rapid and
+      devouring fire, swifter than lightning?&quot;<a name="FNanchor282"
+      id="FNanchor282"></a><a href="#Footnote_282">[282]</a>.... We see a
+      sympathetic creature assuredly, and listen to the voice of a nature
+      endowed with sensibility even more than enough, but with decency, loyalty,
+      above all with self-knowledge, far less than enough.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One more touch completes the picture of the fallen desperate man. He takes
+      great trouble to persuade Saint Lambert that though the rigour of his
+      principles constrains him to frown upon such breaches of social law as the
+      relations between Madame d'Houdetot and her lover, yet he is so attached
+      to the sinful pair that he half forgives them. &quot;Do not suppose,&quot;
+      he says, with superlative gravity, &quot;that you have seduced me by your
+      reasons; I see in them the goodness of your heart, not your justification.
+      I cannot help blaming your connection: you can hardly approve it yourself;
+      and so long as you both of you continue dear to me, I will never leave you
+      in careless security as to the innocence of your state. Yet love such as
+      yours deserves considerateness.... I feel respect for a union so tender,
+      and cannot bring myself to attempt to lead it to virtue along the path of
+      despair&quot; (p. 401).
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.267" id="Page_i.267">[i.267]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ignorance of the facts of the case hindered Saint Lambert from
+      appreciating the strange irony of a man protesting about leading to virtue
+      along the path of despair a poor woman whom he had done as much as he
+      could to lead to vice along the path of highly stimulated sense. Saint
+      Lambert was as much a sentimentalist as Rousseau was, but he had a certain
+      manliness, acquired by long contact with men, which his correspondent only
+      felt in moods of severe exaltation. Saint Lambert took all the blame on
+      himself. He had desired that his mistress and his friend should love one
+      another; then he thought he saw some coolness in his mistress, and he set
+      the change down to his friend, though not on the true grounds. &quot;Do
+      not suppose that I thought you perfidious or a traitor; I knew the
+      austerity of your principles; people had spoken to me of it; and she
+      herself did so with a respect that love found hard to bear.&quot; In
+      short, he had suspected Rousseau of nothing worse than being
+      over-virtuous, and trying in the interest of virtue to break off a
+      connection sanctioned by contemporary manners, but not by law or religion.
+      If Madame d'Houdetot had changed, it was not that she had ceased to honour
+      her good friend, but only that her lover might be spared a certain
+      chagrin, from suspecting the excess of scrupulosity and conscience in so
+      austere an adviser.<a name="FNanchor283" id="FNanchor283"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_283">[283]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is well known how effectively one with a germ<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.268" id="Page_i.268">[i.268]</a></span> of good principle in
+      him is braced by being thought better than he is. With this letter in his
+      hands and its words in his mind, Rousseau strode off for his last
+      interview with Madame d'Houdetot. Had Saint Lambert, he says, been less
+      wise, less generous, less worthy, I should have been a lost man. As it
+      was, he passed four or five hours with her in a delicious calm, infinitely
+      more delightful than the accesses of burning fever which had seized him
+      before. They formed the project of a close companionship of three,
+      including the absent lover; and they counted on the project coming more
+      true than such designs usually do, &quot;since all the feelings that can
+      unite sensitive and upright hearts formed the foundation of it, and we
+      three united talents enough as well as knowledge enough to suffice to
+      ourselves, without need of aid or supplement from others.&quot; What
+      happened was this. Madame d'Houdetot for the next three or four months,
+      which were among the most bitter in Rousseau's life, for then the
+      bitterness which became chronic was new and therefore harder to be borne,
+      wrote him the wisest, most affectionate, and most considerate letters that
+      a sincere and sensible woman ever wrote to the most petulant, suspicious,
+      perverse, and irrestrainable of men. For patience and exquisite sweetness
+      of friendship some of these letters are matchless, and we can only
+      conjecture the wearing querulousness of the letters to which they were
+      replies. If through no fault of her own she had been the occasion of the
+      monstrous delirium of which he never shook off the<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.269" id="Page_i.269">[i.269]</a></span> consequences, at
+      least this good soul did all that wise counsel and grave tenderness could
+      do, to bring him out of the black slough of suspicion and despair into
+      which he was plunged.<a name="FNanchor284" id="FNanchor284"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_284">[284]</a> In the beginning of 1758 there was a
+      change. Rousseau's passion for her somehow became known to all the world;
+      it reached the ears of Saint Lambert, and was the cause of a passing
+      disturbance between him and his mistress. Saint Lambert throughout acted
+      like a man who is thoroughly master of himself. At first, we learn, he
+      ceased for a moment to see in Rousseau the virtue which he sought in him,
+      and which he was persuaded that he found in him. &quot;Since then,
+      however,&quot; wrote Madame d'Houdetot, &quot;he pities you more for your
+      weakness than he reproaches you, and we are both of us far from joining
+      the people who wish to blacken your character; we have and always shall
+      have the courage to speak of you with esteem.&quot;<a name="FNanchor285"
+      id="FNanchor285"></a><a href="#Footnote_285">[285]</a> They saw one
+      another a few times, and on one occasion the Count and Countess
+      d'Houdetot, Saint Lambert, and Rousseau all sat at table together, happily
+      without breach of the peace.<a name="FNanchor286" id="FNanchor286"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_286">[286]</a> One curious thing about this meeting was
+      that it took place some three weeks after Rousseau and Saint Lambert had
+      interchanged letters on the subject of the quarrel with Diderot, in which
+      each promised the other contemptuous oblivion.<a name="FNanchor287"
+      id="FNanchor287"></a><a href="#Footnote_287">[287]</a> Per<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.270" id="Page_i.270">[i.270]</a></span>petuity
+      of hate is as hard as perpetuity of love for our poor short-spanned
+      characters, and at length the three who were once to have lived together
+      in self-sufficing union, and then in their next mood to have forgotten one
+      another instantly and for ever, held to neither of the extremes, but
+      settled down into an easier middle path of indifferent good-will. The
+      conduct of all three, said the most famous of them, may serve for an
+      example of the way in which sensible people separate, when it no longer
+      suits them to see one another.<a name="FNanchor288" id="FNanchor288"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_288">[288]</a> It is at least certain that in them
+      Rousseau lost two of the most unimpeachably good friends that he ever
+      possessed.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      III.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      The egoistic character that loves to brood and hates to act, is big with
+      catastrophe. We have now to see how the inevitable law accomplished itself
+      in the case of Rousseau. In many this brooding egoism produces a silent
+      and melancholy insanity; with him it was developed into something of
+      acridly corrosive quality. One of the agents in this disastrous process
+      was the wearing torture of one of the most painful of disorders. This
+      disorder, arising from an internal malformation, harassed him from his
+      infancy to the day of his death. Our fatuous persistency in reducing man
+      to the spiritual, blinds the biographer to the circumstance that the
+      history of a life is the history of<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.271" id="Page_i.271">[i.271]</a></span> a body no less than
+      that of a soul. Many a piece of conduct that divides the world into two
+      factions of moral assailants and moral vindicators, provoking a thousand
+      ingenuities of ethical or psychological analysis, ought really to have
+      been nothing more than an item in a page of a pathologist's case-book. We
+      are not to suspend our judgment on action; right and wrong can depend on
+      no man's malformations. In trying to know the actor, it is otherwise; here
+      it is folly to underestimate the physical antecedents of mental phenomena.
+      In firm and lofty character, pain is mastered; in a character so little
+      endowed with cool tenacious strength as Rousseau's, pain such as he
+      endured was enough to account, not for his unsociality, which flowed from
+      temperament, but for the bitter, irritable, and suspicious form which this
+      unsociality now first assumed. Rousseau was never a saintly nature, but
+      far the reverse, and in reading the tedious tale of his quarrels with
+      Grimm and Madame d'Epinay and Diderot&#8212;a tale of labyrinthine
+      nightmares&#8212;let us remember that we may even to this point explain
+      what happened, without recourse to the too facile theory of insanity,
+      unless one defines that misused term so widely as to make many sane people
+      very uncomfortable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His own account was this: &quot;In my quality of solitary, I am more
+      sensitive than another; if I am wrong with a friend who lives in the
+      world, he thinks of it for a moment, and then a thousand distractions make
+      him forget it for the rest of the day; but there<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.272" id="Page_i.272">[i.272]</a></span> is nothing to
+      distract me as to his wrong towards me; deprived of my sleep, I busy
+      myself with him all night long; solitary in my walks, I busy myself with
+      him from sunrise until sunset; my heart has not an instant's relief, and
+      the harshness of a friend gives me in one day years of anguish. In my
+      quality of invalid, I have a title to the considerateness that humanity
+      owes to the weakness or irritation of a man in agony. Who is the friend,
+      who is the good man, that ought not to dread to add affliction to an
+      unfortunate wretch tormented with a painful and incurable malady?&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor289" id="FNanchor289"></a><a href="#Footnote_289">[289]</a>
+      We need not accept this as an adequate extenuation of perversities, but it
+      explains them without recourse to the theory of uncontrollable insanity.
+      Insanity came later, the product of intellectual excitation, public
+      persecution, and moral reaction after prolonged tension. Meanwhile he may
+      well be judged by the standards of the sane; knowing his temperament, his
+      previous history, his circumstances, we have no difficulty in accounting
+      for his conduct. Least of all is there any need for laying all the blame
+      upon his friends. There are writers whom enthusiasm for the principles of
+      Jean Jacques has driven into fanatical denigration of every one whom he
+      called his enemy, that is to say, nearly every one whom he ever knew.<a
+      name="FNanchor290" id="FNanchor290"></a><a href="#Footnote_290">[290]</a>
+      Diderot said well, &quot;Too many<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.273"
+      id="Page_i.273">[i.273]</a></span> honest people would be wrong, if Jean
+      Jacques were right.&quot;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The first downright breach was with Grimm, but there were angry passages
+      during the year 1757, not only with him, but with Diderot and Madame
+      d'Epinay as well. Diderot, like many other men of energetic nature
+      unchastened by worldly wisdom, was too interested in everything that
+      attracted his attention to keep silence over the indiscretion of a friend.
+      He threw as much tenacity and zeal into a trifle, if it had once struck
+      him, as he did into the Encyclop&#230;dia. We have already seen how warmly
+      he rated Jean Jacques for missing the court pension. Then he scolded and
+      laughed at him for turning hermit. With still more seriousness he
+      remonstrated with him for remaining in the country through the winter,
+      thus endangering the life of Theresa's aged mother. This stirred up hot
+      anger in the Hermitage, and two or three bitter letters were interchanged,<a
+      name="FNanchor291" id="FNanchor291"></a><a href="#Footnote_291">[291]</a>
+      those of Diderot being pronounced by a person who was no partisan of
+      Rousseau decidedly too harsh.<a name="FNanchor292" id="FNanchor292"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_292">[292]</a> Yet there is copious warmth of friendship
+      in these very letters, if only the man to whom they were written had not
+      hated interference in his affairs as the worst of injuries. &quot;I loved
+      Diderot tenderly, I esteemed him sincerely,&quot; says Rousseau, &quot;and
+      I counted with entire confidence<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.274"
+      id="Page_i.274">[i.274]</a></span> upon the same sentiments in him. But
+      worn out by his unwearied obstinacy in everlastingly thwarting my tastes,
+      my inclinations, my ways of living, everything that concerned myself only;
+      revolted at seeing a younger man than myself insist with all his might on
+      governing me like a child; chilled by his readiness in giving his promise
+      and his negligence in keeping it; tired of so many appointments which he
+      made and broke, and of his fancy for repairing them by new ones to be
+      broken in their turn; provoked at waiting for him to no purpose three or
+      four times a month on days which he had fixed, and of dining alone in the
+      evening, after going on as far as St. Denis to meet him and waiting for
+      him all day,&#8212;I had my heart already full of a multitude of
+      grievances.&quot;<a name="FNanchor293" id="FNanchor293"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_293">[293]</a> This irritation subsided in presence of the
+      storms that now rose up against Diderot. He was in the thick of the
+      dangerous and mortifying distractions stirred up by the foes of the
+      Encyclop&#230;dia. Rousseau in friendly sympathy went to see him; they
+      embraced, and old wrongs were forgotten until new arose.<a
+      name="FNanchor294" id="FNanchor294"></a><a href="#Footnote_294">[294]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is a less rose-coloured account than this. Madame d'Epinay assigns
+      two motives to Rousseau: a desire to find an excuse for going to Paris, in
+      order to avoid seeing Saint Lambert; secondly, a wish to hear Diderot's
+      opinion of the two first parts of the New Helo&#239;sa. She says that he
+      wanted to borrow a portfolio in which to carry the manuscripts to Paris;<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.275" id="Page_i.275">[i.275]</a></span>
+      Rousseau says that they had already been in Diderot's possession for six
+      months.<a name="FNanchor295" id="FNanchor295"></a><a href="#Footnote_295">[295]</a>
+      As her letters containing this very circumstantial story were written at
+      the moment, it is difficult to uphold the Confessions as valid authority
+      against them. Thirdly, Rousseau told her that he had not taken his
+      manuscripts to Paris (p. 302), whereas Grimm writing a few days later (p.
+      309) mentions that he has received a letter from Diderot, to the effect
+      that Rousseau's visit had no other object than the revision of these
+      manuscripts. The scene is characteristic. &quot;Rousseau kept him
+      pitilessly at work from Saturday at ten o'clock in the morning till eleven
+      at night on Monday, hardly giving him time to eat and drink. The revision
+      at an end, Diderot chats with him about a plan he has in his head, and
+      begs Rousseau to help him in contriving some incident which he cannot yet
+      arrange to his taste. 'It is too difficult,' replies the hermit coldly,
+      'it is late, and I am not used to sitting up. Good night; I am off at six
+      in the morning, and 'tis time for bed.' He rises from his chair, goes to
+      bed, and leaves Diderot petrified at his behaviour. The day of his
+      departure, Diderot's wife saw that her husband was in bad spirits, and
+      asked the reason. 'It is that man's want of delicacy,' he replied, 'which
+      afflicts me; he makes me work like a slave, but I should never have found
+      that out, if he had not so drily<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.276"
+      id="Page_i.276">[i.276]</a></span> refused to take an interest in me for a
+      quarter of an hour.' 'You are surprised at that,' his wife answered; 'do
+      you not know him? He is devoured with envy; he goes wild with rage when
+      anything fine appears that is not his own. You will see him one day commit
+      some great crime rather than let himself be ignored. I declare I would not
+      swear that he will not join the ranks of the Jesuits, and undertake their
+      vindication.'&quot;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of course we cannot be sure that Grimm did not manipulate these letters
+      long after the event, but there is nothing in Rousseau's history to make
+      us perfectly sure that he was incapable either of telling a falsehood to
+      Madame d'Epinay, or of being shamelessly selfish in respect of Diderot. I
+      see no reason to refuse substantial credit to Grimm's account, and the
+      points of coincidence between that and the Confessions make its truth
+      probable.<a name="FNanchor296" id="FNanchor296"></a><a href="#Footnote_296">[296]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rousseau's relations with Madame d'Epinay were more complex, and his
+      sentiments towards her underwent many changes. There was a prevalent
+      opinion that he was her lover, for which no real foundation seems to have
+      existed.<a name="FNanchor297" id="FNanchor297"></a><a href="#Footnote_297">[297]</a>
+      Those who disbelieved that he had reached this distinction, yet made sure
+      that he had a passion for her, which may or may not have been true.<a
+      name="FNanchor298" id="FNanchor298"></a><a href="#Footnote_298">[298]</a><span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.277" id="Page_i.277">[i.277]</a></span>
+      Madame d'Epinay herself was vain enough to be willing that this should be
+      generally accepted, and it is certain that she showed a friendship for him
+      which, considering the manners of the time, was invitingly open to
+      misconception. Again, she was jealous of her sister-in-law, Madame
+      d'Houdetot, if for no other reason than that the latter, being the wife of
+      a Norman noble, had access to the court, and this was unattainable by the
+      wife of a farmer-general. Hence Madame d'Epinay's barely-concealed
+      mortification when she heard of the meetings in the forest, the private
+      suppers, the moonlight rambles in the park. When Saint Lambert first
+      became uneasy as to the relations between Rousseau and his mistress, and
+      wrote to her to say that he was so, Rousseau instantly suspected that
+      Madame d'Epinay had been his informant. Theresa confirmed the suspicion by
+      tales of baskets and drawers ransacked by Madame d'Epinay in search of
+      Madame d'Houdetot's letters to him. Whether these tales were true or not,
+      we can never know; we can only say that Madame d'Epinay was probably not
+      incapable of these meannesses, and that there is no reason to suppose that
+      she took the pains to write directly to Saint Lambert a piece of news
+      which she was writing to Grimm, knowing that he was then in communication
+      with Saint Lambert. She herself suspected that Theresa had written to
+      Saint Lambert,<a name="FNanchor299" id="FNanchor299"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_299">[299]</a> but it may be doubted whether Theresa's
+      imagination could have risen to such feat<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.278" id="Page_i.278">[i.278]</a></span> as writing to a
+      marquis, and a marquis in what would have seemed to her to be remote and
+      inaccessible parts of the earth. All this, however, has become ghostly for
+      us; a puzzle that can never be found out, nor be worth finding out.
+      Rousseau was persuaded that Madame d'Epinay was his betrayer, and was
+      seized by one of his blackest and most stormful moods. In reply to an
+      affectionate letter from her, inquiring why she had not seen him for so
+      long, he wrote thus: &quot;I can say nothing to you yet. I wait until I am
+      better informed, and this I shall be sooner or later. Meanwhile, be
+      certain that accused innocence will find a champion ardent enough to make
+      calumniators repent, whoever they may be.&quot; It is rather curious that
+      so strange a missive as this, instead of provoking Madame d'Epinay to
+      anger, was answered by a warmer and more affectionate letter than the
+      first. To this Rousseau replied with increased vehemence, charged with
+      dark and mysteriously worded suspicion. Still Madame d'Epinay remained
+      willing to receive him. He began to repent of his imprudent haste, because
+      it would certainly end by compromising Madame d'Houdetot, and because,
+      moreover, he had no proof after all that his suspicions had any
+      foundation. He went instantly to the house of Madame d'Epinay; at his
+      approach she threw herself on his neck and melted into tears. This
+      unexpected reception from so old a friend moved him extremely; he too wept
+      abundantly. She showed no curiosity as to the precise nature of<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.279" id="Page_i.279">[i.279]</a></span>
+      his suspicions or their origin, and the quarrel came to an end.<a
+      name="FNanchor300" id="FNanchor300"></a><a href="#Footnote_300">[300]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Grimm's turn followed. Though they had been friends for many years, there
+      had long been a certain stiffness in their friendship. Their characters
+      were in fact profoundly antipathetic. Rousseau we know,&#8212;sensuous,
+      impulsive, extravagant, with little sense of the difference between
+      reality and dreams. Grimm was exactly the opposite; judicious, collected,
+      self-seeking, coldly upright. He was a German (born at Ratisbon), and in
+      Paris was first a reader to the Duke of Saxe Gotha, with very scanty
+      salary. He made his way, partly through the friendship of Rousseau, into
+      the society of the Parisian men of letters, rapidly acquired a perfect
+      mastery of the French language, and with the inspiring help of Diderot,
+      became an excellent critic. After being secretary to sundry high people,
+      he became the literary correspondent of various German sovereigns, keeping
+      them informed of what<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.280"
+      id="Page_i.280">[i.280]</a></span> was happening in the world of art and
+      letters, just as an ambassador keeps his government informed of what
+      happens in politics. The sobriety, impartiality, and discrimination of his
+      criticism make one think highly of his literary judgment; he had the
+      courage, or shall we say he preserved enough of the German, to defend both
+      Homer and Shakespeare against the unhappy strictures of Voltaire.<a
+      name="FNanchor301" id="FNanchor301"></a><a href="#Footnote_301">[301]</a>
+      This is not all, however; his criticism is conceived in a tone which
+      impresses us with the writer's integrity. And to this internal evidence we
+      have to add the external corroboration that in the latter part of his life
+      he filled various official posts, which implied a peculiar confidence in
+      his probity on the part of those who appointed him. At the present moment
+      (1756-57), he was acting as secretary to Marshal d'Estr&#233;es, commander
+      of the French army in Westphalia at the outset of the Seven Years' War. He
+      was an able and helpful man, in spite of his having a rough manner,
+      powdering his face, and being so monstrously scented as to earn the name
+      of the musk-bear. He had that firmness and positivity which are not always
+      beautiful, but of which there is probably too little rather than too much
+      in the world, certainly in the France of his time, and of which there was
+      none at all in Rousseau. Above all things he hated declamation. Apparently
+      cold and reserved, he had sensibility enough underneath the surface to go
+      nearly out of his mind for love of a singer at the opera who had a
+      thrilling voice. As he did<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.281"
+      id="Page_i.281">[i.281]</a></span> not believe in the metaphysical
+      doctrine about the freedom of the will, he accepted from temperament the
+      necessity which logic confirmed, of guiding the will by constant pressure
+      from without. &quot;I am surprised,&quot; Madame d'Epinay said to him,
+      &quot;that men should be so little indulgent to one another.&quot; &quot;Nay,
+      the want of indulgence comes of our belief in freedom; it is because the
+      established morality is false and bad, inasmuch as it starts from this
+      false principle of liberty.&quot; &quot;Ah, but the contrary principle, by
+      making one too indulgent, disturbs order.&quot; &quot;It does nothing of
+      the kind. Though man does not wholly change, he is susceptible of
+      modification; you can improve him; hence it is not useless to punish him.
+      The gardener does not cut down a tree that grows crooked; he binds up the
+      branch and keeps it in shape; that is the effect of public punishment.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor302" id="FNanchor302"></a><a href="#Footnote_302">[302]</a>
+      He applied the same doctrine, as we shall see, to private punishment for
+      social crookedness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is easy to conceive how Rousseau's way of ordering himself would
+      gradually estrange so hard a head as this. What the one thought a weighty
+      moral reformation, struck the other as a vain desire to attract attention.
+      Rousseau on the other hand suspected Grimm of intriguing to remove Theresa
+      from him, as well as doing his best to alienate all his friends. The
+      attempted alienation of Theresa consisted in the secret allowance to her
+      mother and her by Grimm and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.282"
+      id="Page_i.282">[i.282]</a></span> Diderot of some sixteen pounds a year.<a
+      name="FNanchor303" id="FNanchor303"></a><a href="#Footnote_303">[303]</a>
+      Rousseau was unaware of this, but the whisperings and goings and comings
+      to which it gave rise, made him darkly uneasy. That the suspicions in
+      other respects were in a certain sense not wholly unfounded, is shown by
+      Grimm's own letters to Madame d'Epinay. He disapproved of her installing
+      Rousseau in the Hermitage, and warned her in a very remarkable prophecy
+      that solitude would darken his imagination.<a name="FNanchor304"
+      id="FNanchor304"></a><a href="#Footnote_304">[304]</a> &quot;He is a poor
+      devil who torments himself, and does not dare to confess the true subject
+      of all his sufferings, which is in his cursed head and his pride; he
+      raises up imaginary matters, so as to have the pleasure of complaining of
+      the whole human race.&quot;<a name="FNanchor305" id="FNanchor305"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_305">[305]</a> More than once he assures her that Rousseau
+      will end by going mad, it being impossible that so hot and ill-organised a
+      head should endure solitude.<a name="FNanchor306" id="FNanchor306"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_306">[306]</a> Rousseauite partisans usually explain all
+      this by supposing that Grimm was eager to set a woman for whom he had a
+      passion, against a man who was suspected of having a passion for her; and
+      it is possible that jealousy may have stimulated the exercise of his
+      natural shrewdness. But this shrewdness, added to entire want of
+      imagination and a very narrow range of sympathy, was quite enough to
+      account for Grimm's harsh judgment, without the addition of any sinister
+      sentiment. He was perfectly right in suspecting Rousseau of want of
+      loyalty to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.283" id="Page_i.283">[i.283]</a></span>
+      Madame d'Epinay, for we find our hermit writing to her in strains of
+      perfect intimacy, while he was writing of her to Madame d'Houdetot as
+      &quot;your unworthy sister.&quot;<a name="FNanchor307" id="FNanchor307"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_307">[307]</a> On the other hand, while Madame d'Epinay
+      was overwhelming him with caressing phrases, she was at the same moment
+      describing him to Grimm as a master of impertinence and intractableness.
+      As usual where there is radical incompatibility of character, an attempted
+      reconciliation between Grimm and Rousseau (some time in the early part of
+      October 1757) had only made the thinly veiled antipathy more resolute.
+      Rousseau excused himself for wrongs of which in his heart he never thought
+      himself guilty. Grimm replied by a discourse on the virtues of friendship
+      and his own special aptitude for practising them. He then conceded to the
+      impetuous penitent the kiss of peace, in a slight embrace which was like
+      the accolade given by a monarch to new knights.<a name="FNanchor308"
+      id="FNanchor308"></a><a href="#Footnote_308">[308]</a> The whole scene is
+      ignoble. We seem to be watching an unclean cauldron, with Theresa's
+      mother, a cringing and babbling crone, standing witch-like over it and
+      infusing suspicion, falsehood, and malice. When minds are thus surcharged,
+      any accident suffices to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.284"
+      id="Page_i.284">[i.284]</a></span> release the evil creatures that lurk in
+      an irritated imagination.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One day towards the end of the autumn of 1757, Rousseau learned to his
+      unbounded surprise that Madame d'Epinay had been seized with some strange
+      disorder, which made it advisable that she should start without any delay
+      for Geneva, there to place herself under the care of Tronchin, who was at
+      that time the most famous doctor in Europe. His surprise was greatly
+      increased by the expectation which he found among his friends that he
+      would show his gratitude for her many kindnesses to him, by offering to
+      bear her company on her journey, and during her stay in a town which was
+      strange to her and thoroughly familiar to him. It was to no purpose that
+      he protested how unfit was one invalid to be the nurse of another; and how
+      great an incumbrance a man would be in a coach in the bad season, when for
+      many days he was absolutely unable to leave his chamber without danger.
+      Diderot, with his usual eagerness to guide a friend's course, wrote him a
+      letter urging that his many obligations, and even his grievances in
+      respect of Madame d'Epinay, bound him to accompany her, as he would thus
+      repay the one and console himself for the other. &quot;She is going into a
+      country where she will be like one fallen from the clouds. She is ill; she
+      will need amusement and distraction. As for winter, are you worse now than
+      you were a month back, or than you will be at the opening of the spring?
+      For me, I confess that if I could not bear the coach, I<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.285" id="Page_i.285">[i.285]</a></span>
+      would take a staff and follow her on foot.&quot;<a name="FNanchor309"
+      id="FNanchor309"></a><a href="#Footnote_309">[309]</a> Rousseau trembled
+      with fury, and as soon as the transport was over, he wrote an indignant
+      reply, in which he more or less politely bade the panurgic one to attend
+      to his own affairs, and hinted that Grimm was making a tool of him. Next
+      he wrote to Grimm himself a letter, not unfriendly in form, asking his
+      advice and promising to follow it, but hardly hiding his resentment. By
+      this time he had found out the secret of Madame d'Epinay's supposed
+      illness and her anxiety to pass some months away from her family, and the
+      share which Grimm had in it. This, however, does not make many passages of
+      his letter any the less ungracious or unseemly. &quot;If Madame d'Epinay
+      has shown friend' ship to me, I have shown more to her.... As for
+      benefits, first of all I do not like them, I do not want them, and I owe
+      no thanks for any that people may burden me with by force. Madame
+      d'Epinay, being so often left alone in the country, wished me for company;
+      it was for that she had kept me. After making one sacrifice to friendship,
+      I must now make another to gratitude. A man must be poor, must be without
+      a servant, must be a hater of constraint, and he must have my character,
+      before he can know what it is for me to live in another person's house.
+      For all that, I lived two years in hers, constantly brought into bondage
+      with the finest harangues about liberty, served by twenty domestics, and
+      cleaning my own shoes every morning, overloaded with gloomy indigestion,
+      and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.286" id="Page_i.286">[i.286]</a></span>
+      incessantly sighing for my homely porringer.... Consider how much money an
+      hour of the life and the time of a man is worth; compare the kindnesses of
+      Madame d'Epinay with the sacrifice of my native country and two years of
+      serfdom; and then tell me whether the obligation is greater on her side or
+      mine.&quot; He then urges with a torrent of impetuous eloquence the
+      thoroughly sound reasons why it was unfair and absurd for him, a beggar
+      and an invalid, to make the journey with Madame d'Epinay, rich and
+      surrounded by attendants. He is particularly splenetic that the
+      philosopher Diderot, sitting in his own room before a good fire and
+      wrapped in a well-lined dressing-gown, should insist on his doing his five
+      and twenty leagues a day on foot, through the mud in winter.<a
+      name="FNanchor310" id="FNanchor310"></a><a href="#Footnote_310">[310]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The whole letter shows, as so many incidents in his later life showed, how
+      difficult it was to do Rousseau a kindness with impunity, and how little
+      such friends as Madame d'Epinay possessed the art of soothing this
+      unfortunate nature. They fretted him by not leaving him sufficiently free
+      to follow his own changing moods, while he in turn lost all self-control,
+      and yielded in hours of bodily torment to angry and resentful fancies. But
+      let us hasten to an end. Grimm replied to his eloquent manifesto somewhat
+      drily, to the effect that he would think the matter over, and that
+      meanwhile Rousseau had best keep quiet in his hermitage. Rousseau burning
+      with excitement at once conceived a thousand suspicions, wholly unable to
+      understand that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.287" id="Page_i.287">[i.287]</a></span>
+      a cold and reserved German might choose to deliberate at length, and
+      finally give an answer with brevity. &quot;After centuries of expectation
+      in the cruel uncertainty in which this barbarous man had plunged me&quot;&#8212;that
+      is after eight or ten days, the answer came, apparently not without a
+      second direct application for one.<a name="FNanchor311" id="FNanchor311"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_311">[311]</a> It was short and extremely pointed, not
+      complaining that Rousseau had refused to accompany Madame d'Epinay but
+      protesting against the horrible tone of the apology which he had sent to
+      him for not accompanying her. &quot;It has made me quiver with
+      indignation; so odious are the principles it contains, so full is it of
+      blackness and duplicity. You venture to talk to me of your slavery, to me
+      who for more than two years have been the daily witness of all the marks
+      of the tenderest and most generous friendship that you have received at
+      the hands of that woman. If I could pardon you, I should think myself
+      unworthy of having a single friend. I will never see you again while I
+      live, and I shall think myself happy if I can banish the recollection of
+      your conduct from my mind.&quot;<a name="FNanchor312" id="FNanchor312"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_312">[312]</a> A flash of manly anger like this is very
+      welcome to us, who have to thread a tedious way between morbid egoistic
+      irritation on the one hand, and sly pieces of equivocal complaisance on
+      the other. The effect on Rousseau was terrific. In a paroxysm he sent
+      Grimm's letter back to him, with three or four lines in the same key. He<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.288" id="Page_i.288">[i.288]</a></span>
+      wrote note after note to Madame d'Houdetot, in shrieks. &quot;Have I a
+      single friend left, man or woman? One word, only one word, and I can live.&quot;
+      A day or two later: &quot;Think of the state I am in. I can bear to be
+      abandoned by all the world, but you! You who know me so well! Great God!
+      am I a scoundrel? a scoundrel, I!&quot;<a name="FNanchor313"
+      id="FNanchor313"></a><a href="#Footnote_313">[313]</a> And so on, raving.
+      It was to no purpose that Madame d'Houdetot wrote him soothing letters,
+      praying him to calm himself, to find something to busy himself with, to
+      remain at peace with Madame d'Epinay, &quot;who had never appeared other
+      than the most thoughtful and warm-hearted friend to him.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor314" id="FNanchor314"></a><a href="#Footnote_314">[314]</a>
+      He was almost ready to quarrel with Madame d'Houdetot herself because she
+      paid the postage of her letters, which he counted an affront to his
+      poverty.<a name="FNanchor315" id="FNanchor315"></a><a href="#Footnote_315">[315]</a>
+      To Madame d'Epinay he had written in the midst of his tormenting
+      uncertainty as to the answer which Grimm would make to his letter. It was
+      an ungainly assertion that she was playing a game of tyranny and intrigue
+      at his cost. For the first time she replied with spirit and warmth. &quot;Your
+      letter is hardly that of a man who, on the eve of my departure, swore to
+      me that he could never in his life repair the wrongs he had done<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.289" id="Page_i.289">[i.289]</a></span>
+      me.&quot; She then tersely remarks that it is not natural to pass one's
+      life in suspecting and insulting one's friends, and that he abuses her
+      patience. To this he answered with still greater terseness that friendship
+      was extinct between them, and that he meant to leave the Hermitage, but as
+      his friends desired him to remain there until the spring he would with her
+      permission follow their counsel. Then she, with a final thrust of
+      impatience, in which we perhaps see the hand of Grimm: &quot;Since you
+      meant to leave the Hermitage, and felt you ought to do so, I am astonished
+      that your friends could detain you. For me, I don't consult mine as to my
+      duties, and I have nothing more to say to you as to yours.&quot; This was
+      the end. Rousseau returned for a moment from ignoble petulance to dignity
+      and self-respect. He wrote to her that if it is a misfortune to make a
+      mistake in the choice of friends, it is one not less cruel to awake from
+      so sweet an error, and two days before he wrote, he left her house. He
+      found a cottage at Montmorency, and thither, nerved with fury, through
+      snow and ice he carried his scanty household goods (Dec. 15, 1757).<a
+      name="FNanchor316" id="FNanchor316"></a><a href="#Footnote_316">[316]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We have a picture of him in this fatal month. Diderot went to pay him a
+      visit (Dec. 5). Rousseau was alone at the bottom of his garden. As soon as
+      he saw Diderot, he cried in a voice of thunder and<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.290" id="Page_i.290">[i.290]</a></span> with his eyes all
+      aflame: &quot;What have you come here for?&quot; &quot;I want to know
+      whether you are mad or malicious.&quot; &quot;You have known me for
+      fifteen years; you are well aware how little malicious I am, and I will
+      prove to you that I am not mad: follow me.&quot; He then drew Diderot into
+      a room, and proceeded to clear himself, by means of letters, of the charge
+      of trying to make a breach between Saint Lambert and Madame d'Houdetot.
+      They were in fact letters that convicted him, as we know, of trying to
+      persuade Madame d'Houdetot of the criminality of her relations with her
+      lover, and at the same time to accept himself in the very same relation.
+      Of all this we have heard more than enough already. He was stubborn in the
+      face of Diderot's remonstrance, and the latter left him in a state which
+      he described in a letter to Grimm the same night. &quot;I throw myself
+      into your arms, like one who has had a shock of fright: that man intrudes
+      into my work; he fills me with trouble, and I am as if I had a damned soul
+      at my side. May I never see him again; he would make me believe in devils
+      and hell.&quot;<a name="FNanchor317" id="FNanchor317"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_317">[317]</a> And thus the unhappy man who had began this
+      episode in his life with confident ecstasy in the glories and clear music
+      of spring, ended it looking out from a narrow chamber upon the sullen
+      crimson of the wintry twilight and over fields silent in snow, with the
+      haggard desperate gaze of a lost spirit.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &#160;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <b>FOOTNOTES:</b>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_254" id="Footnote_254"></a><a href="#FNanchor254">[254]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, ix. 247.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_255" id="Footnote_255"></a><a href="#FNanchor255">[255]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, ix. 230. Madame d'Epinay (<i>M&#233;m.</i>, ii. 132) has
+      given an account of the installation, with a slight discrepancy of date.
+      When Madame d'Epinay's son-in-law emigrated at the Revolution, the
+      Hermitage&#8212;of which nothing now stands&#8212;along with the rest of
+      the estate became national property, and was bought after other purchasers
+      by Robespierre, and afterwards by Gr&#233;try the composer, who paid
+      10,000 livres for it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_256" id="Footnote_256"></a><a href="#FNanchor256">[256]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, ix. 255.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_257" id="Footnote_257"></a><a href="#FNanchor257">[257]</a>
+      Third letter to Malesherbes, 364-368.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_258" id="Footnote_258"></a><a href="#FNanchor258">[258]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, ix. 239.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_259" id="Footnote_259"></a><a href="#FNanchor259">[259]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, ix. 237, 238, and 263, etc.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_260" id="Footnote_260"></a><a href="#FNanchor260">[260]</a>
+      The extract from the Project for Perpetual Peace and the Polysynodia,
+      together with Rousseau's judgments on them, are found at the end of the
+      volume containing the Social Contract. The first, but without the
+      judgment, was printed separately without Rousseau's permission, in 1761,
+      by Bastide, to whom he had sold it for twelve louis for publication in his
+      journal only. <i>Conf.</i>, xi. 107. <i>Corr.</i>, ii. 110, 128.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_261" id="Footnote_261"></a><a href="#FNanchor261">[261]</a>
+      P. 485.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_262" id="Footnote_262"></a><a href="#FNanchor262">[262]</a>
+      For a sympathetic account of the Abb&#233; de Saint Pierre's life and
+      speculations, see M. L&#233;once de Lavergne's <i>Economistes fran&#231;ais
+      du 18i&#232;me si&#232;cle</i> (Paris: 1870). Also Comte's <i>Lettres
+      &#224; M. Valat</i>, p. 73.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_263" id="Footnote_263"></a><a href="#FNanchor263">[263]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, ix. 270-274.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_264" id="Footnote_264"></a><a href="#FNanchor264">[264]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, ix. 289.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_265" id="Footnote_265"></a><a href="#FNanchor265">[265]</a>
+      <i>Ib.</i> ix. 286.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_266" id="Footnote_266"></a><a href="#FNanchor266">[266]</a>
+      D'Epinay, ii. 153.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_267" id="Footnote_267"></a><a href="#FNanchor267">[267]</a>
+      Madame d'Houdetot, (<i>b.</i> 1730&#8212;<i>d.</i> 1813) was the daughter
+      of M. de Bellegarde, the father of Madame d'Epinay's husband. Her marriage
+      with the Count d'Houdetot, of high Norman stock, took place in 1748. The
+      circumstances of the marriage, which help to explain the lax view of the
+      vows common among the great people of the time, are given with perhaps a
+      shade too much dramatic colouring in Madame d'Epinay's <i>M&#233;m.</i>, i
+      101.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_268" id="Footnote_268"></a><a href="#FNanchor268">[268]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, ix. 281.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_269" id="Footnote_269"></a><a href="#FNanchor269">[269]</a>
+      D'Epinay, ii. 246.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_270" id="Footnote_270"></a><a href="#FNanchor270">[270]</a>
+      D'Epinay, ii. 269.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_271" id="Footnote_271"></a><a href="#FNanchor271">[271]</a>
+      Musset-Pathay has collected two or three trifles of her composition, ii.
+      136-138. Heal so quotes Madame d'Allard's account of her, pp. 140, 141.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_272" id="Footnote_272"></a><a href="#FNanchor272">[272]</a>
+      Quoted by M. Girardin, <i>Rev. des Deux Mondes</i>, Sept. 1853, p. 1080.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_273" id="Footnote_273"></a><a href="#FNanchor273">[273]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, ix. 304.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_274" id="Footnote_274"></a><a href="#FNanchor274">[274]</a>
+      <i>Ib.</i> ix. 305. Slightly modified version in <i>Corr.</i>, i. 377.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_275" id="Footnote_275"></a><a href="#FNanchor275">[275]</a>
+      M. Boiteau's note to Madame d'Epinay, ii. 273.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_276" id="Footnote_276"></a><a href="#FNanchor276">[276]</a>
+      Grimm, to Madame d'Epinay, ii. 305.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_277" id="Footnote_277"></a><a href="#FNanchor277">[277]</a>
+      This is shown partly by Saint Lambert's letter to Rousseau, to which we
+      come presently, and partly by a letter of Madame d'Houdetot to Rousseau in
+      May, 1758 (Streckeisen-Moultou, i. 411-413), where she distinctly says
+      that she concealed his mad passion for her from Saint Lambert, who first
+      heard of it in common conversation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_278" id="Footnote_278"></a><a href="#FNanchor278">[278]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, ix. 311.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_279" id="Footnote_279"></a><a href="#FNanchor279">[279]</a>
+      Besides the many hints of reference to this in the Confessions, see the
+      phrenetic Letters to Sarah, printed in the <i>M&#233;langes</i>, pp.
+      347-360.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_280" id="Footnote_280"></a><a href="#FNanchor280">[280]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, ix. 337.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_281" id="Footnote_281"></a><a href="#FNanchor281">[281]</a>
+      <i>Corr.</i>, i. 398. Sept. 4, 1757.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_282" id="Footnote_282"></a><a href="#FNanchor282">[282]</a>
+      To Madame d'Houdetot. <i>Corr.</i>, i. 376-387. June 1757.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_283" id="Footnote_283"></a><a href="#FNanchor283">[283]</a>
+      Saint Lambert to Rousseau, from Wolfenbuttel, Oct. 11, 1757.
+      Streckeisen-Moultou, i. 415.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_284" id="Footnote_284"></a><a href="#FNanchor284">[284]</a>
+      These letters are given in M. Streckeisen-Moultou's first volume (pp.
+      354-414). The thirty-second of them (Jan. 10, 1758) is perhaps the one
+      best worth turning to.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_285" id="Footnote_285"></a><a href="#FNanchor285">[285]</a>
+      Streckeisen-Moultou, i. 412. May 6, 1768. <i>Conf.</i>, x. 15.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_286" id="Footnote_286"></a><a href="#FNanchor286">[286]</a>
+      <i>Ib.</i> x. 22.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_287" id="Footnote_287"></a><a href="#FNanchor287">[287]</a>
+      <i>Ib.</i> x. 18. Streckeisen, i. 422.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_288" id="Footnote_288"></a><a href="#FNanchor288">[288]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, x. 24.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_289" id="Footnote_289"></a><a href="#FNanchor289">[289]</a>
+      To Madame d'Epinay, 1757. <i>Corr.</i>, i. 362, 353. See also <i>Conf.</i>,
+      ix. 307.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_290" id="Footnote_290"></a><a href="#FNanchor290">[290]</a>
+      One of the most unflinching in this kind is an <i>Essai sur la vie et le
+      caract&#232;re de J.J. Rousseau</i>, by G.H. Morin (Paris: 1851): the
+      laborious production of a bitter advocate, who accepts the Confessions,
+      Dialogues, Letters, etc., with the reverence due to verbal inspiration,
+      and writes of everybody who offended his hero, quite in the vein of Marat
+      towards aristocrats.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_291" id="Footnote_291"></a><a href="#FNanchor291">[291]</a>
+      <i>Corr.</i>, i. 327-335. D'Epinay, ii. 165-182
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_292" id="Footnote_292"></a><a href="#FNanchor292">[292]</a>
+      D'Epinay, ii. 173.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_293" id="Footnote_293"></a><a href="#FNanchor293">[293]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, ix. 325.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_294" id="Footnote_294"></a><a href="#FNanchor294">[294]</a>
+      <i>Ib.</i>, ix. 334.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_295" id="Footnote_295"></a><a href="#FNanchor295">[295]</a>
+      <i>M&#233;m.</i>, ii. 297. She also places the date many mouths later than
+      Rousseau, and detaches the reconciliation from the quarrel in the winter
+      of 1756-1757.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_296" id="Footnote_296"></a><a href="#FNanchor296">[296]</a>
+      The same story is referred to in Madame de Vandeul's <i>M&#233;m. de
+      Diderot,</i> p. 61.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_297" id="Footnote_297"></a><a href="#FNanchor297">[297]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, ix. 245, 246.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_298" id="Footnote_298"></a><a href="#FNanchor298">[298]</a>
+      Grimm to Madame d'Epinay, ii. 259, 269, 313, 326. <i>Conf.</i>, x. 17.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_299" id="Footnote_299"></a><a href="#FNanchor299">[299]</a>
+      <i>M&#233;m.</i>, ii. 318.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_300" id="Footnote_300"></a><a href="#FNanchor300">[300]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, ix. 322. Madame d'Epinay (<i>M&#233;m.</i>, ii. 326),
+      writing to Grimm, gives a much colder and stiffer colour to the scene of
+      reconciliation, but the nature of her relations with him would account for
+      this. The same circumstance, as M. Girardin has pointed out (<i>Rev. des
+      Deux Mondes</i>, Sept. 1853), would explain the discrepancy between her
+      letters as given in the Confessions, and the copies of them sent to Grimm,
+      and printed in her Memoirs. M. Sainte Beuve, who is never perfectly master
+      of himself in dealing with the chiefs of the revolutionary schools, as
+      might indeed have been expected in a writer with his predilections for the
+      seventeenth century, rashly hints (<i>Causeries</i>, vii. 301) that
+      Rousseau was the falsifier. The publication from the autograph originals
+      sets this at rest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_301" id="Footnote_301"></a><a href="#FNanchor301">[301]</a>
+      For Shakespeare, see <i>Corr. Lit.</i>, iv. 143, etc.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_302" id="Footnote_302"></a><a href="#FNanchor302">[302]</a>
+      D'Epinay, ii. 188.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_303" id="Footnote_303"></a><a href="#FNanchor303">[303]</a>
+      D'Epinay, ii. 150. Also Vandeul's <i>M&#233;m. de Diderot</i>, p. 61.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_304" id="Footnote_304"></a><a href="#FNanchor304">[304]</a>
+      <i>M&#233;m.</i> ii. 128.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_305" id="Footnote_305"></a><a href="#FNanchor305">[305]</a>
+      P. 258. See also p. 146.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_306" id="Footnote_306"></a><a href="#FNanchor306">[306]</a>
+      Pp. 282, 336, etc.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_307" id="Footnote_307"></a><a href="#FNanchor307">[307]</a>
+      <i>Corr.</i>, i. 386. June 1757.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_308" id="Footnote_308"></a><a href="#FNanchor308">[308]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, ix. 355. For Madame d'Epinay's equally credible version,
+      assigning all the stiffness and arrogance to Rousseau, see <i>M&#233;m.</i>,
+      ii. 355-358. Saint Lambert refers to the momentary reconciliation in his
+      letter to Rousseau of Nov. 21 (Streckeisen, i. 418), repeating what he had
+      said before (p. 417), that Grimm always spoke of Mm in amicable terms,
+      though complaining of Rousseau's injustice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_309" id="Footnote_309"></a><a href="#FNanchor309">[309]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, ix. 372.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_310" id="Footnote_310"></a><a href="#FNanchor310">[310]</a>
+      <i>Corr.</i>, i. 404-416. Oct 19, 1757.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_311" id="Footnote_311"></a><a href="#FNanchor311">[311]</a>
+      Grimm to Diderot, in Madame d'Epinay's <i>M&#233;m.</i> ii. 386. Nov. 3,
+      1757.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_312" id="Footnote_312"></a><a href="#FNanchor312">[312]</a>
+      D'Epinay, ii. 387. Nov. 3.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_313" id="Footnote_313"></a><a href="#FNanchor313">[313]</a>
+      <i>Corr.</i>, i. 425. Nov. 8. <i>Ib.</i> 426.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_314" id="Footnote_314"></a><a href="#FNanchor314">[314]</a>
+      Streckeisen-Moultou, i. 381-383.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_315" id="Footnote_315"></a><a href="#FNanchor315">[315]</a>
+      <i>Ib.</i> 387. Many years after, Rousseau told Bernardin de St. Pierre (<i>Oeuv.</i>,
+      xii. 57) that one of the reasons which made him leave the Hermitage was
+      the indiscretion of friends who insisted on sending him letters by some
+      conveyance that cost 4 francs, when it might equally well have been sent
+      for as many sous.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_316" id="Footnote_316"></a><a href="#FNanchor316">[316]</a>
+      The sources of all this are in the following places. <i>Corr.</i>, i. 416.
+      Oct. 29. Streckeisen, i. 349. Nov. 12. <i>Conf.</i>, ix. 377. <i>Corr.</i>,
+      i. 427. Nov. 23. <i>Conf.</i>, ix. 381. Dec. 1. <i>Ib.</i>, ix. 383. Dec.
+      17.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_317" id="Footnote_317"></a><a href="#FNanchor317">[317]</a>
+      Diderot to Grimm; D'Epinay, ii. 397. Diderot's <i>Oeuv.</i>, xix. 446. See
+      also 449 and 210.
+    </p>
+    <hr style="width: 65%;" />
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.291" id="Page_i.291">[i.291]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      <a name="CHAPTER_VIII." id="CHAPTER_VIII."></a>CHAPTER VIII.
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      MUSIC.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <span class="smcap">Simplification</span> has already been used by us as
+      the key-word to Rousseau's aims and influence. The scheme of musical
+      notation with which he came to try his fortune in Paris in 1741, his
+      published vindication of it, and his musical compositions afterwards all
+      fall under this term. Each of them was a plea for the extrication of the
+      simple from the cumbrousness of elaborated pedantry, and for a return to
+      nature from the unmeaning devices of false art. And all tended alike in
+      the popular direction, towards the extension of enjoyment among the common
+      people, and the glorification of their simple lives and moods, in the art
+      designed for the great.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Village Soothsayer was one of the group of works which marked a
+      revolution in the history of French music, by putting an end to the
+      tyrannical tradition of Lulli and Rameau, and preparing the way through a
+      middle stage of freshness, simplicity, naturalism, up to the noble
+      severity of Gluck (1714-1787). This great composer, though a Bohemian by
+      birth, found his first appreciation in a public that<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.292" id="Page_i.292">[i.292]</a></span> had been trained by
+      the Italian pastoral operas, of which Rousseau's was one of the earliest
+      produced in France. Gr&#233;tri, the Fleming (1741-1813), who had a hearty
+      admiration for Jean Jacques, and out of a sentiment of piety lived for a
+      time in his Hermitage, came in point of musical excellence between the
+      group of Rousseau, Philidor, Duni, and the rest, and Gluck. &quot;I have
+      not produced exaltation in people's heads by tragical superlative,&quot;
+      Gr&#233;tri said, &quot;but I have revealed the accent of truth, which I
+      have impressed deeper in men's hearts.&quot;<a name="FNanchor318"
+      id="FNanchor318"></a><a href="#Footnote_318">[318]</a> These words express
+      sufficiently the kind of influence which Rousseau also had. Crude as the
+      music sounds to us who are accustomed to more sumptuous schools, we can
+      still hear in it the note which would strike a generation weary of Rameau.
+      It was the expression in one way of the same mood which in another way
+      revolted against paint, false hair, and preposterous costume as of savages
+      grown opulent. Such music seems without passion or subtlety or depth or
+      magnificence. Thus it had hardly any higher than a negative merit, but it
+      was the necessary preparation for the acceptance of a more positive style,
+      that should replace both the elaborate false art of the older French
+      composers and the too colourless realism of the pastoral comic opera, by
+      the austere loveliness and elevation of <i>Orfeo</i> and <i>Alceste</i>.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In 1752 an Italian company visited Paris, and performed at the Opera a
+      number of pieces by Pergolese, and other composers of their country. A<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.293" id="Page_i.293">[i.293]</a></span>
+      violent war arose, which agitated Paris far more intensely than the defeat
+      of Rossbach and the loss of Canada did afterwards. The quarrel between the
+      Parliament and the Clergy was at its height. The Parliament had just been
+      exiled, and the gravest confusion threatened the State. The operatic
+      quarrel turned the excitement of the capital into another channel. Things
+      went so far that the censor was entreated to prohibit the printing of any
+      work containing the damnable doctrine and position that Italian music is
+      good. Rousseau took part enthusiastically with the Italians.<a
+      name="FNanchor319" id="FNanchor319"></a><a href="#Footnote_319">[319]</a>
+      His Letter on French Music (1753) proved to the great fury of the people
+      concerned, that the French had no national music, and that it would be so
+      much the worse for them if they ever had any. Their language, so proper to
+      be the organ of truth and reason, was radically unfit either for poetry or
+      music. All national music must derive its principal characteristics from
+      the language. Now if there is a language in Europe fit for music, it is
+      certainly the Italian, for it is sweet, sonorous, harmonious, and more
+      accentuated than any other, and these are precisely the four qualities
+      which adapt a language to singing. It is sweet because the articulations
+      are not composite, because the meeting of consonants is both infrequent
+      and soft, and because a great number of the syllables being only formed of
+      vowels, frequent elisions make its pronunciation more flowing. It is
+      sonorous because most of the vowels<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.294" id="Page_i.294">[i.294]</a></span> are full, because it
+      is without composite diphthongs, because it has few or no nasal vowels.
+      Again, the inversions of the Italian are far more favourable to true
+      melody than the didactic order of French. And so onwards, with much close
+      grappling of the matter. French melody does not exist; it is only a sort
+      of modulated plain-song which has nothing agreeable in itself, which only
+      pleases with the aid of a few capricious ornaments, and then only pleases
+      those who have agreed to find it beautiful.<a name="FNanchor320"
+      id="FNanchor320"></a><a href="#Footnote_320">[320]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The letter contains a variety of acute remarks upon music, and includes a
+      vigorous protest against fugues, imitations, double designs, and the like.
+      Scarcely any one succeeds in them, and success even when obtained hardly
+      rewards the labour. As for counterfugues, double fugues, and &quot;other
+      difficult fooleries that the ear cannot endure nor the reason justify,&quot;
+      they are evidently relics of barbarism and bad taste which only remain,
+      like the porticoes of our gothic churches, to the disgrace of those who
+      had patience enough to construct them.<a name="FNanchor321"
+      id="FNanchor321"></a><a href="#Footnote_321">[321]</a> The last phrase-and
+      both Voltaire and Turgot used gothic architecture as the symbol for the
+      supreme of rudeness and barbarism&#8212;shows that even a man who seems to
+      run counter to the whole current of his time yet does not escape its
+      influence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Grimm, after remarking on the singularity of a demonstration of the
+      impossibility of setting melody<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.295"
+      id="Page_i.295">[i.295]</a></span> to French words on the part of a writer
+      who had just produced the Village Soothsayer, informs us that the letter
+      created a furious uproar, and set all Paris in a blaze. He had himself
+      taken the side of the Italians in an amusing piece of pleasantry, which
+      became a sort of classic model for similar facetiousness in other
+      controversies of the century. The French, as he said, forgive everything
+      in favour of what makes them laugh, but Rousseau talked reason and
+      demolished the pretensions of French music with great sounding strokes as
+      of an axe.<a name="FNanchor322" id="FNanchor322"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_322">[322]</a> Rousseau expected to be assassinated, and
+      gravely assures us that there was a plot to that effect, as well as a
+      design to put him in the Bastille. This we may fairly surmise to have been
+      a fiction of his own imagination, and the only real punishment that
+      overtook him was the loss of his right to free admission to the Opera.
+      After what he had said of the intolerable horrors of French music, the
+      directors of the theatre can hardly be accused of vindictiveness in
+      releasing him from them.<a name="FNanchor323" id="FNanchor323"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_323">[323]</a> Some twenty years after (1774), when Paris
+      was torn asunder by the violence of the two great factions of the
+      Gluckists and Piccinists, Rousseau retracted his opinion as to the
+      impossibility of wedding melody to French words.<a name="FNanchor324"
+      id="FNanchor324"></a><a href="#Footnote_324">[324]</a><span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.296" id="Page_i.296">[i.296]</a></span> He went as often as
+      he could to hear the works both of Gr&#233;tri and Gluck, and <i>Orfeo</i>
+      delighted him, while the <i>Fausse magie</i> of the former moved him to
+      say to the composer, &quot;Your music stirs sweet sensations to which I
+      thought my heart had long been closed.&quot;<a name="FNanchor325"
+      id="FNanchor325"></a><a href="#Footnote_325">[325]</a> This being so, and
+      life being as brief as art is long, we need not further examine the
+      controversy. It may be worth adding that Rousseau wrote some of the
+      articles on music for the Encyclop&#230;dia, and that in 1767 he published
+      a not inconsiderable Musical Dictionary of his own.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His scheme of a new musical notation and the principles on which he
+      defended it are worth attention, because some of the ideas are now
+      accepted as the base of a well-known and growing system of musical
+      instruction. The aim of the scheme, let us say to begin with, was at once
+      practical and popular; to reduce the difficulty of learning music to the
+      lowest possible point, and so to bring the most delightful of the arts
+      within the reach of the largest possible number of people. Hence, although
+      he maintains the fitness of his scheme for instrumental as well as vocal<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.297" id="Page_i.297">[i.297]</a></span>
+      performances, it is clearly the latter which he has most at heart,
+      evidently for the reason that this is the kind of music most accessible to
+      the thousands, and it was always the thousands of whom Rousseau thought.
+      This is the true distinction of music, it is for the people; and the best
+      musical notation is that which best enables persons to sing at sight. The
+      difficulty of the old notation had come practically before him as a
+      teacher. The quantity of details which the pupil was forced to commit to
+      memory before being able to sing from the open book, struck him then as
+      the chief obstacle to anything like facility in performance, and without
+      some of this facility he rightly felt that music must remain a luxury for
+      the few. So genuine was his interest in the matter, that he was not very
+      careful to fight for the originality of his own scheme. Our present
+      musical signs, he said, are so imperfect and so inconvenient that it is no
+      wonder that several persons have tried to re-cast or amend them; nor is it
+      any wonder that some of them should have hit upon the same device in
+      selecting the signs most natural and proper, such as numerical figures. As
+      much, however, depends on the way of dealing with these figures, as with
+      their adoption, and here he submitted that his own plan was as novel as it
+      was advantageous.<a name="FNanchor326" id="FNanchor326"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_326">[326]</a> Thus we have to bear in mind that
+      Rousseau's scheme was above all things a practical device, contrived for
+      making the teach<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.298" id="Page_i.298">[i.298]</a></span>ing
+      and the learning of musical elements an easier process.<a
+      name="FNanchor327" id="FNanchor327"></a><a href="#Footnote_327">[327]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The chief element of the project consists in the substitution of a
+      relative series of notes or symbols in place of an absolute series. In the
+      common notation any given note, say the A of the treble clef, is uniformly
+      represented by the same symbol, namely, the position of second space in
+      the clef, whatever key it may belong to. Rousseau, insisting on the
+      varying quality impressed on any tone of a given pitch by the key-note of
+      the scale to which it belongs, protested against the same name being given
+      to the tone, however the quality of it might vary. Thus Re or D, which is
+      the second tone in the key of C, ought, according to him, to have a
+      different name when found as the fifth in the key of G, and in every case
+      the name should at once indicate the interval of a tone from its key-note.
+      His mode of effecting this change is as follows. The names <i>ut, re</i>,
+      and the rest, are kept for the fixed order of the tones, C, D, E, and the
+      rest. The key of a piece is shown by prefixing one of these symbols, and
+      this determines the absolute quality of the melody as to pitch. That
+      settled, every tone is expressed by a number bearing a relation to the
+      key-note. This tonic note is represented by one, the other six tones of
+      the scale are expressed by the numbers from two to seven. In the popular
+      Tonic<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.299" id="Page_i.299">[i.299]</a></span>
+      Sol-Fa notation, which corresponds so closely to Rousseau's in principle,
+      the key-note is always styled Do, and the other symbols, <i>mi</i>, <i>la</i>,
+      and the rest, indicate at once the relative position of these tones in
+      their particular key or scale. Here the old names were preserved as being
+      easily sung; Rousseau selected numbers because he supposed that they best
+      expressed the generation of the sounds.<a name="FNanchor328"
+      id="FNanchor328"></a><a href="#Footnote_328">[328]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rousseau attempted to find a theoretic base for this symbolic
+      establishment of the relational quality of tones, and he dimly guessed
+      that the order of the harmonics or upper tones of a given tonic would
+      furnish a principle for forming the familiar major scale,<a
+      name="FNanchor329" id="FNanchor329"></a><a href="#Footnote_329">[329]</a>
+      but his knowledge of the order was faulty. He was perhaps groping after
+      the idea by which Professor Helmholtz has accounted for the various mental
+      effects of the several intervals in a key&#8212;namely, the degree of
+      natural affinity, measured by means of the upper tones, existing between
+      the given tone and its tonic. Apart from this, however, the practical
+      value of his ideas in instruction in singing is clearly shown by the
+      circumstance that at any given time many thousands of young children are
+      now being taught to read melody in the Sol-Fa notation in a few weeks.
+      This shows how right Rousseau was in continually declaring the ease of
+      hitting a particular tone, when the relative position of the tone in
+      respect to the key-note is clearly manifested. A singer in trying to hit
+      the tone is compelled to measure the interval<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.300" id="Page_i.300">[i.300]</a></span> between it and the
+      preceding tone, and the simplest and easiest mode of doing this is to
+      associate every tone with the tonics, thus constituting it a term of a
+      relation with this fundamental tone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rousseau made a mistake when he supposed that his ideas were just as
+      applicable to instrumental as they were to vocal music. The requirements
+      of the singer are not those of the player. To a performer on the piano,
+      who has to light rapidly and simultaneously on a number of tones, or to a
+      violinist who has to leap through several octaves with great rapidity, the
+      most urgent need is that of a definite and fixed mark, by which the
+      absolute pitch of each successive tone may be at once recognised. Neither
+      of these has any time to think about the melodious relation of the tones;
+      it is quite as much as they can do to find their place on the key-board or
+      the string. Rousseau's scheme, or any similar one, fails to supply the
+      clear and obvious index to pitch supplied by the old system. Old Rameau
+      pointed this out to Rousseau when the scheme was laid before him, and
+      Rousseau admitted that the objection was decisive,<a name="FNanchor330"
+      id="FNanchor330"></a><a href="#Footnote_330">[330]</a> though his
+      admission was not practically deterrent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His device for expressing change of octave by means of points would render
+      the rapid seizing of a particular tone by the performer still more
+      difficult, and it is strange that he should have preferred this to the
+      other plan suggested, of indicating height of octave by visible place
+      above or below a horizontal<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.301"
+      id="Page_i.301">[i.301]</a></span> line. Again, his attempt to simplify
+      the many varieties of musical time by reducing them all to the two modes
+      of double and triple time, though laudable enough, yet implies an
+      imperfect recognition of the full meaning of time, by omitting all
+      reference to the distribution of accent and to the average time value of
+      the tones in a particular movement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &#160;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <b>FOOTNOTES:</b>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_318" id="Footnote_318"></a><a href="#FNanchor318">[318]</a>
+      Quoted in Martin's <i>Hist. de France</i>, xvi. 158.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_319" id="Footnote_319"></a><a href="#FNanchor319">[319]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, viii. 197. Grimm, <i>Corr. Lit.</i>, i. 27.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_320" id="Footnote_320"></a><a href="#FNanchor320">[320]</a>
+      <i>Lettre sur la Musique Fran&#231;aise</i>, 178, etc., 187.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_321" id="Footnote_321"></a><a href="#FNanchor321">[321]</a>
+      P. 197.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_322" id="Footnote_322"></a><a href="#FNanchor322">[322]</a>
+      <i>Corr. Lit.</i>, i. 92. His own piece was <i>Le petit proph&#232;te de
+      Boehmischbroda</i>, the style of which will be seen in a subsequent
+      footnote.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_323" id="Footnote_323"></a><a href="#FNanchor323">[323]</a>
+      He was burnt in effigy by the musicians of the Opera. Grimm, <i>Corr. Lit.</i>,
+      i. 113.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_324" id="Footnote_324"></a><a href="#FNanchor324">[324]</a>
+      This is Turgot's opinion on the controversy (Letter to Caillard, <i>Oeuv.</i>,
+      ii. 827):&#8212;&quot;Tous avez donc vu Jean-Jacques; la musique est un
+      excellent passe-port aupr&#232;s de lui. Quant &#224; l'impossibilit&#233;
+      de faire de la musique fran&#231;aise, je ne puis y croire, et votre
+      raison ne me para&#238;t pas bonne; car il n'est point vrai que l'essence
+      de la langue fran&#231;aise est d'&#234;tre sans accent. Point de
+      conversation anim&#233;e sans beaucoup d'accent; mais l'accent est libre
+      et d&#233;termin&#233; seulement par l'affection de celui qui parle, sans
+      &#234;tre fix&#233; par des conventions sur certaines syllabes, quoique
+      nous ayons aussi dans plusieurs mots des syllabes dominantes qui seules
+      peuvent &#234;tre accentu&#233;es.&quot;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_325" id="Footnote_325"></a><a href="#FNanchor325">[325]</a>
+      Musset-Pathay, i. 289.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_326" id="Footnote_326"></a><a href="#FNanchor326">[326]</a>
+      Preface to <i>Dissertation sur la Musique Moderne</i>, pp. 32, 33.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_327" id="Footnote_327"></a><a href="#FNanchor327">[327]</a>
+      I am indebted to Mr. James Sully, M.A., for furnishing me with notes on a
+      technical subject with which I have too little acquaintance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_328" id="Footnote_328"></a><a href="#FNanchor328">[328]</a>
+      <i>Dissertation</i>, p. 42.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_329" id="Footnote_329"></a><a href="#FNanchor329">[329]</a>
+      P. 52.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_330" id="Footnote_330"></a><a href="#FNanchor330">[330]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, vii. 18, 19. Also <i>Dissertation</i>, pp. 74, 75.
+    </p>
+    <hr style="width: 65%;" />
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.302" id="Page_i.302">[i.302]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      <a name="CHAPTER_IX." id="CHAPTER_IX."></a>CHAPTER IX.
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      VOLTAIRE AND D'ALEMBERT.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <span class="smcap">Everybody</span> in the full tide of the eighteenth
+      century had something to do with Voltaire, from serious personages like
+      Frederick the Great and Turgot, down to the sorriest poetaster who sent
+      his verses to be corrected or bepraised. Rousseau's debt to him in the
+      days of his unformed youth we have already seen, as well as the courtesies
+      with which they approached one another, when Richelieu employed the
+      struggling musician to make some modifications in the great man's
+      unconsidered court-piece. Neither of them then dreamed that their two
+      names were destined to form the great literary antithesis of the century.
+      In the ten years that elapsed between their first interchange of letters
+      and their first fit of coldness, it must have been tolerably clear to
+      either of them, if either of them gave thought to the matter, that their
+      dissidence was increasing and likely to increase. Their methods were
+      different, their training different, their points of view different, and
+      above all these things, their temperaments were different by a whole
+      heaven's breadth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.303" id="Page_i.303">[i.303]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A great number of excellent and pointed half-truths have been uttered by
+      various persons in illustration of all these contrasts. The philosophy of
+      Voltaire, for instance, is declared to be that of the happy, while
+      Rousseau is the philosopher of the unhappy. Voltaire steals away their
+      faith from those who doubt, while Rousseau strikes doubt into the mind of
+      the unbeliever. The gaiety of the one saddens, while the sadness of the
+      other consoles. If we pass from the marked divergence in tendencies, which
+      is imperfectly hinted at in such sayings as these, to the divergence
+      between them in all the fundamental conditions of intellectual and moral
+      life, then the variation which divided the revolutionary stream into two
+      channels, flowing broadly apart through unlike regions and climates down
+      to the great sea, is intelligible enough. Voltaire was the
+      arch-representative of all those elements in contemporary thought, its
+      curiosity, irreverence, intrepidity, vivaciousness, rationality, to which,
+      as we have so often had to say, Rousseau's temperament and his Genevese
+      spirit made him profoundly antipathetic. Voltaire was the great high
+      priest, robed in the dazzling vestments of poetry and philosophy and
+      history, of that very religion of knowledge and art which Rousseau
+      declared to be the destroyer of the felicity of men. The glitter has faded
+      away from Voltaire's philosophic raiment since those days, and his laurel
+      bough lies a little leafless. Still this can never make us forget that he
+      was in his day and generation one of the sovereign emancipators, because<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.304" id="Page_i.304">[i.304]</a></span> he
+      awoke one dormant set of energies, just as Rousseau presently came to
+      awake another set. Each was a power, not merely by virtue of some singular
+      preeminence of understanding or mysterious unshared insight of his own,
+      but for a far deeper reason. No partial and one-sided direction can
+      permanently satisfy the manifold aspirations and faculties of the human
+      mind in the great average of common men, and it is the common average of
+      men to whom exceptional thinkers speak, whom they influence, and by whom
+      they are in turn influenced, depressed, or buoyed up, just as a painter or
+      a dramatist is affected. Voltaire's mental constitution made him eagerly
+      objective, a seeker of true things, quivering for action, admirably
+      sympathetic with all life and movement, a spirit restlessly traversing the
+      whole world. Rousseau, far different from this, saw in himself a reflected
+      microcosm of the outer world, and was content to take that instead of the
+      outer world, and as its truest version. He made his own moods the
+      premisses from which he deduced a system of life for humanity, and so far
+      as humanity has shared his moods or some parts of them, his system was
+      true, and has been accepted. To him the bustle of the outer world was only
+      a hindrance to that process of self-absorption which was his way of
+      interpreting life. Accessible only to interests of emotion and sense, he
+      was saved from intellectual sterility, and made eloquent, by the vehemence
+      of his emotion and the fire of his senses. He was a master example of
+      sensibility,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.305" id="Page_i.305">[i.305]</a></span>
+      as Voltaire was a master example of clear-eyed penetration.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This must not be taken for a rigid piece of mutually exclusive division,
+      for the edges of character are not cut exactly sharp, as words are.
+      Especially when any type is intense, it seems to meet and touch its
+      opposite. Just as Voltaire's piercing activity and soundness of
+      intelligence made him one of the humanest of men, so Rousseau's emotional
+      susceptibility endowed him with the gift of a vision that carried far into
+      the social depths. It was a very early criticism on the pair, that
+      Voltaire wrote on more subjects, but that Rousseau was the more profound.
+      In truth one was hardly much more profound than the other. Rousseau had
+      the sonorousness of speech which popular confusion of thought is apt to
+      identify with depth. And he had seriousness. If profundity means the
+      quality of seeing to the heart of subjects, Rousseau had in a general way
+      rather less of it than the shrewd-witted crusher of the Infamous. What the
+      distinction really amounts to is that Rousseau had a strong feeling for
+      certain very important aspects of human life, which Voltaire thought very
+      little about, or never thought about at all, and that while Voltaire was
+      concerned with poetry, history, literature, and the more ridiculous parts
+      of the religious superstition of his time, Rousseau thought about social
+      justice and duty and God and the spiritual consciousness of men, with a
+      certain attempt at thoroughness and system. As for the substance of his
+      thinking, as we have<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.306"
+      id="Page_i.306">[i.306]</a></span> already seen in the Discourses, and
+      shall soon have an opportunity of seeing still more clearly, it was often
+      as thin and hollow as if he had belonged to the company of the
+      epigrammatical, who, after all, have far less of a monopoly of shallow
+      thinking than is often supposed. The prime merit of Rousseau, in comparing
+      him with the brilliant chief of the rationalistic school of the time, is
+      his reverence; reverence for moral worth in however obscure intellectual
+      company, for the dignity of human character and the loftiness of duty, for
+      some of those cravings of the human mind after the divine and
+      incommensurable, which may indeed often be content with solutions proved
+      by long time and slow experience to be inadequate, but which are closely
+      bound up with the highest elements of nobleness of soul.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was this spiritual part of him which made Rousseau a third great power
+      in the century, between the Encyclop&#230;dic party and the Church. He
+      recognised a something in men, which the Encyclop&#230;dists treated as a
+      chimera imposed on the imagination by theologians and others for their own
+      purposes. And he recognised this in a way which did not offend the
+      rational feeling of the times, as the Catholic dogmas offended it. In a
+      word he was religious. In being so, he separated himself from Voltaire and
+      his school, who did passably well without religion. Again, he was a
+      puritan. In being this, he was cut off from the intellectually and morally
+      unreformed church, which was then the organ of religion in France. Nor is
+      this<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.307" id="Page_i.307">[i.307]</a></span>
+      all. It was Rousseau, and not the feeble controversialists put up from
+      time to time by the Jesuits and other ecclesiastical bodies, who proved
+      the effective champion of religion, and the only power who could make head
+      against the triumphant onslaught of the Voltaireans. He gave up Christian
+      dogmas and mysteries, and, throwing himself with irresistible ardour upon
+      the emotions in which all religions have their root and their power, he
+      breathed new life into them, he quickened in men a strong desire to have
+      them satisfied, and he beat back the army of emancipators with the loud
+      and incessantly repeated cry that they were not come to deliver the human
+      mind, but to root out all its most glorious and consolatory attributes.
+      This immense achievement accomplished,&#8212;the great framework of a
+      faith in God and immortality and providential government of the world thus
+      preserved, it was an easy thing by and by for the churchmen to come back,
+      and once more unpack and restore to their old places the temporarily
+      discredited paraphernalia of dogma and mystery. How far all this was good
+      or bad for the mental elevation of France and Europe, we shall have a
+      better opportunity of considering presently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We have now only to glance at the first skirmishes between the religious
+      reactionist, on the one side, and, on the other, the leader of the school
+      who believed that men are better employed in thinking as accurately, and
+      knowing as widely, and living as humanely, as all those difficult
+      processes are possible,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.308"
+      id="Page_i.308">[i.308]</a></span> than in wearying themselves in futile
+      search after gods who dwell on inaccessible heights.
+    </p>
+    <hr style="width: 25%;" />
+    <p>
+      Voltaire had acknowledged Rousseau's gift of the second Discourse with his
+      usual shrewd pleasantry: &quot;I have received your new book against the
+      human race, and thank you for it. Never was such cleverness used in the
+      design of making us all stupid. One longs in reading your book to walk on
+      all fours. But as I have lost that habit for more than sixty years, I feel
+      unhappily the impossibility of resuming it. Nor can I embark in search of
+      the savages of Canada, because the maladies to which I am condemned render
+      a European surgeon necessary to me; because war is going on in those
+      regions; and because the example of our actions has made the savages
+      nearly as bad as ourselves. So I content myself with being a very
+      peaceable savage in the solitude which I have chosen near your native
+      place, where you ought to be too.&quot; After an extremely inadequate
+      discussion of one or two points in the essay,<a name="FNanchor331"
+      id="FNanchor331"></a><a href="#Footnote_331">[331]</a> he concludes:&#8212;&quot;I
+      am informed that your health is bad; you ought to come to set it up again
+      in your native air, to enjoy freedom, to drink with me the milk of our
+      cows and browse our grass.&quot;<a name="FNanchor332" id="FNanchor332"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_332">[332]</a> Rousseau replied to all this in a friendly
+      way, recognising Voltaire as his chief, and actually at the very moment
+      when he tells us that the corrupting presence of the arrogant and
+      seductive man at Geneva helped<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.309"
+      id="Page_i.309">[i.309]</a></span> to make the idea of returning to Geneva
+      odious to him, hailing him in such terms as these:&#8212;&quot;Sensible of
+      the honour you do my country, I share the gratitude of my fellow-citizens,
+      and hope that it will increase when they have profited by the lessons that
+      you of all men are able to give them. Embellish the asylum you have
+      chosen; enlighten a people worthy of your instruction; and do you who know
+      so well how to paint virtue and freedom, teach us to cherish them in our
+      walls.&quot;<a name="FNanchor333" id="FNanchor333"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_333">[333]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Within a year, however, the bright sky became a little clouded. In 1756
+      Voltaire published one of the most sincere, energetic, and passionate
+      pieces to be found in the whole literature of the eighteenth century, his
+      poem on the great earthquake of Lisbon (November 1755). No such word had
+      been heard in Europe since the terrible images in which Pascal had figured
+      the doom of man. It was the reaction of one who had begun life by refuting
+      Pascal with doctrines of cheerfulness drawn from the optimism of Pope and
+      Leibnitz, who had done Pope's Essay on Man (1732-34) into French verse as
+      late as 1751,<a name="FNanchor334" id="FNanchor334"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_334">[334]</a> and whose imagination, already sombred by
+      the triumphant cruelty and superstition which raged around him, was
+      suddenly struck with horror by a catastrophe which, in a world where
+      whatever is is best, destroyed hundreds of human creatures in the smoking
+      ashes and engulfed wreck of their city. How, he cried, can you persist in
+      talking of the deliberate will of a free<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.310" id="Page_i.310">[i.310]</a></span> and benevolent God,
+      whose eternal laws necessitated such an appalling climax of misery and
+      injustice as this? Was the disaster retributive? If so, why is Lisbon in
+      ashes, while Paris dances? The enigma is desperate and inscrutable, and
+      the optimist lives in the paradise of the fool. We ask in vain what we
+      are, where we are, whither we go, whence we came. We are tormented atoms
+      on a clod of earth, whom death at last swallows up, and with whom destiny
+      meanwhile makes cruel sport. The past is only a disheartening memory, and
+      if the tomb destroys the thinking creature, how frightful is the present!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Whatever else we may say of Voltaire's poem, it was at least the first
+      sign of the coming reaction of sympathetic imagination against the
+      polished common sense of the great Queen Anne school, which had for more
+      than a quarter of a century such influence in Europe.<a name="FNanchor335"
+      id="FNanchor335"></a><a href="#Footnote_335">[335]</a> It is a little odd
+      that Voltaire, the most brilliant and versatile branch of this stock,
+      should have broken so energetically away from it, and that he should have
+      done so, shows how open and how strong was the feeling in him for reality
+      and actual circumstance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rousseau was amazed that a man overwhelmed as Voltaire was with prosperity
+      and glory, should declaim against the miseries of this life and pro<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.311" id="Page_i.311">[i.311]</a></span>nounce
+      that all is evil and vanity. &quot;Voltaire in seeming always to believe
+      in God, never really believed in anybody but the devil, since his
+      pretended God is a maleficent being who according to him finds all his
+      pleasure in working mischief. The absurdity of this doctrine is especially
+      revolting in a man crowned with good things of every sort, and who from
+      the midst of his own happiness tries to fill his fellow-creatures with
+      despair, by the cruel and terrible image of the serious calamities from
+      which he is himself free.&quot;<a name="FNanchor336" id="FNanchor336"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_336">[336]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As if any doctrine could be more revolting than this which Rousseau so
+      quietly takes for granted, that if it is well with me and I am free from
+      calamities, then there must needs be a beneficent ruler of the universe,
+      and the calamities of all the rest of the world, if by chance they catch
+      the fortunate man's eye, count for nothing in our estimate of the method
+      of the supposed divine government. It is hard to imagine a more execrable
+      emotion than the complacent religiosity of the prosperous. Voltaire is
+      more admirable in nothing than in the ardent humanity and far-spreading
+      lively sympathy with which he interested himself in all the world's
+      fortunes, and felt the catastrophe of Lisbon as profoundly as if the
+      Geneva at his gates had been destroyed. He relished his own prosperity
+      keenly enough, but his prosperity became ashes in his mouth when he heard
+      of distress or wrong, and he did not rest until he had moved heaven<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.312" id="Page_i.312">[i.312]</a></span>
+      and earth to soothe the distress and repair the wrong. It was his
+      impatience in the face of the evils of the time which wrung from him this
+      desperate cry, and it is precisely because these evils did not touch him
+      in his own person, that he merits the greater honour for the surpassing
+      energy and sincerity of his feeling for them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rousseau, however, whose biographer has no such stories to tell as those
+      of Calas and La Barre, Sirven and Lally, but only tales of a maiden
+      wrongfully accused of theft, and a friend left senseless on the pavement
+      of a strange town, and a benefactress abandoned to the cruelty of her
+      fate, still was moved in the midst of his erotic visions in the forest of
+      Montmorency to speak a jealous word in vindication of the divine
+      government of our world. For him at any rate life was then warm and the
+      day bright and the earth very fair, and he lauded his gods accordingly. It
+      was his very sensuousness, as we are so often saying, that made him
+      religious. The optimism which Voltaire wished to destroy was to him a
+      sovereign element of comfort. &quot;Pope's poem,&quot; he says, &quot;softens
+      my misfortunes and inclines me to patience, while yours sharpens all my
+      pains, excites me to murmuring, and reduces me to despair. Pope and
+      Leibnitz exhort me to resignation by declaring calamities to be a
+      necessary effect of the nature and constitution of the universe. You cry,
+      Suffer for ever, unhappy wretch; if there be a God who created thee, he
+      could have stayed thy pains if he would: hope for no end to them, for
+      there is no reason to be discerned for thy<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.313" id="Page_i.313">[i.313]</a></span> existence, except to
+      suffer and to perish.&quot;<a name="FNanchor337" id="FNanchor337"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_337">[337]</a> Rousseau then proceeds to argue the matter,
+      but he says nothing really to the point which Pope had not said before,
+      and said far more effectively. He begins, however, originally enough by a
+      triumphant reference to his own great theme of the superiority of the
+      natural over the civil state. Moral evil is our own work, the result of
+      our liberty; so are most of our physical evils, except death, and that is
+      mostly an evil only from the preparations that we make for it. Take the
+      case of Lisbon. Was it nature who collected the twenty thousand houses,
+      all seven stories high? If the people of Lisbon had been dispersed over
+      the face of the country, as wild tribes are, they would have fled at the
+      first shock, and they would have been seen the next day twenty leagues
+      away, as gay as if nothing had happened. And how many of them perished in
+      the attempt to rescue clothes or papers or money? Is it not true that the
+      person of a man is now, thanks to civilisation, the least part of himself,
+      and is hardly worth saving after loss of the rest? Again, there are some
+      events which lose much of their horror when we look at them closely. A
+      premature death is not always a real evil and may be a relative good; of
+      the people crushed to death under the ruins of Lisbon, many no doubt thus
+      escaped still worse calamities. And is it worse to be killed swiftly than
+      to await death in prolonged anguish?<a name="FNanchor338" id="FNanchor338"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_338">[338]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.314" id="Page_i.314">[i.314]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The good of the whole is to be sought before the good of the part.
+      Although the whole material universe ought not to be dearer to its Creator
+      than a single thinking and feeling being, yet the system of the universe
+      which produces, preserves, and perpetuates all thinking and feeling
+      beings, ought to be dearer to him than any one of them, and he may,
+      notwithstanding his goodness, or rather by reason of his goodness,
+      sacrifice something of the happiness of individuals to the preservation of
+      the whole. &quot;That the dead body of a man should feed worms or wolves
+      or plants is not, I admit, a compensation for the death of such a man; but
+      if in the system of this universe, it is necessary for the preservation of
+      the human race that there should be a circulation of substance between
+      men, animals, vegetables, then the particular mishap of an individual
+      contributes to the general good. I die, I am eaten by worms; but my
+      children, my brothers, will live as I have lived; my body enriches the
+      earth of which they will consume the fruits; and so I do, by the order of
+      nature and for all men, what Codrus, Curtius, the Decii, and a thousand
+      others, did of their own free will for a small part of men.&quot; (p.
+      305.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All this is no doubt very well said, and we are bound to accept it as true
+      doctrine. Although, however, it may make resignation easier by explaining
+      the nature of evil, it does not touch the point of Voltaire's outburst,
+      which is that evil exists, and exists in shapes which it is a mere mockery
+      to associate with<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.315" id="Page_i.315">[i.315]</a></span>
+      the omnipotence of a benevolent controller of the world's forces.
+      According to Rousseau, if we go to the root of what he means, there is no
+      such thing as evil, though much that to our narrow and impatient sight has
+      the look of it. This may be true if we use that fatal word in an arbitrary
+      and unreal sense, for the avoidable, the consequent without antecedent, or
+      antecedent without consequent. If we consent to talk in this way, and only
+      are careful to define terms so that there is no doubt as to their meaning,
+      it is hardly deniable that evil is a mere word and not a reality, and
+      whatever is is indeed right and best, because no better is within our
+      reach. Voltaire, however, like the man of sense that he was, exclaimed
+      that at any rate relatively to us poor creatures the existence of pain,
+      suffering, waste, whether caused or uncaused, whether in accordance with
+      stern immutable law or mere divine caprice, is a most indisputable
+      reality: from our point of view it is a cruel puerility to cry out at
+      every calamity and every iniquity that all is well in the best of possible
+      worlds, and to sing hymns of praise and glory to the goodness and mercy of
+      a being of supreme might, who planted us in this evil state and keeps us
+      in it. Voltaire's is no perfect philosophy; indeed it is not a philosophy
+      at all, but a passionate ejaculation; but it is perfect in comparison with
+      a cut and dried system like this of Rousseau's, which rests on a mocking
+      juggle with phrases, and the substitution by dexterous sleight of hand of
+      one definition for another.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.316" id="Page_i.316">[i.316]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rousseau really gives up the battle, by confessing frankly that the matter
+      is beyond the light of reason, and that, &quot;if the theist only founds
+      his sentiment on probabilities, the atheist with still less precision only
+      founds his on the alternative possibilities.&quot; The objections on both
+      sides are insoluble, because they turn on things of which men can have no
+      veritable idea; &quot;yet I believe in God as strongly as I believe any
+      other truth, because believing and not believing are the last things in
+      the world that depend on me.&quot; So be it. But why take the trouble to
+      argue in favour of one side of an avowedly insoluble question? It was
+      precisely because he felt that the objections on both sides cannot be
+      answered, that Voltaire, hastily or not, cried out that he faced the
+      horrors of such a catastrophe as the Lisbon earthquake without a glimpse
+      of consolation. The upshot of Rousseau's remonstrance only amounted to
+      this, that he could not furnish one with any consolation out of the
+      armoury of reason, that he himself found this consolation, but in a way
+      that did not at all depend upon his own effort or will, and was therefore
+      as incommunicable as the advantage of having a large appetite or being six
+      feet high. The reader of Rousseau becomes accustomed to this way of
+      dealing with subjects of discussion. We see him using his reason as
+      adroitly as he knows how for three-fourths of the debate, and then he
+      suddenly flings himself back with a triumphant kind of weariness into the
+      buoyant waters of emotion and sentiment. &quot;You sir, who are a poet,&quot;
+      once said Madame d'Epinay<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.317"
+      id="Page_i.317">[i.317]</a></span> to Saint Lambert, &quot;will agree with
+      me that the existence of a Being, eternal, all powerful, and of sovereign
+      intelligence, is at any rate the germ of the finest enthusiasm.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor339" id="FNanchor339"></a><a href="#Footnote_339">[339]</a>
+      To take this position and cleave to it may be very well, but why spoil its
+      dignity and repose by an unmeaning and superfluous flourish of the weapons
+      of the reasoner?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With the same hasty change of direction Rousseau says the true question is
+      not whether each of us suffers or not, but whether it is good that the
+      universe should be, and whether our misfortunes were inevitable in its
+      constitution. Then within a dozen lines he admits that there can be no
+      direct proof either way; we must content ourselves with settling it by
+      means of inference from the perfections of God. Of course, it is clear
+      that in the first place what Rousseau calls the true question consists of
+      two quite distinct questions. Is the universe in its present ordering on
+      the whole good relatively either to men, or to all sentient creatures?
+      Next was evil an inevitable element in that ordering? Second, this way of
+      putting it does not in the least advance the case against Voltaire, who
+      insisted that no fine phrases ought to hide from us the dreadful power and
+      crushing reality of evil and the desolate plight in which we are left.
+      This is no exhaustive thought, but a deep cry of anguish at the dark lot
+      of men, and of just indignation against the philosophy which to creatures
+      asking for bread gave the brightly polished<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.318" id="Page_i.318">[i.318]</a></span> stone of sentimental
+      theism. Rousseau urged that Voltaire robbed men of their only solace. What
+      Voltaire really did urge was that the solace derived from the attribution
+      of humanity and justice to the Supreme Being, and from the metaphysical
+      account of evil, rests on too narrow a base either to cover the facts, or
+      to be a true solace to any man who thinks and observes. He ought to have
+      gone on, if it had only been possible in those times, to persuade his
+      readers that there is no solace attainable, except that of an energetic
+      fortitude, and that we do best to go into life not in a softly lined
+      silken robe, but with a sharp sword and armour thrice tempered. As between
+      himself and Rousseau, he saw much the more keenly of the two, and this was
+      because he approached the matter from the side of the facts, while the
+      latter approached it from the side of his own mental comfort and the
+      preconceptions involved in it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The most curious part of this curious letter is the conclusion, where
+      Rousseau, loosely wandering from his theme, separates Voltaire from the
+      philosopher, and beseeches him to draw up a moral code or profession of
+      civil faith that should contain positively the social maxims that
+      everybody should be bound to admit, and negatively the intolerant maxims
+      that everybody should be forced to reject as seditious. Every religion in
+      accord with the code should be allowed, and every religion out of accord
+      with it proscribed, or a man might be free to have no other religion but
+      the code itself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.319" id="Page_i.319">[i.319]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Voltaire was much too clear-headed a person to take any notice of nonsense
+      like this. Rousseau's letter remained unanswered, nor is there any reason
+      to suppose that Voltaire ever got through it, though Rousseau chose to
+      think that <i>Candide</i> (1759) was meant for a reply to him.<a
+      name="FNanchor340" id="FNanchor340"></a><a href="#Footnote_340">[340]</a>
+      He is careful to tell us that he never read that incomparable satire, for
+      which one would be disposed to pity any one except Rousseau, whose
+      appreciation of wit, if not of humour also, was probably more deficient
+      than in any man who ever lived, either in Geneva or any other country
+      fashioned after Genevan guise. Rousseau's next letter to Voltaire was four
+      years later, and by that time the alienation which had no definitely
+      avowed cause, and can be marked by no special date, had become complete.
+      &quot;I hate you, in fact,&quot; he concluded, &quot;since you have so
+      willed it; but I hate you like a man still worthier to have loved you, if
+      you had willed it. Of all the sentiments with which my heart was full
+      towards you, there only remains the admiration that we cannot refuse to
+      your fine genius, and love for your writings. If there is nothing in you
+      which I can honour but your talents, that is no fault of mine.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor341" id="FNanchor341"></a><a href="#Footnote_341">[341]</a>
+      We know that Voltaire did not take reproach with serenity, and he behaved
+      with bitter<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.320" id="Page_i.320">[i.320]</a></span>
+      violence towards Rousseau in circumstances when silence would have been
+      both more magnanimous and more humane. Rousseau occasionally, though not
+      very often, retaliated in the same vein.<a name="FNanchor342"
+      id="FNanchor342"></a><a href="#Footnote_342">[342]</a> On the whole his
+      judgment of Voltaire, when calmly given, was not meant to be unkind.
+      &quot;Voltaire's first impulse,&quot; he said, &quot;is to be good; it is
+      reflection that makes him bad.&quot;<a name="FNanchor343" id="FNanchor343"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_343">[343]</a> Tronchin had said in the same way that
+      Voltaire's heart was the dupe of his understanding. Rousseau is always
+      trying to like him, he always recognises him as the first man of the time,
+      and he subscribed his mite for the erection of a statue to him. It was the
+      satire and mockery in Voltaire which irritated Rousseau more than the
+      doctrines or denial of doctrine which they cloaked; in his eyes sarcasm
+      was always the veritable dialect of the evil power. It says something for
+      the sincerity of his efforts after equitable judgment, that he should have<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.321" id="Page_i.321">[i.321]</a></span>
+      had the patience to discern some of the fundamental merit of the most
+      remorseless and effective mocker that ever made superstition look mean,
+      and its doctors ridiculous.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      II.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      Voltaire was indirectly connected with Rousseau's energetic attack upon
+      another great Encyclop&#230;dist leader, the famous Letter to D'Alembert
+      on Stage Plays. &quot;There,&quot; Rousseau said afterwards, &quot;is my
+      favourite book, my Benjamin, because I produced it without effort, at the
+      first inspiration, and in the most lucid moments of my life.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor344" id="FNanchor344"></a><a href="#Footnote_344">[344]</a>
+      Voltaire, who to us figures so little as a poet and dramatist, was to
+      himself and to his contemporaries of this date a poet and dramatist before
+      all else, the author of <i>Za&#239;re</i> and <i>Mahomet</i>, rather than
+      of <i>Candide</i> and the <i>Philosophical Dictionary</i>. D'Alembert was
+      Voltaire's staunchest henchman. He only wrote his article on Geneva for
+      the Encyclop&#230;dia to gratify the master. Fresh from a visit to him
+      when he composed it, he took occasion to regret that the austerity of the
+      tradition of the city deprived it of the manifold advantages of a theatre.
+      This suggestion had its origin partly in a desire to promote something
+      that would please the eager vanity of the dramatist whom Geneva now had
+      for so close a neighbour, and who had just set her the example by setting
+      up a theatre of his own; and partly, also, because it gave the writer an
+      opportunity<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.322" id="Page_i.322">[i.322]</a></span>
+      of denouncing the intolerant rigour with which the church nearer home
+      treated the stage and all who appeared on it. Geneva was to set an example
+      that could not be resisted, and France would no longer see actors on the
+      one hand pensioned by the government, and on the other an object of
+      anathema, excommunicated by priests and regarded with contempt by
+      citizens.<a name="FNanchor345" id="FNanchor345"></a><a href="#Footnote_345">[345]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The inveterate hostility of the church to the theatre was manifested by
+      the French ecclesiastics in the full eighteenth century as bitterly as
+      ever. The circumstance that Voltaire was the great play-writer of the time
+      would not tend to soften their traditional prejudice, and the persecution
+      of players by priests was in some sense an episode of the war between the
+      priest and the philosophers. The latter took up the cause of the stage
+      partly because they hoped to make the drama an effective rival to the
+      teaching of pulpit and confessional, partly from their natural sympathy
+      with an elevated form of intellectual manifestation, and partly from their
+      abhorrence of the practical inhumanity with which the officers of the
+      church treated stage performers. While people of quality eagerly sought
+      the society of those who furnished them as much diversion in private as in
+      public, the church refused to all players the marriage blessing; when an
+      actor or actress wished to marry, they were<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.323" id="Page_i.323">[i.323]</a></span> obliged to renounce
+      the stage, and the Archbishop of Paris diligently resisted evasion or
+      subterfuge.<a name="FNanchor346" id="FNanchor346"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_346">[346]</a> The atrocities connected with the refusal
+      of burial, as well in the case of players as of philosophers, are known to
+      all readers in a dozen illustrious instances, from Moli&#232;re and
+      Adrienne Lecouvreur downwards.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Here, as along the whole line of the battle between new light and old
+      prejudice, Rousseau took part, if not with the church, at least against
+      its adversaries. His point of view was at bottom truly puritanical. Jeremy
+      Collier in his <i>Short View of the Profaneness and Immorality of the
+      English Stage</i> (1698) takes up quite a different position. This once
+      famous piece was not a treatment of the general question, but an attack on
+      certain specific qualities of the plays of his time&#8212;their indecency
+      of phrase, their oaths, their abuse of the clergy, the gross libertinism
+      of the characters. One can hardly deny that this was richly deserved by
+      the English drama of the Restoration, and Collier's strictures were not
+      applicable, nor meant to apply, either to the ancients, for he has a good
+      word even for Aristophanes, or to the French drama. Bossuet's loftier
+      denunciation, like Rousseau's, was puritanical, and it extended to the
+      whole body of stage plays. He objected to the drama as a school of
+      concupiscence, as a subtle or gross debaucher of the gravity and purity of
+      the understanding, as essentially a charmer of the senses, and therefore
+      the most equivocal and untrust<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.324"
+      id="Page_i.324">[i.324]</a></span>worthy of teachers. He appeals to the
+      fathers, to Scripture, to Plato, and even to Christ, who cried, <i>Woe
+      unto you that laugh</i>.<a name="FNanchor347" id="FNanchor347"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_347">[347]</a> There is a fine austerity about Bossuet's
+      energetic criticism; it is so free from breathless eagerness, and so
+      severe without being thinly bitter. The churchmen of a generation or two
+      later had fallen from this height into gloomy peevishness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rousseau's letter on the theatre, it need hardly be said, is meant to be
+      an appeal to the common sense and judgment of his readers, and not
+      conceived in the ecclesiastical tone of unctuous anathema and fulgurant
+      menace. It is no bishop's pastoral, replete with solecisms of thought and
+      idiom, but a piece of firm dialectic in real matter. His position is this:
+      that the moral effect of the stage can never be salutary in itself, while
+      it may easily be extremely pernicious, and that the habit of frequenting
+      the theatre, the taste for imitating the style of the actors, the cost in
+      money, the waste in time, and all the other accessory conditions, apart
+      from the morality of the matter represented, are bad things in themselves,
+      absolutely and in every circumstance. Secondly, these effects in all kinds
+      are specially bad in relation to the social condition and habits of
+      Geneva.<a name="FNanchor348" id="FNanchor348"></a><a href="#Footnote_348">[348]</a>
+      The first part of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.325"
+      id="Page_i.325">[i.325]</a></span> discussion is an ingenious answer to
+      some of the now trite pleas for the morality of the drama, such as that
+      tragedy leads to pity through terror, that comedy corrects men while
+      amusing them, that both make virtue attractive and vice hateful.<a
+      name="FNanchor349" id="FNanchor349"></a><a href="#Footnote_349">[349]</a>
+      Rousseau insists with abundance of acutely chosen illustration that the
+      pity that is awaked by tragedy is a fleeting emotion which subsides when
+      the curtain falls; that comedy as often as not amuses men at the expense
+      of old age, uncouth virtue, paternal carefulness, and other objects which
+      we should be taught rather to revere than to ridicule; and that both
+      tragedy and comedy, instead of making vice hateful, constantly win our
+      sympathy for it. Is not the French stage, he asks, as much the triumph of
+      great villains, like Catilina, Mahomet, Atreus, as of illustrious heroes?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This rude handling of accepted commonplace is always one of the most
+      interesting features in Rousseau's polemic. It was of course a
+      characteristic of the eighteenth century always to take up the ethical and
+      high prudential view of whatever had to be justified, and Rousseau seems
+      from this point to have been successful in demolishing arguments which
+      might hold of Greek tragedy at its best, but which certainly do not hold
+      of any other dramatic forms. The childishness of the old criticism which
+      attaches the label of some moral from the copybook to each piece, as its<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.326" id="Page_i.326">[i.326]</a></span>
+      lesson and point of moral aim, is evident. In repudiating this Rousseau
+      was certainly right.<a name="FNanchor350" id="FNanchor350"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_350">[350]</a> Both the assailants and the defenders of
+      the stage, however, commit the double error, first of supposing that the
+      drama is always the same thing, from the Agamemnon down to the last
+      triviality of a London theatre, and next of pitching the discussion in too
+      high a key, as if the effect or object of a stage play in the modern era,
+      where grave sentiment clothes itself in other forms, were substantially
+      anything more serious than an evening's amusement. Apart from this, and in
+      so far as the discussion is confined to the highest dramatic expression,
+      the true answer to Rousseau is now a very plain one. The drama does not
+      work in the sphere of direct morality, though like everything else in the
+      world it has a moral or immoral aspect. It is an art of ideal
+      presentation, not concerned with the inculcation of immediate practical
+      lessons, but producing a stir in all our sympathetic emotions, quickening
+      the imagination, and so communicating a wider life to the character of the
+      spectator. This is what the drama in the hands of a worthy master does; it
+      is just what noble composition in music does, and there is no more
+      directly moralising effect in the one than in the other. You must trust to
+      the sum of other agencies to guide the interest and sympathy thus
+      quickened into channels<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.327"
+      id="Page_i.327">[i.327]</a></span> of right action. Rousseau, like most
+      other controversialists, makes an attack of which the force rests on the
+      assumption that the special object of the attack is the single influencing
+      element and the one decisive instrument in making men had or good. What he
+      says about the drama would only be true if the public went to the play all
+      day long, and were accessible to no other moral force whatever, modifying
+      and counteracting such lessons as they might learn at the theatre. He
+      failed here as in the wider controversy on the sciences and arts, to
+      consider the particular subject of discussion in relation to the whole of
+      the general medium in which character moves, and by whose manifold action
+      and reaction it is incessantly affected and variously shaped.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So when he passed on from the theory of dramatic morality to the matter
+      which he had more at heart, namely, the practical effects of introducing
+      the drama into Geneva, he keeps out of sight all the qualities in the
+      Genevese citizen which would protect him against the evil influence of the
+      stage, though it is his anxiety for the preservation of these very
+      qualities that gives all its fire to his eloquence. If the citizen really
+      was what Rousseau insisted that he was, then his virtues would surely
+      neutralise the evil of the drama; if not, the drama would do him no harm.
+      We need not examine the considerations in which Rousseau pointed out the
+      special reasons against introducing a theatre into his native town. It
+      would draw the artisans away from their work, cause wasteful expenditure
+      of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.328" id="Page_i.328">[i.328]</a></span>
+      money in amusements, break up the harmless and inexpensive little clubs of
+      men and the social gatherings of women. The town was not populous enough
+      to support a theatre, therefore the government would have to provide one,
+      and this would mean increased taxation. All this was the secondary and
+      merely colourable support by argumentation, of a position that had been
+      reached and was really held by sentiment. Rousseau hated the introduction
+      of French plays in the same way that Cato hated the introduction of fine
+      talkers from Greece. It was an innovation, and so habitual was it with
+      Rousseau to look on all movement in the direction of what the French
+      writers called taste and cultivation as depraving, that he cannot help
+      taking for granted that any change in manners associated with taste must
+      necessarily be a change for the worse. Thus the Letter to D'Alembert was
+      essentially a supplement to the first Discourse; it was an application of
+      its principles to a practical case. It was part of his general reactionary
+      protest against philosophers, poets, men of letters, and all their works,
+      without particular apprehension on the side of the drama. Hence its
+      reasoning is much less interesting than its panegyric on the simplicity,
+      robust courage, and manliness of the Genevese, and its invective against
+      the effeminacy and frivolity of the Parisian. One of the most significant
+      episodes in the discussion is the lengthy criticism on the immortal
+      Misanthrope of Moli&#232;re. Rousseau admits it for the masterpiece of the
+      comic muse, though with characteristic perver<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.329" id="Page_i.329">[i.329]</a></span>sity he insists that
+      the hero is not misanthropic enough, nor truly misanthropic at all,
+      because he flies into rage at small things affecting himself, instead of
+      at the large follies of the race. Again, he says that Moli&#232;re makes
+      Alceste ridiculous, virtuous as he is, in order to win the applause of the
+      pit. It is for the character of Philinte, however, that Rousseau reserves
+      all his spleen. He takes care to describe him in terms which exactly hit
+      Rousseau's own conception of his philosophic enemies, who find all going
+      well because they have no interest in anything going better; who are
+      content with everybody, because they do not care for anybody; who round a
+      full table maintain that it is not true that the people are hungry. As
+      criticism, one cannot value this kind of analysis. D'Alembert replied with
+      a much more rational interpretation of the great comedy, but finding
+      himself seized with the critic's besetting impertinence of improving
+      masterpieces, he suddenly stopped with the becoming reflection&#8212;&quot;But
+      I perceive, sir, that I am giving lessons to Moli&#232;re.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor351" id="FNanchor351"></a><a href="#Footnote_351">[351]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The constant thought of Paris gave Rousseau an admirable occasion of
+      painting two pictures in violent contrast, each as over-coloured as the
+      other by his mixed conceptions of the Plutarchian antique and imaginary
+      pastoral. We forget the depravation of the stage and the ill living of
+      comedians in magnificent descriptions of the manly exercises and cheerful
+      festivities of the free people on the shores of the Lake of<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.330" id="Page_i.330">[i.330]</a></span>
+      Geneva, and in scornful satire on the Parisian seraglios, where some woman
+      assembles a number of men who are more like women than their entertainers.
+      We see on the one side the rude sons of the republic, boxing, wrestling,
+      running, in generous emulation, and on the other the coxcombs of
+      cultivated Paris imprisoned in a drawing-room, &quot;rising up, sitting
+      down, incessantly going and coming to the fire-place, to the window,
+      taking up a screen and putting it down again a hundred times, turning over
+      books, flitting from picture to picture, turning and pirouetting about the
+      room, while the idol stretched motionless on a couch all the time is only
+      alive in her tongue and eyes&quot; (p. 161). If the rough patriots of the
+      Lake are less polished in speech, they are all the weightier in reason;
+      they do not escape by a pleasantry or a compliment; each feeling himself
+      attacked by all the forces of his adversary, he is obliged to employ all
+      his own to defend himself, and this is how a mind acquires strength and
+      precision. There may be here and there a licentious phrase, but there is
+      no ground for alarm in that. It is not the least rude who are always the
+      most pure, and even a rather clownish speech is better than that
+      artificial style in which the two sexes seduce one another, and
+      familiarise themselves decently with vice. 'Tis true our Swiss drinks too
+      much, but after all let us not calumniate even vice; as a rule drinkers
+      are cordial and frank, good, upright, just, loyal, brave, and worthy folk.
+      Wherever people have most abhorrence of drunkenness, be sure they have
+      most reason<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.331" id="Page_i.331">[i.331]</a></span>
+      to fear lest its indiscretion should betray intrigue and treachery. In
+      Switzerland it is almost thought well of, while at Naples they hold it in
+      horror; but at bottom which is the more to be dreaded, the intemperance of
+      the Swiss or the reserve of the Italian? It is hardly surprising to learn
+      that the people of Geneva were as little gratified by this well-meant
+      panegyric on their jollity as they had been by another writer's friendly
+      eulogy on their Socinianism.<a name="FNanchor352" id="FNanchor352"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_352">[352]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The reader who was not moved to turn brute and walk on all fours by the
+      pictures of the state of nature in the Discourses, may find it more
+      difficult to resist the charm of the brotherly festivities and simple
+      pastimes which in the Letter to D'Alembert the patriot holds up to the
+      admiration of his countrymen and the envy of foreigners. The writer is in
+      Sparta, but he tempers his Sparta with a something from Charmettes. Never
+      before was there so attractive a combination of martial austerity with the
+      grace of the idyll. And the interest of these pictures is much more than
+      literary; it is historic also. They were the original version of those
+      great gatherings in the Champ de Mars and strange suppers of fraternity
+      during the progress of the Revolution in Paris, which have amused the
+      cynical ever since, but which pointed to a not unworthy aspiration. The
+      fine gentlemen whom Rousseau did so well to despise had then all fled, and<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.332" id="Page_i.332">[i.332]</a></span>
+      the common people under Rousseauite leaders were doing the best they could
+      to realise on the banks of the Seine the imaginary joymaking and simple
+      fellowship which had been first dreamed of for the banks of Lake Leman,
+      and commended with an eloquence that struck new chords in minds satiated
+      or untouched by the brilliance of mere literature. There was no real state
+      of things in Geneva corresponding to the gracious picture which Rousseau
+      so generously painted, and some of the citizens complained that his
+      account of their social joys was as little deserved as his ingenious
+      vindication of their hearty feeling for barrel or bottle was little
+      founded.<a name="FNanchor353" id="FNanchor353"></a><a href="#Footnote_353">[353]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The glorification of love of country did little for the Genevese for whom
+      it was meant, but it penetrated many a soul in the greater nation that lay
+      sunk in helpless indifference to its own ruin. Nowhere else among the
+      writers who are the glory of France at this time, is any serious eulogy of
+      patriotism. Rousseau glows with it, and though he always speaks in
+      connection with Geneva, yet there is in his words a generous breadth and
+      fire which gave them an irresistible contagiousness. There are many
+      passages of this fine persuasive force in the Letter to D'Alembert;
+      perhaps this, referring to the citizens of Geneva who had gone elsewhere
+      in search of fortune, is as good as another. Do you think that the opening
+      of a theatre, he asks, will bring them back to their<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.333" id="Page_i.333">[i.333]</a></span> mother city? No;
+      &quot;each of them must feel that he can never find anywhere else what he
+      has left behind in his own land; an invincible charm must call him back to
+      the spot that he ought never to have quitted; the recollection of their
+      first exercises, their first pleasures, their first sights, must remain
+      deeply graven in their hearts; the soft impressions made in the days of
+      their youth must abide and grow stronger with advancing years, while a
+      thousand others wax dim; in the midst of the pomp of great cities and all
+      their cheerless magnificence, a secret voice must for ever cry in the
+      depth of the wanderer's soul, Ah, where are the games and holidays of my
+      youth? Where is the concord of the townsmen, where the public brotherhood?
+      Where is pure joy and true mirth? Where are peace, freedom, equity? Let us
+      hasten to seek all these. With the heart of a Genevese, with a city as
+      smiling, a landscape as full of delight, a government as just, with
+      pleasures so true and so pure, and all that is needed to be able to relish
+      them, how is it that we do not all adore our birth-land? It was thus in
+      old times that by modest feasts and homely games her citizens were called
+      back by that Sparta which I can never quote often enough as an example for
+      us; thus in Athens in the midst of fine art, thus in Susa in the very
+      bosom of luxury and soft delights, the wearied Spartan sighed after his
+      coarse pastimes and exhausting exercises&quot; (p. 211).<a
+      name="FNanchor354" id="FNanchor354"></a><a href="#Footnote_354">[354]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.334" id="Page_i.334">[i.334]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Any reference to this powerfully written, though most sophistical piece,
+      would be imperfect which should omit its slightly virulent onslaught upon
+      women and the passion which women inspire. The modern drama, he said,
+      being too feeble to rise to high themes, has fallen back on love; and on
+      this hint he proceeds to a censure of love as a poetic theme, and a bitter
+      estimate of women as companions for men, which might have pleased Calvin
+      or Knox in his sternest mood. The same eloquence which showed men the
+      superior delights of the state of nature, now shows the superior fitness
+      of the oriental seclusion of women; it makes a sympathetic reader tremble
+      at the want of modesty, purity, and decency, in the part which women are
+      allowed to take by the infatuated men of a modern community.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All this, again, is directed against &quot;that philosophy of a day, which
+      is born and dies in the corner of a city, and would fain stifle the cry of
+      nature and the unanimous voice of the human race&quot; (p. 131). The same
+      intrepid spirits who had brought reason to bear upon the current notions
+      of providence, inspiration, ecclesiastical tradition, and other unlighted
+      spots in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.335" id="Page_i.335">[i.335]</a></span>
+      the human mind, had perceived that the subjection of women to a secondary
+      place belonged to the same category, and could not any more successfully
+      be defended by reason. Instead of raging against women for their boldness,
+      their frivolousness, and the rest, as our passionate sentimentalist did,
+      the opposite school insisted that all these evils were due to the folly of
+      treating women with gallantry instead of respect, and to the blindness of
+      refusing an equally vigorous and masculine education to those who must be
+      the closest companions of educated man. This was the view forced upon the
+      most rational observers of a society where women were so powerful, and so
+      absolutely unfit by want of intellectual training for the right use of
+      social power. D'Alembert expressed this view in a few pages of forcible
+      pleading in his reply to Rousseau,<a name="FNanchor355" id="FNanchor355"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_355">[355]</a> and some thirty-two years later, when all
+      questions had become political (1790), Condorcet ably extended the same
+      line of argument so as to make it cover the claims of women to all the
+      rights of citizenship.<a name="FNanchor356" id="FNanchor356"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_356">[356]</a> From the nature of the case, however, it is
+      impossible to confute by reason a man who denies that the matter in
+      dispute is within the decision and jurisdiction of reason, and who
+      supposes that his own opinion is placed out of the reach of attack when he
+      declares it to be the unanimous voice of the human race. We may remember
+      that the author of this philippic against love was at the very moment
+      brood<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.336" id="Page_i.336">[i.336]</a></span>ing
+      over the New Helo&#239;sa, and was fresh from strange transports at the
+      feet of the Julie whom we know.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Letter on the Stage was the definite mark of Rousseau's schism from
+      the philosophic congregation. Has Jean Jacques turned a father of the
+      church? asked Voltaire. Deserters who fight against their country ought to
+      be hung. The little flock are falling to devouring one another. This
+      arch-madman, who might have been something, if he would only have been
+      guided by his brethren of the Encyclop&#230;dia, takes it into his head to
+      make a band of his own. He writes against the stage, after writing a bad
+      play of his own. He finds four or five rotten staves of Diogenes' tub, and
+      instals himself therein to bark at his friends.<a name="FNanchor357"
+      id="FNanchor357"></a><a href="#Footnote_357">[357]</a> D'Alembert was more
+      tolerant, but less clear-sighted. He insisted that the little flock should
+      do its best to heal divisions instead of widening them. Jean Jacques, he
+      said, &quot;is a madman who is very clever, and who is only clever when he
+      is in a fever; it is best therefore neither to cure nor to insult him.&quot;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rousseau made the preface to the Letter on the Stage an occasion for a
+      proclamation of his final breach with Diderot. &quot;I once,&quot; he
+      said, &quot;possessed a severe and judicious Aristarchus; I have him no
+      longer, and wish for him no longer.&quot; To this he added in a footnote a
+      passage from Ecclesiasticus, to the effect that if you have drawn a sword
+      on a friend<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.337" id="Page_i.337">[i.337]</a></span>
+      there still remains a way open, and if you have spoken cheerless words to
+      him concord is still possible, but malicious reproach and the betrayal of
+      a secret&#8212;these things banish friendship beyond return. This was the
+      end of his personal connection with the men whom he always contemptuously
+      called the Holbachians. After 1760 the great stream divided into two; the
+      rationalist and the emotional schools became visibly antipathetic, and the
+      voice of the epoch was no longer single or undistracted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &#160;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <b>FOOTNOTES:</b>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_331" id="Footnote_331"></a><a href="#FNanchor331">[331]</a>
+      See above p. <a href="#Page_i.149">149</a>.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_332" id="Footnote_332"></a><a href="#FNanchor332">[332]</a>
+      Voltaire to Rousseau. Aug. 30, 1755.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_333" id="Footnote_333"></a><a href="#FNanchor333">[333]</a>
+      <i>Corr.</i>, i. 237. Sept. 10, 1755.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_334" id="Footnote_334"></a><a href="#FNanchor334">[334]</a>
+      <i>La Loi Naturelle.</i>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_335" id="Footnote_335"></a><a href="#FNanchor335">[335]</a>
+      In 1754 the Berlin Academy proposed for a prize essay, An Examination of
+      Pope's System, and Lessing the next year wrote a pamphlet to show that
+      Pope had no system, but only a patchwork. See Mr. Pattison's <i>Introduction
+      to Pope's Essay on Man</i>, p. 12. Sime's <i>Lessing</i>, i. 128.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_336" id="Footnote_336"></a><a href="#FNanchor336">[336]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i> ix. 276.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_337" id="Footnote_337"></a><a href="#FNanchor337">[337]</a>
+      <i>Corr.</i>, i. 289-316. Aug. 18, 1756.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_338" id="Footnote_338"></a><a href="#FNanchor338">[338]</a>
+      Joseph De Maistre put all this much more acutely; <i>Soir&#233;es</i>, iv.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_339" id="Footnote_339"></a><a href="#FNanchor339">[339]</a>
+      Madame d'Epinay, <i>M&#233;m.</i>, i. 380.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_340" id="Footnote_340"></a><a href="#FNanchor340">[340]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, ix. 277. Also <i>Corr.</i>, iii. 326. March 11, 1764.
+      Tronchin's long letter, to which Rousseau refers in this passage, is given
+      in M. Streckeisen-Moultou's collection, i. 323, and is interesting to
+      people who care to know how Voltaire looked to a doctor who saw him
+      closely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_341" id="Footnote_341"></a><a href="#FNanchor341">[341]</a>
+      <i>Corr.</i>, ii. 132. June 17, 1760. Also <i>Conf.</i>, x. 91.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_342" id="Footnote_342"></a><a href="#FNanchor342">[342]</a>
+      Some other interesting references to Voltaire in Rousseau's letters are&#8212;ii.
+      170 (Nov. 29, 1760), denouncing Voltaire as &quot;that trumpet of impiety,
+      that fine genius, and that low soul,&quot; and so forth; iii. 29 (Oct. 30,
+      1762), accusing Voltaire of malicious intrigues against him in
+      Switzerland; iii. 168 (Mar. 21, 1763), that if there is to be any
+      reconciliation, Voltaire must make first advances; iii. 280 (Dec., 1763),
+      described a trick played by Voltaire; iv. 40 (Jan. 31, 1765) 64; <i>Corr.</i>,
+      v. 74 (Jan. 5, 1767), replying to Voltaire's calumnious account of his
+      early life; note on this subject giving Voltaire the lie direct, iv. 150
+      (May 31, 1765); the <i>Lettre &#224; D'Almbert</i>, p. 193, etc.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_343" id="Footnote_343"></a><a href="#FNanchor343">[343]</a>
+      Bernardin St. Pierre, xii. 96. In the same sense, in Dusaulx, <i>Mes
+      Rapports avec J.J.R.</i>, (Paris: 1798), p. 101. See also <i>Corr.</i>,
+      iv. 254. Dec. 30, 1765. And again, iv. 276, Feb. 28, 1766, and p. 356.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_344" id="Footnote_344"></a><a href="#FNanchor344">[344]</a>
+      Dusaulx, p. 102.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_345" id="Footnote_345"></a><a href="#FNanchor345">[345]</a>
+      This part of D'Alembert's article is reproduced in Rousseau's preface, and
+      the whole is given at the end of the volume in M. Auguis's edition, p.
+      409.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_346" id="Footnote_346"></a><a href="#FNanchor346">[346]</a>
+      Goncourt, <i>Femme au 18i&#232;me si&#232;cle</i>, p. 256. Grimm, <i>Corr.
+      Lit.</i>, vi. 248.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_347" id="Footnote_347"></a><a href="#FNanchor347">[347]</a>
+      <i>Maximes sur la Com&#233;die</i>, &#167;15, etc. They were written in
+      reply to a plea for Comedy by Caffaro, a Jesuit father.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_348" id="Footnote_348"></a><a href="#FNanchor348">[348]</a>
+      The letter may be conveniently divided into three parts: I. pp. 1-89, II.
+      pp. 90-145, III. pp. 146 to the end. Of course if Rousseau in saying that
+      tragedy leads to pity through terror, was thinking of the famous passage
+      in the sixth chapter of Aristotle's <i>Poetics</i>, he was guilty of a
+      shocking mistranslation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_349" id="Footnote_349"></a><a href="#FNanchor349">[349]</a>
+      Some of the arguments seem drawn from Plato; see, besides the well-known
+      passages in the <i>Republic</i>, the <i>Laws</i>, iv. 719, and still more
+      directly, <i>Gorgias</i>, 502.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_350" id="Footnote_350"></a><a href="#FNanchor350">[350]</a>
+      Yet D'Alembert in his very cool and sensible reply (p. 245) repeats the
+      old saws, as that in <i>Catilina</i> we learn the lesson of the harm which
+      may be done to the human race by the abuse of great talents, and so forth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_351" id="Footnote_351"></a><a href="#FNanchor351">[351]</a>
+      <i>Lettre &#224; M. J.J. Rousseau</i>, p. 258.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_352" id="Footnote_352"></a><a href="#FNanchor352">[352]</a>
+      D'Alembert's <i>Lettre &#224; J.J. Rousseau</i>, p. 277. Rousseau has a
+      passage to the same effect, that false people are always sober, in the <i>Nouv.
+      H&#233;l.,</i> Pt. I. xxiii. 123.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_353" id="Footnote_353"></a><a href="#FNanchor353">[353]</a>
+      Tronchin, for instance, in a letter to Rousseau, in M.
+      Streckeisen-Moultou's collection, i. 325.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_354" id="Footnote_354"></a><a href="#FNanchor354">[354]</a>
+      A troop of comedians had been allowed to play for a short time in Geneva,
+      with many protests, during the mediation of 1738. In 1766, eight years
+      after Rousseau's letter, the government gave permission for the
+      establishment of a theatre in the town. It was burnt down in 1768, and
+      Voltaire spitefully hinted that the catastrophe was the result of design,
+      instigated by Rousseau (<i>Corr.</i> v. 299, April 26, 1768). The theatre
+      was not re-erected until 1783, when the oligarchic party regained the
+      ascendancy and brought back with them the drama, which the democrats in
+      their reign would not permit.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_355" id="Footnote_355"></a><a href="#FNanchor355">[355]</a>
+      <i>Lettre &#224; J.J. Rousseau</i>, pp. 265-271.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_356" id="Footnote_356"></a><a href="#FNanchor356">[356]</a>
+      <i>Oeuv.</i>, x. 121.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_357" id="Footnote_357"></a><a href="#FNanchor357">[357]</a>
+      To Thieriot, Sept. 17, 1758. To D'Alembert, Oct. 20, 1761. <i>Ib.</i>
+      March 19, 1761.
+    </p>
+    <hr style="width: 35%;" />
+    <h3>
+      END OF VOL. I.
+    </h3>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      <i>Printed by</i> <span class="smcap">R. &amp; R. Clark, Limited</span>,
+      <i>Edinburgh</i>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="volume2" id="volume2"></a>
+    </p>
+    <h1>
+      ROUSSEAU
+    </h1>
+    <h3>
+      BY
+    </h3>
+    <h2>
+      JOHN MORLEY
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      VOL. II.
+    </h3>
+    <hr style="width: 35%;" />
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      London<br /> MACMILLAN AND CO., <span class="smcap">Limited</span><br /> NEW
+      YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY<br /> 1905<br />
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      <i>All rights reserved</i>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      <i>First printed in this form 1886</i><br /> <i>Reprinted 1888, 1891, 1896,
+      1900, 1905</i><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr style="width: 65%;" />
+    <h2>
+      <a name="CONTENTS_II" id="CONTENTS_II_">CONTENTS</a> OF VOL. II.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      &#160;
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      <a href="#CHAPTER_I">CHAPTER I.</a>
+    </h3>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      <span class="smcap">Montmorency&#8212;The New Helo&#239;sa.</span>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Conditions preceding the composition of the New Helo&#239;sa <a
+      href="#Page_1">1</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      The Duke and Duchess of Luxembourg <a href="#Page_2">2</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Rousseau and his patrician acquaintances <a href="#Page_3">4</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Peaceful life at Montmorency <a href="#Page_9">9</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Equivocal prudence occasionally shown by Rousseau <a href="#Page_12">12</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      His want of gratitude for commonplace service <a href="#Page_13">13</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Bad health, and thoughts of suicide <a href="#Page_16">16</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Episode of Madame Latour de Franqueville <a href="#Page_17">17</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Relation of the New Helo&#239;sa to Rousseau's general doctrine <a
+      href="#Page_20">20</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Action of the first part of the story <a href="#Page_25">25</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Contrasted with contemporary literature <a href="#Page_25">25</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      And with contemporary manners <a href="#Page_27">27</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Criticism of the language and principal actors <a href="#Page_28">28</a>,
+      <a href="#Page_29">29</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Popularity of the New Helo&#239;sa <a href="#Page_31">31</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Its reactionary intellectual direction <a href="#Page_33">33</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Action of the second part <a href="#Page_35">35</a>, <a href="#Page_36">36</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Its influence on Goethe and others <a href="#Page_38">38</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Distinction between Rousseau and his school <a href="#Page_40">40</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Singular pictures of domesticity <a href="#Page_42">42</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Sumptuary details <a href="#Page_44">44</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      The slowness of movement in the work justified <a href="#Page_46">46</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Exaltation of marriage <a href="#Page_47">47</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Equalitarian tendencies <a href="#Page_49">49</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Not inconsistent with social quietism <a href="#Page_51">51</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Compensation in the political consequences of the triumph of sentiment <a
+      href="#Page_54">54</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Circumstances of the publication of the New Helo&#239;sa <a href="#Page_55">55</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Nature of the trade in books <a href="#Page_57">57</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Malesherbes and the printing of Emilius <a href="#Page_61">61</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Rousseau's suspicions <a href="#Page_62">62</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      The great struggle of the moment <a href="#Page_64">64</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Proscription of Emilius <a href="#Page_67">67</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Flight of the author <a href="#Page_67">67</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      &#160;
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      <a href="#CHAPTER_IIb">CHAPTER II.</a>
+    </h3>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      <span class="smcap">Persecution.</span>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Rousseau's journey from Switzerland <a href="#Page_69">69</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Absence of vindictiveness <a href="#Page_70">70</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Arrival at Yverdun <a href="#Page_72">72</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Repairs to Motiers <a href="#Page_73">73</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Relations with Frederick the Great <a href="#Page_74">74</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Life at Motiers <a href="#Page_77">77</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Lord Marischal <a href="#Page_79">79</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Voltaire <a href="#Page_81">81</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Rousseau's letter to the Archbishop of Paris <a href="#Page_83">83</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Its dialectic <a href="#Page_86">86</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      The ministers of Neuch&#226;tel <a href="#Page_90">90</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Rousseau's singular costume <a href="#Page_92">92</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      His throng of visitors <a href="#Page_93">93</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Lewis, prince of W&#252;rtemberg <a href="#Page_95">95</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Gibbon <a href="#Page_96">96</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Boswell <a href="#Page_98">98</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Corsican affairs <a href="#Page_99">99</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      The feud at Geneva <a href="#Page_102">102</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Rousseau renounces his citizenship <a href="#Page_105">105</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      The Letters from the Mountain <a href="#Page_106">106</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Political side <a href="#Page_107">107</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Consequent persecution at Motiers <a href="#Page_107">107</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Flight to the isle of St. Peter <a href="#Page_108">108</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      The fifth of the <i>R&#234;veries</i> <a href="#Page_109">109</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Proscription by the government of Berne <a href="#Page_116">116</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Rousseau's singular request <a href="#Page_116">116</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      His renewed flight <a href="#Page_117">117</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Persuaded to seek shelter in England <a href="#Page_118">118</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      &#160;
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      <a href="#CHAPTER_III">CHAPTER III.</a>
+    </h3>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      <span class="smcap">The Social Contract.</span>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Rousseau's reaction against perfectibility <a href="#Page_119">119</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Abandonment of the position of the Discourses <a href="#Page_121">121</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Doubtful idea of equality <a href="#Page_121">121</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      The Social Contract, a repudiation of the historic method <a
+      href="#Page_124">124</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Yet it has glimpses of relativity <a href="#Page_127">127</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Influence of Greek examples <a href="#Page_129">129</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      And of Geneva <a href="#Page_131">131</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Impression upon Robespierre and Saint Just <a href="#Page_132">132</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Rousseau's scheme implied a small territory <a href="#Page_135">135</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Why the Social Contract made fanatics <a href="#Page_137">137</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Verbal quality of its propositions <a href="#Page_138">138</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      The doctrine of public safety <a href="#Page_143">143</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      The doctrine of the sovereignty of peoples <a href="#Page_144">144</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Its early phases <a href="#Page_144">144</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Its history in the sixteenth century <a href="#Page_146">146</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Hooker and Grotius <a href="#Page_148">148</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Locke <a href="#Page_149">149</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Hobbes <a href="#Page_151">151</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Central propositions of the Social Contract&#8212;<br /> <br /> 1. Origin of
+      society in compact <a href="#Page_154">154</a><br /> Different conception
+      held by the Physiocrats <a href="#Page_156">156</a><br /> <br /> 2.
+      Sovereignty of the body thus constituted <a href="#Page_158">158</a><br />
+      Difference from Hobbes and Locke <a href="#Page_159">159</a><br /> The root
+      of socialism <a href="#Page_160">160</a><br /> Republican phraseology <a
+      href="#Page_161">161</a><br /> <br /> 3. Attributes of sovereignty <a
+      href="#Page_162">162</a><br /> <br /> 4. The law-making power <a
+      href="#Page_163">163</a><br /> A contemporary illustration <a
+      href="#Page_164">164</a><br /> Hints of confederation <a href="#Page_166">166</a><br />
+      <br /> 5. Forms of government <a href="#Page_168">168</a><br /> Criticism on
+      the common division <a href="#Page_169">169</a><br /> Rousseau's preference
+      for elective aristocracy <a href="#Page_172">172</a><br /> <br /> 6.
+      Attitude of the state to religion <a href="#Page_173">173</a><br />
+      Rousseau's view, the climax of a reaction <a href="#Page_176">176</a><br />
+      Its effect at the French Revolution <a href="#Page_179">179</a><br /> Its
+      futility <a href="#Page_180">180</a><br /> <br /> Another method of
+      approaching the philosophy of government&#8212;<br /> <br /> Origin of
+      society not a compact <a href="#Page_183">183</a><br /> <br /> The true
+      reason of the submission of a minority to a majority <a href="#Page_184">184</a><br />
+      <br /> Rousseau fails to touch actual problems <a href="#Page_186">186</a><br />
+      <br /> The doctrine of resistance, for instance <a href="#Page_188">188</a><br />
+      <br /> Historical illustrations <a href="#Page_190">190</a><br /> <br />
+      Historical effect of the Social Contract in France and Germany <a
+      href="#Page_193">193</a><br /> <br /> Socialist deductions from it <a
+      href="#Page_194">194</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      <a href="#CHAPTER_IV">CHAPTER IV.</a>
+    </h3>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      <span class="smcap">Emilius.</span>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Rousseau touched by the enthusiasm of his time <a href="#Page_197">197</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Contemporary excitement as to education, part of the revival of naturalism
+      <a href="#Page_199">199</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      I.&#8212;Locke, on education <a href="#Page_202">202</a><br /> Difference
+      between him and Rousseau <a href="#Page_204">204</a><br /> Exhortations to
+      mothers <a href="#Page_205">205</a><br /> Importance of infantile habits <a
+      href="#Page_208">208</a><br /> Rousseau's protest against reasoning with
+      children <a href="#Page_209">209</a><br /> Criticised <a href="#Page_209">209</a><br />
+      The opposite theory <a href="#Page_210">210</a><br /> The idea of property
+      <a href="#Page_212">212</a><br /> Artificially contrived incidents <a
+      href="#Page_214">214</a><br /> Rousseau's omission of the principle of
+      authority <a href="#Page_215">215</a><br /> Connected with his neglect of
+      the faculty of sympathy <a href="#Page_219">219</a><br /> <br /> II.&#8212;Rousseau's
+      ideal of living <a href="#Page_221">221</a><br /> The training that follows
+      from it <a href="#Page_222">222</a><br /> The duty of knowing a craft <a
+      href="#Page_223">223</a><br /> Social conception involved in this moral
+      conception <a href="#Page_226">226</a><br /> <br /> III.&#8212;Three aims
+      before the instructor <a href="#Page_229">229</a><br /> Rousseau's omission
+      of training for the social conscience <a href="#Page_230">230</a><br /> No
+      contemplation of society as a whole <a href="#Page_232">232</a><br />
+      Personal interest, the foundation of the morality of Emilius <a
+      href="#Page_233">233</a><br /> The sphere and definition of the social
+      conscience <a href="#Page_235">235</a><br /> <br /> IV.&#8212;The study of
+      history <a href="#Page_237">237</a><br /> Rousseau's notions upon the
+      subject <a href="#Page_239">239</a><br /> <br /> V.&#8212;Ideals of life for
+      women <a href="#Page_241">241</a><br /> Rousseau's repudiation of his own
+      principles <a href="#Page_242">242</a><br /> His oriental and obscurantist
+      position <a href="#Page_243">243</a><br /> Arising from his want of faith
+      in improvement <a href="#Page_244">244</a><br /> His reactionary tendencies
+      in this region eventually neutralised <a href="#Page_248">248</a><br />
+      <br /> VI.&#8212;Sum of the merits of Emilius <a href="#Page_249">249</a><br />
+      Its influence in France and Germany <a href="#Page_251">251</a><br /> In
+      England <a href="#Page_252">252</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &#160;
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      <a href="#CHAPTER_V">CHAPTER V.</a>
+    </h3>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      <span class="smcap">The Savoyard Vicar.</span>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Shallow hopes entertained by the dogmatic atheists <a href="#Page_256">256</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      The good side of the religious reaction <a href="#Page_258">258</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Its preservation of some parts of Christian influence <a href="#Page_259">259</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Earlier forms of deism <a href="#Page_260">260</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      The deism of the Savoyard Vicar <a href="#Page_264">264</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      The elevation of man, as well as the restoration of a divinity <a
+      href="#Page_265">265</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      A divinity for fair weather <a href="#Page_268">268</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Religious self-denial <a href="#Page_269">269</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      The Savoyard Vicar's vital omission <a href="#Page_270">270</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      His position towards Christianity <a href="#Page_272">272</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Its effectiveness as a solvent <a href="#Page_273">273</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Weakness of the subjective test <a href="#Page_276">276</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      The Savoyard Vicar's deism not compatible with growing intellectual
+      conviction <a href="#Page_276">276</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      The true satisfaction of the religious emotion <a href="#Page_277">277</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &#160;
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      <a href="#CHAPTER_VI">CHAPTER VI.</a>
+    </h3>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      <span class="smcap">England.</span>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Rousseau's English portrait <a href="#Page_281">281</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      His reception in Paris <a href="#Page_282">282</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      And in London <a href="#Page_283">283</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Hume's account of him <a href="#Page_284">284</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Settlement at Wootton <a href="#Page_286">286</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      The quarrel with Hume <a href="#Page_287">287</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Detail of the charges against Hume <a href="#Page_287">287</a>-291
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Walpole's pretended letter from Frederick <a href="#Page_291">291</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Baselessness of the whole delusion <a href="#Page_292">292</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Hume's conduct in the quarrel <a href="#Page_293">293</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      The war of pamphlets <a href="#Page_295">295</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Common theory of Rousseau's madness <a href="#Page_296">296</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Preparatory conditions <a href="#Page_297">297</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Extension of disorder from the affective life to the intelligence <a
+      href="#Page_299">299</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      The Confessions <a href="#Page_301">301</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      His life at Wootton <a href="#Page_306">306</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Flight from Derbyshire <a href="#Page_306">306</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      And from England <a href="#Page_308">308</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &#160;
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      <a href="#CHAPTER_VII">CHAPTER VII.</a>
+    </h3>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      <span class="smcap">The End.</span>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      The elder Mirabeau <a href="#Page_309">309</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Shelters Rousseau at Fleury <a href="#Page_311">311</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Rousseau at Trye <a href="#Page_312">312</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      In Dauphiny <a href="#Page_314">314</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Return to Paris <a href="#Page_314">314</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      The <i>R&#234;veries</i> <a href="#Page_315">315</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Life in Paris <a href="#Page_316">316</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Bernardin de St. Pierre's account of him <a href="#Page_317">317</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      An Easter excursion <a href="#Page_320">320</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Rousseau's unsociality <a href="#Page_322">322</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Poland and Spain <a href="#Page_324">324</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Withdrawal to Ermenonville <a href="#Page_326">326</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      His death <a href="#Page_326">326</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      <a href="#INDEX"><b>INDEX</b></a>
+    </p>
+    <hr style="width: 65%;" />
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">[ii.1]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <h1>
+      ROUSSEAU.
+    </h1>
+    <p>
+      &#160;
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      <a name="CHAPTER_I" id="CHAPTER_I"></a>CHAPTER I.
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      MONTMORENCY&#8212;THE NEW HELO&#207;SA.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <span class="smcap">The</span> many conditions of intellectual
+      productiveness are still hidden in such profound obscurity that we are
+      unable to explain why a period of stormy moral agitation seems to be in
+      certain natures the indispensable antecedent of their highest creative
+      effort. Byron is one instance, and Rousseau is another, in which the
+      current of stimulating force made this rapid way from the lower to the
+      higher parts of character, and only expended itself after having traversed
+      the whole range of emotion and faculty, from their meanest, most
+      realistic, most personal forms of exercise, up to the summit of what is
+      lofty and ideal. No man was ever involved in such an odious complication
+      of moral maladies as beset Rousseau in the winter of 1758. Yet within
+      three years of this miserable epoch he had completed not only the New Helo&#239;sa,
+      which is the monument of his fall, but the Social Contract, which was the
+      most influential,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">[ii.2]</a></span>
+      and Emilius, which was perhaps the most elevated and spiritual, of all the
+      productions of the prolific genius of France in the eighteenth century. A
+      poor light-hearted Marmontel thought that the secret of Rousseau's success
+      lay in the circumstance that he began to write late, and it is true that
+      no other author, so considerable as Rousseau, waited until the age of
+      fifty for the full vigour of his inspiration. No tale of years, however,
+      could have ripened such fruit without native strength and incommunicable
+      savour. Nor can the mechanical movement of those better ordered characters
+      which keep the balance of the world even, impart to literature that
+      peculiar quality, peculiar but not the finest, that comes from experience
+      of the black unlighted abysses of the soul.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The period of actual production was externally calm. The New Helo&#239;sa
+      was completed in 1759, and published in 1761. The Social Contract was
+      published in the spring of 1762, and Emilius a few weeks later. Throughout
+      this period Rousseau was, for the last time in his life, at peace with
+      most of his fellows. Though he never relented from his antipathy to the
+      Holbachians, for the time it slumbered, until a more real and serious
+      persecution than any which he imputed to them, transformed his antipathy
+      into a gloomy frenzy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The new friends whom he made at Montmorency were among the greatest people
+      in the kingdom. The Duke of Luxembourg (1702-64) was a marshal of France,
+      and as intimate a friend of the king as the king was capable of having.
+      The Mar&#233;chale de<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[ii.3]</a></span>
+      [*p.3] Luxembourg (1707-87) had been one of the most beautiful, and
+      continued to be one of the most brilliant leaders of the last aristocratic
+      generation that was destined to sport on the slopes of the volcano. The
+      former seems to have been a loyal and homely soul; the latter, restless,
+      imperious, penetrating, unamiable. Their dealings with Rousseau were
+      marked by perfect sincerity and straightforward friendship. They gave him
+      a convenient apartment in a small summer lodge in the park, to which he
+      retreated when he cared for a change from his narrow cottage. He was a
+      constant guest at their table, where he met the highest personages in
+      France. The marshal did not disdain to pay him visits, or to walk with
+      him, or to discuss his private affairs. Unable as ever to shine in
+      conversation, yet eager to show his great friends that they had to do with
+      no common mortal, Rousseau bethought him of reading the New Helo&#239;sa
+      aloud to them. At ten in the morning he used to wait upon the mar&#233;chale,
+      and there by her bedside he read the story of the love, the sin, the
+      repentance of Julie, the distraction of Saint Preux, the wisdom of Wolmar,
+      and the sage friendship of Lord Edward, in tones which enchanted her both
+      with his book and its author for all the rest of the day, as all the women
+      in France were so soon to be enchanted.<a name="FNanchor_1_1"
+      id="FNanchor_1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a>
+      This, as he expected, amply reconciled her to the uncouthness and
+      clumsiness of his conversation, which was at least as maladroit and as
+      spirit<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[ii.4]</a></span>less
+      in the presence of a duchess as it was in presences less imposing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One side of character is obviously tested by the way in which a man bears
+      himself in his relations with those of greater social consideration.
+      Rousseau was taxed by some of his plebeian enemies with a most unheroic
+      deference to his patrician friends. He had a dog whose name was <i>Duc</i>.
+      When he came to sit at a duke's table, he changed his dog's name to <i>Turc</i>.<a
+      name="FNanchor_2_2" id="FNanchor_2_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_2"
+      class="fnanchor">[2]</a> Again, one day in a transport of tenderness he
+      embraced the old marshal&#8212;the duchess embraced Rousseau ten times a
+      day, for the age was effusive&#8212;&quot;Ah, monsieur le mar&#233;chal, I
+      used to hate the great before I knew you, and I hate them still more,
+      since you make me feel so strongly how easy it would be for them to have
+      themselves adored.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_3_3" id="FNanchor_3_3"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_3_3" class="fnanchor">[3]</a> On another occasion he
+      happened to be playing at chess with the Prince of Conti, who had come to
+      visit him in his cottage.<a name="FNanchor_4_4" id="FNanchor_4_4"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_4_4" class="fnanchor">[4]</a> In spite of the signs and
+      grimaces of the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[ii.5]</a></span>attendants,
+      he insisted on beating the prince in a couple of games. Then he said with
+      respectful gravity, &quot;Monseigneur, I honour your serene highness too
+      much not to beat you at chess always.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_5_5"
+      id="FNanchor_5_5"></a><a href="#Footnote_5_5" class="fnanchor">[5]</a> A
+      few days after, the vanquished prince sent him a present of game which
+      Rousseau duly accepted. The present was repeated, but this time Rousseau
+      wrote to Madame de Boufflers that he would receive no more, and that he
+      loved the prince's conversation better than his gifts.<a
+      name="FNanchor_6_6" id="FNanchor_6_6"></a><a href="#Footnote_6_6"
+      class="fnanchor">[6]</a> He admits that this was an ungracious proceeding,
+      and that to refuse game &quot;from a prince of the blood who throws such
+      good feeling into the present, is not so much the delicacy of a proud man
+      bent on preserving his independence, as the rusticity of an unmannerly
+      person who does not know his place.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_7_7"
+      id="FNanchor_7_7"></a><a href="#Footnote_7_7" class="fnanchor">[7]</a>
+      Considering the extreme virulence with which Rousseau always resented
+      gifts even of the most trifling kind from his friends, one may perhaps
+      find some inconsistency in this condemnation of a sort of conduct to which
+      he tenaciously clung on all other occasions. If the fact of the donor
+      being a prince of the blood is allowed to modify the quality of the
+      donation, that is hardly a defensible position in the austere citizen of
+      Geneva. Madame de Boufflers,<a name="FNanchor_8_8" id="FNanchor_8_8"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_8_8" class="fnanchor">[8]</a> <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[ii.6]</a></span>the intimate friend of our sage
+      Hume, and the yet more intimate friend of the Prince of Conti, gave him a
+      judicious warning when she bade him beware of laying himself open to a
+      charge of affectation, lest it should obscure the brightness of his virtue
+      and so hinder its usefulness. &quot;Fabius and Regulus would have accepted
+      such marks of esteem, without feeling in them any hurt to their
+      disinterestedness and frugality.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_9_9"
+      id="FNanchor_9_9"></a><a href="#Footnote_9_9" class="fnanchor">[9]</a>
+      Perhaps there is a flutter of self-consciousness that is not far removed
+      from this affectation, in the pains which Rousseau takes to tell us that
+      after dining at the castle, he used to return home gleefully to sup with a
+      mason who was his neighbour and his friend.<a name="FNanchor_10_10"
+      id="FNanchor_10_10"></a><a href="#Footnote_10_10" class="fnanchor">[10]</a>
+      On the whole, however, and so far as we know, Rousseau conducted himself
+      not unworthily with these high people. His letters to them are for the
+      most part marked by self-respect and a moderate graciousness, though now
+      and again he makes rather too much case of the difference of rank, and
+      asserts his independence with something too much of pro<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[ii.7]</a></span>testation.<a
+      name="FNanchor_11_11" id="FNanchor_11_11"></a><a href="#Footnote_11_11"
+      class="fnanchor">[11]</a> Their relations with him are a curious sign of
+      the interest which the members of the great world took in the men who were
+      quietly preparing the destruction both of them and their world. The Mar&#233;chale
+      de Luxembourg places this squalid dweller in a hovel on her estate in the
+      place of honour at her table, and embraces his Theresa. The Prince of
+      Conti pays visits of courtesy and sends game to a man whom he employs at a
+      few sous an hour to copy manuscript for him. The Countess of Boufflers, in
+      sending him the money, insists that he is to count her his warmest friend.<a
+      name="FNanchor_12_12" id="FNanchor_12_12"></a><a href="#Footnote_12_12"
+      class="fnanchor">[12]</a> When his dog dies, the countess writes to
+      sympathise with his chagrin, and the prince begs to be allowed to replace
+      it.<a name="FNanchor_13_13" id="FNanchor_13_13"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_13_13" class="fnanchor">[13]</a> And when persecution and
+      trouble and infinite confusion came upon him, they all stood as fast by
+      him as their own comfort would allow. Do we not feel that there must have
+      been in the unhappy man, besides all the recorded pettinesses and
+      perversities which revolt us in him, a vein of something which touched
+      men, and made women devoted to him, until he splenetically drove both men
+      and women away from him? With Madame d'Epinay and Madame d'Houdetot, as
+      with the dearer and humbler patroness of his youth, we have now parted
+      company. But they are instantly succeeded by new devotees. And the lovers
+      of Rousseau, in all degrees, were not silly women led captive by idle
+      fancy. Madame de Boufflers was one <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_8"
+      id="Page_8">[ii.8]</a></span>of the most distinguished spirits of her
+      time. Her friendship for him was such, that his sensuous vanity made
+      Rousseau against all reason or probability confound it with a warmer form
+      of emotion, and he plumes himself in a manner most displeasing on the
+      victory which he won over his own feelings on the occasion.<a
+      name="FNanchor_14_14" id="FNanchor_14_14"></a><a href="#Footnote_14_14"
+      class="fnanchor">[14]</a> As a matter of fact he had no feelings to
+      conquer, any more than the supposed object of them ever bore him any
+      ill-will for his indifference, as in his mania of suspicion he afterwards
+      believed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a calm about the too few years he passed at Montmorency, which
+      leaves us in doubt whether this mania would ever have afflicted him, if
+      his natural irritation had not been made intense and irresistible by the
+      cruel distractions that followed the publication of Emilius. He was
+      tolerably content with his present friends. The simplicity of their way of
+      dealing with him contrasted singularly, as he thought, with the
+      never-ending solicitudes, as importunate as they were officious, of the
+      patronising friends whom he had just cast off.<a name="FNanchor_15_15"
+      id="FNanchor_15_15"></a><a href="#Footnote_15_15" class="fnanchor">[15]</a>
+      Perhaps, too, he was soothed by the companionship of persons whose rank
+      may have flattered his vanity, while unlike Diderot and his old literary
+      friends in Paris, they entered into no competition with him in the
+      peculiar sphere of his own genius. Madame de Boufflers, indeed, wrote a
+      tragedy, but he told her gruffly enough that it was a plagiarism from
+      Southerne's Oroonoko.<a name="FNanchor_16_16" id="FNanchor_16_16"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_16_16" class="fnanchor">[16]</a> That Rousseau was <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[ii.9]</a></span>thoroughly
+      capable of this pitiful emotion of sensitive literary jealousy is proved,
+      if by nothing else, by his readiness to suspect that other authors were
+      jealous of him. No one suspects others of a meanness of this kind unless
+      he is capable of it himself. The resounding success which followed the New
+      Helo&#239;sa and Emilius put an end to these apprehensions. It raised him
+      to a pedestal in popular esteem as high as that on which Voltaire stood
+      triumphant. That very success unfortunately brought troubles which
+      destroyed Rousseau's last chance of ending his days in full
+      reasonableness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Meanwhile he enjoyed his final interval of moderate wholesomeness and
+      peace. He felt his old healthy joy in the green earth. One of the letters
+      commemorates his delight in the great scudding south-west winds of
+      February, soft forerunners of the spring, so sweet to all who live with
+      nature.<a name="FNanchor_17_17" id="FNanchor_17_17"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_17_17" class="fnanchor">[17]</a> At the end of his garden
+      was a summer-house, and here even on wintry days he sat composing or
+      copying. It was not music only that he copied. He took a curious pleasure
+      in making transcripts of his romance, and he sold them to the Duchess of
+      Luxembourg and other ladies for some moderate fee.<a name="FNanchor_18_18"
+      id="FNanchor_18_18"></a><a href="#Footnote_18_18" class="fnanchor">[18]</a>
+      Sometimes he moved from his own lodging to the quarters in the park which
+      his great friends had induced him to accept. &quot;They were charmingly
+      neat; the furniture was of white and blue. It was in this perfumed and
+      delicious solitude, in the midst of woods and streams and choirs of birds
+      of <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[ii.10]</a></span>every
+      kind, with the fragrance of the orange-flower poured round me, that I
+      composed in a continual ecstasy the fifth book of Emilius. With what
+      eagerness did I hasten every morning at sunrise to breathe the balmy air!
+      What good coffee I used to make under the porch in company with my
+      Theresa! The cat and the dog made up the party. That would have sufficed
+      me for all the days of my life, and I should never have known weariness.&quot;
+      And so to the assurance, so often repeated under so many different
+      circumstances, that here was a true heaven upon earth, where if fates had
+      only allowed he would have known unbroken innocence and lasting happiness.<a
+      name="FNanchor_19_19" id="FNanchor_19_19"></a><a href="#Footnote_19_19"
+      class="fnanchor">[19]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yet he had the wisdom to warn others against attempting a life such as he
+      craved for himself. As on a more memorable occasion, there came to him a
+      young man who would fain have been with him always, and whom he sent away
+      exceeding sorrowful. &quot;The first lesson I should give you would be not
+      to surrender yourself to the taste you say you have for the contemplative
+      life. It is only an indolence of the soul, to be condemned at any age, but
+      especially so at yours. Man is not made to meditate, but to act. Labour
+      therefore in the condition of life in which you have been placed by your
+      family and by providence: that is the first precept of the virtue which
+      you wish to follow. If residence at Paris, joined to the business you have
+      there, seems to you irreconcilable with virtue, <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[ii.11]</a></span>do better still, and return
+      to your own province. Go live in the bosom of your family, serve and
+      solace your honest parents. There you will be truly fulfilling the duties
+      that virtue imposes on you.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_20_20"
+      id="FNanchor_20_20"></a><a href="#Footnote_20_20" class="fnanchor">[20]</a>
+      This intermixture of sound sense with unutterable perversities almost
+      suggests a doubt how far the perversities were sincere, until we remember
+      that Rousseau even in the most exalted part of his writings was careful to
+      separate immediate practical maxims from his theoretical principles of
+      social philosophy.<a name="FNanchor_21_21" id="FNanchor_21_21"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_21_21" class="fnanchor">[21]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Occasionally his good sense takes so stiff and unsympathetic a form as to
+      fill us with a warmer dislike for him than his worst paradoxes inspire. A
+      correspondent had written to him about the frightful persecutions which
+      were being inflicted on the Protestants in some district of France.
+      Rousseau's letter is a masterpiece in the style of Eliphaz the Temanite.
+      Our brethren must surely have given some pretext for the evil treatment to
+      which they were subjected. One who is a Christian must learn to suffer,
+      and every man's conduct ought to conform to his doctrine. Our brethren,
+      moreover, ought to remember that the word of God is express upon the duty
+      of obeying the laws set up by the prince. The writer cannot venture to
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[ii.12]</a></span>run
+      any risk by interceding in favour of our brethren with the government.
+      &quot;Every one has his own calling upon the earth; mine is to tell the
+      public harsh but useful truths. I have preached humanity, gentleness,
+      tolerance, so far as it depended upon me; 'tis no fault of mine if the
+      world has not listened. I have made it a rule to keep to general truths; I
+      produce no libels, no satires; I attack no man, but men; not an action,
+      but a vice.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_22_22" id="FNanchor_22_22"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_22_22" class="fnanchor">[22]</a> The worst of the worthy
+      sort of people, wrote Voltaire, is that they are such cowards: a man
+      groans over a wrong, he holds his tongue, he takes his supper, and he
+      forgets all about it.<a name="FNanchor_23_23" id="FNanchor_23_23"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_23_23" class="fnanchor">[23]</a> If Voltaire could not
+      write like F&#233;nelon, at least he could never talk like Tartufe; he
+      responded to no tale of wrong with words about his mission, with strings
+      of antitheses, but always with royal anger and the spring of alert and
+      puissant endeavour. In an hour of oppression one would rather have been
+      the friend of the saviour of the Calas and of Sirven, than of the
+      vindicator of theism.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rousseau, however, had good sense enough in less equivocal forms than
+      this. For example, in another letter he remonstrates with a correspondent
+      for judging the rich too harshly. &quot;You do not bear in mind that
+      having from their childhood contracted a thousand wants which we are
+      without, then to bring them down to the condition of the poor, would be to
+      make them more miserable than the poor. We should be just <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[ii.13]</a></span>towards
+      all the world, even to those who are not just to us. Ah, if we had the
+      virtues opposed to the vices which we reproach in them, we should soon
+      forget that such people were in the world. One word more. To have any
+      right to despise the rich, we ought ourselves to be prudent and thrifty,
+      so as to have no need of riches.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_24_24"
+      id="FNanchor_24_24"></a><a href="#Footnote_24_24" class="fnanchor">[24]</a>
+      In the observance of this just precept Rousseau was to the end of his life
+      absolutely without fault. No one was more rigorously careful to make his
+      independence sure by the fewness of his wants and by minute financial
+      probity. This firm limitation of his material desires was one cause of his
+      habitual and almost invariable refusal to accept presents, though no doubt
+      another cause was the stubborn and ungracious egoism which made him resent
+      every obligation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is worth remembering in illustration of the peculiar susceptibility and
+      softness of his character where women were concerned&#8212;it was not
+      quite without exception&#8212;that he did not fly into a fit of rage over
+      their gifts, as he did over those of men. He remonstrated, but in gentler
+      key. &quot;What could I do with four pullets?&quot; he wrote to a lady who
+      had presented them to him. &quot;I began by sending two of them to people
+      to whom I am indifferent. That made me think of the difference there is
+      between a present and a testimony of friendship. The first will never find
+      in me anything but a thankless heart; the second.... Ah, if you had only
+      given me news of yourself <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_14"
+      id="Page_14">[ii.14]</a></span>without sending me anything else, how rich
+      and how grateful you would have made me; instead of that the pullets are
+      eaten, and the best thing I can do is to forget all about them; let us say
+      no more.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_25_25" id="FNanchor_25_25"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_25_25" class="fnanchor">[25]</a> Rude and repellent as
+      this may seem, and as it is, there is a rough kind of playfulness about
+      it, when compared with the truculence which he was not slow to exhibit to
+      men. If a friend presumed to thank him for any service, he was
+      peremptorily rebuked for his ignorance of the true qualities of
+      friendship, with which thankfulness has no connection. He ostentatiously
+      refused to offer thanks for services himself, even to a woman whom he
+      always treated with so much consideration as the Mar&#233;chale de
+      Luxembourg. He once declared boldly that modesty is a false virtue,<a
+      name="FNanchor_26_26" id="FNanchor_26_26"></a><a href="#Footnote_26_26"
+      class="fnanchor">[26]</a> and though he did not go so far as to make
+      gratitude the subject of a corresponding formula of denunciation, he
+      always implied that this too is really one of the false virtues. He
+      confessed to Malesherbes, without the slightest contrition, that he was
+      ungrateful by nature.<a name="FNanchor_27_27" id="FNanchor_27_27"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_27_27" class="fnanchor">[27]</a> To Madame d'Epinay he
+      once went still further, declaring that he found it hard not to hate those
+      who had used him well.<a name="FNanchor_28_28" id="FNanchor_28_28"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_28_28" class="fnanchor">[28]</a> Undoubtedly he was right
+      so far as this, that gratitude answering to a spirit of exaction in a
+      benefactor is no merit; a service done in expectation of gratitude is from
+      that fact stripped of the quality which makes gratitude due, and is a mere
+      piece of <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[ii.15]</a></span>egoism
+      in altruistic disguise. Kindness in its genuine forms is a testimony of
+      good feeling, and conventional speech is perhaps a little too hard, as
+      well as too shallow and unreal, in calling the recipient evil names
+      because he is unable to respond to the good feeling. Rousseau protested
+      against a conception of friendship which makes of what ought to be
+      disinterested helpfulness a title to everlasting tribute. His way of
+      expressing this was harsh and unamiable, but it was not without an element
+      of uprightness and veracity. As in his greater themes, so in his paradoxes
+      upon private relations, he hid wholesome ingredients of rebuke to the
+      unquestioning acceptance of common form. &quot;I am well pleased,&quot; he
+      said to a friend, &quot;both with thee and thy letters, except the end,
+      where thou say'st thou art more mine than thine own. For there thou liest,
+      and it is not worth while to take the trouble to <i>thee</i> and <i>thou</i>
+      a man as thine intimate, only to tell him untruths.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor_29_29" id="FNanchor_29_29"></a><a href="#Footnote_29_29"
+      class="fnanchor">[29]</a> Chesterfield was for people with much self-love
+      of the small sort, probably a more agreeable person to meet than Doctor
+      Johnson, but Johnson was the more wholesome companion for a man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Occasionally, though not very often, he seems to have let spleen take the
+      place of honest surliness, and so drifted into clumsy and ill-humoured
+      banter, of a sort that gives a dreary shudder to one fresh from Voltaire.
+      &quot;So you have chosen for yourself a tender and virtuous mistress! I am
+      not surprised; all <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[ii.16]</a></span>mistresses
+      are that. You have chosen her in Paris! To find a tender and virtuous
+      mistress in Paris is to have not such bad luck. You have made her a
+      promise of marriage? My friend, you have made a blunder; for if you
+      continue to love, the promise is superfluous, and if you do not, then it
+      is no avail. You have signed it with your blood? That is all but tragic;
+      but I don't know that the choice of the ink in which he writes, gives
+      anything to the fidelity of the man who signs.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor_30_30" id="FNanchor_30_30"></a><a href="#Footnote_30_30"
+      class="fnanchor">[30]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We can only add that the health in which a man writes may possibly excuse
+      the dismal quality of what he writes, and that Rousseau was now as always
+      the prey of bodily pain which, as he was conscious, made him distraught.
+      &quot;My sufferings are not very excruciating just now,&quot; he wrote on
+      a later occasion, &quot;but they are incessant, and I am not out of pain a
+      single moment day or night, and this quite drives me mad. I feel bitterly
+      my wrong conduct and the baseness of my suspicions; but if anything can
+      excuse me, it is my mournful state, my loneliness,&quot; and so on.<a
+      name="FNanchor_31_31" id="FNanchor_31_31"></a><a href="#Footnote_31_31"
+      class="fnanchor">[31]</a> This prolonged physical anguish, which was made
+      more intense towards the end of 1761 by the accidental breaking of a
+      surgical instrument,<a name="FNanchor_32_32" id="FNanchor_32_32"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_32_32" class="fnanchor">[32]</a> sometimes so nearly wore
+      his fortitude away as to make him think of suicide.<a name="FNanchor_33_33"
+      id="FNanchor_33_33"></a><a href="#Footnote_33_33" class="fnanchor">[33]</a>
+      In Lord Edward's famous letter on suicide in the New Helo&#239;sa, while
+      denying in forcible terms the right of ending one's days merely to escape
+      from <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[ii.17]</a></span>intolerable
+      mental distress, he admits that inasmuch as physical disorders only grow
+      incessantly worse, violent and incurable bodily pain may be an excuse for
+      a man making away with himself; he ceases to be a human being before
+      dying, and in putting an end to his life he only completes his release
+      from a body that embarrasses him, and contains his soul no longer.<a
+      name="FNanchor_34_34" id="FNanchor_34_34"></a><a href="#Footnote_34_34"
+      class="fnanchor">[34]</a> The thought was often present to him in this
+      form. Eighteen months later than our last date, the purpose grew very
+      deliberate under an aggravation of his malady, and he seriously looked
+      upon his own case as falling within the conditions of Lord Edward's
+      exception.<a name="FNanchor_35_35" id="FNanchor_35_35"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_35_35" class="fnanchor">[35]</a> It is difficult, in the
+      face of outspoken declarations like these, to know what writers can be
+      thinking of when, with respect to the controversy on the manner of
+      Rousseau's death, they pronounce him incapable of such a dereliction of
+      his own most cherished principles as anything like self-destruction would
+      have been.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As he sat gnawed by pain, with surgical instruments on his table, and
+      sombre thoughts of suicide in his head, the ray of a little episode of
+      romance shone in <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[ii.18]</a></span>incongruously
+      upon the scene. Two ladies in Paris, absorbed in the New Helo&#239;sa,
+      like all the women of the time, identified themselves with the Julie and
+      the Claire of the novel that none could resist. They wrote anonymously to
+      the author, claiming their identification with characters fondly supposed
+      to be immortal. &quot;You will know that Julie is not dead, and that she
+      lives to love you; I am not this Julie, you perceive it by my style; I am
+      only her cousin, or rather her friend, as Claire was.&quot; The
+      unfortunate Saint Preux responded as gallantly as he could be expected to
+      do in the intervals of surgery. &quot;You do not know that the Saint Preux
+      to whom you write is tormented with a cruel and incurable disorder, and
+      that the very letter he writes to you is often interrupted by distractions
+      of a very different kind.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_36_36" id="FNanchor_36_36"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_36_36" class="fnanchor">[36]</a> He figures rather
+      uncouthly, but the unknown fair were not at first disabused, and one of
+      them never was. Rousseau was deeply suspicious. He feared to be made the
+      victim of a masculine pleasantry. From women he never feared anything. His
+      letters were found too short, too cold. He replied to the remonstrance by
+      a reference of extreme coarseness. His correspondents wrote from the
+      neighbourhood of the Palais Royal, then and for long after the haunt of
+      mercenary women. &quot;You belong to your quarter more than I thought,&quot;
+      he said brutally.<a name="FNanchor_37_37" id="FNanchor_37_37"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_37_37" class="fnanchor">[37]</a> The vulgarity of the
+      lackey was never quite obliterated in him, even when the lackey had
+      written Emilius. <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[ii.19]</a></span>This
+      was too much for the imaginary Claire. &quot;I have given myself three
+      good blows on my breast for the correspondence that I was silly enough to
+      open between you,&quot; she wrote to Julie, and she remained implacable.
+      The Julie, on the contrary, was faithful to the end of Rousseau's life.
+      She took his part vehemently in the quarrel with Hume, and wrote in
+      defence of his memory after he was dead. She is the most remarkable of all
+      the instances of that unreasoning passion which the New Helo&#239;sa
+      inflamed in the breasts of the women of that age. Madame Latour pursued
+      Jean Jacques with a devotion that no coldness could repulse. She only saw
+      him three times in all, the first time not until 1766, when he was on his
+      way through Paris to England. The second time, in 1772, she visited him
+      without mentioning her name, and he did not recognise her; she brought him
+      some music to copy, and went away unknown. She made another attempt,
+      announcing herself: he gave her a frosty welcome, and then wrote to her
+      that she was to come no more. With a strange fidelity she bore him no
+      grudge, but cherished his memory and sorrowed over his misfortunes to the
+      day of her death. He was not an idol of very sublime quality, but we may
+      think kindly of the idolatress.<a name="FNanchor_38_38" id="FNanchor_38_38"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_38_38" class="fnanchor">[38]</a> Worshippers are ever
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[ii.20]</a></span>dearer
+      to us than their graven images. Let us turn to the romance which touched
+      women in this way, and helped to give a new spirit to an epoch.
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      <b>II.</b>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As has been already said, it is the business of criticism to separate what
+      is accidental in form, transitory in manner, and merely local in
+      suggestion, from the general ideas which live under a casual and
+      particular literary robe. And so we have to distinguish the external
+      conditions under which a book like the New Helo&#239;sa is produced, from
+      the living qualities in the author which gave the external conditions
+      their hold upon him, and turned their development in one direction rather
+      than another. We are only encouraging poverty of spirit, when we insist on
+      fixing our eyes on a few of the minuti&#230; of construction, instead of
+      patiently seizing larger impressions and more durable meanings; when we
+      stop at the fortuitous incidents of composition, instead of advancing to
+      the central elements of the writer's character.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These incidents in the case of the New Helo&#239;sa we know; the sensuous
+      communion with nature in her summer mood in the woods of Montmorency, the
+      long hours and days of solitary expansion, the despairing passion for the
+      too sage Julie of actual experience. But the power of these impressions
+      from without depended on secrets of conformation within. An adult with
+      marked character is, consciously or uncon<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[ii.21]</a></span>sciously, his own
+      character's victim or sport. It is his whole system of impulses, ideas,
+      pre-occupations, that make those critical situations ready, into which he
+      too hastily supposes that an accident has drawn him. And this inner system
+      not only prepares the situation; it forces his interpretation of the
+      situation. Much of the interest of the New Helo&#239;sa springs from the
+      fact that it was the outcome, in a sense of which the author himself was
+      probably unconscious, of the general doctrine of life and conduct which he
+      only professed to expound in writings of graver pretension. Rousseau
+      generally spoke of his romance in phrases of depreciation, as the monument
+      of a passing weakness. It was in truth as entirely a monument of the
+      strength, no less than the weakness, of his whole scheme, as his
+      weightiest piece. That it was not so deliberately, only added to its
+      effect. The slow and musing air which underlies all the assumption of
+      ardent passion, made a way for the doctrine into sensitive natures, that
+      would have been untouched by the pretended ratiocination of the
+      Discourses, and the didactic manner of the Emilius.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rousseau's scheme, which we must carefully remember was only present to
+      his own mind in an informal and fragmentary way, may be shortly described
+      as an attempt to rehabilitate human nature in as much of the supposed
+      freshness of primitive times, as the hardened crust of civil institutions
+      and social use might allow. In this survey, however incoherently carried
+      out, the mutual passion of the two sexes<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[ii.22]</a></span> was the very last that was
+      likely to escape Rousseau's attention. Hence it was with this that he
+      began. The Discourses had been an attack upon the general ordering of
+      society, and an exposition of the mischief that society has done to human
+      nature at large. The romance treated one set of emotions in human nature
+      particularly, though it also touches the whole emotional sphere
+      indirectly. And this limitation of the field was accompanied by a total
+      revolution in the method. Polemic was abandoned; the presence of hostility
+      was forgotten in appearance, if not in the heart of the writer; instead of
+      discussion, presentation; instead of abstract analysis of principles,
+      concrete drawing of persons and dramatic delineation of passion. There is,
+      it is true, a monstrous superfluity of ethical exposition of most doubtful
+      value, but then that, as we have already said, was in the manners of the
+      time. All people in those days with any pretensions to use their minds,
+      wrote and talked in a superfine ethical manner, and violently translated
+      the dictates of sensibility into formulas of morality. The important thing
+      to remark is not that this semi-didactic strain is present, but that there
+      is much less of it, and that it takes a far more subordinate place, than
+      the subject and the reigning taste would have led us to expect. It is
+      true, also, that Rousseau declared his intention in the two characters of
+      Julie and of Wolmar, who eventually became Julie's husband, of leading to
+      a reconciliation between the two great opposing parties, the devout and
+      the rationalistic; of teaching them the lesson of<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[ii.23]</a></span> reciprocal esteem, by
+      showing the one that it is possible to believe in a God without being a
+      hypocrite, and the other that it is possible to be an unbeliever without
+      being a scoundrel.<a name="FNanchor_39_39" id="FNanchor_39_39"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_39_39" class="fnanchor">[39]</a> This intention, if it was
+      really present to Rousseau's mind while he was writing, and not an
+      afterthought characteristically welcomed for the sake of giving loftiness
+      and gravity to a composition of which he was always a little ashamed, must
+      at any rate have been of a very pale kind. It would hardly have occurred
+      to a critic, unless Rousseau had so emphatically pointed it out, that such
+      a design had presided over the composition, and contemporary readers saw
+      nothing of it. In the first part of the story, which is wholly passionate,
+      it is certainly not visible, and in the second part neither of the two
+      contending factions was likely to learn any lesson with respect to the
+      other. Churchmen would have insisted that Wolmar was really a Christian
+      dressed up as an atheist, and philosophers would hardly have accepted
+      Julie as a type of the too believing people who broke Calas on the wheel,
+      and cut off La Barre's head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      French critics tell us that no one now reads the New Helo&#239;sa in
+      France except deliberate students of the works of Rousseau, and certainly
+      few in this generation read it in our own country.<a name="FNanchor_40_40"
+      id="FNanchor_40_40"></a><a href="#Footnote_40_40" class="fnanchor">[40]</a>
+      The action <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[ii.24]</a></span>is
+      very slight, and the play of motives very simple, when contrasted with the
+      ingenuity of invention, the elaborate subtleties of psychological
+      analysis, the power of rapid change from one perturbing incident or
+      excited humour to another, which mark the modern writer of sentimental
+      fiction. As the title warns us, it is a story of a youthful tutor and a
+      too fair disciple, straying away from the lessons of calm philosophy into
+      the heated places of passion. The high pride of Julie's father forbade all
+      hope of their union, and in very desperation the unhappy pair lost the
+      self-control of virtue, and threw themselves into the pit that lies so
+      ready to our feet. Remorse followed with quick step, for Julie had with
+      her purity lost none of the other lovelinesses of a dutiful character. Her
+      lover was hurried away from the country by the generous solicitude of an
+      English nobleman, one of the bravest, tenderest, and best of men. Julie,
+      left undisturbed by her lover's presence, stricken with affliction at the
+      death of a sweet and affectionate mother, and pressed by the importunities
+      of a father whom she dearly loved, in spite of all the disasters which his
+      will had brought upon her, at length consented to marry a foreign baron
+      from some northern court. Wolmar was much older than she was; a devotee of
+      calm reason, without a system and without prejudices, benevolent, orderly,
+      above all things judicious. The lover meditated suicide, from which he was
+      only diverted by the arguments of Lord Edward, who did more than argue; he
+      hurried the forlorn man on board the ship<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[ii.25]</a></span> of Admiral Anson, then just
+      starting for his famous voyage round the world. And this marks the end of
+      the first episode.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rousseau always urged that his story was dangerous for young girls, and
+      maintained that Richardson was grievously mistaken in supposing that they
+      could be instructed by romances. It was like setting fire to the house, he
+      said, for the sake of making the pumps play.<a name="FNanchor_41_41"
+      id="FNanchor_41_41"></a><a href="#Footnote_41_41" class="fnanchor">[41]</a>
+      As he admitted so much, he is not open to attack on this side, except from
+      those who hold the theory that no books ought to be written which may not
+      prudently be put into the hands of the young,&#8212;a puerile and
+      contemptible doctrine that must emasculate all literature and all art, by
+      excluding the most interesting of human relations and the most powerful of
+      human passions. There is not a single composition of the first rank
+      outside of science, from the Bible downwards, that could undergo the test.
+      The most useful standard for measuring the significance of a book in this
+      respect is found in the manners of the time, and the prevailing tone of
+      contemporary literature. In trying to appreciate the meaning of the New
+      Helo&#239;sa and its popularity, it is well to think of it as a
+      delineation of love, in connection not only with such a book as the
+      Pucelle, where there is at least wit, but with a story like Duclos's,
+      which all ladies both read and were not in the least ashamed to
+      acknowledge that they had read; or still worse, such an abomination as
+      Diderot's first stories; or a story <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_26"
+      id="Page_26">[ii.26]</a></span>like Laclos's, which came a generation
+      later, and with its infinite briskness and devilry carried the tradition
+      of artistic impurity to as vigorous a manifestation as it is capable of
+      reaching.<a name="FNanchor_42_42" id="FNanchor_42_42"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_42_42" class="fnanchor">[42]</a> To a generation whose
+      literature is as pure as the best English, American, and German literature
+      is in the present day, the New Helo&#239;sa might without doubt be
+      corrupting. To the people who read Cr&#233;billon and the Pucelle, it was
+      without doubt elevating.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The case is just as strong if we turn from books to manners. Without
+      looking beyond the circle of names that occur in Rousseau's own history,
+      we see how deep the depravity had become. Madame d'Epinay's gallant sat at
+      table with the husband, and the husband was perfectly aware of the
+      relations between them. M. d'Epinay had notorious relations with two
+      public women, and was not ashamed to refer to them in the presence of his
+      wife, and even to seek her sympathy on an occasion when one of them was in
+      some trouble. Not only this, but husband and lover used to pursue their
+      debaucheries in the town together in jovial comradeship. An opera dancer
+      presided at the table of a patrician abb&#233; in his country house, and
+      he passed weeks in her house in the town. As for shame, says Barbier on
+      one occasion, &quot;'tis true the king has a mistress, but who has not?&#8212;except
+      the Duke of Orleans; he has withdrawn to Ste. Genevi&#232;ve, and is
+      thoroughly despised in consequence, and rightly.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor_43_43" id="FNanchor_43_43"></a><a href="#Footnote_43_43"
+      class="fnanchor">[43]</a> <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_27"
+      id="Page_27">[ii.27]</a></span>Reeking disorder such as all this
+      illustrates, made the passion of the two imaginary lovers of the fair lake
+      seem like a breath from the garden of Eden. One virtue was lost in that
+      simple paradise, but even that loss was followed by circumstances of
+      mental pain and far circling distress, which banished the sin into a
+      secondary place; and what remained to strike the imagination of the time
+      were delightful pictures of fast union between two enchanting women, of
+      the patience and compassionateness of a grave mother, of the chivalrous
+      warmth and helpfulness of a loyal friend. Any one anxious to pick out
+      sensual strokes and turns of grossness could make a small collection of
+      such defilements from the New Helo&#239;sa without any difficulty. They
+      were in Rousseau's character, and so they came out in his work. Saint
+      Preux afflicts us with touches of this kind, just as we are afflicted with
+      similar touches in the Confessions. They were not noticed at that day,
+      when people's ears did not affect to be any chaster than the rest of them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A historian of opinion is concerned with the general effect that was
+      actually produced by a remarkable book, and with the causes that produced
+      it. It is not his easy task to produce a demonstration that if the readers
+      had all been as wise and as virtuous as the moralist might desire them to
+      be, or if they had all been discriminating and scientific critics, not
+      this, but a very different impression would have followed. Today we may
+      wonder at the effect of the New Helo&#239;sa.<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[ii.28]</a></span> A long story told in
+      letters has grown to be a form incomprehensible and intolerable to us. We
+      find Richardson hard to be borne, and he put far greater vivacity and
+      wider variety into his letters than Rousseau did, though he was not any
+      less diffuse, and he abounds in repetitions as Rousseau does not. Rousseau
+      was absolutely without humour; that belongs to the keenly observant
+      natures, and to those who love men in the concrete, not only humanity in
+      the abstract. The pleasantries of Julie's cousin, for instance, are heavy
+      and misplaced. Thus the whole book is in one key, without the dramatic
+      changes of Richardson, too few even as those are. And who now can endure
+      that antique fashion of apostrophising men and women, hot with passion and
+      eager with all active impulses, in oblique terms of abstract qualities, as
+      if their passion and their activity were only the inconsiderable
+      embodiment of fine general ideas? We have not a single thrill, when Saint
+      Preux being led into the chamber where his mistress is supposed to lie
+      dying, murmurs passionately, &quot;What shall I now see in the same place
+      of refuge where once all breathed the ecstasy that intoxicated my soul, in
+      this same object who both caused and shared my transports! the image of
+      death, virtue unhappy, beauty expiring!&quot;<a name="FNanchor_44_44"
+      id="FNanchor_44_44"></a><a href="#Footnote_44_44" class="fnanchor">[44]</a>
+      This rhetorical artificiality of phrase, so repulsive to the more
+      realistic taste of a later age, was as natural then as that facility of
+      shedding tears, which appears so deeply incredible a performance to a
+      generation <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[ii.29]</a></span>that
+      has lost that particular fashion of sensibility, without realising for the
+      honour of its ancestors the physiological truth of the power of the will
+      over the secretions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The characters seem as stiff as some of the language, to us who are
+      accustomed to an Asiatic luxuriousness of delineation. Yet the New Helo&#239;sa
+      was nothing less than the beginning of that fresh, full, highly-coloured
+      style which has now taught us to find so little charm in the source and
+      original of it. Saint Preux is a personage whom no widest charity,
+      literary, philosophic, or Christian, can make endurable. Egoism is made
+      thrice disgusting by a ceaseless redundance of fine phrases. The
+      exaggerated conceits of love in our old poets turn graciously on the
+      lover's eagerness to offer every sacrifice at the feet of his mistress.
+      Even Werther, stricken creature as he was, yet had the stoutness to blow
+      his brains out, rather than be the instrument of surrounding the life of
+      his beloved with snares. Saint Preux's egoism is unbrightened by a single
+      ray of tender abnegation, or a single touch of the sweet humility of
+      devoted passion. The slave of his sensations, he has no care beyond their
+      gratification. With some rotund nothing on his lips about virtue being the
+      only path to happiness, his heart burns with sickly desire. He writes
+      first like a pedagogue infected by some cantharidean philter, and then
+      like a pedagogue without the philter, and that is the worse of the two.
+      Lovelace and the Count of Valmont are manly and hopeful characters in
+      comparison.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[ii.30]</a></span>
+      Werther, again, at least represents a principle of rebellion, in the midst
+      of all his self-centred despair, and he retains strength enough to know
+      that his weakness is shameful. His despair, moreover, is deeply coloured
+      with repulsed social ambition.<a name="FNanchor_45_45" id="FNanchor_45_45"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_45_45" class="fnanchor">[45]</a> He feels the world about
+      him. His French prototype, on the contrary, represents nothing but the
+      unalloyed selfishness of a sensual love for which there is no universe
+      outside of its own fevered pulsation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Julie is much less displeasing, partly perhaps for the reason that she
+      belongs to the less displeasing sex. At least, she preserves fortitude,
+      self-control, and profound considerateness for others. At a certain point
+      her firmness even moves a measure of enthusiasm. If the New Helo&#239;sa
+      could be said to have any moral intention, it is here where women learn
+      from the example of Julie's energetic return to duty, the possibility and
+      the satisfaction of bending character back to comeliness and honour.
+      Excellent as this is from a moral point of view, the reader may wish that
+      Julie had been less of a preacher, as well as less of a sinner. And even
+      as sinner, she would have been more readily forgiven if she had been less
+      deliberate. A maiden who sacrifices her virtue in order that the visible
+      consequences may force her parents to consent to a marriage, is too
+      strategical to be perfectly touching. As was said by the cleverest, though
+      not the greatest, of all the women whose youth was fascinated by Rousseau,
+      when one has renounced the charms of <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[ii.31]</a></span>virtue, it is at least well
+      to have all the charms that entire surrender of heart can bestow.<a
+      name="FNanchor_46_46" id="FNanchor_46_46"></a><a href="#Footnote_46_46"
+      class="fnanchor">[46]</a> In spite of this, however, Julie struck the
+      imagination of the time, and struck it in a way that was thoroughly
+      wholesome. The type taught men some respect for the dignity of women, and
+      it taught women a firmer respect for themselves. It is useless, even if it
+      be possible, to present an example too lofty for the comprehension of an
+      age. At this moment the most brilliant genius in the country was filling
+      France with impish merriment at the expense of the greatest heroine that
+      France had then to boast. In such an atmosphere Julie had almost the halo
+      of saintliness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We may say all we choose about the inconsistency, the excess of preaching,
+      the excess of prudence, in the character of Julie. It was said pungently
+      enough by the wits of the time.<a name="FNanchor_47_47" id="FNanchor_47_47"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_47_47" class="fnanchor">[47]</a> Nothing that could be
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[ii.32]</a></span>said
+      on all this affected the fact, that the women between 1760 and the
+      Revolution were intoxicated by Rousseau's creation to such a pitch that
+      they would pay any price for a glass out of which Rousseau had drunk, they
+      would kiss a scrap of paper that contained a piece of his handwriting, and
+      vow that no woman of true sensibility could hesitate to consecrate her
+      life to him, if she were only certain to be rewarded by his attachment.<a
+      name="FNanchor_48_48" id="FNanchor_48_48"></a><a href="#Footnote_48_48"
+      class="fnanchor">[48]</a> The booksellers were unable to meet the demand.
+      The book was let out at the rate of twelve sous a volume, and the volume
+      could not be detained beyond an hour. All classes shared the excitement,
+      courtiers, soldiers, lawyers, and bourgeois.<a name="FNanchor_49_49"
+      id="FNanchor_49_49"></a><a href="#Footnote_49_49" class="fnanchor">[49]</a>
+      Stories were told of fine ladies, dressed for the ball, who took the book
+      up for half an hour until the time should come for starting; they read
+      until midnight, and when informed that the carriage waited, answered not a
+      word, and when reminded by and by that it was two o'clock, still read
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[ii.33]</a></span>on,
+      and then at four, having ordered the horses to be taken out of the
+      carriage, disrobed, went to bed, and passed the remainder of the night in
+      reading. In Germany the effect was just as astonishing. Kant only once in
+      his life failed to take his afternoon walk, and this unexampled omission
+      was due to the witchery of the New Helo&#239;sa. Gallantry was succeeded
+      by passion, expansion, exaltation; moods far more dangerous for society,
+      as all enthusiasm is dangerous, but also far higher and pregnant with
+      better hopes for character. To move the sympathetic faculties is the first
+      step towards kindling all the other energies which make life wiser and
+      more fruitful. It is especially worth noticing that nothing in the
+      character of Julie concentrates this outburst of sympathy in subjective
+      broodings. Julie is the representative of one recalled to the straight
+      path by practical, wholesome, objective sympathy for others, not of one
+      expiring in unsatisfied yearnings for the sympathy of others for herself,
+      and in moonstruck subjective aspirations. The women who wept over her
+      romance read in it the lesson of duty, not of whimpering introspection.
+      The danger lay in the mischievous intellectual direction which Rousseau
+      imparted to this effusion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The stir which the Julie communicated to the affections in so many ways,
+      marked progress, but in all the elements of reason she was the most
+      perilous of reactionaries. So hard it is with the human mind, constituted
+      as it is, to march forward a space further<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[ii.34]</a></span> to the light, without
+      making some fresh swerve obliquely towards old darkness. The great
+      effusion of natural sentiment was in the air before the New Helo&#239;sa
+      appeared, to condense and turn it into definite channels. One beautiful
+      character, Vauven argues (1715-1747), had begun to teach the culture of
+      emotional instinct in some sayings of exquisite sweetness and moderation,
+      as that &quot;Great thoughts come from the heart.&quot; But he came too
+      soon, and, alas for us all, he died young, and he made no mark. Moderation
+      never can make a mark in the epochs when men are beginning to feel the
+      urgent spirit of a new time. Diderot strove with more powerful efforts, in
+      the midst of all his herculean labours for the acquisition and ordering of
+      knowledge, in the same direction towards the great outer world of nature,
+      and towards the great inner world of nature in the human breast. His
+      criticisms on the paintings of each year, mediocre as the paintings were,
+      are admirable even now for their richness and freshness. If Diderot had
+      been endowed with emotional tenacity, as he was with tenacity of
+      understanding and of purpose, the student of the eighteenth century would
+      probably have been spared the not perfectly agreeable task of threading a
+      way along the sinuosities of the character and work of Rousseau. But
+      Rousseau had what Diderot lacked&#8212;sustained ecstatic moods, and
+      fervid trances; his literary gesture was so commanding, his apparel so
+      glistening, his voice so rich in long-drawn notes of plangent vibration.
+      His words<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[ii.35]</a></span>
+      are the words of a prophet; a prophet, it is understood, who had lived in
+      Paris, and belonged to the eighteenth century, and wrote in French instead
+      of Hebrew. The mischief of his work lay in this, that he raised feeling,
+      now passionate, now quietest, into the supreme place which it was to
+      occupy alone, and not on an equal throne and in equal alliance with
+      understanding. Instead of supplementing reason, he placed emotion as its
+      substitute. And he made this evil doctrine come from the lips of a
+      fictitious character, who stimulated fancy and fascinated imagination.
+      Voltaire laughed at the <i>baisers &#226;cres</i> of Madame de Wolmar, and
+      declared that a criticism of the Marquis of Xim&#233;n&#232;s had crushed
+      the wretched romance.<a name="FNanchor_50_50" id="FNanchor_50_50"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_50_50" class="fnanchor">[50]</a> But Madame de Wolmar was
+      so far from crushed, that she turned the flood of feeling which her own
+      charms, passion, remorse, and conversion had raised, in a direction that
+      Voltaire abhorred, and abhorred in vain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is after the marriage of Julie to Wolmar that the action of the story
+      takes the turn which sensible men like Voltaire found laughable. Saint
+      Preux is absent with Admiral Anson for some years. On his return to Europe
+      he is speedily invited by the sage Wolmar, who knows his past history
+      perfectly well, to pay them a visit. They all meet with leapings on <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[ii.36]</a></span>the neck
+      and hearty kisses, the unprejudiced Wolmar preserving an open, serene, and
+      smiling air. He takes his young friend to a chamber, which is to be
+      reserved for him and for him only. In a few days he takes an opportunity
+      of visiting some distant property, leaving his wife and Saint Preux
+      together, with the sublime of magnanimity. At the same time he confides to
+      Claire his intention of entrusting to Saint Preux the education of his
+      children. All goes perfectly well, and the household presents a picture of
+      contentment, prosperity, moderation, affection, and evenly diffused
+      happiness, which in spite of the disagreeableness of the situation is even
+      now extremely charming. There is only one cloud. Julie is devoured by a
+      source of hidden chagrin. Her husband, &quot;so sage, so reasonable, so
+      far from every kind of vice, so little under the influence of human
+      passions, is without the only belief that makes virtue precious, and in
+      the innocence of an irreproachable life he carries at the bottom of his
+      heart the frightful peace of the wicked.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_51_51"
+      id="FNanchor_51_51"></a><a href="#Footnote_51_51" class="fnanchor">[51]</a>
+      He is an atheist. Julie is now a pietest, locking herself for hours in her
+      chambers, spending days in self-examination and prayer, constantly reading
+      the pages of the good F&#233;nelon.<a name="FNanchor_52_52"
+      id="FNanchor_52_52"></a><a href="#Footnote_52_52" class="fnanchor">[52]</a>
+      &quot;I fear,&quot; she writes to Saint Preux, &quot;that you do not gain
+      all you might from religion in the conduct of your life, and that
+      philosophic pride disdains the simplicity of the Christian. You believe
+      prayers to be of scanty service. That is not, you know, the doctrine of
+      Saint <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[ii.37]</a></span>Paul,
+      nor what our Church professes. We are free, it is true, but we are
+      ignorant, feeble, prone to ill. And whence should light and force come, if
+      not from him who is their very well-spring?... Let us be humble, to be
+      sage; let us see our weakness, and we shall be strong.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor_53_53" id="FNanchor_53_53"></a><a href="#Footnote_53_53"
+      class="fnanchor">[53]</a> This was the opening of the deistical reaction;
+      it was thus, associated with everything that struck imagination and moved
+      the sentiment of his readers, that Rousseau brought back those sophistical
+      conclusions which Pascal had drawn from premisses of dark profound truth,
+      and that enervating displacement of reason by celestial contemplation,
+      which F&#233;nelon had once made beautiful by the persuasion of virtuous
+      example. He was justified in saying, as he afterwards did, that there was
+      nothing in the Savoyard Vicar's Profession of Faith which was not to be
+      found in the letters of Julie. These were the effective preparations for
+      that more famous manifesto; they surrounded belief with all the
+      attractions of an interesting and sympathetic preacher, and set it to a
+      harmony of circumstance that touched softer fibres.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For, curiously enough, while the first half of the romance is a scene of
+      disorderly passion, the second is the glorification of the family. A
+      modern writer of genius has inveighed with whimsical bitterness against
+      the character of Wolmar,&#8212;supposed, we may notice in passing, to be
+      partially drawn from D'Holbach,&#8212;a man performing so long an
+      experiment on these <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[ii.38]</a></span>two
+      souls, with the terrible curiosity of a surgeon engaged in vivisection.<a
+      name="FNanchor_54_54" id="FNanchor_54_54"></a><a href="#Footnote_54_54"
+      class="fnanchor">[54]</a> It was, however, much less difficult for
+      contemporaries than it is for us to accept so unwholesome and prurient a
+      situation. They forgot all the evil that was in it, in the charm of the
+      account of Wolmar's active, peaceful, frugal, sunny household. The
+      influence of this was immense.<a name="FNanchor_55_55" id="FNanchor_55_55"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_55_55" class="fnanchor">[55]</a> It may be that the
+      overstrained scene where Saint Preux waits for Julie in her room,
+      suggested the far lovelier passage of Faust in the chamber of the hapless
+      Margaret. But we may, at least, be sure that Werther (1774) would not have
+      found Charlotte cutting bread and butter, if Saint Preux had not gone to
+      see Julie take cream and cakes with her children and her female servants.
+      And perhaps the other and nobler Charlotte of the <i>Wahlverwandtschaften</i>
+      (1809) would not have detained us so long with her moss hut, her terrace,
+      her park prospect, if Julie had not had her elysium, where the sweet
+      freshness of the air, the cool shadows, the shining verdure, flowers
+      diffusing fragrance and colour, water running with soft whisper, and the
+      song of a thousand birds, reminded the returned traveller of Tinian and
+      Juan Fernandez. There is an animation, a variety, an accuracy, a realistic
+      brightness in this picture, which will always make it enchanting, even to
+      those who cannot make their way through any other letter in the New Helo&#239;sa.<a
+      name="FNanchor_56_56" id="FNanchor_56_56"></a><a href="#Footnote_56_56"
+      class="fnanchor">[56]</a> Such qualities place it as an idyllic piece far
+      above such pieces in <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[ii.39]</a></span>Goethe's
+      two famous romances. They have a clearness and spontaneous freshness which
+      are not among the bountiful gifts of Goethe. There are other admirable
+      landscapes in the New Helo&#239;sa, though not too many of them, and the
+      minute and careful way in which Rousseau made their features real to
+      himself, is accidentally shown in his urgent prayer for exactitude in the
+      engraving of the striking scene where Saint Preux and Julie visit the
+      monuments of their old love for one another.<a name="FNanchor_57_57"
+      id="FNanchor_57_57"></a><a href="#Footnote_57_57" class="fnanchor">[57]</a>
+      &quot;I have traversed all Rousseau's ground with the Helo&#239;sa before
+      me,&quot; said Byron, &quot;and am struck to a degree I cannot express,
+      with the force and accuracy of his descriptions and the beauty of their
+      reality.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_58_58" id="FNanchor_58_58"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_58_58" class="fnanchor">[58]</a> They were memories made
+      true by long dreaming, by endless brooding. The painter lived with these
+      scenes ever present to the inner eye. They were his real world, of which
+      the tamer world of meadow and woodland actually around him only gave
+      suggestion. He thought of the green steeps, the rocks, the mountain pines,
+      the waters of the lake, &quot;the populous solitude of bees and birds,&quot;
+      as of some divine presence, too sublime for personality. And they were
+      always benign, standing in relief with the malignity or folly of the
+      hurtful insect, Man. He was never a manich&#230;an towards nature. To him
+      she <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[ii.40]</a></span>was
+      all good and bounteous. The demon forces that so fascinated Byron were to
+      Rousseau invisible. These were the compositions that presently inspired
+      the landscapes of <i>Paul and Virginia</i> (1788), of <i>Atala</i> and <i>Ren&#233;</i>
+      (1801), and of <i>Obermann</i> (1804), as well as those punier imitators
+      who resemble their masters as the hymns of a methodist negro resemble the
+      psalms of David. They were the outcome of eager and spontaneous feeling
+      for nature, and not the mere hackneyed common-form and inflated
+      description of the literary pastoral.<a name="FNanchor_59_59"
+      id="FNanchor_59_59"></a><a href="#Footnote_59_59" class="fnanchor">[59]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This leads to another great and important distinction to be drawn between
+      Rousseau and the school whom in other respects he inspired. The admirable
+      Sainte Beuve perplexes one by his strange remark, <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[ii.41]</a></span>that the union of the poetry
+      of the family and the hearth with the poetry of nature is essentially
+      wanting to Rousseau.<a name="FNanchor_60_60" id="FNanchor_60_60"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_60_60" class="fnanchor">[60]</a> It only shows that the
+      great critic had for the moment forgotten the whole of the second part of
+      the New Helo&#239;sa, and his failure to identify Cowper's allusion to the
+      <i>matin&#233;e &#224; l'anglaise</i> certainly proves that he had at any
+      rate forgotten one of the most striking and delicious scenes of the hearth
+      in French literature.<a name="FNanchor_61_61" id="FNanchor_61_61"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_61_61" class="fnanchor">[61]</a> The tendency to read
+      Rousseau only in the Byronic sense is one of those foregone conclusions
+      which are constantly tempting the critic to travel out of his record.
+      Rousseau assuredly had a Byronic side, but he is just as often a Cowper
+      done into splendid prose. His pictures are full of social animation and
+      domestic order. He had exalted the simplicity of the savage state in his
+      Discourses, but when he came to constitute an ideal life, he found it in a
+      household that was more, and not less, systematically disciplined than
+      those of the common society <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_42"
+      id="Page_42">[ii.42]</a></span>around him. The paradise in which his Julie
+      moved with Wolmar and Saint Preux, was no more and no less than an
+      establishment of the best kind of the rural middle-class, frugal,
+      decorous, wholesome, tranquilly austere. No most sentimental savage could
+      have found it endurable, or could himself without profound transformation
+      of his manners have been endured in it. The New Helo&#239;sa ends by
+      exalting respectability, and putting the spirit of insurrection to shame.
+      Self-control, not revolt, is its last word.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This is what separates Rousseau here and throughout from S&#233;nancour,
+      Byron, and the rest. He consummates the triumph of will, while their
+      reigning mood is grave or reckless protest against impotence of will, the
+      little worth of common aims, the fretting triviality of common rules.
+      Franklin or Cobbett might have gloried in the regularity of Madame de
+      Wolmar's establishment. The employment of the day was marked out with
+      precision. By artful adjustment of pursuits, it was contrived that the
+      men-servants should be kept apart from the maid-servants, except at their
+      repasts. The women, namely, a cook, a housemaid, and a nurse, found their
+      pastime in rambles with their mistress and her children, and lived mainly
+      with them. The men were amused by games for which their master made
+      regulated provision, now for summer, now for winter, offering prizes of a
+      useful kind for prowess and adroitness. Often on a Sunday night all the
+      household met in an<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[ii.43]</a></span>
+      ample chamber, and passed the evening in dancing. When Saint Preux
+      inquired whether this was not a rather singular infraction of puritan
+      rule, Julie wisely answered that pure morality is so loaded with severe
+      duties, that if you add to them the further burden of indifferent forms,
+      it must always be at the cost of the essential.<a name="FNanchor_62_62"
+      id="FNanchor_62_62"></a><a href="#Footnote_62_62" class="fnanchor">[62]</a>
+      The servants were taken from the country, never from the town. They
+      entered the household young, were gradually trained, and never went away
+      except to establish themselves.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The vulgar and obvious criticism on all this is that it is utopian, that
+      such households do not generally exist, because neither masters nor
+      servants possess the qualities needed to maintain these relations of
+      unbroken order and friendliness. Perhaps not; and masters and servants
+      will be more and more removed from the possession of such qualities, and
+      their relations further distant from such order and friendliness, if
+      writers cease to press the beauty and serviceableness of a domesticity
+      that is at present only possible in a few rare cases, or to insist on the
+      ugliness, the waste of peace, the deterioration of character, that are the
+      results of our present system. Undoubtedly it is much easier for Rousseau
+      to draw his picture of semi-patriarchal felicity, than for the rest of us
+      to realise it. It was his function to press ideals of sweeter life on his
+      contemporaries, and they may be counted fortunate in having a writer who
+      could fulfil this function with Rousseau's peculiar force of masterly
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[ii.44]</a></span>persuasion.
+      His scornful diatribes against the domestic police of great houses, and
+      the essential inhumanity of the ordinary household relations, are both
+      excellent and of permanent interest. There is the full breath of a new
+      humaneness in them. They were the right way of attacking the decrepitude
+      of feudal luxury and insolence, and its imitation among the great
+      farmers-general. This criticism of the conditions of domestic service
+      marks a beginning of true democracy, as distinguished from the mere
+      pulverisation of aristocracy. It rests on the claim of the common people
+      to an equal consideration, as equally useful and equally capable of virtue
+      and vice; and it implies the essential priority of social over political
+      reform.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The story abounds in sumptuary detail. The table partakes of the general
+      plenty, but this plenty is not ruinous. The senses are gratified without
+      daintiness. The food is common, but excellent of its kind. The service is
+      simple, yet exquisite. All that is mere show, all that depends on vulgar
+      opinion, all fine and elaborate dishes whose value comes of their rarity,
+      and whose names you must know before finding any goodness in them, are
+      banished without recall. Even in such delicacies as they permit
+      themselves, our friends abstain every day from certain things which are
+      reserved for feasts on special occasions, and which are thus made more
+      delightful without being more costly. What do you suppose these delicacies
+      are? Rare game, or fish from the sea, or dainties from abroad? Better than
+      all that; some delicious vegetable<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_45"
+      id="Page_45">[ii.45]</a></span> of the district, one of the savoury things
+      that grow in our garden, some fish from the lake dressed in a peculiar
+      way, some cheese from our mountains. The service is modest and rustic, but
+      clean and smiling. Neither gold-laced liveries in sight of which you die
+      of hunger, nor tall crystals laden with flowers for your only dessert,
+      here take the place of honest dishes. Here people have not the art of
+      nourishing the stomach through the eyes, but they know how to add grace to
+      good cheer, to eat heartily without inconvenience, to drink merrily
+      without losing reason, to sit long at table without weariness, and always
+      to rise from it without disgust.<a name="FNanchor_63_63"
+      id="FNanchor_63_63"></a><a href="#Footnote_63_63" class="fnanchor">[63]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One singularity in this ideal household was the avoidance of those middle
+      exchanges between production and consumption, which enrich the shopkeeper
+      but impoverish his customers. Not one of these exchanges is made without
+      loss, and the multiplication of these losses would weaken even a man of
+      fortune. Wolmar seeks those real exchanges in which the convenience of
+      each party to the bargain serves as profit for both. Thus the wool is sent
+      to the factories, from which they receive cloth in exchange; wine, oil,
+      and bread are produced in the house; the butcher pays himself in live
+      cattle; the grocer receives grain in return for his goods; the wages of
+      the labourers and the house-servants are derived from the produce of the
+      land which they render valuable.<a name="FNanchor_64_64"
+      id="FNanchor_64_64"></a><a href="#Footnote_64_64" class="fnanchor">[64]</a>
+      It was reserved for Fourier, Cabet, and the rest, to carry to its highest
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[ii.46]</a></span>point
+      this confusion of what is so fascinating in a book with what is
+      practicable in society.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The expatiation on the loveliness of a well-ordered interior may strike
+      the impatient modern as somewhat long, and the movement as very slow, just
+      as people complain of the same things in Goethe's <i>Wahlverwandtschaften</i>.
+      Such complaint only proves inability, which is or is not justifiable, to
+      seize the spirit of the writer. The expatiation was long and the movement
+      slow, because Rousseau was full of his thoughts; they were a deep and
+      glowing part of himself, and did not merely skim swiftly and lightly
+      through his mind. Anybody who takes the trouble may find out the
+      difference between this expression of long mental brooding, and a merely
+      elaborated diction.<a name="FNanchor_65_65" id="FNanchor_65_65"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_65_65" class="fnanchor">[65]</a> The length is an
+      essential part of the matter. The whole work is the reflection of a series
+      of slow inner processes, the many careful weavings of a lonely and
+      miserable man's dreams. And Julie expressed the spirit and the joy of
+      these dreams when she wrote, &quot;People are only happy before they are
+      happy. Man, so eager and so feeble, made to desire all and obtain little,
+      has received from heaven a consoling force which brings all that he
+      desires close to him, which subjects it to his imagination, which makes it
+      sensible and present before him, which delivers it over to him. The land
+      of chimera is the only one in this world that is worth dwelling in, and
+      such is the nothingness of the human <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[ii.47]</a></span>lot, that except the being
+      who exists in and by himself, there is nothing beautiful except that which
+      does not exist.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_66_66" id="FNanchor_66_66"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_66_66" class="fnanchor">[66]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Closely connected with the vigorous attempt to fascinate his public with
+      the charm of a serene, joyful, and ordered house, is the restoration of
+      marriage in the New Helo&#239;sa to a rank among high and honourable
+      obligations, and its representation as the best support of an equable life
+      of right conduct and fruitful harmonious emotion. Rousseau even invested
+      it with the mysterious dignity as of some natural sacrament. &quot;This
+      chaste knot of nature is subject neither to the sovereign power nor to
+      paternal authority,&quot; he cried, &quot;but only to the authority of the
+      common Father.&quot; And he pointed his remark by a bitter allusion to a
+      celebrated case in which a great house had prevailed on the courts to
+      annul the marriage of an elder son with a young actress, though her
+      character was excellent, and though she had befriended him when he was
+      abandoned by everybody else.<a name="FNanchor_67_67" id="FNanchor_67_67"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_67_67" class="fnanchor">[67]</a> This was one of the
+      countless democratic thrusts in the book. In the case of its heroine,
+      however, the author associated the sanctity of marriage not only with
+      equality but with religion. We may imagine the spleen with which the
+      philosophers, with both their hatred of the faith, and their light esteem
+      of marriage bonds, read Julie's eloquent account of her emotions at the
+      moment of <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[ii.48]</a></span>her
+      union with Wolmar. &quot;I seemed to behold the organ of Providence and to
+      hear the voice of God, as the minister gravely pronounced the words of the
+      holy service. The purity, the dignity, the sanctity of marriage, so
+      vividly set forth in the words of scripture; its chaste and sublime
+      duties, so important to the happiness, order, and peace of the human race,
+      so sweet to fulfil even for their own sake&#8212;all this made such an
+      impression on me that I seemed to feel within my breast a sudden
+      revolution. An unknown power seemed all at once to arrest the disorder of
+      my affections, and to restore them to accordance with the law of duty and
+      of nature. The eternal eye that sees everything, I said to myself, now
+      reads to the depth of my heart.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_68_68"
+      id="FNanchor_68_68"></a><a href="#Footnote_68_68" class="fnanchor">[68]</a>
+      She has all the well-known fervour of the proselyte, and never wearies of
+      extolling the peace of the wedded state. Love is no essential to its
+      perfection. &quot;Worth, virtue, a certain accord not so much in condition
+      and age as in character and temper, are enough between husband and wife;
+      and this does not prevent the growth from such a union of a very tender
+      attachment, which is none the less sweet for not being exactly love, and
+      is all the more lasting.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_69_69" id="FNanchor_69_69"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_69_69" class="fnanchor">[69]</a> <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[ii.49]</a></span>Years after, when Saint
+      Preux has returned and is settled in the household, she even tries to
+      persuade him to imitate her example, and find contentment in marriage with
+      her cousin. The earnestness with which she presses the point, the very
+      sensible but not very delicate references to the hygienic drawbacks of
+      celibacy, and the fact that the cousin whom she would fain have him marry,
+      had complaisantly assisted them in their past loves, naturally drew the
+      fire of Rousseau's critical enemies.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Such matters did not affect the general enthusiasm. When people are weary
+      of a certain way of surveying life, and have their faces eagerly set in
+      some new direction, they read in a book what it pleases them to read; they
+      assimilate as much as falls in with their dominant mood, and the rest
+      passes away unseen. The French public were bewitched by Julie, and were no
+      more capable of criticising her than Julie was capable of criticising
+      Saint Preux in the height of her passion for him. When we say that
+      Rousseau was the author of this movement, all we mean is that his book and
+      its chief personage awoke emotion to self-consciousness, gave it a
+      dialect, communicated an impulse in favour of social order, and then very
+      calamitously at the same moment divorced it from the fundamental
+      conditions of progress, by divorcing it from disciplined intelligence and
+      scientific reason.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Apart from the general tendency of the New Helo&#239;sa in numberless
+      indirect ways to bring the manners of the great into contempt, by the
+      presenta<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[ii.50]</a></span>tion
+      of the happiness of a simple and worthy life, thrifty, self-sufficing, and
+      homely, there is one direct protest of singular eloquence and gravity.
+      Julie's father is deeply revolted at the bare notion of marrying his
+      daughter to a teacher. Rousseau puts his vigorous remonstrance against
+      pride of birth into the mouth of an English nobleman. This is perhaps an
+      infelicitous piece of prosopopoeia, but it is interesting as illustrative
+      of the idea of England in the eighteenth century as the home of
+      stout-hearted freedom. We may quote one piece from the numerous bits of
+      very straightforward speaking in which our representative expressed his
+      mind as to the significance of birth. &quot;My friend has nobility,&quot;
+      cried Lord Edward, &quot;not written in ink on mouldering parchments, but
+      graven in his heart in characters that can never be effaced. For my own
+      part, by God, I should be sorry to have no other proof of my merit but
+      that of a man who has been in his grave these five hundred years. If you
+      know the English nobility, you know that it is the most enlightened, the
+      best informed, the wisest, the bravest in Europe. That being so, I don't
+      care to ask whether it is the oldest or not. We are not, it is true, the
+      slaves of the prince, but his friends; nor the tyrants of the people, but
+      their leaders. We hold the balance true between people, and monarch. Our
+      first duty is towards the nation, our second towards him who governs; it
+      is not his will but his right that we consider.... We suffer no one in the
+      land to say <i>God and my sword</i>, nor more than this, <i>God<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[ii.51]</a></span> and my
+      right</i>.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_70_70" id="FNanchor_70_70"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_70_70" class="fnanchor">[70]</a> All this was only putting
+      Montesquieu into heroics, it is true, but a great many people read the
+      romance who were not likely to read the graver book. And there was a wide
+      difference between the calm statement of a number of political
+      propositions about government, and their transformation into dramatic
+      invective against the arrogance of all social inequality that does not
+      correspond with inequalities of worth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is no contradiction between this and the social quietism of other
+      parts of the book. Moral considerations and the paramount place that they
+      hold in Rousseau's way of thinking, explain at once his contempt for the
+      artificial privileges and assumptions of high rank, and his contempt for
+      anything like discontent with the conditions of humble rank. Simplicity of
+      life was his ideal. He wishes us to despise both those who have departed
+      from it, and those who would depart from it if they could. So Julie does
+      her best to make the lot of the peasants as happy as it is capable of
+      being made, without ever helping them to change it for another. She
+      teaches them to respect their natural condition in respecting themselves.
+      Her prime maxim is to discourage change of station and calling, but above
+      all to dissuade the villager, whose life is the happiest of all, from
+      leaving the true pleasures of his natural career for the fever and
+      corruption of towns.<a name="FNanchor_71_71" id="FNanchor_71_71"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_71_71" class="fnanchor">[71]</a> Presently a recollection
+      of the sombre things that he had seen in his rambles <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[ii.52]</a></span>through France crossed
+      Rousseau's pastoral visions, and he admitted that there were some lands in
+      which the publican devours the fruits of the earth; where the misery that
+      covers the fields, the bitter greed of some grasping farmer, the
+      inflexible rigour of an inhuman master, take something from the charm of
+      his rural scenes. &quot;Worn-out horses ready to expire under the blows
+      they receive, wretched peasants attenuated by hunger, broken by weariness,
+      clad in rags, hamlets all in ruins&#8212;these things offer a mournful
+      spectacle to the eye: one is almost sorry to be a man, as we think of the
+      unhappy creatures on whose blood we have to feed.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor_72_72" id="FNanchor_72_72"></a><a href="#Footnote_72_72"
+      class="fnanchor">[72]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yet there is no hint in the New Helo&#239;sa of the socialism which
+      Morelly and Mably flung themselves upon, as the remedy for all these
+      desperate horrors. Property, in every page of the New Helo&#239;sa, is
+      held in full respect; the master has the honourable burden of patriarchal
+      duty; the servant the not less honourable burden of industry and
+      faithfulness; disobedience or vice is promptly punished with paternal
+      rigour and more than paternal inflexibility. The insurrectionary quality
+      and effect of Rousseau's work lay in no direct preaching or vehement
+      denunciation of the abuses that filled France with cruelty on the one hand
+      and sodden misery on the other. It lay in pictures of a social state in
+      which abuses and cruelty cannot exist, nor any miseries save those which
+      are inseparable from humanity. The contrast between the sober, cheerful,
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[ii.53]</a></span>prosperous
+      scenes of romance, and the dreariness of the reality of the field life of
+      France,&#8212;this was the element that filled generous souls with an
+      intoxicating transport.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rousseau's way of dealing with the portentous questions that lay about
+      that tragic scene of deserted fields, ruined hamlets, tottering brutes,
+      and hunger-stricken men, may be gathered from one of the many traits in
+      Julie which endeared her to that generation, and might endear her even to
+      our own if it only knew her. Wolmar's house was near a great high-road,
+      and so was daily haunted by beggars. Not one of these was allowed to go
+      empty away. And Julie had as many excellent reasons to give for her
+      charity, as if she had been one of the philosophers of whom she thought so
+      surpassingly ill. If you look at mendicancy merely as a trade, what is the
+      harm of a calling whose end is to nourish feelings of humanity and
+      brotherly love? From the point of view of talent, why should I not pay the
+      eloquence of a beggar who stirs my pity, as highly as that of a player who
+      makes me shed tears over imaginary sorrows? If the great number of beggars
+      is burdensome to the state, of how many other professions that people
+      encourage, may you not say the same? How can I be sure that the man to
+      whom I give alms is not an honest soul, whom I may save from perishing? In
+      short, whatever we may think of the poor wretches, if we owe nothing to
+      the beggar, at least we owe it to ourselves to pay honour to suffering
+      humanity or to its image.<a name="FNanchor_73_73" id="FNanchor_73_73"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_73_73" class="fnanchor">[73]</a> Nothing <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[ii.54]</a></span>could be
+      more admirably illustrative of the author's confidence that the first
+      thing for us to do is to satisfy our fine feelings, and that then all the
+      rest shall be added unto us. The doctrine spread so far, that Necker,&#8212;a
+      sort of Julie in a frock-coat, who had never fallen, the incarnation of
+      this doctrine on the great stage of affairs,&#8212;was hailed to power to
+      ward off the bankruptcy of the state by means of a good heart and moral
+      sentences, while Turgot with science and firmness for his resources was
+      driven away as an economist and a philosopher.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At a first glance, it may seem that there was compensation for the triumph
+      of sentiment over reason, and that if France was ruined by the dreams in
+      which Rousseau encouraged the nation to exult, she was saved by the
+      fervour and resoluteness of the aspirations with which he filled the most
+      generous of her children. No wide movement, we may be sure, is thoroughly
+      understood until we have mastered both its material and its ideal sides.
+      Materially, Rousseau's work was inevitably fraught with confusion because
+      in this sphere not to be scientific, not to be careful in tracing effects
+      to their true causes, is to be without any security that the causes with
+      which we try to deal will lead to the effects that we desire. A Roman
+      statesman who had gone to the Sermon on the Mount for a method of staying
+      the economic ruin of the empire, its thinning population, its decreasing
+      capital, would obviously have found nothing of what he sought. But the
+      moral nature of man is redeemed by teaching<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[ii.55]</a></span> that may have no bearing on
+      economics, or even a bearing purely mischievous, and which has to be
+      corrected by teaching that probably goes equally far in the contrary
+      direction of moral mischief. In the ideal sphere, the processes are very
+      complex. In measuring a man's influence within it we have to balance.
+      Rousseau's action was undoubtedly excellent in leading men and women to
+      desire simple lives, and a more harmonious social order. Was this eminent
+      benefit more than counterbalanced by the eminent disadvantage of giving a
+      reactionary intellectual direction? By commending irrational retrogression
+      from active use of the understanding back to dreamy contemplation?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To one teacher is usually only one task allotted. We do not reproach want
+      of science to the virtuous and benevolent Channing; his goodness and
+      effusion stirred women and the young, just as Rousseau did, to sentimental
+      but humane aspiration. It was this kind of influence that formed the
+      opinion which at last destroyed American slavery. We owe a place in the
+      temple that commemorates human emancipation, to every man who has kindled
+      in his generation a brighter flame of moral enthusiasm, and a more eager
+      care for the realisation of good and virtuous ideals.
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      <b>III.</b>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The story of the circumstances of the publication of Emilius and the
+      persecution which befell its author<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_56"
+      id="Page_56">[ii.56]</a></span> in consequence, recalls us to the
+      distinctively evil side of French history in this critical epoch, and
+      carries us away from light into the thick darkness of political intrigue,
+      obscurantist faction, and a misgovernment which was at once tyrannical and
+      decrepit. It is almost impossible for us to realise the existence in the
+      same society of such boundless license of thought, and such unscrupulous
+      restraint upon its expression. Not one of Rousseau's three chief works,
+      for instance, was printed in France. The whole trade in books was a sort
+      of contraband, and was carried on with the stealth, subterfuge, daring,
+      and knavery that are demanded in contraband dealings. An author or a
+      bookseller was forced to be as careful as a kidnapper of coolies or the
+      captain of a slaver would be in our own time. He had to steer clear of the
+      court, of the parliament, of Jansenists, of Jesuits, of the mistresses of
+      the king and the minister, of the friends of the mistresses, and above all
+      of that organised hierarchy of ignorance and oppression in all times and
+      places where they raise their masked heads,&#8212;the bishops and
+      ecclesiastics of every sort and condition. Palissot produced his comedy to
+      please the devout at the expense of the philosophers (1760). Madame de
+      Robecq, daughter of Rousseau's marshal of Luxembourg, instigated and
+      protected him, for Diderot had offended her.<a name="FNanchor_74_74"
+      id="FNanchor_74_74"></a><a href="#Footnote_74_74" class="fnanchor">[74]</a>
+      Morellet replied in a piece in which the keen vision of feminine spite
+      detected a reference to Madame de Robecq. Though dying, she still had
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[ii.57]</a></span>relations
+      with Choiseul, and so Morellet was flung into the Bastile.<a
+      name="FNanchor_75_75" id="FNanchor_75_75"></a><a href="#Footnote_75_75"
+      class="fnanchor">[75]</a> Diderot was thrown for three months into
+      Vincennes, where we saw him on a memorable occasion, for his Letter on the
+      Blind (1748), nominally because it was held to contain irreligious
+      doctrine, really because he had given offence to D'Argenson's mistress by
+      hinting that she might be very handsome, but that her judgment on
+      scientific experiment was of no value.<a name="FNanchor_76_76"
+      id="FNanchor_76_76"></a><a href="#Footnote_76_76" class="fnanchor">[76]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The New Helo&#239;sa could not openly circulate in France so long as it
+      contained the words, &quot;I would rather be the wife of a charcoal-burner
+      than the mistress of a king.&quot; The last word was altered to &quot;prince,&quot;
+      and then Rousseau was warned that he would offend the Prince de Conti and
+      Madame de Boufflers.<a name="FNanchor_77_77" id="FNanchor_77_77"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_77_77" class="fnanchor">[77]</a> No work of merit could
+      appear without more or less of slavish mutilation, and no amount of
+      slavish mutilation could make the writer secure against the accidental
+      grudge of people who had influence in high quarters.<a
+      name="FNanchor_78_78" id="FNanchor_78_78"></a><a href="#Footnote_78_78"
+      class="fnanchor">[78]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If French booksellers in the stirring intellectual time of the eighteenth
+      century needed all the craft of a smuggler, their morality was reduced to
+      an equally <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[ii.58]</a></span>low
+      level in dealing not only with the police, but with their own accomplices,
+      the book-writers. They excused themselves from paying proper sums to
+      authors, on the ground that they were robbed of the profits that would
+      enable them to pay such sums, by the piracy of their brethren in trade.
+      But then they all pirated the works of one another. The whole commerce was
+      a mass of fraud and chicane, and every prominent author passed his life
+      between two fires. He was robbed, his works were pirated, and, worse than
+      robbery and piracy, they were defaced and distorted by the booksellers. On
+      the other side he was tormented to death by the suspicion and timidity,
+      alternately with the hatred and active tyranny of the administration. As
+      we read the story of the lives of all these strenuous men, their
+      struggles, their incessant mortifications, their constantly reviving and
+      ever irrepressible vigour and interest in the fight, we may wish that the
+      shabbiness and the pettiness of the daily lives of some of them had faded
+      away from memory, and left us nothing to think of in connection with their
+      names but the alertness, courage, tenacity, self-sacrifice, and faith with
+      which they defended the cause of human emancipation and progress. Happily
+      the mutual hate of the Christian factions, to which liberty owes at least
+      as much as charity owes to their mutual love, prevented a common union for
+      burning the philosophers as well as their books. All torments short of
+      this they endured, and they had the great merit of enduring them without
+      any hope of being<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[ii.59]</a></span>
+      rewarded after their death, as truly good men must always be capable of
+      doing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rousseau had no taste for martyrdom, nor any intention of courting it in
+      even its slightest forms. Holland was now the great printing press of
+      France, and when we are counting up the contributions of Protestantism to
+      the enfranchisement of Europe, it is just to remember the indispensable
+      services rendered by the freedom of the press in Holland to the
+      dissemination of French thought in the eighteenth century, as well as the
+      shelter that it gave to the French thinkers in the seventeenth, including
+      Descartes, the greatest of them all. The monstrous tediousness of printing
+      a book at Amsterdam or the Hague, the delay, loss, and confusion in
+      receiving and transmitting the proofs, and the subterranean character of
+      the entire process, including the circulation of the book after it was
+      once fairly printed, were as grievous to Rousseau as to authors of more
+      impetuous temper. He agreed with Rey, for instance, the Amsterdam printer,
+      to sell him the Social Contract for 1000 francs. The manuscript had then
+      to be cunningly conveyed to Amsterdam. Rousseau wrote it out in very small
+      characters, sealed it carefully up, and entrusted it to the care of the
+      chaplain of the Dutch embassy, who happened to be a native of Vaud. In
+      passing the barrier, the packet fell into the hands of the officials. They
+      tore it open and examined it, happily unconscious that they were handling
+      the most explosive kind of gunpowder that they had ever meddled with. It
+      was not until the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[ii.60]</a></span>
+      chaplain claimed it in the name of ambassadorial privilege, that the
+      manuscript was allowed to go on its way to the press.<a
+      name="FNanchor_79_79" id="FNanchor_79_79"></a><a href="#Footnote_79_79"
+      class="fnanchor">[79]</a> Rousseau repeats a hundred times, not only in
+      the Confessions, but also in letters to his friends, how resolutely and
+      carefully he avoided any evasion of the laws of the country in which he
+      lived. The French government was anxious enough on all grounds to secure
+      for France the production of the books of which France was the great
+      consumer, but the severity of its censorship prevented this.<a
+      name="FNanchor_80_80" id="FNanchor_80_80"></a><a href="#Footnote_80_80"
+      class="fnanchor">[80]</a> The introduction of the books, when printed, was
+      tolerated or connived at, because the country would hardly have endured to
+      be deprived of the enjoyment of its own literature. By a greater
+      inconsistency the reprinting of a book which had once found admission into
+      the country, was also connived at. Thus M. de Malesherbes, out of
+      friendship for Rousseau, wished to have an edition of the New Helo&#239;sa
+      printed in France, and sold for the benefit of the author. That he should
+      have done so is a curious illustration of the low morality engendered by a
+      repressive system imperfectly carried out. For Rousseau had sold the book
+      to Rey. Rey had treated with a French bookseller in the usual way, that
+      is, had sent him half the edition printed, the bookseller paying either in
+      cash or other books for all the copies he received. Therefore to print an
+      independent edition in Paris was to <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_61"
+      id="Page_61">[ii.61]</a></span>injure, not Rey the foreigner, but the
+      French bookseller who stood practically in Rey's place. It was setting two
+      French booksellers to ruin one another. Rousseau emphatically declined to
+      receive any profit from such a transaction. But, said Malesherbes, you
+      sold to Rey a right which you had not got, the right of sole
+      proprietorship, excluding the competition of a pirated reprint. Then,
+      answered Rousseau, if the right which I sold happens to prove less than I
+      thought, it is clear that far from taking advantage of my mistake, I owe
+      to Rey compensation for any loss that he may suffer.<a
+      name="FNanchor_81_81" id="FNanchor_81_81"></a><a href="#Footnote_81_81"
+      class="fnanchor">[81]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The friendship of Malesherbes for the party of reason was shown on
+      numerous occasions. As director of the book trade he was really the censor
+      of the literature of the time.<a name="FNanchor_82_82" id="FNanchor_82_82"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_82_82" class="fnanchor">[82]</a> The story of his service
+      to <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[ii.62]</a></span>Diderot
+      is well known&#8212;how he warned Diderot that the police were about to
+      visit his house and overhaul his papers, and how when Diderot despaired of
+      being able to put them out of sight in his narrow quarters, Malesherbes
+      said, &quot;Then send them all to me,&quot; and took care of them until
+      the storm was overpast. The proofs of the New Helo&#239;sa came through
+      his hands, and now he made himself Rousseau's agent in the affairs
+      relative to the printing of Emilius. Rousseau entrusted the whole matter
+      to him and to Madame de Luxembourg, being confident that, in acting
+      through persons of such authority and position, he should be protected
+      against any unwitting illegality. Instead of being sent to Rey, the
+      manuscript was sold to a bookseller in Paris for six thousand francs.<a
+      name="FNanchor_83_83" id="FNanchor_83_83"></a><a href="#Footnote_83_83"
+      class="fnanchor">[83]</a> A long time elapsed before any proofs reached
+      the author, and he soon perceived that an edition was being printed in
+      France as well as in Holland. Still, as Malesherbes was in some sort the
+      director of the enterprise, the author felt no alarm. Duclos came to visit
+      him one day, and Rousseau read aloud to him the Savoyard Vicar's
+      Profession of Faith. &quot;What, citizen,&quot; he cried, &quot;and that
+      is part of a book that they are printing at Paris! Be kind enough not to
+      tell any one that you read this to me.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_84_84"
+      id="FNanchor_84_84"></a><a href="#Footnote_84_84" class="fnanchor">[84]</a>
+      Still Rousseau remained secure. Then the printing came to a standstill,
+      and he could not find out the reason, because Malesherbes was away, and
+      the printer did not take the trouble to answer his letters. &quot;My
+      natural tendency,&quot; he says, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_63"
+      id="Page_63">[ii.63]</a></span>and as the rest of his life only too
+      abundantly proved, &quot;is to be afraid of darkness; mystery always
+      disturbs me, it is utterly antipathetic to my character, which is open
+      even to the pitch of imprudence. The aspect of the most hideous monster
+      would alarm me little, I verily believe; but if I discern at night a
+      figure in a white sheet, I am sure to be terrified out of my life.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor_85_85" id="FNanchor_85_85"></a><a href="#Footnote_85_85"
+      class="fnanchor">[85]</a> So he at once fancied that by some means the
+      Jesuits had got possession of his book, and knowing him to be at death's
+      door, designed to keep the Emilius back until he was actually dead, when
+      they would publish a truncated version of it to suit their own purposes.<a
+      name="FNanchor_86_86" id="FNanchor_86_86"></a><a href="#Footnote_86_86"
+      class="fnanchor">[86]</a> He wrote letter upon letter to the printer, to
+      Malesherbes, to Madame de Luxembourg, and if answers did not come, or did
+      not come exactly when he expected them, he grew delirious with anxiety. If
+      he dropped his conviction that the Jesuits were plotting the ruin of his
+      book and the defilement of his reputation, he lost no time in fastening a
+      similar design upon the Jansenists, and when the Jansenists were
+      acquitted, then the turn of the philosophers came. We have constantly to
+      remember that all this time the unfortunate man was suffering incessant
+      pain, and passing his nights in sleeplessness and fever. He sometimes
+      threw off the black dreams of unfathomable suspicion, and dreamed in their
+      stead of some sunny spot in pleasant Touraine, where under a mild climate
+      and among a gentle people he should peacefully end his <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[ii.64]</a></span>days.<a
+      name="FNanchor_87_87" id="FNanchor_87_87"></a><a href="#Footnote_87_87"
+      class="fnanchor">[87]</a> At other times he was fond of supposing M. de
+      Luxembourg not a duke, nor a marshal of France, but a good country squire
+      living in some old mansion, and himself not an author, not a maker of
+      books, but with moderate intelligence and slight attainment, finding with
+      the squire and his dame the happiness of his life, and contributing to the
+      happiness of theirs.<a name="FNanchor_88_88" id="FNanchor_88_88"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_88_88" class="fnanchor">[88]</a> Alas, in spite of all his
+      precautions, he had unwittingly drifted into the stream of great affairs.
+      He and his book were sacrificed to the exigencies of faction; and a
+      persecution set in, which destroyed his last chance of a composed life, by
+      giving his reason, already disturbed, a final blow from which it never
+      recovered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Emilius appeared in the crisis of the movement against the Jesuits. That
+      formidable order had offended Madame de Pompadour by a refusal to
+      recognise her power and position,&#8212;a manly policy, as creditable to
+      their moral vigour as it was contrary to the maxims which had made them
+      powerful. They had also offended Choiseul by the part they had taken in
+      certain hostile intrigues at Versailles. The parliaments had always been
+      their enemies. This was due first to the jealousy with which corporations
+      of lawyers always regard corporations of ecclesiastics, and next to their
+      hatred of the bull Unigenitus, which had been not only an infraction of
+      French liberties, but the occasion of special humiliation to the
+      parliaments. Then the hostility of the parliaments to the Jesuits was
+      caused by the harshness with which the system of confessional <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[ii.65]</a></span>tickets
+      was at this time being carried out. Finally, the once powerful house of
+      Austria, the protector of all retrograde interests, was now weakened by
+      the Seven Years' War; and was unable to bring effective influence to bear
+      on Lewis XV. At last he gave his consent to the destruction of the order.
+      The commercial bankruptcy of one of their missions was the immediate
+      occasion of their fall, and nothing could save them. &quot;I only know one
+      man,&quot; said Grimm, &quot;in a position to have composed an apology for
+      the Jesuits in fine style, if it had been in his way to take the side of
+      that tribe, and this man is M. Rousseau.&quot; The parliaments went to
+      work with alacrity, but they were quite as hostile to the philosophers as
+      they were to the Jesuits, and hence their anxiety to show that they were
+      no allies of the one even when destroying the other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Contemporaries seldom criticise the shades and variations of innovating
+      speculation with any marked nicety. Anything with the stamp of rationality
+      on its phrases or arguments was roughly set down to the school of the
+      philosophers, and Rousseau was counted one of their number, like Voltaire
+      or Helv&#233;tius. The Emilius appeared in May 1762. On the 11th of June
+      the parliament of Paris ordered the book to be burnt by the public
+      executioner, and the writer to be arrested. For Rousseau always scorned
+      the devices of Voltaire and others; he courageously insisted on placing
+      his name on the title-page of all his works,<a name="FNanchor_89_89"
+      id="FNanchor_89_89"></a><a href="#Footnote_89_89" class="fnanchor">[89]</a>
+      and so there <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[ii.66]</a></span>was
+      none of the usual difficulty in identifying the author. The grounds of the
+      proceedings were alleged irreligious tendencies to be found in the book.<a
+      name="FNanchor_90_90" id="FNanchor_90_90"></a><a href="#Footnote_90_90"
+      class="fnanchor">[90]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The indecency of the requisition in which the advocate-general demanded
+      its proscription, was admitted even by people who were least likely to
+      defend Rousseau.<a name="FNanchor_91_91" id="FNanchor_91_91"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_91_91" class="fnanchor">[91]</a> The author was charged
+      with saying not only that man may be saved without believing in God, but
+      even that the Christian religion does not exist&#8212;paradox too flagrant
+      even for the writer of the Discourse on Inequality. No evidence was
+      produced either that the alleged assertions were in the book, or that the
+      name of the author was really the name on its title-page. Rousseau fared
+      no worse, but better, than his fellows, for there was hardly a single man
+      of letters of that time who escaped arbitrary imprisonment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The unfortunate author had news of the ferment which his work was creating
+      in Paris, and received notes of warning from every hand, but he could not
+      believe that the only man in France who believed in God was to be the
+      victim of the defenders of Christianity.<a name="FNanchor_92_92"
+      id="FNanchor_92_92"></a><a href="#Footnote_92_92" class="fnanchor">[92]</a>
+      On the 8th of June he spent a merry day with two friends, taking their
+      dinner in the fields. &quot;Ever since my youth I had a habit of reading
+      at <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[ii.67]</a></span>night
+      in my bed until my eyes grew heavy. Then I put out the candle, and tried
+      to fall asleep for a few minutes, but they seldom lasted long. My ordinary
+      reading at night was the Bible, and I have read it continuously through at
+      least five or six times in this way. That night, finding myself more
+      wakeful than usual, I prolonged my reading, and read through the whole of
+      the book which ends with the Levite of Ephraim, and which if I mistake not
+      is the book of Judges. The story affected me deeply, and I was busy over
+      it in a kind of dream, when all at once I was roused by lights and noises.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor_93_93" id="FNanchor_93_93"></a><a href="#Footnote_93_93"
+      class="fnanchor">[93]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was two o'clock in the morning. A messenger had come in hot haste to
+      carry him to Madame de Luxembourg. News had reached her of the proposed
+      decree of the parliament. She knew Rousseau well enough to be sure that if
+      he were seized and examined, her own share and that of Malesherbes in the
+      production of the condemned book would be made public, and their position
+      uncomfortably compromised. It was to their interest that he should avoid
+      arrest by flight, and they had no difficulty in persuading him to fall in
+      with their plans. After a tearful farewell with Theresa, who had hardly
+      been out of his sight for seventeen years, and many embraces from the
+      greater ladies of the castle, he was thrust into a chaise and despatched
+      on the first stage of eight melancholy years of wandering and despair, to
+      be driven from <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[ii.68]</a></span>place
+      to place, first by the fatuous tyranny of magistrates and religious
+      doctors, and then by the yet more cruel spectres of his own diseased
+      imagination, until at length his whole soul became the home of weariness
+      and torment.
+    </p>
+    <div class="footnotes">
+      <h3>
+        FOOTNOTES:
+      </h3>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_1"><span
+          class="label">[1]</span></a> <i>Conf.</i>, x. 62.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_2_2" id="Footnote_2_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_2"><span
+          class="label">[2]</span></a> <i>Conf.</i>, x.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_3_3" id="Footnote_3_3"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_3"><span
+          class="label">[3]</span></a> <i>Ib.</i> x. 70.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_4_4" id="Footnote_4_4"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_4"><span
+          class="label">[4]</span></a> Louis Fran&#231;ois de Bourbon, Prince de
+          Conti (1717-1776), was great-grandson of the brother of the Great Cond&#233;.
+          He performed creditable things in the war of the Austrian Succession
+          (in Piedmont 1744, in Belgium 1745); had a scheme of foreign policy as
+          director of the secret diplomacy of Lewis XV. (1745-1756), which was
+          to make Turkey, Poland, Sweden, Prussia, a barrier against Russia
+          primarily, and Austria secondarily; lastly went into moderate
+          opposition to the court, protesting against the destruction of the <i>parlements</i>
+          (1771), and afterwards opposing the reforms of Turgot (1776). Finally
+          he had the honour of refusing the sacraments of the church on his
+          deathbed. See Martin's <i>Hist. de France</i>, xv. and xvi.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_5_5" id="Footnote_5_5"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5_5"><span
+          class="label">[5]</span></a> <i>Conf.</i>, 97. <i>Corr.</i>, v. 215.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_6_6" id="Footnote_6_6"></a><a href="#FNanchor_6_6"><span
+          class="label">[6]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>, ii. 144. Oct. 7, 1760.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_7_7" id="Footnote_7_7"></a><a href="#FNanchor_7_7"><span
+          class="label">[7]</span></a> <i>Conf.</i>, x. 98.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_8_8" id="Footnote_8_8"></a><a href="#FNanchor_8_8"><span
+          class="label">[8]</span></a> The reader will distinguish this
+          correspondent of Rousseau's, <i>Comtesse</i> de Boufflers-Rouveret
+          (1727-18&#8212;), from the <i>Duchesse</i> de Boufflers, which was the
+          title of Rousseau's Mar&#233;chale de Luxembourg before her second
+          marriage. And also from the <i>Marquise</i> de Boufflers, said to be
+          the mistress of the old king Stanislaus at Lun&#233;ville, and the
+          mother of the Chevalier de Boufflers (who was the intimate of
+          Voltaire, sat in the States General, emigrated, did homage to
+          Napoleon, and finally died peaceably under Lewis XVIII.). See Jal's <i>Dict.
+          Critique</i>, 259-262. Sainte Beuve has an essay on our present
+          Comtesse de Boufflers (<i>Nouveaux Lundis</i>, iv. 163). She is the
+          Madame de Boufflers who was taken by Beauclerk to visit Johnson in his
+          Temple chambers, and was conducted to her coach by him in a remarkable
+          manner (Boswell's <i>Life</i>, ch. li. p. 467). Also much talked of in
+          H. Walpole's Letters. See D'Alembert to Frederick, April 15, 1768.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_9_9" id="Footnote_9_9"></a><a href="#FNanchor_9_9"><span
+          class="label">[9]</span></a> Streckeisen, ii. 32.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_10_10" id="Footnote_10_10"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_10_10"><span class="label">[10]</span></a> <i>Conf.</i>,
+          x. 71.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_11_11" id="Footnote_11_11"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_11_11"><span class="label">[11]</span></a> For
+          instance, <i>Corr.</i> ii. 85, 90, 92, etc. 1759.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_12_12" id="Footnote_12_12"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_12_12"><span class="label">[12]</span></a>
+          Streckeisen, ii. 28, etc.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_13_13" id="Footnote_13_13"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_13_13"><span class="label">[13]</span></a> <i>Ib.</i>,
+          29.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_14_14" id="Footnote_14_14"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_14_14"><span class="label">[14]</span></a> <i>Conf.</i>,
+          x. 99.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_15_15" id="Footnote_15_15"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_15_15"><span class="label">[15]</span></a> <i>Ib.</i>,
+          x. 57.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_16_16" id="Footnote_16_16"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_16_16"><span class="label">[16]</span></a> <i>Ib.</i>,
+          xi. 119.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_17_17" id="Footnote_17_17"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_17_17"><span class="label">[17]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>,
+          ii. 196. Feb. 16, 1761.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_18_18" id="Footnote_18_18"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_18_18"><span class="label">[18]</span></a> <i>Ib.</i>,
+          ii. 102, 176, etc.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_19_19" id="Footnote_19_19"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_19_19"><span class="label">[19]</span></a> <i>Conf.</i>,
+          x. 60.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_20_20" id="Footnote_20_20"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_20_20"><span class="label">[20]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>,
+          ii. 12.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_21_21" id="Footnote_21_21"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_21_21"><span class="label">[21]</span></a> As M. St.
+          Marc Girardin has put it: &quot;There are in all Rousseau's
+          discussions two things to be carefully distinguished from one another;
+          the maxims of the discourse, and the conclusions of the controversy.
+          The maxims are ordinarily paradoxical; the conclusions are full of
+          good sense.&quot; <i>Rev. des Deux Mondes</i>, Aug. 1852, p. 501.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_22_22" id="Footnote_22_22"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_22_22"><span class="label">[22]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>,
+          ii. 244-246. Oct. 24, 1761.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_23_23" id="Footnote_23_23"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_23_23"><span class="label">[23]</span></a> <i>Ib.</i>,
+          1766. <i>Oeuv.</i>, lxxv. 364.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_24_24" id="Footnote_24_24"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_24_24"><span class="label">[24]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>,
+          ii. 32. (1758.)
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_25_25" id="Footnote_25_25"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_25_25"><span class="label">[25]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>,
+          ii. 63. Jan. 15, 1779.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_26_26" id="Footnote_26_26"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_26_26"><span class="label">[26]</span></a> Bernardin
+          de St. Pierre, xii. 102.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_27_27" id="Footnote_27_27"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_27_27"><span class="label">[27]</span></a> 4th Letter,
+          p. 375.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_28_28" id="Footnote_28_28"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_28_28"><span class="label">[28]</span></a> <i>M&#233;m.</i>,
+          ii. 299.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_29_29" id="Footnote_29_29"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_29_29"><span class="label">[29]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>,
+          ii. 98. July 10, 1759.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_30_30" id="Footnote_30_30"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_30_30"><span class="label">[30]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>,
+          ii. 106. Nov. 10, 1759.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_31_31" id="Footnote_31_31"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_31_31"><span class="label">[31]</span></a> <i>Ib.</i>,
+          ii. 179. Jan. 18, 1761.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_32_32" id="Footnote_32_32"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_32_32"><span class="label">[32]</span></a> <i>Ib.</i>,
+          ii. 268. Dec. 12, 1761.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_33_33" id="Footnote_33_33"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_33_33"><span class="label">[33]</span></a> <i>Ib.</i>,
+          ii. 28. Dec. 23, 1761.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_34_34" id="Footnote_34_34"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_34_34"><span class="label">[34]</span></a> <i>Nouv. H&#233;l.</i>,
+          III. xxii. 147. In 1784 Hume's suppressed essays on &quot;Suicide and
+          the Immortality of the Soul&quot; were published in London:&#8212;&quot;With
+          Remarks, intended as an Antidote to the Poison contained in these
+          Performances, by the Editor; to which is added, Two Letters on
+          Suicide, from Rousseau's Eloisa.&quot; In the preface the reader is
+          told that these &quot;two very masterly letters have been much
+          celebrated.&quot; See Hume's <i>Essays</i>, by Green and Grose, i. 69,
+          70.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_35_35" id="Footnote_35_35"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_35_35"><span class="label">[35]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>,
+          iii. 235. Aug. 1, 1763.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_36_36" id="Footnote_36_36"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_36_36"><span class="label">[36]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>,
+          ii. 226. Sept. 29, 1761.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_37_37" id="Footnote_37_37"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_37_37"><span class="label">[37]</span></a> P. 294.
+          Jan. 11, 1762.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_38_38" id="Footnote_38_38"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_38_38"><span class="label">[38]</span></a> Madame
+          Latour (Nov. 7, 1730-Sept. 6, 1789) was the wife of a man in the
+          financial world, who used her ill and dissipated as much of her
+          fortune as he could, and from whom she separated in 1775. After that
+          she resumed her maiden name and was known as Madame de Franqueville.
+          Musset-Pathay, ii. 182, and Sainte Beuve, <i>Causeries</i>, ii. 63.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_39_39" id="Footnote_39_39"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_39_39"><span class="label">[39]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>,
+          ii. 214. <i>Conf.</i>, ix. 289.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_40_40" id="Footnote_40_40"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_40_40"><span class="label">[40]</span></a> English
+          translations of Rousseau's works appeared very speedily after the
+          originals. A second edition of the Helo&#239;sa was called for as
+          early as May 1761. See <i>Corr.</i> ii. 223. A German translation of
+          the Helo&#239;sa appeared at Leipzig in 1761, in six duodecimos.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_41_41" id="Footnote_41_41"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_41_41"><span class="label">[41]</span></a> For
+          instance, <i>Corr.</i>, ii. 168. Nov. 19, 1762.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_42_42" id="Footnote_42_42"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_42_42"><span class="label">[42]</span></a> Choderlos
+          de La Clos: 1741-1803.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_43_43" id="Footnote_43_43"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_43_43"><span class="label">[43]</span></a> Journal,
+          iv. 496. (Ed. Charpentier, 1857.)
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_44_44" id="Footnote_44_44"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_44_44"><span class="label">[44]</span></a> <i>Nouv. H&#233;l.</i>,
+          III. xiv. 48.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_45_45" id="Footnote_45_45"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_45_45"><span class="label">[45]</span></a> <i>E.g.</i>
+          Letters, 40-46.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_46_46" id="Footnote_46_46"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_46_46"><span class="label">[46]</span></a> Madame de
+          Sta&#235;l (1765-1817), in her <i>Lettres sur les &#233;crits et le
+          caract&#232;re de J.J. Rousseau</i>, written when she was twenty, and
+          her first work of any pretensions. <i>Oeuv.</i>, i. 41. Ed. 1820.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_47_47" id="Footnote_47_47"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_47_47"><span class="label">[47]</span></a> Nowhere
+          more pungently than in a little piece of some half-dozen pages,
+          headed, <i>Pr&#233;diction tir&#233;e d'un vieux Manuscrit</i>, the
+          form of which is borrowed from Grimm's squib in the dispute about
+          French music, <i>Le petit Proph&#232;te de Boehmischbroda</i>, though
+          it seems to me to be superior to Grimm in pointedness. Here are a few
+          verses from the supposed prophecy of the man who should come&#8212;and
+          of what he should do. &quot;Et la multitude courra sur ses pas et
+          plusieurs croiront en lui. Et il leur dira: Vous &#234;tes des sc&#233;l&#233;rats
+          et des fripons, vos femmes sont toutes des femmes perdues, et je viens
+          vivre parmi vous. Et il ajoutera tous les hommes sont vertueux dans le
+          pays o&#249; je suis n&#233;, et je n'habiterai jamais le pays o&#249;
+          je suis n&#233;.... Et il dira aussi qu'il est impossible d'avoir des
+          moeurs, et de lire des Romans, et il fera un Roman; et dans son Roman
+          le vice sera en action et la vertu en paroles, et ses personages
+          seront forcen&#233;s d'amour et de philosophie. Et dans son Roman on
+          apprendra l'art de suborner philosophiquement une jeune fille. Et
+          l'Ecoli&#232;re perdra toute honte et toute pudeur, et elle fera avec
+          son ma&#238;tre des sottises et des maximes.... Et le bel Ami &#233;tant
+          dans un Bateau seul avec sa Ma&#238;tresse voudra le jetter dans l'eau
+          et se pr&#233;cipiter avec elle. Et ils appelleront tout cela de la
+          Philosophie et de la Vertu,&quot; and so on, humorously enough in its
+          way.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_48_48" id="Footnote_48_48"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_48_48"><span class="label">[48]</span></a> See
+          passages in Goncourt's <i>La Femme au 18i&#232;me si&#232;cle</i>, p.
+          380.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_49_49" id="Footnote_49_49"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_49_49"><span class="label">[49]</span></a>
+          Musset-Pathay, II. 361. See Madame Roland's <i>M&#233;m.</i>, i. 207.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_50_50" id="Footnote_50_50"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_50_50"><span class="label">[50]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>,
+          March 3, and March 19, 1761. The criticisms of Xim&#233;n&#232;s, a
+          thoroughly mediocre person in all respects, were entirely literary,
+          and were directed against the too strained and highly coloured quality
+          of the phrases&#8212;&quot;baisers &#226;cres&quot;&#8212;among them.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_51_51" id="Footnote_51_51"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_51_51"><span class="label">[51]</span></a> <i>Nouv. H&#233;l.</i>,
+          V. v. 115.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_52_52" id="Footnote_52_52"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_52_52"><span class="label">[52]</span></a> VI. vii.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_53_53" id="Footnote_53_53"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_53_53"><span class="label">[53]</span></a> VI. vi.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_54_54" id="Footnote_54_54"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_54_54"><span class="label">[54]</span></a> Michelet's
+          <i>Louis XV. et Louis XVI.</i>, p. 58.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_55_55" id="Footnote_55_55"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_55_55"><span class="label">[55]</span></a> See
+          Hettner's <i>Literaturgeschichte</i>, II. 486.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_56_56" id="Footnote_56_56"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_56_56"><span class="label">[56]</span></a> IV. xi.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_57_57" id="Footnote_57_57"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_57_57"><span class="label">[57]</span></a> IV. xvii.
+          See vol. iii. 423.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_58_58" id="Footnote_58_58"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_58_58"><span class="label">[58]</span></a> In 1816.
+          Moore's <i>Life</i>, iii. 247; also 285. And the note to the stanzas
+          in the Third Canto,&#8212;a note curious for a slight admixture of
+          transcendentalism, so rare a thing with Byron, who, sentimental though
+          he was, usually rejoiced in a truly Voltairean common sense.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_59_59" id="Footnote_59_59"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_59_59"><span class="label">[59]</span></a> &quot;The
+          present fashion in France, of passing some time in the country, is
+          new; at this time of the year, and for many weeks past, Paris is,
+          comparatively speaking, empty. Everybody who has a country seat is at
+          it, and such as have none visit others who have. This remarkable
+          revolution in the French manners is certainly one of the best customs
+          they have taken from England; and its introduction was effected the
+          easier, being assisted by the magic of Rousseau's writings. Mankind
+          are much indebted to that splendid genius, who, when living, was
+          hunted from country to country, to seek an asylum, with as much venom
+          as if he had been a mad dog; thanks to the vile spirit of bigotry,
+          which has not received its death wound. Women of the first fashion in
+          France are now ashamed of not nursing their own children; and stays
+          are universally proscribed from the bodies of the poor infants, which
+          were for so many ages torture to them, as they are still in Spain. The
+          country residence may not have effects equally obvious; but they will
+          be no less sure in the end, and in all respects beneficial to every
+          class in the state.&quot; Arthur Young's <i>Travels</i>, i. 72.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_60_60" id="Footnote_60_60"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_60_60"><span class="label">[60]</span></a> <i>Causeries</i>,
+          xi. 195.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_61_61" id="Footnote_61_61"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_61_61"><span class="label">[61]</span></a> <i>Nouv. H&#233;l.</i>,
+          V. iii. &quot;You remember Rousseau's description of an English
+          morning: such are the mornings I spend with these good people.&quot;&#8212;Cowper
+          to Joseph Hill, Oct. 25, 1765. <i>Works</i>, iii. 269. In a letter to
+          William Unwin (Sept. 21, 1779), speaking of his being engaged in
+          mending windows, he says, &quot;Rousseau would have been charmed to
+          have seen me so occupied, and would have exclaimed with rapture that
+          he had found the Emilius who, he supposed, had subsisted only in his
+          own idea.&quot; For a description illustrative of the likeness between
+          Rousseau and Cowper in their feeling for nature, see letter to Newton
+          (Sept. 18, 1784, v. 78), and compare it with the description of Les
+          Charmettes, making proper allowance for the colour of prose.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_62_62" id="Footnote_62_62"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_62_62"><span class="label">[62]</span></a> IV. x. 260.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_63_63" id="Footnote_63_63"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_63_63"><span class="label">[63]</span></a> V. ii. 37.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_64_64" id="Footnote_64_64"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_64_64"><span class="label">[64]</span></a> V. ii.
+          47-52.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_65_65" id="Footnote_65_65"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_65_65"><span class="label">[65]</span></a> Rousseau
+          considered that the Fourth and Sixth parts of the New Helo&#239;sa
+          were masterpieces of diction. <i>Conf.</i> ix. 334.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_66_66" id="Footnote_66_66"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_66_66"><span class="label">[66]</span></a> VI. viii..
+          298. <i>Conf.</i>, xi. 106.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_67_67" id="Footnote_67_67"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_67_67"><span class="label">[67]</span></a> The La B&#233;doy&#232;re
+          case, which began in 1745. See Barbier, iv. 54, 59, etc.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_68_68" id="Footnote_68_68"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_68_68"><span class="label">[68]</span></a> III. xviii.
+          84.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_69_69" id="Footnote_69_69"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_69_69"><span class="label">[69]</span></a> III. xx.
+          116. In the letter to Christopher de Beaumont (p. 102), he fires a
+          double shot against the philosophers on the one hand, and the church
+          on the other; exalting continence and purity, of which the
+          philosophers in their reaction against asceticism thought lightly, and
+          exalting marriage over the celibate state, which the churchmen
+          associated with mysterious sanctity.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_70_70" id="Footnote_70_70"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_70_70"><span class="label">[70]</span></a> I. lxii.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_71_71" id="Footnote_71_71"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_71_71"><span class="label">[71]</span></a> V. ii.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_72_72" id="Footnote_72_72"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_72_72"><span class="label">[72]</span></a> V. vii.
+          141.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_73_73" id="Footnote_73_73"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_73_73"><span class="label">[73]</span></a> V. ii.
+          31-33.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_74_74" id="Footnote_74_74"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_74_74"><span class="label">[74]</span></a> For the
+          Robecq family, see Saint Simon, xviii. 58.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_75_75" id="Footnote_75_75"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_75_75"><span class="label">[75]</span></a> Morellet's
+          <i>M&#233;m.</i>, i. 89-93. Rousseau, <i>Conf.</i>, x. 85, etc. This
+          <i>Vision</i> is also in the style of Grimm's <i>P&#233;tit Proph&#232;te</i>,
+          like the piece referred to in a previous note, vol. ii. p. 31.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_76_76" id="Footnote_76_76"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_76_76"><span class="label">[76]</span></a> Madame de
+          Vandeul's <i>M&#233;m. sur Diderot</i>, p. 27. Rousseau, <i>Conf.</i>,
+          vii. 130.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_77_77" id="Footnote_77_77"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_77_77"><span class="label">[77]</span></a> <i>Nouv. H&#233;l.</i>,
+          V. xiii. 194. <i>Conf.</i>, x. 43.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_78_78" id="Footnote_78_78"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_78_78"><span class="label">[78]</span></a> The reader
+          will find a fuller mention of the French book trade in my <i>Diderot</i>,
+          ch. vi.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_79_79" id="Footnote_79_79"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_79_79"><span class="label">[79]</span></a> <i>Conf.</i>,
+          xi. 127.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_80_80" id="Footnote_80_80"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_80_80"><span class="label">[80]</span></a> See a
+          letter from Rousseau to Malesherbes, Nov. 5, 1760. <i>Corr.</i>, ii.
+          157.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_81_81" id="Footnote_81_81"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_81_81"><span class="label">[81]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>,
+          ii. 157.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_82_82" id="Footnote_82_82"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_82_82"><span class="label">[82]</span></a> C.G. de
+          Lamoignon de Malesherbes (p. 1721&#8212;guillotined, 1794), son of the
+          chancellor, and one of the best instructed and most enlightened men of
+          the century&#8212;a Turgot of the second rank&#8212;was Directeur de
+          la Librairie from 1750-1763. The process was this: a book was
+          submitted to him; he named a censor for it; on the censor's report the
+          director gave or refused permission to print, or required alterations.
+          Even after these formalities were complied with, the book was liable
+          to a decree of the royal council, a decree of the parliament, or else
+          a <i>lettre-de-cachet</i> might send the author to the Bastile. See
+          Barbier, vii. 126.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          After Lord Shelburne saw Malesherbes, he said, &quot;I have seen for
+          the first time in my life what I never thought could exist&#8212;a man
+          whose soul is absolutely free from hope or fear, and yet who is full
+          of life and ardour.&quot; Mdlle. Lespinasse's <i>Lettres</i>, 90.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_83_83" id="Footnote_83_83"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_83_83"><span class="label">[83]</span></a> See note,
+          p. 132.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_84_84" id="Footnote_84_84"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_84_84"><span class="label">[84]</span></a> <i>Conf.</i>,
+          xi. 134.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_85_85" id="Footnote_85_85"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_85_85"><span class="label">[85]</span></a> <i>Conf.</i>,
+          xi. 139.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_86_86" id="Footnote_86_86"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_86_86"><span class="label">[86]</span></a> <i>Ib.</i>,
+          xi. 139. <i>Corr.</i>, ii. 270, etc. Dec. 12, 1761, etc.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_87_87" id="Footnote_87_87"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_87_87"><span class="label">[87]</span></a> <i>Conf.</i>,
+          xi. 150.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_88_88" id="Footnote_88_88"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_88_88"><span class="label">[88]</span></a> Fourth
+          Letter to Malesherbes, p. 377.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_89_89" id="Footnote_89_89"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_89_89"><span class="label">[89]</span></a> With one
+          trifling exception, the Letter to Grimm on the Opera of Omphale
+          (1752): <i>&#201;crits sur la Musique</i>, p. 337.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_90_90" id="Footnote_90_90"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_90_90"><span class="label">[90]</span></a> See
+          Barbier's Journal, viii. 45 (Ed. Charpentier, 1857). A succinct
+          contemporary account of the general situation is to be found in
+          D'Alembert's little book, the <i>Destruction des J&#233;suites</i>.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_91_91" id="Footnote_91_91"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_91_91"><span class="label">[91]</span></a> Grimm, for
+          instance: <i>Corr. Lit.</i>, iii. 117.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_92_92" id="Footnote_92_92"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_92_92"><span class="label">[92]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>,
+          ii. 337. June 7, 1672. <i>Conf.</i>, xi. 152, 162.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_93_93" id="Footnote_93_93"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_93_93"><span class="label">[93]</span></a> <i>Conf.</i>,
+          xi. 162. The Levite's story is to be read in <i>Judges</i>, ch. xix.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+    </div>
+    <hr style="width: 65%;" />
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[ii.69]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      <a name="CHAPTER_IIb" id="CHAPTER_IIb"></a>CHAPTER II.
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      PERSECUTION.<a name="FNanchor_94_94" id="FNanchor_94_94"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_94_94" class="fnanchor">[94]</a>
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <span class="smcap">Those</span> to whom life consists in the immediate
+      consciousness of their own direct relations with the people and
+      circumstances that are in close contact with them, find it hard to follow
+      the moods of a man to whom such consciousness is the least part of
+      himself, and such relations the least real part of his life. Rousseau was
+      no sooner in the post-chaise which was bearing him away towards
+      Switzerland, than the troubles of the previous day at once dropped into a
+      pale and distant past, and he returned to a world where was neither
+      parliament, nor decree for burning books, nor any warrant for personal
+      arrest. He took up the thread where harassing circumstances had broken it,
+      and again fell musing over the tragic tale of the Levite of Ephraim. His
+      dream absorbed him so entirely as to take specific literary form, and
+      before the journey was at an end he had composed a long impassioned
+      version of the Bible story. Though it has Rousseau's usual fine
+      sonorousness in a high degree, no man now reads it; the author himself
+      always preserved a cer<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[ii.70]</a></span>tain
+      tenderness for it.<a name="FNanchor_95_95" id="FNanchor_95_95"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_95_95" class="fnanchor">[95]</a> The contrast between this
+      singular quietism and the angry stir that marked Voltaire's many flights
+      in post-chaises, points like all else to the profound difference between
+      the pair. Contrast with Voltaire's shrill cries under any personal
+      vexation, this calm utterance:&#8212;&quot;Though the consequences of this
+      affair have plunged me into a gulf of woes from which I shall never come
+      up again so long as I live, I bear these gentlemen no grudge. I am aware
+      that their object was not to do me any harm, but only to reach ends of
+      their own. I know that towards me they have neither liking nor hate. I was
+      found in their way, like a pebble that you thrust aside with the foot
+      without even looking at it. They ought not to say they have performed
+      their duty, but that they have done their business.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor_96_96" id="FNanchor_96_96"></a><a href="#Footnote_96_96"
+      class="fnanchor">[96]</a> A new note from a persecuted writer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rousseau, in spite of the belief which henceforth possessed him that he
+      was the victim of a dark unfathomable plot, and in spite of passing
+      outbreaks of gloomy rage, was incapable of steady glowing and active
+      resentments. The world was not real enough to him for this. A throng of
+      phantoms pressed noiselessly before his sight, and dulled all sense of
+      more actual impression. &quot;It is amazing,&quot; he wrote, &quot;with
+      what ease I forget past ill, however fresh it may be. In proportion as the
+      anticipation of it alarms and <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_71"
+      id="Page_71">[ii.71]</a></span>confuses me when I see it coming, so the
+      memory of it returns feebly to my mind and dies out the moment after it
+      has arrived. My cruel imagination, which torments itself incessantly in
+      anticipating woes that are still unborn, makes a diversion for my memory,
+      and hinders me from recalling those which have gone. I exhaust disaster
+      beforehand. The more I have suffered in foreseeing it, the more easily do
+      I forget it; while on the contrary, being incessantly busy with my past
+      happiness, I recall it and brood and ruminate over it, so as to enjoy it
+      over again whenever I wish.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_97_97"
+      id="FNanchor_97_97"></a><a href="#Footnote_97_97" class="fnanchor">[97]</a>
+      The same turn of humour saved him from vindictiveness. &quot;I concern
+      myself too little with the offence, to feel much concern about the
+      offender. I only think of the hurt that I have received from him, on
+      account of the hurt that he may still do me; and if I were sure he would
+      do me no more, what he had already done would be forgotten straightway.&quot;
+      Though he does not carry the analysis any further, we may easily perceive
+      that the same explanation covers what he called his natural ingratitude.
+      Kindness was not much more vividly understood by him than malice. It was
+      only one form of the troublesome interposition of an outer world in his
+      life; he was fain to hurry back from it to the real world of his dreams.
+      If any man called practical is tempted to despise this dreaming creature,
+      as he fares in his chaise from stage to stage, let him remember that one
+      making that journey through France less than thirty years later might
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[ii.72]</a></span>have
+      seen the castles of the great flaring in the destruction of a most
+      righteous vengeance, the great themselves fleeing ignobly from the land to
+      which their selfishness, and heedlessness, and hatred of improvement, and
+      inhuman pride had been a curse, while the legion of toilers with eyes
+      blinded by the oppression of ages were groping with passionate uncertain
+      hand for that divine something which they thought of as justice and right.
+      And this was what Rousseau both partially foresaw and helped to prepare,<a
+      name="FNanchor_98_98" id="FNanchor_98_98"></a><a href="#Footnote_98_98"
+      class="fnanchor">[98]</a> while the common politicians, like Choiseul or
+      D'Aiguillon, played their poor game&#8212;the elemental forces rising
+      unseen into tempest around them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He reached the territory of the canton of Berne, and alighted at the house
+      of an old friend at Yverdun,<a name="FNanchor_99_99" id="FNanchor_99_99"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_99_99" class="fnanchor">[99]</a> where native air, the
+      beauty of the spot, and the charms of the season, immediately repaired all
+      weariness and fatigue.<a name="FNanchor_100_100" id="FNanchor_100_100"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_100_100" class="fnanchor">[100]</a> Friends at Geneva
+      wrote letters of sincere feeling, joyful that he had not followed the
+      precedent of Socrates too closely by remaining in the power of a
+      government eager to destroy him.<a name="FNanchor_101_101"
+      id="FNanchor_101_101"></a><a href="#Footnote_101_101" class="fnanchor">[101]</a>
+      A post or two later brought worse news. The Council at Geneva ordered not
+      only Emilius, but the Social Contract also, to be publicly burnt, and
+      issued a warrant of arrest against their author, if he should set foot in
+      the territory of the republic (June <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_73"
+      id="Page_73">[ii.73]</a></span>19).<a name="FNanchor_102_102"
+      id="FNanchor_102_102"></a><a href="#Footnote_102_102" class="fnanchor">[102]</a>
+      Rousseau could hardly believe it possible that the free Government which
+      he had held up to the reverence of Europe, could have condemned him
+      unheard, but he took occasion in a highly characteristic manner to chide
+      severely a friend at Geneva who had publicly taken his part.<a
+      name="FNanchor_103_103" id="FNanchor_103_103"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_103_103" class="fnanchor">[103]</a> Within a fortnight
+      this blow was followed by another. His two books were reported to the
+      senate of Berne, and Rousseau was informed by one of the authorities that
+      a notification was on its way admonishing him to quit the canton within
+      the space of fifteen days.<a name="FNanchor_104_104" id="FNanchor_104_104"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_104_104" class="fnanchor">[104]</a> This stroke he avoided
+      by flight to Motiers, a village in the principality of Neuch&#226;tel
+      (July 10), then part of the dominions of the King of Prussia.<a
+      name="FNanchor_105_105" id="FNanchor_105_105"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_105_105" class="fnanchor">[105]</a> Rousseau had some
+      antipathy <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[ii.74]</a></span>to
+      Frederick, both because he had beaten the French, whom Rousseau loved, and
+      because his maxims and his conduct alike seemed to trample under foot
+      respect for the natural law and not a few human duties. He had composed a
+      verse to the effect that Frederick thought like a philosopher and acted
+      like a king, philosopher and king notoriously being words of equally evil
+      sense in his dialect. There was also a passage in Emilius about Adrastus,
+      King of the Daunians, which was commonly understood to mean Frederick,
+      King of the Prussians. Still Rousseau was acute enough to know that mean
+      passions usually only rule the weak, and have little hold over the strong.
+      He boldly wrote both to the king and to Lord Marischal, the governor of
+      the principality, informing them that he was there, and asking permission
+      to remain in the only asylum left for him upon the earth.<a
+      name="FNanchor_106_106" id="FNanchor_106_106"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_106_106" class="fnanchor">[106]</a> He compared himself
+      loftily to Coriolanus among the Volscians, and wrote to the king in a vein
+      that must have amused the strong man. &quot;I have said much ill of you,
+      perhaps I shall still say more; yet, driven from France, from Geneva, from
+      the canton of Berne, I am come to seek shelter in your states. Perhaps I
+      was wrong in not beginning there; this is eulogy of which you are worthy.
+      Sire, I have deserved no grace from you, and I seek none, but I thought it
+      my duty to inform your majesty that I am in your power, and that I am so
+      of set design. Your majesty will dispose of me as shall <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[ii.75]</a></span>seem good
+      to you.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_107_107" id="FNanchor_107_107"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_107_107" class="fnanchor">[107]</a> Frederick, though no
+      admirer of Rousseau or his writings,<a name="FNanchor_108_108"
+      id="FNanchor_108_108"></a><a href="#Footnote_108_108" class="fnanchor">[108]</a>
+      readily granted the required permission. He also, says Lord Marischal,
+      &quot;gave me orders to furnish him his small necessaries if he would
+      accept them; and though that king's philosophy be very different from that
+      of Jean Jacques, yet he does not think that a man of an irreproachable
+      life is to be persecuted because his sentiments are singular. He designs
+      to build him a hermitage with a little garden, which I find he will not
+      accept, nor perhaps the rest, which I have not yet offered him.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor_109_109" id="FNanchor_109_109"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_109_109" class="fnanchor">[109]</a> When the offer of the
+      flour, wine, and firewood was at length made in as delicate terms as
+      possible, Rousseau declined the gift on grounds which may raise a smile,
+      but which are not without a rather touching simplicity.<a
+      name="FNanchor_110_110" id="FNanchor_110_110"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_110_110" class="fnanchor">[110]</a> &quot;I have enough to
+      live on for two or three years,&quot; he said, &quot;but if I were dying
+      of hunger, I would rather in the present condition of your good prince,
+      and not being of any service to him, go and eat grass and grub up roots,
+      than accept a morsel of bread from him.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_111_111"
+      id="FNanchor_111_111"></a><a href="#Footnote_111_111" class="fnanchor">[111]</a>
+      Hume might well call this a phenomenon in the world of letters, and one
+      very honourable for the person concerned.<a name="FNanchor_112_112"
+      id="FNanchor_112_112"></a><a href="#Footnote_112_112" class="fnanchor">[112]</a>
+      And we recognise its dignity the more when we contrast <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[ii.76]</a></span>it with
+      the baseness of Voltaire, who drew his pension from the King of Prussia
+      while Frederick was in his most urgent straits, and while the poet was
+      sportively exulting to all his correspondents in the malicious expectation
+      that he would one day have to allow the King of Prussia himself a pension.<a
+      name="FNanchor_113_113" id="FNanchor_113_113"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_113_113" class="fnanchor">[113]</a> And Rousseau was a
+      poor man, living among the poor and in their style. His annual outlay at
+      this time was covered by the modest sum of sixty louis.<a
+      name="FNanchor_114_114" id="FNanchor_114_114"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_114_114" class="fnanchor">[114]</a> What stamps his
+      refusal of Frederick's gifts as true dignity, is the fact that he not only
+      did not refuse money for any work done, but expected and asked for it.
+      Malesherbes at this very time begged him to collect plants for him.
+      Joyfully, replied Rousseau, &quot;but as I cannot subsist without the aid
+      of my own labour, I never meant, in spite of the pleasure that it might
+      otherwise have been to me, to offer you the use of my time for nothing.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor_115_115" id="FNanchor_115_115"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_115_115" class="fnanchor">[115]</a> In the same year, we
+      may add, when the tremendous struggle of the Seven Years' War was closing,
+      the philosopher wrote a second terse epistle to the king, and with this
+      their direct communication came to an end. &quot;Sire, you are my
+      protector and my benefactor; I would fain repay you if I can. You wish to
+      give me bread; is there none of your own subjects in want of it? Take that
+      sword away from my sight, it dazzles and pains me. It has done its work
+      only too well; the sceptre is abandoned. Great is the career for kings of
+      your <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[ii.77]</a></span>stuff,
+      and you are still far from the term; time presses, you have not a moment
+      to lose. Fathom well your heart, O Frederick! Can you dare to die without
+      having been the greatest of men? Would that I could see Frederick, the
+      just and the redoubtable, covering his states with multitudes of men to
+      whom he should be a father; then will J.J. Rousseau, the foe of kings,
+      hasten to die at the foot of his throne.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_116_116"
+      id="FNanchor_116_116"></a><a href="#Footnote_116_116" class="fnanchor">[116]</a>
+      Frederick, strong as his interest was in all curious persons who could
+      amuse him, was too busy to answer this, and Rousseau was not yet
+      recognised as Voltaire's rival in power and popularity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Motiers is one of the half-dozen decent villages standing in the flat
+      bottom of the Val de Travers, a widish valley that lies between the gorges
+      of the Jura and the Lake of Neuch&#226;tel, and is famous in our day for
+      its production of absinthe and of asphalt. The flat of the valley, with
+      the Reuss making a bald and colourless way through the midst of it, is
+      nearly treeless, and it is too uniform to be very pleasing. In winter the
+      climate is most rigorous, for the level is high, and the surrounding hills
+      admit the sun's rays late and cut them off early. Rousseau's description,
+      accurate and recognisable as it is,<a name="FNanchor_117_117"
+      id="FNanchor_117_117"></a><a href="#Footnote_117_117" class="fnanchor">[117]</a>
+      strikes an impartial tourist as too favourable. But when a piece of
+      scenery is a home to a man, he has an eye for a thousand outlines, changes
+      of light, soft variations of colour; <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[ii.78]</a></span>the landscape lives for him
+      with an unspoken suggestion and intimate association, to all of which the
+      swift passing stranger is very cold.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His cottage, which is still shown, was in the midst of the other houses,
+      and his walks, which were at least as important to him as the home in
+      which he dwelt, lay mostly among woody heights with streaming cascades.
+      The country abounded in natural curiosities of a humble sort, and here
+      that interest in plants which had always been strong in him, began to grow
+      into a passion. Rousseau had so curious a feeling about them, that when in
+      his botanical expeditions he came across a single flower of its kind, he
+      could never bring himself to pluck it. His sight, though not good for
+      distant objects, was of the very finest for things held close; his sense
+      of smell was so acute and subtle that, according to a good witness, he
+      might have classified plants by odours, if language furnished as many
+      names as nature supplies varieties of fragrance.<a name="FNanchor_118_118"
+      id="FNanchor_118_118"></a><a href="#Footnote_118_118" class="fnanchor">[118]</a>
+      He insisted in all botanising and other walking excursions on going
+      bareheaded, even in the heat of the dog-days; he declared that the action
+      of the sun did him good. When the days began to turn, the summer was
+      straightway at an end for him: &quot;My imagination,&quot; he said, in a
+      phrase which went further through his life than he supposed, &quot;at once
+      brings winter.&quot; He hated rain as much as he loved sun, so he must
+      once have lost all the mystic fascination of the green Savoy lakes
+      gleaming luminous through pale <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_79"
+      id="Page_79">[ii.79]</a></span>showers, and now again must have lost the
+      sombre majesty of the pines of his valley dripping in torn edges of cloud,
+      and all those other sights in landscape that touch subtler parts of us
+      than comforted sense.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One of his favourite journeys was to Colombier, the summer retreat of Lord
+      Marischal. For him he rapidly conceived the same warm friendship which he
+      felt for the Duke of Luxembourg, whom he had just left. And the sagacious,
+      moderate, silent Scot had as warm a liking for the strange refugee who had
+      come to him for shelter, or shall we call it a kind of shaggy compassion,
+      as of a faithful inarticulate creature. His letters, which are numerous
+      enough, abound in expressions of hearty good-will. These, if we reflect on
+      the genuine worth, veracity, penetration, and experience of the old man
+      who wrote them, may fairly be counted the best testimony that remains to
+      the existence of something sterling at the bottom of Rousseau's character.<a
+      name="FNanchor_119_119" id="FNanchor_119_119"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_119_119" class="fnanchor">[119]</a> It is here no
+      insincere fine lady of the French court, but a homely and weather-beaten
+      Scotchman, who speaks so often of his refugee's rectitude of heart and
+      true sensibility.<a name="FNanchor_120_120" id="FNanchor_120_120"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_120_120" class="fnanchor">[120]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[ii.80]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He insisted on being allowed to settle a small sum on Theresa, who had
+      joined Rousseau at Motiers, and in other ways he showed a true solicitude
+      and considerateness both for her and for him.<a name="FNanchor_121_121"
+      id="FNanchor_121_121"></a><a href="#Footnote_121_121" class="fnanchor">[121]</a>
+      It was his constant dream, that on his return to Scotland, Jean Jacques
+      should accompany him, and that with David Hume, they would make a trio of
+      philosophic hermits; that this was no mere cheery pleasantry is shown by
+      the pains he took in settling the route for the journey.<a
+      name="FNanchor_122_122" id="FNanchor_122_122"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_122_122" class="fnanchor">[122]</a> The plan only fell
+      through in consequence of Frederick's cordial urgency that his friend
+      should end his days with him; he returned to Prussia and lived at Sans
+      Souci until the close, always retaining something of his good-will for
+      &quot;his excellent savage,&quot; as he called the author of the
+      Discourses. They had some common antipathies, including the fundamental
+      one of dislike to society, and especially to the society of the people of
+      Neuch&#226;tel, the Gascons of Switzerland. &quot;Rousseau is gay in
+      company,&quot; Lord Marischal wrote to Hume, &quot;polite, and what the
+      French call <i>aimable</i>, and gains <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[ii.81]</a></span>ground daily in the opinion
+      of even the clergy here. His enemies elsewhere continue to persecute him,
+      and he is pestered with anonymous letters.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_123_123"
+      id="FNanchor_123_123"></a><a href="#Footnote_123_123" class="fnanchor">[123]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Some of these were of a humour that disclosed the master hand. Voltaire
+      had been universally suspected of stirring up the feeling of Geneva
+      against its too famous citizen,<a name="FNanchor_124_124"
+      id="FNanchor_124_124"></a><a href="#Footnote_124_124" class="fnanchor">[124]</a>
+      though for a man of less energy the affair of the Calas, which he was now
+      in the thick of, might have sufficed. Voltaire's letters at this time show
+      how hard he found it in the case of Rousseau to exercise his usual pity
+      for the unfortunate. He could not forget that the man who was now tasting
+      persecution had barked at philosophers and stage-plays; that he was a
+      false brother, who had fatuously insulted the only men who could take his
+      part; that he was a Judas who had betrayed the sacred cause.<a
+      name="FNanchor_125_125" id="FNanchor_125_125"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_125_125" class="fnanchor">[125]</a> On the whole, however,
+      we ought probably to accept his word, though not very categorically given,<a
+      name="FNanchor_126_126" id="FNanchor_126_126"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_126_126" class="fnanchor">[126]</a> that he had nothing to
+      do with the action taken against Rousseau. That action is quite adequately
+      explained, first by the influence of the resident of France at Geneva,
+      which we know to have been exerted against the two fatal books,<a
+      name="FNanchor_127_127" id="FNanchor_127_127"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_127_127" class="fnanchor">[127]</a> and second by the
+      anxiety of the oligarchic party to keep out of their town a man whose
+      democratic tendencies they now knew so well and so justly <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[ii.82]</a></span>dreaded.<a
+      name="FNanchor_128_128" id="FNanchor_128_128"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_128_128" class="fnanchor">[128]</a> Moultou, a Genevese
+      minister, in the full tide of devotion and enthusiasm for the author of
+      Emilius, met Voltaire at the house of a lady in Geneva. All will turn out
+      well, cried the patriarch; &quot;the syndics will say M. Rousseau, you
+      have done ill to write what you have written; promise for the future to
+      respect the religion of your country. Jean Jacques will promise, and
+      perhaps he will say that the printer took the liberty of adding a sheet or
+      two to his book.&quot; &quot;Never,&quot; cried the ardent Moultou; &quot;Jean
+      Jacques never puts his name to works to disown them after.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor_129_129" id="FNanchor_129_129"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_129_129" class="fnanchor">[129]</a> Voltaire disowned his
+      own books with intrepid and sustained mendacity, yet he bore no grudge to
+      Moultou for his vehemence. He sent for him shortly afterwards, professed
+      an extreme desire to be reconciled with Rousseau, and would talk of
+      nothing else. &quot;I swear to you,&quot; wrote Moultou, &quot;that I
+      could not understand him the least in the world; he is a marvellous actor;
+      I could have sworn that he loved you.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_130_130"
+      id="FNanchor_130_130"></a><a href="#Footnote_130_130" class="fnanchor">[130]</a>
+      And there really was no acting in it. The serious Genevese did not see
+      that he was dealing with &quot;one all fire and fickleness, a child.&quot;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rousseau soon found out that he had excited not only the band of professed
+      unbelievers, but also the tormenting wasps of orthodoxy. The doctors of
+      the Sorbonne, not to be outdone in fervour for truth by the lawyers of the
+      parliament, had condemned Emilius as a matter of course. In the same
+      spirit of generous <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[ii.83]</a></span>emulation,
+      Christopher de Beaumont, &quot;by the divine compassion archbishop of
+      Paris, Duke of Saint Cloud, peer of France, commander of the order of the
+      Holy Ghost,&quot; had issued (Aug. 20, 1762) one of those hateful
+      documents in which bishops, Catholic and Protestant, have been wont for
+      the last century and a half to hide with swollen bombastic phrase their
+      dead and decomposing ideas. The windy folly of these poor pieces is
+      usually in proportion to the hierarchic rank of those who promulgate them,
+      and an archbishop owes it to himself to blaspheme against reason and
+      freedom in superlatives of malignant unction. Rousseau's reply (Nov. 18,
+      1762) is a masterpiece of dignity and uprightness. Turning to it from the
+      mandate which was its provocative, we seem to grasp the hand of a man,
+      after being chased by a nightmare of masked figures. Rousseau never showed
+      the substantial quality of his character more surely and unmistakably than
+      in controversy. He had such gravity, such austere self-command, such
+      closeness of grip. Most of us feel pleasure in reading the matchless
+      banter with which Voltaire assailed his theological enemies. Reading
+      Rousseau's letter to De Beaumont we realise the comparative lowness of the
+      pleasure which Voltaire had given us. We understand how it was that
+      Rousseau made fanatics, while Voltaire only made sceptics. At the very
+      first words, the mitre, the crosier, the ring, fall into the dust; the
+      Archbishop of Paris, the Duke of Saint Cloud, the peer of France, the
+      commander of the Holy Ghost, is restored from<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[ii.84]</a></span> the disguises of his
+      enchantment, and becomes a human being. We hear the voice of a man hailing
+      a man. Voltaire often sank to the level of ecclesiastics. Rousseau raised
+      the archbishop to his own level, and with magnanimous courtesy addressed
+      him as an equal. &quot;Why, my lord, have I anything to say to you? What
+      common tongue can we use? How are we to understand one another? And what
+      is there between me and you?&quot; And he persevered in this distant lofty
+      vein, hardly permitting himself a single moment of acerbity. We feel the
+      ever-inspiring breath of seriousness and sincerity. This was because, as
+      we repeat so often, Rousseau's ideas, all engendered of dreams as they
+      were, yet lived in him and were truly rooted in his character. He did not
+      merely say, as any of us can say so fluently, that he craved reality in
+      human relations, that distinctions of rank and post count for nothing,
+      that our lives are in our own hands and ought not to be blown hither and
+      thither by outside opinion and words heedlessly scattered; that our faith,
+      whatever it may be, is the most sacred of our possessions, organic,
+      indissoluble, self-sufficing; that our passage across the world, if very
+      short, is yet too serious to be wasted in frivolous disrespect for
+      ourselves, and angry disrespect for others. All this was actually his
+      mind. And hence the little difficulty he had in keeping his retort to the
+      archbishop, as to his other antagonists, on a worthy level.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Only once or twice does his sense of the reckless injustice with which he
+      had been condemned, and of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_85"
+      id="Page_85">[ii.85]</a></span> the persecution which was inflicted on him
+      by one government after another, stir in him a blaze of high remonstrance.
+      &quot;You accuse me of temerity,&quot; he cried; &quot;how have I earned
+      such a name, when I only propounded difficulties, and even that with so
+      much reserve; when I only advanced reasons, and even that with so much
+      respect; when I attacked no one, nor even named one? And you, my lord, how
+      do you dare to reproach with temerity a man of whom you speak with such
+      scanty justice and so little decency, with so small respect and so much
+      levity? You call me impious, and of what impiety can you accuse me&#8212;me
+      who never spoke of the Supreme Being except to pay him the honour and
+      glory that are his due, nor of man except to persuade all men to love one
+      another? The impious are those who unworthily profane the cause of God by
+      making it serve the passions of men. The impious are those who, daring to
+      pass for the interpreters of divinity, and judges between it and man,
+      exact for themselves the honours that are due to it only. The impious are
+      those who arrogate to themselves the right of exercising the power of God
+      upon earth, and insist on opening and shutting the gates of heaven at
+      their own good will and pleasure. The impious are those who have libels
+      read in the church. At this horrible idea my blood is enkindled, and tears
+      of indignation fall from my eyes. Priests of the God of peace, you shall
+      render an account one day, be very sure, of the use to which you have
+      dared to put his house.... My lord, you<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[ii.86]</a></span> have publicly insulted me:
+      you are now convicted of heaping calumny upon me. If you were a private
+      person like myself, so that I could cite you before an equitable tribunal,
+      and we could both appear before it, I with my book, and you with your
+      mandate, assuredly you would be declared guilty; you would be condemned to
+      make reparation as public as the wrong was public. But you belong to a
+      rank that relieves you from the necessity of being just, and I am nothing.
+      Yet you who profess the gospel, you, a prelate appointed to teach others
+      their duty, you know what your own duty is in such a case. Mine I have
+      done: I have nothing more to say to you, and I hold my peace.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor_131_131" id="FNanchor_131_131"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_131_131" class="fnanchor">[131]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The letter was as good in dialectic as it was in moral tone. For this is a
+      little curious, that Rousseau, so diffuse in expounding his opinions, and
+      so unscientific in his method of coming to them, should have been one of
+      the keenest and most trenchant of the controversialists of a very
+      controversial time. Some of his strokes in defence of his first famous
+      assault on civilisation are as hard, as direct, and as effective as any in
+      the records of polemical literature. We will give one specimen from the
+      letter to the Archbishop of Paris; it has the recommendation of touching
+      an argument that is not yet quite universally recognised for slain. The
+      Savoyard Vicar had dwelt on the difficulty of accepting revelation as the
+      voice of God, on account of the long distance of time between us, <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[ii.87]</a></span>and the
+      questionableness of the supporting testimony. To which the archbishop
+      thus:&#8212;&quot;But is there not then an infinity of facts, even earlier
+      than those of the Christian revelation, which it would be absurd to doubt?
+      By what way other than that of human testimony has our author himself
+      known the Sparta, the Athens, the Rome, whose laws, manners, and heroes he
+      extols with such assurance? How many generations of men between him and
+      the historians who have preserved the memory of these events?&quot; First,
+      says Rousseau in answer, &quot;it is in the order of things that human
+      circumstances should be attested by human evidence, and they can be
+      attested in no other way. I can only know that Rome and Sparta existed,
+      because contemporaries assure me that they existed. In such a case this
+      intermediate communication is indispensable. But why is it necessary
+      between God and me? Is it simple or natural that God should have gone in
+      search of Moses to speak to Jean Jacques Rousseau? Second, nobody is
+      obliged to believe that Sparta once existed, and nobody will be devoured
+      by eternal flames for doubting it. Every fact of which we are not
+      witnesses is only established by moral proofs, and moral proofs have
+      various degrees of strength. Will the divine justice hurl me into hell for
+      missing the exact point at which a proof becomes irresistible? If there is
+      in the world an attested story, it is that of vampires; nothing is wanting
+      for judicial proof,&#8212;reports and certificates from notables,
+      surgeons, clergy, magistrates. But<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_88"
+      id="Page_88">[ii.88]</a></span> who believes in vampires, and shall we all
+      be damned for not believing? Third, <i>my constant experience and that of
+      all men is stronger in reference to prodigies than the testimony of some
+      men</i>.&quot;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He then strikes home with a parable. The Abb&#233; P&#226;ris had died in
+      the odour of Jansenist sanctity (1727), and extraordinary doings went on
+      at his tomb; the lame walked, men and women sick of the palsy were made
+      whole, and so forth. Suppose, says Rousseau, that an inhabitant of the Rue
+      St. Jacques speaks thus to the Archbishop of Paris, &quot;My lord, I know
+      that you neither believe in the beatitude of St. Jean de P&#226;ris, nor
+      in the miracles which God has been pleased publicly to work upon his tomb
+      in the sight of the most enlightened and most populous city in the world;
+      but I feel bound to testify to you that I have just seen the saint in
+      person raised from the dead in the spot where his bones were laid.&quot;
+      The man of the Rue St. Jacques gives all the detail of such a circumstance
+      that could strike a beholder. &quot;I am persuaded that on hearing such
+      strange news, you will begin by interrogating him who testifies to its
+      truth, as to his position, his feelings, his confessor, and other such
+      points; and when from his air, as from his speech, you have perceived that
+      he is a poor workman, and when having no confessional ticket to show you,
+      he has confirmed your notion that he is a Jansenist, Ah, ah, you will say
+      to him, you are a convulsionary, and have seen Saint P&#226;ris
+      resuscitated. There is nothing wonderful in that; you have seen so many
+      other<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[ii.89]</a></span>
+      wonders!&quot; The man would insist that the miracle had been seen equally
+      by a number of other people, who though Jansenists, it is true, were
+      persons of sound sense, good character, and excellent reputation. Some
+      would send the man to Bedlam, &quot;but you after a grave reprimand, will
+      be content with saying: I know that two or three witnesses, good people
+      and of sound sense, may attest the life or the death of a man, but I do
+      not know how many more are needed to establish the resurrection of a
+      Jansenist. Until I find that out, go, my son, and try to strengthen your
+      brain: I give you a dispensation from fasting, and here is something for
+      you to make your broth with. That is what you would say, and what any
+      other sensible man would say in your place. Whence I conclude that even
+      according to you and to every other sensible man, the moral proofs which
+      are sufficient to establish facts that are in the order of moral
+      possibilities, are not sufficient to establish facts of another order and
+      purely supernatural.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_132_132" id="FNanchor_132_132"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_132_132" class="fnanchor">[132]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Perhaps, however, the formal denunciation by the Archbishop of Paris was
+      less vexatious than the swarming of the angrier hive of ministers at his
+      gates. &quot;If I had declared for atheism,&quot; he says bitterly, &quot;they
+      would at first have shrieked, but they would soon have left me in peace
+      like the rest. The people of the Lord would not have kept watch over me;
+      everybody would not have thought he was doing me a high favour in not
+      treating me as a person cut off <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_90"
+      id="Page_90">[ii.90]</a></span>from communion, and I should have been
+      quits with all the world. The holy women in Israel would not have written
+      me anonymous letters, and their charity would not have breathed devout
+      insults. They would not have taken the trouble to assure me in all
+      humility of heart that I was a castaway, an execrable monster, and that
+      the world would have been well off if some good soul had been at the pains
+      to strangle me in my cradle. Worthy people on their side would not torment
+      themselves and torment me to bring me back to the way of salvation; they
+      would not charge at me from right and left, nor stifle me under the weight
+      of their sermons, nor force me to bless their zeal while I cursed their
+      importunity, nor to feel with gratitude that they are obeying a call to
+      lay me in my very grave with weariness.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_133_133"
+      id="FNanchor_133_133"></a><a href="#Footnote_133_133" class="fnanchor">[133]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had done his best to conciliate the good opinion of his vigilant
+      neighbours. Their character for contentious orthodoxy was well known. It
+      was at Neuch&#226;tel that the controversy as to the eternal punishment of
+      the wicked raged with a fury that ended in a civil outbreak. The peace of
+      the town was violently disturbed, ministers were suspended, magistrates
+      were interdicted, life was lost, until at last Frederick promulgated his
+      famous bull:&#8212;&quot;Let the parsons who make for themselves a cruel
+      and barbarous God, be eternally damned as they desire and deserve; and let
+      those parsons who conceive God gentle and merciful, enjoy the plenitude of
+      his <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[ii.91]</a></span>mercy.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor_134_134" id="FNanchor_134_134"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_134_134" class="fnanchor">[134]</a> When Rousseau came
+      within the territory, preparations were made to imitate the action of
+      Paris, Geneva, and Berne. It was only the king's express permission that
+      saved him from a fourth proscription. The minister at Motiers was of the
+      less inhuman stamp, and Rousseau, feeling that he could not, without
+      failing in his engagements and his duty as a citizen, neglect the public
+      profession of the faith to which he had been restored eight years before,
+      attended the religious services with regularity. He even wrote to the
+      pastor a letter in vindication of his book, and protesting the sincerity
+      of his union with the reformed congregation.<a name="FNanchor_135_135"
+      id="FNanchor_135_135"></a><a href="#Footnote_135_135" class="fnanchor">[135]</a>
+      The result of this was that the pastor came to tell him how great an
+      honour he held it to count such a member in his flock, and how willing he
+      was to admit him without further examination to partake of the communion.<a
+      name="FNanchor_136_136" id="FNanchor_136_136"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_136_136" class="fnanchor">[136]</a> Rousseau went to the
+      ceremony with eyes full of tears and a heart swelling with emotion. We may
+      respect his mood as little or as much as we please, but it was certainly
+      more edifying than the sight of Voltaire going through the same rite,
+      merely to harass a priest and fill a bishop with fury.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In all other respects he lived a harmless life during the three years of
+      his sojourn in the Val de Travers. As he could never endure what he calls
+      the inactive chattering of the parlour&#8212;people sitting <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[ii.92]</a></span>in front
+      of one another with folded hands and nothing in motion except the tongue&#8212;he
+      learnt the art of making laces; he used to carry his pillow about with
+      him, or sat at his own door working like the women of the village, and
+      chatting with the passers-by. He made presents of his work to young women
+      about to marry, always on the condition that they should suckle their
+      children when they came to have them. If a little whimsical, it was a
+      harmless and respectable pastime. It is pleasanter to think of a
+      philosopher finding diversion in weaving laces, than of noblemen making it
+      the business of their lives to run after ribands. A society clothed in
+      breeches was incensed about the same time by Rousseau's adoption of the
+      Armenian costume, the vest, the furred bonnet, the caftan, and the girdle.
+      There was nothing very wonderful in this departure from use. An Armenian
+      tailor used often to visit some friends at Montmorency. Rousseau knew him,
+      and reflected that such a dress would be of singular comfort to him in the
+      circumstances of his bodily disorder.<a name="FNanchor_137_137"
+      id="FNanchor_137_137"></a><a href="#Footnote_137_137" class="fnanchor">[137]</a>
+      Here was a solid practical reason for what has usually been counted a
+      demonstration of a turned brain. Rousseau had as good cause for going
+      about in a caftan as Chatham had for coming to the House of Parliament
+      wrapped in flannel. Vanity and a desire to attract notice may, we admit,
+      have had something to do with Rousseau's adoption of an uncommon way of
+      dressing. Shrewd wits like the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_93"
+      id="Page_93">[ii.93]</a></span>Duke of Luxembourg and his wife did not
+      suppose that it was so. We, living a hundred years after, cannot possibly
+      know whether it was so or not, and our estimate of Rousseau's strange
+      character would be very little worth forming, if it only turned on petty
+      singularities of this kind. The foolish, equivocally gifted with the
+      quality of articulate speech, may, if they choose, satisfy their own
+      self-love by reducing all action out of the common course to a series of
+      variations on the same motive in others. Men blessed by the benignity of
+      experience will be thankful not to waste life in guessing evil about
+      unknowable trifles.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      During his stay at Motiers Rousseau's time was hardly ever his own.
+      Visitors of all nations, drawn either by respect for his work or by
+      curiosity to see a man who had been prescribed by so many governments,
+      came to him in throngs. His partisans at Geneva insisted on sending people
+      to convince themselves how good a man they were persecuting. &quot;I had
+      never been free from strangers for six weeks,&quot; he writes. &quot;Two
+      days after, I had a Westphalian gentleman and one from Genoa; six days
+      later, two persons from Zurich, who stayed a week; then a Genevese,
+      recovering from an illness, and coming for change of air, fell ill again,
+      and he has only just gone away.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_138_138"
+      id="FNanchor_138_138"></a><a href="#Footnote_138_138" class="fnanchor">[138]</a>
+      One visitor, writing home to his wife of the philosopher to whom he had
+      come on a pilgrimage, describes his manners in terms which perhaps touch
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[ii.94]</a></span>us
+      with surprise:&#8212;&quot;Thou hast no idea how charming his society is,
+      what true politeness there is in his manners, what a depth of serenity and
+      cheerfulness in his talk. Didst thou not expect quite a different picture,
+      and figure to thyself an eccentric creature, always grave and sometimes
+      even abrupt? Ah, what a mistake! To an expression of great mildness he
+      unites a glance of fire, and eyes of a vivacity the like of which never
+      was seen. When you handle any matter in which he takes an interest, then
+      his eyes, his lips, his hands, everything about him speaks. You would be
+      quite wrong to picture in him an everlasting grumbler. Not at all; he
+      laughs with those who laugh, he chats and jokes with children, he rallies
+      his housekeeper.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_139_139" id="FNanchor_139_139"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_139_139" class="fnanchor">[139]</a> He was not so civil to
+      all the world, and occasionally turned upon his pursuers with a word of
+      most sardonic roughness.<a name="FNanchor_140_140" id="FNanchor_140_140"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_140_140" class="fnanchor">[140]</a> But he could also be
+      very generous. We find him pressing a loan from his scanty store on an
+      outcast adventurer, and warning him, &quot;When I lend (which happens
+      rarely enough), 'tis my constant maxim never to count on repayment, nor to
+      exact it.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_141_141" id="FNanchor_141_141"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_141_141" class="fnanchor">[141]</a> He received hundreds
+      of letters, some seeking an application of his views on education to a
+      special case, others craving further exposition of his religious
+      doctrines. Before he had been at Motiers nine months he had paid ten louis
+      for the postage of letters, which after all contained <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[ii.95]</a></span>little more than reproaches,
+      insults, menaces, imbecilities.<a name="FNanchor_142_142"
+      id="FNanchor_142_142"></a><a href="#Footnote_142_142" class="fnanchor">[142]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Not the least curious of his correspondence at this time is that with the
+      Prince of W&#252;rtemberg, then living near Lausanne.<a
+      name="FNanchor_143_143" id="FNanchor_143_143"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_143_143" class="fnanchor">[143]</a> The prince had a
+      little daughter four months old, and he was resolved that her upbringing
+      should be carried on as the author of Emilius might please to direct.
+      Rousseau replied courteously that he did not pretend to direct the
+      education of princes or princesses.<a name="FNanchor_144_144"
+      id="FNanchor_144_144"></a><a href="#Footnote_144_144" class="fnanchor">[144]</a>
+      His undaunted correspondent sent him full details of his babe's habits and
+      faculties, and continued to do so at short intervals, with the fondness of
+      a young mother or an old nurse. Rousseau was interested, and took some
+      trouble to draw up rules for the child's nurture and admonition. One may
+      smile now and then at the prince's ingenuous zeal, but his fervid respect
+      and devotion for the teacher in whom he thought he had found the wisest
+      man that ever lived, and who had at any rate spoken the word that kindled
+      the love of virtue and truth in him, his eagerness to know what Rousseau
+      thought right, and his equal eagerness in trying to do it, his care to
+      arrange his household in a simple <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_96"
+      id="Page_96">[ii.96]</a></span>and methodical way to please his master,
+      his discipular patience when Rousseau told him that his verses were poor,
+      or that he was too fond of his wife,&#8212;all this is a little uncommon
+      in a prince, and deserves a place among the ample mass of other evidence
+      of the power which Rousseau's pictures of domestic simplicity and wise and
+      humane education had in the eighteenth century. It gives us a glimpse,
+      close and direct, of the naturalist revival reaching up into high places.
+      But the trade of philosopher in such times is perhaps an irksome one, and
+      Rousseau was the private victim of his public action. His prince sent
+      multitudes of Germans to visit the sage, and his letters, endless with
+      their details of the nursery, may well have become a little tedious to a
+      worn-out creature who only wanted to be left alone.<a
+      name="FNanchor_145_145" id="FNanchor_145_145"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_145_145" class="fnanchor">[145]</a> The famous Prince
+      Henry, Frederick's brother, thought a man happy who could have the delight
+      of seeing Rousseau as often as he chose.<a name="FNanchor_146_146"
+      id="FNanchor_146_146"></a><a href="#Footnote_146_146" class="fnanchor">[146]</a>
+      People forgot the other side of this delight, and the unlucky philosopher
+      found in a hundred ways alike from enemies and the friends whose curiosity
+      makes them as bad as enemies, that the pedestal of glory partakes of the
+      nature of the pillory or the stocks.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is interesting to find the famous English names of Gibbon and Boswell
+      in the list of the multitudes <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_97"
+      id="Page_97">[ii.97]</a></span>with whom he had to do at this time.<a
+      name="FNanchor_147_147" id="FNanchor_147_147"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_147_147" class="fnanchor">[147]</a> The former was now at
+      Lausanne, whither he had just returned from that memorable visit to
+      England which persuaded him that his father would never endure his
+      alliance with the daughter of an obscure Swiss pastor. He had just &quot;yielded
+      to his fate, sighed as a lover, and obeyed as a son.&quot; &quot;How sorry
+      I am for our poor Mademoiselle Curchod,&quot; writes Moultou to Rousseau;
+      &quot;Gibbon whom she loves, and to whom she has sacrificed, as I know,
+      some excellent matches, has come to Lausanne, but cold, insensible, and as
+      entirely cured of his old passion as she is far from cure. She has written
+      me a letter that makes my heart ache.&quot; He then entreats Rousseau to
+      use his influence with Gibbon, who is on the point of starting for
+      Motiers, by extolling to him the lady's worth and understanding.<a
+      name="FNanchor_148_148" id="FNanchor_148_148"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_148_148" class="fnanchor">[148]</a> &quot;I hope Mr.
+      Gibbon will not come,&quot; replied the sage; &quot;his coldness makes me
+      think ill of him. I have been looking over his book again [the <i>Essai
+      sur l'&#233;tude de la litt&#233;rature</i>, 1761]; he runs after
+      brilliance too much, and is strained and stilted. Mr. Gibbon is not the
+      man for me, and I do not think he is the man for Mademoiselle Curchod
+      either.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_149_149" id="FNanchor_149_149"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_149_149" class="fnanchor">[149]</a> Whether Gibbon went or
+      not, we do not know. He knew in after years what had been said of him by
+      Jean Jacques, and protested with mild pomp that this extraordinary man
+      should have been <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[ii.98]</a></span>less
+      precipitate in condemning the moral character and the conduct of a
+      stranger.<a name="FNanchor_150_150" id="FNanchor_150_150"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_150_150" class="fnanchor">[150]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Boswell, as we know, had left Johnson &quot;rolling his majestic frame in
+      his usual manner&quot; on Harwich beach in 1763, and was now on his
+      travels. Like many of his countrymen, he found his way to Lord Marischal,
+      and here his indomitable passion for making the personal acquaintance of
+      any one who was much talked about, naturally led him to seek so singular a
+      character as the man who was now at Motiers. What Rousseau thought of one
+      who was as singular a character as himself in another direction, we do not
+      know.<a name="FNanchor_151_151" id="FNanchor_151_151"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_151_151" class="fnanchor">[151]</a> Lord Marischal warned
+      Rousseau that his visitor is of excellent disposition, but full of
+      visionary ideas, even having seen spirits&#8212;a serious proof of
+      unsoundness to a man who had lived in the very positive atmosphere of
+      Frederick's court at Berlin. &quot;I only hope,&quot; says the sage Scot,
+      of the Scot who was not sage, &quot;that he may not fall into <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[ii.99]</a></span>the hands
+      of people who will turn his head: he was very pleased with the reception
+      you gave him.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_152_152" id="FNanchor_152_152"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_152_152" class="fnanchor">[152]</a> As it happens, he was
+      the means of sending Boswell to a place where his head was turned, though
+      not very mischievously. Rousseau was at that time full of Corsican
+      projects, of which this is the proper place for us very briefly to speak.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The prolonged struggles of the natives of Corsica to assert their
+      independence of the oppressive administration of the Genoese, which had
+      begun in 1729, came to end for a moment in 1755, when Paoli (1726-1807)
+      defeated the Genoese, and proceeded to settle the government of the
+      island. In the Social Contract Rousseau had said, &quot;There is still in
+      Europe one country capable of legislation, and that is the island of
+      Corsica. The valour and constancy with which this brave people has
+      succeeded in recovering and defending its liberty, entitle it to the good
+      fortune of having some wise man to teach them how to preserve it. I have a
+      presentiment that this little isle will one day astonish Europe,&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor_153_153" id="FNanchor_153_153"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_153_153" class="fnanchor">[153]</a>&#8212;a presentiment
+      that in a sense came true enough long after Rousseau was gone, in a man
+      who was born on the little island seven years later than the publication
+      of this passage. Some of the Corsican leaders were highly flattered, and
+      in August 1764, Buttafuoco entered into correspondence with Rousseau for
+      the purpose of inducing him to draw up a set of political institutions and
+      a code of laws. Paoli himself was too shrewd to have much belief in <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[ii.100]</a></span>the
+      application of ideal systems, and we are assured that he had no intention
+      of making Rousseau the Solon of his island, but only of inducing him to
+      inflame the gallantry of its inhabitants by writing a history of their
+      exploits.<a name="FNanchor_154_154" id="FNanchor_154_154"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_154_154" class="fnanchor">[154]</a> Rousseau, however, did
+      not understand the invitation in this narrower sense. He replied that the
+      very idea of such a task as legislation transported his soul, and he
+      entered into it with the liveliest ardour. He resolved to quarter himself
+      with Theresa in a cottage in some lonely district in the island; in a year
+      he would collect the necessary information as to the manners and opinions
+      of the inhabitants, and three years afterwards he would produce a set of
+      institutions that should be fit for a free and valorous people.<a
+      name="FNanchor_155_155" id="FNanchor_155_155"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_155_155" class="fnanchor">[155]</a> In the midst of this
+      enthusiasm (May 1765) he urged Boswell to visit Corsica, and gave him a
+      letter to Paoli, with results which we know in the shape of an Account of
+      Corsica (1768), and in a feverishness of imagination upon the subject for
+      many a long day afterwards. &quot;Mind your own affairs,&quot; at length
+      cried Johnson sternly to him, &quot;and leave the Corsicans to theirs; I
+      wish you would empty your head of Corsica.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_156_156"
+      id="FNanchor_156_156"></a><a href="#Footnote_156_156" class="fnanchor">[156]</a>
+      At the end of 1765, the immortal hero-worshipper on his return expected to
+      come upon his hero at Motiers, but finding that he was in Paris wrote him
+      a wonderful letter in <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_101"
+      id="Page_101">[ii.101]</a></span>wonderful French. &quot;You will forget
+      all your cares for many an evening, while I tell you what I have seen. I
+      owe you the deepest obligation for sending me to Corsica. The voyage has
+      done me marvellous good. It has made me as if all the lives of Plutarch
+      had sunk into my soul.... I am devoted to the Corsicans heart and soul; if
+      you, illustrious Rousseau, the philosopher whom they have chosen to help
+      them by your lights to preserve and enjoy the liberty which they have
+      acquired with so much heroism&#8212;if you have cooled towards these
+      gallant islanders, why then I am sorry for you, that is all I can say.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor_157_157" id="FNanchor_157_157"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_157_157" class="fnanchor">[157]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Alas, by this time the gallant islanders had been driven out of Rousseau's
+      mind by personal mishaps. First, Voltaire or some other enemy had spread
+      the rumour that the invitation to become the Lycurgus of Corsica was a
+      practical joke, and Rousseau's suspicious temper found what he took for
+      confirmation of this in some trifling incidents with which we <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[ii.102]</a></span>certainly
+      need not concern ourselves.<a name="FNanchor_158_158" id="FNanchor_158_158"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_158_158" class="fnanchor">[158]</a> Next, a very real
+      storm had burst upon him which drove him once more to seek a new place of
+      shelter, other than an island occupied by French troops. For France having
+      begun by despatching auxiliaries to the assistance of the Genoese (1764),
+      ended by buying the island from the Genoese senate, with a sort of equity
+      of redemption (1768)&#8212;an iniquitous transaction, as Rousseau justly
+      called it, equally shocking to justice, humanity, reason, and policy.<a
+      name="FNanchor_159_159" id="FNanchor_159_159"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_159_159" class="fnanchor">[159]</a> Civilisation would
+      have been saved one of its sorest trials if Genoa could have availed
+      herself of her equity, and so have delivered France from the acquisition
+      of the most terrible citizen that ever scourged a state.<a
+      name="FNanchor_160_160" id="FNanchor_160_160"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_160_160" class="fnanchor">[160]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The condemnation of Rousseau by the Council in 1762 had divided Geneva
+      into two camps, and was followed by a prolonged contention between his
+      partisans and his enemies. The root of the contention was political rather
+      than theological. To take Rousseau's side was to protest against the
+      oligarchic authority which had condemned him, and the quarrel about
+      Emilius was only an episode in the long war between the popular and
+      aristocratic parties. This <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_103"
+      id="Page_103">[ii.103]</a></span>strife, after coming to a height for the
+      first time in 1734, had abated after the pacification of 1738, but the
+      pacification was only effective for a time, and the roots of division were
+      still full of vitality. The lawfulness of the authority and the regularity
+      of the procedure by which Rousseau had been condemned, offered convenient
+      ground for carrying on the dispute, and its warmth was made more intense
+      by the suggestion on the popular side that perhaps the religion of the
+      book which the oligarchs had condemned was more like Christianity than the
+      religion of the oligarchs who condemned it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rousseau was too near the scene of the quarrel, too directly involved in
+      its issues, too constantly in contact with the people who were engaged in
+      it, not to feel the angry buzzings very close about his ears. If he had
+      been as collected and as self-possessed as he loved to fancy, they would
+      have gone for very little in the life of the day. But Rousseau never stood
+      on the heights whence a strong man surveys with clear eye and firm soul
+      the unjust or mean or furious moods of the world. Such achievement is not
+      hard for the creature who is wrapped up in himself; who is careless of the
+      passions of men about him, because he thinks they cannot hurt him, and not
+      because he has measured them, and deliberately assigned them a place among
+      the elements in which a man's destiny is cast. It is only hard for one who
+      is penetrated by true interest in the opinion and action of his fellows,
+      thus to keep both sympathy warm and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_104"
+      id="Page_104">[ii.104]</a></span> self-sufficience true. The task was too
+      hard for Rousseau, though his patience under long persecution far
+      surpassed that of any of the other oppressed teachers of the time. In the
+      spring of 1763 he deliberately renounced in all due forms his rights of
+      burgess-ship and citizenship in the city and republic of Geneva.<a
+      name="FNanchor_161_161" id="FNanchor_161_161"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_161_161" class="fnanchor">[161]</a> And at length he broke
+      forth against his Genevese persecutors in the Letters from the Mountain
+      (1764), a long but extremely vigorous and adroit rejoinder to the pleas
+      which his enemies had put forth in Tronchin's Letters from the Country. If
+      any one now cares to satisfy himself how really unjust and illegal the
+      treatment was, which Rousseau received at the hands of the authorities of
+      his native city, he may do so by examining these most forcible letters.
+      The second part of them may interest the student of political history by
+      its account of the working of the institutions of the little republic. We
+      seem to be reading over again the history of a Greek city; the growth of a
+      wealthy class in face of an increasing number of poor burgesses, the
+      imposition of burdens in unfair proportions upon the metoikoi, the gradual
+      usurpation of legislative and administrative function (including
+      especially the judicial) by the oligarchs, and the twisting of democratic
+      machinery to oligarchic ends; then the growth of staseis or violent
+      factions, followed by metabol&#233; or overthrow of the established
+      constitution, ending in foreign intervention. The Four Hundred at Athens
+      would have treated any <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_105"
+      id="Page_105">[ii.105]</a></span>Social Contract that should have appeared
+      in their day, just as sternly as the Two Hundred or the Twenty-five
+      treated the Social Contract that did appear, and for just the same
+      reasons.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rousseau proved his case with redundancy of demonstration. A body of
+      burgesses had previously availed themselves (Nov. 1763) of a legal right,
+      and made a technical representation to the Lesser Council that the laws
+      had been broken in his case. The Council in return availed itself of an
+      equally legal right, its <i>droit n&#233;gatif</i>, and declined to
+      entertain the representation, without giving any reasons. Unfortunately
+      for Rousseau's comfort, the ferment which his new vindication of his cause
+      stirred up, did not end with the condemnation and burning of his
+      manifesto. For the parliament of Paris ordered the Letters from the
+      Mountain to be burned, and the same decree and the same faggot served for
+      that and for Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary (April 1765).<a
+      name="FNanchor_162_162" id="FNanchor_162_162"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_162_162" class="fnanchor">[162]</a> It was also burned at
+      the Hague (Jan. 22). An observer by no means friendly to the priests
+      noticed that at Paris it was not the fanatics of orthodoxy, but the
+      encyclop&#230;dists and their flock, who on this occasion raised the storm
+      and set the zeal of the magistrates in motion.<a name="FNanchor_163_163"
+      id="FNanchor_163_163"></a><a href="#Footnote_163_163" class="fnanchor">[163]</a>
+      The vanity and egoism of rationalistic sects can be as fatal to candour,
+      justice, and compassion as the intolerant pride of the great churches.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[ii.106]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Persecution came nearer to Rousseau and took more inconvenient shapes than
+      this. A terrible libel appeared (Feb. 1765), full of the coarsest
+      calumnies. Rousseau, stung by their insolence and falseness, sent it to
+      Paris to be published there with a prefatory note, stating that it was by
+      a Genevese pastor whom he named. This landed him in fresh mortification,
+      for the pastor disavowed the libel, Rousseau declined to accept the
+      disavowal, and sensible men were wearied by acrimonious declarations,
+      explanations, protests.<a name="FNanchor_164_164" id="FNanchor_164_164"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_164_164" class="fnanchor">[164]</a> Then the clergy of
+      Neuch&#226;tel were not able any longer to resist the opportunity of
+      inflicting such torments as they could, upon a heretic whom they might
+      more charitably have left to those ultimate and everlasting torments which
+      were so precious to their religious imagination. They began to press the
+      pastor of the village where Rousseau lived, and with whom he had hitherto
+      been on excellent terms. The pastor, though he had been liberal enough to
+      admit his singular parishioner to the communion, in spite of the Savoyard
+      Vicar, was not courageous enough to resist the bigotry of the professional
+      body to which he belonged. He warned Rousseau not to present himself at
+      the next communion. The philosopher insisted that he had a right to do
+      this, until formally cast out by the consistory. The consistory, composed
+      mainly of a body of peasants entirely bound to their minister in matters
+      of religion, cited him to appear, and answer such <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[ii.107]</a></span>questions as might test
+      his loyalty to the faith. Rousseau prepared a most deliberate vindication
+      of all that he had written, which he intended to speak to his rustic
+      judges. The eve of the morning on which he had to appear, he knew his
+      discourse by heart; when morning came he could not repeat two sentences.
+      So he fell back on the instrument over which he had more mastery than he
+      had over tongue or memory, and wrote what he wished to say. The pastor, in
+      whom irritated egoism was probably by this time giving additional heat to
+      professional zeal, was for fulminating a decree of excommunication, but
+      there appears to have been some indirect interference with the proceedings
+      of the consistory by the king's officials at Neuch&#226;tel, and the
+      ecclesiastical bolt was held back.<a name="FNanchor_165_165"
+      id="FNanchor_165_165"></a><a href="#Footnote_165_165" class="fnanchor">[165]</a>
+      Other weapons were not wanting. The pastor proceeded to spread rumours
+      among his flock that Rousseau was a heretic, even an atheist, and most
+      prodigious of all, that he had written a book containing the monstrous
+      doctrine that women have no souls. The pulpit resounded with sermons
+      proving to the honest villagers that antichrist was quartered in their
+      parish in very flesh. The Armenian apparel gave a high degree of
+      plausibleness to such an opinion, and as the wretched man went by the door
+      of his neighbours, he heard cursing and menace, while a hostile pebble now
+      and again whistled past his ear. His botanising expeditions were believed
+      to be devoted to search for <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_108"
+      id="Page_108">[ii.108]</a></span>noxious herbs, and a man who died in the
+      agonies of nephritic colic, was supposed to have been poisoned by him.<a
+      name="FNanchor_166_166" id="FNanchor_166_166"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_166_166" class="fnanchor">[166]</a> If persons went to the
+      post-office for letters for him, they were treated with insult.<a
+      name="FNanchor_167_167" id="FNanchor_167_167"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_167_167" class="fnanchor">[167]</a> At length the ferment
+      against him grew hot enough to be serious. A huge block of stone was found
+      placed so as to kill him when he opened his door; and one night an attempt
+      was made to stone him in his house.<a name="FNanchor_168_168"
+      id="FNanchor_168_168"></a><a href="#Footnote_168_168" class="fnanchor">[168]</a>
+      Popular hate shown with this degree of violence was too much for his
+      fortitude, and after a residence of rather more than three years
+      (September 8-10, 1765), he fled from the inhospitable valley to seek
+      refuge he knew not where.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In his rambles of a previous summer he had seen a little island in the
+      lake of Bienne, which struck his imagination and lived in his memory.
+      Thither he now, after a moment of hesitation, turned his steps, with
+      something of the same instinct as draws a child towards a beam of the sun.
+      He forgot or was heedless of the circumstance that the isle of St. Peter
+      lay in the jurisdiction of the canton of Berne, whose government had
+      forbidden him their territory. Strong craving for a little ease in the
+      midst of his wretchedness extinguished thought of jurisdictions and
+      proscriptive decrees.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The spot where he now found peace for a brief <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[ii.109]</a></span>space usually disappoints
+      the modern hunter for the picturesque, who after wearying himself with the
+      follies of a capital seeks the most violent tonic that he can find in the
+      lonely terrors of glacier and peak, and sees only tameness in a pygmy
+      island, that offers nothing sublimer than a high grassy terrace, some cool
+      over-branching avenues, some mimic vales, and meadows and vineyards
+      sloping down to the sheet of blue water at their feet. Yet, as one sits
+      here on a summer day, with tired mowers sleeping on their grass heaps in
+      the sun, in a stillness faintly broken by the timid lapping of the water
+      in the sedge, or the rustling of swift lizards across the heated sand,
+      while the Bernese snow giants line a distant horizon with mysterious
+      solitary shapes, it is easy to know what solace life in such a scene might
+      bring to a man distracted by pain of body and pain and weariness of soul.
+      Rousseau has commemorated his too short sojourn here in the most perfect
+      of all his compositions.<a name="FNanchor_169_169" id="FNanchor_169_169"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_169_169" class="fnanchor">[169]</a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="blockquot">
+      <p>
+        &quot;I found my existence so charming, and led a life so agreeable to
+        my humour, that I resolved here to end my days. My only source of
+        disquiet was whether I should be allowed to carry my project out. In the
+        midst of the presentiments that disturbed me, I would fain have had them
+        make a perpetual prison of my refuge, to confine me in it for all the
+        rest of my life. I longed for them to cut off all chance and all hope of
+        leaving it; to forbid me holding any communication with the mainland, so
+        that, knowing <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[ii.110]</a></span>nothing
+        of what was going on in the world, I might have forgotten the world's
+        existence, and people might have forgotten mine too. They only suffered
+        me to pass two months in the island, but I could have passed two years,
+        two centuries, and all eternity, without a moment's weariness, though I
+        had not, with my companion, any other society than that of the steward,
+        his wife, and their servants. They were in truth honest souls and
+        nothing more, but that was just what I wanted.... Carried thither in a
+        violent hurry, alone and without a thing, I afterwards sent for my
+        housekeeper, my books, and my scanty possessions, of which I had the
+        delight of unpacking nothing, leaving my boxes and chests just as they
+        had come, and dwelling in the house where I counted on ending my days,
+        exactly as if it were an inn whence I must needs set forth on the
+        morrow. All things went so well, just as they were, that to think of
+        ordering them better were to spoil them. One of my greatest joys was to
+        leave my books safely fastened up in their boxes, and to be without even
+        a case for writing. When any luckless letter forced me to take up a pen
+        for an answer, I grumblingly borrowed the steward's inkstand, and
+        hurried to give it back to him with all the haste I could, in the vain
+        hope that I should never have need of the loan any more. Instead of
+        meddling with those weary quires and reams and piles of old books, I
+        filled my chamber with flowers and grasses, for I was then in my first
+        fervour for botany. Having given up employment that would be a task to
+        me, I needed one that would be an amusement, nor cause me more pains
+        than a sluggard might choose to take. I undertook to make the <i>Flora
+        petrinsularis</i>, and to describe every single plant on the island, in
+        detail enough to occupy me for the rest of my days. In consequence of
+        this fine scheme, every morning after breakfast, which we all took in
+        company, I used to go with a magnifying glass in my hand and my Systema
+        Natur&#230; under my arm, to visit some district of the island. I had
+        divided it for that purpose<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_111"
+        id="Page_111">[ii.111]</a></span> into small squares, meaning to go
+        through them one after another in each season of the year. At the end of
+        two or three hours I used to return laden with an ample harvest, a
+        provision for amusing myself after dinner indoors, in case of rain. I
+        spent the rest of the morning in going with the steward, his wife, and
+        Theresa, to see the labourers and the harvesting, and I generally set to
+        work along with them; many a time when people from Berne came to see me,
+        they found me perched on a high tree, with a bag fastened round my
+        waist; I kept filling it with fruit and then let it down to the ground
+        with a rope. The exercise I had taken in the morning and the good humour
+        that always comes from exercise, made the repose of dinner vastly
+        pleasant to me. But if dinner was kept up too long, and fine weather
+        invited me forth, I could not wait, but was speedily off to throw myself
+        all alone into a boat, which, when the water was smooth enough, I used
+        to pull out to the middle of the lake. There, stretched at full length
+        in the boat's bottom, with my eyes turned up to the sky, I let myself
+        float slowly hither and thither as the water listed, sometimes for hours
+        together, plunged in a thousand confused delicious musings, which,
+        though they had no fixed nor constant object, were not the less on that
+        account a hundred times dearer to me than all that I had found sweetest
+        in what they call the pleasures of life. Often warned by the going down
+        of the sun that it was time to return, I found myself so far from the
+        island that I was forced to row with all my might to get in before it
+        was pitch dark. At other times, instead of losing myself in the midst of
+        the waters, I had a fancy to coast along the green shores of the island,
+        where the clear waters and cool shadows tempted me to bathe. But one of
+        my most frequent expeditions was from the larger island to the less;
+        there I disembarked and spent my afternoon, sometimes in mimic rambles
+        among wild elders, persicaries, willows, and shrubs of every species,
+        sometimes settling myself on the top of a sandy knoll, covered with
+        turf, wild thyme,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[ii.112]</a></span>
+        flowers, even sainfoin and trefoil that had most likely been sown there
+        in old days, making excellent quarters for rabbits. They might multiply
+        in peace without either fearing anything or harming anything. I spoke of
+        this to the steward. He at once had male and female rabbits brought from
+        Neuch&#226;tel, and we went in high state, his wife, one of his sisters,
+        Theresa, and I, to settle them in the little islet. The foundation of
+        our colony was a feast-day. The pilot of the Argonauts was not prouder
+        than I, as I bore my company and the rabbits in triumph from our island
+        to the smaller one....
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        When the lake was too rough for me to sail, I spent my afternoon in
+        going up and down the island, gathering plants to right and left;
+        seating myself now in smiling lonely nooks to dream at my ease, now on
+        little terraces and knolls, to follow with my eyes the superb and
+        ravishing prospect of the lake and its shores, crowned on one side by
+        the neighbouring hills, and on the other melting into rich and fertile
+        plains up to the feet of the pale blue mountains on their far-off edge.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        As evening drew on, I used to come down from the high ground and sit on
+        the beach at the water's brink in some hidden sheltering place. There
+        the murmur of the waves and their agitation, charmed all my senses and
+        drove every other movement away from my soul; they plunged it into
+        delicious dreamings, in which I was often surprised by night. The flux
+        and reflux of the water, its ceaseless stir-swelling and falling at
+        intervals, striking on ear and sight, made up for the internal movements
+        which my musings extinguished; they were enough to give me delight in
+        mere existence, without taking any trouble of thinking. From time to
+        time arose some passing thought of the instability of the things of this
+        world, of which the face of the waters offered an image; but such light
+        impressions were swiftly effaced in the uniformity of the ceaseless
+        motion, which rocked me as in a cradle; it held me with such fascination
+        that even when called at the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_113"
+        id="Page_113">[ii.113]</a></span> hour and by the signal appointed, I
+        could not tear myself away without summoning all my force.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        After supper, when the evening was fine, we used to go all together for
+        a saunter on the terrace, to breathe the freshness of the air from the
+        lake. We sat down in the arbour, laughing, chatting, or singing some old
+        song, and then we went home to bed, well pleased with the day, and only
+        craving another that should be exactly like it on the morrow....
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        All is in a continual flux upon the earth. Nothing in it keeps a form
+        constant and determinate; our affections, fastening on external things,
+        necessarily change and pass just as they do. Ever in front of us or
+        behind us, they recall the past that is gone, or anticipate a future
+        that in many a case is destined never to be. There is nothing solid to
+        which the heart can fix itself. Here we have little more than a pleasure
+        that comes and passes away; as for the happiness that endures, I cannot
+        tell if it be so much as known among men. There is hardly in the midst
+        of our liveliest delights a single instant when the heart could tell us
+        with real truth&#8212;&quot;<i>I would this instant might last for ever</i>.&quot;
+        And how can we give the name of happiness to a fleeting state that all
+        the time leaves the heart unquiet and void, that makes us regret
+        something gone, or still long for something to come?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        But if there is a state in which the soul finds a situation solid enough
+        to comport with perfect repose, and with the expansion of its whole
+        faculty, without need of calling back the past, or pressing on towards
+        the future; where time is nothing for it, and the present has no ending;
+        with no mark for its own duration and without a trace of succession;
+        without a single other sense of privation or delight, of pleasure or
+        pain, of desire or apprehension, than this single sense of existence&#8212;so
+        long as such a state endures, he who finds himself in it may talk of
+        bliss, not with a poor, relative, and imperfect happiness such as people
+        find in the pleasures of life, but with a happiness<span class="pagenum"><a
+        name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[ii.114]</a></span> full, perfect, and
+        sufficing, that leaves in the soul no conscious unfilled void. Such a
+        state was many a day mine in my solitary musings in the isle of St.
+        Peter, either lying in my boat as it floated on the water, or seated on
+        the banks of the broad lake, or in other places than the little isle on
+        the brink of some broad stream, or a rivulet murmuring over a gravel
+        bed.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        What is it that one enjoys in a situation like this? Nothing outside of
+        one's self, nothing except one's self and one's own existence.... But
+        most men, tossed as they are by unceasing passion, have little knowledge
+        of such a state; they taste it imperfectly for a few moments, and then
+        retain no more than an obscure confused idea of it, that is too weak to
+        let them feel its charm. It would not even be good in the present
+        constitution of things, that in their eagerness for these gentle
+        ecstasies, they should fall into a disgust for the active life in which
+        their duty is prescribed to them by needs that are ever on the increase.
+        But a wretch cut off from human society, who can do nothing here below
+        that is useful and good either for himself or for other people, may in
+        such a state find for all lost human felicities many recompenses, of
+        which neither fortune nor men can ever rob him.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        'Tis true that these recompenses cannot be felt by all souls, nor in all
+        situations. The heart must be in peace, nor any passion come to trouble
+        its calm. There must be in the surrounding objects neither absolute
+        repose nor excess of agitation, but a uniform and moderated movement
+        without shock, without interval. With no movement, life is only
+        lethargy. If the movement be unequal or too strong, it awakes us; by
+        recalling us to the objects around, it destroys the charm of our musing,
+        and plucks us from within ourselves, instantly to throw us back under
+        the yoke of fortune and man, in a moment to restore us to all the
+        consciousness of misery. Absolute stillness inclines one to gloom. It
+        offers an image of death: then the help of a cheerful imagination is
+        necessary, and presents itself<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_115"
+        id="Page_115">[ii.115]</a></span> naturally enough to those whom heaven
+        has endowed with such a gift. The movement which does not come from
+        without then stirs within us. The repose is less complete, it is true;
+        but it is also more agreeable when light and gentle ideas, without
+        agitating the depths of the soul, only softly skim the surface. This
+        sort of musing we may taste whenever there is tranquillity about us, and
+        I have thought that in the Bastile, and even in a dungeon where no
+        object struck my sight, I could have dreamed away many a thrice
+        pleasurable day.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        But it must be said that all this came better and more happily in a
+        fruitful and lonely island, where nothing presented itself to me save
+        smiling pictures, where nothing recalled saddening memories, where the
+        fellowship of the few dwellers there was gentle and obliging, without
+        being exciting enough to busy me incessantly, where, in short, I was
+        free to surrender myself all day long to the promptings of my taste or
+        to the most luxurious indolence.... As I came out from a long and most
+        sweet musing fit, seeing myself surrounded by verdure and flowers and
+        birds, and letting my eyes wander far over romantic shores that fringed
+        a wide expanse of water bright as crystal, I fitted all these attractive
+        objects into my dreams; and when at last I slowly recovered myself and
+        recognised what was about me, I could not mark the point that cut off
+        dream from reality, so equally did all things unite to endear to me the
+        lonely retired life I led in this happy spot! Why can that life not come
+        back to me again? Why can I not go finish my days in the beloved island,
+        never to quit it, never again to see in it one dweller from the
+        mainland, to bring back to me the memory of all the woes of every sort
+        that they have delighted in heaping on my head for all these long
+        years?... Freed from the earthly passions engendered by the tumult of
+        social life, my soul would many a time lift itself above this
+        atmosphere, and commune beforehand with the heavenly intelligences, into
+        whose number it trusts to be ere long taken.&quot;
+      </p>
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[ii.116]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The exquisite dream, thus set to words of most soothing music, came soon
+      to its end. The full and perfect sufficience of life was abruptly
+      disturbed. The government of Berne gave him notice to quit the island and
+      their territory within fifteen days. He represented to the authorities
+      that he was infirm and ill, that he knew not whither to go, and that
+      travelling in wintry weather would be dangerous to his life. He even made
+      the most extraordinary request that any man in similar straits ever did
+      make. &quot;In this extremity,&quot; he wrote to their representative,
+      &quot;I only see one resource for me, and however frightful it may appear,
+      I will adopt it, not only without repugnance, but with eagerness, if their
+      excellencies will be good enough to give their consent. It is that it
+      should please them for me to pass the rest of my days in prison in one of
+      their castles, or such other place in their states as they may think fit
+      to select. I will there live at my own expense, and I will give security
+      never to put them to any cost. I submit to be without paper or pen, or any
+      communication from without, except so far as may be absolutely necessary,
+      and through the channel of those who shall have charge of me. Only let me
+      have left, with the use of a few books, the liberty to walk occasionally
+      in a garden, and I am content. Do not suppose that an expedient, so
+      violent in appearance, is the fruit of despair. My mind is perfectly calm
+      at this moment; I have taken time to think about it, and it is only after
+      profound consideration that I<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_117"
+      id="Page_117">[ii.117]</a></span> have brought myself to this decision.
+      Mark, I pray you, that if this seems an extraordinary resolution, my
+      situation is still more so. The distracted life that I have been made to
+      lead for several years without intermission would be terrible for a man in
+      full health; judge what it must be for a miserable invalid worn down with
+      weariness and misfortune, and who has now no wish save only to die in a
+      little peace.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_170_170" id="FNanchor_170_170"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_170_170" class="fnanchor">[170]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That the request was made in all sincerity we may well believe. The
+      difference between being in prison and being out of it was really not
+      considerable to a man who had the previous winter been confined to his
+      chamber for eight months without a break.<a name="FNanchor_171_171"
+      id="FNanchor_171_171"></a><a href="#Footnote_171_171" class="fnanchor">[171]</a>
+      In other respects the world was as cheerless as any prison could be. He
+      was an exile from the only places he knew, and to him a land unknown was
+      terrible. He had thought of Vienna, and the Prince of W&#252;rtemburg had
+      sought the requisite permission for him, but the priests were too strong
+      in the court of the house of Austria.<a name="FNanchor_172_172"
+      id="FNanchor_172_172"></a><a href="#Footnote_172_172" class="fnanchor">[172]</a>
+      Madame d'Houdetot offered him a resting-place in Normandy, and Saint
+      Lambert in Lorraine.<a name="FNanchor_173_173" id="FNanchor_173_173"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_173_173" class="fnanchor">[173]</a> He thought of Potsdam.
+      Rey, the printer, pressed him to go to Holland. He wondered if he should
+      have strength to cross the Alps and make his way to Corsica. Eventually he
+      made up his mind to go to Berlin, and he went as <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[ii.118]</a></span>far as Strasburg on his
+      road thither.<a name="FNanchor_174_174" id="FNanchor_174_174"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_174_174" class="fnanchor">[174]</a> Here he began to fear
+      the rude climate of the northern capital; he changed his plans, and
+      resolved to accept the warm invitations that he had received to cross over
+      to England. His friends used their interest to procure a passport for him,<a
+      name="FNanchor_175_175" id="FNanchor_175_175"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_175_175" class="fnanchor">[175]</a> and the Prince of
+      Conti offered him an apartment in the privileged quarter of the Temple, on
+      his way through Paris. His own purpose seems to have been irresolute to
+      the last, but his friends acted with such energy and bustle on his behalf
+      that the English scheme was adopted, and he found himself in Paris (Dec.
+      17, 1765), on his way to London, almost before he had deliberately
+      realised what he was doing. It was a step that led him into many fatal
+      vexations, as we shall presently see. Meanwhile we may pause to examine
+      the two considerable books which had involved his life in all this
+      confusion and perplexity.
+    </p>
+    <div class="footnotes">
+      <h3>
+        FOOTNOTES:
+      </h3>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_94_94" id="Footnote_94_94"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_94_94"><span class="label">[94]</span></a> June,
+          1762-December, 1765.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_95_95" id="Footnote_95_95"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_95_95"><span class="label">[95]</span></a> <i>Conf.</i>,
+          xi. 175. It is generally printed in the volume of his works entitled
+          <i>M&#233;langes</i>.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_96_96" id="Footnote_96_96"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_96_96"><span class="label">[96]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>,
+          iii. 416.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_97_97" id="Footnote_97_97"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_97_97"><span class="label">[97]</span></a> <i>Conf.</i>,
+          xi. 172.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_98_98" id="Footnote_98_98"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_98_98"><span class="label">[98]</span></a> For a
+          remarkable anticipation of the ruin of France, see <i>Conf.</i>, xi.
+          136.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_99_99" id="Footnote_99_99"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_99_99"><span class="label">[99]</span></a> M. Roguin.
+          June 14, 1762.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_100_100" id="Footnote_100_100"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_100_100"><span class="label">[100]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>,
+          ii. 347.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_101_101" id="Footnote_101_101"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_101_101"><span class="label">[101]</span></a>
+          Streckeisen, i. 35.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_102_102" id="Footnote_102_102"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_102_102"><span class="label">[102]</span></a> His
+          friend Moultou wrote him the news, Streckeisen, i. 43. Geneva was the
+          only place at which the Social Contract was burnt. Here there were
+          peculiar reasons, as we shall see.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_103_103" id="Footnote_103_103"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_103_103"><span class="label">[103]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>,
+          ii. 356.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_104_104" id="Footnote_104_104"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_104_104"><span class="label">[104]</span></a> <i>Ib.</i>,
+          ii. 358, 369, etc.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_105_105" id="Footnote_105_105"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_105_105"><span class="label">[105]</span></a> The
+          principality of Neuch&#226;tel had fallen by marriage (1504) to the
+          French house of Orleans-Longueville, which with certain interruptions
+          retained it until the extinction of the line by the death of Marie,
+          Duchess of Nemours (1707). Fifteen claimants arose with fifteen
+          varieties of far-off title, as well as a party for constituting Neuch&#226;tel
+          a Republic and making it a fourteenth canton. (Saint Simon, v. 276.)
+          The Estates adjudged the sovereignty to the Protestant house of
+          Prussia (Nov. 3, 1707). Lewis XIV., as heir of the pretensions of the
+          extinct line, protested. Finally, at the peace of Utrecht (1713),
+          Lewis surrendered his claim in exchange for the cession by Prussia of
+          the Principality of Orange, and Prussia held it until 1806. The
+          disturbed history of the connection between Prussia and Neuch&#226;tel
+          from 1814, when it became the twenty-first canton of the Swiss
+          Confederation, down to 1857, does not here concern us.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_106_106" id="Footnote_106_106"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_106_106"><span class="label">[106]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>,
+          ii. 370.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_107_107" id="Footnote_107_107"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_107_107"><span class="label">[107]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>,
+          ii. 371. July 1762.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_108_108" id="Footnote_108_108"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_108_108"><span class="label">[108]</span></a>
+          D'Alembert, who knew Frederick better than any of the philosophers, to
+          Voltaire, Nov. 22, 1765.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_109_109" id="Footnote_109_109"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_109_109"><span class="label">[109]</span></a> Letter
+          to Hume; Burton's <i>Life of Hume</i>, ii. 105, corroborating <i>Conf.</i>,
+          xii. 196.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_110_110" id="Footnote_110_110"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_110_110"><span class="label">[110]</span></a>
+          Marischal to J.J.R.; Streckeisen, ii. 70.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_111_111" id="Footnote_111_111"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_111_111"><span class="label">[111]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>,
+          iii. 40. Nov. 1, 1762.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_112_112" id="Footnote_112_112"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_112_112"><span class="label">[112]</span></a> Burton's
+          <i>Life</i>, ii. 113.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_113_113" id="Footnote_113_113"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_113_113"><span class="label">[113]</span></a>
+          Voltaire's <i>Corr.</i> (1758). <i>Oeuv.</i>, lxxv. pp. 31 and 80.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_114_114" id="Footnote_114_114"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_114_114"><span class="label">[114]</span></a> <i>Conf.</i>,
+          xii. 237.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_115_115" id="Footnote_115_115"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_115_115"><span class="label">[115]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>,
+          iii. 41. Nov. 11, 1762.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_116_116" id="Footnote_116_116"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_116_116"><span class="label">[116]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>,
+          iii. 38. Oct. 30, 1762.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_117_117" id="Footnote_117_117"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_117_117"><span class="label">[117]</span></a> <i>Ib.</i>,
+          iii. 110-115. Jan. 28, 1763.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_118_118" id="Footnote_118_118"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_118_118"><span class="label">[118]</span></a>
+          Bernardin de St. Pierre, xii. 103, 59, etc.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_119_119" id="Footnote_119_119"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_119_119"><span class="label">[119]</span></a> George
+          Keith (1685-1778) was elder brother of Frederick's famous
+          field-marshal, James Keith. They had taken part in the Jacobite rising
+          of 1715, and fled abroad on its failure. James Keith brought his
+          brother into the service of the King of Prussia, who sent him as
+          ambassador to Paris (1751), afterwards made him Governor of Neuch&#226;tel
+          (1754), and eventually prevailed on the English Government to
+          reinstate him in the rights which he had forfeited by his share in the
+          rebellion (1763).
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_120_120" id="Footnote_120_120"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_120_120"><span class="label">[120]</span></a>
+          Streckeisen, ii. 98, etc.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_121_121" id="Footnote_121_121"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_121_121"><span class="label">[121]</span></a> One of
+          Rousseau's chief distresses hitherto arose from the indigence in which
+          Theresa would be placed in case of his death. Rey, the bookseller,
+          gave her an annuity of about &#163;16 a year, and Lord Marischal's
+          gift seems to have been 300 louis, the only money that Rousseau was
+          ever induced to accept from any one in his life. See Streckeisen, ii.
+          99; <i>Corr.</i>, iii. 336. The most delicate and sincere of the many
+          offers to provide for Theresa was made by Madame de Verdelin
+          (Streckeisen, ii. 506). The language in which Madame de Verdelin
+          speaks of Theresa in all her letters is the best testimony to
+          character that this much-abused creature has to produce.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_122_122" id="Footnote_122_122"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_122_122"><span class="label">[122]</span></a> <i>Ib.</i>,
+          90, 92, etc. Summer of 1763.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_123_123" id="Footnote_123_123"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_123_123"><span class="label">[123]</span></a> Burton's
+          <i>Life of Hume</i>, ii. 105. Oct. 2, 1762.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_124_124" id="Footnote_124_124"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_124_124"><span class="label">[124]</span></a> The
+          Confessions are not our only authority for this. See Streckeisen, ii.
+          64; also D'Alembert to Voltaire, Sept. 8, 1762.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_125_125" id="Footnote_125_125"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_125_125"><span class="label">[125]</span></a>
+          Voltaire's <i>Corr.</i> <i>Oeuv.</i>, lxvii. 458, 459, 485, etc.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_126_126" id="Footnote_126_126"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_126_126"><span class="label">[126]</span></a> To
+          D'Alembert, Sept. 15, 1762.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_127_127" id="Footnote_127_127"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_127_127"><span class="label">[127]</span></a> Moultou
+          to Rousseau, Streckeisen, i. 85, 87.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_128_128" id="Footnote_128_128"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_128_128"><span class="label">[128]</span></a> Moultou
+          to Rousseau, Streckeisen, i. 85, 87.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_129_129" id="Footnote_129_129"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_129_129"><span class="label">[129]</span></a>
+          Streckeisen, i. 50.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_130_130" id="Footnote_130_130"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_130_130"><span class="label">[130]</span></a> <i>Ib.</i>,
+          i. 76.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_131_131" id="Footnote_131_131"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_131_131"><span class="label">[131]</span></a> <i>Lettre
+          &#224; Christophe de Beaumont</i>, pp. 163-166.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_132_132" id="Footnote_132_132"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_132_132"><span class="label">[132]</span></a> <i>Lettre
+          &#224; Christophe de Beaumont</i>, pp. 130-135.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_133_133" id="Footnote_133_133"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_133_133"><span class="label">[133]</span></a> <i>Lettre
+          &#224; Christophe de Beaumont</i>, p. 93.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_134_134" id="Footnote_134_134"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_134_134"><span class="label">[134]</span></a>
+          Carlyle's <i>Frederick</i>, Bk. xxi. ch. iv. Rousseau, <i>Corr.</i>,
+          iii. 102.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_135_135" id="Footnote_135_135"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_135_135"><span class="label">[135]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>,
+          iii. 57. Nov. 1762. To M. Montmollin.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_136_136" id="Footnote_136_136"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_136_136"><span class="label">[136]</span></a> <i>Conf.</i>,
+          xii. 206.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_137_137" id="Footnote_137_137"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_137_137"><span class="label">[137]</span></a> <i>Conf.</i>,
+          xii. 198.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_138_138" id="Footnote_138_138"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_138_138"><span class="label">[138]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>,
+          iii. 295. Dec. 25, 1763.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_139_139" id="Footnote_139_139"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_139_139"><span class="label">[139]</span></a> Quoted
+          in Musset-Pathay, ii. 500.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_140_140" id="Footnote_140_140"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_140_140"><span class="label">[140]</span></a> For
+          instance, <i>Corr.</i>, iii. 249.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_141_141" id="Footnote_141_141"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_141_141"><span class="label">[141]</span></a> <i>Ib.</i>,
+          iii. 364, 381.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_142_142" id="Footnote_142_142"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_142_142"><span class="label">[142]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>,
+          iii. 181-186, etc.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_143_143" id="Footnote_143_143"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_143_143"><span class="label">[143]</span></a> Prince
+          Lewis Eugene, son of Charles Alexander (reigning duke from 1733 to
+          1737); a younger brother of Charles Eugene, known as Schiller's Duke
+          of W&#252;rtemberg, who reigned up to 1793. Frederick Eugene, known in
+          the Seven Years' War, was another brother. Rousseau's correspondent
+          became reigning duke in 1793, but only lived a year and a half
+          afterwards.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_144_144" id="Footnote_144_144"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_144_144"><span class="label">[144]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>,
+          iii. 250. Sept. 29, 1763.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_145_145" id="Footnote_145_145"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_145_145"><span class="label">[145]</span></a> The
+          prince's letters are given in the Streckeisen collection, vol. ii.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_146_146" id="Footnote_146_146"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_146_146"><span class="label">[146]</span></a>
+          Streckeisen, ii. 202.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_147_147" id="Footnote_147_147"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_147_147"><span class="label">[147]</span></a> Possibly
+          Wilkes also; <i>Corr.</i>, iv. 200.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_148_148" id="Footnote_148_148"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_148_148"><span class="label">[148]</span></a>
+          Streckeisen, i. 89. June 1, 1763.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_149_149" id="Footnote_149_149"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_149_149"><span class="label">[149]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>,
+          iii. 202. June 4, 1763.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_150_150" id="Footnote_150_150"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_150_150"><span class="label">[150]</span></a> <i>Memoirs
+          of my Life</i>, p. 55, <i>n.</i> (Ed. 1862). Necker (1732-1804), whom
+          Mdlle. Curchod ultimately married, was an eager admirer of Rousseau.
+          &quot;Ah, how close the tender, humane, and virtuous soul of Julie,&quot;
+          he wrote to her author, &quot;has brought me to you. How the reading
+          of those letters gratified me! how many good emotions did they stir or
+          fortify! How many sublimities in a thousand places in these six
+          volumes; not the sublimity that perches itself in the clouds, but that
+          which pushes everyday virtues to their highest point,&quot; and so on.
+          Feb. 16, 1761. Streckeisen, i. 333.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_151_151" id="Footnote_151_151"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_151_151"><span class="label">[151]</span></a>
+          Boswell's name only occurs twice in Rousseau's letters, I believe;
+          once (<i>Corr.</i>, iv. 394) as the writer of a letter which Hume was
+          suspected of tampering with, and previously (iv. 70) as the bearer of
+          a letter. See also Streckeisen, i. 262.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_152_152" id="Footnote_152_152"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_152_152"><span class="label">[152]</span></a>
+          Streckeisen, ii. 111. Jan. 18, 1765.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_153_153" id="Footnote_153_153"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_153_153"><span class="label">[153]</span></a> Bk. ii.
+          ch. x.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_154_154" id="Footnote_154_154"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_154_154"><span class="label">[154]</span></a>
+          Boswell's <i>Account of Corsica</i>, p. 367.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_155_155" id="Footnote_155_155"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_155_155"><span class="label">[155]</span></a> The
+          correspondence between Rousseau and Buttafuoco has been published in
+          the <i>Oeuvres et Corr. In&#233;dites de J.J.R.</i>, 1861. See pp. 35,
+          43, etc.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_156_156" id="Footnote_156_156"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_156_156"><span class="label">[156]</span></a>
+          Boswell's <i>Life</i>, 179, 193, etc. (Ed. 1866).
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_157_157" id="Footnote_157_157"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_157_157"><span class="label">[157]</span></a> <i>&quot;Je
+          suis tout homme de pouvoir vous regarder avec piti&#233;!&quot;</i>
+          Letter dated Jan. 4, 1766, and given by Musset-Pathay as from a Scotch
+          lord, unnamed. Boswell had the honour of conducting Theresa to
+          England, after Hume had taken Rousseau over. &quot;This young
+          gentleman,&quot; writes Hume, &quot;very good-humoured, very
+          agreeable, and very mad&#8212;has such a rage for literature that I
+          dread some circumstance fatal to our friend's honour. You remember the
+          story of Terentia, who was first married to Cicero, then to Sallust,
+          and at last in her old age married a young nobleman, who imagined that
+          she must possess some secret which would convey to him eloquence and
+          genius.&quot; Burton's <i>Life</i>, ii. 307, 308. Boswell mentions
+          that he met Rousseau in England (<i>Account of Corsica</i>, p. 340),
+          and also gives Rousseau's letter introducing him to Paoli (p. 266).
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_158_158" id="Footnote_158_158"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_158_158"><span class="label">[158]</span></a> To
+          Buttafuoco, p. 48, etc.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_159_159" id="Footnote_159_159"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_159_159"><span class="label">[159]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>,
+          vi. 176. Feb. 26, 1770.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_160_160" id="Footnote_160_160"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_160_160"><span class="label">[160]</span></a> It may
+          be worth noticing, as a link between historic personages, that
+          Napoleon Bonaparte's first piece was a <i>Lettre &#224; Matteo
+          Buttafuoco</i> (1791), the same Buttafuoco with whom Rousseau
+          corresponded, who had been Choiseul's agent in the union of the island
+          to France, was afterwards sent as deputy to the Constituent, and
+          finally became the bitterest enemy of Paoli and the patriotic party.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_161_161" id="Footnote_161_161"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_161_161"><span class="label">[161]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>,
+          iii. 190. To the First Syndic, May 12, 1763.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_162_162" id="Footnote_162_162"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_162_162"><span class="label">[162]</span></a> Grimm's
+          <i>Corr. Lit.</i>, iv. 235. For Rousseau's opinion of his book's
+          companion at the stake, see <i>Corr.</i>, iii. 442.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_163_163" id="Footnote_163_163"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_163_163"><span class="label">[163]</span></a>
+          Streckeisen, ii. 526.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_164_164" id="Footnote_164_164"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_164_164"><span class="label">[164]</span></a> There
+          appears to be no doubt that Rousseau was wrong in attributing to
+          Vernes the <i>Sentimens des Citoyens</i>.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_165_165" id="Footnote_165_165"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_165_165"><span class="label">[165]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>,
+          iv. 116, 122 (April 1765), 165-196 (August); also <i>Conf.</i>, xii.
+          245.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_166_166" id="Footnote_166_166"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_166_166"><span class="label">[166]</span></a> Note to
+          M. Auguis's edition, <i>Corr.</i>, v. 395.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_167_167" id="Footnote_167_167"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_167_167"><span class="label">[167]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>,
+          iv. 204.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_168_168" id="Footnote_168_168"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_168_168"><span class="label">[168]</span></a> <i>Conf.</i>,
+          xii. 259. This lapidation has sometimes been doubted, and treated as
+          an invention of Rousseau's morbid suspicion. The official documents
+          prove that his account was substantially true (see Musset-Pathay, ii.
+          559.)
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_169_169" id="Footnote_169_169"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_169_169"><span class="label">[169]</span></a> The
+          fifth of the <i>R&#234;veries</i>. See also <i>Conf.</i>, 262-279, and
+          <i>Corr.</i>, iv. 206-224. His stay in the island was from the second
+          week in September down to the last in October, 1765.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_170_170" id="Footnote_170_170"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_170_170"><span class="label">[170]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>,
+          iv. 221. Oct. 20, 1765.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_171_171" id="Footnote_171_171"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_171_171"><span class="label">[171]</span></a> <i>Ib.</i>,
+          iv. 136, etc. April 27, 1765.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_172_172" id="Footnote_172_172"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_172_172"><span class="label">[172]</span></a>
+          Streckeisen-Moultou, ii. 209, 212.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_173_173" id="Footnote_173_173"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_173_173"><span class="label">[173]</span></a> <i>Ib.</i>,
+          ii. 554.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_174_174" id="Footnote_174_174"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_174_174"><span class="label">[174]</span></a> He
+          arrived at Strasburg on the 2d or 3d of November, left it about the
+          end of the first week in December, and arrived in Paris on the 16th of
+          December 1765. A sort of apocryphal tradition is said to linger in the
+          island about Rousseau's last evening on the island, how after supper
+          he called for a lute, and sang some passably bad verses. See M.
+          Bougy's <i>J.J. Rousseau</i>, p. 179 (Paris: 1853.)
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_175_175" id="Footnote_175_175"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_175_175"><span class="label">[175]</span></a> Madame
+          de Verdelin to J.J.R. Streckeisen, ii. 532. The minister even
+          expressed his especial delight at being able to serve Rousseau, so
+          little seriousness was there now in the formalities of absolution. <i>Ib.</i>
+          547.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+    </div>
+    <hr style="width: 65%;" />
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[ii.119]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      <a name="CHAPTER_III" id="CHAPTER_III"></a>CHAPTER III.
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      THE SOCIAL CONTRACT.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <span class="smcap">The</span> dominant belief of the best minds of the
+      latter half of the eighteenth century was a passionate faith in the
+      illimitable possibilities of human progress. Nothing short of a general
+      overthrow of the planet could in their eyes stay the ever upward movement
+      of human perfectibility. They differed as to the details of the philosophy
+      of government which they deduced from this philosophy of society, but the
+      conviction that a golden era of tolerance, enlightenment, and material
+      prosperity was close at hand, belonged to them all. Rousseau set his face
+      the other way. For him the golden era had passed away from our globe many
+      centuries ago. Simplicity had fled from the earth. Wisdom and heroism had
+      vanished from out of the minds of leaders. The spirit of citizenship had
+      gone from those who should have upheld the social union in brotherly
+      accord. The dream of human perfectibility which nerved men like Condorcet,
+      was to Rousseau a sour and fantastic mockery. The utmost that men could do
+      was to turn their eyes to the past, to obliterate the interval, to try to
+      walk<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[ii.120]</a></span>
+      for a space in the track of the ancient societies. They would hardly
+      succeed, but endeavour might at least do something to stay the plague of
+      universal degeneracy. Hence the fatality of his system. It placed the
+      centre of social activity elsewhere than in careful and rational
+      examination of social conditions, and in careful and rational effort to
+      modify them. As we began by saying, it substituted a retrograde aspiration
+      for direction, and emotion for the discovery of law. We can hardly wonder,
+      when we think of the intense exaltation of spirit produced both by the
+      perfectibilitarians and the followers of Rousseau, and at the same time of
+      the political degradation and material disorder of France, that so violent
+      a contrast between the ideal and the actual led to a great volcanic
+      outbreak. Alas, the crucial difficulty of political change is to summon
+      new force without destroying the sound parts of a structure which it has
+      taken so many generations to erect. The Social Contract is the formal
+      denial of the possibility of successfully overcoming the difficulty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &quot;Although man deprives himself in the civil state of many advantages
+      which he holds from nature, yet he acquires in return others so great, his
+      faculties exercise and develop themselves, his ideas extend, his
+      sentiments are ennobled, his whole soul is raised to such a degree, that
+      if the abuses of this new condition did not so often degrade him below
+      that from which he has emerged, he would be bound to bless without ceasing
+      the happy moment which rescued<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_121"
+      id="Page_121">[ii.121]</a></span> him from it for ever, and out of a
+      stupid and blind animal made an intelligent being and a man.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor_176_176" id="FNanchor_176_176"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_176_176" class="fnanchor">[176]</a> The little parenthesis
+      as to the frequent degradation produced by the abuses of the social
+      condition, does not prevent us from recognising in the whole passage a
+      tolerably complete surrender of the main position which was taken up in
+      the two Discourses. The short treatise on the Social Contract is an
+      inquiry into the just foundations and most proper form of that very
+      political society, which the Discourses showed to have its foundation in
+      injustice, and to be incapable of receiving any form proper for the
+      attainment of the full measure of human happiness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Inequality in the same way is no longer denounced, but accepted and
+      defined. Locke's influence has begun to tell. The two principal objects of
+      every system of legislation are declared to be liberty and equality. By
+      equality we are warned not to understand that the degrees of power and
+      wealth should be absolutely the same, but that in respect of power, such
+      power should be out of reach of any violence, and be invariably exercised
+      in virtue of the laws; and in respect of riches, that no citizen should be
+      wealthy enough to buy another, and none poor enough to sell himself. Do
+      you say this equality is a mere chimera? It is precisely because the force
+      of things is constantly tending to destroy equality, that the force of
+      legislation ought as constantly to be directed towards up<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[ii.122]</a></span>holding
+      it.<a name="FNanchor_177_177" id="FNanchor_177_177"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_177_177" class="fnanchor">[177]</a> This is much clearer
+      than the indefinite way of speaking which we have already noticed in the
+      second Discourse. It means neither more nor less than that equality before
+      the law which is one of the elementary marks of a perfectly free
+      community.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The idea of the law being constantly directed to counteract the tendencies
+      to violent inequalities in material possessions among different members of
+      a society, is too vague to be criticised. Does it cover and warrant so
+      sweeping a measure as the old <i>seisachtheia</i> of Solon, voiding all
+      contracts in which the debtor had pledged his land or his person; or such
+      measures as the agrarian laws of Licinius and the Gracchi? Or is it to go
+      no further than to condemn such a law as that which in England gives
+      unwilled lands to the eldest son? We can only criticise accurately a
+      general idea of this sort in connection with specific projects in which it
+      is applied. As it stands, it is no more than the expression of what the
+      author thinks a wise principle of public policy. It assumes the existence
+      of property just as completely as the theory of the most rigorous
+      capitalist could do; it gives no encouragement, as the Discourse did, to
+      the notion of an equality in being without property. There is no element
+      of communism in a principle so stated, but it suggests a social idea,
+      based on the moral claim of men to have equality of opportunity. This
+      ideal stamped itself on the minds <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_123"
+      id="Page_123">[ii.123]</a></span>of Robespierre and the other
+      revolutionary leaders, and led to practical results in the sale of the
+      Church and other lands in small lots, so as to give the peasant a market
+      to buy in. The effect of the economic change thus introduced happened to
+      work in the direction in which Rousseau pointed, for it is now known that
+      the most remarkable and most permanent of the consequences of the
+      revolution in the ownership of land was the erection, between the two
+      extreme classes of proprietors, of an immense body of middle-class
+      freeholders. This state is not equality, but gradation, and there is
+      undoubtedly an immense difference between the two. Still its origin is an
+      illustration on the largest scale in history of the force of legislation
+      being exerted to counteract an irregularity that had become unbearable.<a
+      name="FNanchor_178_178" id="FNanchor_178_178"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_178_178" class="fnanchor">[178]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Notwithstanding the disappearance of the more <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[ii.124]</a></span>extravagant elements of
+      the old thesis, the new speculation was far from being purged of the
+      fundamental errors that had given such popularity to its predecessors.
+      &quot;If the sea,&quot; he says in one place, &quot;bathes nothing but
+      inaccessible rocks on your coasts, remain barbarous ichthyophagi; you will
+      live all the more tranquilly for it, better perhaps, and assuredly more
+      happily.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_179_179" id="FNanchor_179_179"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_179_179" class="fnanchor">[179]</a> Apart from an outburst
+      like this, the central idea remained the same, though it was approached
+      from another side and with different objects. The picture of a state of
+      nature had lost none of its perilous attraction, though it was hung in a
+      slightly changed light. It remained the starting-point of the right and
+      normal constitution of civil society, just as it had been the
+      starting-point of the denunciation of civil society as incapable of right
+      constitution, and as necessarily and for ever abnormal. Equally with the
+      Discourses, the Social Contract is a repudiation of that historic method
+      which traces the present along a line of ascertained circumstances, and
+      seeks an improved future in an unbroken continuation of that line. The
+      opening words, which sent such a thrill through the generation to which
+      they were uttered in two continents, &quot;Man is born free, and
+      everywhere he is in chains,&quot; tell us at the outset that we are as far
+      away as ever from the patient method of positive <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[ii.125]</a></span>observation, and as
+      deeply buried as ever in deducing practical maxims from a set of
+      conditions which never had any other than an abstract and phantasmatic
+      existence. How is a man born free? If he is born into isolation, he
+      perishes instantly. If he is born into a family, he is at the moment of
+      his birth committed to a state of social relation, in however rudimentary
+      a form; and the more or less of freedom which this state may ultimately
+      permit to him, depends upon circumstances. Man was hardly born free among
+      Romans and Athenians, when both law and public opinion left a father at
+      perfect liberty to expose his new-born infant. And the more primitive the
+      circumstances, the later the period at which he gains freedom. A child was
+      not born free in the early days of the Roman state, when the <i>patria
+      potestas</i> was a vigorous reality. Nor, to go yet further back, was he
+      born free in the times of the Hebrew patriarchs, when Abraham had full
+      right of sacrificing his son, and Jephthah of sacrificing his daughter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But to speak thus is to speak what we do know. Rousseau was not open to
+      such testimony. &quot;My principles,&quot; he said in contempt of Grotius,
+      &quot;are not founded on the authority of poets; they come from the nature
+      of things and are based on reason.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_180_180"
+      id="FNanchor_180_180"></a><a href="#Footnote_180_180" class="fnanchor">[180]</a>
+      He does indeed in one place express his reverence for the Judaic law, and
+      administers a just rebuke to the philosophic arrogance which saw only
+      successful impostors in the old legislators.<a name="FNanchor_181_181"
+      id="FNanchor_181_181"></a><a href="#Footnote_181_181" class="fnanchor">[181]</a>
+      But he paid no <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[ii.126]</a></span>attention
+      to the processes and usages of which this law was the organic expression,
+      nor did he allow himself to learn from it the actual conditions of the
+      social state which accepted it. It was Locke, whose essay on civil
+      government haunts us throughout the Social Contract, who had taught him
+      that men are born free, equal, and independent. Locke evaded the
+      difficulty of the dependence of childhood by saying that when the son
+      comes to the estate that made his father a free man, he becomes a free man
+      too.<a name="FNanchor_182_182" id="FNanchor_182_182"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_182_182" class="fnanchor">[182]</a> What of the old Roman
+      use permitting a father to sell his son three times? In the same
+      metaphysical spirit Locke had laid down the absolute proposition that
+      &quot;conjugal society is made by a voluntary compact between man and
+      woman.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_183_183" id="FNanchor_183_183"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_183_183" class="fnanchor">[183]</a> This is true of a
+      small number of western societies in our own day, but what of the
+      primitive usages of communal marriages, marriages by capture, purchase,
+      and the rest? We do not mean it as any discredit to writers upon
+      government in the seventeenth century that they did not make good out of
+      their own consciousness the necessary want of knowledge about primitive
+      communities. But it is necessary to point out, first, that they did not
+      realise all the knowledge within their reach, and next that, as a
+      consequence of this, their propositions had a quality that vitiated all
+      their speculative worth. Filmer's contention that man is not naturally
+      free was truer than the position of Locke and Rousseau, and it was so
+      because Filmer <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[ii.127]</a></span>consulted
+      and appealed to the most authentic of the historic records then
+      accessible.<a name="FNanchor_184_184" id="FNanchor_184_184"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_184_184" class="fnanchor">[184]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is the more singular that Rousseau should have thus deliberately put
+      aside all but the most arbitrary and empirical historical lessons, and it
+      shows the extraordinary force with which men may be mastered by abstract
+      prepossessions, even when they have a partial knowledge of the antidote;
+      because Rousseau in several places not only admits, but insists upon, the
+      necessity of making institutions relative to the state of the community,
+      in respect of size, soil, manners, occupation, morality, character. &quot;It
+      is in view of such relations as these that we must assign to each people a
+      particular system, which shall be the best, not perhaps in itself, but for
+      the state for which it is destined.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_185_185"
+      id="FNanchor_185_185"></a><a href="#Footnote_185_185" class="fnanchor">[185]</a>
+      In another place he calls attention to manners, customs, above all to
+      opinion, as the part of a social system on which the success of all the
+      rest depends; particular rules being only the arching of <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[ii.128]</a></span>the
+      vault, of which manners, though so much tardier in rising, form a
+      key-stone that can never be disturbed.<a name="FNanchor_186_186"
+      id="FNanchor_186_186"></a><a href="#Footnote_186_186" class="fnanchor">[186]</a>
+      This was excellent so far as it went, but it was one of the many great
+      truths, which men may hold in their minds without appreciating their full
+      value. He did not see that these manners, customs, opinions, have old
+      roots which must be sought in a historic past; that they are connected
+      with the constitution of human nature, and that then in turn they prepare
+      modifications of that constitution. His narrow, symmetrical, impatient
+      humour unfitted him to deal with the complex tangle of the history of
+      social growths. It was essential to his mental comfort that he should be
+      able to see a picture of perfect order and logical system at both ends of
+      his speculation. Hence, he invented, to begin with, his ideal state of
+      nature, and an ideal mode of passing from that to the social state. He
+      swept away in his imagination the whole series of actual incidents between
+      present and past; and he constructed a system which might be imposed upon
+      all societies indifferently by a legislator summoned for that purpose, to
+      wipe out existing uses, laws, and institutions, and make afresh a clear
+      and undisturbed beginning of national life. The force of habit was slowly
+      and insensibly to be substituted for that of the legislator's authority,
+      but the existence of such habits previously as forces to be dealt with,
+      and the existence of certain limits of pliancy in the conditions of human
+      nature and social possibility, are facts of which the <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[ii.129]</a></span>author of the Social
+      Contract takes not the least account.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rousseau knew hardly any history, and the few isolated pieces of old fact
+      which he had picked up in his very slight reading were exactly the most
+      unfortunate that a student in need of the historic method could possibly
+      have fallen in with. The illustrations which are scantily dispersed in his
+      pages,&#8212;and we must remark that they are no more than illustrations
+      for conclusions arrived at quite independently of them, and not the
+      historical proof and foundations of his conclusions,&#8212;are nearly all
+      from the annals of the small states of ancient Greece, and from the
+      earlier times of the Roman republic. We have already pointed out to what
+      an extent his imagination was struck at the time of his first compositions
+      by the tale of Lycurgus. The influence of the same notions is still
+      paramount. The hopelessness of giving good laws to a corrupt people is
+      supposed to be demonstrated by the case of Minos, whose legislation failed
+      in Crete because the people for whom he made laws were sunk in vices; and
+      by the further example of Plato, who refused to give laws to the Arcadians
+      and Cyrenians, knowing that they were too rich and could never suffer
+      equality.<a name="FNanchor_187_187" id="FNanchor_187_187"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_187_187" class="fnanchor">[187]</a> The writer is thinking
+      of Plato's Laws, when he says that just as nature has fixed limits to the
+      stature of a well-formed man, outside of which she produces giants and
+      dwarfs, so with reference to the best constitution for a state, there
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[ii.130]</a></span>are
+      bounds to its extent, so that it may be neither too large to be capable of
+      good government, nor too small to be independent and self-sufficing. The
+      further the social bond is extended, the more relaxed it becomes, and in
+      general a small state is proportionally stronger than a large one.<a
+      name="FNanchor_188_188" id="FNanchor_188_188"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_188_188" class="fnanchor">[188]</a> In the remarks with
+      which he proceeds to corroborate this position, we can plainly see that he
+      is privately contrasting an independent Greek community with the unwieldy
+      oriental monarchy against which at one critical period Greece had to
+      contend. He had never realised the possibility of such forms of polity as
+      the Roman Empire, or the half-federal dominion of England which took such
+      enormous dimensions in his time, or the great confederation of states
+      which came to birth two years before he died. He was the servant of his
+      own metaphor, as the Greek writers so often were. His argument that a
+      state must be of a moderate size because the rightly shapen man is neither
+      dwarf nor giant, is exactly on a par with Aristotle's argument to the same
+      effect, on the ground that beauty demands size, and there must not be too
+      great nor too small size, because a ship sails badly if it be either too
+      heavy or too light.<a name="FNanchor_189_189" id="FNanchor_189_189"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_189_189" class="fnanchor">[189]</a> And when Rousseau
+      supposes the state to have ten thousand inhabitants, and talks about the
+      right size of its territory,<a name="FNanchor_190_190"
+      id="FNanchor_190_190"></a><a href="#Footnote_190_190" class="fnanchor">[190]</a>
+      who does not think of the five thousand and forty which the Athenian
+      Stranger prescribed to Cleinias the Cretan as the exactly proper <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[ii.131]</a></span>number
+      for the perfectly formed state?<a name="FNanchor_191_191"
+      id="FNanchor_191_191"></a><a href="#Footnote_191_191" class="fnanchor">[191]</a>
+      The prediction of the short career which awaits a state that is cursed
+      with an extensive and accessible seaboard, corresponds precisely with the
+      Athenian Stranger's satisfaction that the new city is to be eighty stadia
+      from the coast.<a name="FNanchor_192_192" id="FNanchor_192_192"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_192_192" class="fnanchor">[192]</a> When Rousseau himself
+      began to think about the organisation of Corsica, he praised the selection
+      of Corte as the chief town of a patriotic administration, because it was
+      far from the sea, and so its inhabitants would long preserve their
+      simplicity and uprightness.<a name="FNanchor_193_193" id="FNanchor_193_193"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_193_193" class="fnanchor">[193]</a> And in later years
+      still, when meditating upon a constitution for Poland, he propounded an
+      economic system essentially Spartan; the people were enjoined to think
+      little about foreigners, to give themselves little concern about commerce,
+      to suppress stamped paper, and to put a tithe upon the land.<a
+      name="FNanchor_194_194" id="FNanchor_194_194"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_194_194" class="fnanchor">[194]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The chapter on the Legislator is in the same region. We are again referred
+      to Lycurgus; and to the circumstance that Greek towns usually confided to
+      a stranger the sacred task of drawing up their laws. His experience in
+      Venice and the history of his native town supplemented the examples of
+      Greece. Geneva summoned a stranger to legislate for her, and &quot;those
+      who only look on Calvin as a theologian have a scanty idea of the extent
+      of his genius; the preparation of our wise edicts, in which he had so
+      large a <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[ii.132]</a></span>part,
+      do him as much honour as his Institutes.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_195_195"
+      id="FNanchor_195_195"></a><a href="#Footnote_195_195" class="fnanchor">[195]</a>
+      Rousseau's vision was too narrow to let him see the growth of government
+      and laws as a co-ordinate process, flowing from the growth of all the
+      other parts and organs of society, and advancing in more or less equal
+      step along with them. He could begin with nothing short of an absolute
+      legislator, who should impose a system from without by a single act, a
+      structure hit upon once for all by his individual wisdom, not slowly
+      wrought out by many minds, with popular assent and co-operation, at the
+      suggestion of changing social circumstances and need.<a
+      name="FNanchor_196_196" id="FNanchor_196_196"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_196_196" class="fnanchor">[196]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All this would be of very trifling importance in the history of political
+      literature, but for the extraordinary influence which circumstances
+      ultimately bestowed upon it. The Social Contract was the gospel of the
+      Jacobins, and much of the action of the supreme party in France during the
+      first months of the year 1794 is only fully intelligible when we look upon
+      it as the result and practical application of Rousseau's teaching. The
+      conception of the situation entertained by Robespierre and Saint Just was
+      entirely moulded on all this talk about the legislators of Greece and
+      Geneva. &quot;The transition of an oppressed nation to democracy is like
+      the effort by which nature rose from nothingness to existence. You must
+      entirely refashion a people whom you wish <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[ii.133]</a></span>to make free&#8212;destroy
+      its prejudices, alter its habits, limit its necessities, root up its
+      vices, purify its desires. The state therefore must lay hold on every
+      human being at his birth, and direct his education with powerful hand.
+      Solon's weak confidence threw Athens into fresh slavery, while Lycurgus's
+      severity founded the republic of Sparta on an immovable basis.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor_197_197" id="FNanchor_197_197"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_197_197" class="fnanchor">[197]</a> These words, which
+      come from a decree of the Committee of Public Safety, might well be taken
+      for an excerpt from the Social Contract. The fragments of the institutions
+      by which Saint Just intended to regenerate his country, reveal a man with
+      the example of Lycurgus before his eyes in every line he wrote.<a
+      name="FNanchor_198_198" id="FNanchor_198_198"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_198_198" class="fnanchor">[198]</a> When on the eve of the
+      Thermidorian revolution which over<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_134"
+      id="Page_134">[ii.134]</a></span>threw him and his party, he insisted on
+      the necessity of a dictatorship, he was only thinking of the means by
+      which he should at length obtain the necessary power for forcing his
+      regenerating projects on the country; for he knew that Robespierre, whom
+      he named as the man for the dictatorship, accepted his projects, and would
+      lend the full force of the temporal arm to the propagation of ideas which
+      they had acquired together from Jean Jacques, and from the Greeks to whom
+      Jean Jacques had sent them for example and instruction.<a
+      name="FNanchor_199_199" id="FNanchor_199_199"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_199_199" class="fnanchor">[199]</a> No doubt the condition
+      of France after 1792 must naturally have struck any one too deeply imbued
+      with the spirit of the Social Contract to look beneath the surface of the
+      society with which the Convention had to deal, as urgently inviting a
+      lawgiver of the ancient stamp. The old order in church and state had been
+      swept away, no organs for the performance of the functions of national
+      life were visible, the moral ideas which had bound the social elements
+      together in the extinct monarchy seemed to be permanently sapped. A
+      politician who had for years been dreaming about Minos and Lycurgus and
+      Calvin, especially if he lived in a state with such a tradition of
+      centralisation as ruled in France, was sure to suppose that here was the
+      scene and the moment for a splendid repetition on an immense scale of
+      those immortal achievements. The futility of the <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[ii.135]</a></span>attempt was the practical
+      and ever memorable illustration of the defect of Rousseau's geometrical
+      method. It was one thing to make laws for the handful of people who lived
+      in Geneva in the sixteenth century, united in religious faith, and
+      accepting the same form and conception of the common good. It was a very
+      different thing to try to play Calvin over some twenty-five millions of a
+      heterogeneously composed nation, abounding in variations of temperament,
+      faith, laws, and habits and weltering in unfathomable distractions. The
+      French did indeed at length invite a heaven-sent stranger from Corsica to
+      make laws for them, but not until he had set his foot upon their neck; and
+      even Napoleon Bonaparte, who had begun life like the rest of his
+      generation by writing Rousseauite essays, made a swift return to the
+      historic method in the equivocal shape of the Concordat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Not only were Rousseau's schemes of polity conceived from the point of
+      view of a small territory with a limited population. &quot;You must not,&quot;
+      he says in one place, &quot;make the abuses of great states an objection
+      to a writer who would fain have none but small ones.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor_200_200" id="FNanchor_200_200"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_200_200" class="fnanchor">[200]</a> Again, when he said
+      that in a truly free state the citizens performed all their services to
+      the community with their arms and none by money, and that he looked upon
+      the corv&#233;e (or compulsory labour on the public roads) as less hostile
+      to freedom than taxes,<a name="FNanchor_201_201" id="FNanchor_201_201"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_201_201" class="fnanchor">[201]</a> he showed that he was
+      thinking of a state <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[ii.136]</a></span>not
+      greatly passing the dimensions of a parish. This was not the only defect
+      of his schemes. They assumed a sort of state of nature in the minds of the
+      people with whom the lawgiver had to deal. Saint Just made the same
+      assumption afterwards, and trusted to his military school to erect on
+      these bare plots whatever superstructure he might think fit to appoint. A
+      society that had for so many centuries been organised and moulded by a
+      powerful and energetic church, armed with a definite doctrine, fixing the
+      same moral tendencies in a long series of successive generations, was not
+      in the naked mental state which the Jacobins postulated. It was not
+      prepared to accept free divorce, the substitution of friendship for
+      marriage, the displacement of the family by the military school, and the
+      other articles in Saint Just's programme of social renovation. The twelve
+      apostles went among people who were morally swept and garnished, and they
+      went armed with instruments proper to seize the imagination of their
+      hearers. All moral reformers seek the ignorant and simple, poor fishermen
+      in one scene, labourers and women in another, for the good reason that new
+      ideas only make way on ground that is not already too heavily encumbered
+      with prejudices. But France in 1793 was in no condition of this kind.
+      Opinion in all its spheres was deepened by an old and powerful
+      organisation, to a degree which made any<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[ii.137]</a></span> attempt to abolish the
+      opinion, as the organisation appeared to have been abolished, quite
+      hopeless until the lapse of three or four hundred years had allowed due
+      time for dissolution. After all it was not until the fourth century of our
+      era that the work of even the twelve apostles began to tell decisively and
+      quickly. As for the Lycurgus of whom the French chattered, if such a
+      personality ever existed out of the region of myth, he came to his people
+      armed with an oracle from the gods, just as Moses did, and was himself
+      regarded as having a nature touched with divinity. No such pretensions
+      could well be made by any French legislator within a dozen years or so of
+      the death of Voltaire.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Let us here remark that it was exactly what strikes us as the desperate
+      absurdity of the assumptions of the Social Contract, which constituted the
+      power of that work, when it accidentally fell into the hands of men who
+      surveyed a national system wrecked in all its parts. The Social Contract
+      is worked out precisely in that fashion which, if it touches men at all,
+      makes them into fanatics. Long trains of reasoning, careful allegation of
+      proofs, patient admission on every hand of qualifying propositions and
+      multitudinous limitations, are essential to science, and produce treatises
+      that guide the wise statesman in normal times. But it is dogma that gives
+      fervour to a sect. There are always large classes of minds to whom
+      anything in the shape of a vigorously compact system is irresistibly
+      fascinating, and to whom the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_138"
+      id="Page_138">[ii.138]</a></span> qualification of a proposition, or the
+      limitation of a theoretic principle is distressing or intolerable. Such
+      persons always come to the front for a season in times of distraction,
+      when the party that knows its own aims most definitely is sure to have the
+      best chance of obtaining power. And Rousseau's method charmed their
+      temperament. A man who handles sets of complex facts is necessarily
+      slow-footed, but one who has only words to deal with, may advance with a
+      speed, a precision, a consistency, a conclusiveness, that has a magical
+      potency over men who insist on having politics and theology drawn out in
+      exact theorems like those of Euclid.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rousseau traces his conclusions from words, and develops his system from
+      the interior germs of phrases. Like the typical schoolman, he assumes that
+      analysis of terms is the right way of acquiring new knowledge about
+      things; he mistakes the multiplication of propositions for the discovery
+      of fresh truth. Many pages of the Social Contract are mere logical
+      deductions from verbal definitions: the slightest attempt to confront them
+      with actual fact would have shown them to be not only valueless, but
+      wholly meaningless, in connection with real human nature and the visible
+      working of human affairs. He looks into the word, or into his own verbal
+      notion, and tells us what is to be found in that, whereas we need to be
+      told the marks and qualities that distinguish the object which the word is
+      meant to recall. Hence arises his habit of setting himself questions, with<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[ii.139]</a></span>
+      reference to which we cannot say that the answers are not true, but only
+      that the questions themselves were never worth asking. Here is an instance
+      of his method of supposing that to draw something from a verbal notion is
+      to find out something corresponding to fact. &quot;We can distinguish in
+      the magistrate three essentially different wills: 1st, the will peculiar
+      to him as an individual, which only tends to his own particular advantage;
+      2nd, the common will of the magistrates, which refers only to the
+      advantage of the prince [<i>i.e.</i> the government], and this we may name
+      corporate will, which is general in relation to the government, and
+      particular in relation to the state of which the government is a part;
+      3rd, the will of the people or sovereign will, which is general, as well
+      in relation to the state considered as a whole, as in relation to the
+      government considered as part of the whole.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_202_202"
+      id="FNanchor_202_202"></a><a href="#Footnote_202_202" class="fnanchor">[202]</a>
+      It might be hard to prove that all this is not true, but then it is unreal
+      and comes to nothing, as we see if we take the trouble to turn it into
+      real matter. Thus a member of the British House of Commons, who is a
+      magistrate in Rousseau's sense, has three essentially different wills:
+      first, as a man, Mr. So-and-so; second, his corporate will, as member of
+      the chamber, and this will is general in relation to the legislature, but
+      particular in relation to the whole body of electors and peers; third, his
+      will as a member of the great electoral body, which is a general will
+      alike in relation to the electoral <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_140"
+      id="Page_140">[ii.140]</a></span>body and to the legislature. An English
+      publicist is perfectly welcome to make assertions of this kind, if he
+      chooses to do so, and nobody will take the trouble to deny them. But they
+      are nonsense. They do not correspond to the real composition of a member
+      of parliament, nor do they shed the smallest light upon any part either of
+      the theory of government in general, or the working of our own government
+      in particular. Almost the same kind of observation might be made of the
+      famous dogmatic statements about sovereignty. &quot;Sovereignty, being
+      only the exercise of the general will, can never be alienated, and the
+      sovereign, who is only a collective being, can only be represented by
+      himself: the power may be transmitted, but not the will;&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor_203_203" id="FNanchor_203_203"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_203_203" class="fnanchor">[203]</a> sovereignty is
+      indivisible, not only in principle, but in object;<a
+      name="FNanchor_204_204" id="FNanchor_204_204"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_204_204" class="fnanchor">[204]</a> and so forth. We shall
+      have to consider these remarks from another point of view. At present we
+      refer to them as illustrating the character of the book, as consisting of
+      a number of expansions of definitions, analysed as words, not compared
+      with the facts of which the words are representatives. This way of
+      treating political theory enabled the writer to assume an air of certitude
+      and precision, which led narrow deductive minds completely captive. Burke
+      poured merited scorn on the application of geometry to politics and
+      algebraic formulas to government, but then it was just this seeming
+      demonstration, this measured accuracy, that filled Rousseau's disciples
+      with a supreme and undoubting con<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_141"
+      id="Page_141">[ii.141]</a></span>fidence which leaves the modern student
+      of these schemes in amazement unspeakable. The thinness of Robespierre's
+      ideas on government ceases to astonish us, when we remember that he had
+      not trained himself to look upon it as the art of dealing with huge groups
+      of conflicting interests, of hostile passions, of hardly reconcilable
+      aims, of vehemently opposed forces. He had disciplined his political
+      intelligence on such meagre and unsubstantial argumentation as the
+      following:&#8212;&quot;Let us suppose the state composed of ten thousand
+      citizens. The sovereign can only be considered collectively and as a body;
+      but each person, in his quality as subject, is considered as an individual
+      unit; thus the sovereign is to the subject as ten thousand is to one; in
+      other words, each member of the state has for his share only the
+      ten-thousandth part of the sovereign authority, though he is submitted to
+      it in all his own entirety. If the people be composed of a hundred
+      thousand men, the condition of the subjects does not change, and each of
+      them bears equally the whole empire of the laws, while his suffrage,
+      reduced to a hundred-thousandth, has ten times less influence in drawing
+      them up. Then, the subject remaining still only one, the relation of the
+      sovereign augments in the ratio of the number of the citizens. Whence it
+      follows that, the larger the state becomes, the more does liberty
+      diminish.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_205_205" id="FNanchor_205_205"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_205_205" class="fnanchor">[205]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Apart from these arithmetical conceptions, and the <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[ii.142]</a></span>deep charm which their
+      assurance of expression had for the narrow and fervid minds of which
+      England and Germany seem to have got finally rid in Anabaptists and Fifth
+      Monarchy men, but which still haunted France, there were maxims in the
+      Social Contract of remarkable convenience for the members of a Committee
+      of Public Safety. &quot;How can a blind multitude,&quot; the writer asks
+      in one place, &quot;which so often does not know its own will, because it
+      seldom knows what is good for it, execute of itself an undertaking so vast
+      and so difficult as a system of legislation?&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor_206_206" id="FNanchor_206_206"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_206_206" class="fnanchor">[206]</a> Again, &quot;as nature
+      gives to each man an absolute power over all his members, so the social
+      pact gives to the body politic an absolute power over all its members; and
+      it is this same power which, when directed by the general will, bears, as
+      I have said, the name of sovereignty.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_207_207"
+      id="FNanchor_207_207"></a><a href="#Footnote_207_207" class="fnanchor">[207]</a>
+      Above all, the little chapter on a dictatorship is the very foundation of
+      the position of the Robespierrists in the few months immediately preceding
+      their fall. &quot;It is evidently the first intention of the people that
+      the state should not perish,&quot; and so on, with much criticism of the
+      system of occasional dictatorships, as they were resorted to in old Rome.<a
+      name="FNanchor_208_208" id="FNanchor_208_208"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_208_208" class="fnanchor">[208]</a> Yet this does not in
+      itself go much beyond the old monarchic doctrine of Prerogative, as a
+      corrective for the slowness and want of immediate applicability of mere
+      legal processes in cases of state emergency; and it is worth noticing
+      again and again that in spite of the shriek<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[ii.143]</a></span>ings of reaction, the few
+      atrocities of the Terror are an almost invisible speck compared with the
+      atrocities of Christian churchmen and lawful kings, perpetrated in
+      accordance with their notion of what constituted public safety. So far as
+      Rousseau's intention goes, we find in his writings one of the strongest
+      denunciations of the doctrine of public safety that is to be found in any
+      of the writings of the century. &quot;Is the safety of a citizen,&quot; he
+      cries, &quot;less the common cause than the safety of the state? They may
+      tell us that it is well that one should perish on behalf of all. I will
+      admire such a sentence in the mouth of a virtuous patriot, who voluntarily
+      and for duty's sake devotes himself to death for the salvation of his
+      country. But if we are to understand that it is allowed to the government
+      to sacrifice an innocent person for the safety of the multitude, I hold
+      this maxim for one of the most execrable that tyranny has ever invented,
+      and the most dangerous that can be admitted.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor_209_209" id="FNanchor_209_209"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_209_209" class="fnanchor">[209]</a> It may be said that
+      the Terrorists did not sacrifice innocent life, but the plea is frivolous
+      on the lips of men who proscribed whole classes. You cannot justly draw a
+      capital indictment against a class. Rousseau, however, cannot fairly be
+      said to have had a share in the responsibility for the more criminal part
+      of the policy of 1793, any more than the founder of Christianity is
+      responsible for the atrocities that have been committed by the more ardent
+      worshippers of his name, and justified by stray <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[ii.144]</a></span>texts caught up from the
+      gospels. Helv&#233;tius had said, &quot;All becomes legitimate and even
+      virtuous on behalf of the public safety.&quot; Rousseau wrote in the
+      margin, &quot;The public safety is nothing unless individuals enjoy
+      security.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_210_210" id="FNanchor_210_210"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_210_210" class="fnanchor">[210]</a> The author of a theory
+      is not answerable for the applications which may be read into it by the
+      passions of men and the exigencies of a violent crisis. Such applications
+      show this much and no more, that the theory was constructed with an
+      imperfect consideration of the qualities of human nature, with too narrow
+      a view of the conditions of society, and therefore with an inadequate
+      appreciation of the consequences which the theory might be drawn to
+      support.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is time to come to the central conception of the Social Contract, the
+      dogma which made of it for a time the gospel of a nation, the memorable
+      doctrine of the sovereignty of peoples. Of this doctrine Rousseau was
+      assuredly not the inventor, though the exaggerated language of some
+      popular writers in France leads us to suppose that they think of him as
+      nothing less. Even in the thirteenth century the constitution of the
+      Orders, and the contests of the friars with the clergy, had engendered
+      faintly democratic ways of thinking.<a name="FNanchor_211_211"
+      id="FNanchor_211_211"></a><a href="#Footnote_211_211" class="fnanchor">[211]</a>
+      Among others the great Aquinas had protested against the juristic doctrine
+      that the law is the pleasure of the prince. The will of the prince, he
+      says, to be a law, must be directed <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[ii.145]</a></span>by reason; law is
+      appointed for the common good, and not for a special or private good: it
+      follows from this that only the reason of the multitude, or of a prince
+      representing the multitude, can make a law.<a name="FNanchor_212_212"
+      id="FNanchor_212_212"></a><a href="#Footnote_212_212" class="fnanchor">[212]</a>
+      A still more remarkable approach to later views was made by Marsilio of
+      Padua, physician to Lewis of Bavaria, who wrote a strong book on his
+      master's side, in the great contest between him and the pope (1324).
+      Marsilio in the first part of his work not only lays down very elaborately
+      the proposition that laws ought to be made by the &quot;<i>universitas
+      civium</i>&quot;; he places this sovereignty of the people on the true
+      basis (which Rousseau only took for a secondary support to his original
+      compact), namely, the greater likelihood of laws being obeyed in the first
+      place, and being good laws in the second, when they are made by the body
+      of the persons affected. &quot;No one knowingly does hurt to himself, or
+      deliberately asks what is unjust, and on that account all or a great
+      majority must wish such law as best suits the common interest of the
+      citizens.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_213_213" id="FNanchor_213_213"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_213_213" class="fnanchor">[213]</a> Turning from this to
+      the Social Contract, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[ii.146]</a></span>or
+      to Locke's essay on Government, the identity in doctrine and
+      correspondence in dialect may teach us how little true originality there
+      can he among thinkers who are in the same stage; how a metaphysician of
+      the thirteenth century and a metaphysician of the eighteenth hit on the
+      same doctrine; and how the true classification of thinkers does not follow
+      intervals of time, but is fixed by differences of method. It is impossible
+      that in the constant play of circumstances and ideas in the minds of
+      different thinkers, the same combinations of form and colour in a
+      philosophic arrangement of such circumstances and ideas should not recur.
+      Signal novelties in thought are as limited as signal inventions in
+      architectural construction. It is only one of the great changes in method,
+      that can remove the limits of the old combinations, by bringing new
+      material and fundamentally altering the point of view.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the sixteenth century there were numerous writers who declared the
+      right of subjects to depose a bad sovereign, but this position is to be
+      distinguished from Rousseau's doctrine. Thus, if we turn to the great
+      historic event of 1581, the rejection of the yoke of Spain by the Dutch,
+      we find the Declaration of Independence running, &quot;that if a prince is
+      appointed by God over the land, it is to protect them from harm, even as a
+      shepherd to the guardianship of his flock. The subjects are not appointed
+      by God for the behoof of the prince, but the prince for his subjects,
+      without whom he is no prince.&quot; This is obviously divine<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[ii.147]</a></span>
+      right, fundamentally modified by a popular principle, accepted to meet the
+      exigencies of the occasion, and to justify after the event a measure which
+      was dictated by urgent need for practical relief. Such a notion of the
+      social compact was still emphatically in the semi-patriarchal stage, and
+      is distinct as can be from the dogma of popular sovereignty as Rousseau
+      understood it. But it plainly marked a step on the way. It was the
+      development of Protestant principles which produced and necessarily
+      involved the extreme democratic conclusion. Time was needed for their full
+      expansion in this sense, but the result could only have been avoided by a
+      suppression of the Reformation, and we therefore count it inevitable.
+      Bodin (1577) had defined sovereignty as residing in the supreme
+      legislative authority, without further inquiry as to the source or seat of
+      that authority, though he admits the vague position which even Lewis XIV.
+      did not deny, that the object of political society is the greatest good of
+      every citizen or the whole state. In 1603 a Protestant professor of law in
+      Germany, Althusen by name, published a treatise of Politics, in which the
+      doctrine of the sovereignty of peoples was clearly formulated, to the
+      profound indignation both of Jesuits and of Protestant jurists.<a
+      name="FNanchor_214_214" id="FNanchor_214_214"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_214_214" class="fnanchor">[214]</a> Rousseau mentions his
+      name;<a name="FNanchor_215_215" id="FNanchor_215_215"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_215_215" class="fnanchor">[215]</a> it does not appear
+      that he read Althusen's rather uncommon treatise, but its teaching would
+      probably have a place in the traditions of political theorising <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[ii.148]</a></span>current
+      at Geneva, to the spirit of whose government it was so congenial. Hooker,
+      vindicating episcopacy against the democratic principles of the Puritans,
+      had still been led, apparently by way of the ever dominant idea of a law
+      natural, to base civil government on the assent of the governed, and had
+      laid down such propositions as these: &quot;Laws they are not, which
+      public approbation hath not made so. Laws therefore human, of what kind
+      soever, are available by consent,&quot; and so on.<a
+      name="FNanchor_216_216" id="FNanchor_216_216"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_216_216" class="fnanchor">[216]</a> The views of the
+      Ecclesiastical Polity were adopted by Locke, and became the foundation of
+      the famous essay on Civil Government, from which popular leaders in our
+      own country drew all their weapons down to the outbreak of the French
+      Revolution. Grotius (1625) starting from the principle that the law of
+      nature enjoins that we should stand by our agreements, then proceeded to
+      assume either an express, or at any rate a tacit and implied, promise on
+      the part of all who become members of a community, to obey the majority of
+      the body, or a majority of those to whom authority has been delegated.<a
+      name="FNanchor_217_217" id="FNanchor_217_217"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_217_217" class="fnanchor">[217]</a> This is a unilateral
+      view of the social contract, and omits the element of reciprocity which in
+      Rousseau's idea was cardinal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[ii.149]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Locke was Rousseau's most immediate inspirer, and the latter affirmed
+      himself to have treated the same matters exactly on Locke's principles.
+      Rousseau, however, exaggerated Locke's politics as greatly as Condillac
+      exaggerated his metaphysics. There was the important difference that
+      Locke's essay on Civil Government was the justification in theory of a
+      revolution which had already been accomplished in practice, while the
+      Social Contract, tinged as it was by silent reference in the mind of the
+      writer to Geneva, was yet a speculation in the air. The circumstances
+      under which it was written gave to the propositions of Locke's piece a
+      reserve and moderation which savour of a practical origin and a special
+      case. They have not the wide scope and dogmatic air and literary precision
+      of the corresponding propositions in Rousseau. We find in Locke none of
+      those concise phrases which make fanatics. But the essential doctrine is
+      there. The philosopher of the Revolution of 1688 probably carried its
+      principles further than most of those who helped in the Revolution had any
+      intention to carry them, when he said that &quot;the legislature being
+      only a fiduciary power to act for certain ends, there remains still in the
+      people a supreme power to remove or alter the legislative.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor_218_218" id="FNanchor_218_218"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_218_218" class="fnanchor">[218]</a> It may <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[ii.150]</a></span>be
+      questioned how many of the peers of that day would have assented to the
+      proposition that the people&#8212;and did Locke mean by the people the
+      electors of the House of Commons, or all males over twenty-one, or all
+      householders paying rates?&#8212;could by any expression of their will
+      abolish the legislative power of the upper chamber, or put an end to the
+      legislative and executive powers of the crown. But Locke's statements are
+      direct enough, though he does not use so terse a label for his doctrine as
+      Rousseau affixed to it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Again, besides the principle of popular sovereignty, Locke most likely
+      gave to Rousseau the idea of the origin of this sovereignty in the civil
+      state in a pact or contract, which was represented as the foundation and
+      first condition of the civil state. From this naturally flowed the
+      connected theory, of a perpetual consent being implied as given by the
+      people to each new law. We need not quote passages from Locke to
+      demonstrate the substantial correspondence of assumption between him and
+      the author of the Social Contract. They are found in every chapter.<a
+      name="FNanchor_219_219" id="FNanchor_219_219"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_219_219" class="fnanchor">[219]</a> Such principles were
+      indispensable for the defence of a <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_151"
+      id="Page_151">[ii.151]</a></span>Revolution like that of 1688, which was
+      always carefully marked out by its promoters, as well as by its eloquent
+      apologist and expositor a hundred years later, the great Burke, as above
+      all things a revolution within the pale of the law or the constitution.
+      They represented the philosophic adjustment of popular ideas to the
+      political changes wrought by shifting circumstances, as distinguished from
+      the biblical or Hebraic method of adjusting such ideas, which had
+      prevailed in the contests of the previous generation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yet there was in the midst of those contests one thinker of the first rank
+      in intellectual power, who had constructed a genuine philosophy of
+      government. Hobbes's speculations did not fit in with the theory of either
+      of the two bodies of combatants in the Civil War. They were each in the
+      theological order of ideas, and neither of them sought or was able to
+      comprehend the application of philosophic principles to their own case or
+      to that of their adversaries.<a name="FNanchor_220_220"
+      id="FNanchor_220_220"></a><a href="#Footnote_220_220" class="fnanchor">[220]</a>
+      Hebrew precedents and bible texts, on the one hand; prerogative of use and
+      high church doctrine, on the other. Between these was no space for the
+      acceptance of a secular and rationalistic theory, covering the whole field
+      of a social constitution. Now the influence of Hobbes upon Rousseau was
+      very marked, and very singular. There were numerous differences between
+      the philosopher of Geneva and his predecessor of <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[ii.152]</a></span>Malmesbury. The one
+      looked on men as good, the other looked on them as bad. The one described
+      the state of nature as a state of peace, the other as a state of war. The
+      one believed that laws and institutions had depraved man, the other that
+      they had improved him.<a name="FNanchor_221_221" id="FNanchor_221_221"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_221_221" class="fnanchor">[221]</a> But these differences
+      did not prevent the action of Hobbes on Rousseau. It resulted in a curious
+      fusion between the premisses and the temper of Hobbes and the conclusions
+      of Locke. This fusion produced that popular absolutism of which the Social
+      Contract was the theoretical expression, and Jacobin supremacy the
+      practical manifestation. Rousseau borrowed from Hobbes the true conception
+      of sovereignty, and from Locke the true conception of the ultimate seat
+      and original of authority, and of the two together he made the great image
+      of the sovereign people. Strike the crowned head from that monstrous
+      figure which is the frontispiece of the Leviathan, and you have a
+      frontispiece that will do excellently well for the Social Contract. Apart
+      from a multitude of other obligations, good and bad, which Rousseau owed
+      to Hobbes, as we shall point out, we may here mention that of the superior
+      accuracy of the notion of law in the Social Contract over the notion of
+      law in Montesquieu's work. The latter begins, as everybody knows, with a
+      definition inextricably confused: &quot;Laws are necessary relations
+      flowing from the nature of things, and in this sense all beings have their
+      laws, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[ii.153]</a></span>divinity
+      has its laws, the material world has its laws, the intelligences superior
+      to men have their laws, the beasts have their laws, man has his laws....
+      There is a primitive reason, and laws are the relations to be found
+      between that and the different beings, and the relations of these
+      different beings among one another.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_222_222"
+      id="FNanchor_222_222"></a><a href="#Footnote_222_222" class="fnanchor">[222]</a>
+      Rousseau at once put aside these divergent meanings, made the proper
+      distinction between a law of nature and the imperative law of a state, and
+      justly asserted that the one could teach us nothing worth knowing about
+      the other.<a name="FNanchor_223_223" id="FNanchor_223_223"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_223_223" class="fnanchor">[223]</a> Hobbes's phraseology
+      is much less definite than this, and shows that he had not himself wholly
+      shaken off the same confusion as reigned in Montesquieu's account a
+      century later. But then Hobbes's account of the true meaning of
+      sovereignty was so clear, firm, and comprehensive, as easily to lead any
+      fairly perspicuous student who followed him, to apply it to the true
+      meaning of law. And on this head of law not so much fault is to be found
+      with Rousseau, as on the head of larger constitutional theory. He did not
+      look long enough at given laws, and hence failed to seize all their
+      distinctive qualities; above all he only half saw, if he saw at all, that
+      a law is a command and not a contract, and his eyes were closed to this,
+      because the true view was incompatible with his fundamental assumption of
+      contract as the base of the social union.<a name="FNanchor_224_224"
+      id="FNanchor_224_224"></a><a href="#Footnote_224_224" class="fnanchor">[224]</a>
+      But he did at all events <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_154"
+      id="Page_154">[ii.154]</a></span>grasp the quality of generality as
+      belonging to laws proper, and separated them justly from what he calls
+      decrees, which we are now taught to name occasional or particular
+      commands.<a name="FNanchor_225_225" id="FNanchor_225_225"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_225_225" class="fnanchor">[225]</a> This is worth
+      mentioning, because it shows that, in spite of his habits of intellectual
+      laxity, Rousseau was capable, where he had a clear-headed master before
+      him, of a very considerable degree of precision of thought, however liable
+      it was to fall into error or deficiency for want of abundant comparison
+      with bodies of external fact. Let us now proceed to some of the central
+      propositions of the Social Contract.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      1. The origin of society dates from the moment when the obstacles which
+      impede the preservation of men in a state of nature are too strong for
+      such forces as each individual can employ in order to keep himself in that
+      state. At this point they can only save themselves by aggregation.
+      Problem: to find a form of association which defends and protects with the
+      whole common force the person and property of each associate, and by
+      which, each uniting himself to all, still only obeys himself, and remains
+      as free as he was before. Solution: a social compact reducible to these
+      words, &quot;Each of us places in common his person and his whole power
+      under the supreme direction of the general will; and we further receive
+      each member as indivisible part of the whole.&quot; This act of
+      association constitutes a moral and collective body, a public person.<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[ii.155]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The practical importance and the mischief of thus suffering society to
+      repose on conventions which the human will had made, lay in the corollary
+      that the human will is competent at any time to unmake them, and also
+      therefore to devise all possible changes that fell short of unmaking them.
+      This was the root of the fatal hypothesis of the dictator, or divinely
+      commissioned lawgiver. External circumstance and human nature alike were
+      passive and infinitely pliable; they were the material out of which the
+      legislator was to devise conventions at pleasure, without apprehension as
+      to their suitableness either to the conditions of society among which they
+      were to work, or to the passions and interests of those by whom they were
+      to be carried out, and who were supposed to have given assent to them. It
+      would be unjust to say that Rousseau actually faced this position and took
+      the consequences. He expressly says in more places than one that the
+      science of Government is only a science of combinations, applications, and
+      exceptions, according to time, place, and circumstance.<a
+      name="FNanchor_226_226" id="FNanchor_226_226"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_226_226" class="fnanchor">[226]</a> But to base society on
+      conventions is to impute an element of arbitrariness to these combinations
+      and applications, and to make them independent, as they can never be, of
+      the limits inexorably fixed by the nature of things. The notion of compact
+      is the main source of all the worst vagaries in Rousseau's political
+      speculation.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[ii.156]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is worth remarking in the history of opinion, that there was at this
+      time in France a little knot of thinkers who were nearly in full
+      possession of the true view of the limits set by the natural ordering of
+      societies to the power of convention and the function of the legislators.
+      Five years after the publication of the Social Contract, a remarkable book
+      was written by one of the economic sect of the Physiocrats, the later of
+      whom, though specially concerned with the material interests of
+      communities, very properly felt the necessity of connecting the discussion
+      of wealth with the assumption of certain fundamental political conditions.
+      They felt this, because it is impossible to settle any question about
+      wages or profits, for instance, until you have first settled whether you
+      are assuming the principles of liberty and property. This writer with
+      great consistency found the first essential of all social order in
+      conformity of positive law and institution to those qualities of human
+      nature, and their relations with those material instruments of life,
+      which, and not convention, were the true origin, as they are the actual
+      grounds, of the perpetuation of our societies.<a name="FNanchor_227_227"
+      id="FNanchor_227_227"></a><a href="#Footnote_227_227" class="fnanchor">[227]</a>
+      This was wiser than Rousseau's con<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_157"
+      id="Page_157">[ii.157]</a></span>ception of the lawgiver as one who should
+      change human nature, and take away from man the forces that are naturally
+      his own, to replace them by others comparatively foreign to him.<a
+      name="FNanchor_228_228" id="FNanchor_228_228"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_228_228" class="fnanchor">[228]</a> Rousseau once wrote,
+      in a letter about Rivi&#232;re's book, that the great problem in politics,
+      which might be compared with the quadrature of the circle in geometry, is
+      to find a form of government which shall place law above man.<a
+      name="FNanchor_229_229" id="FNanchor_229_229"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_229_229" class="fnanchor">[229]</a> A more important
+      problem, and not any less difficult for the political theoriser, is to
+      mark the bounds at which the authority of the law is powerless or
+      mischievous in attempting to control the egoistic or non-social parts of
+      man. This problem Rousseau ignored, and <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[ii.158]</a></span>that he should do so was
+      only natural in one who believed that man had bound himself by a
+      convention, strictly to suppress his egoistic and non-social parts, and
+      who based all his speculation on this pact as against the force, or the
+      paternal authority, or the will of a Supreme Being, in which other writers
+      founded the social union.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      2. The body thus constituted by convention is the sovereign. Each citizen
+      is a member of the sovereign, standing in a definite relation to
+      individuals <i>qua</i> individuals; he is also as an individual a member
+      of the state and subject to the sovereign, of which from the first point
+      of view he is a component element. The sovereign and the body politic are
+      one and the same thing.<a name="FNanchor_230_230" id="FNanchor_230_230"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_230_230" class="fnanchor">[230]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of the antecedents and history of this doctrine enough has already been
+      said. Its general truth as a description either of what is, or what ought
+      to be and will be, demands an ampler discussion than there is any occasion
+      to carry on here. We need only point out its place as a kind of
+      intermediate dissolvent for which the time was most ripe. It breaks up the
+      feudal conception of political authority as a property of land-ownership,
+      noble birth, and the like, and it associates this authority widely and
+      simply with the bare fact of participation in any form of citizenship in
+      the social union. The later and higher idea of every share of political
+      power as a function to be discharged for the good of the whole body, and
+      not <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[ii.159]</a></span>merely
+      as a right to be enjoyed for the advantage of its possessor, was a form of
+      thought to which Rousseau did not rise. That does not lessen the
+      effectiveness of the blow which his doctrine dealt to French feudalism,
+      and which is its main title to commemoration in connection with his name.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The social compact thus made is essentially different from the social
+      compact which Hobbes described as the origin of what he calls
+      commonwealths by institution, to distinguish them from commonwealths by
+      acquisition, that is to say, states formed by conquest or resting on
+      hereditary rule. &quot;A commonwealth,&quot; Hobbes says, &quot;is said to
+      be instituted when a multitude of men do agree and covenant, every one
+      with every one, that to whatsoever man or assembly of men shall be given
+      by the major part the right to present the person of them all, that is to
+      say, to be their representative; every one ... shall authorise all the
+      actions and judgments of that man or assembly of men, in the same manner
+      as if they were his own, to the end to live peaceably among themselves,
+      and be protected against other men.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_231_231"
+      id="FNanchor_231_231"></a><a href="#Footnote_231_231" class="fnanchor">[231]</a>
+      But Rousseau's compact was an act of association among equals, who also
+      remained equals. Hobbes's compact was an act of surrender on the part of
+      the many to one or a number. The first was the constitution of civil
+      society, the second was the erection of a government. As nobody now
+      believes in the existence of any such compact in either one form or the
+      other, it would be <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[ii.160]</a></span>superfluous
+      to inquire which of the two is the less inaccurate. All we need do is to
+      point out that there was this difference. Rousseau distinctly denied the
+      existence of any element of contract in the erection of a government;
+      there is only one contract in the state, he said, and it is that of
+      association.<a name="FNanchor_232_232" id="FNanchor_232_232"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_232_232" class="fnanchor">[232]</a> Locke's notion of the
+      compact which was the beginning of every political society is indefinite
+      on this point; he speaks of it indifferently as an agreement of a body of
+      free men to unite and incorporate into a society, and an agreement to set
+      up a government.<a name="FNanchor_233_233" id="FNanchor_233_233"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_233_233" class="fnanchor">[233]</a> Most of us would
+      suppose the two processes to be as nearly identical as may be; Rousseau
+      drew a distinction, and from this distinction he derived further
+      differences.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Here, we may remark, is the starting-point in the history of the ideas of
+      the revolution, of one of the most prominent of them all, that of
+      Fraternity. If the whole structure of society rests on an act of
+      partnership entered into by equals on behalf of themselves and their
+      descendants for ever, the nature of the union is not what it would be, if
+      the members of the union had only entered it to place their liberties at
+      the feet of some superior power. Society in the one case is a covenant of
+      subjection, in the other a covenant of social brotherhood. This impressed
+      itself deeply on the feelings of men like Robespierre, who were never so
+      well pleased as when they could find for their sentimentalism a covering
+      of neat political logic. The same idea of association came presently <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[ii.161]</a></span>to
+      receive a still more remarkable and momentous extension, when it was
+      translated from the language of mere government into that of the economic
+      organisation of communities. Rousseau's conception went no further than
+      political association, as distinct from subjection. Socialism, which came
+      by and by to the front place, carried the idea to its fullest capacity,
+      and presented all the relations of men with one another as fixed by the
+      same bond. Men had entered the social union as brethren, equal, and
+      co-operators, not merely for purposes of government, but for purposes of
+      mutual succour in all its aspects. This naturally included the most
+      important of all, material production. They were not associated merely as
+      equal participants in political sovereignty; they were equal participants
+      in all the rest of the increase made to the means of human happiness by
+      united action. Socialism is the transfer of the principle of fraternal
+      association from politics, where Rousseau left it, to the wider sphere of
+      industrial force.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is perhaps worth notice that another famous revolutionary term belongs
+      to the same source. All the associates of this act of union, becoming
+      members of the city, are as such to be called Citizens, as participating
+      in the sovereign authority.<a name="FNanchor_234_234" id="FNanchor_234_234"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_234_234" class="fnanchor">[234]</a> The term was in
+      familiar use enough among the French in their worst days, but it was
+      Rousseau's sanction which marked it in the new times with a sort of
+      sacramental stamp. It came naturally to him, because it was the <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[ii.162]</a></span>name
+      of the first of the two classes which constituted the active portion of
+      the republic of Geneva, and the only class whose members were eligible to
+      the chief magistracies.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      3. We next have a group of propositions setting forth the attributes of
+      sovereignty. It is inalienable.<a name="FNanchor_235_235"
+      id="FNanchor_235_235"></a><a href="#Footnote_235_235" class="fnanchor">[235]</a>
+      It is indivisible.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These two propositions, which play such a part in the history of some of
+      the episodes of the French Revolution, contain no more than was contended
+      for by Hobbes, and has been accepted in our own times by Austin. When
+      Hobbes says that &quot;to the laws which the sovereign maketh, the
+      sovereign is not subject, for if he were subject to the civil laws he were
+      subject to himself, which were not subjection but freedom,&quot; his
+      notion of sovereignty is exactly that expressed by Rousseau in his
+      unexplained dogma of the inalienableness of sovereignty. So Rousseau means
+      no more by the dogma that sovereignty is indivisible, than Austin meant
+      when he declared of the doctrine that the legislative sovereign powers and
+      the executive sovereign powers belong in any society to distinct parties,
+      that it is a supposition too palpably false to endure a moment's
+      examination.<a name="FNanchor_236_236" id="FNanchor_236_236"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_236_236" class="fnanchor">[236]</a> The way in which this
+      account of the indivisibleness of sovereignty was understood during the
+      revolution, twisted it into a condemnation of the dreaded idea of
+      Federalism. It might just as well have been interpreted to condemn
+      alliances between nations; for the properties of <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[ii.163]</a></span>sovereignty are clearly
+      independent of the dimensions of the sovereign unit. Another effect of
+      this doctrine was the rejection by the Constituent Assembly of the
+      balanced parliamentary system, which the followers of Montesquieu would
+      fain have introduced on the English model. Whether that was an evil or a
+      good, publicists will long continue to dispute.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      4. The general will of the sovereign upon an object of common interest is
+      expressed in a law. Only the sovereign can possess this law-making power,
+      because no one but the sovereign has the right of declaring the general
+      will. The legislative power cannot be exerted by delegation or
+      representation. The English fancy that they are a free nation, but they
+      are grievously mistaken. They are only free during the election of members
+      of parliament; the members once chosen, the people are slaves, nay, as
+      people they have ceased to exist.<a name="FNanchor_237_237"
+      id="FNanchor_237_237"></a><a href="#Footnote_237_237" class="fnanchor">[237]</a>
+      It is impossible <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[ii.164]</a></span>for
+      the sovereign to act, except when the people are assembled. Besides such
+      extraordinary assemblies as unforeseen events may call for, there must be
+      fixed periodical meetings that nothing can interrupt or postpone. Do you
+      call this chimerical? Then you have forgotten the Roman comitia, as well
+      as such gatherings of the people as those of the Macedonians and the
+      Franks and most other nations in their primitive times. What has existed
+      is certainly possible.<a name="FNanchor_238_238" id="FNanchor_238_238"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_238_238" class="fnanchor">[238]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is very curious that Rousseau in this part of his subject should have
+      contented himself with going back to Macedonia and Rome, instead of
+      pointing to the sovereign states that have since become confederate with
+      his native republic. A historian in our own time has described with an
+      enthusiasm that equals that of the Social Contract, how he saw the
+      sovereign people of Uri and the sovereign people of Appenzell <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[ii.165]</a></span>discharge
+      the duties of legislation and choice of executive, each in the majesty of
+      its corporate person.<a name="FNanchor_239_239" id="FNanchor_239_239"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_239_239" class="fnanchor">[239]</a> That Rousseau was
+      influenced by the free sovereignty of the states of the Swiss
+      confederation, as well as by that of his own city, we may well believe.
+      Whether he was or not, it must always be counted a serious misfortune that
+      a writer who was destined to exercise such power in a crisis of the
+      history of a great nation, should have chosen his illustrations from a
+      time and from societies so remote, that the true conditions of their
+      political system could not possibly be understood with any approach to
+      reality, while there were, within a few leagues of his native place,
+      communities where the system of a sovereign public in his own sense was
+      actually alive and flourishing and at work. From them the full meaning of
+      his theories might have been practically gathered, and whatever useful
+      lessons lay at the bottom of them might have been made plain. As it was,
+      it came to pass singularly enough that the effect of the French Revolution
+      was the suppression, happily only for a time, of the only governments in
+      Europe where the doctrine of the favourite apostle of the Revolution was a
+      reality. The constitution of the Helvetic Republic in 1798 was as bad a
+      blow to the sovereignty of peoples in a true sense, as the old house of
+      Austria or Charles of Burgundy could ever have dealt. That constitution,
+      moreover, was directly opposed to the Social Contract in setting up what
+      it called representative demo<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_166"
+      id="Page_166">[ii.166]</a></span>cracy, for representative democracy was
+      just what Rousseau steadily maintained to be a nullity and a delusion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The only lesson which the Social Contract contained for a statesman bold
+      enough to take into his hands the reconstruction of France, undoubtedly
+      pointed in the direction of confederation. At one place, where he became
+      sensible of the impotence which his assumption of a small state inflicted
+      on his whole speculation, Rousseau said he would presently show how the
+      good order of a small state might be united to the external power of a
+      great people. Though he never did this, he hints in a footnote that his
+      plan belonged to the theory of confederations, of which the principles
+      were still to be established.<a name="FNanchor_240_240"
+      id="FNanchor_240_240"></a><a href="#Footnote_240_240" class="fnanchor">[240]</a>
+      When he gave advice for the renovation of the wretched constitution of
+      Poland, he insisted above all things that they should apply themselves to
+      extend and perfect the system of federate governments, &quot;the only one
+      that unites in itself all the advantages of great and small states.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor_241_241" id="FNanchor_241_241"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_241_241" class="fnanchor">[241]</a> A very few years after
+      the appearance of his book, the great American union of sovereign states
+      arose to point the political moral. The French revolutionists missed the
+      force alike of <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[ii.167]</a></span>the
+      practical example abroad, and of the theory of the book which they took
+      for gospel at home. How far they were driven to this by the urgent
+      pressure of foreign war, or whether they would have followed the same
+      course without that interference, merely in obedience to the catholic and
+      monarchic absolutism which had sunk so much deeper into French character
+      than people have been willing to admit, we cannot tell. The fact remains
+      that the Jacobins, Rousseau's immediate disciples, at once took up the
+      chain of centralised authority where it had been broken off by the ruin of
+      the monarchy. They caught at the letter of the dogma of a sovereign
+      people, and lost its spirit. They missed the germ of truth in Rousseau's
+      scheme, namely, that for order and freedom and just administration the
+      unit should not be too large to admit of the participation of the persons
+      concerned in the management of their own public affairs. If they had
+      realised this and applied it, either by transforming the old monarchy into
+      a confederacy of sovereign provinces, or by some less sweeping
+      modification of the old centralised scheme of government, they might have
+      saved France.<a name="FNanchor_242_242" id="FNanchor_242_242"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_242_242" class="fnanchor">[242]</a> But, once more, men
+      interpret a political treatise on principles which <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[ii.168]</a></span>either come to them by
+      tradition; or else spring suddenly up from roots of passion.<a
+      name="FNanchor_243_243" id="FNanchor_243_243"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_243_243" class="fnanchor">[243]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      5. The government is the minister of the sovereign. It is an intermediate
+      body set up between sovereign and subjects for their mutual
+      correspondence, charged with the execution of the laws and the maintenance
+      of civil and political freedom. The members comprising it are called
+      magistrates or kings, and to the whole body so composed, whether of one or
+      of more than one, is given the name of prince. If the whole power is
+      centred in the hands of a single magistrate, from whom all the rest hold
+      their authority, the government is called a monarchy. If there are more
+      persons simply citizens than there are magistrates, this is an
+      aristocracy.<a name="FNanchor_244_244" id="FNanchor_244_244"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_244_244" class="fnanchor">[244]</a> If more citizen
+      magistrates than simple private citizens, that is a democracy. The last
+      government is as a general rule best fitted for small states, and the
+      first for large ones&#8212;on the principle that the number of the supreme
+      magistrates ought to be in the inverse ratio of that of the citizens. But
+      there is a multitude of circumstances which may furnish reasons for
+      exceptions to this general rule.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[ii.169]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This common definition of the three forms of governments according to the
+      mere number of the participants in the chief magistracy, though adopted by
+      Hobbes and other writers, is certainly inadequate and uninstructive,
+      without some further qualification. Aristotle, for instance, furnishes
+      such a qualification, when he refers to the interests in which the
+      government is carried on, whether the interest of a small body or of the
+      whole of the citizens.<a name="FNanchor_245_245" id="FNanchor_245_245"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_245_245" class="fnanchor">[245]</a> Montesquieu's
+      well-known division, though logically faulty, still has the merit of
+      pointing to conditions of difference among forms of government, outside of
+      and apart from the one fact of the number of the sovereign. To divide
+      governments, as Montesquieu did, into republics, monarchies, and
+      despotisms, was to use two principles of division, first the number of the
+      sovereign, and next something else, namely, the difference between a
+      constitutional and an absolute monarch. Then he returned to the first
+      principle of division, and separated a republic into a government of all,
+      which is a democracy, and a government by a part, which is aristocracy.<a
+      name="FNanchor_246_246" id="FNanchor_246_246"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_246_246" class="fnanchor">[246]</a> Still, to have
+      introduced the element of law-abidingness in the chief magistracy, whether
+      of one or more, was to have called attention to the fact that no single
+      distinction is enough to furnish us with a conception of the real and
+      vital differences which may exist between one form of government and
+      another.<a name="FNanchor_247_247" id="FNanchor_247_247"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_247_247" class="fnanchor">[247]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[ii.170]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The important fact about a government lies quite as much in the qualifying
+      epithet which is to be affixed to any one of the three names, as in the
+      name itself. We know nothing about a monarchy, until we have been told
+      whether it is absolute or constitutional; if absolute, whether it is
+      administered in the interests of the realm, like that of Prussia under
+      Frederick the Great, or in the interests of the ruler, like that of an
+      Indian principality under a native prince; if constitutional, whether the
+      real power is aristocratic, as in Great Britain a hundred years ago, or
+      plutocratic, as in Great Britain to-day, or popular, as it may be here
+      fifty years hence. And so with reference to each of the other two forms;
+      neither name gives us any instruction, except of a merely negative kind,
+      until it has been made precise by one or more explanatory epithets. What
+      is the common quality of the old Roman republic, the republics of the
+      Swiss confederation, the republic of Venice, the American republic, the
+      republic of Mexico? Plainly the word republic has no further effect beyond
+      that of excluding the idea of a recognised dynasty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rousseau is perhaps less open to this kind of criticism than other writers
+      on political theory, for the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_171"
+      id="Page_171">[ii.171]</a></span> reason that he distinguishes the
+      constitution of the state from the constitution of the government. The
+      first he settles definitely. The whole body of the people is to be
+      sovereign, and to be endowed alone with what he conceived as the only
+      genuinely legislative power. The only question which he considers open is
+      as to the form in which the <i>delegated executive authority</i> shall be
+      organised. Democracy, the immediate government of all by all, he rejects
+      as too perfect for men; it requires a state so small that each citizen
+      knows all the others, manners so simple that the business may be small and
+      the mode of discussion easy, equality of rank and fortune so general as
+      not to allow of the overriding of political equality by material
+      superiority, and so forth.<a name="FNanchor_248_248" id="FNanchor_248_248"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_248_248" class="fnanchor">[248]</a> Monarchy labours under
+      a number of disadvantages which are tolerably obvious. &quot;One essential
+      and inevitable defect, which must always place monarchic below republican
+      government, is that in the latter the public voice hardly ever promotes to
+      the first places any but capable and enlightened men who fill them with
+      honour; whereas those who get on in monarchies, are for the most part
+      small busybodies, small knaves, small intriguers, in whom the puny talents
+      which are the secret of reaching substantial posts in courts, only serve
+      to show their stupidity to the public as soon as they have made their way
+      to the front. The people is far less likely to make a blunder in a choice
+      of this sort, than the prince, and a man of true merit is nearly as rare
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[ii.172]</a></span>in
+      the ministry, as a fool at the head of the government of a republic.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor_249_249" id="FNanchor_249_249"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_249_249" class="fnanchor">[249]</a> There remains
+      aristocracy. Of this there are three sorts: natural, elective, and
+      hereditary. The first can only thrive among primitive folk, while the
+      third is the worst of all governments. The second is the best, for it is
+      aristocracy properly so called. If men only acquire rule in virtue of
+      election, then purity, enlightenment, experience, and all the other
+      grounds of public esteem and preference, become so many new guarantees
+      that the administration shall be wise and just. It is the best and most
+      natural order that the wisest should govern the multitude, provided you
+      are sure that they will govern the multitude for its advantage, and not
+      for their own. If aristocracy of this kind requires one or two virtues
+      less than a popular executive, it also demands others which are peculiar
+      to itself, such as moderation in the rich and content in the poor. For
+      this form comports with a certain inequality of fortune, for the reason
+      that it is well that the administration of public affairs should be
+      confided to those who are best able to give their whole time to it. At the
+      same time it is of importance that an opposite choice should occasionally
+      teach the people that in the merit of men there are more momentous reasons
+      of preference than wealth.<a name="FNanchor_250_250" id="FNanchor_250_250"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_250_250" class="fnanchor">[250]</a> Rousseau, as we have
+      seen, had pronounced English liberty to be no liberty at all, save during
+      the few days once in seven years when the elections to parliament take
+      place. Yet this scheme of an elective <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[ii.173]</a></span>aristocracy was in truth
+      a very near approach to the English form as it is theoretically presented
+      in our own day, with a suffrage gradually becoming universal. If the
+      suffrage were universal, and if its exercise took place once a year, our
+      system, in spite of the now obsolescent elements of hereditary aristocracy
+      and nominal monarchy, would be as close a realisation of the scheme of the
+      Social Contract as any representative system permits. If Rousseau had
+      further developed his notions of confederation, the United States would
+      most have resembled his type.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      6. What is to be the attitude of the state in respect of religion?
+      Certainly not that prescribed by the policy of the middle ages. The
+      separation of the spiritual from the temporal power, indicated by Jesus
+      Christ, and developed by his followers in the course of many subsequent
+      generations, was in Rousseau's eyes most mischievous, because it ended in
+      the subordination of the temporal power to the spiritual, and that is
+      incompatible with an efficient polity. Even the kings of England, though
+      they style themselves heads of the church, are really its ministers and
+      servants.<a name="FNanchor_251_251" id="FNanchor_251_251"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_251_251" class="fnanchor">[251]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The last allegation evinces Rousseau's usual ignorance of history, and
+      need not be discussed, any more than his proposition on which he lays so
+      much stress, that Christians cannot possibly be good soldiers, nor truly
+      good citizens, because their hearts being fixed upon another world, they
+      must necessarily be indiffer<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_174"
+      id="Page_174">[ii.174]</a></span>ent to the success or failure of such
+      enterprises as they may take up in this.<a name="FNanchor_252_252"
+      id="FNanchor_252_252"></a><a href="#Footnote_252_252" class="fnanchor">[252]</a>
+      In reading the Social Contract, and some other of the author's writings
+      besides, we have constantly to interpret the direct, positive, categorical
+      form of assertion into something of this kind&#8212;&quot;Such and such
+      consequences ought logically to follow from the meaning of the name, or
+      the definition of a principle, or from such and such motives.&quot; The
+      change of this moderate form of provisional assertion into the
+      unconditional statement that such and such consequences have actually
+      followed, constantly lands the author in propositions which any reader who
+      tests them by an appeal to the experience of mankind, written and
+      unwritten, at once discovers to be false and absurd. Rousseau himself took
+      less trouble to verify his conclusions by such an appeal to experience
+      than any writer that ever lived in a scientific age. The other remark to
+      be made on the above section is that the rejection of the Christian or
+      ecclesiastical division of the powers of the church and the powers of the
+      state, is the strongest illustration that could be found of the debt of
+      Rousseau's conception of a state to the old pagan conception. It was the
+      main characteristic of the polities which Christian monotheism and
+      feudalism together succeeded in replacing, to recognise no such division
+      as that between church and state, pope and emperor. Rousseau resumed the
+      old conception. But he adjusted it in a certain degree to the spirit of
+      his own <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[ii.175]</a></span>time,
+      and imposed certain philosophical limitations upon it. His scheme is as
+      follows.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Religion, he says, in its relation to the state, may be considered as of
+      three kinds. First, natural religion, without temple, altar, or rite, the
+      true and pure theism of the natural conscience of man. Second, local,
+      civil, or positive religion, with dogmas, rites, exercises; a theology of
+      a primitive people, exactly co-extensive with all the rights and all the
+      duties of men. Third, a religion like the Christianity of the Roman
+      church, which gives men two sets of laws, two chiefs, two countries,
+      submits them to contradictory duties, and prevents them from being able to
+      be at once devout and patriotic. The last of these is so evidently
+      pestilent as to need no discussion. The second has the merit of teaching
+      men to identify duty to their gods with duty to their country; under this
+      to die for the land is martyrdom, to break its laws impiety, and to
+      subject a culprit to public execration is to devote him to the anger of
+      the gods. But it is bad, because it is at bottom a superstition, and
+      because it makes a people sanguinary and intolerant. The first of all,
+      which is now styled a Christian theism, having no special relation with
+      the body politic, adds no force to the laws. There are many particular
+      objections to Christianity flowing from the fact of its not being a
+      kingdom of this world, and this above all, that Christianity only preaches
+      servitude and dependence.<a name="FNanchor_253_253" id="FNanchor_253_253"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_253_253" class="fnanchor">[253]</a> What then is to be
+      done? The sovereign <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[ii.176]</a></span>must
+      establish a purely civil profession of faith. It will consist of the
+      following positive dogmas:&#8212;the existence of a divinity, powerful,
+      intelligent, beneficent and foreseeing; the life to come; the happiness of
+      the just, the chastisement of the wicked; the sanctity of the social
+      contract and the laws. These articles of belief are imposed, not as dogmas
+      of religion exactly, but as sentiments of sociability. If any one declines
+      to accept them, he ought to be exiled, not for being impious, but for
+      being unsociable, incapable of sincere attachment to the laws, or of
+      sacrificing his life to his duty. If any one, after publicly recognising
+      these dogmas, carries himself as if he did not believe them, let him be
+      punished by death, for he has committed the worst of crimes, he has lied
+      before the laws.<a name="FNanchor_254_254" id="FNanchor_254_254"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_254_254" class="fnanchor">[254]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rousseau thus, unconsciously enough, brought to its climax that reaction
+      against the absorption of the state in the church which had first taken a
+      place in literature in the controversy between legists and canonists, and
+      had found its most famous illustration <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[ii.177]</a></span>in the De Monarchi&#226;
+      of the great poet of catholicism. The division of two co-equal realms, one
+      temporal, the other spiritual, was replaced in the Genevese thinker by
+      what he admitted to be &quot;pure Hobbism.&quot; This, the rigorous
+      subordination of the church to the state, was the end, so far as France
+      went, of the speculative controversy which had occupied Europe for so many
+      ages, as to the respective powers of pope and emperor, of positive law and
+      law divine. The famous civil constitution of the clergy (1790), which was
+      the expression of Rousseau's principle as formulated by his disciples in
+      the Constituent Assembly, was the revolutionary conclusion to the
+      world-wide dispute, whose most melodramatic episode had been the scene in
+      the courtyard of Canossa.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rousseau's memorable prescription, banishing all who should not believe in
+      God, or a future state, or in rewards and punishments for the deeds done
+      in the body, and putting to death any who, after subscribing to the
+      required profession, should seem no longer to hold it, has naturally
+      created a very lively horror in a tolerant generation like our own, some
+      of whose finest spirits have rejected deliberately and finally the
+      articles of belief, without which they could not have been suffered to
+      exist in Rousseau's state. It seemed to contemporaries, who were
+      enthusiastic above all things for humanity and infinite tolerance, these
+      being the prizes of the long conflict which they hoped they were
+      completing, to be a return to the horrors of the Holy Office. Men were as
+      shocked as<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[ii.178]</a></span>
+      the modern philosopher is, when he finds the greatest of the followers of
+      Socrates imposing in his latest piece the penalty of imprisonment for five
+      years, to be followed in case of obduracy by death, on one who should not
+      believe in the gods set up for the state by the lawmaker.<a
+      name="FNanchor_255_255" id="FNanchor_255_255"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_255_255" class="fnanchor">[255]</a> And we can hardly
+      comfort ourselves, as Milton did about Plato, who framed laws which no
+      city ever yet received, and &quot;fed his fancy with making many edicts to
+      his airy burgomasters, which they who otherwise admire him, wish had been
+      rather buried and excused in the genial cups of an academic night-sitting.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor_256_256" id="FNanchor_256_256"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_256_256" class="fnanchor">[256]</a> Rousseau's ideas fell
+      among men who were most potent and corporeal burgomasters. In the winter
+      of 1793 two parties in Paris stood face to face; the rationalistic,
+      Voltairean party of the Commune, named improperly after H&#233;bert, but
+      whose best member was Chaumette, and the sentimental, Rousseauite party,
+      led by Robespierre. The first had industriously desecrated the churches,
+      and consummated their revolt against the gods of the old time by the
+      public worship of the Goddess of Reason, who was prematurely set up for
+      deity of the new time. Robespierre retaliated with the mummeries of the
+      Festival of the Supreme Being, and protested against atheism as the crime
+      of aristocrats. Presently the atheistic party succumbed. Chaumette was not
+      directly implicated in the proceedings which led to their fall, but he was
+      by and by accused of conspiring <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_179"
+      id="Page_179">[ii.179]</a></span>with H&#233;bert, Clootz, and the rest,
+      &quot;to destroy all notion of Divinity and base the government of France
+      on atheism.&quot; &quot;They attack the immortality of the soul,&quot;
+      cried Saint Just, &quot;the thought which consoled Socrates in his dying
+      moments, and their dream is to raise atheism into a worship.&quot; And
+      this was the offence, technically and officially described, for which
+      Chaumette and Clootz were sent to the guillotine (April 1794), strictly on
+      the principle which had been laid down in the Social Contract, and
+      accepted by Robespierre.<a name="FNanchor_257_257" id="FNanchor_257_257"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_257_257" class="fnanchor">[257]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It would have been odd in any writer less firmly possessed with the
+      infallibility of his own dreams than Rousseau was, that he should not have
+      seen the impossibility in anything like the existing conditions of human
+      nature, of limiting the profession of civil faith to the three or four
+      articles which happened to constitute his own belief. Having once granted
+      the general position that a citizen may be required to profess some
+      religious faith, there is no speculative principle, and there is no force
+      in the world, which can fix any bound to the amount or kind of religious
+      faith which the state has the right thus to exact. Rousseau said that a
+      man was dangerous to the city who did not believe in God, a future state,
+      and divine reward and retribution. But then Calvin thought a man dangerous
+      who did not believe both that there <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[ii.180]</a></span>is only one God, and also
+      that there are three Gods. And so Chaumette went to the scaffold, and
+      Servetus to the stake, on the one common principle that the civil
+      magistrate is concerned with heresy. And H&#233;bert was only following
+      out the same doctrine in a mild and equitable manner, when he insisted on
+      preventing the publication of a book in which the author professed his
+      belief in a God. A single step in the path of civil interference with
+      opinion leads you the whole way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The history of the Protestant churches is enough to show the pitiable
+      futility of the proviso for religious tolerance with which Rousseau closed
+      his exposition. &quot;If there is no longer an exclusive national
+      religion, then every creed ought to be tolerated which tolerates other
+      creeds, so long as it contains nothing contrary to the duties of the
+      citizen. But whoever dares to say, <i>Out of the church, no salvation</i>,
+      ought to be banished from the state.&quot; The reason for which Henry IV.
+      embraced the Roman religion&#8212;namely, that in that he might be saved,
+      in the opinion alike of Protestants and Catholics, whereas in the reformed
+      faith, though he was saved according to Protestants, yet according to
+      Catholics he was necessarily damned,&#8212;ought to have made every honest
+      man, and especially every prince, reject it. It was the more curious that
+      Rousseau did not see the futility of drawing the line of tolerance at any
+      given set of dogmas, however simple and slight and acceptable to himself
+      they might be, because he invited special admiration for D'Argenson's<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[ii.181]</a></span>
+      excellent maxim that &quot;in the republic everybody is perfectly free in
+      what does not hurt others.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_258_258"
+      id="FNanchor_258_258"></a><a href="#Footnote_258_258" class="fnanchor">[258]</a>
+      Surely this maxim has very little significance or value, unless we
+      interpret it as giving entire liberty of opinion, because no opinion
+      whatever can hurt others, until it manifests itself in act, including of
+      course speech, which is a kind of act. Rousseau admitted that over and
+      above the profession of civil faith, a citizen might hold what opinions he
+      pleased, in entire freedom from the sovereign's cognisance or
+      jurisdiction; &quot;for as the sovereign has no competence in the other
+      world, the fate of subjects in that other world is not his affair,
+      provided they are good citizens in this.&quot; But good citizenship
+      consists in doing or forbearing from certain actions, and to punish men on
+      the inference that forbidden action is likely to follow from the rejection
+      of a set of opinions, or to exact a test oath of adherence to such
+      opinions on the same principle, is to concede the whole theory of civil
+      intolerance, however little Rousseau may have realised the perfectly
+      legitimate applications of his doctrine. It was an unconscious compromise.
+      He was thinking of Calvin in practice and Hobbes in theory, and he was at
+      the same time influenced by the moderate spirit of his time, and the
+      comparatively reasonable character of his personal belief. He praised
+      Hobbes as the only author who had seen the right remedy for the conflict
+      of the spiritual and temporal jurisdictions, by proposing to <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[ii.182]</a></span>unite
+      the two heads of the eagle, and reducing all to political unity, without
+      which never will either state or government be duly constituted. But
+      Hobbes was consistent without flinching. He refused to set limits to the
+      religious prescriptions which a sovereign might impose, for &quot;even
+      when the civil sovereign is an infidel, every one of his own subjects that
+      resisteth him, sinneth against the laws of God (for such are the laws of
+      nature), and rejecteth the counsel of the apostles, that admonisheth all
+      Christians to obey their princes.... And for their faith, it is internal
+      and invisible: they have the licence that Naaman had, and need not put
+      themselves into danger for it; but if they do, they ought to expect their
+      reward in heaven, and not complain of their lawful sovereign.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor_259_259" id="FNanchor_259_259"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_259_259" class="fnanchor">[259]</a> All this flowed from
+      the very idea and definition of sovereignty, which Rousseau accepted from
+      Hobbes, as we have already seen. Such consequences, however, stated in
+      these bold terms, must have been highly revolting to Rousseau; he could
+      not assent to an exercise of sovereignty which might be atheistic,
+      Mahometan, or anything else unqualifiedly monstrous. He failed to see the
+      folly of trying to unite the old notions of a Christian commonwealth with
+      what was fundamentally his own notion of a commonwealth after the ancient
+      type. He stripped the pagan republics, which he took for his model, of
+      their national and official polytheism, and he put on in its stead a
+      scanty remnant of theism slightly tinged with Christianity.<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[ii.183]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then he practically accepted Hobbes's audacious bidding to the man who
+      should not be able to accept the state creed, to go courageously to
+      martyrdom, and leave the land in peace. For the modern principle, which
+      was contained in D'Argenson's saying previously quoted, that the civil
+      power does best absolutely and unreservedly to ignore spirituals, he was
+      not prepared either by his emancipation from the theological ideas of his
+      youth, or by his observation of the working and tendencies of systems,
+      which involved the state in some more or less close relations with the
+      church, either as superior, equal, or subordinate. Every test is sure to
+      insist on mental independence ending exactly where the speculative
+      curiosity of the time is most intent to begin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Let us now shortly confront Rousseau's ideas with some of the propositions
+      belonging to another method of approaching the philosophy of government,
+      that have for their key-note the conception of expediency or convenience,
+      and are tested by their conformity to the observed and recorded experience
+      of mankind. According to this method, the ground and origin of society is
+      not a compact; that never existed in any known case, and never was a
+      condition of obligation either in primitive or developed societies, either
+      between subjects and sovereign, or between the equal members of a
+      sovereign body. The true ground is an acceptance of conditions which came
+      into existence by the sociability inherent in man, and were developed by
+      man's spontaneous search after convenience. The<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[ii.184]</a></span> statement that while the
+      constitution of man is the work of nature, that of the state is the work
+      of art,<a name="FNanchor_260_260" id="FNanchor_260_260"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_260_260" class="fnanchor">[260]</a> is as misleading as
+      the opposite statement that governments are not made but grow.<a
+      name="FNanchor_261_261" id="FNanchor_261_261"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_261_261" class="fnanchor">[261]</a> The truth lies between
+      them, in such propositions as that institutions owe their existence and
+      development to deliberate human effort, working in accordance with
+      circumstances naturally fixed both in human character and in the external
+      field of its activity. The obedience of the subject to the sovereign has
+      its root not in contract but in force,&#8212;the force of the sovereign to
+      punish disobedience. A man does not consent to be put to death if he shall
+      commit a murder, for the reason alleged by Rousseau, namely, as a means of
+      protecting his own life against murder.<a name="FNanchor_262_262"
+      id="FNanchor_262_262"></a><a href="#Footnote_262_262" class="fnanchor">[262]</a>
+      There is no consent in the transaction. Some person or persons, possessed
+      of sovereign authority, promulgated a command that the subject should not
+      commit murder, and appointed penalties for such commission and it was not
+      a fictitious assent to these penalties, but the fact that the sovereign
+      was strong enough to enforce them, which made the command valid.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Supposing a law to be passed in an assembly of the sovereign people by a
+      majority; what binds a member of the minority to obedience? Rousseau's
+      answer is this:&#8212;When the law is proposed, the <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[ii.185]</a></span>question put is not
+      whether they approve or reject the proposition, but whether it is
+      conformable to the general will: the general will appears from the votes:
+      if the opinion contrary to my own wins the day, that only proves that I
+      was mistaken, and that what I took for the general will was not really so.<a
+      name="FNanchor_263_263" id="FNanchor_263_263"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_263_263" class="fnanchor">[263]</a> We can scarcely
+      imagine more nonsensical sophistry than this. The proper answer evidently
+      is, that either experience or calculation has taught the citizens in a
+      popular government that in the long run it is most expedient for the
+      majority of votes to decide the law. In other words, the inconvenience to
+      the minority of submitting to a law which they dislike, is less than the
+      inconvenience of fighting to have their own way, or retiring to form a
+      separate community. The minority submit to obey laws which were made
+      against their will, because they cannot avoid the necessity of undergoing
+      worse inconveniences than are involved in this submission. The same
+      explanation partially covers what is unfortunately the more frequent case
+      in the history of the race, the submission of the majority to the laws
+      imposed by a minority of one or more. In both these cases, however, as in
+      the general question of the source of our obedience to the laws,
+      deliberate and conscious sense of convenience is as slight in its effect
+      upon conduct here, as it is in the rest of the field of our moral motives.
+      It is covered too thickly over and constantly neutralised by the
+      multitudinous growths of use, by the many <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[ii.186]</a></span>forms of fatalistic or
+      ascetic religious sentiment, by physical apathy of race, and all other
+      conditions that interpose to narrow or abrogate the authority of pure
+      reason over human conduct. Rousseau, expounding his conception of a normal
+      political state, was no doubt warranted in leaving these complicating
+      conditions out of account, though to do so is to rob any treatise on
+      government of much of its possible value. The same excuse cannot warrant
+      him in basing his political institutions upon a figment, instead of upon
+      the substantial ground of propositions about human nature, which the
+      average of experience in given races and at given stages of advancement
+      has shown to be true within those limits. There are places in his writings
+      where he reluctantly admits that men are only moved by their interests,
+      and he does not even take care to qualify this sufficiently.<a
+      name="FNanchor_264_264" id="FNanchor_264_264"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_264_264" class="fnanchor">[264]</a> But throughout the
+      Social Contract we seem to be contemplating the erection of a machine
+      which is to work without reference to the only forces that can possibly
+      impart movement to it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The consequence of this is that Rousseau gives us not the least help
+      towards the solution of any of the problems of actual government, because
+      these are naturally both suggested and guided by considerations of
+      expediency and improvement. It is as if he had never really settled the
+      ends for which government exists, beyond the construction of the
+      symmetrical <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[ii.187]</a></span>machine
+      of government itself. He is a geometer, not a mechanician; or shall we say
+      that he is a mechanician, and not a biologist concerned with the
+      conditions of a living organism. The analogy of the body politic to the
+      body natural was as present to him as it had been to all other writers on
+      society, but he failed to seize the only useful lessons which such an
+      analogy might have taught him&#8212;diversity of structure, difference of
+      function, development of strength by exercise, growth by nutrition&#8212;all
+      of which might have been serviceably translated into the dialect of
+      political science, and might have bestowed on his conception of political
+      society more of the features of reality. We see no room for the free play
+      of divergent forces, the active rivalry of hostile interests, the
+      regulated conflict of multifarious personal aims, which can never be
+      extinguished, except in moments of driving crisis, by the most sincere
+      attachment to the common causes of the land. Thus the modern question
+      which is of such vital interest for all the foremost human societies, of
+      the union of collective energy with the encouragement of individual
+      freedom, is, if not wholly untouched, at least wholly unillumined by
+      anything that Rousseau says. To tell us that a man on entering a society
+      exchanges his natural liberty for civil liberty which is limited by the
+      general will,<a name="FNanchor_265_265" id="FNanchor_265_265"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_265_265" class="fnanchor">[265]</a> is to give us a
+      phrase, where we seek a solution. To say that if it is the opposition of
+      private interests which made the establishment of societies necessary, it
+      is <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[ii.188]</a></span>the
+      accord of those interests which makes them possible,<a
+      name="FNanchor_266_266" id="FNanchor_266_266"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_266_266" class="fnanchor">[266]</a> is to utter a truth
+      which feeds no practical curiosity. The opposition of private interests
+      remains, in spite of the yoke which their accord has imposed upon it, but
+      which only controls and does not suppress such an opposition. What sort of
+      control? What degree? What bounds?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So again let us consider the statement that the instant the government
+      usurps the sovereignty, then the social pact is broken, and all the
+      citizens, restored by right to their natural liberty, are forced but not
+      morally obliged to obey.<a name="FNanchor_267_267" id="FNanchor_267_267"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_267_267" class="fnanchor">[267]</a> He began by telling
+      his readers that man, though born free, is now everywhere in chains; and
+      therefore it would appear that in all existing cases the social pact has
+      been broken, and the citizens living under the reign of force, are free to
+      resume their natural liberty, if they are only strong enough to do so.
+      This declaration of the general duty of rebellion no doubt had its share
+      in generating that fervid eagerness that all other peoples should rise and
+      throw off the yoke, which was one of the most astonishing anxieties of the
+      French during their revolution. That was not the worst quality of such a
+      doctrine. It made government impossible, by basing <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[ii.189]</a></span>the right or duty of
+      resistance on a question that could not be reached by positive evidence,
+      but must always be decided by an arbitrary interpretation of an
+      arbitrarily imagined document. The moderate proposition that resistance is
+      lawful if a government is a bad one, and if the people are strong enough
+      to overthrow it, and if their leaders have reason to suppose they can
+      provide a less bad one in its place, supplies tests that are capable of
+      application. Our own writers in favour of the doctrine of resistance
+      partly based their arguments upon the historic instances of the Old
+      Testament, and it is one of the most striking contributions of
+      Protestantism to the cause of freedom, that it sent people in an admiring
+      spirit to the history of the most rebellious nation that ever existed, and
+      so provided them in Hebrew insurgency with a corrective for the too
+      submissive political teaching of the Gospel. But these writers have
+      throughout a tacit appeal to expediency, as writers might always be
+      expected to have, who were really meditating on the possibility of their
+      principles being brought to the test of practice. There can be no evidence
+      possible, with a test so vague as the fact of the rupture of a compact
+      whose terms are authentically known to nobody concerned. Speak of bad laws
+      and good, wise administration or unwise, just government or unjust,
+      extravagant or economical, civically elevating or demoralising; all these
+      are questions which men may apply themselves to settle with knowledge, and
+      with a more or less definite degree of assurance. But who can tell how he
+      is to find out<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[ii.190]</a></span>
+      whether sovereignty has been usurped, and the social compact broken? Was
+      there a usurpation of sovereignty in France not many years ago, when the
+      assumption of power by the prince was ratified by many millions of votes?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The same case, we are told, namely, breach of the social compact and
+      restoration of natural liberty, occurs when the members of the government
+      usurp separately the power which they ought only to exercise in a body.<a
+      name="FNanchor_268_268" id="FNanchor_268_268"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_268_268" class="fnanchor">[268]</a> Now this description
+      applies very fairly to the famous episode in our constitutional history,
+      connected with George the Third's first attack of madness in 1788.
+      Parliament cannot lawfully begin business without a declaration of the
+      cause of summons from the crown. On this occasion parliament both met and
+      deliberated without communication from the crown. What was still more
+      important was a vote of the parliament itself, authorising the passing of
+      letters patent under the great seal for opening parliament by commission,
+      and for giving assent to a Regency Bill. This was a distinct usurpation of
+      regal authority. Two members of the government (in Rousseau's sense of the
+      term), namely the houses of parliament, usurped the power which they ought
+      only to have exercised along with the crown.<a name="FNanchor_269_269"
+      id="FNanchor_269_269"></a><a href="#Footnote_269_269" class="fnanchor">[269]</a>
+      The Whigs denounced the proceeding as a fiction, a forgery, a phantom, but
+      if they had been readers of the Social Contract, and if <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[ii.191]</a></span>they
+      had been bitten by its dogmatic temper, they would have declared the
+      compact of union violated, and all British citizens free to resume their
+      natural rights. Not even the bitter virulence of faction at that time
+      could tempt any politician to take up such a line, though within half a
+      dozen years each of the democratic factions in France had worked at the
+      overthrow of every other in turn, on the very principle which Rousseau had
+      formulated and Robespierre had made familiar, that usurped authority is a
+      valid reason for annihilating a government, no matter under what
+      circumstances, nor how small the chance of replacing it by a better, nor
+      how enormous the peril to the national well-being in the process. The true
+      opposite to so anarchic a doctrine is assuredly not that of passive
+      obedience either to chamber or monarch, but the right and duty of throwing
+      off any government which inflicts more disadvantages than it confers
+      advantages. Rousseau's whole theory tends inevitably to substitute a long
+      series of struggles after phrases and shadows in the new era, for the
+      equally futile and equally bloody wars of dynastic succession which have
+      been the great curse of the old. Men die for a phrase as they used to die
+      for a family. The other theory, which all English politicians accept in
+      their hearts, and so many commanding French politicians have seemed in
+      their hearts to reject, was first expounded in direct view of Rousseau's
+      teaching by Paley.<a name="FNanchor_270_270" id="FNanchor_270_270"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_270_270" class="fnanchor">[270]</a> Of course the
+      greatest, widest, and loftiest <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_192"
+      id="Page_192">[ii.192]</a></span>exposition of the bearings of expediency
+      on government and its conditions, is to be found in the magnificent and
+      immortal pieces of Burke, some of them suggested by absolutist violations
+      of the doctrine in our own affairs, and some of them by anarchic violation
+      of it in the affairs of France, after the seed sown by Rousseau had
+      brought forth fruit.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We should, however, be false to our critical principle, if we did not
+      recognise the historical effect of a speculation scientifically valueless.
+      There has been no attempt to palliate either the shallowness or the
+      practical mischievousness of the Social Contract. But there is another
+      side to its influence. It was the match which kindled revolutionary fire
+      in generous breasts throughout Europe. Not in France merely, but in
+      Germany as well, its phrases became the language of all who aspired after
+      freedom. Schiller spoke of Rousseau as one who &quot;converted Christians
+      into human beings,&quot; and the <i>Robbers</i> (1778) is as if it had
+      been directly inspired by the doctrine that usurped sovereignty restores
+      men to their natural rights. Smaller men in the violent movement which
+      seized all the youth of Germany at that time, followed the same lead, if
+      they happened to have any feeling about the political condition of their
+      enslaved countries.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[ii.193]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was alike in France and Germany a craving for a return to nature
+      among the whole of the young generation.<a name="FNanchor_271_271"
+      id="FNanchor_271_271"></a><a href="#Footnote_271_271" class="fnanchor">[271]</a>
+      The Social Contract supplied a dialect for this longing on one side, just
+      as the Emilius supplied it on another. Such parts in it as people did not
+      understand or did not like, they left out. They did not perceive its
+      direction towards that &quot;perfect Hobbism,&quot; which the author
+      declared to be the only practical alternative to a democracy so austere as
+      to be intolerable. They grasped phrases about the sovereignty of the
+      people, the freedom for which nature had destined man, the slavery to
+      which tyrants and oppressors had brought him. Above all they were struck
+      by the patriotism which shines so brightly in every page, like the fire on
+      the altar of one of those ancient cities which had inspired the writer's
+      ideal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yet there is a marked difference in the channels along which Rousseau's
+      influence moved in the two countries. In France it was drawn eventually
+      into the sphere of direct politics. In Germany it inspired not a great
+      political movement, but an immense literary revival. In France, as we have
+      already said, the patriotic flame seemed extinct. The ruinous disorder of
+      the whole social system made the old love of country resemble love for a
+      phantom, and so much of patriotic speech as survived was profoundly
+      hollow. <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[ii.194]</a></span>Even
+      a man like Turgot was not so much a patriot as a passionate lover of
+      improvement, and with the whole school of which this great spirit was the
+      noblest and strongest, a generous citizenship of the world had replaced
+      the narrower sentiment which had inflamed antique heroism. Rousseau's
+      exaltation of the Greek and Roman types in all their concentration and
+      intensity, touches mortals of commoner mould. His theory made the native
+      land what it had been to the citizens of earlier date, a true centre of
+      existence, round which all the interests of the community, all its
+      pursuits, all its hopes, grouped themselves with entire singleness of
+      convergence, just as religious faith is the centre of existence to a
+      church. It was the virile and patriotic energy thus evoked which presently
+      saved France from partition.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We complete the estimate of the positive worth and tendencies of the
+      Social Contract by adding to this, which was for the time the cardinal
+      service, of rekindling the fire of patriotism, the rapid deduction from
+      the doctrine of the sovereignty of peoples of the great truth, that a
+      nation with a civilised polity does not consist of an order or a caste,
+      but of the great body of its members, the army of toilers who make the
+      most painful of the sacrifices that are needed for the continuous
+      nutrition of the social organisation. As Condorcet put it, and he drew
+      inspiration partly from the intellectual school of Voltaire, and partly
+      from the social school of Rousseau, all institutions ought to have for
+      their aim the physical, intellectual,<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[ii.195]</a></span> and moral amelioration
+      of the poorest and most numerous class.<a name="FNanchor_272_272"
+      id="FNanchor_272_272"></a><a href="#Footnote_272_272" class="fnanchor">[272]</a>
+      This is the People. Second, there gradually followed from the important
+      place given by Rousseau to the idea of equal association, as at once the
+      foundation and the enduring bond of a community, those schemes of
+      Mutualism, and all the other shapes of collective action for a common
+      social good, which have possessed such commanding attraction for the
+      imagination of large classes of good men in France ever since. Hitherto
+      these forms have been sterile and deceptive, and they must remain so,
+      until the idea of special function has been raised to an equal level of
+      importance with that of united forces working together to a single end.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In these ways the author of the Social Contract did involuntarily and
+      unconsciously contribute to the growth of those new and progressive ideas,
+      in which for his own part he lacked all faith. Pr&#230;-Newtonians knew
+      not the wonders of which Newton was to find the key; and so we, grown
+      weary of waiting for the master intelligence who may effect the final
+      combination of moral and scientific ideas needed for a new social era, may
+      be inclined to lend a half-complacent ear to the arid sophisters who
+      assume that the last word of civilisation has been heard in existing
+      arrangements. But we may perhaps take courage from <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[ii.196]</a></span>history to hope that
+      generations will come, to whom our system of distributing among a few the
+      privileges and delights that are procured by the toil of the many, will
+      seem just as wasteful, as morally hideous, and as scientifically
+      indefensible, as that older system which impoverished and depopulated
+      empires, in order that a despot or a caste might have no least wish
+      ungratified, for which the lives or the hard-won treasure of others could
+      suffice.
+    </p>
+    <div class="footnotes">
+      <h3>
+        FOOTNOTES:
+      </h3>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_176_176" id="Footnote_176_176"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_176_176"><span class="label">[176]</span></a> <i>Cont.
+          Soc.</i>, I. viii.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_177_177" id="Footnote_177_177"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_177_177"><span class="label">[177]</span></a> <i>Cont.
+          Soc.</i>, II. xi. He had written in much the same sense in his article
+          on Political Economy in the Encyclop&#230;dia, p. 34.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_178_178" id="Footnote_178_178"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_178_178"><span class="label">[178]</span></a>
+          Robespierre disclaimed the intention of attacking property, and took
+          up a position like that of Rousseau&#8212;teaching the poor contempt
+          for the rich, not envy. &quot;I do not want to touch your treasures,&quot;
+          he cried, on one occasion, &quot;however impure their source. It is
+          far more an object of concern to me to make poverty honourable, than
+          to proscribe wealth; the thatched hut of Fabricius never need envy the
+          palace of Crassus. I should be at least as content, for my own part,
+          to be one of the sons of Aristides, brought up in the Prytaneium at
+          the public expense, as the heir presumptive of Xerxes, born in the
+          mire of royal courts, to sit on a throne decorated by the abasement of
+          the people, and glittering with the public misery.&quot; Quoted in
+          Malon's <i>Expos&#233; des Ecoles Socialistes fran&#231;aises</i>, 15.
+          Baboeuf carried Rousseau's sentiments further towards their natural
+          conclusion by such propositions as these: &quot;The goal of the
+          revolution is to destroy inequality, and to re-establish the happiness
+          of all.&quot; &quot;The revolution is not finished, because the rich
+          absorb all the property, and hold exclusive power; while the poor toil
+          like born slaves, languish in wretchedness, and are nothing in the
+          state.&quot; <i>Expos&#233; des Ecoles Socialistes fran&#231;aises</i>,
+          p. 29.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_179_179" id="Footnote_179_179"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_179_179"><span class="label">[179]</span></a> <i>Cont.
+          Soc.</i>, II. xi.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_180_180" id="Footnote_180_180"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_180_180"><span class="label">[180]</span></a> <i>Cont.
+          Soc.</i>, I. iv.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_181_181" id="Footnote_181_181"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_181_181"><span class="label">[181]</span></a> <i>Ib.</i>,
+          II. vii.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_182_182" id="Footnote_182_182"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_182_182"><span class="label">[182]</span></a> Ch. vi.
+          (vol. v. 371; edit. 1801).
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_183_183" id="Footnote_183_183"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_183_183"><span class="label">[183]</span></a> Ch. vii.
+          (p. 383.)
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_184_184" id="Footnote_184_184"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_184_184"><span class="label">[184]</span></a> Goguet,
+          in his <i>Origine des Lois, des Arts, et des Sciences</i> (1758),
+          really attempted as laboriously as possible to carry out a notion of
+          the historical method, but the fact that history itself at that time
+          had never been subjected to scientific examination made his effort
+          valueless. He accumulates testimony which would be excellent evidence,
+          if only it had been sifted, and had come out of the process
+          substantially undiminished. Yet even Goguet, who thus carefully
+          followed the accounts of early societies given in the Bible and other
+          monuments, intersperses abstract general statements about man being
+          born free and independent (i. 25), and entering society as the result
+          of deliberate reflection.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_185_185" id="Footnote_185_185"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_185_185"><span class="label">[185]</span></a> <i>Cont.
+          Soc.</i>, II. xi. Also III. viii.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_186_186" id="Footnote_186_186"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_186_186"><span class="label">[186]</span></a> II. xi.
+          Also ch. viii.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_187_187" id="Footnote_187_187"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_187_187"><span class="label">[187]</span></a> II.
+          viii.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_188_188" id="Footnote_188_188"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_188_188"><span class="label">[188]</span></a> II. ix.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_189_189" id="Footnote_189_189"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_189_189"><span class="label">[189]</span></a> <i>Politics</i>,
+          VII. iv. 8, 10.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_190_190" id="Footnote_190_190"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_190_190"><span class="label">[190]</span></a> <i>Cont.
+          Soc.</i>, II. x.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_191_191" id="Footnote_191_191"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_191_191"><span class="label">[191]</span></a> Plato's
+          <i>Laws</i>, v. 737.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_192_192" id="Footnote_192_192"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_192_192"><span class="label">[192]</span></a> <i>Ib.</i>,
+          iv. 705.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_193_193" id="Footnote_193_193"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_193_193"><span class="label">[193]</span></a> <i>Projet
+          de Constitution pour la Corse</i>, p. 75.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_194_194" id="Footnote_194_194"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_194_194"><span class="label">[194]</span></a> <i>Gouvernement
+          de Pologne</i>, ch. xi.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_195_195" id="Footnote_195_195"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_195_195"><span class="label">[195]</span></a> <i>Cont.
+          Soc.</i>, II. vii.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_196_196" id="Footnote_196_196"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_196_196"><span class="label">[196]</span></a> Goguet
+          was much nearer to a true conception of this kind; see, for instance,
+          <i>Origine des Lois</i>, i. 46.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_197_197" id="Footnote_197_197"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_197_197"><span class="label">[197]</span></a> Decree
+          of the Committee, April 20, 1794, reported by Billaud-Varennes.
+          Compare ch. iv. of Rousseau's <i>Consid&#233;rations sur le
+          Gouvernement de Pologne</i>.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_198_198" id="Footnote_198_198"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_198_198"><span class="label">[198]</span></a> Here are
+          some of Saint Just's regulations:&#8212;No servants, nor gold or
+          silver vessels; no child under 16 to eat meat, nor any adult to eat
+          meat on three days of the decade; boys at the age of 7 to be handed
+          over to the school of the nation, where they were to be brought up to
+          speak little, to endure hardships, and to train for war; divorce to be
+          free to all; friendship ordained a public institution, every citizen
+          on coming to majority being bound to proclaim his friends, and if he
+          had none, then to be banished; if one committed a crime, his friends
+          were to be banished. Quoted in Von Sybel's <i>Hist. French Rev.</i>,
+          iv. 49. When Morelly dreamed his dream of a model community in 1754
+          (see above, <a href="#Page_i.158">vol. i. p. 158</a>)
+          he little supposed, one would think, that within forty years a man
+          would be so near trying the experiment in France as Saint Just was.
+          Baboeuf is pronounced by La Harpe to have been inspired by the Code de
+          la Nature, which La Harpe impudently set down to Diderot, on whom
+          every great destructive piece was systematically fathered.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_199_199" id="Footnote_199_199"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_199_199"><span class="label">[199]</span></a> I forget
+          where I have read the story of some member of the Convention being
+          very angry because the library contained no copy of the laws which
+          Minos gave to the Cretans.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_200_200" id="Footnote_200_200"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_200_200"><span class="label">[200]</span></a> III.
+          xiii.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_201_201" id="Footnote_201_201"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_201_201"><span class="label">[201]</span></a> III. xv.
+          He actually recommended the Poles to pay all public functionaries in
+          kind, and to have the public works executed on the system of corv&#233;e.
+          <i>Gouvernement de Pologne</i>, ch. xi.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_202_202" id="Footnote_202_202"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_202_202"><span class="label">[202]</span></a> <i>Cont.
+          Soc.</i>, III. ii.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_203_203" id="Footnote_203_203"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_203_203"><span class="label">[203]</span></a> II. i.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_204_204" id="Footnote_204_204"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_204_204"><span class="label">[204]</span></a> II. ii.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_205_205" id="Footnote_205_205"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_205_205"><span class="label">[205]</span></a> III. i.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_206_206" id="Footnote_206_206"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_206_206"><span class="label">[206]</span></a> II. vi.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_207_207" id="Footnote_207_207"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_207_207"><span class="label">[207]</span></a> II. iv.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_208_208" id="Footnote_208_208"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_208_208"><span class="label">[208]</span></a> IV. vi.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_209_209" id="Footnote_209_209"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_209_209"><span class="label">[209]</span></a> <i>Economie
+          Politique</i>, p. 30.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_210_210" id="Footnote_210_210"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_210_210"><span class="label">[210]</span></a> <i>M&#233;langes</i>,
+          p. 310.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_211_211" id="Footnote_211_211"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_211_211"><span class="label">[211]</span></a> See for
+          instance Green's <i>History of the English People</i>, i. 266.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_212_212" id="Footnote_212_212"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_212_212"><span class="label">[212]</span></a> <i>Summa</i>,
+          xc.-cviii. (1265-1273). See Maurice's <i>Moral and Metaphysical
+          Philosophy</i>, i. 627, 628. Also Franck's <i>R&#233;formateurs et
+          Publicistes de l'Europe</i>, p. 48, etc.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_213_213" id="Footnote_213_213"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_213_213"><span class="label">[213]</span></a> <i>Defensor
+          Pacis</i>, Pt. I., ch. xii. This, again, is an example of Marsilio's
+          position:&#8212;&quot;Convenerunt enim homines ad civilem
+          communicationem propter commodum et vit&#230; sufficientiam
+          consequendam, et opposita declinandum. Qu&#230; igitur omnium tangere
+          possunt commodum et incommodum, ab omnibus sciri debent et audiri, ut
+          commodum assequi et oppositum repellere possint.&quot; The whole
+          chapter is a most interesting anticipation, partly due to the
+          influence of Aristotle, of the notions of later centuries.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_214_214" id="Footnote_214_214"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_214_214"><span class="label">[214]</span></a> See
+          Bayle's Dict., s.v. <i>Althusius</i>.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_215_215" id="Footnote_215_215"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_215_215"><span class="label">[215]</span></a> <i>Lettres
+          de la Montagne</i>, I. vi. 388.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_216_216" id="Footnote_216_216"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_216_216"><span class="label">[216]</span></a> <i>Eccles.
+          Polity</i>, Bk. i.; bks. i.-iv., 1594; bk. v., 1597; bks. vi.-viii.,
+          1647,&#8212;being forty-seven years after the author's death.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_217_217" id="Footnote_217_217"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_217_217"><span class="label">[217]</span></a> Goguet (<i>Origine
+          des Lois</i>, i. 22) dwells on tacit conventions as a kind of
+          engagement to which men commit themselves with extreme facility. He
+          was thus rather near the true idea of the spontaneous origin and
+          unconscious acceptance of early institutions.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_218_218" id="Footnote_218_218"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_218_218"><span class="label">[218]</span></a> Of Civil
+          Government, ch. xiii. See also ch. xi. &quot;This legislative is not
+          only the supreme power of the commonwealth, but sacred and unalterable
+          in the hands where the community have once placed it; nor can any
+          edict of anybody else, in what form soever conceived, or by what power
+          soever backed, have the force and obligation of a law, which has not
+          its sanction from that legislative which the public has chosen and
+          appointed; for without this the law could not have that which is
+          absolutely necessary to its being a law&#8212;the consent of the
+          society; over whom nobody can have a power to make laws, but by their
+          own consent, and by authority received from them.&quot; If Rousseau
+          had found no neater expression for his doctrine than this, the Social
+          Contract would assuredly have been no explosive.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_219_219" id="Footnote_219_219"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_219_219"><span class="label">[219]</span></a> See
+          especially ch. viii.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_220_220" id="Footnote_220_220"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_220_220"><span class="label">[220]</span></a> Hence
+          the antipathy of the clergy, catholic, episcopalian, and presbyterian,
+          to which, as Austin has pointed out (<i>Syst. of Jurisprudence</i>, i.
+          288, <i>n.</i>), Hobbes mainly owes his bad repute.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_221_221" id="Footnote_221_221"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_221_221"><span class="label">[221]</span></a> See
+          Diderot's article on <i>Hobbisme</i> in the Encyclop&#230;dia, <i>Oeuv.</i>,
+          xv. 122.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_222_222" id="Footnote_222_222"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_222_222"><span class="label">[222]</span></a> <i>Esprit
+          des Lois</i>, I. i.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_223_223" id="Footnote_223_223"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_223_223"><span class="label">[223]</span></a> <i>Cont.
+          Soc.</i>, II. vi. 50.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_224_224" id="Footnote_224_224"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_224_224"><span class="label">[224]</span></a> Goguet
+          has the merit of seeing distinctly that command is the essence of law.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_225_225" id="Footnote_225_225"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_225_225"><span class="label">[225]</span></a> <i>Cont.
+          Soc.</i>, II. vi. 51-53. See Austin's <i>Jurisprudence</i>, i. 95,
+          etc.; also <i>Lettres &#233;crites de la Montagne</i>, I. vi. 380,
+          381.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_226_226" id="Footnote_226_226"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_226_226"><span class="label">[226]</span></a> See, for
+          instance, letter to Mirabeau (<i>l'ami des hommes</i>), July 26, 1767.
+          <i>Corr.</i>, v. 179. The same letter contains his criticism on the
+          good despot of the Economists.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_227_227" id="Footnote_227_227"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_227_227"><span class="label">[227]</span></a> <i>L'Ordre
+          Naturel et Essentiel des Soci&#233;t&#233;s Politiques</i> (1767). By
+          Mercier de la Rivi&#232;re. One episode in the life of Mercier de la
+          Rivi&#232;re is worth recounting, as closely connected with the
+          subject we are discussing. Just as Corsicans and Poles applied to
+          Rousseau, Catherine of Russia, in consequence of her admiration for
+          Rivi&#232;re's book, summoned him to Russia to assist her in making
+          laws. &quot;Sir,&quot; said the Czarina, &quot;could you point out to
+          me the best means for the good government of a state?&quot; &quot;Madame,
+          there is only one way, and that is being just; in other words, in
+          keeping order and exacting obedience to the laws.&quot; &quot;But on
+          what base is it best to make the laws of an empire repose?&quot;
+          &quot;There is only one base, Madame: the nature of things and of men.&quot;
+          &quot;Just so; but when you wish to give laws to a people, what are
+          the rules which indicate most surely such laws as are most suitable?&quot;
+          &quot;To give or make laws, Madame, is a task that God has left to
+          none. Ah, who is the man that should think himself capable of
+          dictating laws for beings that he does not know, or knows so ill? And
+          by what right can he impose laws on beings whom God has never placed
+          in his hands?&quot; &quot;To what, then, do you reduce the science of
+          government?&quot; &quot;To studying carefully; recognising and setting
+          forth the laws which God has graven so manifestly in the very
+          organisation of men, when he called them into existence. To wish to go
+          any further would be a great misfortune and a most destructive
+          undertaking.&quot; &quot;Sir, I am very pleased to have heard what you
+          have to say; I wish you good day.&quot; Quoted from Thi&#233;bault's
+          <i>Souvenirs de Berlin</i>, in M. Daire's edition of the <i>Physiocrates</i>,
+          ii. 432.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_228_228" id="Footnote_228_228"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_228_228"><span class="label">[228]</span></a> <i>Cont.
+          Soc.</i>, II. vii.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_229_229" id="Footnote_229_229"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_229_229"><span class="label">[229]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>,
+          v. 181.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_230_230" id="Footnote_230_230"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_230_230"><span class="label">[230]</span></a> <i>Cont.
+          Soc.</i>, I. v., vi., vii.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_231_231" id="Footnote_231_231"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_231_231"><span class="label">[231]</span></a> <i>Leviathan</i>,
+          II., ch. xviii. vol. iii. 159 (Molesworth's edition).
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_232_232" id="Footnote_232_232"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_232_232"><span class="label">[232]</span></a> <i>Cont.
+          Soc.</i>, III. xvi.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_233_233" id="Footnote_233_233"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_233_233"><span class="label">[233]</span></a> <i>Civil
+          Government</i>, ch. viii. &#167; 99.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_234_234" id="Footnote_234_234"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_234_234"><span class="label">[234]</span></a> I. vi.
+          Especially the footnote.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_235_235" id="Footnote_235_235"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_235_235"><span class="label">[235]</span></a> <i>Cont.
+          Soc.</i>, II. i.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_236_236" id="Footnote_236_236"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_236_236"><span class="label">[236]</span></a> <i>Syst.
+          of Jurisprudence</i>, i. 256.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_237_237" id="Footnote_237_237"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_237_237"><span class="label">[237]</span></a> <i>Cont.
+          Soc.</i>, III. xv. 137. It was not long, however, before Rousseau
+          found reason to alter his opinion in this respect. The champions of
+          the Council at Geneva compared the <i>droit n&#233;gatif</i>, in the
+          exercise of which the Council had refused to listen to the
+          representations of Rousseau's partisans (see above, vol. ii. p. <a
+          href="#Page_105">105</a>) to the right of veto possessed by the crown
+          in Great Britain. Rousseau seized upon this egregious blunder, which
+          confused the power of refusing assent to a proposed law, with the
+          power of refusing justice under law already passed. He at once found
+          illustrations of the difference, first in the case of the printers of
+          No. 45 of the <i>North Briton</i>, who brought actions for false
+          imprisonment (1763), and next in the proceedings against Wilkes at the
+          same time. If Wilkes, said Rousseau, had written, printed, published,
+          or said, one-fourth against the Lesser Council at Geneva of what he
+          said, wrote, printed, and published openly in London against the court
+          and the government, he would have been heavily punished, and most
+          likely put to death. And so forth, until he has proved very pungently
+          how different degrees of freedom are enjoyed in Geneva and in England.
+          <i>Lettres &#233;crites de la Montague</i>, ix. 491-500. When he wrote
+          this he was unaware that the Triennial Act had long been replaced by
+          the Septennial Act of the 1 Geo. I. On finding out, as he did
+          afterwards, that a parliament could sit for seven years, he thought as
+          meanly of our liberty as ever. <i>Consid&#233;rations sur les
+          gouvernement de Pologne</i>, ch. vii. 253-260. In his <i>Projet de
+          Constitution pour la Corse</i>, p. 113, he says that &quot;the English
+          do not love liberty for itself, but because it is most favourable to
+          money-making.&quot;
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_238_238" id="Footnote_238_238"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_238_238"><span class="label">[238]</span></a> III.,
+          xi., xii., and xiii.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_239_239" id="Footnote_239_239"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_239_239"><span class="label">[239]</span></a> Mr.
+          Freeman's <i>Growth of the English Constitution</i>, c. i.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_240_240" id="Footnote_240_240"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_240_240"><span class="label">[240]</span></a> <i>Cont.
+          Soc.</i>, III. xv. 140. A small manuscript containing his ideas on
+          confederation was given by Rousseau to the Count d'Antraigues
+          (afterwards an <i>&#233;migr&#233;</i>), who destroyed it in 1789,
+          lest its arguments should be used to sap the royal authority. See
+          extract from his pamphlet, prefixed to M. Auguis's edition of the
+          Social Contract, pp. xxiii, xxiv.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_241_241" id="Footnote_241_241"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_241_241"><span class="label">[241]</span></a> <i>Gouvernement
+          de Pologne</i>, v. 246.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_242_242" id="Footnote_242_242"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_242_242"><span class="label">[242]</span></a> Of
+          course no such modification as that proposed by Comte (<i>Politique
+          Positive</i>, iv. 421) would come within the scope of the doctrine of
+          the Social Contract. For each of the seventeen Intendances into which
+          Comte divides France, is to be ruled by a chief, &quot;always
+          appointed and removed by the central power.&quot; There is no room for
+          the sovereignty of the people here, even in things parochial.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_243_243" id="Footnote_243_243"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_243_243"><span class="label">[243]</span></a> There
+          was one extraordinary instance during the revolution of attempting to
+          make popular government direct on Rousseau's principle, in the scheme
+          (1790) of which Danton was a chief supporter, for reorganising the
+          municipal administration of Paris. The assemblies of sections were to
+          sit permanently; their vote was to be taken on current questions; and
+          action was to follow the aggregate of their degrees. See Von Sybel's
+          <i>Hist. Fr. Rev.</i> i. 275; M. Louis Blanc's <i>History</i>, Bk.
+          III. ch. ii.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_244_244" id="Footnote_244_244"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_244_244"><span class="label">[244]</span></a> This was
+          also Bodin's definition of an aristocratic state; &quot;si minor pars
+          civium c&#230;teris imperat.&quot;
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_245_245" id="Footnote_245_245"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_245_245"><span class="label">[245]</span></a> <i>Politics</i>,
+          III. vi.-vii.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_246_246" id="Footnote_246_246"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_246_246"><span class="label">[246]</span></a> <i>Esprit
+          des Lois</i>, II. i. ii.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_247_247" id="Footnote_247_247"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_247_247"><span class="label">[247]</span></a> Rousseau
+          gave the name of <i>tyrant</i> to a usurper of royal authority in a
+          kingdom, and <i>despot</i> to a usurper of the sovereign authority (<i>i.e.</i>
+          <span lang="el" title="Greek: tyrannos">&#964;&#965;&#961;&#945;&#957;&#957;&#959;&#962;</span>
+          in the Greek sense). The former might govern according to the laws,
+          but the latter placed himself above the laws (<i>Cont. Soc.</i>, III.
+          x.) This corresponded to Locke's distinction: &quot;As usurpation is
+          the exercise of power which another hath a right to, so tyranny is the
+          exercise of a power beyond right, which nobody can have a right to.&quot;
+          <i>Civil Gov.</i>, ch. xviii.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_248_248" id="Footnote_248_248"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_248_248"><span class="label">[248]</span></a> III. iv.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_249_249" id="Footnote_249_249"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_249_249"><span class="label">[249]</span></a> III. vi.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_250_250" id="Footnote_250_250"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_250_250"><span class="label">[250]</span></a> III. v.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_251_251" id="Footnote_251_251"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_251_251"><span class="label">[251]</span></a> <i>Cont.
+          Soc.</i>, IV. viii.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_252_252" id="Footnote_252_252"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_252_252"><span class="label">[252]</span></a> <i>Cont.
+          Soc.</i>, IV. viii. 197-201.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_253_253" id="Footnote_253_253"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_253_253"><span class="label">[253]</span></a> This is
+          not unlike what Tocqueville says somewhere, that Christianity bids you
+          render unto C&#230;sar the things that are C&#230;sar's, but seems to
+          discourage any inquiry whether C&#230;sar is an usurper or a lawful
+          ruler.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_254_254" id="Footnote_254_254"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_254_254"><span class="label">[254]</span></a> <i>Cont.
+          Soc.</i>, IV. viii. 203. As we have already seen, he had entreated
+          Voltaire, of all men in the world, to draw up a civil profession of
+          faith. See <a href="#Page_i.318">vol. i. 318</a>.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          In the New Helo&#239;sa (V. v. 117, <i>n.</i>) Rousseau expresses his
+          opinion that &quot;no true believer could be intolerant or a
+          persecutor. <i>If I were a magistrate, and if the law pronounced the
+          penalty of death against atheists, I would begin by burning as such
+          whoever should come to inform against another.</i>&quot;
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_255_255" id="Footnote_255_255"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_255_255"><span class="label">[255]</span></a> Plato's
+          <i>Laws</i>, Bk. x. 909, etc.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_256_256" id="Footnote_256_256"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_256_256"><span class="label">[256]</span></a> <i>Areopagitica</i>,
+          p. 417. (Edit. 1867.)
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_257_257" id="Footnote_257_257"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_257_257"><span class="label">[257]</span></a> See a
+          speech of his, which is Rousseau's &quot;civil faith&quot; done into
+          rhetoric, given in M. Louis Blanc's <i>Hist. de la R&#233;v. Fran&#231;aise</i>,
+          Bk. x. c. xiv.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_258_258" id="Footnote_258_258"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_258_258"><span class="label">[258]</span></a> <i>Consid&#233;rations
+          sur le gouvernement ancien et pr&#233;sent de la France</i> (1764).
+          Quoted by Rousseau from a manuscript copy.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_259_259" id="Footnote_259_259"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_259_259"><span class="label">[259]</span></a> <i>Leviathan</i>,
+          ch. xliii. 601. Also ch. xlii.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_260_260" id="Footnote_260_260"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_260_260"><span class="label">[260]</span></a> <i>Cont.
+          Soc.</i>, III. xi. Borrowed from Hobbes, who said, &quot;Magnus ille
+          Leviathan qu&#230; civitas appellatur, opificium artis est.&quot;
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_261_261" id="Footnote_261_261"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_261_261"><span class="label">[261]</span></a>
+          Mackintosh's.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_262_262" id="Footnote_262_262"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_262_262"><span class="label">[262]</span></a> <i>Cont.
+          Soc.</i>, II. v.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_263_263" id="Footnote_263_263"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_263_263"><span class="label">[263]</span></a> IV. ii.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_264_264" id="Footnote_264_264"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_264_264"><span class="label">[264]</span></a> For
+          instance, <i>Gouvernement de la Pologne</i>, ch. xi. p. 305. And <i>Corr.</i>,
+          v. 180.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_265_265" id="Footnote_265_265"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_265_265"><span class="label">[265]</span></a> <i>Cont.
+          Soc.</i>, I. viii.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_266_266" id="Footnote_266_266"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_266_266"><span class="label">[266]</span></a> <i>Cont.
+          Soc.</i>, II. i.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_267_267" id="Footnote_267_267"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_267_267"><span class="label">[267]</span></a> <i>Ib.</i>,
+          III. x. &quot;Let every individual who may usurp the sovereignty be
+          instantly put to death by free men.&quot; Robespierre's <i>D&#233;claration
+          des droits de l'homme</i>, &#167; 27. &quot;When the government
+          violates the rights of the people, insurrection becomes for the people
+          the most sacred of rights and the most indispensable of duties.&quot;
+          &#167; 35.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_268_268" id="Footnote_268_268"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_268_268"><span class="label">[268]</span></a> <i>Cont.
+          Soc.</i>, III. x.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_269_269" id="Footnote_269_269"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_269_269"><span class="label">[269]</span></a> See
+          May's <i>Constitutional Hist. of England</i>, ch. iii; and Lord
+          Stanhope's <i>Life of Pitt</i>, vol. ii. ch. xii.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_270_270" id="Footnote_270_270"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_270_270"><span class="label">[270]</span></a> In the
+          6th book of the <i>Moral Philosophy</i> (1785), ch. iii., and
+          elsewhere. In the preface he refers to the effect which Rousseau's
+          political theory was supposed to have had in the civil convulsions of
+          Geneva, as one of the reasons which encouraged him to publish his own
+          book.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_271_271" id="Footnote_271_271"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_271_271"><span class="label">[271]</span></a> One side
+          of this was the passion for geographical exploration which took
+          possession of Europe towards the middle of the eighteenth century. See
+          the <i>Life of Humboldt</i>, i. 28, 29. (<i>Eng. Trans.</i> by
+          Lassell.)
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_272_272" id="Footnote_272_272"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_272_272"><span class="label">[272]</span></a>
+          Rousseau's influence on Condorcet is seen in the latter's maxim, which
+          has found such favour in the eyes of socialist writers, that &quot;not
+          only equality of right, but equality of fact, is the goal of the
+          social art.&quot;
+        </p>
+      </div>
+    </div>
+    <hr style="width: 65%;" />
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[ii.197]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      <a name="CHAPTER_IV" id="CHAPTER_IV"></a>CHAPTER IV.
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      EMILIUS.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <span class="smcap">One</span> whose most intense conviction was faith in
+      the goodness of all things and creatures as they are first produced by
+      nature, and so long as they remain unsophisticated by the hand and purpose
+      of man, was in some degree bound to show a way by which this evil process
+      of sophistication might be brought to the lowest possible point, and the
+      best of all natural creatures kept as near as possible to his high
+      original. Rousseau, it is true, held in a sense of his own the doctrine of
+      the fall of man. That doctrine, however, has never made people any more
+      remiss in the search after a virtue, which if they ought to have regarded
+      it as hopeless according to strict logic, is still indispensable in actual
+      life. Rousseau's way of believing that man had fallen was so coloured at
+      once by that expansion of sanguine emotion which marked his century, and
+      by that necessity for repose in idyllic perfection of simplicity which
+      marked his own temperament, that enthusiasm for an imaginary human
+      creature effectually shut out the dogma of his fatal depravation. &quot;How
+      difficult a thing it is,&quot; Madame<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[ii.198]</a></span> d'Epinay once said to
+      him, &quot;to bring up a child.&quot; &quot;Assuredly it is,&quot;
+      answered Rousseau; &quot;because the father and mother are not made by
+      nature to bring it up, nor the child to be brought up.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor_273_273" id="FNanchor_273_273"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_273_273" class="fnanchor">[273]</a> This cynical speech
+      can only have been an accidental outbreak of spleen. It was a
+      contradiction to his one constant opinion that nature is all good and
+      bounteous, and that the inborn capacity of man for reaching true happiness
+      knows no stint.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In writing Emilius, he sat down to consider what man is, and what can be
+      made of him. Here, as in all the rest of his work, he only obeyed the
+      tendencies of his time in choosing a theme. An age touched by the spirit
+      of hope inevitably turns to the young; for with the young lies fulfilment.
+      Such epochs are ever pressing with the question, how is the future to be
+      shaped? Our answer depends on the theory of human disposition, and in
+      these epochs the theory is always optimistic. Rousseau was saved, as so
+      many thousands of men have been alike in conduct and speculation, by
+      inconsistency, and not shrinking from two mutually contradictory trains of
+      thought. Society is corrupt, and society is the work of man. Yet man, who
+      has engendered this corrupted birth, is good and whole. The strain in the
+      argument may be pardoned for the hopefulness of the conclusion. It brought
+      Rousseau into harmony with the eager effort of the time to pour young
+      character into finer mould, and made him the most powerful agent in giving
+      to such efforts both <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[ii.199]</a></span>fervour
+      and elevation. While others were content with the mere enunciation of
+      maxims and precepts, he breathed into them the spirit of life, and
+      enforced them with a vividness of faith that clothed education with the
+      augustness and unction of religion. The training of the young soul to
+      virtue was surrounded with something of the awful holiness of a sacrament;
+      and those who laboured in this sanctified field were exhorted to a
+      constancy of devotion, and were promised a fulness of recompense, that
+      raised them from the rank of drudges to a place of highest honour among
+      the ministers of nature.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Everybody at this time was thinking about education, partly perhaps on
+      account of the suppression of the Jesuits, the chief instructors of the
+      time, and a great many people were writing about it. The Abb&#233; de
+      Saint Pierre had had new ideas on education, as on all the greater
+      departments of human interest. Madame d'Epinay wrote considerations upon
+      the bringing up of the young.<a name="FNanchor_274_274"
+      id="FNanchor_274_274"></a><a href="#Footnote_274_274" class="fnanchor">[274]</a>
+      Madame de Grafigny did the same in a less grave shape.<a
+      name="FNanchor_275_275" id="FNanchor_275_275"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_275_275" class="fnanchor">[275]</a> She received letters
+      from the precociously sage Turgot, abounding in the same natural and
+      sensible precepts which ten years later were commended with more glowing
+      eloquence in the pages of Emilius.<a name="FNanchor_276_276"
+      id="FNanchor_276_276"></a><a href="#Footnote_276_276" class="fnanchor">[276]</a>
+      Grimm had an elaborate scheme for a treatise on education.<a
+      name="FNanchor_277_277" id="FNanchor_277_277"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_277_277" class="fnanchor">[277]</a> Helv&#233;tius
+      followed <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[ii.200]</a></span>his
+      exploration of the composition of the human mind, by a treatise on the
+      training proper for the intellectual and moral faculties. Education by
+      these and other writers was being conceived in a wider sense than had been
+      known to ages controlled by ecclesiastical collegians. It slowly came to
+      be thought of in connection with the family. The improvement of ideas upon
+      education was only one phase of that great general movement towards the
+      restoration of the family, which was so striking a spectacle in France
+      after the middle of the century. Education now came to comprehend the
+      whole system of the relations between parents and their children, from
+      earliest infancy to maturity. The direction of this wider feeling about
+      such relations tended strongly towards an increased closeness in them,
+      more intimacy, and a more continuous suffusion of tenderness and long
+      attachment. All this was part of the general revival of naturalism. People
+      began to reflect that nature was not likely to have designed infants to be
+      suckled by other women than their own mothers, nor that they should be
+      banished from the society of those who are most concerned in their
+      well-being, from the cheerful hearth and wise affectionate converse of
+      home, to the frigid discipline of colleges and convents and the unamiable
+      monition of strangers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then the rising rebellion against the church and its faith perhaps
+      contributed something towards a movement which, if it could not break the
+      religious monopoly of instruction, must at least introduce the<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[ii.201]</a></span>
+      parent as a competitor with the priestly instructor for influence over the
+      ideas, habits, and affections of his children. The rebellion was aimed
+      against the spirit as well as the manner of the established system. The
+      church had not fundamentally modified the significance of the dogma of the
+      fall and depravity of man; education was still conceived as a process of
+      eradication and suppression of the mystical old Adam. The new current
+      flowed in channels far away from that black folly of superstition. Men at
+      length ventured once more to look at one another with free and generous
+      gaze. The veil of the temple was rent, and the false mockeries of the
+      shrine of the Hebrew divinity made plain to scornful eyes. People ceased
+      to see one another as guilty victims cowering under a divine curse. They
+      stood erect in consciousness of manhood. The palsied conception of man,
+      with his large discourse of reason looking before and after, his lofty and
+      majestic patience in search for new forms of beauty and new secrets of
+      truth, his sense of the manifold sweetness and glory and awe of the
+      universe, above all, his infinite capacity of loyal pity and love for his
+      comrades in the great struggle, and his high sorrow for his own
+      wrong-doing,&#8212;the palsied and crushing conception of this excellent
+      and helpful being as a poor worm, writhing under the vindictive and
+      meaningless anger of an omnipotent tyrant in the large heavens, only to be
+      appeased by sacerdotal intervention, was fading back into those regions of
+      night, whence the depth of human misery and the obscura<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[ii.202]</a></span>tion
+      of human intelligence had once permitted its escape, to hang evilly over
+      the western world for a season. So vital a change in the point of view
+      quickly touched the theory and art of the upbringing of the young.
+      Education began to figure less as the suppression of the natural man, than
+      his strengthening and development; less as a process of rooting out tares,
+      more as the grateful tending of shoots abounding in promise of richness.
+      What had been the most drearily mechanical of duties, was transformed into
+      a task that surpassed all others in interest and hope. If man be born not
+      bad but good, under no curse, but rather the bestower and receiver of many
+      blessings, then the entire atmosphere of young life, in spite of the toil
+      and the peril, is made cheerful with the sunshine and warmth of the great
+      folded possibilities of excellence, happiness, and well-doing.
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      <b>I.</b>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Locke in education, as in metaphysics and in politics, was the pioneer of
+      French thought. In education there is less room for scientific
+      originality. The sage of a parish, provided only she began her trade with
+      an open and energetic mind, may here pass philosophers. Locke was nearly
+      as sage, as homely, as real, as one of these strenuous women. The honest
+      plainness of certain of his prescriptions for the preservation of physical
+      health perhaps keeps us somewhat too near the earth. His manner throughout
+      is marked<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[ii.203]</a></span>
+      by the stout wisdom of the practical teacher, who is content to assume
+      good sense in his hearers, and feels no necessity for kindling a blaze or
+      raising a tempest. He gives us a practical manual for producing a healthy,
+      instructed, upright, well-mannered young English squire, who shall be
+      rightly fitted to take his own life sensibly in hand, and procure from it
+      a fair amount of wholesome satisfaction both for himself and the people
+      with whom he is concerned. Locke's treatise is one of the most admirable
+      protests in the world against effeminacy and pedantry, and parents already
+      moved by grave desire to do their duty prudently to their sons, will
+      hardly find another book better suited to their ends. Besides Locke, we
+      must also count Charron, and the amazing educator of Gargantua, and
+      Montaigne before either, among the writers whom Rousseau had read, with
+      that profit and increase which attends the dropping of the good ideas of
+      other men into fertile minds.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is an immense class of natures, and those not the lowest, which the
+      connection of duty with mere prudence does not carry far enough. They only
+      stir when something has moved their feeling for the ideal, and raised the
+      mechanical offices of the narrow day into association with the
+      spaciousness and height of spiritual things. To these Rousseau came. For
+      both the tenour and the wording of the most striking precepts of the
+      Emilius, he owes much to Locke. But what was so realistic in him becomes
+      blended in Rousseau with all the power and richness and beauty<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[ii.204]</a></span> of an
+      ideal that can move the most generous parts of human character. The child
+      is treated as the miniature of humanity; it thus touches the whole sphere
+      of our sympathies, warms our curiosity as to the composition of man's
+      nature, and becomes the very eye and centre of moral and social
+      aspirations.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Accordingly Rousseau almost at once begins by elaborating his conception
+      of the kind of human creature which it is worth while to take the trouble
+      to rear, and the only kind which pure nature will help you in perfecting.
+      Hence Emilius, besides being a manual for parents, contains the lines of a
+      moral type of life and character for all others. The old thought of the
+      Discourses revives in full vigour. The artifices of society, the
+      perverting traditions of use, the feeble maxims of indolence, convention,
+      helpless dependence on the aid or the approval of others, are routed at
+      the first stroke. The old regimen of accumulated prejudice is replaced, in
+      dealing alike with body and soul, by the new system of liberty and nature.
+      In saying this we have already said that the exaltation of Spartan manners
+      which runs through Rousseau's other writings has vanished, and that every
+      trace of the much-vaunted military and public training has yielded before
+      the attractive thought of tender parents and a wisely ruled home. Public
+      instruction, we learn, can now no longer exist, because there is no longer
+      such a thing as country, and therefore there can no longer be citizens.
+      Only domestic education can now help us to rear the man according to
+      nature,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[ii.205]</a></span>&#8212;the
+      man who knows best among us how to bear the mingled good and ill of our
+      life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The artificial society of the time, with its aspirations after a return to
+      nature, was moved to the most energetic enthusiasm by Rousseau's famous
+      exhortations to mothers to nourish their own little ones. Morelly, as we
+      have seen, had already enjoined the adoption of this practice. So too had
+      Buffon. But Morelly's voice had no resonance, Buffon's reasons were purely
+      physical, and children were still sent out to nurse, until Rousseau's more
+      passionate moral entreaties awoke maternal conscience. &quot;Do these
+      tender mothers,&quot; he exclaimed, &quot;who, when they have got rid of
+      their infants, surrender themselves gaily to all the diversions of the
+      town, know what sort of usage the child in the village is receiving,
+      fastened in his swaddling band? At the least interruption that comes, they
+      hang him up by a nail like a bundle of rags, and there the poor creature
+      remains thus crucified, while the nurse goes about her affairs. Every
+      child found in this position had a face of purple; as the violent
+      compression of the chest would not allow the blood to circulate, it all
+      went to the head, and the victim was supposed to be very quiet, just
+      because it had not strength enough to cry out.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor_278_278" id="FNanchor_278_278"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_278_278" class="fnanchor">[278]</a> But in Rousseau, as in
+      Beethoven, a harsh and rugged passage is nearly always followed by some
+      piece of exquisite and touching melody. The force of these indignant
+      pictures was heightened and relieved by <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[ii.206]</a></span>moving appeal to all the
+      tender joys of maternal solicitude, and thoughts of all that this
+      solicitude could do for the happiness of the home, the father, and the
+      young. The attraction of domestic life is pronounced the best antidote to
+      the ill living of the time. The bustle of children, which you now think so
+      importunate, gradually becomes delightful; it brings father and mother
+      nearer to one another; and the lively animation of a family added to
+      domestic cares, makes the dearest occupation of the wife, and the sweetest
+      of all his amusements to the husband. If women will only once more become
+      mothers again, men will very soon become fathers and husbands.<a
+      name="FNanchor_279_279" id="FNanchor_279_279"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_279_279" class="fnanchor">[279]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The physical effect of this was not altogether wholesome. Rousseau's
+      eloquence excited women to an inordinate pitch of enthusiasm for the duty
+      of suckling their infants, but his contemptuous denunciation of the
+      gaieties of Paris could not extinguish the love of amusement.
+    </p>
+    <div class="poem">
+      <div class="stanza">
+        <span class="i0">Quid quod libelli Stoici inter sericos<br /></span>
+        <span class="i2">Jacere pulvillos amant?<br /></span>
+      </div>
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      So young mothers tried as well as they could to satisfy both desires, and
+      their babes were brought to them at all unseasonable hours, while they
+      were <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[ii.207]</a></span>full
+      of food and wine, or heated with dancing or play, and there received the
+      nurture which, but for Rousseau, they would have drawn in more salutary
+      sort from a healthy foster-mother in the country. This, however, was only
+      an incidental drawback to a movement which was in its main lines full of
+      excellent significance. The importance of giving freedom to the young
+      limbs, of accustoming the body to rudeness and vicissitude of climate, of
+      surrounding youth with light and cheerfulness and air, and even a tiny
+      detail such as the propriety of substituting for coral or ivory some soft
+      substance against which the growing teeth might press a way without
+      irritation, all these matters are handled with a fervid reality of
+      interest that gives to the tedium of the nursery a genuine touch of the
+      poetic. Swathings, bandages, leading-strings, are condemned with a warmth
+      like that with which the author had denounced comedy.<a
+      name="FNanchor_280_280" id="FNanchor_280_280"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_280_280" class="fnanchor">[280]</a> The city is held up to
+      indignant reprobation as the gulf of infant life, just as it had been in
+      his earlier pieces as the gulf of all the loftiest energies of the adult
+      life. Every child ought to be born and nursed in the country, and it would
+      be all the better if it remained in the country to the last day of its
+      existence. You must accustom it little by little to the sight of
+      disagreeable objects, such as toads and snakes; also in the same gradual
+      manner to the sound of alarming noises, beginning with <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[ii.208]</a></span>snapping
+      a cap in a pistol. If the infant cries from pain which you cannot remove,
+      make no attempt to soothe it; your caresses will not lessen the anguish of
+      its colic, while the child will remember what it has to do in order to be
+      coaxed and to get its own way. The nurse may amuse it by songs and lively
+      cries, but she is not to din useless words into its ears; the first
+      articulations that come to it should be few, easy, distinct, frequently
+      repeated, and only referring to objects which may be shown to the child.
+      &quot;Our unlucky facility in cheating ourselves with words that we do not
+      understand, begins earlier than we suppose.&quot; Let there be no haste in
+      inducing the child to speak articulately. The evil of precipitation in
+      this respect is not that children use and hear words without sense, but
+      that they use and hear them in a different sense from our own, without our
+      perceiving it. Mistakes of this sort, committed thus early, have an
+      influence, even after they are cured, over the turn of the mind for the
+      rest of the creature's life. Hence it is a good thing to keep a child's
+      vocabulary as limited as possible, lest it should have more words than
+      ideas, and should say more than it can possibly realise in thought.<a
+      name="FNanchor_281_281" id="FNanchor_281_281"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_281_281" class="fnanchor">[281]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In moral as in intellectual habits, the most perilous interval in human
+      life is that between birth and the age of twelve. The great secret is to
+      make the early education purely negative; a process of keeping the heart,
+      naturally so good, clear of vice, and the in<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[ii.209]</a></span>telligence, naturally so
+      true, clear of error. Take for first, second, and third precept, to follow
+      nature and leave her free to the performance of her own tasks. Until the
+      age of reason, there can be no idea of moral beings or social relations.
+      Therefore, says Rousseau, no moral discussion. Locke's maxim in favour of
+      constantly reasoning with children was a mistake. Of all the faculties of
+      man, reason, which is only a compound of the rest, is that which is latest
+      in development, and yet it is this which we are to use to develop those
+      which come earliest of all. Such a course is to begin at the end, and to
+      turn the finished work into an instrument. &quot;In speaking to children
+      in these early years a language which they do not comprehend, we accustom
+      them to cheat themselves with words, to criticise what is said to them, to
+      think themselves as wise as their masters, to become disputatious and
+      mutinous.&quot; If you forget that nature meant children to be children
+      before growing into men, you only force a fruit that has neither ripeness
+      nor savour, and must soon go bad; you will have youthful doctors and old
+      infants.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To all this, however, there is certainly another side which Rousseau was
+      too impetuous to see. Perfected reason is truly the tardiest of human
+      endowments, but it can never be perfected at all unless the process be
+      begun, and, within limits, the sooner the beginning is made, the earlier
+      will be the ripening. To know the grounds of right conduct is, we admit, a
+      different thing from feeling a disposition to practise<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[ii.210]</a></span> it. But nobody will deny
+      the expediency of an intelligent acquaintance with the reasons why one
+      sort of conduct is bad, and its opposite good, even if such an
+      acquaintance can never become a substitute for the spontaneous action of
+      thoroughly formed habit. For one thing, cases are constantly arising in a
+      man's life that demand the exercise of reason, to settle the special
+      application of principles which may have been acquired without knowledge
+      of their rational foundation. In such cases, which are the critical and
+      testing points of character, all depends upon the possession of a more or
+      less justly trained intelligence, and the habit of using it. Now, as we
+      have said, it is one of the great merits of the Emilius that it calls such
+      attention to the early age at which mental influences begin to operate.
+      Why should the gradual formation of the master habit of using the mind be
+      any exception?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Belief in the efficacy of preaching is the bane of educational systems.
+      Verbal lessons seem as if they ought to be so deeply effective, if only
+      the will and the throng of various motives which guide it, instantly
+      followed impression of a truth upon the intelligence. And they are,
+      moreover, so easily communicated, saving the parent a lifetime of anxious
+      painstaking in shaping his own character, after such a pattern as shall
+      silently draw all within its influence to pursuit of good and honourable
+      things. The most valuable of Rousseau's notions about education, though he
+      by no means consistently adhered to them, was<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[ii.211]</a></span> his urgent contempt for
+      this fatuous substitution of spoken injunctions and prohibitions, for the
+      deeper language of example, and the more living instruction of visible
+      circumstance. The vast improvements that have since taken place in the
+      theory and the art of education all over Europe, and of which he has the
+      honour of being the first and most widely influential promoter, may all be
+      traced to the spread of this wise principle, and its adoption in various
+      forms. The change in the up-bringing of the young exactly corresponds to
+      the change in the treatment of the insane. We may look back to the old
+      system of endless catechisms, apophthegms, moral fables, and the rest of
+      the paraphernalia of moral didactics, with the same horror with which we
+      regard the gags, strait-waistcoats, chains, and dark cells, of poor mad
+      people before the intervention of Pinel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is clear now to everybody who has any opinion on this most important of
+      all subjects, that spontaneousness is the first quality in connection with
+      right doing, which you can develop in the young, and this spontaneousness
+      of habit is best secured by associating it with the approval of those to
+      whom the child looks. Sympathy, in a word, is the true foundation from
+      which to build up the structure of good habit. The young should be led to
+      practise the elementary parts of right conduct from the desire to please,
+      because that is a securer basis than the conclusions of an embryo reason,
+      applied to the most complex conditions of action, while the grounds on
+      which<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[ii.212]</a></span>
+      action is justified or condemned may be made plain in the fulness of time,
+      when the understanding is better able to deal with the ideas and terms
+      essential to the matter. You have two aims to secure, each without
+      sacrifice of the other. These are, first, that the child shall grow up
+      with firm and promptly acting habit; second, that it shall retain respect
+      for reason and an open mind. The latter may be acquired in the less
+      immature years, but if the former be not acquired in the earlier times, a
+      man grows up with a drifting unsettledness of will, that makes his life
+      either vicious by quibbling sophistries, or helpless for want of ready
+      conclusions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The first idea which is to be given to a child, little as we might expect
+      such a doctrine from the author of the Second Discourse, is declared to be
+      that of property. And he can only acquire this idea by having something of
+      his own. But how are we to teach him the significance of a thing being
+      one's own? It is a prime rule to attempt to teach nothing by a verbal
+      lesson; all instruction ought to be left to experience.<a
+      name="FNanchor_282_282" id="FNanchor_282_282"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_282_282" class="fnanchor">[282]</a> Therefore you must
+      contrive some piece of experience which shall bring this notion of
+      property vividly into a child's mind; the following for instance. Emilius
+      is taken to a piece of garden; his instructor digs and dresses the ground
+      for him, and the boy takes possession by sowing some beans. &quot;We come
+      every day to water them, and see them rise out of the ground with
+      transports of joy. I add to this joy <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[ii.213]</a></span>by saying, This belongs
+      to you. Then explaining the term, I let him feel that he has put into the
+      ground this time, labour, trouble, his person in short; that there is in
+      this bit of ground something of himself which he may maintain against
+      every comer, as he might withdraw his own arm from the hand of another man
+      who would fain retain it in spite of him.&quot; One day Emilius comes to
+      his beloved garden, watering-pot in hand, and finds to his anguish and
+      despair that all the beans have been plucked up, that the ground has been
+      turned over, and that the spot is hardly recognisable. The gardener comes
+      up, and explains with much warmth that he had sown the seed of a precious
+      Maltese melon in that particular spot long before Emilius had come with
+      his trumpery beans, and that therefore it was his land; that nobody
+      touches the garden of his neighbour, in order that his own may remain
+      untouched; and that if Emilius wants a piece of garden, he must pay for it
+      by surrendering to the owner half the produce.<a name="FNanchor_283_283"
+      id="FNanchor_283_283"></a><a href="#Footnote_283_283" class="fnanchor">[283]</a>
+      Thus, says Rousseau, the boy sees how the notion of property naturally
+      goes back to the right of the first occupant as derived from labour. We
+      should have thought it less troublesome, as it is certainly more
+      important, to teach a boy the facts of property positively and
+      imperatively. This rather elaborate ascent to origins seems an exaggerated
+      form of that very vice of over-instructing the growing reason in
+      abstractions, which Rousseau had condemned so short a time before.<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[ii.214]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Again, there is the very strong objection to conveying lessons by
+      artificially contrived incidents, that children are nearly always
+      extremely acute in suspecting and discovering such contrivances. Yet
+      Rousseau recurs to them over and over again, evidently taking delight in
+      their ingenuity. Besides the illustration of the origin and significance
+      of property, there is the complex fancy in which a juggler is made to
+      combine instruction as to the properties of the magnet with certain severe
+      moral truths.<a name="FNanchor_284_284" id="FNanchor_284_284"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_284_284" class="fnanchor">[284]</a> The tutor interests
+      Emilius in astronomy and geography by a wonderful stratagem indeed. The
+      poor youth loses his way in a wood, is overpowered by hunger and
+      weariness, and then is led on by his cunning tutor to a series of
+      inferences from the position of the sun and so forth, which convince him
+      that his home is just over the hedge, where it is duly found to be.<a
+      name="FNanchor_285_285" id="FNanchor_285_285"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_285_285" class="fnanchor">[285]</a> Here, again, is the
+      way in which the instructor proposes to stir activity of limb in the young
+      Emilius. &quot;In walking with him of an afternoon, I used sometimes to
+      put in my pocket two cakes of a sort he particularly liked; we each of us
+      ate one. One day he perceived that I had three cakes; he could easily have
+      eaten six; he promptly despatches his own, to ask me for the third. Nay, I
+      said to him, I could well eat it myself, or we would divide it, but I
+      would rather see it made the prize of a running match between the two
+      little boys there.&quot; The little boys run their race, and the winner
+      devours the cake. This and <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_215"
+      id="Page_215">[ii.215]</a></span>subsequent repetitions of the performance
+      at first only amused Emilius, but he presently began to reflect, and
+      perceiving that he also had two legs, he began privately to try how fast
+      he could run. When he thought he was strong enough, he importuned his
+      tutor for the third cake, and on being refused, insisted on being allowed
+      to compete for it. The habit of taking exercise was not the only advantage
+      gained. The tutor resorted to a variety of further stratagems in order to
+      induce the boy to find out and practise visual compass, and so forth.<a
+      name="FNanchor_286_286" id="FNanchor_286_286"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_286_286" class="fnanchor">[286]</a> If we consider, as we
+      have said, first the readiness of children to suspect a stratagem wherever
+      instruction is concerned, and next their resentment on discovering
+      artifice of that kind, all this seems as little likely to be successful as
+      it is assuredly contrary to Rousseau's general doctrine of leaving
+      circumstances to lead.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In truth Rousseau's appreciation of the real nature of spontaneousness in
+      the processes of education was essentially inadequate, and that it was so,
+      arose from a no less inadequate conception of the right influence upon the
+      growing character, of the great principle of authority. His dread lest the
+      child should ever be conscious of the pressure of a will external to its
+      own, constituted a fundamental weakness of his system. The child, we are
+      told with endless repetition, ought always to be led to suppose that it is
+      following its own judgment or impulses, and has only them and their
+      consequences to consider. But Rousseau could <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[ii.216]</a></span>not help seeing, as he
+      meditated on the actual development of his Emilius, that to leave him thus
+      to the training of accident would necessarily end in many fatal gaps and
+      chasms. Yet the hand and will of the parent or the master could not be
+      allowed to appear. The only alternative, therefore, was the secret
+      preparation of artificial sets of circumstances, alike in work and in
+      amusement. Jean Paul was wiser than Jean Jacques. &quot;Let not the
+      teacher after the work also order and regulate the games. It is decidedly
+      better not to recognise or make any order in games, than to keep it up
+      with difficulty and send the zephyrets of pleasure through artistic
+      bellows and air-pumps to the little flowers.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor_287_287" id="FNanchor_287_287"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_287_287" class="fnanchor">[287]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The spontaneousness which we ought to seek, does not consist in promptly
+      willing this or that, independently of an authority imposed from without,
+      but in a self-acting desire to do what is right under all its various
+      conditions, including what the child finds pleasant to itself on the one
+      hand, and what it has good reason to suppose will be pleasant to its
+      parents on the other. &quot;You must never,&quot; Rousseau gravely warns
+      us, &quot;inflict punishment upon children as punishment; it should always
+      fall upon them as a natural consequence of their ill-behaviour.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor_288_288" id="FNanchor_288_288"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_288_288" class="fnanchor">[288]</a> But why should one of
+      the most closely following of all these consequences be dissembled or
+      carefully hidden from sight, namely, the effect of ill-behaviour upon the
+      contentment of the child's nearest friend? Why <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[ii.217]</a></span>are the effects of
+      conduct upon the actor's own physical well-being to be the only effects
+      honoured with the title of being natural? Surely, while we leave to the
+      young the widest freedom of choice, and even habitually invite them to
+      decide for themselves between two lines of conduct, we are bound
+      afterwards to state our approval or disapproval of their decision, so that
+      on the next occasion they may take this anger or pleasure in others into
+      proper account in their rough and hasty forecast, often less hasty than it
+      seems, of the consequences of what they are about to do. One of the most
+      important of educating influences is lost, if the young are not taught to
+      place the feelings of others in a front place, when they think in their
+      own simple way of what will happen to them from yielding to a given
+      impulse. Rousseau was quite right in insisting on practical experience of
+      consequences as the only secure foundation for self-acting habit; he was
+      fatally wrong in mutilating this experience by the exclusion from it of
+      the effects of perceiving, resisting, accepting, ignoring, all will and
+      authority from without. The great, and in many respects so admirable,
+      school of Rousseauite philanthropists, have always been feeble on this
+      side, alike in the treatment of the young by their instructors, and the
+      treatment of social offenders by a government.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Again, consider the large group of excellent qualities which are
+      associated with affectionate respect for a more fully informed authority.
+      In a world where necessity stands for so much, it is no inconsiderable<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[ii.218]</a></span> gain
+      to have learnt the lesson of docility on easy terms in our earliest days.
+      If in another sense the will of each individual is all-powerful over his
+      own destinies, it is best that this idea of firm purpose and a settled
+      energy that will not be denied, should grow up in the young soul in
+      connection with a riper wisdom and an ampler experience than its own; for
+      then, when the time for independent action comes, the force of the
+      association will continue. Finally, although none can be vicariously wise,
+      none sage by proxy, nor any pay for the probation of another, yet is it
+      not a puerile wastefulness to send forth the young all bare to the ordeal,
+      while the armour of old experience and tempered judgment hangs idle on the
+      wall? Surely it is thus by accumulation of instruction from generation to
+      generation, that the area of right conduct in the world is extended. Such
+      instruction must with youth be conveyed by military word of command as
+      often as by philosophical persuasion of its worth. Nor is the atmosphere
+      of command other than bracing, even to those who are commanded. If
+      education is to be mainly conducted by force of example, it is a dreadful
+      thing that the child is ever to have before its eyes as living type and
+      practical exemplar the pale figure of parents without passions, and
+      without a will as to the conduct of those who are dependent on them. Even
+      a slight excess of anger, impatience, and the spirit of command, would be
+      less demoralising to the impressionable character than the constant sight
+      of a man artificially impassive.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_219"
+      id="Page_219">[ii.219]</a></span> Rousseau is perpetually calling upon men
+      to try to lay aside their masks; yet the model instructor whom he has
+      created for us is to be the most artfully and elaborately masked of all
+      men; unless he happens to be naturally without blood and without
+      physiognomy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rousseau, then, while he put away the old methods which imprisoned the
+      young spirit in injunctions and over-solicitous monitions, yet did none
+      the less in his own scheme imprison it in a kind of hothouse, which with
+      its regulated temperature and artificially contrived access of light and
+      air, was in many respects as little the method of nature, that is to say
+      it gave as little play for the spontaneous working and growth of the
+      forces of nature in the youth's breast, as that regimen of the cloister
+      which he so profoundly abhorred. Partly this was the result of a
+      ludicrously shallow psychology. He repeats again and again that self-love
+      is the one quality in the youthful embryo of character, from which you
+      have to work. From this, he says, springs the desire of possessing
+      pleasure and avoiding pain, the great fulcrum on which the lever of
+      experience rests. Not only so, but from this same unslumbering quality of
+      self-love you have to develop regard for others. The child's first
+      affection for his nurse is a result of the fact that she serves his
+      comfort, and so down to his passion in later years for his mistress. Now
+      this is not the place for a discussion as to the ultimate atom of the
+      complex moral sentiments of men and women, nor for an examination of the
+      question whether the faculty of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_220"
+      id="Page_220">[ii.220]</a></span> sympathy has or has not an origin
+      independent of self-love. However that may be, no one will deny that
+      sympathy appears in good natures extremely early, and is susceptible of
+      rapid cultivation from the very first. Here is the only adequate key to
+      that education of the affections, from their rudimentary expansion in the
+      nursery, until they include the complete range of all the objects proper
+      to them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One secret of Rousseau's omission of this, the most important of all
+      educating agencies, from the earlier stages of the formation of character,
+      was the fact which is patent enough in every page, that he was not
+      animated by that singular tenderness and almost mystic affection for the
+      young, which breathes through the writings of some of his German
+      followers, of Richter above all others, and which reveals to those who are
+      sensible of it, the hold that may so easily be gained for all good
+      purposes upon the eager sympathy of the youthful spirit. The instructor of
+      Emilius speaks the words of a wise onlooker, sagely meditating on the
+      ideal man, rather than of a parent who is living the life of his child
+      through with him. Rousseau's interest in children, though perfectly
+      sincere, was still &#230;sthetic, moral, reasonable, rather than that pure
+      flood of full-hearted feeling for them, which is perhaps seldom stirred
+      except in those who have actually brought up children of their own. He
+      composed a vindication of his love for the young in an exquisite piece;<a
+      name="FNanchor_289_289" id="FNanchor_289_289"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_289_289" class="fnanchor">[289]</a> but it has none of the
+      yearnings of the bowels of tenderness.<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[ii.221]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      <b>II.</b>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Education being the art of preparing the young to grow into instruments of
+      happiness for themselves and others, a writer who undertakes to speak
+      about it must naturally have some conception of the kind of happiness at
+      which his art aims. We have seen enough of Rousseau's own life to know
+      what sort of ideal he would be likely to set up. It is a healthier
+      epicureanism, with enough stoicism to make happiness safe in case that
+      circumstances should frown. The man who has lived most is not he who has
+      counted most years, but he who has most felt life.<a
+      name="FNanchor_290_290" id="FNanchor_290_290"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_290_290" class="fnanchor">[290]</a> It is mere false
+      wisdom to throw ourselves incessantly out of ourselves, to count the
+      present for nothing, ever to pursue without ceasing a future which flees
+      in proportion as we advance, to try to transport ourselves from whence we
+      are not, to some place where we shall never be.<a name="FNanchor_291_291"
+      id="FNanchor_291_291"></a><a href="#Footnote_291_291" class="fnanchor">[291]</a>
+      He is happiest who suffers fewest pains, and he is most miserable who
+      feels fewest pleasures. Then we have a half stoical strain. The felicity
+      of man here below is only a negative state, to be measured by the more or
+      less of the ills he undergoes. It is in the disproportion between desires
+      and faculties that our misery consists. Happiness, therefore, lies not in
+      diminishing our desires, nor any more in extending our faculties, but in
+      diminishing the excess of desire over faculty, and in bringing power and
+      will into perfect balance.<a name="FNanchor_292_292" id="FNanchor_292_292"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_292_292" class="fnanchor">[292]</a> Excepting health,
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[ii.222]</a></span>strength,
+      respect for one's self, all the goods of this life reside in opinion;
+      excepting bodily pain and remorse of conscience, all our ills are in
+      imagination. Death is no evil; it is only made so by half-knowledge and
+      false wisdom. &quot;Live according to nature, be patient, and drive away
+      physicians; you will not avoid death, but you will only feel it once,
+      while they on the other hand would bring it daily before your troubled
+      imagination, and their false art, instead of prolonging your days, only
+      hinders you from enjoying them. Suffer, die, or recover; but above all
+      things live, live up to your last hour.&quot; It is foresight, constantly
+      carrying us out of ourselves, that is the true source of our miseries.<a
+      name="FNanchor_293_293" id="FNanchor_293_293"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_293_293" class="fnanchor">[293]</a> O man, confine thy
+      existence within thyself, and thou wilt cease to be miserable. Thy
+      liberty, thy power, reach exactly as far as thy natural forces, and no
+      further; all the rest is slavery and illusion. The only man who has his
+      own will is he who does not need in order to have it the arms of another
+      person at the end of his own.<a name="FNanchor_294_294"
+      id="FNanchor_294_294"></a><a href="#Footnote_294_294" class="fnanchor">[294]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The training that follows from this is obvious. The instructor has
+      carefully to distinguish true or natural need from the need which is only
+      fancied, or which only comes from superabundance of life. Emilius, who is
+      brought up in the country, has nothing in his room to distinguish it from
+      that of a peasant.<a name="FNanchor_295_295" id="FNanchor_295_295"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_295_295" class="fnanchor">[295]</a> If he is taken to a
+      luxurious banquet, he is bidden, instead of heedlessly enjoying it, to
+      reflect austerely how many hundreds or thousands of hands <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[ii.223]</a></span>have
+      been employed in preparing it.<a name="FNanchor_296_296"
+      id="FNanchor_296_296"></a><a href="#Footnote_296_296" class="fnanchor">[296]</a>
+      His preference for gay colours in his clothes is to be consulted, because
+      this is natural and becoming to his age, but the moment he prefers a stuff
+      merely because it is rich, behold a sophisticated creature.<a
+      name="FNanchor_297_297" id="FNanchor_297_297"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_297_297" class="fnanchor">[297]</a> The curse of the world
+      is inequality, and inequality springs from the multitude of wants, which
+      cause us to be so much the more dependent. What makes man essentially good
+      is to have few wants, and to abstain from comparing himself with others;
+      what makes him essentially bad, is to have many wants, and to cling much
+      to opinion.<a name="FNanchor_298_298" id="FNanchor_298_298"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_298_298" class="fnanchor">[298]</a> Hence, although
+      Emilius happened to have both wealth and good birth, he is not brought up
+      to be a gentleman, with the prejudices and helplessness and selfishness
+      too naturally associated with that abused name.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This cardinal doctrine of limitation of desire, with its corollary of
+      self-sufficience, contains in itself the great maxim that Emilius and
+      every one else must learn some trade. To work is an indispensable duty in
+      the social man. Rich or poor, powerful or weak, every idle citizen is a
+      knave. And every boy must learn a real trade, a trade with his hands. It
+      is not so much a matter of learning a craft for the sake of knowing one,
+      as for the sake of conquering the prejudices which despise it. Labour for
+      glory, if you have not to labour from necessity. Lower yourself to the
+      condition of the artisan, so as to be above your own. In order to reign in
+      opinion, begin by reigning over <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_224"
+      id="Page_224">[ii.224]</a></span>it. All things well considered, the trade
+      most to be preferred is that of carpenter; it is clean, useful, and
+      capable of being carried on in the house; it demands address and diligence
+      in the workman, and though the form of the work is determined by utility,
+      still elegance and taste are not excluded.<a name="FNanchor_299_299"
+      id="FNanchor_299_299"></a><a href="#Footnote_299_299" class="fnanchor">[299]</a>
+      There are few prettier pictures than that where Sophie enters the
+      workshop, and sees in amazement her young lover at the other end, in his
+      white shirt-sleeves, his hair loosely fastened back, with a chisel in one
+      hand and a mallet in the other, too intent upon his work to perceive even
+      the approach of his mistress.<a name="FNanchor_300_300"
+      id="FNanchor_300_300"></a><a href="#Footnote_300_300" class="fnanchor">[300]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When the revolution came, and princes and nobles wandered in indigent
+      exile, the disciples of Rousseau pointed in unkind triumph to the
+      advantage these unfortunate wretches would have had if they had not been
+      too puffed up with the vanity of feudalism to follow the prudent example
+      of Emilius in learning a craft. That Rousseau should have laid so much
+      stress on the vicissitudes of fortune, which might cause even a king to be
+      grateful one day that he had a trade at the end of his arms, is sometimes
+      quoted as a proof of his foresight of troublous times. This, however, goes
+      too far, because, apart from the instances of such vicissitudes among the
+      ancients, the King of Syracuse keeping school at Corinth, or Alexander,
+      son of Perseus, becoming a Roman scrivener, he actually saw Charles
+      Edward, the Stuart pretender, wandering from court to court in search of
+      succour <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[ii.225]</a></span>and
+      receiving only rebuffs; and he may well have known that after the troubles
+      of 1738 a considerable number of the oligarchs of his native Geneva had
+      gone into exile, rather than endure the humiliation of their party.<a
+      name="FNanchor_301_301" id="FNanchor_301_301"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_301_301" class="fnanchor">[301]</a> Besides all this, the
+      propriety of being able to earn one's bread by some kind of toil that
+      would be useful in even the simplest societies, flowed necessarily from
+      every part of his doctrine of the aims of life and the worth of character.
+      He did, however, say, &quot;We approach a state of crisis and an age of
+      revolutions,&quot; which proved true, but he added too much when he
+      pronounced it impossible that the great monarchies of Europe could last
+      long.<a name="FNanchor_302_302" id="FNanchor_302_302"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_302_302" class="fnanchor">[302]</a> And it is certain that
+      the only one of the great monarchies which did actually fall would have
+      had a far better chance of surviving if Lewis XVI. had been as expert in
+      the trade of king as he was in that of making locks and bolts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[ii.226]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From this semi-stoical ideal there followed certain social notions, of
+      which Rousseau had the distinction of being the most powerful propagator.
+      As has so often been said, his contemporaries were willing to leave social
+      questions alone, provided only the government would suffer the free
+      expression of opinion in literature and science. Rousseau went deeper. His
+      moral conception of individual life and character contained in itself a
+      social conception, and he did not shrink from boldly developing it. The
+      rightly constituted man suffices for himself and is free from prejudices.
+      He has arms, and knows how to use them; he has few wants, and knows how to
+      satisfy them. Nurtured in the most absolute freedom, he can think of no
+      worse ill than servitude. He attaches himself to the beauty which perishes
+      not, limiting his desires to his condition, learning to lose whatever may
+      be taken away from him, to place himself above events, and to detach his
+      heart from loved objects without a pang.<a name="FNanchor_303_303"
+      id="FNanchor_303_303"></a><a href="#Footnote_303_303" class="fnanchor">[303]</a>
+      He pities miserable kings, who are the bondsmen of all that seems to obey
+      them; he pities false sages, who are fast bound in the chains of their
+      empty renown; he pities the silly rich, martyrs to their own ostentation.<a
+      name="FNanchor_304_304" id="FNanchor_304_304"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_304_304" class="fnanchor">[304]</a> All the sympathies of
+      such a man therefore naturally flow away from these, the great of the
+      earth, to those who lead the stoic's life perforce. &quot;It is the common
+      people who compose the human race; what is not the people is hardly worth
+      taking into account. Man is the same in all <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[ii.227]</a></span>ranks; that being so, the
+      ranks which are most numerous deserve most respect. Before one who
+      reflects, all civil distinctions vanish: he marks the same passions and
+      the same feelings in the clown as in the man covered with reputation; he
+      can only distinguish their speech, and a varnish more or less elaborately
+      laid on. Study people of this humble condition; you will perceive that
+      under another sort of language, they have as much intelligence as you, and
+      more good sense. Respect your species: reflect that it is essentially made
+      up of the collection of peoples; that if every king and every philosopher
+      were cut off from among them, they would scarcely be missed, and the world
+      would go none the worse.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_305_305"
+      id="FNanchor_305_305"></a><a href="#Footnote_305_305" class="fnanchor">[305]</a>
+      As it is, the universal spirit of the law in every country is invariably
+      to favour the strong against the weak, and him who has, against him who
+      has not. The many are sacrificed to the few. The specious names of justice
+      and subordination serve only as instruments for violence and arms for
+      iniquity. The ostentatious orders who pretend to be useful to the others,
+      are in truth only useful to themselves at the expense of the others.<a
+      name="FNanchor_306_306" id="FNanchor_306_306"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_306_306" class="fnanchor">[306]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[ii.228]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This was carrying on the work which had already been begun in the New Helo&#239;sa,
+      as we have seen, but in the Emilius it is pushed with a gravity and a
+      directness, that could not be imparted to the picture of a fanciful and
+      arbitrarily chosen situation. The only writer who has approached Rousseau,
+      so far as I know, in fulness and depth of expression in proclaiming the
+      sorrows and wrongs of the poor blind crowd, who painfully drag along the
+      car of triumphant civilisation with its handful of occupants, is the
+      author of the Book of the People. Lamennais even surpasses Rousseau in the
+      profundity of his pathos; his pictures of the life of hut and hovel are as
+      sincere and as touching; and there is in them, instead of the anger and
+      bitterness of the older author, righteous as that was, a certain heroism
+      of pity and devoted sublimity of complaint, which lift the soul up from
+      resentment into divine moods of compassion and resolve, and stir us like a
+      tale of noble action.<a name="FNanchor_307_307" id="FNanchor_307_307"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_307_307" class="fnanchor">[307]</a> It was <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[ii.229]</a></span>Rousseau,
+      however, who first sounded the note of which the religion that had once
+      been the champion and consoler of the common people, seemed long to have
+      lost even the tradition. Yet the teaching was not constructive, because
+      the ideal man was not made truly social. Emilius is brought up in
+      something of the isolation of the imaginary savage of the state of nature.
+      He marries, and then he and his wife seem only fitted to lead a life of
+      detachment from the interests of the world in which they are placed.
+      Social or political education, that is the training which character
+      receives from the medium in which it grows, is left out of account, and so
+      is the correlative process of preparation for the various conditions and
+      exigencies which belong to that medium, until it is too late to take its
+      natural place in character. Nothing can be clumsier than the way in which
+      Rousseau proposes to teach Emilius the existence and nature of his
+      relations with his fellows. And the reason of this was that he had never
+      himself in the course of his ruminations, willingly thought of Emilius as
+      being in a condition of active social relation, the citizen of a state.
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      <b>III.</b>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There appear to be three dominant states of mind, with groups of faculties
+      associated with each of them,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_230"
+      id="Page_230">[ii.230]</a></span> which it is the business of the
+      instructor firmly to establish in the character of the future man. The
+      first is a resolute and unflinching respect for Truth; for the
+      conclusions, that is to say, of the scientific reason, comprehending also
+      a constant anxiety to take all possible pains that such conclusions shall
+      be rightly drawn. Connected with this is the discipline of the whole range
+      of intellectual faculties, from the simple habit of correct observation,
+      down to the highly complex habit of weighing and testing the value of
+      evidence. This very important branch of early discipline, Rousseau for
+      reasons of his own which we have already often referred to, cared little
+      about, and he throws very little light upon it, beyond one or two
+      extremely sensible precepts of the negative kind, warning us against
+      beginning too soon and forcing an apparent progress too rapidly. The
+      second fundamental state in a rightly formed character is a deep feeling
+      for things of the spirit which are unknown and incommensurable; a sense of
+      awe, mystery, sublimity, and the fateful bounds of life at its beginning
+      and its end. Here is the Religious side, and what Rousseau has to say of
+      this we shall presently see. It is enough now to remark that Emilius was
+      never to hear the name of a God or supreme being until his reason was
+      fairly ripened. The third state, which is at least as difficult to bring
+      to healthy perfection as either of the other two, is a passion for
+      Justice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The little use which Rousseau made of this<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[ii.231]</a></span> momentous and
+      much-embracing word, which names the highest peak of social virtue, is a
+      very striking circumstance. The reason would seem to be that his sense of
+      the relations of men with one another was not virile enough to comprehend
+      the deep austerer lines which mark the brow of the benignant divinity of
+      Justice. In the one place in his writings where he speaks of justice
+      freely, he shows a narrowness of idea, which was perhaps as much due to
+      intellectual confusion as to lack of moral robustness. He says excellently
+      that &quot;love of the human race is nothing else in us but love of
+      justice,&quot; and that &quot;of all the virtues, justice is that which
+      contributes most to the common good of men.&quot; While enjoining the
+      discipline of pity as one of the noblest of sentiments, he warns us
+      against letting it degenerate into weakness, and insists that we should
+      only surrender ourselves to it when it accords with justice.<a
+      name="FNanchor_308_308" id="FNanchor_308_308"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_308_308" class="fnanchor">[308]</a> But that is all. What
+      constitutes justice, what is its standard, what its source, what its
+      sanction, whence the extraordinary holiness with which its name has come
+      to be invested among the most highly civilised societies of men, we are
+      never told, nor do we ever see that our teacher had seen the possibility
+      of such questions being asked. If they had been propounded to him, he
+      would, it is most likely, have fallen back upon the convenient mystery of
+      the natural law. This was the current phrase of that time, and it was
+      meant to embody a hypothetical experience of perfect human relations in
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[ii.232]</a></span>an
+      expression of the widest generality. If so, this would have to be
+      impressed upon the mind of Emilius in the same way as other mysteries. As
+      a matter of fact, Emilius was led through pity up to humanity, or
+      sociality in an imperfect signification, and there he was left without a
+      further guide to define the marks of truly social conduct.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This imperfection was a necessity, inseparable from Rousseau's tenacity in
+      keeping society in the background of the picture of life which he opened
+      to his pupil. He said, indeed, &quot;We must study society by men, and men
+      by society; those who would treat politics and morality apart will never
+      understand anything about either one or the other.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor_309_309" id="FNanchor_309_309"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_309_309" class="fnanchor">[309]</a> This is profoundly
+      true, but we hardly see in the morality which is designed for Emilius the
+      traces of political elements. Yet without some gradually unfolded
+      presentation of society as a whole, it is scarcely possible to implant the
+      idea of justice with any hope of large fertility. You may begin at a very
+      early time to develop, even from the primitive quality of self-love, a
+      notion of equity and a respect for it, but the vast conception of social
+      justice can only find room in a character that has been made spacious by
+      habitual contemplation of the height and breadth and close compactedness
+      of the fabric of the relations that bind man to man, and of the share,
+      integral or infinitesimally fractional, that each has in the happiness or
+      woe of other souls. And this contemplation should <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[ii.233]</a></span>begin when we prepare the
+      foundation of all the other maturer habits. Youth can hardly recognise too
+      soon the enormous unresting machine which bears us ceaselessly along,
+      because we can hardly learn too soon that its force and direction depend
+      on the play of human motives, of which our own for good or evil form an
+      inevitable part when the ripe years come. To one reared with the narrow
+      care devoted to Emilius, or with the capricious negligence in which the
+      majority are left to grow to manhood, the society into which they are
+      thrown is a mere moral wilderness. They are to make such way through it as
+      they can, with egotism for their only trusty instrument. This egotism may
+      either be a bludgeon, as with the most part, or it may be a delicately
+      adjusted and fastidiously decorated compass, as with an Emilius. In either
+      case is no perception that the gross outer contact of men with another is
+      transformed by worthiness of common aim and loyal faith in common
+      excellences, into a thing beautiful and generous. It is our business to
+      fix and root the habit of thinking of that <i>moral</i> union, into which,
+      as Kant has so admirably expressed it, the <i>pathological</i> necessities
+      of situation that first compelled social concert, have been gradually
+      transmuted. Instead of this, it is exactly the primitive pathological
+      conditions that a narrow theory of education brings first into prominence;
+      as if knowledge of origins were indispensable to a right attachment to the
+      transformed conditions of a maturer system.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It has been said that Rousseau founds all morality<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[ii.234]</a></span> upon personal interest,
+      perhaps even more specially than Helv&#233;tius himself. The accusation is
+      just. Emilius will enter adult life without the germs of that social
+      conscience, which animates a man with all the associations of duty and
+      right, of gratitude for the past and resolute hope for the future, in face
+      of the great body of which he finds himself a part. &quot;I observe,&quot;
+      says Rousseau, &quot;that in the modern ages men have no hold upon one
+      another save through force and interest, while the ancients on the other
+      hand acted much more by persuasion and the affections of the soul.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor_310_310" id="FNanchor_310_310"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_310_310" class="fnanchor">[310]</a> The reason was that
+      with the ancients, supposing him to mean the Greeks and Romans, the social
+      conscience was so much wider in its scope than the comparatively narrow
+      fragment of duty which is supposed to come under the sacred power of
+      conscience in the more complex and less closely contained organisation of
+      a modern state. The neighbours to whom a man owed duty in those times
+      comprehended all the members of his state. The neighbours of the modern
+      preacher of duty are either the few persons with whom each of us is
+      brought into actual and palpable contact, or else the whole multitude of
+      dwellers on the earth,&#8212;a conception that for many ages to come will
+      remain with the majority of men and women too vague to exert an energetic
+      and concentrating influence upon action, and will lead them no further
+      than an uncoloured and nerveless cosmopolitanism.<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[ii.235]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What the young need to have taught to them in this too little cultivated
+      region, is that they are born not mere atoms floating independent and
+      apart for a season through a terraqueous medium, and sucking up as much
+      more than their share of nourishment as they can seize; nor citizens of
+      the world with no more definite duty than to keep their feelings towards
+      all their fellows in a steady simmer of bland complacency; but soldiers in
+      a host, citizens of a polity whose boundaries are not set down in maps,
+      members of a church the handwriting of whose ordinances is not in the
+      hieroglyphs of idle mystery, nor its hope and recompense in the lands
+      beyond death. They need to be taught that they owe a share of their
+      energies to the great struggle which is in ceaseless progress in all
+      societies in an endless variety of forms, between new truth and old
+      prejudice, between love of self or class and solicitous passion for
+      justice, between the obstructive indolence and inertia of the many and the
+      generous mental activity of the few. This is the sphere and definition of
+      the social conscience. The good causes of enlightenment and justice in all
+      lands,&#8212;here is the church militant in which we should early seek to
+      enrol the young, and the true state to which they should be taught that
+      they owe the duties of active and arduous citizenship. These are the
+      struggles with which the modern instructor should associate those virtues
+      of fortitude, tenacity, silent patience, outspoken energy, readiness to
+      assert ourselves and readiness to efface ourselves, willingness to<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[ii.236]</a></span>
+      suffer and resolution to inflict suffering, which men of old knew how to
+      show for their gods or their sovereign. But the ideal of Emilius was an
+      ideal of quietism; to possess his own soul in patience, with a suppressed
+      intelligence, a suppressed sociality, without a single spark of generous
+      emulation in the courses of strong-fibred virtue, or a single thrill of
+      heroical pursuit after so much as one great forlorn cause.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &quot;If it once comes to him, in reading these parallels of the famous
+      ancients, to desire to be another rather than himself, were this other
+      Socrates, were he Cato, you have missed the mark; he who begins to make
+      himself a stranger to himself, is not long before he forgets himself
+      altogether.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_311_311" id="FNanchor_311_311"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_311_311" class="fnanchor">[311]</a> But if a man only
+      nurses the conception of his own personality, for the sake of keeping his
+      own peace and self-contained comfort at a glow of easy warmth, assuredly
+      the best thing that can befall him is that he should perish, lest his
+      example should infect others with the same base contagion. Excessive
+      personality when militant is often wholesome, excessive personality that
+      only hugs itself is under all circumstances chief among unclean things.
+      Thus even Rousseau's finest monument of moral enthusiasm is fatally
+      tarnished by the cold damp breath of isolation, and the very book which
+      contained so many elements of new life for a state, was at bottom the
+      apotheosis of social despair.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_237"
+      id="Page_237">[ii.237]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      <b>IV.</b>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The great agent in fostering the rise to vigour and uprightness of a
+      social conscience, apart from the yet more powerful instrument of a strong
+      and energetic public spirit at work around the growing character, must be
+      found in the study of history rightly directed with a view to this end. It
+      is here, in observing the long processes of time and appreciating the
+      slowly accumulating sum of endeavour, that the mind gradually comes to
+      read the great lessons how close is the bond that links men together. It
+      is here that he gradually begins to acquire the habit of considering what
+      are the conditions of wise social activity, its limits, its objects, its
+      rewards, what is the capacity of collective achievement, and of what sort
+      is the significance and purport of the little span of time that cuts off
+      the yesterday of our society from its to-morrow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rousseau had very rightly forbidden the teaching of history to young
+      children, on the ground that the essence of history lies in the moral
+      relations between the bare facts which it recounts, and that the terms and
+      ideas of these relations are wholly beyond the intellectual grasp of the
+      very young.<a name="FNanchor_312_312" id="FNanchor_312_312"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_312_312" class="fnanchor">[312]</a> He might have based
+      his objections equally well upon the impossibility of little children
+      knowing the meaning of the multitude of descriptive terms which make up a
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[ii.238]</a></span>historical
+      manual, or realising the relations between events in bare point of time,
+      although childhood may perhaps be a convenient period for some mechanical
+      acquisition of dates. According to Rousseau, history was to appear very
+      late in the educational course, when the youth was almost ready to enter
+      the world. It was to be the finishing study, from which he should learn
+      not sociality either in its scientific or its higher moral sense, but the
+      composition of the heart of man, in a safer way than through actual
+      intercourse with society. Society might make him either cynical or
+      frivolous. History would bring him the same information, without
+      subjecting him to the same perils. In society you only hear the words of
+      men; to know man you must observe his actions, and actions are only
+      unveiled in history.<a name="FNanchor_313_313" id="FNanchor_313_313"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_313_313" class="fnanchor">[313]</a> This view is hardly
+      worth discussing. The subject of history is not the heart of man, but the
+      movements of societies. Moreover, the oracles of history are entirely dumb
+      to one who seeks from them maxims for the shaping of daily conduct, or
+      living instruction as to the motives, aims, caprices, capacities of
+      self-restraint, self-sacrifice, of those with whom the occasions of life
+      bring us into contact.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is true that at the close of the other part of his education, Emilius
+      was to travel and there find the comment upon the completed circle of his
+      studies.<a name="FNanchor_314_314" id="FNanchor_314_314"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_314_314" class="fnanchor">[314]</a> But excellent as
+      travel is for some of the best of those who have the opportunity, still
+      for many it is value<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[ii.239]</a></span>less
+      for lack of the faculty of curiosity. For the great majority it is
+      impossible for lack of opportunity. To trust so much as Rousseau did to
+      the effect of travelling, is to leave a large chasm in education
+      unbridged.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is interesting, however, to notice some of Rousseau's notions about
+      history as an instrument for conveying moral instruction, a few of them
+      are so good, others are so characteristically narrow. &quot;The worst
+      historians for a young man,&quot; he says, &quot;are those who judge. The
+      facts, the facts; then let him judge for himself. If the author's judgment
+      is for ever guiding him, he is only seeing with the eye of another, and as
+      soon as this eye fails him, he sees nothing.&quot; Modern history is not
+      fit for instruction, not only because it has no physiognomy, all our men
+      being exactly like one another, but because our historians, intent on
+      brilliance above all other things, think of nothing so much as painting
+      highly coloured portraits, which for the most part represent nothing at
+      all.<a name="FNanchor_315_315" id="FNanchor_315_315"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_315_315" class="fnanchor">[315]</a> Of course such a
+      judgment as this implies an ignorance alike of the ends and meaning of
+      history, which, considering that he was living in the midst of a singular
+      revival of historical study, is not easy to pardon. If we are to look only
+      to perfection of form and arrangement, it may have been right for one
+      living in the middle of the last century to place the ancients in the
+      first rank without competitors. But the author of the Discourse upon
+      literature and the arts might have been expected to look beyond com<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[ii.240]</a></span>position,
+      and the contemporary of Voltaire's <i>Essai sur les Moeurs</i> (1754-1757)
+      might have been expected to know that the profitable experience of the
+      human race did not close with the fall of the Roman republic. Among the
+      ancient historians, he counted Thucydides to be the true model, because he
+      reports facts without judging, and omits none of the circumstances proper
+      for enabling us to judge of them for ourselves&#8212;though how Rousseau
+      knew what facts Thucydides has omitted, I am unable to divine. Then come C&#230;sar's
+      Commentaries and Xenophon's Retreat of the Ten Thousand. The good
+      Herodotus, without portraits and without maxims, but abounding in details
+      the most capable of interesting and pleasing, would perhaps be the best of
+      historians, if only these details did not so often degenerate into
+      puerilities. Livy is unsuited to youth, because he is political and a
+      rhetorician. Tacitus is the book of the old; you must have learnt the art
+      of reading facts, before you can be trusted with maxims.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The drawback of histories such as those of Thucydides and C&#230;sar,
+      Rousseau admits to be that they dwell almost entirely on war, leaving out
+      the true life of nations, which belongs to the unwritten chronicles of
+      peace. This leads him to the equally just reflection that historians while
+      recounting facts omit the gradual and progressive causes which led to
+      them. &quot;They often find in a battle lost or won the reason of a
+      revolution, which even before the battle was already inevitable. War
+      scarcely does more than bring into<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_241"
+      id="Page_241">[ii.241]</a></span> full light events determined by moral
+      causes, which historians can seldom penetrate.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor_316_316" id="FNanchor_316_316"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_316_316" class="fnanchor">[316]</a> A third complaint
+      against the study which he began by recommending as a proper introduction
+      to the knowledge of man, is that it does not present men but actions, or
+      at least men only in their parade costume and in certain chosen moments,
+      and he justly reproaches writers alike of history and biography, for
+      omitting those trifling strokes and homely anecdotes, which reveal the
+      true physiognomy of character. &quot;Remain then for ever, without bowels,
+      without nature; harden your hearts of cast iron in your trumpery decency,
+      and make yourselves despicable by force of dignity.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor_317_317" id="FNanchor_317_317"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_317_317" class="fnanchor">[317]</a> And so after all, by a
+      common stroke of impetuous inconsistency, he forsakes history, and falls
+      back upon the ancient biographies, because, all the low and familiar
+      details being banished from modern style, however true and characteristic,
+      men are as elaborately tricked out by our authors in their private lives
+      as they were tricked out upon the stage of the world.
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      <b>V.</b>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As women are from the constitution of things the educators of us all at
+      the most critical periods, and mainly of their own sex from the beginning
+      to the end of education, the writer of the most imperfect treatise on this
+      world-interesting subject can hardly avoid saying something on the
+      upbringing of women. <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[ii.242]</a></span>Such
+      a writer may start from one of three points of view; he may consider the
+      woman as destined to be a wife, or a mother, or a human being; as the
+      companion of a man, as the rearer of the young, or as an independent
+      personality, endowed with gifts, talents, possibilities, in less or
+      greater number, and capable, as in the case of men, of being trained to
+      the worst or the best uses. Of course to every one who looks into life,
+      each of these three ideals melts into the other two, and we can only think
+      of them effectively when they are blended. Yet we test a writer's
+      appreciation of the conditions of human progress by observing the function
+      which he makes most prominent. A man's whole thought of the worth and aim
+      of womanhood depends upon the generosity and elevation of the ideal which
+      is silently present in his mind, while he is specially meditating the
+      relations of woman as wife or as mother. Unless he is really capable of
+      thinking of them as human beings, independently of these two functions, he
+      is sure to have comparatively mean notions in connection with them in
+      respect of the functions which he makes paramount.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rousseau breaks down here. The unsparing fashion in which he developed the
+      theory of individualism in the case of Emilius, and insisted on man being
+      allowed to grow into the man of nature, instead of the man of art and
+      manufacture, might have led us to expect that when he came to speak of
+      women, he would suffer equity and logic to have their way, by giving
+      equally free room in the two halves of the<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[ii.243]</a></span> human race, for the
+      development of natural force and capacity. If, as he begins by saying, he
+      wishes to bring up Emilius, not to be a merchant nor a physician nor a
+      soldier nor to the practice of any other special calling, but to be first
+      and above all a man, why should not Sophie too be brought up above all to
+      be a human being, in whom the special qualifications of wifehood and
+      motherhood may be developed in their due order? Emilius is a man first, a
+      husband and a father afterwards and secondarily. How can Sophie be a
+      companion for him, and an instructor for their children, unless she
+      likewise has been left in the hands of nature, and had the same chances
+      permitted to her as were given to her predestined mate? Again, the
+      pictures of the New Helo&#239;sa would have led us to conceive the ideal
+      of womanly station not so much in the wife, as in the house-mother,
+      attached by esteem and sober affection to her husband, but having for her
+      chief functions to be the gentle guardian of her little ones, and the
+      mild, firm, and prudent administrator of a cheerful and well-ordered
+      household. In the last book of the Emilius, which treats of the education
+      of girls, education is reduced within the compass of an even narrower
+      ideal than this. We are confronted with the oriental conception of women.
+      Every principle that has been followed in the education of Emilius is
+      reversed in the education of women. Opinion, which is the tomb of virtue
+      among men, is among women its high throne. The whole education of women
+      ought to be relative to men; to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_244"
+      id="Page_244">[ii.244]</a></span> please them, to be useful to them, to
+      make themselves loved and honoured by them, to console them, to render
+      their lives agreeable and sweet to them,&#8212;these are the duties which
+      ought to be taught to women from their childhood. Every girl ought to have
+      the religion of her mother, and every wife that of her husband. Not being
+      in a condition to judge for themselves, they ought to receive the decision
+      of fathers and husbands as if it were that of the church. And since
+      authority is the rule of faith for women, it is not so much a matter of
+      explaining to them the reasons for belief, as for expounding clearly to
+      them what to believe. Although boys are not to hear of the idea of God
+      until they are fifteen, because they are not in a condition to apprehend
+      it, yet girls who are still less in a condition to apprehend it, are <i>therefore</i>
+      to have it imparted to them at an earlier age. Woman is created to give
+      way to man, and to suffer his injustice. Her empire is an empire of
+      gentleness, mildness, and complaisance. Her orders are caresses, and her
+      threats are tears. Girls must not only be made laborious and vigilant;
+      they must also very early be accustomed to being thwarted and kept in
+      restraint. This misfortune, if they feel it one, is inseparable from their
+      sex, and if ever they attempt to escape from it, they will only suffer
+      misfortunes still more cruel in consequence.<a name="FNanchor_318_318"
+      id="FNanchor_318_318"></a><a href="#Footnote_318_318" class="fnanchor">[318]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After a series of oriental and obscurantist propositions of this kind, it
+      is of little purpose to tell us that <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_245" id="Page_245">[ii.245]</a></span>women have more
+      intelligence and men more genius; that women observe, while men reason;
+      that men will philosophise better upon the human heart, while women will
+      be more skilful in reading it.<a name="FNanchor_319_319"
+      id="FNanchor_319_319"></a><a href="#Footnote_319_319" class="fnanchor">[319]</a>
+      And it is a mere mockery to end the matter by a fervid assurance, that in
+      spite of prejudices that have their origin in the manners of the time, the
+      enthusiasm for what is worthy and noble is no more foreign to women than
+      it is to men, and that there is nothing which under the guidance of nature
+      may not be obtained from them as well as from ourselves.<a
+      name="FNanchor_320_320" id="FNanchor_320_320"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_320_320" class="fnanchor">[320]</a> Finally there is a
+      complete surrender of the obscurantist position in such a sentence as
+      this: &quot;I only know for either sex two really distinct classes; one
+      the people who think, the other the people who do not think, and this
+      difference comes almost entirely from education. A man of the first of
+      these classes ought not to marry into the other; for the greatest charm of
+      companionship is wanting, when in spite of having a wife he is reduced to
+      think by himself. It is only a cultivated spirit that provides agreeable
+      commerce, and 'tis a cheerless thing for a father of a family who loves
+      his home, to be obliged to shut himself up within himself, and to have no
+      one about him who understands him. Besides, how is a woman who has no
+      habits of reflection to bring up her children?&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor_321_321" id="FNanchor_321_321"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_321_321" class="fnanchor">[321]</a> Nothing could be more
+      excellently urged. But how is a woman to have habits of reflection, when
+      she has been constantly brought up in habits of the closest mental
+      bondage, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">[ii.246]</a></span>trained
+      always to consider her first business to be the pleasing of some man, and
+      her instruments not reasonable persuasion but caressing and crying?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This pernicious nonsense was mainly due, like nearly all his most serious
+      errors, to Rousseau's want of a conception of improvement in human
+      affairs. If he had been filled with that conception as Turgot, Condorcet,
+      and others were, he would have been forced as they were, to meditate upon
+      changes in the education and the recognition accorded to women, as one of
+      the first conditions of improvement. For lack of this, he contributed
+      nothing to the most important branch of the subject that he had undertaken
+      to treat. He was always taunting the champions of reigning systems of
+      training for boys, with the vicious or feeble men whom he thought he saw
+      on every hand around him. The same kind of answer obviously meets the
+      current idea, which he adopted with a few idyllic decorations of his own,
+      of the type of the relations between men and women. That type practically
+      reduces marriage in ninety-nine cases out of every hundred to a dolorous
+      parody of a social partnership. It does more than any one other cause to
+      keep societies back, because it prevents one half of the members of a
+      society from cultivating all their natural energies. Thus it produces a
+      waste of helpful quality as immeasurable as it is deplorable, and besides
+      rearing these creatures of mutilated faculty to be the intellectually
+      demoralising companions of the remaining half of their own generation,
+      makes them the mothers and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_247"
+      id="Page_247">[ii.247]</a></span> the earliest and most influential
+      instructors of the whole of the generation that comes after.<a
+      name="FNanchor_322_322" id="FNanchor_322_322"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_322_322" class="fnanchor">[322]</a> Of course, if any one
+      believes that the existing arrangements of a western community are the
+      most successful that we can ever hope to bring into operation, we need not
+      complain of Rousseau. If not, then it is only reasonable to suppose that a
+      considerable portion of the change will be effected in the hitherto
+      neglected and subordinate half of the race. That reconstitution of the
+      family, which Rousseau and others among his contemporaries rightly sought
+      after as one of the most pressing needs of the time, was essentially
+      impossible, so long as the typical woman was the adornment of a
+      semi-philosophic seraglio, a sort of compromise between the frowzy ideal
+      of an English bourgeois and the impertinent ideal of a Parisian gallant.
+      Condorcet and others made a grievous mistake in defending the free
+      gratification of sensual passion, as one of the conditions of happiness
+      and making the most of our lives.<a name="FNanchor_323_323"
+      id="FNanchor_323_323"></a><a href="#Footnote_323_323" class="fnanchor">[323]</a>
+      But even this was not at bottom more fatal to the maintenance and order of
+      the family, than Rousseau's enervating notion of keeping women in strict
+      intellectual and moral subjection was fatal to the family as the true
+      school of high and equal companionship, and the fruitful seed-ground of
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">[ii.248]</a></span>wise
+      activities and new hopes for each fresh generation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This was one side of Rousseau's reactionary tendencies. Fortunately for
+      the revolution of thirty years later, which illustrated the gallery of
+      heroic women with some of its most splendid names, his power was in this
+      respect neutralised by other stronger tendencies in the general spirit of
+      the age. The aristocracy of sex was subjected to the same destructive
+      criticism as the aristocracy of birth. The same feeling for justice which
+      inspired the demand for freedom and equality of opportunity among men, led
+      to the demand for the same freedom and equality of opportunity between men
+      and women. All this was part of the energy of the time, which Rousseau
+      disliked with undisguised bitterness. It broke inconveniently in upon his
+      quietest visions. He had no conception, with his sensuous brooding
+      imagination, never wholly purged of grossness, of that high and pure type
+      of women whom French history so often produced in the seventeenth century,
+      and who were not wanting towards the close of the eighteenth, a type in
+      which devotion went with force, and austerity with sweetness, and divine
+      candour and transparent innocence with energetic loyalty and intellectual
+      uprightness and a firmly set will. Such thoughts were not for Rousseau, a
+      dreamer led by his senses. Perhaps they are for none of us any more. When
+      we turn to modern literature from the pages in which F&#233;nelon speaks
+      of the education of girls, who does not feel that the<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_249" id="Page_249">[ii.249]</a></span> world has lost a sacred
+      accent, as if some ineffable essence has passed out from our hearts?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The fifth book of Emilius is not a chapter on the education of women, but
+      an idyll. We have already seen the circumstances under which Rousseau
+      composed it, in a profound and delicious solitude, in the midst of woods
+      and streams, with the fragrance of the orange-flower poured around him,
+      and in continual ecstasy. As an idyll it is delicious; as a serious
+      contribution to the hardest of problems it is naught. The sequel, by a
+      stroke of matchless whimsicality, unless it be meant, as it perhaps may
+      have been, for a piece of deep tragic irony, is the best refutation that
+      Rousseau's most energetic adversary could have desired. The Sophie who has
+      been educated on the oriental principle, has presently to confess a
+      flagrant infidelity to the blameless Emilius, her lord.<a
+      name="FNanchor_324_324" id="FNanchor_324_324"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_324_324" class="fnanchor">[324]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      <b>VI.</b>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yet the sum of the merits of Emilius as a writing upon education is not to
+      be lightly counted. Its value lies, as has been said of the New Helo&#239;sa,
+      in the spirit which animates it and communicates itself with vivid force
+      to the reader. It is one of the seminal books in the history of
+      literature, and of such books the worth resides less in the parts than in
+      the whole. It touched the deeper things of character. It filled parents
+      with a sense of the dignity and moment of their task. It cleared away the
+      accumulation of <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">[ii.250]</a></span>clogging
+      prejudices and obscure inveterate usage, which made education one of the
+      dark formalistic arts. It admitted floods of light and air into the
+      tightly closed nurseries and schoolrooms. It effected the substitution of
+      growth for mechanism. A strong current of manliness, wholesomeness,
+      simplicity, self-reliance, was sent by it through Europe, while its
+      eloquence was the most powerful adjuration ever addressed to parental
+      affection to cherish the young life in all love and considerate
+      solicitude. It was the charter of youthful deliverance. The first
+      immediate effect of Emilius in France was mainly on the religious side. It
+      was the Christian religion that needed to be avenged, rather than
+      education that needed to be amended, and the press overflowed with replies
+      to that profession of faith which we shall consider in the next chapter.
+      Still there was also an immense quantity of educational books and
+      pamphlets, which is to be set down, first to the suppression of the
+      Jesuits, the great educating order, and the vacancy which they left; and
+      next to the impulse given by the Emilius to a movement from which the book
+      itself had originally been an outcome.<a name="FNanchor_325_325"
+      id="FNanchor_325_325"></a><a href="#Footnote_325_325" class="fnanchor">[325]</a>
+      But why try to state the influence of Emilius on France in this way? To
+      strike the account truly would be to write the history of the first French
+      Revolution.<a name="FNanchor_326_326" id="FNanchor_326_326"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_326_326" class="fnanchor">[326]</a> All mothers, as
+      Michelet <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">[ii.251]</a></span>says,
+      were big with Emilius. &quot;It is not without good reason that people
+      have noted the children born at this glorious moment, as animated by a
+      superior spirit, by a gift of flame and genius. It is the generation of
+      revolutionary Titans: the other generation not less hardy in science. It
+      is Danton, Vergniaud, Desmoulins; it is Amp&#232;re, La Place, Cuvier,
+      Geoffroy Saint Hilaire.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_327_327"
+      id="FNanchor_327_327"></a><a href="#Footnote_327_327" class="fnanchor">[327]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In Germany Emilius had great power. There it fell in with the
+      extraordinary movement towards naturalness and freedom of which we have
+      already spoken.<a name="FNanchor_328_328" id="FNanchor_328_328"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_328_328" class="fnanchor">[328]</a> Herder, whom some have
+      called the Rousseau of the Germans, wrote with enthusiasm to his then
+      beloved Caroline of the &quot;divine Emilius,&quot; and he never ceased to
+      speak of Rousseau as his inspirer and his master.<a name="FNanchor_329_329"
+      id="FNanchor_329_329"></a><a href="#Footnote_329_329" class="fnanchor">[329]</a>
+      Basedow (1723), that strange, restless, and most ill-regulated person, was
+      seized with an almost phrenetic enthusiasm for Rousseau's educational
+      theories, translated them into German, and repeated them in his works over
+      and over again with an incessant iteration. Lavater (1741-1801), who
+      differed from Basedow in being a fervent Christian of soft mystic faith,
+      was thrown into company with him in 1774, and grew equally eager with him
+      in the cause of reforming education in the Rousseauite sense.<a
+      name="FNanchor_330_330" id="FNanchor_330_330"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_330_330" class="fnanchor">[330]</a> <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_252" id="Page_252">[ii.252]</a></span>Pestalozzi (1746-1827),
+      the most systematic, popular, and permanently successful of all the
+      educational reformers, borrowed his spirit and his principles mainly from
+      the Emilius, though he gave larger extension and more intelligent
+      exactitude to their application. Jean Paul the Unique, in the preface to
+      his Levana, or Doctrine of Education (1806), one of the most excellent of
+      all books on the subject, declares that among previous works to which he
+      owes a debt, &quot;first and last he names Rousseau's Emilius; no
+      preceding work can be compared to his; in no previous work on education
+      was the ideal so richly combined with the actual,&quot; and so forth.<a
+      name="FNanchor_331_331" id="FNanchor_331_331"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_331_331" class="fnanchor">[331]</a> It was not merely a
+      Goethe, a Schiller, a Herder, whom Rousseau fired with new thoughts. The
+      smaller men, such as Fr. Jacobi, Heinse, Klinger, shared the same
+      inspiration. The worship of Rousseau penetrated all classes, and touched
+      every degree of intelligence.<a name="FNanchor_332_332"
+      id="FNanchor_332_332"></a><a href="#Footnote_332_332" class="fnanchor">[332]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In our own country Emilius was translated as soon as it appeared, and must
+      have been widely read, for a second version of the translation was called
+      for in a very short time. So far as a cursory survey gives <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">[ii.253]</a></span>one a
+      right to speak, its influence here in the field of education is not very
+      perceptible. That subject did not yet, nor for some time to come, excite
+      much active thought in England. Rousseau's speculations on society both in
+      the Emilius and elsewhere seem to have attracted more attention. Reference
+      has already been made to Paley.<a name="FNanchor_333_333"
+      id="FNanchor_333_333"></a><a href="#Footnote_333_333" class="fnanchor">[333]</a>
+      Adam Ferguson's celebrated Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767)
+      has many allusions, direct and indirect, to Rousseau.<a
+      name="FNanchor_334_334" id="FNanchor_334_334"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_334_334" class="fnanchor">[334]</a> Kames's Sketches of
+      the History of Man (1774) abounds still more copiously in references to
+      Emilius, sometimes to controvert its author, more often to cite him as an
+      authority worthy of respect, and Rousseau's crude notions about women are
+      cited with special acceptance.<a name="FNanchor_335_335"
+      id="FNanchor_335_335"></a><a href="#Footnote_335_335" class="fnanchor">[335]</a>
+      Cowper was probably thinking of the Savoyard Vicar when he wrote the
+      energetic lines in the Task, beginning &quot;Haste now, philosopher, and
+      set him free,&quot; scornfully defying the deist to rescue apostate man.<a
+      name="FNanchor_336_336" id="FNanchor_336_336"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_336_336" class="fnanchor">[336]</a> Nor should we omit
+      what was counted so important a book in its day as Godwin's Enquiry
+      concerning Political Justice (1793). It is perhaps more French in its
+      spirit than any other work of equal consequence in our literature of
+      politics, and in <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">[ii.254]</a></span>its
+      composition the author was avowedly a student of Rousseau, as well as of
+      the members of the materialistic school.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In fine we may add that Emilius was the first expression of that
+      democratic tendency in education, which political and other circumstances
+      gradually made general alike in England, France, and Germany; a tendency,
+      that is, to look on education as a process concerning others besides the
+      rich and the well-born. As has often been remarked, Ascham, Milton, Locke,
+      F&#233;nelon, busy themselves about the instruction of young gentlemen and
+      gentlewomen. The rest of the world are supposed to be sufficiently
+      provided for by the education of circumstance. Since the middle of the
+      eighteenth century this monopolising conception has vanished, along with
+      and through the same general agencies as the corresponding conception of
+      social monopoly. Rousseau enforced the production of a natural and
+      self-sufficing man as the object of education, and showed, or did his best
+      to show, the infinite capacity of the young for that simple and natural
+      cultivation. This easily and directly led people to reflect that such a
+      capacity was not confined to the children of the rich, nor the hope of
+      producing a natural and sufficing man narrowed to those who had every
+      external motive placed around them for being neither natural nor
+      self-sufficing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Voltaire pronounced Emilius a stupid romance, but admitted that it
+      contained fifty pages which he would have bound in morocco. These, we may
+      be sure, con<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">[ii.255]</a></span>cerned
+      religion; in truth it was the Savoyard Vicar's profession of faith which
+      stirred France far more than the upbringing of the natural man in things
+      temporal. Let us pass to that eloquent document which is inserted in the
+      middle of the Emilius, as the expression of the religious opinion that
+      best befits the man of nature&#8212;a document most hyperbolically counted
+      by some French enthusiasts for the spiritualist philosophy and the
+      religion of sentiment, as the noblest monument of the eighteenth century.
+    </p>
+    <div class="footnotes">
+      <h3>
+        FOOTNOTES:
+      </h3>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_273_273" id="Footnote_273_273"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_273_273"><span class="label">[273]</span></a> <i>M&#233;m.
+          de Mdme. d'Epinay</i>, ii. 276, 278.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_274_274" id="Footnote_274_274"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_274_274"><span class="label">[274]</span></a> <i>Lettres
+          &#224; mon Fils</i> (1758), and <i>Les Conversations d'Emilie</i>
+          (1783).
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_275_275" id="Footnote_275_275"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_275_275"><span class="label">[275]</span></a> <i>Lettres
+          P&#233;ruviennes.</i>
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_276_276" id="Footnote_276_276"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_276_276"><span class="label">[276]</span></a> <i>Oeuv.</i>,
+          ii. 785-794.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_277_277" id="Footnote_277_277"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_277_277"><span class="label">[277]</span></a> <i>Corr.
+          Lit.</i>, iii. 65.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_278_278" id="Footnote_278_278"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_278_278"><span class="label">[278]</span></a> <i>Emile</i>,
+          I. 27.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_279_279" id="Footnote_279_279"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_279_279"><span class="label">[279]</span></a> It is
+          interesting to recall a similar movement in the Roman society of the
+          second century of our era. See the advice of Favorinus to mothers, in
+          Aulus Gellius, xii. 1. M. Boissier, contrasting the solicitude of
+          Tacitus and Marcus Aurelius for the infant young with the brutality of
+          Cicero, remarks that in the time of Seneca men discussed in the
+          schools the educational theories of Rousseau's Emilius. (<i>La Relig.
+          Romaine</i>, ii. 202.)
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_280_280" id="Footnote_280_280"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_280_280"><span class="label">[280]</span></a> See also
+          his diatribe against whalebone and tight-lacing for girls, V. 27.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_281_281" id="Footnote_281_281"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_281_281"><span class="label">[281]</span></a> <i>Emile</i>,
+          I. 93, etc.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_282_282" id="Footnote_282_282"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_282_282"><span class="label">[282]</span></a> <i>Emile</i>,
+          II. 141.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_283_283" id="Footnote_283_283"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_283_283"><span class="label">[283]</span></a> <i>Emile</i>,
+          II. 156-160.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_284_284" id="Footnote_284_284"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_284_284"><span class="label">[284]</span></a> <i>Emile</i>,
+          III. 338-345.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_285_285" id="Footnote_285_285"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_285_285"><span class="label">[285]</span></a> III.
+          358, etc.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_286_286" id="Footnote_286_286"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_286_286"><span class="label">[286]</span></a> <i>Emile</i>,
+          II. 263-267.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_287_287" id="Footnote_287_287"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_287_287"><span class="label">[287]</span></a> <i>Levana</i>,
+          ch. iii. &#167; 54.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_288_288" id="Footnote_288_288"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_288_288"><span class="label">[288]</span></a> <i>Emile</i>,
+          II. 163.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_289_289" id="Footnote_289_289"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_289_289"><span class="label">[289]</span></a> The
+          Ninth Promenade (<i>R&#234;veries</i>, 309).
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_290_290" id="Footnote_290_290"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_290_290"><span class="label">[290]</span></a> <i>Emile</i>,
+          I. 23.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_291_291" id="Footnote_291_291"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_291_291"><span class="label">[291]</span></a> II. 109.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_292_292" id="Footnote_292_292"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_292_292"><span class="label">[292]</span></a> II. 111.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_293_293" id="Footnote_293_293"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_293_293"><span class="label">[293]</span></a> <i>Emile</i>,
+          II. 113-117.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_294_294" id="Footnote_294_294"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_294_294"><span class="label">[294]</span></a> II. 121.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_295_295" id="Footnote_295_295"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_295_295"><span class="label">[295]</span></a> II. 143.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_296_296" id="Footnote_296_296"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_296_296"><span class="label">[296]</span></a> <i>Emile</i>,
+          III. 382.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_297_297" id="Footnote_297_297"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_297_297"><span class="label">[297]</span></a> II. 227.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_298_298" id="Footnote_298_298"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_298_298"><span class="label">[298]</span></a> IV. 10.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_299_299" id="Footnote_299_299"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_299_299"><span class="label">[299]</span></a> <i>Emile</i>,
+          III. 394.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_300_300" id="Footnote_300_300"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_300_300"><span class="label">[300]</span></a> V. 199.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_301_301" id="Footnote_301_301"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_301_301"><span class="label">[301]</span></a> The
+          reader will not forget the famous supper-party of princes in <i>Candide</i>.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_302_302" id="Footnote_302_302"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_302_302"><span class="label">[302]</span></a> <i>Emile</i>,
+          III. 392, and note. A still more remarkable passage, as far as it
+          goes, is that in the <i>Confessions</i> (xi. 136):&#8212;&quot;The
+          disasters of an unsuccessful war, all of which came from the fault of
+          the government, the incredible disorder of the finances, the continual
+          dissensions of the administration, divided as it was among two or
+          three ministers at open war with one another, and who for the sake of
+          hurting one another dragged the kingdom into ruin; the general
+          discontent of the people, and of all the orders of the state; the
+          obstinacy of a wrong-headed woman, who, always sacrificing her better
+          judgment, if indeed she had any, to her tastes, dismissed the most
+          capable from office, to make room for her favourites ... all this
+          prospect of a coming break-up made me think of seeking shelter
+          elsewhere.&quot;
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_303_303" id="Footnote_303_303"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_303_303"><span class="label">[303]</span></a> <i>Emile</i>,
+          V. 220.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_304_304" id="Footnote_304_304"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_304_304"><span class="label">[304]</span></a> IV. 85.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_305_305" id="Footnote_305_305"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_305_305"><span class="label">[305]</span></a> <i>Emile</i>,
+          IV. 38, 39. Hence, we suppose, the famous reply to Lavoisier's request
+          that his life might be spared from the guillotine for a fortnight, in
+          order that he might complete some experiments, that the Republic has
+          no need of chemists.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_306_306" id="Footnote_306_306"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_306_306"><span class="label">[306]</span></a> IV. 65.
+          Jefferson, who was American minister in France from 1784 to 1789, and
+          absorbed a great many of the ideas then afloat, writes in words that
+          seem as if they were borrowed from Rousseau:&#8212;&quot;I am
+          convinced that those societies (as the Indians) which live without
+          government, enjoy in their general mass an infinitely greater degree
+          of happiness than those who live under European governments. Among the
+          former public opinion is in the state of law, and restrains morals as
+          powerfully as laws ever did anywhere. Among the latter, under pretence
+          of governing, they have divided their nation into two classes, wolves
+          and sheep. I do not exaggerate; this is a true picture of Europe.&quot;
+          Tucker's <i>Life of Jefferson</i>, i. 255.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_307_307" id="Footnote_307_307"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_307_307"><span class="label">[307]</span></a>
+          Lamennais was influenced by Rousseau throughout. In the <i>Essay on
+          Indifference</i> he often appeals to him as the vindicator of the
+          religious sentiment (<i>e.g.</i> i. 21, 52, iv. 375, etc. Ed. 1837).
+          The same influence is seen still more markedly in the <i>Words of a
+          Believer</i> (1835), when dogma had departed, and he was left with a
+          kind of dual deism, thus being less estranged from Rousseau than in
+          the first days (<i>e.g.</i> &#167; xix. &quot;Tous naissent &#233;gaux,&quot;
+          etc., &#167; xxi., etc.) The <i>Book of the People</i> is thoroughly
+          Rousseauite.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_308_308" id="Footnote_308_308"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_308_308"><span class="label">[308]</span></a> <i>Emile</i>,
+          IV. 105.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_309_309" id="Footnote_309_309"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_309_309"><span class="label">[309]</span></a> <i>Emile</i>,
+          IV. 63.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_310_310" id="Footnote_310_310"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_310_310"><span class="label">[310]</span></a> <i>Emile</i>,
+          IV. 273.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_311_311" id="Footnote_311_311"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_311_311"><span class="label">[311]</span></a> <i>Emile</i>,
+          IV. 83.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_312_312" id="Footnote_312_312"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_312_312"><span class="label">[312]</span></a> <i>Emile</i>,
+          II. 185. See the previous page for some equally prudent observations
+          on the folly of teaching geography to little children.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_313_313" id="Footnote_313_313"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_313_313"><span class="label">[313]</span></a> <i>Emile</i>,
+          IV. 68.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_314_314" id="Footnote_314_314"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_314_314"><span class="label">[314]</span></a> V. 231,
+          etc.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_315_315" id="Footnote_315_315"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_315_315"><span class="label">[315]</span></a> <i>Emile</i>,
+          IV. 71.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_316_316" id="Footnote_316_316"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_316_316"><span class="label">[316]</span></a> <i>Emile</i>,
+          IV. 73.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_317_317" id="Footnote_317_317"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_317_317"><span class="label">[317]</span></a> IV. 77.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_318_318" id="Footnote_318_318"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_318_318"><span class="label">[318]</span></a> <i>Emile</i>,
+          V. 22, 53, 54, 101, 128-132.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_319_319" id="Footnote_319_319"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_319_319"><span class="label">[319]</span></a> <i>Emile</i>,
+          V. 78.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_320_320" id="Footnote_320_320"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_320_320"><span class="label">[320]</span></a> V. 122.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_321_321" id="Footnote_321_321"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_321_321"><span class="label">[321]</span></a> V. 129,
+          130.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_322_322" id="Footnote_322_322"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_322_322"><span class="label">[322]</span></a> Well did
+          Jean Paul say, &quot;If we regard all life as an educational
+          institution, a circumnavigator of the world is less influenced by all
+          the nations he has seen than by his nurse.&quot;&#8212;<i>Levana.</i>
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_323_323" id="Footnote_323_323"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_323_323"><span class="label">[323]</span></a> <i>Tableau
+          des Progr&#232;s de l'Esprit Humain.</i> <i>Oeuv.</i>, vi. pp. 264,
+          523-526, and elsewhere. [Ed. 1847-1849.]
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_324_324" id="Footnote_324_324"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_324_324"><span class="label">[324]</span></a> <i>Emile
+          et Sophie</i>, i.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_325_325" id="Footnote_325_325"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_325_325"><span class="label">[325]</span></a> For an
+          account of some of these, see Grimm's <i>Corr. Lit.</i>, iii. 211,
+          252, 347, etc. Also <i>Corr. In&#233;d.</i>, p. 143.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_326_326" id="Footnote_326_326"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_326_326"><span class="label">[326]</span></a> For the
+          early date at which Rousseau's power began to meet recognition, see
+          D'Alembert to Voltaire, July 31, 1762.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_327_327" id="Footnote_327_327"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_327_327"><span class="label">[327]</span></a> <i>Louis
+          xv. et xvi.</i>, p. 226.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_328_328" id="Footnote_328_328"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_328_328"><span class="label">[328]</span></a> See
+          above, vol. ii. p. <a href="#Page_193">193</a>.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_329_329" id="Footnote_329_329"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_329_329"><span class="label">[329]</span></a> Hettner,
+          III. iii., 2, p. 27, <i>s.v.</i> Herder.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_330_330" id="Footnote_330_330"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_330_330"><span class="label">[330]</span></a> The
+          suggestion of the speculation with which Lavater's name is most
+          commonly associated, is to be found in the Emilius. &quot;It is
+          supposed that physiognomy is only a development of features already
+          marked by nature. For my part, I should think that besides this
+          development, the features of a man's countenance form themselves
+          insensibly and take their expression from the frequent and habitual
+          wearing into them of certain affections of the soul. These affections
+          mark themselves in the countenance, nothing is more certain; and when
+          they grow into habits, they must leave durable impressions upon it.&quot;
+          IV. 49, 50.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_331_331" id="Footnote_331_331"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_331_331"><span class="label">[331]</span></a> Author's
+          Preface, x.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_332_332" id="Footnote_332_332"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_332_332"><span class="label">[332]</span></a> See an
+          excellent page in M. Joret's <i>Herder</i>, 322.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_333_333" id="Footnote_333_333"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_333_333"><span class="label">[333]</span></a> See
+          above, vol. ii. p. <a href="#Page_191">191</a>.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_334_334" id="Footnote_334_334"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_334_334"><span class="label">[334]</span></a> <i>E.g.</i>
+          pp. 8, 198, 204, 205.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_335_335" id="Footnote_335_335"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_335_335"><span class="label">[335]</span></a> <i>E.g.</i>
+          Bk. I. &#167; 5, p. 279. &#167; 6, p. 406, 419, etc. (the portion
+          concerning the female sex).
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_336_336" id="Footnote_336_336"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_336_336"><span class="label">[336]</span></a> Vv.
+          670-703. We have already seen (above, vol. ii. p. 41, <i>n.</i>) that
+          Cowper had read Emilius, and the mocking reference to the Deist as
+          &quot;an Orpheus and omnipotent in song,&quot; coincides with
+          Rousseau's comparison of the Savoyard Vicar to &quot;the divine
+          Orpheus singing the first hymn&quot; (<i>Emile</i>, IV. 205).
+        </p>
+      </div>
+    </div>
+    <hr style="width: 65%;" />
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">[ii.256]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      <a name="CHAPTER_V" id="CHAPTER_V"></a>CHAPTER V.
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      THE SAVOYARD VICAR.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <span class="smcap">The</span> band of dogmatic atheists who met round
+      D'Holbach's dinner-table indulged a shallow and futile hope, if it was not
+      an ungenerous one, when they expected the immediate advent of a generation
+      with whom a humane and rational philosophy should displace, not merely the
+      superstitions which had grown around the Christian dogma, but every root
+      and fragment of theistic conception. A hope of this kind implied a
+      singularly random idea, alike of the hold which Christianity had taken of
+      the religious emotion in western Europe, and of the durableness of those
+      conditions in human character, to which some belief in a deity with a
+      greater or fewer number of good attributes brings solace and nourishment.
+      A movement like that of Christianity does not pass through a group of
+      societies, and then leave no trace behind. It springs from many other
+      sources besides that of adherence to the truth of its dogmas. The stream
+      of its influence must continue to flow long after adherence to the letter
+      has been confined to the least informed portions of a community. The<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">[ii.257]</a></span>
+      Encyclop&#230;dists knew that they had sapped religious dogma and shaken
+      ecclesiastical organisation. They forgot that religious sentiment on the
+      one hand, and habit of respect for authority on the other, were both of
+      them still left behind. They had convinced themselves by a host of
+      persuasive analogies that the universe is an automatic machine, and man
+      only an industrious particle in the stupendous whole; that a final cause
+      is not cognisable by our limited intelligence; and that to make emotion in
+      this or any other respect a test of objective truth and a ground of
+      positive belief, is to lower both truth and the reason which is its single
+      arbiter. They forgot that imagination is as active in man as his reason,
+      and that a craving for mental peace may become much stronger than passion
+      for demonstrated truth. Christianity had given to this craving in western
+      Europe a definite mould, which was not to be effaced in a day, and one or
+      two of its lines mark a permanent and noble acquisition to the highest
+      forces of human nature. There will have to be wrought a profounder and
+      more far-spreading modification than any which the French atheists could
+      effect, before all debilitating influences in the old creed can be
+      effaced, its elevating influences finally separated from them, and then
+      permanently preserved in more beneficent form and in an association less
+      questionable to the understanding.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Neither a purely negative nor a direct attack can ever suffice. There must
+      be a coincidence of many silently oppugnant forces, emotional, scientific,
+      and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">[ii.258]</a></span>
+      material. And, above all, there must be the slow steadfast growth of some
+      replacing faith, which shall retain all the elements of moral beauty that
+      once gave light to the old belief that has disappeared, and must still
+      possess a living force in the new.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Here we find the good side of a religious reaction such as that which
+      Rousseau led in the last century, and of which the Savoyard Vicar's
+      profession of faith was the famous symbol. Evil as this reaction was in
+      many respects, and especially in the check which it gave to the
+      application of positive methods and conceptions to the most important
+      group of our beliefs, yet it had what was the very signal merit under the
+      circumstances of the time, of keeping the religious emotions alive in
+      association with a tolerant, pure, lofty, and living set of articles of
+      faith, instead of feeding them on the dead superstitions which were at
+      that moment the only practical alternative. The deism of Rousseau could
+      not in any case have acquired the force of the corresponding religious
+      reaction in England, because the former never acquired a compact and
+      vigorous external organisation, as the latter did, especially in
+      Wesleyanism and Evangelicalism, the most remarkable of its developments.
+      In truth the vague, fluid, purely subjective character of deism
+      disqualifies it from forming the doctrinal basis of any great objective
+      and visible church, for it is at bottom the sublimation of individualism.
+      But in itself it was a far less retrogressive, as well as a far less
+      powerful, movement. It kept fewer of those dogmas which<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">[ii.259]</a></span>
+      gradual change of intellectual climate had reduced to the condition of
+      rank superstitions. It preserved some of its own, which a still further
+      extension of the same change is assuredly destined to reduce to the same
+      condition; but, nevertheless, along with them it cherished sentiments
+      which the world will never willingly let die.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The one cardinal service of the Christian doctrine, which is of course to
+      be distinguished from the services rendered to civilisation in early times
+      by the Christian church, has been the contribution to the active
+      intelligence of the west, of those moods of holiness, awe, reverence, and
+      silent worship of an Unseen not made with hands, which the Christianising
+      Jews first brought from the east. Of the fabric which four centuries ago
+      looked so stupendous and so enduring, with its magnificent whole and its
+      minutely reticulated parts of belief and practice, this gradual creation
+      of a new temperament in the religious imagination of Western Europe and
+      the countries that take their mental direction from her, is perhaps the
+      only portion that will remain distinctly visible, after all the rest has
+      sunk into the repose of histories of opinion. Whether this be the case or
+      not, the fact that these deeper moods are among the richest acquisitions
+      of human nature, will not be denied either by those who think that
+      Christianity associates them with objects destined permanently to awake
+      them in their loftiest form, or by others who believe that the deepest
+      moods of which man is capable, must<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_260"
+      id="Page_260">[ii.260]</a></span> ultimately ally themselves with
+      something still more purely spiritual than the anthropomorphised deities
+      of the falling church. And if so, then Rousseau's deism, while
+      intercepting the steady advance of the rationalistic assault and diverting
+      the current of renovating energy, still did something to keep alive in a
+      more or less worthy shape those parts of the slowly expiring system which
+      men have the best reasons for cherishing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Let us endeavour to characterise Rousseau's deism with as much precision
+      as it allows. It was a special and graceful form of a doctrine which,
+      though susceptible, alike in theory and in the practical history of
+      religious thought, of numberless wide varieties of significance, is
+      commonly designated by the name of deism, without qualification. People
+      constantly speak as if deism only came in with the eighteenth century. It
+      would be impossible to name any century since the twelfth, in which
+      distinct and abundant traces could not be found within the dominion of
+      Christianity of a belief in a supernatural power apart from the supposed
+      disclosure of it in a special revelation.<a name="FNanchor_337_337"
+      id="FNanchor_337_337"></a><a href="#Footnote_337_337" class="fnanchor">[337]</a>
+      A pr&#230;ter-christian deism, or the principle of natural religion, was
+      inevitably contained in the legal conception of a natural law, for how can
+      we dissociate the idea of law from the idea of a definite lawgiver? <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">[ii.261]</a></span>The
+      very scholastic disputations themselves, by the sharpness and subtlety
+      which they gave to the reasoning faculty, set men in search of novelties,
+      and these novelties were not always of a kind which orthodox views of the
+      Christian mysteries could have sanctioned. It has been said that religion
+      is at the cradle of every nation, and philosophy at its grave; it is at
+      least true that the cradle of philosophy is the open grave of religion.
+      Wherever there is argumentation, there is sure to be scepticism. When
+      people begin to reason, a shadow has already fallen across faith, though
+      the reasoners might have shrunk with horror from knowledge of the goal of
+      their work, and though centuries may elapse before the shadow deepens into
+      eclipse. But the church was strong and alert in the times when free
+      thought vainly tried to rear a dangerous head in Italy. With the
+      Protestant revolution came slowly a wider freedom, while the prolonged and
+      tempestuous discussion between the old church and the reformed bodies, as
+      well as the manifold variations among those bodies at strife with one
+      another, stimulated the growth of religious thought in many directions
+      that tended away from the exclusive pretensions of Christianity to be the
+      oracle of the divine Spirit. The same feeling which thrust aside the
+      sacerdotal interposition between the soul of man and its sovereign creator
+      and inspirer, gradually worked towards the dethronement of those mediators
+      other than sacerdotal, in whom the moral timidity of a dark and stricken
+      age<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">[ii.262]</a></span>
+      had once sought shade from the too dazzling brightness of the All-powerful
+      and the Everlasting. The assertion of the rights and powers of the
+      individual reason within the limits of the sacred documents, began in less
+      than a hundred years to grow into an assertion of the same rights and
+      powers beyond those limits. The rejection of tradition as a substitute for
+      independent judgment, in interpreting or supplementing the records of
+      revelation, gradually impaired the traditional authority both of the
+      records themselves, and of the central doctrines which all churches had in
+      one shape or another agreed to accept. The Trinitarian controversy of the
+      sixteenth century must have been a stealthy solvent. The deism of England
+      in the eighteenth century, which Voltaire was the prime agent in
+      introducing in its negative, colourless, and essentially futile shape into
+      his own country, had its main effect as a process of dissolution.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All this, however, down to the deistical movement which Rousseau found in
+      progress at Geneva in 1754,<a name="FNanchor_338_338" id="FNanchor_338_338"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_338_338" class="fnanchor">[338]</a> was distinctly the
+      outcome in a more or less marked way of a rationalising and philosophic
+      spirit, and not of the religious spirit. The sceptical side of it with
+      reference to revealed religion, predominated over the positive side of it
+      with reference to natural religion. The wild pantheism of which there were
+      one or two extraordinary outbursts during the latter part of the middle
+      ages, to mark the mystical influence which Platonic studies uncorrected
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">[ii.263]</a></span>by
+      science always exert over certain temperaments, had been full of
+      religiosity, such as it was. These had all passed away with a swift flash.
+      There were, indeed, mystics like the author of the immortal <i>De
+      Imitatione</i>, in whom the special qualities of Christian doctrine seem
+      to have grown pale in a brighter flood of devout aspiration towards the
+      perfections of a single Being. But this was not the deism with which
+      either Christianity on the one side, or atheism on the other, had ever had
+      to deal in France. Deism, in its formal acceptation, was either an idle
+      piece of vaporous sentimentality, or else it was the first intellectual
+      halting-place for spirits who had travelled out of the pale of the old
+      dogmatic Christianity, and lacked strength for the continuance of their
+      onward journey. In the latter case, it was only another name either for
+      the shrewd rough conviction of the man of the world, that his universe
+      could not well be imagined to go on without a sort of constitutional
+      monarch, reigning but not governing, keeping evil-doers in order by fear
+      of eternal punishment, and lending a sacred countenance to the
+      indispensable doctrines of property, the gradation of rank and station,
+      and the other moral foundations of the social structure. Or else it was a
+      name for a purely philosophic principle, not embraced with fervour as the
+      basis of a religion, but accepted with decorous satisfaction as the
+      alternative to a religion; not seized upon as the mainspring of spiritual
+      life, but held up as a shield in a controversy.<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_264" id="Page_264">[ii.264]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The deism which the Savoyard Vicar explained to Emilius in his profession
+      of faith was pitched in a very different tone from this. Though the
+      Vicar's conception of the Deity was lightly fenced round with
+      rationalistic supports of the usual kind, drawn from the evidences of will
+      and intelligence in the vast machinery of the universe, yet it was
+      essentially the product not of reason, but of emotional expansion, as
+      every fundamental article of a faith that touches the hearts of many men
+      must always be. The Savoyard Vicar did not believe that a God had made the
+      great world, and rules it with majestic power and supreme justice, in the
+      same way in which he believed that any two sides of a triangle are greater
+      than the third side. That there is a mysterious being penetrating all
+      creation with force, was not a proposition to be demonstrated, but only
+      the poor description in words of an habitual mood going far deeper into
+      life than words can ever carry us. Without for a single moment falling off
+      into the nullities of pantheism, neither did he for a single moment suffer
+      his thought to stiffen and grow hard in the formal lines of a theological
+      definition or a systematic credo. It remains firm enough to give the
+      religious imagination consistency and a centre, yet luminous enough to
+      give the spiritual faculty a vivifying consciousness of freedom and space.
+      A creed is concerned with a number of affirmations, and is constantly held
+      with honest strenuousness by multitudes of men and women who are unfitted
+      by natural temperament<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_265"
+      id="Page_265">[ii.265]</a></span> for knowing what the glow of religious
+      emotion means to the human soul,&#8212;for not every one that saith, Lord,
+      Lord, enters the kingdom of heaven. The Savoyard Vicar's profession of
+      faith was not a creed, and so has few affirmations; it was a single
+      doctrine, melted in a glow of contemplative transport. It is impossible to
+      set about disproving it, for its exponent repeatedly warns his disciple
+      against the idleness of logomachy, and insists that the existence of the
+      Divinity is traced upon every heart in letters that can never be effaced,
+      if we are only content to read them with lowliness and simplicity. You
+      cannot demonstrate an emotion, nor prove an aspiration. How reason, asks
+      the Savoyard Vicar, about that which we cannot conceive? Conscience is the
+      best of all casuists, and conscience affirms the presence of a being who
+      moves the universe and ordains all things, and to him we give the name of
+      God.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &quot;To this name I join the ideas of intelligence, power, will, which I
+      have united in one, and that of goodness, which is a necessary consequence
+      flowing from them. But I do not know any the better for this the being to
+      whom I have given the name; he escapes equally from my senses and my
+      understanding; the more I think of him, the more I confound myself. I have
+      full assurance that he exists, and that he exists by himself. I recognise
+      my own being as subordinate to his and all the things that are known to me
+      as being absolutely in the same case. I perceive God every<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">[ii.266]</a></span>where
+      in his works; I feel him in myself; I see him universally around me. But
+      when I fain would seek where he is, what he is, of what substance, he
+      glides away from me, and my troubled soul discerns nothing.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor_339_339" id="FNanchor_339_339"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_339_339" class="fnanchor">[339]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &quot;In fine, the more earnestly I strive to contemplate his infinite
+      essence, the less do I conceive it. But it is, and that suffices me. The
+      less I conceive it, the more I adore. I bow myself down, and say to him, O
+      being of beings, I am because thou art; to meditate ceaselessly on thee by
+      day and night, is to raise myself to my veritable source and fount. The
+      worthiest use of my reason is to make itself as naught before thee. It is
+      the ravishment of my soul, it is the solace of my weakness, to feel myself
+      brought low before the awful majesty of thy greatness.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor_340_340" id="FNanchor_340_340"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_340_340" class="fnanchor">[340]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Souls weary of the fierce mockeries that had so long been flying like
+      fiery shafts against the far Jehovah of the Hebrews, and the silent Christ
+      of the later doctors and dignitaries, and weary too of the orthodox
+      demonstrations that did not demonstrate, and leaden refutations that could
+      not refute, may well have turned with ardour to listen to this harmonious
+      spiritual voice, sounding clear from a region towards which their hearts
+      yearned with untold aspiration, but from which the spirit of their time
+      had shut them off with brazen barriers. It was the elevation and expansion
+      of man, as much as it was the restoration of a divinity. To realise this,
+      one must turn to such a book as Helv&#233;tius's, which was <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267">[ii.267]</a></span>supposed
+      to reveal the whole inner machinery of the heart. Man was thought of as a
+      singular piece of mechanism principally moved from without, not as a
+      conscious organism, receiving nourishment and direction from the medium in
+      which it is placed, but reacting with a life of its own from within. It
+      was this free and energetic inner life of the individual which the
+      Savoyard Vicar restored to lawful recognition, and made once more the
+      centre of that imaginative and spiritual existence, without which we live
+      in a universe that has no sun by day nor any stars by night. A writer in
+      whom learning has not extinguished enthusiasm, compares this to the
+      advance made by Descartes, who had given certitude to the soul by turning
+      thought confidently upon itself; and he declares that the Savoyard Vicar
+      is for the emancipation of sentiment what the Discourse upon Method was
+      for the emancipation of the understanding.<a name="FNanchor_341_341"
+      id="FNanchor_341_341"></a><a href="#Footnote_341_341" class="fnanchor">[341]</a>
+      There is here a certain audacity of panegyric; still the fact that
+      Rousseau chose to link the highest forms of man's ideal life with a fading
+      projection of the lofty image which had been set up in older days, ought
+      not to blind us to the excellent energies which, notwithstanding defect of
+      association, such a vindication of the ideal was certain to quicken. And
+      at least the lines of that high image were nobly traced.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268">[ii.268]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yet who does not feel that it is a divinity for fair weather? Rousseau,
+      with his fine sense of a proper and artistic setting, imagined the
+      Savoyard Vicar as leading his youthful convert at break of a summer day to
+      the top of a high hill, at whose feet the Po flowed between fertile banks;
+      in the distance the immense chain of the Alps crowned the landscape; the
+      rays of the rising sun projected long level shadows from the trees, the
+      slopes, the houses, and accented with a thousand lines of light the most
+      magnificent of panoramas.<a name="FNanchor_342_342" id="FNanchor_342_342"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_342_342" class="fnanchor">[342]</a> This was the fitting
+      suggestion, so serene, warm, pregnant with power and hope, and half
+      mysterious, of the idea of godhead which the man of peace after an
+      interval of silent contemplation proceeded to expound. Rousseau's
+      sentimental idea at least did not revolt moral sense; it did not afflict
+      the firmness of intelligence; nor did it silence the diviner melodies of
+      the soul. Yet, once more, the heavens in which such a deity dwells are too
+      high, his power is too impalpable, the mysterious air which he has poured
+      around his being is too awful and impenetrable, for the rays from the sun
+      of such majesty to reach more than a few contemplative spirits, and these
+      only in their hours of tranquillity and expansion. The thought is too
+      vague, too far, to bring comfort and refreshment to the mass of travailing
+      men, or to invest duty with the stern ennobling quality of being done,
+      &quot;if I have grace to use it so as ever in the great Taskmaster's eye.&quot;<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269">[ii.269]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Savoyard Vicar was consistent with the sublimity of his own
+      conception. He meditated on the order of the universe with a reverence too
+      profound to allow him to mingle with his thoughts meaner desires as to the
+      special relations of that order to himself. &quot;I penetrate all my
+      faculties,&quot; he said, &quot;with the divine essence of the author of
+      the world; I melt at the thought of his goodness, and bless all his gifts,
+      but I do not pray to him. What should I ask of him? That for me he should
+      change the course of things, and in my favour work miracles? Could I, who
+      must love above all else the order established by his wisdom and upheld by
+      his providence, presume to wish such order troubled for my sake? Nor do I
+      ask of him the power of doing righteousness; why ask for what he has given
+      me? Has he not bestowed on me conscience to love what is good, reason to
+      ascertain it, freedom to choose it? If I do ill, I have no excuse; I do it
+      because I will it. To pray to him to change my will, is to seek from him
+      what he seeks from me; it is to wish no longer to be human, it is to wish
+      something other than what is, it is to wish disorder and evil.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor_343_343" id="FNanchor_343_343"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_343_343" class="fnanchor">[343]</a> We may admire both the
+      logical consistency of such self-denial and the manliness which it would
+      engender in the character that were strong enough to practise it. But a
+      divinity who has conceded no right of petition is still further away from
+      our lives than the divinities of more popular creeds.<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_270" id="Page_270">[ii.270]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Even the fairest deism is of its essence a faith of egotism and
+      complacency. It does not incorporate in the very heart of the religious
+      emotion the pitifulness and sorrow which Christianity first clothed with
+      associations of sanctity, and which can never henceforth miss their place
+      in any religious system to be accepted by men. Why is this? Because a
+      religion that leaves them out, or thrusts them into a hidden corner, fails
+      to comprehend at least one half, and that the most touching and impressive
+      half, of the most conspicuous facts of human life. Rousseau was fuller of
+      the capacity of pity than ordinary men, and this pity was one of the
+      deepest parts of himself. Yet it did not enter into the composition of his
+      religious faith, and this shows that his religious faith, though entirely
+      free from suspicion of insincerity or ostentatious assumption, was like
+      deism in so many cases, whether rationalistic or emotional, a kind of
+      gratuitously adopted superfluity, not the satisfaction of a profound inner
+      craving and resistless spiritual necessity. He speaks of the good and the
+      wicked with the precision and assurance of the most pharisaic theologian,
+      and he begins by asking of what concern it is to him whether the wicked
+      are punished with eternal torment or not, though he concludes more
+      graciously with the hope that in another state the wicked, delivered from
+      their malignity, may enjoy a bliss no less than his own.<a
+      name="FNanchor_344_344" id="FNanchor_344_344"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_344_344" class="fnanchor">[344]</a> But the divine
+      pitifulness <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271">[ii.271]</a></span>which
+      we owe to Christianity, and which will not be the less eagerly cherished
+      by those who repudiate Christian tradition and doctrines, enjoins upon us
+      that we should ask, Who are the wicked, and which is he that is without
+      sin among us? Rousseau answered this glibly enough by some formula of
+      metaphysics, about the human will having been left and constituted free by
+      the creator of the world; and that man is the bad man who abuses his
+      freedom. Grace, fate, destiny, force of circumstances, are all so many
+      names for the protests which the frank sense of fact has forced from man
+      against this miserably inadequate explanation of the foundations of moral
+      responsibility.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Whatever these foundations may be, the theories of grace and fate had at
+      any rate the quality of connecting human conduct with the will of the
+      gods. Rousseau's deism, severing the influence of the Supreme Being upon
+      man, at the very moment when it could have saved him from the guilt that
+      brings misery,&#8212;that is at the moment when conduct begins to follow
+      the preponderant motives or the will,&#8212;did thus effectually cut off
+      the most admirable and fertile group of our sympathies from all direct
+      connection with religious sentiment. Toiling as manfully as we may through
+      the wilderness of our seventy years, we are to reserve our deepest
+      adoration for the being who has left us<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_272" id="Page_272">[ii.272]</a></span> there, with no other
+      solace than that he is good and just and all-powerful, and might have
+      given us comfort and guidance if he would. This was virtually the form
+      which Pelagius had tried to impose upon Christianity in the fifth century,
+      and which the souls of men, thirsting for consciousness of an active
+      divine presence, had then under the lead of Augustine so energetically
+      cast away from them. The faith to which they clung while rejecting this
+      great heresy, though just as transcendental, still had the quality of
+      satisfying a spiritual want. It was even more readily to be accepted by
+      the human intelligence, for it endowed the supreme power with the father's
+      excellence of compassion, and presented for our reverence and gratitude
+      and devotion a figure who drew from men the highest love for the God whom
+      they had not seen, along with the warmest pity and love for their brethren
+      whom they had seen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Savoyard Vicar's own position to Christianity was one of reverential
+      scepticism. &quot;The holiness of the gospel,&quot; he said, &quot;is an
+      argument that speaks to my heart and to which I should even be sorry to
+      find a good answer. Look at the books of the philosophers with all their
+      pomp; how puny they are by the side of that! Is there here the tone of an
+      enthusiast or an ambitious sectary? What gentleness, what purity, in his
+      manners, what touching grace in his teaching, what loftiness in his
+      maxims! Assuredly there was something more than human in such teaching,
+      such a character, such a life, such a death. If the life and<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273">[ii.273]</a></span> death
+      of Socrates were those of a sage, the life and death of Jesus are those of
+      a god. Shall we say that the history of the gospels is invented at
+      pleasure? My friend, that is not the fashion of invention; and the facts
+      about Socrates are less attested than the facts about Christ.<a
+      name="FNanchor_345_345" id="FNanchor_345_345"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_345_345" class="fnanchor">[345]</a> Yet with all that,
+      this same gospel abounds in things incredible, which are repugnant to
+      reason, and which it is impossible for any sensible man to conceive or
+      admit. What are we to do in the midst of all these contradictions? To be
+      ever modest and circumspect, my son; to respect in silence what one can
+      neither reject nor understand, and to make one's self lowly before the
+      great being who alone knows the truth.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_346_346"
+      id="FNanchor_346_346"></a><a href="#Footnote_346_346" class="fnanchor">[346]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &quot;I regard all particular religions as so many salutary institutions,
+      which prescribe in every country a uniform manner of honouring God by
+      public worship. I believe them all good, so long as men serve God
+      fittingly in them. The essential worship is the worship of the heart. God
+      never rejects this homage, under whatever form it be offered to him. In
+      other days I used to say mass with the levity which in time infects even
+      the gravest things, when we do them too often. Since acquiring my new
+      principles I celebrate it with more veneration; I am overwhelmed by the
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_274" id="Page_274">[ii.274]</a></span>majesty
+      of the Supreme Being, by his presence, by the insufficiency of the human
+      mind, which conceives so little what pertains to its author. When I
+      approach the moment of consecration, I collect myself for performing the
+      act with all the feelings required by the church, and the majesty of the
+      sacrament; I strive to annihilate my reason before the supreme
+      intelligence, saying, 'Who art thou, that thou shouldest measure infinite
+      power?'&quot;<a name="FNanchor_347_347" id="FNanchor_347_347"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_347_347" class="fnanchor">[347]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A creed like this, whatever else it may be, is plainly a powerful solvent
+      of every system of exclusive dogma. If the one essential to true worship,
+      the worship of the heart and the inner sentiment, be mystic adoration of
+      an indefinable Supreme, then creeds based upon books, prophecies,
+      miracles, revelations, all fall alike into the second place among things
+      that may be lawful and may be expedient, but that can never be exacted
+      from men by a just God as indispensable to virtue in this world or to
+      bliss in the next. No better answer has ever been given to the exclusive
+      pretensions of sect, Christian, Jewish, or Mahometan, than that propounded
+      by the Savoyard Vicar with such energy, closeness, and most sarcastic
+      fire.<a name="FNanchor_348_348" id="FNanchor_348_348"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_348_348" class="fnanchor">[348]</a> It was turning an
+      unexpected front upon the presumptuousness of all varieties of theological
+      infallibilists, to prove to them that if you insist upon acceptance of
+      this or that special revelation, over and above the dictates of natural
+      religion, then you are bound not only to grant, but imperatively to enjoin
+      upon all men, a searching <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_275"
+      id="Page_275">[ii.275]</a></span>inquiry and comparison, that they may
+      spare no pains in an affair of such momentous issue in proving to
+      themselves that this, and none of the competing revelations, is the
+      veritable message of eternal safety. &quot;Then no other study will be
+      possible but that of religion: hardly shall one who has enjoyed the most
+      robust health, employed his time and used his reason to best purpose, and
+      lived the greatest number of years, hardly shall such an one in his
+      extreme age be quite sure what to believe, and it will be a marvel if he
+      finds out before he dies, in what faith he ought to have lived.&quot; The
+      superiority of the sceptical parts of the Savoyard Vicar's profession, as
+      well as those of the Letters from the Mountain to which we referred
+      previously, over the biting mockeries which Voltaire had made the
+      fashionable method of assault, lay in this fact. The latter only revolted
+      and irritated all serious temperaments to whom religion is a matter of
+      honest concern, while the former actually appealed to their religious
+      sense in support of his doubts; and the more intelligent and sincere this
+      sense happened to be, the more surely would Rousseau's gravely urged
+      objections dissolve the hard particles of dogmatic belief. His objections
+      were on a moral level with the best side of the religion that they
+      oppugned. Those of Voltaire were only on a level with its lowest side, and
+      that was the side presented by the gross and repulsive obscurantism of the
+      functionaries of the church.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Unfortunately Rousseau had placed in the hands<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_276" id="Page_276">[ii.276]</a></span> of the partisans of
+      every exclusive revelation an instrument which was quite enough to
+      disperse all his objections to the winds, and which was the very
+      instrument that defended his own cherished religion. If he was satisfied
+      with replying to the atheist and the materialist, that he knew there is a
+      supreme God, and that the soul must have here and hereafter an existence
+      apart from the body, because he found these truths ineffaceably written
+      upon his own heart, what could prevent the Christian or the Mahometan from
+      replying to Rousseau that the New Testament or the Koran is the special
+      and final revelation from the Supreme Power to his creatures? If you may
+      appeal to the voice of the heart and the dictate of the inner sentiment in
+      one case, why not in the other also? A subjective test necessarily proves
+      anything that any man desires, and the accident of the article proved
+      appearing either reasonable or monstrous to other people, cannot have the
+      least bearing on its efficacy or conclusiveness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Deism like the Savoyard Vicar's opens no path for the future, because it
+      makes no allowance for the growth of intellectual conviction, and binds up
+      religion with mystery, with an object whose attributes can neither be
+      conceived nor defined, with a Being too all-embracing to be able to
+      receive anything from us, too august, self-contained, remote, to be able
+      to bestow on us the humble gifts of which we have need. The temperature of
+      thought is slowly but without an instant's recoil rising to a point when a
+      mystery like<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277">[ii.277]</a></span>
+      this, definite enough to be imposed as a faith, but too indefinite to be
+      grasped by understanding as a truth, melts away from the emotions of
+      religion. Then those instincts of holiness, without which the world would
+      be to so many of its highest spirits the most dreary of exiles, will
+      perhaps come to associate themselves less with unseen divinities, than
+      with the long brotherhood of humanity seen and unseen. Here we shall move
+      with an assurance that no scepticism and no advance of science can ever
+      shake, because the benefactions which we have received from the
+      strenuousness of human effort can never be doubted, and each fresh
+      acquisition in knowledge or goodness can only kindle new fervour. Those
+      who have the religious imagination struck by the awful procession of man
+      from the region of impenetrable night, by his incessant struggle with the
+      hardness of the material world, and his sublimer struggle with the hard
+      world of his own egotistic passions, by the pain and sacrifice by which
+      generation after generation has added some small piece to the temple of
+      human freedom or some new fragment to the ever incomplete sum of human
+      knowledge, or some fresh line to the types of strong or beautiful
+      character,&#8212;those who have an eye for all this may indeed have no
+      ecstasy and no terror, no heaven nor hell, in their religion, but they
+      will have abundant moods of reverence, deep-seated gratitude, and
+      sovereign pitifulness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And such moods will not end in sterile exaltation, or the deathly chills
+      of spiritual reaction. They will<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_278"
+      id="Page_278">[ii.278]</a></span> bring forth abundant fruit in new hope
+      and invigorated endeavour. This devout contemplation of the experience of
+      the race, instead of raising a man into the clouds, brings him into the
+      closest, loftiest, and most conscious relations with his kind, to whom he
+      owes all that is of value in his own life, and to whom he can repay his
+      debt by maintaining the beneficent tradition of service, by cherishing
+      honour for all the true and sage spirits that have shone upon the earth,
+      and sorrow and reprobation for all the unworthier souls whose light has
+      gone out in baseness. A man with this faith can have no foul spiritual
+      pride, for there is no mysteriously accorded divine grace in which one may
+      be a larger participant than another. He can have no incentives to that
+      mutilation with which every branch of the church, from the oldest to the
+      youngest and crudest, has in its degree afflicted and retarded mankind,
+      because the key-note of his religion is the joyful energy of every
+      faculty, practical, reflective, creative, contemplative, in pursuit of a
+      visible common good. And he can be plunged into no fatal and paralysing
+      despair by any doctrine of mortal sin, because active faith in humanity,
+      resting on recorded experience, discloses the many possibilities of moral
+      recovery, and the work that may be done for men in the fragment of days,
+      redeeming the contrite from their burdens by manful hope. If religion is
+      our feeling about the highest forces that govern human destiny, then as it
+      becomes more and more evident how much our destiny is shaped by the<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_279" id="Page_279">[ii.279]</a></span>
+      generation of the dead who have prepared the present, and by the purport
+      of our hopes and the direction of our activity for the generations that
+      are to fill the future, the religious sentiment will more and more attach
+      itself to the great unseen host of our fellows who have gone before us and
+      who are to come after. Such a faith is no rag of metaphysic floating in
+      the sunshine of sentimentalism, like Rousseau's faith. It rests on a
+      positive base, which only becomes wider and firmer with the widening of
+      experience and the augmentation of our skill in interpreting it. Nor is it
+      too transcendent for practical acceptance. One of the most scientific
+      spirits of the eighteenth century, while each moment expecting the knock
+      of the executioner at his door, found as religious a solace as any early
+      martyr had ever found in his barbarous mysteries, when he linked his own
+      efforts for reason and freedom with the eternal chain of the destinies of
+      man. &quot;This contemplation,&quot; he wrote and felt, &quot;is for him a
+      refuge into which the rancour of his persecutors can never follow him; in
+      which, living in thought with man reinstated in the rights and the dignity
+      of his nature, he forgets man tormented and corrupted by greed, by base
+      fear, by envy; it is here that he truly abides with his fellows, in an
+      elysium that his reason has known how to create for itself, and that his
+      love for humanity adorns with all purest delights.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor_349_349" id="FNanchor_349_349"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_349_349" class="fnanchor">[349]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This, to the shame of those wavering souls who <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_280" id="Page_280">[ii.280]</a></span>despair of progress at
+      the first moment when it threatens to leave the path that they have marked
+      out for it, was written by a man at the very close of his days, when every
+      hope that he had ever cherished seemed to one without the eye of faith to
+      be extinguished in bloodshed, disorder, and barbarism. But there is a
+      still happier season in the adolescence of generous natures that have been
+      wisely fostered, when the horizons of the dawning life are suddenly
+      lighted up with a glow of aspiration towards good and holy things.
+      Commonly, alas, this priceless opportunity is lost in a fit of theological
+      exaltation, which is gradually choked out by the dusty facts of life, and
+      slowly moulders away into dry indifference. It would not be so, but far
+      different, if the Savoyard Vicar, instead of taking the youth to the
+      mountain-top, there to contemplate that infinite unseen which is in truth
+      beyond contemplation by the limited faculties of man, were to associate
+      these fine impulses of the early prime with the visible, intelligible, and
+      still sublime possibilities of the human destiny,&#8212;that imperial
+      conception, which alone can shape an existence of entire proportion in all
+      its parts, and leave no natural energy of life idle or athirst. Do you ask
+      for sanctions! One whose conscience has been strengthened from youth in
+      this faith, can know no greater bitterness than the stain cast by wrong
+      act or unworthy thought on the high memories with which he has been used
+      to walk, and the discord wrought in hopes that have become the ruling
+      harmony of his days.
+    </p>
+    <div class="footnotes">
+      <h3>
+        FOOTNOTES:
+      </h3>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_337_337" id="Footnote_337_337"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_337_337"><span class="label">[337]</span></a> See
+          Hallam's <i>Literature of Europe</i>, Pt. I. ch. ii. &#167; 64. Again
+          (for the 16th century), Pt. II. ch. ii. &#167; 53. See also for
+          mention of a sect of deists at Lyons about 1560, Bayle's Dictionary,
+          <i>s.v.</i> Viret.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_338_338" id="Footnote_338_338"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_338_338"><span class="label">[338]</span></a> See
+          above, <a href="#Page_i.223">vol. i. pp. 223-227</a>.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_339_339" id="Footnote_339_339"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_339_339"><span class="label">[339]</span></a> <i>Emile</i>,
+          IV. 163.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_340_340" id="Footnote_340_340"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_340_340"><span class="label">[340]</span></a> IV.
+          183-185.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_341_341" id="Footnote_341_341"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_341_341"><span class="label">[341]</span></a> M. Henri
+          Martin's <i>Hist. de France</i>, xvi. 101, where there is an
+          interesting, but, as it seems to the present writer, hardly a
+          successful attempt, to bring the Savoyard Vicar's eloquence into
+          scientific form.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_342_342" id="Footnote_342_342"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_342_342"><span class="label">[342]</span></a> <i>Emile</i>,
+          IV. 135.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_343_343" id="Footnote_343_343"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_343_343"><span class="label">[343]</span></a> <i>Emile</i>,
+          IV. 204.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_344_344" id="Footnote_344_344"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_344_344"><span class="label">[344]</span></a> <i>Emile</i>,
+          IV. 181, 182. In a letter to Vernes (Feb. 18, 1758. <i>Corr.</i>, ii.
+          9) he expresses his suspicion that possibly the souls of the wicked
+          may be annihilated at their death, and that being and feeling may
+          prove the first reward of a good life. In this letter he asks also,
+          with the same magnanimous security as the Savoyard Vicar, &quot;of
+          what concern the destiny of the wicked can be to him.&quot;
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_345_345" id="Footnote_345_345"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_345_345"><span class="label">[345]</span></a> A
+          similar disparagement of Socrates, in comparison with the Christ of
+          the Gospels, is to be found in the long letter of Jan. 15, 1769 (<i>Corr.</i>,
+          vi. 59, 60), to M&#8212;&#8212;, accompanied by a violent denigration
+          of the Jews, conformably to the philosophic prejudice of the time.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_346_346" id="Footnote_346_346"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_346_346"><span class="label">[346]</span></a> <i>Emile</i>,
+          IV. 241, 242.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_347_347" id="Footnote_347_347"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_347_347"><span class="label">[347]</span></a> <i>Emile</i>,
+          IV. 243.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_348_348" id="Footnote_348_348"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_348_348"><span class="label">[348]</span></a> IV.
+          210-236.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_349_349" id="Footnote_349_349"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_349_349"><span class="label">[349]</span></a>
+          Condorcet's <i>Progr&#232;s de l'Esprit Humain</i> (1794). <i>Oeuv.</i>,
+          vi. 276.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+    </div>
+    <hr style="width: 65%;" />
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_281" id="Page_281">[ii.281]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      <a name="CHAPTER_VI" id="CHAPTER_VI"></a>CHAPTER VI.
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      ENGLAND.<a name="FNanchor_350_350" id="FNanchor_350_350"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_350_350" class="fnanchor">[350]</a>
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <span class="smcap">There</span> is in an English collection a portrait of
+      Jean Jacques, which was painted during his residence in this country by a
+      provincial artist. Singular and displeasing as it is, yet this picture
+      lights up for us many a word and passage in Rousseau's life here and
+      elsewhere, which the ordinary engravings, and the trim self-complacency of
+      the statue on the little island at Geneva, would leave very
+      incomprehensible. It is almost as appalling in its realism as some of the
+      dark pits that open before the reader of the Confessions. Hard struggles
+      with objective difficulty and external obstacle wear deep furrows in the
+      brow; they throw into the glance a solicitude, half penetrating and
+      defiant, half dejected. When a man's hindrances have sprung up from
+      within, and the ill-fought battle of his days has been with his own
+      passions and morbid broodings and unchastened dreams, the eye and the
+      facial lines tell the story of that profound moral defeat which is
+      unlighted by the memories of resolute combat with evil and weakness, and
+      leaves only eternal desola<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_282"
+      id="Page_282">[ii.282]</a></span>tion and the misery that is formless. Our
+      English artist has produced a vision from that prose Inferno which is made
+      so populous in the modern epoch by impotence of will. Those who have seen
+      the picture may easily understand how largely the character of the
+      original must have been pregnant with harassing confusion and distress.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Four years before this (1762), Hume, to whom Lord Marischal had told the
+      story of Rousseau's persecutions, had proffered his services, and declared
+      his eagerness to help in finding a proper refuge for him in England. There
+      had been an exchange of cordial letters,<a name="FNanchor_351_351"
+      id="FNanchor_351_351"></a><a href="#Footnote_351_351" class="fnanchor">[351]</a>
+      and then the matter had lain quiet, until the impossibility of remaining
+      longer in Neuch&#226;tel had once more set his friends on procuring a safe
+      establishment for their rather difficult refugee. Rousseau's appearance in
+      Paris had created the keenest excitement. &quot;People may talk of ancient
+      Greece as they please,&quot; wrote Hume from Paris, &quot;but no nation
+      was ever so proud of genius as this, and no person ever so much engaged
+      their attention as Rousseau! Voltaire and everybody else are quite
+      eclipsed by him.&quot; Even Theresa Le Vasseur, who was declared very
+      homely and very awkward, was more talked of than the Princess of Morocco
+      or the Countess of Egmont, on account of her fidelity towards him. His
+      very dog had a name and reputation in the world.<a name="FNanchor_352_352"
+      id="FNanchor_352_352"></a><a href="#Footnote_352_352" class="fnanchor">[352]</a>
+      Rousseau is always said to have liked the stir which his presence created,
+      but whether this was so or not, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_283"
+      id="Page_283">[ii.283]</a></span>he was very impatient to be away from it
+      as soon as possible.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In company with Hume, he left Paris in the second week of January 1766.
+      They crossed from Calais to Dover by night in a passage that lasted twelve
+      hours. Hume, as the orthodox may be glad to know, was extremely ill, while
+      Rousseau cheerfully passed the whole night upon deck, taking no harm,
+      though the seamen were almost frozen to death.<a name="FNanchor_353_353"
+      id="FNanchor_353_353"></a><a href="#Footnote_353_353" class="fnanchor">[353]</a>
+      They reached London on the thirteenth of January, and the people of London
+      showed nearly as lively an interest in the strange personage whom Hume had
+      brought among them, as the people of Paris had done. <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_284" id="Page_284">[ii.284]</a></span>A prince of the blood at
+      once went to pay his respects to the Swiss philosopher. The crowd at the
+      playhouse showed more curiosity when the stranger came in than when the
+      king and queen entered. Their majesties were as interested as their
+      subjects, and could scarcely keep their eyes off the author of Emilius.
+      George III., then in the heyday of his youth, was so pleased to have a
+      foreigner of genius seeking shelter in his kingdom, that he readily
+      acceded to Conway's suggestion, prompted by Hume, that Rousseau should
+      have a pension settled on him. The ever illustrious Burke, then just made
+      member of Parliament, saw him nearly every day, and became persuaded that
+      &quot;he entertained no principle either to influence his heart, or guide
+      his understanding, but vanity.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_354_354"
+      id="FNanchor_354_354"></a><a href="#Footnote_354_354" class="fnanchor">[354]</a>
+      Hume, on the contrary, thought the best things of his client; &quot;He has
+      an excellent warm heart, and in conversation kindles often to a degree of
+      heat which looks like inspiration; I love him much, and hope that I have
+      some share in his affections.... He is a very modest, mild, well-bred,
+      gentle-spirited and warm-hearted man, as ever I knew in my life. He is
+      also to appearance very sociable. I never saw a man who seems better
+      calculated for good company, nor who seems to take more pleasure in it.&quot;
+      &quot;He is a very agreeable, amiable man; but a great humorist. The
+      philosophers of Paris foretold to me that I could not conduct him to
+      Calais without a quarrel; but I think <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_285" id="Page_285">[ii.285]</a></span>I could live with him all
+      my life in mutual friendship and esteem. I believe one great source of our
+      concord is that neither he nor I are disputatious, which is not the case
+      with any of them. They are also displeased with him, because they think he
+      over-abounds in religion; and it is indeed remarkable that the philosopher
+      of this age who has been most persecuted, is by far the most devout.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor_355_355" id="FNanchor_355_355"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_355_355" class="fnanchor">[355]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What the Scotch philosopher meant by calling his pupil a humorist, may
+      perhaps be inferred from the story of the trouble he had in prevailing
+      upon Rousseau to go to the play, though Garrick had appointed a special
+      occasion and set apart a special box for him. When the hour came, Rousseau
+      declared that he could not leave his dog behind him. &quot;The first
+      person,&quot; he said, &quot;who opens the door, Sultan will run into the
+      streets in search of me and will be lost.&quot; Hume told him to lock
+      Sultan up in the room, and carry away the key in his pocket. This was
+      done, but as they proceeded downstairs, the dog began to howl; his master
+      turned back and avowed he had not resolution to leave him in that
+      condition. Hume, however, caught him in his arms, told him that Mr.
+      Garrick had dismissed another company in order to make room for him, that
+      the king and queen were expecting to see him, and that without a better
+      reason than Sultan's impatience it would be ridiculous to disappoint them.
+      Thus, a little by reason, but more by force, he was carried off.<a
+      name="FNanchor_356_356" id="FNanchor_356_356"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_356_356" class="fnanchor">[356]</a> Such a story, whatever
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_286" id="Page_286">[ii.286]</a></span>else
+      we may think of it, shows at least a certain curious and not untouching
+      simplicity. And singularity which made Rousseau like better to keep his
+      dog company at home, than to be stared at by a gaping pit, was too private
+      in its reward to be the result of that vanity and affectation with which
+      he was taxed by men who lived in another sphere of motive.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was considerable trouble in settling Rousseau. He was eager to leave
+      London almost as soon as he arrived in it. Though pleased with the
+      friendly reception which had been given him, he pronounced London to be as
+      much devoted to idle gossip and frivolity as other capitals. He spent a
+      few weeks in the house of a farmer at Chiswick, thought about fixing
+      himself in the Isle of Wight, then in Wales, then somewhere in our fair
+      Surrey, whose scenery, one is glad to know, greatly attracted him. Finally
+      arrangements were made by Hume with Mr. Davenport for installing him in a
+      house belonging to the latter, at Wootton, near Ashbourne, in the Peak of
+      Derbyshire.<a name="FNanchor_357_357" id="FNanchor_357_357"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_357_357" class="fnanchor">[357]</a> Hither Rousseau
+      proceeded with Theresa, at the end of March. Mr. Davenport was a gentleman
+      of large property, and as he seldom inhabited this solitary house, was
+      very willing that Rousseau should take up his abode there without payment.
+      This, however, was what Rousseau's inde<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_287" id="Page_287">[ii.287]</a></span>pendence could not brook,
+      and he insisted that his entertainer should receive thirty pounds a year
+      for the board of himself and Theresa.<a name="FNanchor_358_358"
+      id="FNanchor_358_358"></a><a href="#Footnote_358_358" class="fnanchor">[358]</a>
+      So here he settled, in an extremely bitter climate, knowing no word of the
+      language of the people about him, with no companionship but Theresa's, and
+      with nothing to do but walk when the weather was fair, play the harpsicord
+      when it rained, and brood over the incidents which had occurred to him
+      since he had left Switzerland six months before. The first fruits of this
+      unfortunate leisure were a bitter quarrel with Hume, one of the most
+      famous and far-resounding of all the quarrels of illustrious men, but one
+      about which very little needs now be said. The merits of it are plain, and
+      all significance that may ever have belonged to it is entirely dead. The
+      incubation of his grievances began immediately after his arrival at
+      Wootton, but two months elapsed before they burst forth in full flame.<a
+      name="FNanchor_359_359" id="FNanchor_359_359"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_359_359" class="fnanchor">[359]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The general charge against Hume was that he was a member of an accursed
+      triumvirate; Voltaire and D'Alembert were the other partners; and their
+      object was to blacken the character of Rousseau and render his life
+      miserable. The particular acts on which this belief was established were
+      the following:&#8212;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (1) While Rousseau was in Paris, there appeared a <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_288" id="Page_288">[ii.288]</a></span>letter nominally
+      addressed to him by the King of Prussia, and written in an ironical
+      strain, which persuaded Jean Jacques himself that it was the work of
+      Voltaire.<a name="FNanchor_360_360" id="FNanchor_360_360"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_360_360" class="fnanchor">[360]</a> Then he suspected
+      D'Alembert. It was really the composition of Horace Walpole, who was then
+      in Paris. Now Hume was the friend of Walpole, and had given Rousseau a
+      card of introduction to him for the purpose of entrusting Walpole with the
+      carriage of some papers. Although the false letter produced the liveliest
+      amusement at Rousseau's cost, first in Paris and then in London, Hume,
+      while feigning to be his warm friend and presenting him to the English
+      public, never took any pains to tell the world that the piece was a
+      forgery, nor did he break with its <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_289"
+      id="Page_289">[ii.289]</a></span>wicked author.<a name="FNanchor_361_361"
+      id="FNanchor_361_361"></a><a href="#Footnote_361_361" class="fnanchor">[361]</a>
+      (2) When Rousseau assured Hume that D'Alembert was a cunning and
+      dishonourable man, Hume denied it with an amazing heat, although he well
+      knew the latter to be Rousseau's enemy.<a name="FNanchor_362_362"
+      id="FNanchor_362_362"></a><a href="#Footnote_362_362" class="fnanchor">[362]</a>
+      (3) Hume lived in London with the son of Tronchin, the Genevese surgeon,
+      and the most mortal of all the foes of Jean Jacques.<a
+      name="FNanchor_363_363" id="FNanchor_363_363"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_363_363" class="fnanchor">[363]</a> (4) When Rousseau
+      first came to London, his reception was a distinguished triumph for the
+      victim of persecution from so many governments. England was proud of being
+      his place of refuge, and justly vaunted the freedom of her laws and
+      administration. Suddenly and for no assignable cause the public tone
+      changed, the newspapers either fell silent or else spoke unfavourably, and
+      Rousseau was thought of no more. This must have been due to Hume, who had
+      much influence among people of credit, and who went about boasting of the
+      protection which he had procured for Jean Jacques in Paris.<a
+      name="FNanchor_364_364" id="FNanchor_364_364"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_364_364" class="fnanchor">[364]</a> (5) Hume resorted to
+      various small artifices for preventing Rousseau from making friends, for
+      procuring opportunities of opening Rousseau's letters, and the like.<a
+      name="FNanchor_365_365" id="FNanchor_365_365"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_365_365" class="fnanchor">[365]</a> (6) A violent
+      satirical letter against Rousseau appeared in the English newspapers, with
+      allusions which could only have been supplied by Hume. (7) On the first
+      night after their departure from Paris, Rousseau, who occupied the same
+      room with Hume, heard him call out several times in the middle of the
+      night in the course of his dreams, <i>Je tiens Jean Jacques <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_290" id="Page_290">[ii.290]</a></span>Rousseau</i>,
+      with extreme vehemence&#8212;which words, in spite of the horribly
+      sardonic tone of the dreamer, he interpreted favourably at the time, but
+      which later event proved to have been full of malign significance.<a
+      name="FNanchor_366_366" id="FNanchor_366_366"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_366_366" class="fnanchor">[366]</a> (8) Rousseau
+      constantly found Hume eyeing him with a glance of sinister and diabolic
+      import that filled him with an astonishing disquietude, though he did his
+      best to combat it. On one of these occasions he was seized with remorse,
+      fell upon Hume's neck, embraced him warmly, and, suffocated with sobs and
+      bathed in tears, cried out in broken accents, <i>No, no, David Hume is no
+      traitor</i>, with many protests of affection. The phlegmatic Hume only
+      returned his embrace with politeness, stroked him gently on the back, and
+      repeated several times in a tranquil voice, <i>Quoi, mon cher monsieur!
+      Eh! mon cher monsieur! Quoi donc, mon cher monsieur!</i><a
+      name="FNanchor_367_367" id="FNanchor_367_367"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_367_367" class="fnanchor">[367]</a> (9) Although for many
+      weeks Rousseau had kept a firm silence to Hume, neglecting to answer
+      letters that plainly called for answer, and marking his displeasure in
+      other unmistakable ways, yet Hume had never sought any explanation of what
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_291" id="Page_291">[ii.291]</a></span>must
+      necessarily have struck him as so singular, but continued to write as if
+      nothing had happened. Was not this positive proof of a consciousness of
+      perfidy?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Some years afterwards he substituted another shorter set of grievances,
+      namely, that Hume would not suffer Theresa to sit at table with him; that
+      he made a show of him; and that Hume had an engraving executed of himself,
+      which made him as beautiful as a cherub, while in another engraving, which
+      was a pendant to his own, Jean Jacques was made as ugly as a bear.<a
+      name="FNanchor_368_368" id="FNanchor_368_368"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_368_368" class="fnanchor">[368]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It would be ridiculous for us to waste any time in discussing these
+      charges. They are not open to serious examination, though it is
+      astonishing to find writers in our own day who fully believe that Hume was
+      a traitor, and behaved extremely basely to the unfortunate man whom he had
+      inveigled over to a barbarous island. The only part of the indictment
+      about which there could be the least doubt, was the possibility of Hume
+      having been an accomplice in Walpole's very small pleasantry. Some of his
+      friends in Paris suspected that he had had a hand in the supposed letter
+      from the King of Prussia. Although the letter constituted no very
+      malignant jest, and could not by a sensible man have been regarded as
+      furnishing just complaint against one who, like Walpole, was merely an
+      impudent stranger, yet if it could be shown that Hume had taken an active
+      part either in the composition or the circulation of a spiteful bit of
+      satire upon <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_292" id="Page_292">[ii.292]</a></span>one
+      towards whom he was pretending a singular affection, then we should admit
+      that he showed such a want of sense of the delicacy of friendship as
+      amounted to something like treachery. But a letter from Walpole to Hume
+      sets this doubt at rest. &quot;I cannot be precise as to the time of my
+      writing the King of Prussia's letter, but ... I not only suppressed the
+      letter while you stayed there, out of delicacy to you, but it was the
+      reason why, out of delicacy to myself, I did not go to see him as you
+      often proposed to me, thinking it wrong to go and make a cordial visit to
+      a man, with a letter in my pocket to laugh at him.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor_369_369" id="FNanchor_369_369"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_369_369" class="fnanchor">[369]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With this all else falls to the ground. It would be as unwise in us, as it
+      was in Rousseau himself, to complicate the hypotheses. Men do not act
+      without motives, and Hume could have no motive in entering into any plot
+      against Rousseau, even if the rival philosophers in France might have
+      motives. We know the character of our David Hume perfectly well, and
+      though it was not faultless, its fault certainly lay rather in an
+      excessive desire to make the world comfortable for everybody, than in
+      anything like purposeless malignity, of which he never had a trace.
+      Moreover, all that befell Rousseau through Hume's agency was exceedingly
+      to his advantage. Hume was <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_293"
+      id="Page_293">[ii.293]</a></span>not without vanity, and his letters show
+      that he was not displeased at the addition to his consequence which came
+      of his patronage of a man who was much talked about and much stared at.
+      But, however this was, he did all for Rousseau that generosity and
+      thoughtfulness could do. He was at great pains in establishing him; he
+      used his interest to procure for him the grant of a pension from the king;
+      when Rousseau provisionally refused the pension rather than owe anything
+      to Hume, the latter, still ignorant of the suspicion that was blackening
+      in Rousseau's mind, supposed that the refusal came from the fact of the
+      pension being kept private, and at once took measures with the minister to
+      procure the removal of the condition of privacy. Besides undeniable acts
+      like these, the state of Hume's mind towards his curious ward is
+      abundantly shown in his letters to all his most intimate friends, just as
+      Rousseau's gratitude to him is to be read in all his early letters both to
+      Hume and other persons. In the presence of such facts on the one side, and
+      in the absence of any particle of intelligible evidence to neutralise them
+      on the other, to treat Rousseau's charges with gravity is irrational.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If Hume had written back in a mild and conciliatory strain, there can be
+      no doubt that the unfortunate victim of his own morbid imagination would,
+      for a time at any rate, have been sobered and brought to a sense of his
+      misconduct. But Hume was incensed beyond control at what he very
+      pardonably took for a masterpiece of atrocious ingratitude. He reproached<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_294" id="Page_294">[ii.294]</a></span>
+      Rousseau in terms as harsh as those which Grimm had used nine years
+      before. He wrote to all his friends, withdrawing the kindly words he had
+      once used of Rousseau's character, and substituting in their place the
+      most unfavourable he could find. He gave the philosophic circle in Paris
+      exquisite delight by the confirmation which his story furnished of their
+      own foresight, when they had warned him that he was taking a viper to his
+      bosom. Finally, in spite of the advice of Adam Smith, of one of the
+      greatest of men, Turgot, and one of the smallest, Horace Walpole, he
+      published a succinct account of the quarrel, first in French, and then in
+      English. This step was chiefly due to the advice of the clique of whom
+      D'Alembert was the spokesman, though it is due to him to mention that he
+      softened various expressions in Hume's narrative, which he pronounced too
+      harsh. It may be true that a council of war never fights; a council of men
+      of letters always does. The governing committee of a literary,
+      philosophical, or theological clique form the very worst advisers any man
+      can have.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Much must be forgiven to Hume, stung as he was by what appeared the most
+      hateful ferocity in one on whom he had heaped acts of affection. Still,
+      one would have been glad on behalf of human dignity, if he had suffered
+      with firm silence petulant charges against which the consciousness of his
+      own uprightness should have been the only answer. That high pride, of
+      which there is too little rather than too much in the world, and which
+      saves men from waste of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_295"
+      id="Page_295">[ii.295]</a></span> themselves and others in pitiful
+      accusations, vindications, retaliations, should have helped humane pity in
+      preserving him from this poor quarrel. Long afterwards Rousseau said,
+      &quot;England, of which they paint such fine pictures in France, has so
+      cheerless a climate; my soul, wearied with many shocks, was in a condition
+      of such profound melancholy, that in all that passed I believe I committed
+      many faults. But are they comparable to those of the enemies who
+      persecuted me, supposing them even to have done no more than published our
+      private quarrels?&quot;<a name="FNanchor_370_370" id="FNanchor_370_370"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_370_370" class="fnanchor">[370]</a> An ampler contrition
+      would have been more seemly in the first offender, but there is a measure
+      of justice in his complaint. We need not, however, reproach the good Hume.
+      Before six months were over, he admits that he is sometimes inclined to
+      blame his publication, and always to regret it.<a name="FNanchor_371_371"
+      id="FNanchor_371_371"></a><a href="#Footnote_371_371" class="fnanchor">[371]</a>
+      And his regret was not verbal merely. When Rousseau had returned to
+      France, and was in danger of arrest, Hume was most urgent in entreating
+      Turgot to use his influence with the government to protect the wretched
+      wanderer, and Turgot's answer shows both how sincere this humane
+      interposition was, and how practically serviceable.<a
+      name="FNanchor_372_372" id="FNanchor_372_372"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_372_372" class="fnanchor">[372]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Meanwhile there ensued a horrible fray in print. Pamphlets appeared in
+      Paris and London in a cloud. The Succinct Exposure was followed by
+      succinct rejoinders. Walpole officiously printed his own account of his
+      own share in the matter. Boswell officiously <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_296" id="Page_296">[ii.296]</a></span>wrote to the newspapers
+      defending Rousseau and attacking Walpole. King George followed the battle
+      with intense curiosity. Hume with solemn formalities sent the documents to
+      the British Museum. There was silence only in one place, and that was at
+      Wootton. The unfortunate person who had done all the mischief printed not
+      a word.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The most prompt and quite the least instructive of the remarks invariably
+      made upon any one who has acted in an unusual manner, is that he must be
+      mad. This universal criticism upon the unwonted really tells us nothing,
+      because the term may cover any state of mind from a warranted dissent from
+      established custom, down to absolute dementia. Rousseau was called mad
+      when he took to wearing convenient clothes and living frugally. He was
+      called mad when he quitted the town and went to live in the country. The
+      same facile explanation covered his quarrel with importunate friends at
+      the Hermitage. Voltaire called him mad for saying that if there were
+      perfect harmony of taste and temperament between the king's daughter and
+      the executioner's son, the pair ought to be allowed to marry. We who are
+      not forced by conversational necessities to hurry to a judgment, may
+      hesitate to take either taste for the country, or for frugal living, or
+      even for democratic extravagances, as a mark of a disordered mind.<a
+      name="FNanchor_373_373" id="FNanchor_373_373"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_373_373" class="fnanchor">[373]</a> That Rousseau's
+      conduct towards Hume was <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_297"
+      id="Page_297">[ii.297]</a></span>inconsistent with perfect mental
+      soundness is quite plain. But to say this with crude trenchancy, teaches
+      us nothing. Instead of paying ourselves with phrases like monomania, it is
+      more useful shortly to trace the conditions which prepared the way for
+      mental derangement, because this is the only means of understanding either
+      its nature, or the degree to which it extended. These conditions in
+      Rousseau's case are perfectly simple and obvious to any one who recognises
+      the principle, that the essential facts of such mental disorder as his
+      must be sought not in the symptoms, but from the whole range of moral and
+      intellectual constitution, acted on by physical states and acting on them
+      in turn.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rousseau was born with an organisation of extreme sensibility. This
+      predisposition was further deepened by the application in early youth of
+      mental influences specially calculated to heighten juvenile sensibility.
+      Corrective discipline from circumstance and from formal instruction was
+      wholly absent, and thus the particular excess in his temperament became
+      ever more and more exaggerated, and encroached at a rate of geometrical
+      progression upon all the rest of his impulses and faculties; these, if he
+      had been happily placed under some of the many forms of wholesome<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_298" id="Page_298">[ii.298]</a></span>
+      social pressure, would then on the contrary have gradually reduced his
+      sensibility to more normal proportion. When the vicious excess had
+      decisively rooted itself in his character, he came to Paris, where it was
+      irritated into further activity by the uncongeniality of all that
+      surrounded him. Hence the growth of a marked unsociality, taking literary
+      form in the Discourses, and practical form in his retirement from the
+      town. The slow depravation of the affective life was hastened by solitude,
+      by sensuous expansion, by the long musings of literary composition. Well
+      does Goethe's Princess warn the hapless Tasso:&#8212;
+    </p>
+    <div class="poem">
+      <div class="stanza">
+        <span class="i10">Dieser Pfad<br /></span> <span class="i0">Verleitet
+        uns, durch einsames Geb&#252;sch,<br /></span> <span class="i0">Durch
+        stille Th&#228;ler fortzuwandern; mehr<br /></span> <span class="i0">Und
+        mehr verw&#246;hnt sich das Gem&#252;th und strebt<br /></span> <span
+        class="i0">Die goldne Zeit, die ihm von aussen mangelt,<br /></span>
+        <span class="i0">In seinem Innern wieder herzustellen,<br /></span> <span
+        class="i0">So wenig der Versuch gelingen will.<br /></span>
+      </div>
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      Then came harsh and unjust treatment prolonged for many months, and this
+      introduced a slight but genuinely misanthropic element of bitterness into
+      what had hitherto been an excess of feeling about himself, rather than any
+      positive feeling of hostility or suspicion about others. Finally and
+      perhaps above all else, he was the victim of tormenting bodily pain, and
+      of sleeplessness which resulted from it. The agitation and excitement of
+      the journey to England, completed the sum of the conditions of
+      disturbance, and as soon as ever he was settled at Wootton, and<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_299" id="Page_299">[ii.299]</a></span> had
+      leisure to brood over the incidents of the few weeks since his arrival in
+      England, the disorder which had long been spreading through his impulses
+      and affections, suddenly but by a most natural sequence extended to the
+      faculties of his intelligence, and he became the prey of delusion, a
+      delusion which was not yet fixed, but which ultimately became so.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &quot;He has only <i>felt</i> during the whole course of his life,&quot;
+      wrote Hume sympathetically; &quot;and in this respect his sensibility
+      rises to a pitch beyond what I have seen any example of; but it still
+      gives him a more acute feeling of pain than of pleasure. He is like a man
+      who was stripped not only of his clothes, but of his skin, and turned out
+      in that situation to combat with the rude and boisterous elements.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor_374_374" id="FNanchor_374_374"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_374_374" class="fnanchor">[374]</a> A morbid affective
+      state of this kind and of such a degree of intensity, was the sure
+      antecedent of a morbid intellectual state, general or partial, depressed
+      or exalted. One who is the prey of unsound feelings, if they are only
+      marked enough and persistent enough, naturally ends by a correspondingly
+      unsound arrangement of all or some of his ideas to match. The intelligence
+      is seduced into finding supports in misconception of circumstances, for a
+      misconception of human relation which had its root in disordered emotion.
+      This completes the breach of correspondence between the man's nature and
+      the external facts with which he has to deal, though the breach may not,
+      and in Rousseau's case certainly did not, extend along <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_300" id="Page_300">[ii.300]</a></span>the
+      whole line of feeling and judgment. Rousseau's delusion about Hume's
+      sinister feeling and designs, which was the first definite manifestation
+      of positive unsoundness in the sphere of the intelligence, was a last
+      result of the gradual development of an inherited predisposition to
+      affective unsoundness, which unhappily for the man's history had never
+      been counteracted either by a strenuous education, or by the wholesome
+      urgencies of life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We have only to remember that with him, as with the rest of us, there was
+      entire unity of nature, without cataclysm or marvel or inexplicable
+      rupture of mental continuity. All the facts came in an order that might
+      have been foretold; they all lay together, with their foundations down in
+      physical temperament; the facts which made Rousseau's name renowned and
+      his influence a great force, along with those which made his life a
+      scandal to others and a misery to himself. The deepest root of moral
+      disorder lies in an immoderate expectation of happiness, and this
+      immoderate unlawful expectation was the mark both of his character and his
+      work. The exaltation of emotion over intelligence was the secret of his
+      most striking production; the same exaltation, by gaining increased
+      mastery over his whole existence, at length passed the limit of sanity and
+      wrecked him. The tendency of the dominant side of a character towards
+      diseased exaggeration is a fact of daily observation. The ruin which the
+      excess of strong religious imagination works in natures without the
+      quality of energetic<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_301" id="Page_301">[ii.301]</a></span>
+      objective reaction, was shown in the case of Rousseau's contemporary,
+      Cowper. This gentle poet's delusions about the wrath of God were equally
+      pitiable and equally a source of torment to their victim, with Rousseau's
+      delusions about the malignity of his mysterious plotters among men. We
+      must call such a condition unsound, but the important thing is to remember
+      that insanity was only a modification of certain specially marked
+      tendencies of the sufferer's sanity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The desire to protect himself against the defamation of his enemies led
+      him at this time to compose that account of his own life, which is
+      probably the only one of his writings that continues to be generally read.
+      He composed the first part of the Confessions at Wootton, during the
+      autumn and winter of 1766. The idea of giving his memoirs to the public
+      was an old one, originally suggested by one of his publishers. To write
+      memoirs of one's own life was one of the fancies of the time, but like all
+      else, it became in Rousseau's hand something more far-reaching and sincere
+      than a passing fashion. Other people wrote polite histories of their outer
+      lives, amply coloured with romantic decorations. Rousseau with unquailing
+      veracity plunged into the inmost depths, hiding nothing that would be
+      likely to make him either ridiculous or hateful in common opinion, and
+      inventing nothing that could attract much sympathy or much admiration.
+      Though, as has been pointed out already, the Confessions abound in small
+      inaccuracies<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_302" id="Page_302">[ii.302]</a></span>
+      of date, hardly to be avoided by an oldish man in reference to the facts
+      of his boyhood, whether a Rousseau or a Goethe, and though one or two of
+      the incidents are too deeply coloured with the hues of sentimental
+      reminiscence, and one or two of them are downright impossible, yet when
+      all these deductions have been made, the substantial truthfulness of what
+      remains is made more evident with every addition to our materials for
+      testing them. When all the circumstances of Rousseau's life are weighed,
+      and when full account has been taken of his proved delinquencies, we yet
+      perceive that he was at bottom a character as essentially sincere,
+      truthful, careful of fact and reality, as is consistent with the general
+      empire of sensation over untrained intelligence.<a name="FNanchor_375_375"
+      id="FNanchor_375_375"></a><a href="#Footnote_375_375" class="fnanchor">[375]</a>
+      As for the egotism of the Confessions, it is hard to see how a man is to
+      tell the story of his own life without egotism. And it may be worth adding
+      that the self-feeling which comes to the surface and asserts itself, is in
+      a great many cases far less vicious and debilitating than the same feeling
+      nursed internally with a troglodytish shyness. But Rousseau's egotism
+      manifested itself perversely. This is true to a certain small extent, and
+      one or two of the disclosures in the Confessions are in very nauseous
+      matter, and are made moreover in a very nauseous manner. There are some
+      vices whose grotesqueness stirs us more deeply than downright <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_303" id="Page_303">[ii.303]</a></span>atrocities,
+      and we read of certain puerilities avowed by Rousseau, with a livelier
+      impatience than old Benvenuto Cellini quickens in us, when he confesses to
+      a horrible assassination. This morbid form of self-feeling is only less
+      disgusting than the allied form which clothes itself in the phrases of
+      religious exaltation. And there is not much of it. Blot out half a dozen
+      pages from the Confessions, and the egotism is no more perverted than in
+      the confessions of Augustine or of Cardan.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These remarks are not made to extenuate Rousseau's faults, or to raise the
+      popular estimate of his character, but simply in the interests of a
+      greater precision of criticism. In England criticism has nearly always
+      been of the most vulgar superficiality in respect to Rousseau, from the
+      time of Horace Walpole downwards. The Confessions in their least agreeable
+      parts, or rather especially in those parts, are the expression on a new
+      side and in a peculiar way of the same notion of the essential goodness of
+      nature and the importance of understanding nature and restoring its reign,
+      which inspired the Discourses and Emilius. &quot;I would fain show to my
+      fellows,&quot; he began, &quot;a man in all the truth of nature,&quot; and
+      he cannot be charged with any failure to keep his word. He despised
+      opinion, and hence was careless to observe whether or no this revelation
+      of human nakedness was likely to add to the popular respect for nature and
+      the natural man. After all, considering that literature is for the most
+      part a hollow and pretentious<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_304"
+      id="Page_304">[ii.304]</a></span> phantasmagoria of mimic figures posing
+      in breeches and peruke, we may try to forgive certain cruel blows to the
+      dignified assumptions, solemn words, and high heels of convention, in one
+      who would not lie, nor dissemble kinship with the four-footed. Intense
+      subjective preoccupations in markedly emotional natures all tend to come
+      to the same end. The distance from Rousseau's odious erotics to the
+      glorified ecstasies of many a poor female saint is not far. In any case,
+      let us know the facts about human nature, and the pathological facts no
+      less than the others. These are the first thing, and the second, and the
+      third also.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The exaltation of the opening page of the Confessions is shocking. No monk
+      nor saint ever wrote anything more revolting in its blasphemous
+      self-feeling. But the exaltation almost instantly became calm, when the
+      course of the story necessarily drew the writer into dealings with
+      objective facts, even muffled as they were by memory and imagination. The
+      broodings over old reminiscence soothed him, the labour of composition
+      occupied him, and he forgot, as the modern reader would never know from
+      internal evidence, that he was preparing a vindication of his life and
+      character against the infamies with which Hume and others were supposed to
+      be industriously blackening them. While he was writing this famous
+      composition, severed by so vast a gulf from the modes of English
+      provincial life, he was on good terms with one or two of the great people
+      in his neighbourhood, and kept up a gracious and social correspondence<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_305" id="Page_305">[ii.305]</a></span> with
+      them. He was greatly pleased by a compliment that was paid to him by the
+      government, apparently through the interest of General Conway. The duty
+      that had been paid upon certain boxes forwarded to Rousseau from
+      Switzerland was recouped by the treasury,<a name="FNanchor_376_376"
+      id="FNanchor_376_376"></a><a href="#Footnote_376_376" class="fnanchor">[376]</a>
+      and the arrangements for the annual pension of one hundred pounds were
+      concluded and accepted by him, after he had duly satisfied himself that
+      Hume was not the indirect author of the benefaction.<a
+      name="FNanchor_377_377" id="FNanchor_377_377"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_377_377" class="fnanchor">[377]</a> The weather was the
+      worst possible, but whenever it allowed him to go out of doors, he found
+      delight in climbing the heights around him in search of curious mosses;
+      for he had now come to think the discovery of a single new plant a hundred
+      times more useful than to have the whole human race listening to your
+      sermons for half a century.<a name="FNanchor_378_378" id="FNanchor_378_378"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_378_378" class="fnanchor">[378]</a> &quot;This indolent
+      and contemplative life that you do not approve,&quot; he wrote to the
+      elder Mirabeau, &quot;and for which I pretend to make no excuses, becomes
+      every day more delicious to me: to wander alone among the trees and rocks
+      that surround my dwelling; to muse or rather to extravagate at my ease,
+      and as you say to stand gaping in the air; when my brain gets too hot, to
+      calm it by dissecting some moss or fern; in short, to surrender myself
+      without restraint to my phantasies, which, heaven be thanked, are all
+      under my own con<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_306" id="Page_306">[ii.306]</a></span>trol,&#8212;all
+      that is for me the height of enjoyment, to which I can imagine nothing
+      superior in this world for a man of my age and in my condition.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor_379_379" id="FNanchor_379_379"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_379_379" class="fnanchor">[379]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This contentment did not last long. The snow kept him indoors. The
+      excitement of composition abated. Theresa harassed him by ignoble quarrels
+      with the women in the kitchen. His delusions returned with greater force
+      than before. He believed that the whole English nation was in a plot
+      against him, that all his letters were opened before reaching London and
+      before leaving it, that all his movements were closely watched, and that
+      he was surrounded by unseen guards to prevent any attempt at escape.<a
+      name="FNanchor_380_380" id="FNanchor_380_380"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_380_380" class="fnanchor">[380]</a> At length these
+      delusions got such complete mastery over him, that in a paroxysm of terror
+      he fled away from Wootton, leaving money, papers, and all else behind him.
+      Nothing was heard of him for a fortnight, when Mr. Davenport received a
+      letter from him dated at Spalding in Lincolnshire. Mr. Davenport's conduct
+      throughout was marked by a humanity and patience that do him the highest
+      honour. He confesses himself &quot;quite moved to read poor Rousseau's
+      mournful epistle.&quot; &quot;You shall see his letter,&quot; he writes to
+      Hume, &quot;the first opportunity; but God help him, I can't for pity give
+      a copy; and 'tis so much mixed with his own poor little private concerns,
+      that it would not be right in me to do <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_307" id="Page_307">[ii.307]</a></span>it.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor_381_381" id="FNanchor_381_381"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_381_381" class="fnanchor">[381]</a> This is the generosity
+      which makes Hume's impatience and that of his mischievous advisers in
+      Paris appear petty. Rousseau had behaved quite as ill to Mr. Davenport as
+      he had done to Hume, and had received at least equal services from him.<a
+      name="FNanchor_382_382" id="FNanchor_382_382"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_382_382" class="fnanchor">[382]</a> The good man at once
+      sent a servant to Spalding in search of his unhappy guest, but Rousseau
+      had again disappeared. The parson of the parish had passed several hours
+      of each day in his company, and had found him cheerful and good-humoured.
+      He had had a blue coat made for himself, and had written a long letter to
+      the lord chancellor, praying him to appoint a guard, at Rousseau's own
+      expense, to escort him in safety out of the kingdom where enemies were
+      plotting against his life.<a name="FNanchor_383_383" id="FNanchor_383_383"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_383_383" class="fnanchor">[383]</a> He was next heard of
+      at Dover (May 18), whence he wrote a letter to General Conway, setting
+      forth his delusion in full form.<a name="FNanchor_384_384"
+      id="FNanchor_384_384"></a><a href="#Footnote_384_384" class="fnanchor">[384]</a>
+      He is the victim of a plot; the conspirators will not allow him to leave
+      the island, lest he should divulge in other countries the outrages to
+      which he has been subjected here; he perceives the sinister manoeuvres
+      that will arrest him if he attempts to put his foot on board ship. But he
+      warns them that his tragical disappearance cannot take place without
+      creating inquiry. Still if General Conway will only let him go, he gives
+      his word of honour that he will not publish <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_308" id="Page_308">[ii.308]</a></span>a line of the memoirs he
+      has written, nor ever divulge the wrongs which he has suffered in England.
+      &quot;I see my last hour approaching,&quot; he concluded; &quot;I am
+      determined, if necessary, to advance to meet it, and to perish or be free;
+      there is no longer any other alternative.&quot; On the same evening on
+      which he wrote this letter (about May 20-22), the forlorn creature took
+      boat and landed at Calais, where he seems at once to have recovered his
+      composure and a right mind.
+    </p>
+    <div class="footnotes">
+      <h3>
+        FOOTNOTES:
+      </h3>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_350_350" id="Footnote_350_350"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_350_350"><span class="label">[350]</span></a> Jan.
+          1766&#8212;May 1767.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_351_351" id="Footnote_351_351"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_351_351"><span class="label">[351]</span></a>
+          Streckeisen, ii. 275, etc. <i>Corr.</i>, iii.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_352_352" id="Footnote_352_352"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_352_352"><span class="label">[352]</span></a> Burton,
+          ii. 299.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_353_353" id="Footnote_353_353"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_353_353"><span class="label">[353]</span></a> The
+          materials for this chapter are taken from Rousseau's <i>Correspondence</i>
+          (vols. iv. and v.), and from Hume's letters to various persons, given
+          in the second volume of Mr. Burton's <i>Life of Hume</i>. Everybody
+          who takes an interest in Rousseau is indebted to Mr. Burton for the
+          ample documents which he has provided. Yet one cannot but regret the
+          satire on Rousseau with which he intersperses them, and which is not
+          always felicitous. For one instance, he implies (p. 295) that Rousseau
+          invented the story given in the Confessions, of Hume's correcting the
+          proofs of Wallace's book against himself. The story may be true or
+          not, but at any rate Rousseau had it very circumstantially from Lord
+          Marischal; see letter from Lord M. to J.J.R., in Streckeisen, ii. 67.
+          Again, such an expression as Rousseau's &quot;<i>occasional</i>
+          attention to small matters&quot; (p. 321) only shows that the writer
+          has not read Rousseau's letters, which are indeed not worth reading,
+          except by those who wish to have a right to speak about Rousseau's
+          character. The numerous pamphlets on the quarrel between Hume and
+          Rousseau, if I may judge from those of them which I have turned over,
+          really shed no light on the matter, though they added much heat. For
+          the journey, see <i>Corr.</i>, iv. 307; Burton, ii. 304.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_354_354" id="Footnote_354_354"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_354_354"><span class="label">[354]</span></a> <i>Letter
+          to a Member of the National Assembly.</i> The same passage contains
+          some strong criticism on Rousseau's style.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_355_355" id="Footnote_355_355"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_355_355"><span class="label">[355]</span></a> Burton,
+          304, 309, 310.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_356_356" id="Footnote_356_356"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_356_356"><span class="label">[356]</span></a> <i>Ib.</i>
+          ii. 309, <i>n.</i>
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_357_357" id="Footnote_357_357"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_357_357"><span class="label">[357]</span></a> Mr.
+          Howitt has given an account of Rousseau's quarters at Wootton, in his
+          <i>Visits to Remarkable Places</i>. One or two aged peasants had some
+          confused memory of &quot;old Ross-hall.&quot; For Rousseau's own
+          description, see his letters to Mdme. de Luze, May 10, 1766. <i>Corr.</i>,
+          iv. 326.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_358_358" id="Footnote_358_358"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_358_358"><span class="label">[358]</span></a> Burton,
+          313. It has been stated that Rousseau never paid this; at any rate
+          when he fled, he left between thirty and forty pounds in Mr.
+          Davenport's hands. See Davenport to Hume; Burton, 367. Rousseau's
+          accurate probity in affairs of money is absolutely unimpeachable.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_359_359" id="Footnote_359_359"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_359_359"><span class="label">[359]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>
+          iv. 312. April 9, 1766.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_360_360" id="Footnote_360_360"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_360_360"><span class="label">[360]</span></a> Here is
+          a translation of this rather poor piece of sarcasm:&#8212;&quot;My
+          dear Jean Jacques&#8212;You have renounced Geneva, your native place.
+          You have caused your expulsion from Switzerland, a country so extolled
+          in your writings; France has issued a warrant against you; so do you
+          come to me. I admire your talents; I am amused by your dreamings,
+          though let me tell you they absorb you too much and for too long. You
+          must at length be sober and happy; you have caused enough talk about
+          yourself by oddities which in truth are hardly becoming a really great
+          man. Prove to your enemies that you can now and then have common
+          sense. That will annoy them and do you no harm. My states offer you a
+          peaceful retreat. I wish you well, and will treat you well, if you
+          will let me. But if you persist in refusing my help, do not reckon
+          upon my telling any one that you did so. If you are bent on tormenting
+          your spirit to find new misfortunes, choose whatever you like best. I
+          am a king, and can procure them for you at your pleasure; and what
+          will certainly never happen to you in respect of your enemies, I will
+          cease to persecute you as soon as you cease to take a pride in being
+          persecuted. Your good friend, <span class="smcap">Frederick</span>.&quot;
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_361_361" id="Footnote_361_361"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_361_361"><span class="label">[361]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>,
+          iv. 313, 343, 388, 398.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_362_362" id="Footnote_362_362"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_362_362"><span class="label">[362]</span></a> <i>Ib.</i>
+          395.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_363_363" id="Footnote_363_363"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_363_363"><span class="label">[363]</span></a> <i>Ib.</i>
+          389, etc.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_364_364" id="Footnote_364_364"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_364_364"><span class="label">[364]</span></a> <i>Ib.</i>
+          384.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_365_365" id="Footnote_365_365"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_365_365"><span class="label">[365]</span></a> <i>Ib.</i>
+          343, 344, 387, etc.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_366_366" id="Footnote_366_366"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_366_366"><span class="label">[366]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>,
+          iv. 346.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_367_367" id="Footnote_367_367"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_367_367"><span class="label">[367]</span></a> <i>Ib.</i>
+          390. A letter from Hume to Blair, long before the rupture overt, shows
+          the former to have been by no means so phlegmatic on this occasion as
+          he may have seemed. &quot;I hope,&quot; he writes, &quot;you have not
+          so bad an opinion of me as to think I was not melted on this occasion;
+          I assure you I kissed him and embraced him twenty times, with a
+          plentiful effusion of tears. I think no scene of my life was ever more
+          affecting.&quot; Burton, ii. 315. The great doubters of the eighteenth
+          century could without fear have accepted the test of the ancient
+          saying, that men without tears are worth little.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_368_368" id="Footnote_368_368"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_368_368"><span class="label">[368]</span></a>
+          Bernardin de St. Pierre, <i>Oeuv.</i>, xii. 79.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_369_369" id="Footnote_369_369"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_369_369"><span class="label">[369]</span></a>
+          Walpole's <i>Letters</i>, v. 7 (Cunningham's edition). For other
+          letters from the shrewd coxcomb on the same matter, see pp. 23-28. A
+          corroboration of the statement that Hume knew nothing of the letter
+          until he was in England, may be inferred from what he wrote to Madame
+          de Boufflers; Burton, ii. 306, and <i>n.</i> 2.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_370_370" id="Footnote_370_370"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_370_370"><span class="label">[370]</span></a>
+          Bernardin de St. Pierre, <i>Oeuv.</i>, xii. 79.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_371_371" id="Footnote_371_371"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_371_371"><span class="label">[371]</span></a> To Adam
+          Smith. Burton, 380.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_372_372" id="Footnote_372_372"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_372_372"><span class="label">[372]</span></a> Burton,
+          381.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_373_373" id="Footnote_373_373"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_373_373"><span class="label">[373]</span></a> A very
+          common but random opinion traces Rousseau's insanity to certain
+          disagreeable habits avowed in the Confessions. They may have
+          contributed in some small degree to depression of vital energies,
+          though for that matter Rousseau's strength and power of endurance were
+          remarkable to the end. But they certainly did not produce a mental
+          state in the least corresponding to that particular variety of
+          insanity, which possesses definitely marked features.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_374_374" id="Footnote_374_374"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_374_374"><span class="label">[374]</span></a> Burton,
+          ii. 314.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_375_375" id="Footnote_375_375"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_375_375"><span class="label">[375]</span></a> For an
+          instructive and, as it appears to me, a thoroughly trustworthy account
+          of the temper in which the Confessions were written, see the 4th of
+          the <i>R&#234;veries</i>.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_376_376" id="Footnote_376_376"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_376_376"><span class="label">[376]</span></a> Letter
+          to the Duke of Grafton, Feb. 27, 1767. <i>Corr.</i>, v. 98: also 118.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_377_377" id="Footnote_377_377"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_377_377"><span class="label">[377]</span></a> <i>Ib.</i>
+          v. 133; also to General Conway (March 26), p. 137, etc.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_378_378" id="Footnote_378_378"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_378_378"><span class="label">[378]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>,
+          v. 37.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_379_379" id="Footnote_379_379"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_379_379"><span class="label">[379]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>,
+          v. 88.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_380_380" id="Footnote_380_380"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_380_380"><span class="label">[380]</span></a> See the
+          letters to Du Peyrou, of the 2d and 4th of April 1767. <i>Corr.</i>,
+          v. 140-147.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_381_381" id="Footnote_381_381"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_381_381"><span class="label">[381]</span></a>
+          Davenport to Hume; Burton, 367-371.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_382_382" id="Footnote_382_382"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_382_382"><span class="label">[382]</span></a> J.J.R.
+          to Davenport, Dec. 22, 1766, and April 30, 1767. <i>Corr.</i>, v. 66,
+          152.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_383_383" id="Footnote_383_383"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_383_383"><span class="label">[383]</span></a> Burton,
+          369, 375.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_384_384" id="Footnote_384_384"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_384_384"><span class="label">[384]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>,
+          v. 153.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+    </div>
+    <hr style="width: 65%;" />
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_309" id="Page_309">[ii.309]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      <a name="CHAPTER_VII" id="CHAPTER_VII"></a>CHAPTER VII.
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      THE END.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <span class="smcap">Before</span> leaving England, Rousseau had received
+      more than one long and rambling letter from a man who was as unlike the
+      rest of mankind as he was unlike them himself. This was the Marquis of
+      Mirabeau (1715-89), the violent, tyrannical, pedantic, humoristic sire of
+      a more famous son. Perhaps we might say that Mirabeau and Rousseau were
+      the two most singular originals then known to men, and Mirabeau's
+      originality was in some respects the more salient of the two. There is
+      less of the conventional tone of the eighteenth century Frenchman in him
+      than in any other conspicuous man of the time, though like many other
+      headstrong and despotic souls he picked up the current notions of
+      philanthropy and human brotherhood. He really was by very force of
+      temperament that rebel against the narrowness, trimness, and moral
+      formalism of the time which Rousseau only claimed and attempted to be,
+      with the secondary degree of success that follows vehemence without native
+      strength. Mirabeau was a sort of Swift, who had strangely taken up the
+      trade of friendship for<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_310"
+      id="Page_310">[ii.310]</a></span> man and adopted the phrases of
+      perfectibility; while Rousseau on the other hand was meant for a F&#233;nelon,
+      save that he became possessed of unclean devils.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mirabeau, like Jean Jacques himself, was so impressed by the marked tenor
+      of contemporary feeling, its prudential didactics, its formulistic
+      sociality, that his native insurgency only found vent in private life,
+      while in public he played pedagogue to the human race. Friend of Quesnai
+      and orthodox economist as he was, he delighted in Rousseau's books: &quot;I
+      know no morality that goes deeper than yours; it strikes like a
+      thunderbolt, and advances with the steady assurance of truth, for you are
+      always true, according to your notions for the moment.&quot; He wrote to
+      tell him so, but he told him at the same time at great length, and with a
+      caustic humour and incoherency less academic than Rabelaisian, that he had
+      behaved absurdly in his quarrel with Hume. There is nothing more quaint
+      than the appearance of a few of the sacramental phrases of the sect of the
+      economists, floating in the midst of a copious stream of egoistic
+      whimsicalities. He concludes with a diverting enumeration of all his
+      country seats and demesnes, with their respective advantages and
+      disadvantages, and prays Rousseau to take up his residence in whichever of
+      them may please him best.<a name="FNanchor_385_385" id="FNanchor_385_385"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_385_385" class="fnanchor">[385]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Immediately on landing at Calais Rousseau informed Mirabeau, and Mirabeau
+      lost no time in conveying him stealthily, for the warrant of the parlia<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_311" id="Page_311">[ii.311]</a></span>ment
+      of Paris was still in force, to a house at Fleury. But the Friend of Men,
+      to use his own account of himself, &quot;bore letters as a plum-tree bears
+      plums,&quot; and wrote to his guest with strange humoristic volubility and
+      droll imperturbable temper, as one who knew his Jean Jacques. He exhorts
+      him in many sheets to harden himself against excessive sensibility, to be
+      less pusillanimous, to take society more lightly, as his own light
+      estimate of its worth should lead him to do. &quot;No doubt its outside is
+      a shifting surface-picture, nay even ridiculous, if you will; but if the
+      irregular and ceaseless flight of butterflies wearies you in your walk, it
+      is your own fault for looking continuously at what was only made to adorn
+      and vary the scene. But how many social virtues, how much gentleness and
+      considerateness, how many benevolent actions, remain at the bottom of it
+      all.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_386_386" id="FNanchor_386_386"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_386_386" class="fnanchor">[386]</a> Enormous manifestoes
+      of the doctrine of perfectibility were not in the least degree either
+      soothing or interesting to Rousseau, and the thrusts of shrewd candour at
+      his expense might touch his fancy on a single occasion, but not oftener.
+      Two humorists are seldom successful in amusing one another. Besides,
+      Mirabeau insisted that Jean Jacques should read this or that of his books.
+      Rousseau answered that he would try, but warned him of the folly of it.
+      &quot;I do not engage always to follow what you say, because it has always
+      been painful to me to think, and fatiguing to follow the thoughts of other
+      people, and at present I cannot <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_312"
+      id="Page_312">[ii.312]</a></span>do so at all.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor_387_387" id="FNanchor_387_387"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_387_387" class="fnanchor">[387]</a> Though they continued
+      to be good friends, Rousseau only remained three or four weeks at Fleury.
+      His old acquaintance at Montmorency, the Prince of Conti, partly perhaps
+      from contrition at the rather unchivalrous fashion in which his great
+      friends had hustled the philosopher away at the time of the decree of the
+      parliament of Paris, offered him refuge at one of his country seats at
+      Trye near Gisors. Here he installed Rousseau under the name of Renou,
+      either to silence the indiscreet curiosity of neighbours, or to gratify a
+      whim of Rousseau himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rousseau remained for a year (June 1767-June 1768), composing the second
+      part of the Confessions, in a condition of extreme mental confusion. Dusky
+      phantoms walked with him once more. He knew the gardener, the servants,
+      the neighbours, all to be in the pay of Hume, and that he was watched day
+      and night with a view to his destruction.<a name="FNanchor_388_388"
+      id="FNanchor_388_388"></a><a href="#Footnote_388_388" class="fnanchor">[388]</a>
+      He entirely gave up either reading or writing, save a very small number of
+      letters, and he declared that to take up the pen even for these was like
+      lifting a load of iron. The only interest he had was botany, and for this
+      his passion became daily more intense. He appears to have been as
+      contented as a child, so long as he could employ himself in long
+      expeditions in search of new plants, in arranging a herbarium, in watching
+      the growth of the germ of some rare seed which needed careful tending. But
+      the story had once more the same conclusion. He fled from Trye, as he had
+      fled <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_313" id="Page_313">[ii.313]</a></span>from
+      Wootton. He meant apparently to go to Chamb&#233;ri, drawn by the deep
+      magnetic force of old memories that seemed long extinct. But at Grenoble
+      on his way thither he encountered a substantial grievance. A man alleged
+      that he had lent Rousseau a few francs seven years previously. He was
+      undoubtedly mistaken, and was fully convicted of his mistake by proper
+      authorities, but Rousseau's correspondents suffered none the less for
+      that. We all know when monomania seizes a man, how adroitly and how
+      eagerly it colours every incident. The mistaken claim was proof
+      demonstrative of that frightful and tenebrous conspiracy, which they might
+      have thought a delusion hitherto, but which, alas, this showed to be only
+      too tragically real; and so on, through many pages of droning
+      wretchedness.<a name="FNanchor_389_389" id="FNanchor_389_389"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_389_389" class="fnanchor">[389]</a> Then we find him at
+      Bourgoin, where he spent some months in shabby taverns, and then many
+      months more at Monquin on adjoining uplands.<a name="FNanchor_390_390"
+      id="FNanchor_390_390"></a><a href="#Footnote_390_390" class="fnanchor">[390]</a>
+      The estrangement from Theresa, of which enough has been said already,<a
+      name="FNanchor_391_391" id="FNanchor_391_391"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_391_391" class="fnanchor">[391]</a> was added to his other
+      torments. He resolved, as so many of the self-tortured have done since, to
+      go in search of happiness to the western lands beyond the Atlantic, where
+      the elixir of bliss is thought by the wearied among us to be inexhaustible
+      and assured. Almost in the same page he turns his face eastwards, <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_314" id="Page_314">[ii.314]</a></span>and
+      dreams of ending his days peacefully among the islands of the Grecian
+      archipelago. Next he gravely, not only designed, but actually took
+      measures, to return to Wootton. All was no more than the momentary
+      incoherent purpose of a sick man's dream, the weary distraction of one who
+      had deliberately devoted himself to isolation from his fellows, without
+      first sitting down carefully to count the cost, or to measure the inner
+      resources which he possessed to meet the deadly strain that isolation puts
+      on every one of a man's mental fibres. Geographical loneliness is to some
+      a condition of their fullest strength, but most of the few who dare to
+      make a moral solitude for themselves, find that they have assuredly not
+      made peace. Such solitude, as South said of the study of the Apocalypse,
+      either finds a man mad, or leaves him so. Not all can play the stoic who
+      will, and it is still more certain that one who like Rousseau has lain
+      down with the doctrine that in all things imaginable it is impossible for
+      him to do at all what he cannot do with pleasure, will end in a condition
+      of profound and hopeless impotence in respect to pleasure itself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In July 1770, he made his way to Paris, and here he remained eight years
+      longer, not without the introduction of a certain degree of order into his
+      outer life, though the clouds of vague suspicion and distrust, half
+      bitter, half mournful, hung heavily as ever upon his mind. The Dialogues,
+      which he wrote at this period (1775-76) to vindicate his memory from the
+      defamation that was to be launched in a dark torrent<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_315" id="Page_315">[ii.315]</a></span> upon the world at the
+      moment of his death, could not possibly have been written by a man in his
+      right mind. Yet the best of the Musings, which were written still nearer
+      the end, are masterpieces in the style of contemplative prose. The third,
+      the fifth, the seventh, especially abound in that even, full, mellow
+      gravity of tone which is so rare in literature, because the deep
+      absorption of spirit which is its source is so rare in life. They reveal
+      Rousseau to us with a truth beyond that attained in any of his other
+      pieces&#8212;a mournful sombre figure, looming shadowily in the dark glow
+      of sundown among sad and desolate places. There is nothing like them in
+      the French tongue, which is the speech of the clear, the cheerful, or the
+      august among men; nothing like this sonorous plainsong, the strangely
+      melodious expression in the music of prose of a darkened spirit which yet
+      had imaginative visions of beatitude.
+    </p>
+    <hr style="width: 45%;" />
+    <p>
+      It is interesting to look on one or two pictures of the last waste and
+      obscure years of the man, whose words were at this time silently
+      fermenting for good and for evil in many spirits&#8212;a Schiller, a
+      Herder, a Jeanne Phlipon, a Robespierre, a Gabriel Mirabeau, and many
+      hundreds of those whose destiny was not to lead, but ingenuously to
+      follow. Rousseau seems to have repulsed nearly all his ancient friends,
+      and to have settled down with dogged resolve to his old trade of copying
+      music. In summer he rose at five, copied music until half-past seven;
+      munched his<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_316" id="Page_316">[ii.316]</a></span>
+      breakfast, arranging on paper during the process such plants as he had
+      gathered the previous afternoon; then he returned to his work, dined at
+      half-past twelve, and went forth to take coffee at some public place. He
+      would not return from his walk until nightfall, and he retired at
+      half-past ten. The pavements of Paris were hateful to him because they
+      tore his feet, and, said he, with deeply significant antithesis, &quot;I
+      am not afraid of death, but I dread pain.&quot; He always found his way as
+      fast as possible to one of the suburbs, and one of his greatest delights
+      was to watch Mont Val&#233;rien in the sunset. &quot;Atheists,&quot; he
+      said calumniously, &quot;do not love the country; they like the environs
+      of Paris, where you have all the pleasures of the city, good cheer, books,
+      pretty women; but if you take these things away, then they die of
+      weariness.&quot; The note of every bird held him attentive, and filled his
+      mind with delicious images. A graceful story is told of two swallows who
+      made a nest in Rousseau's sleeping-room, and hatched the eggs there.
+      &quot;I was no more than a doorkeeper for them,&quot; he said, &quot;for I
+      kept opening the window for them every moment. They used to fly with a
+      great stir round my head, until I had fulfilled the duties of the tacit
+      convention between these swallows and me.&quot;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In January 1771, Bernardin de St. Pierre, author of the immortal <i>Paul
+      and Virginia</i> (1788), finding himself at the Cape of Good Hope, wrote
+      to a friend in France just previously to his return to Europe, counting
+      among other delights that of seeing two<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_317" id="Page_317">[ii.317]</a></span> summers in one year.<a
+      name="FNanchor_392_392" id="FNanchor_392_392"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_392_392" class="fnanchor">[392]</a> Rousseau happened to
+      see the letter, and expressed a desire to make the acquaintance of a man
+      who in returning home should think of that as one of his chief pleasures.
+      To this we owe the following pictures of an interior from St. Pierre's
+      hand:&#8212;
+    </p>
+    <div class="blockquot">
+      <p>
+        In the month of June in 1772, a friend having offered to take me to see
+        Jean Jacques Rousseau, he brought me to a house in the Rue Pl&#226;tri&#232;re,
+        nearly opposite to the H&#244;tel de la Poste. We mounted to the fourth
+        story. We knocked, and Madame Rousseau opened the door. &quot;Come in,
+        gentlemen,&quot; she said, &quot;you will find my husband.&quot; We
+        passed through a very small antechamber, where the household utensils
+        were neatly arranged, and from that into a room where Jean Jacques was
+        seated in an overcoat and a white cap, busy copying music. He rose with
+        a smiling face, offered us chairs, and resumed his work, at the same
+        time taking a part in conversation. He was thin and of middle height.
+        One shoulder struck me as rather higher than the other ... otherwise he
+        was very well proportioned. He had a brown complexion, some colour on
+        his cheek-bones, a good mouth, a well-made nose, a rounded and lofty
+        brow, and eyes full of fire. The oblique lines falling from the nostrils
+        to the extremity of the lips, and marking a physiognomy, in his case
+        expressed great sensibility and something even painful. One observed in
+        his face three or four of the characteristics of melancholy&#8212;the
+        deep receding eyes and the elevation of the eyebrows; you saw profound
+        sadness in the wrinkles of the brow; a keen and even caustic gaiety in a
+        thousand little creases at the corners of the eyes, of <span
+        class="pagenum"><a name="Page_318" id="Page_318">[ii.318]</a></span>which
+        the orbits entirely disappeared when he laughed.... Near him was a
+        spinette on which from time to time he tried an air. Two little beds of
+        blue and white striped calico, a table, and a few chairs, made the stock
+        of his furniture. On the walls hung a plan of the forest and park of
+        Montmorency, where he had once lived, and an engraving of the King of
+        England, his old benefactor. His wife was sitting mending linen; a
+        canary sang in a cage hung from the ceiling; sparrows came for crumbs on
+        to the sills of the windows, which on the side of the street were open;
+        while in the window of the antechamber we noticed boxes and pots filled
+        with such plants as it pleases nature to sow. There was in the whole
+        effect of his little establishment an air of cleanness, peace, and
+        simplicity, which was delightful.
+      </p>
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      A few days after, Rousseau returned the visit. &quot;He wore a round wig,
+      well powdered and curled, carrying a hat under his arm, and in a full suit
+      of nankeen. His whole exterior was modest, but extremely neat.&quot; He
+      expressed his passion for good coffee, saying that this and ice were the
+      only two luxuries for which he cared. St. Pierre happened to have brought
+      some from the Isle of Bourbon, so on the following day he rashly sent
+      Rousseau a small packet, which at first produced a polite letter of
+      thanks; but the day after the letter of thanks came one of harsh protest
+      against the ignominy of receiving presents which could not be returned,
+      and bidding the unfortunate donor to choose between taking his coffee back
+      or never seeing his new friend again. A fair bargain was ultimately
+      arranged, St. Pierre receiving in exchange for his coffee some curious
+      root<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_319" id="Page_319">[ii.319]</a></span>
+      or other, and a book on ichthyology. Immediately afterwards he went to
+      dine with his sage. He arrived at eleven in the forenoon, and they
+      conversed until half-past twelve.
+    </p>
+    <div class="blockquot">
+      <p>
+        Then his wife laid the cloth. He took a bottle of wine, and as he put it
+        on the table, asked whether we should have enough, or if I was fond of
+        drinking. &quot;How many are there of us,&quot; said I. &quot;Three,&quot;
+        he said; &quot;you, my wife, and myself.&quot; &quot;Well,&quot; I went
+        on, &quot;when I drink wine and am alone, I drink a good half-bottle,
+        and I drink a trifle more when I am with friends.&quot; &quot;In that
+        case,&quot; he answered, &quot;we shall not have enough; I must go down
+        into the cellar.&quot; He brought up a second bottle. His wife served
+        two dishes, one of small tarts, and another which was covered. He said,
+        showing me the first, &quot;That is your dish and the other is mine.&quot;
+        &quot;I don't eat much pastry,&quot; I said, &quot;but I hope to be
+        allowed to taste what you have got.&quot; &quot;Oh, they are both
+        common,&quot; he replied; &quot;but most people don't care for this.
+        'Tis a Swiss dish; a compound of lard, mutton, vegetables, and
+        chestnuts.&quot; It was excellent. After these two dishes, we had slices
+        of beef in salad; then biscuits and cheese; after which his wife served
+        the coffee.
+      </p>
+      <hr style="width: 45%;" />
+      <p>
+        One morning when I was at his house, I saw various domestics either
+        coming for rolls of music, or bringing them to him to copy. He received
+        them standing and uncovered. He said to some, &quot;The price is so
+        much,&quot; and received the money; to others, &quot;How soon must I
+        return my copy?&quot; &quot;My mistress would like to have it back in a
+        fortnight.&quot; &quot;Oh, that's out of the question: I have work, I
+        can't do it in less than three weeks.&quot; I inquired why he did not
+        take his talents to better market. &quot;Ah,&quot; he answered, &quot;there
+        are two Rousseaus in the world; one rich, or who might have been if he
+        had<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_320" id="Page_320">[ii.320]</a></span>
+        chosen; a man capricious, singular, fantastic; this is the Rousseau of
+        the public; the other is obliged to work for his living, the Rousseau
+        whom you see.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_393_393" id="FNanchor_393_393"></a><a
+        href="#Footnote_393_393" class="fnanchor">[393]</a>
+      </p>
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      They often took long rambles together, and all proceeded most
+      harmoniously, unless St. Pierre offered to pay for such refreshment as
+      they might take, when a furious explosion was sure to follow. Here is one
+      more picture, without explosion.
+    </p>
+    <div class="blockquot">
+      <p style="text-align: center">
+        <i>An Easter Monday Excursion to Mont Val&#233;rien.</i>
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        We made an appointment at a caf&#233; in the Champs Elys&#233;es. In the
+        morning we took some chocolate. The wind was westerly, and the air
+        fresh. The sun was surrounded by white clouds, spread in masses over an
+        azure sky. Reaching the Bois de Boulogne by eight o'clock, Jean Jacques
+        set to work botanising. As he collected his little harvest, we kept
+        walking along. We had gone through part of the wood, when in the midst
+        of the solitude we perceived two young girls, one of whom was arranging
+        the other's hair.&#8212;[Reminded them of some verses of Virgil.]....
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Arrived on the edge of the river, we crossed the ferry with a number of
+        people whom devotion was taking to Mont Val&#233;rien. We climbed an
+        extremely stiff slope, and were hardly on the top before hunger overtook
+        us and we began to think of dining. Rousseau then led the way towards a
+        hermitage, where he knew we could make sure of hospitality. The brother
+        who opened to us, conducted us to the chapel, where they were reciting
+        the litanies of providence, which are extremely beautiful.... When we
+        had prayed, Jean Jacques said to me with genuine feeling: &quot;Now I
+        feel what is said in the gospel, 'Where several of you are gathered
+        together in my name, there <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_321"
+        id="Page_321">[ii.321]</a></span>will I be in the midst of them.' There
+        is a sentiment of peace and comfort here that penetrates the soul.&quot;
+        I replied, &quot;If F&#233;nelon were alive, you would be a Catholic.&quot;
+        &quot;Ah,&quot; said he, the tears in his eyes, &quot;if F&#233;nelon
+        were alive, I would seek to be his lackey.&quot;
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Presently we were introduced into the refectory; we seated ourselves
+        during the reading. The subject was the injustice of the complainings of
+        man: God has brought him from nothing, he oweth him nothing. After the
+        reading, Rousseau said to me in a voice of deep emotion: &quot;Ah, how
+        happy is the man who can believe....&quot; We walked about for some time
+        in the cloister and the gardens. They command an immense prospect. Paris
+        in the distance reared her towers all covered with light, and made a
+        crown to the far-spreading landscape. The brightness of the view
+        contrasted with the great leaden clouds that rolled after one another
+        from the west, and seemed to fill the valley.... In the afternoon rain
+        came on, as we approached the Porte Maillot. We took shelter along with
+        a crowd of other holiday folk under some chestnut-trees whose leaves
+        were coming out. One of the waiters of a tavern perceiving Jean Jacques,
+        rushed to him full of joy, exclaiming, &quot;What, is it you, <i>mon
+        bonhomme</i>? Why, it is a whole age since we have seen you.&quot;
+        Rousseau replied cheerfully, &quot;'Tis because my wife has been ill,
+        and I myself have been out of sorts.&quot; &quot;<i>Mon pauvre bonhomme</i>,&quot;
+        replied the lad, &quot;you must not stop here; come in, come in, and I
+        will find room for you.&quot; He hurried us along to a room upstairs,
+        where in spite of the crowd he procured for us chairs and a table, and
+        bread and wine. I said to Jean Jacques, &quot;He seems very familiar
+        with you.&quot; He answered, &quot;Yes, we have known one another some
+        years. We used to come here in fine weather, my wife and I, to eat a
+        cutlet of an evening.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_394_394"
+        id="FNanchor_394_394"></a><a href="#Footnote_394_394" class="fnanchor">[394]</a>
+      </p>
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_322" id="Page_322">[ii.322]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Things did not continue to go thus smoothly. One day St. Pierre went to
+      see him, and was received without a word, and with stiff and gloomy mien.
+      He tried to talk, but only got monosyllables; he took up a book, and this
+      drew a sarcasm which sent him forth from the room. For more than two
+      months they did not meet. At length they had an accidental encounter at a
+      street corner. Rousseau accosted St. Pierre, and with a gradually warming
+      sensibility proceeded thus: &quot;There are days when I want to be alone
+      and crave privacy. I come back from my solitary expeditions so calm and
+      contented. There I have not been wanting to anybody, nor has anybody been
+      wanting to me,&quot; and so on.<a name="FNanchor_395_395"
+      id="FNanchor_395_395"></a><a href="#Footnote_395_395" class="fnanchor">[395]</a>
+      He expressed this humour more pointedly on some other occasion, when he
+      said that there were times in which he fled from the eyes of men as from
+      Parthian arrows. As one said who knew from experience, the fate of his
+      most intimate friend depended on a word or a gesture.<a
+      name="FNanchor_396_396" id="FNanchor_396_396"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_396_396" class="fnanchor">[396]</a> Another of them
+      declared that he knew Rousseau's style of discarding a friend by letter so
+      thoroughly, that he felt confident he could supply Rousseau's place in
+      case of illness or absence.<a name="FNanchor_397_397" id="FNanchor_397_397"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_397_397" class="fnanchor">[397]</a> In much of this we
+      suspect that the quarrel was perfectly justified. Sociality meant a futile
+      display before unworthy and condescending curiosity. &quot;It is not I
+      whom they care <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_323" id="Page_323">[ii.323]</a></span>for,&quot;
+      he very truly said, &quot;but public opinion and talk about me, without a
+      thought of what real worth I may have.&quot; Hence his steadfast refusal
+      to go out to dine or sup. The mere impertinence of the desire to see him
+      was illustrated by some coxcombs who insisted with a famous actress of his
+      acquaintance, that she should invite the strange philosopher to meet them.
+      She was aware that no known force would persuade Rousseau to come, so she
+      dressed up her tailor as philosopher, bade him keep a silent tongue, and
+      vanish suddenly without a word of farewell. The tailor was long
+      philosophically silent, and by the time that wine had loosened his tongue,
+      the rest of the company were too far gone to perceive that the supposed
+      Rousseau was chattering vulgar nonsense.<a name="FNanchor_398_398"
+      id="FNanchor_398_398"></a><a href="#Footnote_398_398" class="fnanchor">[398]</a>
+      We can believe that with admirers of this stamp Rousseau was well pleased
+      to let tailors or others stand in his place. There were some, however, of
+      a different sort, who flitted across his sight and then either vanished of
+      their own accord, or were silently dismissed, from Madame de Genlis up to
+      Gr&#233;try and Gluck. With Gluck he seems to have quarrelled for setting
+      his music to French words, when he must have known that Italian was the
+      only tongue fit for music.<a name="FNanchor_399_399" id="FNanchor_399_399"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_399_399" class="fnanchor">[399]</a> Yet it was remarked
+      that no one ever heard him speak ill of others. His enemies, the figures
+      of his delusion, were vaguely denounced in many dronings, but they
+      remained in dark shadow and were unnamed. When Voltaire paid his famous
+      last visit <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_324" id="Page_324">[ii.324]</a></span>to
+      the capital (1778), some one thought of paying court to Rousseau by making
+      a mock of the triumphal reception of the old warrior, but Rousseau harshly
+      checked the detractor. It is true that in 1770-71 he gave to some few of
+      his acquaintances one or more readings of the Confessions, although they
+      contained much painful matter for many people still living, among the rest
+      for Madame d'Epinay. She wrote justifiably enough to the lieutenant of
+      police, praying that all such readings might be prohibited, and it is
+      believed that they were so prohibited.<a name="FNanchor_400_400"
+      id="FNanchor_400_400"></a><a href="#Footnote_400_400" class="fnanchor">[400]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In 1769, when Polish anarchy was at its height, as if to show at once how
+      profound the anarchy was, and how profound the faith among many minds in
+      the power of the new French theories, an application was made to Mably to
+      draw up a scheme for the renovation of distracted Poland. Mably's notions
+      won little esteem from the persons who had sought for them, and in 1771 a
+      similar application was made to Rousseau in his Parisian garret. He
+      replied in the Considerations on the Government of Poland, which are
+      written with a good deal of vigour of expression, but contain nothing that
+      needs further discussion. He hinted to the Poles with some shrewd<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_325" id="Page_325">[ii.325]</a></span>ness
+      that a curtailment of their territory by their neighbours was not far off,<a
+      name="FNanchor_401_401" id="FNanchor_401_401"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_401_401" class="fnanchor">[401]</a> and the prediction was
+      rapidly fulfilled by the first partition of Poland in the following year.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was asked one day of what nation he had the highest opinion. He
+      answered, the Spanish. The Spanish nation, he said, has a character; if it
+      is not rich, it still preserves all its pride and self-respect in the
+      midst of its poverty; and it is animated by a single spirit, for it has
+      not been scourged by the conflicting opinions of philosophy.<a
+      name="FNanchor_402_402" id="FNanchor_402_402"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_402_402" class="fnanchor">[402]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was extremely poor for these last eight years of his life. He seems to
+      have drawn the pension which George III. had settled on him, for not more
+      than one year. We do not know why he refused to receive it afterwards. A
+      well-meaning friend, when the arrears amounted to between six and seven
+      thousand francs, applied for it on his behalf, and a draft for the money
+      was sent. Rousseau gave the offender a vigorous rebuke for meddling in
+      affairs that did not concern him, and the draft was destroyed. Other
+      attempts to induce him to draw this money failed equally.<a
+      name="FNanchor_403_403" id="FNanchor_403_403"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_403_403" class="fnanchor">[403]</a> Yet he had only about
+      fifty pounds <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_326" id="Page_326">[ii.326]</a></span>a
+      year to live on, together with the modest amount which he earned by
+      copying music.<a name="FNanchor_404_404" id="FNanchor_404_404"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_404_404" class="fnanchor">[404]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The sting of indigence began to make itself felt towards 1777. His health
+      became worse and he could not work. Theresa was waxing old, and could no
+      longer attend to the small cares of the household. More than one person
+      offered them shelter and provision, and the old distractions as to a home
+      in which to end his days began once again. At length M. Girardin prevailed
+      upon him to come and live at Ermenonville, one of his estates some twenty
+      miles from Paris. A dense cloud of obscure misery hangs over the last
+      months of this forlorn existence.<a name="FNanchor_405_405"
+      id="FNanchor_405_405"></a><a href="#Footnote_405_405" class="fnanchor">[405]</a>
+      No tragedy had ever a fifth act so squalid. Theresa's character seems to
+      have developed into something truly bestial. Rousseau's terrors of the
+      designs of his enemies returned with great violence. He thought he was
+      imprisoned, and he knew that he had no means of escape. One day (July 2,
+      1778), suddenly and without a single warning symptom, all drew to an end;
+      the sensations which had been the ruling part of his life were affected by
+      pleasure and pain no more, the dusky phantoms all vanished into space. The
+      surgeons reported that the cause of his death was apoplexy, but a
+      suspicion has haunted the world ever since, that he destroyed himself by a
+      pistol-shot. We cannot tell. There is no inherent improbability <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_327" id="Page_327">[ii.327]</a></span>in the
+      fact of his having committed suicide. In the New Helo&#239;sa he had
+      thrown the conditions which justified self-destruction into a distinct
+      formula. Fifteen years before, he declared that his own case fell within
+      the conditions which he had prescribed, and that he was meditating action.<a
+      name="FNanchor_406_406" id="FNanchor_406_406"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_406_406" class="fnanchor">[406]</a> Only seven years
+      before, he had implied that a man had the right to deliver himself of the
+      burden of his own life, if its miseries were intolerable and irremediable.<a
+      name="FNanchor_407_407" id="FNanchor_407_407"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_407_407" class="fnanchor">[407]</a> This, however, counts
+      for nothing in the absence of some kind of positive evidence, and of that
+      there is just enough to leave the manner of his end a little doubtful.<a
+      name="FNanchor_408_408" id="FNanchor_408_408"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_408_408" class="fnanchor">[408]</a> Once more, we cannot
+      tell.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      By the serene moonrise of a summer night, his <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_328" id="Page_328">[ii.328]</a></span>body was put under the
+      ground on an island in the midst of a small lake, where poplars throw
+      shadows over the still water, silently figuring the destiny of mortals.
+      Here it remained for sixteen years. Then amid the roar of cannon, the
+      crash of trumpet and drum, and the wild acclamations of a populace gone
+      mad in exultation, terror, fury, it was ordered that the poor dust should
+      be transported to the national temple of great men.
+    </p>
+    <div class="footnotes">
+      <h3>
+        FOOTNOTES:
+      </h3>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_385_385" id="Footnote_385_385"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_385_385"><span class="label">[385]</span></a>
+          Streckeisen, ii. 315-328.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_386_386" id="Footnote_386_386"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_386_386"><span class="label">[386]</span></a>
+          Streckeisen, ii. 337.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_387_387" id="Footnote_387_387"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_387_387"><span class="label">[387]</span></a> June 19,
+          1767. <i>Corr.</i>, v. 172.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_388_388" id="Footnote_388_388"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_388_388"><span class="label">[388]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>,
+          v. 267, 375.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_389_389" id="Footnote_389_389"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_389_389"><span class="label">[389]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>,
+          v. 330-381, 408, etc.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_390_390" id="Footnote_390_390"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_390_390"><span class="label">[390]</span></a>
+          Bourgoin, Aug. 1768, to March, 1769. Monquin, to July 1770.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_391_391" id="Footnote_391_391"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_391_391"><span class="label">[391]</span></a> See
+          above, <a href="#CHAPTER_IV.">vol. i. chap. iv</a>.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_392_392" id="Footnote_392_392"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_392_392"><span class="label">[392]</span></a> The life
+          of Bernardin de St. Pierre (1737-1814) was nearly as irregular as that
+          of his friend and master. But his character was essentially crafty and
+          selfish, like that of many other sentimentalists of the first order.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_393_393" id="Footnote_393_393"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_393_393"><span class="label">[393]</span></a> <i>Oeuv.</i>,
+          xii. 69, 73.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_394_394" id="Footnote_394_394"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_394_394"><span class="label">[394]</span></a> <i>Oeuv.</i>,
+          xii. 104, etc.; and also the <i>Pr&#233;ambule de l'Arcadie</i>, <i>Oeuv.</i>,
+          vii. 64, 65.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_395_395" id="Footnote_395_395"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_395_395"><span class="label">[395]</span></a> St.
+          Pierre, xii. 81-83.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_396_396" id="Footnote_396_396"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_396_396"><span class="label">[396]</span></a> Dusaulx,
+          p. 81. For his quarrel with Rousseau, see pp. 130, etc.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_397_397" id="Footnote_397_397"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_397_397"><span class="label">[397]</span></a> Rulhi&#232;res
+          in Dusaulx, p. 179. For a strange interview between Rulhi&#232;res and
+          Rousseau, see pp. 185-186.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_398_398" id="Footnote_398_398"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_398_398"><span class="label">[398]</span></a>
+          Musset-Pathay, i. 181.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_399_399" id="Footnote_399_399"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_399_399"><span class="label">[399]</span></a> <i>Ib.</i>
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_400_400" id="Footnote_400_400"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_400_400"><span class="label">[400]</span></a>
+          Musset-Pathay, i. 209. Rousseau gave a copy of the Confessions to
+          Moultou, but forbade the publication before the year 1800.
+          Notwithstanding this, printers procured copies surreptitiously,
+          perhaps through Theresa, ever in need of money; the first part was
+          published four years, and the second part with many suppressions
+          eleven years, after his death, in 1782 and 1789 respectively. See
+          Musset-Pathay, ii. 464.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_401_401" id="Footnote_401_401"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_401_401"><span class="label">[401]</span></a> Ch. v.
+          Such a curtailment, he says, &quot;would no doubt be a great evil for
+          the parts dismembered, but it would be a great advantage for the body
+          of the nation.&quot; He urged federation as the condition of any solid
+          improvement in their affairs.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_402_402" id="Footnote_402_402"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_402_402"><span class="label">[402]</span></a>
+          Bernardin de St. Pierre, xii. 37. Comte had a similar admiration for
+          Spain and for the same reason.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_403_403" id="Footnote_403_403"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_403_403"><span class="label">[403]</span></a>
+          Corancez, quoted in Musset-Pathay, i. 239. Also <i>Corr.</i>, vi. 295.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_404_404" id="Footnote_404_404"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_404_404"><span class="label">[404]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>,
+          vi. 303.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_405_405" id="Footnote_405_405"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_405_405"><span class="label">[405]</span></a>
+          Robespierre, then a youth, is said to have invited him here. See
+          Hamel's <i>Robespierre</i>, i. 22.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_406_406" id="Footnote_406_406"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_406_406"><span class="label">[406]</span></a> See
+          above, <a href="#Page_i.16">vol. i. pp. 16, 17</a>.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_407_407" id="Footnote_407_407"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_407_407"><span class="label">[407]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>,
+          vi. 264.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_408_408" id="Footnote_408_408"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_408_408"><span class="label">[408]</span></a> The case
+          stands thus:&#8212;(1) There was the certificate of five doctors,
+          attesting that Rousseau had died of apoplexy. (2) The assertion of M.
+          Girardin, in whose house he died, that there was no hole in his head,
+          nor poison in the stomach or viscera, nor other sign of
+          self-destruction. (3) The assertion of Theresa to the same effect. On
+          the other hand, we have the assertion of Corancez, that on his journey
+          to Ermenonville on the day of Rousseau's burial a horse-master on the
+          road had said, &quot;Who would have supposed that M. Rousseau would
+          have destroyed himself!&quot;&#8212;and a variety of inferences from
+          the wording of the certificate, and of Theresa's letter. Musset-Pathay
+          believes in the suicide, and argued very ingeniously against M.
+          Girardin. But his arguments do not go far beyond verbal ingenuity,
+          showing that suicide was possible, and was consistent with the
+          language of the documents, rather than adducing positive testimony.
+          See vol. i. of his <i>History</i>, pp. 268, etc. The controversy was
+          resumed as late as 1861, between the <i>Figaro</i> and the <i>Monde
+          Illustr&#233;</i>. See also M. Jal's <i>Dict. Crit. de Biog. et
+          d'Hist.</i>, p. 1091.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+    </div>
+    <hr style="width: 65%;" />
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_329" id="Page_329">[ii.329]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      <a name="INDEX" id="INDEX"></a>INDEX.
+    </h2>
+
+    <p>
+      <span class="smcap">Academies</span> (French) local, <a
+      href="#Page_i.132">i. 132</a>.<br /> <br /> Academy, of
+      Dijon, Rousseau writes essays for, <a href="#Page_i.133">i.
+      133</a>;<br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">French, prize essay against
+      Rousseau's Discourse, <a href="#Page_i.150">i. 150</a>,
+      <i>n.</i></span><br /> <br /> Actors, how regarded in France in Rousseau's
+      time, <a href="#Page_i.322">i. 322</a>.<br /> <br />
+      Althusen, teaches doctrine of sovereignty of the people, <a
+      href="#Page_147">ii. 147</a>.<br /> <br /> America (U.S.), effects in, of
+      the doctrine of the equality of men, <a
+      href="#Page_i.182">i. 182</a>.<br /> <br /> American
+      colonists indebted in eighteenth century to Rousseau's writings, <a
+      href="#Page_i.3">i. 3</a>.<br /> <br /> Anchorite,
+      distinction between the old and the new, <a
+      href="#Page_i.234">i. 234</a>.<br /> <br /> Annecy, <a
+      href="#Page_i.34">i. 34</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.50">50</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's room at, <a
+      href="#Page_i.54">i. 54</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's teachers at, <a
+      href="#Page_i.56">i. 56</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">seminary at, <a
+      href="#Page_i.82">i. 82</a>.</span><br /> <br /> Aquinas,
+      protest against juristical doctrine of law being the pleasure of the
+      prince, <a href="#Page_144">ii. 144</a>, <a href="#Page_145">145</a>.<br />
+      <br /> Aristotle on Origin of Society, <a
+      href="#Page_i.174">i. 174</a>.<br /> <br /> Atheism,
+      Rousseau's protest against, <a href="#Page_i.208">i. 208</a>;<br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">St. Lambert on, <a
+      href="#Page_i.209">i. 209</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Robespierre's protest against, <a
+      href="#Page_178">ii. 178</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Chaumette
+      put to death for endeavouring to base the government of France on, <a
+      href="#Page_180">ii. 180</a>.</span><br /> <br /> Augustine (of Hippo), <a
+      href="#Page_272">ii. 272</a>, <a href="#Page_303">303</a>.<br /> <br />
+      Austin, John, <a href="#Page_151">ii. 151</a>, <i>n.</i>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">on Sovereignty, <a href="#Page_162">ii. 162</a>.</span><br />
+      <br /> Authors, difficulties of, in France in the eighteenth century, <a
+      href="#Page_55">ii. 55</a>-61.<br /> <br /> <br /> <span class="smcap">Baboeuf</span>,
+      on the Revolution, <a href="#Page_123">ii. 123</a>, <i>n.</i><br /> <br />
+      Barbier, <a href="#Page_26">ii. 26</a>.<br /> <br /> Basedow, his enthusiasm
+      for Rousseau's educational theories, <a href="#Page_251">ii. 251</a>.<br />
+      <br /> Beaumont, De, Archbishop of Paris, mandate against Rousseau issued
+      by, <a href="#Page_83">ii. 83</a>;<br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">argument
+      from, <a href="#Page_86">ii. 86</a>.</span><br /> <br /> Bernard, maiden
+      name of Rousseau's mother, <a href="#Page_i.10">i. 10</a>.<br />
+      <br /> Bienne, Rousseau driven to take refuge in island in lake of, <a
+      href="#Page_108">ii. 108</a>;<br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his
+      account of, <a href="#Page_109">ii. 109</a>-115.</span><br /> <br /> Bodin,
+      on Government, <a href="#Page_147">ii. 147</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his definition of an aristocratic state, <a
+      href="#Page_168">ii. 168</a>, <i>n.</i></span><br /> <br /> Bonaparte,
+      Napoleon, <a href="#Page_102">ii. 102</a>, <i>n.</i><br /> <br /> Bossuet,
+      on Stage Plays, <a href="#Page_i.321">i. 321</a>.<br />
+      <br /> Boswell, James, <a href="#Page_98">ii. 98</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">visits Rousseau, <a href="#Page_98">ii. 98</a>,
+      also <i>ib.</i> <i>n.</i>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">urged
+      by Rousseau to visit Corsica, <a href="#Page_100">ii. 100</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his letter to Rousseau, <a href="#Page_101">ii.
+      101</a>.</span><br /> <br /> Boufflers, Madame de, <a href="#Page_5">ii. 5</a>,
+      <i>ib.</i> <i>n.</i><br /> <br /> <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_330"
+      id="Page_330">[ii.330]</a></span>Bougainville (brother of the navigator),
+      <a href="#Page_i.184">i. 184</a>, <i>n.</i><br /> <br />
+      Brutus, how Rousseau came to be panegyrist of, <a
+      href="#Page_i.187">i. 187</a>.<br /> <br /> Buffon, <a
+      href="#Page_205">ii. 205</a>.<br /> <br /> Burke, <a href="#Page_140">ii.
+      140</a>, <a href="#Page_192">192</a>.<br /> <br /> Burnet, Bishop, on
+      Genevese, <a href="#Page_i.225">i. 225</a>.<br /> <br />
+      Burton, John Hill, his <i>Life of Hume</i> (on Rousseau), <a
+      href="#Page_283">ii. 283</a>, <i>n.</i><br /> <br /> Byron, Lord,
+      antecedents of highest creative efforts, <a href="#Page_1">ii. 1</a>;<br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">effect of nature upon, <a href="#Page_40">ii.
+      40</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">difference between and
+      Rousseau, <a href="#Page_41">ii. 41</a>.</span><br /> <br /> <br /> <span
+      class="smcap">Calas</span>, <a href="#Page_i.312">i. 312</a>.<br />
+      <br /> Calvin, <a href="#Page_i.4">i. 4</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.189">189</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau on, as a legislator, <a href="#Page_131">ii.
+      131</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">and Servetus, <a
+      href="#Page_180">ii. 180</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">mentioned,
+      <a href="#Page_181">ii. 181</a>.</span><br /> <br /> <i>Candide</i>, thought
+      by Rousseau to be meant as a reply to him, <a
+      href="#Page_i.319">i. 319</a>.<br /> <br /> Cardan, <a
+      href="#Page_303">ii. 303</a>.<br /> <br /> Cato, how Rousseau came to be his
+      panegyrist, <a href="#Page_i.187">i. 187</a>.<br /> <br />
+      Chamb&#233;ri, probable date of Rousseau's return to, <a
+      href="#Page_i.62">i. 62</a>, <i>n.</i>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">takes up his residence there, <a
+      href="#Page_i.69">i. 69</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">effect on his mind of a French column of troops
+      passing through, <a href="#Page_i.72">i. 72</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.73">73</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his illness at, <a
+      href="#Page_i.73">i. 73</a>, <i>n.</i></span><br /> <br />
+      Charmettes, Les, Madame de Warens's residence, <a
+      href="#Page_i.73">i. 73</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">present condition of, <a
+      href="#Page_i.74">i. 74</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.75">75</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">time spent there by Rousseau, <a
+      href="#Page_i.94">i. 94</a>.</span><br /> <br /> Charron,
+      <a href="#Page_203">ii. 203</a>.<br /> <br /> Chateaubriand, influenced by
+      Rousseau, <a href="#Page_i.3">i. 3</a>.<br /> <br />
+      Chatham, Lord, <a href="#Page_92">ii. 92</a>.<br /> <br /> Chaumette, <a
+      href="#Page_178">ii. 178</a>;<br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">guillotined
+      on charge of endeavouring to establish atheism in France, <a
+      href="#Page_179">ii. 179</a>.</span><br /> <br /> Chesterfield, Lord, <a
+      href="#Page_15">ii. 15</a>.<br /> <br /> Choiseul, <a href="#Page_57">ii. 57</a>,
+      <a href="#Page_64">64</a>, <a href="#Page_72">72</a>.<br /> <br /> Citizen,
+      revolutionary use of word, derived from Rousseau, <a href="#Page_161">ii.
+      161</a>.<br /> <br /> Civilisation, variety of the origin and process of, <a
+      href="#Page_i.176">i. 176</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">defects of, <a
+      href="#Page_i.176">i. 176</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">one of the worst trials of, <a href="#Page_102">ii.
+      102</a>.</span><br /> <br /> Cobbett, <a href="#Page_42">ii. 42</a>.<br />
+      <br /> Collier, Jeremy, on the English Stage, <a
+      href="#Page_i.323">i. 323</a>.<br /> <br /> Condillac, <a
+      href="#Page_i.95">i. 95</a>.<br /> <br /> Condorcet, <a
+      href="#Page_i.89">i. 89</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">on Social Position of Women, <a
+      href="#Page_i.335">i. 335</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">human perfectibility, <a href="#Page_119">ii.
+      119</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">inspiration of, drawn
+      from the school of Voltaire and Rousseau, <a href="#Page_194">ii. 194</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">belief of, in the improvement of humanity,
+      <a href="#Page_246">ii. 246</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">grievous mistake of, <a href="#Page_247">ii. 247</a>.</span><br />
+      <br /> Confessions, the, not to be trusted for minute accuracy, <a
+      href="#Page_i.86">i. 86</a>, <i>n.</i>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">or for dates, <a
+      href="#Page_i.93">i. 93</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">first part written 1766, <a href="#Page_301">ii.
+      301</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">their character, <a
+      href="#Page_303">ii. 303</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">published
+      surreptitiously, <a href="#Page_324">ii. 324</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">readings from, prohibited by police, <a
+      href="#Page_324">ii. 324</a>.</span><br /> <br /> Conti, Prince of, <a
+      href="#Page_4">ii. 4</a>-7;<br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">receives
+      Rousseau at Trye, <a href="#Page_118">ii. 118</a>.</span><br /> <br />
+      Contract, Social, <a href="#Page_i.136">i. 136</a>.<br />
+      <br /> Corsica, struggles for independence of, <a href="#Page_99">ii. 99</a>;<br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau invited to legislate for, <a
+      href="#Page_99">ii. 99</a>-102;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">bought
+      by France, <a href="#Page_102">ii. 102</a>.</span><br /> <br /> Cowper, <a
+      href="#Page_i.20">i. 20</a>; <a href="#Page_41">ii. 41</a>;<br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">on Rousseau, <a href="#Page_41">ii. 41</a>
+      <i>n.</i>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">lines in the Task,
+      <a href="#Page_253">ii. 253</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his delusions, <a href="#Page_301">ii. 301</a>.</span><br />
+      <br /> Cynicism, Rousseau's assumption of, <a
+      href="#Page_i.206">i. 206</a>.<br /> <br /> <br /> <span
+      class="smcap">D'Aiguillon</span>, <a href="#Page_72">ii. 72</a>.<br />
+      <br /> D'Alembert, <a href="#Page_i.89">i. 89</a>;<br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Voltaire's staunchest henchman, <a
+      href="#Page_i.321">i. 321</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his article on Geneva, <a
+      href="#Page_i.321">i. 321</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">on Stage Plays, <a
+      href="#Page_i.326">i. 326</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">on Position of Women in Society, <a
+      href="#Page_i.335">i. 335</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_331" id="Page_331">[ii.331]</a></span><span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">on Rousseau's letter on the Theatre, <a
+      href="#Page_i.336">i. 336</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">suspected by Rousseau of having written the
+      pretended letter from Frederick of Prussia, <a href="#Page_288">ii. 288</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">advises Hume to publish account of
+      Rousseau's quarrel with him, <a href="#Page_294">ii. 294</a>.</span><br />
+      <br /> D'Argenson, <a href="#Page_180">ii. 180</a>.<br /> <br /> Dates of
+      Rousseau's letters to be relied on, not those of the Confessions, <a
+      href="#Page_i.93">i. 93</a>.<br /> <br /> Davenport, Mr.,
+      provides Rousseau with a home at Wootton, <a href="#Page_286">ii. 286</a>;<br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his kindness to Rousseau, <a
+      href="#Page_306">ii. 306</a>.</span><br /> <br /> Deism, Rousseau's, <a
+      href="#Page_260">ii. 260</a>-275;<br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">that
+      of others, <a href="#Page_262">ii. 262</a>-265;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">shortcomings of Rousseau's, <a href="#Page_270">ii.
+      270</a>.</span><br /> <br /> Democracy defined, <a href="#Page_168">ii. 168</a>;<br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">rejected by Rousseau, as too perfect for
+      men, <a href="#Page_171">ii. 171</a>.</span><br /> <br /> D'Epinay, Madame,
+      <a href="#Page_i.194">i. 194</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.195">195</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.205">205</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">gives the Hermitage to Rousseau, <a
+      href="#Page_i.229">i. 229</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his quarrels with, <a
+      href="#Page_i.271">i. 271</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his relations with, <a
+      href="#Page_i.273">i. 273</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.276">276</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">journey to Geneva of, <a
+      href="#Page_i.284">i. 284</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">squabbles arising out of, between, and Rousseau,
+      Diderot, and Grimm, <a href="#Page_i.285">i. 285</a>-290;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">mentioned, <a href="#Page_7">ii. 7</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_26">26</a>, <a href="#Page_197">197</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">wrote on education, <a href="#Page_199">ii. 199</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">applies to secretary of police to prohibit
+      Rousseau's readings from his Confessions, <a href="#Page_324">ii. 324</a>.</span><br />
+      <br /> D'Epinay, Monsieur, <a href="#Page_i.254">i. 254</a>;
+      <a href="#Page_26">ii. 26</a>.<br /> <br /> Descartes, <a
+      href="#Page_i.87">i. 87</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.225">225</a>; <a href="#Page_267">ii. 267</a>.<br />
+      <br /> Deux Ponts, Duc de, Rousseau's rude reply to, <a
+      href="#Page_i.207">i. 207</a>.<br /> <br /> D'Holbach, <a
+      href="#Page_i.192">i. 192</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's dislike of his materialistic friends,
+      <a href="#Page_i.223">i. 223</a>; <a href="#Page_37">ii.
+      37</a>, <a href="#Page_256">256</a>.</span><br /> <br /> D'Houdetot, Madame,
+      <a href="#Page_i.255">i. 255</a>-270;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Madame d'Epinay's jealousy of, <a
+      href="#Page_i.278">i. 278</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">mentioned, <a href="#Page_7">ii. 7</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">offers Rousseau a home in Normandy, <a
+      href="#Page_117">ii. 117</a>.</span><br /> <br /> Diderot, <a
+      href="#Page_i.64">i. 64</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.89">89</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.133">133</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">tries to manage Rousseau, <a
+      href="#Page_i.213">i. 213</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his domestic misconduct, <a
+      href="#Page_i.215">i. 215</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">leader of the materialistic party, <a
+      href="#Page_i.223">i. 223</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">on Solitary Life, <a
+      href="#Page_i.232">i. 232</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his active life, <a
+      href="#Page_i.233">i. 233</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">without moral sensitiveness, <a
+      href="#Page_i.262">i. 262</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">mentioned, <a
+      href="#Page_i.262">i. 262</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.269">269</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.271">271</a>; <a href="#Page_8">ii. 8</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his relations with Rousseau, <a
+      href="#Page_i.271">i. 271</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">accused of pilfering Goldoni's new play, <a
+      href="#Page_i.275">i. 275</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his relations and contentions with Rousseau, <a
+      href="#Page_i.275">i. 275</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.276">276</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">lectures Rousseau about Madame d'Epinay, <a
+      href="#Page_i.284">i. 284</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">visits Rousseau after his leaving the Hermitage,
+      <a href="#Page_i.289">i. 289</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's final breach with, <a
+      href="#Page_i.336">i. 336</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his criticism, and plays, <a href="#Page_34">ii.
+      34</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his defects, <a
+      href="#Page_34">ii. 34</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">thrown
+      into prison, <a href="#Page_57">ii. 57</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his difficulties with the Encyclop&#230;dists,
+      <a href="#Page_57">ii. 57</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his
+      papers saved from the police by Malesherbes, <a href="#Page_62">ii. 62</a>.</span><br />
+      <br /> Dijon, academy of, <a href="#Page_i.132">i. 132</a>.<br />
+      <br /> <a name="Discourses" id="Discourses">Discourses</a>, The,
+      Circumstances of the composition of the first Discourse, <a
+      href="#Page_i.133">i. 133</a>-136;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">summary of it, <a
+      href="#Page_i.138">i. 138</a>-145;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 2.5em;">disastrous effect of the progress of sciences
+      and arts, <a href="#Page_i.140">i. 140</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.141">141</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 2.5em;">error more dangerous than truth useful, <a
+      href="#Page_i.141">i. 141</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 2.5em;">uselessness of learning and art, <a
+      href="#Page_i.141">i. 141</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.142">142</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 2.5em;">terrible disorders caused in Europe by the art
+      of printing, <a href="#Page_i.143">i. 143</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">two kinds of ignorance, <a
+      href="#Page_i.144">i. 144</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">the relation of this Discourse to Montaigne, <a
+      href="#Page_i.145">i. 145</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">its one-sidedness and hollowness, <a
+      href="#Page_i.148">i. 148</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">shown by Voltaire, <a
+      href="#Page_i.148">i. 148</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">its positive side, <a
+      href="#Page_i.149">i. 149</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.150">150</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_332" id="Page_332">[ii.332]</a></span><span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">second Discourse, origin of the Inequality of
+      Man, <a href="#Page_i.154">i. 154</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">summary of it, <a
+      href="#Page_i.159">i. 159</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.170">170</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 2.5em;">state of nature, <a
+      href="#Page_i.150">i. 150</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.162">162</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Hobbes's mistake, <a
+      href="#Page_i.161">i. 161</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 2.5em;">what broke up the &quot;state of nature,&quot;
+      <a href="#Page_i.164">i. 164</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 2.5em;">its preferableness, <a
+      href="#Page_i.166">i. 166</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.167">167</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 2.5em;">origin of society and laws, <a
+      href="#Page_i.168">i. 168</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 2.5em;">&quot;new state of nature,&quot; <a
+      href="#Page_i.169">i. 169</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 2.5em;">main position of the Discourse, <a
+      href="#Page_i.169">i. 169</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">its utter inclusiveness, <a
+      href="#Page_i.170">i. 170</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">criticism on its method, <a
+      href="#Page_i.170">i. 170</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">on its matter, <a
+      href="#Page_i.172">i. 172</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">wanting in evidence, <a
+      href="#Page_i.172">i. 172</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">further objections to it, <a
+      href="#Page_i.173">i. 173</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">assumes uniformity of process, <a
+      href="#Page_i.176">i. 176</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">its unscientific character, <a
+      href="#Page_i.177">i. 177</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">its real importance, <a
+      href="#Page_i.178">i. 178</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">its protest against the mockery of civilisation,
+      <a href="#Page_i.178">i. 178</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">equality of man, <a
+      href="#Page_i.181">i. 181</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">different effects of this doctrine in France and
+      the United States explained, <a href="#Page_i.182">i.
+      182</a>, <a href="#Page_i.183">183</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">discovers a reaction against the
+      historical method of Montesquieu, <a href="#Page_i.183">i.
+      183</a>, <a href="#Page_i.184">184</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">pecuniary results of, <a
+      href="#Page_i.196">i. 196</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Diderot's praise of first Discourse, <a
+      href="#Page_i.200">i. 200</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Voltaire's acknowledgement of gift of second
+      Discourse, <a href="#Page_i.308">i. 308</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">the, an attack on the general ordering of
+      society, <a href="#Page_22">ii. 22</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">referred to, <a href="#Page_41">ii. 41</a>.</span><br />
+      <br /> Drama, its proper effect, <a href="#Page_i.326">i.
+      326</a>;<br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">what would be that of its
+      introduction into Geneva, <a href="#Page_i.327">i. 327</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">true answer to Rousseau's contentions, <a
+      href="#Page_i.329">i. 329</a>.</span><br /> <br />
+      Dramatic morality, <a href="#Page_i.326">i. 326</a>.<br />
+      <br /> Drinkers, Rousseau's estimate of, <a
+      href="#Page_i.330">i. 330</a>.<br /> <br /> Drunkenness,
+      how esteemed in Switzerland and Naples, <a
+      href="#Page_i.331">i. 331</a>.<br /> <br /> Duclos, <a
+      href="#Page_i.206">i. 206</a>; <a href="#Page_62">ii. 62</a>.<br />
+      <br /> Duni, <a href="#Page_i.292">i. 292</a>.<br /> <br />
+      Dupin, Madame de, Rousseau secretary to, <a
+      href="#Page_i.120">i. 120</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">her position in society, <a
+      href="#Page_i.195">i. 195</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's country life with, <a
+      href="#Page_i.196">i. 196</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">friend of the Abb&#233; de Saint Pierre, <a
+      href="#Page_i.244">i. 244</a>.</span><br /> <br /> <br />
+      <span class="smcap">Education</span>, interest taken in, in France in
+      Rousseau's time, <a href="#Page_193">ii. 193</a>, <a href="#Page_194">194</a>;<br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">its new direction <a href="#Page_195">ii.
+      195</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Locke, the pioneer
+      of, <a href="#Page_202">ii. 202</a>, <a href="#Page_203">203</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's special merit in connection
+      with, <a href="#Page_203">ii. 203</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his views on (see <a href="#Emilius">Emilius</a>,
+      <i>passim</i>, as well as for general consideration of) what it is, <a
+      href="#Page_219">ii. 219</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">plans
+      of, of Locke and others, designed for the higher class, <a href="#Page_254">ii.
+      254</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's for all,
+      <a href="#Page_254">ii. 254</a>.</span><br /> <br /> <i>Emile</i>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.136">i. 136</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.196">196</a>.<br /> <br /> <a name="Emilius"
+      id="Emilius">Emilius</a>, character of, <a href="#Page_2">ii. 2</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_3">3</a>;<br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">particulars of
+      the publication of, <a href="#Page_59">ii. 59</a>, <a href="#Page_60">60</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">effect of, on Rousseau's fortunes, <a
+      href="#Page_62">ii. 62</a>-64;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">ordered
+      to be burnt by public executioner at Paris, <a href="#Page_65">ii. 65</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">at Geneva, <a href="#Page_72">ii. 72</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">condemned by the Sorbonne, <a
+      href="#Page_82">ii. 82</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">supplied
+      (as also did the Social Contract) dialect for the longing in France and
+      Germany to return to nature, <a href="#Page_193">ii. 193</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">substance of, furnished by Locke, <a
+      href="#Page_202">ii. 202</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">examination
+      of, <a href="#Page_197">ii. 197</a>-280;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">mischief produced by its good advice, <a
+      href="#Page_206">ii. 206</a>, <a href="#Page_207">207</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">training of young children, <a
+      href="#Page_207">ii. 207</a>, <a href="#Page_208">208</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">constantly reasoning with them a mistake
+      of Locke's, <a href="#Page_209">ii. 209</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's central idea, disparagement of the
+      reasoning faculty, <a href="#Page_209">ii. 209</a>, <a href="#Page_210">210</a>;</span><br />
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_333" id="Page_333">[ii.333]</a></span><span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">theories of education, practice better than
+      precept, <a href="#Page_211">ii. 211</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">the idea of property, the first that Rousseau
+      would have given to a child, <a href="#Page_212">ii. 212</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">modes of teaching, <a href="#Page_214">ii.
+      214</a>, <a href="#Page_215">215</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">futility of such methods, <a href="#Page_215">ii.
+      215</a>, <a href="#Page_216">216</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">where Rousseau is right, and where wrong, <a
+      href="#Page_219">ii. 219</a>, <a href="#Page_220">220</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">effect of his own want of parental love,
+      <a href="#Page_220">ii. 220</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">teaches that everybody should learn a trade, <a
+      href="#Page_223">ii. 223</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">no
+      special foresight, <a href="#Page_224">ii. 224</a>, <a href="#Page_225">225</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">supremacy of the common people insisted
+      upon, <a href="#Page_226">ii. 226</a>, <a href="#Page_227">227</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">three dominant states of mind to be
+      established by the instructor, <a href="#Page_229">ii. 229</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_230">230</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's
+      incomplete notion of justice, <a href="#Page_231">ii. 231</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">ideal of Emilius, <a href="#Page_232">ii.
+      232</a>, <a href="#Page_233">233</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">forbids early teaching of history, <a
+      href="#Page_237">ii. 237</a>, <a href="#Page_238">238</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">disparages modern history, <a
+      href="#Page_239">ii. 239</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">criticism
+      on the old historians, <a href="#Page_240">ii. 240</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">education of women, <a href="#Page_241">ii. 241</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Rousseau's failure here, <a
+      href="#Page_242">ii. 242</a>, <a href="#Page_243">243</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">inconsistent with himself, <a
+      href="#Page_244">ii. 244</a>, <a href="#Page_245">245</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">worthlessness of his views, <a
+      href="#Page_249">ii. 249</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">real
+      merits of the work, <a href="#Page_249">ii. 249</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">its effect in Germany, <a href="#Page_251">ii.
+      251</a>, <a href="#Page_252">252</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">not much effect on education in England, <a
+      href="#Page_252">ii. 252</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Emilius
+      the first expression of democratic teaching in education, <a
+      href="#Page_254">ii. 254</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's
+      deism, <a href="#Page_258">ii. 258</a>, <a href="#Page_260">260</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_264">264</a>-267, <a href="#Page_269">269</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_270">270</a>, <a href="#Page_276">276</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">its inadequacy for the wants of men, <a
+      href="#Page_267">ii. 267</a>-270;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his position towards Christianity, <a
+      href="#Page_270">ii. 270</a>-276;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">real satisfaction of the religious emotions, <a
+      href="#Page_275">ii. 275</a>-280.</span><br /> <br /> Encyclop&#230;dia,
+      The, D'Alembert's article on Geneva in, <a
+      href="#Page_i.321">i. 321</a>.<br /> <br /> Encyclop&#230;dists,
+      the society of, confirms Rousseau's religious faith, <a
+      href="#Page_i.221">i. 221</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">referred to, <a href="#Page_257">ii. 257</a>.</span><br />
+      <br /> Evil, discussions on Rousseau's, Voltaire's, and De Maistre's
+      teachings concerning, <a href="#Page_i.313">i. 313</a>,
+      <i>n.</i>, <a href="#Page_i.318">318</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">different effect of existence of, on Rousseau
+      and Voltaire, <a href="#Page_i.319">i. 319</a>.</span><br />
+      <br /> <br /> <span class="smcap">F&#233;nelon</span>, <a href="#Page_37">ii.
+      37</a>, <a href="#Page_248">248</a>;<br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's
+      veneration for, <a href="#Page_321">ii. 321</a>.</span><br /> <br />
+      Ferguson, Adam, <a href="#Page_253">ii. 253</a>.<br /> <br /> Filmer
+      contends that a man is not naturally free, <a href="#Page_126">ii. 126</a>.<br />
+      <br /> Foundling Hospital, Rousseau sends his children to the, <a
+      href="#Page_i.120">i. 120</a>.<br /> <br /> France, debt
+      of, to Rousseau, <a href="#Page_i.3">i. 3</a>;<br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau the one great religious writer
+      of, in the eighteenth century, <a href="#Page_i.26">i.
+      26</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his wanderings in the
+      east of, <a href="#Page_i.61">i. 61</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his fondness for, <a
+      href="#Page_i.62">i. 62</a>-72;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">establishment of local academies in, <a
+      href="#Page_i.132">i. 132</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">decay in, of Greek literary studies, <a
+      href="#Page_i.146">i. 146</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">effects in, of doctrine of equality of man, <a
+      href="#Page_i.182">i. 182</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">effects in, of Montesquieu's &quot;Spirit of
+      Laws,&quot; <a href="#Page_i.183">i. 183</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">amiability of, in the eighteenth century,
+      <a href="#Page_i.187">i. 187</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">effect of Rousseau's writings in, <a
+      href="#Page_i.187">i. 187</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">collective organisation in, <a
+      href="#Page_i.222">i. 222</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">St. Pierre's strictures on government of, <a
+      href="#Page_i.244">i. 244</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau on government of, <a
+      href="#Page_i.246">i. 246</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">effect of Rousseau's spiritual element on, <a
+      href="#Page_i.306">i. 306</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">patriotism wanting in, <a
+      href="#Page_i.332">i. 332</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">difficulties of authorship in, <a href="#Page_55">ii.
+      55</a>-64;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">buys Corsica from
+      the Genoese, <a href="#Page_102">ii. 102</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">state of, after 1792, apparently favourable to
+      the carrying out of Rousseau's political views, <a href="#Page_131">ii.
+      131</a>, <a href="#Page_132">132</a>;</span><br /> <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_334" id="Page_334">[ii.334]</a></span><span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">in 1793, <a href="#Page_135">ii. 135</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">haunted by narrow and fervid minds, <a
+      href="#Page_142">ii. 142</a>.</span><br /> <br /> Francueil, Rousseau's
+      patron, <a href="#Page_i.99">i. 99</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">grandfather of Madame George Sand, <a
+      href="#Page_i.99">i. 99</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's salary from, <a
+      href="#Page_i.120">i. 120</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">country-house of, <a
+      href="#Page_i.196">i. 196</a>.</span><br /> <br />
+      Franklin, Benjamin, <a href="#Page_42">ii. 42</a>.<br /> <br /> Frederick of
+      Prussia, relations between, and Rousseau, <a href="#Page_73">ii. 73</a>-78;<br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">&quot;famous bull&quot; of, <a
+      href="#Page_90">ii. 90</a>.</span><br /> <br /> Freeman on Growth of English
+      Constitution, <a href="#Page_164">ii. 164</a>.<br /> <br /> French,
+      principles of, revolution, <a href="#Page_i.1">i. 1</a>,
+      <a href="#Page_i.2">2</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.3">3</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">process and ideas of, <a
+      href="#Page_i.4">i. 4</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau of old, stock, <a
+      href="#Page_i.8">i. 8</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">poetry, Rousseau on, <a
+      href="#Page_i.90">i. 90</a>, <i>ib. n.</i>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">melody, <a
+      href="#Page_i.105">i. 105</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">academy, thesis for prize, <a
+      href="#Page_i.150">i. 150</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">philosophers, <a
+      href="#Page_i.202">i. 202</a>,</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">music, <a href="#Page_i.291">i.
+      291</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">music, its
+      pretensions demolished by Rousseau, <a href="#Page_i.294">i.
+      294</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">ecclesiastics opposed
+      to the theatre, <a href="#Page_322">ii. 322</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">stage, Rousseau on, <a
+      href="#Page_i.325">i. 325</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">morals, depravity of, <a href="#Page_26">ii. 26</a>,
+      <a href="#Page_27">27</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Barbier
+      on, <a href="#Page_26">ii. 26</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">thought, benefit, or otherwise of revolution on,
+      <a href="#Page_54">ii. 54</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">history,
+      evil side of, in Rousseau's time, <a href="#Page_56">ii. 56</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">indebted to Holland for freedom of the
+      press, <a href="#Page_59">ii. 59</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">catholic and monarchic absolutism sunk deep into
+      the character of the, <a href="#Page_167">ii. 167</a>.</span><br /> <br />
+      French Convention, story of member of the, <a href="#Page_134">ii. 134</a>,
+      <i>n.</i><br /> <br /> <br /> <span class="smcap">Galuppi</span>, effect of
+      his music, <a href="#Page_i.105">i. 105</a>.<br /> <br />
+      Geneva, <a href="#Page_i.8">i. 8</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">characteristics of its people, <a
+      href="#Page_i.9">i. 9</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's visit to, <a
+      href="#Page_i.93">i. 93</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">influence of, on Rousseau, <a
+      href="#Page_i.94">i. 94</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">he revisits it in 1754, <a
+      href="#Page_i.186">i. 186</a>-190, <a
+      href="#Page_i.218">218</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">turns Protestant again there, <a
+      href="#Page_i.220">i. 220</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">religious opinion in, <a
+      href="#Page_i.223">i. 223</a> (also <a
+      href="#Page_i.224">i. 224</a>, <i>n.</i>);</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau thinks of taking up his abode in,
+      <a href="#Page_i.228">i. 228</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Voltaire at, <a
+      href="#Page_i.308">i. 308</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">D'Alembert's article on, in Encyclop&#230;dia,
+      <a href="#Page_i.321">i. 321</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's notions of effect of introducing the
+      drama at, <a href="#Page_i.327">i. 327</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">council of, order public burning of
+      Emilius and the Social Contract, and arrest of the author if he came
+      there, <a href="#Page_72">ii. 72</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">the only place where the Social Contract was
+      actually burnt, <a href="#Page_73">ii. 73</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Voltaire suspected to have had a hand in
+      the matter, <a href="#Page_81">ii. 81</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">council of, divided into two camps by Rousseau's
+      condemnation, in 1762, <a href="#Page_102">ii. 102</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau renounces his citizenship in, <a
+      href="#Page_104">ii. 104</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">working
+      of the republic, <a href="#Page_104">ii. 104</a>.</span><br /> <br />
+      Genevese, Bishop Burnet on, <a href="#Page_i.225">i. 225</a>;<br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's distrust of, <a
+      href="#Page_i.228">i. 228</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his panegyric on, <a
+      href="#Page_i.328">i. 328</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">manners of, according to Rousseau, <a
+      href="#Page_i.330">i. 330</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">their complaint of it, <a
+      href="#Page_i.331">i. 331</a>.</span><br /> <br /> Genlis,
+      Madame de, <a href="#Page_323">ii. 323</a>.<br /> <br /> Genoa, Rousseau in
+      quarantine at, <a href="#Page_i.103">i. 103</a>;<br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Corsica sold to France by, <a
+      href="#Page_102">ii. 102</a>.</span><br /> <br /> Germany, sentimental
+      movements in, <a href="#Page_33">ii. 33</a>.<br /> <br /> Gibbon, Edward, at
+      Lausanne, <a href="#Page_96">ii. 96</a>.<br /> <br /> Girardin, St. Marc, on
+      Rousseau, <a href="#Page_i.111">i. 111</a>, <i>n.</i>;<br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">on Rousseau's discussions, <a
+      href="#Page_11">ii. 11</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">offers Rousseau a home, <a href="#Page_326">ii.
+      326</a>.</span><br /> <br /> Gluck, <a href="#Page_i.291">i.
+      291</a>, <a href="#Page_i.296">296</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau quarrels with, for setting his music to
+      French words, <a href="#Page_323">ii. 323</a>.</span><br /> <br /> Goethe,
+      <a href="#Page_i.20">i. 20</a>.<br /> <br /> Goguet on
+      Society, <a href="#Page_127">ii. 127</a>, <i>n.</i>;<br /> <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_335" id="Page_335">[ii.335]</a></span><span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">on tacit conventions, <a href="#Page_148">ii.
+      148</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">on law, <a
+      href="#Page_153">ii. 153</a>, <i>n.</i></span><br /> <br /> Goldoni, Diderot
+      accused of pilfering his new play, <a href="#Page_i.275">i.
+      275</a>.<br /> <br /> Gothic architecture denounced by Voltaire and Turgot,
+      <a href="#Page_i.294">i. 294</a>.<br /> <br /> Gouvon,
+      Count, Rousseau servant to, <a href="#Page_i.42">i. 42</a>.<br />
+      <br /> Government, disquisitions on, <a href="#Page_131">ii. 131</a>-206;<br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">remarks on, <a href="#Page_131">ii. 131</a>-141;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">early democratic ideas of, <a
+      href="#Page_144">ii. 144</a>-148;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Hobbes' philosophy of, <a href="#Page_151">ii.
+      151</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's science
+      of, <a href="#Page_155">ii. 155</a>, <a href="#Page_156">156</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">De la Rivi&#232;re's science of, <a
+      href="#Page_156">ii. 156</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">federation recommended by Rousseau to the Poles,
+      <a href="#Page_166">ii. 166</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">three forms of government defined, <a
+      href="#Page_169">ii. 169</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">definition
+      inadequate, <a href="#Page_169">ii. 169</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Montesquieu's definition, <a href="#Page_169">ii.
+      169</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's
+      distinction between <i>tyrant</i> and <i>despot</i>, <a href="#Page_169">ii.
+      169</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his
+      objection to democracy, <a href="#Page_172">ii. 172</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">to monarchy, <a href="#Page_173">ii. 173</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">consideration of aristocracy, <a
+      href="#Page_174">ii. 174</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his
+      own scheme, <a href="#Page_175">ii. 175</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Hobbes's &quot;Passive Obedience,&quot; <a
+      href="#Page_181">ii. 181</a>, <a href="#Page_182">182</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">social conscience theory, <a
+      href="#Page_183">ii. 183</a>-187;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">government made impossible by Rousseau's
+      doctrine of social contract, <a href="#Page_188">ii. 188</a>-192;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Burke on expediency in, <a href="#Page_192">ii.
+      192</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">what a civilised
+      nation is, <a href="#Page_194">ii. 194</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Jefferson on, <a href="#Page_227">ii. 227</a>,
+      <a href="#Page_228">228</a>, <i>n.</i></span><br /> <br /> Governments,
+      earliest, how composed, <a href="#Page_i.169">i. 169</a>.<br />
+      <br /> Graffigny, Madame de, <a href="#Page_199">ii. 199</a>.<br /> <br />
+      Gratitude, Rousseau on, <a href="#Page_14">ii. 14</a>, <a href="#Page_15">15</a>;<br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">explanation of his want of, <a
+      href="#Page_70">ii. 70</a>.</span><br /> <br /> Greece, importance of
+      history of, <a href="#Page_i.184">i. 184</a>, and <i>ib.
+      n.</i><br /> <br /> Greek ideas, influence of, in France in the eighteenth
+      century, <a href="#Page_i.146">i. 146</a>.<br /> <br />
+      Grenoble, <a href="#Page_i.93">i. 93</a>.<br /> <br /> Gr&#233;try,
+      <a href="#Page_i.292">i. 292</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.296">296</a>; <a href="#Page_323">ii. 323</a>.<br />
+      <br /> Grimm, description of Rousseau by, <a
+      href="#Page_i.206">i. 206</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's quarrels with, <a
+      href="#Page_i.279">i. 279</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">letter of, about Rousseau and Diderot, <a
+      href="#Page_i.275">i. 275</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">relations of, with Rousseau, <a
+      href="#Page_i.279">i. 279</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">some account of his life, <a
+      href="#Page_i.279">i. 279</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his conversation with Madame d'Epinay, <a
+      href="#Page_i.281">i. 281</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">criticism on Rousseau, <a
+      href="#Page_i.281">i. 281</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">natural want of sympathy between the two, <a
+      href="#Page_i.282">i. 282</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's quarrel with, <a
+      href="#Page_i.285">i. 285</a>-290; <a href="#Page_65">ii.
+      65</a>, <a href="#Page_199">199</a>.</span><br /> <br /> Grotius, on
+      Government, <a href="#Page_148">ii. 148</a>.<br /> <br /> <br /> <span
+      class="smcap">H&#233;bert</span>, <a href="#Page_178">ii. 178</a>;<br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">prevents publication of a book in which
+      the author professed his belief in a god, <a href="#Page_179">ii. 179</a>.</span><br />
+      <br /> Helmholtz, <a href="#Page_i.299">i. 299</a>.<br />
+      <br /> Helv&#233;tius, <a href="#Page_i.191">i. 191</a>;
+      <a href="#Page_65">ii. 65</a>, <a href="#Page_199">199</a>.<br /> <br />
+      Herder, <a href="#Page_251">ii. 251</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's influence on, <a href="#Page_315">ii.
+      315</a>.</span><br /> <br /> Hermitage, the, given to Rousseau by Madame
+      d'Epinay, <a href="#Page_i.229">i. 229</a> (also <i>ib.</i>
+      <i>n.</i>);<br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">what his friends thought
+      of it, <a href="#Page_i.231">i. 231</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">sale of, after the Revolution, <a
+      href="#Page_i.237">i. 237</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">reasons for Rousseau's leaving, <a
+      href="#Page_i.286">i. 286</a>.</span><br /> <br />
+      Hildebrand, <a href="#Page_i.4">i. 4</a>.<br /> <br />
+      Hobbes, <a href="#Page_i.143">i. 143</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.161">161</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his &quot;Philosophy of Government,&quot; <a
+      href="#Page_151">ii. 151</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">singular
+      influence of, upon Rousseau, <a href="#Page_151">ii. 151</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_183">183</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">essential
+      difference between his views and those of Rousseau, <a href="#Page_159">ii.
+      159</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">on Sovereignty, <a
+      href="#Page_162">ii. 162</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's
+      definition of the three forms of government adopted by, inadequate, <a
+      href="#Page_168">ii. 168</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1.5em;">would
+      reduce spiritual and temporal jurisdiction to one political unity, <a
+      href="#Page_183">ii. 183</a>.</span><span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_336" id="Page_336">[ii.336]</a></span><br /> <br /> Holbachians,
+      <a href="#Page_i.337">i. 337</a>; <a href="#Page_2">ii.
+      2</a>.<br /> <br /> Hooker, on Civil Government, <a href="#Page_148">ii. 148</a>.<br />
+      <br /> H&#244;tel St. Quentin, Rousseau at, <a
+      href="#Page_i.106">i. 106</a>.<br /> <br /> Hume, David,
+      <a href="#Page_i.64">i. 64</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.89">89</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his deep-set sagacity, <a
+      href="#Page_i.156">i. 156</a>, <a href="#Page_6">ii. 6</a>,
+      <a href="#Page_75">75</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">suspected
+      of tampering with Boswell's letter, <a href="#Page_98">ii. 98</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">on Boswell, <a href="#Page_101">ii. 101</a>,
+      <i>n.</i>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his eagerness to
+      find Rousseau a refuge in England, <a href="#Page_282">ii. 282</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_283">283</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his
+      account of Rousseau, <a href="#Page_284">ii. 284</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">finds him a home at Wootton, <a href="#Page_286">ii.
+      286</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's quarrel
+      with, <a href="#Page_286">ii. 286</a>-291 (also <a href="#Page_290">ii.
+      290</a>, <i>n.</i>);</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his
+      innocence of Walpole's letter, <a href="#Page_292">ii. 292</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his conduct in the quarrel, <a
+      href="#Page_293">ii. 293</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">saves
+      Rousseau from arrest of French Government, <a href="#Page_295">ii. 295</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">on Rousseau's sensitiveness, <a
+      href="#Page_299">ii. 299</a>.</span><br /> <br /> <br /> <span class="smcap">Imagination</span>,
+      Rousseau's, <a href="#Page_i.247">i. 247</a>.<br /> <br />
+      <br /> <span class="smcap">Jacobins</span>, the, Rousseau's Social
+      Contract, their gospel, <a href="#Page_132">ii. 132</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_133">133</a>;<br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">their
+      mistake, <a href="#Page_136">ii. 136</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">convenience to them of some of the maxims of the
+      Social Contract, <a href="#Page_142">ii. 142</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Jacobin supremacy and Hobbism, <a
+      href="#Page_152">ii. 152</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">how
+      they might have saved France, <a href="#Page_167">ii. 167</a>.</span><br />
+      <br /> Jansen, his propositions, <a href="#Page_i.81">i.
+      81</a>.<br /> <br /> Jansenists, Rousseau's suspicions of, <a href="#Page_63">ii.
+      63</a>;<br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">mentioned, <a href="#Page_89">ii.
+      89</a>.</span><br /> <br /> Jean Paul, <a href="#Page_216">ii. 216</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_252">252</a>.<br /> <br /> Jefferson, <a href="#Page_227">ii.
+      227</a>, <i>n.</i><br /> <br /> Jesuits, Rousseau's suspicions of the, <a
+      href="#Page_64">ii. 64</a>;<br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">the, and
+      parliaments, <a href="#Page_65">ii. 65</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">movement against, <a href="#Page_65">ii. 65</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">suppression of the, leads to increased
+      thought about education, <a href="#Page_199">ii. 199</a>.</span><br />
+      <br /> Johnson, <a href="#Page_15">ii. 15</a>, <a href="#Page_98">98</a>.<br />
+      <br /> <br /> <span class="smcap">Kames</span>, Lord, <a href="#Page_253">ii.
+      253</a>.<br /> <br /> <br /> <span class="smcap">Lamennais</span>, influenced
+      by Rousseau, <a href="#Page_228">ii. 228</a>.<br /> <br /> Language, origin
+      of, <a href="#Page_i.161">i. 161</a>.<br /> <br /> Latour,
+      Madame, <a href="#Page_19">ii. 19</a>, <i>ib. n.</i><br /> <br /> Lavater
+      favourable to education on Rousseau's plan, <a href="#Page_251">ii. 251</a>
+      (also <i>ib.</i> <i>n.</i>)<br /> <br /> Lavoisier, reply to his request for
+      a fortnight's respite, <a href="#Page_227">ii. 227</a>, <i>n.</i><br />
+      <br /> Law, not a contract, <a href="#Page_153">ii. 153</a>.<br /> <br />
+      Lecouvreur, Adrienne, refused Christian burial on account of her being an
+      actress, <a href="#Page_i.323">i. 323</a>.<br /> <br />
+      Leibnitz, <a href="#Page_i.87">i. 87</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his optimism, <a
+      href="#Page_i.309">i. 309</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">on the constitution of the universe, <a
+      href="#Page_i.312">i. 312</a>.</span><br /> <br />
+      Lessing, on Pope, <a href="#Page_i.310">i. 310</a>, <i>n.</i><br />
+      <br /> &quot;Letters from the Mountain,&quot; <a href="#Page_104">ii. 104</a>;<br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">burned, by command, at Paris and the
+      Hague, <a href="#Page_105">ii. 105</a>.</span><br /> <br /> Liberty,
+      English, Rousseau's notion of, <a href="#Page_163">ii. 163</a>, <i>n.</i><br />
+      <br /> Life, Rousseau's condemnation of the contemplative, <a
+      href="#Page_i.10">i. 10</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his idea of household, <a
+      href="#Page_i.41">i. 41</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">easier for him to preach than for others to
+      practise, <a href="#Page_i.43">i. 43</a>.</span><br />
+      <br /> Lisbon, earthquake of, Voltaire on, <a
+      href="#Page_i.310">i. 310</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's letter to Voltaire on, <a
+      href="#Page_i.310">i. 310</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.311">311</a>.</span><br /> <br /> Locke, his
+      Essay, <a href="#Page_i.87">i. 87</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his notions, <a
+      href="#Page_i.87">i. 87</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his influence upon Rousseau, <a href="#Page_121">ii.
+      121</a>-126;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">on Marriage, <a
+      href="#Page_126">ii. 126</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">on
+      Civil Government, <a href="#Page_149">ii. 149</a>, <a href="#Page_150">150</a>,
+      <i>n.</i>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">indefiniteness of
+      his views, <a href="#Page_160">ii. 160</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">the pioneer of French thought on education, <a
+      href="#Page_202">ii. 202</a>, <a href="#Page_203">203</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's indebtedness to, <a
+      href="#Page_203">ii. 203</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his
+      mistake in education, <a href="#Page_209">ii. 209</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">subjects of his theories, <a href="#Page_254">ii.
+      254</a>.</span><br /> <br /> Lulli (music), <a
+      href="#Page_i.291">i. 291</a>.<br /> <br /> <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_337" id="Page_337">[ii.337]</a></span>Luther,
+      <a href="#Page_i.4">i. 4</a>.<br /> <br /> Luxembourg, the
+      Duke of, gives Rousseau a home, <a href="#Page_2">ii. 2</a>-7, <a
+      href="#Page_9">9</a>.<br /> <br /> Luxembourg, the Mar&#233;chale de, in
+      vain seeks Rousseau's children, <a href="#Page_i.128">i.
+      128</a>;<br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">helps to get Emilius
+      published, <a href="#Page_62">ii. 62</a>-64, <a href="#Page_67">67</a>.</span><br />
+      <br /> Lycurgus, <a href="#Page_129">ii. 129</a>, <a href="#Page_131">131</a>;<br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">influence of, upon Saint Just, <a
+      href="#Page_133">ii. 133</a>.</span><br /> <br /> Lyons, Rousseau a tutor
+      at, <a href="#Page_i.95">i. 95</a>-97.<br /> <br /> <br />
+      <span class="smcap">Mably</span>, De, <a
+      href="#Page_i.95">i. 95</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his socialism, <a
+      href="#Page_i.184">i. 184</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">applied to for scheme for the government of
+      Poland, <a href="#Page_324">ii. 324</a>.</span><br /> <br /> Maistre, De, <a
+      href="#Page_i.145">i. 145</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">on Optimism, <a
+      href="#Page_i.314">i. 314</a>.</span><br /> <br /> Maitre,
+      Le, teaches Rousseau music, <a href="#Page_i.58">i. 58</a>.<br />
+      <br /> Malebranche, <a href="#Page_i.87">i. 87</a>.<br />
+      <br /> Malesherbes, Rousseau confesses his ungrateful nature to, <a
+      href="#Page_14">ii. 14</a>;<br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his
+      dishonest advice to Rousseau, <a href="#Page_60">ii. 60</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">helps Diderot, <a href="#Page_62">ii. 62</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">and Rousseau in the publishing of Emilius,
+      <a href="#Page_62">ii. 62</a>, <a href="#Page_63">63</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">endangered by it, <a href="#Page_67">ii.
+      67</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">asks Rousseau to
+      collect plants for him, <a href="#Page_76">ii. 76</a>.</span><br /> <br />
+      Man, his specific distinction from other animals, <a
+      href="#Page_i.161">i. 161</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his state of nature, <a
+      href="#Page_i.161">i. 161</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Hobbes wrong concerning this, <a
+      href="#Page_i.161">i. 161</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">equality of, <a
+      href="#Page_i.180">i. 180</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">effects of this doctrine in France and in the
+      United States, <a href="#Page_i.182">i. 182</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">not naturally free, <a href="#Page_126">ii.
+      126</a>.</span><br /> <br /> Mandeville, <a
+      href="#Page_i.162">i. 162</a>.<br /> <br /> Manners,
+      Rousseau's, Marmontel, and Grimm on, <a
+      href="#Page_i.205">i. 205</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.206">206</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau on Swiss, <a
+      href="#Page_i.329">i. 329</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.330">330</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">depravity of French, in the eighteenth century,
+      <a href="#Page_25">ii. 25</a>, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>.</span><br />
+      <br /> Marischal, Lord, friendship between, and Rousseau, <a href="#Page_79">ii.
+      79</a>-81;<br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">account of, <a
+      href="#Page_80">ii. 80</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">on
+      Boswell, <a href="#Page_98">ii. 98</a></span><br /> <br /> Marmontel, on
+      Rousseau's manners, <a href="#Page_i.206">i. 206</a>;<br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">on his success, <a href="#Page_2">ii. 2</a>.</span><br />
+      <br /> Marriage, design of the New Helo&#239;sa to exalt, <a href="#Page_46">ii.
+      46</a>-48, <i>ib.</i> <i>n.</i><br /> <br /> Marsilio, of Padua, on Law, <a
+      href="#Page_145">ii. 145</a>.<br /> <br /> Men, inequality of, Rousseau's
+      second Discourse (see <a href="#Discourses">Discourses</a>),<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 2.5em;">dedicated to the republic of Geneva, <a
+      href="#Page_i.190">i. 190</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">how received there, <a
+      href="#Page_i.228">i. 228</a>.</span><br /> <br />
+      Mirabeau the elder, Rousseau's letter to, from Wootton, <a href="#Page_305">ii.
+      305</a>, <a href="#Page_306">306</a>;<br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his
+      character, <a href="#Page_309">ii. 309</a>-312;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">receives Rousseau at Fleury, <a href="#Page_311">ii.
+      311</a>.</span><br /> <br /> Mirabeau, Gabriel, Rousseau's influence on, <a
+      href="#Page_315">ii. 315</a>.<br /> <br /> Moli&#232;re (Misanthrope of),
+      Rousseau's criticism on, <a href="#Page_i.329">i. 329</a>;<br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">D'Alembert on, <a
+      href="#Page_i.329">i. 329</a>.</span><br /> <br />
+      Monarchy, Rousseau's objection to, <a href="#Page_171">ii. 171</a>.<br />
+      <br /> Montaigu, Count de, avarice of, <a
+      href="#Page_i.101">i. 101</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.102">102</a>.<br /> <br /> Montaigne,
+      Rousseau's obligations to, <a href="#Page_i.145">i. 145</a>;<br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">influence of, on Rousseau, <a
+      href="#Page_203">ii. 203</a>.</span><br /> <br /> Montesquieu, &quot;incomplete
+      positivity&quot; of, <a href="#Page_i.156">i. 156</a>;<br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">on Government, <a
+      href="#Page_i.157">i. 157</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">effect of his Spirit of Laws on Rousseau, <a
+      href="#Page_i.183">i. 183</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">confused definition of laws, <a href="#Page_153">ii.
+      153</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">balanced
+      parliamentary system of, <a href="#Page_163">ii. 163</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his definition of forms of government, <a
+      href="#Page_169">ii. 169</a>.</span><br /> <br /> Montmorency, Rousseau goes
+      to live there, <a href="#Page_i.229">i. 229</a>;<br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his life at, <a href="#Page_2">ii. 2</a>-9.</span><br />
+      <br /> Montpellier, <a href="#Page_i.92">i. 92</a>.<br />
+      <br /> <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_338" id="Page_338">[ii.338]</a></span>Morals,
+      state of, in France in the eighteenth century, <a href="#Page_26">ii. 26</a>.<br />
+      <br /> Morellet, thrown into the Bastile, <a href="#Page_57">ii. 57</a>.<br />
+      <br /> Morelly, his indirect influence on Rousseau, <a
+      href="#Page_i.156">i. 156</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his socialistic theory, <a
+      href="#Page_i.157">i. 157</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.158">158</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his rules for organising a model community, <a
+      href="#Page_i.158">i. 158</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his terse exposition of inequality
+      contrasted with that of Rousseau, <a href="#Page_i.170">i.
+      170</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">on primitive human
+      nature, <a href="#Page_i.175">i. 175</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his socialism, <a href="#Page_52">ii. 52</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">influence of his &quot;model community&quot;
+      upon St. Just, <a href="#Page_133">ii. 133</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">advice to mothers, <a href="#Page_205">ii.
+      205</a>.</span><br /> <br /> Motiers, Rousseau's home there, <a
+      href="#Page_77">ii. 77</a>;<br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">attends
+      divine service at, <a href="#Page_91">ii. 91</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">life at, <a href="#Page_91">ii. 91</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_93">93</a>.</span><br /> <br /> Moultou (pastor of Motiers), his
+      enthusiasm for Rousseau, <a href="#Page_82">ii. 82</a>.<br /> <br /> Music,
+      Rousseau undertakes to teach, <a href="#Page_i.60">i. 60</a>;<br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's opinion concerning Italian, <a
+      href="#Page_i.105">i. 105</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">effect of Galuppi's, <a
+      href="#Page_i.105">i. 105</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau earns his living by copying, <a
+      href="#Page_i.196">i. 196</a>; <a href="#Page_315">ii.
+      315</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rameau's criticism on
+      Rousseau's <i>Muses Galantes</i>, <a href="#Page_i.211">i.
+      211</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">French, <a
+      href="#Page_i.291">i. 291</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's letter on, <a
+      href="#Page_i.292">i. 292</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Italian, denounced at Paris, <a
+      href="#Page_i.292">i. 292</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau utterly condemns French, <a
+      href="#Page_i.294">i. 294</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">quarrels with Gluck for setting his, to French
+      words, <a href="#Page_323">ii. 323</a>.</span><br /> <br /> Musical
+      notation, Rousseau's, <a href="#Page_i.291">i. 291</a>;<br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his Musical Dictionary, <a
+      href="#Page_i.296">i. 296</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his notation explained, <a
+      href="#Page_i.296">i. 296</a>-301;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his system inapplicable to instruments, <a
+      href="#Page_i.301">i. 301</a>.</span><br /> <br /> <br />
+      <span class="smcap">Naples</span>, drunkenness, how regarded in, <a
+      href="#Page_i.331">i. 331</a>.<br /> <br /> <i>Narcisse</i>,
+      Rousseau's condemnation of his own comedy of, <a
+      href="#Page_i.215">i. 215</a>.<br /> <br /> <a
+      name="Nature" id="Nature">Nature</a>, Rousseau's love of, <a
+      href="#Page_i.234">i. 234</a>-241; <a href="#Page_39">ii.
+      39</a>;<br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">state of, Rousseau,
+      Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Hume on, <a href="#Page_i.156">i.
+      156</a>-158;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's, in
+      Second Discourse, <a href="#Page_i.171">i. 171</a>-180;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his starting-point of right, and normal
+      constitution of civil society, <a href="#Page_124">ii. 124</a>. See <a
+      href="#State">State of Nature</a>.</span><br /> <br /> Necker, <a
+      href="#Page_54">ii. 54</a>, <a href="#Page_98">98</a>, <i>n.</i><br />
+      <br /> Neuch&#226;tel, flight to principality of, by Rousseau, <a
+      href="#Page_73">ii. 73</a>;<br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">history
+      of, <a href="#Page_73">ii. 73</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">outbreak at, arising from religious controversy,
+      <a href="#Page_90">ii. 90</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">preparations
+      for driving Rousseau out of, defeated by Frederick of Prussia, <a
+      href="#Page_90">ii. 90</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">clergy
+      of, against Rousseau, <a href="#Page_106">ii. 106</a>.</span><br /> <br />
+      <a name="New" id="New">New Helo&#239;sa</a>, first conception of, <a
+      href="#Page_i.250">i. 250</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">monument of Rousseau's fall, <a href="#Page_1">ii.
+      1</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">when completed and
+      published, <a href="#Page_2">ii. 2</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">read aloud to the Duchess de Luxembourg, <a
+      href="#Page_3">ii. 3</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">letter
+      on suicide in, <a href="#Page_16">ii. 16</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">effects upon Parisian ladies of reading the, <a
+      href="#Page_18">ii. 18</a>, <a href="#Page_19">19</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">criticism on, <a href="#Page_20">ii. 20</a>-55;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his scheme proposed in it, <a
+      href="#Page_21">ii. 21</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">its
+      story, <a href="#Page_24">ii. 24</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">its purity, contrasted with contemporary and
+      later French romances, <a href="#Page_24">ii. 24</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">its general effect, <a href="#Page_27">ii. 27</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau absolutely without humour, <a
+      href="#Page_27">ii. 27</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">utter
+      selfishness of hero of, <a href="#Page_30">ii. 30</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">its heroine, <a href="#Page_30">ii. 30</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">its popularity, <a href="#Page_231">ii.
+      231</a>, <a href="#Page_232">232</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">burlesque on it, <a href="#Page_31">ii. 31</a>,
+      <i>n.</i>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">its vital defect,
+      <a href="#Page_35">ii. 35</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">difference
+      between Rousseau, Byron, and others, <a href="#Page_42">ii. 42</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">sumptuary details of the story, <a
+      href="#Page_44">ii. 44</a>, <a href="#Page_45">45</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">its democratic tendency, <a href="#Page_49">ii.
+      49</a>, <a href="#Page_50">50</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">the bearing of its teaching, <a href="#Page_54">ii.
+      54</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">hindrances to its
+      circulation in France, <a href="#Page_57">ii. 57</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Malesherbes's low morality as to publishing, <a
+      href="#Page_61">ii. 61</a>.</span><br /> <br /> <br /> <span class="smcap">Optimism</span>
+      of Pope and Leibnitz, <a href="#Page_i.309">i. 309</a>-310;<br />
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_339" id="Page_339">[ii.339]</a></span><span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">discussed, <a href="#Page_128">ii. 128</a>-130.</span><br />
+      <br /> Origin of inequality among men, <a
+      href="#Page_i.156">i. 156</a>. See also <a
+      href="#Discourses">Discourses</a>.<br /> <br /> <br /> <span class="smcap">Paley</span>,
+      <a href="#Page_191">ii. 191</a>, <i>n.</i><br /> <br /> Palissot, <a
+      href="#Page_56">ii. 56</a>.<br /> <br /> Paris, Rousseau's first visit to,
+      <a href="#Page_i.61">i. 61</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his second, <a
+      href="#Page_i.63">i. 63</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.97">97</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.102">102</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">third visit, <a
+      href="#Page_i.106">i. 106</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">effect in, of his first Discourse, <a
+      href="#Page_i.139">i. 139</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">opinions in, on religion, laws, etc., <a
+      href="#Page_i.185">i. 185</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">&quot;mimic philosophy&quot; there, <a
+      href="#Page_i.193">i. 193</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">society in, in Rousseau's time, <a
+      href="#Page_i.202">i. 202</a>-211;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his view of it, <a
+      href="#Page_i.210">i. 210</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">composes there his <i>Muses Galantes</i>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.211">i. 211</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">returns to, from Geneva, <a
+      href="#Page_i.228">i. 228</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his belief of the unfitness of its people for
+      political affairs, <a href="#Page_i.246">i. 246</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">goes to, in 1741, with his scheme of
+      musical notation, <a href="#Page_i.291">i. 291</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">effect there of his letter on music, <a
+      href="#Page_i.295">i. 295</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's imaginary contrast between, and
+      Geneva, <a href="#Page_i.329">i. 329</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Emilius ordered to be publicly burnt in,
+      <a href="#Page_65">ii. 65</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">parliament
+      of, orders &quot;Letters from the Mountain&quot; to be burnt, <a
+      href="#Page_295">ii. 295</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">also
+      Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary, <a href="#Page_295">ii. 295</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Danton's scheme for municipal
+      administration of, <a href="#Page_168">ii. 168</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">two parties (those of Voltaire and of
+      Rousseau) in, in 1793, <a href="#Page_178">ii. 178</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">excitement in, at Rousseau's appearance in 1765,
+      <a href="#Page_283">ii. 283</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">he goes to live there in 1770, <a
+      href="#Page_314">ii. 314</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Voltaire's
+      last visit to, <a href="#Page_323">ii. 323</a>, <a href="#Page_324">324</a>.</span><br />
+      <br /> P&#226;ris, Abb&#233;, miracles at his tomb, <a href="#Page_88">ii.
+      88</a>.<br /> <br /> Parisian frivolity, <a
+      href="#Page_i.193">i. 193</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.220">220</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.329">329</a>.<br /> <br /> Parliament and
+      Jesuits, <a href="#Page_64">ii. 64</a>.<br /> <br /> Pascal, <a
+      href="#Page_37">ii. 37</a>.<br /> <br /> Passy, Rousseau composes the &quot;Village
+      Soothsayer&quot; at, <a href="#Page_i.212">i. 212</a>.<br />
+      <br /> Paul, St., effect of, on western society, <a
+      href="#Page_i.4">i. 4</a>.<br /> <br /> Peasantry, French,
+      oppression of, <a href="#Page_i.67">i. 67</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.68">68</a>.<br /> <br /> Pedigree of
+      Rousseau, <a href="#Page_i.8">i. 8</a>, <i>n.</i><br />
+      <br /> Pelagius, <a href="#Page_272">ii. 272</a>.<br /> <br /> Peoples,
+      sovereignty of, Rousseau not the inventor of doctrine of, <a
+      href="#Page_144">ii. 144</a>-148;<br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">taught
+      by Althusen, <a href="#Page_i.147">i. 147</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">constitution of Helvetic Republic in 1798,
+      a blow at, <a href="#Page_165">ii. 165</a>.</span><br /> <br /> Pergolese,
+      <a href="#Page_i.292">i. 292</a>.<br /> <br /> Pestalozzi
+      indebted to Emilius, <a href="#Page_252">ii. 252</a>.<br /> <br /> Philidor,
+      <a href="#Page_i.292">i. 292</a>.<br /> <br />
+      Philosophers, of Rousseau's time, contradicting each other, <a
+      href="#Page_i.87">i. 87</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's complaint of the, <a
+      href="#Page_i.202">i. 202</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">war between the, and the priests, <a
+      href="#Page_i.322">i. 322</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's reactionary protest against, <a
+      href="#Page_i.328">i. 328</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">troubles of, <a href="#Page_59">ii. 59</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">parliaments hostile to, <a href="#Page_64">ii.
+      64</a>.</span><br /> <br /> Philosophy, Rousseau's disgust at mimic, at
+      Paris, <a href="#Page_i.193">i. 193</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">drew him to the essential in religion, <a
+      href="#Page_i.220">i. 220</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Voltaire's no perfect, <a
+      href="#Page_i.318">i. 318</a>.</span><br /> <br />
+      Phlipon, Jean Marie, Rousseau's influence on, <a href="#Page_315">ii. 315</a>.<br />
+      <br /> Plato, his republic, <a href="#Page_i.122">i. 122</a>;<br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his influence on Rousseau, <a
+      href="#Page_i.146">i. 146</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.325">325</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Milton on his Laws, <a href="#Page_178">ii. 178</a>.</span><br />
+      <br /> <a name="Plays" id="Plays">Plays</a> (stage), Rousseau's letter on,
+      to D'Alembert, <a href="#Page_i.321">i. 321</a>;<br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his views of, <a
+      href="#Page_i.323">i. 323</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Jeremy Collier and Bossuet on, <a
+      href="#Page_i.323">i. 323</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">in Geneva, <a
+      href="#Page_i.333">i. 333</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.334">334</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau, Voltaire, and D'Alembert on, <a
+      href="#Page_i.332">i. 332</a>-337.</span><br /> <br />
+      Plutarch, Rousseau's love for, <a href="#Page_i.13">i.
+      13</a>.<br /> <br /> Plutocracy, new, faults of, <a
+      href="#Page_i.195">i. 195</a>.<br /> <br /> <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_340" id="Page_340">[ii.340]</a></span>Pompadour,
+      Madame de, and the Jesuits, <a href="#Page_64">ii. 64</a>.<br /> <br />
+      Pontverre (priest) converts Rousseau to Romanism, <a
+      href="#Page_i.31">i. 31</a>-35.<br /> <br /> Pope, his
+      Essay on Man translated by Voltaire, <a
+      href="#Page_i.309">i. 309</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Berlin Academy and Lessing on it, <a
+      href="#Page_i.310">i. 310</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">criticism on it by Rousseau, <a
+      href="#Page_i.312">i. 312</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">its general position reproduced by Rousseau, <a
+      href="#Page_i.315">i. 315</a>.</span><br /> <br />
+      Popelini&#232;re, M. de, <a href="#Page_i.211">i. 211</a>.<br />
+      <br /> Positive knowledge, <a href="#Page_i.78">i. 78</a>.<br />
+      <br /> Press, freedom of the, <a href="#Page_59">ii. 59</a>.<br /> <br /> Pr&#233;vost,
+      Abb&#233;, <a href="#Page_i.48">i. 48</a>.<br /> <br /> <i>Projet
+      pour l'Education</i>, <a href="#Page_i.96">i. 96</a>, <i>n.</i><br />
+      <br /> Property, private, evils ascribed to <a
+      href="#Page_i.157">i. 157</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.185">185</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Robespierre disclaimed the intention of
+      attacking, <a href="#Page_i.123">i. 123</a>, <i>n.</i></span><br />
+      <br /> Protestant principles, effect of development of, <a href="#Page_146">ii.
+      146</a>-147.<br /> <br /> Protestantism, his conversion to, <a
+      href="#Page_i.220">i. 220</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">its influence on Rousseau, <a
+      href="#Page_i.221">i. 221</a>.</span><br /> <br /> <br />
+      <span class="smcap">Rameau</span> on Rousseau's <i>Muses Galantes</i>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.119">i. 119</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.211">211</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">mentioned, <a
+      href="#Page_i.291">i. 291</a>.</span><br /> <br />
+      Rationalism, <a href="#Page_i.224">i. 224</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.225">225</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">influence of Descartes on, <a
+      href="#Page_i.225">i. 225</a>.</span><br /> <br /> Reason,
+      De Saint Pierre's views of, <a href="#Page_i.244">i. 244</a>.<br />
+      <br /> Reform, essential priority of social over political, <a
+      href="#Page_43">ii. 43</a>.<br /> <br /> Religion, simplification of, <a
+      href="#Page_i.3">i. 3</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">ideas of, in Paris, <a
+      href="#Page_i.186">i. 186</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.187">187</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.207">207</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.208">208</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's view of, <a
+      href="#Page_i.220">i. 220</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">doctrines of, in Geneva, <a
+      href="#Page_i.223">i. 223</a>-227, also <i>n.</i>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">curious project concerning it, by
+      Rousseau, <a href="#Page_i.317">i. 317</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">separation of spiritual and temporal
+      powers deemed mischievous by Rousseau, <a href="#Page_173">ii. 173</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">in its relation to the state may be
+      considered as of three kinds, <a href="#Page_175">ii. 175</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">duty of the sovereign to establish a civil
+      confession of faith, <a href="#Page_176">ii. 176</a>, <a href="#Page_177">177</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">positive dogmas of this, <a
+      href="#Page_176">ii. 176</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's
+      &quot;pure Hobbism,&quot; <a href="#Page_177">ii. 177</a>.</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">See <a href="#Savoyard">Savoyard Vicar</a>
+      (Emilius), <a href="#Page_256">ii. 256</a>, <a href="#Page_281">281</a>.</span><br />
+      <br /> Renou, Rousseau assumes name of, <a
+      href="#Page_i.129">i. 129</a>; <a href="#Page_312">ii.
+      312</a>.<br /> <br /> Revelation, Christian, Rousseau's controversy on, with
+      Archbishop of Paris, <a href="#Page_86">ii. 86</a>-91.<br /> <br /> <i>R&#234;veries</i>,
+      Rousseau's relinquishing society, <a href="#Page_i.199">i.
+      199</a>;<br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">description of his life in
+      the isle of St. Peter, in the, <a href="#Page_109">ii. 109</a>-115;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">their style <a href="#Page_314">ii. 314</a>.</span><br />
+      <br /> Revolution, French, principles of, <a
+      href="#Page_i.1">i. 1</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.2">2</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">benefits of, or otherwise, <a href="#Page_54">ii.
+      54</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Baboeuf on, <a
+      href="#Page_123">ii. 123</a>, <a href="#Page_124">124</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">the starting point in the history of its
+      ideas, <a href="#Page_160">ii. 160</a>.</span><br /> <br /> Revolutionary
+      process and ideal <a href="#Page_i.4">i. 4</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.5">5</a>.<br /> <br /> Revolutionists,
+      difference among, <a href="#Page_i.2">i. 2</a>.<br />
+      <br /> Richardson (the novelist), <a href="#Page_25">ii. 25</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_28">28</a>.<br /> <br /> Richelieu's brief patronage of
+      Rousseau, <a href="#Page_i.195">i. 195</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.302">302</a>.<br /> <br /> Rivi&#232;re, de
+      la, origin of society, <a href="#Page_156">ii. 156</a>, <a href="#Page_157">157</a>;<br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">anecdote of, <a href="#Page_156">ii. 156</a>,
+      <a href="#Page_157">157</a>, <i>n.</i></span><br /> <br /> Robecq, Madame
+      de, <a href="#Page_56">ii. 56</a>.<br /> <br /> Robespierre, <a
+      href="#Page_123">ii. 123</a>, <a href="#Page_134">134</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_160">160</a>, <a href="#Page_178">178</a>, <a href="#Page_179">179</a>;<br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his &quot;sacred right of insurrection,&quot;
+      <a href="#Page_188">ii. 188</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's influence on, <a href="#Page_315">ii.
+      315</a>.</span><br /> <br /> Rousseau, Didier, <a
+      href="#Page_i.8">i. 8</a>.<br /> <br /> Rousseau, Jean
+      Baptiste, <a href="#Page_i.61">i. 61</a>, <i>n.</i><br />
+      <br /> Rousseau, Jean Jacques, influence of his writings on France and the
+      American colonists, <a href="#Page_i.1">i. 1</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.2">2</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">on Robespierre, Paine, and Chateaubriand, <a
+      href="#Page_i.3">i. 3</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his place as a leader, <a
+      href="#Page_i.3">i. 3</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">starting-point, of his mental habits, <a
+      href="#Page_i.4">i. 4</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">personality of, <a
+      href="#Page_i.4">i. 4</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_341" id="Page_341">[ii.341]</a></span><span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">influence on the common people, <a
+      href="#Page_i.5">i. 5</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his birth and ancestry, <a
+      href="#Page_i.8">i. 8</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">pedigree, <a href="#Page_i.8">i.
+      8</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">parents, <a
+      href="#Page_i.10">i. 10</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.11">11</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">influence upon him of his father's character, <a
+      href="#Page_i.11">i. 11</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.12">12</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his reading in childhood, <a
+      href="#Page_i.12">i. 12</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.13">13</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">love of Plutarch, <a
+      href="#Page_i.13">i. 13</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">early years, <a
+      href="#Page_i.13">i. 13</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.14">14</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">sent to school at Bossey, <a
+      href="#Page_i.15">i. 15</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">deterioration of his moral character there, <a
+      href="#Page_i.17">i. 17</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">indignation at an unjust punishment, <a
+      href="#Page_i.17">i. 17</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.18">18</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">leaves school, <a
+      href="#Page_i.20">i. 20</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">youthful life at Geneva, <a
+      href="#Page_i.21">i. 21</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.22">22</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his remarks on its character, <a
+      href="#Page_i.24">i. 24</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">anecdotes of it, <a
+      href="#Page_i.22">i. 22</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.24">24</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his leading error as to the education of the
+      young, <a href="#Page_i.25">i. 25</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.26">26</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">religious training, <a
+      href="#Page_i.25">i. 25</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">apprenticeship, <a
+      href="#Page_i.26">i. 26</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">boyish doings, <a
+      href="#Page_i.27">i. 27</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">harshness of his master, <a
+      href="#Page_i.27">i. 27</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">runs away, <a href="#Page_i.29">i.
+      29</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">received by the priest
+      of Confignon, <a href="#Page_i.31">i. 31</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">sent to Madame de Warens, <a
+      href="#Page_i.84">i. 84</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">at Turin, <a href="#Page_i.35">i.
+      35</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">hypocritical
+      conversion to Roman Catholicism, <a href="#Page_i.37">i.
+      37</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">motive, <a
+      href="#Page_i.38">i. 38</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">registry of his baptism, <a
+      href="#Page_i.38">i. 38</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his forlorn condition, <a
+      href="#Page_i.39">i. 39</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">love of music, <a
+      href="#Page_i.39">i. 39</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">becomes servant to Madame de Vercellis, <a
+      href="#Page_i.39">i. 39</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his theft, lying, and excuses for it, <a
+      href="#Page_i.39">i. 39</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.40">40</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">becomes servant to Count of Gouvon, <a
+      href="#Page_i.42">i. 42</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">dismissed, <a href="#Page_i.43">i.
+      43</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">returns to Madame de
+      Warens, <a href="#Page_i.45">i. 45</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his temperament, <a
+      href="#Page_i.46">i. 46</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.47">47</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">in training for the priesthood, but pronounced
+      too stupid, <a href="#Page_i.57">i. 57</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">tries music, <a
+      href="#Page_i.57">i. 57</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">shamelessly abandons his companion, <a
+      href="#Page_i.58">i. 58</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">goes to Freiburg, Neuch&#226;tel, and Paris, <a
+      href="#Page_i.61">i. 61</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.62">62</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">conjectural chronology of his movements about
+      this time. <a href="#Page_i.62">i. 62</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">love of vagabond life, <a
+      href="#Page_i.62">i. 62</a>-68;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">effect upon him of his intercourse with the
+      poor, <a href="#Page_i.68">i. 68</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">becomes clerk to a land surveyor at Chamb&#233;ri,
+      <a href="#Page_i.69">i. 69</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">life there, <a
+      href="#Page_i.69">i. 69</a>-72;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">ill-health and retirement to Les Charmettes, <a
+      href="#Page_i.73">i. 73</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his latest recollection of this time, <a
+      href="#Page_i.75">i. 75</a>-77;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his &quot;form of worship,&quot; <a
+      href="#Page_i.77">i. 77</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">love of nature, <a
+      href="#Page_i.77">i. 77</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.78">78</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">notion of deity, <a
+      href="#Page_i.77">i. 77</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">peculiar intellectual feebleness, <a
+      href="#Page_i.81">i. 81</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">criticism on himself, <a
+      href="#Page_i.83">i. 83</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">want of logic in his mental constitution, <a
+      href="#Page_i.85">i. 85</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">effect on him of Voltaire's Letters on the
+      English, <a href="#Page_i.85">i. 85</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">self-training, <a
+      href="#Page_i.86">i. 86</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">mistaken method of it, <a
+      href="#Page_i.86">i. 86</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.87">8</a>7;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">writes a comedy, <a
+      href="#Page_i.89">i. 89</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">enjoyment of rural life at Les Charmettes, <a
+      href="#Page_i.91">i. 91</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.92">92</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">robs Madame de Warens, <a
+      href="#Page_i.92">i. 92</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">leaves her, <a
+      href="#Page_i.93">i. 93</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">discrepancy between dates of his letters and the
+      Confessions, <a href="#Page_i.93">i. 93</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">takes a tutorship at Lyons, <a
+      href="#Page_i.95">i. 95</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">condemns the practice of writing Latin, <a
+      href="#Page_i.96">i. 96</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">resigns his tutorship, and goes to Paris,
+      <a href="#Page_i.97">i. 97</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">reception there, <a
+      href="#Page_i.98">i. 98</a>-100;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">appointed secretary to French Ambassador at
+      Venice, <a href="#Page_i.100">i. 100</a>-106;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">in quarantine at Genoa, <a
+      href="#Page_i.104">i. 104</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his estimate of French melody, <a
+      href="#Page_i.105">i. 105</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">returns to Paris, <a
+      href="#Page_i.106">i. 106</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">becomes acquainted with Theresa Le Vasseur, <a
+      href="#Page_i.106">i. 106</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his conduct criticised, <a
+      href="#Page_i.107">i. 107</a>-113;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">simple life, <a
+      href="#Page_i.113">i. 113</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">letter to her, <a
+      href="#Page_i.115">i. 115</a>-119;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his poverty, <a
+      href="#Page_i.119">i. 119</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">becomes secretary to Madame Dupin and her
+      son-in-law, M. de Francueil, <a href="#Page_i.119">i.
+      119</a>;</span><br /> <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_342" id="Page_342">[ii.342]</a></span><span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">sends his children to the foundling hospital, <a
+      href="#Page_i.120">i. 120</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.121">121</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">paltry excuses for the crime, <a
+      href="#Page_i.121">i. 121</a>-126;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his pretended marriage under the name of Renou,
+      <a href="#Page_i.129">i. 129</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his Discourses, <a
+      href="#Page_i.132">i. 132</a>-186 (see <a
+      href="#Discourses">Discourses</a>);</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">writes essays for academy of Dijon, <a
+      href="#Page_i.132">i. 132</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">origin of first essay, <a
+      href="#Page_i.133">i. 133</a>-137;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his &quot;visions&quot; for thirteen years, <a
+      href="#Page_i.138">i. 138</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">evil effect upon himself of the first Discourse,
+      <a href="#Page_i.138">i. 138</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">of it, the second Discourse and the Social
+      Contract upon Europe, <a href="#Page_i.138">i. 138</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his own opinion of it, <a
+      href="#Page_i.138">i. 138</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.139">139</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">influence of Plato upon him, <a
+      href="#Page_i.146">i. 146</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">second Discourse, <a
+      href="#Page_i.154">i. 154</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his &quot;State of Nature,&quot; <a
+      href="#Page_i.159">i. 159</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">no evidence for it, <a
+      href="#Page_i.172">i. 172</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">influence of Montesquieu on him, <a
+      href="#Page_i.183">i. 183</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">inconsistency of his views, <a
+      href="#Page_i.124">i. 124</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">influence of Geneva upon him, <a
+      href="#Page_i.187">i. 187</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.188">188</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his disgust at Parisian philosophers, <a
+      href="#Page_i.191">i. 191</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.192">192</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">the two sides of his character, <a
+      href="#Page_i.193">i. 193</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">associates in Paris, <a
+      href="#Page_i.193">i. 193</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his income, <a
+      href="#Page_i.196">i. 196</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.197">197</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">post of cashier, <a
+      href="#Page_i.196">i. 196</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">throws it up, <a
+      href="#Page_i.197">i. 197</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.198">198</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">determines to earn his living by copying music,
+      <a href="#Page_i.198">i. 198</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.199">199</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">change of manners, <a
+      href="#Page_i.201">i. 201</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">dislike of the manners of his time, <a
+      href="#Page_i.202">i. 202</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.203">203</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">assumption of a seeming cynicism, <a
+      href="#Page_i.206">i. 206</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Grimm's rebuke of it, <a
+      href="#Page_i.206">i. 206</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's protest against atheism, <a
+      href="#Page_i.208">i. 208</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.209">209</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">composes a musical interlude, the Village
+      Soothsayer, <a href="#Page_i.212">i. 212</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his nervousness loses him the chance of a
+      pension, <a href="#Page_i.213">i. 213</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his moral simplicity, <a
+      href="#Page_i.214">i. 214</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.215">215</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">revisits Geneva, <a
+      href="#Page_i.216">i. 216</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">re-conversion to Protestantism, <a
+      href="#Page_i.220">i. 220</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his friends at Geneva, <a
+      href="#Page_i.227">i. 227</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">their effect upon him, <a
+      href="#Page_i.227">i. 227</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">returns to Paris, <a
+      href="#Page_i.227">i. 227</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">the Hermitage offered him by Madame d'Epinay, <a
+      href="#Page_i.229">i. 229</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.230">230</a> (and <i>ib. n.</i>);</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">retires to it against the protests of his
+      friends, <a href="#Page_i.231">i. 231</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his love of nature, <a
+      href="#Page_i.234">i. 234</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.235">235</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.236">236</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">first days at the Hermitage, <a
+      href="#Page_i.237">i. 237</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">rural delirium, <a
+      href="#Page_i.237">i. 237</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">dislike of society, <a
+      href="#Page_i.242">i. 242</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">literary scheme, <a
+      href="#Page_i.242">i. 242</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.243">243</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">remarks on Saint Pierre, <a
+      href="#Page_i.246">i. 246</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">violent mental crisis, <a
+      href="#Page_i.247">i. 247</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">employs his illness in writing to Voltaire on
+      Providence, <a href="#Page_i.250">i. 250</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.251">251</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his intolerance of vice in others, <a
+      href="#Page_i.254">i. 254</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">acquaintance with Madame de Houdetot, <a
+      href="#Page_i.255">i. 255</a>-269;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">source of his irritability, <a
+      href="#Page_i.270">i. 270</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.271">271</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">blind enthusiasm of his admirers, <a
+      href="#Page_i.273">i. 273</a>, also <i>ib. n.</i>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">quarrels with Diderot, <a
+      href="#Page_i.275">i. 275</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Grimm's account of them, <a
+      href="#Page_i.276">i. 276</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">quarrels with Madame d'Epinay, <a
+      href="#Page_i.276">i. 276</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.288">288</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">relations with Grimm, <a
+      href="#Page_i.279">i. 279</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">want of sympathy between the two, <a
+      href="#Page_i.279">i. 279</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">declines to accompany Madame d'Epinay to Geneva,
+      <a href="#Page_i.285">i. 285</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">quarrels with Grimm, <a
+      href="#Page_i.285">i. 285</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">leaves the Hermitage, <a
+      href="#Page_i.289">i. 289</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.290">290</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">aims in music, <a
+      href="#Page_i.291">i. 291</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">letter on French music, <a
+      href="#Page_i.293">i. 293</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.294">294</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">writes on music in the Encyclop&#230;dia, <a
+      href="#Page_i.296">i. 296</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his Musical Dictionary, <a
+      href="#Page_i.296">i. 296</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">scheme and principles of his new musical
+      notation, <a href="#Page_i.269">i. 269</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">explained, <a
+      href="#Page_i.298">i. 298</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.299">299</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">its practical value, <a
+      href="#Page_i.299">i. 299</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his mistake, <a
+      href="#Page_i.300">i. 300</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">minor objections, <a
+      href="#Page_i.300">i. 300</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his temperament and Genevan spirit, <a
+      href="#Page_i.303">i. 303</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">compared with Voltaire, <a
+      href="#Page_i.304">i. 304</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.305">305</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_343" id="Page_343">[ii.343]</a></span><span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">had a more spiritual element than Voltaire, <a
+      href="#Page_i.306">i. 306</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">its influence in France, <a
+      href="#Page_i.307">i. 307</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">early relations with Voltaire, <a
+      href="#Page_i.308">i. 308</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">letter to him on his poem on the earthquake at
+      Lisbon, <a href="#Page_i.312">i. 312</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.313">313</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.314">314</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">reasons in a circle, <a
+      href="#Page_i.316">i. 316</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">continuation of argument against Voltaire, <a
+      href="#Page_i.316">i. 316</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.317">317</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">curious notion about religion, <a
+      href="#Page_i.317">i. 317</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">quarrels with Voltaire, <a
+      href="#Page_i.318">i. 318</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.319">319</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">denounces him as a &quot;trumpet of impiety,&quot;
+      <a href="#Page_i.320">i. 320</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">letter to D'Alembert on Stage Plays, <a
+      href="#Page_i.321">i. 321</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">true answer to his theory, <a
+      href="#Page_i.323">i. 323</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.324">324</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">contrasts Paris and Geneva, <a
+      href="#Page_i.327">i. 327</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.328">328</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his patriotism, <a
+      href="#Page_i.329">i. 329</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.330">330</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.331">331</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">censure of love as a poetic theme, <a
+      href="#Page_i.334">i. 334</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.335">335</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">on Social Position of Women, <a
+      href="#Page_i.335">i. 335</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Voltaire and D'Alembert's criticism on his
+      Letter on Stage Plays, <a href="#Page_i.336">i. 336</a>,
+      <a href="#Page_i.337">337</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">final break with Diderot, <a
+      href="#Page_i.336">i. 336</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">antecedents of his highest creative efforts, <a
+      href="#Page_1">ii. 1</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">friends
+      at Montmorency, <a href="#Page_2">ii. 2</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">reads the New Helo&#239;sa to the Mar&#233;chale
+      de Luxembourg, <a href="#Page_2">ii. 2</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">unwillingness to receive gifts, <a href="#Page_5">ii.
+      5</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his relations with the
+      Duke and Duchess de Luxembourg, <a href="#Page_7">ii. 7</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">misunderstands the friendliness of Madame
+      de Boufflers, <a href="#Page_7">ii. 7</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">calm life at Montmorency, <a href="#Page_8">ii.
+      8</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">literary jealousy, <a
+      href="#Page_8">ii. 8</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">last
+      of his peaceful days, <a href="#Page_9">ii. 9</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">advice to a young man against the contemplative
+      life, <a href="#Page_10">ii. 10</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">offensive form of his &quot;good sense&quot;
+      concerning persecution of Protestants, <a href="#Page_11">ii. 11</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_12">12</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">cause
+      of his unwillingness to receive gifts, ii. <a href="#Page_13">13</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_14">14</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">owns
+      his ungrateful nature, <a href="#Page_15">ii. 15</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">ill-humoured banter, <a href="#Page_15">ii. 15</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his constant bodily suffering, <a
+      href="#Page_16">ii. 16</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">thinks
+      of suicide, <a href="#Page_16">ii. 16</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">correspondence with the readers of the New Helo&#239;sa,
+      <a href="#Page_19">ii. 19</a>, <a href="#Page_20">20</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">the New Helo&#239;sa, criticism on, <a
+      href="#Page_20">ii. 20</a>-55 (see <a href="#New">New Helo&#239;sa</a>);</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his publishing difficulties, <a
+      href="#Page_56">ii. 56</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">no
+      taste for martyrdom, <a href="#Page_59">ii. 59</a>, <a href="#Page_60">60</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">curious discussion between, <a
+      href="#Page_59">ii. 59</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">and
+      Malesherbes, <a href="#Page_60">ii. 60</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">indebted to Malesherbes in the publication of
+      Emilius, <a href="#Page_61">ii. 61</a>, <a href="#Page_62">62</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">suspects Jesuits, Jansenists, and
+      philosophers of plotting to crush the book, <a href="#Page_63">ii. 63</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">himself counted among the latter, <a
+      href="#Page_65">ii. 65</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Emilius
+      ordered to be burnt by public executioner, on the charge of irreligious
+      tendency, and its author to be arrested, <a href="#Page_65">ii. 65</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his flight, <a href="#Page_67">ii. 67</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">literary composition on the journey to
+      Switzerland, <a href="#Page_69">ii. 69</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">contrast between him and Voltaire, <a
+      href="#Page_70">ii. 70</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">explanation
+      of his &quot;natural ingratitude,&quot; <a href="#Page_71">ii. 71</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">reaches the canton of Berne, and ordered
+      to quit it, <a href="#Page_72">ii. 72</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Emilius and Social Contract condemned to be
+      publicly burnt at Geneva, and author arrested if he came there, <a
+      href="#Page_72">ii. 72</a>, <a href="#Page_73">73</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">takes refuge at Motiers, in dominions of
+      Frederick of Prussia, <a href="#Page_73">ii. 73</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">characteristic letters to the king, <a
+      href="#Page_74">ii. 74</a>, <a href="#Page_77">77</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">declines pecuniary help from him, <a
+      href="#Page_75">ii. 75</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his
+      home and habits at Motiers, <a href="#Page_77">ii. 77</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_78">78</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Voltaire
+      supposed to have stirred up animosity against him at Geneva, <a
+      href="#Page_81">ii. 81</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Archbishop
+      of Paris writes against him, <a href="#Page_83">ii. 83</a>;</span><br />
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_344" id="Page_344">[ii.344]</a></span><span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his reply, and character as a controversialist,
+      <a href="#Page_83">ii. 83</a>-90;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">life at Val de Travers (Motiers), <a
+      href="#Page_91">ii. 91</a>-95;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his
+      generosity, <a href="#Page_93">ii. 93</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">corresponds with the Prince of W&#252;rtemberg
+      on the education of the prince's daughter, <a href="#Page_95">ii. 95</a>,
+      <a href="#Page_96">96</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">on
+      Gibbon, <a href="#Page_96">ii. 96</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">visit from Boswell, <a href="#Page_98">ii. 98</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">invited to legislate for Corsica, <a
+      href="#Page_99">ii. 99</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">urges Boswell to go there, <a href="#Page_100">ii.
+      100</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">denounces its sale by
+      the Genoese, <a href="#Page_102">ii. 102</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">renounces his citizenship of Geneva, <a
+      href="#Page_103">ii. 103</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his
+      Letters from the Mountain, <a href="#Page_104">ii. 104</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">the letters condemned to be burned at
+      Paris and the Hague, <a href="#Page_105">ii. 105</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">libel upon, <a href="#Page_105">ii. 105</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">religious difficulties with his pastor, <a
+      href="#Page_106">ii. 106</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">ill-treatment
+      of, in parish, <a href="#Page_106">ii. 106</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">obliged to leave it, <a href="#Page_108">ii. 108</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his next retreat, <a href="#Page_108">ii.
+      108</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">account in the <i>R&#234;veries</i>
+      of his short stay there, <a href="#Page_109">ii. 109</a>-115;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">expelled by government of Berne, <a
+      href="#Page_116">ii. 116</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">makes
+      an extraordinary request to it, <a href="#Page_116">ii. 116</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_117">117</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">difficulties
+      in finding a home, <a href="#Page_117">ii. 117</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">short stay at Strasburg, <a href="#Page_117">ii.
+      117</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">decides on
+      going to England, <a href="#Page_118">ii. 118</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his Social Contract, and criticism on, <a
+      href="#Page_119">ii. 119</a>, <a href="#Page_196">196</a> (see <a
+      href="#Social">Social Contract</a>);</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">scanty acquaintance with history, <a
+      href="#Page_129">ii. 129</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">its
+      effects on his political writings, <a href="#Page_129">ii. 129</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_136">136</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his
+      object in writing Emilius, <a href="#Page_198">ii. 198</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his confession of faith, under the
+      character of the Savoyard Vicar (see <a href="#Emilius">Emilius</a>), <a
+      href="#Page_257">ii. 257</a>-280;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">excitement caused by his appearance in Paris in
+      1765, <a href="#Page_282">ii. 282</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">leaves for England in company with Hume, <a
+      href="#Page_283">ii. 283</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">reception
+      in London, <a href="#Page_283">ii. 283</a>, <a href="#Page_284">284</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">George III. gives him a pension, <a
+      href="#Page_284">ii. 284</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his
+      love for his dog, <a href="#Page_286">ii. 286</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">finds a home at Wootton, <a href="#Page_286">ii.
+      286</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">quarrels with Hume,
+      <a href="#Page_287">ii. 287</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">particulars in connection with it, <a
+      href="#Page_287">ii. 287</a>-296;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his approaching insanity at this period, <a
+      href="#Page_296">ii. 296</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">the
+      preparatory conditions of it, <a href="#Page_297">ii. 297</a>-301;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">begins writing the Confessions, <a
+      href="#Page_301">ii. 301</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">their
+      character, <a href="#Page_301">ii. 301</a>-304;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">life at Wootton, <a href="#Page_305">ii. 305</a>,
+      <a href="#Page_306">306</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">sudden
+      flight thence, <a href="#Page_306">ii. 306</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">kindness of Mr. Davenport, <a href="#Page_306">ii.
+      306</a>, <a href="#Page_307">307</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his delusion, <a href="#Page_307">ii. 307</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">returns to France, <a href="#Page_308">ii.
+      308</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">received at Fleury by
+      the elder Mirabeau, <a href="#Page_310">ii. 310</a>, <a href="#Page_311">311</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">the prince of Conti next receives him at
+      Trye, <a href="#Page_312">ii. 312</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">composes the second part of the Confessions
+      here, <a href="#Page_312">ii. 312</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">delusion returns, <a href="#Page_312">ii. 312</a>,
+      <a href="#Page_313">313</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">leaves
+      Trye, and wanders about the country, <a href="#Page_312">ii. 312</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_313">313</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">estrangement
+      from Theresa, <a href="#Page_313">ii. 313</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">goes to Paris, <a href="#Page_314">ii. 314</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">writes his Dialogues there, <a
+      href="#Page_314">ii. 314</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">again
+      earns his living by copying music, <a href="#Page_315">ii. 315</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">daily life in, <a href="#Page_315">ii. 315</a>,
+      <a href="#Page_316">316</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Bernardin
+      St. Pierre's account of him, <a href="#Page_317">ii. 317</a>-321;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his veneration for F&#233;nelon, <a
+      href="#Page_321">ii. 321</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his
+      unsociality, <a href="#Page_322">ii. 322</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">checks a detractor of Voltaire, <a
+      href="#Page_324">ii. 324</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">draws
+      up his Considerations on the Government of Poland, <a href="#Page_324">ii.
+      324</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">estimate of the
+      Spanish, <a href="#Page_324">ii. 324</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his poverty, <a href="#Page_325">ii. 325</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">accepts a home at Ermenonville from M.
+      Girardin, <a href="#Page_326">ii. 326</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his painful condition, <a href="#Page_326">ii.
+      326</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">sudden death, <a
+      href="#Page_326">ii. 326</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">cause
+      of it unknown, <a href="#Page_326">ii. 326</a> (see also <i>ib. n.</i>);</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his interment, <a href="#Page_326">ii. 326</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">finally removed to Paris, <a
+      href="#Page_328">ii. 328</a>.</span><br /> <br /> <br /> <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_345" id="Page_345">[ii.345]</a></span><span class="smcap">Sainte
+      Beuve</span> on Rousseau and Madame d'Epinay, <a
+      href="#Page_i.279">i. 279</a>, <i>n.</i>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">on Rousseau, <a href="#Page_40">ii. 40</a>.</span><br />
+      <br /> Saint Germain, M. de, Rousseau's letter to, <a
+      href="#Page_i.123">i. 123</a>.<br /> <br /> Saint Just, <a
+      href="#Page_132">ii. 132</a>, <a href="#Page_133">133</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his political regulations, <a href="#Page_133">ii.
+      133</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">base of
+      his system, <a href="#Page_136">ii. 136</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">against the atheists, <a href="#Page_179">ii.
+      179</a>.</span><br /> <br /> Saint Lambert, <a
+      href="#Page_i.244">i. 244</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">offers Rousseau a home in Lorraine, <a
+      href="#Page_117">ii. 117</a>.</span><br /> <br /> Saint Pierre, Abb&#233;
+      de, Rousseau arranges papers of, <a href="#Page_i.244">i.
+      244</a>;<br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his views concerning reason,
+      <i>ib.</i>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">boldness of his
+      observations, <a href="#Page_i.245">i. 245</a>.</span><br />
+      <br /> Saint Pierre, Bernardin de, account of his visit to Rousseau at
+      Paris, <a href="#Page_317">ii. 317</a>-321.<br /> <br /> Sand, Madame G., <a
+      href="#Page_i.81">i. 81</a>, <i>n.</i>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Savoy landscape, <a
+      href="#Page_i.99">i. 99</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">ancestry of, <a
+      href="#Page_i.121">i. 121</a>, <i>n.</i></span><br />
+      <br /> Savages, code of morals of, <a href="#Page_i.178">i.
+      178</a>-179, <i>n.</i><br /> <br /> Savage state, advantages of, Rousseau's
+      letter to Voltaire, <a href="#Page_i.312">i. 312</a>.<br />
+      <br /> Savoy, priests of, proselytisers, <a
+      href="#Page_i.30">i. 30</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.31">31</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.33">33</a> (also <i>ib.</i> <i>n.</i>)<br />
+      <br /> <a name="Savoyard" id="Savoyard">Savoyard </a>Vicar, the, origin of
+      character of, <a href="#Page_257">ii. 257</a>-280 (see <a href="#Emilius">Emilius</a>).<br />
+      <br /> Schiller on Rousseau, <a href="#Page_192">ii. 192</a> (also <i>ib.</i>
+      <i>n.</i>);<br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's influence on,
+      <a href="#Page_315">ii. 315</a>.</span><br /> <br /> Servetus, <a
+      href="#Page_180">ii. 180</a>.<br /> <br /> Simplification, the revolutionary
+      process and ideal of, <a href="#Page_i.4">i. 4</a>;<br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">in reference to Rousseau's music, <a
+      href="#Page_i.291">i. 291</a>.</span><br /> <br /> Social
+      conscience, theory and definition of, <a href="#Page_234">ii. 234</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_235">235</a>;<br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">the great
+      agent in fostering, <a href="#Page_237">ii. 237</a>.</span><br /> <br /> <a
+      name="Social" id="Social">Social Contract</a>, the, ill effect of, on
+      Europe, <a href="#Page_i.138">i. 138</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">beginning of its composition, <a
+      href="#Page_i.177">i. 177</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">ideas of, <a href="#Page_i.188">i.
+      188</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">its harmful dreams,
+      <a href="#Page_i.246">i. 246</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">influence of, <a href="#Page_1">ii. 1</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">price of, and difficulties in publishing,
+      <a href="#Page_59">ii. 59</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">ordered
+      to be burnt at Geneva, <a href="#Page_72">ii. 72</a>, <a href="#Page_73">73</a>,
+      <a href="#Page_104">104</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">detailed
+      criticism of, <a href="#Page_119">ii. 119</a>-196;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau diametrically opposed to the dominant
+      belief of his day in human perfectibility, <a href="#Page_119">ii. 119</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">object of the work, <a href="#Page_120">ii.
+      120</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">main position of the
+      two Discourses given up in it, <a href="#Page_120">ii. 120</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">influenced by Locke, <a href="#Page_120">ii.
+      120</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">its uncritical,
+      illogical principles, <a href="#Page_123">ii. 123</a>, <a href="#Page_124">124</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">its impracticableness, <a href="#Page_128">ii.
+      128</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">nature of his
+      illustrations, <a href="#Page_128">ii. 128</a>-133;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">the &quot;gospel of the Jacobins,&quot; <a
+      href="#Page_132">ii. 132</a>, <a href="#Page_133">133</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">the desperate absurdity of its assumptions
+      gave it power in the circumstances of the times, <a href="#Page_135">ii.
+      135</a>-141;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">some of its
+      maxims very convenient for ruling Jacobins, <a href="#Page_142">ii. 142</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">its central conception, the sovereignty of
+      peoples, <a href="#Page_144">ii. 144</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau not its inventor, <a href="#Page_144">ii.
+      144</a>, <a href="#Page_145">145</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">this to be distinguished from doctrine of right
+      of subjects to depose princes, <a href="#Page_146">ii. 146</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Social Contract idea of government,
+      probably derived from Locke, <a href="#Page_150">ii. 150</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">falseness of it, <a href="#Page_153">ii.
+      153</a>, <a href="#Page_154">154</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">origin of society, <a href="#Page_154">ii. 154</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">ill effects on Rousseau's political
+      speculation, <a href="#Page_155">ii. 155</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">what constitutes the sovereignty, <a
+      href="#Page_158">ii. 158</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's
+      Social Contract different from that of Hobbes, <a href="#Page_159">ii. 159</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Locke's indefiniteness on, <a
+      href="#Page_160">ii. 160</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">attributes
+      of sovereignty, <a href="#Page_163">ii. 163</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">confederation, <a href="#Page_164">ii. 164</a>,
+      <a href="#Page_165">165</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his
+      distinction between <i>tyrant</i> and <i>despot</i>, <a href="#Page_169">ii.
+      169</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br /> <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_346"
+      id="Page_346">[ii.346]</a></span><span style="margin-left: 1em;">distinguishes
+      constitution of the state from that of the government, <a href="#Page_170">ii.
+      170</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">scheme of an elective
+      aristocracy, <a href="#Page_172">ii. 172</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">similarity to the English form of government, <a
+      href="#Page_173">ii. 173</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">the
+      state in respect to religion, <a href="#Page_173">ii. 173</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">habitually illogical form of his
+      statements, <a href="#Page_173">ii. 173</a>, <a href="#Page_174">174</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">duty of sovereign to establish civil
+      profession of faith, <a href="#Page_175">ii. 175</a>, <a href="#Page_176">176</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">infringement of it to be punished, even by
+      death, <a href="#Page_176">ii. 176</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's Hobbism, <a href="#Page_177">ii. 177</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">denial of his social compact theory, <a
+      href="#Page_183">ii. 183</a>, <a href="#Page_184">184</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">futility of his disquisitions on, <a
+      href="#Page_185">ii. 185</a>, <a href="#Page_186">186</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his declaration of general duty of
+      rebellion (arising out of the universal breach of social compact)
+      considered, <a href="#Page_188">ii. 188</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">it makes government impossible, <a
+      href="#Page_188">ii. 188</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">he
+      urges that usurped authority is another valid reason for rebellion, <a
+      href="#Page_190">ii. 190</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">practical
+      evils of this, <a href="#Page_192">ii. 192</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">historical effect of the Social Contract, <a
+      href="#Page_192">ii. 192</a>-195.</span><br /> <br /> Social quietism of
+      some parts of New Helo&#239;sa, <a href="#Page_49">ii. 49</a>.<br /> <br />
+      Socialism: Morelly, and De Mably, <a href="#Page_52">ii. 52</a>;<br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">what it is, <a href="#Page_159">ii. 159</a>.</span><br />
+      <br /> Socialistic theory of Morelly, <a
+      href="#Page_i.158">i. 158</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.159">159</a> (also <a
+      href="#Page_i.158">i. 158</a>, <i>n.</i>)<br /> <br />
+      Society, Aristotle on, <a href="#Page_i.174">i. 174</a>;<br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">D'Alembert's statements on, <a
+      href="#Page_i.174">i. 174</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Parisian, Rousseau on, <a
+      href="#Page_i.209">i. 209</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">dislike of, <a
+      href="#Page_i.242">i. 242</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's origin of, <a href="#Page_153">ii.
+      153</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">true grounds of, <a
+      href="#Page_155">ii. 155</a>, <a href="#Page_156">156</a>.</span><br />
+      <br /> Socrates, <a href="#Page_i.131">i. 131</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.140">140</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.232">232</a>; <a href="#Page_72">ii. 72</a>,
+      <a href="#Page_273">273</a>.<br /> <br /> Solitude, eighteenth century
+      notions of, <a href="#Page_i.231">i. 231</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.232">232</a>.<br /> <br /> Solon, <a
+      href="#Page_133">ii. 133</a>.<br /> <br /> Sorbonne, the, condemns Emilius,
+      <a href="#Page_82">ii. 82</a>.<br /> <br /> Spectator, the, Rousseau's
+      liking for, <a href="#Page_i.86">i. 86</a>.<br /> <br />
+      Spinoza, dangerous speculations of, <a href="#Page_i.143">i.
+      143</a>.<br /> <br /> Sta&#235;l, Madame de, <a
+      href="#Page_i.217">i. 217</a>, <i>n.</i><br /> <br />
+      Stage players, how treated in France, <a
+      href="#Page_i.322">i. 322</a>.<br /> <br /> Stage plays
+      (see <a href="#Plays">Plays</a>).<br /> <br /> <a name="State" id="State">State
+      of Nature</a>, Rousseau's, <a href="#Page_i.159">i. 159</a>,
+      <a href="#Page_i.160">160</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Hobbes on, <a
+      href="#Page_i.161">i. 161</a> (see <a href="#Nature">Nature</a>).</span><br />
+      <br /> Suicide, Rousseau on, <a href="#Page_16">ii. 16</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">a mistake to pronounce him incapable of, <a
+      href="#Page_19">ii. 19</a>.</span><br /> <br /> Switzerland, <a
+      href="#Page_i.330">i. 330</a>.<br /> <br /> <br /> <span
+      class="smcap">Tacitus</span>, <a href="#Page_i.177">i.
+      177</a>.<br /> <br /> Theatre, Rousseau's letter, objecting to the, <a
+      href="#Page_i.133">i. 133</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his error in the matter, <a
+      href="#Page_i.134">i. 134</a>.</span><br /> <br />
+      Theology, metaphysical, Descartes' influence on, <a
+      href="#Page_i.226">i. 226</a>.<br /> <br /> Theresa (see
+      Le <a href="#Vasseur">Vasseur</a>).<br /> <br /> Thought, school of,
+      division between rationalists and emotionalists, <a
+      href="#Page_i.337">i. 337</a>.<br /> <br /> Tonic Sol-fa
+      notation, close correspondence of the, to Rousseau's system, <a
+      href="#Page_i.299">i. 299</a>.<br /> <br /> Tronchin on
+      Voltaire, <a href="#Page_i.319">i. 319</a>, <i>n.</i>,
+      <a href="#Page_i.321">321</a>.<br /> <br /> Turgot, <a
+      href="#Page_i.89">i. 89</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his discourses at the Sorbonne in 1750, <a
+      href="#Page_i.155">i. 155</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">the one sane eminent Frenchman of eighteenth
+      century, <a href="#Page_i.202">i. 202</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his unselfish toil, <a
+      href="#Page_i.233">i. 233</a>; <a href="#Page_193">ii.
+      193</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">mentioned, <a
+      href="#Page_246">ii. 246</a>, <a href="#Page_294">294</a>.</span><br />
+      <br /> Turin, Rousseau at, <a href="#Page_i.34">i. 34</a>-43;<br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">leaves it, <a
+      href="#Page_i.45">i. 45</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">tries to learn Latin at, <a
+      href="#Page_i.91">i. 91</a>.</span><br /> <br /> Turretini
+      and other rationalisers, <a href="#Page_i.226">i. 226</a>;<br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his works, <a
+      href="#Page_i.226">i. 226</a>, <i>n.</i></span><br />
+      <br /> <br /> <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_347" id="Page_347">[ii.347]</a></span><span
+      class="smcap">Universe</span>, constitution of, discussion on, <a
+      href="#Page_i.311">i. 311</a>-317.<br /> <br /> <br />
+      <span class="smcap">Vagabond</span> life, Rousseau's love of, <a
+      href="#Page_i.63">i. 63</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.68">68</a>.<br /> <br /> Val de Travers, <a
+      href="#Page_77">ii. 77</a>;<br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's
+      life in, <a href="#Page_91">ii. 91</a>-95.</span><br /> <br /> <a
+      name="Vasseur" id="Vasseur">Vasseur</a>, Theresa Le, Rousseau's first
+      acquaintance with, <a href="#Page_i.106">i. 106</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.107">107</a>, also <i>ib.</i> <i>n.</i>;<br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">their life together, <a
+      href="#Page_i.110">i. 110</a>-113;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">well befriended, <a href="#Page_80">ii. 80</a>,
+      <i>n.</i>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">her evil character,
+      <a href="#Page_326">ii. 326</a>.</span><br /> <br /> Vauvenargues on
+      emotional instinct, <a href="#Page_34">ii. 34</a>.<br /> <br /> Venice,
+      Rousseau at, <a href="#Page_i.100">i. 100</a>-106.<br />
+      <br /> Vercellis, Madame de, Rousseau servant to, <a
+      href="#Page_i.39">i. 39</a>.<br /> <br /> Verdelin, Madame
+      de, her kindness to Theresa, <a href="#Page_80">ii. 80</a>, <i>n.</i>;<br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">to Rousseau, <a href="#Page_118">ii. 118</a>,
+      <i>n.</i></span><br /> <br /> Village Soothsayer, the (<i>Devin du Village</i>),
+      composed at Passy, performed at Fontainebleau and Paris, <a
+      href="#Page_i.212">i. 212</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">marked a revolution in French Music, <a
+      href="#Page_i.291">i. 291</a>.</span><br /> <br />
+      Voltaire, <a href="#Page_i.2">i. 2</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.21">21</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.63">63</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">effect on Rousseau of his Letters on the
+      English, <a href="#Page_i.86">i. 86</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">spreads a derogatory report about
+      Rousseau, <a href="#Page_i.101">i. 101</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his &quot;Princesse de Navarre,&quot; <a
+      href="#Page_i.119">i. 119</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">criticism on Rousseau's first Discourse, <a
+      href="#Page_i.147">i. 147</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">effect on his work of his common sense, <a
+      href="#Page_i.155">i. 155</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">avoids the society of Paris, <a
+      href="#Page_i.202">i. 202</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his conversion to Romanism, <a
+      href="#Page_i.220">i. 220</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.221">221</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">strictures on Homer and Shakespeare, <a
+      href="#Page_i.280">i. 280</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his position in the eighteenth century, <a
+      href="#Page_i.301">i. 301</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">general difference between, and Rousseau, <a
+      href="#Page_i.301">i. 301</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">clung to the rationalistic school of his day, <a
+      href="#Page_i.305">i. 305</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">on Rousseau's second Discourse, <a
+      href="#Page_i.308">i. 308</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his poem on the earthquake of Lisbon, <a
+      href="#Page_i.309">i. 309</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.310">310</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his sympathy with suffering, <a
+      href="#Page_i.311">i. 311</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.312">312</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">entreated by Rousseau to draw up a civil
+      profession of religious faith, <a href="#Page_i.317">i.
+      317</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">denounced by Rousseau
+      as a &quot;trumpet of impiety,&quot; <a
+      href="#Page_i.317">i. 317</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.320">320</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his satire and mockery irritated Rousseau, <a
+      href="#Page_i.319">i. 319</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">what he was to his contemporaries, <a
+      href="#Page_i.321">i. 321</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">the great play-writer of the time, <a
+      href="#Page_i.321">i. 321</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his criticism of Rousseau's Letter on the
+      Theatre, <a href="#Page_i.336">i. 336</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his indignation at wrong, <a
+      href="#Page_11">ii. 11</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">ridicule
+      of the New Helo&#239;sa, <a href="#Page_34">ii. 34</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">less courageous than Rousseau, <a href="#Page_65">ii.
+      65</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">contrast between the
+      two, <a href="#Page_i.99">i. 99</a>, <a href="#Page_75">ii.
+      75</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">supposed to have
+      stirred up animosity at Geneva against Rousseau, <a href="#Page_81">ii. 81</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">denies it, <a href="#Page_81">ii. 81</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his notion of how the matter would end, <a
+      href="#Page_81">ii. 81</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his
+      fickleness, <a href="#Page_83">ii. 83</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">on Rousseau's connection with Corsica, <a
+      href="#Page_101">ii. 101</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his
+      Philosophical Dictionary burnt by order at Paris, <a href="#Page_105">ii.
+      105</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his opinion of
+      Emilius, <a href="#Page_257">ii. 257</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">prime agent in introducing English deism into
+      France, <a href="#Page_262">ii. 262</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">suspected by Rousseau of having written the
+      pretended letter from the King of Prussia, <a href="#Page_288">ii. 288</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">last visit to Paris, <a href="#Page_324">ii.
+      324</a>.</span><br /> <br /> <br /> <span class="smcap">Walking</span>,
+      Rousseau's love of, <a href="#Page_i.63">i. 63</a>.<br />
+      <br /> Walpole, Horace, writer of the pretended letter from the King of
+      Prussia, <a href="#Page_288">ii. 288</a>, <i>n.</i>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">advises Hume not to publish his account of
+      Rousseau's quarrel with him, <a href="#Page_295">ii. 295</a>.</span><br />
+      <br /> War arising out of the succession to the crown of Poland, <a
+      href="#Page_i.72">i. 72</a>.<br /> <br /> Warens, Madame
+      de, Rousseau's introduction to, <a href="#Page_i.34">i.
+      34</a>;<br /> <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_348" id="Page_348">[ii.348]</a></span><span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">her personal appearance, <a
+      href="#Page_i.34">i. 34</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">receives Rousseau into her house, <a
+      href="#Page_i.43">i. 43</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">her early life, <a
+      href="#Page_i.48">i. 48</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">character of, <a
+      href="#Page_i.49">i. 49</a>-51;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">goes to Paris, <a
+      href="#Page_i.59">i. 59</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">receives Rousseau at Chamb&#233;ri, and gets him
+      employment, <a href="#Page_i.69">i. 69</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">her household, <a
+      href="#Page_i.70">i. 70</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">removes to Les Charmettes, <a
+      href="#Page_i.73">i. 73</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">cultivates Rousseau's taste for letters, <a
+      href="#Page_i.85">i. 85</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Saint Louis, her patron saint, <a
+      href="#Page_i.91">i. 91</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">revisited by Rousseau in 1754, <a
+      href="#Page_i.216">i. 216</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">her death in poverty and wretchedness, <a
+      href="#Page_i.217">i. 217</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.218">218</a> (also <a
+      href="#Page_i.219">i. 219</a>, <i>n.</i>)</span><br />
+      <br /> Wesleyanism, <a href="#Page_258">ii. 258</a>.<br /> <br /> Women,
+      Condorcet on social position of, <a href="#Page_i.335">i.
+      335</a>;<br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">D'Alembert and Condorcet on,
+      <a href="#Page_i.335">i. 335</a>.</span><br /> <br />
+      Wootton, Rousseau's home at, <a href="#Page_286">ii. 286</a>.<br /> <br />
+      World, divine government of, Rousseau vindicates, <a
+      href="#Page_i.312">i. 312</a>.<br /> <br /> W&#252;rtemberg,
+      correspondence between Prince of, and Rousseau, on the education of the
+      little princess, <a href="#Page_95">ii. 95</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">becomes reigning duke, <a href="#Page_95">ii. 95</a>,
+      <i>n.</i>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">seeks permission
+      for Rousseau to live in Vienna, <a href="#Page_117">ii. 117</a>.</span><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr style="width: 35%;" />
+    <h3>
+      THE END.
+    </h3>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      <i>Printed by</i> <span class="smcap">R. &amp; R. Clark, Limited</span>,
+      <i>Edinburgh.</i>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      [<a href="">Go to Volume 1</a>]
+    </p>
+  <div>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 14052 ***</div>
+</body>
+</html>
diff --git a/LICENSE.txt b/LICENSE.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6312041
--- /dev/null
+++ b/LICENSE.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,11 @@
+This eBook, including all associated images, markup, improvements,
+metadata, and any other content or labor, has been confirmed to be
+in the PUBLIC DOMAIN IN THE UNITED STATES.
+
+Procedures for determining public domain status are described in
+the "Copyright How-To" at https://www.gutenberg.org.
+
+No investigation has been made concerning possible copyrights in
+jurisdictions other than the United States. Anyone seeking to utilize
+this eBook outside of the United States should confirm copyright
+status under the laws that apply to them.
diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..a6181b2
--- /dev/null
+++ b/README.md
@@ -0,0 +1,2 @@
+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #14052 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/14052)
diff --git a/old/14052-8.txt b/old/14052-8.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..1fee55c
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/14052-8.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,19815 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Rousseau, by John Morley
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Rousseau
+       Volumes I. and II.
+
+Author: John Morley
+
+Release Date: January 25, 2006 [EBook #14052]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ROUSSEAU ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Paul Murray, Charlie Kirschner (Vol. 1), Linda
+Cantoni (Vol. 2), and the Online Distributed Proofreading
+Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+ROUSSEAU
+
+BY
+
+JOHN MORLEY
+
+
+VOLUMES I. and II.
+
+
+
+London
+MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
+NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
+1905
+
+_All rights reserved_
+
+_First printed in this form 1886_
+_Reprinted 1888, 1891, 1896, 1900, 1905_
+
+
+
+
+
+VOL. I.
+
+
+
+NOTE TO THE FIRST EDITION.
+
+
+This work differs from its companion volume in offering something more
+like a continuous personal history than was necessary in the case of
+such a man as Voltaire, the story of whose life may be found in more
+than one English book of repute. Of Rousseau there is, I believe, no
+full biographical account in our literature, and even France has nothing
+more complete under this head than Musset-Pathay's _Histoire de la Vie
+et des Ouvrages de J.J. Rousseau_ (1821). This, though a meritorious
+piece of labour, is extremely crude and formless in composition and
+arrangement, and the interpreting portions are devoid of interest.
+
+The edition of Rousseau's works to which the references have been made
+is that by M. Auguis, in twenty-seven volumes, published in 1825 by
+Dalibon. In 1865 M. Streckeisen-Moultou published from the originals,
+which had been deposited in the library of Neuch�tel by Du Peyrou, the
+letters addressed to Rousseau by various correspondents. These two
+interesting volumes, which are entitled _Rousseau, ses Amis et ses
+Ennemis_, are mostly referred to under the name of their editor.
+
+_February_, 1873.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The second edition in 1878 was revised; some portions were considerably
+shortened, and a few additional footnotes inserted. No further changes
+have been made in the present edition.
+
+_January_, 1886.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS OF VOL. I.
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+PRELIMINARY.
+                                                           PAGE
+
+The Revolution                                                1
+Rousseau its most direct speculative precursor                2
+His distinction among revolutionists                          4
+His personality                                               5
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+YOUTH.
+
+Birth and descent                                             8
+Predispositions                                              10
+First lessons                                                11
+At M. Lambercier's                                           15
+Early disclosure of sensitive temperament                    19
+Return to Geneva                                             20
+Two apprenticeships                                          26
+Flight from Geneva                                           30
+Savoyard proselytisers                                       31
+Rousseau sent to Anncey, and thence to Turin                 34
+Conversion to Catholicism                                    35
+Takes service with Madame de Vercellis                       39
+Then with the Count de Gouvon                                42
+Returns to vagabondage                                       43
+And to Madame de Warens                                      45
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+SAVOY.
+
+Influence of women upon Rousseau                             46
+Account of Madame de Warens                                  48
+Rousseau takes up his abode with her                         54
+His delight in life with her                                 54
+The seminarists                                              57
+To Lyons                                                     58
+Wanderings to Freiburg, Neuch�tel, and elsewhere             60
+Through the east of France                                   62
+Influence of these wanderings upon him                       67
+Chamb�ri                                                     69
+Household of Madame de Warens                                70
+Les Charmettes                                               73
+Account of his feeling for nature                            79
+His intellectual incapacity at this time                     83
+Temperament                                                  84
+Literary interests, and method                               85
+Joyful days with his benefactress                            90
+To Montpellier: end of an episode                            92
+Dates                                                        94
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+THERESA LE VASSEUR.
+
+Tutorship at Lyons                                           95
+Goes to Paris in search of fortune                           97
+His appearance at this time                                  98
+Made secretary to the ambassador at Venice                  100
+His journey thither and life there                          103
+Return to Paris                                             106
+Theresa Le Vasseur                                          107
+Character of their union                                    110
+Rousseau's conduct towards her                              113
+Their later estrangements                                   115
+Rousseau's scanty means                                     119
+Puts away his five children                                 120
+His apologies for the crime                                 122
+Their futility                                              126
+Attempts to recover the children                            128
+Rousseau never married to Theresa                           129
+Contrast between outer and inner life                       130
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+THE DISCOURSES.
+
+Local academies in France                                   132
+Circumstances of the composition of the first Discourse     133
+How far the paradox was original                            135
+His visions for thirteen years                              136
+Summary of the first Discourse                          138-145
+Obligations to Montaigne                                    145
+And to the Greeks                                           145
+Semi-Socratic manner                                        147
+Objections to the Discourse                                 148
+Ways of stating its positive side                           149
+Dangers of exaggerating this positive side                  151
+Its excess                                                  152
+Second Discourse                                            154
+Ideas of the time upon the state of nature                  155
+Their influence upon Rousseau                               156
+Morelly, as his predecessor                                 156
+Summary of the second Discourse                         159-170
+Criticism of its method                                     171
+Objection from its want of evidence                         172
+Other objections to its account of primitive nature         173
+Takes uniformity of process for granted                     176
+In what the importance of the second Discourse consisted    177
+Its protest against the mockery of civilisation             179
+The equality of man, how true, and how false                180
+This doctrine in France, and in America                     182
+Rousseau's Discourses, a reaction against the historic
+    method                                                  183
+Mably, and socialism                                        184
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+PARIS.
+
+Influence of Geneva upon Rousseau                           187
+Two sides of his temperament                                191
+Uncongenial characteristics of Parisian society             191
+His associates                                              195
+Circumstances of a sudden moral reform                      196
+Arising from his violent repugnance for the manners of
+    the time                                                202
+His assumption of a seeming cynicism                        207
+Protests against atheism                                    209
+The Village Soothsayer at Fontainebleau                     212
+Two anedotes of his moral singularity                       214
+Revisits Geneva                                             216
+End of Madame de Warens                                     217
+Rousseau's re-conversion to Protestantism                   220
+The religious opinions then current in Geneva               223
+Turretini and other rationalisers                           226
+Effect upon Rousseau                                        227
+Thinks of taking up his abode in Geneva                     227
+Madame d'Epinay offers him the Hermitage                    229
+Retires thither against the protests of his friends         231
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+THE HERMITAGE.
+
+Distinction between the old and the new anchorite           234
+Rousseau's first days at the Hermitage                      235
+Rural delirium                                              237
+Dislike of society                                          242
+Meditates work on Sensitive Morality                        243
+Arranges the papers of the Abb� de Saint Pierre             244
+His remarks on them                                         246
+Violent mental crisis                                       247
+First conception of the New Helo�sa                         250
+A scene of high morals                                      254
+Madame d'Houdetot                                           255
+Erotic mania becomes intensified                            256
+Interviews with Madame d'Houdetot                           258
+Saint Lambert interposes                                    262
+Rousseau's letter to Saint Lambert                          264
+Its profound falsity                                        265
+Saint Lambert's reply                                       267
+Final relations with him and with Madame d'Houdetot         268
+Sources of Rousseau's irritability                          270
+Relations with Diderot                                      273
+With Madame d'Epinay                                        276
+With Grimm                                                  279
+Grimm's natural want of sympathy with Rousseau              282
+Madame d'Epinay's journey to Geneva                         284
+Occasion of Rousseau's breach with Grimm                    285
+And with Madame d'Epinay                                    288
+Leaves the Hermitage                                        289
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+MUSIC.
+
+General character of Rousseau's aim in music                291
+As composer                                                 292
+Contest on the comparative merits of French and Italian
+    music                                                   293
+Rousseau's Letter on French Music                           293
+His scheme of musical notation                              296
+Its chief element                                           298
+Its practical value                                         299
+His mistake                                                 300
+Two minor objections                                        300
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+VOLTAIRE AND D'ALEMBERT.
+
+Position of Voltaire                                        302
+General differences between him and Rousseau                303
+Rousseau not the profounder of the two                      305
+But he had a spiritual element                              305
+Their early relations                                       308
+Voltaire's poem on the Earthquake of Lisbon                 309
+Rousseau's wonder that he should have written it            310
+His letter to Voltaire upon it                              311
+Points to the advantages of the savage state                312
+Reproduces Pope's general position                          313
+Not an answer to the position taken by Voltaire             314
+Confesses the question insoluble, but still argues          316
+Curious close of the letter                                 318
+Their subsequent relations                                  319
+D'Alembert's article on Geneva                              321
+The church and the theatre                                  322
+Jeremy Collier: Bossuet                                     323
+Rousseau's contention on stage plays                        324
+Rude handling of commonplace                                325
+The true answer to Rousseau as to theory of dramatic
+    morality                                                326
+His arguments relatively to Geneva                          327
+Their meaning                                               328
+Criticism on the Misanthrope                                328
+Rousseau's contrast between Paris and an imaginary Geneva   329
+Attack on love as a poetic theme                            332
+This letter, the mark of his schism from the party of the
+    philosophers                                            336
+
+
+
+
+JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU
+
+Born                                                     1712
+Fled from Geneva                           _March_, 1728
+Changes religion at Turin                  _April_,  "
+With Madame de Warens, including various
+    intervals, until                       _April_, 1740
+Goes to Paris with musical schemes                       1741
+Secretary at Venice                       _Spring_, 1743
+
+Paris, first as secretary to M. Francueil, then  {       1744
+    as composer, and copyist                     {        to
+                                                 {       1756
+The Hermitage                            _April 9_, 1756
+Montmorency                              _Dec. 15_, 1757
+Yverdun                                  _June 14_, 1762
+Motiers-Travers                          _July 10_, 1762
+Isle of St. Peter                          _Sept._, 1765
+Strasburg                                   _Nov._,  "
+Paris                                   _December_,  "
+Arrives in England                       _Jan. 13_, 1766
+Leaves Dover                              _May 22_, 1767
+Fleury                                      _June_,  "
+Trye                                        _July_,  "
+Dauphiny                                    _Aug._, 1768
+Paris                                       _June_, 1770
+Death                                     _July 2_, 1778
+
+PRINCIPAL WRITINGS.
+
+Discourse on the Influence of Learning and
+    Art                                           PUBLISHED 1750
+Discourse on Inequality                               "     1754
+Letter to D'Alembert                                  "     1758
+New Helo�sa (began 1757, finished in winter
+    of 1759-60)                                       "     1761
+Social Contract                                       "     1762
+Emilius                                               "     1762
+Letters from the Mountain                             "     1764
+Confessions (written 1766-70)                     {  Pt. I  1781
+                                                  {  Pt. II 1788
+R�veries (written 1777-78).
+
+     _Comme dans les �tangs assoupis sous les bois,
+     Dans plus d'une �me on voit deux choses � la fois:
+     Le ciel, qui teint les eaux � peine remu�es
+     Avec tous ses rayons et toutes ses nue�s;
+     Et la vase, fond morne, affreux, sombre et dormant,
+     O� des reptiles noirs fourmillent vaguement._
+                                                 HUGO.
+
+
+
+
+ROUSSEAU.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+PRELIMINARY.
+
+
+Christianity is the name for a great variety of changes which took place
+during the first centuries of our era, in men's ways of thinking and
+feeling about their spiritual relations to unseen powers, about their
+moral relations to one another, about the basis and type of social
+union. So the Revolution is now the accepted name for a set of changes
+which began faintly to take a definite practical shape first in America,
+and then in France, towards the end of the eighteenth century; they had
+been directly prepared by a small number of energetic thinkers, whose
+speculations represented, as always, the prolongation of some old lines
+of thought in obedience to the impulse of new social and intellectual
+conditions. While one movement supplied the energy and the principles
+which extricated civilisation from the ruins of the Roman empire, the
+other supplies the energy and the principles which already once, between
+the Seven Years' War and the assembly of the States General, saved
+human progress in face of the political fatuity of England and the
+political nullity of France; and they are now, amid the distraction of
+the various representatives of an obsolete ordering, the only forces to
+be trusted at once for multiplying the achievements of human
+intelligence stimulated by human sympathy, and for diffusing their
+beneficent results with an ampler hand and more far-scattering arm.
+Faith in a divine power, devout obedience to its supposed will, hope of
+ecstatic, unspeakable reward, these were the springs of the old
+movement. Undivided love of our fellows, steadfast faith in human
+nature, steadfast search after justice, firm aspiration towards
+improvement, and generous contentment in the hope that others may reap
+whatever reward may be, these are the springs of the new.
+
+There is no given set of practical maxims agreed to by all members of
+the revolutionary schools for achieving the work of release from the
+pressure of an antiquated social condition, any more than there is one
+set of doctrines and one kind of discipline accepted by all Protestants.
+Voltaire was a revolutionist in one sense, Diderot in another, and
+Rousseau in a third, just as in the practical order, Lafayette, Danton,
+Robespierre, represented three different aspirations and as many
+methods. Rousseau was the most directly revolutionary of all the
+speculative precursors, and he was the first to apply his mind boldly to
+those of the social conditions which the revolution is concerned by one
+solution or another to modify. How far his direct influence was
+disastrous in consequence of a mischievous method, we shall have to
+examine. It was so various that no single answer can comprehend an
+exhaustive judgment. His writings produced that glow of enthusiastic
+feeling in France, which led to the all-important assistance rendered by
+that country to the American colonists in a struggle so momentous for
+mankind. It was from his writings that the Americans took the ideas and
+the phrases of their great charter, thus uniting the native principles
+of their own direct Protestantism with principles that were strictly
+derivative from the Protestantism of Geneva. Again, it was his work more
+than that of any other one man, that France arose from the deadly decay
+which had laid hold of her whole social and political system, and found
+that irresistible energy which warded off dissolution within and
+partition from without. We shall see, further, that besides being the
+first immediately revolutionary thinker in politics, he was the most
+stirring of reactionists in religion. His influence formed not only
+Robespierre and Paine, but Chateaubriand, not only Jacobinism, but the
+Catholicism of the Restoration. Thus he did more than any one else at
+once to give direction to the first episodes of revolution, and force to
+the first episode of reaction.
+
+There are some teachers whose distinction is neither correct thought,
+nor an eye for the exigencies of practical organisation, but simply
+depth and fervour of the moral sentiment, bringing with it the
+indefinable gift of touching many hearts with love of virtue and the
+things of the spirit. The Christian organisations which saved western
+society from dissolution owe all to St. Paul, Hildebrand, Luther,
+Calvin; but the spiritual life of the west during all these generations
+has burnt with the pure flame first lighted by the sublime mystic of the
+Galilean hills. Aristotle acquired for men much knowledge and many
+instruments for gaining more; but it is Plato, his master, who moves the
+soul with love of truth and enthusiasm for excellence. There is peril in
+all such leaders of souls, inasmuch as they incline men to substitute
+warmth for light, and to be content with aspiration where they need
+direction. Yet no movement goes far which does not count one of them in
+the number of its chiefs. Rousseau took this place among those who
+prepared the first act of that revolutionary drama, whose fifth act is
+still dark to us.
+
+At the heart of the Revolution, like a torrid stream flowing
+undiscernible amid the waters of a tumbling sea, is a new way of
+understanding life. The social changes desired by the various assailants
+of the old order are only the expression of a deeper change in moral
+idea, and the drift of the new moral idea is to make life simpler. This
+in a sense is at the bottom of all great religious and moral movements,
+and the Revolution emphatically belongs to the latter class. Like such
+movements in the breast of the individual, those which stir an epoch
+have their principle in the same craving for disentanglement of life.
+This impulse to shake off intricacies is the mark of revolutionary
+generations, and it was the starting-point of all Rousseau's mental
+habits, and of the work in which they expressed themselves. His mind
+moved outwards from this centre, and hence the fact that he dealt
+principally with government and education, the two great agencies which,
+in an old civilisation with a thousand roots and feelers, surround
+external life and internal character with complexity. Simplification of
+religion by clearing away the overgrowth of errors, simplification of
+social relations by equality, of literature and art by constant return
+to nature, of manners by industrious homeliness and thrift,--this is the
+revolutionary process and ideal, and this is the secret of Rousseau's
+hold over a generation that was lost amid the broken maze of
+fallen systems.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The personality of Rousseau has most equivocal and repulsive sides. It
+has deservedly fared ill in the esteem of the saner and more rational of
+those who have judged him, and there is none in the history of famous
+men and our spiritual fathers that begat us, who make more constant
+demands on the patience or pity of those who study his life. Yet in no
+other instance is the common eagerness to condense all predication about
+a character into a single unqualified proposition so fatally inadequate.
+If it is indispensable that we should be for ever describing, naming,
+classifying, at least it is well, in speaking of such a nature as his,
+to enlarge the vocabulary beyond the pedantic formulas of unreal ethics,
+and to be as sure as we know how to make ourselves, that each of the
+sympathies and faculties which together compose our power of spiritual
+observation, is in a condition of free and patient energy. Any less open
+and liberal method, which limits our sentiments to absolute approval or
+disapproval, and fixes the standard either at the balance of common
+qualities which constitutes mediocrity, or at the balance of uncommon
+qualities which is divinity as in a Shakespeare, must leave in a cloud
+of blank incomprehensibleness those singular spirits who come from time
+to time to quicken the germs of strange thought and shake the quietness
+of the earth.
+
+We may forget much in our story that is grievous or hateful, in
+reflecting that if any man now deems a day basely passed in which he has
+given no thought to the hard life of garret and hovel, to the forlorn
+children and trampled women of wide squalid wildernesses in cities, it
+was Rousseau who first in our modern time sounded a new trumpet note for
+one more of the great battles of humanity. He makes the poor very proud,
+it was truly said. Some of his contemporaries followed the same vein of
+thought, as we shall see, and he was only continuing work which others
+had prepared. But he alone had the gift of the golden mouth. It was in
+Rousseau that polite Europe first hearkened to strange voices and faint
+reverberation from out of the vague and cavernous shadow in which the
+common people move. Science has to feel the way towards light and
+solution, to prepare, to organise. But the race owes something to one
+who helped to state the problem, writing up in letters of flame at the
+brutal feast of kings and the rich that civilisation is as yet only a
+mockery, and did furthermore inspire a generation of men and women with
+the stern resolve that they would rather perish than live on in a world
+where such things can be.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+YOUTH.
+
+
+Jean Jacques Rousseau was born at Geneva, June 28, 1712. He was of old
+French stock. His ancestors had removed from Paris to the famous city of
+refuge as far back as 1529, a little while before Farel came thither to
+establish the principles of the Reformation, and seven years before the
+first visit of the more extraordinary man who made Geneva the mother
+city of a new interpretation of Christianity, as Rome was the mother
+city of the old. Three generations in a direct line separated Jean
+Jacques from Didier Rousseau, the son of a Paris bookseller, and the
+first emigrant.[1] Thus Protestant tradition in the Rousseau family
+dates from the appearance of Protestantism in Europe, and seems to have
+exerted the same kind of influence upon them as it did, in conjunction
+with the rest of the surrounding circumstances, upon the other citizens
+of the ideal state of the Reformation. It is computed by the historians
+that out of three thousand families who composed the population of
+Geneva towards the end of the seventeenth century, there were hardly
+fifty who before the Reformation had acquired the position of
+burgess-ship. The curious set of conditions which thus planted a colony
+of foreigners in the midst of a free polity, with a new doctrine and
+newer discipline, introduced into Europe a fresh type of character and
+manners. People declared they could recognise in the men of Geneva
+neither French vivacity, nor Italian subtlety and clearness, nor Swiss
+gravity. They had a zeal for religion, a vigorous energy in government,
+a passion for freedom, a devotion to ingenious industries, which marked
+them with a stamp unlike that of any other community.[2] Towards the
+close of the seventeenth century some of the old austerity and rudeness
+was sensibly modified under the influence of the great neighbouring
+monarchy. One striking illustration of this tendency was the rapid
+decline of the Savoyard patois in popular use. The movement had not gone
+far enough when Rousseau was born, to take away from the manners and
+spirit of his country their special quality and individual note.
+
+The mother of Jean Jacques, who seems to have been a simple, cheerful,
+and tender woman, was the daughter of a Genevan minister; her maiden
+name, Bernard. The birth of her son was fatal to her, and the most
+touching and pathetic of all the many shapes of death was the fit
+beginning of a life preappointed to nearly unlifting cloud. "I cost my
+mother her life," he wrote, "and my birth was the first of my woes."[3]
+Destiny thus touches us with magical finger, long before consciousness
+awakens to the forces that have been set to work in our personality,
+launching us into the universe with country, forefathers, and physical
+predispositions, all fixed without choice of ours. Rousseau was born
+dying, and though he survived this first crisis by the affectionate care
+of one of his father's sisters, yet his constitution remained infirm and
+disordered.
+
+Inborn tendencies, as we perceive on every side, are far from having
+unlimited irresistible mastery, if they meet early encounter from some
+wise and patient external will. The father of Rousseau was unfortunately
+cast in the same mould as his mother, and the child's own morbid
+sensibility was stimulated and deepened by the excessive sensibility of
+his first companion. Isaac Rousseau, in many of his traits, was a
+reversion to an old French type. In all the Genevese there was an
+underlying tendency of this kind. "Under a phlegmatic and cool air,"
+wrote Rousseau, when warning his countrymen against the inflammatory
+effects of the drama, "the Genevese hide an ardent and sensitive
+character, that is more easily moved than controlled."[4] And some of
+the episodes in their history during the eighteenth century might be
+taken for scenes from the turbulent dramas of Paris. But Isaac
+Rousseau's restlessness, his eager emotion, his quick and punctilious
+sense of personal dignity, his heedlessness of ordered affairs, were not
+common in Geneva, fortunately for the stability of her society and the
+prosperity of her citizens. This disorder of spirit descended in
+modified form to the son; it was inevitable that he should be indirectly
+affected by it. Before he was seven years old he had learnt from his
+father to indulge a passion for the reading of romances. The child and
+the man passed whole nights in a fictitious world, reading to one
+another in turn, absorbed by vivid interest in imaginary situations,
+until the morning note of the birds recalled them to a sense of the
+conditions of more actual life, and made the elder cry out in confusion
+that he was the more childish of the two.
+
+The effect of this was to raise passion to a premature exaltation in the
+young brain. "I had no idea of real things," he said, "though all the
+sentiments were already familiar to me. Nothing had come to me by
+conception, everything by sensation. These confused emotions, striking
+me one after another, did not warp a reason that I did not yet possess,
+but they gradually shaped in me a reason of another cast and temper,
+and gave me bizarre and romantic ideas of human life, of which neither
+reflection nor experience has ever been able wholly to cure me."[5] Thus
+these first lessons, which have such tremendous influence over all that
+follow, had the direct and fatal effect in Rousseau's case of deadening
+that sense of the actual relations of things to one another in the
+objective world, which is the master-key and prime law of sanity.
+
+In time the library of romances came to an end (1719), and Jean Jacques
+and his father fell back on the more solid and moderated fiction of
+history and biography. The romances had been the possession of the
+mother; the more serious books were inherited from the old minister, her
+father. Such books as Nani's History of Venice, and Le Sueur's History
+of the Church and the Empire, made less impression on the young Rousseau
+than the admirable Plutarch; and he used to read to his father during
+the hours of work, and read over again to himself during all hours,
+those stories of free and indomitable souls which are so proper to
+kindle the glow of generous fire. Plutarch was dear to him to the end of
+his life; he read him in the late days when he had almost ceased to
+read, and he always declared Plutarch to be nearly the only author to
+whom he had never gone without profit."[6] "I think I see my father now,"
+he wrote when he had begun to make his mark in Paris, "living by the
+work of his hands, and nourishing his soul on the sublimest truths. I
+see Tacitus, Plutarch, and Grotius, lying before him along with the
+tools of his craft. I see at his side a cherished son receiving
+instruction from the best of fathers, alas, with but too little
+fruit."[7] This did little to implant the needed impressions of the
+actual world. Rousseau's first training continued to be in an excessive
+degree the exact reverse of our common method; this stirs the
+imagination too little, and shuts the young too narrowly within the
+strait pen of present and visible reality. The reader of Plutarch at the
+age of ten actually conceived himself a Greek or a Roman, and became the
+personage whose strokes of constancy and intrepidity transported him
+with sympathetic ecstasy, made his eyes sparkle, and raised his voice to
+heroic pitch. Listeners were even alarmed one day as he told the tale of
+Scaevola at table, to see him imitatively thrust forth his arm over a
+hot chafing-dish.[8]
+
+Rousseau had one brother, on whom the spirit of the father came down in
+ample measure, just as the sensibility of the mother descended upon Jean
+Jacques. He passed through a boyhood of revolt, and finally ran away
+into Germany, where he was lost from sight and knowledge of his kinsmen
+for ever. Jean Jacques was thus left virtually an only child,[9] and he
+commemorates the homely tenderness and care with which his early years
+were surrounded. Except in the hours which he passed in reading by the
+side of his father, he was always with his aunt, in the self-satisfying
+curiosity of childhood watching her at work with the needle and busy
+about affairs of the house, or else listening to her with contented
+interest, as she sang the simple airs of the common people. The
+impression of this kind and cheerful figure was stamped on his memory to
+the end; her tone of voice, her dress, the quaint fashion of her hair.
+The constant recollection of her shows, among many other signs, how he
+cherished that conception of the true unity of a man's life, which
+places it in a closely-linked chain of active memories, and which most
+of us lose in wasteful dispersion of sentiment and poor fragmentariness
+of days. When the years came in which he might well say, I have no
+pleasure in them, and after a manhood of distress and suspicion and
+diseased sorrows had come to dim those blameless times, he could still
+often surprise himself unconsciously humming the tune of one of his
+aunt's old songs, with many tears in his eyes.[10]
+
+This affectionate schooling came suddenly to an end. Isaac Rousseau in
+the course of a quarrel in which he had involved himself, believed that
+he saw unfairness in the operation of the law, for the offender had
+kinsfolk in the Great Council. He resolved to leave his country rather
+than give way, in circumstances which compromised his personal honour
+and the free justice of the republic. So his house was broken up, and
+his son was sent to school at the neighbouring village of Bossey (1722),
+under the care of a minister, "there to learn along with Latin all the
+medley of sorry stuff with which, under the name of education, they
+accompany Latin."[11] Rousseau tells us nothing of the course of his
+intellectual instruction here, but he marks his two years' sojourn under
+the roof of M. Lambercier by two forward steps in that fateful
+acquaintance with good and evil, which is so much more important than
+literary knowledge. Upon one of these fruits of the tree of nascent
+experience, men usually keep strict silence. Rousseau is the only person
+that ever lived who proclaimed to the whole world as a part of his own
+biography the ignoble circumstances of the birth of sensuality in
+boyhood. Nobody else ever asked us to listen while he told of the
+playmate with which unwarned youth takes its heedless pleasure, which
+waxes and strengthens with years, until the man suddenly awakens to find
+the playmate grown into a master, grotesque and foul, whose unclean grip
+is not to be shaken off, and who poisons the air with the goatish fume
+of the satyr. It is on this side that the unspoken plays so decisive a
+part, that most of the spoken seems but as dust in the balance; it is
+here that the flesh spreads gross clouds over the firmament of the
+spirit. Thinking of it, we flee from talk about the high matters of will
+and conscience, of purity of heart and the diviner mind, and hurry to
+the physician. Manhood commonly saves itself by its own innate
+healthiness, though the decent apron bequeathed to us in the old legend
+of the fall, the thick veil of a more than legendary reserve, prevents
+us from really measuring the actual waste of delicacy and the finer
+forces. Rousseau, most unhappily for himself, lacked this innate
+healthiness; he never shook off the demon which would be so ridiculous,
+if it did not hide such terrible power. With a moral courage, that it
+needs hardly less moral courage in the critic firmly to refrain from
+calling cynical or shameless, he has told the whole story of this
+lifelong depravation. In the present state of knowledge, which in the
+region of the human character the false shamefacedness of science, aided
+and abetted by the mutilating hand of religious asceticism, has kept
+crude and imperfect, there is nothing very profitable to be said on all
+this. When the great art of life has been more systematically conceived
+in the long processes of time and endeavour, and when more bold,
+ffective, and far-reaching advance has been made in defining those
+pathological manifestations which deserve to be seriously studied, as
+distinguished from those of a minor sort which are barely worth
+registering, then we should know better how to speak, or how to be
+silent, in the present most unwelcome instance. As it is, we perhaps do
+best in chronicling the fact and passing on. The harmless young are
+allowed to play without monition or watching among the deep open graves
+of temperament; and Rousseau, telling the tale of his inmost experience,
+unlike the physician and the moralist who love decorous surfaces of
+things, did not spare himself nor others a glimpse of the ignominies to
+which the body condemns its high tenant, the soul.[12]
+
+The second piece of experience which he acquired at Bossey was the
+knowledge of injustice and wrongful suffering as things actual and
+existent. Circumstances brought him under suspicion of having broken the
+teeth of a comb which did not belong to him. He was innocent, and not
+even the most terrible punishment could wring from him an untrue
+confession of guilt. The root of his constancy was not in an abhorrence
+of falsehood, which is exceptional in youth, and for which he takes no
+credit, but in a furious and invincible resentment against the violent
+pressure that was unjustly put upon him. "Picture a character, timid and
+docile in ordinary life, but ardent, impetuous, indomitable in its
+passions; a child always governed by the voice of reason, always treated
+with equity, gentleness, and consideration, who had not even the idea of
+injustice, and who for the first time experiences an injustice so
+terrible, from the very people whom he most cherishes and respects! What
+a confusion of ideas, what disorder of sentiments, what revolution in
+heart, in brain, in every part of his moral and intellectual being!" He
+had not learnt, any more than other children, either to put himself in
+the place of his elders, or to consider the strength of the apparent
+case against him. All that he felt was the rigour of a frightful
+chastisement for an offence of which he was innocent. And the
+association of ideas was permanent. "This first sentiment of violence
+and injustice has remained so deeply engraved in my soul, that all the
+ideas relating to it bring my first emotion back to me; and this
+sentiment, though only relative to myself in its origin, has taken such
+consistency, and become so disengaged from all personal interest, that
+my heart is inflamed at the sight or story of any wrongful action, just
+as much as if its effect fell on my own person. When I read of the
+cruelties of some ferocious tyrant, or the subtle atrocities of some
+villain of a priest, I would fain start on the instant to poniard such
+wretches, though I were to perish a hundred times for the deed.... This
+movement may be natural to me, and I believe it is so; but the profound
+recollection of the first injustice I suffered was too long and too fast
+bound up with it, not to have strengthened it enormously."[13]
+
+To men who belong to the silent and phlegmatic races like our own, all
+this may possibly strike on the ear like a false or strained note. Yet a
+tranquil appeal to the real history of one's own strongest impressions
+may disclose their roots in facts of childish experience, which
+remoteness of time has gradually emptied of the burning colour they once
+had. This childish discovery of the existence in his own world of that
+injustice which he had only seen through a glass very darkly in the
+imaginary world of his reading, was for Rousseau the angry dismissal
+from the primitive Eden, which in one shape and at one time or another
+overtakes all men. "Here," he says, "was the term of the serenity of my
+childish days. From this moment I ceased to enjoy a pure happiness, and
+I feel even at this day that the reminiscence of the delights of my
+infancy here comes to an end.... Even the country lost in our eyes that
+charm of sweetness and simplicity which goes to the heart; it seemed
+sombre and deserted, and was as if covered by a veil, hiding its
+beauties from our sight. We no longer tended our little gardens, our
+plants, our flowers. We went no more lightly to scratch the earth,
+shouting for joy as we discovered the germ of the seed we had sown."
+
+Whatever may be the degree of literal truth in the Confessions, the
+whole course of Rousseau's life forbids us to pass this passionate
+description by as overcharged or exaggerated. We are conscious in it of
+a constitutional infirmity. We perceive an absence of healthy power of
+reaction against moral shock. Such shocks are experienced in many
+unavoidable forms by all save the dullest natures, when they first come
+into contact with the sharp tooth of outer circumstance. Indeed, a man
+must be either miraculously happy in his experiences, or exceptionally
+obtuse in observing and feeling, or else be the creature of base and
+cynical ideals, if life does not to the end continue to bring many a
+repetition of that first day of incredulous bewilderment. But the urgent
+demands for material activity quickly recall the mass of men to normal
+relations with their fellows and the outer world. A vehement objective
+temperament, like Voltaire's, is instantly roused by one of these
+penetrative stimuli into angry and tenacious resistance. A proud and
+collected soul, like Goethe's, loftily follows its own inner aims,
+without taking any heed of the perturbations that arise from want of
+self-collection in a world still spelling its rudiments. A sensitive and
+depressed spirit, like Rousseau's or Cowper's, finds itself without any
+of these reacting kinds of force, and the first stroke of cruelty or
+oppression is the going out of a divine light.
+
+Leaving Bossey, Rousseau returned to Geneva, and passed two or three
+years with his uncle, losing his time for the most part, but learning
+something of drawing and something of Euclid, for the former of which he
+showed special inclination.[14] It was a question whether he was to be
+made a watchmaker, a lawyer, or a minister. His own preference, as his
+after-life might have led us to suppose, was in favour of the last of
+the three; "for I thought it a fine thing," he says, "to preach." The
+uncle was a man of pleasure, and as often happens in such
+circumstances, his love of pleasure had the effect of turning his wife
+into a pietist. Their son was Rousseau's constant comrade. "Our
+friendship filled our hearts so amply, that if we were only together,
+the simplest amusements were a delight." They made kites, cages, bows
+and arrows, drums, houses; they spoiled the tools of their grandfather,
+in trying to make watches like him. In the same cheerful imitative
+spirit, which is the main feature in childhood when it is not disturbed
+by excess of literary teaching, after Geneva had been visited by an
+Italian showman with a troop of marionettes, they made puppets and
+composed comedies for them; and when one day the uncle read aloud an
+elegant sermon, they abandoned their comedies, and turned with blithe
+energy to exhortation. They had glimpses of the rougher side of life in
+the biting mockeries of some schoolboys of the neighbourhood. These
+ended in appeal to the god of youthful war, who pronounced so plainly
+for the bigger battalions, that the release of their enemies from school
+was the signal for the quick retreat of our pair within doors. All this
+is an old story in every biography written or unwritten. It seldom fails
+to touch us, either in the way of sympathetic reminiscence, or if life
+should have gone somewhat too hardly with a man, then in the way of
+irony, which is not less real and poetic than the eironeia of a Greek
+dramatist, for being concerned with more unheroic creatures.
+
+And this rough play of the streets always seemed to Rousseau a manlier
+schooling than the effeminate tendencies which he thought he noticed in
+Genevese youth in after years. "In my time," he says admiringly,
+"children were brought up in rustic fashion and had no complexion to
+keep.... Timid and modest before the old, they were bold, haughty,
+combative among themselves; they had no curled locks to be careful of;
+they defied one another at wrestling, running, boxing. They returned
+home sweating, out of breath, torn; they were true blackguards, if you
+will, but they made men who have zeal in their heart to serve their
+country and blood to shed for her. May we be able to say as much one day
+of our fine little gentlemen, and may these men at fifteen not turn out
+children at thirty."[15]
+
+Two incidents of this period remain to us, described in Rousseau's own
+words, and as they reveal a certain sweetness in which his life
+unhappily did not afterwards greatly abound, it may help our equitable
+balance of impressions about him to reproduce them. Every Sunday he used
+to spend the day at P�quis at Mr. Fazy's, who had married one of his
+aunts, and who carried on the production of printed calicoes. "One day I
+was in the drying-room, watching the rollers of the hot press; their
+brightness pleased my eye; I was tempted to lay my fingers on them, and
+I was moving them up and down with much satisfaction along the smooth
+cylinder, when young Fazy placed himself in the wheel and gave it a
+half-quarter turn so adroitly, that I had just the ends of my two
+longest fingers caught, but this was enough to crush the tips and tear
+the nails. I raised a piercing cry; Fazy instantly turned back the
+wheel, and the blood gushed from my fingers. In the extremity of
+consternation he hastened to me, embraced me, and besought me to cease
+my cries, or he would be undone. In the height of my own pain, I was
+touched by his; I instantly fell silent, we ran to the pond, where he
+helped me to wash my fingers and to staunch the blood with moss. He
+entreated me with tears not to accuse him; I promised him that I would
+not, and � kept my word so well that twenty years after no one knew the
+origin of the scar. I was kept in bed for more than three weeks, and for
+more than two months was unable to use my hand. But I persisted that a
+large stone had fallen and crushed my fingers."[16]
+
+The other story is of the same tenour, though there is a new touch of
+sensibility in its concluding words. "I was playing at ball at Plain
+Palais, with one of my comrades named Plince. We began to quarrel over
+the game; we fought, and in the fight he dealt me on my bare head a
+stroke so well directed, that with a stronger arm it would have dashed
+my brains out. I fell to the ground, and there never was agitation like
+that of this poor lad, as he saw the blood in my hair. He thought he had
+killed me. He threw himself upon me, and clasped me eagerly in his arms,
+while his tears poured down his cheeks, and he uttered shrill cries. I
+returned his embrace with all my force, weeping like him, in a state of
+confused emotion which was not without a kind of sweetness. Then he
+tried to stop the blood which kept flowing, and seeing that our two
+handkerchiefs were not enough, he dragged me off to his mother's; she
+had a small garden hard by. The good woman nearly fell sick at sight of
+me in this condition; she kept strength enough to dress my wound, and
+after bathing it well, she applied flower-de-luce macerated in brandy,
+an excellent remedy much used in our country. Her tears and those of her
+son, went to my very heart, so that I looked upon them for a long while
+as my mother and my brother."[17]
+
+If it were enough that our early instincts should be thus amiable and
+easy, then doubtless the dismal sloughs in which men and women lie
+floundering would occupy a very much more insignificant space in the
+field of human experience. The problem, as we know, lies in the
+discipline of this primitive goodness. For character in a state of
+society is not a tree that grows into uprightness by the law of its own
+strength, though an adorable instance here and there of rectitude and
+moral loveliness that seem intuitive may sometimes tempt us into a
+moment's belief in a contrary doctrine. In Rousseau's case this serious
+problem was never solved; there was no deliberate preparation of his
+impulses, prepossessions, notions; no foresight on the part of elders,
+and no gradual acclimatisation of a sensitive and ardent nature in the
+fixed principles which are essential to right conduct in the frigid zone
+of our relations with other people. It was one of the most elementary of
+Rousseau's many perverse and mischievous contentions, that it is their
+education by the older which ruins or wastes the abundant capacity for
+virtue that subsists naturally in the young. His mind seems never to
+have sought much more deeply for proof of this, than the fact that he
+himself was innocent and happy so long as he was allowed to follow
+without disturbance the easy simple proclivities of his own temperament.
+Circumstances were not indulgent enough to leave the experiment to
+complete itself within these very rudimentary conditions.
+
+Rousseau had been surrounded, as he is always careful to protest, with a
+religious atmosphere. His father, though a man of pleasure, was
+possessed also not only of probity but of religion as well. His three
+aunts were all in their degrees gracious and devout. M. Lambercier at
+Bossey, "although Churchman and preacher," was still a sincere believer
+and nearly as good in act as in word. His inculcation of religion was so
+hearty, so discreet, so reasonable, that his pupils, far from being
+wearied by the sermon, never came away without being touched inwardly
+and stirred to make virtuous resolutions. With his Aunt Bernard devotion
+was rather more tiresome, because she made a business of it.[18] It
+would be a distinct error to suppose that all this counted for nothing,
+for let us remember that we are now engaged with the youth of the one
+great religious writer of France in the eighteenth century. When after
+many years Rousseau's character hardened, the influences which had
+surrounded his boyhood came out in their full force and the historian of
+opinion soon notices in his spirit and work a something which had no
+counterpart in the spirit and work of men who had been trained in Jesuit
+colleges. At the first outset, however, every trace of religious
+sentiment was obliterated from sight, and he was left unprotected
+against the shocks of the world and the flesh.
+
+At the age of eleven Jean Jacques was sent into a notary's office, but
+that respectable calling struck him in the same repulsive and
+insufferable way in which it has struck many other boys of genius in all
+countries. Contrary to the usual rule, he did not rebel, but was
+ignominiously dismissed by his master[19] for dulness and inaptitude;
+his fellow-clerks pronounced him stupid and incompetent past hope. He
+was next apprenticed to an engraver,[20] a rough and violent man, who
+seems to have instantly plunged the boy into a demoralised stupefaction.
+The reality of contact with this coarse nature benumbed as by touch of
+torpedo the whole being of a youth who had hitherto lived on pure
+sensations and among those ideas which are nearest to sensations. There
+were no longer heroic Romans in Rousseau's universe. "The vilest
+tastes, the meanest bits of rascality, succeeded to my simple
+amusements, without even leaving the least idea behind. I must, in spite
+of the worthiest education, have had a strong tendency to degenerate."
+The truth was that he had never had any education in its veritable
+sense, as the process, on its negative side, of counteracting the
+inborn. There are two kinds, or perhaps we should more correctly say two
+degrees, of the constitution in which the reflective part is weak. There
+are the men who live on sensation, but who do so lustily, with a certain
+fulness of blood and active energy of muscle. There are others who do so
+passively, not searching for excitement, but acquiescing. The former by
+their sheer force and plenitude of vitality may, even in a world where
+reflection is a first condition, still go far. The latter succumb, and
+as reflection does nothing for them, and as their sensations in such a
+world bring them few blandishments, they are tolerably early surrounded
+with a self-diffusing atmosphere of misery. Rousseau had none of this
+energy which makes oppression bracing. For a time he sank.
+
+It would be a mistake to let the story of the Confessions carry us into
+exaggerations. The brutality of his master and the harshness of his life
+led him to nothing very criminal, but only to wrong acts which are
+despicable by their meanness, rather than in any sense atrocious. He
+told lies as readily as the truth. He pilfered things to eat. He
+cunningly found a means of opening his master's private cabinet, and of
+using his master's best instruments by stealth. He wasted his time in
+idle and capricious tasks. When the man, with all the ravity of an adult
+moralist, describes these misdeeds of the boy, they assume a certain
+ugliness of mien, and excites a strong disgust which, when the misdeeds
+themselves are before us in actual life, we experience in a far more
+considerate form. The effect of calm, retrospective avowal is to create
+a kind of feeling which is essentially unlike our feeling at what is
+actually avowed. Still it is clear that his unlucky career as apprentice
+brought out in Rousseau slyness, greediness, slovenliness,
+untruthfulness, and the whole ragged regiment of the squalider vices.
+The evil of his temperament now and always was of the dull smouldering
+kind, seldom breaking out into active flame. There is a certain
+sordidness in the scene. You may complain that the details which
+Rousseau gives of his youthful days are insipid. Yet such things are the
+web and stuff of life, and these days of transition from childhood to
+full manhood in every case mark a crisis. These insipidities test the
+education of home and family, and they presage definitely what is to
+come. The roots of character, good or bad, are shown for this short
+space, and they remain unchanged, though most people learn from their
+fellows the decent and useful art of covering them over with a little
+dust, in the shape of accepted phrases and routine customs and a silence
+which is not oblivion.
+
+After a time the character of Jean Jacques was absolutely broken down.
+He says little of the blows with which his offences were punished by his
+master, but he says enough to enable us to discern that they were
+terrible to him. This cowardice, if we choose to give the name to an
+overmastering physical horror, at length brought his apprentice days to
+an end. He was now in his sixteenth year. He was dragged by his comrades
+into sports for which he had little inclination, though he admits that
+once engaged in them he displayed an impetuosity that carried him beyond
+the others. Such pastimes naturally led them beyond the city walls, and
+on two occasions Rousseau found the gates closed on his return. His
+master when he presented himself in the morning gave him such greeting
+as we may imagine, and held out things beyond imagining as penalty for a
+second sin in this kind. The occasion came, as, alas, it nearly always
+does. "Half a league from the town," says Rousseau, "I hear the retreat
+sounded, and redouble my pace; I hear the drum beat, and run at the top
+of my speed: I arrive out of breath, bathed in sweat; my heart beats
+violently, I see from a distance the soldiers at their post, and call
+out with choking voice. It was too late. Twenty paces from the outpost
+sentinel, I saw the first bridge rising. I shuddered, as I watched those
+terrible horns, sinister and fatal augury of the inevitable lot which
+that moment was opening for me."[21]
+
+In manhood when we have the resource of our own will to fall back upon,
+we underestimate the unsurpassed horror and anguish of such moments as
+this in youth, when we know only the will of others, and that this will
+is inexorable against us. Rousseau dared not expose himself to the
+fulfilment of his master's menace, and he ran away (1728). But for this,
+wrote the unhappy man long years after, "I should have passed, in the
+bosom of my religion, of my native land, of my family, and my friends, a
+mild and peaceful life, such as my character required, in the uniformity
+of work which suited my taste, and of a society after my heart. I should
+have been a good Christian, good citizen, good father of a family, good
+friend, good craftsman, good man in all. I should have been happy in my
+condition, perhaps I might have honoured it; and after living a life
+obscure and simple, but even and gentle, I should have died peacefully
+in the midst of my own people. Soon forgotten, I should at any rate have
+been regretted as long as any memory of me was left."[22]
+
+As a man knows nothing about the secrets of his own individual
+organisation, this illusory mapping out of a supposed Possible need
+seldom be suspected of the smallest insincerity. The poor madman who
+declares that he is a king kept out of his rights only moves our pity,
+and we perhaps owe pity no less to those in all the various stages of
+aberration uncertificated by surgeons, down to the very edge of most
+respectable sanity, who accuse the injustice of men of keeping them out
+of this or that kingdom, of which in truth their own composition
+finally disinherited them at the moment when they were conceived in a
+mother's womb. The first of the famous Five Propositions of Jansen,
+which were a stumbling-block to popes and to the philosophy of the
+eighteenth-century foolishness, put this clear and permanent truth into
+a mystic and perishable formula, to the effect that there are some
+commandments of God which righteous and good men are absolutely unable
+to obey, though ever so disposed to do them, and God does not give them
+so much grace that they are able to observe them.
+
+If Rousseau's sensations in the evening were those of terror, the day
+and its prospect of boundless adventures soon turned them into entire
+delight. The whole world was before him, and all the old conceptions of
+romance were instantly revived by the supposed nearness of their
+realisation. He roamed for two or three days among the villages in the
+neighbourhood of Geneva, finding such hospitality as he needed in the
+cottages of friendly peasants. Before long his wanderings brought him to
+the end of the territory of the little republic. Here he found himself
+in the domain of Savoy, where dukes and lords had for ages been the
+traditional foes of the freedom and the faith of Geneva, Rousseau came
+to the village of Confignon, and the name of the priest of Confignon
+recalled one of the most embittered incidents of the old feud. This feud
+had come to take new forms; instead of midnight expeditions to scale the
+city walls, the descendants of the Savoyard marauders of the sixteenth
+century were now intent with equivocal good will on rescuing the souls
+of the descendants of their old enemies from deadly heresy. At this time
+a systematic struggle was going on between the priests of Savoy and the
+ministers of Geneva, the former using every effort to procure the
+conversion of any Protestant on whom they could lay hands.[23] As it
+happened, the priest of Confignon was one of the most active in this
+good work.[24] He made the young Rousseau welcome, spoke to him of the
+heresies of Geneva and of the authority of the holy Church, and gave him
+some dinner. He could hardly have had a more easy convert, for the
+nature with which he had to deal was now swept and garnished, ready for
+the entrance of all devils or gods. The dinner went for much. "I was too
+good a guest," writes Rousseau in one of his few passages of humour, "to
+be a good theologian, and his Frangi wine, which struck me as excellent,
+was such a triumphant argument on his side, that I should have blushed
+to oppose so capital a host."[25] So it was agreed that he should be put
+in a way to be further instructed of these matters. We may accept
+Rousseau's assurance that he was not exactly a hypocrite in this rapid
+complaisance. He admits that any one who should have seen the artifices
+to which he resorted, might have thought him very false. But, he
+argues, "flattery, or rather concession, is not always a vice; it is
+oftener a virtue, especially in the young. The kindness with which a man
+receives us, attaches us to him; it is not to make a fool of him that we
+give way, but to avoid displeasing him, and not to return him evil for
+good." He never really meant to change his religion; his fault was like
+the coquetting of decent women, who sometimes, to gain their ends,
+without permitting anything or promising anything, lead men to hope more
+than they mean to hold good.[26] Thereupon follow some austere
+reflections on the priest, who ought to have sent him back to his
+friends; and there are strictures even upon the ministers of all
+dogmatic religions, in which the essential thing is not to do but to
+believe; their priests therefore, provided that they can convert a man
+to their faith, are wholly indifferent alike as to his worth and his
+worldly interests. All this is most just; the occasion for such a strain
+of remark, though so apposite on one side, is hardly well chosen to
+impress us. We wonder, as we watch the boy complacently hoodwinking his
+entertainer, what has become of the Roman severity of a few months back.
+This nervous eagerness to please, however, was the complementary element
+of a character of vague ambition, and it was backed by a stealthy
+consciousness of intellectual superiority, which perhaps did something,
+though poorly enough, to make such ignominy less deeply degrading.
+
+The die was cast. M. Pontverre despatched his brand plucked from the
+burning to a certain Madame de Warens, a lady living at Annecy, and
+counted zealous for the cause of the Church. In an interview whose
+minutest circumstances remained for ever stamped in his mind (March 21,
+1728), Rousseau exchanged his first words with this singular personage,
+whose name and character he has covered with doubtful renown. He
+expected to find some gray and wrinkled woman, saving a little remnant
+of days in good works. Instead of this, there turned round upon him a
+person not more than eight-and-twenty years old, with gentle caressing
+air, a fascinating smile, a tender eye. Madame de Warens read the
+letters he brought, and entertained their bearer cheerfully. It was
+decided after consultation that the heretic should be sent to a
+monastery at Turin, where he might be brought over in form to the true
+Church. At the monastery not only would the spiritual question of faith
+and the soul be dealt with, but at the same time the material problem of
+shelter and subsistence for the body would be solved likewise. Elated
+with vanity at the thought of seeing before any of his comrades the
+great land of promise beyond the mountains, heedless of those whom he
+had left, and heedless of the future before him and the object which he
+was about, the young outcast made his journey over the Alps in all
+possible lightness of heart. "Seeing country is an allurement which
+hardly any Genevese can ever resist. Everything that met my eye seemed
+the guarantee of my approaching happiness. In the houses I imagined
+rustic festivals; in the fields, joyful sports; along the streams,
+bathing and fishing; on the trees, delicious fruits; under their shade,
+voluptuous interviews; on the mountains, pails of milk and cream, a
+charming idleness, peace, simplicity, the delight of going forward
+without knowing whither."[27] He might justly choose out this interval
+as more perfectly free from care or anxiety than any other of his life.
+It was the first of the too rare occasions when his usually passive
+sensuousness was stung by novelty and hope into an active energy.
+
+The seven or eight days of the journey came to an end, and the youth
+found himself at Turin without money or clothes, an inmate of a dreary
+monastery, among some of the very basest and foulest of mankind, who
+pass their time in going from one monastery to another through Spain and
+Italy, professing themselves Jews or Moors for the sake of being
+supported while the process of their conversion was going slowly
+forward. At the Hospice of the Catechumens the work of his conversion
+was begun in such earnest as the insincerity of at least one of the
+parties to it might allow. It is needless to enter into the
+circumstances of Rousseau's conversion to Catholicism. The mischievous
+zeal for theological proselytising has led to thousands of such hollow
+and degrading performances, but it may safely be said that none of them
+was ever hollower than this. Rousseau avows that he had been brought up
+in the heartiest abhorrence of the older church, and that he never lost
+this abhorrence. He fully explains that he accepted the arguments with
+which he was not very energetically plied, simply because he could not
+bear the idea of returning to Geneva, and he saw no other way out of his
+present destitute condition. "I could not dissemble from myself that the
+holy deed I was about to do, was at the bottom the action of a bandit."
+"The sophism which destroyed me," he says in one of those eloquent
+pieces of moralising, which bring ignoble action into a relief that
+exaggerates our condemnation, "is that of most men, who complain of lack
+of strength when it is already too late for them to use it. It is only
+through our own fault that virtue costs us anything; if we could be
+always sage, we should rarely feel the need of being virtuous. But
+inclinations that might be easily overcome, drag us on without
+resistance; we yield to light temptations of which we despise the
+hazard. Insensibly we fall into perilous situations, against which we
+could easily have shielded ourselves, but from which we can afterwards
+only make a way out by heroic efforts that stupefy us, and so we sink
+into the abyss, crying aloud to God, Why hast thou made me so weak? But
+in spite of ourselves, God gives answer to our conscience, 'I made thee
+too weak to come out from the pit, because I made thee strong enough to
+avoid falling into it.'"[28] So the hopeful convert did fall in, not as
+happens to the pious soul "too hot for certainties in this our life,"
+to find rest in liberty of private judgment and an open Bible, but
+simply as a means of getting food, clothing, and shelter.[29] The boy
+was clever enough to make some show of resistance, and he turned to good
+use for this purpose the knowledge of Church history and the great
+Reformation controversy which he had picked up at M. Lambercier's. He
+was careful not to carry things too far, and exactly nine days after his
+admission into the Hospice, he "abjured the errors of the sect."[30] Two
+days after that he was publicly received into the kindly bosom of the
+true Church with all solemnity, to the high edification of the devout of
+Turin, who marked their interest in the regenerate soul by contributions
+to the extent of twenty francs in small money.
+
+With that sum and formal good wishes the fathers of the Hospice of the
+Catechumens thrust him out of their doors into the broad world. The
+youth who had begun the day with dreams of palaces, found himself at
+night sleeping in a den where he paid a halfpenny for the privilege of
+resting in the same room with the rude woman who kept the house, her
+husband, her five or six children, and various other lodgers. This rough
+awakening produced no consciousness of hardship in a nature which,
+beneath all fantastic dreams, always remained true to its first sympathy
+with the homely lives of the poor. The woman of the house swore like a
+carter, and was always dishevelled and disorderly: this did not prevent
+Rousseau from recognising her kindness of heart and her staunch
+readiness to befriend. He passed his days in wandering about the streets
+of Turin, seeing the wonders of a capital, and expecting some adventure
+that should raise him to unknown heights. He went regularly to mass,
+watched the pomp of the court, and counted upon stirring a passion in
+the breast of a princess. � more important circumstance was the effect
+of the mass in awakening in his own breast his latent passion for music;
+a passion so strong that the poorest instrument, if it were only in
+tune, never failed to give him the liveliest pleasure. The king of
+Sardinia was believed to have the best performers in Europe; less than
+that was enough to quicken the musical susceptibility which is perhaps
+an invariable element in the most completely sensuous natures.
+
+When the end of the twenty francs began to seem a thing possible, he
+tried to get work as an engraver. A young woman in a shop took pity on
+him, gave him work and food, and perhaps permitted him to make dumb and
+grovelling love to her, until her husband returned home and drove her
+client away from the door with threats and the waving of a wand not
+magical.[31] Rousseau's self-love sought an explanation in the natural
+fury of an Italian husband's jealousy; but we need hardly ask for any
+other cause than a shopkeeper's reasonable objection to vagabonds.
+
+The next step of this youth, who was always dreaming of the love of
+princesses, was to accept with just thankfulness the position of lackey
+or footboy in the household of a widow. With Madame de Vercellis he
+passed three months, and at the end of that time she died. His stay here
+was marked by an incident that has filled many pages with stormful
+discussion. When Madame de Vercellis died, a piece of old rose-coloured
+ribbon was missing; Rousseau had stolen it, and it was found in his
+possession. They asked him whence he had taken it. He replied that it
+had been given to him by Marion, a young and comely maid in the house.
+In her presence and before the whole household he repeated his false
+story, and clung to it with a bitter effrontery that we may well call
+diabolic, remembering how the nervous terror of punishment and exposure
+sinks the angel in man. Our phrase, want of moral courage, really
+denotes in the young an excruciating physical struggle, often so keen
+that the victim clutches after liberation with the spontaneous tenacity
+and cruelty of a creature wrecked in mastering waters. Undisciplined
+sensations constitute egoism in the most ruthless of its shapes, and at
+this epoch, owing either to the brutalities which surrounded his
+apprentice life at Geneva, or to that rapid tendency towards
+degeneration which he suspected in his own character, Rousseau was the
+slave of sensations which stained his days with baseness. "Never," he
+says, in his account of this hateful action, "was wickedness further
+from me than at this cruel moment; and when I accused the poor girl, it
+is contradictory and yet it is true that my affection for her was the
+cause of what I did. She was present to my mind, and I threw the blame
+from myself on to the first object that presented itself. When I saw her
+appear my heart was torn, but the presence of so many people was too
+strong for my remorse. I feared punishment very little; I only feared
+disgrace, but I feared that more than death, more than crime, more than
+anything in the world. I would fain have buried myself in the depths of
+the earth; invincible shame prevailed over all, shame alone caused my
+effrontery, and the more criminal I became, the more intrepid was I made
+by the fright of confessing it. I could see nothing but the horror of
+being recognised and declared publicly to my face a thief, liar, and
+traducer."[32] When he says that he feared punishment little, his
+analysis of his mind is most likely wrong, for nothing is clearer than
+that a dread of punishment in any physical form was a peculiarly strong
+feeling with him at this time. However that may have been, the same
+over-excited imagination which put every sense on the alarm and led him
+into so abominable a misdemeanour, brought its own penalties. It led him
+to conceive a long train of ruin as having befallen Marion in
+consequence of his calumny against her, and this dreadful thought
+haunted him to the end of his life. In the long sleepless nights he
+thought he saw the unhappy girl coming to reproach him with a crime that
+seemed as fresh to him as if it had been perpetrated the day before.[33]
+Thus the same brooding memory which brought back to him the sweet pain
+of his gentle kinswoman's household melody, preserved the darker side of
+his history with equal fidelity and no less perfect continuousness.
+Rousseau expresses a hope and belief that this burning remorse would
+serve as expiation for his fault; as if expiation for the destruction of
+another soul could be anything but a fine name for self-absolution. We
+may, however, charitably and reasonably think that the possible
+consequences of his fault to the unfortunate Marion were not actual, but
+were as much a hallucination as the midnight visits of her reproachful
+spirit. Indeed, we are hardly condoning evil, in suggesting that the
+whole story from its beginning is marked with exaggeration, and that we
+who have our own lives to lead shall find little help in criticising at
+further length the exact heinousness of the ignoble falsehood of a boy
+who happened to grow up into a man of genius.[34]
+
+After an interval of six weeks, which were passed in the garret or
+cellar of his rough patroness with kind heart and ungentle tongue,
+Rousseau again found himself a lackey in the house of a Piedmontese
+person of quality. This new master, the Count of Gouvon, treated him
+with a certain unusual considerateness, which may perhaps make us doubt
+the narrative. His son condescended to teach the youth Latin, and
+Rousseau presumed to entertain a passion for one of the daughters of the
+house, to whom he paid silent homage in the odd shape of attending to
+her wants at table with special solicitude. In this situation he had, or
+at least he supposed that he had, an excellent chance of ultimate
+advancement. But advancement here or elsewhere means a measure of
+stability, and Rousseau's temperament in his youth was the archtype of
+the mutable. An old comrade from Geneva visited him,[35] and as almost
+any incident is stimulating enough to fire the restlessness of
+imaginative youth, the gratitude which he professed to the Count of
+Gouvon and his family, the prudence with which he marked his prospects,
+the industry with which he profited by opportunity, all faded quickly
+into mere dead and disembodied names of virtues. His imagination again
+went over the journey across the mountains; the fields, the woods, the
+streams, began to absorb his whole life. He recalled with delicious
+satisfaction how charming the journey had seemed to him, and thought how
+far more charming it would be in the society of a comrade of his own age
+and taste, without duty, or constraint, or obligation to go or stay
+other than as it might please them. "It would be madness to sacrifice
+such a piece of good fortune to projects of ambition, which were slow,
+difficult, doubtful of execution, and which, even if they should one day
+be realised, were not with all their glory worth a quarter of an hour of
+true pleasure and freedom in youth."[36]
+
+On these high principles he neglected his duties so recklessly that he
+was dismissed from his situation, and he and his comrade began their
+homeward wanderings with more than apostolic heedlessness as to what
+they should eat or wherewithal they should be clothed. They had a toy
+fountain; they hoped that in return for the amusement to be conferred by
+this wonder they should receive all that they might need. Their hopes
+were not fulfilled. The exhibition of the toy fountain did not excuse
+them from their reckoning. Before long it was accidentally broken, and
+to their secret satisfaction, for it had lost its novelty. Their naked,
+vagrancy was thus undisguised. They made their way by some means or
+other across the mountains, and their enjoyment of vagabondage was
+undisturbed by any thought of a future. "To understand my delirium at
+this moment," Rousseau says, in words which shed much light on darker
+parts of his history than fits of vagrancy, "it is necessary to know to
+what a degree my heart is subject to get aflame with the smallest
+things, and with what force it plunges into the imagination of the
+object that attracts it, vain as that object may be. The most grotesque,
+the most childish, the maddest schemes come to caress my favourite idea,
+and to show me the reasonableness of surrendering myself to it."[37] It
+was this deep internal vehemence which distinguished Rousseau all
+through his life from the commonplace type of social revolter. A vagrant
+sensuous temperament, strangely compounded with Genevese austerity; an
+ardent and fantastic imagination, incongruously shot with threads of
+firm reason; too little conscience and too much; a monstrous and
+diseased love of self, intertwined with a sincere compassion and keen
+interest for the great fellowship of his brothers; a wild dreaming of
+dreams that were made to look like sanity by the close and specious
+connection between conclusions and premisses, though the premisses
+happened to have the fault of being profoundly unreal:--this was the
+type of character that lay unfolded in the youth who, towards the autumn
+of 1729, reached Annecy, penniless and ragged, throwing himself once
+more on the charity of the patroness who had given him shelter eighteen
+months before. Few figures in the world at that time were less likely to
+conciliate the favour or excite the interest of an observer, who had not
+studied the hidden convolutions of human character deeply enough to know
+that a boy of eighteen may be sly, sensual, restless, dreamy, and yet
+have it in him to say things one day which may help to plunge a world
+into conflagration.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] Here is the line:--
+
+Didier Rousseau. | Jean | ----------------------- | | David. Noah. | |
+Isaac (b. 1680-5, d. 1745-7). Jean Fran�ois. | | | -------------- | |
+| JEAN JACQUES. Jean. Theodore.
+
+(_Musset-Pathay_, ii. 283.)
+
+[2] Picot's _Hist. de Gen�ve_, iii. 114.
+
+[3] _Conf._, i. 7.
+
+[4] _Lettre � D'Alembert_, p. 187. Also _Nouv. H�l._, VI. v. 239.
+
+[5] _Conf._, i. 9. Also Second Letter to M. de Malesherbes, p. 356.
+
+[6] _R�veries_, iv. p. 189. "My master and counsellor, Plutarch," he
+says, when he lends a volume to Madame d'Epinay in 1756. _Corr._, i.
+265.
+
+[7] Dedication of the _Discours sur l'Origine de l'In�galit�_, p. 201.
+(June, 1754.)
+
+[8] _Conf._, i. 1.
+
+[9] _Ib_, i. 12.
+
+[10] The tenacity of this grateful recollection is shown in letters to
+her (Madame Gonceru)--one in 1754 (_Corr._, i. 204), another as late
+as 1770 (vi. 129), and a third in 1762 (_Oeuvr. et Corr. In�d._, 392).
+
+[11] _Conf._, i. 17-32.
+
+[12] See also _Conf._, i. 43; iii. 185; vii. 73; xii. 188, _n._ 2.
+
+[13] _Conf._, i. 27-31.
+
+[14] _Conf._, i. 38-47.
+
+[15] _Lettre � D'Alembert_(1758), 178, 179.
+
+[16] _R�veries_, iv. 211, 212.
+
+[17] _Conf._ 212, 213.
+
+[18] _Conf._, ii. 102, 103.
+
+[19] M. Masseron.
+
+[20] M. Ducommun.
+
+[21] _Conf._, i. 69.
+
+[22] _Conf._, i. 72.
+
+[23] J. Gaberel's _Histoire de l'�glise de Gen�ve_ (Geneva, 1853-62),
+vol. iii. p. 285.
+
+[24] There is a minute in the register of the company of ministers, to
+the effect that the Sieur de Pontverre "is attracting many young men
+from this town, and changing their religion, and that the public ought
+to be warned." (Gaberel, iii. 224.)
+
+[25] _Conf._, ii. 76.
+
+[26] _Conf._, ii. 77.
+
+[27] _Conf._, ii. 90-97.
+
+[28] _Conf._, ii. 107
+
+[29] See _�mile_, iv. 124, 125, where the youth who was born a
+Calvinist, finding himself a stranger in a strange land, without
+resource, "changed his religion to get bread."
+
+[30] In the _Confessions_ (ii. 115) he has grace enough to make the
+period a month; but the extract from the register of his baptism
+(Gaberel's _Hist. de l'�glise de Gen�ve_, iii. 224), which has been
+recently published, shows that this is untrue: "Jean Jacques Rousseau,
+de Gen�ve (Calviniste), entr� � l'hospice � l'�ge de 16 ans, le 12
+avril, 1728. Abjura les erreurs de la secte le 21; et le 23 du m�me
+mois lui fut administr� le saint bapt�me, ayant pour parrain le sieur
+Andr� Ferrero et pour marraine Fran�oise Christine Rora (ou Rovea)."
+
+A little further on (p. 119) he speaks of having been shut up "for two
+months," but this is not true even on his own showing.
+
+[31] Madame Basile. _Conf._, ii. 121-135.
+
+[32] _Conf._ ii. ad finem.
+
+[33] _Conf._, ii. 144.
+
+[34] Another version of the story mentioned by Musset-Pathay (i. 7)
+makes the object of the theft a diamond, but there is really no
+evidence in the matter beyond that given by Rousseau himself.
+
+[35] Bacle, by name.
+
+[36] _Conf._, iii. 168.
+
+[37] _Conf._, iii. 170. A slightly idealised account of the situation
+is given in _�mile_, Bk. iv. 125.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+SAVOY.
+
+
+The commonplace theory which the world takes for granted as to the
+relations of the sexes, makes the woman ever crave the power and
+guidance of her physically stronger mate. Even if this be a true account
+of the normal state, there is at any rate a kind of temperament among
+the many types of men, in which it seems as if the elements of character
+remain mere futile and dispersive particles, until compelled into unity
+and organisation by the creative shock of feminine influence. There are
+men, famous or obscure, whose lives might be divided into a number of
+epochs, each defined and presided over by the influence of a woman. For
+the inconstant such a calendar contains many divisions, for the constant
+it is brief and simple; for both alike it marks the great decisive
+phases through which character has moved.
+
+Rousseau's temperament was deeply marked by this special sort of
+susceptibility in one of its least agreeable forms. His sentiment was
+neither robustly and courageously animal, nor was it an intellectual
+demand for the bright and vivacious sympathies in which women sometimes
+excel. It had neither bold virility, nor that sociable energy which
+makes close emotional companionship an essential condition of freedom of
+faculty and completeness of work. There is a certain close and sickly
+air round all his dealings with women and all his feeling for them. We
+seem to move not in the star-like radiance of love, nor even in the
+fiery flames of lust, but among the humid heats of some unknown abode of
+things not wholesome or manly. "I know a sentiment," he writes, "which
+is perhaps less impetuous than love, but a thousand times more
+delicious, which sometimes is joined to love, and which is very often
+apart from it. Nor is this sentiment friendship only; it is more
+voluptuous, more tender; I do not believe that any one of the same sex
+could be its object; at least I have been a friend, if ever man was, and
+I never felt this about any of my friends."[38] He admits that he can
+only describe this sentiment by its effects; but our lives are mostly
+ruled by elements that defy definition, and in Rousseau's case the
+sentiment which he could not describe was a paramount trait of his
+mental constitution. It was as a voluptuous garment; in it his
+imagination was cherished into activity, and protected against that
+outer air of reality which braces ordinary men, but benumbs and
+disintegrates the whole vital apparatus of such an organisation as
+Rousseau's. If he had been devoid of this feeling about women, his
+character might very possibly have remained sterile. That feeling was
+the complementary contribution, without which could be no fecundity.
+
+When he returned from his squalid Italian expedition in search of bread
+and a new religion, his mind was clouded with the vague desire, the
+sensual moodiness, which in such natures stains the threshold of
+manhood. This unrest, with its mysterious torments and black delights,
+was banished, or at least soothed into a happier humour, by the
+influence of a person who is one of the most striking types to be found
+in the gallery of fair women.
+
+
+I.
+
+A French writer in the eighteenth century, in a story which deals with a
+rather repulsive theme of action in a tone that is graceful, simple, and
+pathetic, painted the portrait of a creature for whom no moralist with a
+reputation to lose can say a word; and we may, if we choose, fool
+ourselves by supposing her to be without a counterpart in the
+better-regulated world of real life, but, in spite of both these
+objections, she is an interesting and not untouching figure to those who
+like to know all the many-webbed stuff out of which their brothers and
+sisters are made. The Manon Lescaut of the unfortunate Abb� Prevost,
+kindly, bright, playful, tender, but devoid of the very germ of the idea
+of that virtue which is counted the sovereign recommendation of woman,
+helps us to understand Madame de Warens. There are differences enough
+between them, and we need not mistake them for one and the same type.
+Manon Lescaut is a prettier figure, because romance has fewer
+limitations than real life; but if we think of her in reading of
+Rousseau's benefactress, the vision of the imaginary woman tends to
+soften our judgment of the actual one, as well as to enlighten our
+conception of a character that eludes the instruments of a commonplace
+analysis.[39]
+
+She was born at Vevai in 1700; she married early, and early disagreed
+with her husband, from whom she eventually went away, abandoning family,
+religion, country, and means of subsistence, with all gaiety of heart.
+The King of Sardinia happened to be keeping his court at a small town on
+the southern shores of the lake of Geneva, and the conversion of Madame
+de Warens to Catholicism by the preaching of the Bishop of Annecy,[40]
+gave a zest to the royal visit, as being a successful piece of sport in
+that great spiritual hunt which Savoy loved to pursue at the expense of
+the reformed church in Switzerland. The king, to mark his zeal for the
+faith of his house, conferred on the new convert a small pension for
+life; but as the tongues of the scandalous imputed a less pure motive
+for such generosity in a parsimonious prince, Madame de Warens removed
+from the court and settled at Annecy. Her conversion was hardly more
+serious than Rousseau's own, because seriousness was no condition of her
+intelligence on any of its sides or in any of its relations. She was
+extremely charitable to the poor, full of pity for all in misfortune,
+easily moved to forgiveness of wrong or ingratitude; careless, gay,
+open-hearted; having, in a word, all the good qualities which spring in
+certain generous soils from human impulse, and hardly any of those which
+spring from reflection, or are implanted by the ordering of society. Her
+reason had been warped in her youth by an instructor of the devil's
+stamp;[41] finding her attached to her husband and to her duties, always
+cold, argumentative, and impregnable on the side of the senses, he
+attacked her by sophisms, and at last persuaded her that the union of
+the sexes is in itself a matter of the most perfect indifference,
+provided only that decorum of appearance be preserved, and the peace of
+mind of persons concerned be not disturbed.[42] This execrable lesson,
+which greater and more unselfish men held and propagated in grave books
+before the end of the century, took root in her mind. If we accept
+Rousseau's explanation, it did so the more easily as her temperament was
+cold, and thus corroborated the idea of the indifference of what public
+opinion and private passion usually concur in investing with such
+enormous weightiness. "I will even dare to say," Rousseau declares,
+"that she only knew one true pleasure in the world, and that was to give
+pleasure to those whom she loved."[43] He is at great pains to protest
+how compatible this coolness of temperament is with excessive
+sensibility of character; and neither ethological theory nor practical
+observation of men and women is at all hostile to what he is so anxious
+to prove. The cardinal element of character is the speed at which its
+energies move; its rapidity or its steadiness, concentration or
+volatility; whether the thought and feeling travel as quickly as light
+or as slowly as sound. A rapid and volatile constitution like that of
+Madame de Warens is inconsistent with ardent and glowing warmth, which
+belongs to the other sort, but it is essentially bound up with
+sensibility, or readiness of sympathetic answer to every cry from
+another soul. It is the slow, brooding, smouldering nature, like
+Rousseau's own, in which we may expect to find the tropics.
+
+To bring the heavy artillery of moral reprobation to bear upon a poor
+soul like Madame de Warens is as if one should denounce flagrant want
+of moral purpose in the busy movements of ephemera. Her activity was
+incessant, but it ended in nothing better than debt, embarrassment, and
+confusion. She inherited from her father a taste for alchemy, and spent
+much time in search after secret elixirs and the like. "Quacks, taking
+advantage of her weakness, made themselves her master, constantly
+infested her, ruined her, and wasted, in the midst of furnaces and
+chemicals, intelligence, talents, and charms which would have made her
+the delight of the best societies."[44] Perhaps, however, the too
+notorious vagrancy of her amours had at least as much to do with her
+failure to delight the best societies as her indiscreet passion for
+alchemy. Her person was attractive enough. "She had those points of
+beauty," says Rousseau, "which are desirable, because they reside rather
+in expression than in feature. She had a tender and caressing air, a
+soft eye, a divine smile, light hair of uncommon beauty. You could not
+see a finer head or bosom, finer arms or hands."[45] She was full of
+tricks and whimsies. She could not endure the first smell of the soup
+and meats at dinner; when they were placed on the table she nearly
+swooned, and her disgust lasted some time, until at the end of half an
+hour or so she took her first morsel.[46] On the whole, if we accept the
+current standard of sanity, Madame de Warens must be pronounced ever so
+little flighty; but a monotonous world can afford to be lenient to
+people with a slight craziness, if it only has hearty benevolence and
+cheerfulness in its company, and is free from egoism or
+rapacious vanity.
+
+This was the person within the sphere of whose attraction Rousseau was
+decisively brought in the autumn of 1729, and he remained, with certain
+breaks of vagabondage, linked by a close attachment to her until 1738.
+It was in many respects the truly formative portion of his life. He
+acquired during this time much of his knowledge of books, such as it
+was, and his principles of judging them. He saw much of the lives of the
+poor and of the world's ways with them. Above all his ideal was
+revolutionised, and the recent dreams of Plutarchian heroism, of
+grandeur, of palaces, princesses, and a glorious career full in the
+world's eye, were replaced by a new conception of blessedness of life,
+which never afterwards faded from his vision, and which has held a front
+place in the imagination of literary Europe ever since. The notions or
+aspirations which he had picked up from a few books gave way to notions
+and aspirations which were shaped and fostered by the scenes of actual
+life into which he was thrown, and which found his character soft for
+their impression. In one way the new pictures of a future were as
+dissociated from the conditions of reality as the old had been, and the
+sensuous life of the happy valley in Savoy as little fitted a man to
+compose ideals for our gnarled and knotted world as the mental life
+among the heroics of sentimental fiction had done.
+
+Rousseau's delight in the spot where Madame de Warens lived at Annecy
+was the mark of the new ideal which circumstances were to engender in
+him, and after him to spread in many hearts. His room looked over
+gardens and a stream, and beyond them stretched a far landscape. "It was
+the first time since leaving Bossey that I had green before my windows.
+Always shut in by walls, I had nothing under my eye but house-tops and
+the dull gray of the streets. How moving and delicious this novelty was
+to me! It brightened all the tenderness of my disposition. I counted the
+landscape among the kindnesses of my dear benefactress; it seemed as if
+she had brought it there expressly for me. I placed myself there in all
+peacefulness with her; she was present to me everywhere among the
+flowers and the verdure; her charms and those of spring were all mingled
+together in my eyes. My heart, which had hitherto been stifled, found
+itself more free in this ample space, and my sighs had more liberal vent
+among these orchard gardens."[47] Madame de Warens was the semi-divine
+figure who made the scene live, and gave it perfect and harmonious
+accent. He had neither transports nor desires by her side, but existed
+in a state of ravishing calm, enjoying without knowing what. "I could
+have passed my whole life and eternity itself in this way, without an
+instant of weariness. She is the only person with whom I never felt that
+dryness in conversation, which turns the duty of keeping it up into a
+torment. Our intercourse was not so much conversation as an
+inexhaustible stream of chatter, which never came to an end until it was
+interrupted from without. I only felt all the force of my attachment for
+her when she was out of my sight. So long as I could see her I was
+merely happy and satisfied, but my disquiet in her absence went so far
+as to be painful. I shall never forget how one holiday, while she was at
+vespers, I went for a walk outside the town, my heart full of her image
+and of an eager desire to pass all my days by her side. I had sense
+enough to see that for the present this was impossible, and that the
+bliss which I relished so keenly must be brief. This gave to my musing a
+sadness which was free from everything sombre, and which was moderated
+by pleasing hope. The sound of the bells, which has always moved me to a
+singular degree, the singing of the birds, the glory of the weather, the
+sweetness of the landscape, the scattered rustic dwellings in which my
+imagination placed our common home;--all this so struck me with a vivid,
+tender, sad, and touching impression that I saw myself as in an ecstasy
+transported into the happy time and the happy place where my heart,
+possessed of all the felicity that could bring it delight, without even
+dreaming of the pleasures of sense, should share joys
+inexpressible."[48]
+
+There was still, however, a space to be bridged between the doubtful now
+and this delicious future. The harshness of circumstance is ever
+interposing with a money question, and for a vagrant of eighteen the
+first of all problems is a problem of economics. Rousseau was submitted
+to the observation of a kinsman of Madame de Warens,[49] and his verdict
+corresponded with that of the notary of Geneva, with whom years before
+Rousseau had first tried the critical art of making a living. He
+pronounced that in spite of an animated expression, the lad was, if not
+thoroughly inept, at least of very slender intelligence, without ideas,
+almost without attainments, very narrow indeed in all respects, and that
+the honour of one day becoming a village priest was the highest piece of
+fortune to which he had any right to aspire.[50] So he was sent to the
+seminary, to learn Latin enough for the priestly offices. He began by
+conceiving a deadly antipathy to his instructor, whose appearance
+happened to be displeasing to him. A second was found,[51] and the
+patient and obliging temper, the affectionate and sympathetic manner of
+his new teacher made a great impression on the pupil, though the
+progress in intellectual acquirement was as unsatisfactory in one case
+as in the other. It is characteristic of that subtle impressionableness
+to physical comeliness, which in ordinary natures is rapidly effaced by
+press of more urgent considerations, but which Rousseau's strongly
+sensuous quality retained, that he should have remembered, and thought
+worth mentioning years afterwards, that the first of his two teachers at
+the seminary of Annecy had greasy black hair, a complexion as of
+gingerbread, and bristles in place of beard, while the second had the
+most touching expression he ever saw in his life, with fair hair and
+large blue eyes, and a glance and a tone which made you feel that he was
+one of the band predestined from their birth to unhappy days. While at
+Turin, Rousseau had made the acquaintance of another sage and benevolent
+priest,[52] and uniting the two good men thirty years after he conceived
+and drew the character of the Savoyard Vicar.[53]
+
+Shortly the seminarists reported that, though not vicious, their pupil
+was not even good enough for a priest, so deficient was he in
+intellectual faculty. It was next decided to try music, and Rousseau
+ascended for a brief space into the seventh heaven of the arts. This was
+one of the intervals of his life of which he says that he recalls not
+only the times, places, persons, but all the surrounding objects, the
+temperature of the air, its odour, its colour, a certain local
+impression only felt there, and the memory of which stirs the old
+transports anew. He never forgot a certain tune, because one Advent
+Sunday he heard it from his bed being sung before daybreak on the steps
+of the cathedral; nor an old lame carpenter who played the counter-bass,
+nor a fair little abb� who played the violin in the choir.[54] Yet he
+was in so dreamy, absent, and distracted a state, that neither his
+good-will nor his assiduity availed, and he could learn nothing, not
+even music. His teacher, one Le M�itre, belonged to that great class of
+irregular and disorderly natures with which Rousseau's destiny, in the
+shape of an irregular and disorderly temperament of his own, so
+constantly brought him into contact. Le M�itre could not work without
+the inspiration of the wine cup, and thus his passion for his art landed
+him a sot. He took offence at a slight put upon him by the precentor of
+the cathedral of which he was choir-master, and left Annecy in a furtive
+manner along with Rousseau, whom the too comprehensive solicitude of
+Madame de Warens despatched to bear him company. They went together as
+far as Lyons; here the unfortunate musician happened to fall into an
+epileptic fit in the street. Rousseau called for help, informed the
+crowd of the poor man's hotel, and then seizing a moment when no one was
+thinking about him, turned the street corner and finally disappeared,
+the musician being thus "abandoned by the only friend on whom he had a
+right to count."[55] It thus appears that a man maybe exquisitely moved
+by the sound of bells, the song of birds, the fairness of smiling
+gardens, and yet be capable all the time without a qualm of misgiving of
+leaving a friend senseless in the road in a strange place. It has ceased
+to be wonderful how many ugly and cruel actions are done by people with
+an extraordinary sense of the beauty and beneficence of nature. At the
+moment Rousseau only thought of getting back to Annecy and Madame de
+Warens. "It is not," he says in words of profound warning, which many
+men have verified in those two or three hours before the tardy dawn that
+swell into huge purgatorial �ons,--"it is not when we have just done a
+bad action, that it torments us; it is when we recall it long after, for
+the memory of it can never be thrust out."[56]
+
+
+II.
+
+When he made his way homewards again, he found to his surprise and
+dismay that his benefactress had left Annecy, and had gone for an
+indefinite time to Paris. He never knew the secret of this sudden
+departure, for no man, he says, was ever so little curious as to the
+private affairs of his friends. His heart, completely occupied with the
+present, filled its whole capacity and entire space with that, and
+except for past pleasures no empty corner was ever left for what was
+done with.[57] He says he was too young to take the desertion deeply to
+heart. Where he found subsistence we do not know. He was fascinated by a
+flashy French adventurer,[58] in whose company he wasted many hours, and
+the precious stuff of youthful opportunity. He passed a summer day in
+joyful rustic fashion with two damsels whom he hardly ever saw again,
+but the memory of whom and of the holiday that they had made with him
+remained stamped in his brain, to be reproduced many a year hence in
+some of the traits of the new Helo�sa and her friend Claire.[59] Then he
+accepted an invitation from a former waiting-woman of Madame de Warens
+to attend her home to Freiburg. On this expedition he paid an hour's
+visit to his father, who had settled and remarried at Nyon. Returning
+from Freiburg, he came to Lausanne, where, with an audacity that might
+be taken for the first presage of mental disturbance, he undertook to
+teach music. "I have already," he says, "noted some moments of
+inconceivable delirium, in which I ceased to be myself. Behold me now a
+teacher of singing, without knowing how to decipher an air. Without the
+least knowledge of composition, I boasted of my skill in it before all
+the world; and without ability to score the slenderest vaudeville, I
+gave myself out for a composer. Having been presented to M. de
+Treytorens, a professor of law, who loved music and gave concerts at his
+house, I insisted on giving him a specimen of my talent, and I set to
+work to compose a piece for his concert with as much effrontery as if I
+knew all about it." The performance came off duly, and the strange
+impostor conducted it with as much gravity as the profoundest master.
+Never since the beginning of opera has the like charivari greeted the
+ears of men.[60] Such an opening was fatal to all chance of scholars,
+but the friendly tavern-keeper who had first taken him in did not lack
+either hope or charity. "How is it," Rousseau cried, many years after
+this, "that having found so many good people in my youth, I find so few
+in my advanced life? Is their stock exhausted? No; but the class in
+which I have to seek them now is not the same as that in which I found
+them then. Among the common people, where great passions only speak at
+intervals, the sentiments of nature make themselves heard oftener. In
+the higher ranks they are absolutely stifled, and under the mask of
+sentiment it is only interest or vanity that speaks."[61]
+
+From Lausanne he went to Neuch�tel, where he had more success, for,
+teaching others, he began himself to learn. But no success was marked
+enough to make him resist a vagrant chance. One day in his rambles
+falling in with an archimandrite of the Greek church, who was traversing
+Europe in search of subscriptions for the restoration of the Holy
+Sepulchre, he at once attached himself to him in the capacity of
+interpreter. In this position he remained for a few weeks, until the
+French minister at Soleure took him away from the Greek monk, and
+despatched him to Paris to be the attendant of a young officer.[62] A
+few days in the famous city, which he now saw for the first time, and
+which disappointed his expectations just as the sea and all other
+wonders disappointed them,[63] convinced him that here was not what he
+sought, and he again turned his face southwards in search of Madame de
+Warens and more familiar lands.
+
+The interval thus passed in roaming over the eastern face of France, and
+which we may date in the summer of 1732,[64] was always counted by
+Rousseau among the happy epochs of his life, though the weeks may seem
+grievously wasted to a generation which is apt to limit its ideas of
+redeeming the time to the two pursuits of reading books or making money.
+He travelled alone and on foot from Soleure to Paris and from Paris back
+again to Lyons, and this was part of the training which served him in
+the stead of books. Scarcely any great writer since the revival of
+letters has been so little literary as Rousseau, so little indebted to
+literature for the most characteristic part of his work. He was formed
+by life; not by life in the sense of contact with a great number of
+active and important persons, or with a great number of persons of any
+kind, but in the rarer sense of free surrender to the plenitude of his
+own impressions. A world composed of such people, all dispensing with
+the inherited portion of human experience, and living independently on
+their own stock, would rapidly fall backwards into dissolution. But
+there is no more rash idea of the right composition of a society than
+one which leads us to denounce a type of character for no better reason
+than that, if it were universal, society would go to pieces. There is
+very little danger of Rousseau's type becoming common, unless lunar or
+other great physical influences arise to work a vast change in the
+cerebral constitution of the species. We may safely trust the prodigious
+_vis inertioe_ of human nature to ward off the peril of an eccentricity
+beyond bounds spreading too far. At present, however, it is enough,
+without going into the general question, to notice the particular fact
+that while the other great exponents of the eighteenth century movement,
+Hume, Voltaire, Diderot, were nourishing their natural strength of
+understanding by the study and practice of literature, Rousseau, the
+leader of the reaction against that movement, was wandering a beggar and
+an outcast, craving the rude fare of the peasant's hut, knocking at
+roadside inns, and passing nights in caves and holes in the fields, or
+in the great desolate streets of towns.
+
+If such a life had been disagreeable to him, it would have lost all the
+significance that it now has for us. But where others would have found
+affliction, he had consolation, and where they would have lain desperate
+and squalid, he marched elate and ready to strike the stars. "Never," he
+says, "did I think so much, exist so much, be myself so much, as in the
+journeys that I have made alone and on foot. Walking has something about
+it which animates and enlivens my ideas. I can hardly think while I am
+still; my body must be in motion, to move my mind. The sight of the
+country, the succession of agreeable views, open air, good appetite, the
+freedom of the alehouse, the absence of everything that could make me
+feel dependence, or recall me to my situation--all this sets my soul
+free, gives me a greater boldness of thought. I dispose of all nature as
+its sovereign lord; my heart, wandering from object to object, mingles
+and is one with the things that soothe it, wraps itself up in charming
+images, and is intoxicated by delicious sentiment. Ideas come as they
+please, not as I please: they do not come at all, or they come in a
+crowd, overwhelming me with their number and their force. When I came to
+a place I only thought of eating, and when I left it I only thought of
+walking. I felt that a new paradise awaited me at the door, and I
+thought of nothing but of hastening in search of it."[65]
+
+Here again is a picture of one whom vagrancy assuredly did not
+degrade:--"I had not the least care for the future, and I awaited the
+answer [as to the return of Madame de Warens to Savoy], lying out in the
+open air, sleeping stretched out on the ground or on some wooden bench,
+as tranquilly as on a bed of roses. I remember passing one delicious
+night outside the town [Lyons], in a road which ran by the side of
+either the Rhone or the Sa�ne, I forget which of the two. Gardens raised
+on a terrace bordered the other side of the road. It had been very hot
+all day, and the evening was delightful; the dew moistened the parched
+grass, the night was profoundly still, the air fresh without being cold;
+the sun in going down had left red vapours in the heaven, and they
+turned the water to rose colour; the trees on the terrace sheltered
+nightingales, answering song for song. I went on in a sort of ecstasy,
+surrendering my heart and every sense to the enjoyment of it all, and
+only sighing for regret that I was enjoying it alone. Absorbed in the
+sweetness of my musing, I prolonged my ramble far into the night,
+without ever perceiving that I was tired. At last I found it out. I lay
+down luxuriously on the shelf of a niche or false doorway made in the
+wall of the terrace; the canopy of my bed was formed by overarching
+tree-tops; a nightingale was perched exactly over my head, and I fell
+asleep to his singing. My slumber was delicious, my awaking more
+delicious still. It was broad day, and my opening eyes looked on sun and
+water and green things, and an adorable landscape. I rose up and gave
+myself a shake; I felt hungry and started gaily for the town, resolved
+to spend on a good breakfast the two pieces of money which I still had
+left. I was in such joyful spirits that I went along the road singing
+lustily."[66]
+
+There is in this the free expansion of inner sympathy; the natural
+sentiment spontaneously responding to all the delicious movement of the
+external world on its peaceful and harmonious side, just as if the world
+of many-hued social circumstance which man has made for himself had no
+existence. We are conscious of a full nervous elation which is not the
+product of literature, such as we have seen so many a time since, and
+which only found its expression in literature in Rousseau's case by
+accident. He did not feel in order to write, but felt without any
+thought of writing. He dreamed at this time of many lofty destinies,
+among them that of marshal of France, but the fame of authorship never
+entered into his dreams. When the time for authorship actually came,
+his work had all the benefit of the absence of self-consciousness, it
+had all the disinterestedness, so to say, with which the first fresh
+impressions were suffered to rise in his mind.
+
+One other picture of this time is worth remembering, as showing that
+Rousseau was not wholly blind to social circumstances, and as
+illustrating, too, how it was that his way of dealing with them was so
+much more real and passionate, though so much less sagacious in some of
+its aspects, than the way of the other revolutionists of the century.
+One day, when he had lost himself in wandering in search of some site
+which he expected to find beautiful, he entered the house of a peasant,
+half dead with hunger and thirst. His entertainer offered him nothing
+more restoring than coarse barley bread and skimmed milk. Presently,
+after seeing what manner of guest he had, the worthy man descended by a
+small trap into his cellar, and brought up some good brown bread, some
+meat, and a bottle of wine, and an omelette was added afterwards. Then
+he explained to the wondering Rousseau, who was a Swiss, and knew none
+of the mysteries of the French fisc, that he hid away his wine on
+account of the duties, and his bread on account of the _taille_, and
+declared that he would be a ruined man if they suspected that he was not
+dying of hunger. All this made an impression on Rousseau which he never
+forgot. "Here," he says, "was the germ of the inextinguishable hatred
+which afterwards grew up in my heart against the vexations that harass
+the common people, and against all their oppressors. This man actually
+did not dare to eat the bread which he had won by the sweat of his brow,
+and only avoided ruin by showing the same misery as reigned
+around him."[67]
+
+It was because he had thus seen the wrongs of the poor, not from without
+but from within, not as a pitying spectator but as of their own company,
+that Rousseau by and by brought such fire to the attack upon the old
+order, and changed the blank practice of the elder philosophers into a
+deadly affair of ball and shell. The man who had been a servant, who had
+wanted bread, who knew the horrors of the midnight street, who had slept
+in dens, who had been befriended by rough men and rougher women, who saw
+the goodness of humanity under its coarsest outside, and who above all
+never tried to shut these things out from his memory, but accepted them
+as the most interesting, the most touching, the most real of all his
+experiences, might well be expected to penetrate to the root of the
+matter, and to protest to the few who usurp literature and policy with
+their ideas, aspirations, interests, that it is not they but the many,
+whose existence stirs the heart and fills the eye with the great prime
+elements of the human lot.
+
+
+III.
+
+It was, then, some time towards the middle of 1732 that Rousseau arrived
+at Chamb�ri, and finally took up his residence with Madame de Warens, in
+the dullest and most sombre room of a dull and sombre house. She had
+procured him employment in connection with a land survey which the
+government of Charles Emmanuel III. was then executing. It was only
+temporary, and Rousseau's function was no loftier than that of clerk,
+who had to copy and reduce arithmetical calculations. We may imagine how
+little a youth fresh from nights under the summer sky would relish eight
+hours a day of surly toil in a gloomy office, with a crowd of dirty and
+ill-smelling fellow-workers.[68] If Rousseau was ever oppressed by any
+set of circumstances, his method was invariable: he ran away from them.
+So now he threw up his post, and again tried to earn a little money by
+that musical instruction in which he had made so many singular and
+grotesque endeavours. Even here the virtues which make ordinary life a
+possible thing were not his. He was pleased at his lessons while there,
+but he could not bear the idea of being bound to be there, nor the
+fixing of an hour. In time this experiment for a subsistence came to the
+same end as all the others. He next rushed to Besan�on in search of the
+musical instruction which he wished to give to others, but his baggage
+was confiscated at the frontier, and he had to return.[69] Finally he
+abandoned the attempt, and threw himself loyally upon the narrow
+resources of Madame de Warens, whom he assisted in some singularly
+indefinite way in the transaction of her very indefinite and
+miscellaneous affairs,--if we are here, as so often, to give the name of
+affairs to a very rapid and heedless passage along a shabby road
+to ruin.
+
+The household at this time was on a very remarkable footing. Madame de
+Warens was at its head, and Claude Anet, gardener, butler, steward, was
+her factotum. He was a discreet person, of severe probity and few words,
+firm, thrifty, and sage. The too comprehensive principles of his
+mistress admitted him to the closest intimacy, and in due time, when
+Madame de Warens thought of the seductions which ensnare the feet of
+youth, Rousseau was delivered from them in an equivocal way by
+solicitous application of the same maxims of comprehension. "Although
+Claude Anet was as young as she was, he was so mature and so grave, that
+he looked upon us as two children worthy of indulgence, and we both
+looked upon him as a respectable man, whose esteem it was our business
+to conciliate. Thus there grew up between us three a companionship,
+perhaps without another example like it upon earth. All our wishes, our
+cares, our hearts were in common; nothing seemed to pass outside our
+little circle. The habit of living together, and of living together
+exclusively, became so strong that if at our meals one of the three was
+absent, or there came a fourth, all was thrown out; and in spite of our
+peculiar relations, a _t�te-�-t�te_ was less sweet than a meeting of all
+three."[70] Fate interfered to spoil this striking attempt after a new
+type of the family, developed on a duandric base. Claude Anet was seized
+with illness, a consequence of excessive fatigue in an Alpine expedition
+in search of plants, and he came to his end.[71] In him Rousseau always
+believed that he lost the most solid friend he ever possessed, "a rare
+and estimable man, in whom nature served instead of education, and who
+nourished in obscure servitude all the virtues of great men."[72] The
+day after his death, Rousseau was speaking of their lost friend to
+Madame de Warens with the liveliest and most sincere affliction, when
+suddenly in the midst of the conversation he remembered that he should
+inherit the poor man's clothes, and particularly a handsome black coat.
+A reproachful tear from his Maman, as he always somewhat nauseously
+called Madame de Warens, extinguished the vile thought and washed away
+its last traces.[73] After all, those men and women are exceptionally
+happy, who have no such involuntary meanness of thought standing against
+themselves in that unwritten chapter of their lives which even the most
+candid persons keep privately locked up in shamefast recollection.
+
+Shortly after his return to Chamb�ri, a wave from the great tide of
+European affairs surged into the quiet valleys of Savoy. In the February
+of 1733, Augustus the Strong died, and the usual disorder followed in
+the choice of a successor to him in the kingship of Poland. France was
+for Stanislaus, the father-in-law of Lewis XV., while the Emperor
+Charles VI. and Anne of Russia were for August III., elector of Saxony.
+Stanislaus was compelled to flee, and the French Government, taking up
+his quarrel, declared war against the Emperor (October 14, 1733). The
+first act of this war, which was to end in the acquisition of Naples and
+the two Sicilies by Spanish Bourbons, and of Lorraine by France, was the
+despatch of a French expedition to the Milanese under Marshall Villars,
+the husband of one of Voltaire's first idols. This took place in the
+autumn of 1733, and a French column passed through Chamb�ri, exciting
+lively interest in all minds, including Rousseau's. He now read the
+newspapers for the first time, with the most eager sympathy for the
+country with whose history his own name was destined to be so
+permanently associated. "If this mad passion," he says, "had only been
+momentary, I should not speak of it; but for no visible reason it took
+such root in my heart, that when I afterwards at Paris played the stern
+republican, I could not help feeling in spite of myself a secret
+predilection for the very nation that I found so servile, and the
+government I made bold to assail."[74] This fondness for France was
+strong, constant, and invincible, and found what was in the eighteenth
+century a natural complement in a corresponding dislike of England.[75]
+
+Rousseau's health began to show signs of weakness. His breath became
+asthmatic, he had palpitations, he spat blood, and suffered from a slow
+feverishness from which he never afterwards became entirely free.[76]
+His mind was as feverish as his body, and the morbid broodings which
+active life reduces to their lowest degree in most young men, were left
+to make full havoc along with the seven devils of idleness and vacuity.
+An instinct which may flow from the unrecognised animal lying deep down
+in us all, suggested the way of return to wholesomeness. Rousseau
+prevailed upon Madame de Warens to leave the stifling streets for the
+fresh fields, and to deliver herself by retreat to rural solitude from
+the adventurers who made her their prey. Les Charmettes, the modest
+farm-house to which they retired, still stands. The modern traveller,
+with a taste for relieving an imagination strained by great historic
+monuments and secular landmarks, with the sight of spots associated with
+the passion and meditation of some far-shining teacher of men, may walk
+a short league from where the gray slate roofs of dull Chamb�ri bake in
+the sun, and ascending a gently mounting road, with high leafy bank on
+the right throwing cool shadows over his head, and a stream on the left
+making music at his feet, he sees an old red housetop lifted lonely
+above the trees. The homes in which men have lived now and again lend
+themselves to the beholder's subjective impression; they seemed to be
+brooding in forlorn isolation like some life-wearied gray-beard over
+ancient and sorrow-stricken memories. At Les Charmettes a pitiful
+melancholy penetrates you. The supreme loveliness of the scene, the
+sweet-smelling meadows, the orchard, the water-ways, the little vineyard
+with here and there a rose glowing crimson among the yellow stunted
+vines, the rust-red crag of the Nivolet rising against the sky far
+across the broad valley; the contrast between all this peace, beauty,
+silence, and the diseased miserable life of the famous man who found a
+scanty span of paradise in the midst of it, touches the soul with a
+pathetic spell. We are for the moment lifted out of squalor, vagrancy,
+and disorder, and seem to hear some of the harmonies which sounded to
+this perturbed spirit, soothing it, exalting it, and stirring those
+inmost vibrations which in truth make up all the short divine part of a
+man's life.[77]
+
+"No day passes," he wrote in the very year in which he died, "in which
+I do not recall with joy and tender effusion this single and brief time
+in my life, when I was fully myself, without mixture or hindrance, and
+when I may say in a true sense that I lived. I may almost say, like the
+prefect when disgraced and proceeding to end his days tranquilly in the
+country, 'I have passed seventy years on the earth, and I have lived but
+seven of them.' But for this brief and precious space, I should perhaps
+have remained uncertain about myself; for during all the rest of my life
+I have been so agitated, tossed, plucked hither and thither by the
+passions of others, that, being nearly passive in a life so stormy, I
+should find it hard to distinguish what belonged to me in my own
+conduct,--to such a degree has harsh necessity weighed upon me. But
+during these few years I did what I wished to do, I was what I wished to
+be."[78] The secret of such rare felicity is hardly to be described in
+words. It was the ease of a profoundly sensuous nature with every sense
+gratified and fascinated. Caressing and undivided affection within
+doors, all the sweetness and movement of nature without, solitude,
+freedom, and the busy idleness of life in gardens,--these were the
+conditions of Rousseau's ideal state. "If my happiness," he says, in
+language of strange felicity, "consisted in facts, actions, or words, I
+might then describe and represent it in some way; but how say what was
+neither said nor done nor even thought, but only enjoyed and felt
+without my being able to point to any other object of my happiness than
+the very feeling itself? I arose with the sun and I was happy; I went
+out of doors and I was happy; I saw Maman and I was happy; I left her
+and I was happy; I went among the woods and hills, I wandered about in
+the dells, I read, I was idle, I dug in the garden, I gathered fruit, I
+helped them indoors, and everywhere happiness followed me. It was not in
+any given thing, it was all in myself, and could never leave me for a
+single instant."[79] This was a true garden of Eden, with the serpent in
+temporary quiescence, and we may count the man rare since the fall who
+has found such happiness in such conditions, and not less blessed than
+he is rare. The fact that he was one of this chosen company was among
+the foremost of the circumstances which made Rousseau seem to so many
+men in the eighteenth century as a spring of water in a thirsty land.
+
+All innocent and amiable things moved him. He used to spend hours
+together in taming pigeons; he inspired them with such confidence that
+they would follow him about, and allow him to take them wherever he
+would, and the moment that he appeared in the garden two or three of
+them would instantly settle on his arms or his head. The bees, too,
+gradually came to put the same trust in him, and his whole life was
+surrounded with gentle companionship. He always began the day with the
+sun, walking on the high ridge above the slope on which the house lay,
+and going through his form of worship. "It did not consist in a vain
+moving of the lips, but in a sincere elevation of heart to the author of
+the tender nature whose beauties lay spread out before my eyes. This act
+passed rather in wonder and contemplation than in requests; and I always
+knew that with the dispenser of true blessings, the best means of
+obtaining those which are needful for us, is less to ask than to deserve
+them."[80] These effusions may be taken for the beginning of the
+deistical reaction in the eighteenth century. While the truly scientific
+and progressive spirits were occupied in laborious preparation for
+adding to human knowledge and systematising it, Rousseau walked with his
+head in the clouds among gods, beneficent authors of nature, wise
+dispensers of blessings, and the like. "Ah, madam," he once said,
+"sometimes in the privacy of my study, with my hands pressed tight over
+my eyes or in the darkness of the night, I am of his opinion that there
+is no God. But look yonder (pointing with his hand to the sky, with head
+erect, and an inspired glance): the rising of the sun, as it scatters
+the mists that cover the earth and lays bare the wondrous glittering
+scene of nature, disperses at the same moment all cloud from my soul. I
+find my faith again, and my God, and my belief in him. I admire and
+adore him, and I prostrate myself in his presence."[81] As if that
+settled the question affirmatively, any more than the absence of such
+theistic emotion in many noble spirits settles it negatively. God became
+the highest known formula for sensuous expansion, the synthesis of all
+complacent emotions, and Rousseau filled up the measure of his delight
+by creating and invoking a Supreme Being to match with fine scenery and
+sunny gardens. We shall have a better occasion to mark the attributes of
+this important conception when we come to _Emilius_, where it was
+launched in a panoply of resounding phrases upon a Europe which was
+grown too strong for Christian dogma, and was not yet grown strong
+enough to rest in a provisional ordering of the results of its own
+positive knowledge. Walking on the terrace at Les Charmettes, you are at
+the very birth-place of that particular �tre Supr�me to whom Robespierre
+offered the incense of an official festival.
+
+Sometimes the reading of a Jansenist book would make him unhappy by the
+prominence into which it brought the displeasing idea of hell, and he
+used now and then to pass a miserable day in wondering whether this
+cruel destiny should be his. Madame de Warens, whose softness of heart
+inspired her with a theology that ought to have satisfied a seraphic
+doctor, had abolished hell, but she could not dispense with purgatory
+because she did not know what to do with the souls of the wicked, being
+unable either to damn them, or to instal them among the good until they
+had been purified into goodness. In truth it must be confessed, says
+Rousseau, that alike in this world and the other the wicked are
+extremely embarrassing.[82] His own search after knowledge of his fate
+is well known. One day, amusing himself in a characteristic manner by
+throwing stones at trees, he began to be tormented by fear of the
+eternal pit. He resolved to test his doom by throwing a stone at a
+particular tree; if he hit, then salvation; if he missed, then
+perdition. With a trembling hand and beating heart he threw; as he had
+chosen a large tree and was careful not to place himself too far away,
+all was well.[83] As a rule, however, in spite of the ugly phantoms of
+theology, he passed his days in a state of calm. Even when illness
+brought it into his head that he should soon know the future lot by more
+assured experiment, he still preserved a tranquillity which he justly
+qualifies as sensual.
+
+In thinking of Rousseau's peculiar feeling for nature, which acquired
+such a decisive place in his character during his life at Les
+Charmettes, it is to be remembered that it was entirely devoid of that
+stormy and boisterous quality which has grown up in more modern
+literature, out of the violent attempt to press nature in her most awful
+moods into the service of the great revolt against a social and
+religious tradition that can no longer be endured. Of this revolt
+Rousseau was a chief, and his passion for natural aspects was connected
+with this attitude, but he did not seize those of them which the poet of
+_Manfred_, for example, forced into an imputed sympathy with his own
+rebellion. Rousseau always loved nature best in her moods of quiescence
+and serenity, and in proportion as she lent herself to such moods in
+men. He liked rivulets better than rivers. He could not bear the sight
+of the sea; its infertile bosom and blind restless tumblings filled him
+with melancholy. The ruins of a park affected him more than the ruins of
+castles.[84] It is true that no plain, however beautiful, ever seemed so
+in his eyes; he required torrents, rocks, dark forests, mountains, and
+precipices.[85] This does not affect the fact that he never moralised
+appalling landscape, as post-revolutionary writers have done, and that
+the Alpine wastes which throw your puniest modern into a rapture, had no
+attraction for him. He could steep himself in nature without climbing
+fifteen thousand feet to find her. In landscape, as has been said by one
+with a right to speak, Rousseau was truly a great artist, and you can,
+if you are artistic too, follow him with confidence in his wanderings;
+he understood that beauty does not require a great stage, and that the
+effect of things lies in harmony.[86] The humble heights of the Jura,
+and the lovely points of the valley of Chamb�ri, sufficed to give him
+all the pleasure of which he was capable. In truth a man cannot escape
+from his time, and Rousseau at least belonged to the eighteenth century
+in being devoid of the capacity for feeling awe, and the taste for
+objects inspiring it. Nature was a tender friend with softest bosom, and
+no sphinx with cruel enigma. He felt neither terror, nor any sense of
+the littleness of man, nor of the mysteriousness of life, nor of the
+unseen forces which make us their sport, as he peered over the precipice
+and heard the water roaring at the bottom of it; he only remained for
+hours enjoying the physical sensation of dizziness with which it turned
+his brain, with a break now and again for hurling large stones, and
+watching them roll and leap down into the torrent, with as little
+reflection and as little articulate emotion as if he had been a
+child.[87]
+
+Just as it is convenient for purposes of classification to divide a man
+into body and soul, even when we believe the soul to be only a function
+of the body, so people talk of his intellectual side and his emotional
+side, his thinking quality and his feeling quality, though in fact and
+at the roots these qualities are not two but one, with temperament for
+the common substratum. During this period of his life the whole of
+Rousseau's true force went into his feelings, and at all times feeling
+predominated over reflection, with many drawbacks and some advantages of
+a very critical kind for subsequent generations of men. Nearly every one
+who came into contact with him in the way of testing his capacity for
+being instructed pronounced him hopeless. He had several excellent
+opportunities of learning Latin, especially at Turin in the house of
+Count Gouvon, and in the seminary at Annecy, and at Les Charmettes he
+did his best to teach himself, but without any better result than a very
+limited power of reading. In learning one rule he forgot the last; he
+could never master the most elementary laws of versification; he learnt
+and re-learnt twenty times the Eclogues of Virgil, but not a single word
+remained with him.[88] He was absolutely without verbal memory, and he
+pronounces himself wholly incapable of learning anything from masters.
+Madame de Warens tried to have him taught both dancing and fencing; he
+could never achieve a minuet, and after three months of instruction he
+was as clumsy and helpless with his foil as he had been on the first
+day. He resolved to become a master at the chessboard; he shut himself
+up in his room, and worked night and day over the books with
+indescribable efforts which covered many weeks. On proceeding to the
+caf� to manifest his powers, he found that all the moves and
+combinations had got mixed up in his head, he saw nothing but clouds on
+the board, and as often as he repeated the experiment he only found
+himself weaker than before. Even in music, for which he had a genuine
+passion and at which he worked hard, he never could acquire any facility
+at sight, and he was an inaccurate scorer, even when only copying the
+score of others.[89]
+
+Two things nearly incompatible, he writes in an important passage, are
+united in me without my being able to think how; an extremely ardent
+temperament, lively and impetuous passions, along with ideas that are
+very slow in coming to birth, very embarrassed, and which never arise
+until after the event. "One would say that my heart and my intelligence
+do not belong to the same individual.... I feel all, and see nothing; I
+am carried away, but I am stupid.... This slowness of thinking, united
+with such vivacity of feeling, possesses me not only in conversation,
+but when I am alone and working. My ideas arrange themselves in my head
+with incredible difficulty; they circulate there in a dull way and
+ferment until they agitate me, fill me with heat, and give me
+palpitations; in the midst of this stir I see nothing clearly, I could
+not write a single word. Insensibly the violent emotion grows still, the
+chaos is disentangled, everything falls into its place, but very slowly
+and after long and confused agitation."[90]
+
+So far from saying that his heart and intelligence belonged to two
+persons, we might have been quite sure, knowing his heart, that his
+intelligence must be exactly what he describes its process to have been.
+The slow-burning ecstasy in which he knew himself at his height and was
+most conscious of fulness of life, was incompatible with the rapid and
+deliberate generation of ideas. The same soft passivity, the same
+receptiveness, which made his emotions like the surface of a lake under
+sky and breeze, entered also into the working of his intellectual
+faculties. But it happens that in this region, in the attainment of
+knowledge, truth, and definite thoughts, even receptiveness implies a
+distinct and active energy, and hence the very quality of temperament
+which left him free and eager for sensuous impressions, seemed to muffle
+his intelligence in a certain opaque and resisting medium, of the
+indefinable kind that interposes between will and action in a dream. His
+rational part was fatally protected by a non-conducting envelope of
+sentiment; this intercepted clear ideas on their passage, and even cut
+off the direct and true impress of those objects and their relations,
+which are the material of clear ideas. He was no doubt right in his
+avowal that objects generally made less impression on him than the
+recollection of them; that he could see nothing of what was before his
+eyes, and had only his intelligence in cases where memories were
+concerned; and that of what was said or done in his presence, he felt
+and penetrated nothing.[91] In other words, this is to say that his
+material of thought was not fact but image. When he plunged into
+reflection, he did not deal with the objects of reflection at first hand
+and in themselves, but only with the reminiscences of objects, which he
+had never approached in a spirit of deliberate and systematic
+observation, and with those reminiscences, moreover, suffused and
+saturated by the impalpable but most potent essences of a fermenting
+imagination. Instead of urgently seeking truth with the patient energy,
+the wariness, and the conscience, with the sharpened instruments, the
+systematic apparatus, and the minute feelers and tentacles of the
+genuine thinker and solid reasoner, he only floated languidly on a
+summer tide of sensation, and captured premiss and conclusion in a
+succession of swoons. It would be a mistake to contend that no work can
+be done for the world by this method, or that truth only comes to those
+who chase her with logical forceps. But one should always try to
+discover how a teacher of men came by his ideas, whether by careful
+toil, or by the easy bequest of generous phantasy.
+
+To give a zest to rural delight, and partly perhaps to satisfy the
+intellectual interest which must have been an instinct in one who became
+so consummate a master in the great and noble art of composition,
+Rousseau, during the time when he lived with Madame de Warens, tried as
+well as he knew how to acquire a little knowledge of what fruit the
+cultivation of the mind of man had hitherto brought forth. According to
+his own account, it was Voltaire's Letters on the English which first
+drew him seriously to study, and nothing which that illustrious man
+wrote at this time escaped him. His taste for Voltaire inspired him with
+the desire of writing with elegance, and of imitating "the fine and
+enchanting colour of Voltaire's style"[92]--an object in which he cannot
+be held to have in the least succeeded, though he achieved a superb
+style of his own. On his return from Turin Madame de Warens had begun in
+some small way to cultivate a taste for letters in him, though he had
+lost the enthusiasm of his childhood for reading. Saint Evremond,
+Puffendorff, the Henriade, and the Spectator happened to be in his room,
+and he turned over their pages. The Spectator, he says, pleased him
+greatly and did him much good.[93] Madame de Warens was what he calls
+protestant in literary taste, and would talk for ever of the great
+Bayle, while she thought more of Saint Evremond than she could ever
+persuade Rousseau to think. Two or three years later than this he began
+to use his own mind more freely, and opened his eyes for the first time
+to the greatest question that ever dawns upon any human intelligence
+that has the privilege of discerning it, the problem of a philosophy and
+a body of doctrine.
+
+His way of answering it did not promise the best results. He read an
+introduction to the Sciences, then he took an Encyclop�dia and tried to
+learn all things together, until he repented and resolved to study
+subjects apart. This he found a better plan for one to whom long
+application was so fatiguing, that he could not with any effect occupy
+himself for half an hour on any one matter, especially if following the
+ideas of another person.[94] He began his morning's work, after an hour
+or two of dispersive chat, with the Port-Royal Logic, Locke's Essay on
+the Human Understanding, Malebranche, Leibnitz, Descartes.[95] He found
+these authors in a condition of such perpetual contradiction among
+themselves, that he formed the chimerical design of reconciling them
+with one another. This was tedious, so he took up another method, on
+which he congratulated himself to the end of his life. It consisted in
+simply adopting and following the ideas of each author, without
+comparing them either with one another or with those of other writers,
+and above all without any criticism of his own. Let me begin, he said,
+by collecting a store of ideas, true or false, but at any rate clear,
+until my head is well enough stocked to enable me to compare and choose.
+At the end of some years passed "in never thinking exactly, except after
+other people, without reflecting so to speak, and almost without
+reasoning," he found himself in a state to think for himself. "In spite
+of beginning late to exercise my judicial faculty, I never found that it
+had lost its vigour, and when I came to publish my own ideas, I was
+hardly accused of being a servile disciple."[96]
+
+To that fairly credible account of the matter, one can only say that
+this mutually exclusive way of learning the thoughts of others, and
+developing thoughts of your own, is for an adult probably the most
+mischievous, where it is not the most impotent, fashion in which
+intellectual exercise can well be taken. It is exactly the use of the
+judicial faculty, criticising, comparing, and defining, which is
+indispensable in order that a student should not only effectually
+assimilate the ideas of a writer, but even know what those ideas come to
+and how much they are worth. And so when he works at ideas of his own, a
+judicial faculty which has been kept studiously slumbering for some
+years, is not likely to revive in full strength without any preliminary
+training. Rousseau was a man of singular genius, and he set an
+extraordinary mark on Europe, but this mark would have been very
+different if he had ever mastered any one system of thought, or if he
+had ever fully grasped what systematic thinking means. Instead of this,
+his debt to the men whom he read was a debt of piecemeal, and his
+obligation an obligation for fragments; and this is perhaps the worst
+way of acquiring an intellectual lineage, for it leaves out the vital
+continuity of temper and method. It is a small thing to accept this or
+that of Locke's notions upon education or the origin of ideas, if you do
+not see the merit of his way of coming by his notions. In short,
+Rousseau has distinctions in abundance, but the distinction of knowing
+how to think, in the exact sense of that term, was hardly among them,
+and neither now nor at any other time did he go through any of that
+toilsome and vigorous intellectual preparation to which the ablest of
+his contemporaries, Diderot, Voltaire, D'Alembert, Turgot, Condorcet,
+Hume, all submitted themselves. His comfortable view was that "the
+sensible and interesting conversations of a woman of merit are more
+proper to form a young man than all the pedantical philosophy of
+books."[97]
+
+Style, however, in which he ultimately became such a proficient, and
+which wrought such marvels as only style backed by passion can work,
+already engaged his serious attention. We have already seen how Voltaire
+implanted in him the first root idea, which so many of us never perceive
+at all, that there is such a quality of writing as style. He evidently
+took pains with the form of expression and thought about it, in
+obedience to some inborn harmonious predisposition which is the source
+of all veritable eloquence, though there is no strong trace now nor for
+many years to come of any irresistible inclination for literary
+composition. We find him, indeed, in 1736 showing consciousness of a
+slight skill in writing,[98] but he only thought of it as a possible
+recommendation for a secretaryship to some great person. He also appears
+to have practised verses, not for their own sake, for he always most
+justly thought his own verses mediocre, and they are even worse; but on
+the ground that verse-making is a rather good exercise for breaking
+one's self to elegant inversions, and learning a greater ease in
+prose.[99] At the age of one and twenty he composed a comedy, long
+afterwards damned as _Narcisse_. Such prelusions, however, were of small
+importance compared with the fact of his being surrounded by a moral
+atmosphere in which his whole mind was steeped. It is not in the study
+of Voltaire or another, but in the deep soft soil of constant mood and
+old habit that such a style as Rousseau's has its growth.
+
+It was the custom to return to Chamb�ri for the winter, and the day of
+their departure from Les Charmettes was always a day blurred and tearful
+for Rousseau; he never left it without kissing the ground, the trees,
+the flowers; he had to be torn away from it as from a loved companion.
+At the first melting of the winter snows they left their dungeon in
+Chamb�ri, and they never missed the earliest song of the nightingale.
+Many a joyful day of summer peace remained vivid in Rousseau's memory,
+and made a mixed heaven and hell for him long years after in the
+stifling dingy Paris street, and the raw and cheerless air of a
+Derbyshire winter.[100] "We started early in the morning," he says,
+describing one of these simple excursions on the day of St. Lewis, who
+was the very unconscious patron saint of Madame de Warens, "together and
+alone; I proposed that we should go and ramble about the side of the
+valley opposite to our own, which we had not yet visited. We sent our
+provisions on before us, for we were to be out all day. We went from
+hill to hill and wood to wood, sometimes in the sun and often in the
+shade, resting from time to time and forgetting ourselves for whole
+hours; chatting about ourselves, our union, our dear lot, and offering
+unheard prayers that it might last. All seemed to conspire for the bliss
+of this day. Rain had fallen a short time before; there was no dust, and
+the little streams were full; a light fresh breeze stirred the leaves,
+the air was pure, the horizon without a cloud, and the same serenity
+reigned in our own hearts. Our dinner was cooked in a peasant's cottage,
+and we shared it with his family. These Savoyards are such good souls!
+After dinner we sought shade under some tall trees, where, while I
+collected dry sticks for making our coffee, Maman amused herself by
+botanising among the bushes, and the expedition ended in transports of
+tenderness and effusion."[101] This is one of such days as the soul
+turns back to when the misery that stalks after us all has seized it,
+and a man is left to the sting and smart of the memory of
+irrecoverable things.
+
+He was resolved to bind himself to Madame de Warens with an inalterable
+fidelity for all the rest of his days; he would watch over her with all
+the dutiful and tender vigilance of a son, and she should be to him
+something dearer than mother or wife or sister. What actually befell was
+this. He was attacked by vapours, which he characterises as the disorder
+of the happy. One symptom of his disease was the conviction derived from
+the rash perusal of surgeon's treatises, that he was suffering from a
+polypus in the heart. On the not very chivalrous principle that if he
+did not spend Madame de Warens' money, he was only leaving it for
+adventurers and knaves, he proceeded to Montpellier to consult the
+physicians, and took the money for his expenses out of his
+benefactress's store, which was always slender because it was always
+open to any hand. While on the road, he fell into an intrigue with a
+travelling companion, whom critics have compared to the fair Philina of
+Wilhelm Meister. In due time, the Montpellier doctor being unable to
+discover a disease, declared that the patient had none. The scenery was
+dull and unattractive, and this would have counterbalanced the
+weightiest prudential reasons with him at any time. Rousseau debated
+whether he should keep tryst with his gay fellow-traveller, or return to
+Chamb�ri. Remorse and that intractable emptiness of pocket which is the
+iron key to many a deed of ingenuous-looking self-denial and Spartan
+virtue, directed him homewards. Here he had a surprise, and perhaps
+learnt a lesson. He found installed in the house a personage whom he
+describes as tall, fair, noisy, coxcombical, flat-faced, flat-souled.
+Another triple alliance seemed a thing odious in the eyes of a man whom
+his travelling diversions had made a Pharisee for the hour. He
+protested, but Madame de Warens was a woman of principle, and declined
+to let Rousseau, who had profited by the doctrine of indifference, now
+set up in his own favour the contrary doctrine of a narrow and churlish
+partiality. So a short, delicious, and never-forgotten episode came to
+an end: this pair who had known so much happiness together were happy
+together no more, and the air became peopled for Rousseau with wan
+spectres of dead joys and fast gathering cares.
+
+The dates of the various events described in the fifth and sixth books
+of the Confessions are inextricable, and the order is evidently inverted
+more than once. The inversion of order is less serious than the
+contradictions between the dates of the Confessions and the more
+authentic and unmistakable dates of his letters. For instance, he
+describes a visit to Geneva as having been made shortly before Lautrec's
+temporary pacification of the civic troubles of that town; and that
+event took place in the spring of 1738. This would throw the Montpellier
+journey, which he says came after the visit to Geneva, into 1738, but
+the letters to Madame de Warens from Grenoble and Montpellier are dated
+in the autumn and winter of 1737.[102] Minor verifications attest the
+exactitude of the dates of the letters,[103] and we may therefore
+conclude that he returned from Montpellier, found his place taken and
+lost his old delight in Les Charmettes, in the early part of 1738. In
+the tenth of the R�veries he speaks of having passed "a space of four or
+five years" in the bliss of Les Charmettes, and it is true that his
+connection with it in one way and another lasted from the middle of 1736
+until about the middle of 1741. But as he left for Montpellier in the
+autumn of 1737, and found the obnoxious Vinzenried installed in 1738,
+the pure and characteristic felicity of Les Charmettes perhaps only
+lasted about a year or a year and a half. But a year may set a deep mark
+on a man, and give him imperishable taste of many things bitter
+and sweet.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[38] _Conf._, iii. 177.
+
+[39] Lamartine in _Raphael_ defies "a reasonable man to recompose with
+any reality the character that Rousseau gives to his mistress, out of
+the contradictory elements which he associates in her nature. One of
+these elements excludes the other." It is worth while for any who care
+for this kind of study to compare Madame de Warens with the Marquise
+de Courcelles, whom Sainte-Beuve has well called the Manon Lescaut of
+the seventeenth century.
+
+[40] Described by Rousseau in a memorandum for the biographer of M. de
+Bernex, printed in _M�langes_, pp. 139-144.
+
+[41] De Tavel, by name. Disorderly ideas as to the relations of the
+sexes began to appear in Switzerland along with the reformation of
+religion. In the sixteenth century a woman appeared at Geneva with the
+doctrine that it is as inhuman and as unjustifiable to refuse the
+gratification of this appetite in a man as to decline to give food and
+drink to the starving. Picot's _Hist. de Gen�ve_, vol. ii.
+
+[42] _Conf._, v. 341. Also ii. 83; and vi. 401.
+
+[43] _Conf._, v. 345.
+
+[44] _Conf._, ii. 83.
+
+[45] _Ib._ ii. 82.
+
+[46] _Ib._ iii. 179. See also 200.
+
+[47] _Conf._, iii. 177, 178.
+
+[48] _Conf._, iii. 183.
+
+[49] M. d'Aubonne.
+
+[50] _Conf._, iii 192.
+
+[51] M. Gatier.
+
+[52] M. Gaime.
+
+[53] _Conf._, iii. 204.
+
+[54] _Ib._ iii. 209, 210.
+
+[55] _Conf._, iii. 217-222.
+
+[56] _Conf._, iv. 227.
+
+[57] _Ib._ iii. 224.
+
+[58] One Venture de Villeneuve, who visited him years afterwards
+(1755) in Paris, when Rousseau found that the idol of old days was a
+crapulent debauchee. _Ib._ viii. 221.
+
+[59] Mdlles. de Graffenried and Galley. _Conf._, iv. 231.
+
+[60] _Ib._ iv. 254-256.
+
+[61] _Conf._, iv. 253.
+
+[62] While in the ambassador's house at Soleure, he was lodged in a
+room which had once belonged to his namesake, Jean Baptiste Rousseau
+(_b. 1670--d. 1741_), whom the older critics astonishingly insist on
+counting the first of French lyric poets. There was a third Rousseau,
+Pierre [_b. 1725--d. 1785_], who wrote plays and did other work now
+well forgotten. There are some lines imperfectly commemorative of the
+trio--
+
+Trois auteurs que Rousseau l'on nomme, Connus de Paris jusqu'� Rome,
+Sont diff�rens; voici par o�; Rousseau de Paris fut grand homme;
+Rousseau de Gen�ve est un fou; Rousseau de Toulouse un atome.
+
+Jean Jacques refers to both his namesakes in his letter to Voltaire,
+Jan. 30, 1750. _Corr._, i. 145.
+
+[63] The only object which ever surpassed his expectation was the
+great Roman structure near Nismes, the Pont du Gard. _Conf._, vi. 446.
+
+[64] Rousseau gives 1732 as the probable date of his return to
+Chamb�ri, after his first visit to Paris [_Conf._, v. 305], and the
+only objection to this is his mention of the incident of the march of
+the French troops, which could not have happened until the winter of
+1733, as having taken place "some months" after his arrival.
+Musset-Pathay accepts this as decisive, and fixes the return in the
+spring of 1733 [i. 12]. My own conjectural chronology is this: Returns
+from Turin towards the autumn of 1729; stays at Annecy until the
+spring of 1731; passes the winter of 1731-2 at Neuch�tel; first visits
+Paris in spring of 1732; returns to Savoy in the early summer of 1732.
+But a precise harmonising of the dates in the Confessions is
+impossible; Rousseau wrote them three and thirty years after our
+present point [in 1766 at Wootton], and never claimed to be exact in
+minuteness of date. Fortunately such matters in the present case are
+absolutely devoid of importance.
+
+[65] _Conf._, iv. 279, 280.
+
+[66] _Conf._, iv. 290, 291,
+
+[67] _Conf._, iv. 281-283.
+
+[68] _Conf._, v. 325.
+
+[69] _Conf._, v. 360-364. _Corr._, i. 21-24.
+
+[70] _Conf._, v. 349, 350.
+
+[71] Apparently in the summer of 1736, though, the reference to the
+return of the French troops at the peace [_Ib._ v. 365] would place it
+in 1735.
+
+[72] _Ib._ v. 356
+
+[73] _Ib._
+
+[74] _Conf._, v. 315, 316.
+
+[75] _Ib._ iv. 276. _Nouv. H�l._, II. xiv. 381, etc.
+
+[76] He refers to the ill-health of his youth, _Conf._, vii. 32, and
+describes an ominous head seizure while at Chamb�ri, _Ib._ vi. 396.
+
+[77] Rousseau's description of Les Charmettes is at the end of the
+fifth book. The present proprietor keeps the house arranged as it used
+to be, and has gathered one or two memorials of its famous tenant,
+including his poor _clavecin_ and his watch. In an outside wall,
+H�rault de Sechelles, when Commissioner from the Convention in the
+department of Mont Blanc, inserted a little white stone with two most
+lapidary stanzas inscribed upon it, about _g�nie, solitude, fiert�,
+gloire, v�rit�, envie_, and the like.
+
+[78] _R�veries_, x. 336 (1778).
+
+[79] _Conf._, vi. 393.
+
+[80] _Conf._, vi. 412.
+
+[81] _M�m. de Mdme. d'Epinay_, i. 394. (M. Boiteau's edition:
+Charpentier. 1865.)
+
+[82] _Conf._, vi. 399.
+
+[83] _Ib._ vi. 424. Goethe made a similar experiment; see Mr. Lewes's
+_Life_, p. 126.
+
+[84] Bernardin de Saint Pierre tells us this. _Oeuvres_ (Ed. 1818),
+xii. 70, etc.
+
+[85] _Conf._, iv. 297. See also the description of the scenery of the
+Valais, in the _Nouv. H�l._, Pt. I. Let. xxiii.
+
+[86] George Sand in _Mademoiselle la Quintinie_ (p. 27), a book
+containing some peculiarly subtle appreciations of the Savoy
+landscape.
+
+[87] _Conf._, iv. 298.
+
+[88] _Conf._, vi. 416, 422, etc.; iii. 164; iii. 203; v. 347; v. 383,
+384. Also vii. 53.
+
+[89] _Conf._, v. 313, 367; iv. 293; ix. 353. Also _M�m. de Mdme.
+d'Epinay_, ii. 151.
+
+[90] _Ib._ iii. 192, 193.
+
+[91] _Conf._, iv. 301; iii. 195.
+
+[92] _Conf._, v. 372, 373. The mistaken date assigned to the
+correspondence between Voltaire and Frederick is one of many instances
+how little we can trust the Confessions for minute accuracy, though
+their substantial veracity is confirmed by all the collateral evidence
+that we have.
+
+[93] _Ib._ iii. 188. For his debt in the way of education to Madame de
+Warens, see also _Ib._ vii. 46.
+
+[94] _Conf._, vi. 409.
+
+[95] _Ib._ vi. 413. He adds a suspicious-looking "_et cetera_."
+
+[96] _Conf._, vi. 414
+
+[97] _Conf._, iv. 295. See also v. 346.
+
+[98] _Corr._, 1736, pp. 26, 27.
+
+[99] _Conf._, iv. 271, where he says further that he never found
+enough attraction in French poetry to make him think of pursuing it.
+
+[100] The first part of the Confessions was written in Wootton in
+Derbyshire, in the winter of 1766-1767.
+
+[101] _Conf._, vi. 422.
+
+[102] _Corr._, i. 43, 46, 62, etc.
+
+[103] Musset-Pathay, i. 23, _n._
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+THERESA LE VASSEUR.
+
+
+Men like Rousseau, who are most heedless in letting their delight
+perish, are as often as not most loth to bury what they have slain, or
+even to perceive that life has gone out of it. The sight of simple
+hearts trying to coax back a little warm breath of former days into a
+present that is stiff and cold with indifference, is touching enough.
+But there is a certain grossness around the circumstances in which
+Rousseau now and too often found himself, that makes us watch his
+embarrassment with some composure. One cannot easily think of him as a
+simple heart, and we feel perhaps as much relief as he, when he resolves
+after making all due efforts to thrust out the intruder and bring Madame
+de Warens over from theories which had become too practical to be
+interesting, to leave Les Charmettes and accept a tutorship at Lyons.
+His new patron was a De Mably, elder brother of the philosophic abb� of
+the same name (1709-85), and of the still more notable Condillac
+(1714-80).
+
+The future author of the most influential treatise on education that has
+ever been written, was not successful in the practical and far more
+arduous side of that master art.[104] We have seen how little training
+he had ever given himself in the cardinal virtues of collectedness and
+self-control, and we know this to be the indispensable quality in all
+who have to shape young minds for a humane life. So long as all went
+well, he was an angel, but when things went wrong, he is willing to
+confess that he was a devil. When his two pupils could not understand
+him, he became frantic; when they showed wilfulness or any other part of
+the disagreeable materials out of which, along with the rest, human
+excellence has to be ingeniously and painfully manufactured, he was
+ready to kill them. This, as he justly admits, was not the way to render
+them either well learned or sage. The moral education of the teacher
+himself was hardly complete, for he describes how he used to steal his
+employer's wine, and the exquisite draughts which he enjoyed in the
+secrecy of his own room, with a piece of cake in one hand and some dear
+romance in the other. We should forgive greedy pilferings of this kind
+more easily if Rousseau had forgotten them more speedily. These are
+surely offences for which the best expiation is oblivion in a throng of
+worthier memories.
+
+It is easy to understand how often Rousseau's mind turned from the
+deadly drudgery of his present employment to the beatitude of former
+days. "What rendered my present condition insupportable was the
+recollection of my beloved Charmettes, of my garden, my trees, my
+fountain, my orchard, and above all of her for whom I felt myself born
+and who gave life to it all. As I thought of her, of our pleasures, our
+guileless days, I was seized by a tightness in my heart, a stopping of
+my breath, which robbed me of all spirit."[105] For years to come this
+was a kind of far-off accompaniment, thrumming melodiously in his ears
+under all the discords of a miserable life. He made another effort to
+quicken the dead. Throwing up his office with his usual promptitude in
+escaping from the irksome, after a residence of something like a year at
+Lyons (April, 1740--spring of 1741), he made his way back to his old
+haunts. The first half-hour with Madame de Warens persuaded him that
+happiness here was really at an end. After a stay of a few months, his
+desolation again overcame him. It was agreed that he should go to Paris
+to make his fortune by a new method of musical notation which he had
+invented, and after a short stay at Lyons, he found himself for the
+second time in the famous city which in the eighteenth century had
+become for the moment the centre of the universe.[106]
+
+It was not yet, however, destined to be a centre for him. His plan of
+musical notation was examined by a learned committee of the Academy, no
+member of whom was instructed in the musical art. Rousseau, dumb,
+inarticulate, and unready as usual, was amazed at the ease with which
+his critics by the free use of sounding phrases demolished arguments and
+objections which he perceived that they did not at all understand. His
+experience on this occasion suggested to him the most just reflection,
+how even without breadth of intelligence, the profound knowledge of any
+one thing is preferable in forming a judgment about it, to all possible
+enlightenment conferred by the cultivation of the sciences, without
+study of the special matter in question. It astonished him that all
+these learned men, who knew so many things, could yet be so ignorant
+that a man should only pretend to be a judge in his own craft.[107]
+
+His musical path to glory and riches thus blocked up, he surrendered
+himself not to despair but to complete idleness and peace of mind. He
+had a few coins left, and these prevented him from thinking of a future.
+He was presented to one or two great ladies, and with the blundering
+gallantry habitual to him he wrote a letter to one of the greatest of
+them, declaring his passion for her. Madame Dupin was the daughter of
+one, and the wife of another, of the richest men in France, and the
+attentions of a man whose acquaintance Madame Beuzenval had begun by
+inviting him to dine in the servants' hall, were not pleasing to
+her.[108] She forgave the impertinence eventually, and her stepson, M.
+Francueil, was Rousseau's patron for some years.[109] On the whole,
+however, in spite of his own account of his social ineptitude, there
+cannot have been anything so repulsive in his manners as this account
+would lead us to think. There is no grave anachronism in introducing
+here the impression which he made on two fine ladies not many years
+after this. "He pays compliments, yet he is not polite, or at least he
+is without the air of politeness. He seems to be ignorant of the usages
+of society, but it is easily seen that he is infinitely intelligent. He
+has a brown complexion, while eyes that overflow with fire give
+animation to his expression. When he has spoken and you look at him, he
+appears comely; but when you try to recall him, his image is always
+extremely plain. They say that he has bad health, and endures agony
+which from some motive of vanity he most carefully conceals. It is
+this, I fancy, which gives him from time to time an air of
+sullenness."[110] The other lady, who saw him at the same time, speaks
+of "the poor devil of an author, who's as poor as Job for you, but with
+wit and vanity enough for four.... They say his history is as queer as
+his person, and that is saying a good deal.... Madame Maupeou and I
+tried to guess what it was. 'In spite of his face,' said she (for it is
+certain he is uncommonly plain), 'his eyes tell that love plays a great
+part in his romance.' 'No,' said I, 'his nose tells me that it is
+vanity.' 'Well then, 'tis both one and the other.'"[111]
+
+One of his patronesses took some trouble to procure him the post of
+secretary to the French ambassador at Venice, and in the spring of 1743
+our much-wandering man started once more in quest of meat and raiment in
+the famous city of the Adriatic. This was one of those steps of which
+there are not a few in a man's life, that seem at the moment to rank
+foremost in the short line of decisive acts, and then are presently seen
+not to have been decisive at all, but mere interruptions conducting
+nowhither. In truth the critical moments with us are mostly as points in
+slumber. Even if the ancient oracles of the gods were to regain their
+speech once more on the earth, men would usually go to consult them on
+days when the answer would have least significance, and could guide
+them least far. That one of the most heedless vagrants in Europe, and as
+it happened one of the men of most extraordinary genius also, should
+have got a footing in the train of the ambassador of a great government,
+would naturally seem to him and others as chance's one critical stroke
+in his life. In reality it was nothing. The Count of Montaigu, his
+master, was one of the worst characters with whom Rousseau could for his
+own profit have been brought into contact. In his professional quality
+he was not far from imbecile. The folly and weakness of the government
+at Versailles during the reign of Lewis XV., and its indifference to
+competence in every department except perhaps partially in the fisc, was
+fairly illustrated in its absurd representative at Venice. The
+secretary, whose renown has preserved his master's name, has recorded
+more amply than enough the grounds of quarrel between them. Rousseau is
+for once eager to assert his own efficiency, and declares that he
+rendered many important services for which he was repaid with
+ingratitude and persecution.[112] One would be glad to know what the
+Count of Montaigu's version of matters was, for in truth Rousseau's
+conduct in previous posts makes us wonder how it was that he who had
+hitherto always been unfaithful over few things, suddenly touched
+perfection when he became lord over many.
+
+There is other testimony, however, to the ambassador's morbid quality,
+of which, after that general imbecility which was too common a thing
+among men in office to be remarkable, avarice was the most striking
+trait. For instance, careful observation had persuaded him that three
+shoes are equivalent to two pairs, because there is always one of a pair
+which is more worn than its fellow; and hence he habitually ordered his
+shoes in threes.[113] It was natural enough that such a master and such
+a secretary should quarrel over perquisites. That slightly cringing
+quality which we have noticed on one or two occasions in Rousseau's
+hungry youthful time, had been hardened out of him by circumstance or
+the strengthening of inborn fibre. He would now neither dine in a
+servants' hall because a fine lady forgot what was due to a musician,
+nor share his fees with a great ambassador who forgot what was due to
+himself. These sordid disputes are of no interest now to anybody, and we
+need only say that after a period of eighteen months passed in
+uncongenial company, Rousseau parted from his count in extreme dudgeon,
+and the diplomatic career which he had promised to himself came to the
+same close as various other careers had already done.
+
+He returned to Paris towards the end of 1744, burning with indignation
+at the unjust treatment which he believed himself to have suffered, and
+laying memorial after memorial before the minister at home. He assures
+us that it was the justice and the futility of his complaints, that left
+in his soul the germ of exasperation against preposterous civil
+institutions, "in which the true common weal and real justice are always
+sacrificed to some seeming order or other, which is in fact destructive
+of all order, and only adds the sanction of public authority to the
+oppression of the weak and the iniquity of the strong."[114]
+
+One or two pictures connected with the Venetian episode remain in the
+memory of the reader of the Confessions, and among them perhaps with
+most people is that of the quarantine at Genoa in Rousseau's voyage to
+his new post. The travellers had the choice of remaining on board the
+felucca, or passing the time in an unfurnished lazaretto. This, we may
+notice in passing, was his first view of the sea; he makes no mention of
+the fact, nor does the sight or thought of the sea appear to have left
+the least mark in any line of his writings. He always disliked it, and
+thought of it with melancholy. Rousseau, as we may suppose, found the
+want of space and air in the boat the most intolerable of evils, and
+preferred to go alone to the lazaretto, though it had neither
+window-sashes nor tables nor chairs nor bed, nor even a truss of straw
+to lie down upon. He was locked up and had the whole barrack to himself.
+"I manufactured," he says, "a good bed out of my coats and shirts,
+sheets out of towels which I stitched together, a pillow out of my old
+cloak rolled up. I made myself a seat of one trunk placed flat, and a
+table of the other. I got out some paper and my writing-desk, and
+arranged some dozen books that I had by way of library. In short I made
+myself so comfortable, that, with the exception of curtains and windows,
+I was nearly as well off in this absolutely naked lazaretto as in my
+lodgings in Paris. My meals were served with much pomp; two grenadiers,
+with bayonets at their musket-ends, escorted them; the staircase was my
+dining-room, the landing did for table and the lower step for a seat,
+and when my dinner was served, they rang a little bell as they withdrew,
+to warn me to seat myself at table. Between my meals, when I was neither
+writing nor reading, nor busy with my furnishing, I went for a walk in
+the Protestant graveyard, or mounted into a lantern which looked out on
+to the port, and whence I could see the ships sailing in and out. I
+passed a fortnight in this way, and I could have spent the whole three
+weeks of the quarantine without feeling an instant's weariness."[115]
+
+These are the occasions when we catch glimpses of the true Rousseau; but
+his residence in Venice was on the whole one of his few really sociable
+periods. He made friends and kept them, and there was even a certain
+gaiety in his life. He used to tell people their fortunes in a way that
+an earlier century would have counted unholy.[116] He rarely sought
+pleasure in those of her haunts for which the Queen of the Adriatic had
+a guilty renown, but he has left one singular anecdote, showing the
+degree to which profound sensibility is capable of doing the moralist's
+work in a man, and how a stroke of sympathetic imagination may keep one
+from sin more effectually than an ethical precept.[117] It is pleasanter
+to think of him as working at the formation of that musical taste which
+ten years afterwards led him to amaze the Parisians by proving that
+French melody was a hollow idea born of national self-delusion. A
+Venetian experiment, whose evidence in the special controversy is less
+weighty perhaps than Rousseau supposed, was among the facts which
+persuaded him that Italian is the language of music. An Armenian who had
+never heard any music was invited to listen first of all to a French
+monologue, and then to an air of Galuppi's. Rousseau observed in the
+Armenian more surprise than pleasure during the performance of the
+French piece. The first notes of the Italian were no sooner struck, than
+his eyes and whole expression softened; he was enchanted, surrendered
+his whole soul to the ravishing impressions of the music, and could
+never again be induced to listen to the performance of any
+French air.[118]
+
+More important than this was the circumstance that the sight of the
+defects of the government of the Venetian Republic first drew his mind
+to political speculation, and suggested to him the composition of a
+book that was to be called Institutions Politiques.[119] The work, as
+thus designed and named, was never written, but the idea of it, after
+many years of meditation, ripened first in the Discourse on Inequality,
+and then in the Social Contract.
+
+If Rousseau's departure for Venice was a wholly insignificant element in
+his life, his return from it was almost immediately followed by an event
+which counted for nothing at the moment, which his friends by and by
+came to regard as the fatal and irretrievable disaster of his life, but
+which he persistently described as the only real consolation that heaven
+permitted him to taste in his misery, and the only one that enabled him
+to bear his many sore burdens.[120]
+
+He took up his quarters at a small and dirty hotel not far from the
+Sorbonne, where he had alighted on the occasion of his second arrival in
+Paris.[121] Here was a kitchen-maid, some two-and-twenty years old, who
+used to sit at table with her mistress and the guests of the house. The
+company was rough, being mainly composed of Irish and Gascon abb�s, and
+other people to whom graces of mien and refinement of speech had come
+neither by nature nor cultivation. The hostess herself pitched the
+conversation in merry Rabelaisian key, and the apparent modesty of her
+serving-woman gave a zest to her own licence. Rousseau was moved with
+pity for a maid defenceless against a ribald storm, and from pity he
+advanced to some warmer sentiment, and he and Theresa Le Vasseur took
+each other for better for worse, in a way informal but sufficiently
+effective. This was the beginning of a union which lasted for the length
+of a generation and more, down to the day of Rousseau's most tragical
+ending.[122] She thought she saw in him a worthy soul; and he was
+convinced that he saw in her a woman of sensibility, simple and free
+from trick, and neither of the two, he says, was deceived in respect of
+the other. Her intellectual quality was unique. She could never be
+taught to read with any approach to success. She could never follow the
+order of the twelve months of the year, nor master a single arithmetical
+figure, nor count a sum of money, nor reckon the price of a thing. A
+month's instruction was not enough to give knowledge of the hours of the
+day on the dial-plate. The words she used were often the direct
+opposites of the words that she meant to use.[123]
+
+The marriage choice of others is the inscrutable puzzle of those who
+have no eye for the fact that such choice is the great match of cajolery
+between purpose and invisible hazard; the blessedness of many lives is
+the stake, as intention happens to cheat accident or to be cheated by
+it. When the match is once over, deep criticism of a game of pure chance
+is time wasted. The crude talk in which the unwise deliver their
+judgments upon the conditions of success in the relations between men
+and women, has flowed with unprofitable copiousness as to this not very
+inviting case. People construct an imaginary Rousseau out of his
+writings, and then fetter their elevated, susceptible, sensitive, and
+humane creation, to the unfortunate woman who could never be taught that
+April is the month after March, or that twice four and a half are nine.
+Now we have already seen enough of Rousseau to know for how infinitely
+little he counted the gift of a quick wit, and what small store he set
+either on literary varnish or on capacity for receiving it. He was
+touched in people with whom he had to do, not by attainment, but by
+moral fibre or his imaginary impression of their moral fibre. Instead of
+analysing a character, bringing its several elements into the balance,
+computing the more or less of this faculty or that, he loved to feel its
+influence as a whole, indivisible, impalpable, playing without sound or
+agitation around him like soft light and warmth and the fostering air.
+The deepest ignorance, the dullest incapacity, the cloudiest faculties
+of apprehension, were nothing to him in man or woman, provided he could
+only be sensible of that indescribable emanation from voice and eye and
+movement, that silent effusion of serenity around spoken words, which
+nature has given to some tranquillising spirits, and which would have
+left him free in an even life of indolent meditation and unfretted
+sense. A woman of high, eager, stimulating kind would have been a more
+fatal mate for him than the most stupid woman that ever rivalled the
+stupidity of man. Stimulation in any form always meant distress to
+Rousseau. The moist warmth of the Savoy valleys was not dearer to him
+than the subtle inhalations of softened and close enveloping
+companionship, in which the one needful thing is not intellectual
+equality, but easy, smooth, constant contact of feeling about the
+thousand small matters that make up the existence of a day. This is not
+the highest ideal of union that one's mind can conceive from the point
+of view of intense productive energy, but Rousseau was not concerned
+with the conditions of productive energy. He only sought to live, to be
+himself, and he knew better than any critics can know for him, what kind
+of nature was the best supplement for his own. As he said in an
+apophthegm with a deep melancholy lying at the bottom of it,--you never
+can cite the example of a thoroughly happy man, for no one but the man
+himself knows anything about it.[124] "By the side of people we love,"
+he says very truly, "sentiment nourishes the intelligence as well as the
+heart, and we have little occasion to seek ideas elsewhere. I lived with
+my Theresa as pleasantly as with the finest genius in the
+universe."[125]
+
+Theresa Le Vasseur would probably have been happier if she had married a
+stout stable-boy, as indeed she did some thirty years hence by way of
+gathering up the fragments that were left; but there is little reason to
+think that Rousseau would have been much happier with any other mate
+than he was with Theresa. There was no social disparity between the two.
+She was a person accustomed to hardship and coarseness, and so was he.
+And he always systematically preferred the honest coarseness of the
+plain people from whom he was sprung and among whom he had lived, to the
+more hateful coarseness of heart which so often lurks under fine manners
+and a complete knowledge of the order of the months in the year and the
+arithmetical table. Rousseau had been a serving-man, and there was no
+deterioration in going with a serving-woman.[126] However this may be,
+it is certain that for the first dozen years or so of his
+partnership--and many others as well as he are said to have found in
+this term a limit to the conditions of the original contract,--Rousseau
+had perfect and entire contentment in the Theresa whom all his friends
+pronounced as mean, greedy, jealous, degrading, as she was avowedly
+brutish in understanding. Granting that she was all these things, how
+much of the responsibility for his acts has been thus shifted from the
+shoulders of Rousseau himself, whose connection with her was from
+beginning to end entirely voluntary? If he attached himself deliberately
+to an unworthy object by a bond which he was indisputably free to break
+on any day that he chose, were not the effects of such a union as much
+due to his own character which sought, formed, and perpetuated it, as to
+the character of Theresa Le Vasseur? Nothing, as he himself said in a
+passage to which he appends a vindication of Theresa, shows the true
+leanings and inclinations of a man better than the sort of attachments
+which he forms.[127]
+
+It is a natural blunder in a literate and well-mannered society to
+charge a mistake against a man who infringes its conventions in this
+particular way. Rousseau knew what he was about, as well as politer
+persons. He was at least as happy with his kitchen wench as Addison was
+with his countess, or Voltaire with his marchioness, and he would not
+have been what he was, nor have played the part that he did play in the
+eighteenth century, if he had felt anything derogatory or unseemly in a
+kitchen wench. The selection was probably not very deliberate; as it
+happened, Theresa served as a standing illustration of two of his most
+marked traits, a contempt for mere literary culture, and a yet deeper
+contempt for social accomplishments and social position. In time he
+found out the grievous disadvantages of living in solitude with a
+companion who did not know how to think, and whose stock of ideas was so
+slight that the only common ground of talk between them was gossip and
+quodlibets. But her lack of sprightliness, beauty, grace, refinement,
+and that gentle initiative by which women may make even a sombre life so
+various, went for nothing with him. What his friends missed in her, he
+did not seek and would not have valued; and what he found in her, they
+were naturally unable to appreciate, for they never were in the mood for
+detecting it. "I have not seen much of happy men," he wrote when near
+his end, "perhaps nothing; but I have many a time seen contented hearts,
+and of all the objects that have struck me, I believe it is this which
+has always given most contentment to myself."[128] This moderate
+conception of felicity, which was always so characteristic with him, as
+an even, durable, and rather low-toned state of the feelings, accounts
+for his prolonged acquiescence in a companion whom men with more elation
+in their ideal would assuredly have found hostile even to the most
+modest contentment.
+
+"The heart of my Theresa," he wrote long after the first tenderness had
+changed into riper emotion on his side, and, alas, into indifference on
+hers, "was that of an angel; our attachment waxed stronger with our
+intimacy, and we felt more and more each day that we were made for one
+another. If our pleasures could be described, their simplicity would
+make you laugh; our excursions together out of town, in which I would
+munificently expend eight or ten halfpence in some rural tavern; our
+modest suppers at my window, seated in front of one another on two small
+chairs placed on a trunk that filled up the breadth of the embrasure.
+Here the window did duty for a table, we breathed the fresh air, we
+could see the neighbourhood and the people passing by, and though on the
+fourth story, could look down into the street as we ate. Who shall
+describe, who shall feel the charms of those meals, consisting of a
+coarse quartern loaf, some cherries, a tiny morsel of cheese, and a pint
+of wine which we drank between us? Ah, what delicious seasoning there is
+in friendship, confidence, intimacy, gentleness of soul! We used
+sometimes to remain thus until midnight, without once thinking of the
+time."[129]
+
+Men and women are often more fairly judged by the way in which they bear
+the burden of what they have done, than by the prime act which laid the
+burden on their lives.[130] The deeper part of us shows in the manner of
+accepting consequences. On the whole, Rousseau's relations with this
+woman present him in a better light than those with any other person
+whatever. If he became with all the rest of the world suspicious, angry,
+jealous, profoundly diseased in a word, with her he was habitually
+trustful, affectionate, careful, most long-suffering. It sometimes even
+occurs to us that his constancy to Theresa was only another side of the
+morbid perversity of his relations with the rest of the world. People of
+a certain kind not seldom make the most serious and vital sacrifices for
+bare love of singularity, and a man like Rousseau was not unlikely to
+feel an eccentric pleasure in proving that he could find merit in a
+woman who to everybody else was desperate. One who is on bad terms with
+the bulk of his fellows may contrive to save his self-respect and
+confirm his conviction that they are all in the wrong, by preserving
+attachment to some one to whom general opinion is hostile; the private
+argument being that if he is capable of this degree of virtue and
+friendship in an unfavourable case, how much more could he have
+practised it with others, if they would only have allowed him. Whether
+this kind of apology was present to his mind or not, Rousseau could
+always refer those who charged him with black caprice, to his steady
+kindness towards Theresa Le Vasseur. Her family were among the most
+odious of human beings, greedy, idle, and ill-humoured, while her mother
+had every fault that a woman could have in Rousseau's eyes, including
+that worst fault of setting herself up for a fine wit. Yet he bore with
+them all for years, and did not break with Madame Le Vasseur until she
+had poisoned the mind of her daughter, and done her best by rapacity and
+lying to render him contemptible to all his friends.
+
+In the course of years Theresa herself gave him unmistakable signs of a
+change in her affections. "I began to feel," he says, at a date of
+sixteen or seventeen years from our present point, "that she was no
+longer for me what she had been in our happy years, and I felt it all
+the more clearly as I was still the same towards her."[131] This was in
+1762, and her estrangement grew deeper and her indifference more open,
+until at length, seven years afterwards, we find that she had proposed a
+separation from him. What the exact reasons for this gradual change may
+have been we do not know, nor have we any right in ignorance of the
+whole facts to say that they were not adequate and just. There are two
+good traits recorded of the woman's character. She could never console
+herself for having let her father be taken away to end his days
+miserably in a house of charity.[132] And the repudiation of her
+children, against which the glowing egoism of maternity always rebelled,
+remained a cruel dart in her bosom as long as she lived. We may suppose
+that there was that about household life with Rousseau which might have
+bred disgusts even in one as little fastidious as Theresa was. Among
+other things which must have been hard to endure, we know that in
+composing his works he was often weeks together without speaking a word
+to her.[133] Perhaps again it would not be difficult to produce some
+passages in Rousseau's letters and in the Confessions, which show traces
+of that subtle contempt for women that lurks undetected in many who
+would blush to avow it. Whatever the causes may have been, from
+indifference she passed to something like aversion, and in the one
+place where a word of complaint is wrung from him, he describes her as
+rending and piercing his heart at a moment when his other miseries were
+at their height. His patience at any rate was inexhaustible; now old,
+worn by painful bodily infirmities, racked by diseased suspicion and the
+most dreadful and tormenting of the minor forms of madness, nearly
+friendless, and altogether hopeless, he yet kept unabated the old
+tenderness of a quarter of a century before, and expressed it in words
+of such gentleness, gravity, and self-respecting strength, as may touch
+even those whom his books leave unmoved, and who view his character with
+deepest distrust. "For the six-and-twenty years, dearest, that our union
+has lasted, I have never sought my happiness except in yours, and have
+never ceased to try to make you happy; and you saw by what I did
+lately,[134] that your honour and happiness were one as dear to me as
+the other. I see with pain that success does not answer my solicitude,
+and that my kindness is not as sweet to you to receive, as it is sweet
+to me to show. I know that the sentiments of honour and uprightness with
+which you were born will never change in you; but as for those of
+tenderness and attachment which were once reciprocal between us, I feel
+that they now only exist on my side. Not only, dearest of all friends,
+have you ceased to find pleasure in my company, but you have to tax
+yourself severely even to remain a few minutes with me out of
+complaisance. You are at your ease with all the world but me. I do not
+speak to you of many other things. We must take our friends with their
+faults, and I ought to pass over yours, as you pass over mine. If you
+were happy with me I could be content, but I see clearly that you are
+not, and this is what makes my heart sore. If I could do better for your
+happiness, I would do it and hold my peace; but that is not possible. I
+have left nothing undone that I thought would contribute to your
+felicity. At this moment, while I am writing to you, overwhelmed with
+distress and misery, I have no more true or lively desire than to finish
+my days in closest union with you. You know my lot,--it is such as one
+could not even dare to describe, for no one could believe it. I never
+had, my dearest, other than one single solace, but that the sweetest; it
+was to pour out all my heart in yours; when I talked of my miseries to
+you, they were soothed; and when you had pitied me, I needed pity no
+more. My every resource, my whole confidence, is in you and in you only;
+my soul cannot exist without sympathy, and cannot find sympathy except
+with you. It is certain that if you fail me and I am forced to live
+alone, I am as a dead man. But I should die a thousand times more
+cruelly still, if we continued to live together in misunderstanding, and
+if confidence and friendship were to go out between us. It would be a
+hundred times better to cease to see each other; still to live, and
+sometimes to regret one another. Whatever sacrifice may be necessary on
+my part to make you happy, be so at any cost, and I shall be content.
+We have faults to weep over and to expiate, but no crimes; let us not
+blot out by the imprudence of our closing days the sweetness and purity
+of those we have passed together."[135] Think ill as we may of
+Rousseau's theories, and meanly as we may of some parts of his conduct,
+yet to those who can feel the pulsing of a human life apart from a man's
+formul�, and can be content to leave to sure circumstance the tragic
+retaliation for evil behaviour, this letter is like one of the great
+master's symphonies, whose theme falls in soft strokes of melting pity
+on the heart. In truth, alas, the union of this now diverse pair had
+been stained by crimes shortly after its beginning. In the estrangement
+of father and mother in their late years we may perhaps hear the rustle
+and spy the pale forms of the avenging spectres of their lost children.
+
+At the time when the connection with Theresa Le Vasseur was formed,
+Rousseau did not know how to gain bread. He composed the musical
+diversion of the Muses Galantes, which Rameau rightly or wrongly
+pronounced a plagiarism, and at the request of Richelieu he made some
+minor re-adaptations in Voltaire's Princesse de Navarre, which Rameau
+had set to music--that "farce of the fair" to which the author of Za�re
+owed his seat in the Academy.[136] But neither task brought him money,
+and he fell back on a sort of secretaryship, with perhaps a little of
+the valet in it, to Madame Dupin and her son-in-law, M. de Francueil,
+for which he received the too moderate income of nine hundred francs. On
+one occasion he returned to his room expecting with eager impatience the
+arrival of a remittance, the proceeds of some small property which came
+to him by the death of his father.[137] He found the letter, and was
+opening it with trembling hands, when he was suddenly smitten with shame
+at his want of self-control; he placed it unopened on the chimney-piece,
+undressed, slept better than usual, and when he awoke the next morning,
+he had forgotten all about the letter until it caught his eye. He was
+delighted to find that it contained his money, but "I can swear," he
+adds, "that my liveliest delight was in having conquered myself." An
+occasion for self-conquest on a more considerable scale was at hand. In
+these tight straits, he received grievous news from the unfortunate
+Theresa. He made up his mind cheerfully what to do; the mother
+acquiesced after sore persuasion and with bitter tears; and the new-born
+child was dropped into oblivion in the box of the asylum for foundlings.
+Next year the same easy expedient was again resorted to, with the same
+heedlessness on the part of the father, the same pain and reluctance on
+the part of the mother. Five children in all were thus put away, and
+with such entire absence of any precaution with a view to their
+identification in happier times, that not even a note was kept of the
+day of their birth.[138]
+
+People have made a great variety of remarks upon this transaction, from
+the economist who turns it into an illustration of the evil results of
+hospitals for foundlings in encouraging improvident unions, down to the
+theologian who sees in it new proof of the inborn depravity of the human
+heart and the fall of man. Others have vindicated it in various ways,
+one of them courageously taking up the ground that Rousseau had good
+reason to believe that the children were not his own, and therefore was
+fully warranted in sending the poor creatures kinless into the
+universe.[139] Perhaps it is not too transcendental a thing to hope that
+civilisation may one day reach a point when a plea like this shall count
+for an aggravation rather than a palliative; when a higher conception of
+the duties of humanity, familiarised by the practice of adoption as well
+as by the spread of both rational and compassionate considerations as to
+the blameless little ones, shall have expelled what is surely as some
+red and naked beast's emotion of fatherhood. What may be an excellent
+reason for repudiating a woman, can never be a reason for abandoning a
+child, except with those whom reckless egoism has made willing to think
+it a light thing to fling away from us the moulding of new lives and the
+ensuring of salutary nurture for growing souls.
+
+We are, however, dispensed from entering into these questions of the
+greater morals by the very plain account which the chief actor has given
+us, almost in spite of himself. His crime like most others was the
+result of heedlessness, of the overriding of duty by the short dim-eyed
+selfishness of the moment. He had been accustomed to frequent a tavern,
+where the talk turned mostly upon topics which men with much
+self-respect put as far from them, as men with little self-respect will
+allow them to do. "I formed my fashion of thinking from what I perceived
+to reign among people who were at bottom extremely worthy folk, and I
+said to myself, Since it is the usage of the country, as one lives here,
+one may as well follow it. So I made up my mind to it cheerfully, and
+without the least scruple."[140] By and by he proceeded to cover this
+nude and intelligible explanation with finer phrases, about preferring
+that his children should be trained up as workmen and peasants rather
+than as adventurers and fortune-hunters, and about his supposing that in
+sending them to the hospital for foundlings he was enrolling himself a
+citizen in Plato's Republic.[141] This is hardly more than the talk of
+one become famous, who is defending the acts of his obscurity on the
+high principles which fame requires. People do not turn citizens of
+Plato's Republic "cheerfully and without the least scruple," and if a
+man frequents company where the despatch of inconvenient children to the
+hospital was an accepted point of common practice, it is superfluous to
+drag Plato and his Republic into the matter. Another turn again was
+given to his motives when his mind had become clouded by suspicious
+mania. Writing a year or two before his death he had assured himself
+that his determining reason was the fear of a destiny for his children a
+thousand times worse than the hard life of foundlings, namely, being
+spoiled by their mother, being turned into monsters by her family, and
+finally being taught to hate and betray their father by his plotting
+enemies.[142] This is obviously a mixture in his mind of the motives
+which led to the abandonment of the children and justified the act to
+himself at the time, with the circumstances that afterwards reconciled
+him to what he had done; for now he neither had any enemies plotting
+against him, nor did he suppose that he had. As for his wife's family,
+he showed himself quite capable, when the time came, of dealing
+resolutely and shortly with their importunities in his own case, and he
+might therefore well have trusted his power to deal with them in the
+case of his children. He was more right when in 1770, in his important
+letter to M. de St. Germain, he admitted that example, necessity, the
+honour of her who was dear to him, all united to make him entrust his
+children to the establishment provided for that purpose, and kept him
+from fulfilling the first and holiest of natural duties. "In this, far
+from excusing, I accuse myself; and when my reason tells me that I did
+what I ought to have done in my situation, I believe that less than my
+heart, which bitterly belies it."[143] This coincides with the first
+undisguised account given in the Confessions, which has been already
+quoted, and it has not that flawed ring of cant and fine words which
+sounds through nearly all his other references to this great stain upon
+his life, excepting one, and this is the only further document with
+which we need concern ourselves. In that,[144] which was written while
+the unholy work was actually being done, he states very distinctly that
+the motives were those which are more or less closely connected with
+most unholy works, motives of money--the great instrument and measure of
+our personal convenience, the quantitative test of our self-control in
+placing personal convenience behind duty to other people. "If my misery
+and my misfortunes rob me of the power of fulfilling a duty so dear,
+that is a calamity to pity me for, rather than a crime to reproach me
+with. I owe them subsistence, and I procured a better or at least a
+surer subsistence for them than I could myself have provided; this
+condition is above all others." Next comes the consideration of their
+mother, whose honour must be kept. "You know my situation; I gained my
+bread from day to day painfully enough; how then should I feed a family
+as well? And if I were compelled to fall back on the profession of
+author, how would domestic cares and the confusion of children leave me
+peace of mind enough in my garret to earn a living? Writings which
+hunger dictates are hardly of any use, and such a resource is speedily
+exhausted. Then I should have to resort to patronage, to intrigue, to
+tricks ... in short to surrender myself to all those infamies, for which
+I am penetrated with such just horror. Support myself, my children, and
+their mother on the blood of wretches? No, madame, it were better for
+them to be orphans than to have a scoundrel for their father.... Why
+have I not married, you will ask? Madame, ask it of your unjust laws. It
+was not fitting for me to contract an eternal engagement; and it will
+never be proved to me that my duty binds me to it. What is certain is
+that I have never done it, and that I never meant to do it. But we ought
+not to have children when we cannot support them. Pardon me, madame;
+nature means us to have offspring, since the earth produces sustenance
+enough for all; but it is the rich, it is your class, which robs mine of
+the bread of my children.... I know that foundlings are not delicately
+nurtured; so much the better for them, they become more robust. They
+have nothing superfluous given to them, but they have everything that is
+necessary. They do not make gentlemen of them, but peasants or
+artisans.... They would not know how to dance, or ride on horseback, but
+they would have strong unwearied legs. I would neither make authors of
+them, nor clerks; I would not practise them in handling the pen, but the
+plough, the file, and the plane, instruments for leading a healthy,
+laborious, innocent life.... I deprived myself of the delight of seeing
+them, and I have never tasted the sweetness of a father's embrace. Alas,
+as I have already told you, I see in this only a claim on your pity, and
+I deliver them from misery at my own expense."[145] We may see here that
+Rousseau's sophistical eloquence, if it misled others, was at least as
+powerful in misleading himself, and it may be noted that this letter,
+with its talk of the children of the rich taking bread out of the mouths
+of the children of the poor, contains the first of those socialistic
+sentences by which the writer in after times gained so famous a name. It
+is at any rate clear from this that the real motive of the abandonment
+of the children was wholly material. He could not afford to maintain
+them, and he did not wish to have his comfort disturbed by
+their presence.
+
+There is assuredly no word to be said by any one with firm reason and
+unsophisticated conscience in extenuation of this crime. We have only to
+remember that a great many other persons in that lax time, when the
+structure of the family was undermined alike in practice and
+speculation, were guilty of the same crime; that Rousseau, better than
+they, did not erect his own criminality into a social theory, but was
+tolerably soon overtaken by a remorse which drove him both to confess
+his misdeed, and to admit that it was inexpiable; and that the atrocity
+of the offence owes half the blackness with which it has always been
+invested by wholesome opinion, to the fact that the offender was by and
+by the author of the most powerful book by which parental duty has been
+commended in its full loveliness and nobility. And at any rate, let
+Rousseau be a little free from excessive reproach from all clergymen,
+sentimentalists, and others, who do their worst to uphold the common and
+rather bestial opinion in favour of reckless propagation, and who, if
+they do not advocate the despatch of children to public institutions,
+still encourage a selfish incontinence which ultimately falls in burdens
+on others than the offenders, and which turns the family into a scene of
+squalor and brutishness, producing a kind of parental influence that is
+far more disastrous and demoralising than the absence of it in public
+institutions can possibly be. If the propagation of children without
+regard to their maintenance be either a virtue or a necessity, and if
+afterwards the only alternatives are their maintenance in an asylum on
+the one hand, and their maintenance in the degradation of a
+poverty-stricken home on the other, we should not hesitate to give
+people who act as Rousseau acted, all that credit for self-denial and
+high moral courage which he so audaciously claimed for himself. It
+really seems to be no more criminal to produce children with the
+deliberate intention of abandoning them to public charity, as Rousseau
+did, than it is to produce them in deliberate reliance on the besotted
+maxim that he who sends mouths will send meat, or any other of the
+spurious saws which make Providence do duty for self-control, and add to
+the gratification of physical appetite the grotesque luxury of
+religious unction.
+
+In 1761 the Mar�chale de Luxembourg made efforts to discover Rousseau's
+children, but without success. They were gone beyond hope of
+identification, and the author of _Emitius_ and his sons and daughters
+lived together in this world, not knowing one another. Rousseau with
+singular honesty did not conceal his satisfaction at the fruitlessness
+of the charitable endeavours to restore them to him. "The success of
+your search," he wrote, "could not give me pure and undisturbed
+pleasure; it is too late, too late.... In my present condition this
+search interested me more for another person [Theresa] than myself; and
+considering the too easily yielding character of the person in question,
+it is possible that what she had found already formed for good or for
+evil, might turn out a sorry boon to her."[146] We may doubt, in spite
+of one or two charming and graceful passages, whether Rousseau was of a
+nature to have any feeling for the pathos of infancy, the bright blank
+eye, the eager unpurposed straining of the hand, the many turns and
+changes in murmurings that yet can tell us nothing. He was both too
+self-centred and too passionate for warm ease and fulness of life in all
+things, to be truly sympathetic with a condition whose feebleness and
+immaturity touch us with half-painful hope.
+
+Rousseau speaks in the Confessions of having married Theresa
+five-and-twenty years after the beginning of their acquaintance,[147]
+but we hardly have to understand that any ceremony took place which
+anybody but himself would recognise as constituting a marriage. What
+happened appears to have been this. Seated at table with Theresa and two
+guests, one of them the mayor of the place, he declared that she was his
+wife. "This good and seemly engagement was contracted," he says, "in all
+the simplicity but also in all the truth of nature, in the presence of
+two men of worth and honour.... During the short and simple act, I saw
+the honest pair melted in tears."[148] He had at this time whimsically
+assumed the name of Renou, and he wrote to a friend that of course he
+had married in this name, for he adds, with the characteristic insertion
+of an irrelevant bit of magniloquence, "it is not names that are
+married; no, it is persons." "Even if in this simple and holy ceremony
+names entered as a constituent part, the one I bear would have sufficed,
+since I recognise no other. If it were a question of property to be
+assured, then it would be another thing, but you know very well that is
+not our case."[149] Of course, this may have been a marriage according
+to the truth of nature, and Rousseau was as free to choose his own rites
+as more sacramental performers, but it is clear from his own words about
+property that there was no pretence of a marriage in law. He and Theresa
+were on profoundly uncomfortable terms about this time,[150] and
+Rousseau is not the only person by many thousands who has deceived
+himself into thinking that some form of words between man and woman must
+magically transform the substance of their characters and lives, and
+conjure up new relations of peace and steadfastness.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We have, however, been outstripping slow-footed destiny, and have now to
+return to the time when Theresa did not drink brandy, nor run after
+stable-boys, nor fill Rousseau's soul with bitterness and suspicion, but
+sat contentedly with him in an evening taking a stoic's meal in the
+window of their garret on the fourth floor, seasoning it with
+"confidence, intimacy, gentleness of soul," and that general comfort of
+sensation which, as we know to our cost, is by no means an invariable
+condition either of duty done externally or of spiritual growth within.
+It is perhaps hard for us to feel that we are in the presence of a great
+religious reactionist; there is so little sign of the higher graces of
+the soul, there are so many signs of the lowering clogs of the flesh.
+But the spirit of a man moves in mysterious ways, and expands like the
+plants of the field with strange and silent stirrings. It is one of the
+chief tests of worthiness and freedom from vulgarity of soul in us, to
+be able to have faith that this expansion is a reality, and the most
+important of all realities. We do not rightly seize the type of Socrates
+if we can never forget that he was the husband of Xanthippe, nor David's
+if we can only think of him as the murderer of Uriah, nor Peter's if we
+can simply remember that he denied his master. Our vision is only
+blindness, if we can never bring ourselves to see the possibilities of
+deep mystic aspiration behind the vile outer life of a man, or to
+believe that this coarse Rousseau, scantily supping with his coarse
+mate, might yet have many glimpses of the great wide horizons that are
+haunted by figures rather divine than human.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[104] In theory he was even now curiously prudent and almost
+sagacious; witness the Projet pour l'Education, etc., submitted to M.
+de Mably, and printed in the volume of his Works entitled _M�langes_,
+pp. 106-136. In the matter of Latin, it may be worth noting that
+Rousseau rashly or otherwise condemns the practice of writing it, as a
+vexatious superfluity (p. 132).
+
+[105] _Conf._, vi. 471.
+
+[106] _Ib._, vi. 472-475; vii. 8.
+
+[107] _Conf._, vii. 18, 19.
+
+[108] Musset-Pathay (ii. 72) quotes the passage from Lord
+Chesterfield's Letters, where the writer suggests Madame Dupin as a
+proper person with whom his son might in a regular and business-like
+manner open the elevating game of gallant intrigue.
+
+[109] M. Dupin deserves honourable mention as having helped the
+editors of the Encyclop�dia by procuring information for them as to
+salt-works (D'Alembert's _Discours Pr�liminaire_). His son M. Dupin de
+Francueil, it may be worth noting, is a link in the genealogical chain
+between two famous personages. In 1777, the year before Rousseau's
+death, he married (in the chapel of the French embassy in London)
+Aurora de Saxe, a natural daughter of the marshal, himself the natural
+son of August the Strong, King of Poland. From this union was born
+Maurice Dupin, and Maurice Dupin was the father of Madame George Sand.
+M. Francueil died in 1787.
+
+[110] _M�m. de Mdme. d'Epinay_, vol. i. ch. iv. p. 176.
+
+[111] _Ib._ vol. i. ch. iv. pp. 178, 179.
+
+[112] _Conf._, vii. 46, 51, 52, etc. A diplomatic piece in Rousseau's
+handwriting has been found in the archives of the French consulate at
+Constantinople, as M. Girardin informs us. Voltaire unworthily spread
+the report that Rousseau had been the ambassador's private attendant.
+For Rousseau's reply to the calumny, see _Corr._, v. 75 (Jan. 5,
+1767); also iv. 150.
+
+[113] Bernardin de St. Pierre, _Oeuv._, xii. 55 _seq._
+
+[114] _Conf._, vii. 92.
+
+[115] _Conf._, vii. 38, 39.
+
+[116] _Lettres de la Montagne_, iii. 266.
+
+[117] _Conf._, vii. 75-84. Also a second example, 84-86. For Byron's
+opinion of one of these stories, see Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, vi.
+132. (Ed. 1837.)
+
+[118] _Lettre sur la Musique Fran�aise_ (1753), p. 186.
+
+[119] _Conf._, ix. 232.
+
+[120] _Ib._ vii. 97.
+
+[121] H�tel St. Quentin, rue des Cordiers, a narrow street running
+between the rue St. Jacques and the rue Victor Cousin. The still
+squalid hostelry is now visible as H�tel J.J. Rousseau. There is some
+doubt whether he first saw Theresa in 1743 or 1745. The account in Bk.
+vii. of the _Confessions_ is for the latter date (see also _Corr._,
+ii. 207), but in the well-known letter to her in 1769 (_Ib._ vi. 79),
+he speaks of the twenty-six years of their union. Their so-called
+marriage took place in 1768, and writing in that year he speaks of the
+five-and-twenty years of their attachment (_Ib._ v. 323), and in the
+_Confessions_ (ix. 249) he fixes their marriage at the same date; also
+in the letter to Saint-Germain (vi. 152). Musset-Pathay, though giving
+1745 in one place (i. 45), and 1743 in another (ii. 198), has with
+less than his usual care paid no attention to the discrepancy.
+
+[122] _Conf._, vii. 97-100.
+
+[123] _Conf._, vii. 101. A short specimen of her composition may be
+interesting, at any rate to hieroglyphic students: "Mesiceuras ancor
+mien re mies quan geu ceures o pres deu vous, e deu vous temoes tous
+la goies e latandres deu mon querque vous cones ces que getou gour e
+rus pour vous, e qui neu finiraes quotobocs ces mon quere qui vous
+paleu ces paes mes le vre ... ge sui avestous lamities e la reu conec
+caceu posible e la tacheman mon cher bonnamies votreau enble e bon
+amiess theress le vasseur." Of which dark words this is the
+interpretation:--"Mais il sera encore mieux remis quand je sera aupr�s
+de vous, et de vous t�moigner toute la joie et la tendresse de mon
+coeur que vous connaissez que j'ai toujours eue pour vous, et qui ne
+finira qu'au tombeau; c'est mon coeur qui vous parle, c'est pas mes
+l�vres.... Je suis avec toute l'amiti� et la reconnaissance possibles,
+et l'attachement, mon cher bon ami, votre humble et bonne amie,
+Th�r�se Le Vasseur." (_Rousseau, ses Amis et ses Ennemis_, ii. 450.)
+Certainly it was not learning and arts which hindered Theresa's
+manners from being pure.
+
+[124] _Oeuv. et Corr. In�d._, 365.
+
+[125] _Conf._, vii. 102. See also _Corr._, v. 373 (Oct. 10, 1768). On
+the other hand, _Conf._, ix. 249.
+
+[126] M. St. Marc Girardin, in one of his admirable papers on
+Rousseau, speaks of him as "a bourgeois unclassed by an alliance with
+a tavern servant" (_Rev. des Deux Mondes_, Nov. 1852, p. 759); but
+surely Rousseau had unclassed himself long before, in the houses of
+Madame Vercellis, Count Gouvon, and even Madame de Warens, and by his
+repudiation, from the time when he ran away from Geneva, of nearly
+every bourgeois virtue and bourgeois prejudice.
+
+[127] _Conf._, vii. 11. Also footnote.
+
+[128] _R�veries_, ix. 309.
+
+[129] _Conf._, viii. 142, 143.
+
+[130] The other day I came for the first time upon the following in
+the sayings of Madame de Lambert:--"Ce ne sont pas toujours les fautes
+qui nous perdent; c'est la mani�re de se conduire apr�s les avoir
+faites." [1877.]
+
+[131] _Conf._, xii. 187, 188.
+
+[132] _Ib._, viii. 221.
+
+[133] Bernardin de St. Pierre, _Oeuv._, xii. 103. See _Conf._, xii
+188, and _Corr._, v. 324.
+
+[134] Referring, no doubt, to the ceremony which he called their
+marriage, and which had taken place in 1768.
+
+[135] _Corr._, vi. 79-86. August 12, 1769.
+
+[136] Composed in 1745. The _F�tes de Ramire_ was represented at
+Versailles at the very end of this year.
+
+[137] Some time in 1746-7. _Conf._, vii. 113, 114.
+
+[138] Probably in the winter of 1746-7. _Corr._, ii. 207. _Conf._,
+vii. 120-124. _Ib._, viii. 148. _Corr._, ii. 208. June 12, 1761, to
+the Mar�chale de Luxembourg.
+
+[139] George Sand,--in an eloquent piece entitled _� Propos des
+Charmettes (Revue des Deux Mondes_, November 15, 1863), in which she
+expresses her own obligations to Jean Jacques. In 1761 Rousseau
+declares that he had never hitherto had the least reason to suspect
+Theresa's fidelity. _Corr._, ii. 209
+
+[140] _Conf._, vii. 123.
+
+[141] _Ib._, viii. 145-151.
+
+[142] _R�veries_, ix. 313. The same reason is given, _Conf._, ix. 252;
+also in Letter to Madame B., January 17, 1770 (_Corr._, vi. 117).
+
+[143] _Corr._, vi. 152, 153. Feb. 27, 1770.
+
+[144] Letter to Madame de Francueil, April 20, 1751. _Corr._, i. 151.
+
+[145] _Corr._, i. 151-155
+
+[146] August 10, 1761. _Corr._, ii. 220. The Mar�chale de Luxembourg's
+note on the subject, to which this is a reply, is given in _Rousseau,
+ses Amis et ses Ennemis_, i. 444.
+
+[147] _Conf._, x. 249. See above, p. 106, _n._
+
+[148] To Lalliaud, Aug 31, 1768. _Corr._, v. 324. See also D'Escherny,
+quoted in Musset-Pathay, i. 169, 170.
+
+[149] To Du Peyrou, Sept. 26, 1768. _Corr._, v. 360.
+
+[150] To Mdlle. Le Vasseur, July 25, 1768. _Corr._, v. 116-119.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+THE DISCOURSES.
+
+
+The busy establishment of local academies in the provincial centres of
+France only preceded the outbreak of the revolution by ten or a dozen
+years; but one or two of the provincial cities, such as Bordeaux, Rouen,
+Dijon, had possessed academies in imitation of the greater body of Paris
+for a much longer time. Their activity covered a very varied ground,
+from the mere commonplaces of literature to the most practical details
+of material production. If they now and then relapsed into inquiries
+about the laws of Crete, they more often discussed positive and
+scientific theses, and rather resembled our chambers of agriculture than
+bodies of more learned pretension. The academy of Dijon was one of the
+earliest of these excellent institutions, and on the whole the list of
+its theses shows it to have been among the most sensible in respect of
+the subjects which it found worth thinking about. Its members, however,
+could not entirely resist the intellectual atmosphere of the time. In
+1742 they invited discussion of the point, whether the natural law can
+conduct society to perfection without the aid of political laws.[151]
+In 1749 they proposed this question as a theme for their prize essay:
+_Has the restoration of the sciences contributed to purify or to corrupt
+manners?_ Rousseau was one of fourteen competitors, and in 1750 his
+discussion of the academic theme received the prize.[152] This was his
+first entry on the field of literature and speculation. Three years
+afterwards the same academy propounded another question: _What is the
+origin of inequality among men, and is it authorised by the natural
+law?_ Rousseau again competed, and though his essay neither gained the
+prize, nor created as lively an agitation as its predecessor had done,
+yet we may justly regard the second as a more powerful supplement to
+the first.
+
+It is always interesting to know the circumstances under which pieces
+that have moved a world were originally composed, and Rousseau's account
+of the generation of his thoughts as to the influence of enlightenment
+on morality, is remarkable enough to be worth transcribing. He was
+walking along the road from Paris to Vincennes one hot summer afternoon
+on a visit to Diderot, then in prison for his Letter on the Blind
+(1749), when he came across in a newspaper the announcement of the theme
+propounded by the Dijon academy. "If ever anything resembled a sudden
+inspiration, it was the movement which began in me as I read this. All
+at once I felt myself dazzled by a thousand sparkling lights; crowds of
+vivid ideas thronged into my mind with a force and confusion that threw
+me into unspeakable agitation; I felt my head whirling in a giddiness
+like that of intoxication. A violent palpitation oppressed me; unable to
+walk for difficulty of breathing, I sank under one of the trees of the
+avenue, and passed half an hour there in such a condition of excitement,
+that when I arose I saw that the front of my waistcoat was all wet with
+my tears, though I was wholly unconscious of shedding them. Ah, if I
+could ever have written the quarter of what I saw and felt under that
+tree, with what clearness should I have brought out all the
+contradictions of our social system; with what simplicity I should have
+demonstrated that man is good naturally, and that by institutions only
+is he made bad."[153] Diderot encouraged him to compete for the prize,
+and to give full flight to the ideas which had come to him in this
+singular way.[154]
+
+People have held up their hands at the amazing originality of the idea
+that perhaps sciences and arts have not purified manners. This sentiment
+is surely exaggerated, if we reflect first that it occurred to the
+academicians of Dijon as a question for discussion, and second that, if
+you are asked whether a given result has or has not followed from
+certain circumstances, the mere form of the question suggests No quite
+as readily as Yes. The originality lay not in the central contention,
+but in the fervour, sincerity, and conviction of a most unacademic sort
+with which it was presented and enforced. There is less originality in
+denouncing your generation as wicked and adulterous than there is in
+believing it to be so, and in persuading the generation itself both that
+you believe it and that you have good reasons to give. We have not to
+suppose that there was any miracle wrought by agency celestial or
+infernal in the sudden disclosure of his idea to Rousseau. Rousseau had
+been thinking of politics ever since the working of the government of
+Venice had first drawn his mind to the subject. What is the government,
+he had kept asking himself, which is most proper to form a sage and
+virtuous nation? What government by its nature keeps closest to the law?
+What is this law? And whence?[155] This chain of problems had led him to
+what he calls the historic study of morality, though we may doubt
+whether history was so much his teacher as the rather meagrely nourished
+handmaid of his imagination. Here was the irregular preparation, the
+hidden process, which suddenly burst into light and manifested itself
+with an exuberance of energy, that passed to the man himself for an
+inward revolution with no precursive sign.
+
+Rousseau's ecstatic vision on the road to Vincennes was the opening of a
+life of thought and production which only lasted a dozen years, but
+which in that brief space gave to Europe a new gospel. Emilius and the
+Social Contract were completed in 1761, and they crowned a work which if
+you consider its origin, influence, and meaning with due and proper
+breadth, is marked by signal unity of purpose and conception. The key to
+it is given to us in the astonishing transport at the foot of the
+wide-spreading oak. Such a transport does not come to us of cool and
+rational western temperament, but more often to the oriental after
+lonely sojourning in the wilderness, or in violent reactions on the road
+to Damascus and elsewhere. Jean Jacques detected oriental quality in his
+own nature,[156] and so far as the union of ardour with mysticism, of
+intense passion with vague dream, is to be defined as oriental, he
+assuredly deserves the name. The ideas stirred in his mind by the Dijon
+problem suddenly "opened his eyes, brought order into the chaos in his
+head, revealed to him another universe. From the active effervescence
+which thus began in his soul, came sparks of genius which people saw
+glittering in his writings through ten years of fever and delirium, but
+of which no trace had been seen in him previously, and which would
+probably have ceased to shine henceforth, if he should have chanced to
+wish to continue writing after the access was over. Inflamed by the
+contemplation of these lofty objects, he had them incessantly present to
+his mind. His heart, made hot within him by the idea of the future
+happiness of the human race, and by the honour of contributing to it,
+dictated to him a language worthy of so high an enterprise ... and for a
+moment, he astonished Europe by productions in which vulgar souls saw
+only eloquence and brightness of understanding, but in which those who
+dwell in the ethereal regions recognised with joy one of their
+own."[157]
+
+This was his own account of the matter quite at the end of his life, and
+this is the only point of view from which we are secure against the
+vulgarity of counting him a deliberate hypocrite and conscious
+charlatan. He was possessed, as holier natures than his have been, by an
+enthusiastic vision, an intoxicated confidence, a mixture of sacred rage
+and prodigious love, an insensate but absolutely disinterested revolt
+against the stone and iron of a reality which he was bent on melting in
+a heavenly blaze of splendid aspiration and irresistibly persuasive
+expression. The last word of this great expansion was Emilius, its first
+and more imperfectly articulated was the earlier of the two Discourses.
+
+Rousseau's often-repeated assertion that here was the instant of the
+ruin of his life, and that all his misfortunes flowed from that unhappy
+moment, has been constantly treated as the word of affectation and
+disguised pride. Yet, vain as he was, it may well have represented his
+sincere feeling in those better moods when mental suffering was strong
+enough to silence vanity. His visions mastered him for these thirteen
+years, _grande mortalis oevi spatium_. They threw him on to that turbid
+sea of literature for which he had so keen an aversion, and from which,
+let it be remarked, he fled finally away, when his confidence in the
+ease of making men good and happy by words of monition had left him. It
+was the torment of his own enthusiasm which rent that veil of placid
+living, that in his normal moments he would fain have interposed between
+his existence and the tumult of a generation with which he was
+profoundly out of sympathy. In this way the first Discourse was the
+letting in of much evil upon him, as that and the next and the Social
+Contract were the letting in of much evil upon all Europe.
+
+Of this essay the writer has recorded his own impression that, though
+full of heat and force, it is absolutely wanting in logic and order, and
+that of all the products of his pen, it is the feeblest in reasoning and
+the poorest in numbers and harmony. "For," as he justly adds, "the art
+of writing is not learnt all at once."[158] The modern critic must be
+content to accept the same verdict; only a generation so in love as
+this was with anything that could tickle its intellectual curiousness,
+would have found in the first of the two Discourses that combination of
+speculative and literary merit which was imputed to Rousseau on the
+strength of it, and which at once brought him into a place among the
+notables of an age that was full of them.[159] We ought to take in
+connection with it two at any rate of the vindications of the Discourse,
+which the course of controversy provoked from its author, and which
+serve to complete its significance. It is difficult to analyse, because
+in truth it is neither closely argumentative, nor is it vertebrate, even
+as a piece of rhetoric. The gist of the piece, however, runs somewhat in
+this wise:--
+
+Before art had fashioned our manners, and taught our passions to use a
+too elaborate speech, men were rude but natural, and difference of
+conduct announced at a glance difference of character. To-day a vile and
+most deceptive uniformity reigns over our manners, and all minds seem as
+if they had been cast in a single mould. Hence we never know with what
+sort of person we are dealing, hence the hateful troop of suspicions,
+fears, reserves, and treacheries, and the concealment of impiety,
+arrogance, calumny, and scepticism, under a dangerous varnish of
+refinement. So terrible a set of effects must have a cause. History
+shows that the cause here is to be found in the progress of sciences and
+arts. Egypt, once so mighty, becomes the mother of philosophy and the
+fine arts; straightway behold its conquest by Cambyses, by Greeks, by
+Romans, by Arabs, finally by Turks. Greece twice conquered Asia, once
+before Troy, once in its own homes; then came in fatal sequence the
+progress of the arts, the dissolution of manners, and the yoke of the
+Macedonian. Rome, founded by a shepherd and raised to glory by
+husbandmen, began to degenerate with Ennius, and the eve of her ruin was
+the day when she gave a citizen the deadly title of arbiter of good
+taste. China, where letters carry men to the highest dignities of the
+state, could not be preserved by all her literature from the conquering
+power of the ruder Tartar. On the other hand, the Persians, Scythians,
+Germans, remain in history as types of simplicity, innocence, and
+virtue. Was not he admittedly the wisest of the Greeks, who made of his
+own apology a plea for ignorance, and a denunciation of poets, orators,
+and artists? The chosen people of God never cultivated the sciences, and
+when the new law was established, it was not the learned, but the simple
+and lowly, fishers and workmen, to whom Christ entrusted his teaching
+and its ministry.[160]
+
+This, then, is the way in which chastisement has always overtaken our
+presumptuous efforts to emerge from that happy ignorance in which
+eternal wisdom placed us; though the thick veil with which that wisdom
+has covered all its operations seemed to warn us that we were not
+destined to fatuous research. All the secrets that Nature hides from us
+are so many evils against which she would fain shelter us.
+
+Is probity the child of ignorance, and can science and virtue be really
+inconsistent with one another? These sounding contrasts are mere
+deceits, because if you look nearly into the results of this science of
+which we talk so proudly, you will perceive that they confirm the
+results of induction from history. Astronomy, for instance, is born of
+superstition; geometry from the desire of gain; physics from a futile
+curiosity; all of them, even morals, from human pride. Are we for ever
+to be the dupes of words, and to believe that these pompous names of
+science, philosophy, and the rest, stand for worthy and profitable
+realities?[161] Be sure that they do not.
+
+How many errors do we pass through on our road to truth, errors a
+thousandfold more dangerous than truth is useful? And by what marks are
+we to know truth, when we think that we have found it? And above all, if
+we do find it, who of us can be sure that he will make good use of it?
+If celestial intelligences cultivated science, only good could result;
+and we may say as much of great men of the stamp of Socrates, who are
+born to be the guides of others.[162] But the intelligences of common
+men are neither celestial nor Socratic.
+
+Again, every useless citizen may be fairly regarded as a pernicious man;
+and let us ask those illustrious philosophers who have taught us what
+insects reproduce themselves curiously, in what ratio bodies attract
+one another in space, what curves have conjugate points, points of
+inflection or reflection, what in the planetary revolutions are the
+relations of areas traversed in equal times--let us ask those who have
+attained all this sublime knowledge, by how much the worse governed,
+less flourishing, or less perverse we should have been if they had
+attained none of it? Now if the works of our most scientific men and
+best citizens lead to such small utility, tell us what we are to think
+of the crowd of obscure writers and idle men of letters who devour the
+public substance in pure loss.
+
+Then it is in the nature of things that devotion to art leads to luxury,
+and luxury, as we all know from our own experience, no less than from
+the teaching of history, saps not only the military virtues by which
+nations preserve their independence, but also those moral virtues which
+make the independence of a nation worth preserving. Your children go to
+costly establishments where they learn everything except their duties.
+They remain ignorant of their own tongue, though they will speak others
+not in use anywhere in the world; they gain the faculty of composing
+verses which they can barely understand; without capacity to distinguish
+truth from error, they possess the art of rendering them
+indistinguishable to others by specious arguments. Magnanimity, equity,
+temperance, courage, humanity, have no real meaning to them; and if they
+hear speak of God, it breeds more terror than awful fear.
+
+Whence spring all these abuses, if not from the disastrous inequality
+introduced among men by the distinction of talents and the cheapening of
+virtue?[163] People no longer ask of a man whether he has probity, but
+whether he is clever; nor of a book whether it is useful, but whether it
+is well written. And after all, what is this philosophy, what are these
+lessons of wisdom, to which we give the prize of enduring fame? To
+listen to these sages, would you not take them for a troop of
+charlatans, all bawling out in the market-place, Come to me, it is only
+I who never cheat you, and always give good measure? One maintains that
+there is no body, and that everything is mere representation; the other
+that there is no entity but matter, and no God but the universe: one
+that moral good and evil are chimeras; the other that men are wolves and
+may devour one another with the easiest conscience in the world. These
+are the marvellous personages on whom the esteem of contemporaries is
+lavished so long as they live, and to whom immortality is reserved after
+their death. And we have now invented the art of making their
+extravagances eternal, and thanks to the use of typographic characters
+the dangerous speculations of Hobbes and Spinoza will endure for ever.
+Surely when they perceive the terrible disorders which printing has
+already caused in Europe, sovereigns will take as much trouble to
+banish this deadly art from their states as they once took to
+introduce it.
+
+If there is perhaps no harm in allowing one or two men to give
+themselves up to the study of sciences and arts, it is only those who
+feel conscious of the strength required for advancing their subjects,
+who have any right to attempt to raise monuments to the glory of the
+human mind. We ought to have no tolerance for those compilers who rashly
+break open the gate of the sciences, and introduce into their sanctuary
+a populace that is unworthy even to draw near to it. It may be well that
+there should be philosophers, provided only and always that the people
+do not meddle with philosophising.[164]
+
+In short, there are two kinds of ignorance: one brutal and ferocious,
+springing from a bad heart, multiplying vices, degrading the reason, and
+debasing the soul: the other "a reasonable ignorance, which consists in
+limiting our curiosity to the extent of the faculties we have received;
+a modest ignorance, born of a lively love for virtue, and inspiring
+indifference only for what is not worthy of filling a man's heart, or
+fails to contribute to its improvement; a sweet and precious ignorance,
+the treasure of a pure soul at peace with itself, which finds all its
+blessedness in inward retreat, in testifying to itself its own
+innocence, and which feels no need of seeking a warped and hollow
+happiness in the opinion of other people as to its enlightenment."[165]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Some of the most pointed assaults in this Discourse, such for instance
+as that on the pedantic parade of wit, or that on the excessive
+preponderance of literary instruction in the art of education, are due
+to Montaigne; and in one way, the Discourse might be described as
+binding together a number of that shrewd man's detached hints by means
+of a paradoxical generalisation. But the Rousseau is more important than
+the Montaigne in it. Another remark to be made is that its vigorous
+disparagement of science, of the emptiness of much that is called
+science, of the deadly pride of intellect, is an anticipation in a very
+precise way of the attitude taken by the various Christian churches and
+their representatives now and for long, beginning with De Maistre, the
+greatest of the religious reactionaries after Rousseau. The vilification
+of the Greeks is strikingly like some vehement passages in De Maistre's
+estimate of their share in sophisticating European intellect. At last
+Rousseau even began to doubt whether "so chattering a people could ever
+have had any solid virtues, even in primitive times."[166] Yet
+Rousseau's own thinking about society is deeply marked with opinions
+borrowed exactly from these very chatterers. His imagination was
+fascinated from the first by the freedom and boldness of Plato's social
+speculations, to which his debt in a hundred details of his political
+and educational schemes is well known. What was more important than any
+obligation of detail was the fatal conception, borrowed partly from the
+Greeks and partly from Geneva, of the omnipotence of the Lawgiver in
+moulding a social state after his own purpose and ideal. We shall
+presently quote the passage in which he holds up for our envy and
+imitation the policy of Lycurgus at Sparta, who swept away all that he
+found existing and constructed the social edifice afresh from foundation
+to roof.[167] It is true that there was an unmistakable decay of Greek
+literary studies in France from the beginning of the eighteenth century,
+and Rousseau seems to have read Plato only through Ficinus's
+translation. But his example and its influence, along with that of Mably
+and others, warrant the historian in saying that at no time did Greek
+ideas more keenly preoccupy opinion than during this century.[168]
+Perhaps we may say that Rousseau would never have proved how little
+learning and art do for the good of manners, if Plato had not insisted
+on poets being driven out of the Republic. The article on Political
+Economy, written by him for the Encyclop�dia (1755), rings with the
+names of ancient rulers and lawgivers; the project of public education
+is recommended by the example of Cretans, Laced�monians, and Persians,
+while the propriety of the reservation of a state domain is suggested
+by Romulus.
+
+It may be added that one of the not too many merits of the essay is the
+way in which the writer, more or less in the Socratic manner, insists on
+dragging people out of the refuge of sonorous general terms, with a
+great public reputation of much too well-established a kind to be
+subjected to the affront of analysis. It is true that Rousseau himself
+contributed nothing directly to that analytic operation which Socrates
+likened to midwifery, and he set up graven images of his own in place of
+the idols which he destroyed. This, however, did not wholly efface the
+distinction, which he shares with all who have ever tried to lead the
+minds of men into new tracks, of refusing to accept the current coins of
+philosophical speech without test or measurement. Such a treatment of
+the great trite words which come so easily to the tongue and seem to
+weigh for so much, must always be the first step towards bringing
+thought back into the region of real matter, and confronting phrases,
+terms, and all the common form of the discussion of an age, with the
+actualities which it is the object of sincere discussion to penetrate.
+
+The refutation of many parts of Rousseau's main contention on the
+principles which are universally accepted among enlightened men in
+modern society is so extremely obvious that to undertake it would merely
+be to draw up a list of the gratulatory commonplaces of which we hear
+quite enough in the literature and talk of our day. In this direction,
+perhaps it suffices to say that the Discourse is wholly one-sided,
+admitting none of the conveniences, none of the alleviations of
+suffering of all kinds, nothing of the increase of mental stature, which
+the pursuit of knowledge has brought to the race. They may or may not
+counterbalance the evils that it has brought, but they are certainly to
+be put in the balance in any attempt at philosophic examination of the
+subject. It contains no serious attempt to tell us what those alleged
+evils really are, or definitely to trace them one by one, to abuse of
+the thirst for knowledge and defects in the method of satisfying it. It
+omits to take into account the various other circumstances, such as
+climate, government, race, and the disposition of neighbours, which must
+enter equally with intellectual progress into whatever demoralisation
+has marked the destinies of a nation. Finally it has for the base of its
+argument the entirely unsupported assumption of there having once been
+in the early history of each society a stage of mild, credulous, and
+innocent virtue, from which appetite for the fruit of the forbidden tree
+caused an inevitable degeneration. All evidence and all scientific
+analogy are now well known to lead to the contrary doctrine, that the
+history of civilisation is a history of progress and not of decline from
+a primary state. After all, as Voltaire said to Rousseau in a letter
+which only showed a superficial appreciation of the real drift of the
+argument, we must confess that these thorns attached to literature are
+only as flowers in comparison with the other evils that have deluged the
+earth. "It was not Cicero nor Lucretius nor Virgil nor Horace, who
+contrived the proscriptions of Marius, of Sulla, of the debauched
+Antony, of the imbecile Lepidus, of that craven tyrant basely surnamed
+Augustus. It was not Marot who produced the St. Bartholomew massacre,
+nor the tragedy of the Cid that led to the wars of the Fronde. What
+really makes, and always will make, this world into a valley of tears,
+is the insatiable cupidity and indomitable insolence of men, from Kouli
+Khan, who did not know how to read, down to the custom-house clerk, who
+knows nothing but how to cast up figures. Letters nourish the soul, they
+strengthen its integrity, they furnish a solace to it,"--and so on in
+the sense, though without the eloquence, of the famous passage in
+Cicero's defence of Archias the poet.[169] All this, however, in our
+time is in no danger of being forgotten, and will be present to the mind
+of every reader. The only danger is that pointed out by Rousseau
+himself: "People always think they have described what the sciences do,
+when they have in reality only described what the sciences ought
+to do."[170]
+
+What we are more likely to forget is that Rousseau's piece has a
+positive as well as a negative side, and presents, in however vehement
+and overstated a way, a truth which the literary and speculative
+enthusiasm of France in the eighteenth century, as is always the case
+with such enthusiasm whenever it penetrates either a generation or an
+individual, was sure to make men dangerously ready to forget.[171] This
+truth may be put in different terms. We may describe it as the
+possibility of eminent civic virtue existing in people, without either
+literary taste or science or speculative curiosity. Or we may express it
+as the compatibility of a great amount of contentment and order in a
+given social state, with a very low degree of knowledge. Or finally, we
+may give the truth its most general expression, as the subordination of
+all activity to the promotion of social aims. Rousseau's is an elaborate
+and roundabout manner of saying that virtue without science is better
+than science without virtue; or that the well-being of a country depends
+more on the standard of social duty and the willingness of citizens to
+conform to it, than on the standard of intellectual culture and the
+extent of its diffusion. In other words, we ought to be less concerned
+about the speculative or scientific curiousness of our people than about
+the height of their notion of civic virtue and their firmness and
+persistency in realising it. It is a moralist's way of putting the
+ancient preacher's monition, that they are but empty in whom is not the
+wisdom of God. The importance of stating this is in our modern era
+always pressing, because there is a constant tendency on the part of
+energetic intellectual workers, first, to concentrate their energies on
+a minute specialty, leaving public affairs and interests to their own
+course. Second, they are apt to overestimate their contributions to the
+stock of means by which men are made happier, and what is more serious,
+to underestimate in comparison those orderly, modest, self-denying,
+moral qualities, by which only men are made worthier, and the continuity
+of society is made surer. Third, in consequence of their greater command
+of specious expression and their control of the organs of public
+opinion, they both assume a kind of supreme place in the social
+hierarchy, and persuade the majority of plain men unsuspectingly to take
+so very egregious an assumption for granted. So far as Rousseau's
+Discourse recalled the truth as against this sort of error it was full
+of wholesomeness.
+
+Unfortunately his indignation against the overweening pretensions of the
+verse-writer, the gazetteer, and the great band of socialists at large,
+led him into a general position with reference to scientific and
+speculative energy, which seems to involve a perilous misconception of
+the conditions of this energy producing its proper results. It is easy
+now, as it was easy for Rousseau in the last century, to ask in an
+epigrammatical manner by how much men are better or happier for having
+found out this or that novelty in transcendental mathematics, biology,
+or astronomy; and this is very well as against the discoverer of small
+marvels who shall give himself out for the benefactor of the human
+race. But both historical experience and observation of the terms on
+which the human intelligence works, show us that we can only make sure
+of intellectual activity on condition of leaving it free to work all
+round, in every department and in every remotest nook of each
+department, and that its most fruitful epochs are exactly those when
+this freedom is greatest, this curiosity most keen and minute, and this
+waste, if you choose to call the indispensable superfluity of force in a
+natural process waste, most copious and unsparing. You will not find
+your highest capacity in statesmanship, nor in practical science, nor in
+art, nor in any other field where that capacity is most urgently needed
+for the right service of life, unless there is a general and vehement
+spirit of search in the air. If it incidentally leads to many
+industrious futilities and much learned refuse, this is still the sign
+and the generative element of industry which is not futile, and of
+learning which is something more than mere water spilled upon
+the ground.
+
+We may say in fine that this first Discourse and its vindications were a
+dim, shallow, and ineffective feeling after the great truth, that the
+only normal state of society is that in which neither the love of virtue
+has been thrust far back into a secondary place by the love of
+knowledge, nor the active curiosity of the understanding dulled,
+blunted, and made ashamed by soft, lazy ideals of life as a life only of
+the affections. Rousseau now and always fell into the opposite extreme
+from that against which his whole work was a protest. We need not
+complain very loudly that while remonstrating against the restless
+intrepidity of the rationalists of his generation, he passed over the
+central truth, namely that the full and ever festal life is found in
+active freedom of curiosity and search taking significance, motive,
+force, from a warm inner pulse of human love and sympathy. It was not
+given to Rousseau to see all this, but it was given to him to see the
+side of it for which the most powerful of the men living with him had no
+eyes, and the first Discourse was only a moderately successful attempt
+to bring his vision before Europe. It was said at the time that he did
+not believe a word of what he had written.[172] It is a natural
+characteristic of an age passionately occupied with its own set of
+ideas, to question either the sincerity or the sanity of anybody who
+declares its sovereign conceptions to be no better than foolishness. We
+cannot entertain such a suspicion. Perhaps the vehemence of controversy
+carries him rather further than he quite meant to go, when he declares
+that if he were a chief of an African tribe, he would erect on his
+frontier a gallows, on which he would hang without mercy the first
+European who should venture to pass into his territory, and the first
+native who should dare to pass out of it.[173] And there are many other
+extravagances of illustration, but the main position is serious enough,
+as represented in the emblematic vignette with which the essay was
+printed--the torch of science brought to men by Prometheus, who warns a
+satyr that it burns; the satyr, seeing fire for the first time and being
+fain to embrace it, is the symbol of the vulgar men who, seduced by the
+glitter of literature, insist on delivering themselves up to its
+study.[174] Rousseau's whole doctrine hangs compactly together, and we
+may see the signs of its growth after leaving his hands in the crude
+formula of the first Discourse, if we proceed to the more audacious
+paradox of the second.
+
+
+II.
+
+The Discourse on the Origin of Inequality among men opens with a
+description of the natural state of man, which occupies considerably
+more than half of the entire performance. It is composed in a vein which
+is only too familiar to the student of the literature of the time,
+picturing each habit and thought, and each step to new habits and
+thoughts, with the minuteness, the fulness, the precision, of one who
+narrates circumstances of which he has all his life been the close
+eye-witness. The natural man reveals to us every motive, every process
+internal and external, every slightest circumstance of his daily life,
+and each element that gradually transformed him into the non-natural
+man. One who had watched bees or beetles for years could not give us a
+more full or confident account of their doings, their hourly goings in
+and out, than it was the fashion in the eighteenth century to give of
+the walk and conversation of the primeval ancestor. The conditions of
+primitive man were discussed by very incompetent ladies and gentlemen at
+convivial supper parties, and settled with complete assurance.[175]
+
+Rousseau thought and talked about the state of nature because all his
+world was thinking and talking about it. He used phrases and formulas
+with reference to it which other people used. He required no more
+evidence than they did, as to the reality of the existence of the
+supposed set of conditions to which they gave the almost sacramental
+name of state of nature. He never thought of asking, any more than
+anybody else did in the middle of the eighteenth century, what sort of
+proof, how strong, how direct, was to be had, that primeval man had such
+and such habits, and changed them in such a way and direction, and for
+such reasons. Physical science had reached a stage by this time when its
+followers were careful to ask questions about evidence, correct
+description, verification. But the idea of accurate method had to be
+made very familiar to men by the successes of physical science in the
+search after truths of one kind, before the indispensableness of
+applying it in the search after truths of all kinds had extended to the
+science of the constitution and succession of social states. In this
+respect Rousseau was not guiltier than the bulk of his contemporaries.
+Voltaire's piercing common sense, Hume's deep-set sagacity,
+Montesquieu's caution, prevented them from launching very far on to this
+metaphysical sea of nature and natural laws and states, but none of them
+asked those critical questions in relation to such matters which occur
+so promptly in the present day to persons far inferior to them in
+intellectual strength. Rousseau took the notion of the state of nature
+because he found it to his hand; he fitted to it his own characteristic
+aspirations, expanding and vivifying a philosophic conception with all
+the heat of humane passion; and thus, although, at the end of the
+process when he had done with it, the state of nature came out blooming
+as the rose, it was fundamentally only the dry, current abstraction of
+his time, artificially decorated to seduce men into embracing a strange
+ideal under a familiar name.
+
+Before analysing the Discourse on Inequality, we ought to make some
+mention of a remarkable man whose influence probably reached Rousseau in
+an indirect manner through Diderot; I mean Morelly.[176] In 1753 Morelly
+published a prose poem called the Basiliade, describing the corruption
+of manners introduced by the errors of the lawgiver, and pointing out
+how this corruption is to be amended by return to the empire of nature
+and truth. He was no doubt stimulated by what was supposed to be the
+central doctrine of Montesquieu, then freshly given to the world, that
+it is government and institutions which make men what they are. But he
+was stimulated into a reaction, and in 1754 he propounded his whole
+theory, in a piece which in closeness, consistency, and thoroughness is
+admirably different from Rousseau's rhetoric.[177] It lacked the
+sovereign quality of persuasiveness, and so fell on deaf ears. Morelly
+accepts the doctrine that men are formed by the laws, but insists that
+moralists and statesmen have always led us wrong by legislating and
+prescribing conduct on the false theory that man is bad, whereas he is
+in truth a creature endowed with natural probity. Then he strikes to the
+root of society with a directness that Rousseau could not imitate, by
+the position that "these laws by establishing a monstrous division of
+the products of nature, and even of their very elements--by dividing
+what ought to have remained entire, or ought to have been restored to
+entireness if any accident had divided them, aided and favoured the
+break-up of all sociability." All political and all moral evils are the
+effects of this pernicious cause--private property. He says of
+Rousseau's first Discourse that the writer ought to have seen that the
+corruption of manners which he set down to literature and art really
+came from this venomous principle of property, which infects all that
+it touches.[178] Christianity, it is true, assailed this principle and
+restored equality or community of possessions, but Christianity had the
+radical fault of involving such a detachment from earthly affections, in
+order to deliver ourselves to heavenly meditation, as brought about a
+necessary degeneration in social activity. The form of government is a
+matter of indifference, provided you can only assure community of goods.
+Political revolutions are at bottom the clash of material interests, and
+until you have equalised the one you will never prevent the other.[179]
+
+Let us turn from this very definite position to one of the least
+definite productions to be found in all literature.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It will seem a little odd that more than half of a discussion on the
+origin of inequality among men should be devoted to a glowing imaginary
+description, from which no reader could conjecture what thesis it was
+designed to support. But we have only to remember that Rousseau's object
+was to persuade people that the happier state is that in which
+inequality does not subsist, that there had once been such a state, and
+that this was first the state of nature, and then the state only one
+degree removed from it, in which we now find the majority of savage
+tribes. At the outset he defines inequality as a word meaning two
+different things; one, natural or physical inequality, such as
+difference of age, of health, of physical strength, of attributes of
+intelligence and character; the other, moral or political inequality,
+consisting in difference of privileges which some enjoy to the detriment
+of the rest, such as being richer, more honoured, more powerful. The
+former differences are established by nature, the latter are authorised,
+if they were not established, by the consent of men.[180] In the state
+of nature no inequalities flow from the differences among men in point
+of physical advantage and disadvantage, and which remain without
+derivative differences so long as the state of nature endures
+undisturbed. Nature deals with men as the law of Sparta dealt with the
+children of its citizens; she makes those who are well constituted
+strong and robust, and she destroys all the rest.
+
+The surface of the earth is originally covered by dense forest, and
+inhabited by animals of every species. Men, scattered among them,
+imitate their industry, and so rise to the instinct of the brutes, with
+this advantage that while each species has only its own, man, without
+anything special, appropriates the instincts of all. This admirable
+creature, with foes on every side, is forced to be constantly on the
+alert, and hence to be always in full possession of all his faculties,
+unlike civilised man, whose native force is enfeebled by the mechanical
+protections with which he has surrounded himself. He is not afraid of
+the wild beasts around him, for experience has taught him that he is
+their master. His health is better than ours, for we live in a time when
+excess of idleness in some, excess of toil in others, the heating and
+over-abundant diet of the rich, the bad food of the poor, the orgies and
+excesses of every kind, the immoderate transport of every passion, the
+fatigue and strain of spirit,--when all these things have inflicted more
+disorders upon us than the vaunted art of medicine has been able to keep
+pace with. Even if the sick savage has only nature to hope from, on the
+other hand he has only his own malady to be afraid of. He has no fear of
+death, for no animal can know what death is, and the knowledge of death
+and its terrors is one of the first of man's terrible acquisitions
+after abandoning his animal condition.[181] In other respects, such as
+protection against weather, such as habitation, such as food, the
+savage's natural power of adaptation, and the fact that his demands are
+moderate in proportion to his means of satisfying them, forbid us to
+consider him physically unhappy. Let us turn to the intellectual and
+moral side.
+
+If you contend that men were miserable, degraded, and outcast during
+these primitive centuries because the intelligence was dormant, then do
+not forget, first, that you are drawing an indictment against
+nature,--no trifling blasphemy in those days--and second, that you are
+attributing misery to a free creature with tranquil spirit and healthy
+body, and that must surely be a singular abuse of the term. We see
+around us scarcely any but people who complain of the burden of their
+lives; but who ever heard of a savage in full enjoyment of his liberty
+ever dreaming of complaint about his life or of self-destruction?
+
+With reference to virtues and vices in a state of nature, Hobbes is
+wrong in declaring that man in this state is vicious, as not knowing
+virtue. He is not vicious, for the reason that he does not know what
+being good is. It is not development of enlightenment nor the
+restrictions of law, but the calm of the passions and ignorance of vice,
+which keep them from doing ill. _Tanto plus in illis profitcit vitiorum
+ignoratio, quam in his cognitio virtutis._
+
+Besides man has one great natural virtue, that of pity, which precedes
+in him the use of reflection, and which indeed he shares with some of
+the brutes. Mandeville, who was forced to admit the existence of this
+admirable quality in man, was absurd in not perceiving that from it flow
+all the social virtues which he would fain deny. Pity is more energetic
+in the primitive condition than it is among ourselves. It is reflection
+which isolates one. It is philosophy which teaches the philosopher to
+say secretly at sight of a suffering wretch, Perish if it please thee; I
+am safe and sound. They may be butchering a fellow-creature under your
+window; all you have to do is to clap your hands to your ears, and argue
+a little with yourself to hinder nature in revolt from making you feel
+as if you were in the case of the victim.[182] The savage man has not
+got this odious gift. In the state of nature it is pity that takes the
+place of laws, manners, and virtue. It is in this natural sentiment
+rather than in subtle arguments that we have to seek the reluctance that
+every man would feel to do ill, even without the precepts of
+education.[183]
+
+Finally, the passion of love, which produces such disasters in a state
+of society, where the jealousy of lovers and the vengeance of husbands
+lead each day to duels and murders, where the duty of eternal fidelity
+only serves to occasion adulteries, and where the law of continence
+necessarily extends the debauching of women and the practice of
+procuring abortion[184]--this passion in a state of nature, where it is
+purely physical, momentary, and without any association of durable
+sentiment with the object of it, simply leads to the necessary
+reproduction of the species and nothing more.
+
+"Let us conclude, then, that wandering in the forests, without industry,
+without speech, without habitation, without war, without connection of
+any kind, without any need of his fellows or without any desire to harm
+them, perhaps even without ever recognising one of them individually,
+savage man, subject to few passions and sufficing to himself, had only
+the sentiments and the enlightenment proper to his condition. He was
+only sensible of his real wants, and only looked because he thought he
+had an interest in seeing; and his intelligence made no more progress
+than his vanity. If by chance he hit on some discovery, he was all the
+less able to communicate it; as he did not know even his own children.
+An art perished with its inventor. There was neither education nor
+progress; generations multiplied uselessly; and as each generation
+always started from the same point, centuries glided away in all the
+rudeness of the first ages, the race was already old, the individual
+remained always a child."
+
+This brings us to the point of the matter. For if you compare the
+prodigious diversities in education and manner of life which reign in
+the different orders of the civil condition, with the simplicity and
+uniformity of the savage and animal life, where all find nourishment in
+the same articles of food, live in the same way, and do exactly the same
+things, you will easily understand to what degree the difference between
+man and man must be less in the state of nature than in that of
+society.[185] Physical inequality is hardly perceived in the state of
+nature, and its indirect influences there are almost non-existent.
+
+Now as all the social virtues and other faculties possessed by man
+potentially were not bound by anything inherent in him to develop into
+actuality, he might have remained to all eternity in his admirable and
+most fitting primitive condition, but for the fortuitous concurrence of
+a variety of external changes. What are these different changes, which
+may perhaps have perfected human reason, while they certainly have
+deteriorated the race, and made men bad in making them sociable?
+
+What, then, are the intermediary facts between the state of nature and
+the state of civil society, the nursery of inequality? What broke up the
+happy uniformity of the first times? First, difference in soil, in
+climate, in seasons, led to corresponding differences in men's manner of
+living. Along the banks of rivers and on the shores of the sea, they
+invented hooks and lines, and were eaters of fish. In the forests they
+invented bows and arrows, and became hunters. In cold countries they
+covered themselves with the skins of beasts. Lightning, volcanoes, or
+some happy chance acquainted them with fire, a new protection against
+the rigours of winter. In company with these natural acquisitions, grew
+up a sort of reflection or mechanical prudence, which showed them the
+kind of precautions most necessary to their security. From this
+rudimentary and wholly egoistic reflection there came a sense of the
+existence of a similar nature and similar interests in their
+fellow-creatures. Instructed by experience that the love of well-being
+and comfort is the only motive of human actions, the savage united with
+his neighbours when union was for their joint convenience, and did his
+best to blind and outwit his neighbours when their interests were
+adverse to his own, and he felt himself the weaker. Hence the origin of
+certain rude ideas of mutual obligation.[186]
+
+Soon, ceasing to fall asleep under the first tree, or to withdraw into
+caves, they found axes of hard stone, which served them to cut wood, to
+dig the ground, and to construct hovels of branches and clay. This was
+the epoch of a first revolution, which formed the establishment and
+division of families, and which introduced a rough and partial sort of
+property. Along with rudimentary ideas of property, though not
+connected with them, came the rudimentary forms of inequality. When men
+were thrown more together, then he who sang or danced the best, the
+strongest, the most adroit, or the most eloquent, acquired the most
+consideration--that is, men ceased to take uniform and equal place. And
+with the coming of this end of equality there passed away the happy
+primitive immunity from jealousy, envy, malice, hate.
+
+On the whole, though men had lost some of their original endurance, and
+their natural pity had already undergone a certain deterioration, this
+period of the development of the human faculties, occupying a just
+medium between the indolence of the primitive state and the petulant
+activity of our modern self-love, must have been at once the happiest
+and the most durable epoch. The more we reflect, the more evident we
+find it that this state was the least subject to revolutions and the
+best for man. "So long as men were content with their rustic hovels, so
+long as they confined themselves to stitching their garments of skin
+with spines or fish bones, to decking their bodies with feathers and
+shells and painting them in different colours, to perfecting and
+beautifying their bows and arrows--in a word, so long as they only
+applied themselves to works that one person could do, and to arts that
+needed no more than a single hand, then they lived free, healthy, good,
+and happy, so far as was compatible with their natural constitution, and
+continued to enjoy among themselves the sweetness of independent
+intercourse. But from the moment that one man had need of the help of
+another, as soon as they perceived it to be useful for one person to
+have provisions for two, then equality disappeared, property was
+introduced, labour became necessary, and the vast forests changed into
+smiling fields, which had to be watered by the sweat of men, and in
+which they ever saw bondage and misery springing up and growing ripe
+with the harvests."[187]
+
+The working of metals and agriculture have been the two great agents in
+this revolution. For the poet it is gold and silver, but for the
+philosopher it is iron and corn, that have civilised men and undone the
+human race. It is easy to see how the latter of the two arts was
+suggested to men by watching the reproducing processes of vegetation. It
+is less easy to be sure how they discovered metal, saw its uses, and
+invented means of smelting it, for nature had taken extreme precautions
+to hide the fatal secret. It was probably the operation of some volcano
+which first suggested the idea of fusing ore. From the fact of land
+being cultivated its division followed, and therefore the institution of
+property in its full shape. From property arose civil society. "The
+first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, could think of saying,
+_This is mine_, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the
+real founder of civil society. How many crimes, wars, murders, miseries,
+and horrors would not have been spared to the human race by one who,
+plucking up the stakes, or filling in the trench, should have called out
+to his fellows: Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if
+you forget that the earth belongs to no one, and that its fruits are for
+all."[188]
+
+Things might have remained equal even in this state, if talents had only
+been equal, and if for example the employment of iron and the
+consumption of agricultural produce had always exactly balanced one
+another. But the stronger did more work; the cleverer got more advantage
+from his work; the more ingenious found means of shortening his labour;
+the husbandman had more need of metal, or the smith more need of grain;
+and while working equally, one got much gain, and the other could
+scarcely live. This distinction between Have and Have-not led to
+confusion and revolt, to brigandage on the one side and constant
+insecurity on the other.
+
+Hence disorders of a violent and interminable kind, which gave rise to
+the most deeply designed project that ever entered the human mind. This
+was to employ in favour of property the strength of the very persons who
+attacked it, to inspire them with other maxims, and to give them other
+institutions which should be as favourable to property as natural law
+had been contrary to it. The man who conceived this project, after
+showing his neighbours the monstrous confusion which made their lives
+most burdensome, spoke in this wise: "Let us unite to shield the weak
+from oppression, to restrain the proud, and to assure to each the
+possession of what belongs to him; let us set up rules of justice and
+peace, to which all shall be obliged to conform, without respect of
+persons, and which may repair to some extent the caprices of fortune, by
+subjecting the weak and the mighty alike to mutual duties. In a word,
+instead of turning our forces against one another, let us collect them
+into one supreme power to govern us by sage laws, to protect and defend
+all the members of the association, repel their common foes, and
+preserve us in never-ending concord." This, and not the right of
+conquest, must have been the origin of society and laws, which threw new
+chains round the poor and gave new might to the rich; and for the profit
+of a few grasping and ambitious men, subjected the whole human race
+henceforth and for ever to toil and bondage and wretchedness
+without hope.
+
+The social constitution thus propounded and accepted was radically
+imperfect from the outset, and in spite of the efforts of the sagest
+lawgivers, it has always remained imperfect, because it was the work of
+chance, and because, inasmuch as it was ill begun, time, while revealing
+defects and suggesting remedies, could never repair its vices; _people
+went on incessantly repairing and patching, instead of which it was
+indispensable to begin by making a clean surface and by throwing aside
+all the old materials, just as Lycurgus did in Sparta_.
+
+Put shortly, the main positions are these. In the state of nature each
+man lived in entire isolation, and therefore physical inequality was as
+if it did not exist. After many centuries, accident, in the shape of
+difference of climate and external natural conditions, enforcing for the
+sake of subsistence some degree of joint labour, led to an increase of
+communication among men, to a slight development of the reasoning and
+reflective faculties, and to a rude and simple sense of mutual
+obligation, as a means of greater comfort in the long run. The first
+state was good and pure, but the second state was truly perfect. It was
+destroyed by a fresh succession of chances, such as the discovery of the
+arts of metal-working and tillage, which led first to the institution of
+property, and second to the prominence of the natural or physical
+inequalities, which now began to tell with deadly effectiveness. These
+inequalities gradually became summed up in the great distinction between
+rich and poor; and this distinction was finally embodied in the
+constitution of a civil society, expressly adapted to consecrate the
+usurpation of the rich, and to make the inequality of condition between
+them and the poor eternal.
+
+We thus see that the Discourse, unlike Morelly's terse exposition,
+contains no clear account of the kind of inequality with which it deals.
+Is it inequality of material possession or inequality of political
+right? Morelly tells you decisively that the latter is only an accident,
+flowing from the first; that the key to renovation lies in the abolition
+of the first. Rousseau mixes the two confusedly together under a single
+name, bemoans each, but shrinks from a conclusion or a recommendation
+as to either. He declares property to be the key to civil society, but
+falls back from any ideas leading to the modification of the institution
+lying at the root of all that he deplores.
+
+The first general criticism, which in itself contains and covers nearly
+all others, turns on Method. "Conjectures become reasons when they are
+the most likely that you can draw from the nature of things," and "it is
+for philosophy in lack of history to determine the most likely facts."
+In an inductive age this royal road is rigorously closed. Guesses drawn
+from the general nature of things can no longer give us light as to the
+particular nature of the things pertaining to primitive men, any more
+than such guesses can teach us the law of the movement of the heavenly
+bodies, or the foundations of jurisprudence. Nor can deduction from
+anything but propositions which have themselves been won by laborious
+induction, ever lead us to the only kind of philosophy which has fair
+pretension to determine the most probable of the missing facts in the
+chain of human history. That quantitative and differentiating knowledge
+which is science, was not yet thought of in connection with the
+movements of our own race upon the earth. It is to be said, further,
+that of the two possible ways of guessing about the early state, the
+conditions of advance from it, and the rest, Rousseau's guess that all
+movement away from it has been towards corruption, is less supported by
+subsequent knowledge than the guess of his adversaries, that it has
+been a movement progressive and upwards.
+
+This much being said as to incurable vice of method, and there are
+fervent disciples of Rousseau now living who will regard one's craving
+for method in talking about men as a foible of pedantry, we may briefly
+remark on one or two detached objections to Rousseau's story. To begin
+with, there is no certainty as to there having ever been a state of
+nature of a normal and organic kind, any more than there is any one
+normal and typical state of society now. There are infinitely diverse
+states of society, and there were probably as many diverse states of
+nature. Rousseau was sufficiently acquainted with the most recent
+metaphysics of his time to know that you cannot think of a tree in
+general, nor of a triangle in general, but only of some particular tree
+or triangle.[189] In a similar way he might have known that there never
+was any such thing as a state of nature in the general and abstract,
+fixed, typical, and single. He speaks of the savage state also, which
+comes next, as one, identical, normal. It is, of course, nothing of the
+kind. The varieties of belief and habit and custom among the different
+tribes of savages, in reference to every object that can engage their
+attention, from death and the gods and immortality down to the uses of
+marriage and the art of counting and the ways of procuring subsistence,
+are infinitely numerous; and the more we know about this vast diversity,
+the less easy is it to think of the savage state in general. When
+Rousseau extols the savage state as the veritable youth of the world, we
+wonder whether we are to think of the negroes of the Gold Coast, or the
+Dyaks of Borneo, Papuans or Maoris, Cheyennes or Tierra-del-Fuegians or
+the fabled Troglodytes; whether in the veritable youth of the world they
+counted up to five or only to two; whether they used a fire-drill, and
+if so what kind of drill; whether they had the notion of personal
+identity in so weak a shape as to practise the couvade; and a hundred
+other points, which we should now require any writer to settle, who
+should speak of the savage state as sovereign, one, and indivisible, in
+the way in which Rousseau speaks of it, and holds it up to our vain
+admiration.
+
+Again, if the savage state supervened upon the state of nature in
+consequence of certain climatic accidents of a permanent kind, such as
+living on the banks of a river or in a dense forest, how was it that the
+force of these accidents did not begin to operate at once? How could the
+isolated state of nature endure for a year in face of them? Or what was
+the precipitating incident which suddenly set them to work, and drew the
+primitive men from an isolation so profound that they barely recognised
+one another, into that semi-social state in which the family
+was founded?
+
+We cannot tell how the state of nature continued to subsist, or, if it
+ever subsisted, how and why it ever came to an end, because the agencies
+which are alleged to have brought it to an end must have been coeval
+with the appearance of man himself. If gods had brought to men seed,
+fire, and the mechanical arts, as in one of the Platonic myths,[190] we
+could understand that there was a long stage preliminary to these
+heavenly gifts. But if the gods had no part nor lot in it, and if the
+accidents that slowly led the human creature into union were as old as
+that nature, of which indeed they were actually the component elements,
+then man must have quitted the state of nature the very day on which he
+was born into it. And what can be a more monstrous anachronism than to
+turn a flat-headed savage into a clever, self-conscious, argumentative
+utilitarian of the eighteenth century; working the social problem out in
+his flat head with a keenness, a consistency, a grasp of first
+principles, that would have entitled him to a chair in the institute of
+moral sciences, and entering the social union with the calm and
+reasonable deliberation of a great statesman taking a critical step in
+policy? Aristotle was wiser when he fixed upon sociability as an
+ultimate quality of human nature, instead of making it, as Rousseau and
+so many others have done, the conclusion of an unimpeachable train of
+syllogistic reasoning.[191] Morelly even, his own contemporary, and
+much less of a sage than Aristotle, was still sage enough to perceive
+that this primitive human machine, "though composed of intelligent
+parts, generally operates independently of its reason; its deliberations
+are forestalled, and only leave it to look on, while sentiment does its
+work."[192] It is the more remarkable that Rousseau should have fallen
+into this kind of error, as it was one of his distinctions to have
+perceived and partially worked out the principle, that men guide their
+conduct rather from passion and instinct than from reasoned
+enlightenment.[193] The ultimate quality which he named pity is, after
+all, the germ of sociability, which is only extended sympathy. But he
+did not firmly adhere to this ultimate quality, nor make any effort
+consistently to trace out its various products.
+
+We do not find, however, in Rousseau any serious attempt to analyse the
+composition of human nature in its primitive stages. Though constantly
+warning his readers very impressively against confounding domesticated
+with primitive men, he practically assumes that the main elements of
+character must always have been substantially identical with such
+elements and conceptions as are found after the addition of many ages of
+increasingly complex experience. There is something worth considering in
+his notion that civilisation has had effects upon man analogous to those
+of domestication upon animals, but he lacked logical persistency enough
+to enable him to adhere to his own idea, and work out conclusions
+from it.
+
+It might further be pointed out in another direction that he takes for
+granted that the mode of advance into a social state has always been one
+and the same, a single and uniform process, marked by precisely the same
+set of several stages, following one another in precisely the same
+order. There is no evidence of this; on the contrary, evidence goes to
+show that civilisation varies in origin and process with race and other
+things, and that though in all cases starting from the prime factor of
+sociableness in man, yet the course of its development has depended on
+the particular sets of circumstances with which that factor has had to
+combine. These are full of variety, according to climate and racial
+predisposition, although, as has been justly said, the force of both
+these two elements diminishes as the influence of the past in giving
+consistency to our will becomes more definite, and our means of
+modifying climate and race become better known. There is no sign that
+Rousseau, any more than many other inquirers, ever reflected whether the
+capacity for advance into the state of civil society in any highly
+developed form is universal throughout the species, or whether there are
+not races eternally incapable of advance beyond the savage state.
+Progress would hardly be the exception which we know it to be in the
+history of communities if there were not fundamental diversities in the
+civilisable quality of races. Why do some bodies of men get on to the
+high roads of civilisation, while others remain in the jungle and
+thicket of savagery; and why do some races advance along one of these
+roads, and others advance by different roads?
+
+Considerations of this sort disclose the pinched frame of trim theory
+with which Rousseau advanced to set in order a huge mass of boundlessly
+varied, intricate, and unmanageable facts. It is not, however, at all
+worth while to extend such criticism further than suffices to show how
+little his piece can stand the sort of questions which may be put to it
+from a scientific point of view. Nothing that Rousseau had to say about
+the state of nature was seriously meant for scientific exposition, any
+more than the Sermon on the Mount was meant for political economy. The
+importance of the Discourse on Inequality lay in its vehement
+denunciation of the existing social state. To the writer the question
+of the origin of inequality is evidently far less a matter at heart,
+than the question of its results. It is the natural inclination of one
+deeply moved by a spectacle of depravation in his own time and country,
+to extol some other time or country, of which he is happily ignorant
+enough not to know the drawbacks. Rousseau wrote about the savage state
+in something of the same spirit in which Tacitus wrote the Germania. And
+here, as in the Discourse on the influence of science and art upon
+virtue, there is a positive side. To miss this in resentment of the
+unscientific paradox that lies about it, is to miss the force of the
+piece, and to render its enormous influence for a generation after it
+was written incomprehensible. We may always be quite sure that no set of
+ideas ever produced this resounding effect on opinion, unless they
+contained something which the social or spiritual condition of the men
+whom they inflamed made true for the time, and true in an urgent sense.
+Is it not tenable that the state of certain savage tribes is more
+normal, offers a better balance between desire and opportunity, between
+faculty and performance, than the permanent state of large classes in
+western countries, the broken wreck of civilisation?[194] To admit this
+is not to conclude, as Rousseau so rashly concluded, that the movement
+away from the primitive stages has been productive only of evil and
+misery even to the masses of men, the hewers of wood and the drawers of
+water; or that it was occasioned, and has been carried on by the
+predominance of the lower parts and principles of human nature. Our
+provisional acquiescence in the straitness and blank absence of outlook
+or hope of the millions who come on to the earth that greets them with
+no smile, and then stagger blindly under dull burdens for a season, and
+at last are shovelled silently back under the ground,--our acquiescence
+can only be justified in the sight of humanity by the conviction that
+this is one of the temporary conditions of a vast process, working
+forwards through the impulse and agency of the finer human spirits, but
+needing much blood, many tears, uncounted myriads of lives, and
+immeasurable geologic periods of time, for its high and beneficent
+consummation. There is nothing surprising, perhaps nothing deeply
+condemnable, in the burning anger for which this acquiescence is often
+changed in the more impatient natures. As against the ignoble host who
+think that the present ordering of men, with all its prodigious
+inequalities, is in foundation and substance the perfection of social
+blessedness, Rousseau was almost in the right. If the only alternative
+to the present social order remaining in perpetuity were a retrogression
+to some such condition as that of the islanders of the South Sea, a
+lover of his fellow-creatures might look upon the result, so far as it
+affected the happiness of the bulk of them, with tolerably complete
+indifference. It is only the faith that we are moving slowly away from
+the existing order, as our ancestors moved slowly away from the old want
+of order, that makes the present endurable, and makes any tenacious
+effort to raise the future possible.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+An immense quantity of nonsense has been talked about the equality of
+man, for which those who deny that doctrine and those who assert it may
+divide the responsibility. It is in reality true or false, according to
+the doctrines with which it is confronted. As against the theory that
+the existing way of sharing the laboriously acquired fruits and delights
+of the earth is a just representation and fair counterpart of natural
+inequalities among men in merit and capacity, the revolutionary theory
+is true, and the passionate revolutionary cry for equality of external
+chance most righteous and unanswerable. But the issues do not end here.
+Take such propositions as these:--there are differences in the capacity
+of men for serving the community; the well-being of the community
+demands the allotment of high function in proportion to high faculty;
+the rights of man in politics are confined to a right of the same
+protection for his own interests as is given to the interests of others.
+As against these principles, the revolutionary deductions from the
+equality of man are false. And such pretensions as that every man could
+be made equally fit for every function, or that not only each should
+have an equal chance, but that he who uses his chance well and sociably
+should be kept on a level in common opinion and trust with him who uses
+it ill and unsociably, or does not use it at all,--the whole of this is
+obviously most illusory and most disastrous, and in whatever decree any
+set of men have ever taken it up, to that degree they have paid
+the penalty.
+
+What Rousseau's Discourse meant, what he intended it to mean, and what
+his first direct disciples understood it as meaning, is not that all men
+are born equal. He never says this, and his recognition of natural
+inequality implies the contrary proposition. His position is that the
+artificial differences, springing from the conditions of the social
+union, do not coincide with the differences in capacity springing from
+original constitution; that the tendency of the social union as now
+organised is to deepen the artificial inequalities, and make the gulf
+between those endowed with privileges and wealth and those not so
+endowed ever wider and wider. It would have been very difficult a
+hundred years ago to deny the truth of this way of stating the case. If
+it has to some extent already ceased to be entirely true, and if violent
+popular forces are at work making it less and less true, we owe the
+origin of the change, among other causes and influences, not least to
+the influence of Rousseau himself, and those whom he inspired. It was
+that influence which, though it certainly did not produce, yet did as
+certainly give a deep and remarkable bias, first to the American
+Revolution, and a dozen years afterwards to the French Revolution.
+
+It would be interesting to trace the different fortunes which awaited
+the idea of the equality of man in America and in France. In America it
+has always remained strictly within the political order, and perhaps
+with the considerable exception of the possibles share it may have had,
+along with Christian notions of the brotherhood of man, and
+statesmanlike notions of national prosperity, in leading to the
+abolition of slavery, it has brought forth no strong moral sentiment
+against the ethical and economic bases of any part of the social order.
+In France, on the other hand, it was the starting-point of movements
+that have had all the fervour and intensity of religions, and have made
+men feel about social inequalities the burning shame and wrath with
+which a Christian saw the flourishing temples of unclean gods. This
+difference in the interpretation and development of the first doctrine
+may be explained in various ways,--by difference of material
+circumstance between America and France; difference of the political and
+social level from which the principle of equality had to start; and not
+least by difference of intellectual temperament. This last was itself
+partly the product of difference in religion, which makes the English
+dread the practical enforcement of logical conclusions, while the French
+have hitherto been apt to dread and despise any tendency to stop
+short of that.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Let us notice, finally, the important fact that the appearance of
+Rousseau's Discourses was the first sign of reaction against the
+historic mode of inquiry into society that had been initiated by
+Montesquieu. The Spirit of Laws was published in 1748, with a truly
+prodigious effect. It coloured the whole of the social literature in
+France during the rest of the century. A history of its influence would
+be a history of one of the most important sides of speculative activity.
+In the social writings of Rousseau himself there is hardly a chapter
+which does not contain tacit reference to Montesquieu's book. The
+Discourses were the beginning of a movement in an exactly opposite
+direction; that is, away from patient collection of wide multitudes of
+facts relating to the conditions of society, towards the promulgation of
+arbitrary systems of absolute social dogmas. Mably, the chief dogmatic
+socialist of the century, and one of the most dignified and austere
+characters, is an important example of the detriment done by the
+influence of Rousseau to that of Montesquieu, in the earlier stages of
+the conflict between the two schools. Mably (1709-1785), of whom the
+remark is to be made that he was for some years behind the scenes of
+government as De Tencin's secretary and therefore was versed in affairs,
+began his inquiries with Greece and Rome. "You will find everything in
+ancient history," he said.[195] And he remained entirely in this groove
+of thought until Rousseau appeared. He then gradually left Montesquieu.
+"To find the duties of a legislator," he said, "I descend into the
+abysses of my heart, I study my sentiments." He opposed the Economists,
+the other school that was feeling its way imperfectly enough to a
+positive method. "As soon as I see landed property established," he
+wrote, "then I see unequal fortunes; and from these unequal fortunes
+must there not necessarily result different and opposed interests, all
+the vices of riches, all the vices of poverty, the brutalisation of
+intelligence, the corruption of civil manners?" and so forth.[196] In
+his most important work, published in 1776, we see Rousseau's notions
+developed, with a logic from which their first author shrunk, either
+from fear, or more probably from want of firmness and consistency as a
+reasoner. "It is to equality that nature has attached the preservation
+of our social faculties and happiness: and from this I conclude that
+legislation will only be taking useless trouble, unless all its
+attention is first of all directed to the establishment of equality in
+the fortune and condition of citizens."[197] That is to say not only
+political equality, but economic communism. "What miserable folly, that
+persons who pass for philosophers should go on repeating after one
+another that without property there can be no society. Let us leave
+illusion. It is property that divides us into two classes, rich and
+poor; the first will alway prefer their fortune to that of the state,
+while the second will never love a government or laws that leave them in
+misery."[198] This was the kind of opinion for which Rousseau's diffuse
+and rhetorical exposition of social necessity had prepared France some
+twenty years before. After powerfully helping the process of general
+dissolution, it produced the first fruits specifically after its own
+kind some twenty years later in the system of Baboeuf.[199]
+
+The unflinching application of principles is seldom achieved by the men
+who first launch them. The labour of the preliminary task seems to
+exhaust one man's stock of mental force. Rousseau never thought of the
+subversion of society or its reorganisation on a communistic basis.
+Within a few months of his profession of profound lament that the first
+man who made a claim to property had not been instantly unmasked as the
+arch foe of the race, he speaks most respectfully of property as the
+pledge of the engagements of citizens and the foundation of the social
+pact, while the first condition of that pact is that every one should be
+maintained in peaceful enjoyment of what belongs to him.[200] We need
+not impute the apparent discrepancy to insincerity. Rousseau was always
+apt to think in a slipshod manner. He sensibly though illogically
+accepted wholesome practical maxims, as if they flowed from theoretical
+premisses that were in truth utterly incompatible with them.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[151] Delandine's _Couronnes Acad�miques, ou Recueil de prix propos�s
+par les Soci�t�s Savantes_. (Paris, 2 vols., 1787.)
+
+[152] Musset-Pathay has collected the details connected with the award
+of the prize, ii. 365-367.
+
+[153] Second Letter to M. de Malesherbes, p. 358. Also _Conf._, viii.
+135.
+
+[154] Diderot's account (_Vie de S�n�que_, sect. 66, _Oeuv._, iii. 98;
+also ii. 285) is not inconsistent with Rousseau's own, so that we may
+dismiss as apocryphal Marmontel's version of the story (_M�m._ VIII.),
+to the effect that Rousseau was about to answer the question with a
+commonplace affirmative, until Diderot persuaded him that a paradox
+would attract more attention. It has been said also that M. de
+Francueil, and various others, first urged the writer to take a
+negative line of argument. To suppose this possible is to prove one's
+incapacity for understanding what manner of man Rousseau was.
+
+[155] _Conf._, ix. 232, 233.
+
+[156] _Rousseau Juge de Jean Jacques, Dialogues_, i. 252.
+
+[157] _Dialogues_, i. 275, 276.
+
+[158] _Conf._, viii. 138.
+
+[159] "It made a kind of revolution in Paris," says Grimm. _Corr.
+Lit._, i. 108.
+
+[160] _R�p. au Roi de Pologne_, p. 111 and p. 113.
+
+[161] _R�p. � M. Bordes_, 138.
+
+[162] _Ib._ 137.
+
+[163] "The first source of the evil is inequality; from inequality
+come riches ... from riches are born luxury and idleness; from luxury
+come the fine arts, and from idleness the sciences." _R�p. au Roi de
+Pologne_, 120, 121.
+
+[164] _R�p. � M. Bordes_, 147. In the same spirit he once wrote the
+more wholesome maxim, "We should argue with the wise, and never with
+the public." _Corr._, i. 191.
+
+[165] _R�p. au Roi de Pologne_, 128, 129.
+
+[166] _R�p. � M. Bordes_, 150-161.
+
+[167] P. 174.
+
+[168] Egger's _Hell�nisme en France_, 28i�me le�on, p. 265.
+
+[169] Voltaire to J.J.R. Aug. 30, 1755.
+
+[170] _R�p. au Roi de Pologne_, 105.
+
+[171] In 1753 the French Academy, by way no doubt of summoning a
+counter-blast to Rousseau, boldly offered as the subject of their
+essay the thesis that "The love of letters inspires the love of
+virtue," and the prize was won fitly enough by a Jesuit professor of
+rhetoric. See Delandine, i. 42.
+
+[172] Preface to _Narcisse_, 251.
+
+[173] _R�p. � M. Bordes_, 167.
+
+[174] P. 187.
+
+[175] See for instance a strange discussion about _morale universelle_
+and the like in _M�m. de Mdme. d'Epinay_, i. 217-226.
+
+[176] Often described as Morelly the Younger, to distinguish him from
+his father, who wrote an essay on the human heart, and another on the
+human intelligence.
+
+[177] _Code de la Nature, ou le v�ritable esprit de ses loix, de tout
+tems n�glig� ou m�connu._
+
+[178] P. 169. Rousseau did not see it then, but he showed himself on
+the track.
+
+[179] At the end of the _Code de la Nature_ Morelly places a complete
+set of rules for the organisation of a model community. The base of it
+was the absence of private property--a condition that was to be
+preserved by vigilant education of the young in ways of thinking, that
+should make the possession of private property odious or
+inconceivable. There are to be sumptuary laws of a moderate kind. The
+government is to be in the hands of the elders. The children are to be
+taken away from their parents at the age of five; reared and educated
+in public establishments; and returned to their parents at the age of
+sixteen or so when they will marry. Marriage is to be dissoluble at
+the end of ten years, but after divorce the woman is not to marry a
+man younger than herself, nor is the man to marry a woman younger than
+the wife from whom he has parted. The children of a divorced couple
+are to remain with the father, and if he marries again, they are to be
+held the children of the second wife. Mothers are to suckle their own
+children (p. 220). The whole scheme is fuller of good ideas than such
+schemes usually are.
+
+[180] P. 218.
+
+[181] This is obviously untrue. Animals do not know death in the sense
+of scientific definition, and probably have no abstract idea of it as
+a general state; but they know and are afraid of its concrete
+phenomena, and so are most savages.
+
+[182] This is one of the passages in the Discourse, the harshness of
+which was afterwards attributed by Rousseau to the influence of
+Diderot. _Conf._, viii. 205, _n._
+
+[183] P. 261.
+
+[184] As if sin really came by the law in this sense; as if a law
+defining and prohibiting a malpractice were the cause of the
+commission of the act which it constituted a malpractice. As if giving
+a name and juristic classification to any kind of conduct were adding
+to men's motives for indulging in it.
+
+[185] P. 269.
+
+[186] P. 278.
+
+[187] Pp. 285-287.
+
+[188] P. 273.
+
+[189] P. 250.
+
+[190] _Politicus_, 268 D-274 E.
+
+[191] Here for instance is D'Alembert's story:--"The necessity of
+shielding our own body from pain and destruction leads us to examine
+among external objects those which are useful and those which are
+hurtful, so that we may seek the one and flee the others. But we
+hardly begin our search into such objects before we discover among
+them a great number of beings which strike us as exactly like
+ourselves; that is, whose form is just like our own, and who, so far
+as we can judge at the first glance, appear to have the same
+perceptions. Everything therefore leads us to suppose that they have
+also the same wants, and consequently the same interest in satisfying
+them, whence it results that we must find great advantage in joining
+with them for the purpose of distinguishing in nature what has the
+power of preserving us from what has the power of hurting us. The
+communication of ideas is the principle and the stay of this union,
+and necessarily demands the invention of signs; such is the origin of
+the formation of societies." _Discours Pr�liminaire de
+l'Encyclop�die._ Contrast this with Aristotle's sensible statement
+(_Polit._ I. ii. 15) that "there is in men by nature a strong impulse
+to enter into such union."
+
+[192] _Code de la Nature._
+
+[193] See, for example, his criticism on the Abb� de St. Pierre.
+_Conf._, viii. 264. And also in the analysis of this very Discourse,
+above, vol. i. p. 163.
+
+[194] "I have lived with communities of savages in South America and
+in the East, who have no laws or law courts but the public opinion of
+the visage freely expressed. Each man scrupulously respects the rights
+of his fellow, and any infraction of those rights rarely or never
+takes place. In such a community all are nearly equal. There are none
+of those wide distinctions of education and ignorance, wealth and
+poverty, master and servant, which are the products of our
+civilisation; there is none of that widespread division of labour
+which, while it increases wealth, produces also conflicting interests;
+there is not that severe competition and struggle for existence, or
+for wealth, which the dense population of civilised countries
+inevitably creates. All incitements to great crimes are thus wanting,
+and petty ones are repressed, partly by the influence of public
+opinion, but chiefly by that natural sense of justice and of his
+neighbour's right, which seems to be in some degree inherent in every
+race of man. Now, although we have progressed vastly beyond the savage
+state in intellectual achievements, we have not advanced equally in
+morals. It is true that among those classes who have no wants that
+cannot be easily supplied, and among whom public opinion has great
+influence, the rights of others are fully respected. It is true, also,
+that we have vastly extended the sphere of those rights, and include
+within them all the brotherhood of man. But it is not too much to say,
+that the mass of our populations have not at all advanced beyond the
+savage code of morals, and have in many cases sunk below it."
+Wallace's _Malay Archipelago_, vol. ii. pp. 460-461.
+
+[195] So too Bougainville, a brother of the navigator, said in 1760,
+"For an attentive observer who sees nothing in events of the utmost
+diversity of appearance but the natural effects of a certain number of
+causes differently combined, Greece is the universe in small, and the
+history of Greece an excellent epitome of universal history." (Quoted
+in Egger's _Hell�nisme en France_, ii. 272.) The revolutionists of the
+next generation, who used to appeal so unseasonably to the ancients,
+were only following a literary fashion set by their fathers.
+
+[196] _Doutes sur l'Ordre Naturel_; _Oeuv._, xi. 80. (Ed. 1794, 1795.)
+
+[197] _La L�gislation_, I. i.
+
+[198] _Ibid._
+
+[199] It is not within our province to examine the vexed question
+whether the Convention was fundamentally socialist, and not merely
+political. That socialist ideas were afloat in the minds of some
+members, one can hardly doubt. See Von Sybel's _Hist. of the French
+Revolution_, Bk. II. ch. iv., on one side, and Quinet's _La
+R�volution_, ii. 90-107, on the other.
+
+[200] _Economie Politique_, pp. 41, 53, etc.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+PARIS.
+
+
+I.
+
+By what subtle process did Rousseau, whose ideal had been a summer life
+among all the softnesses of sweet gardens and dappled orchards, turn
+into panegyrist of the harsh austerity of old Cato and grim Brutus's
+civic devotion? The amiability of eighteenth century France--and France
+was amiable in spite of the atrocities of White Penitents at Toulouse,
+and black Jansenists at Paris, and the men and women who dealt in
+_lettres-de-cachet_ at Versailles--was revolted by the name of the cruel
+patriot who slew his son for the honour of discipline.[201] How came
+Rousseau of all men, the great humanitarian of his time, to rise to the
+height of these unlovely rigours?
+
+The answer is that he was a citizen of Geneva transplanted. He had been
+bred in puritan and republican tradition, with love of God and love of
+law and freedom and love of country all penetrating it, and then he had
+been accidentally removed to a strange city that was in active ferment
+with ideas that were the direct abnegation of all these. In Paris the
+idea of a God was either repudiated along with many other ancestral
+conceptions, or else it was fatally entangled with the worst
+superstition and not seldom with the vilest cruelties. The idea of
+freedom was unknown, and the idea of law was benumbed by abuses and
+exceptions. The idea of country was enfeebled in some and displaced in
+others by a growing passion for the captivating something styled
+citizenship of the world. If Rousseau could have ended his days among
+the tranquil lakes and hills of Savoy, Geneva might possibly never have
+come back to him. For it depends on circumstance, which of the chances
+that slumber within us shall awake, and which shall fall unroused with
+us into the darkness. The fact of Rousseau ranking among the greatest of
+the writers of the French language, and the yet more important fact that
+his ideas found their most ardent disciples and exploded in their most
+violent form in France, constantly make us forget that he was not a
+Frenchman, but a Genevese deeply imbued with the spirit of his native
+city. He was thirty years old before he began even temporarily to live
+in France: he had only lived there some five or six years when he wrote
+his first famous piece, so un-French in all its spirit; and the ideas of
+the Social Contract were in germ before he settled in France at all.
+
+There have been two great religious reactions, and the name of Geneva
+has a fundamental association with each of them. The first was that
+against the paganised Catholicism of the renaissance, and of this
+Calvin was a prime leader; the second was that against the materialism
+of the eighteenth century, of which the prime leader was Rousseau. The
+diplomatist was right who called Geneva the fifth part of the world. At
+the congress of Vienna, some one, wearied at the enormous place taken by
+the hardly visible Geneva in the midst of negotiations involving
+momentous issues for the whole habitable globe, called out that it was
+after all no more than a grain of sand. But he was not wrong who made
+bold to reply, "Geneva is no grain of sand; 'tis a grain of musk that
+perfumes all Europe."[202] We have to remember that it was at all events
+as a grain of musk ever pervading the character of Rousseau. It happened
+in later years that he repudiated his allegiance to her, but however
+bitterly a man may quarrel with a parent, he cannot change blood, and
+Rousseau ever remained a true son of the city of Calvin. We may perhaps
+conjecture without excessive fancifulness that the constant spectacle
+and memory of a community, free, energetic, and prosperous, whose
+institutions had been shaped and whose political temper had been
+inspired by one great lawgiver, contributed even more powerfully than
+what he had picked up about Lycurgus and Laced�mon, to give him a turn
+for Utopian speculation, and a conviction of the artificiality and easy
+modifiableness of the social structure. This, however, is less certain
+than that he unconsciously received impressions in his youth from the
+circumstances of Geneva, both as to government and religion, as to
+freedom, order, citizenship, manners, which formed the deepest part of
+him on the reflective side, and which made themselves visible whenever
+he exchanged the life of beatified sense for moods of speculative
+energy, "Never," he says, "did I see the walls of that happy city, I
+never went into it, without feeling a certain faintness at my heart, due
+to excess of tender emotion. At the same time that the noble image of
+freedom elevated my soul, those of equality, of union, of gentle
+manners, touched me even to tears."[203] His spirit never ceased to
+haunt city and lake to the end, and he only paid the debt of an owed
+acknowledgment in the dedication of his Discourse on Inequality to the
+republic of Geneva.[204] It was there it had its root. The honour in
+which industry was held in Geneva, the democratic phrases that
+constituted the dialect of its government, the proud tradition of the
+long battle which had won and kept its independence, the severity of its
+manners, the simplicity of its pleasures,--all these things awoke in his
+memory as soon as ever occasion drew him to serious thought. More than
+that, he had in a peculiar manner drawn in with the breath of his
+earliest days in this theocratically constituted city, the vital idea
+that there are sacred things and objects of reverence among men. And
+hence there came to him, though with many stains and much misdirection,
+the most priceless excellence of a capacity for devout veneration.
+
+There is certainly no real contradiction between the quality of
+reverence and the more equivocal quality of a sensuous temperament,
+though a man may well seem on the surface, as the first succeeds the
+second in rule over him, to be the contradiction to his other self. The
+objects of veneration and the objects of sensuous delight are externally
+so unlike and so incongruous, that he who follows both in their turns is
+as one playing the part of an ironical chorus in the tragi-comic drama
+of his own life. You may perceive these two to be mere imperfect or
+illusory opposites, when you confront a man like Rousseau with the true
+opposite of his own type; with those who are from their birth analysts
+and critics, keen, restless, urgent, inexorably questioning. That
+energetic type, though not often dead or dull on the side of sense, yet
+is incapable of steeping itself in the manifold delights of eye and ear,
+of nostril and touch, with the peculiar intensity of passive absorption
+that seeks nothing further nor deeper than unending continuance of this
+profound repose of all filled sensation, just as it is incapable of the
+kindred mood of elevated humility and joyful unasking devoutness in the
+presence of emotions and dim thoughts that are beyond the compass
+of words.
+
+The citizen of Geneva with this unseen fibre of Calvinistic veneration
+and austerity strong and vigorous within him, found a world that had
+nothing sacred and took nothing for granted; that held the past in
+contempt, and ever like old Athenians asked for some new thing; that
+counted simplicity of life an antique barbarism, and literary
+curiousness the master virtue. There were giants in this world, like the
+panurgic Diderot. There were industrious, worthy, disinterested men, who
+used their minds honestly and actively with sincere care for truth, like
+D'Holbach. There was poured around the whole, like a high stimulating
+atmosphere to the stronger, and like some evil mental aphrodisiac to the
+weaker, the influence of Voltaire, the great indomitable chieftain of
+them all. Intellectual size half redeems want of perfect direction by
+its generous power and fulness. It was not the strong men, atheists and
+philosophisers as they were, who first irritated Rousseau into revolt
+against their whole system of thought in all its principles. The dissent
+between him and them was fundamental and enormous, and in time it flamed
+out into open war. Conflict of theory, however, was brought home to him
+first by slow-growing exasperation at the follies in practice of the
+minor disciples of the gospel of knowing and acting, as distinguished
+from his own gospel of placid being. He craved beliefs that should
+uphold men in living their lives, substantial helps on which they might
+lean without examination and without mistrust: his life in Paris was
+thrown among people who lived in the midst of open questions, and
+revelled in a reflective and didactic morality, which had no root in the
+heart and so made things easy for the practical conscience. He sought
+tranquillity and valued life for its own sake, not as an arena and a
+theme for endless argument and debate: he found friends who knew no
+higher pleasure than the futile polemics of mimic philosophy over
+dessert, who were as full of quibble as the wrong-headed interlocutors
+in a Platonic dialogue, and who babbled about God and state of nature,
+about virtue and the spirituality of the soul, much as Boswell may have
+done when Johnson complained of him for asking questions that would make
+a man hang himself. The highest things were thus brought down to the
+level of the cheapest discourse, and subjects which the wise take care
+only to discuss with the wise, were here everyday topics for all comers.
+
+The association with such high themes of those light qualities of tact,
+gaiety, complaisance, which are the life of the superficial commerce of
+men and women of the world, probably gave quite as much offence to
+Rousseau as the doctrines which some of his companions had the honest
+courage or the heedless fatuity to profess. It was an outrage to all the
+serious side of him to find persons of quality introducing materialism
+as a new fashion, and atheism as the liveliest of condiments. The
+perfume of good manners only made what he took for bad principles the
+worse, and heightened his impatience at the flippancy of pretensions to
+overthrow the beliefs of a world between two wines.
+
+Doctrine and temperament united to set him angrily against the world
+around him. The one was austere and the other was sensuous, and the
+sensuous temperament in its full strength is essentially solitary. The
+play of social intercourse, its quick transitions, and incessant
+demands, are fatal to free and uninterrupted abandonment to the flow of
+soft internal emotions. Rousseau, dreaming, moody, indolently,
+meditative, profoundly enwrapped in the brooding egoism of his own
+sensations, had to mix with men and women whose egoism took the contrary
+form of an eager desire to produce flashing effects on other people. We
+may be sure that as the two sides of his character--his notions of
+serious principle, and his notions of personal comfort--both went in the
+same direction, the irritation and impatience with which they inspired
+him towards society did not lessen with increased communication, but
+naturally deepened with a more profoundly settled antipathy.
+
+Rousseau lived in Paris for twelve years, from his return from Venice in
+1744 until his departure in 1756 for the rustic lodge in a wood which
+the good-will of Madame d'Epinay provided for him. We have already seen
+one very important side of his fortunes during these years, in the
+relations he formed with Theresa, and the relations which he repudiated
+with his children. We have heard too the new words with which during
+these years he first began to make the hearts of his contemporaries wax
+hot within them. It remains to examine the current of daily circumstance
+on which his life was embarked, and the shores to which it was
+bearing him.
+
+His patrons were at present almost exclusively in the circle of
+finance. Richelieu, indeed, took him for a moment by the hand, but even
+the introduction to him was through the too frail wife of one of the
+greatest of the farmers general.[205] Madame Dupin and Madame d'Epinay,
+his two chief patronesses, were also both of them the wives of magnates
+of the farm. The society of the great people of this world was marked by
+all the glare, artificiality, and sentimentalism of the epoch, but it
+had also one or two specially hollow characteristics of its own. As is
+always the case when a new rich class rises in the midst of a community
+possessing an old caste, the circle of Parisian financiers made it their
+highest social aim to thrust and strain into the circle of the
+Versailles people of quality. They had no normal life of their own, with
+independent traditions and self-respect; and for the same reason that an
+essentially worn-out aristocracy may so long preserve a considerable
+degree of vigour and even of social utility under certain circumstances
+by means of tenacious pride in its own order, a new plutocracy is
+demoralised from the very beginning of its existence by want of a
+similar kind of pride in itself, and by the ignoble necessity of craving
+the countenance of an upper class that loves to despise and humiliate
+it. Besides the more obvious evils of a position resting entirely on
+material opulence, and maintaining itself by coarse and glittering
+ostentation, there is a fatal moral hollowness which infects both
+serious conduct and social diversion. The result is seen in imitative
+manners, affected culture, and a mixture of timorous self-consciousness
+within and noisy self-assertion without, which completes the most
+distasteful scene that any collected spirit can witness.
+
+Rousseau was, as has been said, the secretary of Madame Dupin and her
+stepson Francueil. He occasionally went with them to Chenonceaux in
+Touraine, one of Henry the Second's castles built for Diana of Poitiers,
+and here he fared sumptuously every day. In Paris his means, as we know,
+were too strait. For the first two years he had a salary of nine hundred
+francs; then his employers raised it to as much as fifty louis. For the
+first of the Discourses the publisher gave him nothing, and for the
+second he had to extract his fee penny by penny, and after long waiting.
+His comic opera, the Village Soothsayer, was a greater success; it
+brought him the round sum of two hundred louis from the court, and some
+five and twenty more from the bookseller, and so, he says, "the
+interlude, which cost me five or six weeks of work, produced nearly as
+much money as Emilius afterwards did, which had cost me twenty years of
+meditation and three years of composition."[206] Before the arrival of
+this windfall, M. Francueil, who was receiver-general, offered him the
+post of cashier in that important department, and Rousseau attended for
+some weeks to receive the necessary instructions. His progress was tardy
+as usual, and the complexities of accounts were as little congenial to
+him as notarial complexities had been three and twenty years previously.
+It is, however, one of the characteristics of times of national break-up
+not to be peremptory in exacting competence, and Rousseau gravely sat at
+the receipt of custom, doing the day's duty with as little skill as
+liking. Before he had been long at his post, his official chief going on
+a short journey left him in charge of the chest, which happened at the
+moment to contain no very portentous amount. The disquiet with which the
+watchful custody of this moderate treasure harassed and afflicted
+Rousseau, not only persuaded him that nature had never designed him to
+be the guardian of money chests, but also threw him into a fit of very
+painful illness. The surgeons let him understand that within six months
+he would be in the pale kingdoms. The effect of such a hint on a man of
+his temper, and the train of reflections which it would be sure to set
+aflame, are to be foreseen by us who know Rousseau's fashion of dealing
+with the irksome. Why sacrifice the peace and charm of the little
+fragment of days left to him, to the bondage of an office for which he
+felt nothing but disgust? How reconcile the austere principles which he
+had just adopted in his denunciation of sciences and arts, and his
+panegyric on the simplicity of the natural life, with such duties as he
+had to perform? And how preach disinterestedness and frugality from amid
+the cashboxes of a receiver-general? Plainly it was his duty to pass in
+independence and poverty the little time that was yet left to him, to
+bring all the forces of his soul to bear in breaking the fetters of
+opinion, and to carry out courageously whatever seemed best to himself,
+without suffering the judgment of others to interpose the slightest
+embarrassment or hindrance.[207]
+
+With Rousseau, to conceive a project of this kind for simplifying his
+life was to hasten urgently towards its realisation, because such
+projects harmonised with all his strongest predispositions. His design
+mastered and took whole possession of him. He resolved to earn his
+living by copying music, as that was conformable to his taste, within
+his capacity, and compatible with entire personal freedom. His patron
+did as the world is so naturally ready to do with those who choose the
+stoic's way; he declared that Rousseau was gone mad.[208] Talk like this
+had no effect on a man whom self-indulgence led into a path that others
+would only have been forced into by self-denial. Let it be said,
+however, that this is a form of self-indulgence of which society is
+never likely to see an excess, and meanwhile we may continue to pay it
+some respect as assuredly leaning to virtue's side. Rousseau's many
+lapses from grace perhaps deserve a certain gentleness of treatment,
+after the time when with deliberation and collected effort he set
+himself to the hard task of fitting his private life to his public
+principles. Anything that heightens the self-respect of the race is good
+for us to behold, and it is a permanent source of comfort to all who
+thirst after reality in teachers, whether their teaching happens to be
+our own or not, to find that the prophet of social equality was not a
+fine gentleman, nor the teacher of democracy a hanger-on to the silly
+skirts of fashion.
+
+Rousseau did not merely throw up a post which would one day have made
+him rich. Stoicism on the heroic, peremptory scale is not so difficult
+as the application of the same principle to trifles. Besides this
+greater sacrifice, he gave up the pleasant things for which most men
+value the money that procures them, and instituted an austere sumptuary
+reform in truly Genevese spirit. His sword was laid aside; for flowing
+peruke was substituted the small round wig; he left off gilt buttons and
+white stockings, and he sold his watch with the joyful and singular
+thought that he would never again need to know the time. One sacrifice
+remained to be made. Part of his equipment for the Venetian embassy had
+been a large stock of fine linen, and for this he retained a particular
+affection, for both now and always Rousseau had a passion for personal
+cleanliness, as he had for corporeal wholesomeness. He was seasonably
+delivered from bondage to his fine linen by aid from without. One
+Christmas Eve it lay drying in a garret in the rather considerable
+quantity of forty-two shirts, when a thief, always suspected to be the
+brother of Theresa, broke open the door and carried off the treasure,
+leaving Rousseau henceforth to be the contented wearer of coarser
+stuffs.[209]
+
+We may place this reform towards the end of the year 1750, or the
+beginning of 1751, when his mind was agitated by the busy discussion
+which his first Discourse excited, and by the new ideas of literary
+power which its reception by the public naturally awakened in him. "It
+takes," wrote Diderot, "right above the clouds; never was such a
+success."[210] We can hardly have a surer sign of a man's fundamental
+sincerity than that his first triumph, the first revelation to him of
+his power, instead of seducing him to frequent the mischievous and
+disturbing circle of his applauders, should throw him inwards upon
+himself and his own principles with new earnestness and refreshed
+independence. Rousseau very soon made up his mind what the world was
+worth to him; and this, not as the ordinary sentimentalist or satirist
+does, by way of set-off against the indulgence of personal foibles, but
+from recognition of his own qualities, of the bounds set to our capacity
+of life, and of the limits of the world's power to satisfy us. "When my
+destiny threw me into the whirlpool of society," he wrote in his last
+meditation on the course of his own life, "I found nothing there to
+give a moment's solace to my heart. Regret for my sweet leisure followed
+me everywhere; it shed indifference or disgust over all that might have
+been within my reach, leading to fortune and honours. Uncertain in the
+disquiet of my desires, I hoped for little, I obtained less, and I felt
+even amid gleams of prosperity that if I obtained all that I supposed
+myself to be seeking, I should still not have found the happiness for
+which my heart was greedily athirst, though without distinctly knowing
+its object. Thus everything served to detach my affections from society,
+even before the misfortunes which were to make me wholly a stranger to
+it. I reached the age of forty, floating between indigence and fortune,
+between wisdom and disorder, full of vices of habit without any evil
+tendency at heart, living by hazard, distracted as to my duties without
+despising them, but often without much clear knowledge what they
+were."[211]
+
+A brooding nature gives to character a connectedness and unity that is
+in strong contrast with the dispersion and multiformity of the active
+type. The attractions of fame never cheated Rousseau into forgetfulness
+of the commanding principle that a man's life ought to be steadily
+composed to oneness with itself in all its parts, as by mastery of an
+art of moral counterpoint, and not crowded with a wild mixture of aim
+and emotion like distracted masks in high carnival. He complains of the
+philosophers with whom he came into contact, that their philosophy was
+something foreign to them and outside of their own lives. They studied
+human nature for the sake of talking learnedly about it, not for the
+sake of self-knowledge; they laboured to instruct others, not to
+enlighten themselves within. When they published a book, its contents
+only interested them to the extent of making the world accept it,
+without seriously troubling themselves whether it were true or false,
+provided only that it was not refuted. "For my own part, when I desired
+to learn, it was to know things myself, and not at all to teach others.
+I always believed that before instructing others it was proper to begin
+by knowing enough for one's self; and of all the studies that I have
+tried to follow in my life in the midst of men, there is hardly one that
+I should not have followed equally if I had been alone, and shut up in a
+desert island for the rest of my days."[212]
+
+When we think of Turgot, whom Rousseau occasionally met among the
+society which he denounces, such a denunciation sounds a little
+outrageous. But then Turgot was perhaps the one sane Frenchman of the
+first eminence in the eighteenth century. Voltaire chose to be an exile
+from the society of Paris and Versailles as pertinaciously as Rousseau
+did, and he spoke more bitterly of it in verse than Rousseau ever spoke
+bitterly of it in prose.[213] It was, as has been so often said, a
+society dominated by women, from the king's mistress who helped to ruin
+France, down to the financier's wife who gave suppers to flashy men of
+letters. The eighteenth century salon has been described as having three
+stages; the salon of 1730, still retaining some of the stately
+domesticity, elegance, dignity of the age of Lewis XIV.; that of 1780,
+grave, cold, dry, given to dissertation; and between the two, the salon
+of 1750, full of intellectual stir, brilliance, frivolous originality,
+glittering wastefulness.[214] Though this division of time must not be
+pressed too closely, it is certain that the era of Rousseau's advent in
+literature with his Discourses fell in with the climax of social
+unreality in the surface intercourse of France, and that the same date
+marks the highest point of feminine activity and power.
+
+The common mixture of much reflective morality in theory with much
+light-hearted immorality in practice, never entered so largely into
+manners. We have constantly to wonder how they analysed and defined the
+word Virtue, to which they so constantly appealed in letters,
+conversation, and books, as the sovereign object for our deepest and
+warmest adoration. A whole company of transgressors of the marriage law
+would melt into floods of tears over a hymn to virtue, which they must
+surely have held of too sacred an essence to mix itself with any one
+virtue in particular, except that very considerable one of charitably
+letting all do as they please. It is much, however, that these tears,
+if not very burning, were really honest. Society, though not believing
+very deeply in the supernatural, was not cursed with an arid, parching,
+and hardened scepticism about the genuineness of good emotions in a man,
+and so long as people keep this baleful poison out of their hearts,
+their lives remain worth having.
+
+It is true that cynicism in the case of some women of this time
+occasionally sounded in a diabolic key, as when one said, "It is your
+lover to whom you should never say that you don't believe in God; to
+one's husband that does not matter, because in the case of a lover one
+must reserve for one's self some door of escape, and devotional scruples
+cut everything short."[215] Or here: "I do not distrust anybody, for
+that is a deliberate act; but I do not trust anybody, and there is no
+trouble in this."[216] Or again in the word thrown to a man vaunting the
+probity of some one: "What! can a man of intelligence like you accept
+the prejudice of _meum_ and _tuum_?"[217] Such speech, however, was
+probably most often a mere freak of the tongue, a mode and fashion, as
+who should go to a masked ball in guise of Mephistopheles, without
+anything more Mephistophelian about him than red apparel and peaked
+toes. "She was absolutely charming," said one of a new-comer; "she did
+not utter one single word that was not a paradox."[218] This was the
+passing taste. Human nature is able to keep itself wholesome in
+fundamentals even under very great difficulties, and it is as wise as it
+is charitable in judging a sharp and cynical tone to make large
+allowances for mere costume and assumed character.
+
+In respect of the light companionship of common usage, however, it is
+exactly the costume which comes closest to us, and bad taste in that is
+most jarring and least easily forgiven. There is a certain stage in an
+observant person's experience of the heedlessness, indolence, and native
+folly of men and women--and if his observation be conducted in a
+catholic spirit, he will probably see something of this not merely in
+others--when the tolerable average sanity of human arrangements strikes
+him as the most marvellous of all the fortunate accidents in the
+universe. Rousseau could not even accept the fact of this miraculous
+result, the provisional and temporary sanity of things, and he
+confronted society with eyes of angry chagrin. A great lady asked him
+how it was that she had not seen him for an age. "Because when I wish to
+see you, I wish to see no one but you. What do you want me to do in the
+midst of your society? I should cut a sorry figure in a circle of
+mincing tripping coxcombs; they do not suit me." We cannot wonder that
+on some occasion when her son's proficiency was to be tested before a
+company of friends, Madame d'Epinay prayed Rousseau to be of them, on
+the ground that he would be sure to ask the child outrageously absurd
+questions, which would give gaiety to the affair.[219] As it happened,
+the father was unwise. He was a man of whom it was said that he had
+devoured two million francs, without either saying or doing a single
+good thing. He rewarded the child's performance with the gift of a
+superb suit of cherry-coloured velvet, extravagantly trimmed with costly
+lace; the peasant from whose sweat and travail the money had been wrung,
+went in heavy rags, and his children lived as the beasts of the field.
+The poor youth was ill dealt with. "That is very fine," said rude
+Duclos, "but remember that a fool in lace is still a fool." Rousseau, in
+reply to the child's importunity, was still blunter: "Sir, I am no judge
+of finery, I am only a judge of man; I wished to talk with you a little
+while ago, but I wish so no longer."[220]
+
+Marmontel, whose account may have been coloured by retrospection in
+later years, says that before the success of the first Discourse,
+Rousseau concealed his pride under the external forms of a politeness
+that was timid even to obsequiousness; in his uneasy glance you
+perceived mistrust and observant jealousy; there was no freedom in his
+manner, and no one ever observed more cautiously the hateful precept to
+live with your friends as though they were one day to be your
+enemies.[221] Grimm's description is different and more trustworthy.
+Until he began to affect singularity, he says, Rousseau had been gallant
+and overflowing with artificial compliment, with manners that were
+honeyed and even wearisome in their soft elaborateness. All at once he
+put on the cynic's cloak, and went to the other extreme. Still in spite
+of an abrupt and cynical tone he kept much of his old art of elaborate
+fine speeches, and particularly in his relations with women.[222] Of his
+abruptness, he tells a most displeasing tale. "One day Rousseau told us
+with an air of triumph, that as he was coming out of the opera where he
+had been seeing the first representation of the Village Soothsayer, the
+Duke of Zweibr�cken had approached him with much politeness, saying,
+'Will you allow me to pay you a compliment?' and that he replied, 'Yes,
+if it be very short.' Everybody was silent at this, until I said to him
+laughingly, 'Illustrious citizen and co-sovereign of Geneva, since there
+resides in you a part of the sovereignty of the republic, let me
+represent to you that, for all the severity of your principles, you
+should hardly refuse to a sovereign prince the respect due to a
+water-carrier, and that if you had met a word of good-will from a
+water-carrier with an answer as rough and brutal as that, you would have
+had to reproach yourself with a most unseasonable piece of
+impertinence.'"[223]
+
+There were still more serious circumstances when exasperation at the
+flippant tone about him carried him beyond the ordinary bounds of that
+polite time. A guest at table asked contemptuously what was the use of a
+nation like the French having reason, if they did not use it. "They mock
+the other nations of the earth, and yet are the most credulous of all."
+ROUSSEAU: "I forgive them for their credulity, but not for condemning
+those who are credulous in some other way." Some one said that in
+matters of religion everybody was right, but that everybody should
+remain in that in which he had been born. ROUSSEAU, with warmth: "Not
+so, by God, if it is a bad one, for then it can do nothing but harm."
+Then some one contended that religion always did some good, as a kind of
+rein to the common people who had no other morality. All the rest cried
+out at this in indignant remonstrance, one shrewd person remarking that
+the common people had much livelier fear of being hanged than of being
+damned. The conversation was broken off for a moment by the hostess
+calling out, "After all, one must nourish the tattered affair we call
+our body, so ring and let them bring us the joint." This done, the
+servants dismissed, and the door shut, the discussion was resumed with
+such vehemence by Duclos and Saint Lambert, that, says the lady who
+tells us the story, "I feared they were bent on destroying all religion,
+and I prayed for some mercy to be shown at any rate to natural
+religion." There was not a whit more sympathy for that than for the
+rest. Rousseau declared himself _paullo infirmior_, and clung to the
+morality of the gospel as the natural morality which in old times
+constituted the whole and only creed. "But what is a God," cried one
+impetuous disputant, "who gets angry and is appeased again?" Rousseau
+began to murmur between grinding teeth, and a tide of pleasantries set
+in at his expense, to which came this: "If it is a piece of cowardice to
+suffer ill to be spoken of one's friend behind his back, 'tis a crime to
+suffer ill to be spoken of one's God, who is present; and for my part,
+sirs, I believe in God." "I admit," said the atheistic champion, "that
+it is a fine thing to see this God bending his brow to earth and
+watching with admiration the conduct of a Cato. But this notion is, like
+many others, very useful in some great heads, such as Trajan, Marcus
+Aurelius, Socrates, where it can only produce heroism, but it is the
+germ of all madnesses." ROUSSEAU: "Sirs, I leave the room if you say
+another word more," and he was rising to fulfil his threat, when the
+entry of a new-comer stopped the discussion.[224]
+
+His words on another occasion show how all that he saw helped to keep up
+a fretted condition of mind, in one whose soft tenacious memory turned
+daily back to simple and unsophisticated days among the green valleys,
+and refused to acquiesce in the conditions of changed climate. So
+terrible a thing is it to be the bondsman of reminiscence. Madame
+d'Epinay was suspected, wrongfully as it afterwards proved, of having
+destroyed some valuable papers belonging to a dead relative. There was
+much idle and cruel gossip in an ill-natured world. Rousseau, her
+friend, kept steadfast silence: she challenged his opinion. "What am I
+to say?" he answered; "I go and come, and all that I hear outrages and
+revolts me. I see the one so evidently malicious and so adroit in their
+injustice; the other so awkward and so stupid in their good intentions,
+that I am tempted (and it is not the first time) to look on Paris as a
+cavern of brigands, of whom every traveller in his turn is the victim.
+What gives me the worst idea of society is to see how eager each person
+is to pardon himself, by reason of the number of the people who are like
+him."[225]
+
+Notwithstanding his hatred of this cavern of brigands, and the little
+pains he took to conceal his feelings from any individual brigand,
+whether male or female, with whom he had to deal, he found out that "it
+is not always so easy as people suppose to be poor and independent."
+Merciless invasion of his time in every shape made his life weariness.
+Sometimes he had the courage to turn and rend the invader, as in the
+letter to a painter who sent him the same copy of verses three times,
+requiring immediate acknowledgment. "It is not just," at length wrote
+the exasperated Rousseau, "that I should be tyrannised over for your
+pleasure; not that my time is precious, as you say; it is either passed
+in suffering or it is lost in idleness; but when I cannot employ it
+usefully for some one, I do not wish to be hindered from wasting it in
+my own fashion. A single minute thus usurped is what all the kings of
+the universe could not give me back, and it is to be my own master that
+I flee from the idle folk of towns,--people as thoroughly wearied as
+they are thoroughly wearisome,--who, because they do not know what to do
+with their own time, think they have a right to waste that of
+others."[226] The more abruptly he treated visitors, persecuting
+dinner-givers, and all the tribe of the importunate, the more obstinate
+they were in possessing themselves of his time. In seizing the hours
+they were keeping his purse empty, as well as keeping up constant
+irritation in his soul. He appears to have earned forty sous for a
+morning's work, and to have counted this a fair fee, remarking modestly
+that he could not well subsist on less.[227] He had one chance of a
+pension, which he threw from him in a truly characteristic manner.
+
+When he came to Paris he composed his musical diversion of the Muses
+Galantes, which was performed (1745) in the presence of Rameau, under
+the patronage of M. de la Popelini�re. Rameau apostrophised the unlucky
+composer with much violence, declaring that one-half of the piece was
+the work of a master, while the other was that of a person entirely
+ignorant of the musical rudiments; the bad work therefore was
+Rousseau's own, and the good was a plagiarism.[228] This repulse did not
+daunt the hero. Five or six years afterwards on a visit to Passy, as he
+was lying awake in bed, he conceived the idea of a pastoral interlude
+after the manner of the Italian comic operas. In six days the Village
+Soothsayer was sketched, and in three weeks virtually completed. Duclos
+procured its rehearsal at the Opera, and after some debate it was
+performed before the court at Fontainebleau. The Plutarchian stoic, its
+author, went from Paris in a court coach, but his Roman tone deserted
+him, and he felt shamefaced as a schoolboy before the great world, such
+divinity doth hedge even a Lewis XV., and even in a soul of Genevan
+temper. The piece was played with great success, and the composer was
+informed that he would the next day have the honour of being presented
+to the king, who would most probably mark his favour by the bestowal of
+a pension.[229] Rousseau was tossed with many doubts. He would fain have
+greeted the king with some word that should show sensibility to the
+royal graciousness, without compromising republican severity, "clothing
+some great and useful truth in a fine and deserved compliment." This
+moral difficulty was heightened by a physical one, for he was liable to
+an infirmity which, if it should overtake him in presence of king and
+courtiers, would land him in an embarrassment worse than death. What
+would become of him if mind or body should fail, if either he should be
+driven into precipitate retreat, or else there should escape him,
+instead of the great truth wrapped delicately round in veracious
+panegyric, a heavy, shapeless word of foolishness? He fled in terror,
+and flung up the chance of pension and patronage. We perceive the born
+dreamer with a phantasmagoric imagination, seizing nothing in just
+proportion and true relation, and paralysing the spirit with terror of
+unrealities; in short, with the most fatal form of moral cowardice,
+which perhaps it is a little dangerous to try to analyse into
+finer names.
+
+When Rousseau got back to Paris he was amazed to find that Diderot spoke
+to him of this abandonment of the pension with a fire that he could
+never have expected from a philosopher, Rousseau plainly sharing the
+opinion of more vulgar souls that philosopher is but fool writ large.
+"He said that if I was disinterested on my own account, I had no right
+to be so on that of Madame Le Vasseur and her daughter, and that I owed
+it to them not to let pass any possible and honest means of giving them
+bread.... This was the first real dispute I had with him, and all our
+quarrels that followed were of the same kind; he laying down for me what
+he insisted that I should do, and I refusing because I thought that I
+ought not to do it."[230]
+
+Let us abstain, at this and all other points, from being too sure that
+we easily see to the bottom of our Rousseau. When we are most ready to
+fling up the book and to pronounce him all selfishness and sophistry,
+some trait is at hand to revive moral interest in him, and show him
+unlike common men, reverent of truth and human dignity. There is a
+slight anecdote of this kind connected with his visit to Fontainebleau.
+The day after the representation of his piece, he happened to be taking
+his breakfast in some public place. An officer entered, and, proceeding
+to describe the performance of the previous day, told at great length
+all that had happened, depicted the composer with much minuteness, and
+gave a circumstantial account of his conversation. In this story, which
+was told with equal assurance and simplicity, there was not a word of
+truth, as was clear from the fact that the author of whom he spoke with
+such intimacy sat unknown and unrecognised before his eyes. The effect
+on Rousseau was singular enough. "The man was of a certain age; he had
+no coxcombical or swaggering air; his expression bespoke a man of merit,
+and his cross of St. Lewis showed that he was an old officer. While he
+was retailing his untruths, I grew red in the face, I lowered my eyes, I
+sat on thorns; I tried to think of some means of believing him to have
+made a mistake in good faith. At length trembling lest some one should
+recognise me and confront him, I hastened to finish my chocolate without
+saying a word; and stooping down as I passed in front of him, I went
+out as fast as possible, while the people present discussed his tale. I
+perceived in the street that I was bathed in sweat, and I am sure that
+if any one had recognised me and called me by name before I got out,
+they would have seen in me the shame and embarrassment of a culprit,
+simply from a feeling of the pain the poor man would have had to suffer
+if his lie had been discovered."[231] One who can feel thus vividly
+humiliated by the meanness of another, assuredly has in himself the
+wholesome salt of respect for the erectness of his fellows; he has the
+rare sentiment that the compromise of integrity in one of them is as a
+stain on his own self-esteem, and a lowering of his own moral stature.
+There is more deep love of humanity in this than in giving many alms,
+and it was not the less deep for being the product of impulse and
+sympathetic emotion, and not of a logical sorites.
+
+Another scene in a caf� is worth referring to, because it shows in the
+same way that at this time Rousseau's egoism fell short of the
+fatuousness to which disease or vicious habit eventually depraved it. In
+1752 he procured the representation of his comedy of Narcisse, which he
+had written at the age of eighteen, and which is as well worth reading
+or playing as most comedies by youths of that amount of experience of
+the ways of the world and the heart of man. Rousseau was amazed and
+touched by the indulgence of the public, in suffering without any sign
+of impatience even a second representation of his piece. For himself,
+he could not so much as sit out the first; quitting the theatre before
+it was over, he entered the famous caf� de Procope at the other side of
+the street, where he found critics as wearied as himself. Here he called
+out, "The new piece has fallen flat, and it deserved to fall flat; it
+wearied me to death. It is by Rousseau of Geneva, and I am that very
+Rousseau."[232] The relentless student of mental pathology is very
+likely to insist that even this was egoism standing on its head and not
+on its feet, choosing to be noticed for an absurdity, rather than not be
+noticed at all. It may be so, but this inversion of the ordinary form of
+vanity is rare enough to be not unrefreshing, and we are very loth to
+hand Rousseau wholly over to the pathologist before his hour has come.
+
+
+II.
+
+In the summer of 1754 Rousseau, in company with his Theresa, went to
+revisit the city of his birth, partly because an exceptionally
+favourable occasion presented itself, but in yet greater part because he
+was growing increasingly weary of the uncongenial world in which he
+moved. On his road he turned aside to visit her who had been more than
+even his birth-place to him. He felt the shock known to all who cherish
+a vision for a dozen years, and then suddenly front the changed reality.
+He had not prepared himself by recalling the commonplace which we only
+remember for others, how time wears hard and ugly lines into the face
+that recollection at each new energy makes lovelier with an added
+sweetness. "I saw her," he says, "but in what a state, O God, in what
+debasement! Was this the same Madame de Warens, in those days so
+brilliant, to whom the priest of Pontverre had sent me! How my heart was
+torn by the sight!" Alas, as has been said with a truth that daily
+experience proves to those whom pity and self-knowledge have made most
+indulgent, as to those whom pinched maxims have made most
+rigorous,--_morality is the nature of things_.[233] We may have a humane
+tenderness for our Manon Lescaut, but we have a deep presentiment all
+the time that the poor soul must die in a penal settlement. It is partly
+a question of time; whether death comes fast enough to sweep you out of
+reach of the penalties which the nature of things may appoint, but which
+in their fiercest shape are mostly of the loitering kind. Death was
+unkind to Madame de Warens, and the unhappy creature lived long enough
+to find that morality does mean something after all; that the old hoary
+world has not fixed on prudence in the outlay of money as a good thing,
+out of avarice or pedantic dryness of heart; nor on some continence and
+order in the relations of men and women as a good thing, out of
+cheerless grudge to the body, but because the breach of such virtues is
+ever in the long run deadly to mutual trust, to strength, to freedom, to
+collectedness, which are the reserve of humanity against days of ordeal.
+
+Rousseau says that he tried hard to prevail upon his fallen benefactress
+to leave Savoy, to come and take up her abode peacefully with him, while
+he and Theresa would devote their days to making her happy. He had not
+forgotten her in the little glimpse of prosperity; he had sent her money
+when he had it.[234] She was sunk in indigence, for her pension had long
+been forestalled, but still she refused to change her home. While
+Rousseau was at Geneva she came to see him. "She lacked money to
+complete her journey; I had not enough about me; I sent it to her an
+hour afterwards by Theresa. Poor Maman! Let me relate this trait of her
+heart. The only trinket she had left was a small ring; she took it from
+her finger to place it on Theresa's, who instantly put it back, as she
+kissed the noble hand and bathed it with her tears." In after years he
+poured bitter reproaches upon himself for not quitting all to attach his
+lot to hers until her last hour, and he professes always to have been
+haunted by the liveliest and most enduring remorse.[235] Here is the
+worst of measuring duty by sensation instead of principle; if the
+sensations happen not to be in right order at the critical moment, the
+chance goes by, never to return, and then, as memory in the best of
+such temperaments is long though not without intermittence, old
+sentiment revives and drags the man into a burning pit. Rousseau appears
+not to have seen her again, but the thought of her remained with him to
+the end, like a soft vesture fragrant with something of the sweet
+mysterious perfume of many-scented night in the silent garden at
+Charmettes. She died in a hovel eight years after this, sunk in disease,
+misery, and neglect, and was put away in the cemetery on the heights
+above Chamb�ri.[236] Rousseau consoled himself with thoughts of another
+world that should reunite him to her and be the dawn of new happiness;
+like a man who should illusorily confound the last glistening of a
+wintry sunset seen through dark yew-branches, with the broad-beaming
+strength of the summer morning. "If I thought," he said, "that I should
+not see her in the other life, my poor imagination would shrink from the
+idea of perfect bliss, which I would fain promise myself in it."[237] To
+pluck so gracious a flower of hope on the edge of the sombre unechoing
+gulf of nothingness into which our friend has slid silently down, is a
+natural impulse of the sensitive soul, numbing remorse and giving a
+moment's relief to the hunger and thirst of a tenderness that has been
+robbed of its object. Yet would not men be more likely to have a deeper
+love for those about them, and a keener dread of filling a house with
+aching hearts, if they courageously realised from the beginning of their
+days that we have none of this perfect companionable bliss to promise
+ourselves in other worlds, that the black and horrible grave is indeed
+the end of our communion, and that we know one another no more?
+
+The first interview between Rousseau and Madame de Warens was followed
+by his ludicrous conversion to Catholicism (1728); the last was
+contemporary with his re-conversion to the faith in which he had been
+reared. The sight of Geneva gave new fire to his Republican enthusiasm;
+he surrendered himself to transports of patriotic zeal. The thought of
+the Parisian world that he had left behind, its frivolity, its
+petulance, its disputation over all things in heaven and on the earth,
+its profound deadness to all civic activity, quickened his admiration
+for the simple, industrious, and independent community from which he
+never forgot that he was sprung. But no Catholic could enjoy the rights
+of citizenship. So Rousseau proceeded to reflect that the Gospel is the
+same for all Christians, and the substance of dogma only differs,
+because people interposed with explanations of what they could not
+understand; that therefore it is in each country the business of the
+sovereign to fix both the worship and the amount and quality of
+unintelligible dogma; that consequently it is the citizen's duty to
+admit the dogma, and follow the worship by law appointed. "The society
+of the Encyclop�dists, far from shaking my faith, had confirmed it by my
+natural aversion for partisanship and controversy. The reading of the
+Bible, especially of the Gospel, to which I had applied myself for
+several years, had made me despise the low and childish interpretation
+put upon the words of Christ by the people who were least worthy to
+understand him. In a word, philosophy by drawing me towards the
+essential in religion, had drawn me away from that stupid mass of
+trivial formulas with which men had overlaid and darkened it."[238] We
+may be sure that if Rousseau had a strong inclination towards a given
+course of action, he would have no difficulty in putting his case in a
+blaze of the brightest light, and surrounding it with endless emblems
+and devices of superlative conviction. In short, he submitted himself
+faithfully to the instruction of the pastor of his parish; was closely
+catechised by a commission of members of the consistory; received from
+them a certificate that he had satisfied the requirements of doctrine in
+all points; was received to partake of the Communion, and finally
+restored to all his rights as a citizen.[239]
+
+This was no farce, such as Voltaire played now and again at the expense
+of an unhappy bishop or unhappier parish priest; nor such as Rousseau
+himself had played six-and-twenty years before, at the expense of those
+honest Catholics of Turin whose helpful donation of twenty francs had
+marked their enthusiasm over a soul that had been lost and was found
+again. He was never a Catholic, any more than he was ever an atheist,
+and if it might be said in one sense that he was no more a Protestant
+than he was either of these two, yet he was emphatically the child of
+Protestantism. It is hardly too much to say that one bred in Catholic
+tradition and observance, accustomed to think of the whole life of men
+as only a manifestation of the unbroken life of the Church, and of all
+the several communities of men as members of that great organisation
+which binds one order to another, and each generation to those that have
+gone before and those that come after, would never have dreamed that
+monstrous dream of a state of nature as a state of perfection. He would
+never have held up to ridicule and hate the idea of society as an
+organism with normal parts and conditions of growth, and never have left
+the spirit of man standing in bald isolation from history, from his
+fellows, from a Church, from a mediator, face to face with the great
+vague phantasm. Nor, on the other hand, is it likely that one born and
+reared in the religious school of authority with its elaborately
+disciplined hierarchy, would have conceived that passion for political
+freedom, that zeal for the rights of peoples against rulers, that
+energetic enthusiasm for a free life, which constituted the fire and
+essence of Rousseau's writing. As illustration of this, let us remark
+how Rousseau's teaching fared when it fell upon a Catholic country like
+France: so many of its principles were assimilated by the revolutionary
+schools as were wanted for violent dissolvents, while the rest dropped
+away, and in this rejected portion was precisely the most vital part of
+his system. In other words, in no country has the power of collective
+organisation been so pressed and exalted as in revolutionised France,
+and in no country has the free life of the individual been made to count
+for so little. With such force does the ancient system of temporal and
+spiritual organisation reign in the minds of those who think most
+confidently that they have cast it wholly out of them. The use of reason
+may lead a man far, but it is the past that has cut the groove.
+
+In re-embracing the Protestant confession, therefore, Rousseau was not
+leaving Catholicism, to which he had never really passed over; he was
+only undergoing in entire gravity of spirit a formality which reconciled
+him with his native city, and reunited those strands of spiritual
+connection with it which had never been more than superficially parted.
+There can be little doubt that the four months which he spent in Geneva
+in 1754 marked a very critical time in the formation of some of the most
+memorable of his opinions. He came from Paris full of inarticulate and
+smouldering resentment against the irreverence and denial of the
+materialistic circle which used to meet at the house of D'Holbach. What
+sort of opinions he found prevailing among the most enlightened of the
+Genevese pastors we know from an abundance of sources. D'Alembert had
+three or four years later than this to suffer a bitter attack from
+them, but the account of the creed of some of the ministers which he
+gave in his article on Geneva in the Encyclopedia, was substantially
+correct. "Many of them," he wrote, "have ceased to believe in the
+divinity of Jesus Christ. Hell, one of the principal points in our
+belief, is no longer one with many of the Genevese pastors, who contend
+that it is an insult to the Divinity to imagine that a being full of
+goodness and justice can be capable of punishing our faults by an
+eternity of torment. In a word, they have no other creed than pure
+Socinianism, rejecting everything that they call mysteries, and
+supposing the first principle of a true religion to be that it shall
+propose nothing for belief which clashes with reason. Religion here is
+almost reduced to the adoration of one single God, at least among nearly
+all who do not belong to the common people; and a certain respect for
+Jesus Christ and the Scriptures is nearly the only thing that
+distinguishes the Christianity of Geneva from pure Deism."[240] And it
+would be easy to trace the growth of these rationalising tendencies.
+Throughout the seventeenth century men sprang up who anticipated some of
+the rationalistic arguments of the eighteenth, in denying the Trinity,
+and so forth,[241] but the time was not then ripe. The general
+conditions grew more favourable. Burnet, who was at Geneva in 1685-6,
+says that though there were not many among the Genevese of the first
+form of learning, "yet almost everybody here has a good tincture of a
+learned education."[242] The pacification of civic troubles in 1738 was
+followed by a quarter of a century of extreme prosperity and
+contentment, and it is in such periods that the minds of men previously
+trained are wont to turn to the great matters of speculation. There was
+at all times a constant communication, both public and private, going on
+between Geneva and Holland, as was only natural between the two chief
+Protestant centres of the Continent. The controversy of the seventeenth
+century between the two churches was as keenly followed in Geneva as at
+Leyden, and there is more than one Genevese writer who deserves a place
+in the history of the transition in the beginning of the eighteenth
+century from theology proper to that metaphysical theology, which was
+the first marked dissolvent of dogma within the Protestant bodies. To
+this general movement of the epoch, of course, Descartes supplied the
+first impulse. The leader of the movement in Geneva, that is of an
+attempt to pacify the Christian churches on the basis of some such Deism
+as was shortly to find its passionate expression in the Savoyard
+Vicar's Confession of Faith, was John Alphonse Turretini (1661-1737). He
+belonged to a family of Italian refugees from Lucca, and his grandfather
+had been sent on a mission to Holland for aid in defence of Geneva
+against Catholic Savoy. He went on his travels in 1692; he visited
+Holland, where he saw Bayle, and England, where he saw Newton, and
+France, where he saw Bossuet. Chouet initiated him into the mysteries of
+Descartes. All this bore fruit when he returned home, and his eloquent
+exposition of rationalistic ideas aroused the usual cry of heresy from
+the people who justly insist that Deism is not Christianity. There was
+much stir for many years, but he succeeded in holding his own and in
+finding many considerable followers.[243] For example, some three years
+or so after his death, a work appeared in Geneva under the title of _La
+Religion Essentielle a l'Homme_, showing that faith in the existence of
+a God suffices, and treating with contempt the belief in the
+inspiration of the Gospels.[244]
+
+Thus we see what vein of thought was running through the graver and more
+active minds of Geneva about the time of Rousseau's visit. Whether it be
+true or not that the accepted belief of many of the preachers was a pure
+Deism, it is certain that the theory was fully launched among them, and
+that those who could not accept it were still pressed to refute it, and
+in refuting, to discuss. Rousseau's friendships were according to his
+own account almost entirely among the ministers of religion and the
+professors of the academy, precisely the sort of persons who would be
+most sure to familiarise him, in the course of frequent conversations,
+with the current religious ideas and the arguments by which they were
+opposed or upheld. We may picture the effect on his mind of the
+difference in tone and temper in these grave, candid, and careful men,
+and the tone of his Parisian friends in discussing the same high themes;
+how this difference would strengthen his repugnance, and corroborate his
+own inborn spirit of veneration; how he would here feel himself in his
+own world. For as wise men have noticed, it is not so much difference of
+opinion that stirs resentment in us, at least in great subjects where
+the difference is not trivial but profound, as difference in gravity of
+humour and manner of moral approach. He returned to Paris (Oct. 1754)
+warm with the resolution to give up his concerns there, and in the
+spring go back once and for all to the city of liberty and virtue, where
+men revered wisdom and reason instead of wasting life in the frivolities
+of literary dialectic.[245]
+
+The project, however, grew cool. The dedication of his Discourse on
+Inequality to the Republic was received with indifference by some and
+indignation by others.[246] Nobody thought it a compliment, and some
+thought it an impertinence. This was one reason which turned his purpose
+aside. Another was the fact that the illustrious Voltaire now also
+signed himself Swiss, and boasted that if he shook his wig the powder
+flew over the whole of the tiny Republic. Rousseau felt certain that
+Voltaire would make a revolution in Geneva, and that he should find in
+his native country the tone, the air, the manners which were driving him
+from Paris. From that moment he counted Geneva lost. Perhaps he ought to
+make head against the disturber, but what could he do alone, timid and
+bad talker as he was, against a man arrogant, rich, supported by the
+credit of the great, of brilliant eloquence, and already the very idol
+of women and young men?[247] Perhaps it would not be uncharitable to
+suspect that this was a reason after the event, for no man was ever so
+fond as Rousseau, or so clever a master in the art, of covering an
+accident in a fine envelope of principle, and, as we shall see, he was
+at this time writing to Voltaire in strains of effusive panegyric. In
+this case he almost tells us that the one real reason why he did not
+return to Geneva was that he found a shelter from Paris close at hand.
+Even before then he had begun to conceive characteristic doubts whether
+his fellow-citizens at Geneva would not be nearly as hostile to his love
+of living solitarily and after his own fashion as the good people
+of Paris.
+
+Rousseau has told us a pretty story, how one day he and Madame d'Epinay
+wandering about the park came upon a dilapidated lodge surrounded by
+fruit gardens, in the skirts of the forest of Montmorency; how he
+exclaimed in delight at its solitary charm that here was the very place
+of refuge made for him; and how on a second visit he found that his good
+friend had in the interval had the old lodge pulled down, and replaced
+by a pretty cottage exactly arranged for his own household. "My poor
+bear," she said, "here is your place of refuge; it was you who chose it,
+'tis friendship offers it; I hope it will drive away your cruel notion
+of going from me."[248] Though moved to tears by such kindness,
+Rousseau did not decide on the spot, but continued to waver for some
+time longer between this retreat and return to Geneva.
+
+In the interval Madame d'Epinay had experience of the character she was
+dealing with. She wrote to Rousseau pressing him to live at the cottage
+in the forest, and begging him to allow her to assist him in assuring
+the moderate annual provision which he had once accidentally declared to
+mark the limit of his wants.[249] He wrote to her bitterly in reply,
+that her proposition struck ice into his soul, and that she could have
+but sorry appreciation of her own interests in thus seeking to turn a
+friend into a valet. He did not refuse to listen to what she proposed,
+if only she would remember that neither he nor his sentiments were for
+sale.[250] Madame d'Epinay wrote to him patiently enough in return, and
+then Rousseau hastened to explain that his vocabulary needed special
+appreciation, and that he meant by the word valet "the degradation into
+which the repudiation of his principles would throw his soul. The
+independence I seek is not immunity from work; I am firm for winning my
+own bread, I take pleasure in it; but I mean not to subject myself to
+any other duty, if I can help it. I will never pledge any portion of my
+liberty, either for my own subsistence or that of any one else. I intend
+to work, but at my own will and pleasure, and even to do nothing, if it
+happens to suit me, without any one finding fault except my
+stomach."[251] We may call this unamiable, if we please, but in a
+frivolous world amiability can hardly go with firm resolve to live an
+independent life after your own fashion. The many distasteful sides of
+Rousseau's character ought not to hinder us from admiring his
+steadfastness in refusing to sacrifice his existence to the first person
+who spoke him civilly. We may wish there had been more of rugged
+simplicity in his way of dealing with temptations to sell his birthright
+for a mess of pottage; less of mere irritability. But then this
+irritability is one side of soft temperament. The soft temperament is
+easily agitated, and this unpleasant disturbance does not stir up true
+anger nor lasting indignation, but only sends quick currents of eager
+irritation along the sufferer's nerves. Rousseau, quivering from head to
+foot with self-consciousness, is sufficiently unlike our plain Johnson,
+the strong-armoured; yet persistent withstanding of the patron is as
+worthy of our honour in one instance as in the other. Indeed, resistance
+to humiliating pressure is harder for such a temper as Rousseau's, in
+which deliberate endeavour is needed, than it is for the naturally
+stoical spirit which asserts itself spontaneously and rises
+without effort.
+
+When our born solitary, wearied of Paris and half afraid of the too
+friendly importunity of Geneva, at length determined to accept Madame
+d'Epinay's offer of the Hermitage on conditions which left him an
+entire sentiment of independence of movement and freedom from all sense
+of pecuniary obligation, he was immediately exposed to a very copious
+torrent of pleasantry and remonstrance from the highly social circle who
+met round D'Holbach's dinner-table. They deemed it sheer midsummer
+madness, or even a sign of secret depravity, to quit their cheerful
+world for the dismal solitude of woods and fields. "Only the bad man is
+alone," wrote Diderot in words which Rousseau kept resentfully in his
+memory as long as he lived. The men and women of the eighteenth century
+had no comprehension of solitude, the strength which it may impart to
+the vigorous, the poetic graces which it may shed about the life of
+those who are less than vigorous; and what they did not comprehend, they
+dreaded and abhorred, and thought monstrous in the one man who did
+comprehend it. They were all of the mind of Socrates when he said to
+Ph�drus, "Knowledge is what I love, and the men who dwell in the town
+are my teachers, not trees and landscape."[252] Sarcasms fell on him
+like hail, and the prophecies usual in cases where a stray soul does not
+share the common tastes of the herd. He would never be able to live
+without the incense and the amusements of the town; he would be back in
+a fortnight; he would throw up the whole enterprise within three
+months.[253] Amid a shower of such words, springing from men's perverse
+blindness to the binding propriety of keeping all propositions as to
+what is the best way of living in respect of place, hours,
+companionship, strictly relative to each individual case, Rousseau
+stubbornly shook the dust of the city from off his feet, and sought new
+life away from the stridulous hum of men. Perhaps we are better pleased
+to think of the unwearied Diderot spending laborious days in factories
+and quarries and workshops and forges, while friendly toilers patiently
+explained to him the structure of stocking looms and velvet looms, the
+processes of metal-casting and wire-drawing and slate-cutting, and all
+the other countless arts and ingenuities of fabrication, which he
+afterwards reproduced to a wondering age in his spacious and magnificent
+repertory of human thought, knowledge, and practical achievement. And it
+is yet more elevating to us to think of the true stoic, the great
+high-souled Turgot, setting forth a little later to discharge beneficent
+duty in the hard field of his distant Limousin commissionership,
+enduring many things and toiling late and early for long years, that the
+burden of others might be lighter, and the welfare of the land more
+assured. But there are many paths for many men, and if only magnanimous
+self-denial has the power of inspiration, and can move us with the deep
+thrill of the heroic, yet every truthful protest, even of excessive
+personality, against the gregarious trifling of life in the social
+groove, has a side which it is not ill for us to consider, and perhaps
+for some men and women in every generation to seek to imitate.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[201] _R�p. � M. Bordes_, 163.
+
+[202] Pictet de Sergy., i. 18.
+
+[203] _Conf._, iv. 248.
+
+[204] _Ib._ ix. 279. Also _Economie Politique_.
+
+[205] Madame de la Popelini�re, whose adventures and the misadventures
+of her husband are only too well known to the reader of Marmontel's
+Memoirs.
+
+[206] The passages relating to income during his first residence in
+Paris (1744-1756) are at pp. 119, 145, 153, 165, 200, 227, in Books
+vii.-ix. of the _Confessions_. Rousseau told Bernardin de St. Pierre
+(_Oeuv._, xii. 74) that Emile was sold for 7000 livres. In the
+_Confessions_ (xi. 126), he says 6000 livres, and one or two hundred
+copies. It may be worth while to add that Diderot and D'Alembert
+received 1200 livres a year apiece for editing the Encyclop�dia.
+Sterne received �650 for two volumes of _Tristram Shandy_ in 1780.
+Walpole's _Letters_, in. 298.
+
+[207] _Conf._, viii. 154-157.
+
+[208] _Ib._ viii. 160.
+
+[209] _Conf._, viii. 160, 161.
+
+[210] _Ib._ viii. 159.
+
+[211] _R�veries_, iii 168.
+
+[212] _R�veries_, iii. 166.
+
+[213] See the _Ep�tre � Mdme. la Marquise du Ch�telet, sur la
+Calomnie_.
+
+[214] _La Femme au 18i�me si�cle_, par MM. de Goncourt, p. 40.
+
+[215] Madame d'Epinay's _M�m._, i. 295.
+
+[216] Quoted in Goncourt's _Femme au 18i�me si�cle_, p. 378.
+
+[217] _Ib._, p. 337.
+
+[218] Mdlle. L'Espinasse's _Letters_, ii. 89.
+
+[219] Madame d'Epinay's _M�m._, ii. 47, 48.
+
+[220] _Ib._, ii. 55.
+
+[221] _M�m._, Bk. iv. 327.
+
+[222] _Corr. Lit._, iii. 58.
+
+[223] _Ib._, 54.
+
+[224] Madame d'Epinay's _M�m._, i. 378-381. Saint Lambert formulated
+his atheism afterwards in the _Cat�chisme Universel_.
+
+[225] Madame d'Epinay's _M�m._, i. 443.
+
+[226] _Corr._, i. 317. Sept. 14, 1756.
+
+[227] Letter to Madame de Cr�qui, 1752. _Corr._, i. 171.
+
+[228] _Conf_,., vii. 104.
+
+[229] The _Devin du Village_ was played at Fontainebleau on October
+18, 1752, and at the Opera in Paris in March 1753. Madame de Pompadour
+took a part in it in a private performance. See Rousseau's note to
+her, _Corr._, i. 178.
+
+[230] _Conf._, viii. 190.
+
+[231] _Conf._, viii. 183.
+
+[232] _Conf._, viii. 202; and Musset-Pathay, ii. 439. When in
+Strasburg, in 1765, he could not bring himself to be present at its
+representation. _Oeuv. et Corr. In�d._, p. 434.
+
+[233] Madame de Sta�l insisted that her father said this, and Necker
+insisted that it was his daughter's.
+
+[234] _Corr._, i. 176. Feb. 13, 1753.
+
+[235] _Conf._, viii. 208-210.
+
+[236] She died on July 30, 1762, aged "about sixty-three years."
+Arthur Young, visiting Chamb�ri in 1789, with some trouble procured
+the certificate of her death, which may be found in his _Travels_, i.
+272. See a letter of M. de Conzi� to Rousseau, in M.
+Streckeisen-Moultou's collection, ii. 445.
+
+[237] _Conf._, xii. 233.
+
+[238] _Conf._, viii. 210.
+
+[239] Gaberel's _Rousseau et les Genevois_, p. 62. _Conf._, viii. 212.
+
+[240] The venerable Company of Pastors and Professors of the Church
+and Academy of Geneva appointed a committee, as in duty bound, to
+examine these allegations, and the committee, equally in duty bound,
+reported (Feb. 10, 1758) with mild indignation, that they were
+unfounded, and that the flock was untainted by unseasonable use of its
+mind. See on this Rousseau's _Lettres �crites de la Montagne_, ii.
+231.
+
+[241] See Picot's _Hist. de Gen�ve_, ii. 415.
+
+[242] _Letters containing an account of Switzerland, Italy, etc., in
+1685-86._ By G. Burnet, p. 9.
+
+[243] J.A. Turretini's complete works were published as late as 1776,
+including among much besides that no longer interests men, an _Oratio
+de Scientiarum Vanitate et Proestantia_ (vol. iii. 437), not at all in
+the vein of Rousseau's Discourse, and a treatise in four parts, _De
+Legibus Naturalibus_, in which, among other matters, he refutes Hobbes
+and assails the doctrine of Utility (i. 173, etc.), by limiting its
+definition to [Greek: to pros heauton] in its narrowest sense. He
+appears to have been a student of Spinoza (i. 326). Francis Turretini,
+his father, took part in the discussion as to the nature of the treaty
+or contract between God and man, in a piece entitled _Foedus Natur� a
+primo homine ruptum, ejusque Proevaricationem posteris imputatam_
+(1675).
+
+[244] Gaberel's _Eglise de Gen�ve_, iii. 188.
+
+[245] _Corr._, i. 223 (to Vernes, April 5, 1755).
+
+[246] _Conf._, viii. 215, 216. _Corr._, i. 218 (to Perdriau, Nov. 28,
+1754).
+
+[247] _Conf._, viii. 218.
+
+[248] _Conf._, viii. 217. It is worth noticing as bearing on the
+accuracy of the Confessions, that Madame d'Epinay herself (_M�m._, ii.
+115) says that when she began to prepare the Hermitage for Rousseau he
+had never been there, and that she was careful to lead him to believe
+that the expense had not been incurred for him. Moreover her letter to
+him describing it could only have been written to one who had not seen
+it, and though her Memoirs are full of sheer imagination and romance,
+the documents in them are substantially authentic, and this letter is
+shown to be so by Rousseau's reply to it.
+
+[249] _M�m._, ii. 116.
+
+[250] _Corr._ (1755), i. 242.
+
+[251] _Corr._, i. 245.
+
+[252] _Ph�drus_, 230.
+
+[253] _Conf._, viii. 221, etc.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+THE HERMITAGE.
+
+
+It would have been a strange anachronism if the decade of the
+Encyclop�dia and the Seven Years' War had reproduced one of those scenes
+which are as still resting-places amid the ceaseless forward tramp of
+humanity, where some holy man turned away from the world, and with
+adorable seriousness sought communion with the divine in mortification
+of flesh and solitude of spirit. Those were the retreats of firm hope
+and beatified faith. The hope and faith of the eighteenth century were
+centred in action, not in contemplation, and the few solitaries of that
+epoch, as well as of another nearer to our own, fled away from the
+impotence of their own will, rather than into the haven of satisfied
+conviction and clear-eyed acceptance. Only one of them--Wordsworth, the
+poetic hermit of our lakes--impresses us in any degree like one of the
+great individualities of the ages when men not only craved for the
+unseen, but felt the closeness of its presence over their heads and
+about their feet. The modern anchorite goes forth in the spirit of the
+preacher who declared all the things that are under the sun to be
+vanity, not in the transport of the saint who knew all the things that
+are under the sun to be no more than the shadow of a dream in the light
+of a celestial brightness to come.
+
+Rousseau's mood, deeply tinged as it was by bitterness against society
+and circumstance, still contained a strong positive element in his
+native exultation in all natural objects and processes, which did not
+leave him vacantly brooding over the evil of the world he had quitted.
+The sensuousness that penetrated him kept his sympathy with life
+extraordinarily buoyant, and all the eager projects for the disclosure
+of a scheme of wisdom became for a time the more vividly desired, as the
+general tide of desire flowed more fully within him. To be surrounded
+with the simplicity of rural life was with him not only a stimulus, but
+an essential condition to free intellectual energy. Many a time, he
+says, when making excursions into the country with great people, "I was
+so tired of fine rooms, fountains, artificial groves and flower beds,
+and the still more tiresome people who displayed all these; I was so
+worn out with pamphlets, card-playing, music, silly jokes, stupid airs,
+great suppers, that as I spied a poor hawthorn copse, a hedge, a
+farmstead, a meadow, as in passing through a hamlet I snuffed the odour
+of a good chervil omelette, as I heard from a distance the rude refrain
+of the shepherd's songs, I used to wish at the devil the whole tale of
+rouge and furbelows."[254] He was no anchorite proper, one weary of the
+world and waiting for the end, but a man with a strong dislike for one
+kind of life and a keen liking for another kind. He thought he was now
+about to reproduce the old days of the Charmettes, true to his
+inveterate error that one may efface years and accurately replace a
+past. He forgot that instead of the once vivacious and tender
+benefactress who was now waiting for slow death in her hovel, his
+house-mates would be a poor dull drudge and her vile mother. He forgot,
+too, that since those days the various processes of intellectual life
+had expanded within him, and produced a busy fermentation which makes a
+man's surroundings very critical. Finally, he forgot that in proportion
+as a man suffers the smooth course of his thought to depend on anything
+external, whether on the greenness of the field or the gaiety of the
+street or the constancy of friends, so comes he nearer to chance of
+making shipwreck. Hence his tragedy, though the very root of the tragedy
+lay deeper,--in temperament.
+
+
+I.
+
+Rousseau's impatience drove him into the country almost before the walls
+of his little house were dry (April 9, 1756). "Although it was cold, and
+snow still lay upon the ground, the earth began to show signs of life;
+violets and primroses were to be seen; the buds on the trees were
+beginning to shoot; and the very night of my arrival was marked by the
+first song of the nightingale. I heard it close to my window in a wood
+that touched the house. After a light sleep I awoke, forgetting that I
+was transplanted; I thought myself still in the Rue de Grenelle, when in
+an instant the warbling of the birds made me thrill with delight. My
+very first care was to surrender myself to the impression of the rustic
+objects about me. Instead of beginning by arranging things inside my
+quarters, I first set about planning my walks, and there was not a path
+nor a copse nor a grove round my cottage which I had not found out
+before the end of the next day. The place, which was lonely rather than
+wild, transported me in fancy to the end of the world, and no one could
+ever have dreamed that we were only four leagues from Paris."[255]
+
+This rural delirium, as he justly calls it, lasted for some days, at the
+end of which he began seriously to apply himself to work. But work was
+too soon broken off by a mood of vehement exaltation, produced by the
+stimulus given to all his senses by the new world of delight in which he
+found himself. This exaltation was in a different direction from that
+which had seized him half a dozen years before, when he had discarded
+the usage and costume of politer society, and had begun to conceive an
+angry contempt for the manners, prejudices, and maxims of his time.
+Restoration to a more purely sensuous atmosphere softened this
+austerity. No longer having the vices of a great city before his eyes,
+he no longer cherished the wrath which they had inspired in him. "When I
+did not see men, I ceased to despise them; and when I had not the bad
+before my eyes, I ceased to hate them. My heart, little made as it is
+for hate, now did no more than deplore their wretchedness, and made no
+distinction between their wretchedness and their badness. This state, so
+much more mild, if much less sublime, soon dulled the glowing enthusiasm
+that had long transported me."[256] That is to say, his nature remained
+for a moment not exalted but fairly balanced. It was only for a moment.
+And in studying the movements of impulse and reflection in him at this
+critical time of his life, we are hurried rapidly from phase to phase.
+Once more we are watching a man who lived without either intellectual or
+spiritual direction, swayed by a reminiscence, a passing mood, a
+personality accidentally encountered, by anything except permanent aim
+and fixed objects, and who would at any time have surrendered the most
+deliberately pondered scheme of persistent effort to the fascination of
+a cottage slumbering in a bounteous landscape. Hence there could be no
+normally composed state for him; the first soothing effect of the rich
+life of forest and garden on a nature exasperated by the life of the
+town passed away, and became transformed into an exaltation that swept
+the stoic into space, leaving sensuousness to sovereign and uncontrolled
+triumph, until the delight turned to its inevitable ashes and
+bitterness.
+
+At first all was pure and delicious. In after times when pain made him
+gloomily measure the length of the night, and when fever prevented him
+from having a moment of sleep, he used to try to still his suffering by
+recollection of the days that he had passed in the woods of Montmorency,
+with his dog, the birds, the deer, for his companions. "As I got up with
+the sun to watch his rising from my garden, if I saw the day was going
+to be fine, my first wish was that neither letters nor visits might come
+to disturb its charm. After having given the morning to divers tasks
+which I fulfilled with all the more pleasure that I could put them off
+to another time if I chose, I hastened to eat my dinner, so as to escape
+from the importunate and make myself a longer afternoon. Before one
+o'clock, even on days of fiercest heat, I used to start in the blaze of
+the sun, along with my faithful Achates, hurrying my steps lest some one
+should lay hold of me before I could get away. But when I had once
+passed a certain corner, with what beating of the heart, with what
+radiant joy, did I begin to breathe freely, as I felt myself safe and my
+own master for the rest of the day! Then with easier pace I went in
+search of some wild and desert spot in the forest, where there was
+nothing to show the hand of man, or to speak of servitude and
+domination; some refuge where I could fancy myself its discoverer, and
+where no inopportune third person came to interfere between nature and
+me. She seemed to spread out before my eyes a magnificence that was
+always new. The gold of the broom and the purple of the heather struck
+my eyes with a glorious splendour that went to my very heart; the
+majesty of the trees that covered me with their shadow, the delicacy of
+the shrubs that surrounded me, the astonishing variety of grasses and
+flowers that I trod under foot, kept my mind in a continual alternation
+of attention and delight.... My imagination did not leave the earth thus
+superbly arrayed without inhabitants. I formed a charming society, of
+which I did not feel myself unworthy; I made a golden age to please my
+own fancy, and filling up these fair days with all those scenes of my
+life that had left sweet memories behind, and all that my heart could
+yet desire or hope in scenes to come, I waxed tender even to shedding
+tears over the true pleasures of humanity, pleasures so delicious, so
+pure, and henceforth so far from the reach of men. Ah, if in such
+moments any ideas of Paris, of the age, of my little aureole as author,
+came to trouble my dreams, with what disdain did I drive them out, to
+deliver myself without distraction to the exquisite sentiments of which
+I was so full. Yet in the midst of it all, the nothingness of my
+chimeras sometimes broke sadly upon my mind. Even if every dream had
+suddenly been transformed into reality, it would not have been enough;
+I should have dreamed, imagined, yearned still." Alas, this deep
+insatiableness of sense, the dreary vacuity of soul that follows fulness
+of animal delight, the restless exactingness of undirected imagination,
+was never recognised by Rousseau distinctly enough to modify either his
+conduct or his theory of life. He filled up the void for a short space
+by that sovereign aspiration, which changed the dead bones of old
+theology into the living figure of a new faith. "From the surface of the
+earth I raised my ideas to all the existences in nature, to the
+universal system of things, to the incomprehensible Being who embraces
+all. Then with mind lost in that immensity, I did not think, I did not
+reason, I did not philosophise; with a sort of pleasure I felt
+overwhelmed by the weight of the universe, I surrendered myself to the
+ravishing confusion of these vast ideas. I loved to lose myself in
+imagination in immeasurable space; within the limits of real existences
+my heart was too tightly compressed; in the universe I was stifled; I
+would fain have launched myself into the infinite. I believe that if I
+had unveiled all the mysteries of nature, I should have found myself in
+a less delicious situation than that bewildering ecstasy to which my
+mind so unreservedly delivered itself, and which sometimes transported
+me until I cried out, 'O mighty Being! O mighty Being!' without power of
+any other word or thought."[257]
+
+It is not wholly insignificant that though he could thus expand his
+soul with ejaculatory delight in something supreme, he could not endure
+the sight of one of his fellow-creatures. "If my gaiety lasted the whole
+night, that showed that I had passed the day alone; I was very different
+after I had seen people, for I was rarely content with others and never
+with myself. Then in the evening I was sure to be in taciturn or
+scolding humour." It is not in every condition that effervescent passion
+for ideal forms of the religious imagination assists sympathy with the
+real beings who surround us. And to this let us add that there are
+natures in which all deep emotion is so entirely associated with the
+ideal, that real and particular manifestations of it are repugnant to
+them as something alien; and this without the least insincerity, though
+with a vicious and disheartening inconsistency. Rousseau belonged to
+this class, and loved man most when he saw men least. Bad as this was,
+it does not justify us in denouncing his love of man as artificial; it
+was one side of an ideal exaltation, which stirred the depths of his
+spirit with a force as genuine as that which is kindled in natures of
+another type by sympathy with the real and concrete, with the daily walk
+and conversation and actual doings and sufferings of the men and women
+whom we know. The fermentation which followed his arrival at the
+Hermitage, in its first form produced a number of literary schemes. The
+idea of the Political Institutions, first conceived at Venice, pressed
+upon his meditations. He had been earnestly requested to compose a
+treatise on education. Besides this, his thoughts wandered confusedly
+round the notion of a treatise to be called Sensitive Morality, or the
+Materialism of the Sage, the object of which was to examine the
+influence of external agencies, such as light, darkness, sound, seasons,
+food, noise, silence, motion, rest, on our corporeal machine, and thus
+indirectly upon the soul also. By knowing these and acquiring the art of
+modifying them according to our individual needs, we should become surer
+of ourselves and fix a deeper constancy in our lives. An external system
+of treatment would thus be established, which would place and keep the
+soul in the condition most favourable to virtue.[258] Though the
+treatise was never completed, and the sketch never saw the light, we
+perceive at least that Rousseau would have made the means of access to
+character wide enough, and the material influences that impress it and
+produce its caprices, multitudinous enough, instead of limiting them
+with the medical specialist to one or two organs, and one or two of the
+conditions that affect them. Nor, on the other hand, do the words in
+which he sketches his project in the least justify the attribution to
+him of the doctrine of the absolute power of the physical constitution
+over the moral habits, whether that doctrine would be a credit or a
+discredit to his philosophical thoroughness of perception. No one denies
+the influence of external conditions on the moral habits, and Rousseau
+says no more than that he proposed to consider the extent and the
+modifiableness of this influence. It was not then deemed essential for a
+spiritualist thinker to ignore physical organisation.
+
+A third undertaking of a more substantial sort was to arrange and edit
+the papers and printed works of the Abb� de Saint Pierre (1658-1743),
+confided to him through the agency of Saint Lambert, and partly also of
+Madame Dupin, the warm friend of that singular and good man.[259] This
+task involved reading, considering, and picking extracts from
+twenty-three diffuse and chaotic volumes, full of prolixity and
+repetition. Rousseau, dreamer as he was, yet had quite keenness of
+perception enough to discern the weakness of a dreamer of another sort;
+and he soon found out that the Abb� de Saint Pierre's views were
+impracticable, in consequence of the author's fixed idea that men are
+guided rather by their lights than by their passions. In fact, Saint
+Pierre was penetrated with the eighteenth-century faith to a peculiar
+degree. As with Condorcet afterwards, he was led by his admiration for
+the extent of modern knowledge to adopt the principle that perfected
+reason is capable of being made the base of all institutions, and would
+speedily terminate all the great abuses of the world. "He went wrong,"
+says Rousseau, "not merely in having no other passion but that of
+reason, but by insisting on making all men like himself, instead of
+taking them as they are and as they will continue to be." The critic's
+own error in later days was not very different from this, save that it
+applied to the medium in which men live, rather than to themselves, by
+refusing to take complex societies as they are, even as starting-points
+for higher attempts at organisation. Rousseau had occasionally seen the
+old man, and he preserved the greatest veneration for his memory,
+speaking of him as the honour of his age and race, with a fulness of
+enthusiasm very unusual towards men, though common enough towards
+inanimate nature. The sincerity of this respect, however, could not make
+the twenty-three volumes which the good man had written, either fewer in
+number or lighter in contents, and after dealing as well as he could
+with two important parts of Saint Pierre's works, he threw up the
+task.[260] It must not be supposed that Rousseau would allow that
+fatigue or tedium had anything to do with a resolve which really needed
+no better justification. As we have seen before, he had amazing skill in
+finding a certain ingeniously contrived largeness for his motives. Saint
+Pierre's writings were full of observations on the government of France,
+some of them remarkably bold in their criticism, but he had not been
+punished for them because the ministers always looked upon him as a
+kind of preacher rather than a genuine politician, and he was allowed to
+say what he pleased, because it was observed that no one listened to
+what he said. Besides, he was a Frenchman, and Rousseau was not, and
+hence the latter, in publishing Saint Pierre's strictures on French
+affairs, was exposing himself to a sharp question why he meddled with a
+country that did not concern him. "It surprised me," says Rousseau,
+"that the reflection had not occurred to me earlier," but this
+coincidence of the discovery that the work was imprudent, with the
+discovery that he was weary of it, will surprise nobody versed in study
+of a man who lives in his sensations, and yet has vanity enough to
+dislike to admit it.
+
+The short remarks which Rousseau appended to his abridgment of Saint
+Pierre's essays on Perpetual Peace, and on a Polysynodia, or Plurality
+of Councils, are extremely shrewd and pointed, and would suffice to show
+us, if there were nothing else to do so, the right kind of answer to
+make to the more harmful dreams of the Social Contract. Saint Pierre's
+fault is said, with entire truth, to be a failure to make his views
+relative to men, to times, to circumstances; and there is something that
+startles us when we think whose words we are reading, in the declaration
+that, "whether an existing government be still that of old times, or
+whether it have insensibly undergone a change of nature, it is equally
+imprudent to touch it: if it is the same, it must be respected, and if
+it has degenerated, that is due to the force of time and circumstance,
+and human sagacity is powerless." Rousseau points to France, asking his
+readers to judge the peril of once moving by an election the enormous
+masses comprising the French monarchy; and in another place, after a
+wise general remark on the futility of political machinery without men
+of a certain character, he illustrates it by this scornful question:
+When you see all Paris in a ferment about the rank of a dancer or a wit,
+and the affairs of the academy or the opera making everybody forget the
+interest of the ruler and the glory of the nation, what can you hope
+from bringing political affairs close to such a people, and removing
+them from the court to the town?[261] Indeed, there is perhaps not one
+of these pages which Burke might not well have owned.[262]
+
+A violent and prolonged crisis followed this not entirely unsuccessful
+effort after sober and laborious meditation. Rousseau was now to find
+that if society has its perils, so too has solitude, and that if there
+is evil in frivolous complaisance for the puppet-work of a world that is
+only a little serious, so there is evil in a passionate tenderness for
+phantoms of an imaginary world that is not serious at all. To the pure
+or stoical soul the solitude of the forest is strength, but then the
+imagination must know the yoke. Rousseau's imagination, in no way of the
+strongest either as receptive or inventive, was the free accomplice of
+his sensations. The undisciplined force of animal sensibility gradually
+rose within him, like a slowly welling flood. The spectacle does not
+either brighten or fortify the student's mind, yet if there are such
+states, it is right that those who care to speak of human nature should
+have an opportunity of knowing its less glorious parts. They may be
+presumed to exist, though in less violent degree, in many people whom we
+meet in the street and at the table, and there can be nothing but danger
+in allowing ourselves to be so narrowed by our own virtuousness,
+viciousness being conventionally banished to the remoter region of the
+third person, as to forget the presence of "the brute brain within the
+man's." In Rousseau's case, at any rate, it was no wicked broth nor
+magic potion that "confused the chemic labour of the blood," but the too
+potent wine of the joyful beauty of nature herself, working misery in a
+mental structure that no educating care nor envelope of circumstance had
+ever hardened against her intoxication. Most of us are protected against
+this subtle debauch of sensuous egoism by a cool organisation, while
+even those who are born with senses and appetites of great strength and
+keenness, are guarded by accumulated discipline of all kinds from
+without, especially by the necessity for active industry which brings
+the most exaggerated native sensibility into balance. It is the constant
+and rigorous social parade which keeps the eager regiment of the senses
+from making furious rout. Rousseau had just repudiated all social
+obligation, and he had never gone through external discipline. He was at
+an age when passion that has never been broken in has the beak of the
+bald vulture, tearing and gnawing a man; but its first approach is in
+fair shapes.
+
+Wandering and dreaming "in the sweetest season of the year, in the month
+of June, under the fresh groves, with the song of the nightingale and
+the soft murmuring of the brooks in his ear," he began to wonder
+restlessly why he had never tasted in their plenitude the vivid
+sentiments which he was conscious of possessing in reserve, or any of
+that intoxicating delight which he felt potentially existent in his
+soul. Why had he been created with faculties so exquisite, to be left
+thus unused and unfruitful? The feeling of his own quality, with this of
+a certain injustice and waste superadded, brought warm tears which he
+loved to let flow. Visions of the past, from girl playmates of his youth
+down to the Venetian courtesan, thronged in fluttering tumult into his
+brain. He saw himself surrounded by a seraglio of houris whom he had
+known, until his blood was all aflame and his head in a whirl. His
+imagination was kindled into deadly activity. "The impossibility of
+reaching to the real beings plunged me into the land of chimera; and
+seeing nothing actual that rose to the height of my delirium, I
+nourished it in an ideal world, which my creative imagination had soon
+peopled with beings after my heart's desire. In my continual ecstasies,
+I made myself drunk with torrents of the most delicious sentiments that
+ever entered the heart of man. Forgetting absolutely the whole human
+race, I invented for myself societies of perfect creatures, as heavenly
+for their virtues as their beauties; sure, tender, faithful friends,
+such as I never found in our nether world. I had such a passion for
+haunting this empyrean with all its charming objects, that I passed
+hours and days in it without counting them as they went by; and losing
+recollection of everything else, I had hardly swallowed a morsel in hot
+haste, before I began to burn to run off in search of my beloved groves.
+If, when I was ready to start for the enchanted world, I saw unhappy
+mortals coming to detain me on the dull earth, I could neither moderate
+nor hide my spleen, and, no longer master over myself, I used to give
+them greeting so rough that it might well be called brutal."[263]
+
+This terrific malady was something of a very different kind from the
+tranquil sensuousness of the days in Savoy, when the blood was young,
+and life was not complicated with memories, and the sweet freshness of
+nature made existence enough. Then his supreme expansion had been
+attended with a kind of divine repose, and had found edifying voice in
+devout acknowledgment in the exhilaration of the morning air of the
+goodness and bounty of a beneficent master. In this later and more
+pitiable time the beneficent master hid himself, and creation was only
+not a blank because it was veiled by troops of sirens not in the flesh.
+Nature without the association of some living human object, like Madame
+de Warens, was a poison to Rousseau, until the advancing years which
+slowly brought decay of sensual force thus brought the antidote. At our
+present point we see one stricken with an ugly disease. It was almost
+mercy when he was laid up with a sharp attack of the more painful, but
+far less absorbing and frightful disorder, to which Rousseau was subject
+all his life long. It gave pause to what he misnames his angelic loves.
+"Besides that one can hardly think of love when suffering anguish, my
+imagination, which is animated by the country and under the trees,
+languishes and dies in a room and under roof-beams." This interval he
+employed with some magnanimity, in vindicating the ways and economy of
+Providence, in the letter to Voltaire which we shall presently examine.
+The moment he could get out of doors again into the forest, the
+transport returned, but this time accompanied with an active effort in
+the creative faculties of his mind to bring the natural relief to these
+over-wrought paroxysms of sensual imagination. He soothed his emotions
+by associating them with the life of personages whom he invented, and by
+introducing into them that play and movement and changing relation which
+prevented them from bringing his days to an end in malodorous fever. The
+egoism of persistent invention and composition was at least better than
+the egoism of mere unreflecting ecstasy in the charm of natural
+objects, and took off something from the violent excess of sensuous
+force. His thought became absorbed in two female figures, one dark and
+the other fair, one sage and the other yielding, one gentle and the
+other quick, analogous in character but different, not handsome but
+animated by cheerfulness and feeling. To one of these he gave a lover,
+to whom the other was a tender friend. He planted them all, after much
+deliberation and some changes, on the shores of his beloved lake at
+Vevay, the spot where his benefactress was born, and which he always
+thought the richest and loveliest in all Europe.
+
+This vicarious or reflected egoism, accompanied as it was by a certain
+amount of productive energy, seemed to mark a return to a sort of moral
+convalescence. He walked about the groves with pencil and tablets,
+assigning this or that thought or expression to one or other of the
+three companions of his fancy. When the bad weather set in, and he was
+confined to the house (the winter of 1756-7), he tried to resume his
+ordinary indoor labour, the copying of music and the compilation of his
+Musical Dictionary. To his amazement he found that this was no longer
+possible. The fever of that literary composition of which he had always
+such dread had strong possession of him. He could see nothing on any
+side but the three figures and the objects about them made beautiful by
+his imagination. Though he tried hard to dismiss them, his resistance
+was vain, and he set himself to bringing some order into his thoughts
+"so as to produce a kind of romance." We have a glimpse of his mental
+state in the odd detail, that he could not bear to write his romance on
+anything but the very finest paper with gilt edges; that the powder with
+which he dried the ink was of azure and sparkling silver; and that he
+tied up the quires with delicate blue riband.[264] The distance from all
+this to the state of nature is obviously very great indeed. It must not
+be supposed that he forgot his older part as Cato, Brutus, and the other
+Plutarchians. "My great embarrassment," he says honestly, "was that I
+should belie myself so clearly and thoroughly. After the severe
+principles I had just been laying down with so much bustle, after the
+austere maxims I had preached so energetically, after so many biting
+invectives against the effeminate books that breathed love and soft
+delights, could anything be imagined more shocking, more unlooked-for,
+than to see me inscribe myself with my own hand among the very authors
+on whose books I had heaped this harsh censure? I felt this
+inconsequence in all its force, I taxed myself with it, I blushed over
+it, and was overcome with mortification; but nothing could restore me to
+reason."[265] He adds that perhaps on the whole the composition of the
+New Helo�sa was turning his madness to the best account. That may be
+true, but does not all this make the bitter denunciation, in the Letter
+to D'Alembert, of love and of all who make its representation a
+considerable element in literature or the drama, at the very time when
+he was composing one of the most dangerously attractive romances of his
+century, a rather indecent piece of invective? We may forgive
+inconsistency when it is only between two of a man's theories, or two
+self-concerning parts of his conduct, but hardly when it takes the form
+of reviling in others what the reviler indulgently permits to himself.
+
+We are more edified by the energy with which Rousseau refused connivance
+with the public outrages on morality perpetrated by a patron. M.
+d'Epinay went to pay him a visit at the Hermitage, taking with him two
+ladies with whom his relations were less than equivocal, and for whom
+among other things he had given Rousseau music to copy. "They were
+curious to see the eccentric man," as M. d'Epinay afterwards told his
+scandalised wife, for it was in the manners of the day on no account to
+parade even the most notorious of these unblessed connections. "He was
+walking in front of the door; he saw me first; he advanced cap in hand;
+he saw the ladies; he saluted us, put on his cap, turned his back, and
+stalked off as fast as he could. Can anything be more mad?"[266] In the
+miserable and intricate tangle of falsity, weakness, sensuality, and
+quarrel, which make up this chapter in Rousseau's life, we are glad of
+even one trait of masculine robustness. We should perhaps be still more
+glad if the unwedded Theresa were not visible in the background of this
+scene of high morals.
+
+
+II.
+
+The New Helo�sa was not to be completed without a further extension of
+morbid experience of a still more burning kind than the sufferings of
+compressed passion. The feverish torment of mere visions of the air
+swarming impalpable in all his veins, was replaced when the earth again
+began to live and the sap to stir in plants, by the more concentred fire
+of a consuming passion for one who was no dryad nor figure of a dream.
+In the spring of 1757 he received a visit from Madame d'Houdetot, the
+sister-in-law of Madame d'Epinay.[267] Her husband had gone to the war
+(we are in the year of Rossbach), and so had her lover, Saint Lambert,
+whose passion had been so fatal to Voltaire's Marquise du Ch�telet eight
+years before. She rode over in man's guise to the Hermitage from a house
+not very far off, where she was to pass her retreat during the absence
+of her two natural protectors. Rousseau had seen her before on various
+occasions; she had been to the Hermitage the previous year, and had
+partaken of its host's homely fare.[268] But the time was not ripe; the
+force of a temptation is not from without but within. Much, too,
+depended with our hermit on the temperature; one who would have been a
+very ordinary mortal to him in cold and rain, might grow to Aphrodite
+herself in days when the sun shone hot and the air was aromatic. His
+fancy was suddenly struck with the romantic guise of the female
+cavalier, and this was the first onset of a veritable intoxication,
+which many men have felt, but which no man before or since ever invited
+the world to hear the story of. He may truly say that after the first
+interview with her in this disastrous spring, he was as one who had
+thirstily drained a poisoned bowl. A sort of palsy struck him. He lay
+weeping in his bed at night, and on days when he did not see the
+sorceress he wept in the woods.[269] He talked to himself for hours, and
+was of a black humour to his house-mates. When approaching the object of
+this deadly fascination, his whole organisation seemed to be dissolved.
+He walked in a dream that filled him with a sense of sickly torture,
+commixed with sicklier delight.
+
+People speak with precisely marked division of mind and body, of will,
+emotion, understanding; the division is good in logic, but its
+convenient lines are lost to us as we watch a being with soul all
+blurred, body all shaken, unstrung, poisoned, by erotic mania, rising in
+slow clouds of mephitic steam from suddenly heated stagnancies of the
+blood, and turning the reality of conduct and duty into distant
+unmeaning shadows. If such a disease were the furious mood of the brute
+in spring-time, it would be less dreadful, but shame and remorse in the
+ever-struggling reason of man or woman in the grip of the foul thing,
+produces an aggravation of frenzy that makes the mental healer tremble.
+Add to all this lurking elements of hollow rage that his passion was not
+returned; of stealthy jealousy of the younger man whose place he could
+not take, and who was his friend besides; of suspicion that he was a
+little despised for his weakness by the very object of it, who saw that
+his hairs were sprinkled with gray,--and the whole offers a scene of
+moral humiliation that half sickens, half appals, and we turn away with
+dismay as from a vision of the horrid loves of heavy-eyed and scaly
+shapes that haunted the warm primeval ooze.
+
+Madame d'Houdetot, the unwilling enchantress bearing in an unconscious
+hand the cup of defilement, was not strikingly singular either in
+physical or mental attraction. She was now seven-and-twenty. Small-pox,
+the terrible plague of the country, had pitted her face and given a
+yellowish tinge to her complexion; her features were clumsy and her brow
+low; she was short-sighted, and in old age at any rate was afflicted by
+an excessive squint. This homeliness was redeemed by a gentle and
+caressing expression, and by a sincerity, a gaiety of heart, and free
+sprightliness of manner, that no trouble could restrain. Her figure was
+very slight, and there was in all her movements at once awkwardness and
+grace. She was natural and simple, and had a fairly good judgment of a
+modest kind, in spite of the wild sallies in which her spirits sometimes
+found vent. Capable of chagrin, she was never prevented by it from
+yielding to any impulse of mirth. "She weeps with the best faith in the
+world, and breaks out laughing at the same moment; never was anybody so
+happily born," says her much less amiable sister-in-law.[270] Her
+husband was indifferent to her. He preserved an attachment to a lady
+whom he knew before his marriage, whose society he never ceased to
+frequent, and who finally died in his arms in 1793. Madame d'Houdetot
+found consolation in the friendship of Saint Lambert. "We both of us,"
+said her husband, "both Madame d'Houdetot and I, had a vocation for
+fidelity, only there was a mis-arrangement." She occasionally composed
+verses of more than ordinary point, but she had good sense enough not to
+write them down, nor to set up on the strength of them for poetess and
+wit.[271] Her talk in her later years, and she lived down to the year of
+Leipsic, preserved the pointed sententiousness of earlier time. One day,
+for instance, in the era of the Directory, a conversation was going on
+as to the various merits and defects of women; she heard much, and then
+with her accustomed suavity of voice contributed this light
+summary:--"Without women, the life of man would be without aid at the
+beginning, without pleasure in the middle, and without solace at the
+end."[272]
+
+We may be sure that it was not her power of saying things of this sort
+that kindled Rousseau's flame, but rather the sprightly naturalness,
+frankness, and kindly softness of a character which in his opinion
+united every virtue except prudence and strength, the two which Rousseau
+would be least likely to miss. The bond of union between them was
+subtle. She found in Rousseau a sympathetic listener while she told the
+story of her passion for Saint Lambert, and a certain contagious force
+produced in him a thrill which he never felt with any one else before or
+after. Thus, as he says, there was equally love on both sides, though it
+was not reciprocal. "We were both of us intoxicated with passion, she
+for her lover, I for her; our sighs and sweet tears mingled. Tender
+confidants, each of the other, our sentiments were of such close kin
+that it was impossible for them not to mix; and still she never forgot
+her duty for a moment, while for myself, I protest, I swear, that if
+sometimes drawn astray by my senses, still"--still he was a paragon of
+virtue, subject to rather new definition. We can appreciate the author
+of the New Helo�sa; we can appreciate the author of Emilius; but this
+strained attempt to confound those two very different persons by
+combining tearful erotics with high ethics, is an exhibition of
+self-delusion that the most patient analyst of human nature might well
+find hard to suffer. "The duty of privation exalted my soul. The glory
+of all the virtues adorned the idol of my heart in my sight; to soil its
+divine image would have been to annihilate it," and so forth.[273]
+Moon-lighted landscape gave a background for the sentimentalist's
+picture, and dim groves, murmuring cascades, and the soft rustle of the
+night air, made up a scene which became for its chief actor "an immortal
+memory of innocence and delight." "It was in this grove, seated with her
+on a grassy bank, under an acacia heavy with flowers, that I found
+expression for the emotions of my heart in words that were worthy of
+them. 'Twas the first and single time of my life; but I was sublime, if
+you can use the word of all the tender and seductive things that the
+most glowing love can bring into the heart of a man. What intoxicating
+tears I shed at her knees, what floods she shed in spite of herself! At
+length in an involuntary transport, she cried out, 'Never was man so
+tender, never did man love as you do! But your friend Saint Lambert
+hears us, and my heart cannot love twice.'"[274] Happily, as we learn
+from another source, a breath of wholesome life from without brought the
+transcendental to grotesque end. In the climax of tears and
+protestations, an honest waggoner at the other side of the park wall,
+urging on a lagging beast launched a round and far-sounding oath out
+into the silent night. Madame d'Houdetot answered with a lively
+continuous peal of young laughter, while an angry chill brought back the
+discomfited lover from an ecstasy that was very full of peril.[275]
+
+Rousseau wrote in the New Helo�sa very sagely that you should grant to
+the senses nothing when you mean to refuse them anything. He admits that
+the saying was falsified by his relations with Madame d'Houdetot.
+Clearly the credit of this happy falsification was due to her rather
+than to himself. What her feelings were, it is not very easy to see.
+Honest pity seems to have been the strongest of them. She was idle and
+unoccupied, and idleness leaves the soul open for much stray generosity
+of emotion, even towards an importunate lover. She thought him mad, and
+she wrote to Saint Lambert to say so. "His madness must be very strong,"
+said Saint Lambert, "since she can perceive it."[276]
+
+Character is ceaselessly marching, even when we seem to have sunk into a
+fixed and stagnant mood. The man is awakened from his dream of passion
+by inexorable event; he finds the house of the soul not swept and
+garnished for a new life, but possessed by demons who have entered
+unseen. In short, such profound disorder of spirit, though in its first
+stage marked by ravishing delirium, never escapes a bitter sequel. When
+a man lets his soul be swept away from the narrow track of conduct
+appointed by his relations with others, still the reality of such
+relations survives. He may retreat to rural lodges; that will not save
+him either from his own passion, or from some degree of that kinship
+with others which instantly creates right and wrong like a wall of brass
+around him. Let it be observed that the natures of finest stuff suffer
+most from these forced reactions, and it was just because Rousseau had
+innate moral sensitiveness, and a man like Diderot was without it, that
+the first felt his fall so profoundly, while the second was unconscious
+of having fallen at all.
+
+One day in July Rousseau went to pay his accustomed visit. He found
+Madame d'Houdetot dejected, and with the flush of recent weeping on her
+cheeks. A bird of the air had carried the matter. As usual, the matter
+was carried wrongly, and apparently all that Saint Lambert suspected was
+that Rousseau's high principles had persuaded Madame d'Houdetot of the
+viciousness of her relations with her lover.[277] "They have played us
+an evil turn," cried Madame d'Houdetot; "they have been unjust to me,
+but that is no matter. Either let us break off at once, or be what you
+ought to be."[278] This was Rousseau's first taste of the ashes of
+shame into which the lusciousness of such forbidden fruit, plucked at
+the expense of others, is ever apt to be transformed. Mortification of
+the considerable spiritual pride that was yet alive after this lapse,
+was a strong element in the sum of his emotion, and it was pointed by
+the reflection which stung him so incessantly, that his monitress was
+younger than himself. He could never master his own contempt for the
+gallantry of grizzled locks.[279] His austerer self might at any rate
+have been consoled by knowing that this scene was the beginning of the
+end, though the end came without any seeking on his part and without
+violence. To his amazement, one day Saint Lambert and Madame d'Houdetot
+came to the Hermitage, asking him to give them dinner, and much to the
+credit of human nature's elasticity, the three passed a delightful
+afternoon. The wronged lover was friendly, though a little stiff, and he
+passed occasional slights which Rousseau would surely not have forgiven,
+if he had not been disarmed by consciousness of guilt. He fell asleep,
+as we can well imagine that he might do, while Rousseau read aloud his
+very inadequate justification of Providence against Voltaire.[280]
+
+In time he returned to the army, and Rousseau began to cure himself of
+his mad passion. His method, however, was not unsuspicious, for it
+involved the perilous assistance of Madame d'Houdetot. Fortunately her
+loyalty and good sense forced a more resolute mode upon him. He found,
+or thought he found her distracted, emharrassed, indifferent. In despair
+at not being allowed to heal his passionate malady in his own fashion,
+he did the most singular thing that he could have done under the
+circumstances. He wrote to Saint Lambert.[281] His letter is a prodigy
+of plausible duplicity, though Rousseau in some of his mental states had
+so little sense of the difference between the actual and the imaginary,
+and was moreover so swiftly borne away on a flood of fine phrases, that
+it is hard to decide how far this was voluntary, and how far he was his
+own dupe. Voluntary or not, it is detestable. We pass the false whine
+about "being abandoned by all that was dear to him," as if he had not
+deliberately quitted Paris against the remonstrance of every friend he
+had; about his being "solitary and sad," as if he was not ready at this
+very time to curse any one who intruded on his solitude, and hindered
+him of a single half-hour in the desert spots that he adored.
+Remembering the scenes in moon-lighted groves and elsewhere, we read
+this:--"Whence comes her coldness to me? Is it possible that you can
+have suspected me of wronging you with her, and of turning perfidious in
+consequence of an unseasonably rigorous virtue? A passage in one of your
+letters shows a glimpse of some such suspicion. No, no, Saint Lambert,
+the breast of J.J. Rousseau never held the heart of a traitor, and I
+should despise myself more than you suppose, if I had ever tried to rob
+you of her heart.... Can you suspect that her friendship for me may hurt
+her love for you? Surely natures endowed with sensibility are open to
+all sorts of affections, and no sentiment can spring up in them which
+does not turn to the advantage of the dominant passion. Where is the
+lover who does not wax the more tender as he talks to his friend of her
+whom he loves? And is it not sweeter for you in your banishment that
+there should be some sympathetic creature to whom your mistress loves to
+talk of you, and who loves to hear?"
+
+Let us turn to another side of his correspondence. The way in which the
+sympathetic creature in the present case loved to hear his friend's
+mistress talk of him, is interestingly shown in one or two passages from
+a letter to her; as when he cries, "Ah, how proud would even thy lover
+himself be of thy constancy, if he only knew how much it has
+surmounted.... I appeal to your sincerity. You, the witness and the
+cause of this delirium, these tears, these ravishing ecstasies, these
+transports which were never made for mortal, say, have I ever tasted
+your favours in such a way that I deserve to lose them?... Never once
+did my ardent desires nor my tender supplications dare to solicit
+supreme happiness, without my feeling stopped by the inner cries of a
+sorrow-stricken soul.... O Sophie, after moments so sweet, the idea of
+eternal privation is too frightful for one who groans that he cannot
+identify himself with thee. What, are thy tender eyes never again to be
+lowered with a delicious modesty, intoxicating me with pleasure? What,
+are my burning lips never again to lay my very soul on thy heart along
+with my kisses? What, may I never more feel that heavenly shudder, that
+rapid and devouring fire, swifter than lightning?"[282].... We see a
+sympathetic creature assuredly, and listen to the voice of a nature
+endowed with sensibility even more than enough, but with decency,
+loyalty, above all with self-knowledge, far less than enough.
+
+One more touch completes the picture of the fallen desperate man. He
+takes great trouble to persuade Saint Lambert that though the rigour of
+his principles constrains him to frown upon such breaches of social law
+as the relations between Madame d'Houdetot and her lover, yet he is so
+attached to the sinful pair that he half forgives them. "Do not
+suppose," he says, with superlative gravity, "that you have seduced me
+by your reasons; I see in them the goodness of your heart, not your
+justification. I cannot help blaming your connection: you can hardly
+approve it yourself; and so long as you both of you continue dear to me,
+I will never leave you in careless security as to the innocence of your
+state. Yet love such as yours deserves considerateness.... I feel
+respect for a union so tender, and cannot bring myself to attempt to
+lead it to virtue along the path of despair" (p. 401).
+
+Ignorance of the facts of the case hindered Saint Lambert from
+appreciating the strange irony of a man protesting about leading to
+virtue along the path of despair a poor woman whom he had done as much
+as he could to lead to vice along the path of highly stimulated sense.
+Saint Lambert was as much a sentimentalist as Rousseau was, but he had a
+certain manliness, acquired by long contact with men, which his
+correspondent only felt in moods of severe exaltation. Saint Lambert
+took all the blame on himself. He had desired that his mistress and his
+friend should love one another; then he thought he saw some coolness in
+his mistress, and he set the change down to his friend, though not on
+the true grounds. "Do not suppose that I thought you perfidious or a
+traitor; I knew the austerity of your principles; people had spoken to
+me of it; and she herself did so with a respect that love found hard to
+bear." In short, he had suspected Rousseau of nothing worse than being
+over-virtuous, and trying in the interest of virtue to break off a
+connection sanctioned by contemporary manners, but not by law or
+religion. If Madame d'Houdetot had changed, it was not that she had
+ceased to honour her good friend, but only that her lover might be
+spared a certain chagrin, from suspecting the excess of scrupulosity and
+conscience in so austere an adviser.[283]
+
+It is well known how effectively one with a germ of good principle in
+him is braced by being thought better than he is. With this letter in
+his hands and its words in his mind, Rousseau strode off for his last
+interview with Madame d'Houdetot. Had Saint Lambert, he says, been less
+wise, less generous, less worthy, I should have been a lost man. As it
+was, he passed four or five hours with her in a delicious calm,
+infinitely more delightful than the accesses of burning fever which had
+seized him before. They formed the project of a close companionship of
+three, including the absent lover; and they counted on the project
+coming more true than such designs usually do, "since all the feelings
+that can unite sensitive and upright hearts formed the foundation of it,
+and we three united talents enough as well as knowledge enough to
+suffice to ourselves, without need of aid or supplement from others."
+What happened was this. Madame d'Houdetot for the next three or four
+months, which were among the most bitter in Rousseau's life, for then
+the bitterness which became chronic was new and therefore harder to be
+borne, wrote him the wisest, most affectionate, and most considerate
+letters that a sincere and sensible woman ever wrote to the most
+petulant, suspicious, perverse, and irrestrainable of men. For patience
+and exquisite sweetness of friendship some of these letters are
+matchless, and we can only conjecture the wearing querulousness of the
+letters to which they were replies. If through no fault of her own she
+had been the occasion of the monstrous delirium of which he never shook
+off the consequences, at least this good soul did all that wise counsel
+and grave tenderness could do, to bring him out of the black slough of
+suspicion and despair into which he was plunged.[284] In the beginning
+of 1758 there was a change. Rousseau's passion for her somehow became
+known to all the world; it reached the ears of Saint Lambert, and was
+the cause of a passing disturbance between him and his mistress. Saint
+Lambert throughout acted like a man who is thoroughly master of himself.
+At first, we learn, he ceased for a moment to see in Rousseau the virtue
+which he sought in him, and which he was persuaded that he found in him.
+"Since then, however," wrote Madame d'Houdetot, "he pities you more for
+your weakness than he reproaches you, and we are both of us far from
+joining the people who wish to blacken your character; we have and
+always shall have the courage to speak of you with esteem."[285] They
+saw one another a few times, and on one occasion the Count and Countess
+d'Houdetot, Saint Lambert, and Rousseau all sat at table together,
+happily without breach of the peace.[286] One curious thing about this
+meeting was that it took place some three weeks after Rousseau and Saint
+Lambert had interchanged letters on the subject of the quarrel with
+Diderot, in which each promised the other contemptuous oblivion.[287]
+Perpetuity of hate is as hard as perpetuity of love for our poor
+short-spanned characters, and at length the three who were once to have
+lived together in self-sufficing union, and then in their next mood to
+have forgotten one another instantly and for ever, held to neither of
+the extremes, but settled down into an easier middle path of indifferent
+good-will. The conduct of all three, said the most famous of them, may
+serve for an example of the way in which sensible people separate, when
+it no longer suits them to see one another.[288] It is at least certain
+that in them Rousseau lost two of the most unimpeachably good friends
+that he ever possessed.
+
+
+III.
+
+The egoistic character that loves to brood and hates to act, is big with
+catastrophe. We have now to see how the inevitable law accomplished
+itself in the case of Rousseau. In many this brooding egoism produces a
+silent and melancholy insanity; with him it was developed into something
+of acridly corrosive quality. One of the agents in this disastrous
+process was the wearing torture of one of the most painful of disorders.
+This disorder, arising from an internal malformation, harassed him from
+his infancy to the day of his death. Our fatuous persistency in reducing
+man to the spiritual, blinds the biographer to the circumstance that the
+history of a life is the history of a body no less than that of a soul.
+Many a piece of conduct that divides the world into two factions of
+moral assailants and moral vindicators, provoking a thousand ingenuities
+of ethical or psychological analysis, ought really to have been nothing
+more than an item in a page of a pathologist's case-book. We are not to
+suspend our judgment on action; right and wrong can depend on no man's
+malformations. In trying to know the actor, it is otherwise; here it is
+folly to underestimate the physical antecedents of mental phenomena. In
+firm and lofty character, pain is mastered; in a character so little
+endowed with cool tenacious strength as Rousseau's, pain such as he
+endured was enough to account, not for his unsociality, which flowed
+from temperament, but for the bitter, irritable, and suspicious form
+which this unsociality now first assumed. Rousseau was never a saintly
+nature, but far the reverse, and in reading the tedious tale of his
+quarrels with Grimm and Madame d'Epinay and Diderot--a tale of
+labyrinthine nightmares--let us remember that we may even to this point
+explain what happened, without recourse to the too facile theory of
+insanity, unless one defines that misused term so widely as to make many
+sane people very uncomfortable.
+
+His own account was this: "In my quality of solitary, I am more
+sensitive than another; if I am wrong with a friend who lives in the
+world, he thinks of it for a moment, and then a thousand distractions
+make him forget it for the rest of the day; but there is nothing to
+distract me as to his wrong towards me; deprived of my sleep, I busy
+myself with him all night long; solitary in my walks, I busy myself with
+him from sunrise until sunset; my heart has not an instant's relief, and
+the harshness of a friend gives me in one day years of anguish. In my
+quality of invalid, I have a title to the considerateness that humanity
+owes to the weakness or irritation of a man in agony. Who is the friend,
+who is the good man, that ought not to dread to add affliction to an
+unfortunate wretch tormented with a painful and incurable malady?"[289]
+We need not accept this as an adequate extenuation of perversities, but
+it explains them without recourse to the theory of uncontrollable
+insanity. Insanity came later, the product of intellectual excitation,
+public persecution, and moral reaction after prolonged tension.
+Meanwhile he may well be judged by the standards of the sane; knowing
+his temperament, his previous history, his circumstances, we have no
+difficulty in accounting for his conduct. Least of all is there any need
+for laying all the blame upon his friends. There are writers whom
+enthusiasm for the principles of Jean Jacques has driven into fanatical
+denigration of every one whom he called his enemy, that is to say,
+nearly every one whom he ever knew.[290] Diderot said well, "Too many
+honest people would be wrong, if Jean Jacques were right."
+
+The first downright breach was with Grimm, but there were angry passages
+during the year 1757, not only with him, but with Diderot and Madame
+d'Epinay as well. Diderot, like many other men of energetic nature
+unchastened by worldly wisdom, was too interested in everything that
+attracted his attention to keep silence over the indiscretion of a
+friend. He threw as much tenacity and zeal into a trifle, if it had once
+struck him, as he did into the Encyclop�dia. We have already seen how
+warmly he rated Jean Jacques for missing the court pension. Then he
+scolded and laughed at him for turning hermit. With still more
+seriousness he remonstrated with him for remaining in the country
+through the winter, thus endangering the life of Theresa's aged mother.
+This stirred up hot anger in the Hermitage, and two or three bitter
+letters were interchanged,[291] those of Diderot being pronounced by a
+person who was no partisan of Rousseau decidedly too harsh.[292] Yet
+there is copious warmth of friendship in these very letters, if only the
+man to whom they were written had not hated interference in his affairs
+as the worst of injuries. "I loved Diderot tenderly, I esteemed him
+sincerely," says Rousseau, "and I counted with entire confidence upon
+the same sentiments in him. But worn out by his unwearied obstinacy in
+everlastingly thwarting my tastes, my inclinations, my ways of living,
+everything that concerned myself only; revolted at seeing a younger man
+than myself insist with all his might on governing me like a child;
+chilled by his readiness in giving his promise and his negligence in
+keeping it; tired of so many appointments which he made and broke, and
+of his fancy for repairing them by new ones to be broken in their turn;
+provoked at waiting for him to no purpose three or four times a month on
+days which he had fixed, and of dining alone in the evening, after going
+on as far as St. Denis to meet him and waiting for him all day,--I had
+my heart already full of a multitude of grievances."[293] This
+irritation subsided in presence of the storms that now rose up against
+Diderot. He was in the thick of the dangerous and mortifying
+distractions stirred up by the foes of the Encyclop�dia. Rousseau in
+friendly sympathy went to see him; they embraced, and old wrongs were
+forgotten until new arose.[294]
+
+There is a less rose-coloured account than this. Madame d'Epinay assigns
+two motives to Rousseau: a desire to find an excuse for going to Paris,
+in order to avoid seeing Saint Lambert; secondly, a wish to hear
+Diderot's opinion of the two first parts of the New Helo�sa. She says
+that he wanted to borrow a portfolio in which to carry the manuscripts
+to Paris; Rousseau says that they had already been in Diderot's
+possession for six months.[295] As her letters containing this very
+circumstantial story were written at the moment, it is difficult to
+uphold the Confessions as valid authority against them. Thirdly,
+Rousseau told her that he had not taken his manuscripts to Paris (p.
+302), whereas Grimm writing a few days later (p. 309) mentions that he
+has received a letter from Diderot, to the effect that Rousseau's visit
+had no other object than the revision of these manuscripts. The scene is
+characteristic. "Rousseau kept him pitilessly at work from Saturday at
+ten o'clock in the morning till eleven at night on Monday, hardly giving
+him time to eat and drink. The revision at an end, Diderot chats with
+him about a plan he has in his head, and begs Rousseau to help him in
+contriving some incident which he cannot yet arrange to his taste. 'It
+is too difficult,' replies the hermit coldly, 'it is late, and I am not
+used to sitting up. Good night; I am off at six in the morning, and 'tis
+time for bed.' He rises from his chair, goes to bed, and leaves Diderot
+petrified at his behaviour. The day of his departure, Diderot's wife saw
+that her husband was in bad spirits, and asked the reason. 'It is that
+man's want of delicacy,' he replied, 'which afflicts me; he makes me
+work like a slave, but I should never have found that out, if he had not
+so drily refused to take an interest in me for a quarter of an hour.'
+'You are surprised at that,' his wife answered; 'do you not know him? He
+is devoured with envy; he goes wild with rage when anything fine appears
+that is not his own. You will see him one day commit some great crime
+rather than let himself be ignored. I declare I would not swear that he
+will not join the ranks of the Jesuits, and undertake their
+vindication.'"
+
+Of course we cannot be sure that Grimm did not manipulate these letters
+long after the event, but there is nothing in Rousseau's history to make
+us perfectly sure that he was incapable either of telling a falsehood to
+Madame d'Epinay, or of being shamelessly selfish in respect of Diderot.
+I see no reason to refuse substantial credit to Grimm's account, and the
+points of coincidence between that and the Confessions make its truth
+probable.[296]
+
+Rousseau's relations with Madame d'Epinay were more complex, and his
+sentiments towards her underwent many changes. There was a prevalent
+opinion that he was her lover, for which no real foundation seems to
+have existed.[297] Those who disbelieved that he had reached this
+distinction, yet made sure that he had a passion for her, which may or
+may not have been true.[298] Madame d'Epinay herself was vain enough to
+be willing that this should be generally accepted, and it is certain
+that she showed a friendship for him which, considering the manners of
+the time, was invitingly open to misconception. Again, she was jealous
+of her sister-in-law, Madame d'Houdetot, if for no other reason than
+that the latter, being the wife of a Norman noble, had access to the
+court, and this was unattainable by the wife of a farmer-general. Hence
+Madame d'Epinay's barely-concealed mortification when she heard of the
+meetings in the forest, the private suppers, the moonlight rambles in
+the park. When Saint Lambert first became uneasy as to the relations
+between Rousseau and his mistress, and wrote to her to say that he was
+so, Rousseau instantly suspected that Madame d'Epinay had been his
+informant. Theresa confirmed the suspicion by tales of baskets and
+drawers ransacked by Madame d'Epinay in search of Madame d'Houdetot's
+letters to him. Whether these tales were true or not, we can never know;
+we can only say that Madame d'Epinay was probably not incapable of these
+meannesses, and that there is no reason to suppose that she took the
+pains to write directly to Saint Lambert a piece of news which she was
+writing to Grimm, knowing that he was then in communication with Saint
+Lambert. She herself suspected that Theresa had written to Saint
+Lambert,[299] but it may be doubted whether Theresa's imagination could
+have risen to such feat as writing to a marquis, and a marquis in what
+would have seemed to her to be remote and inaccessible parts of the
+earth. All this, however, has become ghostly for us; a puzzle that can
+never be found out, nor be worth finding out. Rousseau was persuaded
+that Madame d'Epinay was his betrayer, and was seized by one of his
+blackest and most stormful moods. In reply to an affectionate letter
+from her, inquiring why she had not seen him for so long, he wrote thus:
+"I can say nothing to you yet. I wait until I am better informed, and
+this I shall be sooner or later. Meanwhile, be certain that accused
+innocence will find a champion ardent enough to make calumniators
+repent, whoever they may be." It is rather curious that so strange a
+missive as this, instead of provoking Madame d'Epinay to anger, was
+answered by a warmer and more affectionate letter than the first. To
+this Rousseau replied with increased vehemence, charged with dark and
+mysteriously worded suspicion. Still Madame d'Epinay remained willing to
+receive him. He began to repent of his imprudent haste, because it would
+certainly end by compromising Madame d'Houdetot, and because, moreover,
+he had no proof after all that his suspicions had any foundation. He
+went instantly to the house of Madame d'Epinay; at his approach she
+threw herself on his neck and melted into tears. This unexpected
+reception from so old a friend moved him extremely; he too wept
+abundantly. She showed no curiosity as to the precise nature of his
+suspicions or their origin, and the quarrel came to an end.[300]
+
+Grimm's turn followed. Though they had been friends for many years,
+there had long been a certain stiffness in their friendship. Their
+characters were in fact profoundly antipathetic. Rousseau we
+know,--sensuous, impulsive, extravagant, with little sense of the
+difference between reality and dreams. Grimm was exactly the opposite;
+judicious, collected, self-seeking, coldly upright. He was a German
+(born at Ratisbon), and in Paris was first a reader to the Duke of Saxe
+Gotha, with very scanty salary. He made his way, partly through the
+friendship of Rousseau, into the society of the Parisian men of letters,
+rapidly acquired a perfect mastery of the French language, and with the
+inspiring help of Diderot, became an excellent critic. After being
+secretary to sundry high people, he became the literary correspondent of
+various German sovereigns, keeping them informed of what was happening
+in the world of art and letters, just as an ambassador keeps his
+government informed of what happens in politics. The sobriety,
+impartiality, and discrimination of his criticism make one think highly
+of his literary judgment; he had the courage, or shall we say he
+preserved enough of the German, to defend both Homer and Shakespeare
+against the unhappy strictures of Voltaire.[301] This is not all,
+however; his criticism is conceived in a tone which impresses us with
+the writer's integrity. And to this internal evidence we have to add the
+external corroboration that in the latter part of his life he filled
+various official posts, which implied a peculiar confidence in his
+probity on the part of those who appointed him. At the present moment
+(1756-57), he was acting as secretary to Marshal d'Estr�es, commander of
+the French army in Westphalia at the outset of the Seven Years' War. He
+was an able and helpful man, in spite of his having a rough manner,
+powdering his face, and being so monstrously scented as to earn the name
+of the musk-bear. He had that firmness and positivity which are not
+always beautiful, but of which there is probably too little rather than
+too much in the world, certainly in the France of his time, and of which
+there was none at all in Rousseau. Above all things he hated
+declamation. Apparently cold and reserved, he had sensibility enough
+underneath the surface to go nearly out of his mind for love of a singer
+at the opera who had a thrilling voice. As he did not believe in the
+metaphysical doctrine about the freedom of the will, he accepted from
+temperament the necessity which logic confirmed, of guiding the will by
+constant pressure from without. "I am surprised," Madame d'Epinay said
+to him, "that men should be so little indulgent to one another." "Nay,
+the want of indulgence comes of our belief in freedom; it is because the
+established morality is false and bad, inasmuch as it starts from this
+false principle of liberty." "Ah, but the contrary principle, by making
+one too indulgent, disturbs order." "It does nothing of the kind. Though
+man does not wholly change, he is susceptible of modification; you can
+improve him; hence it is not useless to punish him. The gardener does
+not cut down a tree that grows crooked; he binds up the branch and keeps
+it in shape; that is the effect of public punishment."[302] He applied
+the same doctrine, as we shall see, to private punishment for social
+crookedness.
+
+It is easy to conceive how Rousseau's way of ordering himself would
+gradually estrange so hard a head as this. What the one thought a
+weighty moral reformation, struck the other as a vain desire to attract
+attention. Rousseau on the other hand suspected Grimm of intriguing to
+remove Theresa from him, as well as doing his best to alienate all his
+friends. The attempted alienation of Theresa consisted in the secret
+allowance to her mother and her by Grimm and Diderot of some sixteen
+pounds a year.[303] Rousseau was unaware of this, but the whisperings
+and goings and comings to which it gave rise, made him darkly uneasy.
+That the suspicions in other respects were in a certain sense not wholly
+unfounded, is shown by Grimm's own letters to Madame d'Epinay. He
+disapproved of her installing Rousseau in the Hermitage, and warned her
+in a very remarkable prophecy that solitude would darken his
+imagination.[304] "He is a poor devil who torments himself, and does not
+dare to confess the true subject of all his sufferings, which is in his
+cursed head and his pride; he raises up imaginary matters, so as to have
+the pleasure of complaining of the whole human race."[305] More than
+once he assures her that Rousseau will end by going mad, it being
+impossible that so hot and ill-organised a head should endure
+solitude.[306] Rousseauite partisans usually explain all this by
+supposing that Grimm was eager to set a woman for whom he had a passion,
+against a man who was suspected of having a passion for her; and it is
+possible that jealousy may have stimulated the exercise of his natural
+shrewdness. But this shrewdness, added to entire want of imagination and
+a very narrow range of sympathy, was quite enough to account for Grimm's
+harsh judgment, without the addition of any sinister sentiment. He was
+perfectly right in suspecting Rousseau of want of loyalty to Madame
+d'Epinay, for we find our hermit writing to her in strains of perfect
+intimacy, while he was writing of her to Madame d'Houdetot as "your
+unworthy sister."[307] On the other hand, while Madame d'Epinay was
+overwhelming him with caressing phrases, she was at the same moment
+describing him to Grimm as a master of impertinence and intractableness.
+As usual where there is radical incompatibility of character, an
+attempted reconciliation between Grimm and Rousseau (some time in the
+early part of October 1757) had only made the thinly veiled antipathy
+more resolute. Rousseau excused himself for wrongs of which in his heart
+he never thought himself guilty. Grimm replied by a discourse on the
+virtues of friendship and his own special aptitude for practising them.
+He then conceded to the impetuous penitent the kiss of peace, in a
+slight embrace which was like the accolade given by a monarch to new
+knights.[308] The whole scene is ignoble. We seem to be watching an
+unclean cauldron, with Theresa's mother, a cringing and babbling crone,
+standing witch-like over it and infusing suspicion, falsehood, and
+malice. When minds are thus surcharged, any accident suffices to
+release the evil creatures that lurk in an irritated imagination.
+
+One day towards the end of the autumn of 1757, Rousseau learned to his
+unbounded surprise that Madame d'Epinay had been seized with some
+strange disorder, which made it advisable that she should start without
+any delay for Geneva, there to place herself under the care of Tronchin,
+who was at that time the most famous doctor in Europe. His surprise was
+greatly increased by the expectation which he found among his friends
+that he would show his gratitude for her many kindnesses to him, by
+offering to bear her company on her journey, and during her stay in a
+town which was strange to her and thoroughly familiar to him. It was to
+no purpose that he protested how unfit was one invalid to be the nurse
+of another; and how great an incumbrance a man would be in a coach in
+the bad season, when for many days he was absolutely unable to leave his
+chamber without danger. Diderot, with his usual eagerness to guide a
+friend's course, wrote him a letter urging that his many obligations,
+and even his grievances in respect of Madame d'Epinay, bound him to
+accompany her, as he would thus repay the one and console himself for
+the other. "She is going into a country where she will be like one
+fallen from the clouds. She is ill; she will need amusement and
+distraction. As for winter, are you worse now than you were a month
+back, or than you will be at the opening of the spring? For me, I
+confess that if I could not bear the coach, I would take a staff and
+follow her on foot."[309] Rousseau trembled with fury, and as soon as
+the transport was over, he wrote an indignant reply, in which he more or
+less politely bade the panurgic one to attend to his own affairs, and
+hinted that Grimm was making a tool of him. Next he wrote to Grimm
+himself a letter, not unfriendly in form, asking his advice and
+promising to follow it, but hardly hiding his resentment. By this time
+he had found out the secret of Madame d'Epinay's supposed illness and
+her anxiety to pass some months away from her family, and the share
+which Grimm had in it. This, however, does not make many passages of his
+letter any the less ungracious or unseemly. "If Madame d'Epinay has
+shown friend' ship to me, I have shown more to her.... As for benefits,
+first of all I do not like them, I do not want them, and I owe no thanks
+for any that people may burden me with by force. Madame d'Epinay, being
+so often left alone in the country, wished me for company; it was for
+that she had kept me. After making one sacrifice to friendship, I must
+now make another to gratitude. A man must be poor, must be without a
+servant, must be a hater of constraint, and he must have my character,
+before he can know what it is for me to live in another person's house.
+For all that, I lived two years in hers, constantly brought into bondage
+with the finest harangues about liberty, served by twenty domestics, and
+cleaning my own shoes every morning, overloaded with gloomy indigestion,
+and incessantly sighing for my homely porringer.... Consider how much
+money an hour of the life and the time of a man is worth; compare the
+kindnesses of Madame d'Epinay with the sacrifice of my native country
+and two years of serfdom; and then tell me whether the obligation is
+greater on her side or mine." He then urges with a torrent of impetuous
+eloquence the thoroughly sound reasons why it was unfair and absurd for
+him, a beggar and an invalid, to make the journey with Madame d'Epinay,
+rich and surrounded by attendants. He is particularly splenetic that the
+philosopher Diderot, sitting in his own room before a good fire and
+wrapped in a well-lined dressing-gown, should insist on his doing his
+five and twenty leagues a day on foot, through the mud in winter.[310]
+
+The whole letter shows, as so many incidents in his later life showed,
+how difficult it was to do Rousseau a kindness with impunity, and how
+little such friends as Madame d'Epinay possessed the art of soothing
+this unfortunate nature. They fretted him by not leaving him
+sufficiently free to follow his own changing moods, while he in turn
+lost all self-control, and yielded in hours of bodily torment to angry
+and resentful fancies. But let us hasten to an end. Grimm replied to his
+eloquent manifesto somewhat drily, to the effect that he would think the
+matter over, and that meanwhile Rousseau had best keep quiet in his
+hermitage. Rousseau burning with excitement at once conceived a thousand
+suspicions, wholly unable to understand that a cold and reserved German
+might choose to deliberate at length, and finally give an answer with
+brevity. "After centuries of expectation in the cruel uncertainty in
+which this barbarous man had plunged me"--that is after eight or ten
+days, the answer came, apparently not without a second direct
+application for one.[311] It was short and extremely pointed, not
+complaining that Rousseau had refused to accompany Madame d'Epinay but
+protesting against the horrible tone of the apology which he had sent to
+him for not accompanying her. "It has made me quiver with indignation;
+so odious are the principles it contains, so full is it of blackness and
+duplicity. You venture to talk to me of your slavery, to me who for more
+than two years have been the daily witness of all the marks of the
+tenderest and most generous friendship that you have received at the
+hands of that woman. If I could pardon you, I should think myself
+unworthy of having a single friend. I will never see you again while I
+live, and I shall think myself happy if I can banish the recollection of
+your conduct from my mind."[312] A flash of manly anger like this is
+very welcome to us, who have to thread a tedious way between morbid
+egoistic irritation on the one hand, and sly pieces of equivocal
+complaisance on the other. The effect on Rousseau was terrific. In a
+paroxysm he sent Grimm's letter back to him, with three or four lines in
+the same key. He wrote note after note to Madame d'Houdetot, in
+shrieks. "Have I a single friend left, man or woman? One word, only one
+word, and I can live." A day or two later: "Think of the state I am in.
+I can bear to be abandoned by all the world, but you! You who know me so
+well! Great God! am I a scoundrel? a scoundrel, I!"[313] And so on,
+raving. It was to no purpose that Madame d'Houdetot wrote him soothing
+letters, praying him to calm himself, to find something to busy himself
+with, to remain at peace with Madame d'Epinay, "who had never appeared
+other than the most thoughtful and warm-hearted friend to him."[314] He
+was almost ready to quarrel with Madame d'Houdetot herself because she
+paid the postage of her letters, which he counted an affront to his
+poverty.[315] To Madame d'Epinay he had written in the midst of his
+tormenting uncertainty as to the answer which Grimm would make to his
+letter. It was an ungainly assertion that she was playing a game of
+tyranny and intrigue at his cost. For the first time she replied with
+spirit and warmth. "Your letter is hardly that of a man who, on the eve
+of my departure, swore to me that he could never in his life repair the
+wrongs he had done me." She then tersely remarks that it is not natural
+to pass one's life in suspecting and insulting one's friends, and that
+he abuses her patience. To this he answered with still greater terseness
+that friendship was extinct between them, and that he meant to leave the
+Hermitage, but as his friends desired him to remain there until the
+spring he would with her permission follow their counsel. Then she, with
+a final thrust of impatience, in which we perhaps see the hand of Grimm:
+"Since you meant to leave the Hermitage, and felt you ought to do so, I
+am astonished that your friends could detain you. For me, I don't
+consult mine as to my duties, and I have nothing more to say to you as
+to yours." This was the end. Rousseau returned for a moment from ignoble
+petulance to dignity and self-respect. He wrote to her that if it is a
+misfortune to make a mistake in the choice of friends, it is one not
+less cruel to awake from so sweet an error, and two days before he
+wrote, he left her house. He found a cottage at Montmorency, and
+thither, nerved with fury, through snow and ice he carried his scanty
+household goods (Dec. 15, 1757).[316]
+
+We have a picture of him in this fatal month. Diderot went to pay him a
+visit (Dec. 5). Rousseau was alone at the bottom of his garden. As soon
+as he saw Diderot, he cried in a voice of thunder and with his eyes all
+aflame: "What have you come here for?" "I want to know whether you are
+mad or malicious." "You have known me for fifteen years; you are well
+aware how little malicious I am, and I will prove to you that I am not
+mad: follow me." He then drew Diderot into a room, and proceeded to
+clear himself, by means of letters, of the charge of trying to make a
+breach between Saint Lambert and Madame d'Houdetot. They were in fact
+letters that convicted him, as we know, of trying to persuade Madame
+d'Houdetot of the criminality of her relations with her lover, and at
+the same time to accept himself in the very same relation. Of all this
+we have heard more than enough already. He was stubborn in the face of
+Diderot's remonstrance, and the latter left him in a state which he
+described in a letter to Grimm the same night. "I throw myself into your
+arms, like one who has had a shock of fright: that man intrudes into my
+work; he fills me with trouble, and I am as if I had a damned soul at my
+side. May I never see him again; he would make me believe in devils and
+hell."[317] And thus the unhappy man who had began this episode in his
+life with confident ecstasy in the glories and clear music of spring,
+ended it looking out from a narrow chamber upon the sullen crimson of
+the wintry twilight and over fields silent in snow, with the haggard
+desperate gaze of a lost spirit.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[254] _Conf._, ix. 247.
+
+[255] _Conf._, ix. 230. Madame d'Epinay (_M�m._, ii. 132) has given an
+account of the installation, with a slight discrepancy of date. When
+Madame d'Epinay's son-in-law emigrated at the Revolution, the
+Hermitage--of which nothing now stands--along with the rest of the
+estate became national property, and was bought after other purchasers
+by Robespierre, and afterwards by Gr�try the composer, who paid 10,000
+livres for it.
+
+[256] _Conf._, ix. 255.
+
+[257] Third letter to Malesherbes, 364-368.
+
+[258] _Conf._, ix. 239.
+
+[259] _Conf._, ix. 237, 238, and 263, etc.
+
+[260] The extract from the Project for Perpetual Peace and the
+Polysynodia, together with Rousseau's judgments on them, are found at
+the end of the volume containing the Social Contract. The first, but
+without the judgment, was printed separately without Rousseau's
+permission, in 1761, by Bastide, to whom he had sold it for twelve
+louis for publication in his journal only. _Conf._, xi. 107. _Corr._,
+ii. 110, 128.
+
+[261] P. 485.
+
+[262] For a sympathetic account of the Abb� de Saint Pierre's life and
+speculations, see M. L�once de Lavergne's _Economistes fran�ais du
+18i�me si�cle_ (Paris: 1870). Also Comte's _Lettres � M. Valat_, p.
+73.
+
+[263] _Conf._, ix. 270-274.
+
+[264] _Conf._, ix. 289.
+
+[265] _Ib._ ix. 286.
+
+[266] D'Epinay, ii. 153.
+
+[267] Madame d'Houdetot, (_b._ 1730--_d._ 1813) was the daughter of M.
+de Bellegarde, the father of Madame d'Epinay's husband. Her marriage
+with the Count d'Houdetot, of high Norman stock, took place in 1748.
+The circumstances of the marriage, which help to explain the lax view
+of the vows common among the great people of the time, are given with
+perhaps a shade too much dramatic colouring in Madame d'Epinay's
+_M�m._, i 101.
+
+[268] _Conf._, ix. 281.
+
+[269] D'Epinay, ii. 246.
+
+[270] D'Epinay, ii. 269.
+
+[271] Musset-Pathay has collected two or three trifles of her
+composition, ii. 136-138. Heal so quotes Madame d'Allard's account of
+her, pp. 140, 141.
+
+[272] Quoted by M. Girardin, _Rev. des Deux Mondes_, Sept. 1853, p.
+1080.
+
+[273] _Conf._, ix. 304.
+
+[274] _Ib._ ix. 305. Slightly modified version in _Corr._, i. 377.
+
+[275] M. Boiteau's note to Madame d'Epinay, ii. 273.
+
+[276] Grimm, to Madame d'Epinay, ii. 305.
+
+[277] This is shown partly by Saint Lambert's letter to Rousseau, to
+which we come presently, and partly by a letter of Madame d'Houdetot
+to Rousseau in May, 1758 (Streckeisen-Moultou, i. 411-413), where she
+distinctly says that she concealed his mad passion for her from Saint
+Lambert, who first heard of it in common conversation.
+
+[278] _Conf._, ix. 311.
+
+[279] Besides the many hints of reference to this in the Confessions,
+see the phrenetic Letters to Sarah, printed in the _M�langes_, pp.
+347-360.
+
+[280] _Conf._, ix. 337.
+
+[281] _Corr._, i. 398. Sept. 4, 1757.
+
+[282] To Madame d'Houdetot. _Corr._, i. 376-387. June 1757.
+
+[283] Saint Lambert to Rousseau, from Wolfenbuttel, Oct. 11, 1757.
+Streckeisen-Moultou, i. 415.
+
+[284] These letters are given in M. Streckeisen-Moultou's first volume
+(pp. 354-414). The thirty-second of them (Jan. 10, 1758) is perhaps
+the one best worth turning to.
+
+[285] Streckeisen-Moultou, i. 412. May 6, 1768. _Conf._, x. 15.
+
+[286] _Ib._ x. 22.
+
+[287] _Ib._ x. 18. Streckeisen, i. 422.
+
+[288] _Conf._, x. 24.
+
+[289] To Madame d'Epinay, 1757. _Corr._, i. 362, 353. See also
+_Conf._, ix. 307.
+
+[290] One of the most unflinching in this kind is an _Essai sur la vie
+et le caract�re de J.J. Rousseau_, by G.H. Morin (Paris: 1851): the
+laborious production of a bitter advocate, who accepts the
+Confessions, Dialogues, Letters, etc., with the reverence due to
+verbal inspiration, and writes of everybody who offended his hero,
+quite in the vein of Marat towards aristocrats.
+
+[291] _Corr._, i. 327-335. D'Epinay, ii. 165-182
+
+[292] D'Epinay, ii. 173.
+
+[293] _Conf._, ix. 325.
+
+[294] _Ib._, ix. 334.
+
+[295] _M�m._, ii. 297. She also places the date many mouths later than
+Rousseau, and detaches the reconciliation from the quarrel in the
+winter of 1756-1757.
+
+[296] The same story is referred to in Madame de Vandeul's _M�m. de
+Diderot, _p. 61.
+
+[297] _Conf._, ix. 245, 246.
+
+[298] Grimm to Madame d'Epinay, ii. 259, 269, 313, 326. _Conf._, x.
+17.
+
+[299] _M�m._, ii. 318.
+
+[300] _Conf._, ix. 322. Madame d'Epinay (_M�m._, ii. 326), writing to
+Grimm, gives a much colder and stiffer colour to the scene of
+reconciliation, but the nature of her relations with him would account
+for this. The same circumstance, as M. Girardin has pointed out (_Rev.
+des Deux Mondes_, Sept. 1853), would explain the discrepancy between
+her letters as given in the Confessions, and the copies of them sent
+to Grimm, and printed in her Memoirs. M. Sainte Beuve, who is never
+perfectly master of himself in dealing with the chiefs of the
+revolutionary schools, as might indeed have been expected in a writer
+with his predilections for the seventeenth century, rashly hints
+(_Causeries_, vii. 301) that Rousseau was the falsifier. The
+publication from the autograph originals sets this at rest.
+
+[301] For Shakespeare, see _Corr. Lit._, iv. 143, etc.
+
+[302] D'Epinay, ii. 188.
+
+[303] D'Epinay, ii. 150. Also Vandeul's _M�m. de Diderot_, p. 61.
+
+[304] _M�m._ ii. 128.
+
+[305] P. 258. See also p. 146.
+
+[306] Pp. 282, 336, etc.
+
+[307] _Corr._, i. 386. June 1757.
+
+[308] _Conf._, ix. 355. For Madame d'Epinay's equally credible
+version, assigning all the stiffness and arrogance to Rousseau, see
+_M�m._, ii. 355-358. Saint Lambert refers to the momentary
+reconciliation in his letter to Rousseau of Nov. 21 (Streckeisen, i.
+418), repeating what he had said before (p. 417), that Grimm always
+spoke of Mm in amicable terms, though complaining of Rousseau's
+injustice.
+
+[309] _Conf._, ix. 372.
+
+[310] _Corr._, i. 404-416. Oct 19, 1757.
+
+[311] Grimm to Diderot, in Madame d'Epinay's _M�m._ ii. 386. Nov. 3,
+1757.
+
+[312] D'Epinay, ii. 387. Nov. 3.
+
+[313] _Corr._, i. 425. Nov. 8. _Ib._ 426.
+
+[314] Streckeisen-Moultou, i. 381-383.
+
+[315] _Ib._ 387. Many years after, Rousseau told Bernardin de St.
+Pierre (_Oeuv._, xii. 57) that one of the reasons which made him leave
+the Hermitage was the indiscretion of friends who insisted on sending
+him letters by some conveyance that cost 4 francs, when it might
+equally well have been sent for as many sous.
+
+[316] The sources of all this are in the following places. _Corr._, i.
+416. Oct. 29. Streckeisen, i. 349. Nov. 12. _Conf._, ix. 377. _Corr._,
+i. 427. Nov. 23. _Conf._, ix. 381. Dec. 1. _Ib._, ix. 383. Dec. 17.
+
+[317] Diderot to Grimm; D'Epinay, ii. 397. Diderot's _Oeuv._, xix.
+446. See also 449 and 210.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+MUSIC.
+
+
+Simplification has already been used by us as the key-word to Rousseau's
+aims and influence. The scheme of musical notation with which he came to
+try his fortune in Paris in 1741, his published vindication of it, and
+his musical compositions afterwards all fall under this term. Each of
+them was a plea for the extrication of the simple from the cumbrousness
+of elaborated pedantry, and for a return to nature from the unmeaning
+devices of false art. And all tended alike in the popular direction,
+towards the extension of enjoyment among the common people, and the
+glorification of their simple lives and moods, in the art designed for
+the great.
+
+The Village Soothsayer was one of the group of works which marked a
+revolution in the history of French music, by putting an end to the
+tyrannical tradition of Lulli and Rameau, and preparing the way through
+a middle stage of freshness, simplicity, naturalism, up to the noble
+severity of Gluck (1714-1787). This great composer, though a Bohemian by
+birth, found his first appreciation in a public that had been trained
+by the Italian pastoral operas, of which Rousseau's was one of the
+earliest produced in France. Gr�tri, the Fleming (1741-1813), who had a
+hearty admiration for Jean Jacques, and out of a sentiment of piety
+lived for a time in his Hermitage, came in point of musical excellence
+between the group of Rousseau, Philidor, Duni, and the rest, and Gluck.
+"I have not produced exaltation in people's heads by tragical
+superlative," Gr�tri said, "but I have revealed the accent of truth,
+which I have impressed deeper in men's hearts."[318] These words express
+sufficiently the kind of influence which Rousseau also had. Crude as the
+music sounds to us who are accustomed to more sumptuous schools, we can
+still hear in it the note which would strike a generation weary of
+Rameau. It was the expression in one way of the same mood which in
+another way revolted against paint, false hair, and preposterous costume
+as of savages grown opulent. Such music seems without passion or
+subtlety or depth or magnificence. Thus it had hardly any higher than a
+negative merit, but it was the necessary preparation for the acceptance
+of a more positive style, that should replace both the elaborate false
+art of the older French composers and the too colourless realism of the
+pastoral comic opera, by the austere loveliness and elevation of _Orfeo_
+and _Alceste_.
+
+In 1752 an Italian company visited Paris, and performed at the Opera a
+number of pieces by Pergolese, and other composers of their country. A
+violent war arose, which agitated Paris far more intensely than the
+defeat of Rossbach and the loss of Canada did afterwards. The quarrel
+between the Parliament and the Clergy was at its height. The Parliament
+had just been exiled, and the gravest confusion threatened the State.
+The operatic quarrel turned the excitement of the capital into another
+channel. Things went so far that the censor was entreated to prohibit
+the printing of any work containing the damnable doctrine and position
+that Italian music is good. Rousseau took part enthusiastically with the
+Italians.[319] His Letter on French Music (1753) proved to the great
+fury of the people concerned, that the French had no national music, and
+that it would be so much the worse for them if they ever had any. Their
+language, so proper to be the organ of truth and reason, was radically
+unfit either for poetry or music. All national music must derive its
+principal characteristics from the language. Now if there is a language
+in Europe fit for music, it is certainly the Italian, for it is sweet,
+sonorous, harmonious, and more accentuated than any other, and these are
+precisely the four qualities which adapt a language to singing. It is
+sweet because the articulations are not composite, because the meeting
+of consonants is both infrequent and soft, and because a great number of
+the syllables being only formed of vowels, frequent elisions make its
+pronunciation more flowing. It is sonorous because most of the vowels
+are full, because it is without composite diphthongs, because it has
+few or no nasal vowels. Again, the inversions of the Italian are far
+more favourable to true melody than the didactic order of French. And so
+onwards, with much close grappling of the matter. French melody does not
+exist; it is only a sort of modulated plain-song which has nothing
+agreeable in itself, which only pleases with the aid of a few capricious
+ornaments, and then only pleases those who have agreed to find it
+beautiful.[320]
+
+The letter contains a variety of acute remarks upon music, and includes
+a vigorous protest against fugues, imitations, double designs, and the
+like. Scarcely any one succeeds in them, and success even when obtained
+hardly rewards the labour. As for counterfugues, double fugues, and
+"other difficult fooleries that the ear cannot endure nor the reason
+justify," they are evidently relics of barbarism and bad taste which
+only remain, like the porticoes of our gothic churches, to the disgrace
+of those who had patience enough to construct them.[321] The last
+phrase-and both Voltaire and Turgot used gothic architecture as the
+symbol for the supreme of rudeness and barbarism--shows that even a man
+who seems to run counter to the whole current of his time yet does not
+escape its influence.
+
+Grimm, after remarking on the singularity of a demonstration of the
+impossibility of setting melody to French words on the part of a writer
+who had just produced the Village Soothsayer, informs us that the letter
+created a furious uproar, and set all Paris in a blaze. He had himself
+taken the side of the Italians in an amusing piece of pleasantry, which
+became a sort of classic model for similar facetiousness in other
+controversies of the century. The French, as he said, forgive everything
+in favour of what makes them laugh, but Rousseau talked reason and
+demolished the pretensions of French music with great sounding strokes
+as of an axe.[322] Rousseau expected to be assassinated, and gravely
+assures us that there was a plot to that effect, as well as a design to
+put him in the Bastille. This we may fairly surmise to have been a
+fiction of his own imagination, and the only real punishment that
+overtook him was the loss of his right to free admission to the Opera.
+After what he had said of the intolerable horrors of French music, the
+directors of the theatre can hardly be accused of vindictiveness in
+releasing him from them.[323] Some twenty years after (1774), when Paris
+was torn asunder by the violence of the two great factions of the
+Gluckists and Piccinists, Rousseau retracted his opinion as to the
+impossibility of wedding melody to French words.[324] He went as often
+as he could to hear the works both of Gr�tri and Gluck, and _Orfeo_
+delighted him, while the _Fausse magie_ of the former moved him to say
+to the composer, "Your music stirs sweet sensations to which I thought
+my heart had long been closed."[325] This being so, and life being as
+brief as art is long, we need not further examine the controversy. It
+may be worth adding that Rousseau wrote some of the articles on music
+for the Encyclop�dia, and that in 1767 he published a not inconsiderable
+Musical Dictionary of his own.
+
+His scheme of a new musical notation and the principles on which he
+defended it are worth attention, because some of the ideas are now
+accepted as the base of a well-known and growing system of musical
+instruction. The aim of the scheme, let us say to begin with, was at
+once practical and popular; to reduce the difficulty of learning music
+to the lowest possible point, and so to bring the most delightful of the
+arts within the reach of the largest possible number of people. Hence,
+although he maintains the fitness of his scheme for instrumental as well
+as vocal performances, it is clearly the latter which he has most at
+heart, evidently for the reason that this is the kind of music most
+accessible to the thousands, and it was always the thousands of whom
+Rousseau thought. This is the true distinction of music, it is for the
+people; and the best musical notation is that which best enables persons
+to sing at sight. The difficulty of the old notation had come
+practically before him as a teacher. The quantity of details which the
+pupil was forced to commit to memory before being able to sing from the
+open book, struck him then as the chief obstacle to anything like
+facility in performance, and without some of this facility he rightly
+felt that music must remain a luxury for the few. So genuine was his
+interest in the matter, that he was not very careful to fight for the
+originality of his own scheme. Our present musical signs, he said, are
+so imperfect and so inconvenient that it is no wonder that several
+persons have tried to re-cast or amend them; nor is it any wonder that
+some of them should have hit upon the same device in selecting the signs
+most natural and proper, such as numerical figures. As much, however,
+depends on the way of dealing with these figures, as with their
+adoption, and here he submitted that his own plan was as novel as it was
+advantageous.[326] Thus we have to bear in mind that Rousseau's scheme
+was above all things a practical device, contrived for making the
+teaching and the learning of musical elements an easier process.[327]
+
+The chief element of the project consists in the substitution of a
+relative series of notes or symbols in place of an absolute series. In
+the common notation any given note, say the A of the treble clef, is
+uniformly represented by the same symbol, namely, the position of second
+space in the clef, whatever key it may belong to. Rousseau, insisting on
+the varying quality impressed on any tone of a given pitch by the
+key-note of the scale to which it belongs, protested against the same
+name being given to the tone, however the quality of it might vary. Thus
+Re or D, which is the second tone in the key of C, ought, according to
+him, to have a different name when found as the fifth in the key of G,
+and in every case the name should at once indicate the interval of a
+tone from its key-note. His mode of effecting this change is as follows.
+The names _ut, re_, and the rest, are kept for the fixed order of the
+tones, C, D, E, and the rest. The key of a piece is shown by prefixing
+one of these symbols, and this determines the absolute quality of the
+melody as to pitch. That settled, every tone is expressed by a number
+bearing a relation to the key-note. This tonic note is represented by
+one, the other six tones of the scale are expressed by the numbers from
+two to seven. In the popular Tonic Sol-Fa notation, which corresponds
+so closely to Rousseau's in principle, the key-note is always styled Do,
+and the other symbols, _mi_, _la_, and the rest, indicate at once the
+relative position of these tones in their particular key or scale. Here
+the old names were preserved as being easily sung; Rousseau selected
+numbers because he supposed that they best expressed the generation of
+the sounds.[328]
+
+Rousseau attempted to find a theoretic base for this symbolic
+establishment of the relational quality of tones, and he dimly guessed
+that the order of the harmonics or upper tones of a given tonic would
+furnish a principle for forming the familiar major scale,[329] but his
+knowledge of the order was faulty. He was perhaps groping after the idea
+by which Professor Helmholtz has accounted for the various mental
+effects of the several intervals in a key--namely, the degree of natural
+affinity, measured by means of the upper tones, existing between the
+given tone and its tonic. Apart from this, however, the practical value
+of his ideas in instruction in singing is clearly shown by the
+circumstance that at any given time many thousands of young children are
+now being taught to read melody in the Sol-Fa notation in a few weeks.
+This shows how right Rousseau was in continually declaring the ease of
+hitting a particular tone, when the relative position of the tone in
+respect to the key-note is clearly manifested. A singer in trying to hit
+the tone is compelled to measure the interval between it and the
+preceding tone, and the simplest and easiest mode of doing this is to
+associate every tone with the tonics, thus constituting it a term of a
+relation with this fundamental tone.
+
+Rousseau made a mistake when he supposed that his ideas were just as
+applicable to instrumental as they were to vocal music. The requirements
+of the singer are not those of the player. To a performer on the piano,
+who has to light rapidly and simultaneously on a number of tones, or to
+a violinist who has to leap through several octaves with great rapidity,
+the most urgent need is that of a definite and fixed mark, by which the
+absolute pitch of each successive tone may be at once recognised.
+Neither of these has any time to think about the melodious relation of
+the tones; it is quite as much as they can do to find their place on the
+key-board or the string. Rousseau's scheme, or any similar one, fails to
+supply the clear and obvious index to pitch supplied by the old system.
+Old Rameau pointed this out to Rousseau when the scheme was laid before
+him, and Rousseau admitted that the objection was decisive,[330] though
+his admission was not practically deterrent.
+
+His device for expressing change of octave by means of points would
+render the rapid seizing of a particular tone by the performer still
+more difficult, and it is strange that he should have preferred this to
+the other plan suggested, of indicating height of octave by visible
+place above or below a horizontal line. Again, his attempt to simplify
+the many varieties of musical time by reducing them all to the two modes
+of double and triple time, though laudable enough, yet implies an
+imperfect recognition of the full meaning of time, by omitting all
+reference to the distribution of accent and to the average time value of
+the tones in a particular movement.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[318] Quoted in Martin's _Hist. de France_, xvi. 158.
+
+[319] _Conf._, viii. 197. Grimm, _Corr. Lit._, i. 27.
+
+[320] _Lettre sur la Musique Fran�aise_, 178, etc., 187.
+
+[321] P. 197.
+
+[322] _Corr. Lit._, i. 92. His own piece was _Le petit proph�te de
+Boehmischbroda_, the style of which will be seen in a subsequent
+footnote.
+
+[323] He was burnt in effigy by the musicians of the Opera. Grimm,
+_Corr. Lit._, i. 113.
+
+[324] This is Turgot's opinion on the controversy (Letter to Caillard,
+_Oeuv._, ii. 827):--"Tous avez donc vu Jean-Jacques; la musique est un
+excellent passe-port aupr�s de lui. Quant � l'impossibilit� de faire
+de la musique fran�aise, je ne puis y croire, et votre raison ne me
+para�t pas bonne; car il n'est point vrai que l'essence de la langue
+fran�aise est d'�tre sans accent. Point de conversation anim�e sans
+beaucoup d'accent; mais l'accent est libre et d�termin� seulement par
+l'affection de celui qui parle, sans �tre fix� par des conventions sur
+certaines syllabes, quoique nous ayons aussi dans plusieurs mots des
+syllabes dominantes qui seules peuvent �tre accentu�es."
+
+[325] Musset-Pathay, i. 289.
+
+[326] Preface to _Dissertation sur la Musique Moderne_, pp. 32, 33.
+
+[327] I am indebted to Mr. James Sully, M.A., for furnishing me with
+notes on a technical subject with which I have too little
+acquaintance.
+
+[328] _Dissertation_, p. 42.
+
+[329] P. 52.
+
+[330] _Conf._, vii. 18, 19. Also _Dissertation_, pp. 74, 75.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+VOLTAIRE AND D'ALEMBERT.
+
+
+Everybody in the full tide of the eighteenth century had something to do
+with Voltaire, from serious personages like Frederick the Great and
+Turgot, down to the sorriest poetaster who sent his verses to be
+corrected or bepraised. Rousseau's debt to him in the days of his
+unformed youth we have already seen, as well as the courtesies with
+which they approached one another, when Richelieu employed the
+struggling musician to make some modifications in the great man's
+unconsidered court-piece. Neither of them then dreamed that their two
+names were destined to form the great literary antithesis of the
+century. In the ten years that elapsed between their first interchange
+of letters and their first fit of coldness, it must have been tolerably
+clear to either of them, if either of them gave thought to the matter,
+that their dissidence was increasing and likely to increase. Their
+methods were different, their training different, their points of view
+different, and above all these things, their temperaments were different
+by a whole heaven's breadth.
+
+A great number of excellent and pointed half-truths have been uttered
+by various persons in illustration of all these contrasts. The
+philosophy of Voltaire, for instance, is declared to be that of the
+happy, while Rousseau is the philosopher of the unhappy. Voltaire steals
+away their faith from those who doubt, while Rousseau strikes doubt into
+the mind of the unbeliever. The gaiety of the one saddens, while the
+sadness of the other consoles. If we pass from the marked divergence in
+tendencies, which is imperfectly hinted at in such sayings as these, to
+the divergence between them in all the fundamental conditions of
+intellectual and moral life, then the variation which divided the
+revolutionary stream into two channels, flowing broadly apart through
+unlike regions and climates down to the great sea, is intelligible
+enough. Voltaire was the arch-representative of all those elements in
+contemporary thought, its curiosity, irreverence, intrepidity,
+vivaciousness, rationality, to which, as we have so often had to say,
+Rousseau's temperament and his Genevese spirit made him profoundly
+antipathetic. Voltaire was the great high priest, robed in the dazzling
+vestments of poetry and philosophy and history, of that very religion of
+knowledge and art which Rousseau declared to be the destroyer of the
+felicity of men. The glitter has faded away from Voltaire's philosophic
+raiment since those days, and his laurel bough lies a little leafless.
+Still this can never make us forget that he was in his day and
+generation one of the sovereign emancipators, because he awoke one
+dormant set of energies, just as Rousseau presently came to awake
+another set. Each was a power, not merely by virtue of some singular
+preeminence of understanding or mysterious unshared insight of his own,
+but for a far deeper reason. No partial and one-sided direction can
+permanently satisfy the manifold aspirations and faculties of the human
+mind in the great average of common men, and it is the common average of
+men to whom exceptional thinkers speak, whom they influence, and by whom
+they are in turn influenced, depressed, or buoyed up, just as a painter
+or a dramatist is affected. Voltaire's mental constitution made him
+eagerly objective, a seeker of true things, quivering for action,
+admirably sympathetic with all life and movement, a spirit restlessly
+traversing the whole world. Rousseau, far different from this, saw in
+himself a reflected microcosm of the outer world, and was content to
+take that instead of the outer world, and as its truest version. He made
+his own moods the premisses from which he deduced a system of life for
+humanity, and so far as humanity has shared his moods or some parts of
+them, his system was true, and has been accepted. To him the bustle of
+the outer world was only a hindrance to that process of self-absorption
+which was his way of interpreting life. Accessible only to interests of
+emotion and sense, he was saved from intellectual sterility, and made
+eloquent, by the vehemence of his emotion and the fire of his senses. He
+was a master example of sensibility, as Voltaire was a master example
+of clear-eyed penetration.
+
+This must not be taken for a rigid piece of mutually exclusive division,
+for the edges of character are not cut exactly sharp, as words are.
+Especially when any type is intense, it seems to meet and touch its
+opposite. Just as Voltaire's piercing activity and soundness of
+intelligence made him one of the humanest of men, so Rousseau's
+emotional susceptibility endowed him with the gift of a vision that
+carried far into the social depths. It was a very early criticism on the
+pair, that Voltaire wrote on more subjects, but that Rousseau was the
+more profound. In truth one was hardly much more profound than the
+other. Rousseau had the sonorousness of speech which popular confusion
+of thought is apt to identify with depth. And he had seriousness. If
+profundity means the quality of seeing to the heart of subjects,
+Rousseau had in a general way rather less of it than the shrewd-witted
+crusher of the Infamous. What the distinction really amounts to is that
+Rousseau had a strong feeling for certain very important aspects of
+human life, which Voltaire thought very little about, or never thought
+about at all, and that while Voltaire was concerned with poetry,
+history, literature, and the more ridiculous parts of the religious
+superstition of his time, Rousseau thought about social justice and duty
+and God and the spiritual consciousness of men, with a certain attempt
+at thoroughness and system. As for the substance of his thinking, as we
+have already seen in the Discourses, and shall soon have an opportunity
+of seeing still more clearly, it was often as thin and hollow as if he
+had belonged to the company of the epigrammatical, who, after all, have
+far less of a monopoly of shallow thinking than is often supposed. The
+prime merit of Rousseau, in comparing him with the brilliant chief of
+the rationalistic school of the time, is his reverence; reverence for
+moral worth in however obscure intellectual company, for the dignity of
+human character and the loftiness of duty, for some of those cravings of
+the human mind after the divine and incommensurable, which may indeed
+often be content with solutions proved by long time and slow experience
+to be inadequate, but which are closely bound up with the highest
+elements of nobleness of soul.
+
+It was this spiritual part of him which made Rousseau a third great
+power in the century, between the Encyclop�dic party and the Church. He
+recognised a something in men, which the Encyclop�dists treated as a
+chimera imposed on the imagination by theologians and others for their
+own purposes. And he recognised this in a way which did not offend the
+rational feeling of the times, as the Catholic dogmas offended it. In a
+word he was religious. In being so, he separated himself from Voltaire
+and his school, who did passably well without religion. Again, he was a
+puritan. In being this, he was cut off from the intellectually and
+morally unreformed church, which was then the organ of religion in
+France. Nor is this all. It was Rousseau, and not the feeble
+controversialists put up from time to time by the Jesuits and other
+ecclesiastical bodies, who proved the effective champion of religion,
+and the only power who could make head against the triumphant onslaught
+of the Voltaireans. He gave up Christian dogmas and mysteries, and,
+throwing himself with irresistible ardour upon the emotions in which all
+religions have their root and their power, he breathed new life into
+them, he quickened in men a strong desire to have them satisfied, and he
+beat back the army of emancipators with the loud and incessantly
+repeated cry that they were not come to deliver the human mind, but to
+root out all its most glorious and consolatory attributes. This immense
+achievement accomplished,--the great framework of a faith in God and
+immortality and providential government of the world thus preserved, it
+was an easy thing by and by for the churchmen to come back, and once
+more unpack and restore to their old places the temporarily discredited
+paraphernalia of dogma and mystery. How far all this was good or bad for
+the mental elevation of France and Europe, we shall have a better
+opportunity of considering presently.
+
+We have now only to glance at the first skirmishes between the religious
+reactionist, on the one side, and, on the other, the leader of the
+school who believed that men are better employed in thinking as
+accurately, and knowing as widely, and living as humanely, as all those
+difficult processes are possible, than in wearying themselves in futile
+search after gods who dwell on inaccessible heights.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Voltaire had acknowledged Rousseau's gift of the second Discourse with
+his usual shrewd pleasantry: "I have received your new book against the
+human race, and thank you for it. Never was such cleverness used in the
+design of making us all stupid. One longs in reading your book to walk
+on all fours. But as I have lost that habit for more than sixty years, I
+feel unhappily the impossibility of resuming it. Nor can I embark in
+search of the savages of Canada, because the maladies to which I am
+condemned render a European surgeon necessary to me; because war is
+going on in those regions; and because the example of our actions has
+made the savages nearly as bad as ourselves. So I content myself with
+being a very peaceable savage in the solitude which I have chosen near
+your native place, where you ought to be too." After an extremely
+inadequate discussion of one or two points in the essay,[331] he
+concludes:--"I am informed that your health is bad; you ought to come to
+set it up again in your native air, to enjoy freedom, to drink with me
+the milk of our cows and browse our grass."[332] Rousseau replied to all
+this in a friendly way, recognising Voltaire as his chief, and actually
+at the very moment when he tells us that the corrupting presence of the
+arrogant and seductive man at Geneva helped to make the idea of
+returning to Geneva odious to him, hailing him in such terms as
+these:--"Sensible of the honour you do my country, I share the gratitude
+of my fellow-citizens, and hope that it will increase when they have
+profited by the lessons that you of all men are able to give them.
+Embellish the asylum you have chosen; enlighten a people worthy of your
+instruction; and do you who know so well how to paint virtue and
+freedom, teach us to cherish them in our walls."[333]
+
+Within a year, however, the bright sky became a little clouded. In 1756
+Voltaire published one of the most sincere, energetic, and passionate
+pieces to be found in the whole literature of the eighteenth century,
+his poem on the great earthquake of Lisbon (November 1755). No such word
+had been heard in Europe since the terrible images in which Pascal had
+figured the doom of man. It was the reaction of one who had begun life
+by refuting Pascal with doctrines of cheerfulness drawn from the
+optimism of Pope and Leibnitz, who had done Pope's Essay on Man
+(1732-34) into French verse as late as 1751,[334] and whose imagination,
+already sombred by the triumphant cruelty and superstition which raged
+around him, was suddenly struck with horror by a catastrophe which, in a
+world where whatever is is best, destroyed hundreds of human creatures
+in the smoking ashes and engulfed wreck of their city. How, he cried,
+can you persist in talking of the deliberate will of a free and
+benevolent God, whose eternal laws necessitated such an appalling climax
+of misery and injustice as this? Was the disaster retributive? If so,
+why is Lisbon in ashes, while Paris dances? The enigma is desperate and
+inscrutable, and the optimist lives in the paradise of the fool. We ask
+in vain what we are, where we are, whither we go, whence we came. We are
+tormented atoms on a clod of earth, whom death at last swallows up, and
+with whom destiny meanwhile makes cruel sport. The past is only a
+disheartening memory, and if the tomb destroys the thinking creature,
+how frightful is the present!
+
+Whatever else we may say of Voltaire's poem, it was at least the first
+sign of the coming reaction of sympathetic imagination against the
+polished common sense of the great Queen Anne school, which had for more
+than a quarter of a century such influence in Europe.[335] It is a
+little odd that Voltaire, the most brilliant and versatile branch of
+this stock, should have broken so energetically away from it, and that
+he should have done so, shows how open and how strong was the feeling in
+him for reality and actual circumstance.
+
+Rousseau was amazed that a man overwhelmed as Voltaire was with
+prosperity and glory, should declaim against the miseries of this life
+and pronounce that all is evil and vanity. "Voltaire in seeming always
+to believe in God, never really believed in anybody but the devil, since
+his pretended God is a maleficent being who according to him finds all
+his pleasure in working mischief. The absurdity of this doctrine is
+especially revolting in a man crowned with good things of every sort,
+and who from the midst of his own happiness tries to fill his
+fellow-creatures with despair, by the cruel and terrible image of the
+serious calamities from which he is himself free."[336]
+
+As if any doctrine could be more revolting than this which Rousseau so
+quietly takes for granted, that if it is well with me and I am free from
+calamities, then there must needs be a beneficent ruler of the universe,
+and the calamities of all the rest of the world, if by chance they catch
+the fortunate man's eye, count for nothing in our estimate of the method
+of the supposed divine government. It is hard to imagine a more
+execrable emotion than the complacent religiosity of the prosperous.
+Voltaire is more admirable in nothing than in the ardent humanity and
+far-spreading lively sympathy with which he interested himself in all
+the world's fortunes, and felt the catastrophe of Lisbon as profoundly
+as if the Geneva at his gates had been destroyed. He relished his own
+prosperity keenly enough, but his prosperity became ashes in his mouth
+when he heard of distress or wrong, and he did not rest until he had
+moved heaven and earth to soothe the distress and repair the wrong. It
+was his impatience in the face of the evils of the time which wrung from
+him this desperate cry, and it is precisely because these evils did not
+touch him in his own person, that he merits the greater honour for the
+surpassing energy and sincerity of his feeling for them.
+
+Rousseau, however, whose biographer has no such stories to tell as those
+of Calas and La Barre, Sirven and Lally, but only tales of a maiden
+wrongfully accused of theft, and a friend left senseless on the pavement
+of a strange town, and a benefactress abandoned to the cruelty of her
+fate, still was moved in the midst of his erotic visions in the forest
+of Montmorency to speak a jealous word in vindication of the divine
+government of our world. For him at any rate life was then warm and the
+day bright and the earth very fair, and he lauded his gods accordingly.
+It was his very sensuousness, as we are so often saying, that made him
+religious. The optimism which Voltaire wished to destroy was to him a
+sovereign element of comfort. "Pope's poem," he says, "softens my
+misfortunes and inclines me to patience, while yours sharpens all my
+pains, excites me to murmuring, and reduces me to despair. Pope and
+Leibnitz exhort me to resignation by declaring calamities to be a
+necessary effect of the nature and constitution of the universe. You
+cry, Suffer for ever, unhappy wretch; if there be a God who created
+thee, he could have stayed thy pains if he would: hope for no end to
+them, for there is no reason to be discerned for thy existence, except
+to suffer and to perish."[337] Rousseau then proceeds to argue the
+matter, but he says nothing really to the point which Pope had not said
+before, and said far more effectively. He begins, however, originally
+enough by a triumphant reference to his own great theme of the
+superiority of the natural over the civil state. Moral evil is our own
+work, the result of our liberty; so are most of our physical evils,
+except death, and that is mostly an evil only from the preparations that
+we make for it. Take the case of Lisbon. Was it nature who collected the
+twenty thousand houses, all seven stories high? If the people of Lisbon
+had been dispersed over the face of the country, as wild tribes are,
+they would have fled at the first shock, and they would have been seen
+the next day twenty leagues away, as gay as if nothing had happened. And
+how many of them perished in the attempt to rescue clothes or papers or
+money? Is it not true that the person of a man is now, thanks to
+civilisation, the least part of himself, and is hardly worth saving
+after loss of the rest? Again, there are some events which lose much of
+their horror when we look at them closely. A premature death is not
+always a real evil and may be a relative good; of the people crushed to
+death under the ruins of Lisbon, many no doubt thus escaped still worse
+calamities. And is it worse to be killed swiftly than to await death in
+prolonged anguish?[338]
+
+The good of the whole is to be sought before the good of the part.
+Although the whole material universe ought not to be dearer to its
+Creator than a single thinking and feeling being, yet the system of the
+universe which produces, preserves, and perpetuates all thinking and
+feeling beings, ought to be dearer to him than any one of them, and he
+may, notwithstanding his goodness, or rather by reason of his goodness,
+sacrifice something of the happiness of individuals to the preservation
+of the whole. "That the dead body of a man should feed worms or wolves
+or plants is not, I admit, a compensation for the death of such a man;
+but if in the system of this universe, it is necessary for the
+preservation of the human race that there should be a circulation of
+substance between men, animals, vegetables, then the particular mishap
+of an individual contributes to the general good. I die, I am eaten by
+worms; but my children, my brothers, will live as I have lived; my body
+enriches the earth of which they will consume the fruits; and so I do,
+by the order of nature and for all men, what Codrus, Curtius, the Decii,
+and a thousand others, did of their own free will for a small part of
+men." (p. 305.)
+
+All this is no doubt very well said, and we are bound to accept it as
+true doctrine. Although, however, it may make resignation easier by
+explaining the nature of evil, it does not touch the point of Voltaire's
+outburst, which is that evil exists, and exists in shapes which it is a
+mere mockery to associate with the omnipotence of a benevolent
+controller of the world's forces. According to Rousseau, if we go to the
+root of what he means, there is no such thing as evil, though much that
+to our narrow and impatient sight has the look of it. This may be true
+if we use that fatal word in an arbitrary and unreal sense, for the
+avoidable, the consequent without antecedent, or antecedent without
+consequent. If we consent to talk in this way, and only are careful to
+define terms so that there is no doubt as to their meaning, it is hardly
+deniable that evil is a mere word and not a reality, and whatever is is
+indeed right and best, because no better is within our reach. Voltaire,
+however, like the man of sense that he was, exclaimed that at any rate
+relatively to us poor creatures the existence of pain, suffering, waste,
+whether caused or uncaused, whether in accordance with stern immutable
+law or mere divine caprice, is a most indisputable reality: from our
+point of view it is a cruel puerility to cry out at every calamity and
+every iniquity that all is well in the best of possible worlds, and to
+sing hymns of praise and glory to the goodness and mercy of a being of
+supreme might, who planted us in this evil state and keeps us in it.
+Voltaire's is no perfect philosophy; indeed it is not a philosophy at
+all, but a passionate ejaculation; but it is perfect in comparison with
+a cut and dried system like this of Rousseau's, which rests on a mocking
+juggle with phrases, and the substitution by dexterous sleight of hand
+of one definition for another.
+
+Rousseau really gives up the battle, by confessing frankly that the
+matter is beyond the light of reason, and that, "if the theist only
+founds his sentiment on probabilities, the atheist with still less
+precision only founds his on the alternative possibilities." The
+objections on both sides are insoluble, because they turn on things of
+which men can have no veritable idea; "yet I believe in God as strongly
+as I believe any other truth, because believing and not believing are
+the last things in the world that depend on me." So be it. But why take
+the trouble to argue in favour of one side of an avowedly insoluble
+question? It was precisely because he felt that the objections on both
+sides cannot be answered, that Voltaire, hastily or not, cried out that
+he faced the horrors of such a catastrophe as the Lisbon earthquake
+without a glimpse of consolation. The upshot of Rousseau's remonstrance
+only amounted to this, that he could not furnish one with any
+consolation out of the armoury of reason, that he himself found this
+consolation, but in a way that did not at all depend upon his own effort
+or will, and was therefore as incommunicable as the advantage of having
+a large appetite or being six feet high. The reader of Rousseau becomes
+accustomed to this way of dealing with subjects of discussion. We see
+him using his reason as adroitly as he knows how for three-fourths of
+the debate, and then he suddenly flings himself back with a triumphant
+kind of weariness into the buoyant waters of emotion and sentiment. "You
+sir, who are a poet," once said Madame d'Epinay to Saint Lambert, "will
+agree with me that the existence of a Being, eternal, all powerful, and
+of sovereign intelligence, is at any rate the germ of the finest
+enthusiasm."[339] To take this position and cleave to it may be very
+well, but why spoil its dignity and repose by an unmeaning and
+superfluous flourish of the weapons of the reasoner?
+
+With the same hasty change of direction Rousseau says the true question
+is not whether each of us suffers or not, but whether it is good that
+the universe should be, and whether our misfortunes were inevitable in
+its constitution. Then within a dozen lines he admits that there can be
+no direct proof either way; we must content ourselves with settling it
+by means of inference from the perfections of God. Of course, it is
+clear that in the first place what Rousseau calls the true question
+consists of two quite distinct questions. Is the universe in its present
+ordering on the whole good relatively either to men, or to all sentient
+creatures? Next was evil an inevitable element in that ordering? Second,
+this way of putting it does not in the least advance the case against
+Voltaire, who insisted that no fine phrases ought to hide from us the
+dreadful power and crushing reality of evil and the desolate plight in
+which we are left. This is no exhaustive thought, but a deep cry of
+anguish at the dark lot of men, and of just indignation against the
+philosophy which to creatures asking for bread gave the brightly
+polished stone of sentimental theism. Rousseau urged that Voltaire
+robbed men of their only solace. What Voltaire really did urge was that
+the solace derived from the attribution of humanity and justice to the
+Supreme Being, and from the metaphysical account of evil, rests on too
+narrow a base either to cover the facts, or to be a true solace to any
+man who thinks and observes. He ought to have gone on, if it had only
+been possible in those times, to persuade his readers that there is no
+solace attainable, except that of an energetic fortitude, and that we do
+best to go into life not in a softly lined silken robe, but with a sharp
+sword and armour thrice tempered. As between himself and Rousseau, he
+saw much the more keenly of the two, and this was because he approached
+the matter from the side of the facts, while the latter approached it
+from the side of his own mental comfort and the preconceptions
+involved in it.
+
+The most curious part of this curious letter is the conclusion, where
+Rousseau, loosely wandering from his theme, separates Voltaire from the
+philosopher, and beseeches him to draw up a moral code or profession of
+civil faith that should contain positively the social maxims that
+everybody should be bound to admit, and negatively the intolerant maxims
+that everybody should be forced to reject as seditious. Every religion
+in accord with the code should be allowed, and every religion out of
+accord with it proscribed, or a man might be free to have no other
+religion but the code itself.
+
+Voltaire was much too clear-headed a person to take any notice of
+nonsense like this. Rousseau's letter remained unanswered, nor is there
+any reason to suppose that Voltaire ever got through it, though Rousseau
+chose to think that _Candide_ (1759) was meant for a reply to him.[340]
+He is careful to tell us that he never read that incomparable satire,
+for which one would be disposed to pity any one except Rousseau, whose
+appreciation of wit, if not of humour also, was probably more deficient
+than in any man who ever lived, either in Geneva or any other country
+fashioned after Genevan guise. Rousseau's next letter to Voltaire was
+four years later, and by that time the alienation which had no
+definitely avowed cause, and can be marked by no special date, had
+become complete. "I hate you, in fact," he concluded, "since you have so
+willed it; but I hate you like a man still worthier to have loved you,
+if you had willed it. Of all the sentiments with which my heart was full
+towards you, there only remains the admiration that we cannot refuse to
+your fine genius, and love for your writings. If there is nothing in you
+which I can honour but your talents, that is no fault of mine."[341] We
+know that Voltaire did not take reproach with serenity, and he behaved
+with bitter violence towards Rousseau in circumstances when silence
+would have been both more magnanimous and more humane. Rousseau
+occasionally, though not very often, retaliated in the same vein.[342]
+On the whole his judgment of Voltaire, when calmly given, was not meant
+to be unkind. "Voltaire's first impulse," he said, "is to be good; it is
+reflection that makes him bad."[343] Tronchin had said in the same way
+that Voltaire's heart was the dupe of his understanding. Rousseau is
+always trying to like him, he always recognises him as the first man of
+the time, and he subscribed his mite for the erection of a statue to
+him. It was the satire and mockery in Voltaire which irritated Rousseau
+more than the doctrines or denial of doctrine which they cloaked; in his
+eyes sarcasm was always the veritable dialect of the evil power. It says
+something for the sincerity of his efforts after equitable judgment,
+that he should have had the patience to discern some of the fundamental
+merit of the most remorseless and effective mocker that ever made
+superstition look mean, and its doctors ridiculous.
+
+
+II.
+
+Voltaire was indirectly connected with Rousseau's energetic attack upon
+another great Encyclop�dist leader, the famous Letter to D'Alembert on
+Stage Plays. "There," Rousseau said afterwards, "is my favourite book,
+my Benjamin, because I produced it without effort, at the first
+inspiration, and in the most lucid moments of my life."[344] Voltaire,
+who to us figures so little as a poet and dramatist, was to himself and
+to his contemporaries of this date a poet and dramatist before all else,
+the author of _Za�re_ and _Mahomet_, rather than of _Candide_ and the
+_Philosophical Dictionary_. D'Alembert was Voltaire's staunchest
+henchman. He only wrote his article on Geneva for the Encyclop�dia to
+gratify the master. Fresh from a visit to him when he composed it, he
+took occasion to regret that the austerity of the tradition of the city
+deprived it of the manifold advantages of a theatre. This suggestion had
+its origin partly in a desire to promote something that would please the
+eager vanity of the dramatist whom Geneva now had for so close a
+neighbour, and who had just set her the example by setting up a theatre
+of his own; and partly, also, because it gave the writer an opportunity
+of denouncing the intolerant rigour with which the church nearer home
+treated the stage and all who appeared on it. Geneva was to set an
+example that could not be resisted, and France would no longer see
+actors on the one hand pensioned by the government, and on the other an
+object of anathema, excommunicated by priests and regarded with contempt
+by citizens.[345]
+
+The inveterate hostility of the church to the theatre was manifested by
+the French ecclesiastics in the full eighteenth century as bitterly as
+ever. The circumstance that Voltaire was the great play-writer of the
+time would not tend to soften their traditional prejudice, and the
+persecution of players by priests was in some sense an episode of the
+war between the priest and the philosophers. The latter took up the
+cause of the stage partly because they hoped to make the drama an
+effective rival to the teaching of pulpit and confessional, partly from
+their natural sympathy with an elevated form of intellectual
+manifestation, and partly from their abhorrence of the practical
+inhumanity with which the officers of the church treated stage
+performers. While people of quality eagerly sought the society of those
+who furnished them as much diversion in private as in public, the church
+refused to all players the marriage blessing; when an actor or actress
+wished to marry, they were obliged to renounce the stage, and the
+Archbishop of Paris diligently resisted evasion or subterfuge.[346] The
+atrocities connected with the refusal of burial, as well in the case of
+players as of philosophers, are known to all readers in a dozen
+illustrious instances, from Moli�re and Adrienne Lecouvreur downwards.
+
+Here, as along the whole line of the battle between new light and old
+prejudice, Rousseau took part, if not with the church, at least against
+its adversaries. His point of view was at bottom truly puritanical.
+Jeremy Collier in his _Short View of the Profaneness and Immorality of
+the English Stage_ (1698) takes up quite a different position. This once
+famous piece was not a treatment of the general question, but an attack
+on certain specific qualities of the plays of his time--their indecency
+of phrase, their oaths, their abuse of the clergy, the gross libertinism
+of the characters. One can hardly deny that this was richly deserved by
+the English drama of the Restoration, and Collier's strictures were not
+applicable, nor meant to apply, either to the ancients, for he has a
+good word even for Aristophanes, or to the French drama. Bossuet's
+loftier denunciation, like Rousseau's, was puritanical, and it extended
+to the whole body of stage plays. He objected to the drama as a school
+of concupiscence, as a subtle or gross debaucher of the gravity and
+purity of the understanding, as essentially a charmer of the senses, and
+therefore the most equivocal and untrustworthy of teachers. He appeals
+to the fathers, to Scripture, to Plato, and even to Christ, who cried,
+_Woe unto you that laugh_.[347] There is a fine austerity about
+Bossuet's energetic criticism; it is so free from breathless eagerness,
+and so severe without being thinly bitter. The churchmen of a generation
+or two later had fallen from this height into gloomy peevishness.
+
+Rousseau's letter on the theatre, it need hardly be said, is meant to be
+an appeal to the common sense and judgment of his readers, and not
+conceived in the ecclesiastical tone of unctuous anathema and fulgurant
+menace. It is no bishop's pastoral, replete with solecisms of thought
+and idiom, but a piece of firm dialectic in real matter. His position is
+this: that the moral effect of the stage can never be salutary in
+itself, while it may easily be extremely pernicious, and that the habit
+of frequenting the theatre, the taste for imitating the style of the
+actors, the cost in money, the waste in time, and all the other
+accessory conditions, apart from the morality of the matter represented,
+are bad things in themselves, absolutely and in every circumstance.
+Secondly, these effects in all kinds are specially bad in relation to
+the social condition and habits of Geneva.[348] The first part of the
+discussion is an ingenious answer to some of the now trite pleas for
+the morality of the drama, such as that tragedy leads to pity through
+terror, that comedy corrects men while amusing them, that both make
+virtue attractive and vice hateful.[349] Rousseau insists with abundance
+of acutely chosen illustration that the pity that is awaked by tragedy
+is a fleeting emotion which subsides when the curtain falls; that comedy
+as often as not amuses men at the expense of old age, uncouth virtue,
+paternal carefulness, and other objects which we should be taught rather
+to revere than to ridicule; and that both tragedy and comedy, instead of
+making vice hateful, constantly win our sympathy for it. Is not the
+French stage, he asks, as much the triumph of great villains, like
+Catilina, Mahomet, Atreus, as of illustrious heroes?
+
+This rude handling of accepted commonplace is always one of the most
+interesting features in Rousseau's polemic. It was of course a
+characteristic of the eighteenth century always to take up the ethical
+and high prudential view of whatever had to be justified, and Rousseau
+seems from this point to have been successful in demolishing arguments
+which might hold of Greek tragedy at its best, but which certainly do
+not hold of any other dramatic forms. The childishness of the old
+criticism which attaches the label of some moral from the copybook to
+each piece, as its lesson and point of moral aim, is evident. In
+repudiating this Rousseau was certainly right.[350] Both the assailants
+and the defenders of the stage, however, commit the double error, first
+of supposing that the drama is always the same thing, from the Agamemnon
+down to the last triviality of a London theatre, and next of pitching
+the discussion in too high a key, as if the effect or object of a stage
+play in the modern era, where grave sentiment clothes itself in other
+forms, were substantially anything more serious than an evening's
+amusement. Apart from this, and in so far as the discussion is confined
+to the highest dramatic expression, the true answer to Rousseau is now a
+very plain one. The drama does not work in the sphere of direct
+morality, though like everything else in the world it has a moral or
+immoral aspect. It is an art of ideal presentation, not concerned with
+the inculcation of immediate practical lessons, but producing a stir in
+all our sympathetic emotions, quickening the imagination, and so
+communicating a wider life to the character of the spectator. This is
+what the drama in the hands of a worthy master does; it is just what
+noble composition in music does, and there is no more directly
+moralising effect in the one than in the other. You must trust to the
+sum of other agencies to guide the interest and sympathy thus quickened
+into channels of right action. Rousseau, like most other
+controversialists, makes an attack of which the force rests on the
+assumption that the special object of the attack is the single
+influencing element and the one decisive instrument in making men had or
+good. What he says about the drama would only be true if the public went
+to the play all day long, and were accessible to no other moral force
+whatever, modifying and counteracting such lessons as they might learn
+at the theatre. He failed here as in the wider controversy on the
+sciences and arts, to consider the particular subject of discussion in
+relation to the whole of the general medium in which character moves,
+and by whose manifold action and reaction it is incessantly affected and
+variously shaped.
+
+So when he passed on from the theory of dramatic morality to the matter
+which he had more at heart, namely, the practical effects of introducing
+the drama into Geneva, he keeps out of sight all the qualities in the
+Genevese citizen which would protect him against the evil influence of
+the stage, though it is his anxiety for the preservation of these very
+qualities that gives all its fire to his eloquence. If the citizen
+really was what Rousseau insisted that he was, then his virtues would
+surely neutralise the evil of the drama; if not, the drama would do him
+no harm. We need not examine the considerations in which Rousseau
+pointed out the special reasons against introducing a theatre into his
+native town. It would draw the artisans away from their work, cause
+wasteful expenditure of money in amusements, break up the harmless and
+inexpensive little clubs of men and the social gatherings of women. The
+town was not populous enough to support a theatre, therefore the
+government would have to provide one, and this would mean increased
+taxation. All this was the secondary and merely colourable support by
+argumentation, of a position that had been reached and was really held
+by sentiment. Rousseau hated the introduction of French plays in the
+same way that Cato hated the introduction of fine talkers from Greece.
+It was an innovation, and so habitual was it with Rousseau to look on
+all movement in the direction of what the French writers called taste
+and cultivation as depraving, that he cannot help taking for granted
+that any change in manners associated with taste must necessarily be a
+change for the worse. Thus the Letter to D'Alembert was essentially a
+supplement to the first Discourse; it was an application of its
+principles to a practical case. It was part of his general reactionary
+protest against philosophers, poets, men of letters, and all their
+works, without particular apprehension on the side of the drama. Hence
+its reasoning is much less interesting than its panegyric on the
+simplicity, robust courage, and manliness of the Genevese, and its
+invective against the effeminacy and frivolity of the Parisian. One of
+the most significant episodes in the discussion is the lengthy criticism
+on the immortal Misanthrope of Moli�re. Rousseau admits it for the
+masterpiece of the comic muse, though with characteristic perversity he
+insists that the hero is not misanthropic enough, nor truly misanthropic
+at all, because he flies into rage at small things affecting himself,
+instead of at the large follies of the race. Again, he says that Moli�re
+makes Alceste ridiculous, virtuous as he is, in order to win the
+applause of the pit. It is for the character of Philinte, however, that
+Rousseau reserves all his spleen. He takes care to describe him in terms
+which exactly hit Rousseau's own conception of his philosophic enemies,
+who find all going well because they have no interest in anything going
+better; who are content with everybody, because they do not care for
+anybody; who round a full table maintain that it is not true that the
+people are hungry. As criticism, one cannot value this kind of analysis.
+D'Alembert replied with a much more rational interpretation of the great
+comedy, but finding himself seized with the critic's besetting
+impertinence of improving masterpieces, he suddenly stopped with the
+becoming reflection--"But I perceive, sir, that I am giving lessons to
+Moli�re."[351]
+
+The constant thought of Paris gave Rousseau an admirable occasion of
+painting two pictures in violent contrast, each as over-coloured as the
+other by his mixed conceptions of the Plutarchian antique and imaginary
+pastoral. We forget the depravation of the stage and the ill living of
+comedians in magnificent descriptions of the manly exercises and
+cheerful festivities of the free people on the shores of the Lake of
+Geneva, and in scornful satire on the Parisian seraglios, where some
+woman assembles a number of men who are more like women than their
+entertainers. We see on the one side the rude sons of the republic,
+boxing, wrestling, running, in generous emulation, and on the other the
+coxcombs of cultivated Paris imprisoned in a drawing-room, "rising up,
+sitting down, incessantly going and coming to the fire-place, to the
+window, taking up a screen and putting it down again a hundred times,
+turning over books, flitting from picture to picture, turning and
+pirouetting about the room, while the idol stretched motionless on a
+couch all the time is only alive in her tongue and eyes" (p. 161). If
+the rough patriots of the Lake are less polished in speech, they are all
+the weightier in reason; they do not escape by a pleasantry or a
+compliment; each feeling himself attacked by all the forces of his
+adversary, he is obliged to employ all his own to defend himself, and
+this is how a mind acquires strength and precision. There may be here
+and there a licentious phrase, but there is no ground for alarm in that.
+It is not the least rude who are always the most pure, and even a rather
+clownish speech is better than that artificial style in which the two
+sexes seduce one another, and familiarise themselves decently with vice.
+'Tis true our Swiss drinks too much, but after all let us not calumniate
+even vice; as a rule drinkers are cordial and frank, good, upright,
+just, loyal, brave, and worthy folk. Wherever people have most
+abhorrence of drunkenness, be sure they have most reason to fear lest
+its indiscretion should betray intrigue and treachery. In Switzerland it
+is almost thought well of, while at Naples they hold it in horror; but
+at bottom which is the more to be dreaded, the intemperance of the Swiss
+or the reserve of the Italian? It is hardly surprising to learn that the
+people of Geneva were as little gratified by this well-meant panegyric
+on their jollity as they had been by another writer's friendly eulogy on
+their Socinianism.[352]
+
+The reader who was not moved to turn brute and walk on all fours by the
+pictures of the state of nature in the Discourses, may find it more
+difficult to resist the charm of the brotherly festivities and simple
+pastimes which in the Letter to D'Alembert the patriot holds up to the
+admiration of his countrymen and the envy of foreigners. The writer is
+in Sparta, but he tempers his Sparta with a something from Charmettes.
+Never before was there so attractive a combination of martial austerity
+with the grace of the idyll. And the interest of these pictures is much
+more than literary; it is historic also. They were the original version
+of those great gatherings in the Champ de Mars and strange suppers of
+fraternity during the progress of the Revolution in Paris, which have
+amused the cynical ever since, but which pointed to a not unworthy
+aspiration. The fine gentlemen whom Rousseau did so well to despise had
+then all fled, and the common people under Rousseauite leaders were
+doing the best they could to realise on the banks of the Seine the
+imaginary joymaking and simple fellowship which had been first dreamed
+of for the banks of Lake Leman, and commended with an eloquence that
+struck new chords in minds satiated or untouched by the brilliance of
+mere literature. There was no real state of things in Geneva
+corresponding to the gracious picture which Rousseau so generously
+painted, and some of the citizens complained that his account of their
+social joys was as little deserved as his ingenious vindication of their
+hearty feeling for barrel or bottle was little founded.[353]
+
+The glorification of love of country did little for the Genevese for
+whom it was meant, but it penetrated many a soul in the greater nation
+that lay sunk in helpless indifference to its own ruin. Nowhere else
+among the writers who are the glory of France at this time, is any
+serious eulogy of patriotism. Rousseau glows with it, and though he
+always speaks in connection with Geneva, yet there is in his words a
+generous breadth and fire which gave them an irresistible
+contagiousness. There are many passages of this fine persuasive force in
+the Letter to D'Alembert; perhaps this, referring to the citizens of
+Geneva who had gone elsewhere in search of fortune, is as good as
+another. Do you think that the opening of a theatre, he asks, will bring
+them back to their mother city? No; "each of them must feel that he can
+never find anywhere else what he has left behind in his own land; an
+invincible charm must call him back to the spot that he ought never to
+have quitted; the recollection of their first exercises, their first
+pleasures, their first sights, must remain deeply graven in their
+hearts; the soft impressions made in the days of their youth must abide
+and grow stronger with advancing years, while a thousand others wax dim;
+in the midst of the pomp of great cities and all their cheerless
+magnificence, a secret voice must for ever cry in the depth of the
+wanderer's soul, Ah, where are the games and holidays of my youth? Where
+is the concord of the townsmen, where the public brotherhood? Where is
+pure joy and true mirth? Where are peace, freedom, equity? Let us hasten
+to seek all these. With the heart of a Genevese, with a city as smiling,
+a landscape as full of delight, a government as just, with pleasures so
+true and so pure, and all that is needed to be able to relish them, how
+is it that we do not all adore our birth-land? It was thus in old times
+that by modest feasts and homely games her citizens were called back by
+that Sparta which I can never quote often enough as an example for us;
+thus in Athens in the midst of fine art, thus in Susa in the very bosom
+of luxury and soft delights, the wearied Spartan sighed after his coarse
+pastimes and exhausting exercises" (p. 211).[354]
+
+Any reference to this powerfully written, though most sophistical
+piece, would be imperfect which should omit its slightly virulent
+onslaught upon women and the passion which women inspire. The modern
+drama, he said, being too feeble to rise to high themes, has fallen back
+on love; and on this hint he proceeds to a censure of love as a poetic
+theme, and a bitter estimate of women as companions for men, which might
+have pleased Calvin or Knox in his sternest mood. The same eloquence
+which showed men the superior delights of the state of nature, now shows
+the superior fitness of the oriental seclusion of women; it makes a
+sympathetic reader tremble at the want of modesty, purity, and decency,
+in the part which women are allowed to take by the infatuated men of a
+modern community.
+
+All this, again, is directed against "that philosophy of a day, which is
+born and dies in the corner of a city, and would fain stifle the cry of
+nature and the unanimous voice of the human race" (p. 131). The same
+intrepid spirits who had brought reason to bear upon the current notions
+of providence, inspiration, ecclesiastical tradition, and other
+unlighted spots in the human mind, had perceived that the subjection of
+women to a secondary place belonged to the same category, and could not
+any more successfully be defended by reason. Instead of raging against
+women for their boldness, their frivolousness, and the rest, as our
+passionate sentimentalist did, the opposite school insisted that all
+these evils were due to the folly of treating women with gallantry
+instead of respect, and to the blindness of refusing an equally vigorous
+and masculine education to those who must be the closest companions of
+educated man. This was the view forced upon the most rational observers
+of a society where women were so powerful, and so absolutely unfit by
+want of intellectual training for the right use of social power.
+D'Alembert expressed this view in a few pages of forcible pleading in
+his reply to Rousseau,[355] and some thirty-two years later, when all
+questions had become political (1790), Condorcet ably extended the same
+line of argument so as to make it cover the claims of women to all the
+rights of citizenship.[356] From the nature of the case, however, it is
+impossible to confute by reason a man who denies that the matter in
+dispute is within the decision and jurisdiction of reason, and who
+supposes that his own opinion is placed out of the reach of attack when
+he declares it to be the unanimous voice of the human race. We may
+remember that the author of this philippic against love was at the very
+moment brooding over the New Helo�sa, and was fresh from strange
+transports at the feet of the Julie whom we know.
+
+The Letter on the Stage was the definite mark of Rousseau's schism from
+the philosophic congregation. Has Jean Jacques turned a father of the
+church? asked Voltaire. Deserters who fight against their country ought
+to be hung. The little flock are falling to devouring one another. This
+arch-madman, who might have been something, if he would only have been
+guided by his brethren of the Encyclop�dia, takes it into his head to
+make a band of his own. He writes against the stage, after writing a bad
+play of his own. He finds four or five rotten staves of Diogenes' tub,
+and instals himself therein to bark at his friends.[357] D'Alembert was
+more tolerant, but less clear-sighted. He insisted that the little flock
+should do its best to heal divisions instead of widening them. Jean
+Jacques, he said, "is a madman who is very clever, and who is only
+clever when he is in a fever; it is best therefore neither to cure nor
+to insult him."
+
+Rousseau made the preface to the Letter on the Stage an occasion for a
+proclamation of his final breach with Diderot. "I once," he said,
+"possessed a severe and judicious Aristarchus; I have him no longer, and
+wish for him no longer." To this he added in a footnote a passage from
+Ecclesiasticus, to the effect that if you have drawn a sword on a friend
+there still remains a way open, and if you have spoken cheerless words
+to him concord is still possible, but malicious reproach and the
+betrayal of a secret--these things banish friendship beyond return. This
+was the end of his personal connection with the men whom he always
+contemptuously called the Holbachians. After 1760 the great stream
+divided into two; the rationalist and the emotional schools became
+visibly antipathetic, and the voice of the epoch was no longer single or
+undistracted.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[331] See above p. 149.
+
+[332] Voltaire to Rousseau. Aug. 30, 1755.
+
+[333] _Corr._, i. 237. Sept. 10, 1755.
+
+[334] _La Loi Naturelle._
+
+[335] In 1754 the Berlin Academy proposed for a prize essay, An
+Examination of Pope's System, and Lessing the next year wrote a
+pamphlet to show that Pope had no system, but only a patchwork. See
+Mr. Pattison's _Introduction to Pope's Essay on Man_, p. 12. Sime's
+_Lessing_, i. 128.
+
+[336] _Conf._ ix. 276.
+
+[337] _Corr._, i. 289-316. Aug. 18, 1756.
+
+[338] Joseph De Maistre put all this much more acutely; _Soir�es_, iv.
+
+[339] Madame d'Epinay, _M�m._, i. 380.
+
+[340] _Conf._, ix. 277. Also _Corr._, iii. 326. March 11, 1764.
+Tronchin's long letter, to which Rousseau refers in this passage, is
+given in M. Streckeisen-Moultou's collection, i. 323, and is
+interesting to people who care to know how Voltaire looked to a doctor
+who saw him closely.
+
+[341] _Corr._, ii. 132. June 17, 1760. Also _Conf._, x. 91.
+
+[342] Some other interesting references to Voltaire in Rousseau's
+letters are--ii. 170 (Nov. 29, 1760), denouncing Voltaire as "that
+trumpet of impiety, that fine genius, and that low soul," and so
+forth; iii. 29 (Oct. 30, 1762), accusing Voltaire of malicious
+intrigues against him in Switzerland; iii. 168 (Mar. 21, 1763), that
+if there is to be any reconciliation, Voltaire must make first
+advances; iii. 280 (Dec., 1763), described a trick played by Voltaire;
+iv. 40 (Jan. 31, 1765) 64; _Corr._, v. 74 (Jan. 5, 1767), replying to
+Voltaire's calumnious account of his early life; note on this subject
+giving Voltaire the lie direct, iv. 150 (May 31, 1765); the _Lettre �
+D'Almbert_, p. 193, etc.
+
+[343] Bernardin St. Pierre, xii. 96. In the same sense, in Dusaulx,
+_Mes Rapports avec J.J.R._, (Paris: 1798), p. 101. See also _Corr._,
+iv. 254. Dec. 30, 1765. And again, iv. 276, Feb. 28, 1766, and p. 356.
+
+[344] Dusaulx, p. 102.
+
+[345] This part of D'Alembert's article is reproduced in Rousseau's
+preface, and the whole is given at the end of the volume in M.
+Auguis's edition, p. 409.
+
+[346] Goncourt, _Femme au 18i�me si�cle_, p. 256. Grimm, _Corr. Lit._,
+vi. 248.
+
+[347] _Maximes sur la Com�die_, �15, etc. They were written in reply
+to a plea for Comedy by Caffaro, a Jesuit father.
+
+[348] The letter may be conveniently divided into three parts: I. pp.
+1-89, II. pp. 90-145, III. pp. 146 to the end. Of course if Rousseau
+in saying that tragedy leads to pity through terror, was thinking of
+the famous passage in the sixth chapter of Aristotle's _Poetics_, he
+was guilty of a shocking mistranslation.
+
+[349] Some of the arguments seem drawn from Plato; see, besides the
+well-known passages in the _Republic_, the _Laws_, iv. 719, and still
+more directly, _Gorgias_, 502.
+
+[350] Yet D'Alembert in his very cool and sensible reply (p. 245)
+repeats the old saws, as that in _Catilina_ we learn the lesson of the
+harm which may be done to the human race by the abuse of great
+talents, and so forth.
+
+[351] _Lettre � M. J.J. Rousseau_, p. 258.
+
+[352] D'Alembert's _Lettre � J.J. Rousseau_, p. 277. Rousseau has a
+passage to the same effect, that false people are always sober, in the
+_Nouv. H�l., _Pt. I. xxiii. 123.
+
+[353] Tronchin, for instance, in a letter to Rousseau, in M.
+Streckeisen-Moultou's collection, i. 325.
+
+[354] A troop of comedians had been allowed to play for a short time
+in Geneva, with many protests, during the mediation of 1738. In 1766,
+eight years after Rousseau's letter, the government gave permission
+for the establishment of a theatre in the town. It was burnt down in
+1768, and Voltaire spitefully hinted that the catastrophe was the
+result of design, instigated by Rousseau (_Corr._ v. 299, April 26,
+1768). The theatre was not re-erected until 1783, when the oligarchic
+party regained the ascendancy and brought back with them the drama,
+which the democrats in their reign would not permit.
+
+[355] _Lettre � J.J. Rousseau_, pp. 265-271.
+
+[356] _Oeuv._, x. 121.
+
+[357] To Thieriot, Sept. 17, 1758. To D'Alembert, Oct. 20, 1761. _Ib._
+March 19, 1761.
+
+
+END OF VOL. I.
+
+
+_Printed by_ R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, _Edinburgh_
+
+
+
+                       *  *  *  *  *
+
+
+
+ROUSSEAU
+
+
+BY
+
+JOHN MORLEY
+
+
+VOL. II.
+
+
+London
+MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
+NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
+1905
+
+_All rights reserved_
+
+_First printed in this form 1886_
+_Reprinted 1888, 1891, 1896, 1900, 1905_
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS OF VOL. II.
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+MONTMORENCY--THE NEW HELO�SA.
+
+Conditions preceding the composition of the New Helo�sa 1
+
+The Duke and Duchess of Luxembourg 2
+
+Rousseau and his patrician acquaintances 4
+
+Peaceful life at Montmorency 9
+
+Equivocal prudence occasionally shown by Rousseau 12
+
+His want of gratitude for commonplace service 13
+
+Bad health, and thoughts of suicide 16
+
+Episode of Madame Latour de Franqueville 17
+
+Relation of the New Helo�sa to Rousseau's general doctrine 20
+
+Action of the first part of the story 25
+
+Contrasted with contemporary literature 25
+
+And with contemporary manners 27
+
+Criticism of the language and principal actors 28, 29
+
+Popularity of the New Helo�sa 31
+
+Its reactionary intellectual direction 33
+
+Action of the second part 35, 36
+
+Its influence on Goethe and others 38
+
+Distinction between Rousseau and his school 40
+
+Singular pictures of domesticity 42
+
+Sumptuary details 44
+
+The slowness of movement in the work justified 46
+
+Exaltation of marriage 47
+
+Equalitarian tendencies 49
+
+Not inconsistent with social quietism 51
+
+Compensation in the political consequences of the triumph of sentiment
+54
+
+Circumstances of the publication of the New Helo�sa 55
+
+Nature of the trade in books 57
+
+Malesherbes and the printing of Emilius 61
+
+Rousseau's suspicions 62
+
+The great struggle of the moment 64
+
+Proscription of Emilius 67
+
+Flight of the author 67
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+PERSECUTION.
+
+Rousseau's journey from Switzerland 69
+
+Absence of vindictiveness 70
+
+Arrival at Yverdun 72
+
+Repairs to Motiers 73
+
+Relations with Frederick the Great 74
+
+Life at Motiers 77
+
+Lord Marischal 79
+
+Voltaire 81
+
+Rousseau's letter to the Archbishop of Paris 83
+
+Its dialectic 86
+
+The ministers of Neuch�tel 90
+
+Rousseau's singular costume 92
+
+His throng of visitors 93
+
+Lewis, prince of W�rtemberg 95
+
+Gibbon 96
+
+Boswell 98
+
+Corsican affairs 99
+
+The feud at Geneva 102
+
+Rousseau renounces his citizenship 105
+
+The Letters from the Mountain 106
+
+Political side 107
+
+Consequent persecution at Motiers 107
+
+Flight to the isle of St. Peter 108
+
+The fifth of the _R�veries_ 109
+
+Proscription by the government of Berne 116
+
+Rousseau's singular request 116
+
+His renewed flight 117
+
+Persuaded to seek shelter in England 118
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+THE SOCIAL CONTRACT.
+
+Rousseau's reaction against perfectibility 119
+
+Abandonment of the position of the Discourses 121
+
+Doubtful idea of equality 121
+
+The Social Contract, a repudiation of the historic method 124
+
+Yet it has glimpses of relativity 127
+
+Influence of Greek examples 129
+
+And of Geneva 131
+
+Impression upon Robespierre and Saint Just 132
+
+Rousseau's scheme implied a small territory 135
+
+Why the Social Contract made fanatics 137
+
+Verbal quality of its propositions 138
+
+The doctrine of public safety 143
+
+The doctrine of the sovereignty of peoples 144
+
+Its early phases 144
+
+Its history in the sixteenth century 146
+
+Hooker and Grotius 148
+
+Locke 149
+
+Hobbes 151
+
+Central propositions of the Social Contract--
+
+  1. Origin of society in compact 154
+     Different conception held by the Physiocrats 156
+
+  2. Sovereignty of the body thus constituted 158
+     Difference from Hobbes and Locke 159
+     The root of socialism 160
+     Republican phraseology 161
+
+  3. Attributes of sovereignty 162
+
+  4. The law-making power 163
+     A contemporary illustration 164
+     Hints of confederation 166
+
+  5. Forms of government 168
+     Criticism on the common division 169
+     Rousseau's preference for elective aristocracy 172
+
+  6. Attitude of the state to religion 173
+     Rousseau's view, the climax of a reaction 176
+     Its effect at the French Revolution 179
+     Its futility 180
+
+Another method of approaching the philosophy of government--
+
+  Origin of society not a compact 183
+
+  The true reason of the submission of a minority to a majority 184
+
+  Rousseau fails to touch actual problems 186
+
+  The doctrine of resistance, for instance 188
+
+  Historical illustrations 190
+
+  Historical effect of the Social Contract in France and Germany 193
+
+  Socialist deductions from it 194
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+EMILIUS.
+
+Rousseau touched by the enthusiasm of his time 197
+
+Contemporary excitement as to education, part of the revival of
+  naturalism 199
+
+I.--Locke, on education 202
+    Difference between him and Rousseau 204
+    Exhortations to mothers 205
+    Importance of infantile habits 208
+    Rousseau's protest against reasoning with children 209
+    Criticised 209
+    The opposite theory 210
+    The idea of property 212
+    Artificially contrived incidents 214
+    Rousseau's omission of the principle of authority 215
+    Connected with his neglect of the faculty of sympathy 219
+
+II.--Rousseau's ideal of living 221
+    The training that follows from it 222
+    The duty of knowing a craft 223
+    Social conception involved in this moral conception 226
+
+III.--Three aims before the instructor 229
+      Rousseau's omission of training for the social conscience 230
+      No contemplation of society as a whole 232
+      Personal interest, the foundation of the morality of Emilius 233
+      The sphere and definition of the social conscience 235
+
+IV.--The study of history 237
+     Rousseau's notions upon the subject 239
+
+V.--Ideals of life for women 241
+    Rousseau's repudiation of his own principles 242
+    His oriental and obscurantist position 243
+    Arising from his want of faith in improvement 244
+    His reactionary tendencies in this region eventually
+      neutralised 248
+
+VI.--Sum of the merits of Emilius 249
+     Its influence in France and Germany 251
+     In England 252
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+THE SAVOYARD VICAR.
+
+Shallow hopes entertained by the dogmatic atheists 256
+
+The good side of the religious reaction 258
+
+Its preservation of some parts of Christian influence 259
+
+Earlier forms of deism 260
+
+The deism of the Savoyard Vicar 264
+
+The elevation of man, as well as the restoration of a divinity 265
+
+A divinity for fair weather 268
+
+Religious self-denial 269
+
+The Savoyard Vicar's vital omission 270
+
+His position towards Christianity 272
+
+Its effectiveness as a solvent 273
+
+Weakness of the subjective test 276
+
+The Savoyard Vicar's deism not compatible with growing intellectual
+  conviction 276
+
+The true satisfaction of the religious emotion 277
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+ENGLAND.
+
+Rousseau's English portrait 281
+
+His reception in Paris 282
+
+And in London 283
+
+Hume's account of him 284
+
+Settlement at Wootton 286
+
+The quarrel with Hume 287
+
+Detail of the charges against Hume 287-291
+
+Walpole's pretended letter from Frederick 291
+
+Baselessness of the whole delusion 292
+
+Hume's conduct in the quarrel 293
+
+The war of pamphlets 295
+
+Common theory of Rousseau's madness 296
+
+Preparatory conditions 297
+
+Extension of disorder from the affective life to the intelligence 299
+
+The Confessions 301
+
+His life at Wootton 306
+
+Flight from Derbyshire 306
+
+And from England 308
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+THE END.
+
+The elder Mirabeau 309
+
+Shelters Rousseau at Fleury 311
+
+Rousseau at Trye 312
+
+In Dauphiny 314
+
+Return to Paris 314
+
+The _R�veries_ 315
+
+Life in Paris 316
+
+Bernardin de St. Pierre's account of him 317
+
+An Easter excursion 320
+
+Rousseau's unsociality 322
+
+Poland and Spain 324
+
+Withdrawal to Ermenonville 326
+
+His death 326
+
+
+
+
+ROUSSEAU.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+MONTMORENCY--THE NEW HELO�SA.
+
+
+The many conditions of intellectual productiveness are still hidden in
+such profound obscurity that we are unable to explain why a period of
+stormy moral agitation seems to be in certain natures the
+indispensable antecedent of their highest creative effort. Byron is
+one instance, and Rousseau is another, in which the current of
+stimulating force made this rapid way from the lower to the higher
+parts of character, and only expended itself after having traversed
+the whole range of emotion and faculty, from their meanest, most
+realistic, most personal forms of exercise, up to the summit of what
+is lofty and ideal. No man was ever involved in such an odious
+complication of moral maladies as beset Rousseau in the winter of
+1758. Yet within three years of this miserable epoch he had completed
+not only the New Helo�sa, which is the monument of his fall, but the
+Social Contract, which was the most influential, and Emilius, which
+was perhaps the most elevated and spiritual, of all the productions of
+the prolific genius of France in the eighteenth century. A poor
+light-hearted Marmontel thought that the secret of Rousseau's success
+lay in the circumstance that he began to write late, and it is true
+that no other author, so considerable as Rousseau, waited until the
+age of fifty for the full vigour of his inspiration. No tale of years,
+however, could have ripened such fruit without native strength and
+incommunicable savour. Nor can the mechanical movement of those better
+ordered characters which keep the balance of the world even, impart to
+literature that peculiar quality, peculiar but not the finest, that
+comes from experience of the black unlighted abysses of the soul.
+
+The period of actual production was externally calm. The New Helo�sa
+was completed in 1759, and published in 1761. The Social Contract was
+published in the spring of 1762, and Emilius a few weeks later.
+Throughout this period Rousseau was, for the last time in his life, at
+peace with most of his fellows. Though he never relented from his
+antipathy to the Holbachians, for the time it slumbered, until a more
+real and serious persecution than any which he imputed to them,
+transformed his antipathy into a gloomy frenzy.
+
+The new friends whom he made at Montmorency were among the greatest
+people in the kingdom. The Duke of Luxembourg (1702-64) was a marshal
+of France, and as intimate a friend of the king as the king was
+capable of having. The Mar�chale de Luxembourg (1707-87) had been one
+of the most beautiful, and continued to be one of the most brilliant
+leaders of the last aristocratic generation that was destined to sport
+on the slopes of the volcano. The former seems to have been a loyal
+and homely soul; the latter, restless, imperious, penetrating,
+unamiable. Their dealings with Rousseau were marked by perfect
+sincerity and straightforward friendship. They gave him a convenient
+apartment in a small summer lodge in the park, to which he retreated
+when he cared for a change from his narrow cottage. He was a constant
+guest at their table, where he met the highest personages in France.
+The marshal did not disdain to pay him visits, or to walk with him, or
+to discuss his private affairs. Unable as ever to shine in
+conversation, yet eager to show his great friends that they had to do
+with no common mortal, Rousseau bethought him of reading the New
+Helo�sa aloud to them. At ten in the morning he used to wait upon the
+mar�chale, and there by her bedside he read the story of the love, the
+sin, the repentance of Julie, the distraction of Saint Preux, the
+wisdom of Wolmar, and the sage friendship of Lord Edward, in tones
+which enchanted her both with his book and its author for all the rest
+of the day, as all the women in France were so soon to be
+enchanted.[1] This, as he expected, amply reconciled her to the
+uncouthness and clumsiness of his conversation, which was at least as
+maladroit and as spiritless in the presence of a duchess as it was in
+presences less imposing.
+
+One side of character is obviously tested by the way in which a man
+bears himself in his relations with those of greater social
+consideration. Rousseau was taxed by some of his plebeian enemies with
+a most unheroic deference to his patrician friends. He had a dog whose
+name was _Duc_. When he came to sit at a duke's table, he changed his
+dog's name to _Turc_.[2] Again, one day in a transport of tenderness
+he embraced the old marshal--the duchess embraced Rousseau ten times a
+day, for the age was effusive--"Ah, monsieur le mar�chal, I used to
+hate the great before I knew you, and I hate them still more, since
+you make me feel so strongly how easy it would be for them to have
+themselves adored."[3] On another occasion he happened to be playing
+at chess with the Prince of Conti, who had come to visit him in his
+cottage.[4] In spite of the signs and grimaces of the attendants, he
+insisted on beating the prince in a couple of games. Then he said with
+respectful gravity, "Monseigneur, I honour your serene highness too
+much not to beat you at chess always."[5] A few days after, the
+vanquished prince sent him a present of game which Rousseau duly
+accepted. The present was repeated, but this time Rousseau wrote to
+Madame de Boufflers that he would receive no more, and that he loved
+the prince's conversation better than his gifts.[6] He admits that
+this was an ungracious proceeding, and that to refuse game "from a
+prince of the blood who throws such good feeling into the present, is
+not so much the delicacy of a proud man bent on preserving his
+independence, as the rusticity of an unmannerly person who does not
+know his place."[7] Considering the extreme virulence with which
+Rousseau always resented gifts even of the most trifling kind from his
+friends, one may perhaps find some inconsistency in this condemnation
+of a sort of conduct to which he tenaciously clung on all other
+occasions. If the fact of the donor being a prince of the blood is
+allowed to modify the quality of the donation, that is hardly a
+defensible position in the austere citizen of Geneva. Madame de
+Boufflers,[8] the intimate friend of our sage Hume, and the yet more
+intimate friend of the Prince of Conti, gave him a judicious warning
+when she bade him beware of laying himself open to a charge of
+affectation, lest it should obscure the brightness of his virtue and
+so hinder its usefulness. "Fabius and Regulus would have accepted such
+marks of esteem, without feeling in them any hurt to their
+disinterestedness and frugality."[9] Perhaps there is a flutter of
+self-consciousness that is not far removed from this affectation, in
+the pains which Rousseau takes to tell us that after dining at the
+castle, he used to return home gleefully to sup with a mason who was
+his neighbour and his friend.[10] On the whole, however, and so far as
+we know, Rousseau conducted himself not unworthily with these high
+people. His letters to them are for the most part marked by
+self-respect and a moderate graciousness, though now and again he
+makes rather too much case of the difference of rank, and asserts his
+independence with something too much of protestation.[11] Their
+relations with him are a curious sign of the interest which the
+members of the great world took in the men who were quietly preparing
+the destruction both of them and their world. The Mar�chale de
+Luxembourg places this squalid dweller in a hovel on her estate in the
+place of honour at her table, and embraces his Theresa. The Prince of
+Conti pays visits of courtesy and sends game to a man whom he employs
+at a few sous an hour to copy manuscript for him. The Countess of
+Boufflers, in sending him the money, insists that he is to count her
+his warmest friend.[12] When his dog dies, the countess writes to
+sympathise with his chagrin, and the prince begs to be allowed to
+replace it.[13] And when persecution and trouble and infinite
+confusion came upon him, they all stood as fast by him as their own
+comfort would allow. Do we not feel that there must have been in the
+unhappy man, besides all the recorded pettinesses and perversities
+which revolt us in him, a vein of something which touched men, and
+made women devoted to him, until he splenetically drove both men and
+women away from him? With Madame d'Epinay and Madame d'Houdetot, as
+with the dearer and humbler patroness of his youth, we have now parted
+company. But they are instantly succeeded by new devotees. And the
+lovers of Rousseau, in all degrees, were not silly women led captive
+by idle fancy. Madame de Boufflers was one of the most distinguished
+spirits of her time. Her friendship for him was such, that his
+sensuous vanity made Rousseau against all reason or probability
+confound it with a warmer form of emotion, and he plumes himself in a
+manner most displeasing on the victory which he won over his own
+feelings on the occasion.[14] As a matter of fact he had no feelings
+to conquer, any more than the supposed object of them ever bore him
+any ill-will for his indifference, as in his mania of suspicion he
+afterwards believed.
+
+There was a calm about the too few years he passed at Montmorency,
+which leaves us in doubt whether this mania would ever have afflicted
+him, if his natural irritation had not been made intense and
+irresistible by the cruel distractions that followed the publication
+of Emilius. He was tolerably content with his present friends. The
+simplicity of their way of dealing with him contrasted singularly, as
+he thought, with the never-ending solicitudes, as importunate as they
+were officious, of the patronising friends whom he had just cast
+off.[15] Perhaps, too, he was soothed by the companionship of persons
+whose rank may have flattered his vanity, while unlike Diderot and his
+old literary friends in Paris, they entered into no competition with
+him in the peculiar sphere of his own genius. Madame de Boufflers,
+indeed, wrote a tragedy, but he told her gruffly enough that it was a
+plagiarism from Southerne's Oroonoko.[16] That Rousseau was
+thoroughly capable of this pitiful emotion of sensitive literary
+jealousy is proved, if by nothing else, by his readiness to suspect
+that other authors were jealous of him. No one suspects others of a
+meanness of this kind unless he is capable of it himself. The
+resounding success which followed the New Helo�sa and Emilius put an
+end to these apprehensions. It raised him to a pedestal in popular
+esteem as high as that on which Voltaire stood triumphant. That very
+success unfortunately brought troubles which destroyed Rousseau's last
+chance of ending his days in full reasonableness.
+
+Meanwhile he enjoyed his final interval of moderate wholesomeness and
+peace. He felt his old healthy joy in the green earth. One of the
+letters commemorates his delight in the great scudding south-west
+winds of February, soft forerunners of the spring, so sweet to all who
+live with nature.[17] At the end of his garden was a summer-house, and
+here even on wintry days he sat composing or copying. It was not music
+only that he copied. He took a curious pleasure in making transcripts
+of his romance, and he sold them to the Duchess of Luxembourg and
+other ladies for some moderate fee.[18] Sometimes he moved from his
+own lodging to the quarters in the park which his great friends had
+induced him to accept. "They were charmingly neat; the furniture was
+of white and blue. It was in this perfumed and delicious solitude, in
+the midst of woods and streams and choirs of birds of every kind,
+with the fragrance of the orange-flower poured round me, that I
+composed in a continual ecstasy the fifth book of Emilius. With what
+eagerness did I hasten every morning at sunrise to breathe the balmy
+air! What good coffee I used to make under the porch in company with
+my Theresa! The cat and the dog made up the party. That would have
+sufficed me for all the days of my life, and I should never have known
+weariness." And so to the assurance, so often repeated under so many
+different circumstances, that here was a true heaven upon earth, where
+if fates had only allowed he would have known unbroken innocence and
+lasting happiness.[19]
+
+Yet he had the wisdom to warn others against attempting a life such as
+he craved for himself. As on a more memorable occasion, there came to
+him a young man who would fain have been with him always, and whom he
+sent away exceeding sorrowful. "The first lesson I should give you
+would be not to surrender yourself to the taste you say you have for
+the contemplative life. It is only an indolence of the soul, to be
+condemned at any age, but especially so at yours. Man is not made to
+meditate, but to act. Labour therefore in the condition of life in
+which you have been placed by your family and by providence: that is
+the first precept of the virtue which you wish to follow. If residence
+at Paris, joined to the business you have there, seems to you
+irreconcilable with virtue, do better still, and return to your own
+province. Go live in the bosom of your family, serve and solace your
+honest parents. There you will be truly fulfilling the duties that
+virtue imposes on you."[20] This intermixture of sound sense with
+unutterable perversities almost suggests a doubt how far the
+perversities were sincere, until we remember that Rousseau even in the
+most exalted part of his writings was careful to separate immediate
+practical maxims from his theoretical principles of social
+philosophy.[21]
+
+Occasionally his good sense takes so stiff and unsympathetic a form as
+to fill us with a warmer dislike for him than his worst paradoxes
+inspire. A correspondent had written to him about the frightful
+persecutions which were being inflicted on the Protestants in some
+district of France. Rousseau's letter is a masterpiece in the style of
+Eliphaz the Temanite. Our brethren must surely have given some pretext
+for the evil treatment to which they were subjected. One who is a
+Christian must learn to suffer, and every man's conduct ought to
+conform to his doctrine. Our brethren, moreover, ought to remember
+that the word of God is express upon the duty of obeying the laws set
+up by the prince. The writer cannot venture to run any risk by
+interceding in favour of our brethren with the government. "Every one
+has his own calling upon the earth; mine is to tell the public harsh
+but useful truths. I have preached humanity, gentleness, tolerance, so
+far as it depended upon me; 'tis no fault of mine if the world has not
+listened. I have made it a rule to keep to general truths; I produce
+no libels, no satires; I attack no man, but men; not an action, but a
+vice."[22] The worst of the worthy sort of people, wrote Voltaire, is
+that they are such cowards: a man groans over a wrong, he holds his
+tongue, he takes his supper, and he forgets all about it.[23] If
+Voltaire could not write like F�nelon, at least he could never talk
+like Tartufe; he responded to no tale of wrong with words about his
+mission, with strings of antitheses, but always with royal anger and
+the spring of alert and puissant endeavour. In an hour of oppression
+one would rather have been the friend of the saviour of the Calas and
+of Sirven, than of the vindicator of theism.
+
+Rousseau, however, had good sense enough in less equivocal forms than
+this. For example, in another letter he remonstrates with a
+correspondent for judging the rich too harshly. "You do not bear in
+mind that having from their childhood contracted a thousand wants
+which we are without, then to bring them down to the condition of the
+poor, would be to make them more miserable than the poor. We should be
+just towards all the world, even to those who are not just to us. Ah,
+if we had the virtues opposed to the vices which we reproach in them,
+we should soon forget that such people were in the world. One word
+more. To have any right to despise the rich, we ought ourselves to be
+prudent and thrifty, so as to have no need of riches."[24] In the
+observance of this just precept Rousseau was to the end of his life
+absolutely without fault. No one was more rigorously careful to make
+his independence sure by the fewness of his wants and by minute
+financial probity. This firm limitation of his material desires was
+one cause of his habitual and almost invariable refusal to accept
+presents, though no doubt another cause was the stubborn and
+ungracious egoism which made him resent every obligation.
+
+It is worth remembering in illustration of the peculiar susceptibility
+and softness of his character where women were concerned--it was not
+quite without exception--that he did not fly into a fit of rage over
+their gifts, as he did over those of men. He remonstrated, but in
+gentler key. "What could I do with four pullets?" he wrote to a lady
+who had presented them to him. "I began by sending two of them to
+people to whom I am indifferent. That made me think of the difference
+there is between a present and a testimony of friendship. The first
+will never find in me anything but a thankless heart; the second....
+Ah, if you had only given me news of yourself without sending me
+anything else, how rich and how grateful you would have made me;
+instead of that the pullets are eaten, and the best thing I can do is
+to forget all about them; let us say no more."[25] Rude and repellent
+as this may seem, and as it is, there is a rough kind of playfulness
+about it, when compared with the truculence which he was not slow to
+exhibit to men. If a friend presumed to thank him for any service, he
+was peremptorily rebuked for his ignorance of the true qualities of
+friendship, with which thankfulness has no connection. He
+ostentatiously refused to offer thanks for services himself, even to a
+woman whom he always treated with so much consideration as the
+Mar�chale de Luxembourg. He once declared boldly that modesty is a
+false virtue,[26] and though he did not go so far as to make gratitude
+the subject of a corresponding formula of denunciation, he always
+implied that this too is really one of the false virtues. He confessed
+to Malesherbes, without the slightest contrition, that he was
+ungrateful by nature.[27] To Madame d'Epinay he once went still
+further, declaring that he found it hard not to hate those who had
+used him well.[28] Undoubtedly he was right so far as this, that
+gratitude answering to a spirit of exaction in a benefactor is no
+merit; a service done in expectation of gratitude is from that fact
+stripped of the quality which makes gratitude due, and is a mere piece
+of egoism in altruistic disguise. Kindness in its genuine forms is a
+testimony of good feeling, and conventional speech is perhaps a little
+too hard, as well as too shallow and unreal, in calling the recipient
+evil names because he is unable to respond to the good feeling.
+Rousseau protested against a conception of friendship which makes of
+what ought to be disinterested helpfulness a title to everlasting
+tribute. His way of expressing this was harsh and unamiable, but it
+was not without an element of uprightness and veracity. As in his
+greater themes, so in his paradoxes upon private relations, he hid
+wholesome ingredients of rebuke to the unquestioning acceptance of
+common form. "I am well pleased," he said to a friend, "both with thee
+and thy letters, except the end, where thou say'st thou art more mine
+than thine own. For there thou liest, and it is not worth while to
+take the trouble to _thee_ and _thou_ a man as thine intimate, only to
+tell him untruths."[29] Chesterfield was for people with much
+self-love of the small sort, probably a more agreeable person to meet
+than Doctor Johnson, but Johnson was the more wholesome companion for
+a man.
+
+Occasionally, though not very often, he seems to have let spleen take
+the place of honest surliness, and so drifted into clumsy and
+ill-humoured banter, of a sort that gives a dreary shudder to one
+fresh from Voltaire. "So you have chosen for yourself a tender and
+virtuous mistress! I am not surprised; all mistresses are that. You
+have chosen her in Paris! To find a tender and virtuous mistress in
+Paris is to have not such bad luck. You have made her a promise of
+marriage? My friend, you have made a blunder; for if you continue to
+love, the promise is superfluous, and if you do not, then it is no
+avail. You have signed it with your blood? That is all but tragic; but
+I don't know that the choice of the ink in which he writes, gives
+anything to the fidelity of the man who signs."[30]
+
+We can only add that the health in which a man writes may possibly
+excuse the dismal quality of what he writes, and that Rousseau was now
+as always the prey of bodily pain which, as he was conscious, made him
+distraught. "My sufferings are not very excruciating just now," he
+wrote on a later occasion, "but they are incessant, and I am not out
+of pain a single moment day or night, and this quite drives me mad. I
+feel bitterly my wrong conduct and the baseness of my suspicions; but
+if anything can excuse me, it is my mournful state, my loneliness,"
+and so on.[31] This prolonged physical anguish, which was made more
+intense towards the end of 1761 by the accidental breaking of a
+surgical instrument,[32] sometimes so nearly wore his fortitude away
+as to make him think of suicide.[33] In Lord Edward's famous letter on
+suicide in the New Helo�sa, while denying in forcible terms the right
+of ending one's days merely to escape from intolerable mental
+distress, he admits that inasmuch as physical disorders only grow
+incessantly worse, violent and incurable bodily pain may be an excuse
+for a man making away with himself; he ceases to be a human being
+before dying, and in putting an end to his life he only completes his
+release from a body that embarrasses him, and contains his soul no
+longer.[34] The thought was often present to him in this form.
+Eighteen months later than our last date, the purpose grew very
+deliberate under an aggravation of his malady, and he seriously looked
+upon his own case as falling within the conditions of Lord Edward's
+exception.[35] It is difficult, in the face of outspoken declarations
+like these, to know what writers can be thinking of when, with respect
+to the controversy on the manner of Rousseau's death, they pronounce
+him incapable of such a dereliction of his own most cherished
+principles as anything like self-destruction would have been.
+
+As he sat gnawed by pain, with surgical instruments on his table, and
+sombre thoughts of suicide in his head, the ray of a little episode of
+romance shone in incongruously upon the scene. Two ladies in Paris,
+absorbed in the New Helo�sa, like all the women of the time,
+identified themselves with the Julie and the Claire of the novel that
+none could resist. They wrote anonymously to the author, claiming
+their identification with characters fondly supposed to be immortal.
+"You will know that Julie is not dead, and that she lives to love you;
+I am not this Julie, you perceive it by my style; I am only her
+cousin, or rather her friend, as Claire was." The unfortunate Saint
+Preux responded as gallantly as he could be expected to do in the
+intervals of surgery. "You do not know that the Saint Preux to whom
+you write is tormented with a cruel and incurable disorder, and that
+the very letter he writes to you is often interrupted by distractions
+of a very different kind."[36] He figures rather uncouthly, but the
+unknown fair were not at first disabused, and one of them never was.
+Rousseau was deeply suspicious. He feared to be made the victim of a
+masculine pleasantry. From women he never feared anything. His letters
+were found too short, too cold. He replied to the remonstrance by a
+reference of extreme coarseness. His correspondents wrote from the
+neighbourhood of the Palais Royal, then and for long after the haunt
+of mercenary women. "You belong to your quarter more than I thought,"
+he said brutally.[37] The vulgarity of the lackey was never quite
+obliterated in him, even when the lackey had written Emilius. This
+was too much for the imaginary Claire. "I have given myself three good
+blows on my breast for the correspondence that I was silly enough to
+open between you," she wrote to Julie, and she remained implacable.
+The Julie, on the contrary, was faithful to the end of Rousseau's
+life. She took his part vehemently in the quarrel with Hume, and wrote
+in defence of his memory after he was dead. She is the most remarkable
+of all the instances of that unreasoning passion which the New Helo�sa
+inflamed in the breasts of the women of that age. Madame Latour
+pursued Jean Jacques with a devotion that no coldness could repulse.
+She only saw him three times in all, the first time not until 1766,
+when he was on his way through Paris to England. The second time, in
+1772, she visited him without mentioning her name, and he did not
+recognise her; she brought him some music to copy, and went away
+unknown. She made another attempt, announcing herself: he gave her a
+frosty welcome, and then wrote to her that she was to come no more.
+With a strange fidelity she bore him no grudge, but cherished his
+memory and sorrowed over his misfortunes to the day of her death. He
+was not an idol of very sublime quality, but we may think kindly of
+the idolatress.[38] Worshippers are ever dearer to us than their
+graven images. Let us turn to the romance which touched women in this
+way, and helped to give a new spirit to an epoch.
+
+
+II.
+
+As has been already said, it is the business of criticism to separate
+what is accidental in form, transitory in manner, and merely local in
+suggestion, from the general ideas which live under a casual and
+particular literary robe. And so we have to distinguish the external
+conditions under which a book like the New Helo�sa is produced, from
+the living qualities in the author which gave the external conditions
+their hold upon him, and turned their development in one direction
+rather than another. We are only encouraging poverty of spirit, when
+we insist on fixing our eyes on a few of the minuti� of construction,
+instead of patiently seizing larger impressions and more durable
+meanings; when we stop at the fortuitous incidents of composition,
+instead of advancing to the central elements of the writer's
+character.
+
+These incidents in the case of the New Helo�sa we know; the sensuous
+communion with nature in her summer mood in the woods of Montmorency,
+the long hours and days of solitary expansion, the despairing passion
+for the too sage Julie of actual experience. But the power of these
+impressions from without depended on secrets of conformation within.
+An adult with marked character is, consciously or unconsciously, his
+own character's victim or sport. It is his whole system of impulses,
+ideas, pre-occupations, that make those critical situations ready,
+into which he too hastily supposes that an accident has drawn him. And
+this inner system not only prepares the situation; it forces his
+interpretation of the situation. Much of the interest of the New
+Helo�sa springs from the fact that it was the outcome, in a sense of
+which the author himself was probably unconscious, of the general
+doctrine of life and conduct which he only professed to expound in
+writings of graver pretension. Rousseau generally spoke of his romance
+in phrases of depreciation, as the monument of a passing weakness. It
+was in truth as entirely a monument of the strength, no less than the
+weakness, of his whole scheme, as his weightiest piece. That it was
+not so deliberately, only added to its effect. The slow and musing air
+which underlies all the assumption of ardent passion, made a way for
+the doctrine into sensitive natures, that would have been untouched by
+the pretended ratiocination of the Discourses, and the didactic manner
+of the Emilius.
+
+Rousseau's scheme, which we must carefully remember was only present
+to his own mind in an informal and fragmentary way, may be shortly
+described as an attempt to rehabilitate human nature in as much of the
+supposed freshness of primitive times, as the hardened crust of civil
+institutions and social use might allow. In this survey, however
+incoherently carried out, the mutual passion of the two sexes was the
+very last that was likely to escape Rousseau's attention. Hence it was
+with this that he began. The Discourses had been an attack upon the
+general ordering of society, and an exposition of the mischief that
+society has done to human nature at large. The romance treated one set
+of emotions in human nature particularly, though it also touches the
+whole emotional sphere indirectly. And this limitation of the field
+was accompanied by a total revolution in the method. Polemic was
+abandoned; the presence of hostility was forgotten in appearance, if
+not in the heart of the writer; instead of discussion, presentation;
+instead of abstract analysis of principles, concrete drawing of
+persons and dramatic delineation of passion. There is, it is true, a
+monstrous superfluity of ethical exposition of most doubtful value,
+but then that, as we have already said, was in the manners of the
+time. All people in those days with any pretensions to use their
+minds, wrote and talked in a superfine ethical manner, and violently
+translated the dictates of sensibility into formulas of morality. The
+important thing to remark is not that this semi-didactic strain is
+present, but that there is much less of it, and that it takes a far
+more subordinate place, than the subject and the reigning taste would
+have led us to expect. It is true, also, that Rousseau declared his
+intention in the two characters of Julie and of Wolmar, who eventually
+became Julie's husband, of leading to a reconciliation between the two
+great opposing parties, the devout and the rationalistic; of teaching
+them the lesson of reciprocal esteem, by showing the one that it is
+possible to believe in a God without being a hypocrite, and the other
+that it is possible to be an unbeliever without being a scoundrel.[39]
+This intention, if it was really present to Rousseau's mind while he
+was writing, and not an afterthought characteristically welcomed for
+the sake of giving loftiness and gravity to a composition of which he
+was always a little ashamed, must at any rate have been of a very pale
+kind. It would hardly have occurred to a critic, unless Rousseau had
+so emphatically pointed it out, that such a design had presided over
+the composition, and contemporary readers saw nothing of it. In the
+first part of the story, which is wholly passionate, it is certainly
+not visible, and in the second part neither of the two contending
+factions was likely to learn any lesson with respect to the other.
+Churchmen would have insisted that Wolmar was really a Christian
+dressed up as an atheist, and philosophers would hardly have accepted
+Julie as a type of the too believing people who broke Calas on the
+wheel, and cut off La Barre's head.
+
+French critics tell us that no one now reads the New Helo�sa in France
+except deliberate students of the works of Rousseau, and certainly few
+in this generation read it in our own country.[40] The action is very
+slight, and the play of motives very simple, when contrasted with the
+ingenuity of invention, the elaborate subtleties of psychological
+analysis, the power of rapid change from one perturbing incident or
+excited humour to another, which mark the modern writer of sentimental
+fiction. As the title warns us, it is a story of a youthful tutor and
+a too fair disciple, straying away from the lessons of calm philosophy
+into the heated places of passion. The high pride of Julie's father
+forbade all hope of their union, and in very desperation the unhappy
+pair lost the self-control of virtue, and threw themselves into the
+pit that lies so ready to our feet. Remorse followed with quick step,
+for Julie had with her purity lost none of the other lovelinesses of a
+dutiful character. Her lover was hurried away from the country by the
+generous solicitude of an English nobleman, one of the bravest,
+tenderest, and best of men. Julie, left undisturbed by her lover's
+presence, stricken with affliction at the death of a sweet and
+affectionate mother, and pressed by the importunities of a father whom
+she dearly loved, in spite of all the disasters which his will had
+brought upon her, at length consented to marry a foreign baron from
+some northern court. Wolmar was much older than she was; a devotee of
+calm reason, without a system and without prejudices, benevolent,
+orderly, above all things judicious. The lover meditated suicide, from
+which he was only diverted by the arguments of Lord Edward, who did
+more than argue; he hurried the forlorn man on board the ship of
+Admiral Anson, then just starting for his famous voyage round the
+world. And this marks the end of the first episode.
+
+Rousseau always urged that his story was dangerous for young girls,
+and maintained that Richardson was grievously mistaken in supposing
+that they could be instructed by romances. It was like setting fire to
+the house, he said, for the sake of making the pumps play.[41] As he
+admitted so much, he is not open to attack on this side, except from
+those who hold the theory that no books ought to be written which may
+not prudently be put into the hands of the young,--a puerile and
+contemptible doctrine that must emasculate all literature and all art,
+by excluding the most interesting of human relations and the most
+powerful of human passions. There is not a single composition of the
+first rank outside of science, from the Bible downwards, that could
+undergo the test. The most useful standard for measuring the
+significance of a book in this respect is found in the manners of the
+time, and the prevailing tone of contemporary literature. In trying to
+appreciate the meaning of the New Helo�sa and its popularity, it is
+well to think of it as a delineation of love, in connection not only
+with such a book as the Pucelle, where there is at least wit, but with
+a story like Duclos's, which all ladies both read and were not in the
+least ashamed to acknowledge that they had read; or still worse, such
+an abomination as Diderot's first stories; or a story like Laclos's,
+which came a generation later, and with its infinite briskness and
+devilry carried the tradition of artistic impurity to as vigorous a
+manifestation as it is capable of reaching.[42] To a generation whose
+literature is as pure as the best English, American, and German
+literature is in the present day, the New Helo�sa might without doubt
+be corrupting. To the people who read Cr�billon and the Pucelle, it
+was without doubt elevating.
+
+The case is just as strong if we turn from books to manners. Without
+looking beyond the circle of names that occur in Rousseau's own
+history, we see how deep the depravity had become. Madame d'Epinay's
+gallant sat at table with the husband, and the husband was perfectly
+aware of the relations between them. M. d'Epinay had notorious
+relations with two public women, and was not ashamed to refer to them
+in the presence of his wife, and even to seek her sympathy on an
+occasion when one of them was in some trouble. Not only this, but
+husband and lover used to pursue their debaucheries in the town
+together in jovial comradeship. An opera dancer presided at the table
+of a patrician abb� in his country house, and he passed weeks in her
+house in the town. As for shame, says Barbier on one occasion, "'tis
+true the king has a mistress, but who has not?--except the Duke of
+Orleans; he has withdrawn to Ste. Genevi�ve, and is thoroughly
+despised in consequence, and rightly."[43] Reeking disorder such as
+all this illustrates, made the passion of the two imaginary lovers of
+the fair lake seem like a breath from the garden of Eden. One virtue
+was lost in that simple paradise, but even that loss was followed by
+circumstances of mental pain and far circling distress, which banished
+the sin into a secondary place; and what remained to strike the
+imagination of the time were delightful pictures of fast union between
+two enchanting women, of the patience and compassionateness of a grave
+mother, of the chivalrous warmth and helpfulness of a loyal friend.
+Any one anxious to pick out sensual strokes and turns of grossness
+could make a small collection of such defilements from the New Helo�sa
+without any difficulty. They were in Rousseau's character, and so they
+came out in his work. Saint Preux afflicts us with touches of this
+kind, just as we are afflicted with similar touches in the
+Confessions. They were not noticed at that day, when people's ears did
+not affect to be any chaster than the rest of them.
+
+A historian of opinion is concerned with the general effect that was
+actually produced by a remarkable book, and with the causes that
+produced it. It is not his easy task to produce a demonstration that
+if the readers had all been as wise and as virtuous as the moralist
+might desire them to be, or if they had all been discriminating and
+scientific critics, not this, but a very different impression would
+have followed. Today we may wonder at the effect of the New Helo�sa.
+A long story told in letters has grown to be a form incomprehensible
+and intolerable to us. We find Richardson hard to be borne, and he put
+far greater vivacity and wider variety into his letters than Rousseau
+did, though he was not any less diffuse, and he abounds in repetitions
+as Rousseau does not. Rousseau was absolutely without humour; that
+belongs to the keenly observant natures, and to those who love men in
+the concrete, not only humanity in the abstract. The pleasantries of
+Julie's cousin, for instance, are heavy and misplaced. Thus the whole
+book is in one key, without the dramatic changes of Richardson, too
+few even as those are. And who now can endure that antique fashion of
+apostrophising men and women, hot with passion and eager with all
+active impulses, in oblique terms of abstract qualities, as if their
+passion and their activity were only the inconsiderable embodiment of
+fine general ideas? We have not a single thrill, when Saint Preux
+being led into the chamber where his mistress is supposed to lie
+dying, murmurs passionately, "What shall I now see in the same place
+of refuge where once all breathed the ecstasy that intoxicated my
+soul, in this same object who both caused and shared my transports!
+the image of death, virtue unhappy, beauty expiring!"[44] This
+rhetorical artificiality of phrase, so repulsive to the more realistic
+taste of a later age, was as natural then as that facility of shedding
+tears, which appears so deeply incredible a performance to a
+generation that has lost that particular fashion of sensibility,
+without realising for the honour of its ancestors the physiological
+truth of the power of the will over the secretions.
+
+The characters seem as stiff as some of the language, to us who are
+accustomed to an Asiatic luxuriousness of delineation. Yet the New
+Helo�sa was nothing less than the beginning of that fresh, full,
+highly-coloured style which has now taught us to find so little charm
+in the source and original of it. Saint Preux is a personage whom no
+widest charity, literary, philosophic, or Christian, can make
+endurable. Egoism is made thrice disgusting by a ceaseless redundance
+of fine phrases. The exaggerated conceits of love in our old poets
+turn graciously on the lover's eagerness to offer every sacrifice at
+the feet of his mistress. Even Werther, stricken creature as he was,
+yet had the stoutness to blow his brains out, rather than be the
+instrument of surrounding the life of his beloved with snares. Saint
+Preux's egoism is unbrightened by a single ray of tender abnegation,
+or a single touch of the sweet humility of devoted passion. The slave
+of his sensations, he has no care beyond their gratification. With
+some rotund nothing on his lips about virtue being the only path to
+happiness, his heart burns with sickly desire. He writes first like a
+pedagogue infected by some cantharidean philter, and then like a
+pedagogue without the philter, and that is the worse of the two.
+Lovelace and the Count of Valmont are manly and hopeful characters in
+comparison. Werther, again, at least represents a principle of
+rebellion, in the midst of all his self-centred despair, and he
+retains strength enough to know that his weakness is shameful. His
+despair, moreover, is deeply coloured with repulsed social
+ambition.[45] He feels the world about him. His French prototype, on
+the contrary, represents nothing but the unalloyed selfishness of a
+sensual love for which there is no universe outside of its own fevered
+pulsation.
+
+Julie is much less displeasing, partly perhaps for the reason that she
+belongs to the less displeasing sex. At least, she preserves
+fortitude, self-control, and profound considerateness for others. At a
+certain point her firmness even moves a measure of enthusiasm. If the
+New Helo�sa could be said to have any moral intention, it is here
+where women learn from the example of Julie's energetic return to
+duty, the possibility and the satisfaction of bending character back
+to comeliness and honour. Excellent as this is from a moral point of
+view, the reader may wish that Julie had been less of a preacher, as
+well as less of a sinner. And even as sinner, she would have been more
+readily forgiven if she had been less deliberate. A maiden who
+sacrifices her virtue in order that the visible consequences may force
+her parents to consent to a marriage, is too strategical to be
+perfectly touching. As was said by the cleverest, though not the
+greatest, of all the women whose youth was fascinated by Rousseau,
+when one has renounced the charms of virtue, it is at least well to
+have all the charms that entire surrender of heart can bestow.[46] In
+spite of this, however, Julie struck the imagination of the time, and
+struck it in a way that was thoroughly wholesome. The type taught men
+some respect for the dignity of women, and it taught women a firmer
+respect for themselves. It is useless, even if it be possible, to
+present an example too lofty for the comprehension of an age. At this
+moment the most brilliant genius in the country was filling France
+with impish merriment at the expense of the greatest heroine that
+France had then to boast. In such an atmosphere Julie had almost the
+halo of saintliness.
+
+We may say all we choose about the inconsistency, the excess of
+preaching, the excess of prudence, in the character of Julie. It was
+said pungently enough by the wits of the time.[47] Nothing that could
+be said on all this affected the fact, that the women between 1760
+and the Revolution were intoxicated by Rousseau's creation to such a
+pitch that they would pay any price for a glass out of which Rousseau
+had drunk, they would kiss a scrap of paper that contained a piece of
+his handwriting, and vow that no woman of true sensibility could
+hesitate to consecrate her life to him, if she were only certain to be
+rewarded by his attachment.[48] The booksellers were unable to meet
+the demand. The book was let out at the rate of twelve sous a volume,
+and the volume could not be detained beyond an hour. All classes
+shared the excitement, courtiers, soldiers, lawyers, and
+bourgeois.[49] Stories were told of fine ladies, dressed for the ball,
+who took the book up for half an hour until the time should come for
+starting; they read until midnight, and when informed that the
+carriage waited, answered not a word, and when reminded by and by that
+it was two o'clock, still read on, and then at four, having ordered
+the horses to be taken out of the carriage, disrobed, went to bed, and
+passed the remainder of the night in reading. In Germany the effect
+was just as astonishing. Kant only once in his life failed to take his
+afternoon walk, and this unexampled omission was due to the witchery
+of the New Helo�sa. Gallantry was succeeded by passion, expansion,
+exaltation; moods far more dangerous for society, as all enthusiasm is
+dangerous, but also far higher and pregnant with better hopes for
+character. To move the sympathetic faculties is the first step towards
+kindling all the other energies which make life wiser and more
+fruitful. It is especially worth noticing that nothing in the
+character of Julie concentrates this outburst of sympathy in
+subjective broodings. Julie is the representative of one recalled to
+the straight path by practical, wholesome, objective sympathy for
+others, not of one expiring in unsatisfied yearnings for the sympathy
+of others for herself, and in moonstruck subjective aspirations. The
+women who wept over her romance read in it the lesson of duty, not of
+whimpering introspection. The danger lay in the mischievous
+intellectual direction which Rousseau imparted to this effusion.
+
+The stir which the Julie communicated to the affections in so many
+ways, marked progress, but in all the elements of reason she was the
+most perilous of reactionaries. So hard it is with the human mind,
+constituted as it is, to march forward a space further to the light,
+without making some fresh swerve obliquely towards old darkness. The
+great effusion of natural sentiment was in the air before the New
+Helo�sa appeared, to condense and turn it into definite channels. One
+beautiful character, Vauven argues (1715-1747), had begun to teach the
+culture of emotional instinct in some sayings of exquisite sweetness
+and moderation, as that "Great thoughts come from the heart." But he
+came too soon, and, alas for us all, he died young, and he made no
+mark. Moderation never can make a mark in the epochs when men are
+beginning to feel the urgent spirit of a new time. Diderot strove with
+more powerful efforts, in the midst of all his herculean labours for
+the acquisition and ordering of knowledge, in the same direction
+towards the great outer world of nature, and towards the great inner
+world of nature in the human breast. His criticisms on the paintings
+of each year, mediocre as the paintings were, are admirable even now
+for their richness and freshness. If Diderot had been endowed with
+emotional tenacity, as he was with tenacity of understanding and of
+purpose, the student of the eighteenth century would probably have
+been spared the not perfectly agreeable task of threading a way along
+the sinuosities of the character and work of Rousseau. But Rousseau
+had what Diderot lacked--sustained ecstatic moods, and fervid trances;
+his literary gesture was so commanding, his apparel so glistening, his
+voice so rich in long-drawn notes of plangent vibration. His words
+are the words of a prophet; a prophet, it is understood, who had lived
+in Paris, and belonged to the eighteenth century, and wrote in French
+instead of Hebrew. The mischief of his work lay in this, that he
+raised feeling, now passionate, now quietest, into the supreme place
+which it was to occupy alone, and not on an equal throne and in equal
+alliance with understanding. Instead of supplementing reason, he
+placed emotion as its substitute. And he made this evil doctrine come
+from the lips of a fictitious character, who stimulated fancy and
+fascinated imagination. Voltaire laughed at the _baisers �cres_ of
+Madame de Wolmar, and declared that a criticism of the Marquis of
+Xim�n�s had crushed the wretched romance.[50] But Madame de Wolmar was
+so far from crushed, that she turned the flood of feeling which her
+own charms, passion, remorse, and conversion had raised, in a
+direction that Voltaire abhorred, and abhorred in vain.
+
+It is after the marriage of Julie to Wolmar that the action of the
+story takes the turn which sensible men like Voltaire found laughable.
+Saint Preux is absent with Admiral Anson for some years. On his return
+to Europe he is speedily invited by the sage Wolmar, who knows his
+past history perfectly well, to pay them a visit. They all meet with
+leapings on the neck and hearty kisses, the unprejudiced Wolmar
+preserving an open, serene, and smiling air. He takes his young friend
+to a chamber, which is to be reserved for him and for him only. In a
+few days he takes an opportunity of visiting some distant property,
+leaving his wife and Saint Preux together, with the sublime of
+magnanimity. At the same time he confides to Claire his intention of
+entrusting to Saint Preux the education of his children. All goes
+perfectly well, and the household presents a picture of contentment,
+prosperity, moderation, affection, and evenly diffused happiness,
+which in spite of the disagreeableness of the situation is even now
+extremely charming. There is only one cloud. Julie is devoured by a
+source of hidden chagrin. Her husband, "so sage, so reasonable, so far
+from every kind of vice, so little under the influence of human
+passions, is without the only belief that makes virtue precious, and
+in the innocence of an irreproachable life he carries at the bottom of
+his heart the frightful peace of the wicked."[51] He is an atheist.
+Julie is now a pietest, locking herself for hours in her chambers,
+spending days in self-examination and prayer, constantly reading the
+pages of the good F�nelon.[52] "I fear," she writes to Saint Preux,
+"that you do not gain all you might from religion in the conduct of
+your life, and that philosophic pride disdains the simplicity of the
+Christian. You believe prayers to be of scanty service. That is not,
+you know, the doctrine of Saint Paul, nor what our Church professes.
+We are free, it is true, but we are ignorant, feeble, prone to ill.
+And whence should light and force come, if not from him who is their
+very well-spring?... Let us be humble, to be sage; let us see our
+weakness, and we shall be strong."[53] This was the opening of the
+deistical reaction; it was thus, associated with everything that
+struck imagination and moved the sentiment of his readers, that
+Rousseau brought back those sophistical conclusions which Pascal had
+drawn from premisses of dark profound truth, and that enervating
+displacement of reason by celestial contemplation, which F�nelon had
+once made beautiful by the persuasion of virtuous example. He was
+justified in saying, as he afterwards did, that there was nothing in
+the Savoyard Vicar's Profession of Faith which was not to be found in
+the letters of Julie. These were the effective preparations for that
+more famous manifesto; they surrounded belief with all the attractions
+of an interesting and sympathetic preacher, and set it to a harmony of
+circumstance that touched softer fibres.
+
+For, curiously enough, while the first half of the romance is a scene
+of disorderly passion, the second is the glorification of the family.
+A modern writer of genius has inveighed with whimsical bitterness
+against the character of Wolmar,--supposed, we may notice in passing,
+to be partially drawn from D'Holbach,--a man performing so long an
+experiment on these two souls, with the terrible curiosity of a
+surgeon engaged in vivisection.[54] It was, however, much less
+difficult for contemporaries than it is for us to accept so
+unwholesome and prurient a situation. They forgot all the evil that
+was in it, in the charm of the account of Wolmar's active, peaceful,
+frugal, sunny household. The influence of this was immense.[55] It may
+be that the overstrained scene where Saint Preux waits for Julie in
+her room, suggested the far lovelier passage of Faust in the chamber
+of the hapless Margaret. But we may, at least, be sure that Werther
+(1774) would not have found Charlotte cutting bread and butter, if
+Saint Preux had not gone to see Julie take cream and cakes with her
+children and her female servants. And perhaps the other and nobler
+Charlotte of the _Wahlverwandtschaften_ (1809) would not have detained
+us so long with her moss hut, her terrace, her park prospect, if Julie
+had not had her elysium, where the sweet freshness of the air, the
+cool shadows, the shining verdure, flowers diffusing fragrance and
+colour, water running with soft whisper, and the song of a thousand
+birds, reminded the returned traveller of Tinian and Juan Fernandez.
+There is an animation, a variety, an accuracy, a realistic brightness
+in this picture, which will always make it enchanting, even to those
+who cannot make their way through any other letter in the New
+Helo�sa.[56] Such qualities place it as an idyllic piece far above
+such pieces in Goethe's two famous romances. They have a clearness
+and spontaneous freshness which are not among the bountiful gifts of
+Goethe. There are other admirable landscapes in the New Helo�sa,
+though not too many of them, and the minute and careful way in which
+Rousseau made their features real to himself, is accidentally shown in
+his urgent prayer for exactitude in the engraving of the striking
+scene where Saint Preux and Julie visit the monuments of their old
+love for one another.[57] "I have traversed all Rousseau's ground with
+the Helo�sa before me," said Byron, "and am struck to a degree I
+cannot express, with the force and accuracy of his descriptions and
+the beauty of their reality."[58] They were memories made true by long
+dreaming, by endless brooding. The painter lived with these scenes
+ever present to the inner eye. They were his real world, of which the
+tamer world of meadow and woodland actually around him only gave
+suggestion. He thought of the green steeps, the rocks, the mountain
+pines, the waters of the lake, "the populous solitude of bees and
+birds," as of some divine presence, too sublime for personality. And
+they were always benign, standing in relief with the malignity or
+folly of the hurtful insect, Man. He was never a manich�an towards
+nature. To him she was all good and bounteous. The demon forces that
+so fascinated Byron were to Rousseau invisible. These were the
+compositions that presently inspired the landscapes of _Paul and
+Virginia_ (1788), of _Atala_ and _Ren�_ (1801), and of _Obermann_
+(1804), as well as those punier imitators who resemble their masters
+as the hymns of a methodist negro resemble the psalms of David. They
+were the outcome of eager and spontaneous feeling for nature, and not
+the mere hackneyed common-form and inflated description of the
+literary pastoral.[59]
+
+This leads to another great and important distinction to be drawn
+between Rousseau and the school whom in other respects he inspired.
+The admirable Sainte Beuve perplexes one by his strange remark, that
+the union of the poetry of the family and the hearth with the poetry
+of nature is essentially wanting to Rousseau.[60] It only shows that
+the great critic had for the moment forgotten the whole of the second
+part of the New Helo�sa, and his failure to identify Cowper's allusion
+to the _matin�e � l'anglaise_ certainly proves that he had at any rate
+forgotten one of the most striking and delicious scenes of the hearth
+in French literature.[61] The tendency to read Rousseau only in the
+Byronic sense is one of those foregone conclusions which are
+constantly tempting the critic to travel out of his record. Rousseau
+assuredly had a Byronic side, but he is just as often a Cowper done
+into splendid prose. His pictures are full of social animation and
+domestic order. He had exalted the simplicity of the savage state in
+his Discourses, but when he came to constitute an ideal life, he found
+it in a household that was more, and not less, systematically
+disciplined than those of the common society around him. The paradise
+in which his Julie moved with Wolmar and Saint Preux, was no more and
+no less than an establishment of the best kind of the rural
+middle-class, frugal, decorous, wholesome, tranquilly austere. No most
+sentimental savage could have found it endurable, or could himself
+without profound transformation of his manners have been endured in
+it. The New Helo�sa ends by exalting respectability, and putting the
+spirit of insurrection to shame. Self-control, not revolt, is its last
+word.
+
+This is what separates Rousseau here and throughout from S�nancour,
+Byron, and the rest. He consummates the triumph of will, while their
+reigning mood is grave or reckless protest against impotence of will,
+the little worth of common aims, the fretting triviality of common
+rules. Franklin or Cobbett might have gloried in the regularity of
+Madame de Wolmar's establishment. The employment of the day was marked
+out with precision. By artful adjustment of pursuits, it was contrived
+that the men-servants should be kept apart from the maid-servants,
+except at their repasts. The women, namely, a cook, a housemaid, and a
+nurse, found their pastime in rambles with their mistress and her
+children, and lived mainly with them. The men were amused by games for
+which their master made regulated provision, now for summer, now for
+winter, offering prizes of a useful kind for prowess and adroitness.
+Often on a Sunday night all the household met in an ample chamber,
+and passed the evening in dancing. When Saint Preux inquired whether
+this was not a rather singular infraction of puritan rule, Julie
+wisely answered that pure morality is so loaded with severe duties,
+that if you add to them the further burden of indifferent forms, it
+must always be at the cost of the essential.[62] The servants were
+taken from the country, never from the town. They entered the
+household young, were gradually trained, and never went away except to
+establish themselves.
+
+The vulgar and obvious criticism on all this is that it is utopian,
+that such households do not generally exist, because neither masters
+nor servants possess the qualities needed to maintain these relations
+of unbroken order and friendliness. Perhaps not; and masters and
+servants will be more and more removed from the possession of such
+qualities, and their relations further distant from such order and
+friendliness, if writers cease to press the beauty and serviceableness
+of a domesticity that is at present only possible in a few rare cases,
+or to insist on the ugliness, the waste of peace, the deterioration of
+character, that are the results of our present system. Undoubtedly it
+is much easier for Rousseau to draw his picture of semi-patriarchal
+felicity, than for the rest of us to realise it. It was his function
+to press ideals of sweeter life on his contemporaries, and they may be
+counted fortunate in having a writer who could fulfil this function
+with Rousseau's peculiar force of masterly persuasion. His scornful
+diatribes against the domestic police of great houses, and the
+essential inhumanity of the ordinary household relations, are both
+excellent and of permanent interest. There is the full breath of a new
+humaneness in them. They were the right way of attacking the
+decrepitude of feudal luxury and insolence, and its imitation among
+the great farmers-general. This criticism of the conditions of
+domestic service marks a beginning of true democracy, as distinguished
+from the mere pulverisation of aristocracy. It rests on the claim of
+the common people to an equal consideration, as equally useful and
+equally capable of virtue and vice; and it implies the essential
+priority of social over political reform.
+
+The story abounds in sumptuary detail. The table partakes of the
+general plenty, but this plenty is not ruinous. The senses are
+gratified without daintiness. The food is common, but excellent of its
+kind. The service is simple, yet exquisite. All that is mere show, all
+that depends on vulgar opinion, all fine and elaborate dishes whose
+value comes of their rarity, and whose names you must know before
+finding any goodness in them, are banished without recall. Even in
+such delicacies as they permit themselves, our friends abstain every
+day from certain things which are reserved for feasts on special
+occasions, and which are thus made more delightful without being more
+costly. What do you suppose these delicacies are? Rare game, or fish
+from the sea, or dainties from abroad? Better than all that; some
+delicious vegetable of the district, one of the savoury things that
+grow in our garden, some fish from the lake dressed in a peculiar way,
+some cheese from our mountains. The service is modest and rustic, but
+clean and smiling. Neither gold-laced liveries in sight of which you
+die of hunger, nor tall crystals laden with flowers for your only
+dessert, here take the place of honest dishes. Here people have not
+the art of nourishing the stomach through the eyes, but they know how
+to add grace to good cheer, to eat heartily without inconvenience, to
+drink merrily without losing reason, to sit long at table without
+weariness, and always to rise from it without disgust.[63]
+
+One singularity in this ideal household was the avoidance of those
+middle exchanges between production and consumption, which enrich the
+shopkeeper but impoverish his customers. Not one of these exchanges is
+made without loss, and the multiplication of these losses would weaken
+even a man of fortune. Wolmar seeks those real exchanges in which the
+convenience of each party to the bargain serves as profit for both.
+Thus the wool is sent to the factories, from which they receive cloth
+in exchange; wine, oil, and bread are produced in the house; the
+butcher pays himself in live cattle; the grocer receives grain in
+return for his goods; the wages of the labourers and the
+house-servants are derived from the produce of the land which they
+render valuable.[64] It was reserved for Fourier, Cabet, and the rest,
+to carry to its highest point this confusion of what is so
+fascinating in a book with what is practicable in society.
+
+The expatiation on the loveliness of a well-ordered interior may
+strike the impatient modern as somewhat long, and the movement as very
+slow, just as people complain of the same things in Goethe's
+_Wahlverwandtschaften_. Such complaint only proves inability, which is
+or is not justifiable, to seize the spirit of the writer. The
+expatiation was long and the movement slow, because Rousseau was full
+of his thoughts; they were a deep and glowing part of himself, and did
+not merely skim swiftly and lightly through his mind. Anybody who
+takes the trouble may find out the difference between this expression
+of long mental brooding, and a merely elaborated diction.[65] The
+length is an essential part of the matter. The whole work is the
+reflection of a series of slow inner processes, the many careful
+weavings of a lonely and miserable man's dreams. And Julie expressed
+the spirit and the joy of these dreams when she wrote, "People are
+only happy before they are happy. Man, so eager and so feeble, made to
+desire all and obtain little, has received from heaven a consoling
+force which brings all that he desires close to him, which subjects it
+to his imagination, which makes it sensible and present before him,
+which delivers it over to him. The land of chimera is the only one in
+this world that is worth dwelling in, and such is the nothingness of
+the human lot, that except the being who exists in and by himself,
+there is nothing beautiful except that which does not exist."[66]
+
+Closely connected with the vigorous attempt to fascinate his public
+with the charm of a serene, joyful, and ordered house, is the
+restoration of marriage in the New Helo�sa to a rank among high and
+honourable obligations, and its representation as the best support of
+an equable life of right conduct and fruitful harmonious emotion.
+Rousseau even invested it with the mysterious dignity as of some
+natural sacrament. "This chaste knot of nature is subject neither to
+the sovereign power nor to paternal authority," he cried, "but only to
+the authority of the common Father." And he pointed his remark by a
+bitter allusion to a celebrated case in which a great house had
+prevailed on the courts to annul the marriage of an elder son with a
+young actress, though her character was excellent, and though she had
+befriended him when he was abandoned by everybody else.[67] This was
+one of the countless democratic thrusts in the book. In the case of
+its heroine, however, the author associated the sanctity of marriage
+not only with equality but with religion. We may imagine the spleen
+with which the philosophers, with both their hatred of the faith, and
+their light esteem of marriage bonds, read Julie's eloquent account of
+her emotions at the moment of her union with Wolmar. "I seemed to
+behold the organ of Providence and to hear the voice of God, as the
+minister gravely pronounced the words of the holy service. The purity,
+the dignity, the sanctity of marriage, so vividly set forth in the
+words of scripture; its chaste and sublime duties, so important to the
+happiness, order, and peace of the human race, so sweet to fulfil even
+for their own sake--all this made such an impression on me that I
+seemed to feel within my breast a sudden revolution. An unknown power
+seemed all at once to arrest the disorder of my affections, and to
+restore them to accordance with the law of duty and of nature. The
+eternal eye that sees everything, I said to myself, now reads to the
+depth of my heart."[68] She has all the well-known fervour of the
+proselyte, and never wearies of extolling the peace of the wedded
+state. Love is no essential to its perfection. "Worth, virtue, a
+certain accord not so much in condition and age as in character and
+temper, are enough between husband and wife; and this does not prevent
+the growth from such a union of a very tender attachment, which is
+none the less sweet for not being exactly love, and is all the more
+lasting."[69] Years after, when Saint Preux has returned and is
+settled in the household, she even tries to persuade him to imitate
+her example, and find contentment in marriage with her cousin. The
+earnestness with which she presses the point, the very sensible but
+not very delicate references to the hygienic drawbacks of celibacy,
+and the fact that the cousin whom she would fain have him marry, had
+complaisantly assisted them in their past loves, naturally drew the
+fire of Rousseau's critical enemies.
+
+Such matters did not affect the general enthusiasm. When people are
+weary of a certain way of surveying life, and have their faces eagerly
+set in some new direction, they read in a book what it pleases them to
+read; they assimilate as much as falls in with their dominant mood,
+and the rest passes away unseen. The French public were bewitched by
+Julie, and were no more capable of criticising her than Julie was
+capable of criticising Saint Preux in the height of her passion for
+him. When we say that Rousseau was the author of this movement, all we
+mean is that his book and its chief personage awoke emotion to
+self-consciousness, gave it a dialect, communicated an impulse in
+favour of social order, and then very calamitously at the same moment
+divorced it from the fundamental conditions of progress, by divorcing
+it from disciplined intelligence and scientific reason.
+
+Apart from the general tendency of the New Helo�sa in numberless
+indirect ways to bring the manners of the great into contempt, by the
+presentation of the happiness of a simple and worthy life, thrifty,
+self-sufficing, and homely, there is one direct protest of singular
+eloquence and gravity. Julie's father is deeply revolted at the bare
+notion of marrying his daughter to a teacher. Rousseau puts his
+vigorous remonstrance against pride of birth into the mouth of an
+English nobleman. This is perhaps an infelicitous piece of
+prosopopoeia, but it is interesting as illustrative of the idea of
+England in the eighteenth century as the home of stout-hearted
+freedom. We may quote one piece from the numerous bits of very
+straightforward speaking in which our representative expressed his
+mind as to the significance of birth. "My friend has nobility," cried
+Lord Edward, "not written in ink on mouldering parchments, but graven
+in his heart in characters that can never be effaced. For my own part,
+by God, I should be sorry to have no other proof of my merit but that
+of a man who has been in his grave these five hundred years. If you
+know the English nobility, you know that it is the most enlightened,
+the best informed, the wisest, the bravest in Europe. That being so, I
+don't care to ask whether it is the oldest or not. We are not, it is
+true, the slaves of the prince, but his friends; nor the tyrants of
+the people, but their leaders. We hold the balance true between
+people, and monarch. Our first duty is towards the nation, our second
+towards him who governs; it is not his will but his right that we
+consider.... We suffer no one in the land to say _God and my sword_,
+nor more than this, _God and my right_."[70] All this was only
+putting Montesquieu into heroics, it is true, but a great many people
+read the romance who were not likely to read the graver book. And
+there was a wide difference between the calm statement of a number of
+political propositions about government, and their transformation into
+dramatic invective against the arrogance of all social inequality that
+does not correspond with inequalities of worth.
+
+There is no contradiction between this and the social quietism of
+other parts of the book. Moral considerations and the paramount place
+that they hold in Rousseau's way of thinking, explain at once his
+contempt for the artificial privileges and assumptions of high rank,
+and his contempt for anything like discontent with the conditions of
+humble rank. Simplicity of life was his ideal. He wishes us to despise
+both those who have departed from it, and those who would depart from
+it if they could. So Julie does her best to make the lot of the
+peasants as happy as it is capable of being made, without ever helping
+them to change it for another. She teaches them to respect their
+natural condition in respecting themselves. Her prime maxim is to
+discourage change of station and calling, but above all to dissuade
+the villager, whose life is the happiest of all, from leaving the true
+pleasures of his natural career for the fever and corruption of
+towns.[71] Presently a recollection of the sombre things that he had
+seen in his rambles through France crossed Rousseau's pastoral
+visions, and he admitted that there were some lands in which the
+publican devours the fruits of the earth; where the misery that covers
+the fields, the bitter greed of some grasping farmer, the inflexible
+rigour of an inhuman master, take something from the charm of his
+rural scenes. "Worn-out horses ready to expire under the blows they
+receive, wretched peasants attenuated by hunger, broken by weariness,
+clad in rags, hamlets all in ruins--these things offer a mournful
+spectacle to the eye: one is almost sorry to be a man, as we think of
+the unhappy creatures on whose blood we have to feed."[72]
+
+Yet there is no hint in the New Helo�sa of the socialism which Morelly
+and Mably flung themselves upon, as the remedy for all these desperate
+horrors. Property, in every page of the New Helo�sa, is held in full
+respect; the master has the honourable burden of patriarchal duty; the
+servant the not less honourable burden of industry and faithfulness;
+disobedience or vice is promptly punished with paternal rigour and
+more than paternal inflexibility. The insurrectionary quality and
+effect of Rousseau's work lay in no direct preaching or vehement
+denunciation of the abuses that filled France with cruelty on the one
+hand and sodden misery on the other. It lay in pictures of a social
+state in which abuses and cruelty cannot exist, nor any miseries save
+those which are inseparable from humanity. The contrast between the
+sober, cheerful, prosperous scenes of romance, and the dreariness of
+the reality of the field life of France,--this was the element that
+filled generous souls with an intoxicating transport.
+
+Rousseau's way of dealing with the portentous questions that lay about
+that tragic scene of deserted fields, ruined hamlets, tottering
+brutes, and hunger-stricken men, may be gathered from one of the many
+traits in Julie which endeared her to that generation, and might
+endear her even to our own if it only knew her. Wolmar's house was
+near a great high-road, and so was daily haunted by beggars. Not one
+of these was allowed to go empty away. And Julie had as many excellent
+reasons to give for her charity, as if she had been one of the
+philosophers of whom she thought so surpassingly ill. If you look at
+mendicancy merely as a trade, what is the harm of a calling whose end
+is to nourish feelings of humanity and brotherly love? From the point
+of view of talent, why should I not pay the eloquence of a beggar who
+stirs my pity, as highly as that of a player who makes me shed tears
+over imaginary sorrows? If the great number of beggars is burdensome
+to the state, of how many other professions that people encourage, may
+you not say the same? How can I be sure that the man to whom I give
+alms is not an honest soul, whom I may save from perishing? In short,
+whatever we may think of the poor wretches, if we owe nothing to the
+beggar, at least we owe it to ourselves to pay honour to suffering
+humanity or to its image.[73] Nothing could be more admirably
+illustrative of the author's confidence that the first thing for us to
+do is to satisfy our fine feelings, and that then all the rest shall
+be added unto us. The doctrine spread so far, that Necker,--a sort of
+Julie in a frock-coat, who had never fallen, the incarnation of this
+doctrine on the great stage of affairs,--was hailed to power to ward
+off the bankruptcy of the state by means of a good heart and moral
+sentences, while Turgot with science and firmness for his resources
+was driven away as an economist and a philosopher.
+
+At a first glance, it may seem that there was compensation for the
+triumph of sentiment over reason, and that if France was ruined by the
+dreams in which Rousseau encouraged the nation to exult, she was saved
+by the fervour and resoluteness of the aspirations with which he
+filled the most generous of her children. No wide movement, we may be
+sure, is thoroughly understood until we have mastered both its
+material and its ideal sides. Materially, Rousseau's work was
+inevitably fraught with confusion because in this sphere not to be
+scientific, not to be careful in tracing effects to their true causes,
+is to be without any security that the causes with which we try to
+deal will lead to the effects that we desire. A Roman statesman who
+had gone to the Sermon on the Mount for a method of staying the
+economic ruin of the empire, its thinning population, its decreasing
+capital, would obviously have found nothing of what he sought. But the
+moral nature of man is redeemed by teaching that may have no bearing
+on economics, or even a bearing purely mischievous, and which has to
+be corrected by teaching that probably goes equally far in the
+contrary direction of moral mischief. In the ideal sphere, the
+processes are very complex. In measuring a man's influence within it
+we have to balance. Rousseau's action was undoubtedly excellent in
+leading men and women to desire simple lives, and a more harmonious
+social order. Was this eminent benefit more than counterbalanced by
+the eminent disadvantage of giving a reactionary intellectual
+direction? By commending irrational retrogression from active use of
+the understanding back to dreamy contemplation?
+
+To one teacher is usually only one task allotted. We do not reproach
+want of science to the virtuous and benevolent Channing; his goodness
+and effusion stirred women and the young, just as Rousseau did, to
+sentimental but humane aspiration. It was this kind of influence that
+formed the opinion which at last destroyed American slavery. We owe a
+place in the temple that commemorates human emancipation, to every man
+who has kindled in his generation a brighter flame of moral
+enthusiasm, and a more eager care for the realisation of good and
+virtuous ideals.
+
+
+III.
+
+The story of the circumstances of the publication of Emilius and the
+persecution which befell its author in consequence, recalls us to the
+distinctively evil side of French history in this critical epoch, and
+carries us away from light into the thick darkness of political
+intrigue, obscurantist faction, and a misgovernment which was at once
+tyrannical and decrepit. It is almost impossible for us to realise the
+existence in the same society of such boundless license of thought,
+and such unscrupulous restraint upon its expression. Not one of
+Rousseau's three chief works, for instance, was printed in France. The
+whole trade in books was a sort of contraband, and was carried on with
+the stealth, subterfuge, daring, and knavery that are demanded in
+contraband dealings. An author or a bookseller was forced to be as
+careful as a kidnapper of coolies or the captain of a slaver would be
+in our own time. He had to steer clear of the court, of the
+parliament, of Jansenists, of Jesuits, of the mistresses of the king
+and the minister, of the friends of the mistresses, and above all of
+that organised hierarchy of ignorance and oppression in all times and
+places where they raise their masked heads,--the bishops and
+ecclesiastics of every sort and condition. Palissot produced his
+comedy to please the devout at the expense of the philosophers (1760).
+Madame de Robecq, daughter of Rousseau's marshal of Luxembourg,
+instigated and protected him, for Diderot had offended her.[74]
+Morellet replied in a piece in which the keen vision of feminine spite
+detected a reference to Madame de Robecq. Though dying, she still had
+relations with Choiseul, and so Morellet was flung into the
+Bastile.[75] Diderot was thrown for three months into Vincennes, where
+we saw him on a memorable occasion, for his Letter on the Blind
+(1748), nominally because it was held to contain irreligious doctrine,
+really because he had given offence to D'Argenson's mistress by
+hinting that she might be very handsome, but that her judgment on
+scientific experiment was of no value.[76]
+
+The New Helo�sa could not openly circulate in France so long as it
+contained the words, "I would rather be the wife of a charcoal-burner
+than the mistress of a king." The last word was altered to "prince,"
+and then Rousseau was warned that he would offend the Prince de Conti
+and Madame de Boufflers.[77] No work of merit could appear without
+more or less of slavish mutilation, and no amount of slavish
+mutilation could make the writer secure against the accidental grudge
+of people who had influence in high quarters.[78]
+
+If French booksellers in the stirring intellectual time of the
+eighteenth century needed all the craft of a smuggler, their morality
+was reduced to an equally low level in dealing not only with the
+police, but with their own accomplices, the book-writers. They excused
+themselves from paying proper sums to authors, on the ground that they
+were robbed of the profits that would enable them to pay such sums, by
+the piracy of their brethren in trade. But then they all pirated the
+works of one another. The whole commerce was a mass of fraud and
+chicane, and every prominent author passed his life between two fires.
+He was robbed, his works were pirated, and, worse than robbery and
+piracy, they were defaced and distorted by the booksellers. On the
+other side he was tormented to death by the suspicion and timidity,
+alternately with the hatred and active tyranny of the administration.
+As we read the story of the lives of all these strenuous men, their
+struggles, their incessant mortifications, their constantly reviving
+and ever irrepressible vigour and interest in the fight, we may wish
+that the shabbiness and the pettiness of the daily lives of some of
+them had faded away from memory, and left us nothing to think of in
+connection with their names but the alertness, courage, tenacity,
+self-sacrifice, and faith with which they defended the cause of human
+emancipation and progress. Happily the mutual hate of the Christian
+factions, to which liberty owes at least as much as charity owes to
+their mutual love, prevented a common union for burning the
+philosophers as well as their books. All torments short of this they
+endured, and they had the great merit of enduring them without any
+hope of being rewarded after their death, as truly good men must
+always be capable of doing.
+
+Rousseau had no taste for martyrdom, nor any intention of courting it
+in even its slightest forms. Holland was now the great printing press
+of France, and when we are counting up the contributions of
+Protestantism to the enfranchisement of Europe, it is just to remember
+the indispensable services rendered by the freedom of the press in
+Holland to the dissemination of French thought in the eighteenth
+century, as well as the shelter that it gave to the French thinkers in
+the seventeenth, including Descartes, the greatest of them all. The
+monstrous tediousness of printing a book at Amsterdam or the Hague,
+the delay, loss, and confusion in receiving and transmitting the
+proofs, and the subterranean character of the entire process,
+including the circulation of the book after it was once fairly
+printed, were as grievous to Rousseau as to authors of more impetuous
+temper. He agreed with Rey, for instance, the Amsterdam printer, to
+sell him the Social Contract for 1000 francs. The manuscript had then
+to be cunningly conveyed to Amsterdam. Rousseau wrote it out in very
+small characters, sealed it carefully up, and entrusted it to the care
+of the chaplain of the Dutch embassy, who happened to be a native of
+Vaud. In passing the barrier, the packet fell into the hands of the
+officials. They tore it open and examined it, happily unconscious that
+they were handling the most explosive kind of gunpowder that they had
+ever meddled with. It was not until the chaplain claimed it in the
+name of ambassadorial privilege, that the manuscript was allowed to go
+on its way to the press.[79] Rousseau repeats a hundred times, not
+only in the Confessions, but also in letters to his friends, how
+resolutely and carefully he avoided any evasion of the laws of the
+country in which he lived. The French government was anxious enough on
+all grounds to secure for France the production of the books of which
+France was the great consumer, but the severity of its censorship
+prevented this.[80] The introduction of the books, when printed, was
+tolerated or connived at, because the country would hardly have
+endured to be deprived of the enjoyment of its own literature. By a
+greater inconsistency the reprinting of a book which had once found
+admission into the country, was also connived at. Thus M. de
+Malesherbes, out of friendship for Rousseau, wished to have an edition
+of the New Helo�sa printed in France, and sold for the benefit of the
+author. That he should have done so is a curious illustration of the
+low morality engendered by a repressive system imperfectly carried
+out. For Rousseau had sold the book to Rey. Rey had treated with a
+French bookseller in the usual way, that is, had sent him half the
+edition printed, the bookseller paying either in cash or other books
+for all the copies he received. Therefore to print an independent
+edition in Paris was to injure, not Rey the foreigner, but the French
+bookseller who stood practically in Rey's place. It was setting two
+French booksellers to ruin one another. Rousseau emphatically declined
+to receive any profit from such a transaction. But, said Malesherbes,
+you sold to Rey a right which you had not got, the right of sole
+proprietorship, excluding the competition of a pirated reprint. Then,
+answered Rousseau, if the right which I sold happens to prove less
+than I thought, it is clear that far from taking advantage of my
+mistake, I owe to Rey compensation for any loss that he may
+suffer.[81]
+
+The friendship of Malesherbes for the party of reason was shown on
+numerous occasions. As director of the book trade he was really the
+censor of the literature of the time.[82] The story of his service to
+Diderot is well known--how he warned Diderot that the police were
+about to visit his house and overhaul his papers, and how when Diderot
+despaired of being able to put them out of sight in his narrow
+quarters, Malesherbes said, "Then send them all to me," and took care
+of them until the storm was overpast. The proofs of the New Helo�sa
+came through his hands, and now he made himself Rousseau's agent in
+the affairs relative to the printing of Emilius. Rousseau entrusted
+the whole matter to him and to Madame de Luxembourg, being confident
+that, in acting through persons of such authority and position, he
+should be protected against any unwitting illegality. Instead of being
+sent to Rey, the manuscript was sold to a bookseller in Paris for six
+thousand francs.[83] A long time elapsed before any proofs reached the
+author, and he soon perceived that an edition was being printed in
+France as well as in Holland. Still, as Malesherbes was in some sort
+the director of the enterprise, the author felt no alarm. Duclos came
+to visit him one day, and Rousseau read aloud to him the Savoyard
+Vicar's Profession of Faith. "What, citizen," he cried, "and that is
+part of a book that they are printing at Paris! Be kind enough not to
+tell any one that you read this to me."[84] Still Rousseau remained
+secure. Then the printing came to a standstill, and he could not find
+out the reason, because Malesherbes was away, and the printer did not
+take the trouble to answer his letters. "My natural tendency," he
+says, and as the rest of his life only too abundantly proved, "is to
+be afraid of darkness; mystery always disturbs me, it is utterly
+antipathetic to my character, which is open even to the pitch of
+imprudence. The aspect of the most hideous monster would alarm me
+little, I verily believe; but if I discern at night a figure in a
+white sheet, I am sure to be terrified out of my life."[85] So he at
+once fancied that by some means the Jesuits had got possession of his
+book, and knowing him to be at death's door, designed to keep the
+Emilius back until he was actually dead, when they would publish a
+truncated version of it to suit their own purposes.[86] He wrote
+letter upon letter to the printer, to Malesherbes, to Madame de
+Luxembourg, and if answers did not come, or did not come exactly when
+he expected them, he grew delirious with anxiety. If he dropped his
+conviction that the Jesuits were plotting the ruin of his book and the
+defilement of his reputation, he lost no time in fastening a similar
+design upon the Jansenists, and when the Jansenists were acquitted,
+then the turn of the philosophers came. We have constantly to remember
+that all this time the unfortunate man was suffering incessant pain,
+and passing his nights in sleeplessness and fever. He sometimes threw
+off the black dreams of unfathomable suspicion, and dreamed in their
+stead of some sunny spot in pleasant Touraine, where under a mild
+climate and among a gentle people he should peacefully end his
+days.[87] At other times he was fond of supposing M. de Luxembourg
+not a duke, nor a marshal of France, but a good country squire living
+in some old mansion, and himself not an author, not a maker of books,
+but with moderate intelligence and slight attainment, finding with the
+squire and his dame the happiness of his life, and contributing to the
+happiness of theirs.[88] Alas, in spite of all his precautions, he had
+unwittingly drifted into the stream of great affairs. He and his book
+were sacrificed to the exigencies of faction; and a persecution set
+in, which destroyed his last chance of a composed life, by giving his
+reason, already disturbed, a final blow from which it never recovered.
+
+Emilius appeared in the crisis of the movement against the Jesuits.
+That formidable order had offended Madame de Pompadour by a refusal to
+recognise her power and position,--a manly policy, as creditable to
+their moral vigour as it was contrary to the maxims which had made
+them powerful. They had also offended Choiseul by the part they had
+taken in certain hostile intrigues at Versailles. The parliaments had
+always been their enemies. This was due first to the jealousy with
+which corporations of lawyers always regard corporations of
+ecclesiastics, and next to their hatred of the bull Unigenitus, which
+had been not only an infraction of French liberties, but the occasion
+of special humiliation to the parliaments. Then the hostility of the
+parliaments to the Jesuits was caused by the harshness with which the
+system of confessional tickets was at this time being carried out.
+Finally, the once powerful house of Austria, the protector of all
+retrograde interests, was now weakened by the Seven Years' War; and
+was unable to bring effective influence to bear on Lewis XV. At last
+he gave his consent to the destruction of the order. The commercial
+bankruptcy of one of their missions was the immediate occasion of
+their fall, and nothing could save them. "I only know one man," said
+Grimm, "in a position to have composed an apology for the Jesuits in
+fine style, if it had been in his way to take the side of that tribe,
+and this man is M. Rousseau." The parliaments went to work with
+alacrity, but they were quite as hostile to the philosophers as they
+were to the Jesuits, and hence their anxiety to show that they were no
+allies of the one even when destroying the other.
+
+Contemporaries seldom criticise the shades and variations of
+innovating speculation with any marked nicety. Anything with the stamp
+of rationality on its phrases or arguments was roughly set down to the
+school of the philosophers, and Rousseau was counted one of their
+number, like Voltaire or Helv�tius. The Emilius appeared in May 1762.
+On the 11th of June the parliament of Paris ordered the book to be
+burnt by the public executioner, and the writer to be arrested. For
+Rousseau always scorned the devices of Voltaire and others; he
+courageously insisted on placing his name on the title-page of all his
+works,[89] and so there was none of the usual difficulty in
+identifying the author. The grounds of the proceedings were alleged
+irreligious tendencies to be found in the book.[90]
+
+The indecency of the requisition in which the advocate-general
+demanded its proscription, was admitted even by people who were least
+likely to defend Rousseau.[91] The author was charged with saying not
+only that man may be saved without believing in God, but even that the
+Christian religion does not exist--paradox too flagrant even for the
+writer of the Discourse on Inequality. No evidence was produced either
+that the alleged assertions were in the book, or that the name of the
+author was really the name on its title-page. Rousseau fared no worse,
+but better, than his fellows, for there was hardly a single man of
+letters of that time who escaped arbitrary imprisonment.
+
+The unfortunate author had news of the ferment which his work was
+creating in Paris, and received notes of warning from every hand, but
+he could not believe that the only man in France who believed in God
+was to be the victim of the defenders of Christianity.[92] On the 8th
+of June he spent a merry day with two friends, taking their dinner in
+the fields. "Ever since my youth I had a habit of reading at night in
+my bed until my eyes grew heavy. Then I put out the candle, and tried
+to fall asleep for a few minutes, but they seldom lasted long. My
+ordinary reading at night was the Bible, and I have read it
+continuously through at least five or six times in this way. That
+night, finding myself more wakeful than usual, I prolonged my reading,
+and read through the whole of the book which ends with the Levite of
+Ephraim, and which if I mistake not is the book of Judges. The story
+affected me deeply, and I was busy over it in a kind of dream, when
+all at once I was roused by lights and noises."[93]
+
+It was two o'clock in the morning. A messenger had come in hot haste
+to carry him to Madame de Luxembourg. News had reached her of the
+proposed decree of the parliament. She knew Rousseau well enough to be
+sure that if he were seized and examined, her own share and that of
+Malesherbes in the production of the condemned book would be made
+public, and their position uncomfortably compromised. It was to their
+interest that he should avoid arrest by flight, and they had no
+difficulty in persuading him to fall in with their plans. After a
+tearful farewell with Theresa, who had hardly been out of his sight
+for seventeen years, and many embraces from the greater ladies of the
+castle, he was thrust into a chaise and despatched on the first stage
+of eight melancholy years of wandering and despair, to be driven from
+place to place, first by the fatuous tyranny of magistrates and
+religious doctors, and then by the yet more cruel spectres of his own
+diseased imagination, until at length his whole soul became the home
+of weariness and torment.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] _Conf._, x. 62.
+
+[2] _Conf._, x.
+
+[3] _Ib._ x. 70.
+
+[4] Louis Fran�ois de Bourbon, Prince de Conti (1717-1776), was
+great-grandson of the brother of the Great Cond�. He performed
+creditable things in the war of the Austrian Succession (in Piedmont
+1744, in Belgium 1745); had a scheme of foreign policy as director of
+the secret diplomacy of Lewis XV. (1745-1756), which was to make
+Turkey, Poland, Sweden, Prussia, a barrier against Russia primarily,
+and Austria secondarily; lastly went into moderate opposition to the
+court, protesting against the destruction of the _parlements_ (1771),
+and afterwards opposing the reforms of Turgot (1776). Finally he had
+the honour of refusing the sacraments of the church on his deathbed.
+See Martin's _Hist. de France_, xv. and xvi.
+
+[5] _Conf._, 97. _Corr._, v. 215.
+
+[6] _Corr._, ii. 144. Oct. 7, 1760.
+
+[7] _Conf._, x. 98.
+
+[8] The reader will distinguish this correspondent of Rousseau's,
+_Comtesse_ de Boufflers-Rouveret (1727-18--), from the _Duchesse_ de
+Boufflers, which was the title of Rousseau's Mar�chale de Luxembourg
+before her second marriage. And also from the _Marquise_ de Boufflers,
+said to be the mistress of the old king Stanislaus at Lun�ville, and
+the mother of the Chevalier de Boufflers (who was the intimate of
+Voltaire, sat in the States General, emigrated, did homage to
+Napoleon, and finally died peaceably under Lewis XVIII.). See Jal's
+_Dict. Critique_, 259-262. Sainte Beuve has an essay on our present
+Comtesse de Boufflers (_Nouveaux Lundis_, iv. 163). She is the Madame
+de Boufflers who was taken by Beauclerk to visit Johnson in his Temple
+chambers, and was conducted to her coach by him in a remarkable manner
+(Boswell's _Life_, ch. li. p. 467). Also much talked of in H.
+Walpole's Letters. See D'Alembert to Frederick, April 15, 1768.
+
+[9] Streckeisen, ii. 32.
+
+[10] _Conf._, x. 71.
+
+[11] For instance, _Corr._ ii. 85, 90, 92, etc. 1759.
+
+[12] Streckeisen, ii. 28, etc.
+
+[13] _Ib._, 29.
+
+[14] _Conf._, x. 99.
+
+[15] _Ib._, x. 57.
+
+[16] _Ib._, xi. 119.
+
+[17] _Corr._, ii. 196. Feb. 16, 1761.
+
+[18] _Ib._, ii. 102, 176, etc.
+
+[19] _Conf._, x. 60.
+
+[20] _Corr._, ii. 12.
+
+[21] As M. St. Marc Girardin has put it: "There are in all Rousseau's
+discussions two things to be carefully distinguished from one another;
+the maxims of the discourse, and the conclusions of the controversy.
+The maxims are ordinarily paradoxical; the conclusions are full of
+good sense." _Rev. des Deux Mondes_, Aug. 1852, p. 501.
+
+[22] _Corr._, ii. 244-246. Oct. 24, 1761.
+
+[23] _Ib._, 1766. _Oeuv._, lxxv. 364.
+
+[24] _Corr._, ii. 32. (1758.)
+
+[25] _Corr._, ii. 63. Jan. 15, 1779.
+
+[26] Bernardin de St. Pierre, xii. 102.
+
+[27] 4th Letter, p. 375.
+
+[28] _M�m._, ii. 299.
+
+[29] _Corr._, ii. 98. July 10, 1759.
+
+[30] _Corr._, ii. 106. Nov. 10, 1759.
+
+[31] _Ib._, ii. 179. Jan. 18, 1761.
+
+[32] _Ib._, ii. 268. Dec. 12, 1761.
+
+[33] _Ib._, ii. 28. Dec. 23, 1761.
+
+[34] _Nouv. H�l._, III. xxii. 147. In 1784 Hume's suppressed essays on
+"Suicide and the Immortality of the Soul" were published in
+London:--"With Remarks, intended as an Antidote to the Poison
+contained in these Performances, by the Editor; to which is added, Two
+Letters on Suicide, from Rousseau's Eloisa." In the preface the reader
+is told that these "two very masterly letters have been much
+celebrated." See Hume's _Essays_, by Green and Grose, i. 69, 70.
+
+[35] _Corr._, iii. 235. Aug. 1, 1763.
+
+[36] _Corr._, ii. 226. Sept. 29, 1761.
+
+[37] P. 294. Jan. 11, 1762.
+
+[38] Madame Latour (Nov. 7, 1730-Sept. 6, 1789) was the wife of a man
+in the financial world, who used her ill and dissipated as much of her
+fortune as he could, and from whom she separated in 1775. After that
+she resumed her maiden name and was known as Madame de Franqueville.
+Musset-Pathay, ii. 182, and Sainte Beuve, _Causeries_, ii. 63.
+
+[39] _Corr._, ii. 214. _Conf._, ix. 289.
+
+[40] English translations of Rousseau's works appeared very speedily
+after the originals. A second edition of the Helo�sa was called for as
+early as May 1761. See _Corr._ ii. 223. A German translation of the
+Helo�sa appeared at Leipzig in 1761, in six duodecimos.
+
+[41] For instance, _Corr._, ii. 168. Nov. 19, 1762.
+
+[42] Choderlos de La Clos: 1741-1803.
+
+[43] Journal, iv. 496. (Ed. Charpentier, 1857.)
+
+[44] _Nouv. H�l._, III. xiv. 48.
+
+[45] _E.g._ Letters, 40-46.
+
+[46] Madame de Sta�l (1765-1817), in her _Lettres sur les �crits et le
+caract�re de J.J. Rousseau_, written when she was twenty, and her
+first work of any pretensions. _Oeuv._, i. 41. Ed. 1820.
+
+[47] Nowhere more pungently than in a little piece of some half-dozen
+pages, headed, _Pr�diction tir�e d'un vieux Manuscrit_, the form of
+which is borrowed from Grimm's squib in the dispute about French
+music, _Le petit Proph�te de Boehmischbroda_, though it seems to me to
+be superior to Grimm in pointedness. Here are a few verses from the
+supposed prophecy of the man who should come--and of what he should
+do. "Et la multitude courra sur ses pas et plusieurs croiront en lui.
+Et il leur dira: Vous �tes des sc�l�rats et des fripons, vos femmes
+sont toutes des femmes perdues, et je viens vivre parmi vous. Et il
+ajoutera tous les hommes sont vertueux dans le pays o� je suis n�, et
+je n'habiterai jamais le pays o� je suis n�.... Et il dira aussi qu'il
+est impossible d'avoir des moeurs, et de lire des Romans, et il fera
+un Roman; et dans son Roman le vice sera en action et la vertu en
+paroles, et ses personages seront forcen�s d'amour et de philosophie.
+Et dans son Roman on apprendra l'art de suborner philosophiquement une
+jeune fille. Et l'Ecoli�re perdra toute honte et toute pudeur, et elle
+fera avec son ma�tre des sottises et des maximes.... Et le bel Ami
+�tant dans un Bateau seul avec sa Ma�tresse voudra le jetter dans
+l'eau et se pr�cipiter avec elle. Et ils appelleront tout cela de la
+Philosophie et de la Vertu," and so on, humorously enough in its way.
+
+[48] See passages in Goncourt's _La Femme au 18i�me si�cle_, p. 380.
+
+[49] Musset-Pathay, II. 361. See Madame Roland's _M�m._, i. 207.
+
+[50] _Corr._, March 3, and March 19, 1761. The criticisms of Xim�n�s,
+a thoroughly mediocre person in all respects, were entirely literary,
+and were directed against the too strained and highly coloured quality
+of the phrases--"baisers �cres"--among them.
+
+[51] _Nouv. H�l._, V. v. 115.
+
+[52] VI. vii.
+
+[53] VI. vi.
+
+[54] Michelet's _Louis XV. et Louis XVI._, p. 58.
+
+[55] See Hettner's _Literaturgeschichte_, II. 486.
+
+[56] IV. xi.
+
+[57] IV. xvii. See vol. iii. 423.
+
+[58] In 1816. Moore's _Life_, iii. 247; also 285. And the note to the
+stanzas in the Third Canto,--a note curious for a slight admixture of
+transcendentalism, so rare a thing with Byron, who, sentimental though
+he was, usually rejoiced in a truly Voltairean common sense.
+
+[59] "The present fashion in France, of passing some time in the
+country, is new; at this time of the year, and for many weeks past,
+Paris is, comparatively speaking, empty. Everybody who has a country
+seat is at it, and such as have none visit others who have. This
+remarkable revolution in the French manners is certainly one of the
+best customs they have taken from England; and its introduction was
+effected the easier, being assisted by the magic of Rousseau's
+writings. Mankind are much indebted to that splendid genius, who, when
+living, was hunted from country to country, to seek an asylum, with as
+much venom as if he had been a mad dog; thanks to the vile spirit of
+bigotry, which has not received its death wound. Women of the first
+fashion in France are now ashamed of not nursing their own children;
+and stays are universally proscribed from the bodies of the poor
+infants, which were for so many ages torture to them, as they are
+still in Spain. The country residence may not have effects equally
+obvious; but they will be no less sure in the end, and in all respects
+beneficial to every class in the state." Arthur Young's _Travels_, i.
+72.
+
+[60] _Causeries_, xi. 195.
+
+[61] _Nouv. H�l._, V. iii. "You remember Rousseau's description of an
+English morning: such are the mornings I spend with these good
+people."--Cowper to Joseph Hill, Oct. 25, 1765. _Works_, iii. 269. In
+a letter to William Unwin (Sept. 21, 1779), speaking of his being
+engaged in mending windows, he says, "Rousseau would have been charmed
+to have seen me so occupied, and would have exclaimed with rapture
+that he had found the Emilius who, he supposed, had subsisted only in
+his own idea." For a description illustrative of the likeness between
+Rousseau and Cowper in their feeling for nature, see letter to Newton
+(Sept. 18, 1784, v. 78), and compare it with the description of Les
+Charmettes, making proper allowance for the colour of prose.
+
+[62] IV. x. 260.
+
+[63] V. ii. 37.
+
+[64] V. ii. 47-52.
+
+[65] Rousseau considered that the Fourth and Sixth parts of the New
+Helo�sa were masterpieces of diction. _Conf._ ix. 334.
+
+[66] VI. viii.. 298. _Conf._, xi. 106.
+
+[67] The La B�doy�re case, which began in 1745. See Barbier, iv. 54,
+59, etc.
+
+[68] III. xviii. 84.
+
+[69] III. xx. 116. In the letter to Christopher de Beaumont (p. 102),
+he fires a double shot against the philosophers on the one hand, and
+the church on the other; exalting continence and purity, of which the
+philosophers in their reaction against asceticism thought lightly, and
+exalting marriage over the celibate state, which the churchmen
+associated with mysterious sanctity.
+
+[70] I. lxii.
+
+[71] V. ii.
+
+[72] V. vii. 141.
+
+[73] V. ii. 31-33.
+
+[74] For the Robecq family, see Saint Simon, xviii. 58.
+
+[75] Morellet's _M�m._, i. 89-93. Rousseau, _Conf._, x. 85, etc. This
+_Vision_ is also in the style of Grimm's _P�tit Proph�te_, like the
+piece referred to in a previous note, vol. ii. p. 31.
+
+[76] Madame de Vandeul's _M�m. sur Diderot_, p. 27. Rousseau, _Conf._,
+vii. 130.
+
+[77] _Nouv. H�l._, V. xiii. 194. _Conf._, x. 43.
+
+[78] The reader will find a fuller mention of the French book trade in
+my _Diderot_, ch. vi.
+
+[79] _Conf._, xi. 127.
+
+[80] See a letter from Rousseau to Malesherbes, Nov. 5, 1760. _Corr._,
+ii. 157.
+
+[81] _Corr._, ii. 157.
+
+[82] C.G. de Lamoignon de Malesherbes (p. 1721--guillotined, 1794),
+son of the chancellor, and one of the best instructed and most
+enlightened men of the century--a Turgot of the second rank--was
+Directeur de la Librairie from 1750-1763. The process was this: a book
+was submitted to him; he named a censor for it; on the censor's report
+the director gave or refused permission to print, or required
+alterations. Even after these formalities were complied with, the book
+was liable to a decree of the royal council, a decree of the
+parliament, or else a _lettre-de-cachet_ might send the author to the
+Bastile. See Barbier, vii. 126.
+
+After Lord Shelburne saw Malesherbes, he said, "I have seen for the
+first time in my life what I never thought could exist--a man whose
+soul is absolutely free from hope or fear, and yet who is full of life
+and ardour." Mdlle. Lespinasse's _Lettres_, 90.
+
+[83] See note, p. 132.
+
+[84] _Conf._, xi. 134.
+
+[85] _Conf._, xi. 139.
+
+[86] _Ib._, xi. 139. _Corr._, ii. 270, etc. Dec. 12, 1761, etc.
+
+[87] _Conf._, xi. 150.
+
+[88] Fourth Letter to Malesherbes, p. 377.
+
+[89] With one trifling exception, the Letter to Grimm on the Opera of
+Omphale (1752): _�crits sur la Musique_, p. 337.
+
+[90] See Barbier's Journal, viii. 45 (Ed. Charpentier, 1857). A
+succinct contemporary account of the general situation is to be found
+in D'Alembert's little book, the _Destruction des J�suites_.
+
+[91] Grimm, for instance: _Corr. Lit._, iii. 117.
+
+[92] _Corr._, ii. 337. June 7, 1672. _Conf._, xi. 152, 162.
+
+[93] _Conf._, xi. 162. The Levite's story is to be read in _Judges_,
+ch. xix.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+PERSECUTION.[94]
+
+
+Those to whom life consists in the immediate consciousness of
+their own direct relations with the people and circumstances that are
+in close contact with them, find it hard to follow the moods of a man
+to whom such consciousness is the least part of himself, and such
+relations the least real part of his life. Rousseau was no sooner in
+the post-chaise which was bearing him away towards Switzerland, than
+the troubles of the previous day at once dropped into a pale and
+distant past, and he returned to a world where was neither parliament,
+nor decree for burning books, nor any warrant for personal arrest. He
+took up the thread where harassing circumstances had broken it, and
+again fell musing over the tragic tale of the Levite of Ephraim. His
+dream absorbed him so entirely as to take specific literary form, and
+before the journey was at an end he had composed a long impassioned
+version of the Bible story. Though it has Rousseau's usual fine
+sonorousness in a high degree, no man now reads it; the author himself
+always preserved a certain tenderness for it.[95] The contrast
+between this singular quietism and the angry stir that marked
+Voltaire's many flights in post-chaises, points like all else to the
+profound difference between the pair. Contrast with Voltaire's shrill
+cries under any personal vexation, this calm utterance:--"Though the
+consequences of this affair have plunged me into a gulf of woes from
+which I shall never come up again so long as I live, I bear these
+gentlemen no grudge. I am aware that their object was not to do me any
+harm, but only to reach ends of their own. I know that towards me they
+have neither liking nor hate. I was found in their way, like a pebble
+that you thrust aside with the foot without even looking at it. They
+ought not to say they have performed their duty, but that they have
+done their business."[96] A new note from a persecuted writer.
+
+Rousseau, in spite of the belief which henceforth possessed him that
+he was the victim of a dark unfathomable plot, and in spite of passing
+outbreaks of gloomy rage, was incapable of steady glowing and active
+resentments. The world was not real enough to him for this. A throng
+of phantoms pressed noiselessly before his sight, and dulled all sense
+of more actual impression. "It is amazing," he wrote, "with what ease
+I forget past ill, however fresh it may be. In proportion as the
+anticipation of it alarms and confuses me when I see it coming, so
+the memory of it returns feebly to my mind and dies out the moment
+after it has arrived. My cruel imagination, which torments itself
+incessantly in anticipating woes that are still unborn, makes a
+diversion for my memory, and hinders me from recalling those which
+have gone. I exhaust disaster beforehand. The more I have suffered in
+foreseeing it, the more easily do I forget it; while on the contrary,
+being incessantly busy with my past happiness, I recall it and brood
+and ruminate over it, so as to enjoy it over again whenever I
+wish."[97] The same turn of humour saved him from vindictiveness. "I
+concern myself too little with the offence, to feel much concern about
+the offender. I only think of the hurt that I have received from him,
+on account of the hurt that he may still do me; and if I were sure he
+would do me no more, what he had already done would be forgotten
+straightway." Though he does not carry the analysis any further, we
+may easily perceive that the same explanation covers what he called
+his natural ingratitude. Kindness was not much more vividly understood
+by him than malice. It was only one form of the troublesome
+interposition of an outer world in his life; he was fain to hurry back
+from it to the real world of his dreams. If any man called practical
+is tempted to despise this dreaming creature, as he fares in his
+chaise from stage to stage, let him remember that one making that
+journey through France less than thirty years later might have seen
+the castles of the great flaring in the destruction of a most
+righteous vengeance, the great themselves fleeing ignobly from the
+land to which their selfishness, and heedlessness, and hatred of
+improvement, and inhuman pride had been a curse, while the legion of
+toilers with eyes blinded by the oppression of ages were groping with
+passionate uncertain hand for that divine something which they thought
+of as justice and right. And this was what Rousseau both partially
+foresaw and helped to prepare,[98] while the common politicians, like
+Choiseul or D'Aiguillon, played their poor game--the elemental forces
+rising unseen into tempest around them.
+
+He reached the territory of the canton of Berne, and alighted at the
+house of an old friend at Yverdun,[99] where native air, the beauty of
+the spot, and the charms of the season, immediately repaired all
+weariness and fatigue.[100] Friends at Geneva wrote letters of sincere
+feeling, joyful that he had not followed the precedent of Socrates too
+closely by remaining in the power of a government eager to destroy
+him.[101] A post or two later brought worse news. The Council at
+Geneva ordered not only Emilius, but the Social Contract also, to be
+publicly burnt, and issued a warrant of arrest against their author,
+if he should set foot in the territory of the republic (June
+19).[102] Rousseau could hardly believe it possible that the free
+Government which he had held up to the reverence of Europe, could have
+condemned him unheard, but he took occasion in a highly characteristic
+manner to chide severely a friend at Geneva who had publicly taken his
+part.[103] Within a fortnight this blow was followed by another. His
+two books were reported to the senate of Berne, and Rousseau was
+informed by one of the authorities that a notification was on its way
+admonishing him to quit the canton within the space of fifteen
+days.[104] This stroke he avoided by flight to Motiers, a village in
+the principality of Neuch�tel (July 10), then part of the dominions of
+the King of Prussia.[105] Rousseau had some antipathy to Frederick,
+both because he had beaten the French, whom Rousseau loved, and
+because his maxims and his conduct alike seemed to trample under foot
+respect for the natural law and not a few human duties. He had
+composed a verse to the effect that Frederick thought like a
+philosopher and acted like a king, philosopher and king notoriously
+being words of equally evil sense in his dialect. There was also a
+passage in Emilius about Adrastus, King of the Daunians, which was
+commonly understood to mean Frederick, King of the Prussians. Still
+Rousseau was acute enough to know that mean passions usually only rule
+the weak, and have little hold over the strong. He boldly wrote both
+to the king and to Lord Marischal, the governor of the principality,
+informing them that he was there, and asking permission to remain in
+the only asylum left for him upon the earth.[106] He compared himself
+loftily to Coriolanus among the Volscians, and wrote to the king in a
+vein that must have amused the strong man. "I have said much ill of
+you, perhaps I shall still say more; yet, driven from France, from
+Geneva, from the canton of Berne, I am come to seek shelter in your
+states. Perhaps I was wrong in not beginning there; this is eulogy of
+which you are worthy. Sire, I have deserved no grace from you, and I
+seek none, but I thought it my duty to inform your majesty that I am
+in your power, and that I am so of set design. Your majesty will
+dispose of me as shall seem good to you."[107] Frederick, though no
+admirer of Rousseau or his writings,[108] readily granted the required
+permission. He also, says Lord Marischal, "gave me orders to furnish
+him his small necessaries if he would accept them; and though that
+king's philosophy be very different from that of Jean Jacques, yet he
+does not think that a man of an irreproachable life is to be
+persecuted because his sentiments are singular. He designs to build
+him a hermitage with a little garden, which I find he will not accept,
+nor perhaps the rest, which I have not yet offered him."[109] When the
+offer of the flour, wine, and firewood was at length made in as
+delicate terms as possible, Rousseau declined the gift on grounds
+which may raise a smile, but which are not without a rather touching
+simplicity.[110] "I have enough to live on for two or three years," he
+said, "but if I were dying of hunger, I would rather in the present
+condition of your good prince, and not being of any service to him, go
+and eat grass and grub up roots, than accept a morsel of bread from
+him."[111] Hume might well call this a phenomenon in the world of
+letters, and one very honourable for the person concerned.[112] And we
+recognise its dignity the more when we contrast it with the baseness
+of Voltaire, who drew his pension from the King of Prussia while
+Frederick was in his most urgent straits, and while the poet was
+sportively exulting to all his correspondents in the malicious
+expectation that he would one day have to allow the King of Prussia
+himself a pension.[113] And Rousseau was a poor man, living among the
+poor and in their style. His annual outlay at this time was covered by
+the modest sum of sixty louis.[114] What stamps his refusal of
+Frederick's gifts as true dignity, is the fact that he not only did
+not refuse money for any work done, but expected and asked for it.
+Malesherbes at this very time begged him to collect plants for him.
+Joyfully, replied Rousseau, "but as I cannot subsist without the aid
+of my own labour, I never meant, in spite of the pleasure that it
+might otherwise have been to me, to offer you the use of my time for
+nothing."[115] In the same year, we may add, when the tremendous
+struggle of the Seven Years' War was closing, the philosopher wrote a
+second terse epistle to the king, and with this their direct
+communication came to an end. "Sire, you are my protector and my
+benefactor; I would fain repay you if I can. You wish to give me
+bread; is there none of your own subjects in want of it? Take that
+sword away from my sight, it dazzles and pains me. It has done its
+work only too well; the sceptre is abandoned. Great is the career for
+kings of your stuff, and you are still far from the term; time
+presses, you have not a moment to lose. Fathom well your heart, O
+Frederick! Can you dare to die without having been the greatest of
+men? Would that I could see Frederick, the just and the redoubtable,
+covering his states with multitudes of men to whom he should be a
+father; then will J.J. Rousseau, the foe of kings, hasten to die at
+the foot of his throne."[116] Frederick, strong as his interest was in
+all curious persons who could amuse him, was too busy to answer this,
+and Rousseau was not yet recognised as Voltaire's rival in power and
+popularity.
+
+Motiers is one of the half-dozen decent villages standing in the flat
+bottom of the Val de Travers, a widish valley that lies between the
+gorges of the Jura and the Lake of Neuch�tel, and is famous in our day
+for its production of absinthe and of asphalt. The flat of the valley,
+with the Reuss making a bald and colourless way through the midst of
+it, is nearly treeless, and it is too uniform to be very pleasing. In
+winter the climate is most rigorous, for the level is high, and the
+surrounding hills admit the sun's rays late and cut them off early.
+Rousseau's description, accurate and recognisable as it is,[117]
+strikes an impartial tourist as too favourable. But when a piece of
+scenery is a home to a man, he has an eye for a thousand outlines,
+changes of light, soft variations of colour; the landscape lives for
+him with an unspoken suggestion and intimate association, to all of
+which the swift passing stranger is very cold.
+
+His cottage, which is still shown, was in the midst of the other
+houses, and his walks, which were at least as important to him as the
+home in which he dwelt, lay mostly among woody heights with streaming
+cascades. The country abounded in natural curiosities of a humble
+sort, and here that interest in plants which had always been strong in
+him, began to grow into a passion. Rousseau had so curious a feeling
+about them, that when in his botanical expeditions he came across a
+single flower of its kind, he could never bring himself to pluck it.
+His sight, though not good for distant objects, was of the very finest
+for things held close; his sense of smell was so acute and subtle
+that, according to a good witness, he might have classified plants by
+odours, if language furnished as many names as nature supplies
+varieties of fragrance.[118] He insisted in all botanising and other
+walking excursions on going bareheaded, even in the heat of the
+dog-days; he declared that the action of the sun did him good. When
+the days began to turn, the summer was straightway at an end for him:
+"My imagination," he said, in a phrase which went further through his
+life than he supposed, "at once brings winter." He hated rain as much
+as he loved sun, so he must once have lost all the mystic fascination
+of the green Savoy lakes gleaming luminous through pale showers, and
+now again must have lost the sombre majesty of the pines of his valley
+dripping in torn edges of cloud, and all those other sights in
+landscape that touch subtler parts of us than comforted sense.
+
+One of his favourite journeys was to Colombier, the summer retreat of
+Lord Marischal. For him he rapidly conceived the same warm friendship
+which he felt for the Duke of Luxembourg, whom he had just left. And
+the sagacious, moderate, silent Scot had as warm a liking for the
+strange refugee who had come to him for shelter, or shall we call it a
+kind of shaggy compassion, as of a faithful inarticulate creature. His
+letters, which are numerous enough, abound in expressions of hearty
+good-will. These, if we reflect on the genuine worth, veracity,
+penetration, and experience of the old man who wrote them, may fairly
+be counted the best testimony that remains to the existence of
+something sterling at the bottom of Rousseau's character.[119] It is
+here no insincere fine lady of the French court, but a homely and
+weather-beaten Scotchman, who speaks so often of his refugee's
+rectitude of heart and true sensibility.[120]
+
+He insisted on being allowed to settle a small sum on Theresa, who
+had joined Rousseau at Motiers, and in other ways he showed a true
+solicitude and considerateness both for her and for him.[121] It was
+his constant dream, that on his return to Scotland, Jean Jacques
+should accompany him, and that with David Hume, they would make a trio
+of philosophic hermits; that this was no mere cheery pleasantry is
+shown by the pains he took in settling the route for the journey.[122]
+The plan only fell through in consequence of Frederick's cordial
+urgency that his friend should end his days with him; he returned to
+Prussia and lived at Sans Souci until the close, always retaining
+something of his good-will for "his excellent savage," as he called
+the author of the Discourses. They had some common antipathies,
+including the fundamental one of dislike to society, and especially to
+the society of the people of Neuch�tel, the Gascons of Switzerland.
+"Rousseau is gay in company," Lord Marischal wrote to Hume, "polite,
+and what the French call _aimable_, and gains ground daily in the
+opinion of even the clergy here. His enemies elsewhere continue to
+persecute him, and he is pestered with anonymous letters."[123]
+
+Some of these were of a humour that disclosed the master hand.
+Voltaire had been universally suspected of stirring up the feeling of
+Geneva against its too famous citizen,[124] though for a man of less
+energy the affair of the Calas, which he was now in the thick of,
+might have sufficed. Voltaire's letters at this time show how hard he
+found it in the case of Rousseau to exercise his usual pity for the
+unfortunate. He could not forget that the man who was now tasting
+persecution had barked at philosophers and stage-plays; that he was a
+false brother, who had fatuously insulted the only men who could take
+his part; that he was a Judas who had betrayed the sacred cause.[125]
+On the whole, however, we ought probably to accept his word, though
+not very categorically given,[126] that he had nothing to do with the
+action taken against Rousseau. That action is quite adequately
+explained, first by the influence of the resident of France at Geneva,
+which we know to have been exerted against the two fatal books,[127]
+and second by the anxiety of the oligarchic party to keep out of their
+town a man whose democratic tendencies they now knew so well and so
+justly dreaded.[128] Moultou, a Genevese minister, in the full tide
+of devotion and enthusiasm for the author of Emilius, met Voltaire at
+the house of a lady in Geneva. All will turn out well, cried the
+patriarch; "the syndics will say M. Rousseau, you have done ill to
+write what you have written; promise for the future to respect the
+religion of your country. Jean Jacques will promise, and perhaps he
+will say that the printer took the liberty of adding a sheet or two to
+his book." "Never," cried the ardent Moultou; "Jean Jacques never puts
+his name to works to disown them after."[129] Voltaire disowned his
+own books with intrepid and sustained mendacity, yet he bore no grudge
+to Moultou for his vehemence. He sent for him shortly afterwards,
+professed an extreme desire to be reconciled with Rousseau, and would
+talk of nothing else. "I swear to you," wrote Moultou, "that I could
+not understand him the least in the world; he is a marvellous actor; I
+could have sworn that he loved you."[130] And there really was no
+acting in it. The serious Genevese did not see that he was dealing
+with "one all fire and fickleness, a child."
+
+Rousseau soon found out that he had excited not only the band of
+professed unbelievers, but also the tormenting wasps of orthodoxy. The
+doctors of the Sorbonne, not to be outdone in fervour for truth by the
+lawyers of the parliament, had condemned Emilius as a matter of
+course. In the same spirit of generous emulation, Christopher de
+Beaumont, "by the divine compassion archbishop of Paris, Duke of Saint
+Cloud, peer of France, commander of the order of the Holy Ghost," had
+issued (Aug. 20, 1762) one of those hateful documents in which
+bishops, Catholic and Protestant, have been wont for the last century
+and a half to hide with swollen bombastic phrase their dead and
+decomposing ideas. The windy folly of these poor pieces is usually in
+proportion to the hierarchic rank of those who promulgate them, and an
+archbishop owes it to himself to blaspheme against reason and freedom
+in superlatives of malignant unction. Rousseau's reply (Nov. 18, 1762)
+is a masterpiece of dignity and uprightness. Turning to it from the
+mandate which was its provocative, we seem to grasp the hand of a man,
+after being chased by a nightmare of masked figures. Rousseau never
+showed the substantial quality of his character more surely and
+unmistakably than in controversy. He had such gravity, such austere
+self-command, such closeness of grip. Most of us feel pleasure in
+reading the matchless banter with which Voltaire assailed his
+theological enemies. Reading Rousseau's letter to De Beaumont we
+realise the comparative lowness of the pleasure which Voltaire had
+given us. We understand how it was that Rousseau made fanatics, while
+Voltaire only made sceptics. At the very first words, the mitre, the
+crosier, the ring, fall into the dust; the Archbishop of Paris, the
+Duke of Saint Cloud, the peer of France, the commander of the Holy
+Ghost, is restored from the disguises of his enchantment, and becomes
+a human being. We hear the voice of a man hailing a man. Voltaire
+often sank to the level of ecclesiastics. Rousseau raised the
+archbishop to his own level, and with magnanimous courtesy addressed
+him as an equal. "Why, my lord, have I anything to say to you? What
+common tongue can we use? How are we to understand one another? And
+what is there between me and you?" And he persevered in this distant
+lofty vein, hardly permitting himself a single moment of acerbity. We
+feel the ever-inspiring breath of seriousness and sincerity. This was
+because, as we repeat so often, Rousseau's ideas, all engendered of
+dreams as they were, yet lived in him and were truly rooted in his
+character. He did not merely say, as any of us can say so fluently,
+that he craved reality in human relations, that distinctions of rank
+and post count for nothing, that our lives are in our own hands and
+ought not to be blown hither and thither by outside opinion and words
+heedlessly scattered; that our faith, whatever it may be, is the most
+sacred of our possessions, organic, indissoluble, self-sufficing; that
+our passage across the world, if very short, is yet too serious to be
+wasted in frivolous disrespect for ourselves, and angry disrespect for
+others. All this was actually his mind. And hence the little
+difficulty he had in keeping his retort to the archbishop, as to his
+other antagonists, on a worthy level.
+
+Only once or twice does his sense of the reckless injustice with which
+he had been condemned, and of the persecution which was inflicted on
+him by one government after another, stir in him a blaze of high
+remonstrance. "You accuse me of temerity," he cried; "how have I
+earned such a name, when I only propounded difficulties, and even that
+with so much reserve; when I only advanced reasons, and even that with
+so much respect; when I attacked no one, nor even named one? And you,
+my lord, how do you dare to reproach with temerity a man of whom you
+speak with such scanty justice and so little decency, with so small
+respect and so much levity? You call me impious, and of what impiety
+can you accuse me--me who never spoke of the Supreme Being except to
+pay him the honour and glory that are his due, nor of man except to
+persuade all men to love one another? The impious are those who
+unworthily profane the cause of God by making it serve the passions of
+men. The impious are those who, daring to pass for the interpreters of
+divinity, and judges between it and man, exact for themselves the
+honours that are due to it only. The impious are those who arrogate to
+themselves the right of exercising the power of God upon earth, and
+insist on opening and shutting the gates of heaven at their own good
+will and pleasure. The impious are those who have libels read in the
+church. At this horrible idea my blood is enkindled, and tears of
+indignation fall from my eyes. Priests of the God of peace, you shall
+render an account one day, be very sure, of the use to which you have
+dared to put his house.... My lord, you have publicly insulted me:
+you are now convicted of heaping calumny upon me. If you were a
+private person like myself, so that I could cite you before an
+equitable tribunal, and we could both appear before it, I with my
+book, and you with your mandate, assuredly you would be declared
+guilty; you would be condemned to make reparation as public as the
+wrong was public. But you belong to a rank that relieves you from the
+necessity of being just, and I am nothing. Yet you who profess the
+gospel, you, a prelate appointed to teach others their duty, you know
+what your own duty is in such a case. Mine I have done: I have nothing
+more to say to you, and I hold my peace."[131]
+
+The letter was as good in dialectic as it was in moral tone. For this
+is a little curious, that Rousseau, so diffuse in expounding his
+opinions, and so unscientific in his method of coming to them, should
+have been one of the keenest and most trenchant of the
+controversialists of a very controversial time. Some of his strokes in
+defence of his first famous assault on civilisation are as hard, as
+direct, and as effective as any in the records of polemical
+literature. We will give one specimen from the letter to the
+Archbishop of Paris; it has the recommendation of touching an argument
+that is not yet quite universally recognised for slain. The Savoyard
+Vicar had dwelt on the difficulty of accepting revelation as the voice
+of God, on account of the long distance of time between us, and the
+questionableness of the supporting testimony. To which the archbishop
+thus:--"But is there not then an infinity of facts, even earlier than
+those of the Christian revelation, which it would be absurd to doubt?
+By what way other than that of human testimony has our author himself
+known the Sparta, the Athens, the Rome, whose laws, manners, and
+heroes he extols with such assurance? How many generations of men
+between him and the historians who have preserved the memory of these
+events?" First, says Rousseau in answer, "it is in the order of things
+that human circumstances should be attested by human evidence, and
+they can be attested in no other way. I can only know that Rome and
+Sparta existed, because contemporaries assure me that they existed. In
+such a case this intermediate communication is indispensable. But why
+is it necessary between God and me? Is it simple or natural that God
+should have gone in search of Moses to speak to Jean Jacques Rousseau?
+Second, nobody is obliged to believe that Sparta once existed, and
+nobody will be devoured by eternal flames for doubting it. Every fact
+of which we are not witnesses is only established by moral proofs, and
+moral proofs have various degrees of strength. Will the divine justice
+hurl me into hell for missing the exact point at which a proof becomes
+irresistible? If there is in the world an attested story, it is that
+of vampires; nothing is wanting for judicial proof,--reports and
+certificates from notables, surgeons, clergy, magistrates. But who
+believes in vampires, and shall we all be damned for not believing?
+Third, _my constant experience and that of all men is stronger in
+reference to prodigies than the testimony of some men_."
+
+He then strikes home with a parable. The Abb� P�ris had died in the
+odour of Jansenist sanctity (1727), and extraordinary doings went on
+at his tomb; the lame walked, men and women sick of the palsy were
+made whole, and so forth. Suppose, says Rousseau, that an inhabitant
+of the Rue St. Jacques speaks thus to the Archbishop of Paris, "My
+lord, I know that you neither believe in the beatitude of St. Jean de
+P�ris, nor in the miracles which God has been pleased publicly to work
+upon his tomb in the sight of the most enlightened and most populous
+city in the world; but I feel bound to testify to you that I have just
+seen the saint in person raised from the dead in the spot where his
+bones were laid." The man of the Rue St. Jacques gives all the detail
+of such a circumstance that could strike a beholder. "I am persuaded
+that on hearing such strange news, you will begin by interrogating him
+who testifies to its truth, as to his position, his feelings, his
+confessor, and other such points; and when from his air, as from his
+speech, you have perceived that he is a poor workman, and when having
+no confessional ticket to show you, he has confirmed your notion that
+he is a Jansenist, Ah, ah, you will say to him, you are a
+convulsionary, and have seen Saint P�ris resuscitated. There is
+nothing wonderful in that; you have seen so many other wonders!" The
+man would insist that the miracle had been seen equally by a number of
+other people, who though Jansenists, it is true, were persons of sound
+sense, good character, and excellent reputation. Some would send the
+man to Bedlam, "but you after a grave reprimand, will be content with
+saying: I know that two or three witnesses, good people and of sound
+sense, may attest the life or the death of a man, but I do not know
+how many more are needed to establish the resurrection of a Jansenist.
+Until I find that out, go, my son, and try to strengthen your brain: I
+give you a dispensation from fasting, and here is something for you to
+make your broth with. That is what you would say, and what any other
+sensible man would say in your place. Whence I conclude that even
+according to you and to every other sensible man, the moral proofs
+which are sufficient to establish facts that are in the order of moral
+possibilities, are not sufficient to establish facts of another order
+and purely supernatural."[132]
+
+Perhaps, however, the formal denunciation by the Archbishop of Paris
+was less vexatious than the swarming of the angrier hive of ministers
+at his gates. "If I had declared for atheism," he says bitterly, "they
+would at first have shrieked, but they would soon have left me in
+peace like the rest. The people of the Lord would not have kept watch
+over me; everybody would not have thought he was doing me a high
+favour in not treating me as a person cut off from communion, and I
+should have been quits with all the world. The holy women in Israel
+would not have written me anonymous letters, and their charity would
+not have breathed devout insults. They would not have taken the
+trouble to assure me in all humility of heart that I was a castaway,
+an execrable monster, and that the world would have been well off if
+some good soul had been at the pains to strangle me in my cradle.
+Worthy people on their side would not torment themselves and torment
+me to bring me back to the way of salvation; they would not charge at
+me from right and left, nor stifle me under the weight of their
+sermons, nor force me to bless their zeal while I cursed their
+importunity, nor to feel with gratitude that they are obeying a call
+to lay me in my very grave with weariness."[133]
+
+He had done his best to conciliate the good opinion of his vigilant
+neighbours. Their character for contentious orthodoxy was well known.
+It was at Neuch�tel that the controversy as to the eternal punishment
+of the wicked raged with a fury that ended in a civil outbreak. The
+peace of the town was violently disturbed, ministers were suspended,
+magistrates were interdicted, life was lost, until at last Frederick
+promulgated his famous bull:--"Let the parsons who make for themselves
+a cruel and barbarous God, be eternally damned as they desire and
+deserve; and let those parsons who conceive God gentle and merciful,
+enjoy the plenitude of his mercy."[134] When Rousseau came within the
+territory, preparations were made to imitate the action of Paris,
+Geneva, and Berne. It was only the king's express permission that
+saved him from a fourth proscription. The minister at Motiers was of
+the less inhuman stamp, and Rousseau, feeling that he could not,
+without failing in his engagements and his duty as a citizen, neglect
+the public profession of the faith to which he had been restored eight
+years before, attended the religious services with regularity. He even
+wrote to the pastor a letter in vindication of his book, and
+protesting the sincerity of his union with the reformed
+congregation.[135] The result of this was that the pastor came to tell
+him how great an honour he held it to count such a member in his
+flock, and how willing he was to admit him without further examination
+to partake of the communion.[136] Rousseau went to the ceremony with
+eyes full of tears and a heart swelling with emotion. We may respect
+his mood as little or as much as we please, but it was certainly more
+edifying than the sight of Voltaire going through the same rite,
+merely to harass a priest and fill a bishop with fury.
+
+In all other respects he lived a harmless life during the three years
+of his sojourn in the Val de Travers. As he could never endure what he
+calls the inactive chattering of the parlour--people sitting in front
+of one another with folded hands and nothing in motion except the
+tongue--he learnt the art of making laces; he used to carry his pillow
+about with him, or sat at his own door working like the women of the
+village, and chatting with the passers-by. He made presents of his
+work to young women about to marry, always on the condition that they
+should suckle their children when they came to have them. If a little
+whimsical, it was a harmless and respectable pastime. It is pleasanter
+to think of a philosopher finding diversion in weaving laces, than of
+noblemen making it the business of their lives to run after ribands. A
+society clothed in breeches was incensed about the same time by
+Rousseau's adoption of the Armenian costume, the vest, the furred
+bonnet, the caftan, and the girdle. There was nothing very wonderful
+in this departure from use. An Armenian tailor used often to visit
+some friends at Montmorency. Rousseau knew him, and reflected that
+such a dress would be of singular comfort to him in the circumstances
+of his bodily disorder.[137] Here was a solid practical reason for
+what has usually been counted a demonstration of a turned brain.
+Rousseau had as good cause for going about in a caftan as Chatham had
+for coming to the House of Parliament wrapped in flannel. Vanity and a
+desire to attract notice may, we admit, have had something to do with
+Rousseau's adoption of an uncommon way of dressing. Shrewd wits like
+the Duke of Luxembourg and his wife did not suppose that it was so.
+We, living a hundred years after, cannot possibly know whether it was
+so or not, and our estimate of Rousseau's strange character would be
+very little worth forming, if it only turned on petty singularities of
+this kind. The foolish, equivocally gifted with the quality of
+articulate speech, may, if they choose, satisfy their own self-love by
+reducing all action out of the common course to a series of variations
+on the same motive in others. Men blessed by the benignity of
+experience will be thankful not to waste life in guessing evil about
+unknowable trifles.
+
+During his stay at Motiers Rousseau's time was hardly ever his own.
+Visitors of all nations, drawn either by respect for his work or by
+curiosity to see a man who had been prescribed by so many governments,
+came to him in throngs. His partisans at Geneva insisted on sending
+people to convince themselves how good a man they were persecuting. "I
+had never been free from strangers for six weeks," he writes. "Two
+days after, I had a Westphalian gentleman and one from Genoa; six days
+later, two persons from Zurich, who stayed a week; then a Genevese,
+recovering from an illness, and coming for change of air, fell ill
+again, and he has only just gone away."[138] One visitor, writing home
+to his wife of the philosopher to whom he had come on a pilgrimage,
+describes his manners in terms which perhaps touch us with
+surprise:--"Thou hast no idea how charming his society is, what true
+politeness there is in his manners, what a depth of serenity and
+cheerfulness in his talk. Didst thou not expect quite a different
+picture, and figure to thyself an eccentric creature, always grave and
+sometimes even abrupt? Ah, what a mistake! To an expression of great
+mildness he unites a glance of fire, and eyes of a vivacity the like
+of which never was seen. When you handle any matter in which he takes
+an interest, then his eyes, his lips, his hands, everything about him
+speaks. You would be quite wrong to picture in him an everlasting
+grumbler. Not at all; he laughs with those who laugh, he chats and
+jokes with children, he rallies his housekeeper."[139] He was not so
+civil to all the world, and occasionally turned upon his pursuers with
+a word of most sardonic roughness.[140] But he could also be very
+generous. We find him pressing a loan from his scanty store on an
+outcast adventurer, and warning him, "When I lend (which happens
+rarely enough), 'tis my constant maxim never to count on repayment,
+nor to exact it."[141] He received hundreds of letters, some seeking
+an application of his views on education to a special case, others
+craving further exposition of his religious doctrines. Before he had
+been at Motiers nine months he had paid ten louis for the postage of
+letters, which after all contained little more than reproaches,
+insults, menaces, imbecilities.[142]
+
+Not the least curious of his correspondence at this time is that with
+the Prince of W�rtemberg, then living near Lausanne.[143] The prince
+had a little daughter four months old, and he was resolved that her
+upbringing should be carried on as the author of Emilius might please
+to direct. Rousseau replied courteously that he did not pretend to
+direct the education of princes or princesses.[144] His undaunted
+correspondent sent him full details of his babe's habits and
+faculties, and continued to do so at short intervals, with the
+fondness of a young mother or an old nurse. Rousseau was interested,
+and took some trouble to draw up rules for the child's nurture and
+admonition. One may smile now and then at the prince's ingenuous zeal,
+but his fervid respect and devotion for the teacher in whom he thought
+he had found the wisest man that ever lived, and who had at any rate
+spoken the word that kindled the love of virtue and truth in him, his
+eagerness to know what Rousseau thought right, and his equal eagerness
+in trying to do it, his care to arrange his household in a simple and
+methodical way to please his master, his discipular patience when
+Rousseau told him that his verses were poor, or that he was too fond
+of his wife,--all this is a little uncommon in a prince, and deserves
+a place among the ample mass of other evidence of the power which
+Rousseau's pictures of domestic simplicity and wise and humane
+education had in the eighteenth century. It gives us a glimpse, close
+and direct, of the naturalist revival reaching up into high places.
+But the trade of philosopher in such times is perhaps an irksome one,
+and Rousseau was the private victim of his public action. His prince
+sent multitudes of Germans to visit the sage, and his letters, endless
+with their details of the nursery, may well have become a little
+tedious to a worn-out creature who only wanted to be left alone.[145]
+The famous Prince Henry, Frederick's brother, thought a man happy who
+could have the delight of seeing Rousseau as often as he chose.[146]
+People forgot the other side of this delight, and the unlucky
+philosopher found in a hundred ways alike from enemies and the friends
+whose curiosity makes them as bad as enemies, that the pedestal of
+glory partakes of the nature of the pillory or the stocks.
+
+It is interesting to find the famous English names of Gibbon and
+Boswell in the list of the multitudes with whom he had to do at this
+time.[147] The former was now at Lausanne, whither he had just
+returned from that memorable visit to England which persuaded him that
+his father would never endure his alliance with the daughter of an
+obscure Swiss pastor. He had just "yielded to his fate, sighed as a
+lover, and obeyed as a son." "How sorry I am for our poor Mademoiselle
+Curchod," writes Moultou to Rousseau; "Gibbon whom she loves, and to
+whom she has sacrificed, as I know, some excellent matches, has come
+to Lausanne, but cold, insensible, and as entirely cured of his old
+passion as she is far from cure. She has written me a letter that
+makes my heart ache." He then entreats Rousseau to use his influence
+with Gibbon, who is on the point of starting for Motiers, by extolling
+to him the lady's worth and understanding.[148] "I hope Mr. Gibbon
+will not come," replied the sage; "his coldness makes me think ill of
+him. I have been looking over his book again [the _Essai sur l'�tude
+de la litt�rature_, 1761]; he runs after brilliance too much, and is
+strained and stilted. Mr. Gibbon is not the man for me, and I do not
+think he is the man for Mademoiselle Curchod either."[149] Whether
+Gibbon went or not, we do not know. He knew in after years what had
+been said of him by Jean Jacques, and protested with mild pomp that
+this extraordinary man should have been less precipitate in
+condemning the moral character and the conduct of a stranger.[150]
+
+Boswell, as we know, had left Johnson "rolling his majestic frame in
+his usual manner" on Harwich beach in 1763, and was now on his
+travels. Like many of his countrymen, he found his way to Lord
+Marischal, and here his indomitable passion for making the personal
+acquaintance of any one who was much talked about, naturally led him
+to seek so singular a character as the man who was now at Motiers.
+What Rousseau thought of one who was as singular a character as
+himself in another direction, we do not know.[151] Lord Marischal
+warned Rousseau that his visitor is of excellent disposition, but full
+of visionary ideas, even having seen spirits--a serious proof of
+unsoundness to a man who had lived in the very positive atmosphere of
+Frederick's court at Berlin. "I only hope," says the sage Scot, of the
+Scot who was not sage, "that he may not fall into the hands of people
+who will turn his head: he was very pleased with the reception you
+gave him."[152] As it happens, he was the means of sending Boswell to
+a place where his head was turned, though not very mischievously.
+Rousseau was at that time full of Corsican projects, of which this is
+the proper place for us very briefly to speak.
+
+The prolonged struggles of the natives of Corsica to assert their
+independence of the oppressive administration of the Genoese, which
+had begun in 1729, came to end for a moment in 1755, when Paoli
+(1726-1807) defeated the Genoese, and proceeded to settle the
+government of the island. In the Social Contract Rousseau had said,
+"There is still in Europe one country capable of legislation, and that
+is the island of Corsica. The valour and constancy with which this
+brave people has succeeded in recovering and defending its liberty,
+entitle it to the good fortune of having some wise man to teach them
+how to preserve it. I have a presentiment that this little isle will
+one day astonish Europe,"[153]--a presentiment that in a sense came
+true enough long after Rousseau was gone, in a man who was born on the
+little island seven years later than the publication of this passage.
+Some of the Corsican leaders were highly flattered, and in August
+1764, Buttafuoco entered into correspondence with Rousseau for the
+purpose of inducing him to draw up a set of political institutions and
+a code of laws. Paoli himself was too shrewd to have much belief in
+the application of ideal systems, and we are assured that he had no
+intention of making Rousseau the Solon of his island, but only of
+inducing him to inflame the gallantry of its inhabitants by writing a
+history of their exploits.[154] Rousseau, however, did not understand
+the invitation in this narrower sense. He replied that the very idea
+of such a task as legislation transported his soul, and he entered
+into it with the liveliest ardour. He resolved to quarter himself with
+Theresa in a cottage in some lonely district in the island; in a year
+he would collect the necessary information as to the manners and
+opinions of the inhabitants, and three years afterwards he would
+produce a set of institutions that should be fit for a free and
+valorous people.[155] In the midst of this enthusiasm (May 1765) he
+urged Boswell to visit Corsica, and gave him a letter to Paoli, with
+results which we know in the shape of an Account of Corsica (1768),
+and in a feverishness of imagination upon the subject for many a long
+day afterwards. "Mind your own affairs," at length cried Johnson
+sternly to him, "and leave the Corsicans to theirs; I wish you would
+empty your head of Corsica."[156] At the end of 1765, the immortal
+hero-worshipper on his return expected to come upon his hero at
+Motiers, but finding that he was in Paris wrote him a wonderful letter
+in wonderful French. "You will forget all your cares for many an
+evening, while I tell you what I have seen. I owe you the deepest
+obligation for sending me to Corsica. The voyage has done me
+marvellous good. It has made me as if all the lives of Plutarch had
+sunk into my soul.... I am devoted to the Corsicans heart and soul; if
+you, illustrious Rousseau, the philosopher whom they have chosen to
+help them by your lights to preserve and enjoy the liberty which they
+have acquired with so much heroism--if you have cooled towards these
+gallant islanders, why then I am sorry for you, that is all I can
+say."[157]
+
+Alas, by this time the gallant islanders had been driven out of
+Rousseau's mind by personal mishaps. First, Voltaire or some other
+enemy had spread the rumour that the invitation to become the Lycurgus
+of Corsica was a practical joke, and Rousseau's suspicious temper
+found what he took for confirmation of this in some trifling incidents
+with which we certainly need not concern ourselves.[158] Next, a very
+real storm had burst upon him which drove him once more to seek a new
+place of shelter, other than an island occupied by French troops. For
+France having begun by despatching auxiliaries to the assistance of
+the Genoese (1764), ended by buying the island from the Genoese
+senate, with a sort of equity of redemption (1768)--an iniquitous
+transaction, as Rousseau justly called it, equally shocking to
+justice, humanity, reason, and policy.[159] Civilisation would have
+been saved one of its sorest trials if Genoa could have availed
+herself of her equity, and so have delivered France from the
+acquisition of the most terrible citizen that ever scourged a
+state.[160]
+
+The condemnation of Rousseau by the Council in 1762 had divided Geneva
+into two camps, and was followed by a prolonged contention between his
+partisans and his enemies. The root of the contention was political
+rather than theological. To take Rousseau's side was to protest
+against the oligarchic authority which had condemned him, and the
+quarrel about Emilius was only an episode in the long war between the
+popular and aristocratic parties. This strife, after coming to a
+height for the first time in 1734, had abated after the pacification
+of 1738, but the pacification was only effective for a time, and the
+roots of division were still full of vitality. The lawfulness of the
+authority and the regularity of the procedure by which Rousseau had
+been condemned, offered convenient ground for carrying on the dispute,
+and its warmth was made more intense by the suggestion on the popular
+side that perhaps the religion of the book which the oligarchs had
+condemned was more like Christianity than the religion of the
+oligarchs who condemned it.
+
+Rousseau was too near the scene of the quarrel, too directly involved
+in its issues, too constantly in contact with the people who were
+engaged in it, not to feel the angry buzzings very close about his
+ears. If he had been as collected and as self-possessed as he loved to
+fancy, they would have gone for very little in the life of the day.
+But Rousseau never stood on the heights whence a strong man surveys
+with clear eye and firm soul the unjust or mean or furious moods of
+the world. Such achievement is not hard for the creature who is
+wrapped up in himself; who is careless of the passions of men about
+him, because he thinks they cannot hurt him, and not because he has
+measured them, and deliberately assigned them a place among the
+elements in which a man's destiny is cast. It is only hard for one who
+is penetrated by true interest in the opinion and action of his
+fellows, thus to keep both sympathy warm and self-sufficience true.
+The task was too hard for Rousseau, though his patience under long
+persecution far surpassed that of any of the other oppressed teachers
+of the time. In the spring of 1763 he deliberately renounced in all
+due forms his rights of burgess-ship and citizenship in the city and
+republic of Geneva.[161] And at length he broke forth against his
+Genevese persecutors in the Letters from the Mountain (1764), a long
+but extremely vigorous and adroit rejoinder to the pleas which his
+enemies had put forth in Tronchin's Letters from the Country. If any
+one now cares to satisfy himself how really unjust and illegal the
+treatment was, which Rousseau received at the hands of the authorities
+of his native city, he may do so by examining these most forcible
+letters. The second part of them may interest the student of political
+history by its account of the working of the institutions of the
+little republic. We seem to be reading over again the history of a
+Greek city; the growth of a wealthy class in face of an increasing
+number of poor burgesses, the imposition of burdens in unfair
+proportions upon the metoikoi, the gradual usurpation of legislative
+and administrative function (including especially the judicial) by the
+oligarchs, and the twisting of democratic machinery to oligarchic
+ends; then the growth of staseis or violent factions, followed by
+metabol� or overthrow of the established constitution, ending in
+foreign intervention. The Four Hundred at Athens would have treated
+any Social Contract that should have appeared in their day, just as
+sternly as the Two Hundred or the Twenty-five treated the Social
+Contract that did appear, and for just the same reasons.
+
+Rousseau proved his case with redundancy of demonstration. A body of
+burgesses had previously availed themselves (Nov. 1763) of a legal
+right, and made a technical representation to the Lesser Council that
+the laws had been broken in his case. The Council in return availed
+itself of an equally legal right, its _droit n�gatif_, and declined to
+entertain the representation, without giving any reasons.
+Unfortunately for Rousseau's comfort, the ferment which his new
+vindication of his cause stirred up, did not end with the condemnation
+and burning of his manifesto. For the parliament of Paris ordered the
+Letters from the Mountain to be burned, and the same decree and the
+same faggot served for that and for Voltaire's Philosophical
+Dictionary (April 1765).[162] It was also burned at the Hague (Jan.
+22). An observer by no means friendly to the priests noticed that at
+Paris it was not the fanatics of orthodoxy, but the encyclop�dists and
+their flock, who on this occasion raised the storm and set the zeal of
+the magistrates in motion.[163] The vanity and egoism of rationalistic
+sects can be as fatal to candour, justice, and compassion as the
+intolerant pride of the great churches.
+
+Persecution came nearer to Rousseau and took more inconvenient shapes
+than this. A terrible libel appeared (Feb. 1765), full of the coarsest
+calumnies. Rousseau, stung by their insolence and falseness, sent it
+to Paris to be published there with a prefatory note, stating that it
+was by a Genevese pastor whom he named. This landed him in fresh
+mortification, for the pastor disavowed the libel, Rousseau declined
+to accept the disavowal, and sensible men were wearied by acrimonious
+declarations, explanations, protests.[164] Then the clergy of
+Neuch�tel were not able any longer to resist the opportunity of
+inflicting such torments as they could, upon a heretic whom they might
+more charitably have left to those ultimate and everlasting torments
+which were so precious to their religious imagination. They began to
+press the pastor of the village where Rousseau lived, and with whom he
+had hitherto been on excellent terms. The pastor, though he had been
+liberal enough to admit his singular parishioner to the communion, in
+spite of the Savoyard Vicar, was not courageous enough to resist the
+bigotry of the professional body to which he belonged. He warned
+Rousseau not to present himself at the next communion. The philosopher
+insisted that he had a right to do this, until formally cast out by
+the consistory. The consistory, composed mainly of a body of peasants
+entirely bound to their minister in matters of religion, cited him to
+appear, and answer such questions as might test his loyalty to the
+faith. Rousseau prepared a most deliberate vindication of all that he
+had written, which he intended to speak to his rustic judges. The eve
+of the morning on which he had to appear, he knew his discourse by
+heart; when morning came he could not repeat two sentences. So he fell
+back on the instrument over which he had more mastery than he had over
+tongue or memory, and wrote what he wished to say. The pastor, in whom
+irritated egoism was probably by this time giving additional heat to
+professional zeal, was for fulminating a decree of excommunication,
+but there appears to have been some indirect interference with the
+proceedings of the consistory by the king's officials at Neuch�tel,
+and the ecclesiastical bolt was held back.[165] Other weapons were not
+wanting. The pastor proceeded to spread rumours among his flock that
+Rousseau was a heretic, even an atheist, and most prodigious of all,
+that he had written a book containing the monstrous doctrine that
+women have no souls. The pulpit resounded with sermons proving to the
+honest villagers that antichrist was quartered in their parish in very
+flesh. The Armenian apparel gave a high degree of plausibleness to
+such an opinion, and as the wretched man went by the door of his
+neighbours, he heard cursing and menace, while a hostile pebble now
+and again whistled past his ear. His botanising expeditions were
+believed to be devoted to search for noxious herbs, and a man who
+died in the agonies of nephritic colic, was supposed to have been
+poisoned by him.[166] If persons went to the post-office for letters
+for him, they were treated with insult.[167] At length the ferment
+against him grew hot enough to be serious. A huge block of stone was
+found placed so as to kill him when he opened his door; and one night
+an attempt was made to stone him in his house.[168] Popular hate shown
+with this degree of violence was too much for his fortitude, and after
+a residence of rather more than three years (September 8-10, 1765), he
+fled from the inhospitable valley to seek refuge he knew not where.
+
+In his rambles of a previous summer he had seen a little island in the
+lake of Bienne, which struck his imagination and lived in his memory.
+Thither he now, after a moment of hesitation, turned his steps, with
+something of the same instinct as draws a child towards a beam of the
+sun. He forgot or was heedless of the circumstance that the isle of
+St. Peter lay in the jurisdiction of the canton of Berne, whose
+government had forbidden him their territory. Strong craving for a
+little ease in the midst of his wretchedness extinguished thought of
+jurisdictions and proscriptive decrees.
+
+The spot where he now found peace for a brief space usually
+disappoints the modern hunter for the picturesque, who after wearying
+himself with the follies of a capital seeks the most violent tonic
+that he can find in the lonely terrors of glacier and peak, and sees
+only tameness in a pygmy island, that offers nothing sublimer than a
+high grassy terrace, some cool over-branching avenues, some mimic
+vales, and meadows and vineyards sloping down to the sheet of blue
+water at their feet. Yet, as one sits here on a summer day, with tired
+mowers sleeping on their grass heaps in the sun, in a stillness
+faintly broken by the timid lapping of the water in the sedge, or the
+rustling of swift lizards across the heated sand, while the Bernese
+snow giants line a distant horizon with mysterious solitary shapes, it
+is easy to know what solace life in such a scene might bring to a man
+distracted by pain of body and pain and weariness of soul. Rousseau
+has commemorated his too short sojourn here in the most perfect of all
+his compositions.[169]
+
+     "I found my existence so charming, and led a life so
+     agreeable to my humour, that I resolved here to end my days.
+     My only source of disquiet was whether I should be allowed
+     to carry my project out. In the midst of the presentiments
+     that disturbed me, I would fain have had them make a
+     perpetual prison of my refuge, to confine me in it for all
+     the rest of my life. I longed for them to cut off all chance
+     and all hope of leaving it; to forbid me holding any
+     communication with the mainland, so that, knowing nothing
+     of what was going on in the world, I might have forgotten
+     the world's existence, and people might have forgotten mine
+     too. They only suffered me to pass two months in the island,
+     but I could have passed two years, two centuries, and all
+     eternity, without a moment's weariness, though I had not,
+     with my companion, any other society than that of the
+     steward, his wife, and their servants. They were in truth
+     honest souls and nothing more, but that was just what I
+     wanted.... Carried thither in a violent hurry, alone and
+     without a thing, I afterwards sent for my housekeeper, my
+     books, and my scanty possessions, of which I had the delight
+     of unpacking nothing, leaving my boxes and chests just as
+     they had come, and dwelling in the house where I counted on
+     ending my days, exactly as if it were an inn whence I must
+     needs set forth on the morrow. All things went so well, just
+     as they were, that to think of ordering them better were to
+     spoil them. One of my greatest joys was to leave my books
+     safely fastened up in their boxes, and to be without even a
+     case for writing. When any luckless letter forced me to take
+     up a pen for an answer, I grumblingly borrowed the steward's
+     inkstand, and hurried to give it back to him with all the
+     haste I could, in the vain hope that I should never have
+     need of the loan any more. Instead of meddling with those
+     weary quires and reams and piles of old books, I filled my
+     chamber with flowers and grasses, for I was then in my first
+     fervour for botany. Having given up employment that would be
+     a task to me, I needed one that would be an amusement, nor
+     cause me more pains than a sluggard might choose to take. I
+     undertook to make the _Flora petrinsularis_, and to describe
+     every single plant on the island, in detail enough to occupy
+     me for the rest of my days. In consequence of this fine
+     scheme, every morning after breakfast, which we all took in
+     company, I used to go with a magnifying glass in my hand and
+     my Systema Natur� under my arm, to visit some district of
+     the island. I had divided it for that purpose into small
+     squares, meaning to go through them one after another in
+     each season of the year. At the end of two or three hours I
+     used to return laden with an ample harvest, a provision for
+     amusing myself after dinner indoors, in case of rain. I
+     spent the rest of the morning in going with the steward, his
+     wife, and Theresa, to see the labourers and the harvesting,
+     and I generally set to work along with them; many a time
+     when people from Berne came to see me, they found me perched
+     on a high tree, with a bag fastened round my waist; I kept
+     filling it with fruit and then let it down to the ground
+     with a rope. The exercise I had taken in the morning and the
+     good humour that always comes from exercise, made the repose
+     of dinner vastly pleasant to me. But if dinner was kept up
+     too long, and fine weather invited me forth, I could not
+     wait, but was speedily off to throw myself all alone into a
+     boat, which, when the water was smooth enough, I used to
+     pull out to the middle of the lake. There, stretched at full
+     length in the boat's bottom, with my eyes turned up to the
+     sky, I let myself float slowly hither and thither as the
+     water listed, sometimes for hours together, plunged in a
+     thousand confused delicious musings, which, though they had
+     no fixed nor constant object, were not the less on that
+     account a hundred times dearer to me than all that I had
+     found sweetest in what they call the pleasures of life.
+     Often warned by the going down of the sun that it was time
+     to return, I found myself so far from the island that I was
+     forced to row with all my might to get in before it was
+     pitch dark. At other times, instead of losing myself in the
+     midst of the waters, I had a fancy to coast along the green
+     shores of the island, where the clear waters and cool
+     shadows tempted me to bathe. But one of my most frequent
+     expeditions was from the larger island to the less; there I
+     disembarked and spent my afternoon, sometimes in mimic
+     rambles among wild elders, persicaries, willows, and shrubs
+     of every species, sometimes settling myself on the top of a
+     sandy knoll, covered with turf, wild thyme, flowers, even
+     sainfoin and trefoil that had most likely been sown there in
+     old days, making excellent quarters for rabbits. They might
+     multiply in peace without either fearing anything or harming
+     anything. I spoke of this to the steward. He at once had
+     male and female rabbits brought from Neuch�tel, and we went
+     in high state, his wife, one of his sisters, Theresa, and I,
+     to settle them in the little islet. The foundation of our
+     colony was a feast-day. The pilot of the Argonauts was not
+     prouder than I, as I bore my company and the rabbits in
+     triumph from our island to the smaller one....
+
+     When the lake was too rough for me to sail, I spent my
+     afternoon in going up and down the island, gathering plants
+     to right and left; seating myself now in smiling lonely
+     nooks to dream at my ease, now on little terraces and
+     knolls, to follow with my eyes the superb and ravishing
+     prospect of the lake and its shores, crowned on one side by
+     the neighbouring hills, and on the other melting into rich
+     and fertile plains up to the feet of the pale blue mountains
+     on their far-off edge.
+
+     As evening drew on, I used to come down from the high ground
+     and sit on the beach at the water's brink in some hidden
+     sheltering place. There the murmur of the waves and their
+     agitation, charmed all my senses and drove every other
+     movement away from my soul; they plunged it into delicious
+     dreamings, in which I was often surprised by night. The flux
+     and reflux of the water, its ceaseless stir-swelling and
+     falling at intervals, striking on ear and sight, made up for
+     the internal movements which my musings extinguished; they
+     were enough to give me delight in mere existence, without
+     taking any trouble of thinking. From time to time arose some
+     passing thought of the instability of the things of this
+     world, of which the face of the waters offered an image; but
+     such light impressions were swiftly effaced in the
+     uniformity of the ceaseless motion, which rocked me as in a
+     cradle; it held me with such fascination that even when
+     called at the hour and by the signal appointed, I could not
+     tear myself away without summoning all my force.
+
+     After supper, when the evening was fine, we used to go all
+     together for a saunter on the terrace, to breathe the
+     freshness of the air from the lake. We sat down in the
+     arbour, laughing, chatting, or singing some old song, and
+     then we went home to bed, well pleased with the day, and
+     only craving another that should be exactly like it on the
+     morrow....
+
+     All is in a continual flux upon the earth. Nothing in it
+     keeps a form constant and determinate; our affections,
+     fastening on external things, necessarily change and pass
+     just as they do. Ever in front of us or behind us, they
+     recall the past that is gone, or anticipate a future that in
+     many a case is destined never to be. There is nothing solid
+     to which the heart can fix itself. Here we have little more
+     than a pleasure that comes and passes away; as for the
+     happiness that endures, I cannot tell if it be so much as
+     known among men. There is hardly in the midst of our
+     liveliest delights a single instant when the heart could
+     tell us with real truth--"_I would this instant might last
+     for ever_." And how can we give the name of happiness to a
+     fleeting state that all the time leaves the heart unquiet
+     and void, that makes us regret something gone, or still long
+     for something to come?
+
+     But if there is a state in which the soul finds a situation
+     solid enough to comport with perfect repose, and with the
+     expansion of its whole faculty, without need of calling back
+     the past, or pressing on towards the future; where time is
+     nothing for it, and the present has no ending; with no mark
+     for its own duration and without a trace of succession;
+     without a single other sense of privation or delight, of
+     pleasure or pain, of desire or apprehension, than this
+     single sense of existence--so long as such a state endures,
+     he who finds himself in it may talk of bliss, not with a
+     poor, relative, and imperfect happiness such as people find
+     in the pleasures of life, but with a happiness full,
+     perfect, and sufficing, that leaves in the soul no conscious
+     unfilled void. Such a state was many a day mine in my
+     solitary musings in the isle of St. Peter, either lying in
+     my boat as it floated on the water, or seated on the banks
+     of the broad lake, or in other places than the little isle
+     on the brink of some broad stream, or a rivulet murmuring
+     over a gravel bed.
+
+     What is it that one enjoys in a situation like this? Nothing
+     outside of one's self, nothing except one's self and one's
+     own existence.... But most men, tossed as they are by
+     unceasing passion, have little knowledge of such a state;
+     they taste it imperfectly for a few moments, and then retain
+     no more than an obscure confused idea of it, that is too
+     weak to let them feel its charm. It would not even be good
+     in the present constitution of things, that in their
+     eagerness for these gentle ecstasies, they should fall into
+     a disgust for the active life in which their duty is
+     prescribed to them by needs that are ever on the increase.
+     But a wretch cut off from human society, who can do nothing
+     here below that is useful and good either for himself or for
+     other people, may in such a state find for all lost human
+     felicities many recompenses, of which neither fortune nor
+     men can ever rob him.
+
+     'Tis true that these recompenses cannot be felt by all
+     souls, nor in all situations. The heart must be in peace,
+     nor any passion come to trouble its calm. There must be in
+     the surrounding objects neither absolute repose nor excess
+     of agitation, but a uniform and moderated movement without
+     shock, without interval. With no movement, life is only
+     lethargy. If the movement be unequal or too strong, it
+     awakes us; by recalling us to the objects around, it
+     destroys the charm of our musing, and plucks us from within
+     ourselves, instantly to throw us back under the yoke of
+     fortune and man, in a moment to restore us to all the
+     consciousness of misery. Absolute stillness inclines one to
+     gloom. It offers an image of death: then the help of a
+     cheerful imagination is necessary, and presents itself
+     naturally enough to those whom heaven has endowed with such
+     a gift. The movement which does not come from without then
+     stirs within us. The repose is less complete, it is true;
+     but it is also more agreeable when light and gentle ideas,
+     without agitating the depths of the soul, only softly skim
+     the surface. This sort of musing we may taste whenever there
+     is tranquillity about us, and I have thought that in the
+     Bastile, and even in a dungeon where no object struck my
+     sight, I could have dreamed away many a thrice pleasurable
+     day.
+
+     But it must be said that all this came better and more
+     happily in a fruitful and lonely island, where nothing
+     presented itself to me save smiling pictures, where nothing
+     recalled saddening memories, where the fellowship of the few
+     dwellers there was gentle and obliging, without being
+     exciting enough to busy me incessantly, where, in short, I
+     was free to surrender myself all day long to the promptings
+     of my taste or to the most luxurious indolence.... As I came
+     out from a long and most sweet musing fit, seeing myself
+     surrounded by verdure and flowers and birds, and letting my
+     eyes wander far over romantic shores that fringed a wide
+     expanse of water bright as crystal, I fitted all these
+     attractive objects into my dreams; and when at last I slowly
+     recovered myself and recognised what was about me, I could
+     not mark the point that cut off dream from reality, so
+     equally did all things unite to endear to me the lonely
+     retired life I led in this happy spot! Why can that life not
+     come back to me again? Why can I not go finish my days in
+     the beloved island, never to quit it, never again to see in
+     it one dweller from the mainland, to bring back to me the
+     memory of all the woes of every sort that they have
+     delighted in heaping on my head for all these long years?...
+     Freed from the earthly passions engendered by the tumult of
+     social life, my soul would many a time lift itself above
+     this atmosphere, and commune beforehand with the heavenly
+     intelligences, into whose number it trusts to be ere long
+     taken."
+
+The exquisite dream, thus set to words of most soothing music, came
+soon to its end. The full and perfect sufficience of life was abruptly
+disturbed. The government of Berne gave him notice to quit the island
+and their territory within fifteen days. He represented to the
+authorities that he was infirm and ill, that he knew not whither to
+go, and that travelling in wintry weather would be dangerous to his
+life. He even made the most extraordinary request that any man in
+similar straits ever did make. "In this extremity," he wrote to their
+representative, "I only see one resource for me, and however frightful
+it may appear, I will adopt it, not only without repugnance, but with
+eagerness, if their excellencies will be good enough to give their
+consent. It is that it should please them for me to pass the rest of
+my days in prison in one of their castles, or such other place in
+their states as they may think fit to select. I will there live at my
+own expense, and I will give security never to put them to any cost. I
+submit to be without paper or pen, or any communication from without,
+except so far as may be absolutely necessary, and through the channel
+of those who shall have charge of me. Only let me have left, with the
+use of a few books, the liberty to walk occasionally in a garden, and
+I am content. Do not suppose that an expedient, so violent in
+appearance, is the fruit of despair. My mind is perfectly calm at this
+moment; I have taken time to think about it, and it is only after
+profound consideration that I have brought myself to this decision.
+Mark, I pray you, that if this seems an extraordinary resolution, my
+situation is still more so. The distracted life that I have been made
+to lead for several years without intermission would be terrible for a
+man in full health; judge what it must be for a miserable invalid worn
+down with weariness and misfortune, and who has now no wish save only
+to die in a little peace."[170]
+
+That the request was made in all sincerity we may well believe. The
+difference between being in prison and being out of it was really not
+considerable to a man who had the previous winter been confined to his
+chamber for eight months without a break.[171] In other respects the
+world was as cheerless as any prison could be. He was an exile from
+the only places he knew, and to him a land unknown was terrible. He
+had thought of Vienna, and the Prince of W�rtemburg had sought the
+requisite permission for him, but the priests were too strong in the
+court of the house of Austria.[172] Madame d'Houdetot offered him a
+resting-place in Normandy, and Saint Lambert in Lorraine.[173] He
+thought of Potsdam. Rey, the printer, pressed him to go to Holland. He
+wondered if he should have strength to cross the Alps and make his way
+to Corsica. Eventually he made up his mind to go to Berlin, and he
+went as far as Strasburg on his road thither.[174] Here he began to
+fear the rude climate of the northern capital; he changed his plans,
+and resolved to accept the warm invitations that he had received to
+cross over to England. His friends used their interest to procure a
+passport for him,[175] and the Prince of Conti offered him an
+apartment in the privileged quarter of the Temple, on his way through
+Paris. His own purpose seems to have been irresolute to the last, but
+his friends acted with such energy and bustle on his behalf that the
+English scheme was adopted, and he found himself in Paris (Dec. 17,
+1765), on his way to London, almost before he had deliberately
+realised what he was doing. It was a step that led him into many fatal
+vexations, as we shall presently see. Meanwhile we may pause to
+examine the two considerable books which had involved his life in all
+this confusion and perplexity.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[94] June, 1762-December, 1765.
+
+[95] _Conf._, xi. 175. It is generally printed in the volume of his
+works entitled _M�langes_.
+
+[96] _Corr._, iii. 416.
+
+[97] _Conf._, xi. 172.
+
+[98] For a remarkable anticipation of the ruin of France, see _Conf._,
+xi. 136.
+
+[99] M. Roguin. June 14, 1762.
+
+[100] _Corr._, ii. 347.
+
+[101] Streckeisen, i. 35.
+
+[102] His friend Moultou wrote him the news, Streckeisen, i. 43.
+Geneva was the only place at which the Social Contract was burnt. Here
+there were peculiar reasons, as we shall see.
+
+[103] _Corr._, ii. 356.
+
+[104] _Ib._, ii. 358, 369, etc.
+
+[105] The principality of Neuch�tel had fallen by marriage (1504) to
+the French house of Orleans-Longueville, which with certain
+interruptions retained it until the extinction of the line by the
+death of Marie, Duchess of Nemours (1707). Fifteen claimants arose
+with fifteen varieties of far-off title, as well as a party for
+constituting Neuch�tel a Republic and making it a fourteenth canton.
+(Saint Simon, v. 276.) The Estates adjudged the sovereignty to the
+Protestant house of Prussia (Nov. 3, 1707). Lewis XIV., as heir of the
+pretensions of the extinct line, protested. Finally, at the peace of
+Utrecht (1713), Lewis surrendered his claim in exchange for the
+cession by Prussia of the Principality of Orange, and Prussia held it
+until 1806. The disturbed history of the connection between Prussia
+and Neuch�tel from 1814, when it became the twenty-first canton of the
+Swiss Confederation, down to 1857, does not here concern us.
+
+[106] _Corr._, ii. 370.
+
+[107] _Corr._, ii. 371. July 1762.
+
+[108] D'Alembert, who knew Frederick better than any of the
+philosophers, to Voltaire, Nov. 22, 1765.
+
+[109] Letter to Hume; Burton's _Life of Hume_, ii. 105, corroborating
+_Conf._, xii. 196.
+
+[110] Marischal to J.J.R.; Streckeisen, ii. 70.
+
+[111] _Corr._, iii. 40. Nov. 1, 1762.
+
+[112] Burton's _Life_, ii. 113.
+
+[113] Voltaire's _Corr._ (1758). _Oeuv._, lxxv. pp. 31 and 80.
+
+[114] _Conf._, xii. 237.
+
+[115] _Corr._, iii. 41. Nov. 11, 1762.
+
+[116] _Corr._, iii. 38. Oct. 30, 1762.
+
+[117] _Ib._, iii. 110-115. Jan. 28, 1763.
+
+[118] Bernardin de St. Pierre, xii. 103, 59, etc.
+
+[119] George Keith (1685-1778) was elder brother of Frederick's famous
+field-marshal, James Keith. They had taken part in the Jacobite rising
+of 1715, and fled abroad on its failure. James Keith brought his
+brother into the service of the King of Prussia, who sent him as
+ambassador to Paris (1751), afterwards made him Governor of Neuch�tel
+(1754), and eventually prevailed on the English Government to
+reinstate him in the rights which he had forfeited by his share in the
+rebellion (1763).
+
+[120] Streckeisen, ii. 98, etc.
+
+[121] One of Rousseau's chief distresses hitherto arose from the
+indigence in which Theresa would be placed in case of his death. Rey,
+the bookseller, gave her an annuity of about �16 a year, and Lord
+Marischal's gift seems to have been 300 louis, the only money that
+Rousseau was ever induced to accept from any one in his life. See
+Streckeisen, ii. 99; _Corr._, iii. 336. The most delicate and sincere
+of the many offers to provide for Theresa was made by Madame de
+Verdelin (Streckeisen, ii. 506). The language in which Madame de
+Verdelin speaks of Theresa in all her letters is the best testimony to
+character that this much-abused creature has to produce.
+
+[122] _Ib._, 90, 92, etc. Summer of 1763.
+
+[123] Burton's _Life of Hume_, ii. 105. Oct. 2, 1762.
+
+[124] The Confessions are not our only authority for this. See
+Streckeisen, ii. 64; also D'Alembert to Voltaire, Sept. 8, 1762.
+
+[125] Voltaire's _Corr._ _Oeuv._, lxvii. 458, 459, 485, etc.
+
+[126] To D'Alembert, Sept. 15, 1762.
+
+[127] Moultou to Rousseau, Streckeisen, i. 85, 87.
+
+[128] Moultou to Rousseau, Streckeisen, i. 85, 87.
+
+[129] Streckeisen, i. 50.
+
+[130] _Ib._, i. 76.
+
+[131] _Lettre � Christophe de Beaumont_, pp. 163-166.
+
+[132] _Lettre � Christophe de Beaumont_, pp. 130-135.
+
+[133] _Lettre � Christophe de Beaumont_, p. 93.
+
+[134] Carlyle's _Frederick_, Bk. xxi. ch. iv. Rousseau, _Corr._, iii.
+102.
+
+[135] _Corr._, iii. 57. Nov. 1762. To M. Montmollin.
+
+[136] _Conf._, xii. 206.
+
+[137] _Conf._, xii. 198.
+
+[138] _Corr._, iii. 295. Dec. 25, 1763.
+
+[139] Quoted in Musset-Pathay, ii. 500.
+
+[140] For instance, _Corr._, iii. 249.
+
+[141] _Ib._, iii. 364, 381.
+
+[142] _Corr._, iii. 181-186, etc.
+
+[143] Prince Lewis Eugene, son of Charles Alexander (reigning duke
+from 1733 to 1737); a younger brother of Charles Eugene, known as
+Schiller's Duke of W�rtemberg, who reigned up to 1793. Frederick
+Eugene, known in the Seven Years' War, was another brother. Rousseau's
+correspondent became reigning duke in 1793, but only lived a year and
+a half afterwards.
+
+[144] _Corr._, iii. 250. Sept. 29, 1763.
+
+[145] The prince's letters are given in the Streckeisen collection,
+vol. ii.
+
+[146] Streckeisen, ii. 202.
+
+[147] Possibly Wilkes also; _Corr._, iv. 200.
+
+[148] Streckeisen, i. 89. June 1, 1763.
+
+[149] _Corr._, iii. 202. June 4, 1763.
+
+[150] _Memoirs of my Life_, p. 55, _n._ (Ed. 1862). Necker
+(1732-1804), whom Mdlle. Curchod ultimately married, was an eager
+admirer of Rousseau. "Ah, how close the tender, humane, and virtuous
+soul of Julie," he wrote to her author, "has brought me to you. How
+the reading of those letters gratified me! how many good emotions did
+they stir or fortify! How many sublimities in a thousand places in
+these six volumes; not the sublimity that perches itself in the
+clouds, but that which pushes everyday virtues to their highest
+point," and so on. Feb. 16, 1761. Streckeisen, i. 333.
+
+[151] Boswell's name only occurs twice in Rousseau's letters, I
+believe; once (_Corr._, iv. 394) as the writer of a letter which Hume
+was suspected of tampering with, and previously (iv. 70) as the bearer
+of a letter. See also Streckeisen, i. 262.
+
+[152] Streckeisen, ii. 111. Jan. 18, 1765.
+
+[153] Bk. ii. ch. x.
+
+[154] Boswell's _Account of Corsica_, p. 367.
+
+[155] The correspondence between Rousseau and Buttafuoco has been
+published in the _Oeuvres et Corr. In�dites de J.J.R._, 1861. See pp.
+35, 43, etc.
+
+[156] Boswell's _Life_, 179, 193, etc. (Ed. 1866).
+
+[157] _"Je suis tout homme de pouvoir vous regarder avec piti�!"_
+Letter dated Jan. 4, 1766, and given by Musset-Pathay as from a Scotch
+lord, unnamed. Boswell had the honour of conducting Theresa to
+England, after Hume had taken Rousseau over. "This young gentleman,"
+writes Hume, "very good-humoured, very agreeable, and very mad--has
+such a rage for literature that I dread some circumstance fatal to our
+friend's honour. You remember the story of Terentia, who was first
+married to Cicero, then to Sallust, and at last in her old age married
+a young nobleman, who imagined that she must possess some secret which
+would convey to him eloquence and genius." Burton's _Life_, ii. 307,
+308. Boswell mentions that he met Rousseau in England (_Account of
+Corsica_, p. 340), and also gives Rousseau's letter introducing him to
+Paoli (p. 266).
+
+[158] To Buttafuoco, p. 48, etc.
+
+[159] _Corr._, vi. 176. Feb. 26, 1770.
+
+[160] It may be worth noticing, as a link between historic personages,
+that Napoleon Bonaparte's first piece was a _Lettre � Matteo
+Buttafuoco_ (1791), the same Buttafuoco with whom Rousseau
+corresponded, who had been Choiseul's agent in the union of the island
+to France, was afterwards sent as deputy to the Constituent, and
+finally became the bitterest enemy of Paoli and the patriotic party.
+
+[161] _Corr._, iii. 190. To the First Syndic, May 12, 1763.
+
+[162] Grimm's _Corr. Lit._, iv. 235. For Rousseau's opinion of his
+book's companion at the stake, see _Corr._, iii. 442.
+
+[163] Streckeisen, ii. 526.
+
+[164] There appears to be no doubt that Rousseau was wrong in
+attributing to Vernes the _Sentimens des Citoyens_.
+
+[165] _Corr._, iv. 116, 122 (April 1765), 165-196 (August); also
+_Conf._, xii. 245.
+
+[166] Note to M. Auguis's edition, _Corr._, v. 395.
+
+[167] _Corr._, iv. 204.
+
+[168] _Conf._, xii. 259. This lapidation has sometimes been doubted,
+and treated as an invention of Rousseau's morbid suspicion. The
+official documents prove that his account was substantially true (see
+Musset-Pathay, ii. 559.)
+
+[169] The fifth of the _R�veries_. See also _Conf._, 262-279, and
+_Corr._, iv. 206-224. His stay in the island was from the second week
+in September down to the last in October, 1765.
+
+[170] _Corr._, iv. 221. Oct. 20, 1765.
+
+[171] _Ib._, iv. 136, etc. April 27, 1765.
+
+[172] Streckeisen-Moultou, ii. 209, 212.
+
+[173] _Ib._, ii. 554.
+
+[174] He arrived at Strasburg on the 2d or 3d of November, left it
+about the end of the first week in December, and arrived in Paris on
+the 16th of December 1765. A sort of apocryphal tradition is said to
+linger in the island about Rousseau's last evening on the island, how
+after supper he called for a lute, and sang some passably bad verses.
+See M. Bougy's _J.J. Rousseau_, p. 179 (Paris: 1853.)
+
+[175] Madame de Verdelin to J.J.R. Streckeisen, ii. 532. The minister
+even expressed his especial delight at being able to serve Rousseau,
+so little seriousness was there now in the formalities of absolution.
+_Ib._ 547.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+THE SOCIAL CONTRACT.
+
+
+The dominant belief of the best minds of the latter half of
+the eighteenth century was a passionate faith in the illimitable
+possibilities of human progress. Nothing short of a general overthrow
+of the planet could in their eyes stay the ever upward movement of
+human perfectibility. They differed as to the details of the
+philosophy of government which they deduced from this philosophy of
+society, but the conviction that a golden era of tolerance,
+enlightenment, and material prosperity was close at hand, belonged to
+them all. Rousseau set his face the other way. For him the golden era
+had passed away from our globe many centuries ago. Simplicity had fled
+from the earth. Wisdom and heroism had vanished from out of the minds
+of leaders. The spirit of citizenship had gone from those who should
+have upheld the social union in brotherly accord. The dream of human
+perfectibility which nerved men like Condorcet, was to Rousseau a sour
+and fantastic mockery. The utmost that men could do was to turn their
+eyes to the past, to obliterate the interval, to try to walk for a
+space in the track of the ancient societies. They would hardly
+succeed, but endeavour might at least do something to stay the plague
+of universal degeneracy. Hence the fatality of his system. It placed
+the centre of social activity elsewhere than in careful and rational
+examination of social conditions, and in careful and rational effort
+to modify them. As we began by saying, it substituted a retrograde
+aspiration for direction, and emotion for the discovery of law. We can
+hardly wonder, when we think of the intense exaltation of spirit
+produced both by the perfectibilitarians and the followers of
+Rousseau, and at the same time of the political degradation and
+material disorder of France, that so violent a contrast between the
+ideal and the actual led to a great volcanic outbreak. Alas, the
+crucial difficulty of political change is to summon new force without
+destroying the sound parts of a structure which it has taken so many
+generations to erect. The Social Contract is the formal denial of the
+possibility of successfully overcoming the difficulty.
+
+"Although man deprives himself in the civil state of many advantages
+which he holds from nature, yet he acquires in return others so great,
+his faculties exercise and develop themselves, his ideas extend, his
+sentiments are ennobled, his whole soul is raised to such a degree,
+that if the abuses of this new condition did not so often degrade him
+below that from which he has emerged, he would be bound to bless
+without ceasing the happy moment which rescued him from it for ever,
+and out of a stupid and blind animal made an intelligent being and a
+man."[176] The little parenthesis as to the frequent degradation
+produced by the abuses of the social condition, does not prevent us
+from recognising in the whole passage a tolerably complete surrender
+of the main position which was taken up in the two Discourses. The
+short treatise on the Social Contract is an inquiry into the just
+foundations and most proper form of that very political society, which
+the Discourses showed to have its foundation in injustice, and to be
+incapable of receiving any form proper for the attainment of the full
+measure of human happiness.
+
+Inequality in the same way is no longer denounced, but accepted and
+defined. Locke's influence has begun to tell. The two principal
+objects of every system of legislation are declared to be liberty and
+equality. By equality we are warned not to understand that the degrees
+of power and wealth should be absolutely the same, but that in respect
+of power, such power should be out of reach of any violence, and be
+invariably exercised in virtue of the laws; and in respect of riches,
+that no citizen should be wealthy enough to buy another, and none poor
+enough to sell himself. Do you say this equality is a mere chimera? It
+is precisely because the force of things is constantly tending to
+destroy equality, that the force of legislation ought as constantly to
+be directed towards upholding it.[177] This is much clearer than the
+indefinite way of speaking which we have already noticed in the second
+Discourse. It means neither more nor less than that equality before
+the law which is one of the elementary marks of a perfectly free
+community.
+
+The idea of the law being constantly directed to counteract the
+tendencies to violent inequalities in material possessions among
+different members of a society, is too vague to be criticised. Does it
+cover and warrant so sweeping a measure as the old _seisachtheia_ of
+Solon, voiding all contracts in which the debtor had pledged his land
+or his person; or such measures as the agrarian laws of Licinius and
+the Gracchi? Or is it to go no further than to condemn such a law as
+that which in England gives unwilled lands to the eldest son? We can
+only criticise accurately a general idea of this sort in connection
+with specific projects in which it is applied. As it stands, it is no
+more than the expression of what the author thinks a wise principle of
+public policy. It assumes the existence of property just as completely
+as the theory of the most rigorous capitalist could do; it gives no
+encouragement, as the Discourse did, to the notion of an equality in
+being without property. There is no element of communism in a
+principle so stated, but it suggests a social idea, based on the moral
+claim of men to have equality of opportunity. This ideal stamped
+itself on the minds of Robespierre and the other revolutionary
+leaders, and led to practical results in the sale of the Church and
+other lands in small lots, so as to give the peasant a market to buy
+in. The effect of the economic change thus introduced happened to work
+in the direction in which Rousseau pointed, for it is now known that
+the most remarkable and most permanent of the consequences of the
+revolution in the ownership of land was the erection, between the two
+extreme classes of proprietors, of an immense body of middle-class
+freeholders. This state is not equality, but gradation, and there is
+undoubtedly an immense difference between the two. Still its origin is
+an illustration on the largest scale in history of the force of
+legislation being exerted to counteract an irregularity that had
+become unbearable.[178]
+
+Notwithstanding the disappearance of the more extravagant elements of
+the old thesis, the new speculation was far from being purged of the
+fundamental errors that had given such popularity to its predecessors.
+"If the sea," he says in one place, "bathes nothing but inaccessible
+rocks on your coasts, remain barbarous ichthyophagi; you will live all
+the more tranquilly for it, better perhaps, and assuredly more
+happily."[179] Apart from an outburst like this, the central idea
+remained the same, though it was approached from another side and with
+different objects. The picture of a state of nature had lost none of
+its perilous attraction, though it was hung in a slightly changed
+light. It remained the starting-point of the right and normal
+constitution of civil society, just as it had been the starting-point
+of the denunciation of civil society as incapable of right
+constitution, and as necessarily and for ever abnormal. Equally with
+the Discourses, the Social Contract is a repudiation of that historic
+method which traces the present along a line of ascertained
+circumstances, and seeks an improved future in an unbroken
+continuation of that line. The opening words, which sent such a thrill
+through the generation to which they were uttered in two continents,
+"Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains," tell us at the
+outset that we are as far away as ever from the patient method of
+positive observation, and as deeply buried as ever in deducing
+practical maxims from a set of conditions which never had any other
+than an abstract and phantasmatic existence. How is a man born free?
+If he is born into isolation, he perishes instantly. If he is born
+into a family, he is at the moment of his birth committed to a state
+of social relation, in however rudimentary a form; and the more or
+less of freedom which this state may ultimately permit to him, depends
+upon circumstances. Man was hardly born free among Romans and
+Athenians, when both law and public opinion left a father at perfect
+liberty to expose his new-born infant. And the more primitive the
+circumstances, the later the period at which he gains freedom. A child
+was not born free in the early days of the Roman state, when the
+_patria potestas_ was a vigorous reality. Nor, to go yet further back,
+was he born free in the times of the Hebrew patriarchs, when Abraham
+had full right of sacrificing his son, and Jephthah of sacrificing his
+daughter.
+
+But to speak thus is to speak what we do know. Rousseau was not open
+to such testimony. "My principles," he said in contempt of Grotius,
+"are not founded on the authority of poets; they come from the nature
+of things and are based on reason."[180] He does indeed in one place
+express his reverence for the Judaic law, and administers a just
+rebuke to the philosophic arrogance which saw only successful
+impostors in the old legislators.[181] But he paid no attention to
+the processes and usages of which this law was the organic expression,
+nor did he allow himself to learn from it the actual conditions of the
+social state which accepted it. It was Locke, whose essay on civil
+government haunts us throughout the Social Contract, who had taught
+him that men are born free, equal, and independent. Locke evaded the
+difficulty of the dependence of childhood by saying that when the son
+comes to the estate that made his father a free man, he becomes a free
+man too.[182] What of the old Roman use permitting a father to sell
+his son three times? In the same metaphysical spirit Locke had laid
+down the absolute proposition that "conjugal society is made by a
+voluntary compact between man and woman."[183] This is true of a small
+number of western societies in our own day, but what of the primitive
+usages of communal marriages, marriages by capture, purchase, and the
+rest? We do not mean it as any discredit to writers upon government in
+the seventeenth century that they did not make good out of their own
+consciousness the necessary want of knowledge about primitive
+communities. But it is necessary to point out, first, that they did
+not realise all the knowledge within their reach, and next that, as a
+consequence of this, their propositions had a quality that vitiated
+all their speculative worth. Filmer's contention that man is not
+naturally free was truer than the position of Locke and Rousseau, and
+it was so because Filmer consulted and appealed to the most authentic
+of the historic records then accessible.[184]
+
+It is the more singular that Rousseau should have thus deliberately
+put aside all but the most arbitrary and empirical historical lessons,
+and it shows the extraordinary force with which men may be mastered by
+abstract prepossessions, even when they have a partial knowledge of
+the antidote; because Rousseau in several places not only admits, but
+insists upon, the necessity of making institutions relative to the
+state of the community, in respect of size, soil, manners, occupation,
+morality, character. "It is in view of such relations as these that we
+must assign to each people a particular system, which shall be the
+best, not perhaps in itself, but for the state for which it is
+destined."[185] In another place he calls attention to manners,
+customs, above all to opinion, as the part of a social system on which
+the success of all the rest depends; particular rules being only the
+arching of the vault, of which manners, though so much tardier in
+rising, form a key-stone that can never be disturbed.[186] This was
+excellent so far as it went, but it was one of the many great truths,
+which men may hold in their minds without appreciating their full
+value. He did not see that these manners, customs, opinions, have old
+roots which must be sought in a historic past; that they are connected
+with the constitution of human nature, and that then in turn they
+prepare modifications of that constitution. His narrow, symmetrical,
+impatient humour unfitted him to deal with the complex tangle of the
+history of social growths. It was essential to his mental comfort that
+he should be able to see a picture of perfect order and logical system
+at both ends of his speculation. Hence, he invented, to begin with,
+his ideal state of nature, and an ideal mode of passing from that to
+the social state. He swept away in his imagination the whole series of
+actual incidents between present and past; and he constructed a system
+which might be imposed upon all societies indifferently by a
+legislator summoned for that purpose, to wipe out existing uses, laws,
+and institutions, and make afresh a clear and undisturbed beginning of
+national life. The force of habit was slowly and insensibly to be
+substituted for that of the legislator's authority, but the existence
+of such habits previously as forces to be dealt with, and the
+existence of certain limits of pliancy in the conditions of human
+nature and social possibility, are facts of which the author of the
+Social Contract takes not the least account.
+
+Rousseau knew hardly any history, and the few isolated pieces of old
+fact which he had picked up in his very slight reading were exactly
+the most unfortunate that a student in need of the historic method
+could possibly have fallen in with. The illustrations which are
+scantily dispersed in his pages,--and we must remark that they are no
+more than illustrations for conclusions arrived at quite independently
+of them, and not the historical proof and foundations of his
+conclusions,--are nearly all from the annals of the small states of
+ancient Greece, and from the earlier times of the Roman republic. We
+have already pointed out to what an extent his imagination was struck
+at the time of his first compositions by the tale of Lycurgus. The
+influence of the same notions is still paramount. The hopelessness of
+giving good laws to a corrupt people is supposed to be demonstrated by
+the case of Minos, whose legislation failed in Crete because the
+people for whom he made laws were sunk in vices; and by the further
+example of Plato, who refused to give laws to the Arcadians and
+Cyrenians, knowing that they were too rich and could never suffer
+equality.[187] The writer is thinking of Plato's Laws, when he says
+that just as nature has fixed limits to the stature of a well-formed
+man, outside of which she produces giants and dwarfs, so with
+reference to the best constitution for a state, there are bounds to
+its extent, so that it may be neither too large to be capable of good
+government, nor too small to be independent and self-sufficing. The
+further the social bond is extended, the more relaxed it becomes, and
+in general a small state is proportionally stronger than a large
+one.[188] In the remarks with which he proceeds to corroborate this
+position, we can plainly see that he is privately contrasting an
+independent Greek community with the unwieldy oriental monarchy
+against which at one critical period Greece had to contend. He had
+never realised the possibility of such forms of polity as the Roman
+Empire, or the half-federal dominion of England which took such
+enormous dimensions in his time, or the great confederation of states
+which came to birth two years before he died. He was the servant of
+his own metaphor, as the Greek writers so often were. His argument
+that a state must be of a moderate size because the rightly shapen man
+is neither dwarf nor giant, is exactly on a par with Aristotle's
+argument to the same effect, on the ground that beauty demands size,
+and there must not be too great nor too small size, because a ship
+sails badly if it be either too heavy or too light.[189] And when
+Rousseau supposes the state to have ten thousand inhabitants, and
+talks about the right size of its territory,[190] who does not think
+of the five thousand and forty which the Athenian Stranger prescribed
+to Cleinias the Cretan as the exactly proper number for the perfectly
+formed state?[191] The prediction of the short career which awaits a
+state that is cursed with an extensive and accessible seaboard,
+corresponds precisely with the Athenian Stranger's satisfaction that
+the new city is to be eighty stadia from the coast.[192] When Rousseau
+himself began to think about the organisation of Corsica, he praised
+the selection of Corte as the chief town of a patriotic
+administration, because it was far from the sea, and so its
+inhabitants would long preserve their simplicity and uprightness.[193]
+And in later years still, when meditating upon a constitution for
+Poland, he propounded an economic system essentially Spartan; the
+people were enjoined to think little about foreigners, to give
+themselves little concern about commerce, to suppress stamped paper,
+and to put a tithe upon the land.[194]
+
+The chapter on the Legislator is in the same region. We are again
+referred to Lycurgus; and to the circumstance that Greek towns usually
+confided to a stranger the sacred task of drawing up their laws. His
+experience in Venice and the history of his native town supplemented
+the examples of Greece. Geneva summoned a stranger to legislate for
+her, and "those who only look on Calvin as a theologian have a scanty
+idea of the extent of his genius; the preparation of our wise edicts,
+in which he had so large a part, do him as much honour as his
+Institutes."[195] Rousseau's vision was too narrow to let him see the
+growth of government and laws as a co-ordinate process, flowing from
+the growth of all the other parts and organs of society, and advancing
+in more or less equal step along with them. He could begin with
+nothing short of an absolute legislator, who should impose a system
+from without by a single act, a structure hit upon once for all by his
+individual wisdom, not slowly wrought out by many minds, with popular
+assent and co-operation, at the suggestion of changing social
+circumstances and need.[196]
+
+All this would be of very trifling importance in the history of
+political literature, but for the extraordinary influence which
+circumstances ultimately bestowed upon it. The Social Contract was the
+gospel of the Jacobins, and much of the action of the supreme party in
+France during the first months of the year 1794 is only fully
+intelligible when we look upon it as the result and practical
+application of Rousseau's teaching. The conception of the situation
+entertained by Robespierre and Saint Just was entirely moulded on all
+this talk about the legislators of Greece and Geneva. "The transition
+of an oppressed nation to democracy is like the effort by which nature
+rose from nothingness to existence. You must entirely refashion a
+people whom you wish to make free--destroy its prejudices, alter its
+habits, limit its necessities, root up its vices, purify its desires.
+The state therefore must lay hold on every human being at his birth,
+and direct his education with powerful hand. Solon's weak confidence
+threw Athens into fresh slavery, while Lycurgus's severity founded the
+republic of Sparta on an immovable basis."[197] These words, which
+come from a decree of the Committee of Public Safety, might well be
+taken for an excerpt from the Social Contract. The fragments of the
+institutions by which Saint Just intended to regenerate his country,
+reveal a man with the example of Lycurgus before his eyes in every
+line he wrote.[198] When on the eve of the Thermidorian revolution
+which overthrew him and his party, he insisted on the necessity of a
+dictatorship, he was only thinking of the means by which he should at
+length obtain the necessary power for forcing his regenerating
+projects on the country; for he knew that Robespierre, whom he named
+as the man for the dictatorship, accepted his projects, and would lend
+the full force of the temporal arm to the propagation of ideas which
+they had acquired together from Jean Jacques, and from the Greeks to
+whom Jean Jacques had sent them for example and instruction.[199] No
+doubt the condition of France after 1792 must naturally have struck
+any one too deeply imbued with the spirit of the Social Contract to
+look beneath the surface of the society with which the Convention had
+to deal, as urgently inviting a lawgiver of the ancient stamp. The old
+order in church and state had been swept away, no organs for the
+performance of the functions of national life were visible, the moral
+ideas which had bound the social elements together in the extinct
+monarchy seemed to be permanently sapped. A politician who had for
+years been dreaming about Minos and Lycurgus and Calvin, especially if
+he lived in a state with such a tradition of centralisation as ruled
+in France, was sure to suppose that here was the scene and the moment
+for a splendid repetition on an immense scale of those immortal
+achievements. The futility of the attempt was the practical and ever
+memorable illustration of the defect of Rousseau's geometrical method.
+It was one thing to make laws for the handful of people who lived in
+Geneva in the sixteenth century, united in religious faith, and
+accepting the same form and conception of the common good. It was a
+very different thing to try to play Calvin over some twenty-five
+millions of a heterogeneously composed nation, abounding in variations
+of temperament, faith, laws, and habits and weltering in unfathomable
+distractions. The French did indeed at length invite a heaven-sent
+stranger from Corsica to make laws for them, but not until he had set
+his foot upon their neck; and even Napoleon Bonaparte, who had begun
+life like the rest of his generation by writing Rousseauite essays,
+made a swift return to the historic method in the equivocal shape of
+the Concordat.
+
+Not only were Rousseau's schemes of polity conceived from the point of
+view of a small territory with a limited population. "You must not,"
+he says in one place, "make the abuses of great states an objection to
+a writer who would fain have none but small ones."[200] Again, when he
+said that in a truly free state the citizens performed all their
+services to the community with their arms and none by money, and that
+he looked upon the corv�e (or compulsory labour on the public roads)
+as less hostile to freedom than taxes,[201] he showed that he was
+thinking of a state not greatly passing the dimensions of a parish.
+This was not the only defect of his schemes. They assumed a sort of
+state of nature in the minds of the people with whom the lawgiver had
+to deal. Saint Just made the same assumption afterwards, and trusted
+to his military school to erect on these bare plots whatever
+superstructure he might think fit to appoint. A society that had for
+so many centuries been organised and moulded by a powerful and
+energetic church, armed with a definite doctrine, fixing the same
+moral tendencies in a long series of successive generations, was not
+in the naked mental state which the Jacobins postulated. It was not
+prepared to accept free divorce, the substitution of friendship for
+marriage, the displacement of the family by the military school, and
+the other articles in Saint Just's programme of social renovation. The
+twelve apostles went among people who were morally swept and
+garnished, and they went armed with instruments proper to seize the
+imagination of their hearers. All moral reformers seek the ignorant
+and simple, poor fishermen in one scene, labourers and women in
+another, for the good reason that new ideas only make way on ground
+that is not already too heavily encumbered with prejudices. But France
+in 1793 was in no condition of this kind. Opinion in all its spheres
+was deepened by an old and powerful organisation, to a degree which
+made any attempt to abolish the opinion, as the organisation appeared
+to have been abolished, quite hopeless until the lapse of three or
+four hundred years had allowed due time for dissolution. After all it
+was not until the fourth century of our era that the work of even the
+twelve apostles began to tell decisively and quickly. As for the
+Lycurgus of whom the French chattered, if such a personality ever
+existed out of the region of myth, he came to his people armed with an
+oracle from the gods, just as Moses did, and was himself regarded as
+having a nature touched with divinity. No such pretensions could well
+be made by any French legislator within a dozen years or so of the
+death of Voltaire.
+
+Let us here remark that it was exactly what strikes us as the
+desperate absurdity of the assumptions of the Social Contract, which
+constituted the power of that work, when it accidentally fell into the
+hands of men who surveyed a national system wrecked in all its parts.
+The Social Contract is worked out precisely in that fashion which, if
+it touches men at all, makes them into fanatics. Long trains of
+reasoning, careful allegation of proofs, patient admission on every
+hand of qualifying propositions and multitudinous limitations, are
+essential to science, and produce treatises that guide the wise
+statesman in normal times. But it is dogma that gives fervour to a
+sect. There are always large classes of minds to whom anything in the
+shape of a vigorously compact system is irresistibly fascinating, and
+to whom the qualification of a proposition, or the limitation of a
+theoretic principle is distressing or intolerable. Such persons always
+come to the front for a season in times of distraction, when the party
+that knows its own aims most definitely is sure to have the best
+chance of obtaining power. And Rousseau's method charmed their
+temperament. A man who handles sets of complex facts is necessarily
+slow-footed, but one who has only words to deal with, may advance with
+a speed, a precision, a consistency, a conclusiveness, that has a
+magical potency over men who insist on having politics and theology
+drawn out in exact theorems like those of Euclid.
+
+Rousseau traces his conclusions from words, and develops his system
+from the interior germs of phrases. Like the typical schoolman, he
+assumes that analysis of terms is the right way of acquiring new
+knowledge about things; he mistakes the multiplication of propositions
+for the discovery of fresh truth. Many pages of the Social Contract
+are mere logical deductions from verbal definitions: the slightest
+attempt to confront them with actual fact would have shown them to be
+not only valueless, but wholly meaningless, in connection with real
+human nature and the visible working of human affairs. He looks into
+the word, or into his own verbal notion, and tells us what is to be
+found in that, whereas we need to be told the marks and qualities that
+distinguish the object which the word is meant to recall. Hence arises
+his habit of setting himself questions, with reference to which we
+cannot say that the answers are not true, but only that the questions
+themselves were never worth asking. Here is an instance of his method
+of supposing that to draw something from a verbal notion is to find
+out something corresponding to fact. "We can distinguish in the
+magistrate three essentially different wills: 1st, the will peculiar
+to him as an individual, which only tends to his own particular
+advantage; 2nd, the common will of the magistrates, which refers only
+to the advantage of the prince [_i.e._ the government], and this we
+may name corporate will, which is general in relation to the
+government, and particular in relation to the state of which the
+government is a part; 3rd, the will of the people or sovereign will,
+which is general, as well in relation to the state considered as a
+whole, as in relation to the government considered as part of the
+whole."[202] It might be hard to prove that all this is not true, but
+then it is unreal and comes to nothing, as we see if we take the
+trouble to turn it into real matter. Thus a member of the British
+House of Commons, who is a magistrate in Rousseau's sense, has three
+essentially different wills: first, as a man, Mr. So-and-so; second,
+his corporate will, as member of the chamber, and this will is general
+in relation to the legislature, but particular in relation to the
+whole body of electors and peers; third, his will as a member of the
+great electoral body, which is a general will alike in relation to the
+electoral body and to the legislature. An English publicist is
+perfectly welcome to make assertions of this kind, if he chooses to do
+so, and nobody will take the trouble to deny them. But they are
+nonsense. They do not correspond to the real composition of a member
+of parliament, nor do they shed the smallest light upon any part
+either of the theory of government in general, or the working of our
+own government in particular. Almost the same kind of observation
+might be made of the famous dogmatic statements about sovereignty.
+"Sovereignty, being only the exercise of the general will, can never
+be alienated, and the sovereign, who is only a collective being, can
+only be represented by himself: the power may be transmitted, but not
+the will;"[203] sovereignty is indivisible, not only in principle, but
+in object;[204] and so forth. We shall have to consider these remarks
+from another point of view. At present we refer to them as
+illustrating the character of the book, as consisting of a number of
+expansions of definitions, analysed as words, not compared with the
+facts of which the words are representatives. This way of treating
+political theory enabled the writer to assume an air of certitude and
+precision, which led narrow deductive minds completely captive. Burke
+poured merited scorn on the application of geometry to politics and
+algebraic formulas to government, but then it was just this seeming
+demonstration, this measured accuracy, that filled Rousseau's
+disciples with a supreme and undoubting confidence which leaves the
+modern student of these schemes in amazement unspeakable. The thinness
+of Robespierre's ideas on government ceases to astonish us, when we
+remember that he had not trained himself to look upon it as the art of
+dealing with huge groups of conflicting interests, of hostile
+passions, of hardly reconcilable aims, of vehemently opposed forces.
+He had disciplined his political intelligence on such meagre and
+unsubstantial argumentation as the following:--"Let us suppose the
+state composed of ten thousand citizens. The sovereign can only be
+considered collectively and as a body; but each person, in his quality
+as subject, is considered as an individual unit; thus the sovereign is
+to the subject as ten thousand is to one; in other words, each member
+of the state has for his share only the ten-thousandth part of the
+sovereign authority, though he is submitted to it in all his own
+entirety. If the people be composed of a hundred thousand men, the
+condition of the subjects does not change, and each of them bears
+equally the whole empire of the laws, while his suffrage, reduced to a
+hundred-thousandth, has ten times less influence in drawing them up.
+Then, the subject remaining still only one, the relation of the
+sovereign augments in the ratio of the number of the citizens. Whence
+it follows that, the larger the state becomes, the more does liberty
+diminish."[205]
+
+Apart from these arithmetical conceptions, and the deep charm which
+their assurance of expression had for the narrow and fervid minds of
+which England and Germany seem to have got finally rid in Anabaptists
+and Fifth Monarchy men, but which still haunted France, there were
+maxims in the Social Contract of remarkable convenience for the
+members of a Committee of Public Safety. "How can a blind multitude,"
+the writer asks in one place, "which so often does not know its own
+will, because it seldom knows what is good for it, execute of itself
+an undertaking so vast and so difficult as a system of
+legislation?"[206] Again, "as nature gives to each man an absolute
+power over all his members, so the social pact gives to the body
+politic an absolute power over all its members; and it is this same
+power which, when directed by the general will, bears, as I have said,
+the name of sovereignty."[207] Above all, the little chapter on a
+dictatorship is the very foundation of the position of the
+Robespierrists in the few months immediately preceding their fall. "It
+is evidently the first intention of the people that the state should
+not perish," and so on, with much criticism of the system of
+occasional dictatorships, as they were resorted to in old Rome.[208]
+Yet this does not in itself go much beyond the old monarchic doctrine
+of Prerogative, as a corrective for the slowness and want of immediate
+applicability of mere legal processes in cases of state emergency; and
+it is worth noticing again and again that in spite of the shriekings
+of reaction, the few atrocities of the Terror are an almost invisible
+speck compared with the atrocities of Christian churchmen and lawful
+kings, perpetrated in accordance with their notion of what constituted
+public safety. So far as Rousseau's intention goes, we find in his
+writings one of the strongest denunciations of the doctrine of public
+safety that is to be found in any of the writings of the century. "Is
+the safety of a citizen," he cries, "less the common cause than the
+safety of the state? They may tell us that it is well that one should
+perish on behalf of all. I will admire such a sentence in the mouth of
+a virtuous patriot, who voluntarily and for duty's sake devotes
+himself to death for the salvation of his country. But if we are to
+understand that it is allowed to the government to sacrifice an
+innocent person for the safety of the multitude, I hold this maxim for
+one of the most execrable that tyranny has ever invented, and the most
+dangerous that can be admitted."[209] It may be said that the
+Terrorists did not sacrifice innocent life, but the plea is frivolous
+on the lips of men who proscribed whole classes. You cannot justly
+draw a capital indictment against a class. Rousseau, however, cannot
+fairly be said to have had a share in the responsibility for the more
+criminal part of the policy of 1793, any more than the founder of
+Christianity is responsible for the atrocities that have been
+committed by the more ardent worshippers of his name, and justified by
+stray texts caught up from the gospels. Helv�tius had said, "All
+becomes legitimate and even virtuous on behalf of the public safety."
+Rousseau wrote in the margin, "The public safety is nothing unless
+individuals enjoy security."[210] The author of a theory is not
+answerable for the applications which may be read into it by the
+passions of men and the exigencies of a violent crisis. Such
+applications show this much and no more, that the theory was
+constructed with an imperfect consideration of the qualities of human
+nature, with too narrow a view of the conditions of society, and
+therefore with an inadequate appreciation of the consequences which
+the theory might be drawn to support.
+
+It is time to come to the central conception of the Social Contract,
+the dogma which made of it for a time the gospel of a nation, the
+memorable doctrine of the sovereignty of peoples. Of this doctrine
+Rousseau was assuredly not the inventor, though the exaggerated
+language of some popular writers in France leads us to suppose that
+they think of him as nothing less. Even in the thirteenth century the
+constitution of the Orders, and the contests of the friars with the
+clergy, had engendered faintly democratic ways of thinking.[211] Among
+others the great Aquinas had protested against the juristic doctrine
+that the law is the pleasure of the prince. The will of the prince, he
+says, to be a law, must be directed by reason; law is appointed for
+the common good, and not for a special or private good: it follows
+from this that only the reason of the multitude, or of a prince
+representing the multitude, can make a law.[212] A still more
+remarkable approach to later views was made by Marsilio of Padua,
+physician to Lewis of Bavaria, who wrote a strong book on his master's
+side, in the great contest between him and the pope (1324). Marsilio
+in the first part of his work not only lays down very elaborately the
+proposition that laws ought to be made by the "_universitas civium_";
+he places this sovereignty of the people on the true basis (which
+Rousseau only took for a secondary support to his original compact),
+namely, the greater likelihood of laws being obeyed in the first
+place, and being good laws in the second, when they are made by the
+body of the persons affected. "No one knowingly does hurt to himself,
+or deliberately asks what is unjust, and on that account all or a
+great majority must wish such law as best suits the common interest of
+the citizens."[213] Turning from this to the Social Contract, or to
+Locke's essay on Government, the identity in doctrine and
+correspondence in dialect may teach us how little true originality
+there can he among thinkers who are in the same stage; how a
+metaphysician of the thirteenth century and a metaphysician of the
+eighteenth hit on the same doctrine; and how the true classification
+of thinkers does not follow intervals of time, but is fixed by
+differences of method. It is impossible that in the constant play of
+circumstances and ideas in the minds of different thinkers, the same
+combinations of form and colour in a philosophic arrangement of such
+circumstances and ideas should not recur. Signal novelties in thought
+are as limited as signal inventions in architectural construction. It
+is only one of the great changes in method, that can remove the limits
+of the old combinations, by bringing new material and fundamentally
+altering the point of view.
+
+In the sixteenth century there were numerous writers who declared the
+right of subjects to depose a bad sovereign, but this position is to
+be distinguished from Rousseau's doctrine. Thus, if we turn to the
+great historic event of 1581, the rejection of the yoke of Spain by
+the Dutch, we find the Declaration of Independence running, "that if a
+prince is appointed by God over the land, it is to protect them from
+harm, even as a shepherd to the guardianship of his flock. The
+subjects are not appointed by God for the behoof of the prince, but
+the prince for his subjects, without whom he is no prince." This is
+obviously divine right, fundamentally modified by a popular
+principle, accepted to meet the exigencies of the occasion, and to
+justify after the event a measure which was dictated by urgent need
+for practical relief. Such a notion of the social compact was still
+emphatically in the semi-patriarchal stage, and is distinct as can be
+from the dogma of popular sovereignty as Rousseau understood it. But
+it plainly marked a step on the way. It was the development of
+Protestant principles which produced and necessarily involved the
+extreme democratic conclusion. Time was needed for their full
+expansion in this sense, but the result could only have been avoided
+by a suppression of the Reformation, and we therefore count it
+inevitable. Bodin (1577) had defined sovereignty as residing in the
+supreme legislative authority, without further inquiry as to the
+source or seat of that authority, though he admits the vague position
+which even Lewis XIV. did not deny, that the object of political
+society is the greatest good of every citizen or the whole state. In
+1603 a Protestant professor of law in Germany, Althusen by name,
+published a treatise of Politics, in which the doctrine of the
+sovereignty of peoples was clearly formulated, to the profound
+indignation both of Jesuits and of Protestant jurists.[214] Rousseau
+mentions his name;[215] it does not appear that he read Althusen's
+rather uncommon treatise, but its teaching would probably have a place
+in the traditions of political theorising current at Geneva, to the
+spirit of whose government it was so congenial. Hooker, vindicating
+episcopacy against the democratic principles of the Puritans, had
+still been led, apparently by way of the ever dominant idea of a law
+natural, to base civil government on the assent of the governed, and
+had laid down such propositions as these: "Laws they are not, which
+public approbation hath not made so. Laws therefore human, of what
+kind soever, are available by consent," and so on.[216] The views of
+the Ecclesiastical Polity were adopted by Locke, and became the
+foundation of the famous essay on Civil Government, from which popular
+leaders in our own country drew all their weapons down to the outbreak
+of the French Revolution. Grotius (1625) starting from the principle
+that the law of nature enjoins that we should stand by our agreements,
+then proceeded to assume either an express, or at any rate a tacit and
+implied, promise on the part of all who become members of a community,
+to obey the majority of the body, or a majority of those to whom
+authority has been delegated.[217] This is a unilateral view of the
+social contract, and omits the element of reciprocity which in
+Rousseau's idea was cardinal.
+
+Locke was Rousseau's most immediate inspirer, and the latter affirmed
+himself to have treated the same matters exactly on Locke's
+principles. Rousseau, however, exaggerated Locke's politics as greatly
+as Condillac exaggerated his metaphysics. There was the important
+difference that Locke's essay on Civil Government was the
+justification in theory of a revolution which had already been
+accomplished in practice, while the Social Contract, tinged as it was
+by silent reference in the mind of the writer to Geneva, was yet a
+speculation in the air. The circumstances under which it was written
+gave to the propositions of Locke's piece a reserve and moderation
+which savour of a practical origin and a special case. They have not
+the wide scope and dogmatic air and literary precision of the
+corresponding propositions in Rousseau. We find in Locke none of those
+concise phrases which make fanatics. But the essential doctrine is
+there. The philosopher of the Revolution of 1688 probably carried its
+principles further than most of those who helped in the Revolution had
+any intention to carry them, when he said that "the legislature being
+only a fiduciary power to act for certain ends, there remains still in
+the people a supreme power to remove or alter the legislative."[218]
+It may be questioned how many of the peers of that day would have
+assented to the proposition that the people--and did Locke mean by the
+people the electors of the House of Commons, or all males over
+twenty-one, or all householders paying rates?--could by any expression
+of their will abolish the legislative power of the upper chamber, or
+put an end to the legislative and executive powers of the crown. But
+Locke's statements are direct enough, though he does not use so terse
+a label for his doctrine as Rousseau affixed to it.
+
+Again, besides the principle of popular sovereignty, Locke most likely
+gave to Rousseau the idea of the origin of this sovereignty in the
+civil state in a pact or contract, which was represented as the
+foundation and first condition of the civil state. From this naturally
+flowed the connected theory, of a perpetual consent being implied as
+given by the people to each new law. We need not quote passages from
+Locke to demonstrate the substantial correspondence of assumption
+between him and the author of the Social Contract. They are found in
+every chapter.[219] Such principles were indispensable for the defence
+of a Revolution like that of 1688, which was always carefully marked
+out by its promoters, as well as by its eloquent apologist and
+expositor a hundred years later, the great Burke, as above all things
+a revolution within the pale of the law or the constitution. They
+represented the philosophic adjustment of popular ideas to the
+political changes wrought by shifting circumstances, as distinguished
+from the biblical or Hebraic method of adjusting such ideas, which had
+prevailed in the contests of the previous generation.
+
+Yet there was in the midst of those contests one thinker of the first
+rank in intellectual power, who had constructed a genuine philosophy
+of government. Hobbes's speculations did not fit in with the theory of
+either of the two bodies of combatants in the Civil War. They were
+each in the theological order of ideas, and neither of them sought or
+was able to comprehend the application of philosophic principles to
+their own case or to that of their adversaries.[220] Hebrew precedents
+and bible texts, on the one hand; prerogative of use and high church
+doctrine, on the other. Between these was no space for the acceptance
+of a secular and rationalistic theory, covering the whole field of a
+social constitution. Now the influence of Hobbes upon Rousseau was
+very marked, and very singular. There were numerous differences
+between the philosopher of Geneva and his predecessor of Malmesbury.
+The one looked on men as good, the other looked on them as bad. The
+one described the state of nature as a state of peace, the other as a
+state of war. The one believed that laws and institutions had depraved
+man, the other that they had improved him.[221] But these differences
+did not prevent the action of Hobbes on Rousseau. It resulted in a
+curious fusion between the premisses and the temper of Hobbes and the
+conclusions of Locke. This fusion produced that popular absolutism of
+which the Social Contract was the theoretical expression, and Jacobin
+supremacy the practical manifestation. Rousseau borrowed from Hobbes
+the true conception of sovereignty, and from Locke the true conception
+of the ultimate seat and original of authority, and of the two
+together he made the great image of the sovereign people. Strike the
+crowned head from that monstrous figure which is the frontispiece of
+the Leviathan, and you have a frontispiece that will do excellently
+well for the Social Contract. Apart from a multitude of other
+obligations, good and bad, which Rousseau owed to Hobbes, as we shall
+point out, we may here mention that of the superior accuracy of the
+notion of law in the Social Contract over the notion of law in
+Montesquieu's work. The latter begins, as everybody knows, with a
+definition inextricably confused: "Laws are necessary relations
+flowing from the nature of things, and in this sense all beings have
+their laws, divinity has its laws, the material world has its laws,
+the intelligences superior to men have their laws, the beasts have
+their laws, man has his laws.... There is a primitive reason, and laws
+are the relations to be found between that and the different beings,
+and the relations of these different beings among one another."[222]
+Rousseau at once put aside these divergent meanings, made the proper
+distinction between a law of nature and the imperative law of a state,
+and justly asserted that the one could teach us nothing worth knowing
+about the other.[223] Hobbes's phraseology is much less definite than
+this, and shows that he had not himself wholly shaken off the same
+confusion as reigned in Montesquieu's account a century later. But
+then Hobbes's account of the true meaning of sovereignty was so clear,
+firm, and comprehensive, as easily to lead any fairly perspicuous
+student who followed him, to apply it to the true meaning of law. And
+on this head of law not so much fault is to be found with Rousseau, as
+on the head of larger constitutional theory. He did not look long
+enough at given laws, and hence failed to seize all their distinctive
+qualities; above all he only half saw, if he saw at all, that a law is
+a command and not a contract, and his eyes were closed to this,
+because the true view was incompatible with his fundamental assumption
+of contract as the base of the social union.[224] But he did at all
+events grasp the quality of generality as belonging to laws proper,
+and separated them justly from what he calls decrees, which we are now
+taught to name occasional or particular commands.[225] This is worth
+mentioning, because it shows that, in spite of his habits of
+intellectual laxity, Rousseau was capable, where he had a clear-headed
+master before him, of a very considerable degree of precision of
+thought, however liable it was to fall into error or deficiency for
+want of abundant comparison with bodies of external fact. Let us now
+proceed to some of the central propositions of the Social Contract.
+
+1. The origin of society dates from the moment when the obstacles
+which impede the preservation of men in a state of nature are too
+strong for such forces as each individual can employ in order to keep
+himself in that state. At this point they can only save themselves by
+aggregation. Problem: to find a form of association which defends and
+protects with the whole common force the person and property of each
+associate, and by which, each uniting himself to all, still only obeys
+himself, and remains as free as he was before. Solution: a social
+compact reducible to these words, "Each of us places in common his
+person and his whole power under the supreme direction of the general
+will; and we further receive each member as indivisible part of the
+whole." This act of association constitutes a moral and collective
+body, a public person.
+
+The practical importance and the mischief of thus suffering society to
+repose on conventions which the human will had made, lay in the
+corollary that the human will is competent at any time to unmake them,
+and also therefore to devise all possible changes that fell short of
+unmaking them. This was the root of the fatal hypothesis of the
+dictator, or divinely commissioned lawgiver. External circumstance and
+human nature alike were passive and infinitely pliable; they were the
+material out of which the legislator was to devise conventions at
+pleasure, without apprehension as to their suitableness either to the
+conditions of society among which they were to work, or to the
+passions and interests of those by whom they were to be carried out,
+and who were supposed to have given assent to them. It would be unjust
+to say that Rousseau actually faced this position and took the
+consequences. He expressly says in more places than one that the
+science of Government is only a science of combinations, applications,
+and exceptions, according to time, place, and circumstance.[226] But
+to base society on conventions is to impute an element of
+arbitrariness to these combinations and applications, and to make them
+independent, as they can never be, of the limits inexorably fixed by
+the nature of things. The notion of compact is the main source of all
+the worst vagaries in Rousseau's political speculation.
+
+It is worth remarking in the history of opinion, that there was at
+this time in France a little knot of thinkers who were nearly in full
+possession of the true view of the limits set by the natural ordering
+of societies to the power of convention and the function of the
+legislators. Five years after the publication of the Social Contract,
+a remarkable book was written by one of the economic sect of the
+Physiocrats, the later of whom, though specially concerned with the
+material interests of communities, very properly felt the necessity of
+connecting the discussion of wealth with the assumption of certain
+fundamental political conditions. They felt this, because it is
+impossible to settle any question about wages or profits, for
+instance, until you have first settled whether you are assuming the
+principles of liberty and property. This writer with great consistency
+found the first essential of all social order in conformity of
+positive law and institution to those qualities of human nature, and
+their relations with those material instruments of life, which, and
+not convention, were the true origin, as they are the actual grounds,
+of the perpetuation of our societies.[227] This was wiser than
+Rousseau's conception of the lawgiver as one who should change human
+nature, and take away from man the forces that are naturally his own,
+to replace them by others comparatively foreign to him.[228] Rousseau
+once wrote, in a letter about Rivi�re's book, that the great problem
+in politics, which might be compared with the quadrature of the circle
+in geometry, is to find a form of government which shall place law
+above man.[229] A more important problem, and not any less difficult
+for the political theoriser, is to mark the bounds at which the
+authority of the law is powerless or mischievous in attempting to
+control the egoistic or non-social parts of man. This problem Rousseau
+ignored, and that he should do so was only natural in one who
+believed that man had bound himself by a convention, strictly to
+suppress his egoistic and non-social parts, and who based all his
+speculation on this pact as against the force, or the paternal
+authority, or the will of a Supreme Being, in which other writers
+founded the social union.
+
+2. The body thus constituted by convention is the sovereign. Each
+citizen is a member of the sovereign, standing in a definite relation
+to individuals _qua_ individuals; he is also as an individual a member
+of the state and subject to the sovereign, of which from the first
+point of view he is a component element. The sovereign and the body
+politic are one and the same thing.[230]
+
+Of the antecedents and history of this doctrine enough has already
+been said. Its general truth as a description either of what is, or
+what ought to be and will be, demands an ampler discussion than there
+is any occasion to carry on here. We need only point out its place as
+a kind of intermediate dissolvent for which the time was most ripe. It
+breaks up the feudal conception of political authority as a property
+of land-ownership, noble birth, and the like, and it associates this
+authority widely and simply with the bare fact of participation in any
+form of citizenship in the social union. The later and higher idea of
+every share of political power as a function to be discharged for the
+good of the whole body, and not merely as a right to be enjoyed for
+the advantage of its possessor, was a form of thought to which
+Rousseau did not rise. That does not lessen the effectiveness of the
+blow which his doctrine dealt to French feudalism, and which is its
+main title to commemoration in connection with his name.
+
+The social compact thus made is essentially different from the social
+compact which Hobbes described as the origin of what he calls
+commonwealths by institution, to distinguish them from commonwealths
+by acquisition, that is to say, states formed by conquest or resting
+on hereditary rule. "A commonwealth," Hobbes says, "is said to be
+instituted when a multitude of men do agree and covenant, every one
+with every one, that to whatsoever man or assembly of men shall be
+given by the major part the right to present the person of them all,
+that is to say, to be their representative; every one ... shall
+authorise all the actions and judgments of that man or assembly of
+men, in the same manner as if they were his own, to the end to live
+peaceably among themselves, and be protected against other men."[231]
+But Rousseau's compact was an act of association among equals, who
+also remained equals. Hobbes's compact was an act of surrender on the
+part of the many to one or a number. The first was the constitution of
+civil society, the second was the erection of a government. As nobody
+now believes in the existence of any such compact in either one form
+or the other, it would be superfluous to inquire which of the two is
+the less inaccurate. All we need do is to point out that there was
+this difference. Rousseau distinctly denied the existence of any
+element of contract in the erection of a government; there is only one
+contract in the state, he said, and it is that of association.[232]
+Locke's notion of the compact which was the beginning of every
+political society is indefinite on this point; he speaks of it
+indifferently as an agreement of a body of free men to unite and
+incorporate into a society, and an agreement to set up a
+government.[233] Most of us would suppose the two processes to be as
+nearly identical as may be; Rousseau drew a distinction, and from this
+distinction he derived further differences.
+
+Here, we may remark, is the starting-point in the history of the ideas
+of the revolution, of one of the most prominent of them all, that of
+Fraternity. If the whole structure of society rests on an act of
+partnership entered into by equals on behalf of themselves and their
+descendants for ever, the nature of the union is not what it would be,
+if the members of the union had only entered it to place their
+liberties at the feet of some superior power. Society in the one case
+is a covenant of subjection, in the other a covenant of social
+brotherhood. This impressed itself deeply on the feelings of men like
+Robespierre, who were never so well pleased as when they could find
+for their sentimentalism a covering of neat political logic. The same
+idea of association came presently to receive a still more remarkable
+and momentous extension, when it was translated from the language of
+mere government into that of the economic organisation of communities.
+Rousseau's conception went no further than political association, as
+distinct from subjection. Socialism, which came by and by to the front
+place, carried the idea to its fullest capacity, and presented all the
+relations of men with one another as fixed by the same bond. Men had
+entered the social union as brethren, equal, and co-operators, not
+merely for purposes of government, but for purposes of mutual succour
+in all its aspects. This naturally included the most important of all,
+material production. They were not associated merely as equal
+participants in political sovereignty; they were equal participants in
+all the rest of the increase made to the means of human happiness by
+united action. Socialism is the transfer of the principle of fraternal
+association from politics, where Rousseau left it, to the wider sphere
+of industrial force.
+
+It is perhaps worth notice that another famous revolutionary term
+belongs to the same source. All the associates of this act of union,
+becoming members of the city, are as such to be called Citizens, as
+participating in the sovereign authority.[234] The term was in
+familiar use enough among the French in their worst days, but it was
+Rousseau's sanction which marked it in the new times with a sort of
+sacramental stamp. It came naturally to him, because it was the name
+of the first of the two classes which constituted the active portion
+of the republic of Geneva, and the only class whose members were
+eligible to the chief magistracies.
+
+3. We next have a group of propositions setting forth the attributes
+of sovereignty. It is inalienable.[235] It is indivisible.
+
+These two propositions, which play such a part in the history of some
+of the episodes of the French Revolution, contain no more than was
+contended for by Hobbes, and has been accepted in our own times by
+Austin. When Hobbes says that "to the laws which the sovereign maketh,
+the sovereign is not subject, for if he were subject to the civil laws
+he were subject to himself, which were not subjection but freedom,"
+his notion of sovereignty is exactly that expressed by Rousseau in his
+unexplained dogma of the inalienableness of sovereignty. So Rousseau
+means no more by the dogma that sovereignty is indivisible, than
+Austin meant when he declared of the doctrine that the legislative
+sovereign powers and the executive sovereign powers belong in any
+society to distinct parties, that it is a supposition too palpably
+false to endure a moment's examination.[236] The way in which this
+account of the indivisibleness of sovereignty was understood during
+the revolution, twisted it into a condemnation of the dreaded idea of
+Federalism. It might just as well have been interpreted to condemn
+alliances between nations; for the properties of sovereignty are
+clearly independent of the dimensions of the sovereign unit. Another
+effect of this doctrine was the rejection by the Constituent Assembly
+of the balanced parliamentary system, which the followers of
+Montesquieu would fain have introduced on the English model. Whether
+that was an evil or a good, publicists will long continue to dispute.
+
+4. The general will of the sovereign upon an object of common interest
+is expressed in a law. Only the sovereign can possess this law-making
+power, because no one but the sovereign has the right of declaring the
+general will. The legislative power cannot be exerted by delegation or
+representation. The English fancy that they are a free nation, but
+they are grievously mistaken. They are only free during the election
+of members of parliament; the members once chosen, the people are
+slaves, nay, as people they have ceased to exist.[237] It is
+impossible for the sovereign to act, except when the people are
+assembled. Besides such extraordinary assemblies as unforeseen events
+may call for, there must be fixed periodical meetings that nothing can
+interrupt or postpone. Do you call this chimerical? Then you have
+forgotten the Roman comitia, as well as such gatherings of the people
+as those of the Macedonians and the Franks and most other nations in
+their primitive times. What has existed is certainly possible.[238]
+
+It is very curious that Rousseau in this part of his subject should
+have contented himself with going back to Macedonia and Rome, instead
+of pointing to the sovereign states that have since become confederate
+with his native republic. A historian in our own time has described
+with an enthusiasm that equals that of the Social Contract, how he saw
+the sovereign people of Uri and the sovereign people of Appenzell
+discharge the duties of legislation and choice of executive, each in
+the majesty of its corporate person.[239] That Rousseau was influenced
+by the free sovereignty of the states of the Swiss confederation, as
+well as by that of his own city, we may well believe. Whether he was
+or not, it must always be counted a serious misfortune that a writer
+who was destined to exercise such power in a crisis of the history of
+a great nation, should have chosen his illustrations from a time and
+from societies so remote, that the true conditions of their political
+system could not possibly be understood with any approach to reality,
+while there were, within a few leagues of his native place,
+communities where the system of a sovereign public in his own sense
+was actually alive and flourishing and at work. From them the full
+meaning of his theories might have been practically gathered, and
+whatever useful lessons lay at the bottom of them might have been made
+plain. As it was, it came to pass singularly enough that the effect of
+the French Revolution was the suppression, happily only for a time, of
+the only governments in Europe where the doctrine of the favourite
+apostle of the Revolution was a reality. The constitution of the
+Helvetic Republic in 1798 was as bad a blow to the sovereignty of
+peoples in a true sense, as the old house of Austria or Charles of
+Burgundy could ever have dealt. That constitution, moreover, was
+directly opposed to the Social Contract in setting up what it called
+representative democracy, for representative democracy was just what
+Rousseau steadily maintained to be a nullity and a delusion.
+
+The only lesson which the Social Contract contained for a statesman
+bold enough to take into his hands the reconstruction of France,
+undoubtedly pointed in the direction of confederation. At one place,
+where he became sensible of the impotence which his assumption of a
+small state inflicted on his whole speculation, Rousseau said he would
+presently show how the good order of a small state might be united to
+the external power of a great people. Though he never did this, he
+hints in a footnote that his plan belonged to the theory of
+confederations, of which the principles were still to be
+established.[240] When he gave advice for the renovation of the
+wretched constitution of Poland, he insisted above all things that
+they should apply themselves to extend and perfect the system of
+federate governments, "the only one that unites in itself all the
+advantages of great and small states."[241] A very few years after the
+appearance of his book, the great American union of sovereign states
+arose to point the political moral. The French revolutionists missed
+the force alike of the practical example abroad, and of the theory of
+the book which they took for gospel at home. How far they were driven
+to this by the urgent pressure of foreign war, or whether they would
+have followed the same course without that interference, merely in
+obedience to the catholic and monarchic absolutism which had sunk so
+much deeper into French character than people have been willing to
+admit, we cannot tell. The fact remains that the Jacobins, Rousseau's
+immediate disciples, at once took up the chain of centralised
+authority where it had been broken off by the ruin of the monarchy.
+They caught at the letter of the dogma of a sovereign people, and lost
+its spirit. They missed the germ of truth in Rousseau's scheme,
+namely, that for order and freedom and just administration the unit
+should not be too large to admit of the participation of the persons
+concerned in the management of their own public affairs. If they had
+realised this and applied it, either by transforming the old monarchy
+into a confederacy of sovereign provinces, or by some less sweeping
+modification of the old centralised scheme of government, they might
+have saved France.[242] But, once more, men interpret a political
+treatise on principles which either come to them by tradition; or
+else spring suddenly up from roots of passion.[243]
+
+5. The government is the minister of the sovereign. It is an
+intermediate body set up between sovereign and subjects for their
+mutual correspondence, charged with the execution of the laws and the
+maintenance of civil and political freedom. The members comprising it
+are called magistrates or kings, and to the whole body so composed,
+whether of one or of more than one, is given the name of prince. If
+the whole power is centred in the hands of a single magistrate, from
+whom all the rest hold their authority, the government is called a
+monarchy. If there are more persons simply citizens than there are
+magistrates, this is an aristocracy.[244] If more citizen magistrates
+than simple private citizens, that is a democracy. The last government
+is as a general rule best fitted for small states, and the first for
+large ones--on the principle that the number of the supreme
+magistrates ought to be in the inverse ratio of that of the citizens.
+But there is a multitude of circumstances which may furnish reasons
+for exceptions to this general rule.
+
+This common definition of the three forms of governments according to
+the mere number of the participants in the chief magistracy, though
+adopted by Hobbes and other writers, is certainly inadequate and
+uninstructive, without some further qualification. Aristotle, for
+instance, furnishes such a qualification, when he refers to the
+interests in which the government is carried on, whether the interest
+of a small body or of the whole of the citizens.[245] Montesquieu's
+well-known division, though logically faulty, still has the merit of
+pointing to conditions of difference among forms of government,
+outside of and apart from the one fact of the number of the sovereign.
+To divide governments, as Montesquieu did, into republics, monarchies,
+and despotisms, was to use two principles of division, first the
+number of the sovereign, and next something else, namely, the
+difference between a constitutional and an absolute monarch. Then he
+returned to the first principle of division, and separated a republic
+into a government of all, which is a democracy, and a government by a
+part, which is aristocracy.[246] Still, to have introduced the element
+of law-abidingness in the chief magistracy, whether of one or more,
+was to have called attention to the fact that no single distinction is
+enough to furnish us with a conception of the real and vital
+differences which may exist between one form of government and
+another.[247]
+
+The important fact about a government lies quite as much in the
+qualifying epithet which is to be affixed to any one of the three
+names, as in the name itself. We know nothing about a monarchy, until
+we have been told whether it is absolute or constitutional; if
+absolute, whether it is administered in the interests of the realm,
+like that of Prussia under Frederick the Great, or in the interests of
+the ruler, like that of an Indian principality under a native prince;
+if constitutional, whether the real power is aristocratic, as in Great
+Britain a hundred years ago, or plutocratic, as in Great Britain
+to-day, or popular, as it may be here fifty years hence. And so with
+reference to each of the other two forms; neither name gives us any
+instruction, except of a merely negative kind, until it has been made
+precise by one or more explanatory epithets. What is the common
+quality of the old Roman republic, the republics of the Swiss
+confederation, the republic of Venice, the American republic, the
+republic of Mexico? Plainly the word republic has no further effect
+beyond that of excluding the idea of a recognised dynasty.
+
+Rousseau is perhaps less open to this kind of criticism than other
+writers on political theory, for the reason that he distinguishes the
+constitution of the state from the constitution of the government. The
+first he settles definitely. The whole body of the people is to be
+sovereign, and to be endowed alone with what he conceived as the only
+genuinely legislative power. The only question which he considers open
+is as to the form in which the _delegated executive authority_ shall
+be organised. Democracy, the immediate government of all by all, he
+rejects as too perfect for men; it requires a state so small that each
+citizen knows all the others, manners so simple that the business may
+be small and the mode of discussion easy, equality of rank and fortune
+so general as not to allow of the overriding of political equality by
+material superiority, and so forth.[248] Monarchy labours under a
+number of disadvantages which are tolerably obvious. "One essential
+and inevitable defect, which must always place monarchic below
+republican government, is that in the latter the public voice hardly
+ever promotes to the first places any but capable and enlightened men
+who fill them with honour; whereas those who get on in monarchies, are
+for the most part small busybodies, small knaves, small intriguers, in
+whom the puny talents which are the secret of reaching substantial
+posts in courts, only serve to show their stupidity to the public as
+soon as they have made their way to the front. The people is far less
+likely to make a blunder in a choice of this sort, than the prince,
+and a man of true merit is nearly as rare in the ministry, as a fool
+at the head of the government of a republic."[249] There remains
+aristocracy. Of this there are three sorts: natural, elective, and
+hereditary. The first can only thrive among primitive folk, while the
+third is the worst of all governments. The second is the best, for it
+is aristocracy properly so called. If men only acquire rule in virtue
+of election, then purity, enlightenment, experience, and all the other
+grounds of public esteem and preference, become so many new guarantees
+that the administration shall be wise and just. It is the best and
+most natural order that the wisest should govern the multitude,
+provided you are sure that they will govern the multitude for its
+advantage, and not for their own. If aristocracy of this kind requires
+one or two virtues less than a popular executive, it also demands
+others which are peculiar to itself, such as moderation in the rich
+and content in the poor. For this form comports with a certain
+inequality of fortune, for the reason that it is well that the
+administration of public affairs should be confided to those who are
+best able to give their whole time to it. At the same time it is of
+importance that an opposite choice should occasionally teach the
+people that in the merit of men there are more momentous reasons of
+preference than wealth.[250] Rousseau, as we have seen, had pronounced
+English liberty to be no liberty at all, save during the few days once
+in seven years when the elections to parliament take place. Yet this
+scheme of an elective aristocracy was in truth a very near approach
+to the English form as it is theoretically presented in our own day,
+with a suffrage gradually becoming universal. If the suffrage were
+universal, and if its exercise took place once a year, our system, in
+spite of the now obsolescent elements of hereditary aristocracy and
+nominal monarchy, would be as close a realisation of the scheme of the
+Social Contract as any representative system permits. If Rousseau had
+further developed his notions of confederation, the United States
+would most have resembled his type.
+
+6. What is to be the attitude of the state in respect of religion?
+Certainly not that prescribed by the policy of the middle ages. The
+separation of the spiritual from the temporal power, indicated by
+Jesus Christ, and developed by his followers in the course of many
+subsequent generations, was in Rousseau's eyes most mischievous,
+because it ended in the subordination of the temporal power to the
+spiritual, and that is incompatible with an efficient polity. Even the
+kings of England, though they style themselves heads of the church,
+are really its ministers and servants.[251]
+
+The last allegation evinces Rousseau's usual ignorance of history, and
+need not be discussed, any more than his proposition on which he lays
+so much stress, that Christians cannot possibly be good soldiers, nor
+truly good citizens, because their hearts being fixed upon another
+world, they must necessarily be indifferent to the success or failure
+of such enterprises as they may take up in this.[252] In reading the
+Social Contract, and some other of the author's writings besides, we
+have constantly to interpret the direct, positive, categorical form of
+assertion into something of this kind--"Such and such consequences
+ought logically to follow from the meaning of the name, or the
+definition of a principle, or from such and such motives." The change
+of this moderate form of provisional assertion into the unconditional
+statement that such and such consequences have actually followed,
+constantly lands the author in propositions which any reader who tests
+them by an appeal to the experience of mankind, written and unwritten,
+at once discovers to be false and absurd. Rousseau himself took less
+trouble to verify his conclusions by such an appeal to experience than
+any writer that ever lived in a scientific age. The other remark to be
+made on the above section is that the rejection of the Christian or
+ecclesiastical division of the powers of the church and the powers of
+the state, is the strongest illustration that could be found of the
+debt of Rousseau's conception of a state to the old pagan conception.
+It was the main characteristic of the polities which Christian
+monotheism and feudalism together succeeded in replacing, to recognise
+no such division as that between church and state, pope and emperor.
+Rousseau resumed the old conception. But he adjusted it in a certain
+degree to the spirit of his own time, and imposed certain
+philosophical limitations upon it. His scheme is as follows.
+
+Religion, he says, in its relation to the state, may be considered as
+of three kinds. First, natural religion, without temple, altar, or
+rite, the true and pure theism of the natural conscience of man.
+Second, local, civil, or positive religion, with dogmas, rites,
+exercises; a theology of a primitive people, exactly co-extensive with
+all the rights and all the duties of men. Third, a religion like the
+Christianity of the Roman church, which gives men two sets of laws,
+two chiefs, two countries, submits them to contradictory duties, and
+prevents them from being able to be at once devout and patriotic. The
+last of these is so evidently pestilent as to need no discussion. The
+second has the merit of teaching men to identify duty to their gods
+with duty to their country; under this to die for the land is
+martyrdom, to break its laws impiety, and to subject a culprit to
+public execration is to devote him to the anger of the gods. But it is
+bad, because it is at bottom a superstition, and because it makes a
+people sanguinary and intolerant. The first of all, which is now
+styled a Christian theism, having no special relation with the body
+politic, adds no force to the laws. There are many particular
+objections to Christianity flowing from the fact of its not being a
+kingdom of this world, and this above all, that Christianity only
+preaches servitude and dependence.[253] What then is to be done? The
+sovereign must establish a purely civil profession of faith. It will
+consist of the following positive dogmas:--the existence of a
+divinity, powerful, intelligent, beneficent and foreseeing; the life
+to come; the happiness of the just, the chastisement of the wicked;
+the sanctity of the social contract and the laws. These articles of
+belief are imposed, not as dogmas of religion exactly, but as
+sentiments of sociability. If any one declines to accept them, he
+ought to be exiled, not for being impious, but for being unsociable,
+incapable of sincere attachment to the laws, or of sacrificing his
+life to his duty. If any one, after publicly recognising these dogmas,
+carries himself as if he did not believe them, let him be punished by
+death, for he has committed the worst of crimes, he has lied before
+the laws.[254]
+
+Rousseau thus, unconsciously enough, brought to its climax that
+reaction against the absorption of the state in the church which had
+first taken a place in literature in the controversy between legists
+and canonists, and had found its most famous illustration in the De
+Monarchi� of the great poet of catholicism. The division of two
+co-equal realms, one temporal, the other spiritual, was replaced in
+the Genevese thinker by what he admitted to be "pure Hobbism." This,
+the rigorous subordination of the church to the state, was the end, so
+far as France went, of the speculative controversy which had occupied
+Europe for so many ages, as to the respective powers of pope and
+emperor, of positive law and law divine. The famous civil constitution
+of the clergy (1790), which was the expression of Rousseau's principle
+as formulated by his disciples in the Constituent Assembly, was the
+revolutionary conclusion to the world-wide dispute, whose most
+melodramatic episode had been the scene in the courtyard of Canossa.
+
+Rousseau's memorable prescription, banishing all who should not
+believe in God, or a future state, or in rewards and punishments for
+the deeds done in the body, and putting to death any who, after
+subscribing to the required profession, should seem no longer to hold
+it, has naturally created a very lively horror in a tolerant
+generation like our own, some of whose finest spirits have rejected
+deliberately and finally the articles of belief, without which they
+could not have been suffered to exist in Rousseau's state. It seemed
+to contemporaries, who were enthusiastic above all things for humanity
+and infinite tolerance, these being the prizes of the long conflict
+which they hoped they were completing, to be a return to the horrors
+of the Holy Office. Men were as shocked as the modern philosopher is,
+when he finds the greatest of the followers of Socrates imposing in
+his latest piece the penalty of imprisonment for five years, to be
+followed in case of obduracy by death, on one who should not believe
+in the gods set up for the state by the lawmaker.[255] And we can
+hardly comfort ourselves, as Milton did about Plato, who framed laws
+which no city ever yet received, and "fed his fancy with making many
+edicts to his airy burgomasters, which they who otherwise admire him,
+wish had been rather buried and excused in the genial cups of an
+academic night-sitting."[256] Rousseau's ideas fell among men who were
+most potent and corporeal burgomasters. In the winter of 1793 two
+parties in Paris stood face to face; the rationalistic, Voltairean
+party of the Commune, named improperly after H�bert, but whose best
+member was Chaumette, and the sentimental, Rousseauite party, led by
+Robespierre. The first had industriously desecrated the churches, and
+consummated their revolt against the gods of the old time by the
+public worship of the Goddess of Reason, who was prematurely set up
+for deity of the new time. Robespierre retaliated with the mummeries
+of the Festival of the Supreme Being, and protested against atheism as
+the crime of aristocrats. Presently the atheistic party succumbed.
+Chaumette was not directly implicated in the proceedings which led to
+their fall, but he was by and by accused of conspiring with H�bert,
+Clootz, and the rest, "to destroy all notion of Divinity and base the
+government of France on atheism." "They attack the immortality of the
+soul," cried Saint Just, "the thought which consoled Socrates in his
+dying moments, and their dream is to raise atheism into a worship."
+And this was the offence, technically and officially described, for
+which Chaumette and Clootz were sent to the guillotine (April 1794),
+strictly on the principle which had been laid down in the Social
+Contract, and accepted by Robespierre.[257]
+
+It would have been odd in any writer less firmly possessed with the
+infallibility of his own dreams than Rousseau was, that he should not
+have seen the impossibility in anything like the existing conditions
+of human nature, of limiting the profession of civil faith to the
+three or four articles which happened to constitute his own belief.
+Having once granted the general position that a citizen may be
+required to profess some religious faith, there is no speculative
+principle, and there is no force in the world, which can fix any bound
+to the amount or kind of religious faith which the state has the right
+thus to exact. Rousseau said that a man was dangerous to the city who
+did not believe in God, a future state, and divine reward and
+retribution. But then Calvin thought a man dangerous who did not
+believe both that there is only one God, and also that there are
+three Gods. And so Chaumette went to the scaffold, and Servetus to the
+stake, on the one common principle that the civil magistrate is
+concerned with heresy. And H�bert was only following out the same
+doctrine in a mild and equitable manner, when he insisted on
+preventing the publication of a book in which the author professed his
+belief in a God. A single step in the path of civil interference with
+opinion leads you the whole way.
+
+The history of the Protestant churches is enough to show the pitiable
+futility of the proviso for religious tolerance with which Rousseau
+closed his exposition. "If there is no longer an exclusive national
+religion, then every creed ought to be tolerated which tolerates other
+creeds, so long as it contains nothing contrary to the duties of the
+citizen. But whoever dares to say, _Out of the church, no salvation_,
+ought to be banished from the state." The reason for which Henry IV.
+embraced the Roman religion--namely, that in that he might be saved,
+in the opinion alike of Protestants and Catholics, whereas in the
+reformed faith, though he was saved according to Protestants, yet
+according to Catholics he was necessarily damned,--ought to have made
+every honest man, and especially every prince, reject it. It was the
+more curious that Rousseau did not see the futility of drawing the
+line of tolerance at any given set of dogmas, however simple and
+slight and acceptable to himself they might be, because he invited
+special admiration for D'Argenson's excellent maxim that "in the
+republic everybody is perfectly free in what does not hurt
+others."[258] Surely this maxim has very little significance or value,
+unless we interpret it as giving entire liberty of opinion, because no
+opinion whatever can hurt others, until it manifests itself in act,
+including of course speech, which is a kind of act. Rousseau admitted
+that over and above the profession of civil faith, a citizen might
+hold what opinions he pleased, in entire freedom from the sovereign's
+cognisance or jurisdiction; "for as the sovereign has no competence in
+the other world, the fate of subjects in that other world is not his
+affair, provided they are good citizens in this." But good citizenship
+consists in doing or forbearing from certain actions, and to punish
+men on the inference that forbidden action is likely to follow from
+the rejection of a set of opinions, or to exact a test oath of
+adherence to such opinions on the same principle, is to concede the
+whole theory of civil intolerance, however little Rousseau may have
+realised the perfectly legitimate applications of his doctrine. It was
+an unconscious compromise. He was thinking of Calvin in practice and
+Hobbes in theory, and he was at the same time influenced by the
+moderate spirit of his time, and the comparatively reasonable
+character of his personal belief. He praised Hobbes as the only author
+who had seen the right remedy for the conflict of the spiritual and
+temporal jurisdictions, by proposing to unite the two heads of the
+eagle, and reducing all to political unity, without which never will
+either state or government be duly constituted. But Hobbes was
+consistent without flinching. He refused to set limits to the
+religious prescriptions which a sovereign might impose, for "even when
+the civil sovereign is an infidel, every one of his own subjects that
+resisteth him, sinneth against the laws of God (for such are the laws
+of nature), and rejecteth the counsel of the apostles, that
+admonisheth all Christians to obey their princes.... And for their
+faith, it is internal and invisible: they have the licence that Naaman
+had, and need not put themselves into danger for it; but if they do,
+they ought to expect their reward in heaven, and not complain of their
+lawful sovereign."[259] All this flowed from the very idea and
+definition of sovereignty, which Rousseau accepted from Hobbes, as we
+have already seen. Such consequences, however, stated in these bold
+terms, must have been highly revolting to Rousseau; he could not
+assent to an exercise of sovereignty which might be atheistic,
+Mahometan, or anything else unqualifiedly monstrous. He failed to see
+the folly of trying to unite the old notions of a Christian
+commonwealth with what was fundamentally his own notion of a
+commonwealth after the ancient type. He stripped the pagan republics,
+which he took for his model, of their national and official
+polytheism, and he put on in its stead a scanty remnant of theism
+slightly tinged with Christianity.
+
+Then he practically accepted Hobbes's audacious bidding to the man who
+should not be able to accept the state creed, to go courageously to
+martyrdom, and leave the land in peace. For the modern principle,
+which was contained in D'Argenson's saying previously quoted, that the
+civil power does best absolutely and unreservedly to ignore
+spirituals, he was not prepared either by his emancipation from the
+theological ideas of his youth, or by his observation of the working
+and tendencies of systems, which involved the state in some more or
+less close relations with the church, either as superior, equal, or
+subordinate. Every test is sure to insist on mental independence
+ending exactly where the speculative curiosity of the time is most
+intent to begin.
+
+Let us now shortly confront Rousseau's ideas with some of the
+propositions belonging to another method of approaching the philosophy
+of government, that have for their key-note the conception of
+expediency or convenience, and are tested by their conformity to the
+observed and recorded experience of mankind. According to this method,
+the ground and origin of society is not a compact; that never existed
+in any known case, and never was a condition of obligation either in
+primitive or developed societies, either between subjects and
+sovereign, or between the equal members of a sovereign body. The true
+ground is an acceptance of conditions which came into existence by the
+sociability inherent in man, and were developed by man's spontaneous
+search after convenience. The statement that while the constitution
+of man is the work of nature, that of the state is the work of
+art,[260] is as misleading as the opposite statement that governments
+are not made but grow.[261] The truth lies between them, in such
+propositions as that institutions owe their existence and development
+to deliberate human effort, working in accordance with circumstances
+naturally fixed both in human character and in the external field of
+its activity. The obedience of the subject to the sovereign has its
+root not in contract but in force,--the force of the sovereign to
+punish disobedience. A man does not consent to be put to death if he
+shall commit a murder, for the reason alleged by Rousseau, namely, as
+a means of protecting his own life against murder.[262] There is no
+consent in the transaction. Some person or persons, possessed of
+sovereign authority, promulgated a command that the subject should not
+commit murder, and appointed penalties for such commission and it was
+not a fictitious assent to these penalties, but the fact that the
+sovereign was strong enough to enforce them, which made the command
+valid.
+
+Supposing a law to be passed in an assembly of the sovereign people by
+a majority; what binds a member of the minority to obedience?
+Rousseau's answer is this:--When the law is proposed, the question
+put is not whether they approve or reject the proposition, but whether
+it is conformable to the general will: the general will appears from
+the votes: if the opinion contrary to my own wins the day, that only
+proves that I was mistaken, and that what I took for the general will
+was not really so.[263] We can scarcely imagine more nonsensical
+sophistry than this. The proper answer evidently is, that either
+experience or calculation has taught the citizens in a popular
+government that in the long run it is most expedient for the majority
+of votes to decide the law. In other words, the inconvenience to the
+minority of submitting to a law which they dislike, is less than the
+inconvenience of fighting to have their own way, or retiring to form a
+separate community. The minority submit to obey laws which were made
+against their will, because they cannot avoid the necessity of
+undergoing worse inconveniences than are involved in this submission.
+The same explanation partially covers what is unfortunately the more
+frequent case in the history of the race, the submission of the
+majority to the laws imposed by a minority of one or more. In both
+these cases, however, as in the general question of the source of our
+obedience to the laws, deliberate and conscious sense of convenience
+is as slight in its effect upon conduct here, as it is in the rest of
+the field of our moral motives. It is covered too thickly over and
+constantly neutralised by the multitudinous growths of use, by the
+many forms of fatalistic or ascetic religious sentiment, by physical
+apathy of race, and all other conditions that interpose to narrow or
+abrogate the authority of pure reason over human conduct. Rousseau,
+expounding his conception of a normal political state, was no doubt
+warranted in leaving these complicating conditions out of account,
+though to do so is to rob any treatise on government of much of its
+possible value. The same excuse cannot warrant him in basing his
+political institutions upon a figment, instead of upon the substantial
+ground of propositions about human nature, which the average of
+experience in given races and at given stages of advancement has shown
+to be true within those limits. There are places in his writings where
+he reluctantly admits that men are only moved by their interests, and
+he does not even take care to qualify this sufficiently.[264] But
+throughout the Social Contract we seem to be contemplating the
+erection of a machine which is to work without reference to the only
+forces that can possibly impart movement to it.
+
+The consequence of this is that Rousseau gives us not the least help
+towards the solution of any of the problems of actual government,
+because these are naturally both suggested and guided by
+considerations of expediency and improvement. It is as if he had never
+really settled the ends for which government exists, beyond the
+construction of the symmetrical machine of government itself. He is a
+geometer, not a mechanician; or shall we say that he is a mechanician,
+and not a biologist concerned with the conditions of a living
+organism. The analogy of the body politic to the body natural was as
+present to him as it had been to all other writers on society, but he
+failed to seize the only useful lessons which such an analogy might
+have taught him--diversity of structure, difference of function,
+development of strength by exercise, growth by nutrition--all of which
+might have been serviceably translated into the dialect of political
+science, and might have bestowed on his conception of political
+society more of the features of reality. We see no room for the free
+play of divergent forces, the active rivalry of hostile interests, the
+regulated conflict of multifarious personal aims, which can never be
+extinguished, except in moments of driving crisis, by the most sincere
+attachment to the common causes of the land. Thus the modern question
+which is of such vital interest for all the foremost human societies,
+of the union of collective energy with the encouragement of individual
+freedom, is, if not wholly untouched, at least wholly unillumined by
+anything that Rousseau says. To tell us that a man on entering a
+society exchanges his natural liberty for civil liberty which is
+limited by the general will,[265] is to give us a phrase, where we
+seek a solution. To say that if it is the opposition of private
+interests which made the establishment of societies necessary, it is
+the accord of those interests which makes them possible,[266] is to
+utter a truth which feeds no practical curiosity. The opposition of
+private interests remains, in spite of the yoke which their accord has
+imposed upon it, but which only controls and does not suppress such an
+opposition. What sort of control? What degree? What bounds?
+
+So again let us consider the statement that the instant the government
+usurps the sovereignty, then the social pact is broken, and all the
+citizens, restored by right to their natural liberty, are forced but
+not morally obliged to obey.[267] He began by telling his readers that
+man, though born free, is now everywhere in chains; and therefore it
+would appear that in all existing cases the social pact has been
+broken, and the citizens living under the reign of force, are free to
+resume their natural liberty, if they are only strong enough to do so.
+This declaration of the general duty of rebellion no doubt had its
+share in generating that fervid eagerness that all other peoples
+should rise and throw off the yoke, which was one of the most
+astonishing anxieties of the French during their revolution. That was
+not the worst quality of such a doctrine. It made government
+impossible, by basing the right or duty of resistance on a question
+that could not be reached by positive evidence, but must always be
+decided by an arbitrary interpretation of an arbitrarily imagined
+document. The moderate proposition that resistance is lawful if a
+government is a bad one, and if the people are strong enough to
+overthrow it, and if their leaders have reason to suppose they can
+provide a less bad one in its place, supplies tests that are capable
+of application. Our own writers in favour of the doctrine of
+resistance partly based their arguments upon the historic instances of
+the Old Testament, and it is one of the most striking contributions of
+Protestantism to the cause of freedom, that it sent people in an
+admiring spirit to the history of the most rebellious nation that ever
+existed, and so provided them in Hebrew insurgency with a corrective
+for the too submissive political teaching of the Gospel. But these
+writers have throughout a tacit appeal to expediency, as writers might
+always be expected to have, who were really meditating on the
+possibility of their principles being brought to the test of practice.
+There can be no evidence possible, with a test so vague as the fact of
+the rupture of a compact whose terms are authentically known to nobody
+concerned. Speak of bad laws and good, wise administration or unwise,
+just government or unjust, extravagant or economical, civically
+elevating or demoralising; all these are questions which men may apply
+themselves to settle with knowledge, and with a more or less definite
+degree of assurance. But who can tell how he is to find out whether
+sovereignty has been usurped, and the social compact broken? Was there
+a usurpation of sovereignty in France not many years ago, when the
+assumption of power by the prince was ratified by many millions of
+votes?
+
+The same case, we are told, namely, breach of the social compact and
+restoration of natural liberty, occurs when the members of the
+government usurp separately the power which they ought only to
+exercise in a body.[268] Now this description applies very fairly to
+the famous episode in our constitutional history, connected with
+George the Third's first attack of madness in 1788. Parliament cannot
+lawfully begin business without a declaration of the cause of summons
+from the crown. On this occasion parliament both met and deliberated
+without communication from the crown. What was still more important
+was a vote of the parliament itself, authorising the passing of
+letters patent under the great seal for opening parliament by
+commission, and for giving assent to a Regency Bill. This was a
+distinct usurpation of regal authority. Two members of the government
+(in Rousseau's sense of the term), namely the houses of parliament,
+usurped the power which they ought only to have exercised along with
+the crown.[269] The Whigs denounced the proceeding as a fiction, a
+forgery, a phantom, but if they had been readers of the Social
+Contract, and if they had been bitten by its dogmatic temper, they
+would have declared the compact of union violated, and all British
+citizens free to resume their natural rights. Not even the bitter
+virulence of faction at that time could tempt any politician to take
+up such a line, though within half a dozen years each of the
+democratic factions in France had worked at the overthrow of every
+other in turn, on the very principle which Rousseau had formulated and
+Robespierre had made familiar, that usurped authority is a valid
+reason for annihilating a government, no matter under what
+circumstances, nor how small the chance of replacing it by a better,
+nor how enormous the peril to the national well-being in the process.
+The true opposite to so anarchic a doctrine is assuredly not that of
+passive obedience either to chamber or monarch, but the right and duty
+of throwing off any government which inflicts more disadvantages than
+it confers advantages. Rousseau's whole theory tends inevitably to
+substitute a long series of struggles after phrases and shadows in the
+new era, for the equally futile and equally bloody wars of dynastic
+succession which have been the great curse of the old. Men die for a
+phrase as they used to die for a family. The other theory, which all
+English politicians accept in their hearts, and so many commanding
+French politicians have seemed in their hearts to reject, was first
+expounded in direct view of Rousseau's teaching by Paley.[270] Of
+course the greatest, widest, and loftiest exposition of the bearings
+of expediency on government and its conditions, is to be found in the
+magnificent and immortal pieces of Burke, some of them suggested by
+absolutist violations of the doctrine in our own affairs, and some of
+them by anarchic violation of it in the affairs of France, after the
+seed sown by Rousseau had brought forth fruit.
+
+We should, however, be false to our critical principle, if we did not
+recognise the historical effect of a speculation scientifically
+valueless. There has been no attempt to palliate either the
+shallowness or the practical mischievousness of the Social Contract.
+But there is another side to its influence. It was the match which
+kindled revolutionary fire in generous breasts throughout Europe. Not
+in France merely, but in Germany as well, its phrases became the
+language of all who aspired after freedom. Schiller spoke of Rousseau
+as one who "converted Christians into human beings," and the _Robbers_
+(1778) is as if it had been directly inspired by the doctrine that
+usurped sovereignty restores men to their natural rights. Smaller men
+in the violent movement which seized all the youth of Germany at that
+time, followed the same lead, if they happened to have any feeling
+about the political condition of their enslaved countries.
+
+There was alike in France and Germany a craving for a return to nature
+among the whole of the young generation.[271] The Social Contract
+supplied a dialect for this longing on one side, just as the Emilius
+supplied it on another. Such parts in it as people did not understand
+or did not like, they left out. They did not perceive its direction
+towards that "perfect Hobbism," which the author declared to be the
+only practical alternative to a democracy so austere as to be
+intolerable. They grasped phrases about the sovereignty of the people,
+the freedom for which nature had destined man, the slavery to which
+tyrants and oppressors had brought him. Above all they were struck by
+the patriotism which shines so brightly in every page, like the fire
+on the altar of one of those ancient cities which had inspired the
+writer's ideal.
+
+Yet there is a marked difference in the channels along which
+Rousseau's influence moved in the two countries. In France it was
+drawn eventually into the sphere of direct politics. In Germany it
+inspired not a great political movement, but an immense literary
+revival. In France, as we have already said, the patriotic flame
+seemed extinct. The ruinous disorder of the whole social system made
+the old love of country resemble love for a phantom, and so much of
+patriotic speech as survived was profoundly hollow. Even a man like
+Turgot was not so much a patriot as a passionate lover of improvement,
+and with the whole school of which this great spirit was the noblest
+and strongest, a generous citizenship of the world had replaced the
+narrower sentiment which had inflamed antique heroism. Rousseau's
+exaltation of the Greek and Roman types in all their concentration and
+intensity, touches mortals of commoner mould. His theory made the
+native land what it had been to the citizens of earlier date, a true
+centre of existence, round which all the interests of the community,
+all its pursuits, all its hopes, grouped themselves with entire
+singleness of convergence, just as religious faith is the centre of
+existence to a church. It was the virile and patriotic energy thus
+evoked which presently saved France from partition.
+
+We complete the estimate of the positive worth and tendencies of the
+Social Contract by adding to this, which was for the time the cardinal
+service, of rekindling the fire of patriotism, the rapid deduction
+from the doctrine of the sovereignty of peoples of the great truth,
+that a nation with a civilised polity does not consist of an order or
+a caste, but of the great body of its members, the army of toilers who
+make the most painful of the sacrifices that are needed for the
+continuous nutrition of the social organisation. As Condorcet put it,
+and he drew inspiration partly from the intellectual school of
+Voltaire, and partly from the social school of Rousseau, all
+institutions ought to have for their aim the physical, intellectual,
+and moral amelioration of the poorest and most numerous class.[272]
+This is the People. Second, there gradually followed from the
+important place given by Rousseau to the idea of equal association, as
+at once the foundation and the enduring bond of a community, those
+schemes of Mutualism, and all the other shapes of collective action
+for a common social good, which have possessed such commanding
+attraction for the imagination of large classes of good men in France
+ever since. Hitherto these forms have been sterile and deceptive, and
+they must remain so, until the idea of special function has been
+raised to an equal level of importance with that of united forces
+working together to a single end.
+
+In these ways the author of the Social Contract did involuntarily and
+unconsciously contribute to the growth of those new and progressive
+ideas, in which for his own part he lacked all faith. Pr�-Newtonians
+knew not the wonders of which Newton was to find the key; and so we,
+grown weary of waiting for the master intelligence who may effect the
+final combination of moral and scientific ideas needed for a new
+social era, may be inclined to lend a half-complacent ear to the arid
+sophisters who assume that the last word of civilisation has been
+heard in existing arrangements. But we may perhaps take courage from
+history to hope that generations will come, to whom our system of
+distributing among a few the privileges and delights that are procured
+by the toil of the many, will seem just as wasteful, as morally
+hideous, and as scientifically indefensible, as that older system
+which impoverished and depopulated empires, in order that a despot or
+a caste might have no least wish ungratified, for which the lives or
+the hard-won treasure of others could suffice.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[176] _Cont. Soc._, I. viii.
+
+[177] _Cont. Soc._, II. xi. He had written in much the same sense in
+his article on Political Economy in the Encyclop�dia, p. 34.
+
+[178] Robespierre disclaimed the intention of attacking property, and
+took up a position like that of Rousseau--teaching the poor contempt
+for the rich, not envy. "I do not want to touch your treasures," he
+cried, on one occasion, "however impure their source. It is far more
+an object of concern to me to make poverty honourable, than to
+proscribe wealth; the thatched hut of Fabricius never need envy the
+palace of Crassus. I should be at least as content, for my own part,
+to be one of the sons of Aristides, brought up in the Prytaneium at
+the public expense, as the heir presumptive of Xerxes, born in the
+mire of royal courts, to sit on a throne decorated by the abasement of
+the people, and glittering with the public misery." Quoted in Malon's
+_Expos� des Ecoles Socialistes fran�aises_, 15. Baboeuf carried
+Rousseau's sentiments further towards their natural conclusion by such
+propositions as these: "The goal of the revolution is to destroy
+inequality, and to re-establish the happiness of all." "The revolution
+is not finished, because the rich absorb all the property, and hold
+exclusive power; while the poor toil like born slaves, languish in
+wretchedness, and are nothing in the state." _Expos� des Ecoles
+Socialistes fran�aises_, p. 29.
+
+[179] _Cont. Soc._, II. xi.
+
+[180] _Cont. Soc._, I. iv.
+
+[181] _Ib._, II. vii.
+
+[182] Ch. vi. (vol. v. 371; edit. 1801).
+
+[183] Ch. vii. (p. 383.)
+
+[184] Goguet, in his _Origine des Lois, des Arts, et des Sciences_
+(1758), really attempted as laboriously as possible to carry out a
+notion of the historical method, but the fact that history itself at
+that time had never been subjected to scientific examination made his
+effort valueless. He accumulates testimony which would be excellent
+evidence, if only it had been sifted, and had come out of the process
+substantially undiminished. Yet even Goguet, who thus carefully
+followed the accounts of early societies given in the Bible and other
+monuments, intersperses abstract general statements about man being
+born free and independent (i. 25), and entering society as the result
+of deliberate reflection.
+
+[185] _Cont. Soc._, II. xi. Also III. viii.
+
+[186] II. xi. Also ch. viii.
+
+[187] II. viii.
+
+[188] II. ix.
+
+[189] _Politics_, VII. iv. 8, 10.
+
+[190] _Cont. Soc._, II. x.
+
+[191] Plato's _Laws_, v. 737.
+
+[192] _Ib._, iv. 705.
+
+[193] _Projet de Constitution pour la Corse_, p. 75.
+
+[194] _Gouvernement de Pologne_, ch. xi.
+
+[195] _Cont. Soc._, II. vii.
+
+[196] Goguet was much nearer to a true conception of this kind; see,
+for instance, _Origine des Lois_, i. 46.
+
+[197] Decree of the Committee, April 20, 1794, reported by
+Billaud-Varennes. Compare ch. iv. of Rousseau's _Consid�rations sur le
+Gouvernement de Pologne_.
+
+[198] Here are some of Saint Just's regulations:--No servants, nor
+gold or silver vessels; no child under 16 to eat meat, nor any adult
+to eat meat on three days of the decade; boys at the age of 7 to be
+handed over to the school of the nation, where they were to be brought
+up to speak little, to endure hardships, and to train for war; divorce
+to be free to all; friendship ordained a public institution, every
+citizen on coming to majority being bound to proclaim his friends, and
+if he had none, then to be banished; if one committed a crime, his
+friends were to be banished. Quoted in Von Sybel's _Hist. French
+Rev._, iv. 49. When Morelly dreamed his dream of a model community in
+1754 (see above, vol. i. p. 158) he little supposed, one would think,
+that within forty years a man would be so near trying the experiment
+in France as Saint Just was. Baboeuf is pronounced by La Harpe to have
+been inspired by the Code de la Nature, which La Harpe impudently set
+down to Diderot, on whom every great destructive piece was
+systematically fathered.
+
+[199] I forget where I have read the story of some member of the
+Convention being very angry because the library contained no copy of
+the laws which Minos gave to the Cretans.
+
+[200] III. xiii.
+
+[201] III. xv. He actually recommended the Poles to pay all public
+functionaries in kind, and to have the public works executed on the
+system of corv�e. _Gouvernement de Pologne_, ch. xi.
+
+[202] _Cont. Soc._, III. ii.
+
+[203] II. i.
+
+[204] II. ii.
+
+[205] III. i.
+
+[206] II. vi.
+
+[207] II. iv.
+
+[208] IV. vi.
+
+[209] _Economie Politique_, p. 30.
+
+[210] _M�langes_, p. 310.
+
+[211] See for instance Green's _History of the English People_, i.
+266.
+
+[212] _Summa_, xc.-cviii. (1265-1273). See Maurice's _Moral and
+Metaphysical Philosophy_, i. 627, 628. Also Franck's _R�formateurs et
+Publicistes de l'Europe_, p. 48, etc.
+
+[213] _Defensor Pacis_, Pt. I., ch. xii. This, again, is an example of
+Marsilio's position:--"Convenerunt enim homines ad civilem
+communicationem propter commodum et vit� sufficientiam consequendam,
+et opposita declinandum. Qu� igitur omnium tangere possunt commodum et
+incommodum, ab omnibus sciri debent et audiri, ut commodum assequi et
+oppositum repellere possint." The whole chapter is a most interesting
+anticipation, partly due to the influence of Aristotle, of the notions
+of later centuries.
+
+[214] See Bayle's Dict., s.v. _Althusius_.
+
+[215] _Lettres de la Montagne_, I. vi. 388.
+
+[216] _Eccles. Polity_, Bk. i.; bks. i.-iv., 1594; bk. v., 1597; bks.
+vi.-viii., 1647,--being forty-seven years after the author's death.
+
+[217] Goguet (_Origine des Lois_, i. 22) dwells on tacit conventions
+as a kind of engagement to which men commit themselves with extreme
+facility. He was thus rather near the true idea of the spontaneous
+origin and unconscious acceptance of early institutions.
+
+[218] Of Civil Government, ch. xiii. See also ch. xi. "This
+legislative is not only the supreme power of the commonwealth, but
+sacred and unalterable in the hands where the community have once
+placed it; nor can any edict of anybody else, in what form soever
+conceived, or by what power soever backed, have the force and
+obligation of a law, which has not its sanction from that legislative
+which the public has chosen and appointed; for without this the law
+could not have that which is absolutely necessary to its being a
+law--the consent of the society; over whom nobody can have a power to
+make laws, but by their own consent, and by authority received from
+them." If Rousseau had found no neater expression for his doctrine
+than this, the Social Contract would assuredly have been no explosive.
+
+[219] See especially ch. viii.
+
+[220] Hence the antipathy of the clergy, catholic, episcopalian, and
+presbyterian, to which, as Austin has pointed out (_Syst. of
+Jurisprudence_, i. 288, _n._), Hobbes mainly owes his bad repute.
+
+[221] See Diderot's article on _Hobbisme_ in the Encyclop�dia,
+_Oeuv._, xv. 122.
+
+[222] _Esprit des Lois_, I. i.
+
+[223] _Cont. Soc._, II. vi. 50.
+
+[224] Goguet has the merit of seeing distinctly that command is the
+essence of law.
+
+[225] _Cont. Soc._, II. vi. 51-53. See Austin's _Jurisprudence_, i.
+95, etc.; also _Lettres �crites de la Montagne_, I. vi. 380, 381.
+
+[226] See, for instance, letter to Mirabeau (_l'ami des hommes_), July
+26, 1767. _Corr._, v. 179. The same letter contains his criticism on
+the good despot of the Economists.
+
+[227] _L'Ordre Naturel et Essentiel des Soci�t�s Politiques_ (1767).
+By Mercier de la Rivi�re. One episode in the life of Mercier de la
+Rivi�re is worth recounting, as closely connected with the subject we
+are discussing. Just as Corsicans and Poles applied to Rousseau,
+Catherine of Russia, in consequence of her admiration for Rivi�re's
+book, summoned him to Russia to assist her in making laws. "Sir," said
+the Czarina, "could you point out to me the best means for the good
+government of a state?" "Madame, there is only one way, and that is
+being just; in other words, in keeping order and exacting obedience to
+the laws." "But on what base is it best to make the laws of an empire
+repose?" "There is only one base, Madame: the nature of things and of
+men." "Just so; but when you wish to give laws to a people, what are
+the rules which indicate most surely such laws as are most suitable?"
+"To give or make laws, Madame, is a task that God has left to none.
+Ah, who is the man that should think himself capable of dictating laws
+for beings that he does not know, or knows so ill? And by what right
+can he impose laws on beings whom God has never placed in his hands?"
+"To what, then, do you reduce the science of government?" "To studying
+carefully; recognising and setting forth the laws which God has graven
+so manifestly in the very organisation of men, when he called them
+into existence. To wish to go any further would be a great misfortune
+and a most destructive undertaking." "Sir, I am very pleased to have
+heard what you have to say; I wish you good day." Quoted from
+Thi�bault's _Souvenirs de Berlin_, in M. Daire's edition of the
+_Physiocrates_, ii. 432.
+
+[228] _Cont. Soc._, II. vii.
+
+[229] _Corr._, v. 181.
+
+[230] _Cont. Soc._, I. v., vi., vii.
+
+[231] _Leviathan_, II., ch. xviii. vol. iii. 159 (Molesworth's
+edition).
+
+[232] _Cont. Soc._, III. xvi.
+
+[233] _Civil Government_, ch. viii. � 99.
+
+[234] I. vi. Especially the footnote.
+
+[235] _Cont. Soc._, II. i.
+
+[236] _Syst. of Jurisprudence_, i. 256.
+
+[237] _Cont. Soc._, III. xv. 137. It was not long, however, before
+Rousseau found reason to alter his opinion in this respect. The
+champions of the Council at Geneva compared the _droit n�gatif_, in
+the exercise of which the Council had refused to listen to the
+representations of Rousseau's partisans (see above, vol. ii. p. 105)
+to the right of veto possessed by the crown in Great Britain. Rousseau
+seized upon this egregious blunder, which confused the power of
+refusing assent to a proposed law, with the power of refusing justice
+under law already passed. He at once found illustrations of the
+difference, first in the case of the printers of No. 45 of the _North
+Briton_, who brought actions for false imprisonment (1763), and next
+in the proceedings against Wilkes at the same time. If Wilkes, said
+Rousseau, had written, printed, published, or said, one-fourth against
+the Lesser Council at Geneva of what he said, wrote, printed, and
+published openly in London against the court and the government, he
+would have been heavily punished, and most likely put to death. And so
+forth, until he has proved very pungently how different degrees of
+freedom are enjoyed in Geneva and in England. _Lettres �crites de la
+Montague_, ix. 491-500. When he wrote this he was unaware that the
+Triennial Act had long been replaced by the Septennial Act of the 1
+Geo. I. On finding out, as he did afterwards, that a parliament could
+sit for seven years, he thought as meanly of our liberty as ever.
+_Consid�rations sur les gouvernement de Pologne_, ch. vii. 253-260. In
+his _Projet de Constitution pour la Corse_, p. 113, he says that "the
+English do not love liberty for itself, but because it is most
+favourable to money-making."
+
+[238] III., xi., xii., and xiii.
+
+[239] Mr. Freeman's _Growth of the English Constitution_, c. i.
+
+[240] _Cont. Soc._, III. xv. 140. A small manuscript containing his
+ideas on confederation was given by Rousseau to the Count d'Antraigues
+(afterwards an _�migr�_), who destroyed it in 1789, lest its arguments
+should be used to sap the royal authority. See extract from his
+pamphlet, prefixed to M. Auguis's edition of the Social Contract, pp.
+xxiii, xxiv.
+
+[241] _Gouvernement de Pologne_, v. 246.
+
+[242] Of course no such modification as that proposed by Comte
+(_Politique Positive_, iv. 421) would come within the scope of the
+doctrine of the Social Contract. For each of the seventeen Intendances
+into which Comte divides France, is to be ruled by a chief, "always
+appointed and removed by the central power." There is no room for the
+sovereignty of the people here, even in things parochial.
+
+[243] There was one extraordinary instance during the revolution of
+attempting to make popular government direct on Rousseau's principle,
+in the scheme (1790) of which Danton was a chief supporter, for
+reorganising the municipal administration of Paris. The assemblies of
+sections were to sit permanently; their vote was to be taken on
+current questions; and action was to follow the aggregate of their
+degrees. See Von Sybel's _Hist. Fr. Rev._ i. 275; M. Louis Blanc's
+_History_, Bk. III. ch. ii.
+
+[244] This was also Bodin's definition of an aristocratic state; "si
+minor pars civium c�teris imperat."
+
+[245] _Politics_, III. vi.-vii.
+
+[246] _Esprit des Lois_, II. i. ii.
+
+[247] Rousseau gave the name of _tyrant_ to a usurper of royal
+authority in a kingdom, and _despot_ to a usurper of the sovereign
+authority (_i.e._ [Greek: tyrannos] in the Greek sense). The former
+might govern according to the laws, but the latter placed himself
+above the laws (_Cont. Soc._, III. x.) This corresponded to Locke's
+distinction: "As usurpation is the exercise of power which another
+hath a right to, so tyranny is the exercise of a power beyond right,
+which nobody can have a right to." _Civil Gov._, ch. xviii.
+
+[248] III. iv.
+
+[249] III. vi.
+
+[250] III. v.
+
+[251] _Cont. Soc._, IV. viii.
+
+[252] _Cont. Soc._, IV. viii. 197-201.
+
+[253] This is not unlike what Tocqueville says somewhere, that
+Christianity bids you render unto C�sar the things that are C�sar's,
+but seems to discourage any inquiry whether C�sar is an usurper or a
+lawful ruler.
+
+[254] _Cont. Soc._, IV. viii. 203. As we have already seen, he had
+entreated Voltaire, of all men in the world, to draw up a civil
+profession of faith. See vol. i. 326.
+
+In the New Helo�sa (V. v. 117, _n._) Rousseau expresses his opinion
+that "no true believer could be intolerant or a persecutor. _If I were
+a magistrate, and if the law pronounced the penalty of death against
+atheists, I would begin by burning as such whoever should come to
+inform against another._"
+
+[255] Plato's _Laws_, Bk. x. 909, etc.
+
+[256] _Areopagitica_, p. 417. (Edit. 1867.)
+
+[257] See a speech of his, which is Rousseau's "civil faith" done into
+rhetoric, given in M. Louis Blanc's _Hist. de la R�v. Fran�aise_, Bk.
+x. c. xiv.
+
+[258] _Consid�rations sur le gouvernement ancien et pr�sent de la
+France_ (1764). Quoted by Rousseau from a manuscript copy.
+
+[259] _Leviathan_, ch. xliii. 601. Also ch. xlii.
+
+[260] _Cont. Soc._, III. xi. Borrowed from Hobbes, who said, "Magnus
+ille Leviathan qu� civitas appellatur, opificium artis est."
+
+[261] Mackintosh's.
+
+[262] _Cont. Soc._, II. v.
+
+[263] IV. ii.
+
+[264] For instance, _Gouvernement de la Pologne_, ch. xi. p. 305. And
+_Corr._, v. 180.
+
+[265] _Cont. Soc._, I. viii.
+
+[266] _Cont. Soc._, II. i.
+
+[267] _Ib._, III. x. "Let every individual who may usurp the
+sovereignty be instantly put to death by free men." Robespierre's
+_D�claration des droits de l'homme_, � 27. "When the government
+violates the rights of the people, insurrection becomes for the people
+the most sacred of rights and the most indispensable of duties." � 35.
+
+[268] _Cont. Soc._, III. x.
+
+[269] See May's _Constitutional Hist. of England_, ch. iii; and Lord
+Stanhope's _Life of Pitt_, vol. ii. ch. xii.
+
+[270] In the 6th book of the _Moral Philosophy_ (1785), ch. iii., and
+elsewhere. In the preface he refers to the effect which Rousseau's
+political theory was supposed to have had in the civil convulsions of
+Geneva, as one of the reasons which encouraged him to publish his own
+book.
+
+[271] One side of this was the passion for geographical exploration
+which took possession of Europe towards the middle of the eighteenth
+century. See the _Life of Humboldt_, i. 28, 29. (_Eng. Trans._ by
+Lassell.)
+
+[272] Rousseau's influence on Condorcet is seen in the latter's maxim,
+which has found such favour in the eyes of socialist writers, that
+"not only equality of right, but equality of fact, is the goal of the
+social art."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+EMILIUS.
+
+
+One whose most intense conviction was faith in the goodness
+of all things and creatures as they are first produced by nature, and
+so long as they remain unsophisticated by the hand and purpose of man,
+was in some degree bound to show a way by which this evil process of
+sophistication might be brought to the lowest possible point, and the
+best of all natural creatures kept as near as possible to his high
+original. Rousseau, it is true, held in a sense of his own the
+doctrine of the fall of man. That doctrine, however, has never made
+people any more remiss in the search after a virtue, which if they
+ought to have regarded it as hopeless according to strict logic, is
+still indispensable in actual life. Rousseau's way of believing that
+man had fallen was so coloured at once by that expansion of sanguine
+emotion which marked his century, and by that necessity for repose in
+idyllic perfection of simplicity which marked his own temperament,
+that enthusiasm for an imaginary human creature effectually shut out
+the dogma of his fatal depravation. "How difficult a thing it is,"
+Madame d'Epinay once said to him, "to bring up a child." "Assuredly
+it is," answered Rousseau; "because the father and mother are not made
+by nature to bring it up, nor the child to be brought up."[273] This
+cynical speech can only have been an accidental outbreak of spleen. It
+was a contradiction to his one constant opinion that nature is all
+good and bounteous, and that the inborn capacity of man for reaching
+true happiness knows no stint.
+
+In writing Emilius, he sat down to consider what man is, and what can
+be made of him. Here, as in all the rest of his work, he only obeyed
+the tendencies of his time in choosing a theme. An age touched by the
+spirit of hope inevitably turns to the young; for with the young lies
+fulfilment. Such epochs are ever pressing with the question, how is
+the future to be shaped? Our answer depends on the theory of human
+disposition, and in these epochs the theory is always optimistic.
+Rousseau was saved, as so many thousands of men have been alike in
+conduct and speculation, by inconsistency, and not shrinking from two
+mutually contradictory trains of thought. Society is corrupt, and
+society is the work of man. Yet man, who has engendered this corrupted
+birth, is good and whole. The strain in the argument may be pardoned
+for the hopefulness of the conclusion. It brought Rousseau into
+harmony with the eager effort of the time to pour young character into
+finer mould, and made him the most powerful agent in giving to such
+efforts both fervour and elevation. While others were content with
+the mere enunciation of maxims and precepts, he breathed into them the
+spirit of life, and enforced them with a vividness of faith that
+clothed education with the augustness and unction of religion. The
+training of the young soul to virtue was surrounded with something of
+the awful holiness of a sacrament; and those who laboured in this
+sanctified field were exhorted to a constancy of devotion, and were
+promised a fulness of recompense, that raised them from the rank of
+drudges to a place of highest honour among the ministers of nature.
+
+Everybody at this time was thinking about education, partly perhaps on
+account of the suppression of the Jesuits, the chief instructors of
+the time, and a great many people were writing about it. The Abb� de
+Saint Pierre had had new ideas on education, as on all the greater
+departments of human interest. Madame d'Epinay wrote considerations
+upon the bringing up of the young.[274] Madame de Grafigny did the
+same in a less grave shape.[275] She received letters from the
+precociously sage Turgot, abounding in the same natural and sensible
+precepts which ten years later were commended with more glowing
+eloquence in the pages of Emilius.[276] Grimm had an elaborate scheme
+for a treatise on education.[277] Helv�tius followed his exploration
+of the composition of the human mind, by a treatise on the training
+proper for the intellectual and moral faculties. Education by these
+and other writers was being conceived in a wider sense than had been
+known to ages controlled by ecclesiastical collegians. It slowly came
+to be thought of in connection with the family. The improvement of
+ideas upon education was only one phase of that great general movement
+towards the restoration of the family, which was so striking a
+spectacle in France after the middle of the century. Education now
+came to comprehend the whole system of the relations between parents
+and their children, from earliest infancy to maturity. The direction
+of this wider feeling about such relations tended strongly towards an
+increased closeness in them, more intimacy, and a more continuous
+suffusion of tenderness and long attachment. All this was part of the
+general revival of naturalism. People began to reflect that nature was
+not likely to have designed infants to be suckled by other women than
+their own mothers, nor that they should be banished from the society
+of those who are most concerned in their well-being, from the cheerful
+hearth and wise affectionate converse of home, to the frigid
+discipline of colleges and convents and the unamiable monition of
+strangers.
+
+Then the rising rebellion against the church and its faith perhaps
+contributed something towards a movement which, if it could not break
+the religious monopoly of instruction, must at least introduce the
+parent as a competitor with the priestly instructor for influence over
+the ideas, habits, and affections of his children. The rebellion was
+aimed against the spirit as well as the manner of the established
+system. The church had not fundamentally modified the significance of
+the dogma of the fall and depravity of man; education was still
+conceived as a process of eradication and suppression of the mystical
+old Adam. The new current flowed in channels far away from that black
+folly of superstition. Men at length ventured once more to look at one
+another with free and generous gaze. The veil of the temple was rent,
+and the false mockeries of the shrine of the Hebrew divinity made
+plain to scornful eyes. People ceased to see one another as guilty
+victims cowering under a divine curse. They stood erect in
+consciousness of manhood. The palsied conception of man, with his
+large discourse of reason looking before and after, his lofty and
+majestic patience in search for new forms of beauty and new secrets of
+truth, his sense of the manifold sweetness and glory and awe of the
+universe, above all, his infinite capacity of loyal pity and love for
+his comrades in the great struggle, and his high sorrow for his own
+wrong-doing,--the palsied and crushing conception of this excellent
+and helpful being as a poor worm, writhing under the vindictive and
+meaningless anger of an omnipotent tyrant in the large heavens, only
+to be appeased by sacerdotal intervention, was fading back into those
+regions of night, whence the depth of human misery and the
+obscuration of human intelligence had once permitted its escape, to
+hang evilly over the western world for a season. So vital a change in
+the point of view quickly touched the theory and art of the upbringing
+of the young. Education began to figure less as the suppression of the
+natural man, than his strengthening and development; less as a process
+of rooting out tares, more as the grateful tending of shoots abounding
+in promise of richness. What had been the most drearily mechanical of
+duties, was transformed into a task that surpassed all others in
+interest and hope. If man be born not bad but good, under no curse,
+but rather the bestower and receiver of many blessings, then the
+entire atmosphere of young life, in spite of the toil and the peril,
+is made cheerful with the sunshine and warmth of the great folded
+possibilities of excellence, happiness, and well-doing.
+
+
+I.
+
+Locke in education, as in metaphysics and in politics, was the pioneer
+of French thought. In education there is less room for scientific
+originality. The sage of a parish, provided only she began her trade
+with an open and energetic mind, may here pass philosophers. Locke was
+nearly as sage, as homely, as real, as one of these strenuous women.
+The honest plainness of certain of his prescriptions for the
+preservation of physical health perhaps keeps us somewhat too near the
+earth. His manner throughout is marked by the stout wisdom of the
+practical teacher, who is content to assume good sense in his hearers,
+and feels no necessity for kindling a blaze or raising a tempest. He
+gives us a practical manual for producing a healthy, instructed,
+upright, well-mannered young English squire, who shall be rightly
+fitted to take his own life sensibly in hand, and procure from it a
+fair amount of wholesome satisfaction both for himself and the people
+with whom he is concerned. Locke's treatise is one of the most
+admirable protests in the world against effeminacy and pedantry, and
+parents already moved by grave desire to do their duty prudently to
+their sons, will hardly find another book better suited to their ends.
+Besides Locke, we must also count Charron, and the amazing educator of
+Gargantua, and Montaigne before either, among the writers whom
+Rousseau had read, with that profit and increase which attends the
+dropping of the good ideas of other men into fertile minds.
+
+There is an immense class of natures, and those not the lowest, which
+the connection of duty with mere prudence does not carry far enough.
+They only stir when something has moved their feeling for the ideal,
+and raised the mechanical offices of the narrow day into association
+with the spaciousness and height of spiritual things. To these
+Rousseau came. For both the tenour and the wording of the most
+striking precepts of the Emilius, he owes much to Locke. But what was
+so realistic in him becomes blended in Rousseau with all the power and
+richness and beauty of an ideal that can move the most generous parts
+of human character. The child is treated as the miniature of humanity;
+it thus touches the whole sphere of our sympathies, warms our
+curiosity as to the composition of man's nature, and becomes the very
+eye and centre of moral and social aspirations.
+
+Accordingly Rousseau almost at once begins by elaborating his
+conception of the kind of human creature which it is worth while to
+take the trouble to rear, and the only kind which pure nature will
+help you in perfecting. Hence Emilius, besides being a manual for
+parents, contains the lines of a moral type of life and character for
+all others. The old thought of the Discourses revives in full vigour.
+The artifices of society, the perverting traditions of use, the feeble
+maxims of indolence, convention, helpless dependence on the aid or the
+approval of others, are routed at the first stroke. The old regimen of
+accumulated prejudice is replaced, in dealing alike with body and
+soul, by the new system of liberty and nature. In saying this we have
+already said that the exaltation of Spartan manners which runs through
+Rousseau's other writings has vanished, and that every trace of the
+much-vaunted military and public training has yielded before the
+attractive thought of tender parents and a wisely ruled home. Public
+instruction, we learn, can now no longer exist, because there is no
+longer such a thing as country, and therefore there can no longer be
+citizens. Only domestic education can now help us to rear the man
+according to nature,--the man who knows best among us how to bear
+the mingled good and ill of our life.
+
+The artificial society of the time, with its aspirations after a
+return to nature, was moved to the most energetic enthusiasm by
+Rousseau's famous exhortations to mothers to nourish their own little
+ones. Morelly, as we have seen, had already enjoined the adoption of
+this practice. So too had Buffon. But Morelly's voice had no
+resonance, Buffon's reasons were purely physical, and children were
+still sent out to nurse, until Rousseau's more passionate moral
+entreaties awoke maternal conscience. "Do these tender mothers," he
+exclaimed, "who, when they have got rid of their infants, surrender
+themselves gaily to all the diversions of the town, know what sort of
+usage the child in the village is receiving, fastened in his swaddling
+band? At the least interruption that comes, they hang him up by a nail
+like a bundle of rags, and there the poor creature remains thus
+crucified, while the nurse goes about her affairs. Every child found
+in this position had a face of purple; as the violent compression of
+the chest would not allow the blood to circulate, it all went to the
+head, and the victim was supposed to be very quiet, just because it
+had not strength enough to cry out."[278] But in Rousseau, as in
+Beethoven, a harsh and rugged passage is nearly always followed by
+some piece of exquisite and touching melody. The force of these
+indignant pictures was heightened and relieved by moving appeal to
+all the tender joys of maternal solicitude, and thoughts of all that
+this solicitude could do for the happiness of the home, the father,
+and the young. The attraction of domestic life is pronounced the best
+antidote to the ill living of the time. The bustle of children, which
+you now think so importunate, gradually becomes delightful; it brings
+father and mother nearer to one another; and the lively animation of a
+family added to domestic cares, makes the dearest occupation of the
+wife, and the sweetest of all his amusements to the husband. If women
+will only once more become mothers again, men will very soon become
+fathers and husbands.[279]
+
+The physical effect of this was not altogether wholesome. Rousseau's
+eloquence excited women to an inordinate pitch of enthusiasm for the
+duty of suckling their infants, but his contemptuous denunciation of
+the gaieties of Paris could not extinguish the love of amusement.
+
+    Quid quod libelli Stoici inter sericos
+      Jacere pulvillos amant?
+
+So young mothers tried as well as they could to satisfy both desires,
+and their babes were brought to them at all unseasonable hours, while
+they were full of food and wine, or heated with dancing or play, and
+there received the nurture which, but for Rousseau, they would have
+drawn in more salutary sort from a healthy foster-mother in the
+country. This, however, was only an incidental drawback to a movement
+which was in its main lines full of excellent significance. The
+importance of giving freedom to the young limbs, of accustoming the
+body to rudeness and vicissitude of climate, of surrounding youth with
+light and cheerfulness and air, and even a tiny detail such as the
+propriety of substituting for coral or ivory some soft substance
+against which the growing teeth might press a way without irritation,
+all these matters are handled with a fervid reality of interest that
+gives to the tedium of the nursery a genuine touch of the poetic.
+Swathings, bandages, leading-strings, are condemned with a warmth like
+that with which the author had denounced comedy.[280] The city is held
+up to indignant reprobation as the gulf of infant life, just as it had
+been in his earlier pieces as the gulf of all the loftiest energies of
+the adult life. Every child ought to be born and nursed in the
+country, and it would be all the better if it remained in the country
+to the last day of its existence. You must accustom it little by
+little to the sight of disagreeable objects, such as toads and snakes;
+also in the same gradual manner to the sound of alarming noises,
+beginning with snapping a cap in a pistol. If the infant cries from
+pain which you cannot remove, make no attempt to soothe it; your
+caresses will not lessen the anguish of its colic, while the child
+will remember what it has to do in order to be coaxed and to get its
+own way. The nurse may amuse it by songs and lively cries, but she is
+not to din useless words into its ears; the first articulations that
+come to it should be few, easy, distinct, frequently repeated, and
+only referring to objects which may be shown to the child. "Our
+unlucky facility in cheating ourselves with words that we do not
+understand, begins earlier than we suppose." Let there be no haste in
+inducing the child to speak articulately. The evil of precipitation in
+this respect is not that children use and hear words without sense,
+but that they use and hear them in a different sense from our own,
+without our perceiving it. Mistakes of this sort, committed thus
+early, have an influence, even after they are cured, over the turn of
+the mind for the rest of the creature's life. Hence it is a good thing
+to keep a child's vocabulary as limited as possible, lest it should
+have more words than ideas, and should say more than it can possibly
+realise in thought.[281]
+
+In moral as in intellectual habits, the most perilous interval in
+human life is that between birth and the age of twelve. The great
+secret is to make the early education purely negative; a process of
+keeping the heart, naturally so good, clear of vice, and the
+intelligence, naturally so true, clear of error. Take for first,
+second, and third precept, to follow nature and leave her free to the
+performance of her own tasks. Until the age of reason, there can be no
+idea of moral beings or social relations. Therefore, says Rousseau, no
+moral discussion. Locke's maxim in favour of constantly reasoning with
+children was a mistake. Of all the faculties of man, reason, which is
+only a compound of the rest, is that which is latest in development,
+and yet it is this which we are to use to develop those which come
+earliest of all. Such a course is to begin at the end, and to turn the
+finished work into an instrument. "In speaking to children in these
+early years a language which they do not comprehend, we accustom them
+to cheat themselves with words, to criticise what is said to them, to
+think themselves as wise as their masters, to become disputatious and
+mutinous." If you forget that nature meant children to be children
+before growing into men, you only force a fruit that has neither
+ripeness nor savour, and must soon go bad; you will have youthful
+doctors and old infants.
+
+To all this, however, there is certainly another side which Rousseau
+was too impetuous to see. Perfected reason is truly the tardiest of
+human endowments, but it can never be perfected at all unless the
+process be begun, and, within limits, the sooner the beginning is
+made, the earlier will be the ripening. To know the grounds of right
+conduct is, we admit, a different thing from feeling a disposition to
+practise it. But nobody will deny the expediency of an intelligent
+acquaintance with the reasons why one sort of conduct is bad, and its
+opposite good, even if such an acquaintance can never become a
+substitute for the spontaneous action of thoroughly formed habit. For
+one thing, cases are constantly arising in a man's life that demand
+the exercise of reason, to settle the special application of
+principles which may have been acquired without knowledge of their
+rational foundation. In such cases, which are the critical and testing
+points of character, all depends upon the possession of a more or less
+justly trained intelligence, and the habit of using it. Now, as we
+have said, it is one of the great merits of the Emilius that it calls
+such attention to the early age at which mental influences begin to
+operate. Why should the gradual formation of the master habit of using
+the mind be any exception?
+
+Belief in the efficacy of preaching is the bane of educational
+systems. Verbal lessons seem as if they ought to be so deeply
+effective, if only the will and the throng of various motives which
+guide it, instantly followed impression of a truth upon the
+intelligence. And they are, moreover, so easily communicated, saving
+the parent a lifetime of anxious painstaking in shaping his own
+character, after such a pattern as shall silently draw all within its
+influence to pursuit of good and honourable things. The most valuable
+of Rousseau's notions about education, though he by no means
+consistently adhered to them, was his urgent contempt for this
+fatuous substitution of spoken injunctions and prohibitions, for the
+deeper language of example, and the more living instruction of visible
+circumstance. The vast improvements that have since taken place in the
+theory and the art of education all over Europe, and of which he has
+the honour of being the first and most widely influential promoter,
+may all be traced to the spread of this wise principle, and its
+adoption in various forms. The change in the up-bringing of the young
+exactly corresponds to the change in the treatment of the insane. We
+may look back to the old system of endless catechisms, apophthegms,
+moral fables, and the rest of the paraphernalia of moral didactics,
+with the same horror with which we regard the gags, strait-waistcoats,
+chains, and dark cells, of poor mad people before the intervention of
+Pinel.
+
+It is clear now to everybody who has any opinion on this most
+important of all subjects, that spontaneousness is the first quality
+in connection with right doing, which you can develop in the young,
+and this spontaneousness of habit is best secured by associating it
+with the approval of those to whom the child looks. Sympathy, in a
+word, is the true foundation from which to build up the structure of
+good habit. The young should be led to practise the elementary parts
+of right conduct from the desire to please, because that is a securer
+basis than the conclusions of an embryo reason, applied to the most
+complex conditions of action, while the grounds on which action is
+justified or condemned may be made plain in the fulness of time, when
+the understanding is better able to deal with the ideas and terms
+essential to the matter. You have two aims to secure, each without
+sacrifice of the other. These are, first, that the child shall grow up
+with firm and promptly acting habit; second, that it shall retain
+respect for reason and an open mind. The latter may be acquired in the
+less immature years, but if the former be not acquired in the earlier
+times, a man grows up with a drifting unsettledness of will, that
+makes his life either vicious by quibbling sophistries, or helpless
+for want of ready conclusions.
+
+The first idea which is to be given to a child, little as we might
+expect such a doctrine from the author of the Second Discourse, is
+declared to be that of property. And he can only acquire this idea by
+having something of his own. But how are we to teach him the
+significance of a thing being one's own? It is a prime rule to attempt
+to teach nothing by a verbal lesson; all instruction ought to be left
+to experience.[282] Therefore you must contrive some piece of
+experience which shall bring this notion of property vividly into a
+child's mind; the following for instance. Emilius is taken to a piece
+of garden; his instructor digs and dresses the ground for him, and the
+boy takes possession by sowing some beans. "We come every day to water
+them, and see them rise out of the ground with transports of joy. I
+add to this joy by saying, This belongs to you. Then explaining the
+term, I let him feel that he has put into the ground this time,
+labour, trouble, his person in short; that there is in this bit of
+ground something of himself which he may maintain against every comer,
+as he might withdraw his own arm from the hand of another man who
+would fain retain it in spite of him." One day Emilius comes to his
+beloved garden, watering-pot in hand, and finds to his anguish and
+despair that all the beans have been plucked up, that the ground has
+been turned over, and that the spot is hardly recognisable. The
+gardener comes up, and explains with much warmth that he had sown the
+seed of a precious Maltese melon in that particular spot long before
+Emilius had come with his trumpery beans, and that therefore it was
+his land; that nobody touches the garden of his neighbour, in order
+that his own may remain untouched; and that if Emilius wants a piece
+of garden, he must pay for it by surrendering to the owner half the
+produce.[283] Thus, says Rousseau, the boy sees how the notion of
+property naturally goes back to the right of the first occupant as
+derived from labour. We should have thought it less troublesome, as it
+is certainly more important, to teach a boy the facts of property
+positively and imperatively. This rather elaborate ascent to origins
+seems an exaggerated form of that very vice of over-instructing the
+growing reason in abstractions, which Rousseau had condemned so short
+a time before.
+
+Again, there is the very strong objection to conveying lessons by
+artificially contrived incidents, that children are nearly always
+extremely acute in suspecting and discovering such contrivances. Yet
+Rousseau recurs to them over and over again, evidently taking delight
+in their ingenuity. Besides the illustration of the origin and
+significance of property, there is the complex fancy in which a
+juggler is made to combine instruction as to the properties of the
+magnet with certain severe moral truths.[284] The tutor interests
+Emilius in astronomy and geography by a wonderful stratagem indeed.
+The poor youth loses his way in a wood, is overpowered by hunger and
+weariness, and then is led on by his cunning tutor to a series of
+inferences from the position of the sun and so forth, which convince
+him that his home is just over the hedge, where it is duly found to
+be.[285] Here, again, is the way in which the instructor proposes to
+stir activity of limb in the young Emilius. "In walking with him of an
+afternoon, I used sometimes to put in my pocket two cakes of a sort he
+particularly liked; we each of us ate one. One day he perceived that I
+had three cakes; he could easily have eaten six; he promptly
+despatches his own, to ask me for the third. Nay, I said to him, I
+could well eat it myself, or we would divide it, but I would rather
+see it made the prize of a running match between the two little boys
+there." The little boys run their race, and the winner devours the
+cake. This and subsequent repetitions of the performance at first
+only amused Emilius, but he presently began to reflect, and perceiving
+that he also had two legs, he began privately to try how fast he could
+run. When he thought he was strong enough, he importuned his tutor for
+the third cake, and on being refused, insisted on being allowed to
+compete for it. The habit of taking exercise was not the only
+advantage gained. The tutor resorted to a variety of further
+stratagems in order to induce the boy to find out and practise visual
+compass, and so forth.[286] If we consider, as we have said, first the
+readiness of children to suspect a stratagem wherever instruction is
+concerned, and next their resentment on discovering artifice of that
+kind, all this seems as little likely to be successful as it is
+assuredly contrary to Rousseau's general doctrine of leaving
+circumstances to lead.
+
+In truth Rousseau's appreciation of the real nature of spontaneousness
+in the processes of education was essentially inadequate, and that it
+was so, arose from a no less inadequate conception of the right
+influence upon the growing character, of the great principle of
+authority. His dread lest the child should ever be conscious of the
+pressure of a will external to its own, constituted a fundamental
+weakness of his system. The child, we are told with endless
+repetition, ought always to be led to suppose that it is following its
+own judgment or impulses, and has only them and their consequences to
+consider. But Rousseau could not help seeing, as he meditated on the
+actual development of his Emilius, that to leave him thus to the
+training of accident would necessarily end in many fatal gaps and
+chasms. Yet the hand and will of the parent or the master could not be
+allowed to appear. The only alternative, therefore, was the secret
+preparation of artificial sets of circumstances, alike in work and in
+amusement. Jean Paul was wiser than Jean Jacques. "Let not the teacher
+after the work also order and regulate the games. It is decidedly
+better not to recognise or make any order in games, than to keep it up
+with difficulty and send the zephyrets of pleasure through artistic
+bellows and air-pumps to the little flowers."[287]
+
+The spontaneousness which we ought to seek, does not consist in
+promptly willing this or that, independently of an authority imposed
+from without, but in a self-acting desire to do what is right under
+all its various conditions, including what the child finds pleasant to
+itself on the one hand, and what it has good reason to suppose will be
+pleasant to its parents on the other. "You must never," Rousseau
+gravely warns us, "inflict punishment upon children as punishment; it
+should always fall upon them as a natural consequence of their
+ill-behaviour."[288] But why should one of the most closely following
+of all these consequences be dissembled or carefully hidden from
+sight, namely, the effect of ill-behaviour upon the contentment of the
+child's nearest friend? Why are the effects of conduct upon the
+actor's own physical well-being to be the only effects honoured with
+the title of being natural? Surely, while we leave to the young the
+widest freedom of choice, and even habitually invite them to decide
+for themselves between two lines of conduct, we are bound afterwards
+to state our approval or disapproval of their decision, so that on the
+next occasion they may take this anger or pleasure in others into
+proper account in their rough and hasty forecast, often less hasty
+than it seems, of the consequences of what they are about to do. One
+of the most important of educating influences is lost, if the young
+are not taught to place the feelings of others in a front place, when
+they think in their own simple way of what will happen to them from
+yielding to a given impulse. Rousseau was quite right in insisting on
+practical experience of consequences as the only secure foundation for
+self-acting habit; he was fatally wrong in mutilating this experience
+by the exclusion from it of the effects of perceiving, resisting,
+accepting, ignoring, all will and authority from without. The great,
+and in many respects so admirable, school of Rousseauite
+philanthropists, have always been feeble on this side, alike in the
+treatment of the young by their instructors, and the treatment of
+social offenders by a government.
+
+Again, consider the large group of excellent qualities which are
+associated with affectionate respect for a more fully informed
+authority. In a world where necessity stands for so much, it is no
+inconsiderable gain to have learnt the lesson of docility on easy
+terms in our earliest days. If in another sense the will of each
+individual is all-powerful over his own destinies, it is best that
+this idea of firm purpose and a settled energy that will not be
+denied, should grow up in the young soul in connection with a riper
+wisdom and an ampler experience than its own; for then, when the time
+for independent action comes, the force of the association will
+continue. Finally, although none can be vicariously wise, none sage by
+proxy, nor any pay for the probation of another, yet is it not a
+puerile wastefulness to send forth the young all bare to the ordeal,
+while the armour of old experience and tempered judgment hangs idle on
+the wall? Surely it is thus by accumulation of instruction from
+generation to generation, that the area of right conduct in the world
+is extended. Such instruction must with youth be conveyed by military
+word of command as often as by philosophical persuasion of its worth.
+Nor is the atmosphere of command other than bracing, even to those who
+are commanded. If education is to be mainly conducted by force of
+example, it is a dreadful thing that the child is ever to have before
+its eyes as living type and practical exemplar the pale figure of
+parents without passions, and without a will as to the conduct of
+those who are dependent on them. Even a slight excess of anger,
+impatience, and the spirit of command, would be less demoralising to
+the impressionable character than the constant sight of a man
+artificially impassive. Rousseau is perpetually calling upon men to
+try to lay aside their masks; yet the model instructor whom he has
+created for us is to be the most artfully and elaborately masked of
+all men; unless he happens to be naturally without blood and without
+physiognomy.
+
+Rousseau, then, while he put away the old methods which imprisoned the
+young spirit in injunctions and over-solicitous monitions, yet did
+none the less in his own scheme imprison it in a kind of hothouse,
+which with its regulated temperature and artificially contrived access
+of light and air, was in many respects as little the method of nature,
+that is to say it gave as little play for the spontaneous working and
+growth of the forces of nature in the youth's breast, as that regimen
+of the cloister which he so profoundly abhorred. Partly this was the
+result of a ludicrously shallow psychology. He repeats again and again
+that self-love is the one quality in the youthful embryo of character,
+from which you have to work. From this, he says, springs the desire of
+possessing pleasure and avoiding pain, the great fulcrum on which the
+lever of experience rests. Not only so, but from this same
+unslumbering quality of self-love you have to develop regard for
+others. The child's first affection for his nurse is a result of the
+fact that she serves his comfort, and so down to his passion in later
+years for his mistress. Now this is not the place for a discussion as
+to the ultimate atom of the complex moral sentiments of men and women,
+nor for an examination of the question whether the faculty of
+sympathy has or has not an origin independent of self-love. However
+that may be, no one will deny that sympathy appears in good natures
+extremely early, and is susceptible of rapid cultivation from the very
+first. Here is the only adequate key to that education of the
+affections, from their rudimentary expansion in the nursery, until
+they include the complete range of all the objects proper to them.
+
+One secret of Rousseau's omission of this, the most important of all
+educating agencies, from the earlier stages of the formation of
+character, was the fact which is patent enough in every page, that he
+was not animated by that singular tenderness and almost mystic
+affection for the young, which breathes through the writings of some
+of his German followers, of Richter above all others, and which
+reveals to those who are sensible of it, the hold that may so easily
+be gained for all good purposes upon the eager sympathy of the
+youthful spirit. The instructor of Emilius speaks the words of a wise
+onlooker, sagely meditating on the ideal man, rather than of a parent
+who is living the life of his child through with him. Rousseau's
+interest in children, though perfectly sincere, was still �sthetic,
+moral, reasonable, rather than that pure flood of full-hearted feeling
+for them, which is perhaps seldom stirred except in those who have
+actually brought up children of their own. He composed a vindication
+of his love for the young in an exquisite piece;[289] but it has none
+of the yearnings of the bowels of tenderness.
+
+
+II.
+
+Education being the art of preparing the young to grow into
+instruments of happiness for themselves and others, a writer who
+undertakes to speak about it must naturally have some conception of
+the kind of happiness at which his art aims. We have seen enough of
+Rousseau's own life to know what sort of ideal he would be likely to
+set up. It is a healthier epicureanism, with enough stoicism to make
+happiness safe in case that circumstances should frown. The man who
+has lived most is not he who has counted most years, but he who has
+most felt life.[290] It is mere false wisdom to throw ourselves
+incessantly out of ourselves, to count the present for nothing, ever
+to pursue without ceasing a future which flees in proportion as we
+advance, to try to transport ourselves from whence we are not, to some
+place where we shall never be.[291] He is happiest who suffers fewest
+pains, and he is most miserable who feels fewest pleasures. Then we
+have a half stoical strain. The felicity of man here below is only a
+negative state, to be measured by the more or less of the ills he
+undergoes. It is in the disproportion between desires and faculties
+that our misery consists. Happiness, therefore, lies not in
+diminishing our desires, nor any more in extending our faculties, but
+in diminishing the excess of desire over faculty, and in bringing
+power and will into perfect balance.[292] Excepting health, strength,
+respect for one's self, all the goods of this life reside in opinion;
+excepting bodily pain and remorse of conscience, all our ills are in
+imagination. Death is no evil; it is only made so by half-knowledge
+and false wisdom. "Live according to nature, be patient, and drive
+away physicians; you will not avoid death, but you will only feel it
+once, while they on the other hand would bring it daily before your
+troubled imagination, and their false art, instead of prolonging your
+days, only hinders you from enjoying them. Suffer, die, or recover;
+but above all things live, live up to your last hour." It is
+foresight, constantly carrying us out of ourselves, that is the true
+source of our miseries.[293] O man, confine thy existence within
+thyself, and thou wilt cease to be miserable. Thy liberty, thy power,
+reach exactly as far as thy natural forces, and no further; all the
+rest is slavery and illusion. The only man who has his own will is he
+who does not need in order to have it the arms of another person at
+the end of his own.[294]
+
+The training that follows from this is obvious. The instructor has
+carefully to distinguish true or natural need from the need which is
+only fancied, or which only comes from superabundance of life.
+Emilius, who is brought up in the country, has nothing in his room to
+distinguish it from that of a peasant.[295] If he is taken to a
+luxurious banquet, he is bidden, instead of heedlessly enjoying it, to
+reflect austerely how many hundreds or thousands of hands have been
+employed in preparing it.[296] His preference for gay colours in his
+clothes is to be consulted, because this is natural and becoming to
+his age, but the moment he prefers a stuff merely because it is rich,
+behold a sophisticated creature.[297] The curse of the world is
+inequality, and inequality springs from the multitude of wants, which
+cause us to be so much the more dependent. What makes man essentially
+good is to have few wants, and to abstain from comparing himself with
+others; what makes him essentially bad, is to have many wants, and to
+cling much to opinion.[298] Hence, although Emilius happened to have
+both wealth and good birth, he is not brought up to be a gentleman,
+with the prejudices and helplessness and selfishness too naturally
+associated with that abused name.
+
+This cardinal doctrine of limitation of desire, with its corollary of
+self-sufficience, contains in itself the great maxim that Emilius and
+every one else must learn some trade. To work is an indispensable duty
+in the social man. Rich or poor, powerful or weak, every idle citizen
+is a knave. And every boy must learn a real trade, a trade with his
+hands. It is not so much a matter of learning a craft for the sake of
+knowing one, as for the sake of conquering the prejudices which
+despise it. Labour for glory, if you have not to labour from
+necessity. Lower yourself to the condition of the artisan, so as to be
+above your own. In order to reign in opinion, begin by reigning over
+it. All things well considered, the trade most to be preferred is
+that of carpenter; it is clean, useful, and capable of being carried
+on in the house; it demands address and diligence in the workman, and
+though the form of the work is determined by utility, still elegance
+and taste are not excluded.[299] There are few prettier pictures than
+that where Sophie enters the workshop, and sees in amazement her young
+lover at the other end, in his white shirt-sleeves, his hair loosely
+fastened back, with a chisel in one hand and a mallet in the other,
+too intent upon his work to perceive even the approach of his
+mistress.[300]
+
+When the revolution came, and princes and nobles wandered in indigent
+exile, the disciples of Rousseau pointed in unkind triumph to the
+advantage these unfortunate wretches would have had if they had not
+been too puffed up with the vanity of feudalism to follow the prudent
+example of Emilius in learning a craft. That Rousseau should have laid
+so much stress on the vicissitudes of fortune, which might cause even
+a king to be grateful one day that he had a trade at the end of his
+arms, is sometimes quoted as a proof of his foresight of troublous
+times. This, however, goes too far, because, apart from the instances
+of such vicissitudes among the ancients, the King of Syracuse keeping
+school at Corinth, or Alexander, son of Perseus, becoming a Roman
+scrivener, he actually saw Charles Edward, the Stuart pretender,
+wandering from court to court in search of succour and receiving only
+rebuffs; and he may well have known that after the troubles of 1738 a
+considerable number of the oligarchs of his native Geneva had gone
+into exile, rather than endure the humiliation of their party.[301]
+Besides all this, the propriety of being able to earn one's bread by
+some kind of toil that would be useful in even the simplest societies,
+flowed necessarily from every part of his doctrine of the aims of life
+and the worth of character. He did, however, say, "We approach a state
+of crisis and an age of revolutions," which proved true, but he added
+too much when he pronounced it impossible that the great monarchies of
+Europe could last long.[302] And it is certain that the only one of
+the great monarchies which did actually fall would have had a far
+better chance of surviving if Lewis XVI. had been as expert in the
+trade of king as he was in that of making locks and bolts.
+
+From this semi-stoical ideal there followed certain social notions,
+of which Rousseau had the distinction of being the most powerful
+propagator. As has so often been said, his contemporaries were willing
+to leave social questions alone, provided only the government would
+suffer the free expression of opinion in literature and science.
+Rousseau went deeper. His moral conception of individual life and
+character contained in itself a social conception, and he did not
+shrink from boldly developing it. The rightly constituted man suffices
+for himself and is free from prejudices. He has arms, and knows how to
+use them; he has few wants, and knows how to satisfy them. Nurtured in
+the most absolute freedom, he can think of no worse ill than
+servitude. He attaches himself to the beauty which perishes not,
+limiting his desires to his condition, learning to lose whatever may
+be taken away from him, to place himself above events, and to detach
+his heart from loved objects without a pang.[303] He pities miserable
+kings, who are the bondsmen of all that seems to obey them; he pities
+false sages, who are fast bound in the chains of their empty renown;
+he pities the silly rich, martyrs to their own ostentation.[304] All
+the sympathies of such a man therefore naturally flow away from these,
+the great of the earth, to those who lead the stoic's life perforce.
+"It is the common people who compose the human race; what is not the
+people is hardly worth taking into account. Man is the same in all
+ranks; that being so, the ranks which are most numerous deserve most
+respect. Before one who reflects, all civil distinctions vanish: he
+marks the same passions and the same feelings in the clown as in the
+man covered with reputation; he can only distinguish their speech, and
+a varnish more or less elaborately laid on. Study people of this
+humble condition; you will perceive that under another sort of
+language, they have as much intelligence as you, and more good sense.
+Respect your species: reflect that it is essentially made up of the
+collection of peoples; that if every king and every philosopher were
+cut off from among them, they would scarcely be missed, and the world
+would go none the worse."[305] As it is, the universal spirit of the
+law in every country is invariably to favour the strong against the
+weak, and him who has, against him who has not. The many are
+sacrificed to the few. The specious names of justice and subordination
+serve only as instruments for violence and arms for iniquity. The
+ostentatious orders who pretend to be useful to the others, are in
+truth only useful to themselves at the expense of the others.[306]
+
+This was carrying on the work which had already been begun in the New
+Helo�sa, as we have seen, but in the Emilius it is pushed with a
+gravity and a directness, that could not be imparted to the picture of
+a fanciful and arbitrarily chosen situation. The only writer who has
+approached Rousseau, so far as I know, in fulness and depth of
+expression in proclaiming the sorrows and wrongs of the poor blind
+crowd, who painfully drag along the car of triumphant civilisation
+with its handful of occupants, is the author of the Book of the
+People. Lamennais even surpasses Rousseau in the profundity of his
+pathos; his pictures of the life of hut and hovel are as sincere and
+as touching; and there is in them, instead of the anger and bitterness
+of the older author, righteous as that was, a certain heroism of pity
+and devoted sublimity of complaint, which lift the soul up from
+resentment into divine moods of compassion and resolve, and stir us
+like a tale of noble action.[307] It was Rousseau, however, who first
+sounded the note of which the religion that had once been the champion
+and consoler of the common people, seemed long to have lost even the
+tradition. Yet the teaching was not constructive, because the ideal
+man was not made truly social. Emilius is brought up in something of
+the isolation of the imaginary savage of the state of nature. He
+marries, and then he and his wife seem only fitted to lead a life of
+detachment from the interests of the world in which they are placed.
+Social or political education, that is the training which character
+receives from the medium in which it grows, is left out of account,
+and so is the correlative process of preparation for the various
+conditions and exigencies which belong to that medium, until it is too
+late to take its natural place in character. Nothing can be clumsier
+than the way in which Rousseau proposes to teach Emilius the existence
+and nature of his relations with his fellows. And the reason of this
+was that he had never himself in the course of his ruminations,
+willingly thought of Emilius as being in a condition of active social
+relation, the citizen of a state.
+
+
+III.
+
+There appear to be three dominant states of mind, with groups of
+faculties associated with each of them, which it is the business of
+the instructor firmly to establish in the character of the future man.
+The first is a resolute and unflinching respect for Truth; for the
+conclusions, that is to say, of the scientific reason, comprehending
+also a constant anxiety to take all possible pains that such
+conclusions shall be rightly drawn. Connected with this is the
+discipline of the whole range of intellectual faculties, from the
+simple habit of correct observation, down to the highly complex habit
+of weighing and testing the value of evidence. This very important
+branch of early discipline, Rousseau for reasons of his own which we
+have already often referred to, cared little about, and he throws very
+little light upon it, beyond one or two extremely sensible precepts of
+the negative kind, warning us against beginning too soon and forcing
+an apparent progress too rapidly. The second fundamental state in a
+rightly formed character is a deep feeling for things of the spirit
+which are unknown and incommensurable; a sense of awe, mystery,
+sublimity, and the fateful bounds of life at its beginning and its
+end. Here is the Religious side, and what Rousseau has to say of this
+we shall presently see. It is enough now to remark that Emilius was
+never to hear the name of a God or supreme being until his reason was
+fairly ripened. The third state, which is at least as difficult to
+bring to healthy perfection as either of the other two, is a passion
+for Justice.
+
+The little use which Rousseau made of this momentous and
+much-embracing word, which names the highest peak of social virtue, is
+a very striking circumstance. The reason would seem to be that his
+sense of the relations of men with one another was not virile enough
+to comprehend the deep austerer lines which mark the brow of the
+benignant divinity of Justice. In the one place in his writings where
+he speaks of justice freely, he shows a narrowness of idea, which was
+perhaps as much due to intellectual confusion as to lack of moral
+robustness. He says excellently that "love of the human race is
+nothing else in us but love of justice," and that "of all the virtues,
+justice is that which contributes most to the common good of men."
+While enjoining the discipline of pity as one of the noblest of
+sentiments, he warns us against letting it degenerate into weakness,
+and insists that we should only surrender ourselves to it when it
+accords with justice.[308] But that is all. What constitutes justice,
+what is its standard, what its source, what its sanction, whence the
+extraordinary holiness with which its name has come to be invested
+among the most highly civilised societies of men, we are never told,
+nor do we ever see that our teacher had seen the possibility of such
+questions being asked. If they had been propounded to him, he would,
+it is most likely, have fallen back upon the convenient mystery of the
+natural law. This was the current phrase of that time, and it was
+meant to embody a hypothetical experience of perfect human relations
+in an expression of the widest generality. If so, this would have to
+be impressed upon the mind of Emilius in the same way as other
+mysteries. As a matter of fact, Emilius was led through pity up to
+humanity, or sociality in an imperfect signification, and there he was
+left without a further guide to define the marks of truly social
+conduct.
+
+This imperfection was a necessity, inseparable from Rousseau's
+tenacity in keeping society in the background of the picture of life
+which he opened to his pupil. He said, indeed, "We must study society
+by men, and men by society; those who would treat politics and
+morality apart will never understand anything about either one or the
+other."[309] This is profoundly true, but we hardly see in the
+morality which is designed for Emilius the traces of political
+elements. Yet without some gradually unfolded presentation of society
+as a whole, it is scarcely possible to implant the idea of justice
+with any hope of large fertility. You may begin at a very early time
+to develop, even from the primitive quality of self-love, a notion of
+equity and a respect for it, but the vast conception of social justice
+can only find room in a character that has been made spacious by
+habitual contemplation of the height and breadth and close
+compactedness of the fabric of the relations that bind man to man, and
+of the share, integral or infinitesimally fractional, that each has in
+the happiness or woe of other souls. And this contemplation should
+begin when we prepare the foundation of all the other maturer habits.
+Youth can hardly recognise too soon the enormous unresting machine
+which bears us ceaselessly along, because we can hardly learn too soon
+that its force and direction depend on the play of human motives, of
+which our own for good or evil form an inevitable part when the ripe
+years come. To one reared with the narrow care devoted to Emilius, or
+with the capricious negligence in which the majority are left to grow
+to manhood, the society into which they are thrown is a mere moral
+wilderness. They are to make such way through it as they can, with
+egotism for their only trusty instrument. This egotism may either be a
+bludgeon, as with the most part, or it may be a delicately adjusted
+and fastidiously decorated compass, as with an Emilius. In either case
+is no perception that the gross outer contact of men with another is
+transformed by worthiness of common aim and loyal faith in common
+excellences, into a thing beautiful and generous. It is our business
+to fix and root the habit of thinking of that _moral_ union, into
+which, as Kant has so admirably expressed it, the _pathological_
+necessities of situation that first compelled social concert, have
+been gradually transmuted. Instead of this, it is exactly the
+primitive pathological conditions that a narrow theory of education
+brings first into prominence; as if knowledge of origins were
+indispensable to a right attachment to the transformed conditions of a
+maturer system.
+
+It has been said that Rousseau founds all morality upon personal
+interest, perhaps even more specially than Helv�tius himself. The
+accusation is just. Emilius will enter adult life without the germs of
+that social conscience, which animates a man with all the associations
+of duty and right, of gratitude for the past and resolute hope for the
+future, in face of the great body of which he finds himself a part. "I
+observe," says Rousseau, "that in the modern ages men have no hold
+upon one another save through force and interest, while the ancients
+on the other hand acted much more by persuasion and the affections of
+the soul."[310] The reason was that with the ancients, supposing him
+to mean the Greeks and Romans, the social conscience was so much wider
+in its scope than the comparatively narrow fragment of duty which is
+supposed to come under the sacred power of conscience in the more
+complex and less closely contained organisation of a modern state. The
+neighbours to whom a man owed duty in those times comprehended all the
+members of his state. The neighbours of the modern preacher of duty
+are either the few persons with whom each of us is brought into actual
+and palpable contact, or else the whole multitude of dwellers on the
+earth,--a conception that for many ages to come will remain with the
+majority of men and women too vague to exert an energetic and
+concentrating influence upon action, and will lead them no further
+than an uncoloured and nerveless cosmopolitanism.
+
+What the young need to have taught to them in this too little
+cultivated region, is that they are born not mere atoms floating
+independent and apart for a season through a terraqueous medium, and
+sucking up as much more than their share of nourishment as they can
+seize; nor citizens of the world with no more definite duty than to
+keep their feelings towards all their fellows in a steady simmer of
+bland complacency; but soldiers in a host, citizens of a polity whose
+boundaries are not set down in maps, members of a church the
+handwriting of whose ordinances is not in the hieroglyphs of idle
+mystery, nor its hope and recompense in the lands beyond death. They
+need to be taught that they owe a share of their energies to the great
+struggle which is in ceaseless progress in all societies in an endless
+variety of forms, between new truth and old prejudice, between love of
+self or class and solicitous passion for justice, between the
+obstructive indolence and inertia of the many and the generous mental
+activity of the few. This is the sphere and definition of the social
+conscience. The good causes of enlightenment and justice in all
+lands,--here is the church militant in which we should early seek to
+enrol the young, and the true state to which they should be taught
+that they owe the duties of active and arduous citizenship. These are
+the struggles with which the modern instructor should associate those
+virtues of fortitude, tenacity, silent patience, outspoken energy,
+readiness to assert ourselves and readiness to efface ourselves,
+willingness to suffer and resolution to inflict suffering, which men
+of old knew how to show for their gods or their sovereign. But the
+ideal of Emilius was an ideal of quietism; to possess his own soul in
+patience, with a suppressed intelligence, a suppressed sociality,
+without a single spark of generous emulation in the courses of
+strong-fibred virtue, or a single thrill of heroical pursuit after so
+much as one great forlorn cause.
+
+"If it once comes to him, in reading these parallels of the famous
+ancients, to desire to be another rather than himself, were this other
+Socrates, were he Cato, you have missed the mark; he who begins to
+make himself a stranger to himself, is not long before he forgets
+himself altogether."[311] But if a man only nurses the conception of
+his own personality, for the sake of keeping his own peace and
+self-contained comfort at a glow of easy warmth, assuredly the best
+thing that can befall him is that he should perish, lest his example
+should infect others with the same base contagion. Excessive
+personality when militant is often wholesome, excessive personality
+that only hugs itself is under all circumstances chief among unclean
+things. Thus even Rousseau's finest monument of moral enthusiasm is
+fatally tarnished by the cold damp breath of isolation, and the very
+book which contained so many elements of new life for a state, was at
+bottom the apotheosis of social despair.
+
+
+IV.
+
+The great agent in fostering the rise to vigour and uprightness of a
+social conscience, apart from the yet more powerful instrument of a
+strong and energetic public spirit at work around the growing
+character, must be found in the study of history rightly directed with
+a view to this end. It is here, in observing the long processes of
+time and appreciating the slowly accumulating sum of endeavour, that
+the mind gradually comes to read the great lessons how close is the
+bond that links men together. It is here that he gradually begins to
+acquire the habit of considering what are the conditions of wise
+social activity, its limits, its objects, its rewards, what is the
+capacity of collective achievement, and of what sort is the
+significance and purport of the little span of time that cuts off the
+yesterday of our society from its to-morrow.
+
+Rousseau had very rightly forbidden the teaching of history to young
+children, on the ground that the essence of history lies in the moral
+relations between the bare facts which it recounts, and that the terms
+and ideas of these relations are wholly beyond the intellectual grasp
+of the very young.[312] He might have based his objections equally
+well upon the impossibility of little children knowing the meaning of
+the multitude of descriptive terms which make up a historical manual,
+or realising the relations between events in bare point of time,
+although childhood may perhaps be a convenient period for some
+mechanical acquisition of dates. According to Rousseau, history was to
+appear very late in the educational course, when the youth was almost
+ready to enter the world. It was to be the finishing study, from which
+he should learn not sociality either in its scientific or its higher
+moral sense, but the composition of the heart of man, in a safer way
+than through actual intercourse with society. Society might make him
+either cynical or frivolous. History would bring him the same
+information, without subjecting him to the same perils. In society you
+only hear the words of men; to know man you must observe his actions,
+and actions are only unveiled in history.[313] This view is hardly
+worth discussing. The subject of history is not the heart of man, but
+the movements of societies. Moreover, the oracles of history are
+entirely dumb to one who seeks from them maxims for the shaping of
+daily conduct, or living instruction as to the motives, aims,
+caprices, capacities of self-restraint, self-sacrifice, of those with
+whom the occasions of life bring us into contact.
+
+It is true that at the close of the other part of his education,
+Emilius was to travel and there find the comment upon the completed
+circle of his studies.[314] But excellent as travel is for some of the
+best of those who have the opportunity, still for many it is
+valueless for lack of the faculty of curiosity. For the great
+majority it is impossible for lack of opportunity. To trust so much as
+Rousseau did to the effect of travelling, is to leave a large chasm in
+education unbridged.
+
+It is interesting, however, to notice some of Rousseau's notions about
+history as an instrument for conveying moral instruction, a few of
+them are so good, others are so characteristically narrow. "The worst
+historians for a young man," he says, "are those who judge. The facts,
+the facts; then let him judge for himself. If the author's judgment is
+for ever guiding him, he is only seeing with the eye of another, and
+as soon as this eye fails him, he sees nothing." Modern history is not
+fit for instruction, not only because it has no physiognomy, all our
+men being exactly like one another, but because our historians, intent
+on brilliance above all other things, think of nothing so much as
+painting highly coloured portraits, which for the most part represent
+nothing at all.[315] Of course such a judgment as this implies an
+ignorance alike of the ends and meaning of history, which, considering
+that he was living in the midst of a singular revival of historical
+study, is not easy to pardon. If we are to look only to perfection of
+form and arrangement, it may have been right for one living in the
+middle of the last century to place the ancients in the first rank
+without competitors. But the author of the Discourse upon literature
+and the arts might have been expected to look beyond composition, and
+the contemporary of Voltaire's _Essai sur les Moeurs_ (1754-1757)
+might have been expected to know that the profitable experience of the
+human race did not close with the fall of the Roman republic. Among
+the ancient historians, he counted Thucydides to be the true model,
+because he reports facts without judging, and omits none of the
+circumstances proper for enabling us to judge of them for
+ourselves--though how Rousseau knew what facts Thucydides has omitted,
+I am unable to divine. Then come C�sar's Commentaries and Xenophon's
+Retreat of the Ten Thousand. The good Herodotus, without portraits and
+without maxims, but abounding in details the most capable of
+interesting and pleasing, would perhaps be the best of historians, if
+only these details did not so often degenerate into puerilities. Livy
+is unsuited to youth, because he is political and a rhetorician.
+Tacitus is the book of the old; you must have learnt the art of
+reading facts, before you can be trusted with maxims.
+
+The drawback of histories such as those of Thucydides and C�sar,
+Rousseau admits to be that they dwell almost entirely on war, leaving
+out the true life of nations, which belongs to the unwritten
+chronicles of peace. This leads him to the equally just reflection
+that historians while recounting facts omit the gradual and
+progressive causes which led to them. "They often find in a battle
+lost or won the reason of a revolution, which even before the battle
+was already inevitable. War scarcely does more than bring into full
+light events determined by moral causes, which historians can seldom
+penetrate."[316] A third complaint against the study which he began by
+recommending as a proper introduction to the knowledge of man, is that
+it does not present men but actions, or at least men only in their
+parade costume and in certain chosen moments, and he justly reproaches
+writers alike of history and biography, for omitting those trifling
+strokes and homely anecdotes, which reveal the true physiognomy of
+character. "Remain then for ever, without bowels, without nature;
+harden your hearts of cast iron in your trumpery decency, and make
+yourselves despicable by force of dignity."[317] And so after all, by
+a common stroke of impetuous inconsistency, he forsakes history, and
+falls back upon the ancient biographies, because, all the low and
+familiar details being banished from modern style, however true and
+characteristic, men are as elaborately tricked out by our authors in
+their private lives as they were tricked out upon the stage of the
+world.
+
+
+V.
+
+As women are from the constitution of things the educators of us all
+at the most critical periods, and mainly of their own sex from the
+beginning to the end of education, the writer of the most imperfect
+treatise on this world-interesting subject can hardly avoid saying
+something on the upbringing of women. Such a writer may start from
+one of three points of view; he may consider the woman as destined to
+be a wife, or a mother, or a human being; as the companion of a man,
+as the rearer of the young, or as an independent personality, endowed
+with gifts, talents, possibilities, in less or greater number, and
+capable, as in the case of men, of being trained to the worst or the
+best uses. Of course to every one who looks into life, each of these
+three ideals melts into the other two, and we can only think of them
+effectively when they are blended. Yet we test a writer's appreciation
+of the conditions of human progress by observing the function which he
+makes most prominent. A man's whole thought of the worth and aim of
+womanhood depends upon the generosity and elevation of the ideal which
+is silently present in his mind, while he is specially meditating the
+relations of woman as wife or as mother. Unless he is really capable
+of thinking of them as human beings, independently of these two
+functions, he is sure to have comparatively mean notions in connection
+with them in respect of the functions which he makes paramount.
+
+Rousseau breaks down here. The unsparing fashion in which he developed
+the theory of individualism in the case of Emilius, and insisted on
+man being allowed to grow into the man of nature, instead of the man
+of art and manufacture, might have led us to expect that when he came
+to speak of women, he would suffer equity and logic to have their way,
+by giving equally free room in the two halves of the human race, for
+the development of natural force and capacity. If, as he begins by
+saying, he wishes to bring up Emilius, not to be a merchant nor a
+physician nor a soldier nor to the practice of any other special
+calling, but to be first and above all a man, why should not Sophie
+too be brought up above all to be a human being, in whom the special
+qualifications of wifehood and motherhood may be developed in their
+due order? Emilius is a man first, a husband and a father afterwards
+and secondarily. How can Sophie be a companion for him, and an
+instructor for their children, unless she likewise has been left in
+the hands of nature, and had the same chances permitted to her as were
+given to her predestined mate? Again, the pictures of the New Helo�sa
+would have led us to conceive the ideal of womanly station not so much
+in the wife, as in the house-mother, attached by esteem and sober
+affection to her husband, but having for her chief functions to be the
+gentle guardian of her little ones, and the mild, firm, and prudent
+administrator of a cheerful and well-ordered household. In the last
+book of the Emilius, which treats of the education of girls, education
+is reduced within the compass of an even narrower ideal than this. We
+are confronted with the oriental conception of women. Every principle
+that has been followed in the education of Emilius is reversed in the
+education of women. Opinion, which is the tomb of virtue among men, is
+among women its high throne. The whole education of women ought to be
+relative to men; to please them, to be useful to them, to make
+themselves loved and honoured by them, to console them, to render
+their lives agreeable and sweet to them,--these are the duties which
+ought to be taught to women from their childhood. Every girl ought to
+have the religion of her mother, and every wife that of her husband.
+Not being in a condition to judge for themselves, they ought to
+receive the decision of fathers and husbands as if it were that of the
+church. And since authority is the rule of faith for women, it is not
+so much a matter of explaining to them the reasons for belief, as for
+expounding clearly to them what to believe. Although boys are not to
+hear of the idea of God until they are fifteen, because they are not
+in a condition to apprehend it, yet girls who are still less in a
+condition to apprehend it, are _therefore_ to have it imparted to them
+at an earlier age. Woman is created to give way to man, and to suffer
+his injustice. Her empire is an empire of gentleness, mildness, and
+complaisance. Her orders are caresses, and her threats are tears.
+Girls must not only be made laborious and vigilant; they must also
+very early be accustomed to being thwarted and kept in restraint. This
+misfortune, if they feel it one, is inseparable from their sex, and if
+ever they attempt to escape from it, they will only suffer misfortunes
+still more cruel in consequence.[318]
+
+After a series of oriental and obscurantist propositions of this kind,
+it is of little purpose to tell us that women have more intelligence
+and men more genius; that women observe, while men reason; that men
+will philosophise better upon the human heart, while women will be
+more skilful in reading it.[319] And it is a mere mockery to end the
+matter by a fervid assurance, that in spite of prejudices that have
+their origin in the manners of the time, the enthusiasm for what is
+worthy and noble is no more foreign to women than it is to men, and
+that there is nothing which under the guidance of nature may not be
+obtained from them as well as from ourselves.[320] Finally there is a
+complete surrender of the obscurantist position in such a sentence as
+this: "I only know for either sex two really distinct classes; one the
+people who think, the other the people who do not think, and this
+difference comes almost entirely from education. A man of the first of
+these classes ought not to marry into the other; for the greatest
+charm of companionship is wanting, when in spite of having a wife he
+is reduced to think by himself. It is only a cultivated spirit that
+provides agreeable commerce, and 'tis a cheerless thing for a father
+of a family who loves his home, to be obliged to shut himself up
+within himself, and to have no one about him who understands him.
+Besides, how is a woman who has no habits of reflection to bring up
+her children?"[321] Nothing could be more excellently urged. But how
+is a woman to have habits of reflection, when she has been constantly
+brought up in habits of the closest mental bondage, trained always to
+consider her first business to be the pleasing of some man, and her
+instruments not reasonable persuasion but caressing and crying?
+
+This pernicious nonsense was mainly due, like nearly all his most
+serious errors, to Rousseau's want of a conception of improvement in
+human affairs. If he had been filled with that conception as Turgot,
+Condorcet, and others were, he would have been forced as they were, to
+meditate upon changes in the education and the recognition accorded to
+women, as one of the first conditions of improvement. For lack of
+this, he contributed nothing to the most important branch of the
+subject that he had undertaken to treat. He was always taunting the
+champions of reigning systems of training for boys, with the vicious
+or feeble men whom he thought he saw on every hand around him. The
+same kind of answer obviously meets the current idea, which he adopted
+with a few idyllic decorations of his own, of the type of the
+relations between men and women. That type practically reduces
+marriage in ninety-nine cases out of every hundred to a dolorous
+parody of a social partnership. It does more than any one other cause
+to keep societies back, because it prevents one half of the members of
+a society from cultivating all their natural energies. Thus it
+produces a waste of helpful quality as immeasurable as it is
+deplorable, and besides rearing these creatures of mutilated faculty
+to be the intellectually demoralising companions of the remaining half
+of their own generation, makes them the mothers and the earliest and
+most influential instructors of the whole of the generation that comes
+after.[322] Of course, if any one believes that the existing
+arrangements of a western community are the most successful that we
+can ever hope to bring into operation, we need not complain of
+Rousseau. If not, then it is only reasonable to suppose that a
+considerable portion of the change will be effected in the hitherto
+neglected and subordinate half of the race. That reconstitution of the
+family, which Rousseau and others among his contemporaries rightly
+sought after as one of the most pressing needs of the time, was
+essentially impossible, so long as the typical woman was the adornment
+of a semi-philosophic seraglio, a sort of compromise between the
+frowzy ideal of an English bourgeois and the impertinent ideal of a
+Parisian gallant. Condorcet and others made a grievous mistake in
+defending the free gratification of sensual passion, as one of the
+conditions of happiness and making the most of our lives.[323] But
+even this was not at bottom more fatal to the maintenance and order of
+the family, than Rousseau's enervating notion of keeping women in
+strict intellectual and moral subjection was fatal to the family as
+the true school of high and equal companionship, and the fruitful
+seed-ground of wise activities and new hopes for each fresh
+generation.
+
+This was one side of Rousseau's reactionary tendencies. Fortunately
+for the revolution of thirty years later, which illustrated the
+gallery of heroic women with some of its most splendid names, his
+power was in this respect neutralised by other stronger tendencies in
+the general spirit of the age. The aristocracy of sex was subjected to
+the same destructive criticism as the aristocracy of birth. The same
+feeling for justice which inspired the demand for freedom and equality
+of opportunity among men, led to the demand for the same freedom and
+equality of opportunity between men and women. All this was part of
+the energy of the time, which Rousseau disliked with undisguised
+bitterness. It broke inconveniently in upon his quietest visions. He
+had no conception, with his sensuous brooding imagination, never
+wholly purged of grossness, of that high and pure type of women whom
+French history so often produced in the seventeenth century, and who
+were not wanting towards the close of the eighteenth, a type in which
+devotion went with force, and austerity with sweetness, and divine
+candour and transparent innocence with energetic loyalty and
+intellectual uprightness and a firmly set will. Such thoughts were not
+for Rousseau, a dreamer led by his senses. Perhaps they are for none
+of us any more. When we turn to modern literature from the pages in
+which F�nelon speaks of the education of girls, who does not feel that
+the world has lost a sacred accent, as if some ineffable essence has
+passed out from our hearts?
+
+The fifth book of Emilius is not a chapter on the education of women,
+but an idyll. We have already seen the circumstances under which
+Rousseau composed it, in a profound and delicious solitude, in the
+midst of woods and streams, with the fragrance of the orange-flower
+poured around him, and in continual ecstasy. As an idyll it is
+delicious; as a serious contribution to the hardest of problems it is
+naught. The sequel, by a stroke of matchless whimsicality, unless it
+be meant, as it perhaps may have been, for a piece of deep tragic
+irony, is the best refutation that Rousseau's most energetic adversary
+could have desired. The Sophie who has been educated on the oriental
+principle, has presently to confess a flagrant infidelity to the
+blameless Emilius, her lord.[324]
+
+
+VI.
+
+Yet the sum of the merits of Emilius as a writing upon education is
+not to be lightly counted. Its value lies, as has been said of the New
+Helo�sa, in the spirit which animates it and communicates itself with
+vivid force to the reader. It is one of the seminal books in the
+history of literature, and of such books the worth resides less in the
+parts than in the whole. It touched the deeper things of character. It
+filled parents with a sense of the dignity and moment of their task.
+It cleared away the accumulation of clogging prejudices and obscure
+inveterate usage, which made education one of the dark formalistic
+arts. It admitted floods of light and air into the tightly closed
+nurseries and schoolrooms. It effected the substitution of growth for
+mechanism. A strong current of manliness, wholesomeness, simplicity,
+self-reliance, was sent by it through Europe, while its eloquence was
+the most powerful adjuration ever addressed to parental affection to
+cherish the young life in all love and considerate solicitude. It was
+the charter of youthful deliverance. The first immediate effect of
+Emilius in France was mainly on the religious side. It was the
+Christian religion that needed to be avenged, rather than education
+that needed to be amended, and the press overflowed with replies to
+that profession of faith which we shall consider in the next chapter.
+Still there was also an immense quantity of educational books and
+pamphlets, which is to be set down, first to the suppression of the
+Jesuits, the great educating order, and the vacancy which they left;
+and next to the impulse given by the Emilius to a movement from which
+the book itself had originally been an outcome.[325] But why try to
+state the influence of Emilius on France in this way? To strike the
+account truly would be to write the history of the first French
+Revolution.[326] All mothers, as Michelet says, were big with
+Emilius. "It is not without good reason that people have noted the
+children born at this glorious moment, as animated by a superior
+spirit, by a gift of flame and genius. It is the generation of
+revolutionary Titans: the other generation not less hardy in science.
+It is Danton, Vergniaud, Desmoulins; it is Amp�re, La Place, Cuvier,
+Geoffroy Saint Hilaire."[327]
+
+In Germany Emilius had great power. There it fell in with the
+extraordinary movement towards naturalness and freedom of which we
+have already spoken.[328] Herder, whom some have called the Rousseau
+of the Germans, wrote with enthusiasm to his then beloved Caroline of
+the "divine Emilius," and he never ceased to speak of Rousseau as his
+inspirer and his master.[329] Basedow (1723), that strange, restless,
+and most ill-regulated person, was seized with an almost phrenetic
+enthusiasm for Rousseau's educational theories, translated them into
+German, and repeated them in his works over and over again with an
+incessant iteration. Lavater (1741-1801), who differed from Basedow in
+being a fervent Christian of soft mystic faith, was thrown into
+company with him in 1774, and grew equally eager with him in the cause
+of reforming education in the Rousseauite sense.[330] Pestalozzi
+(1746-1827), the most systematic, popular, and permanently successful
+of all the educational reformers, borrowed his spirit and his
+principles mainly from the Emilius, though he gave larger extension
+and more intelligent exactitude to their application. Jean Paul the
+Unique, in the preface to his Levana, or Doctrine of Education (1806),
+one of the most excellent of all books on the subject, declares that
+among previous works to which he owes a debt, "first and last he names
+Rousseau's Emilius; no preceding work can be compared to his; in no
+previous work on education was the ideal so richly combined with the
+actual," and so forth.[331] It was not merely a Goethe, a Schiller, a
+Herder, whom Rousseau fired with new thoughts. The smaller men, such
+as Fr. Jacobi, Heinse, Klinger, shared the same inspiration. The
+worship of Rousseau penetrated all classes, and touched every degree
+of intelligence.[332]
+
+In our own country Emilius was translated as soon as it appeared, and
+must have been widely read, for a second version of the translation
+was called for in a very short time. So far as a cursory survey gives
+one a right to speak, its influence here in the field of education is
+not very perceptible. That subject did not yet, nor for some time to
+come, excite much active thought in England. Rousseau's speculations
+on society both in the Emilius and elsewhere seem to have attracted
+more attention. Reference has already been made to Paley.[333] Adam
+Ferguson's celebrated Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) has
+many allusions, direct and indirect, to Rousseau.[334] Kames's
+Sketches of the History of Man (1774) abounds still more copiously in
+references to Emilius, sometimes to controvert its author, more often
+to cite him as an authority worthy of respect, and Rousseau's crude
+notions about women are cited with special acceptance.[335] Cowper was
+probably thinking of the Savoyard Vicar when he wrote the energetic
+lines in the Task, beginning "Haste now, philosopher, and set him
+free," scornfully defying the deist to rescue apostate man.[336] Nor
+should we omit what was counted so important a book in its day as
+Godwin's Enquiry concerning Political Justice (1793). It is perhaps
+more French in its spirit than any other work of equal consequence in
+our literature of politics, and in its composition the author was
+avowedly a student of Rousseau, as well as of the members of the
+materialistic school.
+
+In fine we may add that Emilius was the first expression of that
+democratic tendency in education, which political and other
+circumstances gradually made general alike in England, France, and
+Germany; a tendency, that is, to look on education as a process
+concerning others besides the rich and the well-born. As has often
+been remarked, Ascham, Milton, Locke, F�nelon, busy themselves about
+the instruction of young gentlemen and gentlewomen. The rest of the
+world are supposed to be sufficiently provided for by the education of
+circumstance. Since the middle of the eighteenth century this
+monopolising conception has vanished, along with and through the same
+general agencies as the corresponding conception of social monopoly.
+Rousseau enforced the production of a natural and self-sufficing man
+as the object of education, and showed, or did his best to show, the
+infinite capacity of the young for that simple and natural
+cultivation. This easily and directly led people to reflect that such
+a capacity was not confined to the children of the rich, nor the hope
+of producing a natural and sufficing man narrowed to those who had
+every external motive placed around them for being neither natural nor
+self-sufficing.
+
+Voltaire pronounced Emilius a stupid romance, but admitted that it
+contained fifty pages which he would have bound in morocco. These, we
+may be sure, concerned religion; in truth it was the Savoyard Vicar's
+profession of faith which stirred France far more than the upbringing
+of the natural man in things temporal. Let us pass to that eloquent
+document which is inserted in the middle of the Emilius, as the
+expression of the religious opinion that best befits the man of
+nature--a document most hyperbolically counted by some French
+enthusiasts for the spiritualist philosophy and the religion of
+sentiment, as the noblest monument of the eighteenth century.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[273] _M�m. de Mdme. d'Epinay_, ii. 276, 278.
+
+[274] _Lettres � mon Fils_ (1758), and _Les Conversations d'Emilie_
+(1783).
+
+[275] _Lettres P�ruviennes._
+
+[276] _Oeuv._, ii. 785-794.
+
+[277] _Corr. Lit._, iii. 65.
+
+[278] _Emile_, I. 27.
+
+[279] It is interesting to recall a similar movement in the Roman
+society of the second century of our era. See the advice of Favorinus
+to mothers, in Aulus Gellius, xii. 1. M. Boissier, contrasting the
+solicitude of Tacitus and Marcus Aurelius for the infant young with
+the brutality of Cicero, remarks that in the time of Seneca men
+discussed in the schools the educational theories of Rousseau's
+Emilius. (_La Relig. Romaine_, ii. 202.)
+
+[280] See also his diatribe against whalebone and tight-lacing for
+girls, V. 27.
+
+[281] _Emile_, I. 93, etc.
+
+[282] _Emile_, II. 141.
+
+[283] _Emile_, II. 156-160.
+
+[284] _Emile_, III. 338-345.
+
+[285] III. 358, etc.
+
+[286] _Emile_, II. 263-267.
+
+[287] _Levana_, ch. iii. � 54.
+
+[288] _Emile_, II. 163.
+
+[289] The Ninth Promenade (_R�veries_, 309).
+
+[290] _Emile_, I. 23.
+
+[291] II. 109.
+
+[292] II. 111.
+
+[293] _Emile_, II. 113-117.
+
+[294] II. 121.
+
+[295] II. 143.
+
+[296] _Emile_, III. 382.
+
+[297] II. 227.
+
+[298] IV. 10.
+
+[299] _Emile_, III. 394.
+
+[300] V. 199.
+
+[301] The reader will not forget the famous supper-party of princes in
+_Candide_.
+
+[302] _Emile_, III. 392, and note. A still more remarkable passage, as
+far as it goes, is that in the _Confessions_ (xi. 136):--"The
+disasters of an unsuccessful war, all of which came from the fault of
+the government, the incredible disorder of the finances, the continual
+dissensions of the administration, divided as it was among two or
+three ministers at open war with one another, and who for the sake of
+hurting one another dragged the kingdom into ruin; the general
+discontent of the people, and of all the orders of the state; the
+obstinacy of a wrong-headed woman, who, always sacrificing her better
+judgment, if indeed she had any, to her tastes, dismissed the most
+capable from office, to make room for her favourites ... all this
+prospect of a coming break-up made me think of seeking shelter
+elsewhere."
+
+[303] _Emile_, V. 220.
+
+[304] IV. 85.
+
+[305] _Emile_, IV. 38, 39. Hence, we suppose, the famous reply to
+Lavoisier's request that his life might be spared from the guillotine
+for a fortnight, in order that he might complete some experiments,
+that the Republic has no need of chemists.
+
+[306] IV. 65. Jefferson, who was American minister in France from 1784
+to 1789, and absorbed a great many of the ideas then afloat, writes in
+words that seem as if they were borrowed from Rousseau:--"I am
+convinced that those societies (as the Indians) which live without
+government, enjoy in their general mass an infinitely greater degree
+of happiness than those who live under European governments. Among the
+former public opinion is in the state of law, and restrains morals as
+powerfully as laws ever did anywhere. Among the latter, under pretence
+of governing, they have divided their nation into two classes, wolves
+and sheep. I do not exaggerate; this is a true picture of Europe."
+Tucker's _Life of Jefferson_, i. 255.
+
+[307] Lamennais was influenced by Rousseau throughout. In the _Essay
+on Indifference_ he often appeals to him as the vindicator of the
+religious sentiment (_e.g._ i. 21, 52, iv. 375, etc. Ed. 1837). The
+same influence is seen still more markedly in the _Words of a
+Believer_ (1835), when dogma had departed, and he was left with a kind
+of dual deism, thus being less estranged from Rousseau than in the
+first days (_e.g._ � xix. "Tous naissent �gaux," etc., � xxi., etc.)
+The _Book of the People_ is thoroughly Rousseauite.
+
+[308] _Emile_, IV. 105.
+
+[309] _Emile_, IV. 63.
+
+[310] _Emile_, IV. 273.
+
+[311] _Emile_, IV. 83.
+
+[312] _Emile_, II. 185. See the previous page for some equally prudent
+observations on the folly of teaching geography to little children.
+
+[313] _Emile_, IV. 68.
+
+[314] V. 231, etc.
+
+[315] _Emile_, IV. 71.
+
+[316] _Emile_, IV. 73.
+
+[317] IV. 77.
+
+[318] _Emile_, V. 22, 53, 54, 101, 128-132.
+
+[319] _Emile_, V. 78.
+
+[320] V. 122.
+
+[321] V. 129, 130.
+
+[322] Well did Jean Paul say, "If we regard all life as an educational
+institution, a circumnavigator of the world is less influenced by all
+the nations he has seen than by his nurse."--_Levana._
+
+[323] _Tableau des Progr�s de l'Esprit Humain._ _Oeuv._, vi. pp. 264,
+523-526, and elsewhere. [Ed. 1847-1849.]
+
+[324] _Emile et Sophie_, i.
+
+[325] For an account of some of these, see Grimm's _Corr. Lit._, iii.
+211, 252, 347, etc. Also _Corr. In�d._, p. 143.
+
+[326] For the early date at which Rousseau's power began to meet
+recognition, see D'Alembert to Voltaire, July 31, 1762.
+
+[327] _Louis xv. et xvi._, p. 226.
+
+[328] See above, vol. ii. p. 193.
+
+[329] Hettner, III. iii., 2, p. 27, _s.v._ Herder.
+
+[330] The suggestion of the speculation with which Lavater's name is
+most commonly associated, is to be found in the Emilius. "It is
+supposed that physiognomy is only a development of features already
+marked by nature. For my part, I should think that besides this
+development, the features of a man's countenance form themselves
+insensibly and take their expression from the frequent and habitual
+wearing into them of certain affections of the soul. These affections
+mark themselves in the countenance, nothing is more certain; and when
+they grow into habits, they must leave durable impressions upon it."
+IV. 49, 50.
+
+[331] Author's Preface, x.
+
+[332] See an excellent page in M. Joret's _Herder_, 322.
+
+[333] See above, vol. ii. p. 191.
+
+[334] _E.g._ pp. 8, 198, 204, 205.
+
+[335] _E.g._ Bk. I. � 5, p. 279. � 6, p. 406, 419, etc. (the portion
+concerning the female sex).
+
+[336] Vv. 670-703. We have already seen (above, vol. ii. p. 41, _n._)
+that Cowper had read Emilius, and the mocking reference to the Deist
+as "an Orpheus and omnipotent in song," coincides with Rousseau's
+comparison of the Savoyard Vicar to "the divine Orpheus singing the
+first hymn" (_Emile_, IV. 205).
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+THE SAVOYARD VICAR.
+
+
+The band of dogmatic atheists who met round D'Holbach's
+dinner-table indulged a shallow and futile hope, if it was not an
+ungenerous one, when they expected the immediate advent of a
+generation with whom a humane and rational philosophy should displace,
+not merely the superstitions which had grown around the Christian
+dogma, but every root and fragment of theistic conception. A hope of
+this kind implied a singularly random idea, alike of the hold which
+Christianity had taken of the religious emotion in western Europe, and
+of the durableness of those conditions in human character, to which
+some belief in a deity with a greater or fewer number of good
+attributes brings solace and nourishment. A movement like that of
+Christianity does not pass through a group of societies, and then
+leave no trace behind. It springs from many other sources besides that
+of adherence to the truth of its dogmas. The stream of its influence
+must continue to flow long after adherence to the letter has been
+confined to the least informed portions of a community. The
+Encyclop�dists knew that they had sapped religious dogma and shaken
+ecclesiastical organisation. They forgot that religious sentiment on
+the one hand, and habit of respect for authority on the other, were
+both of them still left behind. They had convinced themselves by a
+host of persuasive analogies that the universe is an automatic
+machine, and man only an industrious particle in the stupendous whole;
+that a final cause is not cognisable by our limited intelligence; and
+that to make emotion in this or any other respect a test of objective
+truth and a ground of positive belief, is to lower both truth and the
+reason which is its single arbiter. They forgot that imagination is as
+active in man as his reason, and that a craving for mental peace may
+become much stronger than passion for demonstrated truth. Christianity
+had given to this craving in western Europe a definite mould, which
+was not to be effaced in a day, and one or two of its lines mark a
+permanent and noble acquisition to the highest forces of human nature.
+There will have to be wrought a profounder and more far-spreading
+modification than any which the French atheists could effect, before
+all debilitating influences in the old creed can be effaced, its
+elevating influences finally separated from them, and then permanently
+preserved in more beneficent form and in an association less
+questionable to the understanding.
+
+Neither a purely negative nor a direct attack can ever suffice. There
+must be a coincidence of many silently oppugnant forces, emotional,
+scientific, and material. And, above all, there must be the slow
+steadfast growth of some replacing faith, which shall retain all the
+elements of moral beauty that once gave light to the old belief that
+has disappeared, and must still possess a living force in the new.
+
+Here we find the good side of a religious reaction such as that which
+Rousseau led in the last century, and of which the Savoyard Vicar's
+profession of faith was the famous symbol. Evil as this reaction was
+in many respects, and especially in the check which it gave to the
+application of positive methods and conceptions to the most important
+group of our beliefs, yet it had what was the very signal merit under
+the circumstances of the time, of keeping the religious emotions alive
+in association with a tolerant, pure, lofty, and living set of
+articles of faith, instead of feeding them on the dead superstitions
+which were at that moment the only practical alternative. The deism of
+Rousseau could not in any case have acquired the force of the
+corresponding religious reaction in England, because the former never
+acquired a compact and vigorous external organisation, as the latter
+did, especially in Wesleyanism and Evangelicalism, the most remarkable
+of its developments. In truth the vague, fluid, purely subjective
+character of deism disqualifies it from forming the doctrinal basis of
+any great objective and visible church, for it is at bottom the
+sublimation of individualism. But in itself it was a far less
+retrogressive, as well as a far less powerful, movement. It kept fewer
+of those dogmas which gradual change of intellectual climate had
+reduced to the condition of rank superstitions. It preserved some of
+its own, which a still further extension of the same change is
+assuredly destined to reduce to the same condition; but, nevertheless,
+along with them it cherished sentiments which the world will never
+willingly let die.
+
+The one cardinal service of the Christian doctrine, which is of course
+to be distinguished from the services rendered to civilisation in
+early times by the Christian church, has been the contribution to the
+active intelligence of the west, of those moods of holiness, awe,
+reverence, and silent worship of an Unseen not made with hands, which
+the Christianising Jews first brought from the east. Of the fabric
+which four centuries ago looked so stupendous and so enduring, with
+its magnificent whole and its minutely reticulated parts of belief and
+practice, this gradual creation of a new temperament in the religious
+imagination of Western Europe and the countries that take their mental
+direction from her, is perhaps the only portion that will remain
+distinctly visible, after all the rest has sunk into the repose of
+histories of opinion. Whether this be the case or not, the fact that
+these deeper moods are among the richest acquisitions of human nature,
+will not be denied either by those who think that Christianity
+associates them with objects destined permanently to awake them in
+their loftiest form, or by others who believe that the deepest moods
+of which man is capable, must ultimately ally themselves with
+something still more purely spiritual than the anthropomorphised
+deities of the falling church. And if so, then Rousseau's deism, while
+intercepting the steady advance of the rationalistic assault and
+diverting the current of renovating energy, still did something to
+keep alive in a more or less worthy shape those parts of the slowly
+expiring system which men have the best reasons for cherishing.
+
+Let us endeavour to characterise Rousseau's deism with as much
+precision as it allows. It was a special and graceful form of a
+doctrine which, though susceptible, alike in theory and in the
+practical history of religious thought, of numberless wide varieties
+of significance, is commonly designated by the name of deism, without
+qualification. People constantly speak as if deism only came in with
+the eighteenth century. It would be impossible to name any century
+since the twelfth, in which distinct and abundant traces could not be
+found within the dominion of Christianity of a belief in a
+supernatural power apart from the supposed disclosure of it in a
+special revelation.[337] A pr�ter-christian deism, or the principle of
+natural religion, was inevitably contained in the legal conception of
+a natural law, for how can we dissociate the idea of law from the idea
+of a definite lawgiver? The very scholastic disputations themselves,
+by the sharpness and subtlety which they gave to the reasoning
+faculty, set men in search of novelties, and these novelties were not
+always of a kind which orthodox views of the Christian mysteries could
+have sanctioned. It has been said that religion is at the cradle of
+every nation, and philosophy at its grave; it is at least true that
+the cradle of philosophy is the open grave of religion. Wherever there
+is argumentation, there is sure to be scepticism. When people begin to
+reason, a shadow has already fallen across faith, though the reasoners
+might have shrunk with horror from knowledge of the goal of their
+work, and though centuries may elapse before the shadow deepens into
+eclipse. But the church was strong and alert in the times when free
+thought vainly tried to rear a dangerous head in Italy. With the
+Protestant revolution came slowly a wider freedom, while the prolonged
+and tempestuous discussion between the old church and the reformed
+bodies, as well as the manifold variations among those bodies at
+strife with one another, stimulated the growth of religious thought in
+many directions that tended away from the exclusive pretensions of
+Christianity to be the oracle of the divine Spirit. The same feeling
+which thrust aside the sacerdotal interposition between the soul of
+man and its sovereign creator and inspirer, gradually worked towards
+the dethronement of those mediators other than sacerdotal, in whom the
+moral timidity of a dark and stricken age had once sought shade from
+the too dazzling brightness of the All-powerful and the Everlasting.
+The assertion of the rights and powers of the individual reason within
+the limits of the sacred documents, began in less than a hundred years
+to grow into an assertion of the same rights and powers beyond those
+limits. The rejection of tradition as a substitute for independent
+judgment, in interpreting or supplementing the records of revelation,
+gradually impaired the traditional authority both of the records
+themselves, and of the central doctrines which all churches had in one
+shape or another agreed to accept. The Trinitarian controversy of the
+sixteenth century must have been a stealthy solvent. The deism of
+England in the eighteenth century, which Voltaire was the prime agent
+in introducing in its negative, colourless, and essentially futile
+shape into his own country, had its main effect as a process of
+dissolution.
+
+All this, however, down to the deistical movement which Rousseau found
+in progress at Geneva in 1754,[338] was distinctly the outcome in a
+more or less marked way of a rationalising and philosophic spirit, and
+not of the religious spirit. The sceptical side of it with reference
+to revealed religion, predominated over the positive side of it with
+reference to natural religion. The wild pantheism of which there were
+one or two extraordinary outbursts during the latter part of the
+middle ages, to mark the mystical influence which Platonic studies
+uncorrected by science always exert over certain temperaments, had
+been full of religiosity, such as it was. These had all passed away
+with a swift flash. There were, indeed, mystics like the author of the
+immortal _De Imitatione_, in whom the special qualities of Christian
+doctrine seem to have grown pale in a brighter flood of devout
+aspiration towards the perfections of a single Being. But this was not
+the deism with which either Christianity on the one side, or atheism
+on the other, had ever had to deal in France. Deism, in its formal
+acceptation, was either an idle piece of vaporous sentimentality, or
+else it was the first intellectual halting-place for spirits who had
+travelled out of the pale of the old dogmatic Christianity, and lacked
+strength for the continuance of their onward journey. In the latter
+case, it was only another name either for the shrewd rough conviction
+of the man of the world, that his universe could not well be imagined
+to go on without a sort of constitutional monarch, reigning but not
+governing, keeping evil-doers in order by fear of eternal punishment,
+and lending a sacred countenance to the indispensable doctrines of
+property, the gradation of rank and station, and the other moral
+foundations of the social structure. Or else it was a name for a
+purely philosophic principle, not embraced with fervour as the basis
+of a religion, but accepted with decorous satisfaction as the
+alternative to a religion; not seized upon as the mainspring of
+spiritual life, but held up as a shield in a controversy.
+
+The deism which the Savoyard Vicar explained to Emilius in his
+profession of faith was pitched in a very different tone from this.
+Though the Vicar's conception of the Deity was lightly fenced round
+with rationalistic supports of the usual kind, drawn from the
+evidences of will and intelligence in the vast machinery of the
+universe, yet it was essentially the product not of reason, but of
+emotional expansion, as every fundamental article of a faith that
+touches the hearts of many men must always be. The Savoyard Vicar did
+not believe that a God had made the great world, and rules it with
+majestic power and supreme justice, in the same way in which he
+believed that any two sides of a triangle are greater than the third
+side. That there is a mysterious being penetrating all creation with
+force, was not a proposition to be demonstrated, but only the poor
+description in words of an habitual mood going far deeper into life
+than words can ever carry us. Without for a single moment falling off
+into the nullities of pantheism, neither did he for a single moment
+suffer his thought to stiffen and grow hard in the formal lines of a
+theological definition or a systematic credo. It remains firm enough
+to give the religious imagination consistency and a centre, yet
+luminous enough to give the spiritual faculty a vivifying
+consciousness of freedom and space. A creed is concerned with a number
+of affirmations, and is constantly held with honest strenuousness by
+multitudes of men and women who are unfitted by natural temperament
+for knowing what the glow of religious emotion means to the human
+soul,--for not every one that saith, Lord, Lord, enters the kingdom of
+heaven. The Savoyard Vicar's profession of faith was not a creed, and
+so has few affirmations; it was a single doctrine, melted in a glow of
+contemplative transport. It is impossible to set about disproving it,
+for its exponent repeatedly warns his disciple against the idleness of
+logomachy, and insists that the existence of the Divinity is traced
+upon every heart in letters that can never be effaced, if we are only
+content to read them with lowliness and simplicity. You cannot
+demonstrate an emotion, nor prove an aspiration. How reason, asks the
+Savoyard Vicar, about that which we cannot conceive? Conscience is the
+best of all casuists, and conscience affirms the presence of a being
+who moves the universe and ordains all things, and to him we give the
+name of God.
+
+"To this name I join the ideas of intelligence, power, will, which I
+have united in one, and that of goodness, which is a necessary
+consequence flowing from them. But I do not know any the better for
+this the being to whom I have given the name; he escapes equally from
+my senses and my understanding; the more I think of him, the more I
+confound myself. I have full assurance that he exists, and that he
+exists by himself. I recognise my own being as subordinate to his and
+all the things that are known to me as being absolutely in the same
+case. I perceive God everywhere in his works; I feel him in myself; I
+see him universally around me. But when I fain would seek where he is,
+what he is, of what substance, he glides away from me, and my troubled
+soul discerns nothing."[339]
+
+"In fine, the more earnestly I strive to contemplate his infinite
+essence, the less do I conceive it. But it is, and that suffices me.
+The less I conceive it, the more I adore. I bow myself down, and say
+to him, O being of beings, I am because thou art; to meditate
+ceaselessly on thee by day and night, is to raise myself to my
+veritable source and fount. The worthiest use of my reason is to make
+itself as naught before thee. It is the ravishment of my soul, it is
+the solace of my weakness, to feel myself brought low before the awful
+majesty of thy greatness."[340]
+
+Souls weary of the fierce mockeries that had so long been flying like
+fiery shafts against the far Jehovah of the Hebrews, and the silent
+Christ of the later doctors and dignitaries, and weary too of the
+orthodox demonstrations that did not demonstrate, and leaden
+refutations that could not refute, may well have turned with ardour to
+listen to this harmonious spiritual voice, sounding clear from a
+region towards which their hearts yearned with untold aspiration, but
+from which the spirit of their time had shut them off with brazen
+barriers. It was the elevation and expansion of man, as much as it was
+the restoration of a divinity. To realise this, one must turn to such
+a book as Helv�tius's, which was supposed to reveal the whole inner
+machinery of the heart. Man was thought of as a singular piece of
+mechanism principally moved from without, not as a conscious organism,
+receiving nourishment and direction from the medium in which it is
+placed, but reacting with a life of its own from within. It was this
+free and energetic inner life of the individual which the Savoyard
+Vicar restored to lawful recognition, and made once more the centre of
+that imaginative and spiritual existence, without which we live in a
+universe that has no sun by day nor any stars by night. A writer in
+whom learning has not extinguished enthusiasm, compares this to the
+advance made by Descartes, who had given certitude to the soul by
+turning thought confidently upon itself; and he declares that the
+Savoyard Vicar is for the emancipation of sentiment what the Discourse
+upon Method was for the emancipation of the understanding.[341] There
+is here a certain audacity of panegyric; still the fact that Rousseau
+chose to link the highest forms of man's ideal life with a fading
+projection of the lofty image which had been set up in older days,
+ought not to blind us to the excellent energies which, notwithstanding
+defect of association, such a vindication of the ideal was certain to
+quicken. And at least the lines of that high image were nobly traced.
+
+Yet who does not feel that it is a divinity for fair weather?
+Rousseau, with his fine sense of a proper and artistic setting,
+imagined the Savoyard Vicar as leading his youthful convert at break
+of a summer day to the top of a high hill, at whose feet the Po flowed
+between fertile banks; in the distance the immense chain of the Alps
+crowned the landscape; the rays of the rising sun projected long level
+shadows from the trees, the slopes, the houses, and accented with a
+thousand lines of light the most magnificent of panoramas.[342] This
+was the fitting suggestion, so serene, warm, pregnant with power and
+hope, and half mysterious, of the idea of godhead which the man of
+peace after an interval of silent contemplation proceeded to expound.
+Rousseau's sentimental idea at least did not revolt moral sense; it
+did not afflict the firmness of intelligence; nor did it silence the
+diviner melodies of the soul. Yet, once more, the heavens in which
+such a deity dwells are too high, his power is too impalpable, the
+mysterious air which he has poured around his being is too awful and
+impenetrable, for the rays from the sun of such majesty to reach more
+than a few contemplative spirits, and these only in their hours of
+tranquillity and expansion. The thought is too vague, too far, to
+bring comfort and refreshment to the mass of travailing men, or to
+invest duty with the stern ennobling quality of being done, "if I have
+grace to use it so as ever in the great Taskmaster's eye."
+
+The Savoyard Vicar was consistent with the sublimity of his own
+conception. He meditated on the order of the universe with a reverence
+too profound to allow him to mingle with his thoughts meaner desires
+as to the special relations of that order to himself. "I penetrate all
+my faculties," he said, "with the divine essence of the author of the
+world; I melt at the thought of his goodness, and bless all his gifts,
+but I do not pray to him. What should I ask of him? That for me he
+should change the course of things, and in my favour work miracles?
+Could I, who must love above all else the order established by his
+wisdom and upheld by his providence, presume to wish such order
+troubled for my sake? Nor do I ask of him the power of doing
+righteousness; why ask for what he has given me? Has he not bestowed
+on me conscience to love what is good, reason to ascertain it, freedom
+to choose it? If I do ill, I have no excuse; I do it because I will
+it. To pray to him to change my will, is to seek from him what he
+seeks from me; it is to wish no longer to be human, it is to wish
+something other than what is, it is to wish disorder and evil."[343]
+We may admire both the logical consistency of such self-denial and the
+manliness which it would engender in the character that were strong
+enough to practise it. But a divinity who has conceded no right of
+petition is still further away from our lives than the divinities of
+more popular creeds.
+
+Even the fairest deism is of its essence a faith of egotism and
+complacency. It does not incorporate in the very heart of the
+religious emotion the pitifulness and sorrow which Christianity first
+clothed with associations of sanctity, and which can never henceforth
+miss their place in any religious system to be accepted by men. Why is
+this? Because a religion that leaves them out, or thrusts them into a
+hidden corner, fails to comprehend at least one half, and that the
+most touching and impressive half, of the most conspicuous facts of
+human life. Rousseau was fuller of the capacity of pity than ordinary
+men, and this pity was one of the deepest parts of himself. Yet it did
+not enter into the composition of his religious faith, and this shows
+that his religious faith, though entirely free from suspicion of
+insincerity or ostentatious assumption, was like deism in so many
+cases, whether rationalistic or emotional, a kind of gratuitously
+adopted superfluity, not the satisfaction of a profound inner craving
+and resistless spiritual necessity. He speaks of the good and the
+wicked with the precision and assurance of the most pharisaic
+theologian, and he begins by asking of what concern it is to him
+whether the wicked are punished with eternal torment or not, though he
+concludes more graciously with the hope that in another state the
+wicked, delivered from their malignity, may enjoy a bliss no less than
+his own.[344] But the divine pitifulness which we owe to
+Christianity, and which will not be the less eagerly cherished by
+those who repudiate Christian tradition and doctrines, enjoins upon us
+that we should ask, Who are the wicked, and which is he that is
+without sin among us? Rousseau answered this glibly enough by some
+formula of metaphysics, about the human will having been left and
+constituted free by the creator of the world; and that man is the bad
+man who abuses his freedom. Grace, fate, destiny, force of
+circumstances, are all so many names for the protests which the frank
+sense of fact has forced from man against this miserably inadequate
+explanation of the foundations of moral responsibility.
+
+Whatever these foundations may be, the theories of grace and fate had
+at any rate the quality of connecting human conduct with the will of
+the gods. Rousseau's deism, severing the influence of the Supreme
+Being upon man, at the very moment when it could have saved him from
+the guilt that brings misery,--that is at the moment when conduct
+begins to follow the preponderant motives or the will,--did thus
+effectually cut off the most admirable and fertile group of our
+sympathies from all direct connection with religious sentiment.
+Toiling as manfully as we may through the wilderness of our seventy
+years, we are to reserve our deepest adoration for the being who has
+left us there, with no other solace than that he is good and just and
+all-powerful, and might have given us comfort and guidance if he
+would. This was virtually the form which Pelagius had tried to impose
+upon Christianity in the fifth century, and which the souls of men,
+thirsting for consciousness of an active divine presence, had then
+under the lead of Augustine so energetically cast away from them. The
+faith to which they clung while rejecting this great heresy, though
+just as transcendental, still had the quality of satisfying a
+spiritual want. It was even more readily to be accepted by the human
+intelligence, for it endowed the supreme power with the father's
+excellence of compassion, and presented for our reverence and
+gratitude and devotion a figure who drew from men the highest love for
+the God whom they had not seen, along with the warmest pity and love
+for their brethren whom they had seen.
+
+The Savoyard Vicar's own position to Christianity was one of
+reverential scepticism. "The holiness of the gospel," he said, "is an
+argument that speaks to my heart and to which I should even be sorry
+to find a good answer. Look at the books of the philosophers with all
+their pomp; how puny they are by the side of that! Is there here the
+tone of an enthusiast or an ambitious sectary? What gentleness, what
+purity, in his manners, what touching grace in his teaching, what
+loftiness in his maxims! Assuredly there was something more than human
+in such teaching, such a character, such a life, such a death. If the
+life and death of Socrates were those of a sage, the life and death
+of Jesus are those of a god. Shall we say that the history of the
+gospels is invented at pleasure? My friend, that is not the fashion of
+invention; and the facts about Socrates are less attested than the
+facts about Christ.[345] Yet with all that, this same gospel abounds
+in things incredible, which are repugnant to reason, and which it is
+impossible for any sensible man to conceive or admit. What are we to
+do in the midst of all these contradictions? To be ever modest and
+circumspect, my son; to respect in silence what one can neither reject
+nor understand, and to make one's self lowly before the great being
+who alone knows the truth."[346]
+
+"I regard all particular religions as so many salutary institutions,
+which prescribe in every country a uniform manner of honouring God by
+public worship. I believe them all good, so long as men serve God
+fittingly in them. The essential worship is the worship of the heart.
+God never rejects this homage, under whatever form it be offered to
+him. In other days I used to say mass with the levity which in time
+infects even the gravest things, when we do them too often. Since
+acquiring my new principles I celebrate it with more veneration; I am
+overwhelmed by the majesty of the Supreme Being, by his presence, by
+the insufficiency of the human mind, which conceives so little what
+pertains to its author. When I approach the moment of consecration, I
+collect myself for performing the act with all the feelings required
+by the church, and the majesty of the sacrament; I strive to
+annihilate my reason before the supreme intelligence, saying, 'Who art
+thou, that thou shouldest measure infinite power?'"[347]
+
+A creed like this, whatever else it may be, is plainly a powerful
+solvent of every system of exclusive dogma. If the one essential to
+true worship, the worship of the heart and the inner sentiment, be
+mystic adoration of an indefinable Supreme, then creeds based upon
+books, prophecies, miracles, revelations, all fall alike into the
+second place among things that may be lawful and may be expedient, but
+that can never be exacted from men by a just God as indispensable to
+virtue in this world or to bliss in the next. No better answer has
+ever been given to the exclusive pretensions of sect, Christian,
+Jewish, or Mahometan, than that propounded by the Savoyard Vicar with
+such energy, closeness, and most sarcastic fire.[348] It was turning
+an unexpected front upon the presumptuousness of all varieties of
+theological infallibilists, to prove to them that if you insist upon
+acceptance of this or that special revelation, over and above the
+dictates of natural religion, then you are bound not only to grant,
+but imperatively to enjoin upon all men, a searching inquiry and
+comparison, that they may spare no pains in an affair of such
+momentous issue in proving to themselves that this, and none of the
+competing revelations, is the veritable message of eternal safety.
+"Then no other study will be possible but that of religion: hardly
+shall one who has enjoyed the most robust health, employed his time
+and used his reason to best purpose, and lived the greatest number of
+years, hardly shall such an one in his extreme age be quite sure what
+to believe, and it will be a marvel if he finds out before he dies, in
+what faith he ought to have lived." The superiority of the sceptical
+parts of the Savoyard Vicar's profession, as well as those of the
+Letters from the Mountain to which we referred previously, over the
+biting mockeries which Voltaire had made the fashionable method of
+assault, lay in this fact. The latter only revolted and irritated all
+serious temperaments to whom religion is a matter of honest concern,
+while the former actually appealed to their religious sense in support
+of his doubts; and the more intelligent and sincere this sense
+happened to be, the more surely would Rousseau's gravely urged
+objections dissolve the hard particles of dogmatic belief. His
+objections were on a moral level with the best side of the religion
+that they oppugned. Those of Voltaire were only on a level with its
+lowest side, and that was the side presented by the gross and
+repulsive obscurantism of the functionaries of the church.
+
+Unfortunately Rousseau had placed in the hands of the partisans of
+every exclusive revelation an instrument which was quite enough to
+disperse all his objections to the winds, and which was the very
+instrument that defended his own cherished religion. If he was
+satisfied with replying to the atheist and the materialist, that he
+knew there is a supreme God, and that the soul must have here and
+hereafter an existence apart from the body, because he found these
+truths ineffaceably written upon his own heart, what could prevent the
+Christian or the Mahometan from replying to Rousseau that the New
+Testament or the Koran is the special and final revelation from the
+Supreme Power to his creatures? If you may appeal to the voice of the
+heart and the dictate of the inner sentiment in one case, why not in
+the other also? A subjective test necessarily proves anything that any
+man desires, and the accident of the article proved appearing either
+reasonable or monstrous to other people, cannot have the least bearing
+on its efficacy or conclusiveness.
+
+Deism like the Savoyard Vicar's opens no path for the future, because
+it makes no allowance for the growth of intellectual conviction, and
+binds up religion with mystery, with an object whose attributes can
+neither be conceived nor defined, with a Being too all-embracing to be
+able to receive anything from us, too august, self-contained, remote,
+to be able to bestow on us the humble gifts of which we have need. The
+temperature of thought is slowly but without an instant's recoil
+rising to a point when a mystery like this, definite enough to be
+imposed as a faith, but too indefinite to be grasped by understanding
+as a truth, melts away from the emotions of religion. Then those
+instincts of holiness, without which the world would be to so many of
+its highest spirits the most dreary of exiles, will perhaps come to
+associate themselves less with unseen divinities, than with the long
+brotherhood of humanity seen and unseen. Here we shall move with an
+assurance that no scepticism and no advance of science can ever shake,
+because the benefactions which we have received from the strenuousness
+of human effort can never be doubted, and each fresh acquisition in
+knowledge or goodness can only kindle new fervour. Those who have the
+religious imagination struck by the awful procession of man from the
+region of impenetrable night, by his incessant struggle with the
+hardness of the material world, and his sublimer struggle with the
+hard world of his own egotistic passions, by the pain and sacrifice by
+which generation after generation has added some small piece to the
+temple of human freedom or some new fragment to the ever incomplete
+sum of human knowledge, or some fresh line to the types of strong or
+beautiful character,--those who have an eye for all this may indeed
+have no ecstasy and no terror, no heaven nor hell, in their religion,
+but they will have abundant moods of reverence, deep-seated gratitude,
+and sovereign pitifulness.
+
+And such moods will not end in sterile exaltation, or the deathly
+chills of spiritual reaction. They will bring forth abundant fruit in
+new hope and invigorated endeavour. This devout contemplation of the
+experience of the race, instead of raising a man into the clouds,
+brings him into the closest, loftiest, and most conscious relations
+with his kind, to whom he owes all that is of value in his own life,
+and to whom he can repay his debt by maintaining the beneficent
+tradition of service, by cherishing honour for all the true and sage
+spirits that have shone upon the earth, and sorrow and reprobation for
+all the unworthier souls whose light has gone out in baseness. A man
+with this faith can have no foul spiritual pride, for there is no
+mysteriously accorded divine grace in which one may be a larger
+participant than another. He can have no incentives to that mutilation
+with which every branch of the church, from the oldest to the youngest
+and crudest, has in its degree afflicted and retarded mankind, because
+the key-note of his religion is the joyful energy of every faculty,
+practical, reflective, creative, contemplative, in pursuit of a
+visible common good. And he can be plunged into no fatal and
+paralysing despair by any doctrine of mortal sin, because active faith
+in humanity, resting on recorded experience, discloses the many
+possibilities of moral recovery, and the work that may be done for men
+in the fragment of days, redeeming the contrite from their burdens by
+manful hope. If religion is our feeling about the highest forces that
+govern human destiny, then as it becomes more and more evident how
+much our destiny is shaped by the generation of the dead who have
+prepared the present, and by the purport of our hopes and the
+direction of our activity for the generations that are to fill the
+future, the religious sentiment will more and more attach itself to
+the great unseen host of our fellows who have gone before us and who
+are to come after. Such a faith is no rag of metaphysic floating in
+the sunshine of sentimentalism, like Rousseau's faith. It rests on a
+positive base, which only becomes wider and firmer with the widening
+of experience and the augmentation of our skill in interpreting it.
+Nor is it too transcendent for practical acceptance. One of the most
+scientific spirits of the eighteenth century, while each moment
+expecting the knock of the executioner at his door, found as religious
+a solace as any early martyr had ever found in his barbarous
+mysteries, when he linked his own efforts for reason and freedom with
+the eternal chain of the destinies of man. "This contemplation," he
+wrote and felt, "is for him a refuge into which the rancour of his
+persecutors can never follow him; in which, living in thought with man
+reinstated in the rights and the dignity of his nature, he forgets man
+tormented and corrupted by greed, by base fear, by envy; it is here
+that he truly abides with his fellows, in an elysium that his reason
+has known how to create for itself, and that his love for humanity
+adorns with all purest delights."[349]
+
+This, to the shame of those wavering souls who despair of progress at
+the first moment when it threatens to leave the path that they have
+marked out for it, was written by a man at the very close of his days,
+when every hope that he had ever cherished seemed to one without the
+eye of faith to be extinguished in bloodshed, disorder, and barbarism.
+But there is a still happier season in the adolescence of generous
+natures that have been wisely fostered, when the horizons of the
+dawning life are suddenly lighted up with a glow of aspiration towards
+good and holy things. Commonly, alas, this priceless opportunity is
+lost in a fit of theological exaltation, which is gradually choked out
+by the dusty facts of life, and slowly moulders away into dry
+indifference. It would not be so, but far different, if the Savoyard
+Vicar, instead of taking the youth to the mountain-top, there to
+contemplate that infinite unseen which is in truth beyond
+contemplation by the limited faculties of man, were to associate these
+fine impulses of the early prime with the visible, intelligible, and
+still sublime possibilities of the human destiny,--that imperial
+conception, which alone can shape an existence of entire proportion in
+all its parts, and leave no natural energy of life idle or athirst. Do
+you ask for sanctions! One whose conscience has been strengthened from
+youth in this faith, can know no greater bitterness than the stain
+cast by wrong act or unworthy thought on the high memories with which
+he has been used to walk, and the discord wrought in hopes that have
+become the ruling harmony of his days.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[337] See Hallam's _Literature of Europe_, Pt. I. ch. ii. � 64. Again
+(for the 16th century), Pt. II. ch. ii. � 53. See also for mention of
+a sect of deists at Lyons about 1560, Bayle's Dictionary, _s.v._
+Viret.
+
+[338] See above, vol. i. pp. 223-227.
+
+[339] _Emile_, IV. 163.
+
+[340] IV. 183-185.
+
+[341] M. Henri Martin's _Hist. de France_, xvi. 101, where there is an
+interesting, but, as it seems to the present writer, hardly a
+successful attempt, to bring the Savoyard Vicar's eloquence into
+scientific form.
+
+[342] _Emile_, IV. 135.
+
+[343] _Emile_, IV. 204.
+
+[344] _Emile_, IV. 181, 182. In a letter to Vernes (Feb. 18, 1758.
+_Corr._, ii. 9) he expresses his suspicion that possibly the souls of
+the wicked may be annihilated at their death, and that being and
+feeling may prove the first reward of a good life. In this letter he
+asks also, with the same magnanimous security as the Savoyard Vicar,
+"of what concern the destiny of the wicked can be to him."
+
+[345] A similar disparagement of Socrates, in comparison with the
+Christ of the Gospels, is to be found in the long letter of Jan. 15,
+1769 (_Corr._, vi. 59, 60), to M----, accompanied by a violent
+denigration of the Jews, conformably to the philosophic prejudice of
+the time.
+
+[346] _Emile_, IV. 241, 242.
+
+[347] _Emile_, IV. 243.
+
+[348] IV. 210-236.
+
+[349] Condorcet's _Progr�s de l'Esprit Humain_ (1794). _Oeuv._, vi.
+276.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+ENGLAND.[350]
+
+
+There is in an English collection a portrait of Jean Jacques,
+which was painted during his residence in this country by a provincial
+artist. Singular and displeasing as it is, yet this picture lights up
+for us many a word and passage in Rousseau's life here and elsewhere,
+which the ordinary engravings, and the trim self-complacency of the
+statue on the little island at Geneva, would leave very
+incomprehensible. It is almost as appalling in its realism as some of
+the dark pits that open before the reader of the Confessions. Hard
+struggles with objective difficulty and external obstacle wear deep
+furrows in the brow; they throw into the glance a solicitude, half
+penetrating and defiant, half dejected. When a man's hindrances have
+sprung up from within, and the ill-fought battle of his days has been
+with his own passions and morbid broodings and unchastened dreams, the
+eye and the facial lines tell the story of that profound moral defeat
+which is unlighted by the memories of resolute combat with evil and
+weakness, and leaves only eternal desolation and the misery that is
+formless. Our English artist has produced a vision from that prose
+Inferno which is made so populous in the modern epoch by impotence of
+will. Those who have seen the picture may easily understand how
+largely the character of the original must have been pregnant with
+harassing confusion and distress.
+
+Four years before this (1762), Hume, to whom Lord Marischal had told
+the story of Rousseau's persecutions, had proffered his services, and
+declared his eagerness to help in finding a proper refuge for him in
+England. There had been an exchange of cordial letters,[351] and then
+the matter had lain quiet, until the impossibility of remaining longer
+in Neuch�tel had once more set his friends on procuring a safe
+establishment for their rather difficult refugee. Rousseau's
+appearance in Paris had created the keenest excitement. "People may
+talk of ancient Greece as they please," wrote Hume from Paris, "but no
+nation was ever so proud of genius as this, and no person ever so much
+engaged their attention as Rousseau! Voltaire and everybody else are
+quite eclipsed by him." Even Theresa Le Vasseur, who was declared very
+homely and very awkward, was more talked of than the Princess of
+Morocco or the Countess of Egmont, on account of her fidelity towards
+him. His very dog had a name and reputation in the world.[352]
+Rousseau is always said to have liked the stir which his presence
+created, but whether this was so or not, he was very impatient to be
+away from it as soon as possible.
+
+In company with Hume, he left Paris in the second week of January
+1766. They crossed from Calais to Dover by night in a passage that
+lasted twelve hours. Hume, as the orthodox may be glad to know, was
+extremely ill, while Rousseau cheerfully passed the whole night upon
+deck, taking no harm, though the seamen were almost frozen to
+death.[353] They reached London on the thirteenth of January, and the
+people of London showed nearly as lively an interest in the strange
+personage whom Hume had brought among them, as the people of Paris had
+done. A prince of the blood at once went to pay his respects to the
+Swiss philosopher. The crowd at the playhouse showed more curiosity
+when the stranger came in than when the king and queen entered. Their
+majesties were as interested as their subjects, and could scarcely
+keep their eyes off the author of Emilius. George III., then in the
+heyday of his youth, was so pleased to have a foreigner of genius
+seeking shelter in his kingdom, that he readily acceded to Conway's
+suggestion, prompted by Hume, that Rousseau should have a pension
+settled on him. The ever illustrious Burke, then just made member of
+Parliament, saw him nearly every day, and became persuaded that "he
+entertained no principle either to influence his heart, or guide his
+understanding, but vanity."[354] Hume, on the contrary, thought the
+best things of his client; "He has an excellent warm heart, and in
+conversation kindles often to a degree of heat which looks like
+inspiration; I love him much, and hope that I have some share in his
+affections.... He is a very modest, mild, well-bred, gentle-spirited
+and warm-hearted man, as ever I knew in my life. He is also to
+appearance very sociable. I never saw a man who seems better
+calculated for good company, nor who seems to take more pleasure in
+it." "He is a very agreeable, amiable man; but a great humorist. The
+philosophers of Paris foretold to me that I could not conduct him to
+Calais without a quarrel; but I think I could live with him all my
+life in mutual friendship and esteem. I believe one great source of
+our concord is that neither he nor I are disputatious, which is not
+the case with any of them. They are also displeased with him, because
+they think he over-abounds in religion; and it is indeed remarkable
+that the philosopher of this age who has been most persecuted, is by
+far the most devout."[355]
+
+What the Scotch philosopher meant by calling his pupil a humorist, may
+perhaps be inferred from the story of the trouble he had in prevailing
+upon Rousseau to go to the play, though Garrick had appointed a
+special occasion and set apart a special box for him. When the hour
+came, Rousseau declared that he could not leave his dog behind him.
+"The first person," he said, "who opens the door, Sultan will run into
+the streets in search of me and will be lost." Hume told him to lock
+Sultan up in the room, and carry away the key in his pocket. This was
+done, but as they proceeded downstairs, the dog began to howl; his
+master turned back and avowed he had not resolution to leave him in
+that condition. Hume, however, caught him in his arms, told him that
+Mr. Garrick had dismissed another company in order to make room for
+him, that the king and queen were expecting to see him, and that
+without a better reason than Sultan's impatience it would be
+ridiculous to disappoint them. Thus, a little by reason, but more by
+force, he was carried off.[356] Such a story, whatever else we may
+think of it, shows at least a certain curious and not untouching
+simplicity. And singularity which made Rousseau like better to keep
+his dog company at home, than to be stared at by a gaping pit, was too
+private in its reward to be the result of that vanity and affectation
+with which he was taxed by men who lived in another sphere of motive.
+
+There was considerable trouble in settling Rousseau. He was eager to
+leave London almost as soon as he arrived in it. Though pleased with
+the friendly reception which had been given him, he pronounced London
+to be as much devoted to idle gossip and frivolity as other capitals.
+He spent a few weeks in the house of a farmer at Chiswick, thought
+about fixing himself in the Isle of Wight, then in Wales, then
+somewhere in our fair Surrey, whose scenery, one is glad to know,
+greatly attracted him. Finally arrangements were made by Hume with Mr.
+Davenport for installing him in a house belonging to the latter, at
+Wootton, near Ashbourne, in the Peak of Derbyshire.[357] Hither
+Rousseau proceeded with Theresa, at the end of March. Mr. Davenport
+was a gentleman of large property, and as he seldom inhabited this
+solitary house, was very willing that Rousseau should take up his
+abode there without payment. This, however, was what Rousseau's
+independence could not brook, and he insisted that his entertainer
+should receive thirty pounds a year for the board of himself and
+Theresa.[358] So here he settled, in an extremely bitter climate,
+knowing no word of the language of the people about him, with no
+companionship but Theresa's, and with nothing to do but walk when the
+weather was fair, play the harpsicord when it rained, and brood over
+the incidents which had occurred to him since he had left Switzerland
+six months before. The first fruits of this unfortunate leisure were a
+bitter quarrel with Hume, one of the most famous and far-resounding of
+all the quarrels of illustrious men, but one about which very little
+needs now be said. The merits of it are plain, and all significance
+that may ever have belonged to it is entirely dead. The incubation of
+his grievances began immediately after his arrival at Wootton, but two
+months elapsed before they burst forth in full flame.[359]
+
+The general charge against Hume was that he was a member of an
+accursed triumvirate; Voltaire and D'Alembert were the other partners;
+and their object was to blacken the character of Rousseau and render
+his life miserable. The particular acts on which this belief was
+established were the following:--
+
+(1) While Rousseau was in Paris, there appeared a letter nominally
+addressed to him by the King of Prussia, and written in an ironical
+strain, which persuaded Jean Jacques himself that it was the work of
+Voltaire.[360] Then he suspected D'Alembert. It was really the
+composition of Horace Walpole, who was then in Paris. Now Hume was the
+friend of Walpole, and had given Rousseau a card of introduction to
+him for the purpose of entrusting Walpole with the carriage of some
+papers. Although the false letter produced the liveliest amusement at
+Rousseau's cost, first in Paris and then in London, Hume, while
+feigning to be his warm friend and presenting him to the English
+public, never took any pains to tell the world that the piece was a
+forgery, nor did he break with its wicked author.[361] (2) When
+Rousseau assured Hume that D'Alembert was a cunning and dishonourable
+man, Hume denied it with an amazing heat, although he well knew the
+latter to be Rousseau's enemy.[362] (3) Hume lived in London with the
+son of Tronchin, the Genevese surgeon, and the most mortal of all the
+foes of Jean Jacques.[363] (4) When Rousseau first came to London, his
+reception was a distinguished triumph for the victim of persecution
+from so many governments. England was proud of being his place of
+refuge, and justly vaunted the freedom of her laws and administration.
+Suddenly and for no assignable cause the public tone changed, the
+newspapers either fell silent or else spoke unfavourably, and Rousseau
+was thought of no more. This must have been due to Hume, who had much
+influence among people of credit, and who went about boasting of the
+protection which he had procured for Jean Jacques in Paris.[364] (5)
+Hume resorted to various small artifices for preventing Rousseau from
+making friends, for procuring opportunities of opening Rousseau's
+letters, and the like.[365] (6) A violent satirical letter against
+Rousseau appeared in the English newspapers, with allusions which
+could only have been supplied by Hume. (7) On the first night after
+their departure from Paris, Rousseau, who occupied the same room with
+Hume, heard him call out several times in the middle of the night in
+the course of his dreams, _Je tiens Jean Jacques Rousseau_, with
+extreme vehemence--which words, in spite of the horribly sardonic tone
+of the dreamer, he interpreted favourably at the time, but which later
+event proved to have been full of malign significance.[366] (8)
+Rousseau constantly found Hume eyeing him with a glance of sinister
+and diabolic import that filled him with an astonishing disquietude,
+though he did his best to combat it. On one of these occasions he was
+seized with remorse, fell upon Hume's neck, embraced him warmly, and,
+suffocated with sobs and bathed in tears, cried out in broken accents,
+_No, no, David Hume is no traitor_, with many protests of affection.
+The phlegmatic Hume only returned his embrace with politeness, stroked
+him gently on the back, and repeated several times in a tranquil
+voice, _Quoi, mon cher monsieur! Eh! mon cher monsieur! Quoi donc, mon
+cher monsieur!_[367] (9) Although for many weeks Rousseau had kept a
+firm silence to Hume, neglecting to answer letters that plainly called
+for answer, and marking his displeasure in other unmistakable ways,
+yet Hume had never sought any explanation of what must necessarily
+have struck him as so singular, but continued to write as if nothing
+had happened. Was not this positive proof of a consciousness of
+perfidy?
+
+Some years afterwards he substituted another shorter set of
+grievances, namely, that Hume would not suffer Theresa to sit at table
+with him; that he made a show of him; and that Hume had an engraving
+executed of himself, which made him as beautiful as a cherub, while in
+another engraving, which was a pendant to his own, Jean Jacques was
+made as ugly as a bear.[368]
+
+It would be ridiculous for us to waste any time in discussing these
+charges. They are not open to serious examination, though it is
+astonishing to find writers in our own day who fully believe that Hume
+was a traitor, and behaved extremely basely to the unfortunate man
+whom he had inveigled over to a barbarous island. The only part of the
+indictment about which there could be the least doubt, was the
+possibility of Hume having been an accomplice in Walpole's very small
+pleasantry. Some of his friends in Paris suspected that he had had a
+hand in the supposed letter from the King of Prussia. Although the
+letter constituted no very malignant jest, and could not by a sensible
+man have been regarded as furnishing just complaint against one who,
+like Walpole, was merely an impudent stranger, yet if it could be
+shown that Hume had taken an active part either in the composition or
+the circulation of a spiteful bit of satire upon one towards whom he
+was pretending a singular affection, then we should admit that he
+showed such a want of sense of the delicacy of friendship as amounted
+to something like treachery. But a letter from Walpole to Hume sets
+this doubt at rest. "I cannot be precise as to the time of my writing
+the King of Prussia's letter, but ... I not only suppressed the letter
+while you stayed there, out of delicacy to you, but it was the reason
+why, out of delicacy to myself, I did not go to see him as you often
+proposed to me, thinking it wrong to go and make a cordial visit to a
+man, with a letter in my pocket to laugh at him."[369]
+
+With this all else falls to the ground. It would be as unwise in us,
+as it was in Rousseau himself, to complicate the hypotheses. Men do
+not act without motives, and Hume could have no motive in entering
+into any plot against Rousseau, even if the rival philosophers in
+France might have motives. We know the character of our David Hume
+perfectly well, and though it was not faultless, its fault certainly
+lay rather in an excessive desire to make the world comfortable for
+everybody, than in anything like purposeless malignity, of which he
+never had a trace. Moreover, all that befell Rousseau through Hume's
+agency was exceedingly to his advantage. Hume was not without vanity,
+and his letters show that he was not displeased at the addition to his
+consequence which came of his patronage of a man who was much talked
+about and much stared at. But, however this was, he did all for
+Rousseau that generosity and thoughtfulness could do. He was at great
+pains in establishing him; he used his interest to procure for him the
+grant of a pension from the king; when Rousseau provisionally refused
+the pension rather than owe anything to Hume, the latter, still
+ignorant of the suspicion that was blackening in Rousseau's mind,
+supposed that the refusal came from the fact of the pension being kept
+private, and at once took measures with the minister to procure the
+removal of the condition of privacy. Besides undeniable acts like
+these, the state of Hume's mind towards his curious ward is abundantly
+shown in his letters to all his most intimate friends, just as
+Rousseau's gratitude to him is to be read in all his early letters
+both to Hume and other persons. In the presence of such facts on the
+one side, and in the absence of any particle of intelligible evidence
+to neutralise them on the other, to treat Rousseau's charges with
+gravity is irrational.
+
+If Hume had written back in a mild and conciliatory strain, there can
+be no doubt that the unfortunate victim of his own morbid imagination
+would, for a time at any rate, have been sobered and brought to a
+sense of his misconduct. But Hume was incensed beyond control at what
+he very pardonably took for a masterpiece of atrocious ingratitude. He
+reproached Rousseau in terms as harsh as those which Grimm had used
+nine years before. He wrote to all his friends, withdrawing the kindly
+words he had once used of Rousseau's character, and substituting in
+their place the most unfavourable he could find. He gave the
+philosophic circle in Paris exquisite delight by the confirmation
+which his story furnished of their own foresight, when they had warned
+him that he was taking a viper to his bosom. Finally, in spite of the
+advice of Adam Smith, of one of the greatest of men, Turgot, and one
+of the smallest, Horace Walpole, he published a succinct account of
+the quarrel, first in French, and then in English. This step was
+chiefly due to the advice of the clique of whom D'Alembert was the
+spokesman, though it is due to him to mention that he softened various
+expressions in Hume's narrative, which he pronounced too harsh. It may
+be true that a council of war never fights; a council of men of
+letters always does. The governing committee of a literary,
+philosophical, or theological clique form the very worst advisers any
+man can have.
+
+Much must be forgiven to Hume, stung as he was by what appeared the
+most hateful ferocity in one on whom he had heaped acts of affection.
+Still, one would have been glad on behalf of human dignity, if he had
+suffered with firm silence petulant charges against which the
+consciousness of his own uprightness should have been the only answer.
+That high pride, of which there is too little rather than too much in
+the world, and which saves men from waste of themselves and others in
+pitiful accusations, vindications, retaliations, should have helped
+humane pity in preserving him from this poor quarrel. Long afterwards
+Rousseau said, "England, of which they paint such fine pictures in
+France, has so cheerless a climate; my soul, wearied with many shocks,
+was in a condition of such profound melancholy, that in all that
+passed I believe I committed many faults. But are they comparable to
+those of the enemies who persecuted me, supposing them even to have
+done no more than published our private quarrels?"[370] An ampler
+contrition would have been more seemly in the first offender, but
+there is a measure of justice in his complaint. We need not, however,
+reproach the good Hume. Before six months were over, he admits that he
+is sometimes inclined to blame his publication, and always to regret
+it.[371] And his regret was not verbal merely. When Rousseau had
+returned to France, and was in danger of arrest, Hume was most urgent
+in entreating Turgot to use his influence with the government to
+protect the wretched wanderer, and Turgot's answer shows both how
+sincere this humane interposition was, and how practically
+serviceable.[372]
+
+Meanwhile there ensued a horrible fray in print. Pamphlets appeared in
+Paris and London in a cloud. The Succinct Exposure was followed by
+succinct rejoinders. Walpole officiously printed his own account of
+his own share in the matter. Boswell officiously wrote to the
+newspapers defending Rousseau and attacking Walpole. King George
+followed the battle with intense curiosity. Hume with solemn
+formalities sent the documents to the British Museum. There was
+silence only in one place, and that was at Wootton. The unfortunate
+person who had done all the mischief printed not a word.
+
+The most prompt and quite the least instructive of the remarks
+invariably made upon any one who has acted in an unusual manner, is
+that he must be mad. This universal criticism upon the unwonted really
+tells us nothing, because the term may cover any state of mind from a
+warranted dissent from established custom, down to absolute dementia.
+Rousseau was called mad when he took to wearing convenient clothes and
+living frugally. He was called mad when he quitted the town and went
+to live in the country. The same facile explanation covered his
+quarrel with importunate friends at the Hermitage. Voltaire called him
+mad for saying that if there were perfect harmony of taste and
+temperament between the king's daughter and the executioner's son, the
+pair ought to be allowed to marry. We who are not forced by
+conversational necessities to hurry to a judgment, may hesitate to
+take either taste for the country, or for frugal living, or even for
+democratic extravagances, as a mark of a disordered mind.[373] That
+Rousseau's conduct towards Hume was inconsistent with perfect mental
+soundness is quite plain. But to say this with crude trenchancy,
+teaches us nothing. Instead of paying ourselves with phrases like
+monomania, it is more useful shortly to trace the conditions which
+prepared the way for mental derangement, because this is the only
+means of understanding either its nature, or the degree to which it
+extended. These conditions in Rousseau's case are perfectly simple and
+obvious to any one who recognises the principle, that the essential
+facts of such mental disorder as his must be sought not in the
+symptoms, but from the whole range of moral and intellectual
+constitution, acted on by physical states and acting on them in turn.
+
+Rousseau was born with an organisation of extreme sensibility. This
+predisposition was further deepened by the application in early youth
+of mental influences specially calculated to heighten juvenile
+sensibility. Corrective discipline from circumstance and from formal
+instruction was wholly absent, and thus the particular excess in his
+temperament became ever more and more exaggerated, and encroached at a
+rate of geometrical progression upon all the rest of his impulses and
+faculties; these, if he had been happily placed under some of the many
+forms of wholesome social pressure, would then on the contrary have
+gradually reduced his sensibility to more normal proportion. When the
+vicious excess had decisively rooted itself in his character, he came
+to Paris, where it was irritated into further activity by the
+uncongeniality of all that surrounded him. Hence the growth of a
+marked unsociality, taking literary form in the Discourses, and
+practical form in his retirement from the town. The slow depravation
+of the affective life was hastened by solitude, by sensuous expansion,
+by the long musings of literary composition. Well does Goethe's
+Princess warn the hapless Tasso:--
+
+                                   Dieser Pfad
+    Verleitet uns, durch einsames Geb�sch,
+    Durch stille Th�ler fortzuwandern; mehr
+    Und mehr verw�hnt sich das Gem�th und strebt
+    Die goldne Zeit, die ihm von aussen mangelt,
+    In seinem Innern wieder herzustellen,
+    So wenig der Versuch gelingen will.
+
+Then came harsh and unjust treatment prolonged for many months, and
+this introduced a slight but genuinely misanthropic element of
+bitterness into what had hitherto been an excess of feeling about
+himself, rather than any positive feeling of hostility or suspicion
+about others. Finally and perhaps above all else, he was the victim of
+tormenting bodily pain, and of sleeplessness which resulted from it.
+The agitation and excitement of the journey to England, completed the
+sum of the conditions of disturbance, and as soon as ever he was
+settled at Wootton, and had leisure to brood over the incidents of
+the few weeks since his arrival in England, the disorder which had
+long been spreading through his impulses and affections, suddenly but
+by a most natural sequence extended to the faculties of his
+intelligence, and he became the prey of delusion, a delusion which was
+not yet fixed, but which ultimately became so.
+
+"He has only _felt_ during the whole course of his life," wrote Hume
+sympathetically; "and in this respect his sensibility rises to a pitch
+beyond what I have seen any example of; but it still gives him a more
+acute feeling of pain than of pleasure. He is like a man who was
+stripped not only of his clothes, but of his skin, and turned out in
+that situation to combat with the rude and boisterous elements."[374]
+A morbid affective state of this kind and of such a degree of
+intensity, was the sure antecedent of a morbid intellectual state,
+general or partial, depressed or exalted. One who is the prey of
+unsound feelings, if they are only marked enough and persistent
+enough, naturally ends by a correspondingly unsound arrangement of all
+or some of his ideas to match. The intelligence is seduced into
+finding supports in misconception of circumstances, for a
+misconception of human relation which had its root in disordered
+emotion. This completes the breach of correspondence between the man's
+nature and the external facts with which he has to deal, though the
+breach may not, and in Rousseau's case certainly did not, extend along
+the whole line of feeling and judgment. Rousseau's delusion about
+Hume's sinister feeling and designs, which was the first definite
+manifestation of positive unsoundness in the sphere of the
+intelligence, was a last result of the gradual development of an
+inherited predisposition to affective unsoundness, which unhappily for
+the man's history had never been counteracted either by a strenuous
+education, or by the wholesome urgencies of life.
+
+We have only to remember that with him, as with the rest of us, there
+was entire unity of nature, without cataclysm or marvel or
+inexplicable rupture of mental continuity. All the facts came in an
+order that might have been foretold; they all lay together, with their
+foundations down in physical temperament; the facts which made
+Rousseau's name renowned and his influence a great force, along with
+those which made his life a scandal to others and a misery to himself.
+The deepest root of moral disorder lies in an immoderate expectation
+of happiness, and this immoderate unlawful expectation was the mark
+both of his character and his work. The exaltation of emotion over
+intelligence was the secret of his most striking production; the same
+exaltation, by gaining increased mastery over his whole existence, at
+length passed the limit of sanity and wrecked him. The tendency of the
+dominant side of a character towards diseased exaggeration is a fact
+of daily observation. The ruin which the excess of strong religious
+imagination works in natures without the quality of energetic
+objective reaction, was shown in the case of Rousseau's contemporary,
+Cowper. This gentle poet's delusions about the wrath of God were
+equally pitiable and equally a source of torment to their victim, with
+Rousseau's delusions about the malignity of his mysterious plotters
+among men. We must call such a condition unsound, but the important
+thing is to remember that insanity was only a modification of certain
+specially marked tendencies of the sufferer's sanity.
+
+The desire to protect himself against the defamation of his enemies
+led him at this time to compose that account of his own life, which is
+probably the only one of his writings that continues to be generally
+read. He composed the first part of the Confessions at Wootton, during
+the autumn and winter of 1766. The idea of giving his memoirs to the
+public was an old one, originally suggested by one of his publishers.
+To write memoirs of one's own life was one of the fancies of the time,
+but like all else, it became in Rousseau's hand something more
+far-reaching and sincere than a passing fashion. Other people wrote
+polite histories of their outer lives, amply coloured with romantic
+decorations. Rousseau with unquailing veracity plunged into the inmost
+depths, hiding nothing that would be likely to make him either
+ridiculous or hateful in common opinion, and inventing nothing that
+could attract much sympathy or much admiration. Though, as has been
+pointed out already, the Confessions abound in small inaccuracies of
+date, hardly to be avoided by an oldish man in reference to the facts
+of his boyhood, whether a Rousseau or a Goethe, and though one or two
+of the incidents are too deeply coloured with the hues of sentimental
+reminiscence, and one or two of them are downright impossible, yet
+when all these deductions have been made, the substantial truthfulness
+of what remains is made more evident with every addition to our
+materials for testing them. When all the circumstances of Rousseau's
+life are weighed, and when full account has been taken of his proved
+delinquencies, we yet perceive that he was at bottom a character as
+essentially sincere, truthful, careful of fact and reality, as is
+consistent with the general empire of sensation over untrained
+intelligence.[375] As for the egotism of the Confessions, it is hard
+to see how a man is to tell the story of his own life without egotism.
+And it may be worth adding that the self-feeling which comes to the
+surface and asserts itself, is in a great many cases far less vicious
+and debilitating than the same feeling nursed internally with a
+troglodytish shyness. But Rousseau's egotism manifested itself
+perversely. This is true to a certain small extent, and one or two of
+the disclosures in the Confessions are in very nauseous matter, and
+are made moreover in a very nauseous manner. There are some vices
+whose grotesqueness stirs us more deeply than downright atrocities,
+and we read of certain puerilities avowed by Rousseau, with a livelier
+impatience than old Benvenuto Cellini quickens in us, when he
+confesses to a horrible assassination. This morbid form of
+self-feeling is only less disgusting than the allied form which
+clothes itself in the phrases of religious exaltation. And there is
+not much of it. Blot out half a dozen pages from the Confessions, and
+the egotism is no more perverted than in the confessions of Augustine
+or of Cardan.
+
+These remarks are not made to extenuate Rousseau's faults, or to raise
+the popular estimate of his character, but simply in the interests of
+a greater precision of criticism. In England criticism has nearly
+always been of the most vulgar superficiality in respect to Rousseau,
+from the time of Horace Walpole downwards. The Confessions in their
+least agreeable parts, or rather especially in those parts, are the
+expression on a new side and in a peculiar way of the same notion of
+the essential goodness of nature and the importance of understanding
+nature and restoring its reign, which inspired the Discourses and
+Emilius. "I would fain show to my fellows," he began, "a man in all
+the truth of nature," and he cannot be charged with any failure to
+keep his word. He despised opinion, and hence was careless to observe
+whether or no this revelation of human nakedness was likely to add to
+the popular respect for nature and the natural man. After all,
+considering that literature is for the most part a hollow and
+pretentious phantasmagoria of mimic figures posing in breeches and
+peruke, we may try to forgive certain cruel blows to the dignified
+assumptions, solemn words, and high heels of convention, in one who
+would not lie, nor dissemble kinship with the four-footed. Intense
+subjective preoccupations in markedly emotional natures all tend to
+come to the same end. The distance from Rousseau's odious erotics to
+the glorified ecstasies of many a poor female saint is not far. In any
+case, let us know the facts about human nature, and the pathological
+facts no less than the others. These are the first thing, and the
+second, and the third also.
+
+The exaltation of the opening page of the Confessions is shocking. No
+monk nor saint ever wrote anything more revolting in its blasphemous
+self-feeling. But the exaltation almost instantly became calm, when
+the course of the story necessarily drew the writer into dealings with
+objective facts, even muffled as they were by memory and imagination.
+The broodings over old reminiscence soothed him, the labour of
+composition occupied him, and he forgot, as the modern reader would
+never know from internal evidence, that he was preparing a vindication
+of his life and character against the infamies with which Hume and
+others were supposed to be industriously blackening them. While he was
+writing this famous composition, severed by so vast a gulf from the
+modes of English provincial life, he was on good terms with one or two
+of the great people in his neighbourhood, and kept up a gracious and
+social correspondence with them. He was greatly pleased by a
+compliment that was paid to him by the government, apparently through
+the interest of General Conway. The duty that had been paid upon
+certain boxes forwarded to Rousseau from Switzerland was recouped by
+the treasury,[376] and the arrangements for the annual pension of one
+hundred pounds were concluded and accepted by him, after he had duly
+satisfied himself that Hume was not the indirect author of the
+benefaction.[377] The weather was the worst possible, but whenever it
+allowed him to go out of doors, he found delight in climbing the
+heights around him in search of curious mosses; for he had now come to
+think the discovery of a single new plant a hundred times more useful
+than to have the whole human race listening to your sermons for half a
+century.[378] "This indolent and contemplative life that you do not
+approve," he wrote to the elder Mirabeau, "and for which I pretend to
+make no excuses, becomes every day more delicious to me: to wander
+alone among the trees and rocks that surround my dwelling; to muse or
+rather to extravagate at my ease, and as you say to stand gaping in
+the air; when my brain gets too hot, to calm it by dissecting some
+moss or fern; in short, to surrender myself without restraint to my
+phantasies, which, heaven be thanked, are all under my own
+control,--all that is for me the height of enjoyment, to which I can
+imagine nothing superior in this world for a man of my age and in my
+condition."[379]
+
+This contentment did not last long. The snow kept him indoors. The
+excitement of composition abated. Theresa harassed him by ignoble
+quarrels with the women in the kitchen. His delusions returned with
+greater force than before. He believed that the whole English nation
+was in a plot against him, that all his letters were opened before
+reaching London and before leaving it, that all his movements were
+closely watched, and that he was surrounded by unseen guards to
+prevent any attempt at escape.[380] At length these delusions got such
+complete mastery over him, that in a paroxysm of terror he fled away
+from Wootton, leaving money, papers, and all else behind him. Nothing
+was heard of him for a fortnight, when Mr. Davenport received a letter
+from him dated at Spalding in Lincolnshire. Mr. Davenport's conduct
+throughout was marked by a humanity and patience that do him the
+highest honour. He confesses himself "quite moved to read poor
+Rousseau's mournful epistle." "You shall see his letter," he writes to
+Hume, "the first opportunity; but God help him, I can't for pity give
+a copy; and 'tis so much mixed with his own poor little private
+concerns, that it would not be right in me to do it."[381] This is
+the generosity which makes Hume's impatience and that of his
+mischievous advisers in Paris appear petty. Rousseau had behaved quite
+as ill to Mr. Davenport as he had done to Hume, and had received at
+least equal services from him.[382] The good man at once sent a
+servant to Spalding in search of his unhappy guest, but Rousseau had
+again disappeared. The parson of the parish had passed several hours
+of each day in his company, and had found him cheerful and
+good-humoured. He had had a blue coat made for himself, and had
+written a long letter to the lord chancellor, praying him to appoint a
+guard, at Rousseau's own expense, to escort him in safety out of the
+kingdom where enemies were plotting against his life.[383] He was next
+heard of at Dover (May 18), whence he wrote a letter to General
+Conway, setting forth his delusion in full form.[384] He is the victim
+of a plot; the conspirators will not allow him to leave the island,
+lest he should divulge in other countries the outrages to which he has
+been subjected here; he perceives the sinister manoeuvres that will
+arrest him if he attempts to put his foot on board ship. But he warns
+them that his tragical disappearance cannot take place without
+creating inquiry. Still if General Conway will only let him go, he
+gives his word of honour that he will not publish a line of the
+memoirs he has written, nor ever divulge the wrongs which he has
+suffered in England. "I see my last hour approaching," he concluded;
+"I am determined, if necessary, to advance to meet it, and to perish
+or be free; there is no longer any other alternative." On the same
+evening on which he wrote this letter (about May 20-22), the forlorn
+creature took boat and landed at Calais, where he seems at once to
+have recovered his composure and a right mind.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[350] Jan. 1766--May 1767.
+
+[351] Streckeisen, ii. 275, etc. _Corr._, iii.
+
+[352] Burton, ii. 299.
+
+[353] The materials for this chapter are taken from Rousseau's
+_Correspondence_ (vols. iv. and v.), and from Hume's letters to
+various persons, given in the second volume of Mr. Burton's _Life of
+Hume_. Everybody who takes an interest in Rousseau is indebted to Mr.
+Burton for the ample documents which he has provided. Yet one cannot
+but regret the satire on Rousseau with which he intersperses them, and
+which is not always felicitous. For one instance, he implies (p. 295)
+that Rousseau invented the story given in the Confessions, of Hume's
+correcting the proofs of Wallace's book against himself. The story may
+be true or not, but at any rate Rousseau had it very circumstantially
+from Lord Marischal; see letter from Lord M. to J.J.R., in
+Streckeisen, ii. 67. Again, such an expression as Rousseau's
+"_occasional_ attention to small matters" (p. 321) only shows that the
+writer has not read Rousseau's letters, which are indeed not worth
+reading, except by those who wish to have a right to speak about
+Rousseau's character. The numerous pamphlets on the quarrel between
+Hume and Rousseau, if I may judge from those of them which I have
+turned over, really shed no light on the matter, though they added
+much heat. For the journey, see _Corr._, iv. 307; Burton, ii. 304.
+
+[354] _Letter to a Member of the National Assembly._ The same passage
+contains some strong criticism on Rousseau's style.
+
+[355] Burton, 304, 309, 310.
+
+[356] _Ib._ ii. 309, _n._
+
+[357] Mr. Howitt has given an account of Rousseau's quarters at
+Wootton, in his _Visits to Remarkable Places_. One or two aged
+peasants had some confused memory of "old Ross-hall." For Rousseau's
+own description, see his letters to Mdme. de Luze, May 10, 1766.
+_Corr._, iv. 326.
+
+[358] Burton, 313. It has been stated that Rousseau never paid this;
+at any rate when he fled, he left between thirty and forty pounds in
+Mr. Davenport's hands. See Davenport to Hume; Burton, 367. Rousseau's
+accurate probity in affairs of money is absolutely unimpeachable.
+
+[359] _Corr._ iv. 312. April 9, 1766.
+
+[360] Here is a translation of this rather poor piece of sarcasm:--"My
+dear Jean Jacques--You have renounced Geneva, your native place. You
+have caused your expulsion from Switzerland, a country so extolled in
+your writings; France has issued a warrant against you; so do you come
+to me. I admire your talents; I am amused by your dreamings, though
+let me tell you they absorb you too much and for too long. You must at
+length be sober and happy; you have caused enough talk about yourself
+by oddities which in truth are hardly becoming a really great man.
+Prove to your enemies that you can now and then have common sense.
+That will annoy them and do you no harm. My states offer you a
+peaceful retreat. I wish you well, and will treat you well, if you
+will let me. But if you persist in refusing my help, do not reckon
+upon my telling any one that you did so. If you are bent on tormenting
+your spirit to find new misfortunes, choose whatever you like best. I
+am a king, and can procure them for you at your pleasure; and what
+will certainly never happen to you in respect of your enemies, I will
+cease to persecute you as soon as you cease to take a pride in being
+persecuted. Your good friend, FREDERICK."
+
+[361] _Corr._, iv. 313, 343, 388, 398.
+
+[362] _Ib._ 395.
+
+[363] _Ib._ 389, etc.
+
+[364] _Ib._ 384.
+
+[365] _Ib._ 343, 344, 387, etc.
+
+[366] _Corr._, iv. 346.
+
+[367] _Ib._ 390. A letter from Hume to Blair, long before the rupture
+overt, shows the former to have been by no means so phlegmatic on this
+occasion as he may have seemed. "I hope," he writes, "you have not so
+bad an opinion of me as to think I was not melted on this occasion; I
+assure you I kissed him and embraced him twenty times, with a
+plentiful effusion of tears. I think no scene of my life was ever more
+affecting." Burton, ii. 315. The great doubters of the eighteenth
+century could without fear have accepted the test of the ancient
+saying, that men without tears are worth little.
+
+[368] Bernardin de St. Pierre, _Oeuv._, xii. 79.
+
+[369] Walpole's _Letters_, v. 7 (Cunningham's edition). For other
+letters from the shrewd coxcomb on the same matter, see pp. 23-28. A
+corroboration of the statement that Hume knew nothing of the letter
+until he was in England, may be inferred from what he wrote to Madame
+de Boufflers; Burton, ii. 306, and _n._ 2.
+
+[370] Bernardin de St. Pierre, _Oeuv._, xii. 79.
+
+[371] To Adam Smith. Burton, 380.
+
+[372] Burton, 381.
+
+[373] A very common but random opinion traces Rousseau's insanity to
+certain disagreeable habits avowed in the Confessions. They may have
+contributed in some small degree to depression of vital energies,
+though for that matter Rousseau's strength and power of endurance were
+remarkable to the end. But they certainly did not produce a mental
+state in the least corresponding to that particular variety of
+insanity, which possesses definitely marked features.
+
+[374] Burton, ii. 314.
+
+[375] For an instructive and, as it appears to me, a thoroughly
+trustworthy account of the temper in which the Confessions were
+written, see the 4th of the _R�veries_.
+
+[376] Letter to the Duke of Grafton, Feb. 27, 1767. _Corr._, v. 98:
+also 118.
+
+[377] _Ib._ v. 133; also to General Conway (March 26), p. 137, etc.
+
+[378] _Corr._, v. 37.
+
+[379] _Corr._, v. 88.
+
+[380] See the letters to Du Peyrou, of the 2d and 4th of April 1767.
+_Corr._, v. 140-147.
+
+[381] Davenport to Hume; Burton, 367-371.
+
+[382] J.J.R. to Davenport, Dec. 22, 1766, and April 30, 1767. _Corr._,
+v. 66, 152.
+
+[383] Burton, 369, 375.
+
+[384] _Corr._, v. 153.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+THE END.
+
+
+Before leaving England, Rousseau had received more than one
+long and rambling letter from a man who was as unlike the rest of
+mankind as he was unlike them himself. This was the Marquis of
+Mirabeau (1715-89), the violent, tyrannical, pedantic, humoristic sire
+of a more famous son. Perhaps we might say that Mirabeau and Rousseau
+were the two most singular originals then known to men, and Mirabeau's
+originality was in some respects the more salient of the two. There is
+less of the conventional tone of the eighteenth century Frenchman in
+him than in any other conspicuous man of the time, though like many
+other headstrong and despotic souls he picked up the current notions
+of philanthropy and human brotherhood. He really was by very force of
+temperament that rebel against the narrowness, trimness, and moral
+formalism of the time which Rousseau only claimed and attempted to be,
+with the secondary degree of success that follows vehemence without
+native strength. Mirabeau was a sort of Swift, who had strangely taken
+up the trade of friendship for man and adopted the phrases of
+perfectibility; while Rousseau on the other hand was meant for a
+F�nelon, save that he became possessed of unclean devils.
+
+Mirabeau, like Jean Jacques himself, was so impressed by the marked
+tenor of contemporary feeling, its prudential didactics, its
+formulistic sociality, that his native insurgency only found vent in
+private life, while in public he played pedagogue to the human race.
+Friend of Quesnai and orthodox economist as he was, he delighted in
+Rousseau's books: "I know no morality that goes deeper than yours; it
+strikes like a thunderbolt, and advances with the steady assurance of
+truth, for you are always true, according to your notions for the
+moment." He wrote to tell him so, but he told him at the same time at
+great length, and with a caustic humour and incoherency less academic
+than Rabelaisian, that he had behaved absurdly in his quarrel with
+Hume. There is nothing more quaint than the appearance of a few of the
+sacramental phrases of the sect of the economists, floating in the
+midst of a copious stream of egoistic whimsicalities. He concludes
+with a diverting enumeration of all his country seats and demesnes,
+with their respective advantages and disadvantages, and prays Rousseau
+to take up his residence in whichever of them may please him
+best.[385]
+
+Immediately on landing at Calais Rousseau informed Mirabeau, and
+Mirabeau lost no time in conveying him stealthily, for the warrant of
+the parliament of Paris was still in force, to a house at Fleury. But
+the Friend of Men, to use his own account of himself, "bore letters as
+a plum-tree bears plums," and wrote to his guest with strange
+humoristic volubility and droll imperturbable temper, as one who knew
+his Jean Jacques. He exhorts him in many sheets to harden himself
+against excessive sensibility, to be less pusillanimous, to take
+society more lightly, as his own light estimate of its worth should
+lead him to do. "No doubt its outside is a shifting surface-picture,
+nay even ridiculous, if you will; but if the irregular and ceaseless
+flight of butterflies wearies you in your walk, it is your own fault
+for looking continuously at what was only made to adorn and vary the
+scene. But how many social virtues, how much gentleness and
+considerateness, how many benevolent actions, remain at the bottom of
+it all."[386] Enormous manifestoes of the doctrine of perfectibility
+were not in the least degree either soothing or interesting to
+Rousseau, and the thrusts of shrewd candour at his expense might touch
+his fancy on a single occasion, but not oftener. Two humorists are
+seldom successful in amusing one another. Besides, Mirabeau insisted
+that Jean Jacques should read this or that of his books. Rousseau
+answered that he would try, but warned him of the folly of it. "I do
+not engage always to follow what you say, because it has always been
+painful to me to think, and fatiguing to follow the thoughts of other
+people, and at present I cannot do so at all."[387] Though they
+continued to be good friends, Rousseau only remained three or four
+weeks at Fleury. His old acquaintance at Montmorency, the Prince of
+Conti, partly perhaps from contrition at the rather unchivalrous
+fashion in which his great friends had hustled the philosopher away at
+the time of the decree of the parliament of Paris, offered him refuge
+at one of his country seats at Trye near Gisors. Here he installed
+Rousseau under the name of Renou, either to silence the indiscreet
+curiosity of neighbours, or to gratify a whim of Rousseau himself.
+
+Rousseau remained for a year (June 1767-June 1768), composing the
+second part of the Confessions, in a condition of extreme mental
+confusion. Dusky phantoms walked with him once more. He knew the
+gardener, the servants, the neighbours, all to be in the pay of Hume,
+and that he was watched day and night with a view to his
+destruction.[388] He entirely gave up either reading or writing, save
+a very small number of letters, and he declared that to take up the
+pen even for these was like lifting a load of iron. The only interest
+he had was botany, and for this his passion became daily more intense.
+He appears to have been as contented as a child, so long as he could
+employ himself in long expeditions in search of new plants, in
+arranging a herbarium, in watching the growth of the germ of some rare
+seed which needed careful tending. But the story had once more the
+same conclusion. He fled from Trye, as he had fled from Wootton. He
+meant apparently to go to Chamb�ri, drawn by the deep magnetic force
+of old memories that seemed long extinct. But at Grenoble on his way
+thither he encountered a substantial grievance. A man alleged that he
+had lent Rousseau a few francs seven years previously. He was
+undoubtedly mistaken, and was fully convicted of his mistake by proper
+authorities, but Rousseau's correspondents suffered none the less for
+that. We all know when monomania seizes a man, how adroitly and how
+eagerly it colours every incident. The mistaken claim was proof
+demonstrative of that frightful and tenebrous conspiracy, which they
+might have thought a delusion hitherto, but which, alas, this showed
+to be only too tragically real; and so on, through many pages of
+droning wretchedness.[389] Then we find him at Bourgoin, where he
+spent some months in shabby taverns, and then many months more at
+Monquin on adjoining uplands.[390] The estrangement from Theresa, of
+which enough has been said already,[391] was added to his other
+torments. He resolved, as so many of the self-tortured have done
+since, to go in search of happiness to the western lands beyond the
+Atlantic, where the elixir of bliss is thought by the wearied among us
+to be inexhaustible and assured. Almost in the same page he turns his
+face eastwards, and dreams of ending his days peacefully among the
+islands of the Grecian archipelago. Next he gravely, not only
+designed, but actually took measures, to return to Wootton. All was no
+more than the momentary incoherent purpose of a sick man's dream, the
+weary distraction of one who had deliberately devoted himself to
+isolation from his fellows, without first sitting down carefully to
+count the cost, or to measure the inner resources which he possessed
+to meet the deadly strain that isolation puts on every one of a man's
+mental fibres. Geographical loneliness is to some a condition of their
+fullest strength, but most of the few who dare to make a moral
+solitude for themselves, find that they have assuredly not made peace.
+Such solitude, as South said of the study of the Apocalypse, either
+finds a man mad, or leaves him so. Not all can play the stoic who
+will, and it is still more certain that one who like Rousseau has lain
+down with the doctrine that in all things imaginable it is impossible
+for him to do at all what he cannot do with pleasure, will end in a
+condition of profound and hopeless impotence in respect to pleasure
+itself.
+
+In July 1770, he made his way to Paris, and here he remained eight
+years longer, not without the introduction of a certain degree of
+order into his outer life, though the clouds of vague suspicion and
+distrust, half bitter, half mournful, hung heavily as ever upon his
+mind. The Dialogues, which he wrote at this period (1775-76) to
+vindicate his memory from the defamation that was to be launched in a
+dark torrent upon the world at the moment of his death, could not
+possibly have been written by a man in his right mind. Yet the best of
+the Musings, which were written still nearer the end, are masterpieces
+in the style of contemplative prose. The third, the fifth, the
+seventh, especially abound in that even, full, mellow gravity of tone
+which is so rare in literature, because the deep absorption of spirit
+which is its source is so rare in life. They reveal Rousseau to us
+with a truth beyond that attained in any of his other pieces--a
+mournful sombre figure, looming shadowily in the dark glow of sundown
+among sad and desolate places. There is nothing like them in the
+French tongue, which is the speech of the clear, the cheerful, or the
+august among men; nothing like this sonorous plainsong, the strangely
+melodious expression in the music of prose of a darkened spirit which
+yet had imaginative visions of beatitude.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It is interesting to look on one or two pictures of the last waste and
+obscure years of the man, whose words were at this time silently
+fermenting for good and for evil in many spirits--a Schiller, a
+Herder, a Jeanne Phlipon, a Robespierre, a Gabriel Mirabeau, and many
+hundreds of those whose destiny was not to lead, but ingenuously to
+follow. Rousseau seems to have repulsed nearly all his ancient
+friends, and to have settled down with dogged resolve to his old trade
+of copying music. In summer he rose at five, copied music until
+half-past seven; munched his breakfast, arranging on paper during the
+process such plants as he had gathered the previous afternoon; then he
+returned to his work, dined at half-past twelve, and went forth to
+take coffee at some public place. He would not return from his walk
+until nightfall, and he retired at half-past ten. The pavements of
+Paris were hateful to him because they tore his feet, and, said he,
+with deeply significant antithesis, "I am not afraid of death, but I
+dread pain." He always found his way as fast as possible to one of the
+suburbs, and one of his greatest delights was to watch Mont Val�rien
+in the sunset. "Atheists," he said calumniously, "do not love the
+country; they like the environs of Paris, where you have all the
+pleasures of the city, good cheer, books, pretty women; but if you
+take these things away, then they die of weariness." The note of every
+bird held him attentive, and filled his mind with delicious images. A
+graceful story is told of two swallows who made a nest in Rousseau's
+sleeping-room, and hatched the eggs there. "I was no more than a
+doorkeeper for them," he said, "for I kept opening the window for them
+every moment. They used to fly with a great stir round my head, until
+I had fulfilled the duties of the tacit convention between these
+swallows and me."
+
+In January 1771, Bernardin de St. Pierre, author of the immortal _Paul
+and Virginia_ (1788), finding himself at the Cape of Good Hope, wrote
+to a friend in France just previously to his return to Europe,
+counting among other delights that of seeing two summers in one
+year.[392] Rousseau happened to see the letter, and expressed a desire
+to make the acquaintance of a man who in returning home should think
+of that as one of his chief pleasures. To this we owe the following
+pictures of an interior from St. Pierre's hand:--
+
+     In the month of June in 1772, a friend having offered to
+     take me to see Jean Jacques Rousseau, he brought me to a
+     house in the Rue Pl�tri�re, nearly opposite to the H�tel de
+     la Poste. We mounted to the fourth story. We knocked, and
+     Madame Rousseau opened the door. "Come in, gentlemen," she
+     said, "you will find my husband." We passed through a very
+     small antechamber, where the household utensils were neatly
+     arranged, and from that into a room where Jean Jacques was
+     seated in an overcoat and a white cap, busy copying music.
+     He rose with a smiling face, offered us chairs, and resumed
+     his work, at the same time taking a part in conversation. He
+     was thin and of middle height. One shoulder struck me as
+     rather higher than the other ... otherwise he was very well
+     proportioned. He had a brown complexion, some colour on his
+     cheek-bones, a good mouth, a well-made nose, a rounded and
+     lofty brow, and eyes full of fire. The oblique lines falling
+     from the nostrils to the extremity of the lips, and marking
+     a physiognomy, in his case expressed great sensibility and
+     something even painful. One observed in his face three or
+     four of the characteristics of melancholy--the deep receding
+     eyes and the elevation of the eyebrows; you saw profound
+     sadness in the wrinkles of the brow; a keen and even caustic
+     gaiety in a thousand little creases at the corners of the
+     eyes, of which the orbits entirely disappeared when he
+     laughed.... Near him was a spinette on which from time to
+     time he tried an air. Two little beds of blue and white
+     striped calico, a table, and a few chairs, made the stock of
+     his furniture. On the walls hung a plan of the forest and
+     park of Montmorency, where he had once lived, and an
+     engraving of the King of England, his old benefactor. His
+     wife was sitting mending linen; a canary sang in a cage hung
+     from the ceiling; sparrows came for crumbs on to the sills
+     of the windows, which on the side of the street were open;
+     while in the window of the antechamber we noticed boxes and
+     pots filled with such plants as it pleases nature to sow.
+     There was in the whole effect of his little establishment an
+     air of cleanness, peace, and simplicity, which was
+     delightful.
+
+A few days after, Rousseau returned the visit. "He wore a round wig,
+well powdered and curled, carrying a hat under his arm, and in a full
+suit of nankeen. His whole exterior was modest, but extremely neat."
+He expressed his passion for good coffee, saying that this and ice
+were the only two luxuries for which he cared. St. Pierre happened to
+have brought some from the Isle of Bourbon, so on the following day he
+rashly sent Rousseau a small packet, which at first produced a polite
+letter of thanks; but the day after the letter of thanks came one of
+harsh protest against the ignominy of receiving presents which could
+not be returned, and bidding the unfortunate donor to choose between
+taking his coffee back or never seeing his new friend again. A fair
+bargain was ultimately arranged, St. Pierre receiving in exchange for
+his coffee some curious root or other, and a book on ichthyology.
+Immediately afterwards he went to dine with his sage. He arrived at
+eleven in the forenoon, and they conversed until half-past twelve.
+
+     Then his wife laid the cloth. He took a bottle of wine, and
+     as he put it on the table, asked whether we should have
+     enough, or if I was fond of drinking. "How many are there of
+     us," said I. "Three," he said; "you, my wife, and myself."
+     "Well," I went on, "when I drink wine and am alone, I drink
+     a good half-bottle, and I drink a trifle more when I am with
+     friends." "In that case," he answered, "we shall not have
+     enough; I must go down into the cellar." He brought up a
+     second bottle. His wife served two dishes, one of small
+     tarts, and another which was covered. He said, showing me
+     the first, "That is your dish and the other is mine." "I
+     don't eat much pastry," I said, "but I hope to be allowed to
+     taste what you have got." "Oh, they are both common," he
+     replied; "but most people don't care for this. 'Tis a Swiss
+     dish; a compound of lard, mutton, vegetables, and
+     chestnuts." It was excellent. After these two dishes, we had
+     slices of beef in salad; then biscuits and cheese; after
+     which his wife served the coffee.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+     One morning when I was at his house, I saw various domestics
+     either coming for rolls of music, or bringing them to him to
+     copy. He received them standing and uncovered. He said to
+     some, "The price is so much," and received the money; to
+     others, "How soon must I return my copy?" "My mistress would
+     like to have it back in a fortnight." "Oh, that's out of the
+     question: I have work, I can't do it in less than three
+     weeks." I inquired why he did not take his talents to better
+     market. "Ah," he answered, "there are two Rousseaus in the
+     world; one rich, or who might have been if he had chosen; a
+     man capricious, singular, fantastic; this is the Rousseau of
+     the public; the other is obliged to work for his living, the
+     Rousseau whom you see."[393]
+
+They often took long rambles together, and all proceeded most
+harmoniously, unless St. Pierre offered to pay for such refreshment as
+they might take, when a furious explosion was sure to follow. Here is
+one more picture, without explosion.
+
+     _An Easter Monday Excursion to Mont Val�rien._
+
+     We made an appointment at a caf� in the Champs Elys�es. In
+     the morning we took some chocolate. The wind was westerly,
+     and the air fresh. The sun was surrounded by white clouds,
+     spread in masses over an azure sky. Reaching the Bois de
+     Boulogne by eight o'clock, Jean Jacques set to work
+     botanising. As he collected his little harvest, we kept
+     walking along. We had gone through part of the wood, when in
+     the midst of the solitude we perceived two young girls, one
+     of whom was arranging the other's hair.--[Reminded them of
+     some verses of Virgil.]....
+
+     Arrived on the edge of the river, we crossed the ferry with
+     a number of people whom devotion was taking to Mont
+     Val�rien. We climbed an extremely stiff slope, and were
+     hardly on the top before hunger overtook us and we began to
+     think of dining. Rousseau then led the way towards a
+     hermitage, where he knew we could make sure of hospitality.
+     The brother who opened to us, conducted us to the chapel,
+     where they were reciting the litanies of providence, which
+     are extremely beautiful.... When we had prayed, Jean Jacques
+     said to me with genuine feeling: "Now I feel what is said in
+     the gospel, 'Where several of you are gathered together in
+     my name, there will I be in the midst of them.' There is a
+     sentiment of peace and comfort here that penetrates the
+     soul." I replied, "If F�nelon were alive, you would be a
+     Catholic." "Ah," said he, the tears in his eyes, "if F�nelon
+     were alive, I would seek to be his lackey."
+
+     Presently we were introduced into the refectory; we seated
+     ourselves during the reading. The subject was the injustice
+     of the complainings of man: God has brought him from
+     nothing, he oweth him nothing. After the reading, Rousseau
+     said to me in a voice of deep emotion: "Ah, how happy is the
+     man who can believe...." We walked about for some time in
+     the cloister and the gardens. They command an immense
+     prospect. Paris in the distance reared her towers all
+     covered with light, and made a crown to the far-spreading
+     landscape. The brightness of the view contrasted with the
+     great leaden clouds that rolled after one another from the
+     west, and seemed to fill the valley.... In the afternoon
+     rain came on, as we approached the Porte Maillot. We took
+     shelter along with a crowd of other holiday folk under some
+     chestnut-trees whose leaves were coming out. One of the
+     waiters of a tavern perceiving Jean Jacques, rushed to him
+     full of joy, exclaiming, "What, is it you, _mon bonhomme_?
+     Why, it is a whole age since we have seen you." Rousseau
+     replied cheerfully, "'Tis because my wife has been ill, and
+     I myself have been out of sorts." "_Mon pauvre bonhomme_,"
+     replied the lad, "you must not stop here; come in, come in,
+     and I will find room for you." He hurried us along to a room
+     upstairs, where in spite of the crowd he procured for us
+     chairs and a table, and bread and wine. I said to Jean
+     Jacques, "He seems very familiar with you." He answered,
+     "Yes, we have known one another some years. We used to come
+     here in fine weather, my wife and I, to eat a cutlet of an
+     evening."[394]
+
+Things did not continue to go thus smoothly. One day St. Pierre went
+to see him, and was received without a word, and with stiff and gloomy
+mien. He tried to talk, but only got monosyllables; he took up a book,
+and this drew a sarcasm which sent him forth from the room. For more
+than two months they did not meet. At length they had an accidental
+encounter at a street corner. Rousseau accosted St. Pierre, and with a
+gradually warming sensibility proceeded thus: "There are days when I
+want to be alone and crave privacy. I come back from my solitary
+expeditions so calm and contented. There I have not been wanting to
+anybody, nor has anybody been wanting to me," and so on.[395] He
+expressed this humour more pointedly on some other occasion, when he
+said that there were times in which he fled from the eyes of men as
+from Parthian arrows. As one said who knew from experience, the fate
+of his most intimate friend depended on a word or a gesture.[396]
+Another of them declared that he knew Rousseau's style of discarding a
+friend by letter so thoroughly, that he felt confident he could supply
+Rousseau's place in case of illness or absence.[397] In much of this
+we suspect that the quarrel was perfectly justified. Sociality meant a
+futile display before unworthy and condescending curiosity. "It is not
+I whom they care for," he very truly said, "but public opinion and
+talk about me, without a thought of what real worth I may have." Hence
+his steadfast refusal to go out to dine or sup. The mere impertinence
+of the desire to see him was illustrated by some coxcombs who insisted
+with a famous actress of his acquaintance, that she should invite the
+strange philosopher to meet them. She was aware that no known force
+would persuade Rousseau to come, so she dressed up her tailor as
+philosopher, bade him keep a silent tongue, and vanish suddenly
+without a word of farewell. The tailor was long philosophically
+silent, and by the time that wine had loosened his tongue, the rest of
+the company were too far gone to perceive that the supposed Rousseau
+was chattering vulgar nonsense.[398] We can believe that with admirers
+of this stamp Rousseau was well pleased to let tailors or others stand
+in his place. There were some, however, of a different sort, who
+flitted across his sight and then either vanished of their own accord,
+or were silently dismissed, from Madame de Genlis up to Gr�try and
+Gluck. With Gluck he seems to have quarrelled for setting his music to
+French words, when he must have known that Italian was the only tongue
+fit for music.[399] Yet it was remarked that no one ever heard him
+speak ill of others. His enemies, the figures of his delusion, were
+vaguely denounced in many dronings, but they remained in dark shadow
+and were unnamed. When Voltaire paid his famous last visit to the
+capital (1778), some one thought of paying court to Rousseau by making
+a mock of the triumphal reception of the old warrior, but Rousseau
+harshly checked the detractor. It is true that in 1770-71 he gave to
+some few of his acquaintances one or more readings of the Confessions,
+although they contained much painful matter for many people still
+living, among the rest for Madame d'Epinay. She wrote justifiably
+enough to the lieutenant of police, praying that all such readings
+might be prohibited, and it is believed that they were so
+prohibited.[400]
+
+In 1769, when Polish anarchy was at its height, as if to show at once
+how profound the anarchy was, and how profound the faith among many
+minds in the power of the new French theories, an application was made
+to Mably to draw up a scheme for the renovation of distracted Poland.
+Mably's notions won little esteem from the persons who had sought for
+them, and in 1771 a similar application was made to Rousseau in his
+Parisian garret. He replied in the Considerations on the Government of
+Poland, which are written with a good deal of vigour of expression,
+but contain nothing that needs further discussion. He hinted to the
+Poles with some shrewdness that a curtailment of their territory by
+their neighbours was not far off,[401] and the prediction was rapidly
+fulfilled by the first partition of Poland in the following year.
+
+He was asked one day of what nation he had the highest opinion. He
+answered, the Spanish. The Spanish nation, he said, has a character;
+if it is not rich, it still preserves all its pride and self-respect
+in the midst of its poverty; and it is animated by a single spirit,
+for it has not been scourged by the conflicting opinions of
+philosophy.[402]
+
+He was extremely poor for these last eight years of his life. He seems
+to have drawn the pension which George III. had settled on him, for
+not more than one year. We do not know why he refused to receive it
+afterwards. A well-meaning friend, when the arrears amounted to
+between six and seven thousand francs, applied for it on his behalf,
+and a draft for the money was sent. Rousseau gave the offender a
+vigorous rebuke for meddling in affairs that did not concern him, and
+the draft was destroyed. Other attempts to induce him to draw this
+money failed equally.[403] Yet he had only about fifty pounds a year
+to live on, together with the modest amount which he earned by copying
+music.[404]
+
+The sting of indigence began to make itself felt towards 1777. His
+health became worse and he could not work. Theresa was waxing old, and
+could no longer attend to the small cares of the household. More than
+one person offered them shelter and provision, and the old
+distractions as to a home in which to end his days began once again.
+At length M. Girardin prevailed upon him to come and live at
+Ermenonville, one of his estates some twenty miles from Paris. A dense
+cloud of obscure misery hangs over the last months of this forlorn
+existence.[405] No tragedy had ever a fifth act so squalid. Theresa's
+character seems to have developed into something truly bestial.
+Rousseau's terrors of the designs of his enemies returned with great
+violence. He thought he was imprisoned, and he knew that he had no
+means of escape. One day (July 2, 1778), suddenly and without a single
+warning symptom, all drew to an end; the sensations which had been the
+ruling part of his life were affected by pleasure and pain no more,
+the dusky phantoms all vanished into space. The surgeons reported that
+the cause of his death was apoplexy, but a suspicion has haunted the
+world ever since, that he destroyed himself by a pistol-shot. We
+cannot tell. There is no inherent improbability in the fact of his
+having committed suicide. In the New Helo�sa he had thrown the
+conditions which justified self-destruction into a distinct formula.
+Fifteen years before, he declared that his own case fell within the
+conditions which he had prescribed, and that he was meditating
+action.[406] Only seven years before, he had implied that a man had
+the right to deliver himself of the burden of his own life, if its
+miseries were intolerable and irremediable.[407] This, however, counts
+for nothing in the absence of some kind of positive evidence, and of
+that there is just enough to leave the manner of his end a little
+doubtful.[408] Once more, we cannot tell.
+
+By the serene moonrise of a summer night, his body was put under the
+ground on an island in the midst of a small lake, where poplars throw
+shadows over the still water, silently figuring the destiny of
+mortals. Here it remained for sixteen years. Then amid the roar of
+cannon, the crash of trumpet and drum, and the wild acclamations of a
+populace gone mad in exultation, terror, fury, it was ordered that the
+poor dust should be transported to the national temple of great men.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[385] Streckeisen, ii. 315-328.
+
+[386] Streckeisen, ii. 337.
+
+[387] June 19, 1767. _Corr._, v. 172.
+
+[388] _Corr._, v. 267, 375.
+
+[389] _Corr._, v. 330-381, 408, etc.
+
+[390] Bourgoin, Aug. 1768, to March, 1769. Monquin, to July 1770.
+
+[391] See above, vol. i. chap. iv.
+
+[392] The life of Bernardin de St. Pierre (1737-1814) was nearly as
+irregular as that of his friend and master. But his character was
+essentially crafty and selfish, like that of many other
+sentimentalists of the first order.
+
+[393] _Oeuv._, xii. 69, 73.
+
+[394] _Oeuv._, xii. 104, etc.; and also the _Pr�ambule de l'Arcadie_,
+_Oeuv._, vii. 64, 65.
+
+[395] St. Pierre, xii. 81-83.
+
+[396] Dusaulx, p. 81. For his quarrel with Rousseau, see pp. 130, etc.
+
+[397] Rulhi�res in Dusaulx, p. 179. For a strange interview between
+Rulhi�res and Rousseau, see pp. 185-186.
+
+[398] Musset-Pathay, i. 181.
+
+[399] _Ib._
+
+[400] Musset-Pathay, i. 209. Rousseau gave a copy of the Confessions
+to Moultou, but forbade the publication before the year 1800.
+Notwithstanding this, printers procured copies surreptitiously,
+perhaps through Theresa, ever in need of money; the first part was
+published four years, and the second part with many suppressions
+eleven years, after his death, in 1782 and 1789 respectively. See
+Musset-Pathay, ii. 464.
+
+[401] Ch. v. Such a curtailment, he says, "would no doubt be a great
+evil for the parts dismembered, but it would be a great advantage for
+the body of the nation." He urged federation as the condition of any
+solid improvement in their affairs.
+
+[402] Bernardin de St. Pierre, xii. 37. Comte had a similar admiration
+for Spain and for the same reason.
+
+[403] Corancez, quoted in Musset-Pathay, i. 239. Also _Corr._, vi.
+295.
+
+[404] _Corr._, vi. 303.
+
+[405] Robespierre, then a youth, is said to have invited him here. See
+Hamel's _Robespierre_, i. 22.
+
+[406] See above, vol. i. pp. 16, 17.
+
+[407] _Corr._, vi. 264.
+
+[408] The case stands thus:--(1) There was the certificate of five
+doctors, attesting that Rousseau had died of apoplexy. (2) The
+assertion of M. Girardin, in whose house he died, that there was no
+hole in his head, nor poison in the stomach or viscera, nor other sign
+of self-destruction. (3) The assertion of Theresa to the same effect.
+On the other hand, we have the assertion of Corancez, that on his
+journey to Ermenonville on the day of Rousseau's burial a horse-master
+on the road had said, "Who would have supposed that M. Rousseau would
+have destroyed himself!"--and a variety of inferences from the wording
+of the certificate, and of Theresa's letter. Musset-Pathay believes in
+the suicide, and argued very ingeniously against M. Girardin. But his
+arguments do not go far beyond verbal ingenuity, showing that suicide
+was possible, and was consistent with the language of the documents,
+rather than adducing positive testimony. See vol. i. of his _History_,
+pp. 268, etc. The controversy was resumed as late as 1861, between the
+_Figaro_ and the _Monde Illustr�_. See also M. Jal's _Dict. Crit. de
+Biog. et d'Hist._, p. 1091.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX.
+
+
+ACADEMIES (French) local, i. 132.
+
+Academy, of Dijon, Rousseau writes essays for, i. 133;
+  French, prize essay against Rousseau's Discourse, i. 150, _n._
+
+Actors, how regarded in France in Rousseau's time, i. 322.
+
+Althusen, teaches doctrine of sovereignty of the people, ii. 147.
+
+America (U.S.), effects in, of the doctrine of the equality of men,
+     i. 182.
+
+American colonists indebted in eighteenth century to Rousseau's
+     writings, i. 3.
+
+Anchorite, distinction between the old and the new, i. 234.
+
+Annecy, i. 34, 50;
+  Rousseau's room at, i. 54;
+  Rousseau's teachers at, i. 56;
+  seminary at, i. 82.
+
+Aquinas, protest against juristical doctrine of law being the
+     pleasure of the prince, ii. 144, 145.
+
+Aristotle on Origin of Society, i. 174.
+
+Atheism, Rousseau's protest against, i. 208;
+  St. Lambert on, i. 209, _n._;
+  Robespierre's protest against, ii. 178;
+  Chaumette put to death for endeavouring to base the government of
+     France on, ii. 180.
+
+Augustine (of Hippo), ii. 272, 303.
+
+Austin, John, ii. 151, _n._;
+  on Sovereignty, ii. 162.
+
+Authors, difficulties of, in France in the eighteenth century, ii.
+     55-61.
+
+
+BABOEUF, on the Revolution, ii. 123, _n._
+
+Barbier, ii. 26.
+
+Basedow, his enthusiasm for Rousseau's educational theories, ii. 251.
+
+Beaumont, De, Archbishop of Paris, mandate against Rousseau issued
+     by, ii. 83;
+  argument from, ii. 86.
+
+Bernard, maiden name of Rousseau's mother, i. 10.
+
+Bienne, Rousseau driven to take refuge in island in lake of, ii.
+     108;
+  his account of, ii. 109-115.
+
+Bodin, on Government, ii. 147;
+  his definition of an aristocratic state, ii. 168, _n._
+
+Bonaparte, Napoleon, ii. 102, _n._
+
+Bossuet, on Stage Plays, i. 321.
+
+Boswell, James, ii. 98;
+  visits Rousseau, ii. 98, also _ib._ _n._;
+  urged by Rousseau to visit Corsica, ii. 100;
+  his letter to Rousseau, ii. 101.
+
+Boufflers, Madame de, ii. 5, _ib._ _n._
+
+Bougainville (brother of the navigator), i. 184, _n._
+
+Brutus, how Rousseau came to be panegyrist of, i. 187.
+
+Buffon, ii. 205.
+
+Burke, ii. 140, 192.
+
+Burnet, Bishop, on Genevese, i. 225.
+
+Burton, John Hill, his _Life of Hume_ (on Rousseau), ii. 283,
+     _n._
+
+Byron, Lord, antecedents of highest creative efforts, ii. 1;
+  effect of nature upon, ii. 40;
+  difference between and Rousseau, ii. 41.
+
+
+CALAS, i. 312.
+
+Calvin, i. 4, 189;
+  Rousseau on, as a legislator, ii. 131;
+  and Servetus, ii. 180;
+  mentioned, ii. 181.
+
+_Candide_, thought by Rousseau to be meant as a reply to him,
+     i. 319.
+
+Cardan, ii. 303.
+
+Cato, how Rousseau came to be his panegyrist, i. 187.
+
+Chamb�ri, probable date of Rousseau's return to, i. 62, _n._;
+  takes up his residence there, i. 69;
+  effect on his mind of a French column of troops passing through,
+     i. 72, 73;
+  his illness at, i. 73, _n._
+
+Charmettes, Les, Madame de Warens's residence, i. 73;
+  present condition of, i. 74, 75, _n._;
+  time spent there by Rousseau, i. 94.
+
+Charron, ii. 203.
+
+Chateaubriand, influenced by Rousseau, i. 3.
+
+Chatham, Lord, ii. 92.
+
+Chaumette, ii. 178;
+  guillotined on charge of endeavouring to establish atheism in
+     France, ii. 179.
+
+Chesterfield, Lord, ii. 15.
+
+Choiseul, ii. 57, 64, 72.
+
+Citizen, revolutionary use of word, derived from Rousseau, ii. 161.
+
+Civilisation, variety of the origin and process of, i. 176;
+  defects of, i. 176;
+  one of the worst trials of, ii. 102.
+
+Cobbett, ii. 42.
+
+Collier, Jeremy, on the English Stage, i. 323.
+
+Condillac, i. 95.
+
+Condorcet, i. 89;
+  on Social Position of Women, i. 335;
+  human perfectibility, ii. 119;
+  inspiration of, drawn from the school of Voltaire and Rousseau,
+     ii. 194;
+  belief of, in the improvement of humanity, ii. 246;
+  grievous mistake of, ii. 247.
+
+Confessions, the, not to be trusted for minute accuracy, i. 86,
+     _n._;
+  or for dates, i. 93;
+  first part written 1766, ii. 301;
+  their character, ii. 303;
+  published surreptitiously, ii. 324, _n._;
+  readings from, prohibited by police, ii. 324.
+
+Conti, Prince of, ii. 4-7;
+  receives Rousseau at Trye, ii. 118.
+
+Contract, Social, i. 136.
+
+Corsica, struggles for independence of, ii. 99;
+  Rousseau invited to legislate for, ii. 99-102;
+  bought by France, ii. 102.
+
+Cowper, i. 20;
+  ii. 41;
+  on Rousseau, ii. 41 _n._;
+  lines in the Task, ii. 253;
+  his delusions, ii. 301.
+
+Cynicism, Rousseau's assumption of, i. 206.
+
+
+D'AIGUILLON, ii. 72.
+
+D'Alembert, i. 89;
+  Voltaire's staunchest henchman, i. 321;
+  his article on Geneva, i. 321;
+  on Stage Plays, i. 326, _n._;
+  on Position of Women in Society, i. 335;
+  on Rousseau's letter on the Theatre, i. 336;
+  suspected by Rousseau of having written the pretended letter from
+     Frederick of Prussia, ii. 288;
+  advises Hume to publish account of Rousseau's quarrel with him,
+     ii. 294.
+
+D'Argenson, ii. 180.
+
+Dates of Rousseau's letters to be relied on, not those of the
+     Confessions, i. 93.
+
+Davenport, Mr., provides Rousseau with a home at Wootton, ii. 286;
+  his kindness to Rousseau, ii. 306.
+
+Deism, Rousseau's, ii. 260-275;
+  that of others, ii. 262-265;
+  shortcomings of Rousseau's, ii. 270.
+
+Democracy defined, ii. 168;
+  rejected by Rousseau, as too perfect for men, ii. 171.
+
+D'Epinay, Madame, i. 194, 195, 205;
+  gives the Hermitage to Rousseau, i. 229, _n._;
+  his quarrels with, i. 271;
+  his relations with, i. 273, 276;
+  journey to Geneva of, i. 284;
+  squabbles arising out of, between, and Rousseau, Diderot, and
+     Grimm, i. 285-290;
+  mentioned, ii. 7, 26, 197;
+  wrote on education, ii. 199;
+  applies to secretary of police to prohibit Rousseau's readings
+     from his Confessions, ii. 324.
+
+D'Epinay, Monsieur, i. 254; ii. 26.
+
+Descartes, i. 87, 225; ii. 267.
+
+Deux Ponts, Duc de, Rousseau's rude reply to, i. 207.
+
+D'Holbach, i. 192;
+  Rousseau's dislike of his materialistic friends, i. 223;
+     ii. 37, 256.
+
+D'Houdetot, Madame, i. 255-270;
+  Madame d'Epinay's jealousy of, i. 278;
+  mentioned, ii. 7;
+  offers Rousseau a home in Normandy, ii. 117.
+
+Diderot, i. 64, 89, 133;
+  tries to manage Rousseau, i. 213;
+  his domestic misconduct, i. 215;
+  leader of the materialistic party, i. 223;
+  on Solitary Life, i. 232;
+  his active life, i. 233;
+  without moral sensitiveness, i. 262;
+  mentioned, i. 262, 269, 271;
+     ii. 8;
+  his relations with Rousseau, i. 271;
+  accused of pilfering Goldoni's new play, i. 275;
+  his relations and contentions with Rousseau, i. 275, 276;
+  lectures Rousseau about Madame d'Epinay, i. 284;
+  visits Rousseau after his leaving the Hermitage, i. 289;
+  Rousseau's final breach with, i. 336;
+  his criticism, and plays, ii. 34;
+  his defects, ii. 34;
+  thrown into prison, ii. 57;
+  his difficulties with the Encyclop�dists, ii. 57;
+  his papers saved from the police by Malesherbes, ii. 62.
+
+Dijon, academy of, i. 132.
+
+Discourses, The, Circumstances of the composition of the first
+     Discourse, i. 133-136;
+  summary of it, i. 138-145
+     disastrous effect of the progress of sciences and arts, i.
+          140, 141;
+     error more dangerous than truth useful, i. 141;
+     uselessness of learning and art, i. 141, 142;
+     terrible disorders caused in Europe by the art of printing, i.
+          143;
+     two kinds of ignorance, i. 144;
+  the relation of this Discourse to Montaigne, i. 145;
+  its one-sidedness and hollowness, i. 148;
+  shown by Voltaire, i. 148;
+  its positive side, i. 149, 150;
+  second Discourse, origin of the Inequality of Man, i. 154;
+  summary of it, i. 159, 170;
+     state of nature, i. 150, 162;
+     Hobbes's mistake, i. 161;
+     what broke up the "state of nature," i. 164;
+     its preferableness, i. 166, 167;
+     origin of society and laws, i. 168;
+     "new state of nature," i. 169;
+     main position of the Discourse, i. 169;
+  its utter inclusiveness, i. 170;
+  criticism on its method, i. 170;
+  on its matter, i. 172;
+  wanting in evidence, i. 172;
+  further objections to it, i. 173;
+  assumes uniformity of process, i. 176;
+  its unscientific character, i. 177;
+  its real importance, i. 178;
+  its protest against the mockery of civilisation, i. 178;
+  equality of man, i. 181;
+  different effects of this doctrine in France and the United States
+     explained, i. 182, 183;
+  discovers a reaction against the historical method of Montesquieu,
+     i. 183, 184;
+  pecuniary results of, i. 196;
+  Diderot's praise of first Discourse, i. 200;
+  Voltaire's acknowledgement of gift of second Discourse, i. 308;
+  the, an attack on the general ordering of society, ii. 22;
+  referred to, ii. 41.
+
+Drama, its proper effect, i. 326;
+  what would be that of its introduction into Geneva, i. 327;
+  true answer to Rousseau's contentions, i. 329.
+
+Dramatic morality, i. 326.
+
+Drinkers, Rousseau's estimate of, i. 330.
+
+Drunkenness, how esteemed in Switzerland and Naples, i. 331.
+
+Duclos, i. 206;
+  ii. 62.
+
+Duni, i. 292.
+
+Dupin, Madame de, Rousseau secretary to, i. 120;
+  her position in society, i. 195;
+  Rousseau's country life with, i. 196;
+  friend of the Abb� de Saint Pierre, i. 244.
+
+
+EDUCATION, interest taken in, in France in Rousseau's time, ii. 193,
+     194;
+  its new direction ii. 195;
+  Locke, the pioneer of, ii. 202, 203;
+  Rousseau's special merit in connection with, ii. 203;
+  his views on (see Emilius, _passim_, as well as for general
+     consideration of) what it is, ii. 219;
+  plans of, of Locke and others, designed for the higher class, ii.
+     254;
+  Rousseau's for all, ii. 254.
+
+_Emile_, i. 136, 196.
+
+Emilius, character of, ii. 2, 3;
+  particulars of the publication of, ii. 59, 60;
+  effect of, on Rousseau's fortunes, ii. 62-64;
+  ordered to be burnt by public executioner at Paris, ii. 65;
+  at Geneva, ii. 72;
+  condemned by the Sorbonne, ii. 82;
+  supplied (as also did the Social Contract) dialect for the longing
+     in France and Germany to return to nature, ii. 193;
+  substance of, furnished by Locke, ii. 202;
+  examination of, ii. 197-280;
+  mischief produced by its good advice, ii. 206, 207;
+  training of young children, ii. 207, 208;
+  constantly reasoning with them a mistake of Locke's, ii. 209;
+  Rousseau's central idea, disparagement of the reasoning faculty,
+     ii. 209, 210;
+  theories of education, practice better than precept, ii. 211;
+  the idea of property, the first that Rousseau would have given to
+     a child, ii. 212;
+  modes of teaching, ii. 214, 215;
+  futility of such methods, ii. 215, 216;
+  where Rousseau is right, and where wrong, ii. 219, 220;
+  effect of his own want of parental love, ii. 220;
+  teaches that everybody should learn a trade, ii. 223;
+  no special foresight, ii. 224, 225;
+  supremacy of the common people insisted upon, ii. 226, 227;
+  three dominant states of mind to be established by the instructor,
+     ii. 229, 230;
+  Rousseau's incomplete notion of justice, ii. 231;
+  ideal of Emilius, ii. 232, 233;
+  forbids early teaching of history, ii. 237, 238;
+  disparages modern history, ii. 239;
+  criticism on the old historians, ii. 240;
+  education of women, ii. 241;
+     Rousseau's failure here, ii. 242, 243;
+  inconsistent with himself, ii. 244, 245;
+  worthlessness of his views, ii. 249;
+  real merits of the work, ii. 249;
+  its effect in Germany, ii. 251, 252;
+  not much effect on education in England, ii. 252;
+  Emilius the first expression of democratic teaching in education,
+     ii. 254;
+  Rousseau's deism, ii. 258, 260, 264-267, 269, 270, 276;
+  its inadequacy for the wants of men, ii. 267-270;
+  his position towards Christianity, ii. 270-276;
+  real satisfaction of the religious emotions, ii. 275-280.
+
+Encyclop�dia, The, D'Alembert's article on Geneva in, i. 321.
+
+Encyclop�dists, the society of, confirms Rousseau's religious
+     faith, i. 221;
+  referred to, ii. 257.
+
+Evil, discussions on Rousseau's, Voltaire's, and De Maistre's
+     teachings concerning, i. 313, _n._, 318;
+  different effect of existence of, on Rousseau and Voltaire, i. 319.
+
+
+F�NELON, ii. 37, 248;
+  Rousseau's veneration for, ii. 321.
+
+Ferguson, Adam, ii. 253.
+
+Filmer contends that a man is not naturally free, ii. 126.
+
+Foundling Hospital, Rousseau sends his children to the, i. 120.
+
+France, debt of, to Rousseau, i. 3;
+  Rousseau the one great religious writer of, in the eighteenth
+     century, i. 26;
+  his wanderings in the east of, i. 61;
+  his fondness for, i. 62-72;
+  establishment of local academies in, i. 132;
+  decay in, of Greek literary studies, i. 146;
+  effects in, of doctrine of equality of man, i. 182;
+  effects in, of Montesquieu's "Spirit of Laws," i. 183;
+  amiability of, in the eighteenth century, i. 187;
+  effect of Rousseau's writings in, i. 187;
+  collective organisation in, i. 222;
+  St. Pierre's strictures on government of, i. 244;
+  Rousseau on government of, i. 246;
+  effect of Rousseau's spiritual element on, i. 306;
+  patriotism wanting in, i. 332;
+  difficulties of authorship in, ii. 55-64;
+  buys Corsica from the Genoese, ii. 102;
+  state of, after 1792, apparently favourable to the carrying out of
+     Rousseau's political views, ii. 131, 132;
+  in 1793, ii. 135;
+  haunted by narrow and fervid minds, ii. 142.
+
+Francueil, Rousseau's patron, i. 99;
+  grandfather of Madame George Sand, i. 99, _n._;
+  Rousseau's salary from, i. 120;
+  country-house of, i. 196.
+
+Franklin, Benjamin, ii. 42.
+
+Frederick of Prussia, relations between, and Rousseau, ii. 73-78;
+  "famous bull" of, ii. 90.
+
+Freeman on Growth of English Constitution, ii. 164.
+
+French, principles of, revolution, i. 1, 2, 3;
+  process and ideas of, i. 4;
+  Rousseau of old, stock, i. 8;
+  poetry, Rousseau on, i. 90, _ib. n._;
+  melody, i. 105;
+  academy, thesis for prize, i. 150, _n._;
+  philosophers, i. 202,
+  music, i. 291;
+  music, its pretensions demolished by Rousseau, i. 294;
+  ecclesiastics opposed to the theatre, ii. 322;
+  stage, Rousseau on, i. 325;
+  morals, depravity of, ii. 26, 27;
+  Barbier on, ii. 26;
+  thought, benefit, or otherwise of revolution on, ii. 54;
+  history, evil side of, in Rousseau's time, ii. 56;
+  indebted to Holland for freedom of the press, ii. 59;
+  catholic and monarchic absolutism sunk deep into the character of
+     the, ii. 167.
+
+French Convention, story of member of the, ii. 134, _n._
+
+
+GALUPPI, effect of his music, i. 105.
+
+Geneva, i. 8;
+  characteristics of its people, i. 9;
+  Rousseau's visit to, i. 93;
+  influence of, on Rousseau, i. 94;
+  he revisits it in 1754, i. 186-190, 218;
+  turns Protestant again there, i. 220;
+  religious opinion in, i. 223 (also i. 224, _n._);
+  Rousseau thinks of taking up his abode in, i. 228;
+  Voltaire at, i. 308;
+  D'Alembert's article on, in Encyclop�dia, i. 321;
+  Rousseau's notions of effect of
+  introducing the drama at, i. 327;
+  council of, order public burning of Emilius and the Social
+     Contract, and arrest of the author if he came there, ii. 72;
+  the only place where the Social Contract was actually burnt, ii. 73,
+     _n._;
+  Voltaire suspected to have had a hand in the matter, ii. 81;
+  council of, divided into two camps by Rousseau's condemnation, in
+     1762, ii. 102;
+  Rousseau renounces his citizenship in, ii. 104;
+  working of the republic, ii. 104.
+
+Genevese, Bishop Burnet on, i. 225;
+  Rousseau's distrust of, i. 228;
+  his panegyric on, i. 328;
+  manners of, according to Rousseau, i. 330;
+  their complaint of it, i. 331.
+
+Genlis, Madame de, ii. 323.
+
+Genoa, Rousseau in quarantine at, i. 103;
+  Corsica sold to France by, ii. 102.
+
+Germany, sentimental movements in, ii. 33.
+
+Gibbon, Edward, at Lausanne, ii. 96.
+
+Girardin, St. Marc, on Rousseau, i. 111, _n._;
+  on Rousseau's discussions, ii. 11, _n._;
+  offers Rousseau a home, ii. 326.
+
+Gluck, i. 291, 296;
+  Rousseau quarrels with, for setting his music to French words, ii.
+     323.
+
+Goethe, i. 20.
+
+Goguet on Society, ii. 127, _n._;
+  on tacit conventions, ii. 148, _n._;
+  on law, ii. 153, _n._
+
+Goldoni, Diderot accused of pilfering his new play, i. 275.
+
+Gothic architecture denounced by Voltaire and Turgot, i. 294.
+
+Gouvon, Count, Rousseau servant to, i. 42.
+
+Government, disquisitions on, ii. 131-206;
+  remarks on, ii. 131-141;
+  early democratic ideas of, ii. 144-148;
+  Hobbes' philosophy of, ii. 151;
+  Rousseau's science of, ii. 155, 156;
+  De la Rivi�re's science of, ii. 156, _n._;
+  federation recommended by Rousseau to the Poles, ii. 166;
+  three forms of government defined, ii. 169;
+  definition inadequate, ii. 169;
+  Montesquieu's definition, ii. 169;
+  Rousseau's distinction between _tyrant_ and _despot_, ii.
+     169, _n._;
+  his objection to democracy, ii. 172;
+  to monarchy, ii. 173;
+  consideration of aristocracy, ii. 174;
+  his own scheme, ii. 175;
+  Hobbes's "Passive Obedience," ii. 181, 182;
+  social conscience theory, ii. 183-187;
+  government made impossible by Rousseau's doctrine of social
+     contract, ii. 188-192;
+  Burke on expediency in, ii. 192;
+  what a civilised nation is, ii. 194;
+  Jefferson on, ii. 227, 228, _n._
+
+Governments, earliest, how composed, i. 169.
+
+Graffigny, Madame de, ii. 199.
+
+Gratitude, Rousseau on, ii. 14, 15;
+  explanation of his want of, ii. 70.
+
+Greece, importance of history of, i. 184, and _ib._ _n._
+
+Greek ideas, influence of, in France in the eighteenth century, i.
+     146.
+
+Grenoble, i. 93.
+
+Gr�try, i. 292, 296; ii. 323.
+
+Grimm,
+  description of Rousseau by, i. 206;
+  Rousseau's quarrels with, i. 279;
+  letter of, about Rousseau and Diderot, i. 275;
+  relations of, with Rousseau, i. 279;
+  some account of his life, i. 279;
+  his conversation with Madame d'Epinay, i. 281;
+  criticism on Rousseau, i. 281;
+  natural want of sympathy between the two, i. 282;
+  Rousseau's quarrel with, i. 285-290; ii. 65, 199.
+
+Grotius, on Government, ii. 148.
+
+
+H�BERT, ii. 178;
+  prevents publication of a book in which the author professed his
+     belief in a god, ii. 179.
+
+Helmholtz, i. 299.
+
+Helv�tius, i. 191; ii. 65, 199.
+
+Herder, ii. 251;
+  Rousseau's influence on, ii. 315.
+
+Hermitage, the, given to Rousseau by Madame d'Epinay, i. 229 (also
+     _ib._ _n._);
+  what his friends thought of it, i. 231;
+  sale of, after the Revolution, i. 237, _n._;
+  reasons for Rousseau's leaving, i. 286.
+
+Hildebrand, i. 4.
+
+Hobbes, i. 143, 161;
+  his "Philosophy of Government," ii. 151;
+  singular influence of, upon Rousseau, ii. 151, 183;
+  essential difference between his views and those of Rousseau, ii.
+     159;
+  on Sovereignty, ii. 162;
+  Rousseau's definition of the three forms of government adopted
+     by, inadequate, ii. 168;
+   would reduce spiritual and temporal jurisdiction to one political
+     unity, ii. 183.
+
+Holbachians, i. 337; ii. 2.
+
+Hooker, on Civil Government, ii. 148.
+
+H�tel St. Quentin, Rousseau at, i. 106.
+
+Hume, David, i. 64, 89;
+  his deep-set sagacity, i. 156, ii. 6, 75;
+  suspected of tampering with Boswell's letter, ii. 98, _n._;
+  on Boswell, ii. 101, _n._;
+  his eagerness to find Rousseau a refuge in England, ii. 282, 283;
+  his account of Rousseau, ii. 284;
+  finds him a home at Wootton, ii. 286;
+  Rousseau's quarrel with, ii. 286-291 (also ii. 290, _n._);
+  his innocence of Walpole's letter, ii. 292;
+  his conduct in the quarrel, ii. 293;
+  saves Rousseau from arrest of French Government, ii. 295;
+  on Rousseau's sensitiveness, ii. 299.
+
+
+IMAGINATION, Rousseau's, i. 247.
+
+
+JACOBINS, the, Rousseau's Social Contract, their gospel, ii. 132,
+     133;
+  their mistake, ii. 136;
+  convenience to them of some of the maxims of the Social Contract,
+     ii. 142;
+  Jacobin supremacy and Hobbism, ii. 152;
+  how they might have saved France, ii. 167.
+
+Jansen, his propositions, i. 81.
+
+Jansenists, Rousseau's suspicions of, ii. 63;
+  mentioned, ii. 89.
+
+Jean Paul, ii. 216, 252.
+
+Jefferson, ii. 227, _n._
+
+Jesuits, Rousseau's suspicions of the, ii. 64;
+  the, and parliaments, ii. 65;
+  movement against, ii. 65;
+  suppression of the, leads to increased thought about education,
+     ii. 199.
+
+Johnson, ii. 15, 98.
+
+
+KAMES, Lord, ii. 253.
+
+
+LAMENNAIS, influenced by Rousseau, ii. 228.
+
+Language, origin of, i. 161.
+
+Latour, Madame, ii. 19, _ib. n._
+
+Lavater favourable to education on Rousseau's plan, ii. 251 (also
+     _ib._ _n._)
+
+Lavoisier, reply to his request for a fortnight's respite, ii. 227,
+     _n._
+
+Law, not a contract, ii. 153.
+
+Lecouvreur, Adrienne, refused Christian burial on account of her
+     being an actress, i. 323.
+
+Leibnitz, i. 87;
+  his optimism, i. 309;
+  on the constitution of the universe, i. 312.
+
+Lessing, on Pope, i. 310, _n._
+
+"Letters from the Mountain," ii. 104;
+  burned, by command, at Paris and the Hague, ii. 105.
+
+Liberty, English, Rousseau's notion of, ii. 163, _n._
+
+Life, Rousseau's condemnation of the contemplative, i. 10;
+  his idea of household, i. 41;
+  easier for him to preach than for others to practise, i. 43.
+
+Lisbon, earthquake of, Voltaire on, i. 310;
+  Rousseau's letter to Voltaire on, i. 310, 311.
+
+Locke, his Essay, i. 87;
+  his notions, i. 87;
+  his influence upon Rousseau, ii. 121-126;
+  on Marriage, ii. 126;
+  on Civil Government, ii. 149, 150, _n._;
+  indefiniteness of his views, ii. 160;
+  the pioneer of French thought on education, ii. 202, 203;
+  Rousseau's indebtedness to, ii. 203;
+  his mistake in education, ii. 209;
+  subjects of his theories, ii. 254.
+
+Lulli (music), i. 291.
+
+Luther, i. 4.
+
+Luxembourg, the Duke of, gives Rousseau a home, ii. 2-7, 9.
+
+Luxembourg, the Mar�chale de, in vain seeks Rousseau's children,
+     i. 128;
+  helps to get Emilius published, ii. 63-64, 67.
+
+Lycurgus, ii. 129, 131;
+  influence of, upon Saint Just, ii. 133.
+
+Lyons, Rousseau a tutor at, i. 95-97.
+
+
+MABLY, De, i. 95;
+  his socialism, i. 184;
+  applied to for scheme for the government of Poland, ii. 324.
+
+Maistre, De, i. 145;
+  on Optimism, i. 314.
+
+Maitre, Le, teaches Rousseau music, i. 58.
+
+Malebranche, i. 87.
+
+Malesherbes, Rousseau confesses his ungrateful nature to, ii. 14;
+  his dishonest advice to Rousseau, ii. 60;
+  helps Diderot, ii. 62;
+  and Rousseau in the publishing of Emilius, ii. 62, 63;
+  endangered by it, ii. 67;
+  asks Rousseau to collect plants for him, ii. 76.
+
+Man, his specific distinction from other animals, i. 161;
+  his state of nature, i. 161;
+  Hobbes wrong concerning this, i. 161;
+  equality of, i. 180;
+  effects of this doctrine in France and in the United States, i.
+     182;
+  not naturally free, ii. 126.
+
+Mandeville, i. 162.
+
+Manners, Rousseau's, Marmontel, and Grimm on, i. 205, 206;
+  Rousseau on Swiss, i. 329, 330;
+  depravity of French, in the eighteenth century, ii. 25, 26.
+
+Marischal, Lord, friendship between, and Rousseau, ii. 79-81;
+  account of, ii. 80;
+  on Boswell, ii. 98
+
+Marmontel, on Rousseau's manners, i. 206;
+  on his success, ii. 2.
+
+Marriage, design of the New Helo�sa to exalt, ii. 46-48, _ib._
+     _n._
+
+Marsilio, of Padua, on Law, ii. 145.
+
+Men, inequality of, Rousseau's second Discourse (see Discourses),
+     dedicated to the republic of Geneva, i. 190;
+  how received there, i. 228.
+
+Mirabeau the elder, Rousseau's letter to, from Wootton, ii. 305, 306;
+  his character, ii. 309-312;
+  receives Rousseau at Fleury, ii. 311.
+
+Mirabeau, Gabriel, Rousseau's influence on, ii. 315.
+
+Moli�re (Misanthrope of), Rousseau's criticism on, i. 329;
+  D'Alembert on, i. 329.
+
+Monarchy, Rousseau's objection to, ii. 171.
+
+Montaigu, Count de, avarice of, i. 101, 102.
+
+Montaigne, Rousseau's obligations to, i. 145;
+  influence of, on Rousseau, ii. 203.
+
+Montesquieu, "incomplete positivity" of, i. 156;
+  on Government, i. 157;
+  effect of his Spirit of Laws on Rousseau, i. 183;
+  confused definition of laws, ii. 153;
+  balanced parliamentary system of, ii. 163;
+  his definition of forms of government, ii. 169.
+
+Montmorency, Rousseau goes to live there, i. 229;
+  his life at, ii. 2-9.
+
+Montpellier, i. 92.
+
+Morals, state of, in France in the eighteenth century, ii. 26.
+
+Morellet, thrown into the Bastile, ii. 57.
+
+Morelly, his indirect influence on Rousseau, i. 156;
+  his socialistic theory, i. 157, 158;
+  his rules for organising a model community, i. 158, _n._;
+  his terse exposition of inequality contrasted with that of Rousseau,
+     i. 170;
+  on primitive human nature, i. 175;
+  his socialism, ii. 52;
+  influence of his "model community" upon St. Just, ii. 133,
+     _n._;
+  advice to mothers, ii. 205.
+
+Motiers, Rousseau's home there, ii. 77;
+  attends divine service at, ii. 91;
+  life at, ii. 91, 93.
+
+Moultou (pastor of Motiers), his enthusiasm for Rousseau, ii. 82.
+
+Music, Rousseau undertakes to teach, i. 60;
+  Rousseau's opinion concerning Italian, i. 105;
+  effect of Galuppi's, i. 105;
+  Rousseau earns his living by copying, i. 196; ii. 315;
+  Rameau's criticism on Rousseau's _Muses Galantes_, i. 211;
+  French, i. 291;
+  Rousseau's letter on, i. 292;
+  Italian, denounced at Paris, i. 292;
+  Rousseau utterly condemns French, i. 294;
+  quarrels with Gluck for setting his, to French words, ii. 323.
+
+Musical notation, Rousseau's, i. 291;
+  his Musical Dictionary, i. 296;
+  his notation explained, i. 296-301;
+  his system inapplicable to instruments, i. 301.
+
+
+NAPLES, drunkenness, how regarded in, i. 331.
+
+_Narcisse_, Rousseau's condemnation of his own comedy of, i.
+     215.
+
+Nature, Rousseau's love of, i. 234-241; ii. 39;
+  state of, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Hume on, i. 156-158;
+  Rousseau's, in Second Discourse, i. 171-180;
+  his starting-point of right, and normal constitution of civil
+     society, ii. 124. See State of Nature.
+
+Necker, ii. 54, 98, _n._
+
+Neuch�tel, flight to principality of, by Rousseau, ii. 73;
+  history of, ii. 73, _n._;
+  outbreak at, arising from religious controversy, ii. 90;
+  preparations for driving Rousseau out of, defeated by Frederick of
+     Prussia, ii. 90;
+  clergy of, against Rousseau, ii. 106.
+
+New Helo�sa, first conception of, i. 250;
+  monument of Rousseau's fall, ii. 1;
+  when completed and published, ii. 2;
+  read aloud to the Duchess de Luxembourg, ii. 3;
+  letter on suicide in, ii. 16;
+  effects upon Parisian ladies of reading the, ii. 18, 19;
+  criticism on, ii. 20-55;
+  his scheme proposed in it, ii. 21;
+  its story, ii. 24;
+  its purity, contrasted with contemporary and later French
+     romances, ii. 24;
+  its general effect, ii. 27;
+  Rousseau absolutely without humour, ii. 27;
+  utter selfishness of hero of, ii. 30;
+  its heroine, ii. 30;
+  its popularity, ii. 231, 232;
+  burlesque on it, ii. 31, _n._;
+  its vital defect, ii. 35;
+  difference between Rousseau, Byron, and others, ii. 42;
+  sumptuary details of the story, ii. 44, 45;
+  its democratic tendency, ii. 49, 50;
+  the bearing of its teaching, ii. 54;
+  hindrances to its circulation in France, ii. 57;
+  Malesherbes's low morality as to publishing, ii. 61.
+
+
+OPTIMISM of Pope and Leibnitz, i. 309-310;
+  discussed, ii. 128-130.
+
+Origin of inequality among men, i. 156. See also Discourses.
+
+
+PALEY, ii. 191, _n._
+
+Palissot, ii. 56.
+
+Paris, Rousseau's first visit to, i. 61;
+  his second, i. 63, 97, 102;
+  third visit, i. 106;
+  effect in, of his first Discourse, i. 139, _n._;
+  opinions in, on religion, laws, etc., i. 185;
+  "mimic philosophy" there, i. 193;
+  society in, in Rousseau's time, i. 202-211;
+  his view of it, i. 210;
+  composes there his _Muses Galantes_, i. 211;
+  returns to, from Geneva, i. 228;
+  his belief of the unfitness of its people for political affairs,
+     i. 246;
+  goes to, in 1741, with his scheme of musical notation, i. 291;
+  effect there of his letter on music, i. 295;
+  Rousseau's imaginary contrast between, and Geneva, i. 329;
+  Emilius ordered to be publicly burnt in, ii. 65;
+  parliament of, orders "Letters from the Mountain" to be burnt,
+     ii. 295;
+  also Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary, ii. 295;
+  Danton's scheme for municipal administration of, ii. 168,
+     _n._;
+  two parties (those of Voltaire and of Rousseau) in, in 1793, ii.
+     178;
+  excitement in, at Rousseau's appearance in 1765, ii. 283;
+  he goes to live there in 1770, ii. 314;
+  Voltaire's last visit to, ii. 323, 324.
+
+P�ris, Abb�, miracles at his tomb, ii. 88.
+
+Parisian frivolity, i. 193, 220, 329.
+
+Parliament and Jesuits, ii. 64.
+
+Pascal, ii. 37.
+
+Passy, Rousseau composes the "Village Soothsayer" at, i. 212.
+
+Paul, St., effect of, on western society, i. 4.
+
+Peasantry, French, oppression of, i. 67, 68.
+
+Pedigree of Rousseau, i. 8, _n._
+
+Pelagius, ii. 272.
+
+Peoples, sovereignty of, Rousseau not the inventor of doctrine of,
+     ii. 144-148;
+  taught by Althusen, i. 147;
+  constitution of Helvetic Republic in 1798, a blow at, ii. 165.
+
+Pergolese, i. 292.
+
+Pestalozzi indebted to Emilius, ii. 252.
+
+Philidor, i. 292.
+
+Philosophers, of Rousseau's time, contradicting each other, i. 87;
+  Rousseau's complaint of the, i. 202;
+  war between the, and the priests, i. 322;
+  Rousseau's reactionary protest against, i. 328;
+  troubles of, ii. 59;
+  parliaments hostile to, ii. 64.
+
+Philosophy, Rousseau's disgust at mimic, at Paris, i. 193;
+  drew him to the essential in religion, i. 220;
+  Voltaire's no perfect, i. 318.
+
+Phlipon, Jean Marie, Rousseau's influence on, ii. 315.
+
+Plato, his republic, i. 122;
+  his influence on Rousseau, i. 146, 325, _n._;
+  Milton on his Laws, ii. 178.
+
+Plays (stage), Rousseau's letter on, to D'Alembert, i. 321;
+  his views of, i. 323;
+  Jeremy Collier and Bossuet on, i. 323;
+  in Geneva, i. 333, 334, _n._;
+  Rousseau, Voltaire, and D'Alembert on, i. 332-337.
+
+Plutarch, Rousseau's love for, i. 13.
+
+Plutocracy, new, faults of, i. 195.
+
+Pompadour, Madame de, and the Jesuits, ii. 64.
+
+Pontverre (priest) converts Rousseau to Romanism, i. 31-35.
+
+Pope, his Essay on Man translated by Voltaire, i. 309;
+  Berlin Academy and Lessing on it, i. 310, _n._;
+  criticism on it by Rousseau, i. 312;
+  its general position reproduced by Rousseau, i. 315.
+
+Popelini�re, M. de, i. 211.
+
+Positive knowledge, i. 78.
+
+Press, freedom of the, ii. 59.
+
+Pr�vost, Abb�, i. 48.
+
+_Projet pour l'Education_, i. 96, _n._
+
+Property, private, evils ascribed to i. 157, 185;
+  Robespierre disclaimed the intention of attacking, i. 123,
+     _n._
+
+Protestant principles, effect of development of, ii. 146-147.
+
+Protestantism, his conversion to, i. 220;
+  its influence on Rousseau, i. 221.
+
+
+RAMEAU on Rousseau's _Muses Galantes_, i. 119, 211;
+  mentioned, i. 291.
+
+Rationalism, i. 224, 225;
+  influence of Descartes on, i. 225.
+
+Reason, De Saint Pierre's views of, i. 244.
+
+Reform, essential priority of social over political, ii. 43.
+
+Religion, simplification of, i. 3;
+  ideas of, in Paris, i. 186, 187, 207, 208;
+  Rousseau's view of, i. 220;
+  doctrines of, in Geneva, i. 223-227, also _n._;
+  curious project concerning it, by Rousseau, i. 317;
+  separation of spiritual and temporal powers deemed mischievous by
+     Rousseau, ii. 173;
+  in its relation to the state may be considered as of three kinds,
+     ii. 175;
+  duty of the sovereign to establish a civil confession of faith,
+     ii. 176, 177;
+  positive dogmas of this, ii. 176;
+  Rousseau's "pure Hobbism," ii. 177.
+  See Savoyard Vicar (Emilius), ii. 256, 281.
+
+Renou, Rousseau assumes name of, i. 129; ii. 312.
+
+Revelation, Christian, Rousseau's controversy on, with Archbishop of
+     Paris, ii. 86-91.
+
+_R�veries_, Rousseau's relinquishing society, i. 199;
+  description of his life in the isle of St. Peter, in the, ii.
+     109-115;
+  their style ii. 314.
+
+Revolution, French, principles of, i. 1, 2;
+  benefits of, or otherwise, ii. 54;
+  Baboeuf on, ii. 123, 124, _n._;
+  the starting point in the history of its ideas, ii. 160.
+
+Revolutionary process and ideal i. 4, 5.
+
+Revolutionists, difference among, i. 2.
+
+Richardson (the novelist), ii. 25, 28.
+
+Richelieu's brief patronage of Rousseau, i. 195, 302.
+
+Rivi�re, de la, origin of society, ii. 156, 157;
+  anecdote of, ii. 156, 157, _n._
+
+Robecq, Madame de, ii. 56.
+
+Robespierre, ii. 123, 134, 160, 178, 179;
+  his "sacred right of insurrection," ii. 188, _n._;
+  Rousseau's influence on, ii. 315.
+
+Rousseau, Didier, i. 8.
+
+Rousseau, Jean Baptiste, i. 61, _n._
+
+Rousseau, Jean Jacques, influence of his writings on France and the
+     American colonists, i. 1, 2;
+  on Robespierre, Paine, and Chateaubriand, i. 3;
+  his place as a leader, i. 3;
+  starting-point, of his mental habits, i. 4;
+  personality of, i. 4;
+  influence on the common people, i. 5;
+  his birth and ancestry, i. 8;
+  pedigree, i. 8, _n._;
+  parents, i. 10, 11;
+  influence upon him of his father's character, i. 11, 12;
+  his reading in childhood, i. 12, 13;
+  love of Plutarch, i. 13;
+  early years, i. 13, 14;
+  sent to school at Bossey, i. 15;
+  deterioration of his moral character there, i. 17;
+  indignation at an unjust punishment, i. 17, 18;
+  leaves school, i. 20;
+  youthful life at Geneva, i. 21, 22;
+  his remarks on its character, i. 24;
+  anecdotes of it, i. 22, 24;
+  his leading error as to the education of the young, i. 25, 26;
+  religious training, i. 25;
+  apprenticeship, i. 26;
+  boyish doings, i. 27;
+  harshness of his master, i. 27;
+  runs away, i. 29;
+  received by the priest of Confignon, i. 31;
+  sent to Madame de Warens, i. 84;
+  at Turin, i. 35;
+  hypocritical conversion to Roman Catholicism, i. 37;
+  motive, i. 38;
+  registry of his baptism, i. 38, _n._;
+  his forlorn condition, i. 39;
+  love of music, i. 39;
+  becomes servant to Madame de Vercellis, i. 39;
+  his theft, lying, and excuses for it, i. 39, 40;
+  becomes servant to Count of Gouvon, i. 42;
+  dismissed, i. 43;
+  returns to Madame de Warens, i. 45;
+  his temperament, i. 46, 47;
+  in training for the priesthood, but pronounced too stupid, i. 57;
+  tries music, i. 57;
+  shamelessly abandons his companion, i. 58;
+  goes to Freiburg, Neuch�tel, and Paris, i. 61, 62;
+  conjectural chronology of his movements about this time. i. 62,
+     _n._;
+  love of vagabond life, i. 62-68;
+  effect upon him of his intercourse with the poor, i. 68;
+  becomes clerk to a land surveyor at Chamb�ri, i. 69;
+  life there, i. 69-72;
+  ill-health and retirement to Les Charmettes, i. 73;
+  his latest recollection of this time, i. 75-77;
+  his "form of worship," i. 77;
+  love of nature, i. 77, 78;
+  notion of deity, i. 77;
+  peculiar intellectual feebleness, i. 81;
+  criticism on himself, i. 83;
+  want of logic in his mental constitution, i. 85;
+  effect on him of Voltaire's Letters on the English, i. 85;
+  self-training, i. 86;
+  mistaken method of it, i. 86, 87;
+  writes a comedy, i. 89;
+  enjoyment of rural life at Les Charmettes, i. 91, 92;
+  robs Madame de Warens, i. 92;
+  leaves her, i. 93;
+  discrepancy between dates of his letters and the Confessions, i.
+     93;
+  takes a tutorship at Lyons, i. 95;
+  condemns the practice of writing Latin, i. 96, _n._;
+  resigns his tutorship, and goes to Paris, i. 97;
+  reception there, i. 98-100;
+  appointed secretary to French Ambassador at Venice, i. 100-106;
+  in quarantine at Genoa, i. 104;
+  his estimate of French melody, i. 105;
+  returns to Paris, i. 106;
+  becomes acquainted with Theresa Le Vasseur, i. 106;
+  his conduct criticised, i. 107-113;
+  simple life, i. 113;
+  letter to her, i. 115-119;
+  his poverty, i. 119;
+  becomes secretary to Madame Dupin and her son-in-law, M. de
+     Francueil, i. 119;
+  sends his children to the foundling hospital, i. 120, 121;
+  paltry excuses for the crime, i. 121-126;
+  his pretended marriage under the name of Renou, i. 129;
+  his Discourses, i. 132-186 (see Discourses);
+  writes essays for academy of Dijon, i. 132;
+  origin of first essay, i. 133-137;
+  his "visions" for thirteen years, i. 138;
+  evil effect upon himself of the first Discourse, i. 138;
+  of it, the second Discourse and the Social Contract upon Europe,
+     i. 138;
+  his own opinion of it, i. 138, 139;
+  influence of Plato upon him, i. 146;
+  second Discourse, i. 154;
+  his "State of Nature," i. 159;
+  no evidence for it, i. 172;
+  influence of Montesquieu on him, i. 183;
+  inconsistency of his views, i. 124;
+  influence of Geneva upon him, i. 187, 188;
+  his disgust at Parisian philosophers, i. 191, 192;
+  the two sides of his character, i. 193;
+  associates in Paris, i. 193;
+  his income, i. 196, 197, _n._;
+  post of cashier, i. 196;
+  throws it up, i. 197, 198;
+  determines to earn his living by copying music, i. 198, 199;
+  change of manners, i. 201;
+  dislike of the manners of his time, i. 202, 203;
+  assumption of a seeming cynicism, i. 206;
+  Grimm's rebuke of it, i. 206;
+  Rousseau's protest against atheism, i. 208, 209;
+  composes a musical interlude, the Village Soothsayer, i. 212;
+  his nervousness loses him the chance of a pension, i. 213;
+  his moral simplicity, i. 214, 215;
+  revisits Geneva, i. 216;
+  re-conversion to Protestantism, i. 220;
+  his friends at Geneva, i. 227;
+  their effect upon him, i. 227;
+  returns to Paris, i. 227;
+  the Hermitage offered him by Madame d'Epinay, i. 229, 230 (and
+     _ib. n._);
+  retires to it against the protests of his friends, i. 231;
+  his love of nature, i. 234, 235, 236;
+  first days at the Hermitage, i. 237;
+  rural delirium, i. 237;
+  dislike of society, i. 242;
+  literary scheme, i. 242, 243;
+  remarks on Saint Pierre, i. 246;
+  violent mental crisis, i. 247;
+  employs his illness in writing to Voltaire on Providence, i. 250,
+     251;
+  his intolerance of vice in others, i. 254;
+  acquaintance with Madame de Houdetot, i. 255-269;
+  source of his irritability, i. 270, 271;
+  blind enthusiasm of his admirers, i. 273, also _ib. n._;
+  quarrels with Diderot, i. 275;
+  Grimm's account of them, i. 276;
+  quarrels with Madame d'Epinay, i. 276, 288;
+  relations with Grimm, i. 279;
+  want of sympathy between the two, i. 279;
+  declines to accompany Madame d'Epinay to Geneva, i. 285;
+  quarrels with Grimm, i. 285;
+  leaves the Hermitage, i. 289, 290;
+  aims in music, i. 291;
+  letter on French music, i. 293, 294;
+  writes on music in the Encyclop�dia, i. 296;
+  his Musical Dictionary, i. 296;
+  scheme and principles of his new musical notation, i. 269;
+  explained, i. 298, 299;
+  its practical value, i. 299;
+  his mistake, i. 300;
+  minor objections, i. 300;
+  his temperament and Genevan spirit, i. 303;
+  compared with Voltaire, i. 304, 305;
+  had a more spiritual element than Voltaire, i. 306;
+  its influence in France, i. 307;
+  early relations with Voltaire, i. 308;
+  letter to him on his poem on the earthquake at Lisbon, i. 312,
+     313, 314;
+  reasons in a circle, i. 316;
+  continuation of argument against Voltaire, i. 316, 317;
+  curious notion about religion, i. 317;
+  quarrels with Voltaire, i. 318, 319;
+  denounces him as a "trumpet of impiety," i. 320, _n._;
+  letter to D'Alembert on Stage Plays, i. 321;
+  true answer to his theory, i. 323, 324;
+  contrasts Paris and Geneva, i. 327, 328;
+  his patriotism, i. 329, 330, 331;
+  censure of love as a poetic theme, i. 334, 335;
+  on Social Position of Women, i. 335;
+  Voltaire and D'Alembert's criticism on his Letter on Stage Plays,
+     i. 336, 337;
+  final break with Diderot, i. 336;
+  antecedents of his highest creative efforts, ii. 1;
+  friends at Montmorency, ii. 2;
+  reads the New Helo�sa to the Mar�chale de Luxembourg, ii. 2;
+  unwillingness to receive gifts, ii. 5;
+  his relations with the Duke and Duchess de Luxembourg, ii. 7;
+  misunderstands the friendliness of Madame de Boufflers, ii. 7;
+  calm life at Montmorency, ii. 8;
+  literary jealousy, ii. 8;
+  last of his peaceful days, ii. 9;
+  advice to a young man against the contemplative life, ii. 10;
+  offensive form of his "good sense" concerning persecution of
+     Protestants, ii. 11, 12;
+  cause of his unwillingness to receive gifts, ii. 13, 14;
+  owns his ungrateful nature, ii. 15;
+  ill-humoured banter, ii. 15;
+  his constant bodily suffering, ii. 16;
+  thinks of suicide, ii. 16;
+  correspondence with the readers of the New Helo�sa, ii. 19, 20;
+  the New Helo�sa, criticism on, ii. 20-55 (see New Helo�sa);
+  his publishing difficulties, ii. 56;
+  no taste for martyrdom, ii. 59, 60;
+  curious discussion between, ii. 59;
+  and Malesherbes, ii. 60;
+  indebted to Malesherbes in the publication of Emilius, ii. 61, 62;
+  suspects Jesuits, Jansenists, and philosophers of plotting to
+     crush the book, ii. 63;
+  himself counted among the latter, ii. 65;
+  Emilius ordered to be burnt by public executioner, on the charge
+     of irreligious tendency, and its author to be arrested, ii. 65;
+  his flight, ii. 67;
+  literary composition on the journey to Switzerland, ii. 69;
+  contrast between him and Voltaire, ii. 70;
+  explanation of his "natural ingratitude," ii. 71;
+  reaches the canton of Berne, and ordered to quit it, ii. 72;
+  Emilius and Social Contract condemned to be publicly burnt at
+     Geneva, and author arrested if he came there, ii. 72, 73;
+  takes refuge at Motiers, in dominions of Frederick of Prussia, ii.
+     73;
+  characteristic letters to the king, ii. 74, 77;
+  declines pecuniary help from him, ii. 75;
+  his home and habits at Motiers, ii. 77, 78;
+  Voltaire supposed to have stirred up animosity against him at
+     Geneva, ii. 81;
+  Archbishop of Paris writes against him, ii. 83;
+  his reply, and character as a controversialist, ii. 83-90;
+  life at Val de Travers (Motiers), ii. 91-95;
+  his generosity, ii. 93;
+  corresponds with the Prince of W�rtemberg on the education of the
+     prince's daughter, ii. 95, 96;
+  on Gibbon, ii. 96;
+  visit from Boswell, ii. 98;
+  invited to legislate for Corsica, ii. 99, _n._;
+  urges Boswell to go there, ii. 100;
+  denounces its sale by the Genoese, ii. 102;
+  renounces his citizenship of Geneva, ii. 103;
+  his Letters from the Mountain, ii. 104;
+  the letters condemned to be burned at Paris and the Hague, ii.
+     105;
+  libel upon, ii. 105;
+  religious difficulties with his pastor, ii. 106;
+  ill-treatment of, in parish, ii. 106;
+  obliged to leave it, ii. 108;
+  his next retreat, ii. 108;
+  account in the _R�veries_ of his short stay there, ii. 109-115;
+  expelled by government of Berne, ii. 116;
+  makes an extraordinary request to it, ii. 116, 117;
+  difficulties in finding a home, ii. 117;
+  short stay at Strasburg, ii. 117, _n._;
+  decides on going to England, ii. 118;
+  his Social Contract, and criticism on, ii. 119, 196 (see Social
+     Contract);
+  scanty acquaintance with history, ii. 129;
+  its effects on his political writings, ii. 129, 136;
+  his object in writing Emilius, ii. 198;
+  his confession of faith, under the character of the Savoyard Vicar
+     (see Emilius), ii. 257-280;
+  excitement caused by his appearance in Paris in 1765, ii. 282;
+  leaves for England in company with Hume, ii. 283;
+  reception in London, ii. 283, 284;
+  George III. gives him a pension, ii. 284;
+  his love for his dog, ii. 286;
+  finds a home at Wootton, ii. 286;
+  quarrels with Hume, ii. 287;
+  particulars in connection with it, ii. 287-296;
+  his approaching insanity at this period, ii. 296;
+  the preparatory conditions of it, ii. 297-301;
+  begins writing the Confessions, ii. 301;
+  their character, ii. 301-304;
+  life at Wootton, ii. 305, 306;
+  sudden flight thence, ii. 306;
+  kindness of Mr. Davenport, ii. 306, 307;
+  his delusion, ii. 307;
+  returns to France, ii. 308;
+  received at Fleury by the elder Mirabeau, ii. 310, 311;
+  the prince of Conti next receives him at Trye, ii. 312;
+  composes the second part of the Confessions here, ii. 312;
+  delusion returns, ii. 312, 313;
+  leaves Trye, and wanders about the country, ii. 312, 313;
+  estrangement from Theresa, ii. 313;
+  goes to Paris, ii. 314;
+  writes his Dialogues there, ii. 314;
+  again earns his living by copying music, ii. 315;
+  daily life in, ii. 315, 316;
+  Bernardin St. Pierre's account of him, ii. 317-321;
+  his veneration for F�nelon, ii. 321;
+  his unsociality, ii. 322;
+  checks a detractor of Voltaire, ii. 324;
+  draws up his Considerations on the Government of Poland, ii. 324;
+  estimate of the Spanish, ii. 324;
+  his poverty, ii. 325;
+  accepts a home at Ermenonville from M. Girardin, ii. 326;
+  his painful condition, ii. 326;
+  sudden death, ii. 326;
+  cause of it unknown, ii. 326 (see also _ib. n._);
+  his interment, ii. 326;
+  finally removed to Paris, ii. 328.
+
+
+SAINTE BEUVE on Rousseau and Madame d'Epinay, i. 279, _n._;
+  on Rousseau, ii. 40.
+
+Saint Germain, M. de, Rousseau's letter to, i. 123.
+
+Saint Just, ii. 132, 133;
+  his political regulations, ii. 133, _n._;
+  base of his system, ii. 136;
+  against the atheists, ii. 179.
+
+Saint Lambert, i. 244;
+  offers Rousseau a home in Lorraine, ii. 117.
+
+Saint Pierre, Abb� de, Rousseau arranges papers of, i. 244;
+  his views concerning reason, _ib._;
+  boldness of his observations, i. 245.
+
+Saint Pierre, Bernardin de, account of his visit to Rousseau at
+     Paris, ii. 317-321.
+
+Sand, Madame G., i. 81, _n._;
+  Savoy landscape, i. 99, _n._;
+  ancestry of, i. 121, _n._
+
+Savages, code of morals of, i. 178-179, _n._
+
+Savage state, advantages of, Rousseau's letter to Voltaire, i. 312.
+
+Savoy, priests of, proselytisers, i. 30, 31, 33 (also _ib._ _n._)
+
+Savoyard Vicar, the, origin of character of, ii. 257-280 (see
+     Emilius).
+
+Schiller on Rousseau, ii. 192 (also _ib._ _n._);
+  Rousseau's influence on, ii. 315.
+
+Servetus, ii. 180.
+
+Simplification, the revolutionary process and ideal of, i. 4;
+  in reference to Rousseau's music, i. 291.
+
+Social conscience, theory and definition of, ii. 234, 235;
+  the great agent in fostering, ii. 237.
+
+Social Contract, the, ill effect of, on Europe, i. 138;
+  beginning of its composition, i. 177;
+  ideas of, i. 188;
+  its harmful dreams, i. 246;
+  influence of, ii. 1;
+  price of, and difficulties in publishing, ii. 59;
+  ordered to be burnt at Geneva, ii. 72, 73, 104;
+  detailed criticism of, ii. 119-196;
+  Rousseau diametrically opposed to the dominant belief of his day
+     in human perfectibility, ii. 119;
+  object of the work, ii. 120;
+  main position of the two Discourses given up in it, ii. 120;
+  influenced by Locke, ii. 120;
+  its uncritical, illogical principles, ii. 123, 124;
+  its impracticableness, ii. 128;
+  nature of his illustrations, ii. 128-133;
+  the "gospel of the Jacobins," ii. 132, 133;
+  the desperate absurdity of its assumptions gave it power in the
+     circumstances of the times, ii. 135-141;
+  some of its maxims very convenient for ruling Jacobins, ii. 142;
+  its central conception, the sovereignty of peoples, ii. 144;
+  Rousseau not its inventor, ii. 144, 145;
+  this to be distinguished from doctrine of right of subjects to
+     depose princes, ii. 146;
+  Social Contract idea of government, probably derived from Locke,
+     ii. 150;
+  falseness of it, ii. 153, 154;
+  origin of society, ii. 154;
+  ill effects on Rousseau's political speculation, ii. 155;
+  what constitutes the sovereignty, ii. 158;
+  Rousseau's Social Contract different from that of Hobbes, ii. 159;
+  Locke's indefiniteness on, ii. 160;
+  attributes of sovereignty, ii. 163;
+  confederation, ii. 164, 165;
+  his distinction between _tyrant_ and _despot_, ii. 169,
+     _n._;
+  distinguishes constitution of the state from that of the government,
+     ii. 170;
+  scheme of an elective aristocracy, ii. 172;
+  similarity to the English form of government, ii. 173;
+  the state in respect to religion, ii. 173;
+  habitually illogical form of his statements, ii. 173, 174;
+  duty of sovereign to establish civil profession of faith, ii. 175,
+     176;
+  infringement of it to be punished, even by death, ii. 176;
+  Rousseau's Hobbism, ii. 177;
+  denial of his social compact theory, ii. 183, 184;
+  futility of his disquisitions on, ii. 185, 186;
+  his declaration of general duty of rebellion (arising out of the
+     universal breach of social compact) considered, ii. 188;
+  it makes government impossible, ii. 188;
+  he urges that usurped authority is another valid reason for
+     rebellion, ii. 190;
+  practical evils of this, ii. 192;
+  historical effect of the Social Contract, ii. 192-195.
+
+Social quietism of some parts of New Helo�sa, ii. 49.
+
+Socialism: Morelly, and De Mably, ii. 52;
+  what it is, ii. 159.
+
+Socialistic theory of Morelly, i. 158, 159 (also i. 158, _n._)
+
+Society, Aristotle on, i. 174;
+  D'Alembert's statements on, i. 174, _n._;
+  Parisian, Rousseau on, i. 209;
+  dislike of, i. 242;
+  Rousseau's origin of, ii. 153;
+  true grounds of, ii. 155, 156.
+
+Socrates, i. 131, 140, 232; ii. 72, 273.
+
+Solitude, eighteenth century notions of, i. 231, 232.
+
+Solon, ii. 133.
+
+Sorbonne, the, condemns Emilius, ii. 82.
+
+Spectator, the, Rousseau's liking for, i. 86.
+
+Spinoza, dangerous speculations of, i. 143.
+
+Sta�l, Madame de, i. 217, _n._
+
+Stage players, how treated in France, i. 322.
+
+Stage plays (see Plays).
+
+State of Nature, Rousseau's, i. 159, 160;
+  Hobbes on, i. 161 (see Nature).
+
+Suicide, Rousseau on, ii. 16;
+  a mistake to pronounce him incapable of, ii. 19.
+
+Switzerland, i. 330.
+
+
+TACITUS, i. 177.
+
+Theatre, Rousseau's letter, objecting to the, i. 133;
+  his error in the matter, i. 134.
+
+Theology, metaphysical, Descartes' influence on, i. 226.
+
+Theresa (see Le Vasseur).
+
+Thought, school of, division between rationalists and emotionalists,
+     i. 337.
+
+Tonic Sol-fa notation, close correspondence of the, to Rousseau's
+     system, i. 299.
+
+Tronchin on Voltaire, i. 319, _n._, 321.
+
+Turgot, i. 89;
+  his discourses at the Sorbonne in 1750, i. 155;
+  the one sane eminent Frenchman of eighteenth century, i. 202;
+  his unselfish toil, i. 233; ii. 193;
+  mentioned, ii. 246, 294.
+
+Turin, Rousseau at, i. 34-43;
+  leaves it, i. 45;
+  tries to learn Latin at, i. 91.
+
+Turretini and other rationalisers, i. 226;
+  his works, i. 226, _n._
+
+
+UNIVERSE, constitution of, discussion on, i. 311-317.
+
+
+VAGABOND life, Rousseau's love of, i. 63, 68.
+
+Val de Travers, ii. 77; Rousseau's life in, ii. 91-95.
+
+Vasseur, Theresa Le, Rousseau's first acquaintance with, i. 106,
+     107, also _ib._ _n._;
+  their life together, i. 110-113;
+  well befriended, ii. 80, _n._;
+  her evil character, ii. 326.
+
+Vauvenargues on emotional instinct, ii. 34.
+
+Venice, Rousseau at, i. 100-106.
+
+Vercellis, Madame de, Rousseau servant to, i. 39.
+
+Verdelin, Madame de, her kindness to Theresa, ii. 80, _n._;
+  to Rousseau, ii. 118, _n._
+
+Village Soothsayer, the (_Devin du Village_), composed at
+     Passy, performed at Fontainebleau and Paris, i. 212;
+  marked a revolution in French Music, i. 291.
+
+Voltaire, i. 2, 21, 63;
+  effect on Rousseau of his Letters on the English, i. 86;
+  spreads a derogatory report about Rousseau, i. 101, _n._;
+  his "Princesse de Navarre," i. 119;
+  criticism on Rousseau's first Discourse, i. 147;
+  effect on his work of his common sense, i. 155;
+  avoids the society of Paris, i. 202;
+  his conversion to Romanism, i. 220, 221;
+  strictures on Homer and Shakespeare, i. 280;
+  his position in the eighteenth century, i. 301;
+  general difference between, and Rousseau, i. 301;
+  clung to the rationalistic school of his day, i. 305;
+  on Rousseau's second Discourse, i. 308;
+  his poem on the earthquake of Lisbon, i. 309, 310;
+  his sympathy with suffering, i. 311, 312;
+  entreated by Rousseau to draw up a civil profession of religious
+     faith, i. 317;
+  denounced by Rousseau as a "trumpet of impiety," i. 317, 320,
+     _n._;
+  his satire and mockery irritated Rousseau, i. 319;
+  what he was to his contemporaries, i. 321;
+  the great play-writer of the time, i. 321;
+  his criticism of Rousseau's Letter on the Theatre, i. 336;
+  his indignation at wrong, ii. 11;
+  ridicule of the New Helo�sa, ii. 34;
+  less courageous than Rousseau, ii. 65;
+  contrast between the two, i. 99, ii. 75;
+  supposed to have stirred up animosity at Geneva against Rousseau,
+     ii. 81;
+  denies it, ii. 81;
+  his notion of how the matter would end, ii. 81;
+  his fickleness, ii. 83;
+  on Rousseau's connection with Corsica, ii. 101;
+  his Philosophical Dictionary burnt by order at Paris, ii. 105;
+  his opinion of Emilius, ii. 257;
+  prime agent in introducing English deism into France, ii. 262;
+  suspected by Rousseau of having written the pretended letter from
+     the King of Prussia, ii. 288;
+  last visit to Paris, ii. 324.
+
+
+WALKING, Rousseau's love of, i. 63.
+
+Walpole, Horace, writer of the pretended letter from the King of
+     Prussia, ii. 288, _n._;
+  advises Hume not to publish his account of Rousseau's quarrel with
+     him, ii. 295.
+
+War arising out of the succession to the crown of Poland, i. 72.
+
+Warens, Madame de, Rousseau's introduction to, i. 34;
+  her personal appearance, i. 34;
+  receives Rousseau into her house, i. 43;
+  her early life, i. 48;
+  character of, i. 49-51;
+  goes to Paris, i. 59;
+  receives Rousseau at Chamb�ri, and gets him employment, i. 69;
+  her household, i. 70;
+  removes to Les Charmettes, i. 73;
+  cultivates Rousseau's taste for letters, i. 85;
+  Saint Louis, her patron saint, i. 91;
+  revisited by Rousseau in 1754, i. 216;
+  her death in poverty and wretchedness, i. 217, 218 (also i. 219,
+     _n._)
+
+Wesleyanism, ii. 258.
+
+Women, Condorcet on social position of, i. 335;
+  D'Alembert and Condorcet on, i. 335.
+
+Wootton, Rousseau's home at, ii. 286.
+
+World, divine government of, Rousseau vindicates, i. 312.
+
+W�rtemberg, correspondence between Prince of, and Rousseau, on the
+     education of the little princess, ii. 95;
+  becomes reigning duke, ii. 95, _n._;
+  seeks permission for Rousseau to live in Vienna, ii. 117.
+
+
+THE END.
+
+
+_Printed by_ R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, _Edinburgh._
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Rousseau, by John Morley
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ROUSSEAU ***
+
+***** This file should be named 14052-8.txt or 14052-8.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        http://www.gutenberg.org/1/4/0/5/14052/
+
+Produced by Paul Murray, Charlie Kirschner (Vol. 1), Linda
+Cantoni (Vol. 2), and the Online Distributed Proofreading
+Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+http://gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
+or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need, is critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at http://www.pglaf.org.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
+http://pglaf.org/fundraising.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at http://pglaf.org
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit http://pglaf.org
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations.
+To donate, please visit: http://pglaf.org/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart is the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     http://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
diff --git a/old/14052-8.zip b/old/14052-8.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..8e112e1
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/14052-8.zip
diff --git a/old/14052-h.zip b/old/14052-h.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..a2802ee
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/14052-h.zip
diff --git a/old/14052-h/14052-h.htm b/old/14052-h/14052-h.htm
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..877629f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/14052-h/14052-h.htm
@@ -0,0 +1,27088 @@
+<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>
+
+<!DOCTYPE html
+   PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
+   "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd" >
+
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
+  <head>
+    <title>
+      The Project Gutenberg eBook of Rousseau, Vol. 1 and 2, by John Morley.
+    </title>
+    <style type="text/css" xml:space="preserve">
+    p {  margin-top: .75em;
+         text-align: justify;
+         margin-bottom: .75em;
+         }
+    h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6 {
+         text-align: center; /* all headings centered */
+         clear: both;
+         }
+    hr { width: 33%;
+	 margin-top: 2em;
+	 margin-bottom: 2em;
+         margin-left: auto;
+         margin-right: auto;
+         clear: both;
+       }
+
+    table {margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;}
+
+    body{margin-left: 10%;
+         margin-right: 10%;
+        }
+
+    .pagenum  { /* uncomment the next line for invisible page numbers */
+            /*  visibility: hidden;  */
+                position: absolute;
+                left: 92%;
+                font-size: smaller;
+                text-align: right;
+              } /* page numbers */
+
+    .linenum  {position: absolute; top: auto; left: 4%;} /* poetry number */
+    .blockquot{margin-left: 5%; margin-right: 10%;}
+    .sidenote {width: 20%; padding-bottom: .5em; padding-top: .5em;
+               padding-left: .5em; padding-right: .5em; margin-left: 1em;
+               float: right; clear: right; margin-top: 1em;
+               font-size: smaller; color: black; background: #eeeeee; border: dashed 1px;}
+
+    .bb       {border-bottom: solid 2px;}
+    .bl       {border-left: solid 2px;}
+    .bt       {border-top: solid 2px;}
+    .br       {border-right: solid 2px;}
+    .bbox     {border: solid 2px;}
+
+    .center   {text-align: center;}
+    .smcap    {font-variant: small-caps;}
+    .u        {text-decoration: underline;}
+
+    .caption  {font-weight: bold;}
+
+    .figcenter   {margin: auto; text-align: center;}
+
+    .figleft     {float: left; clear: left; margin-left: 0; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top:
+                 1em; margin-right: 1em; padding: 0; text-align: center;}
+
+    .figright    {float: right; clear: right; margin-left: 1em; margin-bottom: 1em;
+                 margin-top: 1em; margin-right: 0; padding: 0; text-align: center;}
+
+    .poem             {margin-left:10%; margin-right:10%; text-align: left;}
+    .poem br          {display: none;}
+    .poem .stanza     {margin: 1em 0em 1em 0em;}
+    .poem span.i0     {display: block; margin-left: 0em; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;}
+    .poem span.i2     {display: block; margin-left: 2em; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;}
+    .poem span.i4     {display: block; margin-left: 4em; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;}
+    .poem span.i20     {display: block; margin-left: 20em; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;}
+    .poem span.i31     {display: block; margin-left: 31em; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;}
+    </style>
+  </head>
+  <body>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Rousseau, by John Morley
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Rousseau
+       Volumes I. and II.
+
+Author: John Morley
+
+Release Date: January 25, 2006 [EBook #14052]
+Last Updated: March 6, 2019
+
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ROUSSEAU ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Paul Murray, Charlie Kirschner (Vol. 1), Linda
+Cantoni (Vol. 2), and the Online Distributed Proofreading
+Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+The separate html files Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 of the original ebook
+have been combined in the present file by David Widger to make it
+readable in mobile viewers.
+
+
+</pre>
+    <h1>
+      ROUSSEAU
+    </h1>
+    <h3>
+      BY
+    </h3>
+    <h2>
+      JOHN MORLEY
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      VOL. I and II.
+    </h3>
+    <hr style="width: 35%;" />
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      London<br /> MACMILLAN AND CO., <span class="smcap">Limited</span><br /> NEW
+      YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY<br /> 1905<br />
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      <i>All rights reserved</i>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      <i>First printed in this form 1886<br /> Reprinted 1888, 1891, 1896, 1900,
+      1905</i><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr style="width: 65%;" />
+    <h2>
+      NOTE TO THE FIRST EDITION.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      This work differs from its companion volume in offering something more
+      like a continuous personal history than was necessary in the case of such
+      a man as Voltaire, the story of whose life may be found in more than one
+      English book of repute. Of Rousseau there is, I believe, no full
+      biographical account in our literature, and even France has nothing more
+      complete under this head than Musset-Pathay's <i>Histoire de la Vie et des
+      Ouvrages de J.J. Rousseau</i> (1821). This, though a meritorious piece of
+      labour, is extremely crude and formless in composition and arrangement,
+      and the interpreting portions are devoid of interest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The edition of Rousseau's works to which the references have been made is
+      that by M. Auguis, in twenty-seven volumes, published in 1825 by Dalibon.
+      In 1865 M. Streckeisen-Moultou published from the originals, which had
+      been deposited in the library of Neuch&#226;tel by Du Peyrou, the letters
+      addressed to Rousseau by various correspondents. These two interesting
+      volumes, which are entitled <i>Rousseau, ses Amis et ses Ennemis</i>, are
+      mostly referred to under the name of their editor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>February, 1873.</i>
+    </p>
+    <hr style="width: 25%;" />
+    <p>
+      The second edition in 1878 was revised; some portions were considerably
+      shortened, and a few additional footnotes inserted. No further changes
+      have been made in the present edition.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>January, 1886.</i>
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      <a href="#volume1">VOLUME I.</a>
+    </h3>
+    <h3>
+      <a href="#volume2">VOLUME II.</a>
+    </h3>
+    <hr style="width: 65%;" />
+    <h2>
+      <a name="CONTENTS_I" id="CONTENTS_I">CONTENTS</a> OF VOL. I.
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      <a href="#CHAPTER_I.">CHAPTER I.</a>
+    </h3>
+    <h4>
+      <span class="smcap">Preliminary</span>.
+    </h4>
+    <table summary="">
+      <tbody>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            &#160;
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            PAGE
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            The Revolution
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.1">1</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Rousseau its most direct speculative precursor
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.2">2</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            His distinction among revolutionists
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.4">4</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            His personality
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.5">5</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+      </tbody>
+    </table>
+    <p>
+      &#160;
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      <a href="#CHAPTER_II">CHAPTER II.</a>
+    </h3>
+    <h4>
+      <span class="smcap">Youth</span>.
+    </h4>
+    <table summary="">
+      <tbody>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            &#160;
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            PAGE
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Birth and descent
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.8">8</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Predispositions
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.10">10</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            First lessons
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.11">11</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            At M. Lambercier's
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.15">15</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Early disclosure of sensitive temperament
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.19">19</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Return to Geneva
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.20">20</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Two apprenticeships
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.26">26</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Flight from Geneva
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.30">30</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Savoyard proselytisers
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.31">31</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Rousseau sent to Anncey, and thence to Turin
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.34">34</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Conversion to Catholicism
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.35">35</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Takes service with Madame de Vercellis
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.39">39</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Then with the Count de Gouvon
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.42">42</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Returns to vagabondage
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.43">43</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            And to Madame de Warens
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.45">45</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+      </tbody>
+    </table>
+    <p>
+      &#160;
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      <a href="#CHAPTER_III.">CHAPTER III.</a>
+    </h3>
+    <h4>
+      <span class="smcap">Savoy</span>.
+    </h4>
+    <table summary="">
+      <tbody>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            &#160;
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            PAGE
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Influence of women upon Rousseau
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.46">46</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Account of Madame de Warens
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.48">48</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Rousseau takes up his abode with her
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.54">54</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            His delight in life with her
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.54">54</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            The seminarists
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.57">57</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            To Lyons
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.58">58</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Wanderings to Freiburg, Neuch&#226;tel, and elsewhere
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.60">60</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Through the east of France
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.62">62</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Influence of these wanderings upon him
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.67">67</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Chamb&#233;ri
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.69">69</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Household of Madame de Warens
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.70">70</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Les Charmettes
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.73">73</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Account of his feeling for nature
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.79">79</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            His intellectual incapacity at this time
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.83">83</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Temperament
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.84">84</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Literary interests, and method
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.85">85</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Joyful days with his benefactress
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.90">90</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            To Montpellier: end of an episode
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.92">92</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Dates
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.94">94</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+      </tbody>
+    </table>
+    <p>
+      &#160;
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      <a href="#CHAPTER_IV.">CHAPTER IV.</a>
+    </h3>
+    <h4>
+      <span class="smcap">Theresa Le Vasseur</span>.
+    </h4>
+    <table summary="">
+      <tbody>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            &#160;
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            PAGE
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Tutorship at Lyons
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.95">95</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Goes to Paris in search of fortune
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.97">97</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            His appearance at this time
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.98">98</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Made secretary to the ambassador at Venice
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.100">100</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            His journey thither and life there
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.103">103</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Return to Paris
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.106">106</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Theresa Le Vasseur
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.107">107</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Character of their union
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.110">110</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Rousseau's conduct towards her
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.113">113</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Their later estrangements
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.115">115</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Rousseau's scanty means
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.119">119</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Puts away his five children
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.120">120</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            His apologies for the crime
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.122">122</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Their futility
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.126">126</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Attempts to recover the children
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.128">128</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Rousseau never married to Theresa
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.129">129</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Contrast between outer and inner life
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.130">130</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+      </tbody>
+    </table>
+    <p>
+      &#160;
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      <a href="#CHAPTER_V.">CHAPTER V.</a>
+    </h3>
+    <h4>
+      <span class="smcap">The Discourses</span>.
+    </h4>
+    <table summary="">
+      <tbody>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            &#160;
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            PAGE
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Local academies in France
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.132">132</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Circumstances of the composition of the first Discourse
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.133">133</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            How far the paradox was original
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.135">135</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            His visions for thirteen years
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.136">136</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Summary of the first Discourse
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.138">138</a>-145
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Obligations to Montaigne
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.145">145</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            And to the Greeks
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.145">145</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Semi-Socratic manner
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.147">147</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Objections to the Discourse
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.148">148</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Ways of stating its positive side
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.149">149</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Dangers of exaggerating this positive side
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.151">151</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Its excess
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.152">152</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Second Discourse
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.154">154</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Ideas of the time upon the state of nature
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.155">155</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Their influence upon Rousseau
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.156">156</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Morelly, as his predecessor
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.156">156</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Summary of the second Discourse
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.159">159</a>-170
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Criticism of its method
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.171">171</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Objection from its want of evidence
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.172">172</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Other objections to its account of primitive nature
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.173">173</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Takes uniformity of process for granted
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.176">176</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            In what the importance of the second Discourse consisted
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.177">177</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Its protest against the mockery of civilisation
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.179">179</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            The equality of man, how true, and how false
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.180">180</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            This doctrine in France, and in America
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.182">182</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Rousseau's Discourses, a reaction against the historic method
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.183">183</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Mably, and socialism
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.184">184</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+      </tbody>
+    </table>
+    <p>
+      &#160;
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      <a href="#CHAPTER_VI.">CHAPTER VI.</a>
+    </h3>
+    <h4>
+      <span class="smcap">Paris</span>.
+    </h4>
+    <table summary="">
+      <tbody>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            &#160;
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            PAGE
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Influence of Geneva upon Rousseau
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.187">187</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Two sides of his temperament
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.191">191</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Uncongenial characteristics of Parisian society
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.191">191</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            His associates
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.195">195</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Circumstances of a sudden moral reform
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.196">196</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Arising from his violent repugnance for the manners of the time
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.202">202</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            His assumption of a seeming cynicism
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.207">207</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Protests against atheism
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.209">209</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            The Village Soothsayer at Fontainebleau
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.212">212</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Two anedotes of his moral singularity
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.214">214</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Revisits Geneva
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.216">216</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            End of Madame de Warens
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.217">217</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Rousseau's re-conversion to Protestantism
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.220">220</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            The religious opinions then current in Geneva
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.223">223</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Turretini and other rationalisers
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.226">226</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Effect upon Rousseau
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.227">227</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Thinks of taking up his abode in Geneva
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.227">227</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Madame d'Epinay offers him the Hermitage
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.229">229</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Retires thither against the protests of his friends
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.231">231</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+      </tbody>
+    </table>
+    <p>
+      &#160;
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      <a href="#CHAPTER_VII.">CHAPTER VII.</a>
+    </h3>
+    <h4>
+      <span class="smcap">The Hermitage</span>.
+    </h4>
+    <table summary="">
+      <tbody>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            &#160;
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            PAGE
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Distinction between the old and the new anchorite
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.234">234</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Rousseau's first days at the Hermitage
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.235">235</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Rural delirium
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.237">237</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Dislike of society
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.242">242</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Meditates work on Sensitive Morality
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.243">243</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Arranges the papers of the Abb&#233; de Saint Pierre
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.244">244</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            His remarks on them
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.246">246</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Violent mental crisis
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.247">247</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            First conception of the New Helo&#239;sa
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.250">250</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            A scene of high morals
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.254">254</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Madame d'Houdetot
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.255">255</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Erotic mania becomes intensified
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.256">256</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Interviews with Madame d'Houdetot
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.258">258</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Saint Lambert interposes
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.262">262</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Rousseau's letter to Saint Lambert
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.264">264</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Its profound falsity
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.265">265</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Saint Lambert's reply
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.267">267</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Final relations with him and with Madame d'Houdetot
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.268">268</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Sources of Rousseau's irritability
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.270">270</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Relations with Diderot
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.273">273</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            With Madame d'Epinay
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.276">276</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            With Grimm
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.279">279</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Grimm's natural want of sympathy with Rousseau
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.282">282</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Madame d'Epinay's journey to Geneva
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.284">284</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Occasion of Rousseau's breach with Grimm
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.285">285</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            And with Madame d'Epinay
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.288">288</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Leaves the Hermitage
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.289">289</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+      </tbody>
+    </table>
+    <p>
+      &#160;
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      <a href="#CHAPTER_VIII.">CHAPTER VIII.</a>
+    </h3>
+    <h4>
+      <span class="smcap">Music</span>.
+    </h4>
+    <table summary="">
+      <tbody>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            &#160;
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            PAGE
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            General character of Rousseau's aim in music
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.291">291</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            As composer
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.292">292</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Contest on the comparative merits of French and Italian music
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.293">293</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Rousseau's Letter on French Music
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.293">293</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            His scheme of musical notation
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.296">296</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Its chief element
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.298">298</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Its practical value
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.299">299</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            His mistake
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.300">300</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Two minor objections
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.300">300</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+      </tbody>
+    </table>
+    <p>
+      &#160;
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      <a href="#CHAPTER_IX.">CHAPTER IX.</a>
+    </h3>
+    <h4>
+      <span class="smcap">Voltaire And D'Alembert</span>.
+    </h4>
+    <table summary="">
+      <tbody>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            &#160;
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            PAGE
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Position of Voltaire
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.302">302</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            General differences between him and Rousseau
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.303">303</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Rousseau not the profounder of the two
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.305">305</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            But he had a spiritual element
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.305">305</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Their early relations
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.308">308</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Voltaire's poem on the Earthquake of Lisbon
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.309">309</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Rousseau's wonder that he should have written it
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.310">310</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            His letter to Voltaire upon it
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.311">311</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Points to the advantages of the savage state
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.312">312</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Reproduces Pope's general position
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.313">313</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Not an answer to the position taken by Voltaire
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.314">314</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Confesses the question insoluble, but still argues
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.316">316</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Curious close of the letter
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.318">318</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Their subsequent relations
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.319">319</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            D'Alembert's article on Geneva
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.321">321</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            The church and the theatre
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.322">322</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Jeremy Collier: Bossuet
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.323">323</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Rousseau's contention on stage plays
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.324">324</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Rude handling of commonplace
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.325">325</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            The true answer to Rousseau as to theory of dramatic morality
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.326">326</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            His arguments relatively to Geneva
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.327">327</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Their meaning
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.328">328</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Criticism on the Misanthrope
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.328">328</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Rousseau's contrast between Paris and an imaginary Geneva
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.329">329</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Attack on love as a poetic theme
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.332">332</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            This letter, the mark of his schism from the party of the
+            philosophers
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <a href="#Page_i.336">336</a>
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+      </tbody>
+    </table>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr style="width: 65%;" />
+    <h2>
+      <a name="CONTENTS_II" id="CONTENTS_II">CONTENTS</a> OF VOL. II.
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      <a href="#volume2">VOLUME II.</a>
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      &#160;
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      <a href="#CHAPTER_I">CHAPTER I.</a>
+    </h3>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      <span class="smcap">Montmorency&#8212;The New Helo&#239;sa.</span>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Conditions preceding the composition of the New Helo&#239;sa <a
+      href="#Page_1">1</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      The Duke and Duchess of Luxembourg <a href="#Page_2">2</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Rousseau and his patrician acquaintances <a href="#Page_3">4</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Peaceful life at Montmorency <a href="#Page_9">9</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Equivocal prudence occasionally shown by Rousseau <a href="#Page_12">12</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      His want of gratitude for commonplace service <a href="#Page_13">13</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Bad health, and thoughts of suicide <a href="#Page_16">16</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Episode of Madame Latour de Franqueville <a href="#Page_17">17</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Relation of the New Helo&#239;sa to Rousseau's general doctrine <a
+      href="#Page_20">20</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Action of the first part of the story <a href="#Page_25">25</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Contrasted with contemporary literature <a href="#Page_25">25</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      And with contemporary manners <a href="#Page_27">27</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Criticism of the language and principal actors <a href="#Page_28">28</a>,
+      <a href="#Page_29">29</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Popularity of the New Helo&#239;sa <a href="#Page_31">31</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Its reactionary intellectual direction <a href="#Page_33">33</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Action of the second part <a href="#Page_35">35</a>, <a href="#Page_36">36</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Its influence on Goethe and others <a href="#Page_38">38</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Distinction between Rousseau and his school <a href="#Page_40">40</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Singular pictures of domesticity <a href="#Page_42">42</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Sumptuary details <a href="#Page_44">44</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      The slowness of movement in the work justified <a href="#Page_46">46</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Exaltation of marriage <a href="#Page_47">47</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Equalitarian tendencies <a href="#Page_49">49</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Not inconsistent with social quietism <a href="#Page_51">51</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Compensation in the political consequences of the triumph of sentiment <a
+      href="#Page_54">54</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Circumstances of the publication of the New Helo&#239;sa <a href="#Page_55">55</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Nature of the trade in books <a href="#Page_57">57</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Malesherbes and the printing of Emilius <a href="#Page_61">61</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Rousseau's suspicions <a href="#Page_62">62</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      The great struggle of the moment <a href="#Page_64">64</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Proscription of Emilius <a href="#Page_67">67</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Flight of the author <a href="#Page_67">67</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      &#160;
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      <a href="#CHAPTER_II">CHAPTER II.</a>
+    </h3>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      <span class="smcap">Persecution.</span>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Rousseau's journey from Switzerland <a href="#Page_69">69</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Absence of vindictiveness <a href="#Page_70">70</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Arrival at Yverdun <a href="#Page_72">72</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Repairs to Motiers <a href="#Page_73">73</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Relations with Frederick the Great <a href="#Page_74">74</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Life at Motiers <a href="#Page_77">77</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Lord Marischal <a href="#Page_79">79</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Voltaire <a href="#Page_81">81</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Rousseau's letter to the Archbishop of Paris <a href="#Page_83">83</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Its dialectic <a href="#Page_86">86</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      The ministers of Neuch&#226;tel <a href="#Page_90">90</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Rousseau's singular costume <a href="#Page_92">92</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      His throng of visitors <a href="#Page_93">93</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Lewis, prince of W&#252;rtemberg <a href="#Page_95">95</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Gibbon <a href="#Page_96">96</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Boswell <a href="#Page_98">98</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Corsican affairs <a href="#Page_99">99</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      The feud at Geneva <a href="#Page_102">102</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Rousseau renounces his citizenship <a href="#Page_105">105</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      The Letters from the Mountain <a href="#Page_106">106</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Political side <a href="#Page_107">107</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Consequent persecution at Motiers <a href="#Page_107">107</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Flight to the isle of St. Peter <a href="#Page_108">108</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      The fifth of the <i>R&#234;veries</i> <a href="#Page_109">109</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Proscription by the government of Berne <a href="#Page_116">116</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Rousseau's singular request <a href="#Page_116">116</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      His renewed flight <a href="#Page_117">117</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Persuaded to seek shelter in England <a href="#Page_118">118</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      &#160;
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      <a href="#CHAPTER_III">CHAPTER III.</a>
+    </h3>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      <span class="smcap">The Social Contract.</span>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Rousseau's reaction against perfectibility <a href="#Page_119">119</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Abandonment of the position of the Discourses <a href="#Page_121">121</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Doubtful idea of equality <a href="#Page_121">121</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      The Social Contract, a repudiation of the historic method <a
+      href="#Page_124">124</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Yet it has glimpses of relativity <a href="#Page_127">127</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Influence of Greek examples <a href="#Page_129">129</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      And of Geneva <a href="#Page_131">131</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Impression upon Robespierre and Saint Just <a href="#Page_132">132</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Rousseau's scheme implied a small territory <a href="#Page_135">135</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Why the Social Contract made fanatics <a href="#Page_137">137</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Verbal quality of its propositions <a href="#Page_138">138</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      The doctrine of public safety <a href="#Page_143">143</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      The doctrine of the sovereignty of peoples <a href="#Page_144">144</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Its early phases <a href="#Page_144">144</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Its history in the sixteenth century <a href="#Page_146">146</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Hooker and Grotius <a href="#Page_148">148</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Locke <a href="#Page_149">149</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Hobbes <a href="#Page_151">151</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Central propositions of the Social Contract&#8212;<br /> <br /> 1. Origin of
+      society in compact <a href="#Page_154">154</a><br /> Different conception
+      held by the Physiocrats <a href="#Page_156">156</a><br /> <br /> 2.
+      Sovereignty of the body thus constituted <a href="#Page_158">158</a><br />
+      Difference from Hobbes and Locke <a href="#Page_159">159</a><br /> The root
+      of socialism <a href="#Page_160">160</a><br /> Republican phraseology <a
+      href="#Page_161">161</a><br /> <br /> 3. Attributes of sovereignty <a
+      href="#Page_162">162</a><br /> <br /> 4. The law-making power <a
+      href="#Page_163">163</a><br /> A contemporary illustration <a
+      href="#Page_164">164</a><br /> Hints of confederation <a href="#Page_166">166</a><br />
+      <br /> 5. Forms of government <a href="#Page_168">168</a><br /> Criticism on
+      the common division <a href="#Page_169">169</a><br /> Rousseau's preference
+      for elective aristocracy <a href="#Page_172">172</a><br /> <br /> 6.
+      Attitude of the state to religion <a href="#Page_173">173</a><br />
+      Rousseau's view, the climax of a reaction <a href="#Page_176">176</a><br />
+      Its effect at the French Revolution <a href="#Page_179">179</a><br /> Its
+      futility <a href="#Page_180">180</a><br /> <br /> Another method of
+      approaching the philosophy of government&#8212;<br /> <br /> Origin of
+      society not a compact <a href="#Page_183">183</a><br /> <br /> The true
+      reason of the submission of a minority to a majority <a href="#Page_184">184</a><br />
+      <br /> Rousseau fails to touch actual problems <a href="#Page_186">186</a><br />
+      <br /> The doctrine of resistance, for instance <a href="#Page_188">188</a><br />
+      <br /> Historical illustrations <a href="#Page_190">190</a><br /> <br />
+      Historical effect of the Social Contract in France and Germany <a
+      href="#Page_193">193</a><br /> <br /> Socialist deductions from it <a
+      href="#Page_194">194</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      <a href="#CHAPTER_IV">CHAPTER IV.</a>
+    </h3>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      <span class="smcap">Emilius.</span>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Rousseau touched by the enthusiasm of his time <a href="#Page_197">197</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Contemporary excitement as to education, part of the revival of naturalism
+      <a href="#Page_199">199</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      I.&#8212;Locke, on education <a href="#Page_202">202</a><br /> Difference
+      between him and Rousseau <a href="#Page_204">204</a><br /> Exhortations to
+      mothers <a href="#Page_205">205</a><br /> Importance of infantile habits <a
+      href="#Page_208">208</a><br /> Rousseau's protest against reasoning with
+      children <a href="#Page_209">209</a><br /> Criticised <a href="#Page_209">209</a><br />
+      The opposite theory <a href="#Page_210">210</a><br /> The idea of property
+      <a href="#Page_212">212</a><br /> Artificially contrived incidents <a
+      href="#Page_214">214</a><br /> Rousseau's omission of the principle of
+      authority <a href="#Page_215">215</a><br /> Connected with his neglect of
+      the faculty of sympathy <a href="#Page_219">219</a><br /> <br /> II.&#8212;Rousseau's
+      ideal of living <a href="#Page_221">221</a><br /> The training that follows
+      from it <a href="#Page_222">222</a><br /> The duty of knowing a craft <a
+      href="#Page_223">223</a><br /> Social conception involved in this moral
+      conception <a href="#Page_226">226</a><br /> <br /> III.&#8212;Three aims
+      before the instructor <a href="#Page_229">229</a><br /> Rousseau's omission
+      of training for the social conscience <a href="#Page_230">230</a><br /> No
+      contemplation of society as a whole <a href="#Page_232">232</a><br />
+      Personal interest, the foundation of the morality of Emilius <a
+      href="#Page_233">233</a><br /> The sphere and definition of the social
+      conscience <a href="#Page_235">235</a><br /> <br /> IV.&#8212;The study of
+      history <a href="#Page_237">237</a><br /> Rousseau's notions upon the
+      subject <a href="#Page_239">239</a><br /> <br /> V.&#8212;Ideals of life for
+      women <a href="#Page_241">241</a><br /> Rousseau's repudiation of his own
+      principles <a href="#Page_242">242</a><br /> His oriental and obscurantist
+      position <a href="#Page_243">243</a><br /> Arising from his want of faith
+      in improvement <a href="#Page_244">244</a><br /> His reactionary tendencies
+      in this region eventually neutralised <a href="#Page_248">248</a><br />
+      <br /> VI.&#8212;Sum of the merits of Emilius <a href="#Page_249">249</a><br />
+      Its influence in France and Germany <a href="#Page_251">251</a><br /> In
+      England <a href="#Page_252">252</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &#160;
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      <a href="#CHAPTER_V">CHAPTER V.</a>
+    </h3>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      <span class="smcap">The Savoyard Vicar.</span>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Shallow hopes entertained by the dogmatic atheists <a href="#Page_256">256</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      The good side of the religious reaction <a href="#Page_258">258</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Its preservation of some parts of Christian influence <a href="#Page_259">259</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Earlier forms of deism <a href="#Page_260">260</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      The deism of the Savoyard Vicar <a href="#Page_264">264</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      The elevation of man, as well as the restoration of a divinity <a
+      href="#Page_265">265</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      A divinity for fair weather <a href="#Page_268">268</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Religious self-denial <a href="#Page_269">269</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      The Savoyard Vicar's vital omission <a href="#Page_270">270</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      His position towards Christianity <a href="#Page_272">272</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Its effectiveness as a solvent <a href="#Page_273">273</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Weakness of the subjective test <a href="#Page_276">276</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      The Savoyard Vicar's deism not compatible with growing intellectual
+      conviction <a href="#Page_276">276</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      The true satisfaction of the religious emotion <a href="#Page_277">277</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &#160;
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      <a href="#CHAPTER_VI">CHAPTER VI.</a>
+    </h3>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      <span class="smcap">England.</span>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Rousseau's English portrait <a href="#Page_281">281</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      His reception in Paris <a href="#Page_282">282</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      And in London <a href="#Page_283">283</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Hume's account of him <a href="#Page_284">284</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Settlement at Wootton <a href="#Page_286">286</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      The quarrel with Hume <a href="#Page_287">287</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Detail of the charges against Hume <a href="#Page_287">287</a>-291
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Walpole's pretended letter from Frederick <a href="#Page_291">291</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Baselessness of the whole delusion <a href="#Page_292">292</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Hume's conduct in the quarrel <a href="#Page_293">293</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      The war of pamphlets <a href="#Page_295">295</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Common theory of Rousseau's madness <a href="#Page_296">296</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Preparatory conditions <a href="#Page_297">297</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Extension of disorder from the affective life to the intelligence <a
+      href="#Page_299">299</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      The Confessions <a href="#Page_301">301</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      His life at Wootton <a href="#Page_306">306</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Flight from Derbyshire <a href="#Page_306">306</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      And from England <a href="#Page_308">308</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &#160;
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      <a href="#CHAPTER_VII">CHAPTER VII.</a>
+    </h3>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      <span class="smcap">The End.</span>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      The elder Mirabeau <a href="#Page_309">309</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Shelters Rousseau at Fleury <a href="#Page_311">311</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Rousseau at Trye <a href="#Page_312">312</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      In Dauphiny <a href="#Page_314">314</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Return to Paris <a href="#Page_314">314</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      The <i>R&#234;veries</i> <a href="#Page_315">315</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Life in Paris <a href="#Page_316">316</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Bernardin de St. Pierre's account of him <a href="#Page_317">317</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      An Easter excursion <a href="#Page_320">320</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Rousseau's unsociality <a href="#Page_322">322</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Poland and Spain <a href="#Page_324">324</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Withdrawal to Ermenonville <a href="#Page_326">326</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      His death <a href="#Page_326">326</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      <a href="#INDEX"><b>INDEX</b></a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="volume1" id="volume1"></a>
+    </p>
+    <h1>
+      ROUSSEAU
+    </h1>
+    <h3>
+      BY
+    </h3>
+    <h2>
+      JOHN MORLEY
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      VOL. I.
+    </h3>
+    <hr style="width: 35%;" />
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      London<br /> MACMILLAN AND CO., <span class="smcap">Limited</span><br /> NEW
+      YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY<br /> 1905<br />
+    </p>
+    <hr style="width: 45%;" />
+    <h2>
+      JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU
+    </h2>
+    <table summary="">
+      <tbody>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Born
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            1712
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Fled from Geneva
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <i>March</i>, 1728
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Changes religion at Turin
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <i>April</i>,&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&quot;&#160;&#160;&#160;
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            With Madame de Warens, including various intervals, until
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <i>April</i>, 1740
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Goes to Paris with musical schemes
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            1741
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Secretary at Venice
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <i>Spring</i>, 1743
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Paris, first as secretary to M. Francueil, then
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            {&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; 1744
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            &#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;as composer, and copyist
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            {&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; &#160;&#160;to&#160;&#160;&#160;
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            &#160;
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            {&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; 1756
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            The Hermitage
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <i>April 9</i>, 1756
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Montmorency
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <i>Dec. 15</i>, 1757
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Yverdun
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <i>June 14</i>, 1762
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Motiers-Travers
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <i>July 10</i>, 1762
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Isle of St. Peter
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <i>Sept.</i>, 1765
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Strasburg
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <i>Nov.</i>,&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&quot;&#160;&#160;&#160;
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Paris
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <i>December</i>,&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&quot;&#160;&#160;&#160;
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Arrives in England
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <i>Jan. 13</i>, 1766
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Leaves Dover
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <i>May 22</i>, 1767
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Fleury
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <i>June</i>,&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&quot;&#160;&#160;&#160;
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Trye
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <i>July</i>,&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&quot;&#160;&#160;&#160;
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Dauphiny
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <i>Aug.</i>, 1768
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Paris
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <i>June</i>, 1770
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Death
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <i>July 2</i>, 1778
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+      </tbody>
+    </table>
+    <p>
+      &#160;
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      PRINCIPAL WRITINGS.
+    </h3>
+    <table summary="">
+      <tbody>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Discourse on the Influence of Learning and Art
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            <span class="smcap">Published</span> 1750
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Discourse on Inequality
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            &quot;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; 1754
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Letter to D'Alembert
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            &quot;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; 1758
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            New Helo&#239;sa (began 1757, finished in winter of 1759-60
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            &quot;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; 1761
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Social Contract
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            &quot;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; 1762
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Emilius
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            &quot;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; 1762
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Letters from the Mountain
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            &quot;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; 1764
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            Confessions (written 1766-70)
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            { Pt. I 1781
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            &#160;
+          </td>
+          <td align="right">
+            { Pt. II 1788
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr>
+          <td>
+            R&#234;veries (written 1777-78).
+          </td>
+          <td>
+            &#160;
+          </td>
+        </tr>
+      </tbody>
+    </table>
+    <hr style="width: 45%;" />
+    <div class="poem">
+      <div class="stanza">
+        <span class="i0"><i>Comme dans les &#233;tangs assoupis sous les bois,<br /></i></span><i>
+        <span class="i0">Dans plus d'une &#226;me on voit deux choses &#224; la
+        fois:<br /></span> <span class="i0">Le ciel, qui teint les eaux &#224;
+        peine remu&#233;es<br /></span> <span class="i0">Avec tous ses rayons et
+        toutes ses nue&#233;s;<br /></span> <span class="i0">Et la vase, fond
+        morne, affreux, sombre et dormant,<br /></span> <span class="i0">O&#249;
+        des reptiles noirs fourmillent vaguement.</span></i><span class="i0"><br /></span>
+        <span class="i20"><span class="smcap">Hugo</span>.<br /></span>
+      </div>
+    </div>
+    <hr style="width: 65%;" />
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.1" id="Page_i.1">[i.1]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <h1>
+      ROUSSEAU.
+    </h1>
+    <p>
+      &#160;
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      <a name="CHAPTER_I." id="CHAPTER_I."></a>CHAPTER I.
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      PRELIMINARY.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <span class="smcap">Christianity</span> is the name for a great variety of
+      changes which took place during the first centuries of our era, in men's
+      ways of thinking and feeling about their spiritual relations to unseen
+      powers, about their moral relations to one another, about the basis and
+      type of social union. So the Revolution is now the accepted name for a set
+      of changes which began faintly to take a definite practical shape first in
+      America, and then in France, towards the end of the eighteenth century;
+      they had been directly prepared by a small number of energetic thinkers,
+      whose speculations represented, as always, the prolongation of some old
+      lines of thought in obedience to the impulse of new social and
+      intellectual conditions. While one movement supplied the energy and the
+      principles which extricated civilisation from the ruins of the Roman
+      empire, the other supplies the energy and the principles which already
+      once, between the Seven Years'<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.2"
+      id="Page_i.2">[i.2]</a></span> War and the assembly of the States General,
+      saved human progress in face of the political fatuity of England and the
+      political nullity of France; and they are now, amid the distraction of the
+      various representatives of an obsolete ordering, the only forces to be
+      trusted at once for multiplying the achievements of human intelligence
+      stimulated by human sympathy, and for diffusing their beneficent results
+      with an ampler hand and more far-scattering arm. Faith in a divine power,
+      devout obedience to its supposed will, hope of ecstatic, unspeakable
+      reward, these were the springs of the old movement. Undivided love of our
+      fellows, steadfast faith in human nature, steadfast search after justice,
+      firm aspiration towards improvement, and generous contentment in the hope
+      that others may reap whatever reward may be, these are the springs of the
+      new.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is no given set of practical maxims agreed to by all members of the
+      revolutionary schools for achieving the work of release from the pressure
+      of an antiquated social condition, any more than there is one set of
+      doctrines and one kind of discipline accepted by all Protestants. Voltaire
+      was a revolutionist in one sense, Diderot in another, and Rousseau in a
+      third, just as in the practical order, Lafayette, Danton, Robespierre,
+      represented three different aspirations and as many methods. Rousseau was
+      the most directly revolutionary of all the speculative precursors, and he
+      was the first to apply his mind boldly to those of the social conditions
+      which the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.3" id="Page_i.3">[i.3]</a></span>
+      revolution is concerned by one solution or another to modify. How far his
+      direct influence was disastrous in consequence of a mischievous method, we
+      shall have to examine. It was so various that no single answer can
+      comprehend an exhaustive judgment. His writings produced that glow of
+      enthusiastic feeling in France, which led to the all-important assistance
+      rendered by that country to the American colonists in a struggle so
+      momentous for mankind. It was from his writings that the Americans took
+      the ideas and the phrases of their great charter, thus uniting the native
+      principles of their own direct Protestantism with principles that were
+      strictly derivative from the Protestantism of Geneva. Again, it was his
+      work more than that of any other one man, that France arose from the
+      deadly decay which had laid hold of her whole social and political system,
+      and found that irresistible energy which warded off dissolution within and
+      partition from without. We shall see, further, that besides being the
+      first immediately revolutionary thinker in politics, he was the most
+      stirring of reactionists in religion. His influence formed not only
+      Robespierre and Paine, but Chateaubriand, not only Jacobinism, but the
+      Catholicism of the Restoration. Thus he did more than any one else at once
+      to give direction to the first episodes of revolution, and force to the
+      first episode of reaction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There are some teachers whose distinction is neither correct thought, nor
+      an eye for the exigencies of practical organisation, but simply depth and
+      fervour<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.4" id="Page_i.4">[i.4]</a></span>
+      of the moral sentiment, bringing with it the indefinable gift of touching
+      many hearts with love of virtue and the things of the spirit. The
+      Christian organisations which saved western society from dissolution owe
+      all to St. Paul, Hildebrand, Luther, Calvin; but the spiritual life of the
+      west during all these generations has burnt with the pure flame first
+      lighted by the sublime mystic of the Galilean hills. Aristotle acquired
+      for men much knowledge and many instruments for gaining more; but it is
+      Plato, his master, who moves the soul with love of truth and enthusiasm
+      for excellence. There is peril in all such leaders of souls, inasmuch as
+      they incline men to substitute warmth for light, and to be content with
+      aspiration where they need direction. Yet no movement goes far which does
+      not count one of them in the number of its chiefs. Rousseau took this
+      place among those who prepared the first act of that revolutionary drama,
+      whose fifth act is still dark to us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the heart of the Revolution, like a torrid stream flowing undiscernible
+      amid the waters of a tumbling sea, is a new way of understanding life. The
+      social changes desired by the various assailants of the old order are only
+      the expression of a deeper change in moral idea, and the drift of the new
+      moral idea is to make life simpler. This in a sense is at the bottom of
+      all great religious and moral movements, and the Revolution emphatically
+      belongs to the latter class. Like such movements in the breast of the
+      individual, those which stir an epoch have their principle in<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.5" id="Page_i.5">[i.5]</a></span> the same
+      craving for disentanglement of life. This impulse to shake off intricacies
+      is the mark of revolutionary generations, and it was the starting-point of
+      all Rousseau's mental habits, and of the work in which they expressed
+      themselves. His mind moved outwards from this centre, and hence the fact
+      that he dealt principally with government and education, the two great
+      agencies which, in an old civilisation with a thousand roots and feelers,
+      surround external life and internal character with complexity.
+      Simplification of religion by clearing away the overgrowth of errors,
+      simplification of social relations by equality, of literature and art by
+      constant return to nature, of manners by industrious homeliness and
+      thrift,&#8212;this is the revolutionary process and ideal, and this is the
+      secret of Rousseau's hold over a generation that was lost amid the broken
+      maze of fallen systems.
+    </p>
+    <hr style="width: 25%;" />
+    <p>
+      The personality of Rousseau has most equivocal and repulsive sides. It has
+      deservedly fared ill in the esteem of the saner and more rational of those
+      who have judged him, and there is none in the history of famous men and
+      our spiritual fathers that begat us, who make more constant demands on the
+      patience or pity of those who study his life. Yet in no other instance is
+      the common eagerness to condense all predication about a character into a
+      single unqualified proposition so fatally inadequate. If it is
+      indispensable that we should be for ever describing, naming, classifying,
+      at least it is well, in speaking of such a<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.6" id="Page_i.6">[i.6]</a></span> nature as his, to enlarge
+      the vocabulary beyond the pedantic formulas of unreal ethics, and to be as
+      sure as we know how to make ourselves, that each of the sympathies and
+      faculties which together compose our power of spiritual observation, is in
+      a condition of free and patient energy. Any less open and liberal method,
+      which limits our sentiments to absolute approval or disapproval, and fixes
+      the standard either at the balance of common qualities which constitutes
+      mediocrity, or at the balance of uncommon qualities which is divinity as
+      in a Shakespeare, must leave in a cloud of blank incomprehensibleness
+      those singular spirits who come from time to time to quicken the germs of
+      strange thought and shake the quietness of the earth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We may forget much in our story that is grievous or hateful, in reflecting
+      that if any man now deems a day basely passed in which he has given no
+      thought to the hard life of garret and hovel, to the forlorn children and
+      trampled women of wide squalid wildernesses in cities, it was Rousseau who
+      first in our modern time sounded a new trumpet note for one more of the
+      great battles of humanity. He makes the poor very proud, it was truly
+      said. Some of his contemporaries followed the same vein of thought, as we
+      shall see, and he was only continuing work which others had prepared. But
+      he alone had the gift of the golden mouth. It was in Rousseau that polite
+      Europe first hearkened to strange voices and faint reverberation from out
+      of the vague and cavernous<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.7"
+      id="Page_i.7">[i.7]</a></span> shadow in which the common people move.
+      Science has to feel the way towards light and solution, to prepare, to
+      organise. But the race owes something to one who helped to state the
+      problem, writing up in letters of flame at the brutal feast of kings and
+      the rich that civilisation is as yet only a mockery, and did furthermore
+      inspire a generation of men and women with the stern resolve that they
+      would rather perish than live on in a world where such things can be.
+    </p>
+    <hr style="width: 65%;" />
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.8" id="Page_i.8">[i.8]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      <a name="CHAPTER_II" id="CHAPTER_II"></a>CHAPTER II
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      YOUTH.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <span class="smcap">Jean Jacques Rousseau</span> was born at Geneva, June
+      28, 1712. He was of old French stock. His ancestors had removed from Paris
+      to the famous city of refuge as far back as 1529, a little while before
+      Farel came thither to establish the principles of the Reformation, and
+      seven years before the first visit of the more extraordinary man who made
+      Geneva the mother city of a new interpretation of Christianity, as Rome
+      was the mother city of the old. Three generations in a direct line
+      separated Jean Jacques from Didier Rousseau, the son of a Paris
+      bookseller, and the first emigrant.<a name="FNanchor1" id="FNanchor1"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_1">[1]</a> Thus Protestant tradition in the Rousseau
+      family dates<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.9" id="Page_i.9">[i.9]</a></span>
+      from the appearance of Protestantism in Europe, and seems to have exerted
+      the same kind of influence upon them as it did, in conjunction with the
+      rest of the surrounding circumstances, upon the other citizens of the
+      ideal state of the Reformation. It is computed by the historians that out
+      of three thousand families who composed the population of Geneva towards
+      the end of the seventeenth century, there were hardly fifty who before the
+      Reformation had acquired the position of burgess-ship. The curious set of
+      conditions which thus planted a colony of foreigners in the midst of a
+      free polity, with a new doctrine and newer discipline, introduced into
+      Europe a fresh type of character and manners. People declared they could
+      recognise in the men of Geneva neither French vivacity, nor Italian
+      subtlety and clearness, nor Swiss gravity. They had a zeal for religion, a
+      vigorous energy in government, a passion for freedom, a devotion to
+      ingenious industries, which marked them with a stamp unlike that of any
+      other community.<a name="FNanchor2" id="FNanchor2"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_2">[2]</a> Towards the close of the seventeenth century
+      some of the old austerity and rudeness was sensibly modified under the
+      influence of the great neighbouring monarchy. One striking illustration of
+      this tendency was the rapid decline of the Savoyard patois in popular use.
+      The movement had not gone far enough when Rousseau was born, to take away
+      from the manners and spirit of his country their special quality and
+      individual note.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.10" id="Page_i.10">[i.10]</a></span>
+      The mother of Jean Jacques, who seems to have been a simple, cheerful, and
+      tender woman, was the daughter of a Genevan minister; her maiden name,
+      Bernard. The birth of her son was fatal to her, and the most touching and
+      pathetic of all the many shapes of death was the fit beginning of a life
+      preappointed to nearly unlifting cloud. &quot;I cost my mother her life,&quot;
+      he wrote, &quot;and my birth was the first of my woes.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor3" id="FNanchor3"></a><a href="#Footnote_3">[3]</a> Destiny
+      thus touches us with magical finger, long before consciousness awakens to
+      the forces that have been set to work in our personality, launching us
+      into the universe with country, forefathers, and physical predispositions,
+      all fixed without choice of ours. Rousseau was born dying, and though he
+      survived this first crisis by the affectionate care of one of his father's
+      sisters, yet his constitution remained infirm and disordered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Inborn tendencies, as we perceive on every side, are far from having
+      unlimited irresistible mastery, if they meet early encounter from some
+      wise and patient external will. The father of Rousseau was unfortunately
+      cast in the same mould as his mother, and the child's own morbid
+      sensibility was stimulated and deepened by the excessive sensibility of
+      his first companion. Isaac Rousseau, in many of his traits, was a
+      reversion to an old French type. In all the Genevese there was an
+      underlying tendency of this kind. &quot;Under a phlegmatic and cool air,&quot;
+      wrote Rousseau, when warning his countrymen against the<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.11" id="Page_i.11">[i.11]</a></span>
+      inflammatory effects of the drama, &quot;the Genevese hide an ardent and
+      sensitive character, that is more easily moved than controlled.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor4" id="FNanchor4"></a><a href="#Footnote_4">[4]</a> And some
+      of the episodes in their history during the eighteenth century might be
+      taken for scenes from the turbulent dramas of Paris. But Isaac Rousseau's
+      restlessness, his eager emotion, his quick and punctilious sense of
+      personal dignity, his heedlessness of ordered affairs, were not common in
+      Geneva, fortunately for the stability of her society and the prosperity of
+      her citizens. This disorder of spirit descended in modified form to the
+      son; it was inevitable that he should be indirectly affected by it. Before
+      he was seven years old he had learnt from his father to indulge a passion
+      for the reading of romances. The child and the man passed whole nights in
+      a fictitious world, reading to one another in turn, absorbed by vivid
+      interest in imaginary situations, until the morning note of the birds
+      recalled them to a sense of the conditions of more actual life, and made
+      the elder cry out in confusion that he was the more childish of the two.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The effect of this was to raise passion to a premature exaltation in the
+      young brain. &quot;I had no idea of real things,&quot; he said, &quot;though
+      all the sentiments were already familiar to me. Nothing had come to me by
+      conception, everything by sensation. These confused emotions, striking me
+      one after another, did not warp a reason that I did not yet possess, but
+      they gradually shaped in me a reason of another cast and<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.12" id="Page_i.12">[i.12]</a></span>
+      temper, and gave me bizarre and romantic ideas of human life, of which
+      neither reflection nor experience has ever been able wholly to cure me.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor5" id="FNanchor5"></a><a href="#Footnote_5">[5]</a> Thus
+      these first lessons, which have such tremendous influence over all that
+      follow, had the direct and fatal effect in Rousseau's case of deadening
+      that sense of the actual relations of things to one another in the
+      objective world, which is the master-key and prime law of sanity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In time the library of romances came to an end (1719), and Jean Jacques
+      and his father fell back on the more solid and moderated fiction of
+      history and biography. The romances had been the possession of the mother;
+      the more serious books were inherited from the old minister, her father.
+      Such books as Nani's History of Venice, and Le Sueur's History of the
+      Church and the Empire, made less impression on the young Rousseau than the
+      admirable Plutarch; and he used to read to his father during the hours of
+      work, and read over again to himself during all hours, those stories of
+      free and indomitable souls which are so proper to kindle the glow of
+      generous fire. Plutarch was dear to him to the end of his life; he read
+      him in the late days when he had almost ceased to read, and he always
+      declared Plutarch to be nearly the only author to whom he had never gone
+      without profit.<a name="FNanchor6" id="FNanchor6"></a><a href="#Footnote_6">[6]</a>
+      &quot;I think I see my father now,&quot; he wrote<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.13" id="Page_i.13">[i.13]</a></span> when he had begun to
+      make his mark in Paris, &quot;living by the work of his hands, and
+      nourishing his soul on the sublimest truths. I see Tacitus, Plutarch, and
+      Grotius, lying before him along with the tools of his craft. I see at his
+      side a cherished son receiving instruction from the best of fathers, alas,
+      with but too little fruit.&quot;<a name="FNanchor7" id="FNanchor7"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_7">[7]</a> This did little to implant the needed
+      impressions of the actual world. Rousseau's first training continued to be
+      in an excessive degree the exact reverse of our common method; this stirs
+      the imagination too little, and shuts the young too narrowly within the
+      strait pen of present and visible reality. The reader of Plutarch at the
+      age of ten actually conceived himself a Greek or a Roman, and became the
+      personage whose strokes of constancy and intrepidity transported him with
+      sympathetic ecstasy, made his eyes sparkle, and raised his voice to heroic
+      pitch. Listeners were even alarmed one day as he told the tale of Scaevola
+      at table, to see him imitatively thrust forth his arm over a hot
+      chafing-dish.<a name="FNanchor8" id="FNanchor8"></a><a href="#Footnote_8">[8]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rousseau had one brother, on whom the spirit of the father came down in
+      ample measure, just as the sensibility of the mother descended upon Jean
+      Jacques. He passed through a boyhood of revolt, and finally ran away into
+      Germany, where he was lost from sight and knowledge of his kinsmen for
+      ever. Jean Jacques was thus left virtually an only child,<a
+      name="FNanchor9" id="FNanchor9"></a><a href="#Footnote_9">[9]</a> and he
+      com<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.14" id="Page_i.14">[i.14]</a></span>memorates
+      the homely tenderness and care with which his early years were surrounded.
+      Except in the hours which he passed in reading by the side of his father,
+      he was always with his aunt, in the self-satisfying curiosity of childhood
+      watching her at work with the needle and busy about affairs of the house,
+      or else listening to her with contented interest, as she sang the simple
+      airs of the common people. The impression of this kind and cheerful figure
+      was stamped on his memory to the end; her tone of voice, her dress, the
+      quaint fashion of her hair. The constant recollection of her shows, among
+      many other signs, how he cherished that conception of the true unity of a
+      man's life, which places it in a closely-linked chain of active memories,
+      and which most of us lose in wasteful dispersion of sentiment and poor
+      fragmentariness of days. When the years came in which he might well say, I
+      have no pleasure in them, and after a manhood of distress and suspicion
+      and diseased sorrows had come to dim those blameless times, he could still
+      often surprise himself unconsciously humming the tune of one of his aunt's
+      old songs, with many tears in his eyes.<a name="FNanchor10" id="FNanchor10"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_10">[10]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This affectionate schooling came suddenly to an end. Isaac Rousseau in the
+      course of a quarrel in which he had involved himself, believed that he saw<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.15" id="Page_i.15">[i.15]</a></span>
+      unfairness in the operation of the law, for the offender had kinsfolk in
+      the Great Council. He resolved to leave his country rather than give way,
+      in circumstances which compromised his personal honour and the free
+      justice of the republic. So his house was broken up, and his son was sent
+      to school at the neighbouring village of Bossey (1722), under the care of
+      a minister, &quot;there to learn along with Latin all the medley of sorry
+      stuff with which, under the name of education, they accompany Latin.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor11" id="FNanchor11"></a><a href="#Footnote_11">[11]</a>
+      Rousseau tells us nothing of the course of his intellectual instruction
+      here, but he marks his two years' sojourn under the roof of M. Lambercier
+      by two forward steps in that fateful acquaintance with good and evil,
+      which is so much more important than literary knowledge. Upon one of these
+      fruits of the tree of nascent experience, men usually keep strict silence.
+      Rousseau is the only person that ever lived who proclaimed to the whole
+      world as a part of his own biography the ignoble circumstances of the
+      birth of sensuality in boyhood. Nobody else ever asked us to listen while
+      he told of the playmate with which unwarned youth takes its heedless
+      pleasure, which waxes and strengthens with years, until the man suddenly
+      awakens to find the playmate grown into a master, grotesque and foul,
+      whose unclean grip is not to be shaken off, and who poisons the air with
+      the goatish fume of the satyr. It is on this side that the unspoken plays
+      so decisive a part, that most of the<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.16" id="Page_i.16">[i.16]</a></span> spoken seems but as dust
+      in the balance; it is here that the flesh spreads gross clouds over the
+      firmament of the spirit. Thinking of it, we flee from talk about the high
+      matters of will and conscience, of purity of heart and the diviner mind,
+      and hurry to the physician. Manhood commonly saves itself by its own
+      innate healthiness, though the decent apron bequeathed to us in the old
+      legend of the fall, the thick veil of a more than legendary reserve,
+      prevents us from really measuring the actual waste of delicacy and the
+      finer forces. Rousseau, most unhappily for himself, lacked this innate
+      healthiness; he never shook off the demon which would be so ridiculous, if
+      it did not hide such terrible power. With a moral courage, that it needs
+      hardly less moral courage in the critic firmly to refrain from calling
+      cynical or shameless, he has told the whole story of this lifelong
+      depravation. In the present state of knowledge, which in the region of the
+      human character the false shamefacedness of science, aided and abetted by
+      the mutilating hand of religious asceticism, has kept crude and imperfect,
+      there is nothing very profitable to be said on all this. When the great
+      art of life has been more systematically conceived in the long processes
+      of time and endeavour, and when more bold, effective, and far-reaching
+      advance has been made in defining those pathological manifestations which
+      deserve to be seriously studied, as distinguished from those of a minor
+      sort which are barely worth registering, then we should know better how to
+      speak, or how to be<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.17" id="Page_i.17">[i.17]</a></span>
+      silent, in the present most unwelcome instance. As it is, we perhaps do
+      best in chronicling the fact and passing on. The harmless young are
+      allowed to play without monition or watching among the deep open graves of
+      temperament; and Rousseau, telling the tale of his inmost experience,
+      unlike the physician and the moralist who love decorous surfaces of
+      things, did not spare himself nor others a glimpse of the ignominies to
+      which the body condemns its high tenant, the soul.<a name="FNanchor12"
+      id="FNanchor12"></a><a href="#Footnote_12">[12]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The second piece of experience which he acquired at Bossey was the
+      knowledge of injustice and wrongful suffering as things actual and
+      existent. Circumstances brought him under suspicion of having broken the
+      teeth of a comb which did not belong to him. He was innocent, and not even
+      the most terrible punishment could wring from him an untrue confession of
+      guilt. The root of his constancy was not in an abhorrence of falsehood,
+      which is exceptional in youth, and for which he takes no credit, but in a
+      furious and invincible resentment against the violent pressure that was
+      unjustly put upon him. &quot;Picture a character, timid and docile in
+      ordinary life, but ardent, impetuous, indomitable in its passions; a child
+      always governed by the voice of reason, always treated with equity,
+      gentleness, and consideration, who had not even the idea of injustice, and
+      who for the first time experiences an injustice so terrible, from the very
+      people whom he most cherishes and respects! What a con<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.18" id="Page_i.18">[i.18]</a></span>fusion of ideas, what
+      disorder of sentiments, what revolution in heart, in brain, in every part
+      of his moral and intellectual being!&quot; He had not learnt, any more
+      than other children, either to put himself in the place of his elders, or
+      to consider the strength of the apparent case against him. All that he
+      felt was the rigour of a frightful chastisement for an offence of which he
+      was innocent. And the association of ideas was permanent. &quot;This first
+      sentiment of violence and injustice has remained so deeply engraved in my
+      soul, that all the ideas relating to it bring my first emotion back to me;
+      and this sentiment, though only relative to myself in its origin, has
+      taken such consistency, and become so disengaged from all personal
+      interest, that my heart is inflamed at the sight or story of any wrongful
+      action, just as much as if its effect fell on my own person. When I read
+      of the cruelties of some ferocious tyrant, or the subtle atrocities of
+      some villain of a priest, I would fain start on the instant to poniard
+      such wretches, though I were to perish a hundred times for the deed....
+      This movement may be natural to me, and I believe it is so; but the
+      profound recollection of the first injustice I suffered was too long and
+      too fast bound up with it, not to have strengthened it enormously.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor13" id="FNanchor13"></a><a href="#Footnote_13">[13]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To men who belong to the silent and phlegmatic races like our own, all
+      this may possibly strike on the ear like a false or strained note. Yet a
+      tranquil appeal to the real history of one's own strongest im<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.19" id="Page_i.19">[i.19]</a></span>pressions
+      may disclose their roots in facts of childish experience, which remoteness
+      of time has gradually emptied of the burning colour they once had. This
+      childish discovery of the existence in his own world of that injustice
+      which he had only seen through a glass very darkly in the imaginary world
+      of his reading, was for Rousseau the angry dismissal from the primitive
+      Eden, which in one shape and at one time or another overtakes all men.
+      &quot;Here,&quot; he says, &quot;was the term of the serenity of my
+      childish days. From this moment I ceased to enjoy a pure happiness, and I
+      feel even at this day that the reminiscence of the delights of my infancy
+      here comes to an end.... Even the country lost in our eyes that charm of
+      sweetness and simplicity which goes to the heart; it seemed sombre and
+      deserted, and was as if covered by a veil, hiding its beauties from our
+      sight. We no longer tended our little gardens, our plants, our flowers. We
+      went no more lightly to scratch the earth, shouting for joy as we
+      discovered the germ of the seed we had sown.&quot;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Whatever may be the degree of literal truth in the Confessions, the whole
+      course of Rousseau's life forbids us to pass this passionate description
+      by as overcharged or exaggerated. We are conscious in it of a
+      constitutional infirmity. We perceive an absence of healthy power of
+      reaction against moral shock. Such shocks are experienced in many
+      unavoidable forms by all save the dullest natures, when they first come
+      into contact with the sharp tooth of outer cir<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.20" id="Page_i.20">[i.20]</a></span>cumstance. Indeed, a man
+      must be either miraculously happy in his experiences, or exceptionally
+      obtuse in observing and feeling, or else be the creature of base and
+      cynical ideals, if life does not to the end continue to bring many a
+      repetition of that first day of incredulous bewilderment. But the urgent
+      demands for material activity quickly recall the mass of men to normal
+      relations with their fellows and the outer world. A vehement objective
+      temperament, like Voltaire's, is instantly roused by one of these
+      penetrative stimuli into angry and tenacious resistance. A proud and
+      collected soul, like Goethe's, loftily follows its own inner aims, without
+      taking any heed of the perturbations that arise from want of
+      self-collection in a world still spelling its rudiments. A sensitive and
+      depressed spirit, like Rousseau's or Cowper's, finds itself without any of
+      these reacting kinds of force, and the first stroke of cruelty or
+      oppression is the going out of a divine light.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Leaving Bossey, Rousseau returned to Geneva, and passed two or three years
+      with his uncle, losing his time for the most part, but learning something
+      of drawing and something of Euclid, for the former of which he showed
+      special inclination.<a name="FNanchor14" id="FNanchor14"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_14">[14]</a> It was a question whether he was to be made a
+      watchmaker, a lawyer, or a minister. His own preference, as his after-life
+      might have led us to suppose, was in favour of the last of the three;
+      &quot;for I thought it a fine thing,&quot; he says, &quot;to preach.&quot;
+      The uncle was a man<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.21" id="Page_i.21">[i.21]</a></span>
+      of pleasure, and as often happens in such circumstances, his love of
+      pleasure had the effect of turning his wife into a pietist. Their son was
+      Rousseau's constant comrade. &quot;Our friendship filled our hearts so
+      amply, that if we were only together, the simplest amusements were a
+      delight.&quot; They made kites, cages, bows and arrows, drums, houses;
+      they spoiled the tools of their grandfather, in trying to make watches
+      like him. In the same cheerful imitative spirit, which is the main feature
+      in childhood when it is not disturbed by excess of literary teaching,
+      after Geneva had been visited by an Italian showman with a troop of
+      marionettes, they made puppets and composed comedies for them; and when
+      one day the uncle read aloud an elegant sermon, they abandoned their
+      comedies, and turned with blithe energy to exhortation. They had glimpses
+      of the rougher side of life in the biting mockeries of some schoolboys of
+      the neighbourhood. These ended in appeal to the god of youthful war, who
+      pronounced so plainly for the bigger battalions, that the release of their
+      enemies from school was the signal for the quick retreat of our pair
+      within doors. All this is an old story in every biography written or
+      unwritten. It seldom fails to touch us, either in the way of sympathetic
+      reminiscence, or if life should have gone somewhat too hardly with a man,
+      then in the way of irony, which is not less real and poetic than the
+      eironeia of a Greek dramatist, for being concerned with more unheroic
+      creatures.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And this rough play of the streets always seemed<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.22" id="Page_i.22">[i.22]</a></span> to Rousseau a manlier
+      schooling than the effeminate tendencies which he thought he noticed in
+      Genevese youth in after years. &quot;In my time,&quot; he says admiringly,
+      &quot;children were brought up in rustic fashion and had no complexion to
+      keep.... Timid and modest before the old, they were bold, haughty,
+      combative among themselves; they had no curled locks to be careful of;
+      they defied one another at wrestling, running, boxing. They returned home
+      sweating, out of breath, torn; they were true blackguards, if you will,
+      but they made men who have zeal in their heart to serve their country and
+      blood to shed for her. May we be able to say as much one day of our fine
+      little gentlemen, and may these men at fifteen not turn out children at
+      thirty.&quot;<a name="FNanchor15" id="FNanchor15"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_15">[15]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Two incidents of this period remain to us, described in Rousseau's own
+      words, and as they reveal a certain sweetness in which his life unhappily
+      did not afterwards greatly abound, it may help our equitable balance of
+      impressions about him to reproduce them. Every Sunday he used to spend the
+      day at P&#226;quis at Mr. Fazy's, who had married one of his aunts, and
+      who carried on the production of printed calicoes. &quot;One day I was in
+      the drying-room, watching the rollers of the hot press; their brightness
+      pleased my eye; I was tempted to lay my fingers on them, and I was moving
+      them up and down with much satisfaction along the smooth cylinder, when
+      young Fazy placed himself in the wheel and gave it a half-quarter<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.23" id="Page_i.23">[i.23]</a></span> turn
+      so adroitly, that I had just the ends of my two longest fingers caught,
+      but this was enough to crush the tips and tear the nails. I raised a
+      piercing cry; Fazy instantly turned back the wheel, and the blood gushed
+      from my fingers. In the extremity of consternation he hastened to me,
+      embraced me, and besought me to cease my cries, or he would be undone. In
+      the height of my own pain, I was touched by his; I instantly fell silent,
+      we ran to the pond, where he helped me to wash my fingers and to staunch
+      the blood with moss. He entreated me with tears not to accuse him; I
+      promised him that I would not, and &#207; kept my word so well that twenty
+      years after no one knew the origin of the scar. I was kept in bed for more
+      than three weeks, and for more than two months was unable to use my hand.
+      But I persisted that a large stone had fallen and crushed my fingers.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor16" id="FNanchor16"></a><a href="#Footnote_16">[16]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The other story is of the same tenour, though there is a new touch of
+      sensibility in its concluding words. &quot;I was playing at ball at Plain
+      Palais, with one of my comrades named Plince. We began to quarrel over the
+      game; we fought, and in the fight he dealt me on my bare head a stroke so
+      well directed, that with a stronger arm it would have dashed my brains
+      out. I fell to the ground, and there never was agitation like that of this
+      poor lad, as he saw the blood in my hair. He thought he had killed me. He
+      threw himself upon me, and clasped me eagerly in his arms, while his tears
+      poured down his cheeks, and he uttered<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.24" id="Page_i.24">[i.24]</a></span> shrill cries. I returned
+      his embrace with all my force, weeping like him, in a state of confused
+      emotion which was not without a kind of sweetness. Then he tried to stop
+      the blood which kept flowing, and seeing that our two handkerchiefs were
+      not enough, he dragged me off to his mother's; she had a small garden hard
+      by. The good woman nearly fell sick at sight of me in this condition; she
+      kept strength enough to dress my wound, and after bathing it well, she
+      applied flower-de-luce macerated in brandy, an excellent remedy much used
+      in our country. Her tears and those of her son, went to my very heart, so
+      that I looked upon them for a long while as my mother and my brother.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor17" id="FNanchor17"></a><a href="#Footnote_17">[17]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If it were enough that our early instincts should be thus amiable and
+      easy, then doubtless the dismal sloughs in which men and women lie
+      floundering would occupy a very much more insignificant space in the field
+      of human experience. The problem, as we know, lies in the discipline of
+      this primitive goodness. For character in a state of society is not a tree
+      that grows into uprightness by the law of its own strength, though an
+      adorable instance here and there of rectitude and moral loveliness that
+      seem intuitive may sometimes tempt us into a moment's belief in a contrary
+      doctrine. In Rousseau's case this serious problem was never solved; there
+      was no deliberate preparation of his impulses, prepossessions, notions; no
+      foresight on the part of elders, and no gradual<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.25" id="Page_i.25">[i.25]</a></span> acclimatisation of a
+      sensitive and ardent nature in the fixed principles which are essential to
+      right conduct in the frigid zone of our relations with other people. It
+      was one of the most elementary of Rousseau's many perverse and mischievous
+      contentions, that it is their education by the older which ruins or wastes
+      the abundant capacity for virtue that subsists naturally in the young. His
+      mind seems never to have sought much more deeply for proof of this, than
+      the fact that he himself was innocent and happy so long as he was allowed
+      to follow without disturbance the easy simple proclivities of his own
+      temperament. Circumstances were not indulgent enough to leave the
+      experiment to complete itself within these very rudimentary conditions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rousseau had been surrounded, as he is always careful to protest, with a
+      religious atmosphere. His father, though a man of pleasure, was possessed
+      also not only of probity but of religion as well. His three aunts were all
+      in their degrees gracious and devout. M. Lambercier at Bossey, &quot;although
+      Churchman and preacher,&quot; was still a sincere believer and nearly as
+      good in act as in word. His inculcation of religion was so hearty, so
+      discreet, so reasonable, that his pupils, far from being wearied by the
+      sermon, never came away without being touched inwardly and stirred to make
+      virtuous resolutions. With his Aunt Bernard devotion was rather more
+      tiresome, because she made a business of it.<a name="FNanchor18"
+      id="FNanchor18"></a><a href="#Footnote_18">[18]</a> It would be a distinct<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.26" id="Page_i.26">[i.26]</a></span> error
+      to suppose that all this counted for nothing, for let us remember that we
+      are now engaged with the youth of the one great religious writer of France
+      in the eighteenth century. When after many years Rousseau's character
+      hardened, the influences which had surrounded his boyhood came out in
+      their full force and the historian of opinion soon notices in his spirit
+      and work a something which had no counterpart in the spirit and work of
+      men who had been trained in Jesuit colleges. At the first outset, however,
+      every trace of religious sentiment was obliterated from sight, and he was
+      left unprotected against the shocks of the world and the flesh.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the age of eleven Jean Jacques was sent into a notary's office, but
+      that respectable calling struck him in the same repulsive and insufferable
+      way in which it has struck many other boys of genius in all countries.
+      Contrary to the usual rule, he did not rebel, but was ignominiously
+      dismissed by his master<a name="FNanchor19" id="FNanchor19"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_19">[19]</a> for dulness and inaptitude; his fellow-clerks
+      pronounced him stupid and incompetent past hope. He was next apprenticed
+      to an engraver,<a name="FNanchor20" id="FNanchor20"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_20">[20]</a> a rough and violent man, who seems to have
+      instantly plunged the boy into a demoralised stupefaction. The reality of
+      contact with this coarse nature benumbed as by touch of torpedo the whole
+      being of a youth who had hitherto lived on pure sensations and among those
+      ideas which are nearest to sensations. There were no longer heroic Romans
+      in Rousseau's universe. &quot;The vilest<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.27" id="Page_i.27">[i.27]</a></span> tastes, the meanest bits
+      of rascality, succeeded to my simple amusements, without even leaving the
+      least idea behind. I must, in spite of the worthiest education, have had a
+      strong tendency to degenerate.&quot; The truth was that he had never had
+      any education in its veritable sense, as the process, on its negative
+      side, of counteracting the inborn. There are two kinds, or perhaps we
+      should more correctly say two degrees, of the constitution in which the
+      reflective part is weak. There are the men who live on sensation, but who
+      do so lustily, with a certain fulness of blood and active energy of
+      muscle. There are others who do so passively, not searching for
+      excitement, but acquiescing. The former by their sheer force and plenitude
+      of vitality may, even in a world where reflection is a first condition,
+      still go far. The latter succumb, and as reflection does nothing for them,
+      and as their sensations in such a world bring them few blandishments, they
+      are tolerably early surrounded with a self-diffusing atmosphere of misery.
+      Rousseau had none of this energy which makes oppression bracing. For a
+      time he sank.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It would be a mistake to let the story of the Confessions carry us into
+      exaggerations. The brutality of his master and the harshness of his life
+      led him to nothing very criminal, but only to wrong acts which are
+      despicable by their meanness, rather than in any sense atrocious. He told
+      lies as readily as the truth. He pilfered things to eat. He cunningly
+      found a means of opening his master's private cabinet, and of<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.28" id="Page_i.28">[i.28]</a></span> using
+      his master's best instruments by stealth. He wasted his time in idle and
+      capricious tasks. When the man, with all the ravity of an adult moralist,
+      describes these misdeeds of the boy, they assume a certain ugliness of
+      mien, and excites a strong disgust which, when the misdeeds themselves are
+      before us in actual life, we experience in a far more considerate form.
+      The effect of calm, retrospective avowal is to create a kind of feeling
+      which is essentially unlike our feeling at what is actually avowed. Still
+      it is clear that his unlucky career as apprentice brought out in Rousseau
+      slyness, greediness, slovenliness, untruthfulness, and the whole ragged
+      regiment of the squalider vices. The evil of his temperament now and
+      always was of the dull smouldering kind, seldom breaking out into active
+      flame. There is a certain sordidness in the scene. You may complain that
+      the details which Rousseau gives of his youthful days are insipid. Yet
+      such things are the web and stuff of life, and these days of transition
+      from childhood to full manhood in every case mark a crisis. These
+      insipidities test the education of home and family, and they presage
+      definitely what is to come. The roots of character, good or bad, are shown
+      for this short space, and they remain unchanged, though most people learn
+      from their fellows the decent and useful art of covering them over with a
+      little dust, in the shape of accepted phrases and routine customs and a
+      silence which is not oblivion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After a time the character of Jean Jacques was<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.29" id="Page_i.29">[i.29]</a></span> absolutely broken down.
+      He says little of the blows with which his offences were punished by his
+      master, but he says enough to enable us to discern that they were terrible
+      to him. This cowardice, if we choose to give the name to an overmastering
+      physical horror, at length brought his apprentice days to an end. He was
+      now in his sixteenth year. He was dragged by his comrades into sports for
+      which he had little inclination, though he admits that once engaged in
+      them he displayed an impetuosity that carried him beyond the others. Such
+      pastimes naturally led them beyond the city walls, and on two occasions
+      Rousseau found the gates closed on his return. His master when he
+      presented himself in the morning gave him such greeting as we may imagine,
+      and held out things beyond imagining as penalty for a second sin in this
+      kind. The occasion came, as, alas, it nearly always does. &quot;Half a
+      league from the town,&quot; says Rousseau, &quot;I hear the retreat
+      sounded, and redouble my pace; I hear the drum beat, and run at the top of
+      my speed: I arrive out of breath, bathed in sweat; my heart beats
+      violently, I see from a distance the soldiers at their post, and call out
+      with choking voice. It was too late. Twenty paces from the outpost
+      sentinel, I saw the first bridge rising. I shuddered, as I watched those
+      terrible horns, sinister and fatal augury of the inevitable lot which that
+      moment was opening for me.&quot;<a name="FNanchor21" id="FNanchor21"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_21">[21]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In manhood when we have the resource of our own will to fall back upon, we
+      underestimate the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.30" id="Page_i.30">[i.30]</a></span>
+      unsurpassed horror and anguish of such moments as this in youth, when we
+      know only the will of others, and that this will is inexorable against us.
+      Rousseau dared not expose himself to the fulfilment of his master's
+      menace, and he ran away (1728). But for this, wrote the unhappy man long
+      years after, &quot;I should have passed, in the bosom of my religion, of
+      my native land, of my family, and my friends, a mild and peaceful life,
+      such as my character required, in the uniformity of work which suited my
+      taste, and of a society after my heart. I should have been a good
+      Christian, good citizen, good father of a family, good friend, good
+      craftsman, good man in all. I should have been happy in my condition,
+      perhaps I might have honoured it; and after living a life obscure and
+      simple, but even and gentle, I should have died peacefully in the midst of
+      my own people. Soon forgotten, I should at any rate have been regretted as
+      long as any memory of me was left.&quot;<a name="FNanchor22"
+      id="FNanchor22"></a><a href="#Footnote_22">[22]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As a man knows nothing about the secrets of his own individual
+      organisation, this illusory mapping out of a supposed Possible need seldom
+      be suspected of the smallest insincerity. The poor madman who declares
+      that he is a king kept out of his rights only moves our pity, and we
+      perhaps owe pity no less to those in all the various stages of aberration
+      uncertificated by surgeons, down to the very edge of most respectable
+      sanity, who accuse the injustice of men of keeping them out of this or
+      that kingdom, of which in truth<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.31"
+      id="Page_i.31">[i.31]</a></span> their own composition finally
+      disinherited them at the moment when they were conceived in a mother's
+      womb. The first of the famous Five Propositions of Jansen, which were a
+      stumbling-block to popes and to the philosophy of the eighteenth-century
+      foolishness, put this clear and permanent truth into a mystic and
+      perishable formula, to the effect that there are some commandments of God
+      which righteous and good men are absolutely unable to obey, though ever so
+      disposed to do them, and God does not give them so much grace that they
+      are able to observe them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If Rousseau's sensations in the evening were those of terror, the day and
+      its prospect of boundless adventures soon turned them into entire delight.
+      The whole world was before him, and all the old conceptions of romance
+      were instantly revived by the supposed nearness of their realisation. He
+      roamed for two or three days among the villages in the neighbourhood of
+      Geneva, finding such hospitality as he needed in the cottages of friendly
+      peasants. Before long his wanderings brought him to the end of the
+      territory of the little republic. Here he found himself in the domain of
+      Savoy, where dukes and lords had for ages been the traditional foes of the
+      freedom and the faith of Geneva, Rousseau came to the village of
+      Confignon, and the name of the priest of Confignon recalled one of the
+      most embittered incidents of the old feud. This feud had come to take new
+      forms; instead of midnight expeditions to scale the city walls, the
+      descendants of the Savoyard marauders of the sixteenth century were<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.32" id="Page_i.32">[i.32]</a></span> now
+      intent with equivocal good will on rescuing the souls of the descendants
+      of their old enemies from deadly heresy. At this time a systematic
+      struggle was going on between the priests of Savoy and the ministers of
+      Geneva, the former using every effort to procure the conversion of any
+      Protestant on whom they could lay hands.<a name="FNanchor23"
+      id="FNanchor23"></a><a href="#Footnote_23">[23]</a> As it happened, the
+      priest of Confignon was one of the most active in this good work.<a
+      name="FNanchor24" id="FNanchor24"></a><a href="#Footnote_24">[24]</a> He
+      made the young Rousseau welcome, spoke to him of the heresies of Geneva
+      and of the authority of the holy Church, and gave him some dinner. He
+      could hardly have had a more easy convert, for the nature with which he
+      had to deal was now swept and garnished, ready for the entrance of all
+      devils or gods. The dinner went for much. &quot;I was too good a guest,&quot;
+      writes Rousseau in one of his few passages of humour, &quot;to be a good
+      theologian, and his Frangi wine, which struck me as excellent, was such a
+      triumphant argument on his side, that I should have blushed to oppose so
+      capital a host.&quot;<a name="FNanchor25" id="FNanchor25"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_25">[25]</a> So it was agreed that he should be put in a
+      way to be further instructed of these matters. We may accept Rousseau's
+      assurance that he was not exactly a hypocrite in this rapid complaisance.
+      He admits that any one who should have seen the artifices<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.33" id="Page_i.33">[i.33]</a></span> to
+      which he resorted, might have thought him very false. But, he argues,
+      &quot;flattery, or rather concession, is not always a vice; it is oftener
+      a virtue, especially in the young. The kindness with which a man receives
+      us, attaches us to him; it is not to make a fool of him that we give way,
+      but to avoid displeasing him, and not to return him evil for good.&quot;
+      He never really meant to change his religion; his fault was like the
+      coquetting of decent women, who sometimes, to gain their ends, without
+      permitting anything or promising anything, lead men to hope more than they
+      mean to hold good.<a name="FNanchor26" id="FNanchor26"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_26">[26]</a> Thereupon follow some austere reflections on
+      the priest, who ought to have sent him back to his friends; and there are
+      strictures even upon the ministers of all dogmatic religions, in which the
+      essential thing is not to do but to believe; their priests therefore,
+      provided that they can convert a man to their faith, are wholly
+      indifferent alike as to his worth and his worldly interests. All this is
+      most just; the occasion for such a strain of remark, though so apposite on
+      one side, is hardly well chosen to impress us. We wonder, as we watch the
+      boy complacently hoodwinking his entertainer, what has become of the Roman
+      severity of a few months back. This nervous eagerness to please, however,
+      was the complementary element of a character of vague ambition, and it was
+      backed by a stealthy consciousness of intellectual superiority, which
+      perhaps did something, though poorly enough, to make such ignominy less
+      deeply degrading.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.34" id="Page_i.34">[i.34]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The die was cast. M. Pontverre despatched his brand plucked from the
+      burning to a certain Madame de Warens, a lady living at Annecy, and
+      counted zealous for the cause of the Church. In an interview whose
+      minutest circumstances remained for ever stamped in his mind (March 21,
+      1728), Rousseau exchanged his first words with this singular personage,
+      whose name and character he has covered with doubtful renown. He expected
+      to find some gray and wrinkled woman, saving a little remnant of days in
+      good works. Instead of this, there turned round upon him a person not more
+      than eight-and-twenty years old, with gentle caressing air, a fascinating
+      smile, a tender eye. Madame de Warens read the letters he brought, and
+      entertained their bearer cheerfully. It was decided after consultation
+      that the heretic should be sent to a monastery at Turin, where he might be
+      brought over in form to the true Church. At the monastery not only would
+      the spiritual question of faith and the soul be dealt with, but at the
+      same time the material problem of shelter and subsistence for the body
+      would be solved likewise. Elated with vanity at the thought of seeing
+      before any of his comrades the great land of promise beyond the mountains,
+      heedless of those whom he had left, and heedless of the future before him
+      and the object which he was about, the young outcast made his journey over
+      the Alps in all possible lightness of heart. &quot;Seeing country is an
+      allurement which hardly any Genevese can ever resist. Everything that met
+      my eye seemed<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.35" id="Page_i.35">[i.35]</a></span>
+      the guarantee of my approaching happiness. In the houses I imagined rustic
+      festivals; in the fields, joyful sports; along the streams, bathing and
+      fishing; on the trees, delicious fruits; under their shade, voluptuous
+      interviews; on the mountains, pails of milk and cream, a charming
+      idleness, peace, simplicity, the delight of going forward without knowing
+      whither.&quot;<a name="FNanchor27" id="FNanchor27"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_27">[27]</a> He might justly choose out this interval as
+      more perfectly free from care or anxiety than any other of his life. It
+      was the first of the too rare occasions when his usually passive
+      sensuousness was stung by novelty and hope into an active energy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The seven or eight days of the journey came to an end, and the youth found
+      himself at Turin without money or clothes, an inmate of a dreary
+      monastery, among some of the very basest and foulest of mankind, who pass
+      their time in going from one monastery to another through Spain and Italy,
+      professing themselves Jews or Moors for the sake of being supported while
+      the process of their conversion was going slowly forward. At the Hospice
+      of the Catechumens the work of his conversion was begun in such earnest as
+      the insincerity of at least one of the parties to it might allow. It is
+      needless to enter into the circumstances of Rousseau's conversion to
+      Catholicism. The mischievous zeal for theological proselytising has led to
+      thousands of such hollow and degrading performances, but it may safely be
+      said that none of them was ever hollower than this. Rousseau avows that he
+      had been<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.36" id="Page_i.36">[i.36]</a></span>
+      brought up in the heartiest abhorrence of the older church, and that he
+      never lost this abhorrence. He fully explains that he accepted the
+      arguments with which he was not very energetically plied, simply because
+      he could not bear the idea of returning to Geneva, and he saw no other way
+      out of his present destitute condition. &quot;I could not dissemble from
+      myself that the holy deed I was about to do, was at the bottom the action
+      of a bandit.&quot; &quot;The sophism which destroyed me,&quot; he says in
+      one of those eloquent pieces of moralising, which bring ignoble action
+      into a relief that exaggerates our condemnation, &quot;is that of most
+      men, who complain of lack of strength when it is already too late for them
+      to use it. It is only through our own fault that virtue costs us anything;
+      if we could be always sage, we should rarely feel the need of being
+      virtuous. But inclinations that might be easily overcome, drag us on
+      without resistance; we yield to light temptations of which we despise the
+      hazard. Insensibly we fall into perilous situations, against which we
+      could easily have shielded ourselves, but from which we can afterwards
+      only make a way out by heroic efforts that stupefy us, and so we sink into
+      the abyss, crying aloud to God, Why hast thou made me so weak? But in
+      spite of ourselves, God gives answer to our conscience, 'I made thee too
+      weak to come out from the pit, because I made thee strong enough to avoid
+      falling into it.'&quot;<a name="FNanchor28" id="FNanchor28"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_28">[28]</a> So the hopeful convert did fall in, not as
+      happens to the pious soul<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.37"
+      id="Page_i.37">[i.37]</a></span> &quot;too hot for certainties in this our
+      life,&quot; to find rest in liberty of private judgment and an open Bible,
+      but simply as a means of getting food, clothing, and shelter.<a
+      name="FNanchor29" id="FNanchor29"></a><a href="#Footnote_29">[29]</a> The
+      boy was clever enough to make some show of resistance, and he turned to
+      good use for this purpose the knowledge of Church history and the great
+      Reformation controversy which he had picked up at M. Lambercier's. He was
+      careful not to carry things too far, and exactly nine days after his
+      admission into the Hospice, he &quot;abjured the errors of the sect.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor30" id="FNanchor30"></a><a href="#Footnote_30">[30]</a> Two
+      days after that he was publicly received into the kindly bosom of the true
+      Church with all solemnity, to the high edification of the devout of Turin,
+      who marked their interest in the regenerate soul by contributions to the
+      extent of twenty francs in small money.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With that sum and formal good wishes the fathers of the Hospice of the
+      Catechumens thrust him out of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.38"
+      id="Page_i.38">[i.38]</a></span> their doors into the broad world. The
+      youth who had begun the day with dreams of palaces, found himself at night
+      sleeping in a den where he paid a halfpenny for the privilege of resting
+      in the same room with the rude woman who kept the house, her husband, her
+      five or six children, and various other lodgers. This rough awakening
+      produced no consciousness of hardship in a nature which, beneath all
+      fantastic dreams, always remained true to its first sympathy with the
+      homely lives of the poor. The woman of the house swore like a carter, and
+      was always dishevelled and disorderly: this did not prevent Rousseau from
+      recognising her kindness of heart and her staunch readiness to befriend.
+      He passed his days in wandering about the streets of Turin, seeing the
+      wonders of a capital, and expecting some adventure that should raise him
+      to unknown heights. He went regularly to mass, watched the pomp of the
+      court, and counted upon stirring a passion in the breast of a princess.
+      &#192; more important circumstance was the effect of the mass in awakening
+      in his own breast his latent passion for music; a passion so strong that
+      the poorest instrument, if it were only in tune, never failed to give him
+      the liveliest pleasure. The king of Sardinia was believed to have the best
+      performers in Europe; less than that was enough to quicken the musical
+      susceptibility which is perhaps an invariable element in the most
+      completely sensuous natures.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When the end of the twenty francs began to seem<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.39" id="Page_i.39">[i.39]</a></span> a thing possible, he
+      tried to get work as an engraver. A young woman in a shop took pity on
+      him, gave him work and food, and perhaps permitted him to make dumb and
+      grovelling love to her, until her husband returned home and drove her
+      client away from the door with threats and the waving of a wand not
+      magical.<a name="FNanchor31" id="FNanchor31"></a><a href="#Footnote_31">[31]</a>
+      Rousseau's self-love sought an explanation in the natural fury of an
+      Italian husband's jealousy; but we need hardly ask for any other cause
+      than a shopkeeper's reasonable objection to vagabonds.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The next step of this youth, who was always dreaming of the love of
+      princesses, was to accept with just thankfulness the position of lackey or
+      footboy in the household of a widow. With Madame de Vercellis he passed
+      three months, and at the end of that time she died. His stay here was
+      marked by an incident that has filled many pages with stormful discussion.
+      When Madame de Vercellis died, a piece of old rose-coloured ribbon was
+      missing; Rousseau had stolen it, and it was found in his possession. They
+      asked him whence he had taken it. He replied that it had been given to him
+      by Marion, a young and comely maid in the house. In her presence and
+      before the whole household he repeated his false story, and clung to it
+      with a bitter effrontery that we may well call diabolic, remembering how
+      the nervous terror of punishment and exposure sinks the angel in man. Our
+      phrase, want of moral courage, really denotes in the young<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.40" id="Page_i.40">[i.40]</a></span> an
+      excruciating physical struggle, often so keen that the victim clutches
+      after liberation with the spontaneous tenacity and cruelty of a creature
+      wrecked in mastering waters. Undisciplined sensations constitute egoism in
+      the most ruthless of its shapes, and at this epoch, owing either to the
+      brutalities which surrounded his apprentice life at Geneva, or to that
+      rapid tendency towards degeneration which he suspected in his own
+      character, Rousseau was the slave of sensations which stained his days
+      with baseness. &quot;Never,&quot; he says, in his account of this hateful
+      action, &quot;was wickedness further from me than at this cruel moment;
+      and when I accused the poor girl, it is contradictory and yet it is true
+      that my affection for her was the cause of what I did. She was present to
+      my mind, and I threw the blame from myself on to the first object that
+      presented itself. When I saw her appear my heart was torn, but the
+      presence of so many people was too strong for my remorse. I feared
+      punishment very little; I only feared disgrace, but I feared that more
+      than death, more than crime, more than anything in the world. I would fain
+      have buried myself in the depths of the earth; invincible shame prevailed
+      over all, shame alone caused my effrontery, and the more criminal I
+      became, the more intrepid was I made by the fright of confessing it. I
+      could see nothing but the horror of being recognised and declared publicly
+      to my face a thief, liar, and traducer.&quot;<a name="FNanchor32"
+      id="FNanchor32"></a><a href="#Footnote_32">[32]</a> When he says that he<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.41" id="Page_i.41">[i.41]</a></span>
+      feared punishment little, his analysis of his mind is most likely wrong,
+      for nothing is clearer than that a dread of punishment in any physical
+      form was a peculiarly strong feeling with him at this time. However that
+      may have been, the same over-excited imagination which put every sense on
+      the alarm and led him into so abominable a misdemeanour, brought its own
+      penalties. It led him to conceive a long train of ruin as having befallen
+      Marion in consequence of his calumny against her, and this dreadful
+      thought haunted him to the end of his life. In the long sleepless nights
+      he thought he saw the unhappy girl coming to reproach him with a crime
+      that seemed as fresh to him as if it had been perpetrated the day before.<a
+      name="FNanchor33" id="FNanchor33"></a><a href="#Footnote_33">[33]</a> Thus
+      the same brooding memory which brought back to him the sweet pain of his
+      gentle kinswoman's household melody, preserved the darker side of his
+      history with equal fidelity and no less perfect continuousness. Rousseau
+      expresses a hope and belief that this burning remorse would serve as
+      expiation for his fault; as if expiation for the destruction of another
+      soul could be anything but a fine name for self-absolution. We may,
+      however, charitably and reasonably think that the possible consequences of
+      his fault to the unfortunate Marion were not actual, but were as much a
+      hallucination as the midnight visits of her reproachful spirit. Indeed, we
+      are hardly condoning evil, in suggesting that the whole story from its
+      beginning is marked with exag<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.42"
+      id="Page_i.42">[i.42]</a></span>geration, and that we who have our own
+      lives to lead shall find little help in criticising at further length the
+      exact heinousness of the ignoble falsehood of a boy who happened to grow
+      up into a man of genius.<a name="FNanchor34" id="FNanchor34"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_34">[34]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After an interval of six weeks, which were passed in the garret or cellar
+      of his rough patroness with kind heart and ungentle tongue, Rousseau again
+      found himself a lackey in the house of a Piedmontese person of quality.
+      This new master, the Count of Gouvon, treated him with a certain unusual
+      considerateness, which may perhaps make us doubt the narrative. His son
+      condescended to teach the youth Latin, and Rousseau presumed to entertain
+      a passion for one of the daughters of the house, to whom he paid silent
+      homage in the odd shape of attending to her wants at table with special
+      solicitude. In this situation he had, or at least he supposed that he had,
+      an excellent chance of ultimate advancement. But advancement here or
+      elsewhere means a measure of stability, and Rousseau's temperament in his
+      youth was the archtype of the mutable. An old comrade from Geneva visited
+      him,<a name="FNanchor35" id="FNanchor35"></a><a href="#Footnote_35">[35]</a>
+      and as almost any incident is stimulating enough to fire the restlessness
+      of imaginative youth, the gratitude which he professed to the Count of
+      Gouvon and his family, the prudence with which he marked his prospects,
+      the industry<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.43" id="Page_i.43">[i.43]</a></span>
+      with which he profited by opportunity, all faded quickly into mere dead
+      and disembodied names of virtues. His imagination again went over the
+      journey across the mountains; the fields, the woods, the streams, began to
+      absorb his whole life. He recalled with delicious satisfaction how
+      charming the journey had seemed to him, and thought how far more charming
+      it would be in the society of a comrade of his own age and taste, without
+      duty, or constraint, or obligation to go or stay other than as it might
+      please them. &quot;It would be madness to sacrifice such a piece of good
+      fortune to projects of ambition, which were slow, difficult, doubtful of
+      execution, and which, even if they should one day be realised, were not
+      with all their glory worth a quarter of an hour of true pleasure and
+      freedom in youth.&quot;<a name="FNanchor36" id="FNanchor36"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_36">[36]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On these high principles he neglected his duties so recklessly that he was
+      dismissed from his situation, and he and his comrade began their homeward
+      wanderings with more than apostolic heedlessness as to what they should
+      eat or wherewithal they should be clothed. They had a toy fountain; they
+      hoped that in return for the amusement to be conferred by this wonder they
+      should receive all that they might need. Their hopes were not fulfilled.
+      The exhibition of the toy fountain did not excuse them from their
+      reckoning. Before long it was accidentally broken, and to their secret
+      satisfaction, for it had lost its novelty. Their naked, vagrancy was thus
+      undisguised. They made<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.44"
+      id="Page_i.44">[i.44]</a></span> their way by some means or other across
+      the mountains, and their enjoyment of vagabondage was undisturbed by any
+      thought of a future. &quot;To understand my delirium at this moment,&quot;
+      Rousseau says, in words which shed much light on darker parts of his
+      history than fits of vagrancy, &quot;it is necessary to know to what a
+      degree my heart is subject to get aflame with the smallest things, and
+      with what force it plunges into the imagination of the object that
+      attracts it, vain as that object may be. The most grotesque, the most
+      childish, the maddest schemes come to caress my favourite idea, and to
+      show me the reasonableness of surrendering myself to it.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor37" id="FNanchor37"></a><a href="#Footnote_37">[37]</a> It
+      was this deep internal vehemence which distinguished Rousseau all through
+      his life from the commonplace type of social revolter. A vagrant sensuous
+      temperament, strangely compounded with Genevese austerity; an ardent and
+      fantastic imagination, incongruously shot with threads of firm reason; too
+      little conscience and too much; a monstrous and diseased love of self,
+      intertwined with a sincere compassion and keen interest for the great
+      fellowship of his brothers; a wild dreaming of dreams that were made to
+      look like sanity by the close and specious connection between conclusions
+      and premisses, though the premisses happened to have the fault of being
+      profoundly unreal:&#8212;this was the type of character that lay unfolded
+      in the youth who, towards the autumn of 1729, reached Annecy, penni<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.45" id="Page_i.45">[i.45]</a></span>less
+      and ragged, throwing himself once more on the charity of the patroness who
+      had given him shelter eighteen months before. Few figures in the world at
+      that time were less likely to conciliate the favour or excite the interest
+      of an observer, who had not studied the hidden convolutions of human
+      character deeply enough to know that a boy of eighteen may be sly,
+      sensual, restless, dreamy, and yet have it in him to say things one day
+      which may help to plunge a world into conflagration.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &#160;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <b>FOOTNOTES:</b>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_1" id="Footnote_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor1">[1]</a> Here
+      is the line:&#8212;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &#160;
+    </p>
+    <div class="blockquot">
+      <p>
+        &#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;
+        Didier Rousseau.<br /> &#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;|<br />
+        &#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;Jean<br />
+        &#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;|<br />
+        &#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;
+        -----------------------<br /> &#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;
+        |&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;
+        &#160;&#160;&#160; |<br /> &#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;
+        David.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;
+        Noah.<br /> &#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;
+        |&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;
+        |<br /> Isaac (b. 1680-5, d. 1745-7). Jean Fran&#231;ois.<br /> &#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;
+        |&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;
+        |<br /> &#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;
+        |&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;
+        &#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; &#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;
+        --------------<br /> &#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;
+        |&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;
+        &#160;|&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; &#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;|<br />
+        &#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; <span
+        class="smcap">Jean Jacques</span>.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;
+        Jean.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;Theodore.<br />
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        &#160;
+      </p>
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      (<i>Musset-Pathay</i>, ii. 283.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_2" id="Footnote_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor2">[2]</a>
+      Picot's <i>Hist. de Gen&#232;ve</i>, iii. 114.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_3" id="Footnote_3"></a><a href="#FNanchor3">[3]</a> <i>Conf.</i>,
+      i. 7.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_4" id="Footnote_4"></a><a href="#FNanchor4">[4]</a> <i>Lettre
+      &#224; D'Alembert</i>, p. 187. Also <i>Nouv. H&#233;l.</i>, VI. v. 239.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_5" id="Footnote_5"></a><a href="#FNanchor5">[5]</a> <i>Conf.</i>,
+      i. 9. Also Second Letter to M. de Malesherbes, p. 356.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_6" id="Footnote_6"></a><a href="#FNanchor6">[6]</a> <i>R&#234;veries</i>,
+      iv. p. 189. &quot;My master and counsellor, Plutarch,&quot; he says, when
+      he lends a volume to Madame d'Epinay in 1756. <i>Corr.</i>, i. 265.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_7" id="Footnote_7"></a><a href="#FNanchor7">[7]</a>
+      Dedication of the <i>Discours sur l'Origine de l'In&#233;galit&#233;</i>,
+      p. 201. (June, 1754.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_8" id="Footnote_8"></a><a href="#FNanchor8">[8]</a> <i>Conf.</i>,
+      i. 1.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_9" id="Footnote_9"></a><a href="#FNanchor9">[9]</a> <i>Ib</i>,
+      i. 12.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_10" id="Footnote_10"></a><a href="#FNanchor10">[10]</a>
+      The tenacity of this grateful recollection is shown in letters to her
+      (Madame Gonceru)&#8212;one in 1754 (<i>Corr.</i>, i. 204), another as late
+      as 1770 (vi. 129), and a third in 1762 (<i>Oeuvr. et Corr. In&#233;d.</i>,
+      392).
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_11" id="Footnote_11"></a><a href="#FNanchor11">[11]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, i. 17-32.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_12" id="Footnote_12"></a><a href="#FNanchor12">[12]</a>
+      See also <i>Conf.</i>, i. 43; iii. 185; vii. 73; xii. 188, <i>n.</i> 2.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_13" id="Footnote_13"></a><a href="#FNanchor13">[13]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, i. 27-31.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_14" id="Footnote_14"></a><a href="#FNanchor14">[14]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, i. 38-47.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_15" id="Footnote_15"></a><a href="#FNanchor15">[15]</a>
+      <i>Lettre &#224; D'Alembert</i>(1758), 178, 179.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_16" id="Footnote_16"></a><a href="#FNanchor16">[16]</a>
+      <i>R&#234;veries</i>, iv. 211, 212.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_17" id="Footnote_17"></a><a href="#FNanchor17">[17]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i> 212, 213.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_18" id="Footnote_18"></a><a href="#FNanchor18">[18]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, ii. 102, 103.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_19" id="Footnote_19"></a><a href="#FNanchor19">[19]</a>
+      M. Masseron.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_20" id="Footnote_20"></a><a href="#FNanchor20">[20]</a>
+      M. Ducommun.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_21" id="Footnote_21"></a><a href="#FNanchor21">[21]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, i. 69.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_22" id="Footnote_22"></a><a href="#FNanchor22">[22]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, i. 72.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_23" id="Footnote_23"></a><a href="#FNanchor23">[23]</a>
+      J. Gaberel's <i>Histoire de l'&#201;glise de Gen&#232;ve</i> (Geneva,
+      1853-62), vol. iii. p. 285.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_24" id="Footnote_24"></a><a href="#FNanchor24">[24]</a>
+      There is a minute in the register of the company of ministers, to the
+      effect that the Sieur de Pontverre &quot;is attracting many young men from
+      this town, and changing their religion, and that the public ought to be
+      warned.&quot; (Gaberel, iii. 224.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_25" id="Footnote_25"></a><a href="#FNanchor25">[25]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, ii. 76.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_26" id="Footnote_26"></a><a href="#FNanchor26">[26]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, ii. 77.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_27" id="Footnote_27"></a><a href="#FNanchor27">[27]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, ii. 90-97.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_28" id="Footnote_28"></a><a href="#FNanchor28">[28]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, ii. 107
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_29" id="Footnote_29"></a><a href="#FNanchor29">[29]</a>
+      See <i>&#201;mile</i>, iv. 124, 125, where the youth who was born a
+      Calvinist, finding himself a stranger in a strange land, without resource,
+      &quot;changed his religion to get bread.&quot;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_30" id="Footnote_30"></a><a href="#FNanchor30">[30]</a>
+      In the <i>Confessions</i> (ii. 115) he has grace enough to make the period
+      a month; but the extract from the register of his baptism (Gaberel's <i>Hist.
+      de l'&#201;glise de Gen&#232;ve</i>, iii. 224), which has been recently
+      published, shows that this is untrue: &quot;Jean Jacques Rousseau, de Gen&#232;ve
+      (Calviniste), entr&#233; &#224; l'hospice &#224; l'&#226;ge de 16 ans, le
+      12 avril, 1728. Abjura les erreurs de la secte le 21; et le 23 du m&#234;me
+      mois lui fut administr&#233; le saint bapt&#234;me, ayant pour parrain le
+      sieur Andr&#233; Ferrero et pour marraine Fran&#231;oise Christine Rora
+      (ou Rovea).&quot;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A little further on (p. 119) he speaks of having been shut up &quot;for
+      two months,&quot; but this is not true even on his own showing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_31" id="Footnote_31"></a><a href="#FNanchor31">[31]</a>
+      Madame Basile. <i>Conf.</i>, ii. 121-135.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_32" id="Footnote_32"></a><a href="#FNanchor32">[32]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i> ii. ad finem.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_33" id="Footnote_33"></a><a href="#FNanchor33">[33]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, ii. 144.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_34" id="Footnote_34"></a><a href="#FNanchor34">[34]</a>
+      Another version of the story mentioned by Musset-Pathay (i. 7) makes the
+      object of the theft a diamond, but there is really no evidence in the
+      matter beyond that given by Rousseau himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_35" id="Footnote_35"></a><a href="#FNanchor35">[35]</a>
+      Bacle, by name.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_36" id="Footnote_36"></a><a href="#FNanchor36">[36]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, iii. 168.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_37" id="Footnote_37"></a><a href="#FNanchor37">[37]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, iii. 170. A slightly idealised account of the situation is
+      given in <i>&#201;mile</i>, Bk. iv. 125.
+    </p>
+    <hr style="width: 65%;" />
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.46" id="Page_i.46">[i.46]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      <a name="CHAPTER_III." id="CHAPTER_III."></a>CHAPTER III.
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      SAVOY.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <span class="smcap">The</span> commonplace theory which the world takes
+      for granted as to the relations of the sexes, makes the woman ever crave
+      the power and guidance of her physically stronger mate. Even if this be a
+      true account of the normal state, there is at any rate a kind of
+      temperament among the many types of men, in which it seems as if the
+      elements of character remain mere futile and dispersive particles, until
+      compelled into unity and organisation by the creative shock of feminine
+      influence. There are men, famous or obscure, whose lives might be divided
+      into a number of epochs, each defined and presided over by the influence
+      of a woman. For the inconstant such a calendar contains many divisions,
+      for the constant it is brief and simple; for both alike it marks the great
+      decisive phases through which character has moved.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rousseau's temperament was deeply marked by this special sort of
+      susceptibility in one of its least agreeable forms. His sentiment was
+      neither robustly and courageously animal, nor was it an intellectual
+      demand for the bright and vivacious sympathies in<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.47" id="Page_i.47">[i.47]</a></span> which women sometimes
+      excel. It had neither bold virility, nor that sociable energy which makes
+      close emotional companionship an essential condition of freedom of faculty
+      and completeness of work. There is a certain close and sickly air round
+      all his dealings with women and all his feeling for them. We seem to move
+      not in the star-like radiance of love, nor even in the fiery flames of
+      lust, but among the humid heats of some unknown abode of things not
+      wholesome or manly. &quot;I know a sentiment,&quot; he writes, &quot;which
+      is perhaps less impetuous than love, but a thousand times more delicious,
+      which sometimes is joined to love, and which is very often apart from it.
+      Nor is this sentiment friendship only; it is more voluptuous, more tender;
+      I do not believe that any one of the same sex could be its object; at
+      least I have been a friend, if ever man was, and I never felt this about
+      any of my friends.&quot;<a name="FNanchor38" id="FNanchor38"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_38">[38]</a> He admits that he can only describe this
+      sentiment by its effects; but our lives are mostly ruled by elements that
+      defy definition, and in Rousseau's case the sentiment which he could not
+      describe was a paramount trait of his mental constitution. It was as a
+      voluptuous garment; in it his imagination was cherished into activity, and
+      protected against that outer air of reality which braces ordinary men, but
+      benumbs and disintegrates the whole vital apparatus of such an
+      organisation as Rousseau's. If he had been devoid of this feeling about
+      women, his character might very possibly have remained sterile.<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.48" id="Page_i.48">[i.48]</a></span> That
+      feeling was the complementary contribution, without which could be no
+      fecundity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When he returned from his squalid Italian expedition in search of bread
+      and a new religion, his mind was clouded with the vague desire, the
+      sensual moodiness, which in such natures stains the threshold of manhood.
+      This unrest, with its mysterious torments and black delights, was
+      banished, or at least soothed into a happier humour, by the influence of a
+      person who is one of the most striking types to be found in the gallery of
+      fair women.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      I.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      A French writer in the eighteenth century, in a story which deals with a
+      rather repulsive theme of action in a tone that is graceful, simple, and
+      pathetic, painted the portrait of a creature for whom no moralist with a
+      reputation to lose can say a word; and we may, if we choose, fool
+      ourselves by supposing her to be without a counterpart in the
+      better-regulated world of real life, but, in spite of both these
+      objections, she is an interesting and not untouching figure to those who
+      like to know all the many-webbed stuff out of which their brothers and
+      sisters are made. The Manon Lescaut of the unfortunate Abb&#233; Prevost,
+      kindly, bright, playful, tender, but devoid of the very germ of the idea
+      of that virtue which is counted the sovereign recommendation of woman,
+      helps us to understand Madame de Warens. There are differ<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.49" id="Page_i.49">[i.49]</a></span>ences
+      enough between them, and we need not mistake them for one and the same
+      type. Manon Lescaut is a prettier figure, because romance has fewer
+      limitations than real life; but if we think of her in reading of
+      Rousseau's benefactress, the vision of the imaginary woman tends to soften
+      our judgment of the actual one, as well as to enlighten our conception of
+      a character that eludes the instruments of a commonplace analysis.<a
+      name="FNanchor39" id="FNanchor39"></a><a href="#Footnote_39">[39]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was born at Vevai in 1700; she married early, and early disagreed with
+      her husband, from whom she eventually went away, abandoning family,
+      religion, country, and means of subsistence, with all gaiety of heart. The
+      King of Sardinia happened to be keeping his court at a small town on the
+      southern shores of the lake of Geneva, and the conversion of Madame de
+      Warens to Catholicism by the preaching of the Bishop of Annecy,<a
+      name="FNanchor40" id="FNanchor40"></a><a href="#Footnote_40">[40]</a> gave
+      a zest to the royal visit, as being a successful piece of sport in that
+      great spiritual hunt which Savoy loved to pursue at the expense of the
+      reformed church in Switzerland. The king, to mark his zeal for the faith
+      of his house, conferred on<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.50"
+      id="Page_i.50">[i.50]</a></span> the new convert a small pension for life;
+      but as the tongues of the scandalous imputed a less pure motive for such
+      generosity in a parsimonious prince, Madame de Warens removed from the
+      court and settled at Annecy. Her conversion was hardly more serious than
+      Rousseau's own, because seriousness was no condition of her intelligence
+      on any of its sides or in any of its relations. She was extremely
+      charitable to the poor, full of pity for all in misfortune, easily moved
+      to forgiveness of wrong or ingratitude; careless, gay, open-hearted;
+      having, in a word, all the good qualities which spring in certain generous
+      soils from human impulse, and hardly any of those which spring from
+      reflection, or are implanted by the ordering of society. Her reason had
+      been warped in her youth by an instructor of the devil's stamp;&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor41" id="FNanchor41"></a><a href="#Footnote_41">[41]</a>
+      finding her attached to her husband and to her duties, always cold,
+      argumentative, and impregnable on the side of the senses, he attacked her
+      by sophisms, and at last persuaded her that the union of the sexes is in
+      itself a matter of the most perfect indifference, provided only that
+      decorum of appearance be preserved, and the peace of mind of persons
+      concerned be not disturbed.<a name="FNanchor42" id="FNanchor42"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_42">[42]</a><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.51"
+      id="Page_i.51">[i.51]</a></span> This execrable lesson, which greater and
+      more unselfish men held and propagated in grave books before the end of
+      the century, took root in her mind. If we accept Rousseau's explanation,
+      it did so the more easily as her temperament was cold, and thus
+      corroborated the idea of the indifference of what public opinion and
+      private passion usually concur in investing with such enormous
+      weightiness. &quot;I will even dare to say,&quot; Rousseau declares,
+      &quot;that she only knew one true pleasure in the world, and that was to
+      give pleasure to those whom she loved.&quot;<a name="FNanchor43"
+      id="FNanchor43"></a><a href="#Footnote_43">[43]</a> He is at great pains
+      to protest how compatible this coolness of temperament is with excessive
+      sensibility of character; and neither ethological theory nor practical
+      observation of men and women is at all hostile to what he is so anxious to
+      prove. The cardinal element of character is the speed at which its
+      energies move; its rapidity or its steadiness, concentration or
+      volatility; whether the thought and feeling travel as quickly as light or
+      as slowly as sound. A rapid and volatile constitution like that of Madame
+      de Warens is inconsistent with ardent and glowing warmth, which belongs to
+      the other sort, but it is essentially bound up with sensibility, or
+      readiness of sympathetic answer to every cry from another soul. It is the
+      slow, brooding, smouldering nature, like Rousseau's own, in which we may
+      expect to find the tropics.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To bring the heavy artillery of moral reprobation to bear upon a poor soul
+      like Madame de Warens is<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.52"
+      id="Page_i.52">[i.52]</a></span> as if one should denounce flagrant want
+      of moral purpose in the busy movements of ephemera. Her activity was
+      incessant, but it ended in nothing better than debt, embarrassment, and
+      confusion. She inherited from her father a taste for alchemy, and spent
+      much time in search after secret elixirs and the like. &quot;Quacks,
+      taking advantage of her weakness, made themselves her master, constantly
+      infested her, ruined her, and wasted, in the midst of furnaces and
+      chemicals, intelligence, talents, and charms which would have made her the
+      delight of the best societies.&quot;<a name="FNanchor44" id="FNanchor44"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_44">[44]</a> Perhaps, however, the too notorious vagrancy
+      of her amours had at least as much to do with her failure to delight the
+      best societies as her indiscreet passion for alchemy. Her person was
+      attractive enough. &quot;She had those points of beauty,&quot; says
+      Rousseau, &quot;which are desirable, because they reside rather in
+      expression than in feature. She had a tender and caressing air, a soft
+      eye, a divine smile, light hair of uncommon beauty. You could not see a
+      finer head or bosom, finer arms or hands.&quot;<a name="FNanchor45"
+      id="FNanchor45"></a><a href="#Footnote_45">[45]</a> She was full of tricks
+      and whimsies. She could not endure the first smell of the soup and meats
+      at dinner; when they were placed on the table she nearly swooned, and her
+      disgust lasted some time, until at the end of half an hour or so she took
+      her first morsel.<a name="FNanchor46" id="FNanchor46"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_46">[46]</a> On the whole, if we accept the current
+      standard of sanity, Madame de Warens must be pronounced ever so little
+      flighty; but a monotonous<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.53"
+      id="Page_i.53">[i.53]</a></span> world can afford to be lenient to people
+      with a slight craziness, if it only has hearty benevolence and
+      cheerfulness in its company, and is free from egoism or rapacious vanity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This was the person within the sphere of whose attraction Rousseau was
+      decisively brought in the autumn of 1729, and he remained, with certain
+      breaks of vagabondage, linked by a close attachment to her until 1738. It
+      was in many respects the truly formative portion of his life. He acquired
+      during this time much of his knowledge of books, such as it was, and his
+      principles of judging them. He saw much of the lives of the poor and of
+      the world's ways with them. Above all his ideal was revolutionised, and
+      the recent dreams of Plutarchian heroism, of grandeur, of palaces,
+      princesses, and a glorious career full in the world's eye, were replaced
+      by a new conception of blessedness of life, which never afterwards faded
+      from his vision, and which has held a front place in the imagination of
+      literary Europe ever since. The notions or aspirations which he had picked
+      up from a few books gave way to notions and aspirations which were shaped
+      and fostered by the scenes of actual life into which he was thrown, and
+      which found his character soft for their impression. In one way the new
+      pictures of a future were as dissociated from the conditions of reality as
+      the old had been, and the sensuous life of the happy valley in Savoy as
+      little fitted a man to compose ideals for our gnarled and knotted world as
+      the mental life among the heroics of sentimental fiction had done.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.54" id="Page_i.54">[i.54]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rousseau's delight in the spot where Madame de Warens lived at Annecy was
+      the mark of the new ideal which circumstances were to engender in him, and
+      after him to spread in many hearts. His room looked over gardens and a
+      stream, and beyond them stretched a far landscape. &quot;It was the first
+      time since leaving Bossey that I had green before my windows. Always shut
+      in by walls, I had nothing under my eye but house-tops and the dull gray
+      of the streets. How moving and delicious this novelty was to me! It
+      brightened all the tenderness of my disposition. I counted the landscape
+      among the kindnesses of my dear benefactress; it seemed as if she had
+      brought it there expressly for me. I placed myself there in all
+      peacefulness with her; she was present to me everywhere among the flowers
+      and the verdure; her charms and those of spring were all mingled together
+      in my eyes. My heart, which had hitherto been stifled, found itself more
+      free in this ample space, and my sighs had more liberal vent among these
+      orchard gardens.&quot;<a name="FNanchor47" id="FNanchor47"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_47">[47]</a> Madame de Warens was the semi-divine figure
+      who made the scene live, and gave it perfect and harmonious accent. He had
+      neither transports nor desires by her side, but existed in a state of
+      ravishing calm, enjoying without knowing what. &quot;I could have passed
+      my whole life and eternity itself in this way, without an instant of
+      weariness. She is the only person with whom I never felt that dryness in
+      conversation, which turns<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.55"
+      id="Page_i.55">[i.55]</a></span> the duty of keeping it up into a torment.
+      Our intercourse was not so much conversation as an inexhaustible stream of
+      chatter, which never came to an end until it was interrupted from without.
+      I only felt all the force of my attachment for her when she was out of my
+      sight. So long as I could see her I was merely happy and satisfied, but my
+      disquiet in her absence went so far as to be painful. I shall never forget
+      how one holiday, while she was at vespers, I went for a walk outside the
+      town, my heart full of her image and of an eager desire to pass all my
+      days by her side. I had sense enough to see that for the present this was
+      impossible, and that the bliss which I relished so keenly must be brief.
+      This gave to my musing a sadness which was free from everything sombre,
+      and which was moderated by pleasing hope. The sound of the bells, which
+      has always moved me to a singular degree, the singing of the birds, the
+      glory of the weather, the sweetness of the landscape, the scattered rustic
+      dwellings in which my imagination placed our common home;&#8212;all this
+      so struck me with a vivid, tender, sad, and touching impression that I saw
+      myself as in an ecstasy transported into the happy time and the happy
+      place where my heart, possessed of all the felicity that could bring it
+      delight, without even dreaming of the pleasures of sense, should share
+      joys inexpressible.&quot;<a name="FNanchor48" id="FNanchor48"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_48">[48]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was still, however, a space to be bridged between the doubtful now
+      and this delicious future.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.56"
+      id="Page_i.56">[i.56]</a></span> The harshness of circumstance is ever
+      interposing with a money question, and for a vagrant of eighteen the first
+      of all problems is a problem of economics. Rousseau was submitted to the
+      observation of a kinsman of Madame de Warens,<a name="FNanchor49"
+      id="FNanchor49"></a><a href="#Footnote_49">[49]</a> and his verdict
+      corresponded with that of the notary of Geneva, with whom years before
+      Rousseau had first tried the critical art of making a living. He
+      pronounced that in spite of an animated expression, the lad was, if not
+      thoroughly inept, at least of very slender intelligence, without ideas,
+      almost without attainments, very narrow indeed in all respects, and that
+      the honour of one day becoming a village priest was the highest piece of
+      fortune to which he had any right to aspire.<a name="FNanchor50"
+      id="FNanchor50"></a><a href="#Footnote_50">[50]</a> So he was sent to the
+      seminary, to learn Latin enough for the priestly offices. He began by
+      conceiving a deadly antipathy to his instructor, whose appearance happened
+      to be displeasing to him. A second was found,<a name="FNanchor51"
+      id="FNanchor51"></a><a href="#Footnote_51">[51]</a> and the patient and
+      obliging temper, the affectionate and sympathetic manner of his new
+      teacher made a great impression on the pupil, though the progress in
+      intellectual acquirement was as unsatisfactory in one case as in the
+      other. It is characteristic of that subtle impressionableness to physical
+      comeliness, which in ordinary natures is rapidly effaced by press of more
+      urgent considerations, but which Rousseau's strongly sensuous quality
+      retained, that he should have remembered, and thought worth mentioning
+      years afterwards, that the first of his two teachers at the seminary<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.57" id="Page_i.57">[i.57]</a></span> of
+      Annecy had greasy black hair, a complexion as of gingerbread, and bristles
+      in place of beard, while the second had the most touching expression he
+      ever saw in his life, with fair hair and large blue eyes, and a glance and
+      a tone which made you feel that he was one of the band predestined from
+      their birth to unhappy days. While at Turin, Rousseau had made the
+      acquaintance of another sage and benevolent priest,<a name="FNanchor52"
+      id="FNanchor52"></a><a href="#Footnote_52">[52]</a> and uniting the two
+      good men thirty years after he conceived and drew the character of the
+      Savoyard Vicar.<a name="FNanchor53" id="FNanchor53"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_53">[53]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Shortly the seminarists reported that, though not vicious, their pupil was
+      not even good enough for a priest, so deficient was he in intellectual
+      faculty. It was next decided to try music, and Rousseau ascended for a
+      brief space into the seventh heaven of the arts. This was one of the
+      intervals of his life of which he says that he recalls not only the times,
+      places, persons, but all the surrounding objects, the temperature of the
+      air, its odour, its colour, a certain local impression only felt there,
+      and the memory of which stirs the old transports anew. He never forgot a
+      certain tune, because one Advent Sunday he heard it from his bed being
+      sung before daybreak on the steps of the cathedral; nor an old lame
+      carpenter who played the counter-bass, nor a fair little abb&#233; who
+      played the violin in the choir.<a name="FNanchor54" id="FNanchor54"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_54">[54]</a> Yet he was in so dreamy, absent, and
+      distracted a state, that neither his good-will nor his assiduity availed,
+      and he could learn nothing, not<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.58"
+      id="Page_i.58">[i.58]</a></span> even music. His teacher, one Le M&#226;itre,
+      belonged to that great class of irregular and disorderly natures with
+      which Rousseau's destiny, in the shape of an irregular and disorderly
+      temperament of his own, so constantly brought him into contact. Le M&#226;itre
+      could not work without the inspiration of the wine cup, and thus his
+      passion for his art landed him a sot. He took offence at a slight put upon
+      him by the precentor of the cathedral of which he was choir-master, and
+      left Annecy in a furtive manner along with Rousseau, whom the too
+      comprehensive solicitude of Madame de Warens despatched to bear him
+      company. They went together as far as Lyons; here the unfortunate musician
+      happened to fall into an epileptic fit in the street. Rousseau called for
+      help, informed the crowd of the poor man's hotel, and then seizing a
+      moment when no one was thinking about him, turned the street corner and
+      finally disappeared, the musician being thus &quot;abandoned by the only
+      friend on whom he had a right to count.&quot;<a name="FNanchor55"
+      id="FNanchor55"></a><a href="#Footnote_55">[55]</a> It thus appears that a
+      man maybe exquisitely moved by the sound of bells, the song of birds, the
+      fairness of smiling gardens, and yet be capable all the time without a
+      qualm of misgiving of leaving a friend senseless in the road in a strange
+      place. It has ceased to be wonderful how many ugly and cruel actions are
+      done by people with an extraordinary sense of the beauty and beneficence
+      of nature. At the moment Rousseau only thought of getting back to Annecy
+      and Madame de Warens. &quot;It is not,&quot; he<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.59" id="Page_i.59">[i.59]</a></span> says in words of
+      profound warning, which many men have verified in those two or three hours
+      before the tardy dawn that swell into huge purgatorial &#230;ons,&#8212;&quot;it
+      is not when we have just done a bad action, that it torments us; it is
+      when we recall it long after, for the memory of it can never be thrust
+      out.&quot;<a name="FNanchor56" id="FNanchor56"></a><a href="#Footnote_56">[56]</a>
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      II.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      When he made his way homewards again, he found to his surprise and dismay
+      that his benefactress had left Annecy, and had gone for an indefinite time
+      to Paris. He never knew the secret of this sudden departure, for no man,
+      he says, was ever so little curious as to the private affairs of his
+      friends. His heart, completely occupied with the present, filled its whole
+      capacity and entire space with that, and except for past pleasures no
+      empty corner was ever left for what was done with.<a name="FNanchor57"
+      id="FNanchor57"></a><a href="#Footnote_57">[57]</a> He says he was too
+      young to take the desertion deeply to heart. Where he found subsistence we
+      do not know. He was fascinated by a flashy French adventurer,<a
+      name="FNanchor58" id="FNanchor58"></a><a href="#Footnote_58">[58]</a> in
+      whose company he wasted many hours, and the precious stuff of youthful
+      opportunity. He passed a summer day in joyful rustic fashion with two
+      damsels whom he hardly ever saw again, but the memory of whom and of the
+      holiday that they had made with him remained stamped in<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.60" id="Page_i.60">[i.60]</a></span> his
+      brain, to be reproduced many a year hence in some of the traits of the new
+      Helo&#239;sa and her friend Claire.<a name="FNanchor59" id="FNanchor59"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_59">[59]</a> Then he accepted an invitation from a former
+      waiting-woman of Madame de Warens to attend her home to Freiburg. On this
+      expedition he paid an hour's visit to his father, who had settled and
+      remarried at Nyon. Returning from Freiburg, he came to Lausanne, where,
+      with an audacity that might be taken for the first presage of mental
+      disturbance, he undertook to teach music. &quot;I have already,&quot; he
+      says, &quot;noted some moments of inconceivable delirium, in which I
+      ceased to be myself. Behold me now a teacher of singing, without knowing
+      how to decipher an air. Without the least knowledge of composition, I
+      boasted of my skill in it before all the world; and without ability to
+      score the slenderest vaudeville, I gave myself out for a composer. Having
+      been presented to M. de Treytorens, a professor of law, who loved music
+      and gave concerts at his house, I insisted on giving him a specimen of my
+      talent, and I set to work to compose a piece for his concert with as much
+      effrontery as if I knew all about it.&quot; The performance came off duly,
+      and the strange impostor conducted it with as much gravity as the
+      profoundest master. Never since the beginning of opera has the like
+      charivari greeted the ears of men.<a name="FNanchor60" id="FNanchor60"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_60">[60]</a> Such an opening was fatal to all chance of
+      scholars, but the friendly tavern-keeper who had first taken him in did
+      not lack either hope or charity.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.61"
+      id="Page_i.61">[i.61]</a></span> &quot;How is it,&quot; Rousseau cried,
+      many years after this, &quot;that having found so many good people in my
+      youth, I find so few in my advanced life? Is their stock exhausted? No;
+      but the class in which I have to seek them now is not the same as that in
+      which I found them then. Among the common people, where great passions
+      only speak at intervals, the sentiments of nature make themselves heard
+      oftener. In the higher ranks they are absolutely stifled, and under the
+      mask of sentiment it is only interest or vanity that speaks.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor61" id="FNanchor61"></a><a href="#Footnote_61">[61]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From Lausanne he went to Neuch&#226;tel, where he had more success, for,
+      teaching others, he began himself to learn. But no success was marked
+      enough to make him resist a vagrant chance. One day in his rambles falling
+      in with an archimandrite of the Greek church, who was traversing Europe in
+      search of subscriptions for the restoration of the Holy Sepulchre, he at
+      once attached himself to him in the capacity of interpreter. In this
+      position he remained for a few weeks, until the French minister at Soleure
+      took him away from the Greek monk, and despatched him to Paris to be the
+      attendant of a young officer.<a name="FNanchor62" id="FNanchor62"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_62">[62]</a> A few days in the famous city, which he now
+      saw for the first time, and which disappointed his expecta<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.62" id="Page_i.62">[i.62]</a></span>tions
+      just as the sea and all other wonders disappointed them,<a
+      name="FNanchor63" id="FNanchor63"></a><a href="#Footnote_63">[63]</a>
+      convinced him that here was not what he sought, and he again turned his
+      face southwards in search of Madame de Warens and more familiar lands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The interval thus passed in roaming over the eastern face of France, and
+      which we may date in the summer of 1732,<a name="FNanchor64"
+      id="FNanchor64"></a><a href="#Footnote_64">[64]</a> was always counted by
+      Rousseau<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.63" id="Page_i.63">[i.63]</a></span>
+      among the happy epochs of his life, though the weeks may seem grievously
+      wasted to a generation which is apt to limit its ideas of redeeming the
+      time to the two pursuits of reading books or making money. He travelled
+      alone and on foot from Soleure to Paris and from Paris back again to
+      Lyons, and this was part of the training which served him in the stead of
+      books. Scarcely any great writer since the revival of letters has been so
+      little literary as Rousseau, so little indebted to literature for the most
+      characteristic part of his work. He was formed by life; not by life in the
+      sense of contact with a great number of active and important persons, or
+      with a great number of persons of any kind, but in the rarer sense of free
+      surrender to the plenitude of his own impressions. A world composed of
+      such people, all dispensing with the inherited portion of human
+      experience, and living independently on their own stock, would rapidly
+      fall backwards into dissolution. But there is no more rash idea of the
+      right composition of a society than one which leads us to denounce a type
+      of character for no better reason than that, if it were universal, society
+      would go to pieces. There is very little danger of Rousseau's type
+      becoming common, unless lunar or other great physical influences arise to
+      work a vast change in the cerebral constitution of the species. We may
+      safely trust the prodigious <i>vis inertioe</i> of human nature to ward
+      off the peril of an eccentricity beyond bounds spreading too far. At
+      present, however, it is enough, without going into the general<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.64" id="Page_i.64">[i.64]</a></span>
+      question, to notice the particular fact that while the other great
+      exponents of the eighteenth century movement, Hume, Voltaire, Diderot,
+      were nourishing their natural strength of understanding by the study and
+      practice of literature, Rousseau, the leader of the reaction against that
+      movement, was wandering a beggar and an outcast, craving the rude fare of
+      the peasant's hut, knocking at roadside inns, and passing nights in caves
+      and holes in the fields, or in the great desolate streets of towns.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If such a life had been disagreeable to him, it would have lost all the
+      significance that it now has for us. But where others would have found
+      affliction, he had consolation, and where they would have lain desperate
+      and squalid, he marched elate and ready to strike the stars. &quot;Never,&quot;
+      he says, &quot;did I think so much, exist so much, be myself so much, as
+      in the journeys that I have made alone and on foot. Walking has something
+      about it which animates and enlivens my ideas. I can hardly think while I
+      am still; my body must be in motion, to move my mind. The sight of the
+      country, the succession of agreeable views, open air, good appetite, the
+      freedom of the alehouse, the absence of everything that could make me feel
+      dependence, or recall me to my situation&#8212;all this sets my soul free,
+      gives me a greater boldness of thought. I dispose of all nature as its
+      sovereign lord; my heart, wandering from object to object, mingles and is
+      one with the things that soothe it, wraps itself up in charming images,
+      and is intoxi<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.65" id="Page_i.65">[i.65]</a></span>cated
+      by delicious sentiment. Ideas come as they please, not as I please: they
+      do not come at all, or they come in a crowd, overwhelming me with their
+      number and their force. When I came to a place I only thought of eating,
+      and when I left it I only thought of walking. I felt that a new paradise
+      awaited me at the door, and I thought of nothing but of hastening in
+      search of it.&quot;<a name="FNanchor65" id="FNanchor65"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_65">[65]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Here again is a picture of one whom vagrancy assuredly did not degrade:&#8212;&quot;I
+      had not the least care for the future, and I awaited the answer [as to the
+      return of Madame de Warens to Savoy], lying out in the open air, sleeping
+      stretched out on the ground or on some wooden bench, as tranquilly as on a
+      bed of roses. I remember passing one delicious night outside the town
+      [Lyons], in a road which ran by the side of either the Rhone or the Sa&#244;ne,
+      I forget which of the two. Gardens raised on a terrace bordered the other
+      side of the road. It had been very hot all day, and the evening was
+      delightful; the dew moistened the parched grass, the night was profoundly
+      still, the air fresh without being cold; the sun in going down had left
+      red vapours in the heaven, and they turned the water to rose colour; the
+      trees on the terrace sheltered nightingales, answering song for song. I
+      went on in a sort of ecstasy, surrendering my heart and every sense to the
+      enjoyment of it all, and only sighing for regret that I was enjoying it
+      alone. Absorbed in the sweetness of my musing, I prolonged<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.66" id="Page_i.66">[i.66]</a></span> my
+      ramble far into the night, without ever perceiving that I was tired. At
+      last I found it out. I lay down luxuriously on the shelf of a niche or
+      false doorway made in the wall of the terrace; the canopy of my bed was
+      formed by overarching tree-tops; a nightingale was perched exactly over my
+      head, and I fell asleep to his singing. My slumber was delicious, my
+      awaking more delicious still. It was broad day, and my opening eyes looked
+      on sun and water and green things, and an adorable landscape. I rose up
+      and gave myself a shake; I felt hungry and started gaily for the town,
+      resolved to spend on a good breakfast the two pieces of money which I
+      still had left. I was in such joyful spirits that I went along the road
+      singing lustily.&quot;<a name="FNanchor66" id="FNanchor66"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_66">[66]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is in this the free expansion of inner sympathy; the natural
+      sentiment spontaneously responding to all the delicious movement of the
+      external world on its peaceful and harmonious side, just as if the world
+      of many-hued social circumstance which man has made for himself had no
+      existence. We are conscious of a full nervous elation which is not the
+      product of literature, such as we have seen so many a time since, and
+      which only found its expression in literature in Rousseau's case by
+      accident. He did not feel in order to write, but felt without any thought
+      of writing. He dreamed at this time of many lofty destinies, among them
+      that of marshal of France, but the fame of authorship never entered into
+      his dreams.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.67" id="Page_i.67">[i.67]</a></span>
+      When the time for authorship actually came, his work had all the benefit
+      of the absence of self-consciousness, it had all the disinterestedness, so
+      to say, with which the first fresh impressions were suffered to rise in
+      his mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One other picture of this time is worth remembering, as showing that
+      Rousseau was not wholly blind to social circumstances, and as
+      illustrating, too, how it was that his way of dealing with them was so
+      much more real and passionate, though so much less sagacious in some of
+      its aspects, than the way of the other revolutionists of the century. One
+      day, when he had lost himself in wandering in search of some site which he
+      expected to find beautiful, he entered the house of a peasant, half dead
+      with hunger and thirst. His entertainer offered him nothing more restoring
+      than coarse barley bread and skimmed milk. Presently, after seeing what
+      manner of guest he had, the worthy man descended by a small trap into his
+      cellar, and brought up some good brown bread, some meat, and a bottle of
+      wine, and an omelette was added afterwards. Then he explained to the
+      wondering Rousseau, who was a Swiss, and knew none of the mysteries of the
+      French fisc, that he hid away his wine on account of the duties, and his
+      bread on account of the <i>taille</i>, and declared that he would be a
+      ruined man if they suspected that he was not dying of hunger. All this
+      made an impression on Rousseau which he never forgot. &quot;Here,&quot; he
+      says, &quot;was the germ of the inextinguishable hatred which afterwards<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.68" id="Page_i.68">[i.68]</a></span> grew
+      up in my heart against the vexations that harass the common people, and
+      against all their oppressors. This man actually did not dare to eat the
+      bread which he had won by the sweat of his brow, and only avoided ruin by
+      showing the same misery as reigned around him.&quot;<a name="FNanchor67"
+      id="FNanchor67"></a><a href="#Footnote_67">[67]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was because he had thus seen the wrongs of the poor, not from without
+      but from within, not as a pitying spectator but as of their own company,
+      that Rousseau by and by brought such fire to the attack upon the old
+      order, and changed the blank practice of the elder philosophers into a
+      deadly affair of ball and shell. The man who had been a servant, who had
+      wanted bread, who knew the horrors of the midnight street, who had slept
+      in dens, who had been befriended by rough men and rougher women, who saw
+      the goodness of humanity under its coarsest outside, and who above all
+      never tried to shut these things out from his memory, but accepted them as
+      the most interesting, the most touching, the most real of all his
+      experiences, might well be expected to penetrate to the root of the
+      matter, and to protest to the few who usurp literature and policy with
+      their ideas, aspirations, interests, that it is not they but the many,
+      whose existence stirs the heart and fills the eye with the great prime
+      elements of the human lot.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.69" id="Page_i.69">[i.69]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      III.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      It was, then, some time towards the middle of 1732 that Rousseau arrived
+      at Chamb&#233;ri, and finally took up his residence with Madame de Warens,
+      in the dullest and most sombre room of a dull and sombre house. She had
+      procured him employment in connection with a land survey which the
+      government of Charles Emmanuel III. was then executing. It was only
+      temporary, and Rousseau's function was no loftier than that of clerk, who
+      had to copy and reduce arithmetical calculations. We may imagine how
+      little a youth fresh from nights under the summer sky would relish eight
+      hours a day of surly toil in a gloomy office, with a crowd of dirty and
+      ill-smelling fellow-workers.<a name="FNanchor68" id="FNanchor68"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_68">[68]</a> If Rousseau was ever oppressed by any set of
+      circumstances, his method was invariable: he ran away from them. So now he
+      threw up his post, and again tried to earn a little money by that musical
+      instruction in which he had made so many singular and grotesque
+      endeavours. Even here the virtues which make ordinary life a possible
+      thing were not his. He was pleased at his lessons while there, but he
+      could not bear the idea of being bound to be there, nor the fixing of an
+      hour. In time this experiment for a subsistence came to the same end as
+      all the others. He next rushed to Besan&#231;on in search of the musical
+      instruction which he wished to give to others, but his baggage was<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.70" id="Page_i.70">[i.70]</a></span>
+      confiscated at the frontier, and he had to return.<a name="FNanchor69"
+      id="FNanchor69"></a><a href="#Footnote_69">[69]</a> Finally he abandoned
+      the attempt, and threw himself loyally upon the narrow resources of Madame
+      de Warens, whom he assisted in some singularly indefinite way in the
+      transaction of her very indefinite and miscellaneous affairs,&#8212;if we
+      are here, as so often, to give the name of affairs to a very rapid and
+      heedless passage along a shabby road to ruin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The household at this time was on a very remarkable footing. Madame de
+      Warens was at its head, and Claude Anet, gardener, butler, steward, was
+      her factotum. He was a discreet person, of severe probity and few words,
+      firm, thrifty, and sage. The too comprehensive principles of his mistress
+      admitted him to the closest intimacy, and in due time, when Madame de
+      Warens thought of the seductions which ensnare the feet of youth, Rousseau
+      was delivered from them in an equivocal way by solicitous application of
+      the same maxims of comprehension. &quot;Although Claude Anet was as young
+      as she was, he was so mature and so grave, that he looked upon us as two
+      children worthy of indulgence, and we both looked upon him as a
+      respectable man, whose esteem it was our business to conciliate. Thus
+      there grew up between us three a companionship, perhaps without another
+      example like it upon earth. All our wishes, our cares, our hearts were in
+      common; nothing seemed to pass outside our little circle. The habit of
+      living together, and of living together<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.71" id="Page_i.71">[i.71]</a></span> exclusively, became so
+      strong that if at our meals one of the three was absent, or there came a
+      fourth, all was thrown out; and in spite of our peculiar relations, a <i>t&#234;te-&#224;-t&#234;te</i>
+      was less sweet than a meeting of all three.&quot;<a name="FNanchor70"
+      id="FNanchor70"></a><a href="#Footnote_70">[70]</a> Fate interfered to
+      spoil this striking attempt after a new type of the family, developed on a
+      duandric base. Claude Anet was seized with illness, a consequence of
+      excessive fatigue in an Alpine expedition in search of plants, and he came
+      to his end.<a name="FNanchor71" id="FNanchor71"></a><a href="#Footnote_71">[71]</a>
+      In him Rousseau always believed that he lost the most solid friend he ever
+      possessed, &quot;a rare and estimable man, in whom nature served instead
+      of education, and who nourished in obscure servitude all the virtues of
+      great men.&quot;<a name="FNanchor72" id="FNanchor72"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_72">[72]</a> The day after his death, Rousseau was
+      speaking of their lost friend to Madame de Warens with the liveliest and
+      most sincere affliction, when suddenly in the midst of the conversation he
+      remembered that he should inherit the poor man's clothes, and particularly
+      a handsome black coat. A reproachful tear from his Maman, as he always
+      somewhat nauseously called Madame de Warens, extinguished the vile thought
+      and washed away its last traces.<a name="FNanchor73" id="FNanchor73"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_73">[73]</a> After all, those men and women are
+      exceptionally happy, who have no such involuntary meanness of thought
+      standing against themselves in that unwritten chapter of their<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.72" id="Page_i.72">[i.72]</a></span> lives
+      which even the most candid persons keep privately locked up in shamefast
+      recollection.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Shortly after his return to Chamb&#233;ri, a wave from the great tide of
+      European affairs surged into the quiet valleys of Savoy. In the February
+      of 1733, Augustus the Strong died, and the usual disorder followed in the
+      choice of a successor to him in the kingship of Poland. France was for
+      Stanislaus, the father-in-law of Lewis XV., while the Emperor Charles VI.
+      and Anne of Russia were for August III., elector of Saxony. Stanislaus was
+      compelled to flee, and the French Government, taking up his quarrel,
+      declared war against the Emperor (October 14, 1733). The first act of this
+      war, which was to end in the acquisition of Naples and the two Sicilies by
+      Spanish Bourbons, and of Lorraine by France, was the despatch of a French
+      expedition to the Milanese under Marshall Villars, the husband of one of
+      Voltaire's first idols. This took place in the autumn of 1733, and a
+      French column passed through Chamb&#233;ri, exciting lively interest in
+      all minds, including Rousseau's. He now read the newspapers for the first
+      time, with the most eager sympathy for the country with whose history his
+      own name was destined to be so permanently associated. &quot;If this mad
+      passion,&quot; he says, &quot;had only been momentary, I should not speak
+      of it; but for no visible reason it took such root in my heart, that when
+      I afterwards at Paris played the stern republican, I could not help
+      feeling in spite of myself a secret predilection for the very<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.73" id="Page_i.73">[i.73]</a></span>
+      nation that I found so servile, and the government I made bold to assail.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor74" id="FNanchor74"></a><a href="#Footnote_74">[74]</a> This
+      fondness for France was strong, constant, and invincible, and found what
+      was in the eighteenth century a natural complement in a corresponding
+      dislike of England.<a name="FNanchor75" id="FNanchor75"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_75">[75]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rousseau's health began to show signs of weakness. His breath became
+      asthmatic, he had palpitations, he spat blood, and suffered from a slow
+      feverishness from which he never afterwards became entirely free.<a
+      name="FNanchor76" id="FNanchor76"></a><a href="#Footnote_76">[76]</a> His
+      mind was as feverish as his body, and the morbid broodings which active
+      life reduces to their lowest degree in most young men, were left to make
+      full havoc along with the seven devils of idleness and vacuity. An
+      instinct which may flow from the unrecognised animal lying deep down in us
+      all, suggested the way of return to wholesomeness. Rousseau prevailed upon
+      Madame de Warens to leave the stifling streets for the fresh fields, and
+      to deliver herself by retreat to rural solitude from the adventurers who
+      made her their prey. Les Charmettes, the modest farm-house to which they
+      retired, still stands. The modern traveller, with a taste for relieving an
+      imagination strained by great historic monuments and secular landmarks,
+      with the sight of spots associated with the passion and meditation of some
+      far-shining teacher of men, may walk a short league from where the gray<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.74" id="Page_i.74">[i.74]</a></span> slate
+      roofs of dull Chamb&#233;ri bake in the sun, and ascending a gently
+      mounting road, with high leafy bank on the right throwing cool shadows
+      over his head, and a stream on the left making music at his feet, he sees
+      an old red housetop lifted lonely above the trees. The homes in which men
+      have lived now and again lend themselves to the beholder's subjective
+      impression; they seemed to be brooding in forlorn isolation like some
+      life-wearied gray-beard over ancient and sorrow-stricken memories. At Les
+      Charmettes a pitiful melancholy penetrates you. The supreme loveliness of
+      the scene, the sweet-smelling meadows, the orchard, the water-ways, the
+      little vineyard with here and there a rose glowing crimson among the
+      yellow stunted vines, the rust-red crag of the Nivolet rising against the
+      sky far across the broad valley; the contrast between all this peace,
+      beauty, silence, and the diseased miserable life of the famous man who
+      found a scanty span of paradise in the midst of it, touches the soul with
+      a pathetic spell. We are for the moment lifted out of squalor, vagrancy,
+      and disorder, and seem to hear some of the harmonies which sounded to this
+      perturbed spirit, soothing it, exalting it, and stirring those inmost
+      vibrations which in truth make up all the short divine part of a man's
+      life.<a name="FNanchor77" id="FNanchor77"></a><a href="#Footnote_77">[77]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.75" id="Page_i.75">[i.75]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &quot;No day passes,&quot; he wrote in the very year in which he died,
+      &quot;in which I do not recall with joy and tender effusion this single
+      and brief time in my life, when I was fully myself, without mixture or
+      hindrance, and when I may say in a true sense that I lived. I may almost
+      say, like the prefect when disgraced and proceeding to end his days
+      tranquilly in the country, 'I have passed seventy years on the earth, and
+      I have lived but seven of them.' But for this brief and precious space, I
+      should perhaps have remained uncertain about myself; for during all the
+      rest of my life I have been so agitated, tossed, plucked hither and
+      thither by the passions of others, that, being nearly passive in a life so
+      stormy, I should find it hard to distinguish what belonged to me in my own
+      conduct,&#8212;to such a degree has harsh necessity weighed upon me. But
+      during these few years I did what I wished to do, I was what I wished to
+      be.&quot;<a name="FNanchor78" id="FNanchor78"></a><a href="#Footnote_78">[78]</a>
+      The secret of such rare felicity is hardly to be described in words. It
+      was the ease of a profoundly sensuous nature with every sense gratified
+      and fascinated. Caressing and undivided affection within doors, all the
+      sweetness and movement of nature without, solitude, freedom, and the busy
+      idleness of life in gardens,&#8212;these were the conditions of Rousseau's
+      ideal state. &quot;If my happiness,&quot; he says, in language of strange<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.76" id="Page_i.76">[i.76]</a></span>
+      felicity, &quot;consisted in facts, actions, or words, I might then
+      describe and represent it in some way; but how say what was neither said
+      nor done nor even thought, but only enjoyed and felt without my being able
+      to point to any other object of my happiness than the very feeling itself?
+      I arose with the sun and I was happy; I went out of doors and I was happy;
+      I saw Maman and I was happy; I left her and I was happy; I went among the
+      woods and hills, I wandered about in the dells, I read, I was idle, I dug
+      in the garden, I gathered fruit, I helped them indoors, and everywhere
+      happiness followed me. It was not in any given thing, it was all in
+      myself, and could never leave me for a single instant.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor79" id="FNanchor79"></a><a href="#Footnote_79">[79]</a> This
+      was a true garden of Eden, with the serpent in temporary quiescence, and
+      we may count the man rare since the fall who has found such happiness in
+      such conditions, and not less blessed than he is rare. The fact that he
+      was one of this chosen company was among the foremost of the circumstances
+      which made Rousseau seem to so many men in the eighteenth century as a
+      spring of water in a thirsty land.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All innocent and amiable things moved him. He used to spend hours together
+      in taming pigeons; he inspired them with such confidence that they would
+      follow him about, and allow him to take them wherever he would, and the
+      moment that he appeared in the garden two or three of them would instantly
+      settle on his arms or his head. The bees, too, gradually came to<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.77" id="Page_i.77">[i.77]</a></span> put
+      the same trust in him, and his whole life was surrounded with gentle
+      companionship. He always began the day with the sun, walking on the high
+      ridge above the slope on which the house lay, and going through his form
+      of worship. &quot;It did not consist in a vain moving of the lips, but in
+      a sincere elevation of heart to the author of the tender nature whose
+      beauties lay spread out before my eyes. This act passed rather in wonder
+      and contemplation than in requests; and I always knew that with the
+      dispenser of true blessings, the best means of obtaining those which are
+      needful for us, is less to ask than to deserve them.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor80" id="FNanchor80"></a><a href="#Footnote_80">[80]</a>
+      These effusions may be taken for the beginning of the deistical reaction
+      in the eighteenth century. While the truly scientific and progressive
+      spirits were occupied in laborious preparation for adding to human
+      knowledge and systematising it, Rousseau walked with his head in the
+      clouds among gods, beneficent authors of nature, wise dispensers of
+      blessings, and the like. &quot;Ah, madam,&quot; he once said, &quot;sometimes
+      in the privacy of my study, with my hands pressed tight over my eyes or in
+      the darkness of the night, I am of his opinion that there is no God. But
+      look yonder (pointing with his hand to the sky, with head erect, and an
+      inspired glance): the rising of the sun, as it scatters the mists that
+      cover the earth and lays bare the wondrous glittering scene of nature,
+      disperses at the same moment all cloud from my soul. I find my faith
+      again, and my God, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.78"
+      id="Page_i.78">[i.78]</a></span> my belief in him. I admire and adore him,
+      and I prostrate myself in his presence.&quot;<a name="FNanchor81"
+      id="FNanchor81"></a><a href="#Footnote_81">[81]</a> As if that settled the
+      question affirmatively, any more than the absence of such theistic emotion
+      in many noble spirits settles it negatively. God became the highest known
+      formula for sensuous expansion, the synthesis of all complacent emotions,
+      and Rousseau filled up the measure of his delight by creating and invoking
+      a Supreme Being to match with fine scenery and sunny gardens. We shall
+      have a better occasion to mark the attributes of this important conception
+      when we come to <i>Emilius</i>, where it was launched in a panoply of
+      resounding phrases upon a Europe which was grown too strong for Christian
+      dogma, and was not yet grown strong enough to rest in a provisional
+      ordering of the results of its own positive knowledge. Walking on the
+      terrace at Les Charmettes, you are at the very birth-place of that
+      particular &#202;tre Supr&#234;me to whom Robespierre offered the incense
+      of an official festival.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sometimes the reading of a Jansenist book would make him unhappy by the
+      prominence into which it brought the displeasing idea of hell, and he used
+      now and then to pass a miserable day in wondering whether this cruel
+      destiny should be his. Madame de Warens, whose softness of heart inspired
+      her with a theology that ought to have satisfied a seraphic doctor, had
+      abolished hell, but she could not dispense with purgatory because she did
+      not know what to do with the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.79"
+      id="Page_i.79">[i.79]</a></span> souls of the wicked, being unable either
+      to damn them, or to instal them among the good until they had been
+      purified into goodness. In truth it must be confessed, says Rousseau, that
+      alike in this world and the other the wicked are extremely embarrassing.<a
+      name="FNanchor82" id="FNanchor82"></a><a href="#Footnote_82">[82]</a> His
+      own search after knowledge of his fate is well known. One day, amusing
+      himself in a characteristic manner by throwing stones at trees, he began
+      to be tormented by fear of the eternal pit. He resolved to test his doom
+      by throwing a stone at a particular tree; if he hit, then salvation; if he
+      missed, then perdition. With a trembling hand and beating heart he threw;
+      as he had chosen a large tree and was careful not to place himself too far
+      away, all was well.<a name="FNanchor83" id="FNanchor83"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_83">[83]</a> As a rule, however, in spite of the ugly
+      phantoms of theology, he passed his days in a state of calm. Even when
+      illness brought it into his head that he should soon know the future lot
+      by more assured experiment, he still preserved a tranquillity which he
+      justly qualifies as sensual.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In thinking of Rousseau's peculiar feeling for nature, which acquired such
+      a decisive place in his character during his life at Les Charmettes, it is
+      to be remembered that it was entirely devoid of that stormy and boisterous
+      quality which has grown up in more modern literature, out of the violent
+      attempt to press nature in her most awful moods into the service of the
+      great<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.80" id="Page_i.80">[i.80]</a></span>
+      revolt against a social and religious tradition that can no longer be
+      endured. Of this revolt Rousseau was a chief, and his passion for natural
+      aspects was connected with this attitude, but he did not seize those of
+      them which the poet of <i>Manfred</i>, for example, forced into an imputed
+      sympathy with his own rebellion. Rousseau always loved nature best in her
+      moods of quiescence and serenity, and in proportion as she lent herself to
+      such moods in men. He liked rivulets better than rivers. He could not bear
+      the sight of the sea; its infertile bosom and blind restless tumblings
+      filled him with melancholy. The ruins of a park affected him more than the
+      ruins of castles.<a name="FNanchor84" id="FNanchor84"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_84">[84]</a> It is true that no plain, however beautiful,
+      ever seemed so in his eyes; he required torrents, rocks, dark forests,
+      mountains, and precipices.<a name="FNanchor85" id="FNanchor85"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_85">[85]</a> This does not affect the fact that he never
+      moralised appalling landscape, as post-revolutionary writers have done,
+      and that the Alpine wastes which throw your puniest modern into a rapture,
+      had no attraction for him. He could steep himself in nature without
+      climbing fifteen thousand feet to find her. In landscape, as has been said
+      by one with a right to speak, Rousseau was truly a great artist, and you
+      can, if you are artistic too, follow him with confidence in his
+      wanderings; he understood that beauty does not require a great stage, and
+      that the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.81" id="Page_i.81">[i.81]</a></span>
+      effect of things lies in harmony.<a name="FNanchor86" id="FNanchor86"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_86">[86]</a> The humble heights of the Jura, and the
+      lovely points of the valley of Chamb&#233;ri, sufficed to give him all the
+      pleasure of which he was capable. In truth a man cannot escape from his
+      time, and Rousseau at least belonged to the eighteenth century in being
+      devoid of the capacity for feeling awe, and the taste for objects
+      inspiring it. Nature was a tender friend with softest bosom, and no sphinx
+      with cruel enigma. He felt neither terror, nor any sense of the littleness
+      of man, nor of the mysteriousness of life, nor of the unseen forces which
+      make us their sport, as he peered over the precipice and heard the water
+      roaring at the bottom of it; he only remained for hours enjoying the
+      physical sensation of dizziness with which it turned his brain, with a
+      break now and again for hurling large stones, and watching them roll and
+      leap down into the torrent, with as little reflection and as little
+      articulate emotion as if he had been a child.<a name="FNanchor87"
+      id="FNanchor87"></a><a href="#Footnote_87">[87]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Just as it is convenient for purposes of classification to divide a man
+      into body and soul, even when we believe the soul to be only a function of
+      the body, so people talk of his intellectual side and his emotional side,
+      his thinking quality and his feeling quality, though in fact and at the
+      roots these qualities are not two but one, with temperament for the common
+      substratum. During this period of his life the whole of<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.82" id="Page_i.82">[i.82]</a></span>
+      Rousseau's true force went into his feelings, and at all times feeling
+      predominated over reflection, with many drawbacks and some advantages of a
+      very critical kind for subsequent generations of men. Nearly every one who
+      came into contact with him in the way of testing his capacity for being
+      instructed pronounced him hopeless. He had several excellent opportunities
+      of learning Latin, especially at Turin in the house of Count Gouvon, and
+      in the seminary at Annecy, and at Les Charmettes he did his best to teach
+      himself, but without any better result than a very limited power of
+      reading. In learning one rule he forgot the last; he could never master
+      the most elementary laws of versification; he learnt and re-learnt twenty
+      times the Eclogues of Virgil, but not a single word remained with him.<a
+      name="FNanchor88" id="FNanchor88"></a><a href="#Footnote_88">[88]</a> He
+      was absolutely without verbal memory, and he pronounces himself wholly
+      incapable of learning anything from masters. Madame de Warens tried to
+      have him taught both dancing and fencing; he could never achieve a minuet,
+      and after three months of instruction he was as clumsy and helpless with
+      his foil as he had been on the first day. He resolved to become a master
+      at the chessboard; he shut himself up in his room, and worked night and
+      day over the books with indescribable efforts which covered many weeks. On
+      proceeding to the caf&#233; to manifest his powers, he found that all the
+      moves and combinations had got mixed up in his head, he saw nothing but<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.83" id="Page_i.83">[i.83]</a></span>
+      clouds on the board, and as often as he repeated the experiment he only
+      found himself weaker than before. Even in music, for which he had a
+      genuine passion and at which he worked hard, he never could acquire any
+      facility at sight, and he was an inaccurate scorer, even when only copying
+      the score of others.<a name="FNanchor89" id="FNanchor89"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_89">[89]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Two things nearly incompatible, he writes in an important passage, are
+      united in me without my being able to think how; an extremely ardent
+      temperament, lively and impetuous passions, along with ideas that are very
+      slow in coming to birth, very embarrassed, and which never arise until
+      after the event. &quot;One would say that my heart and my intelligence do
+      not belong to the same individual.... I feel all, and see nothing; I am
+      carried away, but I am stupid.... This slowness of thinking, united with
+      such vivacity of feeling, possesses me not only in conversation, but when
+      I am alone and working. My ideas arrange themselves in my head with
+      incredible difficulty; they circulate there in a dull way and ferment
+      until they agitate me, fill me with heat, and give me palpitations; in the
+      midst of this stir I see nothing clearly, I could not write a single word.
+      Insensibly the violent emotion grows still, the chaos is disentangled,
+      everything falls into its place, but very slowly and after long and
+      confused agitation.&quot;<a name="FNanchor90" id="FNanchor90"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_90">[90]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So far from saying that his heart and intelligence belonged to two
+      persons, we might have been quite<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.84"
+      id="Page_i.84">[i.84]</a></span> sure, knowing his heart, that his
+      intelligence must be exactly what he describes its process to have been.
+      The slow-burning ecstasy in which he knew himself at his height and was
+      most conscious of fulness of life, was incompatible with the rapid and
+      deliberate generation of ideas. The same soft passivity, the same
+      receptiveness, which made his emotions like the surface of a lake under
+      sky and breeze, entered also into the working of his intellectual
+      faculties. But it happens that in this region, in the attainment of
+      knowledge, truth, and definite thoughts, even receptiveness implies a
+      distinct and active energy, and hence the very quality of temperament
+      which left him free and eager for sensuous impressions, seemed to muffle
+      his intelligence in a certain opaque and resisting medium, of the
+      indefinable kind that interposes between will and action in a dream. His
+      rational part was fatally protected by a non-conducting envelope of
+      sentiment; this intercepted clear ideas on their passage, and even cut off
+      the direct and true impress of those objects and their relations, which
+      are the material of clear ideas. He was no doubt right in his avowal that
+      objects generally made less impression on him than the recollection of
+      them; that he could see nothing of what was before his eyes, and had only
+      his intelligence in cases where memories were concerned; and that of what
+      was said or done in his presence, he felt and penetrated nothing.<a
+      name="FNanchor91" id="FNanchor91"></a><a href="#Footnote_91">[91]</a> In
+      other words, this is to say that his material of thought was not fact but
+      image.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.85" id="Page_i.85">[i.85]</a></span>
+      When he plunged into reflection, he did not deal with the objects of
+      reflection at first hand and in themselves, but only with the
+      reminiscences of objects, which he had never approached in a spirit of
+      deliberate and systematic observation, and with those reminiscences,
+      moreover, suffused and saturated by the impalpable but most potent
+      essences of a fermenting imagination. Instead of urgently seeking truth
+      with the patient energy, the wariness, and the conscience, with the
+      sharpened instruments, the systematic apparatus, and the minute feelers
+      and tentacles of the genuine thinker and solid reasoner, he only floated
+      languidly on a summer tide of sensation, and captured premiss and
+      conclusion in a succession of swoons. It would be a mistake to contend
+      that no work can be done for the world by this method, or that truth only
+      comes to those who chase her with logical forceps. But one should always
+      try to discover how a teacher of men came by his ideas, whether by careful
+      toil, or by the easy bequest of generous phantasy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To give a zest to rural delight, and partly perhaps to satisfy the
+      intellectual interest which must have been an instinct in one who became
+      so consummate a master in the great and noble art of composition,
+      Rousseau, during the time when he lived with Madame de Warens, tried as
+      well as he knew how to acquire a little knowledge of what fruit the
+      cultivation of the mind of man had hitherto brought forth. According to
+      his own account, it was Voltaire's Letters on the English which first drew
+      him seriously to study, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.86"
+      id="Page_i.86">[i.86]</a></span> nothing which that illustrious man wrote
+      at this time escaped him. His taste for Voltaire inspired him with the
+      desire of writing with elegance, and of imitating &quot;the fine and
+      enchanting colour of Voltaire's style&quot;<a name="FNanchor92"
+      id="FNanchor92"></a><a href="#Footnote_92">[92]</a>&#8212;an object in
+      which he cannot be held to have in the least succeeded, though he achieved
+      a superb style of his own. On his return from Turin Madame de Warens had
+      begun in some small way to cultivate a taste for letters in him, though he
+      had lost the enthusiasm of his childhood for reading. Saint Evremond,
+      Puffendorff, the Henriade, and the Spectator happened to be in his room,
+      and he turned over their pages. The Spectator, he says, pleased him
+      greatly and did him much good.<a name="FNanchor93" id="FNanchor93"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_93">[93]</a> Madame de Warens was what he calls protestant
+      in literary taste, and would talk for ever of the great Bayle, while she
+      thought more of Saint Evremond than she could ever persuade Rousseau to
+      think. Two or three years later than this he began to use his own mind
+      more freely, and opened his eyes for the first time to the greatest
+      question that ever dawns upon any human intelligence that has the
+      privilege of discerning it, the problem of a philosophy and a body of
+      doctrine.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His way of answering it did not promise the best results. He read an
+      introduction to the Sciences,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.87"
+      id="Page_i.87">[i.87]</a></span> then he took an Encyclop&#230;dia and
+      tried to learn all things together, until he repented and resolved to
+      study subjects apart. This he found a better plan for one to whom long
+      application was so fatiguing, that he could not with any effect occupy
+      himself for half an hour on any one matter, especially if following the
+      ideas of another person.<a name="FNanchor94" id="FNanchor94"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_94">[94]</a> He began his morning's work, after an hour or
+      two of dispersive chat, with the Port-Royal Logic, Locke's Essay on the
+      Human Understanding, Malebranche, Leibnitz, Descartes.<a name="FNanchor95"
+      id="FNanchor95"></a><a href="#Footnote_95">[95]</a> He found these authors
+      in a condition of such perpetual contradiction among themselves, that he
+      formed the chimerical design of reconciling them with one another. This
+      was tedious, so he took up another method, on which he congratulated
+      himself to the end of his life. It consisted in simply adopting and
+      following the ideas of each author, without comparing them either with one
+      another or with those of other writers, and above all without any
+      criticism of his own. Let me begin, he said, by collecting a store of
+      ideas, true or false, but at any rate clear, until my head is well enough
+      stocked to enable me to compare and choose. At the end of some years
+      passed &quot;in never thinking exactly, except after other people, without
+      reflecting so to speak, and almost without reasoning,&quot; he found
+      himself in a state to think for himself. &quot;In spite of beginning late
+      to exercise my judicial faculty, I never found that it had lost its<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.88" id="Page_i.88">[i.88]</a></span>
+      vigour, and when I came to publish my own ideas, I was hardly accused of
+      being a servile disciple.&quot;<a name="FNanchor96" id="FNanchor96"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_96">[96]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To that fairly credible account of the matter, one can only say that this
+      mutually exclusive way of learning the thoughts of others, and developing
+      thoughts of your own, is for an adult probably the most mischievous, where
+      it is not the most impotent, fashion in which intellectual exercise can
+      well be taken. It is exactly the use of the judicial faculty, criticising,
+      comparing, and defining, which is indispensable in order that a student
+      should not only effectually assimilate the ideas of a writer, but even
+      know what those ideas come to and how much they are worth. And so when he
+      works at ideas of his own, a judicial faculty which has been kept
+      studiously slumbering for some years, is not likely to revive in full
+      strength without any preliminary training. Rousseau was a man of singular
+      genius, and he set an extraordinary mark on Europe, but this mark would
+      have been very different if he had ever mastered any one system of
+      thought, or if he had ever fully grasped what systematic thinking means.
+      Instead of this, his debt to the men whom he read was a debt of piecemeal,
+      and his obligation an obligation for fragments; and this is perhaps the
+      worst way of acquiring an intellectual lineage, for it leaves out the
+      vital continuity of temper and method. It is a small thing to accept this
+      or that of Locke's notions upon education or the origin of ideas, if you
+      do not see the merit of his way of coming by his<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.89" id="Page_i.89">[i.89]</a></span> notions. In short,
+      Rousseau has distinctions in abundance, but the distinction of knowing how
+      to think, in the exact sense of that term, was hardly among them, and
+      neither now nor at any other time did he go through any of that toilsome
+      and vigorous intellectual preparation to which the ablest of his
+      contemporaries, Diderot, Voltaire, D'Alembert, Turgot, Condorcet, Hume,
+      all submitted themselves. His comfortable view was that &quot;the sensible
+      and interesting conversations of a woman of merit are more proper to form
+      a young man than all the pedantical philosophy of books.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor97" id="FNanchor97"></a><a href="#Footnote_97">[97]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Style, however, in which he ultimately became such a proficient, and which
+      wrought such marvels as only style backed by passion can work, already
+      engaged his serious attention. We have already seen how Voltaire implanted
+      in him the first root idea, which so many of us never perceive at all,
+      that there is such a quality of writing as style. He evidently took pains
+      with the form of expression and thought about it, in obedience to some
+      inborn harmonious predisposition which is the source of all veritable
+      eloquence, though there is no strong trace now nor for many years to come
+      of any irresistible inclination for literary composition. We find him,
+      indeed, in 1736 showing consciousness of a slight skill in writing,<a
+      name="FNanchor98" id="FNanchor98"></a><a href="#Footnote_98">[98]</a> but
+      he only thought of it as a possible recommendation for a secretaryship to
+      some great person. He also appears to have practised verses, not for their<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.90" id="Page_i.90">[i.90]</a></span> own
+      sake, for he always most justly thought his own verses mediocre, and they
+      are even worse; but on the ground that verse-making is a rather good
+      exercise for breaking one's self to elegant inversions, and learning a
+      greater ease in prose.<a name="FNanchor99" id="FNanchor99"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_99">[99]</a> At the age of one and twenty he composed a
+      comedy, long afterwards damned as <i>Narcisse</i>. Such prelusions,
+      however, were of small importance compared with the fact of his being
+      surrounded by a moral atmosphere in which his whole mind was steeped. It
+      is not in the study of Voltaire or another, but in the deep soft soil of
+      constant mood and old habit that such a style as Rousseau's has its
+      growth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was the custom to return to Chamb&#233;ri for the winter, and the day
+      of their departure from Les Charmettes was always a day blurred and
+      tearful for Rousseau; he never left it without kissing the ground, the
+      trees, the flowers; he had to be torn away from it as from a loved
+      companion. At the first melting of the winter snows they left their
+      dungeon in Chamb&#233;ri, and they never missed the earliest song of the
+      nightingale. Many a joyful day of summer peace remained vivid in
+      Rousseau's memory, and made a mixed heaven and hell for him long years
+      after in the stifling dingy Paris street, and the raw and cheerless air of
+      a Derbyshire winter.<a name="FNanchor100" id="FNanchor100"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_100">[100]</a> &quot;We started early in the morning,&quot;<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.91" id="Page_i.91">[i.91]</a></span> he
+      says, describing one of these simple excursions on the day of St. Lewis,
+      who was the very unconscious patron saint of Madame de Warens, &quot;together
+      and alone; I proposed that we should go and ramble about the side of the
+      valley opposite to our own, which we had not yet visited. We sent our
+      provisions on before us, for we were to be out all day. We went from hill
+      to hill and wood to wood, sometimes in the sun and often in the shade,
+      resting from time to time and forgetting ourselves for whole hours;
+      chatting about ourselves, our union, our dear lot, and offering unheard
+      prayers that it might last. All seemed to conspire for the bliss of this
+      day. Rain had fallen a short time before; there was no dust, and the
+      little streams were full; a light fresh breeze stirred the leaves, the air
+      was pure, the horizon without a cloud, and the same serenity reigned in
+      our own hearts. Our dinner was cooked in a peasant's cottage, and we
+      shared it with his family. These Savoyards are such good souls! After
+      dinner we sought shade under some tall trees, where, while I collected dry
+      sticks for making our coffee, Maman amused herself by botanising among the
+      bushes, and the expedition ended in transports of tenderness and effusion.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor101" id="FNanchor101"></a><a href="#Footnote_101">[101]</a>
+      This is one of such days as the soul turns back to when the misery that
+      stalks after us all has seized it, and a man is left to the sting and
+      smart of the memory of irrecoverable things.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was resolved to bind himself to Madame de<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.92" id="Page_i.92">[i.92]</a></span> Warens with an
+      inalterable fidelity for all the rest of his days; he would watch over her
+      with all the dutiful and tender vigilance of a son, and she should be to
+      him something dearer than mother or wife or sister. What actually befell
+      was this. He was attacked by vapours, which he characterises as the
+      disorder of the happy. One symptom of his disease was the conviction
+      derived from the rash perusal of surgeon's treatises, that he was
+      suffering from a polypus in the heart. On the not very chivalrous
+      principle that if he did not spend Madame de Warens' money, he was only
+      leaving it for adventurers and knaves, he proceeded to Montpellier to
+      consult the physicians, and took the money for his expenses out of his
+      benefactress's store, which was always slender because it was always open
+      to any hand. While on the road, he fell into an intrigue with a travelling
+      companion, whom critics have compared to the fair Philina of Wilhelm
+      Meister. In due time, the Montpellier doctor being unable to discover a
+      disease, declared that the patient had none. The scenery was dull and
+      unattractive, and this would have counterbalanced the weightiest
+      prudential reasons with him at any time. Rousseau debated whether he
+      should keep tryst with his gay fellow-traveller, or return to Chamb&#233;ri.
+      Remorse and that intractable emptiness of pocket which is the iron key to
+      many a deed of ingenuous-looking self-denial and Spartan virtue, directed
+      him homewards. Here he had a surprise, and perhaps learnt a lesson. He
+      found installed in the house a personage whom<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.93" id="Page_i.93">[i.93]</a></span> he describes as tall,
+      fair, noisy, coxcombical, flat-faced, flat-souled. Another triple alliance
+      seemed a thing odious in the eyes of a man whom his travelling diversions
+      had made a Pharisee for the hour. He protested, but Madame de Warens was a
+      woman of principle, and declined to let Rousseau, who had profited by the
+      doctrine of indifference, now set up in his own favour the contrary
+      doctrine of a narrow and churlish partiality. So a short, delicious, and
+      never-forgotten episode came to an end: this pair who had known so much
+      happiness together were happy together no more, and the air became peopled
+      for Rousseau with wan spectres of dead joys and fast gathering cares.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The dates of the various events described in the fifth and sixth books of
+      the Confessions are inextricable, and the order is evidently inverted more
+      than once. The inversion of order is less serious than the contradictions
+      between the dates of the Confessions and the more authentic and
+      unmistakable dates of his letters. For instance, he describes a visit to
+      Geneva as having been made shortly before Lautrec's temporary pacification
+      of the civic troubles of that town; and that event took place in the
+      spring of 1738. This would throw the Montpellier journey, which he says
+      came after the visit to Geneva, into 1738, but the letters to Madame de
+      Warens from Grenoble and Montpellier are dated in the autumn and winter of
+      1737.<a name="FNanchor102" id="FNanchor102"></a><a href="#Footnote_102">[102]</a>
+      Minor verifications attest the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.94"
+      id="Page_i.94">[i.94]</a></span> exactitude of the dates of the letters,<a
+      name="FNanchor103" id="FNanchor103"></a><a href="#Footnote_103">[103]</a>
+      and we may therefore conclude that he returned from Montpellier, found his
+      place taken and lost his old delight in Les Charmettes, in the early part
+      of 1738. In the tenth of the R&#234;veries he speaks of having passed
+      &quot;a space of four or five years&quot; in the bliss of Les Charmettes,
+      and it is true that his connection with it in one way and another lasted
+      from the middle of 1736 until about the middle of 1741. But as he left for
+      Montpellier in the autumn of 1737, and found the obnoxious Vinzenried
+      installed in 1738, the pure and characteristic felicity of Les Charmettes
+      perhaps only lasted about a year or a year and a half. But a year may set
+      a deep mark on a man, and give him imperishable taste of many things
+      bitter and sweet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &#160;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <b>FOOTNOTES:</b>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_38" id="Footnote_38"></a><a href="#FNanchor38">[38]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, iii. 177.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_39" id="Footnote_39"></a><a href="#FNanchor39">[39]</a>
+      Lamartine in <i>Raphael</i> defies &quot;a reasonable man to recompose
+      with any reality the character that Rousseau gives to his mistress, out of
+      the contradictory elements which he associates in her nature. One of these
+      elements excludes the other.&quot; It is worth while for any who care for
+      this kind of study to compare Madame de Warens with the Marquise de
+      Courcelles, whom Sainte-Beuve has well called the Manon Lescaut of the
+      seventeenth century.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_40" id="Footnote_40"></a><a href="#FNanchor40">[40]</a>
+      Described by Rousseau in a memorandum for the biographer of M. de Bernex,
+      printed in <i>M&#233;langes</i>, pp. 139-144.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_41" id="Footnote_41"></a><a href="#FNanchor41">[41]</a>
+      De Tavel, by name. Disorderly ideas as to the relations of the sexes began
+      to appear in Switzerland along with the reformation of religion. In the
+      sixteenth century a woman appeared at Geneva with the doctrine that it is
+      as inhuman and as unjustifiable to refuse the gratification of this
+      appetite in a man as to decline to give food and drink to the starving.
+      Picot's <i>Hist. de Gen&#232;ve</i>, vol. ii.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_42" id="Footnote_42"></a><a href="#FNanchor42">[42]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, v. 341. Also ii. 83; and vi. 401.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_43" id="Footnote_43"></a><a href="#FNanchor43">[43]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, v. 345.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_44" id="Footnote_44"></a><a href="#FNanchor44">[44]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, ii. 83.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_45" id="Footnote_45"></a><a href="#FNanchor45">[45]</a>
+      <i>Ib.</i> ii. 82.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_46" id="Footnote_46"></a><a href="#FNanchor46">[46]</a>
+      <i>Ib.</i> iii. 179. See also 200.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_47" id="Footnote_47"></a><a href="#FNanchor47">[47]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, iii. 177, 178.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_48" id="Footnote_48"></a><a href="#FNanchor48">[48]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, iii. 183.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_49" id="Footnote_49"></a><a href="#FNanchor49">[49]</a>
+      M. d'Aubonne.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_50" id="Footnote_50"></a><a href="#FNanchor50">[50]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, iii 192.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_51" id="Footnote_51"></a><a href="#FNanchor51">[51]</a>
+      M. Gatier.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_52" id="Footnote_52"></a><a href="#FNanchor52">[52]</a>
+      M. Gaime.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_53" id="Footnote_53"></a><a href="#FNanchor53">[53]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, iii. 204.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_54" id="Footnote_54"></a><a href="#FNanchor54">[54]</a>
+      <i>Ib.</i> iii. 209, 210.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_55" id="Footnote_55"></a><a href="#FNanchor55">[55]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, iii. 217-222.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_56" id="Footnote_56"></a><a href="#FNanchor56">[56]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, iv. 227.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_57" id="Footnote_57"></a><a href="#FNanchor57">[57]</a>
+      <i>Ib.</i> iii. 224.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_58" id="Footnote_58"></a><a href="#FNanchor58">[58]</a>
+      One Venture de Villeneuve, who visited him years afterwards (1755) in
+      Paris, when Rousseau found that the idol of old days was a crapulent
+      debauchee. <i>Ib.</i> viii. 221.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_59" id="Footnote_59"></a><a href="#FNanchor59">[59]</a>
+      Mdlles. de Graffenried and Galley. <i>Conf.</i>, iv. 231.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_60" id="Footnote_60"></a><a href="#FNanchor60">[60]</a>
+      <i>Ib.</i> iv. 254-256.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_61" id="Footnote_61"></a><a href="#FNanchor61">[61]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, iv. 253.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_62" id="Footnote_62"></a><a href="#FNanchor62">[62]</a>
+      While in the ambassador's house at Soleure, he was lodged in a room which
+      had once belonged to his namesake, Jean Baptiste Rousseau (<i>b. 1670&#8212;d.
+      1741</i>), whom the older critics astonishingly insist on counting the
+      first of French lyric poets. There was a third Rousseau, Pierre [<i>b.
+      1725&#8212;d. 1785</i>], who wrote plays and did other work now well
+      forgotten. There are some lines imperfectly commemorative of the trio&#8212;
+    </p>
+    <div class="blockquot">
+      <p>
+        Trois auteurs que Rousseau l'on nomme,<br /> Connus de Paris jusqu'&#224;
+        Rome,<br /> Sont diff&#233;rens; voici par o&#249;;<br /> Rousseau de
+        Paris fut grand homme;<br /> Rousseau de Gen&#232;ve est un fou;<br />
+        Rousseau de Toulouse un atome.
+      </p>
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      Jean Jacques refers to both his namesakes in his letter to Voltaire, Jan.
+      30, 1750. <i>Corr.</i>, i. 145.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_63" id="Footnote_63"></a><a href="#FNanchor63">[63]</a>
+      The only object which ever surpassed his expectation was the great Roman
+      structure near Nismes, the Pont du Gard. <i>Conf.</i>, vi. 446.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_64" id="Footnote_64"></a><a href="#FNanchor64">[64]</a>
+      Rousseau gives 1732 as the probable date of his return to Chamb&#233;ri,
+      after his first visit to Paris [<i>Conf.</i>, v. 305], and the only
+      objection to this is his mention of the incident of the march of the
+      French troops, which could not have happened until the winter of 1733, as
+      having taken place &quot;some months&quot; after his arrival.
+      Musset-Pathay accepts this as decisive, and fixes the return in the spring
+      of 1733 [i. 12]. My own conjectural chronology is this: Returns from Turin
+      towards the autumn of 1729; stays at Annecy until the spring of 1731;
+      passes the winter of 1731-2 at Neuch&#226;tel; first visits Paris in
+      spring of 1732; returns to Savoy in the early summer of 1732. But a
+      precise harmonising of the dates in the Confessions is impossible;
+      Rousseau wrote them three and thirty years after our present point [in
+      1766 at Wootton], and never claimed to be exact in minuteness of date.
+      Fortunately such matters in the present case are absolutely devoid of
+      importance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_65" id="Footnote_65"></a><a href="#FNanchor65">[65]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, iv. 279, 280.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_66" id="Footnote_66"></a><a href="#FNanchor66">[66]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, iv. 290, 291,
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_67" id="Footnote_67"></a><a href="#FNanchor67">[67]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, iv. 281-283.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_68" id="Footnote_68"></a><a href="#FNanchor68">[68]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, v. 325.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_69" id="Footnote_69"></a><a href="#FNanchor69">[69]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, v. 360-364. <i>Corr.</i>, i. 21-24.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_70" id="Footnote_70"></a><a href="#FNanchor70">[70]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, v. 349, 350.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_71" id="Footnote_71"></a><a href="#FNanchor71">[71]</a>
+      Apparently in the summer of 1736, though, the reference to the return of
+      the French troops at the peace [<i>Ib.</i> v. 365] would place it in 1735.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_72" id="Footnote_72"></a><a href="#FNanchor72">[72]</a>
+      <i>Ib.</i> v. 356
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_73" id="Footnote_73"></a><a href="#FNanchor73">[73]</a>
+      <i>Ib.</i>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_74" id="Footnote_74"></a><a href="#FNanchor74">[74]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, v. 315, 316.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_75" id="Footnote_75"></a><a href="#FNanchor75">[75]</a>
+      <i>Ib.</i> iv. 276. <i>Nouv. H&#233;l.</i>, II. xiv. 381, etc.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_76" id="Footnote_76"></a><a href="#FNanchor76">[76]</a>
+      He refers to the ill-health of his youth, <i>Conf.</i>, vii. 32, and
+      describes an ominous head seizure while at Chamb&#233;ri, <i>Ib.</i> vi.
+      396.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_77" id="Footnote_77"></a><a href="#FNanchor77">[77]</a>
+      Rousseau's description of Les Charmettes is at the end of the fifth book.
+      The present proprietor keeps the house arranged as it used to be, and has
+      gathered one or two memorials of its famous tenant, including his poor <i>clavecin</i>
+      and his watch. In an outside wall, H&#233;rault de Sechelles, when
+      Commissioner from the Convention in the department of Mont Blanc, inserted
+      a little white stone with two most lapidary stanzas inscribed upon it,
+      about <i>g&#233;nie, solitude, fiert&#233;, gloire, v&#233;rit&#233;,
+      envie</i>, and the like.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_78" id="Footnote_78"></a><a href="#FNanchor78">[78]</a>
+      <i>R&#234;veries</i>, x. 336 (1778).
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_79" id="Footnote_79"></a><a href="#FNanchor79">[79]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, vi. 393.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_80" id="Footnote_80"></a><a href="#FNanchor80">[80]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, vi. 412.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_81" id="Footnote_81"></a><a href="#FNanchor81">[81]</a>
+      <i>M&#233;m, de Mdme. d'Epinay</i>, i. 394. (M. Boiteau's edition:
+      Charpentier. 1865.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_82" id="Footnote_82"></a><a href="#FNanchor82">[82]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, vi. 399.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_83" id="Footnote_83"></a><a href="#FNanchor83">[83]</a>
+      <i>Ib.</i> vi. 424. Goethe made a similar experiment; see Mr. Lewes's <i>Life</i>,
+      p. 126.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_84" id="Footnote_84"></a><a href="#FNanchor84">[84]</a>
+      Bernardin de Saint Pierre tells us this. <i>Oeuvres</i> (Ed. 1818), xii.
+      70, etc.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_85" id="Footnote_85"></a><a href="#FNanchor85">[85]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, iv. 297. See also the description of the scenery of the
+      Valais, in the <i>Nouv. H&#233;l.</i>, Pt. I. Let. xxiii.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_86" id="Footnote_86"></a><a href="#FNanchor86">[86]</a>
+      George Sand in <i>Mademoiselle la Quintinie</i> (p. 27), a book containing
+      some peculiarly subtle appreciations of the Savoy landscape.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_87" id="Footnote_87"></a><a href="#FNanchor87">[87]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, iv. 298.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_88" id="Footnote_88"></a><a href="#FNanchor88">[88]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, vi. 416, 422, etc.; iii. 164; iii. 203; v. 347; v. 383, 384.
+      Also vii. 53.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_89" id="Footnote_89"></a><a href="#FNanchor89">[89]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, v. 313, 367; iv. 293; ix. 353. Also <i>M&#233;m. de Mdme.
+      d'Epinay</i>, ii. 151.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_90" id="Footnote_90"></a><a href="#FNanchor90">[90]</a>
+      <i>Ib.</i> iii. 192, 193.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_91" id="Footnote_91"></a><a href="#FNanchor91">[91]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, iv. 301; iii. 195.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_92" id="Footnote_92"></a><a href="#FNanchor92">[92]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, v. 372, 373. The mistaken date assigned to the
+      correspondence between Voltaire and Frederick is one of many instances how
+      little we can trust the Confessions for minute accuracy, though their
+      substantial veracity is confirmed by all the collateral evidence that we
+      have.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_93" id="Footnote_93"></a><a href="#FNanchor93">[93]</a>
+      <i>Ib.</i> iii. 188. For his debt in the way of education to Madame de
+      Warens, see also <i>Ib.</i> vii. 46.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_94" id="Footnote_94"></a><a href="#FNanchor94">[94]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, vi. 409.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_95" id="Footnote_95"></a><a href="#FNanchor95">[95]</a>
+      <i>Ib.</i> vi. 413. He adds a suspicious-looking &quot;<i>et cetera</i>.&quot;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_96" id="Footnote_96"></a><a href="#FNanchor96">[96]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, vi. 414
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_97" id="Footnote_97"></a><a href="#FNanchor97">[97]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, iv. 295. See also v. 346.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_98" id="Footnote_98"></a><a href="#FNanchor98">[98]</a>
+      <i>Corr.</i>, 1736, pp. 26, 27.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_99" id="Footnote_99"></a><a href="#FNanchor99">[99]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, iv. 271, where he says further that he never found enough
+      attraction in French poetry to make him think of pursuing it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_100" id="Footnote_100"></a><a href="#FNanchor100">[100]</a>
+      The first part of the Confessions was written in Wootton in Derbyshire, in
+      the winter of 1766-1767.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_101" id="Footnote_101"></a><a href="#FNanchor101">[101]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, vi. 422.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_102" id="Footnote_102"></a><a href="#FNanchor102">[102]</a>
+      <i>Corr.</i>, i. 43, 46, 62, etc.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_103" id="Footnote_103"></a><a href="#FNanchor103">[103]</a>
+      Musset-Pathay, i. 23, <i>n.</i>
+    </p>
+    <hr style="width: 65%;" />
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.95" id="Page_i.95">[i.95]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      <a name="CHAPTER_IV." id="CHAPTER_IV."></a>CHAPTER IV.
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      THERESA LE VASSEUR.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <span class="smcap">Men</span> like Rousseau, who are most heedless in
+      letting their delight perish, are as often as not most loth to bury what
+      they have slain, or even to perceive that life has gone out of it. The
+      sight of simple hearts trying to coax back a little warm breath of former
+      days into a present that is stiff and cold with indifference, is touching
+      enough. But there is a certain grossness around the circumstances in which
+      Rousseau now and too often found himself, that makes us watch his
+      embarrassment with some composure. One cannot easily think of him as a
+      simple heart, and we feel perhaps as much relief as he, when he resolves
+      after making all due efforts to thrust out the intruder and bring Madame
+      de Warens over from theories which had become too practical to be
+      interesting, to leave Les Charmettes and accept a tutorship at Lyons. His
+      new patron was a De Mably, elder brother of the philosophic abb&#233; of
+      the same name (1709-85), and of the still more notable Condillac
+      (1714-80).
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The future author of the most influential treatise on education that has
+      ever been written, was not<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.96"
+      id="Page_i.96">[i.96]</a></span> successful in the practical and far more
+      arduous side of that master art.<a name="FNanchor104" id="FNanchor104"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_104">[104]</a> We have seen how little training he had
+      ever given himself in the cardinal virtues of collectedness and
+      self-control, and we know this to be the indispensable quality in all who
+      have to shape young minds for a humane life. So long as all went well, he
+      was an angel, but when things went wrong, he is willing to confess that he
+      was a devil. When his two pupils could not understand him, he became
+      frantic; when they showed wilfulness or any other part of the disagreeable
+      materials out of which, along with the rest, human excellence has to be
+      ingeniously and painfully manufactured, he was ready to kill them. This,
+      as he justly admits, was not the way to render them either well learned or
+      sage. The moral education of the teacher himself was hardly complete, for
+      he describes how he used to steal his employer's wine, and the exquisite
+      draughts which he enjoyed in the secrecy of his own room, with a piece of
+      cake in one hand and some dear romance in the other. We should forgive
+      greedy pilferings of this kind more easily if Rousseau had forgotten them
+      more speedily. These are surely offences for which the best expiation is
+      oblivion in a throng of worthier memories.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.97" id="Page_i.97">[i.97]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is easy to understand how often Rousseau's mind turned from the deadly
+      drudgery of his present employment to the beatitude of former days. &quot;What
+      rendered my present condition insupportable was the recollection of my
+      beloved Charmettes, of my garden, my trees, my fountain, my orchard, and
+      above all of her for whom I felt myself born and who gave life to it all.
+      As I thought of her, of our pleasures, our guileless days, I was seized by
+      a tightness in my heart, a stopping of my breath, which robbed me of all
+      spirit.&quot;<a name="FNanchor105" id="FNanchor105"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_105">[105]</a> For years to come this was a kind of
+      far-off accompaniment, thrumming melodiously in his ears under all the
+      discords of a miserable life. He made another effort to quicken the dead.
+      Throwing up his office with his usual promptitude in escaping from the
+      irksome, after a residence of something like a year at Lyons (April, 1740&#8212;spring
+      of 1741), he made his way back to his old haunts. The first half-hour with
+      Madame de Warens persuaded him that happiness here was really at an end.
+      After a stay of a few months, his desolation again overcame him. It was
+      agreed that he should go to Paris to make his fortune by a new method of
+      musical notation which he had invented, and after a short stay at Lyons,
+      he found himself for the second time in the famous city which in the
+      eighteenth century had become for the moment the centre of the universe.<a
+      name="FNanchor106" id="FNanchor106"></a><a href="#Footnote_106">[106]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was not yet, however, destined to be a centre<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.98" id="Page_i.98">[i.98]</a></span> for him. His plan of
+      musical notation was examined by a learned committee of the Academy, no
+      member of whom was instructed in the musical art. Rousseau, dumb,
+      inarticulate, and unready as usual, was amazed at the ease with which his
+      critics by the free use of sounding phrases demolished arguments and
+      objections which he perceived that they did not at all understand. His
+      experience on this occasion suggested to him the most just reflection, how
+      even without breadth of intelligence, the profound knowledge of any one
+      thing is preferable in forming a judgment about it, to all possible
+      enlightenment conferred by the cultivation of the sciences, without study
+      of the special matter in question. It astonished him that all these
+      learned men, who knew so many things, could yet be so ignorant that a man
+      should only pretend to be a judge in his own craft.<a name="FNanchor107"
+      id="FNanchor107"></a><a href="#Footnote_107">[107]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His musical path to glory and riches thus blocked up, he surrendered
+      himself not to despair but to complete idleness and peace of mind. He had
+      a few coins left, and these prevented him from thinking of a future. He
+      was presented to one or two great ladies, and with the blundering
+      gallantry habitual to him he wrote a letter to one of the greatest of
+      them, declaring his passion for her. Madame Dupin was the daughter of one,
+      and the wife of another, of the richest men in France, and the attentions
+      of a man whose acquaintance Madame Beuzenval had begun by inviting him to
+      dine in the servants' hall, were<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.99"
+      id="Page_i.99">[i.99]</a></span> not pleasing to her.<a name="FNanchor108"
+      id="FNanchor108"></a><a href="#Footnote_108">[108]</a> She forgave the
+      impertinence eventually, and her stepson, M. Francueil, was Rousseau's
+      patron for some years.<a name="FNanchor109" id="FNanchor109"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_109">[109]</a> On the whole, however, in spite of his own
+      account of his social ineptitude, there cannot have been anything so
+      repulsive in his manners as this account would lead us to think. There is
+      no grave anachronism in introducing here the impression which he made on
+      two fine ladies not many years after this. &quot;He pays compliments, yet
+      he is not polite, or at least he is without the air of politeness. He
+      seems to be ignorant of the usages of society, but it is easily seen that
+      he is infinitely intelligent. He has a brown complexion, while eyes that
+      overflow with fire give animation to his expression. When he has spoken
+      and you look at him, he appears comely; but when you try to recall him,
+      his image is always extremely plain. They say that he has bad health, and
+      endures agony which from<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.100"
+      id="Page_i.100">[i.100]</a></span> some motive of vanity he most carefully
+      conceals. It is this, I fancy, which gives him from time to time an air of
+      sullenness.&quot;<a name="FNanchor110" id="FNanchor110"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_110">[110]</a> The other lady, who saw him at the same
+      time, speaks of &quot;the poor devil of an author, who's as poor as Job
+      for you, but with wit and vanity enough for four.... They say his history
+      is as queer as his person, and that is saying a good deal.... Madame
+      Maupeou and I tried to guess what it was. 'In spite of his face,' said she
+      (for it is certain he is uncommonly plain), 'his eyes tell that love plays
+      a great part in his romance.' 'No,' said I, 'his nose tells me that it is
+      vanity.' 'Well then, 'tis both one and the other.'&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor111" id="FNanchor111"></a><a href="#Footnote_111">[111]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One of his patronesses took some trouble to procure him the post of
+      secretary to the French ambassador at Venice, and in the spring of 1743
+      our much-wandering man started once more in quest of meat and raiment in
+      the famous city of the Adriatic. This was one of those steps of which
+      there are not a few in a man's life, that seem at the moment to rank
+      foremost in the short line of decisive acts, and then are presently seen
+      not to have been decisive at all, but mere interruptions conducting
+      nowhither. In truth the critical moments with us are mostly as points in
+      slumber. Even if the ancient oracles of the gods were to regain their
+      speech once more on the earth, men would usually go to consult them on
+      days when the answer would have least significance,<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.101" id="Page_i.101">[i.101]</a></span> and could guide them
+      least far. That one of the most heedless vagrants in Europe, and as it
+      happened one of the men of most extraordinary genius also, should have got
+      a footing in the train of the ambassador of a great government, would
+      naturally seem to him and others as chance's one critical stroke in his
+      life. In reality it was nothing. The Count of Montaigu, his master, was
+      one of the worst characters with whom Rousseau could for his own profit
+      have been brought into contact. In his professional quality he was not far
+      from imbecile. The folly and weakness of the government at Versailles
+      during the reign of Lewis XV., and its indifference to competence in every
+      department except perhaps partially in the fisc, was fairly illustrated in
+      its absurd representative at Venice. The secretary, whose renown has
+      preserved his master's name, has recorded more amply than enough the
+      grounds of quarrel between them. Rousseau is for once eager to assert his
+      own efficiency, and declares that he rendered many important services for
+      which he was repaid with ingratitude and persecution.<a name="FNanchor112"
+      id="FNanchor112"></a><a href="#Footnote_112">[112]</a> One would be glad
+      to know what the Count of Montaigu's version of matters was, for in truth
+      Rousseau's conduct in previous posts makes us wonder how it was that he
+      who had hitherto always<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.102"
+      id="Page_i.102">[i.102]</a></span> been unfaithful over few things,
+      suddenly touched perfection when he became lord over many.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is other testimony, however, to the ambassador's morbid quality, of
+      which, after that general imbecility which was too common a thing among
+      men in office to be remarkable, avarice was the most striking trait. For
+      instance, careful observation had persuaded him that three shoes are
+      equivalent to two pairs, because there is always one of a pair which is
+      more worn than its fellow; and hence he habitually ordered his shoes in
+      threes.<a name="FNanchor113" id="FNanchor113"></a><a href="#Footnote_113">[113]</a>
+      It was natural enough that such a master and such a secretary should
+      quarrel over perquisites. That slightly cringing quality which we have
+      noticed on one or two occasions in Rousseau's hungry youthful time, had
+      been hardened out of him by circumstance or the strengthening of inborn
+      fibre. He would now neither dine in a servants' hall because a fine lady
+      forgot what was due to a musician, nor share his fees with a great
+      ambassador who forgot what was due to himself. These sordid disputes are
+      of no interest now to anybody, and we need only say that after a period of
+      eighteen months passed in uncongenial company, Rousseau parted from his
+      count in extreme dudgeon, and the diplomatic career which he had promised
+      to himself came to the same close as various other careers had already
+      done.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He returned to Paris towards the end of 1744, burning with indignation at
+      the unjust treatment which he believed himself to have suffered, and
+      laying<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.103" id="Page_i.103">[i.103]</a></span>
+      memorial after memorial before the minister at home. He assures us that it
+      was the justice and the futility of his complaints, that left in his soul
+      the germ of exasperation against preposterous civil institutions, &quot;in
+      which the true common weal and real justice are always sacrificed to some
+      seeming order or other, which is in fact destructive of all order, and
+      only adds the sanction of public authority to the oppression of the weak
+      and the iniquity of the strong.&quot;<a name="FNanchor114" id="FNanchor114"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_114">[114]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One or two pictures connected with the Venetian episode remain in the
+      memory of the reader of the Confessions, and among them perhaps with most
+      people is that of the quarantine at Genoa in Rousseau's voyage to his new
+      post. The travellers had the choice of remaining on board the felucca, or
+      passing the time in an unfurnished lazaretto. This, we may notice in
+      passing, was his first view of the sea; he makes no mention of the fact,
+      nor does the sight or thought of the sea appear to have left the least
+      mark in any line of his writings. He always disliked it, and thought of it
+      with melancholy. Rousseau, as we may suppose, found the want of space and
+      air in the boat the most intolerable of evils, and preferred to go alone
+      to the lazaretto, though it had neither window-sashes nor tables nor
+      chairs nor bed, nor even a truss of straw to lie down upon. He was locked
+      up and had the whole barrack to himself. &quot;I manufactured,&quot; he
+      says, &quot;a good bed out of my coats and shirts, sheets out of towels
+      which I stitched together,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.104"
+      id="Page_i.104">[i.104]</a></span> a pillow out of my old cloak rolled up.
+      I made myself a seat of one trunk placed flat, and a table of the other. I
+      got out some paper and my writing-desk, and arranged some dozen books that
+      I had by way of library. In short I made myself so comfortable, that, with
+      the exception of curtains and windows, I was nearly as well off in this
+      absolutely naked lazaretto as in my lodgings in Paris. My meals were
+      served with much pomp; two grenadiers, with bayonets at their musket-ends,
+      escorted them; the staircase was my dining-room, the landing did for table
+      and the lower step for a seat, and when my dinner was served, they rang a
+      little bell as they withdrew, to warn me to seat myself at table. Between
+      my meals, when I was neither writing nor reading, nor busy with my
+      furnishing, I went for a walk in the Protestant graveyard, or mounted into
+      a lantern which looked out on to the port, and whence I could see the
+      ships sailing in and out. I passed a fortnight in this way, and I could
+      have spent the whole three weeks of the quarantine without feeling an
+      instant's weariness.&quot;<a name="FNanchor115" id="FNanchor115"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_115">[115]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These are the occasions when we catch glimpses of the true Rousseau; but
+      his residence in Venice was on the whole one of his few really sociable
+      periods. He made friends and kept them, and there was even a certain
+      gaiety in his life. He used to tell people their fortunes in a way that an
+      earlier century would have counted unholy.<a name="FNanchor116"
+      id="FNanchor116"></a><a href="#Footnote_116">[116]</a> He rarely sought
+      pleasure in those of her haunts for which the Queen of the Adri<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.105" id="Page_i.105">[i.105]</a></span>atic
+      had a guilty renown, but he has left one singular anecdote, showing the
+      degree to which profound sensibility is capable of doing the moralist's
+      work in a man, and how a stroke of sympathetic imagination may keep one
+      from sin more effectually than an ethical precept.<a name="FNanchor117"
+      id="FNanchor117"></a><a href="#Footnote_117">[117]</a> It is pleasanter to
+      think of him as working at the formation of that musical taste which ten
+      years afterwards led him to amaze the Parisians by proving that French
+      melody was a hollow idea born of national self-delusion. A Venetian
+      experiment, whose evidence in the special controversy is less weighty
+      perhaps than Rousseau supposed, was among the facts which persuaded him
+      that Italian is the language of music. An Armenian who had never heard any
+      music was invited to listen first of all to a French monologue, and then
+      to an air of Galuppi's. Rousseau observed in the Armenian more surprise
+      than pleasure during the performance of the French piece. The first notes
+      of the Italian were no sooner struck, than his eyes and whole expression
+      softened; he was enchanted, surrendered his whole soul to the ravishing
+      impressions of the music, and could never again be induced to listen to
+      the performance of any French air.<a name="FNanchor118" id="FNanchor118"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_118">[118]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      More important than this was the circumstance that the sight of the
+      defects of the government of the Venetian Republic first drew his mind to
+      political<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.106" id="Page_i.106">[i.106]</a></span>
+      speculation, and suggested to him the composition of a book that was to be
+      called Institutions Politiques.<a name="FNanchor119" id="FNanchor119"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_119">[119]</a> The work, as thus designed and named, was
+      never written, but the idea of it, after many years of meditation, ripened
+      first in the Discourse on Inequality, and then in the Social Contract.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If Rousseau's departure for Venice was a wholly insignificant element in
+      his life, his return from it was almost immediately followed by an event
+      which counted for nothing at the moment, which his friends by and by came
+      to regard as the fatal and irretrievable disaster of his life, but which
+      he persistently described as the only real consolation that heaven
+      permitted him to taste in his misery, and the only one that enabled him to
+      bear his many sore burdens.<a name="FNanchor120" id="FNanchor120"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_120">[120]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He took up his quarters at a small and dirty hotel not far from the
+      Sorbonne, where he had alighted on the occasion of his second arrival in
+      Paris.<a name="FNanchor121" id="FNanchor121"></a><a href="#Footnote_121">[121]</a>
+      Here was a kitchen-maid, some two-and-twenty years old, who used to sit at
+      table with her mistress and the guests<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.107" id="Page_i.107">[i.107]</a></span> of the house. The
+      company was rough, being mainly composed of Irish and Gascon abb&#233;s,
+      and other people to whom graces of mien and refinement of speech had come
+      neither by nature nor cultivation. The hostess herself pitched the
+      conversation in merry Rabelaisian key, and the apparent modesty of her
+      serving-woman gave a zest to her own licence. Rousseau was moved with pity
+      for a maid defenceless against a ribald storm, and from pity he advanced
+      to some warmer sentiment, and he and Theresa Le Vasseur took each other
+      for better for worse, in a way informal but sufficiently effective. This
+      was the beginning of a union which lasted for the length of a generation
+      and more, down to the day of Rousseau's most tragical ending.<a
+      name="FNanchor122" id="FNanchor122"></a><a href="#Footnote_122">[122]</a>
+      She thought she saw in him a worthy soul; and he was convinced that he saw
+      in her a woman of sensibility, simple and free from trick, and neither of
+      the two, he says, was deceived in respect of the other. Her intellectual
+      quality was unique. She could never be taught to read with any approach to
+      success. She could never follow the order of the twelve months of the
+      year, nor master a single arithmetical figure, nor count a sum of money,
+      nor reckon the price of a thing. A month's instruction was not enough to
+      give knowledge of the hours of the day on the dial-plate. The words<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.108" id="Page_i.108">[i.108]</a></span>
+      she used were often the direct opposites of the words that she meant to
+      use.<a name="FNanchor123" id="FNanchor123"></a><a href="#Footnote_123">[123]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The marriage choice of others is the inscrutable puzzle of those who have
+      no eye for the fact that such choice is the great match of cajolery
+      between purpose and invisible hazard; the blessedness of many lives is the
+      stake, as intention happens to cheat accident or to be cheated by it. When
+      the match is once over, deep criticism of a game of pure chance is time
+      wasted. The crude talk in which the unwise deliver their judgments upon
+      the conditions of success in the relations between men and women, has
+      flowed with unprofitable copiousness as to this not very inviting case.
+      People construct an imaginary Rousseau out of his writings, and then
+      fetter their elevated, susceptible,<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.109" id="Page_i.109">[i.109]</a></span> sensitive, and humane
+      creation, to the unfortunate woman who could never be taught that April is
+      the month after March, or that twice four and a half are nine. Now we have
+      already seen enough of Rousseau to know for how infinitely little he
+      counted the gift of a quick wit, and what small store he set either on
+      literary varnish or on capacity for receiving it. He was touched in people
+      with whom he had to do, not by attainment, but by moral fibre or his
+      imaginary impression of their moral fibre. Instead of analysing a
+      character, bringing its several elements into the balance, computing the
+      more or less of this faculty or that, he loved to feel its influence as a
+      whole, indivisible, impalpable, playing without sound or agitation around
+      him like soft light and warmth and the fostering air. The deepest
+      ignorance, the dullest incapacity, the cloudiest faculties of
+      apprehension, were nothing to him in man or woman, provided he could only
+      be sensible of that indescribable emanation from voice and eye and
+      movement, that silent effusion of serenity around spoken words, which
+      nature has given to some tranquillising spirits, and which would have left
+      him free in an even life of indolent meditation and unfretted sense. A
+      woman of high, eager, stimulating kind would have been a more fatal mate
+      for him than the most stupid woman that ever rivalled the stupidity of
+      man. Stimulation in any form always meant distress to Rousseau. The moist
+      warmth of the Savoy valleys was not dearer to him than the subtle
+      inhalations of softened and close enveloping<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.110" id="Page_i.110">[i.110]</a></span> companionship, in
+      which the one needful thing is not intellectual equality, but easy,
+      smooth, constant contact of feeling about the thousand small matters that
+      make up the existence of a day. This is not the highest ideal of union
+      that one's mind can conceive from the point of view of intense productive
+      energy, but Rousseau was not concerned with the conditions of productive
+      energy. He only sought to live, to be himself, and he knew better than any
+      critics can know for him, what kind of nature was the best supplement for
+      his own. As he said in an apophthegm with a deep melancholy lying at the
+      bottom of it,&#8212;you never can cite the example of a thoroughly happy
+      man, for no one but the man himself knows anything about it.<a
+      name="FNanchor124" id="FNanchor124"></a><a href="#Footnote_124">[124]</a>
+      &quot;By the side of people we love,&quot; he says very truly, &quot;sentiment
+      nourishes the intelligence as well as the heart, and we have little
+      occasion to seek ideas elsewhere. I lived with my Theresa as pleasantly as
+      with the finest genius in the universe.&quot;<a name="FNanchor125"
+      id="FNanchor125"></a><a href="#Footnote_125">[125]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theresa Le Vasseur would probably have been happier if she had married a
+      stout stable-boy, as indeed she did some thirty years hence by way of
+      gathering up the fragments that were left; but there is little reason to
+      think that Rousseau would have been much happier with any other mate than
+      he was with Theresa. There was no social disparity between the two. She
+      was a person accustomed to hardship<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.111" id="Page_i.111">[i.111]</a></span> and coarseness, and
+      so was he. And he always systematically preferred the honest coarseness of
+      the plain people from whom he was sprung and among whom he had lived, to
+      the more hateful coarseness of heart which so often lurks under fine
+      manners and a complete knowledge of the order of the months in the year
+      and the arithmetical table. Rousseau had been a serving-man, and there was
+      no deterioration in going with a serving-woman.<a name="FNanchor126"
+      id="FNanchor126"></a><a href="#Footnote_126">[126]</a> However this may
+      be, it is certain that for the first dozen years or so of his partnership&#8212;and
+      many others as well as he are said to have found in this term a limit to
+      the conditions of the original contract,&#8212;Rousseau had perfect and
+      entire contentment in the Theresa whom all his friends pronounced as mean,
+      greedy, jealous, degrading, as she was avowedly brutish in understanding.
+      Granting that she was all these things, how much of the responsibility for
+      his acts has been thus shifted from the shoulders of Rousseau himself,
+      whose connection with her was from beginning to end entirely voluntary? If
+      he attached himself deliberately to an unworthy object by a bond which he
+      was indisputably free to break on any day that he chose, were not the<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.112" id="Page_i.112">[i.112]</a></span>
+      effects of such a union as much due to his own character which sought,
+      formed, and perpetuated it, as to the character of Theresa Le Vasseur?
+      Nothing, as he himself said in a passage to which he appends a vindication
+      of Theresa, shows the true leanings and inclinations of a man better than
+      the sort of attachments which he forms.<a name="FNanchor127"
+      id="FNanchor127"></a><a href="#Footnote_127">[127]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is a natural blunder in a literate and well-mannered society to charge
+      a mistake against a man who infringes its conventions in this particular
+      way. Rousseau knew what he was about, as well as politer persons. He was
+      at least as happy with his kitchen wench as Addison was with his countess,
+      or Voltaire with his marchioness, and he would not have been what he was,
+      nor have played the part that he did play in the eighteenth century, if he
+      had felt anything derogatory or unseemly in a kitchen wench. The selection
+      was probably not very deliberate; as it happened, Theresa served as a
+      standing illustration of two of his most marked traits, a contempt for
+      mere literary culture, and a yet deeper contempt for social
+      accomplishments and social position. In time he found out the grievous
+      disadvantages of living in solitude with a companion who did not know how
+      to think, and whose stock of ideas was so slight that the only common
+      ground of talk between them was gossip and quodlibets. But her lack of
+      sprightliness, beauty, grace, refinement, and that gentle initiative by
+      which women may make even a sombre life so various,<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.113" id="Page_i.113">[i.113]</a></span> went for nothing with
+      him. What his friends missed in her, he did not seek and would not have
+      valued; and what he found in her, they were naturally unable to
+      appreciate, for they never were in the mood for detecting it. &quot;I have
+      not seen much of happy men,&quot; he wrote when near his end, &quot;perhaps
+      nothing; but I have many a time seen contented hearts, and of all the
+      objects that have struck me, I believe it is this which has always given
+      most contentment to myself.&quot;<a name="FNanchor128" id="FNanchor128"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_128">[128]</a> This moderate conception of felicity, which
+      was always so characteristic with him, as an even, durable, and rather
+      low-toned state of the feelings, accounts for his prolonged acquiescence
+      in a companion whom men with more elation in their ideal would assuredly
+      have found hostile even to the most modest contentment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &quot;The heart of my Theresa,&quot; he wrote long after the first
+      tenderness had changed into riper emotion on his side, and, alas, into
+      indifference on hers, &quot;was that of an angel; our attachment waxed
+      stronger with our intimacy, and we felt more and more each day that we
+      were made for one another. If our pleasures could be described, their
+      simplicity would make you laugh; our excursions together out of town, in
+      which I would munificently expend eight or ten halfpence in some rural
+      tavern; our modest suppers at my window, seated in front of one another on
+      two small chairs placed on a trunk that filled up the breadth of the
+      embrasure. Here the window did duty for a table,<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.114" id="Page_i.114">[i.114]</a></span> we breathed the fresh
+      air, we could see the neighbourhood and the people passing by, and though
+      on the fourth story, could look down into the street as we ate. Who shall
+      describe, who shall feel the charms of those meals, consisting of a coarse
+      quartern loaf, some cherries, a tiny morsel of cheese, and a pint of wine
+      which we drank between us? Ah, what delicious seasoning there is in
+      friendship, confidence, intimacy, gentleness of soul! We used sometimes to
+      remain thus until midnight, without once thinking of the time.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor129" id="FNanchor129"></a><a href="#Footnote_129">[129]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Men and women are often more fairly judged by the way in which they bear
+      the burden of what they have done, than by the prime act which laid the
+      burden on their lives.<a name="FNanchor130" id="FNanchor130"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_130">[130]</a> The deeper part of us shows in the manner
+      of accepting consequences. On the whole, Rousseau's relations with this
+      woman present him in a better light than those with any other person
+      whatever. If he became with all the rest of the world suspicious, angry,
+      jealous, profoundly diseased in a word, with her he was habitually
+      trustful, affectionate, careful, most long-suffering. It sometimes even
+      occurs to us that his constancy to Theresa was only another side of the
+      morbid perversity of his relations with the rest of the world. People of a
+      certain kind not seldom make the most serious and vital sacrifices for
+      bare love<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.115" id="Page_i.115">[i.115]</a></span>
+      of singularity, and a man like Rousseau was not unlikely to feel an
+      eccentric pleasure in proving that he could find merit in a woman who to
+      everybody else was desperate. One who is on bad terms with the bulk of his
+      fellows may contrive to save his self-respect and confirm his conviction
+      that they are all in the wrong, by preserving attachment to some one to
+      whom general opinion is hostile; the private argument being that if he is
+      capable of this degree of virtue and friendship in an unfavourable case,
+      how much more could he have practised it with others, if they would only
+      have allowed him. Whether this kind of apology was present to his mind or
+      not, Rousseau could always refer those who charged him with black caprice,
+      to his steady kindness towards Theresa Le Vasseur. Her family were among
+      the most odious of human beings, greedy, idle, and ill-humoured, while her
+      mother had every fault that a woman could have in Rousseau's eyes,
+      including that worst fault of setting herself up for a fine wit. Yet he
+      bore with them all for years, and did not break with Madame Le Vasseur
+      until she had poisoned the mind of her daughter, and done her best by
+      rapacity and lying to render him contemptible to all his friends.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the course of years Theresa herself gave him unmistakable signs of a
+      change in her affections. &quot;I began to feel,&quot; he says, at a date
+      of sixteen or seventeen years from our present point, &quot;that she was
+      no longer for me what she had been in our happy years,<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.116" id="Page_i.116">[i.116]</a></span> and I felt it all the
+      more clearly as I was still the same towards her.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor131" id="FNanchor131"></a><a href="#Footnote_131">[131]</a>
+      This was in 1762, and her estrangement grew deeper and her indifference
+      more open, until at length, seven years afterwards, we find that she had
+      proposed a separation from him. What the exact reasons for this gradual
+      change may have been we do not know, nor have we any right in ignorance of
+      the whole facts to say that they were not adequate and just. There are two
+      good traits recorded of the woman's character. She could never console
+      herself for having let her father be taken away to end his days miserably
+      in a house of charity.<a name="FNanchor132" id="FNanchor132"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_132">[132]</a> And the repudiation of her children,
+      against which the glowing egoism of maternity always rebelled, remained a
+      cruel dart in her bosom as long as she lived. We may suppose that there
+      was that about household life with Rousseau which might have bred disgusts
+      even in one as little fastidious as Theresa was. Among other things which
+      must have been hard to endure, we know that in composing his works he was
+      often weeks together without speaking a word to her.<a name="FNanchor133"
+      id="FNanchor133"></a><a href="#Footnote_133">[133]</a> Perhaps again it
+      would not be difficult to produce some passages in Rousseau's letters and
+      in the Confessions, which show traces of that subtle contempt for women
+      that lurks undetected in many who would blush to avow it. Whatever the
+      causes may have been, from indifference she passed to something like
+      aversion, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.117" id="Page_i.117">[i.117]</a></span>
+      in the one place where a word of complaint is wrung from him, he describes
+      her as rending and piercing his heart at a moment when his other miseries
+      were at their height. His patience at any rate was inexhaustible; now old,
+      worn by painful bodily infirmities, racked by diseased suspicion and the
+      most dreadful and tormenting of the minor forms of madness, nearly
+      friendless, and altogether hopeless, he yet kept unabated the old
+      tenderness of a quarter of a century before, and expressed it in words of
+      such gentleness, gravity, and self-respecting strength, as may touch even
+      those whom his books leave unmoved, and who view his character with
+      deepest distrust. &quot;For the six-and-twenty years, dearest, that our
+      union has lasted, I have never sought my happiness except in yours, and
+      have never ceased to try to make you happy; and you saw by what I did
+      lately,<a name="FNanchor134" id="FNanchor134"></a><a href="#Footnote_134">[134]</a>
+      that your honour and happiness were one as dear to me as the other. I see
+      with pain that success does not answer my solicitude, and that my kindness
+      is not as sweet to you to receive, as it is sweet to me to show. I know
+      that the sentiments of honour and uprightness with which you were born
+      will never change in you; but as for those of tenderness and attachment
+      which were once reciprocal between us, I feel that they now only exist on
+      my side. Not only, dearest of all friends, have you ceased to find
+      pleasure in my company, but you have to tax yourself severely even to
+      remain a few minutes<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.118"
+      id="Page_i.118">[i.118]</a></span> with me out of complaisance. You are at
+      your ease with all the world but me. I do not speak to you of many other
+      things. We must take our friends with their faults, and I ought to pass
+      over yours, as you pass over mine. If you were happy with me I could be
+      content, but I see clearly that you are not, and this is what makes my
+      heart sore. If I could do better for your happiness, I would do it and
+      hold my peace; but that is not possible. I have left nothing undone that I
+      thought would contribute to your felicity. At this moment, while I am
+      writing to you, overwhelmed with distress and misery, I have no more true
+      or lively desire than to finish my days in closest union with you. You
+      know my lot,&#8212;it is such as one could not even dare to describe, for
+      no one could believe it. I never had, my dearest, other than one single
+      solace, but that the sweetest; it was to pour out all my heart in yours;
+      when I talked of my miseries to you, they were soothed; and when you had
+      pitied me, I needed pity no more. My every resource, my whole confidence,
+      is in you and in you only; my soul cannot exist without sympathy, and
+      cannot find sympathy except with you. It is certain that if you fail me
+      and I am forced to live alone, I am as a dead man. But I should die a
+      thousand times more cruelly still, if we continued to live together in
+      misunderstanding, and if confidence and friendship were to go out between
+      us. It would be a hundred times better to cease to see each other; still
+      to live, and sometimes to regret one another. Whatever sacrifice may be
+      necessary on<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.119" id="Page_i.119">[i.119]</a></span>
+      my part to make you happy, be so at any cost, and I shall be content. We
+      have faults to weep over and to expiate, but no crimes; let us not blot
+      out by the imprudence of our closing days the sweetness and purity of
+      those we have passed together.&quot;<a name="FNanchor135" id="FNanchor135"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_135">[135]</a> Think ill as we may of Rousseau's theories,
+      and meanly as we may of some parts of his conduct, yet to those who can
+      feel the pulsing of a human life apart from a man's formul&#230;, and can
+      be content to leave to sure circumstance the tragic retaliation for evil
+      behaviour, this letter is like one of the great master's symphonies, whose
+      theme falls in soft strokes of melting pity on the heart. In truth, alas,
+      the union of this now diverse pair had been stained by crimes shortly
+      after its beginning. In the estrangement of father and mother in their
+      late years we may perhaps hear the rustle and spy the pale forms of the
+      avenging spectres of their lost children.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the time when the connection with Theresa Le Vasseur was formed,
+      Rousseau did not know how to gain bread. He composed the musical diversion
+      of the Muses Galantes, which Rameau rightly or wrongly pronounced a
+      plagiarism, and at the request of Richelieu he made some minor
+      re-adaptations in Voltaire's Princesse de Navarre, which Rameau had set to
+      music&#8212;that &quot;farce of the fair&quot; to which the author of Za&#239;re
+      owed his seat in the Academy.<a name="FNanchor136" id="FNanchor136"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_136">[136]</a> But neither<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.120" id="Page_i.120">[i.120]</a></span> task brought him
+      money, and he fell back on a sort of secretaryship, with perhaps a little
+      of the valet in it, to Madame Dupin and her son-in-law, M. de Francueil,
+      for which he received the too moderate income of nine hundred francs. On
+      one occasion he returned to his room expecting with eager impatience the
+      arrival of a remittance, the proceeds of some small property which came to
+      him by the death of his father.<a name="FNanchor137" id="FNanchor137"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_137">[137]</a> He found the letter, and was opening it
+      with trembling hands, when he was suddenly smitten with shame at his want
+      of self-control; he placed it unopened on the chimney-piece, undressed,
+      slept better than usual, and when he awoke the next morning, he had
+      forgotten all about the letter until it caught his eye. He was delighted
+      to find that it contained his money, but &quot;I can swear,&quot; he adds,
+      &quot;that my liveliest delight was in having conquered myself.&quot; An
+      occasion for self-conquest on a more considerable scale was at hand. In
+      these tight straits, he received grievous news from the unfortunate
+      Theresa. He made up his mind cheerfully what to do; the mother acquiesced
+      after sore persuasion and with bitter tears; and the new-born child was
+      dropped into oblivion in the box of the asylum for foundlings. Next year
+      the same easy expedient was again resorted to, with the same heedlessness
+      on the part of the father, the same pain and reluctance on the part of the
+      mother. Five children in all were thus put away, and with such entire
+      absence of any precaution with a view to their<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.121" id="Page_i.121">[i.121]</a></span> identification in
+      happier times, that not even a note was kept of the day of their birth.<a
+      name="FNanchor138" id="FNanchor138"></a><a href="#Footnote_138">[138]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      People have made a great variety of remarks upon this transaction, from
+      the economist who turns it into an illustration of the evil results of
+      hospitals for foundlings in encouraging improvident unions, down to the
+      theologian who sees in it new proof of the inborn depravity of the human
+      heart and the fall of man. Others have vindicated it in various ways, one
+      of them courageously taking up the ground that Rousseau had good reason to
+      believe that the children were not his own, and therefore was fully
+      warranted in sending the poor creatures kinless into the universe.<a
+      name="FNanchor139" id="FNanchor139"></a><a href="#Footnote_139">[139]</a>
+      Perhaps it is not too transcendental a thing to hope that civilisation may
+      one day reach a point when a plea like this shall count for an aggravation
+      rather than a palliative; when a higher conception of the duties of
+      humanity, familiarised by the practice of adoption as well as by the
+      spread of both rational and compassionate considerations as to the
+      blameless little ones, shall have expelled what is surely as some red and
+      naked beast's emotion of fatherhood. What may be an excellent reason for
+      repudiating a woman, can<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.122"
+      id="Page_i.122">[i.122]</a></span> never be a reason for abandoning a
+      child, except with those whom reckless egoism has made willing to think it
+      a light thing to fling away from us the moulding of new lives and the
+      ensuring of salutary nurture for growing souls.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We are, however, dispensed from entering into these questions of the
+      greater morals by the very plain account which the chief actor has given
+      us, almost in spite of himself. His crime like most others was the result
+      of heedlessness, of the overriding of duty by the short dim-eyed
+      selfishness of the moment. He had been accustomed to frequent a tavern,
+      where the talk turned mostly upon topics which men with much self-respect
+      put as far from them, as men with little self-respect will allow them to
+      do. &quot;I formed my fashion of thinking from what I perceived to reign
+      among people who were at bottom extremely worthy folk, and I said to
+      myself, Since it is the usage of the country, as one lives here, one may
+      as well follow it. So I made up my mind to it cheerfully, and without the
+      least scruple.&quot;<a name="FNanchor140" id="FNanchor140"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_140">[140]</a> By and by he proceeded to cover this nude
+      and intelligible explanation with finer phrases, about preferring that his
+      children should be trained up as workmen and peasants rather than as
+      adventurers and fortune-hunters, and about his supposing that in sending
+      them to the hospital for foundlings he was enrolling himself a citizen in
+      Plato's Republic.<a name="FNanchor141" id="FNanchor141"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_141">[141]</a> This is hardly more than the talk of one
+      become famous, who is defending the acts of his<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.123" id="Page_i.123">[i.123]</a></span> obscurity on the high
+      principles which fame requires. People do not turn citizens of Plato's
+      Republic &quot;cheerfully and without the least scruple,&quot; and if a
+      man frequents company where the despatch of inconvenient children to the
+      hospital was an accepted point of common practice, it is superfluous to
+      drag Plato and his Republic into the matter. Another turn again was given
+      to his motives when his mind had become clouded by suspicious mania.
+      Writing a year or two before his death he had assured himself that his
+      determining reason was the fear of a destiny for his children a thousand
+      times worse than the hard life of foundlings, namely, being spoiled by
+      their mother, being turned into monsters by her family, and finally being
+      taught to hate and betray their father by his plotting enemies.<a
+      name="FNanchor142" id="FNanchor142"></a><a href="#Footnote_142">[142]</a>
+      This is obviously a mixture in his mind of the motives which led to the
+      abandonment of the children and justified the act to himself at the time,
+      with the circumstances that afterwards reconciled him to what he had done;
+      for now he neither had any enemies plotting against him, nor did he
+      suppose that he had. As for his wife's family, he showed himself quite
+      capable, when the time came, of dealing resolutely and shortly with their
+      importunities in his own case, and he might therefore well have trusted
+      his power to deal with them in the case of his children. He was more right
+      when in 1770, in his important letter to M. de St. Germain, he admitted
+      that example,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.124" id="Page_i.124">[i.124]</a></span>
+      necessity, the honour of her who was dear to him, all united to make him
+      entrust his children to the establishment provided for that purpose, and
+      kept him from fulfilling the first and holiest of natural duties. &quot;In
+      this, far from excusing, I accuse myself; and when my reason tells me that
+      I did what I ought to have done in my situation, I believe that less than
+      my heart, which bitterly belies it.&quot;<a name="FNanchor143"
+      id="FNanchor143"></a><a href="#Footnote_143">[143]</a> This coincides with
+      the first undisguised account given in the Confessions, which has been
+      already quoted, and it has not that flawed ring of cant and fine words
+      which sounds through nearly all his other references to this great stain
+      upon his life, excepting one, and this is the only further document with
+      which we need concern ourselves. In that,<a name="FNanchor144"
+      id="FNanchor144"></a><a href="#Footnote_144">[144]</a> which was written
+      while the unholy work was actually being done, he states very distinctly
+      that the motives were those which are more or less closely connected with
+      most unholy works, motives of money&#8212;the great instrument and measure
+      of our personal convenience, the quantitative test of our self-control in
+      placing personal convenience behind duty to other people. &quot;If my
+      misery and my misfortunes rob me of the power of fulfilling a duty so
+      dear, that is a calamity to pity me for, rather than a crime to reproach
+      me with. I owe them subsistence, and I procured a better or at least a
+      surer subsistence for them than I could myself have provided; this condi<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.125" id="Page_i.125">[i.125]</a></span>tion
+      is above all others.&quot; Next comes the consideration of their mother,
+      whose honour must be kept. &quot;You know my situation; I gained my bread
+      from day to day painfully enough; how then should I feed a family as well?
+      And if I were compelled to fall back on the profession of author, how
+      would domestic cares and the confusion of children leave me peace of mind
+      enough in my garret to earn a living? Writings which hunger dictates are
+      hardly of any use, and such a resource is speedily exhausted. Then I
+      should have to resort to patronage, to intrigue, to tricks ... in short to
+      surrender myself to all those infamies, for which I am penetrated with
+      such just horror. Support myself, my children, and their mother on the
+      blood of wretches? No, madame, it were better for them to be orphans than
+      to have a scoundrel for their father.... Why have I not married, you will
+      ask? Madame, ask it of your unjust laws. It was not fitting for me to
+      contract an eternal engagement; and it will never be proved to me that my
+      duty binds me to it. What is certain is that I have never done it, and
+      that I never meant to do it. But we ought not to have children when we
+      cannot support them. Pardon me, madame; nature means us to have offspring,
+      since the earth produces sustenance enough for all; but it is the rich, it
+      is your class, which robs mine of the bread of my children.... I know that
+      foundlings are not delicately nurtured; so much the better for them, they
+      become more robust. They have nothing superfluous given to them, but they
+      have everything that is<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.126"
+      id="Page_i.126">[i.126]</a></span> necessary. They do not make gentlemen
+      of them, but peasants or artisans.... They would not know how to dance, or
+      ride on horseback, but they would have strong unwearied legs. I would
+      neither make authors of them, nor clerks; I would not practise them in
+      handling the pen, but the plough, the file, and the plane, instruments for
+      leading a healthy, laborious, innocent life.... I deprived myself of the
+      delight of seeing them, and I have never tasted the sweetness of a
+      father's embrace. Alas, as I have already told you, I see in this only a
+      claim on your pity, and I deliver them from misery at my own expense.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor145" id="FNanchor145"></a><a href="#Footnote_145">[145]</a>
+      We may see here that Rousseau's sophistical eloquence, if it misled
+      others, was at least as powerful in misleading himself, and it may be
+      noted that this letter, with its talk of the children of the rich taking
+      bread out of the mouths of the children of the poor, contains the first of
+      those socialistic sentences by which the writer in after times gained so
+      famous a name. It is at any rate clear from this that the real motive of
+      the abandonment of the children was wholly material. He could not afford
+      to maintain them, and he did not wish to have his comfort disturbed by
+      their presence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is assuredly no word to be said by any one with firm reason and
+      unsophisticated conscience in extenuation of this crime. We have only to
+      remember that a great many other persons in that lax time, when the
+      structure of the family was undermined alike in<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.127" id="Page_i.127">[i.127]</a></span> practice and
+      speculation, were guilty of the same crime; that Rousseau, better than
+      they, did not erect his own criminality into a social theory, but was
+      tolerably soon overtaken by a remorse which drove him both to confess his
+      misdeed, and to admit that it was inexpiable; and that the atrocity of the
+      offence owes half the blackness with which it has always been invested by
+      wholesome opinion, to the fact that the offender was by and by the author
+      of the most powerful book by which parental duty has been commended in its
+      full loveliness and nobility. And at any rate, let Rousseau be a little
+      free from excessive reproach from all clergymen, sentimentalists, and
+      others, who do their worst to uphold the common and rather bestial opinion
+      in favour of reckless propagation, and who, if they do not advocate the
+      despatch of children to public institutions, still encourage a selfish
+      incontinence which ultimately falls in burdens on others than the
+      offenders, and which turns the family into a scene of squalor and
+      brutishness, producing a kind of parental influence that is far more
+      disastrous and demoralising than the absence of it in public institutions
+      can possibly be. If the propagation of children without regard to their
+      maintenance be either a virtue or a necessity, and if afterwards the only
+      alternatives are their maintenance in an asylum on the one hand, and their
+      maintenance in the degradation of a poverty-stricken home on the other, we
+      should not hesitate to give people who act as Rousseau acted, all that
+      credit for self-denial and high moral courage which he so<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.128" id="Page_i.128">[i.128]</a></span>
+      audaciously claimed for himself. It really seems to be no more criminal to
+      produce children with the deliberate intention of abandoning them to
+      public charity, as Rousseau did, than it is to produce them in deliberate
+      reliance on the besotted maxim that he who sends mouths will send meat, or
+      any other of the spurious saws which make Providence do duty for
+      self-control, and add to the gratification of physical appetite the
+      grotesque luxury of religious unction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In 1761 the Mar&#233;chale de Luxembourg made efforts to discover
+      Rousseau's children, but without success. They were gone beyond hope of
+      identification, and the author of <i>Emitius</i> and his sons and
+      daughters lived together in this world, not knowing one another. Rousseau
+      with singular honesty did not conceal his satisfaction at the
+      fruitlessness of the charitable endeavours to restore them to him. &quot;The
+      success of your search,&quot; he wrote, &quot;could not give me pure and
+      undisturbed pleasure; it is too late, too late.... In my present condition
+      this search interested me more for another person [Theresa] than myself;
+      and considering the too easily yielding character of the person in
+      question, it is possible that what she had found already formed for good
+      or for evil, might turn out a sorry boon to her.&quot;<a name="FNanchor146"
+      id="FNanchor146"></a><a href="#Footnote_146">[146]</a> We may doubt, in
+      spite of one or two charming and graceful passages, whether Rousseau<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.129" id="Page_i.129">[i.129]</a></span>
+      was of a nature to have any feeling for the pathos of infancy, the bright
+      blank eye, the eager unpurposed straining of the hand, the many turns and
+      changes in murmurings that yet can tell us nothing. He was both too
+      self-centred and too passionate for warm ease and fulness of life in all
+      things, to be truly sympathetic with a condition whose feebleness and
+      immaturity touch us with half-painful hope.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rousseau speaks in the Confessions of having married Theresa
+      five-and-twenty years after the beginning of their acquaintance,<a
+      name="FNanchor147" id="FNanchor147"></a><a href="#Footnote_147">[147]</a>
+      but we hardly have to understand that any ceremony took place which
+      anybody but himself would recognise as constituting a marriage. What
+      happened appears to have been this. Seated at table with Theresa and two
+      guests, one of them the mayor of the place, he declared that she was his
+      wife. &quot;This good and seemly engagement was contracted,&quot; he says,
+      &quot;in all the simplicity but also in all the truth of nature, in the
+      presence of two men of worth and honour.... During the short and simple
+      act, I saw the honest pair melted in tears.&quot;<a name="FNanchor148"
+      id="FNanchor148"></a><a href="#Footnote_148">[148]</a> He had at this time
+      whimsically assumed the name of Renou, and he wrote to a friend that of
+      course he had married in this name, for he adds, with the characteristic
+      insertion of an irrelevant bit of magniloquence, &quot;it is not names
+      that are married; no, it is persons.&quot; &quot;Even<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.130" id="Page_i.130">[i.130]</a></span> if in this simple and
+      holy ceremony names entered as a constituent part, the one I bear would
+      have sufficed, since I recognise no other. If it were a question of
+      property to be assured, then it would be another thing, but you know very
+      well that is not our case.&quot;<a name="FNanchor149" id="FNanchor149"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_149">[149]</a> Of course, this may have been a marriage
+      according to the truth of nature, and Rousseau was as free to choose his
+      own rites as more sacramental performers, but it is clear from his own
+      words about property that there was no pretence of a marriage in law. He
+      and Theresa were on profoundly uncomfortable terms about this time,<a
+      name="FNanchor150" id="FNanchor150"></a><a href="#Footnote_150">[150]</a>
+      and Rousseau is not the only person by many thousands who has deceived
+      himself into thinking that some form of words between man and woman must
+      magically transform the substance of their characters and lives, and
+      conjure up new relations of peace and steadfastness.
+    </p>
+    <hr style="width: 25%;" />
+    <p>
+      We have, however, been outstripping slow-footed destiny, and have now to
+      return to the time when Theresa did not drink brandy, nor run after
+      stable-boys, nor fill Rousseau's soul with bitterness and suspicion, but
+      sat contentedly with him in an evening taking a stoic's meal in the window
+      of their garret on the fourth floor, seasoning it with &quot;confidence,
+      intimacy, gentleness of soul,&quot; and that general comfort of sensation
+      which, as we know to our cost, is by no means an invariable condition
+      either of duty done externally<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.131"
+      id="Page_i.131">[i.131]</a></span> or of spiritual growth within. It is
+      perhaps hard for us to feel that we are in the presence of a great
+      religious reactionist; there is so little sign of the higher graces of the
+      soul, there are so many signs of the lowering clogs of the flesh. But the
+      spirit of a man moves in mysterious ways, and expands like the plants of
+      the field with strange and silent stirrings. It is one of the chief tests
+      of worthiness and freedom from vulgarity of soul in us, to be able to have
+      faith that this expansion is a reality, and the most important of all
+      realities. We do not rightly seize the type of Socrates if we can never
+      forget that he was the husband of Xanthippe, nor David's if we can only
+      think of him as the murderer of Uriah, nor Peter's if we can simply
+      remember that he denied his master. Our vision is only blindness, if we
+      can never bring ourselves to see the possibilities of deep mystic
+      aspiration behind the vile outer life of a man, or to believe that this
+      coarse Rousseau, scantily supping with his coarse mate, might yet have
+      many glimpses of the great wide horizons that are haunted by figures
+      rather divine than human.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &#160;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <b>FOOTNOTES:</b>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_104" id="Footnote_104"></a><a href="#FNanchor104">[104]</a>
+      In theory he was even now curiously prudent and almost sagacious; witness
+      the Projet pour l'Education, etc., submitted to M. de Mably, and printed
+      in the volume of his Works entitled <i>M&#233;langes</i>, pp. 106-136. In
+      the matter of Latin, it may be worth noting that Rousseau rashly or
+      otherwise condemns the practice of writing it, as a vexatious superfluity
+      (p. 132).
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_105" id="Footnote_105"></a><a href="#FNanchor105">[105]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, vi. 471.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_106" id="Footnote_106"></a><a href="#FNanchor106">[106]</a>
+      <i>Ib.</i>, vi. 472-475; vii. 8.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_107" id="Footnote_107"></a><a href="#FNanchor107">[107]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, vii. 18, 19.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_108" id="Footnote_108"></a><a href="#FNanchor108">[108]</a>
+      Musset-Pathay (ii. 72) quotes the passage from Lord Chesterfield's
+      Letters, where the writer suggests Madame Dupin as a proper person with
+      whom his son might in a regular and business-like manner open the
+      elevating game of gallant intrigue.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_109" id="Footnote_109"></a><a href="#FNanchor109">[109]</a>
+      M. Dupin deserves honourable mention as having helped the editors of the
+      Encyclop&#230;dia by procuring information for them as to salt-works
+      (D'Alembert's <i>Discours Pr&#233;liminaire</i>). His son M. Dupin de
+      Francueil, it may be worth noting, is a link in the genealogical chain
+      between two famous personages. In 1777, the year before Rousseau's death,
+      he married (in the chapel of the French embassy in London) Aurora de Saxe,
+      a natural daughter of the marshal, himself the natural son of August the
+      Strong, King of Poland. From this union was born Maurice Dupin, and
+      Maurice Dupin was the father of Madame George Sand. M. Francueil died in
+      1787.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_110" id="Footnote_110"></a><a href="#FNanchor110">[110]</a>
+      <i>M&#233;m. de Mdme. d'Epinay</i>, vol. i. ch. iv. p. 176.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_111" id="Footnote_111"></a><a href="#FNanchor111">[111]</a>
+      <i>Ib.</i> vol. i. ch. iv. pp. 178, 179.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_112" id="Footnote_112"></a><a href="#FNanchor112">[112]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, vii. 46, 51, 52, etc. A diplomatic piece in Rousseau's
+      handwriting has been found in the archives of the French consulate at
+      Constantinople, as M. Girardin informs us. Voltaire unworthily spread the
+      report that Rousseau had been the ambassador's private attendant. For
+      Rousseau's reply to the calumny, see <i>Corr.</i>, v. 75 (Jan. 5, 1767);
+      also iv. 150.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_113" id="Footnote_113"></a><a href="#FNanchor113">[113]</a>
+      Bernardin de St. Pierre, <i>Oeuv.</i>, xii. 55 <i>seq.</i>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_114" id="Footnote_114"></a><a href="#FNanchor114">[114]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, vii. 92.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_115" id="Footnote_115"></a><a href="#FNanchor115">[115]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, vii. 38, 39.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_116" id="Footnote_116"></a><a href="#FNanchor116">[116]</a>
+      <i>Lettres de la Montagne</i>, iii. 266.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_117" id="Footnote_117"></a><a href="#FNanchor117">[117]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, vii. 75-84. Also a second example, 84-86. For Byron's
+      opinion of one of these stories, see Lockhart's <i>Life of Scott</i>, vi.
+      132. (Ed. 1837.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_118" id="Footnote_118"></a><a href="#FNanchor118">[118]</a>
+      <i>Lettre sur la Musique Fran&#231;aise</i> (1753), p. 186.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_119" id="Footnote_119"></a><a href="#FNanchor119">[119]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, ix. 232.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_120" id="Footnote_120"></a><a href="#FNanchor120">[120]</a>
+      <i>Ib.</i> vii. 97.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_121" id="Footnote_121"></a><a href="#FNanchor121">[121]</a>
+      H&#244;tel St. Quentin, rue des Cordiers, a narrow street running between
+      the rue St. Jacques and the rue Victor Cousin. The still squalid hostelry
+      is now visible as H&#244;tel J.J. Rousseau. There is some doubt whether he
+      first saw Theresa in 1743 or 1745. The account in Bk. vii. of the <i>Confessions</i>
+      is for the latter date (see also <i>Corr.</i>, ii. 207), but in the
+      well-known letter to her in 1769 (<i>Ib.</i> vi. 79), he speaks of the
+      twenty-six years of their union. Their so-called marriage took place in
+      1768, and writing in that year he speaks of the five-and-twenty years of
+      their attachment (<i>Ib.</i> v. 323), and in the <i>Confessions</i> (ix.
+      249) he fixes their marriage at the same date; also in the letter to
+      Saint-Germain (vi. 152). Musset-Pathay, though giving 1745 in one place
+      (i. 45), and 1743 in another (ii. 198), has with less than his usual care
+      paid no attention to the discrepancy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_122" id="Footnote_122"></a><a href="#FNanchor122">[122]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, vii. 97-100.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_123" id="Footnote_123"></a><a href="#FNanchor123">[123]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, vii. 101. A short specimen of her composition may be
+      interesting, at any rate to hieroglyphic students: &quot;Mesiceuras ancor
+      mien re mies quan geu ceures o pres deu vous, e deu vous temoes tous la
+      goies e latandres deu mon querque vous cones ces que getou gour e rus pour
+      vous, e qui neu finiraes quotobocs ces mon quere qui vous paleu ces paes
+      mes le vre ... ge sui avestous lamities e la reu conec caceu posible e la
+      tacheman mon cher bonnamies votreau enble e bon amiess theress le vasseur.&quot;
+      Of which dark words this is the interpretation:&#8212;&quot;Mais il sera
+      encore mieux remis quand je sera aupr&#232;s de vous, et de vous t&#233;moigner
+      toute la joie et la tendresse de mon coeur que vous connaissez que j'ai
+      toujours eue pour vous, et qui ne finira qu'au tombeau; c'est mon coeur
+      qui vous parle, c'est pas mes l&#232;vres.... Je suis avec toute l'amiti&#233;
+      et la reconnaissance possibles, et l'attachement, mon cher bon ami, votre
+      humble et bonne amie, Th&#233;r&#232;se Le Vasseur.&quot; (<i>Rousseau,
+      ses Amis et ses Ennemis</i>, ii. 450.) Certainly it was not learning and
+      arts which hindered Theresa's manners from being pure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_124" id="Footnote_124"></a><a href="#FNanchor124">[124]</a>
+      <i>Oeuv. et Corr. In&#233;d.</i>, 365.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_125" id="Footnote_125"></a><a href="#FNanchor125">[125]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, vii. 102. See also <i>Corr.</i>, v. 373 (Oct. 10, 1768). On
+      the other hand, <i>Conf.</i>, ix. 249.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_126" id="Footnote_126"></a><a href="#FNanchor126">[126]</a>
+      M. St. Marc Girardin, in one of his admirable papers on Rousseau, speaks
+      of him as &quot;a bourgeois unclassed by an alliance with a tavern servant&quot;
+      (<i>Rev. des Deux Mondes</i>, Nov. 1852, p. 759); but surely Rousseau had
+      unclassed himself long before, in the houses of Madame Vercellis, Count
+      Gouvon, and even Madame de Warens, and by his repudiation, from the time
+      when he ran away from Geneva, of nearly every bourgeois virtue and
+      bourgeois prejudice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_127" id="Footnote_127"></a><a href="#FNanchor127">[127]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, vii. 11. Also footnote.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_128" id="Footnote_128"></a><a href="#FNanchor128">[128]</a>
+      <i>R&#234;veries</i>, ix. 309.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_129" id="Footnote_129"></a><a href="#FNanchor129">[129]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, viii. 142, 143.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_130" id="Footnote_130"></a><a href="#FNanchor130">[130]</a>
+      The other day I came for the first time upon the following in the sayings
+      of Madame de Lambert:&#8212;&quot;Ce ne sont pas toujours les fautes qui
+      nous perdent; c'est la mani&#232;re de se conduire apr&#233;s les avoir
+      faites.&quot; [1877.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_131" id="Footnote_131"></a><a href="#FNanchor131">[131]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, xii. 187, 188.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_132" id="Footnote_132"></a><a href="#FNanchor132">[132]</a>
+      <i>Ib.</i>, viii. 221.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_133" id="Footnote_133"></a><a href="#FNanchor133">[133]</a>
+      Bernardin de St. Pierre, <i>Oeuv.</i>, xii. 103. See <i>Conf.</i>, xii
+      188, and <i>Corr.</i>, v. 324.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_134" id="Footnote_134"></a><a href="#FNanchor134">[134]</a>
+      Referring, no doubt, to the ceremony which he called their marriage, and
+      which had taken place in 1768.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_135" id="Footnote_135"></a><a href="#FNanchor135">[135]</a>
+      <i>Corr.</i>, vi. 79-86. August 12, 1769.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_136" id="Footnote_136"></a><a href="#FNanchor136">[136]</a>
+      Composed in 1745. The <i>F&#234;tes de Ramire</i> was represented at
+      Versailles at the very end of this year.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_137" id="Footnote_137"></a><a href="#FNanchor137">[137]</a>
+      Some time in 1746-7. <i>Conf.</i>, vii. 113, 114.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_138" id="Footnote_138"></a><a href="#FNanchor138">[138]</a>
+      Probably in the winter of 1746-7. <i>Corr.</i>, ii. 207. <i>Conf.</i>,
+      vii. 120-124. <i>Ib.</i>, viii. 148. <i>Corr.</i>, ii. 208. June 12, 1761,
+      to the Mar&#233;chale de Luxembourg.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_139" id="Footnote_139"></a><a href="#FNanchor139">[139]</a>
+      George Sand,&#8212;in an eloquent piece entitled <i>&#192; Propos des
+      Charmettes (Revue des Deux Mondes</i>, November 15, 1863), in which she
+      expresses her own obligations to Jean Jacques. In 1761 Rousseau declares
+      that he had never hitherto had the least reason to suspect Theresa's
+      fidelity. <i>Corr.</i>, ii. 209
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_140" id="Footnote_140"></a><a href="#FNanchor140">[140]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, vii. 123.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_141" id="Footnote_141"></a><a href="#FNanchor141">[141]</a>
+      <i>Ib.</i>, viii. 145-151.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_142" id="Footnote_142"></a><a href="#FNanchor142">[142]</a>
+      <i>R&#234;veries</i>, ix. 313. The same reason is given, <i>Conf.</i>, ix.
+      252; also in Letter to Madame B., January 17, 1770 (<i>Corr.</i>, vi.
+      117).
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_143" id="Footnote_143"></a><a href="#FNanchor143">[143]</a>
+      <i>Corr.</i>, vi. 152, 153. Feb. 27, 1770.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_144" id="Footnote_144"></a><a href="#FNanchor144">[144]</a>
+      Letter to Madame de Francueil, April 20, 1751. <i>Corr.</i>, i. 151.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_145" id="Footnote_145"></a><a href="#FNanchor145">[145]</a>
+      <i>Corr.</i>, i. 151-155
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_146" id="Footnote_146"></a><a href="#FNanchor146">[146]</a>
+      August 10, 1761. <i>Corr.</i>, ii. 220. The Mar&#233;chale de Luxembourg's
+      note on the subject, to which this is a reply, is given in <i>Rousseau,
+      ses Amis et ses Ennemis</i>, i. 444.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_147" id="Footnote_147"></a><a href="#FNanchor147">[147]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, x. 249. See above, p. <a href="#Page_i.106">106</a>, <i>n.</i>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_148" id="Footnote_148"></a><a href="#FNanchor148">[148]</a>
+      To Lalliaud, Aug 31, 1768. <i>Corr.</i>, v. 324. See also D'Escherny,
+      quoted in Musset-Pathay, i. 169, 170.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_149" id="Footnote_149"></a><a href="#FNanchor149">[149]</a>
+      To Du Peyrou, Sept. 26, 1768. <i>Corr.</i>, v. 360.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_150" id="Footnote_150"></a><a href="#FNanchor150">[150]</a>
+      To Mdlle. Le Vasseur, July 25, 1768. <i>Corr.</i>, v. 116-119.
+    </p>
+    <hr style="width: 65%;" />
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.132" id="Page_i.132">[i.132]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      <a name="CHAPTER_V." id="CHAPTER_V."></a>CHAPTER V.
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      THE DISCOURSES.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <span class="smcap">The</span> busy establishment of local academies in
+      the provincial centres of France only preceded the outbreak of the
+      revolution by ten or a dozen years; but one or two of the provincial
+      cities, such as Bordeaux, Rouen, Dijon, had possessed academies in
+      imitation of the greater body of Paris for a much longer time. Their
+      activity covered a very varied ground, from the mere commonplaces of
+      literature to the most practical details of material production. If they
+      now and then relapsed into inquiries about the laws of Crete, they more
+      often discussed positive and scientific theses, and rather resembled our
+      chambers of agriculture than bodies of more learned pretension. The
+      academy of Dijon was one of the earliest of these excellent institutions,
+      and on the whole the list of its theses shows it to have been among the
+      most sensible in respect of the subjects which it found worth thinking
+      about. Its members, however, could not entirely resist the intellectual
+      atmosphere of the time. In 1742 they invited discussion of the point,
+      whether the natural law can conduct society to perfection<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.133" id="Page_i.133">[i.133]</a></span>
+      without the aid of political laws.<a name="FNanchor151" id="FNanchor151"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_151">[151]</a> In 1749 they proposed this question as a
+      theme for their prize essay: <i>Has the restoration of the sciences
+      contributed to purify or to corrupt manners?</i> Rousseau was one of
+      fourteen competitors, and in 1750 his discussion of the academic theme
+      received the prize.<a name="FNanchor152" id="FNanchor152"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_152">[152]</a> This was his first entry on the field of
+      literature and speculation. Three years afterwards the same academy
+      propounded another question: <i>What is the origin of inequality among
+      men, and is it authorised by the natural law?</i> Rousseau again competed,
+      and though his essay neither gained the prize, nor created as lively an
+      agitation as its predecessor had done, yet we may justly regard the second
+      as a more powerful supplement to the first.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is always interesting to know the circumstances under which pieces that
+      have moved a world were originally composed, and Rousseau's account of the
+      generation of his thoughts as to the influence of enlightenment on
+      morality, is remarkable enough to be worth transcribing. He was walking
+      along the road from Paris to Vincennes one hot summer afternoon on a visit
+      to Diderot, then in prison for his Letter on the Blind (1749), when he
+      came across in a newspaper the announcement of the theme propounded by the
+      Dijon academy. &quot;If ever anything resembled<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.134" id="Page_i.134">[i.134]</a></span> a sudden inspiration,
+      it was the movement which began in me as I read this. All at once I felt
+      myself dazzled by a thousand sparkling lights; crowds of vivid ideas
+      thronged into my mind with a force and confusion that threw me into
+      unspeakable agitation; I felt my head whirling in a giddiness like that of
+      intoxication. A violent palpitation oppressed me; unable to walk for
+      difficulty of breathing, I sank under one of the trees of the avenue, and
+      passed half an hour there in such a condition of excitement, that when I
+      arose I saw that the front of my waistcoat was all wet with my tears,
+      though I was wholly unconscious of shedding them. Ah, if I could ever have
+      written the quarter of what I saw and felt under that tree, with what
+      clearness should I have brought out all the contradictions of our social
+      system; with what simplicity I should have demonstrated that man is good
+      naturally, and that by institutions only is he made bad.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor153" id="FNanchor153"></a><a href="#Footnote_153">[153]</a>
+      Diderot encouraged him to compete for the prize, and to give full flight
+      to the ideas which had come to him in this singular way.<a
+      name="FNanchor154" id="FNanchor154"></a><a href="#Footnote_154">[154]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.135" id="Page_i.135">[i.135]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      People have held up their hands at the amazing originality of the idea
+      that perhaps sciences and arts have not purified manners. This sentiment
+      is surely exaggerated, if we reflect first that it occurred to the
+      academicians of Dijon as a question for discussion, and second that, if
+      you are asked whether a given result has or has not followed from certain
+      circumstances, the mere form of the question suggests No quite as readily
+      as Yes. The originality lay not in the central contention, but in the
+      fervour, sincerity, and conviction of a most unacademic sort with which it
+      was presented and enforced. There is less originality in denouncing your
+      generation as wicked and adulterous than there is in believing it to be
+      so, and in persuading the generation itself both that you believe it and
+      that you have good reasons to give. We have not to suppose that there was
+      any miracle wrought by agency celestial or infernal in the sudden
+      disclosure of his idea to Rousseau. Rousseau had been thinking of politics
+      ever since the working of the government of Venice had first drawn his
+      mind to the subject. What is the government, he had kept asking himself,
+      which is most proper to form a sage and virtuous nation? What government
+      by its nature keeps closest to the law? What is this law? And whence?<a
+      name="FNanchor155" id="FNanchor155"></a><a href="#Footnote_155">[155]</a>
+      This chain of problems had led him to what he calls the historic study of
+      morality, though we may doubt whether history was so much his teacher as
+      the rather meagrely nourished handmaid of his<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.136" id="Page_i.136">[i.136]</a></span> imagination. Here was
+      the irregular preparation, the hidden process, which suddenly burst into
+      light and manifested itself with an exuberance of energy, that passed to
+      the man himself for an inward revolution with no precursive sign.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rousseau's ecstatic vision on the road to Vincennes was the opening of a
+      life of thought and production which only lasted a dozen years, but which
+      in that brief space gave to Europe a new gospel. Emilius and the Social
+      Contract were completed in 1761, and they crowned a work which if you
+      consider its origin, influence, and meaning with due and proper breadth,
+      is marked by signal unity of purpose and conception. The key to it is
+      given to us in the astonishing transport at the foot of the wide-spreading
+      oak. Such a transport does not come to us of cool and rational western
+      temperament, but more often to the oriental after lonely sojourning in the
+      wilderness, or in violent reactions on the road to Damascus and elsewhere.
+      Jean Jacques detected oriental quality in his own nature,<a
+      name="FNanchor156" id="FNanchor156"></a><a href="#Footnote_156">[156]</a>
+      and so far as the union of ardour with mysticism, of intense passion with
+      vague dream, is to be defined as oriental, he assuredly deserves the name.
+      The ideas stirred in his mind by the Dijon problem suddenly &quot;opened
+      his eyes, brought order into the chaos in his head, revealed to him
+      another universe. From the active effervescence which thus began in his
+      soul, came sparks of genius which people saw glittering in his writings
+      through ten years of fever<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.137"
+      id="Page_i.137">[i.137]</a></span> and delirium, but of which no trace had
+      been seen in him previously, and which would probably have ceased to shine
+      henceforth, if he should have chanced to wish to continue writing after
+      the access was over. Inflamed by the contemplation of these lofty objects,
+      he had them incessantly present to his mind. His heart, made hot within
+      him by the idea of the future happiness of the human race, and by the
+      honour of contributing to it, dictated to him a language worthy of so high
+      an enterprise ... and for a moment, he astonished Europe by productions in
+      which vulgar souls saw only eloquence and brightness of understanding, but
+      in which those who dwell in the ethereal regions recognised with joy one
+      of their own.&quot;<a name="FNanchor157" id="FNanchor157"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_157">[157]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This was his own account of the matter quite at the end of his life, and
+      this is the only point of view from which we are secure against the
+      vulgarity of counting him a deliberate hypocrite and conscious charlatan.
+      He was possessed, as holier natures than his have been, by an enthusiastic
+      vision, an intoxicated confidence, a mixture of sacred rage and prodigious
+      love, an insensate but absolutely disinterested revolt against the stone
+      and iron of a reality which he was bent on melting in a heavenly blaze of
+      splendid aspiration and irresistibly persuasive expression. The last word
+      of this great expansion was Emilius, its first and more imperfectly
+      articulated was the earlier of the two Discourses.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rousseau's often-repeated assertion that here was<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.138" id="Page_i.138">[i.138]</a></span> the instant of the
+      ruin of his life, and that all his misfortunes flowed from that unhappy
+      moment, has been constantly treated as the word of affectation and
+      disguised pride. Yet, vain as he was, it may well have represented his
+      sincere feeling in those better moods when mental suffering was strong
+      enough to silence vanity. His visions mastered him for these thirteen
+      years, <i>grande mortalis oevi spatium</i>. They threw him on to that
+      turbid sea of literature for which he had so keen an aversion, and from
+      which, let it be remarked, he fled finally away, when his confidence in
+      the ease of making men good and happy by words of monition had left him.
+      It was the torment of his own enthusiasm which rent that veil of placid
+      living, that in his normal moments he would fain have interposed between
+      his existence and the tumult of a generation with which he was profoundly
+      out of sympathy. In this way the first Discourse was the letting in of
+      much evil upon him, as that and the next and the Social Contract were the
+      letting in of much evil upon all Europe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of this essay the writer has recorded his own impression that, though full
+      of heat and force, it is absolutely wanting in logic and order, and that
+      of all the products of his pen, it is the feeblest in reasoning and the
+      poorest in numbers and harmony. &quot;For,&quot; as he justly adds, &quot;the
+      art of writing is not learnt all at once.&quot;<a name="FNanchor158"
+      id="FNanchor158"></a><a href="#Footnote_158">[158]</a> The modern critic
+      must be content to accept the same verdict; only a generation so in love<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.139" id="Page_i.139">[i.139]</a></span> as
+      this was with anything that could tickle its intellectual curiousness,
+      would have found in the first of the two Discourses that combination of
+      speculative and literary merit which was imputed to Rousseau on the
+      strength of it, and which at once brought him into a place among the
+      notables of an age that was full of them.<a name="FNanchor159"
+      id="FNanchor159"></a><a href="#Footnote_159">[159]</a> We ought to take in
+      connection with it two at any rate of the vindications of the Discourse,
+      which the course of controversy provoked from its author, and which serve
+      to complete its significance. It is difficult to analyse, because in truth
+      it is neither closely argumentative, nor is it vertebrate, even as a piece
+      of rhetoric. The gist of the piece, however, runs somewhat in this wise:&#8212;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Before art had fashioned our manners, and taught our passions to use a too
+      elaborate speech, men were rude but natural, and difference of conduct
+      announced at a glance difference of character. To-day a vile and most
+      deceptive uniformity reigns over our manners, and all minds seem as if
+      they had been cast in a single mould. Hence we never know with what sort
+      of person we are dealing, hence the hateful troop of suspicions, fears,
+      reserves, and treacheries, and the concealment of impiety, arrogance,
+      calumny, and scepticism, under a dangerous varnish of refinement. So
+      terrible a set of effects must have a cause. History shows that the cause
+      here is to be found in the progress of sciences and arts. Egypt, once so
+      mighty,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.140" id="Page_i.140">[i.140]</a></span>
+      becomes the mother of philosophy and the fine arts; straightway behold its
+      conquest by Cambyses, by Greeks, by Romans, by Arabs, finally by Turks.
+      Greece twice conquered Asia, once before Troy, once in its own homes; then
+      came in fatal sequence the progress of the arts, the dissolution of
+      manners, and the yoke of the Macedonian. Rome, founded by a shepherd and
+      raised to glory by husbandmen, began to degenerate with Ennius, and the
+      eve of her ruin was the day when she gave a citizen the deadly title of
+      arbiter of good taste. China, where letters carry men to the highest
+      dignities of the state, could not be preserved by all her literature from
+      the conquering power of the ruder Tartar. On the other hand, the Persians,
+      Scythians, Germans, remain in history as types of simplicity, innocence,
+      and virtue. Was not he admittedly the wisest of the Greeks, who made of
+      his own apology a plea for ignorance, and a denunciation of poets,
+      orators, and artists? The chosen people of God never cultivated the
+      sciences, and when the new law was established, it was not the learned,
+      but the simple and lowly, fishers and workmen, to whom Christ entrusted
+      his teaching and its ministry.<a name="FNanchor160" id="FNanchor160"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_160">[160]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This, then, is the way in which chastisement has always overtaken our
+      presumptuous efforts to emerge from that happy ignorance in which eternal
+      wisdom placed us; though the thick veil with which that wisdom has covered
+      all its operations seemed to warn us that we were not destined to fatuous
+      research.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.141" id="Page_i.141">[i.141]</a></span>
+      All the secrets that Nature hides from us are so many evils against which
+      she would fain shelter us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Is probity the child of ignorance, and can science and virtue be really
+      inconsistent with one another? These sounding contrasts are mere deceits,
+      because if you look nearly into the results of this science of which we
+      talk so proudly, you will perceive that they confirm the results of
+      induction from history. Astronomy, for instance, is born of superstition;
+      geometry from the desire of gain; physics from a futile curiosity; all of
+      them, even morals, from human pride. Are we for ever to be the dupes of
+      words, and to believe that these pompous names of science, philosophy, and
+      the rest, stand for worthy and profitable realities?<a name="FNanchor161"
+      id="FNanchor161"></a><a href="#Footnote_161">[161]</a> Be sure that they
+      do not.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      How many errors do we pass through on our road to truth, errors a
+      thousandfold more dangerous than truth is useful? And by what marks are we
+      to know truth, when we think that we have found it? And above all, if we
+      do find it, who of us can be sure that he will make good use of it? If
+      celestial intelligences cultivated science, only good could result; and we
+      may say as much of great men of the stamp of Socrates, who are born to be
+      the guides of others.<a name="FNanchor162" id="FNanchor162"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_162">[162]</a> But the intelligences of common men are
+      neither celestial nor Socratic.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Again, every useless citizen may be fairly regarded as a pernicious man;
+      and let us ask those illustrious philosophers who have taught us what
+      insects repro<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.142" id="Page_i.142">[i.142]</a></span>duce
+      themselves curiously, in what ratio bodies attract one another in space,
+      what curves have conjugate points, points of inflection or reflection,
+      what in the planetary revolutions are the relations of areas traversed in
+      equal times&#8212;let us ask those who have attained all this sublime
+      knowledge, by how much the worse governed, less flourishing, or less
+      perverse we should have been if they had attained none of it? Now if the
+      works of our most scientific men and best citizens lead to such small
+      utility, tell us what we are to think of the crowd of obscure writers and
+      idle men of letters who devour the public substance in pure loss.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then it is in the nature of things that devotion to art leads to luxury,
+      and luxury, as we all know from our own experience, no less than from the
+      teaching of history, saps not only the military virtues by which nations
+      preserve their independence, but also those moral virtues which make the
+      independence of a nation worth preserving. Your children go to costly
+      establishments where they learn everything except their duties. They
+      remain ignorant of their own tongue, though they will speak others not in
+      use anywhere in the world; they gain the faculty of composing verses which
+      they can barely understand; without capacity to distinguish truth from
+      error, they possess the art of rendering them indistinguishable to others
+      by specious arguments. Magnanimity, equity, temperance, courage, humanity,
+      have no real meaning to them; and if they hear speak of God, it breeds
+      more terror than awful fear.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.143" id="Page_i.143">[i.143]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Whence spring all these abuses, if not from the disastrous inequality
+      introduced among men by the distinction of talents and the cheapening of
+      virtue?<a name="FNanchor163" id="FNanchor163"></a><a href="#Footnote_163">[163]</a>
+      People no longer ask of a man whether he has probity, but whether he is
+      clever; nor of a book whether it is useful, but whether it is well
+      written. And after all, what is this philosophy, what are these lessons of
+      wisdom, to which we give the prize of enduring fame? To listen to these
+      sages, would you not take them for a troop of charlatans, all bawling out
+      in the market-place, Come to me, it is only I who never cheat you, and
+      always give good measure? One maintains that there is no body, and that
+      everything is mere representation; the other that there is no entity but
+      matter, and no God but the universe: one that moral good and evil are
+      chimeras; the other that men are wolves and may devour one another with
+      the easiest conscience in the world. These are the marvellous personages
+      on whom the esteem of contemporaries is lavished so long as they live, and
+      to whom immortality is reserved after their death. And we have now
+      invented the art of making their extravagances eternal, and thanks to the
+      use of typographic characters the dangerous speculations of Hobbes and
+      Spinoza will endure for ever. Surely when they perceive the terrible
+      disorders which printing has<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.144"
+      id="Page_i.144">[i.144]</a></span> already caused in Europe, sovereigns
+      will take as much trouble to banish this deadly art from their states as
+      they once took to introduce it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If there is perhaps no harm in allowing one or two men to give themselves
+      up to the study of sciences and arts, it is only those who feel conscious
+      of the strength required for advancing their subjects, who have any right
+      to attempt to raise monuments to the glory of the human mind. We ought to
+      have no tolerance for those compilers who rashly break open the gate of
+      the sciences, and introduce into their sanctuary a populace that is
+      unworthy even to draw near to it. It may be well that there should be
+      philosophers, provided only and always that the people do not meddle with
+      philosophising.<a name="FNanchor164" id="FNanchor164"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_164">[164]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In short, there are two kinds of ignorance: one brutal and ferocious,
+      springing from a bad heart, multiplying vices, degrading the reason, and
+      debasing the soul: the other &quot;a reasonable ignorance, which consists
+      in limiting our curiosity to the extent of the faculties we have received;
+      a modest ignorance, born of a lively love for virtue, and inspiring
+      indifference only for what is not worthy of filling a man's heart, or
+      fails to contribute to its improvement; a sweet and precious ignorance,
+      the treasure of a pure soul at peace with itself, which finds all its
+      blessedness in inward retreat, in testifying to itself its own innocence,
+      and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.145" id="Page_i.145">[i.145]</a></span>
+      which feels no need of seeking a warped and hollow happiness in the
+      opinion of other people as to its enlightenment.&quot;<a name="FNanchor165"
+      id="FNanchor165"></a><a href="#Footnote_165">[165]</a>
+    </p>
+    <hr style="width: 25%;" />
+    <p>
+      Some of the most pointed assaults in this Discourse, such for instance as
+      that on the pedantic parade of wit, or that on the excessive preponderance
+      of literary instruction in the art of education, are due to Montaigne; and
+      in one way, the Discourse might be described as binding together a number
+      of that shrewd man's detached hints by means of a paradoxical
+      generalisation. But the Rousseau is more important than the Montaigne in
+      it. Another remark to be made is that its vigorous disparagement of
+      science, of the emptiness of much that is called science, of the deadly
+      pride of intellect, is an anticipation in a very precise way of the
+      attitude taken by the various Christian churches and their representatives
+      now and for long, beginning with De Maistre, the greatest of the religious
+      reactionaries after Rousseau. The vilification of the Greeks is strikingly
+      like some vehement passages in De Maistre's estimate of their share in
+      sophisticating European intellect. At last Rousseau even began to doubt
+      whether &quot;so chattering a people could ever have had any solid
+      virtues, even in primitive times.&quot;<a name="FNanchor166"
+      id="FNanchor166"></a><a href="#Footnote_166">[166]</a> Yet Rousseau's own
+      thinking about society is deeply marked with opinions borrowed exactly
+      from these very chatterers. His imagination<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.146" id="Page_i.146">[i.146]</a></span> was fascinated from
+      the first by the freedom and boldness of Plato's social speculations, to
+      which his debt in a hundred details of his political and educational
+      schemes is well known. What was more important than any obligation of
+      detail was the fatal conception, borrowed partly from the Greeks and
+      partly from Geneva, of the omnipotence of the Lawgiver in moulding a
+      social state after his own purpose and ideal. We shall presently quote the
+      passage in which he holds up for our envy and imitation the policy of
+      Lycurgus at Sparta, who swept away all that he found existing and
+      constructed the social edifice afresh from foundation to roof.<a
+      name="FNanchor167" id="FNanchor167"></a><a href="#Footnote_167">[167]</a>
+      It is true that there was an unmistakable decay of Greek literary studies
+      in France from the beginning of the eighteenth century, and Rousseau seems
+      to have read Plato only through Ficinus's translation. But his example and
+      its influence, along with that of Mably and others, warrant the historian
+      in saying that at no time did Greek ideas more keenly preoccupy opinion
+      than during this century.<a name="FNanchor168" id="FNanchor168"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_168">[168]</a> Perhaps we may say that Rousseau would
+      never have proved how little learning and art do for the good of manners,
+      if Plato had not insisted on poets being driven out of the Republic. The
+      article on Political Economy, written by him for the Encyclop&#230;dia
+      (1755), rings with the names of ancient rulers and lawgivers; the project
+      of public education is recommended by the example of Cretans,<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.147" id="Page_i.147">[i.147]</a></span>
+      Laced&#230;monians, and Persians, while the propriety of the reservation
+      of a state domain is suggested by Romulus.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It may be added that one of the not too many merits of the essay is the
+      way in which the writer, more or less in the Socratic manner, insists on
+      dragging people out of the refuge of sonorous general terms, with a great
+      public reputation of much too well-established a kind to be subjected to
+      the affront of analysis. It is true that Rousseau himself contributed
+      nothing directly to that analytic operation which Socrates likened to
+      midwifery, and he set up graven images of his own in place of the idols
+      which he destroyed. This, however, did not wholly efface the distinction,
+      which he shares with all who have ever tried to lead the minds of men into
+      new tracks, of refusing to accept the current coins of philosophical
+      speech without test or measurement. Such a treatment of the great trite
+      words which come so easily to the tongue and seem to weigh for so much,
+      must always be the first step towards bringing thought back into the
+      region of real matter, and confronting phrases, terms, and all the common
+      form of the discussion of an age, with the actualities which it is the
+      object of sincere discussion to penetrate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The refutation of many parts of Rousseau's main contention on the
+      principles which are universally accepted among enlightened men in modern
+      society is so extremely obvious that to undertake it would merely be to
+      draw up a list of the gratulatory common<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.148" id="Page_i.148">[i.148]</a></span>places of which we
+      hear quite enough in the literature and talk of our day. In this
+      direction, perhaps it suffices to say that the Discourse is wholly
+      one-sided, admitting none of the conveniences, none of the alleviations of
+      suffering of all kinds, nothing of the increase of mental stature, which
+      the pursuit of knowledge has brought to the race. They may or may not
+      counterbalance the evils that it has brought, but they are certainly to be
+      put in the balance in any attempt at philosophic examination of the
+      subject. It contains no serious attempt to tell us what those alleged
+      evils really are, or definitely to trace them one by one, to abuse of the
+      thirst for knowledge and defects in the method of satisfying it. It omits
+      to take into account the various other circumstances, such as climate,
+      government, race, and the disposition of neighbours, which must enter
+      equally with intellectual progress into whatever demoralisation has marked
+      the destinies of a nation. Finally it has for the base of its argument the
+      entirely unsupported assumption of there having once been in the early
+      history of each society a stage of mild, credulous, and innocent virtue,
+      from which appetite for the fruit of the forbidden tree caused an
+      inevitable degeneration. All evidence and all scientific analogy are now
+      well known to lead to the contrary doctrine, that the history of
+      civilisation is a history of progress and not of decline from a primary
+      state. After all, as Voltaire said to Rousseau in a letter which only
+      showed a superficial appreciation of the real drift of the argument, we
+      must confess<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.149" id="Page_i.149">[i.149]</a></span>
+      that these thorns attached to literature are only as flowers in comparison
+      with the other evils that have deluged the earth. &quot;It was not Cicero
+      nor Lucretius nor Virgil nor Horace, who contrived the proscriptions of
+      Marius, of Sulla, of the debauched Antony, of the imbecile Lepidus, of
+      that craven tyrant basely surnamed Augustus. It was not Marot who produced
+      the St. Bartholomew massacre, nor the tragedy of the Cid that led to the
+      wars of the Fronde. What really makes, and always will make, this world
+      into a valley of tears, is the insatiable cupidity and indomitable
+      insolence of men, from Kouli Khan, who did not know how to read, down to
+      the custom-house clerk, who knows nothing but how to cast up figures.
+      Letters nourish the soul, they strengthen its integrity, they furnish a
+      solace to it,&quot;&#8212;and so on in the sense, though without the
+      eloquence, of the famous passage in Cicero's defence of Archias the poet.<a
+      name="FNanchor169" id="FNanchor169"></a><a href="#Footnote_169">[169]</a>
+      All this, however, in our time is in no danger of being forgotten, and
+      will be present to the mind of every reader. The only danger is that
+      pointed out by Rousseau himself: &quot;People always think they have
+      described what the sciences do, when they have in reality only described
+      what the sciences ought to do.&quot;<a name="FNanchor170" id="FNanchor170"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_170">[170]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What we are more likely to forget is that Rousseau's piece has a positive
+      as well as a negative side, and presents, in however vehement and
+      overstated a way, a truth which the literary and speculative enthu<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.150" id="Page_i.150">[i.150]</a></span>siasm
+      of France in the eighteenth century, as is always the case with such
+      enthusiasm whenever it penetrates either a generation or an individual,
+      was sure to make men dangerously ready to forget.<a name="FNanchor171"
+      id="FNanchor171"></a><a href="#Footnote_171">[171]</a> This truth may be
+      put in different terms. We may describe it as the possibility of eminent
+      civic virtue existing in people, without either literary taste or science
+      or speculative curiosity. Or we may express it as the compatibility of a
+      great amount of contentment and order in a given social state, with a very
+      low degree of knowledge. Or finally, we may give the truth its most
+      general expression, as the subordination of all activity to the promotion
+      of social aims. Rousseau's is an elaborate and roundabout manner of saying
+      that virtue without science is better than science without virtue; or that
+      the well-being of a country depends more on the standard of social duty
+      and the willingness of citizens to conform to it, than on the standard of
+      intellectual culture and the extent of its diffusion. In other words, we
+      ought to be less concerned about the speculative or scientific curiousness
+      of our people than about the height of their notion of civic virtue and
+      their firmness and persistency in realising it. It is a moralist's way of
+      putting the ancient preacher's monition, that they are but empty in whom
+      is not the wisdom of God. The importance of stating this is in<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.151" id="Page_i.151">[i.151]</a></span>
+      our modern era always pressing, because there is a constant tendency on
+      the part of energetic intellectual workers, first, to concentrate their
+      energies on a minute specialty, leaving public affairs and interests to
+      their own course. Second, they are apt to overestimate their contributions
+      to the stock of means by which men are made happier, and what is more
+      serious, to underestimate in comparison those orderly, modest,
+      self-denying, moral qualities, by which only men are made worthier, and
+      the continuity of society is made surer. Third, in consequence of their
+      greater command of specious expression and their control of the organs of
+      public opinion, they both assume a kind of supreme place in the social
+      hierarchy, and persuade the majority of plain men unsuspectingly to take
+      so very egregious an assumption for granted. So far as Rousseau's
+      Discourse recalled the truth as against this sort of error it was full of
+      wholesomeness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Unfortunately his indignation against the overweening pretensions of the
+      verse-writer, the gazetteer, and the great band of socialists at large,
+      led him into a general position with reference to scientific and
+      speculative energy, which seems to involve a perilous misconception of the
+      conditions of this energy producing its proper results. It is easy now, as
+      it was easy for Rousseau in the last century, to ask in an epigrammatical
+      manner by how much men are better or happier for having found out this or
+      that novelty in transcendental mathematics, biology, or astronomy; and
+      this is very well as against the discoverer of small<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.152" id="Page_i.152">[i.152]</a></span> marvels who shall
+      give himself out for the benefactor of the human race. But both historical
+      experience and observation of the terms on which the human intelligence
+      works, show us that we can only make sure of intellectual activity on
+      condition of leaving it free to work all round, in every department and in
+      every remotest nook of each department, and that its most fruitful epochs
+      are exactly those when this freedom is greatest, this curiosity most keen
+      and minute, and this waste, if you choose to call the indispensable
+      superfluity of force in a natural process waste, most copious and
+      unsparing. You will not find your highest capacity in statesmanship, nor
+      in practical science, nor in art, nor in any other field where that
+      capacity is most urgently needed for the right service of life, unless
+      there is a general and vehement spirit of search in the air. If it
+      incidentally leads to many industrious futilities and much learned refuse,
+      this is still the sign and the generative element of industry which is not
+      futile, and of learning which is something more than mere water spilled
+      upon the ground.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We may say in fine that this first Discourse and its vindications were a
+      dim, shallow, and ineffective feeling after the great truth, that the only
+      normal state of society is that in which neither the love of virtue has
+      been thrust far back into a secondary place by the love of knowledge, nor
+      the active curiosity of the understanding dulled, blunted, and made
+      ashamed by soft, lazy ideals of life as a life only of the affections.<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.153" id="Page_i.153">[i.153]</a></span>
+      Rousseau now and always fell into the opposite extreme from that against
+      which his whole work was a protest. We need not complain very loudly that
+      while remonstrating against the restless intrepidity of the rationalists
+      of his generation, he passed over the central truth, namely that the full
+      and ever festal life is found in active freedom of curiosity and search
+      taking significance, motive, force, from a warm inner pulse of human love
+      and sympathy. It was not given to Rousseau to see all this, but it was
+      given to him to see the side of it for which the most powerful of the men
+      living with him had no eyes, and the first Discourse was only a moderately
+      successful attempt to bring his vision before Europe. It was said at the
+      time that he did not believe a word of what he had written.<a
+      name="FNanchor172" id="FNanchor172"></a><a href="#Footnote_172">[172]</a>
+      It is a natural characteristic of an age passionately occupied with its
+      own set of ideas, to question either the sincerity or the sanity of
+      anybody who declares its sovereign conceptions to be no better than
+      foolishness. We cannot entertain such a suspicion. Perhaps the vehemence
+      of controversy carries him rather further than he quite meant to go, when
+      he declares that if he were a chief of an African tribe, he would erect on
+      his frontier a gallows, on which he would hang without mercy the first
+      European who should venture to pass into his territory, and the first
+      native who should dare to pass out of it.<a name="FNanchor173"
+      id="FNanchor173"></a><a href="#Footnote_173">[173]</a> And there are many
+      other extravagances of illustration, but the main position is serious
+      enough, as represented in the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.154"
+      id="Page_i.154">[i.154]</a></span> emblematic vignette with which the
+      essay was printed&#8212;the torch of science brought to men by Prometheus,
+      who warns a satyr that it burns; the satyr, seeing fire for the first time
+      and being fain to embrace it, is the symbol of the vulgar men who, seduced
+      by the glitter of literature, insist on delivering themselves up to its
+      study.<a name="FNanchor174" id="FNanchor174"></a><a href="#Footnote_174">[174]</a>
+      Rousseau's whole doctrine hangs compactly together, and we may see the
+      signs of its growth after leaving his hands in the crude formula of the
+      first Discourse, if we proceed to the more audacious paradox of the
+      second.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      II.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      The Discourse on the Origin of Inequality among men opens with a
+      description of the natural state of man, which occupies considerably more
+      than half of the entire performance. It is composed in a vein which is
+      only too familiar to the student of the literature of the time, picturing
+      each habit and thought, and each step to new habits and thoughts, with the
+      minuteness, the fulness, the precision, of one who narrates circumstances
+      of which he has all his life been the close eye-witness. The natural man
+      reveals to us every motive, every process internal and external, every
+      slightest circumstance of his daily life, and each element that gradually
+      transformed him into the non-natural man. One who had watched bees or
+      beetles for years could not give us a more full or<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.155" id="Page_i.155">[i.155]</a></span> confident account of
+      their doings, their hourly goings in and out, than it was the fashion in
+      the eighteenth century to give of the walk and conversation of the
+      primeval ancestor. The conditions of primitive man were discussed by very
+      incompetent ladies and gentlemen at convivial supper parties, and settled
+      with complete assurance.<a name="FNanchor175" id="FNanchor175"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_175">[175]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rousseau thought and talked about the state of nature because all his
+      world was thinking and talking about it. He used phrases and formulas with
+      reference to it which other people used. He required no more evidence than
+      they did, as to the reality of the existence of the supposed set of
+      conditions to which they gave the almost sacramental name of state of
+      nature. He never thought of asking, any more than anybody else did in the
+      middle of the eighteenth century, what sort of proof, how strong, how
+      direct, was to be had, that primeval man had such and such habits, and
+      changed them in such a way and direction, and for such reasons. Physical
+      science had reached a stage by this time when its followers were careful
+      to ask questions about evidence, correct description, verification. But
+      the idea of accurate method had to be made very familiar to men by the
+      successes of physical science in the search after truths of one kind,
+      before the indispensableness of applying it in the search after truths of
+      all kinds had extended to the science of the constitution and succession
+      of social<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.156" id="Page_i.156">[i.156]</a></span>
+      states. In this respect Rousseau was not guiltier than the bulk of his
+      contemporaries. Voltaire's piercing common sense, Hume's deep-set
+      sagacity, Montesquieu's caution, prevented them from launching very far on
+      to this metaphysical sea of nature and natural laws and states, but none
+      of them asked those critical questions in relation to such matters which
+      occur so promptly in the present day to persons far inferior to them in
+      intellectual strength. Rousseau took the notion of the state of nature
+      because he found it to his hand; he fitted to it his own characteristic
+      aspirations, expanding and vivifying a philosophic conception with all the
+      heat of humane passion; and thus, although, at the end of the process when
+      he had done with it, the state of nature came out blooming as the rose, it
+      was fundamentally only the dry, current abstraction of his time,
+      artificially decorated to seduce men into embracing a strange ideal under
+      a familiar name.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Before analysing the Discourse on Inequality, we ought to make some
+      mention of a remarkable man whose influence probably reached Rousseau in
+      an indirect manner through Diderot; I mean Morelly.<a name="FNanchor176"
+      id="FNanchor176"></a><a href="#Footnote_176">[176]</a> In 1753 Morelly
+      published a prose poem called the Basiliade, describing the corruption of
+      manners introduced by the errors of the lawgiver, and pointing out how
+      this corruption is to be amended by return to<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.157" id="Page_i.157">[i.157]</a></span> the empire of nature
+      and truth. He was no doubt stimulated by what was supposed to be the
+      central doctrine of Montesquieu, then freshly given to the world, that it
+      is government and institutions which make men what they are. But he was
+      stimulated into a reaction, and in 1754 he propounded his whole theory, in
+      a piece which in closeness, consistency, and thoroughness is admirably
+      different from Rousseau's rhetoric.<a name="FNanchor177" id="FNanchor177"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_177">[177]</a> It lacked the sovereign quality of
+      persuasiveness, and so fell on deaf ears. Morelly accepts the doctrine
+      that men are formed by the laws, but insists that moralists and statesmen
+      have always led us wrong by legislating and prescribing conduct on the
+      false theory that man is bad, whereas he is in truth a creature endowed
+      with natural probity. Then he strikes to the root of society with a
+      directness that Rousseau could not imitate, by the position that &quot;these
+      laws by establishing a monstrous division of the products of nature, and
+      even of their very elements&#8212;by dividing what ought to have remained
+      entire, or ought to have been restored to entireness if any accident had
+      divided them, aided and favoured the break-up of all sociability.&quot;
+      All political and all moral evils are the effects of this pernicious cause&#8212;private
+      property. He says of Rousseau's first Discourse that the writer ought to
+      have seen that the corruption of manners which he set down to literature
+      and art really came from this venomous principle of<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.158" id="Page_i.158">[i.158]</a></span> property, which
+      infects all that it touches.<a name="FNanchor178" id="FNanchor178"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_178">[178]</a> Christianity, it is true, assailed this
+      principle and restored equality or community of possessions, but
+      Christianity had the radical fault of involving such a detachment from
+      earthly affections, in order to deliver ourselves to heavenly meditation,
+      as brought about a necessary degeneration in social activity. The form of
+      government is a matter of indifference, provided you can only assure
+      community of goods. Political revolutions are at bottom the clash of
+      material interests, and until you have equalised the one you will never
+      prevent the other.<a name="FNanchor179" id="FNanchor179"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_179">[179]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Let us turn from this very definite position to one<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.159" id="Page_i.159">[i.159]</a></span> of the least definite
+      productions to be found in all literature.
+    </p>
+    <hr style="width: 25%;" />
+    <p>
+      It will seem a little odd that more than half of a discussion on the
+      origin of inequality among men should be devoted to a glowing imaginary
+      description, from which no reader could conjecture what thesis it was
+      designed to support. But we have only to remember that Rousseau's object
+      was to persuade people that the happier state is that in which inequality
+      does not subsist, that there had once been such a state, and that this was
+      first the state of nature, and then the state only one degree removed from
+      it, in which we now find the majority of savage tribes. At the outset he
+      defines inequality as a word meaning two different things; one, natural or
+      physical inequality, such as difference of age, of health, of physical
+      strength, of attributes of intelligence and character; the other, moral or
+      political inequality, consisting in difference of privileges which some
+      enjoy to the detriment of the rest, such as being richer, more honoured,
+      more powerful. The former differences are established by nature, the
+      latter are authorised, if they were not established, by the consent of
+      men.<a name="FNanchor180" id="FNanchor180"></a><a href="#Footnote_180">[180]</a>
+      In the state of nature no inequalities flow from the differences among men
+      in point of physical advantage and disadvantage, and which remain without
+      derivative differences so long as the state of nature endures undisturbed.
+      Nature deals with men as the law of<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.160" id="Page_i.160">[i.160]</a></span> Sparta dealt with the
+      children of its citizens; she makes those who are well constituted strong
+      and robust, and she destroys all the rest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The surface of the earth is originally covered by dense forest, and
+      inhabited by animals of every species. Men, scattered among them, imitate
+      their industry, and so rise to the instinct of the brutes, with this
+      advantage that while each species has only its own, man, without anything
+      special, appropriates the instincts of all. This admirable creature, with
+      foes on every side, is forced to be constantly on the alert, and hence to
+      be always in full possession of all his faculties, unlike civilised man,
+      whose native force is enfeebled by the mechanical protections with which
+      he has surrounded himself. He is not afraid of the wild beasts around him,
+      for experience has taught him that he is their master. His health is
+      better than ours, for we live in a time when excess of idleness in some,
+      excess of toil in others, the heating and over-abundant diet of the rich,
+      the bad food of the poor, the orgies and excesses of every kind, the
+      immoderate transport of every passion, the fatigue and strain of spirit,&#8212;when
+      all these things have inflicted more disorders upon us than the vaunted
+      art of medicine has been able to keep pace with. Even if the sick savage
+      has only nature to hope from, on the other hand he has only his own malady
+      to be afraid of. He has no fear of death, for no animal can know what
+      death is, and the knowledge of death and its terrors is one of the first
+      of man's terrible<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.161" id="Page_i.161">[i.161]</a></span>
+      acquisitions after abandoning his animal condition.<a name="FNanchor181"
+      id="FNanchor181"></a><a href="#Footnote_181">[181]</a> In other respects,
+      such as protection against weather, such as habitation, such as food, the
+      savage's natural power of adaptation, and the fact that his demands are
+      moderate in proportion to his means of satisfying them, forbid us to
+      consider him physically unhappy. Let us turn to the intellectual and moral
+      side.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If you contend that men were miserable, degraded, and outcast during these
+      primitive centuries because the intelligence was dormant, then do not
+      forget, first, that you are drawing an indictment against nature,&#8212;no
+      trifling blasphemy in those days&#8212;and second, that you are
+      attributing misery to a free creature with tranquil spirit and healthy
+      body, and that must surely be a singular abuse of the term. We see around
+      us scarcely any but people who complain of the burden of their lives; but
+      who ever heard of a savage in full enjoyment of his liberty ever dreaming
+      of complaint about his life or of self-destruction?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With reference to virtues and vices in a state of nature, Hobbes is wrong
+      in declaring that man in this state is vicious, as not knowing virtue. He
+      is not vicious, for the reason that he does not know what being good is.
+      It is not development of enlightenment nor the restrictions of law, but
+      the calm of the passions and ignorance of vice, which keep<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.162" id="Page_i.162">[i.162]</a></span>
+      them from doing ill. <i>Tanto plus in illis profitcit vitiorum ignoratio,
+      quam in his cognitio virtutis.</i>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Besides man has one great natural virtue, that of pity, which precedes in
+      him the use of reflection, and which indeed he shares with some of the
+      brutes. Mandeville, who was forced to admit the existence of this
+      admirable quality in man, was absurd in not perceiving that from it flow
+      all the social virtues which he would fain deny. Pity is more energetic in
+      the primitive condition than it is among ourselves. It is reflection which
+      isolates one. It is philosophy which teaches the philosopher to say
+      secretly at sight of a suffering wretch, Perish if it please thee; I am
+      safe and sound. They may be butchering a fellow-creature under your
+      window; all you have to do is to clap your hands to your ears, and argue a
+      little with yourself to hinder nature in revolt from making you feel as if
+      you were in the case of the victim.<a name="FNanchor182" id="FNanchor182"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_182">[182]</a> The savage man has not got this odious
+      gift. In the state of nature it is pity that takes the place of laws,
+      manners, and virtue. It is in this natural sentiment rather than in subtle
+      arguments that we have to seek the reluctance that every man would feel to
+      do ill, even without the precepts of education.<a name="FNanchor183"
+      id="FNanchor183"></a><a href="#Footnote_183">[183]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Finally, the passion of love, which produces such disasters in a state of
+      society, where the jealousy of lovers and the vengeance of husbands lead
+      each day<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.163" id="Page_i.163">[i.163]</a></span>
+      to duels and murders, where the duty of eternal fidelity only serves to
+      occasion adulteries, and where the law of continence necessarily extends
+      the debauching of women and the practice of procuring abortion<a
+      name="FNanchor184" id="FNanchor184"></a><a href="#Footnote_184">[184]</a>&#8212;this
+      passion in a state of nature, where it is purely physical, momentary, and
+      without any association of durable sentiment with the object of it, simply
+      leads to the necessary reproduction of the species and nothing more.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &quot;Let us conclude, then, that wandering in the forests, without
+      industry, without speech, without habitation, without war, without
+      connection of any kind, without any need of his fellows or without any
+      desire to harm them, perhaps even without ever recognising one of them
+      individually, savage man, subject to few passions and sufficing to
+      himself, had only the sentiments and the enlightenment proper to his
+      condition. He was only sensible of his real wants, and only looked because
+      he thought he had an interest in seeing; and his intelligence made no more
+      progress than his vanity. If by chance he hit on some discovery, he was
+      all the less able to communicate it; as he did not know even his own
+      children. An art perished with its inventor. There was neither education
+      nor progress; generations multiplied uselessly; and as each generation
+      always started from the same<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.164"
+      id="Page_i.164">[i.164]</a></span> point, centuries glided away in all the
+      rudeness of the first ages, the race was already old, the individual
+      remained always a child.&quot;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This brings us to the point of the matter. For if you compare the
+      prodigious diversities in education and manner of life which reign in the
+      different orders of the civil condition, with the simplicity and
+      uniformity of the savage and animal life, where all find nourishment in
+      the same articles of food, live in the same way, and do exactly the same
+      things, you will easily understand to what degree the difference between
+      man and man must be less in the state of nature than in that of society.<a
+      name="FNanchor185" id="FNanchor185"></a><a href="#Footnote_185">[185]</a>
+      Physical inequality is hardly perceived in the state of nature, and its
+      indirect influences there are almost non-existent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now as all the social virtues and other faculties possessed by man
+      potentially were not bound by anything inherent in him to develop into
+      actuality, he might have remained to all eternity in his admirable and
+      most fitting primitive condition, but for the fortuitous concurrence of a
+      variety of external changes. What are these different changes, which may
+      perhaps have perfected human reason, while they certainly have
+      deteriorated the race, and made men bad in making them sociable?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What, then, are the intermediary facts between the state of nature and the
+      state of civil society, the nursery of inequality? What broke up the happy
+      uniformity of the first times? First, difference in soil,<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.165" id="Page_i.165">[i.165]</a></span> in
+      climate, in seasons, led to corresponding differences in men's manner of
+      living. Along the banks of rivers and on the shores of the sea, they
+      invented hooks and lines, and were eaters of fish. In the forests they
+      invented bows and arrows, and became hunters. In cold countries they
+      covered themselves with the skins of beasts. Lightning, volcanoes, or some
+      happy chance acquainted them with fire, a new protection against the
+      rigours of winter. In company with these natural acquisitions, grew up a
+      sort of reflection or mechanical prudence, which showed them the kind of
+      precautions most necessary to their security. From this rudimentary and
+      wholly egoistic reflection there came a sense of the existence of a
+      similar nature and similar interests in their fellow-creatures. Instructed
+      by experience that the love of well-being and comfort is the only motive
+      of human actions, the savage united with his neighbours when union was for
+      their joint convenience, and did his best to blind and outwit his
+      neighbours when their interests were adverse to his own, and he felt
+      himself the weaker. Hence the origin of certain rude ideas of mutual
+      obligation.<a name="FNanchor186" id="FNanchor186"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_186">[186]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soon, ceasing to fall asleep under the first tree, or to withdraw into
+      caves, they found axes of hard stone, which served them to cut wood, to
+      dig the ground, and to construct hovels of branches and clay. This was the
+      epoch of a first revolution, which formed the establishment and division
+      of families, and which introduced a rough and partial sort of property.<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.166" id="Page_i.166">[i.166]</a></span>
+      Along with rudimentary ideas of property, though not connected with them,
+      came the rudimentary forms of inequality. When men were thrown more
+      together, then he who sang or danced the best, the strongest, the most
+      adroit, or the most eloquent, acquired the most consideration&#8212;that
+      is, men ceased to take uniform and equal place. And with the coming of
+      this end of equality there passed away the happy primitive immunity from
+      jealousy, envy, malice, hate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the whole, though men had lost some of their original endurance, and
+      their natural pity had already undergone a certain deterioration, this
+      period of the development of the human faculties, occupying a just medium
+      between the indolence of the primitive state and the petulant activity of
+      our modern self-love, must have been at once the happiest and the most
+      durable epoch. The more we reflect, the more evident we find it that this
+      state was the least subject to revolutions and the best for man. &quot;So
+      long as men were content with their rustic hovels, so long as they
+      confined themselves to stitching their garments of skin with spines or
+      fish bones, to decking their bodies with feathers and shells and painting
+      them in different colours, to perfecting and beautifying their bows and
+      arrows&#8212;in a word, so long as they only applied themselves to works
+      that one person could do, and to arts that needed no more than a single
+      hand, then they lived free, healthy, good, and happy, so far as was
+      compatible with their natural constitution, and continued to enjoy among
+      themselves the sweetness<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.167"
+      id="Page_i.167">[i.167]</a></span> of independent intercourse. But from
+      the moment that one man had need of the help of another, as soon as they
+      perceived it to be useful for one person to have provisions for two, then
+      equality disappeared, property was introduced, labour became necessary,
+      and the vast forests changed into smiling fields, which had to be watered
+      by the sweat of men, and in which they ever saw bondage and misery
+      springing up and growing ripe with the harvests.&quot;<a name="FNanchor187"
+      id="FNanchor187"></a><a href="#Footnote_187">[187]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The working of metals and agriculture have been the two great agents in
+      this revolution. For the poet it is gold and silver, but for the
+      philosopher it is iron and corn, that have civilised men and undone the
+      human race. It is easy to see how the latter of the two arts was suggested
+      to men by watching the reproducing processes of vegetation. It is less
+      easy to be sure how they discovered metal, saw its uses, and invented
+      means of smelting it, for nature had taken extreme precautions to hide the
+      fatal secret. It was probably the operation of some volcano which first
+      suggested the idea of fusing ore. From the fact of land being cultivated
+      its division followed, and therefore the institution of property in its
+      full shape. From property arose civil society. &quot;The first man who,
+      having enclosed a piece of ground, could think of saying, <i>This is mine</i>,
+      and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of
+      civil society. How many crimes, wars, murders, miseries, and horrors would
+      not have been spared to the human<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.168"
+      id="Page_i.168">[i.168]</a></span> race by one who, plucking up the
+      stakes, or filling in the trench, should have called out to his fellows:
+      Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you forget that
+      the earth belongs to no one, and that its fruits are for all.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor188" id="FNanchor188"></a><a href="#Footnote_188">[188]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Things might have remained equal even in this state, if talents had only
+      been equal, and if for example the employment of iron and the consumption
+      of agricultural produce had always exactly balanced one another. But the
+      stronger did more work; the cleverer got more advantage from his work; the
+      more ingenious found means of shortening his labour; the husbandman had
+      more need of metal, or the smith more need of grain; and while working
+      equally, one got much gain, and the other could scarcely live. This
+      distinction between Have and Have-not led to confusion and revolt, to
+      brigandage on the one side and constant insecurity on the other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Hence disorders of a violent and interminable kind, which gave rise to the
+      most deeply designed project that ever entered the human mind. This was to
+      employ in favour of property the strength of the very persons who attacked
+      it, to inspire them with other maxims, and to give them other institutions
+      which should be as favourable to property as natural law had been contrary
+      to it. The man who conceived this project, after showing his neighbours
+      the monstrous confusion which made their lives most burdensome, spoke in
+      this wise: &quot;Let us unite to shield the<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.169" id="Page_i.169">[i.169]</a></span> weak from oppression,
+      to restrain the proud, and to assure to each the possession of what
+      belongs to him; let us set up rules of justice and peace, to which all
+      shall be obliged to conform, without respect of persons, and which may
+      repair to some extent the caprices of fortune, by subjecting the weak and
+      the mighty alike to mutual duties. In a word, instead of turning our
+      forces against one another, let us collect them into one supreme power to
+      govern us by sage laws, to protect and defend all the members of the
+      association, repel their common foes, and preserve us in never-ending
+      concord.&quot; This, and not the right of conquest, must have been the
+      origin of society and laws, which threw new chains round the poor and gave
+      new might to the rich; and for the profit of a few grasping and ambitious
+      men, subjected the whole human race henceforth and for ever to toil and
+      bondage and wretchedness without hope.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The social constitution thus propounded and accepted was radically
+      imperfect from the outset, and in spite of the efforts of the sagest
+      lawgivers, it has always remained imperfect, because it was the work of
+      chance, and because, inasmuch as it was ill begun, time, while revealing
+      defects and suggesting remedies, could never repair its vices; <i>people
+      went on incessantly repairing and patching, instead of which it was
+      indispensable to begin by making a clean surface and by throwing aside all
+      the old materials, just as Lycurgus did in Sparta</i>.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Put shortly, the main positions are these. In the state of nature each man
+      lived in entire isolation, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.170"
+      id="Page_i.170">[i.170]</a></span> therefore physical inequality was as if
+      it did not exist. After many centuries, accident, in the shape of
+      difference of climate and external natural conditions, enforcing for the
+      sake of subsistence some degree of joint labour, led to an increase of
+      communication among men, to a slight development of the reasoning and
+      reflective faculties, and to a rude and simple sense of mutual obligation,
+      as a means of greater comfort in the long run. The first state was good
+      and pure, but the second state was truly perfect. It was destroyed by a
+      fresh succession of chances, such as the discovery of the arts of
+      metal-working and tillage, which led first to the institution of property,
+      and second to the prominence of the natural or physical inequalities,
+      which now began to tell with deadly effectiveness. These inequalities
+      gradually became summed up in the great distinction between rich and poor;
+      and this distinction was finally embodied in the constitution of a civil
+      society, expressly adapted to consecrate the usurpation of the rich, and
+      to make the inequality of condition between them and the poor eternal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We thus see that the Discourse, unlike Morelly's terse exposition,
+      contains no clear account of the kind of inequality with which it deals.
+      Is it inequality of material possession or inequality of political right?
+      Morelly tells you decisively that the latter is only an accident, flowing
+      from the first; that the key to renovation lies in the abolition of the
+      first. Rousseau mixes the two confusedly together under a single<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.171" id="Page_i.171">[i.171]</a></span>
+      name, bemoans each, but shrinks from a conclusion or a recommendation as
+      to either. He declares property to be the key to civil society, but falls
+      back from any ideas leading to the modification of the institution lying
+      at the root of all that he deplores.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The first general criticism, which in itself contains and covers nearly
+      all others, turns on Method. &quot;Conjectures become reasons when they
+      are the most likely that you can draw from the nature of things,&quot; and
+      &quot;it is for philosophy in lack of history to determine the most likely
+      facts.&quot; In an inductive age this royal road is rigorously closed.
+      Guesses drawn from the general nature of things can no longer give us
+      light as to the particular nature of the things pertaining to primitive
+      men, any more than such guesses can teach us the law of the movement of
+      the heavenly bodies, or the foundations of jurisprudence. Nor can
+      deduction from anything but propositions which have themselves been won by
+      laborious induction, ever lead us to the only kind of philosophy which has
+      fair pretension to determine the most probable of the missing facts in the
+      chain of human history. That quantitative and differentiating knowledge
+      which is science, was not yet thought of in connection with the movements
+      of our own race upon the earth. It is to be said, further, that of the two
+      possible ways of guessing about the early state, the conditions of advance
+      from it, and the rest, Rousseau's guess that all movement away from it has
+      been towards corruption, is less supported by subsequent knowledge than
+      the guess<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.172" id="Page_i.172">[i.172]</a></span>
+      of his adversaries, that it has been a movement progressive and upwards.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This much being said as to incurable vice of method, and there are fervent
+      disciples of Rousseau now living who will regard one's craving for method
+      in talking about men as a foible of pedantry, we may briefly remark on one
+      or two detached objections to Rousseau's story. To begin with, there is no
+      certainty as to there having ever been a state of nature of a normal and
+      organic kind, any more than there is any one normal and typical state of
+      society now. There are infinitely diverse states of society, and there
+      were probably as many diverse states of nature. Rousseau was sufficiently
+      acquainted with the most recent metaphysics of his time to know that you
+      cannot think of a tree in general, nor of a triangle in general, but only
+      of some particular tree or triangle.<a name="FNanchor189" id="FNanchor189"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_189">[189]</a> In a similar way he might have known that
+      there never was any such thing as a state of nature in the general and
+      abstract, fixed, typical, and single. He speaks of the savage state also,
+      which comes next, as one, identical, normal. It is, of course, nothing of
+      the kind. The varieties of belief and habit and custom among the different
+      tribes of savages, in reference to every object that can engage their
+      attention, from death and the gods and immortality down to the uses of
+      marriage and the art of counting and the ways of procuring subsistence,
+      are infinitely numerous; and the more we know about this vast diversity,
+      the less easy is it to think of the<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.173" id="Page_i.173">[i.173]</a></span> savage state in
+      general. When Rousseau extols the savage state as the veritable youth of
+      the world, we wonder whether we are to think of the negroes of the Gold
+      Coast, or the Dyaks of Borneo, Papuans or Maoris, Cheyennes or
+      Tierra-del-Fuegians or the fabled Troglodytes; whether in the veritable
+      youth of the world they counted up to five or only to two; whether they
+      used a fire-drill, and if so what kind of drill; whether they had the
+      notion of personal identity in so weak a shape as to practise the couvade;
+      and a hundred other points, which we should now require any writer to
+      settle, who should speak of the savage state as sovereign, one, and
+      indivisible, in the way in which Rousseau speaks of it, and holds it up to
+      our vain admiration.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Again, if the savage state supervened upon the state of nature in
+      consequence of certain climatic accidents of a permanent kind, such as
+      living on the banks of a river or in a dense forest, how was it that the
+      force of these accidents did not begin to operate at once? How could the
+      isolated state of nature endure for a year in face of them? Or what was
+      the precipitating incident which suddenly set them to work, and drew the
+      primitive men from an isolation so profound that they barely recognised
+      one another, into that semi-social state in which the family was founded?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We cannot tell how the state of nature continued to subsist, or, if it
+      ever subsisted, how and why it ever came to an end, because the agencies
+      which are<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.174" id="Page_i.174">[i.174]</a></span>
+      alleged to have brought it to an end must have been coeval with the
+      appearance of man himself. If gods had brought to men seed, fire, and the
+      mechanical arts, as in one of the Platonic myths,<a name="FNanchor190"
+      id="FNanchor190"></a><a href="#Footnote_190">[190]</a> we could understand
+      that there was a long stage preliminary to these heavenly gifts. But if
+      the gods had no part nor lot in it, and if the accidents that slowly led
+      the human creature into union were as old as that nature, of which indeed
+      they were actually the component elements, then man must have quitted the
+      state of nature the very day on which he was born into it. And what can be
+      a more monstrous anachronism than to turn a flat-headed savage into a
+      clever, self-conscious, argumentative utilitarian of the eighteenth
+      century; working the social problem out in his flat head with a keenness,
+      a consistency, a grasp of first principles, that would have entitled him
+      to a chair in the institute of moral sciences, and entering the social
+      union with the calm and reasonable deliberation of a great statesman
+      taking a critical step in policy? Aristotle was wiser when he fixed upon
+      sociability as an ultimate quality of human nature, instead of making it,
+      as Rousseau and so many others have done, the conclusion of an
+      unimpeachable train of syllogistic reasoning.<a name="FNanchor191"
+      id="FNanchor191"></a><a href="#Footnote_191">[191]</a><span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.175" id="Page_i.175">[i.175]</a></span> Morelly even, his own
+      contemporary, and much less of a sage than Aristotle, was still sage
+      enough to perceive that this primitive human machine, &quot;though
+      composed of intelligent parts, generally operates independently of its
+      reason; its deliberations are forestalled, and only leave it to look on,
+      while sentiment does its work.&quot;<a name="FNanchor192" id="FNanchor192"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_192">[192]</a> It is the more remarkable that Rousseau
+      should have fallen into this kind of error, as it was one of his
+      distinctions to have perceived and partially worked out the principle,
+      that men guide their conduct rather from passion and instinct than from
+      reasoned enlightenment.<a name="FNanchor193" id="FNanchor193"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_193">[193]</a> The ultimate quality which he named pity
+      is, after all, the germ of sociability, which is only extended sympathy.
+      But he did not firmly adhere to this ultimate quality, nor make any effort
+      consistently to trace out its various products.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.176" id="Page_i.176">[i.176]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We do not find, however, in Rousseau any serious attempt to analyse the
+      composition of human nature in its primitive stages. Though constantly
+      warning his readers very impressively against confounding domesticated
+      with primitive men, he practically assumes that the main elements of
+      character must always have been substantially identical with such elements
+      and conceptions as are found after the addition of many ages of
+      increasingly complex experience. There is something worth considering in
+      his notion that civilisation has had effects upon man analogous to those
+      of domestication upon animals, but he lacked logical persistency enough to
+      enable him to adhere to his own idea, and work out conclusions from it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It might further be pointed out in another direction that he takes for
+      granted that the mode of advance into a social state has always been one
+      and the same, a single and uniform process, marked by precisely the same
+      set of several stages, following one another in precisely the same order.
+      There is no evidence of this; on the contrary, evidence goes to show that
+      civilisation varies in origin and process with race and other things, and
+      that though in all cases starting from the prime factor of sociableness in
+      man, yet the course of its development has depended on the particular sets
+      of circumstances with which that factor has had to combine. These are full
+      of variety, according to climate and racial predisposition, although, as
+      has been justly said, the force of both these two elements<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.177" id="Page_i.177">[i.177]</a></span>
+      diminishes as the influence of the past in giving consistency to our will
+      becomes more definite, and our means of modifying climate and race become
+      better known. There is no sign that Rousseau, any more than many other
+      inquirers, ever reflected whether the capacity for advance into the state
+      of civil society in any highly developed form is universal throughout the
+      species, or whether there are not races eternally incapable of advance
+      beyond the savage state. Progress would hardly be the exception which we
+      know it to be in the history of communities if there were not fundamental
+      diversities in the civilisable quality of races. Why do some bodies of men
+      get on to the high roads of civilisation, while others remain in the
+      jungle and thicket of savagery; and why do some races advance along one of
+      these roads, and others advance by different roads?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Considerations of this sort disclose the pinched frame of trim theory with
+      which Rousseau advanced to set in order a huge mass of boundlessly varied,
+      intricate, and unmanageable facts. It is not, however, at all worth while
+      to extend such criticism further than suffices to show how little his
+      piece can stand the sort of questions which may be put to it from a
+      scientific point of view. Nothing that Rousseau had to say about the state
+      of nature was seriously meant for scientific exposition, any more than the
+      Sermon on the Mount was meant for political economy. The importance of the
+      Discourse on Inequality lay in its vehement denunciation of the existing
+      social state.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.178" id="Page_i.178">[i.178]</a></span>
+      To the writer the question of the origin of inequality is evidently far
+      less a matter at heart, than the question of its results. It is the
+      natural inclination of one deeply moved by a spectacle of depravation in
+      his own time and country, to extol some other time or country, of which he
+      is happily ignorant enough not to know the drawbacks. Rousseau wrote about
+      the savage state in something of the same spirit in which Tacitus wrote
+      the Germania. And here, as in the Discourse on the influence of science
+      and art upon virtue, there is a positive side. To miss this in resentment
+      of the unscientific paradox that lies about it, is to miss the force of
+      the piece, and to render its enormous influence for a generation after it
+      was written incomprehensible. We may always be quite sure that no set of
+      ideas ever produced this resounding effect on opinion, unless they
+      contained something which the social or spiritual condition of the men
+      whom they inflamed made true for the time, and true in an urgent sense. Is
+      it not tenable that the state of certain savage tribes is more normal,
+      offers a better balance between desire and opportunity, between faculty
+      and performance, than the permanent state of large classes in western
+      countries, the broken wreck of civilisation?<a name="FNanchor194"
+      id="FNanchor194"></a><a href="#Footnote_194">[194]</a> To admit this is
+      not to conclude, as<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.179"
+      id="Page_i.179">[i.179]</a></span> Rousseau so rashly concluded, that the
+      movement away from the primitive stages has been productive only of evil
+      and misery even to the masses of men, the hewers of wood and the drawers
+      of water; or that it was occasioned, and has been carried on by the
+      predominance of the lower parts and principles of human nature. Our
+      provisional acquiescence in the straitness and blank absence of outlook or
+      hope of the millions who come on to the earth that greets them with no
+      smile, and then stagger blindly under dull burdens for a season, and at
+      last are shovelled silently back under the ground,&#8212;our acquiescence
+      can only be justified in the sight of humanity by the conviction<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.180" id="Page_i.180">[i.180]</a></span>
+      that this is one of the temporary conditions of a vast process, working
+      forwards through the impulse and agency of the finer human spirits, but
+      needing much blood, many tears, uncounted myriads of lives, and
+      immeasurable geologic periods of time, for its high and beneficent
+      consummation. There is nothing surprising, perhaps nothing deeply
+      condemnable, in the burning anger for which this acquiescence is often
+      changed in the more impatient natures. As against the ignoble host who
+      think that the present ordering of men, with all its prodigious
+      inequalities, is in foundation and substance the perfection of social
+      blessedness, Rousseau was almost in the right. If the only alternative to
+      the present social order remaining in perpetuity were a retrogression to
+      some such condition as that of the islanders of the South Sea, a lover of
+      his fellow-creatures might look upon the result, so far as it affected the
+      happiness of the bulk of them, with tolerably complete indifference. It is
+      only the faith that we are moving slowly away from the existing order, as
+      our ancestors moved slowly away from the old want of order, that makes the
+      present endurable, and makes any tenacious effort to raise the future
+      possible.
+    </p>
+    <hr style="width: 25%;" />
+    <p>
+      An immense quantity of nonsense has been talked about the equality of man,
+      for which those who deny that doctrine and those who assert it may divide
+      the responsibility. It is in reality true or false, according to the
+      doctrines with which it is confronted. As<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.181" id="Page_i.181">[i.181]</a></span> against the theory
+      that the existing way of sharing the laboriously acquired fruits and
+      delights of the earth is a just representation and fair counterpart of
+      natural inequalities among men in merit and capacity, the revolutionary
+      theory is true, and the passionate revolutionary cry for equality of
+      external chance most righteous and unanswerable. But the issues do not end
+      here. Take such propositions as these:&#8212;there are differences in the
+      capacity of men for serving the community; the well-being of the community
+      demands the allotment of high function in proportion to high faculty; the
+      rights of man in politics are confined to a right of the same protection
+      for his own interests as is given to the interests of others. As against
+      these principles, the revolutionary deductions from the equality of man
+      are false. And such pretensions as that every man could be made equally
+      fit for every function, or that not only each should have an equal chance,
+      but that he who uses his chance well and sociably should be kept on a
+      level in common opinion and trust with him who uses it ill and unsociably,
+      or does not use it at all,&#8212;the whole of this is obviously most
+      illusory and most disastrous, and in whatever decree any set of men have
+      ever taken it up, to that degree they have paid the penalty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What Rousseau's Discourse meant, what he intended it to mean, and what his
+      first direct disciples understood it as meaning, is not that all men are
+      born equal. He never says this, and his recognition of natural inequality
+      implies the contrary proposition.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.182"
+      id="Page_i.182">[i.182]</a></span> His position is that the artificial
+      differences, springing from the conditions of the social union, do not
+      coincide with the differences in capacity springing from original
+      constitution; that the tendency of the social union as now organised is to
+      deepen the artificial inequalities, and make the gulf between those
+      endowed with privileges and wealth and those not so endowed ever wider and
+      wider. It would have been very difficult a hundred years ago to deny the
+      truth of this way of stating the case. If it has to some extent already
+      ceased to be entirely true, and if violent popular forces are at work
+      making it less and less true, we owe the origin of the change, among other
+      causes and influences, not least to the influence of Rousseau himself, and
+      those whom he inspired. It was that influence which, though it certainly
+      did not produce, yet did as certainly give a deep and remarkable bias,
+      first to the American Revolution, and a dozen years afterwards to the
+      French Revolution.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It would be interesting to trace the different fortunes which awaited the
+      idea of the equality of man in America and in France. In America it has
+      always remained strictly within the political order, and perhaps with the
+      considerable exception of the possibles share it may have had, along with
+      Christian notions of the brotherhood of man, and statesmanlike notions of
+      national prosperity, in leading to the abolition of slavery, it has
+      brought forth no strong moral sentiment against the ethical and economic
+      bases of any part of the social order. In France, on the other<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.183" id="Page_i.183">[i.183]</a></span>
+      hand, it was the starting-point of movements that have had all the fervour
+      and intensity of religions, and have made men feel about social
+      inequalities the burning shame and wrath with which a Christian saw the
+      flourishing temples of unclean gods. This difference in the interpretation
+      and development of the first doctrine may be explained in various ways,&#8212;by
+      difference of material circumstance between America and France; difference
+      of the political and social level from which the principle of equality had
+      to start; and not least by difference of intellectual temperament. This
+      last was itself partly the product of difference in religion, which makes
+      the English dread the practical enforcement of logical conclusions, while
+      the French have hitherto been apt to dread and despise any tendency to
+      stop short of that.
+    </p>
+    <hr style="width: 25%;" />
+    <p>
+      Let us notice, finally, the important fact that the appearance of
+      Rousseau's Discourses was the first sign of reaction against the historic
+      mode of inquiry into society that had been initiated by Montesquieu. The
+      Spirit of Laws was published in 1748, with a truly prodigious effect. It
+      coloured the whole of the social literature in France during the rest of
+      the century. A history of its influence would be a history of one of the
+      most important sides of speculative activity. In the social writings of
+      Rousseau himself there is hardly a chapter which does not contain tacit
+      reference to Montesquieu's book. The Discourses were the beginning of a
+      movement in an exactly opposite<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.184"
+      id="Page_i.184">[i.184]</a></span> direction; that is, away from patient
+      collection of wide multitudes of facts relating to the conditions of
+      society, towards the promulgation of arbitrary systems of absolute social
+      dogmas. Mably, the chief dogmatic socialist of the century, and one of the
+      most dignified and austere characters, is an important example of the
+      detriment done by the influence of Rousseau to that of Montesquieu, in the
+      earlier stages of the conflict between the two schools. Mably (1709-1785),
+      of whom the remark is to be made that he was for some years behind the
+      scenes of government as De Tencin's secretary and therefore was versed in
+      affairs, began his inquiries with Greece and Rome. &quot;You will find
+      everything in ancient history,&quot; he said.<a name="FNanchor195"
+      id="FNanchor195"></a><a href="#Footnote_195">[195]</a> And he remained
+      entirely in this groove of thought until Rousseau appeared. He then
+      gradually left Montesquieu. &quot;To find the duties of a legislator,&quot;
+      he said, &quot;I descend into the abysses of my heart, I study my
+      sentiments.&quot; He opposed the Economists, the other school that was
+      feeling its way imperfectly enough to a positive method. &quot;As soon as
+      I see landed property established,&quot; he wrote, &quot;then I see<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.185" id="Page_i.185">[i.185]</a></span>
+      unequal fortunes; and from these unequal fortunes must there not
+      necessarily result different and opposed interests, all the vices of
+      riches, all the vices of poverty, the brutalisation of intelligence, the
+      corruption of civil manners?&quot; and so forth.<a name="FNanchor196"
+      id="FNanchor196"></a><a href="#Footnote_196">[196]</a> In his most
+      important work, published in 1776, we see Rousseau's notions developed,
+      with a logic from which their first author shrunk, either from fear, or
+      more probably from want of firmness and consistency as a reasoner. &quot;It
+      is to equality that nature has attached the preservation of our social
+      faculties and happiness: and from this I conclude that legislation will
+      only be taking useless trouble, unless all its attention is first of all
+      directed to the establishment of equality in the fortune and condition of
+      citizens.&quot;<a name="FNanchor197" id="FNanchor197"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_197">[197]</a> That is to say not only political equality,
+      but economic communism. &quot;What miserable folly, that persons who pass
+      for philosophers should go on repeating after one another that without
+      property there can be no society. Let us leave illusion. It is property
+      that divides us into two classes, rich and poor; the first will alway
+      prefer their fortune to that of the state, while the second will never
+      love a government or laws that leave them in misery.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor198" id="FNanchor198"></a><a href="#Footnote_198">[198]</a>
+      This was the kind of opinion for which Rousseau's diffuse and rhetorical
+      exposition of social necessity had prepared France some twenty years
+      before. After powerfully helping the process of general dis<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.186" id="Page_i.186">[i.186]</a></span>solution,
+      it produced the first fruits specifically after its own kind some twenty
+      years later in the system of Baboeuf.<a name="FNanchor199" id="FNanchor199"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_199">[199]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The unflinching application of principles is seldom achieved by the men
+      who first launch them. The labour of the preliminary task seems to exhaust
+      one man's stock of mental force. Rousseau never thought of the subversion
+      of society or its reorganisation on a communistic basis. Within a few
+      months of his profession of profound lament that the first man who made a
+      claim to property had not been instantly unmasked as the arch foe of the
+      race, he speaks most respectfully of property as the pledge of the
+      engagements of citizens and the foundation of the social pact, while the
+      first condition of that pact is that every one should be maintained in
+      peaceful enjoyment of what belongs to him.<a name="FNanchor200"
+      id="FNanchor200"></a><a href="#Footnote_200">[200]</a> We need not impute
+      the apparent discrepancy to insincerity. Rousseau was always apt to think
+      in a slipshod manner. He sensibly though illogically accepted wholesome
+      practical maxims, as if they flowed from theoretical premisses that were
+      in truth utterly incompatible with them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &#160;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <b>FOOTNOTES:</b>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_151" id="Footnote_151"></a><a href="#FNanchor151">[151]</a>
+      Delandine's <i>Couronnes Acad&#233;miques, ou Recueil de prix propos&#233;s
+      par les Soci&#233;t&#233;s Savantes</i>. (Paris, 2 vols., 1787.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_152" id="Footnote_152"></a><a href="#FNanchor152">[152]</a>
+      Musset-Pathay has collected the details connected with the award of the
+      prize, ii. 365-367.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_153" id="Footnote_153"></a><a href="#FNanchor153">[153]</a>
+      Second Letter to M. de Malesherbes, p. 358. Also <i>Conf.</i>, viii 135.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_154" id="Footnote_154"></a><a href="#FNanchor154">[154]</a>
+      Diderot's account (<i>Vie de S&#233;n&#232;que</i>, sect. 66, <i>Oeuv.</i>,
+      iii. 98; also ii. 285) is not inconsistent with Rousseau's own, so that we
+      may dismiss as apocryphal Marmontel's version of the story (<i>M&#233;m.</i>
+      VIII.), to the effect that Rousseau was about to answer the question with
+      a commonplace affirmative, until Diderot persuaded him that a paradox
+      would attract more attention. It has been said also that M. de Francueil,
+      and various others, first urged the writer to take a negative line of
+      argument. To suppose this possible is to prove one's incapacity for
+      understanding what manner of man Rousseau was.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_155" id="Footnote_155"></a><a href="#FNanchor155">[155]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, ix. 232, 233.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_156" id="Footnote_156"></a><a href="#FNanchor156">[156]</a>
+      <i>Rousseau Juge de Jean Jacques, Dialogues</i>, i. 252.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_157" id="Footnote_157"></a><a href="#FNanchor157">[157]</a>
+      <i>Dialogues</i>, i. 275, 276.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_158" id="Footnote_158"></a><a href="#FNanchor158">[158]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, viii. 138.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_159" id="Footnote_159"></a><a href="#FNanchor159">[159]</a>
+      &quot;It made a kind of revolution in Paris,&quot; says Grimm. <i>Corr.
+      Lit.</i>, i. 108.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_160" id="Footnote_160"></a><a href="#FNanchor160">[160]</a>
+      <i>R&#233;p. au Roi de Pologne</i>, p. 111 and p. 113.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_161" id="Footnote_161"></a><a href="#FNanchor161">[161]</a>
+      <i>R&#233;p. &#224; M. Bordes</i>, 138.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_162" id="Footnote_162"></a><a href="#FNanchor162">[162]</a>
+      <i>Ib.</i> 137.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_163" id="Footnote_163"></a><a href="#FNanchor163">[163]</a>
+      &quot;The first source of the evil is inequality; from inequality come
+      riches ... from riches are born luxury and idleness; from luxury come the
+      fine arts, and from idleness the sciences.&quot; <i>R&#233;p. au Roi de
+      Pologne</i>, 120, 121.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_164" id="Footnote_164"></a><a href="#FNanchor164">[164]</a>
+      <i>R&#233;p. &#224; M. Bordes</i>, 147. In the same spirit he once wrote
+      the more wholesome maxim, &quot;We should argue with the wise, and never
+      with the public.&quot; <i>Corr.</i>, i. 191.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_165" id="Footnote_165"></a><a href="#FNanchor165">[165]</a>
+      <i>R&#233;p. au Roi de Pologne</i>, 128, 129.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_166" id="Footnote_166"></a><a href="#FNanchor166">[166]</a>
+      <i>R&#233;p. &#224; M. Bordes</i>, 150-161.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_167" id="Footnote_167"></a><a href="#FNanchor167">[167]</a>
+      P. 174.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_168" id="Footnote_168"></a><a href="#FNanchor168">[168]</a>
+      Egger's <i>Hell&#233;nisme en France</i>, 28i&#232;me le&#231;on, p. 265.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_169" id="Footnote_169"></a><a href="#FNanchor169">[169]</a>
+      Voltaire to J.J.R. Aug. 30, 1755.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_170" id="Footnote_170"></a><a href="#FNanchor170">[170]</a>
+      <i>R&#233;p. au Roi de Pologne</i>, 105.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_171" id="Footnote_171"></a><a href="#FNanchor171">[171]</a>
+      In 1753 the French Academy, by way no doubt of summoning a counter-blast
+      to Rousseau, boldly offered as the subject of their essay the thesis that
+      &quot;The love of letters inspires the love of virtue,&quot; and the prize
+      was won fitly enough by a Jesuit professor of rhetoric. See Delandine, i.
+      42.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_172" id="Footnote_172"></a><a href="#FNanchor172">[172]</a>
+      Preface to <i>Narcisse</i>, 251.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_173" id="Footnote_173"></a><a href="#FNanchor173">[173]</a>
+      <i>R&#233;p. &#224; M. Bordes</i>, 167.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_174" id="Footnote_174"></a><a href="#FNanchor174">[174]</a>
+      P. 187.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_175" id="Footnote_175"></a><a href="#FNanchor175">[175]</a>
+      See for instance a strange discussion about <i>morale universelle</i> and
+      the like in <i>M&#233;m. de Mdme. d'Epinay</i>, i. 217-226.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_176" id="Footnote_176"></a><a href="#FNanchor176">[176]</a>
+      Often described as Morelly the Younger, to distinguish him from his
+      father, who wrote an essay on the human heart, and another on the human
+      intelligence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_177" id="Footnote_177"></a><a href="#FNanchor177">[177]</a>
+      <i>Code de la Nature, ou le v&#233;ritable esprit de ses loix, de tout
+      tems n&#233;glig&#233; ou m&#233;connu.</i>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_178" id="Footnote_178"></a><a href="#FNanchor178">[178]</a>
+      P. 169. Rousseau did not see it then, but he showed himself on the track.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_179" id="Footnote_179"></a><a href="#FNanchor179">[179]</a>
+      At the end of the <i>Code de la Nature</i> Morelly places a complete set
+      of rules for the organisation of a model community. The base of it was the
+      absence of private property&#8212;a condition that was to be preserved by
+      vigilant education of the young in ways of thinking, that should make the
+      possession of private property odious or inconceivable. There are to be
+      sumptuary laws of a moderate kind. The government is to be in the hands of
+      the elders. The children are to be taken away from their parents at the
+      age of five; reared and educated in public establishments; and returned to
+      their parents at the age of sixteen or so when they will marry. Marriage
+      is to be dissoluble at the end of ten years, but after divorce the woman
+      is not to marry a man younger than herself, nor is the man to marry a
+      woman younger than the wife from whom he has parted. The children of a
+      divorced couple are to remain with the father, and if he marries again,
+      they are to be held the children of the second wife. Mothers are to suckle
+      their own children (p. 220). The whole scheme is fuller of good ideas than
+      such schemes usually are.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_180" id="Footnote_180"></a><a href="#FNanchor180">[180]</a>
+      P. 218.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_181" id="Footnote_181"></a><a href="#FNanchor181">[181]</a>
+      This is obviously untrue. Animals do not know death in the sense of
+      scientific definition, and probably have no abstract idea of it as a
+      general state; but they know and are afraid of its concrete phenomena, and
+      so are most savages.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_182" id="Footnote_182"></a><a href="#FNanchor182">[182]</a>
+      This is one of the passages in the Discourse, the harshness of which was
+      afterwards attributed by Rousseau to the influence of Diderot. <i>Conf.</i>,
+      viii. 205, <i>n.</i>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_183" id="Footnote_183"></a><a href="#FNanchor183">[183]</a>
+      P. 261.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_184" id="Footnote_184"></a><a href="#FNanchor184">[184]</a>
+      As if sin really came by the law in this sense; as if a law defining and
+      prohibiting a malpractice were the cause of the commission of the act
+      which it constituted a malpractice. As if giving a name and juristic
+      classification to any kind of conduct were adding to men's motives for
+      indulging in it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_185" id="Footnote_185"></a><a href="#FNanchor185">[185]</a>
+      P. 269.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_186" id="Footnote_186"></a><a href="#FNanchor186">[186]</a>
+      P. 278.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_187" id="Footnote_187"></a><a href="#FNanchor187">[187]</a>
+      Pp. 285-287.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_188" id="Footnote_188"></a><a href="#FNanchor188">[188]</a>
+      P. 273.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_189" id="Footnote_189"></a><a href="#FNanchor189">[189]</a>
+      P. 250.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_190" id="Footnote_190"></a><a href="#FNanchor190">[190]</a>
+      <i>Politicus</i>, 268 D-274 E.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_191" id="Footnote_191"></a><a href="#FNanchor191">[191]</a>
+      Here for instance is D'Alembert's story:&#8212;&quot;The necessity of
+      shielding our own body from pain and destruction leads us to examine among
+      external objects those which are useful and those which are hurtful, so
+      that we may seek the one and flee the others. But we hardly begin our
+      search into such objects before we discover among them a great number of
+      beings which strike us as exactly like ourselves; that is, whose form is
+      just like our own, and who, so far as we can judge at the first glance,
+      appear to have the same perceptions. Everything therefore leads us to
+      suppose that they have also the same wants, and consequently the same
+      interest in satisfying them, whence it results that we must find great
+      advantage in joining with them for the purpose of distinguishing in nature
+      what has the power of preserving us from what has the power of hurting us.
+      The communication of ideas is the principle and the stay of this union,
+      and necessarily demands the invention of signs; such is the origin of the
+      formation of societies.&quot; <i>Discours Pr&#233;liminaire de l'Encyclop&#233;die</i>.
+      Contrast this with Aristotle's sensible statement (<i>Polit.</i> I. ii.
+      15) that &quot;there is in men by nature a strong impulse to enter into
+      such union.&quot;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_192" id="Footnote_192"></a><a href="#FNanchor192">[192]</a>
+      <i>Code de la Nature.</i>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_193" id="Footnote_193"></a><a href="#FNanchor193">[193]</a>
+      See, for example, his criticism on the Abb&#233; de St. Pierre. <i>Conf.</i>,
+      viii. 264. And also in the analysis of this very Discourse, above, vol. i.
+      p. <a href="#Page_i.163">163</a>.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_194" id="Footnote_194"></a><a href="#FNanchor194">[194]</a>
+      &quot;I have lived with communities of savages in South America and in the
+      East, who have no laws or law courts but the public opinion of the visage
+      freely expressed. Each man scrupulously respects the rights of his fellow,
+      and any infraction of those rights rarely or never takes place. In such a
+      community all are nearly equal. There are none of those wide distinctions
+      of education and ignorance, wealth and poverty, master and servant, which
+      are the products of our civilisation; there is none of that widespread
+      division of labour which, while it increases wealth, produces also
+      conflicting interests; there is not that severe competition and struggle
+      for existence, or for wealth, which the dense population of civilised
+      countries inevitably creates. All incitements to great crimes are thus
+      wanting, and petty ones are repressed, partly by the influence of public
+      opinion, but chiefly by that natural sense of justice and of his
+      neighbour's right, which seems to be in some degree inherent in every race
+      of man. Now, although we have progressed vastly beyond the savage state in
+      intellectual achievements, we have not advanced equally in morals. It is
+      true that among those classes who have no wants that cannot be easily
+      supplied, and among whom public opinion has great influence, the rights of
+      others are fully respected. It is true, also, that we have vastly extended
+      the sphere of those rights, and include within them all the brotherhood of
+      man. But it is not too much to say, that the mass of our populations have
+      not at all advanced beyond the savage code of morals, and have in many
+      cases sunk below it.&quot; Wallace's <i>Malay Archipelago</i>, vol. ii.
+      pp. 460-461.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_195" id="Footnote_195"></a><a href="#FNanchor195">[195]</a>
+      So too Bougainville, a brother of the navigator, said in 1760, &quot;For
+      an attentive observer who sees nothing in events of the utmost diversity
+      of appearance but the natural effects of a certain number of causes
+      differently combined, Greece is the universe in small, and the history of
+      Greece an excellent epitome of universal history.&quot; (Quoted in Egger's
+      <i>Hell&#233;nisme en France</i>, ii. 272.) The revolutionists of the next
+      generation, who used to appeal so unseasonably to the ancients, were only
+      following a literary fashion set by their fathers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_196" id="Footnote_196"></a><a href="#FNanchor196">[196]</a>
+      <i>Doutes sur l'Ordre Naturel</i>; <i>Oeuv.</i>, xi. 80. (Ed. 1794, 1795.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_197" id="Footnote_197"></a><a href="#FNanchor197">[197]</a>
+      <i>La L&#233;gislation</i>, I. i.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_198" id="Footnote_198"></a><a href="#FNanchor198">[198]</a>
+      <i>Ibid.</i>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_199" id="Footnote_199"></a><a href="#FNanchor199">[199]</a>
+      It is not within our province to examine the vexed question whether the
+      Convention was fundamentally socialist, and not merely political. That
+      socialist ideas were afloat in the minds of some members, one can hardly
+      doubt. See Von Sybel's <i>Hist. of the French Revolution</i>, Bk. II. ch.
+      iv., on one side, and Quinet's <i>La R&#233;volution</i>, ii. 90-107, on
+      the other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_200" id="Footnote_200"></a><a href="#FNanchor200">[200]</a>
+      <i>Economie Politique</i>, pp. 41, 53, etc.
+    </p>
+    <hr style="width: 65%;" />
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.187" id="Page_i.187">[i.187]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      <a name="CHAPTER_VI." id="CHAPTER_VI."></a>CHAPTER VI.
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      PARIS.
+    </h3>
+    <h3>
+      I.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <span class="smcap">By</span> what subtle process did Rousseau, whose
+      ideal had been a summer life among all the softnesses of sweet gardens and
+      dappled orchards, turn into panegyrist of the harsh austerity of old Cato
+      and grim Brutus's civic devotion? The amiability of eighteenth century
+      France&#8212;and France was amiable in spite of the atrocities of White
+      Penitents at Toulouse, and black Jansenists at Paris, and the men and
+      women who dealt in <i>lettres-de-cachet</i> at Versailles&#8212;was
+      revolted by the name of the cruel patriot who slew his son for the honour
+      of discipline.<a name="FNanchor201" id="FNanchor201"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_201">[201]</a> How came Rousseau of all men, the great
+      humanitarian of his time, to rise to the height of these unlovely rigours?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The answer is that he was a citizen of Geneva transplanted. He had been
+      bred in puritan and republican tradition, with love of God and love of law
+      and freedom and love of country all penetrating it, and then he had been
+      accidentally removed to a strange city that was in active ferment with
+      ideas that were the direct abnegation of all these. In<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.188" id="Page_i.188">[i.188]</a></span> Paris the idea of a
+      God was either repudiated along with many other ancestral conceptions, or
+      else it was fatally entangled with the worst superstition and not seldom
+      with the vilest cruelties. The idea of freedom was unknown, and the idea
+      of law was benumbed by abuses and exceptions. The idea of country was
+      enfeebled in some and displaced in others by a growing passion for the
+      captivating something styled citizenship of the world. If Rousseau could
+      have ended his days among the tranquil lakes and hills of Savoy, Geneva
+      might possibly never have come back to him. For it depends on
+      circumstance, which of the chances that slumber within us shall awake, and
+      which shall fall unroused with us into the darkness. The fact of Rousseau
+      ranking among the greatest of the writers of the French language, and the
+      yet more important fact that his ideas found their most ardent disciples
+      and exploded in their most violent form in France, constantly make us
+      forget that he was not a Frenchman, but a Genevese deeply imbued with the
+      spirit of his native city. He was thirty years old before he began even
+      temporarily to live in France: he had only lived there some five or six
+      years when he wrote his first famous piece, so un-French in all its
+      spirit; and the ideas of the Social Contract were in germ before he
+      settled in France at all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There have been two great religious reactions, and the name of Geneva has
+      a fundamental association with each of them. The first was that against
+      the paganised Catholicism of the renaissance, and of this<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.189" id="Page_i.189">[i.189]</a></span>
+      Calvin was a prime leader; the second was that against the materialism of
+      the eighteenth century, of which the prime leader was Rousseau. The
+      diplomatist was right who called Geneva the fifth part of the world. At
+      the congress of Vienna, some one, wearied at the enormous place taken by
+      the hardly visible Geneva in the midst of negotiations involving momentous
+      issues for the whole habitable globe, called out that it was after all no
+      more than a grain of sand. But he was not wrong who made bold to reply,
+      &quot;Geneva is no grain of sand; 'tis a grain of musk that perfumes all
+      Europe.&quot;<a name="FNanchor202" id="FNanchor202"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_202">[202]</a> We have to remember that it was at all
+      events as a grain of musk ever pervading the character of Rousseau. It
+      happened in later years that he repudiated his allegiance to her, but
+      however bitterly a man may quarrel with a parent, he cannot change blood,
+      and Rousseau ever remained a true son of the city of Calvin. We may
+      perhaps conjecture without excessive fancifulness that the constant
+      spectacle and memory of a community, free, energetic, and prosperous,
+      whose institutions had been shaped and whose political temper had been
+      inspired by one great lawgiver, contributed even more powerfully than what
+      he had picked up about Lycurgus and Laced&#230;mon, to give him a turn for
+      Utopian speculation, and a conviction of the artificiality and easy
+      modifiableness of the social structure. This, however, is less certain
+      than that he unconsciously received impressions in his youth from the
+      circum<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.190" id="Page_i.190">[i.190]</a></span>stances
+      of Geneva, both as to government and religion, as to freedom, order,
+      citizenship, manners, which formed the deepest part of him on the
+      reflective side, and which made themselves visible whenever he exchanged
+      the life of beatified sense for moods of speculative energy, &quot;Never,&quot;
+      he says, &quot;did I see the walls of that happy city, I never went into
+      it, without feeling a certain faintness at my heart, due to excess of
+      tender emotion. At the same time that the noble image of freedom elevated
+      my soul, those of equality, of union, of gentle manners, touched me even
+      to tears.&quot;<a name="FNanchor203" id="FNanchor203"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_203">[203]</a> His spirit never ceased to haunt city and
+      lake to the end, and he only paid the debt of an owed acknowledgment in
+      the dedication of his Discourse on Inequality to the republic of Geneva.<a
+      name="FNanchor204" id="FNanchor204"></a><a href="#Footnote_204">[204]</a>
+      It was there it had its root. The honour in which industry was held in
+      Geneva, the democratic phrases that constituted the dialect of its
+      government, the proud tradition of the long battle which had won and kept
+      its independence, the severity of its manners, the simplicity of its
+      pleasures,&#8212;all these things awoke in his memory as soon as ever
+      occasion drew him to serious thought. More than that, he had in a peculiar
+      manner drawn in with the breath of his earliest days in this
+      theocratically constituted city, the vital idea that there are sacred
+      things and objects of reverence among men. And hence there came to him,
+      though with many stains and much misdirection, the most priceless
+      excellence of a capacity for devout veneration.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.191" id="Page_i.191">[i.191]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is certainly no real contradiction between the quality of reverence
+      and the more equivocal quality of a sensuous temperament, though a man may
+      well seem on the surface, as the first succeeds the second in rule over
+      him, to be the contradiction to his other self. The objects of veneration
+      and the objects of sensuous delight are externally so unlike and so
+      incongruous, that he who follows both in their turns is as one playing the
+      part of an ironical chorus in the tragi-comic drama of his own life. You
+      may perceive these two to be mere imperfect or illusory opposites, when
+      you confront a man like Rousseau with the true opposite of his own type;
+      with those who are from their birth analysts and critics, keen, restless,
+      urgent, inexorably questioning. That energetic type, though not often dead
+      or dull on the side of sense, yet is incapable of steeping itself in the
+      manifold delights of eye and ear, of nostril and touch, with the peculiar
+      intensity of passive absorption that seeks nothing further nor deeper than
+      unending continuance of this profound repose of all filled sensation, just
+      as it is incapable of the kindred mood of elevated humility and joyful
+      unasking devoutness in the presence of emotions and dim thoughts that are
+      beyond the compass of words.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The citizen of Geneva with this unseen fibre of Calvinistic veneration and
+      austerity strong and vigorous within him, found a world that had nothing
+      sacred and took nothing for granted; that held the past in contempt, and
+      ever like old Athenians asked<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.192"
+      id="Page_i.192">[i.192]</a></span> for some new thing; that counted
+      simplicity of life an antique barbarism, and literary curiousness the
+      master virtue. There were giants in this world, like the panurgic Diderot.
+      There were industrious, worthy, disinterested men, who used their minds
+      honestly and actively with sincere care for truth, like D'Holbach. There
+      was poured around the whole, like a high stimulating atmosphere to the
+      stronger, and like some evil mental aphrodisiac to the weaker, the
+      influence of Voltaire, the great indomitable chieftain of them all.
+      Intellectual size half redeems want of perfect direction by its generous
+      power and fulness. It was not the strong men, atheists and philosophisers
+      as they were, who first irritated Rousseau into revolt against their whole
+      system of thought in all its principles. The dissent between him and them
+      was fundamental and enormous, and in time it flamed out into open war.
+      Conflict of theory, however, was brought home to him first by slow-growing
+      exasperation at the follies in practice of the minor disciples of the
+      gospel of knowing and acting, as distinguished from his own gospel of
+      placid being. He craved beliefs that should uphold men in living their
+      lives, substantial helps on which they might lean without examination and
+      without mistrust: his life in Paris was thrown among people who lived in
+      the midst of open questions, and revelled in a reflective and didactic
+      morality, which had no root in the heart and so made things easy for the
+      practical conscience. He sought tranquillity and valued life for its own
+      sake,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.193" id="Page_i.193">[i.193]</a></span>
+      not as an arena and a theme for endless argument and debate: he found
+      friends who knew no higher pleasure than the futile polemics of mimic
+      philosophy over dessert, who were as full of quibble as the wrong-headed
+      interlocutors in a Platonic dialogue, and who babbled about God and state
+      of nature, about virtue and the spirituality of the soul, much as Boswell
+      may have done when Johnson complained of him for asking questions that
+      would make a man hang himself. The highest things were thus brought down
+      to the level of the cheapest discourse, and subjects which the wise take
+      care only to discuss with the wise, were here everyday topics for all
+      comers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The association with such high themes of those light qualities of tact,
+      gaiety, complaisance, which are the life of the superficial commerce of
+      men and women of the world, probably gave quite as much offence to
+      Rousseau as the doctrines which some of his companions had the honest
+      courage or the heedless fatuity to profess. It was an outrage to all the
+      serious side of him to find persons of quality introducing materialism as
+      a new fashion, and atheism as the liveliest of condiments. The perfume of
+      good manners only made what he took for bad principles the worse, and
+      heightened his impatience at the flippancy of pretensions to overthrow the
+      beliefs of a world between two wines.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Doctrine and temperament united to set him angrily against the world
+      around him. The one was austere and the other was sensuous, and the
+      sensuous<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.194" id="Page_i.194">[i.194]</a></span>
+      temperament in its full strength is essentially solitary. The play of
+      social intercourse, its quick transitions, and incessant demands, are
+      fatal to free and uninterrupted abandonment to the flow of soft internal
+      emotions. Rousseau, dreaming, moody, indolently, meditative, profoundly
+      enwrapped in the brooding egoism of his own sensations, had to mix with
+      men and women whose egoism took the contrary form of an eager desire to
+      produce flashing effects on other people. We may be sure that as the two
+      sides of his character&#8212;his notions of serious principle, and his
+      notions of personal comfort&#8212;both went in the same direction, the
+      irritation and impatience with which they inspired him towards society did
+      not lessen with increased communication, but naturally deepened with a
+      more profoundly settled antipathy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rousseau lived in Paris for twelve years, from his return from Venice in
+      1744 until his departure in 1756 for the rustic lodge in a wood which the
+      good-will of Madame d'Epinay provided for him. We have already seen one
+      very important side of his fortunes during these years, in the relations
+      he formed with Theresa, and the relations which he repudiated with his
+      children. We have heard too the new words with which during these years he
+      first began to make the hearts of his contemporaries wax hot within them.
+      It remains to examine the current of daily circumstance on which his life
+      was embarked, and the shores to which it was bearing him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His patrons were at present almost exclusively in<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.195" id="Page_i.195">[i.195]</a></span> the circle of
+      finance. Richelieu, indeed, took him for a moment by the hand, but even
+      the introduction to him was through the too frail wife of one of the
+      greatest of the farmers general.<a name="FNanchor205" id="FNanchor205"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_205">[205]</a> Madame Dupin and Madame d'Epinay, his two
+      chief patronesses, were also both of them the wives of magnates of the
+      farm. The society of the great people of this world was marked by all the
+      glare, artificiality, and sentimentalism of the epoch, but it had also one
+      or two specially hollow characteristics of its own. As is always the case
+      when a new rich class rises in the midst of a community possessing an old
+      caste, the circle of Parisian financiers made it their highest social aim
+      to thrust and strain into the circle of the Versailles people of quality.
+      They had no normal life of their own, with independent traditions and
+      self-respect; and for the same reason that an essentially worn-out
+      aristocracy may so long preserve a considerable degree of vigour and even
+      of social utility under certain circumstances by means of tenacious pride
+      in its own order, a new plutocracy is demoralised from the very beginning
+      of its existence by want of a similar kind of pride in itself, and by the
+      ignoble necessity of craving the countenance of an upper class that loves
+      to despise and humiliate it. Besides the more obvious evils of a position
+      resting entirely on material opulence, and maintaining itself by coarse
+      and glittering osten<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.196"
+      id="Page_i.196">[i.196]</a></span>tation, there is a fatal moral
+      hollowness which infects both serious conduct and social diversion. The
+      result is seen in imitative manners, affected culture, and a mixture of
+      timorous self-consciousness within and noisy self-assertion without, which
+      completes the most distasteful scene that any collected spirit can
+      witness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rousseau was, as has been said, the secretary of Madame Dupin and her
+      stepson Francueil. He occasionally went with them to Chenonceaux in
+      Touraine, one of Henry the Second's castles built for Diana of Poitiers,
+      and here he fared sumptuously every day. In Paris his means, as we know,
+      were too strait. For the first two years he had a salary of nine hundred
+      francs; then his employers raised it to as much as fifty louis. For the
+      first of the Discourses the publisher gave him nothing, and for the second
+      he had to extract his fee penny by penny, and after long waiting. His
+      comic opera, the Village Soothsayer, was a greater success; it brought him
+      the round sum of two hundred louis from the court, and some five and
+      twenty more from the bookseller, and so, he says, &quot;the interlude,
+      which cost me five or six weeks of work, produced nearly as much money as
+      Emilius afterwards did, which had cost me twenty years of meditation and
+      three years of composition.&quot;<a name="FNanchor206" id="FNanchor206"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_206">[206]</a><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.197"
+      id="Page_i.197">[i.197]</a></span> Before the arrival of this windfall, M.
+      Francueil, who was receiver-general, offered him the post of cashier in
+      that important department, and Rousseau attended for some weeks to receive
+      the necessary instructions. His progress was tardy as usual, and the
+      complexities of accounts were as little congenial to him as notarial
+      complexities had been three and twenty years previously. It is, however,
+      one of the characteristics of times of national break-up not to be
+      peremptory in exacting competence, and Rousseau gravely sat at the receipt
+      of custom, doing the day's duty with as little skill as liking. Before he
+      had been long at his post, his official chief going on a short journey
+      left him in charge of the chest, which happened at the moment to contain
+      no very portentous amount. The disquiet with which the watchful custody of
+      this moderate treasure harassed and afflicted Rousseau, not only persuaded
+      him that nature had never designed him to be the guardian of money chests,
+      but also threw him into a fit of very painful illness. The surgeons let
+      him understand that within six months he would be in the pale kingdoms.
+      The effect of such a hint on a man of his temper, and the train of
+      reflections which it would be sure to set aflame, are to be foreseen by us
+      who know Rousseau's fashion of dealing with the irksome. Why sacrifice the
+      peace and charm of the little fragment of days<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.198" id="Page_i.198">[i.198]</a></span> left to him, to the
+      bondage of an office for which he felt nothing but disgust? How reconcile
+      the austere principles which he had just adopted in his denunciation of
+      sciences and arts, and his panegyric on the simplicity of the natural
+      life, with such duties as he had to perform? And how preach
+      disinterestedness and frugality from amid the cashboxes of a
+      receiver-general? Plainly it was his duty to pass in independence and
+      poverty the little time that was yet left to him, to bring all the forces
+      of his soul to bear in breaking the fetters of opinion, and to carry out
+      courageously whatever seemed best to himself, without suffering the
+      judgment of others to interpose the slightest embarrassment or hindrance.<a
+      name="FNanchor207" id="FNanchor207"></a><a href="#Footnote_207">[207]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With Rousseau, to conceive a project of this kind for simplifying his life
+      was to hasten urgently towards its realisation, because such projects
+      harmonised with all his strongest predispositions. His design mastered and
+      took whole possession of him. He resolved to earn his living by copying
+      music, as that was conformable to his taste, within his capacity, and
+      compatible with entire personal freedom. His patron did as the world is so
+      naturally ready to do with those who choose the stoic's way; he declared
+      that Rousseau was gone mad.<a name="FNanchor208" id="FNanchor208"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_208">[208]</a> Talk like this had no effect on a man whom
+      self-indulgence led into a path that others would only have been forced
+      into by self-denial. Let it be said, however, that this is a form of
+      self-indulgence of which society is never likely to see an excess,<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.199" id="Page_i.199">[i.199]</a></span>
+      and meanwhile we may continue to pay it some respect as assuredly leaning
+      to virtue's side. Rousseau's many lapses from grace perhaps deserve a
+      certain gentleness of treatment, after the time when with deliberation and
+      collected effort he set himself to the hard task of fitting his private
+      life to his public principles. Anything that heightens the self-respect of
+      the race is good for us to behold, and it is a permanent source of comfort
+      to all who thirst after reality in teachers, whether their teaching
+      happens to be our own or not, to find that the prophet of social equality
+      was not a fine gentleman, nor the teacher of democracy a hanger-on to the
+      silly skirts of fashion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rousseau did not merely throw up a post which would one day have made him
+      rich. Stoicism on the heroic, peremptory scale is not so difficult as the
+      application of the same principle to trifles. Besides this greater
+      sacrifice, he gave up the pleasant things for which most men value the
+      money that procures them, and instituted an austere sumptuary reform in
+      truly Genevese spirit. His sword was laid aside; for flowing peruke was
+      substituted the small round wig; he left off gilt buttons and white
+      stockings, and he sold his watch with the joyful and singular thought that
+      he would never again need to know the time. One sacrifice remained to be
+      made. Part of his equipment for the Venetian embassy had been a large
+      stock of fine linen, and for this he retained a particular affection, for
+      both now and always Rousseau had a passion for personal cleanliness, as he
+      had for cor<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.200" id="Page_i.200">[i.200]</a></span>poreal
+      wholesomeness. He was seasonably delivered from bondage to his fine linen
+      by aid from without. One Christmas Eve it lay drying in a garret in the
+      rather considerable quantity of forty-two shirts, when a thief, always
+      suspected to be the brother of Theresa, broke open the door and carried
+      off the treasure, leaving Rousseau henceforth to be the contented wearer
+      of coarser stuffs.<a name="FNanchor209" id="FNanchor209"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_209">[209]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We may place this reform towards the end of the year 1750, or the
+      beginning of 1751, when his mind was agitated by the busy discussion which
+      his first Discourse excited, and by the new ideas of literary power which
+      its reception by the public naturally awakened in him. &quot;It takes,&quot;
+      wrote Diderot, &quot;right above the clouds; never was such a success.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor210" id="FNanchor210"></a><a href="#Footnote_210">[210]</a>
+      We can hardly have a surer sign of a man's fundamental sincerity than that
+      his first triumph, the first revelation to him of his power, instead of
+      seducing him to frequent the mischievous and disturbing circle of his
+      applauders, should throw him inwards upon himself and his own principles
+      with new earnestness and refreshed independence. Rousseau very soon made
+      up his mind what the world was worth to him; and this, not as the ordinary
+      sentimentalist or satirist does, by way of set-off against the indulgence
+      of personal foibles, but from recognition of his own qualities, of the
+      bounds set to our capacity of life, and of the limits of the world's power
+      to satisfy us. &quot;When my destiny threw me into the whirlpool of
+      society,&quot; he wrote in his last<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.201" id="Page_i.201">[i.201]</a></span> meditation on the
+      course of his own life, &quot;I found nothing there to give a moment's
+      solace to my heart. Regret for my sweet leisure followed me everywhere; it
+      shed indifference or disgust over all that might have been within my
+      reach, leading to fortune and honours. Uncertain in the disquiet of my
+      desires, I hoped for little, I obtained less, and I felt even amid gleams
+      of prosperity that if I obtained all that I supposed myself to be seeking,
+      I should still not have found the happiness for which my heart was
+      greedily athirst, though without distinctly knowing its object. Thus
+      everything served to detach my affections from society, even before the
+      misfortunes which were to make me wholly a stranger to it. I reached the
+      age of forty, floating between indigence and fortune, between wisdom and
+      disorder, full of vices of habit without any evil tendency at heart,
+      living by hazard, distracted as to my duties without despising them, but
+      often without much clear knowledge what they were.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor211" id="FNanchor211"></a><a href="#Footnote_211">[211]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A brooding nature gives to character a connectedness and unity that is in
+      strong contrast with the dispersion and multiformity of the active type.
+      The attractions of fame never cheated Rousseau into forgetfulness of the
+      commanding principle that a man's life ought to be steadily composed to
+      oneness with itself in all its parts, as by mastery of an art of moral
+      counterpoint, and not crowded with a wild mixture of aim and emotion like
+      distracted masks in high carnival. He complains of the philosophers with<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.202" id="Page_i.202">[i.202]</a></span>
+      whom he came into contact, that their philosophy was something foreign to
+      them and outside of their own lives. They studied human nature for the
+      sake of talking learnedly about it, not for the sake of self-knowledge;
+      they laboured to instruct others, not to enlighten themselves within. When
+      they published a book, its contents only interested them to the extent of
+      making the world accept it, without seriously troubling themselves whether
+      it were true or false, provided only that it was not refuted. &quot;For my
+      own part, when I desired to learn, it was to know things myself, and not
+      at all to teach others. I always believed that before instructing others
+      it was proper to begin by knowing enough for one's self; and of all the
+      studies that I have tried to follow in my life in the midst of men, there
+      is hardly one that I should not have followed equally if I had been alone,
+      and shut up in a desert island for the rest of my days.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor212" id="FNanchor212"></a><a href="#Footnote_212">[212]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When we think of Turgot, whom Rousseau occasionally met among the society
+      which he denounces, such a denunciation sounds a little outrageous. But
+      then Turgot was perhaps the one sane Frenchman of the first eminence in
+      the eighteenth century. Voltaire chose to be an exile from the society of
+      Paris and Versailles as pertinaciously as Rousseau did, and he spoke more
+      bitterly of it in verse than Rousseau ever spoke bitterly of it in prose.<a
+      name="FNanchor213" id="FNanchor213"></a><a href="#Footnote_213">[213]</a>
+      It was, as has been so<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.203"
+      id="Page_i.203">[i.203]</a></span> often said, a society dominated by
+      women, from the king's mistress who helped to ruin France, down to the
+      financier's wife who gave suppers to flashy men of letters. The eighteenth
+      century salon has been described as having three stages; the salon of
+      1730, still retaining some of the stately domesticity, elegance, dignity
+      of the age of Lewis XIV.; that of 1780, grave, cold, dry, given to
+      dissertation; and between the two, the salon of 1750, full of intellectual
+      stir, brilliance, frivolous originality, glittering wastefulness.<a
+      name="FNanchor214" id="FNanchor214"></a><a href="#Footnote_214">[214]</a>
+      Though this division of time must not be pressed too closely, it is
+      certain that the era of Rousseau's advent in literature with his
+      Discourses fell in with the climax of social unreality in the surface
+      intercourse of France, and that the same date marks the highest point of
+      feminine activity and power.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The common mixture of much reflective morality in theory with much
+      light-hearted immorality in practice, never entered so largely into
+      manners. We have constantly to wonder how they analysed and defined the
+      word Virtue, to which they so constantly appealed in letters,
+      conversation, and books, as the sovereign object for our deepest and
+      warmest adoration. A whole company of transgressors of the marriage law
+      would melt into floods of tears over a hymn to virtue, which they must
+      surely have held of too sacred an essence to mix itself with any one
+      virtue in particular, except that very considerable one of charitably<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.204" id="Page_i.204">[i.204]</a></span>
+      letting all do as they please. It is much, however, that these tears, if
+      not very burning, were really honest. Society, though not believing very
+      deeply in the supernatural, was not cursed with an arid, parching, and
+      hardened scepticism about the genuineness of good emotions in a man, and
+      so long as people keep this baleful poison out of their hearts, their
+      lives remain worth having.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is true that cynicism in the case of some women of this time
+      occasionally sounded in a diabolic key, as when one said, &quot;It is your
+      lover to whom you should never say that you don't believe in God; to one's
+      husband that does not matter, because in the case of a lover one must
+      reserve for one's self some door of escape, and devotional scruples cut
+      everything short.&quot;<a name="FNanchor215" id="FNanchor215"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_215">[215]</a> Or here: &quot;I do not distrust anybody,
+      for that is a deliberate act; but I do not trust anybody, and there is no
+      trouble in this.&quot;<a name="FNanchor216" id="FNanchor216"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_216">[216]</a> Or again in the word thrown to a man
+      vaunting the probity of some one: &quot;What! can a man of intelligence
+      like you accept the prejudice of <i>meum</i> and <i>tuum</i>?&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor217" id="FNanchor217"></a><a href="#Footnote_217">[217]</a>
+      Such speech, however, was probably most often a mere freak of the tongue,
+      a mode and fashion, as who should go to a masked ball in guise of
+      Mephistopheles, without anything more Mephistophelian about him than red
+      apparel and peaked toes. &quot;She was absolutely charming,&quot; said one
+      of a new-comer; &quot;she did<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.205"
+      id="Page_i.205">[i.205]</a></span> not utter one single word that was not
+      a paradox.&quot;<a name="FNanchor218" id="FNanchor218"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_218">[218]</a> This was the passing taste. Human nature is
+      able to keep itself wholesome in fundamentals even under very great
+      difficulties, and it is as wise as it is charitable in judging a sharp and
+      cynical tone to make large allowances for mere costume and assumed
+      character.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In respect of the light companionship of common usage, however, it is
+      exactly the costume which comes closest to us, and bad taste in that is
+      most jarring and least easily forgiven. There is a certain stage in an
+      observant person's experience of the heedlessness, indolence, and native
+      folly of men and women&#8212;and if his observation be conducted in a
+      catholic spirit, he will probably see something of this not merely in
+      others&#8212;when the tolerable average sanity of human arrangements
+      strikes him as the most marvellous of all the fortunate accidents in the
+      universe. Rousseau could not even accept the fact of this miraculous
+      result, the provisional and temporary sanity of things, and he confronted
+      society with eyes of angry chagrin. A great lady asked him how it was that
+      she had not seen him for an age. &quot;Because when I wish to see you, I
+      wish to see no one but you. What do you want me to do in the midst of your
+      society? I should cut a sorry figure in a circle of mincing tripping
+      coxcombs; they do not suit me.&quot; We cannot wonder that on some
+      occasion when her son's proficiency was to be tested before a company of
+      friends, Madame d'Epinay<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.206"
+      id="Page_i.206">[i.206]</a></span> prayed Rousseau to be of them, on the
+      ground that he would be sure to ask the child outrageously absurd
+      questions, which would give gaiety to the affair.<a name="FNanchor219"
+      id="FNanchor219"></a><a href="#Footnote_219">[219]</a> As it happened, the
+      father was unwise. He was a man of whom it was said that he had devoured
+      two million francs, without either saying or doing a single good thing. He
+      rewarded the child's performance with the gift of a superb suit of
+      cherry-coloured velvet, extravagantly trimmed with costly lace; the
+      peasant from whose sweat and travail the money had been wrung, went in
+      heavy rags, and his children lived as the beasts of the field. The poor
+      youth was ill dealt with. &quot;That is very fine,&quot; said rude Duclos,
+      &quot;but remember that a fool in lace is still a fool.&quot; Rousseau, in
+      reply to the child's importunity, was still blunter: &quot;Sir, I am no
+      judge of finery, I am only a judge of man; I wished to talk with you a
+      little while ago, but I wish so no longer.&quot;<a name="FNanchor220"
+      id="FNanchor220"></a><a href="#Footnote_220">[220]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Marmontel, whose account may have been coloured by retrospection in later
+      years, says that before the success of the first Discourse, Rousseau
+      concealed his pride under the external forms of a politeness that was
+      timid even to obsequiousness; in his uneasy glance you perceived mistrust
+      and observant jealousy; there was no freedom in his manner, and no one
+      ever observed more cautiously the hateful precept to live with your
+      friends as though they were one day to be your enemies.<a
+      name="FNanchor221" id="FNanchor221"></a><a href="#Footnote_221">[221]</a>
+      Grimm's description is different and<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.207" id="Page_i.207">[i.207]</a></span> more trustworthy.
+      Until he began to affect singularity, he says, Rousseau had been gallant
+      and overflowing with artificial compliment, with manners that were honeyed
+      and even wearisome in their soft elaborateness. All at once he put on the
+      cynic's cloak, and went to the other extreme. Still in spite of an abrupt
+      and cynical tone he kept much of his old art of elaborate fine speeches,
+      and particularly in his relations with women.<a name="FNanchor222"
+      id="FNanchor222"></a><a href="#Footnote_222">[222]</a> Of his abruptness,
+      he tells a most displeasing tale. &quot;One day Rousseau told us with an
+      air of triumph, that as he was coming out of the opera where he had been
+      seeing the first representation of the Village Soothsayer, the Duke of
+      Zweibr&#252;cken had approached him with much politeness, saying, 'Will
+      you allow me to pay you a compliment?' and that he replied, 'Yes, if it be
+      very short.' Everybody was silent at this, until I said to him laughingly,
+      'Illustrious citizen and co-sovereign of Geneva, since there resides in
+      you a part of the sovereignty of the republic, let me represent to you
+      that, for all the severity of your principles, you should hardly refuse to
+      a sovereign prince the respect due to a water-carrier, and that if you had
+      met a word of good-will from a water-carrier with an answer as rough and
+      brutal as that, you would have had to reproach yourself with a most
+      unseasonable piece of impertinence.'&quot;<a name="FNanchor223"
+      id="FNanchor223"></a><a href="#Footnote_223">[223]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There were still more serious circumstances when exasperation at the
+      flippant tone about him carried<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.208"
+      id="Page_i.208">[i.208]</a></span> him beyond the ordinary bounds of that
+      polite time. A guest at table asked contemptuously what was the use of a
+      nation like the French having reason, if they did not use it. &quot;They
+      mock the other nations of the earth, and yet are the most credulous of
+      all.&quot; ROUSSEAU: &quot;I forgive them for their credulity, but not for
+      condemning those who are credulous in some other way.&quot; Some one said
+      that in matters of religion everybody was right, but that everybody should
+      remain in that in which he had been born. ROUSSEAU, with warmth: &quot;Not
+      so, by God, if it is a bad one, for then it can do nothing but harm.&quot;
+      Then some one contended that religion always did some good, as a kind of
+      rein to the common people who had no other morality. All the rest cried
+      out at this in indignant remonstrance, one shrewd person remarking that
+      the common people had much livelier fear of being hanged than of being
+      damned. The conversation was broken off for a moment by the hostess
+      calling out, &quot;After all, one must nourish the tattered affair we call
+      our body, so ring and let them bring us the joint.&quot; This done, the
+      servants dismissed, and the door shut, the discussion was resumed with
+      such vehemence by Duclos and Saint Lambert, that, says the lady who tells
+      us the story, &quot;I feared they were bent on destroying all religion,
+      and I prayed for some mercy to be shown at any rate to natural religion.&quot;
+      There was not a whit more sympathy for that than for the rest. Rousseau
+      declared himself <i>paullo infirmior</i>, and clung to the morality of the<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.209" id="Page_i.209">[i.209]</a></span>
+      gospel as the natural morality which in old times constituted the whole
+      and only creed. &quot;But what is a God,&quot; cried one impetuous
+      disputant, &quot;who gets angry and is appeased again?&quot; Rousseau
+      began to murmur between grinding teeth, and a tide of pleasantries set in
+      at his expense, to which came this: &quot;If it is a piece of cowardice to
+      suffer ill to be spoken of one's friend behind his back, 'tis a crime to
+      suffer ill to be spoken of one's God, who is present; and for my part,
+      sirs, I believe in God.&quot; &quot;I admit,&quot; said the atheistic
+      champion, &quot;that it is a fine thing to see this God bending his brow
+      to earth and watching with admiration the conduct of a Cato. But this
+      notion is, like many others, very useful in some great heads, such as
+      Trajan, Marcus Aurelius, Socrates, where it can only produce heroism, but
+      it is the germ of all madnesses.&quot; ROUSSEAU: &quot;Sirs, I leave the
+      room if you say another word more,&quot; and he was rising to fulfil his
+      threat, when the entry of a new-comer stopped the discussion.<a
+      name="FNanchor224" id="FNanchor224"></a><a href="#Footnote_224">[224]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His words on another occasion show how all that he saw helped to keep up a
+      fretted condition of mind, in one whose soft tenacious memory turned daily
+      back to simple and unsophisticated days among the green valleys, and
+      refused to acquiesce in the conditions of changed climate. So terrible a
+      thing is it to be the bondsman of reminiscence. Madame d'Epinay was
+      suspected, wrongfully as it afterwards proved, of<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.210" id="Page_i.210">[i.210]</a></span> having destroyed some
+      valuable papers belonging to a dead relative. There was much idle and
+      cruel gossip in an ill-natured world. Rousseau, her friend, kept steadfast
+      silence: she challenged his opinion. &quot;What am I to say?&quot; he
+      answered; &quot;I go and come, and all that I hear outrages and revolts
+      me. I see the one so evidently malicious and so adroit in their injustice;
+      the other so awkward and so stupid in their good intentions, that I am
+      tempted (and it is not the first time) to look on Paris as a cavern of
+      brigands, of whom every traveller in his turn is the victim. What gives me
+      the worst idea of society is to see how eager each person is to pardon
+      himself, by reason of the number of the people who are like him.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor225" id="FNanchor225"></a><a href="#Footnote_225">[225]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Notwithstanding his hatred of this cavern of brigands, and the little
+      pains he took to conceal his feelings from any individual brigand, whether
+      male or female, with whom he had to deal, he found out that &quot;it is
+      not always so easy as people suppose to be poor and independent.&quot;
+      Merciless invasion of his time in every shape made his life weariness.
+      Sometimes he had the courage to turn and rend the invader, as in the
+      letter to a painter who sent him the same copy of verses three times,
+      requiring immediate acknowledgment. &quot;It is not just,&quot; at length
+      wrote the exasperated Rousseau, &quot;that I should be tyrannised over for
+      your pleasure; not that my time is precious, as you say; it is either
+      passed in suffering<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.211"
+      id="Page_i.211">[i.211]</a></span> or it is lost in idleness; but when I
+      cannot employ it usefully for some one, I do not wish to be hindered from
+      wasting it in my own fashion. A single minute thus usurped is what all the
+      kings of the universe could not give me back, and it is to be my own
+      master that I flee from the idle folk of towns,&#8212;people as thoroughly
+      wearied as they are thoroughly wearisome,&#8212;who, because they do not
+      know what to do with their own time, think they have a right to waste that
+      of others.&quot;<a name="FNanchor226" id="FNanchor226"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_226">[226]</a> The more abruptly he treated visitors,
+      persecuting dinner-givers, and all the tribe of the importunate, the more
+      obstinate they were in possessing themselves of his time. In seizing the
+      hours they were keeping his purse empty, as well as keeping up constant
+      irritation in his soul. He appears to have earned forty sous for a
+      morning's work, and to have counted this a fair fee, remarking modestly
+      that he could not well subsist on less.<a name="FNanchor227"
+      id="FNanchor227"></a><a href="#Footnote_227">[227]</a> He had one chance
+      of a pension, which he threw from him in a truly characteristic manner.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When he came to Paris he composed his musical diversion of the Muses
+      Galantes, which was performed (1745) in the presence of Rameau, under the
+      patronage of M. de la Popelini&#232;re. Rameau apostrophised the unlucky
+      composer with much violence, declaring that one-half of the piece was the
+      work of a master, while the other was that of a person entirely ignorant
+      of the musical rudiments; the bad work therefore<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.212" id="Page_i.212">[i.212]</a></span> was Rousseau's own,
+      and the good was a plagiarism.<a name="FNanchor228" id="FNanchor228"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_228">[228]</a> This repulse did not daunt the hero. Five
+      or six years afterwards on a visit to Passy, as he was lying awake in bed,
+      he conceived the idea of a pastoral interlude after the manner of the
+      Italian comic operas. In six days the Village Soothsayer was sketched, and
+      in three weeks virtually completed. Duclos procured its rehearsal at the
+      Opera, and after some debate it was performed before the court at
+      Fontainebleau. The Plutarchian stoic, its author, went from Paris in a
+      court coach, but his Roman tone deserted him, and he felt shamefaced as a
+      schoolboy before the great world, such divinity doth hedge even a Lewis
+      XV., and even in a soul of Genevan temper. The piece was played with great
+      success, and the composer was informed that he would the next day have the
+      honour of being presented to the king, who would most probably mark his
+      favour by the bestowal of a pension.<a name="FNanchor229" id="FNanchor229"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_229">[229]</a> Rousseau was tossed with many doubts. He
+      would fain have greeted the king with some word that should show
+      sensibility to the royal graciousness, without compromising republican
+      severity, &quot;clothing some great and useful truth in a fine and
+      deserved compliment.&quot; This moral difficulty was heightened by a
+      physical one, for he was liable to an infirmity which, if it should
+      overtake him in presence of king<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.213"
+      id="Page_i.213">[i.213]</a></span> and courtiers, would land him in an
+      embarrassment worse than death. What would become of him if mind or body
+      should fail, if either he should be driven into precipitate retreat, or
+      else there should escape him, instead of the great truth wrapped
+      delicately round in veracious panegyric, a heavy, shapeless word of
+      foolishness? He fled in terror, and flung up the chance of pension and
+      patronage. We perceive the born dreamer with a phantasmagoric imagination,
+      seizing nothing in just proportion and true relation, and paralysing the
+      spirit with terror of unrealities; in short, with the most fatal form of
+      moral cowardice, which perhaps it is a little dangerous to try to analyse
+      into finer names.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When Rousseau got back to Paris he was amazed to find that Diderot spoke
+      to him of this abandonment of the pension with a fire that he could never
+      have expected from a philosopher, Rousseau plainly sharing the opinion of
+      more vulgar souls that philosopher is but fool writ large. &quot;He said
+      that if I was disinterested on my own account, I had no right to be so on
+      that of Madame Le Vasseur and her daughter, and that I owed it to them not
+      to let pass any possible and honest means of giving them bread.... This
+      was the first real dispute I had with him, and all our quarrels that
+      followed were of the same kind; he laying down for me what he insisted
+      that I should do, and I refusing because I thought that I ought not to do
+      it.&quot;<a name="FNanchor230" id="FNanchor230"></a><a href="#Footnote_230">[230]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.214" id="Page_i.214">[i.214]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Let us abstain, at this and all other points, from being too sure that we
+      easily see to the bottom of our Rousseau. When we are most ready to fling
+      up the book and to pronounce him all selfishness and sophistry, some trait
+      is at hand to revive moral interest in him, and show him unlike common
+      men, reverent of truth and human dignity. There is a slight anecdote of
+      this kind connected with his visit to Fontainebleau. The day after the
+      representation of his piece, he happened to be taking his breakfast in
+      some public place. An officer entered, and, proceeding to describe the
+      performance of the previous day, told at great length all that had
+      happened, depicted the composer with much minuteness, and gave a
+      circumstantial account of his conversation. In this story, which was told
+      with equal assurance and simplicity, there was not a word of truth, as was
+      clear from the fact that the author of whom he spoke with such intimacy
+      sat unknown and unrecognised before his eyes. The effect on Rousseau was
+      singular enough. &quot;The man was of a certain age; he had no coxcombical
+      or swaggering air; his expression bespoke a man of merit, and his cross of
+      St. Lewis showed that he was an old officer. While he was retailing his
+      untruths, I grew red in the face, I lowered my eyes, I sat on thorns; I
+      tried to think of some means of believing him to have made a mistake in
+      good faith. At length trembling lest some one should recognise me and
+      confront him, I hastened to finish my chocolate without saying a word; and
+      stooping<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.215" id="Page_i.215">[i.215]</a></span>
+      down as I passed in front of him, I went out as fast as possible, while
+      the people present discussed his tale. I perceived in the street that I
+      was bathed in sweat, and I am sure that if any one had recognised me and
+      called me by name before I got out, they would have seen in me the shame
+      and embarrassment of a culprit, simply from a feeling of the pain the poor
+      man would have had to suffer if his lie had been discovered.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor231" id="FNanchor231"></a><a href="#Footnote_231">[231]</a>
+      One who can feel thus vividly humiliated by the meanness of another,
+      assuredly has in himself the wholesome salt of respect for the erectness
+      of his fellows; he has the rare sentiment that the compromise of integrity
+      in one of them is as a stain on his own self-esteem, and a lowering of his
+      own moral stature. There is more deep love of humanity in this than in
+      giving many alms, and it was not the less deep for being the product of
+      impulse and sympathetic emotion, and not of a logical sorites.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Another scene in a caf&#233; is worth referring to, because it shows in
+      the same way that at this time Rousseau's egoism fell short of the
+      fatuousness to which disease or vicious habit eventually depraved it. In
+      1752 he procured the representation of his comedy of Narcisse, which he
+      had written at the age of eighteen, and which is as well worth reading or
+      playing as most comedies by youths of that amount of experience of the
+      ways of the world and the heart of man. Rousseau was amazed and touched by
+      the indulgence of the public, in suffering without any sign<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.216" id="Page_i.216">[i.216]</a></span> of
+      impatience even a second representation of his piece. For himself, he
+      could not so much as sit out the first; quitting the theatre before it was
+      over, he entered the famous caf&#233; de Procope at the other side of the
+      street, where he found critics as wearied as himself. Here he called out,
+      &quot;The new piece has fallen flat, and it deserved to fall flat; it
+      wearied me to death. It is by Rousseau of Geneva, and I am that very
+      Rousseau.&quot;<a name="FNanchor232" id="FNanchor232"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_232">[232]</a> The relentless student of mental pathology
+      is very likely to insist that even this was egoism standing on its head
+      and not on its feet, choosing to be noticed for an absurdity, rather than
+      not be noticed at all. It may be so, but this inversion of the ordinary
+      form of vanity is rare enough to be not unrefreshing, and we are very loth
+      to hand Rousseau wholly over to the pathologist before his hour has come.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      II.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      In the summer of 1754 Rousseau, in company with his Theresa, went to
+      revisit the city of his birth, partly because an exceptionally favourable
+      occasion presented itself, but in yet greater part because he was growing
+      increasingly weary of the uncongenial world in which he moved. On his road
+      he turned aside to visit her who had been more than even his birth-place
+      to him. He felt the shock known to all<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.217" id="Page_i.217">[i.217]</a></span> who cherish a vision
+      for a dozen years, and then suddenly front the changed reality. He had not
+      prepared himself by recalling the commonplace which we only remember for
+      others, how time wears hard and ugly lines into the face that recollection
+      at each new energy makes lovelier with an added sweetness. &quot;I saw
+      her,&quot; he says, &quot;but in what a state, O God, in what debasement!
+      Was this the same Madame de Warens, in those days so brilliant, to whom
+      the priest of Pontverre had sent me! How my heart was torn by the sight!&quot;
+      Alas, as has been said with a truth that daily experience proves to those
+      whom pity and self-knowledge have made most indulgent, as to those whom
+      pinched maxims have made most rigorous,&#8212;<i>morality is the nature of
+      things</i>.<a name="FNanchor233" id="FNanchor233"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_233">[233]</a> We may have a humane tenderness for our
+      Manon Lescaut, but we have a deep presentiment all the time that the poor
+      soul must die in a penal settlement. It is partly a question of time;
+      whether death comes fast enough to sweep you out of reach of the penalties
+      which the nature of things may appoint, but which in their fiercest shape
+      are mostly of the loitering kind. Death was unkind to Madame de Warens,
+      and the unhappy creature lived long enough to find that morality does mean
+      something after all; that the old hoary world has not fixed on prudence in
+      the outlay of money as a good thing, out of avarice or pedantic dryness of
+      heart; nor on some continence and order in the relations of men and<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.218" id="Page_i.218">[i.218]</a></span>
+      women as a good thing, out of cheerless grudge to the body, but because
+      the breach of such virtues is ever in the long run deadly to mutual trust,
+      to strength, to freedom, to collectedness, which are the reserve of
+      humanity against days of ordeal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rousseau says that he tried hard to prevail upon his fallen benefactress
+      to leave Savoy, to come and take up her abode peacefully with him, while
+      he and Theresa would devote their days to making her happy. He had not
+      forgotten her in the little glimpse of prosperity; he had sent her money
+      when he had it.<a name="FNanchor234" id="FNanchor234"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_234">[234]</a> She was sunk in indigence, for her pension
+      had long been forestalled, but still she refused to change her home. While
+      Rousseau was at Geneva she came to see him. &quot;She lacked money to
+      complete her journey; I had not enough about me; I sent it to her an hour
+      afterwards by Theresa. Poor Maman! Let me relate this trait of her heart.
+      The only trinket she had left was a small ring; she took it from her
+      finger to place it on Theresa's, who instantly put it back, as she kissed
+      the noble hand and bathed it with her tears.&quot; In after years he
+      poured bitter reproaches upon himself for not quitting all to attach his
+      lot to hers until her last hour, and he professes always to have been
+      haunted by the liveliest and most enduring remorse.<a name="FNanchor235"
+      id="FNanchor235"></a><a href="#Footnote_235">[235]</a> Here is the worst
+      of measuring duty by sensation instead of principle; if the sensations
+      happen not to be in right order at the critical moment, the chance goes
+      by, never to return, and then, as memory<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.219" id="Page_i.219">[i.219]</a></span> in the best of such
+      temperaments is long though not without intermittence, old sentiment
+      revives and drags the man into a burning pit. Rousseau appears not to have
+      seen her again, but the thought of her remained with him to the end, like
+      a soft vesture fragrant with something of the sweet mysterious perfume of
+      many-scented night in the silent garden at Charmettes. She died in a hovel
+      eight years after this, sunk in disease, misery, and neglect, and was put
+      away in the cemetery on the heights above Chamb&#233;ri.<a
+      name="FNanchor236" id="FNanchor236"></a><a href="#Footnote_236">[236]</a>
+      Rousseau consoled himself with thoughts of another world that should
+      reunite him to her and be the dawn of new happiness; like a man who should
+      illusorily confound the last glistening of a wintry sunset seen through
+      dark yew-branches, with the broad-beaming strength of the summer morning.
+      &quot;If I thought,&quot; he said, &quot;that I should not see her in the
+      other life, my poor imagination would shrink from the idea of perfect
+      bliss, which I would fain promise myself in it.&quot;<a name="FNanchor237"
+      id="FNanchor237"></a><a href="#Footnote_237">[237]</a> To pluck so
+      gracious a flower of hope on the edge of the sombre unechoing gulf of
+      nothingness into which our friend has slid silently down, is a natural
+      impulse of the sensitive soul, numbing remorse and giving a moment's
+      relief to the hunger and thirst of a tenderness that has been robbed of
+      its object. Yet would<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.220"
+      id="Page_i.220">[i.220]</a></span> not men be more likely to have a deeper
+      love for those about them, and a keener dread of filling a house with
+      aching hearts, if they courageously realised from the beginning of their
+      days that we have none of this perfect companionable bliss to promise
+      ourselves in other worlds, that the black and horrible grave is indeed the
+      end of our communion, and that we know one another no more?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The first interview between Rousseau and Madame de Warens was followed by
+      his ludicrous conversion to Catholicism (1728); the last was contemporary
+      with his re-conversion to the faith in which he had been reared. The sight
+      of Geneva gave new fire to his Republican enthusiasm; he surrendered
+      himself to transports of patriotic zeal. The thought of the Parisian world
+      that he had left behind, its frivolity, its petulance, its disputation
+      over all things in heaven and on the earth, its profound deadness to all
+      civic activity, quickened his admiration for the simple, industrious, and
+      independent community from which he never forgot that he was sprung. But
+      no Catholic could enjoy the rights of citizenship. So Rousseau proceeded
+      to reflect that the Gospel is the same for all Christians, and the
+      substance of dogma only differs, because people interposed with
+      explanations of what they could not understand; that therefore it is in
+      each country the business of the sovereign to fix both the worship and the
+      amount and quality of unintelligible dogma; that consequently it is the
+      citizen's duty to admit the dogma, and follow the worship by law<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.221" id="Page_i.221">[i.221]</a></span>
+      appointed. &quot;The society of the Encyclop&#230;dists, far from shaking
+      my faith, had confirmed it by my natural aversion for partisanship and
+      controversy. The reading of the Bible, especially of the Gospel, to which
+      I had applied myself for several years, had made me despise the low and
+      childish interpretation put upon the words of Christ by the people who
+      were least worthy to understand him. In a word, philosophy by drawing me
+      towards the essential in religion, had drawn me away from that stupid mass
+      of trivial formulas with which men had overlaid and darkened it.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor238" id="FNanchor238"></a><a href="#Footnote_238">[238]</a>
+      We may be sure that if Rousseau had a strong inclination towards a given
+      course of action, he would have no difficulty in putting his case in a
+      blaze of the brightest light, and surrounding it with endless emblems and
+      devices of superlative conviction. In short, he submitted himself
+      faithfully to the instruction of the pastor of his parish; was closely
+      catechised by a commission of members of the consistory; received from
+      them a certificate that he had satisfied the requirements of doctrine in
+      all points; was received to partake of the Communion, and finally restored
+      to all his rights as a citizen.<a name="FNanchor239" id="FNanchor239"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_239">[239]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This was no farce, such as Voltaire played now and again at the expense of
+      an unhappy bishop or unhappier parish priest; nor such as Rousseau himself
+      had played six-and-twenty years before, at the expense of those honest
+      Catholics of Turin whose helpful dona<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.222" id="Page_i.222">[i.222]</a></span>tion of twenty francs
+      had marked their enthusiasm over a soul that had been lost and was found
+      again. He was never a Catholic, any more than he was ever an atheist, and
+      if it might be said in one sense that he was no more a Protestant than he
+      was either of these two, yet he was emphatically the child of
+      Protestantism. It is hardly too much to say that one bred in Catholic
+      tradition and observance, accustomed to think of the whole life of men as
+      only a manifestation of the unbroken life of the Church, and of all the
+      several communities of men as members of that great organisation which
+      binds one order to another, and each generation to those that have gone
+      before and those that come after, would never have dreamed that monstrous
+      dream of a state of nature as a state of perfection. He would never have
+      held up to ridicule and hate the idea of society as an organism with
+      normal parts and conditions of growth, and never have left the spirit of
+      man standing in bald isolation from history, from his fellows, from a
+      Church, from a mediator, face to face with the great vague phantasm. Nor,
+      on the other hand, is it likely that one born and reared in the religious
+      school of authority with its elaborately disciplined hierarchy, would have
+      conceived that passion for political freedom, that zeal for the rights of
+      peoples against rulers, that energetic enthusiasm for a free life, which
+      constituted the fire and essence of Rousseau's writing. As illustration of
+      this, let us remark how Rousseau's teaching fared when it fell upon a
+      Catholic country like France: so<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.223"
+      id="Page_i.223">[i.223]</a></span> many of its principles were assimilated
+      by the revolutionary schools as were wanted for violent dissolvents, while
+      the rest dropped away, and in this rejected portion was precisely the most
+      vital part of his system. In other words, in no country has the power of
+      collective organisation been so pressed and exalted as in revolutionised
+      France, and in no country has the free life of the individual been made to
+      count for so little. With such force does the ancient system of temporal
+      and spiritual organisation reign in the minds of those who think most
+      confidently that they have cast it wholly out of them. The use of reason
+      may lead a man far, but it is the past that has cut the groove.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In re-embracing the Protestant confession, therefore, Rousseau was not
+      leaving Catholicism, to which he had never really passed over; he was only
+      undergoing in entire gravity of spirit a formality which reconciled him
+      with his native city, and reunited those strands of spiritual connection
+      with it which had never been more than superficially parted. There can be
+      little doubt that the four months which he spent in Geneva in 1754 marked
+      a very critical time in the formation of some of the most memorable of his
+      opinions. He came from Paris full of inarticulate and smouldering
+      resentment against the irreverence and denial of the materialistic circle
+      which used to meet at the house of D'Holbach. What sort of opinions he
+      found prevailing among the most enlightened of the Genevese pastors we
+      know from an abundance of sources. D'Alembert had three or four years
+      later<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.224" id="Page_i.224">[i.224]</a></span>
+      than this to suffer a bitter attack from them, but the account of the
+      creed of some of the ministers which he gave in his article on Geneva in
+      the Encyclopedia, was substantially correct. &quot;Many of them,&quot; he
+      wrote, &quot;have ceased to believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ. Hell,
+      one of the principal points in our belief, is no longer one with many of
+      the Genevese pastors, who contend that it is an insult to the Divinity to
+      imagine that a being full of goodness and justice can be capable of
+      punishing our faults by an eternity of torment. In a word, they have no
+      other creed than pure Socinianism, rejecting everything that they call
+      mysteries, and supposing the first principle of a true religion to be that
+      it shall propose nothing for belief which clashes with reason. Religion
+      here is almost reduced to the adoration of one single God, at least among
+      nearly all who do not belong to the common people; and a certain respect
+      for Jesus Christ and the Scriptures is nearly the only thing that
+      distinguishes the Christianity of Geneva from pure Deism.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor240" id="FNanchor240"></a><a href="#Footnote_240">[240]</a>
+      And it would be easy to trace the growth of these rationalising
+      tendencies. Throughout the seventeenth century men sprang up who
+      anticipated some of the rationalistic arguments of the eighteenth, in
+      denying<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.225" id="Page_i.225">[i.225]</a></span>
+      the Trinity, and so forth,<a name="FNanchor241" id="FNanchor241"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_241">[241]</a> but the time was not then ripe. The general
+      conditions grew more favourable. Burnet, who was at Geneva in 1685-6, says
+      that though there were not many among the Genevese of the first form of
+      learning, &quot;yet almost everybody here has a good tincture of a learned
+      education.&quot;<a name="FNanchor242" id="FNanchor242"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_242">[242]</a> The pacification of civic troubles in 1738
+      was followed by a quarter of a century of extreme prosperity and
+      contentment, and it is in such periods that the minds of men previously
+      trained are wont to turn to the great matters of speculation. There was at
+      all times a constant communication, both public and private, going on
+      between Geneva and Holland, as was only natural between the two chief
+      Protestant centres of the Continent. The controversy of the seventeenth
+      century between the two churches was as keenly followed in Geneva as at
+      Leyden, and there is more than one Genevese writer who deserves a place in
+      the history of the transition in the beginning of the eighteenth century
+      from theology proper to that metaphysical theology, which was the first
+      marked dissolvent of dogma within the Protestant bodies. To this general
+      movement of the epoch, of course, Descartes supplied the first impulse.
+      The leader of the movement in Geneva, that is of an attempt to pacify the
+      Christian churches on the basis of some such Deism as was shortly to find
+      its passionate ex<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.226" id="Page_i.226">[i.226]</a></span>pression
+      in the Savoyard Vicar's Confession of Faith, was John Alphonse Turretini
+      (1661-1737). He belonged to a family of Italian refugees from Lucca, and
+      his grandfather had been sent on a mission to Holland for aid in defence
+      of Geneva against Catholic Savoy. He went on his travels in 1692; he
+      visited Holland, where he saw Bayle, and England, where he saw Newton, and
+      France, where he saw Bossuet. Chouet initiated him into the mysteries of
+      Descartes. All this bore fruit when he returned home, and his eloquent
+      exposition of rationalistic ideas aroused the usual cry of heresy from the
+      people who justly insist that Deism is not Christianity. There was much
+      stir for many years, but he succeeded in holding his own and in finding
+      many considerable followers.<a name="FNanchor243" id="FNanchor243"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_243">[243]</a> For example, some three years or so after
+      his death, a work appeared in Geneva under the title of <i>La Religion
+      Essentielle a l'Homme</i>, showing that faith in the existence of a God
+      suffices, and treating<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.227"
+      id="Page_i.227">[i.227]</a></span> with contempt the belief in the
+      inspiration of the Gospels.<a name="FNanchor244" id="FNanchor244"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_244">[244]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thus we see what vein of thought was running through the graver and more
+      active minds of Geneva about the time of Rousseau's visit. Whether it be
+      true or not that the accepted belief of many of the preachers was a pure
+      Deism, it is certain that the theory was fully launched among them, and
+      that those who could not accept it were still pressed to refute it, and in
+      refuting, to discuss. Rousseau's friendships were according to his own
+      account almost entirely among the ministers of religion and the professors
+      of the academy, precisely the sort of persons who would be most sure to
+      familiarise him, in the course of frequent conversations, with the current
+      religious ideas and the arguments by which they were opposed or upheld. We
+      may picture the effect on his mind of the difference in tone and temper in
+      these grave, candid, and careful men, and the tone of his Parisian friends
+      in discussing the same high themes; how this difference would strengthen
+      his repugnance, and corroborate his own inborn spirit of veneration; how
+      he would here feel himself in his own world. For as wise men have noticed,
+      it is not so much difference of opinion that stirs resentment in us, at
+      least in great subjects where the difference is not trivial but profound,
+      as difference in gravity of humour and manner of moral approach. He
+      returned to Paris (Oct. 1754) warm with the resolution to give up his
+      concerns<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.228" id="Page_i.228">[i.228]</a></span>
+      there, and in the spring go back once and for all to the city of liberty
+      and virtue, where men revered wisdom and reason instead of wasting life in
+      the frivolities of literary dialectic.<a name="FNanchor245"
+      id="FNanchor245"></a><a href="#Footnote_245">[245]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The project, however, grew cool. The dedication of his Discourse on
+      Inequality to the Republic was received with indifference by some and
+      indignation by others.<a name="FNanchor246" id="FNanchor246"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_246">[246]</a> Nobody thought it a compliment, and some
+      thought it an impertinence. This was one reason which turned his purpose
+      aside. Another was the fact that the illustrious Voltaire now also signed
+      himself Swiss, and boasted that if he shook his wig the powder flew over
+      the whole of the tiny Republic. Rousseau felt certain that Voltaire would
+      make a revolution in Geneva, and that he should find in his native country
+      the tone, the air, the manners which were driving him from Paris. From
+      that moment he counted Geneva lost. Perhaps he ought to make head against
+      the disturber, but what could he do alone, timid and bad talker as he was,
+      against a man arrogant, rich, supported by the credit of the great, of
+      brilliant eloquence, and already the very idol of women and young men?<a
+      name="FNanchor247" id="FNanchor247"></a><a href="#Footnote_247">[247]</a>
+      Perhaps it would not be uncharitable to suspect that this was a reason
+      after the event, for no man was ever so fond as Rousseau, or so clever a
+      master in the art, of covering an accident in a fine envelope of
+      principle, and, as we shall see,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.229"
+      id="Page_i.229">[i.229]</a></span> he was at this time writing to Voltaire
+      in strains of effusive panegyric. In this case he almost tells us that the
+      one real reason why he did not return to Geneva was that he found a
+      shelter from Paris close at hand. Even before then he had begun to
+      conceive characteristic doubts whether his fellow-citizens at Geneva would
+      not be nearly as hostile to his love of living solitarily and after his
+      own fashion as the good people of Paris.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rousseau has told us a pretty story, how one day he and Madame d'Epinay
+      wandering about the park came upon a dilapidated lodge surrounded by fruit
+      gardens, in the skirts of the forest of Montmorency; how he exclaimed in
+      delight at its solitary charm that here was the very place of refuge made
+      for him; and how on a second visit he found that his good friend had in
+      the interval had the old lodge pulled down, and replaced by a pretty
+      cottage exactly arranged for his own household. &quot;My poor bear,&quot;
+      she said, &quot;here is your place of refuge; it was you who chose it,
+      'tis friendship offers it; I hope it will drive away your cruel notion of
+      going from me.&quot;<a name="FNanchor248" id="FNanchor248"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_248">[248]</a><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.230"
+      id="Page_i.230">[i.230]</a></span> Though moved to tears by such kindness,
+      Rousseau did not decide on the spot, but continued to waver for some time
+      longer between this retreat and return to Geneva.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the interval Madame d'Epinay had experience of the character she was
+      dealing with. She wrote to Rousseau pressing him to live at the cottage in
+      the forest, and begging him to allow her to assist him in assuring the
+      moderate annual provision which he had once accidentally declared to mark
+      the limit of his wants.<a name="FNanchor249" id="FNanchor249"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_249">[249]</a> He wrote to her bitterly in reply, that her
+      proposition struck ice into his soul, and that she could have but sorry
+      appreciation of her own interests in thus seeking to turn a friend into a
+      valet. He did not refuse to listen to what she proposed, if only she would
+      remember that neither he nor his sentiments were for sale.<a
+      name="FNanchor250" id="FNanchor250"></a><a href="#Footnote_250">[250]</a>
+      Madame d'Epinay wrote to him patiently enough in return, and then Rousseau
+      hastened to explain that his vocabulary needed special appreciation, and
+      that he meant by the word valet &quot;the degradation into which the
+      repudiation of his principles would throw his soul. The independence I
+      seek is not immunity from work; I am firm for winning my own bread, I take
+      pleasure in it; but I mean not to subject myself to any other duty, if I
+      can help it. I will never pledge any portion of my liberty, either for my
+      own subsistence or that of any one else. I intend to work, but at my own
+      will and pleasure, and even to do nothing, if it happens to<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.231" id="Page_i.231">[i.231]</a></span>
+      suit me, without any one finding fault except my stomach.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor251" id="FNanchor251"></a><a href="#Footnote_251">[251]</a>
+      We may call this unamiable, if we please, but in a frivolous world
+      amiability can hardly go with firm resolve to live an independent life
+      after your own fashion. The many distasteful sides of Rousseau's character
+      ought not to hinder us from admiring his steadfastness in refusing to
+      sacrifice his existence to the first person who spoke him civilly. We may
+      wish there had been more of rugged simplicity in his way of dealing with
+      temptations to sell his birthright for a mess of pottage; less of mere
+      irritability. But then this irritability is one side of soft temperament.
+      The soft temperament is easily agitated, and this unpleasant disturbance
+      does not stir up true anger nor lasting indignation, but only sends quick
+      currents of eager irritation along the sufferer's nerves. Rousseau,
+      quivering from head to foot with self-consciousness, is sufficiently
+      unlike our plain Johnson, the strong-armoured; yet persistent withstanding
+      of the patron is as worthy of our honour in one instance as in the other.
+      Indeed, resistance to humiliating pressure is harder for such a temper as
+      Rousseau's, in which deliberate endeavour is needed, than it is for the
+      naturally stoical spirit which asserts itself spontaneously and rises
+      without effort.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When our born solitary, wearied of Paris and half afraid of the too
+      friendly importunity of Geneva, at length determined to accept Madame
+      d'Epinay's offer of the Hermitage on conditions which left him an<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.232" id="Page_i.232">[i.232]</a></span>
+      entire sentiment of independence of movement and freedom from all sense of
+      pecuniary obligation, he was immediately exposed to a very copious torrent
+      of pleasantry and remonstrance from the highly social circle who met round
+      D'Holbach's dinner-table. They deemed it sheer midsummer madness, or even
+      a sign of secret depravity, to quit their cheerful world for the dismal
+      solitude of woods and fields. &quot;Only the bad man is alone,&quot; wrote
+      Diderot in words which Rousseau kept resentfully in his memory as long as
+      he lived. The men and women of the eighteenth century had no comprehension
+      of solitude, the strength which it may impart to the vigorous, the poetic
+      graces which it may shed about the life of those who are less than
+      vigorous; and what they did not comprehend, they dreaded and abhorred, and
+      thought monstrous in the one man who did comprehend it. They were all of
+      the mind of Socrates when he said to Ph&#230;drus, &quot;Knowledge is what
+      I love, and the men who dwell in the town are my teachers, not trees and
+      landscape.&quot;<a name="FNanchor252" id="FNanchor252"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_252">[252]</a> Sarcasms fell on him like hail, and the
+      prophecies usual in cases where a stray soul does not share the common
+      tastes of the herd. He would never be able to live without the incense and
+      the amusements of the town; he would be back in a fortnight; he would
+      throw up the whole enterprise within three months.<a name="FNanchor253"
+      id="FNanchor253"></a><a href="#Footnote_253">[253]</a> Amid a shower of
+      such words, springing from men's perverse blindness to the binding
+      propriety of keeping all propositions as to what<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.233" id="Page_i.233">[i.233]</a></span> is the best way of
+      living in respect of place, hours, companionship, strictly relative to
+      each individual case, Rousseau stubbornly shook the dust of the city from
+      off his feet, and sought new life away from the stridulous hum of men.
+      Perhaps we are better pleased to think of the unwearied Diderot spending
+      laborious days in factories and quarries and workshops and forges, while
+      friendly toilers patiently explained to him the structure of stocking
+      looms and velvet looms, the processes of metal-casting and wire-drawing
+      and slate-cutting, and all the other countless arts and ingenuities of
+      fabrication, which he afterwards reproduced to a wondering age in his
+      spacious and magnificent repertory of human thought, knowledge, and
+      practical achievement. And it is yet more elevating to us to think of the
+      true stoic, the great high-souled Turgot, setting forth a little later to
+      discharge beneficent duty in the hard field of his distant Limousin
+      commissionership, enduring many things and toiling late and early for long
+      years, that the burden of others might be lighter, and the welfare of the
+      land more assured. But there are many paths for many men, and if only
+      magnanimous self-denial has the power of inspiration, and can move us with
+      the deep thrill of the heroic, yet every truthful protest, even of
+      excessive personality, against the gregarious trifling of life in the
+      social groove, has a side which it is not ill for us to consider, and
+      perhaps for some men and women in every generation to seek to imitate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &#160;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <b>FOOTNOTES:</b>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_201" id="Footnote_201"></a><a href="#FNanchor201">[201]</a>
+      <i>R&#233;p. &#224; M. Bordes</i>, 163.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_202" id="Footnote_202"></a><a href="#FNanchor202">[202]</a>
+      Pictet de Sergy., i. 18.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_203" id="Footnote_203"></a><a href="#FNanchor203">[203]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, iv. 248.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_204" id="Footnote_204"></a><a href="#FNanchor204">[204]</a>
+      <i>Ib.</i> ix. 279. Also <i>Economie Politique</i>.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_205" id="Footnote_205"></a><a href="#FNanchor205">[205]</a>
+      Madame de la Popelini&#232;re, whose adventures and the misadventures of
+      her husband are only too well known to the reader of Marmontel's Memoirs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_206" id="Footnote_206"></a><a href="#FNanchor206">[206]</a>
+      The passages relating to income during his first residence in Paris
+      (1744-1756) are at pp. 119, 145, 153, 165, 200, 227, in Books vii.-ix. of
+      the <i>Confessions</i>. Rousseau told Bernardin de St. Pierre (<i>Oeuv.</i>,
+      xii. 74) that Emile was sold for 7000 livres. In the <i>Confessions</i>
+      (xi. 126), he says 6000 livres, and one or two hundred copies. It may be
+      worth while to add that Diderot and D'Alembert received 1200 livres a year
+      apiece for editing the Encyclop&#230;dia. Sterne received &#163;650 for
+      two volumes of <i>Tristram Shandy</i> in 1780. Walpole's <i>Letters</i>,
+      in. 298.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_207" id="Footnote_207"></a><a href="#FNanchor207">[207]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, viii. 154-157.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_208" id="Footnote_208"></a><a href="#FNanchor208">[208]</a>
+      <i>Ib.</i> viii. 160.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_209" id="Footnote_209"></a><a href="#FNanchor209">[209]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, viii. 160, 161.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_210" id="Footnote_210"></a><a href="#FNanchor210">[210]</a>
+      <i>Ib.</i> viii. 159.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_211" id="Footnote_211"></a><a href="#FNanchor211">[211]</a>
+      <i>R&#233;veries</i>, iii 168.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_212" id="Footnote_212"></a><a href="#FNanchor212">[212]</a>
+      <i>R&#234;veries</i>, iii. 166.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_213" id="Footnote_213"></a><a href="#FNanchor213">[213]</a>
+      See the <i>Ep&#238;tre &#224; Mdme. la Marquise du Ch&#226;telet, sur la
+      Calomnie</i>.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_214" id="Footnote_214"></a><a href="#FNanchor214">[214]</a>
+      <i>La Femme au 18i&#232;me si&#232;cle</i>, par MM. de Goncourt, p. 40.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_215" id="Footnote_215"></a><a href="#FNanchor215">[215]</a>
+      Madame d'Epinay's <i>M&#233;m.</i>, i. 295.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_216" id="Footnote_216"></a><a href="#FNanchor216">[216]</a>
+      Quoted in Goncourt's <i>Femme au 18i&#232;me si&#232;cle</i>, p. 378.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_217" id="Footnote_217"></a><a href="#FNanchor217">[217]</a>
+      <i>Ib.</i>, p. 337.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_218" id="Footnote_218"></a><a href="#FNanchor218">[218]</a>
+      Mdlle. L'Espinasse's <i>Letters</i>, ii. 89.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_219" id="Footnote_219"></a><a href="#FNanchor219">[219]</a>
+      Madame d'Epinay's <i>M&#233;m.</i>, ii. 47, 48.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_220" id="Footnote_220"></a><a href="#FNanchor220">[220]</a>
+      <i>Ib.</i>, ii. 55.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_221" id="Footnote_221"></a><a href="#FNanchor221">[221]</a>
+      <i>M&#233;m.</i>, Bk. iv. 327.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_222" id="Footnote_222"></a><a href="#FNanchor222">[222]</a>
+      <i>Corr. Lit.</i>, iii. 58.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_223" id="Footnote_223"></a><a href="#FNanchor223">[223]</a>
+      <i>Ib.</i>, 54.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_224" id="Footnote_224"></a><a href="#FNanchor224">[224]</a>
+      Madame d'Epinay's <i>M&#233;m.</i>, i. 378-381. Saint Lambert formulated
+      his atheism afterwards in the <i>Cat&#233;chisme Universel</i>.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_225" id="Footnote_225"></a><a href="#FNanchor225">[225]</a>
+      Madame d'Epinay's <i>M&#233;m.</i>, i. 443.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_226" id="Footnote_226"></a><a href="#FNanchor226">[226]</a>
+      <i>Corr.</i>, i. 317. Sept. 14, 1756.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_227" id="Footnote_227"></a><a href="#FNanchor227">[227]</a>
+      Letter to Madame de Cr&#233;qui, 1752. <i>Corr.</i>, i. 171.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_228" id="Footnote_228"></a><a href="#FNanchor228">[228]</a>
+      <i>Conf</i>,., vii. 104.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_229" id="Footnote_229"></a><a href="#FNanchor229">[229]</a>
+      The <i>Devin du Village</i> was played at Fontainebleau on October 18,
+      1752, and at the Opera in Paris in March 1753. Madame de Pompadour took a
+      part in it in a private performance. See Rousseau's note to her, <i>Corr.</i>,
+      i. 178.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_230" id="Footnote_230"></a><a href="#FNanchor230">[230]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, viii. 190.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_231" id="Footnote_231"></a><a href="#FNanchor231">[231]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, viii. 183.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_232" id="Footnote_232"></a><a href="#FNanchor232">[232]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, viii. 202; and Musset-Pathay, ii. 439. When in Strasburg, in
+      1765, he could not bring himself to be present at its representation. <i>Oeuv.
+      et Corr. In&#233;d.</i>, p. 434.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_233" id="Footnote_233"></a><a href="#FNanchor233">[233]</a>
+      Madame de Sta&#235;l insisted that her father said this, and Necker
+      insisted that it was his daughter's.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_234" id="Footnote_234"></a><a href="#FNanchor234">[234]</a>
+      <i>Corr.</i>, i. 176. Feb. 13, 1753.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_235" id="Footnote_235"></a><a href="#FNanchor235">[235]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, viii. 208-210.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_236" id="Footnote_236"></a><a href="#FNanchor236">[236]</a>
+      She died on July 30, 1762, aged &quot;about sixty-three years.&quot;
+      Arthur Young, visiting Chamb&#233;ri in 1789, with some trouble procured
+      the certificate of her death, which may be found in his <i>Travels</i>, i.
+      272. See a letter of M. de Conzi&#233; to Rousseau, in M.
+      Streckeisen-Moultou's collection, ii. 445.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_237" id="Footnote_237"></a><a href="#FNanchor237">[237]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, xii. 233.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_238" id="Footnote_238"></a><a href="#FNanchor238">[238]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, viii. 210.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_239" id="Footnote_239"></a><a href="#FNanchor239">[239]</a>
+      Gaberel's <i>Rousseau et les Genevois</i>, p. 62. <i>Conf.</i>, viii. 212.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_240" id="Footnote_240"></a><a href="#FNanchor240">[240]</a>
+      The venerable Company of Pastors and Professors of the Church and Academy
+      of Geneva appointed a committee, as in duty bound, to examine these
+      allegations, and the committee, equally in duty bound, reported (Feb. 10,
+      1758) with mild indignation, that they were unfounded, and that the flock
+      was untainted by unseasonable use of its mind. See on this Rousseau's <i>Lettres
+      &#233;crites de la Montagne</i>, ii. 231.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_241" id="Footnote_241"></a><a href="#FNanchor241">[241]</a>
+      See Picot's <i>Hist. de Gen&#232;ve</i>, ii. 415.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_242" id="Footnote_242"></a><a href="#FNanchor242">[242]</a>
+      <i>Letters containing an account of Switzerland, Italy, etc., in 1685-86.</i>
+      By G. Burnet, p. 9.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_243" id="Footnote_243"></a><a href="#FNanchor243">[243]</a>
+      J.A. Turretini's complete works were published as late as 1776, including
+      among much besides that no longer interests men, an <i>Oratio de
+      Scientiarum Vanitate et Proestantia</i> (vol. iii. 437), not at all in the
+      vein of Rousseau's Discourse, and a treatise in four parts, <i>De Legibus
+      Naturalibus</i>, in which, among other matters, he refutes Hobbes and
+      assails the doctrine of Utility (i. 173, etc.), by limiting its definition
+      to <span lang="el" title="Greek: to pros heauton">&#964;&#959; &#960;&#961;&#959;&#962;
+      &#949;&#945;&#965;&#964;&#959;&#957;</span> in its narrowest sense. He
+      appears to have been a student of Spinoza (i. 326). Francis Turretini, his
+      father, took part in the discussion as to the nature of the treaty or
+      contract between God and man, in a piece entitled <i>Foedus Natur&#230; a
+      primo homine ruptum, ejusque Proevaricationem posteris imputatam</i>
+      (1675).
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_244" id="Footnote_244"></a><a href="#FNanchor244">[244]</a>
+      Gaberel's <i>Eglise de Gen&#232;ve</i>, iii. 188.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_245" id="Footnote_245"></a><a href="#FNanchor245">[245]</a>
+      <i>Corr.</i>, i. 223 (to Vernes, April 5, 1755).
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_246" id="Footnote_246"></a><a href="#FNanchor246">[246]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, viii. 215, 216. <i>Corr.</i>, i. 218 (to Perdriau, Nov. 28,
+      1754).
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_247" id="Footnote_247"></a><a href="#FNanchor247">[247]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, viii. 218.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_248" id="Footnote_248"></a><a href="#FNanchor248">[248]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, viii. 217. It is worth noticing as bearing on the accuracy
+      of the Confessions, that Madame d'Epinay herself (<i>M&#233;m.</i>, ii.
+      115) says that when she began to prepare the Hermitage for Rousseau he had
+      never been there, and that she was careful to lead him to believe that the
+      expense had not been incurred for him. Moreover her letter to him
+      describing it could only have been written to one who had not seen it, and
+      though her Memoirs are full of sheer imagination and romance, the
+      documents in them are substantially authentic, and this letter is shown to
+      be so by Rousseau's reply to it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_249" id="Footnote_249"></a><a href="#FNanchor249">[249]</a>
+      <i>M&#233;m.</i>, ii. 116.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_250" id="Footnote_250"></a><a href="#FNanchor250">[250]</a>
+      <i>Corr.</i> (1755), i. 242.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_251" id="Footnote_251"></a><a href="#FNanchor251">[251]</a>
+      <i>Corr.</i>, i. 245.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_252" id="Footnote_252"></a><a href="#FNanchor252">[252]</a>
+      <i>Ph&#230;drus</i>, 230.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_253" id="Footnote_253"></a><a href="#FNanchor253">[253]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, viii. 221, etc.
+    </p>
+    <hr style="width: 65%;" />
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.234" id="Page_i.234">[i.234]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      <a name="CHAPTER_VII." id="CHAPTER_VII."></a>CHAPTER VII.
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      THE HERMITAGE.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <span class="smcap">It</span> would have been a strange anachronism if the
+      decade of the Encyclop&#230;dia and the Seven Years' War had reproduced
+      one of those scenes which are as still resting-places amid the ceaseless
+      forward tramp of humanity, where some holy man turned away from the world,
+      and with adorable seriousness sought communion with the divine in
+      mortification of flesh and solitude of spirit. Those were the retreats of
+      firm hope and beatified faith. The hope and faith of the eighteenth
+      century were centred in action, not in contemplation, and the few
+      solitaries of that epoch, as well as of another nearer to our own, fled
+      away from the impotence of their own will, rather than into the haven of
+      satisfied conviction and clear-eyed acceptance. Only one of them&#8212;Wordsworth,
+      the poetic hermit of our lakes&#8212;impresses us in any degree like one
+      of the great individualities of the ages when men not only craved for the
+      unseen, but felt the closeness of its presence over their heads and about
+      their feet. The modern anchorite goes forth in the spirit of the preacher
+      who declared all<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.235" id="Page_i.235">[i.235]</a></span>
+      the things that are under the sun to be vanity, not in the transport of
+      the saint who knew all the things that are under the sun to be no more
+      than the shadow of a dream in the light of a celestial brightness to come.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rousseau's mood, deeply tinged as it was by bitterness against society and
+      circumstance, still contained a strong positive element in his native
+      exultation in all natural objects and processes, which did not leave him
+      vacantly brooding over the evil of the world he had quitted. The
+      sensuousness that penetrated him kept his sympathy with life
+      extraordinarily buoyant, and all the eager projects for the disclosure of
+      a scheme of wisdom became for a time the more vividly desired, as the
+      general tide of desire flowed more fully within him. To be surrounded with
+      the simplicity of rural life was with him not only a stimulus, but an
+      essential condition to free intellectual energy. Many a time, he says,
+      when making excursions into the country with great people, &quot;I was so
+      tired of fine rooms, fountains, artificial groves and flower beds, and the
+      still more tiresome people who displayed all these; I was so worn out with
+      pamphlets, card-playing, music, silly jokes, stupid airs, great suppers,
+      that as I spied a poor hawthorn copse, a hedge, a farmstead, a meadow, as
+      in passing through a hamlet I snuffed the odour of a good chervil
+      omelette, as I heard from a distance the rude refrain of the shepherd's
+      songs, I used to wish at the devil the whole tale of rouge and furbelows.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor254" id="FNanchor254"></a><a href="#Footnote_254">[254]</a>
+      He was no anchorite proper,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.236"
+      id="Page_i.236">[i.236]</a></span> one weary of the world and waiting for
+      the end, but a man with a strong dislike for one kind of life and a keen
+      liking for another kind. He thought he was now about to reproduce the old
+      days of the Charmettes, true to his inveterate error that one may efface
+      years and accurately replace a past. He forgot that instead of the once
+      vivacious and tender benefactress who was now waiting for slow death in
+      her hovel, his house-mates would be a poor dull drudge and her vile
+      mother. He forgot, too, that since those days the various processes of
+      intellectual life had expanded within him, and produced a busy
+      fermentation which makes a man's surroundings very critical. Finally, he
+      forgot that in proportion as a man suffers the smooth course of his
+      thought to depend on anything external, whether on the greenness of the
+      field or the gaiety of the street or the constancy of friends, so comes he
+      nearer to chance of making shipwreck. Hence his tragedy, though the very
+      root of the tragedy lay deeper,&#8212;in temperament.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      I.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      Rousseau's impatience drove him into the country almost before the walls
+      of his little house were dry (April 9, 1756). &quot;Although it was cold,
+      and snow still lay upon the ground, the earth began to show signs of life;
+      violets and primroses were to be seen; the buds on the trees were
+      beginning to shoot; and the very night of my arrival was marked by the
+      first<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.237" id="Page_i.237">[i.237]</a></span>
+      song of the nightingale. I heard it close to my window in a wood that
+      touched the house. After a light sleep I awoke, forgetting that I was
+      transplanted; I thought myself still in the Rue de Grenelle, when in an
+      instant the warbling of the birds made me thrill with delight. My very
+      first care was to surrender myself to the impression of the rustic objects
+      about me. Instead of beginning by arranging things inside my quarters, I
+      first set about planning my walks, and there was not a path nor a copse
+      nor a grove round my cottage which I had not found out before the end of
+      the next day. The place, which was lonely rather than wild, transported me
+      in fancy to the end of the world, and no one could ever have dreamed that
+      we were only four leagues from Paris.&quot;<a name="FNanchor255"
+      id="FNanchor255"></a><a href="#Footnote_255">[255]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This rural delirium, as he justly calls it, lasted for some days, at the
+      end of which he began seriously to apply himself to work. But work was too
+      soon broken off by a mood of vehement exaltation, produced by the stimulus
+      given to all his senses by the new world of delight in which he found
+      himself. This exaltation was in a different direction from that which had
+      seized him half a dozen years before, when he had discarded the usage and
+      costume of politer<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.238"
+      id="Page_i.238">[i.238]</a></span> society, and had begun to conceive an
+      angry contempt for the manners, prejudices, and maxims of his time.
+      Restoration to a more purely sensuous atmosphere softened this austerity.
+      No longer having the vices of a great city before his eyes, he no longer
+      cherished the wrath which they had inspired in him. &quot;When I did not
+      see men, I ceased to despise them; and when I had not the bad before my
+      eyes, I ceased to hate them. My heart, little made as it is for hate, now
+      did no more than deplore their wretchedness, and made no distinction
+      between their wretchedness and their badness. This state, so much more
+      mild, if much less sublime, soon dulled the glowing enthusiasm that had
+      long transported me.&quot;<a name="FNanchor256" id="FNanchor256"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_256">[256]</a> That is to say, his nature remained for a
+      moment not exalted but fairly balanced. It was only for a moment. And in
+      studying the movements of impulse and reflection in him at this critical
+      time of his life, we are hurried rapidly from phase to phase. Once more we
+      are watching a man who lived without either intellectual or spiritual
+      direction, swayed by a reminiscence, a passing mood, a personality
+      accidentally encountered, by anything except permanent aim and fixed
+      objects, and who would at any time have surrendered the most deliberately
+      pondered scheme of persistent effort to the fascination of a cottage
+      slumbering in a bounteous landscape. Hence there could be no normally
+      composed state for him; the first soothing effect of the rich life of
+      forest and garden on a nature exasperated<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.239" id="Page_i.239">[i.239]</a></span> by the life of the
+      town passed away, and became transformed into an exaltation that swept the
+      stoic into space, leaving sensuousness to sovereign and uncontrolled
+      triumph, until the delight turned to its inevitable ashes and bitterness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At first all was pure and delicious. In after times when pain made him
+      gloomily measure the length of the night, and when fever prevented him
+      from having a moment of sleep, he used to try to still his suffering by
+      recollection of the days that he had passed in the woods of Montmorency,
+      with his dog, the birds, the deer, for his companions. &quot;As I got up
+      with the sun to watch his rising from my garden, if I saw the day was
+      going to be fine, my first wish was that neither letters nor visits might
+      come to disturb its charm. After having given the morning to divers tasks
+      which I fulfilled with all the more pleasure that I could put them off to
+      another time if I chose, I hastened to eat my dinner, so as to escape from
+      the importunate and make myself a longer afternoon. Before one o'clock,
+      even on days of fiercest heat, I used to start in the blaze of the sun,
+      along with my faithful Achates, hurrying my steps lest some one should lay
+      hold of me before I could get away. But when I had once passed a certain
+      corner, with what beating of the heart, with what radiant joy, did I begin
+      to breathe freely, as I felt myself safe and my own master for the rest of
+      the day! Then with easier pace I went in search of some wild and desert
+      spot in the forest, where there was nothing to show the hand of man,<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.240" id="Page_i.240">[i.240]</a></span> or
+      to speak of servitude and domination; some refuge where I could fancy
+      myself its discoverer, and where no inopportune third person came to
+      interfere between nature and me. She seemed to spread out before my eyes a
+      magnificence that was always new. The gold of the broom and the purple of
+      the heather struck my eyes with a glorious splendour that went to my very
+      heart; the majesty of the trees that covered me with their shadow, the
+      delicacy of the shrubs that surrounded me, the astonishing variety of
+      grasses and flowers that I trod under foot, kept my mind in a continual
+      alternation of attention and delight.... My imagination did not leave the
+      earth thus superbly arrayed without inhabitants. I formed a charming
+      society, of which I did not feel myself unworthy; I made a golden age to
+      please my own fancy, and filling up these fair days with all those scenes
+      of my life that had left sweet memories behind, and all that my heart
+      could yet desire or hope in scenes to come, I waxed tender even to
+      shedding tears over the true pleasures of humanity, pleasures so
+      delicious, so pure, and henceforth so far from the reach of men. Ah, if in
+      such moments any ideas of Paris, of the age, of my little aureole as
+      author, came to trouble my dreams, with what disdain did I drive them out,
+      to deliver myself without distraction to the exquisite sentiments of which
+      I was so full. Yet in the midst of it all, the nothingness of my chimeras
+      sometimes broke sadly upon my mind. Even if every dream had suddenly been
+      transformed into reality, it would not<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.241" id="Page_i.241">[i.241]</a></span> have been enough; I
+      should have dreamed, imagined, yearned still.&quot; Alas, this deep
+      insatiableness of sense, the dreary vacuity of soul that follows fulness
+      of animal delight, the restless exactingness of undirected imagination,
+      was never recognised by Rousseau distinctly enough to modify either his
+      conduct or his theory of life. He filled up the void for a short space by
+      that sovereign aspiration, which changed the dead bones of old theology
+      into the living figure of a new faith. &quot;From the surface of the earth
+      I raised my ideas to all the existences in nature, to the universal system
+      of things, to the incomprehensible Being who embraces all. Then with mind
+      lost in that immensity, I did not think, I did not reason, I did not
+      philosophise; with a sort of pleasure I felt overwhelmed by the weight of
+      the universe, I surrendered myself to the ravishing confusion of these
+      vast ideas. I loved to lose myself in imagination in immeasurable space;
+      within the limits of real existences my heart was too tightly compressed;
+      in the universe I was stifled; I would fain have launched myself into the
+      infinite. I believe that if I had unveiled all the mysteries of nature, I
+      should have found myself in a less delicious situation than that
+      bewildering ecstasy to which my mind so unreservedly delivered itself, and
+      which sometimes transported me until I cried out, 'O mighty Being! O
+      mighty Being!' without power of any other word or thought.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor257" id="FNanchor257"></a><a href="#Footnote_257">[257]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is not wholly insignificant that though he could<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.242" id="Page_i.242">[i.242]</a></span> thus expand his soul
+      with ejaculatory delight in something supreme, he could not endure the
+      sight of one of his fellow-creatures. &quot;If my gaiety lasted the whole
+      night, that showed that I had passed the day alone; I was very different
+      after I had seen people, for I was rarely content with others and never
+      with myself. Then in the evening I was sure to be in taciturn or scolding
+      humour.&quot; It is not in every condition that effervescent passion for
+      ideal forms of the religious imagination assists sympathy with the real
+      beings who surround us. And to this let us add that there are natures in
+      which all deep emotion is so entirely associated with the ideal, that real
+      and particular manifestations of it are repugnant to them as something
+      alien; and this without the least insincerity, though with a vicious and
+      disheartening inconsistency. Rousseau belonged to this class, and loved
+      man most when he saw men least. Bad as this was, it does not justify us in
+      denouncing his love of man as artificial; it was one side of an ideal
+      exaltation, which stirred the depths of his spirit with a force as genuine
+      as that which is kindled in natures of another type by sympathy with the
+      real and concrete, with the daily walk and conversation and actual doings
+      and sufferings of the men and women whom we know. The fermentation which
+      followed his arrival at the Hermitage, in its first form produced a number
+      of literary schemes. The idea of the Political Institutions, first
+      conceived at Venice, pressed upon his meditations. He had been earnestly
+      requested to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.243" id="Page_i.243">[i.243]</a></span>
+      compose a treatise on education. Besides this, his thoughts wandered
+      confusedly round the notion of a treatise to be called Sensitive Morality,
+      or the Materialism of the Sage, the object of which was to examine the
+      influence of external agencies, such as light, darkness, sound, seasons,
+      food, noise, silence, motion, rest, on our corporeal machine, and thus
+      indirectly upon the soul also. By knowing these and acquiring the art of
+      modifying them according to our individual needs, we should become surer
+      of ourselves and fix a deeper constancy in our lives. An external system
+      of treatment would thus be established, which would place and keep the
+      soul in the condition most favourable to virtue.<a name="FNanchor258"
+      id="FNanchor258"></a><a href="#Footnote_258">[258]</a> Though the treatise
+      was never completed, and the sketch never saw the light, we perceive at
+      least that Rousseau would have made the means of access to character wide
+      enough, and the material influences that impress it and produce its
+      caprices, multitudinous enough, instead of limiting them with the medical
+      specialist to one or two organs, and one or two of the conditions that
+      affect them. Nor, on the other hand, do the words in which he sketches his
+      project in the least justify the attribution to him of the doctrine of the
+      absolute power of the physical constitution over the moral habits, whether
+      that doctrine would be a credit or a discredit to his philosophical
+      thoroughness of perception. No one denies the influence of external
+      conditions on the moral habits, and Rousseau says no more than that he<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.244" id="Page_i.244">[i.244]</a></span>
+      proposed to consider the extent and the modifiableness of this influence.
+      It was not then deemed essential for a spiritualist thinker to ignore
+      physical organisation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A third undertaking of a more substantial sort was to arrange and edit the
+      papers and printed works of the Abb&#233; de Saint Pierre (1658-1743),
+      confided to him through the agency of Saint Lambert, and partly also of
+      Madame Dupin, the warm friend of that singular and good man.<a
+      name="FNanchor259" id="FNanchor259"></a><a href="#Footnote_259">[259]</a>
+      This task involved reading, considering, and picking extracts from
+      twenty-three diffuse and chaotic volumes, full of prolixity and
+      repetition. Rousseau, dreamer as he was, yet had quite keenness of
+      perception enough to discern the weakness of a dreamer of another sort;
+      and he soon found out that the Abb&#233; de Saint Pierre's views were
+      impracticable, in consequence of the author's fixed idea that men are
+      guided rather by their lights than by their passions. In fact, Saint
+      Pierre was penetrated with the eighteenth-century faith to a peculiar
+      degree. As with Condorcet afterwards, he was led by his admiration for the
+      extent of modern knowledge to adopt the principle that perfected reason is
+      capable of being made the base of all institutions, and would speedily
+      terminate all the great abuses of the world. &quot;He went wrong,&quot;
+      says Rousseau, &quot;not merely in having no other passion but that of
+      reason, but by insisting on making all men like himself, instead of taking
+      them as they are and as they will continue to be.&quot; The critic's own
+      error<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.245" id="Page_i.245">[i.245]</a></span>
+      in later days was not very different from this, save that it applied to
+      the medium in which men live, rather than to themselves, by refusing to
+      take complex societies as they are, even as starting-points for higher
+      attempts at organisation. Rousseau had occasionally seen the old man, and
+      he preserved the greatest veneration for his memory, speaking of him as
+      the honour of his age and race, with a fulness of enthusiasm very unusual
+      towards men, though common enough towards inanimate nature. The sincerity
+      of this respect, however, could not make the twenty-three volumes which
+      the good man had written, either fewer in number or lighter in contents,
+      and after dealing as well as he could with two important parts of Saint
+      Pierre's works, he threw up the task.<a name="FNanchor260" id="FNanchor260"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_260">[260]</a> It must not be supposed that Rousseau would
+      allow that fatigue or tedium had anything to do with a resolve which
+      really needed no better justification. As we have seen before, he had
+      amazing skill in finding a certain ingeniously contrived largeness for his
+      motives. Saint Pierre's writings were full of observations on the
+      government of France, some of them remarkably bold in their criticism, but
+      he had not been punished for them because the ministers always looked upon<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.246" id="Page_i.246">[i.246]</a></span>
+      him as a kind of preacher rather than a genuine politician, and he was
+      allowed to say what he pleased, because it was observed that no one
+      listened to what he said. Besides, he was a Frenchman, and Rousseau was
+      not, and hence the latter, in publishing Saint Pierre's strictures on
+      French affairs, was exposing himself to a sharp question why he meddled
+      with a country that did not concern him. &quot;It surprised me,&quot; says
+      Rousseau, &quot;that the reflection had not occurred to me earlier,&quot;
+      but this coincidence of the discovery that the work was imprudent, with
+      the discovery that he was weary of it, will surprise nobody versed in
+      study of a man who lives in his sensations, and yet has vanity enough to
+      dislike to admit it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The short remarks which Rousseau appended to his abridgment of Saint
+      Pierre's essays on Perpetual Peace, and on a Polysynodia, or Plurality of
+      Councils, are extremely shrewd and pointed, and would suffice to show us,
+      if there were nothing else to do so, the right kind of answer to make to
+      the more harmful dreams of the Social Contract. Saint Pierre's fault is
+      said, with entire truth, to be a failure to make his views relative to
+      men, to times, to circumstances; and there is something that startles us
+      when we think whose words we are reading, in the declaration that, &quot;whether
+      an existing government be still that of old times, or whether it have
+      insensibly undergone a change of nature, it is equally imprudent to touch
+      it: if it is the same, it must be respected, and if it has degenerated,
+      that is due to the force of time and<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.247" id="Page_i.247">[i.247]</a></span> circumstance, and
+      human sagacity is powerless.&quot; Rousseau points to France, asking his
+      readers to judge the peril of once moving by an election the enormous
+      masses comprising the French monarchy; and in another place, after a wise
+      general remark on the futility of political machinery without men of a
+      certain character, he illustrates it by this scornful question: When you
+      see all Paris in a ferment about the rank of a dancer or a wit, and the
+      affairs of the academy or the opera making everybody forget the interest
+      of the ruler and the glory of the nation, what can you hope from bringing
+      political affairs close to such a people, and removing them from the court
+      to the town?<a name="FNanchor261" id="FNanchor261"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_261">[261]</a> Indeed, there is perhaps not one of these
+      pages which Burke might not well have owned.<a name="FNanchor262"
+      id="FNanchor262"></a><a href="#Footnote_262">[262]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A violent and prolonged crisis followed this not entirely unsuccessful
+      effort after sober and laborious meditation. Rousseau was now to find that
+      if society has its perils, so too has solitude, and that if there is evil
+      in frivolous complaisance for the puppet-work of a world that is only a
+      little serious, so there is evil in a passionate tenderness for phantoms
+      of an imaginary world that is not serious at all. To the pure or stoical
+      soul the solitude of the forest is strength, but then the imagination must
+      know the yoke. Rousseau's imagination, in no way of the strongest either
+      as<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.248" id="Page_i.248">[i.248]</a></span>
+      receptive or inventive, was the free accomplice of his sensations. The
+      undisciplined force of animal sensibility gradually rose within him, like
+      a slowly welling flood. The spectacle does not either brighten or fortify
+      the student's mind, yet if there are such states, it is right that those
+      who care to speak of human nature should have an opportunity of knowing
+      its less glorious parts. They may be presumed to exist, though in less
+      violent degree, in many people whom we meet in the street and at the
+      table, and there can be nothing but danger in allowing ourselves to be so
+      narrowed by our own virtuousness, viciousness being conventionally
+      banished to the remoter region of the third person, as to forget the
+      presence of &quot;the brute brain within the man's.&quot; In Rousseau's
+      case, at any rate, it was no wicked broth nor magic potion that &quot;confused
+      the chemic labour of the blood,&quot; but the too potent wine of the
+      joyful beauty of nature herself, working misery in a mental structure that
+      no educating care nor envelope of circumstance had ever hardened against
+      her intoxication. Most of us are protected against this subtle debauch of
+      sensuous egoism by a cool organisation, while even those who are born with
+      senses and appetites of great strength and keenness, are guarded by
+      accumulated discipline of all kinds from without, especially by the
+      necessity for active industry which brings the most exaggerated native
+      sensibility into balance. It is the constant and rigorous social parade
+      which keeps the eager regiment of the senses from making furious rout.<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.249" id="Page_i.249">[i.249]</a></span>
+      Rousseau had just repudiated all social obligation, and he had never gone
+      through external discipline. He was at an age when passion that has never
+      been broken in has the beak of the bald vulture, tearing and gnawing a
+      man; but its first approach is in fair shapes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Wandering and dreaming &quot;in the sweetest season of the year, in the
+      month of June, under the fresh groves, with the song of the nightingale
+      and the soft murmuring of the brooks in his ear,&quot; he began to wonder
+      restlessly why he had never tasted in their plenitude the vivid sentiments
+      which he was conscious of possessing in reserve, or any of that
+      intoxicating delight which he felt potentially existent in his soul. Why
+      had he been created with faculties so exquisite, to be left thus unused
+      and unfruitful? The feeling of his own quality, with this of a certain
+      injustice and waste superadded, brought warm tears which he loved to let
+      flow. Visions of the past, from girl playmates of his youth down to the
+      Venetian courtesan, thronged in fluttering tumult into his brain. He saw
+      himself surrounded by a seraglio of houris whom he had known, until his
+      blood was all aflame and his head in a whirl. His imagination was kindled
+      into deadly activity. &quot;The impossibility of reaching to the real
+      beings plunged me into the land of chimera; and seeing nothing actual that
+      rose to the height of my delirium, I nourished it in an ideal world, which
+      my creative imagination had soon peopled with beings after my heart's
+      desire. In my continual ecstasies, I<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.250" id="Page_i.250">[i.250]</a></span> made myself drunk
+      with torrents of the most delicious sentiments that ever entered the heart
+      of man. Forgetting absolutely the whole human race, I invented for myself
+      societies of perfect creatures, as heavenly for their virtues as their
+      beauties; sure, tender, faithful friends, such as I never found in our
+      nether world. I had such a passion for haunting this empyrean with all its
+      charming objects, that I passed hours and days in it without counting them
+      as they went by; and losing recollection of everything else, I had hardly
+      swallowed a morsel in hot haste, before I began to burn to run off in
+      search of my beloved groves. If, when I was ready to start for the
+      enchanted world, I saw unhappy mortals coming to detain me on the dull
+      earth, I could neither moderate nor hide my spleen, and, no longer master
+      over myself, I used to give them greeting so rough that it might well be
+      called brutal.&quot;<a name="FNanchor263" id="FNanchor263"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_263">[263]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This terrific malady was something of a very different kind from the
+      tranquil sensuousness of the days in Savoy, when the blood was young, and
+      life was not complicated with memories, and the sweet freshness of nature
+      made existence enough. Then his supreme expansion had been attended with a
+      kind of divine repose, and had found edifying voice in devout
+      acknowledgment in the exhilaration of the morning air of the goodness and
+      bounty of a beneficent master. In this later and more pitiable time the
+      beneficent master hid himself, and creation was<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.251" id="Page_i.251">[i.251]</a></span> only not a blank
+      because it was veiled by troops of sirens not in the flesh. Nature without
+      the association of some living human object, like Madame de Warens, was a
+      poison to Rousseau, until the advancing years which slowly brought decay
+      of sensual force thus brought the antidote. At our present point we see
+      one stricken with an ugly disease. It was almost mercy when he was laid up
+      with a sharp attack of the more painful, but far less absorbing and
+      frightful disorder, to which Rousseau was subject all his life long. It
+      gave pause to what he misnames his angelic loves. &quot;Besides that one
+      can hardly think of love when suffering anguish, my imagination, which is
+      animated by the country and under the trees, languishes and dies in a room
+      and under roof-beams.&quot; This interval he employed with some
+      magnanimity, in vindicating the ways and economy of Providence, in the
+      letter to Voltaire which we shall presently examine. The moment he could
+      get out of doors again into the forest, the transport returned, but this
+      time accompanied with an active effort in the creative faculties of his
+      mind to bring the natural relief to these over-wrought paroxysms of
+      sensual imagination. He soothed his emotions by associating them with the
+      life of personages whom he invented, and by introducing into them that
+      play and movement and changing relation which prevented them from bringing
+      his days to an end in malodorous fever. The egoism of persistent invention
+      and composition was at least better than the egoism of mere unreflecting
+      ecstasy<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.252" id="Page_i.252">[i.252]</a></span>
+      in the charm of natural objects, and took off something from the violent
+      excess of sensuous force. His thought became absorbed in two female
+      figures, one dark and the other fair, one sage and the other yielding, one
+      gentle and the other quick, analogous in character but different, not
+      handsome but animated by cheerfulness and feeling. To one of these he gave
+      a lover, to whom the other was a tender friend. He planted them all, after
+      much deliberation and some changes, on the shores of his beloved lake at
+      Vevay, the spot where his benefactress was born, and which he always
+      thought the richest and loveliest in all Europe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This vicarious or reflected egoism, accompanied as it was by a certain
+      amount of productive energy, seemed to mark a return to a sort of moral
+      convalescence. He walked about the groves with pencil and tablets,
+      assigning this or that thought or expression to one or other of the three
+      companions of his fancy. When the bad weather set in, and he was confined
+      to the house (the winter of 1756-7), he tried to resume his ordinary
+      indoor labour, the copying of music and the compilation of his Musical
+      Dictionary. To his amazement he found that this was no longer possible.
+      The fever of that literary composition of which he had always such dread
+      had strong possession of him. He could see nothing on any side but the
+      three figures and the objects about them made beautiful by his
+      imagination. Though he tried hard to dismiss them, his resistance was
+      vain, and he set<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.253" id="Page_i.253">[i.253]</a></span>
+      himself to bringing some order into his thoughts &quot;so as to produce a
+      kind of romance.&quot; We have a glimpse of his mental state in the odd
+      detail, that he could not bear to write his romance on anything but the
+      very finest paper with gilt edges; that the powder with which he dried the
+      ink was of azure and sparkling silver; and that he tied up the quires with
+      delicate blue riband.<a name="FNanchor264" id="FNanchor264"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_264">[264]</a> The distance from all this to the state of
+      nature is obviously very great indeed. It must not be supposed that he
+      forgot his older part as Cato, Brutus, and the other Plutarchians. &quot;My
+      great embarrassment,&quot; he says honestly, &quot;was that I should belie
+      myself so clearly and thoroughly. After the severe principles I had just
+      been laying down with so much bustle, after the austere maxims I had
+      preached so energetically, after so many biting invectives against the
+      effeminate books that breathed love and soft delights, could anything be
+      imagined more shocking, more unlooked-for, than to see me inscribe myself
+      with my own hand among the very authors on whose books I had heaped this
+      harsh censure? I felt this inconsequence in all its force, I taxed myself
+      with it, I blushed over it, and was overcome with mortification; but
+      nothing could restore me to reason.&quot;<a name="FNanchor265"
+      id="FNanchor265"></a><a href="#Footnote_265">[265]</a> He adds that
+      perhaps on the whole the composition of the New Helo&#239;sa was turning
+      his madness to the best account. That may be true, but does not all this
+      make the bitter denunciation, in the Letter to D'Alembert, of love and of
+      all who make its repre<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.254"
+      id="Page_i.254">[i.254]</a></span>sentation a considerable element in
+      literature or the drama, at the very time when he was composing one of the
+      most dangerously attractive romances of his century, a rather indecent
+      piece of invective? We may forgive inconsistency when it is only between
+      two of a man's theories, or two self-concerning parts of his conduct, but
+      hardly when it takes the form of reviling in others what the reviler
+      indulgently permits to himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We are more edified by the energy with which Rousseau refused connivance
+      with the public outrages on morality perpetrated by a patron. M. d'Epinay
+      went to pay him a visit at the Hermitage, taking with him two ladies with
+      whom his relations were less than equivocal, and for whom among other
+      things he had given Rousseau music to copy. &quot;They were curious to see
+      the eccentric man,&quot; as M. d'Epinay afterwards told his scandalised
+      wife, for it was in the manners of the day on no account to parade even
+      the most notorious of these unblessed connections. &quot;He was walking in
+      front of the door; he saw me first; he advanced cap in hand; he saw the
+      ladies; he saluted us, put on his cap, turned his back, and stalked off as
+      fast as he could. Can anything be more mad?&quot;<a name="FNanchor266"
+      id="FNanchor266"></a><a href="#Footnote_266">[266]</a> In the miserable
+      and intricate tangle of falsity, weakness, sensuality, and quarrel, which
+      make up this chapter in Rousseau's life, we are glad of even one trait of
+      masculine robustness. We should perhaps be still more glad if the unwedded
+      Theresa were not visible in the background of this scene of high morals.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.255" id="Page_i.255">[i.255]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      II.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      The New Helo&#239;sa was not to be completed without a further extension
+      of morbid experience of a still more burning kind than the sufferings of
+      compressed passion. The feverish torment of mere visions of the air
+      swarming impalpable in all his veins, was replaced when the earth again
+      began to live and the sap to stir in plants, by the more concentred fire
+      of a consuming passion for one who was no dryad nor figure of a dream. In
+      the spring of 1757 he received a visit from Madame d'Houdetot, the
+      sister-in-law of Madame d'Epinay.<a name="FNanchor267" id="FNanchor267"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_267">[267]</a> Her husband had gone to the war (we are in
+      the year of Rossbach), and so had her lover, Saint Lambert, whose passion
+      had been so fatal to Voltaire's Marquise du Ch&#226;telet eight years
+      before. She rode over in man's guise to the Hermitage from a house not
+      very far off, where she was to pass her retreat during the absence of her
+      two natural protectors. Rousseau had seen her before on various occasions;
+      she had been to the Hermitage the previous year, and had partaken of its
+      host's homely fare.<a name="FNanchor268" id="FNanchor268"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_268">[268]</a> But the time was not ripe; the<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.256" id="Page_i.256">[i.256]</a></span>
+      force of a temptation is not from without but within. Much, too, depended
+      with our hermit on the temperature; one who would have been a very
+      ordinary mortal to him in cold and rain, might grow to Aphrodite herself
+      in days when the sun shone hot and the air was aromatic. His fancy was
+      suddenly struck with the romantic guise of the female cavalier, and this
+      was the first onset of a veritable intoxication, which many men have felt,
+      but which no man before or since ever invited the world to hear the story
+      of. He may truly say that after the first interview with her in this
+      disastrous spring, he was as one who had thirstily drained a poisoned
+      bowl. A sort of palsy struck him. He lay weeping in his bed at night, and
+      on days when he did not see the sorceress he wept in the woods.<a
+      name="FNanchor269" id="FNanchor269"></a><a href="#Footnote_269">[269]</a>
+      He talked to himself for hours, and was of a black humour to his
+      house-mates. When approaching the object of this deadly fascination, his
+      whole organisation seemed to be dissolved. He walked in a dream that
+      filled him with a sense of sickly torture, commixed with sicklier delight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      People speak with precisely marked division of mind and body, of will,
+      emotion, understanding; the division is good in logic, but its convenient
+      lines are lost to us as we watch a being with soul all blurred, body all
+      shaken, unstrung, poisoned, by erotic mania, rising in slow clouds of
+      mephitic steam from suddenly heated stagnancies of the blood, and turning
+      the reality of conduct and duty into distant unmeaning<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.257" id="Page_i.257">[i.257]</a></span> shadows. If such a
+      disease were the furious mood of the brute in spring-time, it would be
+      less dreadful, but shame and remorse in the ever-struggling reason of man
+      or woman in the grip of the foul thing, produces an aggravation of frenzy
+      that makes the mental healer tremble. Add to all this lurking elements of
+      hollow rage that his passion was not returned; of stealthy jealousy of the
+      younger man whose place he could not take, and who was his friend besides;
+      of suspicion that he was a little despised for his weakness by the very
+      object of it, who saw that his hairs were sprinkled with gray,&#8212;and
+      the whole offers a scene of moral humiliation that half sickens, half
+      appals, and we turn away with dismay as from a vision of the horrid loves
+      of heavy-eyed and scaly shapes that haunted the warm primeval ooze.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Madame d'Houdetot, the unwilling enchantress bearing in an unconscious
+      hand the cup of defilement, was not strikingly singular either in physical
+      or mental attraction. She was now seven-and-twenty. Small-pox, the
+      terrible plague of the country, had pitted her face and given a yellowish
+      tinge to her complexion; her features were clumsy and her brow low; she
+      was short-sighted, and in old age at any rate was afflicted by an
+      excessive squint. This homeliness was redeemed by a gentle and caressing
+      expression, and by a sincerity, a gaiety of heart, and free sprightliness
+      of manner, that no trouble could restrain. Her figure was very slight, and
+      there was in all her movements at once awkwardness and grace. She was<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.258" id="Page_i.258">[i.258]</a></span>
+      natural and simple, and had a fairly good judgment of a modest kind, in
+      spite of the wild sallies in which her spirits sometimes found vent.
+      Capable of chagrin, she was never prevented by it from yielding to any
+      impulse of mirth. &quot;She weeps with the best faith in the world, and
+      breaks out laughing at the same moment; never was anybody so happily born,&quot;
+      says her much less amiable sister-in-law.<a name="FNanchor270"
+      id="FNanchor270"></a><a href="#Footnote_270">[270]</a> Her husband was
+      indifferent to her. He preserved an attachment to a lady whom he knew
+      before his marriage, whose society he never ceased to frequent, and who
+      finally died in his arms in 1793. Madame d'Houdetot found consolation in
+      the friendship of Saint Lambert. &quot;We both of us,&quot; said her
+      husband, &quot;both Madame d'Houdetot and I, had a vocation for fidelity,
+      only there was a mis-arrangement.&quot; She occasionally composed verses
+      of more than ordinary point, but she had good sense enough not to write
+      them down, nor to set up on the strength of them for poetess and wit.<a
+      name="FNanchor271" id="FNanchor271"></a><a href="#Footnote_271">[271]</a>
+      Her talk in her later years, and she lived down to the year of Leipsic,
+      preserved the pointed sententiousness of earlier time. One day, for
+      instance, in the era of the Directory, a conversation was going on as to
+      the various merits and defects of women; she heard much, and then with her
+      accustomed suavity of voice contributed this light summary:&#8212;&quot;Without<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.259" id="Page_i.259">[i.259]</a></span>
+      women, the life of man would be without aid at the beginning, without
+      pleasure in the middle, and without solace at the end.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor272" id="FNanchor272"></a><a href="#Footnote_272">[272]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We may be sure that it was not her power of saying things of this sort
+      that kindled Rousseau's flame, but rather the sprightly naturalness,
+      frankness, and kindly softness of a character which in his opinion united
+      every virtue except prudence and strength, the two which Rousseau would be
+      least likely to miss. The bond of union between them was subtle. She found
+      in Rousseau a sympathetic listener while she told the story of her passion
+      for Saint Lambert, and a certain contagious force produced in him a thrill
+      which he never felt with any one else before or after. Thus, as he says,
+      there was equally love on both sides, though it was not reciprocal. &quot;We
+      were both of us intoxicated with passion, she for her lover, I for her;
+      our sighs and sweet tears mingled. Tender confidants, each of the other,
+      our sentiments were of such close kin that it was impossible for them not
+      to mix; and still she never forgot her duty for a moment, while for
+      myself, I protest, I swear, that if sometimes drawn astray by my senses,
+      still&quot;&#8212;still he was a paragon of virtue, subject to rather new
+      definition. We can appreciate the author of the New Helo&#239;sa; we can
+      appreciate the author of Emilius; but this strained attempt to confound
+      those two very different persons by combining tearful erotics with<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.260" id="Page_i.260">[i.260]</a></span>
+      high ethics, is an exhibition of self-delusion that the most patient
+      analyst of human nature might well find hard to suffer. &quot;The duty of
+      privation exalted my soul. The glory of all the virtues adorned the idol
+      of my heart in my sight; to soil its divine image would have been to
+      annihilate it,&quot; and so forth.<a name="FNanchor273" id="FNanchor273"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_273">[273]</a> Moon-lighted landscape gave a background
+      for the sentimentalist's picture, and dim groves, murmuring cascades, and
+      the soft rustle of the night air, made up a scene which became for its
+      chief actor &quot;an immortal memory of innocence and delight.&quot;
+      &quot;It was in this grove, seated with her on a grassy bank, under an
+      acacia heavy with flowers, that I found expression for the emotions of my
+      heart in words that were worthy of them. 'Twas the first and single time
+      of my life; but I was sublime, if you can use the word of all the tender
+      and seductive things that the most glowing love can bring into the heart
+      of a man. What intoxicating tears I shed at her knees, what floods she
+      shed in spite of herself! At length in an involuntary transport, she cried
+      out, 'Never was man so tender, never did man love as you do! But your
+      friend Saint Lambert hears us, and my heart cannot love twice.'&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor274" id="FNanchor274"></a><a href="#Footnote_274">[274]</a>
+      Happily, as we learn from another source, a breath of wholesome life from
+      without brought the transcendental to grotesque end. In the climax of
+      tears and protestations, an honest waggoner at the other side of the park
+      wall, urging<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.261" id="Page_i.261">[i.261]</a></span>
+      on a lagging beast launched a round and far-sounding oath out into the
+      silent night. Madame d'Houdetot answered with a lively continuous peal of
+      young laughter, while an angry chill brought back the discomfited lover
+      from an ecstasy that was very full of peril.<a name="FNanchor275"
+      id="FNanchor275"></a><a href="#Footnote_275">[275]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rousseau wrote in the New Helo&#239;sa very sagely that you should grant
+      to the senses nothing when you mean to refuse them anything. He admits
+      that the saying was falsified by his relations with Madame d'Houdetot.
+      Clearly the credit of this happy falsification was due to her rather than
+      to himself. What her feelings were, it is not very easy to see. Honest
+      pity seems to have been the strongest of them. She was idle and
+      unoccupied, and idleness leaves the soul open for much stray generosity of
+      emotion, even towards an importunate lover. She thought him mad, and she
+      wrote to Saint Lambert to say so. &quot;His madness must be very strong,&quot;
+      said Saint Lambert, &quot;since she can perceive it.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor276" id="FNanchor276"></a><a href="#Footnote_276">[276]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Character is ceaselessly marching, even when we seem to have sunk into a
+      fixed and stagnant mood. The man is awakened from his dream of passion by
+      inexorable event; he finds the house of the soul not swept and garnished
+      for a new life, but possessed by demons who have entered unseen. In short,
+      such profound disorder of spirit, though in its first stage marked by
+      ravishing delirium, never escapes a bitter<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.262" id="Page_i.262">[i.262]</a></span> sequel. When a man
+      lets his soul be swept away from the narrow track of conduct appointed by
+      his relations with others, still the reality of such relations survives.
+      He may retreat to rural lodges; that will not save him either from his own
+      passion, or from some degree of that kinship with others which instantly
+      creates right and wrong like a wall of brass around him. Let it be
+      observed that the natures of finest stuff suffer most from these forced
+      reactions, and it was just because Rousseau had innate moral
+      sensitiveness, and a man like Diderot was without it, that the first felt
+      his fall so profoundly, while the second was unconscious of having fallen
+      at all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One day in July Rousseau went to pay his accustomed visit. He found Madame
+      d'Houdetot dejected, and with the flush of recent weeping on her cheeks. A
+      bird of the air had carried the matter. As usual, the matter was carried
+      wrongly, and apparently all that Saint Lambert suspected was that
+      Rousseau's high principles had persuaded Madame d'Houdetot of the
+      viciousness of her relations with her lover.<a name="FNanchor277"
+      id="FNanchor277"></a><a href="#Footnote_277">[277]</a> &quot;They have
+      played us an evil turn,&quot; cried Madame d'Houdetot; &quot;they have
+      been unjust to me, but that is no matter. Either let us break off at once,
+      or be what you ought to be.&quot;<a name="FNanchor278" id="FNanchor278"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_278">[278]</a> This was Rousseau's first<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.263" id="Page_i.263">[i.263]</a></span>
+      taste of the ashes of shame into which the lusciousness of such forbidden
+      fruit, plucked at the expense of others, is ever apt to be transformed.
+      Mortification of the considerable spiritual pride that was yet alive after
+      this lapse, was a strong element in the sum of his emotion, and it was
+      pointed by the reflection which stung him so incessantly, that his
+      monitress was younger than himself. He could never master his own contempt
+      for the gallantry of grizzled locks.<a name="FNanchor279" id="FNanchor279"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_279">[279]</a> His austerer self might at any rate have
+      been consoled by knowing that this scene was the beginning of the end,
+      though the end came without any seeking on his part and without violence.
+      To his amazement, one day Saint Lambert and Madame d'Houdetot came to the
+      Hermitage, asking him to give them dinner, and much to the credit of human
+      nature's elasticity, the three passed a delightful afternoon. The wronged
+      lover was friendly, though a little stiff, and he passed occasional
+      slights which Rousseau would surely not have forgiven, if he had not been
+      disarmed by consciousness of guilt. He fell asleep, as we can well imagine
+      that he might do, while Rousseau read aloud his very inadequate
+      justification of Providence against Voltaire.<a name="FNanchor280"
+      id="FNanchor280"></a><a href="#Footnote_280">[280]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In time he returned to the army, and Rousseau began to cure himself of his
+      mad passion. His method, however, was not unsuspicious, for it in<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.264" id="Page_i.264">[i.264]</a></span>volved
+      the perilous assistance of Madame d'Houdetot. Fortunately her loyalty and
+      good sense forced a more resolute mode upon him. He found, or thought he
+      found her distracted, emharrassed, indifferent. In despair at not being
+      allowed to heal his passionate malady in his own fashion, he did the most
+      singular thing that he could have done under the circumstances. He wrote
+      to Saint Lambert.<a name="FNanchor281" id="FNanchor281"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_281">[281]</a> His letter is a prodigy of plausible
+      duplicity, though Rousseau in some of his mental states had so little
+      sense of the difference between the actual and the imaginary, and was
+      moreover so swiftly borne away on a flood of fine phrases, that it is hard
+      to decide how far this was voluntary, and how far he was his own dupe.
+      Voluntary or not, it is detestable. We pass the false whine about &quot;being
+      abandoned by all that was dear to him,&quot; as if he had not deliberately
+      quitted Paris against the remonstrance of every friend he had; about his
+      being &quot;solitary and sad,&quot; as if he was not ready at this very
+      time to curse any one who intruded on his solitude, and hindered him of a
+      single half-hour in the desert spots that he adored. Remembering the
+      scenes in moon-lighted groves and elsewhere, we read this:&#8212;&quot;Whence
+      comes her coldness to me? Is it possible that you can have suspected me of
+      wronging you with her, and of turning perfidious in consequence of an
+      unseasonably rigorous virtue? A passage in one of your letters shows a
+      glimpse of some such suspicion. No, no, Saint Lambert, the breast of J.J.
+      Rousseau never<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.265" id="Page_i.265">[i.265]</a></span>
+      held the heart of a traitor, and I should despise myself more than you
+      suppose, if I had ever tried to rob you of her heart.... Can you suspect
+      that her friendship for me may hurt her love for you? Surely natures
+      endowed with sensibility are open to all sorts of affections, and no
+      sentiment can spring up in them which does not turn to the advantage of
+      the dominant passion. Where is the lover who does not wax the more tender
+      as he talks to his friend of her whom he loves? And is it not sweeter for
+      you in your banishment that there should be some sympathetic creature to
+      whom your mistress loves to talk of you, and who loves to hear?&quot;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Let us turn to another side of his correspondence. The way in which the
+      sympathetic creature in the present case loved to hear his friend's
+      mistress talk of him, is interestingly shown in one or two passages from a
+      letter to her; as when he cries, &quot;Ah, how proud would even thy lover
+      himself be of thy constancy, if he only knew how much it has
+      surmounted.... I appeal to your sincerity. You, the witness and the cause
+      of this delirium, these tears, these ravishing ecstasies, these transports
+      which were never made for mortal, say, have I ever tasted your favours in
+      such a way that I deserve to lose them?... Never once did my ardent
+      desires nor my tender supplications dare to solicit supreme happiness,
+      without my feeling stopped by the inner cries of a sorrow-stricken
+      soul.... O Sophie, after moments so sweet, the idea of eternal privation
+      is too frightful for one who groans<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.266" id="Page_i.266">[i.266]</a></span> that he cannot
+      identify himself with thee. What, are thy tender eyes never again to be
+      lowered with a delicious modesty, intoxicating me with pleasure? What, are
+      my burning lips never again to lay my very soul on thy heart along with my
+      kisses? What, may I never more feel that heavenly shudder, that rapid and
+      devouring fire, swifter than lightning?&quot;<a name="FNanchor282"
+      id="FNanchor282"></a><a href="#Footnote_282">[282]</a>.... We see a
+      sympathetic creature assuredly, and listen to the voice of a nature
+      endowed with sensibility even more than enough, but with decency, loyalty,
+      above all with self-knowledge, far less than enough.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One more touch completes the picture of the fallen desperate man. He takes
+      great trouble to persuade Saint Lambert that though the rigour of his
+      principles constrains him to frown upon such breaches of social law as the
+      relations between Madame d'Houdetot and her lover, yet he is so attached
+      to the sinful pair that he half forgives them. &quot;Do not suppose,&quot;
+      he says, with superlative gravity, &quot;that you have seduced me by your
+      reasons; I see in them the goodness of your heart, not your justification.
+      I cannot help blaming your connection: you can hardly approve it yourself;
+      and so long as you both of you continue dear to me, I will never leave you
+      in careless security as to the innocence of your state. Yet love such as
+      yours deserves considerateness.... I feel respect for a union so tender,
+      and cannot bring myself to attempt to lead it to virtue along the path of
+      despair&quot; (p. 401).
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.267" id="Page_i.267">[i.267]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ignorance of the facts of the case hindered Saint Lambert from
+      appreciating the strange irony of a man protesting about leading to virtue
+      along the path of despair a poor woman whom he had done as much as he
+      could to lead to vice along the path of highly stimulated sense. Saint
+      Lambert was as much a sentimentalist as Rousseau was, but he had a certain
+      manliness, acquired by long contact with men, which his correspondent only
+      felt in moods of severe exaltation. Saint Lambert took all the blame on
+      himself. He had desired that his mistress and his friend should love one
+      another; then he thought he saw some coolness in his mistress, and he set
+      the change down to his friend, though not on the true grounds. &quot;Do
+      not suppose that I thought you perfidious or a traitor; I knew the
+      austerity of your principles; people had spoken to me of it; and she
+      herself did so with a respect that love found hard to bear.&quot; In
+      short, he had suspected Rousseau of nothing worse than being
+      over-virtuous, and trying in the interest of virtue to break off a
+      connection sanctioned by contemporary manners, but not by law or religion.
+      If Madame d'Houdetot had changed, it was not that she had ceased to honour
+      her good friend, but only that her lover might be spared a certain
+      chagrin, from suspecting the excess of scrupulosity and conscience in so
+      austere an adviser.<a name="FNanchor283" id="FNanchor283"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_283">[283]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is well known how effectively one with a germ<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.268" id="Page_i.268">[i.268]</a></span> of good principle in
+      him is braced by being thought better than he is. With this letter in his
+      hands and its words in his mind, Rousseau strode off for his last
+      interview with Madame d'Houdetot. Had Saint Lambert, he says, been less
+      wise, less generous, less worthy, I should have been a lost man. As it
+      was, he passed four or five hours with her in a delicious calm, infinitely
+      more delightful than the accesses of burning fever which had seized him
+      before. They formed the project of a close companionship of three,
+      including the absent lover; and they counted on the project coming more
+      true than such designs usually do, &quot;since all the feelings that can
+      unite sensitive and upright hearts formed the foundation of it, and we
+      three united talents enough as well as knowledge enough to suffice to
+      ourselves, without need of aid or supplement from others.&quot; What
+      happened was this. Madame d'Houdetot for the next three or four months,
+      which were among the most bitter in Rousseau's life, for then the
+      bitterness which became chronic was new and therefore harder to be borne,
+      wrote him the wisest, most affectionate, and most considerate letters that
+      a sincere and sensible woman ever wrote to the most petulant, suspicious,
+      perverse, and irrestrainable of men. For patience and exquisite sweetness
+      of friendship some of these letters are matchless, and we can only
+      conjecture the wearing querulousness of the letters to which they were
+      replies. If through no fault of her own she had been the occasion of the
+      monstrous delirium of which he never shook off the<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.269" id="Page_i.269">[i.269]</a></span> consequences, at
+      least this good soul did all that wise counsel and grave tenderness could
+      do, to bring him out of the black slough of suspicion and despair into
+      which he was plunged.<a name="FNanchor284" id="FNanchor284"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_284">[284]</a> In the beginning of 1758 there was a
+      change. Rousseau's passion for her somehow became known to all the world;
+      it reached the ears of Saint Lambert, and was the cause of a passing
+      disturbance between him and his mistress. Saint Lambert throughout acted
+      like a man who is thoroughly master of himself. At first, we learn, he
+      ceased for a moment to see in Rousseau the virtue which he sought in him,
+      and which he was persuaded that he found in him. &quot;Since then,
+      however,&quot; wrote Madame d'Houdetot, &quot;he pities you more for your
+      weakness than he reproaches you, and we are both of us far from joining
+      the people who wish to blacken your character; we have and always shall
+      have the courage to speak of you with esteem.&quot;<a name="FNanchor285"
+      id="FNanchor285"></a><a href="#Footnote_285">[285]</a> They saw one
+      another a few times, and on one occasion the Count and Countess
+      d'Houdetot, Saint Lambert, and Rousseau all sat at table together, happily
+      without breach of the peace.<a name="FNanchor286" id="FNanchor286"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_286">[286]</a> One curious thing about this meeting was
+      that it took place some three weeks after Rousseau and Saint Lambert had
+      interchanged letters on the subject of the quarrel with Diderot, in which
+      each promised the other contemptuous oblivion.<a name="FNanchor287"
+      id="FNanchor287"></a><a href="#Footnote_287">[287]</a> Per<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.270" id="Page_i.270">[i.270]</a></span>petuity
+      of hate is as hard as perpetuity of love for our poor short-spanned
+      characters, and at length the three who were once to have lived together
+      in self-sufficing union, and then in their next mood to have forgotten one
+      another instantly and for ever, held to neither of the extremes, but
+      settled down into an easier middle path of indifferent good-will. The
+      conduct of all three, said the most famous of them, may serve for an
+      example of the way in which sensible people separate, when it no longer
+      suits them to see one another.<a name="FNanchor288" id="FNanchor288"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_288">[288]</a> It is at least certain that in them
+      Rousseau lost two of the most unimpeachably good friends that he ever
+      possessed.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      III.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      The egoistic character that loves to brood and hates to act, is big with
+      catastrophe. We have now to see how the inevitable law accomplished itself
+      in the case of Rousseau. In many this brooding egoism produces a silent
+      and melancholy insanity; with him it was developed into something of
+      acridly corrosive quality. One of the agents in this disastrous process
+      was the wearing torture of one of the most painful of disorders. This
+      disorder, arising from an internal malformation, harassed him from his
+      infancy to the day of his death. Our fatuous persistency in reducing man
+      to the spiritual, blinds the biographer to the circumstance that the
+      history of a life is the history of<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.271" id="Page_i.271">[i.271]</a></span> a body no less than
+      that of a soul. Many a piece of conduct that divides the world into two
+      factions of moral assailants and moral vindicators, provoking a thousand
+      ingenuities of ethical or psychological analysis, ought really to have
+      been nothing more than an item in a page of a pathologist's case-book. We
+      are not to suspend our judgment on action; right and wrong can depend on
+      no man's malformations. In trying to know the actor, it is otherwise; here
+      it is folly to underestimate the physical antecedents of mental phenomena.
+      In firm and lofty character, pain is mastered; in a character so little
+      endowed with cool tenacious strength as Rousseau's, pain such as he
+      endured was enough to account, not for his unsociality, which flowed from
+      temperament, but for the bitter, irritable, and suspicious form which this
+      unsociality now first assumed. Rousseau was never a saintly nature, but
+      far the reverse, and in reading the tedious tale of his quarrels with
+      Grimm and Madame d'Epinay and Diderot&#8212;a tale of labyrinthine
+      nightmares&#8212;let us remember that we may even to this point explain
+      what happened, without recourse to the too facile theory of insanity,
+      unless one defines that misused term so widely as to make many sane people
+      very uncomfortable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His own account was this: &quot;In my quality of solitary, I am more
+      sensitive than another; if I am wrong with a friend who lives in the
+      world, he thinks of it for a moment, and then a thousand distractions make
+      him forget it for the rest of the day; but there<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.272" id="Page_i.272">[i.272]</a></span> is nothing to
+      distract me as to his wrong towards me; deprived of my sleep, I busy
+      myself with him all night long; solitary in my walks, I busy myself with
+      him from sunrise until sunset; my heart has not an instant's relief, and
+      the harshness of a friend gives me in one day years of anguish. In my
+      quality of invalid, I have a title to the considerateness that humanity
+      owes to the weakness or irritation of a man in agony. Who is the friend,
+      who is the good man, that ought not to dread to add affliction to an
+      unfortunate wretch tormented with a painful and incurable malady?&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor289" id="FNanchor289"></a><a href="#Footnote_289">[289]</a>
+      We need not accept this as an adequate extenuation of perversities, but it
+      explains them without recourse to the theory of uncontrollable insanity.
+      Insanity came later, the product of intellectual excitation, public
+      persecution, and moral reaction after prolonged tension. Meanwhile he may
+      well be judged by the standards of the sane; knowing his temperament, his
+      previous history, his circumstances, we have no difficulty in accounting
+      for his conduct. Least of all is there any need for laying all the blame
+      upon his friends. There are writers whom enthusiasm for the principles of
+      Jean Jacques has driven into fanatical denigration of every one whom he
+      called his enemy, that is to say, nearly every one whom he ever knew.<a
+      name="FNanchor290" id="FNanchor290"></a><a href="#Footnote_290">[290]</a>
+      Diderot said well, &quot;Too many<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.273"
+      id="Page_i.273">[i.273]</a></span> honest people would be wrong, if Jean
+      Jacques were right.&quot;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The first downright breach was with Grimm, but there were angry passages
+      during the year 1757, not only with him, but with Diderot and Madame
+      d'Epinay as well. Diderot, like many other men of energetic nature
+      unchastened by worldly wisdom, was too interested in everything that
+      attracted his attention to keep silence over the indiscretion of a friend.
+      He threw as much tenacity and zeal into a trifle, if it had once struck
+      him, as he did into the Encyclop&#230;dia. We have already seen how warmly
+      he rated Jean Jacques for missing the court pension. Then he scolded and
+      laughed at him for turning hermit. With still more seriousness he
+      remonstrated with him for remaining in the country through the winter,
+      thus endangering the life of Theresa's aged mother. This stirred up hot
+      anger in the Hermitage, and two or three bitter letters were interchanged,<a
+      name="FNanchor291" id="FNanchor291"></a><a href="#Footnote_291">[291]</a>
+      those of Diderot being pronounced by a person who was no partisan of
+      Rousseau decidedly too harsh.<a name="FNanchor292" id="FNanchor292"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_292">[292]</a> Yet there is copious warmth of friendship
+      in these very letters, if only the man to whom they were written had not
+      hated interference in his affairs as the worst of injuries. &quot;I loved
+      Diderot tenderly, I esteemed him sincerely,&quot; says Rousseau, &quot;and
+      I counted with entire confidence<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.274"
+      id="Page_i.274">[i.274]</a></span> upon the same sentiments in him. But
+      worn out by his unwearied obstinacy in everlastingly thwarting my tastes,
+      my inclinations, my ways of living, everything that concerned myself only;
+      revolted at seeing a younger man than myself insist with all his might on
+      governing me like a child; chilled by his readiness in giving his promise
+      and his negligence in keeping it; tired of so many appointments which he
+      made and broke, and of his fancy for repairing them by new ones to be
+      broken in their turn; provoked at waiting for him to no purpose three or
+      four times a month on days which he had fixed, and of dining alone in the
+      evening, after going on as far as St. Denis to meet him and waiting for
+      him all day,&#8212;I had my heart already full of a multitude of
+      grievances.&quot;<a name="FNanchor293" id="FNanchor293"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_293">[293]</a> This irritation subsided in presence of the
+      storms that now rose up against Diderot. He was in the thick of the
+      dangerous and mortifying distractions stirred up by the foes of the
+      Encyclop&#230;dia. Rousseau in friendly sympathy went to see him; they
+      embraced, and old wrongs were forgotten until new arose.<a
+      name="FNanchor294" id="FNanchor294"></a><a href="#Footnote_294">[294]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is a less rose-coloured account than this. Madame d'Epinay assigns
+      two motives to Rousseau: a desire to find an excuse for going to Paris, in
+      order to avoid seeing Saint Lambert; secondly, a wish to hear Diderot's
+      opinion of the two first parts of the New Helo&#239;sa. She says that he
+      wanted to borrow a portfolio in which to carry the manuscripts to Paris;<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.275" id="Page_i.275">[i.275]</a></span>
+      Rousseau says that they had already been in Diderot's possession for six
+      months.<a name="FNanchor295" id="FNanchor295"></a><a href="#Footnote_295">[295]</a>
+      As her letters containing this very circumstantial story were written at
+      the moment, it is difficult to uphold the Confessions as valid authority
+      against them. Thirdly, Rousseau told her that he had not taken his
+      manuscripts to Paris (p. 302), whereas Grimm writing a few days later (p.
+      309) mentions that he has received a letter from Diderot, to the effect
+      that Rousseau's visit had no other object than the revision of these
+      manuscripts. The scene is characteristic. &quot;Rousseau kept him
+      pitilessly at work from Saturday at ten o'clock in the morning till eleven
+      at night on Monday, hardly giving him time to eat and drink. The revision
+      at an end, Diderot chats with him about a plan he has in his head, and
+      begs Rousseau to help him in contriving some incident which he cannot yet
+      arrange to his taste. 'It is too difficult,' replies the hermit coldly,
+      'it is late, and I am not used to sitting up. Good night; I am off at six
+      in the morning, and 'tis time for bed.' He rises from his chair, goes to
+      bed, and leaves Diderot petrified at his behaviour. The day of his
+      departure, Diderot's wife saw that her husband was in bad spirits, and
+      asked the reason. 'It is that man's want of delicacy,' he replied, 'which
+      afflicts me; he makes me work like a slave, but I should never have found
+      that out, if he had not so drily<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.276"
+      id="Page_i.276">[i.276]</a></span> refused to take an interest in me for a
+      quarter of an hour.' 'You are surprised at that,' his wife answered; 'do
+      you not know him? He is devoured with envy; he goes wild with rage when
+      anything fine appears that is not his own. You will see him one day commit
+      some great crime rather than let himself be ignored. I declare I would not
+      swear that he will not join the ranks of the Jesuits, and undertake their
+      vindication.'&quot;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of course we cannot be sure that Grimm did not manipulate these letters
+      long after the event, but there is nothing in Rousseau's history to make
+      us perfectly sure that he was incapable either of telling a falsehood to
+      Madame d'Epinay, or of being shamelessly selfish in respect of Diderot. I
+      see no reason to refuse substantial credit to Grimm's account, and the
+      points of coincidence between that and the Confessions make its truth
+      probable.<a name="FNanchor296" id="FNanchor296"></a><a href="#Footnote_296">[296]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rousseau's relations with Madame d'Epinay were more complex, and his
+      sentiments towards her underwent many changes. There was a prevalent
+      opinion that he was her lover, for which no real foundation seems to have
+      existed.<a name="FNanchor297" id="FNanchor297"></a><a href="#Footnote_297">[297]</a>
+      Those who disbelieved that he had reached this distinction, yet made sure
+      that he had a passion for her, which may or may not have been true.<a
+      name="FNanchor298" id="FNanchor298"></a><a href="#Footnote_298">[298]</a><span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.277" id="Page_i.277">[i.277]</a></span>
+      Madame d'Epinay herself was vain enough to be willing that this should be
+      generally accepted, and it is certain that she showed a friendship for him
+      which, considering the manners of the time, was invitingly open to
+      misconception. Again, she was jealous of her sister-in-law, Madame
+      d'Houdetot, if for no other reason than that the latter, being the wife of
+      a Norman noble, had access to the court, and this was unattainable by the
+      wife of a farmer-general. Hence Madame d'Epinay's barely-concealed
+      mortification when she heard of the meetings in the forest, the private
+      suppers, the moonlight rambles in the park. When Saint Lambert first
+      became uneasy as to the relations between Rousseau and his mistress, and
+      wrote to her to say that he was so, Rousseau instantly suspected that
+      Madame d'Epinay had been his informant. Theresa confirmed the suspicion by
+      tales of baskets and drawers ransacked by Madame d'Epinay in search of
+      Madame d'Houdetot's letters to him. Whether these tales were true or not,
+      we can never know; we can only say that Madame d'Epinay was probably not
+      incapable of these meannesses, and that there is no reason to suppose that
+      she took the pains to write directly to Saint Lambert a piece of news
+      which she was writing to Grimm, knowing that he was then in communication
+      with Saint Lambert. She herself suspected that Theresa had written to
+      Saint Lambert,<a name="FNanchor299" id="FNanchor299"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_299">[299]</a> but it may be doubted whether Theresa's
+      imagination could have risen to such feat<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.278" id="Page_i.278">[i.278]</a></span> as writing to a
+      marquis, and a marquis in what would have seemed to her to be remote and
+      inaccessible parts of the earth. All this, however, has become ghostly for
+      us; a puzzle that can never be found out, nor be worth finding out.
+      Rousseau was persuaded that Madame d'Epinay was his betrayer, and was
+      seized by one of his blackest and most stormful moods. In reply to an
+      affectionate letter from her, inquiring why she had not seen him for so
+      long, he wrote thus: &quot;I can say nothing to you yet. I wait until I am
+      better informed, and this I shall be sooner or later. Meanwhile, be
+      certain that accused innocence will find a champion ardent enough to make
+      calumniators repent, whoever they may be.&quot; It is rather curious that
+      so strange a missive as this, instead of provoking Madame d'Epinay to
+      anger, was answered by a warmer and more affectionate letter than the
+      first. To this Rousseau replied with increased vehemence, charged with
+      dark and mysteriously worded suspicion. Still Madame d'Epinay remained
+      willing to receive him. He began to repent of his imprudent haste, because
+      it would certainly end by compromising Madame d'Houdetot, and because,
+      moreover, he had no proof after all that his suspicions had any
+      foundation. He went instantly to the house of Madame d'Epinay; at his
+      approach she threw herself on his neck and melted into tears. This
+      unexpected reception from so old a friend moved him extremely; he too wept
+      abundantly. She showed no curiosity as to the precise nature of<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.279" id="Page_i.279">[i.279]</a></span>
+      his suspicions or their origin, and the quarrel came to an end.<a
+      name="FNanchor300" id="FNanchor300"></a><a href="#Footnote_300">[300]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Grimm's turn followed. Though they had been friends for many years, there
+      had long been a certain stiffness in their friendship. Their characters
+      were in fact profoundly antipathetic. Rousseau we know,&#8212;sensuous,
+      impulsive, extravagant, with little sense of the difference between
+      reality and dreams. Grimm was exactly the opposite; judicious, collected,
+      self-seeking, coldly upright. He was a German (born at Ratisbon), and in
+      Paris was first a reader to the Duke of Saxe Gotha, with very scanty
+      salary. He made his way, partly through the friendship of Rousseau, into
+      the society of the Parisian men of letters, rapidly acquired a perfect
+      mastery of the French language, and with the inspiring help of Diderot,
+      became an excellent critic. After being secretary to sundry high people,
+      he became the literary correspondent of various German sovereigns, keeping
+      them informed of what<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.280"
+      id="Page_i.280">[i.280]</a></span> was happening in the world of art and
+      letters, just as an ambassador keeps his government informed of what
+      happens in politics. The sobriety, impartiality, and discrimination of his
+      criticism make one think highly of his literary judgment; he had the
+      courage, or shall we say he preserved enough of the German, to defend both
+      Homer and Shakespeare against the unhappy strictures of Voltaire.<a
+      name="FNanchor301" id="FNanchor301"></a><a href="#Footnote_301">[301]</a>
+      This is not all, however; his criticism is conceived in a tone which
+      impresses us with the writer's integrity. And to this internal evidence we
+      have to add the external corroboration that in the latter part of his life
+      he filled various official posts, which implied a peculiar confidence in
+      his probity on the part of those who appointed him. At the present moment
+      (1756-57), he was acting as secretary to Marshal d'Estr&#233;es, commander
+      of the French army in Westphalia at the outset of the Seven Years' War. He
+      was an able and helpful man, in spite of his having a rough manner,
+      powdering his face, and being so monstrously scented as to earn the name
+      of the musk-bear. He had that firmness and positivity which are not always
+      beautiful, but of which there is probably too little rather than too much
+      in the world, certainly in the France of his time, and of which there was
+      none at all in Rousseau. Above all things he hated declamation. Apparently
+      cold and reserved, he had sensibility enough underneath the surface to go
+      nearly out of his mind for love of a singer at the opera who had a
+      thrilling voice. As he did<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.281"
+      id="Page_i.281">[i.281]</a></span> not believe in the metaphysical
+      doctrine about the freedom of the will, he accepted from temperament the
+      necessity which logic confirmed, of guiding the will by constant pressure
+      from without. &quot;I am surprised,&quot; Madame d'Epinay said to him,
+      &quot;that men should be so little indulgent to one another.&quot; &quot;Nay,
+      the want of indulgence comes of our belief in freedom; it is because the
+      established morality is false and bad, inasmuch as it starts from this
+      false principle of liberty.&quot; &quot;Ah, but the contrary principle, by
+      making one too indulgent, disturbs order.&quot; &quot;It does nothing of
+      the kind. Though man does not wholly change, he is susceptible of
+      modification; you can improve him; hence it is not useless to punish him.
+      The gardener does not cut down a tree that grows crooked; he binds up the
+      branch and keeps it in shape; that is the effect of public punishment.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor302" id="FNanchor302"></a><a href="#Footnote_302">[302]</a>
+      He applied the same doctrine, as we shall see, to private punishment for
+      social crookedness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is easy to conceive how Rousseau's way of ordering himself would
+      gradually estrange so hard a head as this. What the one thought a weighty
+      moral reformation, struck the other as a vain desire to attract attention.
+      Rousseau on the other hand suspected Grimm of intriguing to remove Theresa
+      from him, as well as doing his best to alienate all his friends. The
+      attempted alienation of Theresa consisted in the secret allowance to her
+      mother and her by Grimm and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.282"
+      id="Page_i.282">[i.282]</a></span> Diderot of some sixteen pounds a year.<a
+      name="FNanchor303" id="FNanchor303"></a><a href="#Footnote_303">[303]</a>
+      Rousseau was unaware of this, but the whisperings and goings and comings
+      to which it gave rise, made him darkly uneasy. That the suspicions in
+      other respects were in a certain sense not wholly unfounded, is shown by
+      Grimm's own letters to Madame d'Epinay. He disapproved of her installing
+      Rousseau in the Hermitage, and warned her in a very remarkable prophecy
+      that solitude would darken his imagination.<a name="FNanchor304"
+      id="FNanchor304"></a><a href="#Footnote_304">[304]</a> &quot;He is a poor
+      devil who torments himself, and does not dare to confess the true subject
+      of all his sufferings, which is in his cursed head and his pride; he
+      raises up imaginary matters, so as to have the pleasure of complaining of
+      the whole human race.&quot;<a name="FNanchor305" id="FNanchor305"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_305">[305]</a> More than once he assures her that Rousseau
+      will end by going mad, it being impossible that so hot and ill-organised a
+      head should endure solitude.<a name="FNanchor306" id="FNanchor306"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_306">[306]</a> Rousseauite partisans usually explain all
+      this by supposing that Grimm was eager to set a woman for whom he had a
+      passion, against a man who was suspected of having a passion for her; and
+      it is possible that jealousy may have stimulated the exercise of his
+      natural shrewdness. But this shrewdness, added to entire want of
+      imagination and a very narrow range of sympathy, was quite enough to
+      account for Grimm's harsh judgment, without the addition of any sinister
+      sentiment. He was perfectly right in suspecting Rousseau of want of
+      loyalty to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.283" id="Page_i.283">[i.283]</a></span>
+      Madame d'Epinay, for we find our hermit writing to her in strains of
+      perfect intimacy, while he was writing of her to Madame d'Houdetot as
+      &quot;your unworthy sister.&quot;<a name="FNanchor307" id="FNanchor307"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_307">[307]</a> On the other hand, while Madame d'Epinay
+      was overwhelming him with caressing phrases, she was at the same moment
+      describing him to Grimm as a master of impertinence and intractableness.
+      As usual where there is radical incompatibility of character, an attempted
+      reconciliation between Grimm and Rousseau (some time in the early part of
+      October 1757) had only made the thinly veiled antipathy more resolute.
+      Rousseau excused himself for wrongs of which in his heart he never thought
+      himself guilty. Grimm replied by a discourse on the virtues of friendship
+      and his own special aptitude for practising them. He then conceded to the
+      impetuous penitent the kiss of peace, in a slight embrace which was like
+      the accolade given by a monarch to new knights.<a name="FNanchor308"
+      id="FNanchor308"></a><a href="#Footnote_308">[308]</a> The whole scene is
+      ignoble. We seem to be watching an unclean cauldron, with Theresa's
+      mother, a cringing and babbling crone, standing witch-like over it and
+      infusing suspicion, falsehood, and malice. When minds are thus surcharged,
+      any accident suffices to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.284"
+      id="Page_i.284">[i.284]</a></span> release the evil creatures that lurk in
+      an irritated imagination.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One day towards the end of the autumn of 1757, Rousseau learned to his
+      unbounded surprise that Madame d'Epinay had been seized with some strange
+      disorder, which made it advisable that she should start without any delay
+      for Geneva, there to place herself under the care of Tronchin, who was at
+      that time the most famous doctor in Europe. His surprise was greatly
+      increased by the expectation which he found among his friends that he
+      would show his gratitude for her many kindnesses to him, by offering to
+      bear her company on her journey, and during her stay in a town which was
+      strange to her and thoroughly familiar to him. It was to no purpose that
+      he protested how unfit was one invalid to be the nurse of another; and how
+      great an incumbrance a man would be in a coach in the bad season, when for
+      many days he was absolutely unable to leave his chamber without danger.
+      Diderot, with his usual eagerness to guide a friend's course, wrote him a
+      letter urging that his many obligations, and even his grievances in
+      respect of Madame d'Epinay, bound him to accompany her, as he would thus
+      repay the one and console himself for the other. &quot;She is going into a
+      country where she will be like one fallen from the clouds. She is ill; she
+      will need amusement and distraction. As for winter, are you worse now than
+      you were a month back, or than you will be at the opening of the spring?
+      For me, I confess that if I could not bear the coach, I<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.285" id="Page_i.285">[i.285]</a></span>
+      would take a staff and follow her on foot.&quot;<a name="FNanchor309"
+      id="FNanchor309"></a><a href="#Footnote_309">[309]</a> Rousseau trembled
+      with fury, and as soon as the transport was over, he wrote an indignant
+      reply, in which he more or less politely bade the panurgic one to attend
+      to his own affairs, and hinted that Grimm was making a tool of him. Next
+      he wrote to Grimm himself a letter, not unfriendly in form, asking his
+      advice and promising to follow it, but hardly hiding his resentment. By
+      this time he had found out the secret of Madame d'Epinay's supposed
+      illness and her anxiety to pass some months away from her family, and the
+      share which Grimm had in it. This, however, does not make many passages of
+      his letter any the less ungracious or unseemly. &quot;If Madame d'Epinay
+      has shown friend' ship to me, I have shown more to her.... As for
+      benefits, first of all I do not like them, I do not want them, and I owe
+      no thanks for any that people may burden me with by force. Madame
+      d'Epinay, being so often left alone in the country, wished me for company;
+      it was for that she had kept me. After making one sacrifice to friendship,
+      I must now make another to gratitude. A man must be poor, must be without
+      a servant, must be a hater of constraint, and he must have my character,
+      before he can know what it is for me to live in another person's house.
+      For all that, I lived two years in hers, constantly brought into bondage
+      with the finest harangues about liberty, served by twenty domestics, and
+      cleaning my own shoes every morning, overloaded with gloomy indigestion,
+      and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.286" id="Page_i.286">[i.286]</a></span>
+      incessantly sighing for my homely porringer.... Consider how much money an
+      hour of the life and the time of a man is worth; compare the kindnesses of
+      Madame d'Epinay with the sacrifice of my native country and two years of
+      serfdom; and then tell me whether the obligation is greater on her side or
+      mine.&quot; He then urges with a torrent of impetuous eloquence the
+      thoroughly sound reasons why it was unfair and absurd for him, a beggar
+      and an invalid, to make the journey with Madame d'Epinay, rich and
+      surrounded by attendants. He is particularly splenetic that the
+      philosopher Diderot, sitting in his own room before a good fire and
+      wrapped in a well-lined dressing-gown, should insist on his doing his five
+      and twenty leagues a day on foot, through the mud in winter.<a
+      name="FNanchor310" id="FNanchor310"></a><a href="#Footnote_310">[310]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The whole letter shows, as so many incidents in his later life showed, how
+      difficult it was to do Rousseau a kindness with impunity, and how little
+      such friends as Madame d'Epinay possessed the art of soothing this
+      unfortunate nature. They fretted him by not leaving him sufficiently free
+      to follow his own changing moods, while he in turn lost all self-control,
+      and yielded in hours of bodily torment to angry and resentful fancies. But
+      let us hasten to an end. Grimm replied to his eloquent manifesto somewhat
+      drily, to the effect that he would think the matter over, and that
+      meanwhile Rousseau had best keep quiet in his hermitage. Rousseau burning
+      with excitement at once conceived a thousand suspicions, wholly unable to
+      understand that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.287" id="Page_i.287">[i.287]</a></span>
+      a cold and reserved German might choose to deliberate at length, and
+      finally give an answer with brevity. &quot;After centuries of expectation
+      in the cruel uncertainty in which this barbarous man had plunged me&quot;&#8212;that
+      is after eight or ten days, the answer came, apparently not without a
+      second direct application for one.<a name="FNanchor311" id="FNanchor311"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_311">[311]</a> It was short and extremely pointed, not
+      complaining that Rousseau had refused to accompany Madame d'Epinay but
+      protesting against the horrible tone of the apology which he had sent to
+      him for not accompanying her. &quot;It has made me quiver with
+      indignation; so odious are the principles it contains, so full is it of
+      blackness and duplicity. You venture to talk to me of your slavery, to me
+      who for more than two years have been the daily witness of all the marks
+      of the tenderest and most generous friendship that you have received at
+      the hands of that woman. If I could pardon you, I should think myself
+      unworthy of having a single friend. I will never see you again while I
+      live, and I shall think myself happy if I can banish the recollection of
+      your conduct from my mind.&quot;<a name="FNanchor312" id="FNanchor312"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_312">[312]</a> A flash of manly anger like this is very
+      welcome to us, who have to thread a tedious way between morbid egoistic
+      irritation on the one hand, and sly pieces of equivocal complaisance on
+      the other. The effect on Rousseau was terrific. In a paroxysm he sent
+      Grimm's letter back to him, with three or four lines in the same key. He<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.288" id="Page_i.288">[i.288]</a></span>
+      wrote note after note to Madame d'Houdetot, in shrieks. &quot;Have I a
+      single friend left, man or woman? One word, only one word, and I can live.&quot;
+      A day or two later: &quot;Think of the state I am in. I can bear to be
+      abandoned by all the world, but you! You who know me so well! Great God!
+      am I a scoundrel? a scoundrel, I!&quot;<a name="FNanchor313"
+      id="FNanchor313"></a><a href="#Footnote_313">[313]</a> And so on, raving.
+      It was to no purpose that Madame d'Houdetot wrote him soothing letters,
+      praying him to calm himself, to find something to busy himself with, to
+      remain at peace with Madame d'Epinay, &quot;who had never appeared other
+      than the most thoughtful and warm-hearted friend to him.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor314" id="FNanchor314"></a><a href="#Footnote_314">[314]</a>
+      He was almost ready to quarrel with Madame d'Houdetot herself because she
+      paid the postage of her letters, which he counted an affront to his
+      poverty.<a name="FNanchor315" id="FNanchor315"></a><a href="#Footnote_315">[315]</a>
+      To Madame d'Epinay he had written in the midst of his tormenting
+      uncertainty as to the answer which Grimm would make to his letter. It was
+      an ungainly assertion that she was playing a game of tyranny and intrigue
+      at his cost. For the first time she replied with spirit and warmth. &quot;Your
+      letter is hardly that of a man who, on the eve of my departure, swore to
+      me that he could never in his life repair the wrongs he had done<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.289" id="Page_i.289">[i.289]</a></span>
+      me.&quot; She then tersely remarks that it is not natural to pass one's
+      life in suspecting and insulting one's friends, and that he abuses her
+      patience. To this he answered with still greater terseness that friendship
+      was extinct between them, and that he meant to leave the Hermitage, but as
+      his friends desired him to remain there until the spring he would with her
+      permission follow their counsel. Then she, with a final thrust of
+      impatience, in which we perhaps see the hand of Grimm: &quot;Since you
+      meant to leave the Hermitage, and felt you ought to do so, I am astonished
+      that your friends could detain you. For me, I don't consult mine as to my
+      duties, and I have nothing more to say to you as to yours.&quot; This was
+      the end. Rousseau returned for a moment from ignoble petulance to dignity
+      and self-respect. He wrote to her that if it is a misfortune to make a
+      mistake in the choice of friends, it is one not less cruel to awake from
+      so sweet an error, and two days before he wrote, he left her house. He
+      found a cottage at Montmorency, and thither, nerved with fury, through
+      snow and ice he carried his scanty household goods (Dec. 15, 1757).<a
+      name="FNanchor316" id="FNanchor316"></a><a href="#Footnote_316">[316]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We have a picture of him in this fatal month. Diderot went to pay him a
+      visit (Dec. 5). Rousseau was alone at the bottom of his garden. As soon as
+      he saw Diderot, he cried in a voice of thunder and<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.290" id="Page_i.290">[i.290]</a></span> with his eyes all
+      aflame: &quot;What have you come here for?&quot; &quot;I want to know
+      whether you are mad or malicious.&quot; &quot;You have known me for
+      fifteen years; you are well aware how little malicious I am, and I will
+      prove to you that I am not mad: follow me.&quot; He then drew Diderot into
+      a room, and proceeded to clear himself, by means of letters, of the charge
+      of trying to make a breach between Saint Lambert and Madame d'Houdetot.
+      They were in fact letters that convicted him, as we know, of trying to
+      persuade Madame d'Houdetot of the criminality of her relations with her
+      lover, and at the same time to accept himself in the very same relation.
+      Of all this we have heard more than enough already. He was stubborn in the
+      face of Diderot's remonstrance, and the latter left him in a state which
+      he described in a letter to Grimm the same night. &quot;I throw myself
+      into your arms, like one who has had a shock of fright: that man intrudes
+      into my work; he fills me with trouble, and I am as if I had a damned soul
+      at my side. May I never see him again; he would make me believe in devils
+      and hell.&quot;<a name="FNanchor317" id="FNanchor317"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_317">[317]</a> And thus the unhappy man who had began this
+      episode in his life with confident ecstasy in the glories and clear music
+      of spring, ended it looking out from a narrow chamber upon the sullen
+      crimson of the wintry twilight and over fields silent in snow, with the
+      haggard desperate gaze of a lost spirit.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &#160;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <b>FOOTNOTES:</b>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_254" id="Footnote_254"></a><a href="#FNanchor254">[254]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, ix. 247.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_255" id="Footnote_255"></a><a href="#FNanchor255">[255]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, ix. 230. Madame d'Epinay (<i>M&#233;m.</i>, ii. 132) has
+      given an account of the installation, with a slight discrepancy of date.
+      When Madame d'Epinay's son-in-law emigrated at the Revolution, the
+      Hermitage&#8212;of which nothing now stands&#8212;along with the rest of
+      the estate became national property, and was bought after other purchasers
+      by Robespierre, and afterwards by Gr&#233;try the composer, who paid
+      10,000 livres for it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_256" id="Footnote_256"></a><a href="#FNanchor256">[256]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, ix. 255.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_257" id="Footnote_257"></a><a href="#FNanchor257">[257]</a>
+      Third letter to Malesherbes, 364-368.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_258" id="Footnote_258"></a><a href="#FNanchor258">[258]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, ix. 239.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_259" id="Footnote_259"></a><a href="#FNanchor259">[259]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, ix. 237, 238, and 263, etc.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_260" id="Footnote_260"></a><a href="#FNanchor260">[260]</a>
+      The extract from the Project for Perpetual Peace and the Polysynodia,
+      together with Rousseau's judgments on them, are found at the end of the
+      volume containing the Social Contract. The first, but without the
+      judgment, was printed separately without Rousseau's permission, in 1761,
+      by Bastide, to whom he had sold it for twelve louis for publication in his
+      journal only. <i>Conf.</i>, xi. 107. <i>Corr.</i>, ii. 110, 128.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_261" id="Footnote_261"></a><a href="#FNanchor261">[261]</a>
+      P. 485.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_262" id="Footnote_262"></a><a href="#FNanchor262">[262]</a>
+      For a sympathetic account of the Abb&#233; de Saint Pierre's life and
+      speculations, see M. L&#233;once de Lavergne's <i>Economistes fran&#231;ais
+      du 18i&#232;me si&#232;cle</i> (Paris: 1870). Also Comte's <i>Lettres
+      &#224; M. Valat</i>, p. 73.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_263" id="Footnote_263"></a><a href="#FNanchor263">[263]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, ix. 270-274.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_264" id="Footnote_264"></a><a href="#FNanchor264">[264]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, ix. 289.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_265" id="Footnote_265"></a><a href="#FNanchor265">[265]</a>
+      <i>Ib.</i> ix. 286.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_266" id="Footnote_266"></a><a href="#FNanchor266">[266]</a>
+      D'Epinay, ii. 153.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_267" id="Footnote_267"></a><a href="#FNanchor267">[267]</a>
+      Madame d'Houdetot, (<i>b.</i> 1730&#8212;<i>d.</i> 1813) was the daughter
+      of M. de Bellegarde, the father of Madame d'Epinay's husband. Her marriage
+      with the Count d'Houdetot, of high Norman stock, took place in 1748. The
+      circumstances of the marriage, which help to explain the lax view of the
+      vows common among the great people of the time, are given with perhaps a
+      shade too much dramatic colouring in Madame d'Epinay's <i>M&#233;m.</i>, i
+      101.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_268" id="Footnote_268"></a><a href="#FNanchor268">[268]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, ix. 281.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_269" id="Footnote_269"></a><a href="#FNanchor269">[269]</a>
+      D'Epinay, ii. 246.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_270" id="Footnote_270"></a><a href="#FNanchor270">[270]</a>
+      D'Epinay, ii. 269.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_271" id="Footnote_271"></a><a href="#FNanchor271">[271]</a>
+      Musset-Pathay has collected two or three trifles of her composition, ii.
+      136-138. Heal so quotes Madame d'Allard's account of her, pp. 140, 141.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_272" id="Footnote_272"></a><a href="#FNanchor272">[272]</a>
+      Quoted by M. Girardin, <i>Rev. des Deux Mondes</i>, Sept. 1853, p. 1080.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_273" id="Footnote_273"></a><a href="#FNanchor273">[273]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, ix. 304.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_274" id="Footnote_274"></a><a href="#FNanchor274">[274]</a>
+      <i>Ib.</i> ix. 305. Slightly modified version in <i>Corr.</i>, i. 377.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_275" id="Footnote_275"></a><a href="#FNanchor275">[275]</a>
+      M. Boiteau's note to Madame d'Epinay, ii. 273.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_276" id="Footnote_276"></a><a href="#FNanchor276">[276]</a>
+      Grimm, to Madame d'Epinay, ii. 305.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_277" id="Footnote_277"></a><a href="#FNanchor277">[277]</a>
+      This is shown partly by Saint Lambert's letter to Rousseau, to which we
+      come presently, and partly by a letter of Madame d'Houdetot to Rousseau in
+      May, 1758 (Streckeisen-Moultou, i. 411-413), where she distinctly says
+      that she concealed his mad passion for her from Saint Lambert, who first
+      heard of it in common conversation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_278" id="Footnote_278"></a><a href="#FNanchor278">[278]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, ix. 311.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_279" id="Footnote_279"></a><a href="#FNanchor279">[279]</a>
+      Besides the many hints of reference to this in the Confessions, see the
+      phrenetic Letters to Sarah, printed in the <i>M&#233;langes</i>, pp.
+      347-360.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_280" id="Footnote_280"></a><a href="#FNanchor280">[280]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, ix. 337.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_281" id="Footnote_281"></a><a href="#FNanchor281">[281]</a>
+      <i>Corr.</i>, i. 398. Sept. 4, 1757.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_282" id="Footnote_282"></a><a href="#FNanchor282">[282]</a>
+      To Madame d'Houdetot. <i>Corr.</i>, i. 376-387. June 1757.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_283" id="Footnote_283"></a><a href="#FNanchor283">[283]</a>
+      Saint Lambert to Rousseau, from Wolfenbuttel, Oct. 11, 1757.
+      Streckeisen-Moultou, i. 415.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_284" id="Footnote_284"></a><a href="#FNanchor284">[284]</a>
+      These letters are given in M. Streckeisen-Moultou's first volume (pp.
+      354-414). The thirty-second of them (Jan. 10, 1758) is perhaps the one
+      best worth turning to.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_285" id="Footnote_285"></a><a href="#FNanchor285">[285]</a>
+      Streckeisen-Moultou, i. 412. May 6, 1768. <i>Conf.</i>, x. 15.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_286" id="Footnote_286"></a><a href="#FNanchor286">[286]</a>
+      <i>Ib.</i> x. 22.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_287" id="Footnote_287"></a><a href="#FNanchor287">[287]</a>
+      <i>Ib.</i> x. 18. Streckeisen, i. 422.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_288" id="Footnote_288"></a><a href="#FNanchor288">[288]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, x. 24.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_289" id="Footnote_289"></a><a href="#FNanchor289">[289]</a>
+      To Madame d'Epinay, 1757. <i>Corr.</i>, i. 362, 353. See also <i>Conf.</i>,
+      ix. 307.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_290" id="Footnote_290"></a><a href="#FNanchor290">[290]</a>
+      One of the most unflinching in this kind is an <i>Essai sur la vie et le
+      caract&#232;re de J.J. Rousseau</i>, by G.H. Morin (Paris: 1851): the
+      laborious production of a bitter advocate, who accepts the Confessions,
+      Dialogues, Letters, etc., with the reverence due to verbal inspiration,
+      and writes of everybody who offended his hero, quite in the vein of Marat
+      towards aristocrats.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_291" id="Footnote_291"></a><a href="#FNanchor291">[291]</a>
+      <i>Corr.</i>, i. 327-335. D'Epinay, ii. 165-182
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_292" id="Footnote_292"></a><a href="#FNanchor292">[292]</a>
+      D'Epinay, ii. 173.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_293" id="Footnote_293"></a><a href="#FNanchor293">[293]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, ix. 325.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_294" id="Footnote_294"></a><a href="#FNanchor294">[294]</a>
+      <i>Ib.</i>, ix. 334.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_295" id="Footnote_295"></a><a href="#FNanchor295">[295]</a>
+      <i>M&#233;m.</i>, ii. 297. She also places the date many mouths later than
+      Rousseau, and detaches the reconciliation from the quarrel in the winter
+      of 1756-1757.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_296" id="Footnote_296"></a><a href="#FNanchor296">[296]</a>
+      The same story is referred to in Madame de Vandeul's <i>M&#233;m. de
+      Diderot,</i> p. 61.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_297" id="Footnote_297"></a><a href="#FNanchor297">[297]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, ix. 245, 246.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_298" id="Footnote_298"></a><a href="#FNanchor298">[298]</a>
+      Grimm to Madame d'Epinay, ii. 259, 269, 313, 326. <i>Conf.</i>, x. 17.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_299" id="Footnote_299"></a><a href="#FNanchor299">[299]</a>
+      <i>M&#233;m.</i>, ii. 318.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_300" id="Footnote_300"></a><a href="#FNanchor300">[300]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, ix. 322. Madame d'Epinay (<i>M&#233;m.</i>, ii. 326),
+      writing to Grimm, gives a much colder and stiffer colour to the scene of
+      reconciliation, but the nature of her relations with him would account for
+      this. The same circumstance, as M. Girardin has pointed out (<i>Rev. des
+      Deux Mondes</i>, Sept. 1853), would explain the discrepancy between her
+      letters as given in the Confessions, and the copies of them sent to Grimm,
+      and printed in her Memoirs. M. Sainte Beuve, who is never perfectly master
+      of himself in dealing with the chiefs of the revolutionary schools, as
+      might indeed have been expected in a writer with his predilections for the
+      seventeenth century, rashly hints (<i>Causeries</i>, vii. 301) that
+      Rousseau was the falsifier. The publication from the autograph originals
+      sets this at rest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_301" id="Footnote_301"></a><a href="#FNanchor301">[301]</a>
+      For Shakespeare, see <i>Corr. Lit.</i>, iv. 143, etc.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_302" id="Footnote_302"></a><a href="#FNanchor302">[302]</a>
+      D'Epinay, ii. 188.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_303" id="Footnote_303"></a><a href="#FNanchor303">[303]</a>
+      D'Epinay, ii. 150. Also Vandeul's <i>M&#233;m. de Diderot</i>, p. 61.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_304" id="Footnote_304"></a><a href="#FNanchor304">[304]</a>
+      <i>M&#233;m.</i> ii. 128.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_305" id="Footnote_305"></a><a href="#FNanchor305">[305]</a>
+      P. 258. See also p. 146.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_306" id="Footnote_306"></a><a href="#FNanchor306">[306]</a>
+      Pp. 282, 336, etc.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_307" id="Footnote_307"></a><a href="#FNanchor307">[307]</a>
+      <i>Corr.</i>, i. 386. June 1757.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_308" id="Footnote_308"></a><a href="#FNanchor308">[308]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, ix. 355. For Madame d'Epinay's equally credible version,
+      assigning all the stiffness and arrogance to Rousseau, see <i>M&#233;m.</i>,
+      ii. 355-358. Saint Lambert refers to the momentary reconciliation in his
+      letter to Rousseau of Nov. 21 (Streckeisen, i. 418), repeating what he had
+      said before (p. 417), that Grimm always spoke of Mm in amicable terms,
+      though complaining of Rousseau's injustice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_309" id="Footnote_309"></a><a href="#FNanchor309">[309]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, ix. 372.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_310" id="Footnote_310"></a><a href="#FNanchor310">[310]</a>
+      <i>Corr.</i>, i. 404-416. Oct 19, 1757.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_311" id="Footnote_311"></a><a href="#FNanchor311">[311]</a>
+      Grimm to Diderot, in Madame d'Epinay's <i>M&#233;m.</i> ii. 386. Nov. 3,
+      1757.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_312" id="Footnote_312"></a><a href="#FNanchor312">[312]</a>
+      D'Epinay, ii. 387. Nov. 3.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_313" id="Footnote_313"></a><a href="#FNanchor313">[313]</a>
+      <i>Corr.</i>, i. 425. Nov. 8. <i>Ib.</i> 426.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_314" id="Footnote_314"></a><a href="#FNanchor314">[314]</a>
+      Streckeisen-Moultou, i. 381-383.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_315" id="Footnote_315"></a><a href="#FNanchor315">[315]</a>
+      <i>Ib.</i> 387. Many years after, Rousseau told Bernardin de St. Pierre (<i>Oeuv.</i>,
+      xii. 57) that one of the reasons which made him leave the Hermitage was
+      the indiscretion of friends who insisted on sending him letters by some
+      conveyance that cost 4 francs, when it might equally well have been sent
+      for as many sous.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_316" id="Footnote_316"></a><a href="#FNanchor316">[316]</a>
+      The sources of all this are in the following places. <i>Corr.</i>, i. 416.
+      Oct. 29. Streckeisen, i. 349. Nov. 12. <i>Conf.</i>, ix. 377. <i>Corr.</i>,
+      i. 427. Nov. 23. <i>Conf.</i>, ix. 381. Dec. 1. <i>Ib.</i>, ix. 383. Dec.
+      17.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_317" id="Footnote_317"></a><a href="#FNanchor317">[317]</a>
+      Diderot to Grimm; D'Epinay, ii. 397. Diderot's <i>Oeuv.</i>, xix. 446. See
+      also 449 and 210.
+    </p>
+    <hr style="width: 65%;" />
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.291" id="Page_i.291">[i.291]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      <a name="CHAPTER_VIII." id="CHAPTER_VIII."></a>CHAPTER VIII.
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      MUSIC.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <span class="smcap">Simplification</span> has already been used by us as
+      the key-word to Rousseau's aims and influence. The scheme of musical
+      notation with which he came to try his fortune in Paris in 1741, his
+      published vindication of it, and his musical compositions afterwards all
+      fall under this term. Each of them was a plea for the extrication of the
+      simple from the cumbrousness of elaborated pedantry, and for a return to
+      nature from the unmeaning devices of false art. And all tended alike in
+      the popular direction, towards the extension of enjoyment among the common
+      people, and the glorification of their simple lives and moods, in the art
+      designed for the great.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Village Soothsayer was one of the group of works which marked a
+      revolution in the history of French music, by putting an end to the
+      tyrannical tradition of Lulli and Rameau, and preparing the way through a
+      middle stage of freshness, simplicity, naturalism, up to the noble
+      severity of Gluck (1714-1787). This great composer, though a Bohemian by
+      birth, found his first appreciation in a public that<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.292" id="Page_i.292">[i.292]</a></span> had been trained by
+      the Italian pastoral operas, of which Rousseau's was one of the earliest
+      produced in France. Gr&#233;tri, the Fleming (1741-1813), who had a hearty
+      admiration for Jean Jacques, and out of a sentiment of piety lived for a
+      time in his Hermitage, came in point of musical excellence between the
+      group of Rousseau, Philidor, Duni, and the rest, and Gluck. &quot;I have
+      not produced exaltation in people's heads by tragical superlative,&quot;
+      Gr&#233;tri said, &quot;but I have revealed the accent of truth, which I
+      have impressed deeper in men's hearts.&quot;<a name="FNanchor318"
+      id="FNanchor318"></a><a href="#Footnote_318">[318]</a> These words express
+      sufficiently the kind of influence which Rousseau also had. Crude as the
+      music sounds to us who are accustomed to more sumptuous schools, we can
+      still hear in it the note which would strike a generation weary of Rameau.
+      It was the expression in one way of the same mood which in another way
+      revolted against paint, false hair, and preposterous costume as of savages
+      grown opulent. Such music seems without passion or subtlety or depth or
+      magnificence. Thus it had hardly any higher than a negative merit, but it
+      was the necessary preparation for the acceptance of a more positive style,
+      that should replace both the elaborate false art of the older French
+      composers and the too colourless realism of the pastoral comic opera, by
+      the austere loveliness and elevation of <i>Orfeo</i> and <i>Alceste</i>.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In 1752 an Italian company visited Paris, and performed at the Opera a
+      number of pieces by Pergolese, and other composers of their country. A<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.293" id="Page_i.293">[i.293]</a></span>
+      violent war arose, which agitated Paris far more intensely than the defeat
+      of Rossbach and the loss of Canada did afterwards. The quarrel between the
+      Parliament and the Clergy was at its height. The Parliament had just been
+      exiled, and the gravest confusion threatened the State. The operatic
+      quarrel turned the excitement of the capital into another channel. Things
+      went so far that the censor was entreated to prohibit the printing of any
+      work containing the damnable doctrine and position that Italian music is
+      good. Rousseau took part enthusiastically with the Italians.<a
+      name="FNanchor319" id="FNanchor319"></a><a href="#Footnote_319">[319]</a>
+      His Letter on French Music (1753) proved to the great fury of the people
+      concerned, that the French had no national music, and that it would be so
+      much the worse for them if they ever had any. Their language, so proper to
+      be the organ of truth and reason, was radically unfit either for poetry or
+      music. All national music must derive its principal characteristics from
+      the language. Now if there is a language in Europe fit for music, it is
+      certainly the Italian, for it is sweet, sonorous, harmonious, and more
+      accentuated than any other, and these are precisely the four qualities
+      which adapt a language to singing. It is sweet because the articulations
+      are not composite, because the meeting of consonants is both infrequent
+      and soft, and because a great number of the syllables being only formed of
+      vowels, frequent elisions make its pronunciation more flowing. It is
+      sonorous because most of the vowels<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.294" id="Page_i.294">[i.294]</a></span> are full, because it
+      is without composite diphthongs, because it has few or no nasal vowels.
+      Again, the inversions of the Italian are far more favourable to true
+      melody than the didactic order of French. And so onwards, with much close
+      grappling of the matter. French melody does not exist; it is only a sort
+      of modulated plain-song which has nothing agreeable in itself, which only
+      pleases with the aid of a few capricious ornaments, and then only pleases
+      those who have agreed to find it beautiful.<a name="FNanchor320"
+      id="FNanchor320"></a><a href="#Footnote_320">[320]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The letter contains a variety of acute remarks upon music, and includes a
+      vigorous protest against fugues, imitations, double designs, and the like.
+      Scarcely any one succeeds in them, and success even when obtained hardly
+      rewards the labour. As for counterfugues, double fugues, and &quot;other
+      difficult fooleries that the ear cannot endure nor the reason justify,&quot;
+      they are evidently relics of barbarism and bad taste which only remain,
+      like the porticoes of our gothic churches, to the disgrace of those who
+      had patience enough to construct them.<a name="FNanchor321"
+      id="FNanchor321"></a><a href="#Footnote_321">[321]</a> The last phrase-and
+      both Voltaire and Turgot used gothic architecture as the symbol for the
+      supreme of rudeness and barbarism&#8212;shows that even a man who seems to
+      run counter to the whole current of his time yet does not escape its
+      influence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Grimm, after remarking on the singularity of a demonstration of the
+      impossibility of setting melody<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.295"
+      id="Page_i.295">[i.295]</a></span> to French words on the part of a writer
+      who had just produced the Village Soothsayer, informs us that the letter
+      created a furious uproar, and set all Paris in a blaze. He had himself
+      taken the side of the Italians in an amusing piece of pleasantry, which
+      became a sort of classic model for similar facetiousness in other
+      controversies of the century. The French, as he said, forgive everything
+      in favour of what makes them laugh, but Rousseau talked reason and
+      demolished the pretensions of French music with great sounding strokes as
+      of an axe.<a name="FNanchor322" id="FNanchor322"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_322">[322]</a> Rousseau expected to be assassinated, and
+      gravely assures us that there was a plot to that effect, as well as a
+      design to put him in the Bastille. This we may fairly surmise to have been
+      a fiction of his own imagination, and the only real punishment that
+      overtook him was the loss of his right to free admission to the Opera.
+      After what he had said of the intolerable horrors of French music, the
+      directors of the theatre can hardly be accused of vindictiveness in
+      releasing him from them.<a name="FNanchor323" id="FNanchor323"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_323">[323]</a> Some twenty years after (1774), when Paris
+      was torn asunder by the violence of the two great factions of the
+      Gluckists and Piccinists, Rousseau retracted his opinion as to the
+      impossibility of wedding melody to French words.<a name="FNanchor324"
+      id="FNanchor324"></a><a href="#Footnote_324">[324]</a><span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.296" id="Page_i.296">[i.296]</a></span> He went as often as
+      he could to hear the works both of Gr&#233;tri and Gluck, and <i>Orfeo</i>
+      delighted him, while the <i>Fausse magie</i> of the former moved him to
+      say to the composer, &quot;Your music stirs sweet sensations to which I
+      thought my heart had long been closed.&quot;<a name="FNanchor325"
+      id="FNanchor325"></a><a href="#Footnote_325">[325]</a> This being so, and
+      life being as brief as art is long, we need not further examine the
+      controversy. It may be worth adding that Rousseau wrote some of the
+      articles on music for the Encyclop&#230;dia, and that in 1767 he published
+      a not inconsiderable Musical Dictionary of his own.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His scheme of a new musical notation and the principles on which he
+      defended it are worth attention, because some of the ideas are now
+      accepted as the base of a well-known and growing system of musical
+      instruction. The aim of the scheme, let us say to begin with, was at once
+      practical and popular; to reduce the difficulty of learning music to the
+      lowest possible point, and so to bring the most delightful of the arts
+      within the reach of the largest possible number of people. Hence, although
+      he maintains the fitness of his scheme for instrumental as well as vocal<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.297" id="Page_i.297">[i.297]</a></span>
+      performances, it is clearly the latter which he has most at heart,
+      evidently for the reason that this is the kind of music most accessible to
+      the thousands, and it was always the thousands of whom Rousseau thought.
+      This is the true distinction of music, it is for the people; and the best
+      musical notation is that which best enables persons to sing at sight. The
+      difficulty of the old notation had come practically before him as a
+      teacher. The quantity of details which the pupil was forced to commit to
+      memory before being able to sing from the open book, struck him then as
+      the chief obstacle to anything like facility in performance, and without
+      some of this facility he rightly felt that music must remain a luxury for
+      the few. So genuine was his interest in the matter, that he was not very
+      careful to fight for the originality of his own scheme. Our present
+      musical signs, he said, are so imperfect and so inconvenient that it is no
+      wonder that several persons have tried to re-cast or amend them; nor is it
+      any wonder that some of them should have hit upon the same device in
+      selecting the signs most natural and proper, such as numerical figures. As
+      much, however, depends on the way of dealing with these figures, as with
+      their adoption, and here he submitted that his own plan was as novel as it
+      was advantageous.<a name="FNanchor326" id="FNanchor326"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_326">[326]</a> Thus we have to bear in mind that
+      Rousseau's scheme was above all things a practical device, contrived for
+      making the teach<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.298" id="Page_i.298">[i.298]</a></span>ing
+      and the learning of musical elements an easier process.<a
+      name="FNanchor327" id="FNanchor327"></a><a href="#Footnote_327">[327]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The chief element of the project consists in the substitution of a
+      relative series of notes or symbols in place of an absolute series. In the
+      common notation any given note, say the A of the treble clef, is uniformly
+      represented by the same symbol, namely, the position of second space in
+      the clef, whatever key it may belong to. Rousseau, insisting on the
+      varying quality impressed on any tone of a given pitch by the key-note of
+      the scale to which it belongs, protested against the same name being given
+      to the tone, however the quality of it might vary. Thus Re or D, which is
+      the second tone in the key of C, ought, according to him, to have a
+      different name when found as the fifth in the key of G, and in every case
+      the name should at once indicate the interval of a tone from its key-note.
+      His mode of effecting this change is as follows. The names <i>ut, re</i>,
+      and the rest, are kept for the fixed order of the tones, C, D, E, and the
+      rest. The key of a piece is shown by prefixing one of these symbols, and
+      this determines the absolute quality of the melody as to pitch. That
+      settled, every tone is expressed by a number bearing a relation to the
+      key-note. This tonic note is represented by one, the other six tones of
+      the scale are expressed by the numbers from two to seven. In the popular
+      Tonic<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.299" id="Page_i.299">[i.299]</a></span>
+      Sol-Fa notation, which corresponds so closely to Rousseau's in principle,
+      the key-note is always styled Do, and the other symbols, <i>mi</i>, <i>la</i>,
+      and the rest, indicate at once the relative position of these tones in
+      their particular key or scale. Here the old names were preserved as being
+      easily sung; Rousseau selected numbers because he supposed that they best
+      expressed the generation of the sounds.<a name="FNanchor328"
+      id="FNanchor328"></a><a href="#Footnote_328">[328]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rousseau attempted to find a theoretic base for this symbolic
+      establishment of the relational quality of tones, and he dimly guessed
+      that the order of the harmonics or upper tones of a given tonic would
+      furnish a principle for forming the familiar major scale,<a
+      name="FNanchor329" id="FNanchor329"></a><a href="#Footnote_329">[329]</a>
+      but his knowledge of the order was faulty. He was perhaps groping after
+      the idea by which Professor Helmholtz has accounted for the various mental
+      effects of the several intervals in a key&#8212;namely, the degree of
+      natural affinity, measured by means of the upper tones, existing between
+      the given tone and its tonic. Apart from this, however, the practical
+      value of his ideas in instruction in singing is clearly shown by the
+      circumstance that at any given time many thousands of young children are
+      now being taught to read melody in the Sol-Fa notation in a few weeks.
+      This shows how right Rousseau was in continually declaring the ease of
+      hitting a particular tone, when the relative position of the tone in
+      respect to the key-note is clearly manifested. A singer in trying to hit
+      the tone is compelled to measure the interval<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.300" id="Page_i.300">[i.300]</a></span> between it and the
+      preceding tone, and the simplest and easiest mode of doing this is to
+      associate every tone with the tonics, thus constituting it a term of a
+      relation with this fundamental tone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rousseau made a mistake when he supposed that his ideas were just as
+      applicable to instrumental as they were to vocal music. The requirements
+      of the singer are not those of the player. To a performer on the piano,
+      who has to light rapidly and simultaneously on a number of tones, or to a
+      violinist who has to leap through several octaves with great rapidity, the
+      most urgent need is that of a definite and fixed mark, by which the
+      absolute pitch of each successive tone may be at once recognised. Neither
+      of these has any time to think about the melodious relation of the tones;
+      it is quite as much as they can do to find their place on the key-board or
+      the string. Rousseau's scheme, or any similar one, fails to supply the
+      clear and obvious index to pitch supplied by the old system. Old Rameau
+      pointed this out to Rousseau when the scheme was laid before him, and
+      Rousseau admitted that the objection was decisive,<a name="FNanchor330"
+      id="FNanchor330"></a><a href="#Footnote_330">[330]</a> though his
+      admission was not practically deterrent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His device for expressing change of octave by means of points would render
+      the rapid seizing of a particular tone by the performer still more
+      difficult, and it is strange that he should have preferred this to the
+      other plan suggested, of indicating height of octave by visible place
+      above or below a horizontal<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.301"
+      id="Page_i.301">[i.301]</a></span> line. Again, his attempt to simplify
+      the many varieties of musical time by reducing them all to the two modes
+      of double and triple time, though laudable enough, yet implies an
+      imperfect recognition of the full meaning of time, by omitting all
+      reference to the distribution of accent and to the average time value of
+      the tones in a particular movement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &#160;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <b>FOOTNOTES:</b>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_318" id="Footnote_318"></a><a href="#FNanchor318">[318]</a>
+      Quoted in Martin's <i>Hist. de France</i>, xvi. 158.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_319" id="Footnote_319"></a><a href="#FNanchor319">[319]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, viii. 197. Grimm, <i>Corr. Lit.</i>, i. 27.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_320" id="Footnote_320"></a><a href="#FNanchor320">[320]</a>
+      <i>Lettre sur la Musique Fran&#231;aise</i>, 178, etc., 187.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_321" id="Footnote_321"></a><a href="#FNanchor321">[321]</a>
+      P. 197.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_322" id="Footnote_322"></a><a href="#FNanchor322">[322]</a>
+      <i>Corr. Lit.</i>, i. 92. His own piece was <i>Le petit proph&#232;te de
+      Boehmischbroda</i>, the style of which will be seen in a subsequent
+      footnote.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_323" id="Footnote_323"></a><a href="#FNanchor323">[323]</a>
+      He was burnt in effigy by the musicians of the Opera. Grimm, <i>Corr. Lit.</i>,
+      i. 113.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_324" id="Footnote_324"></a><a href="#FNanchor324">[324]</a>
+      This is Turgot's opinion on the controversy (Letter to Caillard, <i>Oeuv.</i>,
+      ii. 827):&#8212;&quot;Tous avez donc vu Jean-Jacques; la musique est un
+      excellent passe-port aupr&#232;s de lui. Quant &#224; l'impossibilit&#233;
+      de faire de la musique fran&#231;aise, je ne puis y croire, et votre
+      raison ne me para&#238;t pas bonne; car il n'est point vrai que l'essence
+      de la langue fran&#231;aise est d'&#234;tre sans accent. Point de
+      conversation anim&#233;e sans beaucoup d'accent; mais l'accent est libre
+      et d&#233;termin&#233; seulement par l'affection de celui qui parle, sans
+      &#234;tre fix&#233; par des conventions sur certaines syllabes, quoique
+      nous ayons aussi dans plusieurs mots des syllabes dominantes qui seules
+      peuvent &#234;tre accentu&#233;es.&quot;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_325" id="Footnote_325"></a><a href="#FNanchor325">[325]</a>
+      Musset-Pathay, i. 289.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_326" id="Footnote_326"></a><a href="#FNanchor326">[326]</a>
+      Preface to <i>Dissertation sur la Musique Moderne</i>, pp. 32, 33.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_327" id="Footnote_327"></a><a href="#FNanchor327">[327]</a>
+      I am indebted to Mr. James Sully, M.A., for furnishing me with notes on a
+      technical subject with which I have too little acquaintance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_328" id="Footnote_328"></a><a href="#FNanchor328">[328]</a>
+      <i>Dissertation</i>, p. 42.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_329" id="Footnote_329"></a><a href="#FNanchor329">[329]</a>
+      P. 52.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_330" id="Footnote_330"></a><a href="#FNanchor330">[330]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, vii. 18, 19. Also <i>Dissertation</i>, pp. 74, 75.
+    </p>
+    <hr style="width: 65%;" />
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.302" id="Page_i.302">[i.302]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      <a name="CHAPTER_IX." id="CHAPTER_IX."></a>CHAPTER IX.
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      VOLTAIRE AND D'ALEMBERT.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <span class="smcap">Everybody</span> in the full tide of the eighteenth
+      century had something to do with Voltaire, from serious personages like
+      Frederick the Great and Turgot, down to the sorriest poetaster who sent
+      his verses to be corrected or bepraised. Rousseau's debt to him in the
+      days of his unformed youth we have already seen, as well as the courtesies
+      with which they approached one another, when Richelieu employed the
+      struggling musician to make some modifications in the great man's
+      unconsidered court-piece. Neither of them then dreamed that their two
+      names were destined to form the great literary antithesis of the century.
+      In the ten years that elapsed between their first interchange of letters
+      and their first fit of coldness, it must have been tolerably clear to
+      either of them, if either of them gave thought to the matter, that their
+      dissidence was increasing and likely to increase. Their methods were
+      different, their training different, their points of view different, and
+      above all these things, their temperaments were different by a whole
+      heaven's breadth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.303" id="Page_i.303">[i.303]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A great number of excellent and pointed half-truths have been uttered by
+      various persons in illustration of all these contrasts. The philosophy of
+      Voltaire, for instance, is declared to be that of the happy, while
+      Rousseau is the philosopher of the unhappy. Voltaire steals away their
+      faith from those who doubt, while Rousseau strikes doubt into the mind of
+      the unbeliever. The gaiety of the one saddens, while the sadness of the
+      other consoles. If we pass from the marked divergence in tendencies, which
+      is imperfectly hinted at in such sayings as these, to the divergence
+      between them in all the fundamental conditions of intellectual and moral
+      life, then the variation which divided the revolutionary stream into two
+      channels, flowing broadly apart through unlike regions and climates down
+      to the great sea, is intelligible enough. Voltaire was the
+      arch-representative of all those elements in contemporary thought, its
+      curiosity, irreverence, intrepidity, vivaciousness, rationality, to which,
+      as we have so often had to say, Rousseau's temperament and his Genevese
+      spirit made him profoundly antipathetic. Voltaire was the great high
+      priest, robed in the dazzling vestments of poetry and philosophy and
+      history, of that very religion of knowledge and art which Rousseau
+      declared to be the destroyer of the felicity of men. The glitter has faded
+      away from Voltaire's philosophic raiment since those days, and his laurel
+      bough lies a little leafless. Still this can never make us forget that he
+      was in his day and generation one of the sovereign emancipators, because<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.304" id="Page_i.304">[i.304]</a></span> he
+      awoke one dormant set of energies, just as Rousseau presently came to
+      awake another set. Each was a power, not merely by virtue of some singular
+      preeminence of understanding or mysterious unshared insight of his own,
+      but for a far deeper reason. No partial and one-sided direction can
+      permanently satisfy the manifold aspirations and faculties of the human
+      mind in the great average of common men, and it is the common average of
+      men to whom exceptional thinkers speak, whom they influence, and by whom
+      they are in turn influenced, depressed, or buoyed up, just as a painter or
+      a dramatist is affected. Voltaire's mental constitution made him eagerly
+      objective, a seeker of true things, quivering for action, admirably
+      sympathetic with all life and movement, a spirit restlessly traversing the
+      whole world. Rousseau, far different from this, saw in himself a reflected
+      microcosm of the outer world, and was content to take that instead of the
+      outer world, and as its truest version. He made his own moods the
+      premisses from which he deduced a system of life for humanity, and so far
+      as humanity has shared his moods or some parts of them, his system was
+      true, and has been accepted. To him the bustle of the outer world was only
+      a hindrance to that process of self-absorption which was his way of
+      interpreting life. Accessible only to interests of emotion and sense, he
+      was saved from intellectual sterility, and made eloquent, by the vehemence
+      of his emotion and the fire of his senses. He was a master example of
+      sensibility,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.305" id="Page_i.305">[i.305]</a></span>
+      as Voltaire was a master example of clear-eyed penetration.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This must not be taken for a rigid piece of mutually exclusive division,
+      for the edges of character are not cut exactly sharp, as words are.
+      Especially when any type is intense, it seems to meet and touch its
+      opposite. Just as Voltaire's piercing activity and soundness of
+      intelligence made him one of the humanest of men, so Rousseau's emotional
+      susceptibility endowed him with the gift of a vision that carried far into
+      the social depths. It was a very early criticism on the pair, that
+      Voltaire wrote on more subjects, but that Rousseau was the more profound.
+      In truth one was hardly much more profound than the other. Rousseau had
+      the sonorousness of speech which popular confusion of thought is apt to
+      identify with depth. And he had seriousness. If profundity means the
+      quality of seeing to the heart of subjects, Rousseau had in a general way
+      rather less of it than the shrewd-witted crusher of the Infamous. What the
+      distinction really amounts to is that Rousseau had a strong feeling for
+      certain very important aspects of human life, which Voltaire thought very
+      little about, or never thought about at all, and that while Voltaire was
+      concerned with poetry, history, literature, and the more ridiculous parts
+      of the religious superstition of his time, Rousseau thought about social
+      justice and duty and God and the spiritual consciousness of men, with a
+      certain attempt at thoroughness and system. As for the substance of his
+      thinking, as we have<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.306"
+      id="Page_i.306">[i.306]</a></span> already seen in the Discourses, and
+      shall soon have an opportunity of seeing still more clearly, it was often
+      as thin and hollow as if he had belonged to the company of the
+      epigrammatical, who, after all, have far less of a monopoly of shallow
+      thinking than is often supposed. The prime merit of Rousseau, in comparing
+      him with the brilliant chief of the rationalistic school of the time, is
+      his reverence; reverence for moral worth in however obscure intellectual
+      company, for the dignity of human character and the loftiness of duty, for
+      some of those cravings of the human mind after the divine and
+      incommensurable, which may indeed often be content with solutions proved
+      by long time and slow experience to be inadequate, but which are closely
+      bound up with the highest elements of nobleness of soul.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was this spiritual part of him which made Rousseau a third great power
+      in the century, between the Encyclop&#230;dic party and the Church. He
+      recognised a something in men, which the Encyclop&#230;dists treated as a
+      chimera imposed on the imagination by theologians and others for their own
+      purposes. And he recognised this in a way which did not offend the
+      rational feeling of the times, as the Catholic dogmas offended it. In a
+      word he was religious. In being so, he separated himself from Voltaire and
+      his school, who did passably well without religion. Again, he was a
+      puritan. In being this, he was cut off from the intellectually and morally
+      unreformed church, which was then the organ of religion in France. Nor is
+      this<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.307" id="Page_i.307">[i.307]</a></span>
+      all. It was Rousseau, and not the feeble controversialists put up from
+      time to time by the Jesuits and other ecclesiastical bodies, who proved
+      the effective champion of religion, and the only power who could make head
+      against the triumphant onslaught of the Voltaireans. He gave up Christian
+      dogmas and mysteries, and, throwing himself with irresistible ardour upon
+      the emotions in which all religions have their root and their power, he
+      breathed new life into them, he quickened in men a strong desire to have
+      them satisfied, and he beat back the army of emancipators with the loud
+      and incessantly repeated cry that they were not come to deliver the human
+      mind, but to root out all its most glorious and consolatory attributes.
+      This immense achievement accomplished,&#8212;the great framework of a
+      faith in God and immortality and providential government of the world thus
+      preserved, it was an easy thing by and by for the churchmen to come back,
+      and once more unpack and restore to their old places the temporarily
+      discredited paraphernalia of dogma and mystery. How far all this was good
+      or bad for the mental elevation of France and Europe, we shall have a
+      better opportunity of considering presently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We have now only to glance at the first skirmishes between the religious
+      reactionist, on the one side, and, on the other, the leader of the school
+      who believed that men are better employed in thinking as accurately, and
+      knowing as widely, and living as humanely, as all those difficult
+      processes are possible,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.308"
+      id="Page_i.308">[i.308]</a></span> than in wearying themselves in futile
+      search after gods who dwell on inaccessible heights.
+    </p>
+    <hr style="width: 25%;" />
+    <p>
+      Voltaire had acknowledged Rousseau's gift of the second Discourse with his
+      usual shrewd pleasantry: &quot;I have received your new book against the
+      human race, and thank you for it. Never was such cleverness used in the
+      design of making us all stupid. One longs in reading your book to walk on
+      all fours. But as I have lost that habit for more than sixty years, I feel
+      unhappily the impossibility of resuming it. Nor can I embark in search of
+      the savages of Canada, because the maladies to which I am condemned render
+      a European surgeon necessary to me; because war is going on in those
+      regions; and because the example of our actions has made the savages
+      nearly as bad as ourselves. So I content myself with being a very
+      peaceable savage in the solitude which I have chosen near your native
+      place, where you ought to be too.&quot; After an extremely inadequate
+      discussion of one or two points in the essay,<a name="FNanchor331"
+      id="FNanchor331"></a><a href="#Footnote_331">[331]</a> he concludes:&#8212;&quot;I
+      am informed that your health is bad; you ought to come to set it up again
+      in your native air, to enjoy freedom, to drink with me the milk of our
+      cows and browse our grass.&quot;<a name="FNanchor332" id="FNanchor332"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_332">[332]</a> Rousseau replied to all this in a friendly
+      way, recognising Voltaire as his chief, and actually at the very moment
+      when he tells us that the corrupting presence of the arrogant and
+      seductive man at Geneva helped<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.309"
+      id="Page_i.309">[i.309]</a></span> to make the idea of returning to Geneva
+      odious to him, hailing him in such terms as these:&#8212;&quot;Sensible of
+      the honour you do my country, I share the gratitude of my fellow-citizens,
+      and hope that it will increase when they have profited by the lessons that
+      you of all men are able to give them. Embellish the asylum you have
+      chosen; enlighten a people worthy of your instruction; and do you who know
+      so well how to paint virtue and freedom, teach us to cherish them in our
+      walls.&quot;<a name="FNanchor333" id="FNanchor333"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_333">[333]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Within a year, however, the bright sky became a little clouded. In 1756
+      Voltaire published one of the most sincere, energetic, and passionate
+      pieces to be found in the whole literature of the eighteenth century, his
+      poem on the great earthquake of Lisbon (November 1755). No such word had
+      been heard in Europe since the terrible images in which Pascal had figured
+      the doom of man. It was the reaction of one who had begun life by refuting
+      Pascal with doctrines of cheerfulness drawn from the optimism of Pope and
+      Leibnitz, who had done Pope's Essay on Man (1732-34) into French verse as
+      late as 1751,<a name="FNanchor334" id="FNanchor334"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_334">[334]</a> and whose imagination, already sombred by
+      the triumphant cruelty and superstition which raged around him, was
+      suddenly struck with horror by a catastrophe which, in a world where
+      whatever is is best, destroyed hundreds of human creatures in the smoking
+      ashes and engulfed wreck of their city. How, he cried, can you persist in
+      talking of the deliberate will of a free<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.310" id="Page_i.310">[i.310]</a></span> and benevolent God,
+      whose eternal laws necessitated such an appalling climax of misery and
+      injustice as this? Was the disaster retributive? If so, why is Lisbon in
+      ashes, while Paris dances? The enigma is desperate and inscrutable, and
+      the optimist lives in the paradise of the fool. We ask in vain what we
+      are, where we are, whither we go, whence we came. We are tormented atoms
+      on a clod of earth, whom death at last swallows up, and with whom destiny
+      meanwhile makes cruel sport. The past is only a disheartening memory, and
+      if the tomb destroys the thinking creature, how frightful is the present!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Whatever else we may say of Voltaire's poem, it was at least the first
+      sign of the coming reaction of sympathetic imagination against the
+      polished common sense of the great Queen Anne school, which had for more
+      than a quarter of a century such influence in Europe.<a name="FNanchor335"
+      id="FNanchor335"></a><a href="#Footnote_335">[335]</a> It is a little odd
+      that Voltaire, the most brilliant and versatile branch of this stock,
+      should have broken so energetically away from it, and that he should have
+      done so, shows how open and how strong was the feeling in him for reality
+      and actual circumstance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rousseau was amazed that a man overwhelmed as Voltaire was with prosperity
+      and glory, should declaim against the miseries of this life and pro<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.311" id="Page_i.311">[i.311]</a></span>nounce
+      that all is evil and vanity. &quot;Voltaire in seeming always to believe
+      in God, never really believed in anybody but the devil, since his
+      pretended God is a maleficent being who according to him finds all his
+      pleasure in working mischief. The absurdity of this doctrine is especially
+      revolting in a man crowned with good things of every sort, and who from
+      the midst of his own happiness tries to fill his fellow-creatures with
+      despair, by the cruel and terrible image of the serious calamities from
+      which he is himself free.&quot;<a name="FNanchor336" id="FNanchor336"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_336">[336]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As if any doctrine could be more revolting than this which Rousseau so
+      quietly takes for granted, that if it is well with me and I am free from
+      calamities, then there must needs be a beneficent ruler of the universe,
+      and the calamities of all the rest of the world, if by chance they catch
+      the fortunate man's eye, count for nothing in our estimate of the method
+      of the supposed divine government. It is hard to imagine a more execrable
+      emotion than the complacent religiosity of the prosperous. Voltaire is
+      more admirable in nothing than in the ardent humanity and far-spreading
+      lively sympathy with which he interested himself in all the world's
+      fortunes, and felt the catastrophe of Lisbon as profoundly as if the
+      Geneva at his gates had been destroyed. He relished his own prosperity
+      keenly enough, but his prosperity became ashes in his mouth when he heard
+      of distress or wrong, and he did not rest until he had moved heaven<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.312" id="Page_i.312">[i.312]</a></span>
+      and earth to soothe the distress and repair the wrong. It was his
+      impatience in the face of the evils of the time which wrung from him this
+      desperate cry, and it is precisely because these evils did not touch him
+      in his own person, that he merits the greater honour for the surpassing
+      energy and sincerity of his feeling for them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rousseau, however, whose biographer has no such stories to tell as those
+      of Calas and La Barre, Sirven and Lally, but only tales of a maiden
+      wrongfully accused of theft, and a friend left senseless on the pavement
+      of a strange town, and a benefactress abandoned to the cruelty of her
+      fate, still was moved in the midst of his erotic visions in the forest of
+      Montmorency to speak a jealous word in vindication of the divine
+      government of our world. For him at any rate life was then warm and the
+      day bright and the earth very fair, and he lauded his gods accordingly. It
+      was his very sensuousness, as we are so often saying, that made him
+      religious. The optimism which Voltaire wished to destroy was to him a
+      sovereign element of comfort. &quot;Pope's poem,&quot; he says, &quot;softens
+      my misfortunes and inclines me to patience, while yours sharpens all my
+      pains, excites me to murmuring, and reduces me to despair. Pope and
+      Leibnitz exhort me to resignation by declaring calamities to be a
+      necessary effect of the nature and constitution of the universe. You cry,
+      Suffer for ever, unhappy wretch; if there be a God who created thee, he
+      could have stayed thy pains if he would: hope for no end to them, for
+      there is no reason to be discerned for thy<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.313" id="Page_i.313">[i.313]</a></span> existence, except to
+      suffer and to perish.&quot;<a name="FNanchor337" id="FNanchor337"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_337">[337]</a> Rousseau then proceeds to argue the matter,
+      but he says nothing really to the point which Pope had not said before,
+      and said far more effectively. He begins, however, originally enough by a
+      triumphant reference to his own great theme of the superiority of the
+      natural over the civil state. Moral evil is our own work, the result of
+      our liberty; so are most of our physical evils, except death, and that is
+      mostly an evil only from the preparations that we make for it. Take the
+      case of Lisbon. Was it nature who collected the twenty thousand houses,
+      all seven stories high? If the people of Lisbon had been dispersed over
+      the face of the country, as wild tribes are, they would have fled at the
+      first shock, and they would have been seen the next day twenty leagues
+      away, as gay as if nothing had happened. And how many of them perished in
+      the attempt to rescue clothes or papers or money? Is it not true that the
+      person of a man is now, thanks to civilisation, the least part of himself,
+      and is hardly worth saving after loss of the rest? Again, there are some
+      events which lose much of their horror when we look at them closely. A
+      premature death is not always a real evil and may be a relative good; of
+      the people crushed to death under the ruins of Lisbon, many no doubt thus
+      escaped still worse calamities. And is it worse to be killed swiftly than
+      to await death in prolonged anguish?<a name="FNanchor338" id="FNanchor338"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_338">[338]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.314" id="Page_i.314">[i.314]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The good of the whole is to be sought before the good of the part.
+      Although the whole material universe ought not to be dearer to its Creator
+      than a single thinking and feeling being, yet the system of the universe
+      which produces, preserves, and perpetuates all thinking and feeling
+      beings, ought to be dearer to him than any one of them, and he may,
+      notwithstanding his goodness, or rather by reason of his goodness,
+      sacrifice something of the happiness of individuals to the preservation of
+      the whole. &quot;That the dead body of a man should feed worms or wolves
+      or plants is not, I admit, a compensation for the death of such a man; but
+      if in the system of this universe, it is necessary for the preservation of
+      the human race that there should be a circulation of substance between
+      men, animals, vegetables, then the particular mishap of an individual
+      contributes to the general good. I die, I am eaten by worms; but my
+      children, my brothers, will live as I have lived; my body enriches the
+      earth of which they will consume the fruits; and so I do, by the order of
+      nature and for all men, what Codrus, Curtius, the Decii, and a thousand
+      others, did of their own free will for a small part of men.&quot; (p.
+      305.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All this is no doubt very well said, and we are bound to accept it as true
+      doctrine. Although, however, it may make resignation easier by explaining
+      the nature of evil, it does not touch the point of Voltaire's outburst,
+      which is that evil exists, and exists in shapes which it is a mere mockery
+      to associate with<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.315" id="Page_i.315">[i.315]</a></span>
+      the omnipotence of a benevolent controller of the world's forces.
+      According to Rousseau, if we go to the root of what he means, there is no
+      such thing as evil, though much that to our narrow and impatient sight has
+      the look of it. This may be true if we use that fatal word in an arbitrary
+      and unreal sense, for the avoidable, the consequent without antecedent, or
+      antecedent without consequent. If we consent to talk in this way, and only
+      are careful to define terms so that there is no doubt as to their meaning,
+      it is hardly deniable that evil is a mere word and not a reality, and
+      whatever is is indeed right and best, because no better is within our
+      reach. Voltaire, however, like the man of sense that he was, exclaimed
+      that at any rate relatively to us poor creatures the existence of pain,
+      suffering, waste, whether caused or uncaused, whether in accordance with
+      stern immutable law or mere divine caprice, is a most indisputable
+      reality: from our point of view it is a cruel puerility to cry out at
+      every calamity and every iniquity that all is well in the best of possible
+      worlds, and to sing hymns of praise and glory to the goodness and mercy of
+      a being of supreme might, who planted us in this evil state and keeps us
+      in it. Voltaire's is no perfect philosophy; indeed it is not a philosophy
+      at all, but a passionate ejaculation; but it is perfect in comparison with
+      a cut and dried system like this of Rousseau's, which rests on a mocking
+      juggle with phrases, and the substitution by dexterous sleight of hand of
+      one definition for another.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.316" id="Page_i.316">[i.316]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rousseau really gives up the battle, by confessing frankly that the matter
+      is beyond the light of reason, and that, &quot;if the theist only founds
+      his sentiment on probabilities, the atheist with still less precision only
+      founds his on the alternative possibilities.&quot; The objections on both
+      sides are insoluble, because they turn on things of which men can have no
+      veritable idea; &quot;yet I believe in God as strongly as I believe any
+      other truth, because believing and not believing are the last things in
+      the world that depend on me.&quot; So be it. But why take the trouble to
+      argue in favour of one side of an avowedly insoluble question? It was
+      precisely because he felt that the objections on both sides cannot be
+      answered, that Voltaire, hastily or not, cried out that he faced the
+      horrors of such a catastrophe as the Lisbon earthquake without a glimpse
+      of consolation. The upshot of Rousseau's remonstrance only amounted to
+      this, that he could not furnish one with any consolation out of the
+      armoury of reason, that he himself found this consolation, but in a way
+      that did not at all depend upon his own effort or will, and was therefore
+      as incommunicable as the advantage of having a large appetite or being six
+      feet high. The reader of Rousseau becomes accustomed to this way of
+      dealing with subjects of discussion. We see him using his reason as
+      adroitly as he knows how for three-fourths of the debate, and then he
+      suddenly flings himself back with a triumphant kind of weariness into the
+      buoyant waters of emotion and sentiment. &quot;You sir, who are a poet,&quot;
+      once said Madame d'Epinay<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.317"
+      id="Page_i.317">[i.317]</a></span> to Saint Lambert, &quot;will agree with
+      me that the existence of a Being, eternal, all powerful, and of sovereign
+      intelligence, is at any rate the germ of the finest enthusiasm.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor339" id="FNanchor339"></a><a href="#Footnote_339">[339]</a>
+      To take this position and cleave to it may be very well, but why spoil its
+      dignity and repose by an unmeaning and superfluous flourish of the weapons
+      of the reasoner?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With the same hasty change of direction Rousseau says the true question is
+      not whether each of us suffers or not, but whether it is good that the
+      universe should be, and whether our misfortunes were inevitable in its
+      constitution. Then within a dozen lines he admits that there can be no
+      direct proof either way; we must content ourselves with settling it by
+      means of inference from the perfections of God. Of course, it is clear
+      that in the first place what Rousseau calls the true question consists of
+      two quite distinct questions. Is the universe in its present ordering on
+      the whole good relatively either to men, or to all sentient creatures?
+      Next was evil an inevitable element in that ordering? Second, this way of
+      putting it does not in the least advance the case against Voltaire, who
+      insisted that no fine phrases ought to hide from us the dreadful power and
+      crushing reality of evil and the desolate plight in which we are left.
+      This is no exhaustive thought, but a deep cry of anguish at the dark lot
+      of men, and of just indignation against the philosophy which to creatures
+      asking for bread gave the brightly polished<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.318" id="Page_i.318">[i.318]</a></span> stone of sentimental
+      theism. Rousseau urged that Voltaire robbed men of their only solace. What
+      Voltaire really did urge was that the solace derived from the attribution
+      of humanity and justice to the Supreme Being, and from the metaphysical
+      account of evil, rests on too narrow a base either to cover the facts, or
+      to be a true solace to any man who thinks and observes. He ought to have
+      gone on, if it had only been possible in those times, to persuade his
+      readers that there is no solace attainable, except that of an energetic
+      fortitude, and that we do best to go into life not in a softly lined
+      silken robe, but with a sharp sword and armour thrice tempered. As between
+      himself and Rousseau, he saw much the more keenly of the two, and this was
+      because he approached the matter from the side of the facts, while the
+      latter approached it from the side of his own mental comfort and the
+      preconceptions involved in it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The most curious part of this curious letter is the conclusion, where
+      Rousseau, loosely wandering from his theme, separates Voltaire from the
+      philosopher, and beseeches him to draw up a moral code or profession of
+      civil faith that should contain positively the social maxims that
+      everybody should be bound to admit, and negatively the intolerant maxims
+      that everybody should be forced to reject as seditious. Every religion in
+      accord with the code should be allowed, and every religion out of accord
+      with it proscribed, or a man might be free to have no other religion but
+      the code itself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.319" id="Page_i.319">[i.319]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Voltaire was much too clear-headed a person to take any notice of nonsense
+      like this. Rousseau's letter remained unanswered, nor is there any reason
+      to suppose that Voltaire ever got through it, though Rousseau chose to
+      think that <i>Candide</i> (1759) was meant for a reply to him.<a
+      name="FNanchor340" id="FNanchor340"></a><a href="#Footnote_340">[340]</a>
+      He is careful to tell us that he never read that incomparable satire, for
+      which one would be disposed to pity any one except Rousseau, whose
+      appreciation of wit, if not of humour also, was probably more deficient
+      than in any man who ever lived, either in Geneva or any other country
+      fashioned after Genevan guise. Rousseau's next letter to Voltaire was four
+      years later, and by that time the alienation which had no definitely
+      avowed cause, and can be marked by no special date, had become complete.
+      &quot;I hate you, in fact,&quot; he concluded, &quot;since you have so
+      willed it; but I hate you like a man still worthier to have loved you, if
+      you had willed it. Of all the sentiments with which my heart was full
+      towards you, there only remains the admiration that we cannot refuse to
+      your fine genius, and love for your writings. If there is nothing in you
+      which I can honour but your talents, that is no fault of mine.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor341" id="FNanchor341"></a><a href="#Footnote_341">[341]</a>
+      We know that Voltaire did not take reproach with serenity, and he behaved
+      with bitter<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.320" id="Page_i.320">[i.320]</a></span>
+      violence towards Rousseau in circumstances when silence would have been
+      both more magnanimous and more humane. Rousseau occasionally, though not
+      very often, retaliated in the same vein.<a name="FNanchor342"
+      id="FNanchor342"></a><a href="#Footnote_342">[342]</a> On the whole his
+      judgment of Voltaire, when calmly given, was not meant to be unkind.
+      &quot;Voltaire's first impulse,&quot; he said, &quot;is to be good; it is
+      reflection that makes him bad.&quot;<a name="FNanchor343" id="FNanchor343"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_343">[343]</a> Tronchin had said in the same way that
+      Voltaire's heart was the dupe of his understanding. Rousseau is always
+      trying to like him, he always recognises him as the first man of the time,
+      and he subscribed his mite for the erection of a statue to him. It was the
+      satire and mockery in Voltaire which irritated Rousseau more than the
+      doctrines or denial of doctrine which they cloaked; in his eyes sarcasm
+      was always the veritable dialect of the evil power. It says something for
+      the sincerity of his efforts after equitable judgment, that he should have<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.321" id="Page_i.321">[i.321]</a></span>
+      had the patience to discern some of the fundamental merit of the most
+      remorseless and effective mocker that ever made superstition look mean,
+      and its doctors ridiculous.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      II.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      Voltaire was indirectly connected with Rousseau's energetic attack upon
+      another great Encyclop&#230;dist leader, the famous Letter to D'Alembert
+      on Stage Plays. &quot;There,&quot; Rousseau said afterwards, &quot;is my
+      favourite book, my Benjamin, because I produced it without effort, at the
+      first inspiration, and in the most lucid moments of my life.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor344" id="FNanchor344"></a><a href="#Footnote_344">[344]</a>
+      Voltaire, who to us figures so little as a poet and dramatist, was to
+      himself and to his contemporaries of this date a poet and dramatist before
+      all else, the author of <i>Za&#239;re</i> and <i>Mahomet</i>, rather than
+      of <i>Candide</i> and the <i>Philosophical Dictionary</i>. D'Alembert was
+      Voltaire's staunchest henchman. He only wrote his article on Geneva for
+      the Encyclop&#230;dia to gratify the master. Fresh from a visit to him
+      when he composed it, he took occasion to regret that the austerity of the
+      tradition of the city deprived it of the manifold advantages of a theatre.
+      This suggestion had its origin partly in a desire to promote something
+      that would please the eager vanity of the dramatist whom Geneva now had
+      for so close a neighbour, and who had just set her the example by setting
+      up a theatre of his own; and partly, also, because it gave the writer an
+      opportunity<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.322" id="Page_i.322">[i.322]</a></span>
+      of denouncing the intolerant rigour with which the church nearer home
+      treated the stage and all who appeared on it. Geneva was to set an example
+      that could not be resisted, and France would no longer see actors on the
+      one hand pensioned by the government, and on the other an object of
+      anathema, excommunicated by priests and regarded with contempt by
+      citizens.<a name="FNanchor345" id="FNanchor345"></a><a href="#Footnote_345">[345]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The inveterate hostility of the church to the theatre was manifested by
+      the French ecclesiastics in the full eighteenth century as bitterly as
+      ever. The circumstance that Voltaire was the great play-writer of the time
+      would not tend to soften their traditional prejudice, and the persecution
+      of players by priests was in some sense an episode of the war between the
+      priest and the philosophers. The latter took up the cause of the stage
+      partly because they hoped to make the drama an effective rival to the
+      teaching of pulpit and confessional, partly from their natural sympathy
+      with an elevated form of intellectual manifestation, and partly from their
+      abhorrence of the practical inhumanity with which the officers of the
+      church treated stage performers. While people of quality eagerly sought
+      the society of those who furnished them as much diversion in private as in
+      public, the church refused to all players the marriage blessing; when an
+      actor or actress wished to marry, they were<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.323" id="Page_i.323">[i.323]</a></span> obliged to renounce
+      the stage, and the Archbishop of Paris diligently resisted evasion or
+      subterfuge.<a name="FNanchor346" id="FNanchor346"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_346">[346]</a> The atrocities connected with the refusal
+      of burial, as well in the case of players as of philosophers, are known to
+      all readers in a dozen illustrious instances, from Moli&#232;re and
+      Adrienne Lecouvreur downwards.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Here, as along the whole line of the battle between new light and old
+      prejudice, Rousseau took part, if not with the church, at least against
+      its adversaries. His point of view was at bottom truly puritanical. Jeremy
+      Collier in his <i>Short View of the Profaneness and Immorality of the
+      English Stage</i> (1698) takes up quite a different position. This once
+      famous piece was not a treatment of the general question, but an attack on
+      certain specific qualities of the plays of his time&#8212;their indecency
+      of phrase, their oaths, their abuse of the clergy, the gross libertinism
+      of the characters. One can hardly deny that this was richly deserved by
+      the English drama of the Restoration, and Collier's strictures were not
+      applicable, nor meant to apply, either to the ancients, for he has a good
+      word even for Aristophanes, or to the French drama. Bossuet's loftier
+      denunciation, like Rousseau's, was puritanical, and it extended to the
+      whole body of stage plays. He objected to the drama as a school of
+      concupiscence, as a subtle or gross debaucher of the gravity and purity of
+      the understanding, as essentially a charmer of the senses, and therefore
+      the most equivocal and untrust<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.324"
+      id="Page_i.324">[i.324]</a></span>worthy of teachers. He appeals to the
+      fathers, to Scripture, to Plato, and even to Christ, who cried, <i>Woe
+      unto you that laugh</i>.<a name="FNanchor347" id="FNanchor347"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_347">[347]</a> There is a fine austerity about Bossuet's
+      energetic criticism; it is so free from breathless eagerness, and so
+      severe without being thinly bitter. The churchmen of a generation or two
+      later had fallen from this height into gloomy peevishness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rousseau's letter on the theatre, it need hardly be said, is meant to be
+      an appeal to the common sense and judgment of his readers, and not
+      conceived in the ecclesiastical tone of unctuous anathema and fulgurant
+      menace. It is no bishop's pastoral, replete with solecisms of thought and
+      idiom, but a piece of firm dialectic in real matter. His position is this:
+      that the moral effect of the stage can never be salutary in itself, while
+      it may easily be extremely pernicious, and that the habit of frequenting
+      the theatre, the taste for imitating the style of the actors, the cost in
+      money, the waste in time, and all the other accessory conditions, apart
+      from the morality of the matter represented, are bad things in themselves,
+      absolutely and in every circumstance. Secondly, these effects in all kinds
+      are specially bad in relation to the social condition and habits of
+      Geneva.<a name="FNanchor348" id="FNanchor348"></a><a href="#Footnote_348">[348]</a>
+      The first part of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.325"
+      id="Page_i.325">[i.325]</a></span> discussion is an ingenious answer to
+      some of the now trite pleas for the morality of the drama, such as that
+      tragedy leads to pity through terror, that comedy corrects men while
+      amusing them, that both make virtue attractive and vice hateful.<a
+      name="FNanchor349" id="FNanchor349"></a><a href="#Footnote_349">[349]</a>
+      Rousseau insists with abundance of acutely chosen illustration that the
+      pity that is awaked by tragedy is a fleeting emotion which subsides when
+      the curtain falls; that comedy as often as not amuses men at the expense
+      of old age, uncouth virtue, paternal carefulness, and other objects which
+      we should be taught rather to revere than to ridicule; and that both
+      tragedy and comedy, instead of making vice hateful, constantly win our
+      sympathy for it. Is not the French stage, he asks, as much the triumph of
+      great villains, like Catilina, Mahomet, Atreus, as of illustrious heroes?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This rude handling of accepted commonplace is always one of the most
+      interesting features in Rousseau's polemic. It was of course a
+      characteristic of the eighteenth century always to take up the ethical and
+      high prudential view of whatever had to be justified, and Rousseau seems
+      from this point to have been successful in demolishing arguments which
+      might hold of Greek tragedy at its best, but which certainly do not hold
+      of any other dramatic forms. The childishness of the old criticism which
+      attaches the label of some moral from the copybook to each piece, as its<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.326" id="Page_i.326">[i.326]</a></span>
+      lesson and point of moral aim, is evident. In repudiating this Rousseau
+      was certainly right.<a name="FNanchor350" id="FNanchor350"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_350">[350]</a> Both the assailants and the defenders of
+      the stage, however, commit the double error, first of supposing that the
+      drama is always the same thing, from the Agamemnon down to the last
+      triviality of a London theatre, and next of pitching the discussion in too
+      high a key, as if the effect or object of a stage play in the modern era,
+      where grave sentiment clothes itself in other forms, were substantially
+      anything more serious than an evening's amusement. Apart from this, and in
+      so far as the discussion is confined to the highest dramatic expression,
+      the true answer to Rousseau is now a very plain one. The drama does not
+      work in the sphere of direct morality, though like everything else in the
+      world it has a moral or immoral aspect. It is an art of ideal
+      presentation, not concerned with the inculcation of immediate practical
+      lessons, but producing a stir in all our sympathetic emotions, quickening
+      the imagination, and so communicating a wider life to the character of the
+      spectator. This is what the drama in the hands of a worthy master does; it
+      is just what noble composition in music does, and there is no more
+      directly moralising effect in the one than in the other. You must trust to
+      the sum of other agencies to guide the interest and sympathy thus
+      quickened into channels<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.327"
+      id="Page_i.327">[i.327]</a></span> of right action. Rousseau, like most
+      other controversialists, makes an attack of which the force rests on the
+      assumption that the special object of the attack is the single influencing
+      element and the one decisive instrument in making men had or good. What he
+      says about the drama would only be true if the public went to the play all
+      day long, and were accessible to no other moral force whatever, modifying
+      and counteracting such lessons as they might learn at the theatre. He
+      failed here as in the wider controversy on the sciences and arts, to
+      consider the particular subject of discussion in relation to the whole of
+      the general medium in which character moves, and by whose manifold action
+      and reaction it is incessantly affected and variously shaped.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So when he passed on from the theory of dramatic morality to the matter
+      which he had more at heart, namely, the practical effects of introducing
+      the drama into Geneva, he keeps out of sight all the qualities in the
+      Genevese citizen which would protect him against the evil influence of the
+      stage, though it is his anxiety for the preservation of these very
+      qualities that gives all its fire to his eloquence. If the citizen really
+      was what Rousseau insisted that he was, then his virtues would surely
+      neutralise the evil of the drama; if not, the drama would do him no harm.
+      We need not examine the considerations in which Rousseau pointed out the
+      special reasons against introducing a theatre into his native town. It
+      would draw the artisans away from their work, cause wasteful expenditure
+      of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.328" id="Page_i.328">[i.328]</a></span>
+      money in amusements, break up the harmless and inexpensive little clubs of
+      men and the social gatherings of women. The town was not populous enough
+      to support a theatre, therefore the government would have to provide one,
+      and this would mean increased taxation. All this was the secondary and
+      merely colourable support by argumentation, of a position that had been
+      reached and was really held by sentiment. Rousseau hated the introduction
+      of French plays in the same way that Cato hated the introduction of fine
+      talkers from Greece. It was an innovation, and so habitual was it with
+      Rousseau to look on all movement in the direction of what the French
+      writers called taste and cultivation as depraving, that he cannot help
+      taking for granted that any change in manners associated with taste must
+      necessarily be a change for the worse. Thus the Letter to D'Alembert was
+      essentially a supplement to the first Discourse; it was an application of
+      its principles to a practical case. It was part of his general reactionary
+      protest against philosophers, poets, men of letters, and all their works,
+      without particular apprehension on the side of the drama. Hence its
+      reasoning is much less interesting than its panegyric on the simplicity,
+      robust courage, and manliness of the Genevese, and its invective against
+      the effeminacy and frivolity of the Parisian. One of the most significant
+      episodes in the discussion is the lengthy criticism on the immortal
+      Misanthrope of Moli&#232;re. Rousseau admits it for the masterpiece of the
+      comic muse, though with characteristic perver<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.329" id="Page_i.329">[i.329]</a></span>sity he insists that
+      the hero is not misanthropic enough, nor truly misanthropic at all,
+      because he flies into rage at small things affecting himself, instead of
+      at the large follies of the race. Again, he says that Moli&#232;re makes
+      Alceste ridiculous, virtuous as he is, in order to win the applause of the
+      pit. It is for the character of Philinte, however, that Rousseau reserves
+      all his spleen. He takes care to describe him in terms which exactly hit
+      Rousseau's own conception of his philosophic enemies, who find all going
+      well because they have no interest in anything going better; who are
+      content with everybody, because they do not care for anybody; who round a
+      full table maintain that it is not true that the people are hungry. As
+      criticism, one cannot value this kind of analysis. D'Alembert replied with
+      a much more rational interpretation of the great comedy, but finding
+      himself seized with the critic's besetting impertinence of improving
+      masterpieces, he suddenly stopped with the becoming reflection&#8212;&quot;But
+      I perceive, sir, that I am giving lessons to Moli&#232;re.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor351" id="FNanchor351"></a><a href="#Footnote_351">[351]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The constant thought of Paris gave Rousseau an admirable occasion of
+      painting two pictures in violent contrast, each as over-coloured as the
+      other by his mixed conceptions of the Plutarchian antique and imaginary
+      pastoral. We forget the depravation of the stage and the ill living of
+      comedians in magnificent descriptions of the manly exercises and cheerful
+      festivities of the free people on the shores of the Lake of<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.330" id="Page_i.330">[i.330]</a></span>
+      Geneva, and in scornful satire on the Parisian seraglios, where some woman
+      assembles a number of men who are more like women than their entertainers.
+      We see on the one side the rude sons of the republic, boxing, wrestling,
+      running, in generous emulation, and on the other the coxcombs of
+      cultivated Paris imprisoned in a drawing-room, &quot;rising up, sitting
+      down, incessantly going and coming to the fire-place, to the window,
+      taking up a screen and putting it down again a hundred times, turning over
+      books, flitting from picture to picture, turning and pirouetting about the
+      room, while the idol stretched motionless on a couch all the time is only
+      alive in her tongue and eyes&quot; (p. 161). If the rough patriots of the
+      Lake are less polished in speech, they are all the weightier in reason;
+      they do not escape by a pleasantry or a compliment; each feeling himself
+      attacked by all the forces of his adversary, he is obliged to employ all
+      his own to defend himself, and this is how a mind acquires strength and
+      precision. There may be here and there a licentious phrase, but there is
+      no ground for alarm in that. It is not the least rude who are always the
+      most pure, and even a rather clownish speech is better than that
+      artificial style in which the two sexes seduce one another, and
+      familiarise themselves decently with vice. 'Tis true our Swiss drinks too
+      much, but after all let us not calumniate even vice; as a rule drinkers
+      are cordial and frank, good, upright, just, loyal, brave, and worthy folk.
+      Wherever people have most abhorrence of drunkenness, be sure they have
+      most reason<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.331" id="Page_i.331">[i.331]</a></span>
+      to fear lest its indiscretion should betray intrigue and treachery. In
+      Switzerland it is almost thought well of, while at Naples they hold it in
+      horror; but at bottom which is the more to be dreaded, the intemperance of
+      the Swiss or the reserve of the Italian? It is hardly surprising to learn
+      that the people of Geneva were as little gratified by this well-meant
+      panegyric on their jollity as they had been by another writer's friendly
+      eulogy on their Socinianism.<a name="FNanchor352" id="FNanchor352"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_352">[352]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The reader who was not moved to turn brute and walk on all fours by the
+      pictures of the state of nature in the Discourses, may find it more
+      difficult to resist the charm of the brotherly festivities and simple
+      pastimes which in the Letter to D'Alembert the patriot holds up to the
+      admiration of his countrymen and the envy of foreigners. The writer is in
+      Sparta, but he tempers his Sparta with a something from Charmettes. Never
+      before was there so attractive a combination of martial austerity with the
+      grace of the idyll. And the interest of these pictures is much more than
+      literary; it is historic also. They were the original version of those
+      great gatherings in the Champ de Mars and strange suppers of fraternity
+      during the progress of the Revolution in Paris, which have amused the
+      cynical ever since, but which pointed to a not unworthy aspiration. The
+      fine gentlemen whom Rousseau did so well to despise had then all fled, and<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.332" id="Page_i.332">[i.332]</a></span>
+      the common people under Rousseauite leaders were doing the best they could
+      to realise on the banks of the Seine the imaginary joymaking and simple
+      fellowship which had been first dreamed of for the banks of Lake Leman,
+      and commended with an eloquence that struck new chords in minds satiated
+      or untouched by the brilliance of mere literature. There was no real state
+      of things in Geneva corresponding to the gracious picture which Rousseau
+      so generously painted, and some of the citizens complained that his
+      account of their social joys was as little deserved as his ingenious
+      vindication of their hearty feeling for barrel or bottle was little
+      founded.<a name="FNanchor353" id="FNanchor353"></a><a href="#Footnote_353">[353]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The glorification of love of country did little for the Genevese for whom
+      it was meant, but it penetrated many a soul in the greater nation that lay
+      sunk in helpless indifference to its own ruin. Nowhere else among the
+      writers who are the glory of France at this time, is any serious eulogy of
+      patriotism. Rousseau glows with it, and though he always speaks in
+      connection with Geneva, yet there is in his words a generous breadth and
+      fire which gave them an irresistible contagiousness. There are many
+      passages of this fine persuasive force in the Letter to D'Alembert;
+      perhaps this, referring to the citizens of Geneva who had gone elsewhere
+      in search of fortune, is as good as another. Do you think that the opening
+      of a theatre, he asks, will bring them back to their<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_i.333" id="Page_i.333">[i.333]</a></span> mother city? No;
+      &quot;each of them must feel that he can never find anywhere else what he
+      has left behind in his own land; an invincible charm must call him back to
+      the spot that he ought never to have quitted; the recollection of their
+      first exercises, their first pleasures, their first sights, must remain
+      deeply graven in their hearts; the soft impressions made in the days of
+      their youth must abide and grow stronger with advancing years, while a
+      thousand others wax dim; in the midst of the pomp of great cities and all
+      their cheerless magnificence, a secret voice must for ever cry in the
+      depth of the wanderer's soul, Ah, where are the games and holidays of my
+      youth? Where is the concord of the townsmen, where the public brotherhood?
+      Where is pure joy and true mirth? Where are peace, freedom, equity? Let us
+      hasten to seek all these. With the heart of a Genevese, with a city as
+      smiling, a landscape as full of delight, a government as just, with
+      pleasures so true and so pure, and all that is needed to be able to relish
+      them, how is it that we do not all adore our birth-land? It was thus in
+      old times that by modest feasts and homely games her citizens were called
+      back by that Sparta which I can never quote often enough as an example for
+      us; thus in Athens in the midst of fine art, thus in Susa in the very
+      bosom of luxury and soft delights, the wearied Spartan sighed after his
+      coarse pastimes and exhausting exercises&quot; (p. 211).<a
+      name="FNanchor354" id="FNanchor354"></a><a href="#Footnote_354">[354]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.334" id="Page_i.334">[i.334]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Any reference to this powerfully written, though most sophistical piece,
+      would be imperfect which should omit its slightly virulent onslaught upon
+      women and the passion which women inspire. The modern drama, he said,
+      being too feeble to rise to high themes, has fallen back on love; and on
+      this hint he proceeds to a censure of love as a poetic theme, and a bitter
+      estimate of women as companions for men, which might have pleased Calvin
+      or Knox in his sternest mood. The same eloquence which showed men the
+      superior delights of the state of nature, now shows the superior fitness
+      of the oriental seclusion of women; it makes a sympathetic reader tremble
+      at the want of modesty, purity, and decency, in the part which women are
+      allowed to take by the infatuated men of a modern community.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All this, again, is directed against &quot;that philosophy of a day, which
+      is born and dies in the corner of a city, and would fain stifle the cry of
+      nature and the unanimous voice of the human race&quot; (p. 131). The same
+      intrepid spirits who had brought reason to bear upon the current notions
+      of providence, inspiration, ecclesiastical tradition, and other unlighted
+      spots in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.335" id="Page_i.335">[i.335]</a></span>
+      the human mind, had perceived that the subjection of women to a secondary
+      place belonged to the same category, and could not any more successfully
+      be defended by reason. Instead of raging against women for their boldness,
+      their frivolousness, and the rest, as our passionate sentimentalist did,
+      the opposite school insisted that all these evils were due to the folly of
+      treating women with gallantry instead of respect, and to the blindness of
+      refusing an equally vigorous and masculine education to those who must be
+      the closest companions of educated man. This was the view forced upon the
+      most rational observers of a society where women were so powerful, and so
+      absolutely unfit by want of intellectual training for the right use of
+      social power. D'Alembert expressed this view in a few pages of forcible
+      pleading in his reply to Rousseau,<a name="FNanchor355" id="FNanchor355"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_355">[355]</a> and some thirty-two years later, when all
+      questions had become political (1790), Condorcet ably extended the same
+      line of argument so as to make it cover the claims of women to all the
+      rights of citizenship.<a name="FNanchor356" id="FNanchor356"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_356">[356]</a> From the nature of the case, however, it is
+      impossible to confute by reason a man who denies that the matter in
+      dispute is within the decision and jurisdiction of reason, and who
+      supposes that his own opinion is placed out of the reach of attack when he
+      declares it to be the unanimous voice of the human race. We may remember
+      that the author of this philippic against love was at the very moment
+      brood<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.336" id="Page_i.336">[i.336]</a></span>ing
+      over the New Helo&#239;sa, and was fresh from strange transports at the
+      feet of the Julie whom we know.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Letter on the Stage was the definite mark of Rousseau's schism from
+      the philosophic congregation. Has Jean Jacques turned a father of the
+      church? asked Voltaire. Deserters who fight against their country ought to
+      be hung. The little flock are falling to devouring one another. This
+      arch-madman, who might have been something, if he would only have been
+      guided by his brethren of the Encyclop&#230;dia, takes it into his head to
+      make a band of his own. He writes against the stage, after writing a bad
+      play of his own. He finds four or five rotten staves of Diogenes' tub, and
+      instals himself therein to bark at his friends.<a name="FNanchor357"
+      id="FNanchor357"></a><a href="#Footnote_357">[357]</a> D'Alembert was more
+      tolerant, but less clear-sighted. He insisted that the little flock should
+      do its best to heal divisions instead of widening them. Jean Jacques, he
+      said, &quot;is a madman who is very clever, and who is only clever when he
+      is in a fever; it is best therefore neither to cure nor to insult him.&quot;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rousseau made the preface to the Letter on the Stage an occasion for a
+      proclamation of his final breach with Diderot. &quot;I once,&quot; he
+      said, &quot;possessed a severe and judicious Aristarchus; I have him no
+      longer, and wish for him no longer.&quot; To this he added in a footnote a
+      passage from Ecclesiasticus, to the effect that if you have drawn a sword
+      on a friend<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.337" id="Page_i.337">[i.337]</a></span>
+      there still remains a way open, and if you have spoken cheerless words to
+      him concord is still possible, but malicious reproach and the betrayal of
+      a secret&#8212;these things banish friendship beyond return. This was the
+      end of his personal connection with the men whom he always contemptuously
+      called the Holbachians. After 1760 the great stream divided into two; the
+      rationalist and the emotional schools became visibly antipathetic, and the
+      voice of the epoch was no longer single or undistracted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &#160;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <b>FOOTNOTES:</b>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_331" id="Footnote_331"></a><a href="#FNanchor331">[331]</a>
+      See above p. <a href="#Page_i.149">149</a>.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_332" id="Footnote_332"></a><a href="#FNanchor332">[332]</a>
+      Voltaire to Rousseau. Aug. 30, 1755.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_333" id="Footnote_333"></a><a href="#FNanchor333">[333]</a>
+      <i>Corr.</i>, i. 237. Sept. 10, 1755.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_334" id="Footnote_334"></a><a href="#FNanchor334">[334]</a>
+      <i>La Loi Naturelle.</i>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_335" id="Footnote_335"></a><a href="#FNanchor335">[335]</a>
+      In 1754 the Berlin Academy proposed for a prize essay, An Examination of
+      Pope's System, and Lessing the next year wrote a pamphlet to show that
+      Pope had no system, but only a patchwork. See Mr. Pattison's <i>Introduction
+      to Pope's Essay on Man</i>, p. 12. Sime's <i>Lessing</i>, i. 128.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_336" id="Footnote_336"></a><a href="#FNanchor336">[336]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i> ix. 276.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_337" id="Footnote_337"></a><a href="#FNanchor337">[337]</a>
+      <i>Corr.</i>, i. 289-316. Aug. 18, 1756.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_338" id="Footnote_338"></a><a href="#FNanchor338">[338]</a>
+      Joseph De Maistre put all this much more acutely; <i>Soir&#233;es</i>, iv.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_339" id="Footnote_339"></a><a href="#FNanchor339">[339]</a>
+      Madame d'Epinay, <i>M&#233;m.</i>, i. 380.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_340" id="Footnote_340"></a><a href="#FNanchor340">[340]</a>
+      <i>Conf.</i>, ix. 277. Also <i>Corr.</i>, iii. 326. March 11, 1764.
+      Tronchin's long letter, to which Rousseau refers in this passage, is given
+      in M. Streckeisen-Moultou's collection, i. 323, and is interesting to
+      people who care to know how Voltaire looked to a doctor who saw him
+      closely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_341" id="Footnote_341"></a><a href="#FNanchor341">[341]</a>
+      <i>Corr.</i>, ii. 132. June 17, 1760. Also <i>Conf.</i>, x. 91.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_342" id="Footnote_342"></a><a href="#FNanchor342">[342]</a>
+      Some other interesting references to Voltaire in Rousseau's letters are&#8212;ii.
+      170 (Nov. 29, 1760), denouncing Voltaire as &quot;that trumpet of impiety,
+      that fine genius, and that low soul,&quot; and so forth; iii. 29 (Oct. 30,
+      1762), accusing Voltaire of malicious intrigues against him in
+      Switzerland; iii. 168 (Mar. 21, 1763), that if there is to be any
+      reconciliation, Voltaire must make first advances; iii. 280 (Dec., 1763),
+      described a trick played by Voltaire; iv. 40 (Jan. 31, 1765) 64; <i>Corr.</i>,
+      v. 74 (Jan. 5, 1767), replying to Voltaire's calumnious account of his
+      early life; note on this subject giving Voltaire the lie direct, iv. 150
+      (May 31, 1765); the <i>Lettre &#224; D'Almbert</i>, p. 193, etc.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_343" id="Footnote_343"></a><a href="#FNanchor343">[343]</a>
+      Bernardin St. Pierre, xii. 96. In the same sense, in Dusaulx, <i>Mes
+      Rapports avec J.J.R.</i>, (Paris: 1798), p. 101. See also <i>Corr.</i>,
+      iv. 254. Dec. 30, 1765. And again, iv. 276, Feb. 28, 1766, and p. 356.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_344" id="Footnote_344"></a><a href="#FNanchor344">[344]</a>
+      Dusaulx, p. 102.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_345" id="Footnote_345"></a><a href="#FNanchor345">[345]</a>
+      This part of D'Alembert's article is reproduced in Rousseau's preface, and
+      the whole is given at the end of the volume in M. Auguis's edition, p.
+      409.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_346" id="Footnote_346"></a><a href="#FNanchor346">[346]</a>
+      Goncourt, <i>Femme au 18i&#232;me si&#232;cle</i>, p. 256. Grimm, <i>Corr.
+      Lit.</i>, vi. 248.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_347" id="Footnote_347"></a><a href="#FNanchor347">[347]</a>
+      <i>Maximes sur la Com&#233;die</i>, &#167;15, etc. They were written in
+      reply to a plea for Comedy by Caffaro, a Jesuit father.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_348" id="Footnote_348"></a><a href="#FNanchor348">[348]</a>
+      The letter may be conveniently divided into three parts: I. pp. 1-89, II.
+      pp. 90-145, III. pp. 146 to the end. Of course if Rousseau in saying that
+      tragedy leads to pity through terror, was thinking of the famous passage
+      in the sixth chapter of Aristotle's <i>Poetics</i>, he was guilty of a
+      shocking mistranslation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_349" id="Footnote_349"></a><a href="#FNanchor349">[349]</a>
+      Some of the arguments seem drawn from Plato; see, besides the well-known
+      passages in the <i>Republic</i>, the <i>Laws</i>, iv. 719, and still more
+      directly, <i>Gorgias</i>, 502.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_350" id="Footnote_350"></a><a href="#FNanchor350">[350]</a>
+      Yet D'Alembert in his very cool and sensible reply (p. 245) repeats the
+      old saws, as that in <i>Catilina</i> we learn the lesson of the harm which
+      may be done to the human race by the abuse of great talents, and so forth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_351" id="Footnote_351"></a><a href="#FNanchor351">[351]</a>
+      <i>Lettre &#224; M. J.J. Rousseau</i>, p. 258.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_352" id="Footnote_352"></a><a href="#FNanchor352">[352]</a>
+      D'Alembert's <i>Lettre &#224; J.J. Rousseau</i>, p. 277. Rousseau has a
+      passage to the same effect, that false people are always sober, in the <i>Nouv.
+      H&#233;l.,</i> Pt. I. xxiii. 123.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_353" id="Footnote_353"></a><a href="#FNanchor353">[353]</a>
+      Tronchin, for instance, in a letter to Rousseau, in M.
+      Streckeisen-Moultou's collection, i. 325.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_354" id="Footnote_354"></a><a href="#FNanchor354">[354]</a>
+      A troop of comedians had been allowed to play for a short time in Geneva,
+      with many protests, during the mediation of 1738. In 1766, eight years
+      after Rousseau's letter, the government gave permission for the
+      establishment of a theatre in the town. It was burnt down in 1768, and
+      Voltaire spitefully hinted that the catastrophe was the result of design,
+      instigated by Rousseau (<i>Corr.</i> v. 299, April 26, 1768). The theatre
+      was not re-erected until 1783, when the oligarchic party regained the
+      ascendancy and brought back with them the drama, which the democrats in
+      their reign would not permit.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_355" id="Footnote_355"></a><a href="#FNanchor355">[355]</a>
+      <i>Lettre &#224; J.J. Rousseau</i>, pp. 265-271.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_356" id="Footnote_356"></a><a href="#FNanchor356">[356]</a>
+      <i>Oeuv.</i>, x. 121.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="Footnote_357" id="Footnote_357"></a><a href="#FNanchor357">[357]</a>
+      To Thieriot, Sept. 17, 1758. To D'Alembert, Oct. 20, 1761. <i>Ib.</i>
+      March 19, 1761.
+    </p>
+    <hr style="width: 35%;" />
+    <h3>
+      END OF VOL. I.
+    </h3>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      <i>Printed by</i> <span class="smcap">R. &amp; R. Clark, Limited</span>,
+      <i>Edinburgh</i>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="volume2" id="volume2"></a>
+    </p>
+    <h1>
+      ROUSSEAU
+    </h1>
+    <h3>
+      BY
+    </h3>
+    <h2>
+      JOHN MORLEY
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      VOL. II.
+    </h3>
+    <hr style="width: 35%;" />
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      London<br /> MACMILLAN AND CO., <span class="smcap">Limited</span><br /> NEW
+      YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY<br /> 1905<br />
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      <i>All rights reserved</i>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      <i>First printed in this form 1886</i><br /> <i>Reprinted 1888, 1891, 1896,
+      1900, 1905</i><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr style="width: 65%;" />
+    <h2>
+      <a name="CONTENTS_II" id="CONTENTS_II_">CONTENTS</a> OF VOL. II.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      &#160;
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      <a href="#CHAPTER_I">CHAPTER I.</a>
+    </h3>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      <span class="smcap">Montmorency&#8212;The New Helo&#239;sa.</span>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Conditions preceding the composition of the New Helo&#239;sa <a
+      href="#Page_1">1</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      The Duke and Duchess of Luxembourg <a href="#Page_2">2</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Rousseau and his patrician acquaintances <a href="#Page_3">4</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Peaceful life at Montmorency <a href="#Page_9">9</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Equivocal prudence occasionally shown by Rousseau <a href="#Page_12">12</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      His want of gratitude for commonplace service <a href="#Page_13">13</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Bad health, and thoughts of suicide <a href="#Page_16">16</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Episode of Madame Latour de Franqueville <a href="#Page_17">17</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Relation of the New Helo&#239;sa to Rousseau's general doctrine <a
+      href="#Page_20">20</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Action of the first part of the story <a href="#Page_25">25</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Contrasted with contemporary literature <a href="#Page_25">25</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      And with contemporary manners <a href="#Page_27">27</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Criticism of the language and principal actors <a href="#Page_28">28</a>,
+      <a href="#Page_29">29</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Popularity of the New Helo&#239;sa <a href="#Page_31">31</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Its reactionary intellectual direction <a href="#Page_33">33</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Action of the second part <a href="#Page_35">35</a>, <a href="#Page_36">36</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Its influence on Goethe and others <a href="#Page_38">38</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Distinction between Rousseau and his school <a href="#Page_40">40</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Singular pictures of domesticity <a href="#Page_42">42</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Sumptuary details <a href="#Page_44">44</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      The slowness of movement in the work justified <a href="#Page_46">46</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Exaltation of marriage <a href="#Page_47">47</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Equalitarian tendencies <a href="#Page_49">49</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Not inconsistent with social quietism <a href="#Page_51">51</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Compensation in the political consequences of the triumph of sentiment <a
+      href="#Page_54">54</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Circumstances of the publication of the New Helo&#239;sa <a href="#Page_55">55</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Nature of the trade in books <a href="#Page_57">57</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Malesherbes and the printing of Emilius <a href="#Page_61">61</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Rousseau's suspicions <a href="#Page_62">62</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      The great struggle of the moment <a href="#Page_64">64</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Proscription of Emilius <a href="#Page_67">67</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Flight of the author <a href="#Page_67">67</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      &#160;
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      <a href="#CHAPTER_IIb">CHAPTER II.</a>
+    </h3>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      <span class="smcap">Persecution.</span>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Rousseau's journey from Switzerland <a href="#Page_69">69</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Absence of vindictiveness <a href="#Page_70">70</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Arrival at Yverdun <a href="#Page_72">72</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Repairs to Motiers <a href="#Page_73">73</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Relations with Frederick the Great <a href="#Page_74">74</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Life at Motiers <a href="#Page_77">77</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Lord Marischal <a href="#Page_79">79</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Voltaire <a href="#Page_81">81</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Rousseau's letter to the Archbishop of Paris <a href="#Page_83">83</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Its dialectic <a href="#Page_86">86</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      The ministers of Neuch&#226;tel <a href="#Page_90">90</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Rousseau's singular costume <a href="#Page_92">92</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      His throng of visitors <a href="#Page_93">93</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Lewis, prince of W&#252;rtemberg <a href="#Page_95">95</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Gibbon <a href="#Page_96">96</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Boswell <a href="#Page_98">98</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Corsican affairs <a href="#Page_99">99</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      The feud at Geneva <a href="#Page_102">102</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Rousseau renounces his citizenship <a href="#Page_105">105</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      The Letters from the Mountain <a href="#Page_106">106</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Political side <a href="#Page_107">107</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Consequent persecution at Motiers <a href="#Page_107">107</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Flight to the isle of St. Peter <a href="#Page_108">108</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      The fifth of the <i>R&#234;veries</i> <a href="#Page_109">109</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Proscription by the government of Berne <a href="#Page_116">116</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Rousseau's singular request <a href="#Page_116">116</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      His renewed flight <a href="#Page_117">117</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Persuaded to seek shelter in England <a href="#Page_118">118</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      &#160;
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      <a href="#CHAPTER_III">CHAPTER III.</a>
+    </h3>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      <span class="smcap">The Social Contract.</span>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Rousseau's reaction against perfectibility <a href="#Page_119">119</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Abandonment of the position of the Discourses <a href="#Page_121">121</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Doubtful idea of equality <a href="#Page_121">121</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      The Social Contract, a repudiation of the historic method <a
+      href="#Page_124">124</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Yet it has glimpses of relativity <a href="#Page_127">127</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Influence of Greek examples <a href="#Page_129">129</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      And of Geneva <a href="#Page_131">131</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Impression upon Robespierre and Saint Just <a href="#Page_132">132</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Rousseau's scheme implied a small territory <a href="#Page_135">135</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Why the Social Contract made fanatics <a href="#Page_137">137</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Verbal quality of its propositions <a href="#Page_138">138</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      The doctrine of public safety <a href="#Page_143">143</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      The doctrine of the sovereignty of peoples <a href="#Page_144">144</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Its early phases <a href="#Page_144">144</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Its history in the sixteenth century <a href="#Page_146">146</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Hooker and Grotius <a href="#Page_148">148</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Locke <a href="#Page_149">149</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Hobbes <a href="#Page_151">151</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Central propositions of the Social Contract&#8212;<br /> <br /> 1. Origin of
+      society in compact <a href="#Page_154">154</a><br /> Different conception
+      held by the Physiocrats <a href="#Page_156">156</a><br /> <br /> 2.
+      Sovereignty of the body thus constituted <a href="#Page_158">158</a><br />
+      Difference from Hobbes and Locke <a href="#Page_159">159</a><br /> The root
+      of socialism <a href="#Page_160">160</a><br /> Republican phraseology <a
+      href="#Page_161">161</a><br /> <br /> 3. Attributes of sovereignty <a
+      href="#Page_162">162</a><br /> <br /> 4. The law-making power <a
+      href="#Page_163">163</a><br /> A contemporary illustration <a
+      href="#Page_164">164</a><br /> Hints of confederation <a href="#Page_166">166</a><br />
+      <br /> 5. Forms of government <a href="#Page_168">168</a><br /> Criticism on
+      the common division <a href="#Page_169">169</a><br /> Rousseau's preference
+      for elective aristocracy <a href="#Page_172">172</a><br /> <br /> 6.
+      Attitude of the state to religion <a href="#Page_173">173</a><br />
+      Rousseau's view, the climax of a reaction <a href="#Page_176">176</a><br />
+      Its effect at the French Revolution <a href="#Page_179">179</a><br /> Its
+      futility <a href="#Page_180">180</a><br /> <br /> Another method of
+      approaching the philosophy of government&#8212;<br /> <br /> Origin of
+      society not a compact <a href="#Page_183">183</a><br /> <br /> The true
+      reason of the submission of a minority to a majority <a href="#Page_184">184</a><br />
+      <br /> Rousseau fails to touch actual problems <a href="#Page_186">186</a><br />
+      <br /> The doctrine of resistance, for instance <a href="#Page_188">188</a><br />
+      <br /> Historical illustrations <a href="#Page_190">190</a><br /> <br />
+      Historical effect of the Social Contract in France and Germany <a
+      href="#Page_193">193</a><br /> <br /> Socialist deductions from it <a
+      href="#Page_194">194</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      <a href="#CHAPTER_IV">CHAPTER IV.</a>
+    </h3>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      <span class="smcap">Emilius.</span>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Rousseau touched by the enthusiasm of his time <a href="#Page_197">197</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Contemporary excitement as to education, part of the revival of naturalism
+      <a href="#Page_199">199</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      I.&#8212;Locke, on education <a href="#Page_202">202</a><br /> Difference
+      between him and Rousseau <a href="#Page_204">204</a><br /> Exhortations to
+      mothers <a href="#Page_205">205</a><br /> Importance of infantile habits <a
+      href="#Page_208">208</a><br /> Rousseau's protest against reasoning with
+      children <a href="#Page_209">209</a><br /> Criticised <a href="#Page_209">209</a><br />
+      The opposite theory <a href="#Page_210">210</a><br /> The idea of property
+      <a href="#Page_212">212</a><br /> Artificially contrived incidents <a
+      href="#Page_214">214</a><br /> Rousseau's omission of the principle of
+      authority <a href="#Page_215">215</a><br /> Connected with his neglect of
+      the faculty of sympathy <a href="#Page_219">219</a><br /> <br /> II.&#8212;Rousseau's
+      ideal of living <a href="#Page_221">221</a><br /> The training that follows
+      from it <a href="#Page_222">222</a><br /> The duty of knowing a craft <a
+      href="#Page_223">223</a><br /> Social conception involved in this moral
+      conception <a href="#Page_226">226</a><br /> <br /> III.&#8212;Three aims
+      before the instructor <a href="#Page_229">229</a><br /> Rousseau's omission
+      of training for the social conscience <a href="#Page_230">230</a><br /> No
+      contemplation of society as a whole <a href="#Page_232">232</a><br />
+      Personal interest, the foundation of the morality of Emilius <a
+      href="#Page_233">233</a><br /> The sphere and definition of the social
+      conscience <a href="#Page_235">235</a><br /> <br /> IV.&#8212;The study of
+      history <a href="#Page_237">237</a><br /> Rousseau's notions upon the
+      subject <a href="#Page_239">239</a><br /> <br /> V.&#8212;Ideals of life for
+      women <a href="#Page_241">241</a><br /> Rousseau's repudiation of his own
+      principles <a href="#Page_242">242</a><br /> His oriental and obscurantist
+      position <a href="#Page_243">243</a><br /> Arising from his want of faith
+      in improvement <a href="#Page_244">244</a><br /> His reactionary tendencies
+      in this region eventually neutralised <a href="#Page_248">248</a><br />
+      <br /> VI.&#8212;Sum of the merits of Emilius <a href="#Page_249">249</a><br />
+      Its influence in France and Germany <a href="#Page_251">251</a><br /> In
+      England <a href="#Page_252">252</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &#160;
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      <a href="#CHAPTER_V">CHAPTER V.</a>
+    </h3>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      <span class="smcap">The Savoyard Vicar.</span>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Shallow hopes entertained by the dogmatic atheists <a href="#Page_256">256</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      The good side of the religious reaction <a href="#Page_258">258</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Its preservation of some parts of Christian influence <a href="#Page_259">259</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Earlier forms of deism <a href="#Page_260">260</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      The deism of the Savoyard Vicar <a href="#Page_264">264</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      The elevation of man, as well as the restoration of a divinity <a
+      href="#Page_265">265</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      A divinity for fair weather <a href="#Page_268">268</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Religious self-denial <a href="#Page_269">269</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      The Savoyard Vicar's vital omission <a href="#Page_270">270</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      His position towards Christianity <a href="#Page_272">272</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Its effectiveness as a solvent <a href="#Page_273">273</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Weakness of the subjective test <a href="#Page_276">276</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      The Savoyard Vicar's deism not compatible with growing intellectual
+      conviction <a href="#Page_276">276</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      The true satisfaction of the religious emotion <a href="#Page_277">277</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &#160;
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      <a href="#CHAPTER_VI">CHAPTER VI.</a>
+    </h3>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      <span class="smcap">England.</span>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Rousseau's English portrait <a href="#Page_281">281</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      His reception in Paris <a href="#Page_282">282</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      And in London <a href="#Page_283">283</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Hume's account of him <a href="#Page_284">284</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Settlement at Wootton <a href="#Page_286">286</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      The quarrel with Hume <a href="#Page_287">287</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Detail of the charges against Hume <a href="#Page_287">287</a>-291
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Walpole's pretended letter from Frederick <a href="#Page_291">291</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Baselessness of the whole delusion <a href="#Page_292">292</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Hume's conduct in the quarrel <a href="#Page_293">293</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      The war of pamphlets <a href="#Page_295">295</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Common theory of Rousseau's madness <a href="#Page_296">296</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Preparatory conditions <a href="#Page_297">297</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Extension of disorder from the affective life to the intelligence <a
+      href="#Page_299">299</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      The Confessions <a href="#Page_301">301</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      His life at Wootton <a href="#Page_306">306</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Flight from Derbyshire <a href="#Page_306">306</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      And from England <a href="#Page_308">308</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &#160;
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      <a href="#CHAPTER_VII">CHAPTER VII.</a>
+    </h3>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      <span class="smcap">The End.</span>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      The elder Mirabeau <a href="#Page_309">309</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Shelters Rousseau at Fleury <a href="#Page_311">311</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Rousseau at Trye <a href="#Page_312">312</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      In Dauphiny <a href="#Page_314">314</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Return to Paris <a href="#Page_314">314</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      The <i>R&#234;veries</i> <a href="#Page_315">315</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Life in Paris <a href="#Page_316">316</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Bernardin de St. Pierre's account of him <a href="#Page_317">317</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      An Easter excursion <a href="#Page_320">320</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Rousseau's unsociality <a href="#Page_322">322</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Poland and Spain <a href="#Page_324">324</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      Withdrawal to Ermenonville <a href="#Page_326">326</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      His death <a href="#Page_326">326</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      <a href="#INDEX"><b>INDEX</b></a>
+    </p>
+    <hr style="width: 65%;" />
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">[ii.1]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <h1>
+      ROUSSEAU.
+    </h1>
+    <p>
+      &#160;
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      <a name="CHAPTER_I" id="CHAPTER_I"></a>CHAPTER I.
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      MONTMORENCY&#8212;THE NEW HELO&#207;SA.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <span class="smcap">The</span> many conditions of intellectual
+      productiveness are still hidden in such profound obscurity that we are
+      unable to explain why a period of stormy moral agitation seems to be in
+      certain natures the indispensable antecedent of their highest creative
+      effort. Byron is one instance, and Rousseau is another, in which the
+      current of stimulating force made this rapid way from the lower to the
+      higher parts of character, and only expended itself after having traversed
+      the whole range of emotion and faculty, from their meanest, most
+      realistic, most personal forms of exercise, up to the summit of what is
+      lofty and ideal. No man was ever involved in such an odious complication
+      of moral maladies as beset Rousseau in the winter of 1758. Yet within
+      three years of this miserable epoch he had completed not only the New Helo&#239;sa,
+      which is the monument of his fall, but the Social Contract, which was the
+      most influential,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">[ii.2]</a></span>
+      and Emilius, which was perhaps the most elevated and spiritual, of all the
+      productions of the prolific genius of France in the eighteenth century. A
+      poor light-hearted Marmontel thought that the secret of Rousseau's success
+      lay in the circumstance that he began to write late, and it is true that
+      no other author, so considerable as Rousseau, waited until the age of
+      fifty for the full vigour of his inspiration. No tale of years, however,
+      could have ripened such fruit without native strength and incommunicable
+      savour. Nor can the mechanical movement of those better ordered characters
+      which keep the balance of the world even, impart to literature that
+      peculiar quality, peculiar but not the finest, that comes from experience
+      of the black unlighted abysses of the soul.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The period of actual production was externally calm. The New Helo&#239;sa
+      was completed in 1759, and published in 1761. The Social Contract was
+      published in the spring of 1762, and Emilius a few weeks later. Throughout
+      this period Rousseau was, for the last time in his life, at peace with
+      most of his fellows. Though he never relented from his antipathy to the
+      Holbachians, for the time it slumbered, until a more real and serious
+      persecution than any which he imputed to them, transformed his antipathy
+      into a gloomy frenzy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The new friends whom he made at Montmorency were among the greatest people
+      in the kingdom. The Duke of Luxembourg (1702-64) was a marshal of France,
+      and as intimate a friend of the king as the king was capable of having.
+      The Mar&#233;chale de<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[ii.3]</a></span>
+      [*p.3] Luxembourg (1707-87) had been one of the most beautiful, and
+      continued to be one of the most brilliant leaders of the last aristocratic
+      generation that was destined to sport on the slopes of the volcano. The
+      former seems to have been a loyal and homely soul; the latter, restless,
+      imperious, penetrating, unamiable. Their dealings with Rousseau were
+      marked by perfect sincerity and straightforward friendship. They gave him
+      a convenient apartment in a small summer lodge in the park, to which he
+      retreated when he cared for a change from his narrow cottage. He was a
+      constant guest at their table, where he met the highest personages in
+      France. The marshal did not disdain to pay him visits, or to walk with
+      him, or to discuss his private affairs. Unable as ever to shine in
+      conversation, yet eager to show his great friends that they had to do with
+      no common mortal, Rousseau bethought him of reading the New Helo&#239;sa
+      aloud to them. At ten in the morning he used to wait upon the mar&#233;chale,
+      and there by her bedside he read the story of the love, the sin, the
+      repentance of Julie, the distraction of Saint Preux, the wisdom of Wolmar,
+      and the sage friendship of Lord Edward, in tones which enchanted her both
+      with his book and its author for all the rest of the day, as all the women
+      in France were so soon to be enchanted.<a name="FNanchor_1_1"
+      id="FNanchor_1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a>
+      This, as he expected, amply reconciled her to the uncouthness and
+      clumsiness of his conversation, which was at least as maladroit and as
+      spirit<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[ii.4]</a></span>less
+      in the presence of a duchess as it was in presences less imposing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One side of character is obviously tested by the way in which a man bears
+      himself in his relations with those of greater social consideration.
+      Rousseau was taxed by some of his plebeian enemies with a most unheroic
+      deference to his patrician friends. He had a dog whose name was <i>Duc</i>.
+      When he came to sit at a duke's table, he changed his dog's name to <i>Turc</i>.<a
+      name="FNanchor_2_2" id="FNanchor_2_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_2"
+      class="fnanchor">[2]</a> Again, one day in a transport of tenderness he
+      embraced the old marshal&#8212;the duchess embraced Rousseau ten times a
+      day, for the age was effusive&#8212;&quot;Ah, monsieur le mar&#233;chal, I
+      used to hate the great before I knew you, and I hate them still more,
+      since you make me feel so strongly how easy it would be for them to have
+      themselves adored.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_3_3" id="FNanchor_3_3"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_3_3" class="fnanchor">[3]</a> On another occasion he
+      happened to be playing at chess with the Prince of Conti, who had come to
+      visit him in his cottage.<a name="FNanchor_4_4" id="FNanchor_4_4"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_4_4" class="fnanchor">[4]</a> In spite of the signs and
+      grimaces of the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[ii.5]</a></span>attendants,
+      he insisted on beating the prince in a couple of games. Then he said with
+      respectful gravity, &quot;Monseigneur, I honour your serene highness too
+      much not to beat you at chess always.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_5_5"
+      id="FNanchor_5_5"></a><a href="#Footnote_5_5" class="fnanchor">[5]</a> A
+      few days after, the vanquished prince sent him a present of game which
+      Rousseau duly accepted. The present was repeated, but this time Rousseau
+      wrote to Madame de Boufflers that he would receive no more, and that he
+      loved the prince's conversation better than his gifts.<a
+      name="FNanchor_6_6" id="FNanchor_6_6"></a><a href="#Footnote_6_6"
+      class="fnanchor">[6]</a> He admits that this was an ungracious proceeding,
+      and that to refuse game &quot;from a prince of the blood who throws such
+      good feeling into the present, is not so much the delicacy of a proud man
+      bent on preserving his independence, as the rusticity of an unmannerly
+      person who does not know his place.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_7_7"
+      id="FNanchor_7_7"></a><a href="#Footnote_7_7" class="fnanchor">[7]</a>
+      Considering the extreme virulence with which Rousseau always resented
+      gifts even of the most trifling kind from his friends, one may perhaps
+      find some inconsistency in this condemnation of a sort of conduct to which
+      he tenaciously clung on all other occasions. If the fact of the donor
+      being a prince of the blood is allowed to modify the quality of the
+      donation, that is hardly a defensible position in the austere citizen of
+      Geneva. Madame de Boufflers,<a name="FNanchor_8_8" id="FNanchor_8_8"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_8_8" class="fnanchor">[8]</a> <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[ii.6]</a></span>the intimate friend of our sage
+      Hume, and the yet more intimate friend of the Prince of Conti, gave him a
+      judicious warning when she bade him beware of laying himself open to a
+      charge of affectation, lest it should obscure the brightness of his virtue
+      and so hinder its usefulness. &quot;Fabius and Regulus would have accepted
+      such marks of esteem, without feeling in them any hurt to their
+      disinterestedness and frugality.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_9_9"
+      id="FNanchor_9_9"></a><a href="#Footnote_9_9" class="fnanchor">[9]</a>
+      Perhaps there is a flutter of self-consciousness that is not far removed
+      from this affectation, in the pains which Rousseau takes to tell us that
+      after dining at the castle, he used to return home gleefully to sup with a
+      mason who was his neighbour and his friend.<a name="FNanchor_10_10"
+      id="FNanchor_10_10"></a><a href="#Footnote_10_10" class="fnanchor">[10]</a>
+      On the whole, however, and so far as we know, Rousseau conducted himself
+      not unworthily with these high people. His letters to them are for the
+      most part marked by self-respect and a moderate graciousness, though now
+      and again he makes rather too much case of the difference of rank, and
+      asserts his independence with something too much of pro<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[ii.7]</a></span>testation.<a
+      name="FNanchor_11_11" id="FNanchor_11_11"></a><a href="#Footnote_11_11"
+      class="fnanchor">[11]</a> Their relations with him are a curious sign of
+      the interest which the members of the great world took in the men who were
+      quietly preparing the destruction both of them and their world. The Mar&#233;chale
+      de Luxembourg places this squalid dweller in a hovel on her estate in the
+      place of honour at her table, and embraces his Theresa. The Prince of
+      Conti pays visits of courtesy and sends game to a man whom he employs at a
+      few sous an hour to copy manuscript for him. The Countess of Boufflers, in
+      sending him the money, insists that he is to count her his warmest friend.<a
+      name="FNanchor_12_12" id="FNanchor_12_12"></a><a href="#Footnote_12_12"
+      class="fnanchor">[12]</a> When his dog dies, the countess writes to
+      sympathise with his chagrin, and the prince begs to be allowed to replace
+      it.<a name="FNanchor_13_13" id="FNanchor_13_13"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_13_13" class="fnanchor">[13]</a> And when persecution and
+      trouble and infinite confusion came upon him, they all stood as fast by
+      him as their own comfort would allow. Do we not feel that there must have
+      been in the unhappy man, besides all the recorded pettinesses and
+      perversities which revolt us in him, a vein of something which touched
+      men, and made women devoted to him, until he splenetically drove both men
+      and women away from him? With Madame d'Epinay and Madame d'Houdetot, as
+      with the dearer and humbler patroness of his youth, we have now parted
+      company. But they are instantly succeeded by new devotees. And the lovers
+      of Rousseau, in all degrees, were not silly women led captive by idle
+      fancy. Madame de Boufflers was one <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_8"
+      id="Page_8">[ii.8]</a></span>of the most distinguished spirits of her
+      time. Her friendship for him was such, that his sensuous vanity made
+      Rousseau against all reason or probability confound it with a warmer form
+      of emotion, and he plumes himself in a manner most displeasing on the
+      victory which he won over his own feelings on the occasion.<a
+      name="FNanchor_14_14" id="FNanchor_14_14"></a><a href="#Footnote_14_14"
+      class="fnanchor">[14]</a> As a matter of fact he had no feelings to
+      conquer, any more than the supposed object of them ever bore him any
+      ill-will for his indifference, as in his mania of suspicion he afterwards
+      believed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a calm about the too few years he passed at Montmorency, which
+      leaves us in doubt whether this mania would ever have afflicted him, if
+      his natural irritation had not been made intense and irresistible by the
+      cruel distractions that followed the publication of Emilius. He was
+      tolerably content with his present friends. The simplicity of their way of
+      dealing with him contrasted singularly, as he thought, with the
+      never-ending solicitudes, as importunate as they were officious, of the
+      patronising friends whom he had just cast off.<a name="FNanchor_15_15"
+      id="FNanchor_15_15"></a><a href="#Footnote_15_15" class="fnanchor">[15]</a>
+      Perhaps, too, he was soothed by the companionship of persons whose rank
+      may have flattered his vanity, while unlike Diderot and his old literary
+      friends in Paris, they entered into no competition with him in the
+      peculiar sphere of his own genius. Madame de Boufflers, indeed, wrote a
+      tragedy, but he told her gruffly enough that it was a plagiarism from
+      Southerne's Oroonoko.<a name="FNanchor_16_16" id="FNanchor_16_16"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_16_16" class="fnanchor">[16]</a> That Rousseau was <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[ii.9]</a></span>thoroughly
+      capable of this pitiful emotion of sensitive literary jealousy is proved,
+      if by nothing else, by his readiness to suspect that other authors were
+      jealous of him. No one suspects others of a meanness of this kind unless
+      he is capable of it himself. The resounding success which followed the New
+      Helo&#239;sa and Emilius put an end to these apprehensions. It raised him
+      to a pedestal in popular esteem as high as that on which Voltaire stood
+      triumphant. That very success unfortunately brought troubles which
+      destroyed Rousseau's last chance of ending his days in full
+      reasonableness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Meanwhile he enjoyed his final interval of moderate wholesomeness and
+      peace. He felt his old healthy joy in the green earth. One of the letters
+      commemorates his delight in the great scudding south-west winds of
+      February, soft forerunners of the spring, so sweet to all who live with
+      nature.<a name="FNanchor_17_17" id="FNanchor_17_17"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_17_17" class="fnanchor">[17]</a> At the end of his garden
+      was a summer-house, and here even on wintry days he sat composing or
+      copying. It was not music only that he copied. He took a curious pleasure
+      in making transcripts of his romance, and he sold them to the Duchess of
+      Luxembourg and other ladies for some moderate fee.<a name="FNanchor_18_18"
+      id="FNanchor_18_18"></a><a href="#Footnote_18_18" class="fnanchor">[18]</a>
+      Sometimes he moved from his own lodging to the quarters in the park which
+      his great friends had induced him to accept. &quot;They were charmingly
+      neat; the furniture was of white and blue. It was in this perfumed and
+      delicious solitude, in the midst of woods and streams and choirs of birds
+      of <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[ii.10]</a></span>every
+      kind, with the fragrance of the orange-flower poured round me, that I
+      composed in a continual ecstasy the fifth book of Emilius. With what
+      eagerness did I hasten every morning at sunrise to breathe the balmy air!
+      What good coffee I used to make under the porch in company with my
+      Theresa! The cat and the dog made up the party. That would have sufficed
+      me for all the days of my life, and I should never have known weariness.&quot;
+      And so to the assurance, so often repeated under so many different
+      circumstances, that here was a true heaven upon earth, where if fates had
+      only allowed he would have known unbroken innocence and lasting happiness.<a
+      name="FNanchor_19_19" id="FNanchor_19_19"></a><a href="#Footnote_19_19"
+      class="fnanchor">[19]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yet he had the wisdom to warn others against attempting a life such as he
+      craved for himself. As on a more memorable occasion, there came to him a
+      young man who would fain have been with him always, and whom he sent away
+      exceeding sorrowful. &quot;The first lesson I should give you would be not
+      to surrender yourself to the taste you say you have for the contemplative
+      life. It is only an indolence of the soul, to be condemned at any age, but
+      especially so at yours. Man is not made to meditate, but to act. Labour
+      therefore in the condition of life in which you have been placed by your
+      family and by providence: that is the first precept of the virtue which
+      you wish to follow. If residence at Paris, joined to the business you have
+      there, seems to you irreconcilable with virtue, <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[ii.11]</a></span>do better still, and return
+      to your own province. Go live in the bosom of your family, serve and
+      solace your honest parents. There you will be truly fulfilling the duties
+      that virtue imposes on you.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_20_20"
+      id="FNanchor_20_20"></a><a href="#Footnote_20_20" class="fnanchor">[20]</a>
+      This intermixture of sound sense with unutterable perversities almost
+      suggests a doubt how far the perversities were sincere, until we remember
+      that Rousseau even in the most exalted part of his writings was careful to
+      separate immediate practical maxims from his theoretical principles of
+      social philosophy.<a name="FNanchor_21_21" id="FNanchor_21_21"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_21_21" class="fnanchor">[21]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Occasionally his good sense takes so stiff and unsympathetic a form as to
+      fill us with a warmer dislike for him than his worst paradoxes inspire. A
+      correspondent had written to him about the frightful persecutions which
+      were being inflicted on the Protestants in some district of France.
+      Rousseau's letter is a masterpiece in the style of Eliphaz the Temanite.
+      Our brethren must surely have given some pretext for the evil treatment to
+      which they were subjected. One who is a Christian must learn to suffer,
+      and every man's conduct ought to conform to his doctrine. Our brethren,
+      moreover, ought to remember that the word of God is express upon the duty
+      of obeying the laws set up by the prince. The writer cannot venture to
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[ii.12]</a></span>run
+      any risk by interceding in favour of our brethren with the government.
+      &quot;Every one has his own calling upon the earth; mine is to tell the
+      public harsh but useful truths. I have preached humanity, gentleness,
+      tolerance, so far as it depended upon me; 'tis no fault of mine if the
+      world has not listened. I have made it a rule to keep to general truths; I
+      produce no libels, no satires; I attack no man, but men; not an action,
+      but a vice.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_22_22" id="FNanchor_22_22"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_22_22" class="fnanchor">[22]</a> The worst of the worthy
+      sort of people, wrote Voltaire, is that they are such cowards: a man
+      groans over a wrong, he holds his tongue, he takes his supper, and he
+      forgets all about it.<a name="FNanchor_23_23" id="FNanchor_23_23"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_23_23" class="fnanchor">[23]</a> If Voltaire could not
+      write like F&#233;nelon, at least he could never talk like Tartufe; he
+      responded to no tale of wrong with words about his mission, with strings
+      of antitheses, but always with royal anger and the spring of alert and
+      puissant endeavour. In an hour of oppression one would rather have been
+      the friend of the saviour of the Calas and of Sirven, than of the
+      vindicator of theism.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rousseau, however, had good sense enough in less equivocal forms than
+      this. For example, in another letter he remonstrates with a correspondent
+      for judging the rich too harshly. &quot;You do not bear in mind that
+      having from their childhood contracted a thousand wants which we are
+      without, then to bring them down to the condition of the poor, would be to
+      make them more miserable than the poor. We should be just <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[ii.13]</a></span>towards
+      all the world, even to those who are not just to us. Ah, if we had the
+      virtues opposed to the vices which we reproach in them, we should soon
+      forget that such people were in the world. One word more. To have any
+      right to despise the rich, we ought ourselves to be prudent and thrifty,
+      so as to have no need of riches.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_24_24"
+      id="FNanchor_24_24"></a><a href="#Footnote_24_24" class="fnanchor">[24]</a>
+      In the observance of this just precept Rousseau was to the end of his life
+      absolutely without fault. No one was more rigorously careful to make his
+      independence sure by the fewness of his wants and by minute financial
+      probity. This firm limitation of his material desires was one cause of his
+      habitual and almost invariable refusal to accept presents, though no doubt
+      another cause was the stubborn and ungracious egoism which made him resent
+      every obligation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is worth remembering in illustration of the peculiar susceptibility and
+      softness of his character where women were concerned&#8212;it was not
+      quite without exception&#8212;that he did not fly into a fit of rage over
+      their gifts, as he did over those of men. He remonstrated, but in gentler
+      key. &quot;What could I do with four pullets?&quot; he wrote to a lady who
+      had presented them to him. &quot;I began by sending two of them to people
+      to whom I am indifferent. That made me think of the difference there is
+      between a present and a testimony of friendship. The first will never find
+      in me anything but a thankless heart; the second.... Ah, if you had only
+      given me news of yourself <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_14"
+      id="Page_14">[ii.14]</a></span>without sending me anything else, how rich
+      and how grateful you would have made me; instead of that the pullets are
+      eaten, and the best thing I can do is to forget all about them; let us say
+      no more.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_25_25" id="FNanchor_25_25"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_25_25" class="fnanchor">[25]</a> Rude and repellent as
+      this may seem, and as it is, there is a rough kind of playfulness about
+      it, when compared with the truculence which he was not slow to exhibit to
+      men. If a friend presumed to thank him for any service, he was
+      peremptorily rebuked for his ignorance of the true qualities of
+      friendship, with which thankfulness has no connection. He ostentatiously
+      refused to offer thanks for services himself, even to a woman whom he
+      always treated with so much consideration as the Mar&#233;chale de
+      Luxembourg. He once declared boldly that modesty is a false virtue,<a
+      name="FNanchor_26_26" id="FNanchor_26_26"></a><a href="#Footnote_26_26"
+      class="fnanchor">[26]</a> and though he did not go so far as to make
+      gratitude the subject of a corresponding formula of denunciation, he
+      always implied that this too is really one of the false virtues. He
+      confessed to Malesherbes, without the slightest contrition, that he was
+      ungrateful by nature.<a name="FNanchor_27_27" id="FNanchor_27_27"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_27_27" class="fnanchor">[27]</a> To Madame d'Epinay he
+      once went still further, declaring that he found it hard not to hate those
+      who had used him well.<a name="FNanchor_28_28" id="FNanchor_28_28"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_28_28" class="fnanchor">[28]</a> Undoubtedly he was right
+      so far as this, that gratitude answering to a spirit of exaction in a
+      benefactor is no merit; a service done in expectation of gratitude is from
+      that fact stripped of the quality which makes gratitude due, and is a mere
+      piece of <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[ii.15]</a></span>egoism
+      in altruistic disguise. Kindness in its genuine forms is a testimony of
+      good feeling, and conventional speech is perhaps a little too hard, as
+      well as too shallow and unreal, in calling the recipient evil names
+      because he is unable to respond to the good feeling. Rousseau protested
+      against a conception of friendship which makes of what ought to be
+      disinterested helpfulness a title to everlasting tribute. His way of
+      expressing this was harsh and unamiable, but it was not without an element
+      of uprightness and veracity. As in his greater themes, so in his paradoxes
+      upon private relations, he hid wholesome ingredients of rebuke to the
+      unquestioning acceptance of common form. &quot;I am well pleased,&quot; he
+      said to a friend, &quot;both with thee and thy letters, except the end,
+      where thou say'st thou art more mine than thine own. For there thou liest,
+      and it is not worth while to take the trouble to <i>thee</i> and <i>thou</i>
+      a man as thine intimate, only to tell him untruths.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor_29_29" id="FNanchor_29_29"></a><a href="#Footnote_29_29"
+      class="fnanchor">[29]</a> Chesterfield was for people with much self-love
+      of the small sort, probably a more agreeable person to meet than Doctor
+      Johnson, but Johnson was the more wholesome companion for a man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Occasionally, though not very often, he seems to have let spleen take the
+      place of honest surliness, and so drifted into clumsy and ill-humoured
+      banter, of a sort that gives a dreary shudder to one fresh from Voltaire.
+      &quot;So you have chosen for yourself a tender and virtuous mistress! I am
+      not surprised; all <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[ii.16]</a></span>mistresses
+      are that. You have chosen her in Paris! To find a tender and virtuous
+      mistress in Paris is to have not such bad luck. You have made her a
+      promise of marriage? My friend, you have made a blunder; for if you
+      continue to love, the promise is superfluous, and if you do not, then it
+      is no avail. You have signed it with your blood? That is all but tragic;
+      but I don't know that the choice of the ink in which he writes, gives
+      anything to the fidelity of the man who signs.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor_30_30" id="FNanchor_30_30"></a><a href="#Footnote_30_30"
+      class="fnanchor">[30]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We can only add that the health in which a man writes may possibly excuse
+      the dismal quality of what he writes, and that Rousseau was now as always
+      the prey of bodily pain which, as he was conscious, made him distraught.
+      &quot;My sufferings are not very excruciating just now,&quot; he wrote on
+      a later occasion, &quot;but they are incessant, and I am not out of pain a
+      single moment day or night, and this quite drives me mad. I feel bitterly
+      my wrong conduct and the baseness of my suspicions; but if anything can
+      excuse me, it is my mournful state, my loneliness,&quot; and so on.<a
+      name="FNanchor_31_31" id="FNanchor_31_31"></a><a href="#Footnote_31_31"
+      class="fnanchor">[31]</a> This prolonged physical anguish, which was made
+      more intense towards the end of 1761 by the accidental breaking of a
+      surgical instrument,<a name="FNanchor_32_32" id="FNanchor_32_32"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_32_32" class="fnanchor">[32]</a> sometimes so nearly wore
+      his fortitude away as to make him think of suicide.<a name="FNanchor_33_33"
+      id="FNanchor_33_33"></a><a href="#Footnote_33_33" class="fnanchor">[33]</a>
+      In Lord Edward's famous letter on suicide in the New Helo&#239;sa, while
+      denying in forcible terms the right of ending one's days merely to escape
+      from <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[ii.17]</a></span>intolerable
+      mental distress, he admits that inasmuch as physical disorders only grow
+      incessantly worse, violent and incurable bodily pain may be an excuse for
+      a man making away with himself; he ceases to be a human being before
+      dying, and in putting an end to his life he only completes his release
+      from a body that embarrasses him, and contains his soul no longer.<a
+      name="FNanchor_34_34" id="FNanchor_34_34"></a><a href="#Footnote_34_34"
+      class="fnanchor">[34]</a> The thought was often present to him in this
+      form. Eighteen months later than our last date, the purpose grew very
+      deliberate under an aggravation of his malady, and he seriously looked
+      upon his own case as falling within the conditions of Lord Edward's
+      exception.<a name="FNanchor_35_35" id="FNanchor_35_35"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_35_35" class="fnanchor">[35]</a> It is difficult, in the
+      face of outspoken declarations like these, to know what writers can be
+      thinking of when, with respect to the controversy on the manner of
+      Rousseau's death, they pronounce him incapable of such a dereliction of
+      his own most cherished principles as anything like self-destruction would
+      have been.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As he sat gnawed by pain, with surgical instruments on his table, and
+      sombre thoughts of suicide in his head, the ray of a little episode of
+      romance shone in <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[ii.18]</a></span>incongruously
+      upon the scene. Two ladies in Paris, absorbed in the New Helo&#239;sa,
+      like all the women of the time, identified themselves with the Julie and
+      the Claire of the novel that none could resist. They wrote anonymously to
+      the author, claiming their identification with characters fondly supposed
+      to be immortal. &quot;You will know that Julie is not dead, and that she
+      lives to love you; I am not this Julie, you perceive it by my style; I am
+      only her cousin, or rather her friend, as Claire was.&quot; The
+      unfortunate Saint Preux responded as gallantly as he could be expected to
+      do in the intervals of surgery. &quot;You do not know that the Saint Preux
+      to whom you write is tormented with a cruel and incurable disorder, and
+      that the very letter he writes to you is often interrupted by distractions
+      of a very different kind.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_36_36" id="FNanchor_36_36"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_36_36" class="fnanchor">[36]</a> He figures rather
+      uncouthly, but the unknown fair were not at first disabused, and one of
+      them never was. Rousseau was deeply suspicious. He feared to be made the
+      victim of a masculine pleasantry. From women he never feared anything. His
+      letters were found too short, too cold. He replied to the remonstrance by
+      a reference of extreme coarseness. His correspondents wrote from the
+      neighbourhood of the Palais Royal, then and for long after the haunt of
+      mercenary women. &quot;You belong to your quarter more than I thought,&quot;
+      he said brutally.<a name="FNanchor_37_37" id="FNanchor_37_37"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_37_37" class="fnanchor">[37]</a> The vulgarity of the
+      lackey was never quite obliterated in him, even when the lackey had
+      written Emilius. <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[ii.19]</a></span>This
+      was too much for the imaginary Claire. &quot;I have given myself three
+      good blows on my breast for the correspondence that I was silly enough to
+      open between you,&quot; she wrote to Julie, and she remained implacable.
+      The Julie, on the contrary, was faithful to the end of Rousseau's life.
+      She took his part vehemently in the quarrel with Hume, and wrote in
+      defence of his memory after he was dead. She is the most remarkable of all
+      the instances of that unreasoning passion which the New Helo&#239;sa
+      inflamed in the breasts of the women of that age. Madame Latour pursued
+      Jean Jacques with a devotion that no coldness could repulse. She only saw
+      him three times in all, the first time not until 1766, when he was on his
+      way through Paris to England. The second time, in 1772, she visited him
+      without mentioning her name, and he did not recognise her; she brought him
+      some music to copy, and went away unknown. She made another attempt,
+      announcing herself: he gave her a frosty welcome, and then wrote to her
+      that she was to come no more. With a strange fidelity she bore him no
+      grudge, but cherished his memory and sorrowed over his misfortunes to the
+      day of her death. He was not an idol of very sublime quality, but we may
+      think kindly of the idolatress.<a name="FNanchor_38_38" id="FNanchor_38_38"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_38_38" class="fnanchor">[38]</a> Worshippers are ever
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[ii.20]</a></span>dearer
+      to us than their graven images. Let us turn to the romance which touched
+      women in this way, and helped to give a new spirit to an epoch.
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      <b>II.</b>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As has been already said, it is the business of criticism to separate what
+      is accidental in form, transitory in manner, and merely local in
+      suggestion, from the general ideas which live under a casual and
+      particular literary robe. And so we have to distinguish the external
+      conditions under which a book like the New Helo&#239;sa is produced, from
+      the living qualities in the author which gave the external conditions
+      their hold upon him, and turned their development in one direction rather
+      than another. We are only encouraging poverty of spirit, when we insist on
+      fixing our eyes on a few of the minuti&#230; of construction, instead of
+      patiently seizing larger impressions and more durable meanings; when we
+      stop at the fortuitous incidents of composition, instead of advancing to
+      the central elements of the writer's character.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These incidents in the case of the New Helo&#239;sa we know; the sensuous
+      communion with nature in her summer mood in the woods of Montmorency, the
+      long hours and days of solitary expansion, the despairing passion for the
+      too sage Julie of actual experience. But the power of these impressions
+      from without depended on secrets of conformation within. An adult with
+      marked character is, consciously or uncon<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[ii.21]</a></span>sciously, his own
+      character's victim or sport. It is his whole system of impulses, ideas,
+      pre-occupations, that make those critical situations ready, into which he
+      too hastily supposes that an accident has drawn him. And this inner system
+      not only prepares the situation; it forces his interpretation of the
+      situation. Much of the interest of the New Helo&#239;sa springs from the
+      fact that it was the outcome, in a sense of which the author himself was
+      probably unconscious, of the general doctrine of life and conduct which he
+      only professed to expound in writings of graver pretension. Rousseau
+      generally spoke of his romance in phrases of depreciation, as the monument
+      of a passing weakness. It was in truth as entirely a monument of the
+      strength, no less than the weakness, of his whole scheme, as his
+      weightiest piece. That it was not so deliberately, only added to its
+      effect. The slow and musing air which underlies all the assumption of
+      ardent passion, made a way for the doctrine into sensitive natures, that
+      would have been untouched by the pretended ratiocination of the
+      Discourses, and the didactic manner of the Emilius.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rousseau's scheme, which we must carefully remember was only present to
+      his own mind in an informal and fragmentary way, may be shortly described
+      as an attempt to rehabilitate human nature in as much of the supposed
+      freshness of primitive times, as the hardened crust of civil institutions
+      and social use might allow. In this survey, however incoherently carried
+      out, the mutual passion of the two sexes<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[ii.22]</a></span> was the very last that was
+      likely to escape Rousseau's attention. Hence it was with this that he
+      began. The Discourses had been an attack upon the general ordering of
+      society, and an exposition of the mischief that society has done to human
+      nature at large. The romance treated one set of emotions in human nature
+      particularly, though it also touches the whole emotional sphere
+      indirectly. And this limitation of the field was accompanied by a total
+      revolution in the method. Polemic was abandoned; the presence of hostility
+      was forgotten in appearance, if not in the heart of the writer; instead of
+      discussion, presentation; instead of abstract analysis of principles,
+      concrete drawing of persons and dramatic delineation of passion. There is,
+      it is true, a monstrous superfluity of ethical exposition of most doubtful
+      value, but then that, as we have already said, was in the manners of the
+      time. All people in those days with any pretensions to use their minds,
+      wrote and talked in a superfine ethical manner, and violently translated
+      the dictates of sensibility into formulas of morality. The important thing
+      to remark is not that this semi-didactic strain is present, but that there
+      is much less of it, and that it takes a far more subordinate place, than
+      the subject and the reigning taste would have led us to expect. It is
+      true, also, that Rousseau declared his intention in the two characters of
+      Julie and of Wolmar, who eventually became Julie's husband, of leading to
+      a reconciliation between the two great opposing parties, the devout and
+      the rationalistic; of teaching them the lesson of<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[ii.23]</a></span> reciprocal esteem, by
+      showing the one that it is possible to believe in a God without being a
+      hypocrite, and the other that it is possible to be an unbeliever without
+      being a scoundrel.<a name="FNanchor_39_39" id="FNanchor_39_39"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_39_39" class="fnanchor">[39]</a> This intention, if it was
+      really present to Rousseau's mind while he was writing, and not an
+      afterthought characteristically welcomed for the sake of giving loftiness
+      and gravity to a composition of which he was always a little ashamed, must
+      at any rate have been of a very pale kind. It would hardly have occurred
+      to a critic, unless Rousseau had so emphatically pointed it out, that such
+      a design had presided over the composition, and contemporary readers saw
+      nothing of it. In the first part of the story, which is wholly passionate,
+      it is certainly not visible, and in the second part neither of the two
+      contending factions was likely to learn any lesson with respect to the
+      other. Churchmen would have insisted that Wolmar was really a Christian
+      dressed up as an atheist, and philosophers would hardly have accepted
+      Julie as a type of the too believing people who broke Calas on the wheel,
+      and cut off La Barre's head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      French critics tell us that no one now reads the New Helo&#239;sa in
+      France except deliberate students of the works of Rousseau, and certainly
+      few in this generation read it in our own country.<a name="FNanchor_40_40"
+      id="FNanchor_40_40"></a><a href="#Footnote_40_40" class="fnanchor">[40]</a>
+      The action <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[ii.24]</a></span>is
+      very slight, and the play of motives very simple, when contrasted with the
+      ingenuity of invention, the elaborate subtleties of psychological
+      analysis, the power of rapid change from one perturbing incident or
+      excited humour to another, which mark the modern writer of sentimental
+      fiction. As the title warns us, it is a story of a youthful tutor and a
+      too fair disciple, straying away from the lessons of calm philosophy into
+      the heated places of passion. The high pride of Julie's father forbade all
+      hope of their union, and in very desperation the unhappy pair lost the
+      self-control of virtue, and threw themselves into the pit that lies so
+      ready to our feet. Remorse followed with quick step, for Julie had with
+      her purity lost none of the other lovelinesses of a dutiful character. Her
+      lover was hurried away from the country by the generous solicitude of an
+      English nobleman, one of the bravest, tenderest, and best of men. Julie,
+      left undisturbed by her lover's presence, stricken with affliction at the
+      death of a sweet and affectionate mother, and pressed by the importunities
+      of a father whom she dearly loved, in spite of all the disasters which his
+      will had brought upon her, at length consented to marry a foreign baron
+      from some northern court. Wolmar was much older than she was; a devotee of
+      calm reason, without a system and without prejudices, benevolent, orderly,
+      above all things judicious. The lover meditated suicide, from which he was
+      only diverted by the arguments of Lord Edward, who did more than argue; he
+      hurried the forlorn man on board the ship<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[ii.25]</a></span> of Admiral Anson, then just
+      starting for his famous voyage round the world. And this marks the end of
+      the first episode.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rousseau always urged that his story was dangerous for young girls, and
+      maintained that Richardson was grievously mistaken in supposing that they
+      could be instructed by romances. It was like setting fire to the house, he
+      said, for the sake of making the pumps play.<a name="FNanchor_41_41"
+      id="FNanchor_41_41"></a><a href="#Footnote_41_41" class="fnanchor">[41]</a>
+      As he admitted so much, he is not open to attack on this side, except from
+      those who hold the theory that no books ought to be written which may not
+      prudently be put into the hands of the young,&#8212;a puerile and
+      contemptible doctrine that must emasculate all literature and all art, by
+      excluding the most interesting of human relations and the most powerful of
+      human passions. There is not a single composition of the first rank
+      outside of science, from the Bible downwards, that could undergo the test.
+      The most useful standard for measuring the significance of a book in this
+      respect is found in the manners of the time, and the prevailing tone of
+      contemporary literature. In trying to appreciate the meaning of the New
+      Helo&#239;sa and its popularity, it is well to think of it as a
+      delineation of love, in connection not only with such a book as the
+      Pucelle, where there is at least wit, but with a story like Duclos's,
+      which all ladies both read and were not in the least ashamed to
+      acknowledge that they had read; or still worse, such an abomination as
+      Diderot's first stories; or a story <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_26"
+      id="Page_26">[ii.26]</a></span>like Laclos's, which came a generation
+      later, and with its infinite briskness and devilry carried the tradition
+      of artistic impurity to as vigorous a manifestation as it is capable of
+      reaching.<a name="FNanchor_42_42" id="FNanchor_42_42"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_42_42" class="fnanchor">[42]</a> To a generation whose
+      literature is as pure as the best English, American, and German literature
+      is in the present day, the New Helo&#239;sa might without doubt be
+      corrupting. To the people who read Cr&#233;billon and the Pucelle, it was
+      without doubt elevating.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The case is just as strong if we turn from books to manners. Without
+      looking beyond the circle of names that occur in Rousseau's own history,
+      we see how deep the depravity had become. Madame d'Epinay's gallant sat at
+      table with the husband, and the husband was perfectly aware of the
+      relations between them. M. d'Epinay had notorious relations with two
+      public women, and was not ashamed to refer to them in the presence of his
+      wife, and even to seek her sympathy on an occasion when one of them was in
+      some trouble. Not only this, but husband and lover used to pursue their
+      debaucheries in the town together in jovial comradeship. An opera dancer
+      presided at the table of a patrician abb&#233; in his country house, and
+      he passed weeks in her house in the town. As for shame, says Barbier on
+      one occasion, &quot;'tis true the king has a mistress, but who has not?&#8212;except
+      the Duke of Orleans; he has withdrawn to Ste. Genevi&#232;ve, and is
+      thoroughly despised in consequence, and rightly.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor_43_43" id="FNanchor_43_43"></a><a href="#Footnote_43_43"
+      class="fnanchor">[43]</a> <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_27"
+      id="Page_27">[ii.27]</a></span>Reeking disorder such as all this
+      illustrates, made the passion of the two imaginary lovers of the fair lake
+      seem like a breath from the garden of Eden. One virtue was lost in that
+      simple paradise, but even that loss was followed by circumstances of
+      mental pain and far circling distress, which banished the sin into a
+      secondary place; and what remained to strike the imagination of the time
+      were delightful pictures of fast union between two enchanting women, of
+      the patience and compassionateness of a grave mother, of the chivalrous
+      warmth and helpfulness of a loyal friend. Any one anxious to pick out
+      sensual strokes and turns of grossness could make a small collection of
+      such defilements from the New Helo&#239;sa without any difficulty. They
+      were in Rousseau's character, and so they came out in his work. Saint
+      Preux afflicts us with touches of this kind, just as we are afflicted with
+      similar touches in the Confessions. They were not noticed at that day,
+      when people's ears did not affect to be any chaster than the rest of them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A historian of opinion is concerned with the general effect that was
+      actually produced by a remarkable book, and with the causes that produced
+      it. It is not his easy task to produce a demonstration that if the readers
+      had all been as wise and as virtuous as the moralist might desire them to
+      be, or if they had all been discriminating and scientific critics, not
+      this, but a very different impression would have followed. Today we may
+      wonder at the effect of the New Helo&#239;sa.<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[ii.28]</a></span> A long story told in
+      letters has grown to be a form incomprehensible and intolerable to us. We
+      find Richardson hard to be borne, and he put far greater vivacity and
+      wider variety into his letters than Rousseau did, though he was not any
+      less diffuse, and he abounds in repetitions as Rousseau does not. Rousseau
+      was absolutely without humour; that belongs to the keenly observant
+      natures, and to those who love men in the concrete, not only humanity in
+      the abstract. The pleasantries of Julie's cousin, for instance, are heavy
+      and misplaced. Thus the whole book is in one key, without the dramatic
+      changes of Richardson, too few even as those are. And who now can endure
+      that antique fashion of apostrophising men and women, hot with passion and
+      eager with all active impulses, in oblique terms of abstract qualities, as
+      if their passion and their activity were only the inconsiderable
+      embodiment of fine general ideas? We have not a single thrill, when Saint
+      Preux being led into the chamber where his mistress is supposed to lie
+      dying, murmurs passionately, &quot;What shall I now see in the same place
+      of refuge where once all breathed the ecstasy that intoxicated my soul, in
+      this same object who both caused and shared my transports! the image of
+      death, virtue unhappy, beauty expiring!&quot;<a name="FNanchor_44_44"
+      id="FNanchor_44_44"></a><a href="#Footnote_44_44" class="fnanchor">[44]</a>
+      This rhetorical artificiality of phrase, so repulsive to the more
+      realistic taste of a later age, was as natural then as that facility of
+      shedding tears, which appears so deeply incredible a performance to a
+      generation <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[ii.29]</a></span>that
+      has lost that particular fashion of sensibility, without realising for the
+      honour of its ancestors the physiological truth of the power of the will
+      over the secretions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The characters seem as stiff as some of the language, to us who are
+      accustomed to an Asiatic luxuriousness of delineation. Yet the New Helo&#239;sa
+      was nothing less than the beginning of that fresh, full, highly-coloured
+      style which has now taught us to find so little charm in the source and
+      original of it. Saint Preux is a personage whom no widest charity,
+      literary, philosophic, or Christian, can make endurable. Egoism is made
+      thrice disgusting by a ceaseless redundance of fine phrases. The
+      exaggerated conceits of love in our old poets turn graciously on the
+      lover's eagerness to offer every sacrifice at the feet of his mistress.
+      Even Werther, stricken creature as he was, yet had the stoutness to blow
+      his brains out, rather than be the instrument of surrounding the life of
+      his beloved with snares. Saint Preux's egoism is unbrightened by a single
+      ray of tender abnegation, or a single touch of the sweet humility of
+      devoted passion. The slave of his sensations, he has no care beyond their
+      gratification. With some rotund nothing on his lips about virtue being the
+      only path to happiness, his heart burns with sickly desire. He writes
+      first like a pedagogue infected by some cantharidean philter, and then
+      like a pedagogue without the philter, and that is the worse of the two.
+      Lovelace and the Count of Valmont are manly and hopeful characters in
+      comparison.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[ii.30]</a></span>
+      Werther, again, at least represents a principle of rebellion, in the midst
+      of all his self-centred despair, and he retains strength enough to know
+      that his weakness is shameful. His despair, moreover, is deeply coloured
+      with repulsed social ambition.<a name="FNanchor_45_45" id="FNanchor_45_45"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_45_45" class="fnanchor">[45]</a> He feels the world about
+      him. His French prototype, on the contrary, represents nothing but the
+      unalloyed selfishness of a sensual love for which there is no universe
+      outside of its own fevered pulsation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Julie is much less displeasing, partly perhaps for the reason that she
+      belongs to the less displeasing sex. At least, she preserves fortitude,
+      self-control, and profound considerateness for others. At a certain point
+      her firmness even moves a measure of enthusiasm. If the New Helo&#239;sa
+      could be said to have any moral intention, it is here where women learn
+      from the example of Julie's energetic return to duty, the possibility and
+      the satisfaction of bending character back to comeliness and honour.
+      Excellent as this is from a moral point of view, the reader may wish that
+      Julie had been less of a preacher, as well as less of a sinner. And even
+      as sinner, she would have been more readily forgiven if she had been less
+      deliberate. A maiden who sacrifices her virtue in order that the visible
+      consequences may force her parents to consent to a marriage, is too
+      strategical to be perfectly touching. As was said by the cleverest, though
+      not the greatest, of all the women whose youth was fascinated by Rousseau,
+      when one has renounced the charms of <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[ii.31]</a></span>virtue, it is at least well
+      to have all the charms that entire surrender of heart can bestow.<a
+      name="FNanchor_46_46" id="FNanchor_46_46"></a><a href="#Footnote_46_46"
+      class="fnanchor">[46]</a> In spite of this, however, Julie struck the
+      imagination of the time, and struck it in a way that was thoroughly
+      wholesome. The type taught men some respect for the dignity of women, and
+      it taught women a firmer respect for themselves. It is useless, even if it
+      be possible, to present an example too lofty for the comprehension of an
+      age. At this moment the most brilliant genius in the country was filling
+      France with impish merriment at the expense of the greatest heroine that
+      France had then to boast. In such an atmosphere Julie had almost the halo
+      of saintliness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We may say all we choose about the inconsistency, the excess of preaching,
+      the excess of prudence, in the character of Julie. It was said pungently
+      enough by the wits of the time.<a name="FNanchor_47_47" id="FNanchor_47_47"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_47_47" class="fnanchor">[47]</a> Nothing that could be
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[ii.32]</a></span>said
+      on all this affected the fact, that the women between 1760 and the
+      Revolution were intoxicated by Rousseau's creation to such a pitch that
+      they would pay any price for a glass out of which Rousseau had drunk, they
+      would kiss a scrap of paper that contained a piece of his handwriting, and
+      vow that no woman of true sensibility could hesitate to consecrate her
+      life to him, if she were only certain to be rewarded by his attachment.<a
+      name="FNanchor_48_48" id="FNanchor_48_48"></a><a href="#Footnote_48_48"
+      class="fnanchor">[48]</a> The booksellers were unable to meet the demand.
+      The book was let out at the rate of twelve sous a volume, and the volume
+      could not be detained beyond an hour. All classes shared the excitement,
+      courtiers, soldiers, lawyers, and bourgeois.<a name="FNanchor_49_49"
+      id="FNanchor_49_49"></a><a href="#Footnote_49_49" class="fnanchor">[49]</a>
+      Stories were told of fine ladies, dressed for the ball, who took the book
+      up for half an hour until the time should come for starting; they read
+      until midnight, and when informed that the carriage waited, answered not a
+      word, and when reminded by and by that it was two o'clock, still read
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[ii.33]</a></span>on,
+      and then at four, having ordered the horses to be taken out of the
+      carriage, disrobed, went to bed, and passed the remainder of the night in
+      reading. In Germany the effect was just as astonishing. Kant only once in
+      his life failed to take his afternoon walk, and this unexampled omission
+      was due to the witchery of the New Helo&#239;sa. Gallantry was succeeded
+      by passion, expansion, exaltation; moods far more dangerous for society,
+      as all enthusiasm is dangerous, but also far higher and pregnant with
+      better hopes for character. To move the sympathetic faculties is the first
+      step towards kindling all the other energies which make life wiser and
+      more fruitful. It is especially worth noticing that nothing in the
+      character of Julie concentrates this outburst of sympathy in subjective
+      broodings. Julie is the representative of one recalled to the straight
+      path by practical, wholesome, objective sympathy for others, not of one
+      expiring in unsatisfied yearnings for the sympathy of others for herself,
+      and in moonstruck subjective aspirations. The women who wept over her
+      romance read in it the lesson of duty, not of whimpering introspection.
+      The danger lay in the mischievous intellectual direction which Rousseau
+      imparted to this effusion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The stir which the Julie communicated to the affections in so many ways,
+      marked progress, but in all the elements of reason she was the most
+      perilous of reactionaries. So hard it is with the human mind, constituted
+      as it is, to march forward a space further<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[ii.34]</a></span> to the light, without
+      making some fresh swerve obliquely towards old darkness. The great
+      effusion of natural sentiment was in the air before the New Helo&#239;sa
+      appeared, to condense and turn it into definite channels. One beautiful
+      character, Vauven argues (1715-1747), had begun to teach the culture of
+      emotional instinct in some sayings of exquisite sweetness and moderation,
+      as that &quot;Great thoughts come from the heart.&quot; But he came too
+      soon, and, alas for us all, he died young, and he made no mark. Moderation
+      never can make a mark in the epochs when men are beginning to feel the
+      urgent spirit of a new time. Diderot strove with more powerful efforts, in
+      the midst of all his herculean labours for the acquisition and ordering of
+      knowledge, in the same direction towards the great outer world of nature,
+      and towards the great inner world of nature in the human breast. His
+      criticisms on the paintings of each year, mediocre as the paintings were,
+      are admirable even now for their richness and freshness. If Diderot had
+      been endowed with emotional tenacity, as he was with tenacity of
+      understanding and of purpose, the student of the eighteenth century would
+      probably have been spared the not perfectly agreeable task of threading a
+      way along the sinuosities of the character and work of Rousseau. But
+      Rousseau had what Diderot lacked&#8212;sustained ecstatic moods, and
+      fervid trances; his literary gesture was so commanding, his apparel so
+      glistening, his voice so rich in long-drawn notes of plangent vibration.
+      His words<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[ii.35]</a></span>
+      are the words of a prophet; a prophet, it is understood, who had lived in
+      Paris, and belonged to the eighteenth century, and wrote in French instead
+      of Hebrew. The mischief of his work lay in this, that he raised feeling,
+      now passionate, now quietest, into the supreme place which it was to
+      occupy alone, and not on an equal throne and in equal alliance with
+      understanding. Instead of supplementing reason, he placed emotion as its
+      substitute. And he made this evil doctrine come from the lips of a
+      fictitious character, who stimulated fancy and fascinated imagination.
+      Voltaire laughed at the <i>baisers &#226;cres</i> of Madame de Wolmar, and
+      declared that a criticism of the Marquis of Xim&#233;n&#232;s had crushed
+      the wretched romance.<a name="FNanchor_50_50" id="FNanchor_50_50"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_50_50" class="fnanchor">[50]</a> But Madame de Wolmar was
+      so far from crushed, that she turned the flood of feeling which her own
+      charms, passion, remorse, and conversion had raised, in a direction that
+      Voltaire abhorred, and abhorred in vain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is after the marriage of Julie to Wolmar that the action of the story
+      takes the turn which sensible men like Voltaire found laughable. Saint
+      Preux is absent with Admiral Anson for some years. On his return to Europe
+      he is speedily invited by the sage Wolmar, who knows his past history
+      perfectly well, to pay them a visit. They all meet with leapings on <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[ii.36]</a></span>the neck
+      and hearty kisses, the unprejudiced Wolmar preserving an open, serene, and
+      smiling air. He takes his young friend to a chamber, which is to be
+      reserved for him and for him only. In a few days he takes an opportunity
+      of visiting some distant property, leaving his wife and Saint Preux
+      together, with the sublime of magnanimity. At the same time he confides to
+      Claire his intention of entrusting to Saint Preux the education of his
+      children. All goes perfectly well, and the household presents a picture of
+      contentment, prosperity, moderation, affection, and evenly diffused
+      happiness, which in spite of the disagreeableness of the situation is even
+      now extremely charming. There is only one cloud. Julie is devoured by a
+      source of hidden chagrin. Her husband, &quot;so sage, so reasonable, so
+      far from every kind of vice, so little under the influence of human
+      passions, is without the only belief that makes virtue precious, and in
+      the innocence of an irreproachable life he carries at the bottom of his
+      heart the frightful peace of the wicked.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_51_51"
+      id="FNanchor_51_51"></a><a href="#Footnote_51_51" class="fnanchor">[51]</a>
+      He is an atheist. Julie is now a pietest, locking herself for hours in her
+      chambers, spending days in self-examination and prayer, constantly reading
+      the pages of the good F&#233;nelon.<a name="FNanchor_52_52"
+      id="FNanchor_52_52"></a><a href="#Footnote_52_52" class="fnanchor">[52]</a>
+      &quot;I fear,&quot; she writes to Saint Preux, &quot;that you do not gain
+      all you might from religion in the conduct of your life, and that
+      philosophic pride disdains the simplicity of the Christian. You believe
+      prayers to be of scanty service. That is not, you know, the doctrine of
+      Saint <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[ii.37]</a></span>Paul,
+      nor what our Church professes. We are free, it is true, but we are
+      ignorant, feeble, prone to ill. And whence should light and force come, if
+      not from him who is their very well-spring?... Let us be humble, to be
+      sage; let us see our weakness, and we shall be strong.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor_53_53" id="FNanchor_53_53"></a><a href="#Footnote_53_53"
+      class="fnanchor">[53]</a> This was the opening of the deistical reaction;
+      it was thus, associated with everything that struck imagination and moved
+      the sentiment of his readers, that Rousseau brought back those sophistical
+      conclusions which Pascal had drawn from premisses of dark profound truth,
+      and that enervating displacement of reason by celestial contemplation,
+      which F&#233;nelon had once made beautiful by the persuasion of virtuous
+      example. He was justified in saying, as he afterwards did, that there was
+      nothing in the Savoyard Vicar's Profession of Faith which was not to be
+      found in the letters of Julie. These were the effective preparations for
+      that more famous manifesto; they surrounded belief with all the
+      attractions of an interesting and sympathetic preacher, and set it to a
+      harmony of circumstance that touched softer fibres.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For, curiously enough, while the first half of the romance is a scene of
+      disorderly passion, the second is the glorification of the family. A
+      modern writer of genius has inveighed with whimsical bitterness against
+      the character of Wolmar,&#8212;supposed, we may notice in passing, to be
+      partially drawn from D'Holbach,&#8212;a man performing so long an
+      experiment on these <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[ii.38]</a></span>two
+      souls, with the terrible curiosity of a surgeon engaged in vivisection.<a
+      name="FNanchor_54_54" id="FNanchor_54_54"></a><a href="#Footnote_54_54"
+      class="fnanchor">[54]</a> It was, however, much less difficult for
+      contemporaries than it is for us to accept so unwholesome and prurient a
+      situation. They forgot all the evil that was in it, in the charm of the
+      account of Wolmar's active, peaceful, frugal, sunny household. The
+      influence of this was immense.<a name="FNanchor_55_55" id="FNanchor_55_55"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_55_55" class="fnanchor">[55]</a> It may be that the
+      overstrained scene where Saint Preux waits for Julie in her room,
+      suggested the far lovelier passage of Faust in the chamber of the hapless
+      Margaret. But we may, at least, be sure that Werther (1774) would not have
+      found Charlotte cutting bread and butter, if Saint Preux had not gone to
+      see Julie take cream and cakes with her children and her female servants.
+      And perhaps the other and nobler Charlotte of the <i>Wahlverwandtschaften</i>
+      (1809) would not have detained us so long with her moss hut, her terrace,
+      her park prospect, if Julie had not had her elysium, where the sweet
+      freshness of the air, the cool shadows, the shining verdure, flowers
+      diffusing fragrance and colour, water running with soft whisper, and the
+      song of a thousand birds, reminded the returned traveller of Tinian and
+      Juan Fernandez. There is an animation, a variety, an accuracy, a realistic
+      brightness in this picture, which will always make it enchanting, even to
+      those who cannot make their way through any other letter in the New Helo&#239;sa.<a
+      name="FNanchor_56_56" id="FNanchor_56_56"></a><a href="#Footnote_56_56"
+      class="fnanchor">[56]</a> Such qualities place it as an idyllic piece far
+      above such pieces in <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[ii.39]</a></span>Goethe's
+      two famous romances. They have a clearness and spontaneous freshness which
+      are not among the bountiful gifts of Goethe. There are other admirable
+      landscapes in the New Helo&#239;sa, though not too many of them, and the
+      minute and careful way in which Rousseau made their features real to
+      himself, is accidentally shown in his urgent prayer for exactitude in the
+      engraving of the striking scene where Saint Preux and Julie visit the
+      monuments of their old love for one another.<a name="FNanchor_57_57"
+      id="FNanchor_57_57"></a><a href="#Footnote_57_57" class="fnanchor">[57]</a>
+      &quot;I have traversed all Rousseau's ground with the Helo&#239;sa before
+      me,&quot; said Byron, &quot;and am struck to a degree I cannot express,
+      with the force and accuracy of his descriptions and the beauty of their
+      reality.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_58_58" id="FNanchor_58_58"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_58_58" class="fnanchor">[58]</a> They were memories made
+      true by long dreaming, by endless brooding. The painter lived with these
+      scenes ever present to the inner eye. They were his real world, of which
+      the tamer world of meadow and woodland actually around him only gave
+      suggestion. He thought of the green steeps, the rocks, the mountain pines,
+      the waters of the lake, &quot;the populous solitude of bees and birds,&quot;
+      as of some divine presence, too sublime for personality. And they were
+      always benign, standing in relief with the malignity or folly of the
+      hurtful insect, Man. He was never a manich&#230;an towards nature. To him
+      she <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[ii.40]</a></span>was
+      all good and bounteous. The demon forces that so fascinated Byron were to
+      Rousseau invisible. These were the compositions that presently inspired
+      the landscapes of <i>Paul and Virginia</i> (1788), of <i>Atala</i> and <i>Ren&#233;</i>
+      (1801), and of <i>Obermann</i> (1804), as well as those punier imitators
+      who resemble their masters as the hymns of a methodist negro resemble the
+      psalms of David. They were the outcome of eager and spontaneous feeling
+      for nature, and not the mere hackneyed common-form and inflated
+      description of the literary pastoral.<a name="FNanchor_59_59"
+      id="FNanchor_59_59"></a><a href="#Footnote_59_59" class="fnanchor">[59]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This leads to another great and important distinction to be drawn between
+      Rousseau and the school whom in other respects he inspired. The admirable
+      Sainte Beuve perplexes one by his strange remark, <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[ii.41]</a></span>that the union of the poetry
+      of the family and the hearth with the poetry of nature is essentially
+      wanting to Rousseau.<a name="FNanchor_60_60" id="FNanchor_60_60"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_60_60" class="fnanchor">[60]</a> It only shows that the
+      great critic had for the moment forgotten the whole of the second part of
+      the New Helo&#239;sa, and his failure to identify Cowper's allusion to the
+      <i>matin&#233;e &#224; l'anglaise</i> certainly proves that he had at any
+      rate forgotten one of the most striking and delicious scenes of the hearth
+      in French literature.<a name="FNanchor_61_61" id="FNanchor_61_61"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_61_61" class="fnanchor">[61]</a> The tendency to read
+      Rousseau only in the Byronic sense is one of those foregone conclusions
+      which are constantly tempting the critic to travel out of his record.
+      Rousseau assuredly had a Byronic side, but he is just as often a Cowper
+      done into splendid prose. His pictures are full of social animation and
+      domestic order. He had exalted the simplicity of the savage state in his
+      Discourses, but when he came to constitute an ideal life, he found it in a
+      household that was more, and not less, systematically disciplined than
+      those of the common society <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_42"
+      id="Page_42">[ii.42]</a></span>around him. The paradise in which his Julie
+      moved with Wolmar and Saint Preux, was no more and no less than an
+      establishment of the best kind of the rural middle-class, frugal,
+      decorous, wholesome, tranquilly austere. No most sentimental savage could
+      have found it endurable, or could himself without profound transformation
+      of his manners have been endured in it. The New Helo&#239;sa ends by
+      exalting respectability, and putting the spirit of insurrection to shame.
+      Self-control, not revolt, is its last word.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This is what separates Rousseau here and throughout from S&#233;nancour,
+      Byron, and the rest. He consummates the triumph of will, while their
+      reigning mood is grave or reckless protest against impotence of will, the
+      little worth of common aims, the fretting triviality of common rules.
+      Franklin or Cobbett might have gloried in the regularity of Madame de
+      Wolmar's establishment. The employment of the day was marked out with
+      precision. By artful adjustment of pursuits, it was contrived that the
+      men-servants should be kept apart from the maid-servants, except at their
+      repasts. The women, namely, a cook, a housemaid, and a nurse, found their
+      pastime in rambles with their mistress and her children, and lived mainly
+      with them. The men were amused by games for which their master made
+      regulated provision, now for summer, now for winter, offering prizes of a
+      useful kind for prowess and adroitness. Often on a Sunday night all the
+      household met in an<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[ii.43]</a></span>
+      ample chamber, and passed the evening in dancing. When Saint Preux
+      inquired whether this was not a rather singular infraction of puritan
+      rule, Julie wisely answered that pure morality is so loaded with severe
+      duties, that if you add to them the further burden of indifferent forms,
+      it must always be at the cost of the essential.<a name="FNanchor_62_62"
+      id="FNanchor_62_62"></a><a href="#Footnote_62_62" class="fnanchor">[62]</a>
+      The servants were taken from the country, never from the town. They
+      entered the household young, were gradually trained, and never went away
+      except to establish themselves.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The vulgar and obvious criticism on all this is that it is utopian, that
+      such households do not generally exist, because neither masters nor
+      servants possess the qualities needed to maintain these relations of
+      unbroken order and friendliness. Perhaps not; and masters and servants
+      will be more and more removed from the possession of such qualities, and
+      their relations further distant from such order and friendliness, if
+      writers cease to press the beauty and serviceableness of a domesticity
+      that is at present only possible in a few rare cases, or to insist on the
+      ugliness, the waste of peace, the deterioration of character, that are the
+      results of our present system. Undoubtedly it is much easier for Rousseau
+      to draw his picture of semi-patriarchal felicity, than for the rest of us
+      to realise it. It was his function to press ideals of sweeter life on his
+      contemporaries, and they may be counted fortunate in having a writer who
+      could fulfil this function with Rousseau's peculiar force of masterly
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[ii.44]</a></span>persuasion.
+      His scornful diatribes against the domestic police of great houses, and
+      the essential inhumanity of the ordinary household relations, are both
+      excellent and of permanent interest. There is the full breath of a new
+      humaneness in them. They were the right way of attacking the decrepitude
+      of feudal luxury and insolence, and its imitation among the great
+      farmers-general. This criticism of the conditions of domestic service
+      marks a beginning of true democracy, as distinguished from the mere
+      pulverisation of aristocracy. It rests on the claim of the common people
+      to an equal consideration, as equally useful and equally capable of virtue
+      and vice; and it implies the essential priority of social over political
+      reform.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The story abounds in sumptuary detail. The table partakes of the general
+      plenty, but this plenty is not ruinous. The senses are gratified without
+      daintiness. The food is common, but excellent of its kind. The service is
+      simple, yet exquisite. All that is mere show, all that depends on vulgar
+      opinion, all fine and elaborate dishes whose value comes of their rarity,
+      and whose names you must know before finding any goodness in them, are
+      banished without recall. Even in such delicacies as they permit
+      themselves, our friends abstain every day from certain things which are
+      reserved for feasts on special occasions, and which are thus made more
+      delightful without being more costly. What do you suppose these delicacies
+      are? Rare game, or fish from the sea, or dainties from abroad? Better than
+      all that; some delicious vegetable<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_45"
+      id="Page_45">[ii.45]</a></span> of the district, one of the savoury things
+      that grow in our garden, some fish from the lake dressed in a peculiar
+      way, some cheese from our mountains. The service is modest and rustic, but
+      clean and smiling. Neither gold-laced liveries in sight of which you die
+      of hunger, nor tall crystals laden with flowers for your only dessert,
+      here take the place of honest dishes. Here people have not the art of
+      nourishing the stomach through the eyes, but they know how to add grace to
+      good cheer, to eat heartily without inconvenience, to drink merrily
+      without losing reason, to sit long at table without weariness, and always
+      to rise from it without disgust.<a name="FNanchor_63_63"
+      id="FNanchor_63_63"></a><a href="#Footnote_63_63" class="fnanchor">[63]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One singularity in this ideal household was the avoidance of those middle
+      exchanges between production and consumption, which enrich the shopkeeper
+      but impoverish his customers. Not one of these exchanges is made without
+      loss, and the multiplication of these losses would weaken even a man of
+      fortune. Wolmar seeks those real exchanges in which the convenience of
+      each party to the bargain serves as profit for both. Thus the wool is sent
+      to the factories, from which they receive cloth in exchange; wine, oil,
+      and bread are produced in the house; the butcher pays himself in live
+      cattle; the grocer receives grain in return for his goods; the wages of
+      the labourers and the house-servants are derived from the produce of the
+      land which they render valuable.<a name="FNanchor_64_64"
+      id="FNanchor_64_64"></a><a href="#Footnote_64_64" class="fnanchor">[64]</a>
+      It was reserved for Fourier, Cabet, and the rest, to carry to its highest
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[ii.46]</a></span>point
+      this confusion of what is so fascinating in a book with what is
+      practicable in society.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The expatiation on the loveliness of a well-ordered interior may strike
+      the impatient modern as somewhat long, and the movement as very slow, just
+      as people complain of the same things in Goethe's <i>Wahlverwandtschaften</i>.
+      Such complaint only proves inability, which is or is not justifiable, to
+      seize the spirit of the writer. The expatiation was long and the movement
+      slow, because Rousseau was full of his thoughts; they were a deep and
+      glowing part of himself, and did not merely skim swiftly and lightly
+      through his mind. Anybody who takes the trouble may find out the
+      difference between this expression of long mental brooding, and a merely
+      elaborated diction.<a name="FNanchor_65_65" id="FNanchor_65_65"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_65_65" class="fnanchor">[65]</a> The length is an
+      essential part of the matter. The whole work is the reflection of a series
+      of slow inner processes, the many careful weavings of a lonely and
+      miserable man's dreams. And Julie expressed the spirit and the joy of
+      these dreams when she wrote, &quot;People are only happy before they are
+      happy. Man, so eager and so feeble, made to desire all and obtain little,
+      has received from heaven a consoling force which brings all that he
+      desires close to him, which subjects it to his imagination, which makes it
+      sensible and present before him, which delivers it over to him. The land
+      of chimera is the only one in this world that is worth dwelling in, and
+      such is the nothingness of the human <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[ii.47]</a></span>lot, that except the being
+      who exists in and by himself, there is nothing beautiful except that which
+      does not exist.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_66_66" id="FNanchor_66_66"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_66_66" class="fnanchor">[66]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Closely connected with the vigorous attempt to fascinate his public with
+      the charm of a serene, joyful, and ordered house, is the restoration of
+      marriage in the New Helo&#239;sa to a rank among high and honourable
+      obligations, and its representation as the best support of an equable life
+      of right conduct and fruitful harmonious emotion. Rousseau even invested
+      it with the mysterious dignity as of some natural sacrament. &quot;This
+      chaste knot of nature is subject neither to the sovereign power nor to
+      paternal authority,&quot; he cried, &quot;but only to the authority of the
+      common Father.&quot; And he pointed his remark by a bitter allusion to a
+      celebrated case in which a great house had prevailed on the courts to
+      annul the marriage of an elder son with a young actress, though her
+      character was excellent, and though she had befriended him when he was
+      abandoned by everybody else.<a name="FNanchor_67_67" id="FNanchor_67_67"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_67_67" class="fnanchor">[67]</a> This was one of the
+      countless democratic thrusts in the book. In the case of its heroine,
+      however, the author associated the sanctity of marriage not only with
+      equality but with religion. We may imagine the spleen with which the
+      philosophers, with both their hatred of the faith, and their light esteem
+      of marriage bonds, read Julie's eloquent account of her emotions at the
+      moment of <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[ii.48]</a></span>her
+      union with Wolmar. &quot;I seemed to behold the organ of Providence and to
+      hear the voice of God, as the minister gravely pronounced the words of the
+      holy service. The purity, the dignity, the sanctity of marriage, so
+      vividly set forth in the words of scripture; its chaste and sublime
+      duties, so important to the happiness, order, and peace of the human race,
+      so sweet to fulfil even for their own sake&#8212;all this made such an
+      impression on me that I seemed to feel within my breast a sudden
+      revolution. An unknown power seemed all at once to arrest the disorder of
+      my affections, and to restore them to accordance with the law of duty and
+      of nature. The eternal eye that sees everything, I said to myself, now
+      reads to the depth of my heart.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_68_68"
+      id="FNanchor_68_68"></a><a href="#Footnote_68_68" class="fnanchor">[68]</a>
+      She has all the well-known fervour of the proselyte, and never wearies of
+      extolling the peace of the wedded state. Love is no essential to its
+      perfection. &quot;Worth, virtue, a certain accord not so much in condition
+      and age as in character and temper, are enough between husband and wife;
+      and this does not prevent the growth from such a union of a very tender
+      attachment, which is none the less sweet for not being exactly love, and
+      is all the more lasting.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_69_69" id="FNanchor_69_69"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_69_69" class="fnanchor">[69]</a> <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[ii.49]</a></span>Years after, when Saint
+      Preux has returned and is settled in the household, she even tries to
+      persuade him to imitate her example, and find contentment in marriage with
+      her cousin. The earnestness with which she presses the point, the very
+      sensible but not very delicate references to the hygienic drawbacks of
+      celibacy, and the fact that the cousin whom she would fain have him marry,
+      had complaisantly assisted them in their past loves, naturally drew the
+      fire of Rousseau's critical enemies.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Such matters did not affect the general enthusiasm. When people are weary
+      of a certain way of surveying life, and have their faces eagerly set in
+      some new direction, they read in a book what it pleases them to read; they
+      assimilate as much as falls in with their dominant mood, and the rest
+      passes away unseen. The French public were bewitched by Julie, and were no
+      more capable of criticising her than Julie was capable of criticising
+      Saint Preux in the height of her passion for him. When we say that
+      Rousseau was the author of this movement, all we mean is that his book and
+      its chief personage awoke emotion to self-consciousness, gave it a
+      dialect, communicated an impulse in favour of social order, and then very
+      calamitously at the same moment divorced it from the fundamental
+      conditions of progress, by divorcing it from disciplined intelligence and
+      scientific reason.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Apart from the general tendency of the New Helo&#239;sa in numberless
+      indirect ways to bring the manners of the great into contempt, by the
+      presenta<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[ii.50]</a></span>tion
+      of the happiness of a simple and worthy life, thrifty, self-sufficing, and
+      homely, there is one direct protest of singular eloquence and gravity.
+      Julie's father is deeply revolted at the bare notion of marrying his
+      daughter to a teacher. Rousseau puts his vigorous remonstrance against
+      pride of birth into the mouth of an English nobleman. This is perhaps an
+      infelicitous piece of prosopopoeia, but it is interesting as illustrative
+      of the idea of England in the eighteenth century as the home of
+      stout-hearted freedom. We may quote one piece from the numerous bits of
+      very straightforward speaking in which our representative expressed his
+      mind as to the significance of birth. &quot;My friend has nobility,&quot;
+      cried Lord Edward, &quot;not written in ink on mouldering parchments, but
+      graven in his heart in characters that can never be effaced. For my own
+      part, by God, I should be sorry to have no other proof of my merit but
+      that of a man who has been in his grave these five hundred years. If you
+      know the English nobility, you know that it is the most enlightened, the
+      best informed, the wisest, the bravest in Europe. That being so, I don't
+      care to ask whether it is the oldest or not. We are not, it is true, the
+      slaves of the prince, but his friends; nor the tyrants of the people, but
+      their leaders. We hold the balance true between people, and monarch. Our
+      first duty is towards the nation, our second towards him who governs; it
+      is not his will but his right that we consider.... We suffer no one in the
+      land to say <i>God and my sword</i>, nor more than this, <i>God<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[ii.51]</a></span> and my
+      right</i>.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_70_70" id="FNanchor_70_70"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_70_70" class="fnanchor">[70]</a> All this was only putting
+      Montesquieu into heroics, it is true, but a great many people read the
+      romance who were not likely to read the graver book. And there was a wide
+      difference between the calm statement of a number of political
+      propositions about government, and their transformation into dramatic
+      invective against the arrogance of all social inequality that does not
+      correspond with inequalities of worth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is no contradiction between this and the social quietism of other
+      parts of the book. Moral considerations and the paramount place that they
+      hold in Rousseau's way of thinking, explain at once his contempt for the
+      artificial privileges and assumptions of high rank, and his contempt for
+      anything like discontent with the conditions of humble rank. Simplicity of
+      life was his ideal. He wishes us to despise both those who have departed
+      from it, and those who would depart from it if they could. So Julie does
+      her best to make the lot of the peasants as happy as it is capable of
+      being made, without ever helping them to change it for another. She
+      teaches them to respect their natural condition in respecting themselves.
+      Her prime maxim is to discourage change of station and calling, but above
+      all to dissuade the villager, whose life is the happiest of all, from
+      leaving the true pleasures of his natural career for the fever and
+      corruption of towns.<a name="FNanchor_71_71" id="FNanchor_71_71"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_71_71" class="fnanchor">[71]</a> Presently a recollection
+      of the sombre things that he had seen in his rambles <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[ii.52]</a></span>through France crossed
+      Rousseau's pastoral visions, and he admitted that there were some lands in
+      which the publican devours the fruits of the earth; where the misery that
+      covers the fields, the bitter greed of some grasping farmer, the
+      inflexible rigour of an inhuman master, take something from the charm of
+      his rural scenes. &quot;Worn-out horses ready to expire under the blows
+      they receive, wretched peasants attenuated by hunger, broken by weariness,
+      clad in rags, hamlets all in ruins&#8212;these things offer a mournful
+      spectacle to the eye: one is almost sorry to be a man, as we think of the
+      unhappy creatures on whose blood we have to feed.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor_72_72" id="FNanchor_72_72"></a><a href="#Footnote_72_72"
+      class="fnanchor">[72]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yet there is no hint in the New Helo&#239;sa of the socialism which
+      Morelly and Mably flung themselves upon, as the remedy for all these
+      desperate horrors. Property, in every page of the New Helo&#239;sa, is
+      held in full respect; the master has the honourable burden of patriarchal
+      duty; the servant the not less honourable burden of industry and
+      faithfulness; disobedience or vice is promptly punished with paternal
+      rigour and more than paternal inflexibility. The insurrectionary quality
+      and effect of Rousseau's work lay in no direct preaching or vehement
+      denunciation of the abuses that filled France with cruelty on the one hand
+      and sodden misery on the other. It lay in pictures of a social state in
+      which abuses and cruelty cannot exist, nor any miseries save those which
+      are inseparable from humanity. The contrast between the sober, cheerful,
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[ii.53]</a></span>prosperous
+      scenes of romance, and the dreariness of the reality of the field life of
+      France,&#8212;this was the element that filled generous souls with an
+      intoxicating transport.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rousseau's way of dealing with the portentous questions that lay about
+      that tragic scene of deserted fields, ruined hamlets, tottering brutes,
+      and hunger-stricken men, may be gathered from one of the many traits in
+      Julie which endeared her to that generation, and might endear her even to
+      our own if it only knew her. Wolmar's house was near a great high-road,
+      and so was daily haunted by beggars. Not one of these was allowed to go
+      empty away. And Julie had as many excellent reasons to give for her
+      charity, as if she had been one of the philosophers of whom she thought so
+      surpassingly ill. If you look at mendicancy merely as a trade, what is the
+      harm of a calling whose end is to nourish feelings of humanity and
+      brotherly love? From the point of view of talent, why should I not pay the
+      eloquence of a beggar who stirs my pity, as highly as that of a player who
+      makes me shed tears over imaginary sorrows? If the great number of beggars
+      is burdensome to the state, of how many other professions that people
+      encourage, may you not say the same? How can I be sure that the man to
+      whom I give alms is not an honest soul, whom I may save from perishing? In
+      short, whatever we may think of the poor wretches, if we owe nothing to
+      the beggar, at least we owe it to ourselves to pay honour to suffering
+      humanity or to its image.<a name="FNanchor_73_73" id="FNanchor_73_73"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_73_73" class="fnanchor">[73]</a> Nothing <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[ii.54]</a></span>could be
+      more admirably illustrative of the author's confidence that the first
+      thing for us to do is to satisfy our fine feelings, and that then all the
+      rest shall be added unto us. The doctrine spread so far, that Necker,&#8212;a
+      sort of Julie in a frock-coat, who had never fallen, the incarnation of
+      this doctrine on the great stage of affairs,&#8212;was hailed to power to
+      ward off the bankruptcy of the state by means of a good heart and moral
+      sentences, while Turgot with science and firmness for his resources was
+      driven away as an economist and a philosopher.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At a first glance, it may seem that there was compensation for the triumph
+      of sentiment over reason, and that if France was ruined by the dreams in
+      which Rousseau encouraged the nation to exult, she was saved by the
+      fervour and resoluteness of the aspirations with which he filled the most
+      generous of her children. No wide movement, we may be sure, is thoroughly
+      understood until we have mastered both its material and its ideal sides.
+      Materially, Rousseau's work was inevitably fraught with confusion because
+      in this sphere not to be scientific, not to be careful in tracing effects
+      to their true causes, is to be without any security that the causes with
+      which we try to deal will lead to the effects that we desire. A Roman
+      statesman who had gone to the Sermon on the Mount for a method of staying
+      the economic ruin of the empire, its thinning population, its decreasing
+      capital, would obviously have found nothing of what he sought. But the
+      moral nature of man is redeemed by teaching<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[ii.55]</a></span> that may have no bearing on
+      economics, or even a bearing purely mischievous, and which has to be
+      corrected by teaching that probably goes equally far in the contrary
+      direction of moral mischief. In the ideal sphere, the processes are very
+      complex. In measuring a man's influence within it we have to balance.
+      Rousseau's action was undoubtedly excellent in leading men and women to
+      desire simple lives, and a more harmonious social order. Was this eminent
+      benefit more than counterbalanced by the eminent disadvantage of giving a
+      reactionary intellectual direction? By commending irrational retrogression
+      from active use of the understanding back to dreamy contemplation?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To one teacher is usually only one task allotted. We do not reproach want
+      of science to the virtuous and benevolent Channing; his goodness and
+      effusion stirred women and the young, just as Rousseau did, to sentimental
+      but humane aspiration. It was this kind of influence that formed the
+      opinion which at last destroyed American slavery. We owe a place in the
+      temple that commemorates human emancipation, to every man who has kindled
+      in his generation a brighter flame of moral enthusiasm, and a more eager
+      care for the realisation of good and virtuous ideals.
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      <b>III.</b>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The story of the circumstances of the publication of Emilius and the
+      persecution which befell its author<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_56"
+      id="Page_56">[ii.56]</a></span> in consequence, recalls us to the
+      distinctively evil side of French history in this critical epoch, and
+      carries us away from light into the thick darkness of political intrigue,
+      obscurantist faction, and a misgovernment which was at once tyrannical and
+      decrepit. It is almost impossible for us to realise the existence in the
+      same society of such boundless license of thought, and such unscrupulous
+      restraint upon its expression. Not one of Rousseau's three chief works,
+      for instance, was printed in France. The whole trade in books was a sort
+      of contraband, and was carried on with the stealth, subterfuge, daring,
+      and knavery that are demanded in contraband dealings. An author or a
+      bookseller was forced to be as careful as a kidnapper of coolies or the
+      captain of a slaver would be in our own time. He had to steer clear of the
+      court, of the parliament, of Jansenists, of Jesuits, of the mistresses of
+      the king and the minister, of the friends of the mistresses, and above all
+      of that organised hierarchy of ignorance and oppression in all times and
+      places where they raise their masked heads,&#8212;the bishops and
+      ecclesiastics of every sort and condition. Palissot produced his comedy to
+      please the devout at the expense of the philosophers (1760). Madame de
+      Robecq, daughter of Rousseau's marshal of Luxembourg, instigated and
+      protected him, for Diderot had offended her.<a name="FNanchor_74_74"
+      id="FNanchor_74_74"></a><a href="#Footnote_74_74" class="fnanchor">[74]</a>
+      Morellet replied in a piece in which the keen vision of feminine spite
+      detected a reference to Madame de Robecq. Though dying, she still had
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[ii.57]</a></span>relations
+      with Choiseul, and so Morellet was flung into the Bastile.<a
+      name="FNanchor_75_75" id="FNanchor_75_75"></a><a href="#Footnote_75_75"
+      class="fnanchor">[75]</a> Diderot was thrown for three months into
+      Vincennes, where we saw him on a memorable occasion, for his Letter on the
+      Blind (1748), nominally because it was held to contain irreligious
+      doctrine, really because he had given offence to D'Argenson's mistress by
+      hinting that she might be very handsome, but that her judgment on
+      scientific experiment was of no value.<a name="FNanchor_76_76"
+      id="FNanchor_76_76"></a><a href="#Footnote_76_76" class="fnanchor">[76]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The New Helo&#239;sa could not openly circulate in France so long as it
+      contained the words, &quot;I would rather be the wife of a charcoal-burner
+      than the mistress of a king.&quot; The last word was altered to &quot;prince,&quot;
+      and then Rousseau was warned that he would offend the Prince de Conti and
+      Madame de Boufflers.<a name="FNanchor_77_77" id="FNanchor_77_77"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_77_77" class="fnanchor">[77]</a> No work of merit could
+      appear without more or less of slavish mutilation, and no amount of
+      slavish mutilation could make the writer secure against the accidental
+      grudge of people who had influence in high quarters.<a
+      name="FNanchor_78_78" id="FNanchor_78_78"></a><a href="#Footnote_78_78"
+      class="fnanchor">[78]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If French booksellers in the stirring intellectual time of the eighteenth
+      century needed all the craft of a smuggler, their morality was reduced to
+      an equally <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[ii.58]</a></span>low
+      level in dealing not only with the police, but with their own accomplices,
+      the book-writers. They excused themselves from paying proper sums to
+      authors, on the ground that they were robbed of the profits that would
+      enable them to pay such sums, by the piracy of their brethren in trade.
+      But then they all pirated the works of one another. The whole commerce was
+      a mass of fraud and chicane, and every prominent author passed his life
+      between two fires. He was robbed, his works were pirated, and, worse than
+      robbery and piracy, they were defaced and distorted by the booksellers. On
+      the other side he was tormented to death by the suspicion and timidity,
+      alternately with the hatred and active tyranny of the administration. As
+      we read the story of the lives of all these strenuous men, their
+      struggles, their incessant mortifications, their constantly reviving and
+      ever irrepressible vigour and interest in the fight, we may wish that the
+      shabbiness and the pettiness of the daily lives of some of them had faded
+      away from memory, and left us nothing to think of in connection with their
+      names but the alertness, courage, tenacity, self-sacrifice, and faith with
+      which they defended the cause of human emancipation and progress. Happily
+      the mutual hate of the Christian factions, to which liberty owes at least
+      as much as charity owes to their mutual love, prevented a common union for
+      burning the philosophers as well as their books. All torments short of
+      this they endured, and they had the great merit of enduring them without
+      any hope of being<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[ii.59]</a></span>
+      rewarded after their death, as truly good men must always be capable of
+      doing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rousseau had no taste for martyrdom, nor any intention of courting it in
+      even its slightest forms. Holland was now the great printing press of
+      France, and when we are counting up the contributions of Protestantism to
+      the enfranchisement of Europe, it is just to remember the indispensable
+      services rendered by the freedom of the press in Holland to the
+      dissemination of French thought in the eighteenth century, as well as the
+      shelter that it gave to the French thinkers in the seventeenth, including
+      Descartes, the greatest of them all. The monstrous tediousness of printing
+      a book at Amsterdam or the Hague, the delay, loss, and confusion in
+      receiving and transmitting the proofs, and the subterranean character of
+      the entire process, including the circulation of the book after it was
+      once fairly printed, were as grievous to Rousseau as to authors of more
+      impetuous temper. He agreed with Rey, for instance, the Amsterdam printer,
+      to sell him the Social Contract for 1000 francs. The manuscript had then
+      to be cunningly conveyed to Amsterdam. Rousseau wrote it out in very small
+      characters, sealed it carefully up, and entrusted it to the care of the
+      chaplain of the Dutch embassy, who happened to be a native of Vaud. In
+      passing the barrier, the packet fell into the hands of the officials. They
+      tore it open and examined it, happily unconscious that they were handling
+      the most explosive kind of gunpowder that they had ever meddled with. It
+      was not until the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[ii.60]</a></span>
+      chaplain claimed it in the name of ambassadorial privilege, that the
+      manuscript was allowed to go on its way to the press.<a
+      name="FNanchor_79_79" id="FNanchor_79_79"></a><a href="#Footnote_79_79"
+      class="fnanchor">[79]</a> Rousseau repeats a hundred times, not only in
+      the Confessions, but also in letters to his friends, how resolutely and
+      carefully he avoided any evasion of the laws of the country in which he
+      lived. The French government was anxious enough on all grounds to secure
+      for France the production of the books of which France was the great
+      consumer, but the severity of its censorship prevented this.<a
+      name="FNanchor_80_80" id="FNanchor_80_80"></a><a href="#Footnote_80_80"
+      class="fnanchor">[80]</a> The introduction of the books, when printed, was
+      tolerated or connived at, because the country would hardly have endured to
+      be deprived of the enjoyment of its own literature. By a greater
+      inconsistency the reprinting of a book which had once found admission into
+      the country, was also connived at. Thus M. de Malesherbes, out of
+      friendship for Rousseau, wished to have an edition of the New Helo&#239;sa
+      printed in France, and sold for the benefit of the author. That he should
+      have done so is a curious illustration of the low morality engendered by a
+      repressive system imperfectly carried out. For Rousseau had sold the book
+      to Rey. Rey had treated with a French bookseller in the usual way, that
+      is, had sent him half the edition printed, the bookseller paying either in
+      cash or other books for all the copies he received. Therefore to print an
+      independent edition in Paris was to <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_61"
+      id="Page_61">[ii.61]</a></span>injure, not Rey the foreigner, but the
+      French bookseller who stood practically in Rey's place. It was setting two
+      French booksellers to ruin one another. Rousseau emphatically declined to
+      receive any profit from such a transaction. But, said Malesherbes, you
+      sold to Rey a right which you had not got, the right of sole
+      proprietorship, excluding the competition of a pirated reprint. Then,
+      answered Rousseau, if the right which I sold happens to prove less than I
+      thought, it is clear that far from taking advantage of my mistake, I owe
+      to Rey compensation for any loss that he may suffer.<a
+      name="FNanchor_81_81" id="FNanchor_81_81"></a><a href="#Footnote_81_81"
+      class="fnanchor">[81]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The friendship of Malesherbes for the party of reason was shown on
+      numerous occasions. As director of the book trade he was really the censor
+      of the literature of the time.<a name="FNanchor_82_82" id="FNanchor_82_82"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_82_82" class="fnanchor">[82]</a> The story of his service
+      to <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[ii.62]</a></span>Diderot
+      is well known&#8212;how he warned Diderot that the police were about to
+      visit his house and overhaul his papers, and how when Diderot despaired of
+      being able to put them out of sight in his narrow quarters, Malesherbes
+      said, &quot;Then send them all to me,&quot; and took care of them until
+      the storm was overpast. The proofs of the New Helo&#239;sa came through
+      his hands, and now he made himself Rousseau's agent in the affairs
+      relative to the printing of Emilius. Rousseau entrusted the whole matter
+      to him and to Madame de Luxembourg, being confident that, in acting
+      through persons of such authority and position, he should be protected
+      against any unwitting illegality. Instead of being sent to Rey, the
+      manuscript was sold to a bookseller in Paris for six thousand francs.<a
+      name="FNanchor_83_83" id="FNanchor_83_83"></a><a href="#Footnote_83_83"
+      class="fnanchor">[83]</a> A long time elapsed before any proofs reached
+      the author, and he soon perceived that an edition was being printed in
+      France as well as in Holland. Still, as Malesherbes was in some sort the
+      director of the enterprise, the author felt no alarm. Duclos came to visit
+      him one day, and Rousseau read aloud to him the Savoyard Vicar's
+      Profession of Faith. &quot;What, citizen,&quot; he cried, &quot;and that
+      is part of a book that they are printing at Paris! Be kind enough not to
+      tell any one that you read this to me.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_84_84"
+      id="FNanchor_84_84"></a><a href="#Footnote_84_84" class="fnanchor">[84]</a>
+      Still Rousseau remained secure. Then the printing came to a standstill,
+      and he could not find out the reason, because Malesherbes was away, and
+      the printer did not take the trouble to answer his letters. &quot;My
+      natural tendency,&quot; he says, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_63"
+      id="Page_63">[ii.63]</a></span>and as the rest of his life only too
+      abundantly proved, &quot;is to be afraid of darkness; mystery always
+      disturbs me, it is utterly antipathetic to my character, which is open
+      even to the pitch of imprudence. The aspect of the most hideous monster
+      would alarm me little, I verily believe; but if I discern at night a
+      figure in a white sheet, I am sure to be terrified out of my life.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor_85_85" id="FNanchor_85_85"></a><a href="#Footnote_85_85"
+      class="fnanchor">[85]</a> So he at once fancied that by some means the
+      Jesuits had got possession of his book, and knowing him to be at death's
+      door, designed to keep the Emilius back until he was actually dead, when
+      they would publish a truncated version of it to suit their own purposes.<a
+      name="FNanchor_86_86" id="FNanchor_86_86"></a><a href="#Footnote_86_86"
+      class="fnanchor">[86]</a> He wrote letter upon letter to the printer, to
+      Malesherbes, to Madame de Luxembourg, and if answers did not come, or did
+      not come exactly when he expected them, he grew delirious with anxiety. If
+      he dropped his conviction that the Jesuits were plotting the ruin of his
+      book and the defilement of his reputation, he lost no time in fastening a
+      similar design upon the Jansenists, and when the Jansenists were
+      acquitted, then the turn of the philosophers came. We have constantly to
+      remember that all this time the unfortunate man was suffering incessant
+      pain, and passing his nights in sleeplessness and fever. He sometimes
+      threw off the black dreams of unfathomable suspicion, and dreamed in their
+      stead of some sunny spot in pleasant Touraine, where under a mild climate
+      and among a gentle people he should peacefully end his <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[ii.64]</a></span>days.<a
+      name="FNanchor_87_87" id="FNanchor_87_87"></a><a href="#Footnote_87_87"
+      class="fnanchor">[87]</a> At other times he was fond of supposing M. de
+      Luxembourg not a duke, nor a marshal of France, but a good country squire
+      living in some old mansion, and himself not an author, not a maker of
+      books, but with moderate intelligence and slight attainment, finding with
+      the squire and his dame the happiness of his life, and contributing to the
+      happiness of theirs.<a name="FNanchor_88_88" id="FNanchor_88_88"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_88_88" class="fnanchor">[88]</a> Alas, in spite of all his
+      precautions, he had unwittingly drifted into the stream of great affairs.
+      He and his book were sacrificed to the exigencies of faction; and a
+      persecution set in, which destroyed his last chance of a composed life, by
+      giving his reason, already disturbed, a final blow from which it never
+      recovered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Emilius appeared in the crisis of the movement against the Jesuits. That
+      formidable order had offended Madame de Pompadour by a refusal to
+      recognise her power and position,&#8212;a manly policy, as creditable to
+      their moral vigour as it was contrary to the maxims which had made them
+      powerful. They had also offended Choiseul by the part they had taken in
+      certain hostile intrigues at Versailles. The parliaments had always been
+      their enemies. This was due first to the jealousy with which corporations
+      of lawyers always regard corporations of ecclesiastics, and next to their
+      hatred of the bull Unigenitus, which had been not only an infraction of
+      French liberties, but the occasion of special humiliation to the
+      parliaments. Then the hostility of the parliaments to the Jesuits was
+      caused by the harshness with which the system of confessional <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[ii.65]</a></span>tickets
+      was at this time being carried out. Finally, the once powerful house of
+      Austria, the protector of all retrograde interests, was now weakened by
+      the Seven Years' War; and was unable to bring effective influence to bear
+      on Lewis XV. At last he gave his consent to the destruction of the order.
+      The commercial bankruptcy of one of their missions was the immediate
+      occasion of their fall, and nothing could save them. &quot;I only know one
+      man,&quot; said Grimm, &quot;in a position to have composed an apology for
+      the Jesuits in fine style, if it had been in his way to take the side of
+      that tribe, and this man is M. Rousseau.&quot; The parliaments went to
+      work with alacrity, but they were quite as hostile to the philosophers as
+      they were to the Jesuits, and hence their anxiety to show that they were
+      no allies of the one even when destroying the other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Contemporaries seldom criticise the shades and variations of innovating
+      speculation with any marked nicety. Anything with the stamp of rationality
+      on its phrases or arguments was roughly set down to the school of the
+      philosophers, and Rousseau was counted one of their number, like Voltaire
+      or Helv&#233;tius. The Emilius appeared in May 1762. On the 11th of June
+      the parliament of Paris ordered the book to be burnt by the public
+      executioner, and the writer to be arrested. For Rousseau always scorned
+      the devices of Voltaire and others; he courageously insisted on placing
+      his name on the title-page of all his works,<a name="FNanchor_89_89"
+      id="FNanchor_89_89"></a><a href="#Footnote_89_89" class="fnanchor">[89]</a>
+      and so there <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[ii.66]</a></span>was
+      none of the usual difficulty in identifying the author. The grounds of the
+      proceedings were alleged irreligious tendencies to be found in the book.<a
+      name="FNanchor_90_90" id="FNanchor_90_90"></a><a href="#Footnote_90_90"
+      class="fnanchor">[90]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The indecency of the requisition in which the advocate-general demanded
+      its proscription, was admitted even by people who were least likely to
+      defend Rousseau.<a name="FNanchor_91_91" id="FNanchor_91_91"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_91_91" class="fnanchor">[91]</a> The author was charged
+      with saying not only that man may be saved without believing in God, but
+      even that the Christian religion does not exist&#8212;paradox too flagrant
+      even for the writer of the Discourse on Inequality. No evidence was
+      produced either that the alleged assertions were in the book, or that the
+      name of the author was really the name on its title-page. Rousseau fared
+      no worse, but better, than his fellows, for there was hardly a single man
+      of letters of that time who escaped arbitrary imprisonment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The unfortunate author had news of the ferment which his work was creating
+      in Paris, and received notes of warning from every hand, but he could not
+      believe that the only man in France who believed in God was to be the
+      victim of the defenders of Christianity.<a name="FNanchor_92_92"
+      id="FNanchor_92_92"></a><a href="#Footnote_92_92" class="fnanchor">[92]</a>
+      On the 8th of June he spent a merry day with two friends, taking their
+      dinner in the fields. &quot;Ever since my youth I had a habit of reading
+      at <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[ii.67]</a></span>night
+      in my bed until my eyes grew heavy. Then I put out the candle, and tried
+      to fall asleep for a few minutes, but they seldom lasted long. My ordinary
+      reading at night was the Bible, and I have read it continuously through at
+      least five or six times in this way. That night, finding myself more
+      wakeful than usual, I prolonged my reading, and read through the whole of
+      the book which ends with the Levite of Ephraim, and which if I mistake not
+      is the book of Judges. The story affected me deeply, and I was busy over
+      it in a kind of dream, when all at once I was roused by lights and noises.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor_93_93" id="FNanchor_93_93"></a><a href="#Footnote_93_93"
+      class="fnanchor">[93]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was two o'clock in the morning. A messenger had come in hot haste to
+      carry him to Madame de Luxembourg. News had reached her of the proposed
+      decree of the parliament. She knew Rousseau well enough to be sure that if
+      he were seized and examined, her own share and that of Malesherbes in the
+      production of the condemned book would be made public, and their position
+      uncomfortably compromised. It was to their interest that he should avoid
+      arrest by flight, and they had no difficulty in persuading him to fall in
+      with their plans. After a tearful farewell with Theresa, who had hardly
+      been out of his sight for seventeen years, and many embraces from the
+      greater ladies of the castle, he was thrust into a chaise and despatched
+      on the first stage of eight melancholy years of wandering and despair, to
+      be driven from <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[ii.68]</a></span>place
+      to place, first by the fatuous tyranny of magistrates and religious
+      doctors, and then by the yet more cruel spectres of his own diseased
+      imagination, until at length his whole soul became the home of weariness
+      and torment.
+    </p>
+    <div class="footnotes">
+      <h3>
+        FOOTNOTES:
+      </h3>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_1"><span
+          class="label">[1]</span></a> <i>Conf.</i>, x. 62.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_2_2" id="Footnote_2_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_2"><span
+          class="label">[2]</span></a> <i>Conf.</i>, x.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_3_3" id="Footnote_3_3"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_3"><span
+          class="label">[3]</span></a> <i>Ib.</i> x. 70.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_4_4" id="Footnote_4_4"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_4"><span
+          class="label">[4]</span></a> Louis Fran&#231;ois de Bourbon, Prince de
+          Conti (1717-1776), was great-grandson of the brother of the Great Cond&#233;.
+          He performed creditable things in the war of the Austrian Succession
+          (in Piedmont 1744, in Belgium 1745); had a scheme of foreign policy as
+          director of the secret diplomacy of Lewis XV. (1745-1756), which was
+          to make Turkey, Poland, Sweden, Prussia, a barrier against Russia
+          primarily, and Austria secondarily; lastly went into moderate
+          opposition to the court, protesting against the destruction of the <i>parlements</i>
+          (1771), and afterwards opposing the reforms of Turgot (1776). Finally
+          he had the honour of refusing the sacraments of the church on his
+          deathbed. See Martin's <i>Hist. de France</i>, xv. and xvi.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_5_5" id="Footnote_5_5"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5_5"><span
+          class="label">[5]</span></a> <i>Conf.</i>, 97. <i>Corr.</i>, v. 215.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_6_6" id="Footnote_6_6"></a><a href="#FNanchor_6_6"><span
+          class="label">[6]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>, ii. 144. Oct. 7, 1760.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_7_7" id="Footnote_7_7"></a><a href="#FNanchor_7_7"><span
+          class="label">[7]</span></a> <i>Conf.</i>, x. 98.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_8_8" id="Footnote_8_8"></a><a href="#FNanchor_8_8"><span
+          class="label">[8]</span></a> The reader will distinguish this
+          correspondent of Rousseau's, <i>Comtesse</i> de Boufflers-Rouveret
+          (1727-18&#8212;), from the <i>Duchesse</i> de Boufflers, which was the
+          title of Rousseau's Mar&#233;chale de Luxembourg before her second
+          marriage. And also from the <i>Marquise</i> de Boufflers, said to be
+          the mistress of the old king Stanislaus at Lun&#233;ville, and the
+          mother of the Chevalier de Boufflers (who was the intimate of
+          Voltaire, sat in the States General, emigrated, did homage to
+          Napoleon, and finally died peaceably under Lewis XVIII.). See Jal's <i>Dict.
+          Critique</i>, 259-262. Sainte Beuve has an essay on our present
+          Comtesse de Boufflers (<i>Nouveaux Lundis</i>, iv. 163). She is the
+          Madame de Boufflers who was taken by Beauclerk to visit Johnson in his
+          Temple chambers, and was conducted to her coach by him in a remarkable
+          manner (Boswell's <i>Life</i>, ch. li. p. 467). Also much talked of in
+          H. Walpole's Letters. See D'Alembert to Frederick, April 15, 1768.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_9_9" id="Footnote_9_9"></a><a href="#FNanchor_9_9"><span
+          class="label">[9]</span></a> Streckeisen, ii. 32.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_10_10" id="Footnote_10_10"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_10_10"><span class="label">[10]</span></a> <i>Conf.</i>,
+          x. 71.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_11_11" id="Footnote_11_11"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_11_11"><span class="label">[11]</span></a> For
+          instance, <i>Corr.</i> ii. 85, 90, 92, etc. 1759.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_12_12" id="Footnote_12_12"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_12_12"><span class="label">[12]</span></a>
+          Streckeisen, ii. 28, etc.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_13_13" id="Footnote_13_13"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_13_13"><span class="label">[13]</span></a> <i>Ib.</i>,
+          29.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_14_14" id="Footnote_14_14"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_14_14"><span class="label">[14]</span></a> <i>Conf.</i>,
+          x. 99.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_15_15" id="Footnote_15_15"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_15_15"><span class="label">[15]</span></a> <i>Ib.</i>,
+          x. 57.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_16_16" id="Footnote_16_16"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_16_16"><span class="label">[16]</span></a> <i>Ib.</i>,
+          xi. 119.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_17_17" id="Footnote_17_17"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_17_17"><span class="label">[17]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>,
+          ii. 196. Feb. 16, 1761.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_18_18" id="Footnote_18_18"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_18_18"><span class="label">[18]</span></a> <i>Ib.</i>,
+          ii. 102, 176, etc.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_19_19" id="Footnote_19_19"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_19_19"><span class="label">[19]</span></a> <i>Conf.</i>,
+          x. 60.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_20_20" id="Footnote_20_20"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_20_20"><span class="label">[20]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>,
+          ii. 12.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_21_21" id="Footnote_21_21"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_21_21"><span class="label">[21]</span></a> As M. St.
+          Marc Girardin has put it: &quot;There are in all Rousseau's
+          discussions two things to be carefully distinguished from one another;
+          the maxims of the discourse, and the conclusions of the controversy.
+          The maxims are ordinarily paradoxical; the conclusions are full of
+          good sense.&quot; <i>Rev. des Deux Mondes</i>, Aug. 1852, p. 501.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_22_22" id="Footnote_22_22"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_22_22"><span class="label">[22]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>,
+          ii. 244-246. Oct. 24, 1761.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_23_23" id="Footnote_23_23"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_23_23"><span class="label">[23]</span></a> <i>Ib.</i>,
+          1766. <i>Oeuv.</i>, lxxv. 364.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_24_24" id="Footnote_24_24"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_24_24"><span class="label">[24]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>,
+          ii. 32. (1758.)
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_25_25" id="Footnote_25_25"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_25_25"><span class="label">[25]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>,
+          ii. 63. Jan. 15, 1779.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_26_26" id="Footnote_26_26"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_26_26"><span class="label">[26]</span></a> Bernardin
+          de St. Pierre, xii. 102.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_27_27" id="Footnote_27_27"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_27_27"><span class="label">[27]</span></a> 4th Letter,
+          p. 375.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_28_28" id="Footnote_28_28"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_28_28"><span class="label">[28]</span></a> <i>M&#233;m.</i>,
+          ii. 299.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_29_29" id="Footnote_29_29"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_29_29"><span class="label">[29]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>,
+          ii. 98. July 10, 1759.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_30_30" id="Footnote_30_30"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_30_30"><span class="label">[30]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>,
+          ii. 106. Nov. 10, 1759.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_31_31" id="Footnote_31_31"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_31_31"><span class="label">[31]</span></a> <i>Ib.</i>,
+          ii. 179. Jan. 18, 1761.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_32_32" id="Footnote_32_32"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_32_32"><span class="label">[32]</span></a> <i>Ib.</i>,
+          ii. 268. Dec. 12, 1761.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_33_33" id="Footnote_33_33"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_33_33"><span class="label">[33]</span></a> <i>Ib.</i>,
+          ii. 28. Dec. 23, 1761.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_34_34" id="Footnote_34_34"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_34_34"><span class="label">[34]</span></a> <i>Nouv. H&#233;l.</i>,
+          III. xxii. 147. In 1784 Hume's suppressed essays on &quot;Suicide and
+          the Immortality of the Soul&quot; were published in London:&#8212;&quot;With
+          Remarks, intended as an Antidote to the Poison contained in these
+          Performances, by the Editor; to which is added, Two Letters on
+          Suicide, from Rousseau's Eloisa.&quot; In the preface the reader is
+          told that these &quot;two very masterly letters have been much
+          celebrated.&quot; See Hume's <i>Essays</i>, by Green and Grose, i. 69,
+          70.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_35_35" id="Footnote_35_35"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_35_35"><span class="label">[35]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>,
+          iii. 235. Aug. 1, 1763.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_36_36" id="Footnote_36_36"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_36_36"><span class="label">[36]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>,
+          ii. 226. Sept. 29, 1761.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_37_37" id="Footnote_37_37"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_37_37"><span class="label">[37]</span></a> P. 294.
+          Jan. 11, 1762.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_38_38" id="Footnote_38_38"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_38_38"><span class="label">[38]</span></a> Madame
+          Latour (Nov. 7, 1730-Sept. 6, 1789) was the wife of a man in the
+          financial world, who used her ill and dissipated as much of her
+          fortune as he could, and from whom she separated in 1775. After that
+          she resumed her maiden name and was known as Madame de Franqueville.
+          Musset-Pathay, ii. 182, and Sainte Beuve, <i>Causeries</i>, ii. 63.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_39_39" id="Footnote_39_39"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_39_39"><span class="label">[39]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>,
+          ii. 214. <i>Conf.</i>, ix. 289.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_40_40" id="Footnote_40_40"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_40_40"><span class="label">[40]</span></a> English
+          translations of Rousseau's works appeared very speedily after the
+          originals. A second edition of the Helo&#239;sa was called for as
+          early as May 1761. See <i>Corr.</i> ii. 223. A German translation of
+          the Helo&#239;sa appeared at Leipzig in 1761, in six duodecimos.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_41_41" id="Footnote_41_41"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_41_41"><span class="label">[41]</span></a> For
+          instance, <i>Corr.</i>, ii. 168. Nov. 19, 1762.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_42_42" id="Footnote_42_42"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_42_42"><span class="label">[42]</span></a> Choderlos
+          de La Clos: 1741-1803.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_43_43" id="Footnote_43_43"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_43_43"><span class="label">[43]</span></a> Journal,
+          iv. 496. (Ed. Charpentier, 1857.)
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_44_44" id="Footnote_44_44"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_44_44"><span class="label">[44]</span></a> <i>Nouv. H&#233;l.</i>,
+          III. xiv. 48.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_45_45" id="Footnote_45_45"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_45_45"><span class="label">[45]</span></a> <i>E.g.</i>
+          Letters, 40-46.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_46_46" id="Footnote_46_46"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_46_46"><span class="label">[46]</span></a> Madame de
+          Sta&#235;l (1765-1817), in her <i>Lettres sur les &#233;crits et le
+          caract&#232;re de J.J. Rousseau</i>, written when she was twenty, and
+          her first work of any pretensions. <i>Oeuv.</i>, i. 41. Ed. 1820.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_47_47" id="Footnote_47_47"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_47_47"><span class="label">[47]</span></a> Nowhere
+          more pungently than in a little piece of some half-dozen pages,
+          headed, <i>Pr&#233;diction tir&#233;e d'un vieux Manuscrit</i>, the
+          form of which is borrowed from Grimm's squib in the dispute about
+          French music, <i>Le petit Proph&#232;te de Boehmischbroda</i>, though
+          it seems to me to be superior to Grimm in pointedness. Here are a few
+          verses from the supposed prophecy of the man who should come&#8212;and
+          of what he should do. &quot;Et la multitude courra sur ses pas et
+          plusieurs croiront en lui. Et il leur dira: Vous &#234;tes des sc&#233;l&#233;rats
+          et des fripons, vos femmes sont toutes des femmes perdues, et je viens
+          vivre parmi vous. Et il ajoutera tous les hommes sont vertueux dans le
+          pays o&#249; je suis n&#233;, et je n'habiterai jamais le pays o&#249;
+          je suis n&#233;.... Et il dira aussi qu'il est impossible d'avoir des
+          moeurs, et de lire des Romans, et il fera un Roman; et dans son Roman
+          le vice sera en action et la vertu en paroles, et ses personages
+          seront forcen&#233;s d'amour et de philosophie. Et dans son Roman on
+          apprendra l'art de suborner philosophiquement une jeune fille. Et
+          l'Ecoli&#232;re perdra toute honte et toute pudeur, et elle fera avec
+          son ma&#238;tre des sottises et des maximes.... Et le bel Ami &#233;tant
+          dans un Bateau seul avec sa Ma&#238;tresse voudra le jetter dans l'eau
+          et se pr&#233;cipiter avec elle. Et ils appelleront tout cela de la
+          Philosophie et de la Vertu,&quot; and so on, humorously enough in its
+          way.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_48_48" id="Footnote_48_48"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_48_48"><span class="label">[48]</span></a> See
+          passages in Goncourt's <i>La Femme au 18i&#232;me si&#232;cle</i>, p.
+          380.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_49_49" id="Footnote_49_49"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_49_49"><span class="label">[49]</span></a>
+          Musset-Pathay, II. 361. See Madame Roland's <i>M&#233;m.</i>, i. 207.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_50_50" id="Footnote_50_50"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_50_50"><span class="label">[50]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>,
+          March 3, and March 19, 1761. The criticisms of Xim&#233;n&#232;s, a
+          thoroughly mediocre person in all respects, were entirely literary,
+          and were directed against the too strained and highly coloured quality
+          of the phrases&#8212;&quot;baisers &#226;cres&quot;&#8212;among them.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_51_51" id="Footnote_51_51"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_51_51"><span class="label">[51]</span></a> <i>Nouv. H&#233;l.</i>,
+          V. v. 115.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_52_52" id="Footnote_52_52"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_52_52"><span class="label">[52]</span></a> VI. vii.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_53_53" id="Footnote_53_53"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_53_53"><span class="label">[53]</span></a> VI. vi.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_54_54" id="Footnote_54_54"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_54_54"><span class="label">[54]</span></a> Michelet's
+          <i>Louis XV. et Louis XVI.</i>, p. 58.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_55_55" id="Footnote_55_55"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_55_55"><span class="label">[55]</span></a> See
+          Hettner's <i>Literaturgeschichte</i>, II. 486.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_56_56" id="Footnote_56_56"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_56_56"><span class="label">[56]</span></a> IV. xi.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_57_57" id="Footnote_57_57"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_57_57"><span class="label">[57]</span></a> IV. xvii.
+          See vol. iii. 423.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_58_58" id="Footnote_58_58"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_58_58"><span class="label">[58]</span></a> In 1816.
+          Moore's <i>Life</i>, iii. 247; also 285. And the note to the stanzas
+          in the Third Canto,&#8212;a note curious for a slight admixture of
+          transcendentalism, so rare a thing with Byron, who, sentimental though
+          he was, usually rejoiced in a truly Voltairean common sense.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_59_59" id="Footnote_59_59"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_59_59"><span class="label">[59]</span></a> &quot;The
+          present fashion in France, of passing some time in the country, is
+          new; at this time of the year, and for many weeks past, Paris is,
+          comparatively speaking, empty. Everybody who has a country seat is at
+          it, and such as have none visit others who have. This remarkable
+          revolution in the French manners is certainly one of the best customs
+          they have taken from England; and its introduction was effected the
+          easier, being assisted by the magic of Rousseau's writings. Mankind
+          are much indebted to that splendid genius, who, when living, was
+          hunted from country to country, to seek an asylum, with as much venom
+          as if he had been a mad dog; thanks to the vile spirit of bigotry,
+          which has not received its death wound. Women of the first fashion in
+          France are now ashamed of not nursing their own children; and stays
+          are universally proscribed from the bodies of the poor infants, which
+          were for so many ages torture to them, as they are still in Spain. The
+          country residence may not have effects equally obvious; but they will
+          be no less sure in the end, and in all respects beneficial to every
+          class in the state.&quot; Arthur Young's <i>Travels</i>, i. 72.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_60_60" id="Footnote_60_60"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_60_60"><span class="label">[60]</span></a> <i>Causeries</i>,
+          xi. 195.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_61_61" id="Footnote_61_61"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_61_61"><span class="label">[61]</span></a> <i>Nouv. H&#233;l.</i>,
+          V. iii. &quot;You remember Rousseau's description of an English
+          morning: such are the mornings I spend with these good people.&quot;&#8212;Cowper
+          to Joseph Hill, Oct. 25, 1765. <i>Works</i>, iii. 269. In a letter to
+          William Unwin (Sept. 21, 1779), speaking of his being engaged in
+          mending windows, he says, &quot;Rousseau would have been charmed to
+          have seen me so occupied, and would have exclaimed with rapture that
+          he had found the Emilius who, he supposed, had subsisted only in his
+          own idea.&quot; For a description illustrative of the likeness between
+          Rousseau and Cowper in their feeling for nature, see letter to Newton
+          (Sept. 18, 1784, v. 78), and compare it with the description of Les
+          Charmettes, making proper allowance for the colour of prose.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_62_62" id="Footnote_62_62"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_62_62"><span class="label">[62]</span></a> IV. x. 260.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_63_63" id="Footnote_63_63"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_63_63"><span class="label">[63]</span></a> V. ii. 37.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_64_64" id="Footnote_64_64"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_64_64"><span class="label">[64]</span></a> V. ii.
+          47-52.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_65_65" id="Footnote_65_65"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_65_65"><span class="label">[65]</span></a> Rousseau
+          considered that the Fourth and Sixth parts of the New Helo&#239;sa
+          were masterpieces of diction. <i>Conf.</i> ix. 334.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_66_66" id="Footnote_66_66"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_66_66"><span class="label">[66]</span></a> VI. viii..
+          298. <i>Conf.</i>, xi. 106.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_67_67" id="Footnote_67_67"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_67_67"><span class="label">[67]</span></a> The La B&#233;doy&#232;re
+          case, which began in 1745. See Barbier, iv. 54, 59, etc.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_68_68" id="Footnote_68_68"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_68_68"><span class="label">[68]</span></a> III. xviii.
+          84.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_69_69" id="Footnote_69_69"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_69_69"><span class="label">[69]</span></a> III. xx.
+          116. In the letter to Christopher de Beaumont (p. 102), he fires a
+          double shot against the philosophers on the one hand, and the church
+          on the other; exalting continence and purity, of which the
+          philosophers in their reaction against asceticism thought lightly, and
+          exalting marriage over the celibate state, which the churchmen
+          associated with mysterious sanctity.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_70_70" id="Footnote_70_70"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_70_70"><span class="label">[70]</span></a> I. lxii.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_71_71" id="Footnote_71_71"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_71_71"><span class="label">[71]</span></a> V. ii.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_72_72" id="Footnote_72_72"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_72_72"><span class="label">[72]</span></a> V. vii.
+          141.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_73_73" id="Footnote_73_73"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_73_73"><span class="label">[73]</span></a> V. ii.
+          31-33.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_74_74" id="Footnote_74_74"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_74_74"><span class="label">[74]</span></a> For the
+          Robecq family, see Saint Simon, xviii. 58.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_75_75" id="Footnote_75_75"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_75_75"><span class="label">[75]</span></a> Morellet's
+          <i>M&#233;m.</i>, i. 89-93. Rousseau, <i>Conf.</i>, x. 85, etc. This
+          <i>Vision</i> is also in the style of Grimm's <i>P&#233;tit Proph&#232;te</i>,
+          like the piece referred to in a previous note, vol. ii. p. 31.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_76_76" id="Footnote_76_76"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_76_76"><span class="label">[76]</span></a> Madame de
+          Vandeul's <i>M&#233;m. sur Diderot</i>, p. 27. Rousseau, <i>Conf.</i>,
+          vii. 130.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_77_77" id="Footnote_77_77"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_77_77"><span class="label">[77]</span></a> <i>Nouv. H&#233;l.</i>,
+          V. xiii. 194. <i>Conf.</i>, x. 43.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_78_78" id="Footnote_78_78"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_78_78"><span class="label">[78]</span></a> The reader
+          will find a fuller mention of the French book trade in my <i>Diderot</i>,
+          ch. vi.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_79_79" id="Footnote_79_79"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_79_79"><span class="label">[79]</span></a> <i>Conf.</i>,
+          xi. 127.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_80_80" id="Footnote_80_80"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_80_80"><span class="label">[80]</span></a> See a
+          letter from Rousseau to Malesherbes, Nov. 5, 1760. <i>Corr.</i>, ii.
+          157.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_81_81" id="Footnote_81_81"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_81_81"><span class="label">[81]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>,
+          ii. 157.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_82_82" id="Footnote_82_82"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_82_82"><span class="label">[82]</span></a> C.G. de
+          Lamoignon de Malesherbes (p. 1721&#8212;guillotined, 1794), son of the
+          chancellor, and one of the best instructed and most enlightened men of
+          the century&#8212;a Turgot of the second rank&#8212;was Directeur de
+          la Librairie from 1750-1763. The process was this: a book was
+          submitted to him; he named a censor for it; on the censor's report the
+          director gave or refused permission to print, or required alterations.
+          Even after these formalities were complied with, the book was liable
+          to a decree of the royal council, a decree of the parliament, or else
+          a <i>lettre-de-cachet</i> might send the author to the Bastile. See
+          Barbier, vii. 126.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          After Lord Shelburne saw Malesherbes, he said, &quot;I have seen for
+          the first time in my life what I never thought could exist&#8212;a man
+          whose soul is absolutely free from hope or fear, and yet who is full
+          of life and ardour.&quot; Mdlle. Lespinasse's <i>Lettres</i>, 90.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_83_83" id="Footnote_83_83"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_83_83"><span class="label">[83]</span></a> See note,
+          p. 132.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_84_84" id="Footnote_84_84"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_84_84"><span class="label">[84]</span></a> <i>Conf.</i>,
+          xi. 134.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_85_85" id="Footnote_85_85"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_85_85"><span class="label">[85]</span></a> <i>Conf.</i>,
+          xi. 139.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_86_86" id="Footnote_86_86"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_86_86"><span class="label">[86]</span></a> <i>Ib.</i>,
+          xi. 139. <i>Corr.</i>, ii. 270, etc. Dec. 12, 1761, etc.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_87_87" id="Footnote_87_87"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_87_87"><span class="label">[87]</span></a> <i>Conf.</i>,
+          xi. 150.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_88_88" id="Footnote_88_88"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_88_88"><span class="label">[88]</span></a> Fourth
+          Letter to Malesherbes, p. 377.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_89_89" id="Footnote_89_89"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_89_89"><span class="label">[89]</span></a> With one
+          trifling exception, the Letter to Grimm on the Opera of Omphale
+          (1752): <i>&#201;crits sur la Musique</i>, p. 337.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_90_90" id="Footnote_90_90"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_90_90"><span class="label">[90]</span></a> See
+          Barbier's Journal, viii. 45 (Ed. Charpentier, 1857). A succinct
+          contemporary account of the general situation is to be found in
+          D'Alembert's little book, the <i>Destruction des J&#233;suites</i>.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_91_91" id="Footnote_91_91"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_91_91"><span class="label">[91]</span></a> Grimm, for
+          instance: <i>Corr. Lit.</i>, iii. 117.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_92_92" id="Footnote_92_92"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_92_92"><span class="label">[92]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>,
+          ii. 337. June 7, 1672. <i>Conf.</i>, xi. 152, 162.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_93_93" id="Footnote_93_93"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_93_93"><span class="label">[93]</span></a> <i>Conf.</i>,
+          xi. 162. The Levite's story is to be read in <i>Judges</i>, ch. xix.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+    </div>
+    <hr style="width: 65%;" />
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[ii.69]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      <a name="CHAPTER_IIb" id="CHAPTER_IIb"></a>CHAPTER II.
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      PERSECUTION.<a name="FNanchor_94_94" id="FNanchor_94_94"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_94_94" class="fnanchor">[94]</a>
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <span class="smcap">Those</span> to whom life consists in the immediate
+      consciousness of their own direct relations with the people and
+      circumstances that are in close contact with them, find it hard to follow
+      the moods of a man to whom such consciousness is the least part of
+      himself, and such relations the least real part of his life. Rousseau was
+      no sooner in the post-chaise which was bearing him away towards
+      Switzerland, than the troubles of the previous day at once dropped into a
+      pale and distant past, and he returned to a world where was neither
+      parliament, nor decree for burning books, nor any warrant for personal
+      arrest. He took up the thread where harassing circumstances had broken it,
+      and again fell musing over the tragic tale of the Levite of Ephraim. His
+      dream absorbed him so entirely as to take specific literary form, and
+      before the journey was at an end he had composed a long impassioned
+      version of the Bible story. Though it has Rousseau's usual fine
+      sonorousness in a high degree, no man now reads it; the author himself
+      always preserved a cer<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[ii.70]</a></span>tain
+      tenderness for it.<a name="FNanchor_95_95" id="FNanchor_95_95"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_95_95" class="fnanchor">[95]</a> The contrast between this
+      singular quietism and the angry stir that marked Voltaire's many flights
+      in post-chaises, points like all else to the profound difference between
+      the pair. Contrast with Voltaire's shrill cries under any personal
+      vexation, this calm utterance:&#8212;&quot;Though the consequences of this
+      affair have plunged me into a gulf of woes from which I shall never come
+      up again so long as I live, I bear these gentlemen no grudge. I am aware
+      that their object was not to do me any harm, but only to reach ends of
+      their own. I know that towards me they have neither liking nor hate. I was
+      found in their way, like a pebble that you thrust aside with the foot
+      without even looking at it. They ought not to say they have performed
+      their duty, but that they have done their business.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor_96_96" id="FNanchor_96_96"></a><a href="#Footnote_96_96"
+      class="fnanchor">[96]</a> A new note from a persecuted writer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rousseau, in spite of the belief which henceforth possessed him that he
+      was the victim of a dark unfathomable plot, and in spite of passing
+      outbreaks of gloomy rage, was incapable of steady glowing and active
+      resentments. The world was not real enough to him for this. A throng of
+      phantoms pressed noiselessly before his sight, and dulled all sense of
+      more actual impression. &quot;It is amazing,&quot; he wrote, &quot;with
+      what ease I forget past ill, however fresh it may be. In proportion as the
+      anticipation of it alarms and <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_71"
+      id="Page_71">[ii.71]</a></span>confuses me when I see it coming, so the
+      memory of it returns feebly to my mind and dies out the moment after it
+      has arrived. My cruel imagination, which torments itself incessantly in
+      anticipating woes that are still unborn, makes a diversion for my memory,
+      and hinders me from recalling those which have gone. I exhaust disaster
+      beforehand. The more I have suffered in foreseeing it, the more easily do
+      I forget it; while on the contrary, being incessantly busy with my past
+      happiness, I recall it and brood and ruminate over it, so as to enjoy it
+      over again whenever I wish.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_97_97"
+      id="FNanchor_97_97"></a><a href="#Footnote_97_97" class="fnanchor">[97]</a>
+      The same turn of humour saved him from vindictiveness. &quot;I concern
+      myself too little with the offence, to feel much concern about the
+      offender. I only think of the hurt that I have received from him, on
+      account of the hurt that he may still do me; and if I were sure he would
+      do me no more, what he had already done would be forgotten straightway.&quot;
+      Though he does not carry the analysis any further, we may easily perceive
+      that the same explanation covers what he called his natural ingratitude.
+      Kindness was not much more vividly understood by him than malice. It was
+      only one form of the troublesome interposition of an outer world in his
+      life; he was fain to hurry back from it to the real world of his dreams.
+      If any man called practical is tempted to despise this dreaming creature,
+      as he fares in his chaise from stage to stage, let him remember that one
+      making that journey through France less than thirty years later might
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[ii.72]</a></span>have
+      seen the castles of the great flaring in the destruction of a most
+      righteous vengeance, the great themselves fleeing ignobly from the land to
+      which their selfishness, and heedlessness, and hatred of improvement, and
+      inhuman pride had been a curse, while the legion of toilers with eyes
+      blinded by the oppression of ages were groping with passionate uncertain
+      hand for that divine something which they thought of as justice and right.
+      And this was what Rousseau both partially foresaw and helped to prepare,<a
+      name="FNanchor_98_98" id="FNanchor_98_98"></a><a href="#Footnote_98_98"
+      class="fnanchor">[98]</a> while the common politicians, like Choiseul or
+      D'Aiguillon, played their poor game&#8212;the elemental forces rising
+      unseen into tempest around them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He reached the territory of the canton of Berne, and alighted at the house
+      of an old friend at Yverdun,<a name="FNanchor_99_99" id="FNanchor_99_99"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_99_99" class="fnanchor">[99]</a> where native air, the
+      beauty of the spot, and the charms of the season, immediately repaired all
+      weariness and fatigue.<a name="FNanchor_100_100" id="FNanchor_100_100"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_100_100" class="fnanchor">[100]</a> Friends at Geneva
+      wrote letters of sincere feeling, joyful that he had not followed the
+      precedent of Socrates too closely by remaining in the power of a
+      government eager to destroy him.<a name="FNanchor_101_101"
+      id="FNanchor_101_101"></a><a href="#Footnote_101_101" class="fnanchor">[101]</a>
+      A post or two later brought worse news. The Council at Geneva ordered not
+      only Emilius, but the Social Contract also, to be publicly burnt, and
+      issued a warrant of arrest against their author, if he should set foot in
+      the territory of the republic (June <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_73"
+      id="Page_73">[ii.73]</a></span>19).<a name="FNanchor_102_102"
+      id="FNanchor_102_102"></a><a href="#Footnote_102_102" class="fnanchor">[102]</a>
+      Rousseau could hardly believe it possible that the free Government which
+      he had held up to the reverence of Europe, could have condemned him
+      unheard, but he took occasion in a highly characteristic manner to chide
+      severely a friend at Geneva who had publicly taken his part.<a
+      name="FNanchor_103_103" id="FNanchor_103_103"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_103_103" class="fnanchor">[103]</a> Within a fortnight
+      this blow was followed by another. His two books were reported to the
+      senate of Berne, and Rousseau was informed by one of the authorities that
+      a notification was on its way admonishing him to quit the canton within
+      the space of fifteen days.<a name="FNanchor_104_104" id="FNanchor_104_104"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_104_104" class="fnanchor">[104]</a> This stroke he avoided
+      by flight to Motiers, a village in the principality of Neuch&#226;tel
+      (July 10), then part of the dominions of the King of Prussia.<a
+      name="FNanchor_105_105" id="FNanchor_105_105"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_105_105" class="fnanchor">[105]</a> Rousseau had some
+      antipathy <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[ii.74]</a></span>to
+      Frederick, both because he had beaten the French, whom Rousseau loved, and
+      because his maxims and his conduct alike seemed to trample under foot
+      respect for the natural law and not a few human duties. He had composed a
+      verse to the effect that Frederick thought like a philosopher and acted
+      like a king, philosopher and king notoriously being words of equally evil
+      sense in his dialect. There was also a passage in Emilius about Adrastus,
+      King of the Daunians, which was commonly understood to mean Frederick,
+      King of the Prussians. Still Rousseau was acute enough to know that mean
+      passions usually only rule the weak, and have little hold over the strong.
+      He boldly wrote both to the king and to Lord Marischal, the governor of
+      the principality, informing them that he was there, and asking permission
+      to remain in the only asylum left for him upon the earth.<a
+      name="FNanchor_106_106" id="FNanchor_106_106"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_106_106" class="fnanchor">[106]</a> He compared himself
+      loftily to Coriolanus among the Volscians, and wrote to the king in a vein
+      that must have amused the strong man. &quot;I have said much ill of you,
+      perhaps I shall still say more; yet, driven from France, from Geneva, from
+      the canton of Berne, I am come to seek shelter in your states. Perhaps I
+      was wrong in not beginning there; this is eulogy of which you are worthy.
+      Sire, I have deserved no grace from you, and I seek none, but I thought it
+      my duty to inform your majesty that I am in your power, and that I am so
+      of set design. Your majesty will dispose of me as shall <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[ii.75]</a></span>seem good
+      to you.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_107_107" id="FNanchor_107_107"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_107_107" class="fnanchor">[107]</a> Frederick, though no
+      admirer of Rousseau or his writings,<a name="FNanchor_108_108"
+      id="FNanchor_108_108"></a><a href="#Footnote_108_108" class="fnanchor">[108]</a>
+      readily granted the required permission. He also, says Lord Marischal,
+      &quot;gave me orders to furnish him his small necessaries if he would
+      accept them; and though that king's philosophy be very different from that
+      of Jean Jacques, yet he does not think that a man of an irreproachable
+      life is to be persecuted because his sentiments are singular. He designs
+      to build him a hermitage with a little garden, which I find he will not
+      accept, nor perhaps the rest, which I have not yet offered him.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor_109_109" id="FNanchor_109_109"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_109_109" class="fnanchor">[109]</a> When the offer of the
+      flour, wine, and firewood was at length made in as delicate terms as
+      possible, Rousseau declined the gift on grounds which may raise a smile,
+      but which are not without a rather touching simplicity.<a
+      name="FNanchor_110_110" id="FNanchor_110_110"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_110_110" class="fnanchor">[110]</a> &quot;I have enough to
+      live on for two or three years,&quot; he said, &quot;but if I were dying
+      of hunger, I would rather in the present condition of your good prince,
+      and not being of any service to him, go and eat grass and grub up roots,
+      than accept a morsel of bread from him.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_111_111"
+      id="FNanchor_111_111"></a><a href="#Footnote_111_111" class="fnanchor">[111]</a>
+      Hume might well call this a phenomenon in the world of letters, and one
+      very honourable for the person concerned.<a name="FNanchor_112_112"
+      id="FNanchor_112_112"></a><a href="#Footnote_112_112" class="fnanchor">[112]</a>
+      And we recognise its dignity the more when we contrast <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[ii.76]</a></span>it with
+      the baseness of Voltaire, who drew his pension from the King of Prussia
+      while Frederick was in his most urgent straits, and while the poet was
+      sportively exulting to all his correspondents in the malicious expectation
+      that he would one day have to allow the King of Prussia himself a pension.<a
+      name="FNanchor_113_113" id="FNanchor_113_113"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_113_113" class="fnanchor">[113]</a> And Rousseau was a
+      poor man, living among the poor and in their style. His annual outlay at
+      this time was covered by the modest sum of sixty louis.<a
+      name="FNanchor_114_114" id="FNanchor_114_114"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_114_114" class="fnanchor">[114]</a> What stamps his
+      refusal of Frederick's gifts as true dignity, is the fact that he not only
+      did not refuse money for any work done, but expected and asked for it.
+      Malesherbes at this very time begged him to collect plants for him.
+      Joyfully, replied Rousseau, &quot;but as I cannot subsist without the aid
+      of my own labour, I never meant, in spite of the pleasure that it might
+      otherwise have been to me, to offer you the use of my time for nothing.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor_115_115" id="FNanchor_115_115"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_115_115" class="fnanchor">[115]</a> In the same year, we
+      may add, when the tremendous struggle of the Seven Years' War was closing,
+      the philosopher wrote a second terse epistle to the king, and with this
+      their direct communication came to an end. &quot;Sire, you are my
+      protector and my benefactor; I would fain repay you if I can. You wish to
+      give me bread; is there none of your own subjects in want of it? Take that
+      sword away from my sight, it dazzles and pains me. It has done its work
+      only too well; the sceptre is abandoned. Great is the career for kings of
+      your <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[ii.77]</a></span>stuff,
+      and you are still far from the term; time presses, you have not a moment
+      to lose. Fathom well your heart, O Frederick! Can you dare to die without
+      having been the greatest of men? Would that I could see Frederick, the
+      just and the redoubtable, covering his states with multitudes of men to
+      whom he should be a father; then will J.J. Rousseau, the foe of kings,
+      hasten to die at the foot of his throne.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_116_116"
+      id="FNanchor_116_116"></a><a href="#Footnote_116_116" class="fnanchor">[116]</a>
+      Frederick, strong as his interest was in all curious persons who could
+      amuse him, was too busy to answer this, and Rousseau was not yet
+      recognised as Voltaire's rival in power and popularity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Motiers is one of the half-dozen decent villages standing in the flat
+      bottom of the Val de Travers, a widish valley that lies between the gorges
+      of the Jura and the Lake of Neuch&#226;tel, and is famous in our day for
+      its production of absinthe and of asphalt. The flat of the valley, with
+      the Reuss making a bald and colourless way through the midst of it, is
+      nearly treeless, and it is too uniform to be very pleasing. In winter the
+      climate is most rigorous, for the level is high, and the surrounding hills
+      admit the sun's rays late and cut them off early. Rousseau's description,
+      accurate and recognisable as it is,<a name="FNanchor_117_117"
+      id="FNanchor_117_117"></a><a href="#Footnote_117_117" class="fnanchor">[117]</a>
+      strikes an impartial tourist as too favourable. But when a piece of
+      scenery is a home to a man, he has an eye for a thousand outlines, changes
+      of light, soft variations of colour; <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[ii.78]</a></span>the landscape lives for him
+      with an unspoken suggestion and intimate association, to all of which the
+      swift passing stranger is very cold.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His cottage, which is still shown, was in the midst of the other houses,
+      and his walks, which were at least as important to him as the home in
+      which he dwelt, lay mostly among woody heights with streaming cascades.
+      The country abounded in natural curiosities of a humble sort, and here
+      that interest in plants which had always been strong in him, began to grow
+      into a passion. Rousseau had so curious a feeling about them, that when in
+      his botanical expeditions he came across a single flower of its kind, he
+      could never bring himself to pluck it. His sight, though not good for
+      distant objects, was of the very finest for things held close; his sense
+      of smell was so acute and subtle that, according to a good witness, he
+      might have classified plants by odours, if language furnished as many
+      names as nature supplies varieties of fragrance.<a name="FNanchor_118_118"
+      id="FNanchor_118_118"></a><a href="#Footnote_118_118" class="fnanchor">[118]</a>
+      He insisted in all botanising and other walking excursions on going
+      bareheaded, even in the heat of the dog-days; he declared that the action
+      of the sun did him good. When the days began to turn, the summer was
+      straightway at an end for him: &quot;My imagination,&quot; he said, in a
+      phrase which went further through his life than he supposed, &quot;at once
+      brings winter.&quot; He hated rain as much as he loved sun, so he must
+      once have lost all the mystic fascination of the green Savoy lakes
+      gleaming luminous through pale <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_79"
+      id="Page_79">[ii.79]</a></span>showers, and now again must have lost the
+      sombre majesty of the pines of his valley dripping in torn edges of cloud,
+      and all those other sights in landscape that touch subtler parts of us
+      than comforted sense.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One of his favourite journeys was to Colombier, the summer retreat of Lord
+      Marischal. For him he rapidly conceived the same warm friendship which he
+      felt for the Duke of Luxembourg, whom he had just left. And the sagacious,
+      moderate, silent Scot had as warm a liking for the strange refugee who had
+      come to him for shelter, or shall we call it a kind of shaggy compassion,
+      as of a faithful inarticulate creature. His letters, which are numerous
+      enough, abound in expressions of hearty good-will. These, if we reflect on
+      the genuine worth, veracity, penetration, and experience of the old man
+      who wrote them, may fairly be counted the best testimony that remains to
+      the existence of something sterling at the bottom of Rousseau's character.<a
+      name="FNanchor_119_119" id="FNanchor_119_119"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_119_119" class="fnanchor">[119]</a> It is here no
+      insincere fine lady of the French court, but a homely and weather-beaten
+      Scotchman, who speaks so often of his refugee's rectitude of heart and
+      true sensibility.<a name="FNanchor_120_120" id="FNanchor_120_120"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_120_120" class="fnanchor">[120]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[ii.80]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He insisted on being allowed to settle a small sum on Theresa, who had
+      joined Rousseau at Motiers, and in other ways he showed a true solicitude
+      and considerateness both for her and for him.<a name="FNanchor_121_121"
+      id="FNanchor_121_121"></a><a href="#Footnote_121_121" class="fnanchor">[121]</a>
+      It was his constant dream, that on his return to Scotland, Jean Jacques
+      should accompany him, and that with David Hume, they would make a trio of
+      philosophic hermits; that this was no mere cheery pleasantry is shown by
+      the pains he took in settling the route for the journey.<a
+      name="FNanchor_122_122" id="FNanchor_122_122"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_122_122" class="fnanchor">[122]</a> The plan only fell
+      through in consequence of Frederick's cordial urgency that his friend
+      should end his days with him; he returned to Prussia and lived at Sans
+      Souci until the close, always retaining something of his good-will for
+      &quot;his excellent savage,&quot; as he called the author of the
+      Discourses. They had some common antipathies, including the fundamental
+      one of dislike to society, and especially to the society of the people of
+      Neuch&#226;tel, the Gascons of Switzerland. &quot;Rousseau is gay in
+      company,&quot; Lord Marischal wrote to Hume, &quot;polite, and what the
+      French call <i>aimable</i>, and gains <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[ii.81]</a></span>ground daily in the opinion
+      of even the clergy here. His enemies elsewhere continue to persecute him,
+      and he is pestered with anonymous letters.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_123_123"
+      id="FNanchor_123_123"></a><a href="#Footnote_123_123" class="fnanchor">[123]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Some of these were of a humour that disclosed the master hand. Voltaire
+      had been universally suspected of stirring up the feeling of Geneva
+      against its too famous citizen,<a name="FNanchor_124_124"
+      id="FNanchor_124_124"></a><a href="#Footnote_124_124" class="fnanchor">[124]</a>
+      though for a man of less energy the affair of the Calas, which he was now
+      in the thick of, might have sufficed. Voltaire's letters at this time show
+      how hard he found it in the case of Rousseau to exercise his usual pity
+      for the unfortunate. He could not forget that the man who was now tasting
+      persecution had barked at philosophers and stage-plays; that he was a
+      false brother, who had fatuously insulted the only men who could take his
+      part; that he was a Judas who had betrayed the sacred cause.<a
+      name="FNanchor_125_125" id="FNanchor_125_125"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_125_125" class="fnanchor">[125]</a> On the whole, however,
+      we ought probably to accept his word, though not very categorically given,<a
+      name="FNanchor_126_126" id="FNanchor_126_126"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_126_126" class="fnanchor">[126]</a> that he had nothing to
+      do with the action taken against Rousseau. That action is quite adequately
+      explained, first by the influence of the resident of France at Geneva,
+      which we know to have been exerted against the two fatal books,<a
+      name="FNanchor_127_127" id="FNanchor_127_127"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_127_127" class="fnanchor">[127]</a> and second by the
+      anxiety of the oligarchic party to keep out of their town a man whose
+      democratic tendencies they now knew so well and so justly <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[ii.82]</a></span>dreaded.<a
+      name="FNanchor_128_128" id="FNanchor_128_128"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_128_128" class="fnanchor">[128]</a> Moultou, a Genevese
+      minister, in the full tide of devotion and enthusiasm for the author of
+      Emilius, met Voltaire at the house of a lady in Geneva. All will turn out
+      well, cried the patriarch; &quot;the syndics will say M. Rousseau, you
+      have done ill to write what you have written; promise for the future to
+      respect the religion of your country. Jean Jacques will promise, and
+      perhaps he will say that the printer took the liberty of adding a sheet or
+      two to his book.&quot; &quot;Never,&quot; cried the ardent Moultou; &quot;Jean
+      Jacques never puts his name to works to disown them after.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor_129_129" id="FNanchor_129_129"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_129_129" class="fnanchor">[129]</a> Voltaire disowned his
+      own books with intrepid and sustained mendacity, yet he bore no grudge to
+      Moultou for his vehemence. He sent for him shortly afterwards, professed
+      an extreme desire to be reconciled with Rousseau, and would talk of
+      nothing else. &quot;I swear to you,&quot; wrote Moultou, &quot;that I
+      could not understand him the least in the world; he is a marvellous actor;
+      I could have sworn that he loved you.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_130_130"
+      id="FNanchor_130_130"></a><a href="#Footnote_130_130" class="fnanchor">[130]</a>
+      And there really was no acting in it. The serious Genevese did not see
+      that he was dealing with &quot;one all fire and fickleness, a child.&quot;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rousseau soon found out that he had excited not only the band of professed
+      unbelievers, but also the tormenting wasps of orthodoxy. The doctors of
+      the Sorbonne, not to be outdone in fervour for truth by the lawyers of the
+      parliament, had condemned Emilius as a matter of course. In the same
+      spirit of generous <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[ii.83]</a></span>emulation,
+      Christopher de Beaumont, &quot;by the divine compassion archbishop of
+      Paris, Duke of Saint Cloud, peer of France, commander of the order of the
+      Holy Ghost,&quot; had issued (Aug. 20, 1762) one of those hateful
+      documents in which bishops, Catholic and Protestant, have been wont for
+      the last century and a half to hide with swollen bombastic phrase their
+      dead and decomposing ideas. The windy folly of these poor pieces is
+      usually in proportion to the hierarchic rank of those who promulgate them,
+      and an archbishop owes it to himself to blaspheme against reason and
+      freedom in superlatives of malignant unction. Rousseau's reply (Nov. 18,
+      1762) is a masterpiece of dignity and uprightness. Turning to it from the
+      mandate which was its provocative, we seem to grasp the hand of a man,
+      after being chased by a nightmare of masked figures. Rousseau never showed
+      the substantial quality of his character more surely and unmistakably than
+      in controversy. He had such gravity, such austere self-command, such
+      closeness of grip. Most of us feel pleasure in reading the matchless
+      banter with which Voltaire assailed his theological enemies. Reading
+      Rousseau's letter to De Beaumont we realise the comparative lowness of the
+      pleasure which Voltaire had given us. We understand how it was that
+      Rousseau made fanatics, while Voltaire only made sceptics. At the very
+      first words, the mitre, the crosier, the ring, fall into the dust; the
+      Archbishop of Paris, the Duke of Saint Cloud, the peer of France, the
+      commander of the Holy Ghost, is restored from<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[ii.84]</a></span> the disguises of his
+      enchantment, and becomes a human being. We hear the voice of a man hailing
+      a man. Voltaire often sank to the level of ecclesiastics. Rousseau raised
+      the archbishop to his own level, and with magnanimous courtesy addressed
+      him as an equal. &quot;Why, my lord, have I anything to say to you? What
+      common tongue can we use? How are we to understand one another? And what
+      is there between me and you?&quot; And he persevered in this distant lofty
+      vein, hardly permitting himself a single moment of acerbity. We feel the
+      ever-inspiring breath of seriousness and sincerity. This was because, as
+      we repeat so often, Rousseau's ideas, all engendered of dreams as they
+      were, yet lived in him and were truly rooted in his character. He did not
+      merely say, as any of us can say so fluently, that he craved reality in
+      human relations, that distinctions of rank and post count for nothing,
+      that our lives are in our own hands and ought not to be blown hither and
+      thither by outside opinion and words heedlessly scattered; that our faith,
+      whatever it may be, is the most sacred of our possessions, organic,
+      indissoluble, self-sufficing; that our passage across the world, if very
+      short, is yet too serious to be wasted in frivolous disrespect for
+      ourselves, and angry disrespect for others. All this was actually his
+      mind. And hence the little difficulty he had in keeping his retort to the
+      archbishop, as to his other antagonists, on a worthy level.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Only once or twice does his sense of the reckless injustice with which he
+      had been condemned, and of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_85"
+      id="Page_85">[ii.85]</a></span> the persecution which was inflicted on him
+      by one government after another, stir in him a blaze of high remonstrance.
+      &quot;You accuse me of temerity,&quot; he cried; &quot;how have I earned
+      such a name, when I only propounded difficulties, and even that with so
+      much reserve; when I only advanced reasons, and even that with so much
+      respect; when I attacked no one, nor even named one? And you, my lord, how
+      do you dare to reproach with temerity a man of whom you speak with such
+      scanty justice and so little decency, with so small respect and so much
+      levity? You call me impious, and of what impiety can you accuse me&#8212;me
+      who never spoke of the Supreme Being except to pay him the honour and
+      glory that are his due, nor of man except to persuade all men to love one
+      another? The impious are those who unworthily profane the cause of God by
+      making it serve the passions of men. The impious are those who, daring to
+      pass for the interpreters of divinity, and judges between it and man,
+      exact for themselves the honours that are due to it only. The impious are
+      those who arrogate to themselves the right of exercising the power of God
+      upon earth, and insist on opening and shutting the gates of heaven at
+      their own good will and pleasure. The impious are those who have libels
+      read in the church. At this horrible idea my blood is enkindled, and tears
+      of indignation fall from my eyes. Priests of the God of peace, you shall
+      render an account one day, be very sure, of the use to which you have
+      dared to put his house.... My lord, you<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[ii.86]</a></span> have publicly insulted me:
+      you are now convicted of heaping calumny upon me. If you were a private
+      person like myself, so that I could cite you before an equitable tribunal,
+      and we could both appear before it, I with my book, and you with your
+      mandate, assuredly you would be declared guilty; you would be condemned to
+      make reparation as public as the wrong was public. But you belong to a
+      rank that relieves you from the necessity of being just, and I am nothing.
+      Yet you who profess the gospel, you, a prelate appointed to teach others
+      their duty, you know what your own duty is in such a case. Mine I have
+      done: I have nothing more to say to you, and I hold my peace.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor_131_131" id="FNanchor_131_131"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_131_131" class="fnanchor">[131]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The letter was as good in dialectic as it was in moral tone. For this is a
+      little curious, that Rousseau, so diffuse in expounding his opinions, and
+      so unscientific in his method of coming to them, should have been one of
+      the keenest and most trenchant of the controversialists of a very
+      controversial time. Some of his strokes in defence of his first famous
+      assault on civilisation are as hard, as direct, and as effective as any in
+      the records of polemical literature. We will give one specimen from the
+      letter to the Archbishop of Paris; it has the recommendation of touching
+      an argument that is not yet quite universally recognised for slain. The
+      Savoyard Vicar had dwelt on the difficulty of accepting revelation as the
+      voice of God, on account of the long distance of time between us, <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[ii.87]</a></span>and the
+      questionableness of the supporting testimony. To which the archbishop
+      thus:&#8212;&quot;But is there not then an infinity of facts, even earlier
+      than those of the Christian revelation, which it would be absurd to doubt?
+      By what way other than that of human testimony has our author himself
+      known the Sparta, the Athens, the Rome, whose laws, manners, and heroes he
+      extols with such assurance? How many generations of men between him and
+      the historians who have preserved the memory of these events?&quot; First,
+      says Rousseau in answer, &quot;it is in the order of things that human
+      circumstances should be attested by human evidence, and they can be
+      attested in no other way. I can only know that Rome and Sparta existed,
+      because contemporaries assure me that they existed. In such a case this
+      intermediate communication is indispensable. But why is it necessary
+      between God and me? Is it simple or natural that God should have gone in
+      search of Moses to speak to Jean Jacques Rousseau? Second, nobody is
+      obliged to believe that Sparta once existed, and nobody will be devoured
+      by eternal flames for doubting it. Every fact of which we are not
+      witnesses is only established by moral proofs, and moral proofs have
+      various degrees of strength. Will the divine justice hurl me into hell for
+      missing the exact point at which a proof becomes irresistible? If there is
+      in the world an attested story, it is that of vampires; nothing is wanting
+      for judicial proof,&#8212;reports and certificates from notables,
+      surgeons, clergy, magistrates. But<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_88"
+      id="Page_88">[ii.88]</a></span> who believes in vampires, and shall we all
+      be damned for not believing? Third, <i>my constant experience and that of
+      all men is stronger in reference to prodigies than the testimony of some
+      men</i>.&quot;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He then strikes home with a parable. The Abb&#233; P&#226;ris had died in
+      the odour of Jansenist sanctity (1727), and extraordinary doings went on
+      at his tomb; the lame walked, men and women sick of the palsy were made
+      whole, and so forth. Suppose, says Rousseau, that an inhabitant of the Rue
+      St. Jacques speaks thus to the Archbishop of Paris, &quot;My lord, I know
+      that you neither believe in the beatitude of St. Jean de P&#226;ris, nor
+      in the miracles which God has been pleased publicly to work upon his tomb
+      in the sight of the most enlightened and most populous city in the world;
+      but I feel bound to testify to you that I have just seen the saint in
+      person raised from the dead in the spot where his bones were laid.&quot;
+      The man of the Rue St. Jacques gives all the detail of such a circumstance
+      that could strike a beholder. &quot;I am persuaded that on hearing such
+      strange news, you will begin by interrogating him who testifies to its
+      truth, as to his position, his feelings, his confessor, and other such
+      points; and when from his air, as from his speech, you have perceived that
+      he is a poor workman, and when having no confessional ticket to show you,
+      he has confirmed your notion that he is a Jansenist, Ah, ah, you will say
+      to him, you are a convulsionary, and have seen Saint P&#226;ris
+      resuscitated. There is nothing wonderful in that; you have seen so many
+      other<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[ii.89]</a></span>
+      wonders!&quot; The man would insist that the miracle had been seen equally
+      by a number of other people, who though Jansenists, it is true, were
+      persons of sound sense, good character, and excellent reputation. Some
+      would send the man to Bedlam, &quot;but you after a grave reprimand, will
+      be content with saying: I know that two or three witnesses, good people
+      and of sound sense, may attest the life or the death of a man, but I do
+      not know how many more are needed to establish the resurrection of a
+      Jansenist. Until I find that out, go, my son, and try to strengthen your
+      brain: I give you a dispensation from fasting, and here is something for
+      you to make your broth with. That is what you would say, and what any
+      other sensible man would say in your place. Whence I conclude that even
+      according to you and to every other sensible man, the moral proofs which
+      are sufficient to establish facts that are in the order of moral
+      possibilities, are not sufficient to establish facts of another order and
+      purely supernatural.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_132_132" id="FNanchor_132_132"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_132_132" class="fnanchor">[132]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Perhaps, however, the formal denunciation by the Archbishop of Paris was
+      less vexatious than the swarming of the angrier hive of ministers at his
+      gates. &quot;If I had declared for atheism,&quot; he says bitterly, &quot;they
+      would at first have shrieked, but they would soon have left me in peace
+      like the rest. The people of the Lord would not have kept watch over me;
+      everybody would not have thought he was doing me a high favour in not
+      treating me as a person cut off <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_90"
+      id="Page_90">[ii.90]</a></span>from communion, and I should have been
+      quits with all the world. The holy women in Israel would not have written
+      me anonymous letters, and their charity would not have breathed devout
+      insults. They would not have taken the trouble to assure me in all
+      humility of heart that I was a castaway, an execrable monster, and that
+      the world would have been well off if some good soul had been at the pains
+      to strangle me in my cradle. Worthy people on their side would not torment
+      themselves and torment me to bring me back to the way of salvation; they
+      would not charge at me from right and left, nor stifle me under the weight
+      of their sermons, nor force me to bless their zeal while I cursed their
+      importunity, nor to feel with gratitude that they are obeying a call to
+      lay me in my very grave with weariness.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_133_133"
+      id="FNanchor_133_133"></a><a href="#Footnote_133_133" class="fnanchor">[133]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had done his best to conciliate the good opinion of his vigilant
+      neighbours. Their character for contentious orthodoxy was well known. It
+      was at Neuch&#226;tel that the controversy as to the eternal punishment of
+      the wicked raged with a fury that ended in a civil outbreak. The peace of
+      the town was violently disturbed, ministers were suspended, magistrates
+      were interdicted, life was lost, until at last Frederick promulgated his
+      famous bull:&#8212;&quot;Let the parsons who make for themselves a cruel
+      and barbarous God, be eternally damned as they desire and deserve; and let
+      those parsons who conceive God gentle and merciful, enjoy the plenitude of
+      his <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[ii.91]</a></span>mercy.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor_134_134" id="FNanchor_134_134"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_134_134" class="fnanchor">[134]</a> When Rousseau came
+      within the territory, preparations were made to imitate the action of
+      Paris, Geneva, and Berne. It was only the king's express permission that
+      saved him from a fourth proscription. The minister at Motiers was of the
+      less inhuman stamp, and Rousseau, feeling that he could not, without
+      failing in his engagements and his duty as a citizen, neglect the public
+      profession of the faith to which he had been restored eight years before,
+      attended the religious services with regularity. He even wrote to the
+      pastor a letter in vindication of his book, and protesting the sincerity
+      of his union with the reformed congregation.<a name="FNanchor_135_135"
+      id="FNanchor_135_135"></a><a href="#Footnote_135_135" class="fnanchor">[135]</a>
+      The result of this was that the pastor came to tell him how great an
+      honour he held it to count such a member in his flock, and how willing he
+      was to admit him without further examination to partake of the communion.<a
+      name="FNanchor_136_136" id="FNanchor_136_136"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_136_136" class="fnanchor">[136]</a> Rousseau went to the
+      ceremony with eyes full of tears and a heart swelling with emotion. We may
+      respect his mood as little or as much as we please, but it was certainly
+      more edifying than the sight of Voltaire going through the same rite,
+      merely to harass a priest and fill a bishop with fury.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In all other respects he lived a harmless life during the three years of
+      his sojourn in the Val de Travers. As he could never endure what he calls
+      the inactive chattering of the parlour&#8212;people sitting <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[ii.92]</a></span>in front
+      of one another with folded hands and nothing in motion except the tongue&#8212;he
+      learnt the art of making laces; he used to carry his pillow about with
+      him, or sat at his own door working like the women of the village, and
+      chatting with the passers-by. He made presents of his work to young women
+      about to marry, always on the condition that they should suckle their
+      children when they came to have them. If a little whimsical, it was a
+      harmless and respectable pastime. It is pleasanter to think of a
+      philosopher finding diversion in weaving laces, than of noblemen making it
+      the business of their lives to run after ribands. A society clothed in
+      breeches was incensed about the same time by Rousseau's adoption of the
+      Armenian costume, the vest, the furred bonnet, the caftan, and the girdle.
+      There was nothing very wonderful in this departure from use. An Armenian
+      tailor used often to visit some friends at Montmorency. Rousseau knew him,
+      and reflected that such a dress would be of singular comfort to him in the
+      circumstances of his bodily disorder.<a name="FNanchor_137_137"
+      id="FNanchor_137_137"></a><a href="#Footnote_137_137" class="fnanchor">[137]</a>
+      Here was a solid practical reason for what has usually been counted a
+      demonstration of a turned brain. Rousseau had as good cause for going
+      about in a caftan as Chatham had for coming to the House of Parliament
+      wrapped in flannel. Vanity and a desire to attract notice may, we admit,
+      have had something to do with Rousseau's adoption of an uncommon way of
+      dressing. Shrewd wits like the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_93"
+      id="Page_93">[ii.93]</a></span>Duke of Luxembourg and his wife did not
+      suppose that it was so. We, living a hundred years after, cannot possibly
+      know whether it was so or not, and our estimate of Rousseau's strange
+      character would be very little worth forming, if it only turned on petty
+      singularities of this kind. The foolish, equivocally gifted with the
+      quality of articulate speech, may, if they choose, satisfy their own
+      self-love by reducing all action out of the common course to a series of
+      variations on the same motive in others. Men blessed by the benignity of
+      experience will be thankful not to waste life in guessing evil about
+      unknowable trifles.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      During his stay at Motiers Rousseau's time was hardly ever his own.
+      Visitors of all nations, drawn either by respect for his work or by
+      curiosity to see a man who had been prescribed by so many governments,
+      came to him in throngs. His partisans at Geneva insisted on sending people
+      to convince themselves how good a man they were persecuting. &quot;I had
+      never been free from strangers for six weeks,&quot; he writes. &quot;Two
+      days after, I had a Westphalian gentleman and one from Genoa; six days
+      later, two persons from Zurich, who stayed a week; then a Genevese,
+      recovering from an illness, and coming for change of air, fell ill again,
+      and he has only just gone away.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_138_138"
+      id="FNanchor_138_138"></a><a href="#Footnote_138_138" class="fnanchor">[138]</a>
+      One visitor, writing home to his wife of the philosopher to whom he had
+      come on a pilgrimage, describes his manners in terms which perhaps touch
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[ii.94]</a></span>us
+      with surprise:&#8212;&quot;Thou hast no idea how charming his society is,
+      what true politeness there is in his manners, what a depth of serenity and
+      cheerfulness in his talk. Didst thou not expect quite a different picture,
+      and figure to thyself an eccentric creature, always grave and sometimes
+      even abrupt? Ah, what a mistake! To an expression of great mildness he
+      unites a glance of fire, and eyes of a vivacity the like of which never
+      was seen. When you handle any matter in which he takes an interest, then
+      his eyes, his lips, his hands, everything about him speaks. You would be
+      quite wrong to picture in him an everlasting grumbler. Not at all; he
+      laughs with those who laugh, he chats and jokes with children, he rallies
+      his housekeeper.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_139_139" id="FNanchor_139_139"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_139_139" class="fnanchor">[139]</a> He was not so civil to
+      all the world, and occasionally turned upon his pursuers with a word of
+      most sardonic roughness.<a name="FNanchor_140_140" id="FNanchor_140_140"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_140_140" class="fnanchor">[140]</a> But he could also be
+      very generous. We find him pressing a loan from his scanty store on an
+      outcast adventurer, and warning him, &quot;When I lend (which happens
+      rarely enough), 'tis my constant maxim never to count on repayment, nor to
+      exact it.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_141_141" id="FNanchor_141_141"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_141_141" class="fnanchor">[141]</a> He received hundreds
+      of letters, some seeking an application of his views on education to a
+      special case, others craving further exposition of his religious
+      doctrines. Before he had been at Motiers nine months he had paid ten louis
+      for the postage of letters, which after all contained <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[ii.95]</a></span>little more than reproaches,
+      insults, menaces, imbecilities.<a name="FNanchor_142_142"
+      id="FNanchor_142_142"></a><a href="#Footnote_142_142" class="fnanchor">[142]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Not the least curious of his correspondence at this time is that with the
+      Prince of W&#252;rtemberg, then living near Lausanne.<a
+      name="FNanchor_143_143" id="FNanchor_143_143"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_143_143" class="fnanchor">[143]</a> The prince had a
+      little daughter four months old, and he was resolved that her upbringing
+      should be carried on as the author of Emilius might please to direct.
+      Rousseau replied courteously that he did not pretend to direct the
+      education of princes or princesses.<a name="FNanchor_144_144"
+      id="FNanchor_144_144"></a><a href="#Footnote_144_144" class="fnanchor">[144]</a>
+      His undaunted correspondent sent him full details of his babe's habits and
+      faculties, and continued to do so at short intervals, with the fondness of
+      a young mother or an old nurse. Rousseau was interested, and took some
+      trouble to draw up rules for the child's nurture and admonition. One may
+      smile now and then at the prince's ingenuous zeal, but his fervid respect
+      and devotion for the teacher in whom he thought he had found the wisest
+      man that ever lived, and who had at any rate spoken the word that kindled
+      the love of virtue and truth in him, his eagerness to know what Rousseau
+      thought right, and his equal eagerness in trying to do it, his care to
+      arrange his household in a simple <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_96"
+      id="Page_96">[ii.96]</a></span>and methodical way to please his master,
+      his discipular patience when Rousseau told him that his verses were poor,
+      or that he was too fond of his wife,&#8212;all this is a little uncommon
+      in a prince, and deserves a place among the ample mass of other evidence
+      of the power which Rousseau's pictures of domestic simplicity and wise and
+      humane education had in the eighteenth century. It gives us a glimpse,
+      close and direct, of the naturalist revival reaching up into high places.
+      But the trade of philosopher in such times is perhaps an irksome one, and
+      Rousseau was the private victim of his public action. His prince sent
+      multitudes of Germans to visit the sage, and his letters, endless with
+      their details of the nursery, may well have become a little tedious to a
+      worn-out creature who only wanted to be left alone.<a
+      name="FNanchor_145_145" id="FNanchor_145_145"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_145_145" class="fnanchor">[145]</a> The famous Prince
+      Henry, Frederick's brother, thought a man happy who could have the delight
+      of seeing Rousseau as often as he chose.<a name="FNanchor_146_146"
+      id="FNanchor_146_146"></a><a href="#Footnote_146_146" class="fnanchor">[146]</a>
+      People forgot the other side of this delight, and the unlucky philosopher
+      found in a hundred ways alike from enemies and the friends whose curiosity
+      makes them as bad as enemies, that the pedestal of glory partakes of the
+      nature of the pillory or the stocks.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is interesting to find the famous English names of Gibbon and Boswell
+      in the list of the multitudes <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_97"
+      id="Page_97">[ii.97]</a></span>with whom he had to do at this time.<a
+      name="FNanchor_147_147" id="FNanchor_147_147"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_147_147" class="fnanchor">[147]</a> The former was now at
+      Lausanne, whither he had just returned from that memorable visit to
+      England which persuaded him that his father would never endure his
+      alliance with the daughter of an obscure Swiss pastor. He had just &quot;yielded
+      to his fate, sighed as a lover, and obeyed as a son.&quot; &quot;How sorry
+      I am for our poor Mademoiselle Curchod,&quot; writes Moultou to Rousseau;
+      &quot;Gibbon whom she loves, and to whom she has sacrificed, as I know,
+      some excellent matches, has come to Lausanne, but cold, insensible, and as
+      entirely cured of his old passion as she is far from cure. She has written
+      me a letter that makes my heart ache.&quot; He then entreats Rousseau to
+      use his influence with Gibbon, who is on the point of starting for
+      Motiers, by extolling to him the lady's worth and understanding.<a
+      name="FNanchor_148_148" id="FNanchor_148_148"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_148_148" class="fnanchor">[148]</a> &quot;I hope Mr.
+      Gibbon will not come,&quot; replied the sage; &quot;his coldness makes me
+      think ill of him. I have been looking over his book again [the <i>Essai
+      sur l'&#233;tude de la litt&#233;rature</i>, 1761]; he runs after
+      brilliance too much, and is strained and stilted. Mr. Gibbon is not the
+      man for me, and I do not think he is the man for Mademoiselle Curchod
+      either.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_149_149" id="FNanchor_149_149"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_149_149" class="fnanchor">[149]</a> Whether Gibbon went or
+      not, we do not know. He knew in after years what had been said of him by
+      Jean Jacques, and protested with mild pomp that this extraordinary man
+      should have been <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[ii.98]</a></span>less
+      precipitate in condemning the moral character and the conduct of a
+      stranger.<a name="FNanchor_150_150" id="FNanchor_150_150"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_150_150" class="fnanchor">[150]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Boswell, as we know, had left Johnson &quot;rolling his majestic frame in
+      his usual manner&quot; on Harwich beach in 1763, and was now on his
+      travels. Like many of his countrymen, he found his way to Lord Marischal,
+      and here his indomitable passion for making the personal acquaintance of
+      any one who was much talked about, naturally led him to seek so singular a
+      character as the man who was now at Motiers. What Rousseau thought of one
+      who was as singular a character as himself in another direction, we do not
+      know.<a name="FNanchor_151_151" id="FNanchor_151_151"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_151_151" class="fnanchor">[151]</a> Lord Marischal warned
+      Rousseau that his visitor is of excellent disposition, but full of
+      visionary ideas, even having seen spirits&#8212;a serious proof of
+      unsoundness to a man who had lived in the very positive atmosphere of
+      Frederick's court at Berlin. &quot;I only hope,&quot; says the sage Scot,
+      of the Scot who was not sage, &quot;that he may not fall into <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[ii.99]</a></span>the hands
+      of people who will turn his head: he was very pleased with the reception
+      you gave him.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_152_152" id="FNanchor_152_152"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_152_152" class="fnanchor">[152]</a> As it happens, he was
+      the means of sending Boswell to a place where his head was turned, though
+      not very mischievously. Rousseau was at that time full of Corsican
+      projects, of which this is the proper place for us very briefly to speak.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The prolonged struggles of the natives of Corsica to assert their
+      independence of the oppressive administration of the Genoese, which had
+      begun in 1729, came to end for a moment in 1755, when Paoli (1726-1807)
+      defeated the Genoese, and proceeded to settle the government of the
+      island. In the Social Contract Rousseau had said, &quot;There is still in
+      Europe one country capable of legislation, and that is the island of
+      Corsica. The valour and constancy with which this brave people has
+      succeeded in recovering and defending its liberty, entitle it to the good
+      fortune of having some wise man to teach them how to preserve it. I have a
+      presentiment that this little isle will one day astonish Europe,&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor_153_153" id="FNanchor_153_153"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_153_153" class="fnanchor">[153]</a>&#8212;a presentiment
+      that in a sense came true enough long after Rousseau was gone, in a man
+      who was born on the little island seven years later than the publication
+      of this passage. Some of the Corsican leaders were highly flattered, and
+      in August 1764, Buttafuoco entered into correspondence with Rousseau for
+      the purpose of inducing him to draw up a set of political institutions and
+      a code of laws. Paoli himself was too shrewd to have much belief in <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[ii.100]</a></span>the
+      application of ideal systems, and we are assured that he had no intention
+      of making Rousseau the Solon of his island, but only of inducing him to
+      inflame the gallantry of its inhabitants by writing a history of their
+      exploits.<a name="FNanchor_154_154" id="FNanchor_154_154"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_154_154" class="fnanchor">[154]</a> Rousseau, however, did
+      not understand the invitation in this narrower sense. He replied that the
+      very idea of such a task as legislation transported his soul, and he
+      entered into it with the liveliest ardour. He resolved to quarter himself
+      with Theresa in a cottage in some lonely district in the island; in a year
+      he would collect the necessary information as to the manners and opinions
+      of the inhabitants, and three years afterwards he would produce a set of
+      institutions that should be fit for a free and valorous people.<a
+      name="FNanchor_155_155" id="FNanchor_155_155"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_155_155" class="fnanchor">[155]</a> In the midst of this
+      enthusiasm (May 1765) he urged Boswell to visit Corsica, and gave him a
+      letter to Paoli, with results which we know in the shape of an Account of
+      Corsica (1768), and in a feverishness of imagination upon the subject for
+      many a long day afterwards. &quot;Mind your own affairs,&quot; at length
+      cried Johnson sternly to him, &quot;and leave the Corsicans to theirs; I
+      wish you would empty your head of Corsica.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_156_156"
+      id="FNanchor_156_156"></a><a href="#Footnote_156_156" class="fnanchor">[156]</a>
+      At the end of 1765, the immortal hero-worshipper on his return expected to
+      come upon his hero at Motiers, but finding that he was in Paris wrote him
+      a wonderful letter in <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_101"
+      id="Page_101">[ii.101]</a></span>wonderful French. &quot;You will forget
+      all your cares for many an evening, while I tell you what I have seen. I
+      owe you the deepest obligation for sending me to Corsica. The voyage has
+      done me marvellous good. It has made me as if all the lives of Plutarch
+      had sunk into my soul.... I am devoted to the Corsicans heart and soul; if
+      you, illustrious Rousseau, the philosopher whom they have chosen to help
+      them by your lights to preserve and enjoy the liberty which they have
+      acquired with so much heroism&#8212;if you have cooled towards these
+      gallant islanders, why then I am sorry for you, that is all I can say.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor_157_157" id="FNanchor_157_157"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_157_157" class="fnanchor">[157]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Alas, by this time the gallant islanders had been driven out of Rousseau's
+      mind by personal mishaps. First, Voltaire or some other enemy had spread
+      the rumour that the invitation to become the Lycurgus of Corsica was a
+      practical joke, and Rousseau's suspicious temper found what he took for
+      confirmation of this in some trifling incidents with which we <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[ii.102]</a></span>certainly
+      need not concern ourselves.<a name="FNanchor_158_158" id="FNanchor_158_158"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_158_158" class="fnanchor">[158]</a> Next, a very real
+      storm had burst upon him which drove him once more to seek a new place of
+      shelter, other than an island occupied by French troops. For France having
+      begun by despatching auxiliaries to the assistance of the Genoese (1764),
+      ended by buying the island from the Genoese senate, with a sort of equity
+      of redemption (1768)&#8212;an iniquitous transaction, as Rousseau justly
+      called it, equally shocking to justice, humanity, reason, and policy.<a
+      name="FNanchor_159_159" id="FNanchor_159_159"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_159_159" class="fnanchor">[159]</a> Civilisation would
+      have been saved one of its sorest trials if Genoa could have availed
+      herself of her equity, and so have delivered France from the acquisition
+      of the most terrible citizen that ever scourged a state.<a
+      name="FNanchor_160_160" id="FNanchor_160_160"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_160_160" class="fnanchor">[160]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The condemnation of Rousseau by the Council in 1762 had divided Geneva
+      into two camps, and was followed by a prolonged contention between his
+      partisans and his enemies. The root of the contention was political rather
+      than theological. To take Rousseau's side was to protest against the
+      oligarchic authority which had condemned him, and the quarrel about
+      Emilius was only an episode in the long war between the popular and
+      aristocratic parties. This <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_103"
+      id="Page_103">[ii.103]</a></span>strife, after coming to a height for the
+      first time in 1734, had abated after the pacification of 1738, but the
+      pacification was only effective for a time, and the roots of division were
+      still full of vitality. The lawfulness of the authority and the regularity
+      of the procedure by which Rousseau had been condemned, offered convenient
+      ground for carrying on the dispute, and its warmth was made more intense
+      by the suggestion on the popular side that perhaps the religion of the
+      book which the oligarchs had condemned was more like Christianity than the
+      religion of the oligarchs who condemned it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rousseau was too near the scene of the quarrel, too directly involved in
+      its issues, too constantly in contact with the people who were engaged in
+      it, not to feel the angry buzzings very close about his ears. If he had
+      been as collected and as self-possessed as he loved to fancy, they would
+      have gone for very little in the life of the day. But Rousseau never stood
+      on the heights whence a strong man surveys with clear eye and firm soul
+      the unjust or mean or furious moods of the world. Such achievement is not
+      hard for the creature who is wrapped up in himself; who is careless of the
+      passions of men about him, because he thinks they cannot hurt him, and not
+      because he has measured them, and deliberately assigned them a place among
+      the elements in which a man's destiny is cast. It is only hard for one who
+      is penetrated by true interest in the opinion and action of his fellows,
+      thus to keep both sympathy warm and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_104"
+      id="Page_104">[ii.104]</a></span> self-sufficience true. The task was too
+      hard for Rousseau, though his patience under long persecution far
+      surpassed that of any of the other oppressed teachers of the time. In the
+      spring of 1763 he deliberately renounced in all due forms his rights of
+      burgess-ship and citizenship in the city and republic of Geneva.<a
+      name="FNanchor_161_161" id="FNanchor_161_161"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_161_161" class="fnanchor">[161]</a> And at length he broke
+      forth against his Genevese persecutors in the Letters from the Mountain
+      (1764), a long but extremely vigorous and adroit rejoinder to the pleas
+      which his enemies had put forth in Tronchin's Letters from the Country. If
+      any one now cares to satisfy himself how really unjust and illegal the
+      treatment was, which Rousseau received at the hands of the authorities of
+      his native city, he may do so by examining these most forcible letters.
+      The second part of them may interest the student of political history by
+      its account of the working of the institutions of the little republic. We
+      seem to be reading over again the history of a Greek city; the growth of a
+      wealthy class in face of an increasing number of poor burgesses, the
+      imposition of burdens in unfair proportions upon the metoikoi, the gradual
+      usurpation of legislative and administrative function (including
+      especially the judicial) by the oligarchs, and the twisting of democratic
+      machinery to oligarchic ends; then the growth of staseis or violent
+      factions, followed by metabol&#233; or overthrow of the established
+      constitution, ending in foreign intervention. The Four Hundred at Athens
+      would have treated any <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_105"
+      id="Page_105">[ii.105]</a></span>Social Contract that should have appeared
+      in their day, just as sternly as the Two Hundred or the Twenty-five
+      treated the Social Contract that did appear, and for just the same
+      reasons.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rousseau proved his case with redundancy of demonstration. A body of
+      burgesses had previously availed themselves (Nov. 1763) of a legal right,
+      and made a technical representation to the Lesser Council that the laws
+      had been broken in his case. The Council in return availed itself of an
+      equally legal right, its <i>droit n&#233;gatif</i>, and declined to
+      entertain the representation, without giving any reasons. Unfortunately
+      for Rousseau's comfort, the ferment which his new vindication of his cause
+      stirred up, did not end with the condemnation and burning of his
+      manifesto. For the parliament of Paris ordered the Letters from the
+      Mountain to be burned, and the same decree and the same faggot served for
+      that and for Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary (April 1765).<a
+      name="FNanchor_162_162" id="FNanchor_162_162"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_162_162" class="fnanchor">[162]</a> It was also burned at
+      the Hague (Jan. 22). An observer by no means friendly to the priests
+      noticed that at Paris it was not the fanatics of orthodoxy, but the
+      encyclop&#230;dists and their flock, who on this occasion raised the storm
+      and set the zeal of the magistrates in motion.<a name="FNanchor_163_163"
+      id="FNanchor_163_163"></a><a href="#Footnote_163_163" class="fnanchor">[163]</a>
+      The vanity and egoism of rationalistic sects can be as fatal to candour,
+      justice, and compassion as the intolerant pride of the great churches.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[ii.106]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Persecution came nearer to Rousseau and took more inconvenient shapes than
+      this. A terrible libel appeared (Feb. 1765), full of the coarsest
+      calumnies. Rousseau, stung by their insolence and falseness, sent it to
+      Paris to be published there with a prefatory note, stating that it was by
+      a Genevese pastor whom he named. This landed him in fresh mortification,
+      for the pastor disavowed the libel, Rousseau declined to accept the
+      disavowal, and sensible men were wearied by acrimonious declarations,
+      explanations, protests.<a name="FNanchor_164_164" id="FNanchor_164_164"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_164_164" class="fnanchor">[164]</a> Then the clergy of
+      Neuch&#226;tel were not able any longer to resist the opportunity of
+      inflicting such torments as they could, upon a heretic whom they might
+      more charitably have left to those ultimate and everlasting torments which
+      were so precious to their religious imagination. They began to press the
+      pastor of the village where Rousseau lived, and with whom he had hitherto
+      been on excellent terms. The pastor, though he had been liberal enough to
+      admit his singular parishioner to the communion, in spite of the Savoyard
+      Vicar, was not courageous enough to resist the bigotry of the professional
+      body to which he belonged. He warned Rousseau not to present himself at
+      the next communion. The philosopher insisted that he had a right to do
+      this, until formally cast out by the consistory. The consistory, composed
+      mainly of a body of peasants entirely bound to their minister in matters
+      of religion, cited him to appear, and answer such <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[ii.107]</a></span>questions as might test
+      his loyalty to the faith. Rousseau prepared a most deliberate vindication
+      of all that he had written, which he intended to speak to his rustic
+      judges. The eve of the morning on which he had to appear, he knew his
+      discourse by heart; when morning came he could not repeat two sentences.
+      So he fell back on the instrument over which he had more mastery than he
+      had over tongue or memory, and wrote what he wished to say. The pastor, in
+      whom irritated egoism was probably by this time giving additional heat to
+      professional zeal, was for fulminating a decree of excommunication, but
+      there appears to have been some indirect interference with the proceedings
+      of the consistory by the king's officials at Neuch&#226;tel, and the
+      ecclesiastical bolt was held back.<a name="FNanchor_165_165"
+      id="FNanchor_165_165"></a><a href="#Footnote_165_165" class="fnanchor">[165]</a>
+      Other weapons were not wanting. The pastor proceeded to spread rumours
+      among his flock that Rousseau was a heretic, even an atheist, and most
+      prodigious of all, that he had written a book containing the monstrous
+      doctrine that women have no souls. The pulpit resounded with sermons
+      proving to the honest villagers that antichrist was quartered in their
+      parish in very flesh. The Armenian apparel gave a high degree of
+      plausibleness to such an opinion, and as the wretched man went by the door
+      of his neighbours, he heard cursing and menace, while a hostile pebble now
+      and again whistled past his ear. His botanising expeditions were believed
+      to be devoted to search for <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_108"
+      id="Page_108">[ii.108]</a></span>noxious herbs, and a man who died in the
+      agonies of nephritic colic, was supposed to have been poisoned by him.<a
+      name="FNanchor_166_166" id="FNanchor_166_166"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_166_166" class="fnanchor">[166]</a> If persons went to the
+      post-office for letters for him, they were treated with insult.<a
+      name="FNanchor_167_167" id="FNanchor_167_167"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_167_167" class="fnanchor">[167]</a> At length the ferment
+      against him grew hot enough to be serious. A huge block of stone was found
+      placed so as to kill him when he opened his door; and one night an attempt
+      was made to stone him in his house.<a name="FNanchor_168_168"
+      id="FNanchor_168_168"></a><a href="#Footnote_168_168" class="fnanchor">[168]</a>
+      Popular hate shown with this degree of violence was too much for his
+      fortitude, and after a residence of rather more than three years
+      (September 8-10, 1765), he fled from the inhospitable valley to seek
+      refuge he knew not where.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In his rambles of a previous summer he had seen a little island in the
+      lake of Bienne, which struck his imagination and lived in his memory.
+      Thither he now, after a moment of hesitation, turned his steps, with
+      something of the same instinct as draws a child towards a beam of the sun.
+      He forgot or was heedless of the circumstance that the isle of St. Peter
+      lay in the jurisdiction of the canton of Berne, whose government had
+      forbidden him their territory. Strong craving for a little ease in the
+      midst of his wretchedness extinguished thought of jurisdictions and
+      proscriptive decrees.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The spot where he now found peace for a brief <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[ii.109]</a></span>space usually disappoints
+      the modern hunter for the picturesque, who after wearying himself with the
+      follies of a capital seeks the most violent tonic that he can find in the
+      lonely terrors of glacier and peak, and sees only tameness in a pygmy
+      island, that offers nothing sublimer than a high grassy terrace, some cool
+      over-branching avenues, some mimic vales, and meadows and vineyards
+      sloping down to the sheet of blue water at their feet. Yet, as one sits
+      here on a summer day, with tired mowers sleeping on their grass heaps in
+      the sun, in a stillness faintly broken by the timid lapping of the water
+      in the sedge, or the rustling of swift lizards across the heated sand,
+      while the Bernese snow giants line a distant horizon with mysterious
+      solitary shapes, it is easy to know what solace life in such a scene might
+      bring to a man distracted by pain of body and pain and weariness of soul.
+      Rousseau has commemorated his too short sojourn here in the most perfect
+      of all his compositions.<a name="FNanchor_169_169" id="FNanchor_169_169"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_169_169" class="fnanchor">[169]</a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="blockquot">
+      <p>
+        &quot;I found my existence so charming, and led a life so agreeable to
+        my humour, that I resolved here to end my days. My only source of
+        disquiet was whether I should be allowed to carry my project out. In the
+        midst of the presentiments that disturbed me, I would fain have had them
+        make a perpetual prison of my refuge, to confine me in it for all the
+        rest of my life. I longed for them to cut off all chance and all hope of
+        leaving it; to forbid me holding any communication with the mainland, so
+        that, knowing <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[ii.110]</a></span>nothing
+        of what was going on in the world, I might have forgotten the world's
+        existence, and people might have forgotten mine too. They only suffered
+        me to pass two months in the island, but I could have passed two years,
+        two centuries, and all eternity, without a moment's weariness, though I
+        had not, with my companion, any other society than that of the steward,
+        his wife, and their servants. They were in truth honest souls and
+        nothing more, but that was just what I wanted.... Carried thither in a
+        violent hurry, alone and without a thing, I afterwards sent for my
+        housekeeper, my books, and my scanty possessions, of which I had the
+        delight of unpacking nothing, leaving my boxes and chests just as they
+        had come, and dwelling in the house where I counted on ending my days,
+        exactly as if it were an inn whence I must needs set forth on the
+        morrow. All things went so well, just as they were, that to think of
+        ordering them better were to spoil them. One of my greatest joys was to
+        leave my books safely fastened up in their boxes, and to be without even
+        a case for writing. When any luckless letter forced me to take up a pen
+        for an answer, I grumblingly borrowed the steward's inkstand, and
+        hurried to give it back to him with all the haste I could, in the vain
+        hope that I should never have need of the loan any more. Instead of
+        meddling with those weary quires and reams and piles of old books, I
+        filled my chamber with flowers and grasses, for I was then in my first
+        fervour for botany. Having given up employment that would be a task to
+        me, I needed one that would be an amusement, nor cause me more pains
+        than a sluggard might choose to take. I undertook to make the <i>Flora
+        petrinsularis</i>, and to describe every single plant on the island, in
+        detail enough to occupy me for the rest of my days. In consequence of
+        this fine scheme, every morning after breakfast, which we all took in
+        company, I used to go with a magnifying glass in my hand and my Systema
+        Natur&#230; under my arm, to visit some district of the island. I had
+        divided it for that purpose<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_111"
+        id="Page_111">[ii.111]</a></span> into small squares, meaning to go
+        through them one after another in each season of the year. At the end of
+        two or three hours I used to return laden with an ample harvest, a
+        provision for amusing myself after dinner indoors, in case of rain. I
+        spent the rest of the morning in going with the steward, his wife, and
+        Theresa, to see the labourers and the harvesting, and I generally set to
+        work along with them; many a time when people from Berne came to see me,
+        they found me perched on a high tree, with a bag fastened round my
+        waist; I kept filling it with fruit and then let it down to the ground
+        with a rope. The exercise I had taken in the morning and the good humour
+        that always comes from exercise, made the repose of dinner vastly
+        pleasant to me. But if dinner was kept up too long, and fine weather
+        invited me forth, I could not wait, but was speedily off to throw myself
+        all alone into a boat, which, when the water was smooth enough, I used
+        to pull out to the middle of the lake. There, stretched at full length
+        in the boat's bottom, with my eyes turned up to the sky, I let myself
+        float slowly hither and thither as the water listed, sometimes for hours
+        together, plunged in a thousand confused delicious musings, which,
+        though they had no fixed nor constant object, were not the less on that
+        account a hundred times dearer to me than all that I had found sweetest
+        in what they call the pleasures of life. Often warned by the going down
+        of the sun that it was time to return, I found myself so far from the
+        island that I was forced to row with all my might to get in before it
+        was pitch dark. At other times, instead of losing myself in the midst of
+        the waters, I had a fancy to coast along the green shores of the island,
+        where the clear waters and cool shadows tempted me to bathe. But one of
+        my most frequent expeditions was from the larger island to the less;
+        there I disembarked and spent my afternoon, sometimes in mimic rambles
+        among wild elders, persicaries, willows, and shrubs of every species,
+        sometimes settling myself on the top of a sandy knoll, covered with
+        turf, wild thyme,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[ii.112]</a></span>
+        flowers, even sainfoin and trefoil that had most likely been sown there
+        in old days, making excellent quarters for rabbits. They might multiply
+        in peace without either fearing anything or harming anything. I spoke of
+        this to the steward. He at once had male and female rabbits brought from
+        Neuch&#226;tel, and we went in high state, his wife, one of his sisters,
+        Theresa, and I, to settle them in the little islet. The foundation of
+        our colony was a feast-day. The pilot of the Argonauts was not prouder
+        than I, as I bore my company and the rabbits in triumph from our island
+        to the smaller one....
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        When the lake was too rough for me to sail, I spent my afternoon in
+        going up and down the island, gathering plants to right and left;
+        seating myself now in smiling lonely nooks to dream at my ease, now on
+        little terraces and knolls, to follow with my eyes the superb and
+        ravishing prospect of the lake and its shores, crowned on one side by
+        the neighbouring hills, and on the other melting into rich and fertile
+        plains up to the feet of the pale blue mountains on their far-off edge.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        As evening drew on, I used to come down from the high ground and sit on
+        the beach at the water's brink in some hidden sheltering place. There
+        the murmur of the waves and their agitation, charmed all my senses and
+        drove every other movement away from my soul; they plunged it into
+        delicious dreamings, in which I was often surprised by night. The flux
+        and reflux of the water, its ceaseless stir-swelling and falling at
+        intervals, striking on ear and sight, made up for the internal movements
+        which my musings extinguished; they were enough to give me delight in
+        mere existence, without taking any trouble of thinking. From time to
+        time arose some passing thought of the instability of the things of this
+        world, of which the face of the waters offered an image; but such light
+        impressions were swiftly effaced in the uniformity of the ceaseless
+        motion, which rocked me as in a cradle; it held me with such fascination
+        that even when called at the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_113"
+        id="Page_113">[ii.113]</a></span> hour and by the signal appointed, I
+        could not tear myself away without summoning all my force.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        After supper, when the evening was fine, we used to go all together for
+        a saunter on the terrace, to breathe the freshness of the air from the
+        lake. We sat down in the arbour, laughing, chatting, or singing some old
+        song, and then we went home to bed, well pleased with the day, and only
+        craving another that should be exactly like it on the morrow....
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        All is in a continual flux upon the earth. Nothing in it keeps a form
+        constant and determinate; our affections, fastening on external things,
+        necessarily change and pass just as they do. Ever in front of us or
+        behind us, they recall the past that is gone, or anticipate a future
+        that in many a case is destined never to be. There is nothing solid to
+        which the heart can fix itself. Here we have little more than a pleasure
+        that comes and passes away; as for the happiness that endures, I cannot
+        tell if it be so much as known among men. There is hardly in the midst
+        of our liveliest delights a single instant when the heart could tell us
+        with real truth&#8212;&quot;<i>I would this instant might last for ever</i>.&quot;
+        And how can we give the name of happiness to a fleeting state that all
+        the time leaves the heart unquiet and void, that makes us regret
+        something gone, or still long for something to come?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        But if there is a state in which the soul finds a situation solid enough
+        to comport with perfect repose, and with the expansion of its whole
+        faculty, without need of calling back the past, or pressing on towards
+        the future; where time is nothing for it, and the present has no ending;
+        with no mark for its own duration and without a trace of succession;
+        without a single other sense of privation or delight, of pleasure or
+        pain, of desire or apprehension, than this single sense of existence&#8212;so
+        long as such a state endures, he who finds himself in it may talk of
+        bliss, not with a poor, relative, and imperfect happiness such as people
+        find in the pleasures of life, but with a happiness<span class="pagenum"><a
+        name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[ii.114]</a></span> full, perfect, and
+        sufficing, that leaves in the soul no conscious unfilled void. Such a
+        state was many a day mine in my solitary musings in the isle of St.
+        Peter, either lying in my boat as it floated on the water, or seated on
+        the banks of the broad lake, or in other places than the little isle on
+        the brink of some broad stream, or a rivulet murmuring over a gravel
+        bed.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        What is it that one enjoys in a situation like this? Nothing outside of
+        one's self, nothing except one's self and one's own existence.... But
+        most men, tossed as they are by unceasing passion, have little knowledge
+        of such a state; they taste it imperfectly for a few moments, and then
+        retain no more than an obscure confused idea of it, that is too weak to
+        let them feel its charm. It would not even be good in the present
+        constitution of things, that in their eagerness for these gentle
+        ecstasies, they should fall into a disgust for the active life in which
+        their duty is prescribed to them by needs that are ever on the increase.
+        But a wretch cut off from human society, who can do nothing here below
+        that is useful and good either for himself or for other people, may in
+        such a state find for all lost human felicities many recompenses, of
+        which neither fortune nor men can ever rob him.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        'Tis true that these recompenses cannot be felt by all souls, nor in all
+        situations. The heart must be in peace, nor any passion come to trouble
+        its calm. There must be in the surrounding objects neither absolute
+        repose nor excess of agitation, but a uniform and moderated movement
+        without shock, without interval. With no movement, life is only
+        lethargy. If the movement be unequal or too strong, it awakes us; by
+        recalling us to the objects around, it destroys the charm of our musing,
+        and plucks us from within ourselves, instantly to throw us back under
+        the yoke of fortune and man, in a moment to restore us to all the
+        consciousness of misery. Absolute stillness inclines one to gloom. It
+        offers an image of death: then the help of a cheerful imagination is
+        necessary, and presents itself<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_115"
+        id="Page_115">[ii.115]</a></span> naturally enough to those whom heaven
+        has endowed with such a gift. The movement which does not come from
+        without then stirs within us. The repose is less complete, it is true;
+        but it is also more agreeable when light and gentle ideas, without
+        agitating the depths of the soul, only softly skim the surface. This
+        sort of musing we may taste whenever there is tranquillity about us, and
+        I have thought that in the Bastile, and even in a dungeon where no
+        object struck my sight, I could have dreamed away many a thrice
+        pleasurable day.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        But it must be said that all this came better and more happily in a
+        fruitful and lonely island, where nothing presented itself to me save
+        smiling pictures, where nothing recalled saddening memories, where the
+        fellowship of the few dwellers there was gentle and obliging, without
+        being exciting enough to busy me incessantly, where, in short, I was
+        free to surrender myself all day long to the promptings of my taste or
+        to the most luxurious indolence.... As I came out from a long and most
+        sweet musing fit, seeing myself surrounded by verdure and flowers and
+        birds, and letting my eyes wander far over romantic shores that fringed
+        a wide expanse of water bright as crystal, I fitted all these attractive
+        objects into my dreams; and when at last I slowly recovered myself and
+        recognised what was about me, I could not mark the point that cut off
+        dream from reality, so equally did all things unite to endear to me the
+        lonely retired life I led in this happy spot! Why can that life not come
+        back to me again? Why can I not go finish my days in the beloved island,
+        never to quit it, never again to see in it one dweller from the
+        mainland, to bring back to me the memory of all the woes of every sort
+        that they have delighted in heaping on my head for all these long
+        years?... Freed from the earthly passions engendered by the tumult of
+        social life, my soul would many a time lift itself above this
+        atmosphere, and commune beforehand with the heavenly intelligences, into
+        whose number it trusts to be ere long taken.&quot;
+      </p>
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[ii.116]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The exquisite dream, thus set to words of most soothing music, came soon
+      to its end. The full and perfect sufficience of life was abruptly
+      disturbed. The government of Berne gave him notice to quit the island and
+      their territory within fifteen days. He represented to the authorities
+      that he was infirm and ill, that he knew not whither to go, and that
+      travelling in wintry weather would be dangerous to his life. He even made
+      the most extraordinary request that any man in similar straits ever did
+      make. &quot;In this extremity,&quot; he wrote to their representative,
+      &quot;I only see one resource for me, and however frightful it may appear,
+      I will adopt it, not only without repugnance, but with eagerness, if their
+      excellencies will be good enough to give their consent. It is that it
+      should please them for me to pass the rest of my days in prison in one of
+      their castles, or such other place in their states as they may think fit
+      to select. I will there live at my own expense, and I will give security
+      never to put them to any cost. I submit to be without paper or pen, or any
+      communication from without, except so far as may be absolutely necessary,
+      and through the channel of those who shall have charge of me. Only let me
+      have left, with the use of a few books, the liberty to walk occasionally
+      in a garden, and I am content. Do not suppose that an expedient, so
+      violent in appearance, is the fruit of despair. My mind is perfectly calm
+      at this moment; I have taken time to think about it, and it is only after
+      profound consideration that I<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_117"
+      id="Page_117">[ii.117]</a></span> have brought myself to this decision.
+      Mark, I pray you, that if this seems an extraordinary resolution, my
+      situation is still more so. The distracted life that I have been made to
+      lead for several years without intermission would be terrible for a man in
+      full health; judge what it must be for a miserable invalid worn down with
+      weariness and misfortune, and who has now no wish save only to die in a
+      little peace.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_170_170" id="FNanchor_170_170"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_170_170" class="fnanchor">[170]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That the request was made in all sincerity we may well believe. The
+      difference between being in prison and being out of it was really not
+      considerable to a man who had the previous winter been confined to his
+      chamber for eight months without a break.<a name="FNanchor_171_171"
+      id="FNanchor_171_171"></a><a href="#Footnote_171_171" class="fnanchor">[171]</a>
+      In other respects the world was as cheerless as any prison could be. He
+      was an exile from the only places he knew, and to him a land unknown was
+      terrible. He had thought of Vienna, and the Prince of W&#252;rtemburg had
+      sought the requisite permission for him, but the priests were too strong
+      in the court of the house of Austria.<a name="FNanchor_172_172"
+      id="FNanchor_172_172"></a><a href="#Footnote_172_172" class="fnanchor">[172]</a>
+      Madame d'Houdetot offered him a resting-place in Normandy, and Saint
+      Lambert in Lorraine.<a name="FNanchor_173_173" id="FNanchor_173_173"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_173_173" class="fnanchor">[173]</a> He thought of Potsdam.
+      Rey, the printer, pressed him to go to Holland. He wondered if he should
+      have strength to cross the Alps and make his way to Corsica. Eventually he
+      made up his mind to go to Berlin, and he went as <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[ii.118]</a></span>far as Strasburg on his
+      road thither.<a name="FNanchor_174_174" id="FNanchor_174_174"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_174_174" class="fnanchor">[174]</a> Here he began to fear
+      the rude climate of the northern capital; he changed his plans, and
+      resolved to accept the warm invitations that he had received to cross over
+      to England. His friends used their interest to procure a passport for him,<a
+      name="FNanchor_175_175" id="FNanchor_175_175"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_175_175" class="fnanchor">[175]</a> and the Prince of
+      Conti offered him an apartment in the privileged quarter of the Temple, on
+      his way through Paris. His own purpose seems to have been irresolute to
+      the last, but his friends acted with such energy and bustle on his behalf
+      that the English scheme was adopted, and he found himself in Paris (Dec.
+      17, 1765), on his way to London, almost before he had deliberately
+      realised what he was doing. It was a step that led him into many fatal
+      vexations, as we shall presently see. Meanwhile we may pause to examine
+      the two considerable books which had involved his life in all this
+      confusion and perplexity.
+    </p>
+    <div class="footnotes">
+      <h3>
+        FOOTNOTES:
+      </h3>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_94_94" id="Footnote_94_94"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_94_94"><span class="label">[94]</span></a> June,
+          1762-December, 1765.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_95_95" id="Footnote_95_95"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_95_95"><span class="label">[95]</span></a> <i>Conf.</i>,
+          xi. 175. It is generally printed in the volume of his works entitled
+          <i>M&#233;langes</i>.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_96_96" id="Footnote_96_96"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_96_96"><span class="label">[96]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>,
+          iii. 416.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_97_97" id="Footnote_97_97"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_97_97"><span class="label">[97]</span></a> <i>Conf.</i>,
+          xi. 172.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_98_98" id="Footnote_98_98"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_98_98"><span class="label">[98]</span></a> For a
+          remarkable anticipation of the ruin of France, see <i>Conf.</i>, xi.
+          136.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_99_99" id="Footnote_99_99"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_99_99"><span class="label">[99]</span></a> M. Roguin.
+          June 14, 1762.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_100_100" id="Footnote_100_100"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_100_100"><span class="label">[100]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>,
+          ii. 347.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_101_101" id="Footnote_101_101"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_101_101"><span class="label">[101]</span></a>
+          Streckeisen, i. 35.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_102_102" id="Footnote_102_102"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_102_102"><span class="label">[102]</span></a> His
+          friend Moultou wrote him the news, Streckeisen, i. 43. Geneva was the
+          only place at which the Social Contract was burnt. Here there were
+          peculiar reasons, as we shall see.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_103_103" id="Footnote_103_103"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_103_103"><span class="label">[103]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>,
+          ii. 356.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_104_104" id="Footnote_104_104"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_104_104"><span class="label">[104]</span></a> <i>Ib.</i>,
+          ii. 358, 369, etc.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_105_105" id="Footnote_105_105"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_105_105"><span class="label">[105]</span></a> The
+          principality of Neuch&#226;tel had fallen by marriage (1504) to the
+          French house of Orleans-Longueville, which with certain interruptions
+          retained it until the extinction of the line by the death of Marie,
+          Duchess of Nemours (1707). Fifteen claimants arose with fifteen
+          varieties of far-off title, as well as a party for constituting Neuch&#226;tel
+          a Republic and making it a fourteenth canton. (Saint Simon, v. 276.)
+          The Estates adjudged the sovereignty to the Protestant house of
+          Prussia (Nov. 3, 1707). Lewis XIV., as heir of the pretensions of the
+          extinct line, protested. Finally, at the peace of Utrecht (1713),
+          Lewis surrendered his claim in exchange for the cession by Prussia of
+          the Principality of Orange, and Prussia held it until 1806. The
+          disturbed history of the connection between Prussia and Neuch&#226;tel
+          from 1814, when it became the twenty-first canton of the Swiss
+          Confederation, down to 1857, does not here concern us.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_106_106" id="Footnote_106_106"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_106_106"><span class="label">[106]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>,
+          ii. 370.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_107_107" id="Footnote_107_107"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_107_107"><span class="label">[107]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>,
+          ii. 371. July 1762.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_108_108" id="Footnote_108_108"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_108_108"><span class="label">[108]</span></a>
+          D'Alembert, who knew Frederick better than any of the philosophers, to
+          Voltaire, Nov. 22, 1765.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_109_109" id="Footnote_109_109"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_109_109"><span class="label">[109]</span></a> Letter
+          to Hume; Burton's <i>Life of Hume</i>, ii. 105, corroborating <i>Conf.</i>,
+          xii. 196.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_110_110" id="Footnote_110_110"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_110_110"><span class="label">[110]</span></a>
+          Marischal to J.J.R.; Streckeisen, ii. 70.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_111_111" id="Footnote_111_111"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_111_111"><span class="label">[111]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>,
+          iii. 40. Nov. 1, 1762.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_112_112" id="Footnote_112_112"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_112_112"><span class="label">[112]</span></a> Burton's
+          <i>Life</i>, ii. 113.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_113_113" id="Footnote_113_113"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_113_113"><span class="label">[113]</span></a>
+          Voltaire's <i>Corr.</i> (1758). <i>Oeuv.</i>, lxxv. pp. 31 and 80.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_114_114" id="Footnote_114_114"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_114_114"><span class="label">[114]</span></a> <i>Conf.</i>,
+          xii. 237.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_115_115" id="Footnote_115_115"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_115_115"><span class="label">[115]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>,
+          iii. 41. Nov. 11, 1762.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_116_116" id="Footnote_116_116"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_116_116"><span class="label">[116]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>,
+          iii. 38. Oct. 30, 1762.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_117_117" id="Footnote_117_117"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_117_117"><span class="label">[117]</span></a> <i>Ib.</i>,
+          iii. 110-115. Jan. 28, 1763.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_118_118" id="Footnote_118_118"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_118_118"><span class="label">[118]</span></a>
+          Bernardin de St. Pierre, xii. 103, 59, etc.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_119_119" id="Footnote_119_119"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_119_119"><span class="label">[119]</span></a> George
+          Keith (1685-1778) was elder brother of Frederick's famous
+          field-marshal, James Keith. They had taken part in the Jacobite rising
+          of 1715, and fled abroad on its failure. James Keith brought his
+          brother into the service of the King of Prussia, who sent him as
+          ambassador to Paris (1751), afterwards made him Governor of Neuch&#226;tel
+          (1754), and eventually prevailed on the English Government to
+          reinstate him in the rights which he had forfeited by his share in the
+          rebellion (1763).
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_120_120" id="Footnote_120_120"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_120_120"><span class="label">[120]</span></a>
+          Streckeisen, ii. 98, etc.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_121_121" id="Footnote_121_121"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_121_121"><span class="label">[121]</span></a> One of
+          Rousseau's chief distresses hitherto arose from the indigence in which
+          Theresa would be placed in case of his death. Rey, the bookseller,
+          gave her an annuity of about &#163;16 a year, and Lord Marischal's
+          gift seems to have been 300 louis, the only money that Rousseau was
+          ever induced to accept from any one in his life. See Streckeisen, ii.
+          99; <i>Corr.</i>, iii. 336. The most delicate and sincere of the many
+          offers to provide for Theresa was made by Madame de Verdelin
+          (Streckeisen, ii. 506). The language in which Madame de Verdelin
+          speaks of Theresa in all her letters is the best testimony to
+          character that this much-abused creature has to produce.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_122_122" id="Footnote_122_122"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_122_122"><span class="label">[122]</span></a> <i>Ib.</i>,
+          90, 92, etc. Summer of 1763.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_123_123" id="Footnote_123_123"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_123_123"><span class="label">[123]</span></a> Burton's
+          <i>Life of Hume</i>, ii. 105. Oct. 2, 1762.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_124_124" id="Footnote_124_124"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_124_124"><span class="label">[124]</span></a> The
+          Confessions are not our only authority for this. See Streckeisen, ii.
+          64; also D'Alembert to Voltaire, Sept. 8, 1762.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_125_125" id="Footnote_125_125"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_125_125"><span class="label">[125]</span></a>
+          Voltaire's <i>Corr.</i> <i>Oeuv.</i>, lxvii. 458, 459, 485, etc.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_126_126" id="Footnote_126_126"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_126_126"><span class="label">[126]</span></a> To
+          D'Alembert, Sept. 15, 1762.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_127_127" id="Footnote_127_127"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_127_127"><span class="label">[127]</span></a> Moultou
+          to Rousseau, Streckeisen, i. 85, 87.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_128_128" id="Footnote_128_128"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_128_128"><span class="label">[128]</span></a> Moultou
+          to Rousseau, Streckeisen, i. 85, 87.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_129_129" id="Footnote_129_129"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_129_129"><span class="label">[129]</span></a>
+          Streckeisen, i. 50.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_130_130" id="Footnote_130_130"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_130_130"><span class="label">[130]</span></a> <i>Ib.</i>,
+          i. 76.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_131_131" id="Footnote_131_131"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_131_131"><span class="label">[131]</span></a> <i>Lettre
+          &#224; Christophe de Beaumont</i>, pp. 163-166.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_132_132" id="Footnote_132_132"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_132_132"><span class="label">[132]</span></a> <i>Lettre
+          &#224; Christophe de Beaumont</i>, pp. 130-135.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_133_133" id="Footnote_133_133"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_133_133"><span class="label">[133]</span></a> <i>Lettre
+          &#224; Christophe de Beaumont</i>, p. 93.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_134_134" id="Footnote_134_134"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_134_134"><span class="label">[134]</span></a>
+          Carlyle's <i>Frederick</i>, Bk. xxi. ch. iv. Rousseau, <i>Corr.</i>,
+          iii. 102.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_135_135" id="Footnote_135_135"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_135_135"><span class="label">[135]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>,
+          iii. 57. Nov. 1762. To M. Montmollin.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_136_136" id="Footnote_136_136"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_136_136"><span class="label">[136]</span></a> <i>Conf.</i>,
+          xii. 206.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_137_137" id="Footnote_137_137"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_137_137"><span class="label">[137]</span></a> <i>Conf.</i>,
+          xii. 198.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_138_138" id="Footnote_138_138"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_138_138"><span class="label">[138]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>,
+          iii. 295. Dec. 25, 1763.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_139_139" id="Footnote_139_139"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_139_139"><span class="label">[139]</span></a> Quoted
+          in Musset-Pathay, ii. 500.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_140_140" id="Footnote_140_140"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_140_140"><span class="label">[140]</span></a> For
+          instance, <i>Corr.</i>, iii. 249.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_141_141" id="Footnote_141_141"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_141_141"><span class="label">[141]</span></a> <i>Ib.</i>,
+          iii. 364, 381.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_142_142" id="Footnote_142_142"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_142_142"><span class="label">[142]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>,
+          iii. 181-186, etc.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_143_143" id="Footnote_143_143"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_143_143"><span class="label">[143]</span></a> Prince
+          Lewis Eugene, son of Charles Alexander (reigning duke from 1733 to
+          1737); a younger brother of Charles Eugene, known as Schiller's Duke
+          of W&#252;rtemberg, who reigned up to 1793. Frederick Eugene, known in
+          the Seven Years' War, was another brother. Rousseau's correspondent
+          became reigning duke in 1793, but only lived a year and a half
+          afterwards.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_144_144" id="Footnote_144_144"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_144_144"><span class="label">[144]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>,
+          iii. 250. Sept. 29, 1763.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_145_145" id="Footnote_145_145"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_145_145"><span class="label">[145]</span></a> The
+          prince's letters are given in the Streckeisen collection, vol. ii.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_146_146" id="Footnote_146_146"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_146_146"><span class="label">[146]</span></a>
+          Streckeisen, ii. 202.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_147_147" id="Footnote_147_147"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_147_147"><span class="label">[147]</span></a> Possibly
+          Wilkes also; <i>Corr.</i>, iv. 200.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_148_148" id="Footnote_148_148"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_148_148"><span class="label">[148]</span></a>
+          Streckeisen, i. 89. June 1, 1763.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_149_149" id="Footnote_149_149"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_149_149"><span class="label">[149]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>,
+          iii. 202. June 4, 1763.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_150_150" id="Footnote_150_150"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_150_150"><span class="label">[150]</span></a> <i>Memoirs
+          of my Life</i>, p. 55, <i>n.</i> (Ed. 1862). Necker (1732-1804), whom
+          Mdlle. Curchod ultimately married, was an eager admirer of Rousseau.
+          &quot;Ah, how close the tender, humane, and virtuous soul of Julie,&quot;
+          he wrote to her author, &quot;has brought me to you. How the reading
+          of those letters gratified me! how many good emotions did they stir or
+          fortify! How many sublimities in a thousand places in these six
+          volumes; not the sublimity that perches itself in the clouds, but that
+          which pushes everyday virtues to their highest point,&quot; and so on.
+          Feb. 16, 1761. Streckeisen, i. 333.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_151_151" id="Footnote_151_151"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_151_151"><span class="label">[151]</span></a>
+          Boswell's name only occurs twice in Rousseau's letters, I believe;
+          once (<i>Corr.</i>, iv. 394) as the writer of a letter which Hume was
+          suspected of tampering with, and previously (iv. 70) as the bearer of
+          a letter. See also Streckeisen, i. 262.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_152_152" id="Footnote_152_152"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_152_152"><span class="label">[152]</span></a>
+          Streckeisen, ii. 111. Jan. 18, 1765.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_153_153" id="Footnote_153_153"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_153_153"><span class="label">[153]</span></a> Bk. ii.
+          ch. x.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_154_154" id="Footnote_154_154"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_154_154"><span class="label">[154]</span></a>
+          Boswell's <i>Account of Corsica</i>, p. 367.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_155_155" id="Footnote_155_155"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_155_155"><span class="label">[155]</span></a> The
+          correspondence between Rousseau and Buttafuoco has been published in
+          the <i>Oeuvres et Corr. In&#233;dites de J.J.R.</i>, 1861. See pp. 35,
+          43, etc.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_156_156" id="Footnote_156_156"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_156_156"><span class="label">[156]</span></a>
+          Boswell's <i>Life</i>, 179, 193, etc. (Ed. 1866).
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_157_157" id="Footnote_157_157"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_157_157"><span class="label">[157]</span></a> <i>&quot;Je
+          suis tout homme de pouvoir vous regarder avec piti&#233;!&quot;</i>
+          Letter dated Jan. 4, 1766, and given by Musset-Pathay as from a Scotch
+          lord, unnamed. Boswell had the honour of conducting Theresa to
+          England, after Hume had taken Rousseau over. &quot;This young
+          gentleman,&quot; writes Hume, &quot;very good-humoured, very
+          agreeable, and very mad&#8212;has such a rage for literature that I
+          dread some circumstance fatal to our friend's honour. You remember the
+          story of Terentia, who was first married to Cicero, then to Sallust,
+          and at last in her old age married a young nobleman, who imagined that
+          she must possess some secret which would convey to him eloquence and
+          genius.&quot; Burton's <i>Life</i>, ii. 307, 308. Boswell mentions
+          that he met Rousseau in England (<i>Account of Corsica</i>, p. 340),
+          and also gives Rousseau's letter introducing him to Paoli (p. 266).
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_158_158" id="Footnote_158_158"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_158_158"><span class="label">[158]</span></a> To
+          Buttafuoco, p. 48, etc.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_159_159" id="Footnote_159_159"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_159_159"><span class="label">[159]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>,
+          vi. 176. Feb. 26, 1770.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_160_160" id="Footnote_160_160"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_160_160"><span class="label">[160]</span></a> It may
+          be worth noticing, as a link between historic personages, that
+          Napoleon Bonaparte's first piece was a <i>Lettre &#224; Matteo
+          Buttafuoco</i> (1791), the same Buttafuoco with whom Rousseau
+          corresponded, who had been Choiseul's agent in the union of the island
+          to France, was afterwards sent as deputy to the Constituent, and
+          finally became the bitterest enemy of Paoli and the patriotic party.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_161_161" id="Footnote_161_161"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_161_161"><span class="label">[161]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>,
+          iii. 190. To the First Syndic, May 12, 1763.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_162_162" id="Footnote_162_162"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_162_162"><span class="label">[162]</span></a> Grimm's
+          <i>Corr. Lit.</i>, iv. 235. For Rousseau's opinion of his book's
+          companion at the stake, see <i>Corr.</i>, iii. 442.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_163_163" id="Footnote_163_163"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_163_163"><span class="label">[163]</span></a>
+          Streckeisen, ii. 526.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_164_164" id="Footnote_164_164"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_164_164"><span class="label">[164]</span></a> There
+          appears to be no doubt that Rousseau was wrong in attributing to
+          Vernes the <i>Sentimens des Citoyens</i>.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_165_165" id="Footnote_165_165"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_165_165"><span class="label">[165]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>,
+          iv. 116, 122 (April 1765), 165-196 (August); also <i>Conf.</i>, xii.
+          245.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_166_166" id="Footnote_166_166"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_166_166"><span class="label">[166]</span></a> Note to
+          M. Auguis's edition, <i>Corr.</i>, v. 395.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_167_167" id="Footnote_167_167"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_167_167"><span class="label">[167]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>,
+          iv. 204.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_168_168" id="Footnote_168_168"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_168_168"><span class="label">[168]</span></a> <i>Conf.</i>,
+          xii. 259. This lapidation has sometimes been doubted, and treated as
+          an invention of Rousseau's morbid suspicion. The official documents
+          prove that his account was substantially true (see Musset-Pathay, ii.
+          559.)
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_169_169" id="Footnote_169_169"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_169_169"><span class="label">[169]</span></a> The
+          fifth of the <i>R&#234;veries</i>. See also <i>Conf.</i>, 262-279, and
+          <i>Corr.</i>, iv. 206-224. His stay in the island was from the second
+          week in September down to the last in October, 1765.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_170_170" id="Footnote_170_170"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_170_170"><span class="label">[170]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>,
+          iv. 221. Oct. 20, 1765.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_171_171" id="Footnote_171_171"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_171_171"><span class="label">[171]</span></a> <i>Ib.</i>,
+          iv. 136, etc. April 27, 1765.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_172_172" id="Footnote_172_172"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_172_172"><span class="label">[172]</span></a>
+          Streckeisen-Moultou, ii. 209, 212.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_173_173" id="Footnote_173_173"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_173_173"><span class="label">[173]</span></a> <i>Ib.</i>,
+          ii. 554.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_174_174" id="Footnote_174_174"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_174_174"><span class="label">[174]</span></a> He
+          arrived at Strasburg on the 2d or 3d of November, left it about the
+          end of the first week in December, and arrived in Paris on the 16th of
+          December 1765. A sort of apocryphal tradition is said to linger in the
+          island about Rousseau's last evening on the island, how after supper
+          he called for a lute, and sang some passably bad verses. See M.
+          Bougy's <i>J.J. Rousseau</i>, p. 179 (Paris: 1853.)
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_175_175" id="Footnote_175_175"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_175_175"><span class="label">[175]</span></a> Madame
+          de Verdelin to J.J.R. Streckeisen, ii. 532. The minister even
+          expressed his especial delight at being able to serve Rousseau, so
+          little seriousness was there now in the formalities of absolution. <i>Ib.</i>
+          547.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+    </div>
+    <hr style="width: 65%;" />
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[ii.119]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      <a name="CHAPTER_III" id="CHAPTER_III"></a>CHAPTER III.
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      THE SOCIAL CONTRACT.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <span class="smcap">The</span> dominant belief of the best minds of the
+      latter half of the eighteenth century was a passionate faith in the
+      illimitable possibilities of human progress. Nothing short of a general
+      overthrow of the planet could in their eyes stay the ever upward movement
+      of human perfectibility. They differed as to the details of the philosophy
+      of government which they deduced from this philosophy of society, but the
+      conviction that a golden era of tolerance, enlightenment, and material
+      prosperity was close at hand, belonged to them all. Rousseau set his face
+      the other way. For him the golden era had passed away from our globe many
+      centuries ago. Simplicity had fled from the earth. Wisdom and heroism had
+      vanished from out of the minds of leaders. The spirit of citizenship had
+      gone from those who should have upheld the social union in brotherly
+      accord. The dream of human perfectibility which nerved men like Condorcet,
+      was to Rousseau a sour and fantastic mockery. The utmost that men could do
+      was to turn their eyes to the past, to obliterate the interval, to try to
+      walk<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[ii.120]</a></span>
+      for a space in the track of the ancient societies. They would hardly
+      succeed, but endeavour might at least do something to stay the plague of
+      universal degeneracy. Hence the fatality of his system. It placed the
+      centre of social activity elsewhere than in careful and rational
+      examination of social conditions, and in careful and rational effort to
+      modify them. As we began by saying, it substituted a retrograde aspiration
+      for direction, and emotion for the discovery of law. We can hardly wonder,
+      when we think of the intense exaltation of spirit produced both by the
+      perfectibilitarians and the followers of Rousseau, and at the same time of
+      the political degradation and material disorder of France, that so violent
+      a contrast between the ideal and the actual led to a great volcanic
+      outbreak. Alas, the crucial difficulty of political change is to summon
+      new force without destroying the sound parts of a structure which it has
+      taken so many generations to erect. The Social Contract is the formal
+      denial of the possibility of successfully overcoming the difficulty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &quot;Although man deprives himself in the civil state of many advantages
+      which he holds from nature, yet he acquires in return others so great, his
+      faculties exercise and develop themselves, his ideas extend, his
+      sentiments are ennobled, his whole soul is raised to such a degree, that
+      if the abuses of this new condition did not so often degrade him below
+      that from which he has emerged, he would be bound to bless without ceasing
+      the happy moment which rescued<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_121"
+      id="Page_121">[ii.121]</a></span> him from it for ever, and out of a
+      stupid and blind animal made an intelligent being and a man.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor_176_176" id="FNanchor_176_176"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_176_176" class="fnanchor">[176]</a> The little parenthesis
+      as to the frequent degradation produced by the abuses of the social
+      condition, does not prevent us from recognising in the whole passage a
+      tolerably complete surrender of the main position which was taken up in
+      the two Discourses. The short treatise on the Social Contract is an
+      inquiry into the just foundations and most proper form of that very
+      political society, which the Discourses showed to have its foundation in
+      injustice, and to be incapable of receiving any form proper for the
+      attainment of the full measure of human happiness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Inequality in the same way is no longer denounced, but accepted and
+      defined. Locke's influence has begun to tell. The two principal objects of
+      every system of legislation are declared to be liberty and equality. By
+      equality we are warned not to understand that the degrees of power and
+      wealth should be absolutely the same, but that in respect of power, such
+      power should be out of reach of any violence, and be invariably exercised
+      in virtue of the laws; and in respect of riches, that no citizen should be
+      wealthy enough to buy another, and none poor enough to sell himself. Do
+      you say this equality is a mere chimera? It is precisely because the force
+      of things is constantly tending to destroy equality, that the force of
+      legislation ought as constantly to be directed towards up<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[ii.122]</a></span>holding
+      it.<a name="FNanchor_177_177" id="FNanchor_177_177"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_177_177" class="fnanchor">[177]</a> This is much clearer
+      than the indefinite way of speaking which we have already noticed in the
+      second Discourse. It means neither more nor less than that equality before
+      the law which is one of the elementary marks of a perfectly free
+      community.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The idea of the law being constantly directed to counteract the tendencies
+      to violent inequalities in material possessions among different members of
+      a society, is too vague to be criticised. Does it cover and warrant so
+      sweeping a measure as the old <i>seisachtheia</i> of Solon, voiding all
+      contracts in which the debtor had pledged his land or his person; or such
+      measures as the agrarian laws of Licinius and the Gracchi? Or is it to go
+      no further than to condemn such a law as that which in England gives
+      unwilled lands to the eldest son? We can only criticise accurately a
+      general idea of this sort in connection with specific projects in which it
+      is applied. As it stands, it is no more than the expression of what the
+      author thinks a wise principle of public policy. It assumes the existence
+      of property just as completely as the theory of the most rigorous
+      capitalist could do; it gives no encouragement, as the Discourse did, to
+      the notion of an equality in being without property. There is no element
+      of communism in a principle so stated, but it suggests a social idea,
+      based on the moral claim of men to have equality of opportunity. This
+      ideal stamped itself on the minds <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_123"
+      id="Page_123">[ii.123]</a></span>of Robespierre and the other
+      revolutionary leaders, and led to practical results in the sale of the
+      Church and other lands in small lots, so as to give the peasant a market
+      to buy in. The effect of the economic change thus introduced happened to
+      work in the direction in which Rousseau pointed, for it is now known that
+      the most remarkable and most permanent of the consequences of the
+      revolution in the ownership of land was the erection, between the two
+      extreme classes of proprietors, of an immense body of middle-class
+      freeholders. This state is not equality, but gradation, and there is
+      undoubtedly an immense difference between the two. Still its origin is an
+      illustration on the largest scale in history of the force of legislation
+      being exerted to counteract an irregularity that had become unbearable.<a
+      name="FNanchor_178_178" id="FNanchor_178_178"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_178_178" class="fnanchor">[178]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Notwithstanding the disappearance of the more <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[ii.124]</a></span>extravagant elements of
+      the old thesis, the new speculation was far from being purged of the
+      fundamental errors that had given such popularity to its predecessors.
+      &quot;If the sea,&quot; he says in one place, &quot;bathes nothing but
+      inaccessible rocks on your coasts, remain barbarous ichthyophagi; you will
+      live all the more tranquilly for it, better perhaps, and assuredly more
+      happily.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_179_179" id="FNanchor_179_179"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_179_179" class="fnanchor">[179]</a> Apart from an outburst
+      like this, the central idea remained the same, though it was approached
+      from another side and with different objects. The picture of a state of
+      nature had lost none of its perilous attraction, though it was hung in a
+      slightly changed light. It remained the starting-point of the right and
+      normal constitution of civil society, just as it had been the
+      starting-point of the denunciation of civil society as incapable of right
+      constitution, and as necessarily and for ever abnormal. Equally with the
+      Discourses, the Social Contract is a repudiation of that historic method
+      which traces the present along a line of ascertained circumstances, and
+      seeks an improved future in an unbroken continuation of that line. The
+      opening words, which sent such a thrill through the generation to which
+      they were uttered in two continents, &quot;Man is born free, and
+      everywhere he is in chains,&quot; tell us at the outset that we are as far
+      away as ever from the patient method of positive <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[ii.125]</a></span>observation, and as
+      deeply buried as ever in deducing practical maxims from a set of
+      conditions which never had any other than an abstract and phantasmatic
+      existence. How is a man born free? If he is born into isolation, he
+      perishes instantly. If he is born into a family, he is at the moment of
+      his birth committed to a state of social relation, in however rudimentary
+      a form; and the more or less of freedom which this state may ultimately
+      permit to him, depends upon circumstances. Man was hardly born free among
+      Romans and Athenians, when both law and public opinion left a father at
+      perfect liberty to expose his new-born infant. And the more primitive the
+      circumstances, the later the period at which he gains freedom. A child was
+      not born free in the early days of the Roman state, when the <i>patria
+      potestas</i> was a vigorous reality. Nor, to go yet further back, was he
+      born free in the times of the Hebrew patriarchs, when Abraham had full
+      right of sacrificing his son, and Jephthah of sacrificing his daughter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But to speak thus is to speak what we do know. Rousseau was not open to
+      such testimony. &quot;My principles,&quot; he said in contempt of Grotius,
+      &quot;are not founded on the authority of poets; they come from the nature
+      of things and are based on reason.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_180_180"
+      id="FNanchor_180_180"></a><a href="#Footnote_180_180" class="fnanchor">[180]</a>
+      He does indeed in one place express his reverence for the Judaic law, and
+      administers a just rebuke to the philosophic arrogance which saw only
+      successful impostors in the old legislators.<a name="FNanchor_181_181"
+      id="FNanchor_181_181"></a><a href="#Footnote_181_181" class="fnanchor">[181]</a>
+      But he paid no <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[ii.126]</a></span>attention
+      to the processes and usages of which this law was the organic expression,
+      nor did he allow himself to learn from it the actual conditions of the
+      social state which accepted it. It was Locke, whose essay on civil
+      government haunts us throughout the Social Contract, who had taught him
+      that men are born free, equal, and independent. Locke evaded the
+      difficulty of the dependence of childhood by saying that when the son
+      comes to the estate that made his father a free man, he becomes a free man
+      too.<a name="FNanchor_182_182" id="FNanchor_182_182"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_182_182" class="fnanchor">[182]</a> What of the old Roman
+      use permitting a father to sell his son three times? In the same
+      metaphysical spirit Locke had laid down the absolute proposition that
+      &quot;conjugal society is made by a voluntary compact between man and
+      woman.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_183_183" id="FNanchor_183_183"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_183_183" class="fnanchor">[183]</a> This is true of a
+      small number of western societies in our own day, but what of the
+      primitive usages of communal marriages, marriages by capture, purchase,
+      and the rest? We do not mean it as any discredit to writers upon
+      government in the seventeenth century that they did not make good out of
+      their own consciousness the necessary want of knowledge about primitive
+      communities. But it is necessary to point out, first, that they did not
+      realise all the knowledge within their reach, and next that, as a
+      consequence of this, their propositions had a quality that vitiated all
+      their speculative worth. Filmer's contention that man is not naturally
+      free was truer than the position of Locke and Rousseau, and it was so
+      because Filmer <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[ii.127]</a></span>consulted
+      and appealed to the most authentic of the historic records then
+      accessible.<a name="FNanchor_184_184" id="FNanchor_184_184"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_184_184" class="fnanchor">[184]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is the more singular that Rousseau should have thus deliberately put
+      aside all but the most arbitrary and empirical historical lessons, and it
+      shows the extraordinary force with which men may be mastered by abstract
+      prepossessions, even when they have a partial knowledge of the antidote;
+      because Rousseau in several places not only admits, but insists upon, the
+      necessity of making institutions relative to the state of the community,
+      in respect of size, soil, manners, occupation, morality, character. &quot;It
+      is in view of such relations as these that we must assign to each people a
+      particular system, which shall be the best, not perhaps in itself, but for
+      the state for which it is destined.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_185_185"
+      id="FNanchor_185_185"></a><a href="#Footnote_185_185" class="fnanchor">[185]</a>
+      In another place he calls attention to manners, customs, above all to
+      opinion, as the part of a social system on which the success of all the
+      rest depends; particular rules being only the arching of <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[ii.128]</a></span>the
+      vault, of which manners, though so much tardier in rising, form a
+      key-stone that can never be disturbed.<a name="FNanchor_186_186"
+      id="FNanchor_186_186"></a><a href="#Footnote_186_186" class="fnanchor">[186]</a>
+      This was excellent so far as it went, but it was one of the many great
+      truths, which men may hold in their minds without appreciating their full
+      value. He did not see that these manners, customs, opinions, have old
+      roots which must be sought in a historic past; that they are connected
+      with the constitution of human nature, and that then in turn they prepare
+      modifications of that constitution. His narrow, symmetrical, impatient
+      humour unfitted him to deal with the complex tangle of the history of
+      social growths. It was essential to his mental comfort that he should be
+      able to see a picture of perfect order and logical system at both ends of
+      his speculation. Hence, he invented, to begin with, his ideal state of
+      nature, and an ideal mode of passing from that to the social state. He
+      swept away in his imagination the whole series of actual incidents between
+      present and past; and he constructed a system which might be imposed upon
+      all societies indifferently by a legislator summoned for that purpose, to
+      wipe out existing uses, laws, and institutions, and make afresh a clear
+      and undisturbed beginning of national life. The force of habit was slowly
+      and insensibly to be substituted for that of the legislator's authority,
+      but the existence of such habits previously as forces to be dealt with,
+      and the existence of certain limits of pliancy in the conditions of human
+      nature and social possibility, are facts of which the <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[ii.129]</a></span>author of the Social
+      Contract takes not the least account.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rousseau knew hardly any history, and the few isolated pieces of old fact
+      which he had picked up in his very slight reading were exactly the most
+      unfortunate that a student in need of the historic method could possibly
+      have fallen in with. The illustrations which are scantily dispersed in his
+      pages,&#8212;and we must remark that they are no more than illustrations
+      for conclusions arrived at quite independently of them, and not the
+      historical proof and foundations of his conclusions,&#8212;are nearly all
+      from the annals of the small states of ancient Greece, and from the
+      earlier times of the Roman republic. We have already pointed out to what
+      an extent his imagination was struck at the time of his first compositions
+      by the tale of Lycurgus. The influence of the same notions is still
+      paramount. The hopelessness of giving good laws to a corrupt people is
+      supposed to be demonstrated by the case of Minos, whose legislation failed
+      in Crete because the people for whom he made laws were sunk in vices; and
+      by the further example of Plato, who refused to give laws to the Arcadians
+      and Cyrenians, knowing that they were too rich and could never suffer
+      equality.<a name="FNanchor_187_187" id="FNanchor_187_187"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_187_187" class="fnanchor">[187]</a> The writer is thinking
+      of Plato's Laws, when he says that just as nature has fixed limits to the
+      stature of a well-formed man, outside of which she produces giants and
+      dwarfs, so with reference to the best constitution for a state, there
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[ii.130]</a></span>are
+      bounds to its extent, so that it may be neither too large to be capable of
+      good government, nor too small to be independent and self-sufficing. The
+      further the social bond is extended, the more relaxed it becomes, and in
+      general a small state is proportionally stronger than a large one.<a
+      name="FNanchor_188_188" id="FNanchor_188_188"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_188_188" class="fnanchor">[188]</a> In the remarks with
+      which he proceeds to corroborate this position, we can plainly see that he
+      is privately contrasting an independent Greek community with the unwieldy
+      oriental monarchy against which at one critical period Greece had to
+      contend. He had never realised the possibility of such forms of polity as
+      the Roman Empire, or the half-federal dominion of England which took such
+      enormous dimensions in his time, or the great confederation of states
+      which came to birth two years before he died. He was the servant of his
+      own metaphor, as the Greek writers so often were. His argument that a
+      state must be of a moderate size because the rightly shapen man is neither
+      dwarf nor giant, is exactly on a par with Aristotle's argument to the same
+      effect, on the ground that beauty demands size, and there must not be too
+      great nor too small size, because a ship sails badly if it be either too
+      heavy or too light.<a name="FNanchor_189_189" id="FNanchor_189_189"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_189_189" class="fnanchor">[189]</a> And when Rousseau
+      supposes the state to have ten thousand inhabitants, and talks about the
+      right size of its territory,<a name="FNanchor_190_190"
+      id="FNanchor_190_190"></a><a href="#Footnote_190_190" class="fnanchor">[190]</a>
+      who does not think of the five thousand and forty which the Athenian
+      Stranger prescribed to Cleinias the Cretan as the exactly proper <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[ii.131]</a></span>number
+      for the perfectly formed state?<a name="FNanchor_191_191"
+      id="FNanchor_191_191"></a><a href="#Footnote_191_191" class="fnanchor">[191]</a>
+      The prediction of the short career which awaits a state that is cursed
+      with an extensive and accessible seaboard, corresponds precisely with the
+      Athenian Stranger's satisfaction that the new city is to be eighty stadia
+      from the coast.<a name="FNanchor_192_192" id="FNanchor_192_192"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_192_192" class="fnanchor">[192]</a> When Rousseau himself
+      began to think about the organisation of Corsica, he praised the selection
+      of Corte as the chief town of a patriotic administration, because it was
+      far from the sea, and so its inhabitants would long preserve their
+      simplicity and uprightness.<a name="FNanchor_193_193" id="FNanchor_193_193"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_193_193" class="fnanchor">[193]</a> And in later years
+      still, when meditating upon a constitution for Poland, he propounded an
+      economic system essentially Spartan; the people were enjoined to think
+      little about foreigners, to give themselves little concern about commerce,
+      to suppress stamped paper, and to put a tithe upon the land.<a
+      name="FNanchor_194_194" id="FNanchor_194_194"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_194_194" class="fnanchor">[194]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The chapter on the Legislator is in the same region. We are again referred
+      to Lycurgus; and to the circumstance that Greek towns usually confided to
+      a stranger the sacred task of drawing up their laws. His experience in
+      Venice and the history of his native town supplemented the examples of
+      Greece. Geneva summoned a stranger to legislate for her, and &quot;those
+      who only look on Calvin as a theologian have a scanty idea of the extent
+      of his genius; the preparation of our wise edicts, in which he had so
+      large a <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[ii.132]</a></span>part,
+      do him as much honour as his Institutes.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_195_195"
+      id="FNanchor_195_195"></a><a href="#Footnote_195_195" class="fnanchor">[195]</a>
+      Rousseau's vision was too narrow to let him see the growth of government
+      and laws as a co-ordinate process, flowing from the growth of all the
+      other parts and organs of society, and advancing in more or less equal
+      step along with them. He could begin with nothing short of an absolute
+      legislator, who should impose a system from without by a single act, a
+      structure hit upon once for all by his individual wisdom, not slowly
+      wrought out by many minds, with popular assent and co-operation, at the
+      suggestion of changing social circumstances and need.<a
+      name="FNanchor_196_196" id="FNanchor_196_196"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_196_196" class="fnanchor">[196]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All this would be of very trifling importance in the history of political
+      literature, but for the extraordinary influence which circumstances
+      ultimately bestowed upon it. The Social Contract was the gospel of the
+      Jacobins, and much of the action of the supreme party in France during the
+      first months of the year 1794 is only fully intelligible when we look upon
+      it as the result and practical application of Rousseau's teaching. The
+      conception of the situation entertained by Robespierre and Saint Just was
+      entirely moulded on all this talk about the legislators of Greece and
+      Geneva. &quot;The transition of an oppressed nation to democracy is like
+      the effort by which nature rose from nothingness to existence. You must
+      entirely refashion a people whom you wish <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[ii.133]</a></span>to make free&#8212;destroy
+      its prejudices, alter its habits, limit its necessities, root up its
+      vices, purify its desires. The state therefore must lay hold on every
+      human being at his birth, and direct his education with powerful hand.
+      Solon's weak confidence threw Athens into fresh slavery, while Lycurgus's
+      severity founded the republic of Sparta on an immovable basis.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor_197_197" id="FNanchor_197_197"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_197_197" class="fnanchor">[197]</a> These words, which
+      come from a decree of the Committee of Public Safety, might well be taken
+      for an excerpt from the Social Contract. The fragments of the institutions
+      by which Saint Just intended to regenerate his country, reveal a man with
+      the example of Lycurgus before his eyes in every line he wrote.<a
+      name="FNanchor_198_198" id="FNanchor_198_198"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_198_198" class="fnanchor">[198]</a> When on the eve of the
+      Thermidorian revolution which over<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_134"
+      id="Page_134">[ii.134]</a></span>threw him and his party, he insisted on
+      the necessity of a dictatorship, he was only thinking of the means by
+      which he should at length obtain the necessary power for forcing his
+      regenerating projects on the country; for he knew that Robespierre, whom
+      he named as the man for the dictatorship, accepted his projects, and would
+      lend the full force of the temporal arm to the propagation of ideas which
+      they had acquired together from Jean Jacques, and from the Greeks to whom
+      Jean Jacques had sent them for example and instruction.<a
+      name="FNanchor_199_199" id="FNanchor_199_199"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_199_199" class="fnanchor">[199]</a> No doubt the condition
+      of France after 1792 must naturally have struck any one too deeply imbued
+      with the spirit of the Social Contract to look beneath the surface of the
+      society with which the Convention had to deal, as urgently inviting a
+      lawgiver of the ancient stamp. The old order in church and state had been
+      swept away, no organs for the performance of the functions of national
+      life were visible, the moral ideas which had bound the social elements
+      together in the extinct monarchy seemed to be permanently sapped. A
+      politician who had for years been dreaming about Minos and Lycurgus and
+      Calvin, especially if he lived in a state with such a tradition of
+      centralisation as ruled in France, was sure to suppose that here was the
+      scene and the moment for a splendid repetition on an immense scale of
+      those immortal achievements. The futility of the <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[ii.135]</a></span>attempt was the practical
+      and ever memorable illustration of the defect of Rousseau's geometrical
+      method. It was one thing to make laws for the handful of people who lived
+      in Geneva in the sixteenth century, united in religious faith, and
+      accepting the same form and conception of the common good. It was a very
+      different thing to try to play Calvin over some twenty-five millions of a
+      heterogeneously composed nation, abounding in variations of temperament,
+      faith, laws, and habits and weltering in unfathomable distractions. The
+      French did indeed at length invite a heaven-sent stranger from Corsica to
+      make laws for them, but not until he had set his foot upon their neck; and
+      even Napoleon Bonaparte, who had begun life like the rest of his
+      generation by writing Rousseauite essays, made a swift return to the
+      historic method in the equivocal shape of the Concordat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Not only were Rousseau's schemes of polity conceived from the point of
+      view of a small territory with a limited population. &quot;You must not,&quot;
+      he says in one place, &quot;make the abuses of great states an objection
+      to a writer who would fain have none but small ones.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor_200_200" id="FNanchor_200_200"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_200_200" class="fnanchor">[200]</a> Again, when he said
+      that in a truly free state the citizens performed all their services to
+      the community with their arms and none by money, and that he looked upon
+      the corv&#233;e (or compulsory labour on the public roads) as less hostile
+      to freedom than taxes,<a name="FNanchor_201_201" id="FNanchor_201_201"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_201_201" class="fnanchor">[201]</a> he showed that he was
+      thinking of a state <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[ii.136]</a></span>not
+      greatly passing the dimensions of a parish. This was not the only defect
+      of his schemes. They assumed a sort of state of nature in the minds of the
+      people with whom the lawgiver had to deal. Saint Just made the same
+      assumption afterwards, and trusted to his military school to erect on
+      these bare plots whatever superstructure he might think fit to appoint. A
+      society that had for so many centuries been organised and moulded by a
+      powerful and energetic church, armed with a definite doctrine, fixing the
+      same moral tendencies in a long series of successive generations, was not
+      in the naked mental state which the Jacobins postulated. It was not
+      prepared to accept free divorce, the substitution of friendship for
+      marriage, the displacement of the family by the military school, and the
+      other articles in Saint Just's programme of social renovation. The twelve
+      apostles went among people who were morally swept and garnished, and they
+      went armed with instruments proper to seize the imagination of their
+      hearers. All moral reformers seek the ignorant and simple, poor fishermen
+      in one scene, labourers and women in another, for the good reason that new
+      ideas only make way on ground that is not already too heavily encumbered
+      with prejudices. But France in 1793 was in no condition of this kind.
+      Opinion in all its spheres was deepened by an old and powerful
+      organisation, to a degree which made any<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[ii.137]</a></span> attempt to abolish the
+      opinion, as the organisation appeared to have been abolished, quite
+      hopeless until the lapse of three or four hundred years had allowed due
+      time for dissolution. After all it was not until the fourth century of our
+      era that the work of even the twelve apostles began to tell decisively and
+      quickly. As for the Lycurgus of whom the French chattered, if such a
+      personality ever existed out of the region of myth, he came to his people
+      armed with an oracle from the gods, just as Moses did, and was himself
+      regarded as having a nature touched with divinity. No such pretensions
+      could well be made by any French legislator within a dozen years or so of
+      the death of Voltaire.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Let us here remark that it was exactly what strikes us as the desperate
+      absurdity of the assumptions of the Social Contract, which constituted the
+      power of that work, when it accidentally fell into the hands of men who
+      surveyed a national system wrecked in all its parts. The Social Contract
+      is worked out precisely in that fashion which, if it touches men at all,
+      makes them into fanatics. Long trains of reasoning, careful allegation of
+      proofs, patient admission on every hand of qualifying propositions and
+      multitudinous limitations, are essential to science, and produce treatises
+      that guide the wise statesman in normal times. But it is dogma that gives
+      fervour to a sect. There are always large classes of minds to whom
+      anything in the shape of a vigorously compact system is irresistibly
+      fascinating, and to whom the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_138"
+      id="Page_138">[ii.138]</a></span> qualification of a proposition, or the
+      limitation of a theoretic principle is distressing or intolerable. Such
+      persons always come to the front for a season in times of distraction,
+      when the party that knows its own aims most definitely is sure to have the
+      best chance of obtaining power. And Rousseau's method charmed their
+      temperament. A man who handles sets of complex facts is necessarily
+      slow-footed, but one who has only words to deal with, may advance with a
+      speed, a precision, a consistency, a conclusiveness, that has a magical
+      potency over men who insist on having politics and theology drawn out in
+      exact theorems like those of Euclid.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rousseau traces his conclusions from words, and develops his system from
+      the interior germs of phrases. Like the typical schoolman, he assumes that
+      analysis of terms is the right way of acquiring new knowledge about
+      things; he mistakes the multiplication of propositions for the discovery
+      of fresh truth. Many pages of the Social Contract are mere logical
+      deductions from verbal definitions: the slightest attempt to confront them
+      with actual fact would have shown them to be not only valueless, but
+      wholly meaningless, in connection with real human nature and the visible
+      working of human affairs. He looks into the word, or into his own verbal
+      notion, and tells us what is to be found in that, whereas we need to be
+      told the marks and qualities that distinguish the object which the word is
+      meant to recall. Hence arises his habit of setting himself questions, with<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[ii.139]</a></span>
+      reference to which we cannot say that the answers are not true, but only
+      that the questions themselves were never worth asking. Here is an instance
+      of his method of supposing that to draw something from a verbal notion is
+      to find out something corresponding to fact. &quot;We can distinguish in
+      the magistrate three essentially different wills: 1st, the will peculiar
+      to him as an individual, which only tends to his own particular advantage;
+      2nd, the common will of the magistrates, which refers only to the
+      advantage of the prince [<i>i.e.</i> the government], and this we may name
+      corporate will, which is general in relation to the government, and
+      particular in relation to the state of which the government is a part;
+      3rd, the will of the people or sovereign will, which is general, as well
+      in relation to the state considered as a whole, as in relation to the
+      government considered as part of the whole.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_202_202"
+      id="FNanchor_202_202"></a><a href="#Footnote_202_202" class="fnanchor">[202]</a>
+      It might be hard to prove that all this is not true, but then it is unreal
+      and comes to nothing, as we see if we take the trouble to turn it into
+      real matter. Thus a member of the British House of Commons, who is a
+      magistrate in Rousseau's sense, has three essentially different wills:
+      first, as a man, Mr. So-and-so; second, his corporate will, as member of
+      the chamber, and this will is general in relation to the legislature, but
+      particular in relation to the whole body of electors and peers; third, his
+      will as a member of the great electoral body, which is a general will
+      alike in relation to the electoral <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_140"
+      id="Page_140">[ii.140]</a></span>body and to the legislature. An English
+      publicist is perfectly welcome to make assertions of this kind, if he
+      chooses to do so, and nobody will take the trouble to deny them. But they
+      are nonsense. They do not correspond to the real composition of a member
+      of parliament, nor do they shed the smallest light upon any part either of
+      the theory of government in general, or the working of our own government
+      in particular. Almost the same kind of observation might be made of the
+      famous dogmatic statements about sovereignty. &quot;Sovereignty, being
+      only the exercise of the general will, can never be alienated, and the
+      sovereign, who is only a collective being, can only be represented by
+      himself: the power may be transmitted, but not the will;&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor_203_203" id="FNanchor_203_203"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_203_203" class="fnanchor">[203]</a> sovereignty is
+      indivisible, not only in principle, but in object;<a
+      name="FNanchor_204_204" id="FNanchor_204_204"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_204_204" class="fnanchor">[204]</a> and so forth. We shall
+      have to consider these remarks from another point of view. At present we
+      refer to them as illustrating the character of the book, as consisting of
+      a number of expansions of definitions, analysed as words, not compared
+      with the facts of which the words are representatives. This way of
+      treating political theory enabled the writer to assume an air of certitude
+      and precision, which led narrow deductive minds completely captive. Burke
+      poured merited scorn on the application of geometry to politics and
+      algebraic formulas to government, but then it was just this seeming
+      demonstration, this measured accuracy, that filled Rousseau's disciples
+      with a supreme and undoubting con<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_141"
+      id="Page_141">[ii.141]</a></span>fidence which leaves the modern student
+      of these schemes in amazement unspeakable. The thinness of Robespierre's
+      ideas on government ceases to astonish us, when we remember that he had
+      not trained himself to look upon it as the art of dealing with huge groups
+      of conflicting interests, of hostile passions, of hardly reconcilable
+      aims, of vehemently opposed forces. He had disciplined his political
+      intelligence on such meagre and unsubstantial argumentation as the
+      following:&#8212;&quot;Let us suppose the state composed of ten thousand
+      citizens. The sovereign can only be considered collectively and as a body;
+      but each person, in his quality as subject, is considered as an individual
+      unit; thus the sovereign is to the subject as ten thousand is to one; in
+      other words, each member of the state has for his share only the
+      ten-thousandth part of the sovereign authority, though he is submitted to
+      it in all his own entirety. If the people be composed of a hundred
+      thousand men, the condition of the subjects does not change, and each of
+      them bears equally the whole empire of the laws, while his suffrage,
+      reduced to a hundred-thousandth, has ten times less influence in drawing
+      them up. Then, the subject remaining still only one, the relation of the
+      sovereign augments in the ratio of the number of the citizens. Whence it
+      follows that, the larger the state becomes, the more does liberty
+      diminish.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_205_205" id="FNanchor_205_205"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_205_205" class="fnanchor">[205]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Apart from these arithmetical conceptions, and the <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[ii.142]</a></span>deep charm which their
+      assurance of expression had for the narrow and fervid minds of which
+      England and Germany seem to have got finally rid in Anabaptists and Fifth
+      Monarchy men, but which still haunted France, there were maxims in the
+      Social Contract of remarkable convenience for the members of a Committee
+      of Public Safety. &quot;How can a blind multitude,&quot; the writer asks
+      in one place, &quot;which so often does not know its own will, because it
+      seldom knows what is good for it, execute of itself an undertaking so vast
+      and so difficult as a system of legislation?&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor_206_206" id="FNanchor_206_206"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_206_206" class="fnanchor">[206]</a> Again, &quot;as nature
+      gives to each man an absolute power over all his members, so the social
+      pact gives to the body politic an absolute power over all its members; and
+      it is this same power which, when directed by the general will, bears, as
+      I have said, the name of sovereignty.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_207_207"
+      id="FNanchor_207_207"></a><a href="#Footnote_207_207" class="fnanchor">[207]</a>
+      Above all, the little chapter on a dictatorship is the very foundation of
+      the position of the Robespierrists in the few months immediately preceding
+      their fall. &quot;It is evidently the first intention of the people that
+      the state should not perish,&quot; and so on, with much criticism of the
+      system of occasional dictatorships, as they were resorted to in old Rome.<a
+      name="FNanchor_208_208" id="FNanchor_208_208"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_208_208" class="fnanchor">[208]</a> Yet this does not in
+      itself go much beyond the old monarchic doctrine of Prerogative, as a
+      corrective for the slowness and want of immediate applicability of mere
+      legal processes in cases of state emergency; and it is worth noticing
+      again and again that in spite of the shriek<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[ii.143]</a></span>ings of reaction, the few
+      atrocities of the Terror are an almost invisible speck compared with the
+      atrocities of Christian churchmen and lawful kings, perpetrated in
+      accordance with their notion of what constituted public safety. So far as
+      Rousseau's intention goes, we find in his writings one of the strongest
+      denunciations of the doctrine of public safety that is to be found in any
+      of the writings of the century. &quot;Is the safety of a citizen,&quot; he
+      cries, &quot;less the common cause than the safety of the state? They may
+      tell us that it is well that one should perish on behalf of all. I will
+      admire such a sentence in the mouth of a virtuous patriot, who voluntarily
+      and for duty's sake devotes himself to death for the salvation of his
+      country. But if we are to understand that it is allowed to the government
+      to sacrifice an innocent person for the safety of the multitude, I hold
+      this maxim for one of the most execrable that tyranny has ever invented,
+      and the most dangerous that can be admitted.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor_209_209" id="FNanchor_209_209"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_209_209" class="fnanchor">[209]</a> It may be said that
+      the Terrorists did not sacrifice innocent life, but the plea is frivolous
+      on the lips of men who proscribed whole classes. You cannot justly draw a
+      capital indictment against a class. Rousseau, however, cannot fairly be
+      said to have had a share in the responsibility for the more criminal part
+      of the policy of 1793, any more than the founder of Christianity is
+      responsible for the atrocities that have been committed by the more ardent
+      worshippers of his name, and justified by stray <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[ii.144]</a></span>texts caught up from the
+      gospels. Helv&#233;tius had said, &quot;All becomes legitimate and even
+      virtuous on behalf of the public safety.&quot; Rousseau wrote in the
+      margin, &quot;The public safety is nothing unless individuals enjoy
+      security.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_210_210" id="FNanchor_210_210"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_210_210" class="fnanchor">[210]</a> The author of a theory
+      is not answerable for the applications which may be read into it by the
+      passions of men and the exigencies of a violent crisis. Such applications
+      show this much and no more, that the theory was constructed with an
+      imperfect consideration of the qualities of human nature, with too narrow
+      a view of the conditions of society, and therefore with an inadequate
+      appreciation of the consequences which the theory might be drawn to
+      support.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is time to come to the central conception of the Social Contract, the
+      dogma which made of it for a time the gospel of a nation, the memorable
+      doctrine of the sovereignty of peoples. Of this doctrine Rousseau was
+      assuredly not the inventor, though the exaggerated language of some
+      popular writers in France leads us to suppose that they think of him as
+      nothing less. Even in the thirteenth century the constitution of the
+      Orders, and the contests of the friars with the clergy, had engendered
+      faintly democratic ways of thinking.<a name="FNanchor_211_211"
+      id="FNanchor_211_211"></a><a href="#Footnote_211_211" class="fnanchor">[211]</a>
+      Among others the great Aquinas had protested against the juristic doctrine
+      that the law is the pleasure of the prince. The will of the prince, he
+      says, to be a law, must be directed <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[ii.145]</a></span>by reason; law is
+      appointed for the common good, and not for a special or private good: it
+      follows from this that only the reason of the multitude, or of a prince
+      representing the multitude, can make a law.<a name="FNanchor_212_212"
+      id="FNanchor_212_212"></a><a href="#Footnote_212_212" class="fnanchor">[212]</a>
+      A still more remarkable approach to later views was made by Marsilio of
+      Padua, physician to Lewis of Bavaria, who wrote a strong book on his
+      master's side, in the great contest between him and the pope (1324).
+      Marsilio in the first part of his work not only lays down very elaborately
+      the proposition that laws ought to be made by the &quot;<i>universitas
+      civium</i>&quot;; he places this sovereignty of the people on the true
+      basis (which Rousseau only took for a secondary support to his original
+      compact), namely, the greater likelihood of laws being obeyed in the first
+      place, and being good laws in the second, when they are made by the body
+      of the persons affected. &quot;No one knowingly does hurt to himself, or
+      deliberately asks what is unjust, and on that account all or a great
+      majority must wish such law as best suits the common interest of the
+      citizens.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_213_213" id="FNanchor_213_213"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_213_213" class="fnanchor">[213]</a> Turning from this to
+      the Social Contract, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[ii.146]</a></span>or
+      to Locke's essay on Government, the identity in doctrine and
+      correspondence in dialect may teach us how little true originality there
+      can he among thinkers who are in the same stage; how a metaphysician of
+      the thirteenth century and a metaphysician of the eighteenth hit on the
+      same doctrine; and how the true classification of thinkers does not follow
+      intervals of time, but is fixed by differences of method. It is impossible
+      that in the constant play of circumstances and ideas in the minds of
+      different thinkers, the same combinations of form and colour in a
+      philosophic arrangement of such circumstances and ideas should not recur.
+      Signal novelties in thought are as limited as signal inventions in
+      architectural construction. It is only one of the great changes in method,
+      that can remove the limits of the old combinations, by bringing new
+      material and fundamentally altering the point of view.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the sixteenth century there were numerous writers who declared the
+      right of subjects to depose a bad sovereign, but this position is to be
+      distinguished from Rousseau's doctrine. Thus, if we turn to the great
+      historic event of 1581, the rejection of the yoke of Spain by the Dutch,
+      we find the Declaration of Independence running, &quot;that if a prince is
+      appointed by God over the land, it is to protect them from harm, even as a
+      shepherd to the guardianship of his flock. The subjects are not appointed
+      by God for the behoof of the prince, but the prince for his subjects,
+      without whom he is no prince.&quot; This is obviously divine<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[ii.147]</a></span>
+      right, fundamentally modified by a popular principle, accepted to meet the
+      exigencies of the occasion, and to justify after the event a measure which
+      was dictated by urgent need for practical relief. Such a notion of the
+      social compact was still emphatically in the semi-patriarchal stage, and
+      is distinct as can be from the dogma of popular sovereignty as Rousseau
+      understood it. But it plainly marked a step on the way. It was the
+      development of Protestant principles which produced and necessarily
+      involved the extreme democratic conclusion. Time was needed for their full
+      expansion in this sense, but the result could only have been avoided by a
+      suppression of the Reformation, and we therefore count it inevitable.
+      Bodin (1577) had defined sovereignty as residing in the supreme
+      legislative authority, without further inquiry as to the source or seat of
+      that authority, though he admits the vague position which even Lewis XIV.
+      did not deny, that the object of political society is the greatest good of
+      every citizen or the whole state. In 1603 a Protestant professor of law in
+      Germany, Althusen by name, published a treatise of Politics, in which the
+      doctrine of the sovereignty of peoples was clearly formulated, to the
+      profound indignation both of Jesuits and of Protestant jurists.<a
+      name="FNanchor_214_214" id="FNanchor_214_214"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_214_214" class="fnanchor">[214]</a> Rousseau mentions his
+      name;<a name="FNanchor_215_215" id="FNanchor_215_215"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_215_215" class="fnanchor">[215]</a> it does not appear
+      that he read Althusen's rather uncommon treatise, but its teaching would
+      probably have a place in the traditions of political theorising <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[ii.148]</a></span>current
+      at Geneva, to the spirit of whose government it was so congenial. Hooker,
+      vindicating episcopacy against the democratic principles of the Puritans,
+      had still been led, apparently by way of the ever dominant idea of a law
+      natural, to base civil government on the assent of the governed, and had
+      laid down such propositions as these: &quot;Laws they are not, which
+      public approbation hath not made so. Laws therefore human, of what kind
+      soever, are available by consent,&quot; and so on.<a
+      name="FNanchor_216_216" id="FNanchor_216_216"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_216_216" class="fnanchor">[216]</a> The views of the
+      Ecclesiastical Polity were adopted by Locke, and became the foundation of
+      the famous essay on Civil Government, from which popular leaders in our
+      own country drew all their weapons down to the outbreak of the French
+      Revolution. Grotius (1625) starting from the principle that the law of
+      nature enjoins that we should stand by our agreements, then proceeded to
+      assume either an express, or at any rate a tacit and implied, promise on
+      the part of all who become members of a community, to obey the majority of
+      the body, or a majority of those to whom authority has been delegated.<a
+      name="FNanchor_217_217" id="FNanchor_217_217"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_217_217" class="fnanchor">[217]</a> This is a unilateral
+      view of the social contract, and omits the element of reciprocity which in
+      Rousseau's idea was cardinal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[ii.149]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Locke was Rousseau's most immediate inspirer, and the latter affirmed
+      himself to have treated the same matters exactly on Locke's principles.
+      Rousseau, however, exaggerated Locke's politics as greatly as Condillac
+      exaggerated his metaphysics. There was the important difference that
+      Locke's essay on Civil Government was the justification in theory of a
+      revolution which had already been accomplished in practice, while the
+      Social Contract, tinged as it was by silent reference in the mind of the
+      writer to Geneva, was yet a speculation in the air. The circumstances
+      under which it was written gave to the propositions of Locke's piece a
+      reserve and moderation which savour of a practical origin and a special
+      case. They have not the wide scope and dogmatic air and literary precision
+      of the corresponding propositions in Rousseau. We find in Locke none of
+      those concise phrases which make fanatics. But the essential doctrine is
+      there. The philosopher of the Revolution of 1688 probably carried its
+      principles further than most of those who helped in the Revolution had any
+      intention to carry them, when he said that &quot;the legislature being
+      only a fiduciary power to act for certain ends, there remains still in the
+      people a supreme power to remove or alter the legislative.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor_218_218" id="FNanchor_218_218"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_218_218" class="fnanchor">[218]</a> It may <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[ii.150]</a></span>be
+      questioned how many of the peers of that day would have assented to the
+      proposition that the people&#8212;and did Locke mean by the people the
+      electors of the House of Commons, or all males over twenty-one, or all
+      householders paying rates?&#8212;could by any expression of their will
+      abolish the legislative power of the upper chamber, or put an end to the
+      legislative and executive powers of the crown. But Locke's statements are
+      direct enough, though he does not use so terse a label for his doctrine as
+      Rousseau affixed to it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Again, besides the principle of popular sovereignty, Locke most likely
+      gave to Rousseau the idea of the origin of this sovereignty in the civil
+      state in a pact or contract, which was represented as the foundation and
+      first condition of the civil state. From this naturally flowed the
+      connected theory, of a perpetual consent being implied as given by the
+      people to each new law. We need not quote passages from Locke to
+      demonstrate the substantial correspondence of assumption between him and
+      the author of the Social Contract. They are found in every chapter.<a
+      name="FNanchor_219_219" id="FNanchor_219_219"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_219_219" class="fnanchor">[219]</a> Such principles were
+      indispensable for the defence of a <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_151"
+      id="Page_151">[ii.151]</a></span>Revolution like that of 1688, which was
+      always carefully marked out by its promoters, as well as by its eloquent
+      apologist and expositor a hundred years later, the great Burke, as above
+      all things a revolution within the pale of the law or the constitution.
+      They represented the philosophic adjustment of popular ideas to the
+      political changes wrought by shifting circumstances, as distinguished from
+      the biblical or Hebraic method of adjusting such ideas, which had
+      prevailed in the contests of the previous generation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yet there was in the midst of those contests one thinker of the first rank
+      in intellectual power, who had constructed a genuine philosophy of
+      government. Hobbes's speculations did not fit in with the theory of either
+      of the two bodies of combatants in the Civil War. They were each in the
+      theological order of ideas, and neither of them sought or was able to
+      comprehend the application of philosophic principles to their own case or
+      to that of their adversaries.<a name="FNanchor_220_220"
+      id="FNanchor_220_220"></a><a href="#Footnote_220_220" class="fnanchor">[220]</a>
+      Hebrew precedents and bible texts, on the one hand; prerogative of use and
+      high church doctrine, on the other. Between these was no space for the
+      acceptance of a secular and rationalistic theory, covering the whole field
+      of a social constitution. Now the influence of Hobbes upon Rousseau was
+      very marked, and very singular. There were numerous differences between
+      the philosopher of Geneva and his predecessor of <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[ii.152]</a></span>Malmesbury. The one
+      looked on men as good, the other looked on them as bad. The one described
+      the state of nature as a state of peace, the other as a state of war. The
+      one believed that laws and institutions had depraved man, the other that
+      they had improved him.<a name="FNanchor_221_221" id="FNanchor_221_221"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_221_221" class="fnanchor">[221]</a> But these differences
+      did not prevent the action of Hobbes on Rousseau. It resulted in a curious
+      fusion between the premisses and the temper of Hobbes and the conclusions
+      of Locke. This fusion produced that popular absolutism of which the Social
+      Contract was the theoretical expression, and Jacobin supremacy the
+      practical manifestation. Rousseau borrowed from Hobbes the true conception
+      of sovereignty, and from Locke the true conception of the ultimate seat
+      and original of authority, and of the two together he made the great image
+      of the sovereign people. Strike the crowned head from that monstrous
+      figure which is the frontispiece of the Leviathan, and you have a
+      frontispiece that will do excellently well for the Social Contract. Apart
+      from a multitude of other obligations, good and bad, which Rousseau owed
+      to Hobbes, as we shall point out, we may here mention that of the superior
+      accuracy of the notion of law in the Social Contract over the notion of
+      law in Montesquieu's work. The latter begins, as everybody knows, with a
+      definition inextricably confused: &quot;Laws are necessary relations
+      flowing from the nature of things, and in this sense all beings have their
+      laws, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[ii.153]</a></span>divinity
+      has its laws, the material world has its laws, the intelligences superior
+      to men have their laws, the beasts have their laws, man has his laws....
+      There is a primitive reason, and laws are the relations to be found
+      between that and the different beings, and the relations of these
+      different beings among one another.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_222_222"
+      id="FNanchor_222_222"></a><a href="#Footnote_222_222" class="fnanchor">[222]</a>
+      Rousseau at once put aside these divergent meanings, made the proper
+      distinction between a law of nature and the imperative law of a state, and
+      justly asserted that the one could teach us nothing worth knowing about
+      the other.<a name="FNanchor_223_223" id="FNanchor_223_223"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_223_223" class="fnanchor">[223]</a> Hobbes's phraseology
+      is much less definite than this, and shows that he had not himself wholly
+      shaken off the same confusion as reigned in Montesquieu's account a
+      century later. But then Hobbes's account of the true meaning of
+      sovereignty was so clear, firm, and comprehensive, as easily to lead any
+      fairly perspicuous student who followed him, to apply it to the true
+      meaning of law. And on this head of law not so much fault is to be found
+      with Rousseau, as on the head of larger constitutional theory. He did not
+      look long enough at given laws, and hence failed to seize all their
+      distinctive qualities; above all he only half saw, if he saw at all, that
+      a law is a command and not a contract, and his eyes were closed to this,
+      because the true view was incompatible with his fundamental assumption of
+      contract as the base of the social union.<a name="FNanchor_224_224"
+      id="FNanchor_224_224"></a><a href="#Footnote_224_224" class="fnanchor">[224]</a>
+      But he did at all events <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_154"
+      id="Page_154">[ii.154]</a></span>grasp the quality of generality as
+      belonging to laws proper, and separated them justly from what he calls
+      decrees, which we are now taught to name occasional or particular
+      commands.<a name="FNanchor_225_225" id="FNanchor_225_225"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_225_225" class="fnanchor">[225]</a> This is worth
+      mentioning, because it shows that, in spite of his habits of intellectual
+      laxity, Rousseau was capable, where he had a clear-headed master before
+      him, of a very considerable degree of precision of thought, however liable
+      it was to fall into error or deficiency for want of abundant comparison
+      with bodies of external fact. Let us now proceed to some of the central
+      propositions of the Social Contract.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      1. The origin of society dates from the moment when the obstacles which
+      impede the preservation of men in a state of nature are too strong for
+      such forces as each individual can employ in order to keep himself in that
+      state. At this point they can only save themselves by aggregation.
+      Problem: to find a form of association which defends and protects with the
+      whole common force the person and property of each associate, and by
+      which, each uniting himself to all, still only obeys himself, and remains
+      as free as he was before. Solution: a social compact reducible to these
+      words, &quot;Each of us places in common his person and his whole power
+      under the supreme direction of the general will; and we further receive
+      each member as indivisible part of the whole.&quot; This act of
+      association constitutes a moral and collective body, a public person.<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[ii.155]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The practical importance and the mischief of thus suffering society to
+      repose on conventions which the human will had made, lay in the corollary
+      that the human will is competent at any time to unmake them, and also
+      therefore to devise all possible changes that fell short of unmaking them.
+      This was the root of the fatal hypothesis of the dictator, or divinely
+      commissioned lawgiver. External circumstance and human nature alike were
+      passive and infinitely pliable; they were the material out of which the
+      legislator was to devise conventions at pleasure, without apprehension as
+      to their suitableness either to the conditions of society among which they
+      were to work, or to the passions and interests of those by whom they were
+      to be carried out, and who were supposed to have given assent to them. It
+      would be unjust to say that Rousseau actually faced this position and took
+      the consequences. He expressly says in more places than one that the
+      science of Government is only a science of combinations, applications, and
+      exceptions, according to time, place, and circumstance.<a
+      name="FNanchor_226_226" id="FNanchor_226_226"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_226_226" class="fnanchor">[226]</a> But to base society on
+      conventions is to impute an element of arbitrariness to these combinations
+      and applications, and to make them independent, as they can never be, of
+      the limits inexorably fixed by the nature of things. The notion of compact
+      is the main source of all the worst vagaries in Rousseau's political
+      speculation.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[ii.156]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is worth remarking in the history of opinion, that there was at this
+      time in France a little knot of thinkers who were nearly in full
+      possession of the true view of the limits set by the natural ordering of
+      societies to the power of convention and the function of the legislators.
+      Five years after the publication of the Social Contract, a remarkable book
+      was written by one of the economic sect of the Physiocrats, the later of
+      whom, though specially concerned with the material interests of
+      communities, very properly felt the necessity of connecting the discussion
+      of wealth with the assumption of certain fundamental political conditions.
+      They felt this, because it is impossible to settle any question about
+      wages or profits, for instance, until you have first settled whether you
+      are assuming the principles of liberty and property. This writer with
+      great consistency found the first essential of all social order in
+      conformity of positive law and institution to those qualities of human
+      nature, and their relations with those material instruments of life,
+      which, and not convention, were the true origin, as they are the actual
+      grounds, of the perpetuation of our societies.<a name="FNanchor_227_227"
+      id="FNanchor_227_227"></a><a href="#Footnote_227_227" class="fnanchor">[227]</a>
+      This was wiser than Rousseau's con<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_157"
+      id="Page_157">[ii.157]</a></span>ception of the lawgiver as one who should
+      change human nature, and take away from man the forces that are naturally
+      his own, to replace them by others comparatively foreign to him.<a
+      name="FNanchor_228_228" id="FNanchor_228_228"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_228_228" class="fnanchor">[228]</a> Rousseau once wrote,
+      in a letter about Rivi&#232;re's book, that the great problem in politics,
+      which might be compared with the quadrature of the circle in geometry, is
+      to find a form of government which shall place law above man.<a
+      name="FNanchor_229_229" id="FNanchor_229_229"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_229_229" class="fnanchor">[229]</a> A more important
+      problem, and not any less difficult for the political theoriser, is to
+      mark the bounds at which the authority of the law is powerless or
+      mischievous in attempting to control the egoistic or non-social parts of
+      man. This problem Rousseau ignored, and <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[ii.158]</a></span>that he should do so was
+      only natural in one who believed that man had bound himself by a
+      convention, strictly to suppress his egoistic and non-social parts, and
+      who based all his speculation on this pact as against the force, or the
+      paternal authority, or the will of a Supreme Being, in which other writers
+      founded the social union.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      2. The body thus constituted by convention is the sovereign. Each citizen
+      is a member of the sovereign, standing in a definite relation to
+      individuals <i>qua</i> individuals; he is also as an individual a member
+      of the state and subject to the sovereign, of which from the first point
+      of view he is a component element. The sovereign and the body politic are
+      one and the same thing.<a name="FNanchor_230_230" id="FNanchor_230_230"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_230_230" class="fnanchor">[230]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of the antecedents and history of this doctrine enough has already been
+      said. Its general truth as a description either of what is, or what ought
+      to be and will be, demands an ampler discussion than there is any occasion
+      to carry on here. We need only point out its place as a kind of
+      intermediate dissolvent for which the time was most ripe. It breaks up the
+      feudal conception of political authority as a property of land-ownership,
+      noble birth, and the like, and it associates this authority widely and
+      simply with the bare fact of participation in any form of citizenship in
+      the social union. The later and higher idea of every share of political
+      power as a function to be discharged for the good of the whole body, and
+      not <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[ii.159]</a></span>merely
+      as a right to be enjoyed for the advantage of its possessor, was a form of
+      thought to which Rousseau did not rise. That does not lessen the
+      effectiveness of the blow which his doctrine dealt to French feudalism,
+      and which is its main title to commemoration in connection with his name.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The social compact thus made is essentially different from the social
+      compact which Hobbes described as the origin of what he calls
+      commonwealths by institution, to distinguish them from commonwealths by
+      acquisition, that is to say, states formed by conquest or resting on
+      hereditary rule. &quot;A commonwealth,&quot; Hobbes says, &quot;is said to
+      be instituted when a multitude of men do agree and covenant, every one
+      with every one, that to whatsoever man or assembly of men shall be given
+      by the major part the right to present the person of them all, that is to
+      say, to be their representative; every one ... shall authorise all the
+      actions and judgments of that man or assembly of men, in the same manner
+      as if they were his own, to the end to live peaceably among themselves,
+      and be protected against other men.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_231_231"
+      id="FNanchor_231_231"></a><a href="#Footnote_231_231" class="fnanchor">[231]</a>
+      But Rousseau's compact was an act of association among equals, who also
+      remained equals. Hobbes's compact was an act of surrender on the part of
+      the many to one or a number. The first was the constitution of civil
+      society, the second was the erection of a government. As nobody now
+      believes in the existence of any such compact in either one form or the
+      other, it would be <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[ii.160]</a></span>superfluous
+      to inquire which of the two is the less inaccurate. All we need do is to
+      point out that there was this difference. Rousseau distinctly denied the
+      existence of any element of contract in the erection of a government;
+      there is only one contract in the state, he said, and it is that of
+      association.<a name="FNanchor_232_232" id="FNanchor_232_232"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_232_232" class="fnanchor">[232]</a> Locke's notion of the
+      compact which was the beginning of every political society is indefinite
+      on this point; he speaks of it indifferently as an agreement of a body of
+      free men to unite and incorporate into a society, and an agreement to set
+      up a government.<a name="FNanchor_233_233" id="FNanchor_233_233"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_233_233" class="fnanchor">[233]</a> Most of us would
+      suppose the two processes to be as nearly identical as may be; Rousseau
+      drew a distinction, and from this distinction he derived further
+      differences.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Here, we may remark, is the starting-point in the history of the ideas of
+      the revolution, of one of the most prominent of them all, that of
+      Fraternity. If the whole structure of society rests on an act of
+      partnership entered into by equals on behalf of themselves and their
+      descendants for ever, the nature of the union is not what it would be, if
+      the members of the union had only entered it to place their liberties at
+      the feet of some superior power. Society in the one case is a covenant of
+      subjection, in the other a covenant of social brotherhood. This impressed
+      itself deeply on the feelings of men like Robespierre, who were never so
+      well pleased as when they could find for their sentimentalism a covering
+      of neat political logic. The same idea of association came presently <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[ii.161]</a></span>to
+      receive a still more remarkable and momentous extension, when it was
+      translated from the language of mere government into that of the economic
+      organisation of communities. Rousseau's conception went no further than
+      political association, as distinct from subjection. Socialism, which came
+      by and by to the front place, carried the idea to its fullest capacity,
+      and presented all the relations of men with one another as fixed by the
+      same bond. Men had entered the social union as brethren, equal, and
+      co-operators, not merely for purposes of government, but for purposes of
+      mutual succour in all its aspects. This naturally included the most
+      important of all, material production. They were not associated merely as
+      equal participants in political sovereignty; they were equal participants
+      in all the rest of the increase made to the means of human happiness by
+      united action. Socialism is the transfer of the principle of fraternal
+      association from politics, where Rousseau left it, to the wider sphere of
+      industrial force.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is perhaps worth notice that another famous revolutionary term belongs
+      to the same source. All the associates of this act of union, becoming
+      members of the city, are as such to be called Citizens, as participating
+      in the sovereign authority.<a name="FNanchor_234_234" id="FNanchor_234_234"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_234_234" class="fnanchor">[234]</a> The term was in
+      familiar use enough among the French in their worst days, but it was
+      Rousseau's sanction which marked it in the new times with a sort of
+      sacramental stamp. It came naturally to him, because it was the <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[ii.162]</a></span>name
+      of the first of the two classes which constituted the active portion of
+      the republic of Geneva, and the only class whose members were eligible to
+      the chief magistracies.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      3. We next have a group of propositions setting forth the attributes of
+      sovereignty. It is inalienable.<a name="FNanchor_235_235"
+      id="FNanchor_235_235"></a><a href="#Footnote_235_235" class="fnanchor">[235]</a>
+      It is indivisible.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These two propositions, which play such a part in the history of some of
+      the episodes of the French Revolution, contain no more than was contended
+      for by Hobbes, and has been accepted in our own times by Austin. When
+      Hobbes says that &quot;to the laws which the sovereign maketh, the
+      sovereign is not subject, for if he were subject to the civil laws he were
+      subject to himself, which were not subjection but freedom,&quot; his
+      notion of sovereignty is exactly that expressed by Rousseau in his
+      unexplained dogma of the inalienableness of sovereignty. So Rousseau means
+      no more by the dogma that sovereignty is indivisible, than Austin meant
+      when he declared of the doctrine that the legislative sovereign powers and
+      the executive sovereign powers belong in any society to distinct parties,
+      that it is a supposition too palpably false to endure a moment's
+      examination.<a name="FNanchor_236_236" id="FNanchor_236_236"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_236_236" class="fnanchor">[236]</a> The way in which this
+      account of the indivisibleness of sovereignty was understood during the
+      revolution, twisted it into a condemnation of the dreaded idea of
+      Federalism. It might just as well have been interpreted to condemn
+      alliances between nations; for the properties of <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[ii.163]</a></span>sovereignty are clearly
+      independent of the dimensions of the sovereign unit. Another effect of
+      this doctrine was the rejection by the Constituent Assembly of the
+      balanced parliamentary system, which the followers of Montesquieu would
+      fain have introduced on the English model. Whether that was an evil or a
+      good, publicists will long continue to dispute.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      4. The general will of the sovereign upon an object of common interest is
+      expressed in a law. Only the sovereign can possess this law-making power,
+      because no one but the sovereign has the right of declaring the general
+      will. The legislative power cannot be exerted by delegation or
+      representation. The English fancy that they are a free nation, but they
+      are grievously mistaken. They are only free during the election of members
+      of parliament; the members once chosen, the people are slaves, nay, as
+      people they have ceased to exist.<a name="FNanchor_237_237"
+      id="FNanchor_237_237"></a><a href="#Footnote_237_237" class="fnanchor">[237]</a>
+      It is impossible <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[ii.164]</a></span>for
+      the sovereign to act, except when the people are assembled. Besides such
+      extraordinary assemblies as unforeseen events may call for, there must be
+      fixed periodical meetings that nothing can interrupt or postpone. Do you
+      call this chimerical? Then you have forgotten the Roman comitia, as well
+      as such gatherings of the people as those of the Macedonians and the
+      Franks and most other nations in their primitive times. What has existed
+      is certainly possible.<a name="FNanchor_238_238" id="FNanchor_238_238"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_238_238" class="fnanchor">[238]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is very curious that Rousseau in this part of his subject should have
+      contented himself with going back to Macedonia and Rome, instead of
+      pointing to the sovereign states that have since become confederate with
+      his native republic. A historian in our own time has described with an
+      enthusiasm that equals that of the Social Contract, how he saw the
+      sovereign people of Uri and the sovereign people of Appenzell <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[ii.165]</a></span>discharge
+      the duties of legislation and choice of executive, each in the majesty of
+      its corporate person.<a name="FNanchor_239_239" id="FNanchor_239_239"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_239_239" class="fnanchor">[239]</a> That Rousseau was
+      influenced by the free sovereignty of the states of the Swiss
+      confederation, as well as by that of his own city, we may well believe.
+      Whether he was or not, it must always be counted a serious misfortune that
+      a writer who was destined to exercise such power in a crisis of the
+      history of a great nation, should have chosen his illustrations from a
+      time and from societies so remote, that the true conditions of their
+      political system could not possibly be understood with any approach to
+      reality, while there were, within a few leagues of his native place,
+      communities where the system of a sovereign public in his own sense was
+      actually alive and flourishing and at work. From them the full meaning of
+      his theories might have been practically gathered, and whatever useful
+      lessons lay at the bottom of them might have been made plain. As it was,
+      it came to pass singularly enough that the effect of the French Revolution
+      was the suppression, happily only for a time, of the only governments in
+      Europe where the doctrine of the favourite apostle of the Revolution was a
+      reality. The constitution of the Helvetic Republic in 1798 was as bad a
+      blow to the sovereignty of peoples in a true sense, as the old house of
+      Austria or Charles of Burgundy could ever have dealt. That constitution,
+      moreover, was directly opposed to the Social Contract in setting up what
+      it called representative demo<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_166"
+      id="Page_166">[ii.166]</a></span>cracy, for representative democracy was
+      just what Rousseau steadily maintained to be a nullity and a delusion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The only lesson which the Social Contract contained for a statesman bold
+      enough to take into his hands the reconstruction of France, undoubtedly
+      pointed in the direction of confederation. At one place, where he became
+      sensible of the impotence which his assumption of a small state inflicted
+      on his whole speculation, Rousseau said he would presently show how the
+      good order of a small state might be united to the external power of a
+      great people. Though he never did this, he hints in a footnote that his
+      plan belonged to the theory of confederations, of which the principles
+      were still to be established.<a name="FNanchor_240_240"
+      id="FNanchor_240_240"></a><a href="#Footnote_240_240" class="fnanchor">[240]</a>
+      When he gave advice for the renovation of the wretched constitution of
+      Poland, he insisted above all things that they should apply themselves to
+      extend and perfect the system of federate governments, &quot;the only one
+      that unites in itself all the advantages of great and small states.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor_241_241" id="FNanchor_241_241"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_241_241" class="fnanchor">[241]</a> A very few years after
+      the appearance of his book, the great American union of sovereign states
+      arose to point the political moral. The French revolutionists missed the
+      force alike of <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[ii.167]</a></span>the
+      practical example abroad, and of the theory of the book which they took
+      for gospel at home. How far they were driven to this by the urgent
+      pressure of foreign war, or whether they would have followed the same
+      course without that interference, merely in obedience to the catholic and
+      monarchic absolutism which had sunk so much deeper into French character
+      than people have been willing to admit, we cannot tell. The fact remains
+      that the Jacobins, Rousseau's immediate disciples, at once took up the
+      chain of centralised authority where it had been broken off by the ruin of
+      the monarchy. They caught at the letter of the dogma of a sovereign
+      people, and lost its spirit. They missed the germ of truth in Rousseau's
+      scheme, namely, that for order and freedom and just administration the
+      unit should not be too large to admit of the participation of the persons
+      concerned in the management of their own public affairs. If they had
+      realised this and applied it, either by transforming the old monarchy into
+      a confederacy of sovereign provinces, or by some less sweeping
+      modification of the old centralised scheme of government, they might have
+      saved France.<a name="FNanchor_242_242" id="FNanchor_242_242"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_242_242" class="fnanchor">[242]</a> But, once more, men
+      interpret a political treatise on principles which <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[ii.168]</a></span>either come to them by
+      tradition; or else spring suddenly up from roots of passion.<a
+      name="FNanchor_243_243" id="FNanchor_243_243"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_243_243" class="fnanchor">[243]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      5. The government is the minister of the sovereign. It is an intermediate
+      body set up between sovereign and subjects for their mutual
+      correspondence, charged with the execution of the laws and the maintenance
+      of civil and political freedom. The members comprising it are called
+      magistrates or kings, and to the whole body so composed, whether of one or
+      of more than one, is given the name of prince. If the whole power is
+      centred in the hands of a single magistrate, from whom all the rest hold
+      their authority, the government is called a monarchy. If there are more
+      persons simply citizens than there are magistrates, this is an
+      aristocracy.<a name="FNanchor_244_244" id="FNanchor_244_244"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_244_244" class="fnanchor">[244]</a> If more citizen
+      magistrates than simple private citizens, that is a democracy. The last
+      government is as a general rule best fitted for small states, and the
+      first for large ones&#8212;on the principle that the number of the supreme
+      magistrates ought to be in the inverse ratio of that of the citizens. But
+      there is a multitude of circumstances which may furnish reasons for
+      exceptions to this general rule.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[ii.169]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This common definition of the three forms of governments according to the
+      mere number of the participants in the chief magistracy, though adopted by
+      Hobbes and other writers, is certainly inadequate and uninstructive,
+      without some further qualification. Aristotle, for instance, furnishes
+      such a qualification, when he refers to the interests in which the
+      government is carried on, whether the interest of a small body or of the
+      whole of the citizens.<a name="FNanchor_245_245" id="FNanchor_245_245"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_245_245" class="fnanchor">[245]</a> Montesquieu's
+      well-known division, though logically faulty, still has the merit of
+      pointing to conditions of difference among forms of government, outside of
+      and apart from the one fact of the number of the sovereign. To divide
+      governments, as Montesquieu did, into republics, monarchies, and
+      despotisms, was to use two principles of division, first the number of the
+      sovereign, and next something else, namely, the difference between a
+      constitutional and an absolute monarch. Then he returned to the first
+      principle of division, and separated a republic into a government of all,
+      which is a democracy, and a government by a part, which is aristocracy.<a
+      name="FNanchor_246_246" id="FNanchor_246_246"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_246_246" class="fnanchor">[246]</a> Still, to have
+      introduced the element of law-abidingness in the chief magistracy, whether
+      of one or more, was to have called attention to the fact that no single
+      distinction is enough to furnish us with a conception of the real and
+      vital differences which may exist between one form of government and
+      another.<a name="FNanchor_247_247" id="FNanchor_247_247"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_247_247" class="fnanchor">[247]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[ii.170]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The important fact about a government lies quite as much in the qualifying
+      epithet which is to be affixed to any one of the three names, as in the
+      name itself. We know nothing about a monarchy, until we have been told
+      whether it is absolute or constitutional; if absolute, whether it is
+      administered in the interests of the realm, like that of Prussia under
+      Frederick the Great, or in the interests of the ruler, like that of an
+      Indian principality under a native prince; if constitutional, whether the
+      real power is aristocratic, as in Great Britain a hundred years ago, or
+      plutocratic, as in Great Britain to-day, or popular, as it may be here
+      fifty years hence. And so with reference to each of the other two forms;
+      neither name gives us any instruction, except of a merely negative kind,
+      until it has been made precise by one or more explanatory epithets. What
+      is the common quality of the old Roman republic, the republics of the
+      Swiss confederation, the republic of Venice, the American republic, the
+      republic of Mexico? Plainly the word republic has no further effect beyond
+      that of excluding the idea of a recognised dynasty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rousseau is perhaps less open to this kind of criticism than other writers
+      on political theory, for the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_171"
+      id="Page_171">[ii.171]</a></span> reason that he distinguishes the
+      constitution of the state from the constitution of the government. The
+      first he settles definitely. The whole body of the people is to be
+      sovereign, and to be endowed alone with what he conceived as the only
+      genuinely legislative power. The only question which he considers open is
+      as to the form in which the <i>delegated executive authority</i> shall be
+      organised. Democracy, the immediate government of all by all, he rejects
+      as too perfect for men; it requires a state so small that each citizen
+      knows all the others, manners so simple that the business may be small and
+      the mode of discussion easy, equality of rank and fortune so general as
+      not to allow of the overriding of political equality by material
+      superiority, and so forth.<a name="FNanchor_248_248" id="FNanchor_248_248"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_248_248" class="fnanchor">[248]</a> Monarchy labours under
+      a number of disadvantages which are tolerably obvious. &quot;One essential
+      and inevitable defect, which must always place monarchic below republican
+      government, is that in the latter the public voice hardly ever promotes to
+      the first places any but capable and enlightened men who fill them with
+      honour; whereas those who get on in monarchies, are for the most part
+      small busybodies, small knaves, small intriguers, in whom the puny talents
+      which are the secret of reaching substantial posts in courts, only serve
+      to show their stupidity to the public as soon as they have made their way
+      to the front. The people is far less likely to make a blunder in a choice
+      of this sort, than the prince, and a man of true merit is nearly as rare
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[ii.172]</a></span>in
+      the ministry, as a fool at the head of the government of a republic.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor_249_249" id="FNanchor_249_249"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_249_249" class="fnanchor">[249]</a> There remains
+      aristocracy. Of this there are three sorts: natural, elective, and
+      hereditary. The first can only thrive among primitive folk, while the
+      third is the worst of all governments. The second is the best, for it is
+      aristocracy properly so called. If men only acquire rule in virtue of
+      election, then purity, enlightenment, experience, and all the other
+      grounds of public esteem and preference, become so many new guarantees
+      that the administration shall be wise and just. It is the best and most
+      natural order that the wisest should govern the multitude, provided you
+      are sure that they will govern the multitude for its advantage, and not
+      for their own. If aristocracy of this kind requires one or two virtues
+      less than a popular executive, it also demands others which are peculiar
+      to itself, such as moderation in the rich and content in the poor. For
+      this form comports with a certain inequality of fortune, for the reason
+      that it is well that the administration of public affairs should be
+      confided to those who are best able to give their whole time to it. At the
+      same time it is of importance that an opposite choice should occasionally
+      teach the people that in the merit of men there are more momentous reasons
+      of preference than wealth.<a name="FNanchor_250_250" id="FNanchor_250_250"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_250_250" class="fnanchor">[250]</a> Rousseau, as we have
+      seen, had pronounced English liberty to be no liberty at all, save during
+      the few days once in seven years when the elections to parliament take
+      place. Yet this scheme of an elective <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[ii.173]</a></span>aristocracy was in truth
+      a very near approach to the English form as it is theoretically presented
+      in our own day, with a suffrage gradually becoming universal. If the
+      suffrage were universal, and if its exercise took place once a year, our
+      system, in spite of the now obsolescent elements of hereditary aristocracy
+      and nominal monarchy, would be as close a realisation of the scheme of the
+      Social Contract as any representative system permits. If Rousseau had
+      further developed his notions of confederation, the United States would
+      most have resembled his type.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      6. What is to be the attitude of the state in respect of religion?
+      Certainly not that prescribed by the policy of the middle ages. The
+      separation of the spiritual from the temporal power, indicated by Jesus
+      Christ, and developed by his followers in the course of many subsequent
+      generations, was in Rousseau's eyes most mischievous, because it ended in
+      the subordination of the temporal power to the spiritual, and that is
+      incompatible with an efficient polity. Even the kings of England, though
+      they style themselves heads of the church, are really its ministers and
+      servants.<a name="FNanchor_251_251" id="FNanchor_251_251"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_251_251" class="fnanchor">[251]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The last allegation evinces Rousseau's usual ignorance of history, and
+      need not be discussed, any more than his proposition on which he lays so
+      much stress, that Christians cannot possibly be good soldiers, nor truly
+      good citizens, because their hearts being fixed upon another world, they
+      must necessarily be indiffer<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_174"
+      id="Page_174">[ii.174]</a></span>ent to the success or failure of such
+      enterprises as they may take up in this.<a name="FNanchor_252_252"
+      id="FNanchor_252_252"></a><a href="#Footnote_252_252" class="fnanchor">[252]</a>
+      In reading the Social Contract, and some other of the author's writings
+      besides, we have constantly to interpret the direct, positive, categorical
+      form of assertion into something of this kind&#8212;&quot;Such and such
+      consequences ought logically to follow from the meaning of the name, or
+      the definition of a principle, or from such and such motives.&quot; The
+      change of this moderate form of provisional assertion into the
+      unconditional statement that such and such consequences have actually
+      followed, constantly lands the author in propositions which any reader who
+      tests them by an appeal to the experience of mankind, written and
+      unwritten, at once discovers to be false and absurd. Rousseau himself took
+      less trouble to verify his conclusions by such an appeal to experience
+      than any writer that ever lived in a scientific age. The other remark to
+      be made on the above section is that the rejection of the Christian or
+      ecclesiastical division of the powers of the church and the powers of the
+      state, is the strongest illustration that could be found of the debt of
+      Rousseau's conception of a state to the old pagan conception. It was the
+      main characteristic of the polities which Christian monotheism and
+      feudalism together succeeded in replacing, to recognise no such division
+      as that between church and state, pope and emperor. Rousseau resumed the
+      old conception. But he adjusted it in a certain degree to the spirit of
+      his own <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[ii.175]</a></span>time,
+      and imposed certain philosophical limitations upon it. His scheme is as
+      follows.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Religion, he says, in its relation to the state, may be considered as of
+      three kinds. First, natural religion, without temple, altar, or rite, the
+      true and pure theism of the natural conscience of man. Second, local,
+      civil, or positive religion, with dogmas, rites, exercises; a theology of
+      a primitive people, exactly co-extensive with all the rights and all the
+      duties of men. Third, a religion like the Christianity of the Roman
+      church, which gives men two sets of laws, two chiefs, two countries,
+      submits them to contradictory duties, and prevents them from being able to
+      be at once devout and patriotic. The last of these is so evidently
+      pestilent as to need no discussion. The second has the merit of teaching
+      men to identify duty to their gods with duty to their country; under this
+      to die for the land is martyrdom, to break its laws impiety, and to
+      subject a culprit to public execration is to devote him to the anger of
+      the gods. But it is bad, because it is at bottom a superstition, and
+      because it makes a people sanguinary and intolerant. The first of all,
+      which is now styled a Christian theism, having no special relation with
+      the body politic, adds no force to the laws. There are many particular
+      objections to Christianity flowing from the fact of its not being a
+      kingdom of this world, and this above all, that Christianity only preaches
+      servitude and dependence.<a name="FNanchor_253_253" id="FNanchor_253_253"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_253_253" class="fnanchor">[253]</a> What then is to be
+      done? The sovereign <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[ii.176]</a></span>must
+      establish a purely civil profession of faith. It will consist of the
+      following positive dogmas:&#8212;the existence of a divinity, powerful,
+      intelligent, beneficent and foreseeing; the life to come; the happiness of
+      the just, the chastisement of the wicked; the sanctity of the social
+      contract and the laws. These articles of belief are imposed, not as dogmas
+      of religion exactly, but as sentiments of sociability. If any one declines
+      to accept them, he ought to be exiled, not for being impious, but for
+      being unsociable, incapable of sincere attachment to the laws, or of
+      sacrificing his life to his duty. If any one, after publicly recognising
+      these dogmas, carries himself as if he did not believe them, let him be
+      punished by death, for he has committed the worst of crimes, he has lied
+      before the laws.<a name="FNanchor_254_254" id="FNanchor_254_254"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_254_254" class="fnanchor">[254]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rousseau thus, unconsciously enough, brought to its climax that reaction
+      against the absorption of the state in the church which had first taken a
+      place in literature in the controversy between legists and canonists, and
+      had found its most famous illustration <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[ii.177]</a></span>in the De Monarchi&#226;
+      of the great poet of catholicism. The division of two co-equal realms, one
+      temporal, the other spiritual, was replaced in the Genevese thinker by
+      what he admitted to be &quot;pure Hobbism.&quot; This, the rigorous
+      subordination of the church to the state, was the end, so far as France
+      went, of the speculative controversy which had occupied Europe for so many
+      ages, as to the respective powers of pope and emperor, of positive law and
+      law divine. The famous civil constitution of the clergy (1790), which was
+      the expression of Rousseau's principle as formulated by his disciples in
+      the Constituent Assembly, was the revolutionary conclusion to the
+      world-wide dispute, whose most melodramatic episode had been the scene in
+      the courtyard of Canossa.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rousseau's memorable prescription, banishing all who should not believe in
+      God, or a future state, or in rewards and punishments for the deeds done
+      in the body, and putting to death any who, after subscribing to the
+      required profession, should seem no longer to hold it, has naturally
+      created a very lively horror in a tolerant generation like our own, some
+      of whose finest spirits have rejected deliberately and finally the
+      articles of belief, without which they could not have been suffered to
+      exist in Rousseau's state. It seemed to contemporaries, who were
+      enthusiastic above all things for humanity and infinite tolerance, these
+      being the prizes of the long conflict which they hoped they were
+      completing, to be a return to the horrors of the Holy Office. Men were as
+      shocked as<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[ii.178]</a></span>
+      the modern philosopher is, when he finds the greatest of the followers of
+      Socrates imposing in his latest piece the penalty of imprisonment for five
+      years, to be followed in case of obduracy by death, on one who should not
+      believe in the gods set up for the state by the lawmaker.<a
+      name="FNanchor_255_255" id="FNanchor_255_255"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_255_255" class="fnanchor">[255]</a> And we can hardly
+      comfort ourselves, as Milton did about Plato, who framed laws which no
+      city ever yet received, and &quot;fed his fancy with making many edicts to
+      his airy burgomasters, which they who otherwise admire him, wish had been
+      rather buried and excused in the genial cups of an academic night-sitting.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor_256_256" id="FNanchor_256_256"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_256_256" class="fnanchor">[256]</a> Rousseau's ideas fell
+      among men who were most potent and corporeal burgomasters. In the winter
+      of 1793 two parties in Paris stood face to face; the rationalistic,
+      Voltairean party of the Commune, named improperly after H&#233;bert, but
+      whose best member was Chaumette, and the sentimental, Rousseauite party,
+      led by Robespierre. The first had industriously desecrated the churches,
+      and consummated their revolt against the gods of the old time by the
+      public worship of the Goddess of Reason, who was prematurely set up for
+      deity of the new time. Robespierre retaliated with the mummeries of the
+      Festival of the Supreme Being, and protested against atheism as the crime
+      of aristocrats. Presently the atheistic party succumbed. Chaumette was not
+      directly implicated in the proceedings which led to their fall, but he was
+      by and by accused of conspiring <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_179"
+      id="Page_179">[ii.179]</a></span>with H&#233;bert, Clootz, and the rest,
+      &quot;to destroy all notion of Divinity and base the government of France
+      on atheism.&quot; &quot;They attack the immortality of the soul,&quot;
+      cried Saint Just, &quot;the thought which consoled Socrates in his dying
+      moments, and their dream is to raise atheism into a worship.&quot; And
+      this was the offence, technically and officially described, for which
+      Chaumette and Clootz were sent to the guillotine (April 1794), strictly on
+      the principle which had been laid down in the Social Contract, and
+      accepted by Robespierre.<a name="FNanchor_257_257" id="FNanchor_257_257"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_257_257" class="fnanchor">[257]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It would have been odd in any writer less firmly possessed with the
+      infallibility of his own dreams than Rousseau was, that he should not have
+      seen the impossibility in anything like the existing conditions of human
+      nature, of limiting the profession of civil faith to the three or four
+      articles which happened to constitute his own belief. Having once granted
+      the general position that a citizen may be required to profess some
+      religious faith, there is no speculative principle, and there is no force
+      in the world, which can fix any bound to the amount or kind of religious
+      faith which the state has the right thus to exact. Rousseau said that a
+      man was dangerous to the city who did not believe in God, a future state,
+      and divine reward and retribution. But then Calvin thought a man dangerous
+      who did not believe both that there <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[ii.180]</a></span>is only one God, and also
+      that there are three Gods. And so Chaumette went to the scaffold, and
+      Servetus to the stake, on the one common principle that the civil
+      magistrate is concerned with heresy. And H&#233;bert was only following
+      out the same doctrine in a mild and equitable manner, when he insisted on
+      preventing the publication of a book in which the author professed his
+      belief in a God. A single step in the path of civil interference with
+      opinion leads you the whole way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The history of the Protestant churches is enough to show the pitiable
+      futility of the proviso for religious tolerance with which Rousseau closed
+      his exposition. &quot;If there is no longer an exclusive national
+      religion, then every creed ought to be tolerated which tolerates other
+      creeds, so long as it contains nothing contrary to the duties of the
+      citizen. But whoever dares to say, <i>Out of the church, no salvation</i>,
+      ought to be banished from the state.&quot; The reason for which Henry IV.
+      embraced the Roman religion&#8212;namely, that in that he might be saved,
+      in the opinion alike of Protestants and Catholics, whereas in the reformed
+      faith, though he was saved according to Protestants, yet according to
+      Catholics he was necessarily damned,&#8212;ought to have made every honest
+      man, and especially every prince, reject it. It was the more curious that
+      Rousseau did not see the futility of drawing the line of tolerance at any
+      given set of dogmas, however simple and slight and acceptable to himself
+      they might be, because he invited special admiration for D'Argenson's<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[ii.181]</a></span>
+      excellent maxim that &quot;in the republic everybody is perfectly free in
+      what does not hurt others.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_258_258"
+      id="FNanchor_258_258"></a><a href="#Footnote_258_258" class="fnanchor">[258]</a>
+      Surely this maxim has very little significance or value, unless we
+      interpret it as giving entire liberty of opinion, because no opinion
+      whatever can hurt others, until it manifests itself in act, including of
+      course speech, which is a kind of act. Rousseau admitted that over and
+      above the profession of civil faith, a citizen might hold what opinions he
+      pleased, in entire freedom from the sovereign's cognisance or
+      jurisdiction; &quot;for as the sovereign has no competence in the other
+      world, the fate of subjects in that other world is not his affair,
+      provided they are good citizens in this.&quot; But good citizenship
+      consists in doing or forbearing from certain actions, and to punish men on
+      the inference that forbidden action is likely to follow from the rejection
+      of a set of opinions, or to exact a test oath of adherence to such
+      opinions on the same principle, is to concede the whole theory of civil
+      intolerance, however little Rousseau may have realised the perfectly
+      legitimate applications of his doctrine. It was an unconscious compromise.
+      He was thinking of Calvin in practice and Hobbes in theory, and he was at
+      the same time influenced by the moderate spirit of his time, and the
+      comparatively reasonable character of his personal belief. He praised
+      Hobbes as the only author who had seen the right remedy for the conflict
+      of the spiritual and temporal jurisdictions, by proposing to <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[ii.182]</a></span>unite
+      the two heads of the eagle, and reducing all to political unity, without
+      which never will either state or government be duly constituted. But
+      Hobbes was consistent without flinching. He refused to set limits to the
+      religious prescriptions which a sovereign might impose, for &quot;even
+      when the civil sovereign is an infidel, every one of his own subjects that
+      resisteth him, sinneth against the laws of God (for such are the laws of
+      nature), and rejecteth the counsel of the apostles, that admonisheth all
+      Christians to obey their princes.... And for their faith, it is internal
+      and invisible: they have the licence that Naaman had, and need not put
+      themselves into danger for it; but if they do, they ought to expect their
+      reward in heaven, and not complain of their lawful sovereign.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor_259_259" id="FNanchor_259_259"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_259_259" class="fnanchor">[259]</a> All this flowed from
+      the very idea and definition of sovereignty, which Rousseau accepted from
+      Hobbes, as we have already seen. Such consequences, however, stated in
+      these bold terms, must have been highly revolting to Rousseau; he could
+      not assent to an exercise of sovereignty which might be atheistic,
+      Mahometan, or anything else unqualifiedly monstrous. He failed to see the
+      folly of trying to unite the old notions of a Christian commonwealth with
+      what was fundamentally his own notion of a commonwealth after the ancient
+      type. He stripped the pagan republics, which he took for his model, of
+      their national and official polytheism, and he put on in its stead a
+      scanty remnant of theism slightly tinged with Christianity.<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[ii.183]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then he practically accepted Hobbes's audacious bidding to the man who
+      should not be able to accept the state creed, to go courageously to
+      martyrdom, and leave the land in peace. For the modern principle, which
+      was contained in D'Argenson's saying previously quoted, that the civil
+      power does best absolutely and unreservedly to ignore spirituals, he was
+      not prepared either by his emancipation from the theological ideas of his
+      youth, or by his observation of the working and tendencies of systems,
+      which involved the state in some more or less close relations with the
+      church, either as superior, equal, or subordinate. Every test is sure to
+      insist on mental independence ending exactly where the speculative
+      curiosity of the time is most intent to begin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Let us now shortly confront Rousseau's ideas with some of the propositions
+      belonging to another method of approaching the philosophy of government,
+      that have for their key-note the conception of expediency or convenience,
+      and are tested by their conformity to the observed and recorded experience
+      of mankind. According to this method, the ground and origin of society is
+      not a compact; that never existed in any known case, and never was a
+      condition of obligation either in primitive or developed societies, either
+      between subjects and sovereign, or between the equal members of a
+      sovereign body. The true ground is an acceptance of conditions which came
+      into existence by the sociability inherent in man, and were developed by
+      man's spontaneous search after convenience. The<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[ii.184]</a></span> statement that while the
+      constitution of man is the work of nature, that of the state is the work
+      of art,<a name="FNanchor_260_260" id="FNanchor_260_260"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_260_260" class="fnanchor">[260]</a> is as misleading as
+      the opposite statement that governments are not made but grow.<a
+      name="FNanchor_261_261" id="FNanchor_261_261"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_261_261" class="fnanchor">[261]</a> The truth lies between
+      them, in such propositions as that institutions owe their existence and
+      development to deliberate human effort, working in accordance with
+      circumstances naturally fixed both in human character and in the external
+      field of its activity. The obedience of the subject to the sovereign has
+      its root not in contract but in force,&#8212;the force of the sovereign to
+      punish disobedience. A man does not consent to be put to death if he shall
+      commit a murder, for the reason alleged by Rousseau, namely, as a means of
+      protecting his own life against murder.<a name="FNanchor_262_262"
+      id="FNanchor_262_262"></a><a href="#Footnote_262_262" class="fnanchor">[262]</a>
+      There is no consent in the transaction. Some person or persons, possessed
+      of sovereign authority, promulgated a command that the subject should not
+      commit murder, and appointed penalties for such commission and it was not
+      a fictitious assent to these penalties, but the fact that the sovereign
+      was strong enough to enforce them, which made the command valid.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Supposing a law to be passed in an assembly of the sovereign people by a
+      majority; what binds a member of the minority to obedience? Rousseau's
+      answer is this:&#8212;When the law is proposed, the <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[ii.185]</a></span>question put is not
+      whether they approve or reject the proposition, but whether it is
+      conformable to the general will: the general will appears from the votes:
+      if the opinion contrary to my own wins the day, that only proves that I
+      was mistaken, and that what I took for the general will was not really so.<a
+      name="FNanchor_263_263" id="FNanchor_263_263"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_263_263" class="fnanchor">[263]</a> We can scarcely
+      imagine more nonsensical sophistry than this. The proper answer evidently
+      is, that either experience or calculation has taught the citizens in a
+      popular government that in the long run it is most expedient for the
+      majority of votes to decide the law. In other words, the inconvenience to
+      the minority of submitting to a law which they dislike, is less than the
+      inconvenience of fighting to have their own way, or retiring to form a
+      separate community. The minority submit to obey laws which were made
+      against their will, because they cannot avoid the necessity of undergoing
+      worse inconveniences than are involved in this submission. The same
+      explanation partially covers what is unfortunately the more frequent case
+      in the history of the race, the submission of the majority to the laws
+      imposed by a minority of one or more. In both these cases, however, as in
+      the general question of the source of our obedience to the laws,
+      deliberate and conscious sense of convenience is as slight in its effect
+      upon conduct here, as it is in the rest of the field of our moral motives.
+      It is covered too thickly over and constantly neutralised by the
+      multitudinous growths of use, by the many <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[ii.186]</a></span>forms of fatalistic or
+      ascetic religious sentiment, by physical apathy of race, and all other
+      conditions that interpose to narrow or abrogate the authority of pure
+      reason over human conduct. Rousseau, expounding his conception of a normal
+      political state, was no doubt warranted in leaving these complicating
+      conditions out of account, though to do so is to rob any treatise on
+      government of much of its possible value. The same excuse cannot warrant
+      him in basing his political institutions upon a figment, instead of upon
+      the substantial ground of propositions about human nature, which the
+      average of experience in given races and at given stages of advancement
+      has shown to be true within those limits. There are places in his writings
+      where he reluctantly admits that men are only moved by their interests,
+      and he does not even take care to qualify this sufficiently.<a
+      name="FNanchor_264_264" id="FNanchor_264_264"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_264_264" class="fnanchor">[264]</a> But throughout the
+      Social Contract we seem to be contemplating the erection of a machine
+      which is to work without reference to the only forces that can possibly
+      impart movement to it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The consequence of this is that Rousseau gives us not the least help
+      towards the solution of any of the problems of actual government, because
+      these are naturally both suggested and guided by considerations of
+      expediency and improvement. It is as if he had never really settled the
+      ends for which government exists, beyond the construction of the
+      symmetrical <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[ii.187]</a></span>machine
+      of government itself. He is a geometer, not a mechanician; or shall we say
+      that he is a mechanician, and not a biologist concerned with the
+      conditions of a living organism. The analogy of the body politic to the
+      body natural was as present to him as it had been to all other writers on
+      society, but he failed to seize the only useful lessons which such an
+      analogy might have taught him&#8212;diversity of structure, difference of
+      function, development of strength by exercise, growth by nutrition&#8212;all
+      of which might have been serviceably translated into the dialect of
+      political science, and might have bestowed on his conception of political
+      society more of the features of reality. We see no room for the free play
+      of divergent forces, the active rivalry of hostile interests, the
+      regulated conflict of multifarious personal aims, which can never be
+      extinguished, except in moments of driving crisis, by the most sincere
+      attachment to the common causes of the land. Thus the modern question
+      which is of such vital interest for all the foremost human societies, of
+      the union of collective energy with the encouragement of individual
+      freedom, is, if not wholly untouched, at least wholly unillumined by
+      anything that Rousseau says. To tell us that a man on entering a society
+      exchanges his natural liberty for civil liberty which is limited by the
+      general will,<a name="FNanchor_265_265" id="FNanchor_265_265"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_265_265" class="fnanchor">[265]</a> is to give us a
+      phrase, where we seek a solution. To say that if it is the opposition of
+      private interests which made the establishment of societies necessary, it
+      is <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[ii.188]</a></span>the
+      accord of those interests which makes them possible,<a
+      name="FNanchor_266_266" id="FNanchor_266_266"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_266_266" class="fnanchor">[266]</a> is to utter a truth
+      which feeds no practical curiosity. The opposition of private interests
+      remains, in spite of the yoke which their accord has imposed upon it, but
+      which only controls and does not suppress such an opposition. What sort of
+      control? What degree? What bounds?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So again let us consider the statement that the instant the government
+      usurps the sovereignty, then the social pact is broken, and all the
+      citizens, restored by right to their natural liberty, are forced but not
+      morally obliged to obey.<a name="FNanchor_267_267" id="FNanchor_267_267"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_267_267" class="fnanchor">[267]</a> He began by telling
+      his readers that man, though born free, is now everywhere in chains; and
+      therefore it would appear that in all existing cases the social pact has
+      been broken, and the citizens living under the reign of force, are free to
+      resume their natural liberty, if they are only strong enough to do so.
+      This declaration of the general duty of rebellion no doubt had its share
+      in generating that fervid eagerness that all other peoples should rise and
+      throw off the yoke, which was one of the most astonishing anxieties of the
+      French during their revolution. That was not the worst quality of such a
+      doctrine. It made government impossible, by basing <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[ii.189]</a></span>the right or duty of
+      resistance on a question that could not be reached by positive evidence,
+      but must always be decided by an arbitrary interpretation of an
+      arbitrarily imagined document. The moderate proposition that resistance is
+      lawful if a government is a bad one, and if the people are strong enough
+      to overthrow it, and if their leaders have reason to suppose they can
+      provide a less bad one in its place, supplies tests that are capable of
+      application. Our own writers in favour of the doctrine of resistance
+      partly based their arguments upon the historic instances of the Old
+      Testament, and it is one of the most striking contributions of
+      Protestantism to the cause of freedom, that it sent people in an admiring
+      spirit to the history of the most rebellious nation that ever existed, and
+      so provided them in Hebrew insurgency with a corrective for the too
+      submissive political teaching of the Gospel. But these writers have
+      throughout a tacit appeal to expediency, as writers might always be
+      expected to have, who were really meditating on the possibility of their
+      principles being brought to the test of practice. There can be no evidence
+      possible, with a test so vague as the fact of the rupture of a compact
+      whose terms are authentically known to nobody concerned. Speak of bad laws
+      and good, wise administration or unwise, just government or unjust,
+      extravagant or economical, civically elevating or demoralising; all these
+      are questions which men may apply themselves to settle with knowledge, and
+      with a more or less definite degree of assurance. But who can tell how he
+      is to find out<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[ii.190]</a></span>
+      whether sovereignty has been usurped, and the social compact broken? Was
+      there a usurpation of sovereignty in France not many years ago, when the
+      assumption of power by the prince was ratified by many millions of votes?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The same case, we are told, namely, breach of the social compact and
+      restoration of natural liberty, occurs when the members of the government
+      usurp separately the power which they ought only to exercise in a body.<a
+      name="FNanchor_268_268" id="FNanchor_268_268"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_268_268" class="fnanchor">[268]</a> Now this description
+      applies very fairly to the famous episode in our constitutional history,
+      connected with George the Third's first attack of madness in 1788.
+      Parliament cannot lawfully begin business without a declaration of the
+      cause of summons from the crown. On this occasion parliament both met and
+      deliberated without communication from the crown. What was still more
+      important was a vote of the parliament itself, authorising the passing of
+      letters patent under the great seal for opening parliament by commission,
+      and for giving assent to a Regency Bill. This was a distinct usurpation of
+      regal authority. Two members of the government (in Rousseau's sense of the
+      term), namely the houses of parliament, usurped the power which they ought
+      only to have exercised along with the crown.<a name="FNanchor_269_269"
+      id="FNanchor_269_269"></a><a href="#Footnote_269_269" class="fnanchor">[269]</a>
+      The Whigs denounced the proceeding as a fiction, a forgery, a phantom, but
+      if they had been readers of the Social Contract, and if <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[ii.191]</a></span>they
+      had been bitten by its dogmatic temper, they would have declared the
+      compact of union violated, and all British citizens free to resume their
+      natural rights. Not even the bitter virulence of faction at that time
+      could tempt any politician to take up such a line, though within half a
+      dozen years each of the democratic factions in France had worked at the
+      overthrow of every other in turn, on the very principle which Rousseau had
+      formulated and Robespierre had made familiar, that usurped authority is a
+      valid reason for annihilating a government, no matter under what
+      circumstances, nor how small the chance of replacing it by a better, nor
+      how enormous the peril to the national well-being in the process. The true
+      opposite to so anarchic a doctrine is assuredly not that of passive
+      obedience either to chamber or monarch, but the right and duty of throwing
+      off any government which inflicts more disadvantages than it confers
+      advantages. Rousseau's whole theory tends inevitably to substitute a long
+      series of struggles after phrases and shadows in the new era, for the
+      equally futile and equally bloody wars of dynastic succession which have
+      been the great curse of the old. Men die for a phrase as they used to die
+      for a family. The other theory, which all English politicians accept in
+      their hearts, and so many commanding French politicians have seemed in
+      their hearts to reject, was first expounded in direct view of Rousseau's
+      teaching by Paley.<a name="FNanchor_270_270" id="FNanchor_270_270"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_270_270" class="fnanchor">[270]</a> Of course the
+      greatest, widest, and loftiest <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_192"
+      id="Page_192">[ii.192]</a></span>exposition of the bearings of expediency
+      on government and its conditions, is to be found in the magnificent and
+      immortal pieces of Burke, some of them suggested by absolutist violations
+      of the doctrine in our own affairs, and some of them by anarchic violation
+      of it in the affairs of France, after the seed sown by Rousseau had
+      brought forth fruit.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We should, however, be false to our critical principle, if we did not
+      recognise the historical effect of a speculation scientifically valueless.
+      There has been no attempt to palliate either the shallowness or the
+      practical mischievousness of the Social Contract. But there is another
+      side to its influence. It was the match which kindled revolutionary fire
+      in generous breasts throughout Europe. Not in France merely, but in
+      Germany as well, its phrases became the language of all who aspired after
+      freedom. Schiller spoke of Rousseau as one who &quot;converted Christians
+      into human beings,&quot; and the <i>Robbers</i> (1778) is as if it had
+      been directly inspired by the doctrine that usurped sovereignty restores
+      men to their natural rights. Smaller men in the violent movement which
+      seized all the youth of Germany at that time, followed the same lead, if
+      they happened to have any feeling about the political condition of their
+      enslaved countries.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[ii.193]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was alike in France and Germany a craving for a return to nature
+      among the whole of the young generation.<a name="FNanchor_271_271"
+      id="FNanchor_271_271"></a><a href="#Footnote_271_271" class="fnanchor">[271]</a>
+      The Social Contract supplied a dialect for this longing on one side, just
+      as the Emilius supplied it on another. Such parts in it as people did not
+      understand or did not like, they left out. They did not perceive its
+      direction towards that &quot;perfect Hobbism,&quot; which the author
+      declared to be the only practical alternative to a democracy so austere as
+      to be intolerable. They grasped phrases about the sovereignty of the
+      people, the freedom for which nature had destined man, the slavery to
+      which tyrants and oppressors had brought him. Above all they were struck
+      by the patriotism which shines so brightly in every page, like the fire on
+      the altar of one of those ancient cities which had inspired the writer's
+      ideal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yet there is a marked difference in the channels along which Rousseau's
+      influence moved in the two countries. In France it was drawn eventually
+      into the sphere of direct politics. In Germany it inspired not a great
+      political movement, but an immense literary revival. In France, as we have
+      already said, the patriotic flame seemed extinct. The ruinous disorder of
+      the whole social system made the old love of country resemble love for a
+      phantom, and so much of patriotic speech as survived was profoundly
+      hollow. <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[ii.194]</a></span>Even
+      a man like Turgot was not so much a patriot as a passionate lover of
+      improvement, and with the whole school of which this great spirit was the
+      noblest and strongest, a generous citizenship of the world had replaced
+      the narrower sentiment which had inflamed antique heroism. Rousseau's
+      exaltation of the Greek and Roman types in all their concentration and
+      intensity, touches mortals of commoner mould. His theory made the native
+      land what it had been to the citizens of earlier date, a true centre of
+      existence, round which all the interests of the community, all its
+      pursuits, all its hopes, grouped themselves with entire singleness of
+      convergence, just as religious faith is the centre of existence to a
+      church. It was the virile and patriotic energy thus evoked which presently
+      saved France from partition.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We complete the estimate of the positive worth and tendencies of the
+      Social Contract by adding to this, which was for the time the cardinal
+      service, of rekindling the fire of patriotism, the rapid deduction from
+      the doctrine of the sovereignty of peoples of the great truth, that a
+      nation with a civilised polity does not consist of an order or a caste,
+      but of the great body of its members, the army of toilers who make the
+      most painful of the sacrifices that are needed for the continuous
+      nutrition of the social organisation. As Condorcet put it, and he drew
+      inspiration partly from the intellectual school of Voltaire, and partly
+      from the social school of Rousseau, all institutions ought to have for
+      their aim the physical, intellectual,<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[ii.195]</a></span> and moral amelioration
+      of the poorest and most numerous class.<a name="FNanchor_272_272"
+      id="FNanchor_272_272"></a><a href="#Footnote_272_272" class="fnanchor">[272]</a>
+      This is the People. Second, there gradually followed from the important
+      place given by Rousseau to the idea of equal association, as at once the
+      foundation and the enduring bond of a community, those schemes of
+      Mutualism, and all the other shapes of collective action for a common
+      social good, which have possessed such commanding attraction for the
+      imagination of large classes of good men in France ever since. Hitherto
+      these forms have been sterile and deceptive, and they must remain so,
+      until the idea of special function has been raised to an equal level of
+      importance with that of united forces working together to a single end.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In these ways the author of the Social Contract did involuntarily and
+      unconsciously contribute to the growth of those new and progressive ideas,
+      in which for his own part he lacked all faith. Pr&#230;-Newtonians knew
+      not the wonders of which Newton was to find the key; and so we, grown
+      weary of waiting for the master intelligence who may effect the final
+      combination of moral and scientific ideas needed for a new social era, may
+      be inclined to lend a half-complacent ear to the arid sophisters who
+      assume that the last word of civilisation has been heard in existing
+      arrangements. But we may perhaps take courage from <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[ii.196]</a></span>history to hope that
+      generations will come, to whom our system of distributing among a few the
+      privileges and delights that are procured by the toil of the many, will
+      seem just as wasteful, as morally hideous, and as scientifically
+      indefensible, as that older system which impoverished and depopulated
+      empires, in order that a despot or a caste might have no least wish
+      ungratified, for which the lives or the hard-won treasure of others could
+      suffice.
+    </p>
+    <div class="footnotes">
+      <h3>
+        FOOTNOTES:
+      </h3>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_176_176" id="Footnote_176_176"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_176_176"><span class="label">[176]</span></a> <i>Cont.
+          Soc.</i>, I. viii.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_177_177" id="Footnote_177_177"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_177_177"><span class="label">[177]</span></a> <i>Cont.
+          Soc.</i>, II. xi. He had written in much the same sense in his article
+          on Political Economy in the Encyclop&#230;dia, p. 34.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_178_178" id="Footnote_178_178"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_178_178"><span class="label">[178]</span></a>
+          Robespierre disclaimed the intention of attacking property, and took
+          up a position like that of Rousseau&#8212;teaching the poor contempt
+          for the rich, not envy. &quot;I do not want to touch your treasures,&quot;
+          he cried, on one occasion, &quot;however impure their source. It is
+          far more an object of concern to me to make poverty honourable, than
+          to proscribe wealth; the thatched hut of Fabricius never need envy the
+          palace of Crassus. I should be at least as content, for my own part,
+          to be one of the sons of Aristides, brought up in the Prytaneium at
+          the public expense, as the heir presumptive of Xerxes, born in the
+          mire of royal courts, to sit on a throne decorated by the abasement of
+          the people, and glittering with the public misery.&quot; Quoted in
+          Malon's <i>Expos&#233; des Ecoles Socialistes fran&#231;aises</i>, 15.
+          Baboeuf carried Rousseau's sentiments further towards their natural
+          conclusion by such propositions as these: &quot;The goal of the
+          revolution is to destroy inequality, and to re-establish the happiness
+          of all.&quot; &quot;The revolution is not finished, because the rich
+          absorb all the property, and hold exclusive power; while the poor toil
+          like born slaves, languish in wretchedness, and are nothing in the
+          state.&quot; <i>Expos&#233; des Ecoles Socialistes fran&#231;aises</i>,
+          p. 29.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_179_179" id="Footnote_179_179"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_179_179"><span class="label">[179]</span></a> <i>Cont.
+          Soc.</i>, II. xi.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_180_180" id="Footnote_180_180"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_180_180"><span class="label">[180]</span></a> <i>Cont.
+          Soc.</i>, I. iv.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_181_181" id="Footnote_181_181"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_181_181"><span class="label">[181]</span></a> <i>Ib.</i>,
+          II. vii.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_182_182" id="Footnote_182_182"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_182_182"><span class="label">[182]</span></a> Ch. vi.
+          (vol. v. 371; edit. 1801).
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_183_183" id="Footnote_183_183"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_183_183"><span class="label">[183]</span></a> Ch. vii.
+          (p. 383.)
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_184_184" id="Footnote_184_184"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_184_184"><span class="label">[184]</span></a> Goguet,
+          in his <i>Origine des Lois, des Arts, et des Sciences</i> (1758),
+          really attempted as laboriously as possible to carry out a notion of
+          the historical method, but the fact that history itself at that time
+          had never been subjected to scientific examination made his effort
+          valueless. He accumulates testimony which would be excellent evidence,
+          if only it had been sifted, and had come out of the process
+          substantially undiminished. Yet even Goguet, who thus carefully
+          followed the accounts of early societies given in the Bible and other
+          monuments, intersperses abstract general statements about man being
+          born free and independent (i. 25), and entering society as the result
+          of deliberate reflection.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_185_185" id="Footnote_185_185"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_185_185"><span class="label">[185]</span></a> <i>Cont.
+          Soc.</i>, II. xi. Also III. viii.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_186_186" id="Footnote_186_186"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_186_186"><span class="label">[186]</span></a> II. xi.
+          Also ch. viii.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_187_187" id="Footnote_187_187"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_187_187"><span class="label">[187]</span></a> II.
+          viii.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_188_188" id="Footnote_188_188"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_188_188"><span class="label">[188]</span></a> II. ix.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_189_189" id="Footnote_189_189"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_189_189"><span class="label">[189]</span></a> <i>Politics</i>,
+          VII. iv. 8, 10.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_190_190" id="Footnote_190_190"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_190_190"><span class="label">[190]</span></a> <i>Cont.
+          Soc.</i>, II. x.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_191_191" id="Footnote_191_191"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_191_191"><span class="label">[191]</span></a> Plato's
+          <i>Laws</i>, v. 737.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_192_192" id="Footnote_192_192"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_192_192"><span class="label">[192]</span></a> <i>Ib.</i>,
+          iv. 705.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_193_193" id="Footnote_193_193"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_193_193"><span class="label">[193]</span></a> <i>Projet
+          de Constitution pour la Corse</i>, p. 75.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_194_194" id="Footnote_194_194"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_194_194"><span class="label">[194]</span></a> <i>Gouvernement
+          de Pologne</i>, ch. xi.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_195_195" id="Footnote_195_195"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_195_195"><span class="label">[195]</span></a> <i>Cont.
+          Soc.</i>, II. vii.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_196_196" id="Footnote_196_196"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_196_196"><span class="label">[196]</span></a> Goguet
+          was much nearer to a true conception of this kind; see, for instance,
+          <i>Origine des Lois</i>, i. 46.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_197_197" id="Footnote_197_197"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_197_197"><span class="label">[197]</span></a> Decree
+          of the Committee, April 20, 1794, reported by Billaud-Varennes.
+          Compare ch. iv. of Rousseau's <i>Consid&#233;rations sur le
+          Gouvernement de Pologne</i>.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_198_198" id="Footnote_198_198"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_198_198"><span class="label">[198]</span></a> Here are
+          some of Saint Just's regulations:&#8212;No servants, nor gold or
+          silver vessels; no child under 16 to eat meat, nor any adult to eat
+          meat on three days of the decade; boys at the age of 7 to be handed
+          over to the school of the nation, where they were to be brought up to
+          speak little, to endure hardships, and to train for war; divorce to be
+          free to all; friendship ordained a public institution, every citizen
+          on coming to majority being bound to proclaim his friends, and if he
+          had none, then to be banished; if one committed a crime, his friends
+          were to be banished. Quoted in Von Sybel's <i>Hist. French Rev.</i>,
+          iv. 49. When Morelly dreamed his dream of a model community in 1754
+          (see above, <a href="#Page_i.158">vol. i. p. 158</a>)
+          he little supposed, one would think, that within forty years a man
+          would be so near trying the experiment in France as Saint Just was.
+          Baboeuf is pronounced by La Harpe to have been inspired by the Code de
+          la Nature, which La Harpe impudently set down to Diderot, on whom
+          every great destructive piece was systematically fathered.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_199_199" id="Footnote_199_199"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_199_199"><span class="label">[199]</span></a> I forget
+          where I have read the story of some member of the Convention being
+          very angry because the library contained no copy of the laws which
+          Minos gave to the Cretans.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_200_200" id="Footnote_200_200"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_200_200"><span class="label">[200]</span></a> III.
+          xiii.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_201_201" id="Footnote_201_201"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_201_201"><span class="label">[201]</span></a> III. xv.
+          He actually recommended the Poles to pay all public functionaries in
+          kind, and to have the public works executed on the system of corv&#233;e.
+          <i>Gouvernement de Pologne</i>, ch. xi.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_202_202" id="Footnote_202_202"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_202_202"><span class="label">[202]</span></a> <i>Cont.
+          Soc.</i>, III. ii.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_203_203" id="Footnote_203_203"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_203_203"><span class="label">[203]</span></a> II. i.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_204_204" id="Footnote_204_204"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_204_204"><span class="label">[204]</span></a> II. ii.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_205_205" id="Footnote_205_205"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_205_205"><span class="label">[205]</span></a> III. i.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_206_206" id="Footnote_206_206"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_206_206"><span class="label">[206]</span></a> II. vi.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_207_207" id="Footnote_207_207"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_207_207"><span class="label">[207]</span></a> II. iv.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_208_208" id="Footnote_208_208"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_208_208"><span class="label">[208]</span></a> IV. vi.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_209_209" id="Footnote_209_209"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_209_209"><span class="label">[209]</span></a> <i>Economie
+          Politique</i>, p. 30.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_210_210" id="Footnote_210_210"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_210_210"><span class="label">[210]</span></a> <i>M&#233;langes</i>,
+          p. 310.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_211_211" id="Footnote_211_211"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_211_211"><span class="label">[211]</span></a> See for
+          instance Green's <i>History of the English People</i>, i. 266.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_212_212" id="Footnote_212_212"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_212_212"><span class="label">[212]</span></a> <i>Summa</i>,
+          xc.-cviii. (1265-1273). See Maurice's <i>Moral and Metaphysical
+          Philosophy</i>, i. 627, 628. Also Franck's <i>R&#233;formateurs et
+          Publicistes de l'Europe</i>, p. 48, etc.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_213_213" id="Footnote_213_213"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_213_213"><span class="label">[213]</span></a> <i>Defensor
+          Pacis</i>, Pt. I., ch. xii. This, again, is an example of Marsilio's
+          position:&#8212;&quot;Convenerunt enim homines ad civilem
+          communicationem propter commodum et vit&#230; sufficientiam
+          consequendam, et opposita declinandum. Qu&#230; igitur omnium tangere
+          possunt commodum et incommodum, ab omnibus sciri debent et audiri, ut
+          commodum assequi et oppositum repellere possint.&quot; The whole
+          chapter is a most interesting anticipation, partly due to the
+          influence of Aristotle, of the notions of later centuries.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_214_214" id="Footnote_214_214"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_214_214"><span class="label">[214]</span></a> See
+          Bayle's Dict., s.v. <i>Althusius</i>.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_215_215" id="Footnote_215_215"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_215_215"><span class="label">[215]</span></a> <i>Lettres
+          de la Montagne</i>, I. vi. 388.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_216_216" id="Footnote_216_216"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_216_216"><span class="label">[216]</span></a> <i>Eccles.
+          Polity</i>, Bk. i.; bks. i.-iv., 1594; bk. v., 1597; bks. vi.-viii.,
+          1647,&#8212;being forty-seven years after the author's death.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_217_217" id="Footnote_217_217"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_217_217"><span class="label">[217]</span></a> Goguet (<i>Origine
+          des Lois</i>, i. 22) dwells on tacit conventions as a kind of
+          engagement to which men commit themselves with extreme facility. He
+          was thus rather near the true idea of the spontaneous origin and
+          unconscious acceptance of early institutions.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_218_218" id="Footnote_218_218"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_218_218"><span class="label">[218]</span></a> Of Civil
+          Government, ch. xiii. See also ch. xi. &quot;This legislative is not
+          only the supreme power of the commonwealth, but sacred and unalterable
+          in the hands where the community have once placed it; nor can any
+          edict of anybody else, in what form soever conceived, or by what power
+          soever backed, have the force and obligation of a law, which has not
+          its sanction from that legislative which the public has chosen and
+          appointed; for without this the law could not have that which is
+          absolutely necessary to its being a law&#8212;the consent of the
+          society; over whom nobody can have a power to make laws, but by their
+          own consent, and by authority received from them.&quot; If Rousseau
+          had found no neater expression for his doctrine than this, the Social
+          Contract would assuredly have been no explosive.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_219_219" id="Footnote_219_219"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_219_219"><span class="label">[219]</span></a> See
+          especially ch. viii.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_220_220" id="Footnote_220_220"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_220_220"><span class="label">[220]</span></a> Hence
+          the antipathy of the clergy, catholic, episcopalian, and presbyterian,
+          to which, as Austin has pointed out (<i>Syst. of Jurisprudence</i>, i.
+          288, <i>n.</i>), Hobbes mainly owes his bad repute.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_221_221" id="Footnote_221_221"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_221_221"><span class="label">[221]</span></a> See
+          Diderot's article on <i>Hobbisme</i> in the Encyclop&#230;dia, <i>Oeuv.</i>,
+          xv. 122.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_222_222" id="Footnote_222_222"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_222_222"><span class="label">[222]</span></a> <i>Esprit
+          des Lois</i>, I. i.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_223_223" id="Footnote_223_223"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_223_223"><span class="label">[223]</span></a> <i>Cont.
+          Soc.</i>, II. vi. 50.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_224_224" id="Footnote_224_224"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_224_224"><span class="label">[224]</span></a> Goguet
+          has the merit of seeing distinctly that command is the essence of law.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_225_225" id="Footnote_225_225"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_225_225"><span class="label">[225]</span></a> <i>Cont.
+          Soc.</i>, II. vi. 51-53. See Austin's <i>Jurisprudence</i>, i. 95,
+          etc.; also <i>Lettres &#233;crites de la Montagne</i>, I. vi. 380,
+          381.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_226_226" id="Footnote_226_226"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_226_226"><span class="label">[226]</span></a> See, for
+          instance, letter to Mirabeau (<i>l'ami des hommes</i>), July 26, 1767.
+          <i>Corr.</i>, v. 179. The same letter contains his criticism on the
+          good despot of the Economists.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_227_227" id="Footnote_227_227"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_227_227"><span class="label">[227]</span></a> <i>L'Ordre
+          Naturel et Essentiel des Soci&#233;t&#233;s Politiques</i> (1767). By
+          Mercier de la Rivi&#232;re. One episode in the life of Mercier de la
+          Rivi&#232;re is worth recounting, as closely connected with the
+          subject we are discussing. Just as Corsicans and Poles applied to
+          Rousseau, Catherine of Russia, in consequence of her admiration for
+          Rivi&#232;re's book, summoned him to Russia to assist her in making
+          laws. &quot;Sir,&quot; said the Czarina, &quot;could you point out to
+          me the best means for the good government of a state?&quot; &quot;Madame,
+          there is only one way, and that is being just; in other words, in
+          keeping order and exacting obedience to the laws.&quot; &quot;But on
+          what base is it best to make the laws of an empire repose?&quot;
+          &quot;There is only one base, Madame: the nature of things and of men.&quot;
+          &quot;Just so; but when you wish to give laws to a people, what are
+          the rules which indicate most surely such laws as are most suitable?&quot;
+          &quot;To give or make laws, Madame, is a task that God has left to
+          none. Ah, who is the man that should think himself capable of
+          dictating laws for beings that he does not know, or knows so ill? And
+          by what right can he impose laws on beings whom God has never placed
+          in his hands?&quot; &quot;To what, then, do you reduce the science of
+          government?&quot; &quot;To studying carefully; recognising and setting
+          forth the laws which God has graven so manifestly in the very
+          organisation of men, when he called them into existence. To wish to go
+          any further would be a great misfortune and a most destructive
+          undertaking.&quot; &quot;Sir, I am very pleased to have heard what you
+          have to say; I wish you good day.&quot; Quoted from Thi&#233;bault's
+          <i>Souvenirs de Berlin</i>, in M. Daire's edition of the <i>Physiocrates</i>,
+          ii. 432.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_228_228" id="Footnote_228_228"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_228_228"><span class="label">[228]</span></a> <i>Cont.
+          Soc.</i>, II. vii.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_229_229" id="Footnote_229_229"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_229_229"><span class="label">[229]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>,
+          v. 181.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_230_230" id="Footnote_230_230"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_230_230"><span class="label">[230]</span></a> <i>Cont.
+          Soc.</i>, I. v., vi., vii.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_231_231" id="Footnote_231_231"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_231_231"><span class="label">[231]</span></a> <i>Leviathan</i>,
+          II., ch. xviii. vol. iii. 159 (Molesworth's edition).
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_232_232" id="Footnote_232_232"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_232_232"><span class="label">[232]</span></a> <i>Cont.
+          Soc.</i>, III. xvi.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_233_233" id="Footnote_233_233"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_233_233"><span class="label">[233]</span></a> <i>Civil
+          Government</i>, ch. viii. &#167; 99.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_234_234" id="Footnote_234_234"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_234_234"><span class="label">[234]</span></a> I. vi.
+          Especially the footnote.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_235_235" id="Footnote_235_235"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_235_235"><span class="label">[235]</span></a> <i>Cont.
+          Soc.</i>, II. i.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_236_236" id="Footnote_236_236"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_236_236"><span class="label">[236]</span></a> <i>Syst.
+          of Jurisprudence</i>, i. 256.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_237_237" id="Footnote_237_237"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_237_237"><span class="label">[237]</span></a> <i>Cont.
+          Soc.</i>, III. xv. 137. It was not long, however, before Rousseau
+          found reason to alter his opinion in this respect. The champions of
+          the Council at Geneva compared the <i>droit n&#233;gatif</i>, in the
+          exercise of which the Council had refused to listen to the
+          representations of Rousseau's partisans (see above, vol. ii. p. <a
+          href="#Page_105">105</a>) to the right of veto possessed by the crown
+          in Great Britain. Rousseau seized upon this egregious blunder, which
+          confused the power of refusing assent to a proposed law, with the
+          power of refusing justice under law already passed. He at once found
+          illustrations of the difference, first in the case of the printers of
+          No. 45 of the <i>North Briton</i>, who brought actions for false
+          imprisonment (1763), and next in the proceedings against Wilkes at the
+          same time. If Wilkes, said Rousseau, had written, printed, published,
+          or said, one-fourth against the Lesser Council at Geneva of what he
+          said, wrote, printed, and published openly in London against the court
+          and the government, he would have been heavily punished, and most
+          likely put to death. And so forth, until he has proved very pungently
+          how different degrees of freedom are enjoyed in Geneva and in England.
+          <i>Lettres &#233;crites de la Montague</i>, ix. 491-500. When he wrote
+          this he was unaware that the Triennial Act had long been replaced by
+          the Septennial Act of the 1 Geo. I. On finding out, as he did
+          afterwards, that a parliament could sit for seven years, he thought as
+          meanly of our liberty as ever. <i>Consid&#233;rations sur les
+          gouvernement de Pologne</i>, ch. vii. 253-260. In his <i>Projet de
+          Constitution pour la Corse</i>, p. 113, he says that &quot;the English
+          do not love liberty for itself, but because it is most favourable to
+          money-making.&quot;
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_238_238" id="Footnote_238_238"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_238_238"><span class="label">[238]</span></a> III.,
+          xi., xii., and xiii.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_239_239" id="Footnote_239_239"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_239_239"><span class="label">[239]</span></a> Mr.
+          Freeman's <i>Growth of the English Constitution</i>, c. i.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_240_240" id="Footnote_240_240"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_240_240"><span class="label">[240]</span></a> <i>Cont.
+          Soc.</i>, III. xv. 140. A small manuscript containing his ideas on
+          confederation was given by Rousseau to the Count d'Antraigues
+          (afterwards an <i>&#233;migr&#233;</i>), who destroyed it in 1789,
+          lest its arguments should be used to sap the royal authority. See
+          extract from his pamphlet, prefixed to M. Auguis's edition of the
+          Social Contract, pp. xxiii, xxiv.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_241_241" id="Footnote_241_241"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_241_241"><span class="label">[241]</span></a> <i>Gouvernement
+          de Pologne</i>, v. 246.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_242_242" id="Footnote_242_242"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_242_242"><span class="label">[242]</span></a> Of
+          course no such modification as that proposed by Comte (<i>Politique
+          Positive</i>, iv. 421) would come within the scope of the doctrine of
+          the Social Contract. For each of the seventeen Intendances into which
+          Comte divides France, is to be ruled by a chief, &quot;always
+          appointed and removed by the central power.&quot; There is no room for
+          the sovereignty of the people here, even in things parochial.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_243_243" id="Footnote_243_243"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_243_243"><span class="label">[243]</span></a> There
+          was one extraordinary instance during the revolution of attempting to
+          make popular government direct on Rousseau's principle, in the scheme
+          (1790) of which Danton was a chief supporter, for reorganising the
+          municipal administration of Paris. The assemblies of sections were to
+          sit permanently; their vote was to be taken on current questions; and
+          action was to follow the aggregate of their degrees. See Von Sybel's
+          <i>Hist. Fr. Rev.</i> i. 275; M. Louis Blanc's <i>History</i>, Bk.
+          III. ch. ii.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_244_244" id="Footnote_244_244"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_244_244"><span class="label">[244]</span></a> This was
+          also Bodin's definition of an aristocratic state; &quot;si minor pars
+          civium c&#230;teris imperat.&quot;
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_245_245" id="Footnote_245_245"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_245_245"><span class="label">[245]</span></a> <i>Politics</i>,
+          III. vi.-vii.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_246_246" id="Footnote_246_246"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_246_246"><span class="label">[246]</span></a> <i>Esprit
+          des Lois</i>, II. i. ii.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_247_247" id="Footnote_247_247"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_247_247"><span class="label">[247]</span></a> Rousseau
+          gave the name of <i>tyrant</i> to a usurper of royal authority in a
+          kingdom, and <i>despot</i> to a usurper of the sovereign authority (<i>i.e.</i>
+          <span lang="el" title="Greek: tyrannos">&#964;&#965;&#961;&#945;&#957;&#957;&#959;&#962;</span>
+          in the Greek sense). The former might govern according to the laws,
+          but the latter placed himself above the laws (<i>Cont. Soc.</i>, III.
+          x.) This corresponded to Locke's distinction: &quot;As usurpation is
+          the exercise of power which another hath a right to, so tyranny is the
+          exercise of a power beyond right, which nobody can have a right to.&quot;
+          <i>Civil Gov.</i>, ch. xviii.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_248_248" id="Footnote_248_248"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_248_248"><span class="label">[248]</span></a> III. iv.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_249_249" id="Footnote_249_249"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_249_249"><span class="label">[249]</span></a> III. vi.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_250_250" id="Footnote_250_250"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_250_250"><span class="label">[250]</span></a> III. v.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_251_251" id="Footnote_251_251"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_251_251"><span class="label">[251]</span></a> <i>Cont.
+          Soc.</i>, IV. viii.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_252_252" id="Footnote_252_252"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_252_252"><span class="label">[252]</span></a> <i>Cont.
+          Soc.</i>, IV. viii. 197-201.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_253_253" id="Footnote_253_253"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_253_253"><span class="label">[253]</span></a> This is
+          not unlike what Tocqueville says somewhere, that Christianity bids you
+          render unto C&#230;sar the things that are C&#230;sar's, but seems to
+          discourage any inquiry whether C&#230;sar is an usurper or a lawful
+          ruler.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_254_254" id="Footnote_254_254"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_254_254"><span class="label">[254]</span></a> <i>Cont.
+          Soc.</i>, IV. viii. 203. As we have already seen, he had entreated
+          Voltaire, of all men in the world, to draw up a civil profession of
+          faith. See <a href="#Page_i.318">vol. i. 318</a>.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          In the New Helo&#239;sa (V. v. 117, <i>n.</i>) Rousseau expresses his
+          opinion that &quot;no true believer could be intolerant or a
+          persecutor. <i>If I were a magistrate, and if the law pronounced the
+          penalty of death against atheists, I would begin by burning as such
+          whoever should come to inform against another.</i>&quot;
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_255_255" id="Footnote_255_255"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_255_255"><span class="label">[255]</span></a> Plato's
+          <i>Laws</i>, Bk. x. 909, etc.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_256_256" id="Footnote_256_256"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_256_256"><span class="label">[256]</span></a> <i>Areopagitica</i>,
+          p. 417. (Edit. 1867.)
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_257_257" id="Footnote_257_257"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_257_257"><span class="label">[257]</span></a> See a
+          speech of his, which is Rousseau's &quot;civil faith&quot; done into
+          rhetoric, given in M. Louis Blanc's <i>Hist. de la R&#233;v. Fran&#231;aise</i>,
+          Bk. x. c. xiv.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_258_258" id="Footnote_258_258"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_258_258"><span class="label">[258]</span></a> <i>Consid&#233;rations
+          sur le gouvernement ancien et pr&#233;sent de la France</i> (1764).
+          Quoted by Rousseau from a manuscript copy.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_259_259" id="Footnote_259_259"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_259_259"><span class="label">[259]</span></a> <i>Leviathan</i>,
+          ch. xliii. 601. Also ch. xlii.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_260_260" id="Footnote_260_260"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_260_260"><span class="label">[260]</span></a> <i>Cont.
+          Soc.</i>, III. xi. Borrowed from Hobbes, who said, &quot;Magnus ille
+          Leviathan qu&#230; civitas appellatur, opificium artis est.&quot;
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_261_261" id="Footnote_261_261"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_261_261"><span class="label">[261]</span></a>
+          Mackintosh's.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_262_262" id="Footnote_262_262"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_262_262"><span class="label">[262]</span></a> <i>Cont.
+          Soc.</i>, II. v.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_263_263" id="Footnote_263_263"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_263_263"><span class="label">[263]</span></a> IV. ii.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_264_264" id="Footnote_264_264"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_264_264"><span class="label">[264]</span></a> For
+          instance, <i>Gouvernement de la Pologne</i>, ch. xi. p. 305. And <i>Corr.</i>,
+          v. 180.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_265_265" id="Footnote_265_265"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_265_265"><span class="label">[265]</span></a> <i>Cont.
+          Soc.</i>, I. viii.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_266_266" id="Footnote_266_266"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_266_266"><span class="label">[266]</span></a> <i>Cont.
+          Soc.</i>, II. i.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_267_267" id="Footnote_267_267"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_267_267"><span class="label">[267]</span></a> <i>Ib.</i>,
+          III. x. &quot;Let every individual who may usurp the sovereignty be
+          instantly put to death by free men.&quot; Robespierre's <i>D&#233;claration
+          des droits de l'homme</i>, &#167; 27. &quot;When the government
+          violates the rights of the people, insurrection becomes for the people
+          the most sacred of rights and the most indispensable of duties.&quot;
+          &#167; 35.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_268_268" id="Footnote_268_268"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_268_268"><span class="label">[268]</span></a> <i>Cont.
+          Soc.</i>, III. x.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_269_269" id="Footnote_269_269"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_269_269"><span class="label">[269]</span></a> See
+          May's <i>Constitutional Hist. of England</i>, ch. iii; and Lord
+          Stanhope's <i>Life of Pitt</i>, vol. ii. ch. xii.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_270_270" id="Footnote_270_270"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_270_270"><span class="label">[270]</span></a> In the
+          6th book of the <i>Moral Philosophy</i> (1785), ch. iii., and
+          elsewhere. In the preface he refers to the effect which Rousseau's
+          political theory was supposed to have had in the civil convulsions of
+          Geneva, as one of the reasons which encouraged him to publish his own
+          book.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_271_271" id="Footnote_271_271"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_271_271"><span class="label">[271]</span></a> One side
+          of this was the passion for geographical exploration which took
+          possession of Europe towards the middle of the eighteenth century. See
+          the <i>Life of Humboldt</i>, i. 28, 29. (<i>Eng. Trans.</i> by
+          Lassell.)
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_272_272" id="Footnote_272_272"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_272_272"><span class="label">[272]</span></a>
+          Rousseau's influence on Condorcet is seen in the latter's maxim, which
+          has found such favour in the eyes of socialist writers, that &quot;not
+          only equality of right, but equality of fact, is the goal of the
+          social art.&quot;
+        </p>
+      </div>
+    </div>
+    <hr style="width: 65%;" />
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[ii.197]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      <a name="CHAPTER_IV" id="CHAPTER_IV"></a>CHAPTER IV.
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      EMILIUS.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <span class="smcap">One</span> whose most intense conviction was faith in
+      the goodness of all things and creatures as they are first produced by
+      nature, and so long as they remain unsophisticated by the hand and purpose
+      of man, was in some degree bound to show a way by which this evil process
+      of sophistication might be brought to the lowest possible point, and the
+      best of all natural creatures kept as near as possible to his high
+      original. Rousseau, it is true, held in a sense of his own the doctrine of
+      the fall of man. That doctrine, however, has never made people any more
+      remiss in the search after a virtue, which if they ought to have regarded
+      it as hopeless according to strict logic, is still indispensable in actual
+      life. Rousseau's way of believing that man had fallen was so coloured at
+      once by that expansion of sanguine emotion which marked his century, and
+      by that necessity for repose in idyllic perfection of simplicity which
+      marked his own temperament, that enthusiasm for an imaginary human
+      creature effectually shut out the dogma of his fatal depravation. &quot;How
+      difficult a thing it is,&quot; Madame<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[ii.198]</a></span> d'Epinay once said to
+      him, &quot;to bring up a child.&quot; &quot;Assuredly it is,&quot;
+      answered Rousseau; &quot;because the father and mother are not made by
+      nature to bring it up, nor the child to be brought up.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor_273_273" id="FNanchor_273_273"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_273_273" class="fnanchor">[273]</a> This cynical speech
+      can only have been an accidental outbreak of spleen. It was a
+      contradiction to his one constant opinion that nature is all good and
+      bounteous, and that the inborn capacity of man for reaching true happiness
+      knows no stint.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In writing Emilius, he sat down to consider what man is, and what can be
+      made of him. Here, as in all the rest of his work, he only obeyed the
+      tendencies of his time in choosing a theme. An age touched by the spirit
+      of hope inevitably turns to the young; for with the young lies fulfilment.
+      Such epochs are ever pressing with the question, how is the future to be
+      shaped? Our answer depends on the theory of human disposition, and in
+      these epochs the theory is always optimistic. Rousseau was saved, as so
+      many thousands of men have been alike in conduct and speculation, by
+      inconsistency, and not shrinking from two mutually contradictory trains of
+      thought. Society is corrupt, and society is the work of man. Yet man, who
+      has engendered this corrupted birth, is good and whole. The strain in the
+      argument may be pardoned for the hopefulness of the conclusion. It brought
+      Rousseau into harmony with the eager effort of the time to pour young
+      character into finer mould, and made him the most powerful agent in giving
+      to such efforts both <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[ii.199]</a></span>fervour
+      and elevation. While others were content with the mere enunciation of
+      maxims and precepts, he breathed into them the spirit of life, and
+      enforced them with a vividness of faith that clothed education with the
+      augustness and unction of religion. The training of the young soul to
+      virtue was surrounded with something of the awful holiness of a sacrament;
+      and those who laboured in this sanctified field were exhorted to a
+      constancy of devotion, and were promised a fulness of recompense, that
+      raised them from the rank of drudges to a place of highest honour among
+      the ministers of nature.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Everybody at this time was thinking about education, partly perhaps on
+      account of the suppression of the Jesuits, the chief instructors of the
+      time, and a great many people were writing about it. The Abb&#233; de
+      Saint Pierre had had new ideas on education, as on all the greater
+      departments of human interest. Madame d'Epinay wrote considerations upon
+      the bringing up of the young.<a name="FNanchor_274_274"
+      id="FNanchor_274_274"></a><a href="#Footnote_274_274" class="fnanchor">[274]</a>
+      Madame de Grafigny did the same in a less grave shape.<a
+      name="FNanchor_275_275" id="FNanchor_275_275"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_275_275" class="fnanchor">[275]</a> She received letters
+      from the precociously sage Turgot, abounding in the same natural and
+      sensible precepts which ten years later were commended with more glowing
+      eloquence in the pages of Emilius.<a name="FNanchor_276_276"
+      id="FNanchor_276_276"></a><a href="#Footnote_276_276" class="fnanchor">[276]</a>
+      Grimm had an elaborate scheme for a treatise on education.<a
+      name="FNanchor_277_277" id="FNanchor_277_277"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_277_277" class="fnanchor">[277]</a> Helv&#233;tius
+      followed <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[ii.200]</a></span>his
+      exploration of the composition of the human mind, by a treatise on the
+      training proper for the intellectual and moral faculties. Education by
+      these and other writers was being conceived in a wider sense than had been
+      known to ages controlled by ecclesiastical collegians. It slowly came to
+      be thought of in connection with the family. The improvement of ideas upon
+      education was only one phase of that great general movement towards the
+      restoration of the family, which was so striking a spectacle in France
+      after the middle of the century. Education now came to comprehend the
+      whole system of the relations between parents and their children, from
+      earliest infancy to maturity. The direction of this wider feeling about
+      such relations tended strongly towards an increased closeness in them,
+      more intimacy, and a more continuous suffusion of tenderness and long
+      attachment. All this was part of the general revival of naturalism. People
+      began to reflect that nature was not likely to have designed infants to be
+      suckled by other women than their own mothers, nor that they should be
+      banished from the society of those who are most concerned in their
+      well-being, from the cheerful hearth and wise affectionate converse of
+      home, to the frigid discipline of colleges and convents and the unamiable
+      monition of strangers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then the rising rebellion against the church and its faith perhaps
+      contributed something towards a movement which, if it could not break the
+      religious monopoly of instruction, must at least introduce the<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[ii.201]</a></span>
+      parent as a competitor with the priestly instructor for influence over the
+      ideas, habits, and affections of his children. The rebellion was aimed
+      against the spirit as well as the manner of the established system. The
+      church had not fundamentally modified the significance of the dogma of the
+      fall and depravity of man; education was still conceived as a process of
+      eradication and suppression of the mystical old Adam. The new current
+      flowed in channels far away from that black folly of superstition. Men at
+      length ventured once more to look at one another with free and generous
+      gaze. The veil of the temple was rent, and the false mockeries of the
+      shrine of the Hebrew divinity made plain to scornful eyes. People ceased
+      to see one another as guilty victims cowering under a divine curse. They
+      stood erect in consciousness of manhood. The palsied conception of man,
+      with his large discourse of reason looking before and after, his lofty and
+      majestic patience in search for new forms of beauty and new secrets of
+      truth, his sense of the manifold sweetness and glory and awe of the
+      universe, above all, his infinite capacity of loyal pity and love for his
+      comrades in the great struggle, and his high sorrow for his own
+      wrong-doing,&#8212;the palsied and crushing conception of this excellent
+      and helpful being as a poor worm, writhing under the vindictive and
+      meaningless anger of an omnipotent tyrant in the large heavens, only to be
+      appeased by sacerdotal intervention, was fading back into those regions of
+      night, whence the depth of human misery and the obscura<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[ii.202]</a></span>tion
+      of human intelligence had once permitted its escape, to hang evilly over
+      the western world for a season. So vital a change in the point of view
+      quickly touched the theory and art of the upbringing of the young.
+      Education began to figure less as the suppression of the natural man, than
+      his strengthening and development; less as a process of rooting out tares,
+      more as the grateful tending of shoots abounding in promise of richness.
+      What had been the most drearily mechanical of duties, was transformed into
+      a task that surpassed all others in interest and hope. If man be born not
+      bad but good, under no curse, but rather the bestower and receiver of many
+      blessings, then the entire atmosphere of young life, in spite of the toil
+      and the peril, is made cheerful with the sunshine and warmth of the great
+      folded possibilities of excellence, happiness, and well-doing.
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      <b>I.</b>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Locke in education, as in metaphysics and in politics, was the pioneer of
+      French thought. In education there is less room for scientific
+      originality. The sage of a parish, provided only she began her trade with
+      an open and energetic mind, may here pass philosophers. Locke was nearly
+      as sage, as homely, as real, as one of these strenuous women. The honest
+      plainness of certain of his prescriptions for the preservation of physical
+      health perhaps keeps us somewhat too near the earth. His manner throughout
+      is marked<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[ii.203]</a></span>
+      by the stout wisdom of the practical teacher, who is content to assume
+      good sense in his hearers, and feels no necessity for kindling a blaze or
+      raising a tempest. He gives us a practical manual for producing a healthy,
+      instructed, upright, well-mannered young English squire, who shall be
+      rightly fitted to take his own life sensibly in hand, and procure from it
+      a fair amount of wholesome satisfaction both for himself and the people
+      with whom he is concerned. Locke's treatise is one of the most admirable
+      protests in the world against effeminacy and pedantry, and parents already
+      moved by grave desire to do their duty prudently to their sons, will
+      hardly find another book better suited to their ends. Besides Locke, we
+      must also count Charron, and the amazing educator of Gargantua, and
+      Montaigne before either, among the writers whom Rousseau had read, with
+      that profit and increase which attends the dropping of the good ideas of
+      other men into fertile minds.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is an immense class of natures, and those not the lowest, which the
+      connection of duty with mere prudence does not carry far enough. They only
+      stir when something has moved their feeling for the ideal, and raised the
+      mechanical offices of the narrow day into association with the
+      spaciousness and height of spiritual things. To these Rousseau came. For
+      both the tenour and the wording of the most striking precepts of the
+      Emilius, he owes much to Locke. But what was so realistic in him becomes
+      blended in Rousseau with all the power and richness and beauty<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[ii.204]</a></span> of an
+      ideal that can move the most generous parts of human character. The child
+      is treated as the miniature of humanity; it thus touches the whole sphere
+      of our sympathies, warms our curiosity as to the composition of man's
+      nature, and becomes the very eye and centre of moral and social
+      aspirations.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Accordingly Rousseau almost at once begins by elaborating his conception
+      of the kind of human creature which it is worth while to take the trouble
+      to rear, and the only kind which pure nature will help you in perfecting.
+      Hence Emilius, besides being a manual for parents, contains the lines of a
+      moral type of life and character for all others. The old thought of the
+      Discourses revives in full vigour. The artifices of society, the
+      perverting traditions of use, the feeble maxims of indolence, convention,
+      helpless dependence on the aid or the approval of others, are routed at
+      the first stroke. The old regimen of accumulated prejudice is replaced, in
+      dealing alike with body and soul, by the new system of liberty and nature.
+      In saying this we have already said that the exaltation of Spartan manners
+      which runs through Rousseau's other writings has vanished, and that every
+      trace of the much-vaunted military and public training has yielded before
+      the attractive thought of tender parents and a wisely ruled home. Public
+      instruction, we learn, can now no longer exist, because there is no longer
+      such a thing as country, and therefore there can no longer be citizens.
+      Only domestic education can now help us to rear the man according to
+      nature,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[ii.205]</a></span>&#8212;the
+      man who knows best among us how to bear the mingled good and ill of our
+      life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The artificial society of the time, with its aspirations after a return to
+      nature, was moved to the most energetic enthusiasm by Rousseau's famous
+      exhortations to mothers to nourish their own little ones. Morelly, as we
+      have seen, had already enjoined the adoption of this practice. So too had
+      Buffon. But Morelly's voice had no resonance, Buffon's reasons were purely
+      physical, and children were still sent out to nurse, until Rousseau's more
+      passionate moral entreaties awoke maternal conscience. &quot;Do these
+      tender mothers,&quot; he exclaimed, &quot;who, when they have got rid of
+      their infants, surrender themselves gaily to all the diversions of the
+      town, know what sort of usage the child in the village is receiving,
+      fastened in his swaddling band? At the least interruption that comes, they
+      hang him up by a nail like a bundle of rags, and there the poor creature
+      remains thus crucified, while the nurse goes about her affairs. Every
+      child found in this position had a face of purple; as the violent
+      compression of the chest would not allow the blood to circulate, it all
+      went to the head, and the victim was supposed to be very quiet, just
+      because it had not strength enough to cry out.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor_278_278" id="FNanchor_278_278"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_278_278" class="fnanchor">[278]</a> But in Rousseau, as in
+      Beethoven, a harsh and rugged passage is nearly always followed by some
+      piece of exquisite and touching melody. The force of these indignant
+      pictures was heightened and relieved by <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[ii.206]</a></span>moving appeal to all the
+      tender joys of maternal solicitude, and thoughts of all that this
+      solicitude could do for the happiness of the home, the father, and the
+      young. The attraction of domestic life is pronounced the best antidote to
+      the ill living of the time. The bustle of children, which you now think so
+      importunate, gradually becomes delightful; it brings father and mother
+      nearer to one another; and the lively animation of a family added to
+      domestic cares, makes the dearest occupation of the wife, and the sweetest
+      of all his amusements to the husband. If women will only once more become
+      mothers again, men will very soon become fathers and husbands.<a
+      name="FNanchor_279_279" id="FNanchor_279_279"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_279_279" class="fnanchor">[279]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The physical effect of this was not altogether wholesome. Rousseau's
+      eloquence excited women to an inordinate pitch of enthusiasm for the duty
+      of suckling their infants, but his contemptuous denunciation of the
+      gaieties of Paris could not extinguish the love of amusement.
+    </p>
+    <div class="poem">
+      <div class="stanza">
+        <span class="i0">Quid quod libelli Stoici inter sericos<br /></span>
+        <span class="i2">Jacere pulvillos amant?<br /></span>
+      </div>
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      So young mothers tried as well as they could to satisfy both desires, and
+      their babes were brought to them at all unseasonable hours, while they
+      were <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[ii.207]</a></span>full
+      of food and wine, or heated with dancing or play, and there received the
+      nurture which, but for Rousseau, they would have drawn in more salutary
+      sort from a healthy foster-mother in the country. This, however, was only
+      an incidental drawback to a movement which was in its main lines full of
+      excellent significance. The importance of giving freedom to the young
+      limbs, of accustoming the body to rudeness and vicissitude of climate, of
+      surrounding youth with light and cheerfulness and air, and even a tiny
+      detail such as the propriety of substituting for coral or ivory some soft
+      substance against which the growing teeth might press a way without
+      irritation, all these matters are handled with a fervid reality of
+      interest that gives to the tedium of the nursery a genuine touch of the
+      poetic. Swathings, bandages, leading-strings, are condemned with a warmth
+      like that with which the author had denounced comedy.<a
+      name="FNanchor_280_280" id="FNanchor_280_280"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_280_280" class="fnanchor">[280]</a> The city is held up to
+      indignant reprobation as the gulf of infant life, just as it had been in
+      his earlier pieces as the gulf of all the loftiest energies of the adult
+      life. Every child ought to be born and nursed in the country, and it would
+      be all the better if it remained in the country to the last day of its
+      existence. You must accustom it little by little to the sight of
+      disagreeable objects, such as toads and snakes; also in the same gradual
+      manner to the sound of alarming noises, beginning with <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[ii.208]</a></span>snapping
+      a cap in a pistol. If the infant cries from pain which you cannot remove,
+      make no attempt to soothe it; your caresses will not lessen the anguish of
+      its colic, while the child will remember what it has to do in order to be
+      coaxed and to get its own way. The nurse may amuse it by songs and lively
+      cries, but she is not to din useless words into its ears; the first
+      articulations that come to it should be few, easy, distinct, frequently
+      repeated, and only referring to objects which may be shown to the child.
+      &quot;Our unlucky facility in cheating ourselves with words that we do not
+      understand, begins earlier than we suppose.&quot; Let there be no haste in
+      inducing the child to speak articulately. The evil of precipitation in
+      this respect is not that children use and hear words without sense, but
+      that they use and hear them in a different sense from our own, without our
+      perceiving it. Mistakes of this sort, committed thus early, have an
+      influence, even after they are cured, over the turn of the mind for the
+      rest of the creature's life. Hence it is a good thing to keep a child's
+      vocabulary as limited as possible, lest it should have more words than
+      ideas, and should say more than it can possibly realise in thought.<a
+      name="FNanchor_281_281" id="FNanchor_281_281"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_281_281" class="fnanchor">[281]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In moral as in intellectual habits, the most perilous interval in human
+      life is that between birth and the age of twelve. The great secret is to
+      make the early education purely negative; a process of keeping the heart,
+      naturally so good, clear of vice, and the in<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[ii.209]</a></span>telligence, naturally so
+      true, clear of error. Take for first, second, and third precept, to follow
+      nature and leave her free to the performance of her own tasks. Until the
+      age of reason, there can be no idea of moral beings or social relations.
+      Therefore, says Rousseau, no moral discussion. Locke's maxim in favour of
+      constantly reasoning with children was a mistake. Of all the faculties of
+      man, reason, which is only a compound of the rest, is that which is latest
+      in development, and yet it is this which we are to use to develop those
+      which come earliest of all. Such a course is to begin at the end, and to
+      turn the finished work into an instrument. &quot;In speaking to children
+      in these early years a language which they do not comprehend, we accustom
+      them to cheat themselves with words, to criticise what is said to them, to
+      think themselves as wise as their masters, to become disputatious and
+      mutinous.&quot; If you forget that nature meant children to be children
+      before growing into men, you only force a fruit that has neither ripeness
+      nor savour, and must soon go bad; you will have youthful doctors and old
+      infants.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To all this, however, there is certainly another side which Rousseau was
+      too impetuous to see. Perfected reason is truly the tardiest of human
+      endowments, but it can never be perfected at all unless the process be
+      begun, and, within limits, the sooner the beginning is made, the earlier
+      will be the ripening. To know the grounds of right conduct is, we admit, a
+      different thing from feeling a disposition to practise<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[ii.210]</a></span> it. But nobody will deny
+      the expediency of an intelligent acquaintance with the reasons why one
+      sort of conduct is bad, and its opposite good, even if such an
+      acquaintance can never become a substitute for the spontaneous action of
+      thoroughly formed habit. For one thing, cases are constantly arising in a
+      man's life that demand the exercise of reason, to settle the special
+      application of principles which may have been acquired without knowledge
+      of their rational foundation. In such cases, which are the critical and
+      testing points of character, all depends upon the possession of a more or
+      less justly trained intelligence, and the habit of using it. Now, as we
+      have said, it is one of the great merits of the Emilius that it calls such
+      attention to the early age at which mental influences begin to operate.
+      Why should the gradual formation of the master habit of using the mind be
+      any exception?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Belief in the efficacy of preaching is the bane of educational systems.
+      Verbal lessons seem as if they ought to be so deeply effective, if only
+      the will and the throng of various motives which guide it, instantly
+      followed impression of a truth upon the intelligence. And they are,
+      moreover, so easily communicated, saving the parent a lifetime of anxious
+      painstaking in shaping his own character, after such a pattern as shall
+      silently draw all within its influence to pursuit of good and honourable
+      things. The most valuable of Rousseau's notions about education, though he
+      by no means consistently adhered to them, was<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[ii.211]</a></span> his urgent contempt for
+      this fatuous substitution of spoken injunctions and prohibitions, for the
+      deeper language of example, and the more living instruction of visible
+      circumstance. The vast improvements that have since taken place in the
+      theory and the art of education all over Europe, and of which he has the
+      honour of being the first and most widely influential promoter, may all be
+      traced to the spread of this wise principle, and its adoption in various
+      forms. The change in the up-bringing of the young exactly corresponds to
+      the change in the treatment of the insane. We may look back to the old
+      system of endless catechisms, apophthegms, moral fables, and the rest of
+      the paraphernalia of moral didactics, with the same horror with which we
+      regard the gags, strait-waistcoats, chains, and dark cells, of poor mad
+      people before the intervention of Pinel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is clear now to everybody who has any opinion on this most important of
+      all subjects, that spontaneousness is the first quality in connection with
+      right doing, which you can develop in the young, and this spontaneousness
+      of habit is best secured by associating it with the approval of those to
+      whom the child looks. Sympathy, in a word, is the true foundation from
+      which to build up the structure of good habit. The young should be led to
+      practise the elementary parts of right conduct from the desire to please,
+      because that is a securer basis than the conclusions of an embryo reason,
+      applied to the most complex conditions of action, while the grounds on
+      which<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[ii.212]</a></span>
+      action is justified or condemned may be made plain in the fulness of time,
+      when the understanding is better able to deal with the ideas and terms
+      essential to the matter. You have two aims to secure, each without
+      sacrifice of the other. These are, first, that the child shall grow up
+      with firm and promptly acting habit; second, that it shall retain respect
+      for reason and an open mind. The latter may be acquired in the less
+      immature years, but if the former be not acquired in the earlier times, a
+      man grows up with a drifting unsettledness of will, that makes his life
+      either vicious by quibbling sophistries, or helpless for want of ready
+      conclusions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The first idea which is to be given to a child, little as we might expect
+      such a doctrine from the author of the Second Discourse, is declared to be
+      that of property. And he can only acquire this idea by having something of
+      his own. But how are we to teach him the significance of a thing being
+      one's own? It is a prime rule to attempt to teach nothing by a verbal
+      lesson; all instruction ought to be left to experience.<a
+      name="FNanchor_282_282" id="FNanchor_282_282"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_282_282" class="fnanchor">[282]</a> Therefore you must
+      contrive some piece of experience which shall bring this notion of
+      property vividly into a child's mind; the following for instance. Emilius
+      is taken to a piece of garden; his instructor digs and dresses the ground
+      for him, and the boy takes possession by sowing some beans. &quot;We come
+      every day to water them, and see them rise out of the ground with
+      transports of joy. I add to this joy <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[ii.213]</a></span>by saying, This belongs
+      to you. Then explaining the term, I let him feel that he has put into the
+      ground this time, labour, trouble, his person in short; that there is in
+      this bit of ground something of himself which he may maintain against
+      every comer, as he might withdraw his own arm from the hand of another man
+      who would fain retain it in spite of him.&quot; One day Emilius comes to
+      his beloved garden, watering-pot in hand, and finds to his anguish and
+      despair that all the beans have been plucked up, that the ground has been
+      turned over, and that the spot is hardly recognisable. The gardener comes
+      up, and explains with much warmth that he had sown the seed of a precious
+      Maltese melon in that particular spot long before Emilius had come with
+      his trumpery beans, and that therefore it was his land; that nobody
+      touches the garden of his neighbour, in order that his own may remain
+      untouched; and that if Emilius wants a piece of garden, he must pay for it
+      by surrendering to the owner half the produce.<a name="FNanchor_283_283"
+      id="FNanchor_283_283"></a><a href="#Footnote_283_283" class="fnanchor">[283]</a>
+      Thus, says Rousseau, the boy sees how the notion of property naturally
+      goes back to the right of the first occupant as derived from labour. We
+      should have thought it less troublesome, as it is certainly more
+      important, to teach a boy the facts of property positively and
+      imperatively. This rather elaborate ascent to origins seems an exaggerated
+      form of that very vice of over-instructing the growing reason in
+      abstractions, which Rousseau had condemned so short a time before.<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[ii.214]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Again, there is the very strong objection to conveying lessons by
+      artificially contrived incidents, that children are nearly always
+      extremely acute in suspecting and discovering such contrivances. Yet
+      Rousseau recurs to them over and over again, evidently taking delight in
+      their ingenuity. Besides the illustration of the origin and significance
+      of property, there is the complex fancy in which a juggler is made to
+      combine instruction as to the properties of the magnet with certain severe
+      moral truths.<a name="FNanchor_284_284" id="FNanchor_284_284"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_284_284" class="fnanchor">[284]</a> The tutor interests
+      Emilius in astronomy and geography by a wonderful stratagem indeed. The
+      poor youth loses his way in a wood, is overpowered by hunger and
+      weariness, and then is led on by his cunning tutor to a series of
+      inferences from the position of the sun and so forth, which convince him
+      that his home is just over the hedge, where it is duly found to be.<a
+      name="FNanchor_285_285" id="FNanchor_285_285"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_285_285" class="fnanchor">[285]</a> Here, again, is the
+      way in which the instructor proposes to stir activity of limb in the young
+      Emilius. &quot;In walking with him of an afternoon, I used sometimes to
+      put in my pocket two cakes of a sort he particularly liked; we each of us
+      ate one. One day he perceived that I had three cakes; he could easily have
+      eaten six; he promptly despatches his own, to ask me for the third. Nay, I
+      said to him, I could well eat it myself, or we would divide it, but I
+      would rather see it made the prize of a running match between the two
+      little boys there.&quot; The little boys run their race, and the winner
+      devours the cake. This and <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_215"
+      id="Page_215">[ii.215]</a></span>subsequent repetitions of the performance
+      at first only amused Emilius, but he presently began to reflect, and
+      perceiving that he also had two legs, he began privately to try how fast
+      he could run. When he thought he was strong enough, he importuned his
+      tutor for the third cake, and on being refused, insisted on being allowed
+      to compete for it. The habit of taking exercise was not the only advantage
+      gained. The tutor resorted to a variety of further stratagems in order to
+      induce the boy to find out and practise visual compass, and so forth.<a
+      name="FNanchor_286_286" id="FNanchor_286_286"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_286_286" class="fnanchor">[286]</a> If we consider, as we
+      have said, first the readiness of children to suspect a stratagem wherever
+      instruction is concerned, and next their resentment on discovering
+      artifice of that kind, all this seems as little likely to be successful as
+      it is assuredly contrary to Rousseau's general doctrine of leaving
+      circumstances to lead.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In truth Rousseau's appreciation of the real nature of spontaneousness in
+      the processes of education was essentially inadequate, and that it was so,
+      arose from a no less inadequate conception of the right influence upon the
+      growing character, of the great principle of authority. His dread lest the
+      child should ever be conscious of the pressure of a will external to its
+      own, constituted a fundamental weakness of his system. The child, we are
+      told with endless repetition, ought always to be led to suppose that it is
+      following its own judgment or impulses, and has only them and their
+      consequences to consider. But Rousseau could <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[ii.216]</a></span>not help seeing, as he
+      meditated on the actual development of his Emilius, that to leave him thus
+      to the training of accident would necessarily end in many fatal gaps and
+      chasms. Yet the hand and will of the parent or the master could not be
+      allowed to appear. The only alternative, therefore, was the secret
+      preparation of artificial sets of circumstances, alike in work and in
+      amusement. Jean Paul was wiser than Jean Jacques. &quot;Let not the
+      teacher after the work also order and regulate the games. It is decidedly
+      better not to recognise or make any order in games, than to keep it up
+      with difficulty and send the zephyrets of pleasure through artistic
+      bellows and air-pumps to the little flowers.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor_287_287" id="FNanchor_287_287"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_287_287" class="fnanchor">[287]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The spontaneousness which we ought to seek, does not consist in promptly
+      willing this or that, independently of an authority imposed from without,
+      but in a self-acting desire to do what is right under all its various
+      conditions, including what the child finds pleasant to itself on the one
+      hand, and what it has good reason to suppose will be pleasant to its
+      parents on the other. &quot;You must never,&quot; Rousseau gravely warns
+      us, &quot;inflict punishment upon children as punishment; it should always
+      fall upon them as a natural consequence of their ill-behaviour.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor_288_288" id="FNanchor_288_288"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_288_288" class="fnanchor">[288]</a> But why should one of
+      the most closely following of all these consequences be dissembled or
+      carefully hidden from sight, namely, the effect of ill-behaviour upon the
+      contentment of the child's nearest friend? Why <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[ii.217]</a></span>are the effects of
+      conduct upon the actor's own physical well-being to be the only effects
+      honoured with the title of being natural? Surely, while we leave to the
+      young the widest freedom of choice, and even habitually invite them to
+      decide for themselves between two lines of conduct, we are bound
+      afterwards to state our approval or disapproval of their decision, so that
+      on the next occasion they may take this anger or pleasure in others into
+      proper account in their rough and hasty forecast, often less hasty than it
+      seems, of the consequences of what they are about to do. One of the most
+      important of educating influences is lost, if the young are not taught to
+      place the feelings of others in a front place, when they think in their
+      own simple way of what will happen to them from yielding to a given
+      impulse. Rousseau was quite right in insisting on practical experience of
+      consequences as the only secure foundation for self-acting habit; he was
+      fatally wrong in mutilating this experience by the exclusion from it of
+      the effects of perceiving, resisting, accepting, ignoring, all will and
+      authority from without. The great, and in many respects so admirable,
+      school of Rousseauite philanthropists, have always been feeble on this
+      side, alike in the treatment of the young by their instructors, and the
+      treatment of social offenders by a government.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Again, consider the large group of excellent qualities which are
+      associated with affectionate respect for a more fully informed authority.
+      In a world where necessity stands for so much, it is no inconsiderable<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[ii.218]</a></span> gain
+      to have learnt the lesson of docility on easy terms in our earliest days.
+      If in another sense the will of each individual is all-powerful over his
+      own destinies, it is best that this idea of firm purpose and a settled
+      energy that will not be denied, should grow up in the young soul in
+      connection with a riper wisdom and an ampler experience than its own; for
+      then, when the time for independent action comes, the force of the
+      association will continue. Finally, although none can be vicariously wise,
+      none sage by proxy, nor any pay for the probation of another, yet is it
+      not a puerile wastefulness to send forth the young all bare to the ordeal,
+      while the armour of old experience and tempered judgment hangs idle on the
+      wall? Surely it is thus by accumulation of instruction from generation to
+      generation, that the area of right conduct in the world is extended. Such
+      instruction must with youth be conveyed by military word of command as
+      often as by philosophical persuasion of its worth. Nor is the atmosphere
+      of command other than bracing, even to those who are commanded. If
+      education is to be mainly conducted by force of example, it is a dreadful
+      thing that the child is ever to have before its eyes as living type and
+      practical exemplar the pale figure of parents without passions, and
+      without a will as to the conduct of those who are dependent on them. Even
+      a slight excess of anger, impatience, and the spirit of command, would be
+      less demoralising to the impressionable character than the constant sight
+      of a man artificially impassive.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_219"
+      id="Page_219">[ii.219]</a></span> Rousseau is perpetually calling upon men
+      to try to lay aside their masks; yet the model instructor whom he has
+      created for us is to be the most artfully and elaborately masked of all
+      men; unless he happens to be naturally without blood and without
+      physiognomy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rousseau, then, while he put away the old methods which imprisoned the
+      young spirit in injunctions and over-solicitous monitions, yet did none
+      the less in his own scheme imprison it in a kind of hothouse, which with
+      its regulated temperature and artificially contrived access of light and
+      air, was in many respects as little the method of nature, that is to say
+      it gave as little play for the spontaneous working and growth of the
+      forces of nature in the youth's breast, as that regimen of the cloister
+      which he so profoundly abhorred. Partly this was the result of a
+      ludicrously shallow psychology. He repeats again and again that self-love
+      is the one quality in the youthful embryo of character, from which you
+      have to work. From this, he says, springs the desire of possessing
+      pleasure and avoiding pain, the great fulcrum on which the lever of
+      experience rests. Not only so, but from this same unslumbering quality of
+      self-love you have to develop regard for others. The child's first
+      affection for his nurse is a result of the fact that she serves his
+      comfort, and so down to his passion in later years for his mistress. Now
+      this is not the place for a discussion as to the ultimate atom of the
+      complex moral sentiments of men and women, nor for an examination of the
+      question whether the faculty of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_220"
+      id="Page_220">[ii.220]</a></span> sympathy has or has not an origin
+      independent of self-love. However that may be, no one will deny that
+      sympathy appears in good natures extremely early, and is susceptible of
+      rapid cultivation from the very first. Here is the only adequate key to
+      that education of the affections, from their rudimentary expansion in the
+      nursery, until they include the complete range of all the objects proper
+      to them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One secret of Rousseau's omission of this, the most important of all
+      educating agencies, from the earlier stages of the formation of character,
+      was the fact which is patent enough in every page, that he was not
+      animated by that singular tenderness and almost mystic affection for the
+      young, which breathes through the writings of some of his German
+      followers, of Richter above all others, and which reveals to those who are
+      sensible of it, the hold that may so easily be gained for all good
+      purposes upon the eager sympathy of the youthful spirit. The instructor of
+      Emilius speaks the words of a wise onlooker, sagely meditating on the
+      ideal man, rather than of a parent who is living the life of his child
+      through with him. Rousseau's interest in children, though perfectly
+      sincere, was still &#230;sthetic, moral, reasonable, rather than that pure
+      flood of full-hearted feeling for them, which is perhaps seldom stirred
+      except in those who have actually brought up children of their own. He
+      composed a vindication of his love for the young in an exquisite piece;<a
+      name="FNanchor_289_289" id="FNanchor_289_289"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_289_289" class="fnanchor">[289]</a> but it has none of the
+      yearnings of the bowels of tenderness.<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[ii.221]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      <b>II.</b>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Education being the art of preparing the young to grow into instruments of
+      happiness for themselves and others, a writer who undertakes to speak
+      about it must naturally have some conception of the kind of happiness at
+      which his art aims. We have seen enough of Rousseau's own life to know
+      what sort of ideal he would be likely to set up. It is a healthier
+      epicureanism, with enough stoicism to make happiness safe in case that
+      circumstances should frown. The man who has lived most is not he who has
+      counted most years, but he who has most felt life.<a
+      name="FNanchor_290_290" id="FNanchor_290_290"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_290_290" class="fnanchor">[290]</a> It is mere false
+      wisdom to throw ourselves incessantly out of ourselves, to count the
+      present for nothing, ever to pursue without ceasing a future which flees
+      in proportion as we advance, to try to transport ourselves from whence we
+      are not, to some place where we shall never be.<a name="FNanchor_291_291"
+      id="FNanchor_291_291"></a><a href="#Footnote_291_291" class="fnanchor">[291]</a>
+      He is happiest who suffers fewest pains, and he is most miserable who
+      feels fewest pleasures. Then we have a half stoical strain. The felicity
+      of man here below is only a negative state, to be measured by the more or
+      less of the ills he undergoes. It is in the disproportion between desires
+      and faculties that our misery consists. Happiness, therefore, lies not in
+      diminishing our desires, nor any more in extending our faculties, but in
+      diminishing the excess of desire over faculty, and in bringing power and
+      will into perfect balance.<a name="FNanchor_292_292" id="FNanchor_292_292"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_292_292" class="fnanchor">[292]</a> Excepting health,
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[ii.222]</a></span>strength,
+      respect for one's self, all the goods of this life reside in opinion;
+      excepting bodily pain and remorse of conscience, all our ills are in
+      imagination. Death is no evil; it is only made so by half-knowledge and
+      false wisdom. &quot;Live according to nature, be patient, and drive away
+      physicians; you will not avoid death, but you will only feel it once,
+      while they on the other hand would bring it daily before your troubled
+      imagination, and their false art, instead of prolonging your days, only
+      hinders you from enjoying them. Suffer, die, or recover; but above all
+      things live, live up to your last hour.&quot; It is foresight, constantly
+      carrying us out of ourselves, that is the true source of our miseries.<a
+      name="FNanchor_293_293" id="FNanchor_293_293"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_293_293" class="fnanchor">[293]</a> O man, confine thy
+      existence within thyself, and thou wilt cease to be miserable. Thy
+      liberty, thy power, reach exactly as far as thy natural forces, and no
+      further; all the rest is slavery and illusion. The only man who has his
+      own will is he who does not need in order to have it the arms of another
+      person at the end of his own.<a name="FNanchor_294_294"
+      id="FNanchor_294_294"></a><a href="#Footnote_294_294" class="fnanchor">[294]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The training that follows from this is obvious. The instructor has
+      carefully to distinguish true or natural need from the need which is only
+      fancied, or which only comes from superabundance of life. Emilius, who is
+      brought up in the country, has nothing in his room to distinguish it from
+      that of a peasant.<a name="FNanchor_295_295" id="FNanchor_295_295"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_295_295" class="fnanchor">[295]</a> If he is taken to a
+      luxurious banquet, he is bidden, instead of heedlessly enjoying it, to
+      reflect austerely how many hundreds or thousands of hands <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[ii.223]</a></span>have
+      been employed in preparing it.<a name="FNanchor_296_296"
+      id="FNanchor_296_296"></a><a href="#Footnote_296_296" class="fnanchor">[296]</a>
+      His preference for gay colours in his clothes is to be consulted, because
+      this is natural and becoming to his age, but the moment he prefers a stuff
+      merely because it is rich, behold a sophisticated creature.<a
+      name="FNanchor_297_297" id="FNanchor_297_297"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_297_297" class="fnanchor">[297]</a> The curse of the world
+      is inequality, and inequality springs from the multitude of wants, which
+      cause us to be so much the more dependent. What makes man essentially good
+      is to have few wants, and to abstain from comparing himself with others;
+      what makes him essentially bad, is to have many wants, and to cling much
+      to opinion.<a name="FNanchor_298_298" id="FNanchor_298_298"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_298_298" class="fnanchor">[298]</a> Hence, although
+      Emilius happened to have both wealth and good birth, he is not brought up
+      to be a gentleman, with the prejudices and helplessness and selfishness
+      too naturally associated with that abused name.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This cardinal doctrine of limitation of desire, with its corollary of
+      self-sufficience, contains in itself the great maxim that Emilius and
+      every one else must learn some trade. To work is an indispensable duty in
+      the social man. Rich or poor, powerful or weak, every idle citizen is a
+      knave. And every boy must learn a real trade, a trade with his hands. It
+      is not so much a matter of learning a craft for the sake of knowing one,
+      as for the sake of conquering the prejudices which despise it. Labour for
+      glory, if you have not to labour from necessity. Lower yourself to the
+      condition of the artisan, so as to be above your own. In order to reign in
+      opinion, begin by reigning over <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_224"
+      id="Page_224">[ii.224]</a></span>it. All things well considered, the trade
+      most to be preferred is that of carpenter; it is clean, useful, and
+      capable of being carried on in the house; it demands address and diligence
+      in the workman, and though the form of the work is determined by utility,
+      still elegance and taste are not excluded.<a name="FNanchor_299_299"
+      id="FNanchor_299_299"></a><a href="#Footnote_299_299" class="fnanchor">[299]</a>
+      There are few prettier pictures than that where Sophie enters the
+      workshop, and sees in amazement her young lover at the other end, in his
+      white shirt-sleeves, his hair loosely fastened back, with a chisel in one
+      hand and a mallet in the other, too intent upon his work to perceive even
+      the approach of his mistress.<a name="FNanchor_300_300"
+      id="FNanchor_300_300"></a><a href="#Footnote_300_300" class="fnanchor">[300]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When the revolution came, and princes and nobles wandered in indigent
+      exile, the disciples of Rousseau pointed in unkind triumph to the
+      advantage these unfortunate wretches would have had if they had not been
+      too puffed up with the vanity of feudalism to follow the prudent example
+      of Emilius in learning a craft. That Rousseau should have laid so much
+      stress on the vicissitudes of fortune, which might cause even a king to be
+      grateful one day that he had a trade at the end of his arms, is sometimes
+      quoted as a proof of his foresight of troublous times. This, however, goes
+      too far, because, apart from the instances of such vicissitudes among the
+      ancients, the King of Syracuse keeping school at Corinth, or Alexander,
+      son of Perseus, becoming a Roman scrivener, he actually saw Charles
+      Edward, the Stuart pretender, wandering from court to court in search of
+      succour <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[ii.225]</a></span>and
+      receiving only rebuffs; and he may well have known that after the troubles
+      of 1738 a considerable number of the oligarchs of his native Geneva had
+      gone into exile, rather than endure the humiliation of their party.<a
+      name="FNanchor_301_301" id="FNanchor_301_301"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_301_301" class="fnanchor">[301]</a> Besides all this, the
+      propriety of being able to earn one's bread by some kind of toil that
+      would be useful in even the simplest societies, flowed necessarily from
+      every part of his doctrine of the aims of life and the worth of character.
+      He did, however, say, &quot;We approach a state of crisis and an age of
+      revolutions,&quot; which proved true, but he added too much when he
+      pronounced it impossible that the great monarchies of Europe could last
+      long.<a name="FNanchor_302_302" id="FNanchor_302_302"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_302_302" class="fnanchor">[302]</a> And it is certain that
+      the only one of the great monarchies which did actually fall would have
+      had a far better chance of surviving if Lewis XVI. had been as expert in
+      the trade of king as he was in that of making locks and bolts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[ii.226]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From this semi-stoical ideal there followed certain social notions, of
+      which Rousseau had the distinction of being the most powerful propagator.
+      As has so often been said, his contemporaries were willing to leave social
+      questions alone, provided only the government would suffer the free
+      expression of opinion in literature and science. Rousseau went deeper. His
+      moral conception of individual life and character contained in itself a
+      social conception, and he did not shrink from boldly developing it. The
+      rightly constituted man suffices for himself and is free from prejudices.
+      He has arms, and knows how to use them; he has few wants, and knows how to
+      satisfy them. Nurtured in the most absolute freedom, he can think of no
+      worse ill than servitude. He attaches himself to the beauty which perishes
+      not, limiting his desires to his condition, learning to lose whatever may
+      be taken away from him, to place himself above events, and to detach his
+      heart from loved objects without a pang.<a name="FNanchor_303_303"
+      id="FNanchor_303_303"></a><a href="#Footnote_303_303" class="fnanchor">[303]</a>
+      He pities miserable kings, who are the bondsmen of all that seems to obey
+      them; he pities false sages, who are fast bound in the chains of their
+      empty renown; he pities the silly rich, martyrs to their own ostentation.<a
+      name="FNanchor_304_304" id="FNanchor_304_304"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_304_304" class="fnanchor">[304]</a> All the sympathies of
+      such a man therefore naturally flow away from these, the great of the
+      earth, to those who lead the stoic's life perforce. &quot;It is the common
+      people who compose the human race; what is not the people is hardly worth
+      taking into account. Man is the same in all <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[ii.227]</a></span>ranks; that being so, the
+      ranks which are most numerous deserve most respect. Before one who
+      reflects, all civil distinctions vanish: he marks the same passions and
+      the same feelings in the clown as in the man covered with reputation; he
+      can only distinguish their speech, and a varnish more or less elaborately
+      laid on. Study people of this humble condition; you will perceive that
+      under another sort of language, they have as much intelligence as you, and
+      more good sense. Respect your species: reflect that it is essentially made
+      up of the collection of peoples; that if every king and every philosopher
+      were cut off from among them, they would scarcely be missed, and the world
+      would go none the worse.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_305_305"
+      id="FNanchor_305_305"></a><a href="#Footnote_305_305" class="fnanchor">[305]</a>
+      As it is, the universal spirit of the law in every country is invariably
+      to favour the strong against the weak, and him who has, against him who
+      has not. The many are sacrificed to the few. The specious names of justice
+      and subordination serve only as instruments for violence and arms for
+      iniquity. The ostentatious orders who pretend to be useful to the others,
+      are in truth only useful to themselves at the expense of the others.<a
+      name="FNanchor_306_306" id="FNanchor_306_306"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_306_306" class="fnanchor">[306]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[ii.228]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This was carrying on the work which had already been begun in the New Helo&#239;sa,
+      as we have seen, but in the Emilius it is pushed with a gravity and a
+      directness, that could not be imparted to the picture of a fanciful and
+      arbitrarily chosen situation. The only writer who has approached Rousseau,
+      so far as I know, in fulness and depth of expression in proclaiming the
+      sorrows and wrongs of the poor blind crowd, who painfully drag along the
+      car of triumphant civilisation with its handful of occupants, is the
+      author of the Book of the People. Lamennais even surpasses Rousseau in the
+      profundity of his pathos; his pictures of the life of hut and hovel are as
+      sincere and as touching; and there is in them, instead of the anger and
+      bitterness of the older author, righteous as that was, a certain heroism
+      of pity and devoted sublimity of complaint, which lift the soul up from
+      resentment into divine moods of compassion and resolve, and stir us like a
+      tale of noble action.<a name="FNanchor_307_307" id="FNanchor_307_307"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_307_307" class="fnanchor">[307]</a> It was <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[ii.229]</a></span>Rousseau,
+      however, who first sounded the note of which the religion that had once
+      been the champion and consoler of the common people, seemed long to have
+      lost even the tradition. Yet the teaching was not constructive, because
+      the ideal man was not made truly social. Emilius is brought up in
+      something of the isolation of the imaginary savage of the state of nature.
+      He marries, and then he and his wife seem only fitted to lead a life of
+      detachment from the interests of the world in which they are placed.
+      Social or political education, that is the training which character
+      receives from the medium in which it grows, is left out of account, and so
+      is the correlative process of preparation for the various conditions and
+      exigencies which belong to that medium, until it is too late to take its
+      natural place in character. Nothing can be clumsier than the way in which
+      Rousseau proposes to teach Emilius the existence and nature of his
+      relations with his fellows. And the reason of this was that he had never
+      himself in the course of his ruminations, willingly thought of Emilius as
+      being in a condition of active social relation, the citizen of a state.
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      <b>III.</b>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There appear to be three dominant states of mind, with groups of faculties
+      associated with each of them,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_230"
+      id="Page_230">[ii.230]</a></span> which it is the business of the
+      instructor firmly to establish in the character of the future man. The
+      first is a resolute and unflinching respect for Truth; for the
+      conclusions, that is to say, of the scientific reason, comprehending also
+      a constant anxiety to take all possible pains that such conclusions shall
+      be rightly drawn. Connected with this is the discipline of the whole range
+      of intellectual faculties, from the simple habit of correct observation,
+      down to the highly complex habit of weighing and testing the value of
+      evidence. This very important branch of early discipline, Rousseau for
+      reasons of his own which we have already often referred to, cared little
+      about, and he throws very little light upon it, beyond one or two
+      extremely sensible precepts of the negative kind, warning us against
+      beginning too soon and forcing an apparent progress too rapidly. The
+      second fundamental state in a rightly formed character is a deep feeling
+      for things of the spirit which are unknown and incommensurable; a sense of
+      awe, mystery, sublimity, and the fateful bounds of life at its beginning
+      and its end. Here is the Religious side, and what Rousseau has to say of
+      this we shall presently see. It is enough now to remark that Emilius was
+      never to hear the name of a God or supreme being until his reason was
+      fairly ripened. The third state, which is at least as difficult to bring
+      to healthy perfection as either of the other two, is a passion for
+      Justice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The little use which Rousseau made of this<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[ii.231]</a></span> momentous and
+      much-embracing word, which names the highest peak of social virtue, is a
+      very striking circumstance. The reason would seem to be that his sense of
+      the relations of men with one another was not virile enough to comprehend
+      the deep austerer lines which mark the brow of the benignant divinity of
+      Justice. In the one place in his writings where he speaks of justice
+      freely, he shows a narrowness of idea, which was perhaps as much due to
+      intellectual confusion as to lack of moral robustness. He says excellently
+      that &quot;love of the human race is nothing else in us but love of
+      justice,&quot; and that &quot;of all the virtues, justice is that which
+      contributes most to the common good of men.&quot; While enjoining the
+      discipline of pity as one of the noblest of sentiments, he warns us
+      against letting it degenerate into weakness, and insists that we should
+      only surrender ourselves to it when it accords with justice.<a
+      name="FNanchor_308_308" id="FNanchor_308_308"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_308_308" class="fnanchor">[308]</a> But that is all. What
+      constitutes justice, what is its standard, what its source, what its
+      sanction, whence the extraordinary holiness with which its name has come
+      to be invested among the most highly civilised societies of men, we are
+      never told, nor do we ever see that our teacher had seen the possibility
+      of such questions being asked. If they had been propounded to him, he
+      would, it is most likely, have fallen back upon the convenient mystery of
+      the natural law. This was the current phrase of that time, and it was
+      meant to embody a hypothetical experience of perfect human relations in
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[ii.232]</a></span>an
+      expression of the widest generality. If so, this would have to be
+      impressed upon the mind of Emilius in the same way as other mysteries. As
+      a matter of fact, Emilius was led through pity up to humanity, or
+      sociality in an imperfect signification, and there he was left without a
+      further guide to define the marks of truly social conduct.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This imperfection was a necessity, inseparable from Rousseau's tenacity in
+      keeping society in the background of the picture of life which he opened
+      to his pupil. He said, indeed, &quot;We must study society by men, and men
+      by society; those who would treat politics and morality apart will never
+      understand anything about either one or the other.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor_309_309" id="FNanchor_309_309"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_309_309" class="fnanchor">[309]</a> This is profoundly
+      true, but we hardly see in the morality which is designed for Emilius the
+      traces of political elements. Yet without some gradually unfolded
+      presentation of society as a whole, it is scarcely possible to implant the
+      idea of justice with any hope of large fertility. You may begin at a very
+      early time to develop, even from the primitive quality of self-love, a
+      notion of equity and a respect for it, but the vast conception of social
+      justice can only find room in a character that has been made spacious by
+      habitual contemplation of the height and breadth and close compactedness
+      of the fabric of the relations that bind man to man, and of the share,
+      integral or infinitesimally fractional, that each has in the happiness or
+      woe of other souls. And this contemplation should <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[ii.233]</a></span>begin when we prepare the
+      foundation of all the other maturer habits. Youth can hardly recognise too
+      soon the enormous unresting machine which bears us ceaselessly along,
+      because we can hardly learn too soon that its force and direction depend
+      on the play of human motives, of which our own for good or evil form an
+      inevitable part when the ripe years come. To one reared with the narrow
+      care devoted to Emilius, or with the capricious negligence in which the
+      majority are left to grow to manhood, the society into which they are
+      thrown is a mere moral wilderness. They are to make such way through it as
+      they can, with egotism for their only trusty instrument. This egotism may
+      either be a bludgeon, as with the most part, or it may be a delicately
+      adjusted and fastidiously decorated compass, as with an Emilius. In either
+      case is no perception that the gross outer contact of men with another is
+      transformed by worthiness of common aim and loyal faith in common
+      excellences, into a thing beautiful and generous. It is our business to
+      fix and root the habit of thinking of that <i>moral</i> union, into which,
+      as Kant has so admirably expressed it, the <i>pathological</i> necessities
+      of situation that first compelled social concert, have been gradually
+      transmuted. Instead of this, it is exactly the primitive pathological
+      conditions that a narrow theory of education brings first into prominence;
+      as if knowledge of origins were indispensable to a right attachment to the
+      transformed conditions of a maturer system.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It has been said that Rousseau founds all morality<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[ii.234]</a></span> upon personal interest,
+      perhaps even more specially than Helv&#233;tius himself. The accusation is
+      just. Emilius will enter adult life without the germs of that social
+      conscience, which animates a man with all the associations of duty and
+      right, of gratitude for the past and resolute hope for the future, in face
+      of the great body of which he finds himself a part. &quot;I observe,&quot;
+      says Rousseau, &quot;that in the modern ages men have no hold upon one
+      another save through force and interest, while the ancients on the other
+      hand acted much more by persuasion and the affections of the soul.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor_310_310" id="FNanchor_310_310"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_310_310" class="fnanchor">[310]</a> The reason was that
+      with the ancients, supposing him to mean the Greeks and Romans, the social
+      conscience was so much wider in its scope than the comparatively narrow
+      fragment of duty which is supposed to come under the sacred power of
+      conscience in the more complex and less closely contained organisation of
+      a modern state. The neighbours to whom a man owed duty in those times
+      comprehended all the members of his state. The neighbours of the modern
+      preacher of duty are either the few persons with whom each of us is
+      brought into actual and palpable contact, or else the whole multitude of
+      dwellers on the earth,&#8212;a conception that for many ages to come will
+      remain with the majority of men and women too vague to exert an energetic
+      and concentrating influence upon action, and will lead them no further
+      than an uncoloured and nerveless cosmopolitanism.<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[ii.235]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What the young need to have taught to them in this too little cultivated
+      region, is that they are born not mere atoms floating independent and
+      apart for a season through a terraqueous medium, and sucking up as much
+      more than their share of nourishment as they can seize; nor citizens of
+      the world with no more definite duty than to keep their feelings towards
+      all their fellows in a steady simmer of bland complacency; but soldiers in
+      a host, citizens of a polity whose boundaries are not set down in maps,
+      members of a church the handwriting of whose ordinances is not in the
+      hieroglyphs of idle mystery, nor its hope and recompense in the lands
+      beyond death. They need to be taught that they owe a share of their
+      energies to the great struggle which is in ceaseless progress in all
+      societies in an endless variety of forms, between new truth and old
+      prejudice, between love of self or class and solicitous passion for
+      justice, between the obstructive indolence and inertia of the many and the
+      generous mental activity of the few. This is the sphere and definition of
+      the social conscience. The good causes of enlightenment and justice in all
+      lands,&#8212;here is the church militant in which we should early seek to
+      enrol the young, and the true state to which they should be taught that
+      they owe the duties of active and arduous citizenship. These are the
+      struggles with which the modern instructor should associate those virtues
+      of fortitude, tenacity, silent patience, outspoken energy, readiness to
+      assert ourselves and readiness to efface ourselves, willingness to<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[ii.236]</a></span>
+      suffer and resolution to inflict suffering, which men of old knew how to
+      show for their gods or their sovereign. But the ideal of Emilius was an
+      ideal of quietism; to possess his own soul in patience, with a suppressed
+      intelligence, a suppressed sociality, without a single spark of generous
+      emulation in the courses of strong-fibred virtue, or a single thrill of
+      heroical pursuit after so much as one great forlorn cause.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &quot;If it once comes to him, in reading these parallels of the famous
+      ancients, to desire to be another rather than himself, were this other
+      Socrates, were he Cato, you have missed the mark; he who begins to make
+      himself a stranger to himself, is not long before he forgets himself
+      altogether.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_311_311" id="FNanchor_311_311"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_311_311" class="fnanchor">[311]</a> But if a man only
+      nurses the conception of his own personality, for the sake of keeping his
+      own peace and self-contained comfort at a glow of easy warmth, assuredly
+      the best thing that can befall him is that he should perish, lest his
+      example should infect others with the same base contagion. Excessive
+      personality when militant is often wholesome, excessive personality that
+      only hugs itself is under all circumstances chief among unclean things.
+      Thus even Rousseau's finest monument of moral enthusiasm is fatally
+      tarnished by the cold damp breath of isolation, and the very book which
+      contained so many elements of new life for a state, was at bottom the
+      apotheosis of social despair.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_237"
+      id="Page_237">[ii.237]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      <b>IV.</b>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The great agent in fostering the rise to vigour and uprightness of a
+      social conscience, apart from the yet more powerful instrument of a strong
+      and energetic public spirit at work around the growing character, must be
+      found in the study of history rightly directed with a view to this end. It
+      is here, in observing the long processes of time and appreciating the
+      slowly accumulating sum of endeavour, that the mind gradually comes to
+      read the great lessons how close is the bond that links men together. It
+      is here that he gradually begins to acquire the habit of considering what
+      are the conditions of wise social activity, its limits, its objects, its
+      rewards, what is the capacity of collective achievement, and of what sort
+      is the significance and purport of the little span of time that cuts off
+      the yesterday of our society from its to-morrow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rousseau had very rightly forbidden the teaching of history to young
+      children, on the ground that the essence of history lies in the moral
+      relations between the bare facts which it recounts, and that the terms and
+      ideas of these relations are wholly beyond the intellectual grasp of the
+      very young.<a name="FNanchor_312_312" id="FNanchor_312_312"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_312_312" class="fnanchor">[312]</a> He might have based
+      his objections equally well upon the impossibility of little children
+      knowing the meaning of the multitude of descriptive terms which make up a
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[ii.238]</a></span>historical
+      manual, or realising the relations between events in bare point of time,
+      although childhood may perhaps be a convenient period for some mechanical
+      acquisition of dates. According to Rousseau, history was to appear very
+      late in the educational course, when the youth was almost ready to enter
+      the world. It was to be the finishing study, from which he should learn
+      not sociality either in its scientific or its higher moral sense, but the
+      composition of the heart of man, in a safer way than through actual
+      intercourse with society. Society might make him either cynical or
+      frivolous. History would bring him the same information, without
+      subjecting him to the same perils. In society you only hear the words of
+      men; to know man you must observe his actions, and actions are only
+      unveiled in history.<a name="FNanchor_313_313" id="FNanchor_313_313"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_313_313" class="fnanchor">[313]</a> This view is hardly
+      worth discussing. The subject of history is not the heart of man, but the
+      movements of societies. Moreover, the oracles of history are entirely dumb
+      to one who seeks from them maxims for the shaping of daily conduct, or
+      living instruction as to the motives, aims, caprices, capacities of
+      self-restraint, self-sacrifice, of those with whom the occasions of life
+      bring us into contact.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is true that at the close of the other part of his education, Emilius
+      was to travel and there find the comment upon the completed circle of his
+      studies.<a name="FNanchor_314_314" id="FNanchor_314_314"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_314_314" class="fnanchor">[314]</a> But excellent as
+      travel is for some of the best of those who have the opportunity, still
+      for many it is value<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[ii.239]</a></span>less
+      for lack of the faculty of curiosity. For the great majority it is
+      impossible for lack of opportunity. To trust so much as Rousseau did to
+      the effect of travelling, is to leave a large chasm in education
+      unbridged.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is interesting, however, to notice some of Rousseau's notions about
+      history as an instrument for conveying moral instruction, a few of them
+      are so good, others are so characteristically narrow. &quot;The worst
+      historians for a young man,&quot; he says, &quot;are those who judge. The
+      facts, the facts; then let him judge for himself. If the author's judgment
+      is for ever guiding him, he is only seeing with the eye of another, and as
+      soon as this eye fails him, he sees nothing.&quot; Modern history is not
+      fit for instruction, not only because it has no physiognomy, all our men
+      being exactly like one another, but because our historians, intent on
+      brilliance above all other things, think of nothing so much as painting
+      highly coloured portraits, which for the most part represent nothing at
+      all.<a name="FNanchor_315_315" id="FNanchor_315_315"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_315_315" class="fnanchor">[315]</a> Of course such a
+      judgment as this implies an ignorance alike of the ends and meaning of
+      history, which, considering that he was living in the midst of a singular
+      revival of historical study, is not easy to pardon. If we are to look only
+      to perfection of form and arrangement, it may have been right for one
+      living in the middle of the last century to place the ancients in the
+      first rank without competitors. But the author of the Discourse upon
+      literature and the arts might have been expected to look beyond com<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[ii.240]</a></span>position,
+      and the contemporary of Voltaire's <i>Essai sur les Moeurs</i> (1754-1757)
+      might have been expected to know that the profitable experience of the
+      human race did not close with the fall of the Roman republic. Among the
+      ancient historians, he counted Thucydides to be the true model, because he
+      reports facts without judging, and omits none of the circumstances proper
+      for enabling us to judge of them for ourselves&#8212;though how Rousseau
+      knew what facts Thucydides has omitted, I am unable to divine. Then come C&#230;sar's
+      Commentaries and Xenophon's Retreat of the Ten Thousand. The good
+      Herodotus, without portraits and without maxims, but abounding in details
+      the most capable of interesting and pleasing, would perhaps be the best of
+      historians, if only these details did not so often degenerate into
+      puerilities. Livy is unsuited to youth, because he is political and a
+      rhetorician. Tacitus is the book of the old; you must have learnt the art
+      of reading facts, before you can be trusted with maxims.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The drawback of histories such as those of Thucydides and C&#230;sar,
+      Rousseau admits to be that they dwell almost entirely on war, leaving out
+      the true life of nations, which belongs to the unwritten chronicles of
+      peace. This leads him to the equally just reflection that historians while
+      recounting facts omit the gradual and progressive causes which led to
+      them. &quot;They often find in a battle lost or won the reason of a
+      revolution, which even before the battle was already inevitable. War
+      scarcely does more than bring into<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_241"
+      id="Page_241">[ii.241]</a></span> full light events determined by moral
+      causes, which historians can seldom penetrate.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor_316_316" id="FNanchor_316_316"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_316_316" class="fnanchor">[316]</a> A third complaint
+      against the study which he began by recommending as a proper introduction
+      to the knowledge of man, is that it does not present men but actions, or
+      at least men only in their parade costume and in certain chosen moments,
+      and he justly reproaches writers alike of history and biography, for
+      omitting those trifling strokes and homely anecdotes, which reveal the
+      true physiognomy of character. &quot;Remain then for ever, without bowels,
+      without nature; harden your hearts of cast iron in your trumpery decency,
+      and make yourselves despicable by force of dignity.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor_317_317" id="FNanchor_317_317"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_317_317" class="fnanchor">[317]</a> And so after all, by a
+      common stroke of impetuous inconsistency, he forsakes history, and falls
+      back upon the ancient biographies, because, all the low and familiar
+      details being banished from modern style, however true and characteristic,
+      men are as elaborately tricked out by our authors in their private lives
+      as they were tricked out upon the stage of the world.
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      <b>V.</b>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As women are from the constitution of things the educators of us all at
+      the most critical periods, and mainly of their own sex from the beginning
+      to the end of education, the writer of the most imperfect treatise on this
+      world-interesting subject can hardly avoid saying something on the
+      upbringing of women. <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[ii.242]</a></span>Such
+      a writer may start from one of three points of view; he may consider the
+      woman as destined to be a wife, or a mother, or a human being; as the
+      companion of a man, as the rearer of the young, or as an independent
+      personality, endowed with gifts, talents, possibilities, in less or
+      greater number, and capable, as in the case of men, of being trained to
+      the worst or the best uses. Of course to every one who looks into life,
+      each of these three ideals melts into the other two, and we can only think
+      of them effectively when they are blended. Yet we test a writer's
+      appreciation of the conditions of human progress by observing the function
+      which he makes most prominent. A man's whole thought of the worth and aim
+      of womanhood depends upon the generosity and elevation of the ideal which
+      is silently present in his mind, while he is specially meditating the
+      relations of woman as wife or as mother. Unless he is really capable of
+      thinking of them as human beings, independently of these two functions, he
+      is sure to have comparatively mean notions in connection with them in
+      respect of the functions which he makes paramount.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rousseau breaks down here. The unsparing fashion in which he developed the
+      theory of individualism in the case of Emilius, and insisted on man being
+      allowed to grow into the man of nature, instead of the man of art and
+      manufacture, might have led us to expect that when he came to speak of
+      women, he would suffer equity and logic to have their way, by giving
+      equally free room in the two halves of the<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[ii.243]</a></span> human race, for the
+      development of natural force and capacity. If, as he begins by saying, he
+      wishes to bring up Emilius, not to be a merchant nor a physician nor a
+      soldier nor to the practice of any other special calling, but to be first
+      and above all a man, why should not Sophie too be brought up above all to
+      be a human being, in whom the special qualifications of wifehood and
+      motherhood may be developed in their due order? Emilius is a man first, a
+      husband and a father afterwards and secondarily. How can Sophie be a
+      companion for him, and an instructor for their children, unless she
+      likewise has been left in the hands of nature, and had the same chances
+      permitted to her as were given to her predestined mate? Again, the
+      pictures of the New Helo&#239;sa would have led us to conceive the ideal
+      of womanly station not so much in the wife, as in the house-mother,
+      attached by esteem and sober affection to her husband, but having for her
+      chief functions to be the gentle guardian of her little ones, and the
+      mild, firm, and prudent administrator of a cheerful and well-ordered
+      household. In the last book of the Emilius, which treats of the education
+      of girls, education is reduced within the compass of an even narrower
+      ideal than this. We are confronted with the oriental conception of women.
+      Every principle that has been followed in the education of Emilius is
+      reversed in the education of women. Opinion, which is the tomb of virtue
+      among men, is among women its high throne. The whole education of women
+      ought to be relative to men; to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_244"
+      id="Page_244">[ii.244]</a></span> please them, to be useful to them, to
+      make themselves loved and honoured by them, to console them, to render
+      their lives agreeable and sweet to them,&#8212;these are the duties which
+      ought to be taught to women from their childhood. Every girl ought to have
+      the religion of her mother, and every wife that of her husband. Not being
+      in a condition to judge for themselves, they ought to receive the decision
+      of fathers and husbands as if it were that of the church. And since
+      authority is the rule of faith for women, it is not so much a matter of
+      explaining to them the reasons for belief, as for expounding clearly to
+      them what to believe. Although boys are not to hear of the idea of God
+      until they are fifteen, because they are not in a condition to apprehend
+      it, yet girls who are still less in a condition to apprehend it, are <i>therefore</i>
+      to have it imparted to them at an earlier age. Woman is created to give
+      way to man, and to suffer his injustice. Her empire is an empire of
+      gentleness, mildness, and complaisance. Her orders are caresses, and her
+      threats are tears. Girls must not only be made laborious and vigilant;
+      they must also very early be accustomed to being thwarted and kept in
+      restraint. This misfortune, if they feel it one, is inseparable from their
+      sex, and if ever they attempt to escape from it, they will only suffer
+      misfortunes still more cruel in consequence.<a name="FNanchor_318_318"
+      id="FNanchor_318_318"></a><a href="#Footnote_318_318" class="fnanchor">[318]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After a series of oriental and obscurantist propositions of this kind, it
+      is of little purpose to tell us that <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_245" id="Page_245">[ii.245]</a></span>women have more
+      intelligence and men more genius; that women observe, while men reason;
+      that men will philosophise better upon the human heart, while women will
+      be more skilful in reading it.<a name="FNanchor_319_319"
+      id="FNanchor_319_319"></a><a href="#Footnote_319_319" class="fnanchor">[319]</a>
+      And it is a mere mockery to end the matter by a fervid assurance, that in
+      spite of prejudices that have their origin in the manners of the time, the
+      enthusiasm for what is worthy and noble is no more foreign to women than
+      it is to men, and that there is nothing which under the guidance of nature
+      may not be obtained from them as well as from ourselves.<a
+      name="FNanchor_320_320" id="FNanchor_320_320"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_320_320" class="fnanchor">[320]</a> Finally there is a
+      complete surrender of the obscurantist position in such a sentence as
+      this: &quot;I only know for either sex two really distinct classes; one
+      the people who think, the other the people who do not think, and this
+      difference comes almost entirely from education. A man of the first of
+      these classes ought not to marry into the other; for the greatest charm of
+      companionship is wanting, when in spite of having a wife he is reduced to
+      think by himself. It is only a cultivated spirit that provides agreeable
+      commerce, and 'tis a cheerless thing for a father of a family who loves
+      his home, to be obliged to shut himself up within himself, and to have no
+      one about him who understands him. Besides, how is a woman who has no
+      habits of reflection to bring up her children?&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor_321_321" id="FNanchor_321_321"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_321_321" class="fnanchor">[321]</a> Nothing could be more
+      excellently urged. But how is a woman to have habits of reflection, when
+      she has been constantly brought up in habits of the closest mental
+      bondage, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">[ii.246]</a></span>trained
+      always to consider her first business to be the pleasing of some man, and
+      her instruments not reasonable persuasion but caressing and crying?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This pernicious nonsense was mainly due, like nearly all his most serious
+      errors, to Rousseau's want of a conception of improvement in human
+      affairs. If he had been filled with that conception as Turgot, Condorcet,
+      and others were, he would have been forced as they were, to meditate upon
+      changes in the education and the recognition accorded to women, as one of
+      the first conditions of improvement. For lack of this, he contributed
+      nothing to the most important branch of the subject that he had undertaken
+      to treat. He was always taunting the champions of reigning systems of
+      training for boys, with the vicious or feeble men whom he thought he saw
+      on every hand around him. The same kind of answer obviously meets the
+      current idea, which he adopted with a few idyllic decorations of his own,
+      of the type of the relations between men and women. That type practically
+      reduces marriage in ninety-nine cases out of every hundred to a dolorous
+      parody of a social partnership. It does more than any one other cause to
+      keep societies back, because it prevents one half of the members of a
+      society from cultivating all their natural energies. Thus it produces a
+      waste of helpful quality as immeasurable as it is deplorable, and besides
+      rearing these creatures of mutilated faculty to be the intellectually
+      demoralising companions of the remaining half of their own generation,
+      makes them the mothers and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_247"
+      id="Page_247">[ii.247]</a></span> the earliest and most influential
+      instructors of the whole of the generation that comes after.<a
+      name="FNanchor_322_322" id="FNanchor_322_322"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_322_322" class="fnanchor">[322]</a> Of course, if any one
+      believes that the existing arrangements of a western community are the
+      most successful that we can ever hope to bring into operation, we need not
+      complain of Rousseau. If not, then it is only reasonable to suppose that a
+      considerable portion of the change will be effected in the hitherto
+      neglected and subordinate half of the race. That reconstitution of the
+      family, which Rousseau and others among his contemporaries rightly sought
+      after as one of the most pressing needs of the time, was essentially
+      impossible, so long as the typical woman was the adornment of a
+      semi-philosophic seraglio, a sort of compromise between the frowzy ideal
+      of an English bourgeois and the impertinent ideal of a Parisian gallant.
+      Condorcet and others made a grievous mistake in defending the free
+      gratification of sensual passion, as one of the conditions of happiness
+      and making the most of our lives.<a name="FNanchor_323_323"
+      id="FNanchor_323_323"></a><a href="#Footnote_323_323" class="fnanchor">[323]</a>
+      But even this was not at bottom more fatal to the maintenance and order of
+      the family, than Rousseau's enervating notion of keeping women in strict
+      intellectual and moral subjection was fatal to the family as the true
+      school of high and equal companionship, and the fruitful seed-ground of
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">[ii.248]</a></span>wise
+      activities and new hopes for each fresh generation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This was one side of Rousseau's reactionary tendencies. Fortunately for
+      the revolution of thirty years later, which illustrated the gallery of
+      heroic women with some of its most splendid names, his power was in this
+      respect neutralised by other stronger tendencies in the general spirit of
+      the age. The aristocracy of sex was subjected to the same destructive
+      criticism as the aristocracy of birth. The same feeling for justice which
+      inspired the demand for freedom and equality of opportunity among men, led
+      to the demand for the same freedom and equality of opportunity between men
+      and women. All this was part of the energy of the time, which Rousseau
+      disliked with undisguised bitterness. It broke inconveniently in upon his
+      quietest visions. He had no conception, with his sensuous brooding
+      imagination, never wholly purged of grossness, of that high and pure type
+      of women whom French history so often produced in the seventeenth century,
+      and who were not wanting towards the close of the eighteenth, a type in
+      which devotion went with force, and austerity with sweetness, and divine
+      candour and transparent innocence with energetic loyalty and intellectual
+      uprightness and a firmly set will. Such thoughts were not for Rousseau, a
+      dreamer led by his senses. Perhaps they are for none of us any more. When
+      we turn to modern literature from the pages in which F&#233;nelon speaks
+      of the education of girls, who does not feel that the<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_249" id="Page_249">[ii.249]</a></span> world has lost a sacred
+      accent, as if some ineffable essence has passed out from our hearts?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The fifth book of Emilius is not a chapter on the education of women, but
+      an idyll. We have already seen the circumstances under which Rousseau
+      composed it, in a profound and delicious solitude, in the midst of woods
+      and streams, with the fragrance of the orange-flower poured around him,
+      and in continual ecstasy. As an idyll it is delicious; as a serious
+      contribution to the hardest of problems it is naught. The sequel, by a
+      stroke of matchless whimsicality, unless it be meant, as it perhaps may
+      have been, for a piece of deep tragic irony, is the best refutation that
+      Rousseau's most energetic adversary could have desired. The Sophie who has
+      been educated on the oriental principle, has presently to confess a
+      flagrant infidelity to the blameless Emilius, her lord.<a
+      name="FNanchor_324_324" id="FNanchor_324_324"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_324_324" class="fnanchor">[324]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      <b>VI.</b>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yet the sum of the merits of Emilius as a writing upon education is not to
+      be lightly counted. Its value lies, as has been said of the New Helo&#239;sa,
+      in the spirit which animates it and communicates itself with vivid force
+      to the reader. It is one of the seminal books in the history of
+      literature, and of such books the worth resides less in the parts than in
+      the whole. It touched the deeper things of character. It filled parents
+      with a sense of the dignity and moment of their task. It cleared away the
+      accumulation of <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">[ii.250]</a></span>clogging
+      prejudices and obscure inveterate usage, which made education one of the
+      dark formalistic arts. It admitted floods of light and air into the
+      tightly closed nurseries and schoolrooms. It effected the substitution of
+      growth for mechanism. A strong current of manliness, wholesomeness,
+      simplicity, self-reliance, was sent by it through Europe, while its
+      eloquence was the most powerful adjuration ever addressed to parental
+      affection to cherish the young life in all love and considerate
+      solicitude. It was the charter of youthful deliverance. The first
+      immediate effect of Emilius in France was mainly on the religious side. It
+      was the Christian religion that needed to be avenged, rather than
+      education that needed to be amended, and the press overflowed with replies
+      to that profession of faith which we shall consider in the next chapter.
+      Still there was also an immense quantity of educational books and
+      pamphlets, which is to be set down, first to the suppression of the
+      Jesuits, the great educating order, and the vacancy which they left; and
+      next to the impulse given by the Emilius to a movement from which the book
+      itself had originally been an outcome.<a name="FNanchor_325_325"
+      id="FNanchor_325_325"></a><a href="#Footnote_325_325" class="fnanchor">[325]</a>
+      But why try to state the influence of Emilius on France in this way? To
+      strike the account truly would be to write the history of the first French
+      Revolution.<a name="FNanchor_326_326" id="FNanchor_326_326"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_326_326" class="fnanchor">[326]</a> All mothers, as
+      Michelet <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">[ii.251]</a></span>says,
+      were big with Emilius. &quot;It is not without good reason that people
+      have noted the children born at this glorious moment, as animated by a
+      superior spirit, by a gift of flame and genius. It is the generation of
+      revolutionary Titans: the other generation not less hardy in science. It
+      is Danton, Vergniaud, Desmoulins; it is Amp&#232;re, La Place, Cuvier,
+      Geoffroy Saint Hilaire.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_327_327"
+      id="FNanchor_327_327"></a><a href="#Footnote_327_327" class="fnanchor">[327]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In Germany Emilius had great power. There it fell in with the
+      extraordinary movement towards naturalness and freedom of which we have
+      already spoken.<a name="FNanchor_328_328" id="FNanchor_328_328"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_328_328" class="fnanchor">[328]</a> Herder, whom some have
+      called the Rousseau of the Germans, wrote with enthusiasm to his then
+      beloved Caroline of the &quot;divine Emilius,&quot; and he never ceased to
+      speak of Rousseau as his inspirer and his master.<a name="FNanchor_329_329"
+      id="FNanchor_329_329"></a><a href="#Footnote_329_329" class="fnanchor">[329]</a>
+      Basedow (1723), that strange, restless, and most ill-regulated person, was
+      seized with an almost phrenetic enthusiasm for Rousseau's educational
+      theories, translated them into German, and repeated them in his works over
+      and over again with an incessant iteration. Lavater (1741-1801), who
+      differed from Basedow in being a fervent Christian of soft mystic faith,
+      was thrown into company with him in 1774, and grew equally eager with him
+      in the cause of reforming education in the Rousseauite sense.<a
+      name="FNanchor_330_330" id="FNanchor_330_330"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_330_330" class="fnanchor">[330]</a> <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_252" id="Page_252">[ii.252]</a></span>Pestalozzi (1746-1827),
+      the most systematic, popular, and permanently successful of all the
+      educational reformers, borrowed his spirit and his principles mainly from
+      the Emilius, though he gave larger extension and more intelligent
+      exactitude to their application. Jean Paul the Unique, in the preface to
+      his Levana, or Doctrine of Education (1806), one of the most excellent of
+      all books on the subject, declares that among previous works to which he
+      owes a debt, &quot;first and last he names Rousseau's Emilius; no
+      preceding work can be compared to his; in no previous work on education
+      was the ideal so richly combined with the actual,&quot; and so forth.<a
+      name="FNanchor_331_331" id="FNanchor_331_331"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_331_331" class="fnanchor">[331]</a> It was not merely a
+      Goethe, a Schiller, a Herder, whom Rousseau fired with new thoughts. The
+      smaller men, such as Fr. Jacobi, Heinse, Klinger, shared the same
+      inspiration. The worship of Rousseau penetrated all classes, and touched
+      every degree of intelligence.<a name="FNanchor_332_332"
+      id="FNanchor_332_332"></a><a href="#Footnote_332_332" class="fnanchor">[332]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In our own country Emilius was translated as soon as it appeared, and must
+      have been widely read, for a second version of the translation was called
+      for in a very short time. So far as a cursory survey gives <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">[ii.253]</a></span>one a
+      right to speak, its influence here in the field of education is not very
+      perceptible. That subject did not yet, nor for some time to come, excite
+      much active thought in England. Rousseau's speculations on society both in
+      the Emilius and elsewhere seem to have attracted more attention. Reference
+      has already been made to Paley.<a name="FNanchor_333_333"
+      id="FNanchor_333_333"></a><a href="#Footnote_333_333" class="fnanchor">[333]</a>
+      Adam Ferguson's celebrated Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767)
+      has many allusions, direct and indirect, to Rousseau.<a
+      name="FNanchor_334_334" id="FNanchor_334_334"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_334_334" class="fnanchor">[334]</a> Kames's Sketches of
+      the History of Man (1774) abounds still more copiously in references to
+      Emilius, sometimes to controvert its author, more often to cite him as an
+      authority worthy of respect, and Rousseau's crude notions about women are
+      cited with special acceptance.<a name="FNanchor_335_335"
+      id="FNanchor_335_335"></a><a href="#Footnote_335_335" class="fnanchor">[335]</a>
+      Cowper was probably thinking of the Savoyard Vicar when he wrote the
+      energetic lines in the Task, beginning &quot;Haste now, philosopher, and
+      set him free,&quot; scornfully defying the deist to rescue apostate man.<a
+      name="FNanchor_336_336" id="FNanchor_336_336"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_336_336" class="fnanchor">[336]</a> Nor should we omit
+      what was counted so important a book in its day as Godwin's Enquiry
+      concerning Political Justice (1793). It is perhaps more French in its
+      spirit than any other work of equal consequence in our literature of
+      politics, and in <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">[ii.254]</a></span>its
+      composition the author was avowedly a student of Rousseau, as well as of
+      the members of the materialistic school.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In fine we may add that Emilius was the first expression of that
+      democratic tendency in education, which political and other circumstances
+      gradually made general alike in England, France, and Germany; a tendency,
+      that is, to look on education as a process concerning others besides the
+      rich and the well-born. As has often been remarked, Ascham, Milton, Locke,
+      F&#233;nelon, busy themselves about the instruction of young gentlemen and
+      gentlewomen. The rest of the world are supposed to be sufficiently
+      provided for by the education of circumstance. Since the middle of the
+      eighteenth century this monopolising conception has vanished, along with
+      and through the same general agencies as the corresponding conception of
+      social monopoly. Rousseau enforced the production of a natural and
+      self-sufficing man as the object of education, and showed, or did his best
+      to show, the infinite capacity of the young for that simple and natural
+      cultivation. This easily and directly led people to reflect that such a
+      capacity was not confined to the children of the rich, nor the hope of
+      producing a natural and sufficing man narrowed to those who had every
+      external motive placed around them for being neither natural nor
+      self-sufficing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Voltaire pronounced Emilius a stupid romance, but admitted that it
+      contained fifty pages which he would have bound in morocco. These, we may
+      be sure, con<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">[ii.255]</a></span>cerned
+      religion; in truth it was the Savoyard Vicar's profession of faith which
+      stirred France far more than the upbringing of the natural man in things
+      temporal. Let us pass to that eloquent document which is inserted in the
+      middle of the Emilius, as the expression of the religious opinion that
+      best befits the man of nature&#8212;a document most hyperbolically counted
+      by some French enthusiasts for the spiritualist philosophy and the
+      religion of sentiment, as the noblest monument of the eighteenth century.
+    </p>
+    <div class="footnotes">
+      <h3>
+        FOOTNOTES:
+      </h3>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_273_273" id="Footnote_273_273"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_273_273"><span class="label">[273]</span></a> <i>M&#233;m.
+          de Mdme. d'Epinay</i>, ii. 276, 278.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_274_274" id="Footnote_274_274"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_274_274"><span class="label">[274]</span></a> <i>Lettres
+          &#224; mon Fils</i> (1758), and <i>Les Conversations d'Emilie</i>
+          (1783).
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_275_275" id="Footnote_275_275"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_275_275"><span class="label">[275]</span></a> <i>Lettres
+          P&#233;ruviennes.</i>
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_276_276" id="Footnote_276_276"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_276_276"><span class="label">[276]</span></a> <i>Oeuv.</i>,
+          ii. 785-794.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_277_277" id="Footnote_277_277"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_277_277"><span class="label">[277]</span></a> <i>Corr.
+          Lit.</i>, iii. 65.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_278_278" id="Footnote_278_278"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_278_278"><span class="label">[278]</span></a> <i>Emile</i>,
+          I. 27.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_279_279" id="Footnote_279_279"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_279_279"><span class="label">[279]</span></a> It is
+          interesting to recall a similar movement in the Roman society of the
+          second century of our era. See the advice of Favorinus to mothers, in
+          Aulus Gellius, xii. 1. M. Boissier, contrasting the solicitude of
+          Tacitus and Marcus Aurelius for the infant young with the brutality of
+          Cicero, remarks that in the time of Seneca men discussed in the
+          schools the educational theories of Rousseau's Emilius. (<i>La Relig.
+          Romaine</i>, ii. 202.)
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_280_280" id="Footnote_280_280"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_280_280"><span class="label">[280]</span></a> See also
+          his diatribe against whalebone and tight-lacing for girls, V. 27.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_281_281" id="Footnote_281_281"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_281_281"><span class="label">[281]</span></a> <i>Emile</i>,
+          I. 93, etc.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_282_282" id="Footnote_282_282"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_282_282"><span class="label">[282]</span></a> <i>Emile</i>,
+          II. 141.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_283_283" id="Footnote_283_283"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_283_283"><span class="label">[283]</span></a> <i>Emile</i>,
+          II. 156-160.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_284_284" id="Footnote_284_284"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_284_284"><span class="label">[284]</span></a> <i>Emile</i>,
+          III. 338-345.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_285_285" id="Footnote_285_285"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_285_285"><span class="label">[285]</span></a> III.
+          358, etc.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_286_286" id="Footnote_286_286"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_286_286"><span class="label">[286]</span></a> <i>Emile</i>,
+          II. 263-267.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_287_287" id="Footnote_287_287"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_287_287"><span class="label">[287]</span></a> <i>Levana</i>,
+          ch. iii. &#167; 54.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_288_288" id="Footnote_288_288"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_288_288"><span class="label">[288]</span></a> <i>Emile</i>,
+          II. 163.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_289_289" id="Footnote_289_289"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_289_289"><span class="label">[289]</span></a> The
+          Ninth Promenade (<i>R&#234;veries</i>, 309).
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_290_290" id="Footnote_290_290"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_290_290"><span class="label">[290]</span></a> <i>Emile</i>,
+          I. 23.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_291_291" id="Footnote_291_291"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_291_291"><span class="label">[291]</span></a> II. 109.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_292_292" id="Footnote_292_292"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_292_292"><span class="label">[292]</span></a> II. 111.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_293_293" id="Footnote_293_293"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_293_293"><span class="label">[293]</span></a> <i>Emile</i>,
+          II. 113-117.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_294_294" id="Footnote_294_294"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_294_294"><span class="label">[294]</span></a> II. 121.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_295_295" id="Footnote_295_295"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_295_295"><span class="label">[295]</span></a> II. 143.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_296_296" id="Footnote_296_296"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_296_296"><span class="label">[296]</span></a> <i>Emile</i>,
+          III. 382.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_297_297" id="Footnote_297_297"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_297_297"><span class="label">[297]</span></a> II. 227.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_298_298" id="Footnote_298_298"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_298_298"><span class="label">[298]</span></a> IV. 10.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_299_299" id="Footnote_299_299"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_299_299"><span class="label">[299]</span></a> <i>Emile</i>,
+          III. 394.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_300_300" id="Footnote_300_300"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_300_300"><span class="label">[300]</span></a> V. 199.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_301_301" id="Footnote_301_301"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_301_301"><span class="label">[301]</span></a> The
+          reader will not forget the famous supper-party of princes in <i>Candide</i>.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_302_302" id="Footnote_302_302"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_302_302"><span class="label">[302]</span></a> <i>Emile</i>,
+          III. 392, and note. A still more remarkable passage, as far as it
+          goes, is that in the <i>Confessions</i> (xi. 136):&#8212;&quot;The
+          disasters of an unsuccessful war, all of which came from the fault of
+          the government, the incredible disorder of the finances, the continual
+          dissensions of the administration, divided as it was among two or
+          three ministers at open war with one another, and who for the sake of
+          hurting one another dragged the kingdom into ruin; the general
+          discontent of the people, and of all the orders of the state; the
+          obstinacy of a wrong-headed woman, who, always sacrificing her better
+          judgment, if indeed she had any, to her tastes, dismissed the most
+          capable from office, to make room for her favourites ... all this
+          prospect of a coming break-up made me think of seeking shelter
+          elsewhere.&quot;
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_303_303" id="Footnote_303_303"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_303_303"><span class="label">[303]</span></a> <i>Emile</i>,
+          V. 220.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_304_304" id="Footnote_304_304"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_304_304"><span class="label">[304]</span></a> IV. 85.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_305_305" id="Footnote_305_305"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_305_305"><span class="label">[305]</span></a> <i>Emile</i>,
+          IV. 38, 39. Hence, we suppose, the famous reply to Lavoisier's request
+          that his life might be spared from the guillotine for a fortnight, in
+          order that he might complete some experiments, that the Republic has
+          no need of chemists.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_306_306" id="Footnote_306_306"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_306_306"><span class="label">[306]</span></a> IV. 65.
+          Jefferson, who was American minister in France from 1784 to 1789, and
+          absorbed a great many of the ideas then afloat, writes in words that
+          seem as if they were borrowed from Rousseau:&#8212;&quot;I am
+          convinced that those societies (as the Indians) which live without
+          government, enjoy in their general mass an infinitely greater degree
+          of happiness than those who live under European governments. Among the
+          former public opinion is in the state of law, and restrains morals as
+          powerfully as laws ever did anywhere. Among the latter, under pretence
+          of governing, they have divided their nation into two classes, wolves
+          and sheep. I do not exaggerate; this is a true picture of Europe.&quot;
+          Tucker's <i>Life of Jefferson</i>, i. 255.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_307_307" id="Footnote_307_307"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_307_307"><span class="label">[307]</span></a>
+          Lamennais was influenced by Rousseau throughout. In the <i>Essay on
+          Indifference</i> he often appeals to him as the vindicator of the
+          religious sentiment (<i>e.g.</i> i. 21, 52, iv. 375, etc. Ed. 1837).
+          The same influence is seen still more markedly in the <i>Words of a
+          Believer</i> (1835), when dogma had departed, and he was left with a
+          kind of dual deism, thus being less estranged from Rousseau than in
+          the first days (<i>e.g.</i> &#167; xix. &quot;Tous naissent &#233;gaux,&quot;
+          etc., &#167; xxi., etc.) The <i>Book of the People</i> is thoroughly
+          Rousseauite.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_308_308" id="Footnote_308_308"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_308_308"><span class="label">[308]</span></a> <i>Emile</i>,
+          IV. 105.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_309_309" id="Footnote_309_309"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_309_309"><span class="label">[309]</span></a> <i>Emile</i>,
+          IV. 63.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_310_310" id="Footnote_310_310"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_310_310"><span class="label">[310]</span></a> <i>Emile</i>,
+          IV. 273.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_311_311" id="Footnote_311_311"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_311_311"><span class="label">[311]</span></a> <i>Emile</i>,
+          IV. 83.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_312_312" id="Footnote_312_312"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_312_312"><span class="label">[312]</span></a> <i>Emile</i>,
+          II. 185. See the previous page for some equally prudent observations
+          on the folly of teaching geography to little children.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_313_313" id="Footnote_313_313"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_313_313"><span class="label">[313]</span></a> <i>Emile</i>,
+          IV. 68.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_314_314" id="Footnote_314_314"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_314_314"><span class="label">[314]</span></a> V. 231,
+          etc.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_315_315" id="Footnote_315_315"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_315_315"><span class="label">[315]</span></a> <i>Emile</i>,
+          IV. 71.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_316_316" id="Footnote_316_316"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_316_316"><span class="label">[316]</span></a> <i>Emile</i>,
+          IV. 73.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_317_317" id="Footnote_317_317"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_317_317"><span class="label">[317]</span></a> IV. 77.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_318_318" id="Footnote_318_318"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_318_318"><span class="label">[318]</span></a> <i>Emile</i>,
+          V. 22, 53, 54, 101, 128-132.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_319_319" id="Footnote_319_319"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_319_319"><span class="label">[319]</span></a> <i>Emile</i>,
+          V. 78.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_320_320" id="Footnote_320_320"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_320_320"><span class="label">[320]</span></a> V. 122.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_321_321" id="Footnote_321_321"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_321_321"><span class="label">[321]</span></a> V. 129,
+          130.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_322_322" id="Footnote_322_322"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_322_322"><span class="label">[322]</span></a> Well did
+          Jean Paul say, &quot;If we regard all life as an educational
+          institution, a circumnavigator of the world is less influenced by all
+          the nations he has seen than by his nurse.&quot;&#8212;<i>Levana.</i>
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_323_323" id="Footnote_323_323"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_323_323"><span class="label">[323]</span></a> <i>Tableau
+          des Progr&#232;s de l'Esprit Humain.</i> <i>Oeuv.</i>, vi. pp. 264,
+          523-526, and elsewhere. [Ed. 1847-1849.]
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_324_324" id="Footnote_324_324"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_324_324"><span class="label">[324]</span></a> <i>Emile
+          et Sophie</i>, i.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_325_325" id="Footnote_325_325"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_325_325"><span class="label">[325]</span></a> For an
+          account of some of these, see Grimm's <i>Corr. Lit.</i>, iii. 211,
+          252, 347, etc. Also <i>Corr. In&#233;d.</i>, p. 143.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_326_326" id="Footnote_326_326"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_326_326"><span class="label">[326]</span></a> For the
+          early date at which Rousseau's power began to meet recognition, see
+          D'Alembert to Voltaire, July 31, 1762.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_327_327" id="Footnote_327_327"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_327_327"><span class="label">[327]</span></a> <i>Louis
+          xv. et xvi.</i>, p. 226.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_328_328" id="Footnote_328_328"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_328_328"><span class="label">[328]</span></a> See
+          above, vol. ii. p. <a href="#Page_193">193</a>.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_329_329" id="Footnote_329_329"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_329_329"><span class="label">[329]</span></a> Hettner,
+          III. iii., 2, p. 27, <i>s.v.</i> Herder.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_330_330" id="Footnote_330_330"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_330_330"><span class="label">[330]</span></a> The
+          suggestion of the speculation with which Lavater's name is most
+          commonly associated, is to be found in the Emilius. &quot;It is
+          supposed that physiognomy is only a development of features already
+          marked by nature. For my part, I should think that besides this
+          development, the features of a man's countenance form themselves
+          insensibly and take their expression from the frequent and habitual
+          wearing into them of certain affections of the soul. These affections
+          mark themselves in the countenance, nothing is more certain; and when
+          they grow into habits, they must leave durable impressions upon it.&quot;
+          IV. 49, 50.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_331_331" id="Footnote_331_331"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_331_331"><span class="label">[331]</span></a> Author's
+          Preface, x.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_332_332" id="Footnote_332_332"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_332_332"><span class="label">[332]</span></a> See an
+          excellent page in M. Joret's <i>Herder</i>, 322.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_333_333" id="Footnote_333_333"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_333_333"><span class="label">[333]</span></a> See
+          above, vol. ii. p. <a href="#Page_191">191</a>.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_334_334" id="Footnote_334_334"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_334_334"><span class="label">[334]</span></a> <i>E.g.</i>
+          pp. 8, 198, 204, 205.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_335_335" id="Footnote_335_335"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_335_335"><span class="label">[335]</span></a> <i>E.g.</i>
+          Bk. I. &#167; 5, p. 279. &#167; 6, p. 406, 419, etc. (the portion
+          concerning the female sex).
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_336_336" id="Footnote_336_336"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_336_336"><span class="label">[336]</span></a> Vv.
+          670-703. We have already seen (above, vol. ii. p. 41, <i>n.</i>) that
+          Cowper had read Emilius, and the mocking reference to the Deist as
+          &quot;an Orpheus and omnipotent in song,&quot; coincides with
+          Rousseau's comparison of the Savoyard Vicar to &quot;the divine
+          Orpheus singing the first hymn&quot; (<i>Emile</i>, IV. 205).
+        </p>
+      </div>
+    </div>
+    <hr style="width: 65%;" />
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">[ii.256]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      <a name="CHAPTER_V" id="CHAPTER_V"></a>CHAPTER V.
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      THE SAVOYARD VICAR.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <span class="smcap">The</span> band of dogmatic atheists who met round
+      D'Holbach's dinner-table indulged a shallow and futile hope, if it was not
+      an ungenerous one, when they expected the immediate advent of a generation
+      with whom a humane and rational philosophy should displace, not merely the
+      superstitions which had grown around the Christian dogma, but every root
+      and fragment of theistic conception. A hope of this kind implied a
+      singularly random idea, alike of the hold which Christianity had taken of
+      the religious emotion in western Europe, and of the durableness of those
+      conditions in human character, to which some belief in a deity with a
+      greater or fewer number of good attributes brings solace and nourishment.
+      A movement like that of Christianity does not pass through a group of
+      societies, and then leave no trace behind. It springs from many other
+      sources besides that of adherence to the truth of its dogmas. The stream
+      of its influence must continue to flow long after adherence to the letter
+      has been confined to the least informed portions of a community. The<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">[ii.257]</a></span>
+      Encyclop&#230;dists knew that they had sapped religious dogma and shaken
+      ecclesiastical organisation. They forgot that religious sentiment on the
+      one hand, and habit of respect for authority on the other, were both of
+      them still left behind. They had convinced themselves by a host of
+      persuasive analogies that the universe is an automatic machine, and man
+      only an industrious particle in the stupendous whole; that a final cause
+      is not cognisable by our limited intelligence; and that to make emotion in
+      this or any other respect a test of objective truth and a ground of
+      positive belief, is to lower both truth and the reason which is its single
+      arbiter. They forgot that imagination is as active in man as his reason,
+      and that a craving for mental peace may become much stronger than passion
+      for demonstrated truth. Christianity had given to this craving in western
+      Europe a definite mould, which was not to be effaced in a day, and one or
+      two of its lines mark a permanent and noble acquisition to the highest
+      forces of human nature. There will have to be wrought a profounder and
+      more far-spreading modification than any which the French atheists could
+      effect, before all debilitating influences in the old creed can be
+      effaced, its elevating influences finally separated from them, and then
+      permanently preserved in more beneficent form and in an association less
+      questionable to the understanding.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Neither a purely negative nor a direct attack can ever suffice. There must
+      be a coincidence of many silently oppugnant forces, emotional, scientific,
+      and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">[ii.258]</a></span>
+      material. And, above all, there must be the slow steadfast growth of some
+      replacing faith, which shall retain all the elements of moral beauty that
+      once gave light to the old belief that has disappeared, and must still
+      possess a living force in the new.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Here we find the good side of a religious reaction such as that which
+      Rousseau led in the last century, and of which the Savoyard Vicar's
+      profession of faith was the famous symbol. Evil as this reaction was in
+      many respects, and especially in the check which it gave to the
+      application of positive methods and conceptions to the most important
+      group of our beliefs, yet it had what was the very signal merit under the
+      circumstances of the time, of keeping the religious emotions alive in
+      association with a tolerant, pure, lofty, and living set of articles of
+      faith, instead of feeding them on the dead superstitions which were at
+      that moment the only practical alternative. The deism of Rousseau could
+      not in any case have acquired the force of the corresponding religious
+      reaction in England, because the former never acquired a compact and
+      vigorous external organisation, as the latter did, especially in
+      Wesleyanism and Evangelicalism, the most remarkable of its developments.
+      In truth the vague, fluid, purely subjective character of deism
+      disqualifies it from forming the doctrinal basis of any great objective
+      and visible church, for it is at bottom the sublimation of individualism.
+      But in itself it was a far less retrogressive, as well as a far less
+      powerful, movement. It kept fewer of those dogmas which<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">[ii.259]</a></span>
+      gradual change of intellectual climate had reduced to the condition of
+      rank superstitions. It preserved some of its own, which a still further
+      extension of the same change is assuredly destined to reduce to the same
+      condition; but, nevertheless, along with them it cherished sentiments
+      which the world will never willingly let die.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The one cardinal service of the Christian doctrine, which is of course to
+      be distinguished from the services rendered to civilisation in early times
+      by the Christian church, has been the contribution to the active
+      intelligence of the west, of those moods of holiness, awe, reverence, and
+      silent worship of an Unseen not made with hands, which the Christianising
+      Jews first brought from the east. Of the fabric which four centuries ago
+      looked so stupendous and so enduring, with its magnificent whole and its
+      minutely reticulated parts of belief and practice, this gradual creation
+      of a new temperament in the religious imagination of Western Europe and
+      the countries that take their mental direction from her, is perhaps the
+      only portion that will remain distinctly visible, after all the rest has
+      sunk into the repose of histories of opinion. Whether this be the case or
+      not, the fact that these deeper moods are among the richest acquisitions
+      of human nature, will not be denied either by those who think that
+      Christianity associates them with objects destined permanently to awake
+      them in their loftiest form, or by others who believe that the deepest
+      moods of which man is capable, must<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_260"
+      id="Page_260">[ii.260]</a></span> ultimately ally themselves with
+      something still more purely spiritual than the anthropomorphised deities
+      of the falling church. And if so, then Rousseau's deism, while
+      intercepting the steady advance of the rationalistic assault and diverting
+      the current of renovating energy, still did something to keep alive in a
+      more or less worthy shape those parts of the slowly expiring system which
+      men have the best reasons for cherishing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Let us endeavour to characterise Rousseau's deism with as much precision
+      as it allows. It was a special and graceful form of a doctrine which,
+      though susceptible, alike in theory and in the practical history of
+      religious thought, of numberless wide varieties of significance, is
+      commonly designated by the name of deism, without qualification. People
+      constantly speak as if deism only came in with the eighteenth century. It
+      would be impossible to name any century since the twelfth, in which
+      distinct and abundant traces could not be found within the dominion of
+      Christianity of a belief in a supernatural power apart from the supposed
+      disclosure of it in a special revelation.<a name="FNanchor_337_337"
+      id="FNanchor_337_337"></a><a href="#Footnote_337_337" class="fnanchor">[337]</a>
+      A pr&#230;ter-christian deism, or the principle of natural religion, was
+      inevitably contained in the legal conception of a natural law, for how can
+      we dissociate the idea of law from the idea of a definite lawgiver? <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">[ii.261]</a></span>The
+      very scholastic disputations themselves, by the sharpness and subtlety
+      which they gave to the reasoning faculty, set men in search of novelties,
+      and these novelties were not always of a kind which orthodox views of the
+      Christian mysteries could have sanctioned. It has been said that religion
+      is at the cradle of every nation, and philosophy at its grave; it is at
+      least true that the cradle of philosophy is the open grave of religion.
+      Wherever there is argumentation, there is sure to be scepticism. When
+      people begin to reason, a shadow has already fallen across faith, though
+      the reasoners might have shrunk with horror from knowledge of the goal of
+      their work, and though centuries may elapse before the shadow deepens into
+      eclipse. But the church was strong and alert in the times when free
+      thought vainly tried to rear a dangerous head in Italy. With the
+      Protestant revolution came slowly a wider freedom, while the prolonged and
+      tempestuous discussion between the old church and the reformed bodies, as
+      well as the manifold variations among those bodies at strife with one
+      another, stimulated the growth of religious thought in many directions
+      that tended away from the exclusive pretensions of Christianity to be the
+      oracle of the divine Spirit. The same feeling which thrust aside the
+      sacerdotal interposition between the soul of man and its sovereign creator
+      and inspirer, gradually worked towards the dethronement of those mediators
+      other than sacerdotal, in whom the moral timidity of a dark and stricken
+      age<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">[ii.262]</a></span>
+      had once sought shade from the too dazzling brightness of the All-powerful
+      and the Everlasting. The assertion of the rights and powers of the
+      individual reason within the limits of the sacred documents, began in less
+      than a hundred years to grow into an assertion of the same rights and
+      powers beyond those limits. The rejection of tradition as a substitute for
+      independent judgment, in interpreting or supplementing the records of
+      revelation, gradually impaired the traditional authority both of the
+      records themselves, and of the central doctrines which all churches had in
+      one shape or another agreed to accept. The Trinitarian controversy of the
+      sixteenth century must have been a stealthy solvent. The deism of England
+      in the eighteenth century, which Voltaire was the prime agent in
+      introducing in its negative, colourless, and essentially futile shape into
+      his own country, had its main effect as a process of dissolution.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All this, however, down to the deistical movement which Rousseau found in
+      progress at Geneva in 1754,<a name="FNanchor_338_338" id="FNanchor_338_338"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_338_338" class="fnanchor">[338]</a> was distinctly the
+      outcome in a more or less marked way of a rationalising and philosophic
+      spirit, and not of the religious spirit. The sceptical side of it with
+      reference to revealed religion, predominated over the positive side of it
+      with reference to natural religion. The wild pantheism of which there were
+      one or two extraordinary outbursts during the latter part of the middle
+      ages, to mark the mystical influence which Platonic studies uncorrected
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">[ii.263]</a></span>by
+      science always exert over certain temperaments, had been full of
+      religiosity, such as it was. These had all passed away with a swift flash.
+      There were, indeed, mystics like the author of the immortal <i>De
+      Imitatione</i>, in whom the special qualities of Christian doctrine seem
+      to have grown pale in a brighter flood of devout aspiration towards the
+      perfections of a single Being. But this was not the deism with which
+      either Christianity on the one side, or atheism on the other, had ever had
+      to deal in France. Deism, in its formal acceptation, was either an idle
+      piece of vaporous sentimentality, or else it was the first intellectual
+      halting-place for spirits who had travelled out of the pale of the old
+      dogmatic Christianity, and lacked strength for the continuance of their
+      onward journey. In the latter case, it was only another name either for
+      the shrewd rough conviction of the man of the world, that his universe
+      could not well be imagined to go on without a sort of constitutional
+      monarch, reigning but not governing, keeping evil-doers in order by fear
+      of eternal punishment, and lending a sacred countenance to the
+      indispensable doctrines of property, the gradation of rank and station,
+      and the other moral foundations of the social structure. Or else it was a
+      name for a purely philosophic principle, not embraced with fervour as the
+      basis of a religion, but accepted with decorous satisfaction as the
+      alternative to a religion; not seized upon as the mainspring of spiritual
+      life, but held up as a shield in a controversy.<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_264" id="Page_264">[ii.264]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The deism which the Savoyard Vicar explained to Emilius in his profession
+      of faith was pitched in a very different tone from this. Though the
+      Vicar's conception of the Deity was lightly fenced round with
+      rationalistic supports of the usual kind, drawn from the evidences of will
+      and intelligence in the vast machinery of the universe, yet it was
+      essentially the product not of reason, but of emotional expansion, as
+      every fundamental article of a faith that touches the hearts of many men
+      must always be. The Savoyard Vicar did not believe that a God had made the
+      great world, and rules it with majestic power and supreme justice, in the
+      same way in which he believed that any two sides of a triangle are greater
+      than the third side. That there is a mysterious being penetrating all
+      creation with force, was not a proposition to be demonstrated, but only
+      the poor description in words of an habitual mood going far deeper into
+      life than words can ever carry us. Without for a single moment falling off
+      into the nullities of pantheism, neither did he for a single moment suffer
+      his thought to stiffen and grow hard in the formal lines of a theological
+      definition or a systematic credo. It remains firm enough to give the
+      religious imagination consistency and a centre, yet luminous enough to
+      give the spiritual faculty a vivifying consciousness of freedom and space.
+      A creed is concerned with a number of affirmations, and is constantly held
+      with honest strenuousness by multitudes of men and women who are unfitted
+      by natural temperament<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_265"
+      id="Page_265">[ii.265]</a></span> for knowing what the glow of religious
+      emotion means to the human soul,&#8212;for not every one that saith, Lord,
+      Lord, enters the kingdom of heaven. The Savoyard Vicar's profession of
+      faith was not a creed, and so has few affirmations; it was a single
+      doctrine, melted in a glow of contemplative transport. It is impossible to
+      set about disproving it, for its exponent repeatedly warns his disciple
+      against the idleness of logomachy, and insists that the existence of the
+      Divinity is traced upon every heart in letters that can never be effaced,
+      if we are only content to read them with lowliness and simplicity. You
+      cannot demonstrate an emotion, nor prove an aspiration. How reason, asks
+      the Savoyard Vicar, about that which we cannot conceive? Conscience is the
+      best of all casuists, and conscience affirms the presence of a being who
+      moves the universe and ordains all things, and to him we give the name of
+      God.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &quot;To this name I join the ideas of intelligence, power, will, which I
+      have united in one, and that of goodness, which is a necessary consequence
+      flowing from them. But I do not know any the better for this the being to
+      whom I have given the name; he escapes equally from my senses and my
+      understanding; the more I think of him, the more I confound myself. I have
+      full assurance that he exists, and that he exists by himself. I recognise
+      my own being as subordinate to his and all the things that are known to me
+      as being absolutely in the same case. I perceive God every<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">[ii.266]</a></span>where
+      in his works; I feel him in myself; I see him universally around me. But
+      when I fain would seek where he is, what he is, of what substance, he
+      glides away from me, and my troubled soul discerns nothing.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor_339_339" id="FNanchor_339_339"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_339_339" class="fnanchor">[339]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &quot;In fine, the more earnestly I strive to contemplate his infinite
+      essence, the less do I conceive it. But it is, and that suffices me. The
+      less I conceive it, the more I adore. I bow myself down, and say to him, O
+      being of beings, I am because thou art; to meditate ceaselessly on thee by
+      day and night, is to raise myself to my veritable source and fount. The
+      worthiest use of my reason is to make itself as naught before thee. It is
+      the ravishment of my soul, it is the solace of my weakness, to feel myself
+      brought low before the awful majesty of thy greatness.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor_340_340" id="FNanchor_340_340"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_340_340" class="fnanchor">[340]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Souls weary of the fierce mockeries that had so long been flying like
+      fiery shafts against the far Jehovah of the Hebrews, and the silent Christ
+      of the later doctors and dignitaries, and weary too of the orthodox
+      demonstrations that did not demonstrate, and leaden refutations that could
+      not refute, may well have turned with ardour to listen to this harmonious
+      spiritual voice, sounding clear from a region towards which their hearts
+      yearned with untold aspiration, but from which the spirit of their time
+      had shut them off with brazen barriers. It was the elevation and expansion
+      of man, as much as it was the restoration of a divinity. To realise this,
+      one must turn to such a book as Helv&#233;tius's, which was <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267">[ii.267]</a></span>supposed
+      to reveal the whole inner machinery of the heart. Man was thought of as a
+      singular piece of mechanism principally moved from without, not as a
+      conscious organism, receiving nourishment and direction from the medium in
+      which it is placed, but reacting with a life of its own from within. It
+      was this free and energetic inner life of the individual which the
+      Savoyard Vicar restored to lawful recognition, and made once more the
+      centre of that imaginative and spiritual existence, without which we live
+      in a universe that has no sun by day nor any stars by night. A writer in
+      whom learning has not extinguished enthusiasm, compares this to the
+      advance made by Descartes, who had given certitude to the soul by turning
+      thought confidently upon itself; and he declares that the Savoyard Vicar
+      is for the emancipation of sentiment what the Discourse upon Method was
+      for the emancipation of the understanding.<a name="FNanchor_341_341"
+      id="FNanchor_341_341"></a><a href="#Footnote_341_341" class="fnanchor">[341]</a>
+      There is here a certain audacity of panegyric; still the fact that
+      Rousseau chose to link the highest forms of man's ideal life with a fading
+      projection of the lofty image which had been set up in older days, ought
+      not to blind us to the excellent energies which, notwithstanding defect of
+      association, such a vindication of the ideal was certain to quicken. And
+      at least the lines of that high image were nobly traced.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268">[ii.268]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yet who does not feel that it is a divinity for fair weather? Rousseau,
+      with his fine sense of a proper and artistic setting, imagined the
+      Savoyard Vicar as leading his youthful convert at break of a summer day to
+      the top of a high hill, at whose feet the Po flowed between fertile banks;
+      in the distance the immense chain of the Alps crowned the landscape; the
+      rays of the rising sun projected long level shadows from the trees, the
+      slopes, the houses, and accented with a thousand lines of light the most
+      magnificent of panoramas.<a name="FNanchor_342_342" id="FNanchor_342_342"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_342_342" class="fnanchor">[342]</a> This was the fitting
+      suggestion, so serene, warm, pregnant with power and hope, and half
+      mysterious, of the idea of godhead which the man of peace after an
+      interval of silent contemplation proceeded to expound. Rousseau's
+      sentimental idea at least did not revolt moral sense; it did not afflict
+      the firmness of intelligence; nor did it silence the diviner melodies of
+      the soul. Yet, once more, the heavens in which such a deity dwells are too
+      high, his power is too impalpable, the mysterious air which he has poured
+      around his being is too awful and impenetrable, for the rays from the sun
+      of such majesty to reach more than a few contemplative spirits, and these
+      only in their hours of tranquillity and expansion. The thought is too
+      vague, too far, to bring comfort and refreshment to the mass of travailing
+      men, or to invest duty with the stern ennobling quality of being done,
+      &quot;if I have grace to use it so as ever in the great Taskmaster's eye.&quot;<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269">[ii.269]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Savoyard Vicar was consistent with the sublimity of his own
+      conception. He meditated on the order of the universe with a reverence too
+      profound to allow him to mingle with his thoughts meaner desires as to the
+      special relations of that order to himself. &quot;I penetrate all my
+      faculties,&quot; he said, &quot;with the divine essence of the author of
+      the world; I melt at the thought of his goodness, and bless all his gifts,
+      but I do not pray to him. What should I ask of him? That for me he should
+      change the course of things, and in my favour work miracles? Could I, who
+      must love above all else the order established by his wisdom and upheld by
+      his providence, presume to wish such order troubled for my sake? Nor do I
+      ask of him the power of doing righteousness; why ask for what he has given
+      me? Has he not bestowed on me conscience to love what is good, reason to
+      ascertain it, freedom to choose it? If I do ill, I have no excuse; I do it
+      because I will it. To pray to him to change my will, is to seek from him
+      what he seeks from me; it is to wish no longer to be human, it is to wish
+      something other than what is, it is to wish disorder and evil.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor_343_343" id="FNanchor_343_343"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_343_343" class="fnanchor">[343]</a> We may admire both the
+      logical consistency of such self-denial and the manliness which it would
+      engender in the character that were strong enough to practise it. But a
+      divinity who has conceded no right of petition is still further away from
+      our lives than the divinities of more popular creeds.<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_270" id="Page_270">[ii.270]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Even the fairest deism is of its essence a faith of egotism and
+      complacency. It does not incorporate in the very heart of the religious
+      emotion the pitifulness and sorrow which Christianity first clothed with
+      associations of sanctity, and which can never henceforth miss their place
+      in any religious system to be accepted by men. Why is this? Because a
+      religion that leaves them out, or thrusts them into a hidden corner, fails
+      to comprehend at least one half, and that the most touching and impressive
+      half, of the most conspicuous facts of human life. Rousseau was fuller of
+      the capacity of pity than ordinary men, and this pity was one of the
+      deepest parts of himself. Yet it did not enter into the composition of his
+      religious faith, and this shows that his religious faith, though entirely
+      free from suspicion of insincerity or ostentatious assumption, was like
+      deism in so many cases, whether rationalistic or emotional, a kind of
+      gratuitously adopted superfluity, not the satisfaction of a profound inner
+      craving and resistless spiritual necessity. He speaks of the good and the
+      wicked with the precision and assurance of the most pharisaic theologian,
+      and he begins by asking of what concern it is to him whether the wicked
+      are punished with eternal torment or not, though he concludes more
+      graciously with the hope that in another state the wicked, delivered from
+      their malignity, may enjoy a bliss no less than his own.<a
+      name="FNanchor_344_344" id="FNanchor_344_344"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_344_344" class="fnanchor">[344]</a> But the divine
+      pitifulness <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271">[ii.271]</a></span>which
+      we owe to Christianity, and which will not be the less eagerly cherished
+      by those who repudiate Christian tradition and doctrines, enjoins upon us
+      that we should ask, Who are the wicked, and which is he that is without
+      sin among us? Rousseau answered this glibly enough by some formula of
+      metaphysics, about the human will having been left and constituted free by
+      the creator of the world; and that man is the bad man who abuses his
+      freedom. Grace, fate, destiny, force of circumstances, are all so many
+      names for the protests which the frank sense of fact has forced from man
+      against this miserably inadequate explanation of the foundations of moral
+      responsibility.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Whatever these foundations may be, the theories of grace and fate had at
+      any rate the quality of connecting human conduct with the will of the
+      gods. Rousseau's deism, severing the influence of the Supreme Being upon
+      man, at the very moment when it could have saved him from the guilt that
+      brings misery,&#8212;that is at the moment when conduct begins to follow
+      the preponderant motives or the will,&#8212;did thus effectually cut off
+      the most admirable and fertile group of our sympathies from all direct
+      connection with religious sentiment. Toiling as manfully as we may through
+      the wilderness of our seventy years, we are to reserve our deepest
+      adoration for the being who has left us<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_272" id="Page_272">[ii.272]</a></span> there, with no other
+      solace than that he is good and just and all-powerful, and might have
+      given us comfort and guidance if he would. This was virtually the form
+      which Pelagius had tried to impose upon Christianity in the fifth century,
+      and which the souls of men, thirsting for consciousness of an active
+      divine presence, had then under the lead of Augustine so energetically
+      cast away from them. The faith to which they clung while rejecting this
+      great heresy, though just as transcendental, still had the quality of
+      satisfying a spiritual want. It was even more readily to be accepted by
+      the human intelligence, for it endowed the supreme power with the father's
+      excellence of compassion, and presented for our reverence and gratitude
+      and devotion a figure who drew from men the highest love for the God whom
+      they had not seen, along with the warmest pity and love for their brethren
+      whom they had seen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Savoyard Vicar's own position to Christianity was one of reverential
+      scepticism. &quot;The holiness of the gospel,&quot; he said, &quot;is an
+      argument that speaks to my heart and to which I should even be sorry to
+      find a good answer. Look at the books of the philosophers with all their
+      pomp; how puny they are by the side of that! Is there here the tone of an
+      enthusiast or an ambitious sectary? What gentleness, what purity, in his
+      manners, what touching grace in his teaching, what loftiness in his
+      maxims! Assuredly there was something more than human in such teaching,
+      such a character, such a life, such a death. If the life and<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273">[ii.273]</a></span> death
+      of Socrates were those of a sage, the life and death of Jesus are those of
+      a god. Shall we say that the history of the gospels is invented at
+      pleasure? My friend, that is not the fashion of invention; and the facts
+      about Socrates are less attested than the facts about Christ.<a
+      name="FNanchor_345_345" id="FNanchor_345_345"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_345_345" class="fnanchor">[345]</a> Yet with all that,
+      this same gospel abounds in things incredible, which are repugnant to
+      reason, and which it is impossible for any sensible man to conceive or
+      admit. What are we to do in the midst of all these contradictions? To be
+      ever modest and circumspect, my son; to respect in silence what one can
+      neither reject nor understand, and to make one's self lowly before the
+      great being who alone knows the truth.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_346_346"
+      id="FNanchor_346_346"></a><a href="#Footnote_346_346" class="fnanchor">[346]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &quot;I regard all particular religions as so many salutary institutions,
+      which prescribe in every country a uniform manner of honouring God by
+      public worship. I believe them all good, so long as men serve God
+      fittingly in them. The essential worship is the worship of the heart. God
+      never rejects this homage, under whatever form it be offered to him. In
+      other days I used to say mass with the levity which in time infects even
+      the gravest things, when we do them too often. Since acquiring my new
+      principles I celebrate it with more veneration; I am overwhelmed by the
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_274" id="Page_274">[ii.274]</a></span>majesty
+      of the Supreme Being, by his presence, by the insufficiency of the human
+      mind, which conceives so little what pertains to its author. When I
+      approach the moment of consecration, I collect myself for performing the
+      act with all the feelings required by the church, and the majesty of the
+      sacrament; I strive to annihilate my reason before the supreme
+      intelligence, saying, 'Who art thou, that thou shouldest measure infinite
+      power?'&quot;<a name="FNanchor_347_347" id="FNanchor_347_347"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_347_347" class="fnanchor">[347]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A creed like this, whatever else it may be, is plainly a powerful solvent
+      of every system of exclusive dogma. If the one essential to true worship,
+      the worship of the heart and the inner sentiment, be mystic adoration of
+      an indefinable Supreme, then creeds based upon books, prophecies,
+      miracles, revelations, all fall alike into the second place among things
+      that may be lawful and may be expedient, but that can never be exacted
+      from men by a just God as indispensable to virtue in this world or to
+      bliss in the next. No better answer has ever been given to the exclusive
+      pretensions of sect, Christian, Jewish, or Mahometan, than that propounded
+      by the Savoyard Vicar with such energy, closeness, and most sarcastic
+      fire.<a name="FNanchor_348_348" id="FNanchor_348_348"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_348_348" class="fnanchor">[348]</a> It was turning an
+      unexpected front upon the presumptuousness of all varieties of theological
+      infallibilists, to prove to them that if you insist upon acceptance of
+      this or that special revelation, over and above the dictates of natural
+      religion, then you are bound not only to grant, but imperatively to enjoin
+      upon all men, a searching <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_275"
+      id="Page_275">[ii.275]</a></span>inquiry and comparison, that they may
+      spare no pains in an affair of such momentous issue in proving to
+      themselves that this, and none of the competing revelations, is the
+      veritable message of eternal safety. &quot;Then no other study will be
+      possible but that of religion: hardly shall one who has enjoyed the most
+      robust health, employed his time and used his reason to best purpose, and
+      lived the greatest number of years, hardly shall such an one in his
+      extreme age be quite sure what to believe, and it will be a marvel if he
+      finds out before he dies, in what faith he ought to have lived.&quot; The
+      superiority of the sceptical parts of the Savoyard Vicar's profession, as
+      well as those of the Letters from the Mountain to which we referred
+      previously, over the biting mockeries which Voltaire had made the
+      fashionable method of assault, lay in this fact. The latter only revolted
+      and irritated all serious temperaments to whom religion is a matter of
+      honest concern, while the former actually appealed to their religious
+      sense in support of his doubts; and the more intelligent and sincere this
+      sense happened to be, the more surely would Rousseau's gravely urged
+      objections dissolve the hard particles of dogmatic belief. His objections
+      were on a moral level with the best side of the religion that they
+      oppugned. Those of Voltaire were only on a level with its lowest side, and
+      that was the side presented by the gross and repulsive obscurantism of the
+      functionaries of the church.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Unfortunately Rousseau had placed in the hands<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_276" id="Page_276">[ii.276]</a></span> of the partisans of
+      every exclusive revelation an instrument which was quite enough to
+      disperse all his objections to the winds, and which was the very
+      instrument that defended his own cherished religion. If he was satisfied
+      with replying to the atheist and the materialist, that he knew there is a
+      supreme God, and that the soul must have here and hereafter an existence
+      apart from the body, because he found these truths ineffaceably written
+      upon his own heart, what could prevent the Christian or the Mahometan from
+      replying to Rousseau that the New Testament or the Koran is the special
+      and final revelation from the Supreme Power to his creatures? If you may
+      appeal to the voice of the heart and the dictate of the inner sentiment in
+      one case, why not in the other also? A subjective test necessarily proves
+      anything that any man desires, and the accident of the article proved
+      appearing either reasonable or monstrous to other people, cannot have the
+      least bearing on its efficacy or conclusiveness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Deism like the Savoyard Vicar's opens no path for the future, because it
+      makes no allowance for the growth of intellectual conviction, and binds up
+      religion with mystery, with an object whose attributes can neither be
+      conceived nor defined, with a Being too all-embracing to be able to
+      receive anything from us, too august, self-contained, remote, to be able
+      to bestow on us the humble gifts of which we have need. The temperature of
+      thought is slowly but without an instant's recoil rising to a point when a
+      mystery like<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277">[ii.277]</a></span>
+      this, definite enough to be imposed as a faith, but too indefinite to be
+      grasped by understanding as a truth, melts away from the emotions of
+      religion. Then those instincts of holiness, without which the world would
+      be to so many of its highest spirits the most dreary of exiles, will
+      perhaps come to associate themselves less with unseen divinities, than
+      with the long brotherhood of humanity seen and unseen. Here we shall move
+      with an assurance that no scepticism and no advance of science can ever
+      shake, because the benefactions which we have received from the
+      strenuousness of human effort can never be doubted, and each fresh
+      acquisition in knowledge or goodness can only kindle new fervour. Those
+      who have the religious imagination struck by the awful procession of man
+      from the region of impenetrable night, by his incessant struggle with the
+      hardness of the material world, and his sublimer struggle with the hard
+      world of his own egotistic passions, by the pain and sacrifice by which
+      generation after generation has added some small piece to the temple of
+      human freedom or some new fragment to the ever incomplete sum of human
+      knowledge, or some fresh line to the types of strong or beautiful
+      character,&#8212;those who have an eye for all this may indeed have no
+      ecstasy and no terror, no heaven nor hell, in their religion, but they
+      will have abundant moods of reverence, deep-seated gratitude, and
+      sovereign pitifulness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And such moods will not end in sterile exaltation, or the deathly chills
+      of spiritual reaction. They will<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_278"
+      id="Page_278">[ii.278]</a></span> bring forth abundant fruit in new hope
+      and invigorated endeavour. This devout contemplation of the experience of
+      the race, instead of raising a man into the clouds, brings him into the
+      closest, loftiest, and most conscious relations with his kind, to whom he
+      owes all that is of value in his own life, and to whom he can repay his
+      debt by maintaining the beneficent tradition of service, by cherishing
+      honour for all the true and sage spirits that have shone upon the earth,
+      and sorrow and reprobation for all the unworthier souls whose light has
+      gone out in baseness. A man with this faith can have no foul spiritual
+      pride, for there is no mysteriously accorded divine grace in which one may
+      be a larger participant than another. He can have no incentives to that
+      mutilation with which every branch of the church, from the oldest to the
+      youngest and crudest, has in its degree afflicted and retarded mankind,
+      because the key-note of his religion is the joyful energy of every
+      faculty, practical, reflective, creative, contemplative, in pursuit of a
+      visible common good. And he can be plunged into no fatal and paralysing
+      despair by any doctrine of mortal sin, because active faith in humanity,
+      resting on recorded experience, discloses the many possibilities of moral
+      recovery, and the work that may be done for men in the fragment of days,
+      redeeming the contrite from their burdens by manful hope. If religion is
+      our feeling about the highest forces that govern human destiny, then as it
+      becomes more and more evident how much our destiny is shaped by the<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_279" id="Page_279">[ii.279]</a></span>
+      generation of the dead who have prepared the present, and by the purport
+      of our hopes and the direction of our activity for the generations that
+      are to fill the future, the religious sentiment will more and more attach
+      itself to the great unseen host of our fellows who have gone before us and
+      who are to come after. Such a faith is no rag of metaphysic floating in
+      the sunshine of sentimentalism, like Rousseau's faith. It rests on a
+      positive base, which only becomes wider and firmer with the widening of
+      experience and the augmentation of our skill in interpreting it. Nor is it
+      too transcendent for practical acceptance. One of the most scientific
+      spirits of the eighteenth century, while each moment expecting the knock
+      of the executioner at his door, found as religious a solace as any early
+      martyr had ever found in his barbarous mysteries, when he linked his own
+      efforts for reason and freedom with the eternal chain of the destinies of
+      man. &quot;This contemplation,&quot; he wrote and felt, &quot;is for him a
+      refuge into which the rancour of his persecutors can never follow him; in
+      which, living in thought with man reinstated in the rights and the dignity
+      of his nature, he forgets man tormented and corrupted by greed, by base
+      fear, by envy; it is here that he truly abides with his fellows, in an
+      elysium that his reason has known how to create for itself, and that his
+      love for humanity adorns with all purest delights.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor_349_349" id="FNanchor_349_349"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_349_349" class="fnanchor">[349]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This, to the shame of those wavering souls who <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_280" id="Page_280">[ii.280]</a></span>despair of progress at
+      the first moment when it threatens to leave the path that they have marked
+      out for it, was written by a man at the very close of his days, when every
+      hope that he had ever cherished seemed to one without the eye of faith to
+      be extinguished in bloodshed, disorder, and barbarism. But there is a
+      still happier season in the adolescence of generous natures that have been
+      wisely fostered, when the horizons of the dawning life are suddenly
+      lighted up with a glow of aspiration towards good and holy things.
+      Commonly, alas, this priceless opportunity is lost in a fit of theological
+      exaltation, which is gradually choked out by the dusty facts of life, and
+      slowly moulders away into dry indifference. It would not be so, but far
+      different, if the Savoyard Vicar, instead of taking the youth to the
+      mountain-top, there to contemplate that infinite unseen which is in truth
+      beyond contemplation by the limited faculties of man, were to associate
+      these fine impulses of the early prime with the visible, intelligible, and
+      still sublime possibilities of the human destiny,&#8212;that imperial
+      conception, which alone can shape an existence of entire proportion in all
+      its parts, and leave no natural energy of life idle or athirst. Do you ask
+      for sanctions! One whose conscience has been strengthened from youth in
+      this faith, can know no greater bitterness than the stain cast by wrong
+      act or unworthy thought on the high memories with which he has been used
+      to walk, and the discord wrought in hopes that have become the ruling
+      harmony of his days.
+    </p>
+    <div class="footnotes">
+      <h3>
+        FOOTNOTES:
+      </h3>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_337_337" id="Footnote_337_337"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_337_337"><span class="label">[337]</span></a> See
+          Hallam's <i>Literature of Europe</i>, Pt. I. ch. ii. &#167; 64. Again
+          (for the 16th century), Pt. II. ch. ii. &#167; 53. See also for
+          mention of a sect of deists at Lyons about 1560, Bayle's Dictionary,
+          <i>s.v.</i> Viret.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_338_338" id="Footnote_338_338"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_338_338"><span class="label">[338]</span></a> See
+          above, <a href="#Page_i.223">vol. i. pp. 223-227</a>.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_339_339" id="Footnote_339_339"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_339_339"><span class="label">[339]</span></a> <i>Emile</i>,
+          IV. 163.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_340_340" id="Footnote_340_340"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_340_340"><span class="label">[340]</span></a> IV.
+          183-185.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_341_341" id="Footnote_341_341"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_341_341"><span class="label">[341]</span></a> M. Henri
+          Martin's <i>Hist. de France</i>, xvi. 101, where there is an
+          interesting, but, as it seems to the present writer, hardly a
+          successful attempt, to bring the Savoyard Vicar's eloquence into
+          scientific form.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_342_342" id="Footnote_342_342"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_342_342"><span class="label">[342]</span></a> <i>Emile</i>,
+          IV. 135.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_343_343" id="Footnote_343_343"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_343_343"><span class="label">[343]</span></a> <i>Emile</i>,
+          IV. 204.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_344_344" id="Footnote_344_344"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_344_344"><span class="label">[344]</span></a> <i>Emile</i>,
+          IV. 181, 182. In a letter to Vernes (Feb. 18, 1758. <i>Corr.</i>, ii.
+          9) he expresses his suspicion that possibly the souls of the wicked
+          may be annihilated at their death, and that being and feeling may
+          prove the first reward of a good life. In this letter he asks also,
+          with the same magnanimous security as the Savoyard Vicar, &quot;of
+          what concern the destiny of the wicked can be to him.&quot;
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_345_345" id="Footnote_345_345"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_345_345"><span class="label">[345]</span></a> A
+          similar disparagement of Socrates, in comparison with the Christ of
+          the Gospels, is to be found in the long letter of Jan. 15, 1769 (<i>Corr.</i>,
+          vi. 59, 60), to M&#8212;&#8212;, accompanied by a violent denigration
+          of the Jews, conformably to the philosophic prejudice of the time.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_346_346" id="Footnote_346_346"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_346_346"><span class="label">[346]</span></a> <i>Emile</i>,
+          IV. 241, 242.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_347_347" id="Footnote_347_347"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_347_347"><span class="label">[347]</span></a> <i>Emile</i>,
+          IV. 243.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_348_348" id="Footnote_348_348"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_348_348"><span class="label">[348]</span></a> IV.
+          210-236.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_349_349" id="Footnote_349_349"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_349_349"><span class="label">[349]</span></a>
+          Condorcet's <i>Progr&#232;s de l'Esprit Humain</i> (1794). <i>Oeuv.</i>,
+          vi. 276.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+    </div>
+    <hr style="width: 65%;" />
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_281" id="Page_281">[ii.281]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      <a name="CHAPTER_VI" id="CHAPTER_VI"></a>CHAPTER VI.
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      ENGLAND.<a name="FNanchor_350_350" id="FNanchor_350_350"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_350_350" class="fnanchor">[350]</a>
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <span class="smcap">There</span> is in an English collection a portrait of
+      Jean Jacques, which was painted during his residence in this country by a
+      provincial artist. Singular and displeasing as it is, yet this picture
+      lights up for us many a word and passage in Rousseau's life here and
+      elsewhere, which the ordinary engravings, and the trim self-complacency of
+      the statue on the little island at Geneva, would leave very
+      incomprehensible. It is almost as appalling in its realism as some of the
+      dark pits that open before the reader of the Confessions. Hard struggles
+      with objective difficulty and external obstacle wear deep furrows in the
+      brow; they throw into the glance a solicitude, half penetrating and
+      defiant, half dejected. When a man's hindrances have sprung up from
+      within, and the ill-fought battle of his days has been with his own
+      passions and morbid broodings and unchastened dreams, the eye and the
+      facial lines tell the story of that profound moral defeat which is
+      unlighted by the memories of resolute combat with evil and weakness, and
+      leaves only eternal desola<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_282"
+      id="Page_282">[ii.282]</a></span>tion and the misery that is formless. Our
+      English artist has produced a vision from that prose Inferno which is made
+      so populous in the modern epoch by impotence of will. Those who have seen
+      the picture may easily understand how largely the character of the
+      original must have been pregnant with harassing confusion and distress.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Four years before this (1762), Hume, to whom Lord Marischal had told the
+      story of Rousseau's persecutions, had proffered his services, and declared
+      his eagerness to help in finding a proper refuge for him in England. There
+      had been an exchange of cordial letters,<a name="FNanchor_351_351"
+      id="FNanchor_351_351"></a><a href="#Footnote_351_351" class="fnanchor">[351]</a>
+      and then the matter had lain quiet, until the impossibility of remaining
+      longer in Neuch&#226;tel had once more set his friends on procuring a safe
+      establishment for their rather difficult refugee. Rousseau's appearance in
+      Paris had created the keenest excitement. &quot;People may talk of ancient
+      Greece as they please,&quot; wrote Hume from Paris, &quot;but no nation
+      was ever so proud of genius as this, and no person ever so much engaged
+      their attention as Rousseau! Voltaire and everybody else are quite
+      eclipsed by him.&quot; Even Theresa Le Vasseur, who was declared very
+      homely and very awkward, was more talked of than the Princess of Morocco
+      or the Countess of Egmont, on account of her fidelity towards him. His
+      very dog had a name and reputation in the world.<a name="FNanchor_352_352"
+      id="FNanchor_352_352"></a><a href="#Footnote_352_352" class="fnanchor">[352]</a>
+      Rousseau is always said to have liked the stir which his presence created,
+      but whether this was so or not, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_283"
+      id="Page_283">[ii.283]</a></span>he was very impatient to be away from it
+      as soon as possible.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In company with Hume, he left Paris in the second week of January 1766.
+      They crossed from Calais to Dover by night in a passage that lasted twelve
+      hours. Hume, as the orthodox may be glad to know, was extremely ill, while
+      Rousseau cheerfully passed the whole night upon deck, taking no harm,
+      though the seamen were almost frozen to death.<a name="FNanchor_353_353"
+      id="FNanchor_353_353"></a><a href="#Footnote_353_353" class="fnanchor">[353]</a>
+      They reached London on the thirteenth of January, and the people of London
+      showed nearly as lively an interest in the strange personage whom Hume had
+      brought among them, as the people of Paris had done. <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_284" id="Page_284">[ii.284]</a></span>A prince of the blood at
+      once went to pay his respects to the Swiss philosopher. The crowd at the
+      playhouse showed more curiosity when the stranger came in than when the
+      king and queen entered. Their majesties were as interested as their
+      subjects, and could scarcely keep their eyes off the author of Emilius.
+      George III., then in the heyday of his youth, was so pleased to have a
+      foreigner of genius seeking shelter in his kingdom, that he readily
+      acceded to Conway's suggestion, prompted by Hume, that Rousseau should
+      have a pension settled on him. The ever illustrious Burke, then just made
+      member of Parliament, saw him nearly every day, and became persuaded that
+      &quot;he entertained no principle either to influence his heart, or guide
+      his understanding, but vanity.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_354_354"
+      id="FNanchor_354_354"></a><a href="#Footnote_354_354" class="fnanchor">[354]</a>
+      Hume, on the contrary, thought the best things of his client; &quot;He has
+      an excellent warm heart, and in conversation kindles often to a degree of
+      heat which looks like inspiration; I love him much, and hope that I have
+      some share in his affections.... He is a very modest, mild, well-bred,
+      gentle-spirited and warm-hearted man, as ever I knew in my life. He is
+      also to appearance very sociable. I never saw a man who seems better
+      calculated for good company, nor who seems to take more pleasure in it.&quot;
+      &quot;He is a very agreeable, amiable man; but a great humorist. The
+      philosophers of Paris foretold to me that I could not conduct him to
+      Calais without a quarrel; but I think <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_285" id="Page_285">[ii.285]</a></span>I could live with him all
+      my life in mutual friendship and esteem. I believe one great source of our
+      concord is that neither he nor I are disputatious, which is not the case
+      with any of them. They are also displeased with him, because they think he
+      over-abounds in religion; and it is indeed remarkable that the philosopher
+      of this age who has been most persecuted, is by far the most devout.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor_355_355" id="FNanchor_355_355"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_355_355" class="fnanchor">[355]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What the Scotch philosopher meant by calling his pupil a humorist, may
+      perhaps be inferred from the story of the trouble he had in prevailing
+      upon Rousseau to go to the play, though Garrick had appointed a special
+      occasion and set apart a special box for him. When the hour came, Rousseau
+      declared that he could not leave his dog behind him. &quot;The first
+      person,&quot; he said, &quot;who opens the door, Sultan will run into the
+      streets in search of me and will be lost.&quot; Hume told him to lock
+      Sultan up in the room, and carry away the key in his pocket. This was
+      done, but as they proceeded downstairs, the dog began to howl; his master
+      turned back and avowed he had not resolution to leave him in that
+      condition. Hume, however, caught him in his arms, told him that Mr.
+      Garrick had dismissed another company in order to make room for him, that
+      the king and queen were expecting to see him, and that without a better
+      reason than Sultan's impatience it would be ridiculous to disappoint them.
+      Thus, a little by reason, but more by force, he was carried off.<a
+      name="FNanchor_356_356" id="FNanchor_356_356"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_356_356" class="fnanchor">[356]</a> Such a story, whatever
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_286" id="Page_286">[ii.286]</a></span>else
+      we may think of it, shows at least a certain curious and not untouching
+      simplicity. And singularity which made Rousseau like better to keep his
+      dog company at home, than to be stared at by a gaping pit, was too private
+      in its reward to be the result of that vanity and affectation with which
+      he was taxed by men who lived in another sphere of motive.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was considerable trouble in settling Rousseau. He was eager to leave
+      London almost as soon as he arrived in it. Though pleased with the
+      friendly reception which had been given him, he pronounced London to be as
+      much devoted to idle gossip and frivolity as other capitals. He spent a
+      few weeks in the house of a farmer at Chiswick, thought about fixing
+      himself in the Isle of Wight, then in Wales, then somewhere in our fair
+      Surrey, whose scenery, one is glad to know, greatly attracted him. Finally
+      arrangements were made by Hume with Mr. Davenport for installing him in a
+      house belonging to the latter, at Wootton, near Ashbourne, in the Peak of
+      Derbyshire.<a name="FNanchor_357_357" id="FNanchor_357_357"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_357_357" class="fnanchor">[357]</a> Hither Rousseau
+      proceeded with Theresa, at the end of March. Mr. Davenport was a gentleman
+      of large property, and as he seldom inhabited this solitary house, was
+      very willing that Rousseau should take up his abode there without payment.
+      This, however, was what Rousseau's inde<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_287" id="Page_287">[ii.287]</a></span>pendence could not brook,
+      and he insisted that his entertainer should receive thirty pounds a year
+      for the board of himself and Theresa.<a name="FNanchor_358_358"
+      id="FNanchor_358_358"></a><a href="#Footnote_358_358" class="fnanchor">[358]</a>
+      So here he settled, in an extremely bitter climate, knowing no word of the
+      language of the people about him, with no companionship but Theresa's, and
+      with nothing to do but walk when the weather was fair, play the harpsicord
+      when it rained, and brood over the incidents which had occurred to him
+      since he had left Switzerland six months before. The first fruits of this
+      unfortunate leisure were a bitter quarrel with Hume, one of the most
+      famous and far-resounding of all the quarrels of illustrious men, but one
+      about which very little needs now be said. The merits of it are plain, and
+      all significance that may ever have belonged to it is entirely dead. The
+      incubation of his grievances began immediately after his arrival at
+      Wootton, but two months elapsed before they burst forth in full flame.<a
+      name="FNanchor_359_359" id="FNanchor_359_359"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_359_359" class="fnanchor">[359]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The general charge against Hume was that he was a member of an accursed
+      triumvirate; Voltaire and D'Alembert were the other partners; and their
+      object was to blacken the character of Rousseau and render his life
+      miserable. The particular acts on which this belief was established were
+      the following:&#8212;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (1) While Rousseau was in Paris, there appeared a <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_288" id="Page_288">[ii.288]</a></span>letter nominally
+      addressed to him by the King of Prussia, and written in an ironical
+      strain, which persuaded Jean Jacques himself that it was the work of
+      Voltaire.<a name="FNanchor_360_360" id="FNanchor_360_360"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_360_360" class="fnanchor">[360]</a> Then he suspected
+      D'Alembert. It was really the composition of Horace Walpole, who was then
+      in Paris. Now Hume was the friend of Walpole, and had given Rousseau a
+      card of introduction to him for the purpose of entrusting Walpole with the
+      carriage of some papers. Although the false letter produced the liveliest
+      amusement at Rousseau's cost, first in Paris and then in London, Hume,
+      while feigning to be his warm friend and presenting him to the English
+      public, never took any pains to tell the world that the piece was a
+      forgery, nor did he break with its <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_289"
+      id="Page_289">[ii.289]</a></span>wicked author.<a name="FNanchor_361_361"
+      id="FNanchor_361_361"></a><a href="#Footnote_361_361" class="fnanchor">[361]</a>
+      (2) When Rousseau assured Hume that D'Alembert was a cunning and
+      dishonourable man, Hume denied it with an amazing heat, although he well
+      knew the latter to be Rousseau's enemy.<a name="FNanchor_362_362"
+      id="FNanchor_362_362"></a><a href="#Footnote_362_362" class="fnanchor">[362]</a>
+      (3) Hume lived in London with the son of Tronchin, the Genevese surgeon,
+      and the most mortal of all the foes of Jean Jacques.<a
+      name="FNanchor_363_363" id="FNanchor_363_363"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_363_363" class="fnanchor">[363]</a> (4) When Rousseau
+      first came to London, his reception was a distinguished triumph for the
+      victim of persecution from so many governments. England was proud of being
+      his place of refuge, and justly vaunted the freedom of her laws and
+      administration. Suddenly and for no assignable cause the public tone
+      changed, the newspapers either fell silent or else spoke unfavourably, and
+      Rousseau was thought of no more. This must have been due to Hume, who had
+      much influence among people of credit, and who went about boasting of the
+      protection which he had procured for Jean Jacques in Paris.<a
+      name="FNanchor_364_364" id="FNanchor_364_364"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_364_364" class="fnanchor">[364]</a> (5) Hume resorted to
+      various small artifices for preventing Rousseau from making friends, for
+      procuring opportunities of opening Rousseau's letters, and the like.<a
+      name="FNanchor_365_365" id="FNanchor_365_365"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_365_365" class="fnanchor">[365]</a> (6) A violent
+      satirical letter against Rousseau appeared in the English newspapers, with
+      allusions which could only have been supplied by Hume. (7) On the first
+      night after their departure from Paris, Rousseau, who occupied the same
+      room with Hume, heard him call out several times in the middle of the
+      night in the course of his dreams, <i>Je tiens Jean Jacques <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_290" id="Page_290">[ii.290]</a></span>Rousseau</i>,
+      with extreme vehemence&#8212;which words, in spite of the horribly
+      sardonic tone of the dreamer, he interpreted favourably at the time, but
+      which later event proved to have been full of malign significance.<a
+      name="FNanchor_366_366" id="FNanchor_366_366"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_366_366" class="fnanchor">[366]</a> (8) Rousseau
+      constantly found Hume eyeing him with a glance of sinister and diabolic
+      import that filled him with an astonishing disquietude, though he did his
+      best to combat it. On one of these occasions he was seized with remorse,
+      fell upon Hume's neck, embraced him warmly, and, suffocated with sobs and
+      bathed in tears, cried out in broken accents, <i>No, no, David Hume is no
+      traitor</i>, with many protests of affection. The phlegmatic Hume only
+      returned his embrace with politeness, stroked him gently on the back, and
+      repeated several times in a tranquil voice, <i>Quoi, mon cher monsieur!
+      Eh! mon cher monsieur! Quoi donc, mon cher monsieur!</i><a
+      name="FNanchor_367_367" id="FNanchor_367_367"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_367_367" class="fnanchor">[367]</a> (9) Although for many
+      weeks Rousseau had kept a firm silence to Hume, neglecting to answer
+      letters that plainly called for answer, and marking his displeasure in
+      other unmistakable ways, yet Hume had never sought any explanation of what
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_291" id="Page_291">[ii.291]</a></span>must
+      necessarily have struck him as so singular, but continued to write as if
+      nothing had happened. Was not this positive proof of a consciousness of
+      perfidy?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Some years afterwards he substituted another shorter set of grievances,
+      namely, that Hume would not suffer Theresa to sit at table with him; that
+      he made a show of him; and that Hume had an engraving executed of himself,
+      which made him as beautiful as a cherub, while in another engraving, which
+      was a pendant to his own, Jean Jacques was made as ugly as a bear.<a
+      name="FNanchor_368_368" id="FNanchor_368_368"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_368_368" class="fnanchor">[368]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It would be ridiculous for us to waste any time in discussing these
+      charges. They are not open to serious examination, though it is
+      astonishing to find writers in our own day who fully believe that Hume was
+      a traitor, and behaved extremely basely to the unfortunate man whom he had
+      inveigled over to a barbarous island. The only part of the indictment
+      about which there could be the least doubt, was the possibility of Hume
+      having been an accomplice in Walpole's very small pleasantry. Some of his
+      friends in Paris suspected that he had had a hand in the supposed letter
+      from the King of Prussia. Although the letter constituted no very
+      malignant jest, and could not by a sensible man have been regarded as
+      furnishing just complaint against one who, like Walpole, was merely an
+      impudent stranger, yet if it could be shown that Hume had taken an active
+      part either in the composition or the circulation of a spiteful bit of
+      satire upon <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_292" id="Page_292">[ii.292]</a></span>one
+      towards whom he was pretending a singular affection, then we should admit
+      that he showed such a want of sense of the delicacy of friendship as
+      amounted to something like treachery. But a letter from Walpole to Hume
+      sets this doubt at rest. &quot;I cannot be precise as to the time of my
+      writing the King of Prussia's letter, but ... I not only suppressed the
+      letter while you stayed there, out of delicacy to you, but it was the
+      reason why, out of delicacy to myself, I did not go to see him as you
+      often proposed to me, thinking it wrong to go and make a cordial visit to
+      a man, with a letter in my pocket to laugh at him.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor_369_369" id="FNanchor_369_369"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_369_369" class="fnanchor">[369]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With this all else falls to the ground. It would be as unwise in us, as it
+      was in Rousseau himself, to complicate the hypotheses. Men do not act
+      without motives, and Hume could have no motive in entering into any plot
+      against Rousseau, even if the rival philosophers in France might have
+      motives. We know the character of our David Hume perfectly well, and
+      though it was not faultless, its fault certainly lay rather in an
+      excessive desire to make the world comfortable for everybody, than in
+      anything like purposeless malignity, of which he never had a trace.
+      Moreover, all that befell Rousseau through Hume's agency was exceedingly
+      to his advantage. Hume was <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_293"
+      id="Page_293">[ii.293]</a></span>not without vanity, and his letters show
+      that he was not displeased at the addition to his consequence which came
+      of his patronage of a man who was much talked about and much stared at.
+      But, however this was, he did all for Rousseau that generosity and
+      thoughtfulness could do. He was at great pains in establishing him; he
+      used his interest to procure for him the grant of a pension from the king;
+      when Rousseau provisionally refused the pension rather than owe anything
+      to Hume, the latter, still ignorant of the suspicion that was blackening
+      in Rousseau's mind, supposed that the refusal came from the fact of the
+      pension being kept private, and at once took measures with the minister to
+      procure the removal of the condition of privacy. Besides undeniable acts
+      like these, the state of Hume's mind towards his curious ward is
+      abundantly shown in his letters to all his most intimate friends, just as
+      Rousseau's gratitude to him is to be read in all his early letters both to
+      Hume and other persons. In the presence of such facts on the one side, and
+      in the absence of any particle of intelligible evidence to neutralise them
+      on the other, to treat Rousseau's charges with gravity is irrational.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If Hume had written back in a mild and conciliatory strain, there can be
+      no doubt that the unfortunate victim of his own morbid imagination would,
+      for a time at any rate, have been sobered and brought to a sense of his
+      misconduct. But Hume was incensed beyond control at what he very
+      pardonably took for a masterpiece of atrocious ingratitude. He reproached<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_294" id="Page_294">[ii.294]</a></span>
+      Rousseau in terms as harsh as those which Grimm had used nine years
+      before. He wrote to all his friends, withdrawing the kindly words he had
+      once used of Rousseau's character, and substituting in their place the
+      most unfavourable he could find. He gave the philosophic circle in Paris
+      exquisite delight by the confirmation which his story furnished of their
+      own foresight, when they had warned him that he was taking a viper to his
+      bosom. Finally, in spite of the advice of Adam Smith, of one of the
+      greatest of men, Turgot, and one of the smallest, Horace Walpole, he
+      published a succinct account of the quarrel, first in French, and then in
+      English. This step was chiefly due to the advice of the clique of whom
+      D'Alembert was the spokesman, though it is due to him to mention that he
+      softened various expressions in Hume's narrative, which he pronounced too
+      harsh. It may be true that a council of war never fights; a council of men
+      of letters always does. The governing committee of a literary,
+      philosophical, or theological clique form the very worst advisers any man
+      can have.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Much must be forgiven to Hume, stung as he was by what appeared the most
+      hateful ferocity in one on whom he had heaped acts of affection. Still,
+      one would have been glad on behalf of human dignity, if he had suffered
+      with firm silence petulant charges against which the consciousness of his
+      own uprightness should have been the only answer. That high pride, of
+      which there is too little rather than too much in the world, and which
+      saves men from waste of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_295"
+      id="Page_295">[ii.295]</a></span> themselves and others in pitiful
+      accusations, vindications, retaliations, should have helped humane pity in
+      preserving him from this poor quarrel. Long afterwards Rousseau said,
+      &quot;England, of which they paint such fine pictures in France, has so
+      cheerless a climate; my soul, wearied with many shocks, was in a condition
+      of such profound melancholy, that in all that passed I believe I committed
+      many faults. But are they comparable to those of the enemies who
+      persecuted me, supposing them even to have done no more than published our
+      private quarrels?&quot;<a name="FNanchor_370_370" id="FNanchor_370_370"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_370_370" class="fnanchor">[370]</a> An ampler contrition
+      would have been more seemly in the first offender, but there is a measure
+      of justice in his complaint. We need not, however, reproach the good Hume.
+      Before six months were over, he admits that he is sometimes inclined to
+      blame his publication, and always to regret it.<a name="FNanchor_371_371"
+      id="FNanchor_371_371"></a><a href="#Footnote_371_371" class="fnanchor">[371]</a>
+      And his regret was not verbal merely. When Rousseau had returned to
+      France, and was in danger of arrest, Hume was most urgent in entreating
+      Turgot to use his influence with the government to protect the wretched
+      wanderer, and Turgot's answer shows both how sincere this humane
+      interposition was, and how practically serviceable.<a
+      name="FNanchor_372_372" id="FNanchor_372_372"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_372_372" class="fnanchor">[372]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Meanwhile there ensued a horrible fray in print. Pamphlets appeared in
+      Paris and London in a cloud. The Succinct Exposure was followed by
+      succinct rejoinders. Walpole officiously printed his own account of his
+      own share in the matter. Boswell officiously <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_296" id="Page_296">[ii.296]</a></span>wrote to the newspapers
+      defending Rousseau and attacking Walpole. King George followed the battle
+      with intense curiosity. Hume with solemn formalities sent the documents to
+      the British Museum. There was silence only in one place, and that was at
+      Wootton. The unfortunate person who had done all the mischief printed not
+      a word.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The most prompt and quite the least instructive of the remarks invariably
+      made upon any one who has acted in an unusual manner, is that he must be
+      mad. This universal criticism upon the unwonted really tells us nothing,
+      because the term may cover any state of mind from a warranted dissent from
+      established custom, down to absolute dementia. Rousseau was called mad
+      when he took to wearing convenient clothes and living frugally. He was
+      called mad when he quitted the town and went to live in the country. The
+      same facile explanation covered his quarrel with importunate friends at
+      the Hermitage. Voltaire called him mad for saying that if there were
+      perfect harmony of taste and temperament between the king's daughter and
+      the executioner's son, the pair ought to be allowed to marry. We who are
+      not forced by conversational necessities to hurry to a judgment, may
+      hesitate to take either taste for the country, or for frugal living, or
+      even for democratic extravagances, as a mark of a disordered mind.<a
+      name="FNanchor_373_373" id="FNanchor_373_373"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_373_373" class="fnanchor">[373]</a> That Rousseau's
+      conduct towards Hume was <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_297"
+      id="Page_297">[ii.297]</a></span>inconsistent with perfect mental
+      soundness is quite plain. But to say this with crude trenchancy, teaches
+      us nothing. Instead of paying ourselves with phrases like monomania, it is
+      more useful shortly to trace the conditions which prepared the way for
+      mental derangement, because this is the only means of understanding either
+      its nature, or the degree to which it extended. These conditions in
+      Rousseau's case are perfectly simple and obvious to any one who recognises
+      the principle, that the essential facts of such mental disorder as his
+      must be sought not in the symptoms, but from the whole range of moral and
+      intellectual constitution, acted on by physical states and acting on them
+      in turn.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rousseau was born with an organisation of extreme sensibility. This
+      predisposition was further deepened by the application in early youth of
+      mental influences specially calculated to heighten juvenile sensibility.
+      Corrective discipline from circumstance and from formal instruction was
+      wholly absent, and thus the particular excess in his temperament became
+      ever more and more exaggerated, and encroached at a rate of geometrical
+      progression upon all the rest of his impulses and faculties; these, if he
+      had been happily placed under some of the many forms of wholesome<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_298" id="Page_298">[ii.298]</a></span>
+      social pressure, would then on the contrary have gradually reduced his
+      sensibility to more normal proportion. When the vicious excess had
+      decisively rooted itself in his character, he came to Paris, where it was
+      irritated into further activity by the uncongeniality of all that
+      surrounded him. Hence the growth of a marked unsociality, taking literary
+      form in the Discourses, and practical form in his retirement from the
+      town. The slow depravation of the affective life was hastened by solitude,
+      by sensuous expansion, by the long musings of literary composition. Well
+      does Goethe's Princess warn the hapless Tasso:&#8212;
+    </p>
+    <div class="poem">
+      <div class="stanza">
+        <span class="i10">Dieser Pfad<br /></span> <span class="i0">Verleitet
+        uns, durch einsames Geb&#252;sch,<br /></span> <span class="i0">Durch
+        stille Th&#228;ler fortzuwandern; mehr<br /></span> <span class="i0">Und
+        mehr verw&#246;hnt sich das Gem&#252;th und strebt<br /></span> <span
+        class="i0">Die goldne Zeit, die ihm von aussen mangelt,<br /></span>
+        <span class="i0">In seinem Innern wieder herzustellen,<br /></span> <span
+        class="i0">So wenig der Versuch gelingen will.<br /></span>
+      </div>
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      Then came harsh and unjust treatment prolonged for many months, and this
+      introduced a slight but genuinely misanthropic element of bitterness into
+      what had hitherto been an excess of feeling about himself, rather than any
+      positive feeling of hostility or suspicion about others. Finally and
+      perhaps above all else, he was the victim of tormenting bodily pain, and
+      of sleeplessness which resulted from it. The agitation and excitement of
+      the journey to England, completed the sum of the conditions of
+      disturbance, and as soon as ever he was settled at Wootton, and<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_299" id="Page_299">[ii.299]</a></span> had
+      leisure to brood over the incidents of the few weeks since his arrival in
+      England, the disorder which had long been spreading through his impulses
+      and affections, suddenly but by a most natural sequence extended to the
+      faculties of his intelligence, and he became the prey of delusion, a
+      delusion which was not yet fixed, but which ultimately became so.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &quot;He has only <i>felt</i> during the whole course of his life,&quot;
+      wrote Hume sympathetically; &quot;and in this respect his sensibility
+      rises to a pitch beyond what I have seen any example of; but it still
+      gives him a more acute feeling of pain than of pleasure. He is like a man
+      who was stripped not only of his clothes, but of his skin, and turned out
+      in that situation to combat with the rude and boisterous elements.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor_374_374" id="FNanchor_374_374"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_374_374" class="fnanchor">[374]</a> A morbid affective
+      state of this kind and of such a degree of intensity, was the sure
+      antecedent of a morbid intellectual state, general or partial, depressed
+      or exalted. One who is the prey of unsound feelings, if they are only
+      marked enough and persistent enough, naturally ends by a correspondingly
+      unsound arrangement of all or some of his ideas to match. The intelligence
+      is seduced into finding supports in misconception of circumstances, for a
+      misconception of human relation which had its root in disordered emotion.
+      This completes the breach of correspondence between the man's nature and
+      the external facts with which he has to deal, though the breach may not,
+      and in Rousseau's case certainly did not, extend along <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_300" id="Page_300">[ii.300]</a></span>the
+      whole line of feeling and judgment. Rousseau's delusion about Hume's
+      sinister feeling and designs, which was the first definite manifestation
+      of positive unsoundness in the sphere of the intelligence, was a last
+      result of the gradual development of an inherited predisposition to
+      affective unsoundness, which unhappily for the man's history had never
+      been counteracted either by a strenuous education, or by the wholesome
+      urgencies of life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We have only to remember that with him, as with the rest of us, there was
+      entire unity of nature, without cataclysm or marvel or inexplicable
+      rupture of mental continuity. All the facts came in an order that might
+      have been foretold; they all lay together, with their foundations down in
+      physical temperament; the facts which made Rousseau's name renowned and
+      his influence a great force, along with those which made his life a
+      scandal to others and a misery to himself. The deepest root of moral
+      disorder lies in an immoderate expectation of happiness, and this
+      immoderate unlawful expectation was the mark both of his character and his
+      work. The exaltation of emotion over intelligence was the secret of his
+      most striking production; the same exaltation, by gaining increased
+      mastery over his whole existence, at length passed the limit of sanity and
+      wrecked him. The tendency of the dominant side of a character towards
+      diseased exaggeration is a fact of daily observation. The ruin which the
+      excess of strong religious imagination works in natures without the
+      quality of energetic<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_301" id="Page_301">[ii.301]</a></span>
+      objective reaction, was shown in the case of Rousseau's contemporary,
+      Cowper. This gentle poet's delusions about the wrath of God were equally
+      pitiable and equally a source of torment to their victim, with Rousseau's
+      delusions about the malignity of his mysterious plotters among men. We
+      must call such a condition unsound, but the important thing is to remember
+      that insanity was only a modification of certain specially marked
+      tendencies of the sufferer's sanity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The desire to protect himself against the defamation of his enemies led
+      him at this time to compose that account of his own life, which is
+      probably the only one of his writings that continues to be generally read.
+      He composed the first part of the Confessions at Wootton, during the
+      autumn and winter of 1766. The idea of giving his memoirs to the public
+      was an old one, originally suggested by one of his publishers. To write
+      memoirs of one's own life was one of the fancies of the time, but like all
+      else, it became in Rousseau's hand something more far-reaching and sincere
+      than a passing fashion. Other people wrote polite histories of their outer
+      lives, amply coloured with romantic decorations. Rousseau with unquailing
+      veracity plunged into the inmost depths, hiding nothing that would be
+      likely to make him either ridiculous or hateful in common opinion, and
+      inventing nothing that could attract much sympathy or much admiration.
+      Though, as has been pointed out already, the Confessions abound in small
+      inaccuracies<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_302" id="Page_302">[ii.302]</a></span>
+      of date, hardly to be avoided by an oldish man in reference to the facts
+      of his boyhood, whether a Rousseau or a Goethe, and though one or two of
+      the incidents are too deeply coloured with the hues of sentimental
+      reminiscence, and one or two of them are downright impossible, yet when
+      all these deductions have been made, the substantial truthfulness of what
+      remains is made more evident with every addition to our materials for
+      testing them. When all the circumstances of Rousseau's life are weighed,
+      and when full account has been taken of his proved delinquencies, we yet
+      perceive that he was at bottom a character as essentially sincere,
+      truthful, careful of fact and reality, as is consistent with the general
+      empire of sensation over untrained intelligence.<a name="FNanchor_375_375"
+      id="FNanchor_375_375"></a><a href="#Footnote_375_375" class="fnanchor">[375]</a>
+      As for the egotism of the Confessions, it is hard to see how a man is to
+      tell the story of his own life without egotism. And it may be worth adding
+      that the self-feeling which comes to the surface and asserts itself, is in
+      a great many cases far less vicious and debilitating than the same feeling
+      nursed internally with a troglodytish shyness. But Rousseau's egotism
+      manifested itself perversely. This is true to a certain small extent, and
+      one or two of the disclosures in the Confessions are in very nauseous
+      matter, and are made moreover in a very nauseous manner. There are some
+      vices whose grotesqueness stirs us more deeply than downright <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_303" id="Page_303">[ii.303]</a></span>atrocities,
+      and we read of certain puerilities avowed by Rousseau, with a livelier
+      impatience than old Benvenuto Cellini quickens in us, when he confesses to
+      a horrible assassination. This morbid form of self-feeling is only less
+      disgusting than the allied form which clothes itself in the phrases of
+      religious exaltation. And there is not much of it. Blot out half a dozen
+      pages from the Confessions, and the egotism is no more perverted than in
+      the confessions of Augustine or of Cardan.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These remarks are not made to extenuate Rousseau's faults, or to raise the
+      popular estimate of his character, but simply in the interests of a
+      greater precision of criticism. In England criticism has nearly always
+      been of the most vulgar superficiality in respect to Rousseau, from the
+      time of Horace Walpole downwards. The Confessions in their least agreeable
+      parts, or rather especially in those parts, are the expression on a new
+      side and in a peculiar way of the same notion of the essential goodness of
+      nature and the importance of understanding nature and restoring its reign,
+      which inspired the Discourses and Emilius. &quot;I would fain show to my
+      fellows,&quot; he began, &quot;a man in all the truth of nature,&quot; and
+      he cannot be charged with any failure to keep his word. He despised
+      opinion, and hence was careless to observe whether or no this revelation
+      of human nakedness was likely to add to the popular respect for nature and
+      the natural man. After all, considering that literature is for the most
+      part a hollow and pretentious<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_304"
+      id="Page_304">[ii.304]</a></span> phantasmagoria of mimic figures posing
+      in breeches and peruke, we may try to forgive certain cruel blows to the
+      dignified assumptions, solemn words, and high heels of convention, in one
+      who would not lie, nor dissemble kinship with the four-footed. Intense
+      subjective preoccupations in markedly emotional natures all tend to come
+      to the same end. The distance from Rousseau's odious erotics to the
+      glorified ecstasies of many a poor female saint is not far. In any case,
+      let us know the facts about human nature, and the pathological facts no
+      less than the others. These are the first thing, and the second, and the
+      third also.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The exaltation of the opening page of the Confessions is shocking. No monk
+      nor saint ever wrote anything more revolting in its blasphemous
+      self-feeling. But the exaltation almost instantly became calm, when the
+      course of the story necessarily drew the writer into dealings with
+      objective facts, even muffled as they were by memory and imagination. The
+      broodings over old reminiscence soothed him, the labour of composition
+      occupied him, and he forgot, as the modern reader would never know from
+      internal evidence, that he was preparing a vindication of his life and
+      character against the infamies with which Hume and others were supposed to
+      be industriously blackening them. While he was writing this famous
+      composition, severed by so vast a gulf from the modes of English
+      provincial life, he was on good terms with one or two of the great people
+      in his neighbourhood, and kept up a gracious and social correspondence<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_305" id="Page_305">[ii.305]</a></span> with
+      them. He was greatly pleased by a compliment that was paid to him by the
+      government, apparently through the interest of General Conway. The duty
+      that had been paid upon certain boxes forwarded to Rousseau from
+      Switzerland was recouped by the treasury,<a name="FNanchor_376_376"
+      id="FNanchor_376_376"></a><a href="#Footnote_376_376" class="fnanchor">[376]</a>
+      and the arrangements for the annual pension of one hundred pounds were
+      concluded and accepted by him, after he had duly satisfied himself that
+      Hume was not the indirect author of the benefaction.<a
+      name="FNanchor_377_377" id="FNanchor_377_377"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_377_377" class="fnanchor">[377]</a> The weather was the
+      worst possible, but whenever it allowed him to go out of doors, he found
+      delight in climbing the heights around him in search of curious mosses;
+      for he had now come to think the discovery of a single new plant a hundred
+      times more useful than to have the whole human race listening to your
+      sermons for half a century.<a name="FNanchor_378_378" id="FNanchor_378_378"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_378_378" class="fnanchor">[378]</a> &quot;This indolent
+      and contemplative life that you do not approve,&quot; he wrote to the
+      elder Mirabeau, &quot;and for which I pretend to make no excuses, becomes
+      every day more delicious to me: to wander alone among the trees and rocks
+      that surround my dwelling; to muse or rather to extravagate at my ease,
+      and as you say to stand gaping in the air; when my brain gets too hot, to
+      calm it by dissecting some moss or fern; in short, to surrender myself
+      without restraint to my phantasies, which, heaven be thanked, are all
+      under my own con<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_306" id="Page_306">[ii.306]</a></span>trol,&#8212;all
+      that is for me the height of enjoyment, to which I can imagine nothing
+      superior in this world for a man of my age and in my condition.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor_379_379" id="FNanchor_379_379"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_379_379" class="fnanchor">[379]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This contentment did not last long. The snow kept him indoors. The
+      excitement of composition abated. Theresa harassed him by ignoble quarrels
+      with the women in the kitchen. His delusions returned with greater force
+      than before. He believed that the whole English nation was in a plot
+      against him, that all his letters were opened before reaching London and
+      before leaving it, that all his movements were closely watched, and that
+      he was surrounded by unseen guards to prevent any attempt at escape.<a
+      name="FNanchor_380_380" id="FNanchor_380_380"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_380_380" class="fnanchor">[380]</a> At length these
+      delusions got such complete mastery over him, that in a paroxysm of terror
+      he fled away from Wootton, leaving money, papers, and all else behind him.
+      Nothing was heard of him for a fortnight, when Mr. Davenport received a
+      letter from him dated at Spalding in Lincolnshire. Mr. Davenport's conduct
+      throughout was marked by a humanity and patience that do him the highest
+      honour. He confesses himself &quot;quite moved to read poor Rousseau's
+      mournful epistle.&quot; &quot;You shall see his letter,&quot; he writes to
+      Hume, &quot;the first opportunity; but God help him, I can't for pity give
+      a copy; and 'tis so much mixed with his own poor little private concerns,
+      that it would not be right in me to do <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_307" id="Page_307">[ii.307]</a></span>it.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor_381_381" id="FNanchor_381_381"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_381_381" class="fnanchor">[381]</a> This is the generosity
+      which makes Hume's impatience and that of his mischievous advisers in
+      Paris appear petty. Rousseau had behaved quite as ill to Mr. Davenport as
+      he had done to Hume, and had received at least equal services from him.<a
+      name="FNanchor_382_382" id="FNanchor_382_382"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_382_382" class="fnanchor">[382]</a> The good man at once
+      sent a servant to Spalding in search of his unhappy guest, but Rousseau
+      had again disappeared. The parson of the parish had passed several hours
+      of each day in his company, and had found him cheerful and good-humoured.
+      He had had a blue coat made for himself, and had written a long letter to
+      the lord chancellor, praying him to appoint a guard, at Rousseau's own
+      expense, to escort him in safety out of the kingdom where enemies were
+      plotting against his life.<a name="FNanchor_383_383" id="FNanchor_383_383"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_383_383" class="fnanchor">[383]</a> He was next heard of
+      at Dover (May 18), whence he wrote a letter to General Conway, setting
+      forth his delusion in full form.<a name="FNanchor_384_384"
+      id="FNanchor_384_384"></a><a href="#Footnote_384_384" class="fnanchor">[384]</a>
+      He is the victim of a plot; the conspirators will not allow him to leave
+      the island, lest he should divulge in other countries the outrages to
+      which he has been subjected here; he perceives the sinister manoeuvres
+      that will arrest him if he attempts to put his foot on board ship. But he
+      warns them that his tragical disappearance cannot take place without
+      creating inquiry. Still if General Conway will only let him go, he gives
+      his word of honour that he will not publish <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_308" id="Page_308">[ii.308]</a></span>a line of the memoirs he
+      has written, nor ever divulge the wrongs which he has suffered in England.
+      &quot;I see my last hour approaching,&quot; he concluded; &quot;I am
+      determined, if necessary, to advance to meet it, and to perish or be free;
+      there is no longer any other alternative.&quot; On the same evening on
+      which he wrote this letter (about May 20-22), the forlorn creature took
+      boat and landed at Calais, where he seems at once to have recovered his
+      composure and a right mind.
+    </p>
+    <div class="footnotes">
+      <h3>
+        FOOTNOTES:
+      </h3>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_350_350" id="Footnote_350_350"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_350_350"><span class="label">[350]</span></a> Jan.
+          1766&#8212;May 1767.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_351_351" id="Footnote_351_351"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_351_351"><span class="label">[351]</span></a>
+          Streckeisen, ii. 275, etc. <i>Corr.</i>, iii.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_352_352" id="Footnote_352_352"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_352_352"><span class="label">[352]</span></a> Burton,
+          ii. 299.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_353_353" id="Footnote_353_353"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_353_353"><span class="label">[353]</span></a> The
+          materials for this chapter are taken from Rousseau's <i>Correspondence</i>
+          (vols. iv. and v.), and from Hume's letters to various persons, given
+          in the second volume of Mr. Burton's <i>Life of Hume</i>. Everybody
+          who takes an interest in Rousseau is indebted to Mr. Burton for the
+          ample documents which he has provided. Yet one cannot but regret the
+          satire on Rousseau with which he intersperses them, and which is not
+          always felicitous. For one instance, he implies (p. 295) that Rousseau
+          invented the story given in the Confessions, of Hume's correcting the
+          proofs of Wallace's book against himself. The story may be true or
+          not, but at any rate Rousseau had it very circumstantially from Lord
+          Marischal; see letter from Lord M. to J.J.R., in Streckeisen, ii. 67.
+          Again, such an expression as Rousseau's &quot;<i>occasional</i>
+          attention to small matters&quot; (p. 321) only shows that the writer
+          has not read Rousseau's letters, which are indeed not worth reading,
+          except by those who wish to have a right to speak about Rousseau's
+          character. The numerous pamphlets on the quarrel between Hume and
+          Rousseau, if I may judge from those of them which I have turned over,
+          really shed no light on the matter, though they added much heat. For
+          the journey, see <i>Corr.</i>, iv. 307; Burton, ii. 304.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_354_354" id="Footnote_354_354"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_354_354"><span class="label">[354]</span></a> <i>Letter
+          to a Member of the National Assembly.</i> The same passage contains
+          some strong criticism on Rousseau's style.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_355_355" id="Footnote_355_355"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_355_355"><span class="label">[355]</span></a> Burton,
+          304, 309, 310.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_356_356" id="Footnote_356_356"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_356_356"><span class="label">[356]</span></a> <i>Ib.</i>
+          ii. 309, <i>n.</i>
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_357_357" id="Footnote_357_357"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_357_357"><span class="label">[357]</span></a> Mr.
+          Howitt has given an account of Rousseau's quarters at Wootton, in his
+          <i>Visits to Remarkable Places</i>. One or two aged peasants had some
+          confused memory of &quot;old Ross-hall.&quot; For Rousseau's own
+          description, see his letters to Mdme. de Luze, May 10, 1766. <i>Corr.</i>,
+          iv. 326.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_358_358" id="Footnote_358_358"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_358_358"><span class="label">[358]</span></a> Burton,
+          313. It has been stated that Rousseau never paid this; at any rate
+          when he fled, he left between thirty and forty pounds in Mr.
+          Davenport's hands. See Davenport to Hume; Burton, 367. Rousseau's
+          accurate probity in affairs of money is absolutely unimpeachable.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_359_359" id="Footnote_359_359"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_359_359"><span class="label">[359]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>
+          iv. 312. April 9, 1766.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_360_360" id="Footnote_360_360"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_360_360"><span class="label">[360]</span></a> Here is
+          a translation of this rather poor piece of sarcasm:&#8212;&quot;My
+          dear Jean Jacques&#8212;You have renounced Geneva, your native place.
+          You have caused your expulsion from Switzerland, a country so extolled
+          in your writings; France has issued a warrant against you; so do you
+          come to me. I admire your talents; I am amused by your dreamings,
+          though let me tell you they absorb you too much and for too long. You
+          must at length be sober and happy; you have caused enough talk about
+          yourself by oddities which in truth are hardly becoming a really great
+          man. Prove to your enemies that you can now and then have common
+          sense. That will annoy them and do you no harm. My states offer you a
+          peaceful retreat. I wish you well, and will treat you well, if you
+          will let me. But if you persist in refusing my help, do not reckon
+          upon my telling any one that you did so. If you are bent on tormenting
+          your spirit to find new misfortunes, choose whatever you like best. I
+          am a king, and can procure them for you at your pleasure; and what
+          will certainly never happen to you in respect of your enemies, I will
+          cease to persecute you as soon as you cease to take a pride in being
+          persecuted. Your good friend, <span class="smcap">Frederick</span>.&quot;
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_361_361" id="Footnote_361_361"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_361_361"><span class="label">[361]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>,
+          iv. 313, 343, 388, 398.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_362_362" id="Footnote_362_362"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_362_362"><span class="label">[362]</span></a> <i>Ib.</i>
+          395.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_363_363" id="Footnote_363_363"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_363_363"><span class="label">[363]</span></a> <i>Ib.</i>
+          389, etc.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_364_364" id="Footnote_364_364"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_364_364"><span class="label">[364]</span></a> <i>Ib.</i>
+          384.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_365_365" id="Footnote_365_365"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_365_365"><span class="label">[365]</span></a> <i>Ib.</i>
+          343, 344, 387, etc.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_366_366" id="Footnote_366_366"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_366_366"><span class="label">[366]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>,
+          iv. 346.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_367_367" id="Footnote_367_367"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_367_367"><span class="label">[367]</span></a> <i>Ib.</i>
+          390. A letter from Hume to Blair, long before the rupture overt, shows
+          the former to have been by no means so phlegmatic on this occasion as
+          he may have seemed. &quot;I hope,&quot; he writes, &quot;you have not
+          so bad an opinion of me as to think I was not melted on this occasion;
+          I assure you I kissed him and embraced him twenty times, with a
+          plentiful effusion of tears. I think no scene of my life was ever more
+          affecting.&quot; Burton, ii. 315. The great doubters of the eighteenth
+          century could without fear have accepted the test of the ancient
+          saying, that men without tears are worth little.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_368_368" id="Footnote_368_368"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_368_368"><span class="label">[368]</span></a>
+          Bernardin de St. Pierre, <i>Oeuv.</i>, xii. 79.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_369_369" id="Footnote_369_369"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_369_369"><span class="label">[369]</span></a>
+          Walpole's <i>Letters</i>, v. 7 (Cunningham's edition). For other
+          letters from the shrewd coxcomb on the same matter, see pp. 23-28. A
+          corroboration of the statement that Hume knew nothing of the letter
+          until he was in England, may be inferred from what he wrote to Madame
+          de Boufflers; Burton, ii. 306, and <i>n.</i> 2.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_370_370" id="Footnote_370_370"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_370_370"><span class="label">[370]</span></a>
+          Bernardin de St. Pierre, <i>Oeuv.</i>, xii. 79.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_371_371" id="Footnote_371_371"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_371_371"><span class="label">[371]</span></a> To Adam
+          Smith. Burton, 380.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_372_372" id="Footnote_372_372"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_372_372"><span class="label">[372]</span></a> Burton,
+          381.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_373_373" id="Footnote_373_373"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_373_373"><span class="label">[373]</span></a> A very
+          common but random opinion traces Rousseau's insanity to certain
+          disagreeable habits avowed in the Confessions. They may have
+          contributed in some small degree to depression of vital energies,
+          though for that matter Rousseau's strength and power of endurance were
+          remarkable to the end. But they certainly did not produce a mental
+          state in the least corresponding to that particular variety of
+          insanity, which possesses definitely marked features.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_374_374" id="Footnote_374_374"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_374_374"><span class="label">[374]</span></a> Burton,
+          ii. 314.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_375_375" id="Footnote_375_375"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_375_375"><span class="label">[375]</span></a> For an
+          instructive and, as it appears to me, a thoroughly trustworthy account
+          of the temper in which the Confessions were written, see the 4th of
+          the <i>R&#234;veries</i>.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_376_376" id="Footnote_376_376"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_376_376"><span class="label">[376]</span></a> Letter
+          to the Duke of Grafton, Feb. 27, 1767. <i>Corr.</i>, v. 98: also 118.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_377_377" id="Footnote_377_377"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_377_377"><span class="label">[377]</span></a> <i>Ib.</i>
+          v. 133; also to General Conway (March 26), p. 137, etc.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_378_378" id="Footnote_378_378"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_378_378"><span class="label">[378]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>,
+          v. 37.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_379_379" id="Footnote_379_379"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_379_379"><span class="label">[379]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>,
+          v. 88.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_380_380" id="Footnote_380_380"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_380_380"><span class="label">[380]</span></a> See the
+          letters to Du Peyrou, of the 2d and 4th of April 1767. <i>Corr.</i>,
+          v. 140-147.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_381_381" id="Footnote_381_381"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_381_381"><span class="label">[381]</span></a>
+          Davenport to Hume; Burton, 367-371.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_382_382" id="Footnote_382_382"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_382_382"><span class="label">[382]</span></a> J.J.R.
+          to Davenport, Dec. 22, 1766, and April 30, 1767. <i>Corr.</i>, v. 66,
+          152.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_383_383" id="Footnote_383_383"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_383_383"><span class="label">[383]</span></a> Burton,
+          369, 375.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_384_384" id="Footnote_384_384"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_384_384"><span class="label">[384]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>,
+          v. 153.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+    </div>
+    <hr style="width: 65%;" />
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_309" id="Page_309">[ii.309]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      <a name="CHAPTER_VII" id="CHAPTER_VII"></a>CHAPTER VII.
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      THE END.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <span class="smcap">Before</span> leaving England, Rousseau had received
+      more than one long and rambling letter from a man who was as unlike the
+      rest of mankind as he was unlike them himself. This was the Marquis of
+      Mirabeau (1715-89), the violent, tyrannical, pedantic, humoristic sire of
+      a more famous son. Perhaps we might say that Mirabeau and Rousseau were
+      the two most singular originals then known to men, and Mirabeau's
+      originality was in some respects the more salient of the two. There is
+      less of the conventional tone of the eighteenth century Frenchman in him
+      than in any other conspicuous man of the time, though like many other
+      headstrong and despotic souls he picked up the current notions of
+      philanthropy and human brotherhood. He really was by very force of
+      temperament that rebel against the narrowness, trimness, and moral
+      formalism of the time which Rousseau only claimed and attempted to be,
+      with the secondary degree of success that follows vehemence without native
+      strength. Mirabeau was a sort of Swift, who had strangely taken up the
+      trade of friendship for<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_310"
+      id="Page_310">[ii.310]</a></span> man and adopted the phrases of
+      perfectibility; while Rousseau on the other hand was meant for a F&#233;nelon,
+      save that he became possessed of unclean devils.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mirabeau, like Jean Jacques himself, was so impressed by the marked tenor
+      of contemporary feeling, its prudential didactics, its formulistic
+      sociality, that his native insurgency only found vent in private life,
+      while in public he played pedagogue to the human race. Friend of Quesnai
+      and orthodox economist as he was, he delighted in Rousseau's books: &quot;I
+      know no morality that goes deeper than yours; it strikes like a
+      thunderbolt, and advances with the steady assurance of truth, for you are
+      always true, according to your notions for the moment.&quot; He wrote to
+      tell him so, but he told him at the same time at great length, and with a
+      caustic humour and incoherency less academic than Rabelaisian, that he had
+      behaved absurdly in his quarrel with Hume. There is nothing more quaint
+      than the appearance of a few of the sacramental phrases of the sect of the
+      economists, floating in the midst of a copious stream of egoistic
+      whimsicalities. He concludes with a diverting enumeration of all his
+      country seats and demesnes, with their respective advantages and
+      disadvantages, and prays Rousseau to take up his residence in whichever of
+      them may please him best.<a name="FNanchor_385_385" id="FNanchor_385_385"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_385_385" class="fnanchor">[385]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Immediately on landing at Calais Rousseau informed Mirabeau, and Mirabeau
+      lost no time in conveying him stealthily, for the warrant of the parlia<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_311" id="Page_311">[ii.311]</a></span>ment
+      of Paris was still in force, to a house at Fleury. But the Friend of Men,
+      to use his own account of himself, &quot;bore letters as a plum-tree bears
+      plums,&quot; and wrote to his guest with strange humoristic volubility and
+      droll imperturbable temper, as one who knew his Jean Jacques. He exhorts
+      him in many sheets to harden himself against excessive sensibility, to be
+      less pusillanimous, to take society more lightly, as his own light
+      estimate of its worth should lead him to do. &quot;No doubt its outside is
+      a shifting surface-picture, nay even ridiculous, if you will; but if the
+      irregular and ceaseless flight of butterflies wearies you in your walk, it
+      is your own fault for looking continuously at what was only made to adorn
+      and vary the scene. But how many social virtues, how much gentleness and
+      considerateness, how many benevolent actions, remain at the bottom of it
+      all.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_386_386" id="FNanchor_386_386"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_386_386" class="fnanchor">[386]</a> Enormous manifestoes
+      of the doctrine of perfectibility were not in the least degree either
+      soothing or interesting to Rousseau, and the thrusts of shrewd candour at
+      his expense might touch his fancy on a single occasion, but not oftener.
+      Two humorists are seldom successful in amusing one another. Besides,
+      Mirabeau insisted that Jean Jacques should read this or that of his books.
+      Rousseau answered that he would try, but warned him of the folly of it.
+      &quot;I do not engage always to follow what you say, because it has always
+      been painful to me to think, and fatiguing to follow the thoughts of other
+      people, and at present I cannot <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_312"
+      id="Page_312">[ii.312]</a></span>do so at all.&quot;<a
+      name="FNanchor_387_387" id="FNanchor_387_387"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_387_387" class="fnanchor">[387]</a> Though they continued
+      to be good friends, Rousseau only remained three or four weeks at Fleury.
+      His old acquaintance at Montmorency, the Prince of Conti, partly perhaps
+      from contrition at the rather unchivalrous fashion in which his great
+      friends had hustled the philosopher away at the time of the decree of the
+      parliament of Paris, offered him refuge at one of his country seats at
+      Trye near Gisors. Here he installed Rousseau under the name of Renou,
+      either to silence the indiscreet curiosity of neighbours, or to gratify a
+      whim of Rousseau himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rousseau remained for a year (June 1767-June 1768), composing the second
+      part of the Confessions, in a condition of extreme mental confusion. Dusky
+      phantoms walked with him once more. He knew the gardener, the servants,
+      the neighbours, all to be in the pay of Hume, and that he was watched day
+      and night with a view to his destruction.<a name="FNanchor_388_388"
+      id="FNanchor_388_388"></a><a href="#Footnote_388_388" class="fnanchor">[388]</a>
+      He entirely gave up either reading or writing, save a very small number of
+      letters, and he declared that to take up the pen even for these was like
+      lifting a load of iron. The only interest he had was botany, and for this
+      his passion became daily more intense. He appears to have been as
+      contented as a child, so long as he could employ himself in long
+      expeditions in search of new plants, in arranging a herbarium, in watching
+      the growth of the germ of some rare seed which needed careful tending. But
+      the story had once more the same conclusion. He fled from Trye, as he had
+      fled <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_313" id="Page_313">[ii.313]</a></span>from
+      Wootton. He meant apparently to go to Chamb&#233;ri, drawn by the deep
+      magnetic force of old memories that seemed long extinct. But at Grenoble
+      on his way thither he encountered a substantial grievance. A man alleged
+      that he had lent Rousseau a few francs seven years previously. He was
+      undoubtedly mistaken, and was fully convicted of his mistake by proper
+      authorities, but Rousseau's correspondents suffered none the less for
+      that. We all know when monomania seizes a man, how adroitly and how
+      eagerly it colours every incident. The mistaken claim was proof
+      demonstrative of that frightful and tenebrous conspiracy, which they might
+      have thought a delusion hitherto, but which, alas, this showed to be only
+      too tragically real; and so on, through many pages of droning
+      wretchedness.<a name="FNanchor_389_389" id="FNanchor_389_389"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_389_389" class="fnanchor">[389]</a> Then we find him at
+      Bourgoin, where he spent some months in shabby taverns, and then many
+      months more at Monquin on adjoining uplands.<a name="FNanchor_390_390"
+      id="FNanchor_390_390"></a><a href="#Footnote_390_390" class="fnanchor">[390]</a>
+      The estrangement from Theresa, of which enough has been said already,<a
+      name="FNanchor_391_391" id="FNanchor_391_391"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_391_391" class="fnanchor">[391]</a> was added to his other
+      torments. He resolved, as so many of the self-tortured have done since, to
+      go in search of happiness to the western lands beyond the Atlantic, where
+      the elixir of bliss is thought by the wearied among us to be inexhaustible
+      and assured. Almost in the same page he turns his face eastwards, <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_314" id="Page_314">[ii.314]</a></span>and
+      dreams of ending his days peacefully among the islands of the Grecian
+      archipelago. Next he gravely, not only designed, but actually took
+      measures, to return to Wootton. All was no more than the momentary
+      incoherent purpose of a sick man's dream, the weary distraction of one who
+      had deliberately devoted himself to isolation from his fellows, without
+      first sitting down carefully to count the cost, or to measure the inner
+      resources which he possessed to meet the deadly strain that isolation puts
+      on every one of a man's mental fibres. Geographical loneliness is to some
+      a condition of their fullest strength, but most of the few who dare to
+      make a moral solitude for themselves, find that they have assuredly not
+      made peace. Such solitude, as South said of the study of the Apocalypse,
+      either finds a man mad, or leaves him so. Not all can play the stoic who
+      will, and it is still more certain that one who like Rousseau has lain
+      down with the doctrine that in all things imaginable it is impossible for
+      him to do at all what he cannot do with pleasure, will end in a condition
+      of profound and hopeless impotence in respect to pleasure itself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In July 1770, he made his way to Paris, and here he remained eight years
+      longer, not without the introduction of a certain degree of order into his
+      outer life, though the clouds of vague suspicion and distrust, half
+      bitter, half mournful, hung heavily as ever upon his mind. The Dialogues,
+      which he wrote at this period (1775-76) to vindicate his memory from the
+      defamation that was to be launched in a dark torrent<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_315" id="Page_315">[ii.315]</a></span> upon the world at the
+      moment of his death, could not possibly have been written by a man in his
+      right mind. Yet the best of the Musings, which were written still nearer
+      the end, are masterpieces in the style of contemplative prose. The third,
+      the fifth, the seventh, especially abound in that even, full, mellow
+      gravity of tone which is so rare in literature, because the deep
+      absorption of spirit which is its source is so rare in life. They reveal
+      Rousseau to us with a truth beyond that attained in any of his other
+      pieces&#8212;a mournful sombre figure, looming shadowily in the dark glow
+      of sundown among sad and desolate places. There is nothing like them in
+      the French tongue, which is the speech of the clear, the cheerful, or the
+      august among men; nothing like this sonorous plainsong, the strangely
+      melodious expression in the music of prose of a darkened spirit which yet
+      had imaginative visions of beatitude.
+    </p>
+    <hr style="width: 45%;" />
+    <p>
+      It is interesting to look on one or two pictures of the last waste and
+      obscure years of the man, whose words were at this time silently
+      fermenting for good and for evil in many spirits&#8212;a Schiller, a
+      Herder, a Jeanne Phlipon, a Robespierre, a Gabriel Mirabeau, and many
+      hundreds of those whose destiny was not to lead, but ingenuously to
+      follow. Rousseau seems to have repulsed nearly all his ancient friends,
+      and to have settled down with dogged resolve to his old trade of copying
+      music. In summer he rose at five, copied music until half-past seven;
+      munched his<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_316" id="Page_316">[ii.316]</a></span>
+      breakfast, arranging on paper during the process such plants as he had
+      gathered the previous afternoon; then he returned to his work, dined at
+      half-past twelve, and went forth to take coffee at some public place. He
+      would not return from his walk until nightfall, and he retired at
+      half-past ten. The pavements of Paris were hateful to him because they
+      tore his feet, and, said he, with deeply significant antithesis, &quot;I
+      am not afraid of death, but I dread pain.&quot; He always found his way as
+      fast as possible to one of the suburbs, and one of his greatest delights
+      was to watch Mont Val&#233;rien in the sunset. &quot;Atheists,&quot; he
+      said calumniously, &quot;do not love the country; they like the environs
+      of Paris, where you have all the pleasures of the city, good cheer, books,
+      pretty women; but if you take these things away, then they die of
+      weariness.&quot; The note of every bird held him attentive, and filled his
+      mind with delicious images. A graceful story is told of two swallows who
+      made a nest in Rousseau's sleeping-room, and hatched the eggs there.
+      &quot;I was no more than a doorkeeper for them,&quot; he said, &quot;for I
+      kept opening the window for them every moment. They used to fly with a
+      great stir round my head, until I had fulfilled the duties of the tacit
+      convention between these swallows and me.&quot;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In January 1771, Bernardin de St. Pierre, author of the immortal <i>Paul
+      and Virginia</i> (1788), finding himself at the Cape of Good Hope, wrote
+      to a friend in France just previously to his return to Europe, counting
+      among other delights that of seeing two<span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_317" id="Page_317">[ii.317]</a></span> summers in one year.<a
+      name="FNanchor_392_392" id="FNanchor_392_392"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_392_392" class="fnanchor">[392]</a> Rousseau happened to
+      see the letter, and expressed a desire to make the acquaintance of a man
+      who in returning home should think of that as one of his chief pleasures.
+      To this we owe the following pictures of an interior from St. Pierre's
+      hand:&#8212;
+    </p>
+    <div class="blockquot">
+      <p>
+        In the month of June in 1772, a friend having offered to take me to see
+        Jean Jacques Rousseau, he brought me to a house in the Rue Pl&#226;tri&#232;re,
+        nearly opposite to the H&#244;tel de la Poste. We mounted to the fourth
+        story. We knocked, and Madame Rousseau opened the door. &quot;Come in,
+        gentlemen,&quot; she said, &quot;you will find my husband.&quot; We
+        passed through a very small antechamber, where the household utensils
+        were neatly arranged, and from that into a room where Jean Jacques was
+        seated in an overcoat and a white cap, busy copying music. He rose with
+        a smiling face, offered us chairs, and resumed his work, at the same
+        time taking a part in conversation. He was thin and of middle height.
+        One shoulder struck me as rather higher than the other ... otherwise he
+        was very well proportioned. He had a brown complexion, some colour on
+        his cheek-bones, a good mouth, a well-made nose, a rounded and lofty
+        brow, and eyes full of fire. The oblique lines falling from the nostrils
+        to the extremity of the lips, and marking a physiognomy, in his case
+        expressed great sensibility and something even painful. One observed in
+        his face three or four of the characteristics of melancholy&#8212;the
+        deep receding eyes and the elevation of the eyebrows; you saw profound
+        sadness in the wrinkles of the brow; a keen and even caustic gaiety in a
+        thousand little creases at the corners of the eyes, of <span
+        class="pagenum"><a name="Page_318" id="Page_318">[ii.318]</a></span>which
+        the orbits entirely disappeared when he laughed.... Near him was a
+        spinette on which from time to time he tried an air. Two little beds of
+        blue and white striped calico, a table, and a few chairs, made the stock
+        of his furniture. On the walls hung a plan of the forest and park of
+        Montmorency, where he had once lived, and an engraving of the King of
+        England, his old benefactor. His wife was sitting mending linen; a
+        canary sang in a cage hung from the ceiling; sparrows came for crumbs on
+        to the sills of the windows, which on the side of the street were open;
+        while in the window of the antechamber we noticed boxes and pots filled
+        with such plants as it pleases nature to sow. There was in the whole
+        effect of his little establishment an air of cleanness, peace, and
+        simplicity, which was delightful.
+      </p>
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      A few days after, Rousseau returned the visit. &quot;He wore a round wig,
+      well powdered and curled, carrying a hat under his arm, and in a full suit
+      of nankeen. His whole exterior was modest, but extremely neat.&quot; He
+      expressed his passion for good coffee, saying that this and ice were the
+      only two luxuries for which he cared. St. Pierre happened to have brought
+      some from the Isle of Bourbon, so on the following day he rashly sent
+      Rousseau a small packet, which at first produced a polite letter of
+      thanks; but the day after the letter of thanks came one of harsh protest
+      against the ignominy of receiving presents which could not be returned,
+      and bidding the unfortunate donor to choose between taking his coffee back
+      or never seeing his new friend again. A fair bargain was ultimately
+      arranged, St. Pierre receiving in exchange for his coffee some curious
+      root<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_319" id="Page_319">[ii.319]</a></span>
+      or other, and a book on ichthyology. Immediately afterwards he went to
+      dine with his sage. He arrived at eleven in the forenoon, and they
+      conversed until half-past twelve.
+    </p>
+    <div class="blockquot">
+      <p>
+        Then his wife laid the cloth. He took a bottle of wine, and as he put it
+        on the table, asked whether we should have enough, or if I was fond of
+        drinking. &quot;How many are there of us,&quot; said I. &quot;Three,&quot;
+        he said; &quot;you, my wife, and myself.&quot; &quot;Well,&quot; I went
+        on, &quot;when I drink wine and am alone, I drink a good half-bottle,
+        and I drink a trifle more when I am with friends.&quot; &quot;In that
+        case,&quot; he answered, &quot;we shall not have enough; I must go down
+        into the cellar.&quot; He brought up a second bottle. His wife served
+        two dishes, one of small tarts, and another which was covered. He said,
+        showing me the first, &quot;That is your dish and the other is mine.&quot;
+        &quot;I don't eat much pastry,&quot; I said, &quot;but I hope to be
+        allowed to taste what you have got.&quot; &quot;Oh, they are both
+        common,&quot; he replied; &quot;but most people don't care for this.
+        'Tis a Swiss dish; a compound of lard, mutton, vegetables, and
+        chestnuts.&quot; It was excellent. After these two dishes, we had slices
+        of beef in salad; then biscuits and cheese; after which his wife served
+        the coffee.
+      </p>
+      <hr style="width: 45%;" />
+      <p>
+        One morning when I was at his house, I saw various domestics either
+        coming for rolls of music, or bringing them to him to copy. He received
+        them standing and uncovered. He said to some, &quot;The price is so
+        much,&quot; and received the money; to others, &quot;How soon must I
+        return my copy?&quot; &quot;My mistress would like to have it back in a
+        fortnight.&quot; &quot;Oh, that's out of the question: I have work, I
+        can't do it in less than three weeks.&quot; I inquired why he did not
+        take his talents to better market. &quot;Ah,&quot; he answered, &quot;there
+        are two Rousseaus in the world; one rich, or who might have been if he
+        had<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_320" id="Page_320">[ii.320]</a></span>
+        chosen; a man capricious, singular, fantastic; this is the Rousseau of
+        the public; the other is obliged to work for his living, the Rousseau
+        whom you see.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_393_393" id="FNanchor_393_393"></a><a
+        href="#Footnote_393_393" class="fnanchor">[393]</a>
+      </p>
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      They often took long rambles together, and all proceeded most
+      harmoniously, unless St. Pierre offered to pay for such refreshment as
+      they might take, when a furious explosion was sure to follow. Here is one
+      more picture, without explosion.
+    </p>
+    <div class="blockquot">
+      <p style="text-align: center">
+        <i>An Easter Monday Excursion to Mont Val&#233;rien.</i>
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        We made an appointment at a caf&#233; in the Champs Elys&#233;es. In the
+        morning we took some chocolate. The wind was westerly, and the air
+        fresh. The sun was surrounded by white clouds, spread in masses over an
+        azure sky. Reaching the Bois de Boulogne by eight o'clock, Jean Jacques
+        set to work botanising. As he collected his little harvest, we kept
+        walking along. We had gone through part of the wood, when in the midst
+        of the solitude we perceived two young girls, one of whom was arranging
+        the other's hair.&#8212;[Reminded them of some verses of Virgil.]....
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Arrived on the edge of the river, we crossed the ferry with a number of
+        people whom devotion was taking to Mont Val&#233;rien. We climbed an
+        extremely stiff slope, and were hardly on the top before hunger overtook
+        us and we began to think of dining. Rousseau then led the way towards a
+        hermitage, where he knew we could make sure of hospitality. The brother
+        who opened to us, conducted us to the chapel, where they were reciting
+        the litanies of providence, which are extremely beautiful.... When we
+        had prayed, Jean Jacques said to me with genuine feeling: &quot;Now I
+        feel what is said in the gospel, 'Where several of you are gathered
+        together in my name, there <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_321"
+        id="Page_321">[ii.321]</a></span>will I be in the midst of them.' There
+        is a sentiment of peace and comfort here that penetrates the soul.&quot;
+        I replied, &quot;If F&#233;nelon were alive, you would be a Catholic.&quot;
+        &quot;Ah,&quot; said he, the tears in his eyes, &quot;if F&#233;nelon
+        were alive, I would seek to be his lackey.&quot;
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Presently we were introduced into the refectory; we seated ourselves
+        during the reading. The subject was the injustice of the complainings of
+        man: God has brought him from nothing, he oweth him nothing. After the
+        reading, Rousseau said to me in a voice of deep emotion: &quot;Ah, how
+        happy is the man who can believe....&quot; We walked about for some time
+        in the cloister and the gardens. They command an immense prospect. Paris
+        in the distance reared her towers all covered with light, and made a
+        crown to the far-spreading landscape. The brightness of the view
+        contrasted with the great leaden clouds that rolled after one another
+        from the west, and seemed to fill the valley.... In the afternoon rain
+        came on, as we approached the Porte Maillot. We took shelter along with
+        a crowd of other holiday folk under some chestnut-trees whose leaves
+        were coming out. One of the waiters of a tavern perceiving Jean Jacques,
+        rushed to him full of joy, exclaiming, &quot;What, is it you, <i>mon
+        bonhomme</i>? Why, it is a whole age since we have seen you.&quot;
+        Rousseau replied cheerfully, &quot;'Tis because my wife has been ill,
+        and I myself have been out of sorts.&quot; &quot;<i>Mon pauvre bonhomme</i>,&quot;
+        replied the lad, &quot;you must not stop here; come in, come in, and I
+        will find room for you.&quot; He hurried us along to a room upstairs,
+        where in spite of the crowd he procured for us chairs and a table, and
+        bread and wine. I said to Jean Jacques, &quot;He seems very familiar
+        with you.&quot; He answered, &quot;Yes, we have known one another some
+        years. We used to come here in fine weather, my wife and I, to eat a
+        cutlet of an evening.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_394_394"
+        id="FNanchor_394_394"></a><a href="#Footnote_394_394" class="fnanchor">[394]</a>
+      </p>
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_322" id="Page_322">[ii.322]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Things did not continue to go thus smoothly. One day St. Pierre went to
+      see him, and was received without a word, and with stiff and gloomy mien.
+      He tried to talk, but only got monosyllables; he took up a book, and this
+      drew a sarcasm which sent him forth from the room. For more than two
+      months they did not meet. At length they had an accidental encounter at a
+      street corner. Rousseau accosted St. Pierre, and with a gradually warming
+      sensibility proceeded thus: &quot;There are days when I want to be alone
+      and crave privacy. I come back from my solitary expeditions so calm and
+      contented. There I have not been wanting to anybody, nor has anybody been
+      wanting to me,&quot; and so on.<a name="FNanchor_395_395"
+      id="FNanchor_395_395"></a><a href="#Footnote_395_395" class="fnanchor">[395]</a>
+      He expressed this humour more pointedly on some other occasion, when he
+      said that there were times in which he fled from the eyes of men as from
+      Parthian arrows. As one said who knew from experience, the fate of his
+      most intimate friend depended on a word or a gesture.<a
+      name="FNanchor_396_396" id="FNanchor_396_396"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_396_396" class="fnanchor">[396]</a> Another of them
+      declared that he knew Rousseau's style of discarding a friend by letter so
+      thoroughly, that he felt confident he could supply Rousseau's place in
+      case of illness or absence.<a name="FNanchor_397_397" id="FNanchor_397_397"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_397_397" class="fnanchor">[397]</a> In much of this we
+      suspect that the quarrel was perfectly justified. Sociality meant a futile
+      display before unworthy and condescending curiosity. &quot;It is not I
+      whom they care <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_323" id="Page_323">[ii.323]</a></span>for,&quot;
+      he very truly said, &quot;but public opinion and talk about me, without a
+      thought of what real worth I may have.&quot; Hence his steadfast refusal
+      to go out to dine or sup. The mere impertinence of the desire to see him
+      was illustrated by some coxcombs who insisted with a famous actress of his
+      acquaintance, that she should invite the strange philosopher to meet them.
+      She was aware that no known force would persuade Rousseau to come, so she
+      dressed up her tailor as philosopher, bade him keep a silent tongue, and
+      vanish suddenly without a word of farewell. The tailor was long
+      philosophically silent, and by the time that wine had loosened his tongue,
+      the rest of the company were too far gone to perceive that the supposed
+      Rousseau was chattering vulgar nonsense.<a name="FNanchor_398_398"
+      id="FNanchor_398_398"></a><a href="#Footnote_398_398" class="fnanchor">[398]</a>
+      We can believe that with admirers of this stamp Rousseau was well pleased
+      to let tailors or others stand in his place. There were some, however, of
+      a different sort, who flitted across his sight and then either vanished of
+      their own accord, or were silently dismissed, from Madame de Genlis up to
+      Gr&#233;try and Gluck. With Gluck he seems to have quarrelled for setting
+      his music to French words, when he must have known that Italian was the
+      only tongue fit for music.<a name="FNanchor_399_399" id="FNanchor_399_399"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_399_399" class="fnanchor">[399]</a> Yet it was remarked
+      that no one ever heard him speak ill of others. His enemies, the figures
+      of his delusion, were vaguely denounced in many dronings, but they
+      remained in dark shadow and were unnamed. When Voltaire paid his famous
+      last visit <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_324" id="Page_324">[ii.324]</a></span>to
+      the capital (1778), some one thought of paying court to Rousseau by making
+      a mock of the triumphal reception of the old warrior, but Rousseau harshly
+      checked the detractor. It is true that in 1770-71 he gave to some few of
+      his acquaintances one or more readings of the Confessions, although they
+      contained much painful matter for many people still living, among the rest
+      for Madame d'Epinay. She wrote justifiably enough to the lieutenant of
+      police, praying that all such readings might be prohibited, and it is
+      believed that they were so prohibited.<a name="FNanchor_400_400"
+      id="FNanchor_400_400"></a><a href="#Footnote_400_400" class="fnanchor">[400]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In 1769, when Polish anarchy was at its height, as if to show at once how
+      profound the anarchy was, and how profound the faith among many minds in
+      the power of the new French theories, an application was made to Mably to
+      draw up a scheme for the renovation of distracted Poland. Mably's notions
+      won little esteem from the persons who had sought for them, and in 1771 a
+      similar application was made to Rousseau in his Parisian garret. He
+      replied in the Considerations on the Government of Poland, which are
+      written with a good deal of vigour of expression, but contain nothing that
+      needs further discussion. He hinted to the Poles with some shrewd<span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_325" id="Page_325">[ii.325]</a></span>ness
+      that a curtailment of their territory by their neighbours was not far off,<a
+      name="FNanchor_401_401" id="FNanchor_401_401"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_401_401" class="fnanchor">[401]</a> and the prediction was
+      rapidly fulfilled by the first partition of Poland in the following year.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was asked one day of what nation he had the highest opinion. He
+      answered, the Spanish. The Spanish nation, he said, has a character; if it
+      is not rich, it still preserves all its pride and self-respect in the
+      midst of its poverty; and it is animated by a single spirit, for it has
+      not been scourged by the conflicting opinions of philosophy.<a
+      name="FNanchor_402_402" id="FNanchor_402_402"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_402_402" class="fnanchor">[402]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was extremely poor for these last eight years of his life. He seems to
+      have drawn the pension which George III. had settled on him, for not more
+      than one year. We do not know why he refused to receive it afterwards. A
+      well-meaning friend, when the arrears amounted to between six and seven
+      thousand francs, applied for it on his behalf, and a draft for the money
+      was sent. Rousseau gave the offender a vigorous rebuke for meddling in
+      affairs that did not concern him, and the draft was destroyed. Other
+      attempts to induce him to draw this money failed equally.<a
+      name="FNanchor_403_403" id="FNanchor_403_403"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_403_403" class="fnanchor">[403]</a> Yet he had only about
+      fifty pounds <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_326" id="Page_326">[ii.326]</a></span>a
+      year to live on, together with the modest amount which he earned by
+      copying music.<a name="FNanchor_404_404" id="FNanchor_404_404"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_404_404" class="fnanchor">[404]</a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The sting of indigence began to make itself felt towards 1777. His health
+      became worse and he could not work. Theresa was waxing old, and could no
+      longer attend to the small cares of the household. More than one person
+      offered them shelter and provision, and the old distractions as to a home
+      in which to end his days began once again. At length M. Girardin prevailed
+      upon him to come and live at Ermenonville, one of his estates some twenty
+      miles from Paris. A dense cloud of obscure misery hangs over the last
+      months of this forlorn existence.<a name="FNanchor_405_405"
+      id="FNanchor_405_405"></a><a href="#Footnote_405_405" class="fnanchor">[405]</a>
+      No tragedy had ever a fifth act so squalid. Theresa's character seems to
+      have developed into something truly bestial. Rousseau's terrors of the
+      designs of his enemies returned with great violence. He thought he was
+      imprisoned, and he knew that he had no means of escape. One day (July 2,
+      1778), suddenly and without a single warning symptom, all drew to an end;
+      the sensations which had been the ruling part of his life were affected by
+      pleasure and pain no more, the dusky phantoms all vanished into space. The
+      surgeons reported that the cause of his death was apoplexy, but a
+      suspicion has haunted the world ever since, that he destroyed himself by a
+      pistol-shot. We cannot tell. There is no inherent improbability <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_327" id="Page_327">[ii.327]</a></span>in the
+      fact of his having committed suicide. In the New Helo&#239;sa he had
+      thrown the conditions which justified self-destruction into a distinct
+      formula. Fifteen years before, he declared that his own case fell within
+      the conditions which he had prescribed, and that he was meditating action.<a
+      name="FNanchor_406_406" id="FNanchor_406_406"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_406_406" class="fnanchor">[406]</a> Only seven years
+      before, he had implied that a man had the right to deliver himself of the
+      burden of his own life, if its miseries were intolerable and irremediable.<a
+      name="FNanchor_407_407" id="FNanchor_407_407"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_407_407" class="fnanchor">[407]</a> This, however, counts
+      for nothing in the absence of some kind of positive evidence, and of that
+      there is just enough to leave the manner of his end a little doubtful.<a
+      name="FNanchor_408_408" id="FNanchor_408_408"></a><a
+      href="#Footnote_408_408" class="fnanchor">[408]</a> Once more, we cannot
+      tell.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      By the serene moonrise of a summer night, his <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_328" id="Page_328">[ii.328]</a></span>body was put under the
+      ground on an island in the midst of a small lake, where poplars throw
+      shadows over the still water, silently figuring the destiny of mortals.
+      Here it remained for sixteen years. Then amid the roar of cannon, the
+      crash of trumpet and drum, and the wild acclamations of a populace gone
+      mad in exultation, terror, fury, it was ordered that the poor dust should
+      be transported to the national temple of great men.
+    </p>
+    <div class="footnotes">
+      <h3>
+        FOOTNOTES:
+      </h3>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_385_385" id="Footnote_385_385"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_385_385"><span class="label">[385]</span></a>
+          Streckeisen, ii. 315-328.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_386_386" id="Footnote_386_386"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_386_386"><span class="label">[386]</span></a>
+          Streckeisen, ii. 337.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_387_387" id="Footnote_387_387"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_387_387"><span class="label">[387]</span></a> June 19,
+          1767. <i>Corr.</i>, v. 172.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_388_388" id="Footnote_388_388"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_388_388"><span class="label">[388]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>,
+          v. 267, 375.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_389_389" id="Footnote_389_389"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_389_389"><span class="label">[389]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>,
+          v. 330-381, 408, etc.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_390_390" id="Footnote_390_390"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_390_390"><span class="label">[390]</span></a>
+          Bourgoin, Aug. 1768, to March, 1769. Monquin, to July 1770.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_391_391" id="Footnote_391_391"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_391_391"><span class="label">[391]</span></a> See
+          above, <a href="#CHAPTER_IV.">vol. i. chap. iv</a>.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_392_392" id="Footnote_392_392"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_392_392"><span class="label">[392]</span></a> The life
+          of Bernardin de St. Pierre (1737-1814) was nearly as irregular as that
+          of his friend and master. But his character was essentially crafty and
+          selfish, like that of many other sentimentalists of the first order.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_393_393" id="Footnote_393_393"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_393_393"><span class="label">[393]</span></a> <i>Oeuv.</i>,
+          xii. 69, 73.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_394_394" id="Footnote_394_394"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_394_394"><span class="label">[394]</span></a> <i>Oeuv.</i>,
+          xii. 104, etc.; and also the <i>Pr&#233;ambule de l'Arcadie</i>, <i>Oeuv.</i>,
+          vii. 64, 65.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_395_395" id="Footnote_395_395"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_395_395"><span class="label">[395]</span></a> St.
+          Pierre, xii. 81-83.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_396_396" id="Footnote_396_396"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_396_396"><span class="label">[396]</span></a> Dusaulx,
+          p. 81. For his quarrel with Rousseau, see pp. 130, etc.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_397_397" id="Footnote_397_397"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_397_397"><span class="label">[397]</span></a> Rulhi&#232;res
+          in Dusaulx, p. 179. For a strange interview between Rulhi&#232;res and
+          Rousseau, see pp. 185-186.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_398_398" id="Footnote_398_398"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_398_398"><span class="label">[398]</span></a>
+          Musset-Pathay, i. 181.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_399_399" id="Footnote_399_399"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_399_399"><span class="label">[399]</span></a> <i>Ib.</i>
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_400_400" id="Footnote_400_400"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_400_400"><span class="label">[400]</span></a>
+          Musset-Pathay, i. 209. Rousseau gave a copy of the Confessions to
+          Moultou, but forbade the publication before the year 1800.
+          Notwithstanding this, printers procured copies surreptitiously,
+          perhaps through Theresa, ever in need of money; the first part was
+          published four years, and the second part with many suppressions
+          eleven years, after his death, in 1782 and 1789 respectively. See
+          Musset-Pathay, ii. 464.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_401_401" id="Footnote_401_401"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_401_401"><span class="label">[401]</span></a> Ch. v.
+          Such a curtailment, he says, &quot;would no doubt be a great evil for
+          the parts dismembered, but it would be a great advantage for the body
+          of the nation.&quot; He urged federation as the condition of any solid
+          improvement in their affairs.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_402_402" id="Footnote_402_402"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_402_402"><span class="label">[402]</span></a>
+          Bernardin de St. Pierre, xii. 37. Comte had a similar admiration for
+          Spain and for the same reason.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_403_403" id="Footnote_403_403"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_403_403"><span class="label">[403]</span></a>
+          Corancez, quoted in Musset-Pathay, i. 239. Also <i>Corr.</i>, vi. 295.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_404_404" id="Footnote_404_404"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_404_404"><span class="label">[404]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>,
+          vi. 303.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_405_405" id="Footnote_405_405"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_405_405"><span class="label">[405]</span></a>
+          Robespierre, then a youth, is said to have invited him here. See
+          Hamel's <i>Robespierre</i>, i. 22.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_406_406" id="Footnote_406_406"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_406_406"><span class="label">[406]</span></a> See
+          above, <a href="#Page_i.16">vol. i. pp. 16, 17</a>.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_407_407" id="Footnote_407_407"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_407_407"><span class="label">[407]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>,
+          vi. 264.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+      <div class="footnote">
+        <p>
+          <a name="Footnote_408_408" id="Footnote_408_408"></a><a
+          href="#FNanchor_408_408"><span class="label">[408]</span></a> The case
+          stands thus:&#8212;(1) There was the certificate of five doctors,
+          attesting that Rousseau had died of apoplexy. (2) The assertion of M.
+          Girardin, in whose house he died, that there was no hole in his head,
+          nor poison in the stomach or viscera, nor other sign of
+          self-destruction. (3) The assertion of Theresa to the same effect. On
+          the other hand, we have the assertion of Corancez, that on his journey
+          to Ermenonville on the day of Rousseau's burial a horse-master on the
+          road had said, &quot;Who would have supposed that M. Rousseau would
+          have destroyed himself!&quot;&#8212;and a variety of inferences from
+          the wording of the certificate, and of Theresa's letter. Musset-Pathay
+          believes in the suicide, and argued very ingeniously against M.
+          Girardin. But his arguments do not go far beyond verbal ingenuity,
+          showing that suicide was possible, and was consistent with the
+          language of the documents, rather than adducing positive testimony.
+          See vol. i. of his <i>History</i>, pp. 268, etc. The controversy was
+          resumed as late as 1861, between the <i>Figaro</i> and the <i>Monde
+          Illustr&#233;</i>. See also M. Jal's <i>Dict. Crit. de Biog. et
+          d'Hist.</i>, p. 1091.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+    </div>
+    <hr style="width: 65%;" />
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_329" id="Page_329">[ii.329]</a></span>
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      <a name="INDEX" id="INDEX"></a>INDEX.
+    </h2>
+
+    <p>
+      <span class="smcap">Academies</span> (French) local, <a
+      href="#Page_i.132">i. 132</a>.<br /> <br /> Academy, of
+      Dijon, Rousseau writes essays for, <a href="#Page_i.133">i.
+      133</a>;<br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">French, prize essay against
+      Rousseau's Discourse, <a href="#Page_i.150">i. 150</a>,
+      <i>n.</i></span><br /> <br /> Actors, how regarded in France in Rousseau's
+      time, <a href="#Page_i.322">i. 322</a>.<br /> <br />
+      Althusen, teaches doctrine of sovereignty of the people, <a
+      href="#Page_147">ii. 147</a>.<br /> <br /> America (U.S.), effects in, of
+      the doctrine of the equality of men, <a
+      href="#Page_i.182">i. 182</a>.<br /> <br /> American
+      colonists indebted in eighteenth century to Rousseau's writings, <a
+      href="#Page_i.3">i. 3</a>.<br /> <br /> Anchorite,
+      distinction between the old and the new, <a
+      href="#Page_i.234">i. 234</a>.<br /> <br /> Annecy, <a
+      href="#Page_i.34">i. 34</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.50">50</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's room at, <a
+      href="#Page_i.54">i. 54</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's teachers at, <a
+      href="#Page_i.56">i. 56</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">seminary at, <a
+      href="#Page_i.82">i. 82</a>.</span><br /> <br /> Aquinas,
+      protest against juristical doctrine of law being the pleasure of the
+      prince, <a href="#Page_144">ii. 144</a>, <a href="#Page_145">145</a>.<br />
+      <br /> Aristotle on Origin of Society, <a
+      href="#Page_i.174">i. 174</a>.<br /> <br /> Atheism,
+      Rousseau's protest against, <a href="#Page_i.208">i. 208</a>;<br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">St. Lambert on, <a
+      href="#Page_i.209">i. 209</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Robespierre's protest against, <a
+      href="#Page_178">ii. 178</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Chaumette
+      put to death for endeavouring to base the government of France on, <a
+      href="#Page_180">ii. 180</a>.</span><br /> <br /> Augustine (of Hippo), <a
+      href="#Page_272">ii. 272</a>, <a href="#Page_303">303</a>.<br /> <br />
+      Austin, John, <a href="#Page_151">ii. 151</a>, <i>n.</i>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">on Sovereignty, <a href="#Page_162">ii. 162</a>.</span><br />
+      <br /> Authors, difficulties of, in France in the eighteenth century, <a
+      href="#Page_55">ii. 55</a>-61.<br /> <br /> <br /> <span class="smcap">Baboeuf</span>,
+      on the Revolution, <a href="#Page_123">ii. 123</a>, <i>n.</i><br /> <br />
+      Barbier, <a href="#Page_26">ii. 26</a>.<br /> <br /> Basedow, his enthusiasm
+      for Rousseau's educational theories, <a href="#Page_251">ii. 251</a>.<br />
+      <br /> Beaumont, De, Archbishop of Paris, mandate against Rousseau issued
+      by, <a href="#Page_83">ii. 83</a>;<br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">argument
+      from, <a href="#Page_86">ii. 86</a>.</span><br /> <br /> Bernard, maiden
+      name of Rousseau's mother, <a href="#Page_i.10">i. 10</a>.<br />
+      <br /> Bienne, Rousseau driven to take refuge in island in lake of, <a
+      href="#Page_108">ii. 108</a>;<br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his
+      account of, <a href="#Page_109">ii. 109</a>-115.</span><br /> <br /> Bodin,
+      on Government, <a href="#Page_147">ii. 147</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his definition of an aristocratic state, <a
+      href="#Page_168">ii. 168</a>, <i>n.</i></span><br /> <br /> Bonaparte,
+      Napoleon, <a href="#Page_102">ii. 102</a>, <i>n.</i><br /> <br /> Bossuet,
+      on Stage Plays, <a href="#Page_i.321">i. 321</a>.<br />
+      <br /> Boswell, James, <a href="#Page_98">ii. 98</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">visits Rousseau, <a href="#Page_98">ii. 98</a>,
+      also <i>ib.</i> <i>n.</i>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">urged
+      by Rousseau to visit Corsica, <a href="#Page_100">ii. 100</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his letter to Rousseau, <a href="#Page_101">ii.
+      101</a>.</span><br /> <br /> Boufflers, Madame de, <a href="#Page_5">ii. 5</a>,
+      <i>ib.</i> <i>n.</i><br /> <br /> <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_330"
+      id="Page_330">[ii.330]</a></span>Bougainville (brother of the navigator),
+      <a href="#Page_i.184">i. 184</a>, <i>n.</i><br /> <br />
+      Brutus, how Rousseau came to be panegyrist of, <a
+      href="#Page_i.187">i. 187</a>.<br /> <br /> Buffon, <a
+      href="#Page_205">ii. 205</a>.<br /> <br /> Burke, <a href="#Page_140">ii.
+      140</a>, <a href="#Page_192">192</a>.<br /> <br /> Burnet, Bishop, on
+      Genevese, <a href="#Page_i.225">i. 225</a>.<br /> <br />
+      Burton, John Hill, his <i>Life of Hume</i> (on Rousseau), <a
+      href="#Page_283">ii. 283</a>, <i>n.</i><br /> <br /> Byron, Lord,
+      antecedents of highest creative efforts, <a href="#Page_1">ii. 1</a>;<br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">effect of nature upon, <a href="#Page_40">ii.
+      40</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">difference between and
+      Rousseau, <a href="#Page_41">ii. 41</a>.</span><br /> <br /> <br /> <span
+      class="smcap">Calas</span>, <a href="#Page_i.312">i. 312</a>.<br />
+      <br /> Calvin, <a href="#Page_i.4">i. 4</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.189">189</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau on, as a legislator, <a href="#Page_131">ii.
+      131</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">and Servetus, <a
+      href="#Page_180">ii. 180</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">mentioned,
+      <a href="#Page_181">ii. 181</a>.</span><br /> <br /> <i>Candide</i>, thought
+      by Rousseau to be meant as a reply to him, <a
+      href="#Page_i.319">i. 319</a>.<br /> <br /> Cardan, <a
+      href="#Page_303">ii. 303</a>.<br /> <br /> Cato, how Rousseau came to be his
+      panegyrist, <a href="#Page_i.187">i. 187</a>.<br /> <br />
+      Chamb&#233;ri, probable date of Rousseau's return to, <a
+      href="#Page_i.62">i. 62</a>, <i>n.</i>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">takes up his residence there, <a
+      href="#Page_i.69">i. 69</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">effect on his mind of a French column of troops
+      passing through, <a href="#Page_i.72">i. 72</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.73">73</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his illness at, <a
+      href="#Page_i.73">i. 73</a>, <i>n.</i></span><br /> <br />
+      Charmettes, Les, Madame de Warens's residence, <a
+      href="#Page_i.73">i. 73</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">present condition of, <a
+      href="#Page_i.74">i. 74</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.75">75</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">time spent there by Rousseau, <a
+      href="#Page_i.94">i. 94</a>.</span><br /> <br /> Charron,
+      <a href="#Page_203">ii. 203</a>.<br /> <br /> Chateaubriand, influenced by
+      Rousseau, <a href="#Page_i.3">i. 3</a>.<br /> <br />
+      Chatham, Lord, <a href="#Page_92">ii. 92</a>.<br /> <br /> Chaumette, <a
+      href="#Page_178">ii. 178</a>;<br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">guillotined
+      on charge of endeavouring to establish atheism in France, <a
+      href="#Page_179">ii. 179</a>.</span><br /> <br /> Chesterfield, Lord, <a
+      href="#Page_15">ii. 15</a>.<br /> <br /> Choiseul, <a href="#Page_57">ii. 57</a>,
+      <a href="#Page_64">64</a>, <a href="#Page_72">72</a>.<br /> <br /> Citizen,
+      revolutionary use of word, derived from Rousseau, <a href="#Page_161">ii.
+      161</a>.<br /> <br /> Civilisation, variety of the origin and process of, <a
+      href="#Page_i.176">i. 176</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">defects of, <a
+      href="#Page_i.176">i. 176</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">one of the worst trials of, <a href="#Page_102">ii.
+      102</a>.</span><br /> <br /> Cobbett, <a href="#Page_42">ii. 42</a>.<br />
+      <br /> Collier, Jeremy, on the English Stage, <a
+      href="#Page_i.323">i. 323</a>.<br /> <br /> Condillac, <a
+      href="#Page_i.95">i. 95</a>.<br /> <br /> Condorcet, <a
+      href="#Page_i.89">i. 89</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">on Social Position of Women, <a
+      href="#Page_i.335">i. 335</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">human perfectibility, <a href="#Page_119">ii.
+      119</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">inspiration of, drawn
+      from the school of Voltaire and Rousseau, <a href="#Page_194">ii. 194</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">belief of, in the improvement of humanity,
+      <a href="#Page_246">ii. 246</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">grievous mistake of, <a href="#Page_247">ii. 247</a>.</span><br />
+      <br /> Confessions, the, not to be trusted for minute accuracy, <a
+      href="#Page_i.86">i. 86</a>, <i>n.</i>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">or for dates, <a
+      href="#Page_i.93">i. 93</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">first part written 1766, <a href="#Page_301">ii.
+      301</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">their character, <a
+      href="#Page_303">ii. 303</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">published
+      surreptitiously, <a href="#Page_324">ii. 324</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">readings from, prohibited by police, <a
+      href="#Page_324">ii. 324</a>.</span><br /> <br /> Conti, Prince of, <a
+      href="#Page_4">ii. 4</a>-7;<br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">receives
+      Rousseau at Trye, <a href="#Page_118">ii. 118</a>.</span><br /> <br />
+      Contract, Social, <a href="#Page_i.136">i. 136</a>.<br />
+      <br /> Corsica, struggles for independence of, <a href="#Page_99">ii. 99</a>;<br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau invited to legislate for, <a
+      href="#Page_99">ii. 99</a>-102;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">bought
+      by France, <a href="#Page_102">ii. 102</a>.</span><br /> <br /> Cowper, <a
+      href="#Page_i.20">i. 20</a>; <a href="#Page_41">ii. 41</a>;<br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">on Rousseau, <a href="#Page_41">ii. 41</a>
+      <i>n.</i>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">lines in the Task,
+      <a href="#Page_253">ii. 253</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his delusions, <a href="#Page_301">ii. 301</a>.</span><br />
+      <br /> Cynicism, Rousseau's assumption of, <a
+      href="#Page_i.206">i. 206</a>.<br /> <br /> <br /> <span
+      class="smcap">D'Aiguillon</span>, <a href="#Page_72">ii. 72</a>.<br />
+      <br /> D'Alembert, <a href="#Page_i.89">i. 89</a>;<br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Voltaire's staunchest henchman, <a
+      href="#Page_i.321">i. 321</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his article on Geneva, <a
+      href="#Page_i.321">i. 321</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">on Stage Plays, <a
+      href="#Page_i.326">i. 326</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">on Position of Women in Society, <a
+      href="#Page_i.335">i. 335</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_331" id="Page_331">[ii.331]</a></span><span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">on Rousseau's letter on the Theatre, <a
+      href="#Page_i.336">i. 336</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">suspected by Rousseau of having written the
+      pretended letter from Frederick of Prussia, <a href="#Page_288">ii. 288</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">advises Hume to publish account of
+      Rousseau's quarrel with him, <a href="#Page_294">ii. 294</a>.</span><br />
+      <br /> D'Argenson, <a href="#Page_180">ii. 180</a>.<br /> <br /> Dates of
+      Rousseau's letters to be relied on, not those of the Confessions, <a
+      href="#Page_i.93">i. 93</a>.<br /> <br /> Davenport, Mr.,
+      provides Rousseau with a home at Wootton, <a href="#Page_286">ii. 286</a>;<br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his kindness to Rousseau, <a
+      href="#Page_306">ii. 306</a>.</span><br /> <br /> Deism, Rousseau's, <a
+      href="#Page_260">ii. 260</a>-275;<br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">that
+      of others, <a href="#Page_262">ii. 262</a>-265;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">shortcomings of Rousseau's, <a href="#Page_270">ii.
+      270</a>.</span><br /> <br /> Democracy defined, <a href="#Page_168">ii. 168</a>;<br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">rejected by Rousseau, as too perfect for
+      men, <a href="#Page_171">ii. 171</a>.</span><br /> <br /> D'Epinay, Madame,
+      <a href="#Page_i.194">i. 194</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.195">195</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.205">205</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">gives the Hermitage to Rousseau, <a
+      href="#Page_i.229">i. 229</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his quarrels with, <a
+      href="#Page_i.271">i. 271</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his relations with, <a
+      href="#Page_i.273">i. 273</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.276">276</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">journey to Geneva of, <a
+      href="#Page_i.284">i. 284</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">squabbles arising out of, between, and Rousseau,
+      Diderot, and Grimm, <a href="#Page_i.285">i. 285</a>-290;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">mentioned, <a href="#Page_7">ii. 7</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_26">26</a>, <a href="#Page_197">197</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">wrote on education, <a href="#Page_199">ii. 199</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">applies to secretary of police to prohibit
+      Rousseau's readings from his Confessions, <a href="#Page_324">ii. 324</a>.</span><br />
+      <br /> D'Epinay, Monsieur, <a href="#Page_i.254">i. 254</a>;
+      <a href="#Page_26">ii. 26</a>.<br /> <br /> Descartes, <a
+      href="#Page_i.87">i. 87</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.225">225</a>; <a href="#Page_267">ii. 267</a>.<br />
+      <br /> Deux Ponts, Duc de, Rousseau's rude reply to, <a
+      href="#Page_i.207">i. 207</a>.<br /> <br /> D'Holbach, <a
+      href="#Page_i.192">i. 192</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's dislike of his materialistic friends,
+      <a href="#Page_i.223">i. 223</a>; <a href="#Page_37">ii.
+      37</a>, <a href="#Page_256">256</a>.</span><br /> <br /> D'Houdetot, Madame,
+      <a href="#Page_i.255">i. 255</a>-270;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Madame d'Epinay's jealousy of, <a
+      href="#Page_i.278">i. 278</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">mentioned, <a href="#Page_7">ii. 7</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">offers Rousseau a home in Normandy, <a
+      href="#Page_117">ii. 117</a>.</span><br /> <br /> Diderot, <a
+      href="#Page_i.64">i. 64</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.89">89</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.133">133</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">tries to manage Rousseau, <a
+      href="#Page_i.213">i. 213</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his domestic misconduct, <a
+      href="#Page_i.215">i. 215</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">leader of the materialistic party, <a
+      href="#Page_i.223">i. 223</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">on Solitary Life, <a
+      href="#Page_i.232">i. 232</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his active life, <a
+      href="#Page_i.233">i. 233</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">without moral sensitiveness, <a
+      href="#Page_i.262">i. 262</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">mentioned, <a
+      href="#Page_i.262">i. 262</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.269">269</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.271">271</a>; <a href="#Page_8">ii. 8</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his relations with Rousseau, <a
+      href="#Page_i.271">i. 271</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">accused of pilfering Goldoni's new play, <a
+      href="#Page_i.275">i. 275</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his relations and contentions with Rousseau, <a
+      href="#Page_i.275">i. 275</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.276">276</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">lectures Rousseau about Madame d'Epinay, <a
+      href="#Page_i.284">i. 284</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">visits Rousseau after his leaving the Hermitage,
+      <a href="#Page_i.289">i. 289</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's final breach with, <a
+      href="#Page_i.336">i. 336</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his criticism, and plays, <a href="#Page_34">ii.
+      34</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his defects, <a
+      href="#Page_34">ii. 34</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">thrown
+      into prison, <a href="#Page_57">ii. 57</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his difficulties with the Encyclop&#230;dists,
+      <a href="#Page_57">ii. 57</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his
+      papers saved from the police by Malesherbes, <a href="#Page_62">ii. 62</a>.</span><br />
+      <br /> Dijon, academy of, <a href="#Page_i.132">i. 132</a>.<br />
+      <br /> <a name="Discourses" id="Discourses">Discourses</a>, The,
+      Circumstances of the composition of the first Discourse, <a
+      href="#Page_i.133">i. 133</a>-136;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">summary of it, <a
+      href="#Page_i.138">i. 138</a>-145;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 2.5em;">disastrous effect of the progress of sciences
+      and arts, <a href="#Page_i.140">i. 140</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.141">141</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 2.5em;">error more dangerous than truth useful, <a
+      href="#Page_i.141">i. 141</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 2.5em;">uselessness of learning and art, <a
+      href="#Page_i.141">i. 141</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.142">142</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 2.5em;">terrible disorders caused in Europe by the art
+      of printing, <a href="#Page_i.143">i. 143</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">two kinds of ignorance, <a
+      href="#Page_i.144">i. 144</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">the relation of this Discourse to Montaigne, <a
+      href="#Page_i.145">i. 145</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">its one-sidedness and hollowness, <a
+      href="#Page_i.148">i. 148</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">shown by Voltaire, <a
+      href="#Page_i.148">i. 148</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">its positive side, <a
+      href="#Page_i.149">i. 149</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.150">150</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_332" id="Page_332">[ii.332]</a></span><span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">second Discourse, origin of the Inequality of
+      Man, <a href="#Page_i.154">i. 154</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">summary of it, <a
+      href="#Page_i.159">i. 159</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.170">170</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 2.5em;">state of nature, <a
+      href="#Page_i.150">i. 150</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.162">162</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Hobbes's mistake, <a
+      href="#Page_i.161">i. 161</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 2.5em;">what broke up the &quot;state of nature,&quot;
+      <a href="#Page_i.164">i. 164</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 2.5em;">its preferableness, <a
+      href="#Page_i.166">i. 166</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.167">167</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 2.5em;">origin of society and laws, <a
+      href="#Page_i.168">i. 168</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 2.5em;">&quot;new state of nature,&quot; <a
+      href="#Page_i.169">i. 169</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 2.5em;">main position of the Discourse, <a
+      href="#Page_i.169">i. 169</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">its utter inclusiveness, <a
+      href="#Page_i.170">i. 170</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">criticism on its method, <a
+      href="#Page_i.170">i. 170</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">on its matter, <a
+      href="#Page_i.172">i. 172</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">wanting in evidence, <a
+      href="#Page_i.172">i. 172</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">further objections to it, <a
+      href="#Page_i.173">i. 173</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">assumes uniformity of process, <a
+      href="#Page_i.176">i. 176</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">its unscientific character, <a
+      href="#Page_i.177">i. 177</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">its real importance, <a
+      href="#Page_i.178">i. 178</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">its protest against the mockery of civilisation,
+      <a href="#Page_i.178">i. 178</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">equality of man, <a
+      href="#Page_i.181">i. 181</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">different effects of this doctrine in France and
+      the United States explained, <a href="#Page_i.182">i.
+      182</a>, <a href="#Page_i.183">183</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">discovers a reaction against the
+      historical method of Montesquieu, <a href="#Page_i.183">i.
+      183</a>, <a href="#Page_i.184">184</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">pecuniary results of, <a
+      href="#Page_i.196">i. 196</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Diderot's praise of first Discourse, <a
+      href="#Page_i.200">i. 200</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Voltaire's acknowledgement of gift of second
+      Discourse, <a href="#Page_i.308">i. 308</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">the, an attack on the general ordering of
+      society, <a href="#Page_22">ii. 22</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">referred to, <a href="#Page_41">ii. 41</a>.</span><br />
+      <br /> Drama, its proper effect, <a href="#Page_i.326">i.
+      326</a>;<br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">what would be that of its
+      introduction into Geneva, <a href="#Page_i.327">i. 327</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">true answer to Rousseau's contentions, <a
+      href="#Page_i.329">i. 329</a>.</span><br /> <br />
+      Dramatic morality, <a href="#Page_i.326">i. 326</a>.<br />
+      <br /> Drinkers, Rousseau's estimate of, <a
+      href="#Page_i.330">i. 330</a>.<br /> <br /> Drunkenness,
+      how esteemed in Switzerland and Naples, <a
+      href="#Page_i.331">i. 331</a>.<br /> <br /> Duclos, <a
+      href="#Page_i.206">i. 206</a>; <a href="#Page_62">ii. 62</a>.<br />
+      <br /> Duni, <a href="#Page_i.292">i. 292</a>.<br /> <br />
+      Dupin, Madame de, Rousseau secretary to, <a
+      href="#Page_i.120">i. 120</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">her position in society, <a
+      href="#Page_i.195">i. 195</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's country life with, <a
+      href="#Page_i.196">i. 196</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">friend of the Abb&#233; de Saint Pierre, <a
+      href="#Page_i.244">i. 244</a>.</span><br /> <br /> <br />
+      <span class="smcap">Education</span>, interest taken in, in France in
+      Rousseau's time, <a href="#Page_193">ii. 193</a>, <a href="#Page_194">194</a>;<br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">its new direction <a href="#Page_195">ii.
+      195</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Locke, the pioneer
+      of, <a href="#Page_202">ii. 202</a>, <a href="#Page_203">203</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's special merit in connection
+      with, <a href="#Page_203">ii. 203</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his views on (see <a href="#Emilius">Emilius</a>,
+      <i>passim</i>, as well as for general consideration of) what it is, <a
+      href="#Page_219">ii. 219</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">plans
+      of, of Locke and others, designed for the higher class, <a href="#Page_254">ii.
+      254</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's for all,
+      <a href="#Page_254">ii. 254</a>.</span><br /> <br /> <i>Emile</i>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.136">i. 136</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.196">196</a>.<br /> <br /> <a name="Emilius"
+      id="Emilius">Emilius</a>, character of, <a href="#Page_2">ii. 2</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_3">3</a>;<br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">particulars of
+      the publication of, <a href="#Page_59">ii. 59</a>, <a href="#Page_60">60</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">effect of, on Rousseau's fortunes, <a
+      href="#Page_62">ii. 62</a>-64;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">ordered
+      to be burnt by public executioner at Paris, <a href="#Page_65">ii. 65</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">at Geneva, <a href="#Page_72">ii. 72</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">condemned by the Sorbonne, <a
+      href="#Page_82">ii. 82</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">supplied
+      (as also did the Social Contract) dialect for the longing in France and
+      Germany to return to nature, <a href="#Page_193">ii. 193</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">substance of, furnished by Locke, <a
+      href="#Page_202">ii. 202</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">examination
+      of, <a href="#Page_197">ii. 197</a>-280;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">mischief produced by its good advice, <a
+      href="#Page_206">ii. 206</a>, <a href="#Page_207">207</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">training of young children, <a
+      href="#Page_207">ii. 207</a>, <a href="#Page_208">208</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">constantly reasoning with them a mistake
+      of Locke's, <a href="#Page_209">ii. 209</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's central idea, disparagement of the
+      reasoning faculty, <a href="#Page_209">ii. 209</a>, <a href="#Page_210">210</a>;</span><br />
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_333" id="Page_333">[ii.333]</a></span><span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">theories of education, practice better than
+      precept, <a href="#Page_211">ii. 211</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">the idea of property, the first that Rousseau
+      would have given to a child, <a href="#Page_212">ii. 212</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">modes of teaching, <a href="#Page_214">ii.
+      214</a>, <a href="#Page_215">215</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">futility of such methods, <a href="#Page_215">ii.
+      215</a>, <a href="#Page_216">216</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">where Rousseau is right, and where wrong, <a
+      href="#Page_219">ii. 219</a>, <a href="#Page_220">220</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">effect of his own want of parental love,
+      <a href="#Page_220">ii. 220</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">teaches that everybody should learn a trade, <a
+      href="#Page_223">ii. 223</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">no
+      special foresight, <a href="#Page_224">ii. 224</a>, <a href="#Page_225">225</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">supremacy of the common people insisted
+      upon, <a href="#Page_226">ii. 226</a>, <a href="#Page_227">227</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">three dominant states of mind to be
+      established by the instructor, <a href="#Page_229">ii. 229</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_230">230</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's
+      incomplete notion of justice, <a href="#Page_231">ii. 231</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">ideal of Emilius, <a href="#Page_232">ii.
+      232</a>, <a href="#Page_233">233</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">forbids early teaching of history, <a
+      href="#Page_237">ii. 237</a>, <a href="#Page_238">238</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">disparages modern history, <a
+      href="#Page_239">ii. 239</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">criticism
+      on the old historians, <a href="#Page_240">ii. 240</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">education of women, <a href="#Page_241">ii. 241</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Rousseau's failure here, <a
+      href="#Page_242">ii. 242</a>, <a href="#Page_243">243</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">inconsistent with himself, <a
+      href="#Page_244">ii. 244</a>, <a href="#Page_245">245</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">worthlessness of his views, <a
+      href="#Page_249">ii. 249</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">real
+      merits of the work, <a href="#Page_249">ii. 249</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">its effect in Germany, <a href="#Page_251">ii.
+      251</a>, <a href="#Page_252">252</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">not much effect on education in England, <a
+      href="#Page_252">ii. 252</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Emilius
+      the first expression of democratic teaching in education, <a
+      href="#Page_254">ii. 254</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's
+      deism, <a href="#Page_258">ii. 258</a>, <a href="#Page_260">260</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_264">264</a>-267, <a href="#Page_269">269</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_270">270</a>, <a href="#Page_276">276</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">its inadequacy for the wants of men, <a
+      href="#Page_267">ii. 267</a>-270;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his position towards Christianity, <a
+      href="#Page_270">ii. 270</a>-276;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">real satisfaction of the religious emotions, <a
+      href="#Page_275">ii. 275</a>-280.</span><br /> <br /> Encyclop&#230;dia,
+      The, D'Alembert's article on Geneva in, <a
+      href="#Page_i.321">i. 321</a>.<br /> <br /> Encyclop&#230;dists,
+      the society of, confirms Rousseau's religious faith, <a
+      href="#Page_i.221">i. 221</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">referred to, <a href="#Page_257">ii. 257</a>.</span><br />
+      <br /> Evil, discussions on Rousseau's, Voltaire's, and De Maistre's
+      teachings concerning, <a href="#Page_i.313">i. 313</a>,
+      <i>n.</i>, <a href="#Page_i.318">318</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">different effect of existence of, on Rousseau
+      and Voltaire, <a href="#Page_i.319">i. 319</a>.</span><br />
+      <br /> <br /> <span class="smcap">F&#233;nelon</span>, <a href="#Page_37">ii.
+      37</a>, <a href="#Page_248">248</a>;<br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's
+      veneration for, <a href="#Page_321">ii. 321</a>.</span><br /> <br />
+      Ferguson, Adam, <a href="#Page_253">ii. 253</a>.<br /> <br /> Filmer
+      contends that a man is not naturally free, <a href="#Page_126">ii. 126</a>.<br />
+      <br /> Foundling Hospital, Rousseau sends his children to the, <a
+      href="#Page_i.120">i. 120</a>.<br /> <br /> France, debt
+      of, to Rousseau, <a href="#Page_i.3">i. 3</a>;<br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau the one great religious writer
+      of, in the eighteenth century, <a href="#Page_i.26">i.
+      26</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his wanderings in the
+      east of, <a href="#Page_i.61">i. 61</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his fondness for, <a
+      href="#Page_i.62">i. 62</a>-72;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">establishment of local academies in, <a
+      href="#Page_i.132">i. 132</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">decay in, of Greek literary studies, <a
+      href="#Page_i.146">i. 146</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">effects in, of doctrine of equality of man, <a
+      href="#Page_i.182">i. 182</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">effects in, of Montesquieu's &quot;Spirit of
+      Laws,&quot; <a href="#Page_i.183">i. 183</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">amiability of, in the eighteenth century,
+      <a href="#Page_i.187">i. 187</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">effect of Rousseau's writings in, <a
+      href="#Page_i.187">i. 187</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">collective organisation in, <a
+      href="#Page_i.222">i. 222</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">St. Pierre's strictures on government of, <a
+      href="#Page_i.244">i. 244</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau on government of, <a
+      href="#Page_i.246">i. 246</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">effect of Rousseau's spiritual element on, <a
+      href="#Page_i.306">i. 306</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">patriotism wanting in, <a
+      href="#Page_i.332">i. 332</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">difficulties of authorship in, <a href="#Page_55">ii.
+      55</a>-64;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">buys Corsica from
+      the Genoese, <a href="#Page_102">ii. 102</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">state of, after 1792, apparently favourable to
+      the carrying out of Rousseau's political views, <a href="#Page_131">ii.
+      131</a>, <a href="#Page_132">132</a>;</span><br /> <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_334" id="Page_334">[ii.334]</a></span><span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">in 1793, <a href="#Page_135">ii. 135</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">haunted by narrow and fervid minds, <a
+      href="#Page_142">ii. 142</a>.</span><br /> <br /> Francueil, Rousseau's
+      patron, <a href="#Page_i.99">i. 99</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">grandfather of Madame George Sand, <a
+      href="#Page_i.99">i. 99</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's salary from, <a
+      href="#Page_i.120">i. 120</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">country-house of, <a
+      href="#Page_i.196">i. 196</a>.</span><br /> <br />
+      Franklin, Benjamin, <a href="#Page_42">ii. 42</a>.<br /> <br /> Frederick of
+      Prussia, relations between, and Rousseau, <a href="#Page_73">ii. 73</a>-78;<br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">&quot;famous bull&quot; of, <a
+      href="#Page_90">ii. 90</a>.</span><br /> <br /> Freeman on Growth of English
+      Constitution, <a href="#Page_164">ii. 164</a>.<br /> <br /> French,
+      principles of, revolution, <a href="#Page_i.1">i. 1</a>,
+      <a href="#Page_i.2">2</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.3">3</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">process and ideas of, <a
+      href="#Page_i.4">i. 4</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau of old, stock, <a
+      href="#Page_i.8">i. 8</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">poetry, Rousseau on, <a
+      href="#Page_i.90">i. 90</a>, <i>ib. n.</i>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">melody, <a
+      href="#Page_i.105">i. 105</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">academy, thesis for prize, <a
+      href="#Page_i.150">i. 150</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">philosophers, <a
+      href="#Page_i.202">i. 202</a>,</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">music, <a href="#Page_i.291">i.
+      291</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">music, its
+      pretensions demolished by Rousseau, <a href="#Page_i.294">i.
+      294</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">ecclesiastics opposed
+      to the theatre, <a href="#Page_322">ii. 322</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">stage, Rousseau on, <a
+      href="#Page_i.325">i. 325</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">morals, depravity of, <a href="#Page_26">ii. 26</a>,
+      <a href="#Page_27">27</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Barbier
+      on, <a href="#Page_26">ii. 26</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">thought, benefit, or otherwise of revolution on,
+      <a href="#Page_54">ii. 54</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">history,
+      evil side of, in Rousseau's time, <a href="#Page_56">ii. 56</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">indebted to Holland for freedom of the
+      press, <a href="#Page_59">ii. 59</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">catholic and monarchic absolutism sunk deep into
+      the character of the, <a href="#Page_167">ii. 167</a>.</span><br /> <br />
+      French Convention, story of member of the, <a href="#Page_134">ii. 134</a>,
+      <i>n.</i><br /> <br /> <br /> <span class="smcap">Galuppi</span>, effect of
+      his music, <a href="#Page_i.105">i. 105</a>.<br /> <br />
+      Geneva, <a href="#Page_i.8">i. 8</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">characteristics of its people, <a
+      href="#Page_i.9">i. 9</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's visit to, <a
+      href="#Page_i.93">i. 93</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">influence of, on Rousseau, <a
+      href="#Page_i.94">i. 94</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">he revisits it in 1754, <a
+      href="#Page_i.186">i. 186</a>-190, <a
+      href="#Page_i.218">218</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">turns Protestant again there, <a
+      href="#Page_i.220">i. 220</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">religious opinion in, <a
+      href="#Page_i.223">i. 223</a> (also <a
+      href="#Page_i.224">i. 224</a>, <i>n.</i>);</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau thinks of taking up his abode in,
+      <a href="#Page_i.228">i. 228</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Voltaire at, <a
+      href="#Page_i.308">i. 308</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">D'Alembert's article on, in Encyclop&#230;dia,
+      <a href="#Page_i.321">i. 321</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's notions of effect of introducing the
+      drama at, <a href="#Page_i.327">i. 327</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">council of, order public burning of
+      Emilius and the Social Contract, and arrest of the author if he came
+      there, <a href="#Page_72">ii. 72</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">the only place where the Social Contract was
+      actually burnt, <a href="#Page_73">ii. 73</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Voltaire suspected to have had a hand in
+      the matter, <a href="#Page_81">ii. 81</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">council of, divided into two camps by Rousseau's
+      condemnation, in 1762, <a href="#Page_102">ii. 102</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau renounces his citizenship in, <a
+      href="#Page_104">ii. 104</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">working
+      of the republic, <a href="#Page_104">ii. 104</a>.</span><br /> <br />
+      Genevese, Bishop Burnet on, <a href="#Page_i.225">i. 225</a>;<br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's distrust of, <a
+      href="#Page_i.228">i. 228</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his panegyric on, <a
+      href="#Page_i.328">i. 328</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">manners of, according to Rousseau, <a
+      href="#Page_i.330">i. 330</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">their complaint of it, <a
+      href="#Page_i.331">i. 331</a>.</span><br /> <br /> Genlis,
+      Madame de, <a href="#Page_323">ii. 323</a>.<br /> <br /> Genoa, Rousseau in
+      quarantine at, <a href="#Page_i.103">i. 103</a>;<br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Corsica sold to France by, <a
+      href="#Page_102">ii. 102</a>.</span><br /> <br /> Germany, sentimental
+      movements in, <a href="#Page_33">ii. 33</a>.<br /> <br /> Gibbon, Edward, at
+      Lausanne, <a href="#Page_96">ii. 96</a>.<br /> <br /> Girardin, St. Marc, on
+      Rousseau, <a href="#Page_i.111">i. 111</a>, <i>n.</i>;<br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">on Rousseau's discussions, <a
+      href="#Page_11">ii. 11</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">offers Rousseau a home, <a href="#Page_326">ii.
+      326</a>.</span><br /> <br /> Gluck, <a href="#Page_i.291">i.
+      291</a>, <a href="#Page_i.296">296</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau quarrels with, for setting his music to
+      French words, <a href="#Page_323">ii. 323</a>.</span><br /> <br /> Goethe,
+      <a href="#Page_i.20">i. 20</a>.<br /> <br /> Goguet on
+      Society, <a href="#Page_127">ii. 127</a>, <i>n.</i>;<br /> <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_335" id="Page_335">[ii.335]</a></span><span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">on tacit conventions, <a href="#Page_148">ii.
+      148</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">on law, <a
+      href="#Page_153">ii. 153</a>, <i>n.</i></span><br /> <br /> Goldoni, Diderot
+      accused of pilfering his new play, <a href="#Page_i.275">i.
+      275</a>.<br /> <br /> Gothic architecture denounced by Voltaire and Turgot,
+      <a href="#Page_i.294">i. 294</a>.<br /> <br /> Gouvon,
+      Count, Rousseau servant to, <a href="#Page_i.42">i. 42</a>.<br />
+      <br /> Government, disquisitions on, <a href="#Page_131">ii. 131</a>-206;<br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">remarks on, <a href="#Page_131">ii. 131</a>-141;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">early democratic ideas of, <a
+      href="#Page_144">ii. 144</a>-148;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Hobbes' philosophy of, <a href="#Page_151">ii.
+      151</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's science
+      of, <a href="#Page_155">ii. 155</a>, <a href="#Page_156">156</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">De la Rivi&#232;re's science of, <a
+      href="#Page_156">ii. 156</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">federation recommended by Rousseau to the Poles,
+      <a href="#Page_166">ii. 166</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">three forms of government defined, <a
+      href="#Page_169">ii. 169</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">definition
+      inadequate, <a href="#Page_169">ii. 169</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Montesquieu's definition, <a href="#Page_169">ii.
+      169</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's
+      distinction between <i>tyrant</i> and <i>despot</i>, <a href="#Page_169">ii.
+      169</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his
+      objection to democracy, <a href="#Page_172">ii. 172</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">to monarchy, <a href="#Page_173">ii. 173</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">consideration of aristocracy, <a
+      href="#Page_174">ii. 174</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his
+      own scheme, <a href="#Page_175">ii. 175</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Hobbes's &quot;Passive Obedience,&quot; <a
+      href="#Page_181">ii. 181</a>, <a href="#Page_182">182</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">social conscience theory, <a
+      href="#Page_183">ii. 183</a>-187;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">government made impossible by Rousseau's
+      doctrine of social contract, <a href="#Page_188">ii. 188</a>-192;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Burke on expediency in, <a href="#Page_192">ii.
+      192</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">what a civilised
+      nation is, <a href="#Page_194">ii. 194</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Jefferson on, <a href="#Page_227">ii. 227</a>,
+      <a href="#Page_228">228</a>, <i>n.</i></span><br /> <br /> Governments,
+      earliest, how composed, <a href="#Page_i.169">i. 169</a>.<br />
+      <br /> Graffigny, Madame de, <a href="#Page_199">ii. 199</a>.<br /> <br />
+      Gratitude, Rousseau on, <a href="#Page_14">ii. 14</a>, <a href="#Page_15">15</a>;<br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">explanation of his want of, <a
+      href="#Page_70">ii. 70</a>.</span><br /> <br /> Greece, importance of
+      history of, <a href="#Page_i.184">i. 184</a>, and <i>ib.
+      n.</i><br /> <br /> Greek ideas, influence of, in France in the eighteenth
+      century, <a href="#Page_i.146">i. 146</a>.<br /> <br />
+      Grenoble, <a href="#Page_i.93">i. 93</a>.<br /> <br /> Gr&#233;try,
+      <a href="#Page_i.292">i. 292</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.296">296</a>; <a href="#Page_323">ii. 323</a>.<br />
+      <br /> Grimm, description of Rousseau by, <a
+      href="#Page_i.206">i. 206</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's quarrels with, <a
+      href="#Page_i.279">i. 279</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">letter of, about Rousseau and Diderot, <a
+      href="#Page_i.275">i. 275</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">relations of, with Rousseau, <a
+      href="#Page_i.279">i. 279</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">some account of his life, <a
+      href="#Page_i.279">i. 279</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his conversation with Madame d'Epinay, <a
+      href="#Page_i.281">i. 281</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">criticism on Rousseau, <a
+      href="#Page_i.281">i. 281</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">natural want of sympathy between the two, <a
+      href="#Page_i.282">i. 282</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's quarrel with, <a
+      href="#Page_i.285">i. 285</a>-290; <a href="#Page_65">ii.
+      65</a>, <a href="#Page_199">199</a>.</span><br /> <br /> Grotius, on
+      Government, <a href="#Page_148">ii. 148</a>.<br /> <br /> <br /> <span
+      class="smcap">H&#233;bert</span>, <a href="#Page_178">ii. 178</a>;<br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">prevents publication of a book in which
+      the author professed his belief in a god, <a href="#Page_179">ii. 179</a>.</span><br />
+      <br /> Helmholtz, <a href="#Page_i.299">i. 299</a>.<br />
+      <br /> Helv&#233;tius, <a href="#Page_i.191">i. 191</a>;
+      <a href="#Page_65">ii. 65</a>, <a href="#Page_199">199</a>.<br /> <br />
+      Herder, <a href="#Page_251">ii. 251</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's influence on, <a href="#Page_315">ii.
+      315</a>.</span><br /> <br /> Hermitage, the, given to Rousseau by Madame
+      d'Epinay, <a href="#Page_i.229">i. 229</a> (also <i>ib.</i>
+      <i>n.</i>);<br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">what his friends thought
+      of it, <a href="#Page_i.231">i. 231</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">sale of, after the Revolution, <a
+      href="#Page_i.237">i. 237</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">reasons for Rousseau's leaving, <a
+      href="#Page_i.286">i. 286</a>.</span><br /> <br />
+      Hildebrand, <a href="#Page_i.4">i. 4</a>.<br /> <br />
+      Hobbes, <a href="#Page_i.143">i. 143</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.161">161</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his &quot;Philosophy of Government,&quot; <a
+      href="#Page_151">ii. 151</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">singular
+      influence of, upon Rousseau, <a href="#Page_151">ii. 151</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_183">183</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">essential
+      difference between his views and those of Rousseau, <a href="#Page_159">ii.
+      159</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">on Sovereignty, <a
+      href="#Page_162">ii. 162</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's
+      definition of the three forms of government adopted by, inadequate, <a
+      href="#Page_168">ii. 168</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1.5em;">would
+      reduce spiritual and temporal jurisdiction to one political unity, <a
+      href="#Page_183">ii. 183</a>.</span><span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_336" id="Page_336">[ii.336]</a></span><br /> <br /> Holbachians,
+      <a href="#Page_i.337">i. 337</a>; <a href="#Page_2">ii.
+      2</a>.<br /> <br /> Hooker, on Civil Government, <a href="#Page_148">ii. 148</a>.<br />
+      <br /> H&#244;tel St. Quentin, Rousseau at, <a
+      href="#Page_i.106">i. 106</a>.<br /> <br /> Hume, David,
+      <a href="#Page_i.64">i. 64</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.89">89</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his deep-set sagacity, <a
+      href="#Page_i.156">i. 156</a>, <a href="#Page_6">ii. 6</a>,
+      <a href="#Page_75">75</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">suspected
+      of tampering with Boswell's letter, <a href="#Page_98">ii. 98</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">on Boswell, <a href="#Page_101">ii. 101</a>,
+      <i>n.</i>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his eagerness to
+      find Rousseau a refuge in England, <a href="#Page_282">ii. 282</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_283">283</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his
+      account of Rousseau, <a href="#Page_284">ii. 284</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">finds him a home at Wootton, <a href="#Page_286">ii.
+      286</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's quarrel
+      with, <a href="#Page_286">ii. 286</a>-291 (also <a href="#Page_290">ii.
+      290</a>, <i>n.</i>);</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his
+      innocence of Walpole's letter, <a href="#Page_292">ii. 292</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his conduct in the quarrel, <a
+      href="#Page_293">ii. 293</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">saves
+      Rousseau from arrest of French Government, <a href="#Page_295">ii. 295</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">on Rousseau's sensitiveness, <a
+      href="#Page_299">ii. 299</a>.</span><br /> <br /> <br /> <span class="smcap">Imagination</span>,
+      Rousseau's, <a href="#Page_i.247">i. 247</a>.<br /> <br />
+      <br /> <span class="smcap">Jacobins</span>, the, Rousseau's Social
+      Contract, their gospel, <a href="#Page_132">ii. 132</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_133">133</a>;<br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">their
+      mistake, <a href="#Page_136">ii. 136</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">convenience to them of some of the maxims of the
+      Social Contract, <a href="#Page_142">ii. 142</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Jacobin supremacy and Hobbism, <a
+      href="#Page_152">ii. 152</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">how
+      they might have saved France, <a href="#Page_167">ii. 167</a>.</span><br />
+      <br /> Jansen, his propositions, <a href="#Page_i.81">i.
+      81</a>.<br /> <br /> Jansenists, Rousseau's suspicions of, <a href="#Page_63">ii.
+      63</a>;<br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">mentioned, <a href="#Page_89">ii.
+      89</a>.</span><br /> <br /> Jean Paul, <a href="#Page_216">ii. 216</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_252">252</a>.<br /> <br /> Jefferson, <a href="#Page_227">ii.
+      227</a>, <i>n.</i><br /> <br /> Jesuits, Rousseau's suspicions of the, <a
+      href="#Page_64">ii. 64</a>;<br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">the, and
+      parliaments, <a href="#Page_65">ii. 65</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">movement against, <a href="#Page_65">ii. 65</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">suppression of the, leads to increased
+      thought about education, <a href="#Page_199">ii. 199</a>.</span><br />
+      <br /> Johnson, <a href="#Page_15">ii. 15</a>, <a href="#Page_98">98</a>.<br />
+      <br /> <br /> <span class="smcap">Kames</span>, Lord, <a href="#Page_253">ii.
+      253</a>.<br /> <br /> <br /> <span class="smcap">Lamennais</span>, influenced
+      by Rousseau, <a href="#Page_228">ii. 228</a>.<br /> <br /> Language, origin
+      of, <a href="#Page_i.161">i. 161</a>.<br /> <br /> Latour,
+      Madame, <a href="#Page_19">ii. 19</a>, <i>ib. n.</i><br /> <br /> Lavater
+      favourable to education on Rousseau's plan, <a href="#Page_251">ii. 251</a>
+      (also <i>ib.</i> <i>n.</i>)<br /> <br /> Lavoisier, reply to his request for
+      a fortnight's respite, <a href="#Page_227">ii. 227</a>, <i>n.</i><br />
+      <br /> Law, not a contract, <a href="#Page_153">ii. 153</a>.<br /> <br />
+      Lecouvreur, Adrienne, refused Christian burial on account of her being an
+      actress, <a href="#Page_i.323">i. 323</a>.<br /> <br />
+      Leibnitz, <a href="#Page_i.87">i. 87</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his optimism, <a
+      href="#Page_i.309">i. 309</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">on the constitution of the universe, <a
+      href="#Page_i.312">i. 312</a>.</span><br /> <br />
+      Lessing, on Pope, <a href="#Page_i.310">i. 310</a>, <i>n.</i><br />
+      <br /> &quot;Letters from the Mountain,&quot; <a href="#Page_104">ii. 104</a>;<br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">burned, by command, at Paris and the
+      Hague, <a href="#Page_105">ii. 105</a>.</span><br /> <br /> Liberty,
+      English, Rousseau's notion of, <a href="#Page_163">ii. 163</a>, <i>n.</i><br />
+      <br /> Life, Rousseau's condemnation of the contemplative, <a
+      href="#Page_i.10">i. 10</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his idea of household, <a
+      href="#Page_i.41">i. 41</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">easier for him to preach than for others to
+      practise, <a href="#Page_i.43">i. 43</a>.</span><br />
+      <br /> Lisbon, earthquake of, Voltaire on, <a
+      href="#Page_i.310">i. 310</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's letter to Voltaire on, <a
+      href="#Page_i.310">i. 310</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.311">311</a>.</span><br /> <br /> Locke, his
+      Essay, <a href="#Page_i.87">i. 87</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his notions, <a
+      href="#Page_i.87">i. 87</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his influence upon Rousseau, <a href="#Page_121">ii.
+      121</a>-126;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">on Marriage, <a
+      href="#Page_126">ii. 126</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">on
+      Civil Government, <a href="#Page_149">ii. 149</a>, <a href="#Page_150">150</a>,
+      <i>n.</i>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">indefiniteness of
+      his views, <a href="#Page_160">ii. 160</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">the pioneer of French thought on education, <a
+      href="#Page_202">ii. 202</a>, <a href="#Page_203">203</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's indebtedness to, <a
+      href="#Page_203">ii. 203</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his
+      mistake in education, <a href="#Page_209">ii. 209</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">subjects of his theories, <a href="#Page_254">ii.
+      254</a>.</span><br /> <br /> Lulli (music), <a
+      href="#Page_i.291">i. 291</a>.<br /> <br /> <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_337" id="Page_337">[ii.337]</a></span>Luther,
+      <a href="#Page_i.4">i. 4</a>.<br /> <br /> Luxembourg, the
+      Duke of, gives Rousseau a home, <a href="#Page_2">ii. 2</a>-7, <a
+      href="#Page_9">9</a>.<br /> <br /> Luxembourg, the Mar&#233;chale de, in
+      vain seeks Rousseau's children, <a href="#Page_i.128">i.
+      128</a>;<br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">helps to get Emilius
+      published, <a href="#Page_62">ii. 62</a>-64, <a href="#Page_67">67</a>.</span><br />
+      <br /> Lycurgus, <a href="#Page_129">ii. 129</a>, <a href="#Page_131">131</a>;<br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">influence of, upon Saint Just, <a
+      href="#Page_133">ii. 133</a>.</span><br /> <br /> Lyons, Rousseau a tutor
+      at, <a href="#Page_i.95">i. 95</a>-97.<br /> <br /> <br />
+      <span class="smcap">Mably</span>, De, <a
+      href="#Page_i.95">i. 95</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his socialism, <a
+      href="#Page_i.184">i. 184</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">applied to for scheme for the government of
+      Poland, <a href="#Page_324">ii. 324</a>.</span><br /> <br /> Maistre, De, <a
+      href="#Page_i.145">i. 145</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">on Optimism, <a
+      href="#Page_i.314">i. 314</a>.</span><br /> <br /> Maitre,
+      Le, teaches Rousseau music, <a href="#Page_i.58">i. 58</a>.<br />
+      <br /> Malebranche, <a href="#Page_i.87">i. 87</a>.<br />
+      <br /> Malesherbes, Rousseau confesses his ungrateful nature to, <a
+      href="#Page_14">ii. 14</a>;<br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his
+      dishonest advice to Rousseau, <a href="#Page_60">ii. 60</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">helps Diderot, <a href="#Page_62">ii. 62</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">and Rousseau in the publishing of Emilius,
+      <a href="#Page_62">ii. 62</a>, <a href="#Page_63">63</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">endangered by it, <a href="#Page_67">ii.
+      67</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">asks Rousseau to
+      collect plants for him, <a href="#Page_76">ii. 76</a>.</span><br /> <br />
+      Man, his specific distinction from other animals, <a
+      href="#Page_i.161">i. 161</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his state of nature, <a
+      href="#Page_i.161">i. 161</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Hobbes wrong concerning this, <a
+      href="#Page_i.161">i. 161</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">equality of, <a
+      href="#Page_i.180">i. 180</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">effects of this doctrine in France and in the
+      United States, <a href="#Page_i.182">i. 182</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">not naturally free, <a href="#Page_126">ii.
+      126</a>.</span><br /> <br /> Mandeville, <a
+      href="#Page_i.162">i. 162</a>.<br /> <br /> Manners,
+      Rousseau's, Marmontel, and Grimm on, <a
+      href="#Page_i.205">i. 205</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.206">206</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau on Swiss, <a
+      href="#Page_i.329">i. 329</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.330">330</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">depravity of French, in the eighteenth century,
+      <a href="#Page_25">ii. 25</a>, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>.</span><br />
+      <br /> Marischal, Lord, friendship between, and Rousseau, <a href="#Page_79">ii.
+      79</a>-81;<br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">account of, <a
+      href="#Page_80">ii. 80</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">on
+      Boswell, <a href="#Page_98">ii. 98</a></span><br /> <br /> Marmontel, on
+      Rousseau's manners, <a href="#Page_i.206">i. 206</a>;<br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">on his success, <a href="#Page_2">ii. 2</a>.</span><br />
+      <br /> Marriage, design of the New Helo&#239;sa to exalt, <a href="#Page_46">ii.
+      46</a>-48, <i>ib.</i> <i>n.</i><br /> <br /> Marsilio, of Padua, on Law, <a
+      href="#Page_145">ii. 145</a>.<br /> <br /> Men, inequality of, Rousseau's
+      second Discourse (see <a href="#Discourses">Discourses</a>),<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 2.5em;">dedicated to the republic of Geneva, <a
+      href="#Page_i.190">i. 190</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">how received there, <a
+      href="#Page_i.228">i. 228</a>.</span><br /> <br />
+      Mirabeau the elder, Rousseau's letter to, from Wootton, <a href="#Page_305">ii.
+      305</a>, <a href="#Page_306">306</a>;<br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his
+      character, <a href="#Page_309">ii. 309</a>-312;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">receives Rousseau at Fleury, <a href="#Page_311">ii.
+      311</a>.</span><br /> <br /> Mirabeau, Gabriel, Rousseau's influence on, <a
+      href="#Page_315">ii. 315</a>.<br /> <br /> Moli&#232;re (Misanthrope of),
+      Rousseau's criticism on, <a href="#Page_i.329">i. 329</a>;<br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">D'Alembert on, <a
+      href="#Page_i.329">i. 329</a>.</span><br /> <br />
+      Monarchy, Rousseau's objection to, <a href="#Page_171">ii. 171</a>.<br />
+      <br /> Montaigu, Count de, avarice of, <a
+      href="#Page_i.101">i. 101</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.102">102</a>.<br /> <br /> Montaigne,
+      Rousseau's obligations to, <a href="#Page_i.145">i. 145</a>;<br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">influence of, on Rousseau, <a
+      href="#Page_203">ii. 203</a>.</span><br /> <br /> Montesquieu, &quot;incomplete
+      positivity&quot; of, <a href="#Page_i.156">i. 156</a>;<br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">on Government, <a
+      href="#Page_i.157">i. 157</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">effect of his Spirit of Laws on Rousseau, <a
+      href="#Page_i.183">i. 183</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">confused definition of laws, <a href="#Page_153">ii.
+      153</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">balanced
+      parliamentary system of, <a href="#Page_163">ii. 163</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his definition of forms of government, <a
+      href="#Page_169">ii. 169</a>.</span><br /> <br /> Montmorency, Rousseau goes
+      to live there, <a href="#Page_i.229">i. 229</a>;<br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his life at, <a href="#Page_2">ii. 2</a>-9.</span><br />
+      <br /> Montpellier, <a href="#Page_i.92">i. 92</a>.<br />
+      <br /> <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_338" id="Page_338">[ii.338]</a></span>Morals,
+      state of, in France in the eighteenth century, <a href="#Page_26">ii. 26</a>.<br />
+      <br /> Morellet, thrown into the Bastile, <a href="#Page_57">ii. 57</a>.<br />
+      <br /> Morelly, his indirect influence on Rousseau, <a
+      href="#Page_i.156">i. 156</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his socialistic theory, <a
+      href="#Page_i.157">i. 157</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.158">158</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his rules for organising a model community, <a
+      href="#Page_i.158">i. 158</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his terse exposition of inequality
+      contrasted with that of Rousseau, <a href="#Page_i.170">i.
+      170</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">on primitive human
+      nature, <a href="#Page_i.175">i. 175</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his socialism, <a href="#Page_52">ii. 52</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">influence of his &quot;model community&quot;
+      upon St. Just, <a href="#Page_133">ii. 133</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">advice to mothers, <a href="#Page_205">ii.
+      205</a>.</span><br /> <br /> Motiers, Rousseau's home there, <a
+      href="#Page_77">ii. 77</a>;<br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">attends
+      divine service at, <a href="#Page_91">ii. 91</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">life at, <a href="#Page_91">ii. 91</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_93">93</a>.</span><br /> <br /> Moultou (pastor of Motiers), his
+      enthusiasm for Rousseau, <a href="#Page_82">ii. 82</a>.<br /> <br /> Music,
+      Rousseau undertakes to teach, <a href="#Page_i.60">i. 60</a>;<br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's opinion concerning Italian, <a
+      href="#Page_i.105">i. 105</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">effect of Galuppi's, <a
+      href="#Page_i.105">i. 105</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau earns his living by copying, <a
+      href="#Page_i.196">i. 196</a>; <a href="#Page_315">ii.
+      315</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rameau's criticism on
+      Rousseau's <i>Muses Galantes</i>, <a href="#Page_i.211">i.
+      211</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">French, <a
+      href="#Page_i.291">i. 291</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's letter on, <a
+      href="#Page_i.292">i. 292</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Italian, denounced at Paris, <a
+      href="#Page_i.292">i. 292</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau utterly condemns French, <a
+      href="#Page_i.294">i. 294</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">quarrels with Gluck for setting his, to French
+      words, <a href="#Page_323">ii. 323</a>.</span><br /> <br /> Musical
+      notation, Rousseau's, <a href="#Page_i.291">i. 291</a>;<br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his Musical Dictionary, <a
+      href="#Page_i.296">i. 296</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his notation explained, <a
+      href="#Page_i.296">i. 296</a>-301;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his system inapplicable to instruments, <a
+      href="#Page_i.301">i. 301</a>.</span><br /> <br /> <br />
+      <span class="smcap">Naples</span>, drunkenness, how regarded in, <a
+      href="#Page_i.331">i. 331</a>.<br /> <br /> <i>Narcisse</i>,
+      Rousseau's condemnation of his own comedy of, <a
+      href="#Page_i.215">i. 215</a>.<br /> <br /> <a
+      name="Nature" id="Nature">Nature</a>, Rousseau's love of, <a
+      href="#Page_i.234">i. 234</a>-241; <a href="#Page_39">ii.
+      39</a>;<br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">state of, Rousseau,
+      Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Hume on, <a href="#Page_i.156">i.
+      156</a>-158;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's, in
+      Second Discourse, <a href="#Page_i.171">i. 171</a>-180;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his starting-point of right, and normal
+      constitution of civil society, <a href="#Page_124">ii. 124</a>. See <a
+      href="#State">State of Nature</a>.</span><br /> <br /> Necker, <a
+      href="#Page_54">ii. 54</a>, <a href="#Page_98">98</a>, <i>n.</i><br />
+      <br /> Neuch&#226;tel, flight to principality of, by Rousseau, <a
+      href="#Page_73">ii. 73</a>;<br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">history
+      of, <a href="#Page_73">ii. 73</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">outbreak at, arising from religious controversy,
+      <a href="#Page_90">ii. 90</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">preparations
+      for driving Rousseau out of, defeated by Frederick of Prussia, <a
+      href="#Page_90">ii. 90</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">clergy
+      of, against Rousseau, <a href="#Page_106">ii. 106</a>.</span><br /> <br />
+      <a name="New" id="New">New Helo&#239;sa</a>, first conception of, <a
+      href="#Page_i.250">i. 250</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">monument of Rousseau's fall, <a href="#Page_1">ii.
+      1</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">when completed and
+      published, <a href="#Page_2">ii. 2</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">read aloud to the Duchess de Luxembourg, <a
+      href="#Page_3">ii. 3</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">letter
+      on suicide in, <a href="#Page_16">ii. 16</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">effects upon Parisian ladies of reading the, <a
+      href="#Page_18">ii. 18</a>, <a href="#Page_19">19</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">criticism on, <a href="#Page_20">ii. 20</a>-55;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his scheme proposed in it, <a
+      href="#Page_21">ii. 21</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">its
+      story, <a href="#Page_24">ii. 24</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">its purity, contrasted with contemporary and
+      later French romances, <a href="#Page_24">ii. 24</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">its general effect, <a href="#Page_27">ii. 27</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau absolutely without humour, <a
+      href="#Page_27">ii. 27</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">utter
+      selfishness of hero of, <a href="#Page_30">ii. 30</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">its heroine, <a href="#Page_30">ii. 30</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">its popularity, <a href="#Page_231">ii.
+      231</a>, <a href="#Page_232">232</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">burlesque on it, <a href="#Page_31">ii. 31</a>,
+      <i>n.</i>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">its vital defect,
+      <a href="#Page_35">ii. 35</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">difference
+      between Rousseau, Byron, and others, <a href="#Page_42">ii. 42</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">sumptuary details of the story, <a
+      href="#Page_44">ii. 44</a>, <a href="#Page_45">45</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">its democratic tendency, <a href="#Page_49">ii.
+      49</a>, <a href="#Page_50">50</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">the bearing of its teaching, <a href="#Page_54">ii.
+      54</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">hindrances to its
+      circulation in France, <a href="#Page_57">ii. 57</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Malesherbes's low morality as to publishing, <a
+      href="#Page_61">ii. 61</a>.</span><br /> <br /> <br /> <span class="smcap">Optimism</span>
+      of Pope and Leibnitz, <a href="#Page_i.309">i. 309</a>-310;<br />
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_339" id="Page_339">[ii.339]</a></span><span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">discussed, <a href="#Page_128">ii. 128</a>-130.</span><br />
+      <br /> Origin of inequality among men, <a
+      href="#Page_i.156">i. 156</a>. See also <a
+      href="#Discourses">Discourses</a>.<br /> <br /> <br /> <span class="smcap">Paley</span>,
+      <a href="#Page_191">ii. 191</a>, <i>n.</i><br /> <br /> Palissot, <a
+      href="#Page_56">ii. 56</a>.<br /> <br /> Paris, Rousseau's first visit to,
+      <a href="#Page_i.61">i. 61</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his second, <a
+      href="#Page_i.63">i. 63</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.97">97</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.102">102</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">third visit, <a
+      href="#Page_i.106">i. 106</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">effect in, of his first Discourse, <a
+      href="#Page_i.139">i. 139</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">opinions in, on religion, laws, etc., <a
+      href="#Page_i.185">i. 185</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">&quot;mimic philosophy&quot; there, <a
+      href="#Page_i.193">i. 193</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">society in, in Rousseau's time, <a
+      href="#Page_i.202">i. 202</a>-211;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his view of it, <a
+      href="#Page_i.210">i. 210</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">composes there his <i>Muses Galantes</i>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.211">i. 211</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">returns to, from Geneva, <a
+      href="#Page_i.228">i. 228</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his belief of the unfitness of its people for
+      political affairs, <a href="#Page_i.246">i. 246</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">goes to, in 1741, with his scheme of
+      musical notation, <a href="#Page_i.291">i. 291</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">effect there of his letter on music, <a
+      href="#Page_i.295">i. 295</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's imaginary contrast between, and
+      Geneva, <a href="#Page_i.329">i. 329</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Emilius ordered to be publicly burnt in,
+      <a href="#Page_65">ii. 65</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">parliament
+      of, orders &quot;Letters from the Mountain&quot; to be burnt, <a
+      href="#Page_295">ii. 295</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">also
+      Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary, <a href="#Page_295">ii. 295</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Danton's scheme for municipal
+      administration of, <a href="#Page_168">ii. 168</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">two parties (those of Voltaire and of
+      Rousseau) in, in 1793, <a href="#Page_178">ii. 178</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">excitement in, at Rousseau's appearance in 1765,
+      <a href="#Page_283">ii. 283</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">he goes to live there in 1770, <a
+      href="#Page_314">ii. 314</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Voltaire's
+      last visit to, <a href="#Page_323">ii. 323</a>, <a href="#Page_324">324</a>.</span><br />
+      <br /> P&#226;ris, Abb&#233;, miracles at his tomb, <a href="#Page_88">ii.
+      88</a>.<br /> <br /> Parisian frivolity, <a
+      href="#Page_i.193">i. 193</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.220">220</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.329">329</a>.<br /> <br /> Parliament and
+      Jesuits, <a href="#Page_64">ii. 64</a>.<br /> <br /> Pascal, <a
+      href="#Page_37">ii. 37</a>.<br /> <br /> Passy, Rousseau composes the &quot;Village
+      Soothsayer&quot; at, <a href="#Page_i.212">i. 212</a>.<br />
+      <br /> Paul, St., effect of, on western society, <a
+      href="#Page_i.4">i. 4</a>.<br /> <br /> Peasantry, French,
+      oppression of, <a href="#Page_i.67">i. 67</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.68">68</a>.<br /> <br /> Pedigree of
+      Rousseau, <a href="#Page_i.8">i. 8</a>, <i>n.</i><br />
+      <br /> Pelagius, <a href="#Page_272">ii. 272</a>.<br /> <br /> Peoples,
+      sovereignty of, Rousseau not the inventor of doctrine of, <a
+      href="#Page_144">ii. 144</a>-148;<br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">taught
+      by Althusen, <a href="#Page_i.147">i. 147</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">constitution of Helvetic Republic in 1798,
+      a blow at, <a href="#Page_165">ii. 165</a>.</span><br /> <br /> Pergolese,
+      <a href="#Page_i.292">i. 292</a>.<br /> <br /> Pestalozzi
+      indebted to Emilius, <a href="#Page_252">ii. 252</a>.<br /> <br /> Philidor,
+      <a href="#Page_i.292">i. 292</a>.<br /> <br />
+      Philosophers, of Rousseau's time, contradicting each other, <a
+      href="#Page_i.87">i. 87</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's complaint of the, <a
+      href="#Page_i.202">i. 202</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">war between the, and the priests, <a
+      href="#Page_i.322">i. 322</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's reactionary protest against, <a
+      href="#Page_i.328">i. 328</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">troubles of, <a href="#Page_59">ii. 59</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">parliaments hostile to, <a href="#Page_64">ii.
+      64</a>.</span><br /> <br /> Philosophy, Rousseau's disgust at mimic, at
+      Paris, <a href="#Page_i.193">i. 193</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">drew him to the essential in religion, <a
+      href="#Page_i.220">i. 220</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Voltaire's no perfect, <a
+      href="#Page_i.318">i. 318</a>.</span><br /> <br />
+      Phlipon, Jean Marie, Rousseau's influence on, <a href="#Page_315">ii. 315</a>.<br />
+      <br /> Plato, his republic, <a href="#Page_i.122">i. 122</a>;<br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his influence on Rousseau, <a
+      href="#Page_i.146">i. 146</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.325">325</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Milton on his Laws, <a href="#Page_178">ii. 178</a>.</span><br />
+      <br /> <a name="Plays" id="Plays">Plays</a> (stage), Rousseau's letter on,
+      to D'Alembert, <a href="#Page_i.321">i. 321</a>;<br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his views of, <a
+      href="#Page_i.323">i. 323</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Jeremy Collier and Bossuet on, <a
+      href="#Page_i.323">i. 323</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">in Geneva, <a
+      href="#Page_i.333">i. 333</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.334">334</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau, Voltaire, and D'Alembert on, <a
+      href="#Page_i.332">i. 332</a>-337.</span><br /> <br />
+      Plutarch, Rousseau's love for, <a href="#Page_i.13">i.
+      13</a>.<br /> <br /> Plutocracy, new, faults of, <a
+      href="#Page_i.195">i. 195</a>.<br /> <br /> <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_340" id="Page_340">[ii.340]</a></span>Pompadour,
+      Madame de, and the Jesuits, <a href="#Page_64">ii. 64</a>.<br /> <br />
+      Pontverre (priest) converts Rousseau to Romanism, <a
+      href="#Page_i.31">i. 31</a>-35.<br /> <br /> Pope, his
+      Essay on Man translated by Voltaire, <a
+      href="#Page_i.309">i. 309</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Berlin Academy and Lessing on it, <a
+      href="#Page_i.310">i. 310</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">criticism on it by Rousseau, <a
+      href="#Page_i.312">i. 312</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">its general position reproduced by Rousseau, <a
+      href="#Page_i.315">i. 315</a>.</span><br /> <br />
+      Popelini&#232;re, M. de, <a href="#Page_i.211">i. 211</a>.<br />
+      <br /> Positive knowledge, <a href="#Page_i.78">i. 78</a>.<br />
+      <br /> Press, freedom of the, <a href="#Page_59">ii. 59</a>.<br /> <br /> Pr&#233;vost,
+      Abb&#233;, <a href="#Page_i.48">i. 48</a>.<br /> <br /> <i>Projet
+      pour l'Education</i>, <a href="#Page_i.96">i. 96</a>, <i>n.</i><br />
+      <br /> Property, private, evils ascribed to <a
+      href="#Page_i.157">i. 157</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.185">185</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Robespierre disclaimed the intention of
+      attacking, <a href="#Page_i.123">i. 123</a>, <i>n.</i></span><br />
+      <br /> Protestant principles, effect of development of, <a href="#Page_146">ii.
+      146</a>-147.<br /> <br /> Protestantism, his conversion to, <a
+      href="#Page_i.220">i. 220</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">its influence on Rousseau, <a
+      href="#Page_i.221">i. 221</a>.</span><br /> <br /> <br />
+      <span class="smcap">Rameau</span> on Rousseau's <i>Muses Galantes</i>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.119">i. 119</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.211">211</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">mentioned, <a
+      href="#Page_i.291">i. 291</a>.</span><br /> <br />
+      Rationalism, <a href="#Page_i.224">i. 224</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.225">225</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">influence of Descartes on, <a
+      href="#Page_i.225">i. 225</a>.</span><br /> <br /> Reason,
+      De Saint Pierre's views of, <a href="#Page_i.244">i. 244</a>.<br />
+      <br /> Reform, essential priority of social over political, <a
+      href="#Page_43">ii. 43</a>.<br /> <br /> Religion, simplification of, <a
+      href="#Page_i.3">i. 3</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">ideas of, in Paris, <a
+      href="#Page_i.186">i. 186</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.187">187</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.207">207</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.208">208</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's view of, <a
+      href="#Page_i.220">i. 220</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">doctrines of, in Geneva, <a
+      href="#Page_i.223">i. 223</a>-227, also <i>n.</i>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">curious project concerning it, by
+      Rousseau, <a href="#Page_i.317">i. 317</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">separation of spiritual and temporal
+      powers deemed mischievous by Rousseau, <a href="#Page_173">ii. 173</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">in its relation to the state may be
+      considered as of three kinds, <a href="#Page_175">ii. 175</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">duty of the sovereign to establish a civil
+      confession of faith, <a href="#Page_176">ii. 176</a>, <a href="#Page_177">177</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">positive dogmas of this, <a
+      href="#Page_176">ii. 176</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's
+      &quot;pure Hobbism,&quot; <a href="#Page_177">ii. 177</a>.</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">See <a href="#Savoyard">Savoyard Vicar</a>
+      (Emilius), <a href="#Page_256">ii. 256</a>, <a href="#Page_281">281</a>.</span><br />
+      <br /> Renou, Rousseau assumes name of, <a
+      href="#Page_i.129">i. 129</a>; <a href="#Page_312">ii.
+      312</a>.<br /> <br /> Revelation, Christian, Rousseau's controversy on, with
+      Archbishop of Paris, <a href="#Page_86">ii. 86</a>-91.<br /> <br /> <i>R&#234;veries</i>,
+      Rousseau's relinquishing society, <a href="#Page_i.199">i.
+      199</a>;<br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">description of his life in
+      the isle of St. Peter, in the, <a href="#Page_109">ii. 109</a>-115;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">their style <a href="#Page_314">ii. 314</a>.</span><br />
+      <br /> Revolution, French, principles of, <a
+      href="#Page_i.1">i. 1</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.2">2</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">benefits of, or otherwise, <a href="#Page_54">ii.
+      54</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Baboeuf on, <a
+      href="#Page_123">ii. 123</a>, <a href="#Page_124">124</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">the starting point in the history of its
+      ideas, <a href="#Page_160">ii. 160</a>.</span><br /> <br /> Revolutionary
+      process and ideal <a href="#Page_i.4">i. 4</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.5">5</a>.<br /> <br /> Revolutionists,
+      difference among, <a href="#Page_i.2">i. 2</a>.<br />
+      <br /> Richardson (the novelist), <a href="#Page_25">ii. 25</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_28">28</a>.<br /> <br /> Richelieu's brief patronage of
+      Rousseau, <a href="#Page_i.195">i. 195</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.302">302</a>.<br /> <br /> Rivi&#232;re, de
+      la, origin of society, <a href="#Page_156">ii. 156</a>, <a href="#Page_157">157</a>;<br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">anecdote of, <a href="#Page_156">ii. 156</a>,
+      <a href="#Page_157">157</a>, <i>n.</i></span><br /> <br /> Robecq, Madame
+      de, <a href="#Page_56">ii. 56</a>.<br /> <br /> Robespierre, <a
+      href="#Page_123">ii. 123</a>, <a href="#Page_134">134</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_160">160</a>, <a href="#Page_178">178</a>, <a href="#Page_179">179</a>;<br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his &quot;sacred right of insurrection,&quot;
+      <a href="#Page_188">ii. 188</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's influence on, <a href="#Page_315">ii.
+      315</a>.</span><br /> <br /> Rousseau, Didier, <a
+      href="#Page_i.8">i. 8</a>.<br /> <br /> Rousseau, Jean
+      Baptiste, <a href="#Page_i.61">i. 61</a>, <i>n.</i><br />
+      <br /> Rousseau, Jean Jacques, influence of his writings on France and the
+      American colonists, <a href="#Page_i.1">i. 1</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.2">2</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">on Robespierre, Paine, and Chateaubriand, <a
+      href="#Page_i.3">i. 3</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his place as a leader, <a
+      href="#Page_i.3">i. 3</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">starting-point, of his mental habits, <a
+      href="#Page_i.4">i. 4</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">personality of, <a
+      href="#Page_i.4">i. 4</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_341" id="Page_341">[ii.341]</a></span><span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">influence on the common people, <a
+      href="#Page_i.5">i. 5</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his birth and ancestry, <a
+      href="#Page_i.8">i. 8</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">pedigree, <a href="#Page_i.8">i.
+      8</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">parents, <a
+      href="#Page_i.10">i. 10</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.11">11</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">influence upon him of his father's character, <a
+      href="#Page_i.11">i. 11</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.12">12</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his reading in childhood, <a
+      href="#Page_i.12">i. 12</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.13">13</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">love of Plutarch, <a
+      href="#Page_i.13">i. 13</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">early years, <a
+      href="#Page_i.13">i. 13</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.14">14</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">sent to school at Bossey, <a
+      href="#Page_i.15">i. 15</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">deterioration of his moral character there, <a
+      href="#Page_i.17">i. 17</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">indignation at an unjust punishment, <a
+      href="#Page_i.17">i. 17</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.18">18</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">leaves school, <a
+      href="#Page_i.20">i. 20</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">youthful life at Geneva, <a
+      href="#Page_i.21">i. 21</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.22">22</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his remarks on its character, <a
+      href="#Page_i.24">i. 24</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">anecdotes of it, <a
+      href="#Page_i.22">i. 22</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.24">24</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his leading error as to the education of the
+      young, <a href="#Page_i.25">i. 25</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.26">26</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">religious training, <a
+      href="#Page_i.25">i. 25</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">apprenticeship, <a
+      href="#Page_i.26">i. 26</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">boyish doings, <a
+      href="#Page_i.27">i. 27</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">harshness of his master, <a
+      href="#Page_i.27">i. 27</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">runs away, <a href="#Page_i.29">i.
+      29</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">received by the priest
+      of Confignon, <a href="#Page_i.31">i. 31</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">sent to Madame de Warens, <a
+      href="#Page_i.84">i. 84</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">at Turin, <a href="#Page_i.35">i.
+      35</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">hypocritical
+      conversion to Roman Catholicism, <a href="#Page_i.37">i.
+      37</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">motive, <a
+      href="#Page_i.38">i. 38</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">registry of his baptism, <a
+      href="#Page_i.38">i. 38</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his forlorn condition, <a
+      href="#Page_i.39">i. 39</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">love of music, <a
+      href="#Page_i.39">i. 39</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">becomes servant to Madame de Vercellis, <a
+      href="#Page_i.39">i. 39</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his theft, lying, and excuses for it, <a
+      href="#Page_i.39">i. 39</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.40">40</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">becomes servant to Count of Gouvon, <a
+      href="#Page_i.42">i. 42</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">dismissed, <a href="#Page_i.43">i.
+      43</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">returns to Madame de
+      Warens, <a href="#Page_i.45">i. 45</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his temperament, <a
+      href="#Page_i.46">i. 46</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.47">47</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">in training for the priesthood, but pronounced
+      too stupid, <a href="#Page_i.57">i. 57</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">tries music, <a
+      href="#Page_i.57">i. 57</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">shamelessly abandons his companion, <a
+      href="#Page_i.58">i. 58</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">goes to Freiburg, Neuch&#226;tel, and Paris, <a
+      href="#Page_i.61">i. 61</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.62">62</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">conjectural chronology of his movements about
+      this time. <a href="#Page_i.62">i. 62</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">love of vagabond life, <a
+      href="#Page_i.62">i. 62</a>-68;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">effect upon him of his intercourse with the
+      poor, <a href="#Page_i.68">i. 68</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">becomes clerk to a land surveyor at Chamb&#233;ri,
+      <a href="#Page_i.69">i. 69</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">life there, <a
+      href="#Page_i.69">i. 69</a>-72;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">ill-health and retirement to Les Charmettes, <a
+      href="#Page_i.73">i. 73</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his latest recollection of this time, <a
+      href="#Page_i.75">i. 75</a>-77;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his &quot;form of worship,&quot; <a
+      href="#Page_i.77">i. 77</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">love of nature, <a
+      href="#Page_i.77">i. 77</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.78">78</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">notion of deity, <a
+      href="#Page_i.77">i. 77</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">peculiar intellectual feebleness, <a
+      href="#Page_i.81">i. 81</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">criticism on himself, <a
+      href="#Page_i.83">i. 83</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">want of logic in his mental constitution, <a
+      href="#Page_i.85">i. 85</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">effect on him of Voltaire's Letters on the
+      English, <a href="#Page_i.85">i. 85</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">self-training, <a
+      href="#Page_i.86">i. 86</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">mistaken method of it, <a
+      href="#Page_i.86">i. 86</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.87">8</a>7;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">writes a comedy, <a
+      href="#Page_i.89">i. 89</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">enjoyment of rural life at Les Charmettes, <a
+      href="#Page_i.91">i. 91</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.92">92</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">robs Madame de Warens, <a
+      href="#Page_i.92">i. 92</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">leaves her, <a
+      href="#Page_i.93">i. 93</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">discrepancy between dates of his letters and the
+      Confessions, <a href="#Page_i.93">i. 93</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">takes a tutorship at Lyons, <a
+      href="#Page_i.95">i. 95</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">condemns the practice of writing Latin, <a
+      href="#Page_i.96">i. 96</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">resigns his tutorship, and goes to Paris,
+      <a href="#Page_i.97">i. 97</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">reception there, <a
+      href="#Page_i.98">i. 98</a>-100;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">appointed secretary to French Ambassador at
+      Venice, <a href="#Page_i.100">i. 100</a>-106;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">in quarantine at Genoa, <a
+      href="#Page_i.104">i. 104</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his estimate of French melody, <a
+      href="#Page_i.105">i. 105</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">returns to Paris, <a
+      href="#Page_i.106">i. 106</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">becomes acquainted with Theresa Le Vasseur, <a
+      href="#Page_i.106">i. 106</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his conduct criticised, <a
+      href="#Page_i.107">i. 107</a>-113;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">simple life, <a
+      href="#Page_i.113">i. 113</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">letter to her, <a
+      href="#Page_i.115">i. 115</a>-119;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his poverty, <a
+      href="#Page_i.119">i. 119</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">becomes secretary to Madame Dupin and her
+      son-in-law, M. de Francueil, <a href="#Page_i.119">i.
+      119</a>;</span><br /> <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_342" id="Page_342">[ii.342]</a></span><span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">sends his children to the foundling hospital, <a
+      href="#Page_i.120">i. 120</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.121">121</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">paltry excuses for the crime, <a
+      href="#Page_i.121">i. 121</a>-126;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his pretended marriage under the name of Renou,
+      <a href="#Page_i.129">i. 129</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his Discourses, <a
+      href="#Page_i.132">i. 132</a>-186 (see <a
+      href="#Discourses">Discourses</a>);</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">writes essays for academy of Dijon, <a
+      href="#Page_i.132">i. 132</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">origin of first essay, <a
+      href="#Page_i.133">i. 133</a>-137;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his &quot;visions&quot; for thirteen years, <a
+      href="#Page_i.138">i. 138</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">evil effect upon himself of the first Discourse,
+      <a href="#Page_i.138">i. 138</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">of it, the second Discourse and the Social
+      Contract upon Europe, <a href="#Page_i.138">i. 138</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his own opinion of it, <a
+      href="#Page_i.138">i. 138</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.139">139</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">influence of Plato upon him, <a
+      href="#Page_i.146">i. 146</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">second Discourse, <a
+      href="#Page_i.154">i. 154</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his &quot;State of Nature,&quot; <a
+      href="#Page_i.159">i. 159</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">no evidence for it, <a
+      href="#Page_i.172">i. 172</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">influence of Montesquieu on him, <a
+      href="#Page_i.183">i. 183</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">inconsistency of his views, <a
+      href="#Page_i.124">i. 124</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">influence of Geneva upon him, <a
+      href="#Page_i.187">i. 187</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.188">188</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his disgust at Parisian philosophers, <a
+      href="#Page_i.191">i. 191</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.192">192</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">the two sides of his character, <a
+      href="#Page_i.193">i. 193</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">associates in Paris, <a
+      href="#Page_i.193">i. 193</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his income, <a
+      href="#Page_i.196">i. 196</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.197">197</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">post of cashier, <a
+      href="#Page_i.196">i. 196</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">throws it up, <a
+      href="#Page_i.197">i. 197</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.198">198</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">determines to earn his living by copying music,
+      <a href="#Page_i.198">i. 198</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.199">199</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">change of manners, <a
+      href="#Page_i.201">i. 201</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">dislike of the manners of his time, <a
+      href="#Page_i.202">i. 202</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.203">203</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">assumption of a seeming cynicism, <a
+      href="#Page_i.206">i. 206</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Grimm's rebuke of it, <a
+      href="#Page_i.206">i. 206</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's protest against atheism, <a
+      href="#Page_i.208">i. 208</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.209">209</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">composes a musical interlude, the Village
+      Soothsayer, <a href="#Page_i.212">i. 212</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his nervousness loses him the chance of a
+      pension, <a href="#Page_i.213">i. 213</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his moral simplicity, <a
+      href="#Page_i.214">i. 214</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.215">215</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">revisits Geneva, <a
+      href="#Page_i.216">i. 216</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">re-conversion to Protestantism, <a
+      href="#Page_i.220">i. 220</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his friends at Geneva, <a
+      href="#Page_i.227">i. 227</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">their effect upon him, <a
+      href="#Page_i.227">i. 227</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">returns to Paris, <a
+      href="#Page_i.227">i. 227</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">the Hermitage offered him by Madame d'Epinay, <a
+      href="#Page_i.229">i. 229</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.230">230</a> (and <i>ib. n.</i>);</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">retires to it against the protests of his
+      friends, <a href="#Page_i.231">i. 231</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his love of nature, <a
+      href="#Page_i.234">i. 234</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.235">235</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.236">236</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">first days at the Hermitage, <a
+      href="#Page_i.237">i. 237</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">rural delirium, <a
+      href="#Page_i.237">i. 237</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">dislike of society, <a
+      href="#Page_i.242">i. 242</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">literary scheme, <a
+      href="#Page_i.242">i. 242</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.243">243</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">remarks on Saint Pierre, <a
+      href="#Page_i.246">i. 246</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">violent mental crisis, <a
+      href="#Page_i.247">i. 247</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">employs his illness in writing to Voltaire on
+      Providence, <a href="#Page_i.250">i. 250</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.251">251</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his intolerance of vice in others, <a
+      href="#Page_i.254">i. 254</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">acquaintance with Madame de Houdetot, <a
+      href="#Page_i.255">i. 255</a>-269;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">source of his irritability, <a
+      href="#Page_i.270">i. 270</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.271">271</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">blind enthusiasm of his admirers, <a
+      href="#Page_i.273">i. 273</a>, also <i>ib. n.</i>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">quarrels with Diderot, <a
+      href="#Page_i.275">i. 275</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Grimm's account of them, <a
+      href="#Page_i.276">i. 276</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">quarrels with Madame d'Epinay, <a
+      href="#Page_i.276">i. 276</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.288">288</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">relations with Grimm, <a
+      href="#Page_i.279">i. 279</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">want of sympathy between the two, <a
+      href="#Page_i.279">i. 279</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">declines to accompany Madame d'Epinay to Geneva,
+      <a href="#Page_i.285">i. 285</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">quarrels with Grimm, <a
+      href="#Page_i.285">i. 285</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">leaves the Hermitage, <a
+      href="#Page_i.289">i. 289</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.290">290</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">aims in music, <a
+      href="#Page_i.291">i. 291</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">letter on French music, <a
+      href="#Page_i.293">i. 293</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.294">294</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">writes on music in the Encyclop&#230;dia, <a
+      href="#Page_i.296">i. 296</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his Musical Dictionary, <a
+      href="#Page_i.296">i. 296</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">scheme and principles of his new musical
+      notation, <a href="#Page_i.269">i. 269</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">explained, <a
+      href="#Page_i.298">i. 298</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.299">299</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">its practical value, <a
+      href="#Page_i.299">i. 299</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his mistake, <a
+      href="#Page_i.300">i. 300</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">minor objections, <a
+      href="#Page_i.300">i. 300</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his temperament and Genevan spirit, <a
+      href="#Page_i.303">i. 303</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">compared with Voltaire, <a
+      href="#Page_i.304">i. 304</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.305">305</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      class="pagenum"><a name="Page_343" id="Page_343">[ii.343]</a></span><span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">had a more spiritual element than Voltaire, <a
+      href="#Page_i.306">i. 306</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">its influence in France, <a
+      href="#Page_i.307">i. 307</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">early relations with Voltaire, <a
+      href="#Page_i.308">i. 308</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">letter to him on his poem on the earthquake at
+      Lisbon, <a href="#Page_i.312">i. 312</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.313">313</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.314">314</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">reasons in a circle, <a
+      href="#Page_i.316">i. 316</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">continuation of argument against Voltaire, <a
+      href="#Page_i.316">i. 316</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.317">317</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">curious notion about religion, <a
+      href="#Page_i.317">i. 317</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">quarrels with Voltaire, <a
+      href="#Page_i.318">i. 318</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.319">319</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">denounces him as a &quot;trumpet of impiety,&quot;
+      <a href="#Page_i.320">i. 320</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">letter to D'Alembert on Stage Plays, <a
+      href="#Page_i.321">i. 321</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">true answer to his theory, <a
+      href="#Page_i.323">i. 323</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.324">324</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">contrasts Paris and Geneva, <a
+      href="#Page_i.327">i. 327</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.328">328</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his patriotism, <a
+      href="#Page_i.329">i. 329</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.330">330</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.331">331</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">censure of love as a poetic theme, <a
+      href="#Page_i.334">i. 334</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.335">335</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">on Social Position of Women, <a
+      href="#Page_i.335">i. 335</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Voltaire and D'Alembert's criticism on his
+      Letter on Stage Plays, <a href="#Page_i.336">i. 336</a>,
+      <a href="#Page_i.337">337</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">final break with Diderot, <a
+      href="#Page_i.336">i. 336</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">antecedents of his highest creative efforts, <a
+      href="#Page_1">ii. 1</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">friends
+      at Montmorency, <a href="#Page_2">ii. 2</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">reads the New Helo&#239;sa to the Mar&#233;chale
+      de Luxembourg, <a href="#Page_2">ii. 2</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">unwillingness to receive gifts, <a href="#Page_5">ii.
+      5</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his relations with the
+      Duke and Duchess de Luxembourg, <a href="#Page_7">ii. 7</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">misunderstands the friendliness of Madame
+      de Boufflers, <a href="#Page_7">ii. 7</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">calm life at Montmorency, <a href="#Page_8">ii.
+      8</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">literary jealousy, <a
+      href="#Page_8">ii. 8</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">last
+      of his peaceful days, <a href="#Page_9">ii. 9</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">advice to a young man against the contemplative
+      life, <a href="#Page_10">ii. 10</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">offensive form of his &quot;good sense&quot;
+      concerning persecution of Protestants, <a href="#Page_11">ii. 11</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_12">12</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">cause
+      of his unwillingness to receive gifts, ii. <a href="#Page_13">13</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_14">14</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">owns
+      his ungrateful nature, <a href="#Page_15">ii. 15</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">ill-humoured banter, <a href="#Page_15">ii. 15</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his constant bodily suffering, <a
+      href="#Page_16">ii. 16</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">thinks
+      of suicide, <a href="#Page_16">ii. 16</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">correspondence with the readers of the New Helo&#239;sa,
+      <a href="#Page_19">ii. 19</a>, <a href="#Page_20">20</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">the New Helo&#239;sa, criticism on, <a
+      href="#Page_20">ii. 20</a>-55 (see <a href="#New">New Helo&#239;sa</a>);</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his publishing difficulties, <a
+      href="#Page_56">ii. 56</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">no
+      taste for martyrdom, <a href="#Page_59">ii. 59</a>, <a href="#Page_60">60</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">curious discussion between, <a
+      href="#Page_59">ii. 59</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">and
+      Malesherbes, <a href="#Page_60">ii. 60</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">indebted to Malesherbes in the publication of
+      Emilius, <a href="#Page_61">ii. 61</a>, <a href="#Page_62">62</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">suspects Jesuits, Jansenists, and
+      philosophers of plotting to crush the book, <a href="#Page_63">ii. 63</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">himself counted among the latter, <a
+      href="#Page_65">ii. 65</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Emilius
+      ordered to be burnt by public executioner, on the charge of irreligious
+      tendency, and its author to be arrested, <a href="#Page_65">ii. 65</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his flight, <a href="#Page_67">ii. 67</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">literary composition on the journey to
+      Switzerland, <a href="#Page_69">ii. 69</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">contrast between him and Voltaire, <a
+      href="#Page_70">ii. 70</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">explanation
+      of his &quot;natural ingratitude,&quot; <a href="#Page_71">ii. 71</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">reaches the canton of Berne, and ordered
+      to quit it, <a href="#Page_72">ii. 72</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Emilius and Social Contract condemned to be
+      publicly burnt at Geneva, and author arrested if he came there, <a
+      href="#Page_72">ii. 72</a>, <a href="#Page_73">73</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">takes refuge at Motiers, in dominions of
+      Frederick of Prussia, <a href="#Page_73">ii. 73</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">characteristic letters to the king, <a
+      href="#Page_74">ii. 74</a>, <a href="#Page_77">77</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">declines pecuniary help from him, <a
+      href="#Page_75">ii. 75</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his
+      home and habits at Motiers, <a href="#Page_77">ii. 77</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_78">78</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Voltaire
+      supposed to have stirred up animosity against him at Geneva, <a
+      href="#Page_81">ii. 81</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Archbishop
+      of Paris writes against him, <a href="#Page_83">ii. 83</a>;</span><br />
+      <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_344" id="Page_344">[ii.344]</a></span><span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his reply, and character as a controversialist,
+      <a href="#Page_83">ii. 83</a>-90;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">life at Val de Travers (Motiers), <a
+      href="#Page_91">ii. 91</a>-95;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his
+      generosity, <a href="#Page_93">ii. 93</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">corresponds with the Prince of W&#252;rtemberg
+      on the education of the prince's daughter, <a href="#Page_95">ii. 95</a>,
+      <a href="#Page_96">96</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">on
+      Gibbon, <a href="#Page_96">ii. 96</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">visit from Boswell, <a href="#Page_98">ii. 98</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">invited to legislate for Corsica, <a
+      href="#Page_99">ii. 99</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">urges Boswell to go there, <a href="#Page_100">ii.
+      100</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">denounces its sale by
+      the Genoese, <a href="#Page_102">ii. 102</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">renounces his citizenship of Geneva, <a
+      href="#Page_103">ii. 103</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his
+      Letters from the Mountain, <a href="#Page_104">ii. 104</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">the letters condemned to be burned at
+      Paris and the Hague, <a href="#Page_105">ii. 105</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">libel upon, <a href="#Page_105">ii. 105</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">religious difficulties with his pastor, <a
+      href="#Page_106">ii. 106</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">ill-treatment
+      of, in parish, <a href="#Page_106">ii. 106</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">obliged to leave it, <a href="#Page_108">ii. 108</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his next retreat, <a href="#Page_108">ii.
+      108</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">account in the <i>R&#234;veries</i>
+      of his short stay there, <a href="#Page_109">ii. 109</a>-115;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">expelled by government of Berne, <a
+      href="#Page_116">ii. 116</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">makes
+      an extraordinary request to it, <a href="#Page_116">ii. 116</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_117">117</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">difficulties
+      in finding a home, <a href="#Page_117">ii. 117</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">short stay at Strasburg, <a href="#Page_117">ii.
+      117</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">decides on
+      going to England, <a href="#Page_118">ii. 118</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his Social Contract, and criticism on, <a
+      href="#Page_119">ii. 119</a>, <a href="#Page_196">196</a> (see <a
+      href="#Social">Social Contract</a>);</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">scanty acquaintance with history, <a
+      href="#Page_129">ii. 129</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">its
+      effects on his political writings, <a href="#Page_129">ii. 129</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_136">136</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his
+      object in writing Emilius, <a href="#Page_198">ii. 198</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his confession of faith, under the
+      character of the Savoyard Vicar (see <a href="#Emilius">Emilius</a>), <a
+      href="#Page_257">ii. 257</a>-280;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">excitement caused by his appearance in Paris in
+      1765, <a href="#Page_282">ii. 282</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">leaves for England in company with Hume, <a
+      href="#Page_283">ii. 283</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">reception
+      in London, <a href="#Page_283">ii. 283</a>, <a href="#Page_284">284</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">George III. gives him a pension, <a
+      href="#Page_284">ii. 284</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his
+      love for his dog, <a href="#Page_286">ii. 286</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">finds a home at Wootton, <a href="#Page_286">ii.
+      286</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">quarrels with Hume,
+      <a href="#Page_287">ii. 287</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">particulars in connection with it, <a
+      href="#Page_287">ii. 287</a>-296;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his approaching insanity at this period, <a
+      href="#Page_296">ii. 296</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">the
+      preparatory conditions of it, <a href="#Page_297">ii. 297</a>-301;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">begins writing the Confessions, <a
+      href="#Page_301">ii. 301</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">their
+      character, <a href="#Page_301">ii. 301</a>-304;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">life at Wootton, <a href="#Page_305">ii. 305</a>,
+      <a href="#Page_306">306</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">sudden
+      flight thence, <a href="#Page_306">ii. 306</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">kindness of Mr. Davenport, <a href="#Page_306">ii.
+      306</a>, <a href="#Page_307">307</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his delusion, <a href="#Page_307">ii. 307</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">returns to France, <a href="#Page_308">ii.
+      308</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">received at Fleury by
+      the elder Mirabeau, <a href="#Page_310">ii. 310</a>, <a href="#Page_311">311</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">the prince of Conti next receives him at
+      Trye, <a href="#Page_312">ii. 312</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">composes the second part of the Confessions
+      here, <a href="#Page_312">ii. 312</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">delusion returns, <a href="#Page_312">ii. 312</a>,
+      <a href="#Page_313">313</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">leaves
+      Trye, and wanders about the country, <a href="#Page_312">ii. 312</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_313">313</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">estrangement
+      from Theresa, <a href="#Page_313">ii. 313</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">goes to Paris, <a href="#Page_314">ii. 314</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">writes his Dialogues there, <a
+      href="#Page_314">ii. 314</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">again
+      earns his living by copying music, <a href="#Page_315">ii. 315</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">daily life in, <a href="#Page_315">ii. 315</a>,
+      <a href="#Page_316">316</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Bernardin
+      St. Pierre's account of him, <a href="#Page_317">ii. 317</a>-321;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his veneration for F&#233;nelon, <a
+      href="#Page_321">ii. 321</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his
+      unsociality, <a href="#Page_322">ii. 322</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">checks a detractor of Voltaire, <a
+      href="#Page_324">ii. 324</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">draws
+      up his Considerations on the Government of Poland, <a href="#Page_324">ii.
+      324</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">estimate of the
+      Spanish, <a href="#Page_324">ii. 324</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his poverty, <a href="#Page_325">ii. 325</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">accepts a home at Ermenonville from M.
+      Girardin, <a href="#Page_326">ii. 326</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his painful condition, <a href="#Page_326">ii.
+      326</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">sudden death, <a
+      href="#Page_326">ii. 326</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">cause
+      of it unknown, <a href="#Page_326">ii. 326</a> (see also <i>ib. n.</i>);</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his interment, <a href="#Page_326">ii. 326</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">finally removed to Paris, <a
+      href="#Page_328">ii. 328</a>.</span><br /> <br /> <br /> <span class="pagenum"><a
+      name="Page_345" id="Page_345">[ii.345]</a></span><span class="smcap">Sainte
+      Beuve</span> on Rousseau and Madame d'Epinay, <a
+      href="#Page_i.279">i. 279</a>, <i>n.</i>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">on Rousseau, <a href="#Page_40">ii. 40</a>.</span><br />
+      <br /> Saint Germain, M. de, Rousseau's letter to, <a
+      href="#Page_i.123">i. 123</a>.<br /> <br /> Saint Just, <a
+      href="#Page_132">ii. 132</a>, <a href="#Page_133">133</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his political regulations, <a href="#Page_133">ii.
+      133</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">base of
+      his system, <a href="#Page_136">ii. 136</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">against the atheists, <a href="#Page_179">ii.
+      179</a>.</span><br /> <br /> Saint Lambert, <a
+      href="#Page_i.244">i. 244</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">offers Rousseau a home in Lorraine, <a
+      href="#Page_117">ii. 117</a>.</span><br /> <br /> Saint Pierre, Abb&#233;
+      de, Rousseau arranges papers of, <a href="#Page_i.244">i.
+      244</a>;<br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his views concerning reason,
+      <i>ib.</i>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">boldness of his
+      observations, <a href="#Page_i.245">i. 245</a>.</span><br />
+      <br /> Saint Pierre, Bernardin de, account of his visit to Rousseau at
+      Paris, <a href="#Page_317">ii. 317</a>-321.<br /> <br /> Sand, Madame G., <a
+      href="#Page_i.81">i. 81</a>, <i>n.</i>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Savoy landscape, <a
+      href="#Page_i.99">i. 99</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">ancestry of, <a
+      href="#Page_i.121">i. 121</a>, <i>n.</i></span><br />
+      <br /> Savages, code of morals of, <a href="#Page_i.178">i.
+      178</a>-179, <i>n.</i><br /> <br /> Savage state, advantages of, Rousseau's
+      letter to Voltaire, <a href="#Page_i.312">i. 312</a>.<br />
+      <br /> Savoy, priests of, proselytisers, <a
+      href="#Page_i.30">i. 30</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.31">31</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.33">33</a> (also <i>ib.</i> <i>n.</i>)<br />
+      <br /> <a name="Savoyard" id="Savoyard">Savoyard </a>Vicar, the, origin of
+      character of, <a href="#Page_257">ii. 257</a>-280 (see <a href="#Emilius">Emilius</a>).<br />
+      <br /> Schiller on Rousseau, <a href="#Page_192">ii. 192</a> (also <i>ib.</i>
+      <i>n.</i>);<br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's influence on,
+      <a href="#Page_315">ii. 315</a>.</span><br /> <br /> Servetus, <a
+      href="#Page_180">ii. 180</a>.<br /> <br /> Simplification, the revolutionary
+      process and ideal of, <a href="#Page_i.4">i. 4</a>;<br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">in reference to Rousseau's music, <a
+      href="#Page_i.291">i. 291</a>.</span><br /> <br /> Social
+      conscience, theory and definition of, <a href="#Page_234">ii. 234</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_235">235</a>;<br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">the great
+      agent in fostering, <a href="#Page_237">ii. 237</a>.</span><br /> <br /> <a
+      name="Social" id="Social">Social Contract</a>, the, ill effect of, on
+      Europe, <a href="#Page_i.138">i. 138</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">beginning of its composition, <a
+      href="#Page_i.177">i. 177</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">ideas of, <a href="#Page_i.188">i.
+      188</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">its harmful dreams,
+      <a href="#Page_i.246">i. 246</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">influence of, <a href="#Page_1">ii. 1</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">price of, and difficulties in publishing,
+      <a href="#Page_59">ii. 59</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">ordered
+      to be burnt at Geneva, <a href="#Page_72">ii. 72</a>, <a href="#Page_73">73</a>,
+      <a href="#Page_104">104</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">detailed
+      criticism of, <a href="#Page_119">ii. 119</a>-196;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau diametrically opposed to the dominant
+      belief of his day in human perfectibility, <a href="#Page_119">ii. 119</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">object of the work, <a href="#Page_120">ii.
+      120</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">main position of the
+      two Discourses given up in it, <a href="#Page_120">ii. 120</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">influenced by Locke, <a href="#Page_120">ii.
+      120</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">its uncritical,
+      illogical principles, <a href="#Page_123">ii. 123</a>, <a href="#Page_124">124</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">its impracticableness, <a href="#Page_128">ii.
+      128</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">nature of his
+      illustrations, <a href="#Page_128">ii. 128</a>-133;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">the &quot;gospel of the Jacobins,&quot; <a
+      href="#Page_132">ii. 132</a>, <a href="#Page_133">133</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">the desperate absurdity of its assumptions
+      gave it power in the circumstances of the times, <a href="#Page_135">ii.
+      135</a>-141;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">some of its
+      maxims very convenient for ruling Jacobins, <a href="#Page_142">ii. 142</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">its central conception, the sovereignty of
+      peoples, <a href="#Page_144">ii. 144</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau not its inventor, <a href="#Page_144">ii.
+      144</a>, <a href="#Page_145">145</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">this to be distinguished from doctrine of right
+      of subjects to depose princes, <a href="#Page_146">ii. 146</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Social Contract idea of government,
+      probably derived from Locke, <a href="#Page_150">ii. 150</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">falseness of it, <a href="#Page_153">ii.
+      153</a>, <a href="#Page_154">154</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">origin of society, <a href="#Page_154">ii. 154</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">ill effects on Rousseau's political
+      speculation, <a href="#Page_155">ii. 155</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">what constitutes the sovereignty, <a
+      href="#Page_158">ii. 158</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's
+      Social Contract different from that of Hobbes, <a href="#Page_159">ii. 159</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Locke's indefiniteness on, <a
+      href="#Page_160">ii. 160</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">attributes
+      of sovereignty, <a href="#Page_163">ii. 163</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">confederation, <a href="#Page_164">ii. 164</a>,
+      <a href="#Page_165">165</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his
+      distinction between <i>tyrant</i> and <i>despot</i>, <a href="#Page_169">ii.
+      169</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br /> <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_346"
+      id="Page_346">[ii.346]</a></span><span style="margin-left: 1em;">distinguishes
+      constitution of the state from that of the government, <a href="#Page_170">ii.
+      170</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">scheme of an elective
+      aristocracy, <a href="#Page_172">ii. 172</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">similarity to the English form of government, <a
+      href="#Page_173">ii. 173</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">the
+      state in respect to religion, <a href="#Page_173">ii. 173</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">habitually illogical form of his
+      statements, <a href="#Page_173">ii. 173</a>, <a href="#Page_174">174</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">duty of sovereign to establish civil
+      profession of faith, <a href="#Page_175">ii. 175</a>, <a href="#Page_176">176</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">infringement of it to be punished, even by
+      death, <a href="#Page_176">ii. 176</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's Hobbism, <a href="#Page_177">ii. 177</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">denial of his social compact theory, <a
+      href="#Page_183">ii. 183</a>, <a href="#Page_184">184</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">futility of his disquisitions on, <a
+      href="#Page_185">ii. 185</a>, <a href="#Page_186">186</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his declaration of general duty of
+      rebellion (arising out of the universal breach of social compact)
+      considered, <a href="#Page_188">ii. 188</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">it makes government impossible, <a
+      href="#Page_188">ii. 188</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">he
+      urges that usurped authority is another valid reason for rebellion, <a
+      href="#Page_190">ii. 190</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">practical
+      evils of this, <a href="#Page_192">ii. 192</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">historical effect of the Social Contract, <a
+      href="#Page_192">ii. 192</a>-195.</span><br /> <br /> Social quietism of
+      some parts of New Helo&#239;sa, <a href="#Page_49">ii. 49</a>.<br /> <br />
+      Socialism: Morelly, and De Mably, <a href="#Page_52">ii. 52</a>;<br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">what it is, <a href="#Page_159">ii. 159</a>.</span><br />
+      <br /> Socialistic theory of Morelly, <a
+      href="#Page_i.158">i. 158</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.159">159</a> (also <a
+      href="#Page_i.158">i. 158</a>, <i>n.</i>)<br /> <br />
+      Society, Aristotle on, <a href="#Page_i.174">i. 174</a>;<br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">D'Alembert's statements on, <a
+      href="#Page_i.174">i. 174</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Parisian, Rousseau on, <a
+      href="#Page_i.209">i. 209</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">dislike of, <a
+      href="#Page_i.242">i. 242</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's origin of, <a href="#Page_153">ii.
+      153</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">true grounds of, <a
+      href="#Page_155">ii. 155</a>, <a href="#Page_156">156</a>.</span><br />
+      <br /> Socrates, <a href="#Page_i.131">i. 131</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.140">140</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.232">232</a>; <a href="#Page_72">ii. 72</a>,
+      <a href="#Page_273">273</a>.<br /> <br /> Solitude, eighteenth century
+      notions of, <a href="#Page_i.231">i. 231</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.232">232</a>.<br /> <br /> Solon, <a
+      href="#Page_133">ii. 133</a>.<br /> <br /> Sorbonne, the, condemns Emilius,
+      <a href="#Page_82">ii. 82</a>.<br /> <br /> Spectator, the, Rousseau's
+      liking for, <a href="#Page_i.86">i. 86</a>.<br /> <br />
+      Spinoza, dangerous speculations of, <a href="#Page_i.143">i.
+      143</a>.<br /> <br /> Sta&#235;l, Madame de, <a
+      href="#Page_i.217">i. 217</a>, <i>n.</i><br /> <br />
+      Stage players, how treated in France, <a
+      href="#Page_i.322">i. 322</a>.<br /> <br /> Stage plays
+      (see <a href="#Plays">Plays</a>).<br /> <br /> <a name="State" id="State">State
+      of Nature</a>, Rousseau's, <a href="#Page_i.159">i. 159</a>,
+      <a href="#Page_i.160">160</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Hobbes on, <a
+      href="#Page_i.161">i. 161</a> (see <a href="#Nature">Nature</a>).</span><br />
+      <br /> Suicide, Rousseau on, <a href="#Page_16">ii. 16</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">a mistake to pronounce him incapable of, <a
+      href="#Page_19">ii. 19</a>.</span><br /> <br /> Switzerland, <a
+      href="#Page_i.330">i. 330</a>.<br /> <br /> <br /> <span
+      class="smcap">Tacitus</span>, <a href="#Page_i.177">i.
+      177</a>.<br /> <br /> Theatre, Rousseau's letter, objecting to the, <a
+      href="#Page_i.133">i. 133</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his error in the matter, <a
+      href="#Page_i.134">i. 134</a>.</span><br /> <br />
+      Theology, metaphysical, Descartes' influence on, <a
+      href="#Page_i.226">i. 226</a>.<br /> <br /> Theresa (see
+      Le <a href="#Vasseur">Vasseur</a>).<br /> <br /> Thought, school of,
+      division between rationalists and emotionalists, <a
+      href="#Page_i.337">i. 337</a>.<br /> <br /> Tonic Sol-fa
+      notation, close correspondence of the, to Rousseau's system, <a
+      href="#Page_i.299">i. 299</a>.<br /> <br /> Tronchin on
+      Voltaire, <a href="#Page_i.319">i. 319</a>, <i>n.</i>,
+      <a href="#Page_i.321">321</a>.<br /> <br /> Turgot, <a
+      href="#Page_i.89">i. 89</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his discourses at the Sorbonne in 1750, <a
+      href="#Page_i.155">i. 155</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">the one sane eminent Frenchman of eighteenth
+      century, <a href="#Page_i.202">i. 202</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his unselfish toil, <a
+      href="#Page_i.233">i. 233</a>; <a href="#Page_193">ii.
+      193</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">mentioned, <a
+      href="#Page_246">ii. 246</a>, <a href="#Page_294">294</a>.</span><br />
+      <br /> Turin, Rousseau at, <a href="#Page_i.34">i. 34</a>-43;<br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">leaves it, <a
+      href="#Page_i.45">i. 45</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">tries to learn Latin at, <a
+      href="#Page_i.91">i. 91</a>.</span><br /> <br /> Turretini
+      and other rationalisers, <a href="#Page_i.226">i. 226</a>;<br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his works, <a
+      href="#Page_i.226">i. 226</a>, <i>n.</i></span><br />
+      <br /> <br /> <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_347" id="Page_347">[ii.347]</a></span><span
+      class="smcap">Universe</span>, constitution of, discussion on, <a
+      href="#Page_i.311">i. 311</a>-317.<br /> <br /> <br />
+      <span class="smcap">Vagabond</span> life, Rousseau's love of, <a
+      href="#Page_i.63">i. 63</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.68">68</a>.<br /> <br /> Val de Travers, <a
+      href="#Page_77">ii. 77</a>;<br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's
+      life in, <a href="#Page_91">ii. 91</a>-95.</span><br /> <br /> <a
+      name="Vasseur" id="Vasseur">Vasseur</a>, Theresa Le, Rousseau's first
+      acquaintance with, <a href="#Page_i.106">i. 106</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.107">107</a>, also <i>ib.</i> <i>n.</i>;<br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">their life together, <a
+      href="#Page_i.110">i. 110</a>-113;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">well befriended, <a href="#Page_80">ii. 80</a>,
+      <i>n.</i>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">her evil character,
+      <a href="#Page_326">ii. 326</a>.</span><br /> <br /> Vauvenargues on
+      emotional instinct, <a href="#Page_34">ii. 34</a>.<br /> <br /> Venice,
+      Rousseau at, <a href="#Page_i.100">i. 100</a>-106.<br />
+      <br /> Vercellis, Madame de, Rousseau servant to, <a
+      href="#Page_i.39">i. 39</a>.<br /> <br /> Verdelin, Madame
+      de, her kindness to Theresa, <a href="#Page_80">ii. 80</a>, <i>n.</i>;<br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">to Rousseau, <a href="#Page_118">ii. 118</a>,
+      <i>n.</i></span><br /> <br /> Village Soothsayer, the (<i>Devin du Village</i>),
+      composed at Passy, performed at Fontainebleau and Paris, <a
+      href="#Page_i.212">i. 212</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">marked a revolution in French Music, <a
+      href="#Page_i.291">i. 291</a>.</span><br /> <br />
+      Voltaire, <a href="#Page_i.2">i. 2</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.21">21</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.63">63</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">effect on Rousseau of his Letters on the
+      English, <a href="#Page_i.86">i. 86</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">spreads a derogatory report about
+      Rousseau, <a href="#Page_i.101">i. 101</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his &quot;Princesse de Navarre,&quot; <a
+      href="#Page_i.119">i. 119</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">criticism on Rousseau's first Discourse, <a
+      href="#Page_i.147">i. 147</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">effect on his work of his common sense, <a
+      href="#Page_i.155">i. 155</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">avoids the society of Paris, <a
+      href="#Page_i.202">i. 202</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his conversion to Romanism, <a
+      href="#Page_i.220">i. 220</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.221">221</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">strictures on Homer and Shakespeare, <a
+      href="#Page_i.280">i. 280</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his position in the eighteenth century, <a
+      href="#Page_i.301">i. 301</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">general difference between, and Rousseau, <a
+      href="#Page_i.301">i. 301</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">clung to the rationalistic school of his day, <a
+      href="#Page_i.305">i. 305</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">on Rousseau's second Discourse, <a
+      href="#Page_i.308">i. 308</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his poem on the earthquake of Lisbon, <a
+      href="#Page_i.309">i. 309</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.310">310</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his sympathy with suffering, <a
+      href="#Page_i.311">i. 311</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.312">312</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">entreated by Rousseau to draw up a civil
+      profession of religious faith, <a href="#Page_i.317">i.
+      317</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">denounced by Rousseau
+      as a &quot;trumpet of impiety,&quot; <a
+      href="#Page_i.317">i. 317</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.320">320</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his satire and mockery irritated Rousseau, <a
+      href="#Page_i.319">i. 319</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">what he was to his contemporaries, <a
+      href="#Page_i.321">i. 321</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">the great play-writer of the time, <a
+      href="#Page_i.321">i. 321</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">his criticism of Rousseau's Letter on the
+      Theatre, <a href="#Page_i.336">i. 336</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his indignation at wrong, <a
+      href="#Page_11">ii. 11</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">ridicule
+      of the New Helo&#239;sa, <a href="#Page_34">ii. 34</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">less courageous than Rousseau, <a href="#Page_65">ii.
+      65</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">contrast between the
+      two, <a href="#Page_i.99">i. 99</a>, <a href="#Page_75">ii.
+      75</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">supposed to have
+      stirred up animosity at Geneva against Rousseau, <a href="#Page_81">ii. 81</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">denies it, <a href="#Page_81">ii. 81</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his notion of how the matter would end, <a
+      href="#Page_81">ii. 81</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his
+      fickleness, <a href="#Page_83">ii. 83</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">on Rousseau's connection with Corsica, <a
+      href="#Page_101">ii. 101</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his
+      Philosophical Dictionary burnt by order at Paris, <a href="#Page_105">ii.
+      105</a>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">his opinion of
+      Emilius, <a href="#Page_257">ii. 257</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">prime agent in introducing English deism into
+      France, <a href="#Page_262">ii. 262</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">suspected by Rousseau of having written the
+      pretended letter from the King of Prussia, <a href="#Page_288">ii. 288</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">last visit to Paris, <a href="#Page_324">ii.
+      324</a>.</span><br /> <br /> <br /> <span class="smcap">Walking</span>,
+      Rousseau's love of, <a href="#Page_i.63">i. 63</a>.<br />
+      <br /> Walpole, Horace, writer of the pretended letter from the King of
+      Prussia, <a href="#Page_288">ii. 288</a>, <i>n.</i>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">advises Hume not to publish his account of
+      Rousseau's quarrel with him, <a href="#Page_295">ii. 295</a>.</span><br />
+      <br /> War arising out of the succession to the crown of Poland, <a
+      href="#Page_i.72">i. 72</a>.<br /> <br /> Warens, Madame
+      de, Rousseau's introduction to, <a href="#Page_i.34">i.
+      34</a>;<br /> <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_348" id="Page_348">[ii.348]</a></span><span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">her personal appearance, <a
+      href="#Page_i.34">i. 34</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">receives Rousseau into her house, <a
+      href="#Page_i.43">i. 43</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">her early life, <a
+      href="#Page_i.48">i. 48</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">character of, <a
+      href="#Page_i.49">i. 49</a>-51;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">goes to Paris, <a
+      href="#Page_i.59">i. 59</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">receives Rousseau at Chamb&#233;ri, and gets him
+      employment, <a href="#Page_i.69">i. 69</a>;</span><br />
+      <span style="margin-left: 1em;">her household, <a
+      href="#Page_i.70">i. 70</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">removes to Les Charmettes, <a
+      href="#Page_i.73">i. 73</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">cultivates Rousseau's taste for letters, <a
+      href="#Page_i.85">i. 85</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">Saint Louis, her patron saint, <a
+      href="#Page_i.91">i. 91</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">revisited by Rousseau in 1754, <a
+      href="#Page_i.216">i. 216</a>;</span><br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">her death in poverty and wretchedness, <a
+      href="#Page_i.217">i. 217</a>, <a
+      href="#Page_i.218">218</a> (also <a
+      href="#Page_i.219">i. 219</a>, <i>n.</i>)</span><br />
+      <br /> Wesleyanism, <a href="#Page_258">ii. 258</a>.<br /> <br /> Women,
+      Condorcet on social position of, <a href="#Page_i.335">i.
+      335</a>;<br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">D'Alembert and Condorcet on,
+      <a href="#Page_i.335">i. 335</a>.</span><br /> <br />
+      Wootton, Rousseau's home at, <a href="#Page_286">ii. 286</a>.<br /> <br />
+      World, divine government of, Rousseau vindicates, <a
+      href="#Page_i.312">i. 312</a>.<br /> <br /> W&#252;rtemberg,
+      correspondence between Prince of, and Rousseau, on the education of the
+      little princess, <a href="#Page_95">ii. 95</a>;<br /> <span
+      style="margin-left: 1em;">becomes reigning duke, <a href="#Page_95">ii. 95</a>,
+      <i>n.</i>;</span><br /> <span style="margin-left: 1em;">seeks permission
+      for Rousseau to live in Vienna, <a href="#Page_117">ii. 117</a>.</span><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr style="width: 35%;" />
+    <h3>
+      THE END.
+    </h3>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      <i>Printed by</i> <span class="smcap">R. &amp; R. Clark, Limited</span>,
+      <i>Edinburgh.</i>
+    </p>
+    <p style="text-align: center">
+      [<a href="">Go to Volume 1</a>]
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Rousseau, by John Morley
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ROUSSEAU ***
+
+***** This file should be named 14052-h.htm or 14052-h.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        http://www.gutenberg.org/1/4/0/5/14052/
+
+Produced by Paul Murray, Charlie Kirschner (Vol. 1), Linda
+Cantoni (Vol. 2), and the Online Distributed Proofreading
+Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+The separate html files Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 of the original ebook
+have been combined in the present file by David Widger to make it
+readable in mobile viewers.
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+http://gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
+or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need, is critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at http://www.pglaf.org.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
+http://pglaf.org/fundraising.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at http://pglaf.org
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit http://pglaf.org
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations.
+To donate, please visit: http://pglaf.org/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart is the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     http://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
+
+
+</pre>
+  </body>
+</html>
diff --git a/old/14052.txt b/old/14052.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..546405d
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/14052.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,19815 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Rousseau, by John Morley
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Rousseau
+       Volumes I. and II.
+
+Author: John Morley
+
+Release Date: January 25, 2006 [EBook #14052]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ROUSSEAU ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Paul Murray, Charlie Kirschner (Vol. 1), Linda
+Cantoni (Vol. 2), and the Online Distributed Proofreading
+Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+ROUSSEAU
+
+BY
+
+JOHN MORLEY
+
+
+VOLUMES I. and II.
+
+
+
+London
+MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
+NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
+1905
+
+_All rights reserved_
+
+_First printed in this form 1886_
+_Reprinted 1888, 1891, 1896, 1900, 1905_
+
+
+
+
+
+VOL. I.
+
+
+
+NOTE TO THE FIRST EDITION.
+
+
+This work differs from its companion volume in offering something more
+like a continuous personal history than was necessary in the case of
+such a man as Voltaire, the story of whose life may be found in more
+than one English book of repute. Of Rousseau there is, I believe, no
+full biographical account in our literature, and even France has nothing
+more complete under this head than Musset-Pathay's _Histoire de la Vie
+et des Ouvrages de J.J. Rousseau_ (1821). This, though a meritorious
+piece of labour, is extremely crude and formless in composition and
+arrangement, and the interpreting portions are devoid of interest.
+
+The edition of Rousseau's works to which the references have been made
+is that by M. Auguis, in twenty-seven volumes, published in 1825 by
+Dalibon. In 1865 M. Streckeisen-Moultou published from the originals,
+which had been deposited in the library of Neuchatel by Du Peyrou, the
+letters addressed to Rousseau by various correspondents. These two
+interesting volumes, which are entitled _Rousseau, ses Amis et ses
+Ennemis_, are mostly referred to under the name of their editor.
+
+_February_, 1873.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The second edition in 1878 was revised; some portions were considerably
+shortened, and a few additional footnotes inserted. No further changes
+have been made in the present edition.
+
+_January_, 1886.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS OF VOL. I.
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+PRELIMINARY.
+                                                           PAGE
+
+The Revolution                                                1
+Rousseau its most direct speculative precursor                2
+His distinction among revolutionists                          4
+His personality                                               5
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+YOUTH.
+
+Birth and descent                                             8
+Predispositions                                              10
+First lessons                                                11
+At M. Lambercier's                                           15
+Early disclosure of sensitive temperament                    19
+Return to Geneva                                             20
+Two apprenticeships                                          26
+Flight from Geneva                                           30
+Savoyard proselytisers                                       31
+Rousseau sent to Anncey, and thence to Turin                 34
+Conversion to Catholicism                                    35
+Takes service with Madame de Vercellis                       39
+Then with the Count de Gouvon                                42
+Returns to vagabondage                                       43
+And to Madame de Warens                                      45
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+SAVOY.
+
+Influence of women upon Rousseau                             46
+Account of Madame de Warens                                  48
+Rousseau takes up his abode with her                         54
+His delight in life with her                                 54
+The seminarists                                              57
+To Lyons                                                     58
+Wanderings to Freiburg, Neuchatel, and elsewhere             60
+Through the east of France                                   62
+Influence of these wanderings upon him                       67
+Chamberi                                                     69
+Household of Madame de Warens                                70
+Les Charmettes                                               73
+Account of his feeling for nature                            79
+His intellectual incapacity at this time                     83
+Temperament                                                  84
+Literary interests, and method                               85
+Joyful days with his benefactress                            90
+To Montpellier: end of an episode                            92
+Dates                                                        94
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+THERESA LE VASSEUR.
+
+Tutorship at Lyons                                           95
+Goes to Paris in search of fortune                           97
+His appearance at this time                                  98
+Made secretary to the ambassador at Venice                  100
+His journey thither and life there                          103
+Return to Paris                                             106
+Theresa Le Vasseur                                          107
+Character of their union                                    110
+Rousseau's conduct towards her                              113
+Their later estrangements                                   115
+Rousseau's scanty means                                     119
+Puts away his five children                                 120
+His apologies for the crime                                 122
+Their futility                                              126
+Attempts to recover the children                            128
+Rousseau never married to Theresa                           129
+Contrast between outer and inner life                       130
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+THE DISCOURSES.
+
+Local academies in France                                   132
+Circumstances of the composition of the first Discourse     133
+How far the paradox was original                            135
+His visions for thirteen years                              136
+Summary of the first Discourse                          138-145
+Obligations to Montaigne                                    145
+And to the Greeks                                           145
+Semi-Socratic manner                                        147
+Objections to the Discourse                                 148
+Ways of stating its positive side                           149
+Dangers of exaggerating this positive side                  151
+Its excess                                                  152
+Second Discourse                                            154
+Ideas of the time upon the state of nature                  155
+Their influence upon Rousseau                               156
+Morelly, as his predecessor                                 156
+Summary of the second Discourse                         159-170
+Criticism of its method                                     171
+Objection from its want of evidence                         172
+Other objections to its account of primitive nature         173
+Takes uniformity of process for granted                     176
+In what the importance of the second Discourse consisted    177
+Its protest against the mockery of civilisation             179
+The equality of man, how true, and how false                180
+This doctrine in France, and in America                     182
+Rousseau's Discourses, a reaction against the historic
+    method                                                  183
+Mably, and socialism                                        184
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+PARIS.
+
+Influence of Geneva upon Rousseau                           187
+Two sides of his temperament                                191
+Uncongenial characteristics of Parisian society             191
+His associates                                              195
+Circumstances of a sudden moral reform                      196
+Arising from his violent repugnance for the manners of
+    the time                                                202
+His assumption of a seeming cynicism                        207
+Protests against atheism                                    209
+The Village Soothsayer at Fontainebleau                     212
+Two anedotes of his moral singularity                       214
+Revisits Geneva                                             216
+End of Madame de Warens                                     217
+Rousseau's re-conversion to Protestantism                   220
+The religious opinions then current in Geneva               223
+Turretini and other rationalisers                           226
+Effect upon Rousseau                                        227
+Thinks of taking up his abode in Geneva                     227
+Madame d'Epinay offers him the Hermitage                    229
+Retires thither against the protests of his friends         231
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+THE HERMITAGE.
+
+Distinction between the old and the new anchorite           234
+Rousseau's first days at the Hermitage                      235
+Rural delirium                                              237
+Dislike of society                                          242
+Meditates work on Sensitive Morality                        243
+Arranges the papers of the Abbe de Saint Pierre             244
+His remarks on them                                         246
+Violent mental crisis                                       247
+First conception of the New Heloisa                         250
+A scene of high morals                                      254
+Madame d'Houdetot                                           255
+Erotic mania becomes intensified                            256
+Interviews with Madame d'Houdetot                           258
+Saint Lambert interposes                                    262
+Rousseau's letter to Saint Lambert                          264
+Its profound falsity                                        265
+Saint Lambert's reply                                       267
+Final relations with him and with Madame d'Houdetot         268
+Sources of Rousseau's irritability                          270
+Relations with Diderot                                      273
+With Madame d'Epinay                                        276
+With Grimm                                                  279
+Grimm's natural want of sympathy with Rousseau              282
+Madame d'Epinay's journey to Geneva                         284
+Occasion of Rousseau's breach with Grimm                    285
+And with Madame d'Epinay                                    288
+Leaves the Hermitage                                        289
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+MUSIC.
+
+General character of Rousseau's aim in music                291
+As composer                                                 292
+Contest on the comparative merits of French and Italian
+    music                                                   293
+Rousseau's Letter on French Music                           293
+His scheme of musical notation                              296
+Its chief element                                           298
+Its practical value                                         299
+His mistake                                                 300
+Two minor objections                                        300
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+VOLTAIRE AND D'ALEMBERT.
+
+Position of Voltaire                                        302
+General differences between him and Rousseau                303
+Rousseau not the profounder of the two                      305
+But he had a spiritual element                              305
+Their early relations                                       308
+Voltaire's poem on the Earthquake of Lisbon                 309
+Rousseau's wonder that he should have written it            310
+His letter to Voltaire upon it                              311
+Points to the advantages of the savage state                312
+Reproduces Pope's general position                          313
+Not an answer to the position taken by Voltaire             314
+Confesses the question insoluble, but still argues          316
+Curious close of the letter                                 318
+Their subsequent relations                                  319
+D'Alembert's article on Geneva                              321
+The church and the theatre                                  322
+Jeremy Collier: Bossuet                                     323
+Rousseau's contention on stage plays                        324
+Rude handling of commonplace                                325
+The true answer to Rousseau as to theory of dramatic
+    morality                                                326
+His arguments relatively to Geneva                          327
+Their meaning                                               328
+Criticism on the Misanthrope                                328
+Rousseau's contrast between Paris and an imaginary Geneva   329
+Attack on love as a poetic theme                            332
+This letter, the mark of his schism from the party of the
+    philosophers                                            336
+
+
+
+
+JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU
+
+Born                                                     1712
+Fled from Geneva                           _March_, 1728
+Changes religion at Turin                  _April_,  "
+With Madame de Warens, including various
+    intervals, until                       _April_, 1740
+Goes to Paris with musical schemes                       1741
+Secretary at Venice                       _Spring_, 1743
+
+Paris, first as secretary to M. Francueil, then  {       1744
+    as composer, and copyist                     {        to
+                                                 {       1756
+The Hermitage                            _April 9_, 1756
+Montmorency                              _Dec. 15_, 1757
+Yverdun                                  _June 14_, 1762
+Motiers-Travers                          _July 10_, 1762
+Isle of St. Peter                          _Sept._, 1765
+Strasburg                                   _Nov._,  "
+Paris                                   _December_,  "
+Arrives in England                       _Jan. 13_, 1766
+Leaves Dover                              _May 22_, 1767
+Fleury                                      _June_,  "
+Trye                                        _July_,  "
+Dauphiny                                    _Aug._, 1768
+Paris                                       _June_, 1770
+Death                                     _July 2_, 1778
+
+PRINCIPAL WRITINGS.
+
+Discourse on the Influence of Learning and
+    Art                                           PUBLISHED 1750
+Discourse on Inequality                               "     1754
+Letter to D'Alembert                                  "     1758
+New Heloisa (began 1757, finished in winter
+    of 1759-60)                                       "     1761
+Social Contract                                       "     1762
+Emilius                                               "     1762
+Letters from the Mountain                             "     1764
+Confessions (written 1766-70)                     {  Pt. I  1781
+                                                  {  Pt. II 1788
+Reveries (written 1777-78).
+
+     _Comme dans les etangs assoupis sous les bois,
+     Dans plus d'une ame on voit deux choses a la fois:
+     Le ciel, qui teint les eaux a peine remuees
+     Avec tous ses rayons et toutes ses nuees;
+     Et la vase, fond morne, affreux, sombre et dormant,
+     Ou des reptiles noirs fourmillent vaguement._
+                                                 HUGO.
+
+
+
+
+ROUSSEAU.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+PRELIMINARY.
+
+
+Christianity is the name for a great variety of changes which took place
+during the first centuries of our era, in men's ways of thinking and
+feeling about their spiritual relations to unseen powers, about their
+moral relations to one another, about the basis and type of social
+union. So the Revolution is now the accepted name for a set of changes
+which began faintly to take a definite practical shape first in America,
+and then in France, towards the end of the eighteenth century; they had
+been directly prepared by a small number of energetic thinkers, whose
+speculations represented, as always, the prolongation of some old lines
+of thought in obedience to the impulse of new social and intellectual
+conditions. While one movement supplied the energy and the principles
+which extricated civilisation from the ruins of the Roman empire, the
+other supplies the energy and the principles which already once, between
+the Seven Years' War and the assembly of the States General, saved
+human progress in face of the political fatuity of England and the
+political nullity of France; and they are now, amid the distraction of
+the various representatives of an obsolete ordering, the only forces to
+be trusted at once for multiplying the achievements of human
+intelligence stimulated by human sympathy, and for diffusing their
+beneficent results with an ampler hand and more far-scattering arm.
+Faith in a divine power, devout obedience to its supposed will, hope of
+ecstatic, unspeakable reward, these were the springs of the old
+movement. Undivided love of our fellows, steadfast faith in human
+nature, steadfast search after justice, firm aspiration towards
+improvement, and generous contentment in the hope that others may reap
+whatever reward may be, these are the springs of the new.
+
+There is no given set of practical maxims agreed to by all members of
+the revolutionary schools for achieving the work of release from the
+pressure of an antiquated social condition, any more than there is one
+set of doctrines and one kind of discipline accepted by all Protestants.
+Voltaire was a revolutionist in one sense, Diderot in another, and
+Rousseau in a third, just as in the practical order, Lafayette, Danton,
+Robespierre, represented three different aspirations and as many
+methods. Rousseau was the most directly revolutionary of all the
+speculative precursors, and he was the first to apply his mind boldly to
+those of the social conditions which the revolution is concerned by one
+solution or another to modify. How far his direct influence was
+disastrous in consequence of a mischievous method, we shall have to
+examine. It was so various that no single answer can comprehend an
+exhaustive judgment. His writings produced that glow of enthusiastic
+feeling in France, which led to the all-important assistance rendered by
+that country to the American colonists in a struggle so momentous for
+mankind. It was from his writings that the Americans took the ideas and
+the phrases of their great charter, thus uniting the native principles
+of their own direct Protestantism with principles that were strictly
+derivative from the Protestantism of Geneva. Again, it was his work more
+than that of any other one man, that France arose from the deadly decay
+which had laid hold of her whole social and political system, and found
+that irresistible energy which warded off dissolution within and
+partition from without. We shall see, further, that besides being the
+first immediately revolutionary thinker in politics, he was the most
+stirring of reactionists in religion. His influence formed not only
+Robespierre and Paine, but Chateaubriand, not only Jacobinism, but the
+Catholicism of the Restoration. Thus he did more than any one else at
+once to give direction to the first episodes of revolution, and force to
+the first episode of reaction.
+
+There are some teachers whose distinction is neither correct thought,
+nor an eye for the exigencies of practical organisation, but simply
+depth and fervour of the moral sentiment, bringing with it the
+indefinable gift of touching many hearts with love of virtue and the
+things of the spirit. The Christian organisations which saved western
+society from dissolution owe all to St. Paul, Hildebrand, Luther,
+Calvin; but the spiritual life of the west during all these generations
+has burnt with the pure flame first lighted by the sublime mystic of the
+Galilean hills. Aristotle acquired for men much knowledge and many
+instruments for gaining more; but it is Plato, his master, who moves the
+soul with love of truth and enthusiasm for excellence. There is peril in
+all such leaders of souls, inasmuch as they incline men to substitute
+warmth for light, and to be content with aspiration where they need
+direction. Yet no movement goes far which does not count one of them in
+the number of its chiefs. Rousseau took this place among those who
+prepared the first act of that revolutionary drama, whose fifth act is
+still dark to us.
+
+At the heart of the Revolution, like a torrid stream flowing
+undiscernible amid the waters of a tumbling sea, is a new way of
+understanding life. The social changes desired by the various assailants
+of the old order are only the expression of a deeper change in moral
+idea, and the drift of the new moral idea is to make life simpler. This
+in a sense is at the bottom of all great religious and moral movements,
+and the Revolution emphatically belongs to the latter class. Like such
+movements in the breast of the individual, those which stir an epoch
+have their principle in the same craving for disentanglement of life.
+This impulse to shake off intricacies is the mark of revolutionary
+generations, and it was the starting-point of all Rousseau's mental
+habits, and of the work in which they expressed themselves. His mind
+moved outwards from this centre, and hence the fact that he dealt
+principally with government and education, the two great agencies which,
+in an old civilisation with a thousand roots and feelers, surround
+external life and internal character with complexity. Simplification of
+religion by clearing away the overgrowth of errors, simplification of
+social relations by equality, of literature and art by constant return
+to nature, of manners by industrious homeliness and thrift,--this is the
+revolutionary process and ideal, and this is the secret of Rousseau's
+hold over a generation that was lost amid the broken maze of
+fallen systems.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The personality of Rousseau has most equivocal and repulsive sides. It
+has deservedly fared ill in the esteem of the saner and more rational of
+those who have judged him, and there is none in the history of famous
+men and our spiritual fathers that begat us, who make more constant
+demands on the patience or pity of those who study his life. Yet in no
+other instance is the common eagerness to condense all predication about
+a character into a single unqualified proposition so fatally inadequate.
+If it is indispensable that we should be for ever describing, naming,
+classifying, at least it is well, in speaking of such a nature as his,
+to enlarge the vocabulary beyond the pedantic formulas of unreal ethics,
+and to be as sure as we know how to make ourselves, that each of the
+sympathies and faculties which together compose our power of spiritual
+observation, is in a condition of free and patient energy. Any less open
+and liberal method, which limits our sentiments to absolute approval or
+disapproval, and fixes the standard either at the balance of common
+qualities which constitutes mediocrity, or at the balance of uncommon
+qualities which is divinity as in a Shakespeare, must leave in a cloud
+of blank incomprehensibleness those singular spirits who come from time
+to time to quicken the germs of strange thought and shake the quietness
+of the earth.
+
+We may forget much in our story that is grievous or hateful, in
+reflecting that if any man now deems a day basely passed in which he has
+given no thought to the hard life of garret and hovel, to the forlorn
+children and trampled women of wide squalid wildernesses in cities, it
+was Rousseau who first in our modern time sounded a new trumpet note for
+one more of the great battles of humanity. He makes the poor very proud,
+it was truly said. Some of his contemporaries followed the same vein of
+thought, as we shall see, and he was only continuing work which others
+had prepared. But he alone had the gift of the golden mouth. It was in
+Rousseau that polite Europe first hearkened to strange voices and faint
+reverberation from out of the vague and cavernous shadow in which the
+common people move. Science has to feel the way towards light and
+solution, to prepare, to organise. But the race owes something to one
+who helped to state the problem, writing up in letters of flame at the
+brutal feast of kings and the rich that civilisation is as yet only a
+mockery, and did furthermore inspire a generation of men and women with
+the stern resolve that they would rather perish than live on in a world
+where such things can be.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+YOUTH.
+
+
+Jean Jacques Rousseau was born at Geneva, June 28, 1712. He was of old
+French stock. His ancestors had removed from Paris to the famous city of
+refuge as far back as 1529, a little while before Farel came thither to
+establish the principles of the Reformation, and seven years before the
+first visit of the more extraordinary man who made Geneva the mother
+city of a new interpretation of Christianity, as Rome was the mother
+city of the old. Three generations in a direct line separated Jean
+Jacques from Didier Rousseau, the son of a Paris bookseller, and the
+first emigrant.[1] Thus Protestant tradition in the Rousseau family
+dates from the appearance of Protestantism in Europe, and seems to have
+exerted the same kind of influence upon them as it did, in conjunction
+with the rest of the surrounding circumstances, upon the other citizens
+of the ideal state of the Reformation. It is computed by the historians
+that out of three thousand families who composed the population of
+Geneva towards the end of the seventeenth century, there were hardly
+fifty who before the Reformation had acquired the position of
+burgess-ship. The curious set of conditions which thus planted a colony
+of foreigners in the midst of a free polity, with a new doctrine and
+newer discipline, introduced into Europe a fresh type of character and
+manners. People declared they could recognise in the men of Geneva
+neither French vivacity, nor Italian subtlety and clearness, nor Swiss
+gravity. They had a zeal for religion, a vigorous energy in government,
+a passion for freedom, a devotion to ingenious industries, which marked
+them with a stamp unlike that of any other community.[2] Towards the
+close of the seventeenth century some of the old austerity and rudeness
+was sensibly modified under the influence of the great neighbouring
+monarchy. One striking illustration of this tendency was the rapid
+decline of the Savoyard patois in popular use. The movement had not gone
+far enough when Rousseau was born, to take away from the manners and
+spirit of his country their special quality and individual note.
+
+The mother of Jean Jacques, who seems to have been a simple, cheerful,
+and tender woman, was the daughter of a Genevan minister; her maiden
+name, Bernard. The birth of her son was fatal to her, and the most
+touching and pathetic of all the many shapes of death was the fit
+beginning of a life preappointed to nearly unlifting cloud. "I cost my
+mother her life," he wrote, "and my birth was the first of my woes."[3]
+Destiny thus touches us with magical finger, long before consciousness
+awakens to the forces that have been set to work in our personality,
+launching us into the universe with country, forefathers, and physical
+predispositions, all fixed without choice of ours. Rousseau was born
+dying, and though he survived this first crisis by the affectionate care
+of one of his father's sisters, yet his constitution remained infirm and
+disordered.
+
+Inborn tendencies, as we perceive on every side, are far from having
+unlimited irresistible mastery, if they meet early encounter from some
+wise and patient external will. The father of Rousseau was unfortunately
+cast in the same mould as his mother, and the child's own morbid
+sensibility was stimulated and deepened by the excessive sensibility of
+his first companion. Isaac Rousseau, in many of his traits, was a
+reversion to an old French type. In all the Genevese there was an
+underlying tendency of this kind. "Under a phlegmatic and cool air,"
+wrote Rousseau, when warning his countrymen against the inflammatory
+effects of the drama, "the Genevese hide an ardent and sensitive
+character, that is more easily moved than controlled."[4] And some of
+the episodes in their history during the eighteenth century might be
+taken for scenes from the turbulent dramas of Paris. But Isaac
+Rousseau's restlessness, his eager emotion, his quick and punctilious
+sense of personal dignity, his heedlessness of ordered affairs, were not
+common in Geneva, fortunately for the stability of her society and the
+prosperity of her citizens. This disorder of spirit descended in
+modified form to the son; it was inevitable that he should be indirectly
+affected by it. Before he was seven years old he had learnt from his
+father to indulge a passion for the reading of romances. The child and
+the man passed whole nights in a fictitious world, reading to one
+another in turn, absorbed by vivid interest in imaginary situations,
+until the morning note of the birds recalled them to a sense of the
+conditions of more actual life, and made the elder cry out in confusion
+that he was the more childish of the two.
+
+The effect of this was to raise passion to a premature exaltation in the
+young brain. "I had no idea of real things," he said, "though all the
+sentiments were already familiar to me. Nothing had come to me by
+conception, everything by sensation. These confused emotions, striking
+me one after another, did not warp a reason that I did not yet possess,
+but they gradually shaped in me a reason of another cast and temper,
+and gave me bizarre and romantic ideas of human life, of which neither
+reflection nor experience has ever been able wholly to cure me."[5] Thus
+these first lessons, which have such tremendous influence over all that
+follow, had the direct and fatal effect in Rousseau's case of deadening
+that sense of the actual relations of things to one another in the
+objective world, which is the master-key and prime law of sanity.
+
+In time the library of romances came to an end (1719), and Jean Jacques
+and his father fell back on the more solid and moderated fiction of
+history and biography. The romances had been the possession of the
+mother; the more serious books were inherited from the old minister, her
+father. Such books as Nani's History of Venice, and Le Sueur's History
+of the Church and the Empire, made less impression on the young Rousseau
+than the admirable Plutarch; and he used to read to his father during
+the hours of work, and read over again to himself during all hours,
+those stories of free and indomitable souls which are so proper to
+kindle the glow of generous fire. Plutarch was dear to him to the end of
+his life; he read him in the late days when he had almost ceased to
+read, and he always declared Plutarch to be nearly the only author to
+whom he had never gone without profit."[6] "I think I see my father now,"
+he wrote when he had begun to make his mark in Paris, "living by the
+work of his hands, and nourishing his soul on the sublimest truths. I
+see Tacitus, Plutarch, and Grotius, lying before him along with the
+tools of his craft. I see at his side a cherished son receiving
+instruction from the best of fathers, alas, with but too little
+fruit."[7] This did little to implant the needed impressions of the
+actual world. Rousseau's first training continued to be in an excessive
+degree the exact reverse of our common method; this stirs the
+imagination too little, and shuts the young too narrowly within the
+strait pen of present and visible reality. The reader of Plutarch at the
+age of ten actually conceived himself a Greek or a Roman, and became the
+personage whose strokes of constancy and intrepidity transported him
+with sympathetic ecstasy, made his eyes sparkle, and raised his voice to
+heroic pitch. Listeners were even alarmed one day as he told the tale of
+Scaevola at table, to see him imitatively thrust forth his arm over a
+hot chafing-dish.[8]
+
+Rousseau had one brother, on whom the spirit of the father came down in
+ample measure, just as the sensibility of the mother descended upon Jean
+Jacques. He passed through a boyhood of revolt, and finally ran away
+into Germany, where he was lost from sight and knowledge of his kinsmen
+for ever. Jean Jacques was thus left virtually an only child,[9] and he
+commemorates the homely tenderness and care with which his early years
+were surrounded. Except in the hours which he passed in reading by the
+side of his father, he was always with his aunt, in the self-satisfying
+curiosity of childhood watching her at work with the needle and busy
+about affairs of the house, or else listening to her with contented
+interest, as she sang the simple airs of the common people. The
+impression of this kind and cheerful figure was stamped on his memory to
+the end; her tone of voice, her dress, the quaint fashion of her hair.
+The constant recollection of her shows, among many other signs, how he
+cherished that conception of the true unity of a man's life, which
+places it in a closely-linked chain of active memories, and which most
+of us lose in wasteful dispersion of sentiment and poor fragmentariness
+of days. When the years came in which he might well say, I have no
+pleasure in them, and after a manhood of distress and suspicion and
+diseased sorrows had come to dim those blameless times, he could still
+often surprise himself unconsciously humming the tune of one of his
+aunt's old songs, with many tears in his eyes.[10]
+
+This affectionate schooling came suddenly to an end. Isaac Rousseau in
+the course of a quarrel in which he had involved himself, believed that
+he saw unfairness in the operation of the law, for the offender had
+kinsfolk in the Great Council. He resolved to leave his country rather
+than give way, in circumstances which compromised his personal honour
+and the free justice of the republic. So his house was broken up, and
+his son was sent to school at the neighbouring village of Bossey (1722),
+under the care of a minister, "there to learn along with Latin all the
+medley of sorry stuff with which, under the name of education, they
+accompany Latin."[11] Rousseau tells us nothing of the course of his
+intellectual instruction here, but he marks his two years' sojourn under
+the roof of M. Lambercier by two forward steps in that fateful
+acquaintance with good and evil, which is so much more important than
+literary knowledge. Upon one of these fruits of the tree of nascent
+experience, men usually keep strict silence. Rousseau is the only person
+that ever lived who proclaimed to the whole world as a part of his own
+biography the ignoble circumstances of the birth of sensuality in
+boyhood. Nobody else ever asked us to listen while he told of the
+playmate with which unwarned youth takes its heedless pleasure, which
+waxes and strengthens with years, until the man suddenly awakens to find
+the playmate grown into a master, grotesque and foul, whose unclean grip
+is not to be shaken off, and who poisons the air with the goatish fume
+of the satyr. It is on this side that the unspoken plays so decisive a
+part, that most of the spoken seems but as dust in the balance; it is
+here that the flesh spreads gross clouds over the firmament of the
+spirit. Thinking of it, we flee from talk about the high matters of will
+and conscience, of purity of heart and the diviner mind, and hurry to
+the physician. Manhood commonly saves itself by its own innate
+healthiness, though the decent apron bequeathed to us in the old legend
+of the fall, the thick veil of a more than legendary reserve, prevents
+us from really measuring the actual waste of delicacy and the finer
+forces. Rousseau, most unhappily for himself, lacked this innate
+healthiness; he never shook off the demon which would be so ridiculous,
+if it did not hide such terrible power. With a moral courage, that it
+needs hardly less moral courage in the critic firmly to refrain from
+calling cynical or shameless, he has told the whole story of this
+lifelong depravation. In the present state of knowledge, which in the
+region of the human character the false shamefacedness of science, aided
+and abetted by the mutilating hand of religious asceticism, has kept
+crude and imperfect, there is nothing very profitable to be said on all
+this. When the great art of life has been more systematically conceived
+in the long processes of time and endeavour, and when more bold,
+ffective, and far-reaching advance has been made in defining those
+pathological manifestations which deserve to be seriously studied, as
+distinguished from those of a minor sort which are barely worth
+registering, then we should know better how to speak, or how to be
+silent, in the present most unwelcome instance. As it is, we perhaps do
+best in chronicling the fact and passing on. The harmless young are
+allowed to play without monition or watching among the deep open graves
+of temperament; and Rousseau, telling the tale of his inmost experience,
+unlike the physician and the moralist who love decorous surfaces of
+things, did not spare himself nor others a glimpse of the ignominies to
+which the body condemns its high tenant, the soul.[12]
+
+The second piece of experience which he acquired at Bossey was the
+knowledge of injustice and wrongful suffering as things actual and
+existent. Circumstances brought him under suspicion of having broken the
+teeth of a comb which did not belong to him. He was innocent, and not
+even the most terrible punishment could wring from him an untrue
+confession of guilt. The root of his constancy was not in an abhorrence
+of falsehood, which is exceptional in youth, and for which he takes no
+credit, but in a furious and invincible resentment against the violent
+pressure that was unjustly put upon him. "Picture a character, timid and
+docile in ordinary life, but ardent, impetuous, indomitable in its
+passions; a child always governed by the voice of reason, always treated
+with equity, gentleness, and consideration, who had not even the idea of
+injustice, and who for the first time experiences an injustice so
+terrible, from the very people whom he most cherishes and respects! What
+a confusion of ideas, what disorder of sentiments, what revolution in
+heart, in brain, in every part of his moral and intellectual being!" He
+had not learnt, any more than other children, either to put himself in
+the place of his elders, or to consider the strength of the apparent
+case against him. All that he felt was the rigour of a frightful
+chastisement for an offence of which he was innocent. And the
+association of ideas was permanent. "This first sentiment of violence
+and injustice has remained so deeply engraved in my soul, that all the
+ideas relating to it bring my first emotion back to me; and this
+sentiment, though only relative to myself in its origin, has taken such
+consistency, and become so disengaged from all personal interest, that
+my heart is inflamed at the sight or story of any wrongful action, just
+as much as if its effect fell on my own person. When I read of the
+cruelties of some ferocious tyrant, or the subtle atrocities of some
+villain of a priest, I would fain start on the instant to poniard such
+wretches, though I were to perish a hundred times for the deed.... This
+movement may be natural to me, and I believe it is so; but the profound
+recollection of the first injustice I suffered was too long and too fast
+bound up with it, not to have strengthened it enormously."[13]
+
+To men who belong to the silent and phlegmatic races like our own, all
+this may possibly strike on the ear like a false or strained note. Yet a
+tranquil appeal to the real history of one's own strongest impressions
+may disclose their roots in facts of childish experience, which
+remoteness of time has gradually emptied of the burning colour they once
+had. This childish discovery of the existence in his own world of that
+injustice which he had only seen through a glass very darkly in the
+imaginary world of his reading, was for Rousseau the angry dismissal
+from the primitive Eden, which in one shape and at one time or another
+overtakes all men. "Here," he says, "was the term of the serenity of my
+childish days. From this moment I ceased to enjoy a pure happiness, and
+I feel even at this day that the reminiscence of the delights of my
+infancy here comes to an end.... Even the country lost in our eyes that
+charm of sweetness and simplicity which goes to the heart; it seemed
+sombre and deserted, and was as if covered by a veil, hiding its
+beauties from our sight. We no longer tended our little gardens, our
+plants, our flowers. We went no more lightly to scratch the earth,
+shouting for joy as we discovered the germ of the seed we had sown."
+
+Whatever may be the degree of literal truth in the Confessions, the
+whole course of Rousseau's life forbids us to pass this passionate
+description by as overcharged or exaggerated. We are conscious in it of
+a constitutional infirmity. We perceive an absence of healthy power of
+reaction against moral shock. Such shocks are experienced in many
+unavoidable forms by all save the dullest natures, when they first come
+into contact with the sharp tooth of outer circumstance. Indeed, a man
+must be either miraculously happy in his experiences, or exceptionally
+obtuse in observing and feeling, or else be the creature of base and
+cynical ideals, if life does not to the end continue to bring many a
+repetition of that first day of incredulous bewilderment. But the urgent
+demands for material activity quickly recall the mass of men to normal
+relations with their fellows and the outer world. A vehement objective
+temperament, like Voltaire's, is instantly roused by one of these
+penetrative stimuli into angry and tenacious resistance. A proud and
+collected soul, like Goethe's, loftily follows its own inner aims,
+without taking any heed of the perturbations that arise from want of
+self-collection in a world still spelling its rudiments. A sensitive and
+depressed spirit, like Rousseau's or Cowper's, finds itself without any
+of these reacting kinds of force, and the first stroke of cruelty or
+oppression is the going out of a divine light.
+
+Leaving Bossey, Rousseau returned to Geneva, and passed two or three
+years with his uncle, losing his time for the most part, but learning
+something of drawing and something of Euclid, for the former of which he
+showed special inclination.[14] It was a question whether he was to be
+made a watchmaker, a lawyer, or a minister. His own preference, as his
+after-life might have led us to suppose, was in favour of the last of
+the three; "for I thought it a fine thing," he says, "to preach." The
+uncle was a man of pleasure, and as often happens in such
+circumstances, his love of pleasure had the effect of turning his wife
+into a pietist. Their son was Rousseau's constant comrade. "Our
+friendship filled our hearts so amply, that if we were only together,
+the simplest amusements were a delight." They made kites, cages, bows
+and arrows, drums, houses; they spoiled the tools of their grandfather,
+in trying to make watches like him. In the same cheerful imitative
+spirit, which is the main feature in childhood when it is not disturbed
+by excess of literary teaching, after Geneva had been visited by an
+Italian showman with a troop of marionettes, they made puppets and
+composed comedies for them; and when one day the uncle read aloud an
+elegant sermon, they abandoned their comedies, and turned with blithe
+energy to exhortation. They had glimpses of the rougher side of life in
+the biting mockeries of some schoolboys of the neighbourhood. These
+ended in appeal to the god of youthful war, who pronounced so plainly
+for the bigger battalions, that the release of their enemies from school
+was the signal for the quick retreat of our pair within doors. All this
+is an old story in every biography written or unwritten. It seldom fails
+to touch us, either in the way of sympathetic reminiscence, or if life
+should have gone somewhat too hardly with a man, then in the way of
+irony, which is not less real and poetic than the eironeia of a Greek
+dramatist, for being concerned with more unheroic creatures.
+
+And this rough play of the streets always seemed to Rousseau a manlier
+schooling than the effeminate tendencies which he thought he noticed in
+Genevese youth in after years. "In my time," he says admiringly,
+"children were brought up in rustic fashion and had no complexion to
+keep.... Timid and modest before the old, they were bold, haughty,
+combative among themselves; they had no curled locks to be careful of;
+they defied one another at wrestling, running, boxing. They returned
+home sweating, out of breath, torn; they were true blackguards, if you
+will, but they made men who have zeal in their heart to serve their
+country and blood to shed for her. May we be able to say as much one day
+of our fine little gentlemen, and may these men at fifteen not turn out
+children at thirty."[15]
+
+Two incidents of this period remain to us, described in Rousseau's own
+words, and as they reveal a certain sweetness in which his life
+unhappily did not afterwards greatly abound, it may help our equitable
+balance of impressions about him to reproduce them. Every Sunday he used
+to spend the day at Paquis at Mr. Fazy's, who had married one of his
+aunts, and who carried on the production of printed calicoes. "One day I
+was in the drying-room, watching the rollers of the hot press; their
+brightness pleased my eye; I was tempted to lay my fingers on them, and
+I was moving them up and down with much satisfaction along the smooth
+cylinder, when young Fazy placed himself in the wheel and gave it a
+half-quarter turn so adroitly, that I had just the ends of my two
+longest fingers caught, but this was enough to crush the tips and tear
+the nails. I raised a piercing cry; Fazy instantly turned back the
+wheel, and the blood gushed from my fingers. In the extremity of
+consternation he hastened to me, embraced me, and besought me to cease
+my cries, or he would be undone. In the height of my own pain, I was
+touched by his; I instantly fell silent, we ran to the pond, where he
+helped me to wash my fingers and to staunch the blood with moss. He
+entreated me with tears not to accuse him; I promised him that I would
+not, and I kept my word so well that twenty years after no one knew the
+origin of the scar. I was kept in bed for more than three weeks, and for
+more than two months was unable to use my hand. But I persisted that a
+large stone had fallen and crushed my fingers."[16]
+
+The other story is of the same tenour, though there is a new touch of
+sensibility in its concluding words. "I was playing at ball at Plain
+Palais, with one of my comrades named Plince. We began to quarrel over
+the game; we fought, and in the fight he dealt me on my bare head a
+stroke so well directed, that with a stronger arm it would have dashed
+my brains out. I fell to the ground, and there never was agitation like
+that of this poor lad, as he saw the blood in my hair. He thought he had
+killed me. He threw himself upon me, and clasped me eagerly in his arms,
+while his tears poured down his cheeks, and he uttered shrill cries. I
+returned his embrace with all my force, weeping like him, in a state of
+confused emotion which was not without a kind of sweetness. Then he
+tried to stop the blood which kept flowing, and seeing that our two
+handkerchiefs were not enough, he dragged me off to his mother's; she
+had a small garden hard by. The good woman nearly fell sick at sight of
+me in this condition; she kept strength enough to dress my wound, and
+after bathing it well, she applied flower-de-luce macerated in brandy,
+an excellent remedy much used in our country. Her tears and those of her
+son, went to my very heart, so that I looked upon them for a long while
+as my mother and my brother."[17]
+
+If it were enough that our early instincts should be thus amiable and
+easy, then doubtless the dismal sloughs in which men and women lie
+floundering would occupy a very much more insignificant space in the
+field of human experience. The problem, as we know, lies in the
+discipline of this primitive goodness. For character in a state of
+society is not a tree that grows into uprightness by the law of its own
+strength, though an adorable instance here and there of rectitude and
+moral loveliness that seem intuitive may sometimes tempt us into a
+moment's belief in a contrary doctrine. In Rousseau's case this serious
+problem was never solved; there was no deliberate preparation of his
+impulses, prepossessions, notions; no foresight on the part of elders,
+and no gradual acclimatisation of a sensitive and ardent nature in the
+fixed principles which are essential to right conduct in the frigid zone
+of our relations with other people. It was one of the most elementary of
+Rousseau's many perverse and mischievous contentions, that it is their
+education by the older which ruins or wastes the abundant capacity for
+virtue that subsists naturally in the young. His mind seems never to
+have sought much more deeply for proof of this, than the fact that he
+himself was innocent and happy so long as he was allowed to follow
+without disturbance the easy simple proclivities of his own temperament.
+Circumstances were not indulgent enough to leave the experiment to
+complete itself within these very rudimentary conditions.
+
+Rousseau had been surrounded, as he is always careful to protest, with a
+religious atmosphere. His father, though a man of pleasure, was
+possessed also not only of probity but of religion as well. His three
+aunts were all in their degrees gracious and devout. M. Lambercier at
+Bossey, "although Churchman and preacher," was still a sincere believer
+and nearly as good in act as in word. His inculcation of religion was so
+hearty, so discreet, so reasonable, that his pupils, far from being
+wearied by the sermon, never came away without being touched inwardly
+and stirred to make virtuous resolutions. With his Aunt Bernard devotion
+was rather more tiresome, because she made a business of it.[18] It
+would be a distinct error to suppose that all this counted for nothing,
+for let us remember that we are now engaged with the youth of the one
+great religious writer of France in the eighteenth century. When after
+many years Rousseau's character hardened, the influences which had
+surrounded his boyhood came out in their full force and the historian of
+opinion soon notices in his spirit and work a something which had no
+counterpart in the spirit and work of men who had been trained in Jesuit
+colleges. At the first outset, however, every trace of religious
+sentiment was obliterated from sight, and he was left unprotected
+against the shocks of the world and the flesh.
+
+At the age of eleven Jean Jacques was sent into a notary's office, but
+that respectable calling struck him in the same repulsive and
+insufferable way in which it has struck many other boys of genius in all
+countries. Contrary to the usual rule, he did not rebel, but was
+ignominiously dismissed by his master[19] for dulness and inaptitude;
+his fellow-clerks pronounced him stupid and incompetent past hope. He
+was next apprenticed to an engraver,[20] a rough and violent man, who
+seems to have instantly plunged the boy into a demoralised stupefaction.
+The reality of contact with this coarse nature benumbed as by touch of
+torpedo the whole being of a youth who had hitherto lived on pure
+sensations and among those ideas which are nearest to sensations. There
+were no longer heroic Romans in Rousseau's universe. "The vilest
+tastes, the meanest bits of rascality, succeeded to my simple
+amusements, without even leaving the least idea behind. I must, in spite
+of the worthiest education, have had a strong tendency to degenerate."
+The truth was that he had never had any education in its veritable
+sense, as the process, on its negative side, of counteracting the
+inborn. There are two kinds, or perhaps we should more correctly say two
+degrees, of the constitution in which the reflective part is weak. There
+are the men who live on sensation, but who do so lustily, with a certain
+fulness of blood and active energy of muscle. There are others who do so
+passively, not searching for excitement, but acquiescing. The former by
+their sheer force and plenitude of vitality may, even in a world where
+reflection is a first condition, still go far. The latter succumb, and
+as reflection does nothing for them, and as their sensations in such a
+world bring them few blandishments, they are tolerably early surrounded
+with a self-diffusing atmosphere of misery. Rousseau had none of this
+energy which makes oppression bracing. For a time he sank.
+
+It would be a mistake to let the story of the Confessions carry us into
+exaggerations. The brutality of his master and the harshness of his life
+led him to nothing very criminal, but only to wrong acts which are
+despicable by their meanness, rather than in any sense atrocious. He
+told lies as readily as the truth. He pilfered things to eat. He
+cunningly found a means of opening his master's private cabinet, and of
+using his master's best instruments by stealth. He wasted his time in
+idle and capricious tasks. When the man, with all the ravity of an adult
+moralist, describes these misdeeds of the boy, they assume a certain
+ugliness of mien, and excites a strong disgust which, when the misdeeds
+themselves are before us in actual life, we experience in a far more
+considerate form. The effect of calm, retrospective avowal is to create
+a kind of feeling which is essentially unlike our feeling at what is
+actually avowed. Still it is clear that his unlucky career as apprentice
+brought out in Rousseau slyness, greediness, slovenliness,
+untruthfulness, and the whole ragged regiment of the squalider vices.
+The evil of his temperament now and always was of the dull smouldering
+kind, seldom breaking out into active flame. There is a certain
+sordidness in the scene. You may complain that the details which
+Rousseau gives of his youthful days are insipid. Yet such things are the
+web and stuff of life, and these days of transition from childhood to
+full manhood in every case mark a crisis. These insipidities test the
+education of home and family, and they presage definitely what is to
+come. The roots of character, good or bad, are shown for this short
+space, and they remain unchanged, though most people learn from their
+fellows the decent and useful art of covering them over with a little
+dust, in the shape of accepted phrases and routine customs and a silence
+which is not oblivion.
+
+After a time the character of Jean Jacques was absolutely broken down.
+He says little of the blows with which his offences were punished by his
+master, but he says enough to enable us to discern that they were
+terrible to him. This cowardice, if we choose to give the name to an
+overmastering physical horror, at length brought his apprentice days to
+an end. He was now in his sixteenth year. He was dragged by his comrades
+into sports for which he had little inclination, though he admits that
+once engaged in them he displayed an impetuosity that carried him beyond
+the others. Such pastimes naturally led them beyond the city walls, and
+on two occasions Rousseau found the gates closed on his return. His
+master when he presented himself in the morning gave him such greeting
+as we may imagine, and held out things beyond imagining as penalty for a
+second sin in this kind. The occasion came, as, alas, it nearly always
+does. "Half a league from the town," says Rousseau, "I hear the retreat
+sounded, and redouble my pace; I hear the drum beat, and run at the top
+of my speed: I arrive out of breath, bathed in sweat; my heart beats
+violently, I see from a distance the soldiers at their post, and call
+out with choking voice. It was too late. Twenty paces from the outpost
+sentinel, I saw the first bridge rising. I shuddered, as I watched those
+terrible horns, sinister and fatal augury of the inevitable lot which
+that moment was opening for me."[21]
+
+In manhood when we have the resource of our own will to fall back upon,
+we underestimate the unsurpassed horror and anguish of such moments as
+this in youth, when we know only the will of others, and that this will
+is inexorable against us. Rousseau dared not expose himself to the
+fulfilment of his master's menace, and he ran away (1728). But for this,
+wrote the unhappy man long years after, "I should have passed, in the
+bosom of my religion, of my native land, of my family, and my friends, a
+mild and peaceful life, such as my character required, in the uniformity
+of work which suited my taste, and of a society after my heart. I should
+have been a good Christian, good citizen, good father of a family, good
+friend, good craftsman, good man in all. I should have been happy in my
+condition, perhaps I might have honoured it; and after living a life
+obscure and simple, but even and gentle, I should have died peacefully
+in the midst of my own people. Soon forgotten, I should at any rate have
+been regretted as long as any memory of me was left."[22]
+
+As a man knows nothing about the secrets of his own individual
+organisation, this illusory mapping out of a supposed Possible need
+seldom be suspected of the smallest insincerity. The poor madman who
+declares that he is a king kept out of his rights only moves our pity,
+and we perhaps owe pity no less to those in all the various stages of
+aberration uncertificated by surgeons, down to the very edge of most
+respectable sanity, who accuse the injustice of men of keeping them out
+of this or that kingdom, of which in truth their own composition
+finally disinherited them at the moment when they were conceived in a
+mother's womb. The first of the famous Five Propositions of Jansen,
+which were a stumbling-block to popes and to the philosophy of the
+eighteenth-century foolishness, put this clear and permanent truth into
+a mystic and perishable formula, to the effect that there are some
+commandments of God which righteous and good men are absolutely unable
+to obey, though ever so disposed to do them, and God does not give them
+so much grace that they are able to observe them.
+
+If Rousseau's sensations in the evening were those of terror, the day
+and its prospect of boundless adventures soon turned them into entire
+delight. The whole world was before him, and all the old conceptions of
+romance were instantly revived by the supposed nearness of their
+realisation. He roamed for two or three days among the villages in the
+neighbourhood of Geneva, finding such hospitality as he needed in the
+cottages of friendly peasants. Before long his wanderings brought him to
+the end of the territory of the little republic. Here he found himself
+in the domain of Savoy, where dukes and lords had for ages been the
+traditional foes of the freedom and the faith of Geneva, Rousseau came
+to the village of Confignon, and the name of the priest of Confignon
+recalled one of the most embittered incidents of the old feud. This feud
+had come to take new forms; instead of midnight expeditions to scale the
+city walls, the descendants of the Savoyard marauders of the sixteenth
+century were now intent with equivocal good will on rescuing the souls
+of the descendants of their old enemies from deadly heresy. At this time
+a systematic struggle was going on between the priests of Savoy and the
+ministers of Geneva, the former using every effort to procure the
+conversion of any Protestant on whom they could lay hands.[23] As it
+happened, the priest of Confignon was one of the most active in this
+good work.[24] He made the young Rousseau welcome, spoke to him of the
+heresies of Geneva and of the authority of the holy Church, and gave him
+some dinner. He could hardly have had a more easy convert, for the
+nature with which he had to deal was now swept and garnished, ready for
+the entrance of all devils or gods. The dinner went for much. "I was too
+good a guest," writes Rousseau in one of his few passages of humour, "to
+be a good theologian, and his Frangi wine, which struck me as excellent,
+was such a triumphant argument on his side, that I should have blushed
+to oppose so capital a host."[25] So it was agreed that he should be put
+in a way to be further instructed of these matters. We may accept
+Rousseau's assurance that he was not exactly a hypocrite in this rapid
+complaisance. He admits that any one who should have seen the artifices
+to which he resorted, might have thought him very false. But, he
+argues, "flattery, or rather concession, is not always a vice; it is
+oftener a virtue, especially in the young. The kindness with which a man
+receives us, attaches us to him; it is not to make a fool of him that we
+give way, but to avoid displeasing him, and not to return him evil for
+good." He never really meant to change his religion; his fault was like
+the coquetting of decent women, who sometimes, to gain their ends,
+without permitting anything or promising anything, lead men to hope more
+than they mean to hold good.[26] Thereupon follow some austere
+reflections on the priest, who ought to have sent him back to his
+friends; and there are strictures even upon the ministers of all
+dogmatic religions, in which the essential thing is not to do but to
+believe; their priests therefore, provided that they can convert a man
+to their faith, are wholly indifferent alike as to his worth and his
+worldly interests. All this is most just; the occasion for such a strain
+of remark, though so apposite on one side, is hardly well chosen to
+impress us. We wonder, as we watch the boy complacently hoodwinking his
+entertainer, what has become of the Roman severity of a few months back.
+This nervous eagerness to please, however, was the complementary element
+of a character of vague ambition, and it was backed by a stealthy
+consciousness of intellectual superiority, which perhaps did something,
+though poorly enough, to make such ignominy less deeply degrading.
+
+The die was cast. M. Pontverre despatched his brand plucked from the
+burning to a certain Madame de Warens, a lady living at Annecy, and
+counted zealous for the cause of the Church. In an interview whose
+minutest circumstances remained for ever stamped in his mind (March 21,
+1728), Rousseau exchanged his first words with this singular personage,
+whose name and character he has covered with doubtful renown. He
+expected to find some gray and wrinkled woman, saving a little remnant
+of days in good works. Instead of this, there turned round upon him a
+person not more than eight-and-twenty years old, with gentle caressing
+air, a fascinating smile, a tender eye. Madame de Warens read the
+letters he brought, and entertained their bearer cheerfully. It was
+decided after consultation that the heretic should be sent to a
+monastery at Turin, where he might be brought over in form to the true
+Church. At the monastery not only would the spiritual question of faith
+and the soul be dealt with, but at the same time the material problem of
+shelter and subsistence for the body would be solved likewise. Elated
+with vanity at the thought of seeing before any of his comrades the
+great land of promise beyond the mountains, heedless of those whom he
+had left, and heedless of the future before him and the object which he
+was about, the young outcast made his journey over the Alps in all
+possible lightness of heart. "Seeing country is an allurement which
+hardly any Genevese can ever resist. Everything that met my eye seemed
+the guarantee of my approaching happiness. In the houses I imagined
+rustic festivals; in the fields, joyful sports; along the streams,
+bathing and fishing; on the trees, delicious fruits; under their shade,
+voluptuous interviews; on the mountains, pails of milk and cream, a
+charming idleness, peace, simplicity, the delight of going forward
+without knowing whither."[27] He might justly choose out this interval
+as more perfectly free from care or anxiety than any other of his life.
+It was the first of the too rare occasions when his usually passive
+sensuousness was stung by novelty and hope into an active energy.
+
+The seven or eight days of the journey came to an end, and the youth
+found himself at Turin without money or clothes, an inmate of a dreary
+monastery, among some of the very basest and foulest of mankind, who
+pass their time in going from one monastery to another through Spain and
+Italy, professing themselves Jews or Moors for the sake of being
+supported while the process of their conversion was going slowly
+forward. At the Hospice of the Catechumens the work of his conversion
+was begun in such earnest as the insincerity of at least one of the
+parties to it might allow. It is needless to enter into the
+circumstances of Rousseau's conversion to Catholicism. The mischievous
+zeal for theological proselytising has led to thousands of such hollow
+and degrading performances, but it may safely be said that none of them
+was ever hollower than this. Rousseau avows that he had been brought up
+in the heartiest abhorrence of the older church, and that he never lost
+this abhorrence. He fully explains that he accepted the arguments with
+which he was not very energetically plied, simply because he could not
+bear the idea of returning to Geneva, and he saw no other way out of his
+present destitute condition. "I could not dissemble from myself that the
+holy deed I was about to do, was at the bottom the action of a bandit."
+"The sophism which destroyed me," he says in one of those eloquent
+pieces of moralising, which bring ignoble action into a relief that
+exaggerates our condemnation, "is that of most men, who complain of lack
+of strength when it is already too late for them to use it. It is only
+through our own fault that virtue costs us anything; if we could be
+always sage, we should rarely feel the need of being virtuous. But
+inclinations that might be easily overcome, drag us on without
+resistance; we yield to light temptations of which we despise the
+hazard. Insensibly we fall into perilous situations, against which we
+could easily have shielded ourselves, but from which we can afterwards
+only make a way out by heroic efforts that stupefy us, and so we sink
+into the abyss, crying aloud to God, Why hast thou made me so weak? But
+in spite of ourselves, God gives answer to our conscience, 'I made thee
+too weak to come out from the pit, because I made thee strong enough to
+avoid falling into it.'"[28] So the hopeful convert did fall in, not as
+happens to the pious soul "too hot for certainties in this our life,"
+to find rest in liberty of private judgment and an open Bible, but
+simply as a means of getting food, clothing, and shelter.[29] The boy
+was clever enough to make some show of resistance, and he turned to good
+use for this purpose the knowledge of Church history and the great
+Reformation controversy which he had picked up at M. Lambercier's. He
+was careful not to carry things too far, and exactly nine days after his
+admission into the Hospice, he "abjured the errors of the sect."[30] Two
+days after that he was publicly received into the kindly bosom of the
+true Church with all solemnity, to the high edification of the devout of
+Turin, who marked their interest in the regenerate soul by contributions
+to the extent of twenty francs in small money.
+
+With that sum and formal good wishes the fathers of the Hospice of the
+Catechumens thrust him out of their doors into the broad world. The
+youth who had begun the day with dreams of palaces, found himself at
+night sleeping in a den where he paid a halfpenny for the privilege of
+resting in the same room with the rude woman who kept the house, her
+husband, her five or six children, and various other lodgers. This rough
+awakening produced no consciousness of hardship in a nature which,
+beneath all fantastic dreams, always remained true to its first sympathy
+with the homely lives of the poor. The woman of the house swore like a
+carter, and was always dishevelled and disorderly: this did not prevent
+Rousseau from recognising her kindness of heart and her staunch
+readiness to befriend. He passed his days in wandering about the streets
+of Turin, seeing the wonders of a capital, and expecting some adventure
+that should raise him to unknown heights. He went regularly to mass,
+watched the pomp of the court, and counted upon stirring a passion in
+the breast of a princess. A more important circumstance was the effect
+of the mass in awakening in his own breast his latent passion for music;
+a passion so strong that the poorest instrument, if it were only in
+tune, never failed to give him the liveliest pleasure. The king of
+Sardinia was believed to have the best performers in Europe; less than
+that was enough to quicken the musical susceptibility which is perhaps
+an invariable element in the most completely sensuous natures.
+
+When the end of the twenty francs began to seem a thing possible, he
+tried to get work as an engraver. A young woman in a shop took pity on
+him, gave him work and food, and perhaps permitted him to make dumb and
+grovelling love to her, until her husband returned home and drove her
+client away from the door with threats and the waving of a wand not
+magical.[31] Rousseau's self-love sought an explanation in the natural
+fury of an Italian husband's jealousy; but we need hardly ask for any
+other cause than a shopkeeper's reasonable objection to vagabonds.
+
+The next step of this youth, who was always dreaming of the love of
+princesses, was to accept with just thankfulness the position of lackey
+or footboy in the household of a widow. With Madame de Vercellis he
+passed three months, and at the end of that time she died. His stay here
+was marked by an incident that has filled many pages with stormful
+discussion. When Madame de Vercellis died, a piece of old rose-coloured
+ribbon was missing; Rousseau had stolen it, and it was found in his
+possession. They asked him whence he had taken it. He replied that it
+had been given to him by Marion, a young and comely maid in the house.
+In her presence and before the whole household he repeated his false
+story, and clung to it with a bitter effrontery that we may well call
+diabolic, remembering how the nervous terror of punishment and exposure
+sinks the angel in man. Our phrase, want of moral courage, really
+denotes in the young an excruciating physical struggle, often so keen
+that the victim clutches after liberation with the spontaneous tenacity
+and cruelty of a creature wrecked in mastering waters. Undisciplined
+sensations constitute egoism in the most ruthless of its shapes, and at
+this epoch, owing either to the brutalities which surrounded his
+apprentice life at Geneva, or to that rapid tendency towards
+degeneration which he suspected in his own character, Rousseau was the
+slave of sensations which stained his days with baseness. "Never," he
+says, in his account of this hateful action, "was wickedness further
+from me than at this cruel moment; and when I accused the poor girl, it
+is contradictory and yet it is true that my affection for her was the
+cause of what I did. She was present to my mind, and I threw the blame
+from myself on to the first object that presented itself. When I saw her
+appear my heart was torn, but the presence of so many people was too
+strong for my remorse. I feared punishment very little; I only feared
+disgrace, but I feared that more than death, more than crime, more than
+anything in the world. I would fain have buried myself in the depths of
+the earth; invincible shame prevailed over all, shame alone caused my
+effrontery, and the more criminal I became, the more intrepid was I made
+by the fright of confessing it. I could see nothing but the horror of
+being recognised and declared publicly to my face a thief, liar, and
+traducer."[32] When he says that he feared punishment little, his
+analysis of his mind is most likely wrong, for nothing is clearer than
+that a dread of punishment in any physical form was a peculiarly strong
+feeling with him at this time. However that may have been, the same
+over-excited imagination which put every sense on the alarm and led him
+into so abominable a misdemeanour, brought its own penalties. It led him
+to conceive a long train of ruin as having befallen Marion in
+consequence of his calumny against her, and this dreadful thought
+haunted him to the end of his life. In the long sleepless nights he
+thought he saw the unhappy girl coming to reproach him with a crime that
+seemed as fresh to him as if it had been perpetrated the day before.[33]
+Thus the same brooding memory which brought back to him the sweet pain
+of his gentle kinswoman's household melody, preserved the darker side of
+his history with equal fidelity and no less perfect continuousness.
+Rousseau expresses a hope and belief that this burning remorse would
+serve as expiation for his fault; as if expiation for the destruction of
+another soul could be anything but a fine name for self-absolution. We
+may, however, charitably and reasonably think that the possible
+consequences of his fault to the unfortunate Marion were not actual, but
+were as much a hallucination as the midnight visits of her reproachful
+spirit. Indeed, we are hardly condoning evil, in suggesting that the
+whole story from its beginning is marked with exaggeration, and that we
+who have our own lives to lead shall find little help in criticising at
+further length the exact heinousness of the ignoble falsehood of a boy
+who happened to grow up into a man of genius.[34]
+
+After an interval of six weeks, which were passed in the garret or
+cellar of his rough patroness with kind heart and ungentle tongue,
+Rousseau again found himself a lackey in the house of a Piedmontese
+person of quality. This new master, the Count of Gouvon, treated him
+with a certain unusual considerateness, which may perhaps make us doubt
+the narrative. His son condescended to teach the youth Latin, and
+Rousseau presumed to entertain a passion for one of the daughters of the
+house, to whom he paid silent homage in the odd shape of attending to
+her wants at table with special solicitude. In this situation he had, or
+at least he supposed that he had, an excellent chance of ultimate
+advancement. But advancement here or elsewhere means a measure of
+stability, and Rousseau's temperament in his youth was the archtype of
+the mutable. An old comrade from Geneva visited him,[35] and as almost
+any incident is stimulating enough to fire the restlessness of
+imaginative youth, the gratitude which he professed to the Count of
+Gouvon and his family, the prudence with which he marked his prospects,
+the industry with which he profited by opportunity, all faded quickly
+into mere dead and disembodied names of virtues. His imagination again
+went over the journey across the mountains; the fields, the woods, the
+streams, began to absorb his whole life. He recalled with delicious
+satisfaction how charming the journey had seemed to him, and thought how
+far more charming it would be in the society of a comrade of his own age
+and taste, without duty, or constraint, or obligation to go or stay
+other than as it might please them. "It would be madness to sacrifice
+such a piece of good fortune to projects of ambition, which were slow,
+difficult, doubtful of execution, and which, even if they should one day
+be realised, were not with all their glory worth a quarter of an hour of
+true pleasure and freedom in youth."[36]
+
+On these high principles he neglected his duties so recklessly that he
+was dismissed from his situation, and he and his comrade began their
+homeward wanderings with more than apostolic heedlessness as to what
+they should eat or wherewithal they should be clothed. They had a toy
+fountain; they hoped that in return for the amusement to be conferred by
+this wonder they should receive all that they might need. Their hopes
+were not fulfilled. The exhibition of the toy fountain did not excuse
+them from their reckoning. Before long it was accidentally broken, and
+to their secret satisfaction, for it had lost its novelty. Their naked,
+vagrancy was thus undisguised. They made their way by some means or
+other across the mountains, and their enjoyment of vagabondage was
+undisturbed by any thought of a future. "To understand my delirium at
+this moment," Rousseau says, in words which shed much light on darker
+parts of his history than fits of vagrancy, "it is necessary to know to
+what a degree my heart is subject to get aflame with the smallest
+things, and with what force it plunges into the imagination of the
+object that attracts it, vain as that object may be. The most grotesque,
+the most childish, the maddest schemes come to caress my favourite idea,
+and to show me the reasonableness of surrendering myself to it."[37] It
+was this deep internal vehemence which distinguished Rousseau all
+through his life from the commonplace type of social revolter. A vagrant
+sensuous temperament, strangely compounded with Genevese austerity; an
+ardent and fantastic imagination, incongruously shot with threads of
+firm reason; too little conscience and too much; a monstrous and
+diseased love of self, intertwined with a sincere compassion and keen
+interest for the great fellowship of his brothers; a wild dreaming of
+dreams that were made to look like sanity by the close and specious
+connection between conclusions and premisses, though the premisses
+happened to have the fault of being profoundly unreal:--this was the
+type of character that lay unfolded in the youth who, towards the autumn
+of 1729, reached Annecy, penniless and ragged, throwing himself once
+more on the charity of the patroness who had given him shelter eighteen
+months before. Few figures in the world at that time were less likely to
+conciliate the favour or excite the interest of an observer, who had not
+studied the hidden convolutions of human character deeply enough to know
+that a boy of eighteen may be sly, sensual, restless, dreamy, and yet
+have it in him to say things one day which may help to plunge a world
+into conflagration.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] Here is the line:--
+
+Didier Rousseau. | Jean | ----------------------- | | David. Noah. | |
+Isaac (b. 1680-5, d. 1745-7). Jean Francois. | | | -------------- | |
+| JEAN JACQUES. Jean. Theodore.
+
+(_Musset-Pathay_, ii. 283.)
+
+[2] Picot's _Hist. de Geneve_, iii. 114.
+
+[3] _Conf._, i. 7.
+
+[4] _Lettre a D'Alembert_, p. 187. Also _Nouv. Hel._, VI. v. 239.
+
+[5] _Conf._, i. 9. Also Second Letter to M. de Malesherbes, p. 356.
+
+[6] _Reveries_, iv. p. 189. "My master and counsellor, Plutarch," he
+says, when he lends a volume to Madame d'Epinay in 1756. _Corr._, i.
+265.
+
+[7] Dedication of the _Discours sur l'Origine de l'Inegalite_, p. 201.
+(June, 1754.)
+
+[8] _Conf._, i. 1.
+
+[9] _Ib_, i. 12.
+
+[10] The tenacity of this grateful recollection is shown in letters to
+her (Madame Gonceru)--one in 1754 (_Corr._, i. 204), another as late
+as 1770 (vi. 129), and a third in 1762 (_Oeuvr. et Corr. Ined._, 392).
+
+[11] _Conf._, i. 17-32.
+
+[12] See also _Conf._, i. 43; iii. 185; vii. 73; xii. 188, _n._ 2.
+
+[13] _Conf._, i. 27-31.
+
+[14] _Conf._, i. 38-47.
+
+[15] _Lettre a D'Alembert_(1758), 178, 179.
+
+[16] _Reveries_, iv. 211, 212.
+
+[17] _Conf._ 212, 213.
+
+[18] _Conf._, ii. 102, 103.
+
+[19] M. Masseron.
+
+[20] M. Ducommun.
+
+[21] _Conf._, i. 69.
+
+[22] _Conf._, i. 72.
+
+[23] J. Gaberel's _Histoire de l'Eglise de Geneve_ (Geneva, 1853-62),
+vol. iii. p. 285.
+
+[24] There is a minute in the register of the company of ministers, to
+the effect that the Sieur de Pontverre "is attracting many young men
+from this town, and changing their religion, and that the public ought
+to be warned." (Gaberel, iii. 224.)
+
+[25] _Conf._, ii. 76.
+
+[26] _Conf._, ii. 77.
+
+[27] _Conf._, ii. 90-97.
+
+[28] _Conf._, ii. 107
+
+[29] See _Emile_, iv. 124, 125, where the youth who was born a
+Calvinist, finding himself a stranger in a strange land, without
+resource, "changed his religion to get bread."
+
+[30] In the _Confessions_ (ii. 115) he has grace enough to make the
+period a month; but the extract from the register of his baptism
+(Gaberel's _Hist. de l'Eglise de Geneve_, iii. 224), which has been
+recently published, shows that this is untrue: "Jean Jacques Rousseau,
+de Geneve (Calviniste), entre a l'hospice a l'age de 16 ans, le 12
+avril, 1728. Abjura les erreurs de la secte le 21; et le 23 du meme
+mois lui fut administre le saint bapteme, ayant pour parrain le sieur
+Andre Ferrero et pour marraine Francoise Christine Rora (ou Rovea)."
+
+A little further on (p. 119) he speaks of having been shut up "for two
+months," but this is not true even on his own showing.
+
+[31] Madame Basile. _Conf._, ii. 121-135.
+
+[32] _Conf._ ii. ad finem.
+
+[33] _Conf._, ii. 144.
+
+[34] Another version of the story mentioned by Musset-Pathay (i. 7)
+makes the object of the theft a diamond, but there is really no
+evidence in the matter beyond that given by Rousseau himself.
+
+[35] Bacle, by name.
+
+[36] _Conf._, iii. 168.
+
+[37] _Conf._, iii. 170. A slightly idealised account of the situation
+is given in _Emile_, Bk. iv. 125.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+SAVOY.
+
+
+The commonplace theory which the world takes for granted as to the
+relations of the sexes, makes the woman ever crave the power and
+guidance of her physically stronger mate. Even if this be a true account
+of the normal state, there is at any rate a kind of temperament among
+the many types of men, in which it seems as if the elements of character
+remain mere futile and dispersive particles, until compelled into unity
+and organisation by the creative shock of feminine influence. There are
+men, famous or obscure, whose lives might be divided into a number of
+epochs, each defined and presided over by the influence of a woman. For
+the inconstant such a calendar contains many divisions, for the constant
+it is brief and simple; for both alike it marks the great decisive
+phases through which character has moved.
+
+Rousseau's temperament was deeply marked by this special sort of
+susceptibility in one of its least agreeable forms. His sentiment was
+neither robustly and courageously animal, nor was it an intellectual
+demand for the bright and vivacious sympathies in which women sometimes
+excel. It had neither bold virility, nor that sociable energy which
+makes close emotional companionship an essential condition of freedom of
+faculty and completeness of work. There is a certain close and sickly
+air round all his dealings with women and all his feeling for them. We
+seem to move not in the star-like radiance of love, nor even in the
+fiery flames of lust, but among the humid heats of some unknown abode of
+things not wholesome or manly. "I know a sentiment," he writes, "which
+is perhaps less impetuous than love, but a thousand times more
+delicious, which sometimes is joined to love, and which is very often
+apart from it. Nor is this sentiment friendship only; it is more
+voluptuous, more tender; I do not believe that any one of the same sex
+could be its object; at least I have been a friend, if ever man was, and
+I never felt this about any of my friends."[38] He admits that he can
+only describe this sentiment by its effects; but our lives are mostly
+ruled by elements that defy definition, and in Rousseau's case the
+sentiment which he could not describe was a paramount trait of his
+mental constitution. It was as a voluptuous garment; in it his
+imagination was cherished into activity, and protected against that
+outer air of reality which braces ordinary men, but benumbs and
+disintegrates the whole vital apparatus of such an organisation as
+Rousseau's. If he had been devoid of this feeling about women, his
+character might very possibly have remained sterile. That feeling was
+the complementary contribution, without which could be no fecundity.
+
+When he returned from his squalid Italian expedition in search of bread
+and a new religion, his mind was clouded with the vague desire, the
+sensual moodiness, which in such natures stains the threshold of
+manhood. This unrest, with its mysterious torments and black delights,
+was banished, or at least soothed into a happier humour, by the
+influence of a person who is one of the most striking types to be found
+in the gallery of fair women.
+
+
+I.
+
+A French writer in the eighteenth century, in a story which deals with a
+rather repulsive theme of action in a tone that is graceful, simple, and
+pathetic, painted the portrait of a creature for whom no moralist with a
+reputation to lose can say a word; and we may, if we choose, fool
+ourselves by supposing her to be without a counterpart in the
+better-regulated world of real life, but, in spite of both these
+objections, she is an interesting and not untouching figure to those who
+like to know all the many-webbed stuff out of which their brothers and
+sisters are made. The Manon Lescaut of the unfortunate Abbe Prevost,
+kindly, bright, playful, tender, but devoid of the very germ of the idea
+of that virtue which is counted the sovereign recommendation of woman,
+helps us to understand Madame de Warens. There are differences enough
+between them, and we need not mistake them for one and the same type.
+Manon Lescaut is a prettier figure, because romance has fewer
+limitations than real life; but if we think of her in reading of
+Rousseau's benefactress, the vision of the imaginary woman tends to
+soften our judgment of the actual one, as well as to enlighten our
+conception of a character that eludes the instruments of a commonplace
+analysis.[39]
+
+She was born at Vevai in 1700; she married early, and early disagreed
+with her husband, from whom she eventually went away, abandoning family,
+religion, country, and means of subsistence, with all gaiety of heart.
+The King of Sardinia happened to be keeping his court at a small town on
+the southern shores of the lake of Geneva, and the conversion of Madame
+de Warens to Catholicism by the preaching of the Bishop of Annecy,[40]
+gave a zest to the royal visit, as being a successful piece of sport in
+that great spiritual hunt which Savoy loved to pursue at the expense of
+the reformed church in Switzerland. The king, to mark his zeal for the
+faith of his house, conferred on the new convert a small pension for
+life; but as the tongues of the scandalous imputed a less pure motive
+for such generosity in a parsimonious prince, Madame de Warens removed
+from the court and settled at Annecy. Her conversion was hardly more
+serious than Rousseau's own, because seriousness was no condition of her
+intelligence on any of its sides or in any of its relations. She was
+extremely charitable to the poor, full of pity for all in misfortune,
+easily moved to forgiveness of wrong or ingratitude; careless, gay,
+open-hearted; having, in a word, all the good qualities which spring in
+certain generous soils from human impulse, and hardly any of those which
+spring from reflection, or are implanted by the ordering of society. Her
+reason had been warped in her youth by an instructor of the devil's
+stamp;[41] finding her attached to her husband and to her duties, always
+cold, argumentative, and impregnable on the side of the senses, he
+attacked her by sophisms, and at last persuaded her that the union of
+the sexes is in itself a matter of the most perfect indifference,
+provided only that decorum of appearance be preserved, and the peace of
+mind of persons concerned be not disturbed.[42] This execrable lesson,
+which greater and more unselfish men held and propagated in grave books
+before the end of the century, took root in her mind. If we accept
+Rousseau's explanation, it did so the more easily as her temperament was
+cold, and thus corroborated the idea of the indifference of what public
+opinion and private passion usually concur in investing with such
+enormous weightiness. "I will even dare to say," Rousseau declares,
+"that she only knew one true pleasure in the world, and that was to give
+pleasure to those whom she loved."[43] He is at great pains to protest
+how compatible this coolness of temperament is with excessive
+sensibility of character; and neither ethological theory nor practical
+observation of men and women is at all hostile to what he is so anxious
+to prove. The cardinal element of character is the speed at which its
+energies move; its rapidity or its steadiness, concentration or
+volatility; whether the thought and feeling travel as quickly as light
+or as slowly as sound. A rapid and volatile constitution like that of
+Madame de Warens is inconsistent with ardent and glowing warmth, which
+belongs to the other sort, but it is essentially bound up with
+sensibility, or readiness of sympathetic answer to every cry from
+another soul. It is the slow, brooding, smouldering nature, like
+Rousseau's own, in which we may expect to find the tropics.
+
+To bring the heavy artillery of moral reprobation to bear upon a poor
+soul like Madame de Warens is as if one should denounce flagrant want
+of moral purpose in the busy movements of ephemera. Her activity was
+incessant, but it ended in nothing better than debt, embarrassment, and
+confusion. She inherited from her father a taste for alchemy, and spent
+much time in search after secret elixirs and the like. "Quacks, taking
+advantage of her weakness, made themselves her master, constantly
+infested her, ruined her, and wasted, in the midst of furnaces and
+chemicals, intelligence, talents, and charms which would have made her
+the delight of the best societies."[44] Perhaps, however, the too
+notorious vagrancy of her amours had at least as much to do with her
+failure to delight the best societies as her indiscreet passion for
+alchemy. Her person was attractive enough. "She had those points of
+beauty," says Rousseau, "which are desirable, because they reside rather
+in expression than in feature. She had a tender and caressing air, a
+soft eye, a divine smile, light hair of uncommon beauty. You could not
+see a finer head or bosom, finer arms or hands."[45] She was full of
+tricks and whimsies. She could not endure the first smell of the soup
+and meats at dinner; when they were placed on the table she nearly
+swooned, and her disgust lasted some time, until at the end of half an
+hour or so she took her first morsel.[46] On the whole, if we accept the
+current standard of sanity, Madame de Warens must be pronounced ever so
+little flighty; but a monotonous world can afford to be lenient to
+people with a slight craziness, if it only has hearty benevolence and
+cheerfulness in its company, and is free from egoism or
+rapacious vanity.
+
+This was the person within the sphere of whose attraction Rousseau was
+decisively brought in the autumn of 1729, and he remained, with certain
+breaks of vagabondage, linked by a close attachment to her until 1738.
+It was in many respects the truly formative portion of his life. He
+acquired during this time much of his knowledge of books, such as it
+was, and his principles of judging them. He saw much of the lives of the
+poor and of the world's ways with them. Above all his ideal was
+revolutionised, and the recent dreams of Plutarchian heroism, of
+grandeur, of palaces, princesses, and a glorious career full in the
+world's eye, were replaced by a new conception of blessedness of life,
+which never afterwards faded from his vision, and which has held a front
+place in the imagination of literary Europe ever since. The notions or
+aspirations which he had picked up from a few books gave way to notions
+and aspirations which were shaped and fostered by the scenes of actual
+life into which he was thrown, and which found his character soft for
+their impression. In one way the new pictures of a future were as
+dissociated from the conditions of reality as the old had been, and the
+sensuous life of the happy valley in Savoy as little fitted a man to
+compose ideals for our gnarled and knotted world as the mental life
+among the heroics of sentimental fiction had done.
+
+Rousseau's delight in the spot where Madame de Warens lived at Annecy
+was the mark of the new ideal which circumstances were to engender in
+him, and after him to spread in many hearts. His room looked over
+gardens and a stream, and beyond them stretched a far landscape. "It was
+the first time since leaving Bossey that I had green before my windows.
+Always shut in by walls, I had nothing under my eye but house-tops and
+the dull gray of the streets. How moving and delicious this novelty was
+to me! It brightened all the tenderness of my disposition. I counted the
+landscape among the kindnesses of my dear benefactress; it seemed as if
+she had brought it there expressly for me. I placed myself there in all
+peacefulness with her; she was present to me everywhere among the
+flowers and the verdure; her charms and those of spring were all mingled
+together in my eyes. My heart, which had hitherto been stifled, found
+itself more free in this ample space, and my sighs had more liberal vent
+among these orchard gardens."[47] Madame de Warens was the semi-divine
+figure who made the scene live, and gave it perfect and harmonious
+accent. He had neither transports nor desires by her side, but existed
+in a state of ravishing calm, enjoying without knowing what. "I could
+have passed my whole life and eternity itself in this way, without an
+instant of weariness. She is the only person with whom I never felt that
+dryness in conversation, which turns the duty of keeping it up into a
+torment. Our intercourse was not so much conversation as an
+inexhaustible stream of chatter, which never came to an end until it was
+interrupted from without. I only felt all the force of my attachment for
+her when she was out of my sight. So long as I could see her I was
+merely happy and satisfied, but my disquiet in her absence went so far
+as to be painful. I shall never forget how one holiday, while she was at
+vespers, I went for a walk outside the town, my heart full of her image
+and of an eager desire to pass all my days by her side. I had sense
+enough to see that for the present this was impossible, and that the
+bliss which I relished so keenly must be brief. This gave to my musing a
+sadness which was free from everything sombre, and which was moderated
+by pleasing hope. The sound of the bells, which has always moved me to a
+singular degree, the singing of the birds, the glory of the weather, the
+sweetness of the landscape, the scattered rustic dwellings in which my
+imagination placed our common home;--all this so struck me with a vivid,
+tender, sad, and touching impression that I saw myself as in an ecstasy
+transported into the happy time and the happy place where my heart,
+possessed of all the felicity that could bring it delight, without even
+dreaming of the pleasures of sense, should share joys
+inexpressible."[48]
+
+There was still, however, a space to be bridged between the doubtful now
+and this delicious future. The harshness of circumstance is ever
+interposing with a money question, and for a vagrant of eighteen the
+first of all problems is a problem of economics. Rousseau was submitted
+to the observation of a kinsman of Madame de Warens,[49] and his verdict
+corresponded with that of the notary of Geneva, with whom years before
+Rousseau had first tried the critical art of making a living. He
+pronounced that in spite of an animated expression, the lad was, if not
+thoroughly inept, at least of very slender intelligence, without ideas,
+almost without attainments, very narrow indeed in all respects, and that
+the honour of one day becoming a village priest was the highest piece of
+fortune to which he had any right to aspire.[50] So he was sent to the
+seminary, to learn Latin enough for the priestly offices. He began by
+conceiving a deadly antipathy to his instructor, whose appearance
+happened to be displeasing to him. A second was found,[51] and the
+patient and obliging temper, the affectionate and sympathetic manner of
+his new teacher made a great impression on the pupil, though the
+progress in intellectual acquirement was as unsatisfactory in one case
+as in the other. It is characteristic of that subtle impressionableness
+to physical comeliness, which in ordinary natures is rapidly effaced by
+press of more urgent considerations, but which Rousseau's strongly
+sensuous quality retained, that he should have remembered, and thought
+worth mentioning years afterwards, that the first of his two teachers at
+the seminary of Annecy had greasy black hair, a complexion as of
+gingerbread, and bristles in place of beard, while the second had the
+most touching expression he ever saw in his life, with fair hair and
+large blue eyes, and a glance and a tone which made you feel that he was
+one of the band predestined from their birth to unhappy days. While at
+Turin, Rousseau had made the acquaintance of another sage and benevolent
+priest,[52] and uniting the two good men thirty years after he conceived
+and drew the character of the Savoyard Vicar.[53]
+
+Shortly the seminarists reported that, though not vicious, their pupil
+was not even good enough for a priest, so deficient was he in
+intellectual faculty. It was next decided to try music, and Rousseau
+ascended for a brief space into the seventh heaven of the arts. This was
+one of the intervals of his life of which he says that he recalls not
+only the times, places, persons, but all the surrounding objects, the
+temperature of the air, its odour, its colour, a certain local
+impression only felt there, and the memory of which stirs the old
+transports anew. He never forgot a certain tune, because one Advent
+Sunday he heard it from his bed being sung before daybreak on the steps
+of the cathedral; nor an old lame carpenter who played the counter-bass,
+nor a fair little abbe who played the violin in the choir.[54] Yet he
+was in so dreamy, absent, and distracted a state, that neither his
+good-will nor his assiduity availed, and he could learn nothing, not
+even music. His teacher, one Le Maitre, belonged to that great class of
+irregular and disorderly natures with which Rousseau's destiny, in the
+shape of an irregular and disorderly temperament of his own, so
+constantly brought him into contact. Le Maitre could not work without
+the inspiration of the wine cup, and thus his passion for his art landed
+him a sot. He took offence at a slight put upon him by the precentor of
+the cathedral of which he was choir-master, and left Annecy in a furtive
+manner along with Rousseau, whom the too comprehensive solicitude of
+Madame de Warens despatched to bear him company. They went together as
+far as Lyons; here the unfortunate musician happened to fall into an
+epileptic fit in the street. Rousseau called for help, informed the
+crowd of the poor man's hotel, and then seizing a moment when no one was
+thinking about him, turned the street corner and finally disappeared,
+the musician being thus "abandoned by the only friend on whom he had a
+right to count."[55] It thus appears that a man maybe exquisitely moved
+by the sound of bells, the song of birds, the fairness of smiling
+gardens, and yet be capable all the time without a qualm of misgiving of
+leaving a friend senseless in the road in a strange place. It has ceased
+to be wonderful how many ugly and cruel actions are done by people with
+an extraordinary sense of the beauty and beneficence of nature. At the
+moment Rousseau only thought of getting back to Annecy and Madame de
+Warens. "It is not," he says in words of profound warning, which many
+men have verified in those two or three hours before the tardy dawn that
+swell into huge purgatorial aeons,--"it is not when we have just done a
+bad action, that it torments us; it is when we recall it long after, for
+the memory of it can never be thrust out."[56]
+
+
+II.
+
+When he made his way homewards again, he found to his surprise and
+dismay that his benefactress had left Annecy, and had gone for an
+indefinite time to Paris. He never knew the secret of this sudden
+departure, for no man, he says, was ever so little curious as to the
+private affairs of his friends. His heart, completely occupied with the
+present, filled its whole capacity and entire space with that, and
+except for past pleasures no empty corner was ever left for what was
+done with.[57] He says he was too young to take the desertion deeply to
+heart. Where he found subsistence we do not know. He was fascinated by a
+flashy French adventurer,[58] in whose company he wasted many hours, and
+the precious stuff of youthful opportunity. He passed a summer day in
+joyful rustic fashion with two damsels whom he hardly ever saw again,
+but the memory of whom and of the holiday that they had made with him
+remained stamped in his brain, to be reproduced many a year hence in
+some of the traits of the new Heloisa and her friend Claire.[59] Then he
+accepted an invitation from a former waiting-woman of Madame de Warens
+to attend her home to Freiburg. On this expedition he paid an hour's
+visit to his father, who had settled and remarried at Nyon. Returning
+from Freiburg, he came to Lausanne, where, with an audacity that might
+be taken for the first presage of mental disturbance, he undertook to
+teach music. "I have already," he says, "noted some moments of
+inconceivable delirium, in which I ceased to be myself. Behold me now a
+teacher of singing, without knowing how to decipher an air. Without the
+least knowledge of composition, I boasted of my skill in it before all
+the world; and without ability to score the slenderest vaudeville, I
+gave myself out for a composer. Having been presented to M. de
+Treytorens, a professor of law, who loved music and gave concerts at his
+house, I insisted on giving him a specimen of my talent, and I set to
+work to compose a piece for his concert with as much effrontery as if I
+knew all about it." The performance came off duly, and the strange
+impostor conducted it with as much gravity as the profoundest master.
+Never since the beginning of opera has the like charivari greeted the
+ears of men.[60] Such an opening was fatal to all chance of scholars,
+but the friendly tavern-keeper who had first taken him in did not lack
+either hope or charity. "How is it," Rousseau cried, many years after
+this, "that having found so many good people in my youth, I find so few
+in my advanced life? Is their stock exhausted? No; but the class in
+which I have to seek them now is not the same as that in which I found
+them then. Among the common people, where great passions only speak at
+intervals, the sentiments of nature make themselves heard oftener. In
+the higher ranks they are absolutely stifled, and under the mask of
+sentiment it is only interest or vanity that speaks."[61]
+
+From Lausanne he went to Neuchatel, where he had more success, for,
+teaching others, he began himself to learn. But no success was marked
+enough to make him resist a vagrant chance. One day in his rambles
+falling in with an archimandrite of the Greek church, who was traversing
+Europe in search of subscriptions for the restoration of the Holy
+Sepulchre, he at once attached himself to him in the capacity of
+interpreter. In this position he remained for a few weeks, until the
+French minister at Soleure took him away from the Greek monk, and
+despatched him to Paris to be the attendant of a young officer.[62] A
+few days in the famous city, which he now saw for the first time, and
+which disappointed his expectations just as the sea and all other
+wonders disappointed them,[63] convinced him that here was not what he
+sought, and he again turned his face southwards in search of Madame de
+Warens and more familiar lands.
+
+The interval thus passed in roaming over the eastern face of France, and
+which we may date in the summer of 1732,[64] was always counted by
+Rousseau among the happy epochs of his life, though the weeks may seem
+grievously wasted to a generation which is apt to limit its ideas of
+redeeming the time to the two pursuits of reading books or making money.
+He travelled alone and on foot from Soleure to Paris and from Paris back
+again to Lyons, and this was part of the training which served him in
+the stead of books. Scarcely any great writer since the revival of
+letters has been so little literary as Rousseau, so little indebted to
+literature for the most characteristic part of his work. He was formed
+by life; not by life in the sense of contact with a great number of
+active and important persons, or with a great number of persons of any
+kind, but in the rarer sense of free surrender to the plenitude of his
+own impressions. A world composed of such people, all dispensing with
+the inherited portion of human experience, and living independently on
+their own stock, would rapidly fall backwards into dissolution. But
+there is no more rash idea of the right composition of a society than
+one which leads us to denounce a type of character for no better reason
+than that, if it were universal, society would go to pieces. There is
+very little danger of Rousseau's type becoming common, unless lunar or
+other great physical influences arise to work a vast change in the
+cerebral constitution of the species. We may safely trust the prodigious
+_vis inertioe_ of human nature to ward off the peril of an eccentricity
+beyond bounds spreading too far. At present, however, it is enough,
+without going into the general question, to notice the particular fact
+that while the other great exponents of the eighteenth century movement,
+Hume, Voltaire, Diderot, were nourishing their natural strength of
+understanding by the study and practice of literature, Rousseau, the
+leader of the reaction against that movement, was wandering a beggar and
+an outcast, craving the rude fare of the peasant's hut, knocking at
+roadside inns, and passing nights in caves and holes in the fields, or
+in the great desolate streets of towns.
+
+If such a life had been disagreeable to him, it would have lost all the
+significance that it now has for us. But where others would have found
+affliction, he had consolation, and where they would have lain desperate
+and squalid, he marched elate and ready to strike the stars. "Never," he
+says, "did I think so much, exist so much, be myself so much, as in the
+journeys that I have made alone and on foot. Walking has something about
+it which animates and enlivens my ideas. I can hardly think while I am
+still; my body must be in motion, to move my mind. The sight of the
+country, the succession of agreeable views, open air, good appetite, the
+freedom of the alehouse, the absence of everything that could make me
+feel dependence, or recall me to my situation--all this sets my soul
+free, gives me a greater boldness of thought. I dispose of all nature as
+its sovereign lord; my heart, wandering from object to object, mingles
+and is one with the things that soothe it, wraps itself up in charming
+images, and is intoxicated by delicious sentiment. Ideas come as they
+please, not as I please: they do not come at all, or they come in a
+crowd, overwhelming me with their number and their force. When I came to
+a place I only thought of eating, and when I left it I only thought of
+walking. I felt that a new paradise awaited me at the door, and I
+thought of nothing but of hastening in search of it."[65]
+
+Here again is a picture of one whom vagrancy assuredly did not
+degrade:--"I had not the least care for the future, and I awaited the
+answer [as to the return of Madame de Warens to Savoy], lying out in the
+open air, sleeping stretched out on the ground or on some wooden bench,
+as tranquilly as on a bed of roses. I remember passing one delicious
+night outside the town [Lyons], in a road which ran by the side of
+either the Rhone or the Saone, I forget which of the two. Gardens raised
+on a terrace bordered the other side of the road. It had been very hot
+all day, and the evening was delightful; the dew moistened the parched
+grass, the night was profoundly still, the air fresh without being cold;
+the sun in going down had left red vapours in the heaven, and they
+turned the water to rose colour; the trees on the terrace sheltered
+nightingales, answering song for song. I went on in a sort of ecstasy,
+surrendering my heart and every sense to the enjoyment of it all, and
+only sighing for regret that I was enjoying it alone. Absorbed in the
+sweetness of my musing, I prolonged my ramble far into the night,
+without ever perceiving that I was tired. At last I found it out. I lay
+down luxuriously on the shelf of a niche or false doorway made in the
+wall of the terrace; the canopy of my bed was formed by overarching
+tree-tops; a nightingale was perched exactly over my head, and I fell
+asleep to his singing. My slumber was delicious, my awaking more
+delicious still. It was broad day, and my opening eyes looked on sun and
+water and green things, and an adorable landscape. I rose up and gave
+myself a shake; I felt hungry and started gaily for the town, resolved
+to spend on a good breakfast the two pieces of money which I still had
+left. I was in such joyful spirits that I went along the road singing
+lustily."[66]
+
+There is in this the free expansion of inner sympathy; the natural
+sentiment spontaneously responding to all the delicious movement of the
+external world on its peaceful and harmonious side, just as if the world
+of many-hued social circumstance which man has made for himself had no
+existence. We are conscious of a full nervous elation which is not the
+product of literature, such as we have seen so many a time since, and
+which only found its expression in literature in Rousseau's case by
+accident. He did not feel in order to write, but felt without any
+thought of writing. He dreamed at this time of many lofty destinies,
+among them that of marshal of France, but the fame of authorship never
+entered into his dreams. When the time for authorship actually came,
+his work had all the benefit of the absence of self-consciousness, it
+had all the disinterestedness, so to say, with which the first fresh
+impressions were suffered to rise in his mind.
+
+One other picture of this time is worth remembering, as showing that
+Rousseau was not wholly blind to social circumstances, and as
+illustrating, too, how it was that his way of dealing with them was so
+much more real and passionate, though so much less sagacious in some of
+its aspects, than the way of the other revolutionists of the century.
+One day, when he had lost himself in wandering in search of some site
+which he expected to find beautiful, he entered the house of a peasant,
+half dead with hunger and thirst. His entertainer offered him nothing
+more restoring than coarse barley bread and skimmed milk. Presently,
+after seeing what manner of guest he had, the worthy man descended by a
+small trap into his cellar, and brought up some good brown bread, some
+meat, and a bottle of wine, and an omelette was added afterwards. Then
+he explained to the wondering Rousseau, who was a Swiss, and knew none
+of the mysteries of the French fisc, that he hid away his wine on
+account of the duties, and his bread on account of the _taille_, and
+declared that he would be a ruined man if they suspected that he was not
+dying of hunger. All this made an impression on Rousseau which he never
+forgot. "Here," he says, "was the germ of the inextinguishable hatred
+which afterwards grew up in my heart against the vexations that harass
+the common people, and against all their oppressors. This man actually
+did not dare to eat the bread which he had won by the sweat of his brow,
+and only avoided ruin by showing the same misery as reigned
+around him."[67]
+
+It was because he had thus seen the wrongs of the poor, not from without
+but from within, not as a pitying spectator but as of their own company,
+that Rousseau by and by brought such fire to the attack upon the old
+order, and changed the blank practice of the elder philosophers into a
+deadly affair of ball and shell. The man who had been a servant, who had
+wanted bread, who knew the horrors of the midnight street, who had slept
+in dens, who had been befriended by rough men and rougher women, who saw
+the goodness of humanity under its coarsest outside, and who above all
+never tried to shut these things out from his memory, but accepted them
+as the most interesting, the most touching, the most real of all his
+experiences, might well be expected to penetrate to the root of the
+matter, and to protest to the few who usurp literature and policy with
+their ideas, aspirations, interests, that it is not they but the many,
+whose existence stirs the heart and fills the eye with the great prime
+elements of the human lot.
+
+
+III.
+
+It was, then, some time towards the middle of 1732 that Rousseau arrived
+at Chamberi, and finally took up his residence with Madame de Warens, in
+the dullest and most sombre room of a dull and sombre house. She had
+procured him employment in connection with a land survey which the
+government of Charles Emmanuel III. was then executing. It was only
+temporary, and Rousseau's function was no loftier than that of clerk,
+who had to copy and reduce arithmetical calculations. We may imagine how
+little a youth fresh from nights under the summer sky would relish eight
+hours a day of surly toil in a gloomy office, with a crowd of dirty and
+ill-smelling fellow-workers.[68] If Rousseau was ever oppressed by any
+set of circumstances, his method was invariable: he ran away from them.
+So now he threw up his post, and again tried to earn a little money by
+that musical instruction in which he had made so many singular and
+grotesque endeavours. Even here the virtues which make ordinary life a
+possible thing were not his. He was pleased at his lessons while there,
+but he could not bear the idea of being bound to be there, nor the
+fixing of an hour. In time this experiment for a subsistence came to the
+same end as all the others. He next rushed to Besancon in search of the
+musical instruction which he wished to give to others, but his baggage
+was confiscated at the frontier, and he had to return.[69] Finally he
+abandoned the attempt, and threw himself loyally upon the narrow
+resources of Madame de Warens, whom he assisted in some singularly
+indefinite way in the transaction of her very indefinite and
+miscellaneous affairs,--if we are here, as so often, to give the name of
+affairs to a very rapid and heedless passage along a shabby road
+to ruin.
+
+The household at this time was on a very remarkable footing. Madame de
+Warens was at its head, and Claude Anet, gardener, butler, steward, was
+her factotum. He was a discreet person, of severe probity and few words,
+firm, thrifty, and sage. The too comprehensive principles of his
+mistress admitted him to the closest intimacy, and in due time, when
+Madame de Warens thought of the seductions which ensnare the feet of
+youth, Rousseau was delivered from them in an equivocal way by
+solicitous application of the same maxims of comprehension. "Although
+Claude Anet was as young as she was, he was so mature and so grave, that
+he looked upon us as two children worthy of indulgence, and we both
+looked upon him as a respectable man, whose esteem it was our business
+to conciliate. Thus there grew up between us three a companionship,
+perhaps without another example like it upon earth. All our wishes, our
+cares, our hearts were in common; nothing seemed to pass outside our
+little circle. The habit of living together, and of living together
+exclusively, became so strong that if at our meals one of the three was
+absent, or there came a fourth, all was thrown out; and in spite of our
+peculiar relations, a _tete-a-tete_ was less sweet than a meeting of all
+three."[70] Fate interfered to spoil this striking attempt after a new
+type of the family, developed on a duandric base. Claude Anet was seized
+with illness, a consequence of excessive fatigue in an Alpine expedition
+in search of plants, and he came to his end.[71] In him Rousseau always
+believed that he lost the most solid friend he ever possessed, "a rare
+and estimable man, in whom nature served instead of education, and who
+nourished in obscure servitude all the virtues of great men."[72] The
+day after his death, Rousseau was speaking of their lost friend to
+Madame de Warens with the liveliest and most sincere affliction, when
+suddenly in the midst of the conversation he remembered that he should
+inherit the poor man's clothes, and particularly a handsome black coat.
+A reproachful tear from his Maman, as he always somewhat nauseously
+called Madame de Warens, extinguished the vile thought and washed away
+its last traces.[73] After all, those men and women are exceptionally
+happy, who have no such involuntary meanness of thought standing against
+themselves in that unwritten chapter of their lives which even the most
+candid persons keep privately locked up in shamefast recollection.
+
+Shortly after his return to Chamberi, a wave from the great tide of
+European affairs surged into the quiet valleys of Savoy. In the February
+of 1733, Augustus the Strong died, and the usual disorder followed in
+the choice of a successor to him in the kingship of Poland. France was
+for Stanislaus, the father-in-law of Lewis XV., while the Emperor
+Charles VI. and Anne of Russia were for August III., elector of Saxony.
+Stanislaus was compelled to flee, and the French Government, taking up
+his quarrel, declared war against the Emperor (October 14, 1733). The
+first act of this war, which was to end in the acquisition of Naples and
+the two Sicilies by Spanish Bourbons, and of Lorraine by France, was the
+despatch of a French expedition to the Milanese under Marshall Villars,
+the husband of one of Voltaire's first idols. This took place in the
+autumn of 1733, and a French column passed through Chamberi, exciting
+lively interest in all minds, including Rousseau's. He now read the
+newspapers for the first time, with the most eager sympathy for the
+country with whose history his own name was destined to be so
+permanently associated. "If this mad passion," he says, "had only been
+momentary, I should not speak of it; but for no visible reason it took
+such root in my heart, that when I afterwards at Paris played the stern
+republican, I could not help feeling in spite of myself a secret
+predilection for the very nation that I found so servile, and the
+government I made bold to assail."[74] This fondness for France was
+strong, constant, and invincible, and found what was in the eighteenth
+century a natural complement in a corresponding dislike of England.[75]
+
+Rousseau's health began to show signs of weakness. His breath became
+asthmatic, he had palpitations, he spat blood, and suffered from a slow
+feverishness from which he never afterwards became entirely free.[76]
+His mind was as feverish as his body, and the morbid broodings which
+active life reduces to their lowest degree in most young men, were left
+to make full havoc along with the seven devils of idleness and vacuity.
+An instinct which may flow from the unrecognised animal lying deep down
+in us all, suggested the way of return to wholesomeness. Rousseau
+prevailed upon Madame de Warens to leave the stifling streets for the
+fresh fields, and to deliver herself by retreat to rural solitude from
+the adventurers who made her their prey. Les Charmettes, the modest
+farm-house to which they retired, still stands. The modern traveller,
+with a taste for relieving an imagination strained by great historic
+monuments and secular landmarks, with the sight of spots associated with
+the passion and meditation of some far-shining teacher of men, may walk
+a short league from where the gray slate roofs of dull Chamberi bake in
+the sun, and ascending a gently mounting road, with high leafy bank on
+the right throwing cool shadows over his head, and a stream on the left
+making music at his feet, he sees an old red housetop lifted lonely
+above the trees. The homes in which men have lived now and again lend
+themselves to the beholder's subjective impression; they seemed to be
+brooding in forlorn isolation like some life-wearied gray-beard over
+ancient and sorrow-stricken memories. At Les Charmettes a pitiful
+melancholy penetrates you. The supreme loveliness of the scene, the
+sweet-smelling meadows, the orchard, the water-ways, the little vineyard
+with here and there a rose glowing crimson among the yellow stunted
+vines, the rust-red crag of the Nivolet rising against the sky far
+across the broad valley; the contrast between all this peace, beauty,
+silence, and the diseased miserable life of the famous man who found a
+scanty span of paradise in the midst of it, touches the soul with a
+pathetic spell. We are for the moment lifted out of squalor, vagrancy,
+and disorder, and seem to hear some of the harmonies which sounded to
+this perturbed spirit, soothing it, exalting it, and stirring those
+inmost vibrations which in truth make up all the short divine part of a
+man's life.[77]
+
+"No day passes," he wrote in the very year in which he died, "in which
+I do not recall with joy and tender effusion this single and brief time
+in my life, when I was fully myself, without mixture or hindrance, and
+when I may say in a true sense that I lived. I may almost say, like the
+prefect when disgraced and proceeding to end his days tranquilly in the
+country, 'I have passed seventy years on the earth, and I have lived but
+seven of them.' But for this brief and precious space, I should perhaps
+have remained uncertain about myself; for during all the rest of my life
+I have been so agitated, tossed, plucked hither and thither by the
+passions of others, that, being nearly passive in a life so stormy, I
+should find it hard to distinguish what belonged to me in my own
+conduct,--to such a degree has harsh necessity weighed upon me. But
+during these few years I did what I wished to do, I was what I wished to
+be."[78] The secret of such rare felicity is hardly to be described in
+words. It was the ease of a profoundly sensuous nature with every sense
+gratified and fascinated. Caressing and undivided affection within
+doors, all the sweetness and movement of nature without, solitude,
+freedom, and the busy idleness of life in gardens,--these were the
+conditions of Rousseau's ideal state. "If my happiness," he says, in
+language of strange felicity, "consisted in facts, actions, or words, I
+might then describe and represent it in some way; but how say what was
+neither said nor done nor even thought, but only enjoyed and felt
+without my being able to point to any other object of my happiness than
+the very feeling itself? I arose with the sun and I was happy; I went
+out of doors and I was happy; I saw Maman and I was happy; I left her
+and I was happy; I went among the woods and hills, I wandered about in
+the dells, I read, I was idle, I dug in the garden, I gathered fruit, I
+helped them indoors, and everywhere happiness followed me. It was not in
+any given thing, it was all in myself, and could never leave me for a
+single instant."[79] This was a true garden of Eden, with the serpent in
+temporary quiescence, and we may count the man rare since the fall who
+has found such happiness in such conditions, and not less blessed than
+he is rare. The fact that he was one of this chosen company was among
+the foremost of the circumstances which made Rousseau seem to so many
+men in the eighteenth century as a spring of water in a thirsty land.
+
+All innocent and amiable things moved him. He used to spend hours
+together in taming pigeons; he inspired them with such confidence that
+they would follow him about, and allow him to take them wherever he
+would, and the moment that he appeared in the garden two or three of
+them would instantly settle on his arms or his head. The bees, too,
+gradually came to put the same trust in him, and his whole life was
+surrounded with gentle companionship. He always began the day with the
+sun, walking on the high ridge above the slope on which the house lay,
+and going through his form of worship. "It did not consist in a vain
+moving of the lips, but in a sincere elevation of heart to the author of
+the tender nature whose beauties lay spread out before my eyes. This act
+passed rather in wonder and contemplation than in requests; and I always
+knew that with the dispenser of true blessings, the best means of
+obtaining those which are needful for us, is less to ask than to deserve
+them."[80] These effusions may be taken for the beginning of the
+deistical reaction in the eighteenth century. While the truly scientific
+and progressive spirits were occupied in laborious preparation for
+adding to human knowledge and systematising it, Rousseau walked with his
+head in the clouds among gods, beneficent authors of nature, wise
+dispensers of blessings, and the like. "Ah, madam," he once said,
+"sometimes in the privacy of my study, with my hands pressed tight over
+my eyes or in the darkness of the night, I am of his opinion that there
+is no God. But look yonder (pointing with his hand to the sky, with head
+erect, and an inspired glance): the rising of the sun, as it scatters
+the mists that cover the earth and lays bare the wondrous glittering
+scene of nature, disperses at the same moment all cloud from my soul. I
+find my faith again, and my God, and my belief in him. I admire and
+adore him, and I prostrate myself in his presence."[81] As if that
+settled the question affirmatively, any more than the absence of such
+theistic emotion in many noble spirits settles it negatively. God became
+the highest known formula for sensuous expansion, the synthesis of all
+complacent emotions, and Rousseau filled up the measure of his delight
+by creating and invoking a Supreme Being to match with fine scenery and
+sunny gardens. We shall have a better occasion to mark the attributes of
+this important conception when we come to _Emilius_, where it was
+launched in a panoply of resounding phrases upon a Europe which was
+grown too strong for Christian dogma, and was not yet grown strong
+enough to rest in a provisional ordering of the results of its own
+positive knowledge. Walking on the terrace at Les Charmettes, you are at
+the very birth-place of that particular Etre Supreme to whom Robespierre
+offered the incense of an official festival.
+
+Sometimes the reading of a Jansenist book would make him unhappy by the
+prominence into which it brought the displeasing idea of hell, and he
+used now and then to pass a miserable day in wondering whether this
+cruel destiny should be his. Madame de Warens, whose softness of heart
+inspired her with a theology that ought to have satisfied a seraphic
+doctor, had abolished hell, but she could not dispense with purgatory
+because she did not know what to do with the souls of the wicked, being
+unable either to damn them, or to instal them among the good until they
+had been purified into goodness. In truth it must be confessed, says
+Rousseau, that alike in this world and the other the wicked are
+extremely embarrassing.[82] His own search after knowledge of his fate
+is well known. One day, amusing himself in a characteristic manner by
+throwing stones at trees, he began to be tormented by fear of the
+eternal pit. He resolved to test his doom by throwing a stone at a
+particular tree; if he hit, then salvation; if he missed, then
+perdition. With a trembling hand and beating heart he threw; as he had
+chosen a large tree and was careful not to place himself too far away,
+all was well.[83] As a rule, however, in spite of the ugly phantoms of
+theology, he passed his days in a state of calm. Even when illness
+brought it into his head that he should soon know the future lot by more
+assured experiment, he still preserved a tranquillity which he justly
+qualifies as sensual.
+
+In thinking of Rousseau's peculiar feeling for nature, which acquired
+such a decisive place in his character during his life at Les
+Charmettes, it is to be remembered that it was entirely devoid of that
+stormy and boisterous quality which has grown up in more modern
+literature, out of the violent attempt to press nature in her most awful
+moods into the service of the great revolt against a social and
+religious tradition that can no longer be endured. Of this revolt
+Rousseau was a chief, and his passion for natural aspects was connected
+with this attitude, but he did not seize those of them which the poet of
+_Manfred_, for example, forced into an imputed sympathy with his own
+rebellion. Rousseau always loved nature best in her moods of quiescence
+and serenity, and in proportion as she lent herself to such moods in
+men. He liked rivulets better than rivers. He could not bear the sight
+of the sea; its infertile bosom and blind restless tumblings filled him
+with melancholy. The ruins of a park affected him more than the ruins of
+castles.[84] It is true that no plain, however beautiful, ever seemed so
+in his eyes; he required torrents, rocks, dark forests, mountains, and
+precipices.[85] This does not affect the fact that he never moralised
+appalling landscape, as post-revolutionary writers have done, and that
+the Alpine wastes which throw your puniest modern into a rapture, had no
+attraction for him. He could steep himself in nature without climbing
+fifteen thousand feet to find her. In landscape, as has been said by one
+with a right to speak, Rousseau was truly a great artist, and you can,
+if you are artistic too, follow him with confidence in his wanderings;
+he understood that beauty does not require a great stage, and that the
+effect of things lies in harmony.[86] The humble heights of the Jura,
+and the lovely points of the valley of Chamberi, sufficed to give him
+all the pleasure of which he was capable. In truth a man cannot escape
+from his time, and Rousseau at least belonged to the eighteenth century
+in being devoid of the capacity for feeling awe, and the taste for
+objects inspiring it. Nature was a tender friend with softest bosom, and
+no sphinx with cruel enigma. He felt neither terror, nor any sense of
+the littleness of man, nor of the mysteriousness of life, nor of the
+unseen forces which make us their sport, as he peered over the precipice
+and heard the water roaring at the bottom of it; he only remained for
+hours enjoying the physical sensation of dizziness with which it turned
+his brain, with a break now and again for hurling large stones, and
+watching them roll and leap down into the torrent, with as little
+reflection and as little articulate emotion as if he had been a
+child.[87]
+
+Just as it is convenient for purposes of classification to divide a man
+into body and soul, even when we believe the soul to be only a function
+of the body, so people talk of his intellectual side and his emotional
+side, his thinking quality and his feeling quality, though in fact and
+at the roots these qualities are not two but one, with temperament for
+the common substratum. During this period of his life the whole of
+Rousseau's true force went into his feelings, and at all times feeling
+predominated over reflection, with many drawbacks and some advantages of
+a very critical kind for subsequent generations of men. Nearly every one
+who came into contact with him in the way of testing his capacity for
+being instructed pronounced him hopeless. He had several excellent
+opportunities of learning Latin, especially at Turin in the house of
+Count Gouvon, and in the seminary at Annecy, and at Les Charmettes he
+did his best to teach himself, but without any better result than a very
+limited power of reading. In learning one rule he forgot the last; he
+could never master the most elementary laws of versification; he learnt
+and re-learnt twenty times the Eclogues of Virgil, but not a single word
+remained with him.[88] He was absolutely without verbal memory, and he
+pronounces himself wholly incapable of learning anything from masters.
+Madame de Warens tried to have him taught both dancing and fencing; he
+could never achieve a minuet, and after three months of instruction he
+was as clumsy and helpless with his foil as he had been on the first
+day. He resolved to become a master at the chessboard; he shut himself
+up in his room, and worked night and day over the books with
+indescribable efforts which covered many weeks. On proceeding to the
+cafe to manifest his powers, he found that all the moves and
+combinations had got mixed up in his head, he saw nothing but clouds on
+the board, and as often as he repeated the experiment he only found
+himself weaker than before. Even in music, for which he had a genuine
+passion and at which he worked hard, he never could acquire any facility
+at sight, and he was an inaccurate scorer, even when only copying the
+score of others.[89]
+
+Two things nearly incompatible, he writes in an important passage, are
+united in me without my being able to think how; an extremely ardent
+temperament, lively and impetuous passions, along with ideas that are
+very slow in coming to birth, very embarrassed, and which never arise
+until after the event. "One would say that my heart and my intelligence
+do not belong to the same individual.... I feel all, and see nothing; I
+am carried away, but I am stupid.... This slowness of thinking, united
+with such vivacity of feeling, possesses me not only in conversation,
+but when I am alone and working. My ideas arrange themselves in my head
+with incredible difficulty; they circulate there in a dull way and
+ferment until they agitate me, fill me with heat, and give me
+palpitations; in the midst of this stir I see nothing clearly, I could
+not write a single word. Insensibly the violent emotion grows still, the
+chaos is disentangled, everything falls into its place, but very slowly
+and after long and confused agitation."[90]
+
+So far from saying that his heart and intelligence belonged to two
+persons, we might have been quite sure, knowing his heart, that his
+intelligence must be exactly what he describes its process to have been.
+The slow-burning ecstasy in which he knew himself at his height and was
+most conscious of fulness of life, was incompatible with the rapid and
+deliberate generation of ideas. The same soft passivity, the same
+receptiveness, which made his emotions like the surface of a lake under
+sky and breeze, entered also into the working of his intellectual
+faculties. But it happens that in this region, in the attainment of
+knowledge, truth, and definite thoughts, even receptiveness implies a
+distinct and active energy, and hence the very quality of temperament
+which left him free and eager for sensuous impressions, seemed to muffle
+his intelligence in a certain opaque and resisting medium, of the
+indefinable kind that interposes between will and action in a dream. His
+rational part was fatally protected by a non-conducting envelope of
+sentiment; this intercepted clear ideas on their passage, and even cut
+off the direct and true impress of those objects and their relations,
+which are the material of clear ideas. He was no doubt right in his
+avowal that objects generally made less impression on him than the
+recollection of them; that he could see nothing of what was before his
+eyes, and had only his intelligence in cases where memories were
+concerned; and that of what was said or done in his presence, he felt
+and penetrated nothing.[91] In other words, this is to say that his
+material of thought was not fact but image. When he plunged into
+reflection, he did not deal with the objects of reflection at first hand
+and in themselves, but only with the reminiscences of objects, which he
+had never approached in a spirit of deliberate and systematic
+observation, and with those reminiscences, moreover, suffused and
+saturated by the impalpable but most potent essences of a fermenting
+imagination. Instead of urgently seeking truth with the patient energy,
+the wariness, and the conscience, with the sharpened instruments, the
+systematic apparatus, and the minute feelers and tentacles of the
+genuine thinker and solid reasoner, he only floated languidly on a
+summer tide of sensation, and captured premiss and conclusion in a
+succession of swoons. It would be a mistake to contend that no work can
+be done for the world by this method, or that truth only comes to those
+who chase her with logical forceps. But one should always try to
+discover how a teacher of men came by his ideas, whether by careful
+toil, or by the easy bequest of generous phantasy.
+
+To give a zest to rural delight, and partly perhaps to satisfy the
+intellectual interest which must have been an instinct in one who became
+so consummate a master in the great and noble art of composition,
+Rousseau, during the time when he lived with Madame de Warens, tried as
+well as he knew how to acquire a little knowledge of what fruit the
+cultivation of the mind of man had hitherto brought forth. According to
+his own account, it was Voltaire's Letters on the English which first
+drew him seriously to study, and nothing which that illustrious man
+wrote at this time escaped him. His taste for Voltaire inspired him with
+the desire of writing with elegance, and of imitating "the fine and
+enchanting colour of Voltaire's style"[92]--an object in which he cannot
+be held to have in the least succeeded, though he achieved a superb
+style of his own. On his return from Turin Madame de Warens had begun in
+some small way to cultivate a taste for letters in him, though he had
+lost the enthusiasm of his childhood for reading. Saint Evremond,
+Puffendorff, the Henriade, and the Spectator happened to be in his room,
+and he turned over their pages. The Spectator, he says, pleased him
+greatly and did him much good.[93] Madame de Warens was what he calls
+protestant in literary taste, and would talk for ever of the great
+Bayle, while she thought more of Saint Evremond than she could ever
+persuade Rousseau to think. Two or three years later than this he began
+to use his own mind more freely, and opened his eyes for the first time
+to the greatest question that ever dawns upon any human intelligence
+that has the privilege of discerning it, the problem of a philosophy and
+a body of doctrine.
+
+His way of answering it did not promise the best results. He read an
+introduction to the Sciences, then he took an Encyclopaedia and tried to
+learn all things together, until he repented and resolved to study
+subjects apart. This he found a better plan for one to whom long
+application was so fatiguing, that he could not with any effect occupy
+himself for half an hour on any one matter, especially if following the
+ideas of another person.[94] He began his morning's work, after an hour
+or two of dispersive chat, with the Port-Royal Logic, Locke's Essay on
+the Human Understanding, Malebranche, Leibnitz, Descartes.[95] He found
+these authors in a condition of such perpetual contradiction among
+themselves, that he formed the chimerical design of reconciling them
+with one another. This was tedious, so he took up another method, on
+which he congratulated himself to the end of his life. It consisted in
+simply adopting and following the ideas of each author, without
+comparing them either with one another or with those of other writers,
+and above all without any criticism of his own. Let me begin, he said,
+by collecting a store of ideas, true or false, but at any rate clear,
+until my head is well enough stocked to enable me to compare and choose.
+At the end of some years passed "in never thinking exactly, except after
+other people, without reflecting so to speak, and almost without
+reasoning," he found himself in a state to think for himself. "In spite
+of beginning late to exercise my judicial faculty, I never found that it
+had lost its vigour, and when I came to publish my own ideas, I was
+hardly accused of being a servile disciple."[96]
+
+To that fairly credible account of the matter, one can only say that
+this mutually exclusive way of learning the thoughts of others, and
+developing thoughts of your own, is for an adult probably the most
+mischievous, where it is not the most impotent, fashion in which
+intellectual exercise can well be taken. It is exactly the use of the
+judicial faculty, criticising, comparing, and defining, which is
+indispensable in order that a student should not only effectually
+assimilate the ideas of a writer, but even know what those ideas come to
+and how much they are worth. And so when he works at ideas of his own, a
+judicial faculty which has been kept studiously slumbering for some
+years, is not likely to revive in full strength without any preliminary
+training. Rousseau was a man of singular genius, and he set an
+extraordinary mark on Europe, but this mark would have been very
+different if he had ever mastered any one system of thought, or if he
+had ever fully grasped what systematic thinking means. Instead of this,
+his debt to the men whom he read was a debt of piecemeal, and his
+obligation an obligation for fragments; and this is perhaps the worst
+way of acquiring an intellectual lineage, for it leaves out the vital
+continuity of temper and method. It is a small thing to accept this or
+that of Locke's notions upon education or the origin of ideas, if you do
+not see the merit of his way of coming by his notions. In short,
+Rousseau has distinctions in abundance, but the distinction of knowing
+how to think, in the exact sense of that term, was hardly among them,
+and neither now nor at any other time did he go through any of that
+toilsome and vigorous intellectual preparation to which the ablest of
+his contemporaries, Diderot, Voltaire, D'Alembert, Turgot, Condorcet,
+Hume, all submitted themselves. His comfortable view was that "the
+sensible and interesting conversations of a woman of merit are more
+proper to form a young man than all the pedantical philosophy of
+books."[97]
+
+Style, however, in which he ultimately became such a proficient, and
+which wrought such marvels as only style backed by passion can work,
+already engaged his serious attention. We have already seen how Voltaire
+implanted in him the first root idea, which so many of us never perceive
+at all, that there is such a quality of writing as style. He evidently
+took pains with the form of expression and thought about it, in
+obedience to some inborn harmonious predisposition which is the source
+of all veritable eloquence, though there is no strong trace now nor for
+many years to come of any irresistible inclination for literary
+composition. We find him, indeed, in 1736 showing consciousness of a
+slight skill in writing,[98] but he only thought of it as a possible
+recommendation for a secretaryship to some great person. He also appears
+to have practised verses, not for their own sake, for he always most
+justly thought his own verses mediocre, and they are even worse; but on
+the ground that verse-making is a rather good exercise for breaking
+one's self to elegant inversions, and learning a greater ease in
+prose.[99] At the age of one and twenty he composed a comedy, long
+afterwards damned as _Narcisse_. Such prelusions, however, were of small
+importance compared with the fact of his being surrounded by a moral
+atmosphere in which his whole mind was steeped. It is not in the study
+of Voltaire or another, but in the deep soft soil of constant mood and
+old habit that such a style as Rousseau's has its growth.
+
+It was the custom to return to Chamberi for the winter, and the day of
+their departure from Les Charmettes was always a day blurred and tearful
+for Rousseau; he never left it without kissing the ground, the trees,
+the flowers; he had to be torn away from it as from a loved companion.
+At the first melting of the winter snows they left their dungeon in
+Chamberi, and they never missed the earliest song of the nightingale.
+Many a joyful day of summer peace remained vivid in Rousseau's memory,
+and made a mixed heaven and hell for him long years after in the
+stifling dingy Paris street, and the raw and cheerless air of a
+Derbyshire winter.[100] "We started early in the morning," he says,
+describing one of these simple excursions on the day of St. Lewis, who
+was the very unconscious patron saint of Madame de Warens, "together and
+alone; I proposed that we should go and ramble about the side of the
+valley opposite to our own, which we had not yet visited. We sent our
+provisions on before us, for we were to be out all day. We went from
+hill to hill and wood to wood, sometimes in the sun and often in the
+shade, resting from time to time and forgetting ourselves for whole
+hours; chatting about ourselves, our union, our dear lot, and offering
+unheard prayers that it might last. All seemed to conspire for the bliss
+of this day. Rain had fallen a short time before; there was no dust, and
+the little streams were full; a light fresh breeze stirred the leaves,
+the air was pure, the horizon without a cloud, and the same serenity
+reigned in our own hearts. Our dinner was cooked in a peasant's cottage,
+and we shared it with his family. These Savoyards are such good souls!
+After dinner we sought shade under some tall trees, where, while I
+collected dry sticks for making our coffee, Maman amused herself by
+botanising among the bushes, and the expedition ended in transports of
+tenderness and effusion."[101] This is one of such days as the soul
+turns back to when the misery that stalks after us all has seized it,
+and a man is left to the sting and smart of the memory of
+irrecoverable things.
+
+He was resolved to bind himself to Madame de Warens with an inalterable
+fidelity for all the rest of his days; he would watch over her with all
+the dutiful and tender vigilance of a son, and she should be to him
+something dearer than mother or wife or sister. What actually befell was
+this. He was attacked by vapours, which he characterises as the disorder
+of the happy. One symptom of his disease was the conviction derived from
+the rash perusal of surgeon's treatises, that he was suffering from a
+polypus in the heart. On the not very chivalrous principle that if he
+did not spend Madame de Warens' money, he was only leaving it for
+adventurers and knaves, he proceeded to Montpellier to consult the
+physicians, and took the money for his expenses out of his
+benefactress's store, which was always slender because it was always
+open to any hand. While on the road, he fell into an intrigue with a
+travelling companion, whom critics have compared to the fair Philina of
+Wilhelm Meister. In due time, the Montpellier doctor being unable to
+discover a disease, declared that the patient had none. The scenery was
+dull and unattractive, and this would have counterbalanced the
+weightiest prudential reasons with him at any time. Rousseau debated
+whether he should keep tryst with his gay fellow-traveller, or return to
+Chamberi. Remorse and that intractable emptiness of pocket which is the
+iron key to many a deed of ingenuous-looking self-denial and Spartan
+virtue, directed him homewards. Here he had a surprise, and perhaps
+learnt a lesson. He found installed in the house a personage whom he
+describes as tall, fair, noisy, coxcombical, flat-faced, flat-souled.
+Another triple alliance seemed a thing odious in the eyes of a man whom
+his travelling diversions had made a Pharisee for the hour. He
+protested, but Madame de Warens was a woman of principle, and declined
+to let Rousseau, who had profited by the doctrine of indifference, now
+set up in his own favour the contrary doctrine of a narrow and churlish
+partiality. So a short, delicious, and never-forgotten episode came to
+an end: this pair who had known so much happiness together were happy
+together no more, and the air became peopled for Rousseau with wan
+spectres of dead joys and fast gathering cares.
+
+The dates of the various events described in the fifth and sixth books
+of the Confessions are inextricable, and the order is evidently inverted
+more than once. The inversion of order is less serious than the
+contradictions between the dates of the Confessions and the more
+authentic and unmistakable dates of his letters. For instance, he
+describes a visit to Geneva as having been made shortly before Lautrec's
+temporary pacification of the civic troubles of that town; and that
+event took place in the spring of 1738. This would throw the Montpellier
+journey, which he says came after the visit to Geneva, into 1738, but
+the letters to Madame de Warens from Grenoble and Montpellier are dated
+in the autumn and winter of 1737.[102] Minor verifications attest the
+exactitude of the dates of the letters,[103] and we may therefore
+conclude that he returned from Montpellier, found his place taken and
+lost his old delight in Les Charmettes, in the early part of 1738. In
+the tenth of the Reveries he speaks of having passed "a space of four or
+five years" in the bliss of Les Charmettes, and it is true that his
+connection with it in one way and another lasted from the middle of 1736
+until about the middle of 1741. But as he left for Montpellier in the
+autumn of 1737, and found the obnoxious Vinzenried installed in 1738,
+the pure and characteristic felicity of Les Charmettes perhaps only
+lasted about a year or a year and a half. But a year may set a deep mark
+on a man, and give him imperishable taste of many things bitter
+and sweet.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[38] _Conf._, iii. 177.
+
+[39] Lamartine in _Raphael_ defies "a reasonable man to recompose with
+any reality the character that Rousseau gives to his mistress, out of
+the contradictory elements which he associates in her nature. One of
+these elements excludes the other." It is worth while for any who care
+for this kind of study to compare Madame de Warens with the Marquise
+de Courcelles, whom Sainte-Beuve has well called the Manon Lescaut of
+the seventeenth century.
+
+[40] Described by Rousseau in a memorandum for the biographer of M. de
+Bernex, printed in _Melanges_, pp. 139-144.
+
+[41] De Tavel, by name. Disorderly ideas as to the relations of the
+sexes began to appear in Switzerland along with the reformation of
+religion. In the sixteenth century a woman appeared at Geneva with the
+doctrine that it is as inhuman and as unjustifiable to refuse the
+gratification of this appetite in a man as to decline to give food and
+drink to the starving. Picot's _Hist. de Geneve_, vol. ii.
+
+[42] _Conf._, v. 341. Also ii. 83; and vi. 401.
+
+[43] _Conf._, v. 345.
+
+[44] _Conf._, ii. 83.
+
+[45] _Ib._ ii. 82.
+
+[46] _Ib._ iii. 179. See also 200.
+
+[47] _Conf._, iii. 177, 178.
+
+[48] _Conf._, iii. 183.
+
+[49] M. d'Aubonne.
+
+[50] _Conf._, iii 192.
+
+[51] M. Gatier.
+
+[52] M. Gaime.
+
+[53] _Conf._, iii. 204.
+
+[54] _Ib._ iii. 209, 210.
+
+[55] _Conf._, iii. 217-222.
+
+[56] _Conf._, iv. 227.
+
+[57] _Ib._ iii. 224.
+
+[58] One Venture de Villeneuve, who visited him years afterwards
+(1755) in Paris, when Rousseau found that the idol of old days was a
+crapulent debauchee. _Ib._ viii. 221.
+
+[59] Mdlles. de Graffenried and Galley. _Conf._, iv. 231.
+
+[60] _Ib._ iv. 254-256.
+
+[61] _Conf._, iv. 253.
+
+[62] While in the ambassador's house at Soleure, he was lodged in a
+room which had once belonged to his namesake, Jean Baptiste Rousseau
+(_b. 1670--d. 1741_), whom the older critics astonishingly insist on
+counting the first of French lyric poets. There was a third Rousseau,
+Pierre [_b. 1725--d. 1785_], who wrote plays and did other work now
+well forgotten. There are some lines imperfectly commemorative of the
+trio--
+
+Trois auteurs que Rousseau l'on nomme, Connus de Paris jusqu'a Rome,
+Sont differens; voici par ou; Rousseau de Paris fut grand homme;
+Rousseau de Geneve est un fou; Rousseau de Toulouse un atome.
+
+Jean Jacques refers to both his namesakes in his letter to Voltaire,
+Jan. 30, 1750. _Corr._, i. 145.
+
+[63] The only object which ever surpassed his expectation was the
+great Roman structure near Nismes, the Pont du Gard. _Conf._, vi. 446.
+
+[64] Rousseau gives 1732 as the probable date of his return to
+Chamberi, after his first visit to Paris [_Conf._, v. 305], and the
+only objection to this is his mention of the incident of the march of
+the French troops, which could not have happened until the winter of
+1733, as having taken place "some months" after his arrival.
+Musset-Pathay accepts this as decisive, and fixes the return in the
+spring of 1733 [i. 12]. My own conjectural chronology is this: Returns
+from Turin towards the autumn of 1729; stays at Annecy until the
+spring of 1731; passes the winter of 1731-2 at Neuchatel; first visits
+Paris in spring of 1732; returns to Savoy in the early summer of 1732.
+But a precise harmonising of the dates in the Confessions is
+impossible; Rousseau wrote them three and thirty years after our
+present point [in 1766 at Wootton], and never claimed to be exact in
+minuteness of date. Fortunately such matters in the present case are
+absolutely devoid of importance.
+
+[65] _Conf._, iv. 279, 280.
+
+[66] _Conf._, iv. 290, 291,
+
+[67] _Conf._, iv. 281-283.
+
+[68] _Conf._, v. 325.
+
+[69] _Conf._, v. 360-364. _Corr._, i. 21-24.
+
+[70] _Conf._, v. 349, 350.
+
+[71] Apparently in the summer of 1736, though, the reference to the
+return of the French troops at the peace [_Ib._ v. 365] would place it
+in 1735.
+
+[72] _Ib._ v. 356
+
+[73] _Ib._
+
+[74] _Conf._, v. 315, 316.
+
+[75] _Ib._ iv. 276. _Nouv. Hel._, II. xiv. 381, etc.
+
+[76] He refers to the ill-health of his youth, _Conf._, vii. 32, and
+describes an ominous head seizure while at Chamberi, _Ib._ vi. 396.
+
+[77] Rousseau's description of Les Charmettes is at the end of the
+fifth book. The present proprietor keeps the house arranged as it used
+to be, and has gathered one or two memorials of its famous tenant,
+including his poor _clavecin_ and his watch. In an outside wall,
+Herault de Sechelles, when Commissioner from the Convention in the
+department of Mont Blanc, inserted a little white stone with two most
+lapidary stanzas inscribed upon it, about _genie, solitude, fierte,
+gloire, verite, envie_, and the like.
+
+[78] _Reveries_, x. 336 (1778).
+
+[79] _Conf._, vi. 393.
+
+[80] _Conf._, vi. 412.
+
+[81] _Mem. de Mdme. d'Epinay_, i. 394. (M. Boiteau's edition:
+Charpentier. 1865.)
+
+[82] _Conf._, vi. 399.
+
+[83] _Ib._ vi. 424. Goethe made a similar experiment; see Mr. Lewes's
+_Life_, p. 126.
+
+[84] Bernardin de Saint Pierre tells us this. _Oeuvres_ (Ed. 1818),
+xii. 70, etc.
+
+[85] _Conf._, iv. 297. See also the description of the scenery of the
+Valais, in the _Nouv. Hel._, Pt. I. Let. xxiii.
+
+[86] George Sand in _Mademoiselle la Quintinie_ (p. 27), a book
+containing some peculiarly subtle appreciations of the Savoy
+landscape.
+
+[87] _Conf._, iv. 298.
+
+[88] _Conf._, vi. 416, 422, etc.; iii. 164; iii. 203; v. 347; v. 383,
+384. Also vii. 53.
+
+[89] _Conf._, v. 313, 367; iv. 293; ix. 353. Also _Mem. de Mdme.
+d'Epinay_, ii. 151.
+
+[90] _Ib._ iii. 192, 193.
+
+[91] _Conf._, iv. 301; iii. 195.
+
+[92] _Conf._, v. 372, 373. The mistaken date assigned to the
+correspondence between Voltaire and Frederick is one of many instances
+how little we can trust the Confessions for minute accuracy, though
+their substantial veracity is confirmed by all the collateral evidence
+that we have.
+
+[93] _Ib._ iii. 188. For his debt in the way of education to Madame de
+Warens, see also _Ib._ vii. 46.
+
+[94] _Conf._, vi. 409.
+
+[95] _Ib._ vi. 413. He adds a suspicious-looking "_et cetera_."
+
+[96] _Conf._, vi. 414
+
+[97] _Conf._, iv. 295. See also v. 346.
+
+[98] _Corr._, 1736, pp. 26, 27.
+
+[99] _Conf._, iv. 271, where he says further that he never found
+enough attraction in French poetry to make him think of pursuing it.
+
+[100] The first part of the Confessions was written in Wootton in
+Derbyshire, in the winter of 1766-1767.
+
+[101] _Conf._, vi. 422.
+
+[102] _Corr._, i. 43, 46, 62, etc.
+
+[103] Musset-Pathay, i. 23, _n._
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+THERESA LE VASSEUR.
+
+
+Men like Rousseau, who are most heedless in letting their delight
+perish, are as often as not most loth to bury what they have slain, or
+even to perceive that life has gone out of it. The sight of simple
+hearts trying to coax back a little warm breath of former days into a
+present that is stiff and cold with indifference, is touching enough.
+But there is a certain grossness around the circumstances in which
+Rousseau now and too often found himself, that makes us watch his
+embarrassment with some composure. One cannot easily think of him as a
+simple heart, and we feel perhaps as much relief as he, when he resolves
+after making all due efforts to thrust out the intruder and bring Madame
+de Warens over from theories which had become too practical to be
+interesting, to leave Les Charmettes and accept a tutorship at Lyons.
+His new patron was a De Mably, elder brother of the philosophic abbe of
+the same name (1709-85), and of the still more notable Condillac
+(1714-80).
+
+The future author of the most influential treatise on education that has
+ever been written, was not successful in the practical and far more
+arduous side of that master art.[104] We have seen how little training
+he had ever given himself in the cardinal virtues of collectedness and
+self-control, and we know this to be the indispensable quality in all
+who have to shape young minds for a humane life. So long as all went
+well, he was an angel, but when things went wrong, he is willing to
+confess that he was a devil. When his two pupils could not understand
+him, he became frantic; when they showed wilfulness or any other part of
+the disagreeable materials out of which, along with the rest, human
+excellence has to be ingeniously and painfully manufactured, he was
+ready to kill them. This, as he justly admits, was not the way to render
+them either well learned or sage. The moral education of the teacher
+himself was hardly complete, for he describes how he used to steal his
+employer's wine, and the exquisite draughts which he enjoyed in the
+secrecy of his own room, with a piece of cake in one hand and some dear
+romance in the other. We should forgive greedy pilferings of this kind
+more easily if Rousseau had forgotten them more speedily. These are
+surely offences for which the best expiation is oblivion in a throng of
+worthier memories.
+
+It is easy to understand how often Rousseau's mind turned from the
+deadly drudgery of his present employment to the beatitude of former
+days. "What rendered my present condition insupportable was the
+recollection of my beloved Charmettes, of my garden, my trees, my
+fountain, my orchard, and above all of her for whom I felt myself born
+and who gave life to it all. As I thought of her, of our pleasures, our
+guileless days, I was seized by a tightness in my heart, a stopping of
+my breath, which robbed me of all spirit."[105] For years to come this
+was a kind of far-off accompaniment, thrumming melodiously in his ears
+under all the discords of a miserable life. He made another effort to
+quicken the dead. Throwing up his office with his usual promptitude in
+escaping from the irksome, after a residence of something like a year at
+Lyons (April, 1740--spring of 1741), he made his way back to his old
+haunts. The first half-hour with Madame de Warens persuaded him that
+happiness here was really at an end. After a stay of a few months, his
+desolation again overcame him. It was agreed that he should go to Paris
+to make his fortune by a new method of musical notation which he had
+invented, and after a short stay at Lyons, he found himself for the
+second time in the famous city which in the eighteenth century had
+become for the moment the centre of the universe.[106]
+
+It was not yet, however, destined to be a centre for him. His plan of
+musical notation was examined by a learned committee of the Academy, no
+member of whom was instructed in the musical art. Rousseau, dumb,
+inarticulate, and unready as usual, was amazed at the ease with which
+his critics by the free use of sounding phrases demolished arguments and
+objections which he perceived that they did not at all understand. His
+experience on this occasion suggested to him the most just reflection,
+how even without breadth of intelligence, the profound knowledge of any
+one thing is preferable in forming a judgment about it, to all possible
+enlightenment conferred by the cultivation of the sciences, without
+study of the special matter in question. It astonished him that all
+these learned men, who knew so many things, could yet be so ignorant
+that a man should only pretend to be a judge in his own craft.[107]
+
+His musical path to glory and riches thus blocked up, he surrendered
+himself not to despair but to complete idleness and peace of mind. He
+had a few coins left, and these prevented him from thinking of a future.
+He was presented to one or two great ladies, and with the blundering
+gallantry habitual to him he wrote a letter to one of the greatest of
+them, declaring his passion for her. Madame Dupin was the daughter of
+one, and the wife of another, of the richest men in France, and the
+attentions of a man whose acquaintance Madame Beuzenval had begun by
+inviting him to dine in the servants' hall, were not pleasing to
+her.[108] She forgave the impertinence eventually, and her stepson, M.
+Francueil, was Rousseau's patron for some years.[109] On the whole,
+however, in spite of his own account of his social ineptitude, there
+cannot have been anything so repulsive in his manners as this account
+would lead us to think. There is no grave anachronism in introducing
+here the impression which he made on two fine ladies not many years
+after this. "He pays compliments, yet he is not polite, or at least he
+is without the air of politeness. He seems to be ignorant of the usages
+of society, but it is easily seen that he is infinitely intelligent. He
+has a brown complexion, while eyes that overflow with fire give
+animation to his expression. When he has spoken and you look at him, he
+appears comely; but when you try to recall him, his image is always
+extremely plain. They say that he has bad health, and endures agony
+which from some motive of vanity he most carefully conceals. It is
+this, I fancy, which gives him from time to time an air of
+sullenness."[110] The other lady, who saw him at the same time, speaks
+of "the poor devil of an author, who's as poor as Job for you, but with
+wit and vanity enough for four.... They say his history is as queer as
+his person, and that is saying a good deal.... Madame Maupeou and I
+tried to guess what it was. 'In spite of his face,' said she (for it is
+certain he is uncommonly plain), 'his eyes tell that love plays a great
+part in his romance.' 'No,' said I, 'his nose tells me that it is
+vanity.' 'Well then, 'tis both one and the other.'"[111]
+
+One of his patronesses took some trouble to procure him the post of
+secretary to the French ambassador at Venice, and in the spring of 1743
+our much-wandering man started once more in quest of meat and raiment in
+the famous city of the Adriatic. This was one of those steps of which
+there are not a few in a man's life, that seem at the moment to rank
+foremost in the short line of decisive acts, and then are presently seen
+not to have been decisive at all, but mere interruptions conducting
+nowhither. In truth the critical moments with us are mostly as points in
+slumber. Even if the ancient oracles of the gods were to regain their
+speech once more on the earth, men would usually go to consult them on
+days when the answer would have least significance, and could guide
+them least far. That one of the most heedless vagrants in Europe, and as
+it happened one of the men of most extraordinary genius also, should
+have got a footing in the train of the ambassador of a great government,
+would naturally seem to him and others as chance's one critical stroke
+in his life. In reality it was nothing. The Count of Montaigu, his
+master, was one of the worst characters with whom Rousseau could for his
+own profit have been brought into contact. In his professional quality
+he was not far from imbecile. The folly and weakness of the government
+at Versailles during the reign of Lewis XV., and its indifference to
+competence in every department except perhaps partially in the fisc, was
+fairly illustrated in its absurd representative at Venice. The
+secretary, whose renown has preserved his master's name, has recorded
+more amply than enough the grounds of quarrel between them. Rousseau is
+for once eager to assert his own efficiency, and declares that he
+rendered many important services for which he was repaid with
+ingratitude and persecution.[112] One would be glad to know what the
+Count of Montaigu's version of matters was, for in truth Rousseau's
+conduct in previous posts makes us wonder how it was that he who had
+hitherto always been unfaithful over few things, suddenly touched
+perfection when he became lord over many.
+
+There is other testimony, however, to the ambassador's morbid quality,
+of which, after that general imbecility which was too common a thing
+among men in office to be remarkable, avarice was the most striking
+trait. For instance, careful observation had persuaded him that three
+shoes are equivalent to two pairs, because there is always one of a pair
+which is more worn than its fellow; and hence he habitually ordered his
+shoes in threes.[113] It was natural enough that such a master and such
+a secretary should quarrel over perquisites. That slightly cringing
+quality which we have noticed on one or two occasions in Rousseau's
+hungry youthful time, had been hardened out of him by circumstance or
+the strengthening of inborn fibre. He would now neither dine in a
+servants' hall because a fine lady forgot what was due to a musician,
+nor share his fees with a great ambassador who forgot what was due to
+himself. These sordid disputes are of no interest now to anybody, and we
+need only say that after a period of eighteen months passed in
+uncongenial company, Rousseau parted from his count in extreme dudgeon,
+and the diplomatic career which he had promised to himself came to the
+same close as various other careers had already done.
+
+He returned to Paris towards the end of 1744, burning with indignation
+at the unjust treatment which he believed himself to have suffered, and
+laying memorial after memorial before the minister at home. He assures
+us that it was the justice and the futility of his complaints, that left
+in his soul the germ of exasperation against preposterous civil
+institutions, "in which the true common weal and real justice are always
+sacrificed to some seeming order or other, which is in fact destructive
+of all order, and only adds the sanction of public authority to the
+oppression of the weak and the iniquity of the strong."[114]
+
+One or two pictures connected with the Venetian episode remain in the
+memory of the reader of the Confessions, and among them perhaps with
+most people is that of the quarantine at Genoa in Rousseau's voyage to
+his new post. The travellers had the choice of remaining on board the
+felucca, or passing the time in an unfurnished lazaretto. This, we may
+notice in passing, was his first view of the sea; he makes no mention of
+the fact, nor does the sight or thought of the sea appear to have left
+the least mark in any line of his writings. He always disliked it, and
+thought of it with melancholy. Rousseau, as we may suppose, found the
+want of space and air in the boat the most intolerable of evils, and
+preferred to go alone to the lazaretto, though it had neither
+window-sashes nor tables nor chairs nor bed, nor even a truss of straw
+to lie down upon. He was locked up and had the whole barrack to himself.
+"I manufactured," he says, "a good bed out of my coats and shirts,
+sheets out of towels which I stitched together, a pillow out of my old
+cloak rolled up. I made myself a seat of one trunk placed flat, and a
+table of the other. I got out some paper and my writing-desk, and
+arranged some dozen books that I had by way of library. In short I made
+myself so comfortable, that, with the exception of curtains and windows,
+I was nearly as well off in this absolutely naked lazaretto as in my
+lodgings in Paris. My meals were served with much pomp; two grenadiers,
+with bayonets at their musket-ends, escorted them; the staircase was my
+dining-room, the landing did for table and the lower step for a seat,
+and when my dinner was served, they rang a little bell as they withdrew,
+to warn me to seat myself at table. Between my meals, when I was neither
+writing nor reading, nor busy with my furnishing, I went for a walk in
+the Protestant graveyard, or mounted into a lantern which looked out on
+to the port, and whence I could see the ships sailing in and out. I
+passed a fortnight in this way, and I could have spent the whole three
+weeks of the quarantine without feeling an instant's weariness."[115]
+
+These are the occasions when we catch glimpses of the true Rousseau; but
+his residence in Venice was on the whole one of his few really sociable
+periods. He made friends and kept them, and there was even a certain
+gaiety in his life. He used to tell people their fortunes in a way that
+an earlier century would have counted unholy.[116] He rarely sought
+pleasure in those of her haunts for which the Queen of the Adriatic had
+a guilty renown, but he has left one singular anecdote, showing the
+degree to which profound sensibility is capable of doing the moralist's
+work in a man, and how a stroke of sympathetic imagination may keep one
+from sin more effectually than an ethical precept.[117] It is pleasanter
+to think of him as working at the formation of that musical taste which
+ten years afterwards led him to amaze the Parisians by proving that
+French melody was a hollow idea born of national self-delusion. A
+Venetian experiment, whose evidence in the special controversy is less
+weighty perhaps than Rousseau supposed, was among the facts which
+persuaded him that Italian is the language of music. An Armenian who had
+never heard any music was invited to listen first of all to a French
+monologue, and then to an air of Galuppi's. Rousseau observed in the
+Armenian more surprise than pleasure during the performance of the
+French piece. The first notes of the Italian were no sooner struck, than
+his eyes and whole expression softened; he was enchanted, surrendered
+his whole soul to the ravishing impressions of the music, and could
+never again be induced to listen to the performance of any
+French air.[118]
+
+More important than this was the circumstance that the sight of the
+defects of the government of the Venetian Republic first drew his mind
+to political speculation, and suggested to him the composition of a
+book that was to be called Institutions Politiques.[119] The work, as
+thus designed and named, was never written, but the idea of it, after
+many years of meditation, ripened first in the Discourse on Inequality,
+and then in the Social Contract.
+
+If Rousseau's departure for Venice was a wholly insignificant element in
+his life, his return from it was almost immediately followed by an event
+which counted for nothing at the moment, which his friends by and by
+came to regard as the fatal and irretrievable disaster of his life, but
+which he persistently described as the only real consolation that heaven
+permitted him to taste in his misery, and the only one that enabled him
+to bear his many sore burdens.[120]
+
+He took up his quarters at a small and dirty hotel not far from the
+Sorbonne, where he had alighted on the occasion of his second arrival in
+Paris.[121] Here was a kitchen-maid, some two-and-twenty years old, who
+used to sit at table with her mistress and the guests of the house. The
+company was rough, being mainly composed of Irish and Gascon abbes, and
+other people to whom graces of mien and refinement of speech had come
+neither by nature nor cultivation. The hostess herself pitched the
+conversation in merry Rabelaisian key, and the apparent modesty of her
+serving-woman gave a zest to her own licence. Rousseau was moved with
+pity for a maid defenceless against a ribald storm, and from pity he
+advanced to some warmer sentiment, and he and Theresa Le Vasseur took
+each other for better for worse, in a way informal but sufficiently
+effective. This was the beginning of a union which lasted for the length
+of a generation and more, down to the day of Rousseau's most tragical
+ending.[122] She thought she saw in him a worthy soul; and he was
+convinced that he saw in her a woman of sensibility, simple and free
+from trick, and neither of the two, he says, was deceived in respect of
+the other. Her intellectual quality was unique. She could never be
+taught to read with any approach to success. She could never follow the
+order of the twelve months of the year, nor master a single arithmetical
+figure, nor count a sum of money, nor reckon the price of a thing. A
+month's instruction was not enough to give knowledge of the hours of the
+day on the dial-plate. The words she used were often the direct
+opposites of the words that she meant to use.[123]
+
+The marriage choice of others is the inscrutable puzzle of those who
+have no eye for the fact that such choice is the great match of cajolery
+between purpose and invisible hazard; the blessedness of many lives is
+the stake, as intention happens to cheat accident or to be cheated by
+it. When the match is once over, deep criticism of a game of pure chance
+is time wasted. The crude talk in which the unwise deliver their
+judgments upon the conditions of success in the relations between men
+and women, has flowed with unprofitable copiousness as to this not very
+inviting case. People construct an imaginary Rousseau out of his
+writings, and then fetter their elevated, susceptible, sensitive, and
+humane creation, to the unfortunate woman who could never be taught that
+April is the month after March, or that twice four and a half are nine.
+Now we have already seen enough of Rousseau to know for how infinitely
+little he counted the gift of a quick wit, and what small store he set
+either on literary varnish or on capacity for receiving it. He was
+touched in people with whom he had to do, not by attainment, but by
+moral fibre or his imaginary impression of their moral fibre. Instead of
+analysing a character, bringing its several elements into the balance,
+computing the more or less of this faculty or that, he loved to feel its
+influence as a whole, indivisible, impalpable, playing without sound or
+agitation around him like soft light and warmth and the fostering air.
+The deepest ignorance, the dullest incapacity, the cloudiest faculties
+of apprehension, were nothing to him in man or woman, provided he could
+only be sensible of that indescribable emanation from voice and eye and
+movement, that silent effusion of serenity around spoken words, which
+nature has given to some tranquillising spirits, and which would have
+left him free in an even life of indolent meditation and unfretted
+sense. A woman of high, eager, stimulating kind would have been a more
+fatal mate for him than the most stupid woman that ever rivalled the
+stupidity of man. Stimulation in any form always meant distress to
+Rousseau. The moist warmth of the Savoy valleys was not dearer to him
+than the subtle inhalations of softened and close enveloping
+companionship, in which the one needful thing is not intellectual
+equality, but easy, smooth, constant contact of feeling about the
+thousand small matters that make up the existence of a day. This is not
+the highest ideal of union that one's mind can conceive from the point
+of view of intense productive energy, but Rousseau was not concerned
+with the conditions of productive energy. He only sought to live, to be
+himself, and he knew better than any critics can know for him, what kind
+of nature was the best supplement for his own. As he said in an
+apophthegm with a deep melancholy lying at the bottom of it,--you never
+can cite the example of a thoroughly happy man, for no one but the man
+himself knows anything about it.[124] "By the side of people we love,"
+he says very truly, "sentiment nourishes the intelligence as well as the
+heart, and we have little occasion to seek ideas elsewhere. I lived with
+my Theresa as pleasantly as with the finest genius in the
+universe."[125]
+
+Theresa Le Vasseur would probably have been happier if she had married a
+stout stable-boy, as indeed she did some thirty years hence by way of
+gathering up the fragments that were left; but there is little reason to
+think that Rousseau would have been much happier with any other mate
+than he was with Theresa. There was no social disparity between the two.
+She was a person accustomed to hardship and coarseness, and so was he.
+And he always systematically preferred the honest coarseness of the
+plain people from whom he was sprung and among whom he had lived, to the
+more hateful coarseness of heart which so often lurks under fine manners
+and a complete knowledge of the order of the months in the year and the
+arithmetical table. Rousseau had been a serving-man, and there was no
+deterioration in going with a serving-woman.[126] However this may be,
+it is certain that for the first dozen years or so of his
+partnership--and many others as well as he are said to have found in
+this term a limit to the conditions of the original contract,--Rousseau
+had perfect and entire contentment in the Theresa whom all his friends
+pronounced as mean, greedy, jealous, degrading, as she was avowedly
+brutish in understanding. Granting that she was all these things, how
+much of the responsibility for his acts has been thus shifted from the
+shoulders of Rousseau himself, whose connection with her was from
+beginning to end entirely voluntary? If he attached himself deliberately
+to an unworthy object by a bond which he was indisputably free to break
+on any day that he chose, were not the effects of such a union as much
+due to his own character which sought, formed, and perpetuated it, as to
+the character of Theresa Le Vasseur? Nothing, as he himself said in a
+passage to which he appends a vindication of Theresa, shows the true
+leanings and inclinations of a man better than the sort of attachments
+which he forms.[127]
+
+It is a natural blunder in a literate and well-mannered society to
+charge a mistake against a man who infringes its conventions in this
+particular way. Rousseau knew what he was about, as well as politer
+persons. He was at least as happy with his kitchen wench as Addison was
+with his countess, or Voltaire with his marchioness, and he would not
+have been what he was, nor have played the part that he did play in the
+eighteenth century, if he had felt anything derogatory or unseemly in a
+kitchen wench. The selection was probably not very deliberate; as it
+happened, Theresa served as a standing illustration of two of his most
+marked traits, a contempt for mere literary culture, and a yet deeper
+contempt for social accomplishments and social position. In time he
+found out the grievous disadvantages of living in solitude with a
+companion who did not know how to think, and whose stock of ideas was so
+slight that the only common ground of talk between them was gossip and
+quodlibets. But her lack of sprightliness, beauty, grace, refinement,
+and that gentle initiative by which women may make even a sombre life so
+various, went for nothing with him. What his friends missed in her, he
+did not seek and would not have valued; and what he found in her, they
+were naturally unable to appreciate, for they never were in the mood for
+detecting it. "I have not seen much of happy men," he wrote when near
+his end, "perhaps nothing; but I have many a time seen contented hearts,
+and of all the objects that have struck me, I believe it is this which
+has always given most contentment to myself."[128] This moderate
+conception of felicity, which was always so characteristic with him, as
+an even, durable, and rather low-toned state of the feelings, accounts
+for his prolonged acquiescence in a companion whom men with more elation
+in their ideal would assuredly have found hostile even to the most
+modest contentment.
+
+"The heart of my Theresa," he wrote long after the first tenderness had
+changed into riper emotion on his side, and, alas, into indifference on
+hers, "was that of an angel; our attachment waxed stronger with our
+intimacy, and we felt more and more each day that we were made for one
+another. If our pleasures could be described, their simplicity would
+make you laugh; our excursions together out of town, in which I would
+munificently expend eight or ten halfpence in some rural tavern; our
+modest suppers at my window, seated in front of one another on two small
+chairs placed on a trunk that filled up the breadth of the embrasure.
+Here the window did duty for a table, we breathed the fresh air, we
+could see the neighbourhood and the people passing by, and though on the
+fourth story, could look down into the street as we ate. Who shall
+describe, who shall feel the charms of those meals, consisting of a
+coarse quartern loaf, some cherries, a tiny morsel of cheese, and a pint
+of wine which we drank between us? Ah, what delicious seasoning there is
+in friendship, confidence, intimacy, gentleness of soul! We used
+sometimes to remain thus until midnight, without once thinking of the
+time."[129]
+
+Men and women are often more fairly judged by the way in which they bear
+the burden of what they have done, than by the prime act which laid the
+burden on their lives.[130] The deeper part of us shows in the manner of
+accepting consequences. On the whole, Rousseau's relations with this
+woman present him in a better light than those with any other person
+whatever. If he became with all the rest of the world suspicious, angry,
+jealous, profoundly diseased in a word, with her he was habitually
+trustful, affectionate, careful, most long-suffering. It sometimes even
+occurs to us that his constancy to Theresa was only another side of the
+morbid perversity of his relations with the rest of the world. People of
+a certain kind not seldom make the most serious and vital sacrifices for
+bare love of singularity, and a man like Rousseau was not unlikely to
+feel an eccentric pleasure in proving that he could find merit in a
+woman who to everybody else was desperate. One who is on bad terms with
+the bulk of his fellows may contrive to save his self-respect and
+confirm his conviction that they are all in the wrong, by preserving
+attachment to some one to whom general opinion is hostile; the private
+argument being that if he is capable of this degree of virtue and
+friendship in an unfavourable case, how much more could he have
+practised it with others, if they would only have allowed him. Whether
+this kind of apology was present to his mind or not, Rousseau could
+always refer those who charged him with black caprice, to his steady
+kindness towards Theresa Le Vasseur. Her family were among the most
+odious of human beings, greedy, idle, and ill-humoured, while her mother
+had every fault that a woman could have in Rousseau's eyes, including
+that worst fault of setting herself up for a fine wit. Yet he bore with
+them all for years, and did not break with Madame Le Vasseur until she
+had poisoned the mind of her daughter, and done her best by rapacity and
+lying to render him contemptible to all his friends.
+
+In the course of years Theresa herself gave him unmistakable signs of a
+change in her affections. "I began to feel," he says, at a date of
+sixteen or seventeen years from our present point, "that she was no
+longer for me what she had been in our happy years, and I felt it all
+the more clearly as I was still the same towards her."[131] This was in
+1762, and her estrangement grew deeper and her indifference more open,
+until at length, seven years afterwards, we find that she had proposed a
+separation from him. What the exact reasons for this gradual change may
+have been we do not know, nor have we any right in ignorance of the
+whole facts to say that they were not adequate and just. There are two
+good traits recorded of the woman's character. She could never console
+herself for having let her father be taken away to end his days
+miserably in a house of charity.[132] And the repudiation of her
+children, against which the glowing egoism of maternity always rebelled,
+remained a cruel dart in her bosom as long as she lived. We may suppose
+that there was that about household life with Rousseau which might have
+bred disgusts even in one as little fastidious as Theresa was. Among
+other things which must have been hard to endure, we know that in
+composing his works he was often weeks together without speaking a word
+to her.[133] Perhaps again it would not be difficult to produce some
+passages in Rousseau's letters and in the Confessions, which show traces
+of that subtle contempt for women that lurks undetected in many who
+would blush to avow it. Whatever the causes may have been, from
+indifference she passed to something like aversion, and in the one
+place where a word of complaint is wrung from him, he describes her as
+rending and piercing his heart at a moment when his other miseries were
+at their height. His patience at any rate was inexhaustible; now old,
+worn by painful bodily infirmities, racked by diseased suspicion and the
+most dreadful and tormenting of the minor forms of madness, nearly
+friendless, and altogether hopeless, he yet kept unabated the old
+tenderness of a quarter of a century before, and expressed it in words
+of such gentleness, gravity, and self-respecting strength, as may touch
+even those whom his books leave unmoved, and who view his character with
+deepest distrust. "For the six-and-twenty years, dearest, that our union
+has lasted, I have never sought my happiness except in yours, and have
+never ceased to try to make you happy; and you saw by what I did
+lately,[134] that your honour and happiness were one as dear to me as
+the other. I see with pain that success does not answer my solicitude,
+and that my kindness is not as sweet to you to receive, as it is sweet
+to me to show. I know that the sentiments of honour and uprightness with
+which you were born will never change in you; but as for those of
+tenderness and attachment which were once reciprocal between us, I feel
+that they now only exist on my side. Not only, dearest of all friends,
+have you ceased to find pleasure in my company, but you have to tax
+yourself severely even to remain a few minutes with me out of
+complaisance. You are at your ease with all the world but me. I do not
+speak to you of many other things. We must take our friends with their
+faults, and I ought to pass over yours, as you pass over mine. If you
+were happy with me I could be content, but I see clearly that you are
+not, and this is what makes my heart sore. If I could do better for your
+happiness, I would do it and hold my peace; but that is not possible. I
+have left nothing undone that I thought would contribute to your
+felicity. At this moment, while I am writing to you, overwhelmed with
+distress and misery, I have no more true or lively desire than to finish
+my days in closest union with you. You know my lot,--it is such as one
+could not even dare to describe, for no one could believe it. I never
+had, my dearest, other than one single solace, but that the sweetest; it
+was to pour out all my heart in yours; when I talked of my miseries to
+you, they were soothed; and when you had pitied me, I needed pity no
+more. My every resource, my whole confidence, is in you and in you only;
+my soul cannot exist without sympathy, and cannot find sympathy except
+with you. It is certain that if you fail me and I am forced to live
+alone, I am as a dead man. But I should die a thousand times more
+cruelly still, if we continued to live together in misunderstanding, and
+if confidence and friendship were to go out between us. It would be a
+hundred times better to cease to see each other; still to live, and
+sometimes to regret one another. Whatever sacrifice may be necessary on
+my part to make you happy, be so at any cost, and I shall be content.
+We have faults to weep over and to expiate, but no crimes; let us not
+blot out by the imprudence of our closing days the sweetness and purity
+of those we have passed together."[135] Think ill as we may of
+Rousseau's theories, and meanly as we may of some parts of his conduct,
+yet to those who can feel the pulsing of a human life apart from a man's
+formulae, and can be content to leave to sure circumstance the tragic
+retaliation for evil behaviour, this letter is like one of the great
+master's symphonies, whose theme falls in soft strokes of melting pity
+on the heart. In truth, alas, the union of this now diverse pair had
+been stained by crimes shortly after its beginning. In the estrangement
+of father and mother in their late years we may perhaps hear the rustle
+and spy the pale forms of the avenging spectres of their lost children.
+
+At the time when the connection with Theresa Le Vasseur was formed,
+Rousseau did not know how to gain bread. He composed the musical
+diversion of the Muses Galantes, which Rameau rightly or wrongly
+pronounced a plagiarism, and at the request of Richelieu he made some
+minor re-adaptations in Voltaire's Princesse de Navarre, which Rameau
+had set to music--that "farce of the fair" to which the author of Zaire
+owed his seat in the Academy.[136] But neither task brought him money,
+and he fell back on a sort of secretaryship, with perhaps a little of
+the valet in it, to Madame Dupin and her son-in-law, M. de Francueil,
+for which he received the too moderate income of nine hundred francs. On
+one occasion he returned to his room expecting with eager impatience the
+arrival of a remittance, the proceeds of some small property which came
+to him by the death of his father.[137] He found the letter, and was
+opening it with trembling hands, when he was suddenly smitten with shame
+at his want of self-control; he placed it unopened on the chimney-piece,
+undressed, slept better than usual, and when he awoke the next morning,
+he had forgotten all about the letter until it caught his eye. He was
+delighted to find that it contained his money, but "I can swear," he
+adds, "that my liveliest delight was in having conquered myself." An
+occasion for self-conquest on a more considerable scale was at hand. In
+these tight straits, he received grievous news from the unfortunate
+Theresa. He made up his mind cheerfully what to do; the mother
+acquiesced after sore persuasion and with bitter tears; and the new-born
+child was dropped into oblivion in the box of the asylum for foundlings.
+Next year the same easy expedient was again resorted to, with the same
+heedlessness on the part of the father, the same pain and reluctance on
+the part of the mother. Five children in all were thus put away, and
+with such entire absence of any precaution with a view to their
+identification in happier times, that not even a note was kept of the
+day of their birth.[138]
+
+People have made a great variety of remarks upon this transaction, from
+the economist who turns it into an illustration of the evil results of
+hospitals for foundlings in encouraging improvident unions, down to the
+theologian who sees in it new proof of the inborn depravity of the human
+heart and the fall of man. Others have vindicated it in various ways,
+one of them courageously taking up the ground that Rousseau had good
+reason to believe that the children were not his own, and therefore was
+fully warranted in sending the poor creatures kinless into the
+universe.[139] Perhaps it is not too transcendental a thing to hope that
+civilisation may one day reach a point when a plea like this shall count
+for an aggravation rather than a palliative; when a higher conception of
+the duties of humanity, familiarised by the practice of adoption as well
+as by the spread of both rational and compassionate considerations as to
+the blameless little ones, shall have expelled what is surely as some
+red and naked beast's emotion of fatherhood. What may be an excellent
+reason for repudiating a woman, can never be a reason for abandoning a
+child, except with those whom reckless egoism has made willing to think
+it a light thing to fling away from us the moulding of new lives and the
+ensuring of salutary nurture for growing souls.
+
+We are, however, dispensed from entering into these questions of the
+greater morals by the very plain account which the chief actor has given
+us, almost in spite of himself. His crime like most others was the
+result of heedlessness, of the overriding of duty by the short dim-eyed
+selfishness of the moment. He had been accustomed to frequent a tavern,
+where the talk turned mostly upon topics which men with much
+self-respect put as far from them, as men with little self-respect will
+allow them to do. "I formed my fashion of thinking from what I perceived
+to reign among people who were at bottom extremely worthy folk, and I
+said to myself, Since it is the usage of the country, as one lives here,
+one may as well follow it. So I made up my mind to it cheerfully, and
+without the least scruple."[140] By and by he proceeded to cover this
+nude and intelligible explanation with finer phrases, about preferring
+that his children should be trained up as workmen and peasants rather
+than as adventurers and fortune-hunters, and about his supposing that in
+sending them to the hospital for foundlings he was enrolling himself a
+citizen in Plato's Republic.[141] This is hardly more than the talk of
+one become famous, who is defending the acts of his obscurity on the
+high principles which fame requires. People do not turn citizens of
+Plato's Republic "cheerfully and without the least scruple," and if a
+man frequents company where the despatch of inconvenient children to the
+hospital was an accepted point of common practice, it is superfluous to
+drag Plato and his Republic into the matter. Another turn again was
+given to his motives when his mind had become clouded by suspicious
+mania. Writing a year or two before his death he had assured himself
+that his determining reason was the fear of a destiny for his children a
+thousand times worse than the hard life of foundlings, namely, being
+spoiled by their mother, being turned into monsters by her family, and
+finally being taught to hate and betray their father by his plotting
+enemies.[142] This is obviously a mixture in his mind of the motives
+which led to the abandonment of the children and justified the act to
+himself at the time, with the circumstances that afterwards reconciled
+him to what he had done; for now he neither had any enemies plotting
+against him, nor did he suppose that he had. As for his wife's family,
+he showed himself quite capable, when the time came, of dealing
+resolutely and shortly with their importunities in his own case, and he
+might therefore well have trusted his power to deal with them in the
+case of his children. He was more right when in 1770, in his important
+letter to M. de St. Germain, he admitted that example, necessity, the
+honour of her who was dear to him, all united to make him entrust his
+children to the establishment provided for that purpose, and kept him
+from fulfilling the first and holiest of natural duties. "In this, far
+from excusing, I accuse myself; and when my reason tells me that I did
+what I ought to have done in my situation, I believe that less than my
+heart, which bitterly belies it."[143] This coincides with the first
+undisguised account given in the Confessions, which has been already
+quoted, and it has not that flawed ring of cant and fine words which
+sounds through nearly all his other references to this great stain upon
+his life, excepting one, and this is the only further document with
+which we need concern ourselves. In that,[144] which was written while
+the unholy work was actually being done, he states very distinctly that
+the motives were those which are more or less closely connected with
+most unholy works, motives of money--the great instrument and measure of
+our personal convenience, the quantitative test of our self-control in
+placing personal convenience behind duty to other people. "If my misery
+and my misfortunes rob me of the power of fulfilling a duty so dear,
+that is a calamity to pity me for, rather than a crime to reproach me
+with. I owe them subsistence, and I procured a better or at least a
+surer subsistence for them than I could myself have provided; this
+condition is above all others." Next comes the consideration of their
+mother, whose honour must be kept. "You know my situation; I gained my
+bread from day to day painfully enough; how then should I feed a family
+as well? And if I were compelled to fall back on the profession of
+author, how would domestic cares and the confusion of children leave me
+peace of mind enough in my garret to earn a living? Writings which
+hunger dictates are hardly of any use, and such a resource is speedily
+exhausted. Then I should have to resort to patronage, to intrigue, to
+tricks ... in short to surrender myself to all those infamies, for which
+I am penetrated with such just horror. Support myself, my children, and
+their mother on the blood of wretches? No, madame, it were better for
+them to be orphans than to have a scoundrel for their father.... Why
+have I not married, you will ask? Madame, ask it of your unjust laws. It
+was not fitting for me to contract an eternal engagement; and it will
+never be proved to me that my duty binds me to it. What is certain is
+that I have never done it, and that I never meant to do it. But we ought
+not to have children when we cannot support them. Pardon me, madame;
+nature means us to have offspring, since the earth produces sustenance
+enough for all; but it is the rich, it is your class, which robs mine of
+the bread of my children.... I know that foundlings are not delicately
+nurtured; so much the better for them, they become more robust. They
+have nothing superfluous given to them, but they have everything that is
+necessary. They do not make gentlemen of them, but peasants or
+artisans.... They would not know how to dance, or ride on horseback, but
+they would have strong unwearied legs. I would neither make authors of
+them, nor clerks; I would not practise them in handling the pen, but the
+plough, the file, and the plane, instruments for leading a healthy,
+laborious, innocent life.... I deprived myself of the delight of seeing
+them, and I have never tasted the sweetness of a father's embrace. Alas,
+as I have already told you, I see in this only a claim on your pity, and
+I deliver them from misery at my own expense."[145] We may see here that
+Rousseau's sophistical eloquence, if it misled others, was at least as
+powerful in misleading himself, and it may be noted that this letter,
+with its talk of the children of the rich taking bread out of the mouths
+of the children of the poor, contains the first of those socialistic
+sentences by which the writer in after times gained so famous a name. It
+is at any rate clear from this that the real motive of the abandonment
+of the children was wholly material. He could not afford to maintain
+them, and he did not wish to have his comfort disturbed by
+their presence.
+
+There is assuredly no word to be said by any one with firm reason and
+unsophisticated conscience in extenuation of this crime. We have only to
+remember that a great many other persons in that lax time, when the
+structure of the family was undermined alike in practice and
+speculation, were guilty of the same crime; that Rousseau, better than
+they, did not erect his own criminality into a social theory, but was
+tolerably soon overtaken by a remorse which drove him both to confess
+his misdeed, and to admit that it was inexpiable; and that the atrocity
+of the offence owes half the blackness with which it has always been
+invested by wholesome opinion, to the fact that the offender was by and
+by the author of the most powerful book by which parental duty has been
+commended in its full loveliness and nobility. And at any rate, let
+Rousseau be a little free from excessive reproach from all clergymen,
+sentimentalists, and others, who do their worst to uphold the common and
+rather bestial opinion in favour of reckless propagation, and who, if
+they do not advocate the despatch of children to public institutions,
+still encourage a selfish incontinence which ultimately falls in burdens
+on others than the offenders, and which turns the family into a scene of
+squalor and brutishness, producing a kind of parental influence that is
+far more disastrous and demoralising than the absence of it in public
+institutions can possibly be. If the propagation of children without
+regard to their maintenance be either a virtue or a necessity, and if
+afterwards the only alternatives are their maintenance in an asylum on
+the one hand, and their maintenance in the degradation of a
+poverty-stricken home on the other, we should not hesitate to give
+people who act as Rousseau acted, all that credit for self-denial and
+high moral courage which he so audaciously claimed for himself. It
+really seems to be no more criminal to produce children with the
+deliberate intention of abandoning them to public charity, as Rousseau
+did, than it is to produce them in deliberate reliance on the besotted
+maxim that he who sends mouths will send meat, or any other of the
+spurious saws which make Providence do duty for self-control, and add to
+the gratification of physical appetite the grotesque luxury of
+religious unction.
+
+In 1761 the Marechale de Luxembourg made efforts to discover Rousseau's
+children, but without success. They were gone beyond hope of
+identification, and the author of _Emitius_ and his sons and daughters
+lived together in this world, not knowing one another. Rousseau with
+singular honesty did not conceal his satisfaction at the fruitlessness
+of the charitable endeavours to restore them to him. "The success of
+your search," he wrote, "could not give me pure and undisturbed
+pleasure; it is too late, too late.... In my present condition this
+search interested me more for another person [Theresa] than myself; and
+considering the too easily yielding character of the person in question,
+it is possible that what she had found already formed for good or for
+evil, might turn out a sorry boon to her."[146] We may doubt, in spite
+of one or two charming and graceful passages, whether Rousseau was of a
+nature to have any feeling for the pathos of infancy, the bright blank
+eye, the eager unpurposed straining of the hand, the many turns and
+changes in murmurings that yet can tell us nothing. He was both too
+self-centred and too passionate for warm ease and fulness of life in all
+things, to be truly sympathetic with a condition whose feebleness and
+immaturity touch us with half-painful hope.
+
+Rousseau speaks in the Confessions of having married Theresa
+five-and-twenty years after the beginning of their acquaintance,[147]
+but we hardly have to understand that any ceremony took place which
+anybody but himself would recognise as constituting a marriage. What
+happened appears to have been this. Seated at table with Theresa and two
+guests, one of them the mayor of the place, he declared that she was his
+wife. "This good and seemly engagement was contracted," he says, "in all
+the simplicity but also in all the truth of nature, in the presence of
+two men of worth and honour.... During the short and simple act, I saw
+the honest pair melted in tears."[148] He had at this time whimsically
+assumed the name of Renou, and he wrote to a friend that of course he
+had married in this name, for he adds, with the characteristic insertion
+of an irrelevant bit of magniloquence, "it is not names that are
+married; no, it is persons." "Even if in this simple and holy ceremony
+names entered as a constituent part, the one I bear would have sufficed,
+since I recognise no other. If it were a question of property to be
+assured, then it would be another thing, but you know very well that is
+not our case."[149] Of course, this may have been a marriage according
+to the truth of nature, and Rousseau was as free to choose his own rites
+as more sacramental performers, but it is clear from his own words about
+property that there was no pretence of a marriage in law. He and Theresa
+were on profoundly uncomfortable terms about this time,[150] and
+Rousseau is not the only person by many thousands who has deceived
+himself into thinking that some form of words between man and woman must
+magically transform the substance of their characters and lives, and
+conjure up new relations of peace and steadfastness.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We have, however, been outstripping slow-footed destiny, and have now to
+return to the time when Theresa did not drink brandy, nor run after
+stable-boys, nor fill Rousseau's soul with bitterness and suspicion, but
+sat contentedly with him in an evening taking a stoic's meal in the
+window of their garret on the fourth floor, seasoning it with
+"confidence, intimacy, gentleness of soul," and that general comfort of
+sensation which, as we know to our cost, is by no means an invariable
+condition either of duty done externally or of spiritual growth within.
+It is perhaps hard for us to feel that we are in the presence of a great
+religious reactionist; there is so little sign of the higher graces of
+the soul, there are so many signs of the lowering clogs of the flesh.
+But the spirit of a man moves in mysterious ways, and expands like the
+plants of the field with strange and silent stirrings. It is one of the
+chief tests of worthiness and freedom from vulgarity of soul in us, to
+be able to have faith that this expansion is a reality, and the most
+important of all realities. We do not rightly seize the type of Socrates
+if we can never forget that he was the husband of Xanthippe, nor David's
+if we can only think of him as the murderer of Uriah, nor Peter's if we
+can simply remember that he denied his master. Our vision is only
+blindness, if we can never bring ourselves to see the possibilities of
+deep mystic aspiration behind the vile outer life of a man, or to
+believe that this coarse Rousseau, scantily supping with his coarse
+mate, might yet have many glimpses of the great wide horizons that are
+haunted by figures rather divine than human.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[104] In theory he was even now curiously prudent and almost
+sagacious; witness the Projet pour l'Education, etc., submitted to M.
+de Mably, and printed in the volume of his Works entitled _Melanges_,
+pp. 106-136. In the matter of Latin, it may be worth noting that
+Rousseau rashly or otherwise condemns the practice of writing it, as a
+vexatious superfluity (p. 132).
+
+[105] _Conf._, vi. 471.
+
+[106] _Ib._, vi. 472-475; vii. 8.
+
+[107] _Conf._, vii. 18, 19.
+
+[108] Musset-Pathay (ii. 72) quotes the passage from Lord
+Chesterfield's Letters, where the writer suggests Madame Dupin as a
+proper person with whom his son might in a regular and business-like
+manner open the elevating game of gallant intrigue.
+
+[109] M. Dupin deserves honourable mention as having helped the
+editors of the Encyclopaedia by procuring information for them as to
+salt-works (D'Alembert's _Discours Preliminaire_). His son M. Dupin de
+Francueil, it may be worth noting, is a link in the genealogical chain
+between two famous personages. In 1777, the year before Rousseau's
+death, he married (in the chapel of the French embassy in London)
+Aurora de Saxe, a natural daughter of the marshal, himself the natural
+son of August the Strong, King of Poland. From this union was born
+Maurice Dupin, and Maurice Dupin was the father of Madame George Sand.
+M. Francueil died in 1787.
+
+[110] _Mem. de Mdme. d'Epinay_, vol. i. ch. iv. p. 176.
+
+[111] _Ib._ vol. i. ch. iv. pp. 178, 179.
+
+[112] _Conf._, vii. 46, 51, 52, etc. A diplomatic piece in Rousseau's
+handwriting has been found in the archives of the French consulate at
+Constantinople, as M. Girardin informs us. Voltaire unworthily spread
+the report that Rousseau had been the ambassador's private attendant.
+For Rousseau's reply to the calumny, see _Corr._, v. 75 (Jan. 5,
+1767); also iv. 150.
+
+[113] Bernardin de St. Pierre, _Oeuv._, xii. 55 _seq._
+
+[114] _Conf._, vii. 92.
+
+[115] _Conf._, vii. 38, 39.
+
+[116] _Lettres de la Montagne_, iii. 266.
+
+[117] _Conf._, vii. 75-84. Also a second example, 84-86. For Byron's
+opinion of one of these stories, see Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, vi.
+132. (Ed. 1837.)
+
+[118] _Lettre sur la Musique Francaise_ (1753), p. 186.
+
+[119] _Conf._, ix. 232.
+
+[120] _Ib._ vii. 97.
+
+[121] Hotel St. Quentin, rue des Cordiers, a narrow street running
+between the rue St. Jacques and the rue Victor Cousin. The still
+squalid hostelry is now visible as Hotel J.J. Rousseau. There is some
+doubt whether he first saw Theresa in 1743 or 1745. The account in Bk.
+vii. of the _Confessions_ is for the latter date (see also _Corr._,
+ii. 207), but in the well-known letter to her in 1769 (_Ib._ vi. 79),
+he speaks of the twenty-six years of their union. Their so-called
+marriage took place in 1768, and writing in that year he speaks of the
+five-and-twenty years of their attachment (_Ib._ v. 323), and in the
+_Confessions_ (ix. 249) he fixes their marriage at the same date; also
+in the letter to Saint-Germain (vi. 152). Musset-Pathay, though giving
+1745 in one place (i. 45), and 1743 in another (ii. 198), has with
+less than his usual care paid no attention to the discrepancy.
+
+[122] _Conf._, vii. 97-100.
+
+[123] _Conf._, vii. 101. A short specimen of her composition may be
+interesting, at any rate to hieroglyphic students: "Mesiceuras ancor
+mien re mies quan geu ceures o pres deu vous, e deu vous temoes tous
+la goies e latandres deu mon querque vous cones ces que getou gour e
+rus pour vous, e qui neu finiraes quotobocs ces mon quere qui vous
+paleu ces paes mes le vre ... ge sui avestous lamities e la reu conec
+caceu posible e la tacheman mon cher bonnamies votreau enble e bon
+amiess theress le vasseur." Of which dark words this is the
+interpretation:--"Mais il sera encore mieux remis quand je sera aupres
+de vous, et de vous temoigner toute la joie et la tendresse de mon
+coeur que vous connaissez que j'ai toujours eue pour vous, et qui ne
+finira qu'au tombeau; c'est mon coeur qui vous parle, c'est pas mes
+levres.... Je suis avec toute l'amitie et la reconnaissance possibles,
+et l'attachement, mon cher bon ami, votre humble et bonne amie,
+Therese Le Vasseur." (_Rousseau, ses Amis et ses Ennemis_, ii. 450.)
+Certainly it was not learning and arts which hindered Theresa's
+manners from being pure.
+
+[124] _Oeuv. et Corr. Ined._, 365.
+
+[125] _Conf._, vii. 102. See also _Corr._, v. 373 (Oct. 10, 1768). On
+the other hand, _Conf._, ix. 249.
+
+[126] M. St. Marc Girardin, in one of his admirable papers on
+Rousseau, speaks of him as "a bourgeois unclassed by an alliance with
+a tavern servant" (_Rev. des Deux Mondes_, Nov. 1852, p. 759); but
+surely Rousseau had unclassed himself long before, in the houses of
+Madame Vercellis, Count Gouvon, and even Madame de Warens, and by his
+repudiation, from the time when he ran away from Geneva, of nearly
+every bourgeois virtue and bourgeois prejudice.
+
+[127] _Conf._, vii. 11. Also footnote.
+
+[128] _Reveries_, ix. 309.
+
+[129] _Conf._, viii. 142, 143.
+
+[130] The other day I came for the first time upon the following in
+the sayings of Madame de Lambert:--"Ce ne sont pas toujours les fautes
+qui nous perdent; c'est la maniere de se conduire apres les avoir
+faites." [1877.]
+
+[131] _Conf._, xii. 187, 188.
+
+[132] _Ib._, viii. 221.
+
+[133] Bernardin de St. Pierre, _Oeuv._, xii. 103. See _Conf._, xii
+188, and _Corr._, v. 324.
+
+[134] Referring, no doubt, to the ceremony which he called their
+marriage, and which had taken place in 1768.
+
+[135] _Corr._, vi. 79-86. August 12, 1769.
+
+[136] Composed in 1745. The _Fetes de Ramire_ was represented at
+Versailles at the very end of this year.
+
+[137] Some time in 1746-7. _Conf._, vii. 113, 114.
+
+[138] Probably in the winter of 1746-7. _Corr._, ii. 207. _Conf._,
+vii. 120-124. _Ib._, viii. 148. _Corr._, ii. 208. June 12, 1761, to
+the Marechale de Luxembourg.
+
+[139] George Sand,--in an eloquent piece entitled _A Propos des
+Charmettes (Revue des Deux Mondes_, November 15, 1863), in which she
+expresses her own obligations to Jean Jacques. In 1761 Rousseau
+declares that he had never hitherto had the least reason to suspect
+Theresa's fidelity. _Corr._, ii. 209
+
+[140] _Conf._, vii. 123.
+
+[141] _Ib._, viii. 145-151.
+
+[142] _Reveries_, ix. 313. The same reason is given, _Conf._, ix. 252;
+also in Letter to Madame B., January 17, 1770 (_Corr._, vi. 117).
+
+[143] _Corr._, vi. 152, 153. Feb. 27, 1770.
+
+[144] Letter to Madame de Francueil, April 20, 1751. _Corr._, i. 151.
+
+[145] _Corr._, i. 151-155
+
+[146] August 10, 1761. _Corr._, ii. 220. The Marechale de Luxembourg's
+note on the subject, to which this is a reply, is given in _Rousseau,
+ses Amis et ses Ennemis_, i. 444.
+
+[147] _Conf._, x. 249. See above, p. 106, _n._
+
+[148] To Lalliaud, Aug 31, 1768. _Corr._, v. 324. See also D'Escherny,
+quoted in Musset-Pathay, i. 169, 170.
+
+[149] To Du Peyrou, Sept. 26, 1768. _Corr._, v. 360.
+
+[150] To Mdlle. Le Vasseur, July 25, 1768. _Corr._, v. 116-119.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+THE DISCOURSES.
+
+
+The busy establishment of local academies in the provincial centres of
+France only preceded the outbreak of the revolution by ten or a dozen
+years; but one or two of the provincial cities, such as Bordeaux, Rouen,
+Dijon, had possessed academies in imitation of the greater body of Paris
+for a much longer time. Their activity covered a very varied ground,
+from the mere commonplaces of literature to the most practical details
+of material production. If they now and then relapsed into inquiries
+about the laws of Crete, they more often discussed positive and
+scientific theses, and rather resembled our chambers of agriculture than
+bodies of more learned pretension. The academy of Dijon was one of the
+earliest of these excellent institutions, and on the whole the list of
+its theses shows it to have been among the most sensible in respect of
+the subjects which it found worth thinking about. Its members, however,
+could not entirely resist the intellectual atmosphere of the time. In
+1742 they invited discussion of the point, whether the natural law can
+conduct society to perfection without the aid of political laws.[151]
+In 1749 they proposed this question as a theme for their prize essay:
+_Has the restoration of the sciences contributed to purify or to corrupt
+manners?_ Rousseau was one of fourteen competitors, and in 1750 his
+discussion of the academic theme received the prize.[152] This was his
+first entry on the field of literature and speculation. Three years
+afterwards the same academy propounded another question: _What is the
+origin of inequality among men, and is it authorised by the natural
+law?_ Rousseau again competed, and though his essay neither gained the
+prize, nor created as lively an agitation as its predecessor had done,
+yet we may justly regard the second as a more powerful supplement to
+the first.
+
+It is always interesting to know the circumstances under which pieces
+that have moved a world were originally composed, and Rousseau's account
+of the generation of his thoughts as to the influence of enlightenment
+on morality, is remarkable enough to be worth transcribing. He was
+walking along the road from Paris to Vincennes one hot summer afternoon
+on a visit to Diderot, then in prison for his Letter on the Blind
+(1749), when he came across in a newspaper the announcement of the theme
+propounded by the Dijon academy. "If ever anything resembled a sudden
+inspiration, it was the movement which began in me as I read this. All
+at once I felt myself dazzled by a thousand sparkling lights; crowds of
+vivid ideas thronged into my mind with a force and confusion that threw
+me into unspeakable agitation; I felt my head whirling in a giddiness
+like that of intoxication. A violent palpitation oppressed me; unable to
+walk for difficulty of breathing, I sank under one of the trees of the
+avenue, and passed half an hour there in such a condition of excitement,
+that when I arose I saw that the front of my waistcoat was all wet with
+my tears, though I was wholly unconscious of shedding them. Ah, if I
+could ever have written the quarter of what I saw and felt under that
+tree, with what clearness should I have brought out all the
+contradictions of our social system; with what simplicity I should have
+demonstrated that man is good naturally, and that by institutions only
+is he made bad."[153] Diderot encouraged him to compete for the prize,
+and to give full flight to the ideas which had come to him in this
+singular way.[154]
+
+People have held up their hands at the amazing originality of the idea
+that perhaps sciences and arts have not purified manners. This sentiment
+is surely exaggerated, if we reflect first that it occurred to the
+academicians of Dijon as a question for discussion, and second that, if
+you are asked whether a given result has or has not followed from
+certain circumstances, the mere form of the question suggests No quite
+as readily as Yes. The originality lay not in the central contention,
+but in the fervour, sincerity, and conviction of a most unacademic sort
+with which it was presented and enforced. There is less originality in
+denouncing your generation as wicked and adulterous than there is in
+believing it to be so, and in persuading the generation itself both that
+you believe it and that you have good reasons to give. We have not to
+suppose that there was any miracle wrought by agency celestial or
+infernal in the sudden disclosure of his idea to Rousseau. Rousseau had
+been thinking of politics ever since the working of the government of
+Venice had first drawn his mind to the subject. What is the government,
+he had kept asking himself, which is most proper to form a sage and
+virtuous nation? What government by its nature keeps closest to the law?
+What is this law? And whence?[155] This chain of problems had led him to
+what he calls the historic study of morality, though we may doubt
+whether history was so much his teacher as the rather meagrely nourished
+handmaid of his imagination. Here was the irregular preparation, the
+hidden process, which suddenly burst into light and manifested itself
+with an exuberance of energy, that passed to the man himself for an
+inward revolution with no precursive sign.
+
+Rousseau's ecstatic vision on the road to Vincennes was the opening of a
+life of thought and production which only lasted a dozen years, but
+which in that brief space gave to Europe a new gospel. Emilius and the
+Social Contract were completed in 1761, and they crowned a work which if
+you consider its origin, influence, and meaning with due and proper
+breadth, is marked by signal unity of purpose and conception. The key to
+it is given to us in the astonishing transport at the foot of the
+wide-spreading oak. Such a transport does not come to us of cool and
+rational western temperament, but more often to the oriental after
+lonely sojourning in the wilderness, or in violent reactions on the road
+to Damascus and elsewhere. Jean Jacques detected oriental quality in his
+own nature,[156] and so far as the union of ardour with mysticism, of
+intense passion with vague dream, is to be defined as oriental, he
+assuredly deserves the name. The ideas stirred in his mind by the Dijon
+problem suddenly "opened his eyes, brought order into the chaos in his
+head, revealed to him another universe. From the active effervescence
+which thus began in his soul, came sparks of genius which people saw
+glittering in his writings through ten years of fever and delirium, but
+of which no trace had been seen in him previously, and which would
+probably have ceased to shine henceforth, if he should have chanced to
+wish to continue writing after the access was over. Inflamed by the
+contemplation of these lofty objects, he had them incessantly present to
+his mind. His heart, made hot within him by the idea of the future
+happiness of the human race, and by the honour of contributing to it,
+dictated to him a language worthy of so high an enterprise ... and for a
+moment, he astonished Europe by productions in which vulgar souls saw
+only eloquence and brightness of understanding, but in which those who
+dwell in the ethereal regions recognised with joy one of their
+own."[157]
+
+This was his own account of the matter quite at the end of his life, and
+this is the only point of view from which we are secure against the
+vulgarity of counting him a deliberate hypocrite and conscious
+charlatan. He was possessed, as holier natures than his have been, by an
+enthusiastic vision, an intoxicated confidence, a mixture of sacred rage
+and prodigious love, an insensate but absolutely disinterested revolt
+against the stone and iron of a reality which he was bent on melting in
+a heavenly blaze of splendid aspiration and irresistibly persuasive
+expression. The last word of this great expansion was Emilius, its first
+and more imperfectly articulated was the earlier of the two Discourses.
+
+Rousseau's often-repeated assertion that here was the instant of the
+ruin of his life, and that all his misfortunes flowed from that unhappy
+moment, has been constantly treated as the word of affectation and
+disguised pride. Yet, vain as he was, it may well have represented his
+sincere feeling in those better moods when mental suffering was strong
+enough to silence vanity. His visions mastered him for these thirteen
+years, _grande mortalis oevi spatium_. They threw him on to that turbid
+sea of literature for which he had so keen an aversion, and from which,
+let it be remarked, he fled finally away, when his confidence in the
+ease of making men good and happy by words of monition had left him. It
+was the torment of his own enthusiasm which rent that veil of placid
+living, that in his normal moments he would fain have interposed between
+his existence and the tumult of a generation with which he was
+profoundly out of sympathy. In this way the first Discourse was the
+letting in of much evil upon him, as that and the next and the Social
+Contract were the letting in of much evil upon all Europe.
+
+Of this essay the writer has recorded his own impression that, though
+full of heat and force, it is absolutely wanting in logic and order, and
+that of all the products of his pen, it is the feeblest in reasoning and
+the poorest in numbers and harmony. "For," as he justly adds, "the art
+of writing is not learnt all at once."[158] The modern critic must be
+content to accept the same verdict; only a generation so in love as
+this was with anything that could tickle its intellectual curiousness,
+would have found in the first of the two Discourses that combination of
+speculative and literary merit which was imputed to Rousseau on the
+strength of it, and which at once brought him into a place among the
+notables of an age that was full of them.[159] We ought to take in
+connection with it two at any rate of the vindications of the Discourse,
+which the course of controversy provoked from its author, and which
+serve to complete its significance. It is difficult to analyse, because
+in truth it is neither closely argumentative, nor is it vertebrate, even
+as a piece of rhetoric. The gist of the piece, however, runs somewhat in
+this wise:--
+
+Before art had fashioned our manners, and taught our passions to use a
+too elaborate speech, men were rude but natural, and difference of
+conduct announced at a glance difference of character. To-day a vile and
+most deceptive uniformity reigns over our manners, and all minds seem as
+if they had been cast in a single mould. Hence we never know with what
+sort of person we are dealing, hence the hateful troop of suspicions,
+fears, reserves, and treacheries, and the concealment of impiety,
+arrogance, calumny, and scepticism, under a dangerous varnish of
+refinement. So terrible a set of effects must have a cause. History
+shows that the cause here is to be found in the progress of sciences and
+arts. Egypt, once so mighty, becomes the mother of philosophy and the
+fine arts; straightway behold its conquest by Cambyses, by Greeks, by
+Romans, by Arabs, finally by Turks. Greece twice conquered Asia, once
+before Troy, once in its own homes; then came in fatal sequence the
+progress of the arts, the dissolution of manners, and the yoke of the
+Macedonian. Rome, founded by a shepherd and raised to glory by
+husbandmen, began to degenerate with Ennius, and the eve of her ruin was
+the day when she gave a citizen the deadly title of arbiter of good
+taste. China, where letters carry men to the highest dignities of the
+state, could not be preserved by all her literature from the conquering
+power of the ruder Tartar. On the other hand, the Persians, Scythians,
+Germans, remain in history as types of simplicity, innocence, and
+virtue. Was not he admittedly the wisest of the Greeks, who made of his
+own apology a plea for ignorance, and a denunciation of poets, orators,
+and artists? The chosen people of God never cultivated the sciences, and
+when the new law was established, it was not the learned, but the simple
+and lowly, fishers and workmen, to whom Christ entrusted his teaching
+and its ministry.[160]
+
+This, then, is the way in which chastisement has always overtaken our
+presumptuous efforts to emerge from that happy ignorance in which
+eternal wisdom placed us; though the thick veil with which that wisdom
+has covered all its operations seemed to warn us that we were not
+destined to fatuous research. All the secrets that Nature hides from us
+are so many evils against which she would fain shelter us.
+
+Is probity the child of ignorance, and can science and virtue be really
+inconsistent with one another? These sounding contrasts are mere
+deceits, because if you look nearly into the results of this science of
+which we talk so proudly, you will perceive that they confirm the
+results of induction from history. Astronomy, for instance, is born of
+superstition; geometry from the desire of gain; physics from a futile
+curiosity; all of them, even morals, from human pride. Are we for ever
+to be the dupes of words, and to believe that these pompous names of
+science, philosophy, and the rest, stand for worthy and profitable
+realities?[161] Be sure that they do not.
+
+How many errors do we pass through on our road to truth, errors a
+thousandfold more dangerous than truth is useful? And by what marks are
+we to know truth, when we think that we have found it? And above all, if
+we do find it, who of us can be sure that he will make good use of it?
+If celestial intelligences cultivated science, only good could result;
+and we may say as much of great men of the stamp of Socrates, who are
+born to be the guides of others.[162] But the intelligences of common
+men are neither celestial nor Socratic.
+
+Again, every useless citizen may be fairly regarded as a pernicious man;
+and let us ask those illustrious philosophers who have taught us what
+insects reproduce themselves curiously, in what ratio bodies attract
+one another in space, what curves have conjugate points, points of
+inflection or reflection, what in the planetary revolutions are the
+relations of areas traversed in equal times--let us ask those who have
+attained all this sublime knowledge, by how much the worse governed,
+less flourishing, or less perverse we should have been if they had
+attained none of it? Now if the works of our most scientific men and
+best citizens lead to such small utility, tell us what we are to think
+of the crowd of obscure writers and idle men of letters who devour the
+public substance in pure loss.
+
+Then it is in the nature of things that devotion to art leads to luxury,
+and luxury, as we all know from our own experience, no less than from
+the teaching of history, saps not only the military virtues by which
+nations preserve their independence, but also those moral virtues which
+make the independence of a nation worth preserving. Your children go to
+costly establishments where they learn everything except their duties.
+They remain ignorant of their own tongue, though they will speak others
+not in use anywhere in the world; they gain the faculty of composing
+verses which they can barely understand; without capacity to distinguish
+truth from error, they possess the art of rendering them
+indistinguishable to others by specious arguments. Magnanimity, equity,
+temperance, courage, humanity, have no real meaning to them; and if they
+hear speak of God, it breeds more terror than awful fear.
+
+Whence spring all these abuses, if not from the disastrous inequality
+introduced among men by the distinction of talents and the cheapening of
+virtue?[163] People no longer ask of a man whether he has probity, but
+whether he is clever; nor of a book whether it is useful, but whether it
+is well written. And after all, what is this philosophy, what are these
+lessons of wisdom, to which we give the prize of enduring fame? To
+listen to these sages, would you not take them for a troop of
+charlatans, all bawling out in the market-place, Come to me, it is only
+I who never cheat you, and always give good measure? One maintains that
+there is no body, and that everything is mere representation; the other
+that there is no entity but matter, and no God but the universe: one
+that moral good and evil are chimeras; the other that men are wolves and
+may devour one another with the easiest conscience in the world. These
+are the marvellous personages on whom the esteem of contemporaries is
+lavished so long as they live, and to whom immortality is reserved after
+their death. And we have now invented the art of making their
+extravagances eternal, and thanks to the use of typographic characters
+the dangerous speculations of Hobbes and Spinoza will endure for ever.
+Surely when they perceive the terrible disorders which printing has
+already caused in Europe, sovereigns will take as much trouble to
+banish this deadly art from their states as they once took to
+introduce it.
+
+If there is perhaps no harm in allowing one or two men to give
+themselves up to the study of sciences and arts, it is only those who
+feel conscious of the strength required for advancing their subjects,
+who have any right to attempt to raise monuments to the glory of the
+human mind. We ought to have no tolerance for those compilers who rashly
+break open the gate of the sciences, and introduce into their sanctuary
+a populace that is unworthy even to draw near to it. It may be well that
+there should be philosophers, provided only and always that the people
+do not meddle with philosophising.[164]
+
+In short, there are two kinds of ignorance: one brutal and ferocious,
+springing from a bad heart, multiplying vices, degrading the reason, and
+debasing the soul: the other "a reasonable ignorance, which consists in
+limiting our curiosity to the extent of the faculties we have received;
+a modest ignorance, born of a lively love for virtue, and inspiring
+indifference only for what is not worthy of filling a man's heart, or
+fails to contribute to its improvement; a sweet and precious ignorance,
+the treasure of a pure soul at peace with itself, which finds all its
+blessedness in inward retreat, in testifying to itself its own
+innocence, and which feels no need of seeking a warped and hollow
+happiness in the opinion of other people as to its enlightenment."[165]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Some of the most pointed assaults in this Discourse, such for instance
+as that on the pedantic parade of wit, or that on the excessive
+preponderance of literary instruction in the art of education, are due
+to Montaigne; and in one way, the Discourse might be described as
+binding together a number of that shrewd man's detached hints by means
+of a paradoxical generalisation. But the Rousseau is more important than
+the Montaigne in it. Another remark to be made is that its vigorous
+disparagement of science, of the emptiness of much that is called
+science, of the deadly pride of intellect, is an anticipation in a very
+precise way of the attitude taken by the various Christian churches and
+their representatives now and for long, beginning with De Maistre, the
+greatest of the religious reactionaries after Rousseau. The vilification
+of the Greeks is strikingly like some vehement passages in De Maistre's
+estimate of their share in sophisticating European intellect. At last
+Rousseau even began to doubt whether "so chattering a people could ever
+have had any solid virtues, even in primitive times."[166] Yet
+Rousseau's own thinking about society is deeply marked with opinions
+borrowed exactly from these very chatterers. His imagination was
+fascinated from the first by the freedom and boldness of Plato's social
+speculations, to which his debt in a hundred details of his political
+and educational schemes is well known. What was more important than any
+obligation of detail was the fatal conception, borrowed partly from the
+Greeks and partly from Geneva, of the omnipotence of the Lawgiver in
+moulding a social state after his own purpose and ideal. We shall
+presently quote the passage in which he holds up for our envy and
+imitation the policy of Lycurgus at Sparta, who swept away all that he
+found existing and constructed the social edifice afresh from foundation
+to roof.[167] It is true that there was an unmistakable decay of Greek
+literary studies in France from the beginning of the eighteenth century,
+and Rousseau seems to have read Plato only through Ficinus's
+translation. But his example and its influence, along with that of Mably
+and others, warrant the historian in saying that at no time did Greek
+ideas more keenly preoccupy opinion than during this century.[168]
+Perhaps we may say that Rousseau would never have proved how little
+learning and art do for the good of manners, if Plato had not insisted
+on poets being driven out of the Republic. The article on Political
+Economy, written by him for the Encyclopaedia (1755), rings with the
+names of ancient rulers and lawgivers; the project of public education
+is recommended by the example of Cretans, Lacedaemonians, and Persians,
+while the propriety of the reservation of a state domain is suggested
+by Romulus.
+
+It may be added that one of the not too many merits of the essay is the
+way in which the writer, more or less in the Socratic manner, insists on
+dragging people out of the refuge of sonorous general terms, with a
+great public reputation of much too well-established a kind to be
+subjected to the affront of analysis. It is true that Rousseau himself
+contributed nothing directly to that analytic operation which Socrates
+likened to midwifery, and he set up graven images of his own in place of
+the idols which he destroyed. This, however, did not wholly efface the
+distinction, which he shares with all who have ever tried to lead the
+minds of men into new tracks, of refusing to accept the current coins of
+philosophical speech without test or measurement. Such a treatment of
+the great trite words which come so easily to the tongue and seem to
+weigh for so much, must always be the first step towards bringing
+thought back into the region of real matter, and confronting phrases,
+terms, and all the common form of the discussion of an age, with the
+actualities which it is the object of sincere discussion to penetrate.
+
+The refutation of many parts of Rousseau's main contention on the
+principles which are universally accepted among enlightened men in
+modern society is so extremely obvious that to undertake it would merely
+be to draw up a list of the gratulatory commonplaces of which we hear
+quite enough in the literature and talk of our day. In this direction,
+perhaps it suffices to say that the Discourse is wholly one-sided,
+admitting none of the conveniences, none of the alleviations of
+suffering of all kinds, nothing of the increase of mental stature, which
+the pursuit of knowledge has brought to the race. They may or may not
+counterbalance the evils that it has brought, but they are certainly to
+be put in the balance in any attempt at philosophic examination of the
+subject. It contains no serious attempt to tell us what those alleged
+evils really are, or definitely to trace them one by one, to abuse of
+the thirst for knowledge and defects in the method of satisfying it. It
+omits to take into account the various other circumstances, such as
+climate, government, race, and the disposition of neighbours, which must
+enter equally with intellectual progress into whatever demoralisation
+has marked the destinies of a nation. Finally it has for the base of its
+argument the entirely unsupported assumption of there having once been
+in the early history of each society a stage of mild, credulous, and
+innocent virtue, from which appetite for the fruit of the forbidden tree
+caused an inevitable degeneration. All evidence and all scientific
+analogy are now well known to lead to the contrary doctrine, that the
+history of civilisation is a history of progress and not of decline from
+a primary state. After all, as Voltaire said to Rousseau in a letter
+which only showed a superficial appreciation of the real drift of the
+argument, we must confess that these thorns attached to literature are
+only as flowers in comparison with the other evils that have deluged the
+earth. "It was not Cicero nor Lucretius nor Virgil nor Horace, who
+contrived the proscriptions of Marius, of Sulla, of the debauched
+Antony, of the imbecile Lepidus, of that craven tyrant basely surnamed
+Augustus. It was not Marot who produced the St. Bartholomew massacre,
+nor the tragedy of the Cid that led to the wars of the Fronde. What
+really makes, and always will make, this world into a valley of tears,
+is the insatiable cupidity and indomitable insolence of men, from Kouli
+Khan, who did not know how to read, down to the custom-house clerk, who
+knows nothing but how to cast up figures. Letters nourish the soul, they
+strengthen its integrity, they furnish a solace to it,"--and so on in
+the sense, though without the eloquence, of the famous passage in
+Cicero's defence of Archias the poet.[169] All this, however, in our
+time is in no danger of being forgotten, and will be present to the mind
+of every reader. The only danger is that pointed out by Rousseau
+himself: "People always think they have described what the sciences do,
+when they have in reality only described what the sciences ought
+to do."[170]
+
+What we are more likely to forget is that Rousseau's piece has a
+positive as well as a negative side, and presents, in however vehement
+and overstated a way, a truth which the literary and speculative
+enthusiasm of France in the eighteenth century, as is always the case
+with such enthusiasm whenever it penetrates either a generation or an
+individual, was sure to make men dangerously ready to forget.[171] This
+truth may be put in different terms. We may describe it as the
+possibility of eminent civic virtue existing in people, without either
+literary taste or science or speculative curiosity. Or we may express it
+as the compatibility of a great amount of contentment and order in a
+given social state, with a very low degree of knowledge. Or finally, we
+may give the truth its most general expression, as the subordination of
+all activity to the promotion of social aims. Rousseau's is an elaborate
+and roundabout manner of saying that virtue without science is better
+than science without virtue; or that the well-being of a country depends
+more on the standard of social duty and the willingness of citizens to
+conform to it, than on the standard of intellectual culture and the
+extent of its diffusion. In other words, we ought to be less concerned
+about the speculative or scientific curiousness of our people than about
+the height of their notion of civic virtue and their firmness and
+persistency in realising it. It is a moralist's way of putting the
+ancient preacher's monition, that they are but empty in whom is not the
+wisdom of God. The importance of stating this is in our modern era
+always pressing, because there is a constant tendency on the part of
+energetic intellectual workers, first, to concentrate their energies on
+a minute specialty, leaving public affairs and interests to their own
+course. Second, they are apt to overestimate their contributions to the
+stock of means by which men are made happier, and what is more serious,
+to underestimate in comparison those orderly, modest, self-denying,
+moral qualities, by which only men are made worthier, and the continuity
+of society is made surer. Third, in consequence of their greater command
+of specious expression and their control of the organs of public
+opinion, they both assume a kind of supreme place in the social
+hierarchy, and persuade the majority of plain men unsuspectingly to take
+so very egregious an assumption for granted. So far as Rousseau's
+Discourse recalled the truth as against this sort of error it was full
+of wholesomeness.
+
+Unfortunately his indignation against the overweening pretensions of the
+verse-writer, the gazetteer, and the great band of socialists at large,
+led him into a general position with reference to scientific and
+speculative energy, which seems to involve a perilous misconception of
+the conditions of this energy producing its proper results. It is easy
+now, as it was easy for Rousseau in the last century, to ask in an
+epigrammatical manner by how much men are better or happier for having
+found out this or that novelty in transcendental mathematics, biology,
+or astronomy; and this is very well as against the discoverer of small
+marvels who shall give himself out for the benefactor of the human
+race. But both historical experience and observation of the terms on
+which the human intelligence works, show us that we can only make sure
+of intellectual activity on condition of leaving it free to work all
+round, in every department and in every remotest nook of each
+department, and that its most fruitful epochs are exactly those when
+this freedom is greatest, this curiosity most keen and minute, and this
+waste, if you choose to call the indispensable superfluity of force in a
+natural process waste, most copious and unsparing. You will not find
+your highest capacity in statesmanship, nor in practical science, nor in
+art, nor in any other field where that capacity is most urgently needed
+for the right service of life, unless there is a general and vehement
+spirit of search in the air. If it incidentally leads to many
+industrious futilities and much learned refuse, this is still the sign
+and the generative element of industry which is not futile, and of
+learning which is something more than mere water spilled upon
+the ground.
+
+We may say in fine that this first Discourse and its vindications were a
+dim, shallow, and ineffective feeling after the great truth, that the
+only normal state of society is that in which neither the love of virtue
+has been thrust far back into a secondary place by the love of
+knowledge, nor the active curiosity of the understanding dulled,
+blunted, and made ashamed by soft, lazy ideals of life as a life only of
+the affections. Rousseau now and always fell into the opposite extreme
+from that against which his whole work was a protest. We need not
+complain very loudly that while remonstrating against the restless
+intrepidity of the rationalists of his generation, he passed over the
+central truth, namely that the full and ever festal life is found in
+active freedom of curiosity and search taking significance, motive,
+force, from a warm inner pulse of human love and sympathy. It was not
+given to Rousseau to see all this, but it was given to him to see the
+side of it for which the most powerful of the men living with him had no
+eyes, and the first Discourse was only a moderately successful attempt
+to bring his vision before Europe. It was said at the time that he did
+not believe a word of what he had written.[172] It is a natural
+characteristic of an age passionately occupied with its own set of
+ideas, to question either the sincerity or the sanity of anybody who
+declares its sovereign conceptions to be no better than foolishness. We
+cannot entertain such a suspicion. Perhaps the vehemence of controversy
+carries him rather further than he quite meant to go, when he declares
+that if he were a chief of an African tribe, he would erect on his
+frontier a gallows, on which he would hang without mercy the first
+European who should venture to pass into his territory, and the first
+native who should dare to pass out of it.[173] And there are many other
+extravagances of illustration, but the main position is serious enough,
+as represented in the emblematic vignette with which the essay was
+printed--the torch of science brought to men by Prometheus, who warns a
+satyr that it burns; the satyr, seeing fire for the first time and being
+fain to embrace it, is the symbol of the vulgar men who, seduced by the
+glitter of literature, insist on delivering themselves up to its
+study.[174] Rousseau's whole doctrine hangs compactly together, and we
+may see the signs of its growth after leaving his hands in the crude
+formula of the first Discourse, if we proceed to the more audacious
+paradox of the second.
+
+
+II.
+
+The Discourse on the Origin of Inequality among men opens with a
+description of the natural state of man, which occupies considerably
+more than half of the entire performance. It is composed in a vein which
+is only too familiar to the student of the literature of the time,
+picturing each habit and thought, and each step to new habits and
+thoughts, with the minuteness, the fulness, the precision, of one who
+narrates circumstances of which he has all his life been the close
+eye-witness. The natural man reveals to us every motive, every process
+internal and external, every slightest circumstance of his daily life,
+and each element that gradually transformed him into the non-natural
+man. One who had watched bees or beetles for years could not give us a
+more full or confident account of their doings, their hourly goings in
+and out, than it was the fashion in the eighteenth century to give of
+the walk and conversation of the primeval ancestor. The conditions of
+primitive man were discussed by very incompetent ladies and gentlemen at
+convivial supper parties, and settled with complete assurance.[175]
+
+Rousseau thought and talked about the state of nature because all his
+world was thinking and talking about it. He used phrases and formulas
+with reference to it which other people used. He required no more
+evidence than they did, as to the reality of the existence of the
+supposed set of conditions to which they gave the almost sacramental
+name of state of nature. He never thought of asking, any more than
+anybody else did in the middle of the eighteenth century, what sort of
+proof, how strong, how direct, was to be had, that primeval man had such
+and such habits, and changed them in such a way and direction, and for
+such reasons. Physical science had reached a stage by this time when its
+followers were careful to ask questions about evidence, correct
+description, verification. But the idea of accurate method had to be
+made very familiar to men by the successes of physical science in the
+search after truths of one kind, before the indispensableness of
+applying it in the search after truths of all kinds had extended to the
+science of the constitution and succession of social states. In this
+respect Rousseau was not guiltier than the bulk of his contemporaries.
+Voltaire's piercing common sense, Hume's deep-set sagacity,
+Montesquieu's caution, prevented them from launching very far on to this
+metaphysical sea of nature and natural laws and states, but none of them
+asked those critical questions in relation to such matters which occur
+so promptly in the present day to persons far inferior to them in
+intellectual strength. Rousseau took the notion of the state of nature
+because he found it to his hand; he fitted to it his own characteristic
+aspirations, expanding and vivifying a philosophic conception with all
+the heat of humane passion; and thus, although, at the end of the
+process when he had done with it, the state of nature came out blooming
+as the rose, it was fundamentally only the dry, current abstraction of
+his time, artificially decorated to seduce men into embracing a strange
+ideal under a familiar name.
+
+Before analysing the Discourse on Inequality, we ought to make some
+mention of a remarkable man whose influence probably reached Rousseau in
+an indirect manner through Diderot; I mean Morelly.[176] In 1753 Morelly
+published a prose poem called the Basiliade, describing the corruption
+of manners introduced by the errors of the lawgiver, and pointing out
+how this corruption is to be amended by return to the empire of nature
+and truth. He was no doubt stimulated by what was supposed to be the
+central doctrine of Montesquieu, then freshly given to the world, that
+it is government and institutions which make men what they are. But he
+was stimulated into a reaction, and in 1754 he propounded his whole
+theory, in a piece which in closeness, consistency, and thoroughness is
+admirably different from Rousseau's rhetoric.[177] It lacked the
+sovereign quality of persuasiveness, and so fell on deaf ears. Morelly
+accepts the doctrine that men are formed by the laws, but insists that
+moralists and statesmen have always led us wrong by legislating and
+prescribing conduct on the false theory that man is bad, whereas he is
+in truth a creature endowed with natural probity. Then he strikes to the
+root of society with a directness that Rousseau could not imitate, by
+the position that "these laws by establishing a monstrous division of
+the products of nature, and even of their very elements--by dividing
+what ought to have remained entire, or ought to have been restored to
+entireness if any accident had divided them, aided and favoured the
+break-up of all sociability." All political and all moral evils are the
+effects of this pernicious cause--private property. He says of
+Rousseau's first Discourse that the writer ought to have seen that the
+corruption of manners which he set down to literature and art really
+came from this venomous principle of property, which infects all that
+it touches.[178] Christianity, it is true, assailed this principle and
+restored equality or community of possessions, but Christianity had the
+radical fault of involving such a detachment from earthly affections, in
+order to deliver ourselves to heavenly meditation, as brought about a
+necessary degeneration in social activity. The form of government is a
+matter of indifference, provided you can only assure community of goods.
+Political revolutions are at bottom the clash of material interests, and
+until you have equalised the one you will never prevent the other.[179]
+
+Let us turn from this very definite position to one of the least
+definite productions to be found in all literature.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It will seem a little odd that more than half of a discussion on the
+origin of inequality among men should be devoted to a glowing imaginary
+description, from which no reader could conjecture what thesis it was
+designed to support. But we have only to remember that Rousseau's object
+was to persuade people that the happier state is that in which
+inequality does not subsist, that there had once been such a state, and
+that this was first the state of nature, and then the state only one
+degree removed from it, in which we now find the majority of savage
+tribes. At the outset he defines inequality as a word meaning two
+different things; one, natural or physical inequality, such as
+difference of age, of health, of physical strength, of attributes of
+intelligence and character; the other, moral or political inequality,
+consisting in difference of privileges which some enjoy to the detriment
+of the rest, such as being richer, more honoured, more powerful. The
+former differences are established by nature, the latter are authorised,
+if they were not established, by the consent of men.[180] In the state
+of nature no inequalities flow from the differences among men in point
+of physical advantage and disadvantage, and which remain without
+derivative differences so long as the state of nature endures
+undisturbed. Nature deals with men as the law of Sparta dealt with the
+children of its citizens; she makes those who are well constituted
+strong and robust, and she destroys all the rest.
+
+The surface of the earth is originally covered by dense forest, and
+inhabited by animals of every species. Men, scattered among them,
+imitate their industry, and so rise to the instinct of the brutes, with
+this advantage that while each species has only its own, man, without
+anything special, appropriates the instincts of all. This admirable
+creature, with foes on every side, is forced to be constantly on the
+alert, and hence to be always in full possession of all his faculties,
+unlike civilised man, whose native force is enfeebled by the mechanical
+protections with which he has surrounded himself. He is not afraid of
+the wild beasts around him, for experience has taught him that he is
+their master. His health is better than ours, for we live in a time when
+excess of idleness in some, excess of toil in others, the heating and
+over-abundant diet of the rich, the bad food of the poor, the orgies and
+excesses of every kind, the immoderate transport of every passion, the
+fatigue and strain of spirit,--when all these things have inflicted more
+disorders upon us than the vaunted art of medicine has been able to keep
+pace with. Even if the sick savage has only nature to hope from, on the
+other hand he has only his own malady to be afraid of. He has no fear of
+death, for no animal can know what death is, and the knowledge of death
+and its terrors is one of the first of man's terrible acquisitions
+after abandoning his animal condition.[181] In other respects, such as
+protection against weather, such as habitation, such as food, the
+savage's natural power of adaptation, and the fact that his demands are
+moderate in proportion to his means of satisfying them, forbid us to
+consider him physically unhappy. Let us turn to the intellectual and
+moral side.
+
+If you contend that men were miserable, degraded, and outcast during
+these primitive centuries because the intelligence was dormant, then do
+not forget, first, that you are drawing an indictment against
+nature,--no trifling blasphemy in those days--and second, that you are
+attributing misery to a free creature with tranquil spirit and healthy
+body, and that must surely be a singular abuse of the term. We see
+around us scarcely any but people who complain of the burden of their
+lives; but who ever heard of a savage in full enjoyment of his liberty
+ever dreaming of complaint about his life or of self-destruction?
+
+With reference to virtues and vices in a state of nature, Hobbes is
+wrong in declaring that man in this state is vicious, as not knowing
+virtue. He is not vicious, for the reason that he does not know what
+being good is. It is not development of enlightenment nor the
+restrictions of law, but the calm of the passions and ignorance of vice,
+which keep them from doing ill. _Tanto plus in illis profitcit vitiorum
+ignoratio, quam in his cognitio virtutis._
+
+Besides man has one great natural virtue, that of pity, which precedes
+in him the use of reflection, and which indeed he shares with some of
+the brutes. Mandeville, who was forced to admit the existence of this
+admirable quality in man, was absurd in not perceiving that from it flow
+all the social virtues which he would fain deny. Pity is more energetic
+in the primitive condition than it is among ourselves. It is reflection
+which isolates one. It is philosophy which teaches the philosopher to
+say secretly at sight of a suffering wretch, Perish if it please thee; I
+am safe and sound. They may be butchering a fellow-creature under your
+window; all you have to do is to clap your hands to your ears, and argue
+a little with yourself to hinder nature in revolt from making you feel
+as if you were in the case of the victim.[182] The savage man has not
+got this odious gift. In the state of nature it is pity that takes the
+place of laws, manners, and virtue. It is in this natural sentiment
+rather than in subtle arguments that we have to seek the reluctance that
+every man would feel to do ill, even without the precepts of
+education.[183]
+
+Finally, the passion of love, which produces such disasters in a state
+of society, where the jealousy of lovers and the vengeance of husbands
+lead each day to duels and murders, where the duty of eternal fidelity
+only serves to occasion adulteries, and where the law of continence
+necessarily extends the debauching of women and the practice of
+procuring abortion[184]--this passion in a state of nature, where it is
+purely physical, momentary, and without any association of durable
+sentiment with the object of it, simply leads to the necessary
+reproduction of the species and nothing more.
+
+"Let us conclude, then, that wandering in the forests, without industry,
+without speech, without habitation, without war, without connection of
+any kind, without any need of his fellows or without any desire to harm
+them, perhaps even without ever recognising one of them individually,
+savage man, subject to few passions and sufficing to himself, had only
+the sentiments and the enlightenment proper to his condition. He was
+only sensible of his real wants, and only looked because he thought he
+had an interest in seeing; and his intelligence made no more progress
+than his vanity. If by chance he hit on some discovery, he was all the
+less able to communicate it; as he did not know even his own children.
+An art perished with its inventor. There was neither education nor
+progress; generations multiplied uselessly; and as each generation
+always started from the same point, centuries glided away in all the
+rudeness of the first ages, the race was already old, the individual
+remained always a child."
+
+This brings us to the point of the matter. For if you compare the
+prodigious diversities in education and manner of life which reign in
+the different orders of the civil condition, with the simplicity and
+uniformity of the savage and animal life, where all find nourishment in
+the same articles of food, live in the same way, and do exactly the same
+things, you will easily understand to what degree the difference between
+man and man must be less in the state of nature than in that of
+society.[185] Physical inequality is hardly perceived in the state of
+nature, and its indirect influences there are almost non-existent.
+
+Now as all the social virtues and other faculties possessed by man
+potentially were not bound by anything inherent in him to develop into
+actuality, he might have remained to all eternity in his admirable and
+most fitting primitive condition, but for the fortuitous concurrence of
+a variety of external changes. What are these different changes, which
+may perhaps have perfected human reason, while they certainly have
+deteriorated the race, and made men bad in making them sociable?
+
+What, then, are the intermediary facts between the state of nature and
+the state of civil society, the nursery of inequality? What broke up the
+happy uniformity of the first times? First, difference in soil, in
+climate, in seasons, led to corresponding differences in men's manner of
+living. Along the banks of rivers and on the shores of the sea, they
+invented hooks and lines, and were eaters of fish. In the forests they
+invented bows and arrows, and became hunters. In cold countries they
+covered themselves with the skins of beasts. Lightning, volcanoes, or
+some happy chance acquainted them with fire, a new protection against
+the rigours of winter. In company with these natural acquisitions, grew
+up a sort of reflection or mechanical prudence, which showed them the
+kind of precautions most necessary to their security. From this
+rudimentary and wholly egoistic reflection there came a sense of the
+existence of a similar nature and similar interests in their
+fellow-creatures. Instructed by experience that the love of well-being
+and comfort is the only motive of human actions, the savage united with
+his neighbours when union was for their joint convenience, and did his
+best to blind and outwit his neighbours when their interests were
+adverse to his own, and he felt himself the weaker. Hence the origin of
+certain rude ideas of mutual obligation.[186]
+
+Soon, ceasing to fall asleep under the first tree, or to withdraw into
+caves, they found axes of hard stone, which served them to cut wood, to
+dig the ground, and to construct hovels of branches and clay. This was
+the epoch of a first revolution, which formed the establishment and
+division of families, and which introduced a rough and partial sort of
+property. Along with rudimentary ideas of property, though not
+connected with them, came the rudimentary forms of inequality. When men
+were thrown more together, then he who sang or danced the best, the
+strongest, the most adroit, or the most eloquent, acquired the most
+consideration--that is, men ceased to take uniform and equal place. And
+with the coming of this end of equality there passed away the happy
+primitive immunity from jealousy, envy, malice, hate.
+
+On the whole, though men had lost some of their original endurance, and
+their natural pity had already undergone a certain deterioration, this
+period of the development of the human faculties, occupying a just
+medium between the indolence of the primitive state and the petulant
+activity of our modern self-love, must have been at once the happiest
+and the most durable epoch. The more we reflect, the more evident we
+find it that this state was the least subject to revolutions and the
+best for man. "So long as men were content with their rustic hovels, so
+long as they confined themselves to stitching their garments of skin
+with spines or fish bones, to decking their bodies with feathers and
+shells and painting them in different colours, to perfecting and
+beautifying their bows and arrows--in a word, so long as they only
+applied themselves to works that one person could do, and to arts that
+needed no more than a single hand, then they lived free, healthy, good,
+and happy, so far as was compatible with their natural constitution, and
+continued to enjoy among themselves the sweetness of independent
+intercourse. But from the moment that one man had need of the help of
+another, as soon as they perceived it to be useful for one person to
+have provisions for two, then equality disappeared, property was
+introduced, labour became necessary, and the vast forests changed into
+smiling fields, which had to be watered by the sweat of men, and in
+which they ever saw bondage and misery springing up and growing ripe
+with the harvests."[187]
+
+The working of metals and agriculture have been the two great agents in
+this revolution. For the poet it is gold and silver, but for the
+philosopher it is iron and corn, that have civilised men and undone the
+human race. It is easy to see how the latter of the two arts was
+suggested to men by watching the reproducing processes of vegetation. It
+is less easy to be sure how they discovered metal, saw its uses, and
+invented means of smelting it, for nature had taken extreme precautions
+to hide the fatal secret. It was probably the operation of some volcano
+which first suggested the idea of fusing ore. From the fact of land
+being cultivated its division followed, and therefore the institution of
+property in its full shape. From property arose civil society. "The
+first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, could think of saying,
+_This is mine_, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the
+real founder of civil society. How many crimes, wars, murders, miseries,
+and horrors would not have been spared to the human race by one who,
+plucking up the stakes, or filling in the trench, should have called out
+to his fellows: Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if
+you forget that the earth belongs to no one, and that its fruits are for
+all."[188]
+
+Things might have remained equal even in this state, if talents had only
+been equal, and if for example the employment of iron and the
+consumption of agricultural produce had always exactly balanced one
+another. But the stronger did more work; the cleverer got more advantage
+from his work; the more ingenious found means of shortening his labour;
+the husbandman had more need of metal, or the smith more need of grain;
+and while working equally, one got much gain, and the other could
+scarcely live. This distinction between Have and Have-not led to
+confusion and revolt, to brigandage on the one side and constant
+insecurity on the other.
+
+Hence disorders of a violent and interminable kind, which gave rise to
+the most deeply designed project that ever entered the human mind. This
+was to employ in favour of property the strength of the very persons who
+attacked it, to inspire them with other maxims, and to give them other
+institutions which should be as favourable to property as natural law
+had been contrary to it. The man who conceived this project, after
+showing his neighbours the monstrous confusion which made their lives
+most burdensome, spoke in this wise: "Let us unite to shield the weak
+from oppression, to restrain the proud, and to assure to each the
+possession of what belongs to him; let us set up rules of justice and
+peace, to which all shall be obliged to conform, without respect of
+persons, and which may repair to some extent the caprices of fortune, by
+subjecting the weak and the mighty alike to mutual duties. In a word,
+instead of turning our forces against one another, let us collect them
+into one supreme power to govern us by sage laws, to protect and defend
+all the members of the association, repel their common foes, and
+preserve us in never-ending concord." This, and not the right of
+conquest, must have been the origin of society and laws, which threw new
+chains round the poor and gave new might to the rich; and for the profit
+of a few grasping and ambitious men, subjected the whole human race
+henceforth and for ever to toil and bondage and wretchedness
+without hope.
+
+The social constitution thus propounded and accepted was radically
+imperfect from the outset, and in spite of the efforts of the sagest
+lawgivers, it has always remained imperfect, because it was the work of
+chance, and because, inasmuch as it was ill begun, time, while revealing
+defects and suggesting remedies, could never repair its vices; _people
+went on incessantly repairing and patching, instead of which it was
+indispensable to begin by making a clean surface and by throwing aside
+all the old materials, just as Lycurgus did in Sparta_.
+
+Put shortly, the main positions are these. In the state of nature each
+man lived in entire isolation, and therefore physical inequality was as
+if it did not exist. After many centuries, accident, in the shape of
+difference of climate and external natural conditions, enforcing for the
+sake of subsistence some degree of joint labour, led to an increase of
+communication among men, to a slight development of the reasoning and
+reflective faculties, and to a rude and simple sense of mutual
+obligation, as a means of greater comfort in the long run. The first
+state was good and pure, but the second state was truly perfect. It was
+destroyed by a fresh succession of chances, such as the discovery of the
+arts of metal-working and tillage, which led first to the institution of
+property, and second to the prominence of the natural or physical
+inequalities, which now began to tell with deadly effectiveness. These
+inequalities gradually became summed up in the great distinction between
+rich and poor; and this distinction was finally embodied in the
+constitution of a civil society, expressly adapted to consecrate the
+usurpation of the rich, and to make the inequality of condition between
+them and the poor eternal.
+
+We thus see that the Discourse, unlike Morelly's terse exposition,
+contains no clear account of the kind of inequality with which it deals.
+Is it inequality of material possession or inequality of political
+right? Morelly tells you decisively that the latter is only an accident,
+flowing from the first; that the key to renovation lies in the abolition
+of the first. Rousseau mixes the two confusedly together under a single
+name, bemoans each, but shrinks from a conclusion or a recommendation
+as to either. He declares property to be the key to civil society, but
+falls back from any ideas leading to the modification of the institution
+lying at the root of all that he deplores.
+
+The first general criticism, which in itself contains and covers nearly
+all others, turns on Method. "Conjectures become reasons when they are
+the most likely that you can draw from the nature of things," and "it is
+for philosophy in lack of history to determine the most likely facts."
+In an inductive age this royal road is rigorously closed. Guesses drawn
+from the general nature of things can no longer give us light as to the
+particular nature of the things pertaining to primitive men, any more
+than such guesses can teach us the law of the movement of the heavenly
+bodies, or the foundations of jurisprudence. Nor can deduction from
+anything but propositions which have themselves been won by laborious
+induction, ever lead us to the only kind of philosophy which has fair
+pretension to determine the most probable of the missing facts in the
+chain of human history. That quantitative and differentiating knowledge
+which is science, was not yet thought of in connection with the
+movements of our own race upon the earth. It is to be said, further,
+that of the two possible ways of guessing about the early state, the
+conditions of advance from it, and the rest, Rousseau's guess that all
+movement away from it has been towards corruption, is less supported by
+subsequent knowledge than the guess of his adversaries, that it has
+been a movement progressive and upwards.
+
+This much being said as to incurable vice of method, and there are
+fervent disciples of Rousseau now living who will regard one's craving
+for method in talking about men as a foible of pedantry, we may briefly
+remark on one or two detached objections to Rousseau's story. To begin
+with, there is no certainty as to there having ever been a state of
+nature of a normal and organic kind, any more than there is any one
+normal and typical state of society now. There are infinitely diverse
+states of society, and there were probably as many diverse states of
+nature. Rousseau was sufficiently acquainted with the most recent
+metaphysics of his time to know that you cannot think of a tree in
+general, nor of a triangle in general, but only of some particular tree
+or triangle.[189] In a similar way he might have known that there never
+was any such thing as a state of nature in the general and abstract,
+fixed, typical, and single. He speaks of the savage state also, which
+comes next, as one, identical, normal. It is, of course, nothing of the
+kind. The varieties of belief and habit and custom among the different
+tribes of savages, in reference to every object that can engage their
+attention, from death and the gods and immortality down to the uses of
+marriage and the art of counting and the ways of procuring subsistence,
+are infinitely numerous; and the more we know about this vast diversity,
+the less easy is it to think of the savage state in general. When
+Rousseau extols the savage state as the veritable youth of the world, we
+wonder whether we are to think of the negroes of the Gold Coast, or the
+Dyaks of Borneo, Papuans or Maoris, Cheyennes or Tierra-del-Fuegians or
+the fabled Troglodytes; whether in the veritable youth of the world they
+counted up to five or only to two; whether they used a fire-drill, and
+if so what kind of drill; whether they had the notion of personal
+identity in so weak a shape as to practise the couvade; and a hundred
+other points, which we should now require any writer to settle, who
+should speak of the savage state as sovereign, one, and indivisible, in
+the way in which Rousseau speaks of it, and holds it up to our vain
+admiration.
+
+Again, if the savage state supervened upon the state of nature in
+consequence of certain climatic accidents of a permanent kind, such as
+living on the banks of a river or in a dense forest, how was it that the
+force of these accidents did not begin to operate at once? How could the
+isolated state of nature endure for a year in face of them? Or what was
+the precipitating incident which suddenly set them to work, and drew the
+primitive men from an isolation so profound that they barely recognised
+one another, into that semi-social state in which the family
+was founded?
+
+We cannot tell how the state of nature continued to subsist, or, if it
+ever subsisted, how and why it ever came to an end, because the agencies
+which are alleged to have brought it to an end must have been coeval
+with the appearance of man himself. If gods had brought to men seed,
+fire, and the mechanical arts, as in one of the Platonic myths,[190] we
+could understand that there was a long stage preliminary to these
+heavenly gifts. But if the gods had no part nor lot in it, and if the
+accidents that slowly led the human creature into union were as old as
+that nature, of which indeed they were actually the component elements,
+then man must have quitted the state of nature the very day on which he
+was born into it. And what can be a more monstrous anachronism than to
+turn a flat-headed savage into a clever, self-conscious, argumentative
+utilitarian of the eighteenth century; working the social problem out in
+his flat head with a keenness, a consistency, a grasp of first
+principles, that would have entitled him to a chair in the institute of
+moral sciences, and entering the social union with the calm and
+reasonable deliberation of a great statesman taking a critical step in
+policy? Aristotle was wiser when he fixed upon sociability as an
+ultimate quality of human nature, instead of making it, as Rousseau and
+so many others have done, the conclusion of an unimpeachable train of
+syllogistic reasoning.[191] Morelly even, his own contemporary, and
+much less of a sage than Aristotle, was still sage enough to perceive
+that this primitive human machine, "though composed of intelligent
+parts, generally operates independently of its reason; its deliberations
+are forestalled, and only leave it to look on, while sentiment does its
+work."[192] It is the more remarkable that Rousseau should have fallen
+into this kind of error, as it was one of his distinctions to have
+perceived and partially worked out the principle, that men guide their
+conduct rather from passion and instinct than from reasoned
+enlightenment.[193] The ultimate quality which he named pity is, after
+all, the germ of sociability, which is only extended sympathy. But he
+did not firmly adhere to this ultimate quality, nor make any effort
+consistently to trace out its various products.
+
+We do not find, however, in Rousseau any serious attempt to analyse the
+composition of human nature in its primitive stages. Though constantly
+warning his readers very impressively against confounding domesticated
+with primitive men, he practically assumes that the main elements of
+character must always have been substantially identical with such
+elements and conceptions as are found after the addition of many ages of
+increasingly complex experience. There is something worth considering in
+his notion that civilisation has had effects upon man analogous to those
+of domestication upon animals, but he lacked logical persistency enough
+to enable him to adhere to his own idea, and work out conclusions
+from it.
+
+It might further be pointed out in another direction that he takes for
+granted that the mode of advance into a social state has always been one
+and the same, a single and uniform process, marked by precisely the same
+set of several stages, following one another in precisely the same
+order. There is no evidence of this; on the contrary, evidence goes to
+show that civilisation varies in origin and process with race and other
+things, and that though in all cases starting from the prime factor of
+sociableness in man, yet the course of its development has depended on
+the particular sets of circumstances with which that factor has had to
+combine. These are full of variety, according to climate and racial
+predisposition, although, as has been justly said, the force of both
+these two elements diminishes as the influence of the past in giving
+consistency to our will becomes more definite, and our means of
+modifying climate and race become better known. There is no sign that
+Rousseau, any more than many other inquirers, ever reflected whether the
+capacity for advance into the state of civil society in any highly
+developed form is universal throughout the species, or whether there are
+not races eternally incapable of advance beyond the savage state.
+Progress would hardly be the exception which we know it to be in the
+history of communities if there were not fundamental diversities in the
+civilisable quality of races. Why do some bodies of men get on to the
+high roads of civilisation, while others remain in the jungle and
+thicket of savagery; and why do some races advance along one of these
+roads, and others advance by different roads?
+
+Considerations of this sort disclose the pinched frame of trim theory
+with which Rousseau advanced to set in order a huge mass of boundlessly
+varied, intricate, and unmanageable facts. It is not, however, at all
+worth while to extend such criticism further than suffices to show how
+little his piece can stand the sort of questions which may be put to it
+from a scientific point of view. Nothing that Rousseau had to say about
+the state of nature was seriously meant for scientific exposition, any
+more than the Sermon on the Mount was meant for political economy. The
+importance of the Discourse on Inequality lay in its vehement
+denunciation of the existing social state. To the writer the question
+of the origin of inequality is evidently far less a matter at heart,
+than the question of its results. It is the natural inclination of one
+deeply moved by a spectacle of depravation in his own time and country,
+to extol some other time or country, of which he is happily ignorant
+enough not to know the drawbacks. Rousseau wrote about the savage state
+in something of the same spirit in which Tacitus wrote the Germania. And
+here, as in the Discourse on the influence of science and art upon
+virtue, there is a positive side. To miss this in resentment of the
+unscientific paradox that lies about it, is to miss the force of the
+piece, and to render its enormous influence for a generation after it
+was written incomprehensible. We may always be quite sure that no set of
+ideas ever produced this resounding effect on opinion, unless they
+contained something which the social or spiritual condition of the men
+whom they inflamed made true for the time, and true in an urgent sense.
+Is it not tenable that the state of certain savage tribes is more
+normal, offers a better balance between desire and opportunity, between
+faculty and performance, than the permanent state of large classes in
+western countries, the broken wreck of civilisation?[194] To admit this
+is not to conclude, as Rousseau so rashly concluded, that the movement
+away from the primitive stages has been productive only of evil and
+misery even to the masses of men, the hewers of wood and the drawers of
+water; or that it was occasioned, and has been carried on by the
+predominance of the lower parts and principles of human nature. Our
+provisional acquiescence in the straitness and blank absence of outlook
+or hope of the millions who come on to the earth that greets them with
+no smile, and then stagger blindly under dull burdens for a season, and
+at last are shovelled silently back under the ground,--our acquiescence
+can only be justified in the sight of humanity by the conviction that
+this is one of the temporary conditions of a vast process, working
+forwards through the impulse and agency of the finer human spirits, but
+needing much blood, many tears, uncounted myriads of lives, and
+immeasurable geologic periods of time, for its high and beneficent
+consummation. There is nothing surprising, perhaps nothing deeply
+condemnable, in the burning anger for which this acquiescence is often
+changed in the more impatient natures. As against the ignoble host who
+think that the present ordering of men, with all its prodigious
+inequalities, is in foundation and substance the perfection of social
+blessedness, Rousseau was almost in the right. If the only alternative
+to the present social order remaining in perpetuity were a retrogression
+to some such condition as that of the islanders of the South Sea, a
+lover of his fellow-creatures might look upon the result, so far as it
+affected the happiness of the bulk of them, with tolerably complete
+indifference. It is only the faith that we are moving slowly away from
+the existing order, as our ancestors moved slowly away from the old want
+of order, that makes the present endurable, and makes any tenacious
+effort to raise the future possible.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+An immense quantity of nonsense has been talked about the equality of
+man, for which those who deny that doctrine and those who assert it may
+divide the responsibility. It is in reality true or false, according to
+the doctrines with which it is confronted. As against the theory that
+the existing way of sharing the laboriously acquired fruits and delights
+of the earth is a just representation and fair counterpart of natural
+inequalities among men in merit and capacity, the revolutionary theory
+is true, and the passionate revolutionary cry for equality of external
+chance most righteous and unanswerable. But the issues do not end here.
+Take such propositions as these:--there are differences in the capacity
+of men for serving the community; the well-being of the community
+demands the allotment of high function in proportion to high faculty;
+the rights of man in politics are confined to a right of the same
+protection for his own interests as is given to the interests of others.
+As against these principles, the revolutionary deductions from the
+equality of man are false. And such pretensions as that every man could
+be made equally fit for every function, or that not only each should
+have an equal chance, but that he who uses his chance well and sociably
+should be kept on a level in common opinion and trust with him who uses
+it ill and unsociably, or does not use it at all,--the whole of this is
+obviously most illusory and most disastrous, and in whatever decree any
+set of men have ever taken it up, to that degree they have paid
+the penalty.
+
+What Rousseau's Discourse meant, what he intended it to mean, and what
+his first direct disciples understood it as meaning, is not that all men
+are born equal. He never says this, and his recognition of natural
+inequality implies the contrary proposition. His position is that the
+artificial differences, springing from the conditions of the social
+union, do not coincide with the differences in capacity springing from
+original constitution; that the tendency of the social union as now
+organised is to deepen the artificial inequalities, and make the gulf
+between those endowed with privileges and wealth and those not so
+endowed ever wider and wider. It would have been very difficult a
+hundred years ago to deny the truth of this way of stating the case. If
+it has to some extent already ceased to be entirely true, and if violent
+popular forces are at work making it less and less true, we owe the
+origin of the change, among other causes and influences, not least to
+the influence of Rousseau himself, and those whom he inspired. It was
+that influence which, though it certainly did not produce, yet did as
+certainly give a deep and remarkable bias, first to the American
+Revolution, and a dozen years afterwards to the French Revolution.
+
+It would be interesting to trace the different fortunes which awaited
+the idea of the equality of man in America and in France. In America it
+has always remained strictly within the political order, and perhaps
+with the considerable exception of the possibles share it may have had,
+along with Christian notions of the brotherhood of man, and
+statesmanlike notions of national prosperity, in leading to the
+abolition of slavery, it has brought forth no strong moral sentiment
+against the ethical and economic bases of any part of the social order.
+In France, on the other hand, it was the starting-point of movements
+that have had all the fervour and intensity of religions, and have made
+men feel about social inequalities the burning shame and wrath with
+which a Christian saw the flourishing temples of unclean gods. This
+difference in the interpretation and development of the first doctrine
+may be explained in various ways,--by difference of material
+circumstance between America and France; difference of the political and
+social level from which the principle of equality had to start; and not
+least by difference of intellectual temperament. This last was itself
+partly the product of difference in religion, which makes the English
+dread the practical enforcement of logical conclusions, while the French
+have hitherto been apt to dread and despise any tendency to stop
+short of that.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Let us notice, finally, the important fact that the appearance of
+Rousseau's Discourses was the first sign of reaction against the
+historic mode of inquiry into society that had been initiated by
+Montesquieu. The Spirit of Laws was published in 1748, with a truly
+prodigious effect. It coloured the whole of the social literature in
+France during the rest of the century. A history of its influence would
+be a history of one of the most important sides of speculative activity.
+In the social writings of Rousseau himself there is hardly a chapter
+which does not contain tacit reference to Montesquieu's book. The
+Discourses were the beginning of a movement in an exactly opposite
+direction; that is, away from patient collection of wide multitudes of
+facts relating to the conditions of society, towards the promulgation of
+arbitrary systems of absolute social dogmas. Mably, the chief dogmatic
+socialist of the century, and one of the most dignified and austere
+characters, is an important example of the detriment done by the
+influence of Rousseau to that of Montesquieu, in the earlier stages of
+the conflict between the two schools. Mably (1709-1785), of whom the
+remark is to be made that he was for some years behind the scenes of
+government as De Tencin's secretary and therefore was versed in affairs,
+began his inquiries with Greece and Rome. "You will find everything in
+ancient history," he said.[195] And he remained entirely in this groove
+of thought until Rousseau appeared. He then gradually left Montesquieu.
+"To find the duties of a legislator," he said, "I descend into the
+abysses of my heart, I study my sentiments." He opposed the Economists,
+the other school that was feeling its way imperfectly enough to a
+positive method. "As soon as I see landed property established," he
+wrote, "then I see unequal fortunes; and from these unequal fortunes
+must there not necessarily result different and opposed interests, all
+the vices of riches, all the vices of poverty, the brutalisation of
+intelligence, the corruption of civil manners?" and so forth.[196] In
+his most important work, published in 1776, we see Rousseau's notions
+developed, with a logic from which their first author shrunk, either
+from fear, or more probably from want of firmness and consistency as a
+reasoner. "It is to equality that nature has attached the preservation
+of our social faculties and happiness: and from this I conclude that
+legislation will only be taking useless trouble, unless all its
+attention is first of all directed to the establishment of equality in
+the fortune and condition of citizens."[197] That is to say not only
+political equality, but economic communism. "What miserable folly, that
+persons who pass for philosophers should go on repeating after one
+another that without property there can be no society. Let us leave
+illusion. It is property that divides us into two classes, rich and
+poor; the first will alway prefer their fortune to that of the state,
+while the second will never love a government or laws that leave them in
+misery."[198] This was the kind of opinion for which Rousseau's diffuse
+and rhetorical exposition of social necessity had prepared France some
+twenty years before. After powerfully helping the process of general
+dissolution, it produced the first fruits specifically after its own
+kind some twenty years later in the system of Baboeuf.[199]
+
+The unflinching application of principles is seldom achieved by the men
+who first launch them. The labour of the preliminary task seems to
+exhaust one man's stock of mental force. Rousseau never thought of the
+subversion of society or its reorganisation on a communistic basis.
+Within a few months of his profession of profound lament that the first
+man who made a claim to property had not been instantly unmasked as the
+arch foe of the race, he speaks most respectfully of property as the
+pledge of the engagements of citizens and the foundation of the social
+pact, while the first condition of that pact is that every one should be
+maintained in peaceful enjoyment of what belongs to him.[200] We need
+not impute the apparent discrepancy to insincerity. Rousseau was always
+apt to think in a slipshod manner. He sensibly though illogically
+accepted wholesome practical maxims, as if they flowed from theoretical
+premisses that were in truth utterly incompatible with them.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[151] Delandine's _Couronnes Academiques, ou Recueil de prix proposes
+par les Societes Savantes_. (Paris, 2 vols., 1787.)
+
+[152] Musset-Pathay has collected the details connected with the award
+of the prize, ii. 365-367.
+
+[153] Second Letter to M. de Malesherbes, p. 358. Also _Conf._, viii.
+135.
+
+[154] Diderot's account (_Vie de Seneque_, sect. 66, _Oeuv._, iii. 98;
+also ii. 285) is not inconsistent with Rousseau's own, so that we may
+dismiss as apocryphal Marmontel's version of the story (_Mem._ VIII.),
+to the effect that Rousseau was about to answer the question with a
+commonplace affirmative, until Diderot persuaded him that a paradox
+would attract more attention. It has been said also that M. de
+Francueil, and various others, first urged the writer to take a
+negative line of argument. To suppose this possible is to prove one's
+incapacity for understanding what manner of man Rousseau was.
+
+[155] _Conf._, ix. 232, 233.
+
+[156] _Rousseau Juge de Jean Jacques, Dialogues_, i. 252.
+
+[157] _Dialogues_, i. 275, 276.
+
+[158] _Conf._, viii. 138.
+
+[159] "It made a kind of revolution in Paris," says Grimm. _Corr.
+Lit._, i. 108.
+
+[160] _Rep. au Roi de Pologne_, p. 111 and p. 113.
+
+[161] _Rep. a M. Bordes_, 138.
+
+[162] _Ib._ 137.
+
+[163] "The first source of the evil is inequality; from inequality
+come riches ... from riches are born luxury and idleness; from luxury
+come the fine arts, and from idleness the sciences." _Rep. au Roi de
+Pologne_, 120, 121.
+
+[164] _Rep. a M. Bordes_, 147. In the same spirit he once wrote the
+more wholesome maxim, "We should argue with the wise, and never with
+the public." _Corr._, i. 191.
+
+[165] _Rep. au Roi de Pologne_, 128, 129.
+
+[166] _Rep. a M. Bordes_, 150-161.
+
+[167] P. 174.
+
+[168] Egger's _Hellenisme en France_, 28ieme lecon, p. 265.
+
+[169] Voltaire to J.J.R. Aug. 30, 1755.
+
+[170] _Rep. au Roi de Pologne_, 105.
+
+[171] In 1753 the French Academy, by way no doubt of summoning a
+counter-blast to Rousseau, boldly offered as the subject of their
+essay the thesis that "The love of letters inspires the love of
+virtue," and the prize was won fitly enough by a Jesuit professor of
+rhetoric. See Delandine, i. 42.
+
+[172] Preface to _Narcisse_, 251.
+
+[173] _Rep. a M. Bordes_, 167.
+
+[174] P. 187.
+
+[175] See for instance a strange discussion about _morale universelle_
+and the like in _Mem. de Mdme. d'Epinay_, i. 217-226.
+
+[176] Often described as Morelly the Younger, to distinguish him from
+his father, who wrote an essay on the human heart, and another on the
+human intelligence.
+
+[177] _Code de la Nature, ou le veritable esprit de ses loix, de tout
+tems neglige ou meconnu._
+
+[178] P. 169. Rousseau did not see it then, but he showed himself on
+the track.
+
+[179] At the end of the _Code de la Nature_ Morelly places a complete
+set of rules for the organisation of a model community. The base of it
+was the absence of private property--a condition that was to be
+preserved by vigilant education of the young in ways of thinking, that
+should make the possession of private property odious or
+inconceivable. There are to be sumptuary laws of a moderate kind. The
+government is to be in the hands of the elders. The children are to be
+taken away from their parents at the age of five; reared and educated
+in public establishments; and returned to their parents at the age of
+sixteen or so when they will marry. Marriage is to be dissoluble at
+the end of ten years, but after divorce the woman is not to marry a
+man younger than herself, nor is the man to marry a woman younger than
+the wife from whom he has parted. The children of a divorced couple
+are to remain with the father, and if he marries again, they are to be
+held the children of the second wife. Mothers are to suckle their own
+children (p. 220). The whole scheme is fuller of good ideas than such
+schemes usually are.
+
+[180] P. 218.
+
+[181] This is obviously untrue. Animals do not know death in the sense
+of scientific definition, and probably have no abstract idea of it as
+a general state; but they know and are afraid of its concrete
+phenomena, and so are most savages.
+
+[182] This is one of the passages in the Discourse, the harshness of
+which was afterwards attributed by Rousseau to the influence of
+Diderot. _Conf._, viii. 205, _n._
+
+[183] P. 261.
+
+[184] As if sin really came by the law in this sense; as if a law
+defining and prohibiting a malpractice were the cause of the
+commission of the act which it constituted a malpractice. As if giving
+a name and juristic classification to any kind of conduct were adding
+to men's motives for indulging in it.
+
+[185] P. 269.
+
+[186] P. 278.
+
+[187] Pp. 285-287.
+
+[188] P. 273.
+
+[189] P. 250.
+
+[190] _Politicus_, 268 D-274 E.
+
+[191] Here for instance is D'Alembert's story:--"The necessity of
+shielding our own body from pain and destruction leads us to examine
+among external objects those which are useful and those which are
+hurtful, so that we may seek the one and flee the others. But we
+hardly begin our search into such objects before we discover among
+them a great number of beings which strike us as exactly like
+ourselves; that is, whose form is just like our own, and who, so far
+as we can judge at the first glance, appear to have the same
+perceptions. Everything therefore leads us to suppose that they have
+also the same wants, and consequently the same interest in satisfying
+them, whence it results that we must find great advantage in joining
+with them for the purpose of distinguishing in nature what has the
+power of preserving us from what has the power of hurting us. The
+communication of ideas is the principle and the stay of this union,
+and necessarily demands the invention of signs; such is the origin of
+the formation of societies." _Discours Preliminaire de
+l'Encyclopedie._ Contrast this with Aristotle's sensible statement
+(_Polit._ I. ii. 15) that "there is in men by nature a strong impulse
+to enter into such union."
+
+[192] _Code de la Nature._
+
+[193] See, for example, his criticism on the Abbe de St. Pierre.
+_Conf._, viii. 264. And also in the analysis of this very Discourse,
+above, vol. i. p. 163.
+
+[194] "I have lived with communities of savages in South America and
+in the East, who have no laws or law courts but the public opinion of
+the visage freely expressed. Each man scrupulously respects the rights
+of his fellow, and any infraction of those rights rarely or never
+takes place. In such a community all are nearly equal. There are none
+of those wide distinctions of education and ignorance, wealth and
+poverty, master and servant, which are the products of our
+civilisation; there is none of that widespread division of labour
+which, while it increases wealth, produces also conflicting interests;
+there is not that severe competition and struggle for existence, or
+for wealth, which the dense population of civilised countries
+inevitably creates. All incitements to great crimes are thus wanting,
+and petty ones are repressed, partly by the influence of public
+opinion, but chiefly by that natural sense of justice and of his
+neighbour's right, which seems to be in some degree inherent in every
+race of man. Now, although we have progressed vastly beyond the savage
+state in intellectual achievements, we have not advanced equally in
+morals. It is true that among those classes who have no wants that
+cannot be easily supplied, and among whom public opinion has great
+influence, the rights of others are fully respected. It is true, also,
+that we have vastly extended the sphere of those rights, and include
+within them all the brotherhood of man. But it is not too much to say,
+that the mass of our populations have not at all advanced beyond the
+savage code of morals, and have in many cases sunk below it."
+Wallace's _Malay Archipelago_, vol. ii. pp. 460-461.
+
+[195] So too Bougainville, a brother of the navigator, said in 1760,
+"For an attentive observer who sees nothing in events of the utmost
+diversity of appearance but the natural effects of a certain number of
+causes differently combined, Greece is the universe in small, and the
+history of Greece an excellent epitome of universal history." (Quoted
+in Egger's _Hellenisme en France_, ii. 272.) The revolutionists of the
+next generation, who used to appeal so unseasonably to the ancients,
+were only following a literary fashion set by their fathers.
+
+[196] _Doutes sur l'Ordre Naturel_; _Oeuv._, xi. 80. (Ed. 1794, 1795.)
+
+[197] _La Legislation_, I. i.
+
+[198] _Ibid._
+
+[199] It is not within our province to examine the vexed question
+whether the Convention was fundamentally socialist, and not merely
+political. That socialist ideas were afloat in the minds of some
+members, one can hardly doubt. See Von Sybel's _Hist. of the French
+Revolution_, Bk. II. ch. iv., on one side, and Quinet's _La
+Revolution_, ii. 90-107, on the other.
+
+[200] _Economie Politique_, pp. 41, 53, etc.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+PARIS.
+
+
+I.
+
+By what subtle process did Rousseau, whose ideal had been a summer life
+among all the softnesses of sweet gardens and dappled orchards, turn
+into panegyrist of the harsh austerity of old Cato and grim Brutus's
+civic devotion? The amiability of eighteenth century France--and France
+was amiable in spite of the atrocities of White Penitents at Toulouse,
+and black Jansenists at Paris, and the men and women who dealt in
+_lettres-de-cachet_ at Versailles--was revolted by the name of the cruel
+patriot who slew his son for the honour of discipline.[201] How came
+Rousseau of all men, the great humanitarian of his time, to rise to the
+height of these unlovely rigours?
+
+The answer is that he was a citizen of Geneva transplanted. He had been
+bred in puritan and republican tradition, with love of God and love of
+law and freedom and love of country all penetrating it, and then he had
+been accidentally removed to a strange city that was in active ferment
+with ideas that were the direct abnegation of all these. In Paris the
+idea of a God was either repudiated along with many other ancestral
+conceptions, or else it was fatally entangled with the worst
+superstition and not seldom with the vilest cruelties. The idea of
+freedom was unknown, and the idea of law was benumbed by abuses and
+exceptions. The idea of country was enfeebled in some and displaced in
+others by a growing passion for the captivating something styled
+citizenship of the world. If Rousseau could have ended his days among
+the tranquil lakes and hills of Savoy, Geneva might possibly never have
+come back to him. For it depends on circumstance, which of the chances
+that slumber within us shall awake, and which shall fall unroused with
+us into the darkness. The fact of Rousseau ranking among the greatest of
+the writers of the French language, and the yet more important fact that
+his ideas found their most ardent disciples and exploded in their most
+violent form in France, constantly make us forget that he was not a
+Frenchman, but a Genevese deeply imbued with the spirit of his native
+city. He was thirty years old before he began even temporarily to live
+in France: he had only lived there some five or six years when he wrote
+his first famous piece, so un-French in all its spirit; and the ideas of
+the Social Contract were in germ before he settled in France at all.
+
+There have been two great religious reactions, and the name of Geneva
+has a fundamental association with each of them. The first was that
+against the paganised Catholicism of the renaissance, and of this
+Calvin was a prime leader; the second was that against the materialism
+of the eighteenth century, of which the prime leader was Rousseau. The
+diplomatist was right who called Geneva the fifth part of the world. At
+the congress of Vienna, some one, wearied at the enormous place taken by
+the hardly visible Geneva in the midst of negotiations involving
+momentous issues for the whole habitable globe, called out that it was
+after all no more than a grain of sand. But he was not wrong who made
+bold to reply, "Geneva is no grain of sand; 'tis a grain of musk that
+perfumes all Europe."[202] We have to remember that it was at all events
+as a grain of musk ever pervading the character of Rousseau. It happened
+in later years that he repudiated his allegiance to her, but however
+bitterly a man may quarrel with a parent, he cannot change blood, and
+Rousseau ever remained a true son of the city of Calvin. We may perhaps
+conjecture without excessive fancifulness that the constant spectacle
+and memory of a community, free, energetic, and prosperous, whose
+institutions had been shaped and whose political temper had been
+inspired by one great lawgiver, contributed even more powerfully than
+what he had picked up about Lycurgus and Lacedaemon, to give him a turn
+for Utopian speculation, and a conviction of the artificiality and easy
+modifiableness of the social structure. This, however, is less certain
+than that he unconsciously received impressions in his youth from the
+circumstances of Geneva, both as to government and religion, as to
+freedom, order, citizenship, manners, which formed the deepest part of
+him on the reflective side, and which made themselves visible whenever
+he exchanged the life of beatified sense for moods of speculative
+energy, "Never," he says, "did I see the walls of that happy city, I
+never went into it, without feeling a certain faintness at my heart, due
+to excess of tender emotion. At the same time that the noble image of
+freedom elevated my soul, those of equality, of union, of gentle
+manners, touched me even to tears."[203] His spirit never ceased to
+haunt city and lake to the end, and he only paid the debt of an owed
+acknowledgment in the dedication of his Discourse on Inequality to the
+republic of Geneva.[204] It was there it had its root. The honour in
+which industry was held in Geneva, the democratic phrases that
+constituted the dialect of its government, the proud tradition of the
+long battle which had won and kept its independence, the severity of its
+manners, the simplicity of its pleasures,--all these things awoke in his
+memory as soon as ever occasion drew him to serious thought. More than
+that, he had in a peculiar manner drawn in with the breath of his
+earliest days in this theocratically constituted city, the vital idea
+that there are sacred things and objects of reverence among men. And
+hence there came to him, though with many stains and much misdirection,
+the most priceless excellence of a capacity for devout veneration.
+
+There is certainly no real contradiction between the quality of
+reverence and the more equivocal quality of a sensuous temperament,
+though a man may well seem on the surface, as the first succeeds the
+second in rule over him, to be the contradiction to his other self. The
+objects of veneration and the objects of sensuous delight are externally
+so unlike and so incongruous, that he who follows both in their turns is
+as one playing the part of an ironical chorus in the tragi-comic drama
+of his own life. You may perceive these two to be mere imperfect or
+illusory opposites, when you confront a man like Rousseau with the true
+opposite of his own type; with those who are from their birth analysts
+and critics, keen, restless, urgent, inexorably questioning. That
+energetic type, though not often dead or dull on the side of sense, yet
+is incapable of steeping itself in the manifold delights of eye and ear,
+of nostril and touch, with the peculiar intensity of passive absorption
+that seeks nothing further nor deeper than unending continuance of this
+profound repose of all filled sensation, just as it is incapable of the
+kindred mood of elevated humility and joyful unasking devoutness in the
+presence of emotions and dim thoughts that are beyond the compass
+of words.
+
+The citizen of Geneva with this unseen fibre of Calvinistic veneration
+and austerity strong and vigorous within him, found a world that had
+nothing sacred and took nothing for granted; that held the past in
+contempt, and ever like old Athenians asked for some new thing; that
+counted simplicity of life an antique barbarism, and literary
+curiousness the master virtue. There were giants in this world, like the
+panurgic Diderot. There were industrious, worthy, disinterested men, who
+used their minds honestly and actively with sincere care for truth, like
+D'Holbach. There was poured around the whole, like a high stimulating
+atmosphere to the stronger, and like some evil mental aphrodisiac to the
+weaker, the influence of Voltaire, the great indomitable chieftain of
+them all. Intellectual size half redeems want of perfect direction by
+its generous power and fulness. It was not the strong men, atheists and
+philosophisers as they were, who first irritated Rousseau into revolt
+against their whole system of thought in all its principles. The dissent
+between him and them was fundamental and enormous, and in time it flamed
+out into open war. Conflict of theory, however, was brought home to him
+first by slow-growing exasperation at the follies in practice of the
+minor disciples of the gospel of knowing and acting, as distinguished
+from his own gospel of placid being. He craved beliefs that should
+uphold men in living their lives, substantial helps on which they might
+lean without examination and without mistrust: his life in Paris was
+thrown among people who lived in the midst of open questions, and
+revelled in a reflective and didactic morality, which had no root in the
+heart and so made things easy for the practical conscience. He sought
+tranquillity and valued life for its own sake, not as an arena and a
+theme for endless argument and debate: he found friends who knew no
+higher pleasure than the futile polemics of mimic philosophy over
+dessert, who were as full of quibble as the wrong-headed interlocutors
+in a Platonic dialogue, and who babbled about God and state of nature,
+about virtue and the spirituality of the soul, much as Boswell may have
+done when Johnson complained of him for asking questions that would make
+a man hang himself. The highest things were thus brought down to the
+level of the cheapest discourse, and subjects which the wise take care
+only to discuss with the wise, were here everyday topics for all comers.
+
+The association with such high themes of those light qualities of tact,
+gaiety, complaisance, which are the life of the superficial commerce of
+men and women of the world, probably gave quite as much offence to
+Rousseau as the doctrines which some of his companions had the honest
+courage or the heedless fatuity to profess. It was an outrage to all the
+serious side of him to find persons of quality introducing materialism
+as a new fashion, and atheism as the liveliest of condiments. The
+perfume of good manners only made what he took for bad principles the
+worse, and heightened his impatience at the flippancy of pretensions to
+overthrow the beliefs of a world between two wines.
+
+Doctrine and temperament united to set him angrily against the world
+around him. The one was austere and the other was sensuous, and the
+sensuous temperament in its full strength is essentially solitary. The
+play of social intercourse, its quick transitions, and incessant
+demands, are fatal to free and uninterrupted abandonment to the flow of
+soft internal emotions. Rousseau, dreaming, moody, indolently,
+meditative, profoundly enwrapped in the brooding egoism of his own
+sensations, had to mix with men and women whose egoism took the contrary
+form of an eager desire to produce flashing effects on other people. We
+may be sure that as the two sides of his character--his notions of
+serious principle, and his notions of personal comfort--both went in the
+same direction, the irritation and impatience with which they inspired
+him towards society did not lessen with increased communication, but
+naturally deepened with a more profoundly settled antipathy.
+
+Rousseau lived in Paris for twelve years, from his return from Venice in
+1744 until his departure in 1756 for the rustic lodge in a wood which
+the good-will of Madame d'Epinay provided for him. We have already seen
+one very important side of his fortunes during these years, in the
+relations he formed with Theresa, and the relations which he repudiated
+with his children. We have heard too the new words with which during
+these years he first began to make the hearts of his contemporaries wax
+hot within them. It remains to examine the current of daily circumstance
+on which his life was embarked, and the shores to which it was
+bearing him.
+
+His patrons were at present almost exclusively in the circle of
+finance. Richelieu, indeed, took him for a moment by the hand, but even
+the introduction to him was through the too frail wife of one of the
+greatest of the farmers general.[205] Madame Dupin and Madame d'Epinay,
+his two chief patronesses, were also both of them the wives of magnates
+of the farm. The society of the great people of this world was marked by
+all the glare, artificiality, and sentimentalism of the epoch, but it
+had also one or two specially hollow characteristics of its own. As is
+always the case when a new rich class rises in the midst of a community
+possessing an old caste, the circle of Parisian financiers made it their
+highest social aim to thrust and strain into the circle of the
+Versailles people of quality. They had no normal life of their own, with
+independent traditions and self-respect; and for the same reason that an
+essentially worn-out aristocracy may so long preserve a considerable
+degree of vigour and even of social utility under certain circumstances
+by means of tenacious pride in its own order, a new plutocracy is
+demoralised from the very beginning of its existence by want of a
+similar kind of pride in itself, and by the ignoble necessity of craving
+the countenance of an upper class that loves to despise and humiliate
+it. Besides the more obvious evils of a position resting entirely on
+material opulence, and maintaining itself by coarse and glittering
+ostentation, there is a fatal moral hollowness which infects both
+serious conduct and social diversion. The result is seen in imitative
+manners, affected culture, and a mixture of timorous self-consciousness
+within and noisy self-assertion without, which completes the most
+distasteful scene that any collected spirit can witness.
+
+Rousseau was, as has been said, the secretary of Madame Dupin and her
+stepson Francueil. He occasionally went with them to Chenonceaux in
+Touraine, one of Henry the Second's castles built for Diana of Poitiers,
+and here he fared sumptuously every day. In Paris his means, as we know,
+were too strait. For the first two years he had a salary of nine hundred
+francs; then his employers raised it to as much as fifty louis. For the
+first of the Discourses the publisher gave him nothing, and for the
+second he had to extract his fee penny by penny, and after long waiting.
+His comic opera, the Village Soothsayer, was a greater success; it
+brought him the round sum of two hundred louis from the court, and some
+five and twenty more from the bookseller, and so, he says, "the
+interlude, which cost me five or six weeks of work, produced nearly as
+much money as Emilius afterwards did, which had cost me twenty years of
+meditation and three years of composition."[206] Before the arrival of
+this windfall, M. Francueil, who was receiver-general, offered him the
+post of cashier in that important department, and Rousseau attended for
+some weeks to receive the necessary instructions. His progress was tardy
+as usual, and the complexities of accounts were as little congenial to
+him as notarial complexities had been three and twenty years previously.
+It is, however, one of the characteristics of times of national break-up
+not to be peremptory in exacting competence, and Rousseau gravely sat at
+the receipt of custom, doing the day's duty with as little skill as
+liking. Before he had been long at his post, his official chief going on
+a short journey left him in charge of the chest, which happened at the
+moment to contain no very portentous amount. The disquiet with which the
+watchful custody of this moderate treasure harassed and afflicted
+Rousseau, not only persuaded him that nature had never designed him to
+be the guardian of money chests, but also threw him into a fit of very
+painful illness. The surgeons let him understand that within six months
+he would be in the pale kingdoms. The effect of such a hint on a man of
+his temper, and the train of reflections which it would be sure to set
+aflame, are to be foreseen by us who know Rousseau's fashion of dealing
+with the irksome. Why sacrifice the peace and charm of the little
+fragment of days left to him, to the bondage of an office for which he
+felt nothing but disgust? How reconcile the austere principles which he
+had just adopted in his denunciation of sciences and arts, and his
+panegyric on the simplicity of the natural life, with such duties as he
+had to perform? And how preach disinterestedness and frugality from amid
+the cashboxes of a receiver-general? Plainly it was his duty to pass in
+independence and poverty the little time that was yet left to him, to
+bring all the forces of his soul to bear in breaking the fetters of
+opinion, and to carry out courageously whatever seemed best to himself,
+without suffering the judgment of others to interpose the slightest
+embarrassment or hindrance.[207]
+
+With Rousseau, to conceive a project of this kind for simplifying his
+life was to hasten urgently towards its realisation, because such
+projects harmonised with all his strongest predispositions. His design
+mastered and took whole possession of him. He resolved to earn his
+living by copying music, as that was conformable to his taste, within
+his capacity, and compatible with entire personal freedom. His patron
+did as the world is so naturally ready to do with those who choose the
+stoic's way; he declared that Rousseau was gone mad.[208] Talk like this
+had no effect on a man whom self-indulgence led into a path that others
+would only have been forced into by self-denial. Let it be said,
+however, that this is a form of self-indulgence of which society is
+never likely to see an excess, and meanwhile we may continue to pay it
+some respect as assuredly leaning to virtue's side. Rousseau's many
+lapses from grace perhaps deserve a certain gentleness of treatment,
+after the time when with deliberation and collected effort he set
+himself to the hard task of fitting his private life to his public
+principles. Anything that heightens the self-respect of the race is good
+for us to behold, and it is a permanent source of comfort to all who
+thirst after reality in teachers, whether their teaching happens to be
+our own or not, to find that the prophet of social equality was not a
+fine gentleman, nor the teacher of democracy a hanger-on to the silly
+skirts of fashion.
+
+Rousseau did not merely throw up a post which would one day have made
+him rich. Stoicism on the heroic, peremptory scale is not so difficult
+as the application of the same principle to trifles. Besides this
+greater sacrifice, he gave up the pleasant things for which most men
+value the money that procures them, and instituted an austere sumptuary
+reform in truly Genevese spirit. His sword was laid aside; for flowing
+peruke was substituted the small round wig; he left off gilt buttons and
+white stockings, and he sold his watch with the joyful and singular
+thought that he would never again need to know the time. One sacrifice
+remained to be made. Part of his equipment for the Venetian embassy had
+been a large stock of fine linen, and for this he retained a particular
+affection, for both now and always Rousseau had a passion for personal
+cleanliness, as he had for corporeal wholesomeness. He was seasonably
+delivered from bondage to his fine linen by aid from without. One
+Christmas Eve it lay drying in a garret in the rather considerable
+quantity of forty-two shirts, when a thief, always suspected to be the
+brother of Theresa, broke open the door and carried off the treasure,
+leaving Rousseau henceforth to be the contented wearer of coarser
+stuffs.[209]
+
+We may place this reform towards the end of the year 1750, or the
+beginning of 1751, when his mind was agitated by the busy discussion
+which his first Discourse excited, and by the new ideas of literary
+power which its reception by the public naturally awakened in him. "It
+takes," wrote Diderot, "right above the clouds; never was such a
+success."[210] We can hardly have a surer sign of a man's fundamental
+sincerity than that his first triumph, the first revelation to him of
+his power, instead of seducing him to frequent the mischievous and
+disturbing circle of his applauders, should throw him inwards upon
+himself and his own principles with new earnestness and refreshed
+independence. Rousseau very soon made up his mind what the world was
+worth to him; and this, not as the ordinary sentimentalist or satirist
+does, by way of set-off against the indulgence of personal foibles, but
+from recognition of his own qualities, of the bounds set to our capacity
+of life, and of the limits of the world's power to satisfy us. "When my
+destiny threw me into the whirlpool of society," he wrote in his last
+meditation on the course of his own life, "I found nothing there to
+give a moment's solace to my heart. Regret for my sweet leisure followed
+me everywhere; it shed indifference or disgust over all that might have
+been within my reach, leading to fortune and honours. Uncertain in the
+disquiet of my desires, I hoped for little, I obtained less, and I felt
+even amid gleams of prosperity that if I obtained all that I supposed
+myself to be seeking, I should still not have found the happiness for
+which my heart was greedily athirst, though without distinctly knowing
+its object. Thus everything served to detach my affections from society,
+even before the misfortunes which were to make me wholly a stranger to
+it. I reached the age of forty, floating between indigence and fortune,
+between wisdom and disorder, full of vices of habit without any evil
+tendency at heart, living by hazard, distracted as to my duties without
+despising them, but often without much clear knowledge what they
+were."[211]
+
+A brooding nature gives to character a connectedness and unity that is
+in strong contrast with the dispersion and multiformity of the active
+type. The attractions of fame never cheated Rousseau into forgetfulness
+of the commanding principle that a man's life ought to be steadily
+composed to oneness with itself in all its parts, as by mastery of an
+art of moral counterpoint, and not crowded with a wild mixture of aim
+and emotion like distracted masks in high carnival. He complains of the
+philosophers with whom he came into contact, that their philosophy was
+something foreign to them and outside of their own lives. They studied
+human nature for the sake of talking learnedly about it, not for the
+sake of self-knowledge; they laboured to instruct others, not to
+enlighten themselves within. When they published a book, its contents
+only interested them to the extent of making the world accept it,
+without seriously troubling themselves whether it were true or false,
+provided only that it was not refuted. "For my own part, when I desired
+to learn, it was to know things myself, and not at all to teach others.
+I always believed that before instructing others it was proper to begin
+by knowing enough for one's self; and of all the studies that I have
+tried to follow in my life in the midst of men, there is hardly one that
+I should not have followed equally if I had been alone, and shut up in a
+desert island for the rest of my days."[212]
+
+When we think of Turgot, whom Rousseau occasionally met among the
+society which he denounces, such a denunciation sounds a little
+outrageous. But then Turgot was perhaps the one sane Frenchman of the
+first eminence in the eighteenth century. Voltaire chose to be an exile
+from the society of Paris and Versailles as pertinaciously as Rousseau
+did, and he spoke more bitterly of it in verse than Rousseau ever spoke
+bitterly of it in prose.[213] It was, as has been so often said, a
+society dominated by women, from the king's mistress who helped to ruin
+France, down to the financier's wife who gave suppers to flashy men of
+letters. The eighteenth century salon has been described as having three
+stages; the salon of 1730, still retaining some of the stately
+domesticity, elegance, dignity of the age of Lewis XIV.; that of 1780,
+grave, cold, dry, given to dissertation; and between the two, the salon
+of 1750, full of intellectual stir, brilliance, frivolous originality,
+glittering wastefulness.[214] Though this division of time must not be
+pressed too closely, it is certain that the era of Rousseau's advent in
+literature with his Discourses fell in with the climax of social
+unreality in the surface intercourse of France, and that the same date
+marks the highest point of feminine activity and power.
+
+The common mixture of much reflective morality in theory with much
+light-hearted immorality in practice, never entered so largely into
+manners. We have constantly to wonder how they analysed and defined the
+word Virtue, to which they so constantly appealed in letters,
+conversation, and books, as the sovereign object for our deepest and
+warmest adoration. A whole company of transgressors of the marriage law
+would melt into floods of tears over a hymn to virtue, which they must
+surely have held of too sacred an essence to mix itself with any one
+virtue in particular, except that very considerable one of charitably
+letting all do as they please. It is much, however, that these tears,
+if not very burning, were really honest. Society, though not believing
+very deeply in the supernatural, was not cursed with an arid, parching,
+and hardened scepticism about the genuineness of good emotions in a man,
+and so long as people keep this baleful poison out of their hearts,
+their lives remain worth having.
+
+It is true that cynicism in the case of some women of this time
+occasionally sounded in a diabolic key, as when one said, "It is your
+lover to whom you should never say that you don't believe in God; to
+one's husband that does not matter, because in the case of a lover one
+must reserve for one's self some door of escape, and devotional scruples
+cut everything short."[215] Or here: "I do not distrust anybody, for
+that is a deliberate act; but I do not trust anybody, and there is no
+trouble in this."[216] Or again in the word thrown to a man vaunting the
+probity of some one: "What! can a man of intelligence like you accept
+the prejudice of _meum_ and _tuum_?"[217] Such speech, however, was
+probably most often a mere freak of the tongue, a mode and fashion, as
+who should go to a masked ball in guise of Mephistopheles, without
+anything more Mephistophelian about him than red apparel and peaked
+toes. "She was absolutely charming," said one of a new-comer; "she did
+not utter one single word that was not a paradox."[218] This was the
+passing taste. Human nature is able to keep itself wholesome in
+fundamentals even under very great difficulties, and it is as wise as it
+is charitable in judging a sharp and cynical tone to make large
+allowances for mere costume and assumed character.
+
+In respect of the light companionship of common usage, however, it is
+exactly the costume which comes closest to us, and bad taste in that is
+most jarring and least easily forgiven. There is a certain stage in an
+observant person's experience of the heedlessness, indolence, and native
+folly of men and women--and if his observation be conducted in a
+catholic spirit, he will probably see something of this not merely in
+others--when the tolerable average sanity of human arrangements strikes
+him as the most marvellous of all the fortunate accidents in the
+universe. Rousseau could not even accept the fact of this miraculous
+result, the provisional and temporary sanity of things, and he
+confronted society with eyes of angry chagrin. A great lady asked him
+how it was that she had not seen him for an age. "Because when I wish to
+see you, I wish to see no one but you. What do you want me to do in the
+midst of your society? I should cut a sorry figure in a circle of
+mincing tripping coxcombs; they do not suit me." We cannot wonder that
+on some occasion when her son's proficiency was to be tested before a
+company of friends, Madame d'Epinay prayed Rousseau to be of them, on
+the ground that he would be sure to ask the child outrageously absurd
+questions, which would give gaiety to the affair.[219] As it happened,
+the father was unwise. He was a man of whom it was said that he had
+devoured two million francs, without either saying or doing a single
+good thing. He rewarded the child's performance with the gift of a
+superb suit of cherry-coloured velvet, extravagantly trimmed with costly
+lace; the peasant from whose sweat and travail the money had been wrung,
+went in heavy rags, and his children lived as the beasts of the field.
+The poor youth was ill dealt with. "That is very fine," said rude
+Duclos, "but remember that a fool in lace is still a fool." Rousseau, in
+reply to the child's importunity, was still blunter: "Sir, I am no judge
+of finery, I am only a judge of man; I wished to talk with you a little
+while ago, but I wish so no longer."[220]
+
+Marmontel, whose account may have been coloured by retrospection in
+later years, says that before the success of the first Discourse,
+Rousseau concealed his pride under the external forms of a politeness
+that was timid even to obsequiousness; in his uneasy glance you
+perceived mistrust and observant jealousy; there was no freedom in his
+manner, and no one ever observed more cautiously the hateful precept to
+live with your friends as though they were one day to be your
+enemies.[221] Grimm's description is different and more trustworthy.
+Until he began to affect singularity, he says, Rousseau had been gallant
+and overflowing with artificial compliment, with manners that were
+honeyed and even wearisome in their soft elaborateness. All at once he
+put on the cynic's cloak, and went to the other extreme. Still in spite
+of an abrupt and cynical tone he kept much of his old art of elaborate
+fine speeches, and particularly in his relations with women.[222] Of his
+abruptness, he tells a most displeasing tale. "One day Rousseau told us
+with an air of triumph, that as he was coming out of the opera where he
+had been seeing the first representation of the Village Soothsayer, the
+Duke of Zweibruecken had approached him with much politeness, saying,
+'Will you allow me to pay you a compliment?' and that he replied, 'Yes,
+if it be very short.' Everybody was silent at this, until I said to him
+laughingly, 'Illustrious citizen and co-sovereign of Geneva, since there
+resides in you a part of the sovereignty of the republic, let me
+represent to you that, for all the severity of your principles, you
+should hardly refuse to a sovereign prince the respect due to a
+water-carrier, and that if you had met a word of good-will from a
+water-carrier with an answer as rough and brutal as that, you would have
+had to reproach yourself with a most unseasonable piece of
+impertinence.'"[223]
+
+There were still more serious circumstances when exasperation at the
+flippant tone about him carried him beyond the ordinary bounds of that
+polite time. A guest at table asked contemptuously what was the use of a
+nation like the French having reason, if they did not use it. "They mock
+the other nations of the earth, and yet are the most credulous of all."
+ROUSSEAU: "I forgive them for their credulity, but not for condemning
+those who are credulous in some other way." Some one said that in
+matters of religion everybody was right, but that everybody should
+remain in that in which he had been born. ROUSSEAU, with warmth: "Not
+so, by God, if it is a bad one, for then it can do nothing but harm."
+Then some one contended that religion always did some good, as a kind of
+rein to the common people who had no other morality. All the rest cried
+out at this in indignant remonstrance, one shrewd person remarking that
+the common people had much livelier fear of being hanged than of being
+damned. The conversation was broken off for a moment by the hostess
+calling out, "After all, one must nourish the tattered affair we call
+our body, so ring and let them bring us the joint." This done, the
+servants dismissed, and the door shut, the discussion was resumed with
+such vehemence by Duclos and Saint Lambert, that, says the lady who
+tells us the story, "I feared they were bent on destroying all religion,
+and I prayed for some mercy to be shown at any rate to natural
+religion." There was not a whit more sympathy for that than for the
+rest. Rousseau declared himself _paullo infirmior_, and clung to the
+morality of the gospel as the natural morality which in old times
+constituted the whole and only creed. "But what is a God," cried one
+impetuous disputant, "who gets angry and is appeased again?" Rousseau
+began to murmur between grinding teeth, and a tide of pleasantries set
+in at his expense, to which came this: "If it is a piece of cowardice to
+suffer ill to be spoken of one's friend behind his back, 'tis a crime to
+suffer ill to be spoken of one's God, who is present; and for my part,
+sirs, I believe in God." "I admit," said the atheistic champion, "that
+it is a fine thing to see this God bending his brow to earth and
+watching with admiration the conduct of a Cato. But this notion is, like
+many others, very useful in some great heads, such as Trajan, Marcus
+Aurelius, Socrates, where it can only produce heroism, but it is the
+germ of all madnesses." ROUSSEAU: "Sirs, I leave the room if you say
+another word more," and he was rising to fulfil his threat, when the
+entry of a new-comer stopped the discussion.[224]
+
+His words on another occasion show how all that he saw helped to keep up
+a fretted condition of mind, in one whose soft tenacious memory turned
+daily back to simple and unsophisticated days among the green valleys,
+and refused to acquiesce in the conditions of changed climate. So
+terrible a thing is it to be the bondsman of reminiscence. Madame
+d'Epinay was suspected, wrongfully as it afterwards proved, of having
+destroyed some valuable papers belonging to a dead relative. There was
+much idle and cruel gossip in an ill-natured world. Rousseau, her
+friend, kept steadfast silence: she challenged his opinion. "What am I
+to say?" he answered; "I go and come, and all that I hear outrages and
+revolts me. I see the one so evidently malicious and so adroit in their
+injustice; the other so awkward and so stupid in their good intentions,
+that I am tempted (and it is not the first time) to look on Paris as a
+cavern of brigands, of whom every traveller in his turn is the victim.
+What gives me the worst idea of society is to see how eager each person
+is to pardon himself, by reason of the number of the people who are like
+him."[225]
+
+Notwithstanding his hatred of this cavern of brigands, and the little
+pains he took to conceal his feelings from any individual brigand,
+whether male or female, with whom he had to deal, he found out that "it
+is not always so easy as people suppose to be poor and independent."
+Merciless invasion of his time in every shape made his life weariness.
+Sometimes he had the courage to turn and rend the invader, as in the
+letter to a painter who sent him the same copy of verses three times,
+requiring immediate acknowledgment. "It is not just," at length wrote
+the exasperated Rousseau, "that I should be tyrannised over for your
+pleasure; not that my time is precious, as you say; it is either passed
+in suffering or it is lost in idleness; but when I cannot employ it
+usefully for some one, I do not wish to be hindered from wasting it in
+my own fashion. A single minute thus usurped is what all the kings of
+the universe could not give me back, and it is to be my own master that
+I flee from the idle folk of towns,--people as thoroughly wearied as
+they are thoroughly wearisome,--who, because they do not know what to do
+with their own time, think they have a right to waste that of
+others."[226] The more abruptly he treated visitors, persecuting
+dinner-givers, and all the tribe of the importunate, the more obstinate
+they were in possessing themselves of his time. In seizing the hours
+they were keeping his purse empty, as well as keeping up constant
+irritation in his soul. He appears to have earned forty sous for a
+morning's work, and to have counted this a fair fee, remarking modestly
+that he could not well subsist on less.[227] He had one chance of a
+pension, which he threw from him in a truly characteristic manner.
+
+When he came to Paris he composed his musical diversion of the Muses
+Galantes, which was performed (1745) in the presence of Rameau, under
+the patronage of M. de la Popeliniere. Rameau apostrophised the unlucky
+composer with much violence, declaring that one-half of the piece was
+the work of a master, while the other was that of a person entirely
+ignorant of the musical rudiments; the bad work therefore was
+Rousseau's own, and the good was a plagiarism.[228] This repulse did not
+daunt the hero. Five or six years afterwards on a visit to Passy, as he
+was lying awake in bed, he conceived the idea of a pastoral interlude
+after the manner of the Italian comic operas. In six days the Village
+Soothsayer was sketched, and in three weeks virtually completed. Duclos
+procured its rehearsal at the Opera, and after some debate it was
+performed before the court at Fontainebleau. The Plutarchian stoic, its
+author, went from Paris in a court coach, but his Roman tone deserted
+him, and he felt shamefaced as a schoolboy before the great world, such
+divinity doth hedge even a Lewis XV., and even in a soul of Genevan
+temper. The piece was played with great success, and the composer was
+informed that he would the next day have the honour of being presented
+to the king, who would most probably mark his favour by the bestowal of
+a pension.[229] Rousseau was tossed with many doubts. He would fain have
+greeted the king with some word that should show sensibility to the
+royal graciousness, without compromising republican severity, "clothing
+some great and useful truth in a fine and deserved compliment." This
+moral difficulty was heightened by a physical one, for he was liable to
+an infirmity which, if it should overtake him in presence of king and
+courtiers, would land him in an embarrassment worse than death. What
+would become of him if mind or body should fail, if either he should be
+driven into precipitate retreat, or else there should escape him,
+instead of the great truth wrapped delicately round in veracious
+panegyric, a heavy, shapeless word of foolishness? He fled in terror,
+and flung up the chance of pension and patronage. We perceive the born
+dreamer with a phantasmagoric imagination, seizing nothing in just
+proportion and true relation, and paralysing the spirit with terror of
+unrealities; in short, with the most fatal form of moral cowardice,
+which perhaps it is a little dangerous to try to analyse into
+finer names.
+
+When Rousseau got back to Paris he was amazed to find that Diderot spoke
+to him of this abandonment of the pension with a fire that he could
+never have expected from a philosopher, Rousseau plainly sharing the
+opinion of more vulgar souls that philosopher is but fool writ large.
+"He said that if I was disinterested on my own account, I had no right
+to be so on that of Madame Le Vasseur and her daughter, and that I owed
+it to them not to let pass any possible and honest means of giving them
+bread.... This was the first real dispute I had with him, and all our
+quarrels that followed were of the same kind; he laying down for me what
+he insisted that I should do, and I refusing because I thought that I
+ought not to do it."[230]
+
+Let us abstain, at this and all other points, from being too sure that
+we easily see to the bottom of our Rousseau. When we are most ready to
+fling up the book and to pronounce him all selfishness and sophistry,
+some trait is at hand to revive moral interest in him, and show him
+unlike common men, reverent of truth and human dignity. There is a
+slight anecdote of this kind connected with his visit to Fontainebleau.
+The day after the representation of his piece, he happened to be taking
+his breakfast in some public place. An officer entered, and, proceeding
+to describe the performance of the previous day, told at great length
+all that had happened, depicted the composer with much minuteness, and
+gave a circumstantial account of his conversation. In this story, which
+was told with equal assurance and simplicity, there was not a word of
+truth, as was clear from the fact that the author of whom he spoke with
+such intimacy sat unknown and unrecognised before his eyes. The effect
+on Rousseau was singular enough. "The man was of a certain age; he had
+no coxcombical or swaggering air; his expression bespoke a man of merit,
+and his cross of St. Lewis showed that he was an old officer. While he
+was retailing his untruths, I grew red in the face, I lowered my eyes, I
+sat on thorns; I tried to think of some means of believing him to have
+made a mistake in good faith. At length trembling lest some one should
+recognise me and confront him, I hastened to finish my chocolate without
+saying a word; and stooping down as I passed in front of him, I went
+out as fast as possible, while the people present discussed his tale. I
+perceived in the street that I was bathed in sweat, and I am sure that
+if any one had recognised me and called me by name before I got out,
+they would have seen in me the shame and embarrassment of a culprit,
+simply from a feeling of the pain the poor man would have had to suffer
+if his lie had been discovered."[231] One who can feel thus vividly
+humiliated by the meanness of another, assuredly has in himself the
+wholesome salt of respect for the erectness of his fellows; he has the
+rare sentiment that the compromise of integrity in one of them is as a
+stain on his own self-esteem, and a lowering of his own moral stature.
+There is more deep love of humanity in this than in giving many alms,
+and it was not the less deep for being the product of impulse and
+sympathetic emotion, and not of a logical sorites.
+
+Another scene in a cafe is worth referring to, because it shows in the
+same way that at this time Rousseau's egoism fell short of the
+fatuousness to which disease or vicious habit eventually depraved it. In
+1752 he procured the representation of his comedy of Narcisse, which he
+had written at the age of eighteen, and which is as well worth reading
+or playing as most comedies by youths of that amount of experience of
+the ways of the world and the heart of man. Rousseau was amazed and
+touched by the indulgence of the public, in suffering without any sign
+of impatience even a second representation of his piece. For himself,
+he could not so much as sit out the first; quitting the theatre before
+it was over, he entered the famous cafe de Procope at the other side of
+the street, where he found critics as wearied as himself. Here he called
+out, "The new piece has fallen flat, and it deserved to fall flat; it
+wearied me to death. It is by Rousseau of Geneva, and I am that very
+Rousseau."[232] The relentless student of mental pathology is very
+likely to insist that even this was egoism standing on its head and not
+on its feet, choosing to be noticed for an absurdity, rather than not be
+noticed at all. It may be so, but this inversion of the ordinary form of
+vanity is rare enough to be not unrefreshing, and we are very loth to
+hand Rousseau wholly over to the pathologist before his hour has come.
+
+
+II.
+
+In the summer of 1754 Rousseau, in company with his Theresa, went to
+revisit the city of his birth, partly because an exceptionally
+favourable occasion presented itself, but in yet greater part because he
+was growing increasingly weary of the uncongenial world in which he
+moved. On his road he turned aside to visit her who had been more than
+even his birth-place to him. He felt the shock known to all who cherish
+a vision for a dozen years, and then suddenly front the changed reality.
+He had not prepared himself by recalling the commonplace which we only
+remember for others, how time wears hard and ugly lines into the face
+that recollection at each new energy makes lovelier with an added
+sweetness. "I saw her," he says, "but in what a state, O God, in what
+debasement! Was this the same Madame de Warens, in those days so
+brilliant, to whom the priest of Pontverre had sent me! How my heart was
+torn by the sight!" Alas, as has been said with a truth that daily
+experience proves to those whom pity and self-knowledge have made most
+indulgent, as to those whom pinched maxims have made most
+rigorous,--_morality is the nature of things_.[233] We may have a humane
+tenderness for our Manon Lescaut, but we have a deep presentiment all
+the time that the poor soul must die in a penal settlement. It is partly
+a question of time; whether death comes fast enough to sweep you out of
+reach of the penalties which the nature of things may appoint, but which
+in their fiercest shape are mostly of the loitering kind. Death was
+unkind to Madame de Warens, and the unhappy creature lived long enough
+to find that morality does mean something after all; that the old hoary
+world has not fixed on prudence in the outlay of money as a good thing,
+out of avarice or pedantic dryness of heart; nor on some continence and
+order in the relations of men and women as a good thing, out of
+cheerless grudge to the body, but because the breach of such virtues is
+ever in the long run deadly to mutual trust, to strength, to freedom, to
+collectedness, which are the reserve of humanity against days of ordeal.
+
+Rousseau says that he tried hard to prevail upon his fallen benefactress
+to leave Savoy, to come and take up her abode peacefully with him, while
+he and Theresa would devote their days to making her happy. He had not
+forgotten her in the little glimpse of prosperity; he had sent her money
+when he had it.[234] She was sunk in indigence, for her pension had long
+been forestalled, but still she refused to change her home. While
+Rousseau was at Geneva she came to see him. "She lacked money to
+complete her journey; I had not enough about me; I sent it to her an
+hour afterwards by Theresa. Poor Maman! Let me relate this trait of her
+heart. The only trinket she had left was a small ring; she took it from
+her finger to place it on Theresa's, who instantly put it back, as she
+kissed the noble hand and bathed it with her tears." In after years he
+poured bitter reproaches upon himself for not quitting all to attach his
+lot to hers until her last hour, and he professes always to have been
+haunted by the liveliest and most enduring remorse.[235] Here is the
+worst of measuring duty by sensation instead of principle; if the
+sensations happen not to be in right order at the critical moment, the
+chance goes by, never to return, and then, as memory in the best of
+such temperaments is long though not without intermittence, old
+sentiment revives and drags the man into a burning pit. Rousseau appears
+not to have seen her again, but the thought of her remained with him to
+the end, like a soft vesture fragrant with something of the sweet
+mysterious perfume of many-scented night in the silent garden at
+Charmettes. She died in a hovel eight years after this, sunk in disease,
+misery, and neglect, and was put away in the cemetery on the heights
+above Chamberi.[236] Rousseau consoled himself with thoughts of another
+world that should reunite him to her and be the dawn of new happiness;
+like a man who should illusorily confound the last glistening of a
+wintry sunset seen through dark yew-branches, with the broad-beaming
+strength of the summer morning. "If I thought," he said, "that I should
+not see her in the other life, my poor imagination would shrink from the
+idea of perfect bliss, which I would fain promise myself in it."[237] To
+pluck so gracious a flower of hope on the edge of the sombre unechoing
+gulf of nothingness into which our friend has slid silently down, is a
+natural impulse of the sensitive soul, numbing remorse and giving a
+moment's relief to the hunger and thirst of a tenderness that has been
+robbed of its object. Yet would not men be more likely to have a deeper
+love for those about them, and a keener dread of filling a house with
+aching hearts, if they courageously realised from the beginning of their
+days that we have none of this perfect companionable bliss to promise
+ourselves in other worlds, that the black and horrible grave is indeed
+the end of our communion, and that we know one another no more?
+
+The first interview between Rousseau and Madame de Warens was followed
+by his ludicrous conversion to Catholicism (1728); the last was
+contemporary with his re-conversion to the faith in which he had been
+reared. The sight of Geneva gave new fire to his Republican enthusiasm;
+he surrendered himself to transports of patriotic zeal. The thought of
+the Parisian world that he had left behind, its frivolity, its
+petulance, its disputation over all things in heaven and on the earth,
+its profound deadness to all civic activity, quickened his admiration
+for the simple, industrious, and independent community from which he
+never forgot that he was sprung. But no Catholic could enjoy the rights
+of citizenship. So Rousseau proceeded to reflect that the Gospel is the
+same for all Christians, and the substance of dogma only differs,
+because people interposed with explanations of what they could not
+understand; that therefore it is in each country the business of the
+sovereign to fix both the worship and the amount and quality of
+unintelligible dogma; that consequently it is the citizen's duty to
+admit the dogma, and follow the worship by law appointed. "The society
+of the Encyclopaedists, far from shaking my faith, had confirmed it by my
+natural aversion for partisanship and controversy. The reading of the
+Bible, especially of the Gospel, to which I had applied myself for
+several years, had made me despise the low and childish interpretation
+put upon the words of Christ by the people who were least worthy to
+understand him. In a word, philosophy by drawing me towards the
+essential in religion, had drawn me away from that stupid mass of
+trivial formulas with which men had overlaid and darkened it."[238] We
+may be sure that if Rousseau had a strong inclination towards a given
+course of action, he would have no difficulty in putting his case in a
+blaze of the brightest light, and surrounding it with endless emblems
+and devices of superlative conviction. In short, he submitted himself
+faithfully to the instruction of the pastor of his parish; was closely
+catechised by a commission of members of the consistory; received from
+them a certificate that he had satisfied the requirements of doctrine in
+all points; was received to partake of the Communion, and finally
+restored to all his rights as a citizen.[239]
+
+This was no farce, such as Voltaire played now and again at the expense
+of an unhappy bishop or unhappier parish priest; nor such as Rousseau
+himself had played six-and-twenty years before, at the expense of those
+honest Catholics of Turin whose helpful donation of twenty francs had
+marked their enthusiasm over a soul that had been lost and was found
+again. He was never a Catholic, any more than he was ever an atheist,
+and if it might be said in one sense that he was no more a Protestant
+than he was either of these two, yet he was emphatically the child of
+Protestantism. It is hardly too much to say that one bred in Catholic
+tradition and observance, accustomed to think of the whole life of men
+as only a manifestation of the unbroken life of the Church, and of all
+the several communities of men as members of that great organisation
+which binds one order to another, and each generation to those that have
+gone before and those that come after, would never have dreamed that
+monstrous dream of a state of nature as a state of perfection. He would
+never have held up to ridicule and hate the idea of society as an
+organism with normal parts and conditions of growth, and never have left
+the spirit of man standing in bald isolation from history, from his
+fellows, from a Church, from a mediator, face to face with the great
+vague phantasm. Nor, on the other hand, is it likely that one born and
+reared in the religious school of authority with its elaborately
+disciplined hierarchy, would have conceived that passion for political
+freedom, that zeal for the rights of peoples against rulers, that
+energetic enthusiasm for a free life, which constituted the fire and
+essence of Rousseau's writing. As illustration of this, let us remark
+how Rousseau's teaching fared when it fell upon a Catholic country like
+France: so many of its principles were assimilated by the revolutionary
+schools as were wanted for violent dissolvents, while the rest dropped
+away, and in this rejected portion was precisely the most vital part of
+his system. In other words, in no country has the power of collective
+organisation been so pressed and exalted as in revolutionised France,
+and in no country has the free life of the individual been made to count
+for so little. With such force does the ancient system of temporal and
+spiritual organisation reign in the minds of those who think most
+confidently that they have cast it wholly out of them. The use of reason
+may lead a man far, but it is the past that has cut the groove.
+
+In re-embracing the Protestant confession, therefore, Rousseau was not
+leaving Catholicism, to which he had never really passed over; he was
+only undergoing in entire gravity of spirit a formality which reconciled
+him with his native city, and reunited those strands of spiritual
+connection with it which had never been more than superficially parted.
+There can be little doubt that the four months which he spent in Geneva
+in 1754 marked a very critical time in the formation of some of the most
+memorable of his opinions. He came from Paris full of inarticulate and
+smouldering resentment against the irreverence and denial of the
+materialistic circle which used to meet at the house of D'Holbach. What
+sort of opinions he found prevailing among the most enlightened of the
+Genevese pastors we know from an abundance of sources. D'Alembert had
+three or four years later than this to suffer a bitter attack from
+them, but the account of the creed of some of the ministers which he
+gave in his article on Geneva in the Encyclopedia, was substantially
+correct. "Many of them," he wrote, "have ceased to believe in the
+divinity of Jesus Christ. Hell, one of the principal points in our
+belief, is no longer one with many of the Genevese pastors, who contend
+that it is an insult to the Divinity to imagine that a being full of
+goodness and justice can be capable of punishing our faults by an
+eternity of torment. In a word, they have no other creed than pure
+Socinianism, rejecting everything that they call mysteries, and
+supposing the first principle of a true religion to be that it shall
+propose nothing for belief which clashes with reason. Religion here is
+almost reduced to the adoration of one single God, at least among nearly
+all who do not belong to the common people; and a certain respect for
+Jesus Christ and the Scriptures is nearly the only thing that
+distinguishes the Christianity of Geneva from pure Deism."[240] And it
+would be easy to trace the growth of these rationalising tendencies.
+Throughout the seventeenth century men sprang up who anticipated some of
+the rationalistic arguments of the eighteenth, in denying the Trinity,
+and so forth,[241] but the time was not then ripe. The general
+conditions grew more favourable. Burnet, who was at Geneva in 1685-6,
+says that though there were not many among the Genevese of the first
+form of learning, "yet almost everybody here has a good tincture of a
+learned education."[242] The pacification of civic troubles in 1738 was
+followed by a quarter of a century of extreme prosperity and
+contentment, and it is in such periods that the minds of men previously
+trained are wont to turn to the great matters of speculation. There was
+at all times a constant communication, both public and private, going on
+between Geneva and Holland, as was only natural between the two chief
+Protestant centres of the Continent. The controversy of the seventeenth
+century between the two churches was as keenly followed in Geneva as at
+Leyden, and there is more than one Genevese writer who deserves a place
+in the history of the transition in the beginning of the eighteenth
+century from theology proper to that metaphysical theology, which was
+the first marked dissolvent of dogma within the Protestant bodies. To
+this general movement of the epoch, of course, Descartes supplied the
+first impulse. The leader of the movement in Geneva, that is of an
+attempt to pacify the Christian churches on the basis of some such Deism
+as was shortly to find its passionate expression in the Savoyard
+Vicar's Confession of Faith, was John Alphonse Turretini (1661-1737). He
+belonged to a family of Italian refugees from Lucca, and his grandfather
+had been sent on a mission to Holland for aid in defence of Geneva
+against Catholic Savoy. He went on his travels in 1692; he visited
+Holland, where he saw Bayle, and England, where he saw Newton, and
+France, where he saw Bossuet. Chouet initiated him into the mysteries of
+Descartes. All this bore fruit when he returned home, and his eloquent
+exposition of rationalistic ideas aroused the usual cry of heresy from
+the people who justly insist that Deism is not Christianity. There was
+much stir for many years, but he succeeded in holding his own and in
+finding many considerable followers.[243] For example, some three years
+or so after his death, a work appeared in Geneva under the title of _La
+Religion Essentielle a l'Homme_, showing that faith in the existence of
+a God suffices, and treating with contempt the belief in the
+inspiration of the Gospels.[244]
+
+Thus we see what vein of thought was running through the graver and more
+active minds of Geneva about the time of Rousseau's visit. Whether it be
+true or not that the accepted belief of many of the preachers was a pure
+Deism, it is certain that the theory was fully launched among them, and
+that those who could not accept it were still pressed to refute it, and
+in refuting, to discuss. Rousseau's friendships were according to his
+own account almost entirely among the ministers of religion and the
+professors of the academy, precisely the sort of persons who would be
+most sure to familiarise him, in the course of frequent conversations,
+with the current religious ideas and the arguments by which they were
+opposed or upheld. We may picture the effect on his mind of the
+difference in tone and temper in these grave, candid, and careful men,
+and the tone of his Parisian friends in discussing the same high themes;
+how this difference would strengthen his repugnance, and corroborate his
+own inborn spirit of veneration; how he would here feel himself in his
+own world. For as wise men have noticed, it is not so much difference of
+opinion that stirs resentment in us, at least in great subjects where
+the difference is not trivial but profound, as difference in gravity of
+humour and manner of moral approach. He returned to Paris (Oct. 1754)
+warm with the resolution to give up his concerns there, and in the
+spring go back once and for all to the city of liberty and virtue, where
+men revered wisdom and reason instead of wasting life in the frivolities
+of literary dialectic.[245]
+
+The project, however, grew cool. The dedication of his Discourse on
+Inequality to the Republic was received with indifference by some and
+indignation by others.[246] Nobody thought it a compliment, and some
+thought it an impertinence. This was one reason which turned his purpose
+aside. Another was the fact that the illustrious Voltaire now also
+signed himself Swiss, and boasted that if he shook his wig the powder
+flew over the whole of the tiny Republic. Rousseau felt certain that
+Voltaire would make a revolution in Geneva, and that he should find in
+his native country the tone, the air, the manners which were driving him
+from Paris. From that moment he counted Geneva lost. Perhaps he ought to
+make head against the disturber, but what could he do alone, timid and
+bad talker as he was, against a man arrogant, rich, supported by the
+credit of the great, of brilliant eloquence, and already the very idol
+of women and young men?[247] Perhaps it would not be uncharitable to
+suspect that this was a reason after the event, for no man was ever so
+fond as Rousseau, or so clever a master in the art, of covering an
+accident in a fine envelope of principle, and, as we shall see, he was
+at this time writing to Voltaire in strains of effusive panegyric. In
+this case he almost tells us that the one real reason why he did not
+return to Geneva was that he found a shelter from Paris close at hand.
+Even before then he had begun to conceive characteristic doubts whether
+his fellow-citizens at Geneva would not be nearly as hostile to his love
+of living solitarily and after his own fashion as the good people
+of Paris.
+
+Rousseau has told us a pretty story, how one day he and Madame d'Epinay
+wandering about the park came upon a dilapidated lodge surrounded by
+fruit gardens, in the skirts of the forest of Montmorency; how he
+exclaimed in delight at its solitary charm that here was the very place
+of refuge made for him; and how on a second visit he found that his good
+friend had in the interval had the old lodge pulled down, and replaced
+by a pretty cottage exactly arranged for his own household. "My poor
+bear," she said, "here is your place of refuge; it was you who chose it,
+'tis friendship offers it; I hope it will drive away your cruel notion
+of going from me."[248] Though moved to tears by such kindness,
+Rousseau did not decide on the spot, but continued to waver for some
+time longer between this retreat and return to Geneva.
+
+In the interval Madame d'Epinay had experience of the character she was
+dealing with. She wrote to Rousseau pressing him to live at the cottage
+in the forest, and begging him to allow her to assist him in assuring
+the moderate annual provision which he had once accidentally declared to
+mark the limit of his wants.[249] He wrote to her bitterly in reply,
+that her proposition struck ice into his soul, and that she could have
+but sorry appreciation of her own interests in thus seeking to turn a
+friend into a valet. He did not refuse to listen to what she proposed,
+if only she would remember that neither he nor his sentiments were for
+sale.[250] Madame d'Epinay wrote to him patiently enough in return, and
+then Rousseau hastened to explain that his vocabulary needed special
+appreciation, and that he meant by the word valet "the degradation into
+which the repudiation of his principles would throw his soul. The
+independence I seek is not immunity from work; I am firm for winning my
+own bread, I take pleasure in it; but I mean not to subject myself to
+any other duty, if I can help it. I will never pledge any portion of my
+liberty, either for my own subsistence or that of any one else. I intend
+to work, but at my own will and pleasure, and even to do nothing, if it
+happens to suit me, without any one finding fault except my
+stomach."[251] We may call this unamiable, if we please, but in a
+frivolous world amiability can hardly go with firm resolve to live an
+independent life after your own fashion. The many distasteful sides of
+Rousseau's character ought not to hinder us from admiring his
+steadfastness in refusing to sacrifice his existence to the first person
+who spoke him civilly. We may wish there had been more of rugged
+simplicity in his way of dealing with temptations to sell his birthright
+for a mess of pottage; less of mere irritability. But then this
+irritability is one side of soft temperament. The soft temperament is
+easily agitated, and this unpleasant disturbance does not stir up true
+anger nor lasting indignation, but only sends quick currents of eager
+irritation along the sufferer's nerves. Rousseau, quivering from head to
+foot with self-consciousness, is sufficiently unlike our plain Johnson,
+the strong-armoured; yet persistent withstanding of the patron is as
+worthy of our honour in one instance as in the other. Indeed, resistance
+to humiliating pressure is harder for such a temper as Rousseau's, in
+which deliberate endeavour is needed, than it is for the naturally
+stoical spirit which asserts itself spontaneously and rises
+without effort.
+
+When our born solitary, wearied of Paris and half afraid of the too
+friendly importunity of Geneva, at length determined to accept Madame
+d'Epinay's offer of the Hermitage on conditions which left him an
+entire sentiment of independence of movement and freedom from all sense
+of pecuniary obligation, he was immediately exposed to a very copious
+torrent of pleasantry and remonstrance from the highly social circle who
+met round D'Holbach's dinner-table. They deemed it sheer midsummer
+madness, or even a sign of secret depravity, to quit their cheerful
+world for the dismal solitude of woods and fields. "Only the bad man is
+alone," wrote Diderot in words which Rousseau kept resentfully in his
+memory as long as he lived. The men and women of the eighteenth century
+had no comprehension of solitude, the strength which it may impart to
+the vigorous, the poetic graces which it may shed about the life of
+those who are less than vigorous; and what they did not comprehend, they
+dreaded and abhorred, and thought monstrous in the one man who did
+comprehend it. They were all of the mind of Socrates when he said to
+Phaedrus, "Knowledge is what I love, and the men who dwell in the town
+are my teachers, not trees and landscape."[252] Sarcasms fell on him
+like hail, and the prophecies usual in cases where a stray soul does not
+share the common tastes of the herd. He would never be able to live
+without the incense and the amusements of the town; he would be back in
+a fortnight; he would throw up the whole enterprise within three
+months.[253] Amid a shower of such words, springing from men's perverse
+blindness to the binding propriety of keeping all propositions as to
+what is the best way of living in respect of place, hours,
+companionship, strictly relative to each individual case, Rousseau
+stubbornly shook the dust of the city from off his feet, and sought new
+life away from the stridulous hum of men. Perhaps we are better pleased
+to think of the unwearied Diderot spending laborious days in factories
+and quarries and workshops and forges, while friendly toilers patiently
+explained to him the structure of stocking looms and velvet looms, the
+processes of metal-casting and wire-drawing and slate-cutting, and all
+the other countless arts and ingenuities of fabrication, which he
+afterwards reproduced to a wondering age in his spacious and magnificent
+repertory of human thought, knowledge, and practical achievement. And it
+is yet more elevating to us to think of the true stoic, the great
+high-souled Turgot, setting forth a little later to discharge beneficent
+duty in the hard field of his distant Limousin commissionership,
+enduring many things and toiling late and early for long years, that the
+burden of others might be lighter, and the welfare of the land more
+assured. But there are many paths for many men, and if only magnanimous
+self-denial has the power of inspiration, and can move us with the deep
+thrill of the heroic, yet every truthful protest, even of excessive
+personality, against the gregarious trifling of life in the social
+groove, has a side which it is not ill for us to consider, and perhaps
+for some men and women in every generation to seek to imitate.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[201] _Rep. a M. Bordes_, 163.
+
+[202] Pictet de Sergy., i. 18.
+
+[203] _Conf._, iv. 248.
+
+[204] _Ib._ ix. 279. Also _Economie Politique_.
+
+[205] Madame de la Popeliniere, whose adventures and the misadventures
+of her husband are only too well known to the reader of Marmontel's
+Memoirs.
+
+[206] The passages relating to income during his first residence in
+Paris (1744-1756) are at pp. 119, 145, 153, 165, 200, 227, in Books
+vii.-ix. of the _Confessions_. Rousseau told Bernardin de St. Pierre
+(_Oeuv._, xii. 74) that Emile was sold for 7000 livres. In the
+_Confessions_ (xi. 126), he says 6000 livres, and one or two hundred
+copies. It may be worth while to add that Diderot and D'Alembert
+received 1200 livres a year apiece for editing the Encyclopaedia.
+Sterne received L650 for two volumes of _Tristram Shandy_ in 1780.
+Walpole's _Letters_, in. 298.
+
+[207] _Conf._, viii. 154-157.
+
+[208] _Ib._ viii. 160.
+
+[209] _Conf._, viii. 160, 161.
+
+[210] _Ib._ viii. 159.
+
+[211] _Reveries_, iii 168.
+
+[212] _Reveries_, iii. 166.
+
+[213] See the _Epitre a Mdme. la Marquise du Chatelet, sur la
+Calomnie_.
+
+[214] _La Femme au 18ieme siecle_, par MM. de Goncourt, p. 40.
+
+[215] Madame d'Epinay's _Mem._, i. 295.
+
+[216] Quoted in Goncourt's _Femme au 18ieme siecle_, p. 378.
+
+[217] _Ib._, p. 337.
+
+[218] Mdlle. L'Espinasse's _Letters_, ii. 89.
+
+[219] Madame d'Epinay's _Mem._, ii. 47, 48.
+
+[220] _Ib._, ii. 55.
+
+[221] _Mem._, Bk. iv. 327.
+
+[222] _Corr. Lit._, iii. 58.
+
+[223] _Ib._, 54.
+
+[224] Madame d'Epinay's _Mem._, i. 378-381. Saint Lambert formulated
+his atheism afterwards in the _Catechisme Universel_.
+
+[225] Madame d'Epinay's _Mem._, i. 443.
+
+[226] _Corr._, i. 317. Sept. 14, 1756.
+
+[227] Letter to Madame de Crequi, 1752. _Corr._, i. 171.
+
+[228] _Conf_,., vii. 104.
+
+[229] The _Devin du Village_ was played at Fontainebleau on October
+18, 1752, and at the Opera in Paris in March 1753. Madame de Pompadour
+took a part in it in a private performance. See Rousseau's note to
+her, _Corr._, i. 178.
+
+[230] _Conf._, viii. 190.
+
+[231] _Conf._, viii. 183.
+
+[232] _Conf._, viii. 202; and Musset-Pathay, ii. 439. When in
+Strasburg, in 1765, he could not bring himself to be present at its
+representation. _Oeuv. et Corr. Ined._, p. 434.
+
+[233] Madame de Stael insisted that her father said this, and Necker
+insisted that it was his daughter's.
+
+[234] _Corr._, i. 176. Feb. 13, 1753.
+
+[235] _Conf._, viii. 208-210.
+
+[236] She died on July 30, 1762, aged "about sixty-three years."
+Arthur Young, visiting Chamberi in 1789, with some trouble procured
+the certificate of her death, which may be found in his _Travels_, i.
+272. See a letter of M. de Conzie to Rousseau, in M.
+Streckeisen-Moultou's collection, ii. 445.
+
+[237] _Conf._, xii. 233.
+
+[238] _Conf._, viii. 210.
+
+[239] Gaberel's _Rousseau et les Genevois_, p. 62. _Conf._, viii. 212.
+
+[240] The venerable Company of Pastors and Professors of the Church
+and Academy of Geneva appointed a committee, as in duty bound, to
+examine these allegations, and the committee, equally in duty bound,
+reported (Feb. 10, 1758) with mild indignation, that they were
+unfounded, and that the flock was untainted by unseasonable use of its
+mind. See on this Rousseau's _Lettres ecrites de la Montagne_, ii.
+231.
+
+[241] See Picot's _Hist. de Geneve_, ii. 415.
+
+[242] _Letters containing an account of Switzerland, Italy, etc., in
+1685-86._ By G. Burnet, p. 9.
+
+[243] J.A. Turretini's complete works were published as late as 1776,
+including among much besides that no longer interests men, an _Oratio
+de Scientiarum Vanitate et Proestantia_ (vol. iii. 437), not at all in
+the vein of Rousseau's Discourse, and a treatise in four parts, _De
+Legibus Naturalibus_, in which, among other matters, he refutes Hobbes
+and assails the doctrine of Utility (i. 173, etc.), by limiting its
+definition to [Greek: to pros heauton] in its narrowest sense. He
+appears to have been a student of Spinoza (i. 326). Francis Turretini,
+his father, took part in the discussion as to the nature of the treaty
+or contract between God and man, in a piece entitled _Foedus Naturae a
+primo homine ruptum, ejusque Proevaricationem posteris imputatam_
+(1675).
+
+[244] Gaberel's _Eglise de Geneve_, iii. 188.
+
+[245] _Corr._, i. 223 (to Vernes, April 5, 1755).
+
+[246] _Conf._, viii. 215, 216. _Corr._, i. 218 (to Perdriau, Nov. 28,
+1754).
+
+[247] _Conf._, viii. 218.
+
+[248] _Conf._, viii. 217. It is worth noticing as bearing on the
+accuracy of the Confessions, that Madame d'Epinay herself (_Mem._, ii.
+115) says that when she began to prepare the Hermitage for Rousseau he
+had never been there, and that she was careful to lead him to believe
+that the expense had not been incurred for him. Moreover her letter to
+him describing it could only have been written to one who had not seen
+it, and though her Memoirs are full of sheer imagination and romance,
+the documents in them are substantially authentic, and this letter is
+shown to be so by Rousseau's reply to it.
+
+[249] _Mem._, ii. 116.
+
+[250] _Corr._ (1755), i. 242.
+
+[251] _Corr._, i. 245.
+
+[252] _Phaedrus_, 230.
+
+[253] _Conf._, viii. 221, etc.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+THE HERMITAGE.
+
+
+It would have been a strange anachronism if the decade of the
+Encyclopaedia and the Seven Years' War had reproduced one of those scenes
+which are as still resting-places amid the ceaseless forward tramp of
+humanity, where some holy man turned away from the world, and with
+adorable seriousness sought communion with the divine in mortification
+of flesh and solitude of spirit. Those were the retreats of firm hope
+and beatified faith. The hope and faith of the eighteenth century were
+centred in action, not in contemplation, and the few solitaries of that
+epoch, as well as of another nearer to our own, fled away from the
+impotence of their own will, rather than into the haven of satisfied
+conviction and clear-eyed acceptance. Only one of them--Wordsworth, the
+poetic hermit of our lakes--impresses us in any degree like one of the
+great individualities of the ages when men not only craved for the
+unseen, but felt the closeness of its presence over their heads and
+about their feet. The modern anchorite goes forth in the spirit of the
+preacher who declared all the things that are under the sun to be
+vanity, not in the transport of the saint who knew all the things that
+are under the sun to be no more than the shadow of a dream in the light
+of a celestial brightness to come.
+
+Rousseau's mood, deeply tinged as it was by bitterness against society
+and circumstance, still contained a strong positive element in his
+native exultation in all natural objects and processes, which did not
+leave him vacantly brooding over the evil of the world he had quitted.
+The sensuousness that penetrated him kept his sympathy with life
+extraordinarily buoyant, and all the eager projects for the disclosure
+of a scheme of wisdom became for a time the more vividly desired, as the
+general tide of desire flowed more fully within him. To be surrounded
+with the simplicity of rural life was with him not only a stimulus, but
+an essential condition to free intellectual energy. Many a time, he
+says, when making excursions into the country with great people, "I was
+so tired of fine rooms, fountains, artificial groves and flower beds,
+and the still more tiresome people who displayed all these; I was so
+worn out with pamphlets, card-playing, music, silly jokes, stupid airs,
+great suppers, that as I spied a poor hawthorn copse, a hedge, a
+farmstead, a meadow, as in passing through a hamlet I snuffed the odour
+of a good chervil omelette, as I heard from a distance the rude refrain
+of the shepherd's songs, I used to wish at the devil the whole tale of
+rouge and furbelows."[254] He was no anchorite proper, one weary of the
+world and waiting for the end, but a man with a strong dislike for one
+kind of life and a keen liking for another kind. He thought he was now
+about to reproduce the old days of the Charmettes, true to his
+inveterate error that one may efface years and accurately replace a
+past. He forgot that instead of the once vivacious and tender
+benefactress who was now waiting for slow death in her hovel, his
+house-mates would be a poor dull drudge and her vile mother. He forgot,
+too, that since those days the various processes of intellectual life
+had expanded within him, and produced a busy fermentation which makes a
+man's surroundings very critical. Finally, he forgot that in proportion
+as a man suffers the smooth course of his thought to depend on anything
+external, whether on the greenness of the field or the gaiety of the
+street or the constancy of friends, so comes he nearer to chance of
+making shipwreck. Hence his tragedy, though the very root of the tragedy
+lay deeper,--in temperament.
+
+
+I.
+
+Rousseau's impatience drove him into the country almost before the walls
+of his little house were dry (April 9, 1756). "Although it was cold, and
+snow still lay upon the ground, the earth began to show signs of life;
+violets and primroses were to be seen; the buds on the trees were
+beginning to shoot; and the very night of my arrival was marked by the
+first song of the nightingale. I heard it close to my window in a wood
+that touched the house. After a light sleep I awoke, forgetting that I
+was transplanted; I thought myself still in the Rue de Grenelle, when in
+an instant the warbling of the birds made me thrill with delight. My
+very first care was to surrender myself to the impression of the rustic
+objects about me. Instead of beginning by arranging things inside my
+quarters, I first set about planning my walks, and there was not a path
+nor a copse nor a grove round my cottage which I had not found out
+before the end of the next day. The place, which was lonely rather than
+wild, transported me in fancy to the end of the world, and no one could
+ever have dreamed that we were only four leagues from Paris."[255]
+
+This rural delirium, as he justly calls it, lasted for some days, at the
+end of which he began seriously to apply himself to work. But work was
+too soon broken off by a mood of vehement exaltation, produced by the
+stimulus given to all his senses by the new world of delight in which he
+found himself. This exaltation was in a different direction from that
+which had seized him half a dozen years before, when he had discarded
+the usage and costume of politer society, and had begun to conceive an
+angry contempt for the manners, prejudices, and maxims of his time.
+Restoration to a more purely sensuous atmosphere softened this
+austerity. No longer having the vices of a great city before his eyes,
+he no longer cherished the wrath which they had inspired in him. "When I
+did not see men, I ceased to despise them; and when I had not the bad
+before my eyes, I ceased to hate them. My heart, little made as it is
+for hate, now did no more than deplore their wretchedness, and made no
+distinction between their wretchedness and their badness. This state, so
+much more mild, if much less sublime, soon dulled the glowing enthusiasm
+that had long transported me."[256] That is to say, his nature remained
+for a moment not exalted but fairly balanced. It was only for a moment.
+And in studying the movements of impulse and reflection in him at this
+critical time of his life, we are hurried rapidly from phase to phase.
+Once more we are watching a man who lived without either intellectual or
+spiritual direction, swayed by a reminiscence, a passing mood, a
+personality accidentally encountered, by anything except permanent aim
+and fixed objects, and who would at any time have surrendered the most
+deliberately pondered scheme of persistent effort to the fascination of
+a cottage slumbering in a bounteous landscape. Hence there could be no
+normally composed state for him; the first soothing effect of the rich
+life of forest and garden on a nature exasperated by the life of the
+town passed away, and became transformed into an exaltation that swept
+the stoic into space, leaving sensuousness to sovereign and uncontrolled
+triumph, until the delight turned to its inevitable ashes and
+bitterness.
+
+At first all was pure and delicious. In after times when pain made him
+gloomily measure the length of the night, and when fever prevented him
+from having a moment of sleep, he used to try to still his suffering by
+recollection of the days that he had passed in the woods of Montmorency,
+with his dog, the birds, the deer, for his companions. "As I got up with
+the sun to watch his rising from my garden, if I saw the day was going
+to be fine, my first wish was that neither letters nor visits might come
+to disturb its charm. After having given the morning to divers tasks
+which I fulfilled with all the more pleasure that I could put them off
+to another time if I chose, I hastened to eat my dinner, so as to escape
+from the importunate and make myself a longer afternoon. Before one
+o'clock, even on days of fiercest heat, I used to start in the blaze of
+the sun, along with my faithful Achates, hurrying my steps lest some one
+should lay hold of me before I could get away. But when I had once
+passed a certain corner, with what beating of the heart, with what
+radiant joy, did I begin to breathe freely, as I felt myself safe and my
+own master for the rest of the day! Then with easier pace I went in
+search of some wild and desert spot in the forest, where there was
+nothing to show the hand of man, or to speak of servitude and
+domination; some refuge where I could fancy myself its discoverer, and
+where no inopportune third person came to interfere between nature and
+me. She seemed to spread out before my eyes a magnificence that was
+always new. The gold of the broom and the purple of the heather struck
+my eyes with a glorious splendour that went to my very heart; the
+majesty of the trees that covered me with their shadow, the delicacy of
+the shrubs that surrounded me, the astonishing variety of grasses and
+flowers that I trod under foot, kept my mind in a continual alternation
+of attention and delight.... My imagination did not leave the earth thus
+superbly arrayed without inhabitants. I formed a charming society, of
+which I did not feel myself unworthy; I made a golden age to please my
+own fancy, and filling up these fair days with all those scenes of my
+life that had left sweet memories behind, and all that my heart could
+yet desire or hope in scenes to come, I waxed tender even to shedding
+tears over the true pleasures of humanity, pleasures so delicious, so
+pure, and henceforth so far from the reach of men. Ah, if in such
+moments any ideas of Paris, of the age, of my little aureole as author,
+came to trouble my dreams, with what disdain did I drive them out, to
+deliver myself without distraction to the exquisite sentiments of which
+I was so full. Yet in the midst of it all, the nothingness of my
+chimeras sometimes broke sadly upon my mind. Even if every dream had
+suddenly been transformed into reality, it would not have been enough;
+I should have dreamed, imagined, yearned still." Alas, this deep
+insatiableness of sense, the dreary vacuity of soul that follows fulness
+of animal delight, the restless exactingness of undirected imagination,
+was never recognised by Rousseau distinctly enough to modify either his
+conduct or his theory of life. He filled up the void for a short space
+by that sovereign aspiration, which changed the dead bones of old
+theology into the living figure of a new faith. "From the surface of the
+earth I raised my ideas to all the existences in nature, to the
+universal system of things, to the incomprehensible Being who embraces
+all. Then with mind lost in that immensity, I did not think, I did not
+reason, I did not philosophise; with a sort of pleasure I felt
+overwhelmed by the weight of the universe, I surrendered myself to the
+ravishing confusion of these vast ideas. I loved to lose myself in
+imagination in immeasurable space; within the limits of real existences
+my heart was too tightly compressed; in the universe I was stifled; I
+would fain have launched myself into the infinite. I believe that if I
+had unveiled all the mysteries of nature, I should have found myself in
+a less delicious situation than that bewildering ecstasy to which my
+mind so unreservedly delivered itself, and which sometimes transported
+me until I cried out, 'O mighty Being! O mighty Being!' without power of
+any other word or thought."[257]
+
+It is not wholly insignificant that though he could thus expand his
+soul with ejaculatory delight in something supreme, he could not endure
+the sight of one of his fellow-creatures. "If my gaiety lasted the whole
+night, that showed that I had passed the day alone; I was very different
+after I had seen people, for I was rarely content with others and never
+with myself. Then in the evening I was sure to be in taciturn or
+scolding humour." It is not in every condition that effervescent passion
+for ideal forms of the religious imagination assists sympathy with the
+real beings who surround us. And to this let us add that there are
+natures in which all deep emotion is so entirely associated with the
+ideal, that real and particular manifestations of it are repugnant to
+them as something alien; and this without the least insincerity, though
+with a vicious and disheartening inconsistency. Rousseau belonged to
+this class, and loved man most when he saw men least. Bad as this was,
+it does not justify us in denouncing his love of man as artificial; it
+was one side of an ideal exaltation, which stirred the depths of his
+spirit with a force as genuine as that which is kindled in natures of
+another type by sympathy with the real and concrete, with the daily walk
+and conversation and actual doings and sufferings of the men and women
+whom we know. The fermentation which followed his arrival at the
+Hermitage, in its first form produced a number of literary schemes. The
+idea of the Political Institutions, first conceived at Venice, pressed
+upon his meditations. He had been earnestly requested to compose a
+treatise on education. Besides this, his thoughts wandered confusedly
+round the notion of a treatise to be called Sensitive Morality, or the
+Materialism of the Sage, the object of which was to examine the
+influence of external agencies, such as light, darkness, sound, seasons,
+food, noise, silence, motion, rest, on our corporeal machine, and thus
+indirectly upon the soul also. By knowing these and acquiring the art of
+modifying them according to our individual needs, we should become surer
+of ourselves and fix a deeper constancy in our lives. An external system
+of treatment would thus be established, which would place and keep the
+soul in the condition most favourable to virtue.[258] Though the
+treatise was never completed, and the sketch never saw the light, we
+perceive at least that Rousseau would have made the means of access to
+character wide enough, and the material influences that impress it and
+produce its caprices, multitudinous enough, instead of limiting them
+with the medical specialist to one or two organs, and one or two of the
+conditions that affect them. Nor, on the other hand, do the words in
+which he sketches his project in the least justify the attribution to
+him of the doctrine of the absolute power of the physical constitution
+over the moral habits, whether that doctrine would be a credit or a
+discredit to his philosophical thoroughness of perception. No one denies
+the influence of external conditions on the moral habits, and Rousseau
+says no more than that he proposed to consider the extent and the
+modifiableness of this influence. It was not then deemed essential for a
+spiritualist thinker to ignore physical organisation.
+
+A third undertaking of a more substantial sort was to arrange and edit
+the papers and printed works of the Abbe de Saint Pierre (1658-1743),
+confided to him through the agency of Saint Lambert, and partly also of
+Madame Dupin, the warm friend of that singular and good man.[259] This
+task involved reading, considering, and picking extracts from
+twenty-three diffuse and chaotic volumes, full of prolixity and
+repetition. Rousseau, dreamer as he was, yet had quite keenness of
+perception enough to discern the weakness of a dreamer of another sort;
+and he soon found out that the Abbe de Saint Pierre's views were
+impracticable, in consequence of the author's fixed idea that men are
+guided rather by their lights than by their passions. In fact, Saint
+Pierre was penetrated with the eighteenth-century faith to a peculiar
+degree. As with Condorcet afterwards, he was led by his admiration for
+the extent of modern knowledge to adopt the principle that perfected
+reason is capable of being made the base of all institutions, and would
+speedily terminate all the great abuses of the world. "He went wrong,"
+says Rousseau, "not merely in having no other passion but that of
+reason, but by insisting on making all men like himself, instead of
+taking them as they are and as they will continue to be." The critic's
+own error in later days was not very different from this, save that it
+applied to the medium in which men live, rather than to themselves, by
+refusing to take complex societies as they are, even as starting-points
+for higher attempts at organisation. Rousseau had occasionally seen the
+old man, and he preserved the greatest veneration for his memory,
+speaking of him as the honour of his age and race, with a fulness of
+enthusiasm very unusual towards men, though common enough towards
+inanimate nature. The sincerity of this respect, however, could not make
+the twenty-three volumes which the good man had written, either fewer in
+number or lighter in contents, and after dealing as well as he could
+with two important parts of Saint Pierre's works, he threw up the
+task.[260] It must not be supposed that Rousseau would allow that
+fatigue or tedium had anything to do with a resolve which really needed
+no better justification. As we have seen before, he had amazing skill in
+finding a certain ingeniously contrived largeness for his motives. Saint
+Pierre's writings were full of observations on the government of France,
+some of them remarkably bold in their criticism, but he had not been
+punished for them because the ministers always looked upon him as a
+kind of preacher rather than a genuine politician, and he was allowed to
+say what he pleased, because it was observed that no one listened to
+what he said. Besides, he was a Frenchman, and Rousseau was not, and
+hence the latter, in publishing Saint Pierre's strictures on French
+affairs, was exposing himself to a sharp question why he meddled with a
+country that did not concern him. "It surprised me," says Rousseau,
+"that the reflection had not occurred to me earlier," but this
+coincidence of the discovery that the work was imprudent, with the
+discovery that he was weary of it, will surprise nobody versed in study
+of a man who lives in his sensations, and yet has vanity enough to
+dislike to admit it.
+
+The short remarks which Rousseau appended to his abridgment of Saint
+Pierre's essays on Perpetual Peace, and on a Polysynodia, or Plurality
+of Councils, are extremely shrewd and pointed, and would suffice to show
+us, if there were nothing else to do so, the right kind of answer to
+make to the more harmful dreams of the Social Contract. Saint Pierre's
+fault is said, with entire truth, to be a failure to make his views
+relative to men, to times, to circumstances; and there is something that
+startles us when we think whose words we are reading, in the declaration
+that, "whether an existing government be still that of old times, or
+whether it have insensibly undergone a change of nature, it is equally
+imprudent to touch it: if it is the same, it must be respected, and if
+it has degenerated, that is due to the force of time and circumstance,
+and human sagacity is powerless." Rousseau points to France, asking his
+readers to judge the peril of once moving by an election the enormous
+masses comprising the French monarchy; and in another place, after a
+wise general remark on the futility of political machinery without men
+of a certain character, he illustrates it by this scornful question:
+When you see all Paris in a ferment about the rank of a dancer or a wit,
+and the affairs of the academy or the opera making everybody forget the
+interest of the ruler and the glory of the nation, what can you hope
+from bringing political affairs close to such a people, and removing
+them from the court to the town?[261] Indeed, there is perhaps not one
+of these pages which Burke might not well have owned.[262]
+
+A violent and prolonged crisis followed this not entirely unsuccessful
+effort after sober and laborious meditation. Rousseau was now to find
+that if society has its perils, so too has solitude, and that if there
+is evil in frivolous complaisance for the puppet-work of a world that is
+only a little serious, so there is evil in a passionate tenderness for
+phantoms of an imaginary world that is not serious at all. To the pure
+or stoical soul the solitude of the forest is strength, but then the
+imagination must know the yoke. Rousseau's imagination, in no way of the
+strongest either as receptive or inventive, was the free accomplice of
+his sensations. The undisciplined force of animal sensibility gradually
+rose within him, like a slowly welling flood. The spectacle does not
+either brighten or fortify the student's mind, yet if there are such
+states, it is right that those who care to speak of human nature should
+have an opportunity of knowing its less glorious parts. They may be
+presumed to exist, though in less violent degree, in many people whom we
+meet in the street and at the table, and there can be nothing but danger
+in allowing ourselves to be so narrowed by our own virtuousness,
+viciousness being conventionally banished to the remoter region of the
+third person, as to forget the presence of "the brute brain within the
+man's." In Rousseau's case, at any rate, it was no wicked broth nor
+magic potion that "confused the chemic labour of the blood," but the too
+potent wine of the joyful beauty of nature herself, working misery in a
+mental structure that no educating care nor envelope of circumstance had
+ever hardened against her intoxication. Most of us are protected against
+this subtle debauch of sensuous egoism by a cool organisation, while
+even those who are born with senses and appetites of great strength and
+keenness, are guarded by accumulated discipline of all kinds from
+without, especially by the necessity for active industry which brings
+the most exaggerated native sensibility into balance. It is the constant
+and rigorous social parade which keeps the eager regiment of the senses
+from making furious rout. Rousseau had just repudiated all social
+obligation, and he had never gone through external discipline. He was at
+an age when passion that has never been broken in has the beak of the
+bald vulture, tearing and gnawing a man; but its first approach is in
+fair shapes.
+
+Wandering and dreaming "in the sweetest season of the year, in the month
+of June, under the fresh groves, with the song of the nightingale and
+the soft murmuring of the brooks in his ear," he began to wonder
+restlessly why he had never tasted in their plenitude the vivid
+sentiments which he was conscious of possessing in reserve, or any of
+that intoxicating delight which he felt potentially existent in his
+soul. Why had he been created with faculties so exquisite, to be left
+thus unused and unfruitful? The feeling of his own quality, with this of
+a certain injustice and waste superadded, brought warm tears which he
+loved to let flow. Visions of the past, from girl playmates of his youth
+down to the Venetian courtesan, thronged in fluttering tumult into his
+brain. He saw himself surrounded by a seraglio of houris whom he had
+known, until his blood was all aflame and his head in a whirl. His
+imagination was kindled into deadly activity. "The impossibility of
+reaching to the real beings plunged me into the land of chimera; and
+seeing nothing actual that rose to the height of my delirium, I
+nourished it in an ideal world, which my creative imagination had soon
+peopled with beings after my heart's desire. In my continual ecstasies,
+I made myself drunk with torrents of the most delicious sentiments that
+ever entered the heart of man. Forgetting absolutely the whole human
+race, I invented for myself societies of perfect creatures, as heavenly
+for their virtues as their beauties; sure, tender, faithful friends,
+such as I never found in our nether world. I had such a passion for
+haunting this empyrean with all its charming objects, that I passed
+hours and days in it without counting them as they went by; and losing
+recollection of everything else, I had hardly swallowed a morsel in hot
+haste, before I began to burn to run off in search of my beloved groves.
+If, when I was ready to start for the enchanted world, I saw unhappy
+mortals coming to detain me on the dull earth, I could neither moderate
+nor hide my spleen, and, no longer master over myself, I used to give
+them greeting so rough that it might well be called brutal."[263]
+
+This terrific malady was something of a very different kind from the
+tranquil sensuousness of the days in Savoy, when the blood was young,
+and life was not complicated with memories, and the sweet freshness of
+nature made existence enough. Then his supreme expansion had been
+attended with a kind of divine repose, and had found edifying voice in
+devout acknowledgment in the exhilaration of the morning air of the
+goodness and bounty of a beneficent master. In this later and more
+pitiable time the beneficent master hid himself, and creation was only
+not a blank because it was veiled by troops of sirens not in the flesh.
+Nature without the association of some living human object, like Madame
+de Warens, was a poison to Rousseau, until the advancing years which
+slowly brought decay of sensual force thus brought the antidote. At our
+present point we see one stricken with an ugly disease. It was almost
+mercy when he was laid up with a sharp attack of the more painful, but
+far less absorbing and frightful disorder, to which Rousseau was subject
+all his life long. It gave pause to what he misnames his angelic loves.
+"Besides that one can hardly think of love when suffering anguish, my
+imagination, which is animated by the country and under the trees,
+languishes and dies in a room and under roof-beams." This interval he
+employed with some magnanimity, in vindicating the ways and economy of
+Providence, in the letter to Voltaire which we shall presently examine.
+The moment he could get out of doors again into the forest, the
+transport returned, but this time accompanied with an active effort in
+the creative faculties of his mind to bring the natural relief to these
+over-wrought paroxysms of sensual imagination. He soothed his emotions
+by associating them with the life of personages whom he invented, and by
+introducing into them that play and movement and changing relation which
+prevented them from bringing his days to an end in malodorous fever. The
+egoism of persistent invention and composition was at least better than
+the egoism of mere unreflecting ecstasy in the charm of natural
+objects, and took off something from the violent excess of sensuous
+force. His thought became absorbed in two female figures, one dark and
+the other fair, one sage and the other yielding, one gentle and the
+other quick, analogous in character but different, not handsome but
+animated by cheerfulness and feeling. To one of these he gave a lover,
+to whom the other was a tender friend. He planted them all, after much
+deliberation and some changes, on the shores of his beloved lake at
+Vevay, the spot where his benefactress was born, and which he always
+thought the richest and loveliest in all Europe.
+
+This vicarious or reflected egoism, accompanied as it was by a certain
+amount of productive energy, seemed to mark a return to a sort of moral
+convalescence. He walked about the groves with pencil and tablets,
+assigning this or that thought or expression to one or other of the
+three companions of his fancy. When the bad weather set in, and he was
+confined to the house (the winter of 1756-7), he tried to resume his
+ordinary indoor labour, the copying of music and the compilation of his
+Musical Dictionary. To his amazement he found that this was no longer
+possible. The fever of that literary composition of which he had always
+such dread had strong possession of him. He could see nothing on any
+side but the three figures and the objects about them made beautiful by
+his imagination. Though he tried hard to dismiss them, his resistance
+was vain, and he set himself to bringing some order into his thoughts
+"so as to produce a kind of romance." We have a glimpse of his mental
+state in the odd detail, that he could not bear to write his romance on
+anything but the very finest paper with gilt edges; that the powder with
+which he dried the ink was of azure and sparkling silver; and that he
+tied up the quires with delicate blue riband.[264] The distance from all
+this to the state of nature is obviously very great indeed. It must not
+be supposed that he forgot his older part as Cato, Brutus, and the other
+Plutarchians. "My great embarrassment," he says honestly, "was that I
+should belie myself so clearly and thoroughly. After the severe
+principles I had just been laying down with so much bustle, after the
+austere maxims I had preached so energetically, after so many biting
+invectives against the effeminate books that breathed love and soft
+delights, could anything be imagined more shocking, more unlooked-for,
+than to see me inscribe myself with my own hand among the very authors
+on whose books I had heaped this harsh censure? I felt this
+inconsequence in all its force, I taxed myself with it, I blushed over
+it, and was overcome with mortification; but nothing could restore me to
+reason."[265] He adds that perhaps on the whole the composition of the
+New Heloisa was turning his madness to the best account. That may be
+true, but does not all this make the bitter denunciation, in the Letter
+to D'Alembert, of love and of all who make its representation a
+considerable element in literature or the drama, at the very time when
+he was composing one of the most dangerously attractive romances of his
+century, a rather indecent piece of invective? We may forgive
+inconsistency when it is only between two of a man's theories, or two
+self-concerning parts of his conduct, but hardly when it takes the form
+of reviling in others what the reviler indulgently permits to himself.
+
+We are more edified by the energy with which Rousseau refused connivance
+with the public outrages on morality perpetrated by a patron. M.
+d'Epinay went to pay him a visit at the Hermitage, taking with him two
+ladies with whom his relations were less than equivocal, and for whom
+among other things he had given Rousseau music to copy. "They were
+curious to see the eccentric man," as M. d'Epinay afterwards told his
+scandalised wife, for it was in the manners of the day on no account to
+parade even the most notorious of these unblessed connections. "He was
+walking in front of the door; he saw me first; he advanced cap in hand;
+he saw the ladies; he saluted us, put on his cap, turned his back, and
+stalked off as fast as he could. Can anything be more mad?"[266] In the
+miserable and intricate tangle of falsity, weakness, sensuality, and
+quarrel, which make up this chapter in Rousseau's life, we are glad of
+even one trait of masculine robustness. We should perhaps be still more
+glad if the unwedded Theresa were not visible in the background of this
+scene of high morals.
+
+
+II.
+
+The New Heloisa was not to be completed without a further extension of
+morbid experience of a still more burning kind than the sufferings of
+compressed passion. The feverish torment of mere visions of the air
+swarming impalpable in all his veins, was replaced when the earth again
+began to live and the sap to stir in plants, by the more concentred fire
+of a consuming passion for one who was no dryad nor figure of a dream.
+In the spring of 1757 he received a visit from Madame d'Houdetot, the
+sister-in-law of Madame d'Epinay.[267] Her husband had gone to the war
+(we are in the year of Rossbach), and so had her lover, Saint Lambert,
+whose passion had been so fatal to Voltaire's Marquise du Chatelet eight
+years before. She rode over in man's guise to the Hermitage from a house
+not very far off, where she was to pass her retreat during the absence
+of her two natural protectors. Rousseau had seen her before on various
+occasions; she had been to the Hermitage the previous year, and had
+partaken of its host's homely fare.[268] But the time was not ripe; the
+force of a temptation is not from without but within. Much, too,
+depended with our hermit on the temperature; one who would have been a
+very ordinary mortal to him in cold and rain, might grow to Aphrodite
+herself in days when the sun shone hot and the air was aromatic. His
+fancy was suddenly struck with the romantic guise of the female
+cavalier, and this was the first onset of a veritable intoxication,
+which many men have felt, but which no man before or since ever invited
+the world to hear the story of. He may truly say that after the first
+interview with her in this disastrous spring, he was as one who had
+thirstily drained a poisoned bowl. A sort of palsy struck him. He lay
+weeping in his bed at night, and on days when he did not see the
+sorceress he wept in the woods.[269] He talked to himself for hours, and
+was of a black humour to his house-mates. When approaching the object of
+this deadly fascination, his whole organisation seemed to be dissolved.
+He walked in a dream that filled him with a sense of sickly torture,
+commixed with sicklier delight.
+
+People speak with precisely marked division of mind and body, of will,
+emotion, understanding; the division is good in logic, but its
+convenient lines are lost to us as we watch a being with soul all
+blurred, body all shaken, unstrung, poisoned, by erotic mania, rising in
+slow clouds of mephitic steam from suddenly heated stagnancies of the
+blood, and turning the reality of conduct and duty into distant
+unmeaning shadows. If such a disease were the furious mood of the brute
+in spring-time, it would be less dreadful, but shame and remorse in the
+ever-struggling reason of man or woman in the grip of the foul thing,
+produces an aggravation of frenzy that makes the mental healer tremble.
+Add to all this lurking elements of hollow rage that his passion was not
+returned; of stealthy jealousy of the younger man whose place he could
+not take, and who was his friend besides; of suspicion that he was a
+little despised for his weakness by the very object of it, who saw that
+his hairs were sprinkled with gray,--and the whole offers a scene of
+moral humiliation that half sickens, half appals, and we turn away with
+dismay as from a vision of the horrid loves of heavy-eyed and scaly
+shapes that haunted the warm primeval ooze.
+
+Madame d'Houdetot, the unwilling enchantress bearing in an unconscious
+hand the cup of defilement, was not strikingly singular either in
+physical or mental attraction. She was now seven-and-twenty. Small-pox,
+the terrible plague of the country, had pitted her face and given a
+yellowish tinge to her complexion; her features were clumsy and her brow
+low; she was short-sighted, and in old age at any rate was afflicted by
+an excessive squint. This homeliness was redeemed by a gentle and
+caressing expression, and by a sincerity, a gaiety of heart, and free
+sprightliness of manner, that no trouble could restrain. Her figure was
+very slight, and there was in all her movements at once awkwardness and
+grace. She was natural and simple, and had a fairly good judgment of a
+modest kind, in spite of the wild sallies in which her spirits sometimes
+found vent. Capable of chagrin, she was never prevented by it from
+yielding to any impulse of mirth. "She weeps with the best faith in the
+world, and breaks out laughing at the same moment; never was anybody so
+happily born," says her much less amiable sister-in-law.[270] Her
+husband was indifferent to her. He preserved an attachment to a lady
+whom he knew before his marriage, whose society he never ceased to
+frequent, and who finally died in his arms in 1793. Madame d'Houdetot
+found consolation in the friendship of Saint Lambert. "We both of us,"
+said her husband, "both Madame d'Houdetot and I, had a vocation for
+fidelity, only there was a mis-arrangement." She occasionally composed
+verses of more than ordinary point, but she had good sense enough not to
+write them down, nor to set up on the strength of them for poetess and
+wit.[271] Her talk in her later years, and she lived down to the year of
+Leipsic, preserved the pointed sententiousness of earlier time. One day,
+for instance, in the era of the Directory, a conversation was going on
+as to the various merits and defects of women; she heard much, and then
+with her accustomed suavity of voice contributed this light
+summary:--"Without women, the life of man would be without aid at the
+beginning, without pleasure in the middle, and without solace at the
+end."[272]
+
+We may be sure that it was not her power of saying things of this sort
+that kindled Rousseau's flame, but rather the sprightly naturalness,
+frankness, and kindly softness of a character which in his opinion
+united every virtue except prudence and strength, the two which Rousseau
+would be least likely to miss. The bond of union between them was
+subtle. She found in Rousseau a sympathetic listener while she told the
+story of her passion for Saint Lambert, and a certain contagious force
+produced in him a thrill which he never felt with any one else before or
+after. Thus, as he says, there was equally love on both sides, though it
+was not reciprocal. "We were both of us intoxicated with passion, she
+for her lover, I for her; our sighs and sweet tears mingled. Tender
+confidants, each of the other, our sentiments were of such close kin
+that it was impossible for them not to mix; and still she never forgot
+her duty for a moment, while for myself, I protest, I swear, that if
+sometimes drawn astray by my senses, still"--still he was a paragon of
+virtue, subject to rather new definition. We can appreciate the author
+of the New Heloisa; we can appreciate the author of Emilius; but this
+strained attempt to confound those two very different persons by
+combining tearful erotics with high ethics, is an exhibition of
+self-delusion that the most patient analyst of human nature might well
+find hard to suffer. "The duty of privation exalted my soul. The glory
+of all the virtues adorned the idol of my heart in my sight; to soil its
+divine image would have been to annihilate it," and so forth.[273]
+Moon-lighted landscape gave a background for the sentimentalist's
+picture, and dim groves, murmuring cascades, and the soft rustle of the
+night air, made up a scene which became for its chief actor "an immortal
+memory of innocence and delight." "It was in this grove, seated with her
+on a grassy bank, under an acacia heavy with flowers, that I found
+expression for the emotions of my heart in words that were worthy of
+them. 'Twas the first and single time of my life; but I was sublime, if
+you can use the word of all the tender and seductive things that the
+most glowing love can bring into the heart of a man. What intoxicating
+tears I shed at her knees, what floods she shed in spite of herself! At
+length in an involuntary transport, she cried out, 'Never was man so
+tender, never did man love as you do! But your friend Saint Lambert
+hears us, and my heart cannot love twice.'"[274] Happily, as we learn
+from another source, a breath of wholesome life from without brought the
+transcendental to grotesque end. In the climax of tears and
+protestations, an honest waggoner at the other side of the park wall,
+urging on a lagging beast launched a round and far-sounding oath out
+into the silent night. Madame d'Houdetot answered with a lively
+continuous peal of young laughter, while an angry chill brought back the
+discomfited lover from an ecstasy that was very full of peril.[275]
+
+Rousseau wrote in the New Heloisa very sagely that you should grant to
+the senses nothing when you mean to refuse them anything. He admits that
+the saying was falsified by his relations with Madame d'Houdetot.
+Clearly the credit of this happy falsification was due to her rather
+than to himself. What her feelings were, it is not very easy to see.
+Honest pity seems to have been the strongest of them. She was idle and
+unoccupied, and idleness leaves the soul open for much stray generosity
+of emotion, even towards an importunate lover. She thought him mad, and
+she wrote to Saint Lambert to say so. "His madness must be very strong,"
+said Saint Lambert, "since she can perceive it."[276]
+
+Character is ceaselessly marching, even when we seem to have sunk into a
+fixed and stagnant mood. The man is awakened from his dream of passion
+by inexorable event; he finds the house of the soul not swept and
+garnished for a new life, but possessed by demons who have entered
+unseen. In short, such profound disorder of spirit, though in its first
+stage marked by ravishing delirium, never escapes a bitter sequel. When
+a man lets his soul be swept away from the narrow track of conduct
+appointed by his relations with others, still the reality of such
+relations survives. He may retreat to rural lodges; that will not save
+him either from his own passion, or from some degree of that kinship
+with others which instantly creates right and wrong like a wall of brass
+around him. Let it be observed that the natures of finest stuff suffer
+most from these forced reactions, and it was just because Rousseau had
+innate moral sensitiveness, and a man like Diderot was without it, that
+the first felt his fall so profoundly, while the second was unconscious
+of having fallen at all.
+
+One day in July Rousseau went to pay his accustomed visit. He found
+Madame d'Houdetot dejected, and with the flush of recent weeping on her
+cheeks. A bird of the air had carried the matter. As usual, the matter
+was carried wrongly, and apparently all that Saint Lambert suspected was
+that Rousseau's high principles had persuaded Madame d'Houdetot of the
+viciousness of her relations with her lover.[277] "They have played us
+an evil turn," cried Madame d'Houdetot; "they have been unjust to me,
+but that is no matter. Either let us break off at once, or be what you
+ought to be."[278] This was Rousseau's first taste of the ashes of
+shame into which the lusciousness of such forbidden fruit, plucked at
+the expense of others, is ever apt to be transformed. Mortification of
+the considerable spiritual pride that was yet alive after this lapse,
+was a strong element in the sum of his emotion, and it was pointed by
+the reflection which stung him so incessantly, that his monitress was
+younger than himself. He could never master his own contempt for the
+gallantry of grizzled locks.[279] His austerer self might at any rate
+have been consoled by knowing that this scene was the beginning of the
+end, though the end came without any seeking on his part and without
+violence. To his amazement, one day Saint Lambert and Madame d'Houdetot
+came to the Hermitage, asking him to give them dinner, and much to the
+credit of human nature's elasticity, the three passed a delightful
+afternoon. The wronged lover was friendly, though a little stiff, and he
+passed occasional slights which Rousseau would surely not have forgiven,
+if he had not been disarmed by consciousness of guilt. He fell asleep,
+as we can well imagine that he might do, while Rousseau read aloud his
+very inadequate justification of Providence against Voltaire.[280]
+
+In time he returned to the army, and Rousseau began to cure himself of
+his mad passion. His method, however, was not unsuspicious, for it
+involved the perilous assistance of Madame d'Houdetot. Fortunately her
+loyalty and good sense forced a more resolute mode upon him. He found,
+or thought he found her distracted, emharrassed, indifferent. In despair
+at not being allowed to heal his passionate malady in his own fashion,
+he did the most singular thing that he could have done under the
+circumstances. He wrote to Saint Lambert.[281] His letter is a prodigy
+of plausible duplicity, though Rousseau in some of his mental states had
+so little sense of the difference between the actual and the imaginary,
+and was moreover so swiftly borne away on a flood of fine phrases, that
+it is hard to decide how far this was voluntary, and how far he was his
+own dupe. Voluntary or not, it is detestable. We pass the false whine
+about "being abandoned by all that was dear to him," as if he had not
+deliberately quitted Paris against the remonstrance of every friend he
+had; about his being "solitary and sad," as if he was not ready at this
+very time to curse any one who intruded on his solitude, and hindered
+him of a single half-hour in the desert spots that he adored.
+Remembering the scenes in moon-lighted groves and elsewhere, we read
+this:--"Whence comes her coldness to me? Is it possible that you can
+have suspected me of wronging you with her, and of turning perfidious in
+consequence of an unseasonably rigorous virtue? A passage in one of your
+letters shows a glimpse of some such suspicion. No, no, Saint Lambert,
+the breast of J.J. Rousseau never held the heart of a traitor, and I
+should despise myself more than you suppose, if I had ever tried to rob
+you of her heart.... Can you suspect that her friendship for me may hurt
+her love for you? Surely natures endowed with sensibility are open to
+all sorts of affections, and no sentiment can spring up in them which
+does not turn to the advantage of the dominant passion. Where is the
+lover who does not wax the more tender as he talks to his friend of her
+whom he loves? And is it not sweeter for you in your banishment that
+there should be some sympathetic creature to whom your mistress loves to
+talk of you, and who loves to hear?"
+
+Let us turn to another side of his correspondence. The way in which the
+sympathetic creature in the present case loved to hear his friend's
+mistress talk of him, is interestingly shown in one or two passages from
+a letter to her; as when he cries, "Ah, how proud would even thy lover
+himself be of thy constancy, if he only knew how much it has
+surmounted.... I appeal to your sincerity. You, the witness and the
+cause of this delirium, these tears, these ravishing ecstasies, these
+transports which were never made for mortal, say, have I ever tasted
+your favours in such a way that I deserve to lose them?... Never once
+did my ardent desires nor my tender supplications dare to solicit
+supreme happiness, without my feeling stopped by the inner cries of a
+sorrow-stricken soul.... O Sophie, after moments so sweet, the idea of
+eternal privation is too frightful for one who groans that he cannot
+identify himself with thee. What, are thy tender eyes never again to be
+lowered with a delicious modesty, intoxicating me with pleasure? What,
+are my burning lips never again to lay my very soul on thy heart along
+with my kisses? What, may I never more feel that heavenly shudder, that
+rapid and devouring fire, swifter than lightning?"[282].... We see a
+sympathetic creature assuredly, and listen to the voice of a nature
+endowed with sensibility even more than enough, but with decency,
+loyalty, above all with self-knowledge, far less than enough.
+
+One more touch completes the picture of the fallen desperate man. He
+takes great trouble to persuade Saint Lambert that though the rigour of
+his principles constrains him to frown upon such breaches of social law
+as the relations between Madame d'Houdetot and her lover, yet he is so
+attached to the sinful pair that he half forgives them. "Do not
+suppose," he says, with superlative gravity, "that you have seduced me
+by your reasons; I see in them the goodness of your heart, not your
+justification. I cannot help blaming your connection: you can hardly
+approve it yourself; and so long as you both of you continue dear to me,
+I will never leave you in careless security as to the innocence of your
+state. Yet love such as yours deserves considerateness.... I feel
+respect for a union so tender, and cannot bring myself to attempt to
+lead it to virtue along the path of despair" (p. 401).
+
+Ignorance of the facts of the case hindered Saint Lambert from
+appreciating the strange irony of a man protesting about leading to
+virtue along the path of despair a poor woman whom he had done as much
+as he could to lead to vice along the path of highly stimulated sense.
+Saint Lambert was as much a sentimentalist as Rousseau was, but he had a
+certain manliness, acquired by long contact with men, which his
+correspondent only felt in moods of severe exaltation. Saint Lambert
+took all the blame on himself. He had desired that his mistress and his
+friend should love one another; then he thought he saw some coolness in
+his mistress, and he set the change down to his friend, though not on
+the true grounds. "Do not suppose that I thought you perfidious or a
+traitor; I knew the austerity of your principles; people had spoken to
+me of it; and she herself did so with a respect that love found hard to
+bear." In short, he had suspected Rousseau of nothing worse than being
+over-virtuous, and trying in the interest of virtue to break off a
+connection sanctioned by contemporary manners, but not by law or
+religion. If Madame d'Houdetot had changed, it was not that she had
+ceased to honour her good friend, but only that her lover might be
+spared a certain chagrin, from suspecting the excess of scrupulosity and
+conscience in so austere an adviser.[283]
+
+It is well known how effectively one with a germ of good principle in
+him is braced by being thought better than he is. With this letter in
+his hands and its words in his mind, Rousseau strode off for his last
+interview with Madame d'Houdetot. Had Saint Lambert, he says, been less
+wise, less generous, less worthy, I should have been a lost man. As it
+was, he passed four or five hours with her in a delicious calm,
+infinitely more delightful than the accesses of burning fever which had
+seized him before. They formed the project of a close companionship of
+three, including the absent lover; and they counted on the project
+coming more true than such designs usually do, "since all the feelings
+that can unite sensitive and upright hearts formed the foundation of it,
+and we three united talents enough as well as knowledge enough to
+suffice to ourselves, without need of aid or supplement from others."
+What happened was this. Madame d'Houdetot for the next three or four
+months, which were among the most bitter in Rousseau's life, for then
+the bitterness which became chronic was new and therefore harder to be
+borne, wrote him the wisest, most affectionate, and most considerate
+letters that a sincere and sensible woman ever wrote to the most
+petulant, suspicious, perverse, and irrestrainable of men. For patience
+and exquisite sweetness of friendship some of these letters are
+matchless, and we can only conjecture the wearing querulousness of the
+letters to which they were replies. If through no fault of her own she
+had been the occasion of the monstrous delirium of which he never shook
+off the consequences, at least this good soul did all that wise counsel
+and grave tenderness could do, to bring him out of the black slough of
+suspicion and despair into which he was plunged.[284] In the beginning
+of 1758 there was a change. Rousseau's passion for her somehow became
+known to all the world; it reached the ears of Saint Lambert, and was
+the cause of a passing disturbance between him and his mistress. Saint
+Lambert throughout acted like a man who is thoroughly master of himself.
+At first, we learn, he ceased for a moment to see in Rousseau the virtue
+which he sought in him, and which he was persuaded that he found in him.
+"Since then, however," wrote Madame d'Houdetot, "he pities you more for
+your weakness than he reproaches you, and we are both of us far from
+joining the people who wish to blacken your character; we have and
+always shall have the courage to speak of you with esteem."[285] They
+saw one another a few times, and on one occasion the Count and Countess
+d'Houdetot, Saint Lambert, and Rousseau all sat at table together,
+happily without breach of the peace.[286] One curious thing about this
+meeting was that it took place some three weeks after Rousseau and Saint
+Lambert had interchanged letters on the subject of the quarrel with
+Diderot, in which each promised the other contemptuous oblivion.[287]
+Perpetuity of hate is as hard as perpetuity of love for our poor
+short-spanned characters, and at length the three who were once to have
+lived together in self-sufficing union, and then in their next mood to
+have forgotten one another instantly and for ever, held to neither of
+the extremes, but settled down into an easier middle path of indifferent
+good-will. The conduct of all three, said the most famous of them, may
+serve for an example of the way in which sensible people separate, when
+it no longer suits them to see one another.[288] It is at least certain
+that in them Rousseau lost two of the most unimpeachably good friends
+that he ever possessed.
+
+
+III.
+
+The egoistic character that loves to brood and hates to act, is big with
+catastrophe. We have now to see how the inevitable law accomplished
+itself in the case of Rousseau. In many this brooding egoism produces a
+silent and melancholy insanity; with him it was developed into something
+of acridly corrosive quality. One of the agents in this disastrous
+process was the wearing torture of one of the most painful of disorders.
+This disorder, arising from an internal malformation, harassed him from
+his infancy to the day of his death. Our fatuous persistency in reducing
+man to the spiritual, blinds the biographer to the circumstance that the
+history of a life is the history of a body no less than that of a soul.
+Many a piece of conduct that divides the world into two factions of
+moral assailants and moral vindicators, provoking a thousand ingenuities
+of ethical or psychological analysis, ought really to have been nothing
+more than an item in a page of a pathologist's case-book. We are not to
+suspend our judgment on action; right and wrong can depend on no man's
+malformations. In trying to know the actor, it is otherwise; here it is
+folly to underestimate the physical antecedents of mental phenomena. In
+firm and lofty character, pain is mastered; in a character so little
+endowed with cool tenacious strength as Rousseau's, pain such as he
+endured was enough to account, not for his unsociality, which flowed
+from temperament, but for the bitter, irritable, and suspicious form
+which this unsociality now first assumed. Rousseau was never a saintly
+nature, but far the reverse, and in reading the tedious tale of his
+quarrels with Grimm and Madame d'Epinay and Diderot--a tale of
+labyrinthine nightmares--let us remember that we may even to this point
+explain what happened, without recourse to the too facile theory of
+insanity, unless one defines that misused term so widely as to make many
+sane people very uncomfortable.
+
+His own account was this: "In my quality of solitary, I am more
+sensitive than another; if I am wrong with a friend who lives in the
+world, he thinks of it for a moment, and then a thousand distractions
+make him forget it for the rest of the day; but there is nothing to
+distract me as to his wrong towards me; deprived of my sleep, I busy
+myself with him all night long; solitary in my walks, I busy myself with
+him from sunrise until sunset; my heart has not an instant's relief, and
+the harshness of a friend gives me in one day years of anguish. In my
+quality of invalid, I have a title to the considerateness that humanity
+owes to the weakness or irritation of a man in agony. Who is the friend,
+who is the good man, that ought not to dread to add affliction to an
+unfortunate wretch tormented with a painful and incurable malady?"[289]
+We need not accept this as an adequate extenuation of perversities, but
+it explains them without recourse to the theory of uncontrollable
+insanity. Insanity came later, the product of intellectual excitation,
+public persecution, and moral reaction after prolonged tension.
+Meanwhile he may well be judged by the standards of the sane; knowing
+his temperament, his previous history, his circumstances, we have no
+difficulty in accounting for his conduct. Least of all is there any need
+for laying all the blame upon his friends. There are writers whom
+enthusiasm for the principles of Jean Jacques has driven into fanatical
+denigration of every one whom he called his enemy, that is to say,
+nearly every one whom he ever knew.[290] Diderot said well, "Too many
+honest people would be wrong, if Jean Jacques were right."
+
+The first downright breach was with Grimm, but there were angry passages
+during the year 1757, not only with him, but with Diderot and Madame
+d'Epinay as well. Diderot, like many other men of energetic nature
+unchastened by worldly wisdom, was too interested in everything that
+attracted his attention to keep silence over the indiscretion of a
+friend. He threw as much tenacity and zeal into a trifle, if it had once
+struck him, as he did into the Encyclopaedia. We have already seen how
+warmly he rated Jean Jacques for missing the court pension. Then he
+scolded and laughed at him for turning hermit. With still more
+seriousness he remonstrated with him for remaining in the country
+through the winter, thus endangering the life of Theresa's aged mother.
+This stirred up hot anger in the Hermitage, and two or three bitter
+letters were interchanged,[291] those of Diderot being pronounced by a
+person who was no partisan of Rousseau decidedly too harsh.[292] Yet
+there is copious warmth of friendship in these very letters, if only the
+man to whom they were written had not hated interference in his affairs
+as the worst of injuries. "I loved Diderot tenderly, I esteemed him
+sincerely," says Rousseau, "and I counted with entire confidence upon
+the same sentiments in him. But worn out by his unwearied obstinacy in
+everlastingly thwarting my tastes, my inclinations, my ways of living,
+everything that concerned myself only; revolted at seeing a younger man
+than myself insist with all his might on governing me like a child;
+chilled by his readiness in giving his promise and his negligence in
+keeping it; tired of so many appointments which he made and broke, and
+of his fancy for repairing them by new ones to be broken in their turn;
+provoked at waiting for him to no purpose three or four times a month on
+days which he had fixed, and of dining alone in the evening, after going
+on as far as St. Denis to meet him and waiting for him all day,--I had
+my heart already full of a multitude of grievances."[293] This
+irritation subsided in presence of the storms that now rose up against
+Diderot. He was in the thick of the dangerous and mortifying
+distractions stirred up by the foes of the Encyclopaedia. Rousseau in
+friendly sympathy went to see him; they embraced, and old wrongs were
+forgotten until new arose.[294]
+
+There is a less rose-coloured account than this. Madame d'Epinay assigns
+two motives to Rousseau: a desire to find an excuse for going to Paris,
+in order to avoid seeing Saint Lambert; secondly, a wish to hear
+Diderot's opinion of the two first parts of the New Heloisa. She says
+that he wanted to borrow a portfolio in which to carry the manuscripts
+to Paris; Rousseau says that they had already been in Diderot's
+possession for six months.[295] As her letters containing this very
+circumstantial story were written at the moment, it is difficult to
+uphold the Confessions as valid authority against them. Thirdly,
+Rousseau told her that he had not taken his manuscripts to Paris (p.
+302), whereas Grimm writing a few days later (p. 309) mentions that he
+has received a letter from Diderot, to the effect that Rousseau's visit
+had no other object than the revision of these manuscripts. The scene is
+characteristic. "Rousseau kept him pitilessly at work from Saturday at
+ten o'clock in the morning till eleven at night on Monday, hardly giving
+him time to eat and drink. The revision at an end, Diderot chats with
+him about a plan he has in his head, and begs Rousseau to help him in
+contriving some incident which he cannot yet arrange to his taste. 'It
+is too difficult,' replies the hermit coldly, 'it is late, and I am not
+used to sitting up. Good night; I am off at six in the morning, and 'tis
+time for bed.' He rises from his chair, goes to bed, and leaves Diderot
+petrified at his behaviour. The day of his departure, Diderot's wife saw
+that her husband was in bad spirits, and asked the reason. 'It is that
+man's want of delicacy,' he replied, 'which afflicts me; he makes me
+work like a slave, but I should never have found that out, if he had not
+so drily refused to take an interest in me for a quarter of an hour.'
+'You are surprised at that,' his wife answered; 'do you not know him? He
+is devoured with envy; he goes wild with rage when anything fine appears
+that is not his own. You will see him one day commit some great crime
+rather than let himself be ignored. I declare I would not swear that he
+will not join the ranks of the Jesuits, and undertake their
+vindication.'"
+
+Of course we cannot be sure that Grimm did not manipulate these letters
+long after the event, but there is nothing in Rousseau's history to make
+us perfectly sure that he was incapable either of telling a falsehood to
+Madame d'Epinay, or of being shamelessly selfish in respect of Diderot.
+I see no reason to refuse substantial credit to Grimm's account, and the
+points of coincidence between that and the Confessions make its truth
+probable.[296]
+
+Rousseau's relations with Madame d'Epinay were more complex, and his
+sentiments towards her underwent many changes. There was a prevalent
+opinion that he was her lover, for which no real foundation seems to
+have existed.[297] Those who disbelieved that he had reached this
+distinction, yet made sure that he had a passion for her, which may or
+may not have been true.[298] Madame d'Epinay herself was vain enough to
+be willing that this should be generally accepted, and it is certain
+that she showed a friendship for him which, considering the manners of
+the time, was invitingly open to misconception. Again, she was jealous
+of her sister-in-law, Madame d'Houdetot, if for no other reason than
+that the latter, being the wife of a Norman noble, had access to the
+court, and this was unattainable by the wife of a farmer-general. Hence
+Madame d'Epinay's barely-concealed mortification when she heard of the
+meetings in the forest, the private suppers, the moonlight rambles in
+the park. When Saint Lambert first became uneasy as to the relations
+between Rousseau and his mistress, and wrote to her to say that he was
+so, Rousseau instantly suspected that Madame d'Epinay had been his
+informant. Theresa confirmed the suspicion by tales of baskets and
+drawers ransacked by Madame d'Epinay in search of Madame d'Houdetot's
+letters to him. Whether these tales were true or not, we can never know;
+we can only say that Madame d'Epinay was probably not incapable of these
+meannesses, and that there is no reason to suppose that she took the
+pains to write directly to Saint Lambert a piece of news which she was
+writing to Grimm, knowing that he was then in communication with Saint
+Lambert. She herself suspected that Theresa had written to Saint
+Lambert,[299] but it may be doubted whether Theresa's imagination could
+have risen to such feat as writing to a marquis, and a marquis in what
+would have seemed to her to be remote and inaccessible parts of the
+earth. All this, however, has become ghostly for us; a puzzle that can
+never be found out, nor be worth finding out. Rousseau was persuaded
+that Madame d'Epinay was his betrayer, and was seized by one of his
+blackest and most stormful moods. In reply to an affectionate letter
+from her, inquiring why she had not seen him for so long, he wrote thus:
+"I can say nothing to you yet. I wait until I am better informed, and
+this I shall be sooner or later. Meanwhile, be certain that accused
+innocence will find a champion ardent enough to make calumniators
+repent, whoever they may be." It is rather curious that so strange a
+missive as this, instead of provoking Madame d'Epinay to anger, was
+answered by a warmer and more affectionate letter than the first. To
+this Rousseau replied with increased vehemence, charged with dark and
+mysteriously worded suspicion. Still Madame d'Epinay remained willing to
+receive him. He began to repent of his imprudent haste, because it would
+certainly end by compromising Madame d'Houdetot, and because, moreover,
+he had no proof after all that his suspicions had any foundation. He
+went instantly to the house of Madame d'Epinay; at his approach she
+threw herself on his neck and melted into tears. This unexpected
+reception from so old a friend moved him extremely; he too wept
+abundantly. She showed no curiosity as to the precise nature of his
+suspicions or their origin, and the quarrel came to an end.[300]
+
+Grimm's turn followed. Though they had been friends for many years,
+there had long been a certain stiffness in their friendship. Their
+characters were in fact profoundly antipathetic. Rousseau we
+know,--sensuous, impulsive, extravagant, with little sense of the
+difference between reality and dreams. Grimm was exactly the opposite;
+judicious, collected, self-seeking, coldly upright. He was a German
+(born at Ratisbon), and in Paris was first a reader to the Duke of Saxe
+Gotha, with very scanty salary. He made his way, partly through the
+friendship of Rousseau, into the society of the Parisian men of letters,
+rapidly acquired a perfect mastery of the French language, and with the
+inspiring help of Diderot, became an excellent critic. After being
+secretary to sundry high people, he became the literary correspondent of
+various German sovereigns, keeping them informed of what was happening
+in the world of art and letters, just as an ambassador keeps his
+government informed of what happens in politics. The sobriety,
+impartiality, and discrimination of his criticism make one think highly
+of his literary judgment; he had the courage, or shall we say he
+preserved enough of the German, to defend both Homer and Shakespeare
+against the unhappy strictures of Voltaire.[301] This is not all,
+however; his criticism is conceived in a tone which impresses us with
+the writer's integrity. And to this internal evidence we have to add the
+external corroboration that in the latter part of his life he filled
+various official posts, which implied a peculiar confidence in his
+probity on the part of those who appointed him. At the present moment
+(1756-57), he was acting as secretary to Marshal d'Estrees, commander of
+the French army in Westphalia at the outset of the Seven Years' War. He
+was an able and helpful man, in spite of his having a rough manner,
+powdering his face, and being so monstrously scented as to earn the name
+of the musk-bear. He had that firmness and positivity which are not
+always beautiful, but of which there is probably too little rather than
+too much in the world, certainly in the France of his time, and of which
+there was none at all in Rousseau. Above all things he hated
+declamation. Apparently cold and reserved, he had sensibility enough
+underneath the surface to go nearly out of his mind for love of a singer
+at the opera who had a thrilling voice. As he did not believe in the
+metaphysical doctrine about the freedom of the will, he accepted from
+temperament the necessity which logic confirmed, of guiding the will by
+constant pressure from without. "I am surprised," Madame d'Epinay said
+to him, "that men should be so little indulgent to one another." "Nay,
+the want of indulgence comes of our belief in freedom; it is because the
+established morality is false and bad, inasmuch as it starts from this
+false principle of liberty." "Ah, but the contrary principle, by making
+one too indulgent, disturbs order." "It does nothing of the kind. Though
+man does not wholly change, he is susceptible of modification; you can
+improve him; hence it is not useless to punish him. The gardener does
+not cut down a tree that grows crooked; he binds up the branch and keeps
+it in shape; that is the effect of public punishment."[302] He applied
+the same doctrine, as we shall see, to private punishment for social
+crookedness.
+
+It is easy to conceive how Rousseau's way of ordering himself would
+gradually estrange so hard a head as this. What the one thought a
+weighty moral reformation, struck the other as a vain desire to attract
+attention. Rousseau on the other hand suspected Grimm of intriguing to
+remove Theresa from him, as well as doing his best to alienate all his
+friends. The attempted alienation of Theresa consisted in the secret
+allowance to her mother and her by Grimm and Diderot of some sixteen
+pounds a year.[303] Rousseau was unaware of this, but the whisperings
+and goings and comings to which it gave rise, made him darkly uneasy.
+That the suspicions in other respects were in a certain sense not wholly
+unfounded, is shown by Grimm's own letters to Madame d'Epinay. He
+disapproved of her installing Rousseau in the Hermitage, and warned her
+in a very remarkable prophecy that solitude would darken his
+imagination.[304] "He is a poor devil who torments himself, and does not
+dare to confess the true subject of all his sufferings, which is in his
+cursed head and his pride; he raises up imaginary matters, so as to have
+the pleasure of complaining of the whole human race."[305] More than
+once he assures her that Rousseau will end by going mad, it being
+impossible that so hot and ill-organised a head should endure
+solitude.[306] Rousseauite partisans usually explain all this by
+supposing that Grimm was eager to set a woman for whom he had a passion,
+against a man who was suspected of having a passion for her; and it is
+possible that jealousy may have stimulated the exercise of his natural
+shrewdness. But this shrewdness, added to entire want of imagination and
+a very narrow range of sympathy, was quite enough to account for Grimm's
+harsh judgment, without the addition of any sinister sentiment. He was
+perfectly right in suspecting Rousseau of want of loyalty to Madame
+d'Epinay, for we find our hermit writing to her in strains of perfect
+intimacy, while he was writing of her to Madame d'Houdetot as "your
+unworthy sister."[307] On the other hand, while Madame d'Epinay was
+overwhelming him with caressing phrases, she was at the same moment
+describing him to Grimm as a master of impertinence and intractableness.
+As usual where there is radical incompatibility of character, an
+attempted reconciliation between Grimm and Rousseau (some time in the
+early part of October 1757) had only made the thinly veiled antipathy
+more resolute. Rousseau excused himself for wrongs of which in his heart
+he never thought himself guilty. Grimm replied by a discourse on the
+virtues of friendship and his own special aptitude for practising them.
+He then conceded to the impetuous penitent the kiss of peace, in a
+slight embrace which was like the accolade given by a monarch to new
+knights.[308] The whole scene is ignoble. We seem to be watching an
+unclean cauldron, with Theresa's mother, a cringing and babbling crone,
+standing witch-like over it and infusing suspicion, falsehood, and
+malice. When minds are thus surcharged, any accident suffices to
+release the evil creatures that lurk in an irritated imagination.
+
+One day towards the end of the autumn of 1757, Rousseau learned to his
+unbounded surprise that Madame d'Epinay had been seized with some
+strange disorder, which made it advisable that she should start without
+any delay for Geneva, there to place herself under the care of Tronchin,
+who was at that time the most famous doctor in Europe. His surprise was
+greatly increased by the expectation which he found among his friends
+that he would show his gratitude for her many kindnesses to him, by
+offering to bear her company on her journey, and during her stay in a
+town which was strange to her and thoroughly familiar to him. It was to
+no purpose that he protested how unfit was one invalid to be the nurse
+of another; and how great an incumbrance a man would be in a coach in
+the bad season, when for many days he was absolutely unable to leave his
+chamber without danger. Diderot, with his usual eagerness to guide a
+friend's course, wrote him a letter urging that his many obligations,
+and even his grievances in respect of Madame d'Epinay, bound him to
+accompany her, as he would thus repay the one and console himself for
+the other. "She is going into a country where she will be like one
+fallen from the clouds. She is ill; she will need amusement and
+distraction. As for winter, are you worse now than you were a month
+back, or than you will be at the opening of the spring? For me, I
+confess that if I could not bear the coach, I would take a staff and
+follow her on foot."[309] Rousseau trembled with fury, and as soon as
+the transport was over, he wrote an indignant reply, in which he more or
+less politely bade the panurgic one to attend to his own affairs, and
+hinted that Grimm was making a tool of him. Next he wrote to Grimm
+himself a letter, not unfriendly in form, asking his advice and
+promising to follow it, but hardly hiding his resentment. By this time
+he had found out the secret of Madame d'Epinay's supposed illness and
+her anxiety to pass some months away from her family, and the share
+which Grimm had in it. This, however, does not make many passages of his
+letter any the less ungracious or unseemly. "If Madame d'Epinay has
+shown friend' ship to me, I have shown more to her.... As for benefits,
+first of all I do not like them, I do not want them, and I owe no thanks
+for any that people may burden me with by force. Madame d'Epinay, being
+so often left alone in the country, wished me for company; it was for
+that she had kept me. After making one sacrifice to friendship, I must
+now make another to gratitude. A man must be poor, must be without a
+servant, must be a hater of constraint, and he must have my character,
+before he can know what it is for me to live in another person's house.
+For all that, I lived two years in hers, constantly brought into bondage
+with the finest harangues about liberty, served by twenty domestics, and
+cleaning my own shoes every morning, overloaded with gloomy indigestion,
+and incessantly sighing for my homely porringer.... Consider how much
+money an hour of the life and the time of a man is worth; compare the
+kindnesses of Madame d'Epinay with the sacrifice of my native country
+and two years of serfdom; and then tell me whether the obligation is
+greater on her side or mine." He then urges with a torrent of impetuous
+eloquence the thoroughly sound reasons why it was unfair and absurd for
+him, a beggar and an invalid, to make the journey with Madame d'Epinay,
+rich and surrounded by attendants. He is particularly splenetic that the
+philosopher Diderot, sitting in his own room before a good fire and
+wrapped in a well-lined dressing-gown, should insist on his doing his
+five and twenty leagues a day on foot, through the mud in winter.[310]
+
+The whole letter shows, as so many incidents in his later life showed,
+how difficult it was to do Rousseau a kindness with impunity, and how
+little such friends as Madame d'Epinay possessed the art of soothing
+this unfortunate nature. They fretted him by not leaving him
+sufficiently free to follow his own changing moods, while he in turn
+lost all self-control, and yielded in hours of bodily torment to angry
+and resentful fancies. But let us hasten to an end. Grimm replied to his
+eloquent manifesto somewhat drily, to the effect that he would think the
+matter over, and that meanwhile Rousseau had best keep quiet in his
+hermitage. Rousseau burning with excitement at once conceived a thousand
+suspicions, wholly unable to understand that a cold and reserved German
+might choose to deliberate at length, and finally give an answer with
+brevity. "After centuries of expectation in the cruel uncertainty in
+which this barbarous man had plunged me"--that is after eight or ten
+days, the answer came, apparently not without a second direct
+application for one.[311] It was short and extremely pointed, not
+complaining that Rousseau had refused to accompany Madame d'Epinay but
+protesting against the horrible tone of the apology which he had sent to
+him for not accompanying her. "It has made me quiver with indignation;
+so odious are the principles it contains, so full is it of blackness and
+duplicity. You venture to talk to me of your slavery, to me who for more
+than two years have been the daily witness of all the marks of the
+tenderest and most generous friendship that you have received at the
+hands of that woman. If I could pardon you, I should think myself
+unworthy of having a single friend. I will never see you again while I
+live, and I shall think myself happy if I can banish the recollection of
+your conduct from my mind."[312] A flash of manly anger like this is
+very welcome to us, who have to thread a tedious way between morbid
+egoistic irritation on the one hand, and sly pieces of equivocal
+complaisance on the other. The effect on Rousseau was terrific. In a
+paroxysm he sent Grimm's letter back to him, with three or four lines in
+the same key. He wrote note after note to Madame d'Houdetot, in
+shrieks. "Have I a single friend left, man or woman? One word, only one
+word, and I can live." A day or two later: "Think of the state I am in.
+I can bear to be abandoned by all the world, but you! You who know me so
+well! Great God! am I a scoundrel? a scoundrel, I!"[313] And so on,
+raving. It was to no purpose that Madame d'Houdetot wrote him soothing
+letters, praying him to calm himself, to find something to busy himself
+with, to remain at peace with Madame d'Epinay, "who had never appeared
+other than the most thoughtful and warm-hearted friend to him."[314] He
+was almost ready to quarrel with Madame d'Houdetot herself because she
+paid the postage of her letters, which he counted an affront to his
+poverty.[315] To Madame d'Epinay he had written in the midst of his
+tormenting uncertainty as to the answer which Grimm would make to his
+letter. It was an ungainly assertion that she was playing a game of
+tyranny and intrigue at his cost. For the first time she replied with
+spirit and warmth. "Your letter is hardly that of a man who, on the eve
+of my departure, swore to me that he could never in his life repair the
+wrongs he had done me." She then tersely remarks that it is not natural
+to pass one's life in suspecting and insulting one's friends, and that
+he abuses her patience. To this he answered with still greater terseness
+that friendship was extinct between them, and that he meant to leave the
+Hermitage, but as his friends desired him to remain there until the
+spring he would with her permission follow their counsel. Then she, with
+a final thrust of impatience, in which we perhaps see the hand of Grimm:
+"Since you meant to leave the Hermitage, and felt you ought to do so, I
+am astonished that your friends could detain you. For me, I don't
+consult mine as to my duties, and I have nothing more to say to you as
+to yours." This was the end. Rousseau returned for a moment from ignoble
+petulance to dignity and self-respect. He wrote to her that if it is a
+misfortune to make a mistake in the choice of friends, it is one not
+less cruel to awake from so sweet an error, and two days before he
+wrote, he left her house. He found a cottage at Montmorency, and
+thither, nerved with fury, through snow and ice he carried his scanty
+household goods (Dec. 15, 1757).[316]
+
+We have a picture of him in this fatal month. Diderot went to pay him a
+visit (Dec. 5). Rousseau was alone at the bottom of his garden. As soon
+as he saw Diderot, he cried in a voice of thunder and with his eyes all
+aflame: "What have you come here for?" "I want to know whether you are
+mad or malicious." "You have known me for fifteen years; you are well
+aware how little malicious I am, and I will prove to you that I am not
+mad: follow me." He then drew Diderot into a room, and proceeded to
+clear himself, by means of letters, of the charge of trying to make a
+breach between Saint Lambert and Madame d'Houdetot. They were in fact
+letters that convicted him, as we know, of trying to persuade Madame
+d'Houdetot of the criminality of her relations with her lover, and at
+the same time to accept himself in the very same relation. Of all this
+we have heard more than enough already. He was stubborn in the face of
+Diderot's remonstrance, and the latter left him in a state which he
+described in a letter to Grimm the same night. "I throw myself into your
+arms, like one who has had a shock of fright: that man intrudes into my
+work; he fills me with trouble, and I am as if I had a damned soul at my
+side. May I never see him again; he would make me believe in devils and
+hell."[317] And thus the unhappy man who had began this episode in his
+life with confident ecstasy in the glories and clear music of spring,
+ended it looking out from a narrow chamber upon the sullen crimson of
+the wintry twilight and over fields silent in snow, with the haggard
+desperate gaze of a lost spirit.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[254] _Conf._, ix. 247.
+
+[255] _Conf._, ix. 230. Madame d'Epinay (_Mem._, ii. 132) has given an
+account of the installation, with a slight discrepancy of date. When
+Madame d'Epinay's son-in-law emigrated at the Revolution, the
+Hermitage--of which nothing now stands--along with the rest of the
+estate became national property, and was bought after other purchasers
+by Robespierre, and afterwards by Gretry the composer, who paid 10,000
+livres for it.
+
+[256] _Conf._, ix. 255.
+
+[257] Third letter to Malesherbes, 364-368.
+
+[258] _Conf._, ix. 239.
+
+[259] _Conf._, ix. 237, 238, and 263, etc.
+
+[260] The extract from the Project for Perpetual Peace and the
+Polysynodia, together with Rousseau's judgments on them, are found at
+the end of the volume containing the Social Contract. The first, but
+without the judgment, was printed separately without Rousseau's
+permission, in 1761, by Bastide, to whom he had sold it for twelve
+louis for publication in his journal only. _Conf._, xi. 107. _Corr._,
+ii. 110, 128.
+
+[261] P. 485.
+
+[262] For a sympathetic account of the Abbe de Saint Pierre's life and
+speculations, see M. Leonce de Lavergne's _Economistes francais du
+18ieme siecle_ (Paris: 1870). Also Comte's _Lettres a M. Valat_, p.
+73.
+
+[263] _Conf._, ix. 270-274.
+
+[264] _Conf._, ix. 289.
+
+[265] _Ib._ ix. 286.
+
+[266] D'Epinay, ii. 153.
+
+[267] Madame d'Houdetot, (_b._ 1730--_d._ 1813) was the daughter of M.
+de Bellegarde, the father of Madame d'Epinay's husband. Her marriage
+with the Count d'Houdetot, of high Norman stock, took place in 1748.
+The circumstances of the marriage, which help to explain the lax view
+of the vows common among the great people of the time, are given with
+perhaps a shade too much dramatic colouring in Madame d'Epinay's
+_Mem._, i 101.
+
+[268] _Conf._, ix. 281.
+
+[269] D'Epinay, ii. 246.
+
+[270] D'Epinay, ii. 269.
+
+[271] Musset-Pathay has collected two or three trifles of her
+composition, ii. 136-138. Heal so quotes Madame d'Allard's account of
+her, pp. 140, 141.
+
+[272] Quoted by M. Girardin, _Rev. des Deux Mondes_, Sept. 1853, p.
+1080.
+
+[273] _Conf._, ix. 304.
+
+[274] _Ib._ ix. 305. Slightly modified version in _Corr._, i. 377.
+
+[275] M. Boiteau's note to Madame d'Epinay, ii. 273.
+
+[276] Grimm, to Madame d'Epinay, ii. 305.
+
+[277] This is shown partly by Saint Lambert's letter to Rousseau, to
+which we come presently, and partly by a letter of Madame d'Houdetot
+to Rousseau in May, 1758 (Streckeisen-Moultou, i. 411-413), where she
+distinctly says that she concealed his mad passion for her from Saint
+Lambert, who first heard of it in common conversation.
+
+[278] _Conf._, ix. 311.
+
+[279] Besides the many hints of reference to this in the Confessions,
+see the phrenetic Letters to Sarah, printed in the _Melanges_, pp.
+347-360.
+
+[280] _Conf._, ix. 337.
+
+[281] _Corr._, i. 398. Sept. 4, 1757.
+
+[282] To Madame d'Houdetot. _Corr._, i. 376-387. June 1757.
+
+[283] Saint Lambert to Rousseau, from Wolfenbuttel, Oct. 11, 1757.
+Streckeisen-Moultou, i. 415.
+
+[284] These letters are given in M. Streckeisen-Moultou's first volume
+(pp. 354-414). The thirty-second of them (Jan. 10, 1758) is perhaps
+the one best worth turning to.
+
+[285] Streckeisen-Moultou, i. 412. May 6, 1768. _Conf._, x. 15.
+
+[286] _Ib._ x. 22.
+
+[287] _Ib._ x. 18. Streckeisen, i. 422.
+
+[288] _Conf._, x. 24.
+
+[289] To Madame d'Epinay, 1757. _Corr._, i. 362, 353. See also
+_Conf._, ix. 307.
+
+[290] One of the most unflinching in this kind is an _Essai sur la vie
+et le caractere de J.J. Rousseau_, by G.H. Morin (Paris: 1851): the
+laborious production of a bitter advocate, who accepts the
+Confessions, Dialogues, Letters, etc., with the reverence due to
+verbal inspiration, and writes of everybody who offended his hero,
+quite in the vein of Marat towards aristocrats.
+
+[291] _Corr._, i. 327-335. D'Epinay, ii. 165-182
+
+[292] D'Epinay, ii. 173.
+
+[293] _Conf._, ix. 325.
+
+[294] _Ib._, ix. 334.
+
+[295] _Mem._, ii. 297. She also places the date many mouths later than
+Rousseau, and detaches the reconciliation from the quarrel in the
+winter of 1756-1757.
+
+[296] The same story is referred to in Madame de Vandeul's _Mem. de
+Diderot, _p. 61.
+
+[297] _Conf._, ix. 245, 246.
+
+[298] Grimm to Madame d'Epinay, ii. 259, 269, 313, 326. _Conf._, x.
+17.
+
+[299] _Mem._, ii. 318.
+
+[300] _Conf._, ix. 322. Madame d'Epinay (_Mem._, ii. 326), writing to
+Grimm, gives a much colder and stiffer colour to the scene of
+reconciliation, but the nature of her relations with him would account
+for this. The same circumstance, as M. Girardin has pointed out (_Rev.
+des Deux Mondes_, Sept. 1853), would explain the discrepancy between
+her letters as given in the Confessions, and the copies of them sent
+to Grimm, and printed in her Memoirs. M. Sainte Beuve, who is never
+perfectly master of himself in dealing with the chiefs of the
+revolutionary schools, as might indeed have been expected in a writer
+with his predilections for the seventeenth century, rashly hints
+(_Causeries_, vii. 301) that Rousseau was the falsifier. The
+publication from the autograph originals sets this at rest.
+
+[301] For Shakespeare, see _Corr. Lit._, iv. 143, etc.
+
+[302] D'Epinay, ii. 188.
+
+[303] D'Epinay, ii. 150. Also Vandeul's _Mem. de Diderot_, p. 61.
+
+[304] _Mem._ ii. 128.
+
+[305] P. 258. See also p. 146.
+
+[306] Pp. 282, 336, etc.
+
+[307] _Corr._, i. 386. June 1757.
+
+[308] _Conf._, ix. 355. For Madame d'Epinay's equally credible
+version, assigning all the stiffness and arrogance to Rousseau, see
+_Mem._, ii. 355-358. Saint Lambert refers to the momentary
+reconciliation in his letter to Rousseau of Nov. 21 (Streckeisen, i.
+418), repeating what he had said before (p. 417), that Grimm always
+spoke of Mm in amicable terms, though complaining of Rousseau's
+injustice.
+
+[309] _Conf._, ix. 372.
+
+[310] _Corr._, i. 404-416. Oct 19, 1757.
+
+[311] Grimm to Diderot, in Madame d'Epinay's _Mem._ ii. 386. Nov. 3,
+1757.
+
+[312] D'Epinay, ii. 387. Nov. 3.
+
+[313] _Corr._, i. 425. Nov. 8. _Ib._ 426.
+
+[314] Streckeisen-Moultou, i. 381-383.
+
+[315] _Ib._ 387. Many years after, Rousseau told Bernardin de St.
+Pierre (_Oeuv._, xii. 57) that one of the reasons which made him leave
+the Hermitage was the indiscretion of friends who insisted on sending
+him letters by some conveyance that cost 4 francs, when it might
+equally well have been sent for as many sous.
+
+[316] The sources of all this are in the following places. _Corr._, i.
+416. Oct. 29. Streckeisen, i. 349. Nov. 12. _Conf._, ix. 377. _Corr._,
+i. 427. Nov. 23. _Conf._, ix. 381. Dec. 1. _Ib._, ix. 383. Dec. 17.
+
+[317] Diderot to Grimm; D'Epinay, ii. 397. Diderot's _Oeuv._, xix.
+446. See also 449 and 210.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+MUSIC.
+
+
+Simplification has already been used by us as the key-word to Rousseau's
+aims and influence. The scheme of musical notation with which he came to
+try his fortune in Paris in 1741, his published vindication of it, and
+his musical compositions afterwards all fall under this term. Each of
+them was a plea for the extrication of the simple from the cumbrousness
+of elaborated pedantry, and for a return to nature from the unmeaning
+devices of false art. And all tended alike in the popular direction,
+towards the extension of enjoyment among the common people, and the
+glorification of their simple lives and moods, in the art designed for
+the great.
+
+The Village Soothsayer was one of the group of works which marked a
+revolution in the history of French music, by putting an end to the
+tyrannical tradition of Lulli and Rameau, and preparing the way through
+a middle stage of freshness, simplicity, naturalism, up to the noble
+severity of Gluck (1714-1787). This great composer, though a Bohemian by
+birth, found his first appreciation in a public that had been trained
+by the Italian pastoral operas, of which Rousseau's was one of the
+earliest produced in France. Gretri, the Fleming (1741-1813), who had a
+hearty admiration for Jean Jacques, and out of a sentiment of piety
+lived for a time in his Hermitage, came in point of musical excellence
+between the group of Rousseau, Philidor, Duni, and the rest, and Gluck.
+"I have not produced exaltation in people's heads by tragical
+superlative," Gretri said, "but I have revealed the accent of truth,
+which I have impressed deeper in men's hearts."[318] These words express
+sufficiently the kind of influence which Rousseau also had. Crude as the
+music sounds to us who are accustomed to more sumptuous schools, we can
+still hear in it the note which would strike a generation weary of
+Rameau. It was the expression in one way of the same mood which in
+another way revolted against paint, false hair, and preposterous costume
+as of savages grown opulent. Such music seems without passion or
+subtlety or depth or magnificence. Thus it had hardly any higher than a
+negative merit, but it was the necessary preparation for the acceptance
+of a more positive style, that should replace both the elaborate false
+art of the older French composers and the too colourless realism of the
+pastoral comic opera, by the austere loveliness and elevation of _Orfeo_
+and _Alceste_.
+
+In 1752 an Italian company visited Paris, and performed at the Opera a
+number of pieces by Pergolese, and other composers of their country. A
+violent war arose, which agitated Paris far more intensely than the
+defeat of Rossbach and the loss of Canada did afterwards. The quarrel
+between the Parliament and the Clergy was at its height. The Parliament
+had just been exiled, and the gravest confusion threatened the State.
+The operatic quarrel turned the excitement of the capital into another
+channel. Things went so far that the censor was entreated to prohibit
+the printing of any work containing the damnable doctrine and position
+that Italian music is good. Rousseau took part enthusiastically with the
+Italians.[319] His Letter on French Music (1753) proved to the great
+fury of the people concerned, that the French had no national music, and
+that it would be so much the worse for them if they ever had any. Their
+language, so proper to be the organ of truth and reason, was radically
+unfit either for poetry or music. All national music must derive its
+principal characteristics from the language. Now if there is a language
+in Europe fit for music, it is certainly the Italian, for it is sweet,
+sonorous, harmonious, and more accentuated than any other, and these are
+precisely the four qualities which adapt a language to singing. It is
+sweet because the articulations are not composite, because the meeting
+of consonants is both infrequent and soft, and because a great number of
+the syllables being only formed of vowels, frequent elisions make its
+pronunciation more flowing. It is sonorous because most of the vowels
+are full, because it is without composite diphthongs, because it has
+few or no nasal vowels. Again, the inversions of the Italian are far
+more favourable to true melody than the didactic order of French. And so
+onwards, with much close grappling of the matter. French melody does not
+exist; it is only a sort of modulated plain-song which has nothing
+agreeable in itself, which only pleases with the aid of a few capricious
+ornaments, and then only pleases those who have agreed to find it
+beautiful.[320]
+
+The letter contains a variety of acute remarks upon music, and includes
+a vigorous protest against fugues, imitations, double designs, and the
+like. Scarcely any one succeeds in them, and success even when obtained
+hardly rewards the labour. As for counterfugues, double fugues, and
+"other difficult fooleries that the ear cannot endure nor the reason
+justify," they are evidently relics of barbarism and bad taste which
+only remain, like the porticoes of our gothic churches, to the disgrace
+of those who had patience enough to construct them.[321] The last
+phrase-and both Voltaire and Turgot used gothic architecture as the
+symbol for the supreme of rudeness and barbarism--shows that even a man
+who seems to run counter to the whole current of his time yet does not
+escape its influence.
+
+Grimm, after remarking on the singularity of a demonstration of the
+impossibility of setting melody to French words on the part of a writer
+who had just produced the Village Soothsayer, informs us that the letter
+created a furious uproar, and set all Paris in a blaze. He had himself
+taken the side of the Italians in an amusing piece of pleasantry, which
+became a sort of classic model for similar facetiousness in other
+controversies of the century. The French, as he said, forgive everything
+in favour of what makes them laugh, but Rousseau talked reason and
+demolished the pretensions of French music with great sounding strokes
+as of an axe.[322] Rousseau expected to be assassinated, and gravely
+assures us that there was a plot to that effect, as well as a design to
+put him in the Bastille. This we may fairly surmise to have been a
+fiction of his own imagination, and the only real punishment that
+overtook him was the loss of his right to free admission to the Opera.
+After what he had said of the intolerable horrors of French music, the
+directors of the theatre can hardly be accused of vindictiveness in
+releasing him from them.[323] Some twenty years after (1774), when Paris
+was torn asunder by the violence of the two great factions of the
+Gluckists and Piccinists, Rousseau retracted his opinion as to the
+impossibility of wedding melody to French words.[324] He went as often
+as he could to hear the works both of Gretri and Gluck, and _Orfeo_
+delighted him, while the _Fausse magie_ of the former moved him to say
+to the composer, "Your music stirs sweet sensations to which I thought
+my heart had long been closed."[325] This being so, and life being as
+brief as art is long, we need not further examine the controversy. It
+may be worth adding that Rousseau wrote some of the articles on music
+for the Encyclopaedia, and that in 1767 he published a not inconsiderable
+Musical Dictionary of his own.
+
+His scheme of a new musical notation and the principles on which he
+defended it are worth attention, because some of the ideas are now
+accepted as the base of a well-known and growing system of musical
+instruction. The aim of the scheme, let us say to begin with, was at
+once practical and popular; to reduce the difficulty of learning music
+to the lowest possible point, and so to bring the most delightful of the
+arts within the reach of the largest possible number of people. Hence,
+although he maintains the fitness of his scheme for instrumental as well
+as vocal performances, it is clearly the latter which he has most at
+heart, evidently for the reason that this is the kind of music most
+accessible to the thousands, and it was always the thousands of whom
+Rousseau thought. This is the true distinction of music, it is for the
+people; and the best musical notation is that which best enables persons
+to sing at sight. The difficulty of the old notation had come
+practically before him as a teacher. The quantity of details which the
+pupil was forced to commit to memory before being able to sing from the
+open book, struck him then as the chief obstacle to anything like
+facility in performance, and without some of this facility he rightly
+felt that music must remain a luxury for the few. So genuine was his
+interest in the matter, that he was not very careful to fight for the
+originality of his own scheme. Our present musical signs, he said, are
+so imperfect and so inconvenient that it is no wonder that several
+persons have tried to re-cast or amend them; nor is it any wonder that
+some of them should have hit upon the same device in selecting the signs
+most natural and proper, such as numerical figures. As much, however,
+depends on the way of dealing with these figures, as with their
+adoption, and here he submitted that his own plan was as novel as it was
+advantageous.[326] Thus we have to bear in mind that Rousseau's scheme
+was above all things a practical device, contrived for making the
+teaching and the learning of musical elements an easier process.[327]
+
+The chief element of the project consists in the substitution of a
+relative series of notes or symbols in place of an absolute series. In
+the common notation any given note, say the A of the treble clef, is
+uniformly represented by the same symbol, namely, the position of second
+space in the clef, whatever key it may belong to. Rousseau, insisting on
+the varying quality impressed on any tone of a given pitch by the
+key-note of the scale to which it belongs, protested against the same
+name being given to the tone, however the quality of it might vary. Thus
+Re or D, which is the second tone in the key of C, ought, according to
+him, to have a different name when found as the fifth in the key of G,
+and in every case the name should at once indicate the interval of a
+tone from its key-note. His mode of effecting this change is as follows.
+The names _ut, re_, and the rest, are kept for the fixed order of the
+tones, C, D, E, and the rest. The key of a piece is shown by prefixing
+one of these symbols, and this determines the absolute quality of the
+melody as to pitch. That settled, every tone is expressed by a number
+bearing a relation to the key-note. This tonic note is represented by
+one, the other six tones of the scale are expressed by the numbers from
+two to seven. In the popular Tonic Sol-Fa notation, which corresponds
+so closely to Rousseau's in principle, the key-note is always styled Do,
+and the other symbols, _mi_, _la_, and the rest, indicate at once the
+relative position of these tones in their particular key or scale. Here
+the old names were preserved as being easily sung; Rousseau selected
+numbers because he supposed that they best expressed the generation of
+the sounds.[328]
+
+Rousseau attempted to find a theoretic base for this symbolic
+establishment of the relational quality of tones, and he dimly guessed
+that the order of the harmonics or upper tones of a given tonic would
+furnish a principle for forming the familiar major scale,[329] but his
+knowledge of the order was faulty. He was perhaps groping after the idea
+by which Professor Helmholtz has accounted for the various mental
+effects of the several intervals in a key--namely, the degree of natural
+affinity, measured by means of the upper tones, existing between the
+given tone and its tonic. Apart from this, however, the practical value
+of his ideas in instruction in singing is clearly shown by the
+circumstance that at any given time many thousands of young children are
+now being taught to read melody in the Sol-Fa notation in a few weeks.
+This shows how right Rousseau was in continually declaring the ease of
+hitting a particular tone, when the relative position of the tone in
+respect to the key-note is clearly manifested. A singer in trying to hit
+the tone is compelled to measure the interval between it and the
+preceding tone, and the simplest and easiest mode of doing this is to
+associate every tone with the tonics, thus constituting it a term of a
+relation with this fundamental tone.
+
+Rousseau made a mistake when he supposed that his ideas were just as
+applicable to instrumental as they were to vocal music. The requirements
+of the singer are not those of the player. To a performer on the piano,
+who has to light rapidly and simultaneously on a number of tones, or to
+a violinist who has to leap through several octaves with great rapidity,
+the most urgent need is that of a definite and fixed mark, by which the
+absolute pitch of each successive tone may be at once recognised.
+Neither of these has any time to think about the melodious relation of
+the tones; it is quite as much as they can do to find their place on the
+key-board or the string. Rousseau's scheme, or any similar one, fails to
+supply the clear and obvious index to pitch supplied by the old system.
+Old Rameau pointed this out to Rousseau when the scheme was laid before
+him, and Rousseau admitted that the objection was decisive,[330] though
+his admission was not practically deterrent.
+
+His device for expressing change of octave by means of points would
+render the rapid seizing of a particular tone by the performer still
+more difficult, and it is strange that he should have preferred this to
+the other plan suggested, of indicating height of octave by visible
+place above or below a horizontal line. Again, his attempt to simplify
+the many varieties of musical time by reducing them all to the two modes
+of double and triple time, though laudable enough, yet implies an
+imperfect recognition of the full meaning of time, by omitting all
+reference to the distribution of accent and to the average time value of
+the tones in a particular movement.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[318] Quoted in Martin's _Hist. de France_, xvi. 158.
+
+[319] _Conf._, viii. 197. Grimm, _Corr. Lit._, i. 27.
+
+[320] _Lettre sur la Musique Francaise_, 178, etc., 187.
+
+[321] P. 197.
+
+[322] _Corr. Lit._, i. 92. His own piece was _Le petit prophete de
+Boehmischbroda_, the style of which will be seen in a subsequent
+footnote.
+
+[323] He was burnt in effigy by the musicians of the Opera. Grimm,
+_Corr. Lit._, i. 113.
+
+[324] This is Turgot's opinion on the controversy (Letter to Caillard,
+_Oeuv._, ii. 827):--"Tous avez donc vu Jean-Jacques; la musique est un
+excellent passe-port aupres de lui. Quant a l'impossibilite de faire
+de la musique francaise, je ne puis y croire, et votre raison ne me
+parait pas bonne; car il n'est point vrai que l'essence de la langue
+francaise est d'etre sans accent. Point de conversation animee sans
+beaucoup d'accent; mais l'accent est libre et determine seulement par
+l'affection de celui qui parle, sans etre fixe par des conventions sur
+certaines syllabes, quoique nous ayons aussi dans plusieurs mots des
+syllabes dominantes qui seules peuvent etre accentuees."
+
+[325] Musset-Pathay, i. 289.
+
+[326] Preface to _Dissertation sur la Musique Moderne_, pp. 32, 33.
+
+[327] I am indebted to Mr. James Sully, M.A., for furnishing me with
+notes on a technical subject with which I have too little
+acquaintance.
+
+[328] _Dissertation_, p. 42.
+
+[329] P. 52.
+
+[330] _Conf._, vii. 18, 19. Also _Dissertation_, pp. 74, 75.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+VOLTAIRE AND D'ALEMBERT.
+
+
+Everybody in the full tide of the eighteenth century had something to do
+with Voltaire, from serious personages like Frederick the Great and
+Turgot, down to the sorriest poetaster who sent his verses to be
+corrected or bepraised. Rousseau's debt to him in the days of his
+unformed youth we have already seen, as well as the courtesies with
+which they approached one another, when Richelieu employed the
+struggling musician to make some modifications in the great man's
+unconsidered court-piece. Neither of them then dreamed that their two
+names were destined to form the great literary antithesis of the
+century. In the ten years that elapsed between their first interchange
+of letters and their first fit of coldness, it must have been tolerably
+clear to either of them, if either of them gave thought to the matter,
+that their dissidence was increasing and likely to increase. Their
+methods were different, their training different, their points of view
+different, and above all these things, their temperaments were different
+by a whole heaven's breadth.
+
+A great number of excellent and pointed half-truths have been uttered
+by various persons in illustration of all these contrasts. The
+philosophy of Voltaire, for instance, is declared to be that of the
+happy, while Rousseau is the philosopher of the unhappy. Voltaire steals
+away their faith from those who doubt, while Rousseau strikes doubt into
+the mind of the unbeliever. The gaiety of the one saddens, while the
+sadness of the other consoles. If we pass from the marked divergence in
+tendencies, which is imperfectly hinted at in such sayings as these, to
+the divergence between them in all the fundamental conditions of
+intellectual and moral life, then the variation which divided the
+revolutionary stream into two channels, flowing broadly apart through
+unlike regions and climates down to the great sea, is intelligible
+enough. Voltaire was the arch-representative of all those elements in
+contemporary thought, its curiosity, irreverence, intrepidity,
+vivaciousness, rationality, to which, as we have so often had to say,
+Rousseau's temperament and his Genevese spirit made him profoundly
+antipathetic. Voltaire was the great high priest, robed in the dazzling
+vestments of poetry and philosophy and history, of that very religion of
+knowledge and art which Rousseau declared to be the destroyer of the
+felicity of men. The glitter has faded away from Voltaire's philosophic
+raiment since those days, and his laurel bough lies a little leafless.
+Still this can never make us forget that he was in his day and
+generation one of the sovereign emancipators, because he awoke one
+dormant set of energies, just as Rousseau presently came to awake
+another set. Each was a power, not merely by virtue of some singular
+preeminence of understanding or mysterious unshared insight of his own,
+but for a far deeper reason. No partial and one-sided direction can
+permanently satisfy the manifold aspirations and faculties of the human
+mind in the great average of common men, and it is the common average of
+men to whom exceptional thinkers speak, whom they influence, and by whom
+they are in turn influenced, depressed, or buoyed up, just as a painter
+or a dramatist is affected. Voltaire's mental constitution made him
+eagerly objective, a seeker of true things, quivering for action,
+admirably sympathetic with all life and movement, a spirit restlessly
+traversing the whole world. Rousseau, far different from this, saw in
+himself a reflected microcosm of the outer world, and was content to
+take that instead of the outer world, and as its truest version. He made
+his own moods the premisses from which he deduced a system of life for
+humanity, and so far as humanity has shared his moods or some parts of
+them, his system was true, and has been accepted. To him the bustle of
+the outer world was only a hindrance to that process of self-absorption
+which was his way of interpreting life. Accessible only to interests of
+emotion and sense, he was saved from intellectual sterility, and made
+eloquent, by the vehemence of his emotion and the fire of his senses. He
+was a master example of sensibility, as Voltaire was a master example
+of clear-eyed penetration.
+
+This must not be taken for a rigid piece of mutually exclusive division,
+for the edges of character are not cut exactly sharp, as words are.
+Especially when any type is intense, it seems to meet and touch its
+opposite. Just as Voltaire's piercing activity and soundness of
+intelligence made him one of the humanest of men, so Rousseau's
+emotional susceptibility endowed him with the gift of a vision that
+carried far into the social depths. It was a very early criticism on the
+pair, that Voltaire wrote on more subjects, but that Rousseau was the
+more profound. In truth one was hardly much more profound than the
+other. Rousseau had the sonorousness of speech which popular confusion
+of thought is apt to identify with depth. And he had seriousness. If
+profundity means the quality of seeing to the heart of subjects,
+Rousseau had in a general way rather less of it than the shrewd-witted
+crusher of the Infamous. What the distinction really amounts to is that
+Rousseau had a strong feeling for certain very important aspects of
+human life, which Voltaire thought very little about, or never thought
+about at all, and that while Voltaire was concerned with poetry,
+history, literature, and the more ridiculous parts of the religious
+superstition of his time, Rousseau thought about social justice and duty
+and God and the spiritual consciousness of men, with a certain attempt
+at thoroughness and system. As for the substance of his thinking, as we
+have already seen in the Discourses, and shall soon have an opportunity
+of seeing still more clearly, it was often as thin and hollow as if he
+had belonged to the company of the epigrammatical, who, after all, have
+far less of a monopoly of shallow thinking than is often supposed. The
+prime merit of Rousseau, in comparing him with the brilliant chief of
+the rationalistic school of the time, is his reverence; reverence for
+moral worth in however obscure intellectual company, for the dignity of
+human character and the loftiness of duty, for some of those cravings of
+the human mind after the divine and incommensurable, which may indeed
+often be content with solutions proved by long time and slow experience
+to be inadequate, but which are closely bound up with the highest
+elements of nobleness of soul.
+
+It was this spiritual part of him which made Rousseau a third great
+power in the century, between the Encyclopaedic party and the Church. He
+recognised a something in men, which the Encyclopaedists treated as a
+chimera imposed on the imagination by theologians and others for their
+own purposes. And he recognised this in a way which did not offend the
+rational feeling of the times, as the Catholic dogmas offended it. In a
+word he was religious. In being so, he separated himself from Voltaire
+and his school, who did passably well without religion. Again, he was a
+puritan. In being this, he was cut off from the intellectually and
+morally unreformed church, which was then the organ of religion in
+France. Nor is this all. It was Rousseau, and not the feeble
+controversialists put up from time to time by the Jesuits and other
+ecclesiastical bodies, who proved the effective champion of religion,
+and the only power who could make head against the triumphant onslaught
+of the Voltaireans. He gave up Christian dogmas and mysteries, and,
+throwing himself with irresistible ardour upon the emotions in which all
+religions have their root and their power, he breathed new life into
+them, he quickened in men a strong desire to have them satisfied, and he
+beat back the army of emancipators with the loud and incessantly
+repeated cry that they were not come to deliver the human mind, but to
+root out all its most glorious and consolatory attributes. This immense
+achievement accomplished,--the great framework of a faith in God and
+immortality and providential government of the world thus preserved, it
+was an easy thing by and by for the churchmen to come back, and once
+more unpack and restore to their old places the temporarily discredited
+paraphernalia of dogma and mystery. How far all this was good or bad for
+the mental elevation of France and Europe, we shall have a better
+opportunity of considering presently.
+
+We have now only to glance at the first skirmishes between the religious
+reactionist, on the one side, and, on the other, the leader of the
+school who believed that men are better employed in thinking as
+accurately, and knowing as widely, and living as humanely, as all those
+difficult processes are possible, than in wearying themselves in futile
+search after gods who dwell on inaccessible heights.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Voltaire had acknowledged Rousseau's gift of the second Discourse with
+his usual shrewd pleasantry: "I have received your new book against the
+human race, and thank you for it. Never was such cleverness used in the
+design of making us all stupid. One longs in reading your book to walk
+on all fours. But as I have lost that habit for more than sixty years, I
+feel unhappily the impossibility of resuming it. Nor can I embark in
+search of the savages of Canada, because the maladies to which I am
+condemned render a European surgeon necessary to me; because war is
+going on in those regions; and because the example of our actions has
+made the savages nearly as bad as ourselves. So I content myself with
+being a very peaceable savage in the solitude which I have chosen near
+your native place, where you ought to be too." After an extremely
+inadequate discussion of one or two points in the essay,[331] he
+concludes:--"I am informed that your health is bad; you ought to come to
+set it up again in your native air, to enjoy freedom, to drink with me
+the milk of our cows and browse our grass."[332] Rousseau replied to all
+this in a friendly way, recognising Voltaire as his chief, and actually
+at the very moment when he tells us that the corrupting presence of the
+arrogant and seductive man at Geneva helped to make the idea of
+returning to Geneva odious to him, hailing him in such terms as
+these:--"Sensible of the honour you do my country, I share the gratitude
+of my fellow-citizens, and hope that it will increase when they have
+profited by the lessons that you of all men are able to give them.
+Embellish the asylum you have chosen; enlighten a people worthy of your
+instruction; and do you who know so well how to paint virtue and
+freedom, teach us to cherish them in our walls."[333]
+
+Within a year, however, the bright sky became a little clouded. In 1756
+Voltaire published one of the most sincere, energetic, and passionate
+pieces to be found in the whole literature of the eighteenth century,
+his poem on the great earthquake of Lisbon (November 1755). No such word
+had been heard in Europe since the terrible images in which Pascal had
+figured the doom of man. It was the reaction of one who had begun life
+by refuting Pascal with doctrines of cheerfulness drawn from the
+optimism of Pope and Leibnitz, who had done Pope's Essay on Man
+(1732-34) into French verse as late as 1751,[334] and whose imagination,
+already sombred by the triumphant cruelty and superstition which raged
+around him, was suddenly struck with horror by a catastrophe which, in a
+world where whatever is is best, destroyed hundreds of human creatures
+in the smoking ashes and engulfed wreck of their city. How, he cried,
+can you persist in talking of the deliberate will of a free and
+benevolent God, whose eternal laws necessitated such an appalling climax
+of misery and injustice as this? Was the disaster retributive? If so,
+why is Lisbon in ashes, while Paris dances? The enigma is desperate and
+inscrutable, and the optimist lives in the paradise of the fool. We ask
+in vain what we are, where we are, whither we go, whence we came. We are
+tormented atoms on a clod of earth, whom death at last swallows up, and
+with whom destiny meanwhile makes cruel sport. The past is only a
+disheartening memory, and if the tomb destroys the thinking creature,
+how frightful is the present!
+
+Whatever else we may say of Voltaire's poem, it was at least the first
+sign of the coming reaction of sympathetic imagination against the
+polished common sense of the great Queen Anne school, which had for more
+than a quarter of a century such influence in Europe.[335] It is a
+little odd that Voltaire, the most brilliant and versatile branch of
+this stock, should have broken so energetically away from it, and that
+he should have done so, shows how open and how strong was the feeling in
+him for reality and actual circumstance.
+
+Rousseau was amazed that a man overwhelmed as Voltaire was with
+prosperity and glory, should declaim against the miseries of this life
+and pronounce that all is evil and vanity. "Voltaire in seeming always
+to believe in God, never really believed in anybody but the devil, since
+his pretended God is a maleficent being who according to him finds all
+his pleasure in working mischief. The absurdity of this doctrine is
+especially revolting in a man crowned with good things of every sort,
+and who from the midst of his own happiness tries to fill his
+fellow-creatures with despair, by the cruel and terrible image of the
+serious calamities from which he is himself free."[336]
+
+As if any doctrine could be more revolting than this which Rousseau so
+quietly takes for granted, that if it is well with me and I am free from
+calamities, then there must needs be a beneficent ruler of the universe,
+and the calamities of all the rest of the world, if by chance they catch
+the fortunate man's eye, count for nothing in our estimate of the method
+of the supposed divine government. It is hard to imagine a more
+execrable emotion than the complacent religiosity of the prosperous.
+Voltaire is more admirable in nothing than in the ardent humanity and
+far-spreading lively sympathy with which he interested himself in all
+the world's fortunes, and felt the catastrophe of Lisbon as profoundly
+as if the Geneva at his gates had been destroyed. He relished his own
+prosperity keenly enough, but his prosperity became ashes in his mouth
+when he heard of distress or wrong, and he did not rest until he had
+moved heaven and earth to soothe the distress and repair the wrong. It
+was his impatience in the face of the evils of the time which wrung from
+him this desperate cry, and it is precisely because these evils did not
+touch him in his own person, that he merits the greater honour for the
+surpassing energy and sincerity of his feeling for them.
+
+Rousseau, however, whose biographer has no such stories to tell as those
+of Calas and La Barre, Sirven and Lally, but only tales of a maiden
+wrongfully accused of theft, and a friend left senseless on the pavement
+of a strange town, and a benefactress abandoned to the cruelty of her
+fate, still was moved in the midst of his erotic visions in the forest
+of Montmorency to speak a jealous word in vindication of the divine
+government of our world. For him at any rate life was then warm and the
+day bright and the earth very fair, and he lauded his gods accordingly.
+It was his very sensuousness, as we are so often saying, that made him
+religious. The optimism which Voltaire wished to destroy was to him a
+sovereign element of comfort. "Pope's poem," he says, "softens my
+misfortunes and inclines me to patience, while yours sharpens all my
+pains, excites me to murmuring, and reduces me to despair. Pope and
+Leibnitz exhort me to resignation by declaring calamities to be a
+necessary effect of the nature and constitution of the universe. You
+cry, Suffer for ever, unhappy wretch; if there be a God who created
+thee, he could have stayed thy pains if he would: hope for no end to
+them, for there is no reason to be discerned for thy existence, except
+to suffer and to perish."[337] Rousseau then proceeds to argue the
+matter, but he says nothing really to the point which Pope had not said
+before, and said far more effectively. He begins, however, originally
+enough by a triumphant reference to his own great theme of the
+superiority of the natural over the civil state. Moral evil is our own
+work, the result of our liberty; so are most of our physical evils,
+except death, and that is mostly an evil only from the preparations that
+we make for it. Take the case of Lisbon. Was it nature who collected the
+twenty thousand houses, all seven stories high? If the people of Lisbon
+had been dispersed over the face of the country, as wild tribes are,
+they would have fled at the first shock, and they would have been seen
+the next day twenty leagues away, as gay as if nothing had happened. And
+how many of them perished in the attempt to rescue clothes or papers or
+money? Is it not true that the person of a man is now, thanks to
+civilisation, the least part of himself, and is hardly worth saving
+after loss of the rest? Again, there are some events which lose much of
+their horror when we look at them closely. A premature death is not
+always a real evil and may be a relative good; of the people crushed to
+death under the ruins of Lisbon, many no doubt thus escaped still worse
+calamities. And is it worse to be killed swiftly than to await death in
+prolonged anguish?[338]
+
+The good of the whole is to be sought before the good of the part.
+Although the whole material universe ought not to be dearer to its
+Creator than a single thinking and feeling being, yet the system of the
+universe which produces, preserves, and perpetuates all thinking and
+feeling beings, ought to be dearer to him than any one of them, and he
+may, notwithstanding his goodness, or rather by reason of his goodness,
+sacrifice something of the happiness of individuals to the preservation
+of the whole. "That the dead body of a man should feed worms or wolves
+or plants is not, I admit, a compensation for the death of such a man;
+but if in the system of this universe, it is necessary for the
+preservation of the human race that there should be a circulation of
+substance between men, animals, vegetables, then the particular mishap
+of an individual contributes to the general good. I die, I am eaten by
+worms; but my children, my brothers, will live as I have lived; my body
+enriches the earth of which they will consume the fruits; and so I do,
+by the order of nature and for all men, what Codrus, Curtius, the Decii,
+and a thousand others, did of their own free will for a small part of
+men." (p. 305.)
+
+All this is no doubt very well said, and we are bound to accept it as
+true doctrine. Although, however, it may make resignation easier by
+explaining the nature of evil, it does not touch the point of Voltaire's
+outburst, which is that evil exists, and exists in shapes which it is a
+mere mockery to associate with the omnipotence of a benevolent
+controller of the world's forces. According to Rousseau, if we go to the
+root of what he means, there is no such thing as evil, though much that
+to our narrow and impatient sight has the look of it. This may be true
+if we use that fatal word in an arbitrary and unreal sense, for the
+avoidable, the consequent without antecedent, or antecedent without
+consequent. If we consent to talk in this way, and only are careful to
+define terms so that there is no doubt as to their meaning, it is hardly
+deniable that evil is a mere word and not a reality, and whatever is is
+indeed right and best, because no better is within our reach. Voltaire,
+however, like the man of sense that he was, exclaimed that at any rate
+relatively to us poor creatures the existence of pain, suffering, waste,
+whether caused or uncaused, whether in accordance with stern immutable
+law or mere divine caprice, is a most indisputable reality: from our
+point of view it is a cruel puerility to cry out at every calamity and
+every iniquity that all is well in the best of possible worlds, and to
+sing hymns of praise and glory to the goodness and mercy of a being of
+supreme might, who planted us in this evil state and keeps us in it.
+Voltaire's is no perfect philosophy; indeed it is not a philosophy at
+all, but a passionate ejaculation; but it is perfect in comparison with
+a cut and dried system like this of Rousseau's, which rests on a mocking
+juggle with phrases, and the substitution by dexterous sleight of hand
+of one definition for another.
+
+Rousseau really gives up the battle, by confessing frankly that the
+matter is beyond the light of reason, and that, "if the theist only
+founds his sentiment on probabilities, the atheist with still less
+precision only founds his on the alternative possibilities." The
+objections on both sides are insoluble, because they turn on things of
+which men can have no veritable idea; "yet I believe in God as strongly
+as I believe any other truth, because believing and not believing are
+the last things in the world that depend on me." So be it. But why take
+the trouble to argue in favour of one side of an avowedly insoluble
+question? It was precisely because he felt that the objections on both
+sides cannot be answered, that Voltaire, hastily or not, cried out that
+he faced the horrors of such a catastrophe as the Lisbon earthquake
+without a glimpse of consolation. The upshot of Rousseau's remonstrance
+only amounted to this, that he could not furnish one with any
+consolation out of the armoury of reason, that he himself found this
+consolation, but in a way that did not at all depend upon his own effort
+or will, and was therefore as incommunicable as the advantage of having
+a large appetite or being six feet high. The reader of Rousseau becomes
+accustomed to this way of dealing with subjects of discussion. We see
+him using his reason as adroitly as he knows how for three-fourths of
+the debate, and then he suddenly flings himself back with a triumphant
+kind of weariness into the buoyant waters of emotion and sentiment. "You
+sir, who are a poet," once said Madame d'Epinay to Saint Lambert, "will
+agree with me that the existence of a Being, eternal, all powerful, and
+of sovereign intelligence, is at any rate the germ of the finest
+enthusiasm."[339] To take this position and cleave to it may be very
+well, but why spoil its dignity and repose by an unmeaning and
+superfluous flourish of the weapons of the reasoner?
+
+With the same hasty change of direction Rousseau says the true question
+is not whether each of us suffers or not, but whether it is good that
+the universe should be, and whether our misfortunes were inevitable in
+its constitution. Then within a dozen lines he admits that there can be
+no direct proof either way; we must content ourselves with settling it
+by means of inference from the perfections of God. Of course, it is
+clear that in the first place what Rousseau calls the true question
+consists of two quite distinct questions. Is the universe in its present
+ordering on the whole good relatively either to men, or to all sentient
+creatures? Next was evil an inevitable element in that ordering? Second,
+this way of putting it does not in the least advance the case against
+Voltaire, who insisted that no fine phrases ought to hide from us the
+dreadful power and crushing reality of evil and the desolate plight in
+which we are left. This is no exhaustive thought, but a deep cry of
+anguish at the dark lot of men, and of just indignation against the
+philosophy which to creatures asking for bread gave the brightly
+polished stone of sentimental theism. Rousseau urged that Voltaire
+robbed men of their only solace. What Voltaire really did urge was that
+the solace derived from the attribution of humanity and justice to the
+Supreme Being, and from the metaphysical account of evil, rests on too
+narrow a base either to cover the facts, or to be a true solace to any
+man who thinks and observes. He ought to have gone on, if it had only
+been possible in those times, to persuade his readers that there is no
+solace attainable, except that of an energetic fortitude, and that we do
+best to go into life not in a softly lined silken robe, but with a sharp
+sword and armour thrice tempered. As between himself and Rousseau, he
+saw much the more keenly of the two, and this was because he approached
+the matter from the side of the facts, while the latter approached it
+from the side of his own mental comfort and the preconceptions
+involved in it.
+
+The most curious part of this curious letter is the conclusion, where
+Rousseau, loosely wandering from his theme, separates Voltaire from the
+philosopher, and beseeches him to draw up a moral code or profession of
+civil faith that should contain positively the social maxims that
+everybody should be bound to admit, and negatively the intolerant maxims
+that everybody should be forced to reject as seditious. Every religion
+in accord with the code should be allowed, and every religion out of
+accord with it proscribed, or a man might be free to have no other
+religion but the code itself.
+
+Voltaire was much too clear-headed a person to take any notice of
+nonsense like this. Rousseau's letter remained unanswered, nor is there
+any reason to suppose that Voltaire ever got through it, though Rousseau
+chose to think that _Candide_ (1759) was meant for a reply to him.[340]
+He is careful to tell us that he never read that incomparable satire,
+for which one would be disposed to pity any one except Rousseau, whose
+appreciation of wit, if not of humour also, was probably more deficient
+than in any man who ever lived, either in Geneva or any other country
+fashioned after Genevan guise. Rousseau's next letter to Voltaire was
+four years later, and by that time the alienation which had no
+definitely avowed cause, and can be marked by no special date, had
+become complete. "I hate you, in fact," he concluded, "since you have so
+willed it; but I hate you like a man still worthier to have loved you,
+if you had willed it. Of all the sentiments with which my heart was full
+towards you, there only remains the admiration that we cannot refuse to
+your fine genius, and love for your writings. If there is nothing in you
+which I can honour but your talents, that is no fault of mine."[341] We
+know that Voltaire did not take reproach with serenity, and he behaved
+with bitter violence towards Rousseau in circumstances when silence
+would have been both more magnanimous and more humane. Rousseau
+occasionally, though not very often, retaliated in the same vein.[342]
+On the whole his judgment of Voltaire, when calmly given, was not meant
+to be unkind. "Voltaire's first impulse," he said, "is to be good; it is
+reflection that makes him bad."[343] Tronchin had said in the same way
+that Voltaire's heart was the dupe of his understanding. Rousseau is
+always trying to like him, he always recognises him as the first man of
+the time, and he subscribed his mite for the erection of a statue to
+him. It was the satire and mockery in Voltaire which irritated Rousseau
+more than the doctrines or denial of doctrine which they cloaked; in his
+eyes sarcasm was always the veritable dialect of the evil power. It says
+something for the sincerity of his efforts after equitable judgment,
+that he should have had the patience to discern some of the fundamental
+merit of the most remorseless and effective mocker that ever made
+superstition look mean, and its doctors ridiculous.
+
+
+II.
+
+Voltaire was indirectly connected with Rousseau's energetic attack upon
+another great Encyclopaedist leader, the famous Letter to D'Alembert on
+Stage Plays. "There," Rousseau said afterwards, "is my favourite book,
+my Benjamin, because I produced it without effort, at the first
+inspiration, and in the most lucid moments of my life."[344] Voltaire,
+who to us figures so little as a poet and dramatist, was to himself and
+to his contemporaries of this date a poet and dramatist before all else,
+the author of _Zaire_ and _Mahomet_, rather than of _Candide_ and the
+_Philosophical Dictionary_. D'Alembert was Voltaire's staunchest
+henchman. He only wrote his article on Geneva for the Encyclopaedia to
+gratify the master. Fresh from a visit to him when he composed it, he
+took occasion to regret that the austerity of the tradition of the city
+deprived it of the manifold advantages of a theatre. This suggestion had
+its origin partly in a desire to promote something that would please the
+eager vanity of the dramatist whom Geneva now had for so close a
+neighbour, and who had just set her the example by setting up a theatre
+of his own; and partly, also, because it gave the writer an opportunity
+of denouncing the intolerant rigour with which the church nearer home
+treated the stage and all who appeared on it. Geneva was to set an
+example that could not be resisted, and France would no longer see
+actors on the one hand pensioned by the government, and on the other an
+object of anathema, excommunicated by priests and regarded with contempt
+by citizens.[345]
+
+The inveterate hostility of the church to the theatre was manifested by
+the French ecclesiastics in the full eighteenth century as bitterly as
+ever. The circumstance that Voltaire was the great play-writer of the
+time would not tend to soften their traditional prejudice, and the
+persecution of players by priests was in some sense an episode of the
+war between the priest and the philosophers. The latter took up the
+cause of the stage partly because they hoped to make the drama an
+effective rival to the teaching of pulpit and confessional, partly from
+their natural sympathy with an elevated form of intellectual
+manifestation, and partly from their abhorrence of the practical
+inhumanity with which the officers of the church treated stage
+performers. While people of quality eagerly sought the society of those
+who furnished them as much diversion in private as in public, the church
+refused to all players the marriage blessing; when an actor or actress
+wished to marry, they were obliged to renounce the stage, and the
+Archbishop of Paris diligently resisted evasion or subterfuge.[346] The
+atrocities connected with the refusal of burial, as well in the case of
+players as of philosophers, are known to all readers in a dozen
+illustrious instances, from Moliere and Adrienne Lecouvreur downwards.
+
+Here, as along the whole line of the battle between new light and old
+prejudice, Rousseau took part, if not with the church, at least against
+its adversaries. His point of view was at bottom truly puritanical.
+Jeremy Collier in his _Short View of the Profaneness and Immorality of
+the English Stage_ (1698) takes up quite a different position. This once
+famous piece was not a treatment of the general question, but an attack
+on certain specific qualities of the plays of his time--their indecency
+of phrase, their oaths, their abuse of the clergy, the gross libertinism
+of the characters. One can hardly deny that this was richly deserved by
+the English drama of the Restoration, and Collier's strictures were not
+applicable, nor meant to apply, either to the ancients, for he has a
+good word even for Aristophanes, or to the French drama. Bossuet's
+loftier denunciation, like Rousseau's, was puritanical, and it extended
+to the whole body of stage plays. He objected to the drama as a school
+of concupiscence, as a subtle or gross debaucher of the gravity and
+purity of the understanding, as essentially a charmer of the senses, and
+therefore the most equivocal and untrustworthy of teachers. He appeals
+to the fathers, to Scripture, to Plato, and even to Christ, who cried,
+_Woe unto you that laugh_.[347] There is a fine austerity about
+Bossuet's energetic criticism; it is so free from breathless eagerness,
+and so severe without being thinly bitter. The churchmen of a generation
+or two later had fallen from this height into gloomy peevishness.
+
+Rousseau's letter on the theatre, it need hardly be said, is meant to be
+an appeal to the common sense and judgment of his readers, and not
+conceived in the ecclesiastical tone of unctuous anathema and fulgurant
+menace. It is no bishop's pastoral, replete with solecisms of thought
+and idiom, but a piece of firm dialectic in real matter. His position is
+this: that the moral effect of the stage can never be salutary in
+itself, while it may easily be extremely pernicious, and that the habit
+of frequenting the theatre, the taste for imitating the style of the
+actors, the cost in money, the waste in time, and all the other
+accessory conditions, apart from the morality of the matter represented,
+are bad things in themselves, absolutely and in every circumstance.
+Secondly, these effects in all kinds are specially bad in relation to
+the social condition and habits of Geneva.[348] The first part of the
+discussion is an ingenious answer to some of the now trite pleas for
+the morality of the drama, such as that tragedy leads to pity through
+terror, that comedy corrects men while amusing them, that both make
+virtue attractive and vice hateful.[349] Rousseau insists with abundance
+of acutely chosen illustration that the pity that is awaked by tragedy
+is a fleeting emotion which subsides when the curtain falls; that comedy
+as often as not amuses men at the expense of old age, uncouth virtue,
+paternal carefulness, and other objects which we should be taught rather
+to revere than to ridicule; and that both tragedy and comedy, instead of
+making vice hateful, constantly win our sympathy for it. Is not the
+French stage, he asks, as much the triumph of great villains, like
+Catilina, Mahomet, Atreus, as of illustrious heroes?
+
+This rude handling of accepted commonplace is always one of the most
+interesting features in Rousseau's polemic. It was of course a
+characteristic of the eighteenth century always to take up the ethical
+and high prudential view of whatever had to be justified, and Rousseau
+seems from this point to have been successful in demolishing arguments
+which might hold of Greek tragedy at its best, but which certainly do
+not hold of any other dramatic forms. The childishness of the old
+criticism which attaches the label of some moral from the copybook to
+each piece, as its lesson and point of moral aim, is evident. In
+repudiating this Rousseau was certainly right.[350] Both the assailants
+and the defenders of the stage, however, commit the double error, first
+of supposing that the drama is always the same thing, from the Agamemnon
+down to the last triviality of a London theatre, and next of pitching
+the discussion in too high a key, as if the effect or object of a stage
+play in the modern era, where grave sentiment clothes itself in other
+forms, were substantially anything more serious than an evening's
+amusement. Apart from this, and in so far as the discussion is confined
+to the highest dramatic expression, the true answer to Rousseau is now a
+very plain one. The drama does not work in the sphere of direct
+morality, though like everything else in the world it has a moral or
+immoral aspect. It is an art of ideal presentation, not concerned with
+the inculcation of immediate practical lessons, but producing a stir in
+all our sympathetic emotions, quickening the imagination, and so
+communicating a wider life to the character of the spectator. This is
+what the drama in the hands of a worthy master does; it is just what
+noble composition in music does, and there is no more directly
+moralising effect in the one than in the other. You must trust to the
+sum of other agencies to guide the interest and sympathy thus quickened
+into channels of right action. Rousseau, like most other
+controversialists, makes an attack of which the force rests on the
+assumption that the special object of the attack is the single
+influencing element and the one decisive instrument in making men had or
+good. What he says about the drama would only be true if the public went
+to the play all day long, and were accessible to no other moral force
+whatever, modifying and counteracting such lessons as they might learn
+at the theatre. He failed here as in the wider controversy on the
+sciences and arts, to consider the particular subject of discussion in
+relation to the whole of the general medium in which character moves,
+and by whose manifold action and reaction it is incessantly affected and
+variously shaped.
+
+So when he passed on from the theory of dramatic morality to the matter
+which he had more at heart, namely, the practical effects of introducing
+the drama into Geneva, he keeps out of sight all the qualities in the
+Genevese citizen which would protect him against the evil influence of
+the stage, though it is his anxiety for the preservation of these very
+qualities that gives all its fire to his eloquence. If the citizen
+really was what Rousseau insisted that he was, then his virtues would
+surely neutralise the evil of the drama; if not, the drama would do him
+no harm. We need not examine the considerations in which Rousseau
+pointed out the special reasons against introducing a theatre into his
+native town. It would draw the artisans away from their work, cause
+wasteful expenditure of money in amusements, break up the harmless and
+inexpensive little clubs of men and the social gatherings of women. The
+town was not populous enough to support a theatre, therefore the
+government would have to provide one, and this would mean increased
+taxation. All this was the secondary and merely colourable support by
+argumentation, of a position that had been reached and was really held
+by sentiment. Rousseau hated the introduction of French plays in the
+same way that Cato hated the introduction of fine talkers from Greece.
+It was an innovation, and so habitual was it with Rousseau to look on
+all movement in the direction of what the French writers called taste
+and cultivation as depraving, that he cannot help taking for granted
+that any change in manners associated with taste must necessarily be a
+change for the worse. Thus the Letter to D'Alembert was essentially a
+supplement to the first Discourse; it was an application of its
+principles to a practical case. It was part of his general reactionary
+protest against philosophers, poets, men of letters, and all their
+works, without particular apprehension on the side of the drama. Hence
+its reasoning is much less interesting than its panegyric on the
+simplicity, robust courage, and manliness of the Genevese, and its
+invective against the effeminacy and frivolity of the Parisian. One of
+the most significant episodes in the discussion is the lengthy criticism
+on the immortal Misanthrope of Moliere. Rousseau admits it for the
+masterpiece of the comic muse, though with characteristic perversity he
+insists that the hero is not misanthropic enough, nor truly misanthropic
+at all, because he flies into rage at small things affecting himself,
+instead of at the large follies of the race. Again, he says that Moliere
+makes Alceste ridiculous, virtuous as he is, in order to win the
+applause of the pit. It is for the character of Philinte, however, that
+Rousseau reserves all his spleen. He takes care to describe him in terms
+which exactly hit Rousseau's own conception of his philosophic enemies,
+who find all going well because they have no interest in anything going
+better; who are content with everybody, because they do not care for
+anybody; who round a full table maintain that it is not true that the
+people are hungry. As criticism, one cannot value this kind of analysis.
+D'Alembert replied with a much more rational interpretation of the great
+comedy, but finding himself seized with the critic's besetting
+impertinence of improving masterpieces, he suddenly stopped with the
+becoming reflection--"But I perceive, sir, that I am giving lessons to
+Moliere."[351]
+
+The constant thought of Paris gave Rousseau an admirable occasion of
+painting two pictures in violent contrast, each as over-coloured as the
+other by his mixed conceptions of the Plutarchian antique and imaginary
+pastoral. We forget the depravation of the stage and the ill living of
+comedians in magnificent descriptions of the manly exercises and
+cheerful festivities of the free people on the shores of the Lake of
+Geneva, and in scornful satire on the Parisian seraglios, where some
+woman assembles a number of men who are more like women than their
+entertainers. We see on the one side the rude sons of the republic,
+boxing, wrestling, running, in generous emulation, and on the other the
+coxcombs of cultivated Paris imprisoned in a drawing-room, "rising up,
+sitting down, incessantly going and coming to the fire-place, to the
+window, taking up a screen and putting it down again a hundred times,
+turning over books, flitting from picture to picture, turning and
+pirouetting about the room, while the idol stretched motionless on a
+couch all the time is only alive in her tongue and eyes" (p. 161). If
+the rough patriots of the Lake are less polished in speech, they are all
+the weightier in reason; they do not escape by a pleasantry or a
+compliment; each feeling himself attacked by all the forces of his
+adversary, he is obliged to employ all his own to defend himself, and
+this is how a mind acquires strength and precision. There may be here
+and there a licentious phrase, but there is no ground for alarm in that.
+It is not the least rude who are always the most pure, and even a rather
+clownish speech is better than that artificial style in which the two
+sexes seduce one another, and familiarise themselves decently with vice.
+'Tis true our Swiss drinks too much, but after all let us not calumniate
+even vice; as a rule drinkers are cordial and frank, good, upright,
+just, loyal, brave, and worthy folk. Wherever people have most
+abhorrence of drunkenness, be sure they have most reason to fear lest
+its indiscretion should betray intrigue and treachery. In Switzerland it
+is almost thought well of, while at Naples they hold it in horror; but
+at bottom which is the more to be dreaded, the intemperance of the Swiss
+or the reserve of the Italian? It is hardly surprising to learn that the
+people of Geneva were as little gratified by this well-meant panegyric
+on their jollity as they had been by another writer's friendly eulogy on
+their Socinianism.[352]
+
+The reader who was not moved to turn brute and walk on all fours by the
+pictures of the state of nature in the Discourses, may find it more
+difficult to resist the charm of the brotherly festivities and simple
+pastimes which in the Letter to D'Alembert the patriot holds up to the
+admiration of his countrymen and the envy of foreigners. The writer is
+in Sparta, but he tempers his Sparta with a something from Charmettes.
+Never before was there so attractive a combination of martial austerity
+with the grace of the idyll. And the interest of these pictures is much
+more than literary; it is historic also. They were the original version
+of those great gatherings in the Champ de Mars and strange suppers of
+fraternity during the progress of the Revolution in Paris, which have
+amused the cynical ever since, but which pointed to a not unworthy
+aspiration. The fine gentlemen whom Rousseau did so well to despise had
+then all fled, and the common people under Rousseauite leaders were
+doing the best they could to realise on the banks of the Seine the
+imaginary joymaking and simple fellowship which had been first dreamed
+of for the banks of Lake Leman, and commended with an eloquence that
+struck new chords in minds satiated or untouched by the brilliance of
+mere literature. There was no real state of things in Geneva
+corresponding to the gracious picture which Rousseau so generously
+painted, and some of the citizens complained that his account of their
+social joys was as little deserved as his ingenious vindication of their
+hearty feeling for barrel or bottle was little founded.[353]
+
+The glorification of love of country did little for the Genevese for
+whom it was meant, but it penetrated many a soul in the greater nation
+that lay sunk in helpless indifference to its own ruin. Nowhere else
+among the writers who are the glory of France at this time, is any
+serious eulogy of patriotism. Rousseau glows with it, and though he
+always speaks in connection with Geneva, yet there is in his words a
+generous breadth and fire which gave them an irresistible
+contagiousness. There are many passages of this fine persuasive force in
+the Letter to D'Alembert; perhaps this, referring to the citizens of
+Geneva who had gone elsewhere in search of fortune, is as good as
+another. Do you think that the opening of a theatre, he asks, will bring
+them back to their mother city? No; "each of them must feel that he can
+never find anywhere else what he has left behind in his own land; an
+invincible charm must call him back to the spot that he ought never to
+have quitted; the recollection of their first exercises, their first
+pleasures, their first sights, must remain deeply graven in their
+hearts; the soft impressions made in the days of their youth must abide
+and grow stronger with advancing years, while a thousand others wax dim;
+in the midst of the pomp of great cities and all their cheerless
+magnificence, a secret voice must for ever cry in the depth of the
+wanderer's soul, Ah, where are the games and holidays of my youth? Where
+is the concord of the townsmen, where the public brotherhood? Where is
+pure joy and true mirth? Where are peace, freedom, equity? Let us hasten
+to seek all these. With the heart of a Genevese, with a city as smiling,
+a landscape as full of delight, a government as just, with pleasures so
+true and so pure, and all that is needed to be able to relish them, how
+is it that we do not all adore our birth-land? It was thus in old times
+that by modest feasts and homely games her citizens were called back by
+that Sparta which I can never quote often enough as an example for us;
+thus in Athens in the midst of fine art, thus in Susa in the very bosom
+of luxury and soft delights, the wearied Spartan sighed after his coarse
+pastimes and exhausting exercises" (p. 211).[354]
+
+Any reference to this powerfully written, though most sophistical
+piece, would be imperfect which should omit its slightly virulent
+onslaught upon women and the passion which women inspire. The modern
+drama, he said, being too feeble to rise to high themes, has fallen back
+on love; and on this hint he proceeds to a censure of love as a poetic
+theme, and a bitter estimate of women as companions for men, which might
+have pleased Calvin or Knox in his sternest mood. The same eloquence
+which showed men the superior delights of the state of nature, now shows
+the superior fitness of the oriental seclusion of women; it makes a
+sympathetic reader tremble at the want of modesty, purity, and decency,
+in the part which women are allowed to take by the infatuated men of a
+modern community.
+
+All this, again, is directed against "that philosophy of a day, which is
+born and dies in the corner of a city, and would fain stifle the cry of
+nature and the unanimous voice of the human race" (p. 131). The same
+intrepid spirits who had brought reason to bear upon the current notions
+of providence, inspiration, ecclesiastical tradition, and other
+unlighted spots in the human mind, had perceived that the subjection of
+women to a secondary place belonged to the same category, and could not
+any more successfully be defended by reason. Instead of raging against
+women for their boldness, their frivolousness, and the rest, as our
+passionate sentimentalist did, the opposite school insisted that all
+these evils were due to the folly of treating women with gallantry
+instead of respect, and to the blindness of refusing an equally vigorous
+and masculine education to those who must be the closest companions of
+educated man. This was the view forced upon the most rational observers
+of a society where women were so powerful, and so absolutely unfit by
+want of intellectual training for the right use of social power.
+D'Alembert expressed this view in a few pages of forcible pleading in
+his reply to Rousseau,[355] and some thirty-two years later, when all
+questions had become political (1790), Condorcet ably extended the same
+line of argument so as to make it cover the claims of women to all the
+rights of citizenship.[356] From the nature of the case, however, it is
+impossible to confute by reason a man who denies that the matter in
+dispute is within the decision and jurisdiction of reason, and who
+supposes that his own opinion is placed out of the reach of attack when
+he declares it to be the unanimous voice of the human race. We may
+remember that the author of this philippic against love was at the very
+moment brooding over the New Heloisa, and was fresh from strange
+transports at the feet of the Julie whom we know.
+
+The Letter on the Stage was the definite mark of Rousseau's schism from
+the philosophic congregation. Has Jean Jacques turned a father of the
+church? asked Voltaire. Deserters who fight against their country ought
+to be hung. The little flock are falling to devouring one another. This
+arch-madman, who might have been something, if he would only have been
+guided by his brethren of the Encyclopaedia, takes it into his head to
+make a band of his own. He writes against the stage, after writing a bad
+play of his own. He finds four or five rotten staves of Diogenes' tub,
+and instals himself therein to bark at his friends.[357] D'Alembert was
+more tolerant, but less clear-sighted. He insisted that the little flock
+should do its best to heal divisions instead of widening them. Jean
+Jacques, he said, "is a madman who is very clever, and who is only
+clever when he is in a fever; it is best therefore neither to cure nor
+to insult him."
+
+Rousseau made the preface to the Letter on the Stage an occasion for a
+proclamation of his final breach with Diderot. "I once," he said,
+"possessed a severe and judicious Aristarchus; I have him no longer, and
+wish for him no longer." To this he added in a footnote a passage from
+Ecclesiasticus, to the effect that if you have drawn a sword on a friend
+there still remains a way open, and if you have spoken cheerless words
+to him concord is still possible, but malicious reproach and the
+betrayal of a secret--these things banish friendship beyond return. This
+was the end of his personal connection with the men whom he always
+contemptuously called the Holbachians. After 1760 the great stream
+divided into two; the rationalist and the emotional schools became
+visibly antipathetic, and the voice of the epoch was no longer single or
+undistracted.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[331] See above p. 149.
+
+[332] Voltaire to Rousseau. Aug. 30, 1755.
+
+[333] _Corr._, i. 237. Sept. 10, 1755.
+
+[334] _La Loi Naturelle._
+
+[335] In 1754 the Berlin Academy proposed for a prize essay, An
+Examination of Pope's System, and Lessing the next year wrote a
+pamphlet to show that Pope had no system, but only a patchwork. See
+Mr. Pattison's _Introduction to Pope's Essay on Man_, p. 12. Sime's
+_Lessing_, i. 128.
+
+[336] _Conf._ ix. 276.
+
+[337] _Corr._, i. 289-316. Aug. 18, 1756.
+
+[338] Joseph De Maistre put all this much more acutely; _Soirees_, iv.
+
+[339] Madame d'Epinay, _Mem._, i. 380.
+
+[340] _Conf._, ix. 277. Also _Corr._, iii. 326. March 11, 1764.
+Tronchin's long letter, to which Rousseau refers in this passage, is
+given in M. Streckeisen-Moultou's collection, i. 323, and is
+interesting to people who care to know how Voltaire looked to a doctor
+who saw him closely.
+
+[341] _Corr._, ii. 132. June 17, 1760. Also _Conf._, x. 91.
+
+[342] Some other interesting references to Voltaire in Rousseau's
+letters are--ii. 170 (Nov. 29, 1760), denouncing Voltaire as "that
+trumpet of impiety, that fine genius, and that low soul," and so
+forth; iii. 29 (Oct. 30, 1762), accusing Voltaire of malicious
+intrigues against him in Switzerland; iii. 168 (Mar. 21, 1763), that
+if there is to be any reconciliation, Voltaire must make first
+advances; iii. 280 (Dec., 1763), described a trick played by Voltaire;
+iv. 40 (Jan. 31, 1765) 64; _Corr._, v. 74 (Jan. 5, 1767), replying to
+Voltaire's calumnious account of his early life; note on this subject
+giving Voltaire the lie direct, iv. 150 (May 31, 1765); the _Lettre a
+D'Almbert_, p. 193, etc.
+
+[343] Bernardin St. Pierre, xii. 96. In the same sense, in Dusaulx,
+_Mes Rapports avec J.J.R._, (Paris: 1798), p. 101. See also _Corr._,
+iv. 254. Dec. 30, 1765. And again, iv. 276, Feb. 28, 1766, and p. 356.
+
+[344] Dusaulx, p. 102.
+
+[345] This part of D'Alembert's article is reproduced in Rousseau's
+preface, and the whole is given at the end of the volume in M.
+Auguis's edition, p. 409.
+
+[346] Goncourt, _Femme au 18ieme siecle_, p. 256. Grimm, _Corr. Lit._,
+vi. 248.
+
+[347] _Maximes sur la Comedie_, Sec.15, etc. They were written in reply
+to a plea for Comedy by Caffaro, a Jesuit father.
+
+[348] The letter may be conveniently divided into three parts: I. pp.
+1-89, II. pp. 90-145, III. pp. 146 to the end. Of course if Rousseau
+in saying that tragedy leads to pity through terror, was thinking of
+the famous passage in the sixth chapter of Aristotle's _Poetics_, he
+was guilty of a shocking mistranslation.
+
+[349] Some of the arguments seem drawn from Plato; see, besides the
+well-known passages in the _Republic_, the _Laws_, iv. 719, and still
+more directly, _Gorgias_, 502.
+
+[350] Yet D'Alembert in his very cool and sensible reply (p. 245)
+repeats the old saws, as that in _Catilina_ we learn the lesson of the
+harm which may be done to the human race by the abuse of great
+talents, and so forth.
+
+[351] _Lettre a M. J.J. Rousseau_, p. 258.
+
+[352] D'Alembert's _Lettre a J.J. Rousseau_, p. 277. Rousseau has a
+passage to the same effect, that false people are always sober, in the
+_Nouv. Hel., _Pt. I. xxiii. 123.
+
+[353] Tronchin, for instance, in a letter to Rousseau, in M.
+Streckeisen-Moultou's collection, i. 325.
+
+[354] A troop of comedians had been allowed to play for a short time
+in Geneva, with many protests, during the mediation of 1738. In 1766,
+eight years after Rousseau's letter, the government gave permission
+for the establishment of a theatre in the town. It was burnt down in
+1768, and Voltaire spitefully hinted that the catastrophe was the
+result of design, instigated by Rousseau (_Corr._ v. 299, April 26,
+1768). The theatre was not re-erected until 1783, when the oligarchic
+party regained the ascendancy and brought back with them the drama,
+which the democrats in their reign would not permit.
+
+[355] _Lettre a J.J. Rousseau_, pp. 265-271.
+
+[356] _Oeuv._, x. 121.
+
+[357] To Thieriot, Sept. 17, 1758. To D'Alembert, Oct. 20, 1761. _Ib._
+March 19, 1761.
+
+
+END OF VOL. I.
+
+
+_Printed by_ R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, _Edinburgh_
+
+
+
+                       *  *  *  *  *
+
+
+
+ROUSSEAU
+
+
+BY
+
+JOHN MORLEY
+
+
+VOL. II.
+
+
+London
+MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
+NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
+1905
+
+_All rights reserved_
+
+_First printed in this form 1886_
+_Reprinted 1888, 1891, 1896, 1900, 1905_
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS OF VOL. II.
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+MONTMORENCY--THE NEW HELOISA.
+
+Conditions preceding the composition of the New Heloisa 1
+
+The Duke and Duchess of Luxembourg 2
+
+Rousseau and his patrician acquaintances 4
+
+Peaceful life at Montmorency 9
+
+Equivocal prudence occasionally shown by Rousseau 12
+
+His want of gratitude for commonplace service 13
+
+Bad health, and thoughts of suicide 16
+
+Episode of Madame Latour de Franqueville 17
+
+Relation of the New Heloisa to Rousseau's general doctrine 20
+
+Action of the first part of the story 25
+
+Contrasted with contemporary literature 25
+
+And with contemporary manners 27
+
+Criticism of the language and principal actors 28, 29
+
+Popularity of the New Heloisa 31
+
+Its reactionary intellectual direction 33
+
+Action of the second part 35, 36
+
+Its influence on Goethe and others 38
+
+Distinction between Rousseau and his school 40
+
+Singular pictures of domesticity 42
+
+Sumptuary details 44
+
+The slowness of movement in the work justified 46
+
+Exaltation of marriage 47
+
+Equalitarian tendencies 49
+
+Not inconsistent with social quietism 51
+
+Compensation in the political consequences of the triumph of sentiment
+54
+
+Circumstances of the publication of the New Heloisa 55
+
+Nature of the trade in books 57
+
+Malesherbes and the printing of Emilius 61
+
+Rousseau's suspicions 62
+
+The great struggle of the moment 64
+
+Proscription of Emilius 67
+
+Flight of the author 67
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+PERSECUTION.
+
+Rousseau's journey from Switzerland 69
+
+Absence of vindictiveness 70
+
+Arrival at Yverdun 72
+
+Repairs to Motiers 73
+
+Relations with Frederick the Great 74
+
+Life at Motiers 77
+
+Lord Marischal 79
+
+Voltaire 81
+
+Rousseau's letter to the Archbishop of Paris 83
+
+Its dialectic 86
+
+The ministers of Neuchatel 90
+
+Rousseau's singular costume 92
+
+His throng of visitors 93
+
+Lewis, prince of Wuertemberg 95
+
+Gibbon 96
+
+Boswell 98
+
+Corsican affairs 99
+
+The feud at Geneva 102
+
+Rousseau renounces his citizenship 105
+
+The Letters from the Mountain 106
+
+Political side 107
+
+Consequent persecution at Motiers 107
+
+Flight to the isle of St. Peter 108
+
+The fifth of the _Reveries_ 109
+
+Proscription by the government of Berne 116
+
+Rousseau's singular request 116
+
+His renewed flight 117
+
+Persuaded to seek shelter in England 118
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+THE SOCIAL CONTRACT.
+
+Rousseau's reaction against perfectibility 119
+
+Abandonment of the position of the Discourses 121
+
+Doubtful idea of equality 121
+
+The Social Contract, a repudiation of the historic method 124
+
+Yet it has glimpses of relativity 127
+
+Influence of Greek examples 129
+
+And of Geneva 131
+
+Impression upon Robespierre and Saint Just 132
+
+Rousseau's scheme implied a small territory 135
+
+Why the Social Contract made fanatics 137
+
+Verbal quality of its propositions 138
+
+The doctrine of public safety 143
+
+The doctrine of the sovereignty of peoples 144
+
+Its early phases 144
+
+Its history in the sixteenth century 146
+
+Hooker and Grotius 148
+
+Locke 149
+
+Hobbes 151
+
+Central propositions of the Social Contract--
+
+  1. Origin of society in compact 154
+     Different conception held by the Physiocrats 156
+
+  2. Sovereignty of the body thus constituted 158
+     Difference from Hobbes and Locke 159
+     The root of socialism 160
+     Republican phraseology 161
+
+  3. Attributes of sovereignty 162
+
+  4. The law-making power 163
+     A contemporary illustration 164
+     Hints of confederation 166
+
+  5. Forms of government 168
+     Criticism on the common division 169
+     Rousseau's preference for elective aristocracy 172
+
+  6. Attitude of the state to religion 173
+     Rousseau's view, the climax of a reaction 176
+     Its effect at the French Revolution 179
+     Its futility 180
+
+Another method of approaching the philosophy of government--
+
+  Origin of society not a compact 183
+
+  The true reason of the submission of a minority to a majority 184
+
+  Rousseau fails to touch actual problems 186
+
+  The doctrine of resistance, for instance 188
+
+  Historical illustrations 190
+
+  Historical effect of the Social Contract in France and Germany 193
+
+  Socialist deductions from it 194
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+EMILIUS.
+
+Rousseau touched by the enthusiasm of his time 197
+
+Contemporary excitement as to education, part of the revival of
+  naturalism 199
+
+I.--Locke, on education 202
+    Difference between him and Rousseau 204
+    Exhortations to mothers 205
+    Importance of infantile habits 208
+    Rousseau's protest against reasoning with children 209
+    Criticised 209
+    The opposite theory 210
+    The idea of property 212
+    Artificially contrived incidents 214
+    Rousseau's omission of the principle of authority 215
+    Connected with his neglect of the faculty of sympathy 219
+
+II.--Rousseau's ideal of living 221
+    The training that follows from it 222
+    The duty of knowing a craft 223
+    Social conception involved in this moral conception 226
+
+III.--Three aims before the instructor 229
+      Rousseau's omission of training for the social conscience 230
+      No contemplation of society as a whole 232
+      Personal interest, the foundation of the morality of Emilius 233
+      The sphere and definition of the social conscience 235
+
+IV.--The study of history 237
+     Rousseau's notions upon the subject 239
+
+V.--Ideals of life for women 241
+    Rousseau's repudiation of his own principles 242
+    His oriental and obscurantist position 243
+    Arising from his want of faith in improvement 244
+    His reactionary tendencies in this region eventually
+      neutralised 248
+
+VI.--Sum of the merits of Emilius 249
+     Its influence in France and Germany 251
+     In England 252
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+THE SAVOYARD VICAR.
+
+Shallow hopes entertained by the dogmatic atheists 256
+
+The good side of the religious reaction 258
+
+Its preservation of some parts of Christian influence 259
+
+Earlier forms of deism 260
+
+The deism of the Savoyard Vicar 264
+
+The elevation of man, as well as the restoration of a divinity 265
+
+A divinity for fair weather 268
+
+Religious self-denial 269
+
+The Savoyard Vicar's vital omission 270
+
+His position towards Christianity 272
+
+Its effectiveness as a solvent 273
+
+Weakness of the subjective test 276
+
+The Savoyard Vicar's deism not compatible with growing intellectual
+  conviction 276
+
+The true satisfaction of the religious emotion 277
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+ENGLAND.
+
+Rousseau's English portrait 281
+
+His reception in Paris 282
+
+And in London 283
+
+Hume's account of him 284
+
+Settlement at Wootton 286
+
+The quarrel with Hume 287
+
+Detail of the charges against Hume 287-291
+
+Walpole's pretended letter from Frederick 291
+
+Baselessness of the whole delusion 292
+
+Hume's conduct in the quarrel 293
+
+The war of pamphlets 295
+
+Common theory of Rousseau's madness 296
+
+Preparatory conditions 297
+
+Extension of disorder from the affective life to the intelligence 299
+
+The Confessions 301
+
+His life at Wootton 306
+
+Flight from Derbyshire 306
+
+And from England 308
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+THE END.
+
+The elder Mirabeau 309
+
+Shelters Rousseau at Fleury 311
+
+Rousseau at Trye 312
+
+In Dauphiny 314
+
+Return to Paris 314
+
+The _Reveries_ 315
+
+Life in Paris 316
+
+Bernardin de St. Pierre's account of him 317
+
+An Easter excursion 320
+
+Rousseau's unsociality 322
+
+Poland and Spain 324
+
+Withdrawal to Ermenonville 326
+
+His death 326
+
+
+
+
+ROUSSEAU.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+MONTMORENCY--THE NEW HELOISA.
+
+
+The many conditions of intellectual productiveness are still hidden in
+such profound obscurity that we are unable to explain why a period of
+stormy moral agitation seems to be in certain natures the
+indispensable antecedent of their highest creative effort. Byron is
+one instance, and Rousseau is another, in which the current of
+stimulating force made this rapid way from the lower to the higher
+parts of character, and only expended itself after having traversed
+the whole range of emotion and faculty, from their meanest, most
+realistic, most personal forms of exercise, up to the summit of what
+is lofty and ideal. No man was ever involved in such an odious
+complication of moral maladies as beset Rousseau in the winter of
+1758. Yet within three years of this miserable epoch he had completed
+not only the New Heloisa, which is the monument of his fall, but the
+Social Contract, which was the most influential, and Emilius, which
+was perhaps the most elevated and spiritual, of all the productions of
+the prolific genius of France in the eighteenth century. A poor
+light-hearted Marmontel thought that the secret of Rousseau's success
+lay in the circumstance that he began to write late, and it is true
+that no other author, so considerable as Rousseau, waited until the
+age of fifty for the full vigour of his inspiration. No tale of years,
+however, could have ripened such fruit without native strength and
+incommunicable savour. Nor can the mechanical movement of those better
+ordered characters which keep the balance of the world even, impart to
+literature that peculiar quality, peculiar but not the finest, that
+comes from experience of the black unlighted abysses of the soul.
+
+The period of actual production was externally calm. The New Heloisa
+was completed in 1759, and published in 1761. The Social Contract was
+published in the spring of 1762, and Emilius a few weeks later.
+Throughout this period Rousseau was, for the last time in his life, at
+peace with most of his fellows. Though he never relented from his
+antipathy to the Holbachians, for the time it slumbered, until a more
+real and serious persecution than any which he imputed to them,
+transformed his antipathy into a gloomy frenzy.
+
+The new friends whom he made at Montmorency were among the greatest
+people in the kingdom. The Duke of Luxembourg (1702-64) was a marshal
+of France, and as intimate a friend of the king as the king was
+capable of having. The Marechale de Luxembourg (1707-87) had been one
+of the most beautiful, and continued to be one of the most brilliant
+leaders of the last aristocratic generation that was destined to sport
+on the slopes of the volcano. The former seems to have been a loyal
+and homely soul; the latter, restless, imperious, penetrating,
+unamiable. Their dealings with Rousseau were marked by perfect
+sincerity and straightforward friendship. They gave him a convenient
+apartment in a small summer lodge in the park, to which he retreated
+when he cared for a change from his narrow cottage. He was a constant
+guest at their table, where he met the highest personages in France.
+The marshal did not disdain to pay him visits, or to walk with him, or
+to discuss his private affairs. Unable as ever to shine in
+conversation, yet eager to show his great friends that they had to do
+with no common mortal, Rousseau bethought him of reading the New
+Heloisa aloud to them. At ten in the morning he used to wait upon the
+marechale, and there by her bedside he read the story of the love, the
+sin, the repentance of Julie, the distraction of Saint Preux, the
+wisdom of Wolmar, and the sage friendship of Lord Edward, in tones
+which enchanted her both with his book and its author for all the rest
+of the day, as all the women in France were so soon to be
+enchanted.[1] This, as he expected, amply reconciled her to the
+uncouthness and clumsiness of his conversation, which was at least as
+maladroit and as spiritless in the presence of a duchess as it was in
+presences less imposing.
+
+One side of character is obviously tested by the way in which a man
+bears himself in his relations with those of greater social
+consideration. Rousseau was taxed by some of his plebeian enemies with
+a most unheroic deference to his patrician friends. He had a dog whose
+name was _Duc_. When he came to sit at a duke's table, he changed his
+dog's name to _Turc_.[2] Again, one day in a transport of tenderness
+he embraced the old marshal--the duchess embraced Rousseau ten times a
+day, for the age was effusive--"Ah, monsieur le marechal, I used to
+hate the great before I knew you, and I hate them still more, since
+you make me feel so strongly how easy it would be for them to have
+themselves adored."[3] On another occasion he happened to be playing
+at chess with the Prince of Conti, who had come to visit him in his
+cottage.[4] In spite of the signs and grimaces of the attendants, he
+insisted on beating the prince in a couple of games. Then he said with
+respectful gravity, "Monseigneur, I honour your serene highness too
+much not to beat you at chess always."[5] A few days after, the
+vanquished prince sent him a present of game which Rousseau duly
+accepted. The present was repeated, but this time Rousseau wrote to
+Madame de Boufflers that he would receive no more, and that he loved
+the prince's conversation better than his gifts.[6] He admits that
+this was an ungracious proceeding, and that to refuse game "from a
+prince of the blood who throws such good feeling into the present, is
+not so much the delicacy of a proud man bent on preserving his
+independence, as the rusticity of an unmannerly person who does not
+know his place."[7] Considering the extreme virulence with which
+Rousseau always resented gifts even of the most trifling kind from his
+friends, one may perhaps find some inconsistency in this condemnation
+of a sort of conduct to which he tenaciously clung on all other
+occasions. If the fact of the donor being a prince of the blood is
+allowed to modify the quality of the donation, that is hardly a
+defensible position in the austere citizen of Geneva. Madame de
+Boufflers,[8] the intimate friend of our sage Hume, and the yet more
+intimate friend of the Prince of Conti, gave him a judicious warning
+when she bade him beware of laying himself open to a charge of
+affectation, lest it should obscure the brightness of his virtue and
+so hinder its usefulness. "Fabius and Regulus would have accepted such
+marks of esteem, without feeling in them any hurt to their
+disinterestedness and frugality."[9] Perhaps there is a flutter of
+self-consciousness that is not far removed from this affectation, in
+the pains which Rousseau takes to tell us that after dining at the
+castle, he used to return home gleefully to sup with a mason who was
+his neighbour and his friend.[10] On the whole, however, and so far as
+we know, Rousseau conducted himself not unworthily with these high
+people. His letters to them are for the most part marked by
+self-respect and a moderate graciousness, though now and again he
+makes rather too much case of the difference of rank, and asserts his
+independence with something too much of protestation.[11] Their
+relations with him are a curious sign of the interest which the
+members of the great world took in the men who were quietly preparing
+the destruction both of them and their world. The Marechale de
+Luxembourg places this squalid dweller in a hovel on her estate in the
+place of honour at her table, and embraces his Theresa. The Prince of
+Conti pays visits of courtesy and sends game to a man whom he employs
+at a few sous an hour to copy manuscript for him. The Countess of
+Boufflers, in sending him the money, insists that he is to count her
+his warmest friend.[12] When his dog dies, the countess writes to
+sympathise with his chagrin, and the prince begs to be allowed to
+replace it.[13] And when persecution and trouble and infinite
+confusion came upon him, they all stood as fast by him as their own
+comfort would allow. Do we not feel that there must have been in the
+unhappy man, besides all the recorded pettinesses and perversities
+which revolt us in him, a vein of something which touched men, and
+made women devoted to him, until he splenetically drove both men and
+women away from him? With Madame d'Epinay and Madame d'Houdetot, as
+with the dearer and humbler patroness of his youth, we have now parted
+company. But they are instantly succeeded by new devotees. And the
+lovers of Rousseau, in all degrees, were not silly women led captive
+by idle fancy. Madame de Boufflers was one of the most distinguished
+spirits of her time. Her friendship for him was such, that his
+sensuous vanity made Rousseau against all reason or probability
+confound it with a warmer form of emotion, and he plumes himself in a
+manner most displeasing on the victory which he won over his own
+feelings on the occasion.[14] As a matter of fact he had no feelings
+to conquer, any more than the supposed object of them ever bore him
+any ill-will for his indifference, as in his mania of suspicion he
+afterwards believed.
+
+There was a calm about the too few years he passed at Montmorency,
+which leaves us in doubt whether this mania would ever have afflicted
+him, if his natural irritation had not been made intense and
+irresistible by the cruel distractions that followed the publication
+of Emilius. He was tolerably content with his present friends. The
+simplicity of their way of dealing with him contrasted singularly, as
+he thought, with the never-ending solicitudes, as importunate as they
+were officious, of the patronising friends whom he had just cast
+off.[15] Perhaps, too, he was soothed by the companionship of persons
+whose rank may have flattered his vanity, while unlike Diderot and his
+old literary friends in Paris, they entered into no competition with
+him in the peculiar sphere of his own genius. Madame de Boufflers,
+indeed, wrote a tragedy, but he told her gruffly enough that it was a
+plagiarism from Southerne's Oroonoko.[16] That Rousseau was
+thoroughly capable of this pitiful emotion of sensitive literary
+jealousy is proved, if by nothing else, by his readiness to suspect
+that other authors were jealous of him. No one suspects others of a
+meanness of this kind unless he is capable of it himself. The
+resounding success which followed the New Heloisa and Emilius put an
+end to these apprehensions. It raised him to a pedestal in popular
+esteem as high as that on which Voltaire stood triumphant. That very
+success unfortunately brought troubles which destroyed Rousseau's last
+chance of ending his days in full reasonableness.
+
+Meanwhile he enjoyed his final interval of moderate wholesomeness and
+peace. He felt his old healthy joy in the green earth. One of the
+letters commemorates his delight in the great scudding south-west
+winds of February, soft forerunners of the spring, so sweet to all who
+live with nature.[17] At the end of his garden was a summer-house, and
+here even on wintry days he sat composing or copying. It was not music
+only that he copied. He took a curious pleasure in making transcripts
+of his romance, and he sold them to the Duchess of Luxembourg and
+other ladies for some moderate fee.[18] Sometimes he moved from his
+own lodging to the quarters in the park which his great friends had
+induced him to accept. "They were charmingly neat; the furniture was
+of white and blue. It was in this perfumed and delicious solitude, in
+the midst of woods and streams and choirs of birds of every kind,
+with the fragrance of the orange-flower poured round me, that I
+composed in a continual ecstasy the fifth book of Emilius. With what
+eagerness did I hasten every morning at sunrise to breathe the balmy
+air! What good coffee I used to make under the porch in company with
+my Theresa! The cat and the dog made up the party. That would have
+sufficed me for all the days of my life, and I should never have known
+weariness." And so to the assurance, so often repeated under so many
+different circumstances, that here was a true heaven upon earth, where
+if fates had only allowed he would have known unbroken innocence and
+lasting happiness.[19]
+
+Yet he had the wisdom to warn others against attempting a life such as
+he craved for himself. As on a more memorable occasion, there came to
+him a young man who would fain have been with him always, and whom he
+sent away exceeding sorrowful. "The first lesson I should give you
+would be not to surrender yourself to the taste you say you have for
+the contemplative life. It is only an indolence of the soul, to be
+condemned at any age, but especially so at yours. Man is not made to
+meditate, but to act. Labour therefore in the condition of life in
+which you have been placed by your family and by providence: that is
+the first precept of the virtue which you wish to follow. If residence
+at Paris, joined to the business you have there, seems to you
+irreconcilable with virtue, do better still, and return to your own
+province. Go live in the bosom of your family, serve and solace your
+honest parents. There you will be truly fulfilling the duties that
+virtue imposes on you."[20] This intermixture of sound sense with
+unutterable perversities almost suggests a doubt how far the
+perversities were sincere, until we remember that Rousseau even in the
+most exalted part of his writings was careful to separate immediate
+practical maxims from his theoretical principles of social
+philosophy.[21]
+
+Occasionally his good sense takes so stiff and unsympathetic a form as
+to fill us with a warmer dislike for him than his worst paradoxes
+inspire. A correspondent had written to him about the frightful
+persecutions which were being inflicted on the Protestants in some
+district of France. Rousseau's letter is a masterpiece in the style of
+Eliphaz the Temanite. Our brethren must surely have given some pretext
+for the evil treatment to which they were subjected. One who is a
+Christian must learn to suffer, and every man's conduct ought to
+conform to his doctrine. Our brethren, moreover, ought to remember
+that the word of God is express upon the duty of obeying the laws set
+up by the prince. The writer cannot venture to run any risk by
+interceding in favour of our brethren with the government. "Every one
+has his own calling upon the earth; mine is to tell the public harsh
+but useful truths. I have preached humanity, gentleness, tolerance, so
+far as it depended upon me; 'tis no fault of mine if the world has not
+listened. I have made it a rule to keep to general truths; I produce
+no libels, no satires; I attack no man, but men; not an action, but a
+vice."[22] The worst of the worthy sort of people, wrote Voltaire, is
+that they are such cowards: a man groans over a wrong, he holds his
+tongue, he takes his supper, and he forgets all about it.[23] If
+Voltaire could not write like Fenelon, at least he could never talk
+like Tartufe; he responded to no tale of wrong with words about his
+mission, with strings of antitheses, but always with royal anger and
+the spring of alert and puissant endeavour. In an hour of oppression
+one would rather have been the friend of the saviour of the Calas and
+of Sirven, than of the vindicator of theism.
+
+Rousseau, however, had good sense enough in less equivocal forms than
+this. For example, in another letter he remonstrates with a
+correspondent for judging the rich too harshly. "You do not bear in
+mind that having from their childhood contracted a thousand wants
+which we are without, then to bring them down to the condition of the
+poor, would be to make them more miserable than the poor. We should be
+just towards all the world, even to those who are not just to us. Ah,
+if we had the virtues opposed to the vices which we reproach in them,
+we should soon forget that such people were in the world. One word
+more. To have any right to despise the rich, we ought ourselves to be
+prudent and thrifty, so as to have no need of riches."[24] In the
+observance of this just precept Rousseau was to the end of his life
+absolutely without fault. No one was more rigorously careful to make
+his independence sure by the fewness of his wants and by minute
+financial probity. This firm limitation of his material desires was
+one cause of his habitual and almost invariable refusal to accept
+presents, though no doubt another cause was the stubborn and
+ungracious egoism which made him resent every obligation.
+
+It is worth remembering in illustration of the peculiar susceptibility
+and softness of his character where women were concerned--it was not
+quite without exception--that he did not fly into a fit of rage over
+their gifts, as he did over those of men. He remonstrated, but in
+gentler key. "What could I do with four pullets?" he wrote to a lady
+who had presented them to him. "I began by sending two of them to
+people to whom I am indifferent. That made me think of the difference
+there is between a present and a testimony of friendship. The first
+will never find in me anything but a thankless heart; the second....
+Ah, if you had only given me news of yourself without sending me
+anything else, how rich and how grateful you would have made me;
+instead of that the pullets are eaten, and the best thing I can do is
+to forget all about them; let us say no more."[25] Rude and repellent
+as this may seem, and as it is, there is a rough kind of playfulness
+about it, when compared with the truculence which he was not slow to
+exhibit to men. If a friend presumed to thank him for any service, he
+was peremptorily rebuked for his ignorance of the true qualities of
+friendship, with which thankfulness has no connection. He
+ostentatiously refused to offer thanks for services himself, even to a
+woman whom he always treated with so much consideration as the
+Marechale de Luxembourg. He once declared boldly that modesty is a
+false virtue,[26] and though he did not go so far as to make gratitude
+the subject of a corresponding formula of denunciation, he always
+implied that this too is really one of the false virtues. He confessed
+to Malesherbes, without the slightest contrition, that he was
+ungrateful by nature.[27] To Madame d'Epinay he once went still
+further, declaring that he found it hard not to hate those who had
+used him well.[28] Undoubtedly he was right so far as this, that
+gratitude answering to a spirit of exaction in a benefactor is no
+merit; a service done in expectation of gratitude is from that fact
+stripped of the quality which makes gratitude due, and is a mere piece
+of egoism in altruistic disguise. Kindness in its genuine forms is a
+testimony of good feeling, and conventional speech is perhaps a little
+too hard, as well as too shallow and unreal, in calling the recipient
+evil names because he is unable to respond to the good feeling.
+Rousseau protested against a conception of friendship which makes of
+what ought to be disinterested helpfulness a title to everlasting
+tribute. His way of expressing this was harsh and unamiable, but it
+was not without an element of uprightness and veracity. As in his
+greater themes, so in his paradoxes upon private relations, he hid
+wholesome ingredients of rebuke to the unquestioning acceptance of
+common form. "I am well pleased," he said to a friend, "both with thee
+and thy letters, except the end, where thou say'st thou art more mine
+than thine own. For there thou liest, and it is not worth while to
+take the trouble to _thee_ and _thou_ a man as thine intimate, only to
+tell him untruths."[29] Chesterfield was for people with much
+self-love of the small sort, probably a more agreeable person to meet
+than Doctor Johnson, but Johnson was the more wholesome companion for
+a man.
+
+Occasionally, though not very often, he seems to have let spleen take
+the place of honest surliness, and so drifted into clumsy and
+ill-humoured banter, of a sort that gives a dreary shudder to one
+fresh from Voltaire. "So you have chosen for yourself a tender and
+virtuous mistress! I am not surprised; all mistresses are that. You
+have chosen her in Paris! To find a tender and virtuous mistress in
+Paris is to have not such bad luck. You have made her a promise of
+marriage? My friend, you have made a blunder; for if you continue to
+love, the promise is superfluous, and if you do not, then it is no
+avail. You have signed it with your blood? That is all but tragic; but
+I don't know that the choice of the ink in which he writes, gives
+anything to the fidelity of the man who signs."[30]
+
+We can only add that the health in which a man writes may possibly
+excuse the dismal quality of what he writes, and that Rousseau was now
+as always the prey of bodily pain which, as he was conscious, made him
+distraught. "My sufferings are not very excruciating just now," he
+wrote on a later occasion, "but they are incessant, and I am not out
+of pain a single moment day or night, and this quite drives me mad. I
+feel bitterly my wrong conduct and the baseness of my suspicions; but
+if anything can excuse me, it is my mournful state, my loneliness,"
+and so on.[31] This prolonged physical anguish, which was made more
+intense towards the end of 1761 by the accidental breaking of a
+surgical instrument,[32] sometimes so nearly wore his fortitude away
+as to make him think of suicide.[33] In Lord Edward's famous letter on
+suicide in the New Heloisa, while denying in forcible terms the right
+of ending one's days merely to escape from intolerable mental
+distress, he admits that inasmuch as physical disorders only grow
+incessantly worse, violent and incurable bodily pain may be an excuse
+for a man making away with himself; he ceases to be a human being
+before dying, and in putting an end to his life he only completes his
+release from a body that embarrasses him, and contains his soul no
+longer.[34] The thought was often present to him in this form.
+Eighteen months later than our last date, the purpose grew very
+deliberate under an aggravation of his malady, and he seriously looked
+upon his own case as falling within the conditions of Lord Edward's
+exception.[35] It is difficult, in the face of outspoken declarations
+like these, to know what writers can be thinking of when, with respect
+to the controversy on the manner of Rousseau's death, they pronounce
+him incapable of such a dereliction of his own most cherished
+principles as anything like self-destruction would have been.
+
+As he sat gnawed by pain, with surgical instruments on his table, and
+sombre thoughts of suicide in his head, the ray of a little episode of
+romance shone in incongruously upon the scene. Two ladies in Paris,
+absorbed in the New Heloisa, like all the women of the time,
+identified themselves with the Julie and the Claire of the novel that
+none could resist. They wrote anonymously to the author, claiming
+their identification with characters fondly supposed to be immortal.
+"You will know that Julie is not dead, and that she lives to love you;
+I am not this Julie, you perceive it by my style; I am only her
+cousin, or rather her friend, as Claire was." The unfortunate Saint
+Preux responded as gallantly as he could be expected to do in the
+intervals of surgery. "You do not know that the Saint Preux to whom
+you write is tormented with a cruel and incurable disorder, and that
+the very letter he writes to you is often interrupted by distractions
+of a very different kind."[36] He figures rather uncouthly, but the
+unknown fair were not at first disabused, and one of them never was.
+Rousseau was deeply suspicious. He feared to be made the victim of a
+masculine pleasantry. From women he never feared anything. His letters
+were found too short, too cold. He replied to the remonstrance by a
+reference of extreme coarseness. His correspondents wrote from the
+neighbourhood of the Palais Royal, then and for long after the haunt
+of mercenary women. "You belong to your quarter more than I thought,"
+he said brutally.[37] The vulgarity of the lackey was never quite
+obliterated in him, even when the lackey had written Emilius. This
+was too much for the imaginary Claire. "I have given myself three good
+blows on my breast for the correspondence that I was silly enough to
+open between you," she wrote to Julie, and she remained implacable.
+The Julie, on the contrary, was faithful to the end of Rousseau's
+life. She took his part vehemently in the quarrel with Hume, and wrote
+in defence of his memory after he was dead. She is the most remarkable
+of all the instances of that unreasoning passion which the New Heloisa
+inflamed in the breasts of the women of that age. Madame Latour
+pursued Jean Jacques with a devotion that no coldness could repulse.
+She only saw him three times in all, the first time not until 1766,
+when he was on his way through Paris to England. The second time, in
+1772, she visited him without mentioning her name, and he did not
+recognise her; she brought him some music to copy, and went away
+unknown. She made another attempt, announcing herself: he gave her a
+frosty welcome, and then wrote to her that she was to come no more.
+With a strange fidelity she bore him no grudge, but cherished his
+memory and sorrowed over his misfortunes to the day of her death. He
+was not an idol of very sublime quality, but we may think kindly of
+the idolatress.[38] Worshippers are ever dearer to us than their
+graven images. Let us turn to the romance which touched women in this
+way, and helped to give a new spirit to an epoch.
+
+
+II.
+
+As has been already said, it is the business of criticism to separate
+what is accidental in form, transitory in manner, and merely local in
+suggestion, from the general ideas which live under a casual and
+particular literary robe. And so we have to distinguish the external
+conditions under which a book like the New Heloisa is produced, from
+the living qualities in the author which gave the external conditions
+their hold upon him, and turned their development in one direction
+rather than another. We are only encouraging poverty of spirit, when
+we insist on fixing our eyes on a few of the minutiae of construction,
+instead of patiently seizing larger impressions and more durable
+meanings; when we stop at the fortuitous incidents of composition,
+instead of advancing to the central elements of the writer's
+character.
+
+These incidents in the case of the New Heloisa we know; the sensuous
+communion with nature in her summer mood in the woods of Montmorency,
+the long hours and days of solitary expansion, the despairing passion
+for the too sage Julie of actual experience. But the power of these
+impressions from without depended on secrets of conformation within.
+An adult with marked character is, consciously or unconsciously, his
+own character's victim or sport. It is his whole system of impulses,
+ideas, pre-occupations, that make those critical situations ready,
+into which he too hastily supposes that an accident has drawn him. And
+this inner system not only prepares the situation; it forces his
+interpretation of the situation. Much of the interest of the New
+Heloisa springs from the fact that it was the outcome, in a sense of
+which the author himself was probably unconscious, of the general
+doctrine of life and conduct which he only professed to expound in
+writings of graver pretension. Rousseau generally spoke of his romance
+in phrases of depreciation, as the monument of a passing weakness. It
+was in truth as entirely a monument of the strength, no less than the
+weakness, of his whole scheme, as his weightiest piece. That it was
+not so deliberately, only added to its effect. The slow and musing air
+which underlies all the assumption of ardent passion, made a way for
+the doctrine into sensitive natures, that would have been untouched by
+the pretended ratiocination of the Discourses, and the didactic manner
+of the Emilius.
+
+Rousseau's scheme, which we must carefully remember was only present
+to his own mind in an informal and fragmentary way, may be shortly
+described as an attempt to rehabilitate human nature in as much of the
+supposed freshness of primitive times, as the hardened crust of civil
+institutions and social use might allow. In this survey, however
+incoherently carried out, the mutual passion of the two sexes was the
+very last that was likely to escape Rousseau's attention. Hence it was
+with this that he began. The Discourses had been an attack upon the
+general ordering of society, and an exposition of the mischief that
+society has done to human nature at large. The romance treated one set
+of emotions in human nature particularly, though it also touches the
+whole emotional sphere indirectly. And this limitation of the field
+was accompanied by a total revolution in the method. Polemic was
+abandoned; the presence of hostility was forgotten in appearance, if
+not in the heart of the writer; instead of discussion, presentation;
+instead of abstract analysis of principles, concrete drawing of
+persons and dramatic delineation of passion. There is, it is true, a
+monstrous superfluity of ethical exposition of most doubtful value,
+but then that, as we have already said, was in the manners of the
+time. All people in those days with any pretensions to use their
+minds, wrote and talked in a superfine ethical manner, and violently
+translated the dictates of sensibility into formulas of morality. The
+important thing to remark is not that this semi-didactic strain is
+present, but that there is much less of it, and that it takes a far
+more subordinate place, than the subject and the reigning taste would
+have led us to expect. It is true, also, that Rousseau declared his
+intention in the two characters of Julie and of Wolmar, who eventually
+became Julie's husband, of leading to a reconciliation between the two
+great opposing parties, the devout and the rationalistic; of teaching
+them the lesson of reciprocal esteem, by showing the one that it is
+possible to believe in a God without being a hypocrite, and the other
+that it is possible to be an unbeliever without being a scoundrel.[39]
+This intention, if it was really present to Rousseau's mind while he
+was writing, and not an afterthought characteristically welcomed for
+the sake of giving loftiness and gravity to a composition of which he
+was always a little ashamed, must at any rate have been of a very pale
+kind. It would hardly have occurred to a critic, unless Rousseau had
+so emphatically pointed it out, that such a design had presided over
+the composition, and contemporary readers saw nothing of it. In the
+first part of the story, which is wholly passionate, it is certainly
+not visible, and in the second part neither of the two contending
+factions was likely to learn any lesson with respect to the other.
+Churchmen would have insisted that Wolmar was really a Christian
+dressed up as an atheist, and philosophers would hardly have accepted
+Julie as a type of the too believing people who broke Calas on the
+wheel, and cut off La Barre's head.
+
+French critics tell us that no one now reads the New Heloisa in France
+except deliberate students of the works of Rousseau, and certainly few
+in this generation read it in our own country.[40] The action is very
+slight, and the play of motives very simple, when contrasted with the
+ingenuity of invention, the elaborate subtleties of psychological
+analysis, the power of rapid change from one perturbing incident or
+excited humour to another, which mark the modern writer of sentimental
+fiction. As the title warns us, it is a story of a youthful tutor and
+a too fair disciple, straying away from the lessons of calm philosophy
+into the heated places of passion. The high pride of Julie's father
+forbade all hope of their union, and in very desperation the unhappy
+pair lost the self-control of virtue, and threw themselves into the
+pit that lies so ready to our feet. Remorse followed with quick step,
+for Julie had with her purity lost none of the other lovelinesses of a
+dutiful character. Her lover was hurried away from the country by the
+generous solicitude of an English nobleman, one of the bravest,
+tenderest, and best of men. Julie, left undisturbed by her lover's
+presence, stricken with affliction at the death of a sweet and
+affectionate mother, and pressed by the importunities of a father whom
+she dearly loved, in spite of all the disasters which his will had
+brought upon her, at length consented to marry a foreign baron from
+some northern court. Wolmar was much older than she was; a devotee of
+calm reason, without a system and without prejudices, benevolent,
+orderly, above all things judicious. The lover meditated suicide, from
+which he was only diverted by the arguments of Lord Edward, who did
+more than argue; he hurried the forlorn man on board the ship of
+Admiral Anson, then just starting for his famous voyage round the
+world. And this marks the end of the first episode.
+
+Rousseau always urged that his story was dangerous for young girls,
+and maintained that Richardson was grievously mistaken in supposing
+that they could be instructed by romances. It was like setting fire to
+the house, he said, for the sake of making the pumps play.[41] As he
+admitted so much, he is not open to attack on this side, except from
+those who hold the theory that no books ought to be written which may
+not prudently be put into the hands of the young,--a puerile and
+contemptible doctrine that must emasculate all literature and all art,
+by excluding the most interesting of human relations and the most
+powerful of human passions. There is not a single composition of the
+first rank outside of science, from the Bible downwards, that could
+undergo the test. The most useful standard for measuring the
+significance of a book in this respect is found in the manners of the
+time, and the prevailing tone of contemporary literature. In trying to
+appreciate the meaning of the New Heloisa and its popularity, it is
+well to think of it as a delineation of love, in connection not only
+with such a book as the Pucelle, where there is at least wit, but with
+a story like Duclos's, which all ladies both read and were not in the
+least ashamed to acknowledge that they had read; or still worse, such
+an abomination as Diderot's first stories; or a story like Laclos's,
+which came a generation later, and with its infinite briskness and
+devilry carried the tradition of artistic impurity to as vigorous a
+manifestation as it is capable of reaching.[42] To a generation whose
+literature is as pure as the best English, American, and German
+literature is in the present day, the New Heloisa might without doubt
+be corrupting. To the people who read Crebillon and the Pucelle, it
+was without doubt elevating.
+
+The case is just as strong if we turn from books to manners. Without
+looking beyond the circle of names that occur in Rousseau's own
+history, we see how deep the depravity had become. Madame d'Epinay's
+gallant sat at table with the husband, and the husband was perfectly
+aware of the relations between them. M. d'Epinay had notorious
+relations with two public women, and was not ashamed to refer to them
+in the presence of his wife, and even to seek her sympathy on an
+occasion when one of them was in some trouble. Not only this, but
+husband and lover used to pursue their debaucheries in the town
+together in jovial comradeship. An opera dancer presided at the table
+of a patrician abbe in his country house, and he passed weeks in her
+house in the town. As for shame, says Barbier on one occasion, "'tis
+true the king has a mistress, but who has not?--except the Duke of
+Orleans; he has withdrawn to Ste. Genevieve, and is thoroughly
+despised in consequence, and rightly."[43] Reeking disorder such as
+all this illustrates, made the passion of the two imaginary lovers of
+the fair lake seem like a breath from the garden of Eden. One virtue
+was lost in that simple paradise, but even that loss was followed by
+circumstances of mental pain and far circling distress, which banished
+the sin into a secondary place; and what remained to strike the
+imagination of the time were delightful pictures of fast union between
+two enchanting women, of the patience and compassionateness of a grave
+mother, of the chivalrous warmth and helpfulness of a loyal friend.
+Any one anxious to pick out sensual strokes and turns of grossness
+could make a small collection of such defilements from the New Heloisa
+without any difficulty. They were in Rousseau's character, and so they
+came out in his work. Saint Preux afflicts us with touches of this
+kind, just as we are afflicted with similar touches in the
+Confessions. They were not noticed at that day, when people's ears did
+not affect to be any chaster than the rest of them.
+
+A historian of opinion is concerned with the general effect that was
+actually produced by a remarkable book, and with the causes that
+produced it. It is not his easy task to produce a demonstration that
+if the readers had all been as wise and as virtuous as the moralist
+might desire them to be, or if they had all been discriminating and
+scientific critics, not this, but a very different impression would
+have followed. Today we may wonder at the effect of the New Heloisa.
+A long story told in letters has grown to be a form incomprehensible
+and intolerable to us. We find Richardson hard to be borne, and he put
+far greater vivacity and wider variety into his letters than Rousseau
+did, though he was not any less diffuse, and he abounds in repetitions
+as Rousseau does not. Rousseau was absolutely without humour; that
+belongs to the keenly observant natures, and to those who love men in
+the concrete, not only humanity in the abstract. The pleasantries of
+Julie's cousin, for instance, are heavy and misplaced. Thus the whole
+book is in one key, without the dramatic changes of Richardson, too
+few even as those are. And who now can endure that antique fashion of
+apostrophising men and women, hot with passion and eager with all
+active impulses, in oblique terms of abstract qualities, as if their
+passion and their activity were only the inconsiderable embodiment of
+fine general ideas? We have not a single thrill, when Saint Preux
+being led into the chamber where his mistress is supposed to lie
+dying, murmurs passionately, "What shall I now see in the same place
+of refuge where once all breathed the ecstasy that intoxicated my
+soul, in this same object who both caused and shared my transports!
+the image of death, virtue unhappy, beauty expiring!"[44] This
+rhetorical artificiality of phrase, so repulsive to the more realistic
+taste of a later age, was as natural then as that facility of shedding
+tears, which appears so deeply incredible a performance to a
+generation that has lost that particular fashion of sensibility,
+without realising for the honour of its ancestors the physiological
+truth of the power of the will over the secretions.
+
+The characters seem as stiff as some of the language, to us who are
+accustomed to an Asiatic luxuriousness of delineation. Yet the New
+Heloisa was nothing less than the beginning of that fresh, full,
+highly-coloured style which has now taught us to find so little charm
+in the source and original of it. Saint Preux is a personage whom no
+widest charity, literary, philosophic, or Christian, can make
+endurable. Egoism is made thrice disgusting by a ceaseless redundance
+of fine phrases. The exaggerated conceits of love in our old poets
+turn graciously on the lover's eagerness to offer every sacrifice at
+the feet of his mistress. Even Werther, stricken creature as he was,
+yet had the stoutness to blow his brains out, rather than be the
+instrument of surrounding the life of his beloved with snares. Saint
+Preux's egoism is unbrightened by a single ray of tender abnegation,
+or a single touch of the sweet humility of devoted passion. The slave
+of his sensations, he has no care beyond their gratification. With
+some rotund nothing on his lips about virtue being the only path to
+happiness, his heart burns with sickly desire. He writes first like a
+pedagogue infected by some cantharidean philter, and then like a
+pedagogue without the philter, and that is the worse of the two.
+Lovelace and the Count of Valmont are manly and hopeful characters in
+comparison. Werther, again, at least represents a principle of
+rebellion, in the midst of all his self-centred despair, and he
+retains strength enough to know that his weakness is shameful. His
+despair, moreover, is deeply coloured with repulsed social
+ambition.[45] He feels the world about him. His French prototype, on
+the contrary, represents nothing but the unalloyed selfishness of a
+sensual love for which there is no universe outside of its own fevered
+pulsation.
+
+Julie is much less displeasing, partly perhaps for the reason that she
+belongs to the less displeasing sex. At least, she preserves
+fortitude, self-control, and profound considerateness for others. At a
+certain point her firmness even moves a measure of enthusiasm. If the
+New Heloisa could be said to have any moral intention, it is here
+where women learn from the example of Julie's energetic return to
+duty, the possibility and the satisfaction of bending character back
+to comeliness and honour. Excellent as this is from a moral point of
+view, the reader may wish that Julie had been less of a preacher, as
+well as less of a sinner. And even as sinner, she would have been more
+readily forgiven if she had been less deliberate. A maiden who
+sacrifices her virtue in order that the visible consequences may force
+her parents to consent to a marriage, is too strategical to be
+perfectly touching. As was said by the cleverest, though not the
+greatest, of all the women whose youth was fascinated by Rousseau,
+when one has renounced the charms of virtue, it is at least well to
+have all the charms that entire surrender of heart can bestow.[46] In
+spite of this, however, Julie struck the imagination of the time, and
+struck it in a way that was thoroughly wholesome. The type taught men
+some respect for the dignity of women, and it taught women a firmer
+respect for themselves. It is useless, even if it be possible, to
+present an example too lofty for the comprehension of an age. At this
+moment the most brilliant genius in the country was filling France
+with impish merriment at the expense of the greatest heroine that
+France had then to boast. In such an atmosphere Julie had almost the
+halo of saintliness.
+
+We may say all we choose about the inconsistency, the excess of
+preaching, the excess of prudence, in the character of Julie. It was
+said pungently enough by the wits of the time.[47] Nothing that could
+be said on all this affected the fact, that the women between 1760
+and the Revolution were intoxicated by Rousseau's creation to such a
+pitch that they would pay any price for a glass out of which Rousseau
+had drunk, they would kiss a scrap of paper that contained a piece of
+his handwriting, and vow that no woman of true sensibility could
+hesitate to consecrate her life to him, if she were only certain to be
+rewarded by his attachment.[48] The booksellers were unable to meet
+the demand. The book was let out at the rate of twelve sous a volume,
+and the volume could not be detained beyond an hour. All classes
+shared the excitement, courtiers, soldiers, lawyers, and
+bourgeois.[49] Stories were told of fine ladies, dressed for the ball,
+who took the book up for half an hour until the time should come for
+starting; they read until midnight, and when informed that the
+carriage waited, answered not a word, and when reminded by and by that
+it was two o'clock, still read on, and then at four, having ordered
+the horses to be taken out of the carriage, disrobed, went to bed, and
+passed the remainder of the night in reading. In Germany the effect
+was just as astonishing. Kant only once in his life failed to take his
+afternoon walk, and this unexampled omission was due to the witchery
+of the New Heloisa. Gallantry was succeeded by passion, expansion,
+exaltation; moods far more dangerous for society, as all enthusiasm is
+dangerous, but also far higher and pregnant with better hopes for
+character. To move the sympathetic faculties is the first step towards
+kindling all the other energies which make life wiser and more
+fruitful. It is especially worth noticing that nothing in the
+character of Julie concentrates this outburst of sympathy in
+subjective broodings. Julie is the representative of one recalled to
+the straight path by practical, wholesome, objective sympathy for
+others, not of one expiring in unsatisfied yearnings for the sympathy
+of others for herself, and in moonstruck subjective aspirations. The
+women who wept over her romance read in it the lesson of duty, not of
+whimpering introspection. The danger lay in the mischievous
+intellectual direction which Rousseau imparted to this effusion.
+
+The stir which the Julie communicated to the affections in so many
+ways, marked progress, but in all the elements of reason she was the
+most perilous of reactionaries. So hard it is with the human mind,
+constituted as it is, to march forward a space further to the light,
+without making some fresh swerve obliquely towards old darkness. The
+great effusion of natural sentiment was in the air before the New
+Heloisa appeared, to condense and turn it into definite channels. One
+beautiful character, Vauven argues (1715-1747), had begun to teach the
+culture of emotional instinct in some sayings of exquisite sweetness
+and moderation, as that "Great thoughts come from the heart." But he
+came too soon, and, alas for us all, he died young, and he made no
+mark. Moderation never can make a mark in the epochs when men are
+beginning to feel the urgent spirit of a new time. Diderot strove with
+more powerful efforts, in the midst of all his herculean labours for
+the acquisition and ordering of knowledge, in the same direction
+towards the great outer world of nature, and towards the great inner
+world of nature in the human breast. His criticisms on the paintings
+of each year, mediocre as the paintings were, are admirable even now
+for their richness and freshness. If Diderot had been endowed with
+emotional tenacity, as he was with tenacity of understanding and of
+purpose, the student of the eighteenth century would probably have
+been spared the not perfectly agreeable task of threading a way along
+the sinuosities of the character and work of Rousseau. But Rousseau
+had what Diderot lacked--sustained ecstatic moods, and fervid trances;
+his literary gesture was so commanding, his apparel so glistening, his
+voice so rich in long-drawn notes of plangent vibration. His words
+are the words of a prophet; a prophet, it is understood, who had lived
+in Paris, and belonged to the eighteenth century, and wrote in French
+instead of Hebrew. The mischief of his work lay in this, that he
+raised feeling, now passionate, now quietest, into the supreme place
+which it was to occupy alone, and not on an equal throne and in equal
+alliance with understanding. Instead of supplementing reason, he
+placed emotion as its substitute. And he made this evil doctrine come
+from the lips of a fictitious character, who stimulated fancy and
+fascinated imagination. Voltaire laughed at the _baisers acres_ of
+Madame de Wolmar, and declared that a criticism of the Marquis of
+Ximenes had crushed the wretched romance.[50] But Madame de Wolmar was
+so far from crushed, that she turned the flood of feeling which her
+own charms, passion, remorse, and conversion had raised, in a
+direction that Voltaire abhorred, and abhorred in vain.
+
+It is after the marriage of Julie to Wolmar that the action of the
+story takes the turn which sensible men like Voltaire found laughable.
+Saint Preux is absent with Admiral Anson for some years. On his return
+to Europe he is speedily invited by the sage Wolmar, who knows his
+past history perfectly well, to pay them a visit. They all meet with
+leapings on the neck and hearty kisses, the unprejudiced Wolmar
+preserving an open, serene, and smiling air. He takes his young friend
+to a chamber, which is to be reserved for him and for him only. In a
+few days he takes an opportunity of visiting some distant property,
+leaving his wife and Saint Preux together, with the sublime of
+magnanimity. At the same time he confides to Claire his intention of
+entrusting to Saint Preux the education of his children. All goes
+perfectly well, and the household presents a picture of contentment,
+prosperity, moderation, affection, and evenly diffused happiness,
+which in spite of the disagreeableness of the situation is even now
+extremely charming. There is only one cloud. Julie is devoured by a
+source of hidden chagrin. Her husband, "so sage, so reasonable, so far
+from every kind of vice, so little under the influence of human
+passions, is without the only belief that makes virtue precious, and
+in the innocence of an irreproachable life he carries at the bottom of
+his heart the frightful peace of the wicked."[51] He is an atheist.
+Julie is now a pietest, locking herself for hours in her chambers,
+spending days in self-examination and prayer, constantly reading the
+pages of the good Fenelon.[52] "I fear," she writes to Saint Preux,
+"that you do not gain all you might from religion in the conduct of
+your life, and that philosophic pride disdains the simplicity of the
+Christian. You believe prayers to be of scanty service. That is not,
+you know, the doctrine of Saint Paul, nor what our Church professes.
+We are free, it is true, but we are ignorant, feeble, prone to ill.
+And whence should light and force come, if not from him who is their
+very well-spring?... Let us be humble, to be sage; let us see our
+weakness, and we shall be strong."[53] This was the opening of the
+deistical reaction; it was thus, associated with everything that
+struck imagination and moved the sentiment of his readers, that
+Rousseau brought back those sophistical conclusions which Pascal had
+drawn from premisses of dark profound truth, and that enervating
+displacement of reason by celestial contemplation, which Fenelon had
+once made beautiful by the persuasion of virtuous example. He was
+justified in saying, as he afterwards did, that there was nothing in
+the Savoyard Vicar's Profession of Faith which was not to be found in
+the letters of Julie. These were the effective preparations for that
+more famous manifesto; they surrounded belief with all the attractions
+of an interesting and sympathetic preacher, and set it to a harmony of
+circumstance that touched softer fibres.
+
+For, curiously enough, while the first half of the romance is a scene
+of disorderly passion, the second is the glorification of the family.
+A modern writer of genius has inveighed with whimsical bitterness
+against the character of Wolmar,--supposed, we may notice in passing,
+to be partially drawn from D'Holbach,--a man performing so long an
+experiment on these two souls, with the terrible curiosity of a
+surgeon engaged in vivisection.[54] It was, however, much less
+difficult for contemporaries than it is for us to accept so
+unwholesome and prurient a situation. They forgot all the evil that
+was in it, in the charm of the account of Wolmar's active, peaceful,
+frugal, sunny household. The influence of this was immense.[55] It may
+be that the overstrained scene where Saint Preux waits for Julie in
+her room, suggested the far lovelier passage of Faust in the chamber
+of the hapless Margaret. But we may, at least, be sure that Werther
+(1774) would not have found Charlotte cutting bread and butter, if
+Saint Preux had not gone to see Julie take cream and cakes with her
+children and her female servants. And perhaps the other and nobler
+Charlotte of the _Wahlverwandtschaften_ (1809) would not have detained
+us so long with her moss hut, her terrace, her park prospect, if Julie
+had not had her elysium, where the sweet freshness of the air, the
+cool shadows, the shining verdure, flowers diffusing fragrance and
+colour, water running with soft whisper, and the song of a thousand
+birds, reminded the returned traveller of Tinian and Juan Fernandez.
+There is an animation, a variety, an accuracy, a realistic brightness
+in this picture, which will always make it enchanting, even to those
+who cannot make their way through any other letter in the New
+Heloisa.[56] Such qualities place it as an idyllic piece far above
+such pieces in Goethe's two famous romances. They have a clearness
+and spontaneous freshness which are not among the bountiful gifts of
+Goethe. There are other admirable landscapes in the New Heloisa,
+though not too many of them, and the minute and careful way in which
+Rousseau made their features real to himself, is accidentally shown in
+his urgent prayer for exactitude in the engraving of the striking
+scene where Saint Preux and Julie visit the monuments of their old
+love for one another.[57] "I have traversed all Rousseau's ground with
+the Heloisa before me," said Byron, "and am struck to a degree I
+cannot express, with the force and accuracy of his descriptions and
+the beauty of their reality."[58] They were memories made true by long
+dreaming, by endless brooding. The painter lived with these scenes
+ever present to the inner eye. They were his real world, of which the
+tamer world of meadow and woodland actually around him only gave
+suggestion. He thought of the green steeps, the rocks, the mountain
+pines, the waters of the lake, "the populous solitude of bees and
+birds," as of some divine presence, too sublime for personality. And
+they were always benign, standing in relief with the malignity or
+folly of the hurtful insect, Man. He was never a manichaean towards
+nature. To him she was all good and bounteous. The demon forces that
+so fascinated Byron were to Rousseau invisible. These were the
+compositions that presently inspired the landscapes of _Paul and
+Virginia_ (1788), of _Atala_ and _Rene_ (1801), and of _Obermann_
+(1804), as well as those punier imitators who resemble their masters
+as the hymns of a methodist negro resemble the psalms of David. They
+were the outcome of eager and spontaneous feeling for nature, and not
+the mere hackneyed common-form and inflated description of the
+literary pastoral.[59]
+
+This leads to another great and important distinction to be drawn
+between Rousseau and the school whom in other respects he inspired.
+The admirable Sainte Beuve perplexes one by his strange remark, that
+the union of the poetry of the family and the hearth with the poetry
+of nature is essentially wanting to Rousseau.[60] It only shows that
+the great critic had for the moment forgotten the whole of the second
+part of the New Heloisa, and his failure to identify Cowper's allusion
+to the _matinee a l'anglaise_ certainly proves that he had at any rate
+forgotten one of the most striking and delicious scenes of the hearth
+in French literature.[61] The tendency to read Rousseau only in the
+Byronic sense is one of those foregone conclusions which are
+constantly tempting the critic to travel out of his record. Rousseau
+assuredly had a Byronic side, but he is just as often a Cowper done
+into splendid prose. His pictures are full of social animation and
+domestic order. He had exalted the simplicity of the savage state in
+his Discourses, but when he came to constitute an ideal life, he found
+it in a household that was more, and not less, systematically
+disciplined than those of the common society around him. The paradise
+in which his Julie moved with Wolmar and Saint Preux, was no more and
+no less than an establishment of the best kind of the rural
+middle-class, frugal, decorous, wholesome, tranquilly austere. No most
+sentimental savage could have found it endurable, or could himself
+without profound transformation of his manners have been endured in
+it. The New Heloisa ends by exalting respectability, and putting the
+spirit of insurrection to shame. Self-control, not revolt, is its last
+word.
+
+This is what separates Rousseau here and throughout from Senancour,
+Byron, and the rest. He consummates the triumph of will, while their
+reigning mood is grave or reckless protest against impotence of will,
+the little worth of common aims, the fretting triviality of common
+rules. Franklin or Cobbett might have gloried in the regularity of
+Madame de Wolmar's establishment. The employment of the day was marked
+out with precision. By artful adjustment of pursuits, it was contrived
+that the men-servants should be kept apart from the maid-servants,
+except at their repasts. The women, namely, a cook, a housemaid, and a
+nurse, found their pastime in rambles with their mistress and her
+children, and lived mainly with them. The men were amused by games for
+which their master made regulated provision, now for summer, now for
+winter, offering prizes of a useful kind for prowess and adroitness.
+Often on a Sunday night all the household met in an ample chamber,
+and passed the evening in dancing. When Saint Preux inquired whether
+this was not a rather singular infraction of puritan rule, Julie
+wisely answered that pure morality is so loaded with severe duties,
+that if you add to them the further burden of indifferent forms, it
+must always be at the cost of the essential.[62] The servants were
+taken from the country, never from the town. They entered the
+household young, were gradually trained, and never went away except to
+establish themselves.
+
+The vulgar and obvious criticism on all this is that it is utopian,
+that such households do not generally exist, because neither masters
+nor servants possess the qualities needed to maintain these relations
+of unbroken order and friendliness. Perhaps not; and masters and
+servants will be more and more removed from the possession of such
+qualities, and their relations further distant from such order and
+friendliness, if writers cease to press the beauty and serviceableness
+of a domesticity that is at present only possible in a few rare cases,
+or to insist on the ugliness, the waste of peace, the deterioration of
+character, that are the results of our present system. Undoubtedly it
+is much easier for Rousseau to draw his picture of semi-patriarchal
+felicity, than for the rest of us to realise it. It was his function
+to press ideals of sweeter life on his contemporaries, and they may be
+counted fortunate in having a writer who could fulfil this function
+with Rousseau's peculiar force of masterly persuasion. His scornful
+diatribes against the domestic police of great houses, and the
+essential inhumanity of the ordinary household relations, are both
+excellent and of permanent interest. There is the full breath of a new
+humaneness in them. They were the right way of attacking the
+decrepitude of feudal luxury and insolence, and its imitation among
+the great farmers-general. This criticism of the conditions of
+domestic service marks a beginning of true democracy, as distinguished
+from the mere pulverisation of aristocracy. It rests on the claim of
+the common people to an equal consideration, as equally useful and
+equally capable of virtue and vice; and it implies the essential
+priority of social over political reform.
+
+The story abounds in sumptuary detail. The table partakes of the
+general plenty, but this plenty is not ruinous. The senses are
+gratified without daintiness. The food is common, but excellent of its
+kind. The service is simple, yet exquisite. All that is mere show, all
+that depends on vulgar opinion, all fine and elaborate dishes whose
+value comes of their rarity, and whose names you must know before
+finding any goodness in them, are banished without recall. Even in
+such delicacies as they permit themselves, our friends abstain every
+day from certain things which are reserved for feasts on special
+occasions, and which are thus made more delightful without being more
+costly. What do you suppose these delicacies are? Rare game, or fish
+from the sea, or dainties from abroad? Better than all that; some
+delicious vegetable of the district, one of the savoury things that
+grow in our garden, some fish from the lake dressed in a peculiar way,
+some cheese from our mountains. The service is modest and rustic, but
+clean and smiling. Neither gold-laced liveries in sight of which you
+die of hunger, nor tall crystals laden with flowers for your only
+dessert, here take the place of honest dishes. Here people have not
+the art of nourishing the stomach through the eyes, but they know how
+to add grace to good cheer, to eat heartily without inconvenience, to
+drink merrily without losing reason, to sit long at table without
+weariness, and always to rise from it without disgust.[63]
+
+One singularity in this ideal household was the avoidance of those
+middle exchanges between production and consumption, which enrich the
+shopkeeper but impoverish his customers. Not one of these exchanges is
+made without loss, and the multiplication of these losses would weaken
+even a man of fortune. Wolmar seeks those real exchanges in which the
+convenience of each party to the bargain serves as profit for both.
+Thus the wool is sent to the factories, from which they receive cloth
+in exchange; wine, oil, and bread are produced in the house; the
+butcher pays himself in live cattle; the grocer receives grain in
+return for his goods; the wages of the labourers and the
+house-servants are derived from the produce of the land which they
+render valuable.[64] It was reserved for Fourier, Cabet, and the rest,
+to carry to its highest point this confusion of what is so
+fascinating in a book with what is practicable in society.
+
+The expatiation on the loveliness of a well-ordered interior may
+strike the impatient modern as somewhat long, and the movement as very
+slow, just as people complain of the same things in Goethe's
+_Wahlverwandtschaften_. Such complaint only proves inability, which is
+or is not justifiable, to seize the spirit of the writer. The
+expatiation was long and the movement slow, because Rousseau was full
+of his thoughts; they were a deep and glowing part of himself, and did
+not merely skim swiftly and lightly through his mind. Anybody who
+takes the trouble may find out the difference between this expression
+of long mental brooding, and a merely elaborated diction.[65] The
+length is an essential part of the matter. The whole work is the
+reflection of a series of slow inner processes, the many careful
+weavings of a lonely and miserable man's dreams. And Julie expressed
+the spirit and the joy of these dreams when she wrote, "People are
+only happy before they are happy. Man, so eager and so feeble, made to
+desire all and obtain little, has received from heaven a consoling
+force which brings all that he desires close to him, which subjects it
+to his imagination, which makes it sensible and present before him,
+which delivers it over to him. The land of chimera is the only one in
+this world that is worth dwelling in, and such is the nothingness of
+the human lot, that except the being who exists in and by himself,
+there is nothing beautiful except that which does not exist."[66]
+
+Closely connected with the vigorous attempt to fascinate his public
+with the charm of a serene, joyful, and ordered house, is the
+restoration of marriage in the New Heloisa to a rank among high and
+honourable obligations, and its representation as the best support of
+an equable life of right conduct and fruitful harmonious emotion.
+Rousseau even invested it with the mysterious dignity as of some
+natural sacrament. "This chaste knot of nature is subject neither to
+the sovereign power nor to paternal authority," he cried, "but only to
+the authority of the common Father." And he pointed his remark by a
+bitter allusion to a celebrated case in which a great house had
+prevailed on the courts to annul the marriage of an elder son with a
+young actress, though her character was excellent, and though she had
+befriended him when he was abandoned by everybody else.[67] This was
+one of the countless democratic thrusts in the book. In the case of
+its heroine, however, the author associated the sanctity of marriage
+not only with equality but with religion. We may imagine the spleen
+with which the philosophers, with both their hatred of the faith, and
+their light esteem of marriage bonds, read Julie's eloquent account of
+her emotions at the moment of her union with Wolmar. "I seemed to
+behold the organ of Providence and to hear the voice of God, as the
+minister gravely pronounced the words of the holy service. The purity,
+the dignity, the sanctity of marriage, so vividly set forth in the
+words of scripture; its chaste and sublime duties, so important to the
+happiness, order, and peace of the human race, so sweet to fulfil even
+for their own sake--all this made such an impression on me that I
+seemed to feel within my breast a sudden revolution. An unknown power
+seemed all at once to arrest the disorder of my affections, and to
+restore them to accordance with the law of duty and of nature. The
+eternal eye that sees everything, I said to myself, now reads to the
+depth of my heart."[68] She has all the well-known fervour of the
+proselyte, and never wearies of extolling the peace of the wedded
+state. Love is no essential to its perfection. "Worth, virtue, a
+certain accord not so much in condition and age as in character and
+temper, are enough between husband and wife; and this does not prevent
+the growth from such a union of a very tender attachment, which is
+none the less sweet for not being exactly love, and is all the more
+lasting."[69] Years after, when Saint Preux has returned and is
+settled in the household, she even tries to persuade him to imitate
+her example, and find contentment in marriage with her cousin. The
+earnestness with which she presses the point, the very sensible but
+not very delicate references to the hygienic drawbacks of celibacy,
+and the fact that the cousin whom she would fain have him marry, had
+complaisantly assisted them in their past loves, naturally drew the
+fire of Rousseau's critical enemies.
+
+Such matters did not affect the general enthusiasm. When people are
+weary of a certain way of surveying life, and have their faces eagerly
+set in some new direction, they read in a book what it pleases them to
+read; they assimilate as much as falls in with their dominant mood,
+and the rest passes away unseen. The French public were bewitched by
+Julie, and were no more capable of criticising her than Julie was
+capable of criticising Saint Preux in the height of her passion for
+him. When we say that Rousseau was the author of this movement, all we
+mean is that his book and its chief personage awoke emotion to
+self-consciousness, gave it a dialect, communicated an impulse in
+favour of social order, and then very calamitously at the same moment
+divorced it from the fundamental conditions of progress, by divorcing
+it from disciplined intelligence and scientific reason.
+
+Apart from the general tendency of the New Heloisa in numberless
+indirect ways to bring the manners of the great into contempt, by the
+presentation of the happiness of a simple and worthy life, thrifty,
+self-sufficing, and homely, there is one direct protest of singular
+eloquence and gravity. Julie's father is deeply revolted at the bare
+notion of marrying his daughter to a teacher. Rousseau puts his
+vigorous remonstrance against pride of birth into the mouth of an
+English nobleman. This is perhaps an infelicitous piece of
+prosopopoeia, but it is interesting as illustrative of the idea of
+England in the eighteenth century as the home of stout-hearted
+freedom. We may quote one piece from the numerous bits of very
+straightforward speaking in which our representative expressed his
+mind as to the significance of birth. "My friend has nobility," cried
+Lord Edward, "not written in ink on mouldering parchments, but graven
+in his heart in characters that can never be effaced. For my own part,
+by God, I should be sorry to have no other proof of my merit but that
+of a man who has been in his grave these five hundred years. If you
+know the English nobility, you know that it is the most enlightened,
+the best informed, the wisest, the bravest in Europe. That being so, I
+don't care to ask whether it is the oldest or not. We are not, it is
+true, the slaves of the prince, but his friends; nor the tyrants of
+the people, but their leaders. We hold the balance true between
+people, and monarch. Our first duty is towards the nation, our second
+towards him who governs; it is not his will but his right that we
+consider.... We suffer no one in the land to say _God and my sword_,
+nor more than this, _God and my right_."[70] All this was only
+putting Montesquieu into heroics, it is true, but a great many people
+read the romance who were not likely to read the graver book. And
+there was a wide difference between the calm statement of a number of
+political propositions about government, and their transformation into
+dramatic invective against the arrogance of all social inequality that
+does not correspond with inequalities of worth.
+
+There is no contradiction between this and the social quietism of
+other parts of the book. Moral considerations and the paramount place
+that they hold in Rousseau's way of thinking, explain at once his
+contempt for the artificial privileges and assumptions of high rank,
+and his contempt for anything like discontent with the conditions of
+humble rank. Simplicity of life was his ideal. He wishes us to despise
+both those who have departed from it, and those who would depart from
+it if they could. So Julie does her best to make the lot of the
+peasants as happy as it is capable of being made, without ever helping
+them to change it for another. She teaches them to respect their
+natural condition in respecting themselves. Her prime maxim is to
+discourage change of station and calling, but above all to dissuade
+the villager, whose life is the happiest of all, from leaving the true
+pleasures of his natural career for the fever and corruption of
+towns.[71] Presently a recollection of the sombre things that he had
+seen in his rambles through France crossed Rousseau's pastoral
+visions, and he admitted that there were some lands in which the
+publican devours the fruits of the earth; where the misery that covers
+the fields, the bitter greed of some grasping farmer, the inflexible
+rigour of an inhuman master, take something from the charm of his
+rural scenes. "Worn-out horses ready to expire under the blows they
+receive, wretched peasants attenuated by hunger, broken by weariness,
+clad in rags, hamlets all in ruins--these things offer a mournful
+spectacle to the eye: one is almost sorry to be a man, as we think of
+the unhappy creatures on whose blood we have to feed."[72]
+
+Yet there is no hint in the New Heloisa of the socialism which Morelly
+and Mably flung themselves upon, as the remedy for all these desperate
+horrors. Property, in every page of the New Heloisa, is held in full
+respect; the master has the honourable burden of patriarchal duty; the
+servant the not less honourable burden of industry and faithfulness;
+disobedience or vice is promptly punished with paternal rigour and
+more than paternal inflexibility. The insurrectionary quality and
+effect of Rousseau's work lay in no direct preaching or vehement
+denunciation of the abuses that filled France with cruelty on the one
+hand and sodden misery on the other. It lay in pictures of a social
+state in which abuses and cruelty cannot exist, nor any miseries save
+those which are inseparable from humanity. The contrast between the
+sober, cheerful, prosperous scenes of romance, and the dreariness of
+the reality of the field life of France,--this was the element that
+filled generous souls with an intoxicating transport.
+
+Rousseau's way of dealing with the portentous questions that lay about
+that tragic scene of deserted fields, ruined hamlets, tottering
+brutes, and hunger-stricken men, may be gathered from one of the many
+traits in Julie which endeared her to that generation, and might
+endear her even to our own if it only knew her. Wolmar's house was
+near a great high-road, and so was daily haunted by beggars. Not one
+of these was allowed to go empty away. And Julie had as many excellent
+reasons to give for her charity, as if she had been one of the
+philosophers of whom she thought so surpassingly ill. If you look at
+mendicancy merely as a trade, what is the harm of a calling whose end
+is to nourish feelings of humanity and brotherly love? From the point
+of view of talent, why should I not pay the eloquence of a beggar who
+stirs my pity, as highly as that of a player who makes me shed tears
+over imaginary sorrows? If the great number of beggars is burdensome
+to the state, of how many other professions that people encourage, may
+you not say the same? How can I be sure that the man to whom I give
+alms is not an honest soul, whom I may save from perishing? In short,
+whatever we may think of the poor wretches, if we owe nothing to the
+beggar, at least we owe it to ourselves to pay honour to suffering
+humanity or to its image.[73] Nothing could be more admirably
+illustrative of the author's confidence that the first thing for us to
+do is to satisfy our fine feelings, and that then all the rest shall
+be added unto us. The doctrine spread so far, that Necker,--a sort of
+Julie in a frock-coat, who had never fallen, the incarnation of this
+doctrine on the great stage of affairs,--was hailed to power to ward
+off the bankruptcy of the state by means of a good heart and moral
+sentences, while Turgot with science and firmness for his resources
+was driven away as an economist and a philosopher.
+
+At a first glance, it may seem that there was compensation for the
+triumph of sentiment over reason, and that if France was ruined by the
+dreams in which Rousseau encouraged the nation to exult, she was saved
+by the fervour and resoluteness of the aspirations with which he
+filled the most generous of her children. No wide movement, we may be
+sure, is thoroughly understood until we have mastered both its
+material and its ideal sides. Materially, Rousseau's work was
+inevitably fraught with confusion because in this sphere not to be
+scientific, not to be careful in tracing effects to their true causes,
+is to be without any security that the causes with which we try to
+deal will lead to the effects that we desire. A Roman statesman who
+had gone to the Sermon on the Mount for a method of staying the
+economic ruin of the empire, its thinning population, its decreasing
+capital, would obviously have found nothing of what he sought. But the
+moral nature of man is redeemed by teaching that may have no bearing
+on economics, or even a bearing purely mischievous, and which has to
+be corrected by teaching that probably goes equally far in the
+contrary direction of moral mischief. In the ideal sphere, the
+processes are very complex. In measuring a man's influence within it
+we have to balance. Rousseau's action was undoubtedly excellent in
+leading men and women to desire simple lives, and a more harmonious
+social order. Was this eminent benefit more than counterbalanced by
+the eminent disadvantage of giving a reactionary intellectual
+direction? By commending irrational retrogression from active use of
+the understanding back to dreamy contemplation?
+
+To one teacher is usually only one task allotted. We do not reproach
+want of science to the virtuous and benevolent Channing; his goodness
+and effusion stirred women and the young, just as Rousseau did, to
+sentimental but humane aspiration. It was this kind of influence that
+formed the opinion which at last destroyed American slavery. We owe a
+place in the temple that commemorates human emancipation, to every man
+who has kindled in his generation a brighter flame of moral
+enthusiasm, and a more eager care for the realisation of good and
+virtuous ideals.
+
+
+III.
+
+The story of the circumstances of the publication of Emilius and the
+persecution which befell its author in consequence, recalls us to the
+distinctively evil side of French history in this critical epoch, and
+carries us away from light into the thick darkness of political
+intrigue, obscurantist faction, and a misgovernment which was at once
+tyrannical and decrepit. It is almost impossible for us to realise the
+existence in the same society of such boundless license of thought,
+and such unscrupulous restraint upon its expression. Not one of
+Rousseau's three chief works, for instance, was printed in France. The
+whole trade in books was a sort of contraband, and was carried on with
+the stealth, subterfuge, daring, and knavery that are demanded in
+contraband dealings. An author or a bookseller was forced to be as
+careful as a kidnapper of coolies or the captain of a slaver would be
+in our own time. He had to steer clear of the court, of the
+parliament, of Jansenists, of Jesuits, of the mistresses of the king
+and the minister, of the friends of the mistresses, and above all of
+that organised hierarchy of ignorance and oppression in all times and
+places where they raise their masked heads,--the bishops and
+ecclesiastics of every sort and condition. Palissot produced his
+comedy to please the devout at the expense of the philosophers (1760).
+Madame de Robecq, daughter of Rousseau's marshal of Luxembourg,
+instigated and protected him, for Diderot had offended her.[74]
+Morellet replied in a piece in which the keen vision of feminine spite
+detected a reference to Madame de Robecq. Though dying, she still had
+relations with Choiseul, and so Morellet was flung into the
+Bastile.[75] Diderot was thrown for three months into Vincennes, where
+we saw him on a memorable occasion, for his Letter on the Blind
+(1748), nominally because it was held to contain irreligious doctrine,
+really because he had given offence to D'Argenson's mistress by
+hinting that she might be very handsome, but that her judgment on
+scientific experiment was of no value.[76]
+
+The New Heloisa could not openly circulate in France so long as it
+contained the words, "I would rather be the wife of a charcoal-burner
+than the mistress of a king." The last word was altered to "prince,"
+and then Rousseau was warned that he would offend the Prince de Conti
+and Madame de Boufflers.[77] No work of merit could appear without
+more or less of slavish mutilation, and no amount of slavish
+mutilation could make the writer secure against the accidental grudge
+of people who had influence in high quarters.[78]
+
+If French booksellers in the stirring intellectual time of the
+eighteenth century needed all the craft of a smuggler, their morality
+was reduced to an equally low level in dealing not only with the
+police, but with their own accomplices, the book-writers. They excused
+themselves from paying proper sums to authors, on the ground that they
+were robbed of the profits that would enable them to pay such sums, by
+the piracy of their brethren in trade. But then they all pirated the
+works of one another. The whole commerce was a mass of fraud and
+chicane, and every prominent author passed his life between two fires.
+He was robbed, his works were pirated, and, worse than robbery and
+piracy, they were defaced and distorted by the booksellers. On the
+other side he was tormented to death by the suspicion and timidity,
+alternately with the hatred and active tyranny of the administration.
+As we read the story of the lives of all these strenuous men, their
+struggles, their incessant mortifications, their constantly reviving
+and ever irrepressible vigour and interest in the fight, we may wish
+that the shabbiness and the pettiness of the daily lives of some of
+them had faded away from memory, and left us nothing to think of in
+connection with their names but the alertness, courage, tenacity,
+self-sacrifice, and faith with which they defended the cause of human
+emancipation and progress. Happily the mutual hate of the Christian
+factions, to which liberty owes at least as much as charity owes to
+their mutual love, prevented a common union for burning the
+philosophers as well as their books. All torments short of this they
+endured, and they had the great merit of enduring them without any
+hope of being rewarded after their death, as truly good men must
+always be capable of doing.
+
+Rousseau had no taste for martyrdom, nor any intention of courting it
+in even its slightest forms. Holland was now the great printing press
+of France, and when we are counting up the contributions of
+Protestantism to the enfranchisement of Europe, it is just to remember
+the indispensable services rendered by the freedom of the press in
+Holland to the dissemination of French thought in the eighteenth
+century, as well as the shelter that it gave to the French thinkers in
+the seventeenth, including Descartes, the greatest of them all. The
+monstrous tediousness of printing a book at Amsterdam or the Hague,
+the delay, loss, and confusion in receiving and transmitting the
+proofs, and the subterranean character of the entire process,
+including the circulation of the book after it was once fairly
+printed, were as grievous to Rousseau as to authors of more impetuous
+temper. He agreed with Rey, for instance, the Amsterdam printer, to
+sell him the Social Contract for 1000 francs. The manuscript had then
+to be cunningly conveyed to Amsterdam. Rousseau wrote it out in very
+small characters, sealed it carefully up, and entrusted it to the care
+of the chaplain of the Dutch embassy, who happened to be a native of
+Vaud. In passing the barrier, the packet fell into the hands of the
+officials. They tore it open and examined it, happily unconscious that
+they were handling the most explosive kind of gunpowder that they had
+ever meddled with. It was not until the chaplain claimed it in the
+name of ambassadorial privilege, that the manuscript was allowed to go
+on its way to the press.[79] Rousseau repeats a hundred times, not
+only in the Confessions, but also in letters to his friends, how
+resolutely and carefully he avoided any evasion of the laws of the
+country in which he lived. The French government was anxious enough on
+all grounds to secure for France the production of the books of which
+France was the great consumer, but the severity of its censorship
+prevented this.[80] The introduction of the books, when printed, was
+tolerated or connived at, because the country would hardly have
+endured to be deprived of the enjoyment of its own literature. By a
+greater inconsistency the reprinting of a book which had once found
+admission into the country, was also connived at. Thus M. de
+Malesherbes, out of friendship for Rousseau, wished to have an edition
+of the New Heloisa printed in France, and sold for the benefit of the
+author. That he should have done so is a curious illustration of the
+low morality engendered by a repressive system imperfectly carried
+out. For Rousseau had sold the book to Rey. Rey had treated with a
+French bookseller in the usual way, that is, had sent him half the
+edition printed, the bookseller paying either in cash or other books
+for all the copies he received. Therefore to print an independent
+edition in Paris was to injure, not Rey the foreigner, but the French
+bookseller who stood practically in Rey's place. It was setting two
+French booksellers to ruin one another. Rousseau emphatically declined
+to receive any profit from such a transaction. But, said Malesherbes,
+you sold to Rey a right which you had not got, the right of sole
+proprietorship, excluding the competition of a pirated reprint. Then,
+answered Rousseau, if the right which I sold happens to prove less
+than I thought, it is clear that far from taking advantage of my
+mistake, I owe to Rey compensation for any loss that he may
+suffer.[81]
+
+The friendship of Malesherbes for the party of reason was shown on
+numerous occasions. As director of the book trade he was really the
+censor of the literature of the time.[82] The story of his service to
+Diderot is well known--how he warned Diderot that the police were
+about to visit his house and overhaul his papers, and how when Diderot
+despaired of being able to put them out of sight in his narrow
+quarters, Malesherbes said, "Then send them all to me," and took care
+of them until the storm was overpast. The proofs of the New Heloisa
+came through his hands, and now he made himself Rousseau's agent in
+the affairs relative to the printing of Emilius. Rousseau entrusted
+the whole matter to him and to Madame de Luxembourg, being confident
+that, in acting through persons of such authority and position, he
+should be protected against any unwitting illegality. Instead of being
+sent to Rey, the manuscript was sold to a bookseller in Paris for six
+thousand francs.[83] A long time elapsed before any proofs reached the
+author, and he soon perceived that an edition was being printed in
+France as well as in Holland. Still, as Malesherbes was in some sort
+the director of the enterprise, the author felt no alarm. Duclos came
+to visit him one day, and Rousseau read aloud to him the Savoyard
+Vicar's Profession of Faith. "What, citizen," he cried, "and that is
+part of a book that they are printing at Paris! Be kind enough not to
+tell any one that you read this to me."[84] Still Rousseau remained
+secure. Then the printing came to a standstill, and he could not find
+out the reason, because Malesherbes was away, and the printer did not
+take the trouble to answer his letters. "My natural tendency," he
+says, and as the rest of his life only too abundantly proved, "is to
+be afraid of darkness; mystery always disturbs me, it is utterly
+antipathetic to my character, which is open even to the pitch of
+imprudence. The aspect of the most hideous monster would alarm me
+little, I verily believe; but if I discern at night a figure in a
+white sheet, I am sure to be terrified out of my life."[85] So he at
+once fancied that by some means the Jesuits had got possession of his
+book, and knowing him to be at death's door, designed to keep the
+Emilius back until he was actually dead, when they would publish a
+truncated version of it to suit their own purposes.[86] He wrote
+letter upon letter to the printer, to Malesherbes, to Madame de
+Luxembourg, and if answers did not come, or did not come exactly when
+he expected them, he grew delirious with anxiety. If he dropped his
+conviction that the Jesuits were plotting the ruin of his book and the
+defilement of his reputation, he lost no time in fastening a similar
+design upon the Jansenists, and when the Jansenists were acquitted,
+then the turn of the philosophers came. We have constantly to remember
+that all this time the unfortunate man was suffering incessant pain,
+and passing his nights in sleeplessness and fever. He sometimes threw
+off the black dreams of unfathomable suspicion, and dreamed in their
+stead of some sunny spot in pleasant Touraine, where under a mild
+climate and among a gentle people he should peacefully end his
+days.[87] At other times he was fond of supposing M. de Luxembourg
+not a duke, nor a marshal of France, but a good country squire living
+in some old mansion, and himself not an author, not a maker of books,
+but with moderate intelligence and slight attainment, finding with the
+squire and his dame the happiness of his life, and contributing to the
+happiness of theirs.[88] Alas, in spite of all his precautions, he had
+unwittingly drifted into the stream of great affairs. He and his book
+were sacrificed to the exigencies of faction; and a persecution set
+in, which destroyed his last chance of a composed life, by giving his
+reason, already disturbed, a final blow from which it never recovered.
+
+Emilius appeared in the crisis of the movement against the Jesuits.
+That formidable order had offended Madame de Pompadour by a refusal to
+recognise her power and position,--a manly policy, as creditable to
+their moral vigour as it was contrary to the maxims which had made
+them powerful. They had also offended Choiseul by the part they had
+taken in certain hostile intrigues at Versailles. The parliaments had
+always been their enemies. This was due first to the jealousy with
+which corporations of lawyers always regard corporations of
+ecclesiastics, and next to their hatred of the bull Unigenitus, which
+had been not only an infraction of French liberties, but the occasion
+of special humiliation to the parliaments. Then the hostility of the
+parliaments to the Jesuits was caused by the harshness with which the
+system of confessional tickets was at this time being carried out.
+Finally, the once powerful house of Austria, the protector of all
+retrograde interests, was now weakened by the Seven Years' War; and
+was unable to bring effective influence to bear on Lewis XV. At last
+he gave his consent to the destruction of the order. The commercial
+bankruptcy of one of their missions was the immediate occasion of
+their fall, and nothing could save them. "I only know one man," said
+Grimm, "in a position to have composed an apology for the Jesuits in
+fine style, if it had been in his way to take the side of that tribe,
+and this man is M. Rousseau." The parliaments went to work with
+alacrity, but they were quite as hostile to the philosophers as they
+were to the Jesuits, and hence their anxiety to show that they were no
+allies of the one even when destroying the other.
+
+Contemporaries seldom criticise the shades and variations of
+innovating speculation with any marked nicety. Anything with the stamp
+of rationality on its phrases or arguments was roughly set down to the
+school of the philosophers, and Rousseau was counted one of their
+number, like Voltaire or Helvetius. The Emilius appeared in May 1762.
+On the 11th of June the parliament of Paris ordered the book to be
+burnt by the public executioner, and the writer to be arrested. For
+Rousseau always scorned the devices of Voltaire and others; he
+courageously insisted on placing his name on the title-page of all his
+works,[89] and so there was none of the usual difficulty in
+identifying the author. The grounds of the proceedings were alleged
+irreligious tendencies to be found in the book.[90]
+
+The indecency of the requisition in which the advocate-general
+demanded its proscription, was admitted even by people who were least
+likely to defend Rousseau.[91] The author was charged with saying not
+only that man may be saved without believing in God, but even that the
+Christian religion does not exist--paradox too flagrant even for the
+writer of the Discourse on Inequality. No evidence was produced either
+that the alleged assertions were in the book, or that the name of the
+author was really the name on its title-page. Rousseau fared no worse,
+but better, than his fellows, for there was hardly a single man of
+letters of that time who escaped arbitrary imprisonment.
+
+The unfortunate author had news of the ferment which his work was
+creating in Paris, and received notes of warning from every hand, but
+he could not believe that the only man in France who believed in God
+was to be the victim of the defenders of Christianity.[92] On the 8th
+of June he spent a merry day with two friends, taking their dinner in
+the fields. "Ever since my youth I had a habit of reading at night in
+my bed until my eyes grew heavy. Then I put out the candle, and tried
+to fall asleep for a few minutes, but they seldom lasted long. My
+ordinary reading at night was the Bible, and I have read it
+continuously through at least five or six times in this way. That
+night, finding myself more wakeful than usual, I prolonged my reading,
+and read through the whole of the book which ends with the Levite of
+Ephraim, and which if I mistake not is the book of Judges. The story
+affected me deeply, and I was busy over it in a kind of dream, when
+all at once I was roused by lights and noises."[93]
+
+It was two o'clock in the morning. A messenger had come in hot haste
+to carry him to Madame de Luxembourg. News had reached her of the
+proposed decree of the parliament. She knew Rousseau well enough to be
+sure that if he were seized and examined, her own share and that of
+Malesherbes in the production of the condemned book would be made
+public, and their position uncomfortably compromised. It was to their
+interest that he should avoid arrest by flight, and they had no
+difficulty in persuading him to fall in with their plans. After a
+tearful farewell with Theresa, who had hardly been out of his sight
+for seventeen years, and many embraces from the greater ladies of the
+castle, he was thrust into a chaise and despatched on the first stage
+of eight melancholy years of wandering and despair, to be driven from
+place to place, first by the fatuous tyranny of magistrates and
+religious doctors, and then by the yet more cruel spectres of his own
+diseased imagination, until at length his whole soul became the home
+of weariness and torment.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] _Conf._, x. 62.
+
+[2] _Conf._, x.
+
+[3] _Ib._ x. 70.
+
+[4] Louis Francois de Bourbon, Prince de Conti (1717-1776), was
+great-grandson of the brother of the Great Conde. He performed
+creditable things in the war of the Austrian Succession (in Piedmont
+1744, in Belgium 1745); had a scheme of foreign policy as director of
+the secret diplomacy of Lewis XV. (1745-1756), which was to make
+Turkey, Poland, Sweden, Prussia, a barrier against Russia primarily,
+and Austria secondarily; lastly went into moderate opposition to the
+court, protesting against the destruction of the _parlements_ (1771),
+and afterwards opposing the reforms of Turgot (1776). Finally he had
+the honour of refusing the sacraments of the church on his deathbed.
+See Martin's _Hist. de France_, xv. and xvi.
+
+[5] _Conf._, 97. _Corr._, v. 215.
+
+[6] _Corr._, ii. 144. Oct. 7, 1760.
+
+[7] _Conf._, x. 98.
+
+[8] The reader will distinguish this correspondent of Rousseau's,
+_Comtesse_ de Boufflers-Rouveret (1727-18--), from the _Duchesse_ de
+Boufflers, which was the title of Rousseau's Marechale de Luxembourg
+before her second marriage. And also from the _Marquise_ de Boufflers,
+said to be the mistress of the old king Stanislaus at Luneville, and
+the mother of the Chevalier de Boufflers (who was the intimate of
+Voltaire, sat in the States General, emigrated, did homage to
+Napoleon, and finally died peaceably under Lewis XVIII.). See Jal's
+_Dict. Critique_, 259-262. Sainte Beuve has an essay on our present
+Comtesse de Boufflers (_Nouveaux Lundis_, iv. 163). She is the Madame
+de Boufflers who was taken by Beauclerk to visit Johnson in his Temple
+chambers, and was conducted to her coach by him in a remarkable manner
+(Boswell's _Life_, ch. li. p. 467). Also much talked of in H.
+Walpole's Letters. See D'Alembert to Frederick, April 15, 1768.
+
+[9] Streckeisen, ii. 32.
+
+[10] _Conf._, x. 71.
+
+[11] For instance, _Corr._ ii. 85, 90, 92, etc. 1759.
+
+[12] Streckeisen, ii. 28, etc.
+
+[13] _Ib._, 29.
+
+[14] _Conf._, x. 99.
+
+[15] _Ib._, x. 57.
+
+[16] _Ib._, xi. 119.
+
+[17] _Corr._, ii. 196. Feb. 16, 1761.
+
+[18] _Ib._, ii. 102, 176, etc.
+
+[19] _Conf._, x. 60.
+
+[20] _Corr._, ii. 12.
+
+[21] As M. St. Marc Girardin has put it: "There are in all Rousseau's
+discussions two things to be carefully distinguished from one another;
+the maxims of the discourse, and the conclusions of the controversy.
+The maxims are ordinarily paradoxical; the conclusions are full of
+good sense." _Rev. des Deux Mondes_, Aug. 1852, p. 501.
+
+[22] _Corr._, ii. 244-246. Oct. 24, 1761.
+
+[23] _Ib._, 1766. _Oeuv._, lxxv. 364.
+
+[24] _Corr._, ii. 32. (1758.)
+
+[25] _Corr._, ii. 63. Jan. 15, 1779.
+
+[26] Bernardin de St. Pierre, xii. 102.
+
+[27] 4th Letter, p. 375.
+
+[28] _Mem._, ii. 299.
+
+[29] _Corr._, ii. 98. July 10, 1759.
+
+[30] _Corr._, ii. 106. Nov. 10, 1759.
+
+[31] _Ib._, ii. 179. Jan. 18, 1761.
+
+[32] _Ib._, ii. 268. Dec. 12, 1761.
+
+[33] _Ib._, ii. 28. Dec. 23, 1761.
+
+[34] _Nouv. Hel._, III. xxii. 147. In 1784 Hume's suppressed essays on
+"Suicide and the Immortality of the Soul" were published in
+London:--"With Remarks, intended as an Antidote to the Poison
+contained in these Performances, by the Editor; to which is added, Two
+Letters on Suicide, from Rousseau's Eloisa." In the preface the reader
+is told that these "two very masterly letters have been much
+celebrated." See Hume's _Essays_, by Green and Grose, i. 69, 70.
+
+[35] _Corr._, iii. 235. Aug. 1, 1763.
+
+[36] _Corr._, ii. 226. Sept. 29, 1761.
+
+[37] P. 294. Jan. 11, 1762.
+
+[38] Madame Latour (Nov. 7, 1730-Sept. 6, 1789) was the wife of a man
+in the financial world, who used her ill and dissipated as much of her
+fortune as he could, and from whom she separated in 1775. After that
+she resumed her maiden name and was known as Madame de Franqueville.
+Musset-Pathay, ii. 182, and Sainte Beuve, _Causeries_, ii. 63.
+
+[39] _Corr._, ii. 214. _Conf._, ix. 289.
+
+[40] English translations of Rousseau's works appeared very speedily
+after the originals. A second edition of the Heloisa was called for as
+early as May 1761. See _Corr._ ii. 223. A German translation of the
+Heloisa appeared at Leipzig in 1761, in six duodecimos.
+
+[41] For instance, _Corr._, ii. 168. Nov. 19, 1762.
+
+[42] Choderlos de La Clos: 1741-1803.
+
+[43] Journal, iv. 496. (Ed. Charpentier, 1857.)
+
+[44] _Nouv. Hel._, III. xiv. 48.
+
+[45] _E.g._ Letters, 40-46.
+
+[46] Madame de Stael (1765-1817), in her _Lettres sur les ecrits et le
+caractere de J.J. Rousseau_, written when she was twenty, and her
+first work of any pretensions. _Oeuv._, i. 41. Ed. 1820.
+
+[47] Nowhere more pungently than in a little piece of some half-dozen
+pages, headed, _Prediction tiree d'un vieux Manuscrit_, the form of
+which is borrowed from Grimm's squib in the dispute about French
+music, _Le petit Prophete de Boehmischbroda_, though it seems to me to
+be superior to Grimm in pointedness. Here are a few verses from the
+supposed prophecy of the man who should come--and of what he should
+do. "Et la multitude courra sur ses pas et plusieurs croiront en lui.
+Et il leur dira: Vous etes des scelerats et des fripons, vos femmes
+sont toutes des femmes perdues, et je viens vivre parmi vous. Et il
+ajoutera tous les hommes sont vertueux dans le pays ou je suis ne, et
+je n'habiterai jamais le pays ou je suis ne.... Et il dira aussi qu'il
+est impossible d'avoir des moeurs, et de lire des Romans, et il fera
+un Roman; et dans son Roman le vice sera en action et la vertu en
+paroles, et ses personages seront forcenes d'amour et de philosophie.
+Et dans son Roman on apprendra l'art de suborner philosophiquement une
+jeune fille. Et l'Ecoliere perdra toute honte et toute pudeur, et elle
+fera avec son maitre des sottises et des maximes.... Et le bel Ami
+etant dans un Bateau seul avec sa Maitresse voudra le jetter dans
+l'eau et se precipiter avec elle. Et ils appelleront tout cela de la
+Philosophie et de la Vertu," and so on, humorously enough in its way.
+
+[48] See passages in Goncourt's _La Femme au 18ieme siecle_, p. 380.
+
+[49] Musset-Pathay, II. 361. See Madame Roland's _Mem._, i. 207.
+
+[50] _Corr._, March 3, and March 19, 1761. The criticisms of Ximenes,
+a thoroughly mediocre person in all respects, were entirely literary,
+and were directed against the too strained and highly coloured quality
+of the phrases--"baisers acres"--among them.
+
+[51] _Nouv. Hel._, V. v. 115.
+
+[52] VI. vii.
+
+[53] VI. vi.
+
+[54] Michelet's _Louis XV. et Louis XVI._, p. 58.
+
+[55] See Hettner's _Literaturgeschichte_, II. 486.
+
+[56] IV. xi.
+
+[57] IV. xvii. See vol. iii. 423.
+
+[58] In 1816. Moore's _Life_, iii. 247; also 285. And the note to the
+stanzas in the Third Canto,--a note curious for a slight admixture of
+transcendentalism, so rare a thing with Byron, who, sentimental though
+he was, usually rejoiced in a truly Voltairean common sense.
+
+[59] "The present fashion in France, of passing some time in the
+country, is new; at this time of the year, and for many weeks past,
+Paris is, comparatively speaking, empty. Everybody who has a country
+seat is at it, and such as have none visit others who have. This
+remarkable revolution in the French manners is certainly one of the
+best customs they have taken from England; and its introduction was
+effected the easier, being assisted by the magic of Rousseau's
+writings. Mankind are much indebted to that splendid genius, who, when
+living, was hunted from country to country, to seek an asylum, with as
+much venom as if he had been a mad dog; thanks to the vile spirit of
+bigotry, which has not received its death wound. Women of the first
+fashion in France are now ashamed of not nursing their own children;
+and stays are universally proscribed from the bodies of the poor
+infants, which were for so many ages torture to them, as they are
+still in Spain. The country residence may not have effects equally
+obvious; but they will be no less sure in the end, and in all respects
+beneficial to every class in the state." Arthur Young's _Travels_, i.
+72.
+
+[60] _Causeries_, xi. 195.
+
+[61] _Nouv. Hel._, V. iii. "You remember Rousseau's description of an
+English morning: such are the mornings I spend with these good
+people."--Cowper to Joseph Hill, Oct. 25, 1765. _Works_, iii. 269. In
+a letter to William Unwin (Sept. 21, 1779), speaking of his being
+engaged in mending windows, he says, "Rousseau would have been charmed
+to have seen me so occupied, and would have exclaimed with rapture
+that he had found the Emilius who, he supposed, had subsisted only in
+his own idea." For a description illustrative of the likeness between
+Rousseau and Cowper in their feeling for nature, see letter to Newton
+(Sept. 18, 1784, v. 78), and compare it with the description of Les
+Charmettes, making proper allowance for the colour of prose.
+
+[62] IV. x. 260.
+
+[63] V. ii. 37.
+
+[64] V. ii. 47-52.
+
+[65] Rousseau considered that the Fourth and Sixth parts of the New
+Heloisa were masterpieces of diction. _Conf._ ix. 334.
+
+[66] VI. viii.. 298. _Conf._, xi. 106.
+
+[67] The La Bedoyere case, which began in 1745. See Barbier, iv. 54,
+59, etc.
+
+[68] III. xviii. 84.
+
+[69] III. xx. 116. In the letter to Christopher de Beaumont (p. 102),
+he fires a double shot against the philosophers on the one hand, and
+the church on the other; exalting continence and purity, of which the
+philosophers in their reaction against asceticism thought lightly, and
+exalting marriage over the celibate state, which the churchmen
+associated with mysterious sanctity.
+
+[70] I. lxii.
+
+[71] V. ii.
+
+[72] V. vii. 141.
+
+[73] V. ii. 31-33.
+
+[74] For the Robecq family, see Saint Simon, xviii. 58.
+
+[75] Morellet's _Mem._, i. 89-93. Rousseau, _Conf._, x. 85, etc. This
+_Vision_ is also in the style of Grimm's _Petit Prophete_, like the
+piece referred to in a previous note, vol. ii. p. 31.
+
+[76] Madame de Vandeul's _Mem. sur Diderot_, p. 27. Rousseau, _Conf._,
+vii. 130.
+
+[77] _Nouv. Hel._, V. xiii. 194. _Conf._, x. 43.
+
+[78] The reader will find a fuller mention of the French book trade in
+my _Diderot_, ch. vi.
+
+[79] _Conf._, xi. 127.
+
+[80] See a letter from Rousseau to Malesherbes, Nov. 5, 1760. _Corr._,
+ii. 157.
+
+[81] _Corr._, ii. 157.
+
+[82] C.G. de Lamoignon de Malesherbes (p. 1721--guillotined, 1794),
+son of the chancellor, and one of the best instructed and most
+enlightened men of the century--a Turgot of the second rank--was
+Directeur de la Librairie from 1750-1763. The process was this: a book
+was submitted to him; he named a censor for it; on the censor's report
+the director gave or refused permission to print, or required
+alterations. Even after these formalities were complied with, the book
+was liable to a decree of the royal council, a decree of the
+parliament, or else a _lettre-de-cachet_ might send the author to the
+Bastile. See Barbier, vii. 126.
+
+After Lord Shelburne saw Malesherbes, he said, "I have seen for the
+first time in my life what I never thought could exist--a man whose
+soul is absolutely free from hope or fear, and yet who is full of life
+and ardour." Mdlle. Lespinasse's _Lettres_, 90.
+
+[83] See note, p. 132.
+
+[84] _Conf._, xi. 134.
+
+[85] _Conf._, xi. 139.
+
+[86] _Ib._, xi. 139. _Corr._, ii. 270, etc. Dec. 12, 1761, etc.
+
+[87] _Conf._, xi. 150.
+
+[88] Fourth Letter to Malesherbes, p. 377.
+
+[89] With one trifling exception, the Letter to Grimm on the Opera of
+Omphale (1752): _Ecrits sur la Musique_, p. 337.
+
+[90] See Barbier's Journal, viii. 45 (Ed. Charpentier, 1857). A
+succinct contemporary account of the general situation is to be found
+in D'Alembert's little book, the _Destruction des Jesuites_.
+
+[91] Grimm, for instance: _Corr. Lit._, iii. 117.
+
+[92] _Corr._, ii. 337. June 7, 1672. _Conf._, xi. 152, 162.
+
+[93] _Conf._, xi. 162. The Levite's story is to be read in _Judges_,
+ch. xix.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+PERSECUTION.[94]
+
+
+Those to whom life consists in the immediate consciousness of
+their own direct relations with the people and circumstances that are
+in close contact with them, find it hard to follow the moods of a man
+to whom such consciousness is the least part of himself, and such
+relations the least real part of his life. Rousseau was no sooner in
+the post-chaise which was bearing him away towards Switzerland, than
+the troubles of the previous day at once dropped into a pale and
+distant past, and he returned to a world where was neither parliament,
+nor decree for burning books, nor any warrant for personal arrest. He
+took up the thread where harassing circumstances had broken it, and
+again fell musing over the tragic tale of the Levite of Ephraim. His
+dream absorbed him so entirely as to take specific literary form, and
+before the journey was at an end he had composed a long impassioned
+version of the Bible story. Though it has Rousseau's usual fine
+sonorousness in a high degree, no man now reads it; the author himself
+always preserved a certain tenderness for it.[95] The contrast
+between this singular quietism and the angry stir that marked
+Voltaire's many flights in post-chaises, points like all else to the
+profound difference between the pair. Contrast with Voltaire's shrill
+cries under any personal vexation, this calm utterance:--"Though the
+consequences of this affair have plunged me into a gulf of woes from
+which I shall never come up again so long as I live, I bear these
+gentlemen no grudge. I am aware that their object was not to do me any
+harm, but only to reach ends of their own. I know that towards me they
+have neither liking nor hate. I was found in their way, like a pebble
+that you thrust aside with the foot without even looking at it. They
+ought not to say they have performed their duty, but that they have
+done their business."[96] A new note from a persecuted writer.
+
+Rousseau, in spite of the belief which henceforth possessed him that
+he was the victim of a dark unfathomable plot, and in spite of passing
+outbreaks of gloomy rage, was incapable of steady glowing and active
+resentments. The world was not real enough to him for this. A throng
+of phantoms pressed noiselessly before his sight, and dulled all sense
+of more actual impression. "It is amazing," he wrote, "with what ease
+I forget past ill, however fresh it may be. In proportion as the
+anticipation of it alarms and confuses me when I see it coming, so
+the memory of it returns feebly to my mind and dies out the moment
+after it has arrived. My cruel imagination, which torments itself
+incessantly in anticipating woes that are still unborn, makes a
+diversion for my memory, and hinders me from recalling those which
+have gone. I exhaust disaster beforehand. The more I have suffered in
+foreseeing it, the more easily do I forget it; while on the contrary,
+being incessantly busy with my past happiness, I recall it and brood
+and ruminate over it, so as to enjoy it over again whenever I
+wish."[97] The same turn of humour saved him from vindictiveness. "I
+concern myself too little with the offence, to feel much concern about
+the offender. I only think of the hurt that I have received from him,
+on account of the hurt that he may still do me; and if I were sure he
+would do me no more, what he had already done would be forgotten
+straightway." Though he does not carry the analysis any further, we
+may easily perceive that the same explanation covers what he called
+his natural ingratitude. Kindness was not much more vividly understood
+by him than malice. It was only one form of the troublesome
+interposition of an outer world in his life; he was fain to hurry back
+from it to the real world of his dreams. If any man called practical
+is tempted to despise this dreaming creature, as he fares in his
+chaise from stage to stage, let him remember that one making that
+journey through France less than thirty years later might have seen
+the castles of the great flaring in the destruction of a most
+righteous vengeance, the great themselves fleeing ignobly from the
+land to which their selfishness, and heedlessness, and hatred of
+improvement, and inhuman pride had been a curse, while the legion of
+toilers with eyes blinded by the oppression of ages were groping with
+passionate uncertain hand for that divine something which they thought
+of as justice and right. And this was what Rousseau both partially
+foresaw and helped to prepare,[98] while the common politicians, like
+Choiseul or D'Aiguillon, played their poor game--the elemental forces
+rising unseen into tempest around them.
+
+He reached the territory of the canton of Berne, and alighted at the
+house of an old friend at Yverdun,[99] where native air, the beauty of
+the spot, and the charms of the season, immediately repaired all
+weariness and fatigue.[100] Friends at Geneva wrote letters of sincere
+feeling, joyful that he had not followed the precedent of Socrates too
+closely by remaining in the power of a government eager to destroy
+him.[101] A post or two later brought worse news. The Council at
+Geneva ordered not only Emilius, but the Social Contract also, to be
+publicly burnt, and issued a warrant of arrest against their author,
+if he should set foot in the territory of the republic (June
+19).[102] Rousseau could hardly believe it possible that the free
+Government which he had held up to the reverence of Europe, could have
+condemned him unheard, but he took occasion in a highly characteristic
+manner to chide severely a friend at Geneva who had publicly taken his
+part.[103] Within a fortnight this blow was followed by another. His
+two books were reported to the senate of Berne, and Rousseau was
+informed by one of the authorities that a notification was on its way
+admonishing him to quit the canton within the space of fifteen
+days.[104] This stroke he avoided by flight to Motiers, a village in
+the principality of Neuchatel (July 10), then part of the dominions of
+the King of Prussia.[105] Rousseau had some antipathy to Frederick,
+both because he had beaten the French, whom Rousseau loved, and
+because his maxims and his conduct alike seemed to trample under foot
+respect for the natural law and not a few human duties. He had
+composed a verse to the effect that Frederick thought like a
+philosopher and acted like a king, philosopher and king notoriously
+being words of equally evil sense in his dialect. There was also a
+passage in Emilius about Adrastus, King of the Daunians, which was
+commonly understood to mean Frederick, King of the Prussians. Still
+Rousseau was acute enough to know that mean passions usually only rule
+the weak, and have little hold over the strong. He boldly wrote both
+to the king and to Lord Marischal, the governor of the principality,
+informing them that he was there, and asking permission to remain in
+the only asylum left for him upon the earth.[106] He compared himself
+loftily to Coriolanus among the Volscians, and wrote to the king in a
+vein that must have amused the strong man. "I have said much ill of
+you, perhaps I shall still say more; yet, driven from France, from
+Geneva, from the canton of Berne, I am come to seek shelter in your
+states. Perhaps I was wrong in not beginning there; this is eulogy of
+which you are worthy. Sire, I have deserved no grace from you, and I
+seek none, but I thought it my duty to inform your majesty that I am
+in your power, and that I am so of set design. Your majesty will
+dispose of me as shall seem good to you."[107] Frederick, though no
+admirer of Rousseau or his writings,[108] readily granted the required
+permission. He also, says Lord Marischal, "gave me orders to furnish
+him his small necessaries if he would accept them; and though that
+king's philosophy be very different from that of Jean Jacques, yet he
+does not think that a man of an irreproachable life is to be
+persecuted because his sentiments are singular. He designs to build
+him a hermitage with a little garden, which I find he will not accept,
+nor perhaps the rest, which I have not yet offered him."[109] When the
+offer of the flour, wine, and firewood was at length made in as
+delicate terms as possible, Rousseau declined the gift on grounds
+which may raise a smile, but which are not without a rather touching
+simplicity.[110] "I have enough to live on for two or three years," he
+said, "but if I were dying of hunger, I would rather in the present
+condition of your good prince, and not being of any service to him, go
+and eat grass and grub up roots, than accept a morsel of bread from
+him."[111] Hume might well call this a phenomenon in the world of
+letters, and one very honourable for the person concerned.[112] And we
+recognise its dignity the more when we contrast it with the baseness
+of Voltaire, who drew his pension from the King of Prussia while
+Frederick was in his most urgent straits, and while the poet was
+sportively exulting to all his correspondents in the malicious
+expectation that he would one day have to allow the King of Prussia
+himself a pension.[113] And Rousseau was a poor man, living among the
+poor and in their style. His annual outlay at this time was covered by
+the modest sum of sixty louis.[114] What stamps his refusal of
+Frederick's gifts as true dignity, is the fact that he not only did
+not refuse money for any work done, but expected and asked for it.
+Malesherbes at this very time begged him to collect plants for him.
+Joyfully, replied Rousseau, "but as I cannot subsist without the aid
+of my own labour, I never meant, in spite of the pleasure that it
+might otherwise have been to me, to offer you the use of my time for
+nothing."[115] In the same year, we may add, when the tremendous
+struggle of the Seven Years' War was closing, the philosopher wrote a
+second terse epistle to the king, and with this their direct
+communication came to an end. "Sire, you are my protector and my
+benefactor; I would fain repay you if I can. You wish to give me
+bread; is there none of your own subjects in want of it? Take that
+sword away from my sight, it dazzles and pains me. It has done its
+work only too well; the sceptre is abandoned. Great is the career for
+kings of your stuff, and you are still far from the term; time
+presses, you have not a moment to lose. Fathom well your heart, O
+Frederick! Can you dare to die without having been the greatest of
+men? Would that I could see Frederick, the just and the redoubtable,
+covering his states with multitudes of men to whom he should be a
+father; then will J.J. Rousseau, the foe of kings, hasten to die at
+the foot of his throne."[116] Frederick, strong as his interest was in
+all curious persons who could amuse him, was too busy to answer this,
+and Rousseau was not yet recognised as Voltaire's rival in power and
+popularity.
+
+Motiers is one of the half-dozen decent villages standing in the flat
+bottom of the Val de Travers, a widish valley that lies between the
+gorges of the Jura and the Lake of Neuchatel, and is famous in our day
+for its production of absinthe and of asphalt. The flat of the valley,
+with the Reuss making a bald and colourless way through the midst of
+it, is nearly treeless, and it is too uniform to be very pleasing. In
+winter the climate is most rigorous, for the level is high, and the
+surrounding hills admit the sun's rays late and cut them off early.
+Rousseau's description, accurate and recognisable as it is,[117]
+strikes an impartial tourist as too favourable. But when a piece of
+scenery is a home to a man, he has an eye for a thousand outlines,
+changes of light, soft variations of colour; the landscape lives for
+him with an unspoken suggestion and intimate association, to all of
+which the swift passing stranger is very cold.
+
+His cottage, which is still shown, was in the midst of the other
+houses, and his walks, which were at least as important to him as the
+home in which he dwelt, lay mostly among woody heights with streaming
+cascades. The country abounded in natural curiosities of a humble
+sort, and here that interest in plants which had always been strong in
+him, began to grow into a passion. Rousseau had so curious a feeling
+about them, that when in his botanical expeditions he came across a
+single flower of its kind, he could never bring himself to pluck it.
+His sight, though not good for distant objects, was of the very finest
+for things held close; his sense of smell was so acute and subtle
+that, according to a good witness, he might have classified plants by
+odours, if language furnished as many names as nature supplies
+varieties of fragrance.[118] He insisted in all botanising and other
+walking excursions on going bareheaded, even in the heat of the
+dog-days; he declared that the action of the sun did him good. When
+the days began to turn, the summer was straightway at an end for him:
+"My imagination," he said, in a phrase which went further through his
+life than he supposed, "at once brings winter." He hated rain as much
+as he loved sun, so he must once have lost all the mystic fascination
+of the green Savoy lakes gleaming luminous through pale showers, and
+now again must have lost the sombre majesty of the pines of his valley
+dripping in torn edges of cloud, and all those other sights in
+landscape that touch subtler parts of us than comforted sense.
+
+One of his favourite journeys was to Colombier, the summer retreat of
+Lord Marischal. For him he rapidly conceived the same warm friendship
+which he felt for the Duke of Luxembourg, whom he had just left. And
+the sagacious, moderate, silent Scot had as warm a liking for the
+strange refugee who had come to him for shelter, or shall we call it a
+kind of shaggy compassion, as of a faithful inarticulate creature. His
+letters, which are numerous enough, abound in expressions of hearty
+good-will. These, if we reflect on the genuine worth, veracity,
+penetration, and experience of the old man who wrote them, may fairly
+be counted the best testimony that remains to the existence of
+something sterling at the bottom of Rousseau's character.[119] It is
+here no insincere fine lady of the French court, but a homely and
+weather-beaten Scotchman, who speaks so often of his refugee's
+rectitude of heart and true sensibility.[120]
+
+He insisted on being allowed to settle a small sum on Theresa, who
+had joined Rousseau at Motiers, and in other ways he showed a true
+solicitude and considerateness both for her and for him.[121] It was
+his constant dream, that on his return to Scotland, Jean Jacques
+should accompany him, and that with David Hume, they would make a trio
+of philosophic hermits; that this was no mere cheery pleasantry is
+shown by the pains he took in settling the route for the journey.[122]
+The plan only fell through in consequence of Frederick's cordial
+urgency that his friend should end his days with him; he returned to
+Prussia and lived at Sans Souci until the close, always retaining
+something of his good-will for "his excellent savage," as he called
+the author of the Discourses. They had some common antipathies,
+including the fundamental one of dislike to society, and especially to
+the society of the people of Neuchatel, the Gascons of Switzerland.
+"Rousseau is gay in company," Lord Marischal wrote to Hume, "polite,
+and what the French call _aimable_, and gains ground daily in the
+opinion of even the clergy here. His enemies elsewhere continue to
+persecute him, and he is pestered with anonymous letters."[123]
+
+Some of these were of a humour that disclosed the master hand.
+Voltaire had been universally suspected of stirring up the feeling of
+Geneva against its too famous citizen,[124] though for a man of less
+energy the affair of the Calas, which he was now in the thick of,
+might have sufficed. Voltaire's letters at this time show how hard he
+found it in the case of Rousseau to exercise his usual pity for the
+unfortunate. He could not forget that the man who was now tasting
+persecution had barked at philosophers and stage-plays; that he was a
+false brother, who had fatuously insulted the only men who could take
+his part; that he was a Judas who had betrayed the sacred cause.[125]
+On the whole, however, we ought probably to accept his word, though
+not very categorically given,[126] that he had nothing to do with the
+action taken against Rousseau. That action is quite adequately
+explained, first by the influence of the resident of France at Geneva,
+which we know to have been exerted against the two fatal books,[127]
+and second by the anxiety of the oligarchic party to keep out of their
+town a man whose democratic tendencies they now knew so well and so
+justly dreaded.[128] Moultou, a Genevese minister, in the full tide
+of devotion and enthusiasm for the author of Emilius, met Voltaire at
+the house of a lady in Geneva. All will turn out well, cried the
+patriarch; "the syndics will say M. Rousseau, you have done ill to
+write what you have written; promise for the future to respect the
+religion of your country. Jean Jacques will promise, and perhaps he
+will say that the printer took the liberty of adding a sheet or two to
+his book." "Never," cried the ardent Moultou; "Jean Jacques never puts
+his name to works to disown them after."[129] Voltaire disowned his
+own books with intrepid and sustained mendacity, yet he bore no grudge
+to Moultou for his vehemence. He sent for him shortly afterwards,
+professed an extreme desire to be reconciled with Rousseau, and would
+talk of nothing else. "I swear to you," wrote Moultou, "that I could
+not understand him the least in the world; he is a marvellous actor; I
+could have sworn that he loved you."[130] And there really was no
+acting in it. The serious Genevese did not see that he was dealing
+with "one all fire and fickleness, a child."
+
+Rousseau soon found out that he had excited not only the band of
+professed unbelievers, but also the tormenting wasps of orthodoxy. The
+doctors of the Sorbonne, not to be outdone in fervour for truth by the
+lawyers of the parliament, had condemned Emilius as a matter of
+course. In the same spirit of generous emulation, Christopher de
+Beaumont, "by the divine compassion archbishop of Paris, Duke of Saint
+Cloud, peer of France, commander of the order of the Holy Ghost," had
+issued (Aug. 20, 1762) one of those hateful documents in which
+bishops, Catholic and Protestant, have been wont for the last century
+and a half to hide with swollen bombastic phrase their dead and
+decomposing ideas. The windy folly of these poor pieces is usually in
+proportion to the hierarchic rank of those who promulgate them, and an
+archbishop owes it to himself to blaspheme against reason and freedom
+in superlatives of malignant unction. Rousseau's reply (Nov. 18, 1762)
+is a masterpiece of dignity and uprightness. Turning to it from the
+mandate which was its provocative, we seem to grasp the hand of a man,
+after being chased by a nightmare of masked figures. Rousseau never
+showed the substantial quality of his character more surely and
+unmistakably than in controversy. He had such gravity, such austere
+self-command, such closeness of grip. Most of us feel pleasure in
+reading the matchless banter with which Voltaire assailed his
+theological enemies. Reading Rousseau's letter to De Beaumont we
+realise the comparative lowness of the pleasure which Voltaire had
+given us. We understand how it was that Rousseau made fanatics, while
+Voltaire only made sceptics. At the very first words, the mitre, the
+crosier, the ring, fall into the dust; the Archbishop of Paris, the
+Duke of Saint Cloud, the peer of France, the commander of the Holy
+Ghost, is restored from the disguises of his enchantment, and becomes
+a human being. We hear the voice of a man hailing a man. Voltaire
+often sank to the level of ecclesiastics. Rousseau raised the
+archbishop to his own level, and with magnanimous courtesy addressed
+him as an equal. "Why, my lord, have I anything to say to you? What
+common tongue can we use? How are we to understand one another? And
+what is there between me and you?" And he persevered in this distant
+lofty vein, hardly permitting himself a single moment of acerbity. We
+feel the ever-inspiring breath of seriousness and sincerity. This was
+because, as we repeat so often, Rousseau's ideas, all engendered of
+dreams as they were, yet lived in him and were truly rooted in his
+character. He did not merely say, as any of us can say so fluently,
+that he craved reality in human relations, that distinctions of rank
+and post count for nothing, that our lives are in our own hands and
+ought not to be blown hither and thither by outside opinion and words
+heedlessly scattered; that our faith, whatever it may be, is the most
+sacred of our possessions, organic, indissoluble, self-sufficing; that
+our passage across the world, if very short, is yet too serious to be
+wasted in frivolous disrespect for ourselves, and angry disrespect for
+others. All this was actually his mind. And hence the little
+difficulty he had in keeping his retort to the archbishop, as to his
+other antagonists, on a worthy level.
+
+Only once or twice does his sense of the reckless injustice with which
+he had been condemned, and of the persecution which was inflicted on
+him by one government after another, stir in him a blaze of high
+remonstrance. "You accuse me of temerity," he cried; "how have I
+earned such a name, when I only propounded difficulties, and even that
+with so much reserve; when I only advanced reasons, and even that with
+so much respect; when I attacked no one, nor even named one? And you,
+my lord, how do you dare to reproach with temerity a man of whom you
+speak with such scanty justice and so little decency, with so small
+respect and so much levity? You call me impious, and of what impiety
+can you accuse me--me who never spoke of the Supreme Being except to
+pay him the honour and glory that are his due, nor of man except to
+persuade all men to love one another? The impious are those who
+unworthily profane the cause of God by making it serve the passions of
+men. The impious are those who, daring to pass for the interpreters of
+divinity, and judges between it and man, exact for themselves the
+honours that are due to it only. The impious are those who arrogate to
+themselves the right of exercising the power of God upon earth, and
+insist on opening and shutting the gates of heaven at their own good
+will and pleasure. The impious are those who have libels read in the
+church. At this horrible idea my blood is enkindled, and tears of
+indignation fall from my eyes. Priests of the God of peace, you shall
+render an account one day, be very sure, of the use to which you have
+dared to put his house.... My lord, you have publicly insulted me:
+you are now convicted of heaping calumny upon me. If you were a
+private person like myself, so that I could cite you before an
+equitable tribunal, and we could both appear before it, I with my
+book, and you with your mandate, assuredly you would be declared
+guilty; you would be condemned to make reparation as public as the
+wrong was public. But you belong to a rank that relieves you from the
+necessity of being just, and I am nothing. Yet you who profess the
+gospel, you, a prelate appointed to teach others their duty, you know
+what your own duty is in such a case. Mine I have done: I have nothing
+more to say to you, and I hold my peace."[131]
+
+The letter was as good in dialectic as it was in moral tone. For this
+is a little curious, that Rousseau, so diffuse in expounding his
+opinions, and so unscientific in his method of coming to them, should
+have been one of the keenest and most trenchant of the
+controversialists of a very controversial time. Some of his strokes in
+defence of his first famous assault on civilisation are as hard, as
+direct, and as effective as any in the records of polemical
+literature. We will give one specimen from the letter to the
+Archbishop of Paris; it has the recommendation of touching an argument
+that is not yet quite universally recognised for slain. The Savoyard
+Vicar had dwelt on the difficulty of accepting revelation as the voice
+of God, on account of the long distance of time between us, and the
+questionableness of the supporting testimony. To which the archbishop
+thus:--"But is there not then an infinity of facts, even earlier than
+those of the Christian revelation, which it would be absurd to doubt?
+By what way other than that of human testimony has our author himself
+known the Sparta, the Athens, the Rome, whose laws, manners, and
+heroes he extols with such assurance? How many generations of men
+between him and the historians who have preserved the memory of these
+events?" First, says Rousseau in answer, "it is in the order of things
+that human circumstances should be attested by human evidence, and
+they can be attested in no other way. I can only know that Rome and
+Sparta existed, because contemporaries assure me that they existed. In
+such a case this intermediate communication is indispensable. But why
+is it necessary between God and me? Is it simple or natural that God
+should have gone in search of Moses to speak to Jean Jacques Rousseau?
+Second, nobody is obliged to believe that Sparta once existed, and
+nobody will be devoured by eternal flames for doubting it. Every fact
+of which we are not witnesses is only established by moral proofs, and
+moral proofs have various degrees of strength. Will the divine justice
+hurl me into hell for missing the exact point at which a proof becomes
+irresistible? If there is in the world an attested story, it is that
+of vampires; nothing is wanting for judicial proof,--reports and
+certificates from notables, surgeons, clergy, magistrates. But who
+believes in vampires, and shall we all be damned for not believing?
+Third, _my constant experience and that of all men is stronger in
+reference to prodigies than the testimony of some men_."
+
+He then strikes home with a parable. The Abbe Paris had died in the
+odour of Jansenist sanctity (1727), and extraordinary doings went on
+at his tomb; the lame walked, men and women sick of the palsy were
+made whole, and so forth. Suppose, says Rousseau, that an inhabitant
+of the Rue St. Jacques speaks thus to the Archbishop of Paris, "My
+lord, I know that you neither believe in the beatitude of St. Jean de
+Paris, nor in the miracles which God has been pleased publicly to work
+upon his tomb in the sight of the most enlightened and most populous
+city in the world; but I feel bound to testify to you that I have just
+seen the saint in person raised from the dead in the spot where his
+bones were laid." The man of the Rue St. Jacques gives all the detail
+of such a circumstance that could strike a beholder. "I am persuaded
+that on hearing such strange news, you will begin by interrogating him
+who testifies to its truth, as to his position, his feelings, his
+confessor, and other such points; and when from his air, as from his
+speech, you have perceived that he is a poor workman, and when having
+no confessional ticket to show you, he has confirmed your notion that
+he is a Jansenist, Ah, ah, you will say to him, you are a
+convulsionary, and have seen Saint Paris resuscitated. There is
+nothing wonderful in that; you have seen so many other wonders!" The
+man would insist that the miracle had been seen equally by a number of
+other people, who though Jansenists, it is true, were persons of sound
+sense, good character, and excellent reputation. Some would send the
+man to Bedlam, "but you after a grave reprimand, will be content with
+saying: I know that two or three witnesses, good people and of sound
+sense, may attest the life or the death of a man, but I do not know
+how many more are needed to establish the resurrection of a Jansenist.
+Until I find that out, go, my son, and try to strengthen your brain: I
+give you a dispensation from fasting, and here is something for you to
+make your broth with. That is what you would say, and what any other
+sensible man would say in your place. Whence I conclude that even
+according to you and to every other sensible man, the moral proofs
+which are sufficient to establish facts that are in the order of moral
+possibilities, are not sufficient to establish facts of another order
+and purely supernatural."[132]
+
+Perhaps, however, the formal denunciation by the Archbishop of Paris
+was less vexatious than the swarming of the angrier hive of ministers
+at his gates. "If I had declared for atheism," he says bitterly, "they
+would at first have shrieked, but they would soon have left me in
+peace like the rest. The people of the Lord would not have kept watch
+over me; everybody would not have thought he was doing me a high
+favour in not treating me as a person cut off from communion, and I
+should have been quits with all the world. The holy women in Israel
+would not have written me anonymous letters, and their charity would
+not have breathed devout insults. They would not have taken the
+trouble to assure me in all humility of heart that I was a castaway,
+an execrable monster, and that the world would have been well off if
+some good soul had been at the pains to strangle me in my cradle.
+Worthy people on their side would not torment themselves and torment
+me to bring me back to the way of salvation; they would not charge at
+me from right and left, nor stifle me under the weight of their
+sermons, nor force me to bless their zeal while I cursed their
+importunity, nor to feel with gratitude that they are obeying a call
+to lay me in my very grave with weariness."[133]
+
+He had done his best to conciliate the good opinion of his vigilant
+neighbours. Their character for contentious orthodoxy was well known.
+It was at Neuchatel that the controversy as to the eternal punishment
+of the wicked raged with a fury that ended in a civil outbreak. The
+peace of the town was violently disturbed, ministers were suspended,
+magistrates were interdicted, life was lost, until at last Frederick
+promulgated his famous bull:--"Let the parsons who make for themselves
+a cruel and barbarous God, be eternally damned as they desire and
+deserve; and let those parsons who conceive God gentle and merciful,
+enjoy the plenitude of his mercy."[134] When Rousseau came within the
+territory, preparations were made to imitate the action of Paris,
+Geneva, and Berne. It was only the king's express permission that
+saved him from a fourth proscription. The minister at Motiers was of
+the less inhuman stamp, and Rousseau, feeling that he could not,
+without failing in his engagements and his duty as a citizen, neglect
+the public profession of the faith to which he had been restored eight
+years before, attended the religious services with regularity. He even
+wrote to the pastor a letter in vindication of his book, and
+protesting the sincerity of his union with the reformed
+congregation.[135] The result of this was that the pastor came to tell
+him how great an honour he held it to count such a member in his
+flock, and how willing he was to admit him without further examination
+to partake of the communion.[136] Rousseau went to the ceremony with
+eyes full of tears and a heart swelling with emotion. We may respect
+his mood as little or as much as we please, but it was certainly more
+edifying than the sight of Voltaire going through the same rite,
+merely to harass a priest and fill a bishop with fury.
+
+In all other respects he lived a harmless life during the three years
+of his sojourn in the Val de Travers. As he could never endure what he
+calls the inactive chattering of the parlour--people sitting in front
+of one another with folded hands and nothing in motion except the
+tongue--he learnt the art of making laces; he used to carry his pillow
+about with him, or sat at his own door working like the women of the
+village, and chatting with the passers-by. He made presents of his
+work to young women about to marry, always on the condition that they
+should suckle their children when they came to have them. If a little
+whimsical, it was a harmless and respectable pastime. It is pleasanter
+to think of a philosopher finding diversion in weaving laces, than of
+noblemen making it the business of their lives to run after ribands. A
+society clothed in breeches was incensed about the same time by
+Rousseau's adoption of the Armenian costume, the vest, the furred
+bonnet, the caftan, and the girdle. There was nothing very wonderful
+in this departure from use. An Armenian tailor used often to visit
+some friends at Montmorency. Rousseau knew him, and reflected that
+such a dress would be of singular comfort to him in the circumstances
+of his bodily disorder.[137] Here was a solid practical reason for
+what has usually been counted a demonstration of a turned brain.
+Rousseau had as good cause for going about in a caftan as Chatham had
+for coming to the House of Parliament wrapped in flannel. Vanity and a
+desire to attract notice may, we admit, have had something to do with
+Rousseau's adoption of an uncommon way of dressing. Shrewd wits like
+the Duke of Luxembourg and his wife did not suppose that it was so.
+We, living a hundred years after, cannot possibly know whether it was
+so or not, and our estimate of Rousseau's strange character would be
+very little worth forming, if it only turned on petty singularities of
+this kind. The foolish, equivocally gifted with the quality of
+articulate speech, may, if they choose, satisfy their own self-love by
+reducing all action out of the common course to a series of variations
+on the same motive in others. Men blessed by the benignity of
+experience will be thankful not to waste life in guessing evil about
+unknowable trifles.
+
+During his stay at Motiers Rousseau's time was hardly ever his own.
+Visitors of all nations, drawn either by respect for his work or by
+curiosity to see a man who had been prescribed by so many governments,
+came to him in throngs. His partisans at Geneva insisted on sending
+people to convince themselves how good a man they were persecuting. "I
+had never been free from strangers for six weeks," he writes. "Two
+days after, I had a Westphalian gentleman and one from Genoa; six days
+later, two persons from Zurich, who stayed a week; then a Genevese,
+recovering from an illness, and coming for change of air, fell ill
+again, and he has only just gone away."[138] One visitor, writing home
+to his wife of the philosopher to whom he had come on a pilgrimage,
+describes his manners in terms which perhaps touch us with
+surprise:--"Thou hast no idea how charming his society is, what true
+politeness there is in his manners, what a depth of serenity and
+cheerfulness in his talk. Didst thou not expect quite a different
+picture, and figure to thyself an eccentric creature, always grave and
+sometimes even abrupt? Ah, what a mistake! To an expression of great
+mildness he unites a glance of fire, and eyes of a vivacity the like
+of which never was seen. When you handle any matter in which he takes
+an interest, then his eyes, his lips, his hands, everything about him
+speaks. You would be quite wrong to picture in him an everlasting
+grumbler. Not at all; he laughs with those who laugh, he chats and
+jokes with children, he rallies his housekeeper."[139] He was not so
+civil to all the world, and occasionally turned upon his pursuers with
+a word of most sardonic roughness.[140] But he could also be very
+generous. We find him pressing a loan from his scanty store on an
+outcast adventurer, and warning him, "When I lend (which happens
+rarely enough), 'tis my constant maxim never to count on repayment,
+nor to exact it."[141] He received hundreds of letters, some seeking
+an application of his views on education to a special case, others
+craving further exposition of his religious doctrines. Before he had
+been at Motiers nine months he had paid ten louis for the postage of
+letters, which after all contained little more than reproaches,
+insults, menaces, imbecilities.[142]
+
+Not the least curious of his correspondence at this time is that with
+the Prince of Wuertemberg, then living near Lausanne.[143] The prince
+had a little daughter four months old, and he was resolved that her
+upbringing should be carried on as the author of Emilius might please
+to direct. Rousseau replied courteously that he did not pretend to
+direct the education of princes or princesses.[144] His undaunted
+correspondent sent him full details of his babe's habits and
+faculties, and continued to do so at short intervals, with the
+fondness of a young mother or an old nurse. Rousseau was interested,
+and took some trouble to draw up rules for the child's nurture and
+admonition. One may smile now and then at the prince's ingenuous zeal,
+but his fervid respect and devotion for the teacher in whom he thought
+he had found the wisest man that ever lived, and who had at any rate
+spoken the word that kindled the love of virtue and truth in him, his
+eagerness to know what Rousseau thought right, and his equal eagerness
+in trying to do it, his care to arrange his household in a simple and
+methodical way to please his master, his discipular patience when
+Rousseau told him that his verses were poor, or that he was too fond
+of his wife,--all this is a little uncommon in a prince, and deserves
+a place among the ample mass of other evidence of the power which
+Rousseau's pictures of domestic simplicity and wise and humane
+education had in the eighteenth century. It gives us a glimpse, close
+and direct, of the naturalist revival reaching up into high places.
+But the trade of philosopher in such times is perhaps an irksome one,
+and Rousseau was the private victim of his public action. His prince
+sent multitudes of Germans to visit the sage, and his letters, endless
+with their details of the nursery, may well have become a little
+tedious to a worn-out creature who only wanted to be left alone.[145]
+The famous Prince Henry, Frederick's brother, thought a man happy who
+could have the delight of seeing Rousseau as often as he chose.[146]
+People forgot the other side of this delight, and the unlucky
+philosopher found in a hundred ways alike from enemies and the friends
+whose curiosity makes them as bad as enemies, that the pedestal of
+glory partakes of the nature of the pillory or the stocks.
+
+It is interesting to find the famous English names of Gibbon and
+Boswell in the list of the multitudes with whom he had to do at this
+time.[147] The former was now at Lausanne, whither he had just
+returned from that memorable visit to England which persuaded him that
+his father would never endure his alliance with the daughter of an
+obscure Swiss pastor. He had just "yielded to his fate, sighed as a
+lover, and obeyed as a son." "How sorry I am for our poor Mademoiselle
+Curchod," writes Moultou to Rousseau; "Gibbon whom she loves, and to
+whom she has sacrificed, as I know, some excellent matches, has come
+to Lausanne, but cold, insensible, and as entirely cured of his old
+passion as she is far from cure. She has written me a letter that
+makes my heart ache." He then entreats Rousseau to use his influence
+with Gibbon, who is on the point of starting for Motiers, by extolling
+to him the lady's worth and understanding.[148] "I hope Mr. Gibbon
+will not come," replied the sage; "his coldness makes me think ill of
+him. I have been looking over his book again [the _Essai sur l'etude
+de la litterature_, 1761]; he runs after brilliance too much, and is
+strained and stilted. Mr. Gibbon is not the man for me, and I do not
+think he is the man for Mademoiselle Curchod either."[149] Whether
+Gibbon went or not, we do not know. He knew in after years what had
+been said of him by Jean Jacques, and protested with mild pomp that
+this extraordinary man should have been less precipitate in
+condemning the moral character and the conduct of a stranger.[150]
+
+Boswell, as we know, had left Johnson "rolling his majestic frame in
+his usual manner" on Harwich beach in 1763, and was now on his
+travels. Like many of his countrymen, he found his way to Lord
+Marischal, and here his indomitable passion for making the personal
+acquaintance of any one who was much talked about, naturally led him
+to seek so singular a character as the man who was now at Motiers.
+What Rousseau thought of one who was as singular a character as
+himself in another direction, we do not know.[151] Lord Marischal
+warned Rousseau that his visitor is of excellent disposition, but full
+of visionary ideas, even having seen spirits--a serious proof of
+unsoundness to a man who had lived in the very positive atmosphere of
+Frederick's court at Berlin. "I only hope," says the sage Scot, of the
+Scot who was not sage, "that he may not fall into the hands of people
+who will turn his head: he was very pleased with the reception you
+gave him."[152] As it happens, he was the means of sending Boswell to
+a place where his head was turned, though not very mischievously.
+Rousseau was at that time full of Corsican projects, of which this is
+the proper place for us very briefly to speak.
+
+The prolonged struggles of the natives of Corsica to assert their
+independence of the oppressive administration of the Genoese, which
+had begun in 1729, came to end for a moment in 1755, when Paoli
+(1726-1807) defeated the Genoese, and proceeded to settle the
+government of the island. In the Social Contract Rousseau had said,
+"There is still in Europe one country capable of legislation, and that
+is the island of Corsica. The valour and constancy with which this
+brave people has succeeded in recovering and defending its liberty,
+entitle it to the good fortune of having some wise man to teach them
+how to preserve it. I have a presentiment that this little isle will
+one day astonish Europe,"[153]--a presentiment that in a sense came
+true enough long after Rousseau was gone, in a man who was born on the
+little island seven years later than the publication of this passage.
+Some of the Corsican leaders were highly flattered, and in August
+1764, Buttafuoco entered into correspondence with Rousseau for the
+purpose of inducing him to draw up a set of political institutions and
+a code of laws. Paoli himself was too shrewd to have much belief in
+the application of ideal systems, and we are assured that he had no
+intention of making Rousseau the Solon of his island, but only of
+inducing him to inflame the gallantry of its inhabitants by writing a
+history of their exploits.[154] Rousseau, however, did not understand
+the invitation in this narrower sense. He replied that the very idea
+of such a task as legislation transported his soul, and he entered
+into it with the liveliest ardour. He resolved to quarter himself with
+Theresa in a cottage in some lonely district in the island; in a year
+he would collect the necessary information as to the manners and
+opinions of the inhabitants, and three years afterwards he would
+produce a set of institutions that should be fit for a free and
+valorous people.[155] In the midst of this enthusiasm (May 1765) he
+urged Boswell to visit Corsica, and gave him a letter to Paoli, with
+results which we know in the shape of an Account of Corsica (1768),
+and in a feverishness of imagination upon the subject for many a long
+day afterwards. "Mind your own affairs," at length cried Johnson
+sternly to him, "and leave the Corsicans to theirs; I wish you would
+empty your head of Corsica."[156] At the end of 1765, the immortal
+hero-worshipper on his return expected to come upon his hero at
+Motiers, but finding that he was in Paris wrote him a wonderful letter
+in wonderful French. "You will forget all your cares for many an
+evening, while I tell you what I have seen. I owe you the deepest
+obligation for sending me to Corsica. The voyage has done me
+marvellous good. It has made me as if all the lives of Plutarch had
+sunk into my soul.... I am devoted to the Corsicans heart and soul; if
+you, illustrious Rousseau, the philosopher whom they have chosen to
+help them by your lights to preserve and enjoy the liberty which they
+have acquired with so much heroism--if you have cooled towards these
+gallant islanders, why then I am sorry for you, that is all I can
+say."[157]
+
+Alas, by this time the gallant islanders had been driven out of
+Rousseau's mind by personal mishaps. First, Voltaire or some other
+enemy had spread the rumour that the invitation to become the Lycurgus
+of Corsica was a practical joke, and Rousseau's suspicious temper
+found what he took for confirmation of this in some trifling incidents
+with which we certainly need not concern ourselves.[158] Next, a very
+real storm had burst upon him which drove him once more to seek a new
+place of shelter, other than an island occupied by French troops. For
+France having begun by despatching auxiliaries to the assistance of
+the Genoese (1764), ended by buying the island from the Genoese
+senate, with a sort of equity of redemption (1768)--an iniquitous
+transaction, as Rousseau justly called it, equally shocking to
+justice, humanity, reason, and policy.[159] Civilisation would have
+been saved one of its sorest trials if Genoa could have availed
+herself of her equity, and so have delivered France from the
+acquisition of the most terrible citizen that ever scourged a
+state.[160]
+
+The condemnation of Rousseau by the Council in 1762 had divided Geneva
+into two camps, and was followed by a prolonged contention between his
+partisans and his enemies. The root of the contention was political
+rather than theological. To take Rousseau's side was to protest
+against the oligarchic authority which had condemned him, and the
+quarrel about Emilius was only an episode in the long war between the
+popular and aristocratic parties. This strife, after coming to a
+height for the first time in 1734, had abated after the pacification
+of 1738, but the pacification was only effective for a time, and the
+roots of division were still full of vitality. The lawfulness of the
+authority and the regularity of the procedure by which Rousseau had
+been condemned, offered convenient ground for carrying on the dispute,
+and its warmth was made more intense by the suggestion on the popular
+side that perhaps the religion of the book which the oligarchs had
+condemned was more like Christianity than the religion of the
+oligarchs who condemned it.
+
+Rousseau was too near the scene of the quarrel, too directly involved
+in its issues, too constantly in contact with the people who were
+engaged in it, not to feel the angry buzzings very close about his
+ears. If he had been as collected and as self-possessed as he loved to
+fancy, they would have gone for very little in the life of the day.
+But Rousseau never stood on the heights whence a strong man surveys
+with clear eye and firm soul the unjust or mean or furious moods of
+the world. Such achievement is not hard for the creature who is
+wrapped up in himself; who is careless of the passions of men about
+him, because he thinks they cannot hurt him, and not because he has
+measured them, and deliberately assigned them a place among the
+elements in which a man's destiny is cast. It is only hard for one who
+is penetrated by true interest in the opinion and action of his
+fellows, thus to keep both sympathy warm and self-sufficience true.
+The task was too hard for Rousseau, though his patience under long
+persecution far surpassed that of any of the other oppressed teachers
+of the time. In the spring of 1763 he deliberately renounced in all
+due forms his rights of burgess-ship and citizenship in the city and
+republic of Geneva.[161] And at length he broke forth against his
+Genevese persecutors in the Letters from the Mountain (1764), a long
+but extremely vigorous and adroit rejoinder to the pleas which his
+enemies had put forth in Tronchin's Letters from the Country. If any
+one now cares to satisfy himself how really unjust and illegal the
+treatment was, which Rousseau received at the hands of the authorities
+of his native city, he may do so by examining these most forcible
+letters. The second part of them may interest the student of political
+history by its account of the working of the institutions of the
+little republic. We seem to be reading over again the history of a
+Greek city; the growth of a wealthy class in face of an increasing
+number of poor burgesses, the imposition of burdens in unfair
+proportions upon the metoikoi, the gradual usurpation of legislative
+and administrative function (including especially the judicial) by the
+oligarchs, and the twisting of democratic machinery to oligarchic
+ends; then the growth of staseis or violent factions, followed by
+metabole or overthrow of the established constitution, ending in
+foreign intervention. The Four Hundred at Athens would have treated
+any Social Contract that should have appeared in their day, just as
+sternly as the Two Hundred or the Twenty-five treated the Social
+Contract that did appear, and for just the same reasons.
+
+Rousseau proved his case with redundancy of demonstration. A body of
+burgesses had previously availed themselves (Nov. 1763) of a legal
+right, and made a technical representation to the Lesser Council that
+the laws had been broken in his case. The Council in return availed
+itself of an equally legal right, its _droit negatif_, and declined to
+entertain the representation, without giving any reasons.
+Unfortunately for Rousseau's comfort, the ferment which his new
+vindication of his cause stirred up, did not end with the condemnation
+and burning of his manifesto. For the parliament of Paris ordered the
+Letters from the Mountain to be burned, and the same decree and the
+same faggot served for that and for Voltaire's Philosophical
+Dictionary (April 1765).[162] It was also burned at the Hague (Jan.
+22). An observer by no means friendly to the priests noticed that at
+Paris it was not the fanatics of orthodoxy, but the encyclopaedists and
+their flock, who on this occasion raised the storm and set the zeal of
+the magistrates in motion.[163] The vanity and egoism of rationalistic
+sects can be as fatal to candour, justice, and compassion as the
+intolerant pride of the great churches.
+
+Persecution came nearer to Rousseau and took more inconvenient shapes
+than this. A terrible libel appeared (Feb. 1765), full of the coarsest
+calumnies. Rousseau, stung by their insolence and falseness, sent it
+to Paris to be published there with a prefatory note, stating that it
+was by a Genevese pastor whom he named. This landed him in fresh
+mortification, for the pastor disavowed the libel, Rousseau declined
+to accept the disavowal, and sensible men were wearied by acrimonious
+declarations, explanations, protests.[164] Then the clergy of
+Neuchatel were not able any longer to resist the opportunity of
+inflicting such torments as they could, upon a heretic whom they might
+more charitably have left to those ultimate and everlasting torments
+which were so precious to their religious imagination. They began to
+press the pastor of the village where Rousseau lived, and with whom he
+had hitherto been on excellent terms. The pastor, though he had been
+liberal enough to admit his singular parishioner to the communion, in
+spite of the Savoyard Vicar, was not courageous enough to resist the
+bigotry of the professional body to which he belonged. He warned
+Rousseau not to present himself at the next communion. The philosopher
+insisted that he had a right to do this, until formally cast out by
+the consistory. The consistory, composed mainly of a body of peasants
+entirely bound to their minister in matters of religion, cited him to
+appear, and answer such questions as might test his loyalty to the
+faith. Rousseau prepared a most deliberate vindication of all that he
+had written, which he intended to speak to his rustic judges. The eve
+of the morning on which he had to appear, he knew his discourse by
+heart; when morning came he could not repeat two sentences. So he fell
+back on the instrument over which he had more mastery than he had over
+tongue or memory, and wrote what he wished to say. The pastor, in whom
+irritated egoism was probably by this time giving additional heat to
+professional zeal, was for fulminating a decree of excommunication,
+but there appears to have been some indirect interference with the
+proceedings of the consistory by the king's officials at Neuchatel,
+and the ecclesiastical bolt was held back.[165] Other weapons were not
+wanting. The pastor proceeded to spread rumours among his flock that
+Rousseau was a heretic, even an atheist, and most prodigious of all,
+that he had written a book containing the monstrous doctrine that
+women have no souls. The pulpit resounded with sermons proving to the
+honest villagers that antichrist was quartered in their parish in very
+flesh. The Armenian apparel gave a high degree of plausibleness to
+such an opinion, and as the wretched man went by the door of his
+neighbours, he heard cursing and menace, while a hostile pebble now
+and again whistled past his ear. His botanising expeditions were
+believed to be devoted to search for noxious herbs, and a man who
+died in the agonies of nephritic colic, was supposed to have been
+poisoned by him.[166] If persons went to the post-office for letters
+for him, they were treated with insult.[167] At length the ferment
+against him grew hot enough to be serious. A huge block of stone was
+found placed so as to kill him when he opened his door; and one night
+an attempt was made to stone him in his house.[168] Popular hate shown
+with this degree of violence was too much for his fortitude, and after
+a residence of rather more than three years (September 8-10, 1765), he
+fled from the inhospitable valley to seek refuge he knew not where.
+
+In his rambles of a previous summer he had seen a little island in the
+lake of Bienne, which struck his imagination and lived in his memory.
+Thither he now, after a moment of hesitation, turned his steps, with
+something of the same instinct as draws a child towards a beam of the
+sun. He forgot or was heedless of the circumstance that the isle of
+St. Peter lay in the jurisdiction of the canton of Berne, whose
+government had forbidden him their territory. Strong craving for a
+little ease in the midst of his wretchedness extinguished thought of
+jurisdictions and proscriptive decrees.
+
+The spot where he now found peace for a brief space usually
+disappoints the modern hunter for the picturesque, who after wearying
+himself with the follies of a capital seeks the most violent tonic
+that he can find in the lonely terrors of glacier and peak, and sees
+only tameness in a pygmy island, that offers nothing sublimer than a
+high grassy terrace, some cool over-branching avenues, some mimic
+vales, and meadows and vineyards sloping down to the sheet of blue
+water at their feet. Yet, as one sits here on a summer day, with tired
+mowers sleeping on their grass heaps in the sun, in a stillness
+faintly broken by the timid lapping of the water in the sedge, or the
+rustling of swift lizards across the heated sand, while the Bernese
+snow giants line a distant horizon with mysterious solitary shapes, it
+is easy to know what solace life in such a scene might bring to a man
+distracted by pain of body and pain and weariness of soul. Rousseau
+has commemorated his too short sojourn here in the most perfect of all
+his compositions.[169]
+
+     "I found my existence so charming, and led a life so
+     agreeable to my humour, that I resolved here to end my days.
+     My only source of disquiet was whether I should be allowed
+     to carry my project out. In the midst of the presentiments
+     that disturbed me, I would fain have had them make a
+     perpetual prison of my refuge, to confine me in it for all
+     the rest of my life. I longed for them to cut off all chance
+     and all hope of leaving it; to forbid me holding any
+     communication with the mainland, so that, knowing nothing
+     of what was going on in the world, I might have forgotten
+     the world's existence, and people might have forgotten mine
+     too. They only suffered me to pass two months in the island,
+     but I could have passed two years, two centuries, and all
+     eternity, without a moment's weariness, though I had not,
+     with my companion, any other society than that of the
+     steward, his wife, and their servants. They were in truth
+     honest souls and nothing more, but that was just what I
+     wanted.... Carried thither in a violent hurry, alone and
+     without a thing, I afterwards sent for my housekeeper, my
+     books, and my scanty possessions, of which I had the delight
+     of unpacking nothing, leaving my boxes and chests just as
+     they had come, and dwelling in the house where I counted on
+     ending my days, exactly as if it were an inn whence I must
+     needs set forth on the morrow. All things went so well, just
+     as they were, that to think of ordering them better were to
+     spoil them. One of my greatest joys was to leave my books
+     safely fastened up in their boxes, and to be without even a
+     case for writing. When any luckless letter forced me to take
+     up a pen for an answer, I grumblingly borrowed the steward's
+     inkstand, and hurried to give it back to him with all the
+     haste I could, in the vain hope that I should never have
+     need of the loan any more. Instead of meddling with those
+     weary quires and reams and piles of old books, I filled my
+     chamber with flowers and grasses, for I was then in my first
+     fervour for botany. Having given up employment that would be
+     a task to me, I needed one that would be an amusement, nor
+     cause me more pains than a sluggard might choose to take. I
+     undertook to make the _Flora petrinsularis_, and to describe
+     every single plant on the island, in detail enough to occupy
+     me for the rest of my days. In consequence of this fine
+     scheme, every morning after breakfast, which we all took in
+     company, I used to go with a magnifying glass in my hand and
+     my Systema Naturae under my arm, to visit some district of
+     the island. I had divided it for that purpose into small
+     squares, meaning to go through them one after another in
+     each season of the year. At the end of two or three hours I
+     used to return laden with an ample harvest, a provision for
+     amusing myself after dinner indoors, in case of rain. I
+     spent the rest of the morning in going with the steward, his
+     wife, and Theresa, to see the labourers and the harvesting,
+     and I generally set to work along with them; many a time
+     when people from Berne came to see me, they found me perched
+     on a high tree, with a bag fastened round my waist; I kept
+     filling it with fruit and then let it down to the ground
+     with a rope. The exercise I had taken in the morning and the
+     good humour that always comes from exercise, made the repose
+     of dinner vastly pleasant to me. But if dinner was kept up
+     too long, and fine weather invited me forth, I could not
+     wait, but was speedily off to throw myself all alone into a
+     boat, which, when the water was smooth enough, I used to
+     pull out to the middle of the lake. There, stretched at full
+     length in the boat's bottom, with my eyes turned up to the
+     sky, I let myself float slowly hither and thither as the
+     water listed, sometimes for hours together, plunged in a
+     thousand confused delicious musings, which, though they had
+     no fixed nor constant object, were not the less on that
+     account a hundred times dearer to me than all that I had
+     found sweetest in what they call the pleasures of life.
+     Often warned by the going down of the sun that it was time
+     to return, I found myself so far from the island that I was
+     forced to row with all my might to get in before it was
+     pitch dark. At other times, instead of losing myself in the
+     midst of the waters, I had a fancy to coast along the green
+     shores of the island, where the clear waters and cool
+     shadows tempted me to bathe. But one of my most frequent
+     expeditions was from the larger island to the less; there I
+     disembarked and spent my afternoon, sometimes in mimic
+     rambles among wild elders, persicaries, willows, and shrubs
+     of every species, sometimes settling myself on the top of a
+     sandy knoll, covered with turf, wild thyme, flowers, even
+     sainfoin and trefoil that had most likely been sown there in
+     old days, making excellent quarters for rabbits. They might
+     multiply in peace without either fearing anything or harming
+     anything. I spoke of this to the steward. He at once had
+     male and female rabbits brought from Neuchatel, and we went
+     in high state, his wife, one of his sisters, Theresa, and I,
+     to settle them in the little islet. The foundation of our
+     colony was a feast-day. The pilot of the Argonauts was not
+     prouder than I, as I bore my company and the rabbits in
+     triumph from our island to the smaller one....
+
+     When the lake was too rough for me to sail, I spent my
+     afternoon in going up and down the island, gathering plants
+     to right and left; seating myself now in smiling lonely
+     nooks to dream at my ease, now on little terraces and
+     knolls, to follow with my eyes the superb and ravishing
+     prospect of the lake and its shores, crowned on one side by
+     the neighbouring hills, and on the other melting into rich
+     and fertile plains up to the feet of the pale blue mountains
+     on their far-off edge.
+
+     As evening drew on, I used to come down from the high ground
+     and sit on the beach at the water's brink in some hidden
+     sheltering place. There the murmur of the waves and their
+     agitation, charmed all my senses and drove every other
+     movement away from my soul; they plunged it into delicious
+     dreamings, in which I was often surprised by night. The flux
+     and reflux of the water, its ceaseless stir-swelling and
+     falling at intervals, striking on ear and sight, made up for
+     the internal movements which my musings extinguished; they
+     were enough to give me delight in mere existence, without
+     taking any trouble of thinking. From time to time arose some
+     passing thought of the instability of the things of this
+     world, of which the face of the waters offered an image; but
+     such light impressions were swiftly effaced in the
+     uniformity of the ceaseless motion, which rocked me as in a
+     cradle; it held me with such fascination that even when
+     called at the hour and by the signal appointed, I could not
+     tear myself away without summoning all my force.
+
+     After supper, when the evening was fine, we used to go all
+     together for a saunter on the terrace, to breathe the
+     freshness of the air from the lake. We sat down in the
+     arbour, laughing, chatting, or singing some old song, and
+     then we went home to bed, well pleased with the day, and
+     only craving another that should be exactly like it on the
+     morrow....
+
+     All is in a continual flux upon the earth. Nothing in it
+     keeps a form constant and determinate; our affections,
+     fastening on external things, necessarily change and pass
+     just as they do. Ever in front of us or behind us, they
+     recall the past that is gone, or anticipate a future that in
+     many a case is destined never to be. There is nothing solid
+     to which the heart can fix itself. Here we have little more
+     than a pleasure that comes and passes away; as for the
+     happiness that endures, I cannot tell if it be so much as
+     known among men. There is hardly in the midst of our
+     liveliest delights a single instant when the heart could
+     tell us with real truth--"_I would this instant might last
+     for ever_." And how can we give the name of happiness to a
+     fleeting state that all the time leaves the heart unquiet
+     and void, that makes us regret something gone, or still long
+     for something to come?
+
+     But if there is a state in which the soul finds a situation
+     solid enough to comport with perfect repose, and with the
+     expansion of its whole faculty, without need of calling back
+     the past, or pressing on towards the future; where time is
+     nothing for it, and the present has no ending; with no mark
+     for its own duration and without a trace of succession;
+     without a single other sense of privation or delight, of
+     pleasure or pain, of desire or apprehension, than this
+     single sense of existence--so long as such a state endures,
+     he who finds himself in it may talk of bliss, not with a
+     poor, relative, and imperfect happiness such as people find
+     in the pleasures of life, but with a happiness full,
+     perfect, and sufficing, that leaves in the soul no conscious
+     unfilled void. Such a state was many a day mine in my
+     solitary musings in the isle of St. Peter, either lying in
+     my boat as it floated on the water, or seated on the banks
+     of the broad lake, or in other places than the little isle
+     on the brink of some broad stream, or a rivulet murmuring
+     over a gravel bed.
+
+     What is it that one enjoys in a situation like this? Nothing
+     outside of one's self, nothing except one's self and one's
+     own existence.... But most men, tossed as they are by
+     unceasing passion, have little knowledge of such a state;
+     they taste it imperfectly for a few moments, and then retain
+     no more than an obscure confused idea of it, that is too
+     weak to let them feel its charm. It would not even be good
+     in the present constitution of things, that in their
+     eagerness for these gentle ecstasies, they should fall into
+     a disgust for the active life in which their duty is
+     prescribed to them by needs that are ever on the increase.
+     But a wretch cut off from human society, who can do nothing
+     here below that is useful and good either for himself or for
+     other people, may in such a state find for all lost human
+     felicities many recompenses, of which neither fortune nor
+     men can ever rob him.
+
+     'Tis true that these recompenses cannot be felt by all
+     souls, nor in all situations. The heart must be in peace,
+     nor any passion come to trouble its calm. There must be in
+     the surrounding objects neither absolute repose nor excess
+     of agitation, but a uniform and moderated movement without
+     shock, without interval. With no movement, life is only
+     lethargy. If the movement be unequal or too strong, it
+     awakes us; by recalling us to the objects around, it
+     destroys the charm of our musing, and plucks us from within
+     ourselves, instantly to throw us back under the yoke of
+     fortune and man, in a moment to restore us to all the
+     consciousness of misery. Absolute stillness inclines one to
+     gloom. It offers an image of death: then the help of a
+     cheerful imagination is necessary, and presents itself
+     naturally enough to those whom heaven has endowed with such
+     a gift. The movement which does not come from without then
+     stirs within us. The repose is less complete, it is true;
+     but it is also more agreeable when light and gentle ideas,
+     without agitating the depths of the soul, only softly skim
+     the surface. This sort of musing we may taste whenever there
+     is tranquillity about us, and I have thought that in the
+     Bastile, and even in a dungeon where no object struck my
+     sight, I could have dreamed away many a thrice pleasurable
+     day.
+
+     But it must be said that all this came better and more
+     happily in a fruitful and lonely island, where nothing
+     presented itself to me save smiling pictures, where nothing
+     recalled saddening memories, where the fellowship of the few
+     dwellers there was gentle and obliging, without being
+     exciting enough to busy me incessantly, where, in short, I
+     was free to surrender myself all day long to the promptings
+     of my taste or to the most luxurious indolence.... As I came
+     out from a long and most sweet musing fit, seeing myself
+     surrounded by verdure and flowers and birds, and letting my
+     eyes wander far over romantic shores that fringed a wide
+     expanse of water bright as crystal, I fitted all these
+     attractive objects into my dreams; and when at last I slowly
+     recovered myself and recognised what was about me, I could
+     not mark the point that cut off dream from reality, so
+     equally did all things unite to endear to me the lonely
+     retired life I led in this happy spot! Why can that life not
+     come back to me again? Why can I not go finish my days in
+     the beloved island, never to quit it, never again to see in
+     it one dweller from the mainland, to bring back to me the
+     memory of all the woes of every sort that they have
+     delighted in heaping on my head for all these long years?...
+     Freed from the earthly passions engendered by the tumult of
+     social life, my soul would many a time lift itself above
+     this atmosphere, and commune beforehand with the heavenly
+     intelligences, into whose number it trusts to be ere long
+     taken."
+
+The exquisite dream, thus set to words of most soothing music, came
+soon to its end. The full and perfect sufficience of life was abruptly
+disturbed. The government of Berne gave him notice to quit the island
+and their territory within fifteen days. He represented to the
+authorities that he was infirm and ill, that he knew not whither to
+go, and that travelling in wintry weather would be dangerous to his
+life. He even made the most extraordinary request that any man in
+similar straits ever did make. "In this extremity," he wrote to their
+representative, "I only see one resource for me, and however frightful
+it may appear, I will adopt it, not only without repugnance, but with
+eagerness, if their excellencies will be good enough to give their
+consent. It is that it should please them for me to pass the rest of
+my days in prison in one of their castles, or such other place in
+their states as they may think fit to select. I will there live at my
+own expense, and I will give security never to put them to any cost. I
+submit to be without paper or pen, or any communication from without,
+except so far as may be absolutely necessary, and through the channel
+of those who shall have charge of me. Only let me have left, with the
+use of a few books, the liberty to walk occasionally in a garden, and
+I am content. Do not suppose that an expedient, so violent in
+appearance, is the fruit of despair. My mind is perfectly calm at this
+moment; I have taken time to think about it, and it is only after
+profound consideration that I have brought myself to this decision.
+Mark, I pray you, that if this seems an extraordinary resolution, my
+situation is still more so. The distracted life that I have been made
+to lead for several years without intermission would be terrible for a
+man in full health; judge what it must be for a miserable invalid worn
+down with weariness and misfortune, and who has now no wish save only
+to die in a little peace."[170]
+
+That the request was made in all sincerity we may well believe. The
+difference between being in prison and being out of it was really not
+considerable to a man who had the previous winter been confined to his
+chamber for eight months without a break.[171] In other respects the
+world was as cheerless as any prison could be. He was an exile from
+the only places he knew, and to him a land unknown was terrible. He
+had thought of Vienna, and the Prince of Wuertemburg had sought the
+requisite permission for him, but the priests were too strong in the
+court of the house of Austria.[172] Madame d'Houdetot offered him a
+resting-place in Normandy, and Saint Lambert in Lorraine.[173] He
+thought of Potsdam. Rey, the printer, pressed him to go to Holland. He
+wondered if he should have strength to cross the Alps and make his way
+to Corsica. Eventually he made up his mind to go to Berlin, and he
+went as far as Strasburg on his road thither.[174] Here he began to
+fear the rude climate of the northern capital; he changed his plans,
+and resolved to accept the warm invitations that he had received to
+cross over to England. His friends used their interest to procure a
+passport for him,[175] and the Prince of Conti offered him an
+apartment in the privileged quarter of the Temple, on his way through
+Paris. His own purpose seems to have been irresolute to the last, but
+his friends acted with such energy and bustle on his behalf that the
+English scheme was adopted, and he found himself in Paris (Dec. 17,
+1765), on his way to London, almost before he had deliberately
+realised what he was doing. It was a step that led him into many fatal
+vexations, as we shall presently see. Meanwhile we may pause to
+examine the two considerable books which had involved his life in all
+this confusion and perplexity.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[94] June, 1762-December, 1765.
+
+[95] _Conf._, xi. 175. It is generally printed in the volume of his
+works entitled _Melanges_.
+
+[96] _Corr._, iii. 416.
+
+[97] _Conf._, xi. 172.
+
+[98] For a remarkable anticipation of the ruin of France, see _Conf._,
+xi. 136.
+
+[99] M. Roguin. June 14, 1762.
+
+[100] _Corr._, ii. 347.
+
+[101] Streckeisen, i. 35.
+
+[102] His friend Moultou wrote him the news, Streckeisen, i. 43.
+Geneva was the only place at which the Social Contract was burnt. Here
+there were peculiar reasons, as we shall see.
+
+[103] _Corr._, ii. 356.
+
+[104] _Ib._, ii. 358, 369, etc.
+
+[105] The principality of Neuchatel had fallen by marriage (1504) to
+the French house of Orleans-Longueville, which with certain
+interruptions retained it until the extinction of the line by the
+death of Marie, Duchess of Nemours (1707). Fifteen claimants arose
+with fifteen varieties of far-off title, as well as a party for
+constituting Neuchatel a Republic and making it a fourteenth canton.
+(Saint Simon, v. 276.) The Estates adjudged the sovereignty to the
+Protestant house of Prussia (Nov. 3, 1707). Lewis XIV., as heir of the
+pretensions of the extinct line, protested. Finally, at the peace of
+Utrecht (1713), Lewis surrendered his claim in exchange for the
+cession by Prussia of the Principality of Orange, and Prussia held it
+until 1806. The disturbed history of the connection between Prussia
+and Neuchatel from 1814, when it became the twenty-first canton of the
+Swiss Confederation, down to 1857, does not here concern us.
+
+[106] _Corr._, ii. 370.
+
+[107] _Corr._, ii. 371. July 1762.
+
+[108] D'Alembert, who knew Frederick better than any of the
+philosophers, to Voltaire, Nov. 22, 1765.
+
+[109] Letter to Hume; Burton's _Life of Hume_, ii. 105, corroborating
+_Conf._, xii. 196.
+
+[110] Marischal to J.J.R.; Streckeisen, ii. 70.
+
+[111] _Corr._, iii. 40. Nov. 1, 1762.
+
+[112] Burton's _Life_, ii. 113.
+
+[113] Voltaire's _Corr._ (1758). _Oeuv._, lxxv. pp. 31 and 80.
+
+[114] _Conf._, xii. 237.
+
+[115] _Corr._, iii. 41. Nov. 11, 1762.
+
+[116] _Corr._, iii. 38. Oct. 30, 1762.
+
+[117] _Ib._, iii. 110-115. Jan. 28, 1763.
+
+[118] Bernardin de St. Pierre, xii. 103, 59, etc.
+
+[119] George Keith (1685-1778) was elder brother of Frederick's famous
+field-marshal, James Keith. They had taken part in the Jacobite rising
+of 1715, and fled abroad on its failure. James Keith brought his
+brother into the service of the King of Prussia, who sent him as
+ambassador to Paris (1751), afterwards made him Governor of Neuchatel
+(1754), and eventually prevailed on the English Government to
+reinstate him in the rights which he had forfeited by his share in the
+rebellion (1763).
+
+[120] Streckeisen, ii. 98, etc.
+
+[121] One of Rousseau's chief distresses hitherto arose from the
+indigence in which Theresa would be placed in case of his death. Rey,
+the bookseller, gave her an annuity of about L16 a year, and Lord
+Marischal's gift seems to have been 300 louis, the only money that
+Rousseau was ever induced to accept from any one in his life. See
+Streckeisen, ii. 99; _Corr._, iii. 336. The most delicate and sincere
+of the many offers to provide for Theresa was made by Madame de
+Verdelin (Streckeisen, ii. 506). The language in which Madame de
+Verdelin speaks of Theresa in all her letters is the best testimony to
+character that this much-abused creature has to produce.
+
+[122] _Ib._, 90, 92, etc. Summer of 1763.
+
+[123] Burton's _Life of Hume_, ii. 105. Oct. 2, 1762.
+
+[124] The Confessions are not our only authority for this. See
+Streckeisen, ii. 64; also D'Alembert to Voltaire, Sept. 8, 1762.
+
+[125] Voltaire's _Corr._ _Oeuv._, lxvii. 458, 459, 485, etc.
+
+[126] To D'Alembert, Sept. 15, 1762.
+
+[127] Moultou to Rousseau, Streckeisen, i. 85, 87.
+
+[128] Moultou to Rousseau, Streckeisen, i. 85, 87.
+
+[129] Streckeisen, i. 50.
+
+[130] _Ib._, i. 76.
+
+[131] _Lettre a Christophe de Beaumont_, pp. 163-166.
+
+[132] _Lettre a Christophe de Beaumont_, pp. 130-135.
+
+[133] _Lettre a Christophe de Beaumont_, p. 93.
+
+[134] Carlyle's _Frederick_, Bk. xxi. ch. iv. Rousseau, _Corr._, iii.
+102.
+
+[135] _Corr._, iii. 57. Nov. 1762. To M. Montmollin.
+
+[136] _Conf._, xii. 206.
+
+[137] _Conf._, xii. 198.
+
+[138] _Corr._, iii. 295. Dec. 25, 1763.
+
+[139] Quoted in Musset-Pathay, ii. 500.
+
+[140] For instance, _Corr._, iii. 249.
+
+[141] _Ib._, iii. 364, 381.
+
+[142] _Corr._, iii. 181-186, etc.
+
+[143] Prince Lewis Eugene, son of Charles Alexander (reigning duke
+from 1733 to 1737); a younger brother of Charles Eugene, known as
+Schiller's Duke of Wuertemberg, who reigned up to 1793. Frederick
+Eugene, known in the Seven Years' War, was another brother. Rousseau's
+correspondent became reigning duke in 1793, but only lived a year and
+a half afterwards.
+
+[144] _Corr._, iii. 250. Sept. 29, 1763.
+
+[145] The prince's letters are given in the Streckeisen collection,
+vol. ii.
+
+[146] Streckeisen, ii. 202.
+
+[147] Possibly Wilkes also; _Corr._, iv. 200.
+
+[148] Streckeisen, i. 89. June 1, 1763.
+
+[149] _Corr._, iii. 202. June 4, 1763.
+
+[150] _Memoirs of my Life_, p. 55, _n._ (Ed. 1862). Necker
+(1732-1804), whom Mdlle. Curchod ultimately married, was an eager
+admirer of Rousseau. "Ah, how close the tender, humane, and virtuous
+soul of Julie," he wrote to her author, "has brought me to you. How
+the reading of those letters gratified me! how many good emotions did
+they stir or fortify! How many sublimities in a thousand places in
+these six volumes; not the sublimity that perches itself in the
+clouds, but that which pushes everyday virtues to their highest
+point," and so on. Feb. 16, 1761. Streckeisen, i. 333.
+
+[151] Boswell's name only occurs twice in Rousseau's letters, I
+believe; once (_Corr._, iv. 394) as the writer of a letter which Hume
+was suspected of tampering with, and previously (iv. 70) as the bearer
+of a letter. See also Streckeisen, i. 262.
+
+[152] Streckeisen, ii. 111. Jan. 18, 1765.
+
+[153] Bk. ii. ch. x.
+
+[154] Boswell's _Account of Corsica_, p. 367.
+
+[155] The correspondence between Rousseau and Buttafuoco has been
+published in the _Oeuvres et Corr. Inedites de J.J.R._, 1861. See pp.
+35, 43, etc.
+
+[156] Boswell's _Life_, 179, 193, etc. (Ed. 1866).
+
+[157] _"Je suis tout homme de pouvoir vous regarder avec pitie!"_
+Letter dated Jan. 4, 1766, and given by Musset-Pathay as from a Scotch
+lord, unnamed. Boswell had the honour of conducting Theresa to
+England, after Hume had taken Rousseau over. "This young gentleman,"
+writes Hume, "very good-humoured, very agreeable, and very mad--has
+such a rage for literature that I dread some circumstance fatal to our
+friend's honour. You remember the story of Terentia, who was first
+married to Cicero, then to Sallust, and at last in her old age married
+a young nobleman, who imagined that she must possess some secret which
+would convey to him eloquence and genius." Burton's _Life_, ii. 307,
+308. Boswell mentions that he met Rousseau in England (_Account of
+Corsica_, p. 340), and also gives Rousseau's letter introducing him to
+Paoli (p. 266).
+
+[158] To Buttafuoco, p. 48, etc.
+
+[159] _Corr._, vi. 176. Feb. 26, 1770.
+
+[160] It may be worth noticing, as a link between historic personages,
+that Napoleon Bonaparte's first piece was a _Lettre a Matteo
+Buttafuoco_ (1791), the same Buttafuoco with whom Rousseau
+corresponded, who had been Choiseul's agent in the union of the island
+to France, was afterwards sent as deputy to the Constituent, and
+finally became the bitterest enemy of Paoli and the patriotic party.
+
+[161] _Corr._, iii. 190. To the First Syndic, May 12, 1763.
+
+[162] Grimm's _Corr. Lit._, iv. 235. For Rousseau's opinion of his
+book's companion at the stake, see _Corr._, iii. 442.
+
+[163] Streckeisen, ii. 526.
+
+[164] There appears to be no doubt that Rousseau was wrong in
+attributing to Vernes the _Sentimens des Citoyens_.
+
+[165] _Corr._, iv. 116, 122 (April 1765), 165-196 (August); also
+_Conf._, xii. 245.
+
+[166] Note to M. Auguis's edition, _Corr._, v. 395.
+
+[167] _Corr._, iv. 204.
+
+[168] _Conf._, xii. 259. This lapidation has sometimes been doubted,
+and treated as an invention of Rousseau's morbid suspicion. The
+official documents prove that his account was substantially true (see
+Musset-Pathay, ii. 559.)
+
+[169] The fifth of the _Reveries_. See also _Conf._, 262-279, and
+_Corr._, iv. 206-224. His stay in the island was from the second week
+in September down to the last in October, 1765.
+
+[170] _Corr._, iv. 221. Oct. 20, 1765.
+
+[171] _Ib._, iv. 136, etc. April 27, 1765.
+
+[172] Streckeisen-Moultou, ii. 209, 212.
+
+[173] _Ib._, ii. 554.
+
+[174] He arrived at Strasburg on the 2d or 3d of November, left it
+about the end of the first week in December, and arrived in Paris on
+the 16th of December 1765. A sort of apocryphal tradition is said to
+linger in the island about Rousseau's last evening on the island, how
+after supper he called for a lute, and sang some passably bad verses.
+See M. Bougy's _J.J. Rousseau_, p. 179 (Paris: 1853.)
+
+[175] Madame de Verdelin to J.J.R. Streckeisen, ii. 532. The minister
+even expressed his especial delight at being able to serve Rousseau,
+so little seriousness was there now in the formalities of absolution.
+_Ib._ 547.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+THE SOCIAL CONTRACT.
+
+
+The dominant belief of the best minds of the latter half of
+the eighteenth century was a passionate faith in the illimitable
+possibilities of human progress. Nothing short of a general overthrow
+of the planet could in their eyes stay the ever upward movement of
+human perfectibility. They differed as to the details of the
+philosophy of government which they deduced from this philosophy of
+society, but the conviction that a golden era of tolerance,
+enlightenment, and material prosperity was close at hand, belonged to
+them all. Rousseau set his face the other way. For him the golden era
+had passed away from our globe many centuries ago. Simplicity had fled
+from the earth. Wisdom and heroism had vanished from out of the minds
+of leaders. The spirit of citizenship had gone from those who should
+have upheld the social union in brotherly accord. The dream of human
+perfectibility which nerved men like Condorcet, was to Rousseau a sour
+and fantastic mockery. The utmost that men could do was to turn their
+eyes to the past, to obliterate the interval, to try to walk for a
+space in the track of the ancient societies. They would hardly
+succeed, but endeavour might at least do something to stay the plague
+of universal degeneracy. Hence the fatality of his system. It placed
+the centre of social activity elsewhere than in careful and rational
+examination of social conditions, and in careful and rational effort
+to modify them. As we began by saying, it substituted a retrograde
+aspiration for direction, and emotion for the discovery of law. We can
+hardly wonder, when we think of the intense exaltation of spirit
+produced both by the perfectibilitarians and the followers of
+Rousseau, and at the same time of the political degradation and
+material disorder of France, that so violent a contrast between the
+ideal and the actual led to a great volcanic outbreak. Alas, the
+crucial difficulty of political change is to summon new force without
+destroying the sound parts of a structure which it has taken so many
+generations to erect. The Social Contract is the formal denial of the
+possibility of successfully overcoming the difficulty.
+
+"Although man deprives himself in the civil state of many advantages
+which he holds from nature, yet he acquires in return others so great,
+his faculties exercise and develop themselves, his ideas extend, his
+sentiments are ennobled, his whole soul is raised to such a degree,
+that if the abuses of this new condition did not so often degrade him
+below that from which he has emerged, he would be bound to bless
+without ceasing the happy moment which rescued him from it for ever,
+and out of a stupid and blind animal made an intelligent being and a
+man."[176] The little parenthesis as to the frequent degradation
+produced by the abuses of the social condition, does not prevent us
+from recognising in the whole passage a tolerably complete surrender
+of the main position which was taken up in the two Discourses. The
+short treatise on the Social Contract is an inquiry into the just
+foundations and most proper form of that very political society, which
+the Discourses showed to have its foundation in injustice, and to be
+incapable of receiving any form proper for the attainment of the full
+measure of human happiness.
+
+Inequality in the same way is no longer denounced, but accepted and
+defined. Locke's influence has begun to tell. The two principal
+objects of every system of legislation are declared to be liberty and
+equality. By equality we are warned not to understand that the degrees
+of power and wealth should be absolutely the same, but that in respect
+of power, such power should be out of reach of any violence, and be
+invariably exercised in virtue of the laws; and in respect of riches,
+that no citizen should be wealthy enough to buy another, and none poor
+enough to sell himself. Do you say this equality is a mere chimera? It
+is precisely because the force of things is constantly tending to
+destroy equality, that the force of legislation ought as constantly to
+be directed towards upholding it.[177] This is much clearer than the
+indefinite way of speaking which we have already noticed in the second
+Discourse. It means neither more nor less than that equality before
+the law which is one of the elementary marks of a perfectly free
+community.
+
+The idea of the law being constantly directed to counteract the
+tendencies to violent inequalities in material possessions among
+different members of a society, is too vague to be criticised. Does it
+cover and warrant so sweeping a measure as the old _seisachtheia_ of
+Solon, voiding all contracts in which the debtor had pledged his land
+or his person; or such measures as the agrarian laws of Licinius and
+the Gracchi? Or is it to go no further than to condemn such a law as
+that which in England gives unwilled lands to the eldest son? We can
+only criticise accurately a general idea of this sort in connection
+with specific projects in which it is applied. As it stands, it is no
+more than the expression of what the author thinks a wise principle of
+public policy. It assumes the existence of property just as completely
+as the theory of the most rigorous capitalist could do; it gives no
+encouragement, as the Discourse did, to the notion of an equality in
+being without property. There is no element of communism in a
+principle so stated, but it suggests a social idea, based on the moral
+claim of men to have equality of opportunity. This ideal stamped
+itself on the minds of Robespierre and the other revolutionary
+leaders, and led to practical results in the sale of the Church and
+other lands in small lots, so as to give the peasant a market to buy
+in. The effect of the economic change thus introduced happened to work
+in the direction in which Rousseau pointed, for it is now known that
+the most remarkable and most permanent of the consequences of the
+revolution in the ownership of land was the erection, between the two
+extreme classes of proprietors, of an immense body of middle-class
+freeholders. This state is not equality, but gradation, and there is
+undoubtedly an immense difference between the two. Still its origin is
+an illustration on the largest scale in history of the force of
+legislation being exerted to counteract an irregularity that had
+become unbearable.[178]
+
+Notwithstanding the disappearance of the more extravagant elements of
+the old thesis, the new speculation was far from being purged of the
+fundamental errors that had given such popularity to its predecessors.
+"If the sea," he says in one place, "bathes nothing but inaccessible
+rocks on your coasts, remain barbarous ichthyophagi; you will live all
+the more tranquilly for it, better perhaps, and assuredly more
+happily."[179] Apart from an outburst like this, the central idea
+remained the same, though it was approached from another side and with
+different objects. The picture of a state of nature had lost none of
+its perilous attraction, though it was hung in a slightly changed
+light. It remained the starting-point of the right and normal
+constitution of civil society, just as it had been the starting-point
+of the denunciation of civil society as incapable of right
+constitution, and as necessarily and for ever abnormal. Equally with
+the Discourses, the Social Contract is a repudiation of that historic
+method which traces the present along a line of ascertained
+circumstances, and seeks an improved future in an unbroken
+continuation of that line. The opening words, which sent such a thrill
+through the generation to which they were uttered in two continents,
+"Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains," tell us at the
+outset that we are as far away as ever from the patient method of
+positive observation, and as deeply buried as ever in deducing
+practical maxims from a set of conditions which never had any other
+than an abstract and phantasmatic existence. How is a man born free?
+If he is born into isolation, he perishes instantly. If he is born
+into a family, he is at the moment of his birth committed to a state
+of social relation, in however rudimentary a form; and the more or
+less of freedom which this state may ultimately permit to him, depends
+upon circumstances. Man was hardly born free among Romans and
+Athenians, when both law and public opinion left a father at perfect
+liberty to expose his new-born infant. And the more primitive the
+circumstances, the later the period at which he gains freedom. A child
+was not born free in the early days of the Roman state, when the
+_patria potestas_ was a vigorous reality. Nor, to go yet further back,
+was he born free in the times of the Hebrew patriarchs, when Abraham
+had full right of sacrificing his son, and Jephthah of sacrificing his
+daughter.
+
+But to speak thus is to speak what we do know. Rousseau was not open
+to such testimony. "My principles," he said in contempt of Grotius,
+"are not founded on the authority of poets; they come from the nature
+of things and are based on reason."[180] He does indeed in one place
+express his reverence for the Judaic law, and administers a just
+rebuke to the philosophic arrogance which saw only successful
+impostors in the old legislators.[181] But he paid no attention to
+the processes and usages of which this law was the organic expression,
+nor did he allow himself to learn from it the actual conditions of the
+social state which accepted it. It was Locke, whose essay on civil
+government haunts us throughout the Social Contract, who had taught
+him that men are born free, equal, and independent. Locke evaded the
+difficulty of the dependence of childhood by saying that when the son
+comes to the estate that made his father a free man, he becomes a free
+man too.[182] What of the old Roman use permitting a father to sell
+his son three times? In the same metaphysical spirit Locke had laid
+down the absolute proposition that "conjugal society is made by a
+voluntary compact between man and woman."[183] This is true of a small
+number of western societies in our own day, but what of the primitive
+usages of communal marriages, marriages by capture, purchase, and the
+rest? We do not mean it as any discredit to writers upon government in
+the seventeenth century that they did not make good out of their own
+consciousness the necessary want of knowledge about primitive
+communities. But it is necessary to point out, first, that they did
+not realise all the knowledge within their reach, and next that, as a
+consequence of this, their propositions had a quality that vitiated
+all their speculative worth. Filmer's contention that man is not
+naturally free was truer than the position of Locke and Rousseau, and
+it was so because Filmer consulted and appealed to the most authentic
+of the historic records then accessible.[184]
+
+It is the more singular that Rousseau should have thus deliberately
+put aside all but the most arbitrary and empirical historical lessons,
+and it shows the extraordinary force with which men may be mastered by
+abstract prepossessions, even when they have a partial knowledge of
+the antidote; because Rousseau in several places not only admits, but
+insists upon, the necessity of making institutions relative to the
+state of the community, in respect of size, soil, manners, occupation,
+morality, character. "It is in view of such relations as these that we
+must assign to each people a particular system, which shall be the
+best, not perhaps in itself, but for the state for which it is
+destined."[185] In another place he calls attention to manners,
+customs, above all to opinion, as the part of a social system on which
+the success of all the rest depends; particular rules being only the
+arching of the vault, of which manners, though so much tardier in
+rising, form a key-stone that can never be disturbed.[186] This was
+excellent so far as it went, but it was one of the many great truths,
+which men may hold in their minds without appreciating their full
+value. He did not see that these manners, customs, opinions, have old
+roots which must be sought in a historic past; that they are connected
+with the constitution of human nature, and that then in turn they
+prepare modifications of that constitution. His narrow, symmetrical,
+impatient humour unfitted him to deal with the complex tangle of the
+history of social growths. It was essential to his mental comfort that
+he should be able to see a picture of perfect order and logical system
+at both ends of his speculation. Hence, he invented, to begin with,
+his ideal state of nature, and an ideal mode of passing from that to
+the social state. He swept away in his imagination the whole series of
+actual incidents between present and past; and he constructed a system
+which might be imposed upon all societies indifferently by a
+legislator summoned for that purpose, to wipe out existing uses, laws,
+and institutions, and make afresh a clear and undisturbed beginning of
+national life. The force of habit was slowly and insensibly to be
+substituted for that of the legislator's authority, but the existence
+of such habits previously as forces to be dealt with, and the
+existence of certain limits of pliancy in the conditions of human
+nature and social possibility, are facts of which the author of the
+Social Contract takes not the least account.
+
+Rousseau knew hardly any history, and the few isolated pieces of old
+fact which he had picked up in his very slight reading were exactly
+the most unfortunate that a student in need of the historic method
+could possibly have fallen in with. The illustrations which are
+scantily dispersed in his pages,--and we must remark that they are no
+more than illustrations for conclusions arrived at quite independently
+of them, and not the historical proof and foundations of his
+conclusions,--are nearly all from the annals of the small states of
+ancient Greece, and from the earlier times of the Roman republic. We
+have already pointed out to what an extent his imagination was struck
+at the time of his first compositions by the tale of Lycurgus. The
+influence of the same notions is still paramount. The hopelessness of
+giving good laws to a corrupt people is supposed to be demonstrated by
+the case of Minos, whose legislation failed in Crete because the
+people for whom he made laws were sunk in vices; and by the further
+example of Plato, who refused to give laws to the Arcadians and
+Cyrenians, knowing that they were too rich and could never suffer
+equality.[187] The writer is thinking of Plato's Laws, when he says
+that just as nature has fixed limits to the stature of a well-formed
+man, outside of which she produces giants and dwarfs, so with
+reference to the best constitution for a state, there are bounds to
+its extent, so that it may be neither too large to be capable of good
+government, nor too small to be independent and self-sufficing. The
+further the social bond is extended, the more relaxed it becomes, and
+in general a small state is proportionally stronger than a large
+one.[188] In the remarks with which he proceeds to corroborate this
+position, we can plainly see that he is privately contrasting an
+independent Greek community with the unwieldy oriental monarchy
+against which at one critical period Greece had to contend. He had
+never realised the possibility of such forms of polity as the Roman
+Empire, or the half-federal dominion of England which took such
+enormous dimensions in his time, or the great confederation of states
+which came to birth two years before he died. He was the servant of
+his own metaphor, as the Greek writers so often were. His argument
+that a state must be of a moderate size because the rightly shapen man
+is neither dwarf nor giant, is exactly on a par with Aristotle's
+argument to the same effect, on the ground that beauty demands size,
+and there must not be too great nor too small size, because a ship
+sails badly if it be either too heavy or too light.[189] And when
+Rousseau supposes the state to have ten thousand inhabitants, and
+talks about the right size of its territory,[190] who does not think
+of the five thousand and forty which the Athenian Stranger prescribed
+to Cleinias the Cretan as the exactly proper number for the perfectly
+formed state?[191] The prediction of the short career which awaits a
+state that is cursed with an extensive and accessible seaboard,
+corresponds precisely with the Athenian Stranger's satisfaction that
+the new city is to be eighty stadia from the coast.[192] When Rousseau
+himself began to think about the organisation of Corsica, he praised
+the selection of Corte as the chief town of a patriotic
+administration, because it was far from the sea, and so its
+inhabitants would long preserve their simplicity and uprightness.[193]
+And in later years still, when meditating upon a constitution for
+Poland, he propounded an economic system essentially Spartan; the
+people were enjoined to think little about foreigners, to give
+themselves little concern about commerce, to suppress stamped paper,
+and to put a tithe upon the land.[194]
+
+The chapter on the Legislator is in the same region. We are again
+referred to Lycurgus; and to the circumstance that Greek towns usually
+confided to a stranger the sacred task of drawing up their laws. His
+experience in Venice and the history of his native town supplemented
+the examples of Greece. Geneva summoned a stranger to legislate for
+her, and "those who only look on Calvin as a theologian have a scanty
+idea of the extent of his genius; the preparation of our wise edicts,
+in which he had so large a part, do him as much honour as his
+Institutes."[195] Rousseau's vision was too narrow to let him see the
+growth of government and laws as a co-ordinate process, flowing from
+the growth of all the other parts and organs of society, and advancing
+in more or less equal step along with them. He could begin with
+nothing short of an absolute legislator, who should impose a system
+from without by a single act, a structure hit upon once for all by his
+individual wisdom, not slowly wrought out by many minds, with popular
+assent and co-operation, at the suggestion of changing social
+circumstances and need.[196]
+
+All this would be of very trifling importance in the history of
+political literature, but for the extraordinary influence which
+circumstances ultimately bestowed upon it. The Social Contract was the
+gospel of the Jacobins, and much of the action of the supreme party in
+France during the first months of the year 1794 is only fully
+intelligible when we look upon it as the result and practical
+application of Rousseau's teaching. The conception of the situation
+entertained by Robespierre and Saint Just was entirely moulded on all
+this talk about the legislators of Greece and Geneva. "The transition
+of an oppressed nation to democracy is like the effort by which nature
+rose from nothingness to existence. You must entirely refashion a
+people whom you wish to make free--destroy its prejudices, alter its
+habits, limit its necessities, root up its vices, purify its desires.
+The state therefore must lay hold on every human being at his birth,
+and direct his education with powerful hand. Solon's weak confidence
+threw Athens into fresh slavery, while Lycurgus's severity founded the
+republic of Sparta on an immovable basis."[197] These words, which
+come from a decree of the Committee of Public Safety, might well be
+taken for an excerpt from the Social Contract. The fragments of the
+institutions by which Saint Just intended to regenerate his country,
+reveal a man with the example of Lycurgus before his eyes in every
+line he wrote.[198] When on the eve of the Thermidorian revolution
+which overthrew him and his party, he insisted on the necessity of a
+dictatorship, he was only thinking of the means by which he should at
+length obtain the necessary power for forcing his regenerating
+projects on the country; for he knew that Robespierre, whom he named
+as the man for the dictatorship, accepted his projects, and would lend
+the full force of the temporal arm to the propagation of ideas which
+they had acquired together from Jean Jacques, and from the Greeks to
+whom Jean Jacques had sent them for example and instruction.[199] No
+doubt the condition of France after 1792 must naturally have struck
+any one too deeply imbued with the spirit of the Social Contract to
+look beneath the surface of the society with which the Convention had
+to deal, as urgently inviting a lawgiver of the ancient stamp. The old
+order in church and state had been swept away, no organs for the
+performance of the functions of national life were visible, the moral
+ideas which had bound the social elements together in the extinct
+monarchy seemed to be permanently sapped. A politician who had for
+years been dreaming about Minos and Lycurgus and Calvin, especially if
+he lived in a state with such a tradition of centralisation as ruled
+in France, was sure to suppose that here was the scene and the moment
+for a splendid repetition on an immense scale of those immortal
+achievements. The futility of the attempt was the practical and ever
+memorable illustration of the defect of Rousseau's geometrical method.
+It was one thing to make laws for the handful of people who lived in
+Geneva in the sixteenth century, united in religious faith, and
+accepting the same form and conception of the common good. It was a
+very different thing to try to play Calvin over some twenty-five
+millions of a heterogeneously composed nation, abounding in variations
+of temperament, faith, laws, and habits and weltering in unfathomable
+distractions. The French did indeed at length invite a heaven-sent
+stranger from Corsica to make laws for them, but not until he had set
+his foot upon their neck; and even Napoleon Bonaparte, who had begun
+life like the rest of his generation by writing Rousseauite essays,
+made a swift return to the historic method in the equivocal shape of
+the Concordat.
+
+Not only were Rousseau's schemes of polity conceived from the point of
+view of a small territory with a limited population. "You must not,"
+he says in one place, "make the abuses of great states an objection to
+a writer who would fain have none but small ones."[200] Again, when he
+said that in a truly free state the citizens performed all their
+services to the community with their arms and none by money, and that
+he looked upon the corvee (or compulsory labour on the public roads)
+as less hostile to freedom than taxes,[201] he showed that he was
+thinking of a state not greatly passing the dimensions of a parish.
+This was not the only defect of his schemes. They assumed a sort of
+state of nature in the minds of the people with whom the lawgiver had
+to deal. Saint Just made the same assumption afterwards, and trusted
+to his military school to erect on these bare plots whatever
+superstructure he might think fit to appoint. A society that had for
+so many centuries been organised and moulded by a powerful and
+energetic church, armed with a definite doctrine, fixing the same
+moral tendencies in a long series of successive generations, was not
+in the naked mental state which the Jacobins postulated. It was not
+prepared to accept free divorce, the substitution of friendship for
+marriage, the displacement of the family by the military school, and
+the other articles in Saint Just's programme of social renovation. The
+twelve apostles went among people who were morally swept and
+garnished, and they went armed with instruments proper to seize the
+imagination of their hearers. All moral reformers seek the ignorant
+and simple, poor fishermen in one scene, labourers and women in
+another, for the good reason that new ideas only make way on ground
+that is not already too heavily encumbered with prejudices. But France
+in 1793 was in no condition of this kind. Opinion in all its spheres
+was deepened by an old and powerful organisation, to a degree which
+made any attempt to abolish the opinion, as the organisation appeared
+to have been abolished, quite hopeless until the lapse of three or
+four hundred years had allowed due time for dissolution. After all it
+was not until the fourth century of our era that the work of even the
+twelve apostles began to tell decisively and quickly. As for the
+Lycurgus of whom the French chattered, if such a personality ever
+existed out of the region of myth, he came to his people armed with an
+oracle from the gods, just as Moses did, and was himself regarded as
+having a nature touched with divinity. No such pretensions could well
+be made by any French legislator within a dozen years or so of the
+death of Voltaire.
+
+Let us here remark that it was exactly what strikes us as the
+desperate absurdity of the assumptions of the Social Contract, which
+constituted the power of that work, when it accidentally fell into the
+hands of men who surveyed a national system wrecked in all its parts.
+The Social Contract is worked out precisely in that fashion which, if
+it touches men at all, makes them into fanatics. Long trains of
+reasoning, careful allegation of proofs, patient admission on every
+hand of qualifying propositions and multitudinous limitations, are
+essential to science, and produce treatises that guide the wise
+statesman in normal times. But it is dogma that gives fervour to a
+sect. There are always large classes of minds to whom anything in the
+shape of a vigorously compact system is irresistibly fascinating, and
+to whom the qualification of a proposition, or the limitation of a
+theoretic principle is distressing or intolerable. Such persons always
+come to the front for a season in times of distraction, when the party
+that knows its own aims most definitely is sure to have the best
+chance of obtaining power. And Rousseau's method charmed their
+temperament. A man who handles sets of complex facts is necessarily
+slow-footed, but one who has only words to deal with, may advance with
+a speed, a precision, a consistency, a conclusiveness, that has a
+magical potency over men who insist on having politics and theology
+drawn out in exact theorems like those of Euclid.
+
+Rousseau traces his conclusions from words, and develops his system
+from the interior germs of phrases. Like the typical schoolman, he
+assumes that analysis of terms is the right way of acquiring new
+knowledge about things; he mistakes the multiplication of propositions
+for the discovery of fresh truth. Many pages of the Social Contract
+are mere logical deductions from verbal definitions: the slightest
+attempt to confront them with actual fact would have shown them to be
+not only valueless, but wholly meaningless, in connection with real
+human nature and the visible working of human affairs. He looks into
+the word, or into his own verbal notion, and tells us what is to be
+found in that, whereas we need to be told the marks and qualities that
+distinguish the object which the word is meant to recall. Hence arises
+his habit of setting himself questions, with reference to which we
+cannot say that the answers are not true, but only that the questions
+themselves were never worth asking. Here is an instance of his method
+of supposing that to draw something from a verbal notion is to find
+out something corresponding to fact. "We can distinguish in the
+magistrate three essentially different wills: 1st, the will peculiar
+to him as an individual, which only tends to his own particular
+advantage; 2nd, the common will of the magistrates, which refers only
+to the advantage of the prince [_i.e._ the government], and this we
+may name corporate will, which is general in relation to the
+government, and particular in relation to the state of which the
+government is a part; 3rd, the will of the people or sovereign will,
+which is general, as well in relation to the state considered as a
+whole, as in relation to the government considered as part of the
+whole."[202] It might be hard to prove that all this is not true, but
+then it is unreal and comes to nothing, as we see if we take the
+trouble to turn it into real matter. Thus a member of the British
+House of Commons, who is a magistrate in Rousseau's sense, has three
+essentially different wills: first, as a man, Mr. So-and-so; second,
+his corporate will, as member of the chamber, and this will is general
+in relation to the legislature, but particular in relation to the
+whole body of electors and peers; third, his will as a member of the
+great electoral body, which is a general will alike in relation to the
+electoral body and to the legislature. An English publicist is
+perfectly welcome to make assertions of this kind, if he chooses to do
+so, and nobody will take the trouble to deny them. But they are
+nonsense. They do not correspond to the real composition of a member
+of parliament, nor do they shed the smallest light upon any part
+either of the theory of government in general, or the working of our
+own government in particular. Almost the same kind of observation
+might be made of the famous dogmatic statements about sovereignty.
+"Sovereignty, being only the exercise of the general will, can never
+be alienated, and the sovereign, who is only a collective being, can
+only be represented by himself: the power may be transmitted, but not
+the will;"[203] sovereignty is indivisible, not only in principle, but
+in object;[204] and so forth. We shall have to consider these remarks
+from another point of view. At present we refer to them as
+illustrating the character of the book, as consisting of a number of
+expansions of definitions, analysed as words, not compared with the
+facts of which the words are representatives. This way of treating
+political theory enabled the writer to assume an air of certitude and
+precision, which led narrow deductive minds completely captive. Burke
+poured merited scorn on the application of geometry to politics and
+algebraic formulas to government, but then it was just this seeming
+demonstration, this measured accuracy, that filled Rousseau's
+disciples with a supreme and undoubting confidence which leaves the
+modern student of these schemes in amazement unspeakable. The thinness
+of Robespierre's ideas on government ceases to astonish us, when we
+remember that he had not trained himself to look upon it as the art of
+dealing with huge groups of conflicting interests, of hostile
+passions, of hardly reconcilable aims, of vehemently opposed forces.
+He had disciplined his political intelligence on such meagre and
+unsubstantial argumentation as the following:--"Let us suppose the
+state composed of ten thousand citizens. The sovereign can only be
+considered collectively and as a body; but each person, in his quality
+as subject, is considered as an individual unit; thus the sovereign is
+to the subject as ten thousand is to one; in other words, each member
+of the state has for his share only the ten-thousandth part of the
+sovereign authority, though he is submitted to it in all his own
+entirety. If the people be composed of a hundred thousand men, the
+condition of the subjects does not change, and each of them bears
+equally the whole empire of the laws, while his suffrage, reduced to a
+hundred-thousandth, has ten times less influence in drawing them up.
+Then, the subject remaining still only one, the relation of the
+sovereign augments in the ratio of the number of the citizens. Whence
+it follows that, the larger the state becomes, the more does liberty
+diminish."[205]
+
+Apart from these arithmetical conceptions, and the deep charm which
+their assurance of expression had for the narrow and fervid minds of
+which England and Germany seem to have got finally rid in Anabaptists
+and Fifth Monarchy men, but which still haunted France, there were
+maxims in the Social Contract of remarkable convenience for the
+members of a Committee of Public Safety. "How can a blind multitude,"
+the writer asks in one place, "which so often does not know its own
+will, because it seldom knows what is good for it, execute of itself
+an undertaking so vast and so difficult as a system of
+legislation?"[206] Again, "as nature gives to each man an absolute
+power over all his members, so the social pact gives to the body
+politic an absolute power over all its members; and it is this same
+power which, when directed by the general will, bears, as I have said,
+the name of sovereignty."[207] Above all, the little chapter on a
+dictatorship is the very foundation of the position of the
+Robespierrists in the few months immediately preceding their fall. "It
+is evidently the first intention of the people that the state should
+not perish," and so on, with much criticism of the system of
+occasional dictatorships, as they were resorted to in old Rome.[208]
+Yet this does not in itself go much beyond the old monarchic doctrine
+of Prerogative, as a corrective for the slowness and want of immediate
+applicability of mere legal processes in cases of state emergency; and
+it is worth noticing again and again that in spite of the shriekings
+of reaction, the few atrocities of the Terror are an almost invisible
+speck compared with the atrocities of Christian churchmen and lawful
+kings, perpetrated in accordance with their notion of what constituted
+public safety. So far as Rousseau's intention goes, we find in his
+writings one of the strongest denunciations of the doctrine of public
+safety that is to be found in any of the writings of the century. "Is
+the safety of a citizen," he cries, "less the common cause than the
+safety of the state? They may tell us that it is well that one should
+perish on behalf of all. I will admire such a sentence in the mouth of
+a virtuous patriot, who voluntarily and for duty's sake devotes
+himself to death for the salvation of his country. But if we are to
+understand that it is allowed to the government to sacrifice an
+innocent person for the safety of the multitude, I hold this maxim for
+one of the most execrable that tyranny has ever invented, and the most
+dangerous that can be admitted."[209] It may be said that the
+Terrorists did not sacrifice innocent life, but the plea is frivolous
+on the lips of men who proscribed whole classes. You cannot justly
+draw a capital indictment against a class. Rousseau, however, cannot
+fairly be said to have had a share in the responsibility for the more
+criminal part of the policy of 1793, any more than the founder of
+Christianity is responsible for the atrocities that have been
+committed by the more ardent worshippers of his name, and justified by
+stray texts caught up from the gospels. Helvetius had said, "All
+becomes legitimate and even virtuous on behalf of the public safety."
+Rousseau wrote in the margin, "The public safety is nothing unless
+individuals enjoy security."[210] The author of a theory is not
+answerable for the applications which may be read into it by the
+passions of men and the exigencies of a violent crisis. Such
+applications show this much and no more, that the theory was
+constructed with an imperfect consideration of the qualities of human
+nature, with too narrow a view of the conditions of society, and
+therefore with an inadequate appreciation of the consequences which
+the theory might be drawn to support.
+
+It is time to come to the central conception of the Social Contract,
+the dogma which made of it for a time the gospel of a nation, the
+memorable doctrine of the sovereignty of peoples. Of this doctrine
+Rousseau was assuredly not the inventor, though the exaggerated
+language of some popular writers in France leads us to suppose that
+they think of him as nothing less. Even in the thirteenth century the
+constitution of the Orders, and the contests of the friars with the
+clergy, had engendered faintly democratic ways of thinking.[211] Among
+others the great Aquinas had protested against the juristic doctrine
+that the law is the pleasure of the prince. The will of the prince, he
+says, to be a law, must be directed by reason; law is appointed for
+the common good, and not for a special or private good: it follows
+from this that only the reason of the multitude, or of a prince
+representing the multitude, can make a law.[212] A still more
+remarkable approach to later views was made by Marsilio of Padua,
+physician to Lewis of Bavaria, who wrote a strong book on his master's
+side, in the great contest between him and the pope (1324). Marsilio
+in the first part of his work not only lays down very elaborately the
+proposition that laws ought to be made by the "_universitas civium_";
+he places this sovereignty of the people on the true basis (which
+Rousseau only took for a secondary support to his original compact),
+namely, the greater likelihood of laws being obeyed in the first
+place, and being good laws in the second, when they are made by the
+body of the persons affected. "No one knowingly does hurt to himself,
+or deliberately asks what is unjust, and on that account all or a
+great majority must wish such law as best suits the common interest of
+the citizens."[213] Turning from this to the Social Contract, or to
+Locke's essay on Government, the identity in doctrine and
+correspondence in dialect may teach us how little true originality
+there can he among thinkers who are in the same stage; how a
+metaphysician of the thirteenth century and a metaphysician of the
+eighteenth hit on the same doctrine; and how the true classification
+of thinkers does not follow intervals of time, but is fixed by
+differences of method. It is impossible that in the constant play of
+circumstances and ideas in the minds of different thinkers, the same
+combinations of form and colour in a philosophic arrangement of such
+circumstances and ideas should not recur. Signal novelties in thought
+are as limited as signal inventions in architectural construction. It
+is only one of the great changes in method, that can remove the limits
+of the old combinations, by bringing new material and fundamentally
+altering the point of view.
+
+In the sixteenth century there were numerous writers who declared the
+right of subjects to depose a bad sovereign, but this position is to
+be distinguished from Rousseau's doctrine. Thus, if we turn to the
+great historic event of 1581, the rejection of the yoke of Spain by
+the Dutch, we find the Declaration of Independence running, "that if a
+prince is appointed by God over the land, it is to protect them from
+harm, even as a shepherd to the guardianship of his flock. The
+subjects are not appointed by God for the behoof of the prince, but
+the prince for his subjects, without whom he is no prince." This is
+obviously divine right, fundamentally modified by a popular
+principle, accepted to meet the exigencies of the occasion, and to
+justify after the event a measure which was dictated by urgent need
+for practical relief. Such a notion of the social compact was still
+emphatically in the semi-patriarchal stage, and is distinct as can be
+from the dogma of popular sovereignty as Rousseau understood it. But
+it plainly marked a step on the way. It was the development of
+Protestant principles which produced and necessarily involved the
+extreme democratic conclusion. Time was needed for their full
+expansion in this sense, but the result could only have been avoided
+by a suppression of the Reformation, and we therefore count it
+inevitable. Bodin (1577) had defined sovereignty as residing in the
+supreme legislative authority, without further inquiry as to the
+source or seat of that authority, though he admits the vague position
+which even Lewis XIV. did not deny, that the object of political
+society is the greatest good of every citizen or the whole state. In
+1603 a Protestant professor of law in Germany, Althusen by name,
+published a treatise of Politics, in which the doctrine of the
+sovereignty of peoples was clearly formulated, to the profound
+indignation both of Jesuits and of Protestant jurists.[214] Rousseau
+mentions his name;[215] it does not appear that he read Althusen's
+rather uncommon treatise, but its teaching would probably have a place
+in the traditions of political theorising current at Geneva, to the
+spirit of whose government it was so congenial. Hooker, vindicating
+episcopacy against the democratic principles of the Puritans, had
+still been led, apparently by way of the ever dominant idea of a law
+natural, to base civil government on the assent of the governed, and
+had laid down such propositions as these: "Laws they are not, which
+public approbation hath not made so. Laws therefore human, of what
+kind soever, are available by consent," and so on.[216] The views of
+the Ecclesiastical Polity were adopted by Locke, and became the
+foundation of the famous essay on Civil Government, from which popular
+leaders in our own country drew all their weapons down to the outbreak
+of the French Revolution. Grotius (1625) starting from the principle
+that the law of nature enjoins that we should stand by our agreements,
+then proceeded to assume either an express, or at any rate a tacit and
+implied, promise on the part of all who become members of a community,
+to obey the majority of the body, or a majority of those to whom
+authority has been delegated.[217] This is a unilateral view of the
+social contract, and omits the element of reciprocity which in
+Rousseau's idea was cardinal.
+
+Locke was Rousseau's most immediate inspirer, and the latter affirmed
+himself to have treated the same matters exactly on Locke's
+principles. Rousseau, however, exaggerated Locke's politics as greatly
+as Condillac exaggerated his metaphysics. There was the important
+difference that Locke's essay on Civil Government was the
+justification in theory of a revolution which had already been
+accomplished in practice, while the Social Contract, tinged as it was
+by silent reference in the mind of the writer to Geneva, was yet a
+speculation in the air. The circumstances under which it was written
+gave to the propositions of Locke's piece a reserve and moderation
+which savour of a practical origin and a special case. They have not
+the wide scope and dogmatic air and literary precision of the
+corresponding propositions in Rousseau. We find in Locke none of those
+concise phrases which make fanatics. But the essential doctrine is
+there. The philosopher of the Revolution of 1688 probably carried its
+principles further than most of those who helped in the Revolution had
+any intention to carry them, when he said that "the legislature being
+only a fiduciary power to act for certain ends, there remains still in
+the people a supreme power to remove or alter the legislative."[218]
+It may be questioned how many of the peers of that day would have
+assented to the proposition that the people--and did Locke mean by the
+people the electors of the House of Commons, or all males over
+twenty-one, or all householders paying rates?--could by any expression
+of their will abolish the legislative power of the upper chamber, or
+put an end to the legislative and executive powers of the crown. But
+Locke's statements are direct enough, though he does not use so terse
+a label for his doctrine as Rousseau affixed to it.
+
+Again, besides the principle of popular sovereignty, Locke most likely
+gave to Rousseau the idea of the origin of this sovereignty in the
+civil state in a pact or contract, which was represented as the
+foundation and first condition of the civil state. From this naturally
+flowed the connected theory, of a perpetual consent being implied as
+given by the people to each new law. We need not quote passages from
+Locke to demonstrate the substantial correspondence of assumption
+between him and the author of the Social Contract. They are found in
+every chapter.[219] Such principles were indispensable for the defence
+of a Revolution like that of 1688, which was always carefully marked
+out by its promoters, as well as by its eloquent apologist and
+expositor a hundred years later, the great Burke, as above all things
+a revolution within the pale of the law or the constitution. They
+represented the philosophic adjustment of popular ideas to the
+political changes wrought by shifting circumstances, as distinguished
+from the biblical or Hebraic method of adjusting such ideas, which had
+prevailed in the contests of the previous generation.
+
+Yet there was in the midst of those contests one thinker of the first
+rank in intellectual power, who had constructed a genuine philosophy
+of government. Hobbes's speculations did not fit in with the theory of
+either of the two bodies of combatants in the Civil War. They were
+each in the theological order of ideas, and neither of them sought or
+was able to comprehend the application of philosophic principles to
+their own case or to that of their adversaries.[220] Hebrew precedents
+and bible texts, on the one hand; prerogative of use and high church
+doctrine, on the other. Between these was no space for the acceptance
+of a secular and rationalistic theory, covering the whole field of a
+social constitution. Now the influence of Hobbes upon Rousseau was
+very marked, and very singular. There were numerous differences
+between the philosopher of Geneva and his predecessor of Malmesbury.
+The one looked on men as good, the other looked on them as bad. The
+one described the state of nature as a state of peace, the other as a
+state of war. The one believed that laws and institutions had depraved
+man, the other that they had improved him.[221] But these differences
+did not prevent the action of Hobbes on Rousseau. It resulted in a
+curious fusion between the premisses and the temper of Hobbes and the
+conclusions of Locke. This fusion produced that popular absolutism of
+which the Social Contract was the theoretical expression, and Jacobin
+supremacy the practical manifestation. Rousseau borrowed from Hobbes
+the true conception of sovereignty, and from Locke the true conception
+of the ultimate seat and original of authority, and of the two
+together he made the great image of the sovereign people. Strike the
+crowned head from that monstrous figure which is the frontispiece of
+the Leviathan, and you have a frontispiece that will do excellently
+well for the Social Contract. Apart from a multitude of other
+obligations, good and bad, which Rousseau owed to Hobbes, as we shall
+point out, we may here mention that of the superior accuracy of the
+notion of law in the Social Contract over the notion of law in
+Montesquieu's work. The latter begins, as everybody knows, with a
+definition inextricably confused: "Laws are necessary relations
+flowing from the nature of things, and in this sense all beings have
+their laws, divinity has its laws, the material world has its laws,
+the intelligences superior to men have their laws, the beasts have
+their laws, man has his laws.... There is a primitive reason, and laws
+are the relations to be found between that and the different beings,
+and the relations of these different beings among one another."[222]
+Rousseau at once put aside these divergent meanings, made the proper
+distinction between a law of nature and the imperative law of a state,
+and justly asserted that the one could teach us nothing worth knowing
+about the other.[223] Hobbes's phraseology is much less definite than
+this, and shows that he had not himself wholly shaken off the same
+confusion as reigned in Montesquieu's account a century later. But
+then Hobbes's account of the true meaning of sovereignty was so clear,
+firm, and comprehensive, as easily to lead any fairly perspicuous
+student who followed him, to apply it to the true meaning of law. And
+on this head of law not so much fault is to be found with Rousseau, as
+on the head of larger constitutional theory. He did not look long
+enough at given laws, and hence failed to seize all their distinctive
+qualities; above all he only half saw, if he saw at all, that a law is
+a command and not a contract, and his eyes were closed to this,
+because the true view was incompatible with his fundamental assumption
+of contract as the base of the social union.[224] But he did at all
+events grasp the quality of generality as belonging to laws proper,
+and separated them justly from what he calls decrees, which we are now
+taught to name occasional or particular commands.[225] This is worth
+mentioning, because it shows that, in spite of his habits of
+intellectual laxity, Rousseau was capable, where he had a clear-headed
+master before him, of a very considerable degree of precision of
+thought, however liable it was to fall into error or deficiency for
+want of abundant comparison with bodies of external fact. Let us now
+proceed to some of the central propositions of the Social Contract.
+
+1. The origin of society dates from the moment when the obstacles
+which impede the preservation of men in a state of nature are too
+strong for such forces as each individual can employ in order to keep
+himself in that state. At this point they can only save themselves by
+aggregation. Problem: to find a form of association which defends and
+protects with the whole common force the person and property of each
+associate, and by which, each uniting himself to all, still only obeys
+himself, and remains as free as he was before. Solution: a social
+compact reducible to these words, "Each of us places in common his
+person and his whole power under the supreme direction of the general
+will; and we further receive each member as indivisible part of the
+whole." This act of association constitutes a moral and collective
+body, a public person.
+
+The practical importance and the mischief of thus suffering society to
+repose on conventions which the human will had made, lay in the
+corollary that the human will is competent at any time to unmake them,
+and also therefore to devise all possible changes that fell short of
+unmaking them. This was the root of the fatal hypothesis of the
+dictator, or divinely commissioned lawgiver. External circumstance and
+human nature alike were passive and infinitely pliable; they were the
+material out of which the legislator was to devise conventions at
+pleasure, without apprehension as to their suitableness either to the
+conditions of society among which they were to work, or to the
+passions and interests of those by whom they were to be carried out,
+and who were supposed to have given assent to them. It would be unjust
+to say that Rousseau actually faced this position and took the
+consequences. He expressly says in more places than one that the
+science of Government is only a science of combinations, applications,
+and exceptions, according to time, place, and circumstance.[226] But
+to base society on conventions is to impute an element of
+arbitrariness to these combinations and applications, and to make them
+independent, as they can never be, of the limits inexorably fixed by
+the nature of things. The notion of compact is the main source of all
+the worst vagaries in Rousseau's political speculation.
+
+It is worth remarking in the history of opinion, that there was at
+this time in France a little knot of thinkers who were nearly in full
+possession of the true view of the limits set by the natural ordering
+of societies to the power of convention and the function of the
+legislators. Five years after the publication of the Social Contract,
+a remarkable book was written by one of the economic sect of the
+Physiocrats, the later of whom, though specially concerned with the
+material interests of communities, very properly felt the necessity of
+connecting the discussion of wealth with the assumption of certain
+fundamental political conditions. They felt this, because it is
+impossible to settle any question about wages or profits, for
+instance, until you have first settled whether you are assuming the
+principles of liberty and property. This writer with great consistency
+found the first essential of all social order in conformity of
+positive law and institution to those qualities of human nature, and
+their relations with those material instruments of life, which, and
+not convention, were the true origin, as they are the actual grounds,
+of the perpetuation of our societies.[227] This was wiser than
+Rousseau's conception of the lawgiver as one who should change human
+nature, and take away from man the forces that are naturally his own,
+to replace them by others comparatively foreign to him.[228] Rousseau
+once wrote, in a letter about Riviere's book, that the great problem
+in politics, which might be compared with the quadrature of the circle
+in geometry, is to find a form of government which shall place law
+above man.[229] A more important problem, and not any less difficult
+for the political theoriser, is to mark the bounds at which the
+authority of the law is powerless or mischievous in attempting to
+control the egoistic or non-social parts of man. This problem Rousseau
+ignored, and that he should do so was only natural in one who
+believed that man had bound himself by a convention, strictly to
+suppress his egoistic and non-social parts, and who based all his
+speculation on this pact as against the force, or the paternal
+authority, or the will of a Supreme Being, in which other writers
+founded the social union.
+
+2. The body thus constituted by convention is the sovereign. Each
+citizen is a member of the sovereign, standing in a definite relation
+to individuals _qua_ individuals; he is also as an individual a member
+of the state and subject to the sovereign, of which from the first
+point of view he is a component element. The sovereign and the body
+politic are one and the same thing.[230]
+
+Of the antecedents and history of this doctrine enough has already
+been said. Its general truth as a description either of what is, or
+what ought to be and will be, demands an ampler discussion than there
+is any occasion to carry on here. We need only point out its place as
+a kind of intermediate dissolvent for which the time was most ripe. It
+breaks up the feudal conception of political authority as a property
+of land-ownership, noble birth, and the like, and it associates this
+authority widely and simply with the bare fact of participation in any
+form of citizenship in the social union. The later and higher idea of
+every share of political power as a function to be discharged for the
+good of the whole body, and not merely as a right to be enjoyed for
+the advantage of its possessor, was a form of thought to which
+Rousseau did not rise. That does not lessen the effectiveness of the
+blow which his doctrine dealt to French feudalism, and which is its
+main title to commemoration in connection with his name.
+
+The social compact thus made is essentially different from the social
+compact which Hobbes described as the origin of what he calls
+commonwealths by institution, to distinguish them from commonwealths
+by acquisition, that is to say, states formed by conquest or resting
+on hereditary rule. "A commonwealth," Hobbes says, "is said to be
+instituted when a multitude of men do agree and covenant, every one
+with every one, that to whatsoever man or assembly of men shall be
+given by the major part the right to present the person of them all,
+that is to say, to be their representative; every one ... shall
+authorise all the actions and judgments of that man or assembly of
+men, in the same manner as if they were his own, to the end to live
+peaceably among themselves, and be protected against other men."[231]
+But Rousseau's compact was an act of association among equals, who
+also remained equals. Hobbes's compact was an act of surrender on the
+part of the many to one or a number. The first was the constitution of
+civil society, the second was the erection of a government. As nobody
+now believes in the existence of any such compact in either one form
+or the other, it would be superfluous to inquire which of the two is
+the less inaccurate. All we need do is to point out that there was
+this difference. Rousseau distinctly denied the existence of any
+element of contract in the erection of a government; there is only one
+contract in the state, he said, and it is that of association.[232]
+Locke's notion of the compact which was the beginning of every
+political society is indefinite on this point; he speaks of it
+indifferently as an agreement of a body of free men to unite and
+incorporate into a society, and an agreement to set up a
+government.[233] Most of us would suppose the two processes to be as
+nearly identical as may be; Rousseau drew a distinction, and from this
+distinction he derived further differences.
+
+Here, we may remark, is the starting-point in the history of the ideas
+of the revolution, of one of the most prominent of them all, that of
+Fraternity. If the whole structure of society rests on an act of
+partnership entered into by equals on behalf of themselves and their
+descendants for ever, the nature of the union is not what it would be,
+if the members of the union had only entered it to place their
+liberties at the feet of some superior power. Society in the one case
+is a covenant of subjection, in the other a covenant of social
+brotherhood. This impressed itself deeply on the feelings of men like
+Robespierre, who were never so well pleased as when they could find
+for their sentimentalism a covering of neat political logic. The same
+idea of association came presently to receive a still more remarkable
+and momentous extension, when it was translated from the language of
+mere government into that of the economic organisation of communities.
+Rousseau's conception went no further than political association, as
+distinct from subjection. Socialism, which came by and by to the front
+place, carried the idea to its fullest capacity, and presented all the
+relations of men with one another as fixed by the same bond. Men had
+entered the social union as brethren, equal, and co-operators, not
+merely for purposes of government, but for purposes of mutual succour
+in all its aspects. This naturally included the most important of all,
+material production. They were not associated merely as equal
+participants in political sovereignty; they were equal participants in
+all the rest of the increase made to the means of human happiness by
+united action. Socialism is the transfer of the principle of fraternal
+association from politics, where Rousseau left it, to the wider sphere
+of industrial force.
+
+It is perhaps worth notice that another famous revolutionary term
+belongs to the same source. All the associates of this act of union,
+becoming members of the city, are as such to be called Citizens, as
+participating in the sovereign authority.[234] The term was in
+familiar use enough among the French in their worst days, but it was
+Rousseau's sanction which marked it in the new times with a sort of
+sacramental stamp. It came naturally to him, because it was the name
+of the first of the two classes which constituted the active portion
+of the republic of Geneva, and the only class whose members were
+eligible to the chief magistracies.
+
+3. We next have a group of propositions setting forth the attributes
+of sovereignty. It is inalienable.[235] It is indivisible.
+
+These two propositions, which play such a part in the history of some
+of the episodes of the French Revolution, contain no more than was
+contended for by Hobbes, and has been accepted in our own times by
+Austin. When Hobbes says that "to the laws which the sovereign maketh,
+the sovereign is not subject, for if he were subject to the civil laws
+he were subject to himself, which were not subjection but freedom,"
+his notion of sovereignty is exactly that expressed by Rousseau in his
+unexplained dogma of the inalienableness of sovereignty. So Rousseau
+means no more by the dogma that sovereignty is indivisible, than
+Austin meant when he declared of the doctrine that the legislative
+sovereign powers and the executive sovereign powers belong in any
+society to distinct parties, that it is a supposition too palpably
+false to endure a moment's examination.[236] The way in which this
+account of the indivisibleness of sovereignty was understood during
+the revolution, twisted it into a condemnation of the dreaded idea of
+Federalism. It might just as well have been interpreted to condemn
+alliances between nations; for the properties of sovereignty are
+clearly independent of the dimensions of the sovereign unit. Another
+effect of this doctrine was the rejection by the Constituent Assembly
+of the balanced parliamentary system, which the followers of
+Montesquieu would fain have introduced on the English model. Whether
+that was an evil or a good, publicists will long continue to dispute.
+
+4. The general will of the sovereign upon an object of common interest
+is expressed in a law. Only the sovereign can possess this law-making
+power, because no one but the sovereign has the right of declaring the
+general will. The legislative power cannot be exerted by delegation or
+representation. The English fancy that they are a free nation, but
+they are grievously mistaken. They are only free during the election
+of members of parliament; the members once chosen, the people are
+slaves, nay, as people they have ceased to exist.[237] It is
+impossible for the sovereign to act, except when the people are
+assembled. Besides such extraordinary assemblies as unforeseen events
+may call for, there must be fixed periodical meetings that nothing can
+interrupt or postpone. Do you call this chimerical? Then you have
+forgotten the Roman comitia, as well as such gatherings of the people
+as those of the Macedonians and the Franks and most other nations in
+their primitive times. What has existed is certainly possible.[238]
+
+It is very curious that Rousseau in this part of his subject should
+have contented himself with going back to Macedonia and Rome, instead
+of pointing to the sovereign states that have since become confederate
+with his native republic. A historian in our own time has described
+with an enthusiasm that equals that of the Social Contract, how he saw
+the sovereign people of Uri and the sovereign people of Appenzell
+discharge the duties of legislation and choice of executive, each in
+the majesty of its corporate person.[239] That Rousseau was influenced
+by the free sovereignty of the states of the Swiss confederation, as
+well as by that of his own city, we may well believe. Whether he was
+or not, it must always be counted a serious misfortune that a writer
+who was destined to exercise such power in a crisis of the history of
+a great nation, should have chosen his illustrations from a time and
+from societies so remote, that the true conditions of their political
+system could not possibly be understood with any approach to reality,
+while there were, within a few leagues of his native place,
+communities where the system of a sovereign public in his own sense
+was actually alive and flourishing and at work. From them the full
+meaning of his theories might have been practically gathered, and
+whatever useful lessons lay at the bottom of them might have been made
+plain. As it was, it came to pass singularly enough that the effect of
+the French Revolution was the suppression, happily only for a time, of
+the only governments in Europe where the doctrine of the favourite
+apostle of the Revolution was a reality. The constitution of the
+Helvetic Republic in 1798 was as bad a blow to the sovereignty of
+peoples in a true sense, as the old house of Austria or Charles of
+Burgundy could ever have dealt. That constitution, moreover, was
+directly opposed to the Social Contract in setting up what it called
+representative democracy, for representative democracy was just what
+Rousseau steadily maintained to be a nullity and a delusion.
+
+The only lesson which the Social Contract contained for a statesman
+bold enough to take into his hands the reconstruction of France,
+undoubtedly pointed in the direction of confederation. At one place,
+where he became sensible of the impotence which his assumption of a
+small state inflicted on his whole speculation, Rousseau said he would
+presently show how the good order of a small state might be united to
+the external power of a great people. Though he never did this, he
+hints in a footnote that his plan belonged to the theory of
+confederations, of which the principles were still to be
+established.[240] When he gave advice for the renovation of the
+wretched constitution of Poland, he insisted above all things that
+they should apply themselves to extend and perfect the system of
+federate governments, "the only one that unites in itself all the
+advantages of great and small states."[241] A very few years after the
+appearance of his book, the great American union of sovereign states
+arose to point the political moral. The French revolutionists missed
+the force alike of the practical example abroad, and of the theory of
+the book which they took for gospel at home. How far they were driven
+to this by the urgent pressure of foreign war, or whether they would
+have followed the same course without that interference, merely in
+obedience to the catholic and monarchic absolutism which had sunk so
+much deeper into French character than people have been willing to
+admit, we cannot tell. The fact remains that the Jacobins, Rousseau's
+immediate disciples, at once took up the chain of centralised
+authority where it had been broken off by the ruin of the monarchy.
+They caught at the letter of the dogma of a sovereign people, and lost
+its spirit. They missed the germ of truth in Rousseau's scheme,
+namely, that for order and freedom and just administration the unit
+should not be too large to admit of the participation of the persons
+concerned in the management of their own public affairs. If they had
+realised this and applied it, either by transforming the old monarchy
+into a confederacy of sovereign provinces, or by some less sweeping
+modification of the old centralised scheme of government, they might
+have saved France.[242] But, once more, men interpret a political
+treatise on principles which either come to them by tradition; or
+else spring suddenly up from roots of passion.[243]
+
+5. The government is the minister of the sovereign. It is an
+intermediate body set up between sovereign and subjects for their
+mutual correspondence, charged with the execution of the laws and the
+maintenance of civil and political freedom. The members comprising it
+are called magistrates or kings, and to the whole body so composed,
+whether of one or of more than one, is given the name of prince. If
+the whole power is centred in the hands of a single magistrate, from
+whom all the rest hold their authority, the government is called a
+monarchy. If there are more persons simply citizens than there are
+magistrates, this is an aristocracy.[244] If more citizen magistrates
+than simple private citizens, that is a democracy. The last government
+is as a general rule best fitted for small states, and the first for
+large ones--on the principle that the number of the supreme
+magistrates ought to be in the inverse ratio of that of the citizens.
+But there is a multitude of circumstances which may furnish reasons
+for exceptions to this general rule.
+
+This common definition of the three forms of governments according to
+the mere number of the participants in the chief magistracy, though
+adopted by Hobbes and other writers, is certainly inadequate and
+uninstructive, without some further qualification. Aristotle, for
+instance, furnishes such a qualification, when he refers to the
+interests in which the government is carried on, whether the interest
+of a small body or of the whole of the citizens.[245] Montesquieu's
+well-known division, though logically faulty, still has the merit of
+pointing to conditions of difference among forms of government,
+outside of and apart from the one fact of the number of the sovereign.
+To divide governments, as Montesquieu did, into republics, monarchies,
+and despotisms, was to use two principles of division, first the
+number of the sovereign, and next something else, namely, the
+difference between a constitutional and an absolute monarch. Then he
+returned to the first principle of division, and separated a republic
+into a government of all, which is a democracy, and a government by a
+part, which is aristocracy.[246] Still, to have introduced the element
+of law-abidingness in the chief magistracy, whether of one or more,
+was to have called attention to the fact that no single distinction is
+enough to furnish us with a conception of the real and vital
+differences which may exist between one form of government and
+another.[247]
+
+The important fact about a government lies quite as much in the
+qualifying epithet which is to be affixed to any one of the three
+names, as in the name itself. We know nothing about a monarchy, until
+we have been told whether it is absolute or constitutional; if
+absolute, whether it is administered in the interests of the realm,
+like that of Prussia under Frederick the Great, or in the interests of
+the ruler, like that of an Indian principality under a native prince;
+if constitutional, whether the real power is aristocratic, as in Great
+Britain a hundred years ago, or plutocratic, as in Great Britain
+to-day, or popular, as it may be here fifty years hence. And so with
+reference to each of the other two forms; neither name gives us any
+instruction, except of a merely negative kind, until it has been made
+precise by one or more explanatory epithets. What is the common
+quality of the old Roman republic, the republics of the Swiss
+confederation, the republic of Venice, the American republic, the
+republic of Mexico? Plainly the word republic has no further effect
+beyond that of excluding the idea of a recognised dynasty.
+
+Rousseau is perhaps less open to this kind of criticism than other
+writers on political theory, for the reason that he distinguishes the
+constitution of the state from the constitution of the government. The
+first he settles definitely. The whole body of the people is to be
+sovereign, and to be endowed alone with what he conceived as the only
+genuinely legislative power. The only question which he considers open
+is as to the form in which the _delegated executive authority_ shall
+be organised. Democracy, the immediate government of all by all, he
+rejects as too perfect for men; it requires a state so small that each
+citizen knows all the others, manners so simple that the business may
+be small and the mode of discussion easy, equality of rank and fortune
+so general as not to allow of the overriding of political equality by
+material superiority, and so forth.[248] Monarchy labours under a
+number of disadvantages which are tolerably obvious. "One essential
+and inevitable defect, which must always place monarchic below
+republican government, is that in the latter the public voice hardly
+ever promotes to the first places any but capable and enlightened men
+who fill them with honour; whereas those who get on in monarchies, are
+for the most part small busybodies, small knaves, small intriguers, in
+whom the puny talents which are the secret of reaching substantial
+posts in courts, only serve to show their stupidity to the public as
+soon as they have made their way to the front. The people is far less
+likely to make a blunder in a choice of this sort, than the prince,
+and a man of true merit is nearly as rare in the ministry, as a fool
+at the head of the government of a republic."[249] There remains
+aristocracy. Of this there are three sorts: natural, elective, and
+hereditary. The first can only thrive among primitive folk, while the
+third is the worst of all governments. The second is the best, for it
+is aristocracy properly so called. If men only acquire rule in virtue
+of election, then purity, enlightenment, experience, and all the other
+grounds of public esteem and preference, become so many new guarantees
+that the administration shall be wise and just. It is the best and
+most natural order that the wisest should govern the multitude,
+provided you are sure that they will govern the multitude for its
+advantage, and not for their own. If aristocracy of this kind requires
+one or two virtues less than a popular executive, it also demands
+others which are peculiar to itself, such as moderation in the rich
+and content in the poor. For this form comports with a certain
+inequality of fortune, for the reason that it is well that the
+administration of public affairs should be confided to those who are
+best able to give their whole time to it. At the same time it is of
+importance that an opposite choice should occasionally teach the
+people that in the merit of men there are more momentous reasons of
+preference than wealth.[250] Rousseau, as we have seen, had pronounced
+English liberty to be no liberty at all, save during the few days once
+in seven years when the elections to parliament take place. Yet this
+scheme of an elective aristocracy was in truth a very near approach
+to the English form as it is theoretically presented in our own day,
+with a suffrage gradually becoming universal. If the suffrage were
+universal, and if its exercise took place once a year, our system, in
+spite of the now obsolescent elements of hereditary aristocracy and
+nominal monarchy, would be as close a realisation of the scheme of the
+Social Contract as any representative system permits. If Rousseau had
+further developed his notions of confederation, the United States
+would most have resembled his type.
+
+6. What is to be the attitude of the state in respect of religion?
+Certainly not that prescribed by the policy of the middle ages. The
+separation of the spiritual from the temporal power, indicated by
+Jesus Christ, and developed by his followers in the course of many
+subsequent generations, was in Rousseau's eyes most mischievous,
+because it ended in the subordination of the temporal power to the
+spiritual, and that is incompatible with an efficient polity. Even the
+kings of England, though they style themselves heads of the church,
+are really its ministers and servants.[251]
+
+The last allegation evinces Rousseau's usual ignorance of history, and
+need not be discussed, any more than his proposition on which he lays
+so much stress, that Christians cannot possibly be good soldiers, nor
+truly good citizens, because their hearts being fixed upon another
+world, they must necessarily be indifferent to the success or failure
+of such enterprises as they may take up in this.[252] In reading the
+Social Contract, and some other of the author's writings besides, we
+have constantly to interpret the direct, positive, categorical form of
+assertion into something of this kind--"Such and such consequences
+ought logically to follow from the meaning of the name, or the
+definition of a principle, or from such and such motives." The change
+of this moderate form of provisional assertion into the unconditional
+statement that such and such consequences have actually followed,
+constantly lands the author in propositions which any reader who tests
+them by an appeal to the experience of mankind, written and unwritten,
+at once discovers to be false and absurd. Rousseau himself took less
+trouble to verify his conclusions by such an appeal to experience than
+any writer that ever lived in a scientific age. The other remark to be
+made on the above section is that the rejection of the Christian or
+ecclesiastical division of the powers of the church and the powers of
+the state, is the strongest illustration that could be found of the
+debt of Rousseau's conception of a state to the old pagan conception.
+It was the main characteristic of the polities which Christian
+monotheism and feudalism together succeeded in replacing, to recognise
+no such division as that between church and state, pope and emperor.
+Rousseau resumed the old conception. But he adjusted it in a certain
+degree to the spirit of his own time, and imposed certain
+philosophical limitations upon it. His scheme is as follows.
+
+Religion, he says, in its relation to the state, may be considered as
+of three kinds. First, natural religion, without temple, altar, or
+rite, the true and pure theism of the natural conscience of man.
+Second, local, civil, or positive religion, with dogmas, rites,
+exercises; a theology of a primitive people, exactly co-extensive with
+all the rights and all the duties of men. Third, a religion like the
+Christianity of the Roman church, which gives men two sets of laws,
+two chiefs, two countries, submits them to contradictory duties, and
+prevents them from being able to be at once devout and patriotic. The
+last of these is so evidently pestilent as to need no discussion. The
+second has the merit of teaching men to identify duty to their gods
+with duty to their country; under this to die for the land is
+martyrdom, to break its laws impiety, and to subject a culprit to
+public execration is to devote him to the anger of the gods. But it is
+bad, because it is at bottom a superstition, and because it makes a
+people sanguinary and intolerant. The first of all, which is now
+styled a Christian theism, having no special relation with the body
+politic, adds no force to the laws. There are many particular
+objections to Christianity flowing from the fact of its not being a
+kingdom of this world, and this above all, that Christianity only
+preaches servitude and dependence.[253] What then is to be done? The
+sovereign must establish a purely civil profession of faith. It will
+consist of the following positive dogmas:--the existence of a
+divinity, powerful, intelligent, beneficent and foreseeing; the life
+to come; the happiness of the just, the chastisement of the wicked;
+the sanctity of the social contract and the laws. These articles of
+belief are imposed, not as dogmas of religion exactly, but as
+sentiments of sociability. If any one declines to accept them, he
+ought to be exiled, not for being impious, but for being unsociable,
+incapable of sincere attachment to the laws, or of sacrificing his
+life to his duty. If any one, after publicly recognising these dogmas,
+carries himself as if he did not believe them, let him be punished by
+death, for he has committed the worst of crimes, he has lied before
+the laws.[254]
+
+Rousseau thus, unconsciously enough, brought to its climax that
+reaction against the absorption of the state in the church which had
+first taken a place in literature in the controversy between legists
+and canonists, and had found its most famous illustration in the De
+Monarchia of the great poet of catholicism. The division of two
+co-equal realms, one temporal, the other spiritual, was replaced in
+the Genevese thinker by what he admitted to be "pure Hobbism." This,
+the rigorous subordination of the church to the state, was the end, so
+far as France went, of the speculative controversy which had occupied
+Europe for so many ages, as to the respective powers of pope and
+emperor, of positive law and law divine. The famous civil constitution
+of the clergy (1790), which was the expression of Rousseau's principle
+as formulated by his disciples in the Constituent Assembly, was the
+revolutionary conclusion to the world-wide dispute, whose most
+melodramatic episode had been the scene in the courtyard of Canossa.
+
+Rousseau's memorable prescription, banishing all who should not
+believe in God, or a future state, or in rewards and punishments for
+the deeds done in the body, and putting to death any who, after
+subscribing to the required profession, should seem no longer to hold
+it, has naturally created a very lively horror in a tolerant
+generation like our own, some of whose finest spirits have rejected
+deliberately and finally the articles of belief, without which they
+could not have been suffered to exist in Rousseau's state. It seemed
+to contemporaries, who were enthusiastic above all things for humanity
+and infinite tolerance, these being the prizes of the long conflict
+which they hoped they were completing, to be a return to the horrors
+of the Holy Office. Men were as shocked as the modern philosopher is,
+when he finds the greatest of the followers of Socrates imposing in
+his latest piece the penalty of imprisonment for five years, to be
+followed in case of obduracy by death, on one who should not believe
+in the gods set up for the state by the lawmaker.[255] And we can
+hardly comfort ourselves, as Milton did about Plato, who framed laws
+which no city ever yet received, and "fed his fancy with making many
+edicts to his airy burgomasters, which they who otherwise admire him,
+wish had been rather buried and excused in the genial cups of an
+academic night-sitting."[256] Rousseau's ideas fell among men who were
+most potent and corporeal burgomasters. In the winter of 1793 two
+parties in Paris stood face to face; the rationalistic, Voltairean
+party of the Commune, named improperly after Hebert, but whose best
+member was Chaumette, and the sentimental, Rousseauite party, led by
+Robespierre. The first had industriously desecrated the churches, and
+consummated their revolt against the gods of the old time by the
+public worship of the Goddess of Reason, who was prematurely set up
+for deity of the new time. Robespierre retaliated with the mummeries
+of the Festival of the Supreme Being, and protested against atheism as
+the crime of aristocrats. Presently the atheistic party succumbed.
+Chaumette was not directly implicated in the proceedings which led to
+their fall, but he was by and by accused of conspiring with Hebert,
+Clootz, and the rest, "to destroy all notion of Divinity and base the
+government of France on atheism." "They attack the immortality of the
+soul," cried Saint Just, "the thought which consoled Socrates in his
+dying moments, and their dream is to raise atheism into a worship."
+And this was the offence, technically and officially described, for
+which Chaumette and Clootz were sent to the guillotine (April 1794),
+strictly on the principle which had been laid down in the Social
+Contract, and accepted by Robespierre.[257]
+
+It would have been odd in any writer less firmly possessed with the
+infallibility of his own dreams than Rousseau was, that he should not
+have seen the impossibility in anything like the existing conditions
+of human nature, of limiting the profession of civil faith to the
+three or four articles which happened to constitute his own belief.
+Having once granted the general position that a citizen may be
+required to profess some religious faith, there is no speculative
+principle, and there is no force in the world, which can fix any bound
+to the amount or kind of religious faith which the state has the right
+thus to exact. Rousseau said that a man was dangerous to the city who
+did not believe in God, a future state, and divine reward and
+retribution. But then Calvin thought a man dangerous who did not
+believe both that there is only one God, and also that there are
+three Gods. And so Chaumette went to the scaffold, and Servetus to the
+stake, on the one common principle that the civil magistrate is
+concerned with heresy. And Hebert was only following out the same
+doctrine in a mild and equitable manner, when he insisted on
+preventing the publication of a book in which the author professed his
+belief in a God. A single step in the path of civil interference with
+opinion leads you the whole way.
+
+The history of the Protestant churches is enough to show the pitiable
+futility of the proviso for religious tolerance with which Rousseau
+closed his exposition. "If there is no longer an exclusive national
+religion, then every creed ought to be tolerated which tolerates other
+creeds, so long as it contains nothing contrary to the duties of the
+citizen. But whoever dares to say, _Out of the church, no salvation_,
+ought to be banished from the state." The reason for which Henry IV.
+embraced the Roman religion--namely, that in that he might be saved,
+in the opinion alike of Protestants and Catholics, whereas in the
+reformed faith, though he was saved according to Protestants, yet
+according to Catholics he was necessarily damned,--ought to have made
+every honest man, and especially every prince, reject it. It was the
+more curious that Rousseau did not see the futility of drawing the
+line of tolerance at any given set of dogmas, however simple and
+slight and acceptable to himself they might be, because he invited
+special admiration for D'Argenson's excellent maxim that "in the
+republic everybody is perfectly free in what does not hurt
+others."[258] Surely this maxim has very little significance or value,
+unless we interpret it as giving entire liberty of opinion, because no
+opinion whatever can hurt others, until it manifests itself in act,
+including of course speech, which is a kind of act. Rousseau admitted
+that over and above the profession of civil faith, a citizen might
+hold what opinions he pleased, in entire freedom from the sovereign's
+cognisance or jurisdiction; "for as the sovereign has no competence in
+the other world, the fate of subjects in that other world is not his
+affair, provided they are good citizens in this." But good citizenship
+consists in doing or forbearing from certain actions, and to punish
+men on the inference that forbidden action is likely to follow from
+the rejection of a set of opinions, or to exact a test oath of
+adherence to such opinions on the same principle, is to concede the
+whole theory of civil intolerance, however little Rousseau may have
+realised the perfectly legitimate applications of his doctrine. It was
+an unconscious compromise. He was thinking of Calvin in practice and
+Hobbes in theory, and he was at the same time influenced by the
+moderate spirit of his time, and the comparatively reasonable
+character of his personal belief. He praised Hobbes as the only author
+who had seen the right remedy for the conflict of the spiritual and
+temporal jurisdictions, by proposing to unite the two heads of the
+eagle, and reducing all to political unity, without which never will
+either state or government be duly constituted. But Hobbes was
+consistent without flinching. He refused to set limits to the
+religious prescriptions which a sovereign might impose, for "even when
+the civil sovereign is an infidel, every one of his own subjects that
+resisteth him, sinneth against the laws of God (for such are the laws
+of nature), and rejecteth the counsel of the apostles, that
+admonisheth all Christians to obey their princes.... And for their
+faith, it is internal and invisible: they have the licence that Naaman
+had, and need not put themselves into danger for it; but if they do,
+they ought to expect their reward in heaven, and not complain of their
+lawful sovereign."[259] All this flowed from the very idea and
+definition of sovereignty, which Rousseau accepted from Hobbes, as we
+have already seen. Such consequences, however, stated in these bold
+terms, must have been highly revolting to Rousseau; he could not
+assent to an exercise of sovereignty which might be atheistic,
+Mahometan, or anything else unqualifiedly monstrous. He failed to see
+the folly of trying to unite the old notions of a Christian
+commonwealth with what was fundamentally his own notion of a
+commonwealth after the ancient type. He stripped the pagan republics,
+which he took for his model, of their national and official
+polytheism, and he put on in its stead a scanty remnant of theism
+slightly tinged with Christianity.
+
+Then he practically accepted Hobbes's audacious bidding to the man who
+should not be able to accept the state creed, to go courageously to
+martyrdom, and leave the land in peace. For the modern principle,
+which was contained in D'Argenson's saying previously quoted, that the
+civil power does best absolutely and unreservedly to ignore
+spirituals, he was not prepared either by his emancipation from the
+theological ideas of his youth, or by his observation of the working
+and tendencies of systems, which involved the state in some more or
+less close relations with the church, either as superior, equal, or
+subordinate. Every test is sure to insist on mental independence
+ending exactly where the speculative curiosity of the time is most
+intent to begin.
+
+Let us now shortly confront Rousseau's ideas with some of the
+propositions belonging to another method of approaching the philosophy
+of government, that have for their key-note the conception of
+expediency or convenience, and are tested by their conformity to the
+observed and recorded experience of mankind. According to this method,
+the ground and origin of society is not a compact; that never existed
+in any known case, and never was a condition of obligation either in
+primitive or developed societies, either between subjects and
+sovereign, or between the equal members of a sovereign body. The true
+ground is an acceptance of conditions which came into existence by the
+sociability inherent in man, and were developed by man's spontaneous
+search after convenience. The statement that while the constitution
+of man is the work of nature, that of the state is the work of
+art,[260] is as misleading as the opposite statement that governments
+are not made but grow.[261] The truth lies between them, in such
+propositions as that institutions owe their existence and development
+to deliberate human effort, working in accordance with circumstances
+naturally fixed both in human character and in the external field of
+its activity. The obedience of the subject to the sovereign has its
+root not in contract but in force,--the force of the sovereign to
+punish disobedience. A man does not consent to be put to death if he
+shall commit a murder, for the reason alleged by Rousseau, namely, as
+a means of protecting his own life against murder.[262] There is no
+consent in the transaction. Some person or persons, possessed of
+sovereign authority, promulgated a command that the subject should not
+commit murder, and appointed penalties for such commission and it was
+not a fictitious assent to these penalties, but the fact that the
+sovereign was strong enough to enforce them, which made the command
+valid.
+
+Supposing a law to be passed in an assembly of the sovereign people by
+a majority; what binds a member of the minority to obedience?
+Rousseau's answer is this:--When the law is proposed, the question
+put is not whether they approve or reject the proposition, but whether
+it is conformable to the general will: the general will appears from
+the votes: if the opinion contrary to my own wins the day, that only
+proves that I was mistaken, and that what I took for the general will
+was not really so.[263] We can scarcely imagine more nonsensical
+sophistry than this. The proper answer evidently is, that either
+experience or calculation has taught the citizens in a popular
+government that in the long run it is most expedient for the majority
+of votes to decide the law. In other words, the inconvenience to the
+minority of submitting to a law which they dislike, is less than the
+inconvenience of fighting to have their own way, or retiring to form a
+separate community. The minority submit to obey laws which were made
+against their will, because they cannot avoid the necessity of
+undergoing worse inconveniences than are involved in this submission.
+The same explanation partially covers what is unfortunately the more
+frequent case in the history of the race, the submission of the
+majority to the laws imposed by a minority of one or more. In both
+these cases, however, as in the general question of the source of our
+obedience to the laws, deliberate and conscious sense of convenience
+is as slight in its effect upon conduct here, as it is in the rest of
+the field of our moral motives. It is covered too thickly over and
+constantly neutralised by the multitudinous growths of use, by the
+many forms of fatalistic or ascetic religious sentiment, by physical
+apathy of race, and all other conditions that interpose to narrow or
+abrogate the authority of pure reason over human conduct. Rousseau,
+expounding his conception of a normal political state, was no doubt
+warranted in leaving these complicating conditions out of account,
+though to do so is to rob any treatise on government of much of its
+possible value. The same excuse cannot warrant him in basing his
+political institutions upon a figment, instead of upon the substantial
+ground of propositions about human nature, which the average of
+experience in given races and at given stages of advancement has shown
+to be true within those limits. There are places in his writings where
+he reluctantly admits that men are only moved by their interests, and
+he does not even take care to qualify this sufficiently.[264] But
+throughout the Social Contract we seem to be contemplating the
+erection of a machine which is to work without reference to the only
+forces that can possibly impart movement to it.
+
+The consequence of this is that Rousseau gives us not the least help
+towards the solution of any of the problems of actual government,
+because these are naturally both suggested and guided by
+considerations of expediency and improvement. It is as if he had never
+really settled the ends for which government exists, beyond the
+construction of the symmetrical machine of government itself. He is a
+geometer, not a mechanician; or shall we say that he is a mechanician,
+and not a biologist concerned with the conditions of a living
+organism. The analogy of the body politic to the body natural was as
+present to him as it had been to all other writers on society, but he
+failed to seize the only useful lessons which such an analogy might
+have taught him--diversity of structure, difference of function,
+development of strength by exercise, growth by nutrition--all of which
+might have been serviceably translated into the dialect of political
+science, and might have bestowed on his conception of political
+society more of the features of reality. We see no room for the free
+play of divergent forces, the active rivalry of hostile interests, the
+regulated conflict of multifarious personal aims, which can never be
+extinguished, except in moments of driving crisis, by the most sincere
+attachment to the common causes of the land. Thus the modern question
+which is of such vital interest for all the foremost human societies,
+of the union of collective energy with the encouragement of individual
+freedom, is, if not wholly untouched, at least wholly unillumined by
+anything that Rousseau says. To tell us that a man on entering a
+society exchanges his natural liberty for civil liberty which is
+limited by the general will,[265] is to give us a phrase, where we
+seek a solution. To say that if it is the opposition of private
+interests which made the establishment of societies necessary, it is
+the accord of those interests which makes them possible,[266] is to
+utter a truth which feeds no practical curiosity. The opposition of
+private interests remains, in spite of the yoke which their accord has
+imposed upon it, but which only controls and does not suppress such an
+opposition. What sort of control? What degree? What bounds?
+
+So again let us consider the statement that the instant the government
+usurps the sovereignty, then the social pact is broken, and all the
+citizens, restored by right to their natural liberty, are forced but
+not morally obliged to obey.[267] He began by telling his readers that
+man, though born free, is now everywhere in chains; and therefore it
+would appear that in all existing cases the social pact has been
+broken, and the citizens living under the reign of force, are free to
+resume their natural liberty, if they are only strong enough to do so.
+This declaration of the general duty of rebellion no doubt had its
+share in generating that fervid eagerness that all other peoples
+should rise and throw off the yoke, which was one of the most
+astonishing anxieties of the French during their revolution. That was
+not the worst quality of such a doctrine. It made government
+impossible, by basing the right or duty of resistance on a question
+that could not be reached by positive evidence, but must always be
+decided by an arbitrary interpretation of an arbitrarily imagined
+document. The moderate proposition that resistance is lawful if a
+government is a bad one, and if the people are strong enough to
+overthrow it, and if their leaders have reason to suppose they can
+provide a less bad one in its place, supplies tests that are capable
+of application. Our own writers in favour of the doctrine of
+resistance partly based their arguments upon the historic instances of
+the Old Testament, and it is one of the most striking contributions of
+Protestantism to the cause of freedom, that it sent people in an
+admiring spirit to the history of the most rebellious nation that ever
+existed, and so provided them in Hebrew insurgency with a corrective
+for the too submissive political teaching of the Gospel. But these
+writers have throughout a tacit appeal to expediency, as writers might
+always be expected to have, who were really meditating on the
+possibility of their principles being brought to the test of practice.
+There can be no evidence possible, with a test so vague as the fact of
+the rupture of a compact whose terms are authentically known to nobody
+concerned. Speak of bad laws and good, wise administration or unwise,
+just government or unjust, extravagant or economical, civically
+elevating or demoralising; all these are questions which men may apply
+themselves to settle with knowledge, and with a more or less definite
+degree of assurance. But who can tell how he is to find out whether
+sovereignty has been usurped, and the social compact broken? Was there
+a usurpation of sovereignty in France not many years ago, when the
+assumption of power by the prince was ratified by many millions of
+votes?
+
+The same case, we are told, namely, breach of the social compact and
+restoration of natural liberty, occurs when the members of the
+government usurp separately the power which they ought only to
+exercise in a body.[268] Now this description applies very fairly to
+the famous episode in our constitutional history, connected with
+George the Third's first attack of madness in 1788. Parliament cannot
+lawfully begin business without a declaration of the cause of summons
+from the crown. On this occasion parliament both met and deliberated
+without communication from the crown. What was still more important
+was a vote of the parliament itself, authorising the passing of
+letters patent under the great seal for opening parliament by
+commission, and for giving assent to a Regency Bill. This was a
+distinct usurpation of regal authority. Two members of the government
+(in Rousseau's sense of the term), namely the houses of parliament,
+usurped the power which they ought only to have exercised along with
+the crown.[269] The Whigs denounced the proceeding as a fiction, a
+forgery, a phantom, but if they had been readers of the Social
+Contract, and if they had been bitten by its dogmatic temper, they
+would have declared the compact of union violated, and all British
+citizens free to resume their natural rights. Not even the bitter
+virulence of faction at that time could tempt any politician to take
+up such a line, though within half a dozen years each of the
+democratic factions in France had worked at the overthrow of every
+other in turn, on the very principle which Rousseau had formulated and
+Robespierre had made familiar, that usurped authority is a valid
+reason for annihilating a government, no matter under what
+circumstances, nor how small the chance of replacing it by a better,
+nor how enormous the peril to the national well-being in the process.
+The true opposite to so anarchic a doctrine is assuredly not that of
+passive obedience either to chamber or monarch, but the right and duty
+of throwing off any government which inflicts more disadvantages than
+it confers advantages. Rousseau's whole theory tends inevitably to
+substitute a long series of struggles after phrases and shadows in the
+new era, for the equally futile and equally bloody wars of dynastic
+succession which have been the great curse of the old. Men die for a
+phrase as they used to die for a family. The other theory, which all
+English politicians accept in their hearts, and so many commanding
+French politicians have seemed in their hearts to reject, was first
+expounded in direct view of Rousseau's teaching by Paley.[270] Of
+course the greatest, widest, and loftiest exposition of the bearings
+of expediency on government and its conditions, is to be found in the
+magnificent and immortal pieces of Burke, some of them suggested by
+absolutist violations of the doctrine in our own affairs, and some of
+them by anarchic violation of it in the affairs of France, after the
+seed sown by Rousseau had brought forth fruit.
+
+We should, however, be false to our critical principle, if we did not
+recognise the historical effect of a speculation scientifically
+valueless. There has been no attempt to palliate either the
+shallowness or the practical mischievousness of the Social Contract.
+But there is another side to its influence. It was the match which
+kindled revolutionary fire in generous breasts throughout Europe. Not
+in France merely, but in Germany as well, its phrases became the
+language of all who aspired after freedom. Schiller spoke of Rousseau
+as one who "converted Christians into human beings," and the _Robbers_
+(1778) is as if it had been directly inspired by the doctrine that
+usurped sovereignty restores men to their natural rights. Smaller men
+in the violent movement which seized all the youth of Germany at that
+time, followed the same lead, if they happened to have any feeling
+about the political condition of their enslaved countries.
+
+There was alike in France and Germany a craving for a return to nature
+among the whole of the young generation.[271] The Social Contract
+supplied a dialect for this longing on one side, just as the Emilius
+supplied it on another. Such parts in it as people did not understand
+or did not like, they left out. They did not perceive its direction
+towards that "perfect Hobbism," which the author declared to be the
+only practical alternative to a democracy so austere as to be
+intolerable. They grasped phrases about the sovereignty of the people,
+the freedom for which nature had destined man, the slavery to which
+tyrants and oppressors had brought him. Above all they were struck by
+the patriotism which shines so brightly in every page, like the fire
+on the altar of one of those ancient cities which had inspired the
+writer's ideal.
+
+Yet there is a marked difference in the channels along which
+Rousseau's influence moved in the two countries. In France it was
+drawn eventually into the sphere of direct politics. In Germany it
+inspired not a great political movement, but an immense literary
+revival. In France, as we have already said, the patriotic flame
+seemed extinct. The ruinous disorder of the whole social system made
+the old love of country resemble love for a phantom, and so much of
+patriotic speech as survived was profoundly hollow. Even a man like
+Turgot was not so much a patriot as a passionate lover of improvement,
+and with the whole school of which this great spirit was the noblest
+and strongest, a generous citizenship of the world had replaced the
+narrower sentiment which had inflamed antique heroism. Rousseau's
+exaltation of the Greek and Roman types in all their concentration and
+intensity, touches mortals of commoner mould. His theory made the
+native land what it had been to the citizens of earlier date, a true
+centre of existence, round which all the interests of the community,
+all its pursuits, all its hopes, grouped themselves with entire
+singleness of convergence, just as religious faith is the centre of
+existence to a church. It was the virile and patriotic energy thus
+evoked which presently saved France from partition.
+
+We complete the estimate of the positive worth and tendencies of the
+Social Contract by adding to this, which was for the time the cardinal
+service, of rekindling the fire of patriotism, the rapid deduction
+from the doctrine of the sovereignty of peoples of the great truth,
+that a nation with a civilised polity does not consist of an order or
+a caste, but of the great body of its members, the army of toilers who
+make the most painful of the sacrifices that are needed for the
+continuous nutrition of the social organisation. As Condorcet put it,
+and he drew inspiration partly from the intellectual school of
+Voltaire, and partly from the social school of Rousseau, all
+institutions ought to have for their aim the physical, intellectual,
+and moral amelioration of the poorest and most numerous class.[272]
+This is the People. Second, there gradually followed from the
+important place given by Rousseau to the idea of equal association, as
+at once the foundation and the enduring bond of a community, those
+schemes of Mutualism, and all the other shapes of collective action
+for a common social good, which have possessed such commanding
+attraction for the imagination of large classes of good men in France
+ever since. Hitherto these forms have been sterile and deceptive, and
+they must remain so, until the idea of special function has been
+raised to an equal level of importance with that of united forces
+working together to a single end.
+
+In these ways the author of the Social Contract did involuntarily and
+unconsciously contribute to the growth of those new and progressive
+ideas, in which for his own part he lacked all faith. Prae-Newtonians
+knew not the wonders of which Newton was to find the key; and so we,
+grown weary of waiting for the master intelligence who may effect the
+final combination of moral and scientific ideas needed for a new
+social era, may be inclined to lend a half-complacent ear to the arid
+sophisters who assume that the last word of civilisation has been
+heard in existing arrangements. But we may perhaps take courage from
+history to hope that generations will come, to whom our system of
+distributing among a few the privileges and delights that are procured
+by the toil of the many, will seem just as wasteful, as morally
+hideous, and as scientifically indefensible, as that older system
+which impoverished and depopulated empires, in order that a despot or
+a caste might have no least wish ungratified, for which the lives or
+the hard-won treasure of others could suffice.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[176] _Cont. Soc._, I. viii.
+
+[177] _Cont. Soc._, II. xi. He had written in much the same sense in
+his article on Political Economy in the Encyclopaedia, p. 34.
+
+[178] Robespierre disclaimed the intention of attacking property, and
+took up a position like that of Rousseau--teaching the poor contempt
+for the rich, not envy. "I do not want to touch your treasures," he
+cried, on one occasion, "however impure their source. It is far more
+an object of concern to me to make poverty honourable, than to
+proscribe wealth; the thatched hut of Fabricius never need envy the
+palace of Crassus. I should be at least as content, for my own part,
+to be one of the sons of Aristides, brought up in the Prytaneium at
+the public expense, as the heir presumptive of Xerxes, born in the
+mire of royal courts, to sit on a throne decorated by the abasement of
+the people, and glittering with the public misery." Quoted in Malon's
+_Expose des Ecoles Socialistes francaises_, 15. Baboeuf carried
+Rousseau's sentiments further towards their natural conclusion by such
+propositions as these: "The goal of the revolution is to destroy
+inequality, and to re-establish the happiness of all." "The revolution
+is not finished, because the rich absorb all the property, and hold
+exclusive power; while the poor toil like born slaves, languish in
+wretchedness, and are nothing in the state." _Expose des Ecoles
+Socialistes francaises_, p. 29.
+
+[179] _Cont. Soc._, II. xi.
+
+[180] _Cont. Soc._, I. iv.
+
+[181] _Ib._, II. vii.
+
+[182] Ch. vi. (vol. v. 371; edit. 1801).
+
+[183] Ch. vii. (p. 383.)
+
+[184] Goguet, in his _Origine des Lois, des Arts, et des Sciences_
+(1758), really attempted as laboriously as possible to carry out a
+notion of the historical method, but the fact that history itself at
+that time had never been subjected to scientific examination made his
+effort valueless. He accumulates testimony which would be excellent
+evidence, if only it had been sifted, and had come out of the process
+substantially undiminished. Yet even Goguet, who thus carefully
+followed the accounts of early societies given in the Bible and other
+monuments, intersperses abstract general statements about man being
+born free and independent (i. 25), and entering society as the result
+of deliberate reflection.
+
+[185] _Cont. Soc._, II. xi. Also III. viii.
+
+[186] II. xi. Also ch. viii.
+
+[187] II. viii.
+
+[188] II. ix.
+
+[189] _Politics_, VII. iv. 8, 10.
+
+[190] _Cont. Soc._, II. x.
+
+[191] Plato's _Laws_, v. 737.
+
+[192] _Ib._, iv. 705.
+
+[193] _Projet de Constitution pour la Corse_, p. 75.
+
+[194] _Gouvernement de Pologne_, ch. xi.
+
+[195] _Cont. Soc._, II. vii.
+
+[196] Goguet was much nearer to a true conception of this kind; see,
+for instance, _Origine des Lois_, i. 46.
+
+[197] Decree of the Committee, April 20, 1794, reported by
+Billaud-Varennes. Compare ch. iv. of Rousseau's _Considerations sur le
+Gouvernement de Pologne_.
+
+[198] Here are some of Saint Just's regulations:--No servants, nor
+gold or silver vessels; no child under 16 to eat meat, nor any adult
+to eat meat on three days of the decade; boys at the age of 7 to be
+handed over to the school of the nation, where they were to be brought
+up to speak little, to endure hardships, and to train for war; divorce
+to be free to all; friendship ordained a public institution, every
+citizen on coming to majority being bound to proclaim his friends, and
+if he had none, then to be banished; if one committed a crime, his
+friends were to be banished. Quoted in Von Sybel's _Hist. French
+Rev._, iv. 49. When Morelly dreamed his dream of a model community in
+1754 (see above, vol. i. p. 158) he little supposed, one would think,
+that within forty years a man would be so near trying the experiment
+in France as Saint Just was. Baboeuf is pronounced by La Harpe to have
+been inspired by the Code de la Nature, which La Harpe impudently set
+down to Diderot, on whom every great destructive piece was
+systematically fathered.
+
+[199] I forget where I have read the story of some member of the
+Convention being very angry because the library contained no copy of
+the laws which Minos gave to the Cretans.
+
+[200] III. xiii.
+
+[201] III. xv. He actually recommended the Poles to pay all public
+functionaries in kind, and to have the public works executed on the
+system of corvee. _Gouvernement de Pologne_, ch. xi.
+
+[202] _Cont. Soc._, III. ii.
+
+[203] II. i.
+
+[204] II. ii.
+
+[205] III. i.
+
+[206] II. vi.
+
+[207] II. iv.
+
+[208] IV. vi.
+
+[209] _Economie Politique_, p. 30.
+
+[210] _Melanges_, p. 310.
+
+[211] See for instance Green's _History of the English People_, i.
+266.
+
+[212] _Summa_, xc.-cviii. (1265-1273). See Maurice's _Moral and
+Metaphysical Philosophy_, i. 627, 628. Also Franck's _Reformateurs et
+Publicistes de l'Europe_, p. 48, etc.
+
+[213] _Defensor Pacis_, Pt. I., ch. xii. This, again, is an example of
+Marsilio's position:--"Convenerunt enim homines ad civilem
+communicationem propter commodum et vitae sufficientiam consequendam,
+et opposita declinandum. Quae igitur omnium tangere possunt commodum et
+incommodum, ab omnibus sciri debent et audiri, ut commodum assequi et
+oppositum repellere possint." The whole chapter is a most interesting
+anticipation, partly due to the influence of Aristotle, of the notions
+of later centuries.
+
+[214] See Bayle's Dict., s.v. _Althusius_.
+
+[215] _Lettres de la Montagne_, I. vi. 388.
+
+[216] _Eccles. Polity_, Bk. i.; bks. i.-iv., 1594; bk. v., 1597; bks.
+vi.-viii., 1647,--being forty-seven years after the author's death.
+
+[217] Goguet (_Origine des Lois_, i. 22) dwells on tacit conventions
+as a kind of engagement to which men commit themselves with extreme
+facility. He was thus rather near the true idea of the spontaneous
+origin and unconscious acceptance of early institutions.
+
+[218] Of Civil Government, ch. xiii. See also ch. xi. "This
+legislative is not only the supreme power of the commonwealth, but
+sacred and unalterable in the hands where the community have once
+placed it; nor can any edict of anybody else, in what form soever
+conceived, or by what power soever backed, have the force and
+obligation of a law, which has not its sanction from that legislative
+which the public has chosen and appointed; for without this the law
+could not have that which is absolutely necessary to its being a
+law--the consent of the society; over whom nobody can have a power to
+make laws, but by their own consent, and by authority received from
+them." If Rousseau had found no neater expression for his doctrine
+than this, the Social Contract would assuredly have been no explosive.
+
+[219] See especially ch. viii.
+
+[220] Hence the antipathy of the clergy, catholic, episcopalian, and
+presbyterian, to which, as Austin has pointed out (_Syst. of
+Jurisprudence_, i. 288, _n._), Hobbes mainly owes his bad repute.
+
+[221] See Diderot's article on _Hobbisme_ in the Encyclopaedia,
+_Oeuv._, xv. 122.
+
+[222] _Esprit des Lois_, I. i.
+
+[223] _Cont. Soc._, II. vi. 50.
+
+[224] Goguet has the merit of seeing distinctly that command is the
+essence of law.
+
+[225] _Cont. Soc._, II. vi. 51-53. See Austin's _Jurisprudence_, i.
+95, etc.; also _Lettres ecrites de la Montagne_, I. vi. 380, 381.
+
+[226] See, for instance, letter to Mirabeau (_l'ami des hommes_), July
+26, 1767. _Corr._, v. 179. The same letter contains his criticism on
+the good despot of the Economists.
+
+[227] _L'Ordre Naturel et Essentiel des Societes Politiques_ (1767).
+By Mercier de la Riviere. One episode in the life of Mercier de la
+Riviere is worth recounting, as closely connected with the subject we
+are discussing. Just as Corsicans and Poles applied to Rousseau,
+Catherine of Russia, in consequence of her admiration for Riviere's
+book, summoned him to Russia to assist her in making laws. "Sir," said
+the Czarina, "could you point out to me the best means for the good
+government of a state?" "Madame, there is only one way, and that is
+being just; in other words, in keeping order and exacting obedience to
+the laws." "But on what base is it best to make the laws of an empire
+repose?" "There is only one base, Madame: the nature of things and of
+men." "Just so; but when you wish to give laws to a people, what are
+the rules which indicate most surely such laws as are most suitable?"
+"To give or make laws, Madame, is a task that God has left to none.
+Ah, who is the man that should think himself capable of dictating laws
+for beings that he does not know, or knows so ill? And by what right
+can he impose laws on beings whom God has never placed in his hands?"
+"To what, then, do you reduce the science of government?" "To studying
+carefully; recognising and setting forth the laws which God has graven
+so manifestly in the very organisation of men, when he called them
+into existence. To wish to go any further would be a great misfortune
+and a most destructive undertaking." "Sir, I am very pleased to have
+heard what you have to say; I wish you good day." Quoted from
+Thiebault's _Souvenirs de Berlin_, in M. Daire's edition of the
+_Physiocrates_, ii. 432.
+
+[228] _Cont. Soc._, II. vii.
+
+[229] _Corr._, v. 181.
+
+[230] _Cont. Soc._, I. v., vi., vii.
+
+[231] _Leviathan_, II., ch. xviii. vol. iii. 159 (Molesworth's
+edition).
+
+[232] _Cont. Soc._, III. xvi.
+
+[233] _Civil Government_, ch. viii. Sec. 99.
+
+[234] I. vi. Especially the footnote.
+
+[235] _Cont. Soc._, II. i.
+
+[236] _Syst. of Jurisprudence_, i. 256.
+
+[237] _Cont. Soc._, III. xv. 137. It was not long, however, before
+Rousseau found reason to alter his opinion in this respect. The
+champions of the Council at Geneva compared the _droit negatif_, in
+the exercise of which the Council had refused to listen to the
+representations of Rousseau's partisans (see above, vol. ii. p. 105)
+to the right of veto possessed by the crown in Great Britain. Rousseau
+seized upon this egregious blunder, which confused the power of
+refusing assent to a proposed law, with the power of refusing justice
+under law already passed. He at once found illustrations of the
+difference, first in the case of the printers of No. 45 of the _North
+Briton_, who brought actions for false imprisonment (1763), and next
+in the proceedings against Wilkes at the same time. If Wilkes, said
+Rousseau, had written, printed, published, or said, one-fourth against
+the Lesser Council at Geneva of what he said, wrote, printed, and
+published openly in London against the court and the government, he
+would have been heavily punished, and most likely put to death. And so
+forth, until he has proved very pungently how different degrees of
+freedom are enjoyed in Geneva and in England. _Lettres ecrites de la
+Montague_, ix. 491-500. When he wrote this he was unaware that the
+Triennial Act had long been replaced by the Septennial Act of the 1
+Geo. I. On finding out, as he did afterwards, that a parliament could
+sit for seven years, he thought as meanly of our liberty as ever.
+_Considerations sur les gouvernement de Pologne_, ch. vii. 253-260. In
+his _Projet de Constitution pour la Corse_, p. 113, he says that "the
+English do not love liberty for itself, but because it is most
+favourable to money-making."
+
+[238] III., xi., xii., and xiii.
+
+[239] Mr. Freeman's _Growth of the English Constitution_, c. i.
+
+[240] _Cont. Soc._, III. xv. 140. A small manuscript containing his
+ideas on confederation was given by Rousseau to the Count d'Antraigues
+(afterwards an _emigre_), who destroyed it in 1789, lest its arguments
+should be used to sap the royal authority. See extract from his
+pamphlet, prefixed to M. Auguis's edition of the Social Contract, pp.
+xxiii, xxiv.
+
+[241] _Gouvernement de Pologne_, v. 246.
+
+[242] Of course no such modification as that proposed by Comte
+(_Politique Positive_, iv. 421) would come within the scope of the
+doctrine of the Social Contract. For each of the seventeen Intendances
+into which Comte divides France, is to be ruled by a chief, "always
+appointed and removed by the central power." There is no room for the
+sovereignty of the people here, even in things parochial.
+
+[243] There was one extraordinary instance during the revolution of
+attempting to make popular government direct on Rousseau's principle,
+in the scheme (1790) of which Danton was a chief supporter, for
+reorganising the municipal administration of Paris. The assemblies of
+sections were to sit permanently; their vote was to be taken on
+current questions; and action was to follow the aggregate of their
+degrees. See Von Sybel's _Hist. Fr. Rev._ i. 275; M. Louis Blanc's
+_History_, Bk. III. ch. ii.
+
+[244] This was also Bodin's definition of an aristocratic state; "si
+minor pars civium caeteris imperat."
+
+[245] _Politics_, III. vi.-vii.
+
+[246] _Esprit des Lois_, II. i. ii.
+
+[247] Rousseau gave the name of _tyrant_ to a usurper of royal
+authority in a kingdom, and _despot_ to a usurper of the sovereign
+authority (_i.e._ [Greek: tyrannos] in the Greek sense). The former
+might govern according to the laws, but the latter placed himself
+above the laws (_Cont. Soc._, III. x.) This corresponded to Locke's
+distinction: "As usurpation is the exercise of power which another
+hath a right to, so tyranny is the exercise of a power beyond right,
+which nobody can have a right to." _Civil Gov._, ch. xviii.
+
+[248] III. iv.
+
+[249] III. vi.
+
+[250] III. v.
+
+[251] _Cont. Soc._, IV. viii.
+
+[252] _Cont. Soc._, IV. viii. 197-201.
+
+[253] This is not unlike what Tocqueville says somewhere, that
+Christianity bids you render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's,
+but seems to discourage any inquiry whether Caesar is an usurper or a
+lawful ruler.
+
+[254] _Cont. Soc._, IV. viii. 203. As we have already seen, he had
+entreated Voltaire, of all men in the world, to draw up a civil
+profession of faith. See vol. i. 326.
+
+In the New Heloisa (V. v. 117, _n._) Rousseau expresses his opinion
+that "no true believer could be intolerant or a persecutor. _If I were
+a magistrate, and if the law pronounced the penalty of death against
+atheists, I would begin by burning as such whoever should come to
+inform against another._"
+
+[255] Plato's _Laws_, Bk. x. 909, etc.
+
+[256] _Areopagitica_, p. 417. (Edit. 1867.)
+
+[257] See a speech of his, which is Rousseau's "civil faith" done into
+rhetoric, given in M. Louis Blanc's _Hist. de la Rev. Francaise_, Bk.
+x. c. xiv.
+
+[258] _Considerations sur le gouvernement ancien et present de la
+France_ (1764). Quoted by Rousseau from a manuscript copy.
+
+[259] _Leviathan_, ch. xliii. 601. Also ch. xlii.
+
+[260] _Cont. Soc._, III. xi. Borrowed from Hobbes, who said, "Magnus
+ille Leviathan quae civitas appellatur, opificium artis est."
+
+[261] Mackintosh's.
+
+[262] _Cont. Soc._, II. v.
+
+[263] IV. ii.
+
+[264] For instance, _Gouvernement de la Pologne_, ch. xi. p. 305. And
+_Corr._, v. 180.
+
+[265] _Cont. Soc._, I. viii.
+
+[266] _Cont. Soc._, II. i.
+
+[267] _Ib._, III. x. "Let every individual who may usurp the
+sovereignty be instantly put to death by free men." Robespierre's
+_Declaration des droits de l'homme_, Sec. 27. "When the government
+violates the rights of the people, insurrection becomes for the people
+the most sacred of rights and the most indispensable of duties." Sec. 35.
+
+[268] _Cont. Soc._, III. x.
+
+[269] See May's _Constitutional Hist. of England_, ch. iii; and Lord
+Stanhope's _Life of Pitt_, vol. ii. ch. xii.
+
+[270] In the 6th book of the _Moral Philosophy_ (1785), ch. iii., and
+elsewhere. In the preface he refers to the effect which Rousseau's
+political theory was supposed to have had in the civil convulsions of
+Geneva, as one of the reasons which encouraged him to publish his own
+book.
+
+[271] One side of this was the passion for geographical exploration
+which took possession of Europe towards the middle of the eighteenth
+century. See the _Life of Humboldt_, i. 28, 29. (_Eng. Trans._ by
+Lassell.)
+
+[272] Rousseau's influence on Condorcet is seen in the latter's maxim,
+which has found such favour in the eyes of socialist writers, that
+"not only equality of right, but equality of fact, is the goal of the
+social art."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+EMILIUS.
+
+
+One whose most intense conviction was faith in the goodness
+of all things and creatures as they are first produced by nature, and
+so long as they remain unsophisticated by the hand and purpose of man,
+was in some degree bound to show a way by which this evil process of
+sophistication might be brought to the lowest possible point, and the
+best of all natural creatures kept as near as possible to his high
+original. Rousseau, it is true, held in a sense of his own the
+doctrine of the fall of man. That doctrine, however, has never made
+people any more remiss in the search after a virtue, which if they
+ought to have regarded it as hopeless according to strict logic, is
+still indispensable in actual life. Rousseau's way of believing that
+man had fallen was so coloured at once by that expansion of sanguine
+emotion which marked his century, and by that necessity for repose in
+idyllic perfection of simplicity which marked his own temperament,
+that enthusiasm for an imaginary human creature effectually shut out
+the dogma of his fatal depravation. "How difficult a thing it is,"
+Madame d'Epinay once said to him, "to bring up a child." "Assuredly
+it is," answered Rousseau; "because the father and mother are not made
+by nature to bring it up, nor the child to be brought up."[273] This
+cynical speech can only have been an accidental outbreak of spleen. It
+was a contradiction to his one constant opinion that nature is all
+good and bounteous, and that the inborn capacity of man for reaching
+true happiness knows no stint.
+
+In writing Emilius, he sat down to consider what man is, and what can
+be made of him. Here, as in all the rest of his work, he only obeyed
+the tendencies of his time in choosing a theme. An age touched by the
+spirit of hope inevitably turns to the young; for with the young lies
+fulfilment. Such epochs are ever pressing with the question, how is
+the future to be shaped? Our answer depends on the theory of human
+disposition, and in these epochs the theory is always optimistic.
+Rousseau was saved, as so many thousands of men have been alike in
+conduct and speculation, by inconsistency, and not shrinking from two
+mutually contradictory trains of thought. Society is corrupt, and
+society is the work of man. Yet man, who has engendered this corrupted
+birth, is good and whole. The strain in the argument may be pardoned
+for the hopefulness of the conclusion. It brought Rousseau into
+harmony with the eager effort of the time to pour young character into
+finer mould, and made him the most powerful agent in giving to such
+efforts both fervour and elevation. While others were content with
+the mere enunciation of maxims and precepts, he breathed into them the
+spirit of life, and enforced them with a vividness of faith that
+clothed education with the augustness and unction of religion. The
+training of the young soul to virtue was surrounded with something of
+the awful holiness of a sacrament; and those who laboured in this
+sanctified field were exhorted to a constancy of devotion, and were
+promised a fulness of recompense, that raised them from the rank of
+drudges to a place of highest honour among the ministers of nature.
+
+Everybody at this time was thinking about education, partly perhaps on
+account of the suppression of the Jesuits, the chief instructors of
+the time, and a great many people were writing about it. The Abbe de
+Saint Pierre had had new ideas on education, as on all the greater
+departments of human interest. Madame d'Epinay wrote considerations
+upon the bringing up of the young.[274] Madame de Grafigny did the
+same in a less grave shape.[275] She received letters from the
+precociously sage Turgot, abounding in the same natural and sensible
+precepts which ten years later were commended with more glowing
+eloquence in the pages of Emilius.[276] Grimm had an elaborate scheme
+for a treatise on education.[277] Helvetius followed his exploration
+of the composition of the human mind, by a treatise on the training
+proper for the intellectual and moral faculties. Education by these
+and other writers was being conceived in a wider sense than had been
+known to ages controlled by ecclesiastical collegians. It slowly came
+to be thought of in connection with the family. The improvement of
+ideas upon education was only one phase of that great general movement
+towards the restoration of the family, which was so striking a
+spectacle in France after the middle of the century. Education now
+came to comprehend the whole system of the relations between parents
+and their children, from earliest infancy to maturity. The direction
+of this wider feeling about such relations tended strongly towards an
+increased closeness in them, more intimacy, and a more continuous
+suffusion of tenderness and long attachment. All this was part of the
+general revival of naturalism. People began to reflect that nature was
+not likely to have designed infants to be suckled by other women than
+their own mothers, nor that they should be banished from the society
+of those who are most concerned in their well-being, from the cheerful
+hearth and wise affectionate converse of home, to the frigid
+discipline of colleges and convents and the unamiable monition of
+strangers.
+
+Then the rising rebellion against the church and its faith perhaps
+contributed something towards a movement which, if it could not break
+the religious monopoly of instruction, must at least introduce the
+parent as a competitor with the priestly instructor for influence over
+the ideas, habits, and affections of his children. The rebellion was
+aimed against the spirit as well as the manner of the established
+system. The church had not fundamentally modified the significance of
+the dogma of the fall and depravity of man; education was still
+conceived as a process of eradication and suppression of the mystical
+old Adam. The new current flowed in channels far away from that black
+folly of superstition. Men at length ventured once more to look at one
+another with free and generous gaze. The veil of the temple was rent,
+and the false mockeries of the shrine of the Hebrew divinity made
+plain to scornful eyes. People ceased to see one another as guilty
+victims cowering under a divine curse. They stood erect in
+consciousness of manhood. The palsied conception of man, with his
+large discourse of reason looking before and after, his lofty and
+majestic patience in search for new forms of beauty and new secrets of
+truth, his sense of the manifold sweetness and glory and awe of the
+universe, above all, his infinite capacity of loyal pity and love for
+his comrades in the great struggle, and his high sorrow for his own
+wrong-doing,--the palsied and crushing conception of this excellent
+and helpful being as a poor worm, writhing under the vindictive and
+meaningless anger of an omnipotent tyrant in the large heavens, only
+to be appeased by sacerdotal intervention, was fading back into those
+regions of night, whence the depth of human misery and the
+obscuration of human intelligence had once permitted its escape, to
+hang evilly over the western world for a season. So vital a change in
+the point of view quickly touched the theory and art of the upbringing
+of the young. Education began to figure less as the suppression of the
+natural man, than his strengthening and development; less as a process
+of rooting out tares, more as the grateful tending of shoots abounding
+in promise of richness. What had been the most drearily mechanical of
+duties, was transformed into a task that surpassed all others in
+interest and hope. If man be born not bad but good, under no curse,
+but rather the bestower and receiver of many blessings, then the
+entire atmosphere of young life, in spite of the toil and the peril,
+is made cheerful with the sunshine and warmth of the great folded
+possibilities of excellence, happiness, and well-doing.
+
+
+I.
+
+Locke in education, as in metaphysics and in politics, was the pioneer
+of French thought. In education there is less room for scientific
+originality. The sage of a parish, provided only she began her trade
+with an open and energetic mind, may here pass philosophers. Locke was
+nearly as sage, as homely, as real, as one of these strenuous women.
+The honest plainness of certain of his prescriptions for the
+preservation of physical health perhaps keeps us somewhat too near the
+earth. His manner throughout is marked by the stout wisdom of the
+practical teacher, who is content to assume good sense in his hearers,
+and feels no necessity for kindling a blaze or raising a tempest. He
+gives us a practical manual for producing a healthy, instructed,
+upright, well-mannered young English squire, who shall be rightly
+fitted to take his own life sensibly in hand, and procure from it a
+fair amount of wholesome satisfaction both for himself and the people
+with whom he is concerned. Locke's treatise is one of the most
+admirable protests in the world against effeminacy and pedantry, and
+parents already moved by grave desire to do their duty prudently to
+their sons, will hardly find another book better suited to their ends.
+Besides Locke, we must also count Charron, and the amazing educator of
+Gargantua, and Montaigne before either, among the writers whom
+Rousseau had read, with that profit and increase which attends the
+dropping of the good ideas of other men into fertile minds.
+
+There is an immense class of natures, and those not the lowest, which
+the connection of duty with mere prudence does not carry far enough.
+They only stir when something has moved their feeling for the ideal,
+and raised the mechanical offices of the narrow day into association
+with the spaciousness and height of spiritual things. To these
+Rousseau came. For both the tenour and the wording of the most
+striking precepts of the Emilius, he owes much to Locke. But what was
+so realistic in him becomes blended in Rousseau with all the power and
+richness and beauty of an ideal that can move the most generous parts
+of human character. The child is treated as the miniature of humanity;
+it thus touches the whole sphere of our sympathies, warms our
+curiosity as to the composition of man's nature, and becomes the very
+eye and centre of moral and social aspirations.
+
+Accordingly Rousseau almost at once begins by elaborating his
+conception of the kind of human creature which it is worth while to
+take the trouble to rear, and the only kind which pure nature will
+help you in perfecting. Hence Emilius, besides being a manual for
+parents, contains the lines of a moral type of life and character for
+all others. The old thought of the Discourses revives in full vigour.
+The artifices of society, the perverting traditions of use, the feeble
+maxims of indolence, convention, helpless dependence on the aid or the
+approval of others, are routed at the first stroke. The old regimen of
+accumulated prejudice is replaced, in dealing alike with body and
+soul, by the new system of liberty and nature. In saying this we have
+already said that the exaltation of Spartan manners which runs through
+Rousseau's other writings has vanished, and that every trace of the
+much-vaunted military and public training has yielded before the
+attractive thought of tender parents and a wisely ruled home. Public
+instruction, we learn, can now no longer exist, because there is no
+longer such a thing as country, and therefore there can no longer be
+citizens. Only domestic education can now help us to rear the man
+according to nature,--the man who knows best among us how to bear
+the mingled good and ill of our life.
+
+The artificial society of the time, with its aspirations after a
+return to nature, was moved to the most energetic enthusiasm by
+Rousseau's famous exhortations to mothers to nourish their own little
+ones. Morelly, as we have seen, had already enjoined the adoption of
+this practice. So too had Buffon. But Morelly's voice had no
+resonance, Buffon's reasons were purely physical, and children were
+still sent out to nurse, until Rousseau's more passionate moral
+entreaties awoke maternal conscience. "Do these tender mothers," he
+exclaimed, "who, when they have got rid of their infants, surrender
+themselves gaily to all the diversions of the town, know what sort of
+usage the child in the village is receiving, fastened in his swaddling
+band? At the least interruption that comes, they hang him up by a nail
+like a bundle of rags, and there the poor creature remains thus
+crucified, while the nurse goes about her affairs. Every child found
+in this position had a face of purple; as the violent compression of
+the chest would not allow the blood to circulate, it all went to the
+head, and the victim was supposed to be very quiet, just because it
+had not strength enough to cry out."[278] But in Rousseau, as in
+Beethoven, a harsh and rugged passage is nearly always followed by
+some piece of exquisite and touching melody. The force of these
+indignant pictures was heightened and relieved by moving appeal to
+all the tender joys of maternal solicitude, and thoughts of all that
+this solicitude could do for the happiness of the home, the father,
+and the young. The attraction of domestic life is pronounced the best
+antidote to the ill living of the time. The bustle of children, which
+you now think so importunate, gradually becomes delightful; it brings
+father and mother nearer to one another; and the lively animation of a
+family added to domestic cares, makes the dearest occupation of the
+wife, and the sweetest of all his amusements to the husband. If women
+will only once more become mothers again, men will very soon become
+fathers and husbands.[279]
+
+The physical effect of this was not altogether wholesome. Rousseau's
+eloquence excited women to an inordinate pitch of enthusiasm for the
+duty of suckling their infants, but his contemptuous denunciation of
+the gaieties of Paris could not extinguish the love of amusement.
+
+    Quid quod libelli Stoici inter sericos
+      Jacere pulvillos amant?
+
+So young mothers tried as well as they could to satisfy both desires,
+and their babes were brought to them at all unseasonable hours, while
+they were full of food and wine, or heated with dancing or play, and
+there received the nurture which, but for Rousseau, they would have
+drawn in more salutary sort from a healthy foster-mother in the
+country. This, however, was only an incidental drawback to a movement
+which was in its main lines full of excellent significance. The
+importance of giving freedom to the young limbs, of accustoming the
+body to rudeness and vicissitude of climate, of surrounding youth with
+light and cheerfulness and air, and even a tiny detail such as the
+propriety of substituting for coral or ivory some soft substance
+against which the growing teeth might press a way without irritation,
+all these matters are handled with a fervid reality of interest that
+gives to the tedium of the nursery a genuine touch of the poetic.
+Swathings, bandages, leading-strings, are condemned with a warmth like
+that with which the author had denounced comedy.[280] The city is held
+up to indignant reprobation as the gulf of infant life, just as it had
+been in his earlier pieces as the gulf of all the loftiest energies of
+the adult life. Every child ought to be born and nursed in the
+country, and it would be all the better if it remained in the country
+to the last day of its existence. You must accustom it little by
+little to the sight of disagreeable objects, such as toads and snakes;
+also in the same gradual manner to the sound of alarming noises,
+beginning with snapping a cap in a pistol. If the infant cries from
+pain which you cannot remove, make no attempt to soothe it; your
+caresses will not lessen the anguish of its colic, while the child
+will remember what it has to do in order to be coaxed and to get its
+own way. The nurse may amuse it by songs and lively cries, but she is
+not to din useless words into its ears; the first articulations that
+come to it should be few, easy, distinct, frequently repeated, and
+only referring to objects which may be shown to the child. "Our
+unlucky facility in cheating ourselves with words that we do not
+understand, begins earlier than we suppose." Let there be no haste in
+inducing the child to speak articulately. The evil of precipitation in
+this respect is not that children use and hear words without sense,
+but that they use and hear them in a different sense from our own,
+without our perceiving it. Mistakes of this sort, committed thus
+early, have an influence, even after they are cured, over the turn of
+the mind for the rest of the creature's life. Hence it is a good thing
+to keep a child's vocabulary as limited as possible, lest it should
+have more words than ideas, and should say more than it can possibly
+realise in thought.[281]
+
+In moral as in intellectual habits, the most perilous interval in
+human life is that between birth and the age of twelve. The great
+secret is to make the early education purely negative; a process of
+keeping the heart, naturally so good, clear of vice, and the
+intelligence, naturally so true, clear of error. Take for first,
+second, and third precept, to follow nature and leave her free to the
+performance of her own tasks. Until the age of reason, there can be no
+idea of moral beings or social relations. Therefore, says Rousseau, no
+moral discussion. Locke's maxim in favour of constantly reasoning with
+children was a mistake. Of all the faculties of man, reason, which is
+only a compound of the rest, is that which is latest in development,
+and yet it is this which we are to use to develop those which come
+earliest of all. Such a course is to begin at the end, and to turn the
+finished work into an instrument. "In speaking to children in these
+early years a language which they do not comprehend, we accustom them
+to cheat themselves with words, to criticise what is said to them, to
+think themselves as wise as their masters, to become disputatious and
+mutinous." If you forget that nature meant children to be children
+before growing into men, you only force a fruit that has neither
+ripeness nor savour, and must soon go bad; you will have youthful
+doctors and old infants.
+
+To all this, however, there is certainly another side which Rousseau
+was too impetuous to see. Perfected reason is truly the tardiest of
+human endowments, but it can never be perfected at all unless the
+process be begun, and, within limits, the sooner the beginning is
+made, the earlier will be the ripening. To know the grounds of right
+conduct is, we admit, a different thing from feeling a disposition to
+practise it. But nobody will deny the expediency of an intelligent
+acquaintance with the reasons why one sort of conduct is bad, and its
+opposite good, even if such an acquaintance can never become a
+substitute for the spontaneous action of thoroughly formed habit. For
+one thing, cases are constantly arising in a man's life that demand
+the exercise of reason, to settle the special application of
+principles which may have been acquired without knowledge of their
+rational foundation. In such cases, which are the critical and testing
+points of character, all depends upon the possession of a more or less
+justly trained intelligence, and the habit of using it. Now, as we
+have said, it is one of the great merits of the Emilius that it calls
+such attention to the early age at which mental influences begin to
+operate. Why should the gradual formation of the master habit of using
+the mind be any exception?
+
+Belief in the efficacy of preaching is the bane of educational
+systems. Verbal lessons seem as if they ought to be so deeply
+effective, if only the will and the throng of various motives which
+guide it, instantly followed impression of a truth upon the
+intelligence. And they are, moreover, so easily communicated, saving
+the parent a lifetime of anxious painstaking in shaping his own
+character, after such a pattern as shall silently draw all within its
+influence to pursuit of good and honourable things. The most valuable
+of Rousseau's notions about education, though he by no means
+consistently adhered to them, was his urgent contempt for this
+fatuous substitution of spoken injunctions and prohibitions, for the
+deeper language of example, and the more living instruction of visible
+circumstance. The vast improvements that have since taken place in the
+theory and the art of education all over Europe, and of which he has
+the honour of being the first and most widely influential promoter,
+may all be traced to the spread of this wise principle, and its
+adoption in various forms. The change in the up-bringing of the young
+exactly corresponds to the change in the treatment of the insane. We
+may look back to the old system of endless catechisms, apophthegms,
+moral fables, and the rest of the paraphernalia of moral didactics,
+with the same horror with which we regard the gags, strait-waistcoats,
+chains, and dark cells, of poor mad people before the intervention of
+Pinel.
+
+It is clear now to everybody who has any opinion on this most
+important of all subjects, that spontaneousness is the first quality
+in connection with right doing, which you can develop in the young,
+and this spontaneousness of habit is best secured by associating it
+with the approval of those to whom the child looks. Sympathy, in a
+word, is the true foundation from which to build up the structure of
+good habit. The young should be led to practise the elementary parts
+of right conduct from the desire to please, because that is a securer
+basis than the conclusions of an embryo reason, applied to the most
+complex conditions of action, while the grounds on which action is
+justified or condemned may be made plain in the fulness of time, when
+the understanding is better able to deal with the ideas and terms
+essential to the matter. You have two aims to secure, each without
+sacrifice of the other. These are, first, that the child shall grow up
+with firm and promptly acting habit; second, that it shall retain
+respect for reason and an open mind. The latter may be acquired in the
+less immature years, but if the former be not acquired in the earlier
+times, a man grows up with a drifting unsettledness of will, that
+makes his life either vicious by quibbling sophistries, or helpless
+for want of ready conclusions.
+
+The first idea which is to be given to a child, little as we might
+expect such a doctrine from the author of the Second Discourse, is
+declared to be that of property. And he can only acquire this idea by
+having something of his own. But how are we to teach him the
+significance of a thing being one's own? It is a prime rule to attempt
+to teach nothing by a verbal lesson; all instruction ought to be left
+to experience.[282] Therefore you must contrive some piece of
+experience which shall bring this notion of property vividly into a
+child's mind; the following for instance. Emilius is taken to a piece
+of garden; his instructor digs and dresses the ground for him, and the
+boy takes possession by sowing some beans. "We come every day to water
+them, and see them rise out of the ground with transports of joy. I
+add to this joy by saying, This belongs to you. Then explaining the
+term, I let him feel that he has put into the ground this time,
+labour, trouble, his person in short; that there is in this bit of
+ground something of himself which he may maintain against every comer,
+as he might withdraw his own arm from the hand of another man who
+would fain retain it in spite of him." One day Emilius comes to his
+beloved garden, watering-pot in hand, and finds to his anguish and
+despair that all the beans have been plucked up, that the ground has
+been turned over, and that the spot is hardly recognisable. The
+gardener comes up, and explains with much warmth that he had sown the
+seed of a precious Maltese melon in that particular spot long before
+Emilius had come with his trumpery beans, and that therefore it was
+his land; that nobody touches the garden of his neighbour, in order
+that his own may remain untouched; and that if Emilius wants a piece
+of garden, he must pay for it by surrendering to the owner half the
+produce.[283] Thus, says Rousseau, the boy sees how the notion of
+property naturally goes back to the right of the first occupant as
+derived from labour. We should have thought it less troublesome, as it
+is certainly more important, to teach a boy the facts of property
+positively and imperatively. This rather elaborate ascent to origins
+seems an exaggerated form of that very vice of over-instructing the
+growing reason in abstractions, which Rousseau had condemned so short
+a time before.
+
+Again, there is the very strong objection to conveying lessons by
+artificially contrived incidents, that children are nearly always
+extremely acute in suspecting and discovering such contrivances. Yet
+Rousseau recurs to them over and over again, evidently taking delight
+in their ingenuity. Besides the illustration of the origin and
+significance of property, there is the complex fancy in which a
+juggler is made to combine instruction as to the properties of the
+magnet with certain severe moral truths.[284] The tutor interests
+Emilius in astronomy and geography by a wonderful stratagem indeed.
+The poor youth loses his way in a wood, is overpowered by hunger and
+weariness, and then is led on by his cunning tutor to a series of
+inferences from the position of the sun and so forth, which convince
+him that his home is just over the hedge, where it is duly found to
+be.[285] Here, again, is the way in which the instructor proposes to
+stir activity of limb in the young Emilius. "In walking with him of an
+afternoon, I used sometimes to put in my pocket two cakes of a sort he
+particularly liked; we each of us ate one. One day he perceived that I
+had three cakes; he could easily have eaten six; he promptly
+despatches his own, to ask me for the third. Nay, I said to him, I
+could well eat it myself, or we would divide it, but I would rather
+see it made the prize of a running match between the two little boys
+there." The little boys run their race, and the winner devours the
+cake. This and subsequent repetitions of the performance at first
+only amused Emilius, but he presently began to reflect, and perceiving
+that he also had two legs, he began privately to try how fast he could
+run. When he thought he was strong enough, he importuned his tutor for
+the third cake, and on being refused, insisted on being allowed to
+compete for it. The habit of taking exercise was not the only
+advantage gained. The tutor resorted to a variety of further
+stratagems in order to induce the boy to find out and practise visual
+compass, and so forth.[286] If we consider, as we have said, first the
+readiness of children to suspect a stratagem wherever instruction is
+concerned, and next their resentment on discovering artifice of that
+kind, all this seems as little likely to be successful as it is
+assuredly contrary to Rousseau's general doctrine of leaving
+circumstances to lead.
+
+In truth Rousseau's appreciation of the real nature of spontaneousness
+in the processes of education was essentially inadequate, and that it
+was so, arose from a no less inadequate conception of the right
+influence upon the growing character, of the great principle of
+authority. His dread lest the child should ever be conscious of the
+pressure of a will external to its own, constituted a fundamental
+weakness of his system. The child, we are told with endless
+repetition, ought always to be led to suppose that it is following its
+own judgment or impulses, and has only them and their consequences to
+consider. But Rousseau could not help seeing, as he meditated on the
+actual development of his Emilius, that to leave him thus to the
+training of accident would necessarily end in many fatal gaps and
+chasms. Yet the hand and will of the parent or the master could not be
+allowed to appear. The only alternative, therefore, was the secret
+preparation of artificial sets of circumstances, alike in work and in
+amusement. Jean Paul was wiser than Jean Jacques. "Let not the teacher
+after the work also order and regulate the games. It is decidedly
+better not to recognise or make any order in games, than to keep it up
+with difficulty and send the zephyrets of pleasure through artistic
+bellows and air-pumps to the little flowers."[287]
+
+The spontaneousness which we ought to seek, does not consist in
+promptly willing this or that, independently of an authority imposed
+from without, but in a self-acting desire to do what is right under
+all its various conditions, including what the child finds pleasant to
+itself on the one hand, and what it has good reason to suppose will be
+pleasant to its parents on the other. "You must never," Rousseau
+gravely warns us, "inflict punishment upon children as punishment; it
+should always fall upon them as a natural consequence of their
+ill-behaviour."[288] But why should one of the most closely following
+of all these consequences be dissembled or carefully hidden from
+sight, namely, the effect of ill-behaviour upon the contentment of the
+child's nearest friend? Why are the effects of conduct upon the
+actor's own physical well-being to be the only effects honoured with
+the title of being natural? Surely, while we leave to the young the
+widest freedom of choice, and even habitually invite them to decide
+for themselves between two lines of conduct, we are bound afterwards
+to state our approval or disapproval of their decision, so that on the
+next occasion they may take this anger or pleasure in others into
+proper account in their rough and hasty forecast, often less hasty
+than it seems, of the consequences of what they are about to do. One
+of the most important of educating influences is lost, if the young
+are not taught to place the feelings of others in a front place, when
+they think in their own simple way of what will happen to them from
+yielding to a given impulse. Rousseau was quite right in insisting on
+practical experience of consequences as the only secure foundation for
+self-acting habit; he was fatally wrong in mutilating this experience
+by the exclusion from it of the effects of perceiving, resisting,
+accepting, ignoring, all will and authority from without. The great,
+and in many respects so admirable, school of Rousseauite
+philanthropists, have always been feeble on this side, alike in the
+treatment of the young by their instructors, and the treatment of
+social offenders by a government.
+
+Again, consider the large group of excellent qualities which are
+associated with affectionate respect for a more fully informed
+authority. In a world where necessity stands for so much, it is no
+inconsiderable gain to have learnt the lesson of docility on easy
+terms in our earliest days. If in another sense the will of each
+individual is all-powerful over his own destinies, it is best that
+this idea of firm purpose and a settled energy that will not be
+denied, should grow up in the young soul in connection with a riper
+wisdom and an ampler experience than its own; for then, when the time
+for independent action comes, the force of the association will
+continue. Finally, although none can be vicariously wise, none sage by
+proxy, nor any pay for the probation of another, yet is it not a
+puerile wastefulness to send forth the young all bare to the ordeal,
+while the armour of old experience and tempered judgment hangs idle on
+the wall? Surely it is thus by accumulation of instruction from
+generation to generation, that the area of right conduct in the world
+is extended. Such instruction must with youth be conveyed by military
+word of command as often as by philosophical persuasion of its worth.
+Nor is the atmosphere of command other than bracing, even to those who
+are commanded. If education is to be mainly conducted by force of
+example, it is a dreadful thing that the child is ever to have before
+its eyes as living type and practical exemplar the pale figure of
+parents without passions, and without a will as to the conduct of
+those who are dependent on them. Even a slight excess of anger,
+impatience, and the spirit of command, would be less demoralising to
+the impressionable character than the constant sight of a man
+artificially impassive. Rousseau is perpetually calling upon men to
+try to lay aside their masks; yet the model instructor whom he has
+created for us is to be the most artfully and elaborately masked of
+all men; unless he happens to be naturally without blood and without
+physiognomy.
+
+Rousseau, then, while he put away the old methods which imprisoned the
+young spirit in injunctions and over-solicitous monitions, yet did
+none the less in his own scheme imprison it in a kind of hothouse,
+which with its regulated temperature and artificially contrived access
+of light and air, was in many respects as little the method of nature,
+that is to say it gave as little play for the spontaneous working and
+growth of the forces of nature in the youth's breast, as that regimen
+of the cloister which he so profoundly abhorred. Partly this was the
+result of a ludicrously shallow psychology. He repeats again and again
+that self-love is the one quality in the youthful embryo of character,
+from which you have to work. From this, he says, springs the desire of
+possessing pleasure and avoiding pain, the great fulcrum on which the
+lever of experience rests. Not only so, but from this same
+unslumbering quality of self-love you have to develop regard for
+others. The child's first affection for his nurse is a result of the
+fact that she serves his comfort, and so down to his passion in later
+years for his mistress. Now this is not the place for a discussion as
+to the ultimate atom of the complex moral sentiments of men and women,
+nor for an examination of the question whether the faculty of
+sympathy has or has not an origin independent of self-love. However
+that may be, no one will deny that sympathy appears in good natures
+extremely early, and is susceptible of rapid cultivation from the very
+first. Here is the only adequate key to that education of the
+affections, from their rudimentary expansion in the nursery, until
+they include the complete range of all the objects proper to them.
+
+One secret of Rousseau's omission of this, the most important of all
+educating agencies, from the earlier stages of the formation of
+character, was the fact which is patent enough in every page, that he
+was not animated by that singular tenderness and almost mystic
+affection for the young, which breathes through the writings of some
+of his German followers, of Richter above all others, and which
+reveals to those who are sensible of it, the hold that may so easily
+be gained for all good purposes upon the eager sympathy of the
+youthful spirit. The instructor of Emilius speaks the words of a wise
+onlooker, sagely meditating on the ideal man, rather than of a parent
+who is living the life of his child through with him. Rousseau's
+interest in children, though perfectly sincere, was still aesthetic,
+moral, reasonable, rather than that pure flood of full-hearted feeling
+for them, which is perhaps seldom stirred except in those who have
+actually brought up children of their own. He composed a vindication
+of his love for the young in an exquisite piece;[289] but it has none
+of the yearnings of the bowels of tenderness.
+
+
+II.
+
+Education being the art of preparing the young to grow into
+instruments of happiness for themselves and others, a writer who
+undertakes to speak about it must naturally have some conception of
+the kind of happiness at which his art aims. We have seen enough of
+Rousseau's own life to know what sort of ideal he would be likely to
+set up. It is a healthier epicureanism, with enough stoicism to make
+happiness safe in case that circumstances should frown. The man who
+has lived most is not he who has counted most years, but he who has
+most felt life.[290] It is mere false wisdom to throw ourselves
+incessantly out of ourselves, to count the present for nothing, ever
+to pursue without ceasing a future which flees in proportion as we
+advance, to try to transport ourselves from whence we are not, to some
+place where we shall never be.[291] He is happiest who suffers fewest
+pains, and he is most miserable who feels fewest pleasures. Then we
+have a half stoical strain. The felicity of man here below is only a
+negative state, to be measured by the more or less of the ills he
+undergoes. It is in the disproportion between desires and faculties
+that our misery consists. Happiness, therefore, lies not in
+diminishing our desires, nor any more in extending our faculties, but
+in diminishing the excess of desire over faculty, and in bringing
+power and will into perfect balance.[292] Excepting health, strength,
+respect for one's self, all the goods of this life reside in opinion;
+excepting bodily pain and remorse of conscience, all our ills are in
+imagination. Death is no evil; it is only made so by half-knowledge
+and false wisdom. "Live according to nature, be patient, and drive
+away physicians; you will not avoid death, but you will only feel it
+once, while they on the other hand would bring it daily before your
+troubled imagination, and their false art, instead of prolonging your
+days, only hinders you from enjoying them. Suffer, die, or recover;
+but above all things live, live up to your last hour." It is
+foresight, constantly carrying us out of ourselves, that is the true
+source of our miseries.[293] O man, confine thy existence within
+thyself, and thou wilt cease to be miserable. Thy liberty, thy power,
+reach exactly as far as thy natural forces, and no further; all the
+rest is slavery and illusion. The only man who has his own will is he
+who does not need in order to have it the arms of another person at
+the end of his own.[294]
+
+The training that follows from this is obvious. The instructor has
+carefully to distinguish true or natural need from the need which is
+only fancied, or which only comes from superabundance of life.
+Emilius, who is brought up in the country, has nothing in his room to
+distinguish it from that of a peasant.[295] If he is taken to a
+luxurious banquet, he is bidden, instead of heedlessly enjoying it, to
+reflect austerely how many hundreds or thousands of hands have been
+employed in preparing it.[296] His preference for gay colours in his
+clothes is to be consulted, because this is natural and becoming to
+his age, but the moment he prefers a stuff merely because it is rich,
+behold a sophisticated creature.[297] The curse of the world is
+inequality, and inequality springs from the multitude of wants, which
+cause us to be so much the more dependent. What makes man essentially
+good is to have few wants, and to abstain from comparing himself with
+others; what makes him essentially bad, is to have many wants, and to
+cling much to opinion.[298] Hence, although Emilius happened to have
+both wealth and good birth, he is not brought up to be a gentleman,
+with the prejudices and helplessness and selfishness too naturally
+associated with that abused name.
+
+This cardinal doctrine of limitation of desire, with its corollary of
+self-sufficience, contains in itself the great maxim that Emilius and
+every one else must learn some trade. To work is an indispensable duty
+in the social man. Rich or poor, powerful or weak, every idle citizen
+is a knave. And every boy must learn a real trade, a trade with his
+hands. It is not so much a matter of learning a craft for the sake of
+knowing one, as for the sake of conquering the prejudices which
+despise it. Labour for glory, if you have not to labour from
+necessity. Lower yourself to the condition of the artisan, so as to be
+above your own. In order to reign in opinion, begin by reigning over
+it. All things well considered, the trade most to be preferred is
+that of carpenter; it is clean, useful, and capable of being carried
+on in the house; it demands address and diligence in the workman, and
+though the form of the work is determined by utility, still elegance
+and taste are not excluded.[299] There are few prettier pictures than
+that where Sophie enters the workshop, and sees in amazement her young
+lover at the other end, in his white shirt-sleeves, his hair loosely
+fastened back, with a chisel in one hand and a mallet in the other,
+too intent upon his work to perceive even the approach of his
+mistress.[300]
+
+When the revolution came, and princes and nobles wandered in indigent
+exile, the disciples of Rousseau pointed in unkind triumph to the
+advantage these unfortunate wretches would have had if they had not
+been too puffed up with the vanity of feudalism to follow the prudent
+example of Emilius in learning a craft. That Rousseau should have laid
+so much stress on the vicissitudes of fortune, which might cause even
+a king to be grateful one day that he had a trade at the end of his
+arms, is sometimes quoted as a proof of his foresight of troublous
+times. This, however, goes too far, because, apart from the instances
+of such vicissitudes among the ancients, the King of Syracuse keeping
+school at Corinth, or Alexander, son of Perseus, becoming a Roman
+scrivener, he actually saw Charles Edward, the Stuart pretender,
+wandering from court to court in search of succour and receiving only
+rebuffs; and he may well have known that after the troubles of 1738 a
+considerable number of the oligarchs of his native Geneva had gone
+into exile, rather than endure the humiliation of their party.[301]
+Besides all this, the propriety of being able to earn one's bread by
+some kind of toil that would be useful in even the simplest societies,
+flowed necessarily from every part of his doctrine of the aims of life
+and the worth of character. He did, however, say, "We approach a state
+of crisis and an age of revolutions," which proved true, but he added
+too much when he pronounced it impossible that the great monarchies of
+Europe could last long.[302] And it is certain that the only one of
+the great monarchies which did actually fall would have had a far
+better chance of surviving if Lewis XVI. had been as expert in the
+trade of king as he was in that of making locks and bolts.
+
+From this semi-stoical ideal there followed certain social notions,
+of which Rousseau had the distinction of being the most powerful
+propagator. As has so often been said, his contemporaries were willing
+to leave social questions alone, provided only the government would
+suffer the free expression of opinion in literature and science.
+Rousseau went deeper. His moral conception of individual life and
+character contained in itself a social conception, and he did not
+shrink from boldly developing it. The rightly constituted man suffices
+for himself and is free from prejudices. He has arms, and knows how to
+use them; he has few wants, and knows how to satisfy them. Nurtured in
+the most absolute freedom, he can think of no worse ill than
+servitude. He attaches himself to the beauty which perishes not,
+limiting his desires to his condition, learning to lose whatever may
+be taken away from him, to place himself above events, and to detach
+his heart from loved objects without a pang.[303] He pities miserable
+kings, who are the bondsmen of all that seems to obey them; he pities
+false sages, who are fast bound in the chains of their empty renown;
+he pities the silly rich, martyrs to their own ostentation.[304] All
+the sympathies of such a man therefore naturally flow away from these,
+the great of the earth, to those who lead the stoic's life perforce.
+"It is the common people who compose the human race; what is not the
+people is hardly worth taking into account. Man is the same in all
+ranks; that being so, the ranks which are most numerous deserve most
+respect. Before one who reflects, all civil distinctions vanish: he
+marks the same passions and the same feelings in the clown as in the
+man covered with reputation; he can only distinguish their speech, and
+a varnish more or less elaborately laid on. Study people of this
+humble condition; you will perceive that under another sort of
+language, they have as much intelligence as you, and more good sense.
+Respect your species: reflect that it is essentially made up of the
+collection of peoples; that if every king and every philosopher were
+cut off from among them, they would scarcely be missed, and the world
+would go none the worse."[305] As it is, the universal spirit of the
+law in every country is invariably to favour the strong against the
+weak, and him who has, against him who has not. The many are
+sacrificed to the few. The specious names of justice and subordination
+serve only as instruments for violence and arms for iniquity. The
+ostentatious orders who pretend to be useful to the others, are in
+truth only useful to themselves at the expense of the others.[306]
+
+This was carrying on the work which had already been begun in the New
+Heloisa, as we have seen, but in the Emilius it is pushed with a
+gravity and a directness, that could not be imparted to the picture of
+a fanciful and arbitrarily chosen situation. The only writer who has
+approached Rousseau, so far as I know, in fulness and depth of
+expression in proclaiming the sorrows and wrongs of the poor blind
+crowd, who painfully drag along the car of triumphant civilisation
+with its handful of occupants, is the author of the Book of the
+People. Lamennais even surpasses Rousseau in the profundity of his
+pathos; his pictures of the life of hut and hovel are as sincere and
+as touching; and there is in them, instead of the anger and bitterness
+of the older author, righteous as that was, a certain heroism of pity
+and devoted sublimity of complaint, which lift the soul up from
+resentment into divine moods of compassion and resolve, and stir us
+like a tale of noble action.[307] It was Rousseau, however, who first
+sounded the note of which the religion that had once been the champion
+and consoler of the common people, seemed long to have lost even the
+tradition. Yet the teaching was not constructive, because the ideal
+man was not made truly social. Emilius is brought up in something of
+the isolation of the imaginary savage of the state of nature. He
+marries, and then he and his wife seem only fitted to lead a life of
+detachment from the interests of the world in which they are placed.
+Social or political education, that is the training which character
+receives from the medium in which it grows, is left out of account,
+and so is the correlative process of preparation for the various
+conditions and exigencies which belong to that medium, until it is too
+late to take its natural place in character. Nothing can be clumsier
+than the way in which Rousseau proposes to teach Emilius the existence
+and nature of his relations with his fellows. And the reason of this
+was that he had never himself in the course of his ruminations,
+willingly thought of Emilius as being in a condition of active social
+relation, the citizen of a state.
+
+
+III.
+
+There appear to be three dominant states of mind, with groups of
+faculties associated with each of them, which it is the business of
+the instructor firmly to establish in the character of the future man.
+The first is a resolute and unflinching respect for Truth; for the
+conclusions, that is to say, of the scientific reason, comprehending
+also a constant anxiety to take all possible pains that such
+conclusions shall be rightly drawn. Connected with this is the
+discipline of the whole range of intellectual faculties, from the
+simple habit of correct observation, down to the highly complex habit
+of weighing and testing the value of evidence. This very important
+branch of early discipline, Rousseau for reasons of his own which we
+have already often referred to, cared little about, and he throws very
+little light upon it, beyond one or two extremely sensible precepts of
+the negative kind, warning us against beginning too soon and forcing
+an apparent progress too rapidly. The second fundamental state in a
+rightly formed character is a deep feeling for things of the spirit
+which are unknown and incommensurable; a sense of awe, mystery,
+sublimity, and the fateful bounds of life at its beginning and its
+end. Here is the Religious side, and what Rousseau has to say of this
+we shall presently see. It is enough now to remark that Emilius was
+never to hear the name of a God or supreme being until his reason was
+fairly ripened. The third state, which is at least as difficult to
+bring to healthy perfection as either of the other two, is a passion
+for Justice.
+
+The little use which Rousseau made of this momentous and
+much-embracing word, which names the highest peak of social virtue, is
+a very striking circumstance. The reason would seem to be that his
+sense of the relations of men with one another was not virile enough
+to comprehend the deep austerer lines which mark the brow of the
+benignant divinity of Justice. In the one place in his writings where
+he speaks of justice freely, he shows a narrowness of idea, which was
+perhaps as much due to intellectual confusion as to lack of moral
+robustness. He says excellently that "love of the human race is
+nothing else in us but love of justice," and that "of all the virtues,
+justice is that which contributes most to the common good of men."
+While enjoining the discipline of pity as one of the noblest of
+sentiments, he warns us against letting it degenerate into weakness,
+and insists that we should only surrender ourselves to it when it
+accords with justice.[308] But that is all. What constitutes justice,
+what is its standard, what its source, what its sanction, whence the
+extraordinary holiness with which its name has come to be invested
+among the most highly civilised societies of men, we are never told,
+nor do we ever see that our teacher had seen the possibility of such
+questions being asked. If they had been propounded to him, he would,
+it is most likely, have fallen back upon the convenient mystery of the
+natural law. This was the current phrase of that time, and it was
+meant to embody a hypothetical experience of perfect human relations
+in an expression of the widest generality. If so, this would have to
+be impressed upon the mind of Emilius in the same way as other
+mysteries. As a matter of fact, Emilius was led through pity up to
+humanity, or sociality in an imperfect signification, and there he was
+left without a further guide to define the marks of truly social
+conduct.
+
+This imperfection was a necessity, inseparable from Rousseau's
+tenacity in keeping society in the background of the picture of life
+which he opened to his pupil. He said, indeed, "We must study society
+by men, and men by society; those who would treat politics and
+morality apart will never understand anything about either one or the
+other."[309] This is profoundly true, but we hardly see in the
+morality which is designed for Emilius the traces of political
+elements. Yet without some gradually unfolded presentation of society
+as a whole, it is scarcely possible to implant the idea of justice
+with any hope of large fertility. You may begin at a very early time
+to develop, even from the primitive quality of self-love, a notion of
+equity and a respect for it, but the vast conception of social justice
+can only find room in a character that has been made spacious by
+habitual contemplation of the height and breadth and close
+compactedness of the fabric of the relations that bind man to man, and
+of the share, integral or infinitesimally fractional, that each has in
+the happiness or woe of other souls. And this contemplation should
+begin when we prepare the foundation of all the other maturer habits.
+Youth can hardly recognise too soon the enormous unresting machine
+which bears us ceaselessly along, because we can hardly learn too soon
+that its force and direction depend on the play of human motives, of
+which our own for good or evil form an inevitable part when the ripe
+years come. To one reared with the narrow care devoted to Emilius, or
+with the capricious negligence in which the majority are left to grow
+to manhood, the society into which they are thrown is a mere moral
+wilderness. They are to make such way through it as they can, with
+egotism for their only trusty instrument. This egotism may either be a
+bludgeon, as with the most part, or it may be a delicately adjusted
+and fastidiously decorated compass, as with an Emilius. In either case
+is no perception that the gross outer contact of men with another is
+transformed by worthiness of common aim and loyal faith in common
+excellences, into a thing beautiful and generous. It is our business
+to fix and root the habit of thinking of that _moral_ union, into
+which, as Kant has so admirably expressed it, the _pathological_
+necessities of situation that first compelled social concert, have
+been gradually transmuted. Instead of this, it is exactly the
+primitive pathological conditions that a narrow theory of education
+brings first into prominence; as if knowledge of origins were
+indispensable to a right attachment to the transformed conditions of a
+maturer system.
+
+It has been said that Rousseau founds all morality upon personal
+interest, perhaps even more specially than Helvetius himself. The
+accusation is just. Emilius will enter adult life without the germs of
+that social conscience, which animates a man with all the associations
+of duty and right, of gratitude for the past and resolute hope for the
+future, in face of the great body of which he finds himself a part. "I
+observe," says Rousseau, "that in the modern ages men have no hold
+upon one another save through force and interest, while the ancients
+on the other hand acted much more by persuasion and the affections of
+the soul."[310] The reason was that with the ancients, supposing him
+to mean the Greeks and Romans, the social conscience was so much wider
+in its scope than the comparatively narrow fragment of duty which is
+supposed to come under the sacred power of conscience in the more
+complex and less closely contained organisation of a modern state. The
+neighbours to whom a man owed duty in those times comprehended all the
+members of his state. The neighbours of the modern preacher of duty
+are either the few persons with whom each of us is brought into actual
+and palpable contact, or else the whole multitude of dwellers on the
+earth,--a conception that for many ages to come will remain with the
+majority of men and women too vague to exert an energetic and
+concentrating influence upon action, and will lead them no further
+than an uncoloured and nerveless cosmopolitanism.
+
+What the young need to have taught to them in this too little
+cultivated region, is that they are born not mere atoms floating
+independent and apart for a season through a terraqueous medium, and
+sucking up as much more than their share of nourishment as they can
+seize; nor citizens of the world with no more definite duty than to
+keep their feelings towards all their fellows in a steady simmer of
+bland complacency; but soldiers in a host, citizens of a polity whose
+boundaries are not set down in maps, members of a church the
+handwriting of whose ordinances is not in the hieroglyphs of idle
+mystery, nor its hope and recompense in the lands beyond death. They
+need to be taught that they owe a share of their energies to the great
+struggle which is in ceaseless progress in all societies in an endless
+variety of forms, between new truth and old prejudice, between love of
+self or class and solicitous passion for justice, between the
+obstructive indolence and inertia of the many and the generous mental
+activity of the few. This is the sphere and definition of the social
+conscience. The good causes of enlightenment and justice in all
+lands,--here is the church militant in which we should early seek to
+enrol the young, and the true state to which they should be taught
+that they owe the duties of active and arduous citizenship. These are
+the struggles with which the modern instructor should associate those
+virtues of fortitude, tenacity, silent patience, outspoken energy,
+readiness to assert ourselves and readiness to efface ourselves,
+willingness to suffer and resolution to inflict suffering, which men
+of old knew how to show for their gods or their sovereign. But the
+ideal of Emilius was an ideal of quietism; to possess his own soul in
+patience, with a suppressed intelligence, a suppressed sociality,
+without a single spark of generous emulation in the courses of
+strong-fibred virtue, or a single thrill of heroical pursuit after so
+much as one great forlorn cause.
+
+"If it once comes to him, in reading these parallels of the famous
+ancients, to desire to be another rather than himself, were this other
+Socrates, were he Cato, you have missed the mark; he who begins to
+make himself a stranger to himself, is not long before he forgets
+himself altogether."[311] But if a man only nurses the conception of
+his own personality, for the sake of keeping his own peace and
+self-contained comfort at a glow of easy warmth, assuredly the best
+thing that can befall him is that he should perish, lest his example
+should infect others with the same base contagion. Excessive
+personality when militant is often wholesome, excessive personality
+that only hugs itself is under all circumstances chief among unclean
+things. Thus even Rousseau's finest monument of moral enthusiasm is
+fatally tarnished by the cold damp breath of isolation, and the very
+book which contained so many elements of new life for a state, was at
+bottom the apotheosis of social despair.
+
+
+IV.
+
+The great agent in fostering the rise to vigour and uprightness of a
+social conscience, apart from the yet more powerful instrument of a
+strong and energetic public spirit at work around the growing
+character, must be found in the study of history rightly directed with
+a view to this end. It is here, in observing the long processes of
+time and appreciating the slowly accumulating sum of endeavour, that
+the mind gradually comes to read the great lessons how close is the
+bond that links men together. It is here that he gradually begins to
+acquire the habit of considering what are the conditions of wise
+social activity, its limits, its objects, its rewards, what is the
+capacity of collective achievement, and of what sort is the
+significance and purport of the little span of time that cuts off the
+yesterday of our society from its to-morrow.
+
+Rousseau had very rightly forbidden the teaching of history to young
+children, on the ground that the essence of history lies in the moral
+relations between the bare facts which it recounts, and that the terms
+and ideas of these relations are wholly beyond the intellectual grasp
+of the very young.[312] He might have based his objections equally
+well upon the impossibility of little children knowing the meaning of
+the multitude of descriptive terms which make up a historical manual,
+or realising the relations between events in bare point of time,
+although childhood may perhaps be a convenient period for some
+mechanical acquisition of dates. According to Rousseau, history was to
+appear very late in the educational course, when the youth was almost
+ready to enter the world. It was to be the finishing study, from which
+he should learn not sociality either in its scientific or its higher
+moral sense, but the composition of the heart of man, in a safer way
+than through actual intercourse with society. Society might make him
+either cynical or frivolous. History would bring him the same
+information, without subjecting him to the same perils. In society you
+only hear the words of men; to know man you must observe his actions,
+and actions are only unveiled in history.[313] This view is hardly
+worth discussing. The subject of history is not the heart of man, but
+the movements of societies. Moreover, the oracles of history are
+entirely dumb to one who seeks from them maxims for the shaping of
+daily conduct, or living instruction as to the motives, aims,
+caprices, capacities of self-restraint, self-sacrifice, of those with
+whom the occasions of life bring us into contact.
+
+It is true that at the close of the other part of his education,
+Emilius was to travel and there find the comment upon the completed
+circle of his studies.[314] But excellent as travel is for some of the
+best of those who have the opportunity, still for many it is
+valueless for lack of the faculty of curiosity. For the great
+majority it is impossible for lack of opportunity. To trust so much as
+Rousseau did to the effect of travelling, is to leave a large chasm in
+education unbridged.
+
+It is interesting, however, to notice some of Rousseau's notions about
+history as an instrument for conveying moral instruction, a few of
+them are so good, others are so characteristically narrow. "The worst
+historians for a young man," he says, "are those who judge. The facts,
+the facts; then let him judge for himself. If the author's judgment is
+for ever guiding him, he is only seeing with the eye of another, and
+as soon as this eye fails him, he sees nothing." Modern history is not
+fit for instruction, not only because it has no physiognomy, all our
+men being exactly like one another, but because our historians, intent
+on brilliance above all other things, think of nothing so much as
+painting highly coloured portraits, which for the most part represent
+nothing at all.[315] Of course such a judgment as this implies an
+ignorance alike of the ends and meaning of history, which, considering
+that he was living in the midst of a singular revival of historical
+study, is not easy to pardon. If we are to look only to perfection of
+form and arrangement, it may have been right for one living in the
+middle of the last century to place the ancients in the first rank
+without competitors. But the author of the Discourse upon literature
+and the arts might have been expected to look beyond composition, and
+the contemporary of Voltaire's _Essai sur les Moeurs_ (1754-1757)
+might have been expected to know that the profitable experience of the
+human race did not close with the fall of the Roman republic. Among
+the ancient historians, he counted Thucydides to be the true model,
+because he reports facts without judging, and omits none of the
+circumstances proper for enabling us to judge of them for
+ourselves--though how Rousseau knew what facts Thucydides has omitted,
+I am unable to divine. Then come Caesar's Commentaries and Xenophon's
+Retreat of the Ten Thousand. The good Herodotus, without portraits and
+without maxims, but abounding in details the most capable of
+interesting and pleasing, would perhaps be the best of historians, if
+only these details did not so often degenerate into puerilities. Livy
+is unsuited to youth, because he is political and a rhetorician.
+Tacitus is the book of the old; you must have learnt the art of
+reading facts, before you can be trusted with maxims.
+
+The drawback of histories such as those of Thucydides and Caesar,
+Rousseau admits to be that they dwell almost entirely on war, leaving
+out the true life of nations, which belongs to the unwritten
+chronicles of peace. This leads him to the equally just reflection
+that historians while recounting facts omit the gradual and
+progressive causes which led to them. "They often find in a battle
+lost or won the reason of a revolution, which even before the battle
+was already inevitable. War scarcely does more than bring into full
+light events determined by moral causes, which historians can seldom
+penetrate."[316] A third complaint against the study which he began by
+recommending as a proper introduction to the knowledge of man, is that
+it does not present men but actions, or at least men only in their
+parade costume and in certain chosen moments, and he justly reproaches
+writers alike of history and biography, for omitting those trifling
+strokes and homely anecdotes, which reveal the true physiognomy of
+character. "Remain then for ever, without bowels, without nature;
+harden your hearts of cast iron in your trumpery decency, and make
+yourselves despicable by force of dignity."[317] And so after all, by
+a common stroke of impetuous inconsistency, he forsakes history, and
+falls back upon the ancient biographies, because, all the low and
+familiar details being banished from modern style, however true and
+characteristic, men are as elaborately tricked out by our authors in
+their private lives as they were tricked out upon the stage of the
+world.
+
+
+V.
+
+As women are from the constitution of things the educators of us all
+at the most critical periods, and mainly of their own sex from the
+beginning to the end of education, the writer of the most imperfect
+treatise on this world-interesting subject can hardly avoid saying
+something on the upbringing of women. Such a writer may start from
+one of three points of view; he may consider the woman as destined to
+be a wife, or a mother, or a human being; as the companion of a man,
+as the rearer of the young, or as an independent personality, endowed
+with gifts, talents, possibilities, in less or greater number, and
+capable, as in the case of men, of being trained to the worst or the
+best uses. Of course to every one who looks into life, each of these
+three ideals melts into the other two, and we can only think of them
+effectively when they are blended. Yet we test a writer's appreciation
+of the conditions of human progress by observing the function which he
+makes most prominent. A man's whole thought of the worth and aim of
+womanhood depends upon the generosity and elevation of the ideal which
+is silently present in his mind, while he is specially meditating the
+relations of woman as wife or as mother. Unless he is really capable
+of thinking of them as human beings, independently of these two
+functions, he is sure to have comparatively mean notions in connection
+with them in respect of the functions which he makes paramount.
+
+Rousseau breaks down here. The unsparing fashion in which he developed
+the theory of individualism in the case of Emilius, and insisted on
+man being allowed to grow into the man of nature, instead of the man
+of art and manufacture, might have led us to expect that when he came
+to speak of women, he would suffer equity and logic to have their way,
+by giving equally free room in the two halves of the human race, for
+the development of natural force and capacity. If, as he begins by
+saying, he wishes to bring up Emilius, not to be a merchant nor a
+physician nor a soldier nor to the practice of any other special
+calling, but to be first and above all a man, why should not Sophie
+too be brought up above all to be a human being, in whom the special
+qualifications of wifehood and motherhood may be developed in their
+due order? Emilius is a man first, a husband and a father afterwards
+and secondarily. How can Sophie be a companion for him, and an
+instructor for their children, unless she likewise has been left in
+the hands of nature, and had the same chances permitted to her as were
+given to her predestined mate? Again, the pictures of the New Heloisa
+would have led us to conceive the ideal of womanly station not so much
+in the wife, as in the house-mother, attached by esteem and sober
+affection to her husband, but having for her chief functions to be the
+gentle guardian of her little ones, and the mild, firm, and prudent
+administrator of a cheerful and well-ordered household. In the last
+book of the Emilius, which treats of the education of girls, education
+is reduced within the compass of an even narrower ideal than this. We
+are confronted with the oriental conception of women. Every principle
+that has been followed in the education of Emilius is reversed in the
+education of women. Opinion, which is the tomb of virtue among men, is
+among women its high throne. The whole education of women ought to be
+relative to men; to please them, to be useful to them, to make
+themselves loved and honoured by them, to console them, to render
+their lives agreeable and sweet to them,--these are the duties which
+ought to be taught to women from their childhood. Every girl ought to
+have the religion of her mother, and every wife that of her husband.
+Not being in a condition to judge for themselves, they ought to
+receive the decision of fathers and husbands as if it were that of the
+church. And since authority is the rule of faith for women, it is not
+so much a matter of explaining to them the reasons for belief, as for
+expounding clearly to them what to believe. Although boys are not to
+hear of the idea of God until they are fifteen, because they are not
+in a condition to apprehend it, yet girls who are still less in a
+condition to apprehend it, are _therefore_ to have it imparted to them
+at an earlier age. Woman is created to give way to man, and to suffer
+his injustice. Her empire is an empire of gentleness, mildness, and
+complaisance. Her orders are caresses, and her threats are tears.
+Girls must not only be made laborious and vigilant; they must also
+very early be accustomed to being thwarted and kept in restraint. This
+misfortune, if they feel it one, is inseparable from their sex, and if
+ever they attempt to escape from it, they will only suffer misfortunes
+still more cruel in consequence.[318]
+
+After a series of oriental and obscurantist propositions of this kind,
+it is of little purpose to tell us that women have more intelligence
+and men more genius; that women observe, while men reason; that men
+will philosophise better upon the human heart, while women will be
+more skilful in reading it.[319] And it is a mere mockery to end the
+matter by a fervid assurance, that in spite of prejudices that have
+their origin in the manners of the time, the enthusiasm for what is
+worthy and noble is no more foreign to women than it is to men, and
+that there is nothing which under the guidance of nature may not be
+obtained from them as well as from ourselves.[320] Finally there is a
+complete surrender of the obscurantist position in such a sentence as
+this: "I only know for either sex two really distinct classes; one the
+people who think, the other the people who do not think, and this
+difference comes almost entirely from education. A man of the first of
+these classes ought not to marry into the other; for the greatest
+charm of companionship is wanting, when in spite of having a wife he
+is reduced to think by himself. It is only a cultivated spirit that
+provides agreeable commerce, and 'tis a cheerless thing for a father
+of a family who loves his home, to be obliged to shut himself up
+within himself, and to have no one about him who understands him.
+Besides, how is a woman who has no habits of reflection to bring up
+her children?"[321] Nothing could be more excellently urged. But how
+is a woman to have habits of reflection, when she has been constantly
+brought up in habits of the closest mental bondage, trained always to
+consider her first business to be the pleasing of some man, and her
+instruments not reasonable persuasion but caressing and crying?
+
+This pernicious nonsense was mainly due, like nearly all his most
+serious errors, to Rousseau's want of a conception of improvement in
+human affairs. If he had been filled with that conception as Turgot,
+Condorcet, and others were, he would have been forced as they were, to
+meditate upon changes in the education and the recognition accorded to
+women, as one of the first conditions of improvement. For lack of
+this, he contributed nothing to the most important branch of the
+subject that he had undertaken to treat. He was always taunting the
+champions of reigning systems of training for boys, with the vicious
+or feeble men whom he thought he saw on every hand around him. The
+same kind of answer obviously meets the current idea, which he adopted
+with a few idyllic decorations of his own, of the type of the
+relations between men and women. That type practically reduces
+marriage in ninety-nine cases out of every hundred to a dolorous
+parody of a social partnership. It does more than any one other cause
+to keep societies back, because it prevents one half of the members of
+a society from cultivating all their natural energies. Thus it
+produces a waste of helpful quality as immeasurable as it is
+deplorable, and besides rearing these creatures of mutilated faculty
+to be the intellectually demoralising companions of the remaining half
+of their own generation, makes them the mothers and the earliest and
+most influential instructors of the whole of the generation that comes
+after.[322] Of course, if any one believes that the existing
+arrangements of a western community are the most successful that we
+can ever hope to bring into operation, we need not complain of
+Rousseau. If not, then it is only reasonable to suppose that a
+considerable portion of the change will be effected in the hitherto
+neglected and subordinate half of the race. That reconstitution of the
+family, which Rousseau and others among his contemporaries rightly
+sought after as one of the most pressing needs of the time, was
+essentially impossible, so long as the typical woman was the adornment
+of a semi-philosophic seraglio, a sort of compromise between the
+frowzy ideal of an English bourgeois and the impertinent ideal of a
+Parisian gallant. Condorcet and others made a grievous mistake in
+defending the free gratification of sensual passion, as one of the
+conditions of happiness and making the most of our lives.[323] But
+even this was not at bottom more fatal to the maintenance and order of
+the family, than Rousseau's enervating notion of keeping women in
+strict intellectual and moral subjection was fatal to the family as
+the true school of high and equal companionship, and the fruitful
+seed-ground of wise activities and new hopes for each fresh
+generation.
+
+This was one side of Rousseau's reactionary tendencies. Fortunately
+for the revolution of thirty years later, which illustrated the
+gallery of heroic women with some of its most splendid names, his
+power was in this respect neutralised by other stronger tendencies in
+the general spirit of the age. The aristocracy of sex was subjected to
+the same destructive criticism as the aristocracy of birth. The same
+feeling for justice which inspired the demand for freedom and equality
+of opportunity among men, led to the demand for the same freedom and
+equality of opportunity between men and women. All this was part of
+the energy of the time, which Rousseau disliked with undisguised
+bitterness. It broke inconveniently in upon his quietest visions. He
+had no conception, with his sensuous brooding imagination, never
+wholly purged of grossness, of that high and pure type of women whom
+French history so often produced in the seventeenth century, and who
+were not wanting towards the close of the eighteenth, a type in which
+devotion went with force, and austerity with sweetness, and divine
+candour and transparent innocence with energetic loyalty and
+intellectual uprightness and a firmly set will. Such thoughts were not
+for Rousseau, a dreamer led by his senses. Perhaps they are for none
+of us any more. When we turn to modern literature from the pages in
+which Fenelon speaks of the education of girls, who does not feel that
+the world has lost a sacred accent, as if some ineffable essence has
+passed out from our hearts?
+
+The fifth book of Emilius is not a chapter on the education of women,
+but an idyll. We have already seen the circumstances under which
+Rousseau composed it, in a profound and delicious solitude, in the
+midst of woods and streams, with the fragrance of the orange-flower
+poured around him, and in continual ecstasy. As an idyll it is
+delicious; as a serious contribution to the hardest of problems it is
+naught. The sequel, by a stroke of matchless whimsicality, unless it
+be meant, as it perhaps may have been, for a piece of deep tragic
+irony, is the best refutation that Rousseau's most energetic adversary
+could have desired. The Sophie who has been educated on the oriental
+principle, has presently to confess a flagrant infidelity to the
+blameless Emilius, her lord.[324]
+
+
+VI.
+
+Yet the sum of the merits of Emilius as a writing upon education is
+not to be lightly counted. Its value lies, as has been said of the New
+Heloisa, in the spirit which animates it and communicates itself with
+vivid force to the reader. It is one of the seminal books in the
+history of literature, and of such books the worth resides less in the
+parts than in the whole. It touched the deeper things of character. It
+filled parents with a sense of the dignity and moment of their task.
+It cleared away the accumulation of clogging prejudices and obscure
+inveterate usage, which made education one of the dark formalistic
+arts. It admitted floods of light and air into the tightly closed
+nurseries and schoolrooms. It effected the substitution of growth for
+mechanism. A strong current of manliness, wholesomeness, simplicity,
+self-reliance, was sent by it through Europe, while its eloquence was
+the most powerful adjuration ever addressed to parental affection to
+cherish the young life in all love and considerate solicitude. It was
+the charter of youthful deliverance. The first immediate effect of
+Emilius in France was mainly on the religious side. It was the
+Christian religion that needed to be avenged, rather than education
+that needed to be amended, and the press overflowed with replies to
+that profession of faith which we shall consider in the next chapter.
+Still there was also an immense quantity of educational books and
+pamphlets, which is to be set down, first to the suppression of the
+Jesuits, the great educating order, and the vacancy which they left;
+and next to the impulse given by the Emilius to a movement from which
+the book itself had originally been an outcome.[325] But why try to
+state the influence of Emilius on France in this way? To strike the
+account truly would be to write the history of the first French
+Revolution.[326] All mothers, as Michelet says, were big with
+Emilius. "It is not without good reason that people have noted the
+children born at this glorious moment, as animated by a superior
+spirit, by a gift of flame and genius. It is the generation of
+revolutionary Titans: the other generation not less hardy in science.
+It is Danton, Vergniaud, Desmoulins; it is Ampere, La Place, Cuvier,
+Geoffroy Saint Hilaire."[327]
+
+In Germany Emilius had great power. There it fell in with the
+extraordinary movement towards naturalness and freedom of which we
+have already spoken.[328] Herder, whom some have called the Rousseau
+of the Germans, wrote with enthusiasm to his then beloved Caroline of
+the "divine Emilius," and he never ceased to speak of Rousseau as his
+inspirer and his master.[329] Basedow (1723), that strange, restless,
+and most ill-regulated person, was seized with an almost phrenetic
+enthusiasm for Rousseau's educational theories, translated them into
+German, and repeated them in his works over and over again with an
+incessant iteration. Lavater (1741-1801), who differed from Basedow in
+being a fervent Christian of soft mystic faith, was thrown into
+company with him in 1774, and grew equally eager with him in the cause
+of reforming education in the Rousseauite sense.[330] Pestalozzi
+(1746-1827), the most systematic, popular, and permanently successful
+of all the educational reformers, borrowed his spirit and his
+principles mainly from the Emilius, though he gave larger extension
+and more intelligent exactitude to their application. Jean Paul the
+Unique, in the preface to his Levana, or Doctrine of Education (1806),
+one of the most excellent of all books on the subject, declares that
+among previous works to which he owes a debt, "first and last he names
+Rousseau's Emilius; no preceding work can be compared to his; in no
+previous work on education was the ideal so richly combined with the
+actual," and so forth.[331] It was not merely a Goethe, a Schiller, a
+Herder, whom Rousseau fired with new thoughts. The smaller men, such
+as Fr. Jacobi, Heinse, Klinger, shared the same inspiration. The
+worship of Rousseau penetrated all classes, and touched every degree
+of intelligence.[332]
+
+In our own country Emilius was translated as soon as it appeared, and
+must have been widely read, for a second version of the translation
+was called for in a very short time. So far as a cursory survey gives
+one a right to speak, its influence here in the field of education is
+not very perceptible. That subject did not yet, nor for some time to
+come, excite much active thought in England. Rousseau's speculations
+on society both in the Emilius and elsewhere seem to have attracted
+more attention. Reference has already been made to Paley.[333] Adam
+Ferguson's celebrated Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) has
+many allusions, direct and indirect, to Rousseau.[334] Kames's
+Sketches of the History of Man (1774) abounds still more copiously in
+references to Emilius, sometimes to controvert its author, more often
+to cite him as an authority worthy of respect, and Rousseau's crude
+notions about women are cited with special acceptance.[335] Cowper was
+probably thinking of the Savoyard Vicar when he wrote the energetic
+lines in the Task, beginning "Haste now, philosopher, and set him
+free," scornfully defying the deist to rescue apostate man.[336] Nor
+should we omit what was counted so important a book in its day as
+Godwin's Enquiry concerning Political Justice (1793). It is perhaps
+more French in its spirit than any other work of equal consequence in
+our literature of politics, and in its composition the author was
+avowedly a student of Rousseau, as well as of the members of the
+materialistic school.
+
+In fine we may add that Emilius was the first expression of that
+democratic tendency in education, which political and other
+circumstances gradually made general alike in England, France, and
+Germany; a tendency, that is, to look on education as a process
+concerning others besides the rich and the well-born. As has often
+been remarked, Ascham, Milton, Locke, Fenelon, busy themselves about
+the instruction of young gentlemen and gentlewomen. The rest of the
+world are supposed to be sufficiently provided for by the education of
+circumstance. Since the middle of the eighteenth century this
+monopolising conception has vanished, along with and through the same
+general agencies as the corresponding conception of social monopoly.
+Rousseau enforced the production of a natural and self-sufficing man
+as the object of education, and showed, or did his best to show, the
+infinite capacity of the young for that simple and natural
+cultivation. This easily and directly led people to reflect that such
+a capacity was not confined to the children of the rich, nor the hope
+of producing a natural and sufficing man narrowed to those who had
+every external motive placed around them for being neither natural nor
+self-sufficing.
+
+Voltaire pronounced Emilius a stupid romance, but admitted that it
+contained fifty pages which he would have bound in morocco. These, we
+may be sure, concerned religion; in truth it was the Savoyard Vicar's
+profession of faith which stirred France far more than the upbringing
+of the natural man in things temporal. Let us pass to that eloquent
+document which is inserted in the middle of the Emilius, as the
+expression of the religious opinion that best befits the man of
+nature--a document most hyperbolically counted by some French
+enthusiasts for the spiritualist philosophy and the religion of
+sentiment, as the noblest monument of the eighteenth century.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[273] _Mem. de Mdme. d'Epinay_, ii. 276, 278.
+
+[274] _Lettres a mon Fils_ (1758), and _Les Conversations d'Emilie_
+(1783).
+
+[275] _Lettres Peruviennes._
+
+[276] _Oeuv._, ii. 785-794.
+
+[277] _Corr. Lit._, iii. 65.
+
+[278] _Emile_, I. 27.
+
+[279] It is interesting to recall a similar movement in the Roman
+society of the second century of our era. See the advice of Favorinus
+to mothers, in Aulus Gellius, xii. 1. M. Boissier, contrasting the
+solicitude of Tacitus and Marcus Aurelius for the infant young with
+the brutality of Cicero, remarks that in the time of Seneca men
+discussed in the schools the educational theories of Rousseau's
+Emilius. (_La Relig. Romaine_, ii. 202.)
+
+[280] See also his diatribe against whalebone and tight-lacing for
+girls, V. 27.
+
+[281] _Emile_, I. 93, etc.
+
+[282] _Emile_, II. 141.
+
+[283] _Emile_, II. 156-160.
+
+[284] _Emile_, III. 338-345.
+
+[285] III. 358, etc.
+
+[286] _Emile_, II. 263-267.
+
+[287] _Levana_, ch. iii. Sec. 54.
+
+[288] _Emile_, II. 163.
+
+[289] The Ninth Promenade (_Reveries_, 309).
+
+[290] _Emile_, I. 23.
+
+[291] II. 109.
+
+[292] II. 111.
+
+[293] _Emile_, II. 113-117.
+
+[294] II. 121.
+
+[295] II. 143.
+
+[296] _Emile_, III. 382.
+
+[297] II. 227.
+
+[298] IV. 10.
+
+[299] _Emile_, III. 394.
+
+[300] V. 199.
+
+[301] The reader will not forget the famous supper-party of princes in
+_Candide_.
+
+[302] _Emile_, III. 392, and note. A still more remarkable passage, as
+far as it goes, is that in the _Confessions_ (xi. 136):--"The
+disasters of an unsuccessful war, all of which came from the fault of
+the government, the incredible disorder of the finances, the continual
+dissensions of the administration, divided as it was among two or
+three ministers at open war with one another, and who for the sake of
+hurting one another dragged the kingdom into ruin; the general
+discontent of the people, and of all the orders of the state; the
+obstinacy of a wrong-headed woman, who, always sacrificing her better
+judgment, if indeed she had any, to her tastes, dismissed the most
+capable from office, to make room for her favourites ... all this
+prospect of a coming break-up made me think of seeking shelter
+elsewhere."
+
+[303] _Emile_, V. 220.
+
+[304] IV. 85.
+
+[305] _Emile_, IV. 38, 39. Hence, we suppose, the famous reply to
+Lavoisier's request that his life might be spared from the guillotine
+for a fortnight, in order that he might complete some experiments,
+that the Republic has no need of chemists.
+
+[306] IV. 65. Jefferson, who was American minister in France from 1784
+to 1789, and absorbed a great many of the ideas then afloat, writes in
+words that seem as if they were borrowed from Rousseau:--"I am
+convinced that those societies (as the Indians) which live without
+government, enjoy in their general mass an infinitely greater degree
+of happiness than those who live under European governments. Among the
+former public opinion is in the state of law, and restrains morals as
+powerfully as laws ever did anywhere. Among the latter, under pretence
+of governing, they have divided their nation into two classes, wolves
+and sheep. I do not exaggerate; this is a true picture of Europe."
+Tucker's _Life of Jefferson_, i. 255.
+
+[307] Lamennais was influenced by Rousseau throughout. In the _Essay
+on Indifference_ he often appeals to him as the vindicator of the
+religious sentiment (_e.g._ i. 21, 52, iv. 375, etc. Ed. 1837). The
+same influence is seen still more markedly in the _Words of a
+Believer_ (1835), when dogma had departed, and he was left with a kind
+of dual deism, thus being less estranged from Rousseau than in the
+first days (_e.g._ Sec. xix. "Tous naissent egaux," etc., Sec. xxi., etc.)
+The _Book of the People_ is thoroughly Rousseauite.
+
+[308] _Emile_, IV. 105.
+
+[309] _Emile_, IV. 63.
+
+[310] _Emile_, IV. 273.
+
+[311] _Emile_, IV. 83.
+
+[312] _Emile_, II. 185. See the previous page for some equally prudent
+observations on the folly of teaching geography to little children.
+
+[313] _Emile_, IV. 68.
+
+[314] V. 231, etc.
+
+[315] _Emile_, IV. 71.
+
+[316] _Emile_, IV. 73.
+
+[317] IV. 77.
+
+[318] _Emile_, V. 22, 53, 54, 101, 128-132.
+
+[319] _Emile_, V. 78.
+
+[320] V. 122.
+
+[321] V. 129, 130.
+
+[322] Well did Jean Paul say, "If we regard all life as an educational
+institution, a circumnavigator of the world is less influenced by all
+the nations he has seen than by his nurse."--_Levana._
+
+[323] _Tableau des Progres de l'Esprit Humain._ _Oeuv._, vi. pp. 264,
+523-526, and elsewhere. [Ed. 1847-1849.]
+
+[324] _Emile et Sophie_, i.
+
+[325] For an account of some of these, see Grimm's _Corr. Lit._, iii.
+211, 252, 347, etc. Also _Corr. Ined._, p. 143.
+
+[326] For the early date at which Rousseau's power began to meet
+recognition, see D'Alembert to Voltaire, July 31, 1762.
+
+[327] _Louis xv. et xvi._, p. 226.
+
+[328] See above, vol. ii. p. 193.
+
+[329] Hettner, III. iii., 2, p. 27, _s.v._ Herder.
+
+[330] The suggestion of the speculation with which Lavater's name is
+most commonly associated, is to be found in the Emilius. "It is
+supposed that physiognomy is only a development of features already
+marked by nature. For my part, I should think that besides this
+development, the features of a man's countenance form themselves
+insensibly and take their expression from the frequent and habitual
+wearing into them of certain affections of the soul. These affections
+mark themselves in the countenance, nothing is more certain; and when
+they grow into habits, they must leave durable impressions upon it."
+IV. 49, 50.
+
+[331] Author's Preface, x.
+
+[332] See an excellent page in M. Joret's _Herder_, 322.
+
+[333] See above, vol. ii. p. 191.
+
+[334] _E.g._ pp. 8, 198, 204, 205.
+
+[335] _E.g._ Bk. I. Sec. 5, p. 279. Sec. 6, p. 406, 419, etc. (the portion
+concerning the female sex).
+
+[336] Vv. 670-703. We have already seen (above, vol. ii. p. 41, _n._)
+that Cowper had read Emilius, and the mocking reference to the Deist
+as "an Orpheus and omnipotent in song," coincides with Rousseau's
+comparison of the Savoyard Vicar to "the divine Orpheus singing the
+first hymn" (_Emile_, IV. 205).
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+THE SAVOYARD VICAR.
+
+
+The band of dogmatic atheists who met round D'Holbach's
+dinner-table indulged a shallow and futile hope, if it was not an
+ungenerous one, when they expected the immediate advent of a
+generation with whom a humane and rational philosophy should displace,
+not merely the superstitions which had grown around the Christian
+dogma, but every root and fragment of theistic conception. A hope of
+this kind implied a singularly random idea, alike of the hold which
+Christianity had taken of the religious emotion in western Europe, and
+of the durableness of those conditions in human character, to which
+some belief in a deity with a greater or fewer number of good
+attributes brings solace and nourishment. A movement like that of
+Christianity does not pass through a group of societies, and then
+leave no trace behind. It springs from many other sources besides that
+of adherence to the truth of its dogmas. The stream of its influence
+must continue to flow long after adherence to the letter has been
+confined to the least informed portions of a community. The
+Encyclopaedists knew that they had sapped religious dogma and shaken
+ecclesiastical organisation. They forgot that religious sentiment on
+the one hand, and habit of respect for authority on the other, were
+both of them still left behind. They had convinced themselves by a
+host of persuasive analogies that the universe is an automatic
+machine, and man only an industrious particle in the stupendous whole;
+that a final cause is not cognisable by our limited intelligence; and
+that to make emotion in this or any other respect a test of objective
+truth and a ground of positive belief, is to lower both truth and the
+reason which is its single arbiter. They forgot that imagination is as
+active in man as his reason, and that a craving for mental peace may
+become much stronger than passion for demonstrated truth. Christianity
+had given to this craving in western Europe a definite mould, which
+was not to be effaced in a day, and one or two of its lines mark a
+permanent and noble acquisition to the highest forces of human nature.
+There will have to be wrought a profounder and more far-spreading
+modification than any which the French atheists could effect, before
+all debilitating influences in the old creed can be effaced, its
+elevating influences finally separated from them, and then permanently
+preserved in more beneficent form and in an association less
+questionable to the understanding.
+
+Neither a purely negative nor a direct attack can ever suffice. There
+must be a coincidence of many silently oppugnant forces, emotional,
+scientific, and material. And, above all, there must be the slow
+steadfast growth of some replacing faith, which shall retain all the
+elements of moral beauty that once gave light to the old belief that
+has disappeared, and must still possess a living force in the new.
+
+Here we find the good side of a religious reaction such as that which
+Rousseau led in the last century, and of which the Savoyard Vicar's
+profession of faith was the famous symbol. Evil as this reaction was
+in many respects, and especially in the check which it gave to the
+application of positive methods and conceptions to the most important
+group of our beliefs, yet it had what was the very signal merit under
+the circumstances of the time, of keeping the religious emotions alive
+in association with a tolerant, pure, lofty, and living set of
+articles of faith, instead of feeding them on the dead superstitions
+which were at that moment the only practical alternative. The deism of
+Rousseau could not in any case have acquired the force of the
+corresponding religious reaction in England, because the former never
+acquired a compact and vigorous external organisation, as the latter
+did, especially in Wesleyanism and Evangelicalism, the most remarkable
+of its developments. In truth the vague, fluid, purely subjective
+character of deism disqualifies it from forming the doctrinal basis of
+any great objective and visible church, for it is at bottom the
+sublimation of individualism. But in itself it was a far less
+retrogressive, as well as a far less powerful, movement. It kept fewer
+of those dogmas which gradual change of intellectual climate had
+reduced to the condition of rank superstitions. It preserved some of
+its own, which a still further extension of the same change is
+assuredly destined to reduce to the same condition; but, nevertheless,
+along with them it cherished sentiments which the world will never
+willingly let die.
+
+The one cardinal service of the Christian doctrine, which is of course
+to be distinguished from the services rendered to civilisation in
+early times by the Christian church, has been the contribution to the
+active intelligence of the west, of those moods of holiness, awe,
+reverence, and silent worship of an Unseen not made with hands, which
+the Christianising Jews first brought from the east. Of the fabric
+which four centuries ago looked so stupendous and so enduring, with
+its magnificent whole and its minutely reticulated parts of belief and
+practice, this gradual creation of a new temperament in the religious
+imagination of Western Europe and the countries that take their mental
+direction from her, is perhaps the only portion that will remain
+distinctly visible, after all the rest has sunk into the repose of
+histories of opinion. Whether this be the case or not, the fact that
+these deeper moods are among the richest acquisitions of human nature,
+will not be denied either by those who think that Christianity
+associates them with objects destined permanently to awake them in
+their loftiest form, or by others who believe that the deepest moods
+of which man is capable, must ultimately ally themselves with
+something still more purely spiritual than the anthropomorphised
+deities of the falling church. And if so, then Rousseau's deism, while
+intercepting the steady advance of the rationalistic assault and
+diverting the current of renovating energy, still did something to
+keep alive in a more or less worthy shape those parts of the slowly
+expiring system which men have the best reasons for cherishing.
+
+Let us endeavour to characterise Rousseau's deism with as much
+precision as it allows. It was a special and graceful form of a
+doctrine which, though susceptible, alike in theory and in the
+practical history of religious thought, of numberless wide varieties
+of significance, is commonly designated by the name of deism, without
+qualification. People constantly speak as if deism only came in with
+the eighteenth century. It would be impossible to name any century
+since the twelfth, in which distinct and abundant traces could not be
+found within the dominion of Christianity of a belief in a
+supernatural power apart from the supposed disclosure of it in a
+special revelation.[337] A praeter-christian deism, or the principle of
+natural religion, was inevitably contained in the legal conception of
+a natural law, for how can we dissociate the idea of law from the idea
+of a definite lawgiver? The very scholastic disputations themselves,
+by the sharpness and subtlety which they gave to the reasoning
+faculty, set men in search of novelties, and these novelties were not
+always of a kind which orthodox views of the Christian mysteries could
+have sanctioned. It has been said that religion is at the cradle of
+every nation, and philosophy at its grave; it is at least true that
+the cradle of philosophy is the open grave of religion. Wherever there
+is argumentation, there is sure to be scepticism. When people begin to
+reason, a shadow has already fallen across faith, though the reasoners
+might have shrunk with horror from knowledge of the goal of their
+work, and though centuries may elapse before the shadow deepens into
+eclipse. But the church was strong and alert in the times when free
+thought vainly tried to rear a dangerous head in Italy. With the
+Protestant revolution came slowly a wider freedom, while the prolonged
+and tempestuous discussion between the old church and the reformed
+bodies, as well as the manifold variations among those bodies at
+strife with one another, stimulated the growth of religious thought in
+many directions that tended away from the exclusive pretensions of
+Christianity to be the oracle of the divine Spirit. The same feeling
+which thrust aside the sacerdotal interposition between the soul of
+man and its sovereign creator and inspirer, gradually worked towards
+the dethronement of those mediators other than sacerdotal, in whom the
+moral timidity of a dark and stricken age had once sought shade from
+the too dazzling brightness of the All-powerful and the Everlasting.
+The assertion of the rights and powers of the individual reason within
+the limits of the sacred documents, began in less than a hundred years
+to grow into an assertion of the same rights and powers beyond those
+limits. The rejection of tradition as a substitute for independent
+judgment, in interpreting or supplementing the records of revelation,
+gradually impaired the traditional authority both of the records
+themselves, and of the central doctrines which all churches had in one
+shape or another agreed to accept. The Trinitarian controversy of the
+sixteenth century must have been a stealthy solvent. The deism of
+England in the eighteenth century, which Voltaire was the prime agent
+in introducing in its negative, colourless, and essentially futile
+shape into his own country, had its main effect as a process of
+dissolution.
+
+All this, however, down to the deistical movement which Rousseau found
+in progress at Geneva in 1754,[338] was distinctly the outcome in a
+more or less marked way of a rationalising and philosophic spirit, and
+not of the religious spirit. The sceptical side of it with reference
+to revealed religion, predominated over the positive side of it with
+reference to natural religion. The wild pantheism of which there were
+one or two extraordinary outbursts during the latter part of the
+middle ages, to mark the mystical influence which Platonic studies
+uncorrected by science always exert over certain temperaments, had
+been full of religiosity, such as it was. These had all passed away
+with a swift flash. There were, indeed, mystics like the author of the
+immortal _De Imitatione_, in whom the special qualities of Christian
+doctrine seem to have grown pale in a brighter flood of devout
+aspiration towards the perfections of a single Being. But this was not
+the deism with which either Christianity on the one side, or atheism
+on the other, had ever had to deal in France. Deism, in its formal
+acceptation, was either an idle piece of vaporous sentimentality, or
+else it was the first intellectual halting-place for spirits who had
+travelled out of the pale of the old dogmatic Christianity, and lacked
+strength for the continuance of their onward journey. In the latter
+case, it was only another name either for the shrewd rough conviction
+of the man of the world, that his universe could not well be imagined
+to go on without a sort of constitutional monarch, reigning but not
+governing, keeping evil-doers in order by fear of eternal punishment,
+and lending a sacred countenance to the indispensable doctrines of
+property, the gradation of rank and station, and the other moral
+foundations of the social structure. Or else it was a name for a
+purely philosophic principle, not embraced with fervour as the basis
+of a religion, but accepted with decorous satisfaction as the
+alternative to a religion; not seized upon as the mainspring of
+spiritual life, but held up as a shield in a controversy.
+
+The deism which the Savoyard Vicar explained to Emilius in his
+profession of faith was pitched in a very different tone from this.
+Though the Vicar's conception of the Deity was lightly fenced round
+with rationalistic supports of the usual kind, drawn from the
+evidences of will and intelligence in the vast machinery of the
+universe, yet it was essentially the product not of reason, but of
+emotional expansion, as every fundamental article of a faith that
+touches the hearts of many men must always be. The Savoyard Vicar did
+not believe that a God had made the great world, and rules it with
+majestic power and supreme justice, in the same way in which he
+believed that any two sides of a triangle are greater than the third
+side. That there is a mysterious being penetrating all creation with
+force, was not a proposition to be demonstrated, but only the poor
+description in words of an habitual mood going far deeper into life
+than words can ever carry us. Without for a single moment falling off
+into the nullities of pantheism, neither did he for a single moment
+suffer his thought to stiffen and grow hard in the formal lines of a
+theological definition or a systematic credo. It remains firm enough
+to give the religious imagination consistency and a centre, yet
+luminous enough to give the spiritual faculty a vivifying
+consciousness of freedom and space. A creed is concerned with a number
+of affirmations, and is constantly held with honest strenuousness by
+multitudes of men and women who are unfitted by natural temperament
+for knowing what the glow of religious emotion means to the human
+soul,--for not every one that saith, Lord, Lord, enters the kingdom of
+heaven. The Savoyard Vicar's profession of faith was not a creed, and
+so has few affirmations; it was a single doctrine, melted in a glow of
+contemplative transport. It is impossible to set about disproving it,
+for its exponent repeatedly warns his disciple against the idleness of
+logomachy, and insists that the existence of the Divinity is traced
+upon every heart in letters that can never be effaced, if we are only
+content to read them with lowliness and simplicity. You cannot
+demonstrate an emotion, nor prove an aspiration. How reason, asks the
+Savoyard Vicar, about that which we cannot conceive? Conscience is the
+best of all casuists, and conscience affirms the presence of a being
+who moves the universe and ordains all things, and to him we give the
+name of God.
+
+"To this name I join the ideas of intelligence, power, will, which I
+have united in one, and that of goodness, which is a necessary
+consequence flowing from them. But I do not know any the better for
+this the being to whom I have given the name; he escapes equally from
+my senses and my understanding; the more I think of him, the more I
+confound myself. I have full assurance that he exists, and that he
+exists by himself. I recognise my own being as subordinate to his and
+all the things that are known to me as being absolutely in the same
+case. I perceive God everywhere in his works; I feel him in myself; I
+see him universally around me. But when I fain would seek where he is,
+what he is, of what substance, he glides away from me, and my troubled
+soul discerns nothing."[339]
+
+"In fine, the more earnestly I strive to contemplate his infinite
+essence, the less do I conceive it. But it is, and that suffices me.
+The less I conceive it, the more I adore. I bow myself down, and say
+to him, O being of beings, I am because thou art; to meditate
+ceaselessly on thee by day and night, is to raise myself to my
+veritable source and fount. The worthiest use of my reason is to make
+itself as naught before thee. It is the ravishment of my soul, it is
+the solace of my weakness, to feel myself brought low before the awful
+majesty of thy greatness."[340]
+
+Souls weary of the fierce mockeries that had so long been flying like
+fiery shafts against the far Jehovah of the Hebrews, and the silent
+Christ of the later doctors and dignitaries, and weary too of the
+orthodox demonstrations that did not demonstrate, and leaden
+refutations that could not refute, may well have turned with ardour to
+listen to this harmonious spiritual voice, sounding clear from a
+region towards which their hearts yearned with untold aspiration, but
+from which the spirit of their time had shut them off with brazen
+barriers. It was the elevation and expansion of man, as much as it was
+the restoration of a divinity. To realise this, one must turn to such
+a book as Helvetius's, which was supposed to reveal the whole inner
+machinery of the heart. Man was thought of as a singular piece of
+mechanism principally moved from without, not as a conscious organism,
+receiving nourishment and direction from the medium in which it is
+placed, but reacting with a life of its own from within. It was this
+free and energetic inner life of the individual which the Savoyard
+Vicar restored to lawful recognition, and made once more the centre of
+that imaginative and spiritual existence, without which we live in a
+universe that has no sun by day nor any stars by night. A writer in
+whom learning has not extinguished enthusiasm, compares this to the
+advance made by Descartes, who had given certitude to the soul by
+turning thought confidently upon itself; and he declares that the
+Savoyard Vicar is for the emancipation of sentiment what the Discourse
+upon Method was for the emancipation of the understanding.[341] There
+is here a certain audacity of panegyric; still the fact that Rousseau
+chose to link the highest forms of man's ideal life with a fading
+projection of the lofty image which had been set up in older days,
+ought not to blind us to the excellent energies which, notwithstanding
+defect of association, such a vindication of the ideal was certain to
+quicken. And at least the lines of that high image were nobly traced.
+
+Yet who does not feel that it is a divinity for fair weather?
+Rousseau, with his fine sense of a proper and artistic setting,
+imagined the Savoyard Vicar as leading his youthful convert at break
+of a summer day to the top of a high hill, at whose feet the Po flowed
+between fertile banks; in the distance the immense chain of the Alps
+crowned the landscape; the rays of the rising sun projected long level
+shadows from the trees, the slopes, the houses, and accented with a
+thousand lines of light the most magnificent of panoramas.[342] This
+was the fitting suggestion, so serene, warm, pregnant with power and
+hope, and half mysterious, of the idea of godhead which the man of
+peace after an interval of silent contemplation proceeded to expound.
+Rousseau's sentimental idea at least did not revolt moral sense; it
+did not afflict the firmness of intelligence; nor did it silence the
+diviner melodies of the soul. Yet, once more, the heavens in which
+such a deity dwells are too high, his power is too impalpable, the
+mysterious air which he has poured around his being is too awful and
+impenetrable, for the rays from the sun of such majesty to reach more
+than a few contemplative spirits, and these only in their hours of
+tranquillity and expansion. The thought is too vague, too far, to
+bring comfort and refreshment to the mass of travailing men, or to
+invest duty with the stern ennobling quality of being done, "if I have
+grace to use it so as ever in the great Taskmaster's eye."
+
+The Savoyard Vicar was consistent with the sublimity of his own
+conception. He meditated on the order of the universe with a reverence
+too profound to allow him to mingle with his thoughts meaner desires
+as to the special relations of that order to himself. "I penetrate all
+my faculties," he said, "with the divine essence of the author of the
+world; I melt at the thought of his goodness, and bless all his gifts,
+but I do not pray to him. What should I ask of him? That for me he
+should change the course of things, and in my favour work miracles?
+Could I, who must love above all else the order established by his
+wisdom and upheld by his providence, presume to wish such order
+troubled for my sake? Nor do I ask of him the power of doing
+righteousness; why ask for what he has given me? Has he not bestowed
+on me conscience to love what is good, reason to ascertain it, freedom
+to choose it? If I do ill, I have no excuse; I do it because I will
+it. To pray to him to change my will, is to seek from him what he
+seeks from me; it is to wish no longer to be human, it is to wish
+something other than what is, it is to wish disorder and evil."[343]
+We may admire both the logical consistency of such self-denial and the
+manliness which it would engender in the character that were strong
+enough to practise it. But a divinity who has conceded no right of
+petition is still further away from our lives than the divinities of
+more popular creeds.
+
+Even the fairest deism is of its essence a faith of egotism and
+complacency. It does not incorporate in the very heart of the
+religious emotion the pitifulness and sorrow which Christianity first
+clothed with associations of sanctity, and which can never henceforth
+miss their place in any religious system to be accepted by men. Why is
+this? Because a religion that leaves them out, or thrusts them into a
+hidden corner, fails to comprehend at least one half, and that the
+most touching and impressive half, of the most conspicuous facts of
+human life. Rousseau was fuller of the capacity of pity than ordinary
+men, and this pity was one of the deepest parts of himself. Yet it did
+not enter into the composition of his religious faith, and this shows
+that his religious faith, though entirely free from suspicion of
+insincerity or ostentatious assumption, was like deism in so many
+cases, whether rationalistic or emotional, a kind of gratuitously
+adopted superfluity, not the satisfaction of a profound inner craving
+and resistless spiritual necessity. He speaks of the good and the
+wicked with the precision and assurance of the most pharisaic
+theologian, and he begins by asking of what concern it is to him
+whether the wicked are punished with eternal torment or not, though he
+concludes more graciously with the hope that in another state the
+wicked, delivered from their malignity, may enjoy a bliss no less than
+his own.[344] But the divine pitifulness which we owe to
+Christianity, and which will not be the less eagerly cherished by
+those who repudiate Christian tradition and doctrines, enjoins upon us
+that we should ask, Who are the wicked, and which is he that is
+without sin among us? Rousseau answered this glibly enough by some
+formula of metaphysics, about the human will having been left and
+constituted free by the creator of the world; and that man is the bad
+man who abuses his freedom. Grace, fate, destiny, force of
+circumstances, are all so many names for the protests which the frank
+sense of fact has forced from man against this miserably inadequate
+explanation of the foundations of moral responsibility.
+
+Whatever these foundations may be, the theories of grace and fate had
+at any rate the quality of connecting human conduct with the will of
+the gods. Rousseau's deism, severing the influence of the Supreme
+Being upon man, at the very moment when it could have saved him from
+the guilt that brings misery,--that is at the moment when conduct
+begins to follow the preponderant motives or the will,--did thus
+effectually cut off the most admirable and fertile group of our
+sympathies from all direct connection with religious sentiment.
+Toiling as manfully as we may through the wilderness of our seventy
+years, we are to reserve our deepest adoration for the being who has
+left us there, with no other solace than that he is good and just and
+all-powerful, and might have given us comfort and guidance if he
+would. This was virtually the form which Pelagius had tried to impose
+upon Christianity in the fifth century, and which the souls of men,
+thirsting for consciousness of an active divine presence, had then
+under the lead of Augustine so energetically cast away from them. The
+faith to which they clung while rejecting this great heresy, though
+just as transcendental, still had the quality of satisfying a
+spiritual want. It was even more readily to be accepted by the human
+intelligence, for it endowed the supreme power with the father's
+excellence of compassion, and presented for our reverence and
+gratitude and devotion a figure who drew from men the highest love for
+the God whom they had not seen, along with the warmest pity and love
+for their brethren whom they had seen.
+
+The Savoyard Vicar's own position to Christianity was one of
+reverential scepticism. "The holiness of the gospel," he said, "is an
+argument that speaks to my heart and to which I should even be sorry
+to find a good answer. Look at the books of the philosophers with all
+their pomp; how puny they are by the side of that! Is there here the
+tone of an enthusiast or an ambitious sectary? What gentleness, what
+purity, in his manners, what touching grace in his teaching, what
+loftiness in his maxims! Assuredly there was something more than human
+in such teaching, such a character, such a life, such a death. If the
+life and death of Socrates were those of a sage, the life and death
+of Jesus are those of a god. Shall we say that the history of the
+gospels is invented at pleasure? My friend, that is not the fashion of
+invention; and the facts about Socrates are less attested than the
+facts about Christ.[345] Yet with all that, this same gospel abounds
+in things incredible, which are repugnant to reason, and which it is
+impossible for any sensible man to conceive or admit. What are we to
+do in the midst of all these contradictions? To be ever modest and
+circumspect, my son; to respect in silence what one can neither reject
+nor understand, and to make one's self lowly before the great being
+who alone knows the truth."[346]
+
+"I regard all particular religions as so many salutary institutions,
+which prescribe in every country a uniform manner of honouring God by
+public worship. I believe them all good, so long as men serve God
+fittingly in them. The essential worship is the worship of the heart.
+God never rejects this homage, under whatever form it be offered to
+him. In other days I used to say mass with the levity which in time
+infects even the gravest things, when we do them too often. Since
+acquiring my new principles I celebrate it with more veneration; I am
+overwhelmed by the majesty of the Supreme Being, by his presence, by
+the insufficiency of the human mind, which conceives so little what
+pertains to its author. When I approach the moment of consecration, I
+collect myself for performing the act with all the feelings required
+by the church, and the majesty of the sacrament; I strive to
+annihilate my reason before the supreme intelligence, saying, 'Who art
+thou, that thou shouldest measure infinite power?'"[347]
+
+A creed like this, whatever else it may be, is plainly a powerful
+solvent of every system of exclusive dogma. If the one essential to
+true worship, the worship of the heart and the inner sentiment, be
+mystic adoration of an indefinable Supreme, then creeds based upon
+books, prophecies, miracles, revelations, all fall alike into the
+second place among things that may be lawful and may be expedient, but
+that can never be exacted from men by a just God as indispensable to
+virtue in this world or to bliss in the next. No better answer has
+ever been given to the exclusive pretensions of sect, Christian,
+Jewish, or Mahometan, than that propounded by the Savoyard Vicar with
+such energy, closeness, and most sarcastic fire.[348] It was turning
+an unexpected front upon the presumptuousness of all varieties of
+theological infallibilists, to prove to them that if you insist upon
+acceptance of this or that special revelation, over and above the
+dictates of natural religion, then you are bound not only to grant,
+but imperatively to enjoin upon all men, a searching inquiry and
+comparison, that they may spare no pains in an affair of such
+momentous issue in proving to themselves that this, and none of the
+competing revelations, is the veritable message of eternal safety.
+"Then no other study will be possible but that of religion: hardly
+shall one who has enjoyed the most robust health, employed his time
+and used his reason to best purpose, and lived the greatest number of
+years, hardly shall such an one in his extreme age be quite sure what
+to believe, and it will be a marvel if he finds out before he dies, in
+what faith he ought to have lived." The superiority of the sceptical
+parts of the Savoyard Vicar's profession, as well as those of the
+Letters from the Mountain to which we referred previously, over the
+biting mockeries which Voltaire had made the fashionable method of
+assault, lay in this fact. The latter only revolted and irritated all
+serious temperaments to whom religion is a matter of honest concern,
+while the former actually appealed to their religious sense in support
+of his doubts; and the more intelligent and sincere this sense
+happened to be, the more surely would Rousseau's gravely urged
+objections dissolve the hard particles of dogmatic belief. His
+objections were on a moral level with the best side of the religion
+that they oppugned. Those of Voltaire were only on a level with its
+lowest side, and that was the side presented by the gross and
+repulsive obscurantism of the functionaries of the church.
+
+Unfortunately Rousseau had placed in the hands of the partisans of
+every exclusive revelation an instrument which was quite enough to
+disperse all his objections to the winds, and which was the very
+instrument that defended his own cherished religion. If he was
+satisfied with replying to the atheist and the materialist, that he
+knew there is a supreme God, and that the soul must have here and
+hereafter an existence apart from the body, because he found these
+truths ineffaceably written upon his own heart, what could prevent the
+Christian or the Mahometan from replying to Rousseau that the New
+Testament or the Koran is the special and final revelation from the
+Supreme Power to his creatures? If you may appeal to the voice of the
+heart and the dictate of the inner sentiment in one case, why not in
+the other also? A subjective test necessarily proves anything that any
+man desires, and the accident of the article proved appearing either
+reasonable or monstrous to other people, cannot have the least bearing
+on its efficacy or conclusiveness.
+
+Deism like the Savoyard Vicar's opens no path for the future, because
+it makes no allowance for the growth of intellectual conviction, and
+binds up religion with mystery, with an object whose attributes can
+neither be conceived nor defined, with a Being too all-embracing to be
+able to receive anything from us, too august, self-contained, remote,
+to be able to bestow on us the humble gifts of which we have need. The
+temperature of thought is slowly but without an instant's recoil
+rising to a point when a mystery like this, definite enough to be
+imposed as a faith, but too indefinite to be grasped by understanding
+as a truth, melts away from the emotions of religion. Then those
+instincts of holiness, without which the world would be to so many of
+its highest spirits the most dreary of exiles, will perhaps come to
+associate themselves less with unseen divinities, than with the long
+brotherhood of humanity seen and unseen. Here we shall move with an
+assurance that no scepticism and no advance of science can ever shake,
+because the benefactions which we have received from the strenuousness
+of human effort can never be doubted, and each fresh acquisition in
+knowledge or goodness can only kindle new fervour. Those who have the
+religious imagination struck by the awful procession of man from the
+region of impenetrable night, by his incessant struggle with the
+hardness of the material world, and his sublimer struggle with the
+hard world of his own egotistic passions, by the pain and sacrifice by
+which generation after generation has added some small piece to the
+temple of human freedom or some new fragment to the ever incomplete
+sum of human knowledge, or some fresh line to the types of strong or
+beautiful character,--those who have an eye for all this may indeed
+have no ecstasy and no terror, no heaven nor hell, in their religion,
+but they will have abundant moods of reverence, deep-seated gratitude,
+and sovereign pitifulness.
+
+And such moods will not end in sterile exaltation, or the deathly
+chills of spiritual reaction. They will bring forth abundant fruit in
+new hope and invigorated endeavour. This devout contemplation of the
+experience of the race, instead of raising a man into the clouds,
+brings him into the closest, loftiest, and most conscious relations
+with his kind, to whom he owes all that is of value in his own life,
+and to whom he can repay his debt by maintaining the beneficent
+tradition of service, by cherishing honour for all the true and sage
+spirits that have shone upon the earth, and sorrow and reprobation for
+all the unworthier souls whose light has gone out in baseness. A man
+with this faith can have no foul spiritual pride, for there is no
+mysteriously accorded divine grace in which one may be a larger
+participant than another. He can have no incentives to that mutilation
+with which every branch of the church, from the oldest to the youngest
+and crudest, has in its degree afflicted and retarded mankind, because
+the key-note of his religion is the joyful energy of every faculty,
+practical, reflective, creative, contemplative, in pursuit of a
+visible common good. And he can be plunged into no fatal and
+paralysing despair by any doctrine of mortal sin, because active faith
+in humanity, resting on recorded experience, discloses the many
+possibilities of moral recovery, and the work that may be done for men
+in the fragment of days, redeeming the contrite from their burdens by
+manful hope. If religion is our feeling about the highest forces that
+govern human destiny, then as it becomes more and more evident how
+much our destiny is shaped by the generation of the dead who have
+prepared the present, and by the purport of our hopes and the
+direction of our activity for the generations that are to fill the
+future, the religious sentiment will more and more attach itself to
+the great unseen host of our fellows who have gone before us and who
+are to come after. Such a faith is no rag of metaphysic floating in
+the sunshine of sentimentalism, like Rousseau's faith. It rests on a
+positive base, which only becomes wider and firmer with the widening
+of experience and the augmentation of our skill in interpreting it.
+Nor is it too transcendent for practical acceptance. One of the most
+scientific spirits of the eighteenth century, while each moment
+expecting the knock of the executioner at his door, found as religious
+a solace as any early martyr had ever found in his barbarous
+mysteries, when he linked his own efforts for reason and freedom with
+the eternal chain of the destinies of man. "This contemplation," he
+wrote and felt, "is for him a refuge into which the rancour of his
+persecutors can never follow him; in which, living in thought with man
+reinstated in the rights and the dignity of his nature, he forgets man
+tormented and corrupted by greed, by base fear, by envy; it is here
+that he truly abides with his fellows, in an elysium that his reason
+has known how to create for itself, and that his love for humanity
+adorns with all purest delights."[349]
+
+This, to the shame of those wavering souls who despair of progress at
+the first moment when it threatens to leave the path that they have
+marked out for it, was written by a man at the very close of his days,
+when every hope that he had ever cherished seemed to one without the
+eye of faith to be extinguished in bloodshed, disorder, and barbarism.
+But there is a still happier season in the adolescence of generous
+natures that have been wisely fostered, when the horizons of the
+dawning life are suddenly lighted up with a glow of aspiration towards
+good and holy things. Commonly, alas, this priceless opportunity is
+lost in a fit of theological exaltation, which is gradually choked out
+by the dusty facts of life, and slowly moulders away into dry
+indifference. It would not be so, but far different, if the Savoyard
+Vicar, instead of taking the youth to the mountain-top, there to
+contemplate that infinite unseen which is in truth beyond
+contemplation by the limited faculties of man, were to associate these
+fine impulses of the early prime with the visible, intelligible, and
+still sublime possibilities of the human destiny,--that imperial
+conception, which alone can shape an existence of entire proportion in
+all its parts, and leave no natural energy of life idle or athirst. Do
+you ask for sanctions! One whose conscience has been strengthened from
+youth in this faith, can know no greater bitterness than the stain
+cast by wrong act or unworthy thought on the high memories with which
+he has been used to walk, and the discord wrought in hopes that have
+become the ruling harmony of his days.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[337] See Hallam's _Literature of Europe_, Pt. I. ch. ii. Sec. 64. Again
+(for the 16th century), Pt. II. ch. ii. Sec. 53. See also for mention of
+a sect of deists at Lyons about 1560, Bayle's Dictionary, _s.v._
+Viret.
+
+[338] See above, vol. i. pp. 223-227.
+
+[339] _Emile_, IV. 163.
+
+[340] IV. 183-185.
+
+[341] M. Henri Martin's _Hist. de France_, xvi. 101, where there is an
+interesting, but, as it seems to the present writer, hardly a
+successful attempt, to bring the Savoyard Vicar's eloquence into
+scientific form.
+
+[342] _Emile_, IV. 135.
+
+[343] _Emile_, IV. 204.
+
+[344] _Emile_, IV. 181, 182. In a letter to Vernes (Feb. 18, 1758.
+_Corr._, ii. 9) he expresses his suspicion that possibly the souls of
+the wicked may be annihilated at their death, and that being and
+feeling may prove the first reward of a good life. In this letter he
+asks also, with the same magnanimous security as the Savoyard Vicar,
+"of what concern the destiny of the wicked can be to him."
+
+[345] A similar disparagement of Socrates, in comparison with the
+Christ of the Gospels, is to be found in the long letter of Jan. 15,
+1769 (_Corr._, vi. 59, 60), to M----, accompanied by a violent
+denigration of the Jews, conformably to the philosophic prejudice of
+the time.
+
+[346] _Emile_, IV. 241, 242.
+
+[347] _Emile_, IV. 243.
+
+[348] IV. 210-236.
+
+[349] Condorcet's _Progres de l'Esprit Humain_ (1794). _Oeuv._, vi.
+276.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+ENGLAND.[350]
+
+
+There is in an English collection a portrait of Jean Jacques,
+which was painted during his residence in this country by a provincial
+artist. Singular and displeasing as it is, yet this picture lights up
+for us many a word and passage in Rousseau's life here and elsewhere,
+which the ordinary engravings, and the trim self-complacency of the
+statue on the little island at Geneva, would leave very
+incomprehensible. It is almost as appalling in its realism as some of
+the dark pits that open before the reader of the Confessions. Hard
+struggles with objective difficulty and external obstacle wear deep
+furrows in the brow; they throw into the glance a solicitude, half
+penetrating and defiant, half dejected. When a man's hindrances have
+sprung up from within, and the ill-fought battle of his days has been
+with his own passions and morbid broodings and unchastened dreams, the
+eye and the facial lines tell the story of that profound moral defeat
+which is unlighted by the memories of resolute combat with evil and
+weakness, and leaves only eternal desolation and the misery that is
+formless. Our English artist has produced a vision from that prose
+Inferno which is made so populous in the modern epoch by impotence of
+will. Those who have seen the picture may easily understand how
+largely the character of the original must have been pregnant with
+harassing confusion and distress.
+
+Four years before this (1762), Hume, to whom Lord Marischal had told
+the story of Rousseau's persecutions, had proffered his services, and
+declared his eagerness to help in finding a proper refuge for him in
+England. There had been an exchange of cordial letters,[351] and then
+the matter had lain quiet, until the impossibility of remaining longer
+in Neuchatel had once more set his friends on procuring a safe
+establishment for their rather difficult refugee. Rousseau's
+appearance in Paris had created the keenest excitement. "People may
+talk of ancient Greece as they please," wrote Hume from Paris, "but no
+nation was ever so proud of genius as this, and no person ever so much
+engaged their attention as Rousseau! Voltaire and everybody else are
+quite eclipsed by him." Even Theresa Le Vasseur, who was declared very
+homely and very awkward, was more talked of than the Princess of
+Morocco or the Countess of Egmont, on account of her fidelity towards
+him. His very dog had a name and reputation in the world.[352]
+Rousseau is always said to have liked the stir which his presence
+created, but whether this was so or not, he was very impatient to be
+away from it as soon as possible.
+
+In company with Hume, he left Paris in the second week of January
+1766. They crossed from Calais to Dover by night in a passage that
+lasted twelve hours. Hume, as the orthodox may be glad to know, was
+extremely ill, while Rousseau cheerfully passed the whole night upon
+deck, taking no harm, though the seamen were almost frozen to
+death.[353] They reached London on the thirteenth of January, and the
+people of London showed nearly as lively an interest in the strange
+personage whom Hume had brought among them, as the people of Paris had
+done. A prince of the blood at once went to pay his respects to the
+Swiss philosopher. The crowd at the playhouse showed more curiosity
+when the stranger came in than when the king and queen entered. Their
+majesties were as interested as their subjects, and could scarcely
+keep their eyes off the author of Emilius. George III., then in the
+heyday of his youth, was so pleased to have a foreigner of genius
+seeking shelter in his kingdom, that he readily acceded to Conway's
+suggestion, prompted by Hume, that Rousseau should have a pension
+settled on him. The ever illustrious Burke, then just made member of
+Parliament, saw him nearly every day, and became persuaded that "he
+entertained no principle either to influence his heart, or guide his
+understanding, but vanity."[354] Hume, on the contrary, thought the
+best things of his client; "He has an excellent warm heart, and in
+conversation kindles often to a degree of heat which looks like
+inspiration; I love him much, and hope that I have some share in his
+affections.... He is a very modest, mild, well-bred, gentle-spirited
+and warm-hearted man, as ever I knew in my life. He is also to
+appearance very sociable. I never saw a man who seems better
+calculated for good company, nor who seems to take more pleasure in
+it." "He is a very agreeable, amiable man; but a great humorist. The
+philosophers of Paris foretold to me that I could not conduct him to
+Calais without a quarrel; but I think I could live with him all my
+life in mutual friendship and esteem. I believe one great source of
+our concord is that neither he nor I are disputatious, which is not
+the case with any of them. They are also displeased with him, because
+they think he over-abounds in religion; and it is indeed remarkable
+that the philosopher of this age who has been most persecuted, is by
+far the most devout."[355]
+
+What the Scotch philosopher meant by calling his pupil a humorist, may
+perhaps be inferred from the story of the trouble he had in prevailing
+upon Rousseau to go to the play, though Garrick had appointed a
+special occasion and set apart a special box for him. When the hour
+came, Rousseau declared that he could not leave his dog behind him.
+"The first person," he said, "who opens the door, Sultan will run into
+the streets in search of me and will be lost." Hume told him to lock
+Sultan up in the room, and carry away the key in his pocket. This was
+done, but as they proceeded downstairs, the dog began to howl; his
+master turned back and avowed he had not resolution to leave him in
+that condition. Hume, however, caught him in his arms, told him that
+Mr. Garrick had dismissed another company in order to make room for
+him, that the king and queen were expecting to see him, and that
+without a better reason than Sultan's impatience it would be
+ridiculous to disappoint them. Thus, a little by reason, but more by
+force, he was carried off.[356] Such a story, whatever else we may
+think of it, shows at least a certain curious and not untouching
+simplicity. And singularity which made Rousseau like better to keep
+his dog company at home, than to be stared at by a gaping pit, was too
+private in its reward to be the result of that vanity and affectation
+with which he was taxed by men who lived in another sphere of motive.
+
+There was considerable trouble in settling Rousseau. He was eager to
+leave London almost as soon as he arrived in it. Though pleased with
+the friendly reception which had been given him, he pronounced London
+to be as much devoted to idle gossip and frivolity as other capitals.
+He spent a few weeks in the house of a farmer at Chiswick, thought
+about fixing himself in the Isle of Wight, then in Wales, then
+somewhere in our fair Surrey, whose scenery, one is glad to know,
+greatly attracted him. Finally arrangements were made by Hume with Mr.
+Davenport for installing him in a house belonging to the latter, at
+Wootton, near Ashbourne, in the Peak of Derbyshire.[357] Hither
+Rousseau proceeded with Theresa, at the end of March. Mr. Davenport
+was a gentleman of large property, and as he seldom inhabited this
+solitary house, was very willing that Rousseau should take up his
+abode there without payment. This, however, was what Rousseau's
+independence could not brook, and he insisted that his entertainer
+should receive thirty pounds a year for the board of himself and
+Theresa.[358] So here he settled, in an extremely bitter climate,
+knowing no word of the language of the people about him, with no
+companionship but Theresa's, and with nothing to do but walk when the
+weather was fair, play the harpsicord when it rained, and brood over
+the incidents which had occurred to him since he had left Switzerland
+six months before. The first fruits of this unfortunate leisure were a
+bitter quarrel with Hume, one of the most famous and far-resounding of
+all the quarrels of illustrious men, but one about which very little
+needs now be said. The merits of it are plain, and all significance
+that may ever have belonged to it is entirely dead. The incubation of
+his grievances began immediately after his arrival at Wootton, but two
+months elapsed before they burst forth in full flame.[359]
+
+The general charge against Hume was that he was a member of an
+accursed triumvirate; Voltaire and D'Alembert were the other partners;
+and their object was to blacken the character of Rousseau and render
+his life miserable. The particular acts on which this belief was
+established were the following:--
+
+(1) While Rousseau was in Paris, there appeared a letter nominally
+addressed to him by the King of Prussia, and written in an ironical
+strain, which persuaded Jean Jacques himself that it was the work of
+Voltaire.[360] Then he suspected D'Alembert. It was really the
+composition of Horace Walpole, who was then in Paris. Now Hume was the
+friend of Walpole, and had given Rousseau a card of introduction to
+him for the purpose of entrusting Walpole with the carriage of some
+papers. Although the false letter produced the liveliest amusement at
+Rousseau's cost, first in Paris and then in London, Hume, while
+feigning to be his warm friend and presenting him to the English
+public, never took any pains to tell the world that the piece was a
+forgery, nor did he break with its wicked author.[361] (2) When
+Rousseau assured Hume that D'Alembert was a cunning and dishonourable
+man, Hume denied it with an amazing heat, although he well knew the
+latter to be Rousseau's enemy.[362] (3) Hume lived in London with the
+son of Tronchin, the Genevese surgeon, and the most mortal of all the
+foes of Jean Jacques.[363] (4) When Rousseau first came to London, his
+reception was a distinguished triumph for the victim of persecution
+from so many governments. England was proud of being his place of
+refuge, and justly vaunted the freedom of her laws and administration.
+Suddenly and for no assignable cause the public tone changed, the
+newspapers either fell silent or else spoke unfavourably, and Rousseau
+was thought of no more. This must have been due to Hume, who had much
+influence among people of credit, and who went about boasting of the
+protection which he had procured for Jean Jacques in Paris.[364] (5)
+Hume resorted to various small artifices for preventing Rousseau from
+making friends, for procuring opportunities of opening Rousseau's
+letters, and the like.[365] (6) A violent satirical letter against
+Rousseau appeared in the English newspapers, with allusions which
+could only have been supplied by Hume. (7) On the first night after
+their departure from Paris, Rousseau, who occupied the same room with
+Hume, heard him call out several times in the middle of the night in
+the course of his dreams, _Je tiens Jean Jacques Rousseau_, with
+extreme vehemence--which words, in spite of the horribly sardonic tone
+of the dreamer, he interpreted favourably at the time, but which later
+event proved to have been full of malign significance.[366] (8)
+Rousseau constantly found Hume eyeing him with a glance of sinister
+and diabolic import that filled him with an astonishing disquietude,
+though he did his best to combat it. On one of these occasions he was
+seized with remorse, fell upon Hume's neck, embraced him warmly, and,
+suffocated with sobs and bathed in tears, cried out in broken accents,
+_No, no, David Hume is no traitor_, with many protests of affection.
+The phlegmatic Hume only returned his embrace with politeness, stroked
+him gently on the back, and repeated several times in a tranquil
+voice, _Quoi, mon cher monsieur! Eh! mon cher monsieur! Quoi donc, mon
+cher monsieur!_[367] (9) Although for many weeks Rousseau had kept a
+firm silence to Hume, neglecting to answer letters that plainly called
+for answer, and marking his displeasure in other unmistakable ways,
+yet Hume had never sought any explanation of what must necessarily
+have struck him as so singular, but continued to write as if nothing
+had happened. Was not this positive proof of a consciousness of
+perfidy?
+
+Some years afterwards he substituted another shorter set of
+grievances, namely, that Hume would not suffer Theresa to sit at table
+with him; that he made a show of him; and that Hume had an engraving
+executed of himself, which made him as beautiful as a cherub, while in
+another engraving, which was a pendant to his own, Jean Jacques was
+made as ugly as a bear.[368]
+
+It would be ridiculous for us to waste any time in discussing these
+charges. They are not open to serious examination, though it is
+astonishing to find writers in our own day who fully believe that Hume
+was a traitor, and behaved extremely basely to the unfortunate man
+whom he had inveigled over to a barbarous island. The only part of the
+indictment about which there could be the least doubt, was the
+possibility of Hume having been an accomplice in Walpole's very small
+pleasantry. Some of his friends in Paris suspected that he had had a
+hand in the supposed letter from the King of Prussia. Although the
+letter constituted no very malignant jest, and could not by a sensible
+man have been regarded as furnishing just complaint against one who,
+like Walpole, was merely an impudent stranger, yet if it could be
+shown that Hume had taken an active part either in the composition or
+the circulation of a spiteful bit of satire upon one towards whom he
+was pretending a singular affection, then we should admit that he
+showed such a want of sense of the delicacy of friendship as amounted
+to something like treachery. But a letter from Walpole to Hume sets
+this doubt at rest. "I cannot be precise as to the time of my writing
+the King of Prussia's letter, but ... I not only suppressed the letter
+while you stayed there, out of delicacy to you, but it was the reason
+why, out of delicacy to myself, I did not go to see him as you often
+proposed to me, thinking it wrong to go and make a cordial visit to a
+man, with a letter in my pocket to laugh at him."[369]
+
+With this all else falls to the ground. It would be as unwise in us,
+as it was in Rousseau himself, to complicate the hypotheses. Men do
+not act without motives, and Hume could have no motive in entering
+into any plot against Rousseau, even if the rival philosophers in
+France might have motives. We know the character of our David Hume
+perfectly well, and though it was not faultless, its fault certainly
+lay rather in an excessive desire to make the world comfortable for
+everybody, than in anything like purposeless malignity, of which he
+never had a trace. Moreover, all that befell Rousseau through Hume's
+agency was exceedingly to his advantage. Hume was not without vanity,
+and his letters show that he was not displeased at the addition to his
+consequence which came of his patronage of a man who was much talked
+about and much stared at. But, however this was, he did all for
+Rousseau that generosity and thoughtfulness could do. He was at great
+pains in establishing him; he used his interest to procure for him the
+grant of a pension from the king; when Rousseau provisionally refused
+the pension rather than owe anything to Hume, the latter, still
+ignorant of the suspicion that was blackening in Rousseau's mind,
+supposed that the refusal came from the fact of the pension being kept
+private, and at once took measures with the minister to procure the
+removal of the condition of privacy. Besides undeniable acts like
+these, the state of Hume's mind towards his curious ward is abundantly
+shown in his letters to all his most intimate friends, just as
+Rousseau's gratitude to him is to be read in all his early letters
+both to Hume and other persons. In the presence of such facts on the
+one side, and in the absence of any particle of intelligible evidence
+to neutralise them on the other, to treat Rousseau's charges with
+gravity is irrational.
+
+If Hume had written back in a mild and conciliatory strain, there can
+be no doubt that the unfortunate victim of his own morbid imagination
+would, for a time at any rate, have been sobered and brought to a
+sense of his misconduct. But Hume was incensed beyond control at what
+he very pardonably took for a masterpiece of atrocious ingratitude. He
+reproached Rousseau in terms as harsh as those which Grimm had used
+nine years before. He wrote to all his friends, withdrawing the kindly
+words he had once used of Rousseau's character, and substituting in
+their place the most unfavourable he could find. He gave the
+philosophic circle in Paris exquisite delight by the confirmation
+which his story furnished of their own foresight, when they had warned
+him that he was taking a viper to his bosom. Finally, in spite of the
+advice of Adam Smith, of one of the greatest of men, Turgot, and one
+of the smallest, Horace Walpole, he published a succinct account of
+the quarrel, first in French, and then in English. This step was
+chiefly due to the advice of the clique of whom D'Alembert was the
+spokesman, though it is due to him to mention that he softened various
+expressions in Hume's narrative, which he pronounced too harsh. It may
+be true that a council of war never fights; a council of men of
+letters always does. The governing committee of a literary,
+philosophical, or theological clique form the very worst advisers any
+man can have.
+
+Much must be forgiven to Hume, stung as he was by what appeared the
+most hateful ferocity in one on whom he had heaped acts of affection.
+Still, one would have been glad on behalf of human dignity, if he had
+suffered with firm silence petulant charges against which the
+consciousness of his own uprightness should have been the only answer.
+That high pride, of which there is too little rather than too much in
+the world, and which saves men from waste of themselves and others in
+pitiful accusations, vindications, retaliations, should have helped
+humane pity in preserving him from this poor quarrel. Long afterwards
+Rousseau said, "England, of which they paint such fine pictures in
+France, has so cheerless a climate; my soul, wearied with many shocks,
+was in a condition of such profound melancholy, that in all that
+passed I believe I committed many faults. But are they comparable to
+those of the enemies who persecuted me, supposing them even to have
+done no more than published our private quarrels?"[370] An ampler
+contrition would have been more seemly in the first offender, but
+there is a measure of justice in his complaint. We need not, however,
+reproach the good Hume. Before six months were over, he admits that he
+is sometimes inclined to blame his publication, and always to regret
+it.[371] And his regret was not verbal merely. When Rousseau had
+returned to France, and was in danger of arrest, Hume was most urgent
+in entreating Turgot to use his influence with the government to
+protect the wretched wanderer, and Turgot's answer shows both how
+sincere this humane interposition was, and how practically
+serviceable.[372]
+
+Meanwhile there ensued a horrible fray in print. Pamphlets appeared in
+Paris and London in a cloud. The Succinct Exposure was followed by
+succinct rejoinders. Walpole officiously printed his own account of
+his own share in the matter. Boswell officiously wrote to the
+newspapers defending Rousseau and attacking Walpole. King George
+followed the battle with intense curiosity. Hume with solemn
+formalities sent the documents to the British Museum. There was
+silence only in one place, and that was at Wootton. The unfortunate
+person who had done all the mischief printed not a word.
+
+The most prompt and quite the least instructive of the remarks
+invariably made upon any one who has acted in an unusual manner, is
+that he must be mad. This universal criticism upon the unwonted really
+tells us nothing, because the term may cover any state of mind from a
+warranted dissent from established custom, down to absolute dementia.
+Rousseau was called mad when he took to wearing convenient clothes and
+living frugally. He was called mad when he quitted the town and went
+to live in the country. The same facile explanation covered his
+quarrel with importunate friends at the Hermitage. Voltaire called him
+mad for saying that if there were perfect harmony of taste and
+temperament between the king's daughter and the executioner's son, the
+pair ought to be allowed to marry. We who are not forced by
+conversational necessities to hurry to a judgment, may hesitate to
+take either taste for the country, or for frugal living, or even for
+democratic extravagances, as a mark of a disordered mind.[373] That
+Rousseau's conduct towards Hume was inconsistent with perfect mental
+soundness is quite plain. But to say this with crude trenchancy,
+teaches us nothing. Instead of paying ourselves with phrases like
+monomania, it is more useful shortly to trace the conditions which
+prepared the way for mental derangement, because this is the only
+means of understanding either its nature, or the degree to which it
+extended. These conditions in Rousseau's case are perfectly simple and
+obvious to any one who recognises the principle, that the essential
+facts of such mental disorder as his must be sought not in the
+symptoms, but from the whole range of moral and intellectual
+constitution, acted on by physical states and acting on them in turn.
+
+Rousseau was born with an organisation of extreme sensibility. This
+predisposition was further deepened by the application in early youth
+of mental influences specially calculated to heighten juvenile
+sensibility. Corrective discipline from circumstance and from formal
+instruction was wholly absent, and thus the particular excess in his
+temperament became ever more and more exaggerated, and encroached at a
+rate of geometrical progression upon all the rest of his impulses and
+faculties; these, if he had been happily placed under some of the many
+forms of wholesome social pressure, would then on the contrary have
+gradually reduced his sensibility to more normal proportion. When the
+vicious excess had decisively rooted itself in his character, he came
+to Paris, where it was irritated into further activity by the
+uncongeniality of all that surrounded him. Hence the growth of a
+marked unsociality, taking literary form in the Discourses, and
+practical form in his retirement from the town. The slow depravation
+of the affective life was hastened by solitude, by sensuous expansion,
+by the long musings of literary composition. Well does Goethe's
+Princess warn the hapless Tasso:--
+
+                                   Dieser Pfad
+    Verleitet uns, durch einsames Gebuesch,
+    Durch stille Thaeler fortzuwandern; mehr
+    Und mehr verwoehnt sich das Gemueth und strebt
+    Die goldne Zeit, die ihm von aussen mangelt,
+    In seinem Innern wieder herzustellen,
+    So wenig der Versuch gelingen will.
+
+Then came harsh and unjust treatment prolonged for many months, and
+this introduced a slight but genuinely misanthropic element of
+bitterness into what had hitherto been an excess of feeling about
+himself, rather than any positive feeling of hostility or suspicion
+about others. Finally and perhaps above all else, he was the victim of
+tormenting bodily pain, and of sleeplessness which resulted from it.
+The agitation and excitement of the journey to England, completed the
+sum of the conditions of disturbance, and as soon as ever he was
+settled at Wootton, and had leisure to brood over the incidents of
+the few weeks since his arrival in England, the disorder which had
+long been spreading through his impulses and affections, suddenly but
+by a most natural sequence extended to the faculties of his
+intelligence, and he became the prey of delusion, a delusion which was
+not yet fixed, but which ultimately became so.
+
+"He has only _felt_ during the whole course of his life," wrote Hume
+sympathetically; "and in this respect his sensibility rises to a pitch
+beyond what I have seen any example of; but it still gives him a more
+acute feeling of pain than of pleasure. He is like a man who was
+stripped not only of his clothes, but of his skin, and turned out in
+that situation to combat with the rude and boisterous elements."[374]
+A morbid affective state of this kind and of such a degree of
+intensity, was the sure antecedent of a morbid intellectual state,
+general or partial, depressed or exalted. One who is the prey of
+unsound feelings, if they are only marked enough and persistent
+enough, naturally ends by a correspondingly unsound arrangement of all
+or some of his ideas to match. The intelligence is seduced into
+finding supports in misconception of circumstances, for a
+misconception of human relation which had its root in disordered
+emotion. This completes the breach of correspondence between the man's
+nature and the external facts with which he has to deal, though the
+breach may not, and in Rousseau's case certainly did not, extend along
+the whole line of feeling and judgment. Rousseau's delusion about
+Hume's sinister feeling and designs, which was the first definite
+manifestation of positive unsoundness in the sphere of the
+intelligence, was a last result of the gradual development of an
+inherited predisposition to affective unsoundness, which unhappily for
+the man's history had never been counteracted either by a strenuous
+education, or by the wholesome urgencies of life.
+
+We have only to remember that with him, as with the rest of us, there
+was entire unity of nature, without cataclysm or marvel or
+inexplicable rupture of mental continuity. All the facts came in an
+order that might have been foretold; they all lay together, with their
+foundations down in physical temperament; the facts which made
+Rousseau's name renowned and his influence a great force, along with
+those which made his life a scandal to others and a misery to himself.
+The deepest root of moral disorder lies in an immoderate expectation
+of happiness, and this immoderate unlawful expectation was the mark
+both of his character and his work. The exaltation of emotion over
+intelligence was the secret of his most striking production; the same
+exaltation, by gaining increased mastery over his whole existence, at
+length passed the limit of sanity and wrecked him. The tendency of the
+dominant side of a character towards diseased exaggeration is a fact
+of daily observation. The ruin which the excess of strong religious
+imagination works in natures without the quality of energetic
+objective reaction, was shown in the case of Rousseau's contemporary,
+Cowper. This gentle poet's delusions about the wrath of God were
+equally pitiable and equally a source of torment to their victim, with
+Rousseau's delusions about the malignity of his mysterious plotters
+among men. We must call such a condition unsound, but the important
+thing is to remember that insanity was only a modification of certain
+specially marked tendencies of the sufferer's sanity.
+
+The desire to protect himself against the defamation of his enemies
+led him at this time to compose that account of his own life, which is
+probably the only one of his writings that continues to be generally
+read. He composed the first part of the Confessions at Wootton, during
+the autumn and winter of 1766. The idea of giving his memoirs to the
+public was an old one, originally suggested by one of his publishers.
+To write memoirs of one's own life was one of the fancies of the time,
+but like all else, it became in Rousseau's hand something more
+far-reaching and sincere than a passing fashion. Other people wrote
+polite histories of their outer lives, amply coloured with romantic
+decorations. Rousseau with unquailing veracity plunged into the inmost
+depths, hiding nothing that would be likely to make him either
+ridiculous or hateful in common opinion, and inventing nothing that
+could attract much sympathy or much admiration. Though, as has been
+pointed out already, the Confessions abound in small inaccuracies of
+date, hardly to be avoided by an oldish man in reference to the facts
+of his boyhood, whether a Rousseau or a Goethe, and though one or two
+of the incidents are too deeply coloured with the hues of sentimental
+reminiscence, and one or two of them are downright impossible, yet
+when all these deductions have been made, the substantial truthfulness
+of what remains is made more evident with every addition to our
+materials for testing them. When all the circumstances of Rousseau's
+life are weighed, and when full account has been taken of his proved
+delinquencies, we yet perceive that he was at bottom a character as
+essentially sincere, truthful, careful of fact and reality, as is
+consistent with the general empire of sensation over untrained
+intelligence.[375] As for the egotism of the Confessions, it is hard
+to see how a man is to tell the story of his own life without egotism.
+And it may be worth adding that the self-feeling which comes to the
+surface and asserts itself, is in a great many cases far less vicious
+and debilitating than the same feeling nursed internally with a
+troglodytish shyness. But Rousseau's egotism manifested itself
+perversely. This is true to a certain small extent, and one or two of
+the disclosures in the Confessions are in very nauseous matter, and
+are made moreover in a very nauseous manner. There are some vices
+whose grotesqueness stirs us more deeply than downright atrocities,
+and we read of certain puerilities avowed by Rousseau, with a livelier
+impatience than old Benvenuto Cellini quickens in us, when he
+confesses to a horrible assassination. This morbid form of
+self-feeling is only less disgusting than the allied form which
+clothes itself in the phrases of religious exaltation. And there is
+not much of it. Blot out half a dozen pages from the Confessions, and
+the egotism is no more perverted than in the confessions of Augustine
+or of Cardan.
+
+These remarks are not made to extenuate Rousseau's faults, or to raise
+the popular estimate of his character, but simply in the interests of
+a greater precision of criticism. In England criticism has nearly
+always been of the most vulgar superficiality in respect to Rousseau,
+from the time of Horace Walpole downwards. The Confessions in their
+least agreeable parts, or rather especially in those parts, are the
+expression on a new side and in a peculiar way of the same notion of
+the essential goodness of nature and the importance of understanding
+nature and restoring its reign, which inspired the Discourses and
+Emilius. "I would fain show to my fellows," he began, "a man in all
+the truth of nature," and he cannot be charged with any failure to
+keep his word. He despised opinion, and hence was careless to observe
+whether or no this revelation of human nakedness was likely to add to
+the popular respect for nature and the natural man. After all,
+considering that literature is for the most part a hollow and
+pretentious phantasmagoria of mimic figures posing in breeches and
+peruke, we may try to forgive certain cruel blows to the dignified
+assumptions, solemn words, and high heels of convention, in one who
+would not lie, nor dissemble kinship with the four-footed. Intense
+subjective preoccupations in markedly emotional natures all tend to
+come to the same end. The distance from Rousseau's odious erotics to
+the glorified ecstasies of many a poor female saint is not far. In any
+case, let us know the facts about human nature, and the pathological
+facts no less than the others. These are the first thing, and the
+second, and the third also.
+
+The exaltation of the opening page of the Confessions is shocking. No
+monk nor saint ever wrote anything more revolting in its blasphemous
+self-feeling. But the exaltation almost instantly became calm, when
+the course of the story necessarily drew the writer into dealings with
+objective facts, even muffled as they were by memory and imagination.
+The broodings over old reminiscence soothed him, the labour of
+composition occupied him, and he forgot, as the modern reader would
+never know from internal evidence, that he was preparing a vindication
+of his life and character against the infamies with which Hume and
+others were supposed to be industriously blackening them. While he was
+writing this famous composition, severed by so vast a gulf from the
+modes of English provincial life, he was on good terms with one or two
+of the great people in his neighbourhood, and kept up a gracious and
+social correspondence with them. He was greatly pleased by a
+compliment that was paid to him by the government, apparently through
+the interest of General Conway. The duty that had been paid upon
+certain boxes forwarded to Rousseau from Switzerland was recouped by
+the treasury,[376] and the arrangements for the annual pension of one
+hundred pounds were concluded and accepted by him, after he had duly
+satisfied himself that Hume was not the indirect author of the
+benefaction.[377] The weather was the worst possible, but whenever it
+allowed him to go out of doors, he found delight in climbing the
+heights around him in search of curious mosses; for he had now come to
+think the discovery of a single new plant a hundred times more useful
+than to have the whole human race listening to your sermons for half a
+century.[378] "This indolent and contemplative life that you do not
+approve," he wrote to the elder Mirabeau, "and for which I pretend to
+make no excuses, becomes every day more delicious to me: to wander
+alone among the trees and rocks that surround my dwelling; to muse or
+rather to extravagate at my ease, and as you say to stand gaping in
+the air; when my brain gets too hot, to calm it by dissecting some
+moss or fern; in short, to surrender myself without restraint to my
+phantasies, which, heaven be thanked, are all under my own
+control,--all that is for me the height of enjoyment, to which I can
+imagine nothing superior in this world for a man of my age and in my
+condition."[379]
+
+This contentment did not last long. The snow kept him indoors. The
+excitement of composition abated. Theresa harassed him by ignoble
+quarrels with the women in the kitchen. His delusions returned with
+greater force than before. He believed that the whole English nation
+was in a plot against him, that all his letters were opened before
+reaching London and before leaving it, that all his movements were
+closely watched, and that he was surrounded by unseen guards to
+prevent any attempt at escape.[380] At length these delusions got such
+complete mastery over him, that in a paroxysm of terror he fled away
+from Wootton, leaving money, papers, and all else behind him. Nothing
+was heard of him for a fortnight, when Mr. Davenport received a letter
+from him dated at Spalding in Lincolnshire. Mr. Davenport's conduct
+throughout was marked by a humanity and patience that do him the
+highest honour. He confesses himself "quite moved to read poor
+Rousseau's mournful epistle." "You shall see his letter," he writes to
+Hume, "the first opportunity; but God help him, I can't for pity give
+a copy; and 'tis so much mixed with his own poor little private
+concerns, that it would not be right in me to do it."[381] This is
+the generosity which makes Hume's impatience and that of his
+mischievous advisers in Paris appear petty. Rousseau had behaved quite
+as ill to Mr. Davenport as he had done to Hume, and had received at
+least equal services from him.[382] The good man at once sent a
+servant to Spalding in search of his unhappy guest, but Rousseau had
+again disappeared. The parson of the parish had passed several hours
+of each day in his company, and had found him cheerful and
+good-humoured. He had had a blue coat made for himself, and had
+written a long letter to the lord chancellor, praying him to appoint a
+guard, at Rousseau's own expense, to escort him in safety out of the
+kingdom where enemies were plotting against his life.[383] He was next
+heard of at Dover (May 18), whence he wrote a letter to General
+Conway, setting forth his delusion in full form.[384] He is the victim
+of a plot; the conspirators will not allow him to leave the island,
+lest he should divulge in other countries the outrages to which he has
+been subjected here; he perceives the sinister manoeuvres that will
+arrest him if he attempts to put his foot on board ship. But he warns
+them that his tragical disappearance cannot take place without
+creating inquiry. Still if General Conway will only let him go, he
+gives his word of honour that he will not publish a line of the
+memoirs he has written, nor ever divulge the wrongs which he has
+suffered in England. "I see my last hour approaching," he concluded;
+"I am determined, if necessary, to advance to meet it, and to perish
+or be free; there is no longer any other alternative." On the same
+evening on which he wrote this letter (about May 20-22), the forlorn
+creature took boat and landed at Calais, where he seems at once to
+have recovered his composure and a right mind.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[350] Jan. 1766--May 1767.
+
+[351] Streckeisen, ii. 275, etc. _Corr._, iii.
+
+[352] Burton, ii. 299.
+
+[353] The materials for this chapter are taken from Rousseau's
+_Correspondence_ (vols. iv. and v.), and from Hume's letters to
+various persons, given in the second volume of Mr. Burton's _Life of
+Hume_. Everybody who takes an interest in Rousseau is indebted to Mr.
+Burton for the ample documents which he has provided. Yet one cannot
+but regret the satire on Rousseau with which he intersperses them, and
+which is not always felicitous. For one instance, he implies (p. 295)
+that Rousseau invented the story given in the Confessions, of Hume's
+correcting the proofs of Wallace's book against himself. The story may
+be true or not, but at any rate Rousseau had it very circumstantially
+from Lord Marischal; see letter from Lord M. to J.J.R., in
+Streckeisen, ii. 67. Again, such an expression as Rousseau's
+"_occasional_ attention to small matters" (p. 321) only shows that the
+writer has not read Rousseau's letters, which are indeed not worth
+reading, except by those who wish to have a right to speak about
+Rousseau's character. The numerous pamphlets on the quarrel between
+Hume and Rousseau, if I may judge from those of them which I have
+turned over, really shed no light on the matter, though they added
+much heat. For the journey, see _Corr._, iv. 307; Burton, ii. 304.
+
+[354] _Letter to a Member of the National Assembly._ The same passage
+contains some strong criticism on Rousseau's style.
+
+[355] Burton, 304, 309, 310.
+
+[356] _Ib._ ii. 309, _n._
+
+[357] Mr. Howitt has given an account of Rousseau's quarters at
+Wootton, in his _Visits to Remarkable Places_. One or two aged
+peasants had some confused memory of "old Ross-hall." For Rousseau's
+own description, see his letters to Mdme. de Luze, May 10, 1766.
+_Corr._, iv. 326.
+
+[358] Burton, 313. It has been stated that Rousseau never paid this;
+at any rate when he fled, he left between thirty and forty pounds in
+Mr. Davenport's hands. See Davenport to Hume; Burton, 367. Rousseau's
+accurate probity in affairs of money is absolutely unimpeachable.
+
+[359] _Corr._ iv. 312. April 9, 1766.
+
+[360] Here is a translation of this rather poor piece of sarcasm:--"My
+dear Jean Jacques--You have renounced Geneva, your native place. You
+have caused your expulsion from Switzerland, a country so extolled in
+your writings; France has issued a warrant against you; so do you come
+to me. I admire your talents; I am amused by your dreamings, though
+let me tell you they absorb you too much and for too long. You must at
+length be sober and happy; you have caused enough talk about yourself
+by oddities which in truth are hardly becoming a really great man.
+Prove to your enemies that you can now and then have common sense.
+That will annoy them and do you no harm. My states offer you a
+peaceful retreat. I wish you well, and will treat you well, if you
+will let me. But if you persist in refusing my help, do not reckon
+upon my telling any one that you did so. If you are bent on tormenting
+your spirit to find new misfortunes, choose whatever you like best. I
+am a king, and can procure them for you at your pleasure; and what
+will certainly never happen to you in respect of your enemies, I will
+cease to persecute you as soon as you cease to take a pride in being
+persecuted. Your good friend, FREDERICK."
+
+[361] _Corr._, iv. 313, 343, 388, 398.
+
+[362] _Ib._ 395.
+
+[363] _Ib._ 389, etc.
+
+[364] _Ib._ 384.
+
+[365] _Ib._ 343, 344, 387, etc.
+
+[366] _Corr._, iv. 346.
+
+[367] _Ib._ 390. A letter from Hume to Blair, long before the rupture
+overt, shows the former to have been by no means so phlegmatic on this
+occasion as he may have seemed. "I hope," he writes, "you have not so
+bad an opinion of me as to think I was not melted on this occasion; I
+assure you I kissed him and embraced him twenty times, with a
+plentiful effusion of tears. I think no scene of my life was ever more
+affecting." Burton, ii. 315. The great doubters of the eighteenth
+century could without fear have accepted the test of the ancient
+saying, that men without tears are worth little.
+
+[368] Bernardin de St. Pierre, _Oeuv._, xii. 79.
+
+[369] Walpole's _Letters_, v. 7 (Cunningham's edition). For other
+letters from the shrewd coxcomb on the same matter, see pp. 23-28. A
+corroboration of the statement that Hume knew nothing of the letter
+until he was in England, may be inferred from what he wrote to Madame
+de Boufflers; Burton, ii. 306, and _n._ 2.
+
+[370] Bernardin de St. Pierre, _Oeuv._, xii. 79.
+
+[371] To Adam Smith. Burton, 380.
+
+[372] Burton, 381.
+
+[373] A very common but random opinion traces Rousseau's insanity to
+certain disagreeable habits avowed in the Confessions. They may have
+contributed in some small degree to depression of vital energies,
+though for that matter Rousseau's strength and power of endurance were
+remarkable to the end. But they certainly did not produce a mental
+state in the least corresponding to that particular variety of
+insanity, which possesses definitely marked features.
+
+[374] Burton, ii. 314.
+
+[375] For an instructive and, as it appears to me, a thoroughly
+trustworthy account of the temper in which the Confessions were
+written, see the 4th of the _Reveries_.
+
+[376] Letter to the Duke of Grafton, Feb. 27, 1767. _Corr._, v. 98:
+also 118.
+
+[377] _Ib._ v. 133; also to General Conway (March 26), p. 137, etc.
+
+[378] _Corr._, v. 37.
+
+[379] _Corr._, v. 88.
+
+[380] See the letters to Du Peyrou, of the 2d and 4th of April 1767.
+_Corr._, v. 140-147.
+
+[381] Davenport to Hume; Burton, 367-371.
+
+[382] J.J.R. to Davenport, Dec. 22, 1766, and April 30, 1767. _Corr._,
+v. 66, 152.
+
+[383] Burton, 369, 375.
+
+[384] _Corr._, v. 153.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+THE END.
+
+
+Before leaving England, Rousseau had received more than one
+long and rambling letter from a man who was as unlike the rest of
+mankind as he was unlike them himself. This was the Marquis of
+Mirabeau (1715-89), the violent, tyrannical, pedantic, humoristic sire
+of a more famous son. Perhaps we might say that Mirabeau and Rousseau
+were the two most singular originals then known to men, and Mirabeau's
+originality was in some respects the more salient of the two. There is
+less of the conventional tone of the eighteenth century Frenchman in
+him than in any other conspicuous man of the time, though like many
+other headstrong and despotic souls he picked up the current notions
+of philanthropy and human brotherhood. He really was by very force of
+temperament that rebel against the narrowness, trimness, and moral
+formalism of the time which Rousseau only claimed and attempted to be,
+with the secondary degree of success that follows vehemence without
+native strength. Mirabeau was a sort of Swift, who had strangely taken
+up the trade of friendship for man and adopted the phrases of
+perfectibility; while Rousseau on the other hand was meant for a
+Fenelon, save that he became possessed of unclean devils.
+
+Mirabeau, like Jean Jacques himself, was so impressed by the marked
+tenor of contemporary feeling, its prudential didactics, its
+formulistic sociality, that his native insurgency only found vent in
+private life, while in public he played pedagogue to the human race.
+Friend of Quesnai and orthodox economist as he was, he delighted in
+Rousseau's books: "I know no morality that goes deeper than yours; it
+strikes like a thunderbolt, and advances with the steady assurance of
+truth, for you are always true, according to your notions for the
+moment." He wrote to tell him so, but he told him at the same time at
+great length, and with a caustic humour and incoherency less academic
+than Rabelaisian, that he had behaved absurdly in his quarrel with
+Hume. There is nothing more quaint than the appearance of a few of the
+sacramental phrases of the sect of the economists, floating in the
+midst of a copious stream of egoistic whimsicalities. He concludes
+with a diverting enumeration of all his country seats and demesnes,
+with their respective advantages and disadvantages, and prays Rousseau
+to take up his residence in whichever of them may please him
+best.[385]
+
+Immediately on landing at Calais Rousseau informed Mirabeau, and
+Mirabeau lost no time in conveying him stealthily, for the warrant of
+the parliament of Paris was still in force, to a house at Fleury. But
+the Friend of Men, to use his own account of himself, "bore letters as
+a plum-tree bears plums," and wrote to his guest with strange
+humoristic volubility and droll imperturbable temper, as one who knew
+his Jean Jacques. He exhorts him in many sheets to harden himself
+against excessive sensibility, to be less pusillanimous, to take
+society more lightly, as his own light estimate of its worth should
+lead him to do. "No doubt its outside is a shifting surface-picture,
+nay even ridiculous, if you will; but if the irregular and ceaseless
+flight of butterflies wearies you in your walk, it is your own fault
+for looking continuously at what was only made to adorn and vary the
+scene. But how many social virtues, how much gentleness and
+considerateness, how many benevolent actions, remain at the bottom of
+it all."[386] Enormous manifestoes of the doctrine of perfectibility
+were not in the least degree either soothing or interesting to
+Rousseau, and the thrusts of shrewd candour at his expense might touch
+his fancy on a single occasion, but not oftener. Two humorists are
+seldom successful in amusing one another. Besides, Mirabeau insisted
+that Jean Jacques should read this or that of his books. Rousseau
+answered that he would try, but warned him of the folly of it. "I do
+not engage always to follow what you say, because it has always been
+painful to me to think, and fatiguing to follow the thoughts of other
+people, and at present I cannot do so at all."[387] Though they
+continued to be good friends, Rousseau only remained three or four
+weeks at Fleury. His old acquaintance at Montmorency, the Prince of
+Conti, partly perhaps from contrition at the rather unchivalrous
+fashion in which his great friends had hustled the philosopher away at
+the time of the decree of the parliament of Paris, offered him refuge
+at one of his country seats at Trye near Gisors. Here he installed
+Rousseau under the name of Renou, either to silence the indiscreet
+curiosity of neighbours, or to gratify a whim of Rousseau himself.
+
+Rousseau remained for a year (June 1767-June 1768), composing the
+second part of the Confessions, in a condition of extreme mental
+confusion. Dusky phantoms walked with him once more. He knew the
+gardener, the servants, the neighbours, all to be in the pay of Hume,
+and that he was watched day and night with a view to his
+destruction.[388] He entirely gave up either reading or writing, save
+a very small number of letters, and he declared that to take up the
+pen even for these was like lifting a load of iron. The only interest
+he had was botany, and for this his passion became daily more intense.
+He appears to have been as contented as a child, so long as he could
+employ himself in long expeditions in search of new plants, in
+arranging a herbarium, in watching the growth of the germ of some rare
+seed which needed careful tending. But the story had once more the
+same conclusion. He fled from Trye, as he had fled from Wootton. He
+meant apparently to go to Chamberi, drawn by the deep magnetic force
+of old memories that seemed long extinct. But at Grenoble on his way
+thither he encountered a substantial grievance. A man alleged that he
+had lent Rousseau a few francs seven years previously. He was
+undoubtedly mistaken, and was fully convicted of his mistake by proper
+authorities, but Rousseau's correspondents suffered none the less for
+that. We all know when monomania seizes a man, how adroitly and how
+eagerly it colours every incident. The mistaken claim was proof
+demonstrative of that frightful and tenebrous conspiracy, which they
+might have thought a delusion hitherto, but which, alas, this showed
+to be only too tragically real; and so on, through many pages of
+droning wretchedness.[389] Then we find him at Bourgoin, where he
+spent some months in shabby taverns, and then many months more at
+Monquin on adjoining uplands.[390] The estrangement from Theresa, of
+which enough has been said already,[391] was added to his other
+torments. He resolved, as so many of the self-tortured have done
+since, to go in search of happiness to the western lands beyond the
+Atlantic, where the elixir of bliss is thought by the wearied among us
+to be inexhaustible and assured. Almost in the same page he turns his
+face eastwards, and dreams of ending his days peacefully among the
+islands of the Grecian archipelago. Next he gravely, not only
+designed, but actually took measures, to return to Wootton. All was no
+more than the momentary incoherent purpose of a sick man's dream, the
+weary distraction of one who had deliberately devoted himself to
+isolation from his fellows, without first sitting down carefully to
+count the cost, or to measure the inner resources which he possessed
+to meet the deadly strain that isolation puts on every one of a man's
+mental fibres. Geographical loneliness is to some a condition of their
+fullest strength, but most of the few who dare to make a moral
+solitude for themselves, find that they have assuredly not made peace.
+Such solitude, as South said of the study of the Apocalypse, either
+finds a man mad, or leaves him so. Not all can play the stoic who
+will, and it is still more certain that one who like Rousseau has lain
+down with the doctrine that in all things imaginable it is impossible
+for him to do at all what he cannot do with pleasure, will end in a
+condition of profound and hopeless impotence in respect to pleasure
+itself.
+
+In July 1770, he made his way to Paris, and here he remained eight
+years longer, not without the introduction of a certain degree of
+order into his outer life, though the clouds of vague suspicion and
+distrust, half bitter, half mournful, hung heavily as ever upon his
+mind. The Dialogues, which he wrote at this period (1775-76) to
+vindicate his memory from the defamation that was to be launched in a
+dark torrent upon the world at the moment of his death, could not
+possibly have been written by a man in his right mind. Yet the best of
+the Musings, which were written still nearer the end, are masterpieces
+in the style of contemplative prose. The third, the fifth, the
+seventh, especially abound in that even, full, mellow gravity of tone
+which is so rare in literature, because the deep absorption of spirit
+which is its source is so rare in life. They reveal Rousseau to us
+with a truth beyond that attained in any of his other pieces--a
+mournful sombre figure, looming shadowily in the dark glow of sundown
+among sad and desolate places. There is nothing like them in the
+French tongue, which is the speech of the clear, the cheerful, or the
+august among men; nothing like this sonorous plainsong, the strangely
+melodious expression in the music of prose of a darkened spirit which
+yet had imaginative visions of beatitude.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It is interesting to look on one or two pictures of the last waste and
+obscure years of the man, whose words were at this time silently
+fermenting for good and for evil in many spirits--a Schiller, a
+Herder, a Jeanne Phlipon, a Robespierre, a Gabriel Mirabeau, and many
+hundreds of those whose destiny was not to lead, but ingenuously to
+follow. Rousseau seems to have repulsed nearly all his ancient
+friends, and to have settled down with dogged resolve to his old trade
+of copying music. In summer he rose at five, copied music until
+half-past seven; munched his breakfast, arranging on paper during the
+process such plants as he had gathered the previous afternoon; then he
+returned to his work, dined at half-past twelve, and went forth to
+take coffee at some public place. He would not return from his walk
+until nightfall, and he retired at half-past ten. The pavements of
+Paris were hateful to him because they tore his feet, and, said he,
+with deeply significant antithesis, "I am not afraid of death, but I
+dread pain." He always found his way as fast as possible to one of the
+suburbs, and one of his greatest delights was to watch Mont Valerien
+in the sunset. "Atheists," he said calumniously, "do not love the
+country; they like the environs of Paris, where you have all the
+pleasures of the city, good cheer, books, pretty women; but if you
+take these things away, then they die of weariness." The note of every
+bird held him attentive, and filled his mind with delicious images. A
+graceful story is told of two swallows who made a nest in Rousseau's
+sleeping-room, and hatched the eggs there. "I was no more than a
+doorkeeper for them," he said, "for I kept opening the window for them
+every moment. They used to fly with a great stir round my head, until
+I had fulfilled the duties of the tacit convention between these
+swallows and me."
+
+In January 1771, Bernardin de St. Pierre, author of the immortal _Paul
+and Virginia_ (1788), finding himself at the Cape of Good Hope, wrote
+to a friend in France just previously to his return to Europe,
+counting among other delights that of seeing two summers in one
+year.[392] Rousseau happened to see the letter, and expressed a desire
+to make the acquaintance of a man who in returning home should think
+of that as one of his chief pleasures. To this we owe the following
+pictures of an interior from St. Pierre's hand:--
+
+     In the month of June in 1772, a friend having offered to
+     take me to see Jean Jacques Rousseau, he brought me to a
+     house in the Rue Platriere, nearly opposite to the Hotel de
+     la Poste. We mounted to the fourth story. We knocked, and
+     Madame Rousseau opened the door. "Come in, gentlemen," she
+     said, "you will find my husband." We passed through a very
+     small antechamber, where the household utensils were neatly
+     arranged, and from that into a room where Jean Jacques was
+     seated in an overcoat and a white cap, busy copying music.
+     He rose with a smiling face, offered us chairs, and resumed
+     his work, at the same time taking a part in conversation. He
+     was thin and of middle height. One shoulder struck me as
+     rather higher than the other ... otherwise he was very well
+     proportioned. He had a brown complexion, some colour on his
+     cheek-bones, a good mouth, a well-made nose, a rounded and
+     lofty brow, and eyes full of fire. The oblique lines falling
+     from the nostrils to the extremity of the lips, and marking
+     a physiognomy, in his case expressed great sensibility and
+     something even painful. One observed in his face three or
+     four of the characteristics of melancholy--the deep receding
+     eyes and the elevation of the eyebrows; you saw profound
+     sadness in the wrinkles of the brow; a keen and even caustic
+     gaiety in a thousand little creases at the corners of the
+     eyes, of which the orbits entirely disappeared when he
+     laughed.... Near him was a spinette on which from time to
+     time he tried an air. Two little beds of blue and white
+     striped calico, a table, and a few chairs, made the stock of
+     his furniture. On the walls hung a plan of the forest and
+     park of Montmorency, where he had once lived, and an
+     engraving of the King of England, his old benefactor. His
+     wife was sitting mending linen; a canary sang in a cage hung
+     from the ceiling; sparrows came for crumbs on to the sills
+     of the windows, which on the side of the street were open;
+     while in the window of the antechamber we noticed boxes and
+     pots filled with such plants as it pleases nature to sow.
+     There was in the whole effect of his little establishment an
+     air of cleanness, peace, and simplicity, which was
+     delightful.
+
+A few days after, Rousseau returned the visit. "He wore a round wig,
+well powdered and curled, carrying a hat under his arm, and in a full
+suit of nankeen. His whole exterior was modest, but extremely neat."
+He expressed his passion for good coffee, saying that this and ice
+were the only two luxuries for which he cared. St. Pierre happened to
+have brought some from the Isle of Bourbon, so on the following day he
+rashly sent Rousseau a small packet, which at first produced a polite
+letter of thanks; but the day after the letter of thanks came one of
+harsh protest against the ignominy of receiving presents which could
+not be returned, and bidding the unfortunate donor to choose between
+taking his coffee back or never seeing his new friend again. A fair
+bargain was ultimately arranged, St. Pierre receiving in exchange for
+his coffee some curious root or other, and a book on ichthyology.
+Immediately afterwards he went to dine with his sage. He arrived at
+eleven in the forenoon, and they conversed until half-past twelve.
+
+     Then his wife laid the cloth. He took a bottle of wine, and
+     as he put it on the table, asked whether we should have
+     enough, or if I was fond of drinking. "How many are there of
+     us," said I. "Three," he said; "you, my wife, and myself."
+     "Well," I went on, "when I drink wine and am alone, I drink
+     a good half-bottle, and I drink a trifle more when I am with
+     friends." "In that case," he answered, "we shall not have
+     enough; I must go down into the cellar." He brought up a
+     second bottle. His wife served two dishes, one of small
+     tarts, and another which was covered. He said, showing me
+     the first, "That is your dish and the other is mine." "I
+     don't eat much pastry," I said, "but I hope to be allowed to
+     taste what you have got." "Oh, they are both common," he
+     replied; "but most people don't care for this. 'Tis a Swiss
+     dish; a compound of lard, mutton, vegetables, and
+     chestnuts." It was excellent. After these two dishes, we had
+     slices of beef in salad; then biscuits and cheese; after
+     which his wife served the coffee.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+     One morning when I was at his house, I saw various domestics
+     either coming for rolls of music, or bringing them to him to
+     copy. He received them standing and uncovered. He said to
+     some, "The price is so much," and received the money; to
+     others, "How soon must I return my copy?" "My mistress would
+     like to have it back in a fortnight." "Oh, that's out of the
+     question: I have work, I can't do it in less than three
+     weeks." I inquired why he did not take his talents to better
+     market. "Ah," he answered, "there are two Rousseaus in the
+     world; one rich, or who might have been if he had chosen; a
+     man capricious, singular, fantastic; this is the Rousseau of
+     the public; the other is obliged to work for his living, the
+     Rousseau whom you see."[393]
+
+They often took long rambles together, and all proceeded most
+harmoniously, unless St. Pierre offered to pay for such refreshment as
+they might take, when a furious explosion was sure to follow. Here is
+one more picture, without explosion.
+
+     _An Easter Monday Excursion to Mont Valerien._
+
+     We made an appointment at a cafe in the Champs Elysees. In
+     the morning we took some chocolate. The wind was westerly,
+     and the air fresh. The sun was surrounded by white clouds,
+     spread in masses over an azure sky. Reaching the Bois de
+     Boulogne by eight o'clock, Jean Jacques set to work
+     botanising. As he collected his little harvest, we kept
+     walking along. We had gone through part of the wood, when in
+     the midst of the solitude we perceived two young girls, one
+     of whom was arranging the other's hair.--[Reminded them of
+     some verses of Virgil.]....
+
+     Arrived on the edge of the river, we crossed the ferry with
+     a number of people whom devotion was taking to Mont
+     Valerien. We climbed an extremely stiff slope, and were
+     hardly on the top before hunger overtook us and we began to
+     think of dining. Rousseau then led the way towards a
+     hermitage, where he knew we could make sure of hospitality.
+     The brother who opened to us, conducted us to the chapel,
+     where they were reciting the litanies of providence, which
+     are extremely beautiful.... When we had prayed, Jean Jacques
+     said to me with genuine feeling: "Now I feel what is said in
+     the gospel, 'Where several of you are gathered together in
+     my name, there will I be in the midst of them.' There is a
+     sentiment of peace and comfort here that penetrates the
+     soul." I replied, "If Fenelon were alive, you would be a
+     Catholic." "Ah," said he, the tears in his eyes, "if Fenelon
+     were alive, I would seek to be his lackey."
+
+     Presently we were introduced into the refectory; we seated
+     ourselves during the reading. The subject was the injustice
+     of the complainings of man: God has brought him from
+     nothing, he oweth him nothing. After the reading, Rousseau
+     said to me in a voice of deep emotion: "Ah, how happy is the
+     man who can believe...." We walked about for some time in
+     the cloister and the gardens. They command an immense
+     prospect. Paris in the distance reared her towers all
+     covered with light, and made a crown to the far-spreading
+     landscape. The brightness of the view contrasted with the
+     great leaden clouds that rolled after one another from the
+     west, and seemed to fill the valley.... In the afternoon
+     rain came on, as we approached the Porte Maillot. We took
+     shelter along with a crowd of other holiday folk under some
+     chestnut-trees whose leaves were coming out. One of the
+     waiters of a tavern perceiving Jean Jacques, rushed to him
+     full of joy, exclaiming, "What, is it you, _mon bonhomme_?
+     Why, it is a whole age since we have seen you." Rousseau
+     replied cheerfully, "'Tis because my wife has been ill, and
+     I myself have been out of sorts." "_Mon pauvre bonhomme_,"
+     replied the lad, "you must not stop here; come in, come in,
+     and I will find room for you." He hurried us along to a room
+     upstairs, where in spite of the crowd he procured for us
+     chairs and a table, and bread and wine. I said to Jean
+     Jacques, "He seems very familiar with you." He answered,
+     "Yes, we have known one another some years. We used to come
+     here in fine weather, my wife and I, to eat a cutlet of an
+     evening."[394]
+
+Things did not continue to go thus smoothly. One day St. Pierre went
+to see him, and was received without a word, and with stiff and gloomy
+mien. He tried to talk, but only got monosyllables; he took up a book,
+and this drew a sarcasm which sent him forth from the room. For more
+than two months they did not meet. At length they had an accidental
+encounter at a street corner. Rousseau accosted St. Pierre, and with a
+gradually warming sensibility proceeded thus: "There are days when I
+want to be alone and crave privacy. I come back from my solitary
+expeditions so calm and contented. There I have not been wanting to
+anybody, nor has anybody been wanting to me," and so on.[395] He
+expressed this humour more pointedly on some other occasion, when he
+said that there were times in which he fled from the eyes of men as
+from Parthian arrows. As one said who knew from experience, the fate
+of his most intimate friend depended on a word or a gesture.[396]
+Another of them declared that he knew Rousseau's style of discarding a
+friend by letter so thoroughly, that he felt confident he could supply
+Rousseau's place in case of illness or absence.[397] In much of this
+we suspect that the quarrel was perfectly justified. Sociality meant a
+futile display before unworthy and condescending curiosity. "It is not
+I whom they care for," he very truly said, "but public opinion and
+talk about me, without a thought of what real worth I may have." Hence
+his steadfast refusal to go out to dine or sup. The mere impertinence
+of the desire to see him was illustrated by some coxcombs who insisted
+with a famous actress of his acquaintance, that she should invite the
+strange philosopher to meet them. She was aware that no known force
+would persuade Rousseau to come, so she dressed up her tailor as
+philosopher, bade him keep a silent tongue, and vanish suddenly
+without a word of farewell. The tailor was long philosophically
+silent, and by the time that wine had loosened his tongue, the rest of
+the company were too far gone to perceive that the supposed Rousseau
+was chattering vulgar nonsense.[398] We can believe that with admirers
+of this stamp Rousseau was well pleased to let tailors or others stand
+in his place. There were some, however, of a different sort, who
+flitted across his sight and then either vanished of their own accord,
+or were silently dismissed, from Madame de Genlis up to Gretry and
+Gluck. With Gluck he seems to have quarrelled for setting his music to
+French words, when he must have known that Italian was the only tongue
+fit for music.[399] Yet it was remarked that no one ever heard him
+speak ill of others. His enemies, the figures of his delusion, were
+vaguely denounced in many dronings, but they remained in dark shadow
+and were unnamed. When Voltaire paid his famous last visit to the
+capital (1778), some one thought of paying court to Rousseau by making
+a mock of the triumphal reception of the old warrior, but Rousseau
+harshly checked the detractor. It is true that in 1770-71 he gave to
+some few of his acquaintances one or more readings of the Confessions,
+although they contained much painful matter for many people still
+living, among the rest for Madame d'Epinay. She wrote justifiably
+enough to the lieutenant of police, praying that all such readings
+might be prohibited, and it is believed that they were so
+prohibited.[400]
+
+In 1769, when Polish anarchy was at its height, as if to show at once
+how profound the anarchy was, and how profound the faith among many
+minds in the power of the new French theories, an application was made
+to Mably to draw up a scheme for the renovation of distracted Poland.
+Mably's notions won little esteem from the persons who had sought for
+them, and in 1771 a similar application was made to Rousseau in his
+Parisian garret. He replied in the Considerations on the Government of
+Poland, which are written with a good deal of vigour of expression,
+but contain nothing that needs further discussion. He hinted to the
+Poles with some shrewdness that a curtailment of their territory by
+their neighbours was not far off,[401] and the prediction was rapidly
+fulfilled by the first partition of Poland in the following year.
+
+He was asked one day of what nation he had the highest opinion. He
+answered, the Spanish. The Spanish nation, he said, has a character;
+if it is not rich, it still preserves all its pride and self-respect
+in the midst of its poverty; and it is animated by a single spirit,
+for it has not been scourged by the conflicting opinions of
+philosophy.[402]
+
+He was extremely poor for these last eight years of his life. He seems
+to have drawn the pension which George III. had settled on him, for
+not more than one year. We do not know why he refused to receive it
+afterwards. A well-meaning friend, when the arrears amounted to
+between six and seven thousand francs, applied for it on his behalf,
+and a draft for the money was sent. Rousseau gave the offender a
+vigorous rebuke for meddling in affairs that did not concern him, and
+the draft was destroyed. Other attempts to induce him to draw this
+money failed equally.[403] Yet he had only about fifty pounds a year
+to live on, together with the modest amount which he earned by copying
+music.[404]
+
+The sting of indigence began to make itself felt towards 1777. His
+health became worse and he could not work. Theresa was waxing old, and
+could no longer attend to the small cares of the household. More than
+one person offered them shelter and provision, and the old
+distractions as to a home in which to end his days began once again.
+At length M. Girardin prevailed upon him to come and live at
+Ermenonville, one of his estates some twenty miles from Paris. A dense
+cloud of obscure misery hangs over the last months of this forlorn
+existence.[405] No tragedy had ever a fifth act so squalid. Theresa's
+character seems to have developed into something truly bestial.
+Rousseau's terrors of the designs of his enemies returned with great
+violence. He thought he was imprisoned, and he knew that he had no
+means of escape. One day (July 2, 1778), suddenly and without a single
+warning symptom, all drew to an end; the sensations which had been the
+ruling part of his life were affected by pleasure and pain no more,
+the dusky phantoms all vanished into space. The surgeons reported that
+the cause of his death was apoplexy, but a suspicion has haunted the
+world ever since, that he destroyed himself by a pistol-shot. We
+cannot tell. There is no inherent improbability in the fact of his
+having committed suicide. In the New Heloisa he had thrown the
+conditions which justified self-destruction into a distinct formula.
+Fifteen years before, he declared that his own case fell within the
+conditions which he had prescribed, and that he was meditating
+action.[406] Only seven years before, he had implied that a man had
+the right to deliver himself of the burden of his own life, if its
+miseries were intolerable and irremediable.[407] This, however, counts
+for nothing in the absence of some kind of positive evidence, and of
+that there is just enough to leave the manner of his end a little
+doubtful.[408] Once more, we cannot tell.
+
+By the serene moonrise of a summer night, his body was put under the
+ground on an island in the midst of a small lake, where poplars throw
+shadows over the still water, silently figuring the destiny of
+mortals. Here it remained for sixteen years. Then amid the roar of
+cannon, the crash of trumpet and drum, and the wild acclamations of a
+populace gone mad in exultation, terror, fury, it was ordered that the
+poor dust should be transported to the national temple of great men.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[385] Streckeisen, ii. 315-328.
+
+[386] Streckeisen, ii. 337.
+
+[387] June 19, 1767. _Corr._, v. 172.
+
+[388] _Corr._, v. 267, 375.
+
+[389] _Corr._, v. 330-381, 408, etc.
+
+[390] Bourgoin, Aug. 1768, to March, 1769. Monquin, to July 1770.
+
+[391] See above, vol. i. chap. iv.
+
+[392] The life of Bernardin de St. Pierre (1737-1814) was nearly as
+irregular as that of his friend and master. But his character was
+essentially crafty and selfish, like that of many other
+sentimentalists of the first order.
+
+[393] _Oeuv._, xii. 69, 73.
+
+[394] _Oeuv._, xii. 104, etc.; and also the _Preambule de l'Arcadie_,
+_Oeuv._, vii. 64, 65.
+
+[395] St. Pierre, xii. 81-83.
+
+[396] Dusaulx, p. 81. For his quarrel with Rousseau, see pp. 130, etc.
+
+[397] Rulhieres in Dusaulx, p. 179. For a strange interview between
+Rulhieres and Rousseau, see pp. 185-186.
+
+[398] Musset-Pathay, i. 181.
+
+[399] _Ib._
+
+[400] Musset-Pathay, i. 209. Rousseau gave a copy of the Confessions
+to Moultou, but forbade the publication before the year 1800.
+Notwithstanding this, printers procured copies surreptitiously,
+perhaps through Theresa, ever in need of money; the first part was
+published four years, and the second part with many suppressions
+eleven years, after his death, in 1782 and 1789 respectively. See
+Musset-Pathay, ii. 464.
+
+[401] Ch. v. Such a curtailment, he says, "would no doubt be a great
+evil for the parts dismembered, but it would be a great advantage for
+the body of the nation." He urged federation as the condition of any
+solid improvement in their affairs.
+
+[402] Bernardin de St. Pierre, xii. 37. Comte had a similar admiration
+for Spain and for the same reason.
+
+[403] Corancez, quoted in Musset-Pathay, i. 239. Also _Corr._, vi.
+295.
+
+[404] _Corr._, vi. 303.
+
+[405] Robespierre, then a youth, is said to have invited him here. See
+Hamel's _Robespierre_, i. 22.
+
+[406] See above, vol. i. pp. 16, 17.
+
+[407] _Corr._, vi. 264.
+
+[408] The case stands thus:--(1) There was the certificate of five
+doctors, attesting that Rousseau had died of apoplexy. (2) The
+assertion of M. Girardin, in whose house he died, that there was no
+hole in his head, nor poison in the stomach or viscera, nor other sign
+of self-destruction. (3) The assertion of Theresa to the same effect.
+On the other hand, we have the assertion of Corancez, that on his
+journey to Ermenonville on the day of Rousseau's burial a horse-master
+on the road had said, "Who would have supposed that M. Rousseau would
+have destroyed himself!"--and a variety of inferences from the wording
+of the certificate, and of Theresa's letter. Musset-Pathay believes in
+the suicide, and argued very ingeniously against M. Girardin. But his
+arguments do not go far beyond verbal ingenuity, showing that suicide
+was possible, and was consistent with the language of the documents,
+rather than adducing positive testimony. See vol. i. of his _History_,
+pp. 268, etc. The controversy was resumed as late as 1861, between the
+_Figaro_ and the _Monde Illustre_. See also M. Jal's _Dict. Crit. de
+Biog. et d'Hist._, p. 1091.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX.
+
+
+ACADEMIES (French) local, i. 132.
+
+Academy, of Dijon, Rousseau writes essays for, i. 133;
+  French, prize essay against Rousseau's Discourse, i. 150, _n._
+
+Actors, how regarded in France in Rousseau's time, i. 322.
+
+Althusen, teaches doctrine of sovereignty of the people, ii. 147.
+
+America (U.S.), effects in, of the doctrine of the equality of men,
+     i. 182.
+
+American colonists indebted in eighteenth century to Rousseau's
+     writings, i. 3.
+
+Anchorite, distinction between the old and the new, i. 234.
+
+Annecy, i. 34, 50;
+  Rousseau's room at, i. 54;
+  Rousseau's teachers at, i. 56;
+  seminary at, i. 82.
+
+Aquinas, protest against juristical doctrine of law being the
+     pleasure of the prince, ii. 144, 145.
+
+Aristotle on Origin of Society, i. 174.
+
+Atheism, Rousseau's protest against, i. 208;
+  St. Lambert on, i. 209, _n._;
+  Robespierre's protest against, ii. 178;
+  Chaumette put to death for endeavouring to base the government of
+     France on, ii. 180.
+
+Augustine (of Hippo), ii. 272, 303.
+
+Austin, John, ii. 151, _n._;
+  on Sovereignty, ii. 162.
+
+Authors, difficulties of, in France in the eighteenth century, ii.
+     55-61.
+
+
+BABOEUF, on the Revolution, ii. 123, _n._
+
+Barbier, ii. 26.
+
+Basedow, his enthusiasm for Rousseau's educational theories, ii. 251.
+
+Beaumont, De, Archbishop of Paris, mandate against Rousseau issued
+     by, ii. 83;
+  argument from, ii. 86.
+
+Bernard, maiden name of Rousseau's mother, i. 10.
+
+Bienne, Rousseau driven to take refuge in island in lake of, ii.
+     108;
+  his account of, ii. 109-115.
+
+Bodin, on Government, ii. 147;
+  his definition of an aristocratic state, ii. 168, _n._
+
+Bonaparte, Napoleon, ii. 102, _n._
+
+Bossuet, on Stage Plays, i. 321.
+
+Boswell, James, ii. 98;
+  visits Rousseau, ii. 98, also _ib._ _n._;
+  urged by Rousseau to visit Corsica, ii. 100;
+  his letter to Rousseau, ii. 101.
+
+Boufflers, Madame de, ii. 5, _ib._ _n._
+
+Bougainville (brother of the navigator), i. 184, _n._
+
+Brutus, how Rousseau came to be panegyrist of, i. 187.
+
+Buffon, ii. 205.
+
+Burke, ii. 140, 192.
+
+Burnet, Bishop, on Genevese, i. 225.
+
+Burton, John Hill, his _Life of Hume_ (on Rousseau), ii. 283,
+     _n._
+
+Byron, Lord, antecedents of highest creative efforts, ii. 1;
+  effect of nature upon, ii. 40;
+  difference between and Rousseau, ii. 41.
+
+
+CALAS, i. 312.
+
+Calvin, i. 4, 189;
+  Rousseau on, as a legislator, ii. 131;
+  and Servetus, ii. 180;
+  mentioned, ii. 181.
+
+_Candide_, thought by Rousseau to be meant as a reply to him,
+     i. 319.
+
+Cardan, ii. 303.
+
+Cato, how Rousseau came to be his panegyrist, i. 187.
+
+Chamberi, probable date of Rousseau's return to, i. 62, _n._;
+  takes up his residence there, i. 69;
+  effect on his mind of a French column of troops passing through,
+     i. 72, 73;
+  his illness at, i. 73, _n._
+
+Charmettes, Les, Madame de Warens's residence, i. 73;
+  present condition of, i. 74, 75, _n._;
+  time spent there by Rousseau, i. 94.
+
+Charron, ii. 203.
+
+Chateaubriand, influenced by Rousseau, i. 3.
+
+Chatham, Lord, ii. 92.
+
+Chaumette, ii. 178;
+  guillotined on charge of endeavouring to establish atheism in
+     France, ii. 179.
+
+Chesterfield, Lord, ii. 15.
+
+Choiseul, ii. 57, 64, 72.
+
+Citizen, revolutionary use of word, derived from Rousseau, ii. 161.
+
+Civilisation, variety of the origin and process of, i. 176;
+  defects of, i. 176;
+  one of the worst trials of, ii. 102.
+
+Cobbett, ii. 42.
+
+Collier, Jeremy, on the English Stage, i. 323.
+
+Condillac, i. 95.
+
+Condorcet, i. 89;
+  on Social Position of Women, i. 335;
+  human perfectibility, ii. 119;
+  inspiration of, drawn from the school of Voltaire and Rousseau,
+     ii. 194;
+  belief of, in the improvement of humanity, ii. 246;
+  grievous mistake of, ii. 247.
+
+Confessions, the, not to be trusted for minute accuracy, i. 86,
+     _n._;
+  or for dates, i. 93;
+  first part written 1766, ii. 301;
+  their character, ii. 303;
+  published surreptitiously, ii. 324, _n._;
+  readings from, prohibited by police, ii. 324.
+
+Conti, Prince of, ii. 4-7;
+  receives Rousseau at Trye, ii. 118.
+
+Contract, Social, i. 136.
+
+Corsica, struggles for independence of, ii. 99;
+  Rousseau invited to legislate for, ii. 99-102;
+  bought by France, ii. 102.
+
+Cowper, i. 20;
+  ii. 41;
+  on Rousseau, ii. 41 _n._;
+  lines in the Task, ii. 253;
+  his delusions, ii. 301.
+
+Cynicism, Rousseau's assumption of, i. 206.
+
+
+D'AIGUILLON, ii. 72.
+
+D'Alembert, i. 89;
+  Voltaire's staunchest henchman, i. 321;
+  his article on Geneva, i. 321;
+  on Stage Plays, i. 326, _n._;
+  on Position of Women in Society, i. 335;
+  on Rousseau's letter on the Theatre, i. 336;
+  suspected by Rousseau of having written the pretended letter from
+     Frederick of Prussia, ii. 288;
+  advises Hume to publish account of Rousseau's quarrel with him,
+     ii. 294.
+
+D'Argenson, ii. 180.
+
+Dates of Rousseau's letters to be relied on, not those of the
+     Confessions, i. 93.
+
+Davenport, Mr., provides Rousseau with a home at Wootton, ii. 286;
+  his kindness to Rousseau, ii. 306.
+
+Deism, Rousseau's, ii. 260-275;
+  that of others, ii. 262-265;
+  shortcomings of Rousseau's, ii. 270.
+
+Democracy defined, ii. 168;
+  rejected by Rousseau, as too perfect for men, ii. 171.
+
+D'Epinay, Madame, i. 194, 195, 205;
+  gives the Hermitage to Rousseau, i. 229, _n._;
+  his quarrels with, i. 271;
+  his relations with, i. 273, 276;
+  journey to Geneva of, i. 284;
+  squabbles arising out of, between, and Rousseau, Diderot, and
+     Grimm, i. 285-290;
+  mentioned, ii. 7, 26, 197;
+  wrote on education, ii. 199;
+  applies to secretary of police to prohibit Rousseau's readings
+     from his Confessions, ii. 324.
+
+D'Epinay, Monsieur, i. 254; ii. 26.
+
+Descartes, i. 87, 225; ii. 267.
+
+Deux Ponts, Duc de, Rousseau's rude reply to, i. 207.
+
+D'Holbach, i. 192;
+  Rousseau's dislike of his materialistic friends, i. 223;
+     ii. 37, 256.
+
+D'Houdetot, Madame, i. 255-270;
+  Madame d'Epinay's jealousy of, i. 278;
+  mentioned, ii. 7;
+  offers Rousseau a home in Normandy, ii. 117.
+
+Diderot, i. 64, 89, 133;
+  tries to manage Rousseau, i. 213;
+  his domestic misconduct, i. 215;
+  leader of the materialistic party, i. 223;
+  on Solitary Life, i. 232;
+  his active life, i. 233;
+  without moral sensitiveness, i. 262;
+  mentioned, i. 262, 269, 271;
+     ii. 8;
+  his relations with Rousseau, i. 271;
+  accused of pilfering Goldoni's new play, i. 275;
+  his relations and contentions with Rousseau, i. 275, 276;
+  lectures Rousseau about Madame d'Epinay, i. 284;
+  visits Rousseau after his leaving the Hermitage, i. 289;
+  Rousseau's final breach with, i. 336;
+  his criticism, and plays, ii. 34;
+  his defects, ii. 34;
+  thrown into prison, ii. 57;
+  his difficulties with the Encyclopaedists, ii. 57;
+  his papers saved from the police by Malesherbes, ii. 62.
+
+Dijon, academy of, i. 132.
+
+Discourses, The, Circumstances of the composition of the first
+     Discourse, i. 133-136;
+  summary of it, i. 138-145
+     disastrous effect of the progress of sciences and arts, i.
+          140, 141;
+     error more dangerous than truth useful, i. 141;
+     uselessness of learning and art, i. 141, 142;
+     terrible disorders caused in Europe by the art of printing, i.
+          143;
+     two kinds of ignorance, i. 144;
+  the relation of this Discourse to Montaigne, i. 145;
+  its one-sidedness and hollowness, i. 148;
+  shown by Voltaire, i. 148;
+  its positive side, i. 149, 150;
+  second Discourse, origin of the Inequality of Man, i. 154;
+  summary of it, i. 159, 170;
+     state of nature, i. 150, 162;
+     Hobbes's mistake, i. 161;
+     what broke up the "state of nature," i. 164;
+     its preferableness, i. 166, 167;
+     origin of society and laws, i. 168;
+     "new state of nature," i. 169;
+     main position of the Discourse, i. 169;
+  its utter inclusiveness, i. 170;
+  criticism on its method, i. 170;
+  on its matter, i. 172;
+  wanting in evidence, i. 172;
+  further objections to it, i. 173;
+  assumes uniformity of process, i. 176;
+  its unscientific character, i. 177;
+  its real importance, i. 178;
+  its protest against the mockery of civilisation, i. 178;
+  equality of man, i. 181;
+  different effects of this doctrine in France and the United States
+     explained, i. 182, 183;
+  discovers a reaction against the historical method of Montesquieu,
+     i. 183, 184;
+  pecuniary results of, i. 196;
+  Diderot's praise of first Discourse, i. 200;
+  Voltaire's acknowledgement of gift of second Discourse, i. 308;
+  the, an attack on the general ordering of society, ii. 22;
+  referred to, ii. 41.
+
+Drama, its proper effect, i. 326;
+  what would be that of its introduction into Geneva, i. 327;
+  true answer to Rousseau's contentions, i. 329.
+
+Dramatic morality, i. 326.
+
+Drinkers, Rousseau's estimate of, i. 330.
+
+Drunkenness, how esteemed in Switzerland and Naples, i. 331.
+
+Duclos, i. 206;
+  ii. 62.
+
+Duni, i. 292.
+
+Dupin, Madame de, Rousseau secretary to, i. 120;
+  her position in society, i. 195;
+  Rousseau's country life with, i. 196;
+  friend of the Abbe de Saint Pierre, i. 244.
+
+
+EDUCATION, interest taken in, in France in Rousseau's time, ii. 193,
+     194;
+  its new direction ii. 195;
+  Locke, the pioneer of, ii. 202, 203;
+  Rousseau's special merit in connection with, ii. 203;
+  his views on (see Emilius, _passim_, as well as for general
+     consideration of) what it is, ii. 219;
+  plans of, of Locke and others, designed for the higher class, ii.
+     254;
+  Rousseau's for all, ii. 254.
+
+_Emile_, i. 136, 196.
+
+Emilius, character of, ii. 2, 3;
+  particulars of the publication of, ii. 59, 60;
+  effect of, on Rousseau's fortunes, ii. 62-64;
+  ordered to be burnt by public executioner at Paris, ii. 65;
+  at Geneva, ii. 72;
+  condemned by the Sorbonne, ii. 82;
+  supplied (as also did the Social Contract) dialect for the longing
+     in France and Germany to return to nature, ii. 193;
+  substance of, furnished by Locke, ii. 202;
+  examination of, ii. 197-280;
+  mischief produced by its good advice, ii. 206, 207;
+  training of young children, ii. 207, 208;
+  constantly reasoning with them a mistake of Locke's, ii. 209;
+  Rousseau's central idea, disparagement of the reasoning faculty,
+     ii. 209, 210;
+  theories of education, practice better than precept, ii. 211;
+  the idea of property, the first that Rousseau would have given to
+     a child, ii. 212;
+  modes of teaching, ii. 214, 215;
+  futility of such methods, ii. 215, 216;
+  where Rousseau is right, and where wrong, ii. 219, 220;
+  effect of his own want of parental love, ii. 220;
+  teaches that everybody should learn a trade, ii. 223;
+  no special foresight, ii. 224, 225;
+  supremacy of the common people insisted upon, ii. 226, 227;
+  three dominant states of mind to be established by the instructor,
+     ii. 229, 230;
+  Rousseau's incomplete notion of justice, ii. 231;
+  ideal of Emilius, ii. 232, 233;
+  forbids early teaching of history, ii. 237, 238;
+  disparages modern history, ii. 239;
+  criticism on the old historians, ii. 240;
+  education of women, ii. 241;
+     Rousseau's failure here, ii. 242, 243;
+  inconsistent with himself, ii. 244, 245;
+  worthlessness of his views, ii. 249;
+  real merits of the work, ii. 249;
+  its effect in Germany, ii. 251, 252;
+  not much effect on education in England, ii. 252;
+  Emilius the first expression of democratic teaching in education,
+     ii. 254;
+  Rousseau's deism, ii. 258, 260, 264-267, 269, 270, 276;
+  its inadequacy for the wants of men, ii. 267-270;
+  his position towards Christianity, ii. 270-276;
+  real satisfaction of the religious emotions, ii. 275-280.
+
+Encyclopaedia, The, D'Alembert's article on Geneva in, i. 321.
+
+Encyclopaedists, the society of, confirms Rousseau's religious
+     faith, i. 221;
+  referred to, ii. 257.
+
+Evil, discussions on Rousseau's, Voltaire's, and De Maistre's
+     teachings concerning, i. 313, _n._, 318;
+  different effect of existence of, on Rousseau and Voltaire, i. 319.
+
+
+FENELON, ii. 37, 248;
+  Rousseau's veneration for, ii. 321.
+
+Ferguson, Adam, ii. 253.
+
+Filmer contends that a man is not naturally free, ii. 126.
+
+Foundling Hospital, Rousseau sends his children to the, i. 120.
+
+France, debt of, to Rousseau, i. 3;
+  Rousseau the one great religious writer of, in the eighteenth
+     century, i. 26;
+  his wanderings in the east of, i. 61;
+  his fondness for, i. 62-72;
+  establishment of local academies in, i. 132;
+  decay in, of Greek literary studies, i. 146;
+  effects in, of doctrine of equality of man, i. 182;
+  effects in, of Montesquieu's "Spirit of Laws," i. 183;
+  amiability of, in the eighteenth century, i. 187;
+  effect of Rousseau's writings in, i. 187;
+  collective organisation in, i. 222;
+  St. Pierre's strictures on government of, i. 244;
+  Rousseau on government of, i. 246;
+  effect of Rousseau's spiritual element on, i. 306;
+  patriotism wanting in, i. 332;
+  difficulties of authorship in, ii. 55-64;
+  buys Corsica from the Genoese, ii. 102;
+  state of, after 1792, apparently favourable to the carrying out of
+     Rousseau's political views, ii. 131, 132;
+  in 1793, ii. 135;
+  haunted by narrow and fervid minds, ii. 142.
+
+Francueil, Rousseau's patron, i. 99;
+  grandfather of Madame George Sand, i. 99, _n._;
+  Rousseau's salary from, i. 120;
+  country-house of, i. 196.
+
+Franklin, Benjamin, ii. 42.
+
+Frederick of Prussia, relations between, and Rousseau, ii. 73-78;
+  "famous bull" of, ii. 90.
+
+Freeman on Growth of English Constitution, ii. 164.
+
+French, principles of, revolution, i. 1, 2, 3;
+  process and ideas of, i. 4;
+  Rousseau of old, stock, i. 8;
+  poetry, Rousseau on, i. 90, _ib. n._;
+  melody, i. 105;
+  academy, thesis for prize, i. 150, _n._;
+  philosophers, i. 202,
+  music, i. 291;
+  music, its pretensions demolished by Rousseau, i. 294;
+  ecclesiastics opposed to the theatre, ii. 322;
+  stage, Rousseau on, i. 325;
+  morals, depravity of, ii. 26, 27;
+  Barbier on, ii. 26;
+  thought, benefit, or otherwise of revolution on, ii. 54;
+  history, evil side of, in Rousseau's time, ii. 56;
+  indebted to Holland for freedom of the press, ii. 59;
+  catholic and monarchic absolutism sunk deep into the character of
+     the, ii. 167.
+
+French Convention, story of member of the, ii. 134, _n._
+
+
+GALUPPI, effect of his music, i. 105.
+
+Geneva, i. 8;
+  characteristics of its people, i. 9;
+  Rousseau's visit to, i. 93;
+  influence of, on Rousseau, i. 94;
+  he revisits it in 1754, i. 186-190, 218;
+  turns Protestant again there, i. 220;
+  religious opinion in, i. 223 (also i. 224, _n._);
+  Rousseau thinks of taking up his abode in, i. 228;
+  Voltaire at, i. 308;
+  D'Alembert's article on, in Encyclopaedia, i. 321;
+  Rousseau's notions of effect of
+  introducing the drama at, i. 327;
+  council of, order public burning of Emilius and the Social
+     Contract, and arrest of the author if he came there, ii. 72;
+  the only place where the Social Contract was actually burnt, ii. 73,
+     _n._;
+  Voltaire suspected to have had a hand in the matter, ii. 81;
+  council of, divided into two camps by Rousseau's condemnation, in
+     1762, ii. 102;
+  Rousseau renounces his citizenship in, ii. 104;
+  working of the republic, ii. 104.
+
+Genevese, Bishop Burnet on, i. 225;
+  Rousseau's distrust of, i. 228;
+  his panegyric on, i. 328;
+  manners of, according to Rousseau, i. 330;
+  their complaint of it, i. 331.
+
+Genlis, Madame de, ii. 323.
+
+Genoa, Rousseau in quarantine at, i. 103;
+  Corsica sold to France by, ii. 102.
+
+Germany, sentimental movements in, ii. 33.
+
+Gibbon, Edward, at Lausanne, ii. 96.
+
+Girardin, St. Marc, on Rousseau, i. 111, _n._;
+  on Rousseau's discussions, ii. 11, _n._;
+  offers Rousseau a home, ii. 326.
+
+Gluck, i. 291, 296;
+  Rousseau quarrels with, for setting his music to French words, ii.
+     323.
+
+Goethe, i. 20.
+
+Goguet on Society, ii. 127, _n._;
+  on tacit conventions, ii. 148, _n._;
+  on law, ii. 153, _n._
+
+Goldoni, Diderot accused of pilfering his new play, i. 275.
+
+Gothic architecture denounced by Voltaire and Turgot, i. 294.
+
+Gouvon, Count, Rousseau servant to, i. 42.
+
+Government, disquisitions on, ii. 131-206;
+  remarks on, ii. 131-141;
+  early democratic ideas of, ii. 144-148;
+  Hobbes' philosophy of, ii. 151;
+  Rousseau's science of, ii. 155, 156;
+  De la Riviere's science of, ii. 156, _n._;
+  federation recommended by Rousseau to the Poles, ii. 166;
+  three forms of government defined, ii. 169;
+  definition inadequate, ii. 169;
+  Montesquieu's definition, ii. 169;
+  Rousseau's distinction between _tyrant_ and _despot_, ii.
+     169, _n._;
+  his objection to democracy, ii. 172;
+  to monarchy, ii. 173;
+  consideration of aristocracy, ii. 174;
+  his own scheme, ii. 175;
+  Hobbes's "Passive Obedience," ii. 181, 182;
+  social conscience theory, ii. 183-187;
+  government made impossible by Rousseau's doctrine of social
+     contract, ii. 188-192;
+  Burke on expediency in, ii. 192;
+  what a civilised nation is, ii. 194;
+  Jefferson on, ii. 227, 228, _n._
+
+Governments, earliest, how composed, i. 169.
+
+Graffigny, Madame de, ii. 199.
+
+Gratitude, Rousseau on, ii. 14, 15;
+  explanation of his want of, ii. 70.
+
+Greece, importance of history of, i. 184, and _ib._ _n._
+
+Greek ideas, influence of, in France in the eighteenth century, i.
+     146.
+
+Grenoble, i. 93.
+
+Gretry, i. 292, 296; ii. 323.
+
+Grimm,
+  description of Rousseau by, i. 206;
+  Rousseau's quarrels with, i. 279;
+  letter of, about Rousseau and Diderot, i. 275;
+  relations of, with Rousseau, i. 279;
+  some account of his life, i. 279;
+  his conversation with Madame d'Epinay, i. 281;
+  criticism on Rousseau, i. 281;
+  natural want of sympathy between the two, i. 282;
+  Rousseau's quarrel with, i. 285-290; ii. 65, 199.
+
+Grotius, on Government, ii. 148.
+
+
+HEBERT, ii. 178;
+  prevents publication of a book in which the author professed his
+     belief in a god, ii. 179.
+
+Helmholtz, i. 299.
+
+Helvetius, i. 191; ii. 65, 199.
+
+Herder, ii. 251;
+  Rousseau's influence on, ii. 315.
+
+Hermitage, the, given to Rousseau by Madame d'Epinay, i. 229 (also
+     _ib._ _n._);
+  what his friends thought of it, i. 231;
+  sale of, after the Revolution, i. 237, _n._;
+  reasons for Rousseau's leaving, i. 286.
+
+Hildebrand, i. 4.
+
+Hobbes, i. 143, 161;
+  his "Philosophy of Government," ii. 151;
+  singular influence of, upon Rousseau, ii. 151, 183;
+  essential difference between his views and those of Rousseau, ii.
+     159;
+  on Sovereignty, ii. 162;
+  Rousseau's definition of the three forms of government adopted
+     by, inadequate, ii. 168;
+   would reduce spiritual and temporal jurisdiction to one political
+     unity, ii. 183.
+
+Holbachians, i. 337; ii. 2.
+
+Hooker, on Civil Government, ii. 148.
+
+Hotel St. Quentin, Rousseau at, i. 106.
+
+Hume, David, i. 64, 89;
+  his deep-set sagacity, i. 156, ii. 6, 75;
+  suspected of tampering with Boswell's letter, ii. 98, _n._;
+  on Boswell, ii. 101, _n._;
+  his eagerness to find Rousseau a refuge in England, ii. 282, 283;
+  his account of Rousseau, ii. 284;
+  finds him a home at Wootton, ii. 286;
+  Rousseau's quarrel with, ii. 286-291 (also ii. 290, _n._);
+  his innocence of Walpole's letter, ii. 292;
+  his conduct in the quarrel, ii. 293;
+  saves Rousseau from arrest of French Government, ii. 295;
+  on Rousseau's sensitiveness, ii. 299.
+
+
+IMAGINATION, Rousseau's, i. 247.
+
+
+JACOBINS, the, Rousseau's Social Contract, their gospel, ii. 132,
+     133;
+  their mistake, ii. 136;
+  convenience to them of some of the maxims of the Social Contract,
+     ii. 142;
+  Jacobin supremacy and Hobbism, ii. 152;
+  how they might have saved France, ii. 167.
+
+Jansen, his propositions, i. 81.
+
+Jansenists, Rousseau's suspicions of, ii. 63;
+  mentioned, ii. 89.
+
+Jean Paul, ii. 216, 252.
+
+Jefferson, ii. 227, _n._
+
+Jesuits, Rousseau's suspicions of the, ii. 64;
+  the, and parliaments, ii. 65;
+  movement against, ii. 65;
+  suppression of the, leads to increased thought about education,
+     ii. 199.
+
+Johnson, ii. 15, 98.
+
+
+KAMES, Lord, ii. 253.
+
+
+LAMENNAIS, influenced by Rousseau, ii. 228.
+
+Language, origin of, i. 161.
+
+Latour, Madame, ii. 19, _ib. n._
+
+Lavater favourable to education on Rousseau's plan, ii. 251 (also
+     _ib._ _n._)
+
+Lavoisier, reply to his request for a fortnight's respite, ii. 227,
+     _n._
+
+Law, not a contract, ii. 153.
+
+Lecouvreur, Adrienne, refused Christian burial on account of her
+     being an actress, i. 323.
+
+Leibnitz, i. 87;
+  his optimism, i. 309;
+  on the constitution of the universe, i. 312.
+
+Lessing, on Pope, i. 310, _n._
+
+"Letters from the Mountain," ii. 104;
+  burned, by command, at Paris and the Hague, ii. 105.
+
+Liberty, English, Rousseau's notion of, ii. 163, _n._
+
+Life, Rousseau's condemnation of the contemplative, i. 10;
+  his idea of household, i. 41;
+  easier for him to preach than for others to practise, i. 43.
+
+Lisbon, earthquake of, Voltaire on, i. 310;
+  Rousseau's letter to Voltaire on, i. 310, 311.
+
+Locke, his Essay, i. 87;
+  his notions, i. 87;
+  his influence upon Rousseau, ii. 121-126;
+  on Marriage, ii. 126;
+  on Civil Government, ii. 149, 150, _n._;
+  indefiniteness of his views, ii. 160;
+  the pioneer of French thought on education, ii. 202, 203;
+  Rousseau's indebtedness to, ii. 203;
+  his mistake in education, ii. 209;
+  subjects of his theories, ii. 254.
+
+Lulli (music), i. 291.
+
+Luther, i. 4.
+
+Luxembourg, the Duke of, gives Rousseau a home, ii. 2-7, 9.
+
+Luxembourg, the Marechale de, in vain seeks Rousseau's children,
+     i. 128;
+  helps to get Emilius published, ii. 63-64, 67.
+
+Lycurgus, ii. 129, 131;
+  influence of, upon Saint Just, ii. 133.
+
+Lyons, Rousseau a tutor at, i. 95-97.
+
+
+MABLY, De, i. 95;
+  his socialism, i. 184;
+  applied to for scheme for the government of Poland, ii. 324.
+
+Maistre, De, i. 145;
+  on Optimism, i. 314.
+
+Maitre, Le, teaches Rousseau music, i. 58.
+
+Malebranche, i. 87.
+
+Malesherbes, Rousseau confesses his ungrateful nature to, ii. 14;
+  his dishonest advice to Rousseau, ii. 60;
+  helps Diderot, ii. 62;
+  and Rousseau in the publishing of Emilius, ii. 62, 63;
+  endangered by it, ii. 67;
+  asks Rousseau to collect plants for him, ii. 76.
+
+Man, his specific distinction from other animals, i. 161;
+  his state of nature, i. 161;
+  Hobbes wrong concerning this, i. 161;
+  equality of, i. 180;
+  effects of this doctrine in France and in the United States, i.
+     182;
+  not naturally free, ii. 126.
+
+Mandeville, i. 162.
+
+Manners, Rousseau's, Marmontel, and Grimm on, i. 205, 206;
+  Rousseau on Swiss, i. 329, 330;
+  depravity of French, in the eighteenth century, ii. 25, 26.
+
+Marischal, Lord, friendship between, and Rousseau, ii. 79-81;
+  account of, ii. 80;
+  on Boswell, ii. 98
+
+Marmontel, on Rousseau's manners, i. 206;
+  on his success, ii. 2.
+
+Marriage, design of the New Heloisa to exalt, ii. 46-48, _ib._
+     _n._
+
+Marsilio, of Padua, on Law, ii. 145.
+
+Men, inequality of, Rousseau's second Discourse (see Discourses),
+     dedicated to the republic of Geneva, i. 190;
+  how received there, i. 228.
+
+Mirabeau the elder, Rousseau's letter to, from Wootton, ii. 305, 306;
+  his character, ii. 309-312;
+  receives Rousseau at Fleury, ii. 311.
+
+Mirabeau, Gabriel, Rousseau's influence on, ii. 315.
+
+Moliere (Misanthrope of), Rousseau's criticism on, i. 329;
+  D'Alembert on, i. 329.
+
+Monarchy, Rousseau's objection to, ii. 171.
+
+Montaigu, Count de, avarice of, i. 101, 102.
+
+Montaigne, Rousseau's obligations to, i. 145;
+  influence of, on Rousseau, ii. 203.
+
+Montesquieu, "incomplete positivity" of, i. 156;
+  on Government, i. 157;
+  effect of his Spirit of Laws on Rousseau, i. 183;
+  confused definition of laws, ii. 153;
+  balanced parliamentary system of, ii. 163;
+  his definition of forms of government, ii. 169.
+
+Montmorency, Rousseau goes to live there, i. 229;
+  his life at, ii. 2-9.
+
+Montpellier, i. 92.
+
+Morals, state of, in France in the eighteenth century, ii. 26.
+
+Morellet, thrown into the Bastile, ii. 57.
+
+Morelly, his indirect influence on Rousseau, i. 156;
+  his socialistic theory, i. 157, 158;
+  his rules for organising a model community, i. 158, _n._;
+  his terse exposition of inequality contrasted with that of Rousseau,
+     i. 170;
+  on primitive human nature, i. 175;
+  his socialism, ii. 52;
+  influence of his "model community" upon St. Just, ii. 133,
+     _n._;
+  advice to mothers, ii. 205.
+
+Motiers, Rousseau's home there, ii. 77;
+  attends divine service at, ii. 91;
+  life at, ii. 91, 93.
+
+Moultou (pastor of Motiers), his enthusiasm for Rousseau, ii. 82.
+
+Music, Rousseau undertakes to teach, i. 60;
+  Rousseau's opinion concerning Italian, i. 105;
+  effect of Galuppi's, i. 105;
+  Rousseau earns his living by copying, i. 196; ii. 315;
+  Rameau's criticism on Rousseau's _Muses Galantes_, i. 211;
+  French, i. 291;
+  Rousseau's letter on, i. 292;
+  Italian, denounced at Paris, i. 292;
+  Rousseau utterly condemns French, i. 294;
+  quarrels with Gluck for setting his, to French words, ii. 323.
+
+Musical notation, Rousseau's, i. 291;
+  his Musical Dictionary, i. 296;
+  his notation explained, i. 296-301;
+  his system inapplicable to instruments, i. 301.
+
+
+NAPLES, drunkenness, how regarded in, i. 331.
+
+_Narcisse_, Rousseau's condemnation of his own comedy of, i.
+     215.
+
+Nature, Rousseau's love of, i. 234-241; ii. 39;
+  state of, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Hume on, i. 156-158;
+  Rousseau's, in Second Discourse, i. 171-180;
+  his starting-point of right, and normal constitution of civil
+     society, ii. 124. See State of Nature.
+
+Necker, ii. 54, 98, _n._
+
+Neuchatel, flight to principality of, by Rousseau, ii. 73;
+  history of, ii. 73, _n._;
+  outbreak at, arising from religious controversy, ii. 90;
+  preparations for driving Rousseau out of, defeated by Frederick of
+     Prussia, ii. 90;
+  clergy of, against Rousseau, ii. 106.
+
+New Heloisa, first conception of, i. 250;
+  monument of Rousseau's fall, ii. 1;
+  when completed and published, ii. 2;
+  read aloud to the Duchess de Luxembourg, ii. 3;
+  letter on suicide in, ii. 16;
+  effects upon Parisian ladies of reading the, ii. 18, 19;
+  criticism on, ii. 20-55;
+  his scheme proposed in it, ii. 21;
+  its story, ii. 24;
+  its purity, contrasted with contemporary and later French
+     romances, ii. 24;
+  its general effect, ii. 27;
+  Rousseau absolutely without humour, ii. 27;
+  utter selfishness of hero of, ii. 30;
+  its heroine, ii. 30;
+  its popularity, ii. 231, 232;
+  burlesque on it, ii. 31, _n._;
+  its vital defect, ii. 35;
+  difference between Rousseau, Byron, and others, ii. 42;
+  sumptuary details of the story, ii. 44, 45;
+  its democratic tendency, ii. 49, 50;
+  the bearing of its teaching, ii. 54;
+  hindrances to its circulation in France, ii. 57;
+  Malesherbes's low morality as to publishing, ii. 61.
+
+
+OPTIMISM of Pope and Leibnitz, i. 309-310;
+  discussed, ii. 128-130.
+
+Origin of inequality among men, i. 156. See also Discourses.
+
+
+PALEY, ii. 191, _n._
+
+Palissot, ii. 56.
+
+Paris, Rousseau's first visit to, i. 61;
+  his second, i. 63, 97, 102;
+  third visit, i. 106;
+  effect in, of his first Discourse, i. 139, _n._;
+  opinions in, on religion, laws, etc., i. 185;
+  "mimic philosophy" there, i. 193;
+  society in, in Rousseau's time, i. 202-211;
+  his view of it, i. 210;
+  composes there his _Muses Galantes_, i. 211;
+  returns to, from Geneva, i. 228;
+  his belief of the unfitness of its people for political affairs,
+     i. 246;
+  goes to, in 1741, with his scheme of musical notation, i. 291;
+  effect there of his letter on music, i. 295;
+  Rousseau's imaginary contrast between, and Geneva, i. 329;
+  Emilius ordered to be publicly burnt in, ii. 65;
+  parliament of, orders "Letters from the Mountain" to be burnt,
+     ii. 295;
+  also Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary, ii. 295;
+  Danton's scheme for municipal administration of, ii. 168,
+     _n._;
+  two parties (those of Voltaire and of Rousseau) in, in 1793, ii.
+     178;
+  excitement in, at Rousseau's appearance in 1765, ii. 283;
+  he goes to live there in 1770, ii. 314;
+  Voltaire's last visit to, ii. 323, 324.
+
+Paris, Abbe, miracles at his tomb, ii. 88.
+
+Parisian frivolity, i. 193, 220, 329.
+
+Parliament and Jesuits, ii. 64.
+
+Pascal, ii. 37.
+
+Passy, Rousseau composes the "Village Soothsayer" at, i. 212.
+
+Paul, St., effect of, on western society, i. 4.
+
+Peasantry, French, oppression of, i. 67, 68.
+
+Pedigree of Rousseau, i. 8, _n._
+
+Pelagius, ii. 272.
+
+Peoples, sovereignty of, Rousseau not the inventor of doctrine of,
+     ii. 144-148;
+  taught by Althusen, i. 147;
+  constitution of Helvetic Republic in 1798, a blow at, ii. 165.
+
+Pergolese, i. 292.
+
+Pestalozzi indebted to Emilius, ii. 252.
+
+Philidor, i. 292.
+
+Philosophers, of Rousseau's time, contradicting each other, i. 87;
+  Rousseau's complaint of the, i. 202;
+  war between the, and the priests, i. 322;
+  Rousseau's reactionary protest against, i. 328;
+  troubles of, ii. 59;
+  parliaments hostile to, ii. 64.
+
+Philosophy, Rousseau's disgust at mimic, at Paris, i. 193;
+  drew him to the essential in religion, i. 220;
+  Voltaire's no perfect, i. 318.
+
+Phlipon, Jean Marie, Rousseau's influence on, ii. 315.
+
+Plato, his republic, i. 122;
+  his influence on Rousseau, i. 146, 325, _n._;
+  Milton on his Laws, ii. 178.
+
+Plays (stage), Rousseau's letter on, to D'Alembert, i. 321;
+  his views of, i. 323;
+  Jeremy Collier and Bossuet on, i. 323;
+  in Geneva, i. 333, 334, _n._;
+  Rousseau, Voltaire, and D'Alembert on, i. 332-337.
+
+Plutarch, Rousseau's love for, i. 13.
+
+Plutocracy, new, faults of, i. 195.
+
+Pompadour, Madame de, and the Jesuits, ii. 64.
+
+Pontverre (priest) converts Rousseau to Romanism, i. 31-35.
+
+Pope, his Essay on Man translated by Voltaire, i. 309;
+  Berlin Academy and Lessing on it, i. 310, _n._;
+  criticism on it by Rousseau, i. 312;
+  its general position reproduced by Rousseau, i. 315.
+
+Popeliniere, M. de, i. 211.
+
+Positive knowledge, i. 78.
+
+Press, freedom of the, ii. 59.
+
+Prevost, Abbe, i. 48.
+
+_Projet pour l'Education_, i. 96, _n._
+
+Property, private, evils ascribed to i. 157, 185;
+  Robespierre disclaimed the intention of attacking, i. 123,
+     _n._
+
+Protestant principles, effect of development of, ii. 146-147.
+
+Protestantism, his conversion to, i. 220;
+  its influence on Rousseau, i. 221.
+
+
+RAMEAU on Rousseau's _Muses Galantes_, i. 119, 211;
+  mentioned, i. 291.
+
+Rationalism, i. 224, 225;
+  influence of Descartes on, i. 225.
+
+Reason, De Saint Pierre's views of, i. 244.
+
+Reform, essential priority of social over political, ii. 43.
+
+Religion, simplification of, i. 3;
+  ideas of, in Paris, i. 186, 187, 207, 208;
+  Rousseau's view of, i. 220;
+  doctrines of, in Geneva, i. 223-227, also _n._;
+  curious project concerning it, by Rousseau, i. 317;
+  separation of spiritual and temporal powers deemed mischievous by
+     Rousseau, ii. 173;
+  in its relation to the state may be considered as of three kinds,
+     ii. 175;
+  duty of the sovereign to establish a civil confession of faith,
+     ii. 176, 177;
+  positive dogmas of this, ii. 176;
+  Rousseau's "pure Hobbism," ii. 177.
+  See Savoyard Vicar (Emilius), ii. 256, 281.
+
+Renou, Rousseau assumes name of, i. 129; ii. 312.
+
+Revelation, Christian, Rousseau's controversy on, with Archbishop of
+     Paris, ii. 86-91.
+
+_Reveries_, Rousseau's relinquishing society, i. 199;
+  description of his life in the isle of St. Peter, in the, ii.
+     109-115;
+  their style ii. 314.
+
+Revolution, French, principles of, i. 1, 2;
+  benefits of, or otherwise, ii. 54;
+  Baboeuf on, ii. 123, 124, _n._;
+  the starting point in the history of its ideas, ii. 160.
+
+Revolutionary process and ideal i. 4, 5.
+
+Revolutionists, difference among, i. 2.
+
+Richardson (the novelist), ii. 25, 28.
+
+Richelieu's brief patronage of Rousseau, i. 195, 302.
+
+Riviere, de la, origin of society, ii. 156, 157;
+  anecdote of, ii. 156, 157, _n._
+
+Robecq, Madame de, ii. 56.
+
+Robespierre, ii. 123, 134, 160, 178, 179;
+  his "sacred right of insurrection," ii. 188, _n._;
+  Rousseau's influence on, ii. 315.
+
+Rousseau, Didier, i. 8.
+
+Rousseau, Jean Baptiste, i. 61, _n._
+
+Rousseau, Jean Jacques, influence of his writings on France and the
+     American colonists, i. 1, 2;
+  on Robespierre, Paine, and Chateaubriand, i. 3;
+  his place as a leader, i. 3;
+  starting-point, of his mental habits, i. 4;
+  personality of, i. 4;
+  influence on the common people, i. 5;
+  his birth and ancestry, i. 8;
+  pedigree, i. 8, _n._;
+  parents, i. 10, 11;
+  influence upon him of his father's character, i. 11, 12;
+  his reading in childhood, i. 12, 13;
+  love of Plutarch, i. 13;
+  early years, i. 13, 14;
+  sent to school at Bossey, i. 15;
+  deterioration of his moral character there, i. 17;
+  indignation at an unjust punishment, i. 17, 18;
+  leaves school, i. 20;
+  youthful life at Geneva, i. 21, 22;
+  his remarks on its character, i. 24;
+  anecdotes of it, i. 22, 24;
+  his leading error as to the education of the young, i. 25, 26;
+  religious training, i. 25;
+  apprenticeship, i. 26;
+  boyish doings, i. 27;
+  harshness of his master, i. 27;
+  runs away, i. 29;
+  received by the priest of Confignon, i. 31;
+  sent to Madame de Warens, i. 84;
+  at Turin, i. 35;
+  hypocritical conversion to Roman Catholicism, i. 37;
+  motive, i. 38;
+  registry of his baptism, i. 38, _n._;
+  his forlorn condition, i. 39;
+  love of music, i. 39;
+  becomes servant to Madame de Vercellis, i. 39;
+  his theft, lying, and excuses for it, i. 39, 40;
+  becomes servant to Count of Gouvon, i. 42;
+  dismissed, i. 43;
+  returns to Madame de Warens, i. 45;
+  his temperament, i. 46, 47;
+  in training for the priesthood, but pronounced too stupid, i. 57;
+  tries music, i. 57;
+  shamelessly abandons his companion, i. 58;
+  goes to Freiburg, Neuchatel, and Paris, i. 61, 62;
+  conjectural chronology of his movements about this time. i. 62,
+     _n._;
+  love of vagabond life, i. 62-68;
+  effect upon him of his intercourse with the poor, i. 68;
+  becomes clerk to a land surveyor at Chamberi, i. 69;
+  life there, i. 69-72;
+  ill-health and retirement to Les Charmettes, i. 73;
+  his latest recollection of this time, i. 75-77;
+  his "form of worship," i. 77;
+  love of nature, i. 77, 78;
+  notion of deity, i. 77;
+  peculiar intellectual feebleness, i. 81;
+  criticism on himself, i. 83;
+  want of logic in his mental constitution, i. 85;
+  effect on him of Voltaire's Letters on the English, i. 85;
+  self-training, i. 86;
+  mistaken method of it, i. 86, 87;
+  writes a comedy, i. 89;
+  enjoyment of rural life at Les Charmettes, i. 91, 92;
+  robs Madame de Warens, i. 92;
+  leaves her, i. 93;
+  discrepancy between dates of his letters and the Confessions, i.
+     93;
+  takes a tutorship at Lyons, i. 95;
+  condemns the practice of writing Latin, i. 96, _n._;
+  resigns his tutorship, and goes to Paris, i. 97;
+  reception there, i. 98-100;
+  appointed secretary to French Ambassador at Venice, i. 100-106;
+  in quarantine at Genoa, i. 104;
+  his estimate of French melody, i. 105;
+  returns to Paris, i. 106;
+  becomes acquainted with Theresa Le Vasseur, i. 106;
+  his conduct criticised, i. 107-113;
+  simple life, i. 113;
+  letter to her, i. 115-119;
+  his poverty, i. 119;
+  becomes secretary to Madame Dupin and her son-in-law, M. de
+     Francueil, i. 119;
+  sends his children to the foundling hospital, i. 120, 121;
+  paltry excuses for the crime, i. 121-126;
+  his pretended marriage under the name of Renou, i. 129;
+  his Discourses, i. 132-186 (see Discourses);
+  writes essays for academy of Dijon, i. 132;
+  origin of first essay, i. 133-137;
+  his "visions" for thirteen years, i. 138;
+  evil effect upon himself of the first Discourse, i. 138;
+  of it, the second Discourse and the Social Contract upon Europe,
+     i. 138;
+  his own opinion of it, i. 138, 139;
+  influence of Plato upon him, i. 146;
+  second Discourse, i. 154;
+  his "State of Nature," i. 159;
+  no evidence for it, i. 172;
+  influence of Montesquieu on him, i. 183;
+  inconsistency of his views, i. 124;
+  influence of Geneva upon him, i. 187, 188;
+  his disgust at Parisian philosophers, i. 191, 192;
+  the two sides of his character, i. 193;
+  associates in Paris, i. 193;
+  his income, i. 196, 197, _n._;
+  post of cashier, i. 196;
+  throws it up, i. 197, 198;
+  determines to earn his living by copying music, i. 198, 199;
+  change of manners, i. 201;
+  dislike of the manners of his time, i. 202, 203;
+  assumption of a seeming cynicism, i. 206;
+  Grimm's rebuke of it, i. 206;
+  Rousseau's protest against atheism, i. 208, 209;
+  composes a musical interlude, the Village Soothsayer, i. 212;
+  his nervousness loses him the chance of a pension, i. 213;
+  his moral simplicity, i. 214, 215;
+  revisits Geneva, i. 216;
+  re-conversion to Protestantism, i. 220;
+  his friends at Geneva, i. 227;
+  their effect upon him, i. 227;
+  returns to Paris, i. 227;
+  the Hermitage offered him by Madame d'Epinay, i. 229, 230 (and
+     _ib. n._);
+  retires to it against the protests of his friends, i. 231;
+  his love of nature, i. 234, 235, 236;
+  first days at the Hermitage, i. 237;
+  rural delirium, i. 237;
+  dislike of society, i. 242;
+  literary scheme, i. 242, 243;
+  remarks on Saint Pierre, i. 246;
+  violent mental crisis, i. 247;
+  employs his illness in writing to Voltaire on Providence, i. 250,
+     251;
+  his intolerance of vice in others, i. 254;
+  acquaintance with Madame de Houdetot, i. 255-269;
+  source of his irritability, i. 270, 271;
+  blind enthusiasm of his admirers, i. 273, also _ib. n._;
+  quarrels with Diderot, i. 275;
+  Grimm's account of them, i. 276;
+  quarrels with Madame d'Epinay, i. 276, 288;
+  relations with Grimm, i. 279;
+  want of sympathy between the two, i. 279;
+  declines to accompany Madame d'Epinay to Geneva, i. 285;
+  quarrels with Grimm, i. 285;
+  leaves the Hermitage, i. 289, 290;
+  aims in music, i. 291;
+  letter on French music, i. 293, 294;
+  writes on music in the Encyclopaedia, i. 296;
+  his Musical Dictionary, i. 296;
+  scheme and principles of his new musical notation, i. 269;
+  explained, i. 298, 299;
+  its practical value, i. 299;
+  his mistake, i. 300;
+  minor objections, i. 300;
+  his temperament and Genevan spirit, i. 303;
+  compared with Voltaire, i. 304, 305;
+  had a more spiritual element than Voltaire, i. 306;
+  its influence in France, i. 307;
+  early relations with Voltaire, i. 308;
+  letter to him on his poem on the earthquake at Lisbon, i. 312,
+     313, 314;
+  reasons in a circle, i. 316;
+  continuation of argument against Voltaire, i. 316, 317;
+  curious notion about religion, i. 317;
+  quarrels with Voltaire, i. 318, 319;
+  denounces him as a "trumpet of impiety," i. 320, _n._;
+  letter to D'Alembert on Stage Plays, i. 321;
+  true answer to his theory, i. 323, 324;
+  contrasts Paris and Geneva, i. 327, 328;
+  his patriotism, i. 329, 330, 331;
+  censure of love as a poetic theme, i. 334, 335;
+  on Social Position of Women, i. 335;
+  Voltaire and D'Alembert's criticism on his Letter on Stage Plays,
+     i. 336, 337;
+  final break with Diderot, i. 336;
+  antecedents of his highest creative efforts, ii. 1;
+  friends at Montmorency, ii. 2;
+  reads the New Heloisa to the Marechale de Luxembourg, ii. 2;
+  unwillingness to receive gifts, ii. 5;
+  his relations with the Duke and Duchess de Luxembourg, ii. 7;
+  misunderstands the friendliness of Madame de Boufflers, ii. 7;
+  calm life at Montmorency, ii. 8;
+  literary jealousy, ii. 8;
+  last of his peaceful days, ii. 9;
+  advice to a young man against the contemplative life, ii. 10;
+  offensive form of his "good sense" concerning persecution of
+     Protestants, ii. 11, 12;
+  cause of his unwillingness to receive gifts, ii. 13, 14;
+  owns his ungrateful nature, ii. 15;
+  ill-humoured banter, ii. 15;
+  his constant bodily suffering, ii. 16;
+  thinks of suicide, ii. 16;
+  correspondence with the readers of the New Heloisa, ii. 19, 20;
+  the New Heloisa, criticism on, ii. 20-55 (see New Heloisa);
+  his publishing difficulties, ii. 56;
+  no taste for martyrdom, ii. 59, 60;
+  curious discussion between, ii. 59;
+  and Malesherbes, ii. 60;
+  indebted to Malesherbes in the publication of Emilius, ii. 61, 62;
+  suspects Jesuits, Jansenists, and philosophers of plotting to
+     crush the book, ii. 63;
+  himself counted among the latter, ii. 65;
+  Emilius ordered to be burnt by public executioner, on the charge
+     of irreligious tendency, and its author to be arrested, ii. 65;
+  his flight, ii. 67;
+  literary composition on the journey to Switzerland, ii. 69;
+  contrast between him and Voltaire, ii. 70;
+  explanation of his "natural ingratitude," ii. 71;
+  reaches the canton of Berne, and ordered to quit it, ii. 72;
+  Emilius and Social Contract condemned to be publicly burnt at
+     Geneva, and author arrested if he came there, ii. 72, 73;
+  takes refuge at Motiers, in dominions of Frederick of Prussia, ii.
+     73;
+  characteristic letters to the king, ii. 74, 77;
+  declines pecuniary help from him, ii. 75;
+  his home and habits at Motiers, ii. 77, 78;
+  Voltaire supposed to have stirred up animosity against him at
+     Geneva, ii. 81;
+  Archbishop of Paris writes against him, ii. 83;
+  his reply, and character as a controversialist, ii. 83-90;
+  life at Val de Travers (Motiers), ii. 91-95;
+  his generosity, ii. 93;
+  corresponds with the Prince of Wuertemberg on the education of the
+     prince's daughter, ii. 95, 96;
+  on Gibbon, ii. 96;
+  visit from Boswell, ii. 98;
+  invited to legislate for Corsica, ii. 99, _n._;
+  urges Boswell to go there, ii. 100;
+  denounces its sale by the Genoese, ii. 102;
+  renounces his citizenship of Geneva, ii. 103;
+  his Letters from the Mountain, ii. 104;
+  the letters condemned to be burned at Paris and the Hague, ii.
+     105;
+  libel upon, ii. 105;
+  religious difficulties with his pastor, ii. 106;
+  ill-treatment of, in parish, ii. 106;
+  obliged to leave it, ii. 108;
+  his next retreat, ii. 108;
+  account in the _Reveries_ of his short stay there, ii. 109-115;
+  expelled by government of Berne, ii. 116;
+  makes an extraordinary request to it, ii. 116, 117;
+  difficulties in finding a home, ii. 117;
+  short stay at Strasburg, ii. 117, _n._;
+  decides on going to England, ii. 118;
+  his Social Contract, and criticism on, ii. 119, 196 (see Social
+     Contract);
+  scanty acquaintance with history, ii. 129;
+  its effects on his political writings, ii. 129, 136;
+  his object in writing Emilius, ii. 198;
+  his confession of faith, under the character of the Savoyard Vicar
+     (see Emilius), ii. 257-280;
+  excitement caused by his appearance in Paris in 1765, ii. 282;
+  leaves for England in company with Hume, ii. 283;
+  reception in London, ii. 283, 284;
+  George III. gives him a pension, ii. 284;
+  his love for his dog, ii. 286;
+  finds a home at Wootton, ii. 286;
+  quarrels with Hume, ii. 287;
+  particulars in connection with it, ii. 287-296;
+  his approaching insanity at this period, ii. 296;
+  the preparatory conditions of it, ii. 297-301;
+  begins writing the Confessions, ii. 301;
+  their character, ii. 301-304;
+  life at Wootton, ii. 305, 306;
+  sudden flight thence, ii. 306;
+  kindness of Mr. Davenport, ii. 306, 307;
+  his delusion, ii. 307;
+  returns to France, ii. 308;
+  received at Fleury by the elder Mirabeau, ii. 310, 311;
+  the prince of Conti next receives him at Trye, ii. 312;
+  composes the second part of the Confessions here, ii. 312;
+  delusion returns, ii. 312, 313;
+  leaves Trye, and wanders about the country, ii. 312, 313;
+  estrangement from Theresa, ii. 313;
+  goes to Paris, ii. 314;
+  writes his Dialogues there, ii. 314;
+  again earns his living by copying music, ii. 315;
+  daily life in, ii. 315, 316;
+  Bernardin St. Pierre's account of him, ii. 317-321;
+  his veneration for Fenelon, ii. 321;
+  his unsociality, ii. 322;
+  checks a detractor of Voltaire, ii. 324;
+  draws up his Considerations on the Government of Poland, ii. 324;
+  estimate of the Spanish, ii. 324;
+  his poverty, ii. 325;
+  accepts a home at Ermenonville from M. Girardin, ii. 326;
+  his painful condition, ii. 326;
+  sudden death, ii. 326;
+  cause of it unknown, ii. 326 (see also _ib. n._);
+  his interment, ii. 326;
+  finally removed to Paris, ii. 328.
+
+
+SAINTE BEUVE on Rousseau and Madame d'Epinay, i. 279, _n._;
+  on Rousseau, ii. 40.
+
+Saint Germain, M. de, Rousseau's letter to, i. 123.
+
+Saint Just, ii. 132, 133;
+  his political regulations, ii. 133, _n._;
+  base of his system, ii. 136;
+  against the atheists, ii. 179.
+
+Saint Lambert, i. 244;
+  offers Rousseau a home in Lorraine, ii. 117.
+
+Saint Pierre, Abbe de, Rousseau arranges papers of, i. 244;
+  his views concerning reason, _ib._;
+  boldness of his observations, i. 245.
+
+Saint Pierre, Bernardin de, account of his visit to Rousseau at
+     Paris, ii. 317-321.
+
+Sand, Madame G., i. 81, _n._;
+  Savoy landscape, i. 99, _n._;
+  ancestry of, i. 121, _n._
+
+Savages, code of morals of, i. 178-179, _n._
+
+Savage state, advantages of, Rousseau's letter to Voltaire, i. 312.
+
+Savoy, priests of, proselytisers, i. 30, 31, 33 (also _ib._ _n._)
+
+Savoyard Vicar, the, origin of character of, ii. 257-280 (see
+     Emilius).
+
+Schiller on Rousseau, ii. 192 (also _ib._ _n._);
+  Rousseau's influence on, ii. 315.
+
+Servetus, ii. 180.
+
+Simplification, the revolutionary process and ideal of, i. 4;
+  in reference to Rousseau's music, i. 291.
+
+Social conscience, theory and definition of, ii. 234, 235;
+  the great agent in fostering, ii. 237.
+
+Social Contract, the, ill effect of, on Europe, i. 138;
+  beginning of its composition, i. 177;
+  ideas of, i. 188;
+  its harmful dreams, i. 246;
+  influence of, ii. 1;
+  price of, and difficulties in publishing, ii. 59;
+  ordered to be burnt at Geneva, ii. 72, 73, 104;
+  detailed criticism of, ii. 119-196;
+  Rousseau diametrically opposed to the dominant belief of his day
+     in human perfectibility, ii. 119;
+  object of the work, ii. 120;
+  main position of the two Discourses given up in it, ii. 120;
+  influenced by Locke, ii. 120;
+  its uncritical, illogical principles, ii. 123, 124;
+  its impracticableness, ii. 128;
+  nature of his illustrations, ii. 128-133;
+  the "gospel of the Jacobins," ii. 132, 133;
+  the desperate absurdity of its assumptions gave it power in the
+     circumstances of the times, ii. 135-141;
+  some of its maxims very convenient for ruling Jacobins, ii. 142;
+  its central conception, the sovereignty of peoples, ii. 144;
+  Rousseau not its inventor, ii. 144, 145;
+  this to be distinguished from doctrine of right of subjects to
+     depose princes, ii. 146;
+  Social Contract idea of government, probably derived from Locke,
+     ii. 150;
+  falseness of it, ii. 153, 154;
+  origin of society, ii. 154;
+  ill effects on Rousseau's political speculation, ii. 155;
+  what constitutes the sovereignty, ii. 158;
+  Rousseau's Social Contract different from that of Hobbes, ii. 159;
+  Locke's indefiniteness on, ii. 160;
+  attributes of sovereignty, ii. 163;
+  confederation, ii. 164, 165;
+  his distinction between _tyrant_ and _despot_, ii. 169,
+     _n._;
+  distinguishes constitution of the state from that of the government,
+     ii. 170;
+  scheme of an elective aristocracy, ii. 172;
+  similarity to the English form of government, ii. 173;
+  the state in respect to religion, ii. 173;
+  habitually illogical form of his statements, ii. 173, 174;
+  duty of sovereign to establish civil profession of faith, ii. 175,
+     176;
+  infringement of it to be punished, even by death, ii. 176;
+  Rousseau's Hobbism, ii. 177;
+  denial of his social compact theory, ii. 183, 184;
+  futility of his disquisitions on, ii. 185, 186;
+  his declaration of general duty of rebellion (arising out of the
+     universal breach of social compact) considered, ii. 188;
+  it makes government impossible, ii. 188;
+  he urges that usurped authority is another valid reason for
+     rebellion, ii. 190;
+  practical evils of this, ii. 192;
+  historical effect of the Social Contract, ii. 192-195.
+
+Social quietism of some parts of New Heloisa, ii. 49.
+
+Socialism: Morelly, and De Mably, ii. 52;
+  what it is, ii. 159.
+
+Socialistic theory of Morelly, i. 158, 159 (also i. 158, _n._)
+
+Society, Aristotle on, i. 174;
+  D'Alembert's statements on, i. 174, _n._;
+  Parisian, Rousseau on, i. 209;
+  dislike of, i. 242;
+  Rousseau's origin of, ii. 153;
+  true grounds of, ii. 155, 156.
+
+Socrates, i. 131, 140, 232; ii. 72, 273.
+
+Solitude, eighteenth century notions of, i. 231, 232.
+
+Solon, ii. 133.
+
+Sorbonne, the, condemns Emilius, ii. 82.
+
+Spectator, the, Rousseau's liking for, i. 86.
+
+Spinoza, dangerous speculations of, i. 143.
+
+Stael, Madame de, i. 217, _n._
+
+Stage players, how treated in France, i. 322.
+
+Stage plays (see Plays).
+
+State of Nature, Rousseau's, i. 159, 160;
+  Hobbes on, i. 161 (see Nature).
+
+Suicide, Rousseau on, ii. 16;
+  a mistake to pronounce him incapable of, ii. 19.
+
+Switzerland, i. 330.
+
+
+TACITUS, i. 177.
+
+Theatre, Rousseau's letter, objecting to the, i. 133;
+  his error in the matter, i. 134.
+
+Theology, metaphysical, Descartes' influence on, i. 226.
+
+Theresa (see Le Vasseur).
+
+Thought, school of, division between rationalists and emotionalists,
+     i. 337.
+
+Tonic Sol-fa notation, close correspondence of the, to Rousseau's
+     system, i. 299.
+
+Tronchin on Voltaire, i. 319, _n._, 321.
+
+Turgot, i. 89;
+  his discourses at the Sorbonne in 1750, i. 155;
+  the one sane eminent Frenchman of eighteenth century, i. 202;
+  his unselfish toil, i. 233; ii. 193;
+  mentioned, ii. 246, 294.
+
+Turin, Rousseau at, i. 34-43;
+  leaves it, i. 45;
+  tries to learn Latin at, i. 91.
+
+Turretini and other rationalisers, i. 226;
+  his works, i. 226, _n._
+
+
+UNIVERSE, constitution of, discussion on, i. 311-317.
+
+
+VAGABOND life, Rousseau's love of, i. 63, 68.
+
+Val de Travers, ii. 77; Rousseau's life in, ii. 91-95.
+
+Vasseur, Theresa Le, Rousseau's first acquaintance with, i. 106,
+     107, also _ib._ _n._;
+  their life together, i. 110-113;
+  well befriended, ii. 80, _n._;
+  her evil character, ii. 326.
+
+Vauvenargues on emotional instinct, ii. 34.
+
+Venice, Rousseau at, i. 100-106.
+
+Vercellis, Madame de, Rousseau servant to, i. 39.
+
+Verdelin, Madame de, her kindness to Theresa, ii. 80, _n._;
+  to Rousseau, ii. 118, _n._
+
+Village Soothsayer, the (_Devin du Village_), composed at
+     Passy, performed at Fontainebleau and Paris, i. 212;
+  marked a revolution in French Music, i. 291.
+
+Voltaire, i. 2, 21, 63;
+  effect on Rousseau of his Letters on the English, i. 86;
+  spreads a derogatory report about Rousseau, i. 101, _n._;
+  his "Princesse de Navarre," i. 119;
+  criticism on Rousseau's first Discourse, i. 147;
+  effect on his work of his common sense, i. 155;
+  avoids the society of Paris, i. 202;
+  his conversion to Romanism, i. 220, 221;
+  strictures on Homer and Shakespeare, i. 280;
+  his position in the eighteenth century, i. 301;
+  general difference between, and Rousseau, i. 301;
+  clung to the rationalistic school of his day, i. 305;
+  on Rousseau's second Discourse, i. 308;
+  his poem on the earthquake of Lisbon, i. 309, 310;
+  his sympathy with suffering, i. 311, 312;
+  entreated by Rousseau to draw up a civil profession of religious
+     faith, i. 317;
+  denounced by Rousseau as a "trumpet of impiety," i. 317, 320,
+     _n._;
+  his satire and mockery irritated Rousseau, i. 319;
+  what he was to his contemporaries, i. 321;
+  the great play-writer of the time, i. 321;
+  his criticism of Rousseau's Letter on the Theatre, i. 336;
+  his indignation at wrong, ii. 11;
+  ridicule of the New Heloisa, ii. 34;
+  less courageous than Rousseau, ii. 65;
+  contrast between the two, i. 99, ii. 75;
+  supposed to have stirred up animosity at Geneva against Rousseau,
+     ii. 81;
+  denies it, ii. 81;
+  his notion of how the matter would end, ii. 81;
+  his fickleness, ii. 83;
+  on Rousseau's connection with Corsica, ii. 101;
+  his Philosophical Dictionary burnt by order at Paris, ii. 105;
+  his opinion of Emilius, ii. 257;
+  prime agent in introducing English deism into France, ii. 262;
+  suspected by Rousseau of having written the pretended letter from
+     the King of Prussia, ii. 288;
+  last visit to Paris, ii. 324.
+
+
+WALKING, Rousseau's love of, i. 63.
+
+Walpole, Horace, writer of the pretended letter from the King of
+     Prussia, ii. 288, _n._;
+  advises Hume not to publish his account of Rousseau's quarrel with
+     him, ii. 295.
+
+War arising out of the succession to the crown of Poland, i. 72.
+
+Warens, Madame de, Rousseau's introduction to, i. 34;
+  her personal appearance, i. 34;
+  receives Rousseau into her house, i. 43;
+  her early life, i. 48;
+  character of, i. 49-51;
+  goes to Paris, i. 59;
+  receives Rousseau at Chamberi, and gets him employment, i. 69;
+  her household, i. 70;
+  removes to Les Charmettes, i. 73;
+  cultivates Rousseau's taste for letters, i. 85;
+  Saint Louis, her patron saint, i. 91;
+  revisited by Rousseau in 1754, i. 216;
+  her death in poverty and wretchedness, i. 217, 218 (also i. 219,
+     _n._)
+
+Wesleyanism, ii. 258.
+
+Women, Condorcet on social position of, i. 335;
+  D'Alembert and Condorcet on, i. 335.
+
+Wootton, Rousseau's home at, ii. 286.
+
+World, divine government of, Rousseau vindicates, i. 312.
+
+Wuertemberg, correspondence between Prince of, and Rousseau, on the
+     education of the little princess, ii. 95;
+  becomes reigning duke, ii. 95, _n._;
+  seeks permission for Rousseau to live in Vienna, ii. 117.
+
+
+THE END.
+
+
+_Printed by_ R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, _Edinburgh._
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Rousseau, by John Morley
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ROUSSEAU ***
+
+***** This file should be named 14052.txt or 14052.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        http://www.gutenberg.org/1/4/0/5/14052/
+
+Produced by Paul Murray, Charlie Kirschner (Vol. 1), Linda
+Cantoni (Vol. 2), and the Online Distributed Proofreading
+Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+http://gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
+or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need, is critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at http://www.pglaf.org.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
+http://pglaf.org/fundraising.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at http://pglaf.org
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit http://pglaf.org
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations.
+To donate, please visit: http://pglaf.org/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart is the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     http://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
diff --git a/old/14052.zip b/old/14052.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..80264f6
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/14052.zip
diff --git a/old/old/2006-01-25-14052-h/2006-01-25-14052-h.htm b/old/old/2006-01-25-14052-h/2006-01-25-14052-h.htm
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..20cb6a7
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/old/2006-01-25-14052-h/2006-01-25-14052-h.htm
@@ -0,0 +1,505 @@
+<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
+    "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
+
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
+  <head>
+    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=iso-8859-1" />
+    <title>
+      The Project Gutenberg eBook of Rousseau, Vols. 1 and 2, by John Morley.
+    </title>
+    <style type="text/css">
+/*<![CDATA[  XML blockout */
+<!--
+    p {  margin-top: .75em;
+         text-align: justify;
+         margin-bottom: .75em;
+         }
+    h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6 {
+         text-align: center; /* all headings centered */
+         clear: both;
+         }
+    hr { width: 33%;
+	 margin-top: 2em;
+	 margin-bottom: 2em;
+         margin-left: auto;
+         margin-right: auto;
+         clear: both;
+       }
+
+    table {margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;}
+
+    body{margin-left: 10%;
+         margin-right: 10%;
+        }
+
+    .smcap    {font-variant: small-caps;}
+
+    // -->
+    /* XML end  ]]>*/
+    </style>
+  </head>
+<body>
+
+
+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Rousseau, by John Morley
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Rousseau
+       Volumes I. and II.
+
+Author: John Morley
+
+Release Date: January 25, 2006 [EBook #14052]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ROUSSEAU ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Paul Murray, Charlie Kirschner (Vol. 1), Linda
+Cantoni (Vol. 2), and the Online Distributed Proofreading
+Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+<h1>ROUSSEAU</h1>
+
+
+<h3>BY</h3>
+
+<h2>JOHN MORLEY</h2>
+
+
+<h3>VOLUMES I and II.</h3>
+
+<hr style="width: 35%;" />
+
+<p style="text-align: center">
+London<br />
+MACMILLAN AND CO., <span class="smcap">Limited</span><br />
+NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY<br />
+1905<br />
+</p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center"><i>All rights reserved</i></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<i>First printed in this form 1886</i><br />
+<i>Reprinted 1888, 1891, 1896, 1900, 1905</i><br />
+</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<h2><a href="rousseau1-htm.html">VOLUME I.</a></h2>
+<h3><a href="rousseau1-htm.html#CONTENTS_I">CONTENTS OF VOL. I.</a></h3>
+
+<hr style="width: 35%;" />
+
+<h2><a href="rousseau2-htm.html">VOLUME II.</a></h2>
+<h3><a href="rousseau2-htm.html#CONTENTS_II">CONTENTS OF VOL. II.</a></h3>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Rousseau, by John Morley
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ROUSSEAU ***
+
+***** This file should be named 14052-h.htm or 14052-h.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        http://www.gutenberg.org/1/4/0/5/14052/
+
+Produced by Paul Murray, Charlie Kirschner (Vol. 1), Linda
+Cantoni (Vol. 2), and the Online Distributed Proofreading
+Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+http://gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
+or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need, is critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at http://www.pglaf.org.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
+http://pglaf.org/fundraising.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at http://pglaf.org
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit http://pglaf.org
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations.
+To donate, please visit: http://pglaf.org/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart is the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     http://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
+
+
+</pre>
+
+</body>
+</html>
diff --git a/old/old/2006-01-25-14052-h/rousseau1-htm.html b/old/old/2006-01-25-14052-h/rousseau1-htm.html
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..70951ad
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/old/2006-01-25-14052-h/rousseau1-htm.html
@@ -0,0 +1,9921 @@
+<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
+    "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
+
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
+  <head>
+    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=iso-8859-1" />
+    <title>The Project Gutenberg eBook of Rousseau, Vol. 1, by John
+Morley.</title>
+
+<style type="text/css">
+/*<![CDATA[  XML blockout */
+<!--
+    p {  margin-top: .75em;
+         text-align: justify;
+         margin-bottom: .75em;
+         }
+    h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6 {
+         text-align: center; /* all headings centered */
+         clear: both;
+         }
+    hr { width: 33%;
+	 margin-top: 2em;
+	 margin-bottom: 2em;
+         margin-left: auto;
+         margin-right: auto;
+         clear: both;
+       }
+
+    table {margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;}
+
+    body{margin-left: 10%;
+         margin-right: 10%;
+        }
+
+    .pagenum  { /* uncomment the next line for invisible page numbers */
+            /*  visibility: hidden;  */
+                position: absolute;
+                left: 92%;
+                font-size: smaller;
+                text-align: right;
+              } /* page numbers */
+
+    .linenum  {position: absolute; top: auto; left: 4%;} /* poetry number */
+    .blockquot{margin-left: 5%; margin-right: 10%;}
+    .sidenote {width: 20%; padding-bottom: .5em; padding-top: .5em;
+               padding-left: .5em; padding-right: .5em; margin-left: 1em;
+               float: right; clear: right; margin-top: 1em;
+               font-size: smaller; color: black; background: #eeeeee; border: dashed 1px;}
+
+    .bb       {border-bottom: solid 2px;}
+    .bl       {border-left: solid 2px;}
+    .bt       {border-top: solid 2px;}
+    .br       {border-right: solid 2px;}
+    .bbox     {border: solid 2px;}
+
+    .center   {text-align: center;}
+    .smcap    {font-variant: small-caps;}
+    .u        {text-decoration: underline;}
+
+    .caption  {font-weight: bold;}
+
+    .figcenter   {margin: auto; text-align: center;}
+
+    .figleft     {float: left; clear: left; margin-left: 0; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top:
+                 1em; margin-right: 1em; padding: 0; text-align: center;}
+
+    .figright    {float: right; clear: right; margin-left: 1em; margin-bottom: 1em;
+                 margin-top: 1em; margin-right: 0; padding: 0; text-align: center;}
+
+    .poem             {margin-left:10%; margin-right:10%; text-align: left;}
+    .poem br          {display: none;}
+    .poem .stanza     {margin: 1em 0em 1em 0em;}
+    .poem span.i0     {display: block; margin-left: 0em; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;}
+    .poem span.i2     {display: block; margin-left: 2em; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;}
+    .poem span.i4     {display: block; margin-left: 4em; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;}
+    .poem span.i20     {display: block; margin-left: 20em; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;}
+    .poem span.i31     {display: block; margin-left: 31em; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;}
+    // -->
+    /* XML end  ]]>*/
+
+    </style>
+</head>
+<body>
+
+
+<h1>ROUSSEAU</h1>
+<h3>BY</h3>
+<h2>JOHN MORLEY</h2>
+<h3>VOL. I.</h3>
+<hr style="width: 35%;" />
+
+<p style="text-align: center">London<br />
+MACMILLAN AND CO., <span class="smcap">Limited</span><br />
+NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY<br />
+1905<br /></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center"><i>All rights reserved</i></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center"><i>First printed in this form 1886<br />
+Reprinted 1888, 1891, 1896, 1900, 1905</i><br /></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<h2>NOTE TO THE FIRST EDITION.</h2>
+<p>This work differs from its companion volume in offering
+something more like a continuous personal history than was
+necessary in the case of such a man as Voltaire, the story of whose
+life may be found in more than one English book of repute. Of
+Rousseau there is, I believe, no full biographical account in our
+literature, and even France has nothing more complete under this
+head than Musset-Pathay's <i>Histoire de la Vie et des Ouvrages de
+J.J. Rousseau</i> (1821). This, though a meritorious piece of
+labour, is extremely crude and formless in composition and
+arrangement, and the interpreting portions are devoid of
+interest.</p>
+<p>The edition of Rousseau's works to which the references have
+been made is that by M. Auguis, in twenty-seven volumes, published
+in 1825 by Dalibon. In 1865 M. Streckeisen-Moultou published from
+the originals, which had been deposited in the library of
+Neuch&#226;tel by Du Peyrou, the letters addressed to Rousseau by
+various correspondents. These two interesting volumes, which are
+entitled <i>Rousseau, ses Amis et ses Ennemis</i>, are mostly
+referred to under the name of their editor.</p>
+<p><i>February, 1873.</i></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 25%;" />
+
+<p>The second edition in 1878 was revised; some portions were
+considerably shortened, and a few additional footnotes inserted. No
+further changes have been made in the present edition.</p>
+<p><i>January, 1886.</i></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<h2><a name="CONTENTS_I">CONTENTS</a> OF VOL. I.</h2>
+<h3><a href="#CHAPTER_I.">CHAPTER I.</a></h3>
+<h4><span class="smcap">Preliminary</span>.</h4>
+<table summary="">
+<tbody>
+<tr>
+<td>&#160;</td>
+<td align="right">PAGE</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>The Revolution</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.1">1</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Rousseau its most direct speculative precursor</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.2">2</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>His distinction among revolutionists</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.4">4</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>His personality</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.5">5</a></td>
+</tr>
+</tbody>
+</table>
+<p>&#160;</p>
+<h3><a href="#CHAPTER_II">CHAPTER II.</a></h3>
+<h4><span class="smcap">Youth</span>.</h4>
+<table summary="">
+<tbody>
+<tr>
+<td>&#160;</td>
+<td align="right">PAGE</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Birth and descent</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.8">8</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Predispositions</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.10">10</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>First lessons</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.11">11</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>At M. Lambercier's</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.15">15</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Early disclosure of sensitive temperament</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.19">19</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Return to Geneva</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.20">20</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Two apprenticeships</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.26">26</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Flight from Geneva</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.30">30</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Savoyard proselytisers</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.31">31</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Rousseau sent to Anncey, and thence to Turin</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.34">34</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Conversion to Catholicism</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.35">35</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Takes service with Madame de Vercellis</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.39">39</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Then with the Count de Gouvon</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.42">42</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Returns to vagabondage</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.43">43</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>And to Madame de Warens</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.45">45</a></td>
+</tr>
+</tbody>
+</table>
+<p>&#160;</p>
+<h3><a href="#CHAPTER_III.">CHAPTER III.</a></h3>
+<h4><span class="smcap">Savoy</span>.</h4>
+<table summary="">
+<tbody>
+<tr>
+<td>&#160;</td>
+<td align="right">PAGE</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Influence of women upon Rousseau</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.46">46</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Account of Madame de Warens</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.48">48</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Rousseau takes up his abode with her</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.54">54</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>His delight in life with her</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.54">54</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>The seminarists</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.57">57</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>To Lyons</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.58">58</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Wanderings to Freiburg, Neuch&#226;tel, and elsewhere</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.60">60</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Through the east of France</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.62">62</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Influence of these wanderings upon him</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.67">67</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Chamb&#233;ri</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.69">69</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Household of Madame de Warens</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.70">70</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Les Charmettes</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.73">73</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Account of his feeling for nature</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.79">79</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>His intellectual incapacity at this time</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.83">83</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Temperament</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.84">84</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Literary interests, and method</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.85">85</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Joyful days with his benefactress</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.90">90</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>To Montpellier: end of an episode</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.92">92</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Dates</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.94">94</a></td>
+</tr>
+</tbody>
+</table>
+<p>&#160;</p>
+<h3><a href="#CHAPTER_IV.">CHAPTER IV.</a></h3>
+<h4><span class="smcap">Theresa Le Vasseur</span>.</h4>
+<table summary="">
+<tbody>
+<tr>
+<td>&#160;</td>
+<td align="right">PAGE</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Tutorship at Lyons</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.95">95</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Goes to Paris in search of fortune</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.97">97</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>His appearance at this time</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.98">98</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Made secretary to the ambassador at Venice</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.100">100</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>His journey thither and life there</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.103">103</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Return to Paris</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.106">106</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Theresa Le Vasseur</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.107">107</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Character of their union</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.110">110</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Rousseau's conduct towards her</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.113">113</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Their later estrangements</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.115">115</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Rousseau's scanty means</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.119">119</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Puts away his five children</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.120">120</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>His apologies for the crime</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.122">122</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Their futility</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.126">126</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Attempts to recover the children</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.128">128</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Rousseau never married to Theresa</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.129">129</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Contrast between outer and inner life</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.130">130</a></td>
+</tr>
+</tbody>
+</table>
+
+<p>&#160;</p>
+<h3><a href="#CHAPTER_V.">CHAPTER V.</a></h3>
+<h4><span class="smcap">The Discourses</span>.</h4>
+
+<table summary="">
+<tbody>
+<tr>
+<td>&#160;</td>
+<td align="right">PAGE</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Local academies in France</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.132">132</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Circumstances of the composition of the first Discourse</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.133">133</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>How far the paradox was original</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.135">135</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>His visions for thirteen years</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.136">136</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Summary of the first Discourse</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.138">138</a>-145</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Obligations to Montaigne</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.145">145</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>And to the Greeks</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.145">145</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Semi-Socratic manner</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.147">147</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Objections to the Discourse</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.148">148</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Ways of stating its positive side</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.149">149</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Dangers of exaggerating this positive side</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.151">151</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Its excess</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.152">152</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Second Discourse</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.154">154</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Ideas of the time upon the state of nature</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.155">155</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Their influence upon Rousseau</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.156">156</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Morelly, as his predecessor</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.156">156</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Summary of the second Discourse</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.159">159</a>-170</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Criticism of its method</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.171">171</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Objection from its want of evidence</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.172">172</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Other objections to its account of primitive nature</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.173">173</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Takes uniformity of process for granted</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.176">176</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>In what the importance of the second Discourse consisted</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.177">177</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Its protest against the mockery of civilisation</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.179">179</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>The equality of man, how true, and how false</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.180">180</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>This doctrine in France, and in America</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.182">182</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Rousseau's Discourses, a reaction against the historic
+method</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.183">183</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Mably, and socialism</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.184">184</a></td>
+</tr>
+</tbody>
+</table>
+<p>&#160;</p>
+<h3><a href="#CHAPTER_VI.">CHAPTER VI.</a></h3>
+<h4><span class="smcap">Paris</span>.</h4>
+<table summary="">
+<tbody>
+<tr>
+<td>&#160;</td>
+<td align="right">PAGE</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Influence of Geneva upon Rousseau</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.187">187</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Two sides of his temperament</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.191">191</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Uncongenial characteristics of Parisian society</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.191">191</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>His associates</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.195">195</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Circumstances of a sudden moral reform</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.196">196</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Arising from his violent repugnance for the manners of the
+time</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.202">202</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>His assumption of a seeming cynicism</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.207">207</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Protests against atheism</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.209">209</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>The Village Soothsayer at Fontainebleau</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.212">212</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Two anedotes of his moral singularity</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.214">214</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Revisits Geneva</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.216">216</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>End of Madame de Warens</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.217">217</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Rousseau's re-conversion to Protestantism</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.220">220</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>The religious opinions then current in Geneva</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.223">223</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Turretini and other rationalisers</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.226">226</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Effect upon Rousseau</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.227">227</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Thinks of taking up his abode in Geneva</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.227">227</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Madame d'Epinay offers him the Hermitage</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.229">229</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Retires thither against the protests of his friends</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.231">231</a></td>
+</tr>
+</tbody>
+</table>
+<p>&#160;</p>
+<h3><a href="#CHAPTER_VII.">CHAPTER VII.</a></h3>
+<h4><span class="smcap">The Hermitage</span>.</h4>
+<table summary="">
+<tbody>
+<tr>
+<td>&#160;</td>
+<td align="right">PAGE</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Distinction between the old and the new anchorite</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.234">234</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Rousseau's first days at the Hermitage</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.235">235</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Rural delirium</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.237">237</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Dislike of society</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.242">242</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Meditates work on Sensitive Morality</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.243">243</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Arranges the papers of the Abb&#233; de Saint Pierre</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.244">244</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>His remarks on them</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.246">246</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Violent mental crisis</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.247">247</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>First conception of the New Helo&#239;sa</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.250">250</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>A scene of high morals</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.254">254</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Madame d'Houdetot</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.255">255</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Erotic mania becomes intensified</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.256">256</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Interviews with Madame d'Houdetot</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.258">258</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Saint Lambert interposes</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.262">262</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Rousseau's letter to Saint Lambert</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.264">264</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Its profound falsity</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.265">265</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Saint Lambert's reply</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.267">267</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Final relations with him and with Madame d'Houdetot</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.268">268</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Sources of Rousseau's irritability</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.270">270</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Relations with Diderot</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.273">273</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>With Madame d'Epinay</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.276">276</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>With Grimm</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.279">279</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Grimm's natural want of sympathy with Rousseau</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.282">282</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Madame d'Epinay's journey to Geneva</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.284">284</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Occasion of Rousseau's breach with Grimm</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.285">285</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>And with Madame d'Epinay</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.288">288</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Leaves the Hermitage</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.289">289</a></td>
+</tr>
+</tbody>
+</table>
+<p>&#160;</p>
+<h3><a href="#CHAPTER_VIII.">CHAPTER VIII.</a></h3>
+<h4><span class="smcap">Music</span>.</h4>
+<table summary="">
+<tbody>
+<tr>
+<td>&#160;</td>
+<td align="right">PAGE</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>General character of Rousseau's aim in music</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.291">291</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>As composer</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.292">292</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Contest on the comparative merits of French and Italian
+music</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.293">293</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Rousseau's Letter on French Music</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.293">293</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>His scheme of musical notation</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.296">296</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Its chief element</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.298">298</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Its practical value</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.299">299</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>His mistake</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.300">300</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Two minor objections</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.300">300</a></td>
+</tr>
+</tbody>
+</table>
+<p>&#160;</p>
+<h3><a href="#CHAPTER_IX.">CHAPTER IX.</a></h3>
+<h4><span class="smcap">Voltaire And D'Alembert</span>.</h4>
+<table summary="">
+<tbody>
+<tr>
+<td>&#160;</td>
+<td align="right">PAGE</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Position of Voltaire</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.302">302</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>General differences between him and Rousseau</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.303">303</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Rousseau not the profounder of the two</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.305">305</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>But he had a spiritual element</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.305">305</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Their early relations</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.308">308</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Voltaire's poem on the Earthquake of Lisbon</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.309">309</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Rousseau's wonder that he should have written it</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.310">310</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>His letter to Voltaire upon it</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.311">311</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Points to the advantages of the savage state</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.312">312</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Reproduces Pope's general position</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.313">313</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Not an answer to the position taken by Voltaire</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.314">314</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Confesses the question insoluble, but still argues</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.316">316</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Curious close of the letter</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.318">318</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Their subsequent relations</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.319">319</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>D'Alembert's article on Geneva</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.321">321</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>The church and the theatre</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.322">322</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Jeremy Collier: Bossuet</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.323">323</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Rousseau's contention on stage plays</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.324">324</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Rude handling of commonplace</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.325">325</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>The true answer to Rousseau as to theory of dramatic
+morality</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.326">326</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>His arguments relatively to Geneva</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.327">327</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Their meaning</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.328">328</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Criticism on the Misanthrope</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.328">328</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Rousseau's contrast between Paris and an imaginary Geneva</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.329">329</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Attack on love as a poetic theme</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.332">332</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>This letter, the mark of his schism from the party of the
+philosophers</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#Page_i.336">336</a></td>
+</tr>
+</tbody>
+</table>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<h2>JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU</h2>
+<table summary="">
+<tbody>
+<tr>
+<td>Born</td>
+<td align="right">1712</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Fled from Geneva</td>
+<td align="right"><i>March</i>, 1728</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Changes religion at Turin</td>
+<td align="right">
+<i>April</i>,&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&quot;&#160;&#160;&#160;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>With Madame de Warens, including various intervals, until</td>
+<td align="right"><i>April</i>, 1740</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Goes to Paris with musical schemes</td>
+<td align="right">1741</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Secretary at Venice</td>
+<td align="right"><i>Spring</i>, 1743</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Paris, first as secretary to M. Francueil, then</td>
+<td align="right">{&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; 1744</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;as composer, and copyist</td>
+<td align="right">{&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;
+&#160;&#160;to&#160;&#160;&#160;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>&#160;</td>
+<td align="right">{&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; 1756</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>The Hermitage</td>
+<td align="right"><i>April 9</i>, 1756</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Montmorency</td>
+<td align="right"><i>Dec. 15</i>, 1757</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Yverdun</td>
+<td align="right"><i>June 14</i>, 1762</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Motiers-Travers</td>
+<td align="right"><i>July 10</i>, 1762</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Isle of St. Peter</td>
+<td align="right"><i>Sept.</i>, 1765</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Strasburg</td>
+<td align="right">
+<i>Nov.</i>,&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&quot;&#160;&#160;&#160;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Paris</td>
+<td align="right">
+<i>December</i>,&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&quot;&#160;&#160;&#160;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Arrives in England</td>
+<td align="right"><i>Jan. 13</i>, 1766</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Leaves Dover</td>
+<td align="right"><i>May 22</i>, 1767</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Fleury</td>
+<td align="right">
+<i>June</i>,&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&quot;&#160;&#160;&#160;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Trye</td>
+<td align="right">
+<i>July</i>,&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&quot;&#160;&#160;&#160;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Dauphiny</td>
+<td align="right"><i>Aug.</i>, 1768</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Paris</td>
+<td align="right"><i>June</i>, 1770</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Death</td>
+<td align="right"><i>July 2</i>, 1778</td>
+</tr>
+</tbody>
+</table>
+<p>&#160;</p>
+<h3>PRINCIPAL WRITINGS.</h3>
+<table summary="">
+<tbody>
+<tr>
+<td>Discourse on the Influence of Learning and Art</td>
+<td align="right"><span class="smcap">Published</span> 1750</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Discourse on Inequality</td>
+<td align="right">&quot;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; 1754</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Letter to D'Alembert</td>
+<td align="right">&quot;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; 1758</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>New Helo&#239;sa (began 1757, finished in winter of
+1759-60</td>
+<td align="right">&quot;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; 1761</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Social Contract</td>
+<td align="right">&quot;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; 1762</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Emilius</td>
+<td align="right">&quot;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; 1762</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Letters from the Mountain</td>
+<td align="right">&quot;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; 1764</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Confessions (written 1766-70)</td>
+<td align="right">{ Pt. I 1781</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>&#160;</td>
+<td align="right">{ Pt. II 1788</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>R&#234;veries (written 1777-78).</td>
+<td>&#160;</td>
+</tr>
+</tbody>
+</table>
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0"><i>Comme dans les &#233;tangs assoupis sous les
+bois,<br /></i></span><i>
+<span class="i0">Dans plus d'une &#226;me on voit deux choses &#224; la fois:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Le ciel, qui teint les eaux &#224; peine remu&#233;es<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Avec tous ses rayons et toutes ses nue&#233;s;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Et la vase, fond morne, affreux, sombre et dormant,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">O&#249; des reptiles noirs fourmillent vaguement.</span></i><span class="i0"><br /></span>
+<span class="i20"><span class="smcap">Hugo</span>.<br /></span></div></div>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.1" id="Page_i.1">[i.1]</a></span></p>
+<h1>ROUSSEAU.</h1>
+<p>&#160;</p>
+
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_I."></a>CHAPTER I.</h2>
+<h3>PRELIMINARY.</h3>
+<p><span class="smcap">Christianity</span> is the name for a great variety of changes which
+took place during the first centuries of our era, in men's ways of
+thinking and feeling about their spiritual relations to unseen
+powers, about their moral relations to one another, about the basis
+and type of social union. So the Revolution is now the accepted
+name for a set of changes which began faintly to take a definite
+practical shape first in America, and then in France, towards the
+end of the eighteenth century; they had been directly prepared by a
+small number of energetic thinkers, whose speculations represented,
+as always, the prolongation of some old lines of thought in
+obedience to the impulse of new social and intellectual conditions.
+While one movement supplied the energy and the principles which
+extricated civilisation from the ruins of the Roman empire, the
+other supplies the energy and the principles which already once,
+between the Seven Years'<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.2" id="Page_i.2">[i.2]</a></span>
+ War and the assembly of the States
+General, saved human progress in face of the political fatuity of
+England and the political nullity of France; and they are now, amid
+the distraction of the various representatives of an obsolete
+ordering, the only forces to be trusted at once for multiplying the
+achievements of human intelligence stimulated by human sympathy,
+and for diffusing their beneficent results with an ampler hand and
+more far-scattering arm. Faith in a divine power, devout obedience
+to its supposed will, hope of ecstatic, unspeakable reward, these
+were the springs of the old movement. Undivided love of our
+fellows, steadfast faith in human nature, steadfast search after
+justice, firm aspiration towards improvement, and generous
+contentment in the hope that others may reap whatever reward may
+be, these are the springs of the new.</p>
+<p>There is no given set of practical maxims agreed to by all
+members of the revolutionary schools for achieving the work of
+release from the pressure of an antiquated social condition, any
+more than there is one set of doctrines and one kind of discipline
+accepted by all Protestants. Voltaire was a revolutionist in one
+sense, Diderot in another, and Rousseau in a third, just as in the
+practical order, Lafayette, Danton, Robespierre, represented three
+different aspirations and as many methods. Rousseau was the most
+directly revolutionary of all the speculative precursors, and he
+was the first to apply his mind boldly to those of the social
+conditions which the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.3" id="Page_i.3">[i.3]</a></span>
+ revolution is concerned by one solution or
+another to modify. How far his direct influence was disastrous in
+consequence of a mischievous method, we shall have to examine. It
+was so various that no single answer can comprehend an exhaustive
+judgment. His writings produced that glow of enthusiastic feeling
+in France, which led to the all-important assistance rendered by
+that country to the American colonists in a struggle so momentous
+for mankind. It was from his writings that the Americans took the
+ideas and the phrases of their great charter, thus uniting the
+native principles of their own direct Protestantism with principles
+that were strictly derivative from the Protestantism of Geneva.
+Again, it was his work more than that of any other one man, that
+France arose from the deadly decay which had laid hold of her whole
+social and political system, and found that irresistible energy
+which warded off dissolution within and partition from without. We
+shall see, further, that besides being the first immediately
+revolutionary thinker in politics, he was the most stirring of
+reactionists in religion. His influence formed not only Robespierre
+and Paine, but Chateaubriand, not only Jacobinism, but the
+Catholicism of the Restoration. Thus he did more than any one else
+at once to give direction to the first episodes of revolution, and
+force to the first episode of reaction.</p>
+<p>There are some teachers whose distinction is neither correct
+thought, nor an eye for the exigencies of practical organisation,
+but simply depth and fervour<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.4" id="Page_i.4">[i.4]</a></span>
+ of the moral sentiment, bringing with
+it the indefinable gift of touching many hearts with love of virtue
+and the things of the spirit. The Christian organisations which
+saved western society from dissolution owe all to St. Paul,
+Hildebrand, Luther, Calvin; but the spiritual life of the west
+during all these generations has burnt with the pure flame first
+lighted by the sublime mystic of the Galilean hills. Aristotle
+acquired for men much knowledge and many instruments for gaining
+more; but it is Plato, his master, who moves the soul with love of
+truth and enthusiasm for excellence. There is peril in all such
+leaders of souls, inasmuch as they incline men to substitute warmth
+for light, and to be content with aspiration where they need
+direction. Yet no movement goes far which does not count one of
+them in the number of its chiefs. Rousseau took this place among
+those who prepared the first act of that revolutionary drama, whose
+fifth act is still dark to us.</p>
+<p>At the heart of the Revolution, like a torrid stream flowing
+undiscernible amid the waters of a tumbling sea, is a new way of
+understanding life. The social changes desired by the various
+assailants of the old order are only the expression of a deeper
+change in moral idea, and the drift of the new moral idea is to
+make life simpler. This in a sense is at the bottom of all great
+religious and moral movements, and the Revolution emphatically
+belongs to the latter class. Like such movements in the breast of
+the individual, those which stir an epoch have their principle in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.5" id="Page_i.5">[i.5]</a></span>
+
+the same craving for disentanglement of life. This impulse to shake
+off intricacies is the mark of revolutionary generations, and it
+was the starting-point of all Rousseau's mental habits, and of the
+work in which they expressed themselves. His mind moved outwards
+from this centre, and hence the fact that he dealt principally with
+government and education, the two great agencies which, in an old
+civilisation with a thousand roots and feelers, surround external
+life and internal character with complexity. Simplification of
+religion by clearing away the overgrowth of errors, simplification
+of social relations by equality, of literature and art by constant
+return to nature, of manners by industrious homeliness and
+thrift,&#8212;this is the revolutionary process and ideal, and this is
+the secret of Rousseau's hold over a generation that was lost amid
+the broken maze of fallen systems.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 25%;" />
+
+<p>The personality of Rousseau has most equivocal and repulsive
+sides. It has deservedly fared ill in the esteem of the saner and
+more rational of those who have judged him, and there is none in
+the history of famous men and our spiritual fathers that begat us,
+who make more constant demands on the patience or pity of those who
+study his life. Yet in no other instance is the common eagerness to
+condense all predication about a character into a single
+unqualified proposition so fatally inadequate. If it is
+indispensable that we should be for ever describing, naming,
+classifying, at least it is well, in speaking of such a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.6" id="Page_i.6">[i.6]</a></span>
+ nature as
+his, to enlarge the vocabulary beyond the pedantic formulas of
+unreal ethics, and to be as sure as we know how to make ourselves,
+that each of the sympathies and faculties which together compose
+our power of spiritual observation, is in a condition of free and
+patient energy. Any less open and liberal method, which limits our
+sentiments to absolute approval or disapproval, and fixes the
+standard either at the balance of common qualities which
+constitutes mediocrity, or at the balance of uncommon qualities
+which is divinity as in a Shakespeare, must leave in a cloud of
+blank incomprehensibleness those singular spirits who come from
+time to time to quicken the germs of strange thought and shake the
+quietness of the earth.</p>
+<p>We may forget much in our story that is grievous or hateful, in
+reflecting that if any man now deems a day basely passed in which
+he has given no thought to the hard life of garret and hovel, to
+the forlorn children and trampled women of wide squalid
+wildernesses in cities, it was Rousseau who first in our modern
+time sounded a new trumpet note for one more of the great battles
+of humanity. He makes the poor very proud, it was truly said. Some
+of his contemporaries followed the same vein of thought, as we
+shall see, and he was only continuing work which others had
+prepared. But he alone had the gift of the golden mouth. It was in
+Rousseau that polite Europe first hearkened to strange voices and
+faint reverberation from out of the vague and cavernous<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.7" id="Page_i.7">[i.7]</a></span>
+ shadow in
+which the common people move. Science has to feel the way towards
+light and solution, to prepare, to organise. But the race owes
+something to one who helped to state the problem, writing up in
+letters of flame at the brutal feast of kings and the rich that
+civilisation is as yet only a mockery, and did furthermore inspire
+a generation of men and women with the stern resolve that they
+would rather perish than live on in a world where such things can
+be.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.8" id="Page_i.8">[i.8]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_II"></a>CHAPTER II</h2>
+<h3>YOUTH.</h3>
+<p><span class="smcap">Jean Jacques Rousseau</span> was born at Geneva, June 28, 1712. He was
+of old French stock. His ancestors had removed from Paris to the
+famous city of refuge as far back as 1529, a little while before
+Farel came thither to establish the principles of the Reformation,
+and seven years before the first visit of the more extraordinary
+man who made Geneva the mother city of a new interpretation of
+Christianity, as Rome was the mother city of the old. Three
+generations in a direct line separated Jean Jacques from Didier
+Rousseau, the son of a Paris bookseller, and the first
+emigrant.<a name="FNanchor1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1">[1]</a> Thus
+Protestant tradition in the Rousseau family dates<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.9" id="Page_i.9">[i.9]</a></span>
+ from the
+appearance of Protestantism in Europe, and seems to have exerted
+the same kind of influence upon them as it did, in conjunction with
+the rest of the surrounding circumstances, upon the other citizens
+of the ideal state of the Reformation. It is computed by the
+historians that out of three thousand families who composed the
+population of Geneva towards the end of the seventeenth century,
+there were hardly fifty who before the Reformation had acquired the
+position of burgess-ship. The curious set of conditions which thus
+planted a colony of foreigners in the midst of a free polity, with
+a new doctrine and newer discipline, introduced into Europe a fresh
+type of character and manners. People declared they could recognise
+in the men of Geneva neither French vivacity, nor Italian subtlety
+and clearness, nor Swiss gravity. They had a zeal for religion, a
+vigorous energy in government, a passion for freedom, a devotion to
+ingenious industries, which marked them with a stamp unlike that of
+any other community.<a name="FNanchor2"></a><a href="#Footnote_2">[2]</a> Towards the close of the seventeenth century
+some of the old austerity and rudeness was sensibly modified under
+the influence of the great neighbouring monarchy. One striking
+illustration of this tendency was the rapid decline of the Savoyard
+patois in popular use. The movement had not gone far enough when
+Rousseau was born, to take away from the manners and spirit of his
+country their special quality and individual note.</p>
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.10" id="Page_i.10">[i.10]</a></span>
+The mother of Jean Jacques, who seems to have been a simple,
+cheerful, and tender woman, was the daughter of a Genevan minister;
+her maiden name, Bernard. The birth of her son was fatal to her,
+and the most touching and pathetic of all the many shapes of death
+was the fit beginning of a life preappointed to nearly unlifting
+cloud. &quot;I cost my mother her life,&quot; he wrote, &quot;and my birth was the
+first of my woes.&quot;<a name="FNanchor3"></a><a href="#Footnote_3">[3]</a> Destiny thus touches us with magical
+finger, long before consciousness awakens to the forces that have
+been set to work in our personality, launching us into the universe
+with country, forefathers, and physical predispositions, all fixed
+without choice of ours. Rousseau was born dying, and though he
+survived this first crisis by the affectionate care of one of his
+father's sisters, yet his constitution remained infirm and
+disordered.</p>
+<p>Inborn tendencies, as we perceive on every side, are far from
+having unlimited irresistible mastery, if they meet early encounter
+from some wise and patient external will. The father of Rousseau
+was unfortunately cast in the same mould as his mother, and the
+child's own morbid sensibility was stimulated and deepened by the
+excessive sensibility of his first companion. Isaac Rousseau, in
+many of his traits, was a reversion to an old French type. In all
+the Genevese there was an underlying tendency of this kind. &quot;Under
+a phlegmatic and cool air,&quot; wrote Rousseau, when warning his
+countrymen against the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.11" id="Page_i.11">[i.11]</a></span>
+ inflammatory effects of the drama, &quot;the
+Genevese hide an ardent and sensitive character, that is more
+easily moved than controlled.&quot;<a name="FNanchor4"></a><a href="#Footnote_4">[4]</a> And some of the episodes in their history
+during the eighteenth century might be taken for scenes from the
+turbulent dramas of Paris. But Isaac Rousseau's restlessness, his
+eager emotion, his quick and punctilious sense of personal dignity,
+his heedlessness of ordered affairs, were not common in Geneva,
+fortunately for the stability of her society and the prosperity of
+her citizens. This disorder of spirit descended in modified form to
+the son; it was inevitable that he should be indirectly affected by
+it. Before he was seven years old he had learnt from his father to
+indulge a passion for the reading of romances. The child and the
+man passed whole nights in a fictitious world, reading to one
+another in turn, absorbed by vivid interest in imaginary
+situations, until the morning note of the birds recalled them to a
+sense of the conditions of more actual life, and made the elder cry
+out in confusion that he was the more childish of the two.</p>
+<p>The effect of this was to raise passion to a premature
+exaltation in the young brain. &quot;I had no idea of real things,&quot; he
+said, &quot;though all the sentiments were already familiar to me.
+Nothing had come to me by conception, everything by sensation.
+These confused emotions, striking me one after another, did not
+warp a reason that I did not yet possess, but they gradually shaped
+in me a reason of another cast and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.12" id="Page_i.12">[i.12]</a></span>
+ temper, and gave me bizarre and
+romantic ideas of human life, of which neither reflection nor
+experience has ever been able wholly to cure me.&quot;<a name="FNanchor5"></a><a href="#Footnote_5">[5]</a> Thus these first
+lessons, which have such tremendous influence over all that follow,
+had the direct and fatal effect in Rousseau's case of deadening
+that sense of the actual relations of things to one another in the
+objective world, which is the master-key and prime law of
+sanity.</p>
+<p>In time the library of romances came to an end (1719), and Jean
+Jacques and his father fell back on the more solid and moderated
+fiction of history and biography. The romances had been the
+possession of the mother; the more serious books were inherited
+from the old minister, her father. Such books as Nani's History of
+Venice, and Le Sueur's History of the Church and the Empire, made
+less impression on the young Rousseau than the admirable Plutarch;
+and he used to read to his father during the hours of work, and
+read over again to himself during all hours, those stories of free
+and indomitable souls which are so proper to kindle the glow of
+generous fire. Plutarch was dear to him to the end of his life; he
+read him in the late days when he had almost ceased to read, and he
+always declared Plutarch to be nearly the only author to whom he
+had never gone without profit.<a name="FNanchor6"></a><a href="#Footnote_6">[6]</a> &quot;I think I see my father now,&quot; he wrote<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.13" id="Page_i.13">[i.13]</a></span>
+ when
+he had begun to make his mark in Paris, &quot;living by the work of his
+hands, and nourishing his soul on the sublimest truths. I see
+Tacitus, Plutarch, and Grotius, lying before him along with the
+tools of his craft. I see at his side a cherished son receiving
+instruction from the best of fathers, alas, with but too little
+fruit.&quot;<a name="FNanchor7"></a><a href="#Footnote_7">[7]</a> This
+did little to implant the needed impressions of the actual world.
+Rousseau's first training continued to be in an excessive degree
+the exact reverse of our common method; this stirs the imagination
+too little, and shuts the young too narrowly within the strait pen
+of present and visible reality. The reader of Plutarch at the age
+of ten actually conceived himself a Greek or a Roman, and became
+the personage whose strokes of constancy and intrepidity
+transported him with sympathetic ecstasy, made his eyes sparkle,
+and raised his voice to heroic pitch. Listeners were even alarmed
+one day as he told the tale of Scaevola at table, to see him
+imitatively thrust forth his arm over a hot chafing-dish.<a name="FNanchor8"></a><a href="#Footnote_8">[8]</a></p>
+<p>Rousseau had one brother, on whom the spirit of the father came
+down in ample measure, just as the sensibility of the mother
+descended upon Jean Jacques. He passed through a boyhood of revolt,
+and finally ran away into Germany, where he was lost from sight and
+knowledge of his kinsmen for ever. Jean Jacques was thus left
+virtually an only child,<a name="FNanchor9"></a><a href="#Footnote_9">[9]</a> and he com<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.14" id="Page_i.14">[i.14]</a></span>memorates the homely tenderness
+and care with which his early years were surrounded. Except in the
+hours which he passed in reading by the side of his father, he was
+always with his aunt, in the self-satisfying curiosity of childhood
+watching her at work with the needle and busy about affairs of the
+house, or else listening to her with contented interest, as she
+sang the simple airs of the common people. The impression of this
+kind and cheerful figure was stamped on his memory to the end; her
+tone of voice, her dress, the quaint fashion of her hair. The
+constant recollection of her shows, among many other signs, how he
+cherished that conception of the true unity of a man's life, which
+places it in a closely-linked chain of active memories, and which
+most of us lose in wasteful dispersion of sentiment and poor
+fragmentariness of days. When the years came in which he might well
+say, I have no pleasure in them, and after a manhood of distress
+and suspicion and diseased sorrows had come to dim those blameless
+times, he could still often surprise himself unconsciously humming
+the tune of one of his aunt's old songs, with many tears in his
+eyes.<a name="FNanchor10"></a><a href="#Footnote_10">[10]</a></p>
+<p>This affectionate schooling came suddenly to an end. Isaac
+Rousseau in the course of a quarrel in which he had involved
+himself, believed that he saw<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.15" id="Page_i.15">[i.15]</a></span>
+ unfairness in the operation of the
+law, for the offender had kinsfolk in the Great Council. He
+resolved to leave his country rather than give way, in
+circumstances which compromised his personal honour and the free
+justice of the republic. So his house was broken up, and his son
+was sent to school at the neighbouring village of Bossey (1722),
+under the care of a minister, &quot;there to learn along with Latin all
+the medley of sorry stuff with which, under the name of education,
+they accompany Latin.&quot;<a name="FNanchor11"></a><a href="#Footnote_11">[11]</a> Rousseau tells us nothing of the course
+of his intellectual instruction here, but he marks his two years'
+sojourn under the roof of M. Lambercier by two forward steps in
+that fateful acquaintance with good and evil, which is so much more
+important than literary knowledge. Upon one of these fruits of the
+tree of nascent experience, men usually keep strict silence.
+Rousseau is the only person that ever lived who proclaimed to the
+whole world as a part of his own biography the ignoble
+circumstances of the birth of sensuality in boyhood. Nobody else
+ever asked us to listen while he told of the playmate with which
+unwarned youth takes its heedless pleasure, which waxes and
+strengthens with years, until the man suddenly awakens to find the
+playmate grown into a master, grotesque and foul, whose unclean
+grip is not to be shaken off, and who poisons the air with the
+goatish fume of the satyr. It is on this side that the unspoken
+plays so decisive a part, that most of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.16" id="Page_i.16">[i.16]</a></span>
+ spoken seems but as dust
+in the balance; it is here that the flesh spreads gross clouds over
+the firmament of the spirit. Thinking of it, we flee from talk
+about the high matters of will and conscience, of purity of heart
+and the diviner mind, and hurry to the physician. Manhood commonly
+saves itself by its own innate healthiness, though the decent apron
+bequeathed to us in the old legend of the fall, the thick veil of a
+more than legendary reserve, prevents us from really measuring the
+actual waste of delicacy and the finer forces. Rousseau, most
+unhappily for himself, lacked this innate healthiness; he never
+shook off the demon which would be so ridiculous, if it did not
+hide such terrible power. With a moral courage, that it needs
+hardly less moral courage in the critic firmly to refrain from
+calling cynical or shameless, he has told the whole story of this
+lifelong depravation. In the present state of knowledge, which in
+the region of the human character the false shamefacedness of
+science, aided and abetted by the mutilating hand of religious
+asceticism, has kept crude and imperfect, there is nothing very
+profitable to be said on all this. When the great art of life has
+been more systematically conceived in the long processes of time
+and endeavour, and when more bold, effective, and far-reaching
+advance has been made in defining those pathological manifestations
+which deserve to be seriously studied, as distinguished from those
+of a minor sort which are barely worth registering, then we should
+know better how to speak, or how to be<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.17" id="Page_i.17">[i.17]</a></span>
+ silent, in the present most
+unwelcome instance. As it is, we perhaps do best in chronicling the
+fact and passing on. The harmless young are allowed to play without
+monition or watching among the deep open graves of temperament; and
+Rousseau, telling the tale of his inmost experience, unlike the
+physician and the moralist who love decorous surfaces of things,
+did not spare himself nor others a glimpse of the ignominies to
+which the body condemns its high tenant, the soul.<a name="FNanchor12"></a><a href="#Footnote_12">[12]</a></p>
+<p>The second piece of experience which he acquired at Bossey was
+the knowledge of injustice and wrongful suffering as things actual
+and existent. Circumstances brought him under suspicion of having
+broken the teeth of a comb which did not belong to him. He was
+innocent, and not even the most terrible punishment could wring
+from him an untrue confession of guilt. The root of his constancy
+was not in an abhorrence of falsehood, which is exceptional in
+youth, and for which he takes no credit, but in a furious and
+invincible resentment against the violent pressure that was
+unjustly put upon him. &quot;Picture a character, timid and docile in
+ordinary life, but ardent, impetuous, indomitable in its passions;
+a child always governed by the voice of reason, always treated with
+equity, gentleness, and consideration, who had not even the idea of
+injustice, and who for the first time experiences an injustice so
+terrible, from the very people whom he most cherishes and respects!
+What a con<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.18" id="Page_i.18">[i.18]</a></span>fusion of ideas, what disorder of sentiments, what
+revolution in heart, in brain, in every part of his moral and
+intellectual being!&quot; He had not learnt, any more than other
+children, either to put himself in the place of his elders, or to
+consider the strength of the apparent case against him. All that he
+felt was the rigour of a frightful chastisement for an offence of
+which he was innocent. And the association of ideas was permanent.
+&quot;This first sentiment of violence and injustice has remained so
+deeply engraved in my soul, that all the ideas relating to it bring
+my first emotion back to me; and this sentiment, though only
+relative to myself in its origin, has taken such consistency, and
+become so disengaged from all personal interest, that my heart is
+inflamed at the sight or story of any wrongful action, just as much
+as if its effect fell on my own person. When I read of the
+cruelties of some ferocious tyrant, or the subtle atrocities of
+some villain of a priest, I would fain start on the instant to
+poniard such wretches, though I were to perish a hundred times for
+the deed.... This movement may be natural to me, and I believe it
+is so; but the profound recollection of the first injustice I
+suffered was too long and too fast bound up with it, not to have
+strengthened it enormously.&quot;<a name="FNanchor13"></a><a href="#Footnote_13">[13]</a></p>
+<p>To men who belong to the silent and phlegmatic races like our
+own, all this may possibly strike on the ear like a false or
+strained note. Yet a tranquil appeal to the real history of one's
+own strongest im<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.19" id="Page_i.19">[i.19]</a></span>pressions may disclose their roots in facts of
+childish experience, which remoteness of time has gradually emptied
+of the burning colour they once had. This childish discovery of the
+existence in his own world of that injustice which he had only seen
+through a glass very darkly in the imaginary world of his reading,
+was for Rousseau the angry dismissal from the primitive Eden, which
+in one shape and at one time or another overtakes all men. &quot;Here,&quot;
+he says, &quot;was the term of the serenity of my childish days. From
+this moment I ceased to enjoy a pure happiness, and I feel even at
+this day that the reminiscence of the delights of my infancy here
+comes to an end.... Even the country lost in our eyes that charm of
+sweetness and simplicity which goes to the heart; it seemed sombre
+and deserted, and was as if covered by a veil, hiding its beauties
+from our sight. We no longer tended our little gardens, our plants,
+our flowers. We went no more lightly to scratch the earth, shouting
+for joy as we discovered the germ of the seed we had sown.&quot;</p>
+<p>Whatever may be the degree of literal truth in the Confessions,
+the whole course of Rousseau's life forbids us to pass this
+passionate description by as overcharged or exaggerated. We are
+conscious in it of a constitutional infirmity. We perceive an
+absence of healthy power of reaction against moral shock. Such
+shocks are experienced in many unavoidable forms by all save the
+dullest natures, when they first come into contact with the sharp
+tooth of outer cir<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.20" id="Page_i.20">[i.20]</a></span>cumstance. Indeed, a man must be either
+miraculously happy in his experiences, or exceptionally obtuse in
+observing and feeling, or else be the creature of base and cynical
+ideals, if life does not to the end continue to bring many a
+repetition of that first day of incredulous bewilderment. But the
+urgent demands for material activity quickly recall the mass of men
+to normal relations with their fellows and the outer world. A
+vehement objective temperament, like Voltaire's, is instantly
+roused by one of these penetrative stimuli into angry and tenacious
+resistance. A proud and collected soul, like Goethe's, loftily
+follows its own inner aims, without taking any heed of the
+perturbations that arise from want of self-collection in a world
+still spelling its rudiments. A sensitive and depressed spirit,
+like Rousseau's or Cowper's, finds itself without any of these
+reacting kinds of force, and the first stroke of cruelty or
+oppression is the going out of a divine light.</p>
+<p>Leaving Bossey, Rousseau returned to Geneva, and passed two or
+three years with his uncle, losing his time for the most part, but
+learning something of drawing and something of Euclid, for the
+former of which he showed special inclination.<a name="FNanchor14"></a><a href="#Footnote_14">[14]</a> It was a question
+whether he was to be made a watchmaker, a lawyer, or a minister.
+His own preference, as his after-life might have led us to suppose,
+was in favour of the last of the three; &quot;for I thought it a fine
+thing,&quot; he says, &quot;to preach.&quot; The uncle was a man<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.21" id="Page_i.21">[i.21]</a></span>
+ of pleasure, and
+as often happens in such circumstances, his love of pleasure had
+the effect of turning his wife into a pietist. Their son was
+Rousseau's constant comrade. &quot;Our friendship filled our hearts so
+amply, that if we were only together, the simplest amusements were
+a delight.&quot; They made kites, cages, bows and arrows, drums, houses;
+they spoiled the tools of their grandfather, in trying to make
+watches like him. In the same cheerful imitative spirit, which is
+the main feature in childhood when it is not disturbed by excess of
+literary teaching, after Geneva had been visited by an Italian
+showman with a troop of marionettes, they made puppets and composed
+comedies for them; and when one day the uncle read aloud an elegant
+sermon, they abandoned their comedies, and turned with blithe
+energy to exhortation. They had glimpses of the rougher side of
+life in the biting mockeries of some schoolboys of the
+neighbourhood. These ended in appeal to the god of youthful war,
+who pronounced so plainly for the bigger battalions, that the
+release of their enemies from school was the signal for the quick
+retreat of our pair within doors. All this is an old story in every
+biography written or unwritten. It seldom fails to touch us, either
+in the way of sympathetic reminiscence, or if life should have gone
+somewhat too hardly with a man, then in the way of irony, which is
+not less real and poetic than the eironeia of a Greek dramatist,
+for being concerned with more unheroic creatures.</p>
+<p>And this rough play of the streets always seemed<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.22" id="Page_i.22">[i.22]</a></span>
+ to Rousseau a
+manlier schooling than the effeminate tendencies which he thought
+he noticed in Genevese youth in after years. &quot;In my time,&quot; he says
+admiringly, &quot;children were brought up in rustic fashion and had no
+complexion to keep.... Timid and modest before the old, they were
+bold, haughty, combative among themselves; they had no curled locks
+to be careful of; they defied one another at wrestling, running,
+boxing. They returned home sweating, out of breath, torn; they were
+true blackguards, if you will, but they made men who have zeal in
+their heart to serve their country and blood to shed for her. May
+we be able to say as much one day of our fine little gentlemen, and
+may these men at fifteen not turn out children at thirty.&quot;<a name="FNanchor15"></a><a href="#Footnote_15">[15]</a></p>
+<p>Two incidents of this period remain to us, described in
+Rousseau's own words, and as they reveal a certain sweetness in
+which his life unhappily did not afterwards greatly abound, it may
+help our equitable balance of impressions about him to reproduce
+them. Every Sunday he used to spend the day at P&#226;quis at Mr.
+Fazy's, who had married one of his aunts, and who carried on the
+production of printed calicoes. &quot;One day I was in the drying-room,
+watching the rollers of the hot press; their brightness pleased my
+eye; I was tempted to lay my fingers on them, and I was moving them
+up and down with much satisfaction along the smooth cylinder, when
+young Fazy placed himself in the wheel and gave it a half-quarter<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.23" id="Page_i.23">[i.23]</a></span>
+
+turn so adroitly, that I had just the ends of my two longest
+fingers caught, but this was enough to crush the tips and tear the
+nails. I raised a piercing cry; Fazy instantly turned back the
+wheel, and the blood gushed from my fingers. In the extremity of
+consternation he hastened to me, embraced me, and besought me to
+cease my cries, or he would be undone. In the height of my own
+pain, I was touched by his; I instantly fell silent, we ran to the
+pond, where he helped me to wash my fingers and to staunch the
+blood with moss. He entreated me with tears not to accuse him; I
+promised him that I would not, and &#207; kept my word so well that
+twenty years after no one knew the origin of the scar. I was kept
+in bed for more than three weeks, and for more than two months was
+unable to use my hand. But I persisted that a large stone had
+fallen and crushed my fingers.&quot;<a name="FNanchor16"></a><a href="#Footnote_16">[16]</a></p>
+<p>The other story is of the same tenour, though there is a new
+touch of sensibility in its concluding words. &quot;I was playing at
+ball at Plain Palais, with one of my comrades named Plince. We
+began to quarrel over the game; we fought, and in the fight he
+dealt me on my bare head a stroke so well directed, that with a
+stronger arm it would have dashed my brains out. I fell to the
+ground, and there never was agitation like that of this poor lad,
+as he saw the blood in my hair. He thought he had killed me. He
+threw himself upon me, and clasped me eagerly in his arms, while
+his tears poured down his cheeks, and he uttered<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.24" id="Page_i.24">[i.24]</a></span>
+ shrill cries. I
+returned his embrace with all my force, weeping like him, in a
+state of confused emotion which was not without a kind of
+sweetness. Then he tried to stop the blood which kept flowing, and
+seeing that our two handkerchiefs were not enough, he dragged me
+off to his mother's; she had a small garden hard by. The good woman
+nearly fell sick at sight of me in this condition; she kept
+strength enough to dress my wound, and after bathing it well, she
+applied flower-de-luce macerated in brandy, an excellent remedy
+much used in our country. Her tears and those of her son, went to
+my very heart, so that I looked upon them for a long while as my
+mother and my brother.&quot;<a name="FNanchor17"></a><a href="#Footnote_17">[17]</a></p>
+<p>If it were enough that our early instincts should be thus
+amiable and easy, then doubtless the dismal sloughs in which men
+and women lie floundering would occupy a very much more
+insignificant space in the field of human experience. The problem,
+as we know, lies in the discipline of this primitive goodness. For
+character in a state of society is not a tree that grows into
+uprightness by the law of its own strength, though an adorable
+instance here and there of rectitude and moral loveliness that seem
+intuitive may sometimes tempt us into a moment's belief in a
+contrary doctrine. In Rousseau's case this serious problem was
+never solved; there was no deliberate preparation of his impulses,
+prepossessions, notions; no foresight on the part of elders, and no
+gradual<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.25" id="Page_i.25">[i.25]</a></span>
+ acclimatisation of a sensitive and ardent nature in the
+fixed principles which are essential to right conduct in the frigid
+zone of our relations with other people. It was one of the most
+elementary of Rousseau's many perverse and mischievous contentions,
+that it is their education by the older which ruins or wastes the
+abundant capacity for virtue that subsists naturally in the young.
+His mind seems never to have sought much more deeply for proof of
+this, than the fact that he himself was innocent and happy so long
+as he was allowed to follow without disturbance the easy simple
+proclivities of his own temperament. Circumstances were not
+indulgent enough to leave the experiment to complete itself within
+these very rudimentary conditions.</p>
+<p>Rousseau had been surrounded, as he is always careful to
+protest, with a religious atmosphere. His father, though a man of
+pleasure, was possessed also not only of probity but of religion as
+well. His three aunts were all in their degrees gracious and
+devout. M. Lambercier at Bossey, &quot;although Churchman and preacher,&quot;
+was still a sincere believer and nearly as good in act as in word.
+His inculcation of religion was so hearty, so discreet, so
+reasonable, that his pupils, far from being wearied by the sermon,
+never came away without being touched inwardly and stirred to make
+virtuous resolutions. With his Aunt Bernard devotion was rather
+more tiresome, because she made a business of it.<a name="FNanchor18"></a><a href="#Footnote_18">[18]</a> It would be a
+distinct<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.26" id="Page_i.26">[i.26]</a></span>
+ error to suppose that all this counted for nothing, for
+let us remember that we are now engaged with the youth of the one
+great religious writer of France in the eighteenth century. When
+after many years Rousseau's character hardened, the influences
+which had surrounded his boyhood came out in their full force and
+the historian of opinion soon notices in his spirit and work a
+something which had no counterpart in the spirit and work of men
+who had been trained in Jesuit colleges. At the first outset,
+however, every trace of religious sentiment was obliterated from
+sight, and he was left unprotected against the shocks of the world
+and the flesh.</p>
+<p>At the age of eleven Jean Jacques was sent into a notary's
+office, but that respectable calling struck him in the same
+repulsive and insufferable way in which it has struck many other
+boys of genius in all countries. Contrary to the usual rule, he did
+not rebel, but was ignominiously dismissed by his master<a name="FNanchor19"></a><a href="#Footnote_19">[19]</a> for dulness and
+inaptitude; his fellow-clerks pronounced him stupid and incompetent
+past hope. He was next apprenticed to an engraver,<a name="FNanchor20"></a><a href="#Footnote_20">[20]</a> a rough and
+violent man, who seems to have instantly plunged the boy into a
+demoralised stupefaction. The reality of contact with this coarse
+nature benumbed as by touch of torpedo the whole being of a youth
+who had hitherto lived on pure sensations and among those ideas
+which are nearest to sensations. There were no longer heroic Romans
+in Rousseau's universe. &quot;The vilest<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.27" id="Page_i.27">[i.27]</a></span>
+ tastes, the meanest bits of
+rascality, succeeded to my simple amusements, without even leaving
+the least idea behind. I must, in spite of the worthiest education,
+have had a strong tendency to degenerate.&quot; The truth was that he
+had never had any education in its veritable sense, as the process,
+on its negative side, of counteracting the inborn. There are two
+kinds, or perhaps we should more correctly say two degrees, of the
+constitution in which the reflective part is weak. There are the
+men who live on sensation, but who do so lustily, with a certain
+fulness of blood and active energy of muscle. There are others who
+do so passively, not searching for excitement, but acquiescing. The
+former by their sheer force and plenitude of vitality may, even in
+a world where reflection is a first condition, still go far. The
+latter succumb, and as reflection does nothing for them, and as
+their sensations in such a world bring them few blandishments, they
+are tolerably early surrounded with a self-diffusing atmosphere of
+misery. Rousseau had none of this energy which makes oppression
+bracing. For a time he sank.</p>
+<p>It would be a mistake to let the story of the Confessions carry
+us into exaggerations. The brutality of his master and the
+harshness of his life led him to nothing very criminal, but only to
+wrong acts which are despicable by their meanness, rather than in
+any sense atrocious. He told lies as readily as the truth. He
+pilfered things to eat. He cunningly found a means of opening his
+master's private cabinet, and of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.28" id="Page_i.28">[i.28]</a></span>
+ using his master's best
+instruments by stealth. He wasted his time in idle and capricious
+tasks. When the man, with all the ravity of an adult moralist,
+describes these misdeeds of the boy, they assume a certain ugliness
+of mien, and excites a strong disgust which, when the misdeeds
+themselves are before us in actual life, we experience in a far
+more considerate form. The effect of calm, retrospective avowal is
+to create a kind of feeling which is essentially unlike our feeling
+at what is actually avowed. Still it is clear that his unlucky
+career as apprentice brought out in Rousseau slyness, greediness,
+slovenliness, untruthfulness, and the whole ragged regiment of the
+squalider vices. The evil of his temperament now and always was of
+the dull smouldering kind, seldom breaking out into active flame.
+There is a certain sordidness in the scene. You may complain that
+the details which Rousseau gives of his youthful days are insipid.
+Yet such things are the web and stuff of life, and these days of
+transition from childhood to full manhood in every case mark a
+crisis. These insipidities test the education of home and family,
+and they presage definitely what is to come. The roots of
+character, good or bad, are shown for this short space, and they
+remain unchanged, though most people learn from their fellows the
+decent and useful art of covering them over with a little dust, in
+the shape of accepted phrases and routine customs and a silence
+which is not oblivion.</p>
+<p>After a time the character of Jean Jacques was<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.29" id="Page_i.29">[i.29]</a></span>
+ absolutely broken
+down. He says little of the blows with which his offences were
+punished by his master, but he says enough to enable us to discern
+that they were terrible to him. This cowardice, if we choose to
+give the name to an overmastering physical horror, at length
+brought his apprentice days to an end. He was now in his sixteenth
+year. He was dragged by his comrades into sports for which he had
+little inclination, though he admits that once engaged in them he
+displayed an impetuosity that carried him beyond the others. Such
+pastimes naturally led them beyond the city walls, and on two
+occasions Rousseau found the gates closed on his return. His master
+when he presented himself in the morning gave him such greeting as
+we may imagine, and held out things beyond imagining as penalty for
+a second sin in this kind. The occasion came, as, alas, it nearly
+always does. &quot;Half a league from the town,&quot; says Rousseau, &quot;I hear
+the retreat sounded, and redouble my pace; I hear the drum beat,
+and run at the top of my speed: I arrive out of breath, bathed in
+sweat; my heart beats violently, I see from a distance the soldiers
+at their post, and call out with choking voice. It was too late.
+Twenty paces from the outpost sentinel, I saw the first bridge
+rising. I shuddered, as I watched those terrible horns, sinister
+and fatal augury of the inevitable lot which that moment was
+opening for me.&quot;<a name="FNanchor21"></a><a href="#Footnote_21">[21]</a></p>
+<p>In manhood when we have the resource of our own will to fall
+back upon, we underestimate the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.30" id="Page_i.30">[i.30]</a></span>
+ unsurpassed horror and anguish of
+such moments as this in youth, when we know only the will of
+others, and that this will is inexorable against us. Rousseau dared
+not expose himself to the fulfilment of his master's menace, and he
+ran away (1728). But for this, wrote the unhappy man long years
+after, &quot;I should have passed, in the bosom of my religion, of my
+native land, of my family, and my friends, a mild and peaceful
+life, such as my character required, in the uniformity of work
+which suited my taste, and of a society after my heart. I should
+have been a good Christian, good citizen, good father of a family,
+good friend, good craftsman, good man in all. I should have been
+happy in my condition, perhaps I might have honoured it; and after
+living a life obscure and simple, but even and gentle, I should
+have died peacefully in the midst of my own people. Soon forgotten,
+I should at any rate have been regretted as long as any memory of
+me was left.&quot;<a name="FNanchor22"></a><a href="#Footnote_22">[22]</a></p>
+<p>As a man knows nothing about the secrets of his own individual
+organisation, this illusory mapping out of a supposed Possible need
+seldom be suspected of the smallest insincerity. The poor madman
+who declares that he is a king kept out of his rights only moves
+our pity, and we perhaps owe pity no less to those in all the
+various stages of aberration uncertificated by surgeons, down to
+the very edge of most respectable sanity, who accuse the injustice
+of men of keeping them out of this or that kingdom, of which in
+truth<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.31" id="Page_i.31">[i.31]</a></span>
+ their own composition finally disinherited them at the moment
+when they were conceived in a mother's womb. The first of the
+famous Five Propositions of Jansen, which were a stumbling-block to
+popes and to the philosophy of the eighteenth-century foolishness,
+put this clear and permanent truth into a mystic and perishable
+formula, to the effect that there are some commandments of God
+which righteous and good men are absolutely unable to obey, though
+ever so disposed to do them, and God does not give them so much
+grace that they are able to observe them.</p>
+<p>If Rousseau's sensations in the evening were those of terror,
+the day and its prospect of boundless adventures soon turned them
+into entire delight. The whole world was before him, and all the
+old conceptions of romance were instantly revived by the supposed
+nearness of their realisation. He roamed for two or three days
+among the villages in the neighbourhood of Geneva, finding such
+hospitality as he needed in the cottages of friendly peasants.
+Before long his wanderings brought him to the end of the territory
+of the little republic. Here he found himself in the domain of
+Savoy, where dukes and lords had for ages been the traditional foes
+of the freedom and the faith of Geneva, Rousseau came to the
+village of Confignon, and the name of the priest of Confignon
+recalled one of the most embittered incidents of the old feud. This
+feud had come to take new forms; instead of midnight expeditions to
+scale the city walls, the descendants of the Savoyard marauders of
+the sixteenth century were<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.32" id="Page_i.32">[i.32]</a></span>
+ now intent with equivocal good will on
+rescuing the souls of the descendants of their old enemies from
+deadly heresy. At this time a systematic struggle was going on
+between the priests of Savoy and the ministers of Geneva, the
+former using every effort to procure the conversion of any
+Protestant on whom they could lay hands.<a name="FNanchor23"></a><a href="#Footnote_23">[23]</a> As it happened,
+the priest of Confignon was one of the most active in this good
+work.<a name="FNanchor24"></a><a href="#Footnote_24">[24]</a> He
+made the young Rousseau welcome, spoke to him of the heresies of
+Geneva and of the authority of the holy Church, and gave him some
+dinner. He could hardly have had a more easy convert, for the
+nature with which he had to deal was now swept and garnished, ready
+for the entrance of all devils or gods. The dinner went for much.
+&quot;I was too good a guest,&quot; writes Rousseau in one of his few
+passages of humour, &quot;to be a good theologian, and his Frangi wine,
+which struck me as excellent, was such a triumphant argument on his
+side, that I should have blushed to oppose so capital a
+host.&quot;<a name="FNanchor25"></a><a href="#Footnote_25">[25]</a> So
+it was agreed that he should be put in a way to be further
+instructed of these matters. We may accept Rousseau's assurance
+that he was not exactly a hypocrite in this rapid complaisance. He
+admits that any one who should have seen the artifices<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.33" id="Page_i.33">[i.33]</a></span>
+ to which he
+resorted, might have thought him very false. But, he argues,
+&quot;flattery, or rather concession, is not always a vice; it is
+oftener a virtue, especially in the young. The kindness with which
+a man receives us, attaches us to him; it is not to make a fool of
+him that we give way, but to avoid displeasing him, and not to
+return him evil for good.&quot; He never really meant to change his
+religion; his fault was like the coquetting of decent women, who
+sometimes, to gain their ends, without permitting anything or
+promising anything, lead men to hope more than they mean to hold
+good.<a name="FNanchor26"></a><a href="#Footnote_26">[26]</a>
+Thereupon follow some austere reflections on the priest, who ought
+to have sent him back to his friends; and there are strictures even
+upon the ministers of all dogmatic religions, in which the
+essential thing is not to do but to believe; their priests
+therefore, provided that they can convert a man to their faith, are
+wholly indifferent alike as to his worth and his worldly interests.
+All this is most just; the occasion for such a strain of remark,
+though so apposite on one side, is hardly well chosen to impress
+us. We wonder, as we watch the boy complacently hoodwinking his
+entertainer, what has become of the Roman severity of a few months
+back. This nervous eagerness to please, however, was the
+complementary element of a character of vague ambition, and it was
+backed by a stealthy consciousness of intellectual superiority,
+which perhaps did something, though poorly enough, to make such
+ignominy less deeply degrading.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.34" id="Page_i.34">[i.34]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The die was cast. M. Pontverre despatched his brand plucked from
+the burning to a certain Madame de Warens, a lady living at Annecy,
+and counted zealous for the cause of the Church. In an interview
+whose minutest circumstances remained for ever stamped in his mind
+(March 21, 1728), Rousseau exchanged his first words with this
+singular personage, whose name and character he has covered with
+doubtful renown. He expected to find some gray and wrinkled woman,
+saving a little remnant of days in good works. Instead of this,
+there turned round upon him a person not more than eight-and-twenty
+years old, with gentle caressing air, a fascinating smile, a tender
+eye. Madame de Warens read the letters he brought, and entertained
+their bearer cheerfully. It was decided after consultation that the
+heretic should be sent to a monastery at Turin, where he might be
+brought over in form to the true Church. At the monastery not only
+would the spiritual question of faith and the soul be dealt with,
+but at the same time the material problem of shelter and
+subsistence for the body would be solved likewise. Elated with
+vanity at the thought of seeing before any of his comrades the
+great land of promise beyond the mountains, heedless of those whom
+he had left, and heedless of the future before him and the object
+which he was about, the young outcast made his journey over the
+Alps in all possible lightness of heart. &quot;Seeing country is an
+allurement which hardly any Genevese can ever resist. Everything
+that met my eye seemed<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.35" id="Page_i.35">[i.35]</a></span>
+ the guarantee of my approaching happiness.
+In the houses I imagined rustic festivals; in the fields, joyful
+sports; along the streams, bathing and fishing; on the trees,
+delicious fruits; under their shade, voluptuous interviews; on the
+mountains, pails of milk and cream, a charming idleness, peace,
+simplicity, the delight of going forward without knowing
+whither.&quot;<a name="FNanchor27"></a><a href="#Footnote_27">[27]</a>
+He might justly choose out this interval as more perfectly free
+from care or anxiety than any other of his life. It was the first
+of the too rare occasions when his usually passive sensuousness was
+stung by novelty and hope into an active energy.</p>
+<p>The seven or eight days of the journey came to an end, and the
+youth found himself at Turin without money or clothes, an inmate of
+a dreary monastery, among some of the very basest and foulest of
+mankind, who pass their time in going from one monastery to another
+through Spain and Italy, professing themselves Jews or Moors for
+the sake of being supported while the process of their conversion
+was going slowly forward. At the Hospice of the Catechumens the
+work of his conversion was begun in such earnest as the insincerity
+of at least one of the parties to it might allow. It is needless to
+enter into the circumstances of Rousseau's conversion to
+Catholicism. The mischievous zeal for theological proselytising has
+led to thousands of such hollow and degrading performances, but it
+may safely be said that none of them was ever hollower than this.
+Rousseau avows that he had been<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.36" id="Page_i.36">[i.36]</a></span>
+ brought up in the heartiest
+abhorrence of the older church, and that he never lost this
+abhorrence. He fully explains that he accepted the arguments with
+which he was not very energetically plied, simply because he could
+not bear the idea of returning to Geneva, and he saw no other way
+out of his present destitute condition. &quot;I could not dissemble from
+myself that the holy deed I was about to do, was at the bottom the
+action of a bandit.&quot; &quot;The sophism which destroyed me,&quot; he says in
+one of those eloquent pieces of moralising, which bring ignoble
+action into a relief that exaggerates our condemnation, &quot;is that of
+most men, who complain of lack of strength when it is already too
+late for them to use it. It is only through our own fault that
+virtue costs us anything; if we could be always sage, we should
+rarely feel the need of being virtuous. But inclinations that might
+be easily overcome, drag us on without resistance; we yield to
+light temptations of which we despise the hazard. Insensibly we
+fall into perilous situations, against which we could easily have
+shielded ourselves, but from which we can afterwards only make a
+way out by heroic efforts that stupefy us, and so we sink into the
+abyss, crying aloud to God, Why hast thou made me so weak? But in
+spite of ourselves, God gives answer to our conscience, 'I made
+thee too weak to come out from the pit, because I made thee strong
+enough to avoid falling into it.'&quot;<a name="FNanchor28"></a><a href="#Footnote_28">[28]</a> So the hopeful convert did fall in, not
+as happens to the pious soul<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.37" id="Page_i.37">[i.37]</a></span>
+ &quot;too hot for certainties in this our
+life,&quot; to find rest in liberty of private judgment and an open
+Bible, but simply as a means of getting food, clothing, and
+shelter.<a name="FNanchor29"></a><a href="#Footnote_29">[29]</a>
+The boy was clever enough to make some show of resistance, and he
+turned to good use for this purpose the knowledge of Church history
+and the great Reformation controversy which he had picked up at M.
+Lambercier's. He was careful not to carry things too far, and
+exactly nine days after his admission into the Hospice, he &quot;abjured
+the errors of the sect.&quot;<a name="FNanchor30"></a><a href="#Footnote_30">[30]</a> Two days after that he was publicly
+received into the kindly bosom of the true Church with all
+solemnity, to the high edification of the devout of Turin, who
+marked their interest in the regenerate soul by contributions to
+the extent of twenty francs in small money.</p>
+<p>With that sum and formal good wishes the fathers of the Hospice
+of the Catechumens thrust him out of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.38" id="Page_i.38">[i.38]</a></span>
+ their doors into the broad
+world. The youth who had begun the day with dreams of palaces,
+found himself at night sleeping in a den where he paid a halfpenny
+for the privilege of resting in the same room with the rude woman
+who kept the house, her husband, her five or six children, and
+various other lodgers. This rough awakening produced no
+consciousness of hardship in a nature which, beneath all fantastic
+dreams, always remained true to its first sympathy with the homely
+lives of the poor. The woman of the house swore like a carter, and
+was always dishevelled and disorderly: this did not prevent
+Rousseau from recognising her kindness of heart and her staunch
+readiness to befriend. He passed his days in wandering about the
+streets of Turin, seeing the wonders of a capital, and expecting
+some adventure that should raise him to unknown heights. He went
+regularly to mass, watched the pomp of the court, and counted upon
+stirring a passion in the breast of a princess. &#192; more
+important circumstance was the effect of the mass in awakening in
+his own breast his latent passion for music; a passion so strong
+that the poorest instrument, if it were only in tune, never failed
+to give him the liveliest pleasure. The king of Sardinia was
+believed to have the best performers in Europe; less than that was
+enough to quicken the musical susceptibility which is perhaps an
+invariable element in the most completely sensuous natures.</p>
+<p>When the end of the twenty francs began to seem<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.39" id="Page_i.39">[i.39]</a></span>
+ a thing
+possible, he tried to get work as an engraver. A young woman in a
+shop took pity on him, gave him work and food, and perhaps
+permitted him to make dumb and grovelling love to her, until her
+husband returned home and drove her client away from the door with
+threats and the waving of a wand not magical.<a name="FNanchor31"></a><a href="#Footnote_31">[31]</a> Rousseau's
+self-love sought an explanation in the natural fury of an Italian
+husband's jealousy; but we need hardly ask for any other cause than
+a shopkeeper's reasonable objection to vagabonds.</p>
+<p>The next step of this youth, who was always dreaming of the love
+of princesses, was to accept with just thankfulness the position of
+lackey or footboy in the household of a widow. With Madame de
+Vercellis he passed three months, and at the end of that time she
+died. His stay here was marked by an incident that has filled many
+pages with stormful discussion. When Madame de Vercellis died, a
+piece of old rose-coloured ribbon was missing; Rousseau had stolen
+it, and it was found in his possession. They asked him whence he
+had taken it. He replied that it had been given to him by Marion, a
+young and comely maid in the house. In her presence and before the
+whole household he repeated his false story, and clung to it with a
+bitter effrontery that we may well call diabolic, remembering how
+the nervous terror of punishment and exposure sinks the angel in
+man. Our phrase, want of moral courage, really denotes in the young<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.40" id="Page_i.40">[i.40]</a></span>
+an excruciating physical struggle, often so keen that the victim
+clutches after liberation with the spontaneous tenacity and cruelty
+of a creature wrecked in mastering waters. Undisciplined sensations
+constitute egoism in the most ruthless of its shapes, and at this
+epoch, owing either to the brutalities which surrounded his
+apprentice life at Geneva, or to that rapid tendency towards
+degeneration which he suspected in his own character, Rousseau was
+the slave of sensations which stained his days with baseness.
+&quot;Never,&quot; he says, in his account of this hateful action, &quot;was
+wickedness further from me than at this cruel moment; and when I
+accused the poor girl, it is contradictory and yet it is true that
+my affection for her was the cause of what I did. She was present
+to my mind, and I threw the blame from myself on to the first
+object that presented itself. When I saw her appear my heart was
+torn, but the presence of so many people was too strong for my
+remorse. I feared punishment very little; I only feared disgrace,
+but I feared that more than death, more than crime, more than
+anything in the world. I would fain have buried myself in the
+depths of the earth; invincible shame prevailed over all, shame
+alone caused my effrontery, and the more criminal I became, the
+more intrepid was I made by the fright of confessing it. I could
+see nothing but the horror of being recognised and declared
+publicly to my face a thief, liar, and traducer.&quot;<a name="FNanchor32"></a><a href="#Footnote_32">[32]</a> When he says
+that he<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.41" id="Page_i.41">[i.41]</a></span> feared punishment little, his analysis of his mind is most
+likely wrong, for nothing is clearer than that a dread of
+punishment in any physical form was a peculiarly strong feeling
+with him at this time. However that may have been, the same
+over-excited imagination which put every sense on the alarm and led
+him into so abominable a misdemeanour, brought its own penalties.
+It led him to conceive a long train of ruin as having befallen
+Marion in consequence of his calumny against her, and this dreadful
+thought haunted him to the end of his life. In the long sleepless
+nights he thought he saw the unhappy girl coming to reproach him
+with a crime that seemed as fresh to him as if it had been
+perpetrated the day before.<a name="FNanchor33"></a><a href="#Footnote_33">[33]</a> Thus the same brooding memory which
+brought back to him the sweet pain of his gentle kinswoman's
+household melody, preserved the darker side of his history with
+equal fidelity and no less perfect continuousness. Rousseau
+expresses a hope and belief that this burning remorse would serve
+as expiation for his fault; as if expiation for the destruction of
+another soul could be anything but a fine name for self-absolution.
+We may, however, charitably and reasonably think that the possible
+consequences of his fault to the unfortunate Marion were not
+actual, but were as much a hallucination as the midnight visits of
+her reproachful spirit. Indeed, we are hardly condoning evil, in
+suggesting that the whole story from its beginning is marked with
+exag<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.42" id="Page_i.42">[i.42]</a></span>geration, and that we who have our own lives to lead shall find
+little help in criticising at further length the exact heinousness
+of the ignoble falsehood of a boy who happened to grow up into a
+man of genius.<a name="FNanchor34"></a><a href="#Footnote_34">[34]</a></p>
+<p>After an interval of six weeks, which were passed in the garret
+or cellar of his rough patroness with kind heart and ungentle
+tongue, Rousseau again found himself a lackey in the house of a
+Piedmontese person of quality. This new master, the Count of
+Gouvon, treated him with a certain unusual considerateness, which
+may perhaps make us doubt the narrative. His son condescended to
+teach the youth Latin, and Rousseau presumed to entertain a passion
+for one of the daughters of the house, to whom he paid silent
+homage in the odd shape of attending to her wants at table with
+special solicitude. In this situation he had, or at least he
+supposed that he had, an excellent chance of ultimate advancement.
+But advancement here or elsewhere means a measure of stability, and
+Rousseau's temperament in his youth was the archtype of the
+mutable. An old comrade from Geneva visited him,<a name="FNanchor35"></a><a href="#Footnote_35">[35]</a> and as almost any
+incident is stimulating enough to fire the restlessness of
+imaginative youth, the gratitude which he professed to the Count of
+Gouvon and his family, the prudence with which he marked his
+prospects, the industry<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.43" id="Page_i.43">[i.43]</a></span> with which he profited by opportunity, all
+faded quickly into mere dead and disembodied names of virtues. His
+imagination again went over the journey across the mountains; the
+fields, the woods, the streams, began to absorb his whole life. He
+recalled with delicious satisfaction how charming the journey had
+seemed to him, and thought how far more charming it would be in the
+society of a comrade of his own age and taste, without duty, or
+constraint, or obligation to go or stay other than as it might
+please them. &quot;It would be madness to sacrifice such a piece of good
+fortune to projects of ambition, which were slow, difficult,
+doubtful of execution, and which, even if they should one day be
+realised, were not with all their glory worth a quarter of an hour
+of true pleasure and freedom in youth.&quot;<a name="FNanchor36"></a><a href="#Footnote_36">[36]</a></p>
+<p>On these high principles he neglected his duties so recklessly
+that he was dismissed from his situation, and he and his comrade
+began their homeward wanderings with more than apostolic
+heedlessness as to what they should eat or wherewithal they should
+be clothed. They had a toy fountain; they hoped that in return for
+the amusement to be conferred by this wonder they should receive
+all that they might need. Their hopes were not fulfilled. The
+exhibition of the toy fountain did not excuse them from their
+reckoning. Before long it was accidentally broken, and to their
+secret satisfaction, for it had lost its novelty. Their naked,
+vagrancy was thus undisguised. They made<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.44" id="Page_i.44">[i.44]</a></span> their way by some means or
+other across the mountains, and their enjoyment of vagabondage was
+undisturbed by any thought of a future. &quot;To understand my delirium
+at this moment,&quot; Rousseau says, in words which shed much light on
+darker parts of his history than fits of vagrancy, &quot;it is necessary
+to know to what a degree my heart is subject to get aflame with the
+smallest things, and with what force it plunges into the
+imagination of the object that attracts it, vain as that object may
+be. The most grotesque, the most childish, the maddest schemes come
+to caress my favourite idea, and to show me the reasonableness of
+surrendering myself to it.&quot;<a name="FNanchor37"></a><a href="#Footnote_37">[37]</a> It was this deep internal vehemence which
+distinguished Rousseau all through his life from the commonplace
+type of social revolter. A vagrant sensuous temperament, strangely
+compounded with Genevese austerity; an ardent and fantastic
+imagination, incongruously shot with threads of firm reason; too
+little conscience and too much; a monstrous and diseased love of
+self, intertwined with a sincere compassion and keen interest for
+the great fellowship of his brothers; a wild dreaming of dreams
+that were made to look like sanity by the close and specious
+connection between conclusions and premisses, though the premisses
+happened to have the fault of being profoundly unreal:&#8212;this was
+the type of character that lay unfolded in the youth who, towards
+the autumn of 1729, reached Annecy, penni<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.45" id="Page_i.45">[i.45]</a></span>less and ragged, throwing
+himself once more on the charity of the patroness who had given him
+shelter eighteen months before. Few figures in the world at that
+time were less likely to conciliate the favour or excite the
+interest of an observer, who had not studied the hidden
+convolutions of human character deeply enough to know that a boy of
+eighteen may be sly, sensual, restless, dreamy, and yet have it in
+him to say things one day which may help to plunge a world into
+conflagration.</p>
+<p>&#160;</p>
+<p><b>FOOTNOTES:</b></p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor1">[1]</a> Here is
+the line:&#8212;</p>
+<p>&#160;</p>
+<div class="blockquot"><p>
+&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;
+Didier Rousseau.<br />
+&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;|<br />
+
+&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;Jean<br />
+
+&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;|<br />
+
+&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;
+-----------------------<br />
+&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;
+|&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; &#160;&#160;&#160;
+|<br />
+&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;
+David.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; Noah.<br />
+&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;
+|&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; |<br />
+Isaac (b. 1680-5, d. 1745-7). Jean Fran&#231;ois.<br />
+&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;
+|&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; |<br />
+&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;
+|&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; &#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; &#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; --------------<br />
+
+&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;
+|&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; &#160;|&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; &#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;|<br />
+
+&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; <span class="smcap">Jean Jacques</span>.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;
+Jean.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;Theodore.<br /></p>
+<p>&#160;</p></div>
+<p>(<i>Musset-Pathay</i>, ii. 283.)</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor2">[2]</a> Picot's
+<i>Hist. de Gen&#232;ve</i>, iii. 114.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_3"></a><a href="#FNanchor3">[3]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i>, i. 7.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_4"></a><a href="#FNanchor4">[4]</a> <i>Lettre
+&#224; D'Alembert</i>, p. 187. Also <i>Nouv. H&#233;l.</i>, VI.
+v. 239.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_5"></a><a href="#FNanchor5">[5]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i>, i. 9. Also Second Letter to M. de Malesherbes, p.
+356.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_6"></a><a href="#FNanchor6">[6]</a>
+<i>R&#234;veries</i>, iv. p. 189. &quot;My master and counsellor,
+Plutarch,&quot; he says, when he lends a volume to Madame d'Epinay in
+1756. <i>Corr.</i>, i. 265.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_7"></a><a href="#FNanchor7">[7]</a> Dedication
+of the <i>Discours sur l'Origine de l'In&#233;galit&#233;</i>,
+p. 201. (June, 1754.)</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_8"></a><a href="#FNanchor8">[8]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i>, i. 1.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_9"></a><a href="#FNanchor9">[9]</a> <i>Ib</i>,
+i. 12.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_10"></a><a href="#FNanchor10">[10]</a> The
+tenacity of this grateful recollection is shown in letters to her
+(Madame Gonceru)&#8212;one in 1754 (<i>Corr.</i>, i. 204), another as
+late as 1770 (vi. 129), and a third in 1762 (<i>Oeuvr. et Corr.
+In&#233;d.</i>, 392).</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_11"></a><a href="#FNanchor11">[11]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i>, i. 17-32.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_12"></a><a href="#FNanchor12">[12]</a> See
+also <i>Conf.</i>, i. 43; iii. 185; vii. 73; xii. 188, <i>n.</i>
+2.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_13"></a><a href="#FNanchor13">[13]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i>, i. 27-31.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_14"></a><a href="#FNanchor14">[14]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i>, i. 38-47.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_15"></a><a href="#FNanchor15">[15]</a>
+<i>Lettre &#224; D'Alembert</i>(1758), 178, 179.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_16"></a><a href="#FNanchor16">[16]</a>
+<i>R&#234;veries</i>, iv. 211, 212.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_17"></a><a href="#FNanchor17">[17]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i> 212, 213.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_18"></a><a href="#FNanchor18">[18]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i>, ii. 102, 103.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_19"></a><a href="#FNanchor19">[19]</a> M.
+Masseron.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_20"></a><a href="#FNanchor20">[20]</a> M.
+Ducommun.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_21"></a><a href="#FNanchor21">[21]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i>, i. 69.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_22"></a><a href="#FNanchor22">[22]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i>, i. 72.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_23"></a><a href="#FNanchor23">[23]</a> J.
+Gaberel's <i>Histoire de l'&#201;glise de Gen&#232;ve</i>
+(Geneva, 1853-62), vol. iii. p. 285.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_24"></a><a href="#FNanchor24">[24]</a> There
+is a minute in the register of the company of ministers, to the
+effect that the Sieur de Pontverre &quot;is attracting many young men
+from this town, and changing their religion, and that the public
+ought to be warned.&quot; (Gaberel, iii. 224.)</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_25"></a><a href="#FNanchor25">[25]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i>, ii. 76.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_26"></a><a href="#FNanchor26">[26]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i>, ii. 77.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_27"></a><a href="#FNanchor27">[27]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i>, ii. 90-97.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_28"></a><a href="#FNanchor28">[28]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i>, ii. 107</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_29"></a><a href="#FNanchor29">[29]</a> See
+<i>&#201;mile</i>, iv. 124, 125, where the youth who was born a
+Calvinist, finding himself a stranger in a strange land, without
+resource, &quot;changed his religion to get bread.&quot;</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_30"></a><a href="#FNanchor30">[30]</a> In the
+<i>Confessions</i> (ii. 115) he has grace enough to make the period
+a month; but the extract from the register of his baptism
+(Gaberel's <i>Hist. de l'&#201;glise de Gen&#232;ve</i>, iii.
+224), which has been recently published, shows that this is untrue:
+&quot;Jean Jacques Rousseau, de Gen&#232;ve (Calviniste), entr&#233;
+&#224; l'hospice &#224; l'&#226;ge de 16 ans, le 12 avril,
+1728. Abjura les erreurs de la secte le 21; et le 23 du m&#234;me
+mois lui fut administr&#233; le saint bapt&#234;me, ayant pour
+parrain le sieur Andr&#233; Ferrero et pour marraine
+Fran&#231;oise Christine Rora (ou Rovea).&quot;</p>
+<p>A little further on (p. 119) he speaks of having been shut up &quot;for
+two months,&quot; but this is not true even on his own showing.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_31"></a><a href="#FNanchor31">[31]</a> Madame
+Basile. <i>Conf.</i>, ii. 121-135.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_32"></a><a href="#FNanchor32">[32]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i> ii. ad finem.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_33"></a><a href="#FNanchor33">[33]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i>, ii. 144.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_34"></a><a href="#FNanchor34">[34]</a> Another
+version of the story mentioned by Musset-Pathay (i. 7) makes the
+object of the theft a diamond, but there is really no evidence in
+the matter beyond that given by Rousseau himself.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_35"></a><a href="#FNanchor35">[35]</a> Bacle,
+by name.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_36"></a><a href="#FNanchor36">[36]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i>, iii. 168.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_37"></a><a href="#FNanchor37">[37]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i>, iii. 170. A slightly idealised account of the
+situation is given in <i>&#201;mile</i>, Bk. iv. 125.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.46" id="Page_i.46">[i.46]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_III."></a>CHAPTER III.</h2>
+<h3>SAVOY.</h3>
+<p><span class="smcap">The</span> commonplace theory which the world takes for granted as to
+the relations of the sexes, makes the woman ever crave the power
+and guidance of her physically stronger mate. Even if this be a
+true account of the normal state, there is at any rate a kind of
+temperament among the many types of men, in which it seems as if
+the elements of character remain mere futile and dispersive
+particles, until compelled into unity and organisation by the
+creative shock of feminine influence. There are men, famous or
+obscure, whose lives might be divided into a number of epochs, each
+defined and presided over by the influence of a woman. For the
+inconstant such a calendar contains many divisions, for the
+constant it is brief and simple; for both alike it marks the great
+decisive phases through which character has moved.</p>
+<p>Rousseau's temperament was deeply marked by this special sort of
+susceptibility in one of its least agreeable forms. His sentiment
+was neither robustly and courageously animal, nor was it an
+intellectual demand for the bright and vivacious sympathies in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.47" id="Page_i.47">[i.47]</a></span>
+which women sometimes excel. It had neither bold virility, nor that
+sociable energy which makes close emotional companionship an
+essential condition of freedom of faculty and completeness of work.
+There is a certain close and sickly air round all his dealings with
+women and all his feeling for them. We seem to move not in the
+star-like radiance of love, nor even in the fiery flames of lust,
+but among the humid heats of some unknown abode of things not
+wholesome or manly. &quot;I know a sentiment,&quot; he writes, &quot;which is
+perhaps less impetuous than love, but a thousand times more
+delicious, which sometimes is joined to love, and which is very
+often apart from it. Nor is this sentiment friendship only; it is
+more voluptuous, more tender; I do not believe that any one of the
+same sex could be its object; at least I have been a friend, if
+ever man was, and I never felt this about any of my friends.&quot;<a name="FNanchor38"></a><a href="#Footnote_38">[38]</a> He admits that
+he can only describe this sentiment by its effects; but our lives
+are mostly ruled by elements that defy definition, and in
+Rousseau's case the sentiment which he could not describe was a
+paramount trait of his mental constitution. It was as a voluptuous
+garment; in it his imagination was cherished into activity, and
+protected against that outer air of reality which braces ordinary
+men, but benumbs and disintegrates the whole vital apparatus of
+such an organisation as Rousseau's. If he had been devoid of this
+feeling about women, his character might very possibly have
+remained sterile.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.48" id="Page_i.48">[i.48]</a></span> That feeling was the complementary contribution,
+without which could be no fecundity.</p>
+<p>When he returned from his squalid Italian expedition in search
+of bread and a new religion, his mind was clouded with the vague
+desire, the sensual moodiness, which in such natures stains the
+threshold of manhood. This unrest, with its mysterious torments and
+black delights, was banished, or at least soothed into a happier
+humour, by the influence of a person who is one of the most
+striking types to be found in the gallery of fair women.</p>
+<h3>I.</h3>
+<p>A French writer in the eighteenth century, in a story which
+deals with a rather repulsive theme of action in a tone that is
+graceful, simple, and pathetic, painted the portrait of a creature
+for whom no moralist with a reputation to lose can say a word; and
+we may, if we choose, fool ourselves by supposing her to be without
+a counterpart in the better-regulated world of real life, but, in
+spite of both these objections, she is an interesting and not
+untouching figure to those who like to know all the many-webbed
+stuff out of which their brothers and sisters are made. The Manon
+Lescaut of the unfortunate Abb&#233; Prevost, kindly, bright,
+playful, tender, but devoid of the very germ of the idea of that
+virtue which is counted the sovereign recommendation of woman,
+helps us to understand Madame de Warens. There are differ<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.49" id="Page_i.49">[i.49]</a></span>ences
+enough between them, and we need not mistake them for one and the
+same type. Manon Lescaut is a prettier figure, because romance has
+fewer limitations than real life; but if we think of her in reading
+of Rousseau's benefactress, the vision of the imaginary woman tends
+to soften our judgment of the actual one, as well as to enlighten
+our conception of a character that eludes the instruments of a
+commonplace analysis.<a name="FNanchor39"></a><a href="#Footnote_39">[39]</a></p>
+<p>She was born at Vevai in 1700; she married early, and early
+disagreed with her husband, from whom she eventually went away,
+abandoning family, religion, country, and means of subsistence,
+with all gaiety of heart. The King of Sardinia happened to be
+keeping his court at a small town on the southern shores of the
+lake of Geneva, and the conversion of Madame de Warens to
+Catholicism by the preaching of the Bishop of Annecy,<a name="FNanchor40"></a><a href="#Footnote_40">[40]</a> gave a zest to
+the royal visit, as being a successful piece of sport in that great
+spiritual hunt which Savoy loved to pursue at the expense of the
+reformed church in Switzerland. The king, to mark his zeal for the
+faith of his house, conferred on<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.50" id="Page_i.50">[i.50]</a></span> the new convert a small pension
+for life; but as the tongues of the scandalous imputed a less pure
+motive for such generosity in a parsimonious prince, Madame de
+Warens removed from the court and settled at Annecy. Her conversion
+was hardly more serious than Rousseau's own, because seriousness
+was no condition of her intelligence on any of its sides or in any
+of its relations. She was extremely charitable to the poor, full of
+pity for all in misfortune, easily moved to forgiveness of wrong or
+ingratitude; careless, gay, open-hearted; having, in a word, all
+the good qualities which spring in certain generous soils from
+human impulse, and hardly any of those which spring from
+reflection, or are implanted by the ordering of society. Her reason
+had been warped in her youth by an instructor of the devil's
+stamp;&quot;<a name="FNanchor41"></a><a href="#Footnote_41">[41]</a>
+finding her attached to her husband and to her duties, always cold,
+argumentative, and impregnable on the side of the senses, he
+attacked her by sophisms, and at last persuaded her that the union
+of the sexes is in itself a matter of the most perfect
+indifference, provided only that decorum of appearance be
+preserved, and the peace of mind of persons concerned be not
+disturbed.<a name="FNanchor42"></a><a href="#Footnote_42">[42]</a><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.51" id="Page_i.51">[i.51]</a></span>
+This execrable lesson, which greater and more unselfish men held
+and propagated in grave books before the end of the century, took
+root in her mind. If we accept Rousseau's explanation, it did so
+the more easily as her temperament was cold, and thus corroborated
+the idea of the indifference of what public opinion and private
+passion usually concur in investing with such enormous weightiness.
+&quot;I will even dare to say,&quot; Rousseau declares, &quot;that she only knew
+one true pleasure in the world, and that was to give pleasure to
+those whom she loved.&quot;<a name="FNanchor43"></a><a href="#Footnote_43">[43]</a> He is at great pains to protest how
+compatible this coolness of temperament is with excessive
+sensibility of character; and neither ethological theory nor
+practical observation of men and women is at all hostile to what he
+is so anxious to prove. The cardinal element of character is the
+speed at which its energies move; its rapidity or its steadiness,
+concentration or volatility; whether the thought and feeling travel
+as quickly as light or as slowly as sound. A rapid and volatile
+constitution like that of Madame de Warens is inconsistent with
+ardent and glowing warmth, which belongs to the other sort, but it
+is essentially bound up with sensibility, or readiness of
+sympathetic answer to every cry from another soul. It is the slow,
+brooding, smouldering nature, like Rousseau's own, in which we may
+expect to find the tropics.</p>
+<p>To bring the heavy artillery of moral reprobation to bear upon a
+poor soul like Madame de Warens is<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.52" id="Page_i.52">[i.52]</a></span> as if one should denounce
+flagrant want of moral purpose in the busy movements of ephemera.
+Her activity was incessant, but it ended in nothing better than
+debt, embarrassment, and confusion. She inherited from her father a
+taste for alchemy, and spent much time in search after secret
+elixirs and the like. &quot;Quacks, taking advantage of her weakness,
+made themselves her master, constantly infested her, ruined her,
+and wasted, in the midst of furnaces and chemicals, intelligence,
+talents, and charms which would have made her the delight of the
+best societies.&quot;<a name="FNanchor44"></a><a href="#Footnote_44">[44]</a> Perhaps, however, the too notorious
+vagrancy of her amours had at least as much to do with her failure
+to delight the best societies as her indiscreet passion for
+alchemy. Her person was attractive enough. &quot;She had those points of
+beauty,&quot; says Rousseau, &quot;which are desirable, because they reside
+rather in expression than in feature. She had a tender and
+caressing air, a soft eye, a divine smile, light hair of uncommon
+beauty. You could not see a finer head or bosom, finer arms or
+hands.&quot;<a name="FNanchor45"></a><a href="#Footnote_45">[45]</a> She
+was full of tricks and whimsies. She could not endure the first
+smell of the soup and meats at dinner; when they were placed on the
+table she nearly swooned, and her disgust lasted some time, until
+at the end of half an hour or so she took her first morsel.<a name="FNanchor46"></a><a href="#Footnote_46">[46]</a> On the whole, if
+we accept the current standard of sanity, Madame de Warens must be
+pronounced ever so little flighty; but a monotonous<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.53" id="Page_i.53">[i.53]</a></span> world can
+afford to be lenient to people with a slight craziness, if it only
+has hearty benevolence and cheerfulness in its company, and is free
+from egoism or rapacious vanity.</p>
+<p>This was the person within the sphere of whose attraction
+Rousseau was decisively brought in the autumn of 1729, and he
+remained, with certain breaks of vagabondage, linked by a close
+attachment to her until 1738. It was in many respects the truly
+formative portion of his life. He acquired during this time much of
+his knowledge of books, such as it was, and his principles of
+judging them. He saw much of the lives of the poor and of the
+world's ways with them. Above all his ideal was revolutionised, and
+the recent dreams of Plutarchian heroism, of grandeur, of palaces,
+princesses, and a glorious career full in the world's eye, were
+replaced by a new conception of blessedness of life, which never
+afterwards faded from his vision, and which has held a front place
+in the imagination of literary Europe ever since. The notions or
+aspirations which he had picked up from a few books gave way to
+notions and aspirations which were shaped and fostered by the
+scenes of actual life into which he was thrown, and which found his
+character soft for their impression. In one way the new pictures of
+a future were as dissociated from the conditions of reality as the
+old had been, and the sensuous life of the happy valley in Savoy as
+little fitted a man to compose ideals for our gnarled and knotted
+world as the mental life among the heroics of sentimental fiction
+had done.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.54" id="Page_i.54">[i.54]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Rousseau's delight in the spot where Madame de Warens lived at
+Annecy was the mark of the new ideal which circumstances were to
+engender in him, and after him to spread in many hearts. His room
+looked over gardens and a stream, and beyond them stretched a far
+landscape. &quot;It was the first time since leaving Bossey that I had
+green before my windows. Always shut in by walls, I had nothing
+under my eye but house-tops and the dull gray of the streets. How
+moving and delicious this novelty was to me! It brightened all the
+tenderness of my disposition. I counted the landscape among the
+kindnesses of my dear benefactress; it seemed as if she had brought
+it there expressly for me. I placed myself there in all
+peacefulness with her; she was present to me everywhere among the
+flowers and the verdure; her charms and those of spring were all
+mingled together in my eyes. My heart, which had hitherto been
+stifled, found itself more free in this ample space, and my sighs
+had more liberal vent among these orchard gardens.&quot;<a name="FNanchor47"></a><a href="#Footnote_47">[47]</a> Madame de Warens
+was the semi-divine figure who made the scene live, and gave it
+perfect and harmonious accent. He had neither transports nor
+desires by her side, but existed in a state of ravishing calm,
+enjoying without knowing what. &quot;I could have passed my whole life
+and eternity itself in this way, without an instant of weariness.
+She is the only person with whom I never felt that dryness in
+conversation, which turns<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.55" id="Page_i.55">[i.55]</a></span> the duty of keeping it up into a torment.
+Our intercourse was not so much conversation as an inexhaustible
+stream of chatter, which never came to an end until it was
+interrupted from without. I only felt all the force of my
+attachment for her when she was out of my sight. So long as I could
+see her I was merely happy and satisfied, but my disquiet in her
+absence went so far as to be painful. I shall never forget how one
+holiday, while she was at vespers, I went for a walk outside the
+town, my heart full of her image and of an eager desire to pass all
+my days by her side. I had sense enough to see that for the present
+this was impossible, and that the bliss which I relished so keenly
+must be brief. This gave to my musing a sadness which was free from
+everything sombre, and which was moderated by pleasing hope. The
+sound of the bells, which has always moved me to a singular degree,
+the singing of the birds, the glory of the weather, the sweetness
+of the landscape, the scattered rustic dwellings in which my
+imagination placed our common home;&#8212;all this so struck me with a
+vivid, tender, sad, and touching impression that I saw myself as in
+an ecstasy transported into the happy time and the happy place
+where my heart, possessed of all the felicity that could bring it
+delight, without even dreaming of the pleasures of sense, should
+share joys inexpressible.&quot;<a name="FNanchor48"></a><a href="#Footnote_48">[48]</a></p>
+<p>There was still, however, a space to be bridged between the
+doubtful now and this delicious future.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.56" id="Page_i.56">[i.56]</a></span> The harshness of
+circumstance is ever interposing with a money question, and for a
+vagrant of eighteen the first of all problems is a problem of
+economics. Rousseau was submitted to the observation of a kinsman
+of Madame de Warens,<a name="FNanchor49"></a><a href="#Footnote_49">[49]</a> and his verdict corresponded with that of
+the notary of Geneva, with whom years before Rousseau had first
+tried the critical art of making a living. He pronounced that in
+spite of an animated expression, the lad was, if not thoroughly
+inept, at least of very slender intelligence, without ideas, almost
+without attainments, very narrow indeed in all respects, and that
+the honour of one day becoming a village priest was the highest
+piece of fortune to which he had any right to aspire.<a name="FNanchor50"></a><a href="#Footnote_50">[50]</a> So he was sent to
+the seminary, to learn Latin enough for the priestly offices. He
+began by conceiving a deadly antipathy to his instructor, whose
+appearance happened to be displeasing to him. A second was
+found,<a name="FNanchor51"></a><a href="#Footnote_51">[51]</a> and
+the patient and obliging temper, the affectionate and sympathetic
+manner of his new teacher made a great impression on the pupil,
+though the progress in intellectual acquirement was as
+unsatisfactory in one case as in the other. It is characteristic of
+that subtle impressionableness to physical comeliness, which in
+ordinary natures is rapidly effaced by press of more urgent
+considerations, but which Rousseau's strongly sensuous quality
+retained, that he should have remembered, and thought worth
+mentioning years afterwards, that the first of his two teachers at
+the seminary<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.57" id="Page_i.57">[i.57]</a></span> of Annecy had greasy black hair, a complexion as of
+gingerbread, and bristles in place of beard, while the second had
+the most touching expression he ever saw in his life, with fair
+hair and large blue eyes, and a glance and a tone which made you
+feel that he was one of the band predestined from their birth to
+unhappy days. While at Turin, Rousseau had made the acquaintance of
+another sage and benevolent priest,<a name="FNanchor52"></a><a href="#Footnote_52">[52]</a> and uniting the two good men thirty years
+after he conceived and drew the character of the Savoyard
+Vicar.<a name="FNanchor53"></a><a href="#Footnote_53">[53]</a></p>
+<p>Shortly the seminarists reported that, though not vicious, their
+pupil was not even good enough for a priest, so deficient was he in
+intellectual faculty. It was next decided to try music, and
+Rousseau ascended for a brief space into the seventh heaven of the
+arts. This was one of the intervals of his life of which he says
+that he recalls not only the times, places, persons, but all the
+surrounding objects, the temperature of the air, its odour, its
+colour, a certain local impression only felt there, and the memory
+of which stirs the old transports anew. He never forgot a certain
+tune, because one Advent Sunday he heard it from his bed being sung
+before daybreak on the steps of the cathedral; nor an old lame
+carpenter who played the counter-bass, nor a fair little
+abb&#233; who played the violin in the choir.<a name="FNanchor54"></a><a href="#Footnote_54">[54]</a> Yet he was in so
+dreamy, absent, and distracted a state, that neither his good-will
+nor his assiduity availed, and he could learn nothing, not<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.58" id="Page_i.58">[i.58]</a></span> even
+music. His teacher, one Le M&#226;itre, belonged to that great
+class of irregular and disorderly natures with which Rousseau's
+destiny, in the shape of an irregular and disorderly temperament of
+his own, so constantly brought him into contact. Le M&#226;itre
+could not work without the inspiration of the wine cup, and thus
+his passion for his art landed him a sot. He took offence at a
+slight put upon him by the precentor of the cathedral of which he
+was choir-master, and left Annecy in a furtive manner along with
+Rousseau, whom the too comprehensive solicitude of Madame de Warens
+despatched to bear him company. They went together as far as Lyons;
+here the unfortunate musician happened to fall into an epileptic
+fit in the street. Rousseau called for help, informed the crowd of
+the poor man's hotel, and then seizing a moment when no one was
+thinking about him, turned the street corner and finally
+disappeared, the musician being thus &quot;abandoned by the only friend
+on whom he had a right to count.&quot;<a name="FNanchor55"></a><a href="#Footnote_55">[55]</a> It thus appears that a man maybe
+exquisitely moved by the sound of bells, the song of birds, the
+fairness of smiling gardens, and yet be capable all the time
+without a qualm of misgiving of leaving a friend senseless in the
+road in a strange place. It has ceased to be wonderful how many
+ugly and cruel actions are done by people with an extraordinary
+sense of the beauty and beneficence of nature. At the moment
+Rousseau only thought of getting back to Annecy and Madame de
+Warens. &quot;It is not,&quot; he<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.59" id="Page_i.59">[i.59]</a></span> says in words of profound warning, which
+many men have verified in those two or three hours before the tardy
+dawn that swell into huge purgatorial &#230;ons,&#8212;&quot;it is not when
+we have just done a bad action, that it torments us; it is when we
+recall it long after, for the memory of it can never be thrust
+out.&quot;<a name="FNanchor56"></a><a href="#Footnote_56">[56]</a></p>
+<h3>II.</h3>
+<p>When he made his way homewards again, he found to his surprise
+and dismay that his benefactress had left Annecy, and had gone for
+an indefinite time to Paris. He never knew the secret of this
+sudden departure, for no man, he says, was ever so little curious
+as to the private affairs of his friends. His heart, completely
+occupied with the present, filled its whole capacity and entire
+space with that, and except for past pleasures no empty corner was
+ever left for what was done with.<a name="FNanchor57"></a><a href="#Footnote_57">[57]</a> He says he was too young to take the
+desertion deeply to heart. Where he found subsistence we do not
+know. He was fascinated by a flashy French adventurer,<a name="FNanchor58"></a><a href="#Footnote_58">[58]</a> in whose company
+he wasted many hours, and the precious stuff of youthful
+opportunity. He passed a summer day in joyful rustic fashion with
+two damsels whom he hardly ever saw again, but the memory of whom
+and of the holiday that they had made with him remained stamped in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.60" id="Page_i.60">[i.60]</a></span>
+his brain, to be reproduced many a year hence in some of the traits
+of the new Helo&#239;sa and her friend Claire.<a name="FNanchor59"></a><a href="#Footnote_59">[59]</a> Then he accepted
+an invitation from a former waiting-woman of Madame de Warens to
+attend her home to Freiburg. On this expedition he paid an hour's
+visit to his father, who had settled and remarried at Nyon.
+Returning from Freiburg, he came to Lausanne, where, with an
+audacity that might be taken for the first presage of mental
+disturbance, he undertook to teach music. &quot;I have already,&quot; he
+says, &quot;noted some moments of inconceivable delirium, in which I
+ceased to be myself. Behold me now a teacher of singing, without
+knowing how to decipher an air. Without the least knowledge of
+composition, I boasted of my skill in it before all the world; and
+without ability to score the slenderest vaudeville, I gave myself
+out for a composer. Having been presented to M. de Treytorens, a
+professor of law, who loved music and gave concerts at his house, I
+insisted on giving him a specimen of my talent, and I set to work
+to compose a piece for his concert with as much effrontery as if I
+knew all about it.&quot; The performance came off duly, and the strange
+impostor conducted it with as much gravity as the profoundest
+master. Never since the beginning of opera has the like charivari
+greeted the ears of men.<a name="FNanchor60"></a><a href="#Footnote_60">[60]</a> Such an opening was fatal to all chance of
+scholars, but the friendly tavern-keeper who had first taken him in
+did not lack either hope or charity.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.61" id="Page_i.61">[i.61]</a></span> &quot;How is it,&quot; Rousseau cried,
+many years after this, &quot;that having found so many good people in my
+youth, I find so few in my advanced life? Is their stock exhausted?
+No; but the class in which I have to seek them now is not the same
+as that in which I found them then. Among the common people, where
+great passions only speak at intervals, the sentiments of nature
+make themselves heard oftener. In the higher ranks they are
+absolutely stifled, and under the mask of sentiment it is only
+interest or vanity that speaks.&quot;<a name="FNanchor61"></a><a href="#Footnote_61">[61]</a></p>
+<p>From Lausanne he went to Neuch&#226;tel, where he had more
+success, for, teaching others, he began himself to learn. But no
+success was marked enough to make him resist a vagrant chance. One
+day in his rambles falling in with an archimandrite of the Greek
+church, who was traversing Europe in search of subscriptions for
+the restoration of the Holy Sepulchre, he at once attached himself
+to him in the capacity of interpreter. In this position he remained
+for a few weeks, until the French minister at Soleure took him away
+from the Greek monk, and despatched him to Paris to be the
+attendant of a young officer.<a name="FNanchor62"></a><a href="#Footnote_62">[62]</a> A few days in the famous city, which he
+now saw for the first time, and which disappointed his expecta<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.62" id="Page_i.62">[i.62]</a></span>tions
+just as the sea and all other wonders disappointed them,<a name="FNanchor63"></a><a href="#Footnote_63">[63]</a> convinced him
+that here was not what he sought, and he again turned his face
+southwards in search of Madame de Warens and more familiar
+lands.</p>
+<p>The interval thus passed in roaming over the eastern face of
+France, and which we may date in the summer of 1732,<a name="FNanchor64"></a><a href="#Footnote_64">[64]</a> was always
+counted by Rousseau<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.63" id="Page_i.63">[i.63]</a></span> among the happy epochs of his life, though the
+weeks may seem grievously wasted to a generation which is apt to
+limit its ideas of redeeming the time to the two pursuits of
+reading books or making money. He travelled alone and on foot from
+Soleure to Paris and from Paris back again to Lyons, and this was
+part of the training which served him in the stead of books.
+Scarcely any great writer since the revival of letters has been so
+little literary as Rousseau, so little indebted to literature for
+the most characteristic part of his work. He was formed by life;
+not by life in the sense of contact with a great number of active
+and important persons, or with a great number of persons of any
+kind, but in the rarer sense of free surrender to the plenitude of
+his own impressions. A world composed of such people, all
+dispensing with the inherited portion of human experience, and
+living independently on their own stock, would rapidly fall
+backwards into dissolution. But there is no more rash idea of the
+right composition of a society than one which leads us to denounce
+a type of character for no better reason than that, if it were
+universal, society would go to pieces. There is very little danger
+of Rousseau's type becoming common, unless lunar or other great
+physical influences arise to work a vast change in the cerebral
+constitution of the species. We may safely trust the prodigious
+<i>vis inertioe</i> of human nature to ward off the peril of an
+eccentricity beyond bounds spreading too far. At present, however,
+it is enough, without going into the general<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.64" id="Page_i.64">[i.64]</a></span> question, to notice
+the particular fact that while the other great exponents of the
+eighteenth century movement, Hume, Voltaire, Diderot, were
+nourishing their natural strength of understanding by the study and
+practice of literature, Rousseau, the leader of the reaction
+against that movement, was wandering a beggar and an outcast,
+craving the rude fare of the peasant's hut, knocking at roadside
+inns, and passing nights in caves and holes in the fields, or in
+the great desolate streets of towns.</p>
+<p>If such a life had been disagreeable to him, it would have lost
+all the significance that it now has for us. But where others would
+have found affliction, he had consolation, and where they would
+have lain desperate and squalid, he marched elate and ready to
+strike the stars. &quot;Never,&quot; he says, &quot;did I think so much, exist so
+much, be myself so much, as in the journeys that I have made alone
+and on foot. Walking has something about it which animates and
+enlivens my ideas. I can hardly think while I am still; my body
+must be in motion, to move my mind. The sight of the country, the
+succession of agreeable views, open air, good appetite, the freedom
+of the alehouse, the absence of everything that could make me feel
+dependence, or recall me to my situation&#8212;all this sets my soul
+free, gives me a greater boldness of thought. I dispose of all
+nature as its sovereign lord; my heart, wandering from object to
+object, mingles and is one with the things that soothe it, wraps
+itself up in charming images, and is intoxi<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.65" id="Page_i.65">[i.65]</a></span>cated by delicious
+sentiment. Ideas come as they please, not as I please: they do not
+come at all, or they come in a crowd, overwhelming me with their
+number and their force. When I came to a place I only thought of
+eating, and when I left it I only thought of walking. I felt that a
+new paradise awaited me at the door, and I thought of nothing but
+of hastening in search of it.&quot;<a name="FNanchor65"></a><a href="#Footnote_65">[65]</a></p>
+<p>Here again is a picture of one whom vagrancy assuredly did not
+degrade:&#8212;&quot;I had not the least care for the future, and I awaited
+the answer [as to the return of Madame de Warens to Savoy], lying
+out in the open air, sleeping stretched out on the ground or on
+some wooden bench, as tranquilly as on a bed of roses. I remember
+passing one delicious night outside the town [Lyons], in a road
+which ran by the side of either the Rhone or the Sa&#244;ne, I
+forget which of the two. Gardens raised on a terrace bordered the
+other side of the road. It had been very hot all day, and the
+evening was delightful; the dew moistened the parched grass, the
+night was profoundly still, the air fresh without being cold; the
+sun in going down had left red vapours in the heaven, and they
+turned the water to rose colour; the trees on the terrace sheltered
+nightingales, answering song for song. I went on in a sort of
+ecstasy, surrendering my heart and every sense to the enjoyment of
+it all, and only sighing for regret that I was enjoying it alone.
+Absorbed in the sweetness of my musing, I prolonged<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.66" id="Page_i.66">[i.66]</a></span> my ramble far
+into the night, without ever perceiving that I was tired. At last I
+found it out. I lay down luxuriously on the shelf of a niche or
+false doorway made in the wall of the terrace; the canopy of my bed
+was formed by overarching tree-tops; a nightingale was perched
+exactly over my head, and I fell asleep to his singing. My slumber
+was delicious, my awaking more delicious still. It was broad day,
+and my opening eyes looked on sun and water and green things, and
+an adorable landscape. I rose up and gave myself a shake; I felt
+hungry and started gaily for the town, resolved to spend on a good
+breakfast the two pieces of money which I still had left. I was in
+such joyful spirits that I went along the road singing
+lustily.&quot;<a name="FNanchor66"></a><a href="#Footnote_66">[66]</a></p>
+<p>There is in this the free expansion of inner sympathy; the
+natural sentiment spontaneously responding to all the delicious
+movement of the external world on its peaceful and harmonious side,
+just as if the world of many-hued social circumstance which man has
+made for himself had no existence. We are conscious of a full
+nervous elation which is not the product of literature, such as we
+have seen so many a time since, and which only found its expression
+in literature in Rousseau's case by accident. He did not feel in
+order to write, but felt without any thought of writing. He dreamed
+at this time of many lofty destinies, among them that of marshal of
+France, but the fame of authorship never entered into his dreams.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.67" id="Page_i.67">[i.67]</a></span>
+When the time for authorship actually came, his work had all the
+benefit of the absence of self-consciousness, it had all the
+disinterestedness, so to say, with which the first fresh
+impressions were suffered to rise in his mind.</p>
+<p>One other picture of this time is worth remembering, as showing
+that Rousseau was not wholly blind to social circumstances, and as
+illustrating, too, how it was that his way of dealing with them was
+so much more real and passionate, though so much less sagacious in
+some of its aspects, than the way of the other revolutionists of
+the century. One day, when he had lost himself in wandering in
+search of some site which he expected to find beautiful, he entered
+the house of a peasant, half dead with hunger and thirst. His
+entertainer offered him nothing more restoring than coarse barley
+bread and skimmed milk. Presently, after seeing what manner of
+guest he had, the worthy man descended by a small trap into his
+cellar, and brought up some good brown bread, some meat, and a
+bottle of wine, and an omelette was added afterwards. Then he
+explained to the wondering Rousseau, who was a Swiss, and knew none
+of the mysteries of the French fisc, that he hid away his wine on
+account of the duties, and his bread on account of the
+<i>taille</i>, and declared that he would be a ruined man if they
+suspected that he was not dying of hunger. All this made an
+impression on Rousseau which he never forgot. &quot;Here,&quot; he says, &quot;was
+the germ of the inextinguishable hatred which afterwards<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.68" id="Page_i.68">[i.68]</a></span> grew up in
+my heart against the vexations that harass the common people, and
+against all their oppressors. This man actually did not dare to eat
+the bread which he had won by the sweat of his brow, and only
+avoided ruin by showing the same misery as reigned around
+him.&quot;<a name="FNanchor67"></a><a href="#Footnote_67">[67]</a></p>
+<p>It was because he had thus seen the wrongs of the poor, not from
+without but from within, not as a pitying spectator but as of their
+own company, that Rousseau by and by brought such fire to the
+attack upon the old order, and changed the blank practice of the
+elder philosophers into a deadly affair of ball and shell. The man
+who had been a servant, who had wanted bread, who knew the horrors
+of the midnight street, who had slept in dens, who had been
+befriended by rough men and rougher women, who saw the goodness of
+humanity under its coarsest outside, and who above all never tried
+to shut these things out from his memory, but accepted them as the
+most interesting, the most touching, the most real of all his
+experiences, might well be expected to penetrate to the root of the
+matter, and to protest to the few who usurp literature and policy
+with their ideas, aspirations, interests, that it is not they but
+the many, whose existence stirs the heart and fills the eye with
+the great prime elements of the human lot.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.69" id="Page_i.69">[i.69]</a></span></p>
+
+<h3>III.</h3>
+<p>It was, then, some time towards the middle of 1732 that Rousseau
+arrived at Chamb&#233;ri, and finally took up his residence with
+Madame de Warens, in the dullest and most sombre room of a dull and
+sombre house. She had procured him employment in connection with a
+land survey which the government of Charles Emmanuel III. was then
+executing. It was only temporary, and Rousseau's function was no
+loftier than that of clerk, who had to copy and reduce arithmetical
+calculations. We may imagine how little a youth fresh from nights
+under the summer sky would relish eight hours a day of surly toil
+in a gloomy office, with a crowd of dirty and ill-smelling
+fellow-workers.<a name="FNanchor68"></a><a href="#Footnote_68">[68]</a> If Rousseau was ever oppressed by any set
+of circumstances, his method was invariable: he ran away from them.
+So now he threw up his post, and again tried to earn a little money
+by that musical instruction in which he had made so many singular
+and grotesque endeavours. Even here the virtues which make ordinary
+life a possible thing were not his. He was pleased at his lessons
+while there, but he could not bear the idea of being bound to be
+there, nor the fixing of an hour. In time this experiment for a
+subsistence came to the same end as all the others. He next rushed
+to Besan&#231;on in search of the musical instruction which he
+wished to give to others, but his baggage was<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.70" id="Page_i.70">[i.70]</a></span> confiscated at the
+frontier, and he had to return.<a name="FNanchor69"></a><a href="#Footnote_69">[69]</a> Finally he abandoned the attempt, and
+threw himself loyally upon the narrow resources of Madame de
+Warens, whom he assisted in some singularly indefinite way in the
+transaction of her very indefinite and miscellaneous affairs,&#8212;if
+we are here, as so often, to give the name of affairs to a very
+rapid and heedless passage along a shabby road to ruin.</p>
+<p>The household at this time was on a very remarkable footing.
+Madame de Warens was at its head, and Claude Anet, gardener,
+butler, steward, was her factotum. He was a discreet person, of
+severe probity and few words, firm, thrifty, and sage. The too
+comprehensive principles of his mistress admitted him to the
+closest intimacy, and in due time, when Madame de Warens thought of
+the seductions which ensnare the feet of youth, Rousseau was
+delivered from them in an equivocal way by solicitous application
+of the same maxims of comprehension. &quot;Although Claude Anet was as
+young as she was, he was so mature and so grave, that he looked
+upon us as two children worthy of indulgence, and we both looked
+upon him as a respectable man, whose esteem it was our business to
+conciliate. Thus there grew up between us three a companionship,
+perhaps without another example like it upon earth. All our wishes,
+our cares, our hearts were in common; nothing seemed to pass
+outside our little circle. The habit of living together, and of
+living together<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.71" id="Page_i.71">[i.71]</a></span> exclusively, became so strong that if at our meals
+one of the three was absent, or there came a fourth, all was thrown
+out; and in spite of our peculiar relations, a
+<i>t&#234;te-&#224;-t&#234;te</i> was less sweet than a meeting
+of all three.&quot;<a name="FNanchor70"></a><a href="#Footnote_70">[70]</a> Fate interfered to spoil this striking
+attempt after a new type of the family, developed on a duandric
+base. Claude Anet was seized with illness, a consequence of
+excessive fatigue in an Alpine expedition in search of plants, and
+he came to his end.<a name="FNanchor71"></a><a href="#Footnote_71">[71]</a> In him Rousseau always believed that he
+lost the most solid friend he ever possessed, &quot;a rare and estimable
+man, in whom nature served instead of education, and who nourished
+in obscure servitude all the virtues of great men.&quot;<a name="FNanchor72"></a><a href="#Footnote_72">[72]</a> The day after
+his death, Rousseau was speaking of their lost friend to Madame de
+Warens with the liveliest and most sincere affliction, when
+suddenly in the midst of the conversation he remembered that he
+should inherit the poor man's clothes, and particularly a handsome
+black coat. A reproachful tear from his Maman, as he always
+somewhat nauseously called Madame de Warens, extinguished the vile
+thought and washed away its last traces.<a name="FNanchor73"></a><a href="#Footnote_73">[73]</a> After all, those
+men and women are exceptionally happy, who have no such involuntary
+meanness of thought standing against themselves in that unwritten
+chapter of their<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.72" id="Page_i.72">[i.72]</a></span> lives which even the most candid persons keep
+privately locked up in shamefast recollection.</p>
+<p>Shortly after his return to Chamb&#233;ri, a wave from the
+great tide of European affairs surged into the quiet valleys of
+Savoy. In the February of 1733, Augustus the Strong died, and the
+usual disorder followed in the choice of a successor to him in the
+kingship of Poland. France was for Stanislaus, the father-in-law of
+Lewis XV., while the Emperor Charles VI. and Anne of Russia were
+for August III., elector of Saxony. Stanislaus was compelled to
+flee, and the French Government, taking up his quarrel, declared
+war against the Emperor (October 14, 1733). The first act of this
+war, which was to end in the acquisition of Naples and the two
+Sicilies by Spanish Bourbons, and of Lorraine by France, was the
+despatch of a French expedition to the Milanese under Marshall
+Villars, the husband of one of Voltaire's first idols. This took
+place in the autumn of 1733, and a French column passed through
+Chamb&#233;ri, exciting lively interest in all minds, including
+Rousseau's. He now read the newspapers for the first time, with the
+most eager sympathy for the country with whose history his own name
+was destined to be so permanently associated. &quot;If this mad
+passion,&quot; he says, &quot;had only been momentary, I should not speak of
+it; but for no visible reason it took such root in my heart, that
+when I afterwards at Paris played the stern republican, I could not
+help feeling in spite of myself a secret predilection for the very<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.73" id="Page_i.73">[i.73]</a></span>
+nation that I found so servile, and the government I made bold to
+assail.&quot;<a name="FNanchor74"></a><a href="#Footnote_74">[74]</a>
+This fondness for France was strong, constant, and invincible, and
+found what was in the eighteenth century a natural complement in a
+corresponding dislike of England.<a name="FNanchor75"></a><a href="#Footnote_75">[75]</a></p>
+<p>Rousseau's health began to show signs of weakness. His breath
+became asthmatic, he had palpitations, he spat blood, and suffered
+from a slow feverishness from which he never afterwards became
+entirely free.<a name="FNanchor76"></a><a href="#Footnote_76">[76]</a> His mind was as feverish as his body, and
+the morbid broodings which active life reduces to their lowest
+degree in most young men, were left to make full havoc along with
+the seven devils of idleness and vacuity. An instinct which may
+flow from the unrecognised animal lying deep down in us all,
+suggested the way of return to wholesomeness. Rousseau prevailed
+upon Madame de Warens to leave the stifling streets for the fresh
+fields, and to deliver herself by retreat to rural solitude from
+the adventurers who made her their prey. Les Charmettes, the modest
+farm-house to which they retired, still stands. The modern
+traveller, with a taste for relieving an imagination strained by
+great historic monuments and secular landmarks, with the sight of
+spots associated with the passion and meditation of some
+far-shining teacher of men, may walk a short league from where the
+gray<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.74" id="Page_i.74">[i.74]</a></span> slate roofs of dull Chamb&#233;ri bake in the sun, and
+ascending a gently mounting road, with high leafy bank on the right
+throwing cool shadows over his head, and a stream on the left
+making music at his feet, he sees an old red housetop lifted lonely
+above the trees. The homes in which men have lived now and again
+lend themselves to the beholder's subjective impression; they
+seemed to be brooding in forlorn isolation like some life-wearied
+gray-beard over ancient and sorrow-stricken memories. At Les
+Charmettes a pitiful melancholy penetrates you. The supreme
+loveliness of the scene, the sweet-smelling meadows, the orchard,
+the water-ways, the little vineyard with here and there a rose
+glowing crimson among the yellow stunted vines, the rust-red crag
+of the Nivolet rising against the sky far across the broad valley;
+the contrast between all this peace, beauty, silence, and the
+diseased miserable life of the famous man who found a scanty span
+of paradise in the midst of it, touches the soul with a pathetic
+spell. We are for the moment lifted out of squalor, vagrancy, and
+disorder, and seem to hear some of the harmonies which sounded to
+this perturbed spirit, soothing it, exalting it, and stirring those
+inmost vibrations which in truth make up all the short divine part
+of a man's life.<a name="FNanchor77"></a><a href="#Footnote_77">[77]</a></p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.75" id="Page_i.75">[i.75]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>&quot;No day passes,&quot; he wrote in the very year in which he died, &quot;in
+which I do not recall with joy and tender effusion this single and
+brief time in my life, when I was fully myself, without mixture or
+hindrance, and when I may say in a true sense that I lived. I may
+almost say, like the prefect when disgraced and proceeding to end
+his days tranquilly in the country, 'I have passed seventy years on
+the earth, and I have lived but seven of them.' But for this brief
+and precious space, I should perhaps have remained uncertain about
+myself; for during all the rest of my life I have been so agitated,
+tossed, plucked hither and thither by the passions of others, that,
+being nearly passive in a life so stormy, I should find it hard to
+distinguish what belonged to me in my own conduct,&#8212;to such a
+degree has harsh necessity weighed upon me. But during these few
+years I did what I wished to do, I was what I wished to be.&quot;<a name="FNanchor78"></a><a href="#Footnote_78">[78]</a> The secret of
+such rare felicity is hardly to be described in words. It was the
+ease of a profoundly sensuous nature with every sense gratified and
+fascinated. Caressing and undivided affection within doors, all the
+sweetness and movement of nature without, solitude, freedom, and
+the busy idleness of life in gardens,&#8212;these were the conditions of
+Rousseau's ideal state. &quot;If my happiness,&quot; he says, in language of
+strange<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.76" id="Page_i.76">[i.76]</a></span> felicity, &quot;consisted in facts, actions, or words, I might
+then describe and represent it in some way; but how say what was
+neither said nor done nor even thought, but only enjoyed and felt
+without my being able to point to any other object of my happiness
+than the very feeling itself? I arose with the sun and I was happy;
+I went out of doors and I was happy; I saw Maman and I was happy; I
+left her and I was happy; I went among the woods and hills, I
+wandered about in the dells, I read, I was idle, I dug in the
+garden, I gathered fruit, I helped them indoors, and everywhere
+happiness followed me. It was not in any given thing, it was all in
+myself, and could never leave me for a single instant.&quot;<a name="FNanchor79"></a><a href="#Footnote_79">[79]</a> This was a true
+garden of Eden, with the serpent in temporary quiescence, and we
+may count the man rare since the fall who has found such happiness
+in such conditions, and not less blessed than he is rare. The fact
+that he was one of this chosen company was among the foremost of
+the circumstances which made Rousseau seem to so many men in the
+eighteenth century as a spring of water in a thirsty land.</p>
+<p>All innocent and amiable things moved him. He used to spend
+hours together in taming pigeons; he inspired them with such
+confidence that they would follow him about, and allow him to take
+them wherever he would, and the moment that he appeared in the
+garden two or three of them would instantly settle on his arms or
+his head. The bees, too, gradually came to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.77" id="Page_i.77">[i.77]</a></span> put the same trust in
+him, and his whole life was surrounded with gentle companionship.
+He always began the day with the sun, walking on the high ridge
+above the slope on which the house lay, and going through his form
+of worship. &quot;It did not consist in a vain moving of the lips, but
+in a sincere elevation of heart to the author of the tender nature
+whose beauties lay spread out before my eyes. This act passed
+rather in wonder and contemplation than in requests; and I always
+knew that with the dispenser of true blessings, the best means of
+obtaining those which are needful for us, is less to ask than to
+deserve them.&quot;<a name="FNanchor80"></a><a href="#Footnote_80">[80]</a> These effusions may be taken for the
+beginning of the deistical reaction in the eighteenth century.
+While the truly scientific and progressive spirits were occupied in
+laborious preparation for adding to human knowledge and
+systematising it, Rousseau walked with his head in the clouds among
+gods, beneficent authors of nature, wise dispensers of blessings,
+and the like. &quot;Ah, madam,&quot; he once said, &quot;sometimes in the privacy
+of my study, with my hands pressed tight over my eyes or in the
+darkness of the night, I am of his opinion that there is no God.
+But look yonder (pointing with his hand to the sky, with head
+erect, and an inspired glance): the rising of the sun, as it
+scatters the mists that cover the earth and lays bare the wondrous
+glittering scene of nature, disperses at the same moment all cloud
+from my soul. I find my faith again, and my God, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.78" id="Page_i.78">[i.78]</a></span> my belief in
+him. I admire and adore him, and I prostrate myself in his
+presence.&quot;<a name="FNanchor81"></a><a href="#Footnote_81">[81]</a>
+As if that settled the question affirmatively, any more than the
+absence of such theistic emotion in many noble spirits settles it
+negatively. God became the highest known formula for sensuous
+expansion, the synthesis of all complacent emotions, and Rousseau
+filled up the measure of his delight by creating and invoking a
+Supreme Being to match with fine scenery and sunny gardens. We
+shall have a better occasion to mark the attributes of this
+important conception when we come to <i>Emilius</i>, where it was
+launched in a panoply of resounding phrases upon a Europe which was
+grown too strong for Christian dogma, and was not yet grown strong
+enough to rest in a provisional ordering of the results of its own
+positive knowledge. Walking on the terrace at Les Charmettes, you
+are at the very birth-place of that particular &#202;tre
+Supr&#234;me to whom Robespierre offered the incense of an
+official festival.</p>
+<p>Sometimes the reading of a Jansenist book would make him unhappy
+by the prominence into which it brought the displeasing idea of
+hell, and he used now and then to pass a miserable day in wondering
+whether this cruel destiny should be his. Madame de Warens, whose
+softness of heart inspired her with a theology that ought to have
+satisfied a seraphic doctor, had abolished hell, but she could not
+dispense with purgatory because she did not know what to do with
+the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.79" id="Page_i.79">[i.79]</a></span> souls of the wicked, being unable either to damn them, or to
+instal them among the good until they had been purified into
+goodness. In truth it must be confessed, says Rousseau, that alike
+in this world and the other the wicked are extremely
+embarrassing.<a name="FNanchor82"></a><a href="#Footnote_82">[82]</a> His own search after knowledge of his fate
+is well known. One day, amusing himself in a characteristic manner
+by throwing stones at trees, he began to be tormented by fear of
+the eternal pit. He resolved to test his doom by throwing a stone
+at a particular tree; if he hit, then salvation; if he missed, then
+perdition. With a trembling hand and beating heart he threw; as he
+had chosen a large tree and was careful not to place himself too
+far away, all was well.<a name="FNanchor83"></a><a href="#Footnote_83">[83]</a> As a rule, however, in spite of the ugly
+phantoms of theology, he passed his days in a state of calm. Even
+when illness brought it into his head that he should soon know the
+future lot by more assured experiment, he still preserved a
+tranquillity which he justly qualifies as sensual.</p>
+<p>In thinking of Rousseau's peculiar feeling for nature, which
+acquired such a decisive place in his character during his life at
+Les Charmettes, it is to be remembered that it was entirely devoid
+of that stormy and boisterous quality which has grown up in more
+modern literature, out of the violent attempt to press nature in
+her most awful moods into the service of the great<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.80" id="Page_i.80">[i.80]</a></span> revolt against a
+social and religious tradition that can no longer be endured. Of
+this revolt Rousseau was a chief, and his passion for natural
+aspects was connected with this attitude, but he did not seize
+those of them which the poet of <i>Manfred</i>, for example, forced
+into an imputed sympathy with his own rebellion. Rousseau always
+loved nature best in her moods of quiescence and serenity, and in
+proportion as she lent herself to such moods in men. He liked
+rivulets better than rivers. He could not bear the sight of the
+sea; its infertile bosom and blind restless tumblings filled him
+with melancholy. The ruins of a park affected him more than the
+ruins of castles.<a name="FNanchor84"></a><a href="#Footnote_84">[84]</a> It is true that no plain, however
+beautiful, ever seemed so in his eyes; he required torrents, rocks,
+dark forests, mountains, and precipices.<a name="FNanchor85"></a><a href="#Footnote_85">[85]</a> This does not
+affect the fact that he never moralised appalling landscape, as
+post-revolutionary writers have done, and that the Alpine wastes
+which throw your puniest modern into a rapture, had no attraction
+for him. He could steep himself in nature without climbing fifteen
+thousand feet to find her. In landscape, as has been said by one
+with a right to speak, Rousseau was truly a great artist, and you
+can, if you are artistic too, follow him with confidence in his
+wanderings; he understood that beauty does not require a great
+stage, and that the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.81" id="Page_i.81">[i.81]</a></span> effect of things lies in harmony.<a name="FNanchor86"></a><a href="#Footnote_86">[86]</a> The humble
+heights of the Jura, and the lovely points of the valley of
+Chamb&#233;ri, sufficed to give him all the pleasure of which he
+was capable. In truth a man cannot escape from his time, and
+Rousseau at least belonged to the eighteenth century in being
+devoid of the capacity for feeling awe, and the taste for objects
+inspiring it. Nature was a tender friend with softest bosom, and no
+sphinx with cruel enigma. He felt neither terror, nor any sense of
+the littleness of man, nor of the mysteriousness of life, nor of
+the unseen forces which make us their sport, as he peered over the
+precipice and heard the water roaring at the bottom of it; he only
+remained for hours enjoying the physical sensation of dizziness
+with which it turned his brain, with a break now and again for
+hurling large stones, and watching them roll and leap down into the
+torrent, with as little reflection and as little articulate emotion
+as if he had been a child.<a name="FNanchor87"></a><a href="#Footnote_87">[87]</a></p>
+<p>Just as it is convenient for purposes of classification to
+divide a man into body and soul, even when we believe the soul to
+be only a function of the body, so people talk of his intellectual
+side and his emotional side, his thinking quality and his feeling
+quality, though in fact and at the roots these qualities are not
+two but one, with temperament for the common substratum. During
+this period of his life the whole of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.82" id="Page_i.82">[i.82]</a></span> Rousseau's true force went
+into his feelings, and at all times feeling predominated over
+reflection, with many drawbacks and some advantages of a very
+critical kind for subsequent generations of men. Nearly every one
+who came into contact with him in the way of testing his capacity
+for being instructed pronounced him hopeless. He had several
+excellent opportunities of learning Latin, especially at Turin in
+the house of Count Gouvon, and in the seminary at Annecy, and at
+Les Charmettes he did his best to teach himself, but without any
+better result than a very limited power of reading. In learning one
+rule he forgot the last; he could never master the most elementary
+laws of versification; he learnt and re-learnt twenty times the
+Eclogues of Virgil, but not a single word remained with him.<a name="FNanchor88"></a><a href="#Footnote_88">[88]</a> He was absolutely
+without verbal memory, and he pronounces himself wholly incapable
+of learning anything from masters. Madame de Warens tried to have
+him taught both dancing and fencing; he could never achieve a
+minuet, and after three months of instruction he was as clumsy and
+helpless with his foil as he had been on the first day. He resolved
+to become a master at the chessboard; he shut himself up in his
+room, and worked night and day over the books with indescribable
+efforts which covered many weeks. On proceeding to the caf&#233;
+to manifest his powers, he found that all the moves and
+combinations had got mixed up in his head, he saw nothing but<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.83" id="Page_i.83">[i.83]</a></span>
+clouds on the board, and as often as he repeated the experiment he
+only found himself weaker than before. Even in music, for which he
+had a genuine passion and at which he worked hard, he never could
+acquire any facility at sight, and he was an inaccurate scorer,
+even when only copying the score of others.<a name="FNanchor89"></a><a href="#Footnote_89">[89]</a></p>
+<p>Two things nearly incompatible, he writes in an important
+passage, are united in me without my being able to think how; an
+extremely ardent temperament, lively and impetuous passions, along
+with ideas that are very slow in coming to birth, very embarrassed,
+and which never arise until after the event. &quot;One would say that my
+heart and my intelligence do not belong to the same individual....
+I feel all, and see nothing; I am carried away, but I am stupid....
+This slowness of thinking, united with such vivacity of feeling,
+possesses me not only in conversation, but when I am alone and
+working. My ideas arrange themselves in my head with incredible
+difficulty; they circulate there in a dull way and ferment until
+they agitate me, fill me with heat, and give me palpitations; in
+the midst of this stir I see nothing clearly, I could not write a
+single word. Insensibly the violent emotion grows still, the chaos
+is disentangled, everything falls into its place, but very slowly
+and after long and confused agitation.&quot;<a name="FNanchor90"></a><a href="#Footnote_90">[90]</a></p>
+<p>So far from saying that his heart and intelligence belonged to
+two persons, we might have been quite<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.84" id="Page_i.84">[i.84]</a></span> sure, knowing his heart, that
+his intelligence must be exactly what he describes its process to
+have been. The slow-burning ecstasy in which he knew himself at his
+height and was most conscious of fulness of life, was incompatible
+with the rapid and deliberate generation of ideas. The same soft
+passivity, the same receptiveness, which made his emotions like the
+surface of a lake under sky and breeze, entered also into the
+working of his intellectual faculties. But it happens that in this
+region, in the attainment of knowledge, truth, and definite
+thoughts, even receptiveness implies a distinct and active energy,
+and hence the very quality of temperament which left him free and
+eager for sensuous impressions, seemed to muffle his intelligence
+in a certain opaque and resisting medium, of the indefinable kind
+that interposes between will and action in a dream. His rational
+part was fatally protected by a non-conducting envelope of
+sentiment; this intercepted clear ideas on their passage, and even
+cut off the direct and true impress of those objects and their
+relations, which are the material of clear ideas. He was no doubt
+right in his avowal that objects generally made less impression on
+him than the recollection of them; that he could see nothing of
+what was before his eyes, and had only his intelligence in cases
+where memories were concerned; and that of what was said or done in
+his presence, he felt and penetrated nothing.<a name="FNanchor91"></a><a href="#Footnote_91">[91]</a> In other words,
+this is to say that his material of thought was not fact but image.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.85" id="Page_i.85">[i.85]</a></span>
+When he plunged into reflection, he did not deal with the objects
+of reflection at first hand and in themselves, but only with the
+reminiscences of objects, which he had never approached in a spirit
+of deliberate and systematic observation, and with those
+reminiscences, moreover, suffused and saturated by the impalpable
+but most potent essences of a fermenting imagination. Instead of
+urgently seeking truth with the patient energy, the wariness, and
+the conscience, with the sharpened instruments, the systematic
+apparatus, and the minute feelers and tentacles of the genuine
+thinker and solid reasoner, he only floated languidly on a summer
+tide of sensation, and captured premiss and conclusion in a
+succession of swoons. It would be a mistake to contend that no work
+can be done for the world by this method, or that truth only comes
+to those who chase her with logical forceps. But one should always
+try to discover how a teacher of men came by his ideas, whether by
+careful toil, or by the easy bequest of generous phantasy.</p>
+<p>To give a zest to rural delight, and partly perhaps to satisfy
+the intellectual interest which must have been an instinct in one
+who became so consummate a master in the great and noble art of
+composition, Rousseau, during the time when he lived with Madame de
+Warens, tried as well as he knew how to acquire a little knowledge
+of what fruit the cultivation of the mind of man had hitherto
+brought forth. According to his own account, it was Voltaire's
+Letters on the English which first drew him seriously to study, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.86" id="Page_i.86">[i.86]</a></span>
+nothing which that illustrious man wrote at this time escaped him.
+His taste for Voltaire inspired him with the desire of writing with
+elegance, and of imitating &quot;the fine and enchanting colour of
+Voltaire's style&quot;<a name="FNanchor92"></a><a href="#Footnote_92">[92]</a>&#8212;an object in which he cannot be held to
+have in the least succeeded, though he achieved a superb style of
+his own. On his return from Turin Madame de Warens had begun in
+some small way to cultivate a taste for letters in him, though he
+had lost the enthusiasm of his childhood for reading. Saint
+Evremond, Puffendorff, the Henriade, and the Spectator happened to
+be in his room, and he turned over their pages. The Spectator, he
+says, pleased him greatly and did him much good.<a name="FNanchor93"></a><a href="#Footnote_93">[93]</a> Madame de Warens
+was what he calls protestant in literary taste, and would talk for
+ever of the great Bayle, while she thought more of Saint Evremond
+than she could ever persuade Rousseau to think. Two or three years
+later than this he began to use his own mind more freely, and
+opened his eyes for the first time to the greatest question that
+ever dawns upon any human intelligence that has the privilege of
+discerning it, the problem of a philosophy and a body of
+doctrine.</p>
+<p>His way of answering it did not promise the best results. He
+read an introduction to the Sciences,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.87" id="Page_i.87">[i.87]</a></span> then he took an
+Encyclop&#230;dia and tried to learn all things together, until he
+repented and resolved to study subjects apart. This he found a
+better plan for one to whom long application was so fatiguing, that
+he could not with any effect occupy himself for half an hour on any
+one matter, especially if following the ideas of another
+person.<a name="FNanchor94"></a><a href="#Footnote_94">[94]</a> He
+began his morning's work, after an hour or two of dispersive chat,
+with the Port-Royal Logic, Locke's Essay on the Human
+Understanding, Malebranche, Leibnitz, Descartes.<a name="FNanchor95"></a><a href="#Footnote_95">[95]</a> He found these
+authors in a condition of such perpetual contradiction among
+themselves, that he formed the chimerical design of reconciling
+them with one another. This was tedious, so he took up another
+method, on which he congratulated himself to the end of his life.
+It consisted in simply adopting and following the ideas of each
+author, without comparing them either with one another or with
+those of other writers, and above all without any criticism of his
+own. Let me begin, he said, by collecting a store of ideas, true or
+false, but at any rate clear, until my head is well enough stocked
+to enable me to compare and choose. At the end of some years passed
+&quot;in never thinking exactly, except after other people, without
+reflecting so to speak, and almost without reasoning,&quot; he found
+himself in a state to think for himself. &quot;In spite of beginning
+late to exercise my judicial faculty, I never found that it had
+lost its<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.88" id="Page_i.88">[i.88]</a></span> vigour, and when I came to publish my own ideas, I was
+hardly accused of being a servile disciple.&quot;<a name="FNanchor96"></a><a href="#Footnote_96">[96]</a></p>
+<p>To that fairly credible account of the matter, one can only say
+that this mutually exclusive way of learning the thoughts of
+others, and developing thoughts of your own, is for an adult
+probably the most mischievous, where it is not the most impotent,
+fashion in which intellectual exercise can well be taken. It is
+exactly the use of the judicial faculty, criticising, comparing,
+and defining, which is indispensable in order that a student should
+not only effectually assimilate the ideas of a writer, but even
+know what those ideas come to and how much they are worth. And so
+when he works at ideas of his own, a judicial faculty which has
+been kept studiously slumbering for some years, is not likely to
+revive in full strength without any preliminary training. Rousseau
+was a man of singular genius, and he set an extraordinary mark on
+Europe, but this mark would have been very different if he had ever
+mastered any one system of thought, or if he had ever fully grasped
+what systematic thinking means. Instead of this, his debt to the
+men whom he read was a debt of piecemeal, and his obligation an
+obligation for fragments; and this is perhaps the worst way of
+acquiring an intellectual lineage, for it leaves out the vital
+continuity of temper and method. It is a small thing to accept this
+or that of Locke's notions upon education or the origin of ideas,
+if you do not see the merit of his way of coming by his<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.89" id="Page_i.89">[i.89]</a></span> notions. In
+short, Rousseau has distinctions in abundance, but the distinction
+of knowing how to think, in the exact sense of that term, was
+hardly among them, and neither now nor at any other time did he go
+through any of that toilsome and vigorous intellectual preparation
+to which the ablest of his contemporaries, Diderot, Voltaire,
+D'Alembert, Turgot, Condorcet, Hume, all submitted themselves. His
+comfortable view was that &quot;the sensible and interesting
+conversations of a woman of merit are more proper to form a young
+man than all the pedantical philosophy of books.&quot;<a name="FNanchor97"></a><a href="#Footnote_97">[97]</a></p>
+<p>Style, however, in which he ultimately became such a proficient,
+and which wrought such marvels as only style backed by passion can
+work, already engaged his serious attention. We have already seen
+how Voltaire implanted in him the first root idea, which so many of
+us never perceive at all, that there is such a quality of writing
+as style. He evidently took pains with the form of expression and
+thought about it, in obedience to some inborn harmonious
+predisposition which is the source of all veritable eloquence,
+though there is no strong trace now nor for many years to come of
+any irresistible inclination for literary composition. We find him,
+indeed, in 1736 showing consciousness of a slight skill in
+writing,<a name="FNanchor98"></a><a href="#Footnote_98">[98]</a>
+but he only thought of it as a possible recommendation for a
+secretaryship to some great person. He also appears to have
+practised verses, not for their<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.90" id="Page_i.90">[i.90]</a></span> own sake, for he always most justly
+thought his own verses mediocre, and they are even worse; but on
+the ground that verse-making is a rather good exercise for breaking
+one's self to elegant inversions, and learning a greater ease in
+prose.<a name="FNanchor99"></a><a href="#Footnote_99">[99]</a> At
+the age of one and twenty he composed a comedy, long afterwards
+damned as <i>Narcisse</i>. Such prelusions, however, were of small
+importance compared with the fact of his being surrounded by a
+moral atmosphere in which his whole mind was steeped. It is not in
+the study of Voltaire or another, but in the deep soft soil of
+constant mood and old habit that such a style as Rousseau's has its
+growth.</p>
+<p>It was the custom to return to Chamb&#233;ri for the winter,
+and the day of their departure from Les Charmettes was always a day
+blurred and tearful for Rousseau; he never left it without kissing
+the ground, the trees, the flowers; he had to be torn away from it
+as from a loved companion. At the first melting of the winter snows
+they left their dungeon in Chamb&#233;ri, and they never missed
+the earliest song of the nightingale. Many a joyful day of summer
+peace remained vivid in Rousseau's memory, and made a mixed heaven
+and hell for him long years after in the stifling dingy Paris
+street, and the raw and cheerless air of a Derbyshire
+winter.<a name="FNanchor100"></a><a href="#Footnote_100">[100]</a>
+&quot;We started early in the morning,&quot;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.91" id="Page_i.91">[i.91]</a></span> he says, describing one of these
+simple excursions on the day of St. Lewis, who was the very
+unconscious patron saint of Madame de Warens, &quot;together and alone;
+I proposed that we should go and ramble about the side of the
+valley opposite to our own, which we had not yet visited. We sent
+our provisions on before us, for we were to be out all day. We went
+from hill to hill and wood to wood, sometimes in the sun and often
+in the shade, resting from time to time and forgetting ourselves
+for whole hours; chatting about ourselves, our union, our dear lot,
+and offering unheard prayers that it might last. All seemed to
+conspire for the bliss of this day. Rain had fallen a short time
+before; there was no dust, and the little streams were full; a
+light fresh breeze stirred the leaves, the air was pure, the
+horizon without a cloud, and the same serenity reigned in our own
+hearts. Our dinner was cooked in a peasant's cottage, and we shared
+it with his family. These Savoyards are such good souls! After
+dinner we sought shade under some tall trees, where, while I
+collected dry sticks for making our coffee, Maman amused herself by
+botanising among the bushes, and the expedition ended in transports
+of tenderness and effusion.&quot;<a name="FNanchor101"></a><a href="#Footnote_101">[101]</a> This is one of such days as the soul
+turns back to when the misery that stalks after us all has seized
+it, and a man is left to the sting and smart of the memory of
+irrecoverable things.</p>
+<p>He was resolved to bind himself to Madame de<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.92" id="Page_i.92">[i.92]</a></span> Warens with an
+inalterable fidelity for all the rest of his days; he would watch
+over her with all the dutiful and tender vigilance of a son, and
+she should be to him something dearer than mother or wife or
+sister. What actually befell was this. He was attacked by vapours,
+which he characterises as the disorder of the happy. One symptom of
+his disease was the conviction derived from the rash perusal of
+surgeon's treatises, that he was suffering from a polypus in the
+heart. On the not very chivalrous principle that if he did not
+spend Madame de Warens' money, he was only leaving it for
+adventurers and knaves, he proceeded to Montpellier to consult the
+physicians, and took the money for his expenses out of his
+benefactress's store, which was always slender because it was
+always open to any hand. While on the road, he fell into an
+intrigue with a travelling companion, whom critics have compared to
+the fair Philina of Wilhelm Meister. In due time, the Montpellier
+doctor being unable to discover a disease, declared that the
+patient had none. The scenery was dull and unattractive, and this
+would have counterbalanced the weightiest prudential reasons with
+him at any time. Rousseau debated whether he should keep tryst with
+his gay fellow-traveller, or return to Chamb&#233;ri. Remorse and
+that intractable emptiness of pocket which is the iron key to many
+a deed of ingenuous-looking self-denial and Spartan virtue,
+directed him homewards. Here he had a surprise, and perhaps learnt
+a lesson. He found installed in the house a personage whom<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.93" id="Page_i.93">[i.93]</a></span> he
+describes as tall, fair, noisy, coxcombical, flat-faced,
+flat-souled. Another triple alliance seemed a thing odious in the
+eyes of a man whom his travelling diversions had made a Pharisee
+for the hour. He protested, but Madame de Warens was a woman of
+principle, and declined to let Rousseau, who had profited by the
+doctrine of indifference, now set up in his own favour the contrary
+doctrine of a narrow and churlish partiality. So a short,
+delicious, and never-forgotten episode came to an end: this pair
+who had known so much happiness together were happy together no
+more, and the air became peopled for Rousseau with wan spectres of
+dead joys and fast gathering cares.</p>
+<p>The dates of the various events described in the fifth and sixth
+books of the Confessions are inextricable, and the order is
+evidently inverted more than once. The inversion of order is less
+serious than the contradictions between the dates of the
+Confessions and the more authentic and unmistakable dates of his
+letters. For instance, he describes a visit to Geneva as having
+been made shortly before Lautrec's temporary pacification of the
+civic troubles of that town; and that event took place in the
+spring of 1738. This would throw the Montpellier journey, which he
+says came after the visit to Geneva, into 1738, but the letters to
+Madame de Warens from Grenoble and Montpellier are dated in the
+autumn and winter of 1737.<a name="FNanchor102"></a><a href="#Footnote_102">[102]</a> Minor verifications attest the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.94" id="Page_i.94">[i.94]</a></span>
+exactitude of the dates of the letters,<a name="FNanchor103"></a><a href="#Footnote_103">[103]</a> and we may
+therefore conclude that he returned from Montpellier, found his
+place taken and lost his old delight in Les Charmettes, in the
+early part of 1738. In the tenth of the R&#234;veries he speaks of
+having passed &quot;a space of four or five years&quot; in the bliss of Les
+Charmettes, and it is true that his connection with it in one way
+and another lasted from the middle of 1736 until about the middle
+of 1741. But as he left for Montpellier in the autumn of 1737, and
+found the obnoxious Vinzenried installed in 1738, the pure and
+characteristic felicity of Les Charmettes perhaps only lasted about
+a year or a year and a half. But a year may set a deep mark on a
+man, and give him imperishable taste of many things bitter and
+sweet.</p>
+<p>&#160;</p>
+<p><b>FOOTNOTES:</b></p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_38"></a><a href="#FNanchor38">[38]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i>, iii. 177.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_39"></a><a href="#FNanchor39">[39]</a>
+Lamartine in <i>Raphael</i> defies &quot;a reasonable man to recompose
+with any reality the character that Rousseau gives to his mistress,
+out of the contradictory elements which he associates in her
+nature. One of these elements excludes the other.&quot; It is worth
+while for any who care for this kind of study to compare Madame de
+Warens with the Marquise de Courcelles, whom Sainte-Beuve has well
+called the Manon Lescaut of the seventeenth century.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_40"></a><a href="#FNanchor40">[40]</a>
+Described by Rousseau in a memorandum for the biographer of M. de
+Bernex, printed in <i>M&#233;langes</i>, pp. 139-144.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_41"></a><a href="#FNanchor41">[41]</a> De
+Tavel, by name. Disorderly ideas as to the relations of the sexes
+began to appear in Switzerland along with the reformation of
+religion. In the sixteenth century a woman appeared at Geneva with
+the doctrine that it is as inhuman and as unjustifiable to refuse
+the gratification of this appetite in a man as to decline to give
+food and drink to the starving. Picot's <i>Hist. de
+Gen&#232;ve</i>, vol. ii.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_42"></a><a href="#FNanchor42">[42]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i>, v. 341. Also ii. 83; and vi. 401.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_43"></a><a href="#FNanchor43">[43]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i>, v. 345.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_44"></a><a href="#FNanchor44">[44]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i>, ii. 83.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_45"></a><a href="#FNanchor45">[45]</a>
+<i>Ib.</i> ii. 82.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_46"></a><a href="#FNanchor46">[46]</a>
+<i>Ib.</i> iii. 179. See also 200.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_47"></a><a href="#FNanchor47">[47]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i>, iii. 177, 178.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_48"></a><a href="#FNanchor48">[48]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i>, iii. 183.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_49"></a><a href="#FNanchor49">[49]</a> M.
+d'Aubonne.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_50"></a><a href="#FNanchor50">[50]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i>, iii 192.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_51"></a><a href="#FNanchor51">[51]</a> M.
+Gatier.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_52"></a><a href="#FNanchor52">[52]</a> M.
+Gaime.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_53"></a><a href="#FNanchor53">[53]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i>, iii. 204.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_54"></a><a href="#FNanchor54">[54]</a>
+<i>Ib.</i> iii. 209, 210.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_55"></a><a href="#FNanchor55">[55]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i>, iii. 217-222.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_56"></a><a href="#FNanchor56">[56]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i>, iv. 227.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_57"></a><a href="#FNanchor57">[57]</a>
+<i>Ib.</i> iii. 224.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_58"></a><a href="#FNanchor58">[58]</a> One
+Venture de Villeneuve, who visited him years afterwards (1755) in
+Paris, when Rousseau found that the idol of old days was a
+crapulent debauchee. <i>Ib.</i> viii. 221.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_59"></a><a href="#FNanchor59">[59]</a> Mdlles.
+de Graffenried and Galley. <i>Conf.</i>, iv. 231.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_60"></a><a href="#FNanchor60">[60]</a>
+<i>Ib.</i> iv. 254-256.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_61"></a><a href="#FNanchor61">[61]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i>, iv. 253.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_62"></a><a href="#FNanchor62">[62]</a> While
+in the ambassador's house at Soleure, he was lodged in a room which
+had once belonged to his namesake, Jean Baptiste Rousseau (<i>b.
+1670&#8212;d. 1741</i>), whom the older critics astonishingly insist on
+counting the first of French lyric poets. There was a third
+Rousseau, Pierre [<i>b. 1725&#8212;d. 1785</i>], who wrote plays and did
+other work now well forgotten. There are some lines imperfectly
+commemorative of the trio&#8212;</p>
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Trois auteurs que Rousseau l'on nomme,<br />
+Connus de Paris jusqu'&#224; Rome,<br />
+Sont diff&#233;rens; voici par o&#249;;<br />
+Rousseau de Paris fut grand homme;<br />
+Rousseau de Gen&#232;ve est un fou;<br />
+Rousseau de Toulouse un atome.</p></div>
+<p>Jean Jacques refers to both his namesakes in his letter to
+Voltaire, Jan. 30, 1750. <i>Corr.</i>, i. 145.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_63"></a><a href="#FNanchor63">[63]</a> The
+only object which ever surpassed his expectation was the great
+Roman structure near Nismes, the Pont du Gard. <i>Conf.</i>, vi.
+446.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_64"></a><a href="#FNanchor64">[64]</a>
+Rousseau gives 1732 as the probable date of his return to
+Chamb&#233;ri, after his first visit to Paris [<i>Conf.</i>, v.
+305], and the only objection to this is his mention of the incident
+of the march of the French troops, which could not have happened
+until the winter of 1733, as having taken place &quot;some months&quot; after
+his arrival. Musset-Pathay accepts this as decisive, and fixes the
+return in the spring of 1733 [i. 12]. My own conjectural chronology
+is this: Returns from Turin towards the autumn of 1729; stays at
+Annecy until the spring of 1731; passes the winter of 1731-2 at
+Neuch&#226;tel; first visits Paris in spring of 1732; returns to
+Savoy in the early summer of 1732. But a precise harmonising of the
+dates in the Confessions is impossible; Rousseau wrote them three
+and thirty years after our present point [in 1766 at Wootton], and
+never claimed to be exact in minuteness of date. Fortunately such
+matters in the present case are absolutely devoid of
+importance.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_65"></a><a href="#FNanchor65">[65]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i>, iv. 279, 280.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_66"></a><a href="#FNanchor66">[66]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i>, iv. 290, 291,</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_67"></a><a href="#FNanchor67">[67]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i>, iv. 281-283.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_68"></a><a href="#FNanchor68">[68]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i>, v. 325.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_69"></a><a href="#FNanchor69">[69]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i>, v. 360-364. <i>Corr.</i>, i. 21-24.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_70"></a><a href="#FNanchor70">[70]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i>, v. 349, 350.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_71"></a><a href="#FNanchor71">[71]</a>
+Apparently in the summer of 1736, though, the reference to the
+return of the French troops at the peace [<i>Ib.</i> v. 365] would
+place it in 1735.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_72"></a><a href="#FNanchor72">[72]</a>
+<i>Ib.</i> v. 356</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_73"></a><a href="#FNanchor73">[73]</a>
+<i>Ib.</i></p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_74"></a><a href="#FNanchor74">[74]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i>, v. 315, 316.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_75"></a><a href="#FNanchor75">[75]</a>
+<i>Ib.</i> iv. 276. <i>Nouv. H&#233;l.</i>, II. xiv. 381,
+etc.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_76"></a><a href="#FNanchor76">[76]</a> He
+refers to the ill-health of his youth, <i>Conf.</i>, vii. 32, and
+describes an ominous head seizure while at Chamb&#233;ri,
+<i>Ib.</i> vi. 396.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_77"></a><a href="#FNanchor77">[77]</a>
+Rousseau's description of Les Charmettes is at the end of the fifth
+book. The present proprietor keeps the house arranged as it used to
+be, and has gathered one or two memorials of its famous tenant,
+including his poor <i>clavecin</i> and his watch. In an outside
+wall, H&#233;rault de Sechelles, when Commissioner from the
+Convention in the department of Mont Blanc, inserted a little white
+stone with two most lapidary stanzas inscribed upon it, about
+<i>g&#233;nie, solitude, fiert&#233;, gloire,
+v&#233;rit&#233;, envie</i>, and the like.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_78"></a><a href="#FNanchor78">[78]</a>
+<i>R&#234;veries</i>, x. 336 (1778).</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_79"></a><a href="#FNanchor79">[79]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i>, vi. 393.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_80"></a><a href="#FNanchor80">[80]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i>, vi. 412.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_81"></a><a href="#FNanchor81">[81]</a>
+<i>M&#233;m, de Mdme. d'Epinay</i>, i. 394. (M. Boiteau's
+edition: Charpentier. 1865.)</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_82"></a><a href="#FNanchor82">[82]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i>, vi. 399.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_83"></a><a href="#FNanchor83">[83]</a>
+<i>Ib.</i> vi. 424. Goethe made a similar experiment; see Mr.
+Lewes's <i>Life</i>, p. 126.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_84"></a><a href="#FNanchor84">[84]</a>
+Bernardin de Saint Pierre tells us this. <i>Oeuvres</i> (Ed. 1818),
+xii. 70, etc.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_85"></a><a href="#FNanchor85">[85]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i>, iv. 297. See also the description of the scenery of
+the Valais, in the <i>Nouv. H&#233;l.</i>, Pt. I. Let. xxiii.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_86"></a><a href="#FNanchor86">[86]</a> George
+Sand in <i>Mademoiselle la Quintinie</i> (p. 27), a book containing
+some peculiarly subtle appreciations of the Savoy landscape.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_87"></a><a href="#FNanchor87">[87]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i>, iv. 298.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_88"></a><a href="#FNanchor88">[88]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i>, vi. 416, 422, etc.; iii. 164; iii. 203; v. 347; v.
+383, 384. Also vii. 53.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_89"></a><a href="#FNanchor89">[89]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i>, v. 313, 367; iv. 293; ix. 353. Also <i>M&#233;m. de
+Mdme. d'Epinay</i>, ii. 151.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_90"></a><a href="#FNanchor90">[90]</a>
+<i>Ib.</i> iii. 192, 193.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_91"></a><a href="#FNanchor91">[91]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i>, iv. 301; iii. 195.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_92"></a><a href="#FNanchor92">[92]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i>, v. 372, 373. The mistaken date assigned to the
+correspondence between Voltaire and Frederick is one of many
+instances how little we can trust the Confessions for minute
+accuracy, though their substantial veracity is confirmed by all the
+collateral evidence that we have.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_93"></a><a href="#FNanchor93">[93]</a> <i>Ib.</i>
+iii. 188. For his debt in the way of education to Madame de Warens,
+see also <i>Ib.</i> vii. 46.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_94"></a><a href="#FNanchor94">[94]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i>, vi. 409.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_95"></a><a href="#FNanchor95">[95]</a> <i>Ib.</i> vi.
+413. He adds a suspicious-looking &quot;<i>et cetera</i>.&quot;</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_96"></a><a href="#FNanchor96">[96]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i>, vi. 414</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_97"></a><a href="#FNanchor97">[97]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i>, iv. 295. See also v. 346.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_98"></a><a href="#FNanchor98">[98]</a>
+<i>Corr.</i>, 1736, pp. 26, 27.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_99"></a><a href="#FNanchor99">[99]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i>, iv. 271, where he says further that he never found
+enough attraction in French poetry to make him think of pursuing
+it.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_100"></a><a href="#FNanchor100">[100]</a> The
+first part of the Confessions was written in Wootton in Derbyshire,
+in the winter of 1766-1767.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_101"></a><a href="#FNanchor101">[101]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i>, vi. 422.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_102"></a><a href="#FNanchor102">[102]</a>
+<i>Corr.</i>, i. 43, 46, 62, etc.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_103"></a><a href="#FNanchor103">[103]</a>
+Musset-Pathay, i. 23, <i>n.</i></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.95" id="Page_i.95">[i.95]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IV."></a>CHAPTER IV.</h2>
+<h3>THERESA LE VASSEUR.</h3>
+<p><span class="smcap">Men</span> like Rousseau, who are most heedless in letting their
+delight perish, are as often as not most loth to bury what they
+have slain, or even to perceive that life has gone out of it. The
+sight of simple hearts trying to coax back a little warm breath of
+former days into a present that is stiff and cold with
+indifference, is touching enough. But there is a certain grossness
+around the circumstances in which Rousseau now and too often found
+himself, that makes us watch his embarrassment with some composure.
+One cannot easily think of him as a simple heart, and we feel
+perhaps as much relief as he, when he resolves after making all due
+efforts to thrust out the intruder and bring Madame de Warens over
+from theories which had become too practical to be interesting, to
+leave Les Charmettes and accept a tutorship at Lyons. His new
+patron was a De Mably, elder brother of the philosophic abb&#233;
+of the same name (1709-85), and of the still more notable Condillac
+(1714-80).</p>
+<p>The future author of the most influential treatise on education
+that has ever been written, was not<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.96" id="Page_i.96">[i.96]</a></span>
+ successful in the practical and
+far more arduous side of that master art.<a name="FNanchor104"></a><a href="#Footnote_104">[104]</a> We have seen
+how little training he had ever given himself in the cardinal
+virtues of collectedness and self-control, and we know this to be
+the indispensable quality in all who have to shape young minds for
+a humane life. So long as all went well, he was an angel, but when
+things went wrong, he is willing to confess that he was a devil.
+When his two pupils could not understand him, he became frantic;
+when they showed wilfulness or any other part of the disagreeable
+materials out of which, along with the rest, human excellence has
+to be ingeniously and painfully manufactured, he was ready to kill
+them. This, as he justly admits, was not the way to render them
+either well learned or sage. The moral education of the teacher
+himself was hardly complete, for he describes how he used to steal
+his employer's wine, and the exquisite draughts which he enjoyed in
+the secrecy of his own room, with a piece of cake in one hand and
+some dear romance in the other. We should forgive greedy pilferings
+of this kind more easily if Rousseau had forgotten them more
+speedily. These are surely offences for which the best expiation is
+oblivion in a throng of worthier memories.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.97" id="Page_i.97">[i.97]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>It is easy to understand how often Rousseau's mind turned from
+the deadly drudgery of his present employment to the beatitude of
+former days. &quot;What rendered my present condition insupportable was
+the recollection of my beloved Charmettes, of my garden, my trees,
+my fountain, my orchard, and above all of her for whom I felt
+myself born and who gave life to it all. As I thought of her, of
+our pleasures, our guileless days, I was seized by a tightness in
+my heart, a stopping of my breath, which robbed me of all
+spirit.&quot;<a name="FNanchor105"></a><a href="#Footnote_105">[105]</a>
+For years to come this was a kind of far-off accompaniment,
+thrumming melodiously in his ears under all the discords of a
+miserable life. He made another effort to quicken the dead.
+Throwing up his office with his usual promptitude in escaping from
+the irksome, after a residence of something like a year at Lyons
+(April, 1740&#8212;spring of 1741), he made his way back to his old
+haunts. The first half-hour with Madame de Warens persuaded him
+that happiness here was really at an end. After a stay of a few
+months, his desolation again overcame him. It was agreed that he
+should go to Paris to make his fortune by a new method of musical
+notation which he had invented, and after a short stay at Lyons, he
+found himself for the second time in the famous city which in the
+eighteenth century had become for the moment the centre of the
+universe.<a name="FNanchor106"></a><a href="#Footnote_106">[106]</a></p>
+<p>It was not yet, however, destined to be a centre<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.98" id="Page_i.98">[i.98]</a></span>
+ for him. His
+plan of musical notation was examined by a learned committee of the
+Academy, no member of whom was instructed in the musical art.
+Rousseau, dumb, inarticulate, and unready as usual, was amazed at
+the ease with which his critics by the free use of sounding phrases
+demolished arguments and objections which he perceived that they
+did not at all understand. His experience on this occasion
+suggested to him the most just reflection, how even without breadth
+of intelligence, the profound knowledge of any one thing is
+preferable in forming a judgment about it, to all possible
+enlightenment conferred by the cultivation of the sciences, without
+study of the special matter in question. It astonished him that all
+these learned men, who knew so many things, could yet be so
+ignorant that a man should only pretend to be a judge in his own
+craft.<a name="FNanchor107"></a><a href="#Footnote_107">[107]</a></p>
+<p>His musical path to glory and riches thus blocked up, he
+surrendered himself not to despair but to complete idleness and
+peace of mind. He had a few coins left, and these prevented him
+from thinking of a future. He was presented to one or two great
+ladies, and with the blundering gallantry habitual to him he wrote
+a letter to one of the greatest of them, declaring his passion for
+her. Madame Dupin was the daughter of one, and the wife of another,
+of the richest men in France, and the attentions of a man whose
+acquaintance Madame Beuzenval had begun by inviting him to dine in
+the servants' hall, were<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.99" id="Page_i.99">[i.99]</a></span>
+ not pleasing to her.<a name="FNanchor108"></a><a href="#Footnote_108">[108]</a> She forgave
+the impertinence eventually, and her stepson, M. Francueil, was
+Rousseau's patron for some years.<a name="FNanchor109"></a><a href="#Footnote_109">[109]</a> On the whole, however, in spite of his
+own account of his social ineptitude, there cannot have been
+anything so repulsive in his manners as this account would lead us
+to think. There is no grave anachronism in introducing here the
+impression which he made on two fine ladies not many years after
+this. &quot;He pays compliments, yet he is not polite, or at least he is
+without the air of politeness. He seems to be ignorant of the
+usages of society, but it is easily seen that he is infinitely
+intelligent. He has a brown complexion, while eyes that overflow
+with fire give animation to his expression. When he has spoken and
+you look at him, he appears comely; but when you try to recall him,
+his image is always extremely plain. They say that he has bad
+health, and endures agony which from<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.100" id="Page_i.100">[i.100]</a></span>
+ some motive of vanity he most
+carefully conceals. It is this, I fancy, which gives him from time
+to time an air of sullenness.&quot;<a name="FNanchor110"></a><a href="#Footnote_110">[110]</a> The other lady, who saw him at the same
+time, speaks of &quot;the poor devil of an author, who's as poor as Job
+for you, but with wit and vanity enough for four.... They say his
+history is as queer as his person, and that is saying a good
+deal.... Madame Maupeou and I tried to guess what it was. 'In spite
+of his face,' said she (for it is certain he is uncommonly plain),
+'his eyes tell that love plays a great part in his romance.' 'No,'
+said I, 'his nose tells me that it is vanity.' 'Well then, 'tis
+both one and the other.'&quot;<a name="FNanchor111"></a><a href="#Footnote_111">[111]</a></p>
+<p>One of his patronesses took some trouble to procure him the post
+of secretary to the French ambassador at Venice, and in the spring
+of 1743 our much-wandering man started once more in quest of meat
+and raiment in the famous city of the Adriatic. This was one of
+those steps of which there are not a few in a man's life, that seem
+at the moment to rank foremost in the short line of decisive acts,
+and then are presently seen not to have been decisive at all, but
+mere interruptions conducting nowhither. In truth the critical
+moments with us are mostly as points in slumber. Even if the
+ancient oracles of the gods were to regain their speech once more
+on the earth, men would usually go to consult them on days when the
+answer would have least significance,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.101" id="Page_i.101">[i.101]</a></span>
+ and could guide them least
+far. That one of the most heedless vagrants in Europe, and as it
+happened one of the men of most extraordinary genius also, should
+have got a footing in the train of the ambassador of a great
+government, would naturally seem to him and others as chance's one
+critical stroke in his life. In reality it was nothing. The Count
+of Montaigu, his master, was one of the worst characters with whom
+Rousseau could for his own profit have been brought into contact.
+In his professional quality he was not far from imbecile. The folly
+and weakness of the government at Versailles during the reign of
+Lewis XV., and its indifference to competence in every department
+except perhaps partially in the fisc, was fairly illustrated in its
+absurd representative at Venice. The secretary, whose renown has
+preserved his master's name, has recorded more amply than enough
+the grounds of quarrel between them. Rousseau is for once eager to
+assert his own efficiency, and declares that he rendered many
+important services for which he was repaid with ingratitude and
+persecution.<a name="FNanchor112"></a><a href="#Footnote_112">[112]</a> One would be glad to know what the Count
+of Montaigu's version of matters was, for in truth Rousseau's
+conduct in previous posts makes us wonder how it was that he who
+had hitherto always<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.102" id="Page_i.102">[i.102]</a></span> been unfaithful over few things, suddenly
+touched perfection when he became lord over many.</p>
+<p>There is other testimony, however, to the ambassador's morbid
+quality, of which, after that general imbecility which was too
+common a thing among men in office to be remarkable, avarice was
+the most striking trait. For instance, careful observation had
+persuaded him that three shoes are equivalent to two pairs, because
+there is always one of a pair which is more worn than its fellow;
+and hence he habitually ordered his shoes in threes.<a name="FNanchor113"></a><a href="#Footnote_113">[113]</a> It was natural
+enough that such a master and such a secretary should quarrel over
+perquisites. That slightly cringing quality which we have noticed
+on one or two occasions in Rousseau's hungry youthful time, had
+been hardened out of him by circumstance or the strengthening of
+inborn fibre. He would now neither dine in a servants' hall because
+a fine lady forgot what was due to a musician, nor share his fees
+with a great ambassador who forgot what was due to himself. These
+sordid disputes are of no interest now to anybody, and we need only
+say that after a period of eighteen months passed in uncongenial
+company, Rousseau parted from his count in extreme dudgeon, and the
+diplomatic career which he had promised to himself came to the same
+close as various other careers had already done.</p>
+<p>He returned to Paris towards the end of 1744, burning with
+indignation at the unjust treatment which he believed himself to
+have suffered, and laying<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.103" id="Page_i.103">[i.103]</a></span> memorial after memorial before the
+minister at home. He assures us that it was the justice and the
+futility of his complaints, that left in his soul the germ of
+exasperation against preposterous civil institutions, &quot;in which the
+true common weal and real justice are always sacrificed to some
+seeming order or other, which is in fact destructive of all order,
+and only adds the sanction of public authority to the oppression of
+the weak and the iniquity of the strong.&quot;<a name="FNanchor114"></a><a href="#Footnote_114">[114]</a></p>
+<p>One or two pictures connected with the Venetian episode remain
+in the memory of the reader of the Confessions, and among them
+perhaps with most people is that of the quarantine at Genoa in
+Rousseau's voyage to his new post. The travellers had the choice of
+remaining on board the felucca, or passing the time in an
+unfurnished lazaretto. This, we may notice in passing, was his
+first view of the sea; he makes no mention of the fact, nor does
+the sight or thought of the sea appear to have left the least mark
+in any line of his writings. He always disliked it, and thought of
+it with melancholy. Rousseau, as we may suppose, found the want of
+space and air in the boat the most intolerable of evils, and
+preferred to go alone to the lazaretto, though it had neither
+window-sashes nor tables nor chairs nor bed, nor even a truss of
+straw to lie down upon. He was locked up and had the whole barrack
+to himself. &quot;I manufactured,&quot; he says, &quot;a good bed out of my coats
+and shirts, sheets out of towels which I stitched together,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.104" id="Page_i.104">[i.104]</a></span> a
+pillow out of my old cloak rolled up. I made myself a seat of one
+trunk placed flat, and a table of the other. I got out some paper
+and my writing-desk, and arranged some dozen books that I had by
+way of library. In short I made myself so comfortable, that, with
+the exception of curtains and windows, I was nearly as well off in
+this absolutely naked lazaretto as in my lodgings in Paris. My
+meals were served with much pomp; two grenadiers, with bayonets at
+their musket-ends, escorted them; the staircase was my dining-room,
+the landing did for table and the lower step for a seat, and when
+my dinner was served, they rang a little bell as they withdrew, to
+warn me to seat myself at table. Between my meals, when I was
+neither writing nor reading, nor busy with my furnishing, I went
+for a walk in the Protestant graveyard, or mounted into a lantern
+which looked out on to the port, and whence I could see the ships
+sailing in and out. I passed a fortnight in this way, and I could
+have spent the whole three weeks of the quarantine without feeling
+an instant's weariness.&quot;<a name="FNanchor115"></a><a href="#Footnote_115">[115]</a></p>
+<p>These are the occasions when we catch glimpses of the true
+Rousseau; but his residence in Venice was on the whole one of his
+few really sociable periods. He made friends and kept them, and
+there was even a certain gaiety in his life. He used to tell people
+their fortunes in a way that an earlier century would have counted
+unholy.<a name="FNanchor116"></a><a href="#Footnote_116">[116]</a>
+He rarely sought pleasure in those of her haunts for which the
+Queen of the Adri<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.105" id="Page_i.105">[i.105]</a></span>atic had a guilty renown, but he has left one
+singular anecdote, showing the degree to which profound sensibility
+is capable of doing the moralist's work in a man, and how a stroke
+of sympathetic imagination may keep one from sin more effectually
+than an ethical precept.<a name="FNanchor117"></a><a href="#Footnote_117">[117]</a> It is pleasanter to think of him as
+working at the formation of that musical taste which ten years
+afterwards led him to amaze the Parisians by proving that French
+melody was a hollow idea born of national self-delusion. A Venetian
+experiment, whose evidence in the special controversy is less
+weighty perhaps than Rousseau supposed, was among the facts which
+persuaded him that Italian is the language of music. An Armenian
+who had never heard any music was invited to listen first of all to
+a French monologue, and then to an air of Galuppi's. Rousseau
+observed in the Armenian more surprise than pleasure during the
+performance of the French piece. The first notes of the Italian
+were no sooner struck, than his eyes and whole expression softened;
+he was enchanted, surrendered his whole soul to the ravishing
+impressions of the music, and could never again be induced to
+listen to the performance of any French air.<a name="FNanchor118"></a><a href="#Footnote_118">[118]</a></p>
+<p>More important than this was the circumstance that the sight of
+the defects of the government of the Venetian Republic first drew
+his mind to political<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.106" id="Page_i.106">[i.106]</a></span> speculation, and suggested to him the
+composition of a book that was to be called Institutions
+Politiques.<a name="FNanchor119"></a><a href="#Footnote_119">[119]</a> The work, as thus designed and named,
+was never written, but the idea of it, after many years of
+meditation, ripened first in the Discourse on Inequality, and then
+in the Social Contract.</p>
+<p>If Rousseau's departure for Venice was a wholly insignificant
+element in his life, his return from it was almost immediately
+followed by an event which counted for nothing at the moment, which
+his friends by and by came to regard as the fatal and irretrievable
+disaster of his life, but which he persistently described as the
+only real consolation that heaven permitted him to taste in his
+misery, and the only one that enabled him to bear his many sore
+burdens.<a name="FNanchor120"></a><a href="#Footnote_120">[120]</a></p>
+<p>He took up his quarters at a small and dirty hotel not far from
+the Sorbonne, where he had alighted on the occasion of his second
+arrival in Paris.<a name="FNanchor121"></a><a href="#Footnote_121">[121]</a> Here was a kitchen-maid, some
+two-and-twenty years old, who used to sit at table with her
+mistress and the guests<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.107" id="Page_i.107">[i.107]</a></span> of the house. The company was rough, being
+mainly composed of Irish and Gascon abb&#233;s, and other people
+to whom graces of mien and refinement of speech had come neither by
+nature nor cultivation. The hostess herself pitched the
+conversation in merry Rabelaisian key, and the apparent modesty of
+her serving-woman gave a zest to her own licence. Rousseau was
+moved with pity for a maid defenceless against a ribald storm, and
+from pity he advanced to some warmer sentiment, and he and Theresa
+Le Vasseur took each other for better for worse, in a way informal
+but sufficiently effective. This was the beginning of a union which
+lasted for the length of a generation and more, down to the day of
+Rousseau's most tragical ending.<a name="FNanchor122"></a><a href="#Footnote_122">[122]</a> She thought she saw in him a worthy
+soul; and he was convinced that he saw in her a woman of
+sensibility, simple and free from trick, and neither of the two, he
+says, was deceived in respect of the other. Her intellectual
+quality was unique. She could never be taught to read with any
+approach to success. She could never follow the order of the twelve
+months of the year, nor master a single arithmetical figure, nor
+count a sum of money, nor reckon the price of a thing. A month's
+instruction was not enough to give knowledge of the hours of the
+day on the dial-plate. The words<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.108" id="Page_i.108">[i.108]</a></span> she used were often the direct
+opposites of the words that she meant to use.<a name="FNanchor123"></a><a href="#Footnote_123">[123]</a></p>
+<p>The marriage choice of others is the inscrutable puzzle of those
+who have no eye for the fact that such choice is the great match of
+cajolery between purpose and invisible hazard; the blessedness of
+many lives is the stake, as intention happens to cheat accident or
+to be cheated by it. When the match is once over, deep criticism of
+a game of pure chance is time wasted. The crude talk in which the
+unwise deliver their judgments upon the conditions of success in
+the relations between men and women, has flowed with unprofitable
+copiousness as to this not very inviting case. People construct an
+imaginary Rousseau out of his writings, and then fetter their
+elevated, susceptible,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.109" id="Page_i.109">[i.109]</a></span> sensitive, and humane creation, to the
+unfortunate woman who could never be taught that April is the month
+after March, or that twice four and a half are nine. Now we have
+already seen enough of Rousseau to know for how infinitely little
+he counted the gift of a quick wit, and what small store he set
+either on literary varnish or on capacity for receiving it. He was
+touched in people with whom he had to do, not by attainment, but by
+moral fibre or his imaginary impression of their moral fibre.
+Instead of analysing a character, bringing its several elements
+into the balance, computing the more or less of this faculty or
+that, he loved to feel its influence as a whole, indivisible,
+impalpable, playing without sound or agitation around him like soft
+light and warmth and the fostering air. The deepest ignorance, the
+dullest incapacity, the cloudiest faculties of apprehension, were
+nothing to him in man or woman, provided he could only be sensible
+of that indescribable emanation from voice and eye and movement,
+that silent effusion of serenity around spoken words, which nature
+has given to some tranquillising spirits, and which would have left
+him free in an even life of indolent meditation and unfretted
+sense. A woman of high, eager, stimulating kind would have been a
+more fatal mate for him than the most stupid woman that ever
+rivalled the stupidity of man. Stimulation in any form always meant
+distress to Rousseau. The moist warmth of the Savoy valleys was not
+dearer to him than the subtle inhalations of softened and close
+enveloping<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.110" id="Page_i.110">[i.110]</a></span> companionship, in which the one needful thing is not
+intellectual equality, but easy, smooth, constant contact of
+feeling about the thousand small matters that make up the existence
+of a day. This is not the highest ideal of union that one's mind
+can conceive from the point of view of intense productive energy,
+but Rousseau was not concerned with the conditions of productive
+energy. He only sought to live, to be himself, and he knew better
+than any critics can know for him, what kind of nature was the best
+supplement for his own. As he said in an apophthegm with a deep
+melancholy lying at the bottom of it,&#8212;you never can cite the
+example of a thoroughly happy man, for no one but the man himself
+knows anything about it.<a name="FNanchor124"></a><a href="#Footnote_124">[124]</a> &quot;By the side of people we love,&quot; he says
+very truly, &quot;sentiment nourishes the intelligence as well as the
+heart, and we have little occasion to seek ideas elsewhere. I lived
+with my Theresa as pleasantly as with the finest genius in the
+universe.&quot;<a name="FNanchor125"></a><a href="#Footnote_125">[125]</a></p>
+<p>Theresa Le Vasseur would probably have been happier if she had
+married a stout stable-boy, as indeed she did some thirty years
+hence by way of gathering up the fragments that were left; but
+there is little reason to think that Rousseau would have been much
+happier with any other mate than he was with Theresa. There was no
+social disparity between the two. She was a person accustomed to
+hardship<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.111" id="Page_i.111">[i.111]</a></span> and coarseness, and so was he. And he always
+systematically preferred the honest coarseness of the plain people
+from whom he was sprung and among whom he had lived, to the more
+hateful coarseness of heart which so often lurks under fine manners
+and a complete knowledge of the order of the months in the year and
+the arithmetical table. Rousseau had been a serving-man, and there
+was no deterioration in going with a serving-woman.<a name="FNanchor126"></a><a href="#Footnote_126">[126]</a> However this
+may be, it is certain that for the first dozen years or so of his
+partnership&#8212;and many others as well as he are said to have found
+in this term a limit to the conditions of the original
+contract,&#8212;Rousseau had perfect and entire contentment in the
+Theresa whom all his friends pronounced as mean, greedy, jealous,
+degrading, as she was avowedly brutish in understanding. Granting
+that she was all these things, how much of the responsibility for
+his acts has been thus shifted from the shoulders of Rousseau
+himself, whose connection with her was from beginning to end
+entirely voluntary? If he attached himself deliberately to an
+unworthy object by a bond which he was indisputably free to break
+on any day that he chose, were not the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.112" id="Page_i.112">[i.112]</a></span> effects of such a union as
+much due to his own character which sought, formed, and perpetuated
+it, as to the character of Theresa Le Vasseur? Nothing, as he
+himself said in a passage to which he appends a vindication of
+Theresa, shows the true leanings and inclinations of a man better
+than the sort of attachments which he forms.<a name="FNanchor127"></a><a href="#Footnote_127">[127]</a></p>
+<p>It is a natural blunder in a literate and well-mannered society
+to charge a mistake against a man who infringes its conventions in
+this particular way. Rousseau knew what he was about, as well as
+politer persons. He was at least as happy with his kitchen wench as
+Addison was with his countess, or Voltaire with his marchioness,
+and he would not have been what he was, nor have played the part
+that he did play in the eighteenth century, if he had felt anything
+derogatory or unseemly in a kitchen wench. The selection was
+probably not very deliberate; as it happened, Theresa served as a
+standing illustration of two of his most marked traits, a contempt
+for mere literary culture, and a yet deeper contempt for social
+accomplishments and social position. In time he found out the
+grievous disadvantages of living in solitude with a companion who
+did not know how to think, and whose stock of ideas was so slight
+that the only common ground of talk between them was gossip and
+quodlibets. But her lack of sprightliness, beauty, grace,
+refinement, and that gentle initiative by which women may make even
+a sombre life so various,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.113" id="Page_i.113">[i.113]</a></span> went for nothing with him. What his
+friends missed in her, he did not seek and would not have valued;
+and what he found in her, they were naturally unable to appreciate,
+for they never were in the mood for detecting it. &quot;I have not seen
+much of happy men,&quot; he wrote when near his end, &quot;perhaps nothing;
+but I have many a time seen contented hearts, and of all the
+objects that have struck me, I believe it is this which has always
+given most contentment to myself.&quot;<a name="FNanchor128"></a><a href="#Footnote_128">[128]</a> This moderate conception of felicity,
+which was always so characteristic with him, as an even, durable,
+and rather low-toned state of the feelings, accounts for his
+prolonged acquiescence in a companion whom men with more elation in
+their ideal would assuredly have found hostile even to the most
+modest contentment.</p>
+<p>&quot;The heart of my Theresa,&quot; he wrote long after the first
+tenderness had changed into riper emotion on his side, and, alas,
+into indifference on hers, &quot;was that of an angel; our attachment
+waxed stronger with our intimacy, and we felt more and more each
+day that we were made for one another. If our pleasures could be
+described, their simplicity would make you laugh; our excursions
+together out of town, in which I would munificently expend eight or
+ten halfpence in some rural tavern; our modest suppers at my
+window, seated in front of one another on two small chairs placed
+on a trunk that filled up the breadth of the embrasure. Here the
+window did duty for a table,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.114" id="Page_i.114">[i.114]</a></span> we breathed the fresh air, we could
+see the neighbourhood and the people passing by, and though on the
+fourth story, could look down into the street as we ate. Who shall
+describe, who shall feel the charms of those meals, consisting of a
+coarse quartern loaf, some cherries, a tiny morsel of cheese, and a
+pint of wine which we drank between us? Ah, what delicious
+seasoning there is in friendship, confidence, intimacy, gentleness
+of soul! We used sometimes to remain thus until midnight, without
+once thinking of the time.&quot;<a name="FNanchor129"></a><a href="#Footnote_129">[129]</a></p>
+<p>Men and women are often more fairly judged by the way in which
+they bear the burden of what they have done, than by the prime act
+which laid the burden on their lives.<a name="FNanchor130"></a><a href="#Footnote_130">[130]</a> The deeper
+part of us shows in the manner of accepting consequences. On the
+whole, Rousseau's relations with this woman present him in a better
+light than those with any other person whatever. If he became with
+all the rest of the world suspicious, angry, jealous, profoundly
+diseased in a word, with her he was habitually trustful,
+affectionate, careful, most long-suffering. It sometimes even
+occurs to us that his constancy to Theresa was only another side of
+the morbid perversity of his relations with the rest of the world.
+People of a certain kind not seldom make the most serious and vital
+sacrifices for bare love<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.115" id="Page_i.115">[i.115]</a></span> of singularity, and a man like Rousseau
+was not unlikely to feel an eccentric pleasure in proving that he
+could find merit in a woman who to everybody else was desperate.
+One who is on bad terms with the bulk of his fellows may contrive
+to save his self-respect and confirm his conviction that they are
+all in the wrong, by preserving attachment to some one to whom
+general opinion is hostile; the private argument being that if he
+is capable of this degree of virtue and friendship in an
+unfavourable case, how much more could he have practised it with
+others, if they would only have allowed him. Whether this kind of
+apology was present to his mind or not, Rousseau could always refer
+those who charged him with black caprice, to his steady kindness
+towards Theresa Le Vasseur. Her family were among the most odious
+of human beings, greedy, idle, and ill-humoured, while her mother
+had every fault that a woman could have in Rousseau's eyes,
+including that worst fault of setting herself up for a fine wit.
+Yet he bore with them all for years, and did not break with Madame
+Le Vasseur until she had poisoned the mind of her daughter, and
+done her best by rapacity and lying to render him contemptible to
+all his friends.</p>
+<p>In the course of years Theresa herself gave him unmistakable
+signs of a change in her affections. &quot;I began to feel,&quot; he says, at
+a date of sixteen or seventeen years from our present point, &quot;that
+she was no longer for me what she had been in our happy years,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.116" id="Page_i.116">[i.116]</a></span> and
+I felt it all the more clearly as I was still the same towards
+her.&quot;<a name="FNanchor131"></a><a href="#Footnote_131">[131]</a>
+This was in 1762, and her estrangement grew deeper and her
+indifference more open, until at length, seven years afterwards, we
+find that she had proposed a separation from him. What the exact
+reasons for this gradual change may have been we do not know, nor
+have we any right in ignorance of the whole facts to say that they
+were not adequate and just. There are two good traits recorded of
+the woman's character. She could never console herself for having
+let her father be taken away to end his days miserably in a house
+of charity.<a name="FNanchor132"></a><a href="#Footnote_132">[132]</a> And the repudiation of her children,
+against which the glowing egoism of maternity always rebelled,
+remained a cruel dart in her bosom as long as she lived. We may
+suppose that there was that about household life with Rousseau
+which might have bred disgusts even in one as little fastidious as
+Theresa was. Among other things which must have been hard to
+endure, we know that in composing his works he was often weeks
+together without speaking a word to her.<a name="FNanchor133"></a><a href="#Footnote_133">[133]</a> Perhaps again
+it would not be difficult to produce some passages in Rousseau's
+letters and in the Confessions, which show traces of that subtle
+contempt for women that lurks undetected in many who would blush to
+avow it. Whatever the causes may have been, from indifference she
+passed to something like aversion, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.117" id="Page_i.117">[i.117]</a></span> in the one place where a
+word of complaint is wrung from him, he describes her as rending
+and piercing his heart at a moment when his other miseries were at
+their height. His patience at any rate was inexhaustible; now old,
+worn by painful bodily infirmities, racked by diseased suspicion
+and the most dreadful and tormenting of the minor forms of madness,
+nearly friendless, and altogether hopeless, he yet kept unabated
+the old tenderness of a quarter of a century before, and expressed
+it in words of such gentleness, gravity, and self-respecting
+strength, as may touch even those whom his books leave unmoved, and
+who view his character with deepest distrust. &quot;For the
+six-and-twenty years, dearest, that our union has lasted, I have
+never sought my happiness except in yours, and have never ceased to
+try to make you happy; and you saw by what I did lately,<a name="FNanchor134"></a><a href="#Footnote_134">[134]</a> that your
+honour and happiness were one as dear to me as the other. I see
+with pain that success does not answer my solicitude, and that my
+kindness is not as sweet to you to receive, as it is sweet to me to
+show. I know that the sentiments of honour and uprightness with
+which you were born will never change in you; but as for those of
+tenderness and attachment which were once reciprocal between us, I
+feel that they now only exist on my side. Not only, dearest of all
+friends, have you ceased to find pleasure in my company, but you
+have to tax yourself severely even to remain a few minutes<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.118" id="Page_i.118">[i.118]</a></span> with me
+out of complaisance. You are at your ease with all the world but
+me. I do not speak to you of many other things. We must take our
+friends with their faults, and I ought to pass over yours, as you
+pass over mine. If you were happy with me I could be content, but I
+see clearly that you are not, and this is what makes my heart sore.
+If I could do better for your happiness, I would do it and hold my
+peace; but that is not possible. I have left nothing undone that I
+thought would contribute to your felicity. At this moment, while I
+am writing to you, overwhelmed with distress and misery, I have no
+more true or lively desire than to finish my days in closest union
+with you. You know my lot,&#8212;it is such as one could not even dare
+to describe, for no one could believe it. I never had, my dearest,
+other than one single solace, but that the sweetest; it was to pour
+out all my heart in yours; when I talked of my miseries to you,
+they were soothed; and when you had pitied me, I needed pity no
+more. My every resource, my whole confidence, is in you and in you
+only; my soul cannot exist without sympathy, and cannot find
+sympathy except with you. It is certain that if you fail me and I
+am forced to live alone, I am as a dead man. But I should die a
+thousand times more cruelly still, if we continued to live together
+in misunderstanding, and if confidence and friendship were to go
+out between us. It would be a hundred times better to cease to see
+each other; still to live, and sometimes to regret one another.
+Whatever sacrifice may be necessary on<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.119" id="Page_i.119">[i.119]</a></span> my part to make you happy,
+be so at any cost, and I shall be content. We have faults to weep
+over and to expiate, but no crimes; let us not blot out by the
+imprudence of our closing days the sweetness and purity of those we
+have passed together.&quot;<a name="FNanchor135"></a><a href="#Footnote_135">[135]</a> Think ill as we may of Rousseau's
+theories, and meanly as we may of some parts of his conduct, yet to
+those who can feel the pulsing of a human life apart from a man's
+formul&#230;, and can be content to leave to sure circumstance the
+tragic retaliation for evil behaviour, this letter is like one of
+the great master's symphonies, whose theme falls in soft strokes of
+melting pity on the heart. In truth, alas, the union of this now
+diverse pair had been stained by crimes shortly after its
+beginning. In the estrangement of father and mother in their late
+years we may perhaps hear the rustle and spy the pale forms of the
+avenging spectres of their lost children.</p>
+<p>At the time when the connection with Theresa Le Vasseur was
+formed, Rousseau did not know how to gain bread. He composed the
+musical diversion of the Muses Galantes, which Rameau rightly or
+wrongly pronounced a plagiarism, and at the request of Richelieu he
+made some minor re-adaptations in Voltaire's Princesse de Navarre,
+which Rameau had set to music&#8212;that &quot;farce of the fair&quot; to which
+the author of Za&#239;re owed his seat in the Academy.<a name="FNanchor136"></a><a href="#Footnote_136">[136]</a> But neither<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.120" id="Page_i.120">[i.120]</a></span>
+task brought him money, and he fell back on a sort of
+secretaryship, with perhaps a little of the valet in it, to Madame
+Dupin and her son-in-law, M. de Francueil, for which he received
+the too moderate income of nine hundred francs. On one occasion he
+returned to his room expecting with eager impatience the arrival of
+a remittance, the proceeds of some small property which came to him
+by the death of his father.<a name="FNanchor137"></a><a href="#Footnote_137">[137]</a> He found the letter, and was opening it
+with trembling hands, when he was suddenly smitten with shame at
+his want of self-control; he placed it unopened on the
+chimney-piece, undressed, slept better than usual, and when he
+awoke the next morning, he had forgotten all about the letter until
+it caught his eye. He was delighted to find that it contained his
+money, but &quot;I can swear,&quot; he adds, &quot;that my liveliest delight was
+in having conquered myself.&quot; An occasion for self-conquest on a
+more considerable scale was at hand. In these tight straits, he
+received grievous news from the unfortunate Theresa. He made up his
+mind cheerfully what to do; the mother acquiesced after sore
+persuasion and with bitter tears; and the new-born child was
+dropped into oblivion in the box of the asylum for foundlings. Next
+year the same easy expedient was again resorted to, with the same
+heedlessness on the part of the father, the same pain and
+reluctance on the part of the mother. Five children in all were
+thus put away, and with such entire absence of any precaution with
+a view to their<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.121" id="Page_i.121">[i.121]</a></span> identification in happier times, that not even a
+note was kept of the day of their birth.<a name="FNanchor138"></a><a href="#Footnote_138">[138]</a></p>
+<p>People have made a great variety of remarks upon this
+transaction, from the economist who turns it into an illustration
+of the evil results of hospitals for foundlings in encouraging
+improvident unions, down to the theologian who sees in it new proof
+of the inborn depravity of the human heart and the fall of man.
+Others have vindicated it in various ways, one of them courageously
+taking up the ground that Rousseau had good reason to believe that
+the children were not his own, and therefore was fully warranted in
+sending the poor creatures kinless into the universe.<a name="FNanchor139"></a><a href="#Footnote_139">[139]</a> Perhaps it is
+not too transcendental a thing to hope that civilisation may one
+day reach a point when a plea like this shall count for an
+aggravation rather than a palliative; when a higher conception of
+the duties of humanity, familiarised by the practice of adoption as
+well as by the spread of both rational and compassionate
+considerations as to the blameless little ones, shall have expelled
+what is surely as some red and naked beast's emotion of fatherhood.
+What may be an excellent reason for repudiating a woman, can<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.122" id="Page_i.122">[i.122]</a></span> never
+be a reason for abandoning a child, except with those whom reckless
+egoism has made willing to think it a light thing to fling away
+from us the moulding of new lives and the ensuring of salutary
+nurture for growing souls.</p>
+<p>We are, however, dispensed from entering into these questions of
+the greater morals by the very plain account which the chief actor
+has given us, almost in spite of himself. His crime like most
+others was the result of heedlessness, of the overriding of duty by
+the short dim-eyed selfishness of the moment. He had been
+accustomed to frequent a tavern, where the talk turned mostly upon
+topics which men with much self-respect put as far from them, as
+men with little self-respect will allow them to do. &quot;I formed my
+fashion of thinking from what I perceived to reign among people who
+were at bottom extremely worthy folk, and I said to myself, Since
+it is the usage of the country, as one lives here, one may as well
+follow it. So I made up my mind to it cheerfully, and without the
+least scruple.&quot;<a name="FNanchor140"></a><a href="#Footnote_140">[140]</a> By and by he proceeded to cover this
+nude and intelligible explanation with finer phrases, about
+preferring that his children should be trained up as workmen and
+peasants rather than as adventurers and fortune-hunters, and about
+his supposing that in sending them to the hospital for foundlings
+he was enrolling himself a citizen in Plato's Republic.<a name="FNanchor141"></a><a href="#Footnote_141">[141]</a> This is hardly
+more than the talk of one become famous, who is defending the acts
+of his<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.123" id="Page_i.123">[i.123]</a></span> obscurity on the high principles which fame requires. People
+do not turn citizens of Plato's Republic &quot;cheerfully and without
+the least scruple,&quot; and if a man frequents company where the
+despatch of inconvenient children to the hospital was an accepted
+point of common practice, it is superfluous to drag Plato and his
+Republic into the matter. Another turn again was given to his
+motives when his mind had become clouded by suspicious mania.
+Writing a year or two before his death he had assured himself that
+his determining reason was the fear of a destiny for his children a
+thousand times worse than the hard life of foundlings, namely,
+being spoiled by their mother, being turned into monsters by her
+family, and finally being taught to hate and betray their father by
+his plotting enemies.<a name="FNanchor142"></a><a href="#Footnote_142">[142]</a> This is obviously a mixture in his mind
+of the motives which led to the abandonment of the children and
+justified the act to himself at the time, with the circumstances
+that afterwards reconciled him to what he had done; for now he
+neither had any enemies plotting against him, nor did he suppose
+that he had. As for his wife's family, he showed himself quite
+capable, when the time came, of dealing resolutely and shortly with
+their importunities in his own case, and he might therefore well
+have trusted his power to deal with them in the case of his
+children. He was more right when in 1770, in his important letter
+to M. de St. Germain, he admitted that example,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.124" id="Page_i.124">[i.124]</a></span> necessity, the
+honour of her who was dear to him, all united to make him entrust
+his children to the establishment provided for that purpose, and
+kept him from fulfilling the first and holiest of natural duties.
+&quot;In this, far from excusing, I accuse myself; and when my reason
+tells me that I did what I ought to have done in my situation, I
+believe that less than my heart, which bitterly belies it.&quot;<a name="FNanchor143"></a><a href="#Footnote_143">[143]</a> This
+coincides with the first undisguised account given in the
+Confessions, which has been already quoted, and it has not that
+flawed ring of cant and fine words which sounds through nearly all
+his other references to this great stain upon his life, excepting
+one, and this is the only further document with which we need
+concern ourselves. In that,<a name="FNanchor144"></a><a href="#Footnote_144">[144]</a> which was written while the unholy work
+was actually being done, he states very distinctly that the motives
+were those which are more or less closely connected with most
+unholy works, motives of money&#8212;the great instrument and measure of
+our personal convenience, the quantitative test of our self-control
+in placing personal convenience behind duty to other people. &quot;If my
+misery and my misfortunes rob me of the power of fulfilling a duty
+so dear, that is a calamity to pity me for, rather than a crime to
+reproach me with. I owe them subsistence, and I procured a better
+or at least a surer subsistence for them than I could myself have
+provided; this condi<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.125" id="Page_i.125">[i.125]</a></span>tion is above all others.&quot; Next comes the
+consideration of their mother, whose honour must be kept. &quot;You know
+my situation; I gained my bread from day to day painfully enough;
+how then should I feed a family as well? And if I were compelled to
+fall back on the profession of author, how would domestic cares and
+the confusion of children leave me peace of mind enough in my
+garret to earn a living? Writings which hunger dictates are hardly
+of any use, and such a resource is speedily exhausted. Then I
+should have to resort to patronage, to intrigue, to tricks ... in
+short to surrender myself to all those infamies, for which I am
+penetrated with such just horror. Support myself, my children, and
+their mother on the blood of wretches? No, madame, it were better
+for them to be orphans than to have a scoundrel for their
+father.... Why have I not married, you will ask? Madame, ask it of
+your unjust laws. It was not fitting for me to contract an eternal
+engagement; and it will never be proved to me that my duty binds me
+to it. What is certain is that I have never done it, and that I
+never meant to do it. But we ought not to have children when we
+cannot support them. Pardon me, madame; nature means us to have
+offspring, since the earth produces sustenance enough for all; but
+it is the rich, it is your class, which robs mine of the bread of
+my children.... I know that foundlings are not delicately nurtured;
+so much the better for them, they become more robust. They have
+nothing superfluous given to them, but they have everything that is<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.126" id="Page_i.126">[i.126]</a></span>
+necessary. They do not make gentlemen of them, but peasants or
+artisans.... They would not know how to dance, or ride on
+horseback, but they would have strong unwearied legs. I would
+neither make authors of them, nor clerks; I would not practise them
+in handling the pen, but the plough, the file, and the plane,
+instruments for leading a healthy, laborious, innocent life.... I
+deprived myself of the delight of seeing them, and I have never
+tasted the sweetness of a father's embrace. Alas, as I have already
+told you, I see in this only a claim on your pity, and I deliver
+them from misery at my own expense.&quot;<a name="FNanchor145"></a><a href="#Footnote_145">[145]</a> We may see
+here that Rousseau's sophistical eloquence, if it misled others,
+was at least as powerful in misleading himself, and it may be noted
+that this letter, with its talk of the children of the rich taking
+bread out of the mouths of the children of the poor, contains the
+first of those socialistic sentences by which the writer in after
+times gained so famous a name. It is at any rate clear from this
+that the real motive of the abandonment of the children was wholly
+material. He could not afford to maintain them, and he did not wish
+to have his comfort disturbed by their presence.</p>
+<p>There is assuredly no word to be said by any one with firm
+reason and unsophisticated conscience in extenuation of this crime.
+We have only to remember that a great many other persons in that
+lax time, when the structure of the family was undermined alike in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.127" id="Page_i.127">[i.127]</a></span>
+practice and speculation, were guilty of the same crime; that
+Rousseau, better than they, did not erect his own criminality into
+a social theory, but was tolerably soon overtaken by a remorse
+which drove him both to confess his misdeed, and to admit that it
+was inexpiable; and that the atrocity of the offence owes half the
+blackness with which it has always been invested by wholesome
+opinion, to the fact that the offender was by and by the author of
+the most powerful book by which parental duty has been commended in
+its full loveliness and nobility. And at any rate, let Rousseau be
+a little free from excessive reproach from all clergymen,
+sentimentalists, and others, who do their worst to uphold the
+common and rather bestial opinion in favour of reckless
+propagation, and who, if they do not advocate the despatch of
+children to public institutions, still encourage a selfish
+incontinence which ultimately falls in burdens on others than the
+offenders, and which turns the family into a scene of squalor and
+brutishness, producing a kind of parental influence that is far
+more disastrous and demoralising than the absence of it in public
+institutions can possibly be. If the propagation of children
+without regard to their maintenance be either a virtue or a
+necessity, and if afterwards the only alternatives are their
+maintenance in an asylum on the one hand, and their maintenance in
+the degradation of a poverty-stricken home on the other, we should
+not hesitate to give people who act as Rousseau acted, all that
+credit for self-denial and high moral courage which he so<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.128" id="Page_i.128">[i.128]</a></span>
+audaciously claimed for himself. It really seems to be no more
+criminal to produce children with the deliberate intention of
+abandoning them to public charity, as Rousseau did, than it is to
+produce them in deliberate reliance on the besotted maxim that he
+who sends mouths will send meat, or any other of the spurious saws
+which make Providence do duty for self-control, and add to the
+gratification of physical appetite the grotesque luxury of
+religious unction.</p>
+<p>In 1761 the Mar&#233;chale de Luxembourg made efforts to
+discover Rousseau's children, but without success. They were gone
+beyond hope of identification, and the author of <i>Emitius</i> and
+his sons and daughters lived together in this world, not knowing
+one another. Rousseau with singular honesty did not conceal his
+satisfaction at the fruitlessness of the charitable endeavours to
+restore them to him. &quot;The success of your search,&quot; he wrote, &quot;could
+not give me pure and undisturbed pleasure; it is too late, too
+late.... In my present condition this search interested me more for
+another person [Theresa] than myself; and considering the too
+easily yielding character of the person in question, it is possible
+that what she had found already formed for good or for evil, might
+turn out a sorry boon to her.&quot;<a name="FNanchor146"></a><a href="#Footnote_146">[146]</a> We may doubt, in spite of one or two
+charming and graceful passages, whether Rousseau<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.129" id="Page_i.129">[i.129]</a></span> was of a nature to
+have any feeling for the pathos of infancy, the bright blank eye,
+the eager unpurposed straining of the hand, the many turns and
+changes in murmurings that yet can tell us nothing. He was both too
+self-centred and too passionate for warm ease and fulness of life
+in all things, to be truly sympathetic with a condition whose
+feebleness and immaturity touch us with half-painful hope.</p>
+<p>Rousseau speaks in the Confessions of having married Theresa
+five-and-twenty years after the beginning of their
+acquaintance,<a name="FNanchor147"></a><a href="#Footnote_147">[147]</a> but we hardly have to understand that
+any ceremony took place which anybody but himself would recognise
+as constituting a marriage. What happened appears to have been
+this. Seated at table with Theresa and two guests, one of them the
+mayor of the place, he declared that she was his wife. &quot;This good
+and seemly engagement was contracted,&quot; he says, &quot;in all the
+simplicity but also in all the truth of nature, in the presence of
+two men of worth and honour.... During the short and simple act, I
+saw the honest pair melted in tears.&quot;<a name="FNanchor148"></a><a href="#Footnote_148">[148]</a> He had at
+this time whimsically assumed the name of Renou, and he wrote to a
+friend that of course he had married in this name, for he adds,
+with the characteristic insertion of an irrelevant bit of
+magniloquence, &quot;it is not names that are married; no, it is
+persons.&quot; &quot;Even<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.130" id="Page_i.130">[i.130]</a></span> if in this simple and holy ceremony names entered
+as a constituent part, the one I bear would have sufficed, since I
+recognise no other. If it were a question of property to be
+assured, then it would be another thing, but you know very well
+that is not our case.&quot;<a name="FNanchor149"></a><a href="#Footnote_149">[149]</a> Of course, this may have been a
+marriage according to the truth of nature, and Rousseau was as free
+to choose his own rites as more sacramental performers, but it is
+clear from his own words about property that there was no pretence
+of a marriage in law. He and Theresa were on profoundly
+uncomfortable terms about this time,<a name="FNanchor150"></a><a href="#Footnote_150">[150]</a> and Rousseau
+is not the only person by many thousands who has deceived himself
+into thinking that some form of words between man and woman must
+magically transform the substance of their characters and lives,
+and conjure up new relations of peace and steadfastness.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 25%;" />
+
+<p>We have, however, been outstripping slow-footed destiny, and
+have now to return to the time when Theresa did not drink brandy,
+nor run after stable-boys, nor fill Rousseau's soul with bitterness
+and suspicion, but sat contentedly with him in an evening taking a
+stoic's meal in the window of their garret on the fourth floor,
+seasoning it with &quot;confidence, intimacy, gentleness of soul,&quot; and
+that general comfort of sensation which, as we know to our cost, is
+by no means an invariable condition either of duty done externally<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.131" id="Page_i.131">[i.131]</a></span>
+or of spiritual growth within. It is perhaps hard for us to feel
+that we are in the presence of a great religious reactionist; there
+is so little sign of the higher graces of the soul, there are so
+many signs of the lowering clogs of the flesh. But the spirit of a
+man moves in mysterious ways, and expands like the plants of the
+field with strange and silent stirrings. It is one of the chief
+tests of worthiness and freedom from vulgarity of soul in us, to be
+able to have faith that this expansion is a reality, and the most
+important of all realities. We do not rightly seize the type of
+Socrates if we can never forget that he was the husband of
+Xanthippe, nor David's if we can only think of him as the murderer
+of Uriah, nor Peter's if we can simply remember that he denied his
+master. Our vision is only blindness, if we can never bring
+ourselves to see the possibilities of deep mystic aspiration behind
+the vile outer life of a man, or to believe that this coarse
+Rousseau, scantily supping with his coarse mate, might yet have
+many glimpses of the great wide horizons that are haunted by
+figures rather divine than human.</p>
+<p>&#160;</p>
+<p><b>FOOTNOTES:</b></p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_104"></a><a href="#FNanchor104">[104]</a> In
+theory he was even now curiously prudent and almost sagacious;
+witness the Projet pour l'Education, etc., submitted to M. de
+Mably, and printed in the volume of his Works entitled
+<i>M&#233;langes</i>, pp. 106-136. In the matter of Latin, it may
+be worth noting that Rousseau rashly or otherwise condemns the
+practice of writing it, as a vexatious superfluity (p. 132).</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_105"></a><a href="#FNanchor105">[105]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i>, vi. 471.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_106"></a><a href="#FNanchor106">[106]</a>
+<i>Ib.</i>, vi. 472-475; vii. 8.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_107"></a><a href="#FNanchor107">[107]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i>, vii. 18, 19.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_108"></a><a href="#FNanchor108">[108]</a>
+Musset-Pathay (ii. 72) quotes the passage from Lord Chesterfield's
+Letters, where the writer suggests Madame Dupin as a proper person
+with whom his son might in a regular and business-like manner open
+the elevating game of gallant intrigue.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_109"></a><a href="#FNanchor109">[109]</a> M.
+Dupin deserves honourable mention as having helped the editors of
+the Encyclop&#230;dia by procuring information for them as to
+salt-works (D'Alembert's <i>Discours Pr&#233;liminaire</i>). His
+son M. Dupin de Francueil, it may be worth noting, is a link in the
+genealogical chain between two famous personages. In 1777, the year
+before Rousseau's death, he married (in the chapel of the French
+embassy in London) Aurora de Saxe, a natural daughter of the
+marshal, himself the natural son of August the Strong, King of
+Poland. From this union was born Maurice Dupin, and Maurice Dupin
+was the father of Madame George Sand. M. Francueil died in
+1787.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_110"></a><a href="#FNanchor110">[110]</a>
+<i>M&#233;m. de Mdme. d'Epinay</i>, vol. i. ch. iv. p. 176.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_111"></a><a href="#FNanchor111">[111]</a>
+<i>Ib.</i> vol. i. ch. iv. pp. 178, 179.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_112"></a><a href="#FNanchor112">[112]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i>, vii. 46, 51, 52, etc. A diplomatic piece in
+Rousseau's handwriting has been found in the archives of the French
+consulate at Constantinople, as M. Girardin informs us. Voltaire
+unworthily spread the report that Rousseau had been the
+ambassador's private attendant. For Rousseau's reply to the
+calumny, see <i>Corr.</i>, v. 75 (Jan. 5, 1767); also iv. 150.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_113"></a><a href="#FNanchor113">[113]</a>
+Bernardin de St. Pierre, <i>Oeuv.</i>, xii. 55 <i>seq.</i></p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_114"></a><a href="#FNanchor114">[114]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i>, vii. 92.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_115"></a><a href="#FNanchor115">[115]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i>, vii. 38, 39.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_116"></a><a href="#FNanchor116">[116]</a>
+<i>Lettres de la Montagne</i>, iii. 266.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_117"></a><a href="#FNanchor117">[117]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i>, vii. 75-84. Also a second example, 84-86. For Byron's
+opinion of one of these stories, see Lockhart's <i>Life of
+Scott</i>, vi. 132. (Ed. 1837.)</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_118"></a><a href="#FNanchor118">[118]</a>
+<i>Lettre sur la Musique Fran&#231;aise</i> (1753), p. 186.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_119"></a><a href="#FNanchor119">[119]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i>, ix. 232.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_120"></a><a href="#FNanchor120">[120]</a>
+<i>Ib.</i> vii. 97.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_121"></a><a href="#FNanchor121">[121]</a>
+H&#244;tel St. Quentin, rue des Cordiers, a narrow street running
+between the rue St. Jacques and the rue Victor Cousin. The still
+squalid hostelry is now visible as H&#244;tel J.J. Rousseau. There
+is some doubt whether he first saw Theresa in 1743 or 1745. The
+account in Bk. vii. of the <i>Confessions</i> is for the latter
+date (see also <i>Corr.</i>, ii. 207), but in the well-known letter
+to her in 1769 (<i>Ib.</i> vi. 79), he speaks of the twenty-six
+years of their union. Their so-called marriage took place in 1768,
+and writing in that year he speaks of the five-and-twenty years of
+their attachment (<i>Ib.</i> v. 323), and in the <i>Confessions</i>
+(ix. 249) he fixes their marriage at the same date; also in the
+letter to Saint-Germain (vi. 152). Musset-Pathay, though giving
+1745 in one place (i. 45), and 1743 in another (ii. 198), has with
+less than his usual care paid no attention to the discrepancy.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_122"></a><a href="#FNanchor122">[122]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i>, vii. 97-100.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_123"></a><a href="#FNanchor123">[123]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i>, vii. 101. A short specimen of her composition may be
+interesting, at any rate to hieroglyphic students: &quot;Mesiceuras
+ancor mien re mies quan geu ceures o pres deu vous, e deu vous
+temoes tous la goies e latandres deu mon querque vous cones ces que
+getou gour e rus pour vous, e qui neu finiraes quotobocs ces mon
+quere qui vous paleu ces paes mes le vre ... ge sui avestous
+lamities e la reu conec caceu posible e la tacheman mon cher
+bonnamies votreau enble e bon amiess theress le vasseur.&quot; Of which
+dark words this is the interpretation:&#8212;&quot;Mais il sera encore mieux
+remis quand je sera aupr&#232;s de vous, et de vous
+t&#233;moigner toute la joie et la tendresse de mon coeur que
+vous connaissez que j'ai toujours eue pour vous, et qui ne finira
+qu'au tombeau; c'est mon coeur qui vous parle, c'est pas mes
+l&#232;vres.... Je suis avec toute l'amiti&#233; et la
+reconnaissance possibles, et l'attachement, mon cher bon ami, votre
+humble et bonne amie, Th&#233;r&#232;se Le Vasseur.&quot;
+(<i>Rousseau, ses Amis et ses Ennemis</i>, ii. 450.) Certainly it
+was not learning and arts which hindered Theresa's manners from
+being pure.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_124"></a><a href="#FNanchor124">[124]</a>
+<i>Oeuv. et Corr. In&#233;d.</i>, 365.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_125"></a><a href="#FNanchor125">[125]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i>, vii. 102. See also <i>Corr.</i>, v. 373 (Oct. 10,
+1768). On the other hand, <i>Conf.</i>, ix. 249.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_126"></a><a href="#FNanchor126">[126]</a> M.
+St. Marc Girardin, in one of his admirable papers on Rousseau,
+speaks of him as &quot;a bourgeois unclassed by an alliance with a
+tavern servant&quot; (<i>Rev. des Deux Mondes</i>, Nov. 1852, p. 759);
+but surely Rousseau had unclassed himself long before, in the
+houses of Madame Vercellis, Count Gouvon, and even Madame de
+Warens, and by his repudiation, from the time when he ran away from
+Geneva, of nearly every bourgeois virtue and bourgeois
+prejudice.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_127"></a><a href="#FNanchor127">[127]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i>, vii. 11. Also footnote.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_128"></a><a href="#FNanchor128">[128]</a>
+<i>R&#234;veries</i>, ix. 309.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_129"></a><a href="#FNanchor129">[129]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i>, viii. 142, 143.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_130"></a><a href="#FNanchor130">[130]</a> The
+other day I came for the first time upon the following in the
+sayings of Madame de Lambert:&#8212;&quot;Ce ne sont pas toujours les fautes
+qui nous perdent; c'est la mani&#232;re de se conduire
+apr&#233;s les avoir faites.&quot; [1877.]</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_131"></a><a href="#FNanchor131">[131]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i>, xii. 187, 188.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_132"></a><a href="#FNanchor132">[132]</a>
+<i>Ib.</i>, viii. 221.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_133"></a><a href="#FNanchor133">[133]</a>
+Bernardin de St. Pierre, <i>Oeuv.</i>, xii. 103. See <i>Conf.</i>,
+xii 188, and <i>Corr.</i>, v. 324.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_134"></a><a href="#FNanchor134">[134]</a>
+Referring, no doubt, to the ceremony which he called their
+marriage, and which had taken place in 1768.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_135"></a><a href="#FNanchor135">[135]</a>
+<i>Corr.</i>, vi. 79-86. August 12, 1769.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_136"></a><a href="#FNanchor136">[136]</a>
+Composed in 1745. The <i>F&#234;tes de Ramire</i> was represented
+at Versailles at the very end of this year.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_137"></a><a href="#FNanchor137">[137]</a> Some
+time in 1746-7. <i>Conf.</i>, vii. 113, 114.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_138"></a><a href="#FNanchor138">[138]</a>
+Probably in the winter of 1746-7. <i>Corr.</i>, ii. 207.
+<i>Conf.</i>, vii. 120-124. <i>Ib.</i>, viii. 148. <i>Corr.</i>,
+ii. 208. June 12, 1761, to the Mar&#233;chale de Luxembourg.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_139"></a><a href="#FNanchor139">[139]</a>
+George Sand,&#8212;in an eloquent piece entitled <i>&#192; Propos des
+Charmettes (Revue des Deux Mondes</i>, November 15, 1863), in which
+she expresses her own obligations to Jean Jacques. In 1761 Rousseau
+declares that he had never hitherto had the least reason to suspect
+Theresa's fidelity. <i>Corr.</i>, ii. 209</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_140"></a><a href="#FNanchor140">[140]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i>, vii. 123.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_141"></a><a href="#FNanchor141">[141]</a>
+<i>Ib.</i>, viii. 145-151.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_142"></a><a href="#FNanchor142">[142]</a>
+<i>R&#234;veries</i>, ix. 313. The same reason is given,
+<i>Conf.</i>, ix. 252; also in Letter to Madame B., January 17,
+1770 (<i>Corr.</i>, vi. 117).</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_143"></a><a href="#FNanchor143">[143]</a>
+<i>Corr.</i>, vi. 152, 153. Feb. 27, 1770.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_144"></a><a href="#FNanchor144">[144]</a>
+Letter to Madame de Francueil, April 20, 1751. <i>Corr.</i>, i.
+151.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_145"></a><a href="#FNanchor145">[145]</a>
+<i>Corr.</i>, i. 151-155</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_146"></a><a href="#FNanchor146">[146]</a>
+August 10, 1761. <i>Corr.</i>, ii. 220. The Mar&#233;chale de
+Luxembourg's note on the subject, to which this is a reply, is
+given in <i>Rousseau, ses Amis et ses Ennemis</i>, i. 444.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_147"></a><a href="#FNanchor147">[147]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i>, x. 249. See above, p. <a href="#Page_i.106">106</a>, <i>n.</i></p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_148"></a><a href="#FNanchor148">[148]</a> To
+Lalliaud, Aug 31, 1768. <i>Corr.</i>, v. 324. See also D'Escherny,
+quoted in Musset-Pathay, i. 169, 170.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_149"></a><a href="#FNanchor149">[149]</a> To
+Du Peyrou, Sept. 26, 1768. <i>Corr.</i>, v. 360.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_150"></a><a href="#FNanchor150">[150]</a> To
+Mdlle. Le Vasseur, July 25, 1768. <i>Corr.</i>, v. 116-119.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.132" id="Page_i.132">[i.132]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_V."></a>CHAPTER V.</h2>
+<h3>THE DISCOURSES.</h3>
+<p><span class="smcap">The</span> busy establishment of local academies in the provincial
+centres of France only preceded the outbreak of the revolution by
+ten or a dozen years; but one or two of the provincial cities, such
+as Bordeaux, Rouen, Dijon, had possessed academies in imitation of
+the greater body of Paris for a much longer time. Their activity
+covered a very varied ground, from the mere commonplaces of
+literature to the most practical details of material production. If
+they now and then relapsed into inquiries about the laws of Crete,
+they more often discussed positive and scientific theses, and
+rather resembled our chambers of agriculture than bodies of more
+learned pretension. The academy of Dijon was one of the earliest of
+these excellent institutions, and on the whole the list of its
+theses shows it to have been among the most sensible in respect of
+the subjects which it found worth thinking about. Its members,
+however, could not entirely resist the intellectual atmosphere of
+the time. In 1742 they invited discussion of the point, whether the
+natural law can conduct society to perfection<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.133" id="Page_i.133">[i.133]</a></span> without the aid of
+political laws.<a name="FNanchor151"></a><a href="#Footnote_151">[151]</a> In 1749 they proposed this question as a
+theme for their prize essay: <i>Has the restoration of the sciences
+contributed to purify or to corrupt manners?</i> Rousseau was one
+of fourteen competitors, and in 1750 his discussion of the academic
+theme received the prize.<a name="FNanchor152"></a><a href="#Footnote_152">[152]</a> This was his first entry on the field of
+literature and speculation. Three years afterwards the same academy
+propounded another question: <i>What is the origin of inequality
+among men, and is it authorised by the natural law?</i> Rousseau
+again competed, and though his essay neither gained the prize, nor
+created as lively an agitation as its predecessor had done, yet we
+may justly regard the second as a more powerful supplement to the
+first.</p>
+<p>It is always interesting to know the circumstances under which
+pieces that have moved a world were originally composed, and
+Rousseau's account of the generation of his thoughts as to the
+influence of enlightenment on morality, is remarkable enough to be
+worth transcribing. He was walking along the road from Paris to
+Vincennes one hot summer afternoon on a visit to Diderot, then in
+prison for his Letter on the Blind (1749), when he came across in a
+newspaper the announcement of the theme propounded by the Dijon
+academy. &quot;If ever anything resembled<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.134" id="Page_i.134">[i.134]</a></span> a sudden inspiration, it was
+the movement which began in me as I read this. All at once I felt
+myself dazzled by a thousand sparkling lights; crowds of vivid
+ideas thronged into my mind with a force and confusion that threw
+me into unspeakable agitation; I felt my head whirling in a
+giddiness like that of intoxication. A violent palpitation
+oppressed me; unable to walk for difficulty of breathing, I sank
+under one of the trees of the avenue, and passed half an hour there
+in such a condition of excitement, that when I arose I saw that the
+front of my waistcoat was all wet with my tears, though I was
+wholly unconscious of shedding them. Ah, if I could ever have
+written the quarter of what I saw and felt under that tree, with
+what clearness should I have brought out all the contradictions of
+our social system; with what simplicity I should have demonstrated
+that man is good naturally, and that by institutions only is he
+made bad.&quot;<a name="FNanchor153"></a><a href="#Footnote_153">[153]</a> Diderot encouraged him to compete for
+the prize, and to give full flight to the ideas which had come to
+him in this singular way.<a name="FNanchor154"></a><a href="#Footnote_154">[154]</a></p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.135" id="Page_i.135">[i.135]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>People have held up their hands at the amazing originality of
+the idea that perhaps sciences and arts have not purified manners.
+This sentiment is surely exaggerated, if we reflect first that it
+occurred to the academicians of Dijon as a question for discussion,
+and second that, if you are asked whether a given result has or has
+not followed from certain circumstances, the mere form of the
+question suggests No quite as readily as Yes. The originality lay
+not in the central contention, but in the fervour, sincerity, and
+conviction of a most unacademic sort with which it was presented
+and enforced. There is less originality in denouncing your
+generation as wicked and adulterous than there is in believing it
+to be so, and in persuading the generation itself both that you
+believe it and that you have good reasons to give. We have not to
+suppose that there was any miracle wrought by agency celestial or
+infernal in the sudden disclosure of his idea to Rousseau. Rousseau
+had been thinking of politics ever since the working of the
+government of Venice had first drawn his mind to the subject. What
+is the government, he had kept asking himself, which is most proper
+to form a sage and virtuous nation? What government by its nature
+keeps closest to the law? What is this law? And whence?<a name="FNanchor155"></a><a href="#Footnote_155">[155]</a> This chain of
+problems had led him to what he calls the historic study of
+morality, though we may doubt whether history was so much his
+teacher as the rather meagrely nourished handmaid of his<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.136" id="Page_i.136">[i.136]</a></span>
+imagination. Here was the irregular preparation, the hidden
+process, which suddenly burst into light and manifested itself with
+an exuberance of energy, that passed to the man himself for an
+inward revolution with no precursive sign.</p>
+<p>Rousseau's ecstatic vision on the road to Vincennes was the
+opening of a life of thought and production which only lasted a
+dozen years, but which in that brief space gave to Europe a new
+gospel. Emilius and the Social Contract were completed in 1761, and
+they crowned a work which if you consider its origin, influence,
+and meaning with due and proper breadth, is marked by signal unity
+of purpose and conception. The key to it is given to us in the
+astonishing transport at the foot of the wide-spreading oak. Such a
+transport does not come to us of cool and rational western
+temperament, but more often to the oriental after lonely sojourning
+in the wilderness, or in violent reactions on the road to Damascus
+and elsewhere. Jean Jacques detected oriental quality in his own
+nature,<a name="FNanchor156"></a><a href="#Footnote_156">[156]</a>
+and so far as the union of ardour with mysticism, of intense
+passion with vague dream, is to be defined as oriental, he
+assuredly deserves the name. The ideas stirred in his mind by the
+Dijon problem suddenly &quot;opened his eyes, brought order into the
+chaos in his head, revealed to him another universe. From the
+active effervescence which thus began in his soul, came sparks of
+genius which people saw glittering in his writings through ten
+years of fever<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.137" id="Page_i.137">[i.137]</a></span> and delirium, but of which no trace had been seen in
+him previously, and which would probably have ceased to shine
+henceforth, if he should have chanced to wish to continue writing
+after the access was over. Inflamed by the contemplation of these
+lofty objects, he had them incessantly present to his mind. His
+heart, made hot within him by the idea of the future happiness of
+the human race, and by the honour of contributing to it, dictated
+to him a language worthy of so high an enterprise ... and for a
+moment, he astonished Europe by productions in which vulgar souls
+saw only eloquence and brightness of understanding, but in which
+those who dwell in the ethereal regions recognised with joy one of
+their own.&quot;<a name="FNanchor157"></a><a href="#Footnote_157">[157]</a></p>
+<p>This was his own account of the matter quite at the end of his
+life, and this is the only point of view from which we are secure
+against the vulgarity of counting him a deliberate hypocrite and
+conscious charlatan. He was possessed, as holier natures than his
+have been, by an enthusiastic vision, an intoxicated confidence, a
+mixture of sacred rage and prodigious love, an insensate but
+absolutely disinterested revolt against the stone and iron of a
+reality which he was bent on melting in a heavenly blaze of
+splendid aspiration and irresistibly persuasive expression. The
+last word of this great expansion was Emilius, its first and more
+imperfectly articulated was the earlier of the two Discourses.</p>
+<p>Rousseau's often-repeated assertion that here was<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.138" id="Page_i.138">[i.138]</a></span> the instant of
+the ruin of his life, and that all his misfortunes flowed from that
+unhappy moment, has been constantly treated as the word of
+affectation and disguised pride. Yet, vain as he was, it may well
+have represented his sincere feeling in those better moods when
+mental suffering was strong enough to silence vanity. His visions
+mastered him for these thirteen years, <i>grande mortalis oevi
+spatium</i>. They threw him on to that turbid sea of literature for
+which he had so keen an aversion, and from which, let it be
+remarked, he fled finally away, when his confidence in the ease of
+making men good and happy by words of monition had left him. It was
+the torment of his own enthusiasm which rent that veil of placid
+living, that in his normal moments he would fain have interposed
+between his existence and the tumult of a generation with which he
+was profoundly out of sympathy. In this way the first Discourse was
+the letting in of much evil upon him, as that and the next and the
+Social Contract were the letting in of much evil upon all
+Europe.</p>
+<p>Of this essay the writer has recorded his own impression that,
+though full of heat and force, it is absolutely wanting in logic
+and order, and that of all the products of his pen, it is the
+feeblest in reasoning and the poorest in numbers and harmony.
+&quot;For,&quot; as he justly adds, &quot;the art of writing is not learnt all at
+once.&quot;<a name="FNanchor158"></a><a href="#Footnote_158">[158]</a>
+The modern critic must be content to accept the same verdict; only
+a generation so in love<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.139" id="Page_i.139">[i.139]</a></span> as this was with anything that could tickle
+its intellectual curiousness, would have found in the first of the
+two Discourses that combination of speculative and literary merit
+which was imputed to Rousseau on the strength of it, and which at
+once brought him into a place among the notables of an age that was
+full of them.<a name="FNanchor159"></a><a href="#Footnote_159">[159]</a> We ought to take in connection with it
+two at any rate of the vindications of the Discourse, which the
+course of controversy provoked from its author, and which serve to
+complete its significance. It is difficult to analyse, because in
+truth it is neither closely argumentative, nor is it vertebrate,
+even as a piece of rhetoric. The gist of the piece, however, runs
+somewhat in this wise:&#8212;</p>
+<p>Before art had fashioned our manners, and taught our passions to
+use a too elaborate speech, men were rude but natural, and
+difference of conduct announced at a glance difference of
+character. To-day a vile and most deceptive uniformity reigns over
+our manners, and all minds seem as if they had been cast in a
+single mould. Hence we never know with what sort of person we are
+dealing, hence the hateful troop of suspicions, fears, reserves,
+and treacheries, and the concealment of impiety, arrogance,
+calumny, and scepticism, under a dangerous varnish of refinement.
+So terrible a set of effects must have a cause. History shows that
+the cause here is to be found in the progress of sciences and arts.
+Egypt, once so mighty,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.140" id="Page_i.140">[i.140]</a></span> becomes the mother of philosophy and the
+fine arts; straightway behold its conquest by Cambyses, by Greeks,
+by Romans, by Arabs, finally by Turks. Greece twice conquered Asia,
+once before Troy, once in its own homes; then came in fatal
+sequence the progress of the arts, the dissolution of manners, and
+the yoke of the Macedonian. Rome, founded by a shepherd and raised
+to glory by husbandmen, began to degenerate with Ennius, and the
+eve of her ruin was the day when she gave a citizen the deadly
+title of arbiter of good taste. China, where letters carry men to
+the highest dignities of the state, could not be preserved by all
+her literature from the conquering power of the ruder Tartar. On
+the other hand, the Persians, Scythians, Germans, remain in history
+as types of simplicity, innocence, and virtue. Was not he
+admittedly the wisest of the Greeks, who made of his own apology a
+plea for ignorance, and a denunciation of poets, orators, and
+artists? The chosen people of God never cultivated the sciences,
+and when the new law was established, it was not the learned, but
+the simple and lowly, fishers and workmen, to whom Christ entrusted
+his teaching and its ministry.<a name="FNanchor160"></a><a href="#Footnote_160">[160]</a></p>
+<p>This, then, is the way in which chastisement has always
+overtaken our presumptuous efforts to emerge from that happy
+ignorance in which eternal wisdom placed us; though the thick veil
+with which that wisdom has covered all its operations seemed to
+warn us that we were not destined to fatuous research.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.141" id="Page_i.141">[i.141]</a></span> All the
+secrets that Nature hides from us are so many evils against which
+she would fain shelter us.</p>
+<p>Is probity the child of ignorance, and can science and virtue be
+really inconsistent with one another? These sounding contrasts are
+mere deceits, because if you look nearly into the results of this
+science of which we talk so proudly, you will perceive that they
+confirm the results of induction from history. Astronomy, for
+instance, is born of superstition; geometry from the desire of
+gain; physics from a futile curiosity; all of them, even morals,
+from human pride. Are we for ever to be the dupes of words, and to
+believe that these pompous names of science, philosophy, and the
+rest, stand for worthy and profitable realities?<a name="FNanchor161"></a><a href="#Footnote_161">[161]</a> Be sure that
+they do not.</p>
+<p>How many errors do we pass through on our road to truth, errors
+a thousandfold more dangerous than truth is useful? And by what
+marks are we to know truth, when we think that we have found it?
+And above all, if we do find it, who of us can be sure that he will
+make good use of it? If celestial intelligences cultivated science,
+only good could result; and we may say as much of great men of the
+stamp of Socrates, who are born to be the guides of others.<a name="FNanchor162"></a><a href="#Footnote_162">[162]</a> But the
+intelligences of common men are neither celestial nor Socratic.</p>
+<p>Again, every useless citizen may be fairly regarded as a
+pernicious man; and let us ask those illustrious philosophers who
+have taught us what insects repro<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.142" id="Page_i.142">[i.142]</a></span>duce themselves curiously, in what
+ratio bodies attract one another in space, what curves have
+conjugate points, points of inflection or reflection, what in the
+planetary revolutions are the relations of areas traversed in equal
+times&#8212;let us ask those who have attained all this sublime
+knowledge, by how much the worse governed, less flourishing, or
+less perverse we should have been if they had attained none of it?
+Now if the works of our most scientific men and best citizens lead
+to such small utility, tell us what we are to think of the crowd of
+obscure writers and idle men of letters who devour the public
+substance in pure loss.</p>
+<p>Then it is in the nature of things that devotion to art leads to
+luxury, and luxury, as we all know from our own experience, no less
+than from the teaching of history, saps not only the military
+virtues by which nations preserve their independence, but also
+those moral virtues which make the independence of a nation worth
+preserving. Your children go to costly establishments where they
+learn everything except their duties. They remain ignorant of their
+own tongue, though they will speak others not in use anywhere in
+the world; they gain the faculty of composing verses which they can
+barely understand; without capacity to distinguish truth from
+error, they possess the art of rendering them indistinguishable to
+others by specious arguments. Magnanimity, equity, temperance,
+courage, humanity, have no real meaning to them; and if they hear
+speak of God, it breeds more terror than awful fear.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.143" id="Page_i.143">[i.143]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Whence spring all these abuses, if not from the disastrous
+inequality introduced among men by the distinction of talents and
+the cheapening of virtue?<a name="FNanchor163"></a><a href="#Footnote_163">[163]</a> People no longer ask of a man whether he
+has probity, but whether he is clever; nor of a book whether it is
+useful, but whether it is well written. And after all, what is this
+philosophy, what are these lessons of wisdom, to which we give the
+prize of enduring fame? To listen to these sages, would you not
+take them for a troop of charlatans, all bawling out in the
+market-place, Come to me, it is only I who never cheat you, and
+always give good measure? One maintains that there is no body, and
+that everything is mere representation; the other that there is no
+entity but matter, and no God but the universe: one that moral good
+and evil are chimeras; the other that men are wolves and may devour
+one another with the easiest conscience in the world. These are the
+marvellous personages on whom the esteem of contemporaries is
+lavished so long as they live, and to whom immortality is reserved
+after their death. And we have now invented the art of making their
+extravagances eternal, and thanks to the use of typographic
+characters the dangerous speculations of Hobbes and Spinoza will
+endure for ever. Surely when they perceive the terrible disorders
+which printing has<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.144" id="Page_i.144">[i.144]</a></span> already caused in Europe, sovereigns will take
+as much trouble to banish this deadly art from their states as they
+once took to introduce it.</p>
+<p>If there is perhaps no harm in allowing one or two men to give
+themselves up to the study of sciences and arts, it is only those
+who feel conscious of the strength required for advancing their
+subjects, who have any right to attempt to raise monuments to the
+glory of the human mind. We ought to have no tolerance for those
+compilers who rashly break open the gate of the sciences, and
+introduce into their sanctuary a populace that is unworthy even to
+draw near to it. It may be well that there should be philosophers,
+provided only and always that the people do not meddle with
+philosophising.<a name="FNanchor164"></a><a href="#Footnote_164">[164]</a></p>
+<p>In short, there are two kinds of ignorance: one brutal and
+ferocious, springing from a bad heart, multiplying vices, degrading
+the reason, and debasing the soul: the other &quot;a reasonable
+ignorance, which consists in limiting our curiosity to the extent
+of the faculties we have received; a modest ignorance, born of a
+lively love for virtue, and inspiring indifference only for what is
+not worthy of filling a man's heart, or fails to contribute to its
+improvement; a sweet and precious ignorance, the treasure of a pure
+soul at peace with itself, which finds all its blessedness in
+inward retreat, in testifying to itself its own innocence, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.145" id="Page_i.145">[i.145]</a></span>
+which feels no need of seeking a warped and hollow happiness in the
+opinion of other people as to its enlightenment.&quot;<a name="FNanchor165"></a><a href="#Footnote_165">[165]</a></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 25%;" />
+
+<p>Some of the most pointed assaults in this Discourse, such for
+instance as that on the pedantic parade of wit, or that on the
+excessive preponderance of literary instruction in the art of
+education, are due to Montaigne; and in one way, the Discourse
+might be described as binding together a number of that shrewd
+man's detached hints by means of a paradoxical generalisation. But
+the Rousseau is more important than the Montaigne in it. Another
+remark to be made is that its vigorous disparagement of science, of
+the emptiness of much that is called science, of the deadly pride
+of intellect, is an anticipation in a very precise way of the
+attitude taken by the various Christian churches and their
+representatives now and for long, beginning with De Maistre, the
+greatest of the religious reactionaries after Rousseau. The
+vilification of the Greeks is strikingly like some vehement
+passages in De Maistre's estimate of their share in sophisticating
+European intellect. At last Rousseau even began to doubt whether
+&quot;so chattering a people could ever have had any solid virtues, even
+in primitive times.&quot;<a name="FNanchor166"></a><a href="#Footnote_166">[166]</a> Yet Rousseau's own thinking about
+society is deeply marked with opinions borrowed exactly from these
+very chatterers. His imagination<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.146" id="Page_i.146">[i.146]</a></span> was fascinated from the first by
+the freedom and boldness of Plato's social speculations, to which
+his debt in a hundred details of his political and educational
+schemes is well known. What was more important than any obligation
+of detail was the fatal conception, borrowed partly from the Greeks
+and partly from Geneva, of the omnipotence of the Lawgiver in
+moulding a social state after his own purpose and ideal. We shall
+presently quote the passage in which he holds up for our envy and
+imitation the policy of Lycurgus at Sparta, who swept away all that
+he found existing and constructed the social edifice afresh from
+foundation to roof.<a name="FNanchor167"></a><a href="#Footnote_167">[167]</a> It is true that there was an
+unmistakable decay of Greek literary studies in France from the
+beginning of the eighteenth century, and Rousseau seems to have
+read Plato only through Ficinus's translation. But his example and
+its influence, along with that of Mably and others, warrant the
+historian in saying that at no time did Greek ideas more keenly
+preoccupy opinion than during this century.<a name="FNanchor168"></a><a href="#Footnote_168">[168]</a> Perhaps we may
+say that Rousseau would never have proved how little learning and
+art do for the good of manners, if Plato had not insisted on poets
+being driven out of the Republic. The article on Political Economy,
+written by him for the Encyclop&#230;dia (1755), rings with the
+names of ancient rulers and lawgivers; the project of public
+education is recommended by the example of Cretans,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.147" id="Page_i.147">[i.147]</a></span>
+Laced&#230;monians, and Persians, while the propriety of the
+reservation of a state domain is suggested by Romulus.</p>
+<p>It may be added that one of the not too many merits of the essay
+is the way in which the writer, more or less in the Socratic
+manner, insists on dragging people out of the refuge of sonorous
+general terms, with a great public reputation of much too
+well-established a kind to be subjected to the affront of analysis.
+It is true that Rousseau himself contributed nothing directly to
+that analytic operation which Socrates likened to midwifery, and he
+set up graven images of his own in place of the idols which he
+destroyed. This, however, did not wholly efface the distinction,
+which he shares with all who have ever tried to lead the minds of
+men into new tracks, of refusing to accept the current coins of
+philosophical speech without test or measurement. Such a treatment
+of the great trite words which come so easily to the tongue and
+seem to weigh for so much, must always be the first step towards
+bringing thought back into the region of real matter, and
+confronting phrases, terms, and all the common form of the
+discussion of an age, with the actualities which it is the object
+of sincere discussion to penetrate.</p>
+<p>The refutation of many parts of Rousseau's main contention on
+the principles which are universally accepted among enlightened men
+in modern society is so extremely obvious that to undertake it
+would merely be to draw up a list of the gratulatory common<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.148" id="Page_i.148">[i.148]</a></span>places
+of which we hear quite enough in the literature and talk of our
+day. In this direction, perhaps it suffices to say that the
+Discourse is wholly one-sided, admitting none of the conveniences,
+none of the alleviations of suffering of all kinds, nothing of the
+increase of mental stature, which the pursuit of knowledge has
+brought to the race. They may or may not counterbalance the evils
+that it has brought, but they are certainly to be put in the
+balance in any attempt at philosophic examination of the subject.
+It contains no serious attempt to tell us what those alleged evils
+really are, or definitely to trace them one by one, to abuse of the
+thirst for knowledge and defects in the method of satisfying it. It
+omits to take into account the various other circumstances, such as
+climate, government, race, and the disposition of neighbours, which
+must enter equally with intellectual progress into whatever
+demoralisation has marked the destinies of a nation. Finally it has
+for the base of its argument the entirely unsupported assumption of
+there having once been in the early history of each society a stage
+of mild, credulous, and innocent virtue, from which appetite for
+the fruit of the forbidden tree caused an inevitable degeneration.
+All evidence and all scientific analogy are now well known to lead
+to the contrary doctrine, that the history of civilisation is a
+history of progress and not of decline from a primary state. After
+all, as Voltaire said to Rousseau in a letter which only showed a
+superficial appreciation of the real drift of the argument, we must
+confess<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.149" id="Page_i.149">[i.149]</a></span> that these thorns attached to literature are only as
+flowers in comparison with the other evils that have deluged the
+earth. &quot;It was not Cicero nor Lucretius nor Virgil nor Horace, who
+contrived the proscriptions of Marius, of Sulla, of the debauched
+Antony, of the imbecile Lepidus, of that craven tyrant basely
+surnamed Augustus. It was not Marot who produced the St.
+Bartholomew massacre, nor the tragedy of the Cid that led to the
+wars of the Fronde. What really makes, and always will make, this
+world into a valley of tears, is the insatiable cupidity and
+indomitable insolence of men, from Kouli Khan, who did not know how
+to read, down to the custom-house clerk, who knows nothing but how
+to cast up figures. Letters nourish the soul, they strengthen its
+integrity, they furnish a solace to it,&quot;&#8212;and so on in the sense,
+though without the eloquence, of the famous passage in Cicero's
+defence of Archias the poet.<a name="FNanchor169"></a><a href="#Footnote_169">[169]</a> All this, however, in our time is in no
+danger of being forgotten, and will be present to the mind of every
+reader. The only danger is that pointed out by Rousseau himself:
+&quot;People always think they have described what the sciences do, when
+they have in reality only described what the sciences ought to
+do.&quot;<a name="FNanchor170"></a><a href="#Footnote_170">[170]</a></p>
+<p>What we are more likely to forget is that Rousseau's piece has a
+positive as well as a negative side, and presents, in however
+vehement and overstated a way, a truth which the literary and
+speculative enthu<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.150" id="Page_i.150">[i.150]</a></span>siasm of France in the eighteenth century, as is
+always the case with such enthusiasm whenever it penetrates either
+a generation or an individual, was sure to make men dangerously
+ready to forget.<a name="FNanchor171"></a><a href="#Footnote_171">[171]</a> This truth may be put in different
+terms. We may describe it as the possibility of eminent civic
+virtue existing in people, without either literary taste or science
+or speculative curiosity. Or we may express it as the compatibility
+of a great amount of contentment and order in a given social state,
+with a very low degree of knowledge. Or finally, we may give the
+truth its most general expression, as the subordination of all
+activity to the promotion of social aims. Rousseau's is an
+elaborate and roundabout manner of saying that virtue without
+science is better than science without virtue; or that the
+well-being of a country depends more on the standard of social duty
+and the willingness of citizens to conform to it, than on the
+standard of intellectual culture and the extent of its diffusion.
+In other words, we ought to be less concerned about the speculative
+or scientific curiousness of our people than about the height of
+their notion of civic virtue and their firmness and persistency in
+realising it. It is a moralist's way of putting the ancient
+preacher's monition, that they are but empty in whom is not the
+wisdom of God. The importance of stating this is in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.151" id="Page_i.151">[i.151]</a></span> our modern era
+always pressing, because there is a constant tendency on the part
+of energetic intellectual workers, first, to concentrate their
+energies on a minute specialty, leaving public affairs and
+interests to their own course. Second, they are apt to overestimate
+their contributions to the stock of means by which men are made
+happier, and what is more serious, to underestimate in comparison
+those orderly, modest, self-denying, moral qualities, by which only
+men are made worthier, and the continuity of society is made surer.
+Third, in consequence of their greater command of specious
+expression and their control of the organs of public opinion, they
+both assume a kind of supreme place in the social hierarchy, and
+persuade the majority of plain men unsuspectingly to take so very
+egregious an assumption for granted. So far as Rousseau's Discourse
+recalled the truth as against this sort of error it was full of
+wholesomeness.</p>
+<p>Unfortunately his indignation against the overweening
+pretensions of the verse-writer, the gazetteer, and the great band
+of socialists at large, led him into a general position with
+reference to scientific and speculative energy, which seems to
+involve a perilous misconception of the conditions of this energy
+producing its proper results. It is easy now, as it was easy for
+Rousseau in the last century, to ask in an epigrammatical manner by
+how much men are better or happier for having found out this or
+that novelty in transcendental mathematics, biology, or astronomy;
+and this is very well as against the discoverer of small<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.152" id="Page_i.152">[i.152]</a></span> marvels
+who shall give himself out for the benefactor of the human race.
+But both historical experience and observation of the terms on
+which the human intelligence works, show us that we can only make
+sure of intellectual activity on condition of leaving it free to
+work all round, in every department and in every remotest nook of
+each department, and that its most fruitful epochs are exactly
+those when this freedom is greatest, this curiosity most keen and
+minute, and this waste, if you choose to call the indispensable
+superfluity of force in a natural process waste, most copious and
+unsparing. You will not find your highest capacity in
+statesmanship, nor in practical science, nor in art, nor in any
+other field where that capacity is most urgently needed for the
+right service of life, unless there is a general and vehement
+spirit of search in the air. If it incidentally leads to many
+industrious futilities and much learned refuse, this is still the
+sign and the generative element of industry which is not futile,
+and of learning which is something more than mere water spilled
+upon the ground.</p>
+<p>We may say in fine that this first Discourse and its
+vindications were a dim, shallow, and ineffective feeling after the
+great truth, that the only normal state of society is that in which
+neither the love of virtue has been thrust far back into a
+secondary place by the love of knowledge, nor the active curiosity
+of the understanding dulled, blunted, and made ashamed by soft,
+lazy ideals of life as a life only of the affections.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.153" id="Page_i.153">[i.153]</a></span> Rousseau now
+and always fell into the opposite extreme from that against which
+his whole work was a protest. We need not complain very loudly that
+while remonstrating against the restless intrepidity of the
+rationalists of his generation, he passed over the central truth,
+namely that the full and ever festal life is found in active
+freedom of curiosity and search taking significance, motive, force,
+from a warm inner pulse of human love and sympathy. It was not
+given to Rousseau to see all this, but it was given to him to see
+the side of it for which the most powerful of the men living with
+him had no eyes, and the first Discourse was only a moderately
+successful attempt to bring his vision before Europe. It was said
+at the time that he did not believe a word of what he had
+written.<a name="FNanchor172"></a><a href="#Footnote_172">[172]</a>
+It is a natural characteristic of an age passionately occupied with
+its own set of ideas, to question either the sincerity or the
+sanity of anybody who declares its sovereign conceptions to be no
+better than foolishness. We cannot entertain such a suspicion.
+Perhaps the vehemence of controversy carries him rather further
+than he quite meant to go, when he declares that if he were a chief
+of an African tribe, he would erect on his frontier a gallows, on
+which he would hang without mercy the first European who should
+venture to pass into his territory, and the first native who should
+dare to pass out of it.<a name="FNanchor173"></a><a href="#Footnote_173">[173]</a> And there are many other extravagances
+of illustration, but the main position is serious enough, as
+represented in the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.154" id="Page_i.154">[i.154]</a></span> emblematic vignette with which the essay was
+printed&#8212;the torch of science brought to men by Prometheus, who
+warns a satyr that it burns; the satyr, seeing fire for the first
+time and being fain to embrace it, is the symbol of the vulgar men
+who, seduced by the glitter of literature, insist on delivering
+themselves up to its study.<a name="FNanchor174"></a><a href="#Footnote_174">[174]</a> Rousseau's whole doctrine hangs
+compactly together, and we may see the signs of its growth after
+leaving his hands in the crude formula of the first Discourse, if
+we proceed to the more audacious paradox of the second.</p>
+<h3>II.</h3>
+<p>The Discourse on the Origin of Inequality among men opens with a
+description of the natural state of man, which occupies
+considerably more than half of the entire performance. It is
+composed in a vein which is only too familiar to the student of the
+literature of the time, picturing each habit and thought, and each
+step to new habits and thoughts, with the minuteness, the fulness,
+the precision, of one who narrates circumstances of which he has
+all his life been the close eye-witness. The natural man reveals to
+us every motive, every process internal and external, every
+slightest circumstance of his daily life, and each element that
+gradually transformed him into the non-natural man. One who had
+watched bees or beetles for years could not give us a more full or<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.155" id="Page_i.155">[i.155]</a></span>
+confident account of their doings, their hourly goings in and out,
+than it was the fashion in the eighteenth century to give of the
+walk and conversation of the primeval ancestor. The conditions of
+primitive man were discussed by very incompetent ladies and
+gentlemen at convivial supper parties, and settled with complete
+assurance.<a name="FNanchor175"></a><a href="#Footnote_175">[175]</a></p>
+<p>Rousseau thought and talked about the state of nature because
+all his world was thinking and talking about it. He used phrases
+and formulas with reference to it which other people used. He
+required no more evidence than they did, as to the reality of the
+existence of the supposed set of conditions to which they gave the
+almost sacramental name of state of nature. He never thought of
+asking, any more than anybody else did in the middle of the
+eighteenth century, what sort of proof, how strong, how direct, was
+to be had, that primeval man had such and such habits, and changed
+them in such a way and direction, and for such reasons. Physical
+science had reached a stage by this time when its followers were
+careful to ask questions about evidence, correct description,
+verification. But the idea of accurate method had to be made very
+familiar to men by the successes of physical science in the search
+after truths of one kind, before the indispensableness of applying
+it in the search after truths of all kinds had extended to the
+science of the constitution and succession of social<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.156" id="Page_i.156">[i.156]</a></span> states. In
+this respect Rousseau was not guiltier than the bulk of his
+contemporaries. Voltaire's piercing common sense, Hume's deep-set
+sagacity, Montesquieu's caution, prevented them from launching very
+far on to this metaphysical sea of nature and natural laws and
+states, but none of them asked those critical questions in relation
+to such matters which occur so promptly in the present day to
+persons far inferior to them in intellectual strength. Rousseau
+took the notion of the state of nature because he found it to his
+hand; he fitted to it his own characteristic aspirations, expanding
+and vivifying a philosophic conception with all the heat of humane
+passion; and thus, although, at the end of the process when he had
+done with it, the state of nature came out blooming as the rose, it
+was fundamentally only the dry, current abstraction of his time,
+artificially decorated to seduce men into embracing a strange ideal
+under a familiar name.</p>
+<p>Before analysing the Discourse on Inequality, we ought to make
+some mention of a remarkable man whose influence probably reached
+Rousseau in an indirect manner through Diderot; I mean
+Morelly.<a name="FNanchor176"></a><a href="#Footnote_176">[176]</a>
+In 1753 Morelly published a prose poem called the Basiliade,
+describing the corruption of manners introduced by the errors of
+the lawgiver, and pointing out how this corruption is to be amended
+by return to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.157" id="Page_i.157">[i.157]</a></span> the empire of nature and truth. He was no doubt
+stimulated by what was supposed to be the central doctrine of
+Montesquieu, then freshly given to the world, that it is government
+and institutions which make men what they are. But he was
+stimulated into a reaction, and in 1754 he propounded his whole
+theory, in a piece which in closeness, consistency, and
+thoroughness is admirably different from Rousseau's
+rhetoric.<a name="FNanchor177"></a><a href="#Footnote_177">[177]</a> It lacked the sovereign quality of
+persuasiveness, and so fell on deaf ears. Morelly accepts the
+doctrine that men are formed by the laws, but insists that
+moralists and statesmen have always led us wrong by legislating and
+prescribing conduct on the false theory that man is bad, whereas he
+is in truth a creature endowed with natural probity. Then he
+strikes to the root of society with a directness that Rousseau
+could not imitate, by the position that &quot;these laws by establishing
+a monstrous division of the products of nature, and even of their
+very elements&#8212;by dividing what ought to have remained entire, or
+ought to have been restored to entireness if any accident had
+divided them, aided and favoured the break-up of all sociability.&quot;
+All political and all moral evils are the effects of this
+pernicious cause&#8212;private property. He says of Rousseau's first
+Discourse that the writer ought to have seen that the corruption of
+manners which he set down to literature and art really came from
+this venomous principle of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.158" id="Page_i.158">[i.158]</a></span> property, which infects all that it
+touches.<a name="FNanchor178"></a><a href="#Footnote_178">[178]</a>
+Christianity, it is true, assailed this principle and restored
+equality or community of possessions, but Christianity had the
+radical fault of involving such a detachment from earthly
+affections, in order to deliver ourselves to heavenly meditation,
+as brought about a necessary degeneration in social activity. The
+form of government is a matter of indifference, provided you can
+only assure community of goods. Political revolutions are at bottom
+the clash of material interests, and until you have equalised the
+one you will never prevent the other.<a name="FNanchor179"></a><a href="#Footnote_179">[179]</a></p>
+<p>Let us turn from this very definite position to one<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.159" id="Page_i.159">[i.159]</a></span> of the least
+definite productions to be found in all literature.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 25%;" />
+
+<p>It will seem a little odd that more than half of a discussion on
+the origin of inequality among men should be devoted to a glowing
+imaginary description, from which no reader could conjecture what
+thesis it was designed to support. But we have only to remember
+that Rousseau's object was to persuade people that the happier
+state is that in which inequality does not subsist, that there had
+once been such a state, and that this was first the state of
+nature, and then the state only one degree removed from it, in
+which we now find the majority of savage tribes. At the outset he
+defines inequality as a word meaning two different things; one,
+natural or physical inequality, such as difference of age, of
+health, of physical strength, of attributes of intelligence and
+character; the other, moral or political inequality, consisting in
+difference of privileges which some enjoy to the detriment of the
+rest, such as being richer, more honoured, more powerful. The
+former differences are established by nature, the latter are
+authorised, if they were not established, by the consent of
+men.<a name="FNanchor180"></a><a href="#Footnote_180">[180]</a> In
+the state of nature no inequalities flow from the differences among
+men in point of physical advantage and disadvantage, and which
+remain without derivative differences so long as the state of
+nature endures undisturbed. Nature deals with men as the law of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.160" id="Page_i.160">[i.160]</a></span>
+Sparta dealt with the children of its citizens; she makes those who
+are well constituted strong and robust, and she destroys all the
+rest.</p>
+<p>The surface of the earth is originally covered by dense forest,
+and inhabited by animals of every species. Men, scattered among
+them, imitate their industry, and so rise to the instinct of the
+brutes, with this advantage that while each species has only its
+own, man, without anything special, appropriates the instincts of
+all. This admirable creature, with foes on every side, is forced to
+be constantly on the alert, and hence to be always in full
+possession of all his faculties, unlike civilised man, whose native
+force is enfeebled by the mechanical protections with which he has
+surrounded himself. He is not afraid of the wild beasts around him,
+for experience has taught him that he is their master. His health
+is better than ours, for we live in a time when excess of idleness
+in some, excess of toil in others, the heating and over-abundant
+diet of the rich, the bad food of the poor, the orgies and excesses
+of every kind, the immoderate transport of every passion, the
+fatigue and strain of spirit,&#8212;when all these things have inflicted
+more disorders upon us than the vaunted art of medicine has been
+able to keep pace with. Even if the sick savage has only nature to
+hope from, on the other hand he has only his own malady to be
+afraid of. He has no fear of death, for no animal can know what
+death is, and the knowledge of death and its terrors is one of the
+first of man's terrible<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.161" id="Page_i.161">[i.161]</a></span> acquisitions after abandoning his animal
+condition.<a name="FNanchor181"></a><a href="#Footnote_181">[181]</a> In other respects, such as protection
+against weather, such as habitation, such as food, the savage's
+natural power of adaptation, and the fact that his demands are
+moderate in proportion to his means of satisfying them, forbid us
+to consider him physically unhappy. Let us turn to the intellectual
+and moral side.</p>
+<p>If you contend that men were miserable, degraded, and outcast
+during these primitive centuries because the intelligence was
+dormant, then do not forget, first, that you are drawing an
+indictment against nature,&#8212;no trifling blasphemy in those
+days&#8212;and second, that you are attributing misery to a free
+creature with tranquil spirit and healthy body, and that must
+surely be a singular abuse of the term. We see around us scarcely
+any but people who complain of the burden of their lives; but who
+ever heard of a savage in full enjoyment of his liberty ever
+dreaming of complaint about his life or of self-destruction?</p>
+<p>With reference to virtues and vices in a state of nature, Hobbes
+is wrong in declaring that man in this state is vicious, as not
+knowing virtue. He is not vicious, for the reason that he does not
+know what being good is. It is not development of enlightenment nor
+the restrictions of law, but the calm of the passions and ignorance
+of vice, which keep<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.162" id="Page_i.162">[i.162]</a></span> them from doing ill. <i>Tanto plus in illis
+profitcit vitiorum ignoratio, quam in his cognitio
+virtutis.</i></p>
+<p>Besides man has one great natural virtue, that of pity, which
+precedes in him the use of reflection, and which indeed he shares
+with some of the brutes. Mandeville, who was forced to admit the
+existence of this admirable quality in man, was absurd in not
+perceiving that from it flow all the social virtues which he would
+fain deny. Pity is more energetic in the primitive condition than
+it is among ourselves. It is reflection which isolates one. It is
+philosophy which teaches the philosopher to say secretly at sight
+of a suffering wretch, Perish if it please thee; I am safe and
+sound. They may be butchering a fellow-creature under your window;
+all you have to do is to clap your hands to your ears, and argue a
+little with yourself to hinder nature in revolt from making you
+feel as if you were in the case of the victim.<a name="FNanchor182"></a><a href="#Footnote_182">[182]</a> The savage man
+has not got this odious gift. In the state of nature it is pity
+that takes the place of laws, manners, and virtue. It is in this
+natural sentiment rather than in subtle arguments that we have to
+seek the reluctance that every man would feel to do ill, even
+without the precepts of education.<a name="FNanchor183"></a><a href="#Footnote_183">[183]</a></p>
+<p>Finally, the passion of love, which produces such disasters in a
+state of society, where the jealousy of lovers and the vengeance of
+husbands lead each day<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.163" id="Page_i.163">[i.163]</a></span> to duels and murders, where the duty of
+eternal fidelity only serves to occasion adulteries, and where the
+law of continence necessarily extends the debauching of women and
+the practice of procuring abortion<a name="FNanchor184"></a><a href="#Footnote_184">[184]</a>&#8212;this passion
+in a state of nature, where it is purely physical, momentary, and
+without any association of durable sentiment with the object of it,
+simply leads to the necessary reproduction of the species and
+nothing more.</p>
+<p>&quot;Let us conclude, then, that wandering in the forests, without
+industry, without speech, without habitation, without war, without
+connection of any kind, without any need of his fellows or without
+any desire to harm them, perhaps even without ever recognising one
+of them individually, savage man, subject to few passions and
+sufficing to himself, had only the sentiments and the enlightenment
+proper to his condition. He was only sensible of his real wants,
+and only looked because he thought he had an interest in seeing;
+and his intelligence made no more progress than his vanity. If by
+chance he hit on some discovery, he was all the less able to
+communicate it; as he did not know even his own children. An art
+perished with its inventor. There was neither education nor
+progress; generations multiplied uselessly; and as each generation
+always started from the same<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.164" id="Page_i.164">[i.164]</a></span> point, centuries glided away in all
+the rudeness of the first ages, the race was already old, the
+individual remained always a child.&quot;</p>
+<p>This brings us to the point of the matter. For if you compare
+the prodigious diversities in education and manner of life which
+reign in the different orders of the civil condition, with the
+simplicity and uniformity of the savage and animal life, where all
+find nourishment in the same articles of food, live in the same
+way, and do exactly the same things, you will easily understand to
+what degree the difference between man and man must be less in the
+state of nature than in that of society.<a name="FNanchor185"></a><a href="#Footnote_185">[185]</a> Physical
+inequality is hardly perceived in the state of nature, and its
+indirect influences there are almost non-existent.</p>
+<p>Now as all the social virtues and other faculties possessed by
+man potentially were not bound by anything inherent in him to
+develop into actuality, he might have remained to all eternity in
+his admirable and most fitting primitive condition, but for the
+fortuitous concurrence of a variety of external changes. What are
+these different changes, which may perhaps have perfected human
+reason, while they certainly have deteriorated the race, and made
+men bad in making them sociable?</p>
+<p>What, then, are the intermediary facts between the state of
+nature and the state of civil society, the nursery of inequality?
+What broke up the happy uniformity of the first times? First,
+difference in soil,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.165" id="Page_i.165">[i.165]</a></span> in climate, in seasons, led to corresponding
+differences in men's manner of living. Along the banks of rivers
+and on the shores of the sea, they invented hooks and lines, and
+were eaters of fish. In the forests they invented bows and arrows,
+and became hunters. In cold countries they covered themselves with
+the skins of beasts. Lightning, volcanoes, or some happy chance
+acquainted them with fire, a new protection against the rigours of
+winter. In company with these natural acquisitions, grew up a sort
+of reflection or mechanical prudence, which showed them the kind of
+precautions most necessary to their security. From this rudimentary
+and wholly egoistic reflection there came a sense of the existence
+of a similar nature and similar interests in their
+fellow-creatures. Instructed by experience that the love of
+well-being and comfort is the only motive of human actions, the
+savage united with his neighbours when union was for their joint
+convenience, and did his best to blind and outwit his neighbours
+when their interests were adverse to his own, and he felt himself
+the weaker. Hence the origin of certain rude ideas of mutual
+obligation.<a name="FNanchor186"></a><a href="#Footnote_186">[186]</a></p>
+<p>Soon, ceasing to fall asleep under the first tree, or to
+withdraw into caves, they found axes of hard stone, which served
+them to cut wood, to dig the ground, and to construct hovels of
+branches and clay. This was the epoch of a first revolution, which
+formed the establishment and division of families, and which
+introduced a rough and partial sort of property.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.166" id="Page_i.166">[i.166]</a></span> Along with
+rudimentary ideas of property, though not connected with them, came
+the rudimentary forms of inequality. When men were thrown more
+together, then he who sang or danced the best, the strongest, the
+most adroit, or the most eloquent, acquired the most
+consideration&#8212;that is, men ceased to take uniform and equal place.
+And with the coming of this end of equality there passed away the
+happy primitive immunity from jealousy, envy, malice, hate.</p>
+<p>On the whole, though men had lost some of their original
+endurance, and their natural pity had already undergone a certain
+deterioration, this period of the development of the human
+faculties, occupying a just medium between the indolence of the
+primitive state and the petulant activity of our modern self-love,
+must have been at once the happiest and the most durable epoch. The
+more we reflect, the more evident we find it that this state was
+the least subject to revolutions and the best for man. &quot;So long as
+men were content with their rustic hovels, so long as they confined
+themselves to stitching their garments of skin with spines or fish
+bones, to decking their bodies with feathers and shells and
+painting them in different colours, to perfecting and beautifying
+their bows and arrows&#8212;in a word, so long as they only applied
+themselves to works that one person could do, and to arts that
+needed no more than a single hand, then they lived free, healthy,
+good, and happy, so far as was compatible with their natural
+constitution, and continued to enjoy among themselves the sweetness<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.167" id="Page_i.167">[i.167]</a></span>
+of independent intercourse. But from the moment that one man had
+need of the help of another, as soon as they perceived it to be
+useful for one person to have provisions for two, then equality
+disappeared, property was introduced, labour became necessary, and
+the vast forests changed into smiling fields, which had to be
+watered by the sweat of men, and in which they ever saw bondage and
+misery springing up and growing ripe with the harvests.&quot;<a name="FNanchor187"></a><a href="#Footnote_187">[187]</a></p>
+<p>The working of metals and agriculture have been the two great
+agents in this revolution. For the poet it is gold and silver, but
+for the philosopher it is iron and corn, that have civilised men
+and undone the human race. It is easy to see how the latter of the
+two arts was suggested to men by watching the reproducing processes
+of vegetation. It is less easy to be sure how they discovered
+metal, saw its uses, and invented means of smelting it, for nature
+had taken extreme precautions to hide the fatal secret. It was
+probably the operation of some volcano which first suggested the
+idea of fusing ore. From the fact of land being cultivated its
+division followed, and therefore the institution of property in its
+full shape. From property arose civil society. &quot;The first man who,
+having enclosed a piece of ground, could think of saying, <i>This
+is mine</i>, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the
+real founder of civil society. How many crimes, wars, murders,
+miseries, and horrors would not have been spared to the human<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.168" id="Page_i.168">[i.168]</a></span> race
+by one who, plucking up the stakes, or filling in the trench,
+should have called out to his fellows: Beware of listening to this
+impostor; you are undone if you forget that the earth belongs to no
+one, and that its fruits are for all.&quot;<a name="FNanchor188"></a><a href="#Footnote_188">[188]</a></p>
+<p>Things might have remained equal even in this state, if talents
+had only been equal, and if for example the employment of iron and
+the consumption of agricultural produce had always exactly balanced
+one another. But the stronger did more work; the cleverer got more
+advantage from his work; the more ingenious found means of
+shortening his labour; the husbandman had more need of metal, or
+the smith more need of grain; and while working equally, one got
+much gain, and the other could scarcely live. This distinction
+between Have and Have-not led to confusion and revolt, to
+brigandage on the one side and constant insecurity on the
+other.</p>
+<p>Hence disorders of a violent and interminable kind, which gave
+rise to the most deeply designed project that ever entered the
+human mind. This was to employ in favour of property the strength
+of the very persons who attacked it, to inspire them with other
+maxims, and to give them other institutions which should be as
+favourable to property as natural law had been contrary to it. The
+man who conceived this project, after showing his neighbours the
+monstrous confusion which made their lives most burdensome, spoke
+in this wise: &quot;Let us unite to shield the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.169" id="Page_i.169">[i.169]</a></span> weak from oppression, to
+restrain the proud, and to assure to each the possession of what
+belongs to him; let us set up rules of justice and peace, to which
+all shall be obliged to conform, without respect of persons, and
+which may repair to some extent the caprices of fortune, by
+subjecting the weak and the mighty alike to mutual duties. In a
+word, instead of turning our forces against one another, let us
+collect them into one supreme power to govern us by sage laws, to
+protect and defend all the members of the association, repel their
+common foes, and preserve us in never-ending concord.&quot; This, and
+not the right of conquest, must have been the origin of society and
+laws, which threw new chains round the poor and gave new might to
+the rich; and for the profit of a few grasping and ambitious men,
+subjected the whole human race henceforth and for ever to toil and
+bondage and wretchedness without hope.</p>
+<p>The social constitution thus propounded and accepted was
+radically imperfect from the outset, and in spite of the efforts of
+the sagest lawgivers, it has always remained imperfect, because it
+was the work of chance, and because, inasmuch as it was ill begun,
+time, while revealing defects and suggesting remedies, could never
+repair its vices; <i>people went on incessantly repairing and
+patching, instead of which it was indispensable to begin by making
+a clean surface and by throwing aside all the old materials, just
+as Lycurgus did in Sparta</i>.</p>
+<p>Put shortly, the main positions are these. In the state of
+nature each man lived in entire isolation, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.170" id="Page_i.170">[i.170]</a></span> therefore physical
+inequality was as if it did not exist. After many centuries,
+accident, in the shape of difference of climate and external
+natural conditions, enforcing for the sake of subsistence some
+degree of joint labour, led to an increase of communication among
+men, to a slight development of the reasoning and reflective
+faculties, and to a rude and simple sense of mutual obligation, as
+a means of greater comfort in the long run. The first state was
+good and pure, but the second state was truly perfect. It was
+destroyed by a fresh succession of chances, such as the discovery
+of the arts of metal-working and tillage, which led first to the
+institution of property, and second to the prominence of the
+natural or physical inequalities, which now began to tell with
+deadly effectiveness. These inequalities gradually became summed up
+in the great distinction between rich and poor; and this
+distinction was finally embodied in the constitution of a civil
+society, expressly adapted to consecrate the usurpation of the
+rich, and to make the inequality of condition between them and the
+poor eternal.</p>
+<p>We thus see that the Discourse, unlike Morelly's terse
+exposition, contains no clear account of the kind of inequality
+with which it deals. Is it inequality of material possession or
+inequality of political right? Morelly tells you decisively that
+the latter is only an accident, flowing from the first; that the
+key to renovation lies in the abolition of the first. Rousseau
+mixes the two confusedly together under a single<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.171" id="Page_i.171">[i.171]</a></span> name, bemoans
+each, but shrinks from a conclusion or a recommendation as to
+either. He declares property to be the key to civil society, but
+falls back from any ideas leading to the modification of the
+institution lying at the root of all that he deplores.</p>
+<p>The first general criticism, which in itself contains and covers
+nearly all others, turns on Method. &quot;Conjectures become reasons
+when they are the most likely that you can draw from the nature of
+things,&quot; and &quot;it is for philosophy in lack of history to determine
+the most likely facts.&quot; In an inductive age this royal road is
+rigorously closed. Guesses drawn from the general nature of things
+can no longer give us light as to the particular nature of the
+things pertaining to primitive men, any more than such guesses can
+teach us the law of the movement of the heavenly bodies, or the
+foundations of jurisprudence. Nor can deduction from anything but
+propositions which have themselves been won by laborious induction,
+ever lead us to the only kind of philosophy which has fair
+pretension to determine the most probable of the missing facts in
+the chain of human history. That quantitative and differentiating
+knowledge which is science, was not yet thought of in connection
+with the movements of our own race upon the earth. It is to be
+said, further, that of the two possible ways of guessing about the
+early state, the conditions of advance from it, and the rest,
+Rousseau's guess that all movement away from it has been towards
+corruption, is less supported by subsequent knowledge than the
+guess<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.172" id="Page_i.172">[i.172]</a></span> of his adversaries, that it has been a movement progressive
+and upwards.</p>
+<p>This much being said as to incurable vice of method, and there
+are fervent disciples of Rousseau now living who will regard one's
+craving for method in talking about men as a foible of pedantry, we
+may briefly remark on one or two detached objections to Rousseau's
+story. To begin with, there is no certainty as to there having ever
+been a state of nature of a normal and organic kind, any more than
+there is any one normal and typical state of society now. There are
+infinitely diverse states of society, and there were probably as
+many diverse states of nature. Rousseau was sufficiently acquainted
+with the most recent metaphysics of his time to know that you
+cannot think of a tree in general, nor of a triangle in general,
+but only of some particular tree or triangle.<a name="FNanchor189"></a><a href="#Footnote_189">[189]</a> In a similar
+way he might have known that there never was any such thing as a
+state of nature in the general and abstract, fixed, typical, and
+single. He speaks of the savage state also, which comes next, as
+one, identical, normal. It is, of course, nothing of the kind. The
+varieties of belief and habit and custom among the different tribes
+of savages, in reference to every object that can engage their
+attention, from death and the gods and immortality down to the uses
+of marriage and the art of counting and the ways of procuring
+subsistence, are infinitely numerous; and the more we know about
+this vast diversity, the less easy is it to think of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.173" id="Page_i.173">[i.173]</a></span> savage
+state in general. When Rousseau extols the savage state as the
+veritable youth of the world, we wonder whether we are to think of
+the negroes of the Gold Coast, or the Dyaks of Borneo, Papuans or
+Maoris, Cheyennes or Tierra-del-Fuegians or the fabled Troglodytes;
+whether in the veritable youth of the world they counted up to five
+or only to two; whether they used a fire-drill, and if so what kind
+of drill; whether they had the notion of personal identity in so
+weak a shape as to practise the couvade; and a hundred other
+points, which we should now require any writer to settle, who
+should speak of the savage state as sovereign, one, and
+indivisible, in the way in which Rousseau speaks of it, and holds
+it up to our vain admiration.</p>
+<p>Again, if the savage state supervened upon the state of nature
+in consequence of certain climatic accidents of a permanent kind,
+such as living on the banks of a river or in a dense forest, how
+was it that the force of these accidents did not begin to operate
+at once? How could the isolated state of nature endure for a year
+in face of them? Or what was the precipitating incident which
+suddenly set them to work, and drew the primitive men from an
+isolation so profound that they barely recognised one another, into
+that semi-social state in which the family was founded?</p>
+<p>We cannot tell how the state of nature continued to subsist, or,
+if it ever subsisted, how and why it ever came to an end, because
+the agencies which are<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.174" id="Page_i.174">[i.174]</a></span> alleged to have brought it to an end must
+have been coeval with the appearance of man himself. If gods had
+brought to men seed, fire, and the mechanical arts, as in one of
+the Platonic myths,<a name="FNanchor190"></a><a href="#Footnote_190">[190]</a> we could understand that there was a
+long stage preliminary to these heavenly gifts. But if the gods had
+no part nor lot in it, and if the accidents that slowly led the
+human creature into union were as old as that nature, of which
+indeed they were actually the component elements, then man must
+have quitted the state of nature the very day on which he was born
+into it. And what can be a more monstrous anachronism than to turn
+a flat-headed savage into a clever, self-conscious, argumentative
+utilitarian of the eighteenth century; working the social problem
+out in his flat head with a keenness, a consistency, a grasp of
+first principles, that would have entitled him to a chair in the
+institute of moral sciences, and entering the social union with the
+calm and reasonable deliberation of a great statesman taking a
+critical step in policy? Aristotle was wiser when he fixed upon
+sociability as an ultimate quality of human nature, instead of
+making it, as Rousseau and so many others have done, the conclusion
+of an unimpeachable train of syllogistic reasoning.<a name="FNanchor191"></a><a href="#Footnote_191">[191]</a><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.175" id="Page_i.175">[i.175]</a></span> Morelly even,
+his own contemporary, and much less of a sage than Aristotle, was
+still sage enough to perceive that this primitive human machine,
+&quot;though composed of intelligent parts, generally operates
+independently of its reason; its deliberations are forestalled, and
+only leave it to look on, while sentiment does its work.&quot;<a name="FNanchor192"></a><a href="#Footnote_192">[192]</a> It is the
+more remarkable that Rousseau should have fallen into this kind of
+error, as it was one of his distinctions to have perceived and
+partially worked out the principle, that men guide their conduct
+rather from passion and instinct than from reasoned
+enlightenment.<a name="FNanchor193"></a><a href="#Footnote_193">[193]</a> The ultimate quality which he named pity
+is, after all, the germ of sociability, which is only extended
+sympathy. But he did not firmly adhere to this ultimate quality,
+nor make any effort consistently to trace out its various
+products.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.176" id="Page_i.176">[i.176]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>We do not find, however, in Rousseau any serious attempt to
+analyse the composition of human nature in its primitive stages.
+Though constantly warning his readers very impressively against
+confounding domesticated with primitive men, he practically assumes
+that the main elements of character must always have been
+substantially identical with such elements and conceptions as are
+found after the addition of many ages of increasingly complex
+experience. There is something worth considering in his notion that
+civilisation has had effects upon man analogous to those of
+domestication upon animals, but he lacked logical persistency
+enough to enable him to adhere to his own idea, and work out
+conclusions from it.</p>
+<p>It might further be pointed out in another direction that he
+takes for granted that the mode of advance into a social state has
+always been one and the same, a single and uniform process, marked
+by precisely the same set of several stages, following one another
+in precisely the same order. There is no evidence of this; on the
+contrary, evidence goes to show that civilisation varies in origin
+and process with race and other things, and that though in all
+cases starting from the prime factor of sociableness in man, yet
+the course of its development has depended on the particular sets
+of circumstances with which that factor has had to combine. These
+are full of variety, according to climate and racial
+predisposition, although, as has been justly said, the force of
+both these two elements<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.177" id="Page_i.177">[i.177]</a></span> diminishes as the influence of the past in
+giving consistency to our will becomes more definite, and our means
+of modifying climate and race become better known. There is no sign
+that Rousseau, any more than many other inquirers, ever reflected
+whether the capacity for advance into the state of civil society in
+any highly developed form is universal throughout the species, or
+whether there are not races eternally incapable of advance beyond
+the savage state. Progress would hardly be the exception which we
+know it to be in the history of communities if there were not
+fundamental diversities in the civilisable quality of races. Why do
+some bodies of men get on to the high roads of civilisation, while
+others remain in the jungle and thicket of savagery; and why do
+some races advance along one of these roads, and others advance by
+different roads?</p>
+<p>Considerations of this sort disclose the pinched frame of trim
+theory with which Rousseau advanced to set in order a huge mass of
+boundlessly varied, intricate, and unmanageable facts. It is not,
+however, at all worth while to extend such criticism further than
+suffices to show how little his piece can stand the sort of
+questions which may be put to it from a scientific point of view.
+Nothing that Rousseau had to say about the state of nature was
+seriously meant for scientific exposition, any more than the Sermon
+on the Mount was meant for political economy. The importance of the
+Discourse on Inequality lay in its vehement denunciation of the
+existing social state.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.178" id="Page_i.178">[i.178]</a></span> To the writer the question of the origin of
+inequality is evidently far less a matter at heart, than the
+question of its results. It is the natural inclination of one
+deeply moved by a spectacle of depravation in his own time and
+country, to extol some other time or country, of which he is
+happily ignorant enough not to know the drawbacks. Rousseau wrote
+about the savage state in something of the same spirit in which
+Tacitus wrote the Germania. And here, as in the Discourse on the
+influence of science and art upon virtue, there is a positive side.
+To miss this in resentment of the unscientific paradox that lies
+about it, is to miss the force of the piece, and to render its
+enormous influence for a generation after it was written
+incomprehensible. We may always be quite sure that no set of ideas
+ever produced this resounding effect on opinion, unless they
+contained something which the social or spiritual condition of the
+men whom they inflamed made true for the time, and true in an
+urgent sense. Is it not tenable that the state of certain savage
+tribes is more normal, offers a better balance between desire and
+opportunity, between faculty and performance, than the permanent
+state of large classes in western countries, the broken wreck of
+civilisation?<a name="FNanchor194"></a><a href="#Footnote_194">[194]</a> To admit this is not to conclude, as<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.179" id="Page_i.179">[i.179]</a></span>
+Rousseau so rashly concluded, that the movement away from the
+primitive stages has been productive only of evil and misery even
+to the masses of men, the hewers of wood and the drawers of water;
+or that it was occasioned, and has been carried on by the
+predominance of the lower parts and principles of human nature. Our
+provisional acquiescence in the straitness and blank absence of
+outlook or hope of the millions who come on to the earth that
+greets them with no smile, and then stagger blindly under dull
+burdens for a season, and at last are shovelled silently back under
+the ground,&#8212;our acquiescence can only be justified in the sight of
+humanity by the conviction<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.180" id="Page_i.180">[i.180]</a></span> that this is one of the temporary
+conditions of a vast process, working forwards through the impulse
+and agency of the finer human spirits, but needing much blood, many
+tears, uncounted myriads of lives, and immeasurable geologic
+periods of time, for its high and beneficent consummation. There is
+nothing surprising, perhaps nothing deeply condemnable, in the
+burning anger for which this acquiescence is often changed in the
+more impatient natures. As against the ignoble host who think that
+the present ordering of men, with all its prodigious inequalities,
+is in foundation and substance the perfection of social
+blessedness, Rousseau was almost in the right. If the only
+alternative to the present social order remaining in perpetuity
+were a retrogression to some such condition as that of the
+islanders of the South Sea, a lover of his fellow-creatures might
+look upon the result, so far as it affected the happiness of the
+bulk of them, with tolerably complete indifference. It is only the
+faith that we are moving slowly away from the existing order, as
+our ancestors moved slowly away from the old want of order, that
+makes the present endurable, and makes any tenacious effort to
+raise the future possible.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 25%;" />
+
+<p>An immense quantity of nonsense has been talked about the
+equality of man, for which those who deny that doctrine and those
+who assert it may divide the responsibility. It is in reality true
+or false, according to the doctrines with which it is confronted.
+As<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.181" id="Page_i.181">[i.181]</a></span> against the theory that the existing way of sharing the
+laboriously acquired fruits and delights of the earth is a just
+representation and fair counterpart of natural inequalities among
+men in merit and capacity, the revolutionary theory is true, and
+the passionate revolutionary cry for equality of external chance
+most righteous and unanswerable. But the issues do not end here.
+Take such propositions as these:&#8212;there are differences in the
+capacity of men for serving the community; the well-being of the
+community demands the allotment of high function in proportion to
+high faculty; the rights of man in politics are confined to a right
+of the same protection for his own interests as is given to the
+interests of others. As against these principles, the revolutionary
+deductions from the equality of man are false. And such pretensions
+as that every man could be made equally fit for every function, or
+that not only each should have an equal chance, but that he who
+uses his chance well and sociably should be kept on a level in
+common opinion and trust with him who uses it ill and unsociably,
+or does not use it at all,&#8212;the whole of this is obviously most
+illusory and most disastrous, and in whatever decree any set of men
+have ever taken it up, to that degree they have paid the
+penalty.</p>
+<p>What Rousseau's Discourse meant, what he intended it to mean,
+and what his first direct disciples understood it as meaning, is
+not that all men are born equal. He never says this, and his
+recognition of natural inequality implies the contrary proposition.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.182" id="Page_i.182">[i.182]</a></span>
+His position is that the artificial differences, springing from the
+conditions of the social union, do not coincide with the
+differences in capacity springing from original constitution; that
+the tendency of the social union as now organised is to deepen the
+artificial inequalities, and make the gulf between those endowed
+with privileges and wealth and those not so endowed ever wider and
+wider. It would have been very difficult a hundred years ago to
+deny the truth of this way of stating the case. If it has to some
+extent already ceased to be entirely true, and if violent popular
+forces are at work making it less and less true, we owe the origin
+of the change, among other causes and influences, not least to the
+influence of Rousseau himself, and those whom he inspired. It was
+that influence which, though it certainly did not produce, yet did
+as certainly give a deep and remarkable bias, first to the American
+Revolution, and a dozen years afterwards to the French
+Revolution.</p>
+<p>It would be interesting to trace the different fortunes which
+awaited the idea of the equality of man in America and in France.
+In America it has always remained strictly within the political
+order, and perhaps with the considerable exception of the possibles
+share it may have had, along with Christian notions of the
+brotherhood of man, and statesmanlike notions of national
+prosperity, in leading to the abolition of slavery, it has brought
+forth no strong moral sentiment against the ethical and economic
+bases of any part of the social order. In France, on the other<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.183" id="Page_i.183">[i.183]</a></span>
+hand, it was the starting-point of movements that have had all the
+fervour and intensity of religions, and have made men feel about
+social inequalities the burning shame and wrath with which a
+Christian saw the flourishing temples of unclean gods. This
+difference in the interpretation and development of the first
+doctrine may be explained in various ways,&#8212;by difference of
+material circumstance between America and France; difference of the
+political and social level from which the principle of equality had
+to start; and not least by difference of intellectual temperament.
+This last was itself partly the product of difference in religion,
+which makes the English dread the practical enforcement of logical
+conclusions, while the French have hitherto been apt to dread and
+despise any tendency to stop short of that.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 25%;" />
+
+<p>Let us notice, finally, the important fact that the appearance
+of Rousseau's Discourses was the first sign of reaction against the
+historic mode of inquiry into society that had been initiated by
+Montesquieu. The Spirit of Laws was published in 1748, with a truly
+prodigious effect. It coloured the whole of the social literature
+in France during the rest of the century. A history of its
+influence would be a history of one of the most important sides of
+speculative activity. In the social writings of Rousseau himself
+there is hardly a chapter which does not contain tacit reference to
+Montesquieu's book. The Discourses were the beginning of a movement
+in an exactly opposite<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.184" id="Page_i.184">[i.184]</a></span> direction; that is, away from patient
+collection of wide multitudes of facts relating to the conditions
+of society, towards the promulgation of arbitrary systems of
+absolute social dogmas. Mably, the chief dogmatic socialist of the
+century, and one of the most dignified and austere characters, is
+an important example of the detriment done by the influence of
+Rousseau to that of Montesquieu, in the earlier stages of the
+conflict between the two schools. Mably (1709-1785), of whom the
+remark is to be made that he was for some years behind the scenes
+of government as De Tencin's secretary and therefore was versed in
+affairs, began his inquiries with Greece and Rome. &quot;You will find
+everything in ancient history,&quot; he said.<a name="FNanchor195"></a><a href="#Footnote_195">[195]</a> And he
+remained entirely in this groove of thought until Rousseau
+appeared. He then gradually left Montesquieu. &quot;To find the duties
+of a legislator,&quot; he said, &quot;I descend into the abysses of my heart,
+I study my sentiments.&quot; He opposed the Economists, the other school
+that was feeling its way imperfectly enough to a positive method.
+&quot;As soon as I see landed property established,&quot; he wrote, &quot;then I
+see<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.185" id="Page_i.185">[i.185]</a></span> unequal fortunes; and from these unequal fortunes must there
+not necessarily result different and opposed interests, all the
+vices of riches, all the vices of poverty, the brutalisation of
+intelligence, the corruption of civil manners?&quot; and so
+forth.<a name="FNanchor196"></a><a href="#Footnote_196">[196]</a>
+In his most important work, published in 1776, we see Rousseau's
+notions developed, with a logic from which their first author
+shrunk, either from fear, or more probably from want of firmness
+and consistency as a reasoner. &quot;It is to equality that nature has
+attached the preservation of our social faculties and happiness:
+and from this I conclude that legislation will only be taking
+useless trouble, unless all its attention is first of all directed
+to the establishment of equality in the fortune and condition of
+citizens.&quot;<a name="FNanchor197"></a><a href="#Footnote_197">[197]</a> That is to say not only political
+equality, but economic communism. &quot;What miserable folly, that
+persons who pass for philosophers should go on repeating after one
+another that without property there can be no society. Let us leave
+illusion. It is property that divides us into two classes, rich and
+poor; the first will alway prefer their fortune to that of the
+state, while the second will never love a government or laws that
+leave them in misery.&quot;<a name="FNanchor198"></a><a href="#Footnote_198">[198]</a> This was the kind of opinion for which
+Rousseau's diffuse and rhetorical exposition of social necessity
+had prepared France some twenty years before. After powerfully
+helping the process of general dis<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.186" id="Page_i.186">[i.186]</a></span>solution, it produced the first
+fruits specifically after its own kind some twenty years later in
+the system of Baboeuf.<a name="FNanchor199"></a><a href="#Footnote_199">[199]</a></p>
+<p>The unflinching application of principles is seldom achieved by
+the men who first launch them. The labour of the preliminary task
+seems to exhaust one man's stock of mental force. Rousseau never
+thought of the subversion of society or its reorganisation on a
+communistic basis. Within a few months of his profession of
+profound lament that the first man who made a claim to property had
+not been instantly unmasked as the arch foe of the race, he speaks
+most respectfully of property as the pledge of the engagements of
+citizens and the foundation of the social pact, while the first
+condition of that pact is that every one should be maintained in
+peaceful enjoyment of what belongs to him.<a name="FNanchor200"></a><a href="#Footnote_200">[200]</a> We need not
+impute the apparent discrepancy to insincerity. Rousseau was always
+apt to think in a slipshod manner. He sensibly though illogically
+accepted wholesome practical maxims, as if they flowed from
+theoretical premisses that were in truth utterly incompatible with
+them.</p>
+<p>&#160;</p>
+<p><b>FOOTNOTES:</b></p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_151"></a><a href="#FNanchor151">[151]</a>
+Delandine's <i>Couronnes Acad&#233;miques, ou Recueil de prix
+propos&#233;s par les Soci&#233;t&#233;s Savantes</i>.
+(Paris, 2 vols., 1787.)</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_152"></a><a href="#FNanchor152">[152]</a>
+Musset-Pathay has collected the details connected with the award of
+the prize, ii. 365-367.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_153"></a><a href="#FNanchor153">[153]</a>
+Second Letter to M. de Malesherbes, p. 358. Also <i>Conf.</i>, viii
+135.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_154"></a><a href="#FNanchor154">[154]</a>
+Diderot's account (<i>Vie de S&#233;n&#232;que</i>, sect. 66,
+<i>Oeuv.</i>, iii. 98; also ii. 285) is not inconsistent with
+Rousseau's own, so that we may dismiss as apocryphal Marmontel's
+version of the story (<i>M&#233;m.</i> VIII.), to the effect that
+Rousseau was about to answer the question with a commonplace
+affirmative, until Diderot persuaded him that a paradox would
+attract more attention. It has been said also that M. de Francueil,
+and various others, first urged the writer to take a negative line
+of argument. To suppose this possible is to prove one's incapacity
+for understanding what manner of man Rousseau was.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_155"></a><a href="#FNanchor155">[155]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i>, ix. 232, 233.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_156"></a><a href="#FNanchor156">[156]</a>
+<i>Rousseau Juge de Jean Jacques, Dialogues</i>, i. 252.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_157"></a><a href="#FNanchor157">[157]</a>
+<i>Dialogues</i>, i. 275, 276.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_158"></a><a href="#FNanchor158">[158]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i>, viii. 138.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_159"></a><a href="#FNanchor159">[159]</a> &quot;It
+made a kind of revolution in Paris,&quot; says Grimm. <i>Corr. Lit.</i>,
+i. 108.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_160"></a><a href="#FNanchor160">[160]</a>
+<i>R&#233;p. au Roi de Pologne</i>, p. 111 and p. 113.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_161"></a><a href="#FNanchor161">[161]</a>
+<i>R&#233;p. &#224; M. Bordes</i>, 138.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_162"></a><a href="#FNanchor162">[162]</a>
+<i>Ib.</i> 137.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_163"></a><a href="#FNanchor163">[163]</a> &quot;The
+first source of the evil is inequality; from inequality come riches
+... from riches are born luxury and idleness; from luxury come the
+fine arts, and from idleness the sciences.&quot; <i>R&#233;p. au Roi
+de Pologne</i>, 120, 121.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_164"></a><a href="#FNanchor164">[164]</a>
+<i>R&#233;p. &#224; M. Bordes</i>, 147. In the same spirit he
+once wrote the more wholesome maxim, &quot;We should argue with the
+wise, and never with the public.&quot; <i>Corr.</i>, i. 191.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_165"></a><a href="#FNanchor165">[165]</a>
+<i>R&#233;p. au Roi de Pologne</i>, 128, 129.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_166"></a><a href="#FNanchor166">[166]</a>
+<i>R&#233;p. &#224; M. Bordes</i>, 150-161.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_167"></a><a href="#FNanchor167">[167]</a> P.
+174.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_168"></a><a href="#FNanchor168">[168]</a>
+Egger's <i>Hell&#233;nisme en France</i>, 28i&#232;me
+le&#231;on, p. 265.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_169"></a><a href="#FNanchor169">[169]</a>
+Voltaire to J.J.R. Aug. 30, 1755.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_170"></a><a href="#FNanchor170">[170]</a>
+<i>R&#233;p. au Roi de Pologne</i>, 105.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_171"></a><a href="#FNanchor171">[171]</a> In
+1753 the French Academy, by way no doubt of summoning a
+counter-blast to Rousseau, boldly offered as the subject of their
+essay the thesis that &quot;The love of letters inspires the love of
+virtue,&quot; and the prize was won fitly enough by a Jesuit professor
+of rhetoric. See Delandine, i. 42.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_172"></a><a href="#FNanchor172">[172]</a>
+Preface to <i>Narcisse</i>, 251.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_173"></a><a href="#FNanchor173">[173]</a>
+<i>R&#233;p. &#224; M. Bordes</i>, 167.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_174"></a><a href="#FNanchor174">[174]</a> P.
+187.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_175"></a><a href="#FNanchor175">[175]</a> See
+for instance a strange discussion about <i>morale universelle</i>
+and the like in <i>M&#233;m. de Mdme. d'Epinay</i>, i.
+217-226.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_176"></a><a href="#FNanchor176">[176]</a>
+Often described as Morelly the Younger, to distinguish him from his
+father, who wrote an essay on the human heart, and another on the
+human intelligence.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_177"></a><a href="#FNanchor177">[177]</a>
+<i>Code de la Nature, ou le v&#233;ritable esprit de ses loix, de
+tout tems n&#233;glig&#233; ou m&#233;connu.</i></p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_178"></a><a href="#FNanchor178">[178]</a> P.
+169. Rousseau did not see it then, but he showed himself on the
+track.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_179"></a><a href="#FNanchor179">[179]</a> At
+the end of the <i>Code de la Nature</i> Morelly places a complete
+set of rules for the organisation of a model community. The base of
+it was the absence of private property&#8212;a condition that was to be
+preserved by vigilant education of the young in ways of thinking,
+that should make the possession of private property odious or
+inconceivable. There are to be sumptuary laws of a moderate kind.
+The government is to be in the hands of the elders. The children
+are to be taken away from their parents at the age of five; reared
+and educated in public establishments; and returned to their
+parents at the age of sixteen or so when they will marry. Marriage
+is to be dissoluble at the end of ten years, but after divorce the
+woman is not to marry a man younger than herself, nor is the man to
+marry a woman younger than the wife from whom he has parted. The
+children of a divorced couple are to remain with the father, and if
+he marries again, they are to be held the children of the second
+wife. Mothers are to suckle their own children (p. 220). The whole
+scheme is fuller of good ideas than such schemes usually are.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_180"></a><a href="#FNanchor180">[180]</a> P.
+218.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_181"></a><a href="#FNanchor181">[181]</a> This
+is obviously untrue. Animals do not know death in the sense of
+scientific definition, and probably have no abstract idea of it as
+a general state; but they know and are afraid of its concrete
+phenomena, and so are most savages.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_182"></a><a href="#FNanchor182">[182]</a> This
+is one of the passages in the Discourse, the harshness of which was
+afterwards attributed by Rousseau to the influence of Diderot.
+<i>Conf.</i>, viii. 205, <i>n.</i></p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_183"></a><a href="#FNanchor183">[183]</a> P.
+261.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_184"></a><a href="#FNanchor184">[184]</a> As
+if sin really came by the law in this sense; as if a law defining
+and prohibiting a malpractice were the cause of the commission of
+the act which it constituted a malpractice. As if giving a name and
+juristic classification to any kind of conduct were adding to men's
+motives for indulging in it.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_185"></a><a href="#FNanchor185">[185]</a> P.
+269.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_186"></a><a href="#FNanchor186">[186]</a> P.
+278.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_187"></a><a href="#FNanchor187">[187]</a> Pp.
+285-287.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_188"></a><a href="#FNanchor188">[188]</a> P.
+273.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_189"></a><a href="#FNanchor189">[189]</a> P.
+250.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_190"></a><a href="#FNanchor190">[190]</a>
+<i>Politicus</i>, 268 D-274 E.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_191"></a><a href="#FNanchor191">[191]</a> Here
+for instance is D'Alembert's story:&#8212;&quot;The necessity of shielding
+our own body from pain and destruction leads us to examine among
+external objects those which are useful and those which are
+hurtful, so that we may seek the one and flee the others. But we
+hardly begin our search into such objects before we discover among
+them a great number of beings which strike us as exactly like
+ourselves; that is, whose form is just like our own, and who, so
+far as we can judge at the first glance, appear to have the same
+perceptions. Everything therefore leads us to suppose that they
+have also the same wants, and consequently the same interest in
+satisfying them, whence it results that we must find great
+advantage in joining with them for the purpose of distinguishing in
+nature what has the power of preserving us from what has the power
+of hurting us. The communication of ideas is the principle and the
+stay of this union, and necessarily demands the invention of signs;
+such is the origin of the formation of societies.&quot; <i>Discours
+Pr&#233;liminaire de l'Encyclop&#233;die</i>. Contrast this
+with Aristotle's sensible statement (<i>Polit.</i> I. ii. 15) that
+&quot;there is in men by nature a strong impulse to enter into such
+union.&quot;</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_192"></a><a href="#FNanchor192">[192]</a>
+<i>Code de la Nature.</i></p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_193"></a><a href="#FNanchor193">[193]</a> See,
+for example, his criticism on the Abb&#233; de St. Pierre.
+<i>Conf.</i>, viii. 264. And also in the analysis of this very
+Discourse, above, vol. i. p. <a href="#Page_i.163">163</a>.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_194"></a><a href="#FNanchor194">[194]</a> &quot;I
+have lived with communities of savages in South America and in the
+East, who have no laws or law courts but the public opinion of the
+visage freely expressed. Each man scrupulously respects the rights
+of his fellow, and any infraction of those rights rarely or never
+takes place. In such a community all are nearly equal. There are
+none of those wide distinctions of education and ignorance, wealth
+and poverty, master and servant, which are the products of our
+civilisation; there is none of that widespread division of labour
+which, while it increases wealth, produces also conflicting
+interests; there is not that severe competition and struggle for
+existence, or for wealth, which the dense population of civilised
+countries inevitably creates. All incitements to great crimes are
+thus wanting, and petty ones are repressed, partly by the influence
+of public opinion, but chiefly by that natural sense of justice and
+of his neighbour's right, which seems to be in some degree inherent
+in every race of man. Now, although we have progressed vastly
+beyond the savage state in intellectual achievements, we have not
+advanced equally in morals. It is true that among those classes who
+have no wants that cannot be easily supplied, and among whom public
+opinion has great influence, the rights of others are fully
+respected. It is true, also, that we have vastly extended the
+sphere of those rights, and include within them all the brotherhood
+of man. But it is not too much to say, that the mass of our
+populations have not at all advanced beyond the savage code of
+morals, and have in many cases sunk below it.&quot; Wallace's <i>Malay
+Archipelago</i>, vol. ii. pp. 460-461.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_195"></a><a href="#FNanchor195">[195]</a> So
+too Bougainville, a brother of the navigator, said in 1760, &quot;For an
+attentive observer who sees nothing in events of the utmost
+diversity of appearance but the natural effects of a certain number
+of causes differently combined, Greece is the universe in small,
+and the history of Greece an excellent epitome of universal
+history.&quot; (Quoted in Egger's <i>Hell&#233;nisme en France</i>,
+ii. 272.) The revolutionists of the next generation, who used to
+appeal so unseasonably to the ancients, were only following a
+literary fashion set by their fathers.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_196"></a><a href="#FNanchor196">[196]</a>
+<i>Doutes sur l'Ordre Naturel</i>; <i>Oeuv.</i>, xi. 80. (Ed. 1794,
+1795.)</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_197"></a><a href="#FNanchor197">[197]</a>
+<i>La L&#233;gislation</i>, I. i.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_198"></a><a href="#FNanchor198">[198]</a>
+<i>Ibid.</i></p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_199"></a><a href="#FNanchor199">[199]</a> It
+is not within our province to examine the vexed question whether
+the Convention was fundamentally socialist, and not merely
+political. That socialist ideas were afloat in the minds of some
+members, one can hardly doubt. See Von Sybel's <i>Hist. of the
+French Revolution</i>, Bk. II. ch. iv., on one side, and Quinet's
+<i>La R&#233;volution</i>, ii. 90-107, on the other.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_200"></a><a href="#FNanchor200">[200]</a>
+<i>Economie Politique</i>, pp. 41, 53, etc.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.187" id="Page_i.187">[i.187]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VI."></a>CHAPTER VI.</h2>
+<h3>PARIS.</h3>
+<h3>I.</h3>
+<p><span class="smcap">By</span> what subtle process did Rousseau, whose ideal had been a
+summer life among all the softnesses of sweet gardens and dappled
+orchards, turn into panegyrist of the harsh austerity of old Cato
+and grim Brutus's civic devotion? The amiability of eighteenth
+century France&#8212;and France was amiable in spite of the atrocities
+of White Penitents at Toulouse, and black Jansenists at Paris, and
+the men and women who dealt in <i>lettres-de-cachet</i> at
+Versailles&#8212;was revolted by the name of the cruel patriot who slew
+his son for the honour of discipline.<a name="FNanchor201"></a><a href="#Footnote_201">[201]</a> How came
+Rousseau of all men, the great humanitarian of his time, to rise to
+the height of these unlovely rigours?</p>
+<p>The answer is that he was a citizen of Geneva transplanted. He
+had been bred in puritan and republican tradition, with love of God
+and love of law and freedom and love of country all penetrating it,
+and then he had been accidentally removed to a strange city that
+was in active ferment with ideas that were the direct abnegation of
+all these. In<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.188" id="Page_i.188">[i.188]</a></span> Paris the idea of a God was either repudiated along
+with many other ancestral conceptions, or else it was fatally
+entangled with the worst superstition and not seldom with the
+vilest cruelties. The idea of freedom was unknown, and the idea of
+law was benumbed by abuses and exceptions. The idea of country was
+enfeebled in some and displaced in others by a growing passion for
+the captivating something styled citizenship of the world. If
+Rousseau could have ended his days among the tranquil lakes and
+hills of Savoy, Geneva might possibly never have come back to him.
+For it depends on circumstance, which of the chances that slumber
+within us shall awake, and which shall fall unroused with us into
+the darkness. The fact of Rousseau ranking among the greatest of
+the writers of the French language, and the yet more important fact
+that his ideas found their most ardent disciples and exploded in
+their most violent form in France, constantly make us forget that
+he was not a Frenchman, but a Genevese deeply imbued with the
+spirit of his native city. He was thirty years old before he began
+even temporarily to live in France: he had only lived there some
+five or six years when he wrote his first famous piece, so
+un-French in all its spirit; and the ideas of the Social Contract
+were in germ before he settled in France at all.</p>
+<p>There have been two great religious reactions, and the name of
+Geneva has a fundamental association with each of them. The first
+was that against the paganised Catholicism of the renaissance, and
+of this<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.189" id="Page_i.189">[i.189]</a></span> Calvin was a prime leader; the second was that against the
+materialism of the eighteenth century, of which the prime leader
+was Rousseau. The diplomatist was right who called Geneva the fifth
+part of the world. At the congress of Vienna, some one, wearied at
+the enormous place taken by the hardly visible Geneva in the midst
+of negotiations involving momentous issues for the whole habitable
+globe, called out that it was after all no more than a grain of
+sand. But he was not wrong who made bold to reply, &quot;Geneva is no
+grain of sand; 'tis a grain of musk that perfumes all
+Europe.&quot;<a name="FNanchor202"></a><a href="#Footnote_202">[202]</a>
+We have to remember that it was at all events as a grain of musk
+ever pervading the character of Rousseau. It happened in later
+years that he repudiated his allegiance to her, but however
+bitterly a man may quarrel with a parent, he cannot change blood,
+and Rousseau ever remained a true son of the city of Calvin. We may
+perhaps conjecture without excessive fancifulness that the constant
+spectacle and memory of a community, free, energetic, and
+prosperous, whose institutions had been shaped and whose political
+temper had been inspired by one great lawgiver, contributed even
+more powerfully than what he had picked up about Lycurgus and
+Laced&#230;mon, to give him a turn for Utopian speculation, and a
+conviction of the artificiality and easy modifiableness of the
+social structure. This, however, is less certain than that he
+unconsciously received impressions in his youth from the
+circum<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.190" id="Page_i.190">[i.190]</a></span>stances of Geneva, both as to government and religion, as to
+freedom, order, citizenship, manners, which formed the deepest part
+of him on the reflective side, and which made themselves visible
+whenever he exchanged the life of beatified sense for moods of
+speculative energy, &quot;Never,&quot; he says, &quot;did I see the walls of that
+happy city, I never went into it, without feeling a certain
+faintness at my heart, due to excess of tender emotion. At the same
+time that the noble image of freedom elevated my soul, those of
+equality, of union, of gentle manners, touched me even to
+tears.&quot;<a name="FNanchor203"></a><a href="#Footnote_203">[203]</a>
+His spirit never ceased to haunt city and lake to the end, and he
+only paid the debt of an owed acknowledgment in the dedication of
+his Discourse on Inequality to the republic of Geneva.<a name="FNanchor204"></a><a href="#Footnote_204">[204]</a> It was there
+it had its root. The honour in which industry was held in Geneva,
+the democratic phrases that constituted the dialect of its
+government, the proud tradition of the long battle which had won
+and kept its independence, the severity of its manners, the
+simplicity of its pleasures,&#8212;all these things awoke in his memory
+as soon as ever occasion drew him to serious thought. More than
+that, he had in a peculiar manner drawn in with the breath of his
+earliest days in this theocratically constituted city, the vital
+idea that there are sacred things and objects of reverence among
+men. And hence there came to him, though with many stains and much
+misdirection, the most priceless excellence of a capacity for
+devout veneration.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.191" id="Page_i.191">[i.191]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>There is certainly no real contradiction between the quality of
+reverence and the more equivocal quality of a sensuous temperament,
+though a man may well seem on the surface, as the first succeeds
+the second in rule over him, to be the contradiction to his other
+self. The objects of veneration and the objects of sensuous delight
+are externally so unlike and so incongruous, that he who follows
+both in their turns is as one playing the part of an ironical
+chorus in the tragi-comic drama of his own life. You may perceive
+these two to be mere imperfect or illusory opposites, when you
+confront a man like Rousseau with the true opposite of his own
+type; with those who are from their birth analysts and critics,
+keen, restless, urgent, inexorably questioning. That energetic
+type, though not often dead or dull on the side of sense, yet is
+incapable of steeping itself in the manifold delights of eye and
+ear, of nostril and touch, with the peculiar intensity of passive
+absorption that seeks nothing further nor deeper than unending
+continuance of this profound repose of all filled sensation, just
+as it is incapable of the kindred mood of elevated humility and
+joyful unasking devoutness in the presence of emotions and dim
+thoughts that are beyond the compass of words.</p>
+<p>The citizen of Geneva with this unseen fibre of Calvinistic
+veneration and austerity strong and vigorous within him, found a
+world that had nothing sacred and took nothing for granted; that
+held the past in contempt, and ever like old Athenians asked<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.192" id="Page_i.192">[i.192]</a></span> for
+some new thing; that counted simplicity of life an antique
+barbarism, and literary curiousness the master virtue. There were
+giants in this world, like the panurgic Diderot. There were
+industrious, worthy, disinterested men, who used their minds
+honestly and actively with sincere care for truth, like D'Holbach.
+There was poured around the whole, like a high stimulating
+atmosphere to the stronger, and like some evil mental aphrodisiac
+to the weaker, the influence of Voltaire, the great indomitable
+chieftain of them all. Intellectual size half redeems want of
+perfect direction by its generous power and fulness. It was not the
+strong men, atheists and philosophisers as they were, who first
+irritated Rousseau into revolt against their whole system of
+thought in all its principles. The dissent between him and them was
+fundamental and enormous, and in time it flamed out into open war.
+Conflict of theory, however, was brought home to him first by
+slow-growing exasperation at the follies in practice of the minor
+disciples of the gospel of knowing and acting, as distinguished
+from his own gospel of placid being. He craved beliefs that should
+uphold men in living their lives, substantial helps on which they
+might lean without examination and without mistrust: his life in
+Paris was thrown among people who lived in the midst of open
+questions, and revelled in a reflective and didactic morality,
+which had no root in the heart and so made things easy for the
+practical conscience. He sought tranquillity and valued life for
+its own sake,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.193" id="Page_i.193">[i.193]</a></span> not as an arena and a theme for endless argument and
+debate: he found friends who knew no higher pleasure than the
+futile polemics of mimic philosophy over dessert, who were as full
+of quibble as the wrong-headed interlocutors in a Platonic
+dialogue, and who babbled about God and state of nature, about
+virtue and the spirituality of the soul, much as Boswell may have
+done when Johnson complained of him for asking questions that would
+make a man hang himself. The highest things were thus brought down
+to the level of the cheapest discourse, and subjects which the wise
+take care only to discuss with the wise, were here everyday topics
+for all comers.</p>
+<p>The association with such high themes of those light qualities
+of tact, gaiety, complaisance, which are the life of the
+superficial commerce of men and women of the world, probably gave
+quite as much offence to Rousseau as the doctrines which some of
+his companions had the honest courage or the heedless fatuity to
+profess. It was an outrage to all the serious side of him to find
+persons of quality introducing materialism as a new fashion, and
+atheism as the liveliest of condiments. The perfume of good manners
+only made what he took for bad principles the worse, and heightened
+his impatience at the flippancy of pretensions to overthrow the
+beliefs of a world between two wines.</p>
+<p>Doctrine and temperament united to set him angrily against the
+world around him. The one was austere and the other was sensuous,
+and the sensuous<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.194" id="Page_i.194">[i.194]</a></span> temperament in its full strength is essentially
+solitary. The play of social intercourse, its quick transitions,
+and incessant demands, are fatal to free and uninterrupted
+abandonment to the flow of soft internal emotions. Rousseau,
+dreaming, moody, indolently, meditative, profoundly enwrapped in
+the brooding egoism of his own sensations, had to mix with men and
+women whose egoism took the contrary form of an eager desire to
+produce flashing effects on other people. We may be sure that as
+the two sides of his character&#8212;his notions of serious principle,
+and his notions of personal comfort&#8212;both went in the same
+direction, the irritation and impatience with which they inspired
+him towards society did not lessen with increased communication,
+but naturally deepened with a more profoundly settled
+antipathy.</p>
+<p>Rousseau lived in Paris for twelve years, from his return from
+Venice in 1744 until his departure in 1756 for the rustic lodge in
+a wood which the good-will of Madame d'Epinay provided for him. We
+have already seen one very important side of his fortunes during
+these years, in the relations he formed with Theresa, and the
+relations which he repudiated with his children. We have heard too
+the new words with which during these years he first began to make
+the hearts of his contemporaries wax hot within them. It remains to
+examine the current of daily circumstance on which his life was
+embarked, and the shores to which it was bearing him.</p>
+<p>His patrons were at present almost exclusively in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.195" id="Page_i.195">[i.195]</a></span> the circle of
+finance. Richelieu, indeed, took him for a moment by the hand, but
+even the introduction to him was through the too frail wife of one
+of the greatest of the farmers general.<a name="FNanchor205"></a><a href="#Footnote_205">[205]</a> Madame Dupin
+and Madame d'Epinay, his two chief patronesses, were also both of
+them the wives of magnates of the farm. The society of the great
+people of this world was marked by all the glare, artificiality,
+and sentimentalism of the epoch, but it had also one or two
+specially hollow characteristics of its own. As is always the case
+when a new rich class rises in the midst of a community possessing
+an old caste, the circle of Parisian financiers made it their
+highest social aim to thrust and strain into the circle of the
+Versailles people of quality. They had no normal life of their own,
+with independent traditions and self-respect; and for the same
+reason that an essentially worn-out aristocracy may so long
+preserve a considerable degree of vigour and even of social utility
+under certain circumstances by means of tenacious pride in its own
+order, a new plutocracy is demoralised from the very beginning of
+its existence by want of a similar kind of pride in itself, and by
+the ignoble necessity of craving the countenance of an upper class
+that loves to despise and humiliate it. Besides the more obvious
+evils of a position resting entirely on material opulence, and
+maintaining itself by coarse and glittering osten<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.196" id="Page_i.196">[i.196]</a></span>tation, there is a
+fatal moral hollowness which infects both serious conduct and
+social diversion. The result is seen in imitative manners, affected
+culture, and a mixture of timorous self-consciousness within and
+noisy self-assertion without, which completes the most distasteful
+scene that any collected spirit can witness.</p>
+<p>Rousseau was, as has been said, the secretary of Madame Dupin
+and her stepson Francueil. He occasionally went with them to
+Chenonceaux in Touraine, one of Henry the Second's castles built
+for Diana of Poitiers, and here he fared sumptuously every day. In
+Paris his means, as we know, were too strait. For the first two
+years he had a salary of nine hundred francs; then his employers
+raised it to as much as fifty louis. For the first of the
+Discourses the publisher gave him nothing, and for the second he
+had to extract his fee penny by penny, and after long waiting. His
+comic opera, the Village Soothsayer, was a greater success; it
+brought him the round sum of two hundred louis from the court, and
+some five and twenty more from the bookseller, and so, he says,
+&quot;the interlude, which cost me five or six weeks of work, produced
+nearly as much money as Emilius afterwards did, which had cost me
+twenty years of meditation and three years of composition.&quot;<a name="FNanchor206"></a><a href="#Footnote_206">[206]</a><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.197" id="Page_i.197">[i.197]</a></span> Before the
+arrival of this windfall, M. Francueil, who was receiver-general,
+offered him the post of cashier in that important department, and
+Rousseau attended for some weeks to receive the necessary
+instructions. His progress was tardy as usual, and the complexities
+of accounts were as little congenial to him as notarial
+complexities had been three and twenty years previously. It is,
+however, one of the characteristics of times of national break-up
+not to be peremptory in exacting competence, and Rousseau gravely
+sat at the receipt of custom, doing the day's duty with as little
+skill as liking. Before he had been long at his post, his official
+chief going on a short journey left him in charge of the chest,
+which happened at the moment to contain no very portentous amount.
+The disquiet with which the watchful custody of this moderate
+treasure harassed and afflicted Rousseau, not only persuaded him
+that nature had never designed him to be the guardian of money
+chests, but also threw him into a fit of very painful illness. The
+surgeons let him understand that within six months he would be in
+the pale kingdoms. The effect of such a hint on a man of his
+temper, and the train of reflections which it would be sure to set
+aflame, are to be foreseen by us who know Rousseau's fashion of
+dealing with the irksome. Why sacrifice the peace and charm of the
+little fragment of days<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.198" id="Page_i.198">[i.198]</a></span> left to him, to the bondage of an office
+for which he felt nothing but disgust? How reconcile the austere
+principles which he had just adopted in his denunciation of
+sciences and arts, and his panegyric on the simplicity of the
+natural life, with such duties as he had to perform? And how preach
+disinterestedness and frugality from amid the cashboxes of a
+receiver-general? Plainly it was his duty to pass in independence
+and poverty the little time that was yet left to him, to bring all
+the forces of his soul to bear in breaking the fetters of opinion,
+and to carry out courageously whatever seemed best to himself,
+without suffering the judgment of others to interpose the slightest
+embarrassment or hindrance.<a name="FNanchor207"></a><a href="#Footnote_207">[207]</a></p>
+<p>With Rousseau, to conceive a project of this kind for
+simplifying his life was to hasten urgently towards its
+realisation, because such projects harmonised with all his
+strongest predispositions. His design mastered and took whole
+possession of him. He resolved to earn his living by copying music,
+as that was conformable to his taste, within his capacity, and
+compatible with entire personal freedom. His patron did as the
+world is so naturally ready to do with those who choose the stoic's
+way; he declared that Rousseau was gone mad.<a name="FNanchor208"></a><a href="#Footnote_208">[208]</a> Talk like this
+had no effect on a man whom self-indulgence led into a path that
+others would only have been forced into by self-denial. Let it be
+said, however, that this is a form of self-indulgence of which
+society is never likely to see an excess,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.199" id="Page_i.199">[i.199]</a></span> and meanwhile we may
+continue to pay it some respect as assuredly leaning to virtue's
+side. Rousseau's many lapses from grace perhaps deserve a certain
+gentleness of treatment, after the time when with deliberation and
+collected effort he set himself to the hard task of fitting his
+private life to his public principles. Anything that heightens the
+self-respect of the race is good for us to behold, and it is a
+permanent source of comfort to all who thirst after reality in
+teachers, whether their teaching happens to be our own or not, to
+find that the prophet of social equality was not a fine gentleman,
+nor the teacher of democracy a hanger-on to the silly skirts of
+fashion.</p>
+<p>Rousseau did not merely throw up a post which would one day have
+made him rich. Stoicism on the heroic, peremptory scale is not so
+difficult as the application of the same principle to trifles.
+Besides this greater sacrifice, he gave up the pleasant things for
+which most men value the money that procures them, and instituted
+an austere sumptuary reform in truly Genevese spirit. His sword was
+laid aside; for flowing peruke was substituted the small round wig;
+he left off gilt buttons and white stockings, and he sold his watch
+with the joyful and singular thought that he would never again need
+to know the time. One sacrifice remained to be made. Part of his
+equipment for the Venetian embassy had been a large stock of fine
+linen, and for this he retained a particular affection, for both
+now and always Rousseau had a passion for personal cleanliness, as
+he had for cor<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.200" id="Page_i.200">[i.200]</a></span>poreal wholesomeness. He was seasonably delivered
+from bondage to his fine linen by aid from without. One Christmas
+Eve it lay drying in a garret in the rather considerable quantity
+of forty-two shirts, when a thief, always suspected to be the
+brother of Theresa, broke open the door and carried off the
+treasure, leaving Rousseau henceforth to be the contented wearer of
+coarser stuffs.<a name="FNanchor209"></a><a href="#Footnote_209">[209]</a></p>
+<p>We may place this reform towards the end of the year 1750, or
+the beginning of 1751, when his mind was agitated by the busy
+discussion which his first Discourse excited, and by the new ideas
+of literary power which its reception by the public naturally
+awakened in him. &quot;It takes,&quot; wrote Diderot, &quot;right above the
+clouds; never was such a success.&quot;<a name="FNanchor210"></a><a href="#Footnote_210">[210]</a> We can hardly have a surer sign of a
+man's fundamental sincerity than that his first triumph, the first
+revelation to him of his power, instead of seducing him to frequent
+the mischievous and disturbing circle of his applauders, should
+throw him inwards upon himself and his own principles with new
+earnestness and refreshed independence. Rousseau very soon made up
+his mind what the world was worth to him; and this, not as the
+ordinary sentimentalist or satirist does, by way of set-off against
+the indulgence of personal foibles, but from recognition of his own
+qualities, of the bounds set to our capacity of life, and of the
+limits of the world's power to satisfy us. &quot;When my destiny threw
+me into the whirlpool of society,&quot; he wrote in his last<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.201" id="Page_i.201">[i.201]</a></span> meditation
+on the course of his own life, &quot;I found nothing there to give a
+moment's solace to my heart. Regret for my sweet leisure followed
+me everywhere; it shed indifference or disgust over all that might
+have been within my reach, leading to fortune and honours.
+Uncertain in the disquiet of my desires, I hoped for little, I
+obtained less, and I felt even amid gleams of prosperity that if I
+obtained all that I supposed myself to be seeking, I should still
+not have found the happiness for which my heart was greedily
+athirst, though without distinctly knowing its object. Thus
+everything served to detach my affections from society, even before
+the misfortunes which were to make me wholly a stranger to it. I
+reached the age of forty, floating between indigence and fortune,
+between wisdom and disorder, full of vices of habit without any
+evil tendency at heart, living by hazard, distracted as to my
+duties without despising them, but often without much clear
+knowledge what they were.&quot;<a name="FNanchor211"></a><a href="#Footnote_211">[211]</a></p>
+<p>A brooding nature gives to character a connectedness and unity
+that is in strong contrast with the dispersion and multiformity of
+the active type. The attractions of fame never cheated Rousseau
+into forgetfulness of the commanding principle that a man's life
+ought to be steadily composed to oneness with itself in all its
+parts, as by mastery of an art of moral counterpoint, and not
+crowded with a wild mixture of aim and emotion like distracted
+masks in high carnival. He complains of the philosophers with<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.202" id="Page_i.202">[i.202]</a></span> whom
+he came into contact, that their philosophy was something foreign
+to them and outside of their own lives. They studied human nature
+for the sake of talking learnedly about it, not for the sake of
+self-knowledge; they laboured to instruct others, not to enlighten
+themselves within. When they published a book, its contents only
+interested them to the extent of making the world accept it,
+without seriously troubling themselves whether it were true or
+false, provided only that it was not refuted. &quot;For my own part,
+when I desired to learn, it was to know things myself, and not at
+all to teach others. I always believed that before instructing
+others it was proper to begin by knowing enough for one's self; and
+of all the studies that I have tried to follow in my life in the
+midst of men, there is hardly one that I should not have followed
+equally if I had been alone, and shut up in a desert island for the
+rest of my days.&quot;<a name="FNanchor212"></a><a href="#Footnote_212">[212]</a></p>
+<p>When we think of Turgot, whom Rousseau occasionally met among
+the society which he denounces, such a denunciation sounds a little
+outrageous. But then Turgot was perhaps the one sane Frenchman of
+the first eminence in the eighteenth century. Voltaire chose to be
+an exile from the society of Paris and Versailles as pertinaciously
+as Rousseau did, and he spoke more bitterly of it in verse than
+Rousseau ever spoke bitterly of it in prose.<a name="FNanchor213"></a><a href="#Footnote_213">[213]</a> It was, as has
+been so<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.203" id="Page_i.203">[i.203]</a></span> often said, a society dominated by women, from the king's
+mistress who helped to ruin France, down to the financier's wife
+who gave suppers to flashy men of letters. The eighteenth century
+salon has been described as having three stages; the salon of 1730,
+still retaining some of the stately domesticity, elegance, dignity
+of the age of Lewis XIV.; that of 1780, grave, cold, dry, given to
+dissertation; and between the two, the salon of 1750, full of
+intellectual stir, brilliance, frivolous originality, glittering
+wastefulness.<a name="FNanchor214"></a><a href="#Footnote_214">[214]</a> Though this division of time must not be
+pressed too closely, it is certain that the era of Rousseau's
+advent in literature with his Discourses fell in with the climax of
+social unreality in the surface intercourse of France, and that the
+same date marks the highest point of feminine activity and
+power.</p>
+<p>The common mixture of much reflective morality in theory with
+much light-hearted immorality in practice, never entered so largely
+into manners. We have constantly to wonder how they analysed and
+defined the word Virtue, to which they so constantly appealed in
+letters, conversation, and books, as the sovereign object for our
+deepest and warmest adoration. A whole company of transgressors of
+the marriage law would melt into floods of tears over a hymn to
+virtue, which they must surely have held of too sacred an essence
+to mix itself with any one virtue in particular, except that very
+considerable one of charitably<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.204" id="Page_i.204">[i.204]</a></span> letting all do as they please. It is
+much, however, that these tears, if not very burning, were really
+honest. Society, though not believing very deeply in the
+supernatural, was not cursed with an arid, parching, and hardened
+scepticism about the genuineness of good emotions in a man, and so
+long as people keep this baleful poison out of their hearts, their
+lives remain worth having.</p>
+<p>It is true that cynicism in the case of some women of this time
+occasionally sounded in a diabolic key, as when one said, &quot;It is
+your lover to whom you should never say that you don't believe in
+God; to one's husband that does not matter, because in the case of
+a lover one must reserve for one's self some door of escape, and
+devotional scruples cut everything short.&quot;<a name="FNanchor215"></a><a href="#Footnote_215">[215]</a> Or here: &quot;I
+do not distrust anybody, for that is a deliberate act; but I do not
+trust anybody, and there is no trouble in this.&quot;<a name="FNanchor216"></a><a href="#Footnote_216">[216]</a> Or again in
+the word thrown to a man vaunting the probity of some one: &quot;What!
+can a man of intelligence like you accept the prejudice of
+<i>meum</i> and <i>tuum</i>?&quot;<a name="FNanchor217"></a><a href="#Footnote_217">[217]</a>  Such speech, however, was probably most
+often a mere freak of the tongue, a mode and fashion, as who should
+go to a masked ball in guise of Mephistopheles, without anything
+more Mephistophelian about him than red apparel and peaked toes.
+&quot;She was absolutely charming,&quot; said one of a new-comer; &quot;she did<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.205" id="Page_i.205">[i.205]</a></span>
+not utter one single word that was not a paradox.&quot;<a name="FNanchor218"></a><a href="#Footnote_218">[218]</a> This was the
+passing taste. Human nature is able to keep itself wholesome in
+fundamentals even under very great difficulties, and it is as wise
+as it is charitable in judging a sharp and cynical tone to make
+large allowances for mere costume and assumed character.</p>
+<p>In respect of the light companionship of common usage, however,
+it is exactly the costume which comes closest to us, and bad taste
+in that is most jarring and least easily forgiven. There is a
+certain stage in an observant person's experience of the
+heedlessness, indolence, and native folly of men and women&#8212;and if
+his observation be conducted in a catholic spirit, he will probably
+see something of this not merely in others&#8212;when the tolerable
+average sanity of human arrangements strikes him as the most
+marvellous of all the fortunate accidents in the universe. Rousseau
+could not even accept the fact of this miraculous result, the
+provisional and temporary sanity of things, and he confronted
+society with eyes of angry chagrin. A great lady asked him how it
+was that she had not seen him for an age. &quot;Because when I wish to
+see you, I wish to see no one but you. What do you want me to do in
+the midst of your society? I should cut a sorry figure in a circle
+of mincing tripping coxcombs; they do not suit me.&quot; We cannot
+wonder that on some occasion when her son's proficiency was to be
+tested before a company of friends, Madame d'Epinay<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.206" id="Page_i.206">[i.206]</a></span> prayed Rousseau
+to be of them, on the ground that he would be sure to ask the child
+outrageously absurd questions, which would give gaiety to the
+affair.<a name="FNanchor219"></a><a href="#Footnote_219">[219]</a>
+As it happened, the father was unwise. He was a man of whom it was
+said that he had devoured two million francs, without either saying
+or doing a single good thing. He rewarded the child's performance
+with the gift of a superb suit of cherry-coloured velvet,
+extravagantly trimmed with costly lace; the peasant from whose
+sweat and travail the money had been wrung, went in heavy rags, and
+his children lived as the beasts of the field. The poor youth was
+ill dealt with. &quot;That is very fine,&quot; said rude Duclos, &quot;but
+remember that a fool in lace is still a fool.&quot; Rousseau, in reply
+to the child's importunity, was still blunter: &quot;Sir, I am no judge
+of finery, I am only a judge of man; I wished to talk with you a
+little while ago, but I wish so no longer.&quot;<a name="FNanchor220"></a><a href="#Footnote_220">[220]</a></p>
+<p>Marmontel, whose account may have been coloured by retrospection
+in later years, says that before the success of the first
+Discourse, Rousseau concealed his pride under the external forms of
+a politeness that was timid even to obsequiousness; in his uneasy
+glance you perceived mistrust and observant jealousy; there was no
+freedom in his manner, and no one ever observed more cautiously the
+hateful precept to live with your friends as though they were one
+day to be your enemies.<a name="FNanchor221"></a><a href="#Footnote_221">[221]</a> Grimm's description is different and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.207" id="Page_i.207">[i.207]</a></span>
+more trustworthy. Until he began to affect singularity, he says,
+Rousseau had been gallant and overflowing with artificial
+compliment, with manners that were honeyed and even wearisome in
+their soft elaborateness. All at once he put on the cynic's cloak,
+and went to the other extreme. Still in spite of an abrupt and
+cynical tone he kept much of his old art of elaborate fine
+speeches, and particularly in his relations with women.<a name="FNanchor222"></a><a href="#Footnote_222">[222]</a> Of his
+abruptness, he tells a most displeasing tale. &quot;One day Rousseau
+told us with an air of triumph, that as he was coming out of the
+opera where he had been seeing the first representation of the
+Village Soothsayer, the Duke of Zweibr&#252;cken had approached him
+with much politeness, saying, 'Will you allow me to pay you a
+compliment?' and that he replied, 'Yes, if it be very short.'
+Everybody was silent at this, until I said to him laughingly,
+'Illustrious citizen and co-sovereign of Geneva, since there
+resides in you a part of the sovereignty of the republic, let me
+represent to you that, for all the severity of your principles, you
+should hardly refuse to a sovereign prince the respect due to a
+water-carrier, and that if you had met a word of good-will from a
+water-carrier with an answer as rough and brutal as that, you would
+have had to reproach yourself with a most unseasonable piece of
+impertinence.'&quot;<a name="FNanchor223"></a><a href="#Footnote_223">[223]</a></p>
+<p>There were still more serious circumstances when exasperation at
+the flippant tone about him carried<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.208" id="Page_i.208">[i.208]</a></span> him beyond the ordinary bounds
+of that polite time. A guest at table asked contemptuously what was
+the use of a nation like the French having reason, if they did not
+use it. &quot;They mock the other nations of the earth, and yet are the
+most credulous of all.&quot; ROUSSEAU: &quot;I forgive them for their
+credulity, but not for condemning those who are credulous in some
+other way.&quot; Some one said that in matters of religion everybody was
+right, but that everybody should remain in that in which he had
+been born. ROUSSEAU, with warmth: &quot;Not so, by God, if it is a bad
+one, for then it can do nothing but harm.&quot; Then some one contended
+that religion always did some good, as a kind of rein to the common
+people who had no other morality. All the rest cried out at this in
+indignant remonstrance, one shrewd person remarking that the common
+people had much livelier fear of being hanged than of being damned.
+The conversation was broken off for a moment by the hostess calling
+out, &quot;After all, one must nourish the tattered affair we call our
+body, so ring and let them bring us the joint.&quot; This done, the
+servants dismissed, and the door shut, the discussion was resumed
+with such vehemence by Duclos and Saint Lambert, that, says the
+lady who tells us the story, &quot;I feared they were bent on destroying
+all religion, and I prayed for some mercy to be shown at any rate
+to natural religion.&quot; There was not a whit more sympathy for that
+than for the rest. Rousseau declared himself <i>paullo
+infirmior</i>, and clung to the morality of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.209" id="Page_i.209">[i.209]</a></span> gospel as the
+natural morality which in old times constituted the whole and only
+creed. &quot;But what is a God,&quot; cried one impetuous disputant, &quot;who
+gets angry and is appeased again?&quot; Rousseau began to murmur between
+grinding teeth, and a tide of pleasantries set in at his expense,
+to which came this: &quot;If it is a piece of cowardice to suffer ill to
+be spoken of one's friend behind his back, 'tis a crime to suffer
+ill to be spoken of one's God, who is present; and for my part,
+sirs, I believe in God.&quot; &quot;I admit,&quot; said the atheistic champion,
+&quot;that it is a fine thing to see this God bending his brow to earth
+and watching with admiration the conduct of a Cato. But this notion
+is, like many others, very useful in some great heads, such as
+Trajan, Marcus Aurelius, Socrates, where it can only produce
+heroism, but it is the germ of all madnesses.&quot; ROUSSEAU: &quot;Sirs, I
+leave the room if you say another word more,&quot; and he was rising to
+fulfil his threat, when the entry of a new-comer stopped the
+discussion.<a name="FNanchor224"></a><a href="#Footnote_224">[224]</a></p>
+<p>His words on another occasion show how all that he saw helped to
+keep up a fretted condition of mind, in one whose soft tenacious
+memory turned daily back to simple and unsophisticated days among
+the green valleys, and refused to acquiesce in the conditions of
+changed climate. So terrible a thing is it to be the bondsman of
+reminiscence. Madame d'Epinay was suspected, wrongfully as it
+afterwards proved, of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.210" id="Page_i.210">[i.210]</a></span> having destroyed some valuable papers
+belonging to a dead relative. There was much idle and cruel gossip
+in an ill-natured world. Rousseau, her friend, kept steadfast
+silence: she challenged his opinion. &quot;What am I to say?&quot; he
+answered; &quot;I go and come, and all that I hear outrages and revolts
+me. I see the one so evidently malicious and so adroit in their
+injustice; the other so awkward and so stupid in their good
+intentions, that I am tempted (and it is not the first time) to
+look on Paris as a cavern of brigands, of whom every traveller in
+his turn is the victim. What gives me the worst idea of society is
+to see how eager each person is to pardon himself, by reason of the
+number of the people who are like him.&quot;<a name="FNanchor225"></a><a href="#Footnote_225">[225]</a></p>
+<p>Notwithstanding his hatred of this cavern of brigands, and the
+little pains he took to conceal his feelings from any individual
+brigand, whether male or female, with whom he had to deal, he found
+out that &quot;it is not always so easy as people suppose to be poor and
+independent.&quot; Merciless invasion of his time in every shape made
+his life weariness. Sometimes he had the courage to turn and rend
+the invader, as in the letter to a painter who sent him the same
+copy of verses three times, requiring immediate acknowledgment. &quot;It
+is not just,&quot; at length wrote the exasperated Rousseau, &quot;that I
+should be tyrannised over for your pleasure; not that my time is
+precious, as you say; it is either passed in suffering<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.211" id="Page_i.211">[i.211]</a></span> or it is
+lost in idleness; but when I cannot employ it usefully for some
+one, I do not wish to be hindered from wasting it in my own
+fashion. A single minute thus usurped is what all the kings of the
+universe could not give me back, and it is to be my own master that
+I flee from the idle folk of towns,&#8212;people as thoroughly wearied
+as they are thoroughly wearisome,&#8212;who, because they do not know
+what to do with their own time, think they have a right to waste
+that of others.&quot;<a name="FNanchor226"></a><a href="#Footnote_226">[226]</a> The more abruptly he treated visitors,
+persecuting dinner-givers, and all the tribe of the importunate,
+the more obstinate they were in possessing themselves of his time.
+In seizing the hours they were keeping his purse empty, as well as
+keeping up constant irritation in his soul. He appears to have
+earned forty sous for a morning's work, and to have counted this a
+fair fee, remarking modestly that he could not well subsist on
+less.<a name="FNanchor227"></a><a href="#Footnote_227">[227]</a> He
+had one chance of a pension, which he threw from him in a truly
+characteristic manner.</p>
+<p>When he came to Paris he composed his musical diversion of the
+Muses Galantes, which was performed (1745) in the presence of
+Rameau, under the patronage of M. de la Popelini&#232;re. Rameau
+apostrophised the unlucky composer with much violence, declaring
+that one-half of the piece was the work of a master, while the
+other was that of a person entirely ignorant of the musical
+rudiments; the bad work therefore<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.212" id="Page_i.212">[i.212]</a></span> was Rousseau's own, and the good
+was a plagiarism.<a name="FNanchor228"></a><a href="#Footnote_228">[228]</a> This repulse did not daunt the hero.
+Five or six years afterwards on a visit to Passy, as he was lying
+awake in bed, he conceived the idea of a pastoral interlude after
+the manner of the Italian comic operas. In six days the Village
+Soothsayer was sketched, and in three weeks virtually completed.
+Duclos procured its rehearsal at the Opera, and after some debate
+it was performed before the court at Fontainebleau. The Plutarchian
+stoic, its author, went from Paris in a court coach, but his Roman
+tone deserted him, and he felt shamefaced as a schoolboy before the
+great world, such divinity doth hedge even a Lewis XV., and even in
+a soul of Genevan temper. The piece was played with great success,
+and the composer was informed that he would the next day have the
+honour of being presented to the king, who would most probably mark
+his favour by the bestowal of a pension.<a name="FNanchor229"></a><a href="#Footnote_229">[229]</a> Rousseau was
+tossed with many doubts. He would fain have greeted the king with
+some word that should show sensibility to the royal graciousness,
+without compromising republican severity, &quot;clothing some great and
+useful truth in a fine and deserved compliment.&quot; This moral
+difficulty was heightened by a physical one, for he was liable to
+an infirmity which, if it should overtake him in presence of king<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.213" id="Page_i.213">[i.213]</a></span>
+and courtiers, would land him in an embarrassment worse than death.
+What would become of him if mind or body should fail, if either he
+should be driven into precipitate retreat, or else there should
+escape him, instead of the great truth wrapped delicately round in
+veracious panegyric, a heavy, shapeless word of foolishness? He
+fled in terror, and flung up the chance of pension and patronage.
+We perceive the born dreamer with a phantasmagoric imagination,
+seizing nothing in just proportion and true relation, and
+paralysing the spirit with terror of unrealities; in short, with
+the most fatal form of moral cowardice, which perhaps it is a
+little dangerous to try to analyse into finer names.</p>
+<p>When Rousseau got back to Paris he was amazed to find that
+Diderot spoke to him of this abandonment of the pension with a fire
+that he could never have expected from a philosopher, Rousseau
+plainly sharing the opinion of more vulgar souls that philosopher
+is but fool writ large. &quot;He said that if I was disinterested on my
+own account, I had no right to be so on that of Madame Le Vasseur
+and her daughter, and that I owed it to them not to let pass any
+possible and honest means of giving them bread.... This was the
+first real dispute I had with him, and all our quarrels that
+followed were of the same kind; he laying down for me what he
+insisted that I should do, and I refusing because I thought that I
+ought not to do it.&quot;<a name="FNanchor230"></a><a href="#Footnote_230">[230]</a></p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.214" id="Page_i.214">[i.214]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Let us abstain, at this and all other points, from being too
+sure that we easily see to the bottom of our Rousseau. When we are
+most ready to fling up the book and to pronounce him all
+selfishness and sophistry, some trait is at hand to revive moral
+interest in him, and show him unlike common men, reverent of truth
+and human dignity. There is a slight anecdote of this kind
+connected with his visit to Fontainebleau. The day after the
+representation of his piece, he happened to be taking his breakfast
+in some public place. An officer entered, and, proceeding to
+describe the performance of the previous day, told at great length
+all that had happened, depicted the composer with much minuteness,
+and gave a circumstantial account of his conversation. In this
+story, which was told with equal assurance and simplicity, there
+was not a word of truth, as was clear from the fact that the author
+of whom he spoke with such intimacy sat unknown and unrecognised
+before his eyes. The effect on Rousseau was singular enough. &quot;The
+man was of a certain age; he had no coxcombical or swaggering air;
+his expression bespoke a man of merit, and his cross of St. Lewis
+showed that he was an old officer. While he was retailing his
+untruths, I grew red in the face, I lowered my eyes, I sat on
+thorns; I tried to think of some means of believing him to have
+made a mistake in good faith. At length trembling lest some one
+should recognise me and confront him, I hastened to finish my
+chocolate without saying a word; and stooping<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.215" id="Page_i.215">[i.215]</a></span> down as I passed in
+front of him, I went out as fast as possible, while the people
+present discussed his tale. I perceived in the street that I was
+bathed in sweat, and I am sure that if any one had recognised me
+and called me by name before I got out, they would have seen in me
+the shame and embarrassment of a culprit, simply from a feeling of
+the pain the poor man would have had to suffer if his lie had been
+discovered.&quot;<a name="FNanchor231"></a><a href="#Footnote_231">[231]</a> One who can feel thus vividly
+humiliated by the meanness of another, assuredly has in himself the
+wholesome salt of respect for the erectness of his fellows; he has
+the rare sentiment that the compromise of integrity in one of them
+is as a stain on his own self-esteem, and a lowering of his own
+moral stature. There is more deep love of humanity in this than in
+giving many alms, and it was not the less deep for being the
+product of impulse and sympathetic emotion, and not of a logical
+sorites.</p>
+<p>Another scene in a caf&#233; is worth referring to, because it
+shows in the same way that at this time Rousseau's egoism fell
+short of the fatuousness to which disease or vicious habit
+eventually depraved it. In 1752 he procured the representation of
+his comedy of Narcisse, which he had written at the age of
+eighteen, and which is as well worth reading or playing as most
+comedies by youths of that amount of experience of the ways of the
+world and the heart of man. Rousseau was amazed and touched by the
+indulgence of the public, in suffering without any sign<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.216" id="Page_i.216">[i.216]</a></span> of
+impatience even a second representation of his piece. For himself,
+he could not so much as sit out the first; quitting the theatre
+before it was over, he entered the famous caf&#233; de Procope at
+the other side of the street, where he found critics as wearied as
+himself. Here he called out, &quot;The new piece has fallen flat, and it
+deserved to fall flat; it wearied me to death. It is by Rousseau of
+Geneva, and I am that very Rousseau.&quot;<a name="FNanchor232"></a><a href="#Footnote_232">[232]</a> The
+relentless student of mental pathology is very likely to insist
+that even this was egoism standing on its head and not on its feet,
+choosing to be noticed for an absurdity, rather than not be noticed
+at all. It may be so, but this inversion of the ordinary form of
+vanity is rare enough to be not unrefreshing, and we are very loth
+to hand Rousseau wholly over to the pathologist before his hour has
+come.</p>
+<h3>II.</h3>
+<p>In the summer of 1754 Rousseau, in company with his Theresa,
+went to revisit the city of his birth, partly because an
+exceptionally favourable occasion presented itself, but in yet
+greater part because he was growing increasingly weary of the
+uncongenial world in which he moved. On his road he turned aside to
+visit her who had been more than even his birth-place to him. He
+felt the shock known to all<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.217" id="Page_i.217">[i.217]</a></span> who cherish a vision for a dozen years,
+and then suddenly front the changed reality. He had not prepared
+himself by recalling the commonplace which we only remember for
+others, how time wears hard and ugly lines into the face that
+recollection at each new energy makes lovelier with an added
+sweetness. &quot;I saw her,&quot; he says, &quot;but in what a state, O God, in
+what debasement! Was this the same Madame de Warens, in those days
+so brilliant, to whom the priest of Pontverre had sent me! How my
+heart was torn by the sight!&quot; Alas, as has been said with a truth
+that daily experience proves to those whom pity and self-knowledge
+have made most indulgent, as to those whom pinched maxims have made
+most rigorous,&#8212;<i>morality is the nature of things</i>.<a name="FNanchor233"></a><a href="#Footnote_233">[233]</a> We may have a
+humane tenderness for our Manon Lescaut, but we have a deep
+presentiment all the time that the poor soul must die in a penal
+settlement. It is partly a question of time; whether death comes
+fast enough to sweep you out of reach of the penalties which the
+nature of things may appoint, but which in their fiercest shape are
+mostly of the loitering kind. Death was unkind to Madame de Warens,
+and the unhappy creature lived long enough to find that morality
+does mean something after all; that the old hoary world has not
+fixed on prudence in the outlay of money as a good thing, out of
+avarice or pedantic dryness of heart; nor on some continence and
+order in the relations of men and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.218" id="Page_i.218">[i.218]</a></span> women as a good thing, out of
+cheerless grudge to the body, but because the breach of such
+virtues is ever in the long run deadly to mutual trust, to
+strength, to freedom, to collectedness, which are the reserve of
+humanity against days of ordeal.</p>
+<p>Rousseau says that he tried hard to prevail upon his fallen
+benefactress to leave Savoy, to come and take up her abode
+peacefully with him, while he and Theresa would devote their days
+to making her happy. He had not forgotten her in the little glimpse
+of prosperity; he had sent her money when he had it.<a name="FNanchor234"></a><a href="#Footnote_234">[234]</a> She was sunk
+in indigence, for her pension had long been forestalled, but still
+she refused to change her home. While Rousseau was at Geneva she
+came to see him. &quot;She lacked money to complete her journey; I had
+not enough about me; I sent it to her an hour afterwards by
+Theresa. Poor Maman! Let me relate this trait of her heart. The
+only trinket she had left was a small ring; she took it from her
+finger to place it on Theresa's, who instantly put it back, as she
+kissed the noble hand and bathed it with her tears.&quot; In after years
+he poured bitter reproaches upon himself for not quitting all to
+attach his lot to hers until her last hour, and he professes always
+to have been haunted by the liveliest and most enduring
+remorse.<a name="FNanchor235"></a><a href="#Footnote_235">[235]</a>
+Here is the worst of measuring duty by sensation instead of
+principle; if the sensations happen not to be in right order at the
+critical moment, the chance goes by, never to return, and then, as
+memory<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.219" id="Page_i.219">[i.219]</a></span> in the best of such temperaments is long though not without
+intermittence, old sentiment revives and drags the man into a
+burning pit. Rousseau appears not to have seen her again, but the
+thought of her remained with him to the end, like a soft vesture
+fragrant with something of the sweet mysterious perfume of
+many-scented night in the silent garden at Charmettes. She died in
+a hovel eight years after this, sunk in disease, misery, and
+neglect, and was put away in the cemetery on the heights above
+Chamb&#233;ri.<a name="FNanchor236"></a><a href="#Footnote_236">[236]</a> Rousseau consoled himself with thoughts
+of another world that should reunite him to her and be the dawn of
+new happiness; like a man who should illusorily confound the last
+glistening of a wintry sunset seen through dark yew-branches, with
+the broad-beaming strength of the summer morning. &quot;If I thought,&quot;
+he said, &quot;that I should not see her in the other life, my poor
+imagination would shrink from the idea of perfect bliss, which I
+would fain promise myself in it.&quot;<a name="FNanchor237"></a><a href="#Footnote_237">[237]</a> To pluck so gracious a flower of hope
+on the edge of the sombre unechoing gulf of nothingness into which
+our friend has slid silently down, is a natural impulse of the
+sensitive soul, numbing remorse and giving a moment's relief to the
+hunger and thirst of a tenderness that has been robbed of its
+object. Yet would<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.220" id="Page_i.220">[i.220]</a></span> not men be more likely to have a deeper love for
+those about them, and a keener dread of filling a house with aching
+hearts, if they courageously realised from the beginning of their
+days that we have none of this perfect companionable bliss to
+promise ourselves in other worlds, that the black and horrible
+grave is indeed the end of our communion, and that we know one
+another no more?</p>
+<p>The first interview between Rousseau and Madame de Warens was
+followed by his ludicrous conversion to Catholicism (1728); the
+last was contemporary with his re-conversion to the faith in which
+he had been reared. The sight of Geneva gave new fire to his
+Republican enthusiasm; he surrendered himself to transports of
+patriotic zeal. The thought of the Parisian world that he had left
+behind, its frivolity, its petulance, its disputation over all
+things in heaven and on the earth, its profound deadness to all
+civic activity, quickened his admiration for the simple,
+industrious, and independent community from which he never forgot
+that he was sprung. But no Catholic could enjoy the rights of
+citizenship. So Rousseau proceeded to reflect that the Gospel is
+the same for all Christians, and the substance of dogma only
+differs, because people interposed with explanations of what they
+could not understand; that therefore it is in each country the
+business of the sovereign to fix both the worship and the amount
+and quality of unintelligible dogma; that consequently it is the
+citizen's duty to admit the dogma, and follow the worship by law<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.221" id="Page_i.221">[i.221]</a></span>
+appointed. &quot;The society of the Encyclop&#230;dists, far from
+shaking my faith, had confirmed it by my natural aversion for
+partisanship and controversy. The reading of the Bible, especially
+of the Gospel, to which I had applied myself for several years, had
+made me despise the low and childish interpretation put upon the
+words of Christ by the people who were least worthy to understand
+him. In a word, philosophy by drawing me towards the essential in
+religion, had drawn me away from that stupid mass of trivial
+formulas with which men had overlaid and darkened it.&quot;<a name="FNanchor238"></a><a href="#Footnote_238">[238]</a> We may be
+sure that if Rousseau had a strong inclination towards a given
+course of action, he would have no difficulty in putting his case
+in a blaze of the brightest light, and surrounding it with endless
+emblems and devices of superlative conviction. In short, he
+submitted himself faithfully to the instruction of the pastor of
+his parish; was closely catechised by a commission of members of
+the consistory; received from them a certificate that he had
+satisfied the requirements of doctrine in all points; was received
+to partake of the Communion, and finally restored to all his rights
+as a citizen.<a name="FNanchor239"></a><a href="#Footnote_239">[239]</a></p>
+<p>This was no farce, such as Voltaire played now and again at the
+expense of an unhappy bishop or unhappier parish priest; nor such
+as Rousseau himself had played six-and-twenty years before, at the
+expense of those honest Catholics of Turin whose helpful dona<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.222" id="Page_i.222">[i.222]</a></span>tion
+of twenty francs had marked their enthusiasm over a soul that had
+been lost and was found again. He was never a Catholic, any more
+than he was ever an atheist, and if it might be said in one sense
+that he was no more a Protestant than he was either of these two,
+yet he was emphatically the child of Protestantism. It is hardly
+too much to say that one bred in Catholic tradition and observance,
+accustomed to think of the whole life of men as only a
+manifestation of the unbroken life of the Church, and of all the
+several communities of men as members of that great organisation
+which binds one order to another, and each generation to those that
+have gone before and those that come after, would never have
+dreamed that monstrous dream of a state of nature as a state of
+perfection. He would never have held up to ridicule and hate the
+idea of society as an organism with normal parts and conditions of
+growth, and never have left the spirit of man standing in bald
+isolation from history, from his fellows, from a Church, from a
+mediator, face to face with the great vague phantasm. Nor, on the
+other hand, is it likely that one born and reared in the religious
+school of authority with its elaborately disciplined hierarchy,
+would have conceived that passion for political freedom, that zeal
+for the rights of peoples against rulers, that energetic enthusiasm
+for a free life, which constituted the fire and essence of
+Rousseau's writing. As illustration of this, let us remark how
+Rousseau's teaching fared when it fell upon a Catholic country like
+France: so<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.223" id="Page_i.223">[i.223]</a></span> many of its principles were assimilated by the
+revolutionary schools as were wanted for violent dissolvents, while
+the rest dropped away, and in this rejected portion was precisely
+the most vital part of his system. In other words, in no country
+has the power of collective organisation been so pressed and
+exalted as in revolutionised France, and in no country has the free
+life of the individual been made to count for so little. With such
+force does the ancient system of temporal and spiritual
+organisation reign in the minds of those who think most confidently
+that they have cast it wholly out of them. The use of reason may
+lead a man far, but it is the past that has cut the groove.</p>
+<p>In re-embracing the Protestant confession, therefore, Rousseau
+was not leaving Catholicism, to which he had never really passed
+over; he was only undergoing in entire gravity of spirit a
+formality which reconciled him with his native city, and reunited
+those strands of spiritual connection with it which had never been
+more than superficially parted. There can be little doubt that the
+four months which he spent in Geneva in 1754 marked a very critical
+time in the formation of some of the most memorable of his
+opinions. He came from Paris full of inarticulate and smouldering
+resentment against the irreverence and denial of the materialistic
+circle which used to meet at the house of D'Holbach. What sort of
+opinions he found prevailing among the most enlightened of the
+Genevese pastors we know from an abundance of sources. D'Alembert
+had three or four years later<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.224" id="Page_i.224">[i.224]</a></span> than this to suffer a bitter attack
+from them, but the account of the creed of some of the ministers
+which he gave in his article on Geneva in the Encyclopedia, was
+substantially correct. &quot;Many of them,&quot; he wrote, &quot;have ceased to
+believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ. Hell, one of the principal
+points in our belief, is no longer one with many of the Genevese
+pastors, who contend that it is an insult to the Divinity to
+imagine that a being full of goodness and justice can be capable of
+punishing our faults by an eternity of torment. In a word, they
+have no other creed than pure Socinianism, rejecting everything
+that they call mysteries, and supposing the first principle of a
+true religion to be that it shall propose nothing for belief which
+clashes with reason. Religion here is almost reduced to the
+adoration of one single God, at least among nearly all who do not
+belong to the common people; and a certain respect for Jesus Christ
+and the Scriptures is nearly the only thing that distinguishes the
+Christianity of Geneva from pure Deism.&quot;<a name="FNanchor240"></a><a href="#Footnote_240">[240]</a> And it would
+be easy to trace the growth of these rationalising tendencies.
+Throughout the seventeenth century men sprang up who anticipated
+some of the rationalistic arguments of the eighteenth, in denying<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.225" id="Page_i.225">[i.225]</a></span>
+the Trinity, and so forth,<a name="FNanchor241"></a><a href="#Footnote_241">[241]</a> but the time was not then ripe. The
+general conditions grew more favourable. Burnet, who was at Geneva
+in 1685-6, says that though there were not many among the Genevese
+of the first form of learning, &quot;yet almost everybody here has a
+good tincture of a learned education.&quot;<a name="FNanchor242"></a><a href="#Footnote_242">[242]</a> The
+pacification of civic troubles in 1738 was followed by a quarter of
+a century of extreme prosperity and contentment, and it is in such
+periods that the minds of men previously trained are wont to turn
+to the great matters of speculation. There was at all times a
+constant communication, both public and private, going on between
+Geneva and Holland, as was only natural between the two chief
+Protestant centres of the Continent. The controversy of the
+seventeenth century between the two churches was as keenly followed
+in Geneva as at Leyden, and there is more than one Genevese writer
+who deserves a place in the history of the transition in the
+beginning of the eighteenth century from theology proper to that
+metaphysical theology, which was the first marked dissolvent of
+dogma within the Protestant bodies. To this general movement of the
+epoch, of course, Descartes supplied the first impulse. The leader
+of the movement in Geneva, that is of an attempt to pacify the
+Christian churches on the basis of some such Deism as was shortly
+to find its passionate ex<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.226" id="Page_i.226">[i.226]</a></span>pression in the Savoyard Vicar's
+Confession of Faith, was John Alphonse Turretini (1661-1737). He
+belonged to a family of Italian refugees from Lucca, and his
+grandfather had been sent on a mission to Holland for aid in
+defence of Geneva against Catholic Savoy. He went on his travels in
+1692; he visited Holland, where he saw Bayle, and England, where he
+saw Newton, and France, where he saw Bossuet. Chouet initiated him
+into the mysteries of Descartes. All this bore fruit when he
+returned home, and his eloquent exposition of rationalistic ideas
+aroused the usual cry of heresy from the people who justly insist
+that Deism is not Christianity. There was much stir for many years,
+but he succeeded in holding his own and in finding many
+considerable followers.<a name="FNanchor243"></a><a href="#Footnote_243">[243]</a> For example, some three years or so
+after his death, a work appeared in Geneva under the title of <i>La
+Religion Essentielle a l'Homme</i>, showing that faith in the
+existence of a God suffices, and treating<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.227" id="Page_i.227">[i.227]</a></span> with contempt the belief
+in the inspiration of the Gospels.<a name="FNanchor244"></a><a href="#Footnote_244">[244]</a></p>
+<p>Thus we see what vein of thought was running through the graver
+and more active minds of Geneva about the time of Rousseau's visit.
+Whether it be true or not that the accepted belief of many of the
+preachers was a pure Deism, it is certain that the theory was fully
+launched among them, and that those who could not accept it were
+still pressed to refute it, and in refuting, to discuss. Rousseau's
+friendships were according to his own account almost entirely among
+the ministers of religion and the professors of the academy,
+precisely the sort of persons who would be most sure to familiarise
+him, in the course of frequent conversations, with the current
+religious ideas and the arguments by which they were opposed or
+upheld. We may picture the effect on his mind of the difference in
+tone and temper in these grave, candid, and careful men, and the
+tone of his Parisian friends in discussing the same high themes;
+how this difference would strengthen his repugnance, and
+corroborate his own inborn spirit of veneration; how he would here
+feel himself in his own world. For as wise men have noticed, it is
+not so much difference of opinion that stirs resentment in us, at
+least in great subjects where the difference is not trivial but
+profound, as difference in gravity of humour and manner of moral
+approach. He returned to Paris (Oct. 1754) warm with the resolution
+to give up his concerns<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.228" id="Page_i.228">[i.228]</a></span> there, and in the spring go back once and
+for all to the city of liberty and virtue, where men revered wisdom
+and reason instead of wasting life in the frivolities of literary
+dialectic.<a name="FNanchor245"></a><a href="#Footnote_245">[245]</a></p>
+<p>The project, however, grew cool. The dedication of his Discourse
+on Inequality to the Republic was received with indifference by
+some and indignation by others.<a name="FNanchor246"></a><a href="#Footnote_246">[246]</a> Nobody thought it a compliment, and some
+thought it an impertinence. This was one reason which turned his
+purpose aside. Another was the fact that the illustrious Voltaire
+now also signed himself Swiss, and boasted that if he shook his wig
+the powder flew over the whole of the tiny Republic. Rousseau felt
+certain that Voltaire would make a revolution in Geneva, and that
+he should find in his native country the tone, the air, the manners
+which were driving him from Paris. From that moment he counted
+Geneva lost. Perhaps he ought to make head against the disturber,
+but what could he do alone, timid and bad talker as he was, against
+a man arrogant, rich, supported by the credit of the great, of
+brilliant eloquence, and already the very idol of women and young
+men?<a name="FNanchor247"></a><a href="#Footnote_247">[247]</a>
+Perhaps it would not be uncharitable to suspect that this was a
+reason after the event, for no man was ever so fond as Rousseau, or
+so clever a master in the art, of covering an accident in a fine
+envelope of principle, and, as we shall see,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.229" id="Page_i.229">[i.229]</a></span> he was at this time
+writing to Voltaire in strains of effusive panegyric. In this case
+he almost tells us that the one real reason why he did not return
+to Geneva was that he found a shelter from Paris close at hand.
+Even before then he had begun to conceive characteristic doubts
+whether his fellow-citizens at Geneva would not be nearly as
+hostile to his love of living solitarily and after his own fashion
+as the good people of Paris.</p>
+<p>Rousseau has told us a pretty story, how one day he and Madame
+d'Epinay wandering about the park came upon a dilapidated lodge
+surrounded by fruit gardens, in the skirts of the forest of
+Montmorency; how he exclaimed in delight at its solitary charm that
+here was the very place of refuge made for him; and how on a second
+visit he found that his good friend had in the interval had the old
+lodge pulled down, and replaced by a pretty cottage exactly
+arranged for his own household. &quot;My poor bear,&quot; she said, &quot;here is
+your place of refuge; it was you who chose it, 'tis friendship
+offers it; I hope it will drive away your cruel notion of going
+from me.&quot;<a name="FNanchor248"></a><a href="#Footnote_248">[248]</a><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.230" id="Page_i.230">[i.230]</a></span> Though moved to tears by such kindness,
+Rousseau did not decide on the spot, but continued to waver for
+some time longer between this retreat and return to Geneva.</p>
+<p>In the interval Madame d'Epinay had experience of the character
+she was dealing with. She wrote to Rousseau pressing him to live at
+the cottage in the forest, and begging him to allow her to assist
+him in assuring the moderate annual provision which he had once
+accidentally declared to mark the limit of his wants.<a name="FNanchor249"></a><a href="#Footnote_249">[249]</a> He wrote to
+her bitterly in reply, that her proposition struck ice into his
+soul, and that she could have but sorry appreciation of her own
+interests in thus seeking to turn a friend into a valet. He did not
+refuse to listen to what she proposed, if only she would remember
+that neither he nor his sentiments were for sale.<a name="FNanchor250"></a><a href="#Footnote_250">[250]</a> Madame
+d'Epinay wrote to him patiently enough in return, and then Rousseau
+hastened to explain that his vocabulary needed special
+appreciation, and that he meant by the word valet &quot;the degradation
+into which the repudiation of his principles would throw his soul.
+The independence I seek is not immunity from work; I am firm for
+winning my own bread, I take pleasure in it; but I mean not to
+subject myself to any other duty, if I can help it. I will never
+pledge any portion of my liberty, either for my own subsistence or
+that of any one else. I intend to work, but at my own will and
+pleasure, and even to do nothing, if it happens to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.231" id="Page_i.231">[i.231]</a></span> suit me, without
+any one finding fault except my stomach.&quot;<a name="FNanchor251"></a><a href="#Footnote_251">[251]</a> We may call
+this unamiable, if we please, but in a frivolous world amiability
+can hardly go with firm resolve to live an independent life after
+your own fashion. The many distasteful sides of Rousseau's
+character ought not to hinder us from admiring his steadfastness in
+refusing to sacrifice his existence to the first person who spoke
+him civilly. We may wish there had been more of rugged simplicity
+in his way of dealing with temptations to sell his birthright for a
+mess of pottage; less of mere irritability. But then this
+irritability is one side of soft temperament. The soft temperament
+is easily agitated, and this unpleasant disturbance does not stir
+up true anger nor lasting indignation, but only sends quick
+currents of eager irritation along the sufferer's nerves. Rousseau,
+quivering from head to foot with self-consciousness, is
+sufficiently unlike our plain Johnson, the strong-armoured; yet
+persistent withstanding of the patron is as worthy of our honour in
+one instance as in the other. Indeed, resistance to humiliating
+pressure is harder for such a temper as Rousseau's, in which
+deliberate endeavour is needed, than it is for the naturally
+stoical spirit which asserts itself spontaneously and rises without
+effort.</p>
+<p>When our born solitary, wearied of Paris and half afraid of the
+too friendly importunity of Geneva, at length determined to accept
+Madame d'Epinay's offer of the Hermitage on conditions which left
+him an<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.232" id="Page_i.232">[i.232]</a></span> entire sentiment of independence of movement and freedom
+from all sense of pecuniary obligation, he was immediately exposed
+to a very copious torrent of pleasantry and remonstrance from the
+highly social circle who met round D'Holbach's dinner-table. They
+deemed it sheer midsummer madness, or even a sign of secret
+depravity, to quit their cheerful world for the dismal solitude of
+woods and fields. &quot;Only the bad man is alone,&quot; wrote Diderot in
+words which Rousseau kept resentfully in his memory as long as he
+lived. The men and women of the eighteenth century had no
+comprehension of solitude, the strength which it may impart to the
+vigorous, the poetic graces which it may shed about the life of
+those who are less than vigorous; and what they did not comprehend,
+they dreaded and abhorred, and thought monstrous in the one man who
+did comprehend it. They were all of the mind of Socrates when he
+said to Ph&#230;drus, &quot;Knowledge is what I love, and the men who
+dwell in the town are my teachers, not trees and landscape.&quot;<a name="FNanchor252"></a><a href="#Footnote_252">[252]</a> Sarcasms fell
+on him like hail, and the prophecies usual in cases where a stray
+soul does not share the common tastes of the herd. He would never
+be able to live without the incense and the amusements of the town;
+he would be back in a fortnight; he would throw up the whole
+enterprise within three months.<a name="FNanchor253"></a><a href="#Footnote_253">[253]</a> Amid a shower of such words, springing
+from men's perverse blindness to the binding propriety of keeping
+all propositions as to what<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.233" id="Page_i.233">[i.233]</a></span> is the best way of living in respect of
+place, hours, companionship, strictly relative to each individual
+case, Rousseau stubbornly shook the dust of the city from off his
+feet, and sought new life away from the stridulous hum of men.
+Perhaps we are better pleased to think of the unwearied Diderot
+spending laborious days in factories and quarries and workshops and
+forges, while friendly toilers patiently explained to him the
+structure of stocking looms and velvet looms, the processes of
+metal-casting and wire-drawing and slate-cutting, and all the other
+countless arts and ingenuities of fabrication, which he afterwards
+reproduced to a wondering age in his spacious and magnificent
+repertory of human thought, knowledge, and practical achievement.
+And it is yet more elevating to us to think of the true stoic, the
+great high-souled Turgot, setting forth a little later to discharge
+beneficent duty in the hard field of his distant Limousin
+commissionership, enduring many things and toiling late and early
+for long years, that the burden of others might be lighter, and the
+welfare of the land more assured. But there are many paths for many
+men, and if only magnanimous self-denial has the power of
+inspiration, and can move us with the deep thrill of the heroic,
+yet every truthful protest, even of excessive personality, against
+the gregarious trifling of life in the social groove, has a side
+which it is not ill for us to consider, and perhaps for some men
+and women in every generation to seek to imitate.</p>
+<p>&#160;</p>
+<p><b>FOOTNOTES:</b></p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_201"></a><a href="#FNanchor201">[201]</a>
+<i>R&#233;p. &#224; M. Bordes</i>, 163.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_202"></a><a href="#FNanchor202">[202]</a>
+Pictet de Sergy., i. 18.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_203"></a><a href="#FNanchor203">[203]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i>, iv. 248.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_204"></a><a href="#FNanchor204">[204]</a>
+<i>Ib.</i> ix. 279. Also <i>Economie Politique</i>.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_205"></a><a href="#FNanchor205">[205]</a>
+Madame de la Popelini&#232;re, whose adventures and the
+misadventures of her husband are only too well known to the reader
+of Marmontel's Memoirs.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_206"></a><a href="#FNanchor206">[206]</a> The
+passages relating to income during his first residence in Paris
+(1744-1756) are at pp. 119, 145, 153, 165, 200, 227, in Books
+vii.-ix. of the <i>Confessions</i>. Rousseau told Bernardin de St.
+Pierre (<i>Oeuv.</i>, xii. 74) that Emile was sold for 7000 livres.
+In the <i>Confessions</i> (xi. 126), he says 6000 livres, and one
+or two hundred copies. It may be worth while to add that Diderot
+and D'Alembert received 1200 livres a year apiece for editing the
+Encyclop&#230;dia. Sterne received &#163;650 for two volumes of
+<i>Tristram Shandy</i> in 1780. Walpole's <i>Letters</i>, in.
+298.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_207"></a><a href="#FNanchor207">[207]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i>, viii. 154-157.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_208"></a><a href="#FNanchor208">[208]</a>
+<i>Ib.</i> viii. 160.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_209"></a><a href="#FNanchor209">[209]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i>, viii. 160, 161.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_210"></a><a href="#FNanchor210">[210]</a>
+<i>Ib.</i> viii. 159.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_211"></a><a href="#FNanchor211">[211]</a>
+<i>R&#233;veries</i>, iii 168.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_212"></a><a href="#FNanchor212">[212]</a>
+<i>R&#234;veries</i>, iii. 166.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_213"></a><a href="#FNanchor213">[213]</a> See
+the <i>Ep&#238;tre &#224; Mdme. la Marquise du Ch&#226;telet,
+sur la Calomnie</i>.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_214"></a><a href="#FNanchor214">[214]</a>
+<i>La Femme au 18i&#232;me si&#232;cle</i>, par MM. de
+Goncourt, p. 40.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_215"></a><a href="#FNanchor215">[215]</a>
+Madame d'Epinay's <i>M&#233;m.</i>, i. 295.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_216"></a><a href="#FNanchor216">[216]</a>
+Quoted in Goncourt's <i>Femme au 18i&#232;me si&#232;cle</i>,
+p. 378.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_217"></a><a href="#FNanchor217">[217]</a>
+<i>Ib.</i>, p. 337.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_218"></a><a href="#FNanchor218">[218]</a>
+Mdlle. L'Espinasse's <i>Letters</i>, ii. 89.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_219"></a><a href="#FNanchor219">[219]</a>
+Madame d'Epinay's <i>M&#233;m.</i>, ii. 47, 48.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_220"></a><a href="#FNanchor220">[220]</a>
+<i>Ib.</i>, ii. 55.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_221"></a><a href="#FNanchor221">[221]</a>
+<i>M&#233;m.</i>, Bk. iv. 327.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_222"></a><a href="#FNanchor222">[222]</a>
+<i>Corr. Lit.</i>, iii. 58.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_223"></a><a href="#FNanchor223">[223]</a>
+<i>Ib.</i>, 54.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_224"></a><a href="#FNanchor224">[224]</a>
+Madame d'Epinay's <i>M&#233;m.</i>, i. 378-381. Saint Lambert
+formulated his atheism afterwards in the <i>Cat&#233;chisme
+Universel</i>.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_225"></a><a href="#FNanchor225">[225]</a>
+Madame d'Epinay's <i>M&#233;m.</i>, i. 443.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_226"></a><a href="#FNanchor226">[226]</a>
+<i>Corr.</i>, i. 317. Sept. 14, 1756.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_227"></a><a href="#FNanchor227">[227]</a>
+Letter to Madame de Cr&#233;qui, 1752. <i>Corr.</i>, i. 171.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_228"></a><a href="#FNanchor228">[228]</a>
+<i>Conf</i>,., vii. 104.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_229"></a><a href="#FNanchor229">[229]</a> The
+<i>Devin du Village</i> was played at Fontainebleau on October 18,
+1752, and at the Opera in Paris in March 1753. Madame de Pompadour
+took a part in it in a private performance. See Rousseau's note to
+her, <i>Corr.</i>, i. 178.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_230"></a><a href="#FNanchor230">[230]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i>, viii. 190.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_231"></a><a href="#FNanchor231">[231]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i>, viii. 183.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_232"></a><a href="#FNanchor232">[232]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i>, viii. 202; and Musset-Pathay, ii. 439. When in
+Strasburg, in 1765, he could not bring himself to be present at its
+representation. <i>Oeuv. et Corr. In&#233;d.</i>, p. 434.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_233"></a><a href="#FNanchor233">[233]</a>
+Madame de Sta&#235;l insisted that her father said this, and Necker
+insisted that it was his daughter's.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_234"></a><a href="#FNanchor234">[234]</a>
+<i>Corr.</i>, i. 176. Feb. 13, 1753.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_235"></a><a href="#FNanchor235">[235]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i>, viii. 208-210.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_236"></a><a href="#FNanchor236">[236]</a> She
+died on July 30, 1762, aged &quot;about sixty-three years.&quot; Arthur
+Young, visiting Chamb&#233;ri in 1789, with some trouble procured
+the certificate of her death, which may be found in his
+<i>Travels</i>, i. 272. See a letter of M. de Conzi&#233; to
+Rousseau, in M. Streckeisen-Moultou's collection, ii. 445.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_237"></a><a href="#FNanchor237">[237]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i>, xii. 233.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_238"></a><a href="#FNanchor238">[238]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i>, viii. 210.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_239"></a><a href="#FNanchor239">[239]</a>
+Gaberel's <i>Rousseau et les Genevois</i>, p. 62. <i>Conf.</i>,
+viii. 212.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_240"></a><a href="#FNanchor240">[240]</a> The
+venerable Company of Pastors and Professors of the Church and
+Academy of Geneva appointed a committee, as in duty bound, to
+examine these allegations, and the committee, equally in duty
+bound, reported (Feb. 10, 1758) with mild indignation, that they
+were unfounded, and that the flock was untainted by unseasonable
+use of its mind. See on this Rousseau's <i>Lettres &#233;crites
+de la Montagne</i>, ii. 231.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_241"></a><a href="#FNanchor241">[241]</a> See
+Picot's <i>Hist. de Gen&#232;ve</i>, ii. 415.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_242"></a><a href="#FNanchor242">[242]</a>
+<i>Letters containing an account of Switzerland, Italy, etc.,
+in 1685-86.</i> By G. Burnet, p. 9.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_243"></a><a href="#FNanchor243">[243]</a> J.A.
+Turretini's complete works were published as late as 1776,
+including among much besides that no longer interests men, an
+<i>Oratio de Scientiarum Vanitate et Proestantia</i> (vol. iii.
+437), not at all in the vein of Rousseau's Discourse, and a
+treatise in four parts, <i>De Legibus Naturalibus</i>, in which,
+among other matters, he refutes Hobbes and assails the doctrine of
+Utility (i. 173, etc.), by limiting its definition to <span lang="el" title="Greek: to pros heauton">&#964;&#959; &#960;&#961;&#959;&#962; &#949;&#945;&#965;&#964;&#959;&#957;</span> in its narrowest sense. He appears to have been a
+student of Spinoza (i. 326). Francis Turretini, his father, took
+part in the discussion as to the nature of the treaty or contract
+between God and man, in a piece entitled <i>Foedus Natur&#230; a
+primo homine ruptum, ejusque Proevaricationem posteris
+imputatam</i> (1675).</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_244"></a><a href="#FNanchor244">[244]</a>
+Gaberel's <i>Eglise de Gen&#232;ve</i>, iii. 188.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_245"></a><a href="#FNanchor245">[245]</a>
+<i>Corr.</i>, i. 223 (to Vernes, April 5, 1755).</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_246"></a><a href="#FNanchor246">[246]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i>, viii. 215, 216. <i>Corr.</i>, i. 218 (to Perdriau,
+Nov. 28, 1754).</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_247"></a><a href="#FNanchor247">[247]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i>, viii. 218.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_248"></a><a href="#FNanchor248">[248]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i>, viii. 217. It is worth noticing as bearing on the
+accuracy of the Confessions, that Madame d'Epinay herself
+(<i>M&#233;m.</i>, ii. 115) says that when she began to prepare
+the Hermitage for Rousseau he had never been there, and that she
+was careful to lead him to believe that the expense had not been
+incurred for him. Moreover her letter to him describing it could
+only have been written to one who had not seen it, and though her
+Memoirs are full of sheer imagination and romance, the documents in
+them are substantially authentic, and this letter is shown to be so
+by Rousseau's reply to it.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_249"></a><a href="#FNanchor249">[249]</a>
+<i>M&#233;m.</i>, ii. 116.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_250"></a><a href="#FNanchor250">[250]</a>
+<i>Corr.</i> (1755), i. 242.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_251"></a><a href="#FNanchor251">[251]</a>
+<i>Corr.</i>, i. 245.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_252"></a><a href="#FNanchor252">[252]</a>
+<i>Ph&#230;drus</i>, 230.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_253"></a><a href="#FNanchor253">[253]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i>, viii. 221, etc.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.234" id="Page_i.234">[i.234]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VII."></a>CHAPTER VII.</h2>
+<h3>THE HERMITAGE.</h3>
+<p><span class="smcap">It</span> would have been a strange anachronism if the decade of the
+Encyclop&#230;dia and the Seven Years' War had reproduced one of
+those scenes which are as still resting-places amid the ceaseless
+forward tramp of humanity, where some holy man turned away from the
+world, and with adorable seriousness sought communion with the
+divine in mortification of flesh and solitude of spirit. Those were
+the retreats of firm hope and beatified faith. The hope and faith
+of the eighteenth century were centred in action, not in
+contemplation, and the few solitaries of that epoch, as well as of
+another nearer to our own, fled away from the impotence of their
+own will, rather than into the haven of satisfied conviction and
+clear-eyed acceptance. Only one of them&#8212;Wordsworth, the poetic
+hermit of our lakes&#8212;impresses us in any degree like one of the
+great individualities of the ages when men not only craved for the
+unseen, but felt the closeness of its presence over their heads and
+about their feet. The modern anchorite goes forth in the spirit of
+the preacher who declared all<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.235" id="Page_i.235">[i.235]</a></span> the things that are under the sun to
+be vanity, not in the transport of the saint who knew all the
+things that are under the sun to be no more than the shadow of a
+dream in the light of a celestial brightness to come.</p>
+<p>Rousseau's mood, deeply tinged as it was by bitterness against
+society and circumstance, still contained a strong positive element
+in his native exultation in all natural objects and processes,
+which did not leave him vacantly brooding over the evil of the
+world he had quitted. The sensuousness that penetrated him kept his
+sympathy with life extraordinarily buoyant, and all the eager
+projects for the disclosure of a scheme of wisdom became for a time
+the more vividly desired, as the general tide of desire flowed more
+fully within him. To be surrounded with the simplicity of rural
+life was with him not only a stimulus, but an essential condition
+to free intellectual energy. Many a time, he says, when making
+excursions into the country with great people, &quot;I was so tired of
+fine rooms, fountains, artificial groves and flower beds, and the
+still more tiresome people who displayed all these; I was so worn
+out with pamphlets, card-playing, music, silly jokes, stupid airs,
+great suppers, that as I spied a poor hawthorn copse, a hedge, a
+farmstead, a meadow, as in passing through a hamlet I snuffed the
+odour of a good chervil omelette, as I heard from a distance the
+rude refrain of the shepherd's songs, I used to wish at the devil
+the whole tale of rouge and furbelows.&quot;<a name="FNanchor254"></a><a href="#Footnote_254">[254]</a> He was no
+anchorite proper,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.236" id="Page_i.236">[i.236]</a></span> one weary of the world and waiting for the end,
+but a man with a strong dislike for one kind of life and a keen
+liking for another kind. He thought he was now about to reproduce
+the old days of the Charmettes, true to his inveterate error that
+one may efface years and accurately replace a past. He forgot that
+instead of the once vivacious and tender benefactress who was now
+waiting for slow death in her hovel, his house-mates would be a
+poor dull drudge and her vile mother. He forgot, too, that since
+those days the various processes of intellectual life had expanded
+within him, and produced a busy fermentation which makes a man's
+surroundings very critical. Finally, he forgot that in proportion
+as a man suffers the smooth course of his thought to depend on
+anything external, whether on the greenness of the field or the
+gaiety of the street or the constancy of friends, so comes he
+nearer to chance of making shipwreck. Hence his tragedy, though the
+very root of the tragedy lay deeper,&#8212;in temperament.</p>
+<h3>I.</h3>
+<p>Rousseau's impatience drove him into the country almost before
+the walls of his little house were dry (April 9, 1756). &quot;Although
+it was cold, and snow still lay upon the ground, the earth began to
+show signs of life; violets and primroses were to be seen; the buds
+on the trees were beginning to shoot; and the very night of my
+arrival was marked by the first<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.237" id="Page_i.237">[i.237]</a></span> song of the nightingale. I heard it
+close to my window in a wood that touched the house. After a light
+sleep I awoke, forgetting that I was transplanted; I thought myself
+still in the Rue de Grenelle, when in an instant the warbling of
+the birds made me thrill with delight. My very first care was to
+surrender myself to the impression of the rustic objects about me.
+Instead of beginning by arranging things inside my quarters, I
+first set about planning my walks, and there was not a path nor a
+copse nor a grove round my cottage which I had not found out before
+the end of the next day. The place, which was lonely rather than
+wild, transported me in fancy to the end of the world, and no one
+could ever have dreamed that we were only four leagues from
+Paris.&quot;<a name="FNanchor255"></a><a href="#Footnote_255">[255]</a></p>
+<p>This rural delirium, as he justly calls it, lasted for some
+days, at the end of which he began seriously to apply himself to
+work. But work was too soon broken off by a mood of vehement
+exaltation, produced by the stimulus given to all his senses by the
+new world of delight in which he found himself. This exaltation was
+in a different direction from that which had seized him half a
+dozen years before, when he had discarded the usage and costume of
+politer<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.238" id="Page_i.238">[i.238]</a></span> society, and had begun to conceive an angry contempt for
+the manners, prejudices, and maxims of his time. Restoration to a
+more purely sensuous atmosphere softened this austerity. No longer
+having the vices of a great city before his eyes, he no longer
+cherished the wrath which they had inspired in him. &quot;When I did not
+see men, I ceased to despise them; and when I had not the bad
+before my eyes, I ceased to hate them. My heart, little made as it
+is for hate, now did no more than deplore their wretchedness, and
+made no distinction between their wretchedness and their badness.
+This state, so much more mild, if much less sublime, soon dulled
+the glowing enthusiasm that had long transported me.&quot;<a name="FNanchor256"></a><a href="#Footnote_256">[256]</a> That is to
+say, his nature remained for a moment not exalted but fairly
+balanced. It was only for a moment. And in studying the movements
+of impulse and reflection in him at this critical time of his life,
+we are hurried rapidly from phase to phase. Once more we are
+watching a man who lived without either intellectual or spiritual
+direction, swayed by a reminiscence, a passing mood, a personality
+accidentally encountered, by anything except permanent aim and
+fixed objects, and who would at any time have surrendered the most
+deliberately pondered scheme of persistent effort to the
+fascination of a cottage slumbering in a bounteous landscape. Hence
+there could be no normally composed state for him; the first
+soothing effect of the rich life of forest and garden on a nature
+exasperated<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.239" id="Page_i.239">[i.239]</a></span> by the life of the town passed away, and became
+transformed into an exaltation that swept the stoic into space,
+leaving sensuousness to sovereign and uncontrolled triumph, until
+the delight turned to its inevitable ashes and bitterness.</p>
+<p>At first all was pure and delicious. In after times when pain
+made him gloomily measure the length of the night, and when fever
+prevented him from having a moment of sleep, he used to try to
+still his suffering by recollection of the days that he had passed
+in the woods of Montmorency, with his dog, the birds, the deer, for
+his companions. &quot;As I got up with the sun to watch his rising from
+my garden, if I saw the day was going to be fine, my first wish was
+that neither letters nor visits might come to disturb its charm.
+After having given the morning to divers tasks which I fulfilled
+with all the more pleasure that I could put them off to another
+time if I chose, I hastened to eat my dinner, so as to escape from
+the importunate and make myself a longer afternoon. Before one
+o'clock, even on days of fiercest heat, I used to start in the
+blaze of the sun, along with my faithful Achates, hurrying my steps
+lest some one should lay hold of me before I could get away. But
+when I had once passed a certain corner, with what beating of the
+heart, with what radiant joy, did I begin to breathe freely, as I
+felt myself safe and my own master for the rest of the day! Then
+with easier pace I went in search of some wild and desert spot in
+the forest, where there was nothing to show the hand of man,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.240" id="Page_i.240">[i.240]</a></span> or to
+speak of servitude and domination; some refuge where I could fancy
+myself its discoverer, and where no inopportune third person came
+to interfere between nature and me. She seemed to spread out before
+my eyes a magnificence that was always new. The gold of the broom
+and the purple of the heather struck my eyes with a glorious
+splendour that went to my very heart; the majesty of the trees that
+covered me with their shadow, the delicacy of the shrubs that
+surrounded me, the astonishing variety of grasses and flowers that
+I trod under foot, kept my mind in a continual alternation of
+attention and delight.... My imagination did not leave the earth
+thus superbly arrayed without inhabitants. I formed a charming
+society, of which I did not feel myself unworthy; I made a golden
+age to please my own fancy, and filling up these fair days with all
+those scenes of my life that had left sweet memories behind, and
+all that my heart could yet desire or hope in scenes to come, I
+waxed tender even to shedding tears over the true pleasures of
+humanity, pleasures so delicious, so pure, and henceforth so far
+from the reach of men. Ah, if in such moments any ideas of Paris,
+of the age, of my little aureole as author, came to trouble my
+dreams, with what disdain did I drive them out, to deliver myself
+without distraction to the exquisite sentiments of which I was so
+full. Yet in the midst of it all, the nothingness of my chimeras
+sometimes broke sadly upon my mind. Even if every dream had
+suddenly been transformed into reality, it would not<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.241" id="Page_i.241">[i.241]</a></span> have been
+enough; I should have dreamed, imagined, yearned still.&quot; Alas, this
+deep insatiableness of sense, the dreary vacuity of soul that
+follows fulness of animal delight, the restless exactingness of
+undirected imagination, was never recognised by Rousseau distinctly
+enough to modify either his conduct or his theory of life. He
+filled up the void for a short space by that sovereign aspiration,
+which changed the dead bones of old theology into the living figure
+of a new faith. &quot;From the surface of the earth I raised my ideas to
+all the existences in nature, to the universal system of things, to
+the incomprehensible Being who embraces all. Then with mind lost in
+that immensity, I did not think, I did not reason, I did not
+philosophise; with a sort of pleasure I felt overwhelmed by the
+weight of the universe, I surrendered myself to the ravishing
+confusion of these vast ideas. I loved to lose myself in
+imagination in immeasurable space; within the limits of real
+existences my heart was too tightly compressed; in the universe I
+was stifled; I would fain have launched myself into the infinite. I
+believe that if I had unveiled all the mysteries of nature, I
+should have found myself in a less delicious situation than that
+bewildering ecstasy to which my mind so unreservedly delivered
+itself, and which sometimes transported me until I cried out, 'O
+mighty Being! O mighty Being!' without power of any other word or
+thought.&quot;<a name="FNanchor257"></a><a href="#Footnote_257">[257]</a></p>
+<p>It is not wholly insignificant that though he could<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.242" id="Page_i.242">[i.242]</a></span> thus expand
+his soul with ejaculatory delight in something supreme, he could
+not endure the sight of one of his fellow-creatures. &quot;If my gaiety
+lasted the whole night, that showed that I had passed the day
+alone; I was very different after I had seen people, for I was
+rarely content with others and never with myself. Then in the
+evening I was sure to be in taciturn or scolding humour.&quot; It is not
+in every condition that effervescent passion for ideal forms of the
+religious imagination assists sympathy with the real beings who
+surround us. And to this let us add that there are natures in which
+all deep emotion is so entirely associated with the ideal, that
+real and particular manifestations of it are repugnant to them as
+something alien; and this without the least insincerity, though
+with a vicious and disheartening inconsistency. Rousseau belonged
+to this class, and loved man most when he saw men least. Bad as
+this was, it does not justify us in denouncing his love of man as
+artificial; it was one side of an ideal exaltation, which stirred
+the depths of his spirit with a force as genuine as that which is
+kindled in natures of another type by sympathy with the real and
+concrete, with the daily walk and conversation and actual doings
+and sufferings of the men and women whom we know. The fermentation
+which followed his arrival at the Hermitage, in its first form
+produced a number of literary schemes. The idea of the Political
+Institutions, first conceived at Venice, pressed upon his
+meditations. He had been earnestly requested to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.243" id="Page_i.243">[i.243]</a></span> compose a treatise
+on education. Besides this, his thoughts wandered confusedly round
+the notion of a treatise to be called Sensitive Morality, or the
+Materialism of the Sage, the object of which was to examine the
+influence of external agencies, such as light, darkness, sound,
+seasons, food, noise, silence, motion, rest, on our corporeal
+machine, and thus indirectly upon the soul also. By knowing these
+and acquiring the art of modifying them according to our individual
+needs, we should become surer of ourselves and fix a deeper
+constancy in our lives. An external system of treatment would thus
+be established, which would place and keep the soul in the
+condition most favourable to virtue.<a name="FNanchor258"></a><a href="#Footnote_258">[258]</a> Though the
+treatise was never completed, and the sketch never saw the light,
+we perceive at least that Rousseau would have made the means of
+access to character wide enough, and the material influences that
+impress it and produce its caprices, multitudinous enough, instead
+of limiting them with the medical specialist to one or two organs,
+and one or two of the conditions that affect them. Nor, on the
+other hand, do the words in which he sketches his project in the
+least justify the attribution to him of the doctrine of the
+absolute power of the physical constitution over the moral habits,
+whether that doctrine would be a credit or a discredit to his
+philosophical thoroughness of perception. No one denies the
+influence of external conditions on the moral habits, and Rousseau
+says no more than that he<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.244" id="Page_i.244">[i.244]</a></span> proposed to consider the extent and the
+modifiableness of this influence. It was not then deemed essential
+for a spiritualist thinker to ignore physical organisation.</p>
+<p>A third undertaking of a more substantial sort was to arrange
+and edit the papers and printed works of the Abb&#233; de Saint
+Pierre (1658-1743), confided to him through the agency of Saint
+Lambert, and partly also of Madame Dupin, the warm friend of that
+singular and good man.<a name="FNanchor259"></a><a href="#Footnote_259">[259]</a> This task involved reading, considering,
+and picking extracts from twenty-three diffuse and chaotic volumes,
+full of prolixity and repetition. Rousseau, dreamer as he was, yet
+had quite keenness of perception enough to discern the weakness of
+a dreamer of another sort; and he soon found out that the
+Abb&#233; de Saint Pierre's views were impracticable, in
+consequence of the author's fixed idea that men are guided rather
+by their lights than by their passions. In fact, Saint Pierre was
+penetrated with the eighteenth-century faith to a peculiar degree.
+As with Condorcet afterwards, he was led by his admiration for the
+extent of modern knowledge to adopt the principle that perfected
+reason is capable of being made the base of all institutions, and
+would speedily terminate all the great abuses of the world. &quot;He
+went wrong,&quot; says Rousseau, &quot;not merely in having no other passion
+but that of reason, but by insisting on making all men like
+himself, instead of taking them as they are and as they will
+continue to be.&quot; The critic's own error<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.245" id="Page_i.245">[i.245]</a></span> in later days was not very
+different from this, save that it applied to the medium in which
+men live, rather than to themselves, by refusing to take complex
+societies as they are, even as starting-points for higher attempts
+at organisation. Rousseau had occasionally seen the old man, and he
+preserved the greatest veneration for his memory, speaking of him
+as the honour of his age and race, with a fulness of enthusiasm
+very unusual towards men, though common enough towards inanimate
+nature. The sincerity of this respect, however, could not make the
+twenty-three volumes which the good man had written, either fewer
+in number or lighter in contents, and after dealing as well as he
+could with two important parts of Saint Pierre's works, he threw up
+the task.<a name="FNanchor260"></a><a href="#Footnote_260">[260]</a> It must not be supposed that Rousseau
+would allow that fatigue or tedium had anything to do with a
+resolve which really needed no better justification. As we have
+seen before, he had amazing skill in finding a certain ingeniously
+contrived largeness for his motives. Saint Pierre's writings were
+full of observations on the government of France, some of them
+remarkably bold in their criticism, but he had not been punished
+for them because the ministers always looked upon<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.246" id="Page_i.246">[i.246]</a></span> him as a kind of
+preacher rather than a genuine politician, and he was allowed to
+say what he pleased, because it was observed that no one listened
+to what he said. Besides, he was a Frenchman, and Rousseau was not,
+and hence the latter, in publishing Saint Pierre's strictures on
+French affairs, was exposing himself to a sharp question why he
+meddled with a country that did not concern him. &quot;It surprised me,&quot;
+says Rousseau, &quot;that the reflection had not occurred to me
+earlier,&quot; but this coincidence of the discovery that the work was
+imprudent, with the discovery that he was weary of it, will
+surprise nobody versed in study of a man who lives in his
+sensations, and yet has vanity enough to dislike to admit it.</p>
+<p>The short remarks which Rousseau appended to his abridgment of
+Saint Pierre's essays on Perpetual Peace, and on a Polysynodia, or
+Plurality of Councils, are extremely shrewd and pointed, and would
+suffice to show us, if there were nothing else to do so, the right
+kind of answer to make to the more harmful dreams of the Social
+Contract. Saint Pierre's fault is said, with entire truth, to be a
+failure to make his views relative to men, to times, to
+circumstances; and there is something that startles us when we
+think whose words we are reading, in the declaration that, &quot;whether
+an existing government be still that of old times, or whether it
+have insensibly undergone a change of nature, it is equally
+imprudent to touch it: if it is the same, it must be respected, and
+if it has degenerated, that is due to the force of time and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.247" id="Page_i.247">[i.247]</a></span>
+circumstance, and human sagacity is powerless.&quot; Rousseau points to
+France, asking his readers to judge the peril of once moving by an
+election the enormous masses comprising the French monarchy; and in
+another place, after a wise general remark on the futility of
+political machinery without men of a certain character, he
+illustrates it by this scornful question: When you see all Paris in
+a ferment about the rank of a dancer or a wit, and the affairs of
+the academy or the opera making everybody forget the interest of
+the ruler and the glory of the nation, what can you hope from
+bringing political affairs close to such a people, and removing
+them from the court to the town?<a name="FNanchor261"></a><a href="#Footnote_261">[261]</a> Indeed, there is perhaps not one of
+these pages which Burke might not well have owned.<a name="FNanchor262"></a><a href="#Footnote_262">[262]</a></p>
+<p>A violent and prolonged crisis followed this not entirely
+unsuccessful effort after sober and laborious meditation. Rousseau
+was now to find that if society has its perils, so too has
+solitude, and that if there is evil in frivolous complaisance for
+the puppet-work of a world that is only a little serious, so there
+is evil in a passionate tenderness for phantoms of an imaginary
+world that is not serious at all. To the pure or stoical soul the
+solitude of the forest is strength, but then the imagination must
+know the yoke. Rousseau's imagination, in no way of the strongest
+either as<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.248" id="Page_i.248">[i.248]</a></span> receptive or inventive, was the free accomplice of his
+sensations. The undisciplined force of animal sensibility gradually
+rose within him, like a slowly welling flood. The spectacle does
+not either brighten or fortify the student's mind, yet if there are
+such states, it is right that those who care to speak of human
+nature should have an opportunity of knowing its less glorious
+parts. They may be presumed to exist, though in less violent
+degree, in many people whom we meet in the street and at the table,
+and there can be nothing but danger in allowing ourselves to be so
+narrowed by our own virtuousness, viciousness being conventionally
+banished to the remoter region of the third person, as to forget
+the presence of &quot;the brute brain within the man's.&quot; In Rousseau's
+case, at any rate, it was no wicked broth nor magic potion that
+&quot;confused the chemic labour of the blood,&quot; but the too potent wine
+of the joyful beauty of nature herself, working misery in a mental
+structure that no educating care nor envelope of circumstance had
+ever hardened against her intoxication. Most of us are protected
+against this subtle debauch of sensuous egoism by a cool
+organisation, while even those who are born with senses and
+appetites of great strength and keenness, are guarded by
+accumulated discipline of all kinds from without, especially by the
+necessity for active industry which brings the most exaggerated
+native sensibility into balance. It is the constant and rigorous
+social parade which keeps the eager regiment of the senses from
+making furious rout.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.249" id="Page_i.249">[i.249]</a></span> Rousseau had just repudiated all social
+obligation, and he had never gone through external discipline. He
+was at an age when passion that has never been broken in has the
+beak of the bald vulture, tearing and gnawing a man; but its first
+approach is in fair shapes.</p>
+<p>Wandering and dreaming &quot;in the sweetest season of the year, in
+the month of June, under the fresh groves, with the song of the
+nightingale and the soft murmuring of the brooks in his ear,&quot; he
+began to wonder restlessly why he had never tasted in their
+plenitude the vivid sentiments which he was conscious of possessing
+in reserve, or any of that intoxicating delight which he felt
+potentially existent in his soul. Why had he been created with
+faculties so exquisite, to be left thus unused and unfruitful? The
+feeling of his own quality, with this of a certain injustice and
+waste superadded, brought warm tears which he loved to let flow.
+Visions of the past, from girl playmates of his youth down to the
+Venetian courtesan, thronged in fluttering tumult into his brain.
+He saw himself surrounded by a seraglio of houris whom he had
+known, until his blood was all aflame and his head in a whirl. His
+imagination was kindled into deadly activity. &quot;The impossibility of
+reaching to the real beings plunged me into the land of chimera;
+and seeing nothing actual that rose to the height of my delirium, I
+nourished it in an ideal world, which my creative imagination had
+soon peopled with beings after my heart's desire. In my continual
+ecstasies, I<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.250" id="Page_i.250">[i.250]</a></span> made myself drunk with torrents of the most delicious
+sentiments that ever entered the heart of man. Forgetting
+absolutely the whole human race, I invented for myself societies of
+perfect creatures, as heavenly for their virtues as their beauties;
+sure, tender, faithful friends, such as I never found in our nether
+world. I had such a passion for haunting this empyrean with all its
+charming objects, that I passed hours and days in it without
+counting them as they went by; and losing recollection of
+everything else, I had hardly swallowed a morsel in hot haste,
+before I began to burn to run off in search of my beloved groves.
+If, when I was ready to start for the enchanted world, I saw
+unhappy mortals coming to detain me on the dull earth, I could
+neither moderate nor hide my spleen, and, no longer master over
+myself, I used to give them greeting so rough that it might well be
+called brutal.&quot;<a name="FNanchor263"></a><a href="#Footnote_263">[263]</a></p>
+<p>This terrific malady was something of a very different kind from
+the tranquil sensuousness of the days in Savoy, when the blood was
+young, and life was not complicated with memories, and the sweet
+freshness of nature made existence enough. Then his supreme
+expansion had been attended with a kind of divine repose, and had
+found edifying voice in devout acknowledgment in the exhilaration
+of the morning air of the goodness and bounty of a beneficent
+master. In this later and more pitiable time the beneficent master
+hid himself, and creation was<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.251" id="Page_i.251">[i.251]</a></span> only not a blank because it was
+veiled by troops of sirens not in the flesh. Nature without the
+association of some living human object, like Madame de Warens, was
+a poison to Rousseau, until the advancing years which slowly
+brought decay of sensual force thus brought the antidote. At our
+present point we see one stricken with an ugly disease. It was
+almost mercy when he was laid up with a sharp attack of the more
+painful, but far less absorbing and frightful disorder, to which
+Rousseau was subject all his life long. It gave pause to what he
+misnames his angelic loves. &quot;Besides that one can hardly think of
+love when suffering anguish, my imagination, which is animated by
+the country and under the trees, languishes and dies in a room and
+under roof-beams.&quot; This interval he employed with some magnanimity,
+in vindicating the ways and economy of Providence, in the letter to
+Voltaire which we shall presently examine. The moment he could get
+out of doors again into the forest, the transport returned, but
+this time accompanied with an active effort in the creative
+faculties of his mind to bring the natural relief to these
+over-wrought paroxysms of sensual imagination. He soothed his
+emotions by associating them with the life of personages whom he
+invented, and by introducing into them that play and movement and
+changing relation which prevented them from bringing his days to an
+end in malodorous fever. The egoism of persistent invention and
+composition was at least better than the egoism of mere
+unreflecting ecstasy<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.252" id="Page_i.252">[i.252]</a></span> in the charm of natural objects, and took off
+something from the violent excess of sensuous force. His thought
+became absorbed in two female figures, one dark and the other fair,
+one sage and the other yielding, one gentle and the other quick,
+analogous in character but different, not handsome but animated by
+cheerfulness and feeling. To one of these he gave a lover, to whom
+the other was a tender friend. He planted them all, after much
+deliberation and some changes, on the shores of his beloved lake at
+Vevay, the spot where his benefactress was born, and which he
+always thought the richest and loveliest in all Europe.</p>
+<p>This vicarious or reflected egoism, accompanied as it was by a
+certain amount of productive energy, seemed to mark a return to a
+sort of moral convalescence. He walked about the groves with pencil
+and tablets, assigning this or that thought or expression to one or
+other of the three companions of his fancy. When the bad weather
+set in, and he was confined to the house (the winter of 1756-7), he
+tried to resume his ordinary indoor labour, the copying of music
+and the compilation of his Musical Dictionary. To his amazement he
+found that this was no longer possible. The fever of that literary
+composition of which he had always such dread had strong possession
+of him. He could see nothing on any side but the three figures and
+the objects about them made beautiful by his imagination. Though he
+tried hard to dismiss them, his resistance was vain, and he set<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.253" id="Page_i.253">[i.253]</a></span>
+himself to bringing some order into his thoughts &quot;so as to produce
+a kind of romance.&quot; We have a glimpse of his mental state in the
+odd detail, that he could not bear to write his romance on anything
+but the very finest paper with gilt edges; that the powder with
+which he dried the ink was of azure and sparkling silver; and that
+he tied up the quires with delicate blue riband.<a name="FNanchor264"></a><a href="#Footnote_264">[264]</a> The distance
+from all this to the state of nature is obviously very great
+indeed. It must not be supposed that he forgot his older part as
+Cato, Brutus, and the other Plutarchians. &quot;My great embarrassment,&quot;
+he says honestly, &quot;was that I should belie myself so clearly and
+thoroughly. After the severe principles I had just been laying down
+with so much bustle, after the austere maxims I had preached so
+energetically, after so many biting invectives against the
+effeminate books that breathed love and soft delights, could
+anything be imagined more shocking, more unlooked-for, than to see
+me inscribe myself with my own hand among the very authors on whose
+books I had heaped this harsh censure? I felt this inconsequence in
+all its force, I taxed myself with it, I blushed over it, and was
+overcome with mortification; but nothing could restore me to
+reason.&quot;<a name="FNanchor265"></a><a href="#Footnote_265">[265]</a>
+He adds that perhaps on the whole the composition of the New
+Helo&#239;sa was turning his madness to the best account. That may
+be true, but does not all this make the bitter denunciation, in the
+Letter to D'Alembert, of love and of all who make its
+repre<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.254" id="Page_i.254">[i.254]</a></span>sentation a considerable element in literature or the drama,
+at the very time when he was composing one of the most dangerously
+attractive romances of his century, a rather indecent piece of
+invective? We may forgive inconsistency when it is only between two
+of a man's theories, or two self-concerning parts of his conduct,
+but hardly when it takes the form of reviling in others what the
+reviler indulgently permits to himself.</p>
+<p>We are more edified by the energy with which Rousseau refused
+connivance with the public outrages on morality perpetrated by a
+patron. M. d'Epinay went to pay him a visit at the Hermitage,
+taking with him two ladies with whom his relations were less than
+equivocal, and for whom among other things he had given Rousseau
+music to copy. &quot;They were curious to see the eccentric man,&quot; as M.
+d'Epinay afterwards told his scandalised wife, for it was in the
+manners of the day on no account to parade even the most notorious
+of these unblessed connections. &quot;He was walking in front of the
+door; he saw me first; he advanced cap in hand; he saw the ladies;
+he saluted us, put on his cap, turned his back, and stalked off as
+fast as he could. Can anything be more mad?&quot;<a name="FNanchor266"></a><a href="#Footnote_266">[266]</a>  In the
+miserable and intricate tangle of falsity, weakness, sensuality,
+and quarrel, which make up this chapter in Rousseau's life, we are
+glad of even one trait of masculine robustness. We should perhaps
+be still more glad if the unwedded Theresa were not visible in the
+background of this scene of high morals.</p>
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.255" id="Page_i.255">[i.255]</a></span></p>
+<h3>II.</h3>
+<p>The New Helo&#239;sa was not to be completed without a further
+extension of morbid experience of a still more burning kind than
+the sufferings of compressed passion. The feverish torment of mere
+visions of the air swarming impalpable in all his veins, was
+replaced when the earth again began to live and the sap to stir in
+plants, by the more concentred fire of a consuming passion for one
+who was no dryad nor figure of a dream. In the spring of 1757 he
+received a visit from Madame d'Houdetot, the sister-in-law of
+Madame d'Epinay.<a name="FNanchor267"></a><a href="#Footnote_267">[267]</a> Her husband had gone to the war (we are
+in the year of Rossbach), and so had her lover, Saint Lambert,
+whose passion had been so fatal to Voltaire's Marquise du
+Ch&#226;telet eight years before. She rode over in man's guise to
+the Hermitage from a house not very far off, where she was to pass
+her retreat during the absence of her two natural protectors.
+Rousseau had seen her before on various occasions; she had been to
+the Hermitage the previous year, and had partaken of its host's
+homely fare.<a name="FNanchor268"></a><a href="#Footnote_268">[268]</a> But the time was not ripe; the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.256" id="Page_i.256">[i.256]</a></span> force of
+a temptation is not from without but within. Much, too, depended
+with our hermit on the temperature; one who would have been a very
+ordinary mortal to him in cold and rain, might grow to Aphrodite
+herself in days when the sun shone hot and the air was aromatic.
+His fancy was suddenly struck with the romantic guise of the female
+cavalier, and this was the first onset of a veritable intoxication,
+which many men have felt, but which no man before or since ever
+invited the world to hear the story of. He may truly say that after
+the first interview with her in this disastrous spring, he was as
+one who had thirstily drained a poisoned bowl. A sort of palsy
+struck him. He lay weeping in his bed at night, and on days when he
+did not see the sorceress he wept in the woods.<a name="FNanchor269"></a><a href="#Footnote_269">[269]</a> He talked to
+himself for hours, and was of a black humour to his house-mates.
+When approaching the object of this deadly fascination, his whole
+organisation seemed to be dissolved. He walked in a dream that
+filled him with a sense of sickly torture, commixed with sicklier
+delight.</p>
+<p>People speak with precisely marked division of mind and body, of
+will, emotion, understanding; the division is good in logic, but
+its convenient lines are lost to us as we watch a being with soul
+all blurred, body all shaken, unstrung, poisoned, by erotic mania,
+rising in slow clouds of mephitic steam from suddenly heated
+stagnancies of the blood, and turning the reality of conduct and
+duty into distant unmeaning<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.257" id="Page_i.257">[i.257]</a></span> shadows. If such a disease were the
+furious mood of the brute in spring-time, it would be less
+dreadful, but shame and remorse in the ever-struggling reason of
+man or woman in the grip of the foul thing, produces an aggravation
+of frenzy that makes the mental healer tremble. Add to all this
+lurking elements of hollow rage that his passion was not returned;
+of stealthy jealousy of the younger man whose place he could not
+take, and who was his friend besides; of suspicion that he was a
+little despised for his weakness by the very object of it, who saw
+that his hairs were sprinkled with gray,&#8212;and the whole offers a
+scene of moral humiliation that half sickens, half appals, and we
+turn away with dismay as from a vision of the horrid loves of
+heavy-eyed and scaly shapes that haunted the warm primeval
+ooze.</p>
+<p>Madame d'Houdetot, the unwilling enchantress bearing in an
+unconscious hand the cup of defilement, was not strikingly singular
+either in physical or mental attraction. She was now
+seven-and-twenty. Small-pox, the terrible plague of the country,
+had pitted her face and given a yellowish tinge to her complexion;
+her features were clumsy and her brow low; she was short-sighted,
+and in old age at any rate was afflicted by an excessive squint.
+This homeliness was redeemed by a gentle and caressing expression,
+and by a sincerity, a gaiety of heart, and free sprightliness of
+manner, that no trouble could restrain. Her figure was very slight,
+and there was in all her movements at once awkwardness and grace.
+She was<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.258" id="Page_i.258">[i.258]</a></span> natural and simple, and had a fairly good judgment of a
+modest kind, in spite of the wild sallies in which her spirits
+sometimes found vent. Capable of chagrin, she was never prevented
+by it from yielding to any impulse of mirth. &quot;She weeps with the
+best faith in the world, and breaks out laughing at the same
+moment; never was anybody so happily born,&quot; says her much less
+amiable sister-in-law.<a name="FNanchor270"></a><a href="#Footnote_270">[270]</a> Her husband was indifferent to her. He
+preserved an attachment to a lady whom he knew before his marriage,
+whose society he never ceased to frequent, and who finally died in
+his arms in 1793. Madame d'Houdetot found consolation in the
+friendship of Saint Lambert. &quot;We both of us,&quot; said her husband,
+&quot;both Madame d'Houdetot and I, had a vocation for fidelity, only
+there was a mis-arrangement.&quot; She occasionally composed verses of
+more than ordinary point, but she had good sense enough not to
+write them down, nor to set up on the strength of them for poetess
+and wit.<a name="FNanchor271"></a><a href="#Footnote_271">[271]</a>
+Her talk in her later years, and she lived down to the year of
+Leipsic, preserved the pointed sententiousness of earlier time. One
+day, for instance, in the era of the Directory, a conversation was
+going on as to the various merits and defects of women; she heard
+much, and then with her accustomed suavity of voice contributed
+this light summary:&#8212;&quot;Without<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.259" id="Page_i.259">[i.259]</a></span> women, the life of man would be
+without aid at the beginning, without pleasure in the middle, and
+without solace at the end.&quot;<a name="FNanchor272"></a><a href="#Footnote_272">[272]</a></p>
+<p>We may be sure that it was not her power of saying things of
+this sort that kindled Rousseau's flame, but rather the sprightly
+naturalness, frankness, and kindly softness of a character which in
+his opinion united every virtue except prudence and strength, the
+two which Rousseau would be least likely to miss. The bond of union
+between them was subtle. She found in Rousseau a sympathetic
+listener while she told the story of her passion for Saint Lambert,
+and a certain contagious force produced in him a thrill which he
+never felt with any one else before or after. Thus, as he says,
+there was equally love on both sides, though it was not reciprocal.
+&quot;We were both of us intoxicated with passion, she for her lover, I
+for her; our sighs and sweet tears mingled. Tender confidants, each
+of the other, our sentiments were of such close kin that it was
+impossible for them not to mix; and still she never forgot her duty
+for a moment, while for myself, I protest, I swear, that if
+sometimes drawn astray by my senses, still&quot;&#8212;still he was a paragon
+of virtue, subject to rather new definition. We can appreciate the
+author of the New Helo&#239;sa; we can appreciate the author of
+Emilius; but this strained attempt to confound those two very
+different persons by combining tearful erotics with<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.260" id="Page_i.260">[i.260]</a></span> high ethics, is
+an exhibition of self-delusion that the most patient analyst of
+human nature might well find hard to suffer. &quot;The duty of privation
+exalted my soul. The glory of all the virtues adorned the idol of
+my heart in my sight; to soil its divine image would have been to
+annihilate it,&quot; and so forth.<a name="FNanchor273"></a><a href="#Footnote_273">[273]</a> Moon-lighted landscape gave a background
+for the sentimentalist's picture, and dim groves, murmuring
+cascades, and the soft rustle of the night air, made up a scene
+which became for its chief actor &quot;an immortal memory of innocence
+and delight.&quot; &quot;It was in this grove, seated with her on a grassy
+bank, under an acacia heavy with flowers, that I found expression
+for the emotions of my heart in words that were worthy of them.
+'Twas the first and single time of my life; but I was sublime, if
+you can use the word of all the tender and seductive things that
+the most glowing love can bring into the heart of a man. What
+intoxicating tears I shed at her knees, what floods she shed in
+spite of herself! At length in an involuntary transport, she cried
+out, 'Never was man so tender, never did man love as you do! But
+your friend Saint Lambert hears us, and my heart cannot love
+twice.'&quot;<a name="FNanchor274"></a><a href="#Footnote_274">[274]</a>
+Happily, as we learn from another source, a breath of wholesome
+life from without brought the transcendental to grotesque end. In
+the climax of tears and protestations, an honest waggoner at the
+other side of the park wall, urging<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.261" id="Page_i.261">[i.261]</a></span> on a lagging beast launched a
+round and far-sounding oath out into the silent night. Madame
+d'Houdetot answered with a lively continuous peal of young
+laughter, while an angry chill brought back the discomfited lover
+from an ecstasy that was very full of peril.<a name="FNanchor275"></a><a href="#Footnote_275">[275]</a></p>
+<p>Rousseau wrote in the New Helo&#239;sa very sagely that you
+should grant to the senses nothing when you mean to refuse them
+anything. He admits that the saying was falsified by his relations
+with Madame d'Houdetot. Clearly the credit of this happy
+falsification was due to her rather than to himself. What her
+feelings were, it is not very easy to see. Honest pity seems to
+have been the strongest of them. She was idle and unoccupied, and
+idleness leaves the soul open for much stray generosity of emotion,
+even towards an importunate lover. She thought him mad, and she
+wrote to Saint Lambert to say so. &quot;His madness must be very
+strong,&quot; said Saint Lambert, &quot;since she can perceive it.&quot;<a name="FNanchor276"></a><a href="#Footnote_276">[276]</a></p>
+<p>Character is ceaselessly marching, even when we seem to have
+sunk into a fixed and stagnant mood. The man is awakened from his
+dream of passion by inexorable event; he finds the house of the
+soul not swept and garnished for a new life, but possessed by
+demons who have entered unseen. In short, such profound disorder of
+spirit, though in its first stage marked by ravishing delirium,
+never escapes a bitter<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.262" id="Page_i.262">[i.262]</a></span> sequel. When a man lets his soul be swept
+away from the narrow track of conduct appointed by his relations
+with others, still the reality of such relations survives. He may
+retreat to rural lodges; that will not save him either from his own
+passion, or from some degree of that kinship with others which
+instantly creates right and wrong like a wall of brass around him.
+Let it be observed that the natures of finest stuff suffer most
+from these forced reactions, and it was just because Rousseau had
+innate moral sensitiveness, and a man like Diderot was without it,
+that the first felt his fall so profoundly, while the second was
+unconscious of having fallen at all.</p>
+<p>One day in July Rousseau went to pay his accustomed visit. He
+found Madame d'Houdetot dejected, and with the flush of recent
+weeping on her cheeks. A bird of the air had carried the matter. As
+usual, the matter was carried wrongly, and apparently all that
+Saint Lambert suspected was that Rousseau's high principles had
+persuaded Madame d'Houdetot of the viciousness of her relations
+with her lover.<a name="FNanchor277"></a><a href="#Footnote_277">[277]</a> &quot;They have played us an evil turn,&quot;
+cried Madame d'Houdetot; &quot;they have been unjust to me, but that is
+no matter. Either let us break off at once, or be what you ought to
+be.&quot;<a name="FNanchor278"></a><a href="#Footnote_278">[278]</a>
+This was Rousseau's first<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.263" id="Page_i.263">[i.263]</a></span> taste of the ashes of shame into which
+the lusciousness of such forbidden fruit, plucked at the expense of
+others, is ever apt to be transformed. Mortification of the
+considerable spiritual pride that was yet alive after this lapse,
+was a strong element in the sum of his emotion, and it was pointed
+by the reflection which stung him so incessantly, that his
+monitress was younger than himself. He could never master his own
+contempt for the gallantry of grizzled locks.<a name="FNanchor279"></a><a href="#Footnote_279">[279]</a> His austerer
+self might at any rate have been consoled by knowing that this
+scene was the beginning of the end, though the end came without any
+seeking on his part and without violence. To his amazement, one day
+Saint Lambert and Madame d'Houdetot came to the Hermitage, asking
+him to give them dinner, and much to the credit of human nature's
+elasticity, the three passed a delightful afternoon. The wronged
+lover was friendly, though a little stiff, and he passed occasional
+slights which Rousseau would surely not have forgiven, if he had
+not been disarmed by consciousness of guilt. He fell asleep, as we
+can well imagine that he might do, while Rousseau read aloud his
+very inadequate justification of Providence against
+Voltaire.<a name="FNanchor280"></a><a href="#Footnote_280">[280]</a></p>
+<p>In time he returned to the army, and Rousseau began to cure
+himself of his mad passion. His method, however, was not
+unsuspicious, for it in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.264" id="Page_i.264">[i.264]</a></span>volved the perilous assistance of Madame
+d'Houdetot. Fortunately her loyalty and good sense forced a more
+resolute mode upon him. He found, or thought he found her
+distracted, emharrassed, indifferent. In despair at not being
+allowed to heal his passionate malady in his own fashion, he did
+the most singular thing that he could have done under the
+circumstances. He wrote to Saint Lambert.<a name="FNanchor281"></a><a href="#Footnote_281">[281]</a> His letter is
+a prodigy of plausible duplicity, though Rousseau in some of his
+mental states had so little sense of the difference between the
+actual and the imaginary, and was moreover so swiftly borne away on
+a flood of fine phrases, that it is hard to decide how far this was
+voluntary, and how far he was his own dupe. Voluntary or not, it is
+detestable. We pass the false whine about &quot;being abandoned by all
+that was dear to him,&quot; as if he had not deliberately quitted Paris
+against the remonstrance of every friend he had; about his being
+&quot;solitary and sad,&quot; as if he was not ready at this very time to
+curse any one who intruded on his solitude, and hindered him of a
+single half-hour in the desert spots that he adored. Remembering
+the scenes in moon-lighted groves and elsewhere, we read
+this:&#8212;&quot;Whence comes her coldness to me? Is it possible that you
+can have suspected me of wronging you with her, and of turning
+perfidious in consequence of an unseasonably rigorous virtue? A
+passage in one of your letters shows a glimpse of some such
+suspicion. No, no, Saint Lambert, the breast of J.J. Rousseau never<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.265" id="Page_i.265">[i.265]</a></span>
+held the heart of a traitor, and I should despise myself more than
+you suppose, if I had ever tried to rob you of her heart.... Can you
+suspect that her friendship for me may hurt her love for you?
+Surely natures endowed with sensibility are open to all sorts of
+affections, and no sentiment can spring up in them which does not
+turn to the advantage of the dominant passion. Where is the lover
+who does not wax the more tender as he talks to his friend of her
+whom he loves? And is it not sweeter for you in your banishment
+that there should be some sympathetic creature to whom your
+mistress loves to talk of you, and who loves to hear?&quot;</p>
+<p>Let us turn to another side of his correspondence. The way in
+which the sympathetic creature in the present case loved to hear
+his friend's mistress talk of him, is interestingly shown in one or
+two passages from a letter to her; as when he cries, &quot;Ah, how proud
+would even thy lover himself be of thy constancy, if he only knew
+how much it has surmounted.... I appeal to your sincerity. You, the
+witness and the cause of this delirium, these tears, these
+ravishing ecstasies, these transports which were never made for
+mortal, say, have I ever tasted your favours in such a way that I
+deserve to lose them?... Never once did my ardent desires nor my
+tender supplications dare to solicit supreme happiness, without my
+feeling stopped by the inner cries of a sorrow-stricken soul.... O
+Sophie, after moments so sweet, the idea of eternal privation is
+too frightful for one who groans<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.266" id="Page_i.266">[i.266]</a></span> that he cannot identify himself
+with thee. What, are thy tender eyes never again to be lowered with
+a delicious modesty, intoxicating me with pleasure? What, are my
+burning lips never again to lay my very soul on thy heart along
+with my kisses? What, may I never more feel that heavenly shudder,
+that rapid and devouring fire, swifter than lightning?&quot;<a name="FNanchor282"></a><a href="#Footnote_282">[282]</a>.... We see a
+sympathetic creature assuredly, and listen to the voice of a nature
+endowed with sensibility even more than enough, but with decency,
+loyalty, above all with self-knowledge, far less than enough.</p>
+<p>One more touch completes the picture of the fallen desperate
+man. He takes great trouble to persuade Saint Lambert that though
+the rigour of his principles constrains him to frown upon such
+breaches of social law as the relations between Madame d'Houdetot
+and her lover, yet he is so attached to the sinful pair that he
+half forgives them. &quot;Do not suppose,&quot; he says, with superlative
+gravity, &quot;that you have seduced me by your reasons; I see in them
+the goodness of your heart, not your justification. I cannot help
+blaming your connection: you can hardly approve it yourself; and so
+long as you both of you continue dear to me, I will never leave you
+in careless security as to the innocence of your state. Yet love
+such as yours deserves considerateness.... I feel respect for a
+union so tender, and cannot bring myself to attempt to lead it to
+virtue along the path of despair&quot; (p. 401).</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.267" id="Page_i.267">[i.267]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Ignorance of the facts of the case hindered Saint Lambert from
+appreciating the strange irony of a man protesting about leading to
+virtue along the path of despair a poor woman whom he had done as
+much as he could to lead to vice along the path of highly
+stimulated sense. Saint Lambert was as much a sentimentalist as
+Rousseau was, but he had a certain manliness, acquired by long
+contact with men, which his correspondent only felt in moods of
+severe exaltation. Saint Lambert took all the blame on himself. He
+had desired that his mistress and his friend should love one
+another; then he thought he saw some coolness in his mistress, and
+he set the change down to his friend, though not on the true
+grounds. &quot;Do not suppose that I thought you perfidious or a
+traitor; I knew the austerity of your principles; people had spoken
+to me of it; and she herself did so with a respect that love found
+hard to bear.&quot; In short, he had suspected Rousseau of nothing worse
+than being over-virtuous, and trying in the interest of virtue to
+break off a connection sanctioned by contemporary manners, but not
+by law or religion. If Madame d'Houdetot had changed, it was not
+that she had ceased to honour her good friend, but only that her
+lover might be spared a certain chagrin, from suspecting the excess
+of scrupulosity and conscience in so austere an adviser.<a name="FNanchor283"></a><a href="#Footnote_283">[283]</a></p>
+<p>It is well known how effectively one with a germ<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.268" id="Page_i.268">[i.268]</a></span> of good
+principle in him is braced by being thought better than he is. With
+this letter in his hands and its words in his mind, Rousseau strode
+off for his last interview with Madame d'Houdetot. Had Saint
+Lambert, he says, been less wise, less generous, less worthy, I
+should have been a lost man. As it was, he passed four or five
+hours with her in a delicious calm, infinitely more delightful than
+the accesses of burning fever which had seized him before. They
+formed the project of a close companionship of three, including the
+absent lover; and they counted on the project coming more true than
+such designs usually do, &quot;since all the feelings that can unite
+sensitive and upright hearts formed the foundation of it, and we
+three united talents enough as well as knowledge enough to suffice
+to ourselves, without need of aid or supplement from others.&quot; What
+happened was this. Madame d'Houdetot for the next three or four
+months, which were among the most bitter in Rousseau's life, for
+then the bitterness which became chronic was new and therefore
+harder to be borne, wrote him the wisest, most affectionate, and
+most considerate letters that a sincere and sensible woman ever
+wrote to the most petulant, suspicious, perverse, and
+irrestrainable of men. For patience and exquisite sweetness of
+friendship some of these letters are matchless, and we can only
+conjecture the wearing querulousness of the letters to which they
+were replies. If through no fault of her own she had been the
+occasion of the monstrous delirium of which he never shook off the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.269" id="Page_i.269">[i.269]</a></span>
+consequences, at least this good soul did all that wise counsel and
+grave tenderness could do, to bring him out of the black slough of
+suspicion and despair into which he was plunged.<a name="FNanchor284"></a><a href="#Footnote_284">[284]</a> In the
+beginning of 1758 there was a change. Rousseau's passion for her
+somehow became known to all the world; it reached the ears of Saint
+Lambert, and was the cause of a passing disturbance between him and
+his mistress. Saint Lambert throughout acted like a man who is
+thoroughly master of himself. At first, we learn, he ceased for a
+moment to see in Rousseau the virtue which he sought in him, and
+which he was persuaded that he found in him. &quot;Since then, however,&quot;
+wrote Madame d'Houdetot, &quot;he pities you more for your weakness than
+he reproaches you, and we are both of us far from joining the
+people who wish to blacken your character; we have and always shall
+have the courage to speak of you with esteem.&quot;<a name="FNanchor285"></a><a href="#Footnote_285">[285]</a> They saw one
+another a few times, and on one occasion the Count and Countess
+d'Houdetot, Saint Lambert, and Rousseau all sat at table together,
+happily without breach of the peace.<a name="FNanchor286"></a><a href="#Footnote_286">[286]</a> One curious
+thing about this meeting was that it took place some three weeks
+after Rousseau and Saint Lambert had interchanged letters on the
+subject of the quarrel with Diderot, in which each promised the
+other contemptuous oblivion.<a name="FNanchor287"></a><a href="#Footnote_287">[287]</a> Per<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.270" id="Page_i.270">[i.270]</a></span>petuity of hate is as hard as
+perpetuity of love for our poor short-spanned characters, and at
+length the three who were once to have lived together in
+self-sufficing union, and then in their next mood to have forgotten
+one another instantly and for ever, held to neither of the
+extremes, but settled down into an easier middle path of
+indifferent good-will. The conduct of all three, said the most
+famous of them, may serve for an example of the way in which
+sensible people separate, when it no longer suits them to see one
+another.<a name="FNanchor288"></a><a href="#Footnote_288">[288]</a>
+It is at least certain that in them Rousseau lost two of the most
+unimpeachably good friends that he ever possessed.</p>
+<h3>III.</h3>
+<p>The egoistic character that loves to brood and hates to act, is
+big with catastrophe. We have now to see how the inevitable law
+accomplished itself in the case of Rousseau. In many this brooding
+egoism produces a silent and melancholy insanity; with him it was
+developed into something of acridly corrosive quality. One of the
+agents in this disastrous process was the wearing torture of one of
+the most painful of disorders. This disorder, arising from an
+internal malformation, harassed him from his infancy to the day of
+his death. Our fatuous persistency in reducing man to the
+spiritual, blinds the biographer to the circumstance that the
+history of a life is the history of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.271" id="Page_i.271">[i.271]</a></span> a body no less than that of a
+soul. Many a piece of conduct that divides the world into two
+factions of moral assailants and moral vindicators, provoking a
+thousand ingenuities of ethical or psychological analysis, ought
+really to have been nothing more than an item in a page of a
+pathologist's case-book. We are not to suspend our judgment on
+action; right and wrong can depend on no man's malformations. In
+trying to know the actor, it is otherwise; here it is folly to
+underestimate the physical antecedents of mental phenomena. In firm
+and lofty character, pain is mastered; in a character so little
+endowed with cool tenacious strength as Rousseau's, pain such as he
+endured was enough to account, not for his unsociality, which
+flowed from temperament, but for the bitter, irritable, and
+suspicious form which this unsociality now first assumed. Rousseau
+was never a saintly nature, but far the reverse, and in reading the
+tedious tale of his quarrels with Grimm and Madame d'Epinay and
+Diderot&#8212;a tale of labyrinthine nightmares&#8212;let us remember that we
+may even to this point explain what happened, without recourse to
+the too facile theory of insanity, unless one defines that misused
+term so widely as to make many sane people very uncomfortable.</p>
+<p>His own account was this: &quot;In my quality of solitary, I am more
+sensitive than another; if I am wrong with a friend who lives in
+the world, he thinks of it for a moment, and then a thousand
+distractions make him forget it for the rest of the day; but there<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.272" id="Page_i.272">[i.272]</a></span>
+is nothing to distract me as to his wrong towards me; deprived of
+my sleep, I busy myself with him all night long; solitary in my
+walks, I busy myself with him from sunrise until sunset; my heart
+has not an instant's relief, and the harshness of a friend gives me
+in one day years of anguish. In my quality of invalid, I have a
+title to the considerateness that humanity owes to the weakness or
+irritation of a man in agony. Who is the friend, who is the good
+man, that ought not to dread to add affliction to an unfortunate
+wretch tormented with a painful and incurable malady?&quot;<a name="FNanchor289"></a><a href="#Footnote_289">[289]</a>  We need not
+accept this as an adequate extenuation of perversities, but it
+explains them without recourse to the theory of uncontrollable
+insanity. Insanity came later, the product of intellectual
+excitation, public persecution, and moral reaction after prolonged
+tension. Meanwhile he may well be judged by the standards of the
+sane; knowing his temperament, his previous history, his
+circumstances, we have no difficulty in accounting for his conduct.
+Least of all is there any need for laying all the blame upon his
+friends. There are writers whom enthusiasm for the principles of
+Jean Jacques has driven into fanatical denigration of every one
+whom he called his enemy, that is to say, nearly every one whom he
+ever knew.<a name="FNanchor290"></a><a href="#Footnote_290">[290]</a> Diderot said well, &quot;Too many<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.273" id="Page_i.273">[i.273]</a></span> honest
+people would be wrong, if Jean Jacques were right.&quot;</p>
+<p>The first downright breach was with Grimm, but there were angry
+passages during the year 1757, not only with him, but with Diderot
+and Madame d'Epinay as well. Diderot, like many other men of
+energetic nature unchastened by worldly wisdom, was too interested
+in everything that attracted his attention to keep silence over the
+indiscretion of a friend. He threw as much tenacity and zeal into a
+trifle, if it had once struck him, as he did into the
+Encyclop&#230;dia. We have already seen how warmly he rated Jean
+Jacques for missing the court pension. Then he scolded and laughed
+at him for turning hermit. With still more seriousness he
+remonstrated with him for remaining in the country through the
+winter, thus endangering the life of Theresa's aged mother. This
+stirred up hot anger in the Hermitage, and two or three bitter
+letters were interchanged,<a name="FNanchor291"></a><a href="#Footnote_291">[291]</a> those of Diderot being pronounced by a
+person who was no partisan of Rousseau decidedly too harsh.<a name="FNanchor292"></a><a href="#Footnote_292">[292]</a> Yet there is
+copious warmth of friendship in these very letters, if only the man
+to whom they were written had not hated interference in his affairs
+as the worst of injuries. &quot;I loved Diderot tenderly, I esteemed him
+sincerely,&quot; says Rousseau, &quot;and I counted with entire confidence<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.274" id="Page_i.274">[i.274]</a></span>
+upon the same sentiments in him. But worn out by his unwearied
+obstinacy in everlastingly thwarting my tastes, my inclinations, my
+ways of living, everything that concerned myself only; revolted at
+seeing a younger man than myself insist with all his might on
+governing me like a child; chilled by his readiness in giving his
+promise and his negligence in keeping it; tired of so many
+appointments which he made and broke, and of his fancy for
+repairing them by new ones to be broken in their turn; provoked at
+waiting for him to no purpose three or four times a month on days
+which he had fixed, and of dining alone in the evening, after going
+on as far as St. Denis to meet him and waiting for him all day,&#8212;I
+had my heart already full of a multitude of grievances.&quot;<a name="FNanchor293"></a><a href="#Footnote_293">[293]</a> This
+irritation subsided in presence of the storms that now rose up
+against Diderot. He was in the thick of the dangerous and
+mortifying distractions stirred up by the foes of the
+Encyclop&#230;dia. Rousseau in friendly sympathy went to see him;
+they embraced, and old wrongs were forgotten until new
+arose.<a name="FNanchor294"></a><a href="#Footnote_294">[294]</a></p>
+<p>There is a less rose-coloured account than this. Madame d'Epinay
+assigns two motives to Rousseau: a desire to find an excuse for
+going to Paris, in order to avoid seeing Saint Lambert; secondly, a
+wish to hear Diderot's opinion of the two first parts of the New
+Helo&#239;sa. She says that he wanted to borrow a portfolio in
+which to carry the manuscripts to Paris;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.275" id="Page_i.275">[i.275]</a></span> Rousseau says that they
+had already been in Diderot's possession for six months.<a name="FNanchor295"></a><a href="#Footnote_295">[295]</a> As her letters
+containing this very circumstantial story were written at the
+moment, it is difficult to uphold the Confessions as valid
+authority against them. Thirdly, Rousseau told her that he had not
+taken his manuscripts to Paris (p. 302), whereas Grimm writing a
+few days later (p. 309) mentions that he has received a letter from
+Diderot, to the effect that Rousseau's visit had no other object
+than the revision of these manuscripts. The scene is
+characteristic. &quot;Rousseau kept him pitilessly at work from Saturday
+at ten o'clock in the morning till eleven at night on Monday,
+hardly giving him time to eat and drink. The revision at an end,
+Diderot chats with him about a plan he has in his head, and begs
+Rousseau to help him in contriving some incident which he cannot
+yet arrange to his taste. 'It is too difficult,' replies the hermit
+coldly, 'it is late, and I am not used to sitting up. Good night; I
+am off at six in the morning, and 'tis time for bed.' He rises from
+his chair, goes to bed, and leaves Diderot petrified at his
+behaviour. The day of his departure, Diderot's wife saw that her
+husband was in bad spirits, and asked the reason. 'It is that man's
+want of delicacy,' he replied, 'which afflicts me; he makes me work
+like a slave, but I should never have found that out, if he had not
+so drily<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.276" id="Page_i.276">[i.276]</a></span> refused to take an interest in me for a quarter of an
+hour.' 'You are surprised at that,' his wife answered; 'do you not
+know him? He is devoured with envy; he goes wild with rage when
+anything fine appears that is not his own. You will see him one day
+commit some great crime rather than let himself be ignored. I
+declare I would not swear that he will not join the ranks of the
+Jesuits, and undertake their vindication.'&quot;</p>
+<p>Of course we cannot be sure that Grimm did not manipulate these
+letters long after the event, but there is nothing in Rousseau's
+history to make us perfectly sure that he was incapable either of
+telling a falsehood to Madame d'Epinay, or of being shamelessly
+selfish in respect of Diderot. I see no reason to refuse
+substantial credit to Grimm's account, and the points of
+coincidence between that and the Confessions make its truth
+probable.<a name="FNanchor296"></a><a href="#Footnote_296">[296]</a></p>
+<p>Rousseau's relations with Madame d'Epinay were more complex, and
+his sentiments towards her underwent many changes. There was a
+prevalent opinion that he was her lover, for which no real
+foundation seems to have existed.<a name="FNanchor297"></a><a href="#Footnote_297">[297]</a> Those who disbelieved that he had
+reached this distinction, yet made sure that he had a passion for
+her, which may or may not have been true.<a name="FNanchor298"></a><a href="#Footnote_298">[298]</a><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.277" id="Page_i.277">[i.277]</a></span> Madame
+d'Epinay herself was vain enough to be willing that this should be
+generally accepted, and it is certain that she showed a friendship
+for him which, considering the manners of the time, was invitingly
+open to misconception. Again, she was jealous of her sister-in-law,
+Madame d'Houdetot, if for no other reason than that the latter,
+being the wife of a Norman noble, had access to the court, and this
+was unattainable by the wife of a farmer-general. Hence Madame
+d'Epinay's barely-concealed mortification when she heard of the
+meetings in the forest, the private suppers, the moonlight rambles
+in the park. When Saint Lambert first became uneasy as to the
+relations between Rousseau and his mistress, and wrote to her to
+say that he was so, Rousseau instantly suspected that Madame
+d'Epinay had been his informant. Theresa confirmed the suspicion by
+tales of baskets and drawers ransacked by Madame d'Epinay in search
+of Madame d'Houdetot's letters to him. Whether these tales were
+true or not, we can never know; we can only say that Madame
+d'Epinay was probably not incapable of these meannesses, and that
+there is no reason to suppose that she took the pains to write
+directly to Saint Lambert a piece of news which she was writing to
+Grimm, knowing that he was then in communication with Saint
+Lambert. She herself suspected that Theresa had written to Saint
+Lambert,<a name="FNanchor299"></a><a href="#Footnote_299">[299]</a>
+but it may be doubted whether Theresa's imagination could have
+risen to such feat<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.278" id="Page_i.278">[i.278]</a></span> as writing to a marquis, and a marquis in what
+would have seemed to her to be remote and inaccessible parts of the
+earth. All this, however, has become ghostly for us; a puzzle that
+can never be found out, nor be worth finding out. Rousseau was
+persuaded that Madame d'Epinay was his betrayer, and was seized by
+one of his blackest and most stormful moods. In reply to an
+affectionate letter from her, inquiring why she had not seen him
+for so long, he wrote thus: &quot;I can say nothing to you yet. I wait
+until I am better informed, and this I shall be sooner or later.
+Meanwhile, be certain that accused innocence will find a champion
+ardent enough to make calumniators repent, whoever they may be.&quot; It
+is rather curious that so strange a missive as this, instead of
+provoking Madame d'Epinay to anger, was answered by a warmer and
+more affectionate letter than the first. To this Rousseau replied
+with increased vehemence, charged with dark and mysteriously worded
+suspicion. Still Madame d'Epinay remained willing to receive him.
+He began to repent of his imprudent haste, because it would
+certainly end by compromising Madame d'Houdetot, and because,
+moreover, he had no proof after all that his suspicions had any
+foundation. He went instantly to the house of Madame d'Epinay; at
+his approach she threw herself on his neck and melted into tears.
+This unexpected reception from so old a friend moved him extremely;
+he too wept abundantly. She showed no curiosity as to the precise
+nature of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.279" id="Page_i.279">[i.279]</a></span> his suspicions or their origin, and the quarrel came to
+an end.<a name="FNanchor300"></a><a href="#Footnote_300">[300]</a></p>
+<p>Grimm's turn followed. Though they had been friends for many
+years, there had long been a certain stiffness in their friendship.
+Their characters were in fact profoundly antipathetic. Rousseau we
+know,&#8212;sensuous, impulsive, extravagant, with little sense of the
+difference between reality and dreams. Grimm was exactly the
+opposite; judicious, collected, self-seeking, coldly upright. He
+was a German (born at Ratisbon), and in Paris was first a reader to
+the Duke of Saxe Gotha, with very scanty salary. He made his way,
+partly through the friendship of Rousseau, into the society of the
+Parisian men of letters, rapidly acquired a perfect mastery of the
+French language, and with the inspiring help of Diderot, became an
+excellent critic. After being secretary to sundry high people, he
+became the literary correspondent of various German sovereigns,
+keeping them informed of what<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.280" id="Page_i.280">[i.280]</a></span> was happening in the world of art and
+letters, just as an ambassador keeps his government informed of
+what happens in politics. The sobriety, impartiality, and
+discrimination of his criticism make one think highly of his
+literary judgment; he had the courage, or shall we say he preserved
+enough of the German, to defend both Homer and Shakespeare against
+the unhappy strictures of Voltaire.<a name="FNanchor301"></a><a href="#Footnote_301">[301]</a> This is not
+all, however; his criticism is conceived in a tone which impresses
+us with the writer's integrity. And to this internal evidence we
+have to add the external corroboration that in the latter part of
+his life he filled various official posts, which implied a peculiar
+confidence in his probity on the part of those who appointed him.
+At the present moment (1756-57), he was acting as secretary to
+Marshal d'Estr&#233;es, commander of the French army in
+Westphalia at the outset of the Seven Years' War. He was an able
+and helpful man, in spite of his having a rough manner, powdering
+his face, and being so monstrously scented as to earn the name of
+the musk-bear. He had that firmness and positivity which are not
+always beautiful, but of which there is probably too little rather
+than too much in the world, certainly in the France of his time,
+and of which there was none at all in Rousseau. Above all things he
+hated declamation. Apparently cold and reserved, he had sensibility
+enough underneath the surface to go nearly out of his mind for love
+of a singer at the opera who had a thrilling voice. As he did<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.281" id="Page_i.281">[i.281]</a></span> not
+believe in the metaphysical doctrine about the freedom of the will,
+he accepted from temperament the necessity which logic confirmed,
+of guiding the will by constant pressure from without. &quot;I am
+surprised,&quot; Madame d'Epinay said to him, &quot;that men should be so
+little indulgent to one another.&quot; &quot;Nay, the want of indulgence
+comes of our belief in freedom; it is because the established
+morality is false and bad, inasmuch as it starts from this false
+principle of liberty.&quot; &quot;Ah, but the contrary principle, by making
+one too indulgent, disturbs order.&quot; &quot;It does nothing of the kind.
+Though man does not wholly change, he is susceptible of
+modification; you can improve him; hence it is not useless to
+punish him. The gardener does not cut down a tree that grows
+crooked; he binds up the branch and keeps it in shape; that is the
+effect of public punishment.&quot;<a name="FNanchor302"></a><a href="#Footnote_302">[302]</a> He applied the same doctrine, as we
+shall see, to private punishment for social crookedness.</p>
+<p>It is easy to conceive how Rousseau's way of ordering himself
+would gradually estrange so hard a head as this. What the one
+thought a weighty moral reformation, struck the other as a vain
+desire to attract attention. Rousseau on the other hand suspected
+Grimm of intriguing to remove Theresa from him, as well as doing
+his best to alienate all his friends. The attempted alienation of
+Theresa consisted in the secret allowance to her mother and her by
+Grimm and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.282" id="Page_i.282">[i.282]</a></span> Diderot of some sixteen pounds a year.<a name="FNanchor303"></a><a href="#Footnote_303">[303]</a> Rousseau was
+unaware of this, but the whisperings and goings and comings to
+which it gave rise, made him darkly uneasy. That the suspicions in
+other respects were in a certain sense not wholly unfounded, is
+shown by Grimm's own letters to Madame d'Epinay. He disapproved of
+her installing Rousseau in the Hermitage, and warned her in a very
+remarkable prophecy that solitude would darken his
+imagination.<a name="FNanchor304"></a><a href="#Footnote_304">[304]</a> &quot;He is a poor devil who torments
+himself, and does not dare to confess the true subject of all his
+sufferings, which is in his cursed head and his pride; he raises up
+imaginary matters, so as to have the pleasure of complaining of the
+whole human race.&quot;<a name="FNanchor305"></a><a href="#Footnote_305">[305]</a> More than once he assures her that
+Rousseau will end by going mad, it being impossible that so hot and
+ill-organised a head should endure solitude.<a name="FNanchor306"></a><a href="#Footnote_306">[306]</a> Rousseauite
+partisans usually explain all this by supposing that Grimm was
+eager to set a woman for whom he had a passion, against a man who
+was suspected of having a passion for her; and it is possible that
+jealousy may have stimulated the exercise of his natural
+shrewdness. But this shrewdness, added to entire want of
+imagination and a very narrow range of sympathy, was quite enough
+to account for Grimm's harsh judgment, without the addition of any
+sinister sentiment. He was perfectly right in suspecting Rousseau
+of want of loyalty to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.283" id="Page_i.283">[i.283]</a></span> Madame d'Epinay, for we find our hermit
+writing to her in strains of perfect intimacy, while he was writing
+of her to Madame d'Houdetot as &quot;your unworthy sister.&quot;<a name="FNanchor307"></a><a href="#Footnote_307">[307]</a> On the other
+hand, while Madame d'Epinay was overwhelming him with caressing
+phrases, she was at the same moment describing him to Grimm as a
+master of impertinence and intractableness. As usual where there is
+radical incompatibility of character, an attempted reconciliation
+between Grimm and Rousseau (some time in the early part of October
+1757) had only made the thinly veiled antipathy more resolute.
+Rousseau excused himself for wrongs of which in his heart he never
+thought himself guilty. Grimm replied by a discourse on the virtues
+of friendship and his own special aptitude for practising them. He
+then conceded to the impetuous penitent the kiss of peace, in a
+slight embrace which was like the accolade given by a monarch to
+new knights.<a name="FNanchor308"></a><a href="#Footnote_308">[308]</a> The whole scene is ignoble. We seem to
+be watching an unclean cauldron, with Theresa's mother, a cringing
+and babbling crone, standing witch-like over it and infusing
+suspicion, falsehood, and malice. When minds are thus surcharged,
+any accident suffices to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.284" id="Page_i.284">[i.284]</a></span> release the evil creatures that lurk in an
+irritated imagination.</p>
+<p>One day towards the end of the autumn of 1757, Rousseau learned
+to his unbounded surprise that Madame d'Epinay had been seized with
+some strange disorder, which made it advisable that she should
+start without any delay for Geneva, there to place herself under
+the care of Tronchin, who was at that time the most famous doctor
+in Europe. His surprise was greatly increased by the expectation
+which he found among his friends that he would show his gratitude
+for her many kindnesses to him, by offering to bear her company on
+her journey, and during her stay in a town which was strange to her
+and thoroughly familiar to him. It was to no purpose that he
+protested how unfit was one invalid to be the nurse of another; and
+how great an incumbrance a man would be in a coach in the bad
+season, when for many days he was absolutely unable to leave his
+chamber without danger. Diderot, with his usual eagerness to guide
+a friend's course, wrote him a letter urging that his many
+obligations, and even his grievances in respect of Madame d'Epinay,
+bound him to accompany her, as he would thus repay the one and
+console himself for the other. &quot;She is going into a country where
+she will be like one fallen from the clouds. She is ill; she will
+need amusement and distraction. As for winter, are you worse now
+than you were a month back, or than you will be at the opening of
+the spring? For me, I confess that if I could not bear the coach, I<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.285" id="Page_i.285">[i.285]</a></span>
+would take a staff and follow her on foot.&quot;<a name="FNanchor309"></a><a href="#Footnote_309">[309]</a> Rousseau
+trembled with fury, and as soon as the transport was over, he wrote
+an indignant reply, in which he more or less politely bade the
+panurgic one to attend to his own affairs, and hinted that Grimm
+was making a tool of him. Next he wrote to Grimm himself a letter,
+not unfriendly in form, asking his advice and promising to follow
+it, but hardly hiding his resentment. By this time he had found out
+the secret of Madame d'Epinay's supposed illness and her anxiety to
+pass some months away from her family, and the share which Grimm
+had in it. This, however, does not make many passages of his letter
+any the less ungracious or unseemly. &quot;If Madame d'Epinay has shown
+friend' ship to me, I have shown more to her.... As for benefits,
+first of all I do not like them, I do not want them, and I owe no
+thanks for any that people may burden me with by force. Madame
+d'Epinay, being so often left alone in the country, wished me for
+company; it was for that she had kept me. After making one
+sacrifice to friendship, I must now make another to gratitude. A
+man must be poor, must be without a servant, must be a hater of
+constraint, and he must have my character, before he can know what
+it is for me to live in another person's house. For all that, I
+lived two years in hers, constantly brought into bondage with the
+finest harangues about liberty, served by twenty domestics, and
+cleaning my own shoes every morning, overloaded with gloomy
+indigestion, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.286" id="Page_i.286">[i.286]</a></span> incessantly sighing for my homely porringer....
+Consider how much money an hour of the life and the time of a man
+is worth; compare the kindnesses of Madame d'Epinay with the
+sacrifice of my native country and two years of serfdom; and then
+tell me whether the obligation is greater on her side or mine.&quot; He
+then urges with a torrent of impetuous eloquence the thoroughly
+sound reasons why it was unfair and absurd for him, a beggar and an
+invalid, to make the journey with Madame d'Epinay, rich and
+surrounded by attendants. He is particularly splenetic that the
+philosopher Diderot, sitting in his own room before a good fire and
+wrapped in a well-lined dressing-gown, should insist on his doing
+his five and twenty leagues a day on foot, through the mud in
+winter.<a name="FNanchor310"></a><a href="#Footnote_310">[310]</a></p>
+<p>The whole letter shows, as so many incidents in his later life
+showed, how difficult it was to do Rousseau a kindness with
+impunity, and how little such friends as Madame d'Epinay possessed
+the art of soothing this unfortunate nature. They fretted him by
+not leaving him sufficiently free to follow his own changing moods,
+while he in turn lost all self-control, and yielded in hours of
+bodily torment to angry and resentful fancies. But let us hasten to
+an end. Grimm replied to his eloquent manifesto somewhat drily, to
+the effect that he would think the matter over, and that meanwhile
+Rousseau had best keep quiet in his hermitage. Rousseau burning
+with excitement at once conceived a thousand suspicions, wholly
+unable to understand that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.287" id="Page_i.287">[i.287]</a></span> a cold and reserved German might choose
+to deliberate at length, and finally give an answer with brevity.
+&quot;After centuries of expectation in the cruel uncertainty in which
+this barbarous man had plunged me&quot;&#8212;that is after eight or ten
+days, the answer came, apparently not without a second direct
+application for one.<a name="FNanchor311"></a><a href="#Footnote_311">[311]</a> It was short and extremely pointed, not
+complaining that Rousseau had refused to accompany Madame d'Epinay
+but protesting against the horrible tone of the apology which he
+had sent to him for not accompanying her. &quot;It has made me quiver
+with indignation; so odious are the principles it contains, so full
+is it of blackness and duplicity. You venture to talk to me of your
+slavery, to me who for more than two years have been the daily
+witness of all the marks of the tenderest and most generous
+friendship that you have received at the hands of that woman. If I
+could pardon you, I should think myself unworthy of having a single
+friend. I will never see you again while I live, and I shall think
+myself happy if I can banish the recollection of your conduct from
+my mind.&quot;<a name="FNanchor312"></a><a href="#Footnote_312">[312]</a> A flash of manly anger like this is
+very welcome to us, who have to thread a tedious way between morbid
+egoistic irritation on the one hand, and sly pieces of equivocal
+complaisance on the other. The effect on Rousseau was terrific. In
+a paroxysm he sent Grimm's letter back to him, with three or four
+lines in the same key. He<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.288" id="Page_i.288">[i.288]</a></span> wrote note after note to Madame
+d'Houdetot, in shrieks. &quot;Have I a single friend left, man or woman?
+One word, only one word, and I can live.&quot; A day or two later:
+&quot;Think of the state I am in. I can bear to be abandoned by all the
+world, but you! You who know me so well! Great God! am I a
+scoundrel? a scoundrel, I!&quot;<a name="FNanchor313"></a><a href="#Footnote_313">[313]</a> And so on, raving. It was to no purpose
+that Madame d'Houdetot wrote him soothing letters, praying him to
+calm himself, to find something to busy himself with, to remain at
+peace with Madame d'Epinay, &quot;who had never appeared other than the
+most thoughtful and warm-hearted friend to him.&quot;<a name="FNanchor314"></a><a href="#Footnote_314">[314]</a> He was almost
+ready to quarrel with Madame d'Houdetot herself because she paid
+the postage of her letters, which he counted an affront to his
+poverty.<a name="FNanchor315"></a><a href="#Footnote_315">[315]</a>
+To Madame d'Epinay he had written in the midst of his tormenting
+uncertainty as to the answer which Grimm would make to his letter.
+It was an ungainly assertion that she was playing a game of tyranny
+and intrigue at his cost. For the first time she replied with
+spirit and warmth. &quot;Your letter is hardly that of a man who, on the
+eve of my departure, swore to me that he could never in his life
+repair the wrongs he had done<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.289" id="Page_i.289">[i.289]</a></span> me.&quot; She then tersely remarks that it
+is not natural to pass one's life in suspecting and insulting one's
+friends, and that he abuses her patience. To this he answered with
+still greater terseness that friendship was extinct between them,
+and that he meant to leave the Hermitage, but as his friends
+desired him to remain there until the spring he would with her
+permission follow their counsel. Then she, with a final thrust of
+impatience, in which we perhaps see the hand of Grimm: &quot;Since you
+meant to leave the Hermitage, and felt you ought to do so, I am
+astonished that your friends could detain you. For me, I don't
+consult mine as to my duties, and I have nothing more to say to you
+as to yours.&quot; This was the end. Rousseau returned for a moment from
+ignoble petulance to dignity and self-respect. He wrote to her that
+if it is a misfortune to make a mistake in the choice of friends,
+it is one not less cruel to awake from so sweet an error, and two
+days before he wrote, he left her house. He found a cottage at
+Montmorency, and thither, nerved with fury, through snow and ice he
+carried his scanty household goods (Dec. 15, 1757).<a name="FNanchor316"></a><a href="#Footnote_316">[316]</a></p>
+<p>We have a picture of him in this fatal month. Diderot went to
+pay him a visit (Dec. 5). Rousseau was alone at the bottom of his
+garden. As soon as he saw Diderot, he cried in a voice of thunder
+and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.290" id="Page_i.290">[i.290]</a></span> with his eyes all aflame: &quot;What have you come here for?&quot; &quot;I
+want to know whether you are mad or malicious.&quot; &quot;You have known me
+for fifteen years; you are well aware how little malicious I am,
+and I will prove to you that I am not mad: follow me.&quot; He then drew
+Diderot into a room, and proceeded to clear himself, by means of
+letters, of the charge of trying to make a breach between Saint
+Lambert and Madame d'Houdetot. They were in fact letters that
+convicted him, as we know, of trying to persuade Madame d'Houdetot
+of the criminality of her relations with her lover, and at the same
+time to accept himself in the very same relation. Of all this we
+have heard more than enough already. He was stubborn in the face of
+Diderot's remonstrance, and the latter left him in a state which he
+described in a letter to Grimm the same night. &quot;I throw myself into
+your arms, like one who has had a shock of fright: that man
+intrudes into my work; he fills me with trouble, and I am as if I
+had a damned soul at my side. May I never see him again; he would
+make me believe in devils and hell.&quot;<a name="FNanchor317"></a><a href="#Footnote_317">[317]</a> And thus the
+unhappy man who had began this episode in his life with confident
+ecstasy in the glories and clear music of spring, ended it looking
+out from a narrow chamber upon the sullen crimson of the wintry
+twilight and over fields silent in snow, with the haggard desperate
+gaze of a lost spirit.</p>
+<p>&#160;</p>
+<p><b>FOOTNOTES:</b></p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_254"></a><a href="#FNanchor254">[254]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i>, ix. 247.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_255"></a><a href="#FNanchor255">[255]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i>, ix. 230. Madame d'Epinay (<i>M&#233;m.</i>, ii.
+132) has given an account of the installation, with a slight
+discrepancy of date. When Madame d'Epinay's son-in-law emigrated at
+the Revolution, the Hermitage&#8212;of which nothing now stands&#8212;along
+with the rest of the estate became national property, and was
+bought after other purchasers by Robespierre, and afterwards by
+Gr&#233;try the composer, who paid 10,000 livres for it.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_256"></a><a href="#FNanchor256">[256]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i>, ix. 255.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_257"></a><a href="#FNanchor257">[257]</a>
+Third letter to Malesherbes, 364-368.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_258"></a><a href="#FNanchor258">[258]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i>, ix. 239.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_259"></a><a href="#FNanchor259">[259]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i>, ix. 237, 238, and 263, etc.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_260"></a><a href="#FNanchor260">[260]</a> The
+extract from the Project for Perpetual Peace and the Polysynodia,
+together with Rousseau's judgments on them, are found at the end of
+the volume containing the Social Contract. The first, but without
+the judgment, was printed separately without Rousseau's permission,
+in 1761, by Bastide, to whom he had sold it for twelve louis for
+publication in his journal only. <i>Conf.</i>, xi. 107.
+<i>Corr.</i>, ii. 110, 128.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_261"></a><a href="#FNanchor261">[261]</a> P.
+485.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_262"></a><a href="#FNanchor262">[262]</a> For
+a sympathetic account of the Abb&#233; de Saint Pierre's life and
+speculations, see M. L&#233;once de Lavergne's <i>Economistes
+fran&#231;ais du 18i&#232;me si&#232;cle</i> (Paris: 1870).
+Also Comte's <i>Lettres &#224; M. Valat</i>, p. 73.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_263"></a><a href="#FNanchor263">[263]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i>, ix. 270-274.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_264"></a><a href="#FNanchor264">[264]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i>, ix. 289.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_265"></a><a href="#FNanchor265">[265]</a>
+<i>Ib.</i> ix. 286.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_266"></a><a href="#FNanchor266">[266]</a>
+D'Epinay, ii. 153.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_267"></a><a href="#FNanchor267">[267]</a>
+Madame d'Houdetot, (<i>b.</i> 1730&#8212;<i>d.</i> 1813) was the
+daughter of M. de Bellegarde, the father of Madame d'Epinay's
+husband. Her marriage with the Count d'Houdetot, of high Norman
+stock, took place in 1748. The circumstances of the marriage, which
+help to explain the lax view of the vows common among the great
+people of the time, are given with perhaps a shade too much
+dramatic colouring in Madame d'Epinay's <i>M&#233;m.</i>, i
+101.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_268"></a><a href="#FNanchor268">[268]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i>, ix. 281.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_269"></a><a href="#FNanchor269">[269]</a>
+D'Epinay, ii. 246.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_270"></a><a href="#FNanchor270">[270]</a>
+D'Epinay, ii. 269.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_271"></a><a href="#FNanchor271">[271]</a>
+Musset-Pathay has collected two or three trifles of her
+composition, ii. 136-138. Heal so quotes Madame d'Allard's account
+of her, pp. 140, 141.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_272"></a><a href="#FNanchor272">[272]</a>
+Quoted by M. Girardin, <i>Rev. des Deux Mondes</i>, Sept. 1853, p.
+1080.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_273"></a><a href="#FNanchor273">[273]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i>, ix. 304.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_274"></a><a href="#FNanchor274">[274]</a>
+<i>Ib.</i> ix. 305. Slightly modified version in <i>Corr.</i>, i.
+377.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_275"></a><a href="#FNanchor275">[275]</a> M.
+Boiteau's note to Madame d'Epinay, ii. 273.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_276"></a><a href="#FNanchor276">[276]</a>
+Grimm, to Madame d'Epinay, ii. 305.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_277"></a><a href="#FNanchor277">[277]</a> This
+is shown partly by Saint Lambert's letter to Rousseau, to which we
+come presently, and partly by a letter of Madame d'Houdetot to
+Rousseau in May, 1758 (Streckeisen-Moultou, i. 411-413), where she
+distinctly says that she concealed his mad passion for her from
+Saint Lambert, who first heard of it in common conversation.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_278"></a><a href="#FNanchor278">[278]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i>, ix. 311.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_279"></a><a href="#FNanchor279">[279]</a>
+Besides the many hints of reference to this in the Confessions, see
+the phrenetic Letters to Sarah, printed in the
+<i>M&#233;langes</i>, pp. 347-360.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_280"></a><a href="#FNanchor280">[280]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i>, ix. 337.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_281"></a><a href="#FNanchor281">[281]</a>
+<i>Corr.</i>, i. 398. Sept. 4, 1757.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_282"></a><a href="#FNanchor282">[282]</a> To
+Madame d'Houdetot. <i>Corr.</i>, i. 376-387. June 1757.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_283"></a><a href="#FNanchor283">[283]</a>
+Saint Lambert to Rousseau, from Wolfenbuttel, Oct. 11, 1757.
+Streckeisen-Moultou, i. 415.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_284"></a><a href="#FNanchor284">[284]</a>
+These letters are given in M. Streckeisen-Moultou's first volume
+(pp. 354-414). The thirty-second of them (Jan. 10, 1758) is perhaps
+the one best worth turning to.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_285"></a><a href="#FNanchor285">[285]</a>
+Streckeisen-Moultou, i. 412. May 6, 1768. <i>Conf.</i>, x. 15.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_286"></a><a href="#FNanchor286">[286]</a>
+<i>Ib.</i> x. 22.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_287"></a><a href="#FNanchor287">[287]</a>
+<i>Ib.</i> x. 18. Streckeisen, i. 422.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_288"></a><a href="#FNanchor288">[288]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i>, x. 24.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_289"></a><a href="#FNanchor289">[289]</a> To
+Madame d'Epinay, 1757. <i>Corr.</i>, i. 362, 353. See also
+<i>Conf.</i>, ix. 307.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_290"></a><a href="#FNanchor290">[290]</a> One
+of the most unflinching in this kind is an <i>Essai sur la vie et
+le caract&#232;re de J.J. Rousseau</i>, by G.H. Morin (Paris:
+1851): the laborious production of a bitter advocate, who accepts
+the Confessions, Dialogues, Letters, etc., with the reverence due
+to verbal inspiration, and writes of everybody who offended his
+hero, quite in the vein of Marat towards aristocrats.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_291"></a><a href="#FNanchor291">[291]</a>
+<i>Corr.</i>, i. 327-335. D'Epinay, ii. 165-182</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_292"></a><a href="#FNanchor292">[292]</a>
+D'Epinay, ii. 173.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_293"></a><a href="#FNanchor293">[293]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i>, ix. 325.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_294"></a><a href="#FNanchor294">[294]</a>
+<i>Ib.</i>, ix. 334.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_295"></a><a href="#FNanchor295">[295]</a>
+<i>M&#233;m.</i>, ii. 297. She also places the date many mouths
+later than Rousseau, and detaches the reconciliation from the
+quarrel in the winter of 1756-1757.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_296"></a><a href="#FNanchor296">[296]</a> The
+same story is referred to in Madame de Vandeul's <i>M&#233;m. de
+Diderot,</i> p. 61.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_297"></a><a href="#FNanchor297">[297]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i>, ix. 245, 246.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_298"></a><a href="#FNanchor298">[298]</a>
+Grimm to Madame d'Epinay, ii. 259, 269, 313, 326. <i>Conf.</i>, x.
+17.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_299"></a><a href="#FNanchor299">[299]</a>
+<i>M&#233;m.</i>, ii. 318.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_300"></a><a href="#FNanchor300">[300]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i>, ix. 322. Madame d'Epinay (<i>M&#233;m.</i>, ii.
+326), writing to Grimm, gives a much colder and stiffer colour to
+the scene of reconciliation, but the nature of her relations with
+him would account for this. The same circumstance, as M. Girardin
+has pointed out (<i>Rev. des Deux Mondes</i>, Sept. 1853), would
+explain the discrepancy between her letters as given in the
+Confessions, and the copies of them sent to Grimm, and printed in
+her Memoirs. M. Sainte Beuve, who is never perfectly master of
+himself in dealing with the chiefs of the revolutionary schools, as
+might indeed have been expected in a writer with his predilections
+for the seventeenth century, rashly hints (<i>Causeries</i>, vii.
+301) that Rousseau was the falsifier. The publication from the
+autograph originals sets this at rest.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_301"></a><a href="#FNanchor301">[301]</a> For
+Shakespeare, see <i>Corr. Lit.</i>, iv. 143, etc.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_302"></a><a href="#FNanchor302">[302]</a>
+D'Epinay, ii. 188.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_303"></a><a href="#FNanchor303">[303]</a>
+D'Epinay, ii. 150. Also Vandeul's <i>M&#233;m. de Diderot</i>, p.
+61.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_304"></a><a href="#FNanchor304">[304]</a>
+<i>M&#233;m.</i> ii. 128.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_305"></a><a href="#FNanchor305">[305]</a> P.
+258. See also p. 146.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_306"></a><a href="#FNanchor306">[306]</a> Pp.
+282, 336, etc.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_307"></a><a href="#FNanchor307">[307]</a>
+<i>Corr.</i>, i. 386. June 1757.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_308"></a><a href="#FNanchor308">[308]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i>, ix. 355. For Madame d'Epinay's equally credible
+version, assigning all the stiffness and arrogance to Rousseau, see
+<i>M&#233;m.</i>, ii. 355-358. Saint Lambert refers to the
+momentary reconciliation in his letter to Rousseau of Nov. 21
+(Streckeisen, i. 418), repeating what he had said before (p. 417),
+that Grimm always spoke of Mm in amicable terms, though complaining
+of Rousseau's injustice.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_309"></a><a href="#FNanchor309">[309]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i>, ix. 372.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_310"></a><a href="#FNanchor310">[310]</a>
+<i>Corr.</i>, i. 404-416. Oct 19, 1757.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_311"></a><a href="#FNanchor311">[311]</a>
+Grimm to Diderot, in Madame d'Epinay's <i>M&#233;m.</i> ii. 386.
+Nov. 3, 1757.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_312"></a><a href="#FNanchor312">[312]</a>
+D'Epinay, ii. 387. Nov. 3.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_313"></a><a href="#FNanchor313">[313]</a>
+<i>Corr.</i>, i. 425. Nov. 8. <i>Ib.</i> 426.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_314"></a><a href="#FNanchor314">[314]</a>
+Streckeisen-Moultou, i. 381-383.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_315"></a><a href="#FNanchor315">[315]</a>
+<i>Ib.</i> 387. Many years after, Rousseau told Bernardin de St.
+Pierre (<i>Oeuv.</i>, xii. 57) that one of the reasons which made
+him leave the Hermitage was the indiscretion of friends who
+insisted on sending him letters by some conveyance that cost 4
+francs, when it might equally well have been sent for as many
+sous.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_316"></a><a href="#FNanchor316">[316]</a> The
+sources of all this are in the following places. <i>Corr.</i>, i.
+416. Oct. 29. Streckeisen, i. 349. Nov. 12. <i>Conf.</i>, ix. 377.
+<i>Corr.</i>, i. 427. Nov. 23. <i>Conf.</i>, ix. 381. Dec. 1.
+<i>Ib.</i>, ix. 383. Dec. 17.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_317"></a><a href="#FNanchor317">[317]</a>
+Diderot to Grimm; D'Epinay, ii. 397. Diderot's <i>Oeuv.</i>, xix.
+446. See also 449 and 210.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.291" id="Page_i.291">[i.291]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VIII."></a>CHAPTER VIII.</h2>
+<h3>MUSIC.</h3>
+<p><span class="smcap">Simplification</span> has already been used by us as the key-word to
+Rousseau's aims and influence. The scheme of musical notation with
+which he came to try his fortune in Paris in 1741, his published
+vindication of it, and his musical compositions afterwards all fall
+under this term. Each of them was a plea for the extrication of the
+simple from the cumbrousness of elaborated pedantry, and for a
+return to nature from the unmeaning devices of false art. And all
+tended alike in the popular direction, towards the extension of
+enjoyment among the common people, and the glorification of their
+simple lives and moods, in the art designed for the great.</p>
+<p>The Village Soothsayer was one of the group of works which
+marked a revolution in the history of French music, by putting an
+end to the tyrannical tradition of Lulli and Rameau, and preparing
+the way through a middle stage of freshness, simplicity,
+naturalism, up to the noble severity of Gluck (1714-1787). This
+great composer, though a Bohemian by birth, found his first
+appreciation in a public that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.292" id="Page_i.292">[i.292]</a></span> had been trained by the Italian
+pastoral operas, of which Rousseau's was one of the earliest
+produced in France. Gr&#233;tri, the Fleming (1741-1813), who had
+a hearty admiration for Jean Jacques, and out of a sentiment of
+piety lived for a time in his Hermitage, came in point of musical
+excellence between the group of Rousseau, Philidor, Duni, and the
+rest, and Gluck. &quot;I have not produced exaltation in people's heads
+by tragical superlative,&quot; Gr&#233;tri said, &quot;but I have revealed
+the accent of truth, which I have impressed deeper in men's
+hearts.&quot;<a name="FNanchor318"></a><a href="#Footnote_318">[318]</a>
+These words express sufficiently the kind of influence which
+Rousseau also had. Crude as the music sounds to us who are
+accustomed to more sumptuous schools, we can still hear in it the
+note which would strike a generation weary of Rameau. It was the
+expression in one way of the same mood which in another way
+revolted against paint, false hair, and preposterous costume as of
+savages grown opulent. Such music seems without passion or subtlety
+or depth or magnificence. Thus it had hardly any higher than a
+negative merit, but it was the necessary preparation for the
+acceptance of a more positive style, that should replace both the
+elaborate false art of the older French composers and the too
+colourless realism of the pastoral comic opera, by the austere
+loveliness and elevation of <i>Orfeo</i> and <i>Alceste</i>.</p>
+<p>In 1752 an Italian company visited Paris, and performed at the
+Opera a number of pieces by Pergolese, and other composers of their
+country. A<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.293" id="Page_i.293">[i.293]</a></span> violent war arose, which agitated Paris far more
+intensely than the defeat of Rossbach and the loss of Canada did
+afterwards. The quarrel between the Parliament and the Clergy was
+at its height. The Parliament had just been exiled, and the gravest
+confusion threatened the State. The operatic quarrel turned the
+excitement of the capital into another channel. Things went so far
+that the censor was entreated to prohibit the printing of any work
+containing the damnable doctrine and position that Italian music is
+good. Rousseau took part enthusiastically with the Italians.<a name="FNanchor319"></a><a href="#Footnote_319">[319]</a> His Letter on
+French Music (1753) proved to the great fury of the people
+concerned, that the French had no national music, and that it would
+be so much the worse for them if they ever had any. Their language,
+so proper to be the organ of truth and reason, was radically unfit
+either for poetry or music. All national music must derive its
+principal characteristics from the language. Now if there is a
+language in Europe fit for music, it is certainly the Italian, for
+it is sweet, sonorous, harmonious, and more accentuated than any
+other, and these are precisely the four qualities which adapt a
+language to singing. It is sweet because the articulations are not
+composite, because the meeting of consonants is both infrequent and
+soft, and because a great number of the syllables being only formed
+of vowels, frequent elisions make its pronunciation more flowing.
+It is sonorous because most of the vowels<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.294" id="Page_i.294">[i.294]</a></span> are full, because it is
+without composite diphthongs, because it has few or no nasal
+vowels. Again, the inversions of the Italian are far more
+favourable to true melody than the didactic order of French. And so
+onwards, with much close grappling of the matter. French melody
+does not exist; it is only a sort of modulated plain-song which has
+nothing agreeable in itself, which only pleases with the aid of a
+few capricious ornaments, and then only pleases those who have
+agreed to find it beautiful.<a name="FNanchor320"></a><a href="#Footnote_320">[320]</a></p>
+<p>The letter contains a variety of acute remarks upon music, and
+includes a vigorous protest against fugues, imitations, double
+designs, and the like. Scarcely any one succeeds in them, and
+success even when obtained hardly rewards the labour. As for
+counterfugues, double fugues, and &quot;other difficult fooleries that
+the ear cannot endure nor the reason justify,&quot; they are evidently
+relics of barbarism and bad taste which only remain, like the
+porticoes of our gothic churches, to the disgrace of those who had
+patience enough to construct them.<a name="FNanchor321"></a><a href="#Footnote_321">[321]</a> The last phrase-and both Voltaire and
+Turgot used gothic architecture as the symbol for the supreme of
+rudeness and barbarism&#8212;shows that even a man who seems to run
+counter to the whole current of his time yet does not escape its
+influence.</p>
+<p>Grimm, after remarking on the singularity of a demonstration of
+the impossibility of setting melody<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.295" id="Page_i.295">[i.295]</a></span> to French words on the part of
+a writer who had just produced the Village Soothsayer, informs us
+that the letter created a furious uproar, and set all Paris in a
+blaze. He had himself taken the side of the Italians in an amusing
+piece of pleasantry, which became a sort of classic model for
+similar facetiousness in other controversies of the century. The
+French, as he said, forgive everything in favour of what makes them
+laugh, but Rousseau talked reason and demolished the pretensions of
+French music with great sounding strokes as of an axe.<a name="FNanchor322"></a><a href="#Footnote_322">[322]</a> Rousseau
+expected to be assassinated, and gravely assures us that there was
+a plot to that effect, as well as a design to put him in the
+Bastille. This we may fairly surmise to have been a fiction of his
+own imagination, and the only real punishment that overtook him was
+the loss of his right to free admission to the Opera. After what he
+had said of the intolerable horrors of French music, the directors
+of the theatre can hardly be accused of vindictiveness in releasing
+him from them.<a name="FNanchor323"></a><a href="#Footnote_323">[323]</a> Some twenty years after (1774), when
+Paris was torn asunder by the violence of the two great factions of
+the Gluckists and Piccinists, Rousseau retracted his opinion as to
+the impossibility of wedding melody to French words.<a name="FNanchor324"></a><a href="#Footnote_324">[324]</a><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.296" id="Page_i.296">[i.296]</a></span> He went as
+often as he could to hear the works both of Gr&#233;tri and
+Gluck, and <i>Orfeo</i> delighted him, while the <i>Fausse
+magie</i> of the former moved him to say to the composer, &quot;Your
+music stirs sweet sensations to which I thought my heart had long
+been closed.&quot;<a name="FNanchor325"></a><a href="#Footnote_325">[325]</a> This being so, and life being as brief
+as art is long, we need not further examine the controversy. It may
+be worth adding that Rousseau wrote some of the articles on music
+for the Encyclop&#230;dia, and that in 1767 he published a not
+inconsiderable Musical Dictionary of his own.</p>
+<p>His scheme of a new musical notation and the principles on which
+he defended it are worth attention, because some of the ideas are
+now accepted as the base of a well-known and growing system of
+musical instruction. The aim of the scheme, let us say to begin
+with, was at once practical and popular; to reduce the difficulty
+of learning music to the lowest possible point, and so to bring the
+most delightful of the arts within the reach of the largest
+possible number of people. Hence, although he maintains the fitness
+of his scheme for instrumental as well as vocal<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.297" id="Page_i.297">[i.297]</a></span> performances, it is
+clearly the latter which he has most at heart, evidently for the
+reason that this is the kind of music most accessible to the
+thousands, and it was always the thousands of whom Rousseau
+thought. This is the true distinction of music, it is for the
+people; and the best musical notation is that which best enables
+persons to sing at sight. The difficulty of the old notation had
+come practically before him as a teacher. The quantity of details
+which the pupil was forced to commit to memory before being able to
+sing from the open book, struck him then as the chief obstacle to
+anything like facility in performance, and without some of this
+facility he rightly felt that music must remain a luxury for the
+few. So genuine was his interest in the matter, that he was not
+very careful to fight for the originality of his own scheme. Our
+present musical signs, he said, are so imperfect and so
+inconvenient that it is no wonder that several persons have tried
+to re-cast or amend them; nor is it any wonder that some of them
+should have hit upon the same device in selecting the signs most
+natural and proper, such as numerical figures. As much, however,
+depends on the way of dealing with these figures, as with their
+adoption, and here he submitted that his own plan was as novel as
+it was advantageous.<a name="FNanchor326"></a><a href="#Footnote_326">[326]</a> Thus we have to bear in mind that
+Rousseau's scheme was above all things a practical device,
+contrived for making the teach<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.298" id="Page_i.298">[i.298]</a></span>ing and the learning of musical
+elements an easier process.<a name="FNanchor327"></a><a href="#Footnote_327">[327]</a></p>
+<p>The chief element of the project consists in the substitution of
+a relative series of notes or symbols in place of an absolute
+series. In the common notation any given note, say the A of the
+treble clef, is uniformly represented by the same symbol, namely,
+the position of second space in the clef, whatever key it may
+belong to. Rousseau, insisting on the varying quality impressed on
+any tone of a given pitch by the key-note of the scale to which it
+belongs, protested against the same name being given to the tone,
+however the quality of it might vary. Thus Re or D, which is the
+second tone in the key of C, ought, according to him, to have a
+different name when found as the fifth in the key of G, and in
+every case the name should at once indicate the interval of a tone
+from its key-note. His mode of effecting this change is as follows.
+The names <i>ut, re</i>, and the rest, are kept for the fixed order
+of the tones, C, D, E, and the rest. The key of a piece is shown by
+prefixing one of these symbols, and this determines the absolute
+quality of the melody as to pitch. That settled, every tone is
+expressed by a number bearing a relation to the key-note. This
+tonic note is represented by one, the other six tones of the scale
+are expressed by the numbers from two to seven. In the popular
+Tonic<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.299" id="Page_i.299">[i.299]</a></span> Sol-Fa notation, which corresponds so closely to Rousseau's
+in principle, the key-note is always styled Do, and the other
+symbols, <i>mi</i>, <i>la</i>, and the rest, indicate at once the
+relative position of these tones in their particular key or scale.
+Here the old names were preserved as being easily sung; Rousseau
+selected numbers because he supposed that they best expressed the
+generation of the sounds.<a name="FNanchor328"></a><a href="#Footnote_328">[328]</a></p>
+<p>Rousseau attempted to find a theoretic base for this symbolic
+establishment of the relational quality of tones, and he dimly
+guessed that the order of the harmonics or upper tones of a given
+tonic would furnish a principle for forming the familiar major
+scale,<a name="FNanchor329"></a><a href="#Footnote_329">[329]</a>
+but his knowledge of the order was faulty. He was perhaps groping
+after the idea by which Professor Helmholtz has accounted for the
+various mental effects of the several intervals in a key&#8212;namely,
+the degree of natural affinity, measured by means of the upper
+tones, existing between the given tone and its tonic. Apart from
+this, however, the practical value of his ideas in instruction in
+singing is clearly shown by the circumstance that at any given time
+many thousands of young children are now being taught to read
+melody in the Sol-Fa notation in a few weeks. This shows how right
+Rousseau was in continually declaring the ease of hitting a
+particular tone, when the relative position of the tone in respect
+to the key-note is clearly manifested. A singer in trying to hit
+the tone is compelled to measure the interval<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.300" id="Page_i.300">[i.300]</a></span> between it and the
+preceding tone, and the simplest and easiest mode of doing this is
+to associate every tone with the tonics, thus constituting it a
+term of a relation with this fundamental tone.</p>
+<p>Rousseau made a mistake when he supposed that his ideas were
+just as applicable to instrumental as they were to vocal music. The
+requirements of the singer are not those of the player. To a
+performer on the piano, who has to light rapidly and simultaneously
+on a number of tones, or to a violinist who has to leap through
+several octaves with great rapidity, the most urgent need is that
+of a definite and fixed mark, by which the absolute pitch of each
+successive tone may be at once recognised. Neither of these has any
+time to think about the melodious relation of the tones; it is
+quite as much as they can do to find their place on the key-board
+or the string. Rousseau's scheme, or any similar one, fails to
+supply the clear and obvious index to pitch supplied by the old
+system. Old Rameau pointed this out to Rousseau when the scheme was
+laid before him, and Rousseau admitted that the objection was
+decisive,<a name="FNanchor330"></a><a href="#Footnote_330">[330]</a> though his admission was not practically
+deterrent.</p>
+<p>His device for expressing change of octave by means of points
+would render the rapid seizing of a particular tone by the
+performer still more difficult, and it is strange that he should
+have preferred this to the other plan suggested, of indicating
+height of octave by visible place above or below a horizontal<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.301" id="Page_i.301">[i.301]</a></span> line.
+Again, his attempt to simplify the many varieties of musical time
+by reducing them all to the two modes of double and triple time,
+though laudable enough, yet implies an imperfect recognition of the
+full meaning of time, by omitting all reference to the distribution
+of accent and to the average time value of the tones in a
+particular movement.</p>
+<p>&#160;</p>
+<p><b>FOOTNOTES:</b></p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_318"></a><a href="#FNanchor318">[318]</a>
+Quoted in Martin's <i>Hist. de France</i>, xvi. 158.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_319"></a><a href="#FNanchor319">[319]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i>, viii. 197. Grimm, <i>Corr. Lit.</i>, i. 27.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_320"></a><a href="#FNanchor320">[320]</a>
+<i>Lettre sur la Musique Fran&#231;aise</i>, 178, etc., 187.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_321"></a><a href="#FNanchor321">[321]</a> P.
+197.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_322"></a><a href="#FNanchor322">[322]</a>
+<i>Corr. Lit.</i>, i. 92. His own piece was <i>Le petit
+proph&#232;te de Boehmischbroda</i>, the style of which will be
+seen in a subsequent footnote.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_323"></a><a href="#FNanchor323">[323]</a> He
+was burnt in effigy by the musicians of the Opera. Grimm, <i>Corr.
+Lit.</i>, i. 113.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_324"></a><a href="#FNanchor324">[324]</a> This
+is Turgot's opinion on the controversy (Letter to Caillard,
+<i>Oeuv.</i>, ii. 827):&#8212;&quot;Tous avez donc vu Jean-Jacques; la
+musique est un excellent passe-port aupr&#232;s de lui. Quant
+&#224; l'impossibilit&#233; de faire de la musique
+fran&#231;aise, je ne puis y croire, et votre raison ne me
+para&#238;t pas bonne; car il n'est point vrai que l'essence de la
+langue fran&#231;aise est d'&#234;tre sans accent. Point de
+conversation anim&#233;e sans beaucoup d'accent; mais l'accent
+est libre et d&#233;termin&#233; seulement par l'affection de
+celui qui parle, sans &#234;tre fix&#233; par des conventions
+sur certaines syllabes, quoique nous ayons aussi dans plusieurs
+mots des syllabes dominantes qui seules peuvent &#234;tre
+accentu&#233;es.&quot;</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_325"></a><a href="#FNanchor325">[325]</a>
+Musset-Pathay, i. 289.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_326"></a><a href="#FNanchor326">[326]</a>
+Preface to <i>Dissertation sur la Musique Moderne</i>, pp. 32,
+33.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_327"></a><a href="#FNanchor327">[327]</a> I am
+indebted to Mr. James Sully, M.A., for furnishing me with notes on
+a technical subject with which I have too little acquaintance.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_328"></a><a href="#FNanchor328">[328]</a>
+<i>Dissertation</i>, p. 42.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_329"></a><a href="#FNanchor329">[329]</a> P.
+52.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_330"></a><a href="#FNanchor330">[330]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i>, vii. 18, 19. Also <i>Dissertation</i>, pp. 74,
+75.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.302" id="Page_i.302">[i.302]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IX."></a>CHAPTER IX.</h2>
+<h3>VOLTAIRE AND D'ALEMBERT.</h3>
+<p><span class="smcap">Everybody</span> in the full tide of the eighteenth century had
+something to do with Voltaire, from serious personages like
+Frederick the Great and Turgot, down to the sorriest poetaster who
+sent his verses to be corrected or bepraised. Rousseau's debt to
+him in the days of his unformed youth we have already seen, as well
+as the courtesies with which they approached one another, when
+Richelieu employed the struggling musician to make some
+modifications in the great man's unconsidered court-piece. Neither
+of them then dreamed that their two names were destined to form the
+great literary antithesis of the century. In the ten years that
+elapsed between their first interchange of letters and their first
+fit of coldness, it must have been tolerably clear to either of
+them, if either of them gave thought to the matter, that their
+dissidence was increasing and likely to increase. Their methods
+were different, their training different, their points of view
+different, and above all these things, their temperaments were
+different by a whole heaven's breadth.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.303" id="Page_i.303">[i.303]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>A great number of excellent and pointed half-truths have been
+uttered by various persons in illustration of all these contrasts.
+The philosophy of Voltaire, for instance, is declared to be that of
+the happy, while Rousseau is the philosopher of the unhappy.
+Voltaire steals away their faith from those who doubt, while
+Rousseau strikes doubt into the mind of the unbeliever. The gaiety
+of the one saddens, while the sadness of the other consoles. If we
+pass from the marked divergence in tendencies, which is imperfectly
+hinted at in such sayings as these, to the divergence between them
+in all the fundamental conditions of intellectual and moral life,
+then the variation which divided the revolutionary stream into two
+channels, flowing broadly apart through unlike regions and climates
+down to the great sea, is intelligible enough. Voltaire was the
+arch-representative of all those elements in contemporary thought,
+its curiosity, irreverence, intrepidity, vivaciousness,
+rationality, to which, as we have so often had to say, Rousseau's
+temperament and his Genevese spirit made him profoundly
+antipathetic. Voltaire was the great high priest, robed in the
+dazzling vestments of poetry and philosophy and history, of that
+very religion of knowledge and art which Rousseau declared to be
+the destroyer of the felicity of men. The glitter has faded away
+from Voltaire's philosophic raiment since those days, and his
+laurel bough lies a little leafless. Still this can never make us
+forget that he was in his day and generation one of the sovereign
+emancipators, because<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.304" id="Page_i.304">[i.304]</a></span> he awoke one dormant set of energies, just as
+Rousseau presently came to awake another set. Each was a power, not
+merely by virtue of some singular preeminence of understanding or
+mysterious unshared insight of his own, but for a far deeper
+reason. No partial and one-sided direction can permanently satisfy
+the manifold aspirations and faculties of the human mind in the
+great average of common men, and it is the common average of men to
+whom exceptional thinkers speak, whom they influence, and by whom
+they are in turn influenced, depressed, or buoyed up, just as a
+painter or a dramatist is affected. Voltaire's mental constitution
+made him eagerly objective, a seeker of true things, quivering for
+action, admirably sympathetic with all life and movement, a spirit
+restlessly traversing the whole world. Rousseau, far different from
+this, saw in himself a reflected microcosm of the outer world, and
+was content to take that instead of the outer world, and as its
+truest version. He made his own moods the premisses from which he
+deduced a system of life for humanity, and so far as humanity has
+shared his moods or some parts of them, his system was true, and
+has been accepted. To him the bustle of the outer world was only a
+hindrance to that process of self-absorption which was his way of
+interpreting life. Accessible only to interests of emotion and
+sense, he was saved from intellectual sterility, and made eloquent,
+by the vehemence of his emotion and the fire of his senses. He was
+a master example of sensibility,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.305" id="Page_i.305">[i.305]</a></span> as Voltaire was a master example
+of clear-eyed penetration.</p>
+<p>This must not be taken for a rigid piece of mutually exclusive
+division, for the edges of character are not cut exactly sharp, as
+words are. Especially when any type is intense, it seems to meet
+and touch its opposite. Just as Voltaire's piercing activity and
+soundness of intelligence made him one of the humanest of men, so
+Rousseau's emotional susceptibility endowed him with the gift of a
+vision that carried far into the social depths. It was a very early
+criticism on the pair, that Voltaire wrote on more subjects, but
+that Rousseau was the more profound. In truth one was hardly much
+more profound than the other. Rousseau had the sonorousness of
+speech which popular confusion of thought is apt to identify with
+depth. And he had seriousness. If profundity means the quality of
+seeing to the heart of subjects, Rousseau had in a general way
+rather less of it than the shrewd-witted crusher of the Infamous.
+What the distinction really amounts to is that Rousseau had a
+strong feeling for certain very important aspects of human life,
+which Voltaire thought very little about, or never thought about at
+all, and that while Voltaire was concerned with poetry, history,
+literature, and the more ridiculous parts of the religious
+superstition of his time, Rousseau thought about social justice and
+duty and God and the spiritual consciousness of men, with a certain
+attempt at thoroughness and system. As for the substance of his
+thinking, as we have<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.306" id="Page_i.306">[i.306]</a></span> already seen in the Discourses, and shall soon
+have an opportunity of seeing still more clearly, it was often as
+thin and hollow as if he had belonged to the company of the
+epigrammatical, who, after all, have far less of a monopoly of
+shallow thinking than is often supposed. The prime merit of
+Rousseau, in comparing him with the brilliant chief of the
+rationalistic school of the time, is his reverence; reverence for
+moral worth in however obscure intellectual company, for the
+dignity of human character and the loftiness of duty, for some of
+those cravings of the human mind after the divine and
+incommensurable, which may indeed often be content with solutions
+proved by long time and slow experience to be inadequate, but which
+are closely bound up with the highest elements of nobleness of
+soul.</p>
+<p>It was this spiritual part of him which made Rousseau a third
+great power in the century, between the Encyclop&#230;dic party
+and the Church. He recognised a something in men, which the
+Encyclop&#230;dists treated as a chimera imposed on the
+imagination by theologians and others for their own purposes. And
+he recognised this in a way which did not offend the rational
+feeling of the times, as the Catholic dogmas offended it. In a word
+he was religious. In being so, he separated himself from Voltaire
+and his school, who did passably well without religion. Again, he
+was a puritan. In being this, he was cut off from the
+intellectually and morally unreformed church, which was then the
+organ of religion in France. Nor is this<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.307" id="Page_i.307">[i.307]</a></span> all. It was Rousseau, and
+not the feeble controversialists put up from time to time by the
+Jesuits and other ecclesiastical bodies, who proved the effective
+champion of religion, and the only power who could make head
+against the triumphant onslaught of the Voltaireans. He gave up
+Christian dogmas and mysteries, and, throwing himself with
+irresistible ardour upon the emotions in which all religions have
+their root and their power, he breathed new life into them, he
+quickened in men a strong desire to have them satisfied, and he
+beat back the army of emancipators with the loud and incessantly
+repeated cry that they were not come to deliver the human mind, but
+to root out all its most glorious and consolatory attributes. This
+immense achievement accomplished,&#8212;the great framework of a faith
+in God and immortality and providential government of the world
+thus preserved, it was an easy thing by and by for the churchmen to
+come back, and once more unpack and restore to their old places the
+temporarily discredited paraphernalia of dogma and mystery. How far
+all this was good or bad for the mental elevation of France and
+Europe, we shall have a better opportunity of considering
+presently.</p>
+<p>We have now only to glance at the first skirmishes between the
+religious reactionist, on the one side, and, on the other, the
+leader of the school who believed that men are better employed in
+thinking as accurately, and knowing as widely, and living as
+humanely, as all those difficult processes are possible,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.308" id="Page_i.308">[i.308]</a></span> than in
+wearying themselves in futile search after gods who dwell on
+inaccessible heights.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 25%;" />
+
+<p>Voltaire had acknowledged Rousseau's gift of the second
+Discourse with his usual shrewd pleasantry: &quot;I have received your
+new book against the human race, and thank you for it. Never was
+such cleverness used in the design of making us all stupid. One
+longs in reading your book to walk on all fours. But as I have lost
+that habit for more than sixty years, I feel unhappily the
+impossibility of resuming it. Nor can I embark in search of the
+savages of Canada, because the maladies to which I am condemned
+render a European surgeon necessary to me; because war is going on
+in those regions; and because the example of our actions has made
+the savages nearly as bad as ourselves. So I content myself with
+being a very peaceable savage in the solitude which I have chosen
+near your native place, where you ought to be too.&quot; After an
+extremely inadequate discussion of one or two points in the
+essay,<a name="FNanchor331"></a><a href="#Footnote_331">[331]</a>
+he concludes:&#8212;&quot;I am informed that your health is bad; you ought to
+come to set it up again in your native air, to enjoy freedom, to
+drink with me the milk of our cows and browse our grass.&quot;<a name="FNanchor332"></a><a href="#Footnote_332">[332]</a> Rousseau
+replied to all this in a friendly way, recognising Voltaire as his
+chief, and actually at the very moment when he tells us that the
+corrupting presence of the arrogant and seductive man at Geneva
+helped<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.309" id="Page_i.309">[i.309]</a></span> to make the idea of returning to Geneva odious to him,
+hailing him in such terms as these:&#8212;&quot;Sensible of the honour you do
+my country, I share the gratitude of my fellow-citizens, and hope
+that it will increase when they have profited by the lessons that
+you of all men are able to give them. Embellish the asylum you have
+chosen; enlighten a people worthy of your instruction; and do you
+who know so well how to paint virtue and freedom, teach us to
+cherish them in our walls.&quot;<a name="FNanchor333"></a><a href="#Footnote_333">[333]</a></p>
+<p>Within a year, however, the bright sky became a little clouded.
+In 1756 Voltaire published one of the most sincere, energetic, and
+passionate pieces to be found in the whole literature of the
+eighteenth century, his poem on the great earthquake of Lisbon
+(November 1755). No such word had been heard in Europe since the
+terrible images in which Pascal had figured the doom of man. It was
+the reaction of one who had begun life by refuting Pascal with
+doctrines of cheerfulness drawn from the optimism of Pope and
+Leibnitz, who had done Pope's Essay on Man (1732-34) into French
+verse as late as 1751,<a name="FNanchor334"></a><a href="#Footnote_334">[334]</a> and whose imagination, already sombred
+by the triumphant cruelty and superstition which raged around him,
+was suddenly struck with horror by a catastrophe which, in a world
+where whatever is is best, destroyed hundreds of human creatures in
+the smoking ashes and engulfed wreck of their city. How, he cried,
+can you persist in talking of the deliberate will of a free<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.310" id="Page_i.310">[i.310]</a></span> and
+benevolent God, whose eternal laws necessitated such an appalling
+climax of misery and injustice as this? Was the disaster
+retributive? If so, why is Lisbon in ashes, while Paris dances? The
+enigma is desperate and inscrutable, and the optimist lives in the
+paradise of the fool. We ask in vain what we are, where we are,
+whither we go, whence we came. We are tormented atoms on a clod of
+earth, whom death at last swallows up, and with whom destiny
+meanwhile makes cruel sport. The past is only a disheartening
+memory, and if the tomb destroys the thinking creature, how
+frightful is the present!</p>
+<p>Whatever else we may say of Voltaire's poem, it was at least the
+first sign of the coming reaction of sympathetic imagination
+against the polished common sense of the great Queen Anne school,
+which had for more than a quarter of a century such influence in
+Europe.<a name="FNanchor335"></a><a href="#Footnote_335">[335]</a>
+It is a little odd that Voltaire, the most brilliant and versatile
+branch of this stock, should have broken so energetically away from
+it, and that he should have done so, shows how open and how strong
+was the feeling in him for reality and actual circumstance.</p>
+<p>Rousseau was amazed that a man overwhelmed as Voltaire was with
+prosperity and glory, should declaim against the miseries of this
+life and pro<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.311" id="Page_i.311">[i.311]</a></span>nounce that all is evil and vanity. &quot;Voltaire in
+seeming always to believe in God, never really believed in anybody
+but the devil, since his pretended God is a maleficent being who
+according to him finds all his pleasure in working mischief. The
+absurdity of this doctrine is especially revolting in a man crowned
+with good things of every sort, and who from the midst of his own
+happiness tries to fill his fellow-creatures with despair, by the
+cruel and terrible image of the serious calamities from which he is
+himself free.&quot;<a name="FNanchor336"></a><a href="#Footnote_336">[336]</a></p>
+<p>As if any doctrine could be more revolting than this which
+Rousseau so quietly takes for granted, that if it is well with me
+and I am free from calamities, then there must needs be a
+beneficent ruler of the universe, and the calamities of all the
+rest of the world, if by chance they catch the fortunate man's eye,
+count for nothing in our estimate of the method of the supposed
+divine government. It is hard to imagine a more execrable emotion
+than the complacent religiosity of the prosperous. Voltaire is more
+admirable in nothing than in the ardent humanity and far-spreading
+lively sympathy with which he interested himself in all the world's
+fortunes, and felt the catastrophe of Lisbon as profoundly as if
+the Geneva at his gates had been destroyed. He relished his own
+prosperity keenly enough, but his prosperity became ashes in his
+mouth when he heard of distress or wrong, and he did not rest until
+he had moved heaven<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.312" id="Page_i.312">[i.312]</a></span> and earth to soothe the distress and repair the
+wrong. It was his impatience in the face of the evils of the time
+which wrung from him this desperate cry, and it is precisely
+because these evils did not touch him in his own person, that he
+merits the greater honour for the surpassing energy and sincerity
+of his feeling for them.</p>
+<p>Rousseau, however, whose biographer has no such stories to tell
+as those of Calas and La Barre, Sirven and Lally, but only tales of
+a maiden wrongfully accused of theft, and a friend left senseless
+on the pavement of a strange town, and a benefactress abandoned to
+the cruelty of her fate, still was moved in the midst of his erotic
+visions in the forest of Montmorency to speak a jealous word in
+vindication of the divine government of our world. For him at any
+rate life was then warm and the day bright and the earth very fair,
+and he lauded his gods accordingly. It was his very sensuousness,
+as we are so often saying, that made him religious. The optimism
+which Voltaire wished to destroy was to him a sovereign element of
+comfort. &quot;Pope's poem,&quot; he says, &quot;softens my misfortunes and
+inclines me to patience, while yours sharpens all my pains, excites
+me to murmuring, and reduces me to despair. Pope and Leibnitz
+exhort me to resignation by declaring calamities to be a necessary
+effect of the nature and constitution of the universe. You cry,
+Suffer for ever, unhappy wretch; if there be a God who created
+thee, he could have stayed thy pains if he would: hope for no end
+to them, for there is no reason to be discerned for thy<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.313" id="Page_i.313">[i.313]</a></span> existence,
+except to suffer and to perish.&quot;<a name="FNanchor337"></a><a href="#Footnote_337">[337]</a> Rousseau then proceeds to argue the
+matter, but he says nothing really to the point which Pope had not
+said before, and said far more effectively. He begins, however,
+originally enough by a triumphant reference to his own great theme
+of the superiority of the natural over the civil state. Moral evil
+is our own work, the result of our liberty; so are most of our
+physical evils, except death, and that is mostly an evil only from
+the preparations that we make for it. Take the case of Lisbon. Was
+it nature who collected the twenty thousand houses, all seven
+stories high? If the people of Lisbon had been dispersed over the
+face of the country, as wild tribes are, they would have fled at
+the first shock, and they would have been seen the next day twenty
+leagues away, as gay as if nothing had happened. And how many of
+them perished in the attempt to rescue clothes or papers or money?
+Is it not true that the person of a man is now, thanks to
+civilisation, the least part of himself, and is hardly worth saving
+after loss of the rest? Again, there are some events which lose
+much of their horror when we look at them closely. A premature
+death is not always a real evil and may be a relative good; of the
+people crushed to death under the ruins of Lisbon, many no doubt
+thus escaped still worse calamities. And is it worse to be killed
+swiftly than to await death in prolonged anguish?<a name="FNanchor338"></a><a href="#Footnote_338">[338]</a></p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.314" id="Page_i.314">[i.314]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The good of the whole is to be sought before the good of the
+part. Although the whole material universe ought not to be dearer
+to its Creator than a single thinking and feeling being, yet the
+system of the universe which produces, preserves, and perpetuates
+all thinking and feeling beings, ought to be dearer to him than any
+one of them, and he may, notwithstanding his goodness, or rather by
+reason of his goodness, sacrifice something of the happiness of
+individuals to the preservation of the whole. &quot;That the dead body
+of a man should feed worms or wolves or plants is not, I admit, a
+compensation for the death of such a man; but if in the system of
+this universe, it is necessary for the preservation of the human
+race that there should be a circulation of substance between men,
+animals, vegetables, then the particular mishap of an individual
+contributes to the general good. I die, I am eaten by worms; but my
+children, my brothers, will live as I have lived; my body enriches
+the earth of which they will consume the fruits; and so I do, by
+the order of nature and for all men, what Codrus, Curtius, the
+Decii, and a thousand others, did of their own free will for a
+small part of men.&quot; (p. 305.)</p>
+<p>All this is no doubt very well said, and we are bound to accept
+it as true doctrine. Although, however, it may make resignation
+easier by explaining the nature of evil, it does not touch the
+point of Voltaire's outburst, which is that evil exists, and exists
+in shapes which it is a mere mockery to associate with<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.315" id="Page_i.315">[i.315]</a></span> the
+omnipotence of a benevolent controller of the world's forces.
+According to Rousseau, if we go to the root of what he means, there
+is no such thing as evil, though much that to our narrow and
+impatient sight has the look of it. This may be true if we use that
+fatal word in an arbitrary and unreal sense, for the avoidable, the
+consequent without antecedent, or antecedent without consequent. If
+we consent to talk in this way, and only are careful to define
+terms so that there is no doubt as to their meaning, it is hardly
+deniable that evil is a mere word and not a reality, and whatever
+is is indeed right and best, because no better is within our reach.
+Voltaire, however, like the man of sense that he was, exclaimed
+that at any rate relatively to us poor creatures the existence of
+pain, suffering, waste, whether caused or uncaused, whether in
+accordance with stern immutable law or mere divine caprice, is a
+most indisputable reality: from our point of view it is a cruel
+puerility to cry out at every calamity and every iniquity that all
+is well in the best of possible worlds, and to sing hymns of praise
+and glory to the goodness and mercy of a being of supreme might,
+who planted us in this evil state and keeps us in it. Voltaire's is
+no perfect philosophy; indeed it is not a philosophy at all, but a
+passionate ejaculation; but it is perfect in comparison with a cut
+and dried system like this of Rousseau's, which rests on a mocking
+juggle with phrases, and the substitution by dexterous sleight of
+hand of one definition for another.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.316" id="Page_i.316">[i.316]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Rousseau really gives up the battle, by confessing frankly that
+the matter is beyond the light of reason, and that, &quot;if the theist
+only founds his sentiment on probabilities, the atheist with still
+less precision only founds his on the alternative possibilities.&quot;
+The objections on both sides are insoluble, because they turn on
+things of which men can have no veritable idea; &quot;yet I believe in
+God as strongly as I believe any other truth, because believing and
+not believing are the last things in the world that depend on me.&quot;
+So be it. But why take the trouble to argue in favour of one side
+of an avowedly insoluble question? It was precisely because he felt
+that the objections on both sides cannot be answered, that
+Voltaire, hastily or not, cried out that he faced the horrors of
+such a catastrophe as the Lisbon earthquake without a glimpse of
+consolation. The upshot of Rousseau's remonstrance only amounted to
+this, that he could not furnish one with any consolation out of the
+armoury of reason, that he himself found this consolation, but in a
+way that did not at all depend upon his own effort or will, and was
+therefore as incommunicable as the advantage of having a large
+appetite or being six feet high. The reader of Rousseau becomes
+accustomed to this way of dealing with subjects of discussion. We
+see him using his reason as adroitly as he knows how for
+three-fourths of the debate, and then he suddenly flings himself
+back with a triumphant kind of weariness into the buoyant waters of
+emotion and sentiment. &quot;You sir, who are a poet,&quot; once said Madame
+d'Epinay<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.317" id="Page_i.317">[i.317]</a></span> to Saint Lambert, &quot;will agree with me that the existence
+of a Being, eternal, all powerful, and of sovereign intelligence,
+is at any rate the germ of the finest enthusiasm.&quot;<a name="FNanchor339"></a><a href="#Footnote_339">[339]</a> To take this
+position and cleave to it may be very well, but why spoil its
+dignity and repose by an unmeaning and superfluous flourish of the
+weapons of the reasoner?</p>
+<p>With the same hasty change of direction Rousseau says the true
+question is not whether each of us suffers or not, but whether it
+is good that the universe should be, and whether our misfortunes
+were inevitable in its constitution. Then within a dozen lines he
+admits that there can be no direct proof either way; we must
+content ourselves with settling it by means of inference from the
+perfections of God. Of course, it is clear that in the first place
+what Rousseau calls the true question consists of two quite
+distinct questions. Is the universe in its present ordering on the
+whole good relatively either to men, or to all sentient creatures?
+Next was evil an inevitable element in that ordering? Second, this
+way of putting it does not in the least advance the case against
+Voltaire, who insisted that no fine phrases ought to hide from us
+the dreadful power and crushing reality of evil and the desolate
+plight in which we are left. This is no exhaustive thought, but a
+deep cry of anguish at the dark lot of men, and of just indignation
+against the philosophy which to creatures asking for bread gave the
+brightly polished<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.318" id="Page_i.318">[i.318]</a></span> stone of sentimental theism. Rousseau urged that
+Voltaire robbed men of their only solace. What Voltaire really did
+urge was that the solace derived from the attribution of humanity
+and justice to the Supreme Being, and from the metaphysical account
+of evil, rests on too narrow a base either to cover the facts, or
+to be a true solace to any man who thinks and observes. He ought to
+have gone on, if it had only been possible in those times, to
+persuade his readers that there is no solace attainable, except
+that of an energetic fortitude, and that we do best to go into life
+not in a softly lined silken robe, but with a sharp sword and
+armour thrice tempered. As between himself and Rousseau, he saw
+much the more keenly of the two, and this was because he approached
+the matter from the side of the facts, while the latter approached
+it from the side of his own mental comfort and the preconceptions
+involved in it.</p>
+<p>The most curious part of this curious letter is the conclusion,
+where Rousseau, loosely wandering from his theme, separates
+Voltaire from the philosopher, and beseeches him to draw up a moral
+code or profession of civil faith that should contain positively
+the social maxims that everybody should be bound to admit, and
+negatively the intolerant maxims that everybody should be forced to
+reject as seditious. Every religion in accord with the code should
+be allowed, and every religion out of accord with it proscribed, or
+a man might be free to have no other religion but the code
+itself.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.319" id="Page_i.319">[i.319]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Voltaire was much too clear-headed a person to take any notice
+of nonsense like this. Rousseau's letter remained unanswered, nor
+is there any reason to suppose that Voltaire ever got through it,
+though Rousseau chose to think that <i>Candide</i> (1759) was meant
+for a reply to him.<a name="FNanchor340"></a><a href="#Footnote_340">[340]</a> He is careful to tell us that he never
+read that incomparable satire, for which one would be disposed to
+pity any one except Rousseau, whose appreciation of wit, if not of
+humour also, was probably more deficient than in any man who ever
+lived, either in Geneva or any other country fashioned after
+Genevan guise. Rousseau's next letter to Voltaire was four years
+later, and by that time the alienation which had no definitely
+avowed cause, and can be marked by no special date, had become
+complete. &quot;I hate you, in fact,&quot; he concluded, &quot;since you have so
+willed it; but I hate you like a man still worthier to have loved
+you, if you had willed it. Of all the sentiments with which my
+heart was full towards you, there only remains the admiration that
+we cannot refuse to your fine genius, and love for your writings.
+If there is nothing in you which I can honour but your talents,
+that is no fault of mine.&quot;<a name="FNanchor341"></a><a href="#Footnote_341">[341]</a> We know that Voltaire did not take
+reproach with serenity, and he behaved with bitter<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.320" id="Page_i.320">[i.320]</a></span> violence towards
+Rousseau in circumstances when silence would have been both more
+magnanimous and more humane. Rousseau occasionally, though not very
+often, retaliated in the same vein.<a name="FNanchor342"></a><a href="#Footnote_342">[342]</a> On the whole
+his judgment of Voltaire, when calmly given, was not meant to be
+unkind. &quot;Voltaire's first impulse,&quot; he said, &quot;is to be good; it is
+reflection that makes him bad.&quot;<a name="FNanchor343"></a><a href="#Footnote_343">[343]</a> Tronchin had said in the same way that
+Voltaire's heart was the dupe of his understanding. Rousseau is
+always trying to like him, he always recognises him as the first
+man of the time, and he subscribed his mite for the erection of a
+statue to him. It was the satire and mockery in Voltaire which
+irritated Rousseau more than the doctrines or denial of doctrine
+which they cloaked; in his eyes sarcasm was always the veritable
+dialect of the evil power. It says something for the sincerity of
+his efforts after equitable judgment, that he should have<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.321" id="Page_i.321">[i.321]</a></span> had the
+patience to discern some of the fundamental merit of the most
+remorseless and effective mocker that ever made superstition look
+mean, and its doctors ridiculous.</p>
+<h3>II.</h3>
+<p>Voltaire was indirectly connected with Rousseau's energetic
+attack upon another great Encyclop&#230;dist leader, the famous
+Letter to D'Alembert on Stage Plays. &quot;There,&quot; Rousseau said
+afterwards, &quot;is my favourite book, my Benjamin, because I produced
+it without effort, at the first inspiration, and in the most lucid
+moments of my life.&quot;<a name="FNanchor344"></a><a href="#Footnote_344">[344]</a> Voltaire, who to us figures so little
+as a poet and dramatist, was to himself and to his contemporaries
+of this date a poet and dramatist before all else, the author of
+<i>Za&#239;re</i> and <i>Mahomet</i>, rather than of <i>Candide</i>
+and the <i>Philosophical Dictionary</i>. D'Alembert was Voltaire's
+staunchest henchman. He only wrote his article on Geneva for the
+Encyclop&#230;dia to gratify the master. Fresh from a visit to him
+when he composed it, he took occasion to regret that the austerity
+of the tradition of the city deprived it of the manifold advantages
+of a theatre. This suggestion had its origin partly in a desire to
+promote something that would please the eager vanity of the
+dramatist whom Geneva now had for so close a neighbour, and who had
+just set her the example by setting up a theatre of his own; and
+partly, also, because it gave the writer an opportunity<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.322" id="Page_i.322">[i.322]</a></span> of
+denouncing the intolerant rigour with which the church nearer home
+treated the stage and all who appeared on it. Geneva was to set an
+example that could not be resisted, and France would no longer see
+actors on the one hand pensioned by the government, and on the
+other an object of anathema, excommunicated by priests and regarded
+with contempt by citizens.<a name="FNanchor345"></a><a href="#Footnote_345">[345]</a></p>
+<p>The inveterate hostility of the church to the theatre was
+manifested by the French ecclesiastics in the full eighteenth
+century as bitterly as ever. The circumstance that Voltaire was the
+great play-writer of the time would not tend to soften their
+traditional prejudice, and the persecution of players by priests
+was in some sense an episode of the war between the priest and the
+philosophers. The latter took up the cause of the stage partly
+because they hoped to make the drama an effective rival to the
+teaching of pulpit and confessional, partly from their natural
+sympathy with an elevated form of intellectual manifestation, and
+partly from their abhorrence of the practical inhumanity with which
+the officers of the church treated stage performers. While people
+of quality eagerly sought the society of those who furnished them
+as much diversion in private as in public, the church refused to
+all players the marriage blessing; when an actor or actress wished
+to marry, they were<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.323" id="Page_i.323">[i.323]</a></span> obliged to renounce the stage, and the
+Archbishop of Paris diligently resisted evasion or
+subterfuge.<a name="FNanchor346"></a><a href="#Footnote_346">[346]</a> The atrocities connected with the
+refusal of burial, as well in the case of players as of
+philosophers, are known to all readers in a dozen illustrious
+instances, from Moli&#232;re and Adrienne Lecouvreur
+downwards.</p>
+<p>Here, as along the whole line of the battle between new light
+and old prejudice, Rousseau took part, if not with the church, at
+least against its adversaries. His point of view was at bottom
+truly puritanical. Jeremy Collier in his <i>Short View of the
+Profaneness and Immorality of the English Stage</i> (1698) takes up
+quite a different position. This once famous piece was not a
+treatment of the general question, but an attack on certain
+specific qualities of the plays of his time&#8212;their indecency of
+phrase, their oaths, their abuse of the clergy, the gross
+libertinism of the characters. One can hardly deny that this was
+richly deserved by the English drama of the Restoration, and
+Collier's strictures were not applicable, nor meant to apply,
+either to the ancients, for he has a good word even for
+Aristophanes, or to the French drama. Bossuet's loftier
+denunciation, like Rousseau's, was puritanical, and it extended to
+the whole body of stage plays. He objected to the drama as a school
+of concupiscence, as a subtle or gross debaucher of the gravity and
+purity of the understanding, as essentially a charmer of the
+senses, and therefore the most equivocal and untrust<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.324" id="Page_i.324">[i.324]</a></span>worthy of
+teachers. He appeals to the fathers, to Scripture, to Plato, and
+even to Christ, who cried, <i>Woe unto you that laugh</i>.<a name="FNanchor347"></a><a href="#Footnote_347">[347]</a> There is a
+fine austerity about Bossuet's energetic criticism; it is so free
+from breathless eagerness, and so severe without being thinly
+bitter. The churchmen of a generation or two later had fallen from
+this height into gloomy peevishness.</p>
+<p>Rousseau's letter on the theatre, it need hardly be said, is
+meant to be an appeal to the common sense and judgment of his
+readers, and not conceived in the ecclesiastical tone of unctuous
+anathema and fulgurant menace. It is no bishop's pastoral, replete
+with solecisms of thought and idiom, but a piece of firm dialectic
+in real matter. His position is this: that the moral effect of the
+stage can never be salutary in itself, while it may easily be
+extremely pernicious, and that the habit of frequenting the
+theatre, the taste for imitating the style of the actors, the cost
+in money, the waste in time, and all the other accessory
+conditions, apart from the morality of the matter represented, are
+bad things in themselves, absolutely and in every circumstance.
+Secondly, these effects in all kinds are specially bad in relation
+to the social condition and habits of Geneva.<a name="FNanchor348"></a><a href="#Footnote_348">[348]</a> The first part
+of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.325" id="Page_i.325">[i.325]</a></span> discussion is an ingenious answer to some of the now trite
+pleas for the morality of the drama, such as that tragedy leads to
+pity through terror, that comedy corrects men while amusing them,
+that both make virtue attractive and vice hateful.<a name="FNanchor349"></a><a href="#Footnote_349">[349]</a> Rousseau
+insists with abundance of acutely chosen illustration that the pity
+that is awaked by tragedy is a fleeting emotion which subsides when
+the curtain falls; that comedy as often as not amuses men at the
+expense of old age, uncouth virtue, paternal carefulness, and other
+objects which we should be taught rather to revere than to
+ridicule; and that both tragedy and comedy, instead of making vice
+hateful, constantly win our sympathy for it. Is not the French
+stage, he asks, as much the triumph of great villains, like
+Catilina, Mahomet, Atreus, as of illustrious heroes?</p>
+<p>This rude handling of accepted commonplace is always one of the
+most interesting features in Rousseau's polemic. It was of course a
+characteristic of the eighteenth century always to take up the
+ethical and high prudential view of whatever had to be justified,
+and Rousseau seems from this point to have been successful in
+demolishing arguments which might hold of Greek tragedy at its
+best, but which certainly do not hold of any other dramatic forms.
+The childishness of the old criticism which attaches the label of
+some moral from the copybook to each piece, as its<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.326" id="Page_i.326">[i.326]</a></span> lesson and point
+of moral aim, is evident. In repudiating this Rousseau was
+certainly right.<a name="FNanchor350"></a><a href="#Footnote_350">[350]</a> Both the assailants and the defenders of
+the stage, however, commit the double error, first of supposing
+that the drama is always the same thing, from the Agamemnon down to
+the last triviality of a London theatre, and next of pitching the
+discussion in too high a key, as if the effect or object of a stage
+play in the modern era, where grave sentiment clothes itself in
+other forms, were substantially anything more serious than an
+evening's amusement. Apart from this, and in so far as the
+discussion is confined to the highest dramatic expression, the true
+answer to Rousseau is now a very plain one. The drama does not work
+in the sphere of direct morality, though like everything else in
+the world it has a moral or immoral aspect. It is an art of ideal
+presentation, not concerned with the inculcation of immediate
+practical lessons, but producing a stir in all our sympathetic
+emotions, quickening the imagination, and so communicating a wider
+life to the character of the spectator. This is what the drama in
+the hands of a worthy master does; it is just what noble
+composition in music does, and there is no more directly moralising
+effect in the one than in the other. You must trust to the sum of
+other agencies to guide the interest and sympathy thus quickened
+into channels<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.327" id="Page_i.327">[i.327]</a></span> of right action. Rousseau, like most other
+controversialists, makes an attack of which the force rests on the
+assumption that the special object of the attack is the single
+influencing element and the one decisive instrument in making men
+had or good. What he says about the drama would only be true if the
+public went to the play all day long, and were accessible to no
+other moral force whatever, modifying and counteracting such
+lessons as they might learn at the theatre. He failed here as in
+the wider controversy on the sciences and arts, to consider the
+particular subject of discussion in relation to the whole of the
+general medium in which character moves, and by whose manifold
+action and reaction it is incessantly affected and variously
+shaped.</p>
+<p>So when he passed on from the theory of dramatic morality to the
+matter which he had more at heart, namely, the practical effects of
+introducing the drama into Geneva, he keeps out of sight all the
+qualities in the Genevese citizen which would protect him against
+the evil influence of the stage, though it is his anxiety for the
+preservation of these very qualities that gives all its fire to his
+eloquence. If the citizen really was what Rousseau insisted that he
+was, then his virtues would surely neutralise the evil of the
+drama; if not, the drama would do him no harm. We need not examine
+the considerations in which Rousseau pointed out the special
+reasons against introducing a theatre into his native town. It
+would draw the artisans away from their work, cause wasteful
+expenditure of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.328" id="Page_i.328">[i.328]</a></span> money in amusements, break up the harmless and
+inexpensive little clubs of men and the social gatherings of women.
+The town was not populous enough to support a theatre, therefore
+the government would have to provide one, and this would mean
+increased taxation. All this was the secondary and merely
+colourable support by argumentation, of a position that had been
+reached and was really held by sentiment. Rousseau hated the
+introduction of French plays in the same way that Cato hated the
+introduction of fine talkers from Greece. It was an innovation, and
+so habitual was it with Rousseau to look on all movement in the
+direction of what the French writers called taste and cultivation
+as depraving, that he cannot help taking for granted that any
+change in manners associated with taste must necessarily be a
+change for the worse. Thus the Letter to D'Alembert was essentially
+a supplement to the first Discourse; it was an application of its
+principles to a practical case. It was part of his general
+reactionary protest against philosophers, poets, men of letters,
+and all their works, without particular apprehension on the side of
+the drama. Hence its reasoning is much less interesting than its
+panegyric on the simplicity, robust courage, and manliness of the
+Genevese, and its invective against the effeminacy and frivolity of
+the Parisian. One of the most significant episodes in the
+discussion is the lengthy criticism on the immortal Misanthrope of
+Moli&#232;re. Rousseau admits it for the masterpiece of the comic
+muse, though with characteristic perver<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.329" id="Page_i.329">[i.329]</a></span>sity he insists that the
+hero is not misanthropic enough, nor truly misanthropic at all,
+because he flies into rage at small things affecting himself,
+instead of at the large follies of the race. Again, he says that
+Moli&#232;re makes Alceste ridiculous, virtuous as he is, in
+order to win the applause of the pit. It is for the character of
+Philinte, however, that Rousseau reserves all his spleen. He takes
+care to describe him in terms which exactly hit Rousseau's own
+conception of his philosophic enemies, who find all going well
+because they have no interest in anything going better; who are
+content with everybody, because they do not care for anybody; who
+round a full table maintain that it is not true that the people are
+hungry. As criticism, one cannot value this kind of analysis.
+D'Alembert replied with a much more rational interpretation of the
+great comedy, but finding himself seized with the critic's
+besetting impertinence of improving masterpieces, he suddenly
+stopped with the becoming reflection&#8212;&quot;But I perceive, sir, that I
+am giving lessons to Moli&#232;re.&quot;<a name="FNanchor351"></a><a href="#Footnote_351">[351]</a></p>
+<p>The constant thought of Paris gave Rousseau an admirable
+occasion of painting two pictures in violent contrast, each as
+over-coloured as the other by his mixed conceptions of the
+Plutarchian antique and imaginary pastoral. We forget the
+depravation of the stage and the ill living of comedians in
+magnificent descriptions of the manly exercises and cheerful
+festivities of the free people on the shores of the Lake of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.330" id="Page_i.330">[i.330]</a></span> Geneva,
+and in scornful satire on the Parisian seraglios, where some woman
+assembles a number of men who are more like women than their
+entertainers. We see on the one side the rude sons of the republic,
+boxing, wrestling, running, in generous emulation, and on the other
+the coxcombs of cultivated Paris imprisoned in a drawing-room,
+&quot;rising up, sitting down, incessantly going and coming to the
+fire-place, to the window, taking up a screen and putting it down
+again a hundred times, turning over books, flitting from picture to
+picture, turning and pirouetting about the room, while the idol
+stretched motionless on a couch all the time is only alive in her
+tongue and eyes&quot; (p. 161). If the rough patriots of the Lake are
+less polished in speech, they are all the weightier in reason; they
+do not escape by a pleasantry or a compliment; each feeling himself
+attacked by all the forces of his adversary, he is obliged to
+employ all his own to defend himself, and this is how a mind
+acquires strength and precision. There may be here and there a
+licentious phrase, but there is no ground for alarm in that. It is
+not the least rude who are always the most pure, and even a rather
+clownish speech is better than that artificial style in which the
+two sexes seduce one another, and familiarise themselves decently
+with vice. 'Tis true our Swiss drinks too much, but after all let
+us not calumniate even vice; as a rule drinkers are cordial and
+frank, good, upright, just, loyal, brave, and worthy folk. Wherever
+people have most abhorrence of drunkenness, be sure they have most
+reason<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.331" id="Page_i.331">[i.331]</a></span> to fear lest its indiscretion should betray intrigue and
+treachery. In Switzerland it is almost thought well of, while at
+Naples they hold it in horror; but at bottom which is the more to
+be dreaded, the intemperance of the Swiss or the reserve of the
+Italian? It is hardly surprising to learn that the people of Geneva
+were as little gratified by this well-meant panegyric on their
+jollity as they had been by another writer's friendly eulogy on
+their Socinianism.<a name="FNanchor352"></a><a href="#Footnote_352">[352]</a></p>
+<p>The reader who was not moved to turn brute and walk on all fours
+by the pictures of the state of nature in the Discourses, may find
+it more difficult to resist the charm of the brotherly festivities
+and simple pastimes which in the Letter to D'Alembert the patriot
+holds up to the admiration of his countrymen and the envy of
+foreigners. The writer is in Sparta, but he tempers his Sparta with
+a something from Charmettes. Never before was there so attractive a
+combination of martial austerity with the grace of the idyll. And
+the interest of these pictures is much more than literary; it is
+historic also. They were the original version of those great
+gatherings in the Champ de Mars and strange suppers of fraternity
+during the progress of the Revolution in Paris, which have amused
+the cynical ever since, but which pointed to a not unworthy
+aspiration. The fine gentlemen whom Rousseau did so well to despise
+had then all fled, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.332" id="Page_i.332">[i.332]</a></span> the common people under Rousseauite leaders
+were doing the best they could to realise on the banks of the Seine
+the imaginary joymaking and simple fellowship which had been first
+dreamed of for the banks of Lake Leman, and commended with an
+eloquence that struck new chords in minds satiated or untouched by
+the brilliance of mere literature. There was no real state of
+things in Geneva corresponding to the gracious picture which
+Rousseau so generously painted, and some of the citizens complained
+that his account of their social joys was as little deserved as his
+ingenious vindication of their hearty feeling for barrel or bottle
+was little founded.<a name="FNanchor353"></a><a href="#Footnote_353">[353]</a></p>
+<p>The glorification of love of country did little for the Genevese
+for whom it was meant, but it penetrated many a soul in the greater
+nation that lay sunk in helpless indifference to its own ruin.
+Nowhere else among the writers who are the glory of France at this
+time, is any serious eulogy of patriotism. Rousseau glows with it,
+and though he always speaks in connection with Geneva, yet there is
+in his words a generous breadth and fire which gave them an
+irresistible contagiousness. There are many passages of this fine
+persuasive force in the Letter to D'Alembert; perhaps this,
+referring to the citizens of Geneva who had gone elsewhere in
+search of fortune, is as good as another. Do you think that the
+opening of a theatre, he asks, will bring them back to their<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.333" id="Page_i.333">[i.333]</a></span> mother
+city? No; &quot;each of them must feel that he can never find anywhere
+else what he has left behind in his own land; an invincible charm
+must call him back to the spot that he ought never to have quitted;
+the recollection of their first exercises, their first pleasures,
+their first sights, must remain deeply graven in their hearts; the
+soft impressions made in the days of their youth must abide and
+grow stronger with advancing years, while a thousand others wax
+dim; in the midst of the pomp of great cities and all their
+cheerless magnificence, a secret voice must for ever cry in the
+depth of the wanderer's soul, Ah, where are the games and holidays
+of my youth? Where is the concord of the townsmen, where the public
+brotherhood? Where is pure joy and true mirth? Where are peace,
+freedom, equity? Let us hasten to seek all these. With the heart of
+a Genevese, with a city as smiling, a landscape as full of delight,
+a government as just, with pleasures so true and so pure, and all
+that is needed to be able to relish them, how is it that we do not
+all adore our birth-land? It was thus in old times that by modest
+feasts and homely games her citizens were called back by that
+Sparta which I can never quote often enough as an example for us;
+thus in Athens in the midst of fine art, thus in Susa in the very
+bosom of luxury and soft delights, the wearied Spartan sighed after
+his coarse pastimes and exhausting exercises&quot; (p. 211).<a name="FNanchor354"></a><a href="#Footnote_354">[354]</a></p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.334" id="Page_i.334">[i.334]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Any reference to this powerfully written, though most
+sophistical piece, would be imperfect which should omit its
+slightly virulent onslaught upon women and the passion which women
+inspire. The modern drama, he said, being too feeble to rise to
+high themes, has fallen back on love; and on this hint he proceeds
+to a censure of love as a poetic theme, and a bitter estimate of
+women as companions for men, which might have pleased Calvin or
+Knox in his sternest mood. The same eloquence which showed men the
+superior delights of the state of nature, now shows the superior
+fitness of the oriental seclusion of women; it makes a sympathetic
+reader tremble at the want of modesty, purity, and decency, in the
+part which women are allowed to take by the infatuated men of a
+modern community.</p>
+<p>All this, again, is directed against &quot;that philosophy of a day,
+which is born and dies in the corner of a city, and would fain
+stifle the cry of nature and the unanimous voice of the human race&quot;
+(p. 131). The same intrepid spirits who had brought reason to bear
+upon the current notions of providence, inspiration, ecclesiastical
+tradition, and other unlighted spots in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.335" id="Page_i.335">[i.335]</a></span> the human mind, had
+perceived that the subjection of women to a secondary place
+belonged to the same category, and could not any more successfully
+be defended by reason. Instead of raging against women for their
+boldness, their frivolousness, and the rest, as our passionate
+sentimentalist did, the opposite school insisted that all these
+evils were due to the folly of treating women with gallantry
+instead of respect, and to the blindness of refusing an equally
+vigorous and masculine education to those who must be the closest
+companions of educated man. This was the view forced upon the most
+rational observers of a society where women were so powerful, and
+so absolutely unfit by want of intellectual training for the right
+use of social power. D'Alembert expressed this view in a few pages
+of forcible pleading in his reply to Rousseau,<a name="FNanchor355"></a><a href="#Footnote_355">[355]</a> and some
+thirty-two years later, when all questions had become political
+(1790), Condorcet ably extended the same line of argument so as to
+make it cover the claims of women to all the rights of
+citizenship.<a name="FNanchor356"></a><a href="#Footnote_356">[356]</a> From the nature of the case, however, it
+is impossible to confute by reason a man who denies that the matter
+in dispute is within the decision and jurisdiction of reason, and
+who supposes that his own opinion is placed out of the reach of
+attack when he declares it to be the unanimous voice of the human
+race. We may remember that the author of this philippic against
+love was at the very moment brood<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.336" id="Page_i.336">[i.336]</a></span>ing over the New Helo&#239;sa, and
+was fresh from strange transports at the feet of the Julie whom we
+know.</p>
+<p>The Letter on the Stage was the definite mark of Rousseau's
+schism from the philosophic congregation. Has Jean Jacques turned a
+father of the church? asked Voltaire. Deserters who fight against
+their country ought to be hung. The little flock are falling to
+devouring one another. This arch-madman, who might have been
+something, if he would only have been guided by his brethren of the
+Encyclop&#230;dia, takes it into his head to make a band of his
+own. He writes against the stage, after writing a bad play of his
+own. He finds four or five rotten staves of Diogenes' tub, and
+instals himself therein to bark at his friends.<a name="FNanchor357"></a><a href="#Footnote_357">[357]</a> D'Alembert was
+more tolerant, but less clear-sighted. He insisted that the little
+flock should do its best to heal divisions instead of widening
+them. Jean Jacques, he said, &quot;is a madman who is very clever, and
+who is only clever when he is in a fever; it is best therefore
+neither to cure nor to insult him.&quot;</p>
+<p>Rousseau made the preface to the Letter on the Stage an occasion
+for a proclamation of his final breach with Diderot. &quot;I once,&quot; he
+said, &quot;possessed a severe and judicious Aristarchus; I have him no
+longer, and wish for him no longer.&quot; To this he added in a footnote
+a passage from Ecclesiasticus, to the effect that if you have drawn
+a sword on a friend<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i.337" id="Page_i.337">[i.337]</a></span> there still remains a way open, and if you have
+spoken cheerless words to him concord is still possible, but
+malicious reproach and the betrayal of a secret&#8212;these things
+banish friendship beyond return. This was the end of his personal
+connection with the men whom he always contemptuously called the
+Holbachians. After 1760 the great stream divided into two; the
+rationalist and the emotional schools became visibly antipathetic,
+and the voice of the epoch was no longer single or
+undistracted.</p>
+<p>&#160;</p>
+<p><b>FOOTNOTES:</b></p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_331"></a><a href="#FNanchor331">[331]</a> See
+above p. <a href="#Page_i.149">149</a>.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_332"></a><a href="#FNanchor332">[332]</a>
+Voltaire to Rousseau. Aug. 30, 1755.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_333"></a><a href="#FNanchor333">[333]</a>
+<i>Corr.</i>, i. 237. Sept. 10, 1755.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_334"></a><a href="#FNanchor334">[334]</a>
+<i>La Loi Naturelle.</i></p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_335"></a><a href="#FNanchor335">[335]</a> In
+1754 the Berlin Academy proposed for a prize essay, An Examination
+of Pope's System, and Lessing the next year wrote a pamphlet to
+show that Pope had no system, but only a patchwork. See Mr.
+Pattison's <i>Introduction to Pope's Essay on Man</i>, p. 12.
+Sime's <i>Lessing</i>, i. 128.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_336"></a><a href="#FNanchor336">[336]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i> ix. 276.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_337"></a><a href="#FNanchor337">[337]</a>
+<i>Corr.</i>, i. 289-316. Aug. 18, 1756.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_338"></a><a href="#FNanchor338">[338]</a>
+Joseph De Maistre put all this much more acutely;
+<i>Soir&#233;es</i>, iv.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_339"></a><a href="#FNanchor339">[339]</a>
+Madame d'Epinay, <i>M&#233;m.</i>, i. 380.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_340"></a><a href="#FNanchor340">[340]</a>
+<i>Conf.</i>, ix. 277. Also <i>Corr.</i>, iii. 326. March 11, 1764.
+Tronchin's long letter, to which Rousseau refers in this passage,
+is given in M. Streckeisen-Moultou's collection, i. 323, and is
+interesting to people who care to know how Voltaire looked to a
+doctor who saw him closely.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_341"></a><a href="#FNanchor341">[341]</a>
+<i>Corr.</i>, ii. 132. June 17, 1760. Also <i>Conf.</i>, x. 91.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_342"></a><a href="#FNanchor342">[342]</a> Some
+other interesting references to Voltaire in Rousseau's letters
+are&#8212;ii. 170 (Nov. 29, 1760), denouncing Voltaire as &quot;that trumpet
+of impiety, that fine genius, and that low soul,&quot; and so forth;
+iii. 29 (Oct. 30, 1762), accusing Voltaire of malicious intrigues
+against him in Switzerland; iii. 168 (Mar. 21, 1763), that if there
+is to be any reconciliation, Voltaire must make first advances;
+iii. 280 (Dec., 1763), described a trick played by Voltaire; iv. 40
+(Jan. 31, 1765) 64; <i>Corr.</i>, v. 74 (Jan. 5, 1767), replying to
+Voltaire's calumnious account of his early life; note on this
+subject giving Voltaire the lie direct, iv. 150 (May 31, 1765); the
+<i>Lettre &#224; D'Almbert</i>, p. 193, etc.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_343"></a><a href="#FNanchor343">[343]</a>
+Bernardin St. Pierre, xii. 96. In the same sense, in Dusaulx,
+<i>Mes Rapports avec J.J.R.</i>, (Paris: 1798), p. 101. See also
+<i>Corr.</i>, iv. 254. Dec. 30, 1765. And again, iv. 276, Feb. 28,
+1766, and p. 356.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_344"></a><a href="#FNanchor344">[344]</a>
+Dusaulx, p. 102.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_345"></a><a href="#FNanchor345">[345]</a> This
+part of D'Alembert's article is reproduced in Rousseau's preface,
+and the whole is given at the end of the volume in M. Auguis's
+edition, p. 409.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_346"></a><a href="#FNanchor346">[346]</a>
+Goncourt, <i>Femme au 18i&#232;me si&#232;cle</i>, p. 256.
+Grimm, <i>Corr. Lit.</i>, vi. 248.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_347"></a><a href="#FNanchor347">[347]</a>
+<i>Maximes sur la Com&#233;die</i>, &#167;15, etc. They were
+written in reply to a plea for Comedy by Caffaro, a Jesuit
+father.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_348"></a><a href="#FNanchor348">[348]</a> The
+letter may be conveniently divided into three parts: I. pp. 1-89,
+II. pp. 90-145, III. pp. 146 to the end. Of course if Rousseau in
+saying that tragedy leads to pity through terror, was thinking of
+the famous passage in the sixth chapter of Aristotle's
+<i>Poetics</i>, he was guilty of a shocking mistranslation.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_349"></a><a href="#FNanchor349">[349]</a> Some
+of the arguments seem drawn from Plato; see, besides the well-known
+passages in the <i>Republic</i>, the <i>Laws</i>, iv. 719, and
+still more directly, <i>Gorgias</i>, 502.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_350"></a><a href="#FNanchor350">[350]</a> Yet
+D'Alembert in his very cool and sensible reply (p. 245) repeats the
+old saws, as that in <i>Catilina</i> we learn the lesson of the
+harm which may be done to the human race by the abuse of great
+talents, and so forth.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_351"></a><a href="#FNanchor351">[351]</a>
+<i>Lettre &#224; M. J.J. Rousseau</i>, p. 258.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_352"></a><a href="#FNanchor352">[352]</a>
+D'Alembert's <i>Lettre &#224; J.J. Rousseau</i>, p. 277. Rousseau
+has a passage to the same effect, that false people are always
+sober, in the <i>Nouv. H&#233;l.,</i> Pt. I. xxiii. 123.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_353"></a><a href="#FNanchor353">[353]</a>
+Tronchin, for instance, in a letter to Rousseau, in M.
+Streckeisen-Moultou's collection, i. 325.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_354"></a><a href="#FNanchor354">[354]</a> A
+troop of comedians had been allowed to play for a short time in
+Geneva, with many protests, during the mediation of 1738. In 1766,
+eight years after Rousseau's letter, the government gave permission
+for the establishment of a theatre in the town. It was burnt down
+in 1768, and Voltaire spitefully hinted that the catastrophe was
+the result of design, instigated by Rousseau (<i>Corr.</i> v. 299,
+April 26, 1768). The theatre was not re-erected until 1783, when
+the oligarchic party regained the ascendancy and brought back with
+them the drama, which the democrats in their reign would not
+permit.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_355"></a><a href="#FNanchor355">[355]</a>
+<i>Lettre &#224; J.J. Rousseau</i>, pp. 265-271.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_356"></a><a href="#FNanchor356">[356]</a>
+<i>Oeuv.</i>, x. 121.</p>
+<p><a name="Footnote_357"></a><a href="#FNanchor357">[357]</a> To
+Thieriot, Sept. 17, 1758. To D'Alembert, Oct. 20, 1761. <i>Ib.</i>
+March 19, 1761.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 35%;" />
+
+<h3>END OF VOL. I.</h3>
+
+<p style="text-align: center"><i>Printed by</i> <span class="smcap">R. &amp; R. Clark, Limited</span>, <i>Edinburgh</i></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">[<a href="rousseau2-htm.html">Go to Volume II</a>]</p>
+
+
+</body>
+</html>
diff --git a/old/old/2006-01-25-14052-h/rousseau2-htm.html b/old/old/2006-01-25-14052-h/rousseau2-htm.html
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..66c999f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/old/2006-01-25-14052-h/rousseau2-htm.html
@@ -0,0 +1,10924 @@
+<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
+    "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
+
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
+  <head>
+    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=iso-8859-1" />
+    <title>
+      The Project Gutenberg eBook of Rousseau, Vol. 2, by John Morley.
+    </title>
+    <style type="text/css">
+/*<![CDATA[  XML blockout */
+<!--
+    p {  margin-top: .75em;
+         text-align: justify;
+         margin-bottom: .75em;
+         }
+    h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6 {
+         text-align: center; /* all headings centered */
+         clear: both;
+         }
+    hr { width: 33%;
+	 margin-top: 2em;
+	 margin-bottom: 2em;
+         margin-left: auto;
+         margin-right: auto;
+         clear: both;
+       }
+
+    table {margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;}
+
+    body{margin-left: 10%;
+         margin-right: 10%;
+        }
+
+    .pagenum  { /* uncomment the next line for invisible page numbers */
+            /*  visibility: hidden;  */
+                position: absolute;
+                left: 92%;
+                font-size: smaller;
+                text-align: right;
+              } /* page numbers */
+
+    .linenum  {position: absolute; top: auto; left: 4%;} /* poetry number */
+    .blockquot{margin-left: 5%; margin-right: 10%;}
+    .sidenote {width: 20%; padding-bottom: .5em; padding-top: .5em;
+               padding-left: .5em; padding-right: .5em; margin-left: 1em;
+               float: right; clear: right; margin-top: 1em;
+               font-size: smaller; color: black; background: #eeeeee; border: dashed 1px;}
+
+    .bb       {border-bottom: solid 2px;}
+    .bl       {border-left: solid 2px;}
+    .bt       {border-top: solid 2px;}
+    .br       {border-right: solid 2px;}
+    .bbox     {border: solid 2px;}
+
+    .center   {text-align: center;}
+    .smcap    {font-variant: small-caps;}
+    .u        {text-decoration: underline;}
+
+    .caption  {font-weight: bold;}
+
+    .figcenter   {margin: auto; text-align: center;}
+
+    .figleft     {float: left; clear: left; margin-left: 0; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top:
+                 1em; margin-right: 1em; padding: 0; text-align: center;}
+
+    .figright    {float: right; clear: right; margin-left: 1em; margin-bottom: 1em;
+                 margin-top: 1em; margin-right: 0; padding: 0; text-align: center;}
+
+    .footnotes        {border: none;}
+    .footnote         {margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; font-size: 0.9em;}
+    .footnote .label  {position: absolute; right: 84%; text-align: right;}
+    .fnanchor         {vertical-align: super; font-size: .8em; text-decoration: none;}
+
+    .poem             {margin-left:10%; margin-right:10%; text-align: left;}
+    .poem br          {display: none;}
+    .poem .stanza     {margin: 1em 0em 1em 0em;}
+    .poem span.i0     {display: block; margin-left: 0em; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;}
+    .poem span.i2     {display: block; margin-left: 2em; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;}
+    .poem span.i4     {display: block; margin-left: 4em; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;}
+    .poem span.i10    {display: block; margin-left: 10em; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;}
+    .poem span.i20    {display: block; margin-left: 20em; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;}
+    // -->
+    /* XML end  ]]>*/
+    </style>
+  </head>
+<body>
+
+
+
+
+<h1>ROUSSEAU</h1>
+
+
+<h3>BY</h3>
+
+<h2>JOHN MORLEY</h2>
+
+
+<h3>VOL. II.</h3>
+
+<hr style="width: 35%;" />
+
+<p style="text-align: center">
+London<br />
+MACMILLAN AND CO., <span class="smcap">Limited</span><br />
+NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY<br />
+1905<br />
+</p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center"><i>All rights reserved</i></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<i>First printed in this form 1886</i><br />
+<i>Reprinted 1888, 1891, 1896, 1900, 1905</i><br />
+</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CONTENTS_II">CONTENTS</a> OF VOL. II.</h2>
+
+<p>&#160;</p>
+
+<h3><a href="#CHAPTER_I">CHAPTER I.</a></h3>
+
+<p style="text-align: center"><span class="smcap">Montmorency&#8212;The New Helo&#239;sa.</span></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">Conditions preceding the composition of the New Helo&#239;sa
+<a href="#Page_1">1</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">The Duke and Duchess of Luxembourg
+<a href="#Page_2">2</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">Rousseau and his patrician acquaintances
+<a href="#Page_3">4</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">Peaceful life at Montmorency <a href="#Page_9">9</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">Equivocal prudence occasionally shown by Rousseau
+<a href="#Page_12">12</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">His want of gratitude for commonplace service
+<a href="#Page_13">13</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">Bad health, and thoughts of suicide
+<a href="#Page_16">16</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">Episode of Madame Latour de Franqueville
+<a href="#Page_17">17</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">Relation of the New Helo&#239;sa to Rousseau's general doctrine
+<a href="#Page_20">20</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">Action of the first part of the story
+<a href="#Page_25">25</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">Contrasted with contemporary literature
+<a href="#Page_25">25</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">And with contemporary manners <a href="#Page_27">27</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">Criticism of the language and principal actors
+<a href="#Page_28">28</a>, <a href="#Page_29">29</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">Popularity of the New Helo&#239;sa
+<a href="#Page_31">31</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">Its reactionary intellectual direction
+<a href="#Page_33">33</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">Action of the second part <a href="#Page_35">35</a>,
+<a href="#Page_36">36</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">Its influence on Goethe and others
+<a href="#Page_38">38</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">Distinction between Rousseau and his school
+<a href="#Page_40">40</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">Singular pictures of domesticity
+<a href="#Page_42">42</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">Sumptuary details <a href="#Page_44">44</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">The slowness of movement in the work justified
+<a href="#Page_46">46</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">Exaltation of marriage <a href="#Page_47">47</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">Equalitarian tendencies <a href="#Page_49">49</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">Not inconsistent with social quietism
+<a href="#Page_51">51</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">Compensation in the political consequences of the triumph of sentiment <a href="#Page_54">54</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">Circumstances of the publication of the New Helo&#239;sa <a href="#Page_55">55</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">Nature of the trade in books <a href="#Page_57">57</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">Malesherbes and the printing of Emilius <a href="#Page_61">61</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">Rousseau's suspicions <a href="#Page_62">62</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">The great struggle of the moment <a href="#Page_64">64</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">Proscription of Emilius <a href="#Page_67">67</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">Flight of the author <a href="#Page_67">67</a></p>
+
+
+<p style="text-align: center">&#160;</p>
+
+
+<h3><a href="#CHAPTER_II">CHAPTER II.</a></h3>
+
+<p style="text-align: center"><span class="smcap">Persecution.</span></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">Rousseau's journey from Switzerland <a href="#Page_69">69</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">Absence of vindictiveness <a href="#Page_70">70</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">Arrival at Yverdun <a href="#Page_72">72</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">Repairs to Motiers <a href="#Page_73">73</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">Relations with Frederick the Great <a href="#Page_74">74</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">Life at Motiers <a href="#Page_77">77</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">Lord Marischal <a href="#Page_79">79</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">Voltaire <a href="#Page_81">81</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">Rousseau's letter to the Archbishop of Paris <a href="#Page_83">83</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">Its dialectic <a href="#Page_86">86</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">The ministers of Neuch&#226;tel <a href="#Page_90">90</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">Rousseau's singular costume <a href="#Page_92">92</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">His throng of visitors <a href="#Page_93">93</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">Lewis, prince of W&#252;rtemberg <a href="#Page_95">95</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">Gibbon <a href="#Page_96">96</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">Boswell <a href="#Page_98">98</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">Corsican affairs <a href="#Page_99">99</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">The feud at Geneva <a href="#Page_102">102</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">Rousseau renounces his citizenship <a href="#Page_105">105</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">The Letters from the Mountain <a href="#Page_106">106</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">Political side <a href="#Page_107">107</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">Consequent persecution at Motiers <a href="#Page_107">107</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">Flight to the isle of St. Peter <a href="#Page_108">108</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">The fifth of the <i>R&#234;veries</i> <a href="#Page_109">109</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">Proscription by the government of Berne <a href="#Page_116">116</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">Rousseau's singular request <a href="#Page_116">116</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">His renewed flight <a href="#Page_117">117</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">Persuaded to seek shelter in England <a href="#Page_118">118</a></p>
+
+
+<p style="text-align: center">&#160;</p>
+
+
+<h3><a href="#CHAPTER_III">CHAPTER III.</a></h3>
+
+<p style="text-align: center"><span class="smcap">The Social Contract.</span></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">Rousseau's reaction against perfectibility <a href="#Page_119">119</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">Abandonment of the position of the Discourses <a href="#Page_121">121</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">Doubtful idea of equality <a href="#Page_121">121</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">The Social Contract, a repudiation of the historic method <a href="#Page_124">124</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">Yet it has glimpses of relativity <a href="#Page_127">127</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">Influence of Greek examples <a href="#Page_129">129</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">And of Geneva <a href="#Page_131">131</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">Impression upon Robespierre and Saint Just <a href="#Page_132">132</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">Rousseau's scheme implied a small territory <a href="#Page_135">135</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">Why the Social Contract made fanatics <a href="#Page_137">137</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">Verbal quality of its propositions <a href="#Page_138">138</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">The doctrine of public safety <a href="#Page_143">143</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">The doctrine of the sovereignty of peoples <a href="#Page_144">144</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">Its early phases <a href="#Page_144">144</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">Its history in the sixteenth century <a href="#Page_146">146</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">Hooker and Grotius <a href="#Page_148">148</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">Locke <a href="#Page_149">149</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">Hobbes <a href="#Page_151">151</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">
+Central propositions of the Social Contract&#8212;<br />
+<br />
+1. Origin of society in compact <a href="#Page_154">154</a><br />
+Different conception held by the Physiocrats <a href="#Page_156">156</a><br />
+<br />
+2. Sovereignty of the body thus constituted <a href="#Page_158">158</a><br />
+Difference from Hobbes and Locke <a href="#Page_159">159</a><br />
+The root of socialism <a href="#Page_160">160</a><br />
+Republican phraseology <a href="#Page_161">161</a><br />
+<br />
+3. Attributes of sovereignty <a href="#Page_162">162</a><br />
+<br />
+4. The law-making power <a href="#Page_163">163</a><br />
+A contemporary illustration <a href="#Page_164">164</a><br />
+Hints of confederation <a href="#Page_166">166</a><br />
+<br />
+5. Forms of government <a href="#Page_168">168</a><br />
+Criticism on the common division <a href="#Page_169">169</a><br />
+Rousseau's preference for elective aristocracy <a href="#Page_172">172</a><br />
+<br />
+6. Attitude of the state to religion <a href="#Page_173">173</a><br />
+Rousseau's view, the climax of a reaction <a href="#Page_176">176</a><br />
+Its effect at the French Revolution <a href="#Page_179">179</a><br />
+Its futility <a href="#Page_180">180</a><br />
+<br />
+Another method of approaching the philosophy of government&#8212;<br />
+<br />
+Origin of society not a compact <a href="#Page_183">183</a><br />
+<br />
+The true reason of the submission of a minority to a majority <a href="#Page_184">184</a><br />
+<br />
+Rousseau fails to touch actual problems <a href="#Page_186">186</a><br />
+<br />
+The doctrine of resistance, for instance <a href="#Page_188">188</a><br />
+<br />
+Historical illustrations <a href="#Page_190">190</a><br />
+<br />
+Historical effect of the Social Contract in France and Germany <a href="#Page_193">193</a><br />
+<br />
+Socialist deductions from it <a href="#Page_194">194</a></p>
+
+
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<br />
+</p>
+
+
+<h3><a href="#CHAPTER_IV">CHAPTER IV.</a></h3>
+
+<p style="text-align: center"><span class="smcap">Emilius.</span></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">Rousseau touched by the enthusiasm of his time <a href="#Page_197">197</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">Contemporary excitement as to education, part of the revival of
+naturalism <a href="#Page_199">199</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">
+I.&#8212;Locke, on education <a href="#Page_202">202</a><br />
+Difference between him and Rousseau <a href="#Page_204">204</a><br />
+Exhortations to mothers <a href="#Page_205">205</a><br />
+Importance of infantile habits <a href="#Page_208">208</a><br />
+Rousseau's protest against reasoning with children <a href="#Page_209">209</a><br />
+Criticised <a href="#Page_209">209</a><br />
+The opposite theory <a href="#Page_210">210</a><br />
+The idea of property <a href="#Page_212">212</a><br />
+Artificially contrived incidents <a href="#Page_214">214</a><br />
+Rousseau's omission of the principle of authority <a href="#Page_215">215</a><br />
+Connected with his neglect of the faculty of sympathy <a href="#Page_219">219</a><br />
+<br />
+II.&#8212;Rousseau's ideal of living <a href="#Page_221">221</a><br />
+The training that follows from it <a href="#Page_222">222</a><br />
+The duty of knowing a craft <a href="#Page_223">223</a><br />
+Social conception involved in this moral conception <a href="#Page_226">226</a><br />
+<br />
+III.&#8212;Three aims before the instructor <a href="#Page_229">229</a><br />
+Rousseau's omission of training for the social conscience <a href="#Page_230">230</a><br />
+No contemplation of society as a whole <a href="#Page_232">232</a><br />
+Personal interest, the foundation of the morality of Emilius <a href="#Page_233">233</a><br />
+The sphere and definition of the social conscience <a href="#Page_235">235</a><br />
+<br />
+IV.&#8212;The study of history <a href="#Page_237">237</a><br />
+Rousseau's notions upon the subject <a href="#Page_239">239</a><br />
+<br />
+V.&#8212;Ideals of life for women <a href="#Page_241">241</a><br />
+Rousseau's repudiation of his own principles <a href="#Page_242">242</a><br />
+His oriental and obscurantist position <a href="#Page_243">243</a><br />
+Arising from his want of faith in improvement <a href="#Page_244">244</a><br />
+His reactionary tendencies in this region eventually neutralised <a href="#Page_248">248</a><br />
+<br />
+VI.&#8212;Sum of the merits of Emilius <a href="#Page_249">249</a><br />
+Its influence in France and Germany <a href="#Page_251">251</a><br />
+In England <a href="#Page_252">252</a></p>
+
+<p>&#160;</p>
+
+
+<h3><a href="#CHAPTER_V">CHAPTER V.</a></h3>
+
+<p style="text-align: center"><span class="smcap">The Savoyard Vicar.</span></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">Shallow hopes entertained by the dogmatic atheists <a href="#Page_256">256</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">The good side of the religious reaction <a href="#Page_258">258</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">Its preservation of some parts of Christian influence <a href="#Page_259">259</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">Earlier forms of deism <a href="#Page_260">260</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">The deism of the Savoyard Vicar <a href="#Page_264">264</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">The elevation of man, as well as the restoration of a divinity <a href="#Page_265">265</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">A divinity for fair weather <a href="#Page_268">268</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">Religious self-denial <a href="#Page_269">269</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">The Savoyard Vicar's vital omission <a href="#Page_270">270</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">His position towards Christianity <a href="#Page_272">272</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">Its effectiveness as a solvent <a href="#Page_273">273</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">Weakness of the subjective test <a href="#Page_276">276</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">The Savoyard Vicar's deism not compatible with growing intellectual
+conviction <a href="#Page_276">276</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">The true satisfaction of the religious emotion <a href="#Page_277">277</a></p>
+
+<p>&#160;</p>
+
+<h3><a href="#CHAPTER_VI">CHAPTER VI.</a></h3>
+
+<p style="text-align: center"><span class="smcap">England.</span></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">Rousseau's English portrait <a href="#Page_281">281</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">His reception in Paris <a href="#Page_282">282</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">And in London <a href="#Page_283">283</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">Hume's account of him <a href="#Page_284">284</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">Settlement at Wootton <a href="#Page_286">286</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">The quarrel with Hume <a href="#Page_287">287</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">Detail of the charges against Hume <a href="#Page_287">287</a>-291</p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">Walpole's pretended letter from Frederick <a href="#Page_291">291</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">Baselessness of the whole delusion <a href="#Page_292">292</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">Hume's conduct in the quarrel <a href="#Page_293">293</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">The war of pamphlets <a href="#Page_295">295</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">Common theory of Rousseau's madness <a href="#Page_296">296</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">Preparatory conditions <a href="#Page_297">297</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">Extension of disorder from the affective life to the intelligence <a href="#Page_299">299</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">The Confessions <a href="#Page_301">301</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">His life at Wootton <a href="#Page_306">306</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">Flight from Derbyshire <a href="#Page_306">306</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">And from England <a href="#Page_308">308</a></p>
+
+<p>&#160;</p>
+
+<h3><a href="#CHAPTER_VII">CHAPTER VII.</a></h3>
+
+<p style="text-align: center"><span class="smcap">The End.</span></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">The elder Mirabeau <a href="#Page_309">309</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">Shelters Rousseau at Fleury <a href="#Page_311">311</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">Rousseau at Trye <a href="#Page_312">312</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">In Dauphiny <a href="#Page_314">314</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">Return to Paris <a href="#Page_314">314</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">The <i>R&#234;veries</i> <a href="#Page_315">315</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">Life in Paris <a href="#Page_316">316</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">Bernardin de St. Pierre's account of him <a href="#Page_317">317</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">An Easter excursion <a href="#Page_320">320</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">Rousseau's unsociality <a href="#Page_322">322</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">Poland and Spain <a href="#Page_324">324</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">Withdrawal to Ermenonville <a href="#Page_326">326</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">His death <a href="#Page_326">326</a></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center"><a href="#INDEX"><b>INDEX</b></a></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">[ii.1]</a></span></p>
+<h1>ROUSSEAU.</h1>
+
+<p>&#160;</p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_I" id="CHAPTER_I"></a>CHAPTER I.</h2>
+
+<h3>MONTMORENCY&#8212;THE NEW HELO&#207;SA.</h3>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The</span> many conditions of intellectual productiveness are still
+hidden in such profound obscurity that we are unable to explain why a
+period of stormy moral agitation seems to be in certain natures the
+indispensable antecedent of their highest creative effort. Byron is
+one instance, and Rousseau is another, in which the current of
+stimulating force made this rapid way from the lower to the higher
+parts of character, and only expended itself after having traversed
+the whole range of emotion and faculty, from their meanest, most
+realistic, most personal forms of exercise, up to the summit of what
+is lofty and ideal. No man was ever involved in such an odious
+complication of moral maladies as beset Rousseau in the winter of
+1758. Yet within three years of this miserable epoch he had completed
+not only the New Helo&#239;sa, which is the monument of his fall, but the
+Social Contract, which was the most influential,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">[ii.2]</a></span> and Emilius,
+which was perhaps the most elevated and spiritual, of all the
+productions of the prolific genius of France in the eighteenth
+century. A poor light-hearted Marmontel thought that the secret of
+Rousseau's success lay in the circumstance that he began to write
+late, and it is true that no other author, so considerable as
+Rousseau, waited until the age of fifty for the full vigour of his
+inspiration. No tale of years, however, could have ripened such fruit
+without native strength and incommunicable savour. Nor can the
+mechanical movement of those better ordered characters which keep the
+balance of the world even, impart to literature that peculiar quality,
+peculiar but not the finest, that comes from experience of the black
+unlighted abysses of the soul.</p>
+
+<p>The period of actual production was externally calm. The New Helo&#239;sa
+was completed in 1759, and published in 1761. The Social Contract was
+published in the spring of 1762, and Emilius a few weeks later.
+Throughout this period Rousseau was, for the last time in his life, at
+peace with most of his fellows. Though he never relented from his
+antipathy to the Holbachians, for the time it slumbered, until a more
+real and serious persecution than any which he imputed to them,
+transformed his antipathy into a gloomy frenzy.</p>
+
+<p>The new friends whom he made at Montmorency were among the greatest
+people in the kingdom. The Duke of Luxembourg (1702-64) was a marshal
+of France, and as intimate a friend of the king as the king was
+capable of having. The Mar&#233;chale de<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[ii.3]</a></span>
+ [*p.3] Luxembourg (1707-87) had
+been one of the most beautiful, and continued to be one of the most
+brilliant leaders of the last aristocratic generation that was
+destined to sport on the slopes of the volcano. The former seems to
+have been a loyal and homely soul; the latter, restless, imperious,
+penetrating, unamiable. Their dealings with Rousseau were marked by
+perfect sincerity and straightforward friendship. They gave him a
+convenient apartment in a small summer lodge in the park, to which he
+retreated when he cared for a change from his narrow cottage. He was a
+constant guest at their table, where he met the highest personages in
+France. The marshal did not disdain to pay him visits, or to walk with
+him, or to discuss his private affairs. Unable as ever to shine in
+conversation, yet eager to show his great friends that they had to do
+with no common mortal, Rousseau bethought him of reading the New
+Helo&#239;sa aloud to them. At ten in the morning he used to wait upon the
+mar&#233;chale, and there by her bedside he read the story of the love, the
+sin, the repentance of Julie, the distraction of Saint Preux, the
+wisdom of Wolmar, and the sage friendship of Lord Edward, in tones
+which enchanted her both with his book and its author for all the rest
+of the day, as all the women in France were so soon to be
+enchanted.<a name="FNanchor_1_1" id="FNanchor_1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a> This, as he expected, amply reconciled her to the
+uncouthness and clumsiness of his conversation, which was at least as
+maladroit and as spirit<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[ii.4]</a></span>less in the presence of a duchess as it
+was in presences less imposing.</p>
+
+<p>One side of character is obviously tested by the way in which a man
+bears himself in his relations with those of greater social
+consideration. Rousseau was taxed by some of his plebeian enemies with
+a most unheroic deference to his patrician friends. He had a dog whose
+name was <i>Duc</i>. When he came to sit at a duke's table, he changed his
+dog's name to <i>Turc</i>.<a name="FNanchor_2_2" id="FNanchor_2_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_2" class="fnanchor">[2]</a> Again, one day in a transport of tenderness
+he embraced the old marshal&#8212;the duchess embraced Rousseau ten times a
+day, for the age was effusive&#8212;&quot;Ah, monsieur le mar&#233;chal, I used to
+hate the great before I knew you, and I hate them still more, since
+you make me feel so strongly how easy it would be for them to have
+themselves adored.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_3_3" id="FNanchor_3_3"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_3" class="fnanchor">[3]</a> On another occasion he happened to be playing
+at chess with the Prince of Conti, who had come to visit him in his
+cottage.<a name="FNanchor_4_4" id="FNanchor_4_4"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_4" class="fnanchor">[4]</a> In spite of the signs and grimaces of the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[ii.5]</a></span>attendants, he
+insisted on beating the prince in a couple of games. Then he said with
+respectful gravity, &quot;Monseigneur, I honour your serene highness too
+much not to beat you at chess always.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_5_5" id="FNanchor_5_5"></a><a href="#Footnote_5_5" class="fnanchor">[5]</a> A few days after, the
+vanquished prince sent him a present of game which Rousseau duly
+accepted. The present was repeated, but this time Rousseau wrote to
+Madame de Boufflers that he would receive no more, and that he loved
+the prince's conversation better than his gifts.<a name="FNanchor_6_6" id="FNanchor_6_6"></a><a href="#Footnote_6_6" class="fnanchor">[6]</a> He admits that
+this was an ungracious proceeding, and that to refuse game &quot;from a
+prince of the blood who throws such good feeling into the present, is
+not so much the delicacy of a proud man bent on preserving his
+independence, as the rusticity of an unmannerly person who does not
+know his place.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_7_7" id="FNanchor_7_7"></a><a href="#Footnote_7_7" class="fnanchor">[7]</a> Considering the extreme virulence with which
+Rousseau always resented gifts even of the most trifling kind from his
+friends, one may perhaps find some inconsistency in this condemnation
+of a sort of conduct to which he tenaciously clung on all other
+occasions. If the fact of the donor being a prince of the blood is
+allowed to modify the quality of the donation, that is hardly a
+defensible position in the austere citizen of Geneva. Madame de
+Boufflers,<a name="FNanchor_8_8" id="FNanchor_8_8"></a><a href="#Footnote_8_8" class="fnanchor">[8]</a> <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[ii.6]</a></span>the intimate friend of our sage Hume, and the yet more
+intimate friend of the Prince of Conti, gave him a judicious warning
+when she bade him beware of laying himself open to a charge of
+affectation, lest it should obscure the brightness of his virtue and
+so hinder its usefulness. &quot;Fabius and Regulus would have accepted such
+marks of esteem, without feeling in them any hurt to their
+disinterestedness and frugality.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_9_9" id="FNanchor_9_9"></a><a href="#Footnote_9_9" class="fnanchor">[9]</a> Perhaps there is a flutter of
+self-consciousness that is not far removed from this affectation, in
+the pains which Rousseau takes to tell us that after dining at the
+castle, he used to return home gleefully to sup with a mason who was
+his neighbour and his friend.<a name="FNanchor_10_10" id="FNanchor_10_10"></a><a href="#Footnote_10_10" class="fnanchor">[10]</a> On the whole, however, and so far as
+we know, Rousseau conducted himself not unworthily with these high
+people. His letters to them are for the most part marked by
+self-respect and a moderate graciousness, though now and again he
+makes rather too much case of the difference of rank, and asserts his
+independence with something too much of pro<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[ii.7]</a></span>testation.<a name="FNanchor_11_11" id="FNanchor_11_11"></a><a href="#Footnote_11_11" class="fnanchor">[11]</a> Their
+relations with him are a curious sign of the interest which the
+members of the great world took in the men who were quietly preparing
+the destruction both of them and their world. The Mar&#233;chale de
+Luxembourg places this squalid dweller in a hovel on her estate in the
+place of honour at her table, and embraces his Theresa. The Prince of
+Conti pays visits of courtesy and sends game to a man whom he employs
+at a few sous an hour to copy manuscript for him. The Countess of
+Boufflers, in sending him the money, insists that he is to count her
+his warmest friend.<a name="FNanchor_12_12" id="FNanchor_12_12"></a><a href="#Footnote_12_12" class="fnanchor">[12]</a> When his dog dies, the countess writes to
+sympathise with his chagrin, and the prince begs to be allowed to
+replace it.<a name="FNanchor_13_13" id="FNanchor_13_13"></a><a href="#Footnote_13_13" class="fnanchor">[13]</a> And when persecution and trouble and infinite
+confusion came upon him, they all stood as fast by him as their own
+comfort would allow. Do we not feel that there must have been in the
+unhappy man, besides all the recorded pettinesses and perversities
+which revolt us in him, a vein of something which touched men, and
+made women devoted to him, until he splenetically drove both men and
+women away from him? With Madame d'Epinay and Madame d'Houdetot, as
+with the dearer and humbler patroness of his youth, we have now parted
+company. But they are instantly succeeded by new devotees. And the
+lovers of Rousseau, in all degrees, were not silly women led captive
+by idle fancy. Madame de Boufflers was one <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[ii.8]</a></span>of the most distinguished
+spirits of her time. Her friendship for him was such, that his
+sensuous vanity made Rousseau against all reason or probability
+confound it with a warmer form of emotion, and he plumes himself in a
+manner most displeasing on the victory which he won over his own
+feelings on the occasion.<a name="FNanchor_14_14" id="FNanchor_14_14"></a><a href="#Footnote_14_14" class="fnanchor">[14]</a> As a matter of fact he had no feelings
+to conquer, any more than the supposed object of them ever bore him
+any ill-will for his indifference, as in his mania of suspicion he
+afterwards believed.</p>
+
+<p>There was a calm about the too few years he passed at Montmorency,
+which leaves us in doubt whether this mania would ever have afflicted
+him, if his natural irritation had not been made intense and
+irresistible by the cruel distractions that followed the publication
+of Emilius. He was tolerably content with his present friends. The
+simplicity of their way of dealing with him contrasted singularly, as
+he thought, with the never-ending solicitudes, as importunate as they
+were officious, of the patronising friends whom he had just cast
+off.<a name="FNanchor_15_15" id="FNanchor_15_15"></a><a href="#Footnote_15_15" class="fnanchor">[15]</a> Perhaps, too, he was soothed by the companionship of persons
+whose rank may have flattered his vanity, while unlike Diderot and his
+old literary friends in Paris, they entered into no competition with
+him in the peculiar sphere of his own genius. Madame de Boufflers,
+indeed, wrote a tragedy, but he told her gruffly enough that it was a
+plagiarism from Southerne's Oroonoko.<a name="FNanchor_16_16" id="FNanchor_16_16"></a><a href="#Footnote_16_16" class="fnanchor">[16]</a> That Rousseau was
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[ii.9]</a></span>thoroughly capable of this pitiful emotion of sensitive literary
+jealousy is proved, if by nothing else, by his readiness to suspect
+that other authors were jealous of him. No one suspects others of a
+meanness of this kind unless he is capable of it himself. The
+resounding success which followed the New Helo&#239;sa and Emilius put an
+end to these apprehensions. It raised him to a pedestal in popular
+esteem as high as that on which Voltaire stood triumphant. That very
+success unfortunately brought troubles which destroyed Rousseau's last
+chance of ending his days in full reasonableness.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile he enjoyed his final interval of moderate wholesomeness and
+peace. He felt his old healthy joy in the green earth. One of the
+letters commemorates his delight in the great scudding south-west
+winds of February, soft forerunners of the spring, so sweet to all who
+live with nature.<a name="FNanchor_17_17" id="FNanchor_17_17"></a><a href="#Footnote_17_17" class="fnanchor">[17]</a> At the end of his garden was a summer-house, and
+here even on wintry days he sat composing or copying. It was not music
+only that he copied. He took a curious pleasure in making transcripts
+of his romance, and he sold them to the Duchess of Luxembourg and
+other ladies for some moderate fee.<a name="FNanchor_18_18" id="FNanchor_18_18"></a><a href="#Footnote_18_18" class="fnanchor">[18]</a> Sometimes he moved from his
+own lodging to the quarters in the park which his great friends had
+induced him to accept. &quot;They were charmingly neat; the furniture was
+of white and blue. It was in this perfumed and delicious solitude, in
+the midst of woods and streams and choirs of birds of <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[ii.10]</a></span>every kind,
+with the fragrance of the orange-flower poured round me, that I
+composed in a continual ecstasy the fifth book of Emilius. With what
+eagerness did I hasten every morning at sunrise to breathe the balmy
+air! What good coffee I used to make under the porch in company with
+my Theresa! The cat and the dog made up the party. That would have
+sufficed me for all the days of my life, and I should never have known
+weariness.&quot; And so to the assurance, so often repeated under so many
+different circumstances, that here was a true heaven upon earth, where
+if fates had only allowed he would have known unbroken innocence and
+lasting happiness.<a name="FNanchor_19_19" id="FNanchor_19_19"></a><a href="#Footnote_19_19" class="fnanchor">[19]</a></p>
+
+<p>Yet he had the wisdom to warn others against attempting a life such as
+he craved for himself. As on a more memorable occasion, there came to
+him a young man who would fain have been with him always, and whom he
+sent away exceeding sorrowful. &quot;The first lesson I should give you
+would be not to surrender yourself to the taste you say you have for
+the contemplative life. It is only an indolence of the soul, to be
+condemned at any age, but especially so at yours. Man is not made to
+meditate, but to act. Labour therefore in the condition of life in
+which you have been placed by your family and by providence: that is
+the first precept of the virtue which you wish to follow. If residence
+at Paris, joined to the business you have there, seems to you
+irreconcilable with virtue, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[ii.11]</a></span>do better still, and return to your own
+province. Go live in the bosom of your family, serve and solace your
+honest parents. There you will be truly fulfilling the duties that
+virtue imposes on you.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_20_20" id="FNanchor_20_20"></a><a href="#Footnote_20_20" class="fnanchor">[20]</a> This intermixture of sound sense with
+unutterable perversities almost suggests a doubt how far the
+perversities were sincere, until we remember that Rousseau even in the
+most exalted part of his writings was careful to separate immediate
+practical maxims from his theoretical principles of social
+philosophy.<a name="FNanchor_21_21" id="FNanchor_21_21"></a><a href="#Footnote_21_21" class="fnanchor">[21]</a></p>
+
+<p>Occasionally his good sense takes so stiff and unsympathetic a form as
+to fill us with a warmer dislike for him than his worst paradoxes
+inspire. A correspondent had written to him about the frightful
+persecutions which were being inflicted on the Protestants in some
+district of France. Rousseau's letter is a masterpiece in the style of
+Eliphaz the Temanite. Our brethren must surely have given some pretext
+for the evil treatment to which they were subjected. One who is a
+Christian must learn to suffer, and every man's conduct ought to
+conform to his doctrine. Our brethren, moreover, ought to remember
+that the word of God is express upon the duty of obeying the laws set
+up by the prince. The writer cannot venture to <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[ii.12]</a></span>run any risk by
+interceding in favour of our brethren with the government. &quot;Every one
+has his own calling upon the earth; mine is to tell the public harsh
+but useful truths. I have preached humanity, gentleness, tolerance, so
+far as it depended upon me; 'tis no fault of mine if the world has not
+listened. I have made it a rule to keep to general truths; I produce
+no libels, no satires; I attack no man, but men; not an action, but a
+vice.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_22_22" id="FNanchor_22_22"></a><a href="#Footnote_22_22" class="fnanchor">[22]</a> The worst of the worthy sort of people, wrote Voltaire, is
+that they are such cowards: a man groans over a wrong, he holds his
+tongue, he takes his supper, and he forgets all about it.<a name="FNanchor_23_23" id="FNanchor_23_23"></a><a href="#Footnote_23_23" class="fnanchor">[23]</a> If
+Voltaire could not write like F&#233;nelon, at least he could never talk
+like Tartufe; he responded to no tale of wrong with words about his
+mission, with strings of antitheses, but always with royal anger and
+the spring of alert and puissant endeavour. In an hour of oppression
+one would rather have been the friend of the saviour of the Calas and
+of Sirven, than of the vindicator of theism.</p>
+
+<p>Rousseau, however, had good sense enough in less equivocal forms than
+this. For example, in another letter he remonstrates with a
+correspondent for judging the rich too harshly. &quot;You do not bear in
+mind that having from their childhood contracted a thousand wants
+which we are without, then to bring them down to the condition of the
+poor, would be to make them more miserable than the poor. We should be
+just <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[ii.13]</a></span>towards all the world, even to those who are not just to us. Ah,
+if we had the virtues opposed to the vices which we reproach in them,
+we should soon forget that such people were in the world. One word
+more. To have any right to despise the rich, we ought ourselves to be
+prudent and thrifty, so as to have no need of riches.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_24_24" id="FNanchor_24_24"></a><a href="#Footnote_24_24" class="fnanchor">[24]</a> In the
+observance of this just precept Rousseau was to the end of his life
+absolutely without fault. No one was more rigorously careful to make
+his independence sure by the fewness of his wants and by minute
+financial probity. This firm limitation of his material desires was
+one cause of his habitual and almost invariable refusal to accept
+presents, though no doubt another cause was the stubborn and
+ungracious egoism which made him resent every obligation.</p>
+
+<p>It is worth remembering in illustration of the peculiar susceptibility
+and softness of his character where women were concerned&#8212;it was not
+quite without exception&#8212;that he did not fly into a fit of rage over
+their gifts, as he did over those of men. He remonstrated, but in
+gentler key. &quot;What could I do with four pullets?&quot; he wrote to a lady
+who had presented them to him. &quot;I began by sending two of them to
+people to whom I am indifferent. That made me think of the difference
+there is between a present and a testimony of friendship. The first
+will never find in me anything but a thankless heart; the second....
+Ah, if you had only given me news of yourself <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[ii.14]</a></span>without sending me
+anything else, how rich and how grateful you would have made me;
+instead of that the pullets are eaten, and the best thing I can do is
+to forget all about them; let us say no more.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_25_25" id="FNanchor_25_25"></a><a href="#Footnote_25_25" class="fnanchor">[25]</a> Rude and repellent
+as this may seem, and as it is, there is a rough kind of playfulness
+about it, when compared with the truculence which he was not slow to
+exhibit to men. If a friend presumed to thank him for any service, he
+was peremptorily rebuked for his ignorance of the true qualities of
+friendship, with which thankfulness has no connection. He
+ostentatiously refused to offer thanks for services himself, even to a
+woman whom he always treated with so much consideration as the
+Mar&#233;chale de Luxembourg. He once declared boldly that modesty is a
+false virtue,<a name="FNanchor_26_26" id="FNanchor_26_26"></a><a href="#Footnote_26_26" class="fnanchor">[26]</a> and though he did not go so far as to make gratitude
+the subject of a corresponding formula of denunciation, he always
+implied that this too is really one of the false virtues. He confessed
+to Malesherbes, without the slightest contrition, that he was
+ungrateful by nature.<a name="FNanchor_27_27" id="FNanchor_27_27"></a><a href="#Footnote_27_27" class="fnanchor">[27]</a> To Madame d'Epinay he once went still
+further, declaring that he found it hard not to hate those who had
+used him well.<a name="FNanchor_28_28" id="FNanchor_28_28"></a><a href="#Footnote_28_28" class="fnanchor">[28]</a> Undoubtedly he was right so far as this, that
+gratitude answering to a spirit of exaction in a benefactor is no
+merit; a service done in expectation of gratitude is from that fact
+stripped of the quality which makes gratitude due, and is a mere piece
+of <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[ii.15]</a></span>egoism in altruistic disguise. Kindness in its genuine forms is a
+testimony of good feeling, and conventional speech is perhaps a little
+too hard, as well as too shallow and unreal, in calling the recipient
+evil names because he is unable to respond to the good feeling.
+Rousseau protested against a conception of friendship which makes of
+what ought to be disinterested helpfulness a title to everlasting
+tribute. His way of expressing this was harsh and unamiable, but it
+was not without an element of uprightness and veracity. As in his
+greater themes, so in his paradoxes upon private relations, he hid
+wholesome ingredients of rebuke to the unquestioning acceptance of
+common form. &quot;I am well pleased,&quot; he said to a friend, &quot;both with thee
+and thy letters, except the end, where thou say'st thou art more mine
+than thine own. For there thou liest, and it is not worth while to
+take the trouble to <i>thee</i> and <i>thou</i> a man as thine intimate, only to
+tell him untruths.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_29_29" id="FNanchor_29_29"></a><a href="#Footnote_29_29" class="fnanchor">[29]</a> Chesterfield was for people with much
+self-love of the small sort, probably a more agreeable person to meet
+than Doctor Johnson, but Johnson was the more wholesome companion for
+a man.</p>
+
+<p>Occasionally, though not very often, he seems to have let spleen take
+the place of honest surliness, and so drifted into clumsy and
+ill-humoured banter, of a sort that gives a dreary shudder to one
+fresh from Voltaire. &quot;So you have chosen for yourself a tender and
+virtuous mistress! I am not surprised; all <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[ii.16]</a></span>mistresses are that. You
+have chosen her in Paris! To find a tender and virtuous mistress in
+Paris is to have not such bad luck. You have made her a promise of
+marriage? My friend, you have made a blunder; for if you continue to
+love, the promise is superfluous, and if you do not, then it is no
+avail. You have signed it with your blood? That is all but tragic; but
+I don't know that the choice of the ink in which he writes, gives
+anything to the fidelity of the man who signs.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_30_30" id="FNanchor_30_30"></a><a href="#Footnote_30_30" class="fnanchor">[30]</a></p>
+
+<p>We can only add that the health in which a man writes may possibly
+excuse the dismal quality of what he writes, and that Rousseau was now
+as always the prey of bodily pain which, as he was conscious, made him
+distraught. &quot;My sufferings are not very excruciating just now,&quot; he
+wrote on a later occasion, &quot;but they are incessant, and I am not out
+of pain a single moment day or night, and this quite drives me mad. I
+feel bitterly my wrong conduct and the baseness of my suspicions; but
+if anything can excuse me, it is my mournful state, my loneliness,&quot;
+and so on.<a name="FNanchor_31_31" id="FNanchor_31_31"></a><a href="#Footnote_31_31" class="fnanchor">[31]</a> This prolonged physical anguish, which was made more
+intense towards the end of 1761 by the accidental breaking of a
+surgical instrument,<a name="FNanchor_32_32" id="FNanchor_32_32"></a><a href="#Footnote_32_32" class="fnanchor">[32]</a> sometimes so nearly wore his fortitude away
+as to make him think of suicide.<a name="FNanchor_33_33" id="FNanchor_33_33"></a><a href="#Footnote_33_33" class="fnanchor">[33]</a> In Lord Edward's famous letter on
+suicide in the New Helo&#239;sa, while denying in forcible terms the right
+of ending one's days merely to escape from <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[ii.17]</a></span>intolerable mental
+distress, he admits that inasmuch as physical disorders only grow
+incessantly worse, violent and incurable bodily pain may be an excuse
+for a man making away with himself; he ceases to be a human being
+before dying, and in putting an end to his life he only completes his
+release from a body that embarrasses him, and contains his soul no
+longer.<a name="FNanchor_34_34" id="FNanchor_34_34"></a><a href="#Footnote_34_34" class="fnanchor">[34]</a> The thought was often present to him in this form.
+Eighteen months later than our last date, the purpose grew very
+deliberate under an aggravation of his malady, and he seriously looked
+upon his own case as falling within the conditions of Lord Edward's
+exception.<a name="FNanchor_35_35" id="FNanchor_35_35"></a><a href="#Footnote_35_35" class="fnanchor">[35]</a> It is difficult, in the face of outspoken declarations
+like these, to know what writers can be thinking of when, with respect
+to the controversy on the manner of Rousseau's death, they pronounce
+him incapable of such a dereliction of his own most cherished
+principles as anything like self-destruction would have been.</p>
+
+<p>As he sat gnawed by pain, with surgical instruments on his table, and
+sombre thoughts of suicide in his head, the ray of a little episode of
+romance shone in <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[ii.18]</a></span>incongruously upon the scene. Two ladies in Paris,
+absorbed in the New Helo&#239;sa, like all the women of the time,
+identified themselves with the Julie and the Claire of the novel that
+none could resist. They wrote anonymously to the author, claiming
+their identification with characters fondly supposed to be immortal.
+&quot;You will know that Julie is not dead, and that she lives to love you;
+I am not this Julie, you perceive it by my style; I am only her
+cousin, or rather her friend, as Claire was.&quot; The unfortunate Saint
+Preux responded as gallantly as he could be expected to do in the
+intervals of surgery. &quot;You do not know that the Saint Preux to whom
+you write is tormented with a cruel and incurable disorder, and that
+the very letter he writes to you is often interrupted by distractions
+of a very different kind.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_36_36" id="FNanchor_36_36"></a><a href="#Footnote_36_36" class="fnanchor">[36]</a> He figures rather uncouthly, but the
+unknown fair were not at first disabused, and one of them never was.
+Rousseau was deeply suspicious. He feared to be made the victim of a
+masculine pleasantry. From women he never feared anything. His letters
+were found too short, too cold. He replied to the remonstrance by a
+reference of extreme coarseness. His correspondents wrote from the
+neighbourhood of the Palais Royal, then and for long after the haunt
+of mercenary women. &quot;You belong to your quarter more than I thought,&quot;
+he said brutally.<a name="FNanchor_37_37" id="FNanchor_37_37"></a><a href="#Footnote_37_37" class="fnanchor">[37]</a> The vulgarity of the lackey was never quite
+obliterated in him, even when the lackey had written Emilius. <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[ii.19]</a></span>This
+was too much for the imaginary Claire. &quot;I have given myself three good
+blows on my breast for the correspondence that I was silly enough to
+open between you,&quot; she wrote to Julie, and she remained implacable.
+The Julie, on the contrary, was faithful to the end of Rousseau's
+life. She took his part vehemently in the quarrel with Hume, and wrote
+in defence of his memory after he was dead. She is the most remarkable
+of all the instances of that unreasoning passion which the New Helo&#239;sa
+inflamed in the breasts of the women of that age. Madame Latour
+pursued Jean Jacques with a devotion that no coldness could repulse.
+She only saw him three times in all, the first time not until 1766,
+when he was on his way through Paris to England. The second time, in
+1772, she visited him without mentioning her name, and he did not
+recognise her; she brought him some music to copy, and went away
+unknown. She made another attempt, announcing herself: he gave her a
+frosty welcome, and then wrote to her that she was to come no more.
+With a strange fidelity she bore him no grudge, but cherished his
+memory and sorrowed over his misfortunes to the day of her death. He
+was not an idol of very sublime quality, but we may think kindly of
+the idolatress.<a name="FNanchor_38_38" id="FNanchor_38_38"></a><a href="#Footnote_38_38" class="fnanchor">[38]</a> Worshippers are ever <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[ii.20]</a></span>dearer to us than their
+graven images. Let us turn to the romance which touched women in this
+way, and helped to give a new spirit to an epoch.</p>
+
+
+<p style="text-align: center"><b>II.</b></p>
+
+<p>As has been already said, it is the business of criticism to separate
+what is accidental in form, transitory in manner, and merely local in
+suggestion, from the general ideas which live under a casual and
+particular literary robe. And so we have to distinguish the external
+conditions under which a book like the New Helo&#239;sa is produced, from
+the living qualities in the author which gave the external conditions
+their hold upon him, and turned their development in one direction
+rather than another. We are only encouraging poverty of spirit, when
+we insist on fixing our eyes on a few of the minuti&#230; of construction,
+instead of patiently seizing larger impressions and more durable
+meanings; when we stop at the fortuitous incidents of composition,
+instead of advancing to the central elements of the writer's
+character.</p>
+
+<p>These incidents in the case of the New Helo&#239;sa we know; the sensuous
+communion with nature in her summer mood in the woods of Montmorency,
+the long hours and days of solitary expansion, the despairing passion
+for the too sage Julie of actual experience. But the power of these
+impressions from without depended on secrets of conformation within.
+An adult with marked character is, consciously or uncon<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[ii.21]</a></span>sciously, his
+own character's victim or sport. It is his whole system of impulses,
+ideas, pre-occupations, that make those critical situations ready,
+into which he too hastily supposes that an accident has drawn him. And
+this inner system not only prepares the situation; it forces his
+interpretation of the situation. Much of the interest of the New
+Helo&#239;sa springs from the fact that it was the outcome, in a sense of
+which the author himself was probably unconscious, of the general
+doctrine of life and conduct which he only professed to expound in
+writings of graver pretension. Rousseau generally spoke of his romance
+in phrases of depreciation, as the monument of a passing weakness. It
+was in truth as entirely a monument of the strength, no less than the
+weakness, of his whole scheme, as his weightiest piece. That it was
+not so deliberately, only added to its effect. The slow and musing air
+which underlies all the assumption of ardent passion, made a way for
+the doctrine into sensitive natures, that would have been untouched by
+the pretended ratiocination of the Discourses, and the didactic manner
+of the Emilius.</p>
+
+<p>Rousseau's scheme, which we must carefully remember was only present
+to his own mind in an informal and fragmentary way, may be shortly
+described as an attempt to rehabilitate human nature in as much of the
+supposed freshness of primitive times, as the hardened crust of civil
+institutions and social use might allow. In this survey, however
+incoherently carried out, the mutual passion of the two sexes<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[ii.22]</a></span> was the
+very last that was likely to escape Rousseau's attention. Hence it was
+with this that he began. The Discourses had been an attack upon the
+general ordering of society, and an exposition of the mischief that
+society has done to human nature at large. The romance treated one set
+of emotions in human nature particularly, though it also touches the
+whole emotional sphere indirectly. And this limitation of the field
+was accompanied by a total revolution in the method. Polemic was
+abandoned; the presence of hostility was forgotten in appearance, if
+not in the heart of the writer; instead of discussion, presentation;
+instead of abstract analysis of principles, concrete drawing of
+persons and dramatic delineation of passion. There is, it is true, a
+monstrous superfluity of ethical exposition of most doubtful value,
+but then that, as we have already said, was in the manners of the
+time. All people in those days with any pretensions to use their
+minds, wrote and talked in a superfine ethical manner, and violently
+translated the dictates of sensibility into formulas of morality. The
+important thing to remark is not that this semi-didactic strain is
+present, but that there is much less of it, and that it takes a far
+more subordinate place, than the subject and the reigning taste would
+have led us to expect. It is true, also, that Rousseau declared his
+intention in the two characters of Julie and of Wolmar, who eventually
+became Julie's husband, of leading to a reconciliation between the two
+great opposing parties, the devout and the rationalistic; of teaching
+them the lesson of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[ii.23]</a></span> reciprocal esteem, by showing the one that it is
+possible to believe in a God without being a hypocrite, and the other
+that it is possible to be an unbeliever without being a scoundrel.<a name="FNanchor_39_39" id="FNanchor_39_39"></a><a href="#Footnote_39_39" class="fnanchor">[39]</a>
+This intention, if it was really present to Rousseau's mind while he
+was writing, and not an afterthought characteristically welcomed for
+the sake of giving loftiness and gravity to a composition of which he
+was always a little ashamed, must at any rate have been of a very pale
+kind. It would hardly have occurred to a critic, unless Rousseau had
+so emphatically pointed it out, that such a design had presided over
+the composition, and contemporary readers saw nothing of it. In the
+first part of the story, which is wholly passionate, it is certainly
+not visible, and in the second part neither of the two contending
+factions was likely to learn any lesson with respect to the other.
+Churchmen would have insisted that Wolmar was really a Christian
+dressed up as an atheist, and philosophers would hardly have accepted
+Julie as a type of the too believing people who broke Calas on the
+wheel, and cut off La Barre's head.</p>
+
+<p>French critics tell us that no one now reads the New Helo&#239;sa in France
+except deliberate students of the works of Rousseau, and certainly few
+in this generation read it in our own country.<a name="FNanchor_40_40" id="FNanchor_40_40"></a><a href="#Footnote_40_40" class="fnanchor">[40]</a> The action <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[ii.24]</a></span>is very
+slight, and the play of motives very simple, when contrasted with the
+ingenuity of invention, the elaborate subtleties of psychological
+analysis, the power of rapid change from one perturbing incident or
+excited humour to another, which mark the modern writer of sentimental
+fiction. As the title warns us, it is a story of a youthful tutor and
+a too fair disciple, straying away from the lessons of calm philosophy
+into the heated places of passion. The high pride of Julie's father
+forbade all hope of their union, and in very desperation the unhappy
+pair lost the self-control of virtue, and threw themselves into the
+pit that lies so ready to our feet. Remorse followed with quick step,
+for Julie had with her purity lost none of the other lovelinesses of a
+dutiful character. Her lover was hurried away from the country by the
+generous solicitude of an English nobleman, one of the bravest,
+tenderest, and best of men. Julie, left undisturbed by her lover's
+presence, stricken with affliction at the death of a sweet and
+affectionate mother, and pressed by the importunities of a father whom
+she dearly loved, in spite of all the disasters which his will had
+brought upon her, at length consented to marry a foreign baron from
+some northern court. Wolmar was much older than she was; a devotee of
+calm reason, without a system and without prejudices, benevolent,
+orderly, above all things judicious. The lover meditated suicide, from
+which he was only diverted by the arguments of Lord Edward, who did
+more than argue; he hurried the forlorn man on board the ship<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[ii.25]</a></span> of
+Admiral Anson, then just starting for his famous voyage round the
+world. And this marks the end of the first episode.</p>
+
+<p>Rousseau always urged that his story was dangerous for young girls,
+and maintained that Richardson was grievously mistaken in supposing
+that they could be instructed by romances. It was like setting fire to
+the house, he said, for the sake of making the pumps play.<a name="FNanchor_41_41" id="FNanchor_41_41"></a><a href="#Footnote_41_41" class="fnanchor">[41]</a> As he
+admitted so much, he is not open to attack on this side, except from
+those who hold the theory that no books ought to be written which may
+not prudently be put into the hands of the young,&#8212;a puerile and
+contemptible doctrine that must emasculate all literature and all art,
+by excluding the most interesting of human relations and the most
+powerful of human passions. There is not a single composition of the
+first rank outside of science, from the Bible downwards, that could
+undergo the test. The most useful standard for measuring the
+significance of a book in this respect is found in the manners of the
+time, and the prevailing tone of contemporary literature. In trying to
+appreciate the meaning of the New Helo&#239;sa and its popularity, it is
+well to think of it as a delineation of love, in connection not only
+with such a book as the Pucelle, where there is at least wit, but with
+a story like Duclos's, which all ladies both read and were not in the
+least ashamed to acknowledge that they had read; or still worse, such
+an abomination as Diderot's first stories; or a story <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[ii.26]</a></span>like Laclos's,
+which came a generation later, and with its infinite briskness and
+devilry carried the tradition of artistic impurity to as vigorous a
+manifestation as it is capable of reaching.<a name="FNanchor_42_42" id="FNanchor_42_42"></a><a href="#Footnote_42_42" class="fnanchor">[42]</a> To a generation whose
+literature is as pure as the best English, American, and German
+literature is in the present day, the New Helo&#239;sa might without doubt
+be corrupting. To the people who read Cr&#233;billon and the Pucelle, it
+was without doubt elevating.</p>
+
+<p>The case is just as strong if we turn from books to manners. Without
+looking beyond the circle of names that occur in Rousseau's own
+history, we see how deep the depravity had become. Madame d'Epinay's
+gallant sat at table with the husband, and the husband was perfectly
+aware of the relations between them. M. d'Epinay had notorious
+relations with two public women, and was not ashamed to refer to them
+in the presence of his wife, and even to seek her sympathy on an
+occasion when one of them was in some trouble. Not only this, but
+husband and lover used to pursue their debaucheries in the town
+together in jovial comradeship. An opera dancer presided at the table
+of a patrician abb&#233; in his country house, and he passed weeks in her
+house in the town. As for shame, says Barbier on one occasion, &quot;'tis
+true the king has a mistress, but who has not?&#8212;except the Duke of
+Orleans; he has withdrawn to Ste. Genevi&#232;ve, and is thoroughly
+despised in consequence, and rightly.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_43_43" id="FNanchor_43_43"></a><a href="#Footnote_43_43" class="fnanchor">[43]</a> <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[ii.27]</a></span>Reeking disorder such as
+all this illustrates, made the passion of the two imaginary lovers of
+the fair lake seem like a breath from the garden of Eden. One virtue
+was lost in that simple paradise, but even that loss was followed by
+circumstances of mental pain and far circling distress, which banished
+the sin into a secondary place; and what remained to strike the
+imagination of the time were delightful pictures of fast union between
+two enchanting women, of the patience and compassionateness of a grave
+mother, of the chivalrous warmth and helpfulness of a loyal friend.
+Any one anxious to pick out sensual strokes and turns of grossness
+could make a small collection of such defilements from the New Helo&#239;sa
+without any difficulty. They were in Rousseau's character, and so they
+came out in his work. Saint Preux afflicts us with touches of this
+kind, just as we are afflicted with similar touches in the
+Confessions. They were not noticed at that day, when people's ears did
+not affect to be any chaster than the rest of them.</p>
+
+<p>A historian of opinion is concerned with the general effect that was
+actually produced by a remarkable book, and with the causes that
+produced it. It is not his easy task to produce a demonstration that
+if the readers had all been as wise and as virtuous as the moralist
+might desire them to be, or if they had all been discriminating and
+scientific critics, not this, but a very different impression would
+have followed. Today we may wonder at the effect of the New Helo&#239;sa.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[ii.28]</a></span>
+A long story told in letters has grown to be a form incomprehensible
+and intolerable to us. We find Richardson hard to be borne, and he put
+far greater vivacity and wider variety into his letters than Rousseau
+did, though he was not any less diffuse, and he abounds in repetitions
+as Rousseau does not. Rousseau was absolutely without humour; that
+belongs to the keenly observant natures, and to those who love men in
+the concrete, not only humanity in the abstract. The pleasantries of
+Julie's cousin, for instance, are heavy and misplaced. Thus the whole
+book is in one key, without the dramatic changes of Richardson, too
+few even as those are. And who now can endure that antique fashion of
+apostrophising men and women, hot with passion and eager with all
+active impulses, in oblique terms of abstract qualities, as if their
+passion and their activity were only the inconsiderable embodiment of
+fine general ideas? We have not a single thrill, when Saint Preux
+being led into the chamber where his mistress is supposed to lie
+dying, murmurs passionately, &quot;What shall I now see in the same place
+of refuge where once all breathed the ecstasy that intoxicated my
+soul, in this same object who both caused and shared my transports!
+the image of death, virtue unhappy, beauty expiring!&quot;<a name="FNanchor_44_44" id="FNanchor_44_44"></a><a href="#Footnote_44_44" class="fnanchor">[44]</a> This
+rhetorical artificiality of phrase, so repulsive to the more realistic
+taste of a later age, was as natural then as that facility of shedding
+tears, which appears so deeply incredible a performance to a
+generation <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[ii.29]</a></span>that has lost that particular fashion of sensibility,
+without realising for the honour of its ancestors the physiological
+truth of the power of the will over the secretions.</p>
+
+<p>The characters seem as stiff as some of the language, to us who are
+accustomed to an Asiatic luxuriousness of delineation. Yet the New
+Helo&#239;sa was nothing less than the beginning of that fresh, full,
+highly-coloured style which has now taught us to find so little charm
+in the source and original of it. Saint Preux is a personage whom no
+widest charity, literary, philosophic, or Christian, can make
+endurable. Egoism is made thrice disgusting by a ceaseless redundance
+of fine phrases. The exaggerated conceits of love in our old poets
+turn graciously on the lover's eagerness to offer every sacrifice at
+the feet of his mistress. Even Werther, stricken creature as he was,
+yet had the stoutness to blow his brains out, rather than be the
+instrument of surrounding the life of his beloved with snares. Saint
+Preux's egoism is unbrightened by a single ray of tender abnegation,
+or a single touch of the sweet humility of devoted passion. The slave
+of his sensations, he has no care beyond their gratification. With
+some rotund nothing on his lips about virtue being the only path to
+happiness, his heart burns with sickly desire. He writes first like a
+pedagogue infected by some cantharidean philter, and then like a
+pedagogue without the philter, and that is the worse of the two.
+Lovelace and the Count of Valmont are manly and hopeful characters in
+comparison.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[ii.30]</a></span> Werther, again, at least represents a principle of
+rebellion, in the midst of all his self-centred despair, and he
+retains strength enough to know that his weakness is shameful. His
+despair, moreover, is deeply coloured with repulsed social
+ambition.<a name="FNanchor_45_45" id="FNanchor_45_45"></a><a href="#Footnote_45_45" class="fnanchor">[45]</a> He feels the world about him. His French prototype, on
+the contrary, represents nothing but the unalloyed selfishness of a
+sensual love for which there is no universe outside of its own fevered
+pulsation.</p>
+
+<p>Julie is much less displeasing, partly perhaps for the reason that she
+belongs to the less displeasing sex. At least, she preserves
+fortitude, self-control, and profound considerateness for others. At a
+certain point her firmness even moves a measure of enthusiasm. If the
+New Helo&#239;sa could be said to have any moral intention, it is here
+where women learn from the example of Julie's energetic return to
+duty, the possibility and the satisfaction of bending character back
+to comeliness and honour. Excellent as this is from a moral point of
+view, the reader may wish that Julie had been less of a preacher, as
+well as less of a sinner. And even as sinner, she would have been more
+readily forgiven if she had been less deliberate. A maiden who
+sacrifices her virtue in order that the visible consequences may force
+her parents to consent to a marriage, is too strategical to be
+perfectly touching. As was said by the cleverest, though not the
+greatest, of all the women whose youth was fascinated by Rousseau,
+when one has renounced the charms of <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[ii.31]</a></span>virtue, it is at least well to
+have all the charms that entire surrender of heart can bestow.<a name="FNanchor_46_46" id="FNanchor_46_46"></a><a href="#Footnote_46_46" class="fnanchor">[46]</a> In
+spite of this, however, Julie struck the imagination of the time, and
+struck it in a way that was thoroughly wholesome. The type taught men
+some respect for the dignity of women, and it taught women a firmer
+respect for themselves. It is useless, even if it be possible, to
+present an example too lofty for the comprehension of an age. At this
+moment the most brilliant genius in the country was filling France
+with impish merriment at the expense of the greatest heroine that
+France had then to boast. In such an atmosphere Julie had almost the
+halo of saintliness.</p>
+
+<p>We may say all we choose about the inconsistency, the excess of
+preaching, the excess of prudence, in the character of Julie. It was
+said pungently enough by the wits of the time.<a name="FNanchor_47_47" id="FNanchor_47_47"></a><a href="#Footnote_47_47" class="fnanchor">[47]</a> Nothing that could
+be <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[ii.32]</a></span>said on all this affected the fact, that the women between 1760
+and the Revolution were intoxicated by Rousseau's creation to such a
+pitch that they would pay any price for a glass out of which Rousseau
+had drunk, they would kiss a scrap of paper that contained a piece of
+his handwriting, and vow that no woman of true sensibility could
+hesitate to consecrate her life to him, if she were only certain to be
+rewarded by his attachment.<a name="FNanchor_48_48" id="FNanchor_48_48"></a><a href="#Footnote_48_48" class="fnanchor">[48]</a> The booksellers were unable to meet
+the demand. The book was let out at the rate of twelve sous a volume,
+and the volume could not be detained beyond an hour. All classes
+shared the excitement, courtiers, soldiers, lawyers, and
+bourgeois.<a name="FNanchor_49_49" id="FNanchor_49_49"></a><a href="#Footnote_49_49" class="fnanchor">[49]</a> Stories were told of fine ladies, dressed for the ball,
+who took the book up for half an hour until the time should come for
+starting; they read until midnight, and when informed that the
+carriage waited, answered not a word, and when reminded by and by that
+it was two o'clock, still read <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[ii.33]</a></span>on, and then at four, having ordered
+the horses to be taken out of the carriage, disrobed, went to bed, and
+passed the remainder of the night in reading. In Germany the effect
+was just as astonishing. Kant only once in his life failed to take his
+afternoon walk, and this unexampled omission was due to the witchery
+of the New Helo&#239;sa. Gallantry was succeeded by passion, expansion,
+exaltation; moods far more dangerous for society, as all enthusiasm is
+dangerous, but also far higher and pregnant with better hopes for
+character. To move the sympathetic faculties is the first step towards
+kindling all the other energies which make life wiser and more
+fruitful. It is especially worth noticing that nothing in the
+character of Julie concentrates this outburst of sympathy in
+subjective broodings. Julie is the representative of one recalled to
+the straight path by practical, wholesome, objective sympathy for
+others, not of one expiring in unsatisfied yearnings for the sympathy
+of others for herself, and in moonstruck subjective aspirations. The
+women who wept over her romance read in it the lesson of duty, not of
+whimpering introspection. The danger lay in the mischievous
+intellectual direction which Rousseau imparted to this effusion.</p>
+
+<p>The stir which the Julie communicated to the affections in so many
+ways, marked progress, but in all the elements of reason she was the
+most perilous of reactionaries. So hard it is with the human mind,
+constituted as it is, to march forward a space further<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[ii.34]</a></span> to the light,
+without making some fresh swerve obliquely towards old darkness. The
+great effusion of natural sentiment was in the air before the New
+Helo&#239;sa appeared, to condense and turn it into definite channels. One
+beautiful character, Vauven argues (1715-1747), had begun to teach the
+culture of emotional instinct in some sayings of exquisite sweetness
+and moderation, as that &quot;Great thoughts come from the heart.&quot; But he
+came too soon, and, alas for us all, he died young, and he made no
+mark. Moderation never can make a mark in the epochs when men are
+beginning to feel the urgent spirit of a new time. Diderot strove with
+more powerful efforts, in the midst of all his herculean labours for
+the acquisition and ordering of knowledge, in the same direction
+towards the great outer world of nature, and towards the great inner
+world of nature in the human breast. His criticisms on the paintings
+of each year, mediocre as the paintings were, are admirable even now
+for their richness and freshness. If Diderot had been endowed with
+emotional tenacity, as he was with tenacity of understanding and of
+purpose, the student of the eighteenth century would probably have
+been spared the not perfectly agreeable task of threading a way along
+the sinuosities of the character and work of Rousseau. But Rousseau
+had what Diderot lacked&#8212;sustained ecstatic moods, and fervid trances;
+his literary gesture was so commanding, his apparel so glistening, his
+voice so rich in long-drawn notes of plangent vibration. His words<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[ii.35]</a></span>
+are the words of a prophet; a prophet, it is understood, who had lived
+in Paris, and belonged to the eighteenth century, and wrote in French
+instead of Hebrew. The mischief of his work lay in this, that he
+raised feeling, now passionate, now quietest, into the supreme place
+which it was to occupy alone, and not on an equal throne and in equal
+alliance with understanding. Instead of supplementing reason, he
+placed emotion as its substitute. And he made this evil doctrine come
+from the lips of a fictitious character, who stimulated fancy and
+fascinated imagination. Voltaire laughed at the <i>baisers &#226;cres</i> of
+Madame de Wolmar, and declared that a criticism of the Marquis of
+Xim&#233;n&#232;s had crushed the wretched romance.<a name="FNanchor_50_50" id="FNanchor_50_50"></a><a href="#Footnote_50_50" class="fnanchor">[50]</a> But Madame de Wolmar was
+so far from crushed, that she turned the flood of feeling which her
+own charms, passion, remorse, and conversion had raised, in a
+direction that Voltaire abhorred, and abhorred in vain.</p>
+
+<p>It is after the marriage of Julie to Wolmar that the action of the
+story takes the turn which sensible men like Voltaire found laughable.
+Saint Preux is absent with Admiral Anson for some years. On his return
+to Europe he is speedily invited by the sage Wolmar, who knows his
+past history perfectly well, to pay them a visit. They all meet with
+leapings on <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[ii.36]</a></span>the neck and hearty kisses, the unprejudiced Wolmar
+preserving an open, serene, and smiling air. He takes his young friend
+to a chamber, which is to be reserved for him and for him only. In a
+few days he takes an opportunity of visiting some distant property,
+leaving his wife and Saint Preux together, with the sublime of
+magnanimity. At the same time he confides to Claire his intention of
+entrusting to Saint Preux the education of his children. All goes
+perfectly well, and the household presents a picture of contentment,
+prosperity, moderation, affection, and evenly diffused happiness,
+which in spite of the disagreeableness of the situation is even now
+extremely charming. There is only one cloud. Julie is devoured by a
+source of hidden chagrin. Her husband, &quot;so sage, so reasonable, so far
+from every kind of vice, so little under the influence of human
+passions, is without the only belief that makes virtue precious, and
+in the innocence of an irreproachable life he carries at the bottom of
+his heart the frightful peace of the wicked.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_51_51" id="FNanchor_51_51"></a><a href="#Footnote_51_51" class="fnanchor">[51]</a> He is an atheist.
+Julie is now a pietest, locking herself for hours in her chambers,
+spending days in self-examination and prayer, constantly reading the
+pages of the good F&#233;nelon.<a name="FNanchor_52_52" id="FNanchor_52_52"></a><a href="#Footnote_52_52" class="fnanchor">[52]</a> &quot;I fear,&quot; she writes to Saint Preux,
+&quot;that you do not gain all you might from religion in the conduct of
+your life, and that philosophic pride disdains the simplicity of the
+Christian. You believe prayers to be of scanty service. That is not,
+you know, the doctrine of Saint <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[ii.37]</a></span>Paul, nor what our Church professes.
+We are free, it is true, but we are ignorant, feeble, prone to ill.
+And whence should light and force come, if not from him who is their
+very well-spring?... Let us be humble, to be sage; let us see our
+weakness, and we shall be strong.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_53_53" id="FNanchor_53_53"></a><a href="#Footnote_53_53" class="fnanchor">[53]</a> This was the opening of the
+deistical reaction; it was thus, associated with everything that
+struck imagination and moved the sentiment of his readers, that
+Rousseau brought back those sophistical conclusions which Pascal had
+drawn from premisses of dark profound truth, and that enervating
+displacement of reason by celestial contemplation, which F&#233;nelon had
+once made beautiful by the persuasion of virtuous example. He was
+justified in saying, as he afterwards did, that there was nothing in
+the Savoyard Vicar's Profession of Faith which was not to be found in
+the letters of Julie. These were the effective preparations for that
+more famous manifesto; they surrounded belief with all the attractions
+of an interesting and sympathetic preacher, and set it to a harmony of
+circumstance that touched softer fibres.</p>
+
+<p>For, curiously enough, while the first half of the romance is a scene
+of disorderly passion, the second is the glorification of the family.
+A modern writer of genius has inveighed with whimsical bitterness
+against the character of Wolmar,&#8212;supposed, we may notice in passing,
+to be partially drawn from D'Holbach,&#8212;a man performing so long an
+experiment on these <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[ii.38]</a></span>two souls, with the terrible curiosity of a
+surgeon engaged in vivisection.<a name="FNanchor_54_54" id="FNanchor_54_54"></a><a href="#Footnote_54_54" class="fnanchor">[54]</a> It was, however, much less
+difficult for contemporaries than it is for us to accept so
+unwholesome and prurient a situation. They forgot all the evil that
+was in it, in the charm of the account of Wolmar's active, peaceful,
+frugal, sunny household. The influence of this was immense.<a name="FNanchor_55_55" id="FNanchor_55_55"></a><a href="#Footnote_55_55" class="fnanchor">[55]</a> It may
+be that the overstrained scene where Saint Preux waits for Julie in
+her room, suggested the far lovelier passage of Faust in the chamber
+of the hapless Margaret. But we may, at least, be sure that Werther
+(1774) would not have found Charlotte cutting bread and butter, if
+Saint Preux had not gone to see Julie take cream and cakes with her
+children and her female servants. And perhaps the other and nobler
+Charlotte of the <i>Wahlverwandtschaften</i> (1809) would not have detained
+us so long with her moss hut, her terrace, her park prospect, if Julie
+had not had her elysium, where the sweet freshness of the air, the
+cool shadows, the shining verdure, flowers diffusing fragrance and
+colour, water running with soft whisper, and the song of a thousand
+birds, reminded the returned traveller of Tinian and Juan Fernandez.
+There is an animation, a variety, an accuracy, a realistic brightness
+in this picture, which will always make it enchanting, even to those
+who cannot make their way through any other letter in the New
+Helo&#239;sa.<a name="FNanchor_56_56" id="FNanchor_56_56"></a><a href="#Footnote_56_56" class="fnanchor">[56]</a> Such qualities place it as an idyllic piece far above
+such pieces in <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[ii.39]</a></span>Goethe's two famous romances. They have a clearness
+and spontaneous freshness which are not among the bountiful gifts of
+Goethe. There are other admirable landscapes in the New Helo&#239;sa,
+though not too many of them, and the minute and careful way in which
+Rousseau made their features real to himself, is accidentally shown in
+his urgent prayer for exactitude in the engraving of the striking
+scene where Saint Preux and Julie visit the monuments of their old
+love for one another.<a name="FNanchor_57_57" id="FNanchor_57_57"></a><a href="#Footnote_57_57" class="fnanchor">[57]</a> &quot;I have traversed all Rousseau's ground with
+the Helo&#239;sa before me,&quot; said Byron, &quot;and am struck to a degree I
+cannot express, with the force and accuracy of his descriptions and
+the beauty of their reality.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_58_58" id="FNanchor_58_58"></a><a href="#Footnote_58_58" class="fnanchor">[58]</a> They were memories made true by long
+dreaming, by endless brooding. The painter lived with these scenes
+ever present to the inner eye. They were his real world, of which the
+tamer world of meadow and woodland actually around him only gave
+suggestion. He thought of the green steeps, the rocks, the mountain
+pines, the waters of the lake, &quot;the populous solitude of bees and
+birds,&quot; as of some divine presence, too sublime for personality. And
+they were always benign, standing in relief with the malignity or
+folly of the hurtful insect, Man. He was never a manich&#230;an towards
+nature. To him she <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[ii.40]</a></span>was all good and bounteous. The demon forces that
+so fascinated Byron were to Rousseau invisible. These were the
+compositions that presently inspired the landscapes of <i>Paul and
+Virginia</i> (1788), of <i>Atala</i> and <i>Ren&#233;</i> (1801), and of <i>Obermann</i>
+(1804), as well as those punier imitators who resemble their masters
+as the hymns of a methodist negro resemble the psalms of David. They
+were the outcome of eager and spontaneous feeling for nature, and not
+the mere hackneyed common-form and inflated description of the
+literary pastoral.<a name="FNanchor_59_59" id="FNanchor_59_59"></a><a href="#Footnote_59_59" class="fnanchor">[59]</a></p>
+
+<p>This leads to another great and important distinction to be drawn
+between Rousseau and the school whom in other respects he inspired.
+The admirable Sainte Beuve perplexes one by his strange remark, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[ii.41]</a></span>that
+the union of the poetry of the family and the hearth with the poetry
+of nature is essentially wanting to Rousseau.<a name="FNanchor_60_60" id="FNanchor_60_60"></a><a href="#Footnote_60_60" class="fnanchor">[60]</a> It only shows that
+the great critic had for the moment forgotten the whole of the second
+part of the New Helo&#239;sa, and his failure to identify Cowper's allusion
+to the <i>matin&#233;e &#224; l'anglaise</i> certainly proves that he had at any rate
+forgotten one of the most striking and delicious scenes of the hearth
+in French literature.<a name="FNanchor_61_61" id="FNanchor_61_61"></a><a href="#Footnote_61_61" class="fnanchor">[61]</a> The tendency to read Rousseau only in the
+Byronic sense is one of those foregone conclusions which are
+constantly tempting the critic to travel out of his record. Rousseau
+assuredly had a Byronic side, but he is just as often a Cowper done
+into splendid prose. His pictures are full of social animation and
+domestic order. He had exalted the simplicity of the savage state in
+his Discourses, but when he came to constitute an ideal life, he found
+it in a household that was more, and not less, systematically
+disciplined than those of the common society <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[ii.42]</a></span>around him. The paradise
+in which his Julie moved with Wolmar and Saint Preux, was no more and
+no less than an establishment of the best kind of the rural
+middle-class, frugal, decorous, wholesome, tranquilly austere. No most
+sentimental savage could have found it endurable, or could himself
+without profound transformation of his manners have been endured in
+it. The New Helo&#239;sa ends by exalting respectability, and putting the
+spirit of insurrection to shame. Self-control, not revolt, is its last
+word.</p>
+
+<p>This is what separates Rousseau here and throughout from S&#233;nancour,
+Byron, and the rest. He consummates the triumph of will, while their
+reigning mood is grave or reckless protest against impotence of will,
+the little worth of common aims, the fretting triviality of common
+rules. Franklin or Cobbett might have gloried in the regularity of
+Madame de Wolmar's establishment. The employment of the day was marked
+out with precision. By artful adjustment of pursuits, it was contrived
+that the men-servants should be kept apart from the maid-servants,
+except at their repasts. The women, namely, a cook, a housemaid, and a
+nurse, found their pastime in rambles with their mistress and her
+children, and lived mainly with them. The men were amused by games for
+which their master made regulated provision, now for summer, now for
+winter, offering prizes of a useful kind for prowess and adroitness.
+Often on a Sunday night all the household met in an<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[ii.43]</a></span> ample chamber,
+and passed the evening in dancing. When Saint Preux inquired whether
+this was not a rather singular infraction of puritan rule, Julie
+wisely answered that pure morality is so loaded with severe duties,
+that if you add to them the further burden of indifferent forms, it
+must always be at the cost of the essential.<a name="FNanchor_62_62" id="FNanchor_62_62"></a><a href="#Footnote_62_62" class="fnanchor">[62]</a> The servants were
+taken from the country, never from the town. They entered the
+household young, were gradually trained, and never went away except to
+establish themselves.</p>
+
+<p>The vulgar and obvious criticism on all this is that it is utopian,
+that such households do not generally exist, because neither masters
+nor servants possess the qualities needed to maintain these relations
+of unbroken order and friendliness. Perhaps not; and masters and
+servants will be more and more removed from the possession of such
+qualities, and their relations further distant from such order and
+friendliness, if writers cease to press the beauty and serviceableness
+of a domesticity that is at present only possible in a few rare cases,
+or to insist on the ugliness, the waste of peace, the deterioration of
+character, that are the results of our present system. Undoubtedly it
+is much easier for Rousseau to draw his picture of semi-patriarchal
+felicity, than for the rest of us to realise it. It was his function
+to press ideals of sweeter life on his contemporaries, and they may be
+counted fortunate in having a writer who could fulfil this function
+with Rousseau's peculiar force of masterly <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[ii.44]</a></span>persuasion. His scornful
+diatribes against the domestic police of great houses, and the
+essential inhumanity of the ordinary household relations, are both
+excellent and of permanent interest. There is the full breath of a new
+humaneness in them. They were the right way of attacking the
+decrepitude of feudal luxury and insolence, and its imitation among
+the great farmers-general. This criticism of the conditions of
+domestic service marks a beginning of true democracy, as distinguished
+from the mere pulverisation of aristocracy. It rests on the claim of
+the common people to an equal consideration, as equally useful and
+equally capable of virtue and vice; and it implies the essential
+priority of social over political reform.</p>
+
+<p>The story abounds in sumptuary detail. The table partakes of the
+general plenty, but this plenty is not ruinous. The senses are
+gratified without daintiness. The food is common, but excellent of its
+kind. The service is simple, yet exquisite. All that is mere show, all
+that depends on vulgar opinion, all fine and elaborate dishes whose
+value comes of their rarity, and whose names you must know before
+finding any goodness in them, are banished without recall. Even in
+such delicacies as they permit themselves, our friends abstain every
+day from certain things which are reserved for feasts on special
+occasions, and which are thus made more delightful without being more
+costly. What do you suppose these delicacies are? Rare game, or fish
+from the sea, or dainties from abroad? Better than all that; some
+delicious vegetable<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[ii.45]</a></span> of the district, one of the savoury things that
+grow in our garden, some fish from the lake dressed in a peculiar way,
+some cheese from our mountains. The service is modest and rustic, but
+clean and smiling. Neither gold-laced liveries in sight of which you
+die of hunger, nor tall crystals laden with flowers for your only
+dessert, here take the place of honest dishes. Here people have not
+the art of nourishing the stomach through the eyes, but they know how
+to add grace to good cheer, to eat heartily without inconvenience, to
+drink merrily without losing reason, to sit long at table without
+weariness, and always to rise from it without disgust.<a name="FNanchor_63_63" id="FNanchor_63_63"></a><a href="#Footnote_63_63" class="fnanchor">[63]</a></p>
+
+<p>One singularity in this ideal household was the avoidance of those
+middle exchanges between production and consumption, which enrich the
+shopkeeper but impoverish his customers. Not one of these exchanges is
+made without loss, and the multiplication of these losses would weaken
+even a man of fortune. Wolmar seeks those real exchanges in which the
+convenience of each party to the bargain serves as profit for both.
+Thus the wool is sent to the factories, from which they receive cloth
+in exchange; wine, oil, and bread are produced in the house; the
+butcher pays himself in live cattle; the grocer receives grain in
+return for his goods; the wages of the labourers and the
+house-servants are derived from the produce of the land which they
+render valuable.<a name="FNanchor_64_64" id="FNanchor_64_64"></a><a href="#Footnote_64_64" class="fnanchor">[64]</a> It was reserved for Fourier, Cabet, and the rest,
+to carry to its highest <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[ii.46]</a></span>point this confusion of what is so
+fascinating in a book with what is practicable in society.</p>
+
+<p>The expatiation on the loveliness of a well-ordered interior may
+strike the impatient modern as somewhat long, and the movement as very
+slow, just as people complain of the same things in Goethe's
+<i>Wahlverwandtschaften</i>. Such complaint only proves inability, which is
+or is not justifiable, to seize the spirit of the writer. The
+expatiation was long and the movement slow, because Rousseau was full
+of his thoughts; they were a deep and glowing part of himself, and did
+not merely skim swiftly and lightly through his mind. Anybody who
+takes the trouble may find out the difference between this expression
+of long mental brooding, and a merely elaborated diction.<a name="FNanchor_65_65" id="FNanchor_65_65"></a><a href="#Footnote_65_65" class="fnanchor">[65]</a> The
+length is an essential part of the matter. The whole work is the
+reflection of a series of slow inner processes, the many careful
+weavings of a lonely and miserable man's dreams. And Julie expressed
+the spirit and the joy of these dreams when she wrote, &quot;People are
+only happy before they are happy. Man, so eager and so feeble, made to
+desire all and obtain little, has received from heaven a consoling
+force which brings all that he desires close to him, which subjects it
+to his imagination, which makes it sensible and present before him,
+which delivers it over to him. The land of chimera is the only one in
+this world that is worth dwelling in, and such is the nothingness of
+the human <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[ii.47]</a></span>lot, that except the being who exists in and by himself,
+there is nothing beautiful except that which does not exist.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_66_66" id="FNanchor_66_66"></a><a href="#Footnote_66_66" class="fnanchor">[66]</a></p>
+
+<p>Closely connected with the vigorous attempt to fascinate his public
+with the charm of a serene, joyful, and ordered house, is the
+restoration of marriage in the New Helo&#239;sa to a rank among high and
+honourable obligations, and its representation as the best support of
+an equable life of right conduct and fruitful harmonious emotion.
+Rousseau even invested it with the mysterious dignity as of some
+natural sacrament. &quot;This chaste knot of nature is subject neither to
+the sovereign power nor to paternal authority,&quot; he cried, &quot;but only to
+the authority of the common Father.&quot; And he pointed his remark by a
+bitter allusion to a celebrated case in which a great house had
+prevailed on the courts to annul the marriage of an elder son with a
+young actress, though her character was excellent, and though she had
+befriended him when he was abandoned by everybody else.<a name="FNanchor_67_67" id="FNanchor_67_67"></a><a href="#Footnote_67_67" class="fnanchor">[67]</a> This was
+one of the countless democratic thrusts in the book. In the case of
+its heroine, however, the author associated the sanctity of marriage
+not only with equality but with religion. We may imagine the spleen
+with which the philosophers, with both their hatred of the faith, and
+their light esteem of marriage bonds, read Julie's eloquent account of
+her emotions at the moment of <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[ii.48]</a></span>her union with Wolmar. &quot;I seemed to
+behold the organ of Providence and to hear the voice of God, as the
+minister gravely pronounced the words of the holy service. The purity,
+the dignity, the sanctity of marriage, so vividly set forth in the
+words of scripture; its chaste and sublime duties, so important to the
+happiness, order, and peace of the human race, so sweet to fulfil even
+for their own sake&#8212;all this made such an impression on me that I
+seemed to feel within my breast a sudden revolution. An unknown power
+seemed all at once to arrest the disorder of my affections, and to
+restore them to accordance with the law of duty and of nature. The
+eternal eye that sees everything, I said to myself, now reads to the
+depth of my heart.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_68_68" id="FNanchor_68_68"></a><a href="#Footnote_68_68" class="fnanchor">[68]</a> She has all the well-known fervour of the
+proselyte, and never wearies of extolling the peace of the wedded
+state. Love is no essential to its perfection. &quot;Worth, virtue, a
+certain accord not so much in condition and age as in character and
+temper, are enough between husband and wife; and this does not prevent
+the growth from such a union of a very tender attachment, which is
+none the less sweet for not being exactly love, and is all the more
+lasting.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_69_69" id="FNanchor_69_69"></a><a href="#Footnote_69_69" class="fnanchor">[69]</a> <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[ii.49]</a></span>Years after, when Saint Preux has returned and is
+settled in the household, she even tries to persuade him to imitate
+her example, and find contentment in marriage with her cousin. The
+earnestness with which she presses the point, the very sensible but
+not very delicate references to the hygienic drawbacks of celibacy,
+and the fact that the cousin whom she would fain have him marry, had
+complaisantly assisted them in their past loves, naturally drew the
+fire of Rousseau's critical enemies.</p>
+
+<p>Such matters did not affect the general enthusiasm. When people are
+weary of a certain way of surveying life, and have their faces eagerly
+set in some new direction, they read in a book what it pleases them to
+read; they assimilate as much as falls in with their dominant mood,
+and the rest passes away unseen. The French public were bewitched by
+Julie, and were no more capable of criticising her than Julie was
+capable of criticising Saint Preux in the height of her passion for
+him. When we say that Rousseau was the author of this movement, all we
+mean is that his book and its chief personage awoke emotion to
+self-consciousness, gave it a dialect, communicated an impulse in
+favour of social order, and then very calamitously at the same moment
+divorced it from the fundamental conditions of progress, by divorcing
+it from disciplined intelligence and scientific reason.</p>
+
+<p>Apart from the general tendency of the New Helo&#239;sa in numberless
+indirect ways to bring the manners of the great into contempt, by the
+presenta<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[ii.50]</a></span>tion of the happiness of a simple and worthy life, thrifty,
+self-sufficing, and homely, there is one direct protest of singular
+eloquence and gravity. Julie's father is deeply revolted at the bare
+notion of marrying his daughter to a teacher. Rousseau puts his
+vigorous remonstrance against pride of birth into the mouth of an
+English nobleman. This is perhaps an infelicitous piece of
+prosopopoeia, but it is interesting as illustrative of the idea of
+England in the eighteenth century as the home of stout-hearted
+freedom. We may quote one piece from the numerous bits of very
+straightforward speaking in which our representative expressed his
+mind as to the significance of birth. &quot;My friend has nobility,&quot; cried
+Lord Edward, &quot;not written in ink on mouldering parchments, but graven
+in his heart in characters that can never be effaced. For my own part,
+by God, I should be sorry to have no other proof of my merit but that
+of a man who has been in his grave these five hundred years. If you
+know the English nobility, you know that it is the most enlightened,
+the best informed, the wisest, the bravest in Europe. That being so, I
+don't care to ask whether it is the oldest or not. We are not, it is
+true, the slaves of the prince, but his friends; nor the tyrants of
+the people, but their leaders. We hold the balance true between
+people, and monarch. Our first duty is towards the nation, our second
+towards him who governs; it is not his will but his right that we
+consider.... We suffer no one in the land to say <i>God and my sword</i>,
+nor more than this, <i>God<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[ii.51]</a></span> and my right</i>.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_70_70" id="FNanchor_70_70"></a><a href="#Footnote_70_70" class="fnanchor">[70]</a> All this was only
+putting Montesquieu into heroics, it is true, but a great many people
+read the romance who were not likely to read the graver book. And
+there was a wide difference between the calm statement of a number of
+political propositions about government, and their transformation into
+dramatic invective against the arrogance of all social inequality that
+does not correspond with inequalities of worth.</p>
+
+<p>There is no contradiction between this and the social quietism of
+other parts of the book. Moral considerations and the paramount place
+that they hold in Rousseau's way of thinking, explain at once his
+contempt for the artificial privileges and assumptions of high rank,
+and his contempt for anything like discontent with the conditions of
+humble rank. Simplicity of life was his ideal. He wishes us to despise
+both those who have departed from it, and those who would depart from
+it if they could. So Julie does her best to make the lot of the
+peasants as happy as it is capable of being made, without ever helping
+them to change it for another. She teaches them to respect their
+natural condition in respecting themselves. Her prime maxim is to
+discourage change of station and calling, but above all to dissuade
+the villager, whose life is the happiest of all, from leaving the true
+pleasures of his natural career for the fever and corruption of
+towns.<a name="FNanchor_71_71" id="FNanchor_71_71"></a><a href="#Footnote_71_71" class="fnanchor">[71]</a> Presently a recollection of the sombre things that he had
+seen in his rambles <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[ii.52]</a></span>through France crossed Rousseau's pastoral
+visions, and he admitted that there were some lands in which the
+publican devours the fruits of the earth; where the misery that covers
+the fields, the bitter greed of some grasping farmer, the inflexible
+rigour of an inhuman master, take something from the charm of his
+rural scenes. &quot;Worn-out horses ready to expire under the blows they
+receive, wretched peasants attenuated by hunger, broken by weariness,
+clad in rags, hamlets all in ruins&#8212;these things offer a mournful
+spectacle to the eye: one is almost sorry to be a man, as we think of
+the unhappy creatures on whose blood we have to feed.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_72_72" id="FNanchor_72_72"></a><a href="#Footnote_72_72" class="fnanchor">[72]</a></p>
+
+<p>Yet there is no hint in the New Helo&#239;sa of the socialism which Morelly
+and Mably flung themselves upon, as the remedy for all these desperate
+horrors. Property, in every page of the New Helo&#239;sa, is held in full
+respect; the master has the honourable burden of patriarchal duty; the
+servant the not less honourable burden of industry and faithfulness;
+disobedience or vice is promptly punished with paternal rigour and
+more than paternal inflexibility. The insurrectionary quality and
+effect of Rousseau's work lay in no direct preaching or vehement
+denunciation of the abuses that filled France with cruelty on the one
+hand and sodden misery on the other. It lay in pictures of a social
+state in which abuses and cruelty cannot exist, nor any miseries save
+those which are inseparable from humanity. The contrast between the
+sober, cheerful, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[ii.53]</a></span>prosperous scenes of romance, and the dreariness of
+the reality of the field life of France,&#8212;this was the element that
+filled generous souls with an intoxicating transport.</p>
+
+<p>Rousseau's way of dealing with the portentous questions that lay about
+that tragic scene of deserted fields, ruined hamlets, tottering
+brutes, and hunger-stricken men, may be gathered from one of the many
+traits in Julie which endeared her to that generation, and might
+endear her even to our own if it only knew her. Wolmar's house was
+near a great high-road, and so was daily haunted by beggars. Not one
+of these was allowed to go empty away. And Julie had as many excellent
+reasons to give for her charity, as if she had been one of the
+philosophers of whom she thought so surpassingly ill. If you look at
+mendicancy merely as a trade, what is the harm of a calling whose end
+is to nourish feelings of humanity and brotherly love? From the point
+of view of talent, why should I not pay the eloquence of a beggar who
+stirs my pity, as highly as that of a player who makes me shed tears
+over imaginary sorrows? If the great number of beggars is burdensome
+to the state, of how many other professions that people encourage, may
+you not say the same? How can I be sure that the man to whom I give
+alms is not an honest soul, whom I may save from perishing? In short,
+whatever we may think of the poor wretches, if we owe nothing to the
+beggar, at least we owe it to ourselves to pay honour to suffering
+humanity or to its image.<a name="FNanchor_73_73" id="FNanchor_73_73"></a><a href="#Footnote_73_73" class="fnanchor">[73]</a> Nothing <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[ii.54]</a></span>could be more admirably
+illustrative of the author's confidence that the first thing for us to
+do is to satisfy our fine feelings, and that then all the rest shall
+be added unto us. The doctrine spread so far, that Necker,&#8212;a sort of
+Julie in a frock-coat, who had never fallen, the incarnation of this
+doctrine on the great stage of affairs,&#8212;was hailed to power to ward
+off the bankruptcy of the state by means of a good heart and moral
+sentences, while Turgot with science and firmness for his resources
+was driven away as an economist and a philosopher.</p>
+
+<p>At a first glance, it may seem that there was compensation for the
+triumph of sentiment over reason, and that if France was ruined by the
+dreams in which Rousseau encouraged the nation to exult, she was saved
+by the fervour and resoluteness of the aspirations with which he
+filled the most generous of her children. No wide movement, we may be
+sure, is thoroughly understood until we have mastered both its
+material and its ideal sides. Materially, Rousseau's work was
+inevitably fraught with confusion because in this sphere not to be
+scientific, not to be careful in tracing effects to their true causes,
+is to be without any security that the causes with which we try to
+deal will lead to the effects that we desire. A Roman statesman who
+had gone to the Sermon on the Mount for a method of staying the
+economic ruin of the empire, its thinning population, its decreasing
+capital, would obviously have found nothing of what he sought. But the
+moral nature of man is redeemed by teaching<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[ii.55]</a></span> that may have no bearing
+on economics, or even a bearing purely mischievous, and which has to
+be corrected by teaching that probably goes equally far in the
+contrary direction of moral mischief. In the ideal sphere, the
+processes are very complex. In measuring a man's influence within it
+we have to balance. Rousseau's action was undoubtedly excellent in
+leading men and women to desire simple lives, and a more harmonious
+social order. Was this eminent benefit more than counterbalanced by
+the eminent disadvantage of giving a reactionary intellectual
+direction? By commending irrational retrogression from active use of
+the understanding back to dreamy contemplation?</p>
+
+<p>To one teacher is usually only one task allotted. We do not reproach
+want of science to the virtuous and benevolent Channing; his goodness
+and effusion stirred women and the young, just as Rousseau did, to
+sentimental but humane aspiration. It was this kind of influence that
+formed the opinion which at last destroyed American slavery. We owe a
+place in the temple that commemorates human emancipation, to every man
+who has kindled in his generation a brighter flame of moral
+enthusiasm, and a more eager care for the realisation of good and
+virtuous ideals.</p>
+
+
+<p style="text-align: center"><b>III.</b></p>
+
+<p>The story of the circumstances of the publication of Emilius and the
+persecution which befell its author<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[ii.56]</a></span> in consequence, recalls us to the
+distinctively evil side of French history in this critical epoch, and
+carries us away from light into the thick darkness of political
+intrigue, obscurantist faction, and a misgovernment which was at once
+tyrannical and decrepit. It is almost impossible for us to realise the
+existence in the same society of such boundless license of thought,
+and such unscrupulous restraint upon its expression. Not one of
+Rousseau's three chief works, for instance, was printed in France. The
+whole trade in books was a sort of contraband, and was carried on with
+the stealth, subterfuge, daring, and knavery that are demanded in
+contraband dealings. An author or a bookseller was forced to be as
+careful as a kidnapper of coolies or the captain of a slaver would be
+in our own time. He had to steer clear of the court, of the
+parliament, of Jansenists, of Jesuits, of the mistresses of the king
+and the minister, of the friends of the mistresses, and above all of
+that organised hierarchy of ignorance and oppression in all times and
+places where they raise their masked heads,&#8212;the bishops and
+ecclesiastics of every sort and condition. Palissot produced his
+comedy to please the devout at the expense of the philosophers (1760).
+Madame de Robecq, daughter of Rousseau's marshal of Luxembourg,
+instigated and protected him, for Diderot had offended her.<a name="FNanchor_74_74" id="FNanchor_74_74"></a><a href="#Footnote_74_74" class="fnanchor">[74]</a>
+Morellet replied in a piece in which the keen vision of feminine spite
+detected a reference to Madame de Robecq. Though dying, she still had
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[ii.57]</a></span>relations with Choiseul, and so Morellet was flung into the
+Bastile.<a name="FNanchor_75_75" id="FNanchor_75_75"></a><a href="#Footnote_75_75" class="fnanchor">[75]</a> Diderot was thrown for three months into Vincennes, where
+we saw him on a memorable occasion, for his Letter on the Blind
+(1748), nominally because it was held to contain irreligious doctrine,
+really because he had given offence to D'Argenson's mistress by
+hinting that she might be very handsome, but that her judgment on
+scientific experiment was of no value.<a name="FNanchor_76_76" id="FNanchor_76_76"></a><a href="#Footnote_76_76" class="fnanchor">[76]</a></p>
+
+<p>The New Helo&#239;sa could not openly circulate in France so long as it
+contained the words, &quot;I would rather be the wife of a charcoal-burner
+than the mistress of a king.&quot; The last word was altered to &quot;prince,&quot;
+and then Rousseau was warned that he would offend the Prince de Conti
+and Madame de Boufflers.<a name="FNanchor_77_77" id="FNanchor_77_77"></a><a href="#Footnote_77_77" class="fnanchor">[77]</a> No work of merit could appear without
+more or less of slavish mutilation, and no amount of slavish
+mutilation could make the writer secure against the accidental grudge
+of people who had influence in high quarters.<a name="FNanchor_78_78" id="FNanchor_78_78"></a><a href="#Footnote_78_78" class="fnanchor">[78]</a></p>
+
+<p>If French booksellers in the stirring intellectual time of the
+eighteenth century needed all the craft of a smuggler, their morality
+was reduced to an equally <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[ii.58]</a></span>low level in dealing not only with the
+police, but with their own accomplices, the book-writers. They excused
+themselves from paying proper sums to authors, on the ground that they
+were robbed of the profits that would enable them to pay such sums, by
+the piracy of their brethren in trade. But then they all pirated the
+works of one another. The whole commerce was a mass of fraud and
+chicane, and every prominent author passed his life between two fires.
+He was robbed, his works were pirated, and, worse than robbery and
+piracy, they were defaced and distorted by the booksellers. On the
+other side he was tormented to death by the suspicion and timidity,
+alternately with the hatred and active tyranny of the administration.
+As we read the story of the lives of all these strenuous men, their
+struggles, their incessant mortifications, their constantly reviving
+and ever irrepressible vigour and interest in the fight, we may wish
+that the shabbiness and the pettiness of the daily lives of some of
+them had faded away from memory, and left us nothing to think of in
+connection with their names but the alertness, courage, tenacity,
+self-sacrifice, and faith with which they defended the cause of human
+emancipation and progress. Happily the mutual hate of the Christian
+factions, to which liberty owes at least as much as charity owes to
+their mutual love, prevented a common union for burning the
+philosophers as well as their books. All torments short of this they
+endured, and they had the great merit of enduring them without any
+hope of being<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[ii.59]</a></span> rewarded after their death, as truly good men must
+always be capable of doing.</p>
+
+<p>Rousseau had no taste for martyrdom, nor any intention of courting it
+in even its slightest forms. Holland was now the great printing press
+of France, and when we are counting up the contributions of
+Protestantism to the enfranchisement of Europe, it is just to remember
+the indispensable services rendered by the freedom of the press in
+Holland to the dissemination of French thought in the eighteenth
+century, as well as the shelter that it gave to the French thinkers in
+the seventeenth, including Descartes, the greatest of them all. The
+monstrous tediousness of printing a book at Amsterdam or the Hague,
+the delay, loss, and confusion in receiving and transmitting the
+proofs, and the subterranean character of the entire process,
+including the circulation of the book after it was once fairly
+printed, were as grievous to Rousseau as to authors of more impetuous
+temper. He agreed with Rey, for instance, the Amsterdam printer, to
+sell him the Social Contract for 1000 francs. The manuscript had then
+to be cunningly conveyed to Amsterdam. Rousseau wrote it out in very
+small characters, sealed it carefully up, and entrusted it to the care
+of the chaplain of the Dutch embassy, who happened to be a native of
+Vaud. In passing the barrier, the packet fell into the hands of the
+officials. They tore it open and examined it, happily unconscious that
+they were handling the most explosive kind of gunpowder that they had
+ever meddled with. It was not until the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[ii.60]</a></span> chaplain claimed it in the
+name of ambassadorial privilege, that the manuscript was allowed to go
+on its way to the press.<a name="FNanchor_79_79" id="FNanchor_79_79"></a><a href="#Footnote_79_79" class="fnanchor">[79]</a> Rousseau repeats a hundred times, not
+only in the Confessions, but also in letters to his friends, how
+resolutely and carefully he avoided any evasion of the laws of the
+country in which he lived. The French government was anxious enough on
+all grounds to secure for France the production of the books of which
+France was the great consumer, but the severity of its censorship
+prevented this.<a name="FNanchor_80_80" id="FNanchor_80_80"></a><a href="#Footnote_80_80" class="fnanchor">[80]</a> The introduction of the books, when printed, was
+tolerated or connived at, because the country would hardly have
+endured to be deprived of the enjoyment of its own literature. By a
+greater inconsistency the reprinting of a book which had once found
+admission into the country, was also connived at. Thus M. de
+Malesherbes, out of friendship for Rousseau, wished to have an edition
+of the New Helo&#239;sa printed in France, and sold for the benefit of the
+author. That he should have done so is a curious illustration of the
+low morality engendered by a repressive system imperfectly carried
+out. For Rousseau had sold the book to Rey. Rey had treated with a
+French bookseller in the usual way, that is, had sent him half the
+edition printed, the bookseller paying either in cash or other books
+for all the copies he received. Therefore to print an independent
+edition in Paris was to <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[ii.61]</a></span>injure, not Rey the foreigner, but the French
+bookseller who stood practically in Rey's place. It was setting two
+French booksellers to ruin one another. Rousseau emphatically declined
+to receive any profit from such a transaction. But, said Malesherbes,
+you sold to Rey a right which you had not got, the right of sole
+proprietorship, excluding the competition of a pirated reprint. Then,
+answered Rousseau, if the right which I sold happens to prove less
+than I thought, it is clear that far from taking advantage of my
+mistake, I owe to Rey compensation for any loss that he may
+suffer.<a name="FNanchor_81_81" id="FNanchor_81_81"></a><a href="#Footnote_81_81" class="fnanchor">[81]</a></p>
+
+<p>The friendship of Malesherbes for the party of reason was shown on
+numerous occasions. As director of the book trade he was really the
+censor of the literature of the time.<a name="FNanchor_82_82" id="FNanchor_82_82"></a><a href="#Footnote_82_82" class="fnanchor">[82]</a> The story of his service to
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[ii.62]</a></span>Diderot is well known&#8212;how he warned Diderot that the police were
+about to visit his house and overhaul his papers, and how when Diderot
+despaired of being able to put them out of sight in his narrow
+quarters, Malesherbes said, &quot;Then send them all to me,&quot; and took care
+of them until the storm was overpast. The proofs of the New Helo&#239;sa
+came through his hands, and now he made himself Rousseau's agent in
+the affairs relative to the printing of Emilius. Rousseau entrusted
+the whole matter to him and to Madame de Luxembourg, being confident
+that, in acting through persons of such authority and position, he
+should be protected against any unwitting illegality. Instead of being
+sent to Rey, the manuscript was sold to a bookseller in Paris for six
+thousand francs.<a name="FNanchor_83_83" id="FNanchor_83_83"></a><a href="#Footnote_83_83" class="fnanchor">[83]</a> A long time elapsed before any proofs reached the
+author, and he soon perceived that an edition was being printed in
+France as well as in Holland. Still, as Malesherbes was in some sort
+the director of the enterprise, the author felt no alarm. Duclos came
+to visit him one day, and Rousseau read aloud to him the Savoyard
+Vicar's Profession of Faith. &quot;What, citizen,&quot; he cried, &quot;and that is
+part of a book that they are printing at Paris! Be kind enough not to
+tell any one that you read this to me.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_84_84" id="FNanchor_84_84"></a><a href="#Footnote_84_84" class="fnanchor">[84]</a> Still Rousseau remained
+secure. Then the printing came to a standstill, and he could not find
+out the reason, because Malesherbes was away, and the printer did not
+take the trouble to answer his letters. &quot;My natural tendency,&quot; he
+says, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[ii.63]</a></span>and as the rest of his life only too abundantly proved, &quot;is to
+be afraid of darkness; mystery always disturbs me, it is utterly
+antipathetic to my character, which is open even to the pitch of
+imprudence. The aspect of the most hideous monster would alarm me
+little, I verily believe; but if I discern at night a figure in a
+white sheet, I am sure to be terrified out of my life.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_85_85" id="FNanchor_85_85"></a><a href="#Footnote_85_85" class="fnanchor">[85]</a> So he at
+once fancied that by some means the Jesuits had got possession of his
+book, and knowing him to be at death's door, designed to keep the
+Emilius back until he was actually dead, when they would publish a
+truncated version of it to suit their own purposes.<a name="FNanchor_86_86" id="FNanchor_86_86"></a><a href="#Footnote_86_86" class="fnanchor">[86]</a> He wrote
+letter upon letter to the printer, to Malesherbes, to Madame de
+Luxembourg, and if answers did not come, or did not come exactly when
+he expected them, he grew delirious with anxiety. If he dropped his
+conviction that the Jesuits were plotting the ruin of his book and the
+defilement of his reputation, he lost no time in fastening a similar
+design upon the Jansenists, and when the Jansenists were acquitted,
+then the turn of the philosophers came. We have constantly to remember
+that all this time the unfortunate man was suffering incessant pain,
+and passing his nights in sleeplessness and fever. He sometimes threw
+off the black dreams of unfathomable suspicion, and dreamed in their
+stead of some sunny spot in pleasant Touraine, where under a mild
+climate and among a gentle people he should peacefully end his
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[ii.64]</a></span>days.<a name="FNanchor_87_87" id="FNanchor_87_87"></a><a href="#Footnote_87_87" class="fnanchor">[87]</a> At other times he was fond of supposing M. de Luxembourg
+not a duke, nor a marshal of France, but a good country squire living
+in some old mansion, and himself not an author, not a maker of books,
+but with moderate intelligence and slight attainment, finding with the
+squire and his dame the happiness of his life, and contributing to the
+happiness of theirs.<a name="FNanchor_88_88" id="FNanchor_88_88"></a><a href="#Footnote_88_88" class="fnanchor">[88]</a> Alas, in spite of all his precautions, he had
+unwittingly drifted into the stream of great affairs. He and his book
+were sacrificed to the exigencies of faction; and a persecution set
+in, which destroyed his last chance of a composed life, by giving his
+reason, already disturbed, a final blow from which it never recovered.</p>
+
+<p>Emilius appeared in the crisis of the movement against the Jesuits.
+That formidable order had offended Madame de Pompadour by a refusal to
+recognise her power and position,&#8212;a manly policy, as creditable to
+their moral vigour as it was contrary to the maxims which had made
+them powerful. They had also offended Choiseul by the part they had
+taken in certain hostile intrigues at Versailles. The parliaments had
+always been their enemies. This was due first to the jealousy with
+which corporations of lawyers always regard corporations of
+ecclesiastics, and next to their hatred of the bull Unigenitus, which
+had been not only an infraction of French liberties, but the occasion
+of special humiliation to the parliaments. Then the hostility of the
+parliaments to the Jesuits was caused by the harshness with which the
+system of confessional <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[ii.65]</a></span>tickets was at this time being carried out.
+Finally, the once powerful house of Austria, the protector of all
+retrograde interests, was now weakened by the Seven Years' War; and
+was unable to bring effective influence to bear on Lewis XV. At last
+he gave his consent to the destruction of the order. The commercial
+bankruptcy of one of their missions was the immediate occasion of
+their fall, and nothing could save them. &quot;I only know one man,&quot; said
+Grimm, &quot;in a position to have composed an apology for the Jesuits in
+fine style, if it had been in his way to take the side of that tribe,
+and this man is M. Rousseau.&quot; The parliaments went to work with
+alacrity, but they were quite as hostile to the philosophers as they
+were to the Jesuits, and hence their anxiety to show that they were no
+allies of the one even when destroying the other.</p>
+
+<p>Contemporaries seldom criticise the shades and variations of
+innovating speculation with any marked nicety. Anything with the stamp
+of rationality on its phrases or arguments was roughly set down to the
+school of the philosophers, and Rousseau was counted one of their
+number, like Voltaire or Helv&#233;tius. The Emilius appeared in May 1762.
+On the 11th of June the parliament of Paris ordered the book to be
+burnt by the public executioner, and the writer to be arrested. For
+Rousseau always scorned the devices of Voltaire and others; he
+courageously insisted on placing his name on the title-page of all his
+works,<a name="FNanchor_89_89" id="FNanchor_89_89"></a><a href="#Footnote_89_89" class="fnanchor">[89]</a> and so there <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[ii.66]</a></span>was none of the usual difficulty in
+identifying the author. The grounds of the proceedings were alleged
+irreligious tendencies to be found in the book.<a name="FNanchor_90_90" id="FNanchor_90_90"></a><a href="#Footnote_90_90" class="fnanchor">[90]</a></p>
+
+<p>The indecency of the requisition in which the advocate-general
+demanded its proscription, was admitted even by people who were least
+likely to defend Rousseau.<a name="FNanchor_91_91" id="FNanchor_91_91"></a><a href="#Footnote_91_91" class="fnanchor">[91]</a> The author was charged with saying not
+only that man may be saved without believing in God, but even that the
+Christian religion does not exist&#8212;paradox too flagrant even for the
+writer of the Discourse on Inequality. No evidence was produced either
+that the alleged assertions were in the book, or that the name of the
+author was really the name on its title-page. Rousseau fared no worse,
+but better, than his fellows, for there was hardly a single man of
+letters of that time who escaped arbitrary imprisonment.</p>
+
+<p>The unfortunate author had news of the ferment which his work was
+creating in Paris, and received notes of warning from every hand, but
+he could not believe that the only man in France who believed in God
+was to be the victim of the defenders of Christianity.<a name="FNanchor_92_92" id="FNanchor_92_92"></a><a href="#Footnote_92_92" class="fnanchor">[92]</a> On the 8th
+of June he spent a merry day with two friends, taking their dinner in
+the fields. &quot;Ever since my youth I had a habit of reading at <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[ii.67]</a></span>night in
+my bed until my eyes grew heavy. Then I put out the candle, and tried
+to fall asleep for a few minutes, but they seldom lasted long. My
+ordinary reading at night was the Bible, and I have read it
+continuously through at least five or six times in this way. That
+night, finding myself more wakeful than usual, I prolonged my reading,
+and read through the whole of the book which ends with the Levite of
+Ephraim, and which if I mistake not is the book of Judges. The story
+affected me deeply, and I was busy over it in a kind of dream, when
+all at once I was roused by lights and noises.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_93_93" id="FNanchor_93_93"></a><a href="#Footnote_93_93" class="fnanchor">[93]</a></p>
+
+<p>It was two o'clock in the morning. A messenger had come in hot haste
+to carry him to Madame de Luxembourg. News had reached her of the
+proposed decree of the parliament. She knew Rousseau well enough to be
+sure that if he were seized and examined, her own share and that of
+Malesherbes in the production of the condemned book would be made
+public, and their position uncomfortably compromised. It was to their
+interest that he should avoid arrest by flight, and they had no
+difficulty in persuading him to fall in with their plans. After a
+tearful farewell with Theresa, who had hardly been out of his sight
+for seventeen years, and many embraces from the greater ladies of the
+castle, he was thrust into a chaise and despatched on the first stage
+of eight melancholy years of wandering and despair, to be driven from
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[ii.68]</a></span>place to place, first by the fatuous tyranny of magistrates and
+religious doctors, and then by the yet more cruel spectres of his own
+diseased imagination, until at length his whole soul became the home
+of weariness and torment.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_1"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> <i>Conf.</i>, x. 62.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_2" id="Footnote_2_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_2"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> <i>Conf.</i>, x.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_3_3" id="Footnote_3_3"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_3"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> <i>Ib.</i> x. 70.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_4_4" id="Footnote_4_4"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_4"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> Louis Fran&#231;ois de Bourbon, Prince de Conti (1717-1776),
+was great-grandson of the brother of the Great Cond&#233;. He performed
+creditable things in the war of the Austrian Succession (in Piedmont
+1744, in Belgium 1745); had a scheme of foreign policy as director of
+the secret diplomacy of Lewis XV. (1745-1756), which was to make
+Turkey, Poland, Sweden, Prussia, a barrier against Russia primarily,
+and Austria secondarily; lastly went into moderate opposition to the
+court, protesting against the destruction of the <i>parlements</i> (1771),
+and afterwards opposing the reforms of Turgot (1776). Finally he had
+the honour of refusing the sacraments of the church on his deathbed.
+See Martin's <i>Hist. de France</i>, xv. and xvi.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_5_5" id="Footnote_5_5"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5_5"><span class="label">[5]</span></a> <i>Conf.</i>, 97. <i>Corr.</i>, v. 215.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_6_6" id="Footnote_6_6"></a><a href="#FNanchor_6_6"><span class="label">[6]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>, ii. 144. Oct. 7, 1760.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_7_7" id="Footnote_7_7"></a><a href="#FNanchor_7_7"><span class="label">[7]</span></a> <i>Conf.</i>, x. 98.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_8_8" id="Footnote_8_8"></a><a href="#FNanchor_8_8"><span class="label">[8]</span></a> The reader will distinguish this correspondent of
+Rousseau's, <i>Comtesse</i> de Boufflers-Rouveret (1727-18&#8212;), from the
+<i>Duchesse</i> de Boufflers, which was the title of Rousseau's Mar&#233;chale
+de Luxembourg before her second marriage. And also from the <i>Marquise</i>
+de Boufflers, said to be the mistress of the old king Stanislaus at
+Lun&#233;ville, and the mother of the Chevalier de Boufflers (who was the
+intimate of Voltaire, sat in the States General, emigrated, did homage
+to Napoleon, and finally died peaceably under Lewis XVIII.). See Jal's
+<i>Dict. Critique</i>, 259-262. Sainte Beuve has an essay on our present
+Comtesse de Boufflers (<i>Nouveaux Lundis</i>, iv. 163). She is the Madame
+de Boufflers who was taken by Beauclerk to visit Johnson in his Temple
+chambers, and was conducted to her coach by him in a remarkable manner
+(Boswell's <i>Life</i>, ch. li. p. 467). Also much talked of in H.
+Walpole's Letters. See D'Alembert to Frederick, April 15, 1768.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_9_9" id="Footnote_9_9"></a><a href="#FNanchor_9_9"><span class="label">[9]</span></a> Streckeisen, ii. 32.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_10_10" id="Footnote_10_10"></a><a href="#FNanchor_10_10"><span class="label">[10]</span></a> <i>Conf.</i>, x. 71.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_11_11" id="Footnote_11_11"></a><a href="#FNanchor_11_11"><span class="label">[11]</span></a> For instance, <i>Corr.</i> ii. 85, 90, 92, etc. 1759.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_12_12" id="Footnote_12_12"></a><a href="#FNanchor_12_12"><span class="label">[12]</span></a> Streckeisen, ii. 28, etc.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_13_13" id="Footnote_13_13"></a><a href="#FNanchor_13_13"><span class="label">[13]</span></a> <i>Ib.</i>, 29.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_14_14" id="Footnote_14_14"></a><a href="#FNanchor_14_14"><span class="label">[14]</span></a> <i>Conf.</i>, x. 99.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_15_15" id="Footnote_15_15"></a><a href="#FNanchor_15_15"><span class="label">[15]</span></a> <i>Ib.</i>, x. 57.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_16_16" id="Footnote_16_16"></a><a href="#FNanchor_16_16"><span class="label">[16]</span></a> <i>Ib.</i>, xi. 119.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_17_17" id="Footnote_17_17"></a><a href="#FNanchor_17_17"><span class="label">[17]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>, ii. 196. Feb. 16, 1761.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_18_18" id="Footnote_18_18"></a><a href="#FNanchor_18_18"><span class="label">[18]</span></a> <i>Ib.</i>, ii. 102, 176, etc.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_19_19" id="Footnote_19_19"></a><a href="#FNanchor_19_19"><span class="label">[19]</span></a> <i>Conf.</i>, x. 60.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_20_20" id="Footnote_20_20"></a><a href="#FNanchor_20_20"><span class="label">[20]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>, ii. 12.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_21_21" id="Footnote_21_21"></a><a href="#FNanchor_21_21"><span class="label">[21]</span></a> As M. St. Marc Girardin has put it: &quot;There are in all
+Rousseau's discussions two things to be carefully distinguished from
+one another; the maxims of the discourse, and the conclusions of the
+controversy. The maxims are ordinarily paradoxical; the conclusions
+are full of good sense.&quot; <i>Rev. des Deux Mondes</i>, Aug. 1852, p. 501.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_22_22" id="Footnote_22_22"></a><a href="#FNanchor_22_22"><span class="label">[22]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>, ii. 244-246. Oct. 24, 1761.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_23_23" id="Footnote_23_23"></a><a href="#FNanchor_23_23"><span class="label">[23]</span></a> <i>Ib.</i>, 1766. <i>Oeuv.</i>, lxxv. 364.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_24_24" id="Footnote_24_24"></a><a href="#FNanchor_24_24"><span class="label">[24]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>, ii. 32. (1758.)</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_25_25" id="Footnote_25_25"></a><a href="#FNanchor_25_25"><span class="label">[25]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>, ii. 63. Jan. 15, 1779.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_26_26" id="Footnote_26_26"></a><a href="#FNanchor_26_26"><span class="label">[26]</span></a> Bernardin de St. Pierre, xii. 102.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_27_27" id="Footnote_27_27"></a><a href="#FNanchor_27_27"><span class="label">[27]</span></a> 4th Letter, p. 375.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_28_28" id="Footnote_28_28"></a><a href="#FNanchor_28_28"><span class="label">[28]</span></a> <i>M&#233;m.</i>, ii. 299.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_29_29" id="Footnote_29_29"></a><a href="#FNanchor_29_29"><span class="label">[29]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>, ii. 98. July 10, 1759.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_30_30" id="Footnote_30_30"></a><a href="#FNanchor_30_30"><span class="label">[30]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>, ii. 106. Nov. 10, 1759.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_31_31" id="Footnote_31_31"></a><a href="#FNanchor_31_31"><span class="label">[31]</span></a> <i>Ib.</i>, ii. 179. Jan. 18, 1761.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_32_32" id="Footnote_32_32"></a><a href="#FNanchor_32_32"><span class="label">[32]</span></a> <i>Ib.</i>, ii. 268. Dec. 12, 1761.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_33_33" id="Footnote_33_33"></a><a href="#FNanchor_33_33"><span class="label">[33]</span></a> <i>Ib.</i>, ii. 28. Dec. 23, 1761.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_34_34" id="Footnote_34_34"></a><a href="#FNanchor_34_34"><span class="label">[34]</span></a> <i>Nouv. H&#233;l.</i>, III. xxii. 147. In 1784 Hume's suppressed
+essays on &quot;Suicide and the Immortality of the Soul&quot; were published in
+London:&#8212;&quot;With Remarks, intended as an Antidote to the Poison
+contained in these Performances, by the Editor; to which is added, Two
+Letters on Suicide, from Rousseau's Eloisa.&quot; In the preface the reader
+is told that these &quot;two very masterly letters have been much
+celebrated.&quot; See Hume's <i>Essays</i>, by Green and Grose, i. 69, 70.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_35_35" id="Footnote_35_35"></a><a href="#FNanchor_35_35"><span class="label">[35]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>, iii. 235. Aug. 1, 1763.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_36_36" id="Footnote_36_36"></a><a href="#FNanchor_36_36"><span class="label">[36]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>, ii. 226. Sept. 29, 1761.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_37_37" id="Footnote_37_37"></a><a href="#FNanchor_37_37"><span class="label">[37]</span></a> P. 294. Jan. 11, 1762.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_38_38" id="Footnote_38_38"></a><a href="#FNanchor_38_38"><span class="label">[38]</span></a> Madame Latour (Nov. 7, 1730-Sept. 6, 1789) was the wife
+of a man in the financial world, who used her ill and dissipated as
+much of her fortune as he could, and from whom she separated in 1775.
+After that she resumed her maiden name and was known as Madame de
+Franqueville. Musset-Pathay, ii. 182, and Sainte Beuve, <i>Causeries</i>,
+ii. 63.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_39_39" id="Footnote_39_39"></a><a href="#FNanchor_39_39"><span class="label">[39]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>, ii. 214. <i>Conf.</i>, ix. 289.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_40_40" id="Footnote_40_40"></a><a href="#FNanchor_40_40"><span class="label">[40]</span></a> English translations of Rousseau's works appeared very
+speedily after the originals. A second edition of the Helo&#239;sa was
+called for as early as May 1761. See <i>Corr.</i> ii. 223. A German
+translation of the Helo&#239;sa appeared at Leipzig in 1761, in six
+duodecimos.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_41_41" id="Footnote_41_41"></a><a href="#FNanchor_41_41"><span class="label">[41]</span></a> For instance, <i>Corr.</i>, ii. 168. Nov. 19, 1762.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_42_42" id="Footnote_42_42"></a><a href="#FNanchor_42_42"><span class="label">[42]</span></a> Choderlos de La Clos: 1741-1803.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_43_43" id="Footnote_43_43"></a><a href="#FNanchor_43_43"><span class="label">[43]</span></a> Journal, iv. 496. (Ed. Charpentier, 1857.)</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_44_44" id="Footnote_44_44"></a><a href="#FNanchor_44_44"><span class="label">[44]</span></a> <i>Nouv. H&#233;l.</i>, III. xiv. 48.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_45_45" id="Footnote_45_45"></a><a href="#FNanchor_45_45"><span class="label">[45]</span></a> <i>E.g.</i> Letters, 40-46.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_46_46" id="Footnote_46_46"></a><a href="#FNanchor_46_46"><span class="label">[46]</span></a> Madame de Sta&#235;l (1765-1817), in her <i>Lettres sur les
+&#233;crits et le caract&#232;re de J.J. Rousseau</i>, written when she was twenty,
+and her first work of any pretensions. <i>Oeuv.</i>, i. 41. Ed. 1820.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_47_47" id="Footnote_47_47"></a><a href="#FNanchor_47_47"><span class="label">[47]</span></a> Nowhere more pungently than in a little piece of some
+half-dozen pages, headed, <i>Pr&#233;diction tir&#233;e d'un vieux Manuscrit</i>, the
+form of which is borrowed from Grimm's squib in the dispute about
+French music, <i>Le petit Proph&#232;te de Boehmischbroda</i>, though it seems
+to me to be superior to Grimm in pointedness. Here are a few verses
+from the supposed prophecy of the man who should come&#8212;and of what he
+should do. &quot;Et la multitude courra sur ses pas et plusieurs croiront
+en lui. Et il leur dira: Vous &#234;tes des sc&#233;l&#233;rats et des fripons, vos
+femmes sont toutes des femmes perdues, et je viens vivre parmi vous.
+Et il ajoutera tous les hommes sont vertueux dans le pays o&#249; je suis
+n&#233;, et je n'habiterai jamais le pays o&#249; je suis n&#233;.... Et il dira
+aussi qu'il est impossible d'avoir des moeurs, et de lire des Romans,
+et il fera un Roman; et dans son Roman le vice sera en action et la
+vertu en paroles, et ses personages seront forcen&#233;s d'amour et de
+philosophie. Et dans son Roman on apprendra l'art de suborner
+philosophiquement une jeune fille. Et l'Ecoli&#232;re perdra toute honte et
+toute pudeur, et elle fera avec son ma&#238;tre des sottises et des
+maximes.... Et le bel Ami &#233;tant dans un Bateau seul avec sa Ma&#238;tresse
+voudra le jetter dans l'eau et se pr&#233;cipiter avec elle. Et ils
+appelleront tout cela de la Philosophie et de la Vertu,&quot; and so on,
+humorously enough in its way.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_48_48" id="Footnote_48_48"></a><a href="#FNanchor_48_48"><span class="label">[48]</span></a> See passages in Goncourt's <i>La Femme au 18i&#232;me si&#232;cle</i>,
+p. 380.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_49_49" id="Footnote_49_49"></a><a href="#FNanchor_49_49"><span class="label">[49]</span></a> Musset-Pathay, II. 361. See Madame Roland's <i>M&#233;m.</i>, i.
+207.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_50_50" id="Footnote_50_50"></a><a href="#FNanchor_50_50"><span class="label">[50]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>, March 3, and March 19, 1761. The criticisms of
+Xim&#233;n&#232;s, a thoroughly mediocre person in all respects, were entirely
+literary, and were directed against the too strained and highly
+coloured quality of the phrases&#8212;&quot;baisers &#226;cres&quot;&#8212;among them.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_51_51" id="Footnote_51_51"></a><a href="#FNanchor_51_51"><span class="label">[51]</span></a> <i>Nouv. H&#233;l.</i>, V. v. 115.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_52_52" id="Footnote_52_52"></a><a href="#FNanchor_52_52"><span class="label">[52]</span></a> VI. vii.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_53_53" id="Footnote_53_53"></a><a href="#FNanchor_53_53"><span class="label">[53]</span></a> VI. vi.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_54_54" id="Footnote_54_54"></a><a href="#FNanchor_54_54"><span class="label">[54]</span></a> Michelet's <i>Louis XV. et Louis XVI.</i>, p. 58.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_55_55" id="Footnote_55_55"></a><a href="#FNanchor_55_55"><span class="label">[55]</span></a> See Hettner's <i>Literaturgeschichte</i>, II. 486.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_56_56" id="Footnote_56_56"></a><a href="#FNanchor_56_56"><span class="label">[56]</span></a> IV. xi.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_57_57" id="Footnote_57_57"></a><a href="#FNanchor_57_57"><span class="label">[57]</span></a> IV. xvii. See vol. iii. 423.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_58_58" id="Footnote_58_58"></a><a href="#FNanchor_58_58"><span class="label">[58]</span></a> In 1816. Moore's <i>Life</i>, iii. 247; also 285. And the
+note to the stanzas in the Third Canto,&#8212;a note curious for a slight
+admixture of transcendentalism, so rare a thing with Byron, who,
+sentimental though he was, usually rejoiced in a truly Voltairean
+common sense.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_59_59" id="Footnote_59_59"></a><a href="#FNanchor_59_59"><span class="label">[59]</span></a> &quot;The present fashion in France, of passing some time in
+the country, is new; at this time of the year, and for many weeks
+past, Paris is, comparatively speaking, empty. Everybody who has a
+country seat is at it, and such as have none visit others who have.
+This remarkable revolution in the French manners is certainly one of
+the best customs they have taken from England; and its introduction
+was effected the easier, being assisted by the magic of Rousseau's
+writings. Mankind are much indebted to that splendid genius, who, when
+living, was hunted from country to country, to seek an asylum, with as
+much venom as if he had been a mad dog; thanks to the vile spirit of
+bigotry, which has not received its death wound. Women of the first
+fashion in France are now ashamed of not nursing their own children;
+and stays are universally proscribed from the bodies of the poor
+infants, which were for so many ages torture to them, as they are
+still in Spain. The country residence may not have effects equally
+obvious; but they will be no less sure in the end, and in all respects
+beneficial to every class in the state.&quot; Arthur Young's <i>Travels</i>, i.
+72.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_60_60" id="Footnote_60_60"></a><a href="#FNanchor_60_60"><span class="label">[60]</span></a> <i>Causeries</i>, xi. 195.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_61_61" id="Footnote_61_61"></a><a href="#FNanchor_61_61"><span class="label">[61]</span></a> <i>Nouv. H&#233;l.</i>, V. iii. &quot;You remember Rousseau's
+description of an English morning: such are the mornings I spend with
+these good people.&quot;&#8212;Cowper to Joseph Hill, Oct. 25, 1765. <i>Works</i>,
+iii. 269. In a letter to William Unwin (Sept. 21, 1779), speaking of
+his being engaged in mending windows, he says, &quot;Rousseau would have
+been charmed to have seen me so occupied, and would have exclaimed
+with rapture that he had found the Emilius who, he supposed, had
+subsisted only in his own idea.&quot; For a description illustrative of the
+likeness between Rousseau and Cowper in their feeling for nature, see
+letter to Newton (Sept. 18, 1784, v. 78), and compare it with the
+description of Les Charmettes, making proper allowance for the colour
+of prose.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_62_62" id="Footnote_62_62"></a><a href="#FNanchor_62_62"><span class="label">[62]</span></a> IV. x. 260.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_63_63" id="Footnote_63_63"></a><a href="#FNanchor_63_63"><span class="label">[63]</span></a> V. ii. 37.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_64_64" id="Footnote_64_64"></a><a href="#FNanchor_64_64"><span class="label">[64]</span></a> V. ii. 47-52.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_65_65" id="Footnote_65_65"></a><a href="#FNanchor_65_65"><span class="label">[65]</span></a> Rousseau considered that the Fourth and Sixth parts of
+the New Helo&#239;sa were masterpieces of diction. <i>Conf.</i> ix. 334.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_66_66" id="Footnote_66_66"></a><a href="#FNanchor_66_66"><span class="label">[66]</span></a> VI. viii.. 298. <i>Conf.</i>, xi. 106.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_67_67" id="Footnote_67_67"></a><a href="#FNanchor_67_67"><span class="label">[67]</span></a> The La B&#233;doy&#232;re case, which began in 1745. See Barbier,
+iv. 54, 59, etc.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_68_68" id="Footnote_68_68"></a><a href="#FNanchor_68_68"><span class="label">[68]</span></a> III. xviii. 84.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_69_69" id="Footnote_69_69"></a><a href="#FNanchor_69_69"><span class="label">[69]</span></a> III. xx. 116. In the letter to Christopher de Beaumont
+(p. 102), he fires a double shot against the philosophers on the one
+hand, and the church on the other; exalting continence and purity, of
+which the philosophers in their reaction against asceticism thought
+lightly, and exalting marriage over the celibate state, which the
+churchmen associated with mysterious sanctity.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_70_70" id="Footnote_70_70"></a><a href="#FNanchor_70_70"><span class="label">[70]</span></a> I. lxii.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_71_71" id="Footnote_71_71"></a><a href="#FNanchor_71_71"><span class="label">[71]</span></a> V. ii.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_72_72" id="Footnote_72_72"></a><a href="#FNanchor_72_72"><span class="label">[72]</span></a> V. vii. 141.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_73_73" id="Footnote_73_73"></a><a href="#FNanchor_73_73"><span class="label">[73]</span></a> V. ii. 31-33.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_74_74" id="Footnote_74_74"></a><a href="#FNanchor_74_74"><span class="label">[74]</span></a> For the Robecq family, see Saint Simon, xviii. 58.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_75_75" id="Footnote_75_75"></a><a href="#FNanchor_75_75"><span class="label">[75]</span></a> Morellet's <i>M&#233;m.</i>, i. 89-93. Rousseau, <i>Conf.</i>, x. 85,
+etc. This <i>Vision</i> is also in the style of Grimm's <i>P&#233;tit Proph&#232;te</i>,
+like the piece referred to in a previous note, vol. ii. p. 31.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_76_76" id="Footnote_76_76"></a><a href="#FNanchor_76_76"><span class="label">[76]</span></a> Madame de Vandeul's <i>M&#233;m. sur Diderot</i>, p. 27. Rousseau,
+<i>Conf.</i>, vii. 130.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_77_77" id="Footnote_77_77"></a><a href="#FNanchor_77_77"><span class="label">[77]</span></a> <i>Nouv. H&#233;l.</i>, V. xiii. 194. <i>Conf.</i>, x. 43.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_78_78" id="Footnote_78_78"></a><a href="#FNanchor_78_78"><span class="label">[78]</span></a> The reader will find a fuller mention of the French book
+trade in my <i>Diderot</i>, ch. vi.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_79_79" id="Footnote_79_79"></a><a href="#FNanchor_79_79"><span class="label">[79]</span></a> <i>Conf.</i>, xi. 127.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_80_80" id="Footnote_80_80"></a><a href="#FNanchor_80_80"><span class="label">[80]</span></a> See a letter from Rousseau to Malesherbes, Nov. 5, 1760.
+<i>Corr.</i>, ii. 157.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_81_81" id="Footnote_81_81"></a><a href="#FNanchor_81_81"><span class="label">[81]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>, ii. 157.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_82_82" id="Footnote_82_82"></a><a href="#FNanchor_82_82"><span class="label">[82]</span></a> C.G. de Lamoignon de Malesherbes (p. 1721&#8212;guillotined,
+1794), son of the chancellor, and one of the best instructed and most
+enlightened men of the century&#8212;a Turgot of the second rank&#8212;was
+Directeur de la Librairie from 1750-1763. The process was this: a book
+was submitted to him; he named a censor for it; on the censor's report
+the director gave or refused permission to print, or required
+alterations. Even after these formalities were complied with, the book
+was liable to a decree of the royal council, a decree of the
+parliament, or else a <i>lettre-de-cachet</i> might send the author to the
+Bastile. See Barbier, vii. 126.
+</p><p>
+After Lord Shelburne saw Malesherbes, he said, &quot;I have seen for the
+first time in my life what I never thought could exist&#8212;a man whose
+soul is absolutely free from hope or fear, and yet who is full of life
+and ardour.&quot; Mdlle. Lespinasse's <i>Lettres</i>, 90.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_83_83" id="Footnote_83_83"></a><a href="#FNanchor_83_83"><span class="label">[83]</span></a> See note, p. 132.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_84_84" id="Footnote_84_84"></a><a href="#FNanchor_84_84"><span class="label">[84]</span></a> <i>Conf.</i>, xi. 134.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_85_85" id="Footnote_85_85"></a><a href="#FNanchor_85_85"><span class="label">[85]</span></a> <i>Conf.</i>, xi. 139.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_86_86" id="Footnote_86_86"></a><a href="#FNanchor_86_86"><span class="label">[86]</span></a> <i>Ib.</i>, xi. 139. <i>Corr.</i>, ii. 270, etc. Dec. 12, 1761,
+etc.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_87_87" id="Footnote_87_87"></a><a href="#FNanchor_87_87"><span class="label">[87]</span></a> <i>Conf.</i>, xi. 150.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_88_88" id="Footnote_88_88"></a><a href="#FNanchor_88_88"><span class="label">[88]</span></a> Fourth Letter to Malesherbes, p. 377.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_89_89" id="Footnote_89_89"></a><a href="#FNanchor_89_89"><span class="label">[89]</span></a> With one trifling exception, the Letter to Grimm on the
+Opera of Omphale (1752): <i>&#201;crits sur la Musique</i>, p. 337.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_90_90" id="Footnote_90_90"></a><a href="#FNanchor_90_90"><span class="label">[90]</span></a> See Barbier's Journal, viii. 45 (Ed. Charpentier, 1857).
+A succinct contemporary account of the general situation is to be
+found in D'Alembert's little book, the <i>Destruction des J&#233;suites</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_91_91" id="Footnote_91_91"></a><a href="#FNanchor_91_91"><span class="label">[91]</span></a> Grimm, for instance: <i>Corr. Lit.</i>, iii. 117.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_92_92" id="Footnote_92_92"></a><a href="#FNanchor_92_92"><span class="label">[92]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>, ii. 337. June 7, 1672. <i>Conf.</i>, xi. 152, 162.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_93_93" id="Footnote_93_93"></a><a href="#FNanchor_93_93"><span class="label">[93]</span></a> <i>Conf.</i>, xi. 162. The Levite's story is to be read in
+<i>Judges</i>, ch. xix.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[ii.69]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_II" id="CHAPTER_II"></a>CHAPTER II.</h2>
+
+<h3>PERSECUTION.<a name="FNanchor_94_94" id="FNanchor_94_94"></a><a href="#Footnote_94_94" class="fnanchor">[94]</a></h3>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Those</span> to whom life consists in the immediate consciousness of
+their own direct relations with the people and circumstances that are
+in close contact with them, find it hard to follow the moods of a man
+to whom such consciousness is the least part of himself, and such
+relations the least real part of his life. Rousseau was no sooner in
+the post-chaise which was bearing him away towards Switzerland, than
+the troubles of the previous day at once dropped into a pale and
+distant past, and he returned to a world where was neither parliament,
+nor decree for burning books, nor any warrant for personal arrest. He
+took up the thread where harassing circumstances had broken it, and
+again fell musing over the tragic tale of the Levite of Ephraim. His
+dream absorbed him so entirely as to take specific literary form, and
+before the journey was at an end he had composed a long impassioned
+version of the Bible story. Though it has Rousseau's usual fine
+sonorousness in a high degree, no man now reads it; the author himself
+always preserved a cer<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[ii.70]</a></span>tain tenderness for it.<a name="FNanchor_95_95" id="FNanchor_95_95"></a><a href="#Footnote_95_95" class="fnanchor">[95]</a> The contrast
+between this singular quietism and the angry stir that marked
+Voltaire's many flights in post-chaises, points like all else to the
+profound difference between the pair. Contrast with Voltaire's shrill
+cries under any personal vexation, this calm utterance:&#8212;&quot;Though the
+consequences of this affair have plunged me into a gulf of woes from
+which I shall never come up again so long as I live, I bear these
+gentlemen no grudge. I am aware that their object was not to do me any
+harm, but only to reach ends of their own. I know that towards me they
+have neither liking nor hate. I was found in their way, like a pebble
+that you thrust aside with the foot without even looking at it. They
+ought not to say they have performed their duty, but that they have
+done their business.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_96_96" id="FNanchor_96_96"></a><a href="#Footnote_96_96" class="fnanchor">[96]</a> A new note from a persecuted writer.</p>
+
+<p>Rousseau, in spite of the belief which henceforth possessed him that
+he was the victim of a dark unfathomable plot, and in spite of passing
+outbreaks of gloomy rage, was incapable of steady glowing and active
+resentments. The world was not real enough to him for this. A throng
+of phantoms pressed noiselessly before his sight, and dulled all sense
+of more actual impression. &quot;It is amazing,&quot; he wrote, &quot;with what ease
+I forget past ill, however fresh it may be. In proportion as the
+anticipation of it alarms and <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[ii.71]</a></span>confuses me when I see it coming, so
+the memory of it returns feebly to my mind and dies out the moment
+after it has arrived. My cruel imagination, which torments itself
+incessantly in anticipating woes that are still unborn, makes a
+diversion for my memory, and hinders me from recalling those which
+have gone. I exhaust disaster beforehand. The more I have suffered in
+foreseeing it, the more easily do I forget it; while on the contrary,
+being incessantly busy with my past happiness, I recall it and brood
+and ruminate over it, so as to enjoy it over again whenever I
+wish.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_97_97" id="FNanchor_97_97"></a><a href="#Footnote_97_97" class="fnanchor">[97]</a> The same turn of humour saved him from vindictiveness. &quot;I
+concern myself too little with the offence, to feel much concern about
+the offender. I only think of the hurt that I have received from him,
+on account of the hurt that he may still do me; and if I were sure he
+would do me no more, what he had already done would be forgotten
+straightway.&quot; Though he does not carry the analysis any further, we
+may easily perceive that the same explanation covers what he called
+his natural ingratitude. Kindness was not much more vividly understood
+by him than malice. It was only one form of the troublesome
+interposition of an outer world in his life; he was fain to hurry back
+from it to the real world of his dreams. If any man called practical
+is tempted to despise this dreaming creature, as he fares in his
+chaise from stage to stage, let him remember that one making that
+journey through France less than thirty years later might <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[ii.72]</a></span>have seen
+the castles of the great flaring in the destruction of a most
+righteous vengeance, the great themselves fleeing ignobly from the
+land to which their selfishness, and heedlessness, and hatred of
+improvement, and inhuman pride had been a curse, while the legion of
+toilers with eyes blinded by the oppression of ages were groping with
+passionate uncertain hand for that divine something which they thought
+of as justice and right. And this was what Rousseau both partially
+foresaw and helped to prepare,<a name="FNanchor_98_98" id="FNanchor_98_98"></a><a href="#Footnote_98_98" class="fnanchor">[98]</a> while the common politicians, like
+Choiseul or D'Aiguillon, played their poor game&#8212;the elemental forces
+rising unseen into tempest around them.</p>
+
+<p>He reached the territory of the canton of Berne, and alighted at the
+house of an old friend at Yverdun,<a name="FNanchor_99_99" id="FNanchor_99_99"></a><a href="#Footnote_99_99" class="fnanchor">[99]</a> where native air, the beauty of
+the spot, and the charms of the season, immediately repaired all
+weariness and fatigue.<a name="FNanchor_100_100" id="FNanchor_100_100"></a><a href="#Footnote_100_100" class="fnanchor">[100]</a> Friends at Geneva wrote letters of sincere
+feeling, joyful that he had not followed the precedent of Socrates too
+closely by remaining in the power of a government eager to destroy
+him.<a name="FNanchor_101_101" id="FNanchor_101_101"></a><a href="#Footnote_101_101" class="fnanchor">[101]</a> A post or two later brought worse news. The Council at
+Geneva ordered not only Emilius, but the Social Contract also, to be
+publicly burnt, and issued a warrant of arrest against their author,
+if he should set foot in the territory of the republic (June
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[ii.73]</a></span>19).<a name="FNanchor_102_102" id="FNanchor_102_102"></a><a href="#Footnote_102_102" class="fnanchor">[102]</a> Rousseau could hardly believe it possible that the free
+Government which he had held up to the reverence of Europe, could have
+condemned him unheard, but he took occasion in a highly characteristic
+manner to chide severely a friend at Geneva who had publicly taken his
+part.<a name="FNanchor_103_103" id="FNanchor_103_103"></a><a href="#Footnote_103_103" class="fnanchor">[103]</a> Within a fortnight this blow was followed by another. His
+two books were reported to the senate of Berne, and Rousseau was
+informed by one of the authorities that a notification was on its way
+admonishing him to quit the canton within the space of fifteen
+days.<a name="FNanchor_104_104" id="FNanchor_104_104"></a><a href="#Footnote_104_104" class="fnanchor">[104]</a> This stroke he avoided by flight to Motiers, a village in
+the principality of Neuch&#226;tel (July 10), then part of the dominions of
+the King of Prussia.<a name="FNanchor_105_105" id="FNanchor_105_105"></a><a href="#Footnote_105_105" class="fnanchor">[105]</a> Rousseau had some antipathy <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[ii.74]</a></span>to Frederick,
+both because he had beaten the French, whom Rousseau loved, and
+because his maxims and his conduct alike seemed to trample under foot
+respect for the natural law and not a few human duties. He had
+composed a verse to the effect that Frederick thought like a
+philosopher and acted like a king, philosopher and king notoriously
+being words of equally evil sense in his dialect. There was also a
+passage in Emilius about Adrastus, King of the Daunians, which was
+commonly understood to mean Frederick, King of the Prussians. Still
+Rousseau was acute enough to know that mean passions usually only rule
+the weak, and have little hold over the strong. He boldly wrote both
+to the king and to Lord Marischal, the governor of the principality,
+informing them that he was there, and asking permission to remain in
+the only asylum left for him upon the earth.<a name="FNanchor_106_106" id="FNanchor_106_106"></a><a href="#Footnote_106_106" class="fnanchor">[106]</a> He compared himself
+loftily to Coriolanus among the Volscians, and wrote to the king in a
+vein that must have amused the strong man. &quot;I have said much ill of
+you, perhaps I shall still say more; yet, driven from France, from
+Geneva, from the canton of Berne, I am come to seek shelter in your
+states. Perhaps I was wrong in not beginning there; this is eulogy of
+which you are worthy. Sire, I have deserved no grace from you, and I
+seek none, but I thought it my duty to inform your majesty that I am
+in your power, and that I am so of set design. Your majesty will
+dispose of me as shall <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[ii.75]</a></span>seem good to you.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_107_107" id="FNanchor_107_107"></a><a href="#Footnote_107_107" class="fnanchor">[107]</a> Frederick, though no
+admirer of Rousseau or his writings,<a name="FNanchor_108_108" id="FNanchor_108_108"></a><a href="#Footnote_108_108" class="fnanchor">[108]</a> readily granted the required
+permission. He also, says Lord Marischal, &quot;gave me orders to furnish
+him his small necessaries if he would accept them; and though that
+king's philosophy be very different from that of Jean Jacques, yet he
+does not think that a man of an irreproachable life is to be
+persecuted because his sentiments are singular. He designs to build
+him a hermitage with a little garden, which I find he will not accept,
+nor perhaps the rest, which I have not yet offered him.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_109_109" id="FNanchor_109_109"></a><a href="#Footnote_109_109" class="fnanchor">[109]</a> When the
+offer of the flour, wine, and firewood was at length made in as
+delicate terms as possible, Rousseau declined the gift on grounds
+which may raise a smile, but which are not without a rather touching
+simplicity.<a name="FNanchor_110_110" id="FNanchor_110_110"></a><a href="#Footnote_110_110" class="fnanchor">[110]</a> &quot;I have enough to live on for two or three years,&quot; he
+said, &quot;but if I were dying of hunger, I would rather in the present
+condition of your good prince, and not being of any service to him, go
+and eat grass and grub up roots, than accept a morsel of bread from
+him.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_111_111" id="FNanchor_111_111"></a><a href="#Footnote_111_111" class="fnanchor">[111]</a> Hume might well call this a phenomenon in the world of
+letters, and one very honourable for the person concerned.<a name="FNanchor_112_112" id="FNanchor_112_112"></a><a href="#Footnote_112_112" class="fnanchor">[112]</a> And we
+recognise its dignity the more when we contrast <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[ii.76]</a></span>it with the baseness
+of Voltaire, who drew his pension from the King of Prussia while
+Frederick was in his most urgent straits, and while the poet was
+sportively exulting to all his correspondents in the malicious
+expectation that he would one day have to allow the King of Prussia
+himself a pension.<a name="FNanchor_113_113" id="FNanchor_113_113"></a><a href="#Footnote_113_113" class="fnanchor">[113]</a> And Rousseau was a poor man, living among the
+poor and in their style. His annual outlay at this time was covered by
+the modest sum of sixty louis.<a name="FNanchor_114_114" id="FNanchor_114_114"></a><a href="#Footnote_114_114" class="fnanchor">[114]</a> What stamps his refusal of
+Frederick's gifts as true dignity, is the fact that he not only did
+not refuse money for any work done, but expected and asked for it.
+Malesherbes at this very time begged him to collect plants for him.
+Joyfully, replied Rousseau, &quot;but as I cannot subsist without the aid
+of my own labour, I never meant, in spite of the pleasure that it
+might otherwise have been to me, to offer you the use of my time for
+nothing.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_115_115" id="FNanchor_115_115"></a><a href="#Footnote_115_115" class="fnanchor">[115]</a> In the same year, we may add, when the tremendous
+struggle of the Seven Years' War was closing, the philosopher wrote a
+second terse epistle to the king, and with this their direct
+communication came to an end. &quot;Sire, you are my protector and my
+benefactor; I would fain repay you if I can. You wish to give me
+bread; is there none of your own subjects in want of it? Take that
+sword away from my sight, it dazzles and pains me. It has done its
+work only too well; the sceptre is abandoned. Great is the career for
+kings of your <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[ii.77]</a></span>stuff, and you are still far from the term; time
+presses, you have not a moment to lose. Fathom well your heart, O
+Frederick! Can you dare to die without having been the greatest of
+men? Would that I could see Frederick, the just and the redoubtable,
+covering his states with multitudes of men to whom he should be a
+father; then will J.J. Rousseau, the foe of kings, hasten to die at
+the foot of his throne.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_116_116" id="FNanchor_116_116"></a><a href="#Footnote_116_116" class="fnanchor">[116]</a> Frederick, strong as his interest was in
+all curious persons who could amuse him, was too busy to answer this,
+and Rousseau was not yet recognised as Voltaire's rival in power and
+popularity.</p>
+
+<p>Motiers is one of the half-dozen decent villages standing in the flat
+bottom of the Val de Travers, a widish valley that lies between the
+gorges of the Jura and the Lake of Neuch&#226;tel, and is famous in our day
+for its production of absinthe and of asphalt. The flat of the valley,
+with the Reuss making a bald and colourless way through the midst of
+it, is nearly treeless, and it is too uniform to be very pleasing. In
+winter the climate is most rigorous, for the level is high, and the
+surrounding hills admit the sun's rays late and cut them off early.
+Rousseau's description, accurate and recognisable as it is,<a name="FNanchor_117_117" id="FNanchor_117_117"></a><a href="#Footnote_117_117" class="fnanchor">[117]</a>
+strikes an impartial tourist as too favourable. But when a piece of
+scenery is a home to a man, he has an eye for a thousand outlines,
+changes of light, soft variations of colour; <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[ii.78]</a></span>the landscape lives for
+him with an unspoken suggestion and intimate association, to all of
+which the swift passing stranger is very cold.</p>
+
+<p>His cottage, which is still shown, was in the midst of the other
+houses, and his walks, which were at least as important to him as the
+home in which he dwelt, lay mostly among woody heights with streaming
+cascades. The country abounded in natural curiosities of a humble
+sort, and here that interest in plants which had always been strong in
+him, began to grow into a passion. Rousseau had so curious a feeling
+about them, that when in his botanical expeditions he came across a
+single flower of its kind, he could never bring himself to pluck it.
+His sight, though not good for distant objects, was of the very finest
+for things held close; his sense of smell was so acute and subtle
+that, according to a good witness, he might have classified plants by
+odours, if language furnished as many names as nature supplies
+varieties of fragrance.<a name="FNanchor_118_118" id="FNanchor_118_118"></a><a href="#Footnote_118_118" class="fnanchor">[118]</a> He insisted in all botanising and other
+walking excursions on going bareheaded, even in the heat of the
+dog-days; he declared that the action of the sun did him good. When
+the days began to turn, the summer was straightway at an end for him:
+&quot;My imagination,&quot; he said, in a phrase which went further through his
+life than he supposed, &quot;at once brings winter.&quot; He hated rain as much
+as he loved sun, so he must once have lost all the mystic fascination
+of the green Savoy lakes gleaming luminous through pale <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[ii.79]</a></span>showers, and
+now again must have lost the sombre majesty of the pines of his valley
+dripping in torn edges of cloud, and all those other sights in
+landscape that touch subtler parts of us than comforted sense.</p>
+
+<p>One of his favourite journeys was to Colombier, the summer retreat of
+Lord Marischal. For him he rapidly conceived the same warm friendship
+which he felt for the Duke of Luxembourg, whom he had just left. And
+the sagacious, moderate, silent Scot had as warm a liking for the
+strange refugee who had come to him for shelter, or shall we call it a
+kind of shaggy compassion, as of a faithful inarticulate creature. His
+letters, which are numerous enough, abound in expressions of hearty
+good-will. These, if we reflect on the genuine worth, veracity,
+penetration, and experience of the old man who wrote them, may fairly
+be counted the best testimony that remains to the existence of
+something sterling at the bottom of Rousseau's character.<a name="FNanchor_119_119" id="FNanchor_119_119"></a><a href="#Footnote_119_119" class="fnanchor">[119]</a> It is
+here no insincere fine lady of the French court, but a homely and
+weather-beaten Scotchman, who speaks so often of his refugee's
+rectitude of heart and true sensibility.<a name="FNanchor_120_120" id="FNanchor_120_120"></a><a href="#Footnote_120_120" class="fnanchor">[120]</a></p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[ii.80]</a></span></p><p>He insisted on being allowed to settle a small sum on Theresa, who
+had joined Rousseau at Motiers, and in other ways he showed a true
+solicitude and considerateness both for her and for him.<a name="FNanchor_121_121" id="FNanchor_121_121"></a><a href="#Footnote_121_121" class="fnanchor">[121]</a> It was
+his constant dream, that on his return to Scotland, Jean Jacques
+should accompany him, and that with David Hume, they would make a trio
+of philosophic hermits; that this was no mere cheery pleasantry is
+shown by the pains he took in settling the route for the journey.<a name="FNanchor_122_122" id="FNanchor_122_122"></a><a href="#Footnote_122_122" class="fnanchor">[122]</a>
+The plan only fell through in consequence of Frederick's cordial
+urgency that his friend should end his days with him; he returned to
+Prussia and lived at Sans Souci until the close, always retaining
+something of his good-will for &quot;his excellent savage,&quot; as he called
+the author of the Discourses. They had some common antipathies,
+including the fundamental one of dislike to society, and especially to
+the society of the people of Neuch&#226;tel, the Gascons of Switzerland.
+&quot;Rousseau is gay in company,&quot; Lord Marischal wrote to Hume, &quot;polite,
+and what the French call <i>aimable</i>, and gains <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[ii.81]</a></span>ground daily in the
+opinion of even the clergy here. His enemies elsewhere continue to
+persecute him, and he is pestered with anonymous letters.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_123_123" id="FNanchor_123_123"></a><a href="#Footnote_123_123" class="fnanchor">[123]</a></p>
+
+<p>Some of these were of a humour that disclosed the master hand.
+Voltaire had been universally suspected of stirring up the feeling of
+Geneva against its too famous citizen,<a name="FNanchor_124_124" id="FNanchor_124_124"></a><a href="#Footnote_124_124" class="fnanchor">[124]</a> though for a man of less
+energy the affair of the Calas, which he was now in the thick of,
+might have sufficed. Voltaire's letters at this time show how hard he
+found it in the case of Rousseau to exercise his usual pity for the
+unfortunate. He could not forget that the man who was now tasting
+persecution had barked at philosophers and stage-plays; that he was a
+false brother, who had fatuously insulted the only men who could take
+his part; that he was a Judas who had betrayed the sacred cause.<a name="FNanchor_125_125" id="FNanchor_125_125"></a><a href="#Footnote_125_125" class="fnanchor">[125]</a>
+On the whole, however, we ought probably to accept his word, though
+not very categorically given,<a name="FNanchor_126_126" id="FNanchor_126_126"></a><a href="#Footnote_126_126" class="fnanchor">[126]</a> that he had nothing to do with the
+action taken against Rousseau. That action is quite adequately
+explained, first by the influence of the resident of France at Geneva,
+which we know to have been exerted against the two fatal books,<a name="FNanchor_127_127" id="FNanchor_127_127"></a><a href="#Footnote_127_127" class="fnanchor">[127]</a>
+and second by the anxiety of the oligarchic party to keep out of their
+town a man whose democratic tendencies they now knew so well and so
+justly <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[ii.82]</a></span>dreaded.<a name="FNanchor_128_128" id="FNanchor_128_128"></a><a href="#Footnote_128_128" class="fnanchor">[128]</a> Moultou, a Genevese minister, in the full tide
+of devotion and enthusiasm for the author of Emilius, met Voltaire at
+the house of a lady in Geneva. All will turn out well, cried the
+patriarch; &quot;the syndics will say M. Rousseau, you have done ill to
+write what you have written; promise for the future to respect the
+religion of your country. Jean Jacques will promise, and perhaps he
+will say that the printer took the liberty of adding a sheet or two to
+his book.&quot; &quot;Never,&quot; cried the ardent Moultou; &quot;Jean Jacques never puts
+his name to works to disown them after.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_129_129" id="FNanchor_129_129"></a><a href="#Footnote_129_129" class="fnanchor">[129]</a> Voltaire disowned his
+own books with intrepid and sustained mendacity, yet he bore no grudge
+to Moultou for his vehemence. He sent for him shortly afterwards,
+professed an extreme desire to be reconciled with Rousseau, and would
+talk of nothing else. &quot;I swear to you,&quot; wrote Moultou, &quot;that I could
+not understand him the least in the world; he is a marvellous actor; I
+could have sworn that he loved you.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_130_130" id="FNanchor_130_130"></a><a href="#Footnote_130_130" class="fnanchor">[130]</a> And there really was no
+acting in it. The serious Genevese did not see that he was dealing
+with &quot;one all fire and fickleness, a child.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Rousseau soon found out that he had excited not only the band of
+professed unbelievers, but also the tormenting wasps of orthodoxy. The
+doctors of the Sorbonne, not to be outdone in fervour for truth by the
+lawyers of the parliament, had condemned Emilius as a matter of
+course. In the same spirit of generous <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[ii.83]</a></span>emulation, Christopher de
+Beaumont, &quot;by the divine compassion archbishop of Paris, Duke of Saint
+Cloud, peer of France, commander of the order of the Holy Ghost,&quot; had
+issued (Aug. 20, 1762) one of those hateful documents in which
+bishops, Catholic and Protestant, have been wont for the last century
+and a half to hide with swollen bombastic phrase their dead and
+decomposing ideas. The windy folly of these poor pieces is usually in
+proportion to the hierarchic rank of those who promulgate them, and an
+archbishop owes it to himself to blaspheme against reason and freedom
+in superlatives of malignant unction. Rousseau's reply (Nov. 18, 1762)
+is a masterpiece of dignity and uprightness. Turning to it from the
+mandate which was its provocative, we seem to grasp the hand of a man,
+after being chased by a nightmare of masked figures. Rousseau never
+showed the substantial quality of his character more surely and
+unmistakably than in controversy. He had such gravity, such austere
+self-command, such closeness of grip. Most of us feel pleasure in
+reading the matchless banter with which Voltaire assailed his
+theological enemies. Reading Rousseau's letter to De Beaumont we
+realise the comparative lowness of the pleasure which Voltaire had
+given us. We understand how it was that Rousseau made fanatics, while
+Voltaire only made sceptics. At the very first words, the mitre, the
+crosier, the ring, fall into the dust; the Archbishop of Paris, the
+Duke of Saint Cloud, the peer of France, the commander of the Holy
+Ghost, is restored from<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[ii.84]</a></span> the disguises of his enchantment, and becomes
+a human being. We hear the voice of a man hailing a man. Voltaire
+often sank to the level of ecclesiastics. Rousseau raised the
+archbishop to his own level, and with magnanimous courtesy addressed
+him as an equal. &quot;Why, my lord, have I anything to say to you? What
+common tongue can we use? How are we to understand one another? And
+what is there between me and you?&quot; And he persevered in this distant
+lofty vein, hardly permitting himself a single moment of acerbity. We
+feel the ever-inspiring breath of seriousness and sincerity. This was
+because, as we repeat so often, Rousseau's ideas, all engendered of
+dreams as they were, yet lived in him and were truly rooted in his
+character. He did not merely say, as any of us can say so fluently,
+that he craved reality in human relations, that distinctions of rank
+and post count for nothing, that our lives are in our own hands and
+ought not to be blown hither and thither by outside opinion and words
+heedlessly scattered; that our faith, whatever it may be, is the most
+sacred of our possessions, organic, indissoluble, self-sufficing; that
+our passage across the world, if very short, is yet too serious to be
+wasted in frivolous disrespect for ourselves, and angry disrespect for
+others. All this was actually his mind. And hence the little
+difficulty he had in keeping his retort to the archbishop, as to his
+other antagonists, on a worthy level.</p>
+
+<p>Only once or twice does his sense of the reckless injustice with which
+he had been condemned, and of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[ii.85]</a></span> the persecution which was inflicted on
+him by one government after another, stir in him a blaze of high
+remonstrance. &quot;You accuse me of temerity,&quot; he cried; &quot;how have I
+earned such a name, when I only propounded difficulties, and even that
+with so much reserve; when I only advanced reasons, and even that with
+so much respect; when I attacked no one, nor even named one? And you,
+my lord, how do you dare to reproach with temerity a man of whom you
+speak with such scanty justice and so little decency, with so small
+respect and so much levity? You call me impious, and of what impiety
+can you accuse me&#8212;me who never spoke of the Supreme Being except to
+pay him the honour and glory that are his due, nor of man except to
+persuade all men to love one another? The impious are those who
+unworthily profane the cause of God by making it serve the passions of
+men. The impious are those who, daring to pass for the interpreters of
+divinity, and judges between it and man, exact for themselves the
+honours that are due to it only. The impious are those who arrogate to
+themselves the right of exercising the power of God upon earth, and
+insist on opening and shutting the gates of heaven at their own good
+will and pleasure. The impious are those who have libels read in the
+church. At this horrible idea my blood is enkindled, and tears of
+indignation fall from my eyes. Priests of the God of peace, you shall
+render an account one day, be very sure, of the use to which you have
+dared to put his house.... My lord, you<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[ii.86]</a></span> have publicly insulted me:
+you are now convicted of heaping calumny upon me. If you were a
+private person like myself, so that I could cite you before an
+equitable tribunal, and we could both appear before it, I with my
+book, and you with your mandate, assuredly you would be declared
+guilty; you would be condemned to make reparation as public as the
+wrong was public. But you belong to a rank that relieves you from the
+necessity of being just, and I am nothing. Yet you who profess the
+gospel, you, a prelate appointed to teach others their duty, you know
+what your own duty is in such a case. Mine I have done: I have nothing
+more to say to you, and I hold my peace.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_131_131" id="FNanchor_131_131"></a><a href="#Footnote_131_131" class="fnanchor">[131]</a></p>
+
+<p>The letter was as good in dialectic as it was in moral tone. For this
+is a little curious, that Rousseau, so diffuse in expounding his
+opinions, and so unscientific in his method of coming to them, should
+have been one of the keenest and most trenchant of the
+controversialists of a very controversial time. Some of his strokes in
+defence of his first famous assault on civilisation are as hard, as
+direct, and as effective as any in the records of polemical
+literature. We will give one specimen from the letter to the
+Archbishop of Paris; it has the recommendation of touching an argument
+that is not yet quite universally recognised for slain. The Savoyard
+Vicar had dwelt on the difficulty of accepting revelation as the voice
+of God, on account of the long distance of time between us, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[ii.87]</a></span>and the
+questionableness of the supporting testimony. To which the archbishop
+thus:&#8212;&quot;But is there not then an infinity of facts, even earlier than
+those of the Christian revelation, which it would be absurd to doubt?
+By what way other than that of human testimony has our author himself
+known the Sparta, the Athens, the Rome, whose laws, manners, and
+heroes he extols with such assurance? How many generations of men
+between him and the historians who have preserved the memory of these
+events?&quot; First, says Rousseau in answer, &quot;it is in the order of things
+that human circumstances should be attested by human evidence, and
+they can be attested in no other way. I can only know that Rome and
+Sparta existed, because contemporaries assure me that they existed. In
+such a case this intermediate communication is indispensable. But why
+is it necessary between God and me? Is it simple or natural that God
+should have gone in search of Moses to speak to Jean Jacques Rousseau?
+Second, nobody is obliged to believe that Sparta once existed, and
+nobody will be devoured by eternal flames for doubting it. Every fact
+of which we are not witnesses is only established by moral proofs, and
+moral proofs have various degrees of strength. Will the divine justice
+hurl me into hell for missing the exact point at which a proof becomes
+irresistible? If there is in the world an attested story, it is that
+of vampires; nothing is wanting for judicial proof,&#8212;reports and
+certificates from notables, surgeons, clergy, magistrates. But<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[ii.88]</a></span> who
+believes in vampires, and shall we all be damned for not believing?
+Third, <i>my constant experience and that of all men is stronger in
+reference to prodigies than the testimony of some men</i>.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>He then strikes home with a parable. The Abb&#233; P&#226;ris had died in the
+odour of Jansenist sanctity (1727), and extraordinary doings went on
+at his tomb; the lame walked, men and women sick of the palsy were
+made whole, and so forth. Suppose, says Rousseau, that an inhabitant
+of the Rue St. Jacques speaks thus to the Archbishop of Paris, &quot;My
+lord, I know that you neither believe in the beatitude of St. Jean de
+P&#226;ris, nor in the miracles which God has been pleased publicly to work
+upon his tomb in the sight of the most enlightened and most populous
+city in the world; but I feel bound to testify to you that I have just
+seen the saint in person raised from the dead in the spot where his
+bones were laid.&quot; The man of the Rue St. Jacques gives all the detail
+of such a circumstance that could strike a beholder. &quot;I am persuaded
+that on hearing such strange news, you will begin by interrogating him
+who testifies to its truth, as to his position, his feelings, his
+confessor, and other such points; and when from his air, as from his
+speech, you have perceived that he is a poor workman, and when having
+no confessional ticket to show you, he has confirmed your notion that
+he is a Jansenist, Ah, ah, you will say to him, you are a
+convulsionary, and have seen Saint P&#226;ris resuscitated. There is
+nothing wonderful in that; you have seen so many other<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[ii.89]</a></span> wonders!&quot; The
+man would insist that the miracle had been seen equally by a number of
+other people, who though Jansenists, it is true, were persons of sound
+sense, good character, and excellent reputation. Some would send the
+man to Bedlam, &quot;but you after a grave reprimand, will be content with
+saying: I know that two or three witnesses, good people and of sound
+sense, may attest the life or the death of a man, but I do not know
+how many more are needed to establish the resurrection of a Jansenist.
+Until I find that out, go, my son, and try to strengthen your brain: I
+give you a dispensation from fasting, and here is something for you to
+make your broth with. That is what you would say, and what any other
+sensible man would say in your place. Whence I conclude that even
+according to you and to every other sensible man, the moral proofs
+which are sufficient to establish facts that are in the order of moral
+possibilities, are not sufficient to establish facts of another order
+and purely supernatural.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_132_132" id="FNanchor_132_132"></a><a href="#Footnote_132_132" class="fnanchor">[132]</a></p>
+
+<p>Perhaps, however, the formal denunciation by the Archbishop of Paris
+was less vexatious than the swarming of the angrier hive of ministers
+at his gates. &quot;If I had declared for atheism,&quot; he says bitterly, &quot;they
+would at first have shrieked, but they would soon have left me in
+peace like the rest. The people of the Lord would not have kept watch
+over me; everybody would not have thought he was doing me a high
+favour in not treating me as a person cut off <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[ii.90]</a></span>from communion, and I
+should have been quits with all the world. The holy women in Israel
+would not have written me anonymous letters, and their charity would
+not have breathed devout insults. They would not have taken the
+trouble to assure me in all humility of heart that I was a castaway,
+an execrable monster, and that the world would have been well off if
+some good soul had been at the pains to strangle me in my cradle.
+Worthy people on their side would not torment themselves and torment
+me to bring me back to the way of salvation; they would not charge at
+me from right and left, nor stifle me under the weight of their
+sermons, nor force me to bless their zeal while I cursed their
+importunity, nor to feel with gratitude that they are obeying a call
+to lay me in my very grave with weariness.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_133_133" id="FNanchor_133_133"></a><a href="#Footnote_133_133" class="fnanchor">[133]</a></p>
+
+<p>He had done his best to conciliate the good opinion of his vigilant
+neighbours. Their character for contentious orthodoxy was well known.
+It was at Neuch&#226;tel that the controversy as to the eternal punishment
+of the wicked raged with a fury that ended in a civil outbreak. The
+peace of the town was violently disturbed, ministers were suspended,
+magistrates were interdicted, life was lost, until at last Frederick
+promulgated his famous bull:&#8212;&quot;Let the parsons who make for themselves
+a cruel and barbarous God, be eternally damned as they desire and
+deserve; and let those parsons who conceive God gentle and merciful,
+enjoy the plenitude of his <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[ii.91]</a></span>mercy.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_134_134" id="FNanchor_134_134"></a><a href="#Footnote_134_134" class="fnanchor">[134]</a> When Rousseau came within the
+territory, preparations were made to imitate the action of Paris,
+Geneva, and Berne. It was only the king's express permission that
+saved him from a fourth proscription. The minister at Motiers was of
+the less inhuman stamp, and Rousseau, feeling that he could not,
+without failing in his engagements and his duty as a citizen, neglect
+the public profession of the faith to which he had been restored eight
+years before, attended the religious services with regularity. He even
+wrote to the pastor a letter in vindication of his book, and
+protesting the sincerity of his union with the reformed
+congregation.<a name="FNanchor_135_135" id="FNanchor_135_135"></a><a href="#Footnote_135_135" class="fnanchor">[135]</a> The result of this was that the pastor came to tell
+him how great an honour he held it to count such a member in his
+flock, and how willing he was to admit him without further examination
+to partake of the communion.<a name="FNanchor_136_136" id="FNanchor_136_136"></a><a href="#Footnote_136_136" class="fnanchor">[136]</a> Rousseau went to the ceremony with
+eyes full of tears and a heart swelling with emotion. We may respect
+his mood as little or as much as we please, but it was certainly more
+edifying than the sight of Voltaire going through the same rite,
+merely to harass a priest and fill a bishop with fury.</p>
+
+<p>In all other respects he lived a harmless life during the three years
+of his sojourn in the Val de Travers. As he could never endure what he
+calls the inactive chattering of the parlour&#8212;people sitting <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[ii.92]</a></span>in front
+of one another with folded hands and nothing in motion except the
+tongue&#8212;he learnt the art of making laces; he used to carry his pillow
+about with him, or sat at his own door working like the women of the
+village, and chatting with the passers-by. He made presents of his
+work to young women about to marry, always on the condition that they
+should suckle their children when they came to have them. If a little
+whimsical, it was a harmless and respectable pastime. It is pleasanter
+to think of a philosopher finding diversion in weaving laces, than of
+noblemen making it the business of their lives to run after ribands. A
+society clothed in breeches was incensed about the same time by
+Rousseau's adoption of the Armenian costume, the vest, the furred
+bonnet, the caftan, and the girdle. There was nothing very wonderful
+in this departure from use. An Armenian tailor used often to visit
+some friends at Montmorency. Rousseau knew him, and reflected that
+such a dress would be of singular comfort to him in the circumstances
+of his bodily disorder.<a name="FNanchor_137_137" id="FNanchor_137_137"></a><a href="#Footnote_137_137" class="fnanchor">[137]</a> Here was a solid practical reason for
+what has usually been counted a demonstration of a turned brain.
+Rousseau had as good cause for going about in a caftan as Chatham had
+for coming to the House of Parliament wrapped in flannel. Vanity and a
+desire to attract notice may, we admit, have had something to do with
+Rousseau's adoption of an uncommon way of dressing. Shrewd wits like
+the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[ii.93]</a></span>Duke of Luxembourg and his wife did not suppose that it was so.
+We, living a hundred years after, cannot possibly know whether it was
+so or not, and our estimate of Rousseau's strange character would be
+very little worth forming, if it only turned on petty singularities of
+this kind. The foolish, equivocally gifted with the quality of
+articulate speech, may, if they choose, satisfy their own self-love by
+reducing all action out of the common course to a series of variations
+on the same motive in others. Men blessed by the benignity of
+experience will be thankful not to waste life in guessing evil about
+unknowable trifles.</p>
+
+<p>During his stay at Motiers Rousseau's time was hardly ever his own.
+Visitors of all nations, drawn either by respect for his work or by
+curiosity to see a man who had been prescribed by so many governments,
+came to him in throngs. His partisans at Geneva insisted on sending
+people to convince themselves how good a man they were persecuting. &quot;I
+had never been free from strangers for six weeks,&quot; he writes. &quot;Two
+days after, I had a Westphalian gentleman and one from Genoa; six days
+later, two persons from Zurich, who stayed a week; then a Genevese,
+recovering from an illness, and coming for change of air, fell ill
+again, and he has only just gone away.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_138_138" id="FNanchor_138_138"></a><a href="#Footnote_138_138" class="fnanchor">[138]</a> One visitor, writing home
+to his wife of the philosopher to whom he had come on a pilgrimage,
+describes his manners in terms which perhaps touch <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[ii.94]</a></span>us with
+surprise:&#8212;&quot;Thou hast no idea how charming his society is, what true
+politeness there is in his manners, what a depth of serenity and
+cheerfulness in his talk. Didst thou not expect quite a different
+picture, and figure to thyself an eccentric creature, always grave and
+sometimes even abrupt? Ah, what a mistake! To an expression of great
+mildness he unites a glance of fire, and eyes of a vivacity the like
+of which never was seen. When you handle any matter in which he takes
+an interest, then his eyes, his lips, his hands, everything about him
+speaks. You would be quite wrong to picture in him an everlasting
+grumbler. Not at all; he laughs with those who laugh, he chats and
+jokes with children, he rallies his housekeeper.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_139_139" id="FNanchor_139_139"></a><a href="#Footnote_139_139" class="fnanchor">[139]</a> He was not so
+civil to all the world, and occasionally turned upon his pursuers with
+a word of most sardonic roughness.<a name="FNanchor_140_140" id="FNanchor_140_140"></a><a href="#Footnote_140_140" class="fnanchor">[140]</a> But he could also be very
+generous. We find him pressing a loan from his scanty store on an
+outcast adventurer, and warning him, &quot;When I lend (which happens
+rarely enough), 'tis my constant maxim never to count on repayment,
+nor to exact it.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_141_141" id="FNanchor_141_141"></a><a href="#Footnote_141_141" class="fnanchor">[141]</a> He received hundreds of letters, some seeking
+an application of his views on education to a special case, others
+craving further exposition of his religious doctrines. Before he had
+been at Motiers nine months he had paid ten louis for the postage of
+letters, which after all contained <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[ii.95]</a></span>little more than reproaches,
+insults, menaces, imbecilities.<a name="FNanchor_142_142" id="FNanchor_142_142"></a><a href="#Footnote_142_142" class="fnanchor">[142]</a></p>
+
+<p>Not the least curious of his correspondence at this time is that with
+the Prince of W&#252;rtemberg, then living near Lausanne.<a name="FNanchor_143_143" id="FNanchor_143_143"></a><a href="#Footnote_143_143" class="fnanchor">[143]</a> The prince
+had a little daughter four months old, and he was resolved that her
+upbringing should be carried on as the author of Emilius might please
+to direct. Rousseau replied courteously that he did not pretend to
+direct the education of princes or princesses.<a name="FNanchor_144_144" id="FNanchor_144_144"></a><a href="#Footnote_144_144" class="fnanchor">[144]</a> His undaunted
+correspondent sent him full details of his babe's habits and
+faculties, and continued to do so at short intervals, with the
+fondness of a young mother or an old nurse. Rousseau was interested,
+and took some trouble to draw up rules for the child's nurture and
+admonition. One may smile now and then at the prince's ingenuous zeal,
+but his fervid respect and devotion for the teacher in whom he thought
+he had found the wisest man that ever lived, and who had at any rate
+spoken the word that kindled the love of virtue and truth in him, his
+eagerness to know what Rousseau thought right, and his equal eagerness
+in trying to do it, his care to arrange his household in a simple <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[ii.96]</a></span>and
+methodical way to please his master, his discipular patience when
+Rousseau told him that his verses were poor, or that he was too fond
+of his wife,&#8212;all this is a little uncommon in a prince, and deserves
+a place among the ample mass of other evidence of the power which
+Rousseau's pictures of domestic simplicity and wise and humane
+education had in the eighteenth century. It gives us a glimpse, close
+and direct, of the naturalist revival reaching up into high places.
+But the trade of philosopher in such times is perhaps an irksome one,
+and Rousseau was the private victim of his public action. His prince
+sent multitudes of Germans to visit the sage, and his letters, endless
+with their details of the nursery, may well have become a little
+tedious to a worn-out creature who only wanted to be left alone.<a name="FNanchor_145_145" id="FNanchor_145_145"></a><a href="#Footnote_145_145" class="fnanchor">[145]</a>
+The famous Prince Henry, Frederick's brother, thought a man happy who
+could have the delight of seeing Rousseau as often as he chose.<a name="FNanchor_146_146" id="FNanchor_146_146"></a><a href="#Footnote_146_146" class="fnanchor">[146]</a>
+People forgot the other side of this delight, and the unlucky
+philosopher found in a hundred ways alike from enemies and the friends
+whose curiosity makes them as bad as enemies, that the pedestal of
+glory partakes of the nature of the pillory or the stocks.</p>
+
+<p>It is interesting to find the famous English names of Gibbon and
+Boswell in the list of the multitudes <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[ii.97]</a></span>with whom he had to do at this
+time.<a name="FNanchor_147_147" id="FNanchor_147_147"></a><a href="#Footnote_147_147" class="fnanchor">[147]</a> The former was now at Lausanne, whither he had just
+returned from that memorable visit to England which persuaded him that
+his father would never endure his alliance with the daughter of an
+obscure Swiss pastor. He had just &quot;yielded to his fate, sighed as a
+lover, and obeyed as a son.&quot; &quot;How sorry I am for our poor Mademoiselle
+Curchod,&quot; writes Moultou to Rousseau; &quot;Gibbon whom she loves, and to
+whom she has sacrificed, as I know, some excellent matches, has come
+to Lausanne, but cold, insensible, and as entirely cured of his old
+passion as she is far from cure. She has written me a letter that
+makes my heart ache.&quot; He then entreats Rousseau to use his influence
+with Gibbon, who is on the point of starting for Motiers, by extolling
+to him the lady's worth and understanding.<a name="FNanchor_148_148" id="FNanchor_148_148"></a><a href="#Footnote_148_148" class="fnanchor">[148]</a> &quot;I hope Mr. Gibbon
+will not come,&quot; replied the sage; &quot;his coldness makes me think ill of
+him. I have been looking over his book again [the <i>Essai sur l'&#233;tude
+de la litt&#233;rature</i>, 1761]; he runs after brilliance too much, and is
+strained and stilted. Mr. Gibbon is not the man for me, and I do not
+think he is the man for Mademoiselle Curchod either.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_149_149" id="FNanchor_149_149"></a><a href="#Footnote_149_149" class="fnanchor">[149]</a> Whether
+Gibbon went or not, we do not know. He knew in after years what had
+been said of him by Jean Jacques, and protested with mild pomp that
+this extraordinary man should have been <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[ii.98]</a></span>less precipitate in
+condemning the moral character and the conduct of a stranger.<a name="FNanchor_150_150" id="FNanchor_150_150"></a><a href="#Footnote_150_150" class="fnanchor">[150]</a></p>
+
+<p>Boswell, as we know, had left Johnson &quot;rolling his majestic frame in
+his usual manner&quot; on Harwich beach in 1763, and was now on his
+travels. Like many of his countrymen, he found his way to Lord
+Marischal, and here his indomitable passion for making the personal
+acquaintance of any one who was much talked about, naturally led him
+to seek so singular a character as the man who was now at Motiers.
+What Rousseau thought of one who was as singular a character as
+himself in another direction, we do not know.<a name="FNanchor_151_151" id="FNanchor_151_151"></a><a href="#Footnote_151_151" class="fnanchor">[151]</a> Lord Marischal
+warned Rousseau that his visitor is of excellent disposition, but full
+of visionary ideas, even having seen spirits&#8212;a serious proof of
+unsoundness to a man who had lived in the very positive atmosphere of
+Frederick's court at Berlin. &quot;I only hope,&quot; says the sage Scot, of the
+Scot who was not sage, &quot;that he may not fall into <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[ii.99]</a></span>the hands of people
+who will turn his head: he was very pleased with the reception you
+gave him.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_152_152" id="FNanchor_152_152"></a><a href="#Footnote_152_152" class="fnanchor">[152]</a> As it happens, he was the means of sending Boswell to
+a place where his head was turned, though not very mischievously.
+Rousseau was at that time full of Corsican projects, of which this is
+the proper place for us very briefly to speak.</p>
+
+<p>The prolonged struggles of the natives of Corsica to assert their
+independence of the oppressive administration of the Genoese, which
+had begun in 1729, came to end for a moment in 1755, when Paoli
+(1726-1807) defeated the Genoese, and proceeded to settle the
+government of the island. In the Social Contract Rousseau had said,
+&quot;There is still in Europe one country capable of legislation, and that
+is the island of Corsica. The valour and constancy with which this
+brave people has succeeded in recovering and defending its liberty,
+entitle it to the good fortune of having some wise man to teach them
+how to preserve it. I have a presentiment that this little isle will
+one day astonish Europe,&quot;<a name="FNanchor_153_153" id="FNanchor_153_153"></a><a href="#Footnote_153_153" class="fnanchor">[153]</a>&#8212;a presentiment that in a sense came
+true enough long after Rousseau was gone, in a man who was born on the
+little island seven years later than the publication of this passage.
+Some of the Corsican leaders were highly flattered, and in August
+1764, Buttafuoco entered into correspondence with Rousseau for the
+purpose of inducing him to draw up a set of political institutions and
+a code of laws. Paoli himself was too shrewd to have much belief in
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[ii.100]</a></span>the application of ideal systems, and we are assured that he had no
+intention of making Rousseau the Solon of his island, but only of
+inducing him to inflame the gallantry of its inhabitants by writing a
+history of their exploits.<a name="FNanchor_154_154" id="FNanchor_154_154"></a><a href="#Footnote_154_154" class="fnanchor">[154]</a> Rousseau, however, did not understand
+the invitation in this narrower sense. He replied that the very idea
+of such a task as legislation transported his soul, and he entered
+into it with the liveliest ardour. He resolved to quarter himself with
+Theresa in a cottage in some lonely district in the island; in a year
+he would collect the necessary information as to the manners and
+opinions of the inhabitants, and three years afterwards he would
+produce a set of institutions that should be fit for a free and
+valorous people.<a name="FNanchor_155_155" id="FNanchor_155_155"></a><a href="#Footnote_155_155" class="fnanchor">[155]</a> In the midst of this enthusiasm (May 1765) he
+urged Boswell to visit Corsica, and gave him a letter to Paoli, with
+results which we know in the shape of an Account of Corsica (1768),
+and in a feverishness of imagination upon the subject for many a long
+day afterwards. &quot;Mind your own affairs,&quot; at length cried Johnson
+sternly to him, &quot;and leave the Corsicans to theirs; I wish you would
+empty your head of Corsica.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_156_156" id="FNanchor_156_156"></a><a href="#Footnote_156_156" class="fnanchor">[156]</a> At the end of 1765, the immortal
+hero-worshipper on his return expected to come upon his hero at
+Motiers, but finding that he was in Paris wrote him a wonderful letter
+in <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[ii.101]</a></span>wonderful French. &quot;You will forget all your cares for many an
+evening, while I tell you what I have seen. I owe you the deepest
+obligation for sending me to Corsica. The voyage has done me
+marvellous good. It has made me as if all the lives of Plutarch had
+sunk into my soul.... I am devoted to the Corsicans heart and soul; if
+you, illustrious Rousseau, the philosopher whom they have chosen to
+help them by your lights to preserve and enjoy the liberty which they
+have acquired with so much heroism&#8212;if you have cooled towards these
+gallant islanders, why then I am sorry for you, that is all I can
+say.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_157_157" id="FNanchor_157_157"></a><a href="#Footnote_157_157" class="fnanchor">[157]</a></p>
+
+<p>Alas, by this time the gallant islanders had been driven out of
+Rousseau's mind by personal mishaps. First, Voltaire or some other
+enemy had spread the rumour that the invitation to become the Lycurgus
+of Corsica was a practical joke, and Rousseau's suspicious temper
+found what he took for confirmation of this in some trifling incidents
+with which we <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[ii.102]</a></span>certainly need not concern ourselves.<a name="FNanchor_158_158" id="FNanchor_158_158"></a><a href="#Footnote_158_158" class="fnanchor">[158]</a> Next, a very
+real storm had burst upon him which drove him once more to seek a new
+place of shelter, other than an island occupied by French troops. For
+France having begun by despatching auxiliaries to the assistance of
+the Genoese (1764), ended by buying the island from the Genoese
+senate, with a sort of equity of redemption (1768)&#8212;an iniquitous
+transaction, as Rousseau justly called it, equally shocking to
+justice, humanity, reason, and policy.<a name="FNanchor_159_159" id="FNanchor_159_159"></a><a href="#Footnote_159_159" class="fnanchor">[159]</a> Civilisation would have
+been saved one of its sorest trials if Genoa could have availed
+herself of her equity, and so have delivered France from the
+acquisition of the most terrible citizen that ever scourged a
+state.<a name="FNanchor_160_160" id="FNanchor_160_160"></a><a href="#Footnote_160_160" class="fnanchor">[160]</a></p>
+
+<p>The condemnation of Rousseau by the Council in 1762 had divided Geneva
+into two camps, and was followed by a prolonged contention between his
+partisans and his enemies. The root of the contention was political
+rather than theological. To take Rousseau's side was to protest
+against the oligarchic authority which had condemned him, and the
+quarrel about Emilius was only an episode in the long war between the
+popular and aristocratic parties. This <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[ii.103]</a></span>strife, after coming to a
+height for the first time in 1734, had abated after the pacification
+of 1738, but the pacification was only effective for a time, and the
+roots of division were still full of vitality. The lawfulness of the
+authority and the regularity of the procedure by which Rousseau had
+been condemned, offered convenient ground for carrying on the dispute,
+and its warmth was made more intense by the suggestion on the popular
+side that perhaps the religion of the book which the oligarchs had
+condemned was more like Christianity than the religion of the
+oligarchs who condemned it.</p>
+
+<p>Rousseau was too near the scene of the quarrel, too directly involved
+in its issues, too constantly in contact with the people who were
+engaged in it, not to feel the angry buzzings very close about his
+ears. If he had been as collected and as self-possessed as he loved to
+fancy, they would have gone for very little in the life of the day.
+But Rousseau never stood on the heights whence a strong man surveys
+with clear eye and firm soul the unjust or mean or furious moods of
+the world. Such achievement is not hard for the creature who is
+wrapped up in himself; who is careless of the passions of men about
+him, because he thinks they cannot hurt him, and not because he has
+measured them, and deliberately assigned them a place among the
+elements in which a man's destiny is cast. It is only hard for one who
+is penetrated by true interest in the opinion and action of his
+fellows, thus to keep both sympathy warm and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[ii.104]</a></span> self-sufficience true.
+The task was too hard for Rousseau, though his patience under long
+persecution far surpassed that of any of the other oppressed teachers
+of the time. In the spring of 1763 he deliberately renounced in all
+due forms his rights of burgess-ship and citizenship in the city and
+republic of Geneva.<a name="FNanchor_161_161" id="FNanchor_161_161"></a><a href="#Footnote_161_161" class="fnanchor">[161]</a> And at length he broke forth against his
+Genevese persecutors in the Letters from the Mountain (1764), a long
+but extremely vigorous and adroit rejoinder to the pleas which his
+enemies had put forth in Tronchin's Letters from the Country. If any
+one now cares to satisfy himself how really unjust and illegal the
+treatment was, which Rousseau received at the hands of the authorities
+of his native city, he may do so by examining these most forcible
+letters. The second part of them may interest the student of political
+history by its account of the working of the institutions of the
+little republic. We seem to be reading over again the history of a
+Greek city; the growth of a wealthy class in face of an increasing
+number of poor burgesses, the imposition of burdens in unfair
+proportions upon the metoikoi, the gradual usurpation of legislative
+and administrative function (including especially the judicial) by the
+oligarchs, and the twisting of democratic machinery to oligarchic
+ends; then the growth of staseis or violent factions, followed by
+metabol&#233; or overthrow of the established constitution, ending in
+foreign intervention. The Four Hundred at Athens would have treated
+any <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[ii.105]</a></span>Social Contract that should have appeared in their day, just as
+sternly as the Two Hundred or the Twenty-five treated the Social
+Contract that did appear, and for just the same reasons.</p>
+
+<p>Rousseau proved his case with redundancy of demonstration. A body of
+burgesses had previously availed themselves (Nov. 1763) of a legal
+right, and made a technical representation to the Lesser Council that
+the laws had been broken in his case. The Council in return availed
+itself of an equally legal right, its <i>droit n&#233;gatif</i>, and declined to
+entertain the representation, without giving any reasons.
+Unfortunately for Rousseau's comfort, the ferment which his new
+vindication of his cause stirred up, did not end with the condemnation
+and burning of his manifesto. For the parliament of Paris ordered the
+Letters from the Mountain to be burned, and the same decree and the
+same faggot served for that and for Voltaire's Philosophical
+Dictionary (April 1765).<a name="FNanchor_162_162" id="FNanchor_162_162"></a><a href="#Footnote_162_162" class="fnanchor">[162]</a> It was also burned at the Hague (Jan.
+22). An observer by no means friendly to the priests noticed that at
+Paris it was not the fanatics of orthodoxy, but the encyclop&#230;dists and
+their flock, who on this occasion raised the storm and set the zeal of
+the magistrates in motion.<a name="FNanchor_163_163" id="FNanchor_163_163"></a><a href="#Footnote_163_163" class="fnanchor">[163]</a> The vanity and egoism of rationalistic
+sects can be as fatal to candour, justice, and compassion as the
+intolerant pride of the great churches.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[ii.106]</a></span></p><p>Persecution came nearer to Rousseau and took more inconvenient shapes
+than this. A terrible libel appeared (Feb. 1765), full of the coarsest
+calumnies. Rousseau, stung by their insolence and falseness, sent it
+to Paris to be published there with a prefatory note, stating that it
+was by a Genevese pastor whom he named. This landed him in fresh
+mortification, for the pastor disavowed the libel, Rousseau declined
+to accept the disavowal, and sensible men were wearied by acrimonious
+declarations, explanations, protests.<a name="FNanchor_164_164" id="FNanchor_164_164"></a><a href="#Footnote_164_164" class="fnanchor">[164]</a> Then the clergy of
+Neuch&#226;tel were not able any longer to resist the opportunity of
+inflicting such torments as they could, upon a heretic whom they might
+more charitably have left to those ultimate and everlasting torments
+which were so precious to their religious imagination. They began to
+press the pastor of the village where Rousseau lived, and with whom he
+had hitherto been on excellent terms. The pastor, though he had been
+liberal enough to admit his singular parishioner to the communion, in
+spite of the Savoyard Vicar, was not courageous enough to resist the
+bigotry of the professional body to which he belonged. He warned
+Rousseau not to present himself at the next communion. The philosopher
+insisted that he had a right to do this, until formally cast out by
+the consistory. The consistory, composed mainly of a body of peasants
+entirely bound to their minister in matters of religion, cited him to
+appear, and answer such <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[ii.107]</a></span>questions as might test his loyalty to the
+faith. Rousseau prepared a most deliberate vindication of all that he
+had written, which he intended to speak to his rustic judges. The eve
+of the morning on which he had to appear, he knew his discourse by
+heart; when morning came he could not repeat two sentences. So he fell
+back on the instrument over which he had more mastery than he had over
+tongue or memory, and wrote what he wished to say. The pastor, in whom
+irritated egoism was probably by this time giving additional heat to
+professional zeal, was for fulminating a decree of excommunication,
+but there appears to have been some indirect interference with the
+proceedings of the consistory by the king's officials at Neuch&#226;tel,
+and the ecclesiastical bolt was held back.<a name="FNanchor_165_165" id="FNanchor_165_165"></a><a href="#Footnote_165_165" class="fnanchor">[165]</a> Other weapons were not
+wanting. The pastor proceeded to spread rumours among his flock that
+Rousseau was a heretic, even an atheist, and most prodigious of all,
+that he had written a book containing the monstrous doctrine that
+women have no souls. The pulpit resounded with sermons proving to the
+honest villagers that antichrist was quartered in their parish in very
+flesh. The Armenian apparel gave a high degree of plausibleness to
+such an opinion, and as the wretched man went by the door of his
+neighbours, he heard cursing and menace, while a hostile pebble now
+and again whistled past his ear. His botanising expeditions were
+believed to be devoted to search for <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[ii.108]</a></span>noxious herbs, and a man who
+died in the agonies of nephritic colic, was supposed to have been
+poisoned by him.<a name="FNanchor_166_166" id="FNanchor_166_166"></a><a href="#Footnote_166_166" class="fnanchor">[166]</a> If persons went to the post-office for letters
+for him, they were treated with insult.<a name="FNanchor_167_167" id="FNanchor_167_167"></a><a href="#Footnote_167_167" class="fnanchor">[167]</a> At length the ferment
+against him grew hot enough to be serious. A huge block of stone was
+found placed so as to kill him when he opened his door; and one night
+an attempt was made to stone him in his house.<a name="FNanchor_168_168" id="FNanchor_168_168"></a><a href="#Footnote_168_168" class="fnanchor">[168]</a> Popular hate shown
+with this degree of violence was too much for his fortitude, and after
+a residence of rather more than three years (September 8-10, 1765), he
+fled from the inhospitable valley to seek refuge he knew not where.</p>
+
+<p>In his rambles of a previous summer he had seen a little island in the
+lake of Bienne, which struck his imagination and lived in his memory.
+Thither he now, after a moment of hesitation, turned his steps, with
+something of the same instinct as draws a child towards a beam of the
+sun. He forgot or was heedless of the circumstance that the isle of
+St. Peter lay in the jurisdiction of the canton of Berne, whose
+government had forbidden him their territory. Strong craving for a
+little ease in the midst of his wretchedness extinguished thought of
+jurisdictions and proscriptive decrees.</p>
+
+<p>The spot where he now found peace for a brief <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[ii.109]</a></span>space usually
+disappoints the modern hunter for the picturesque, who after wearying
+himself with the follies of a capital seeks the most violent tonic
+that he can find in the lonely terrors of glacier and peak, and sees
+only tameness in a pygmy island, that offers nothing sublimer than a
+high grassy terrace, some cool over-branching avenues, some mimic
+vales, and meadows and vineyards sloping down to the sheet of blue
+water at their feet. Yet, as one sits here on a summer day, with tired
+mowers sleeping on their grass heaps in the sun, in a stillness
+faintly broken by the timid lapping of the water in the sedge, or the
+rustling of swift lizards across the heated sand, while the Bernese
+snow giants line a distant horizon with mysterious solitary shapes, it
+is easy to know what solace life in such a scene might bring to a man
+distracted by pain of body and pain and weariness of soul. Rousseau
+has commemorated his too short sojourn here in the most perfect of all
+his compositions.<a name="FNanchor_169_169" id="FNanchor_169_169"></a><a href="#Footnote_169_169" class="fnanchor">[169]</a></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&quot;I found my existence so charming, and led a life so
+agreeable to my humour, that I resolved here to end my days.
+My only source of disquiet was whether I should be allowed
+to carry my project out. In the midst of the presentiments
+that disturbed me, I would fain have had them make a
+perpetual prison of my refuge, to confine me in it for all
+the rest of my life. I longed for them to cut off all chance
+and all hope of leaving it; to forbid me holding any
+communication with the mainland, so that, knowing <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[ii.110]</a></span>nothing
+of what was going on in the world, I might have forgotten
+the world's existence, and people might have forgotten mine
+too. They only suffered me to pass two months in the island,
+but I could have passed two years, two centuries, and all
+eternity, without a moment's weariness, though I had not,
+with my companion, any other society than that of the
+steward, his wife, and their servants. They were in truth
+honest souls and nothing more, but that was just what I
+wanted.... Carried thither in a violent hurry, alone and
+without a thing, I afterwards sent for my housekeeper, my
+books, and my scanty possessions, of which I had the delight
+of unpacking nothing, leaving my boxes and chests just as
+they had come, and dwelling in the house where I counted on
+ending my days, exactly as if it were an inn whence I must
+needs set forth on the morrow. All things went so well, just
+as they were, that to think of ordering them better were to
+spoil them. One of my greatest joys was to leave my books
+safely fastened up in their boxes, and to be without even a
+case for writing. When any luckless letter forced me to take
+up a pen for an answer, I grumblingly borrowed the steward's
+inkstand, and hurried to give it back to him with all the
+haste I could, in the vain hope that I should never have
+need of the loan any more. Instead of meddling with those
+weary quires and reams and piles of old books, I filled my
+chamber with flowers and grasses, for I was then in my first
+fervour for botany. Having given up employment that would be
+a task to me, I needed one that would be an amusement, nor
+cause me more pains than a sluggard might choose to take. I
+undertook to make the <i>Flora petrinsularis</i>, and to describe
+every single plant on the island, in detail enough to occupy
+me for the rest of my days. In consequence of this fine
+scheme, every morning after breakfast, which we all took in
+company, I used to go with a magnifying glass in my hand and
+my Systema Natur&#230; under my arm, to visit some district of
+the island. I had divided it for that purpose<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[ii.111]</a></span> into small
+squares, meaning to go through them one after another in
+each season of the year. At the end of two or three hours I
+used to return laden with an ample harvest, a provision for
+amusing myself after dinner indoors, in case of rain. I
+spent the rest of the morning in going with the steward, his
+wife, and Theresa, to see the labourers and the harvesting,
+and I generally set to work along with them; many a time
+when people from Berne came to see me, they found me perched
+on a high tree, with a bag fastened round my waist; I kept
+filling it with fruit and then let it down to the ground
+with a rope. The exercise I had taken in the morning and the
+good humour that always comes from exercise, made the repose
+of dinner vastly pleasant to me. But if dinner was kept up
+too long, and fine weather invited me forth, I could not
+wait, but was speedily off to throw myself all alone into a
+boat, which, when the water was smooth enough, I used to
+pull out to the middle of the lake. There, stretched at full
+length in the boat's bottom, with my eyes turned up to the
+sky, I let myself float slowly hither and thither as the
+water listed, sometimes for hours together, plunged in a
+thousand confused delicious musings, which, though they had
+no fixed nor constant object, were not the less on that
+account a hundred times dearer to me than all that I had
+found sweetest in what they call the pleasures of life.
+Often warned by the going down of the sun that it was time
+to return, I found myself so far from the island that I was
+forced to row with all my might to get in before it was
+pitch dark. At other times, instead of losing myself in the
+midst of the waters, I had a fancy to coast along the green
+shores of the island, where the clear waters and cool
+shadows tempted me to bathe. But one of my most frequent
+expeditions was from the larger island to the less; there I
+disembarked and spent my afternoon, sometimes in mimic
+rambles among wild elders, persicaries, willows, and shrubs
+of every species, sometimes settling myself on the top of a
+sandy knoll, covered with turf, wild thyme,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[ii.112]</a></span> flowers, even
+sainfoin and trefoil that had most likely been sown there in
+old days, making excellent quarters for rabbits. They might
+multiply in peace without either fearing anything or harming
+anything. I spoke of this to the steward. He at once had
+male and female rabbits brought from Neuch&#226;tel, and we went
+in high state, his wife, one of his sisters, Theresa, and I,
+to settle them in the little islet. The foundation of our
+colony was a feast-day. The pilot of the Argonauts was not
+prouder than I, as I bore my company and the rabbits in
+triumph from our island to the smaller one....</p>
+
+<p>When the lake was too rough for me to sail, I spent my
+afternoon in going up and down the island, gathering plants
+to right and left; seating myself now in smiling lonely
+nooks to dream at my ease, now on little terraces and
+knolls, to follow with my eyes the superb and ravishing
+prospect of the lake and its shores, crowned on one side by
+the neighbouring hills, and on the other melting into rich
+and fertile plains up to the feet of the pale blue mountains
+on their far-off edge.</p>
+
+<p>As evening drew on, I used to come down from the high ground
+and sit on the beach at the water's brink in some hidden
+sheltering place. There the murmur of the waves and their
+agitation, charmed all my senses and drove every other
+movement away from my soul; they plunged it into delicious
+dreamings, in which I was often surprised by night. The flux
+and reflux of the water, its ceaseless stir-swelling and
+falling at intervals, striking on ear and sight, made up for
+the internal movements which my musings extinguished; they
+were enough to give me delight in mere existence, without
+taking any trouble of thinking. From time to time arose some
+passing thought of the instability of the things of this
+world, of which the face of the waters offered an image; but
+such light impressions were swiftly effaced in the
+uniformity of the ceaseless motion, which rocked me as in a
+cradle; it held me with such fascination that even when
+called at the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[ii.113]</a></span> hour and by the signal appointed, I could not
+tear myself away without summoning all my force.</p>
+
+<p>After supper, when the evening was fine, we used to go all
+together for a saunter on the terrace, to breathe the
+freshness of the air from the lake. We sat down in the
+arbour, laughing, chatting, or singing some old song, and
+then we went home to bed, well pleased with the day, and
+only craving another that should be exactly like it on the
+morrow....</p>
+
+<p>All is in a continual flux upon the earth. Nothing in it
+keeps a form constant and determinate; our affections,
+fastening on external things, necessarily change and pass
+just as they do. Ever in front of us or behind us, they
+recall the past that is gone, or anticipate a future that in
+many a case is destined never to be. There is nothing solid
+to which the heart can fix itself. Here we have little more
+than a pleasure that comes and passes away; as for the
+happiness that endures, I cannot tell if it be so much as
+known among men. There is hardly in the midst of our
+liveliest delights a single instant when the heart could
+tell us with real truth&#8212;&quot;<i>I would this instant might last
+for ever</i>.&quot; And how can we give the name of happiness to a
+fleeting state that all the time leaves the heart unquiet
+and void, that makes us regret something gone, or still long
+for something to come?</p>
+
+<p>But if there is a state in which the soul finds a situation
+solid enough to comport with perfect repose, and with the
+expansion of its whole faculty, without need of calling back
+the past, or pressing on towards the future; where time is
+nothing for it, and the present has no ending; with no mark
+for its own duration and without a trace of succession;
+without a single other sense of privation or delight, of
+pleasure or pain, of desire or apprehension, than this
+single sense of existence&#8212;so long as such a state endures,
+he who finds himself in it may talk of bliss, not with a
+poor, relative, and imperfect happiness such as people find
+in the pleasures of life, but with a happiness<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[ii.114]</a></span> full,
+perfect, and sufficing, that leaves in the soul no conscious
+unfilled void. Such a state was many a day mine in my
+solitary musings in the isle of St. Peter, either lying in
+my boat as it floated on the water, or seated on the banks
+of the broad lake, or in other places than the little isle
+on the brink of some broad stream, or a rivulet murmuring
+over a gravel bed.</p>
+
+<p>What is it that one enjoys in a situation like this? Nothing
+outside of one's self, nothing except one's self and one's
+own existence.... But most men, tossed as they are by
+unceasing passion, have little knowledge of such a state;
+they taste it imperfectly for a few moments, and then retain
+no more than an obscure confused idea of it, that is too
+weak to let them feel its charm. It would not even be good
+in the present constitution of things, that in their
+eagerness for these gentle ecstasies, they should fall into
+a disgust for the active life in which their duty is
+prescribed to them by needs that are ever on the increase.
+But a wretch cut off from human society, who can do nothing
+here below that is useful and good either for himself or for
+other people, may in such a state find for all lost human
+felicities many recompenses, of which neither fortune nor
+men can ever rob him.</p>
+
+<p>'Tis true that these recompenses cannot be felt by all
+souls, nor in all situations. The heart must be in peace,
+nor any passion come to trouble its calm. There must be in
+the surrounding objects neither absolute repose nor excess
+of agitation, but a uniform and moderated movement without
+shock, without interval. With no movement, life is only
+lethargy. If the movement be unequal or too strong, it
+awakes us; by recalling us to the objects around, it
+destroys the charm of our musing, and plucks us from within
+ourselves, instantly to throw us back under the yoke of
+fortune and man, in a moment to restore us to all the
+consciousness of misery. Absolute stillness inclines one to
+gloom. It offers an image of death: then the help of a
+cheerful imagination is necessary, and presents itself<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[ii.115]</a></span>
+naturally enough to those whom heaven has endowed with such
+a gift. The movement which does not come from without then
+stirs within us. The repose is less complete, it is true;
+but it is also more agreeable when light and gentle ideas,
+without agitating the depths of the soul, only softly skim
+the surface. This sort of musing we may taste whenever there
+is tranquillity about us, and I have thought that in the
+Bastile, and even in a dungeon where no object struck my
+sight, I could have dreamed away many a thrice pleasurable
+day.</p>
+
+<p>But it must be said that all this came better and more
+happily in a fruitful and lonely island, where nothing
+presented itself to me save smiling pictures, where nothing
+recalled saddening memories, where the fellowship of the few
+dwellers there was gentle and obliging, without being
+exciting enough to busy me incessantly, where, in short, I
+was free to surrender myself all day long to the promptings
+of my taste or to the most luxurious indolence.... As I came
+out from a long and most sweet musing fit, seeing myself
+surrounded by verdure and flowers and birds, and letting my
+eyes wander far over romantic shores that fringed a wide
+expanse of water bright as crystal, I fitted all these
+attractive objects into my dreams; and when at last I slowly
+recovered myself and recognised what was about me, I could
+not mark the point that cut off dream from reality, so
+equally did all things unite to endear to me the lonely
+retired life I led in this happy spot! Why can that life not
+come back to me again? Why can I not go finish my days in
+the beloved island, never to quit it, never again to see in
+it one dweller from the mainland, to bring back to me the
+memory of all the woes of every sort that they have
+delighted in heaping on my head for all these long years?...
+Freed from the earthly passions engendered by the tumult of
+social life, my soul would many a time lift itself above
+this atmosphere, and commune beforehand with the heavenly
+intelligences, into whose number it trusts to be ere long
+taken.&quot;</p></div><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[ii.116]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The exquisite dream, thus set to words of most soothing music, came
+soon to its end. The full and perfect sufficience of life was abruptly
+disturbed. The government of Berne gave him notice to quit the island
+and their territory within fifteen days. He represented to the
+authorities that he was infirm and ill, that he knew not whither to
+go, and that travelling in wintry weather would be dangerous to his
+life. He even made the most extraordinary request that any man in
+similar straits ever did make. &quot;In this extremity,&quot; he wrote to their
+representative, &quot;I only see one resource for me, and however frightful
+it may appear, I will adopt it, not only without repugnance, but with
+eagerness, if their excellencies will be good enough to give their
+consent. It is that it should please them for me to pass the rest of
+my days in prison in one of their castles, or such other place in
+their states as they may think fit to select. I will there live at my
+own expense, and I will give security never to put them to any cost. I
+submit to be without paper or pen, or any communication from without,
+except so far as may be absolutely necessary, and through the channel
+of those who shall have charge of me. Only let me have left, with the
+use of a few books, the liberty to walk occasionally in a garden, and
+I am content. Do not suppose that an expedient, so violent in
+appearance, is the fruit of despair. My mind is perfectly calm at this
+moment; I have taken time to think about it, and it is only after
+profound consideration that I<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[ii.117]</a></span> have brought myself to this decision.
+Mark, I pray you, that if this seems an extraordinary resolution, my
+situation is still more so. The distracted life that I have been made
+to lead for several years without intermission would be terrible for a
+man in full health; judge what it must be for a miserable invalid worn
+down with weariness and misfortune, and who has now no wish save only
+to die in a little peace.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_170_170" id="FNanchor_170_170"></a><a href="#Footnote_170_170" class="fnanchor">[170]</a></p>
+
+<p>That the request was made in all sincerity we may well believe. The
+difference between being in prison and being out of it was really not
+considerable to a man who had the previous winter been confined to his
+chamber for eight months without a break.<a name="FNanchor_171_171" id="FNanchor_171_171"></a><a href="#Footnote_171_171" class="fnanchor">[171]</a> In other respects the
+world was as cheerless as any prison could be. He was an exile from
+the only places he knew, and to him a land unknown was terrible. He
+had thought of Vienna, and the Prince of W&#252;rtemburg had sought the
+requisite permission for him, but the priests were too strong in the
+court of the house of Austria.<a name="FNanchor_172_172" id="FNanchor_172_172"></a><a href="#Footnote_172_172" class="fnanchor">[172]</a> Madame d'Houdetot offered him a
+resting-place in Normandy, and Saint Lambert in Lorraine.<a name="FNanchor_173_173" id="FNanchor_173_173"></a><a href="#Footnote_173_173" class="fnanchor">[173]</a> He
+thought of Potsdam. Rey, the printer, pressed him to go to Holland. He
+wondered if he should have strength to cross the Alps and make his way
+to Corsica. Eventually he made up his mind to go to Berlin, and he
+went as <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[ii.118]</a></span>far as Strasburg on his road thither.<a name="FNanchor_174_174" id="FNanchor_174_174"></a><a href="#Footnote_174_174" class="fnanchor">[174]</a> Here he began to
+fear the rude climate of the northern capital; he changed his plans,
+and resolved to accept the warm invitations that he had received to
+cross over to England. His friends used their interest to procure a
+passport for him,<a name="FNanchor_175_175" id="FNanchor_175_175"></a><a href="#Footnote_175_175" class="fnanchor">[175]</a> and the Prince of Conti offered him an
+apartment in the privileged quarter of the Temple, on his way through
+Paris. His own purpose seems to have been irresolute to the last, but
+his friends acted with such energy and bustle on his behalf that the
+English scheme was adopted, and he found himself in Paris (Dec. 17,
+1765), on his way to London, almost before he had deliberately
+realised what he was doing. It was a step that led him into many fatal
+vexations, as we shall presently see. Meanwhile we may pause to
+examine the two considerable books which had involved his life in all
+this confusion and perplexity.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_94_94" id="Footnote_94_94"></a><a href="#FNanchor_94_94"><span class="label">[94]</span></a> June, 1762-December, 1765.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_95_95" id="Footnote_95_95"></a><a href="#FNanchor_95_95"><span class="label">[95]</span></a> <i>Conf.</i>, xi. 175. It is generally printed in the volume
+of his works entitled <i>M&#233;langes</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_96_96" id="Footnote_96_96"></a><a href="#FNanchor_96_96"><span class="label">[96]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>, iii. 416.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_97_97" id="Footnote_97_97"></a><a href="#FNanchor_97_97"><span class="label">[97]</span></a> <i>Conf.</i>, xi. 172.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_98_98" id="Footnote_98_98"></a><a href="#FNanchor_98_98"><span class="label">[98]</span></a> For a remarkable anticipation of the ruin of France, see
+<i>Conf.</i>, xi. 136.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_99_99" id="Footnote_99_99"></a><a href="#FNanchor_99_99"><span class="label">[99]</span></a> M. Roguin. June 14, 1762.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_100_100" id="Footnote_100_100"></a><a href="#FNanchor_100_100"><span class="label">[100]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>, ii. 347.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_101_101" id="Footnote_101_101"></a><a href="#FNanchor_101_101"><span class="label">[101]</span></a> Streckeisen, i. 35.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_102_102" id="Footnote_102_102"></a><a href="#FNanchor_102_102"><span class="label">[102]</span></a> His friend Moultou wrote him the news, Streckeisen, i.
+43. Geneva was the only place at which the Social Contract was burnt.
+Here there were peculiar reasons, as we shall see.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_103_103" id="Footnote_103_103"></a><a href="#FNanchor_103_103"><span class="label">[103]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>, ii. 356.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_104_104" id="Footnote_104_104"></a><a href="#FNanchor_104_104"><span class="label">[104]</span></a> <i>Ib.</i>, ii. 358, 369, etc.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_105_105" id="Footnote_105_105"></a><a href="#FNanchor_105_105"><span class="label">[105]</span></a> The principality of Neuch&#226;tel had fallen by marriage
+(1504) to the French house of Orleans-Longueville, which with certain
+interruptions retained it until the extinction of the line by the
+death of Marie, Duchess of Nemours (1707). Fifteen claimants arose
+with fifteen varieties of far-off title, as well as a party for
+constituting Neuch&#226;tel a Republic and making it a fourteenth canton.
+(Saint Simon, v. 276.) The Estates adjudged the sovereignty to the
+Protestant house of Prussia (Nov. 3, 1707). Lewis XIV., as heir of the
+pretensions of the extinct line, protested. Finally, at the peace of
+Utrecht (1713), Lewis surrendered his claim in exchange for the
+cession by Prussia of the Principality of Orange, and Prussia held it
+until 1806. The disturbed history of the connection between Prussia
+and Neuch&#226;tel from 1814, when it became the twenty-first canton of the
+Swiss Confederation, down to 1857, does not here concern us.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_106_106" id="Footnote_106_106"></a><a href="#FNanchor_106_106"><span class="label">[106]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>, ii. 370.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_107_107" id="Footnote_107_107"></a><a href="#FNanchor_107_107"><span class="label">[107]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>, ii. 371. July 1762.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_108_108" id="Footnote_108_108"></a><a href="#FNanchor_108_108"><span class="label">[108]</span></a> D'Alembert, who knew Frederick better than any of the
+philosophers, to Voltaire, Nov. 22, 1765.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_109_109" id="Footnote_109_109"></a><a href="#FNanchor_109_109"><span class="label">[109]</span></a> Letter to Hume; Burton's <i>Life of Hume</i>, ii. 105,
+corroborating <i>Conf.</i>, xii. 196.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_110_110" id="Footnote_110_110"></a><a href="#FNanchor_110_110"><span class="label">[110]</span></a> Marischal to J.J.R.; Streckeisen, ii. 70.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_111_111" id="Footnote_111_111"></a><a href="#FNanchor_111_111"><span class="label">[111]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>, iii. 40. Nov. 1, 1762.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_112_112" id="Footnote_112_112"></a><a href="#FNanchor_112_112"><span class="label">[112]</span></a> Burton's <i>Life</i>, ii. 113.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_113_113" id="Footnote_113_113"></a><a href="#FNanchor_113_113"><span class="label">[113]</span></a> Voltaire's <i>Corr.</i> (1758). <i>Oeuv.</i>, lxxv. pp. 31 and
+80.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_114_114" id="Footnote_114_114"></a><a href="#FNanchor_114_114"><span class="label">[114]</span></a> <i>Conf.</i>, xii. 237.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_115_115" id="Footnote_115_115"></a><a href="#FNanchor_115_115"><span class="label">[115]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>, iii. 41. Nov. 11, 1762.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_116_116" id="Footnote_116_116"></a><a href="#FNanchor_116_116"><span class="label">[116]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>, iii. 38. Oct. 30, 1762.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_117_117" id="Footnote_117_117"></a><a href="#FNanchor_117_117"><span class="label">[117]</span></a> <i>Ib.</i>, iii. 110-115. Jan. 28, 1763.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_118_118" id="Footnote_118_118"></a><a href="#FNanchor_118_118"><span class="label">[118]</span></a> Bernardin de St. Pierre, xii. 103, 59, etc.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_119_119" id="Footnote_119_119"></a><a href="#FNanchor_119_119"><span class="label">[119]</span></a> George Keith (1685-1778) was elder brother of
+Frederick's famous field-marshal, James Keith. They had taken part in
+the Jacobite rising of 1715, and fled abroad on its failure. James
+Keith brought his brother into the service of the King of Prussia, who
+sent him as ambassador to Paris (1751), afterwards made him Governor
+of Neuch&#226;tel (1754), and eventually prevailed on the English
+Government to reinstate him in the rights which he had forfeited by
+his share in the rebellion (1763).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_120_120" id="Footnote_120_120"></a><a href="#FNanchor_120_120"><span class="label">[120]</span></a> Streckeisen, ii. 98, etc.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_121_121" id="Footnote_121_121"></a><a href="#FNanchor_121_121"><span class="label">[121]</span></a> One of Rousseau's chief distresses hitherto arose from
+the indigence in which Theresa would be placed in case of his death.
+Rey, the bookseller, gave her an annuity of about &#163;16 a year, and Lord
+Marischal's gift seems to have been 300 louis, the only money that
+Rousseau was ever induced to accept from any one in his life. See
+Streckeisen, ii. 99; <i>Corr.</i>, iii. 336. The most delicate and sincere
+of the many offers to provide for Theresa was made by Madame de
+Verdelin (Streckeisen, ii. 506). The language in which Madame de
+Verdelin speaks of Theresa in all her letters is the best testimony to
+character that this much-abused creature has to produce.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_122_122" id="Footnote_122_122"></a><a href="#FNanchor_122_122"><span class="label">[122]</span></a> <i>Ib.</i>, 90, 92, etc. Summer of 1763.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_123_123" id="Footnote_123_123"></a><a href="#FNanchor_123_123"><span class="label">[123]</span></a> Burton's <i>Life of Hume</i>, ii. 105. Oct. 2, 1762.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_124_124" id="Footnote_124_124"></a><a href="#FNanchor_124_124"><span class="label">[124]</span></a> The Confessions are not our only authority for this.
+See Streckeisen, ii. 64; also D'Alembert to Voltaire, Sept. 8, 1762.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_125_125" id="Footnote_125_125"></a><a href="#FNanchor_125_125"><span class="label">[125]</span></a> Voltaire's <i>Corr.</i> <i>Oeuv.</i>, lxvii. 458, 459, 485, etc.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_126_126" id="Footnote_126_126"></a><a href="#FNanchor_126_126"><span class="label">[126]</span></a> To D'Alembert, Sept. 15, 1762.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_127_127" id="Footnote_127_127"></a><a href="#FNanchor_127_127"><span class="label">[127]</span></a> Moultou to Rousseau, Streckeisen, i. 85, 87.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_128_128" id="Footnote_128_128"></a><a href="#FNanchor_128_128"><span class="label">[128]</span></a> Moultou to Rousseau, Streckeisen, i. 85, 87.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_129_129" id="Footnote_129_129"></a><a href="#FNanchor_129_129"><span class="label">[129]</span></a> Streckeisen, i. 50.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_130_130" id="Footnote_130_130"></a><a href="#FNanchor_130_130"><span class="label">[130]</span></a> <i>Ib.</i>, i. 76.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_131_131" id="Footnote_131_131"></a><a href="#FNanchor_131_131"><span class="label">[131]</span></a> <i>Lettre &#224; Christophe de Beaumont</i>, pp. 163-166.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_132_132" id="Footnote_132_132"></a><a href="#FNanchor_132_132"><span class="label">[132]</span></a> <i>Lettre &#224; Christophe de Beaumont</i>, pp. 130-135.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_133_133" id="Footnote_133_133"></a><a href="#FNanchor_133_133"><span class="label">[133]</span></a> <i>Lettre &#224; Christophe de Beaumont</i>, p. 93.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_134_134" id="Footnote_134_134"></a><a href="#FNanchor_134_134"><span class="label">[134]</span></a> Carlyle's <i>Frederick</i>, Bk. xxi. ch. iv. Rousseau,
+<i>Corr.</i>, iii. 102.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_135_135" id="Footnote_135_135"></a><a href="#FNanchor_135_135"><span class="label">[135]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>, iii. 57. Nov. 1762. To M. Montmollin.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_136_136" id="Footnote_136_136"></a><a href="#FNanchor_136_136"><span class="label">[136]</span></a> <i>Conf.</i>, xii. 206.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_137_137" id="Footnote_137_137"></a><a href="#FNanchor_137_137"><span class="label">[137]</span></a> <i>Conf.</i>, xii. 198.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_138_138" id="Footnote_138_138"></a><a href="#FNanchor_138_138"><span class="label">[138]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>, iii. 295. Dec. 25, 1763.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_139_139" id="Footnote_139_139"></a><a href="#FNanchor_139_139"><span class="label">[139]</span></a> Quoted in Musset-Pathay, ii. 500.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_140_140" id="Footnote_140_140"></a><a href="#FNanchor_140_140"><span class="label">[140]</span></a> For instance, <i>Corr.</i>, iii. 249.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_141_141" id="Footnote_141_141"></a><a href="#FNanchor_141_141"><span class="label">[141]</span></a> <i>Ib.</i>, iii. 364, 381.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_142_142" id="Footnote_142_142"></a><a href="#FNanchor_142_142"><span class="label">[142]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>, iii. 181-186, etc.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_143_143" id="Footnote_143_143"></a><a href="#FNanchor_143_143"><span class="label">[143]</span></a> Prince Lewis Eugene, son of Charles Alexander (reigning
+duke from 1733 to 1737); a younger brother of Charles Eugene, known as
+Schiller's Duke of W&#252;rtemberg, who reigned up to 1793. Frederick
+Eugene, known in the Seven Years' War, was another brother. Rousseau's
+correspondent became reigning duke in 1793, but only lived a year and
+a half afterwards.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_144_144" id="Footnote_144_144"></a><a href="#FNanchor_144_144"><span class="label">[144]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>, iii. 250. Sept. 29, 1763.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_145_145" id="Footnote_145_145"></a><a href="#FNanchor_145_145"><span class="label">[145]</span></a> The prince's letters are given in the Streckeisen
+collection, vol. ii.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_146_146" id="Footnote_146_146"></a><a href="#FNanchor_146_146"><span class="label">[146]</span></a> Streckeisen, ii. 202.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_147_147" id="Footnote_147_147"></a><a href="#FNanchor_147_147"><span class="label">[147]</span></a> Possibly Wilkes also; <i>Corr.</i>, iv. 200.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_148_148" id="Footnote_148_148"></a><a href="#FNanchor_148_148"><span class="label">[148]</span></a> Streckeisen, i. 89. June 1, 1763.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_149_149" id="Footnote_149_149"></a><a href="#FNanchor_149_149"><span class="label">[149]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>, iii. 202. June 4, 1763.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_150_150" id="Footnote_150_150"></a><a href="#FNanchor_150_150"><span class="label">[150]</span></a> <i>Memoirs of my Life</i>, p. 55, <i>n.</i> (Ed. 1862). Necker
+(1732-1804), whom Mdlle. Curchod ultimately married, was an eager
+admirer of Rousseau. &quot;Ah, how close the tender, humane, and virtuous
+soul of Julie,&quot; he wrote to her author, &quot;has brought me to you. How
+the reading of those letters gratified me! how many good emotions did
+they stir or fortify! How many sublimities in a thousand places in
+these six volumes; not the sublimity that perches itself in the
+clouds, but that which pushes everyday virtues to their highest
+point,&quot; and so on. Feb. 16, 1761. Streckeisen, i. 333.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_151_151" id="Footnote_151_151"></a><a href="#FNanchor_151_151"><span class="label">[151]</span></a> Boswell's name only occurs twice in Rousseau's letters,
+I believe; once (<i>Corr.</i>, iv. 394) as the writer of a letter which
+Hume was suspected of tampering with, and previously (iv. 70) as the
+bearer of a letter. See also Streckeisen, i. 262.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_152_152" id="Footnote_152_152"></a><a href="#FNanchor_152_152"><span class="label">[152]</span></a> Streckeisen, ii. 111. Jan. 18, 1765.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_153_153" id="Footnote_153_153"></a><a href="#FNanchor_153_153"><span class="label">[153]</span></a> Bk. ii. ch. x.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_154_154" id="Footnote_154_154"></a><a href="#FNanchor_154_154"><span class="label">[154]</span></a> Boswell's <i>Account of Corsica</i>, p. 367.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_155_155" id="Footnote_155_155"></a><a href="#FNanchor_155_155"><span class="label">[155]</span></a> The correspondence between Rousseau and Buttafuoco has
+been published in the <i>Oeuvres et Corr. In&#233;dites de J.J.R.</i>, 1861. See
+pp. 35, 43, etc.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_156_156" id="Footnote_156_156"></a><a href="#FNanchor_156_156"><span class="label">[156]</span></a> Boswell's <i>Life</i>, 179, 193, etc. (Ed. 1866).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_157_157" id="Footnote_157_157"></a><a href="#FNanchor_157_157"><span class="label">[157]</span></a> <i>&quot;Je suis tout homme de pouvoir vous regarder avec
+piti&#233;!&quot;</i> Letter dated Jan. 4, 1766, and given by Musset-Pathay as from
+a Scotch lord, unnamed. Boswell had the honour of conducting Theresa
+to England, after Hume had taken Rousseau over. &quot;This young
+gentleman,&quot; writes Hume, &quot;very good-humoured, very agreeable, and very
+mad&#8212;has such a rage for literature that I dread some circumstance
+fatal to our friend's honour. You remember the story of Terentia, who
+was first married to Cicero, then to Sallust, and at last in her old
+age married a young nobleman, who imagined that she must possess some
+secret which would convey to him eloquence and genius.&quot; Burton's
+<i>Life</i>, ii. 307, 308. Boswell mentions that he met Rousseau in England
+(<i>Account of Corsica</i>, p. 340), and also gives Rousseau's letter
+introducing him to Paoli (p. 266).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_158_158" id="Footnote_158_158"></a><a href="#FNanchor_158_158"><span class="label">[158]</span></a> To Buttafuoco, p. 48, etc.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_159_159" id="Footnote_159_159"></a><a href="#FNanchor_159_159"><span class="label">[159]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>, vi. 176. Feb. 26, 1770.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_160_160" id="Footnote_160_160"></a><a href="#FNanchor_160_160"><span class="label">[160]</span></a> It may be worth noticing, as a link between historic
+personages, that Napoleon Bonaparte's first piece was a <i>Lettre &#224;
+Matteo Buttafuoco</i> (1791), the same Buttafuoco with whom Rousseau
+corresponded, who had been Choiseul's agent in the union of the island
+to France, was afterwards sent as deputy to the Constituent, and
+finally became the bitterest enemy of Paoli and the patriotic party.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_161_161" id="Footnote_161_161"></a><a href="#FNanchor_161_161"><span class="label">[161]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>, iii. 190. To the First Syndic, May 12, 1763.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_162_162" id="Footnote_162_162"></a><a href="#FNanchor_162_162"><span class="label">[162]</span></a> Grimm's <i>Corr. Lit.</i>, iv. 235. For Rousseau's opinion
+of his book's companion at the stake, see <i>Corr.</i>, iii. 442.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_163_163" id="Footnote_163_163"></a><a href="#FNanchor_163_163"><span class="label">[163]</span></a> Streckeisen, ii. 526.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_164_164" id="Footnote_164_164"></a><a href="#FNanchor_164_164"><span class="label">[164]</span></a> There appears to be no doubt that Rousseau was wrong in
+attributing to Vernes the <i>Sentimens des Citoyens</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_165_165" id="Footnote_165_165"></a><a href="#FNanchor_165_165"><span class="label">[165]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>, iv. 116, 122 (April 1765), 165-196 (August);
+also <i>Conf.</i>, xii. 245.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_166_166" id="Footnote_166_166"></a><a href="#FNanchor_166_166"><span class="label">[166]</span></a> Note to M. Auguis's edition, <i>Corr.</i>, v. 395.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_167_167" id="Footnote_167_167"></a><a href="#FNanchor_167_167"><span class="label">[167]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>, iv. 204.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_168_168" id="Footnote_168_168"></a><a href="#FNanchor_168_168"><span class="label">[168]</span></a> <i>Conf.</i>, xii. 259. This lapidation has sometimes been
+doubted, and treated as an invention of Rousseau's morbid suspicion.
+The official documents prove that his account was substantially true
+(see Musset-Pathay, ii. 559.)</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_169_169" id="Footnote_169_169"></a><a href="#FNanchor_169_169"><span class="label">[169]</span></a> The fifth of the <i>R&#234;veries</i>. See also <i>Conf.</i>, 262-279,
+and <i>Corr.</i>, iv. 206-224. His stay in the island was from the second
+week in September down to the last in October, 1765.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_170_170" id="Footnote_170_170"></a><a href="#FNanchor_170_170"><span class="label">[170]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>, iv. 221. Oct. 20, 1765.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_171_171" id="Footnote_171_171"></a><a href="#FNanchor_171_171"><span class="label">[171]</span></a> <i>Ib.</i>, iv. 136, etc. April 27, 1765.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_172_172" id="Footnote_172_172"></a><a href="#FNanchor_172_172"><span class="label">[172]</span></a> Streckeisen-Moultou, ii. 209, 212.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_173_173" id="Footnote_173_173"></a><a href="#FNanchor_173_173"><span class="label">[173]</span></a> <i>Ib.</i>, ii. 554.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_174_174" id="Footnote_174_174"></a><a href="#FNanchor_174_174"><span class="label">[174]</span></a> He arrived at Strasburg on the 2d or 3d of November,
+left it about the end of the first week in December, and arrived in
+Paris on the 16th of December 1765. A sort of apocryphal tradition is
+said to linger in the island about Rousseau's last evening on the
+island, how after supper he called for a lute, and sang some passably
+bad verses. See M. Bougy's <i>J.J. Rousseau</i>, p. 179 (Paris: 1853.)</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_175_175" id="Footnote_175_175"></a><a href="#FNanchor_175_175"><span class="label">[175]</span></a> Madame de Verdelin to J.J.R. Streckeisen, ii. 532. The
+minister even expressed his especial delight at being able to serve
+Rousseau, so little seriousness was there now in the formalities of
+absolution. <i>Ib.</i> 547.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[ii.119]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_III" id="CHAPTER_III"></a>CHAPTER III.</h2>
+
+<h3>THE SOCIAL CONTRACT.</h3>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The</span> dominant belief of the best minds of the latter half of
+the eighteenth century was a passionate faith in the illimitable
+possibilities of human progress. Nothing short of a general overthrow
+of the planet could in their eyes stay the ever upward movement of
+human perfectibility. They differed as to the details of the
+philosophy of government which they deduced from this philosophy of
+society, but the conviction that a golden era of tolerance,
+enlightenment, and material prosperity was close at hand, belonged to
+them all. Rousseau set his face the other way. For him the golden era
+had passed away from our globe many centuries ago. Simplicity had fled
+from the earth. Wisdom and heroism had vanished from out of the minds
+of leaders. The spirit of citizenship had gone from those who should
+have upheld the social union in brotherly accord. The dream of human
+perfectibility which nerved men like Condorcet, was to Rousseau a sour
+and fantastic mockery. The utmost that men could do was to turn their
+eyes to the past, to obliterate the interval, to try to walk<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[ii.120]</a></span> for a
+space in the track of the ancient societies. They would hardly
+succeed, but endeavour might at least do something to stay the plague
+of universal degeneracy. Hence the fatality of his system. It placed
+the centre of social activity elsewhere than in careful and rational
+examination of social conditions, and in careful and rational effort
+to modify them. As we began by saying, it substituted a retrograde
+aspiration for direction, and emotion for the discovery of law. We can
+hardly wonder, when we think of the intense exaltation of spirit
+produced both by the perfectibilitarians and the followers of
+Rousseau, and at the same time of the political degradation and
+material disorder of France, that so violent a contrast between the
+ideal and the actual led to a great volcanic outbreak. Alas, the
+crucial difficulty of political change is to summon new force without
+destroying the sound parts of a structure which it has taken so many
+generations to erect. The Social Contract is the formal denial of the
+possibility of successfully overcoming the difficulty.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Although man deprives himself in the civil state of many advantages
+which he holds from nature, yet he acquires in return others so great,
+his faculties exercise and develop themselves, his ideas extend, his
+sentiments are ennobled, his whole soul is raised to such a degree,
+that if the abuses of this new condition did not so often degrade him
+below that from which he has emerged, he would be bound to bless
+without ceasing the happy moment which rescued<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[ii.121]</a></span> him from it for ever,
+and out of a stupid and blind animal made an intelligent being and a
+man.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_176_176" id="FNanchor_176_176"></a><a href="#Footnote_176_176" class="fnanchor">[176]</a> The little parenthesis as to the frequent degradation
+produced by the abuses of the social condition, does not prevent us
+from recognising in the whole passage a tolerably complete surrender
+of the main position which was taken up in the two Discourses. The
+short treatise on the Social Contract is an inquiry into the just
+foundations and most proper form of that very political society, which
+the Discourses showed to have its foundation in injustice, and to be
+incapable of receiving any form proper for the attainment of the full
+measure of human happiness.</p>
+
+<p>Inequality in the same way is no longer denounced, but accepted and
+defined. Locke's influence has begun to tell. The two principal
+objects of every system of legislation are declared to be liberty and
+equality. By equality we are warned not to understand that the degrees
+of power and wealth should be absolutely the same, but that in respect
+of power, such power should be out of reach of any violence, and be
+invariably exercised in virtue of the laws; and in respect of riches,
+that no citizen should be wealthy enough to buy another, and none poor
+enough to sell himself. Do you say this equality is a mere chimera? It
+is precisely because the force of things is constantly tending to
+destroy equality, that the force of legislation ought as constantly to
+be directed towards up<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[ii.122]</a></span>holding it.<a name="FNanchor_177_177" id="FNanchor_177_177"></a><a href="#Footnote_177_177" class="fnanchor">[177]</a> This is much clearer than the
+indefinite way of speaking which we have already noticed in the second
+Discourse. It means neither more nor less than that equality before
+the law which is one of the elementary marks of a perfectly free
+community.</p>
+
+<p>The idea of the law being constantly directed to counteract the
+tendencies to violent inequalities in material possessions among
+different members of a society, is too vague to be criticised. Does it
+cover and warrant so sweeping a measure as the old <i>seisachtheia</i> of
+Solon, voiding all contracts in which the debtor had pledged his land
+or his person; or such measures as the agrarian laws of Licinius and
+the Gracchi? Or is it to go no further than to condemn such a law as
+that which in England gives unwilled lands to the eldest son? We can
+only criticise accurately a general idea of this sort in connection
+with specific projects in which it is applied. As it stands, it is no
+more than the expression of what the author thinks a wise principle of
+public policy. It assumes the existence of property just as completely
+as the theory of the most rigorous capitalist could do; it gives no
+encouragement, as the Discourse did, to the notion of an equality in
+being without property. There is no element of communism in a
+principle so stated, but it suggests a social idea, based on the moral
+claim of men to have equality of opportunity. This ideal stamped
+itself on the minds <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[ii.123]</a></span>of Robespierre and the other revolutionary
+leaders, and led to practical results in the sale of the Church and
+other lands in small lots, so as to give the peasant a market to buy
+in. The effect of the economic change thus introduced happened to work
+in the direction in which Rousseau pointed, for it is now known that
+the most remarkable and most permanent of the consequences of the
+revolution in the ownership of land was the erection, between the two
+extreme classes of proprietors, of an immense body of middle-class
+freeholders. This state is not equality, but gradation, and there is
+undoubtedly an immense difference between the two. Still its origin is
+an illustration on the largest scale in history of the force of
+legislation being exerted to counteract an irregularity that had
+become unbearable.<a name="FNanchor_178_178" id="FNanchor_178_178"></a><a href="#Footnote_178_178" class="fnanchor">[178]</a></p>
+
+<p>Notwithstanding the disappearance of the more <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[ii.124]</a></span>extravagant elements of
+the old thesis, the new speculation was far from being purged of the
+fundamental errors that had given such popularity to its predecessors.
+&quot;If the sea,&quot; he says in one place, &quot;bathes nothing but inaccessible
+rocks on your coasts, remain barbarous ichthyophagi; you will live all
+the more tranquilly for it, better perhaps, and assuredly more
+happily.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_179_179" id="FNanchor_179_179"></a><a href="#Footnote_179_179" class="fnanchor">[179]</a> Apart from an outburst like this, the central idea
+remained the same, though it was approached from another side and with
+different objects. The picture of a state of nature had lost none of
+its perilous attraction, though it was hung in a slightly changed
+light. It remained the starting-point of the right and normal
+constitution of civil society, just as it had been the starting-point
+of the denunciation of civil society as incapable of right
+constitution, and as necessarily and for ever abnormal. Equally with
+the Discourses, the Social Contract is a repudiation of that historic
+method which traces the present along a line of ascertained
+circumstances, and seeks an improved future in an unbroken
+continuation of that line. The opening words, which sent such a thrill
+through the generation to which they were uttered in two continents,
+&quot;Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains,&quot; tell us at the
+outset that we are as far away as ever from the patient method of
+positive <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[ii.125]</a></span>observation, and as deeply buried as ever in deducing
+practical maxims from a set of conditions which never had any other
+than an abstract and phantasmatic existence. How is a man born free?
+If he is born into isolation, he perishes instantly. If he is born
+into a family, he is at the moment of his birth committed to a state
+of social relation, in however rudimentary a form; and the more or
+less of freedom which this state may ultimately permit to him, depends
+upon circumstances. Man was hardly born free among Romans and
+Athenians, when both law and public opinion left a father at perfect
+liberty to expose his new-born infant. And the more primitive the
+circumstances, the later the period at which he gains freedom. A child
+was not born free in the early days of the Roman state, when the
+<i>patria potestas</i> was a vigorous reality. Nor, to go yet further back,
+was he born free in the times of the Hebrew patriarchs, when Abraham
+had full right of sacrificing his son, and Jephthah of sacrificing his
+daughter.</p>
+
+<p>But to speak thus is to speak what we do know. Rousseau was not open
+to such testimony. &quot;My principles,&quot; he said in contempt of Grotius,
+&quot;are not founded on the authority of poets; they come from the nature
+of things and are based on reason.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_180_180" id="FNanchor_180_180"></a><a href="#Footnote_180_180" class="fnanchor">[180]</a> He does indeed in one place
+express his reverence for the Judaic law, and administers a just
+rebuke to the philosophic arrogance which saw only successful
+impostors in the old legislators.<a name="FNanchor_181_181" id="FNanchor_181_181"></a><a href="#Footnote_181_181" class="fnanchor">[181]</a> But he paid no <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[ii.126]</a></span>attention to
+the processes and usages of which this law was the organic expression,
+nor did he allow himself to learn from it the actual conditions of the
+social state which accepted it. It was Locke, whose essay on civil
+government haunts us throughout the Social Contract, who had taught
+him that men are born free, equal, and independent. Locke evaded the
+difficulty of the dependence of childhood by saying that when the son
+comes to the estate that made his father a free man, he becomes a free
+man too.<a name="FNanchor_182_182" id="FNanchor_182_182"></a><a href="#Footnote_182_182" class="fnanchor">[182]</a> What of the old Roman use permitting a father to sell
+his son three times? In the same metaphysical spirit Locke had laid
+down the absolute proposition that &quot;conjugal society is made by a
+voluntary compact between man and woman.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_183_183" id="FNanchor_183_183"></a><a href="#Footnote_183_183" class="fnanchor">[183]</a> This is true of a small
+number of western societies in our own day, but what of the primitive
+usages of communal marriages, marriages by capture, purchase, and the
+rest? We do not mean it as any discredit to writers upon government in
+the seventeenth century that they did not make good out of their own
+consciousness the necessary want of knowledge about primitive
+communities. But it is necessary to point out, first, that they did
+not realise all the knowledge within their reach, and next that, as a
+consequence of this, their propositions had a quality that vitiated
+all their speculative worth. Filmer's contention that man is not
+naturally free was truer than the position of Locke and Rousseau, and
+it was so because Filmer <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[ii.127]</a></span>consulted and appealed to the most authentic
+of the historic records then accessible.<a name="FNanchor_184_184" id="FNanchor_184_184"></a><a href="#Footnote_184_184" class="fnanchor">[184]</a></p>
+
+<p>It is the more singular that Rousseau should have thus deliberately
+put aside all but the most arbitrary and empirical historical lessons,
+and it shows the extraordinary force with which men may be mastered by
+abstract prepossessions, even when they have a partial knowledge of
+the antidote; because Rousseau in several places not only admits, but
+insists upon, the necessity of making institutions relative to the
+state of the community, in respect of size, soil, manners, occupation,
+morality, character. &quot;It is in view of such relations as these that we
+must assign to each people a particular system, which shall be the
+best, not perhaps in itself, but for the state for which it is
+destined.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_185_185" id="FNanchor_185_185"></a><a href="#Footnote_185_185" class="fnanchor">[185]</a> In another place he calls attention to manners,
+customs, above all to opinion, as the part of a social system on which
+the success of all the rest depends; particular rules being only the
+arching of <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[ii.128]</a></span>the vault, of which manners, though so much tardier in
+rising, form a key-stone that can never be disturbed.<a name="FNanchor_186_186" id="FNanchor_186_186"></a><a href="#Footnote_186_186" class="fnanchor">[186]</a> This was
+excellent so far as it went, but it was one of the many great truths,
+which men may hold in their minds without appreciating their full
+value. He did not see that these manners, customs, opinions, have old
+roots which must be sought in a historic past; that they are connected
+with the constitution of human nature, and that then in turn they
+prepare modifications of that constitution. His narrow, symmetrical,
+impatient humour unfitted him to deal with the complex tangle of the
+history of social growths. It was essential to his mental comfort that
+he should be able to see a picture of perfect order and logical system
+at both ends of his speculation. Hence, he invented, to begin with,
+his ideal state of nature, and an ideal mode of passing from that to
+the social state. He swept away in his imagination the whole series of
+actual incidents between present and past; and he constructed a system
+which might be imposed upon all societies indifferently by a
+legislator summoned for that purpose, to wipe out existing uses, laws,
+and institutions, and make afresh a clear and undisturbed beginning of
+national life. The force of habit was slowly and insensibly to be
+substituted for that of the legislator's authority, but the existence
+of such habits previously as forces to be dealt with, and the
+existence of certain limits of pliancy in the conditions of human
+nature and social possibility, are facts of which the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[ii.129]</a></span>author of the
+Social Contract takes not the least account.</p>
+
+<p>Rousseau knew hardly any history, and the few isolated pieces of old
+fact which he had picked up in his very slight reading were exactly
+the most unfortunate that a student in need of the historic method
+could possibly have fallen in with. The illustrations which are
+scantily dispersed in his pages,&#8212;and we must remark that they are no
+more than illustrations for conclusions arrived at quite independently
+of them, and not the historical proof and foundations of his
+conclusions,&#8212;are nearly all from the annals of the small states of
+ancient Greece, and from the earlier times of the Roman republic. We
+have already pointed out to what an extent his imagination was struck
+at the time of his first compositions by the tale of Lycurgus. The
+influence of the same notions is still paramount. The hopelessness of
+giving good laws to a corrupt people is supposed to be demonstrated by
+the case of Minos, whose legislation failed in Crete because the
+people for whom he made laws were sunk in vices; and by the further
+example of Plato, who refused to give laws to the Arcadians and
+Cyrenians, knowing that they were too rich and could never suffer
+equality.<a name="FNanchor_187_187" id="FNanchor_187_187"></a><a href="#Footnote_187_187" class="fnanchor">[187]</a> The writer is thinking of Plato's Laws, when he says
+that just as nature has fixed limits to the stature of a well-formed
+man, outside of which she produces giants and dwarfs, so with
+reference to the best constitution for a state, there <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[ii.130]</a></span>are bounds to
+its extent, so that it may be neither too large to be capable of good
+government, nor too small to be independent and self-sufficing. The
+further the social bond is extended, the more relaxed it becomes, and
+in general a small state is proportionally stronger than a large
+one.<a name="FNanchor_188_188" id="FNanchor_188_188"></a><a href="#Footnote_188_188" class="fnanchor">[188]</a> In the remarks with which he proceeds to corroborate this
+position, we can plainly see that he is privately contrasting an
+independent Greek community with the unwieldy oriental monarchy
+against which at one critical period Greece had to contend. He had
+never realised the possibility of such forms of polity as the Roman
+Empire, or the half-federal dominion of England which took such
+enormous dimensions in his time, or the great confederation of states
+which came to birth two years before he died. He was the servant of
+his own metaphor, as the Greek writers so often were. His argument
+that a state must be of a moderate size because the rightly shapen man
+is neither dwarf nor giant, is exactly on a par with Aristotle's
+argument to the same effect, on the ground that beauty demands size,
+and there must not be too great nor too small size, because a ship
+sails badly if it be either too heavy or too light.<a name="FNanchor_189_189" id="FNanchor_189_189"></a><a href="#Footnote_189_189" class="fnanchor">[189]</a> And when
+Rousseau supposes the state to have ten thousand inhabitants, and
+talks about the right size of its territory,<a name="FNanchor_190_190" id="FNanchor_190_190"></a><a href="#Footnote_190_190" class="fnanchor">[190]</a> who does not think
+of the five thousand and forty which the Athenian Stranger prescribed
+to Cleinias the Cretan as the exactly proper <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[ii.131]</a></span>number for the perfectly
+formed state?<a name="FNanchor_191_191" id="FNanchor_191_191"></a><a href="#Footnote_191_191" class="fnanchor">[191]</a> The prediction of the short career which awaits a
+state that is cursed with an extensive and accessible seaboard,
+corresponds precisely with the Athenian Stranger's satisfaction that
+the new city is to be eighty stadia from the coast.<a name="FNanchor_192_192" id="FNanchor_192_192"></a><a href="#Footnote_192_192" class="fnanchor">[192]</a> When Rousseau
+himself began to think about the organisation of Corsica, he praised
+the selection of Corte as the chief town of a patriotic
+administration, because it was far from the sea, and so its
+inhabitants would long preserve their simplicity and uprightness.<a name="FNanchor_193_193" id="FNanchor_193_193"></a><a href="#Footnote_193_193" class="fnanchor">[193]</a>
+And in later years still, when meditating upon a constitution for
+Poland, he propounded an economic system essentially Spartan; the
+people were enjoined to think little about foreigners, to give
+themselves little concern about commerce, to suppress stamped paper,
+and to put a tithe upon the land.<a name="FNanchor_194_194" id="FNanchor_194_194"></a><a href="#Footnote_194_194" class="fnanchor">[194]</a></p>
+
+<p>The chapter on the Legislator is in the same region. We are again
+referred to Lycurgus; and to the circumstance that Greek towns usually
+confided to a stranger the sacred task of drawing up their laws. His
+experience in Venice and the history of his native town supplemented
+the examples of Greece. Geneva summoned a stranger to legislate for
+her, and &quot;those who only look on Calvin as a theologian have a scanty
+idea of the extent of his genius; the preparation of our wise edicts,
+in which he had so large a <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[ii.132]</a></span>part, do him as much honour as his
+Institutes.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_195_195" id="FNanchor_195_195"></a><a href="#Footnote_195_195" class="fnanchor">[195]</a> Rousseau's vision was too narrow to let him see the
+growth of government and laws as a co-ordinate process, flowing from
+the growth of all the other parts and organs of society, and advancing
+in more or less equal step along with them. He could begin with
+nothing short of an absolute legislator, who should impose a system
+from without by a single act, a structure hit upon once for all by his
+individual wisdom, not slowly wrought out by many minds, with popular
+assent and co-operation, at the suggestion of changing social
+circumstances and need.<a name="FNanchor_196_196" id="FNanchor_196_196"></a><a href="#Footnote_196_196" class="fnanchor">[196]</a></p>
+
+<p>All this would be of very trifling importance in the history of
+political literature, but for the extraordinary influence which
+circumstances ultimately bestowed upon it. The Social Contract was the
+gospel of the Jacobins, and much of the action of the supreme party in
+France during the first months of the year 1794 is only fully
+intelligible when we look upon it as the result and practical
+application of Rousseau's teaching. The conception of the situation
+entertained by Robespierre and Saint Just was entirely moulded on all
+this talk about the legislators of Greece and Geneva. &quot;The transition
+of an oppressed nation to democracy is like the effort by which nature
+rose from nothingness to existence. You must entirely refashion a
+people whom you wish <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[ii.133]</a></span>to make free&#8212;destroy its prejudices, alter its
+habits, limit its necessities, root up its vices, purify its desires.
+The state therefore must lay hold on every human being at his birth,
+and direct his education with powerful hand. Solon's weak confidence
+threw Athens into fresh slavery, while Lycurgus's severity founded the
+republic of Sparta on an immovable basis.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_197_197" id="FNanchor_197_197"></a><a href="#Footnote_197_197" class="fnanchor">[197]</a> These words, which
+come from a decree of the Committee of Public Safety, might well be
+taken for an excerpt from the Social Contract. The fragments of the
+institutions by which Saint Just intended to regenerate his country,
+reveal a man with the example of Lycurgus before his eyes in every
+line he wrote.<a name="FNanchor_198_198" id="FNanchor_198_198"></a><a href="#Footnote_198_198" class="fnanchor">[198]</a> When on the eve of the Thermidorian revolution
+which over<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[ii.134]</a></span>threw him and his party, he insisted on the necessity of a
+dictatorship, he was only thinking of the means by which he should at
+length obtain the necessary power for forcing his regenerating
+projects on the country; for he knew that Robespierre, whom he named
+as the man for the dictatorship, accepted his projects, and would lend
+the full force of the temporal arm to the propagation of ideas which
+they had acquired together from Jean Jacques, and from the Greeks to
+whom Jean Jacques had sent them for example and instruction.<a name="FNanchor_199_199" id="FNanchor_199_199"></a><a href="#Footnote_199_199" class="fnanchor">[199]</a> No
+doubt the condition of France after 1792 must naturally have struck
+any one too deeply imbued with the spirit of the Social Contract to
+look beneath the surface of the society with which the Convention had
+to deal, as urgently inviting a lawgiver of the ancient stamp. The old
+order in church and state had been swept away, no organs for the
+performance of the functions of national life were visible, the moral
+ideas which had bound the social elements together in the extinct
+monarchy seemed to be permanently sapped. A politician who had for
+years been dreaming about Minos and Lycurgus and Calvin, especially if
+he lived in a state with such a tradition of centralisation as ruled
+in France, was sure to suppose that here was the scene and the moment
+for a splendid repetition on an immense scale of those immortal
+achievements. The futility of the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[ii.135]</a></span>attempt was the practical and ever
+memorable illustration of the defect of Rousseau's geometrical method.
+It was one thing to make laws for the handful of people who lived in
+Geneva in the sixteenth century, united in religious faith, and
+accepting the same form and conception of the common good. It was a
+very different thing to try to play Calvin over some twenty-five
+millions of a heterogeneously composed nation, abounding in variations
+of temperament, faith, laws, and habits and weltering in unfathomable
+distractions. The French did indeed at length invite a heaven-sent
+stranger from Corsica to make laws for them, but not until he had set
+his foot upon their neck; and even Napoleon Bonaparte, who had begun
+life like the rest of his generation by writing Rousseauite essays,
+made a swift return to the historic method in the equivocal shape of
+the Concordat.</p>
+
+<p>Not only were Rousseau's schemes of polity conceived from the point of
+view of a small territory with a limited population. &quot;You must not,&quot;
+he says in one place, &quot;make the abuses of great states an objection to
+a writer who would fain have none but small ones.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_200_200" id="FNanchor_200_200"></a><a href="#Footnote_200_200" class="fnanchor">[200]</a> Again, when he
+said that in a truly free state the citizens performed all their
+services to the community with their arms and none by money, and that
+he looked upon the corv&#233;e (or compulsory labour on the public roads)
+as less hostile to freedom than taxes,<a name="FNanchor_201_201" id="FNanchor_201_201"></a><a href="#Footnote_201_201" class="fnanchor">[201]</a> he showed that he was
+thinking of a state <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[ii.136]</a></span>not greatly passing the dimensions of a parish.
+This was not the only defect of his schemes. They assumed a sort of
+state of nature in the minds of the people with whom the lawgiver had
+to deal. Saint Just made the same assumption afterwards, and trusted
+to his military school to erect on these bare plots whatever
+superstructure he might think fit to appoint. A society that had for
+so many centuries been organised and moulded by a powerful and
+energetic church, armed with a definite doctrine, fixing the same
+moral tendencies in a long series of successive generations, was not
+in the naked mental state which the Jacobins postulated. It was not
+prepared to accept free divorce, the substitution of friendship for
+marriage, the displacement of the family by the military school, and
+the other articles in Saint Just's programme of social renovation. The
+twelve apostles went among people who were morally swept and
+garnished, and they went armed with instruments proper to seize the
+imagination of their hearers. All moral reformers seek the ignorant
+and simple, poor fishermen in one scene, labourers and women in
+another, for the good reason that new ideas only make way on ground
+that is not already too heavily encumbered with prejudices. But France
+in 1793 was in no condition of this kind. Opinion in all its spheres
+was deepened by an old and powerful organisation, to a degree which
+made any<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[ii.137]</a></span> attempt to abolish the opinion, as the organisation appeared
+to have been abolished, quite hopeless until the lapse of three or
+four hundred years had allowed due time for dissolution. After all it
+was not until the fourth century of our era that the work of even the
+twelve apostles began to tell decisively and quickly. As for the
+Lycurgus of whom the French chattered, if such a personality ever
+existed out of the region of myth, he came to his people armed with an
+oracle from the gods, just as Moses did, and was himself regarded as
+having a nature touched with divinity. No such pretensions could well
+be made by any French legislator within a dozen years or so of the
+death of Voltaire.</p>
+
+<p>Let us here remark that it was exactly what strikes us as the
+desperate absurdity of the assumptions of the Social Contract, which
+constituted the power of that work, when it accidentally fell into the
+hands of men who surveyed a national system wrecked in all its parts.
+The Social Contract is worked out precisely in that fashion which, if
+it touches men at all, makes them into fanatics. Long trains of
+reasoning, careful allegation of proofs, patient admission on every
+hand of qualifying propositions and multitudinous limitations, are
+essential to science, and produce treatises that guide the wise
+statesman in normal times. But it is dogma that gives fervour to a
+sect. There are always large classes of minds to whom anything in the
+shape of a vigorously compact system is irresistibly fascinating, and
+to whom the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[ii.138]</a></span> qualification of a proposition, or the limitation of a
+theoretic principle is distressing or intolerable. Such persons always
+come to the front for a season in times of distraction, when the party
+that knows its own aims most definitely is sure to have the best
+chance of obtaining power. And Rousseau's method charmed their
+temperament. A man who handles sets of complex facts is necessarily
+slow-footed, but one who has only words to deal with, may advance with
+a speed, a precision, a consistency, a conclusiveness, that has a
+magical potency over men who insist on having politics and theology
+drawn out in exact theorems like those of Euclid.</p>
+
+<p>Rousseau traces his conclusions from words, and develops his system
+from the interior germs of phrases. Like the typical schoolman, he
+assumes that analysis of terms is the right way of acquiring new
+knowledge about things; he mistakes the multiplication of propositions
+for the discovery of fresh truth. Many pages of the Social Contract
+are mere logical deductions from verbal definitions: the slightest
+attempt to confront them with actual fact would have shown them to be
+not only valueless, but wholly meaningless, in connection with real
+human nature and the visible working of human affairs. He looks into
+the word, or into his own verbal notion, and tells us what is to be
+found in that, whereas we need to be told the marks and qualities that
+distinguish the object which the word is meant to recall. Hence arises
+his habit of setting himself questions, with<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[ii.139]</a></span> reference to which we
+cannot say that the answers are not true, but only that the questions
+themselves were never worth asking. Here is an instance of his method
+of supposing that to draw something from a verbal notion is to find
+out something corresponding to fact. &quot;We can distinguish in the
+magistrate three essentially different wills: 1st, the will peculiar
+to him as an individual, which only tends to his own particular
+advantage; 2nd, the common will of the magistrates, which refers only
+to the advantage of the prince [<i>i.e.</i> the government], and this we
+may name corporate will, which is general in relation to the
+government, and particular in relation to the state of which the
+government is a part; 3rd, the will of the people or sovereign will,
+which is general, as well in relation to the state considered as a
+whole, as in relation to the government considered as part of the
+whole.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_202_202" id="FNanchor_202_202"></a><a href="#Footnote_202_202" class="fnanchor">[202]</a> It might be hard to prove that all this is not true, but
+then it is unreal and comes to nothing, as we see if we take the
+trouble to turn it into real matter. Thus a member of the British
+House of Commons, who is a magistrate in Rousseau's sense, has three
+essentially different wills: first, as a man, Mr. So-and-so; second,
+his corporate will, as member of the chamber, and this will is general
+in relation to the legislature, but particular in relation to the
+whole body of electors and peers; third, his will as a member of the
+great electoral body, which is a general will alike in relation to the
+electoral <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[ii.140]</a></span>body and to the legislature. An English publicist is
+perfectly welcome to make assertions of this kind, if he chooses to do
+so, and nobody will take the trouble to deny them. But they are
+nonsense. They do not correspond to the real composition of a member
+of parliament, nor do they shed the smallest light upon any part
+either of the theory of government in general, or the working of our
+own government in particular. Almost the same kind of observation
+might be made of the famous dogmatic statements about sovereignty.
+&quot;Sovereignty, being only the exercise of the general will, can never
+be alienated, and the sovereign, who is only a collective being, can
+only be represented by himself: the power may be transmitted, but not
+the will;&quot;<a name="FNanchor_203_203" id="FNanchor_203_203"></a><a href="#Footnote_203_203" class="fnanchor">[203]</a> sovereignty is indivisible, not only in principle, but
+in object;<a name="FNanchor_204_204" id="FNanchor_204_204"></a><a href="#Footnote_204_204" class="fnanchor">[204]</a> and so forth. We shall have to consider these remarks
+from another point of view. At present we refer to them as
+illustrating the character of the book, as consisting of a number of
+expansions of definitions, analysed as words, not compared with the
+facts of which the words are representatives. This way of treating
+political theory enabled the writer to assume an air of certitude and
+precision, which led narrow deductive minds completely captive. Burke
+poured merited scorn on the application of geometry to politics and
+algebraic formulas to government, but then it was just this seeming
+demonstration, this measured accuracy, that filled Rousseau's
+disciples with a supreme and undoubting con<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[ii.141]</a></span>fidence which leaves the
+modern student of these schemes in amazement unspeakable. The thinness
+of Robespierre's ideas on government ceases to astonish us, when we
+remember that he had not trained himself to look upon it as the art of
+dealing with huge groups of conflicting interests, of hostile
+passions, of hardly reconcilable aims, of vehemently opposed forces.
+He had disciplined his political intelligence on such meagre and
+unsubstantial argumentation as the following:&#8212;&quot;Let us suppose the
+state composed of ten thousand citizens. The sovereign can only be
+considered collectively and as a body; but each person, in his quality
+as subject, is considered as an individual unit; thus the sovereign is
+to the subject as ten thousand is to one; in other words, each member
+of the state has for his share only the ten-thousandth part of the
+sovereign authority, though he is submitted to it in all his own
+entirety. If the people be composed of a hundred thousand men, the
+condition of the subjects does not change, and each of them bears
+equally the whole empire of the laws, while his suffrage, reduced to a
+hundred-thousandth, has ten times less influence in drawing them up.
+Then, the subject remaining still only one, the relation of the
+sovereign augments in the ratio of the number of the citizens. Whence
+it follows that, the larger the state becomes, the more does liberty
+diminish.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_205_205" id="FNanchor_205_205"></a><a href="#Footnote_205_205" class="fnanchor">[205]</a></p>
+
+<p>Apart from these arithmetical conceptions, and the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[ii.142]</a></span>deep charm which
+their assurance of expression had for the narrow and fervid minds of
+which England and Germany seem to have got finally rid in Anabaptists
+and Fifth Monarchy men, but which still haunted France, there were
+maxims in the Social Contract of remarkable convenience for the
+members of a Committee of Public Safety. &quot;How can a blind multitude,&quot;
+the writer asks in one place, &quot;which so often does not know its own
+will, because it seldom knows what is good for it, execute of itself
+an undertaking so vast and so difficult as a system of
+legislation?&quot;<a name="FNanchor_206_206" id="FNanchor_206_206"></a><a href="#Footnote_206_206" class="fnanchor">[206]</a> Again, &quot;as nature gives to each man an absolute
+power over all his members, so the social pact gives to the body
+politic an absolute power over all its members; and it is this same
+power which, when directed by the general will, bears, as I have said,
+the name of sovereignty.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_207_207" id="FNanchor_207_207"></a><a href="#Footnote_207_207" class="fnanchor">[207]</a> Above all, the little chapter on a
+dictatorship is the very foundation of the position of the
+Robespierrists in the few months immediately preceding their fall. &quot;It
+is evidently the first intention of the people that the state should
+not perish,&quot; and so on, with much criticism of the system of
+occasional dictatorships, as they were resorted to in old Rome.<a name="FNanchor_208_208" id="FNanchor_208_208"></a><a href="#Footnote_208_208" class="fnanchor">[208]</a>
+Yet this does not in itself go much beyond the old monarchic doctrine
+of Prerogative, as a corrective for the slowness and want of immediate
+applicability of mere legal processes in cases of state emergency; and
+it is worth noticing again and again that in spite of the shriek<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[ii.143]</a></span>ings
+of reaction, the few atrocities of the Terror are an almost invisible
+speck compared with the atrocities of Christian churchmen and lawful
+kings, perpetrated in accordance with their notion of what constituted
+public safety. So far as Rousseau's intention goes, we find in his
+writings one of the strongest denunciations of the doctrine of public
+safety that is to be found in any of the writings of the century. &quot;Is
+the safety of a citizen,&quot; he cries, &quot;less the common cause than the
+safety of the state? They may tell us that it is well that one should
+perish on behalf of all. I will admire such a sentence in the mouth of
+a virtuous patriot, who voluntarily and for duty's sake devotes
+himself to death for the salvation of his country. But if we are to
+understand that it is allowed to the government to sacrifice an
+innocent person for the safety of the multitude, I hold this maxim for
+one of the most execrable that tyranny has ever invented, and the most
+dangerous that can be admitted.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_209_209" id="FNanchor_209_209"></a><a href="#Footnote_209_209" class="fnanchor">[209]</a> It may be said that the
+Terrorists did not sacrifice innocent life, but the plea is frivolous
+on the lips of men who proscribed whole classes. You cannot justly
+draw a capital indictment against a class. Rousseau, however, cannot
+fairly be said to have had a share in the responsibility for the more
+criminal part of the policy of 1793, any more than the founder of
+Christianity is responsible for the atrocities that have been
+committed by the more ardent worshippers of his name, and justified by
+stray <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[ii.144]</a></span>texts caught up from the gospels. Helv&#233;tius had said, &quot;All
+becomes legitimate and even virtuous on behalf of the public safety.&quot;
+Rousseau wrote in the margin, &quot;The public safety is nothing unless
+individuals enjoy security.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_210_210" id="FNanchor_210_210"></a><a href="#Footnote_210_210" class="fnanchor">[210]</a> The author of a theory is not
+answerable for the applications which may be read into it by the
+passions of men and the exigencies of a violent crisis. Such
+applications show this much and no more, that the theory was
+constructed with an imperfect consideration of the qualities of human
+nature, with too narrow a view of the conditions of society, and
+therefore with an inadequate appreciation of the consequences which
+the theory might be drawn to support.</p>
+
+<p>It is time to come to the central conception of the Social Contract,
+the dogma which made of it for a time the gospel of a nation, the
+memorable doctrine of the sovereignty of peoples. Of this doctrine
+Rousseau was assuredly not the inventor, though the exaggerated
+language of some popular writers in France leads us to suppose that
+they think of him as nothing less. Even in the thirteenth century the
+constitution of the Orders, and the contests of the friars with the
+clergy, had engendered faintly democratic ways of thinking.<a name="FNanchor_211_211" id="FNanchor_211_211"></a><a href="#Footnote_211_211" class="fnanchor">[211]</a> Among
+others the great Aquinas had protested against the juristic doctrine
+that the law is the pleasure of the prince. The will of the prince, he
+says, to be a law, must be directed <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[ii.145]</a></span>by reason; law is appointed for
+the common good, and not for a special or private good: it follows
+from this that only the reason of the multitude, or of a prince
+representing the multitude, can make a law.<a name="FNanchor_212_212" id="FNanchor_212_212"></a><a href="#Footnote_212_212" class="fnanchor">[212]</a> A still more
+remarkable approach to later views was made by Marsilio of Padua,
+physician to Lewis of Bavaria, who wrote a strong book on his master's
+side, in the great contest between him and the pope (1324). Marsilio
+in the first part of his work not only lays down very elaborately the
+proposition that laws ought to be made by the &quot;<i>universitas civium</i>&quot;;
+he places this sovereignty of the people on the true basis (which
+Rousseau only took for a secondary support to his original compact),
+namely, the greater likelihood of laws being obeyed in the first
+place, and being good laws in the second, when they are made by the
+body of the persons affected. &quot;No one knowingly does hurt to himself,
+or deliberately asks what is unjust, and on that account all or a
+great majority must wish such law as best suits the common interest of
+the citizens.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_213_213" id="FNanchor_213_213"></a><a href="#Footnote_213_213" class="fnanchor">[213]</a> Turning from this to the Social Contract, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[ii.146]</a></span>or to
+Locke's essay on Government, the identity in doctrine and
+correspondence in dialect may teach us how little true originality
+there can he among thinkers who are in the same stage; how a
+metaphysician of the thirteenth century and a metaphysician of the
+eighteenth hit on the same doctrine; and how the true classification
+of thinkers does not follow intervals of time, but is fixed by
+differences of method. It is impossible that in the constant play of
+circumstances and ideas in the minds of different thinkers, the same
+combinations of form and colour in a philosophic arrangement of such
+circumstances and ideas should not recur. Signal novelties in thought
+are as limited as signal inventions in architectural construction. It
+is only one of the great changes in method, that can remove the limits
+of the old combinations, by bringing new material and fundamentally
+altering the point of view.</p>
+
+<p>In the sixteenth century there were numerous writers who declared the
+right of subjects to depose a bad sovereign, but this position is to
+be distinguished from Rousseau's doctrine. Thus, if we turn to the
+great historic event of 1581, the rejection of the yoke of Spain by
+the Dutch, we find the Declaration of Independence running, &quot;that if a
+prince is appointed by God over the land, it is to protect them from
+harm, even as a shepherd to the guardianship of his flock. The
+subjects are not appointed by God for the behoof of the prince, but
+the prince for his subjects, without whom he is no prince.&quot; This is
+obviously divine<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[ii.147]</a></span> right, fundamentally modified by a popular
+principle, accepted to meet the exigencies of the occasion, and to
+justify after the event a measure which was dictated by urgent need
+for practical relief. Such a notion of the social compact was still
+emphatically in the semi-patriarchal stage, and is distinct as can be
+from the dogma of popular sovereignty as Rousseau understood it. But
+it plainly marked a step on the way. It was the development of
+Protestant principles which produced and necessarily involved the
+extreme democratic conclusion. Time was needed for their full
+expansion in this sense, but the result could only have been avoided
+by a suppression of the Reformation, and we therefore count it
+inevitable. Bodin (1577) had defined sovereignty as residing in the
+supreme legislative authority, without further inquiry as to the
+source or seat of that authority, though he admits the vague position
+which even Lewis XIV. did not deny, that the object of political
+society is the greatest good of every citizen or the whole state. In
+1603 a Protestant professor of law in Germany, Althusen by name,
+published a treatise of Politics, in which the doctrine of the
+sovereignty of peoples was clearly formulated, to the profound
+indignation both of Jesuits and of Protestant jurists.<a name="FNanchor_214_214" id="FNanchor_214_214"></a><a href="#Footnote_214_214" class="fnanchor">[214]</a> Rousseau
+mentions his name;<a name="FNanchor_215_215" id="FNanchor_215_215"></a><a href="#Footnote_215_215" class="fnanchor">[215]</a> it does not appear that he read Althusen's
+rather uncommon treatise, but its teaching would probably have a place
+in the traditions of political theorising <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[ii.148]</a></span>current at Geneva, to the
+spirit of whose government it was so congenial. Hooker, vindicating
+episcopacy against the democratic principles of the Puritans, had
+still been led, apparently by way of the ever dominant idea of a law
+natural, to base civil government on the assent of the governed, and
+had laid down such propositions as these: &quot;Laws they are not, which
+public approbation hath not made so. Laws therefore human, of what
+kind soever, are available by consent,&quot; and so on.<a name="FNanchor_216_216" id="FNanchor_216_216"></a><a href="#Footnote_216_216" class="fnanchor">[216]</a> The views of
+the Ecclesiastical Polity were adopted by Locke, and became the
+foundation of the famous essay on Civil Government, from which popular
+leaders in our own country drew all their weapons down to the outbreak
+of the French Revolution. Grotius (1625) starting from the principle
+that the law of nature enjoins that we should stand by our agreements,
+then proceeded to assume either an express, or at any rate a tacit and
+implied, promise on the part of all who become members of a community,
+to obey the majority of the body, or a majority of those to whom
+authority has been delegated.<a name="FNanchor_217_217" id="FNanchor_217_217"></a><a href="#Footnote_217_217" class="fnanchor">[217]</a> This is a unilateral view of the
+social contract, and omits the element of reciprocity which in
+Rousseau's idea was cardinal.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[ii.149]</a></span></p><p>Locke was Rousseau's most immediate inspirer, and the latter affirmed
+himself to have treated the same matters exactly on Locke's
+principles. Rousseau, however, exaggerated Locke's politics as greatly
+as Condillac exaggerated his metaphysics. There was the important
+difference that Locke's essay on Civil Government was the
+justification in theory of a revolution which had already been
+accomplished in practice, while the Social Contract, tinged as it was
+by silent reference in the mind of the writer to Geneva, was yet a
+speculation in the air. The circumstances under which it was written
+gave to the propositions of Locke's piece a reserve and moderation
+which savour of a practical origin and a special case. They have not
+the wide scope and dogmatic air and literary precision of the
+corresponding propositions in Rousseau. We find in Locke none of those
+concise phrases which make fanatics. But the essential doctrine is
+there. The philosopher of the Revolution of 1688 probably carried its
+principles further than most of those who helped in the Revolution had
+any intention to carry them, when he said that &quot;the legislature being
+only a fiduciary power to act for certain ends, there remains still in
+the people a supreme power to remove or alter the legislative.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_218_218" id="FNanchor_218_218"></a><a href="#Footnote_218_218" class="fnanchor">[218]</a>
+It may <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[ii.150]</a></span>be questioned how many of the peers of that day would have
+assented to the proposition that the people&#8212;and did Locke mean by the
+people the electors of the House of Commons, or all males over
+twenty-one, or all householders paying rates?&#8212;could by any expression
+of their will abolish the legislative power of the upper chamber, or
+put an end to the legislative and executive powers of the crown. But
+Locke's statements are direct enough, though he does not use so terse
+a label for his doctrine as Rousseau affixed to it.</p>
+
+<p>Again, besides the principle of popular sovereignty, Locke most likely
+gave to Rousseau the idea of the origin of this sovereignty in the
+civil state in a pact or contract, which was represented as the
+foundation and first condition of the civil state. From this naturally
+flowed the connected theory, of a perpetual consent being implied as
+given by the people to each new law. We need not quote passages from
+Locke to demonstrate the substantial correspondence of assumption
+between him and the author of the Social Contract. They are found in
+every chapter.<a name="FNanchor_219_219" id="FNanchor_219_219"></a><a href="#Footnote_219_219" class="fnanchor">[219]</a> Such principles were indispensable for the defence
+of a <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[ii.151]</a></span>Revolution like that of 1688, which was always carefully marked
+out by its promoters, as well as by its eloquent apologist and
+expositor a hundred years later, the great Burke, as above all things
+a revolution within the pale of the law or the constitution. They
+represented the philosophic adjustment of popular ideas to the
+political changes wrought by shifting circumstances, as distinguished
+from the biblical or Hebraic method of adjusting such ideas, which had
+prevailed in the contests of the previous generation.</p>
+
+<p>Yet there was in the midst of those contests one thinker of the first
+rank in intellectual power, who had constructed a genuine philosophy
+of government. Hobbes's speculations did not fit in with the theory of
+either of the two bodies of combatants in the Civil War. They were
+each in the theological order of ideas, and neither of them sought or
+was able to comprehend the application of philosophic principles to
+their own case or to that of their adversaries.<a name="FNanchor_220_220" id="FNanchor_220_220"></a><a href="#Footnote_220_220" class="fnanchor">[220]</a> Hebrew precedents
+and bible texts, on the one hand; prerogative of use and high church
+doctrine, on the other. Between these was no space for the acceptance
+of a secular and rationalistic theory, covering the whole field of a
+social constitution. Now the influence of Hobbes upon Rousseau was
+very marked, and very singular. There were numerous differences
+between the philosopher of Geneva and his predecessor of <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[ii.152]</a></span>Malmesbury.
+The one looked on men as good, the other looked on them as bad. The
+one described the state of nature as a state of peace, the other as a
+state of war. The one believed that laws and institutions had depraved
+man, the other that they had improved him.<a name="FNanchor_221_221" id="FNanchor_221_221"></a><a href="#Footnote_221_221" class="fnanchor">[221]</a> But these differences
+did not prevent the action of Hobbes on Rousseau. It resulted in a
+curious fusion between the premisses and the temper of Hobbes and the
+conclusions of Locke. This fusion produced that popular absolutism of
+which the Social Contract was the theoretical expression, and Jacobin
+supremacy the practical manifestation. Rousseau borrowed from Hobbes
+the true conception of sovereignty, and from Locke the true conception
+of the ultimate seat and original of authority, and of the two
+together he made the great image of the sovereign people. Strike the
+crowned head from that monstrous figure which is the frontispiece of
+the Leviathan, and you have a frontispiece that will do excellently
+well for the Social Contract. Apart from a multitude of other
+obligations, good and bad, which Rousseau owed to Hobbes, as we shall
+point out, we may here mention that of the superior accuracy of the
+notion of law in the Social Contract over the notion of law in
+Montesquieu's work. The latter begins, as everybody knows, with a
+definition inextricably confused: &quot;Laws are necessary relations
+flowing from the nature of things, and in this sense all beings have
+their laws, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[ii.153]</a></span>divinity has its laws, the material world has its laws,
+the intelligences superior to men have their laws, the beasts have
+their laws, man has his laws.... There is a primitive reason, and laws
+are the relations to be found between that and the different beings,
+and the relations of these different beings among one another.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_222_222" id="FNanchor_222_222"></a><a href="#Footnote_222_222" class="fnanchor">[222]</a>
+Rousseau at once put aside these divergent meanings, made the proper
+distinction between a law of nature and the imperative law of a state,
+and justly asserted that the one could teach us nothing worth knowing
+about the other.<a name="FNanchor_223_223" id="FNanchor_223_223"></a><a href="#Footnote_223_223" class="fnanchor">[223]</a> Hobbes's phraseology is much less definite than
+this, and shows that he had not himself wholly shaken off the same
+confusion as reigned in Montesquieu's account a century later. But
+then Hobbes's account of the true meaning of sovereignty was so clear,
+firm, and comprehensive, as easily to lead any fairly perspicuous
+student who followed him, to apply it to the true meaning of law. And
+on this head of law not so much fault is to be found with Rousseau, as
+on the head of larger constitutional theory. He did not look long
+enough at given laws, and hence failed to seize all their distinctive
+qualities; above all he only half saw, if he saw at all, that a law is
+a command and not a contract, and his eyes were closed to this,
+because the true view was incompatible with his fundamental assumption
+of contract as the base of the social union.<a name="FNanchor_224_224" id="FNanchor_224_224"></a><a href="#Footnote_224_224" class="fnanchor">[224]</a> But he did at all
+events <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[ii.154]</a></span>grasp the quality of generality as belonging to laws proper,
+and separated them justly from what he calls decrees, which we are now
+taught to name occasional or particular commands.<a name="FNanchor_225_225" id="FNanchor_225_225"></a><a href="#Footnote_225_225" class="fnanchor">[225]</a> This is worth
+mentioning, because it shows that, in spite of his habits of
+intellectual laxity, Rousseau was capable, where he had a clear-headed
+master before him, of a very considerable degree of precision of
+thought, however liable it was to fall into error or deficiency for
+want of abundant comparison with bodies of external fact. Let us now
+proceed to some of the central propositions of the Social Contract.</p>
+
+<p>1. The origin of society dates from the moment when the obstacles
+which impede the preservation of men in a state of nature are too
+strong for such forces as each individual can employ in order to keep
+himself in that state. At this point they can only save themselves by
+aggregation. Problem: to find a form of association which defends and
+protects with the whole common force the person and property of each
+associate, and by which, each uniting himself to all, still only obeys
+himself, and remains as free as he was before. Solution: a social
+compact reducible to these words, &quot;Each of us places in common his
+person and his whole power under the supreme direction of the general
+will; and we further receive each member as indivisible part of the
+whole.&quot; This act of association constitutes a moral and collective
+body, a public person.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[ii.155]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The practical importance and the mischief of thus suffering society to
+repose on conventions which the human will had made, lay in the
+corollary that the human will is competent at any time to unmake them,
+and also therefore to devise all possible changes that fell short of
+unmaking them. This was the root of the fatal hypothesis of the
+dictator, or divinely commissioned lawgiver. External circumstance and
+human nature alike were passive and infinitely pliable; they were the
+material out of which the legislator was to devise conventions at
+pleasure, without apprehension as to their suitableness either to the
+conditions of society among which they were to work, or to the
+passions and interests of those by whom they were to be carried out,
+and who were supposed to have given assent to them. It would be unjust
+to say that Rousseau actually faced this position and took the
+consequences. He expressly says in more places than one that the
+science of Government is only a science of combinations, applications,
+and exceptions, according to time, place, and circumstance.<a name="FNanchor_226_226" id="FNanchor_226_226"></a><a href="#Footnote_226_226" class="fnanchor">[226]</a> But
+to base society on conventions is to impute an element of
+arbitrariness to these combinations and applications, and to make them
+independent, as they can never be, of the limits inexorably fixed by
+the nature of things. The notion of compact is the main source of all
+the worst vagaries in Rousseau's political speculation.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[ii.156]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>It is worth remarking in the history of opinion, that there was at
+this time in France a little knot of thinkers who were nearly in full
+possession of the true view of the limits set by the natural ordering
+of societies to the power of convention and the function of the
+legislators. Five years after the publication of the Social Contract,
+a remarkable book was written by one of the economic sect of the
+Physiocrats, the later of whom, though specially concerned with the
+material interests of communities, very properly felt the necessity of
+connecting the discussion of wealth with the assumption of certain
+fundamental political conditions. They felt this, because it is
+impossible to settle any question about wages or profits, for
+instance, until you have first settled whether you are assuming the
+principles of liberty and property. This writer with great consistency
+found the first essential of all social order in conformity of
+positive law and institution to those qualities of human nature, and
+their relations with those material instruments of life, which, and
+not convention, were the true origin, as they are the actual grounds,
+of the perpetuation of our societies.<a name="FNanchor_227_227" id="FNanchor_227_227"></a><a href="#Footnote_227_227" class="fnanchor">[227]</a> This was wiser than
+Rousseau's con<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[ii.157]</a></span>ception of the lawgiver as one who should change human
+nature, and take away from man the forces that are naturally his own,
+to replace them by others comparatively foreign to him.<a name="FNanchor_228_228" id="FNanchor_228_228"></a><a href="#Footnote_228_228" class="fnanchor">[228]</a> Rousseau
+once wrote, in a letter about Rivi&#232;re's book, that the great problem
+in politics, which might be compared with the quadrature of the circle
+in geometry, is to find a form of government which shall place law
+above man.<a name="FNanchor_229_229" id="FNanchor_229_229"></a><a href="#Footnote_229_229" class="fnanchor">[229]</a> A more important problem, and not any less difficult
+for the political theoriser, is to mark the bounds at which the
+authority of the law is powerless or mischievous in attempting to
+control the egoistic or non-social parts of man. This problem Rousseau
+ignored, and <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[ii.158]</a></span>that he should do so was only natural in one who
+believed that man had bound himself by a convention, strictly to
+suppress his egoistic and non-social parts, and who based all his
+speculation on this pact as against the force, or the paternal
+authority, or the will of a Supreme Being, in which other writers
+founded the social union.</p>
+
+<p>2. The body thus constituted by convention is the sovereign. Each
+citizen is a member of the sovereign, standing in a definite relation
+to individuals <i>qua</i> individuals; he is also as an individual a member
+of the state and subject to the sovereign, of which from the first
+point of view he is a component element. The sovereign and the body
+politic are one and the same thing.<a name="FNanchor_230_230" id="FNanchor_230_230"></a><a href="#Footnote_230_230" class="fnanchor">[230]</a></p>
+
+<p>Of the antecedents and history of this doctrine enough has already
+been said. Its general truth as a description either of what is, or
+what ought to be and will be, demands an ampler discussion than there
+is any occasion to carry on here. We need only point out its place as
+a kind of intermediate dissolvent for which the time was most ripe. It
+breaks up the feudal conception of political authority as a property
+of land-ownership, noble birth, and the like, and it associates this
+authority widely and simply with the bare fact of participation in any
+form of citizenship in the social union. The later and higher idea of
+every share of political power as a function to be discharged for the
+good of the whole body, and not <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[ii.159]</a></span>merely as a right to be enjoyed for
+the advantage of its possessor, was a form of thought to which
+Rousseau did not rise. That does not lessen the effectiveness of the
+blow which his doctrine dealt to French feudalism, and which is its
+main title to commemoration in connection with his name.</p>
+
+<p>The social compact thus made is essentially different from the social
+compact which Hobbes described as the origin of what he calls
+commonwealths by institution, to distinguish them from commonwealths
+by acquisition, that is to say, states formed by conquest or resting
+on hereditary rule. &quot;A commonwealth,&quot; Hobbes says, &quot;is said to be
+instituted when a multitude of men do agree and covenant, every one
+with every one, that to whatsoever man or assembly of men shall be
+given by the major part the right to present the person of them all,
+that is to say, to be their representative; every one ... shall
+authorise all the actions and judgments of that man or assembly of
+men, in the same manner as if they were his own, to the end to live
+peaceably among themselves, and be protected against other men.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_231_231" id="FNanchor_231_231"></a><a href="#Footnote_231_231" class="fnanchor">[231]</a>
+But Rousseau's compact was an act of association among equals, who
+also remained equals. Hobbes's compact was an act of surrender on the
+part of the many to one or a number. The first was the constitution of
+civil society, the second was the erection of a government. As nobody
+now believes in the existence of any such compact in either one form
+or the other, it would be <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[ii.160]</a></span>superfluous to inquire which of the two is
+the less inaccurate. All we need do is to point out that there was
+this difference. Rousseau distinctly denied the existence of any
+element of contract in the erection of a government; there is only one
+contract in the state, he said, and it is that of association.<a name="FNanchor_232_232" id="FNanchor_232_232"></a><a href="#Footnote_232_232" class="fnanchor">[232]</a>
+Locke's notion of the compact which was the beginning of every
+political society is indefinite on this point; he speaks of it
+indifferently as an agreement of a body of free men to unite and
+incorporate into a society, and an agreement to set up a
+government.<a name="FNanchor_233_233" id="FNanchor_233_233"></a><a href="#Footnote_233_233" class="fnanchor">[233]</a> Most of us would suppose the two processes to be as
+nearly identical as may be; Rousseau drew a distinction, and from this
+distinction he derived further differences.</p>
+
+<p>Here, we may remark, is the starting-point in the history of the ideas
+of the revolution, of one of the most prominent of them all, that of
+Fraternity. If the whole structure of society rests on an act of
+partnership entered into by equals on behalf of themselves and their
+descendants for ever, the nature of the union is not what it would be,
+if the members of the union had only entered it to place their
+liberties at the feet of some superior power. Society in the one case
+is a covenant of subjection, in the other a covenant of social
+brotherhood. This impressed itself deeply on the feelings of men like
+Robespierre, who were never so well pleased as when they could find
+for their sentimentalism a covering of neat political logic. The same
+idea of association came presently <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[ii.161]</a></span>to receive a still more remarkable
+and momentous extension, when it was translated from the language of
+mere government into that of the economic organisation of communities.
+Rousseau's conception went no further than political association, as
+distinct from subjection. Socialism, which came by and by to the front
+place, carried the idea to its fullest capacity, and presented all the
+relations of men with one another as fixed by the same bond. Men had
+entered the social union as brethren, equal, and co-operators, not
+merely for purposes of government, but for purposes of mutual succour
+in all its aspects. This naturally included the most important of all,
+material production. They were not associated merely as equal
+participants in political sovereignty; they were equal participants in
+all the rest of the increase made to the means of human happiness by
+united action. Socialism is the transfer of the principle of fraternal
+association from politics, where Rousseau left it, to the wider sphere
+of industrial force.</p>
+
+<p>It is perhaps worth notice that another famous revolutionary term
+belongs to the same source. All the associates of this act of union,
+becoming members of the city, are as such to be called Citizens, as
+participating in the sovereign authority.<a name="FNanchor_234_234" id="FNanchor_234_234"></a><a href="#Footnote_234_234" class="fnanchor">[234]</a> The term was in
+familiar use enough among the French in their worst days, but it was
+Rousseau's sanction which marked it in the new times with a sort of
+sacramental stamp. It came naturally to him, because it was the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[ii.162]</a></span>name
+of the first of the two classes which constituted the active portion
+of the republic of Geneva, and the only class whose members were
+eligible to the chief magistracies.</p>
+
+<p>3. We next have a group of propositions setting forth the attributes
+of sovereignty. It is inalienable.<a name="FNanchor_235_235" id="FNanchor_235_235"></a><a href="#Footnote_235_235" class="fnanchor">[235]</a> It is indivisible.</p>
+
+<p>These two propositions, which play such a part in the history of some
+of the episodes of the French Revolution, contain no more than was
+contended for by Hobbes, and has been accepted in our own times by
+Austin. When Hobbes says that &quot;to the laws which the sovereign maketh,
+the sovereign is not subject, for if he were subject to the civil laws
+he were subject to himself, which were not subjection but freedom,&quot;
+his notion of sovereignty is exactly that expressed by Rousseau in his
+unexplained dogma of the inalienableness of sovereignty. So Rousseau
+means no more by the dogma that sovereignty is indivisible, than
+Austin meant when he declared of the doctrine that the legislative
+sovereign powers and the executive sovereign powers belong in any
+society to distinct parties, that it is a supposition too palpably
+false to endure a moment's examination.<a name="FNanchor_236_236" id="FNanchor_236_236"></a><a href="#Footnote_236_236" class="fnanchor">[236]</a> The way in which this
+account of the indivisibleness of sovereignty was understood during
+the revolution, twisted it into a condemnation of the dreaded idea of
+Federalism. It might just as well have been interpreted to condemn
+alliances between nations; for the properties of <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[ii.163]</a></span>sovereignty are
+clearly independent of the dimensions of the sovereign unit. Another
+effect of this doctrine was the rejection by the Constituent Assembly
+of the balanced parliamentary system, which the followers of
+Montesquieu would fain have introduced on the English model. Whether
+that was an evil or a good, publicists will long continue to dispute.</p>
+
+<p>4. The general will of the sovereign upon an object of common interest
+is expressed in a law. Only the sovereign can possess this law-making
+power, because no one but the sovereign has the right of declaring the
+general will. The legislative power cannot be exerted by delegation or
+representation. The English fancy that they are a free nation, but
+they are grievously mistaken. They are only free during the election
+of members of parliament; the members once chosen, the people are
+slaves, nay, as people they have ceased to exist.<a name="FNanchor_237_237" id="FNanchor_237_237"></a><a href="#Footnote_237_237" class="fnanchor">[237]</a> It is
+impossible <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[ii.164]</a></span>for the sovereign to act, except when the people are
+assembled. Besides such extraordinary assemblies as unforeseen events
+may call for, there must be fixed periodical meetings that nothing can
+interrupt or postpone. Do you call this chimerical? Then you have
+forgotten the Roman comitia, as well as such gatherings of the people
+as those of the Macedonians and the Franks and most other nations in
+their primitive times. What has existed is certainly possible.<a name="FNanchor_238_238" id="FNanchor_238_238"></a><a href="#Footnote_238_238" class="fnanchor">[238]</a></p>
+
+<p>It is very curious that Rousseau in this part of his subject should
+have contented himself with going back to Macedonia and Rome, instead
+of pointing to the sovereign states that have since become confederate
+with his native republic. A historian in our own time has described
+with an enthusiasm that equals that of the Social Contract, how he saw
+the sovereign people of Uri and the sovereign people of Appenzell
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[ii.165]</a></span>discharge the duties of legislation and choice of executive, each in
+the majesty of its corporate person.<a name="FNanchor_239_239" id="FNanchor_239_239"></a><a href="#Footnote_239_239" class="fnanchor">[239]</a> That Rousseau was influenced
+by the free sovereignty of the states of the Swiss confederation, as
+well as by that of his own city, we may well believe. Whether he was
+or not, it must always be counted a serious misfortune that a writer
+who was destined to exercise such power in a crisis of the history of
+a great nation, should have chosen his illustrations from a time and
+from societies so remote, that the true conditions of their political
+system could not possibly be understood with any approach to reality,
+while there were, within a few leagues of his native place,
+communities where the system of a sovereign public in his own sense
+was actually alive and flourishing and at work. From them the full
+meaning of his theories might have been practically gathered, and
+whatever useful lessons lay at the bottom of them might have been made
+plain. As it was, it came to pass singularly enough that the effect of
+the French Revolution was the suppression, happily only for a time, of
+the only governments in Europe where the doctrine of the favourite
+apostle of the Revolution was a reality. The constitution of the
+Helvetic Republic in 1798 was as bad a blow to the sovereignty of
+peoples in a true sense, as the old house of Austria or Charles of
+Burgundy could ever have dealt. That constitution, moreover, was
+directly opposed to the Social Contract in setting up what it called
+representative demo<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[ii.166]</a></span>cracy, for representative democracy was just what
+Rousseau steadily maintained to be a nullity and a delusion.</p>
+
+<p>The only lesson which the Social Contract contained for a statesman
+bold enough to take into his hands the reconstruction of France,
+undoubtedly pointed in the direction of confederation. At one place,
+where he became sensible of the impotence which his assumption of a
+small state inflicted on his whole speculation, Rousseau said he would
+presently show how the good order of a small state might be united to
+the external power of a great people. Though he never did this, he
+hints in a footnote that his plan belonged to the theory of
+confederations, of which the principles were still to be
+established.<a name="FNanchor_240_240" id="FNanchor_240_240"></a><a href="#Footnote_240_240" class="fnanchor">[240]</a> When he gave advice for the renovation of the
+wretched constitution of Poland, he insisted above all things that
+they should apply themselves to extend and perfect the system of
+federate governments, &quot;the only one that unites in itself all the
+advantages of great and small states.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_241_241" id="FNanchor_241_241"></a><a href="#Footnote_241_241" class="fnanchor">[241]</a> A very few years after the
+appearance of his book, the great American union of sovereign states
+arose to point the political moral. The French revolutionists missed
+the force alike of <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[ii.167]</a></span>the practical example abroad, and of the theory of
+the book which they took for gospel at home. How far they were driven
+to this by the urgent pressure of foreign war, or whether they would
+have followed the same course without that interference, merely in
+obedience to the catholic and monarchic absolutism which had sunk so
+much deeper into French character than people have been willing to
+admit, we cannot tell. The fact remains that the Jacobins, Rousseau's
+immediate disciples, at once took up the chain of centralised
+authority where it had been broken off by the ruin of the monarchy.
+They caught at the letter of the dogma of a sovereign people, and lost
+its spirit. They missed the germ of truth in Rousseau's scheme,
+namely, that for order and freedom and just administration the unit
+should not be too large to admit of the participation of the persons
+concerned in the management of their own public affairs. If they had
+realised this and applied it, either by transforming the old monarchy
+into a confederacy of sovereign provinces, or by some less sweeping
+modification of the old centralised scheme of government, they might
+have saved France.<a name="FNanchor_242_242" id="FNanchor_242_242"></a><a href="#Footnote_242_242" class="fnanchor">[242]</a> But, once more, men interpret a political
+treatise on principles which <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[ii.168]</a></span>either come to them by tradition; or
+else spring suddenly up from roots of passion.<a name="FNanchor_243_243" id="FNanchor_243_243"></a><a href="#Footnote_243_243" class="fnanchor">[243]</a></p>
+
+<p>5. The government is the minister of the sovereign. It is an
+intermediate body set up between sovereign and subjects for their
+mutual correspondence, charged with the execution of the laws and the
+maintenance of civil and political freedom. The members comprising it
+are called magistrates or kings, and to the whole body so composed,
+whether of one or of more than one, is given the name of prince. If
+the whole power is centred in the hands of a single magistrate, from
+whom all the rest hold their authority, the government is called a
+monarchy. If there are more persons simply citizens than there are
+magistrates, this is an aristocracy.<a name="FNanchor_244_244" id="FNanchor_244_244"></a><a href="#Footnote_244_244" class="fnanchor">[244]</a> If more citizen magistrates
+than simple private citizens, that is a democracy. The last government
+is as a general rule best fitted for small states, and the first for
+large ones&#8212;on the principle that the number of the supreme
+magistrates ought to be in the inverse ratio of that of the citizens.
+But there is a multitude of circumstances which may furnish reasons
+for exceptions to this general rule.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[ii.169]</a></span></p><p>This common definition of the three forms of governments according to
+the mere number of the participants in the chief magistracy, though
+adopted by Hobbes and other writers, is certainly inadequate and
+uninstructive, without some further qualification. Aristotle, for
+instance, furnishes such a qualification, when he refers to the
+interests in which the government is carried on, whether the interest
+of a small body or of the whole of the citizens.<a name="FNanchor_245_245" id="FNanchor_245_245"></a><a href="#Footnote_245_245" class="fnanchor">[245]</a> Montesquieu's
+well-known division, though logically faulty, still has the merit of
+pointing to conditions of difference among forms of government,
+outside of and apart from the one fact of the number of the sovereign.
+To divide governments, as Montesquieu did, into republics, monarchies,
+and despotisms, was to use two principles of division, first the
+number of the sovereign, and next something else, namely, the
+difference between a constitutional and an absolute monarch. Then he
+returned to the first principle of division, and separated a republic
+into a government of all, which is a democracy, and a government by a
+part, which is aristocracy.<a name="FNanchor_246_246" id="FNanchor_246_246"></a><a href="#Footnote_246_246" class="fnanchor">[246]</a> Still, to have introduced the element
+of law-abidingness in the chief magistracy, whether of one or more,
+was to have called attention to the fact that no single distinction is
+enough to furnish us with a conception of the real and vital
+differences which may exist between one form of government and
+another.<a name="FNanchor_247_247" id="FNanchor_247_247"></a><a href="#Footnote_247_247" class="fnanchor">[247]</a></p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[ii.170]</a></span></p><p>The important fact about a government lies quite as much in the
+qualifying epithet which is to be affixed to any one of the three
+names, as in the name itself. We know nothing about a monarchy, until
+we have been told whether it is absolute or constitutional; if
+absolute, whether it is administered in the interests of the realm,
+like that of Prussia under Frederick the Great, or in the interests of
+the ruler, like that of an Indian principality under a native prince;
+if constitutional, whether the real power is aristocratic, as in Great
+Britain a hundred years ago, or plutocratic, as in Great Britain
+to-day, or popular, as it may be here fifty years hence. And so with
+reference to each of the other two forms; neither name gives us any
+instruction, except of a merely negative kind, until it has been made
+precise by one or more explanatory epithets. What is the common
+quality of the old Roman republic, the republics of the Swiss
+confederation, the republic of Venice, the American republic, the
+republic of Mexico? Plainly the word republic has no further effect
+beyond that of excluding the idea of a recognised dynasty.</p>
+
+<p>Rousseau is perhaps less open to this kind of criticism than other
+writers on political theory, for the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[ii.171]</a></span> reason that he distinguishes the
+constitution of the state from the constitution of the government. The
+first he settles definitely. The whole body of the people is to be
+sovereign, and to be endowed alone with what he conceived as the only
+genuinely legislative power. The only question which he considers open
+is as to the form in which the <i>delegated executive authority</i> shall
+be organised. Democracy, the immediate government of all by all, he
+rejects as too perfect for men; it requires a state so small that each
+citizen knows all the others, manners so simple that the business may
+be small and the mode of discussion easy, equality of rank and fortune
+so general as not to allow of the overriding of political equality by
+material superiority, and so forth.<a name="FNanchor_248_248" id="FNanchor_248_248"></a><a href="#Footnote_248_248" class="fnanchor">[248]</a> Monarchy labours under a
+number of disadvantages which are tolerably obvious. &quot;One essential
+and inevitable defect, which must always place monarchic below
+republican government, is that in the latter the public voice hardly
+ever promotes to the first places any but capable and enlightened men
+who fill them with honour; whereas those who get on in monarchies, are
+for the most part small busybodies, small knaves, small intriguers, in
+whom the puny talents which are the secret of reaching substantial
+posts in courts, only serve to show their stupidity to the public as
+soon as they have made their way to the front. The people is far less
+likely to make a blunder in a choice of this sort, than the prince,
+and a man of true merit is nearly as rare <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[ii.172]</a></span>in the ministry, as a fool
+at the head of the government of a republic.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_249_249" id="FNanchor_249_249"></a><a href="#Footnote_249_249" class="fnanchor">[249]</a> There remains
+aristocracy. Of this there are three sorts: natural, elective, and
+hereditary. The first can only thrive among primitive folk, while the
+third is the worst of all governments. The second is the best, for it
+is aristocracy properly so called. If men only acquire rule in virtue
+of election, then purity, enlightenment, experience, and all the other
+grounds of public esteem and preference, become so many new guarantees
+that the administration shall be wise and just. It is the best and
+most natural order that the wisest should govern the multitude,
+provided you are sure that they will govern the multitude for its
+advantage, and not for their own. If aristocracy of this kind requires
+one or two virtues less than a popular executive, it also demands
+others which are peculiar to itself, such as moderation in the rich
+and content in the poor. For this form comports with a certain
+inequality of fortune, for the reason that it is well that the
+administration of public affairs should be confided to those who are
+best able to give their whole time to it. At the same time it is of
+importance that an opposite choice should occasionally teach the
+people that in the merit of men there are more momentous reasons of
+preference than wealth.<a name="FNanchor_250_250" id="FNanchor_250_250"></a><a href="#Footnote_250_250" class="fnanchor">[250]</a> Rousseau, as we have seen, had pronounced
+English liberty to be no liberty at all, save during the few days once
+in seven years when the elections to parliament take place. Yet this
+scheme of an elective <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[ii.173]</a></span>aristocracy was in truth a very near approach
+to the English form as it is theoretically presented in our own day,
+with a suffrage gradually becoming universal. If the suffrage were
+universal, and if its exercise took place once a year, our system, in
+spite of the now obsolescent elements of hereditary aristocracy and
+nominal monarchy, would be as close a realisation of the scheme of the
+Social Contract as any representative system permits. If Rousseau had
+further developed his notions of confederation, the United States
+would most have resembled his type.</p>
+
+<p>6. What is to be the attitude of the state in respect of religion?
+Certainly not that prescribed by the policy of the middle ages. The
+separation of the spiritual from the temporal power, indicated by
+Jesus Christ, and developed by his followers in the course of many
+subsequent generations, was in Rousseau's eyes most mischievous,
+because it ended in the subordination of the temporal power to the
+spiritual, and that is incompatible with an efficient polity. Even the
+kings of England, though they style themselves heads of the church,
+are really its ministers and servants.<a name="FNanchor_251_251" id="FNanchor_251_251"></a><a href="#Footnote_251_251" class="fnanchor">[251]</a></p>
+
+<p>The last allegation evinces Rousseau's usual ignorance of history, and
+need not be discussed, any more than his proposition on which he lays
+so much stress, that Christians cannot possibly be good soldiers, nor
+truly good citizens, because their hearts being fixed upon another
+world, they must necessarily be indiffer<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[ii.174]</a></span>ent to the success or failure
+of such enterprises as they may take up in this.<a name="FNanchor_252_252" id="FNanchor_252_252"></a><a href="#Footnote_252_252" class="fnanchor">[252]</a> In reading the
+Social Contract, and some other of the author's writings besides, we
+have constantly to interpret the direct, positive, categorical form of
+assertion into something of this kind&#8212;&quot;Such and such consequences
+ought logically to follow from the meaning of the name, or the
+definition of a principle, or from such and such motives.&quot; The change
+of this moderate form of provisional assertion into the unconditional
+statement that such and such consequences have actually followed,
+constantly lands the author in propositions which any reader who tests
+them by an appeal to the experience of mankind, written and unwritten,
+at once discovers to be false and absurd. Rousseau himself took less
+trouble to verify his conclusions by such an appeal to experience than
+any writer that ever lived in a scientific age. The other remark to be
+made on the above section is that the rejection of the Christian or
+ecclesiastical division of the powers of the church and the powers of
+the state, is the strongest illustration that could be found of the
+debt of Rousseau's conception of a state to the old pagan conception.
+It was the main characteristic of the polities which Christian
+monotheism and feudalism together succeeded in replacing, to recognise
+no such division as that between church and state, pope and emperor.
+Rousseau resumed the old conception. But he adjusted it in a certain
+degree to the spirit of his own <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[ii.175]</a></span>time, and imposed certain
+philosophical limitations upon it. His scheme is as follows.</p>
+
+<p>Religion, he says, in its relation to the state, may be considered as
+of three kinds. First, natural religion, without temple, altar, or
+rite, the true and pure theism of the natural conscience of man.
+Second, local, civil, or positive religion, with dogmas, rites,
+exercises; a theology of a primitive people, exactly co-extensive with
+all the rights and all the duties of men. Third, a religion like the
+Christianity of the Roman church, which gives men two sets of laws,
+two chiefs, two countries, submits them to contradictory duties, and
+prevents them from being able to be at once devout and patriotic. The
+last of these is so evidently pestilent as to need no discussion. The
+second has the merit of teaching men to identify duty to their gods
+with duty to their country; under this to die for the land is
+martyrdom, to break its laws impiety, and to subject a culprit to
+public execration is to devote him to the anger of the gods. But it is
+bad, because it is at bottom a superstition, and because it makes a
+people sanguinary and intolerant. The first of all, which is now
+styled a Christian theism, having no special relation with the body
+politic, adds no force to the laws. There are many particular
+objections to Christianity flowing from the fact of its not being a
+kingdom of this world, and this above all, that Christianity only
+preaches servitude and dependence.<a name="FNanchor_253_253" id="FNanchor_253_253"></a><a href="#Footnote_253_253" class="fnanchor">[253]</a> What then is to be done? The
+sovereign <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[ii.176]</a></span>must establish a purely civil profession of faith. It will
+consist of the following positive dogmas:&#8212;the existence of a
+divinity, powerful, intelligent, beneficent and foreseeing; the life
+to come; the happiness of the just, the chastisement of the wicked;
+the sanctity of the social contract and the laws. These articles of
+belief are imposed, not as dogmas of religion exactly, but as
+sentiments of sociability. If any one declines to accept them, he
+ought to be exiled, not for being impious, but for being unsociable,
+incapable of sincere attachment to the laws, or of sacrificing his
+life to his duty. If any one, after publicly recognising these dogmas,
+carries himself as if he did not believe them, let him be punished by
+death, for he has committed the worst of crimes, he has lied before
+the laws.<a name="FNanchor_254_254" id="FNanchor_254_254"></a><a href="#Footnote_254_254" class="fnanchor">[254]</a></p>
+
+<p>Rousseau thus, unconsciously enough, brought to its climax that
+reaction against the absorption of the state in the church which had
+first taken a place in literature in the controversy between legists
+and canonists, and had found its most famous illustration <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[ii.177]</a></span>in the De
+Monarchi&#226; of the great poet of catholicism. The division of two
+co-equal realms, one temporal, the other spiritual, was replaced in
+the Genevese thinker by what he admitted to be &quot;pure Hobbism.&quot; This,
+the rigorous subordination of the church to the state, was the end, so
+far as France went, of the speculative controversy which had occupied
+Europe for so many ages, as to the respective powers of pope and
+emperor, of positive law and law divine. The famous civil constitution
+of the clergy (1790), which was the expression of Rousseau's principle
+as formulated by his disciples in the Constituent Assembly, was the
+revolutionary conclusion to the world-wide dispute, whose most
+melodramatic episode had been the scene in the courtyard of Canossa.</p>
+
+<p>Rousseau's memorable prescription, banishing all who should not
+believe in God, or a future state, or in rewards and punishments for
+the deeds done in the body, and putting to death any who, after
+subscribing to the required profession, should seem no longer to hold
+it, has naturally created a very lively horror in a tolerant
+generation like our own, some of whose finest spirits have rejected
+deliberately and finally the articles of belief, without which they
+could not have been suffered to exist in Rousseau's state. It seemed
+to contemporaries, who were enthusiastic above all things for humanity
+and infinite tolerance, these being the prizes of the long conflict
+which they hoped they were completing, to be a return to the horrors
+of the Holy Office. Men were as shocked as<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[ii.178]</a></span> the modern philosopher is,
+when he finds the greatest of the followers of Socrates imposing in
+his latest piece the penalty of imprisonment for five years, to be
+followed in case of obduracy by death, on one who should not believe
+in the gods set up for the state by the lawmaker.<a name="FNanchor_255_255" id="FNanchor_255_255"></a><a href="#Footnote_255_255" class="fnanchor">[255]</a> And we can
+hardly comfort ourselves, as Milton did about Plato, who framed laws
+which no city ever yet received, and &quot;fed his fancy with making many
+edicts to his airy burgomasters, which they who otherwise admire him,
+wish had been rather buried and excused in the genial cups of an
+academic night-sitting.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_256_256" id="FNanchor_256_256"></a><a href="#Footnote_256_256" class="fnanchor">[256]</a> Rousseau's ideas fell among men who were
+most potent and corporeal burgomasters. In the winter of 1793 two
+parties in Paris stood face to face; the rationalistic, Voltairean
+party of the Commune, named improperly after H&#233;bert, but whose best
+member was Chaumette, and the sentimental, Rousseauite party, led by
+Robespierre. The first had industriously desecrated the churches, and
+consummated their revolt against the gods of the old time by the
+public worship of the Goddess of Reason, who was prematurely set up
+for deity of the new time. Robespierre retaliated with the mummeries
+of the Festival of the Supreme Being, and protested against atheism as
+the crime of aristocrats. Presently the atheistic party succumbed.
+Chaumette was not directly implicated in the proceedings which led to
+their fall, but he was by and by accused of conspiring <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[ii.179]</a></span>with H&#233;bert,
+Clootz, and the rest, &quot;to destroy all notion of Divinity and base the
+government of France on atheism.&quot; &quot;They attack the immortality of the
+soul,&quot; cried Saint Just, &quot;the thought which consoled Socrates in his
+dying moments, and their dream is to raise atheism into a worship.&quot;
+And this was the offence, technically and officially described, for
+which Chaumette and Clootz were sent to the guillotine (April 1794),
+strictly on the principle which had been laid down in the Social
+Contract, and accepted by Robespierre.<a name="FNanchor_257_257" id="FNanchor_257_257"></a><a href="#Footnote_257_257" class="fnanchor">[257]</a></p>
+
+<p>It would have been odd in any writer less firmly possessed with the
+infallibility of his own dreams than Rousseau was, that he should not
+have seen the impossibility in anything like the existing conditions
+of human nature, of limiting the profession of civil faith to the
+three or four articles which happened to constitute his own belief.
+Having once granted the general position that a citizen may be
+required to profess some religious faith, there is no speculative
+principle, and there is no force in the world, which can fix any bound
+to the amount or kind of religious faith which the state has the right
+thus to exact. Rousseau said that a man was dangerous to the city who
+did not believe in God, a future state, and divine reward and
+retribution. But then Calvin thought a man dangerous who did not
+believe both that there <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[ii.180]</a></span>is only one God, and also that there are
+three Gods. And so Chaumette went to the scaffold, and Servetus to the
+stake, on the one common principle that the civil magistrate is
+concerned with heresy. And H&#233;bert was only following out the same
+doctrine in a mild and equitable manner, when he insisted on
+preventing the publication of a book in which the author professed his
+belief in a God. A single step in the path of civil interference with
+opinion leads you the whole way.</p>
+
+<p>The history of the Protestant churches is enough to show the pitiable
+futility of the proviso for religious tolerance with which Rousseau
+closed his exposition. &quot;If there is no longer an exclusive national
+religion, then every creed ought to be tolerated which tolerates other
+creeds, so long as it contains nothing contrary to the duties of the
+citizen. But whoever dares to say, <i>Out of the church, no salvation</i>,
+ought to be banished from the state.&quot; The reason for which Henry IV.
+embraced the Roman religion&#8212;namely, that in that he might be saved,
+in the opinion alike of Protestants and Catholics, whereas in the
+reformed faith, though he was saved according to Protestants, yet
+according to Catholics he was necessarily damned,&#8212;ought to have made
+every honest man, and especially every prince, reject it. It was the
+more curious that Rousseau did not see the futility of drawing the
+line of tolerance at any given set of dogmas, however simple and
+slight and acceptable to himself they might be, because he invited
+special admiration for D'Argenson's<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[ii.181]</a></span> excellent maxim that &quot;in the
+republic everybody is perfectly free in what does not hurt
+others.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_258_258" id="FNanchor_258_258"></a><a href="#Footnote_258_258" class="fnanchor">[258]</a> Surely this maxim has very little significance or value,
+unless we interpret it as giving entire liberty of opinion, because no
+opinion whatever can hurt others, until it manifests itself in act,
+including of course speech, which is a kind of act. Rousseau admitted
+that over and above the profession of civil faith, a citizen might
+hold what opinions he pleased, in entire freedom from the sovereign's
+cognisance or jurisdiction; &quot;for as the sovereign has no competence in
+the other world, the fate of subjects in that other world is not his
+affair, provided they are good citizens in this.&quot; But good citizenship
+consists in doing or forbearing from certain actions, and to punish
+men on the inference that forbidden action is likely to follow from
+the rejection of a set of opinions, or to exact a test oath of
+adherence to such opinions on the same principle, is to concede the
+whole theory of civil intolerance, however little Rousseau may have
+realised the perfectly legitimate applications of his doctrine. It was
+an unconscious compromise. He was thinking of Calvin in practice and
+Hobbes in theory, and he was at the same time influenced by the
+moderate spirit of his time, and the comparatively reasonable
+character of his personal belief. He praised Hobbes as the only author
+who had seen the right remedy for the conflict of the spiritual and
+temporal jurisdictions, by proposing to <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[ii.182]</a></span>unite the two heads of the
+eagle, and reducing all to political unity, without which never will
+either state or government be duly constituted. But Hobbes was
+consistent without flinching. He refused to set limits to the
+religious prescriptions which a sovereign might impose, for &quot;even when
+the civil sovereign is an infidel, every one of his own subjects that
+resisteth him, sinneth against the laws of God (for such are the laws
+of nature), and rejecteth the counsel of the apostles, that
+admonisheth all Christians to obey their princes.... And for their
+faith, it is internal and invisible: they have the licence that Naaman
+had, and need not put themselves into danger for it; but if they do,
+they ought to expect their reward in heaven, and not complain of their
+lawful sovereign.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_259_259" id="FNanchor_259_259"></a><a href="#Footnote_259_259" class="fnanchor">[259]</a> All this flowed from the very idea and
+definition of sovereignty, which Rousseau accepted from Hobbes, as we
+have already seen. Such consequences, however, stated in these bold
+terms, must have been highly revolting to Rousseau; he could not
+assent to an exercise of sovereignty which might be atheistic,
+Mahometan, or anything else unqualifiedly monstrous. He failed to see
+the folly of trying to unite the old notions of a Christian
+commonwealth with what was fundamentally his own notion of a
+commonwealth after the ancient type. He stripped the pagan republics,
+which he took for his model, of their national and official
+polytheism, and he put on in its stead a scanty remnant of theism
+slightly tinged with Christianity.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[ii.183]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Then he practically accepted Hobbes's audacious bidding to the man who
+should not be able to accept the state creed, to go courageously to
+martyrdom, and leave the land in peace. For the modern principle,
+which was contained in D'Argenson's saying previously quoted, that the
+civil power does best absolutely and unreservedly to ignore
+spirituals, he was not prepared either by his emancipation from the
+theological ideas of his youth, or by his observation of the working
+and tendencies of systems, which involved the state in some more or
+less close relations with the church, either as superior, equal, or
+subordinate. Every test is sure to insist on mental independence
+ending exactly where the speculative curiosity of the time is most
+intent to begin.</p>
+
+<p>Let us now shortly confront Rousseau's ideas with some of the
+propositions belonging to another method of approaching the philosophy
+of government, that have for their key-note the conception of
+expediency or convenience, and are tested by their conformity to the
+observed and recorded experience of mankind. According to this method,
+the ground and origin of society is not a compact; that never existed
+in any known case, and never was a condition of obligation either in
+primitive or developed societies, either between subjects and
+sovereign, or between the equal members of a sovereign body. The true
+ground is an acceptance of conditions which came into existence by the
+sociability inherent in man, and were developed by man's spontaneous
+search after convenience. The<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[ii.184]</a></span> statement that while the constitution
+of man is the work of nature, that of the state is the work of
+art,<a name="FNanchor_260_260" id="FNanchor_260_260"></a><a href="#Footnote_260_260" class="fnanchor">[260]</a> is as misleading as the opposite statement that governments
+are not made but grow.<a name="FNanchor_261_261" id="FNanchor_261_261"></a><a href="#Footnote_261_261" class="fnanchor">[261]</a> The truth lies between them, in such
+propositions as that institutions owe their existence and development
+to deliberate human effort, working in accordance with circumstances
+naturally fixed both in human character and in the external field of
+its activity. The obedience of the subject to the sovereign has its
+root not in contract but in force,&#8212;the force of the sovereign to
+punish disobedience. A man does not consent to be put to death if he
+shall commit a murder, for the reason alleged by Rousseau, namely, as
+a means of protecting his own life against murder.<a name="FNanchor_262_262" id="FNanchor_262_262"></a><a href="#Footnote_262_262" class="fnanchor">[262]</a> There is no
+consent in the transaction. Some person or persons, possessed of
+sovereign authority, promulgated a command that the subject should not
+commit murder, and appointed penalties for such commission and it was
+not a fictitious assent to these penalties, but the fact that the
+sovereign was strong enough to enforce them, which made the command
+valid.</p>
+
+<p>Supposing a law to be passed in an assembly of the sovereign people by
+a majority; what binds a member of the minority to obedience?
+Rousseau's answer is this:&#8212;When the law is proposed, the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[ii.185]</a></span>question
+put is not whether they approve or reject the proposition, but whether
+it is conformable to the general will: the general will appears from
+the votes: if the opinion contrary to my own wins the day, that only
+proves that I was mistaken, and that what I took for the general will
+was not really so.<a name="FNanchor_263_263" id="FNanchor_263_263"></a><a href="#Footnote_263_263" class="fnanchor">[263]</a> We can scarcely imagine more nonsensical
+sophistry than this. The proper answer evidently is, that either
+experience or calculation has taught the citizens in a popular
+government that in the long run it is most expedient for the majority
+of votes to decide the law. In other words, the inconvenience to the
+minority of submitting to a law which they dislike, is less than the
+inconvenience of fighting to have their own way, or retiring to form a
+separate community. The minority submit to obey laws which were made
+against their will, because they cannot avoid the necessity of
+undergoing worse inconveniences than are involved in this submission.
+The same explanation partially covers what is unfortunately the more
+frequent case in the history of the race, the submission of the
+majority to the laws imposed by a minority of one or more. In both
+these cases, however, as in the general question of the source of our
+obedience to the laws, deliberate and conscious sense of convenience
+is as slight in its effect upon conduct here, as it is in the rest of
+the field of our moral motives. It is covered too thickly over and
+constantly neutralised by the multitudinous growths of use, by the
+many <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[ii.186]</a></span>forms of fatalistic or ascetic religious sentiment, by physical
+apathy of race, and all other conditions that interpose to narrow or
+abrogate the authority of pure reason over human conduct. Rousseau,
+expounding his conception of a normal political state, was no doubt
+warranted in leaving these complicating conditions out of account,
+though to do so is to rob any treatise on government of much of its
+possible value. The same excuse cannot warrant him in basing his
+political institutions upon a figment, instead of upon the substantial
+ground of propositions about human nature, which the average of
+experience in given races and at given stages of advancement has shown
+to be true within those limits. There are places in his writings where
+he reluctantly admits that men are only moved by their interests, and
+he does not even take care to qualify this sufficiently.<a name="FNanchor_264_264" id="FNanchor_264_264"></a><a href="#Footnote_264_264" class="fnanchor">[264]</a> But
+throughout the Social Contract we seem to be contemplating the
+erection of a machine which is to work without reference to the only
+forces that can possibly impart movement to it.</p>
+
+<p>The consequence of this is that Rousseau gives us not the least help
+towards the solution of any of the problems of actual government,
+because these are naturally both suggested and guided by
+considerations of expediency and improvement. It is as if he had never
+really settled the ends for which government exists, beyond the
+construction of the symmetrical <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[ii.187]</a></span>machine of government itself. He is a
+geometer, not a mechanician; or shall we say that he is a mechanician,
+and not a biologist concerned with the conditions of a living
+organism. The analogy of the body politic to the body natural was as
+present to him as it had been to all other writers on society, but he
+failed to seize the only useful lessons which such an analogy might
+have taught him&#8212;diversity of structure, difference of function,
+development of strength by exercise, growth by nutrition&#8212;all of which
+might have been serviceably translated into the dialect of political
+science, and might have bestowed on his conception of political
+society more of the features of reality. We see no room for the free
+play of divergent forces, the active rivalry of hostile interests, the
+regulated conflict of multifarious personal aims, which can never be
+extinguished, except in moments of driving crisis, by the most sincere
+attachment to the common causes of the land. Thus the modern question
+which is of such vital interest for all the foremost human societies,
+of the union of collective energy with the encouragement of individual
+freedom, is, if not wholly untouched, at least wholly unillumined by
+anything that Rousseau says. To tell us that a man on entering a
+society exchanges his natural liberty for civil liberty which is
+limited by the general will,<a name="FNanchor_265_265" id="FNanchor_265_265"></a><a href="#Footnote_265_265" class="fnanchor">[265]</a> is to give us a phrase, where we
+seek a solution. To say that if it is the opposition of private
+interests which made the establishment of societies necessary, it is
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[ii.188]</a></span>the accord of those interests which makes them possible,<a name="FNanchor_266_266" id="FNanchor_266_266"></a><a href="#Footnote_266_266" class="fnanchor">[266]</a> is to
+utter a truth which feeds no practical curiosity. The opposition of
+private interests remains, in spite of the yoke which their accord has
+imposed upon it, but which only controls and does not suppress such an
+opposition. What sort of control? What degree? What bounds?</p>
+
+<p>So again let us consider the statement that the instant the government
+usurps the sovereignty, then the social pact is broken, and all the
+citizens, restored by right to their natural liberty, are forced but
+not morally obliged to obey.<a name="FNanchor_267_267" id="FNanchor_267_267"></a><a href="#Footnote_267_267" class="fnanchor">[267]</a> He began by telling his readers that
+man, though born free, is now everywhere in chains; and therefore it
+would appear that in all existing cases the social pact has been
+broken, and the citizens living under the reign of force, are free to
+resume their natural liberty, if they are only strong enough to do so.
+This declaration of the general duty of rebellion no doubt had its
+share in generating that fervid eagerness that all other peoples
+should rise and throw off the yoke, which was one of the most
+astonishing anxieties of the French during their revolution. That was
+not the worst quality of such a doctrine. It made government
+impossible, by basing <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[ii.189]</a></span>the right or duty of resistance on a question
+that could not be reached by positive evidence, but must always be
+decided by an arbitrary interpretation of an arbitrarily imagined
+document. The moderate proposition that resistance is lawful if a
+government is a bad one, and if the people are strong enough to
+overthrow it, and if their leaders have reason to suppose they can
+provide a less bad one in its place, supplies tests that are capable
+of application. Our own writers in favour of the doctrine of
+resistance partly based their arguments upon the historic instances of
+the Old Testament, and it is one of the most striking contributions of
+Protestantism to the cause of freedom, that it sent people in an
+admiring spirit to the history of the most rebellious nation that ever
+existed, and so provided them in Hebrew insurgency with a corrective
+for the too submissive political teaching of the Gospel. But these
+writers have throughout a tacit appeal to expediency, as writers might
+always be expected to have, who were really meditating on the
+possibility of their principles being brought to the test of practice.
+There can be no evidence possible, with a test so vague as the fact of
+the rupture of a compact whose terms are authentically known to nobody
+concerned. Speak of bad laws and good, wise administration or unwise,
+just government or unjust, extravagant or economical, civically
+elevating or demoralising; all these are questions which men may apply
+themselves to settle with knowledge, and with a more or less definite
+degree of assurance. But who can tell how he is to find out<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[ii.190]</a></span> whether
+sovereignty has been usurped, and the social compact broken? Was there
+a usurpation of sovereignty in France not many years ago, when the
+assumption of power by the prince was ratified by many millions of
+votes?</p>
+
+<p>The same case, we are told, namely, breach of the social compact and
+restoration of natural liberty, occurs when the members of the
+government usurp separately the power which they ought only to
+exercise in a body.<a name="FNanchor_268_268" id="FNanchor_268_268"></a><a href="#Footnote_268_268" class="fnanchor">[268]</a> Now this description applies very fairly to
+the famous episode in our constitutional history, connected with
+George the Third's first attack of madness in 1788. Parliament cannot
+lawfully begin business without a declaration of the cause of summons
+from the crown. On this occasion parliament both met and deliberated
+without communication from the crown. What was still more important
+was a vote of the parliament itself, authorising the passing of
+letters patent under the great seal for opening parliament by
+commission, and for giving assent to a Regency Bill. This was a
+distinct usurpation of regal authority. Two members of the government
+(in Rousseau's sense of the term), namely the houses of parliament,
+usurped the power which they ought only to have exercised along with
+the crown.<a name="FNanchor_269_269" id="FNanchor_269_269"></a><a href="#Footnote_269_269" class="fnanchor">[269]</a> The Whigs denounced the proceeding as a fiction, a
+forgery, a phantom, but if they had been readers of the Social
+Contract, and if <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[ii.191]</a></span>they had been bitten by its dogmatic temper, they
+would have declared the compact of union violated, and all British
+citizens free to resume their natural rights. Not even the bitter
+virulence of faction at that time could tempt any politician to take
+up such a line, though within half a dozen years each of the
+democratic factions in France had worked at the overthrow of every
+other in turn, on the very principle which Rousseau had formulated and
+Robespierre had made familiar, that usurped authority is a valid
+reason for annihilating a government, no matter under what
+circumstances, nor how small the chance of replacing it by a better,
+nor how enormous the peril to the national well-being in the process.
+The true opposite to so anarchic a doctrine is assuredly not that of
+passive obedience either to chamber or monarch, but the right and duty
+of throwing off any government which inflicts more disadvantages than
+it confers advantages. Rousseau's whole theory tends inevitably to
+substitute a long series of struggles after phrases and shadows in the
+new era, for the equally futile and equally bloody wars of dynastic
+succession which have been the great curse of the old. Men die for a
+phrase as they used to die for a family. The other theory, which all
+English politicians accept in their hearts, and so many commanding
+French politicians have seemed in their hearts to reject, was first
+expounded in direct view of Rousseau's teaching by Paley.<a name="FNanchor_270_270" id="FNanchor_270_270"></a><a href="#Footnote_270_270" class="fnanchor">[270]</a> Of
+course the greatest, widest, and loftiest <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[ii.192]</a></span>exposition of the bearings
+of expediency on government and its conditions, is to be found in the
+magnificent and immortal pieces of Burke, some of them suggested by
+absolutist violations of the doctrine in our own affairs, and some of
+them by anarchic violation of it in the affairs of France, after the
+seed sown by Rousseau had brought forth fruit.</p>
+
+<p>We should, however, be false to our critical principle, if we did not
+recognise the historical effect of a speculation scientifically
+valueless. There has been no attempt to palliate either the
+shallowness or the practical mischievousness of the Social Contract.
+But there is another side to its influence. It was the match which
+kindled revolutionary fire in generous breasts throughout Europe. Not
+in France merely, but in Germany as well, its phrases became the
+language of all who aspired after freedom. Schiller spoke of Rousseau
+as one who &quot;converted Christians into human beings,&quot; and the <i>Robbers</i>
+(1778) is as if it had been directly inspired by the doctrine that
+usurped sovereignty restores men to their natural rights. Smaller men
+in the violent movement which seized all the youth of Germany at that
+time, followed the same lead, if they happened to have any feeling
+about the political condition of their enslaved countries.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[ii.193]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>There was alike in France and Germany a craving for a return to nature
+among the whole of the young generation.<a name="FNanchor_271_271" id="FNanchor_271_271"></a><a href="#Footnote_271_271" class="fnanchor">[271]</a> The Social Contract
+supplied a dialect for this longing on one side, just as the Emilius
+supplied it on another. Such parts in it as people did not understand
+or did not like, they left out. They did not perceive its direction
+towards that &quot;perfect Hobbism,&quot; which the author declared to be the
+only practical alternative to a democracy so austere as to be
+intolerable. They grasped phrases about the sovereignty of the people,
+the freedom for which nature had destined man, the slavery to which
+tyrants and oppressors had brought him. Above all they were struck by
+the patriotism which shines so brightly in every page, like the fire
+on the altar of one of those ancient cities which had inspired the
+writer's ideal.</p>
+
+<p>Yet there is a marked difference in the channels along which
+Rousseau's influence moved in the two countries. In France it was
+drawn eventually into the sphere of direct politics. In Germany it
+inspired not a great political movement, but an immense literary
+revival. In France, as we have already said, the patriotic flame
+seemed extinct. The ruinous disorder of the whole social system made
+the old love of country resemble love for a phantom, and so much of
+patriotic speech as survived was profoundly hollow. <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[ii.194]</a></span>Even a man like
+Turgot was not so much a patriot as a passionate lover of improvement,
+and with the whole school of which this great spirit was the noblest
+and strongest, a generous citizenship of the world had replaced the
+narrower sentiment which had inflamed antique heroism. Rousseau's
+exaltation of the Greek and Roman types in all their concentration and
+intensity, touches mortals of commoner mould. His theory made the
+native land what it had been to the citizens of earlier date, a true
+centre of existence, round which all the interests of the community,
+all its pursuits, all its hopes, grouped themselves with entire
+singleness of convergence, just as religious faith is the centre of
+existence to a church. It was the virile and patriotic energy thus
+evoked which presently saved France from partition.</p>
+
+<p>We complete the estimate of the positive worth and tendencies of the
+Social Contract by adding to this, which was for the time the cardinal
+service, of rekindling the fire of patriotism, the rapid deduction
+from the doctrine of the sovereignty of peoples of the great truth,
+that a nation with a civilised polity does not consist of an order or
+a caste, but of the great body of its members, the army of toilers who
+make the most painful of the sacrifices that are needed for the
+continuous nutrition of the social organisation. As Condorcet put it,
+and he drew inspiration partly from the intellectual school of
+Voltaire, and partly from the social school of Rousseau, all
+institutions ought to have for their aim the physical, intellectual,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[ii.195]</a></span>
+and moral amelioration of the poorest and most numerous class.<a name="FNanchor_272_272" id="FNanchor_272_272"></a><a href="#Footnote_272_272" class="fnanchor">[272]</a>
+This is the People. Second, there gradually followed from the
+important place given by Rousseau to the idea of equal association, as
+at once the foundation and the enduring bond of a community, those
+schemes of Mutualism, and all the other shapes of collective action
+for a common social good, which have possessed such commanding
+attraction for the imagination of large classes of good men in France
+ever since. Hitherto these forms have been sterile and deceptive, and
+they must remain so, until the idea of special function has been
+raised to an equal level of importance with that of united forces
+working together to a single end.</p>
+
+<p>In these ways the author of the Social Contract did involuntarily and
+unconsciously contribute to the growth of those new and progressive
+ideas, in which for his own part he lacked all faith. Pr&#230;-Newtonians
+knew not the wonders of which Newton was to find the key; and so we,
+grown weary of waiting for the master intelligence who may effect the
+final combination of moral and scientific ideas needed for a new
+social era, may be inclined to lend a half-complacent ear to the arid
+sophisters who assume that the last word of civilisation has been
+heard in existing arrangements. But we may perhaps take courage from
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[ii.196]</a></span>history to hope that generations will come, to whom our system of
+distributing among a few the privileges and delights that are procured
+by the toil of the many, will seem just as wasteful, as morally
+hideous, and as scientifically indefensible, as that older system
+which impoverished and depopulated empires, in order that a despot or
+a caste might have no least wish ungratified, for which the lives or
+the hard-won treasure of others could suffice.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_176_176" id="Footnote_176_176"></a><a href="#FNanchor_176_176"><span class="label">[176]</span></a> <i>Cont. Soc.</i>, I. viii.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_177_177" id="Footnote_177_177"></a><a href="#FNanchor_177_177"><span class="label">[177]</span></a> <i>Cont. Soc.</i>, II. xi. He had written in much the same
+sense in his article on Political Economy in the Encyclop&#230;dia, p. 34.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_178_178" id="Footnote_178_178"></a><a href="#FNanchor_178_178"><span class="label">[178]</span></a> Robespierre disclaimed the intention of attacking
+property, and took up a position like that of Rousseau&#8212;teaching the
+poor contempt for the rich, not envy. &quot;I do not want to touch your
+treasures,&quot; he cried, on one occasion, &quot;however impure their source.
+It is far more an object of concern to me to make poverty honourable,
+than to proscribe wealth; the thatched hut of Fabricius never need
+envy the palace of Crassus. I should be at least as content, for my
+own part, to be one of the sons of Aristides, brought up in the
+Prytaneium at the public expense, as the heir presumptive of Xerxes,
+born in the mire of royal courts, to sit on a throne decorated by the
+abasement of the people, and glittering with the public misery.&quot;
+Quoted in Malon's <i>Expos&#233; des Ecoles Socialistes fran&#231;aises</i>, 15.
+Baboeuf carried Rousseau's sentiments further towards their natural
+conclusion by such propositions as these: &quot;The goal of the revolution
+is to destroy inequality, and to re-establish the happiness of all.&quot;
+&quot;The revolution is not finished, because the rich absorb all the
+property, and hold exclusive power; while the poor toil like born
+slaves, languish in wretchedness, and are nothing in the state.&quot;
+<i>Expos&#233; des Ecoles Socialistes fran&#231;aises</i>, p. 29.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_179_179" id="Footnote_179_179"></a><a href="#FNanchor_179_179"><span class="label">[179]</span></a> <i>Cont. Soc.</i>, II. xi.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_180_180" id="Footnote_180_180"></a><a href="#FNanchor_180_180"><span class="label">[180]</span></a> <i>Cont. Soc.</i>, I. iv.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_181_181" id="Footnote_181_181"></a><a href="#FNanchor_181_181"><span class="label">[181]</span></a> <i>Ib.</i>, II. vii.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_182_182" id="Footnote_182_182"></a><a href="#FNanchor_182_182"><span class="label">[182]</span></a> Ch. vi. (vol. v. 371; edit. 1801).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_183_183" id="Footnote_183_183"></a><a href="#FNanchor_183_183"><span class="label">[183]</span></a> Ch. vii. (p. 383.)</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_184_184" id="Footnote_184_184"></a><a href="#FNanchor_184_184"><span class="label">[184]</span></a> Goguet, in his <i>Origine des Lois, des Arts, et des
+Sciences</i> (1758), really attempted as laboriously as possible to carry
+out a notion of the historical method, but the fact that history
+itself at that time had never been subjected to scientific examination
+made his effort valueless. He accumulates testimony which would be
+excellent evidence, if only it had been sifted, and had come out of
+the process substantially undiminished. Yet even Goguet, who thus
+carefully followed the accounts of early societies given in the Bible
+and other monuments, intersperses abstract general statements about
+man being born free and independent (i. 25), and entering society as
+the result of deliberate reflection.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_185_185" id="Footnote_185_185"></a><a href="#FNanchor_185_185"><span class="label">[185]</span></a> <i>Cont. Soc.</i>, II. xi. Also III. viii.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_186_186" id="Footnote_186_186"></a><a href="#FNanchor_186_186"><span class="label">[186]</span></a> II. xi. Also ch. viii.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_187_187" id="Footnote_187_187"></a><a href="#FNanchor_187_187"><span class="label">[187]</span></a> II. viii.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_188_188" id="Footnote_188_188"></a><a href="#FNanchor_188_188"><span class="label">[188]</span></a> II. ix.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_189_189" id="Footnote_189_189"></a><a href="#FNanchor_189_189"><span class="label">[189]</span></a> <i>Politics</i>, VII. iv. 8, 10.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_190_190" id="Footnote_190_190"></a><a href="#FNanchor_190_190"><span class="label">[190]</span></a> <i>Cont. Soc.</i>, II. x.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_191_191" id="Footnote_191_191"></a><a href="#FNanchor_191_191"><span class="label">[191]</span></a> Plato's <i>Laws</i>, v. 737.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_192_192" id="Footnote_192_192"></a><a href="#FNanchor_192_192"><span class="label">[192]</span></a> <i>Ib.</i>, iv. 705.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_193_193" id="Footnote_193_193"></a><a href="#FNanchor_193_193"><span class="label">[193]</span></a> <i>Projet de Constitution pour la Corse</i>, p. 75.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_194_194" id="Footnote_194_194"></a><a href="#FNanchor_194_194"><span class="label">[194]</span></a> <i>Gouvernement de Pologne</i>, ch. xi.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_195_195" id="Footnote_195_195"></a><a href="#FNanchor_195_195"><span class="label">[195]</span></a> <i>Cont. Soc.</i>, II. vii.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_196_196" id="Footnote_196_196"></a><a href="#FNanchor_196_196"><span class="label">[196]</span></a> Goguet was much nearer to a true conception of this
+kind; see, for instance, <i>Origine des Lois</i>, i. 46.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_197_197" id="Footnote_197_197"></a><a href="#FNanchor_197_197"><span class="label">[197]</span></a> Decree of the Committee, April 20, 1794, reported by
+Billaud-Varennes. Compare ch. iv. of Rousseau's <i>Consid&#233;rations sur le
+Gouvernement de Pologne</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_198_198" id="Footnote_198_198"></a><a href="#FNanchor_198_198"><span class="label">[198]</span></a> Here are some of Saint Just's regulations:&#8212;No
+servants, nor gold or silver vessels; no child under 16 to eat meat,
+nor any adult to eat meat on three days of the decade; boys at the age
+of 7 to be handed over to the school of the nation, where they were to
+be brought up to speak little, to endure hardships, and to train for
+war; divorce to be free to all; friendship ordained a public
+institution, every citizen on coming to majority being bound to
+proclaim his friends, and if he had none, then to be banished; if one
+committed a crime, his friends were to be banished. Quoted in Von
+Sybel's <i>Hist. French Rev.</i>, iv. 49. When Morelly dreamed his dream of
+a model community in 1754 (see above, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.158">vol. i. p. 158</a>) he little
+supposed, one would think, that within forty years a man would be so
+near trying the experiment in France as Saint Just was. Baboeuf is
+pronounced by La Harpe to have been inspired by the Code de la Nature,
+which La Harpe impudently set down to Diderot, on whom every great
+destructive piece was systematically fathered.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_199_199" id="Footnote_199_199"></a><a href="#FNanchor_199_199"><span class="label">[199]</span></a> I forget where I have read the story of some member of
+the Convention being very angry because the library contained no copy
+of the laws which Minos gave to the Cretans.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_200_200" id="Footnote_200_200"></a><a href="#FNanchor_200_200"><span class="label">[200]</span></a> III. xiii.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_201_201" id="Footnote_201_201"></a><a href="#FNanchor_201_201"><span class="label">[201]</span></a> III. xv. He actually recommended the Poles to pay all
+public functionaries in kind, and to have the public works executed on
+the system of corv&#233;e. <i>Gouvernement de Pologne</i>, ch. xi.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_202_202" id="Footnote_202_202"></a><a href="#FNanchor_202_202"><span class="label">[202]</span></a> <i>Cont. Soc.</i>, III. ii.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_203_203" id="Footnote_203_203"></a><a href="#FNanchor_203_203"><span class="label">[203]</span></a> II. i.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_204_204" id="Footnote_204_204"></a><a href="#FNanchor_204_204"><span class="label">[204]</span></a> II. ii.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_205_205" id="Footnote_205_205"></a><a href="#FNanchor_205_205"><span class="label">[205]</span></a> III. i.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_206_206" id="Footnote_206_206"></a><a href="#FNanchor_206_206"><span class="label">[206]</span></a> II. vi.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_207_207" id="Footnote_207_207"></a><a href="#FNanchor_207_207"><span class="label">[207]</span></a> II. iv.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_208_208" id="Footnote_208_208"></a><a href="#FNanchor_208_208"><span class="label">[208]</span></a> IV. vi.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_209_209" id="Footnote_209_209"></a><a href="#FNanchor_209_209"><span class="label">[209]</span></a> <i>Economie Politique</i>, p. 30.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_210_210" id="Footnote_210_210"></a><a href="#FNanchor_210_210"><span class="label">[210]</span></a> <i>M&#233;langes</i>, p. 310.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_211_211" id="Footnote_211_211"></a><a href="#FNanchor_211_211"><span class="label">[211]</span></a> See for instance Green's <i>History of the English
+People</i>, i. 266.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_212_212" id="Footnote_212_212"></a><a href="#FNanchor_212_212"><span class="label">[212]</span></a> <i>Summa</i>, xc.-cviii. (1265-1273). See Maurice's <i>Moral
+and Metaphysical Philosophy</i>, i. 627, 628. Also Franck's <i>R&#233;formateurs
+et Publicistes de l'Europe</i>, p. 48, etc.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_213_213" id="Footnote_213_213"></a><a href="#FNanchor_213_213"><span class="label">[213]</span></a> <i>Defensor Pacis</i>, Pt. I., ch. xii. This, again, is an
+example of Marsilio's position:&#8212;&quot;Convenerunt enim homines ad civilem
+communicationem propter commodum et vit&#230; sufficientiam consequendam,
+et opposita declinandum. Qu&#230; igitur omnium tangere possunt commodum et
+incommodum, ab omnibus sciri debent et audiri, ut commodum assequi et
+oppositum repellere possint.&quot; The whole chapter is a most interesting
+anticipation, partly due to the influence of Aristotle, of the notions
+of later centuries.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_214_214" id="Footnote_214_214"></a><a href="#FNanchor_214_214"><span class="label">[214]</span></a> See Bayle's Dict., s.v. <i>Althusius</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_215_215" id="Footnote_215_215"></a><a href="#FNanchor_215_215"><span class="label">[215]</span></a> <i>Lettres de la Montagne</i>, I. vi. 388.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_216_216" id="Footnote_216_216"></a><a href="#FNanchor_216_216"><span class="label">[216]</span></a> <i>Eccles. Polity</i>, Bk. i.; bks. i.-iv., 1594; bk. v.,
+1597; bks. vi.-viii., 1647,&#8212;being forty-seven years after the
+author's death.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_217_217" id="Footnote_217_217"></a><a href="#FNanchor_217_217"><span class="label">[217]</span></a> Goguet (<i>Origine des Lois</i>, i. 22) dwells on tacit
+conventions as a kind of engagement to which men commit themselves
+with extreme facility. He was thus rather near the true idea of the
+spontaneous origin and unconscious acceptance of early institutions.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_218_218" id="Footnote_218_218"></a><a href="#FNanchor_218_218"><span class="label">[218]</span></a> Of Civil Government, ch. xiii. See also ch. xi. &quot;This
+legislative is not only the supreme power of the commonwealth, but
+sacred and unalterable in the hands where the community have once
+placed it; nor can any edict of anybody else, in what form soever
+conceived, or by what power soever backed, have the force and
+obligation of a law, which has not its sanction from that legislative
+which the public has chosen and appointed; for without this the law
+could not have that which is absolutely necessary to its being a
+law&#8212;the consent of the society; over whom nobody can have a power to
+make laws, but by their own consent, and by authority received from
+them.&quot; If Rousseau had found no neater expression for his doctrine
+than this, the Social Contract would assuredly have been no
+explosive.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_219_219" id="Footnote_219_219"></a><a href="#FNanchor_219_219"><span class="label">[219]</span></a> See especially ch. viii.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_220_220" id="Footnote_220_220"></a><a href="#FNanchor_220_220"><span class="label">[220]</span></a> Hence the antipathy of the clergy, catholic,
+episcopalian, and presbyterian, to which, as Austin has pointed out
+(<i>Syst. of Jurisprudence</i>, i. 288, <i>n.</i>), Hobbes mainly owes his bad
+repute.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_221_221" id="Footnote_221_221"></a><a href="#FNanchor_221_221"><span class="label">[221]</span></a> See Diderot's article on <i>Hobbisme</i> in the
+Encyclop&#230;dia, <i>Oeuv.</i>, xv. 122.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_222_222" id="Footnote_222_222"></a><a href="#FNanchor_222_222"><span class="label">[222]</span></a> <i>Esprit des Lois</i>, I. i.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_223_223" id="Footnote_223_223"></a><a href="#FNanchor_223_223"><span class="label">[223]</span></a> <i>Cont. Soc.</i>, II. vi. 50.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_224_224" id="Footnote_224_224"></a><a href="#FNanchor_224_224"><span class="label">[224]</span></a> Goguet has the merit of seeing distinctly that command
+is the essence of law.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_225_225" id="Footnote_225_225"></a><a href="#FNanchor_225_225"><span class="label">[225]</span></a> <i>Cont. Soc.</i>, II. vi. 51-53. See Austin's
+<i>Jurisprudence</i>, i. 95, etc.; also <i>Lettres &#233;crites de la Montagne</i>,
+I. vi. 380, 381.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_226_226" id="Footnote_226_226"></a><a href="#FNanchor_226_226"><span class="label">[226]</span></a> See, for instance, letter to Mirabeau (<i>l'ami des
+hommes</i>), July 26, 1767. <i>Corr.</i>, v. 179. The same letter contains his
+criticism on the good despot of the Economists.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_227_227" id="Footnote_227_227"></a><a href="#FNanchor_227_227"><span class="label">[227]</span></a> <i>L'Ordre Naturel et Essentiel des Soci&#233;t&#233;s Politiques</i>
+(1767). By Mercier de la Rivi&#232;re. One episode in the life of Mercier
+de la Rivi&#232;re is worth recounting, as closely connected with the
+subject we are discussing. Just as Corsicans and Poles applied to
+Rousseau, Catherine of Russia, in consequence of her admiration for
+Rivi&#232;re's book, summoned him to Russia to assist her in making laws.
+&quot;Sir,&quot; said the Czarina, &quot;could you point out to me the best means for
+the good government of a state?&quot; &quot;Madame, there is only one way, and
+that is being just; in other words, in keeping order and exacting
+obedience to the laws.&quot; &quot;But on what base is it best to make the laws
+of an empire repose?&quot; &quot;There is only one base, Madame: the nature of
+things and of men.&quot; &quot;Just so; but when you wish to give laws to a
+people, what are the rules which indicate most surely such laws as are
+most suitable?&quot; &quot;To give or make laws, Madame, is a task that God has
+left to none. Ah, who is the man that should think himself capable of
+dictating laws for beings that he does not know, or knows so ill? And
+by what right can he impose laws on beings whom God has never placed
+in his hands?&quot; &quot;To what, then, do you reduce the science of
+government?&quot; &quot;To studying carefully; recognising and setting forth the
+laws which God has graven so manifestly in the very organisation of
+men, when he called them into existence. To wish to go any further
+would be a great misfortune and a most destructive undertaking.&quot; &quot;Sir,
+I am very pleased to have heard what you have to say; I wish you good
+day.&quot; Quoted from Thi&#233;bault's <i>Souvenirs de Berlin</i>, in M. Daire's
+edition of the <i>Physiocrates</i>, ii. 432.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_228_228" id="Footnote_228_228"></a><a href="#FNanchor_228_228"><span class="label">[228]</span></a> <i>Cont. Soc.</i>, II. vii.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_229_229" id="Footnote_229_229"></a><a href="#FNanchor_229_229"><span class="label">[229]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>, v. 181.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_230_230" id="Footnote_230_230"></a><a href="#FNanchor_230_230"><span class="label">[230]</span></a> <i>Cont. Soc.</i>, I. v., vi., vii.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_231_231" id="Footnote_231_231"></a><a href="#FNanchor_231_231"><span class="label">[231]</span></a> <i>Leviathan</i>, II., ch. xviii. vol. iii. 159
+(Molesworth's edition).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_232_232" id="Footnote_232_232"></a><a href="#FNanchor_232_232"><span class="label">[232]</span></a> <i>Cont. Soc.</i>, III. xvi.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_233_233" id="Footnote_233_233"></a><a href="#FNanchor_233_233"><span class="label">[233]</span></a> <i>Civil Government</i>, ch. viii. &#167; 99.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_234_234" id="Footnote_234_234"></a><a href="#FNanchor_234_234"><span class="label">[234]</span></a> I. vi. Especially the footnote.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_235_235" id="Footnote_235_235"></a><a href="#FNanchor_235_235"><span class="label">[235]</span></a> <i>Cont. Soc.</i>, II. i.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_236_236" id="Footnote_236_236"></a><a href="#FNanchor_236_236"><span class="label">[236]</span></a> <i>Syst. of Jurisprudence</i>, i. 256.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_237_237" id="Footnote_237_237"></a><a href="#FNanchor_237_237"><span class="label">[237]</span></a> <i>Cont. Soc.</i>, III. xv. 137. It was not long, however,
+before Rousseau found reason to alter his opinion in this respect. The
+champions of the Council at Geneva compared the <i>droit n&#233;gatif</i>, in
+the exercise of which the Council had refused to listen to the
+representations of Rousseau's partisans (see above, vol. ii. p.
+  <a href="#Page_105">105</a>)
+to the right of veto possessed by the crown in Great Britain. Rousseau
+seized upon this egregious blunder, which confused the power of
+refusing assent to a proposed law, with the power of refusing justice
+under law already passed. He at once found illustrations of the
+difference, first in the case of the printers of No. 45 of the <i>North
+Briton</i>, who brought actions for false imprisonment (1763), and next
+in the proceedings against Wilkes at the same time. If Wilkes, said
+Rousseau, had written, printed, published, or said, one-fourth against
+the Lesser Council at Geneva of what he said, wrote, printed, and
+published openly in London against the court and the government, he
+would have been heavily punished, and most likely put to death. And so
+forth, until he has proved very pungently how different degrees of
+freedom are enjoyed in Geneva and in England. <i>Lettres &#233;crites de la
+Montague</i>, ix. 491-500. When he wrote this he was unaware that the
+Triennial Act had long been replaced by the Septennial Act of the 1
+Geo. I. On finding out, as he did afterwards, that a parliament could
+sit for seven years, he thought as meanly of our liberty as ever.
+<i>Consid&#233;rations sur les gouvernement de Pologne</i>, ch. vii. 253-260. In
+his <i>Projet de Constitution pour la Corse</i>, p. 113, he says that &quot;the
+English do not love liberty for itself, but because it is most
+favourable to money-making.&quot;</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_238_238" id="Footnote_238_238"></a><a href="#FNanchor_238_238"><span class="label">[238]</span></a> III., xi., xii., and xiii.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_239_239" id="Footnote_239_239"></a><a href="#FNanchor_239_239"><span class="label">[239]</span></a> Mr. Freeman's <i>Growth of the English Constitution</i>, c.
+i.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_240_240" id="Footnote_240_240"></a><a href="#FNanchor_240_240"><span class="label">[240]</span></a> <i>Cont. Soc.</i>, III. xv. 140. A small manuscript
+containing his ideas on confederation was given by Rousseau to the
+Count d'Antraigues (afterwards an <i>&#233;migr&#233;</i>), who destroyed it in 1789,
+lest its arguments should be used to sap the royal authority. See
+extract from his pamphlet, prefixed to M. Auguis's edition of the
+Social Contract, pp. xxiii, xxiv.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_241_241" id="Footnote_241_241"></a><a href="#FNanchor_241_241"><span class="label">[241]</span></a> <i>Gouvernement de Pologne</i>, v. 246.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_242_242" id="Footnote_242_242"></a><a href="#FNanchor_242_242"><span class="label">[242]</span></a> Of course no such modification as that proposed by
+Comte (<i>Politique Positive</i>, iv. 421) would come within the scope of
+the doctrine of the Social Contract. For each of the seventeen
+Intendances into which Comte divides France, is to be ruled by a
+chief, &quot;always appointed and removed by the central power.&quot; There is
+no room for the sovereignty of the people here, even in things
+parochial.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_243_243" id="Footnote_243_243"></a><a href="#FNanchor_243_243"><span class="label">[243]</span></a> There was one extraordinary instance during the
+revolution of attempting to make popular government direct on
+Rousseau's principle, in the scheme (1790) of which Danton was a chief
+supporter, for reorganising the municipal administration of Paris. The
+assemblies of sections were to sit permanently; their vote was to be
+taken on current questions; and action was to follow the aggregate of
+their degrees. See Von Sybel's <i>Hist. Fr. Rev.</i> i. 275; M. Louis
+Blanc's <i>History</i>, Bk. III. ch. ii.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_244_244" id="Footnote_244_244"></a><a href="#FNanchor_244_244"><span class="label">[244]</span></a> This was also Bodin's definition of an aristocratic
+state; &quot;si minor pars civium c&#230;teris imperat.&quot;</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_245_245" id="Footnote_245_245"></a><a href="#FNanchor_245_245"><span class="label">[245]</span></a> <i>Politics</i>, III. vi.-vii.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_246_246" id="Footnote_246_246"></a><a href="#FNanchor_246_246"><span class="label">[246]</span></a> <i>Esprit des Lois</i>, II. i. ii.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_247_247" id="Footnote_247_247"></a><a href="#FNanchor_247_247"><span class="label">[247]</span></a> Rousseau gave the name of <i>tyrant</i> to a usurper of
+royal authority in a kingdom, and <i>despot</i> to a usurper of the
+sovereign authority (<i>i.e.</i> <span lang="el" title="Greek: tyrannos">&#964;&#965;&#961;&#945;&#957;&#957;&#959;&#962;</span> in the Greek sense). The
+former might govern according to the laws, but the latter placed
+himself above the laws (<i>Cont. Soc.</i>, III. x.) This corresponded to
+Locke's distinction: &quot;As usurpation is the exercise of power which
+another hath a right to, so tyranny is the exercise of a power beyond
+right, which nobody can have a right to.&quot; <i>Civil Gov.</i>, ch. xviii.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_248_248" id="Footnote_248_248"></a><a href="#FNanchor_248_248"><span class="label">[248]</span></a> III. iv.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_249_249" id="Footnote_249_249"></a><a href="#FNanchor_249_249"><span class="label">[249]</span></a> III. vi.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_250_250" id="Footnote_250_250"></a><a href="#FNanchor_250_250"><span class="label">[250]</span></a> III. v.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_251_251" id="Footnote_251_251"></a><a href="#FNanchor_251_251"><span class="label">[251]</span></a> <i>Cont. Soc.</i>, IV. viii.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_252_252" id="Footnote_252_252"></a><a href="#FNanchor_252_252"><span class="label">[252]</span></a> <i>Cont. Soc.</i>, IV. viii. 197-201.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_253_253" id="Footnote_253_253"></a><a href="#FNanchor_253_253"><span class="label">[253]</span></a> This is not unlike what Tocqueville says somewhere,
+that Christianity bids you render unto C&#230;sar the things that are
+C&#230;sar's, but seems to discourage any inquiry whether C&#230;sar is an
+usurper or a lawful ruler.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_254_254" id="Footnote_254_254"></a><a href="#FNanchor_254_254"><span class="label">[254]</span></a> <i>Cont. Soc.</i>, IV. viii. 203. As we have already seen,
+he had entreated Voltaire, of all men in the world, to draw up a civil
+profession of faith. See <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.318">vol. i. 318</a>.
+</p><p>
+In the New Helo&#239;sa (V. v. 117, <i>n.</i>) Rousseau expresses his opinion
+that &quot;no true believer could be intolerant or a persecutor. <i>If I were
+a magistrate, and if the law pronounced the penalty of death against
+atheists, I would begin by burning as such whoever should come to
+inform against another.</i>&quot;</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_255_255" id="Footnote_255_255"></a><a href="#FNanchor_255_255"><span class="label">[255]</span></a> Plato's <i>Laws</i>, Bk. x. 909, etc.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_256_256" id="Footnote_256_256"></a><a href="#FNanchor_256_256"><span class="label">[256]</span></a> <i>Areopagitica</i>, p. 417. (Edit. 1867.)</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_257_257" id="Footnote_257_257"></a><a href="#FNanchor_257_257"><span class="label">[257]</span></a> See a speech of his, which is Rousseau's &quot;civil faith&quot;
+done into rhetoric, given in M. Louis Blanc's <i>Hist. de la R&#233;v.
+Fran&#231;aise</i>, Bk. x. c. xiv.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_258_258" id="Footnote_258_258"></a><a href="#FNanchor_258_258"><span class="label">[258]</span></a> <i>Consid&#233;rations sur le gouvernement ancien et pr&#233;sent
+de la France</i> (1764). Quoted by Rousseau from a manuscript copy.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_259_259" id="Footnote_259_259"></a><a href="#FNanchor_259_259"><span class="label">[259]</span></a> <i>Leviathan</i>, ch. xliii. 601. Also ch. xlii.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_260_260" id="Footnote_260_260"></a><a href="#FNanchor_260_260"><span class="label">[260]</span></a> <i>Cont. Soc.</i>, III. xi. Borrowed from Hobbes, who said,
+&quot;Magnus ille Leviathan qu&#230; civitas appellatur, opificium artis est.&quot;</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_261_261" id="Footnote_261_261"></a><a href="#FNanchor_261_261"><span class="label">[261]</span></a> Mackintosh's.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_262_262" id="Footnote_262_262"></a><a href="#FNanchor_262_262"><span class="label">[262]</span></a> <i>Cont. Soc.</i>, II. v.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_263_263" id="Footnote_263_263"></a><a href="#FNanchor_263_263"><span class="label">[263]</span></a> IV. ii.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_264_264" id="Footnote_264_264"></a><a href="#FNanchor_264_264"><span class="label">[264]</span></a> For instance, <i>Gouvernement de la Pologne</i>, ch. xi. p.
+305. And <i>Corr.</i>, v. 180.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_265_265" id="Footnote_265_265"></a><a href="#FNanchor_265_265"><span class="label">[265]</span></a> <i>Cont. Soc.</i>, I. viii.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_266_266" id="Footnote_266_266"></a><a href="#FNanchor_266_266"><span class="label">[266]</span></a> <i>Cont. Soc.</i>, II. i.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_267_267" id="Footnote_267_267"></a><a href="#FNanchor_267_267"><span class="label">[267]</span></a> <i>Ib.</i>, III. x. &quot;Let every individual who may usurp the
+sovereignty be instantly put to death by free men.&quot; Robespierre's
+<i>D&#233;claration des droits de l'homme</i>, &#167; 27. &quot;When the government
+violates the rights of the people, insurrection becomes for the people
+the most sacred of rights and the most indispensable of duties.&quot; &#167;
+35.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_268_268" id="Footnote_268_268"></a><a href="#FNanchor_268_268"><span class="label">[268]</span></a> <i>Cont. Soc.</i>, III. x.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_269_269" id="Footnote_269_269"></a><a href="#FNanchor_269_269"><span class="label">[269]</span></a> See May's <i>Constitutional Hist. of England</i>, ch. iii;
+and Lord Stanhope's <i>Life of Pitt</i>, vol. ii. ch. xii.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_270_270" id="Footnote_270_270"></a><a href="#FNanchor_270_270"><span class="label">[270]</span></a> In the 6th book of the <i>Moral Philosophy</i> (1785), ch.
+iii., and elsewhere. In the preface he refers to the effect which
+Rousseau's political theory was supposed to have had in the civil
+convulsions of Geneva, as one of the reasons which encouraged him to
+publish his own book.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_271_271" id="Footnote_271_271"></a><a href="#FNanchor_271_271"><span class="label">[271]</span></a> One side of this was the passion for geographical
+exploration which took possession of Europe towards the middle of the
+eighteenth century. See the <i>Life of Humboldt</i>, i. 28, 29. (<i>Eng.
+Trans.</i> by Lassell.)</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_272_272" id="Footnote_272_272"></a><a href="#FNanchor_272_272"><span class="label">[272]</span></a> Rousseau's influence on Condorcet is seen in the
+latter's maxim, which has found such favour in the eyes of socialist
+writers, that &quot;not only equality of right, but equality of fact, is
+the goal of the social art.&quot;</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[ii.197]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IV" id="CHAPTER_IV"></a>CHAPTER IV.</h2>
+
+<h3>EMILIUS.</h3>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">One</span> whose most intense conviction was faith in the goodness
+of all things and creatures as they are first produced by nature, and
+so long as they remain unsophisticated by the hand and purpose of man,
+was in some degree bound to show a way by which this evil process of
+sophistication might be brought to the lowest possible point, and the
+best of all natural creatures kept as near as possible to his high
+original. Rousseau, it is true, held in a sense of his own the
+doctrine of the fall of man. That doctrine, however, has never made
+people any more remiss in the search after a virtue, which if they
+ought to have regarded it as hopeless according to strict logic, is
+still indispensable in actual life. Rousseau's way of believing that
+man had fallen was so coloured at once by that expansion of sanguine
+emotion which marked his century, and by that necessity for repose in
+idyllic perfection of simplicity which marked his own temperament,
+that enthusiasm for an imaginary human creature effectually shut out
+the dogma of his fatal depravation. &quot;How difficult a thing it is,&quot;
+Madame<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[ii.198]</a></span> d'Epinay once said to him, &quot;to bring up a child.&quot; &quot;Assuredly
+it is,&quot; answered Rousseau; &quot;because the father and mother are not made
+by nature to bring it up, nor the child to be brought up.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_273_273" id="FNanchor_273_273"></a><a href="#Footnote_273_273" class="fnanchor">[273]</a> This
+cynical speech can only have been an accidental outbreak of spleen. It
+was a contradiction to his one constant opinion that nature is all
+good and bounteous, and that the inborn capacity of man for reaching
+true happiness knows no stint.</p>
+
+<p>In writing Emilius, he sat down to consider what man is, and what can
+be made of him. Here, as in all the rest of his work, he only obeyed
+the tendencies of his time in choosing a theme. An age touched by the
+spirit of hope inevitably turns to the young; for with the young lies
+fulfilment. Such epochs are ever pressing with the question, how is
+the future to be shaped? Our answer depends on the theory of human
+disposition, and in these epochs the theory is always optimistic.
+Rousseau was saved, as so many thousands of men have been alike in
+conduct and speculation, by inconsistency, and not shrinking from two
+mutually contradictory trains of thought. Society is corrupt, and
+society is the work of man. Yet man, who has engendered this corrupted
+birth, is good and whole. The strain in the argument may be pardoned
+for the hopefulness of the conclusion. It brought Rousseau into
+harmony with the eager effort of the time to pour young character into
+finer mould, and made him the most powerful agent in giving to such
+efforts both <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[ii.199]</a></span>fervour and elevation. While others were content with
+the mere enunciation of maxims and precepts, he breathed into them the
+spirit of life, and enforced them with a vividness of faith that
+clothed education with the augustness and unction of religion. The
+training of the young soul to virtue was surrounded with something of
+the awful holiness of a sacrament; and those who laboured in this
+sanctified field were exhorted to a constancy of devotion, and were
+promised a fulness of recompense, that raised them from the rank of
+drudges to a place of highest honour among the ministers of nature.</p>
+
+<p>Everybody at this time was thinking about education, partly perhaps on
+account of the suppression of the Jesuits, the chief instructors of
+the time, and a great many people were writing about it. The Abb&#233; de
+Saint Pierre had had new ideas on education, as on all the greater
+departments of human interest. Madame d'Epinay wrote considerations
+upon the bringing up of the young.<a name="FNanchor_274_274" id="FNanchor_274_274"></a><a href="#Footnote_274_274" class="fnanchor">[274]</a> Madame de Grafigny did the
+same in a less grave shape.<a name="FNanchor_275_275" id="FNanchor_275_275"></a><a href="#Footnote_275_275" class="fnanchor">[275]</a> She received letters from the
+precociously sage Turgot, abounding in the same natural and sensible
+precepts which ten years later were commended with more glowing
+eloquence in the pages of Emilius.<a name="FNanchor_276_276" id="FNanchor_276_276"></a><a href="#Footnote_276_276" class="fnanchor">[276]</a> Grimm had an elaborate scheme
+for a treatise on education.<a name="FNanchor_277_277" id="FNanchor_277_277"></a><a href="#Footnote_277_277" class="fnanchor">[277]</a> Helv&#233;tius followed <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[ii.200]</a></span>his exploration
+of the composition of the human mind, by a treatise on the training
+proper for the intellectual and moral faculties. Education by these
+and other writers was being conceived in a wider sense than had been
+known to ages controlled by ecclesiastical collegians. It slowly came
+to be thought of in connection with the family. The improvement of
+ideas upon education was only one phase of that great general movement
+towards the restoration of the family, which was so striking a
+spectacle in France after the middle of the century. Education now
+came to comprehend the whole system of the relations between parents
+and their children, from earliest infancy to maturity. The direction
+of this wider feeling about such relations tended strongly towards an
+increased closeness in them, more intimacy, and a more continuous
+suffusion of tenderness and long attachment. All this was part of the
+general revival of naturalism. People began to reflect that nature was
+not likely to have designed infants to be suckled by other women than
+their own mothers, nor that they should be banished from the society
+of those who are most concerned in their well-being, from the cheerful
+hearth and wise affectionate converse of home, to the frigid
+discipline of colleges and convents and the unamiable monition of
+strangers.</p>
+
+<p>Then the rising rebellion against the church and its faith perhaps
+contributed something towards a movement which, if it could not break
+the religious monopoly of instruction, must at least introduce the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[ii.201]</a></span>
+parent as a competitor with the priestly instructor for influence over
+the ideas, habits, and affections of his children. The rebellion was
+aimed against the spirit as well as the manner of the established
+system. The church had not fundamentally modified the significance of
+the dogma of the fall and depravity of man; education was still
+conceived as a process of eradication and suppression of the mystical
+old Adam. The new current flowed in channels far away from that black
+folly of superstition. Men at length ventured once more to look at one
+another with free and generous gaze. The veil of the temple was rent,
+and the false mockeries of the shrine of the Hebrew divinity made
+plain to scornful eyes. People ceased to see one another as guilty
+victims cowering under a divine curse. They stood erect in
+consciousness of manhood. The palsied conception of man, with his
+large discourse of reason looking before and after, his lofty and
+majestic patience in search for new forms of beauty and new secrets of
+truth, his sense of the manifold sweetness and glory and awe of the
+universe, above all, his infinite capacity of loyal pity and love for
+his comrades in the great struggle, and his high sorrow for his own
+wrong-doing,&#8212;the palsied and crushing conception of this excellent
+and helpful being as a poor worm, writhing under the vindictive and
+meaningless anger of an omnipotent tyrant in the large heavens, only
+to be appeased by sacerdotal intervention, was fading back into those
+regions of night, whence the depth of human misery and the
+obscura<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[ii.202]</a></span>tion of human intelligence had once permitted its escape, to
+hang evilly over the western world for a season. So vital a change in
+the point of view quickly touched the theory and art of the upbringing
+of the young. Education began to figure less as the suppression of the
+natural man, than his strengthening and development; less as a process
+of rooting out tares, more as the grateful tending of shoots abounding
+in promise of richness. What had been the most drearily mechanical of
+duties, was transformed into a task that surpassed all others in
+interest and hope. If man be born not bad but good, under no curse,
+but rather the bestower and receiver of many blessings, then the
+entire atmosphere of young life, in spite of the toil and the peril,
+is made cheerful with the sunshine and warmth of the great folded
+possibilities of excellence, happiness, and well-doing.</p>
+
+
+<p style="text-align: center"><b>I.</b></p>
+
+<p>Locke in education, as in metaphysics and in politics, was the pioneer
+of French thought. In education there is less room for scientific
+originality. The sage of a parish, provided only she began her trade
+with an open and energetic mind, may here pass philosophers. Locke was
+nearly as sage, as homely, as real, as one of these strenuous women.
+The honest plainness of certain of his prescriptions for the
+preservation of physical health perhaps keeps us somewhat too near the
+earth. His manner throughout is marked<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[ii.203]</a></span> by the stout wisdom of the
+practical teacher, who is content to assume good sense in his hearers,
+and feels no necessity for kindling a blaze or raising a tempest. He
+gives us a practical manual for producing a healthy, instructed,
+upright, well-mannered young English squire, who shall be rightly
+fitted to take his own life sensibly in hand, and procure from it a
+fair amount of wholesome satisfaction both for himself and the people
+with whom he is concerned. Locke's treatise is one of the most
+admirable protests in the world against effeminacy and pedantry, and
+parents already moved by grave desire to do their duty prudently to
+their sons, will hardly find another book better suited to their ends.
+Besides Locke, we must also count Charron, and the amazing educator of
+Gargantua, and Montaigne before either, among the writers whom
+Rousseau had read, with that profit and increase which attends the
+dropping of the good ideas of other men into fertile minds.</p>
+
+<p>There is an immense class of natures, and those not the lowest, which
+the connection of duty with mere prudence does not carry far enough.
+They only stir when something has moved their feeling for the ideal,
+and raised the mechanical offices of the narrow day into association
+with the spaciousness and height of spiritual things. To these
+Rousseau came. For both the tenour and the wording of the most
+striking precepts of the Emilius, he owes much to Locke. But what was
+so realistic in him becomes blended in Rousseau with all the power and
+richness and beauty<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[ii.204]</a></span> of an ideal that can move the most generous parts
+of human character. The child is treated as the miniature of humanity;
+it thus touches the whole sphere of our sympathies, warms our
+curiosity as to the composition of man's nature, and becomes the very
+eye and centre of moral and social aspirations.</p>
+
+<p>Accordingly Rousseau almost at once begins by elaborating his
+conception of the kind of human creature which it is worth while to
+take the trouble to rear, and the only kind which pure nature will
+help you in perfecting. Hence Emilius, besides being a manual for
+parents, contains the lines of a moral type of life and character for
+all others. The old thought of the Discourses revives in full vigour.
+The artifices of society, the perverting traditions of use, the feeble
+maxims of indolence, convention, helpless dependence on the aid or the
+approval of others, are routed at the first stroke. The old regimen of
+accumulated prejudice is replaced, in dealing alike with body and
+soul, by the new system of liberty and nature. In saying this we have
+already said that the exaltation of Spartan manners which runs through
+Rousseau's other writings has vanished, and that every trace of the
+much-vaunted military and public training has yielded before the
+attractive thought of tender parents and a wisely ruled home. Public
+instruction, we learn, can now no longer exist, because there is no
+longer such a thing as country, and therefore there can no longer be
+citizens. Only domestic education can now help us to rear the man
+according to nature,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[ii.205]</a></span>&#8212;the man who knows best among us how to bear
+the mingled good and ill of our life.</p>
+
+<p>The artificial society of the time, with its aspirations after a
+return to nature, was moved to the most energetic enthusiasm by
+Rousseau's famous exhortations to mothers to nourish their own little
+ones. Morelly, as we have seen, had already enjoined the adoption of
+this practice. So too had Buffon. But Morelly's voice had no
+resonance, Buffon's reasons were purely physical, and children were
+still sent out to nurse, until Rousseau's more passionate moral
+entreaties awoke maternal conscience. &quot;Do these tender mothers,&quot; he
+exclaimed, &quot;who, when they have got rid of their infants, surrender
+themselves gaily to all the diversions of the town, know what sort of
+usage the child in the village is receiving, fastened in his swaddling
+band? At the least interruption that comes, they hang him up by a nail
+like a bundle of rags, and there the poor creature remains thus
+crucified, while the nurse goes about her affairs. Every child found
+in this position had a face of purple; as the violent compression of
+the chest would not allow the blood to circulate, it all went to the
+head, and the victim was supposed to be very quiet, just because it
+had not strength enough to cry out.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_278_278" id="FNanchor_278_278"></a><a href="#Footnote_278_278" class="fnanchor">[278]</a> But in Rousseau, as in
+Beethoven, a harsh and rugged passage is nearly always followed by
+some piece of exquisite and touching melody. The force of these
+indignant pictures was heightened and relieved by <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[ii.206]</a></span>moving appeal to
+all the tender joys of maternal solicitude, and thoughts of all that
+this solicitude could do for the happiness of the home, the father,
+and the young. The attraction of domestic life is pronounced the best
+antidote to the ill living of the time. The bustle of children, which
+you now think so importunate, gradually becomes delightful; it brings
+father and mother nearer to one another; and the lively animation of a
+family added to domestic cares, makes the dearest occupation of the
+wife, and the sweetest of all his amusements to the husband. If women
+will only once more become mothers again, men will very soon become
+fathers and husbands.<a name="FNanchor_279_279" id="FNanchor_279_279"></a><a href="#Footnote_279_279" class="fnanchor">[279]</a></p>
+
+<p>The physical effect of this was not altogether wholesome. Rousseau's
+eloquence excited women to an inordinate pitch of enthusiasm for the
+duty of suckling their infants, but his contemptuous denunciation of
+the gaieties of Paris could not extinguish the love of amusement.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Quid quod libelli Stoici inter sericos<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Jacere pulvillos amant?<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>So young mothers tried as well as they could to satisfy both desires,
+and their babes were brought to them at all unseasonable hours, while
+they were <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[ii.207]</a></span>full of food and wine, or heated with dancing or play, and
+there received the nurture which, but for Rousseau, they would have
+drawn in more salutary sort from a healthy foster-mother in the
+country. This, however, was only an incidental drawback to a movement
+which was in its main lines full of excellent significance. The
+importance of giving freedom to the young limbs, of accustoming the
+body to rudeness and vicissitude of climate, of surrounding youth with
+light and cheerfulness and air, and even a tiny detail such as the
+propriety of substituting for coral or ivory some soft substance
+against which the growing teeth might press a way without irritation,
+all these matters are handled with a fervid reality of interest that
+gives to the tedium of the nursery a genuine touch of the poetic.
+Swathings, bandages, leading-strings, are condemned with a warmth like
+that with which the author had denounced comedy.<a name="FNanchor_280_280" id="FNanchor_280_280"></a><a href="#Footnote_280_280" class="fnanchor">[280]</a> The city is held
+up to indignant reprobation as the gulf of infant life, just as it had
+been in his earlier pieces as the gulf of all the loftiest energies of
+the adult life. Every child ought to be born and nursed in the
+country, and it would be all the better if it remained in the country
+to the last day of its existence. You must accustom it little by
+little to the sight of disagreeable objects, such as toads and snakes;
+also in the same gradual manner to the sound of alarming noises,
+beginning with <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[ii.208]</a></span>snapping a cap in a pistol. If the infant cries from
+pain which you cannot remove, make no attempt to soothe it; your
+caresses will not lessen the anguish of its colic, while the child
+will remember what it has to do in order to be coaxed and to get its
+own way. The nurse may amuse it by songs and lively cries, but she is
+not to din useless words into its ears; the first articulations that
+come to it should be few, easy, distinct, frequently repeated, and
+only referring to objects which may be shown to the child. &quot;Our
+unlucky facility in cheating ourselves with words that we do not
+understand, begins earlier than we suppose.&quot; Let there be no haste in
+inducing the child to speak articulately. The evil of precipitation in
+this respect is not that children use and hear words without sense,
+but that they use and hear them in a different sense from our own,
+without our perceiving it. Mistakes of this sort, committed thus
+early, have an influence, even after they are cured, over the turn of
+the mind for the rest of the creature's life. Hence it is a good thing
+to keep a child's vocabulary as limited as possible, lest it should
+have more words than ideas, and should say more than it can possibly
+realise in thought.<a name="FNanchor_281_281" id="FNanchor_281_281"></a><a href="#Footnote_281_281" class="fnanchor">[281]</a></p>
+
+<p>In moral as in intellectual habits, the most perilous interval in
+human life is that between birth and the age of twelve. The great
+secret is to make the early education purely negative; a process of
+keeping the heart, naturally so good, clear of vice, and the
+in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[ii.209]</a></span>telligence, naturally so true, clear of error. Take for first,
+second, and third precept, to follow nature and leave her free to the
+performance of her own tasks. Until the age of reason, there can be no
+idea of moral beings or social relations. Therefore, says Rousseau, no
+moral discussion. Locke's maxim in favour of constantly reasoning with
+children was a mistake. Of all the faculties of man, reason, which is
+only a compound of the rest, is that which is latest in development,
+and yet it is this which we are to use to develop those which come
+earliest of all. Such a course is to begin at the end, and to turn the
+finished work into an instrument. &quot;In speaking to children in these
+early years a language which they do not comprehend, we accustom them
+to cheat themselves with words, to criticise what is said to them, to
+think themselves as wise as their masters, to become disputatious and
+mutinous.&quot; If you forget that nature meant children to be children
+before growing into men, you only force a fruit that has neither
+ripeness nor savour, and must soon go bad; you will have youthful
+doctors and old infants.</p>
+
+<p>To all this, however, there is certainly another side which Rousseau
+was too impetuous to see. Perfected reason is truly the tardiest of
+human endowments, but it can never be perfected at all unless the
+process be begun, and, within limits, the sooner the beginning is
+made, the earlier will be the ripening. To know the grounds of right
+conduct is, we admit, a different thing from feeling a disposition to
+practise<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[ii.210]</a></span> it. But nobody will deny the expediency of an intelligent
+acquaintance with the reasons why one sort of conduct is bad, and its
+opposite good, even if such an acquaintance can never become a
+substitute for the spontaneous action of thoroughly formed habit. For
+one thing, cases are constantly arising in a man's life that demand
+the exercise of reason, to settle the special application of
+principles which may have been acquired without knowledge of their
+rational foundation. In such cases, which are the critical and testing
+points of character, all depends upon the possession of a more or less
+justly trained intelligence, and the habit of using it. Now, as we
+have said, it is one of the great merits of the Emilius that it calls
+such attention to the early age at which mental influences begin to
+operate. Why should the gradual formation of the master habit of using
+the mind be any exception?</p>
+
+<p>Belief in the efficacy of preaching is the bane of educational
+systems. Verbal lessons seem as if they ought to be so deeply
+effective, if only the will and the throng of various motives which
+guide it, instantly followed impression of a truth upon the
+intelligence. And they are, moreover, so easily communicated, saving
+the parent a lifetime of anxious painstaking in shaping his own
+character, after such a pattern as shall silently draw all within its
+influence to pursuit of good and honourable things. The most valuable
+of Rousseau's notions about education, though he by no means
+consistently adhered to them, was<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[ii.211]</a></span> his urgent contempt for this
+fatuous substitution of spoken injunctions and prohibitions, for the
+deeper language of example, and the more living instruction of visible
+circumstance. The vast improvements that have since taken place in the
+theory and the art of education all over Europe, and of which he has
+the honour of being the first and most widely influential promoter,
+may all be traced to the spread of this wise principle, and its
+adoption in various forms. The change in the up-bringing of the young
+exactly corresponds to the change in the treatment of the insane. We
+may look back to the old system of endless catechisms, apophthegms,
+moral fables, and the rest of the paraphernalia of moral didactics,
+with the same horror with which we regard the gags, strait-waistcoats,
+chains, and dark cells, of poor mad people before the intervention of
+Pinel.</p>
+
+<p>It is clear now to everybody who has any opinion on this most
+important of all subjects, that spontaneousness is the first quality
+in connection with right doing, which you can develop in the young,
+and this spontaneousness of habit is best secured by associating it
+with the approval of those to whom the child looks. Sympathy, in a
+word, is the true foundation from which to build up the structure of
+good habit. The young should be led to practise the elementary parts
+of right conduct from the desire to please, because that is a securer
+basis than the conclusions of an embryo reason, applied to the most
+complex conditions of action, while the grounds on which<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[ii.212]</a></span> action is
+justified or condemned may be made plain in the fulness of time, when
+the understanding is better able to deal with the ideas and terms
+essential to the matter. You have two aims to secure, each without
+sacrifice of the other. These are, first, that the child shall grow up
+with firm and promptly acting habit; second, that it shall retain
+respect for reason and an open mind. The latter may be acquired in the
+less immature years, but if the former be not acquired in the earlier
+times, a man grows up with a drifting unsettledness of will, that
+makes his life either vicious by quibbling sophistries, or helpless
+for want of ready conclusions.</p>
+
+<p>The first idea which is to be given to a child, little as we might
+expect such a doctrine from the author of the Second Discourse, is
+declared to be that of property. And he can only acquire this idea by
+having something of his own. But how are we to teach him the
+significance of a thing being one's own? It is a prime rule to attempt
+to teach nothing by a verbal lesson; all instruction ought to be left
+to experience.<a name="FNanchor_282_282" id="FNanchor_282_282"></a><a href="#Footnote_282_282" class="fnanchor">[282]</a> Therefore you must contrive some piece of
+experience which shall bring this notion of property vividly into a
+child's mind; the following for instance. Emilius is taken to a piece
+of garden; his instructor digs and dresses the ground for him, and the
+boy takes possession by sowing some beans. &quot;We come every day to water
+them, and see them rise out of the ground with transports of joy. I
+add to this joy <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[ii.213]</a></span>by saying, This belongs to you. Then explaining the
+term, I let him feel that he has put into the ground this time,
+labour, trouble, his person in short; that there is in this bit of
+ground something of himself which he may maintain against every comer,
+as he might withdraw his own arm from the hand of another man who
+would fain retain it in spite of him.&quot; One day Emilius comes to his
+beloved garden, watering-pot in hand, and finds to his anguish and
+despair that all the beans have been plucked up, that the ground has
+been turned over, and that the spot is hardly recognisable. The
+gardener comes up, and explains with much warmth that he had sown the
+seed of a precious Maltese melon in that particular spot long before
+Emilius had come with his trumpery beans, and that therefore it was
+his land; that nobody touches the garden of his neighbour, in order
+that his own may remain untouched; and that if Emilius wants a piece
+of garden, he must pay for it by surrendering to the owner half the
+produce.<a name="FNanchor_283_283" id="FNanchor_283_283"></a><a href="#Footnote_283_283" class="fnanchor">[283]</a> Thus, says Rousseau, the boy sees how the notion of
+property naturally goes back to the right of the first occupant as
+derived from labour. We should have thought it less troublesome, as it
+is certainly more important, to teach a boy the facts of property
+positively and imperatively. This rather elaborate ascent to origins
+seems an exaggerated form of that very vice of over-instructing the
+growing reason in abstractions, which Rousseau had condemned so short
+a time before.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[ii.214]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Again, there is the very strong objection to conveying lessons by
+artificially contrived incidents, that children are nearly always
+extremely acute in suspecting and discovering such contrivances. Yet
+Rousseau recurs to them over and over again, evidently taking delight
+in their ingenuity. Besides the illustration of the origin and
+significance of property, there is the complex fancy in which a
+juggler is made to combine instruction as to the properties of the
+magnet with certain severe moral truths.<a name="FNanchor_284_284" id="FNanchor_284_284"></a><a href="#Footnote_284_284" class="fnanchor">[284]</a> The tutor interests
+Emilius in astronomy and geography by a wonderful stratagem indeed.
+The poor youth loses his way in a wood, is overpowered by hunger and
+weariness, and then is led on by his cunning tutor to a series of
+inferences from the position of the sun and so forth, which convince
+him that his home is just over the hedge, where it is duly found to
+be.<a name="FNanchor_285_285" id="FNanchor_285_285"></a><a href="#Footnote_285_285" class="fnanchor">[285]</a> Here, again, is the way in which the instructor proposes to
+stir activity of limb in the young Emilius. &quot;In walking with him of an
+afternoon, I used sometimes to put in my pocket two cakes of a sort he
+particularly liked; we each of us ate one. One day he perceived that I
+had three cakes; he could easily have eaten six; he promptly
+despatches his own, to ask me for the third. Nay, I said to him, I
+could well eat it myself, or we would divide it, but I would rather
+see it made the prize of a running match between the two little boys
+there.&quot; The little boys run their race, and the winner devours the
+cake. This and <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[ii.215]</a></span>subsequent repetitions of the performance at first
+only amused Emilius, but he presently began to reflect, and perceiving
+that he also had two legs, he began privately to try how fast he could
+run. When he thought he was strong enough, he importuned his tutor for
+the third cake, and on being refused, insisted on being allowed to
+compete for it. The habit of taking exercise was not the only
+advantage gained. The tutor resorted to a variety of further
+stratagems in order to induce the boy to find out and practise visual
+compass, and so forth.<a name="FNanchor_286_286" id="FNanchor_286_286"></a><a href="#Footnote_286_286" class="fnanchor">[286]</a> If we consider, as we have said, first the
+readiness of children to suspect a stratagem wherever instruction is
+concerned, and next their resentment on discovering artifice of that
+kind, all this seems as little likely to be successful as it is
+assuredly contrary to Rousseau's general doctrine of leaving
+circumstances to lead.</p>
+
+<p>In truth Rousseau's appreciation of the real nature of spontaneousness
+in the processes of education was essentially inadequate, and that it
+was so, arose from a no less inadequate conception of the right
+influence upon the growing character, of the great principle of
+authority. His dread lest the child should ever be conscious of the
+pressure of a will external to its own, constituted a fundamental
+weakness of his system. The child, we are told with endless
+repetition, ought always to be led to suppose that it is following its
+own judgment or impulses, and has only them and their consequences to
+consider. But Rousseau could <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[ii.216]</a></span>not help seeing, as he meditated on the
+actual development of his Emilius, that to leave him thus to the
+training of accident would necessarily end in many fatal gaps and
+chasms. Yet the hand and will of the parent or the master could not be
+allowed to appear. The only alternative, therefore, was the secret
+preparation of artificial sets of circumstances, alike in work and in
+amusement. Jean Paul was wiser than Jean Jacques. &quot;Let not the teacher
+after the work also order and regulate the games. It is decidedly
+better not to recognise or make any order in games, than to keep it up
+with difficulty and send the zephyrets of pleasure through artistic
+bellows and air-pumps to the little flowers.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_287_287" id="FNanchor_287_287"></a><a href="#Footnote_287_287" class="fnanchor">[287]</a></p>
+
+<p>The spontaneousness which we ought to seek, does not consist in
+promptly willing this or that, independently of an authority imposed
+from without, but in a self-acting desire to do what is right under
+all its various conditions, including what the child finds pleasant to
+itself on the one hand, and what it has good reason to suppose will be
+pleasant to its parents on the other. &quot;You must never,&quot; Rousseau
+gravely warns us, &quot;inflict punishment upon children as punishment; it
+should always fall upon them as a natural consequence of their
+ill-behaviour.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_288_288" id="FNanchor_288_288"></a><a href="#Footnote_288_288" class="fnanchor">[288]</a> But why should one of the most closely following
+of all these consequences be dissembled or carefully hidden from
+sight, namely, the effect of ill-behaviour upon the contentment of the
+child's nearest friend? Why <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[ii.217]</a></span>are the effects of conduct upon the
+actor's own physical well-being to be the only effects honoured with
+the title of being natural? Surely, while we leave to the young the
+widest freedom of choice, and even habitually invite them to decide
+for themselves between two lines of conduct, we are bound afterwards
+to state our approval or disapproval of their decision, so that on the
+next occasion they may take this anger or pleasure in others into
+proper account in their rough and hasty forecast, often less hasty
+than it seems, of the consequences of what they are about to do. One
+of the most important of educating influences is lost, if the young
+are not taught to place the feelings of others in a front place, when
+they think in their own simple way of what will happen to them from
+yielding to a given impulse. Rousseau was quite right in insisting on
+practical experience of consequences as the only secure foundation for
+self-acting habit; he was fatally wrong in mutilating this experience
+by the exclusion from it of the effects of perceiving, resisting,
+accepting, ignoring, all will and authority from without. The great,
+and in many respects so admirable, school of Rousseauite
+philanthropists, have always been feeble on this side, alike in the
+treatment of the young by their instructors, and the treatment of
+social offenders by a government.</p>
+
+<p>Again, consider the large group of excellent qualities which are
+associated with affectionate respect for a more fully informed
+authority. In a world where necessity stands for so much, it is no
+inconsiderable<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[ii.218]</a></span> gain to have learnt the lesson of docility on easy
+terms in our earliest days. If in another sense the will of each
+individual is all-powerful over his own destinies, it is best that
+this idea of firm purpose and a settled energy that will not be
+denied, should grow up in the young soul in connection with a riper
+wisdom and an ampler experience than its own; for then, when the time
+for independent action comes, the force of the association will
+continue. Finally, although none can be vicariously wise, none sage by
+proxy, nor any pay for the probation of another, yet is it not a
+puerile wastefulness to send forth the young all bare to the ordeal,
+while the armour of old experience and tempered judgment hangs idle on
+the wall? Surely it is thus by accumulation of instruction from
+generation to generation, that the area of right conduct in the world
+is extended. Such instruction must with youth be conveyed by military
+word of command as often as by philosophical persuasion of its worth.
+Nor is the atmosphere of command other than bracing, even to those who
+are commanded. If education is to be mainly conducted by force of
+example, it is a dreadful thing that the child is ever to have before
+its eyes as living type and practical exemplar the pale figure of
+parents without passions, and without a will as to the conduct of
+those who are dependent on them. Even a slight excess of anger,
+impatience, and the spirit of command, would be less demoralising to
+the impressionable character than the constant sight of a man
+artificially impassive.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[ii.219]</a></span> Rousseau is perpetually calling upon men to
+try to lay aside their masks; yet the model instructor whom he has
+created for us is to be the most artfully and elaborately masked of
+all men; unless he happens to be naturally without blood and without
+physiognomy.</p>
+
+<p>Rousseau, then, while he put away the old methods which imprisoned the
+young spirit in injunctions and over-solicitous monitions, yet did
+none the less in his own scheme imprison it in a kind of hothouse,
+which with its regulated temperature and artificially contrived access
+of light and air, was in many respects as little the method of nature,
+that is to say it gave as little play for the spontaneous working and
+growth of the forces of nature in the youth's breast, as that regimen
+of the cloister which he so profoundly abhorred. Partly this was the
+result of a ludicrously shallow psychology. He repeats again and again
+that self-love is the one quality in the youthful embryo of character,
+from which you have to work. From this, he says, springs the desire of
+possessing pleasure and avoiding pain, the great fulcrum on which the
+lever of experience rests. Not only so, but from this same
+unslumbering quality of self-love you have to develop regard for
+others. The child's first affection for his nurse is a result of the
+fact that she serves his comfort, and so down to his passion in later
+years for his mistress. Now this is not the place for a discussion as
+to the ultimate atom of the complex moral sentiments of men and women,
+nor for an examination of the question whether the faculty of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[ii.220]</a></span>
+sympathy has or has not an origin independent of self-love. However
+that may be, no one will deny that sympathy appears in good natures
+extremely early, and is susceptible of rapid cultivation from the very
+first. Here is the only adequate key to that education of the
+affections, from their rudimentary expansion in the nursery, until
+they include the complete range of all the objects proper to them.</p>
+
+<p>One secret of Rousseau's omission of this, the most important of all
+educating agencies, from the earlier stages of the formation of
+character, was the fact which is patent enough in every page, that he
+was not animated by that singular tenderness and almost mystic
+affection for the young, which breathes through the writings of some
+of his German followers, of Richter above all others, and which
+reveals to those who are sensible of it, the hold that may so easily
+be gained for all good purposes upon the eager sympathy of the
+youthful spirit. The instructor of Emilius speaks the words of a wise
+onlooker, sagely meditating on the ideal man, rather than of a parent
+who is living the life of his child through with him. Rousseau's
+interest in children, though perfectly sincere, was still &#230;sthetic,
+moral, reasonable, rather than that pure flood of full-hearted feeling
+for them, which is perhaps seldom stirred except in those who have
+actually brought up children of their own. He composed a vindication
+of his love for the young in an exquisite piece;<a name="FNanchor_289_289" id="FNanchor_289_289"></a><a href="#Footnote_289_289" class="fnanchor">[289]</a> but it has none
+of the yearnings of the bowels of tenderness.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[ii.221]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<p style="text-align: center"><b>II.</b></p>
+
+<p>Education being the art of preparing the young to grow into
+instruments of happiness for themselves and others, a writer who
+undertakes to speak about it must naturally have some conception of
+the kind of happiness at which his art aims. We have seen enough of
+Rousseau's own life to know what sort of ideal he would be likely to
+set up. It is a healthier epicureanism, with enough stoicism to make
+happiness safe in case that circumstances should frown. The man who
+has lived most is not he who has counted most years, but he who has
+most felt life.<a name="FNanchor_290_290" id="FNanchor_290_290"></a><a href="#Footnote_290_290" class="fnanchor">[290]</a> It is mere false wisdom to throw ourselves
+incessantly out of ourselves, to count the present for nothing, ever
+to pursue without ceasing a future which flees in proportion as we
+advance, to try to transport ourselves from whence we are not, to some
+place where we shall never be.<a name="FNanchor_291_291" id="FNanchor_291_291"></a><a href="#Footnote_291_291" class="fnanchor">[291]</a> He is happiest who suffers fewest
+pains, and he is most miserable who feels fewest pleasures. Then we
+have a half stoical strain. The felicity of man here below is only a
+negative state, to be measured by the more or less of the ills he
+undergoes. It is in the disproportion between desires and faculties
+that our misery consists. Happiness, therefore, lies not in
+diminishing our desires, nor any more in extending our faculties, but
+in diminishing the excess of desire over faculty, and in bringing
+power and will into perfect balance.<a name="FNanchor_292_292" id="FNanchor_292_292"></a><a href="#Footnote_292_292" class="fnanchor">[292]</a> Excepting health, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[ii.222]</a></span>strength,
+respect for one's self, all the goods of this life reside in opinion;
+excepting bodily pain and remorse of conscience, all our ills are in
+imagination. Death is no evil; it is only made so by half-knowledge
+and false wisdom. &quot;Live according to nature, be patient, and drive
+away physicians; you will not avoid death, but you will only feel it
+once, while they on the other hand would bring it daily before your
+troubled imagination, and their false art, instead of prolonging your
+days, only hinders you from enjoying them. Suffer, die, or recover;
+but above all things live, live up to your last hour.&quot; It is
+foresight, constantly carrying us out of ourselves, that is the true
+source of our miseries.<a name="FNanchor_293_293" id="FNanchor_293_293"></a><a href="#Footnote_293_293" class="fnanchor">[293]</a> O man, confine thy existence within
+thyself, and thou wilt cease to be miserable. Thy liberty, thy power,
+reach exactly as far as thy natural forces, and no further; all the
+rest is slavery and illusion. The only man who has his own will is he
+who does not need in order to have it the arms of another person at
+the end of his own.<a name="FNanchor_294_294" id="FNanchor_294_294"></a><a href="#Footnote_294_294" class="fnanchor">[294]</a></p>
+
+<p>The training that follows from this is obvious. The instructor has
+carefully to distinguish true or natural need from the need which is
+only fancied, or which only comes from superabundance of life.
+Emilius, who is brought up in the country, has nothing in his room to
+distinguish it from that of a peasant.<a name="FNanchor_295_295" id="FNanchor_295_295"></a><a href="#Footnote_295_295" class="fnanchor">[295]</a> If he is taken to a
+luxurious banquet, he is bidden, instead of heedlessly enjoying it, to
+reflect austerely how many hundreds or thousands of hands <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[ii.223]</a></span>have been
+employed in preparing it.<a name="FNanchor_296_296" id="FNanchor_296_296"></a><a href="#Footnote_296_296" class="fnanchor">[296]</a> His preference for gay colours in his
+clothes is to be consulted, because this is natural and becoming to
+his age, but the moment he prefers a stuff merely because it is rich,
+behold a sophisticated creature.<a name="FNanchor_297_297" id="FNanchor_297_297"></a><a href="#Footnote_297_297" class="fnanchor">[297]</a> The curse of the world is
+inequality, and inequality springs from the multitude of wants, which
+cause us to be so much the more dependent. What makes man essentially
+good is to have few wants, and to abstain from comparing himself with
+others; what makes him essentially bad, is to have many wants, and to
+cling much to opinion.<a name="FNanchor_298_298" id="FNanchor_298_298"></a><a href="#Footnote_298_298" class="fnanchor">[298]</a> Hence, although Emilius happened to have
+both wealth and good birth, he is not brought up to be a gentleman,
+with the prejudices and helplessness and selfishness too naturally
+associated with that abused name.</p>
+
+<p>This cardinal doctrine of limitation of desire, with its corollary of
+self-sufficience, contains in itself the great maxim that Emilius and
+every one else must learn some trade. To work is an indispensable duty
+in the social man. Rich or poor, powerful or weak, every idle citizen
+is a knave. And every boy must learn a real trade, a trade with his
+hands. It is not so much a matter of learning a craft for the sake of
+knowing one, as for the sake of conquering the prejudices which
+despise it. Labour for glory, if you have not to labour from
+necessity. Lower yourself to the condition of the artisan, so as to be
+above your own. In order to reign in opinion, begin by reigning over
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[ii.224]</a></span>it. All things well considered, the trade most to be preferred is
+that of carpenter; it is clean, useful, and capable of being carried
+on in the house; it demands address and diligence in the workman, and
+though the form of the work is determined by utility, still elegance
+and taste are not excluded.<a name="FNanchor_299_299" id="FNanchor_299_299"></a><a href="#Footnote_299_299" class="fnanchor">[299]</a> There are few prettier pictures than
+that where Sophie enters the workshop, and sees in amazement her young
+lover at the other end, in his white shirt-sleeves, his hair loosely
+fastened back, with a chisel in one hand and a mallet in the other,
+too intent upon his work to perceive even the approach of his
+mistress.<a name="FNanchor_300_300" id="FNanchor_300_300"></a><a href="#Footnote_300_300" class="fnanchor">[300]</a></p>
+
+<p>When the revolution came, and princes and nobles wandered in indigent
+exile, the disciples of Rousseau pointed in unkind triumph to the
+advantage these unfortunate wretches would have had if they had not
+been too puffed up with the vanity of feudalism to follow the prudent
+example of Emilius in learning a craft. That Rousseau should have laid
+so much stress on the vicissitudes of fortune, which might cause even
+a king to be grateful one day that he had a trade at the end of his
+arms, is sometimes quoted as a proof of his foresight of troublous
+times. This, however, goes too far, because, apart from the instances
+of such vicissitudes among the ancients, the King of Syracuse keeping
+school at Corinth, or Alexander, son of Perseus, becoming a Roman
+scrivener, he actually saw Charles Edward, the Stuart pretender,
+wandering from court to court in search of succour <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[ii.225]</a></span>and receiving only
+rebuffs; and he may well have known that after the troubles of 1738 a
+considerable number of the oligarchs of his native Geneva had gone
+into exile, rather than endure the humiliation of their party.<a name="FNanchor_301_301" id="FNanchor_301_301"></a><a href="#Footnote_301_301" class="fnanchor">[301]</a>
+Besides all this, the propriety of being able to earn one's bread by
+some kind of toil that would be useful in even the simplest societies,
+flowed necessarily from every part of his doctrine of the aims of life
+and the worth of character. He did, however, say, &quot;We approach a state
+of crisis and an age of revolutions,&quot; which proved true, but he added
+too much when he pronounced it impossible that the great monarchies of
+Europe could last long.<a name="FNanchor_302_302" id="FNanchor_302_302"></a><a href="#Footnote_302_302" class="fnanchor">[302]</a> And it is certain that the only one of
+the great monarchies which did actually fall would have had a far
+better chance of surviving if Lewis XVI. had been as expert in the
+trade of king as he was in that of making locks and bolts.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[ii.226]</a></span></p><p>From this semi-stoical ideal there followed certain social notions,
+of which Rousseau had the distinction of being the most powerful
+propagator. As has so often been said, his contemporaries were willing
+to leave social questions alone, provided only the government would
+suffer the free expression of opinion in literature and science.
+Rousseau went deeper. His moral conception of individual life and
+character contained in itself a social conception, and he did not
+shrink from boldly developing it. The rightly constituted man suffices
+for himself and is free from prejudices. He has arms, and knows how to
+use them; he has few wants, and knows how to satisfy them. Nurtured in
+the most absolute freedom, he can think of no worse ill than
+servitude. He attaches himself to the beauty which perishes not,
+limiting his desires to his condition, learning to lose whatever may
+be taken away from him, to place himself above events, and to detach
+his heart from loved objects without a pang.<a name="FNanchor_303_303" id="FNanchor_303_303"></a><a href="#Footnote_303_303" class="fnanchor">[303]</a> He pities miserable
+kings, who are the bondsmen of all that seems to obey them; he pities
+false sages, who are fast bound in the chains of their empty renown;
+he pities the silly rich, martyrs to their own ostentation.<a name="FNanchor_304_304" id="FNanchor_304_304"></a><a href="#Footnote_304_304" class="fnanchor">[304]</a> All
+the sympathies of such a man therefore naturally flow away from these,
+the great of the earth, to those who lead the stoic's life perforce.
+&quot;It is the common people who compose the human race; what is not the
+people is hardly worth taking into account. Man is the same in all
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[ii.227]</a></span>ranks; that being so, the ranks which are most numerous deserve most
+respect. Before one who reflects, all civil distinctions vanish: he
+marks the same passions and the same feelings in the clown as in the
+man covered with reputation; he can only distinguish their speech, and
+a varnish more or less elaborately laid on. Study people of this
+humble condition; you will perceive that under another sort of
+language, they have as much intelligence as you, and more good sense.
+Respect your species: reflect that it is essentially made up of the
+collection of peoples; that if every king and every philosopher were
+cut off from among them, they would scarcely be missed, and the world
+would go none the worse.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_305_305" id="FNanchor_305_305"></a><a href="#Footnote_305_305" class="fnanchor">[305]</a> As it is, the universal spirit of the
+law in every country is invariably to favour the strong against the
+weak, and him who has, against him who has not. The many are
+sacrificed to the few. The specious names of justice and subordination
+serve only as instruments for violence and arms for iniquity. The
+ostentatious orders who pretend to be useful to the others, are in
+truth only useful to themselves at the expense of the others.<a name="FNanchor_306_306" id="FNanchor_306_306"></a><a href="#Footnote_306_306" class="fnanchor">[306]</a></p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[ii.228]</a></span></p><p>This was carrying on the work which had already been begun in the New
+Helo&#239;sa, as we have seen, but in the Emilius it is pushed with a
+gravity and a directness, that could not be imparted to the picture of
+a fanciful and arbitrarily chosen situation. The only writer who has
+approached Rousseau, so far as I know, in fulness and depth of
+expression in proclaiming the sorrows and wrongs of the poor blind
+crowd, who painfully drag along the car of triumphant civilisation
+with its handful of occupants, is the author of the Book of the
+People. Lamennais even surpasses Rousseau in the profundity of his
+pathos; his pictures of the life of hut and hovel are as sincere and
+as touching; and there is in them, instead of the anger and bitterness
+of the older author, righteous as that was, a certain heroism of pity
+and devoted sublimity of complaint, which lift the soul up from
+resentment into divine moods of compassion and resolve, and stir us
+like a tale of noble action.<a name="FNanchor_307_307" id="FNanchor_307_307"></a><a href="#Footnote_307_307" class="fnanchor">[307]</a> It was <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[ii.229]</a></span>Rousseau, however, who first
+sounded the note of which the religion that had once been the champion
+and consoler of the common people, seemed long to have lost even the
+tradition. Yet the teaching was not constructive, because the ideal
+man was not made truly social. Emilius is brought up in something of
+the isolation of the imaginary savage of the state of nature. He
+marries, and then he and his wife seem only fitted to lead a life of
+detachment from the interests of the world in which they are placed.
+Social or political education, that is the training which character
+receives from the medium in which it grows, is left out of account,
+and so is the correlative process of preparation for the various
+conditions and exigencies which belong to that medium, until it is too
+late to take its natural place in character. Nothing can be clumsier
+than the way in which Rousseau proposes to teach Emilius the existence
+and nature of his relations with his fellows. And the reason of this
+was that he had never himself in the course of his ruminations,
+willingly thought of Emilius as being in a condition of active social
+relation, the citizen of a state.</p>
+
+
+<p style="text-align: center"><b>III.</b></p>
+
+<p>There appear to be three dominant states of mind, with groups of
+faculties associated with each of them,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[ii.230]</a></span> which it is the business of
+the instructor firmly to establish in the character of the future man.
+The first is a resolute and unflinching respect for Truth; for the
+conclusions, that is to say, of the scientific reason, comprehending
+also a constant anxiety to take all possible pains that such
+conclusions shall be rightly drawn. Connected with this is the
+discipline of the whole range of intellectual faculties, from the
+simple habit of correct observation, down to the highly complex habit
+of weighing and testing the value of evidence. This very important
+branch of early discipline, Rousseau for reasons of his own which we
+have already often referred to, cared little about, and he throws very
+little light upon it, beyond one or two extremely sensible precepts of
+the negative kind, warning us against beginning too soon and forcing
+an apparent progress too rapidly. The second fundamental state in a
+rightly formed character is a deep feeling for things of the spirit
+which are unknown and incommensurable; a sense of awe, mystery,
+sublimity, and the fateful bounds of life at its beginning and its
+end. Here is the Religious side, and what Rousseau has to say of this
+we shall presently see. It is enough now to remark that Emilius was
+never to hear the name of a God or supreme being until his reason was
+fairly ripened. The third state, which is at least as difficult to
+bring to healthy perfection as either of the other two, is a passion
+for Justice.</p>
+
+<p>The little use which Rousseau made of this<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[ii.231]</a></span> momentous and
+much-embracing word, which names the highest peak of social virtue, is
+a very striking circumstance. The reason would seem to be that his
+sense of the relations of men with one another was not virile enough
+to comprehend the deep austerer lines which mark the brow of the
+benignant divinity of Justice. In the one place in his writings where
+he speaks of justice freely, he shows a narrowness of idea, which was
+perhaps as much due to intellectual confusion as to lack of moral
+robustness. He says excellently that &quot;love of the human race is
+nothing else in us but love of justice,&quot; and that &quot;of all the virtues,
+justice is that which contributes most to the common good of men.&quot;
+While enjoining the discipline of pity as one of the noblest of
+sentiments, he warns us against letting it degenerate into weakness,
+and insists that we should only surrender ourselves to it when it
+accords with justice.<a name="FNanchor_308_308" id="FNanchor_308_308"></a><a href="#Footnote_308_308" class="fnanchor">[308]</a> But that is all. What constitutes justice,
+what is its standard, what its source, what its sanction, whence the
+extraordinary holiness with which its name has come to be invested
+among the most highly civilised societies of men, we are never told,
+nor do we ever see that our teacher had seen the possibility of such
+questions being asked. If they had been propounded to him, he would,
+it is most likely, have fallen back upon the convenient mystery of the
+natural law. This was the current phrase of that time, and it was
+meant to embody a hypothetical experience of perfect human relations
+in <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[ii.232]</a></span>an expression of the widest generality. If so, this would have to
+be impressed upon the mind of Emilius in the same way as other
+mysteries. As a matter of fact, Emilius was led through pity up to
+humanity, or sociality in an imperfect signification, and there he was
+left without a further guide to define the marks of truly social
+conduct.</p>
+
+<p>This imperfection was a necessity, inseparable from Rousseau's
+tenacity in keeping society in the background of the picture of life
+which he opened to his pupil. He said, indeed, &quot;We must study society
+by men, and men by society; those who would treat politics and
+morality apart will never understand anything about either one or the
+other.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_309_309" id="FNanchor_309_309"></a><a href="#Footnote_309_309" class="fnanchor">[309]</a> This is profoundly true, but we hardly see in the
+morality which is designed for Emilius the traces of political
+elements. Yet without some gradually unfolded presentation of society
+as a whole, it is scarcely possible to implant the idea of justice
+with any hope of large fertility. You may begin at a very early time
+to develop, even from the primitive quality of self-love, a notion of
+equity and a respect for it, but the vast conception of social justice
+can only find room in a character that has been made spacious by
+habitual contemplation of the height and breadth and close
+compactedness of the fabric of the relations that bind man to man, and
+of the share, integral or infinitesimally fractional, that each has in
+the happiness or woe of other souls. And this contemplation should
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[ii.233]</a></span>begin when we prepare the foundation of all the other maturer habits.
+Youth can hardly recognise too soon the enormous unresting machine
+which bears us ceaselessly along, because we can hardly learn too soon
+that its force and direction depend on the play of human motives, of
+which our own for good or evil form an inevitable part when the ripe
+years come. To one reared with the narrow care devoted to Emilius, or
+with the capricious negligence in which the majority are left to grow
+to manhood, the society into which they are thrown is a mere moral
+wilderness. They are to make such way through it as they can, with
+egotism for their only trusty instrument. This egotism may either be a
+bludgeon, as with the most part, or it may be a delicately adjusted
+and fastidiously decorated compass, as with an Emilius. In either case
+is no perception that the gross outer contact of men with another is
+transformed by worthiness of common aim and loyal faith in common
+excellences, into a thing beautiful and generous. It is our business
+to fix and root the habit of thinking of that <i>moral</i> union, into
+which, as Kant has so admirably expressed it, the <i>pathological</i>
+necessities of situation that first compelled social concert, have
+been gradually transmuted. Instead of this, it is exactly the
+primitive pathological conditions that a narrow theory of education
+brings first into prominence; as if knowledge of origins were
+indispensable to a right attachment to the transformed conditions of a
+maturer system.</p>
+
+<p>It has been said that Rousseau founds all morality<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[ii.234]</a></span> upon personal
+interest, perhaps even more specially than Helv&#233;tius himself. The
+accusation is just. Emilius will enter adult life without the germs of
+that social conscience, which animates a man with all the associations
+of duty and right, of gratitude for the past and resolute hope for the
+future, in face of the great body of which he finds himself a part. &quot;I
+observe,&quot; says Rousseau, &quot;that in the modern ages men have no hold
+upon one another save through force and interest, while the ancients
+on the other hand acted much more by persuasion and the affections of
+the soul.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_310_310" id="FNanchor_310_310"></a><a href="#Footnote_310_310" class="fnanchor">[310]</a> The reason was that with the ancients, supposing him
+to mean the Greeks and Romans, the social conscience was so much wider
+in its scope than the comparatively narrow fragment of duty which is
+supposed to come under the sacred power of conscience in the more
+complex and less closely contained organisation of a modern state. The
+neighbours to whom a man owed duty in those times comprehended all the
+members of his state. The neighbours of the modern preacher of duty
+are either the few persons with whom each of us is brought into actual
+and palpable contact, or else the whole multitude of dwellers on the
+earth,&#8212;a conception that for many ages to come will remain with the
+majority of men and women too vague to exert an energetic and
+concentrating influence upon action, and will lead them no further
+than an uncoloured and nerveless cosmopolitanism.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[ii.235]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>What the young need to have taught to them in this too little
+cultivated region, is that they are born not mere atoms floating
+independent and apart for a season through a terraqueous medium, and
+sucking up as much more than their share of nourishment as they can
+seize; nor citizens of the world with no more definite duty than to
+keep their feelings towards all their fellows in a steady simmer of
+bland complacency; but soldiers in a host, citizens of a polity whose
+boundaries are not set down in maps, members of a church the
+handwriting of whose ordinances is not in the hieroglyphs of idle
+mystery, nor its hope and recompense in the lands beyond death. They
+need to be taught that they owe a share of their energies to the great
+struggle which is in ceaseless progress in all societies in an endless
+variety of forms, between new truth and old prejudice, between love of
+self or class and solicitous passion for justice, between the
+obstructive indolence and inertia of the many and the generous mental
+activity of the few. This is the sphere and definition of the social
+conscience. The good causes of enlightenment and justice in all
+lands,&#8212;here is the church militant in which we should early seek to
+enrol the young, and the true state to which they should be taught
+that they owe the duties of active and arduous citizenship. These are
+the struggles with which the modern instructor should associate those
+virtues of fortitude, tenacity, silent patience, outspoken energy,
+readiness to assert ourselves and readiness to efface ourselves,
+willingness to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[ii.236]</a></span> suffer and resolution to inflict suffering, which men
+of old knew how to show for their gods or their sovereign. But the
+ideal of Emilius was an ideal of quietism; to possess his own soul in
+patience, with a suppressed intelligence, a suppressed sociality,
+without a single spark of generous emulation in the courses of
+strong-fibred virtue, or a single thrill of heroical pursuit after so
+much as one great forlorn cause.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;If it once comes to him, in reading these parallels of the famous
+ancients, to desire to be another rather than himself, were this other
+Socrates, were he Cato, you have missed the mark; he who begins to
+make himself a stranger to himself, is not long before he forgets
+himself altogether.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_311_311" id="FNanchor_311_311"></a><a href="#Footnote_311_311" class="fnanchor">[311]</a> But if a man only nurses the conception of
+his own personality, for the sake of keeping his own peace and
+self-contained comfort at a glow of easy warmth, assuredly the best
+thing that can befall him is that he should perish, lest his example
+should infect others with the same base contagion. Excessive
+personality when militant is often wholesome, excessive personality
+that only hugs itself is under all circumstances chief among unclean
+things. Thus even Rousseau's finest monument of moral enthusiasm is
+fatally tarnished by the cold damp breath of isolation, and the very
+book which contained so many elements of new life for a state, was at
+bottom the apotheosis of social despair.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[ii.237]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<p style="text-align: center"><b>IV.</b></p>
+
+<p>The great agent in fostering the rise to vigour and uprightness of a
+social conscience, apart from the yet more powerful instrument of a
+strong and energetic public spirit at work around the growing
+character, must be found in the study of history rightly directed with
+a view to this end. It is here, in observing the long processes of
+time and appreciating the slowly accumulating sum of endeavour, that
+the mind gradually comes to read the great lessons how close is the
+bond that links men together. It is here that he gradually begins to
+acquire the habit of considering what are the conditions of wise
+social activity, its limits, its objects, its rewards, what is the
+capacity of collective achievement, and of what sort is the
+significance and purport of the little span of time that cuts off the
+yesterday of our society from its to-morrow.</p>
+
+<p>Rousseau had very rightly forbidden the teaching of history to young
+children, on the ground that the essence of history lies in the moral
+relations between the bare facts which it recounts, and that the terms
+and ideas of these relations are wholly beyond the intellectual grasp
+of the very young.<a name="FNanchor_312_312" id="FNanchor_312_312"></a><a href="#Footnote_312_312" class="fnanchor">[312]</a> He might have based his objections equally
+well upon the impossibility of little children knowing the meaning of
+the multitude of descriptive terms which make up a <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[ii.238]</a></span>historical manual,
+or realising the relations between events in bare point of time,
+although childhood may perhaps be a convenient period for some
+mechanical acquisition of dates. According to Rousseau, history was to
+appear very late in the educational course, when the youth was almost
+ready to enter the world. It was to be the finishing study, from which
+he should learn not sociality either in its scientific or its higher
+moral sense, but the composition of the heart of man, in a safer way
+than through actual intercourse with society. Society might make him
+either cynical or frivolous. History would bring him the same
+information, without subjecting him to the same perils. In society you
+only hear the words of men; to know man you must observe his actions,
+and actions are only unveiled in history.<a name="FNanchor_313_313" id="FNanchor_313_313"></a><a href="#Footnote_313_313" class="fnanchor">[313]</a> This view is hardly
+worth discussing. The subject of history is not the heart of man, but
+the movements of societies. Moreover, the oracles of history are
+entirely dumb to one who seeks from them maxims for the shaping of
+daily conduct, or living instruction as to the motives, aims,
+caprices, capacities of self-restraint, self-sacrifice, of those with
+whom the occasions of life bring us into contact.</p>
+
+<p>It is true that at the close of the other part of his education,
+Emilius was to travel and there find the comment upon the completed
+circle of his studies.<a name="FNanchor_314_314" id="FNanchor_314_314"></a><a href="#Footnote_314_314" class="fnanchor">[314]</a> But excellent as travel is for some of the
+best of those who have the opportunity, still for many it is
+value<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[ii.239]</a></span>less for lack of the faculty of curiosity. For the great
+majority it is impossible for lack of opportunity. To trust so much as
+Rousseau did to the effect of travelling, is to leave a large chasm in
+education unbridged.</p>
+
+<p>It is interesting, however, to notice some of Rousseau's notions about
+history as an instrument for conveying moral instruction, a few of
+them are so good, others are so characteristically narrow. &quot;The worst
+historians for a young man,&quot; he says, &quot;are those who judge. The facts,
+the facts; then let him judge for himself. If the author's judgment is
+for ever guiding him, he is only seeing with the eye of another, and
+as soon as this eye fails him, he sees nothing.&quot; Modern history is not
+fit for instruction, not only because it has no physiognomy, all our
+men being exactly like one another, but because our historians, intent
+on brilliance above all other things, think of nothing so much as
+painting highly coloured portraits, which for the most part represent
+nothing at all.<a name="FNanchor_315_315" id="FNanchor_315_315"></a><a href="#Footnote_315_315" class="fnanchor">[315]</a> Of course such a judgment as this implies an
+ignorance alike of the ends and meaning of history, which, considering
+that he was living in the midst of a singular revival of historical
+study, is not easy to pardon. If we are to look only to perfection of
+form and arrangement, it may have been right for one living in the
+middle of the last century to place the ancients in the first rank
+without competitors. But the author of the Discourse upon literature
+and the arts might have been expected to look beyond com<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[ii.240]</a></span>position, and
+the contemporary of Voltaire's <i>Essai sur les Moeurs</i> (1754-1757)
+might have been expected to know that the profitable experience of the
+human race did not close with the fall of the Roman republic. Among
+the ancient historians, he counted Thucydides to be the true model,
+because he reports facts without judging, and omits none of the
+circumstances proper for enabling us to judge of them for
+ourselves&#8212;though how Rousseau knew what facts Thucydides has omitted,
+I am unable to divine. Then come C&#230;sar's Commentaries and Xenophon's
+Retreat of the Ten Thousand. The good Herodotus, without portraits and
+without maxims, but abounding in details the most capable of
+interesting and pleasing, would perhaps be the best of historians, if
+only these details did not so often degenerate into puerilities. Livy
+is unsuited to youth, because he is political and a rhetorician.
+Tacitus is the book of the old; you must have learnt the art of
+reading facts, before you can be trusted with maxims.</p>
+
+<p>The drawback of histories such as those of Thucydides and C&#230;sar,
+Rousseau admits to be that they dwell almost entirely on war, leaving
+out the true life of nations, which belongs to the unwritten
+chronicles of peace. This leads him to the equally just reflection
+that historians while recounting facts omit the gradual and
+progressive causes which led to them. &quot;They often find in a battle
+lost or won the reason of a revolution, which even before the battle
+was already inevitable. War scarcely does more than bring into<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">[ii.241]</a></span> full
+light events determined by moral causes, which historians can seldom
+penetrate.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_316_316" id="FNanchor_316_316"></a><a href="#Footnote_316_316" class="fnanchor">[316]</a> A third complaint against the study which he began by
+recommending as a proper introduction to the knowledge of man, is that
+it does not present men but actions, or at least men only in their
+parade costume and in certain chosen moments, and he justly reproaches
+writers alike of history and biography, for omitting those trifling
+strokes and homely anecdotes, which reveal the true physiognomy of
+character. &quot;Remain then for ever, without bowels, without nature;
+harden your hearts of cast iron in your trumpery decency, and make
+yourselves despicable by force of dignity.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_317_317" id="FNanchor_317_317"></a><a href="#Footnote_317_317" class="fnanchor">[317]</a> And so after all, by
+a common stroke of impetuous inconsistency, he forsakes history, and
+falls back upon the ancient biographies, because, all the low and
+familiar details being banished from modern style, however true and
+characteristic, men are as elaborately tricked out by our authors in
+their private lives as they were tricked out upon the stage of the
+world.</p>
+
+
+<p style="text-align: center"><b>V.</b></p>
+
+<p>As women are from the constitution of things the educators of us all
+at the most critical periods, and mainly of their own sex from the
+beginning to the end of education, the writer of the most imperfect
+treatise on this world-interesting subject can hardly avoid saying
+something on the upbringing of women. <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[ii.242]</a></span>Such a writer may start from
+one of three points of view; he may consider the woman as destined to
+be a wife, or a mother, or a human being; as the companion of a man,
+as the rearer of the young, or as an independent personality, endowed
+with gifts, talents, possibilities, in less or greater number, and
+capable, as in the case of men, of being trained to the worst or the
+best uses. Of course to every one who looks into life, each of these
+three ideals melts into the other two, and we can only think of them
+effectively when they are blended. Yet we test a writer's appreciation
+of the conditions of human progress by observing the function which he
+makes most prominent. A man's whole thought of the worth and aim of
+womanhood depends upon the generosity and elevation of the ideal which
+is silently present in his mind, while he is specially meditating the
+relations of woman as wife or as mother. Unless he is really capable
+of thinking of them as human beings, independently of these two
+functions, he is sure to have comparatively mean notions in connection
+with them in respect of the functions which he makes paramount.</p>
+
+<p>Rousseau breaks down here. The unsparing fashion in which he developed
+the theory of individualism in the case of Emilius, and insisted on
+man being allowed to grow into the man of nature, instead of the man
+of art and manufacture, might have led us to expect that when he came
+to speak of women, he would suffer equity and logic to have their way,
+by giving equally free room in the two halves of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[ii.243]</a></span> human race, for
+the development of natural force and capacity. If, as he begins by
+saying, he wishes to bring up Emilius, not to be a merchant nor a
+physician nor a soldier nor to the practice of any other special
+calling, but to be first and above all a man, why should not Sophie
+too be brought up above all to be a human being, in whom the special
+qualifications of wifehood and motherhood may be developed in their
+due order? Emilius is a man first, a husband and a father afterwards
+and secondarily. How can Sophie be a companion for him, and an
+instructor for their children, unless she likewise has been left in
+the hands of nature, and had the same chances permitted to her as were
+given to her predestined mate? Again, the pictures of the New Helo&#239;sa
+would have led us to conceive the ideal of womanly station not so much
+in the wife, as in the house-mother, attached by esteem and sober
+affection to her husband, but having for her chief functions to be the
+gentle guardian of her little ones, and the mild, firm, and prudent
+administrator of a cheerful and well-ordered household. In the last
+book of the Emilius, which treats of the education of girls, education
+is reduced within the compass of an even narrower ideal than this. We
+are confronted with the oriental conception of women. Every principle
+that has been followed in the education of Emilius is reversed in the
+education of women. Opinion, which is the tomb of virtue among men, is
+among women its high throne. The whole education of women ought to be
+relative to men; to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">[ii.244]</a></span> please them, to be useful to them, to make
+themselves loved and honoured by them, to console them, to render
+their lives agreeable and sweet to them,&#8212;these are the duties which
+ought to be taught to women from their childhood. Every girl ought to
+have the religion of her mother, and every wife that of her husband.
+Not being in a condition to judge for themselves, they ought to
+receive the decision of fathers and husbands as if it were that of the
+church. And since authority is the rule of faith for women, it is not
+so much a matter of explaining to them the reasons for belief, as for
+expounding clearly to them what to believe. Although boys are not to
+hear of the idea of God until they are fifteen, because they are not
+in a condition to apprehend it, yet girls who are still less in a
+condition to apprehend it, are <i>therefore</i> to have it imparted to them
+at an earlier age. Woman is created to give way to man, and to suffer
+his injustice. Her empire is an empire of gentleness, mildness, and
+complaisance. Her orders are caresses, and her threats are tears.
+Girls must not only be made laborious and vigilant; they must also
+very early be accustomed to being thwarted and kept in restraint. This
+misfortune, if they feel it one, is inseparable from their sex, and if
+ever they attempt to escape from it, they will only suffer misfortunes
+still more cruel in consequence.<a name="FNanchor_318_318" id="FNanchor_318_318"></a><a href="#Footnote_318_318" class="fnanchor">[318]</a></p>
+
+<p>After a series of oriental and obscurantist propositions of this kind,
+it is of little purpose to tell us that <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">[ii.245]</a></span>women have more intelligence
+and men more genius; that women observe, while men reason; that men
+will philosophise better upon the human heart, while women will be
+more skilful in reading it.<a name="FNanchor_319_319" id="FNanchor_319_319"></a><a href="#Footnote_319_319" class="fnanchor">[319]</a> And it is a mere mockery to end the
+matter by a fervid assurance, that in spite of prejudices that have
+their origin in the manners of the time, the enthusiasm for what is
+worthy and noble is no more foreign to women than it is to men, and
+that there is nothing which under the guidance of nature may not be
+obtained from them as well as from ourselves.<a name="FNanchor_320_320" id="FNanchor_320_320"></a><a href="#Footnote_320_320" class="fnanchor">[320]</a> Finally there is a
+complete surrender of the obscurantist position in such a sentence as
+this: &quot;I only know for either sex two really distinct classes; one the
+people who think, the other the people who do not think, and this
+difference comes almost entirely from education. A man of the first of
+these classes ought not to marry into the other; for the greatest
+charm of companionship is wanting, when in spite of having a wife he
+is reduced to think by himself. It is only a cultivated spirit that
+provides agreeable commerce, and 'tis a cheerless thing for a father
+of a family who loves his home, to be obliged to shut himself up
+within himself, and to have no one about him who understands him.
+Besides, how is a woman who has no habits of reflection to bring up
+her children?&quot;<a name="FNanchor_321_321" id="FNanchor_321_321"></a><a href="#Footnote_321_321" class="fnanchor">[321]</a> Nothing could be more excellently urged. But how
+is a woman to have habits of reflection, when she has been constantly
+brought up in habits of the closest mental bondage, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">[ii.246]</a></span>trained always to
+consider her first business to be the pleasing of some man, and her
+instruments not reasonable persuasion but caressing and crying?</p>
+
+<p>This pernicious nonsense was mainly due, like nearly all his most
+serious errors, to Rousseau's want of a conception of improvement in
+human affairs. If he had been filled with that conception as Turgot,
+Condorcet, and others were, he would have been forced as they were, to
+meditate upon changes in the education and the recognition accorded to
+women, as one of the first conditions of improvement. For lack of
+this, he contributed nothing to the most important branch of the
+subject that he had undertaken to treat. He was always taunting the
+champions of reigning systems of training for boys, with the vicious
+or feeble men whom he thought he saw on every hand around him. The
+same kind of answer obviously meets the current idea, which he adopted
+with a few idyllic decorations of his own, of the type of the
+relations between men and women. That type practically reduces
+marriage in ninety-nine cases out of every hundred to a dolorous
+parody of a social partnership. It does more than any one other cause
+to keep societies back, because it prevents one half of the members of
+a society from cultivating all their natural energies. Thus it
+produces a waste of helpful quality as immeasurable as it is
+deplorable, and besides rearing these creatures of mutilated faculty
+to be the intellectually demoralising companions of the remaining half
+of their own generation, makes them the mothers and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">[ii.247]</a></span> the earliest and
+most influential instructors of the whole of the generation that comes
+after.<a name="FNanchor_322_322" id="FNanchor_322_322"></a><a href="#Footnote_322_322" class="fnanchor">[322]</a> Of course, if any one believes that the existing
+arrangements of a western community are the most successful that we
+can ever hope to bring into operation, we need not complain of
+Rousseau. If not, then it is only reasonable to suppose that a
+considerable portion of the change will be effected in the hitherto
+neglected and subordinate half of the race. That reconstitution of the
+family, which Rousseau and others among his contemporaries rightly
+sought after as one of the most pressing needs of the time, was
+essentially impossible, so long as the typical woman was the adornment
+of a semi-philosophic seraglio, a sort of compromise between the
+frowzy ideal of an English bourgeois and the impertinent ideal of a
+Parisian gallant. Condorcet and others made a grievous mistake in
+defending the free gratification of sensual passion, as one of the
+conditions of happiness and making the most of our lives.<a name="FNanchor_323_323" id="FNanchor_323_323"></a><a href="#Footnote_323_323" class="fnanchor">[323]</a> But
+even this was not at bottom more fatal to the maintenance and order of
+the family, than Rousseau's enervating notion of keeping women in
+strict intellectual and moral subjection was fatal to the family as
+the true school of high and equal companionship, and the fruitful
+seed-ground of <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">[ii.248]</a></span>wise activities and new hopes for each fresh
+generation.</p>
+
+<p>This was one side of Rousseau's reactionary tendencies. Fortunately
+for the revolution of thirty years later, which illustrated the
+gallery of heroic women with some of its most splendid names, his
+power was in this respect neutralised by other stronger tendencies in
+the general spirit of the age. The aristocracy of sex was subjected to
+the same destructive criticism as the aristocracy of birth. The same
+feeling for justice which inspired the demand for freedom and equality
+of opportunity among men, led to the demand for the same freedom and
+equality of opportunity between men and women. All this was part of
+the energy of the time, which Rousseau disliked with undisguised
+bitterness. It broke inconveniently in upon his quietest visions. He
+had no conception, with his sensuous brooding imagination, never
+wholly purged of grossness, of that high and pure type of women whom
+French history so often produced in the seventeenth century, and who
+were not wanting towards the close of the eighteenth, a type in which
+devotion went with force, and austerity with sweetness, and divine
+candour and transparent innocence with energetic loyalty and
+intellectual uprightness and a firmly set will. Such thoughts were not
+for Rousseau, a dreamer led by his senses. Perhaps they are for none
+of us any more. When we turn to modern literature from the pages in
+which F&#233;nelon speaks of the education of girls, who does not feel that
+the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">[ii.249]</a></span> world has lost a sacred accent, as if some ineffable essence has
+passed out from our hearts?</p>
+
+<p>The fifth book of Emilius is not a chapter on the education of women,
+but an idyll. We have already seen the circumstances under which
+Rousseau composed it, in a profound and delicious solitude, in the
+midst of woods and streams, with the fragrance of the orange-flower
+poured around him, and in continual ecstasy. As an idyll it is
+delicious; as a serious contribution to the hardest of problems it is
+naught. The sequel, by a stroke of matchless whimsicality, unless it
+be meant, as it perhaps may have been, for a piece of deep tragic
+irony, is the best refutation that Rousseau's most energetic adversary
+could have desired. The Sophie who has been educated on the oriental
+principle, has presently to confess a flagrant infidelity to the
+blameless Emilius, her lord.<a name="FNanchor_324_324" id="FNanchor_324_324"></a><a href="#Footnote_324_324" class="fnanchor">[324]</a></p>
+
+
+<p style="text-align: center"><b>VI.</b></p>
+
+<p>Yet the sum of the merits of Emilius as a writing upon education is
+not to be lightly counted. Its value lies, as has been said of the New
+Helo&#239;sa, in the spirit which animates it and communicates itself with
+vivid force to the reader. It is one of the seminal books in the
+history of literature, and of such books the worth resides less in the
+parts than in the whole. It touched the deeper things of character. It
+filled parents with a sense of the dignity and moment of their task.
+It cleared away the accumulation of <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">[ii.250]</a></span>clogging prejudices and obscure
+inveterate usage, which made education one of the dark formalistic
+arts. It admitted floods of light and air into the tightly closed
+nurseries and schoolrooms. It effected the substitution of growth for
+mechanism. A strong current of manliness, wholesomeness, simplicity,
+self-reliance, was sent by it through Europe, while its eloquence was
+the most powerful adjuration ever addressed to parental affection to
+cherish the young life in all love and considerate solicitude. It was
+the charter of youthful deliverance. The first immediate effect of
+Emilius in France was mainly on the religious side. It was the
+Christian religion that needed to be avenged, rather than education
+that needed to be amended, and the press overflowed with replies to
+that profession of faith which we shall consider in the next chapter.
+Still there was also an immense quantity of educational books and
+pamphlets, which is to be set down, first to the suppression of the
+Jesuits, the great educating order, and the vacancy which they left;
+and next to the impulse given by the Emilius to a movement from which
+the book itself had originally been an outcome.<a name="FNanchor_325_325" id="FNanchor_325_325"></a><a href="#Footnote_325_325" class="fnanchor">[325]</a> But why try to
+state the influence of Emilius on France in this way? To strike the
+account truly would be to write the history of the first French
+Revolution.<a name="FNanchor_326_326" id="FNanchor_326_326"></a><a href="#Footnote_326_326" class="fnanchor">[326]</a> All mothers, as Michelet <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">[ii.251]</a></span>says, were big with
+Emilius. &quot;It is not without good reason that people have noted the
+children born at this glorious moment, as animated by a superior
+spirit, by a gift of flame and genius. It is the generation of
+revolutionary Titans: the other generation not less hardy in science.
+It is Danton, Vergniaud, Desmoulins; it is Amp&#232;re, La Place, Cuvier,
+Geoffroy Saint Hilaire.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_327_327" id="FNanchor_327_327"></a><a href="#Footnote_327_327" class="fnanchor">[327]</a></p>
+
+<p>In Germany Emilius had great power. There it fell in with the
+extraordinary movement towards naturalness and freedom of which we
+have already spoken.<a name="FNanchor_328_328" id="FNanchor_328_328"></a><a href="#Footnote_328_328" class="fnanchor">[328]</a> Herder, whom some have called the Rousseau
+of the Germans, wrote with enthusiasm to his then beloved Caroline of
+the &quot;divine Emilius,&quot; and he never ceased to speak of Rousseau as his
+inspirer and his master.<a name="FNanchor_329_329" id="FNanchor_329_329"></a><a href="#Footnote_329_329" class="fnanchor">[329]</a> Basedow (1723), that strange, restless,
+and most ill-regulated person, was seized with an almost phrenetic
+enthusiasm for Rousseau's educational theories, translated them into
+German, and repeated them in his works over and over again with an
+incessant iteration. Lavater (1741-1801), who differed from Basedow in
+being a fervent Christian of soft mystic faith, was thrown into
+company with him in 1774, and grew equally eager with him in the cause
+of reforming education in the Rousseauite sense.<a name="FNanchor_330_330" id="FNanchor_330_330"></a><a href="#Footnote_330_330" class="fnanchor">[330]</a> <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">[ii.252]</a></span>Pestalozzi
+(1746-1827), the most systematic, popular, and permanently successful
+of all the educational reformers, borrowed his spirit and his
+principles mainly from the Emilius, though he gave larger extension
+and more intelligent exactitude to their application. Jean Paul the
+Unique, in the preface to his Levana, or Doctrine of Education (1806),
+one of the most excellent of all books on the subject, declares that
+among previous works to which he owes a debt, &quot;first and last he names
+Rousseau's Emilius; no preceding work can be compared to his; in no
+previous work on education was the ideal so richly combined with the
+actual,&quot; and so forth.<a name="FNanchor_331_331" id="FNanchor_331_331"></a><a href="#Footnote_331_331" class="fnanchor">[331]</a> It was not merely a Goethe, a Schiller, a
+Herder, whom Rousseau fired with new thoughts. The smaller men, such
+as Fr. Jacobi, Heinse, Klinger, shared the same inspiration. The
+worship of Rousseau penetrated all classes, and touched every degree
+of intelligence.<a name="FNanchor_332_332" id="FNanchor_332_332"></a><a href="#Footnote_332_332" class="fnanchor">[332]</a></p>
+
+<p>In our own country Emilius was translated as soon as it appeared, and
+must have been widely read, for a second version of the translation
+was called for in a very short time. So far as a cursory survey gives
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">[ii.253]</a></span>one a right to speak, its influence here in the field of education is
+not very perceptible. That subject did not yet, nor for some time to
+come, excite much active thought in England. Rousseau's speculations
+on society both in the Emilius and elsewhere seem to have attracted
+more attention. Reference has already been made to Paley.<a name="FNanchor_333_333" id="FNanchor_333_333"></a><a href="#Footnote_333_333" class="fnanchor">[333]</a> Adam
+Ferguson's celebrated Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) has
+many allusions, direct and indirect, to Rousseau.<a name="FNanchor_334_334" id="FNanchor_334_334"></a><a href="#Footnote_334_334" class="fnanchor">[334]</a> Kames's
+Sketches of the History of Man (1774) abounds still more copiously in
+references to Emilius, sometimes to controvert its author, more often
+to cite him as an authority worthy of respect, and Rousseau's crude
+notions about women are cited with special acceptance.<a name="FNanchor_335_335" id="FNanchor_335_335"></a><a href="#Footnote_335_335" class="fnanchor">[335]</a> Cowper was
+probably thinking of the Savoyard Vicar when he wrote the energetic
+lines in the Task, beginning &quot;Haste now, philosopher, and set him
+free,&quot; scornfully defying the deist to rescue apostate man.<a name="FNanchor_336_336" id="FNanchor_336_336"></a><a href="#Footnote_336_336" class="fnanchor">[336]</a> Nor
+should we omit what was counted so important a book in its day as
+Godwin's Enquiry concerning Political Justice (1793). It is perhaps
+more French in its spirit than any other work of equal consequence in
+our literature of politics, and in <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">[ii.254]</a></span>its composition the author was
+avowedly a student of Rousseau, as well as of the members of the
+materialistic school.</p>
+
+<p>In fine we may add that Emilius was the first expression of that
+democratic tendency in education, which political and other
+circumstances gradually made general alike in England, France, and
+Germany; a tendency, that is, to look on education as a process
+concerning others besides the rich and the well-born. As has often
+been remarked, Ascham, Milton, Locke, F&#233;nelon, busy themselves about
+the instruction of young gentlemen and gentlewomen. The rest of the
+world are supposed to be sufficiently provided for by the education of
+circumstance. Since the middle of the eighteenth century this
+monopolising conception has vanished, along with and through the same
+general agencies as the corresponding conception of social monopoly.
+Rousseau enforced the production of a natural and self-sufficing man
+as the object of education, and showed, or did his best to show, the
+infinite capacity of the young for that simple and natural
+cultivation. This easily and directly led people to reflect that such
+a capacity was not confined to the children of the rich, nor the hope
+of producing a natural and sufficing man narrowed to those who had
+every external motive placed around them for being neither natural nor
+self-sufficing.</p>
+
+<p>Voltaire pronounced Emilius a stupid romance, but admitted that it
+contained fifty pages which he would have bound in morocco. These, we
+may be sure, con<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">[ii.255]</a></span>cerned religion; in truth it was the Savoyard Vicar's
+profession of faith which stirred France far more than the upbringing
+of the natural man in things temporal. Let us pass to that eloquent
+document which is inserted in the middle of the Emilius, as the
+expression of the religious opinion that best befits the man of
+nature&#8212;a document most hyperbolically counted by some French
+enthusiasts for the spiritualist philosophy and the religion of
+sentiment, as the noblest monument of the eighteenth century.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_273_273" id="Footnote_273_273"></a><a href="#FNanchor_273_273"><span class="label">[273]</span></a> <i>M&#233;m. de Mdme. d'Epinay</i>, ii. 276, 278.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_274_274" id="Footnote_274_274"></a><a href="#FNanchor_274_274"><span class="label">[274]</span></a> <i>Lettres &#224; mon Fils</i> (1758), and <i>Les Conversations
+d'Emilie</i> (1783).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_275_275" id="Footnote_275_275"></a><a href="#FNanchor_275_275"><span class="label">[275]</span></a> <i>Lettres P&#233;ruviennes.</i></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_276_276" id="Footnote_276_276"></a><a href="#FNanchor_276_276"><span class="label">[276]</span></a> <i>Oeuv.</i>, ii. 785-794.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_277_277" id="Footnote_277_277"></a><a href="#FNanchor_277_277"><span class="label">[277]</span></a> <i>Corr. Lit.</i>, iii. 65.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_278_278" id="Footnote_278_278"></a><a href="#FNanchor_278_278"><span class="label">[278]</span></a> <i>Emile</i>, I. 27.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_279_279" id="Footnote_279_279"></a><a href="#FNanchor_279_279"><span class="label">[279]</span></a> It is interesting to recall a similar movement in the
+Roman society of the second century of our era. See the advice of
+Favorinus to mothers, in Aulus Gellius, xii. 1. M. Boissier,
+contrasting the solicitude of Tacitus and Marcus Aurelius for the
+infant young with the brutality of Cicero, remarks that in the time of
+Seneca men discussed in the schools the educational theories of
+Rousseau's Emilius. (<i>La Relig. Romaine</i>, ii. 202.)</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_280_280" id="Footnote_280_280"></a><a href="#FNanchor_280_280"><span class="label">[280]</span></a> See also his diatribe against whalebone and
+tight-lacing for girls, V. 27.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_281_281" id="Footnote_281_281"></a><a href="#FNanchor_281_281"><span class="label">[281]</span></a> <i>Emile</i>, I. 93, etc.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_282_282" id="Footnote_282_282"></a><a href="#FNanchor_282_282"><span class="label">[282]</span></a> <i>Emile</i>, II. 141.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_283_283" id="Footnote_283_283"></a><a href="#FNanchor_283_283"><span class="label">[283]</span></a> <i>Emile</i>, II. 156-160.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_284_284" id="Footnote_284_284"></a><a href="#FNanchor_284_284"><span class="label">[284]</span></a> <i>Emile</i>, III. 338-345.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_285_285" id="Footnote_285_285"></a><a href="#FNanchor_285_285"><span class="label">[285]</span></a> III. 358, etc.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_286_286" id="Footnote_286_286"></a><a href="#FNanchor_286_286"><span class="label">[286]</span></a> <i>Emile</i>, II. 263-267.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_287_287" id="Footnote_287_287"></a><a href="#FNanchor_287_287"><span class="label">[287]</span></a> <i>Levana</i>, ch. iii. &#167; 54.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_288_288" id="Footnote_288_288"></a><a href="#FNanchor_288_288"><span class="label">[288]</span></a> <i>Emile</i>, II. 163.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_289_289" id="Footnote_289_289"></a><a href="#FNanchor_289_289"><span class="label">[289]</span></a> The Ninth Promenade (<i>R&#234;veries</i>, 309).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_290_290" id="Footnote_290_290"></a><a href="#FNanchor_290_290"><span class="label">[290]</span></a> <i>Emile</i>, I. 23.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_291_291" id="Footnote_291_291"></a><a href="#FNanchor_291_291"><span class="label">[291]</span></a> II. 109.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_292_292" id="Footnote_292_292"></a><a href="#FNanchor_292_292"><span class="label">[292]</span></a> II. 111.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_293_293" id="Footnote_293_293"></a><a href="#FNanchor_293_293"><span class="label">[293]</span></a> <i>Emile</i>, II. 113-117.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_294_294" id="Footnote_294_294"></a><a href="#FNanchor_294_294"><span class="label">[294]</span></a> II. 121.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_295_295" id="Footnote_295_295"></a><a href="#FNanchor_295_295"><span class="label">[295]</span></a> II. 143.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_296_296" id="Footnote_296_296"></a><a href="#FNanchor_296_296"><span class="label">[296]</span></a> <i>Emile</i>, III. 382.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_297_297" id="Footnote_297_297"></a><a href="#FNanchor_297_297"><span class="label">[297]</span></a> II. 227.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_298_298" id="Footnote_298_298"></a><a href="#FNanchor_298_298"><span class="label">[298]</span></a> IV. 10.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_299_299" id="Footnote_299_299"></a><a href="#FNanchor_299_299"><span class="label">[299]</span></a> <i>Emile</i>, III. 394.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_300_300" id="Footnote_300_300"></a><a href="#FNanchor_300_300"><span class="label">[300]</span></a> V. 199.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_301_301" id="Footnote_301_301"></a><a href="#FNanchor_301_301"><span class="label">[301]</span></a> The reader will not forget the famous supper-party of
+princes in <i>Candide</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_302_302" id="Footnote_302_302"></a><a href="#FNanchor_302_302"><span class="label">[302]</span></a> <i>Emile</i>, III. 392, and note. A still more remarkable
+passage, as far as it goes, is that in the <i>Confessions</i> (xi.
+136):&#8212;&quot;The disasters of an unsuccessful war, all of which came from
+the fault of the government, the incredible disorder of the finances,
+the continual dissensions of the administration, divided as it was
+among two or three ministers at open war with one another, and who for
+the sake of hurting one another dragged the kingdom into ruin; the
+general discontent of the people, and of all the orders of the state;
+the obstinacy of a wrong-headed woman, who, always sacrificing her
+better judgment, if indeed she had any, to her tastes, dismissed the
+most capable from office, to make room for her favourites ... all this
+prospect of a coming break-up made me think of seeking shelter
+elsewhere.&quot;</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_303_303" id="Footnote_303_303"></a><a href="#FNanchor_303_303"><span class="label">[303]</span></a> <i>Emile</i>, V. 220.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_304_304" id="Footnote_304_304"></a><a href="#FNanchor_304_304"><span class="label">[304]</span></a> IV. 85.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_305_305" id="Footnote_305_305"></a><a href="#FNanchor_305_305"><span class="label">[305]</span></a> <i>Emile</i>, IV. 38, 39. Hence, we suppose, the famous
+reply to Lavoisier's request that his life might be spared from the
+guillotine for a fortnight, in order that he might complete some
+experiments, that the Republic has no need of chemists.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_306_306" id="Footnote_306_306"></a><a href="#FNanchor_306_306"><span class="label">[306]</span></a> IV. 65. Jefferson, who was American minister in France
+from 1784 to 1789, and absorbed a great many of the ideas then afloat,
+writes in words that seem as if they were borrowed from Rousseau:&#8212;&quot;I
+am convinced that those societies (as the Indians) which live without
+government, enjoy in their general mass an infinitely greater degree
+of happiness than those who live under European governments. Among the
+former public opinion is in the state of law, and restrains morals as
+powerfully as laws ever did anywhere. Among the latter, under pretence
+of governing, they have divided their nation into two classes, wolves
+and sheep. I do not exaggerate; this is a true picture of Europe.&quot;
+Tucker's <i>Life of Jefferson</i>, i. 255.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_307_307" id="Footnote_307_307"></a><a href="#FNanchor_307_307"><span class="label">[307]</span></a> Lamennais was influenced by Rousseau throughout. In the
+<i>Essay on Indifference</i> he often appeals to him as the vindicator of
+the religious sentiment (<i>e.g.</i> i. 21, 52, iv. 375, etc. Ed. 1837).
+The same influence is seen still more markedly in the <i>Words of a
+Believer</i> (1835), when dogma had departed, and he was left with a kind
+of dual deism, thus being less estranged from Rousseau than in the
+first days (<i>e.g.</i> &#167; xix. &quot;Tous naissent &#233;gaux,&quot; etc., &#167; xxi., etc.)
+The <i>Book of the People</i> is thoroughly Rousseauite.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_308_308" id="Footnote_308_308"></a><a href="#FNanchor_308_308"><span class="label">[308]</span></a> <i>Emile</i>, IV. 105.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_309_309" id="Footnote_309_309"></a><a href="#FNanchor_309_309"><span class="label">[309]</span></a> <i>Emile</i>, IV. 63.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_310_310" id="Footnote_310_310"></a><a href="#FNanchor_310_310"><span class="label">[310]</span></a> <i>Emile</i>, IV. 273.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_311_311" id="Footnote_311_311"></a><a href="#FNanchor_311_311"><span class="label">[311]</span></a> <i>Emile</i>, IV. 83.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_312_312" id="Footnote_312_312"></a><a href="#FNanchor_312_312"><span class="label">[312]</span></a> <i>Emile</i>, II. 185. See the previous page for some
+equally prudent observations on the folly of teaching geography to
+little children.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_313_313" id="Footnote_313_313"></a><a href="#FNanchor_313_313"><span class="label">[313]</span></a> <i>Emile</i>, IV. 68.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_314_314" id="Footnote_314_314"></a><a href="#FNanchor_314_314"><span class="label">[314]</span></a> V. 231, etc.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_315_315" id="Footnote_315_315"></a><a href="#FNanchor_315_315"><span class="label">[315]</span></a> <i>Emile</i>, IV. 71.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_316_316" id="Footnote_316_316"></a><a href="#FNanchor_316_316"><span class="label">[316]</span></a> <i>Emile</i>, IV. 73.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_317_317" id="Footnote_317_317"></a><a href="#FNanchor_317_317"><span class="label">[317]</span></a> IV. 77.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_318_318" id="Footnote_318_318"></a><a href="#FNanchor_318_318"><span class="label">[318]</span></a> <i>Emile</i>, V. 22, 53, 54, 101, 128-132.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_319_319" id="Footnote_319_319"></a><a href="#FNanchor_319_319"><span class="label">[319]</span></a> <i>Emile</i>, V. 78.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_320_320" id="Footnote_320_320"></a><a href="#FNanchor_320_320"><span class="label">[320]</span></a> V. 122.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_321_321" id="Footnote_321_321"></a><a href="#FNanchor_321_321"><span class="label">[321]</span></a> V. 129, 130.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_322_322" id="Footnote_322_322"></a><a href="#FNanchor_322_322"><span class="label">[322]</span></a> Well did Jean Paul say, &quot;If we regard all life as an
+educational institution, a circumnavigator of the world is less
+influenced by all the nations he has seen than by his
+nurse.&quot;&#8212;<i>Levana.</i></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_323_323" id="Footnote_323_323"></a><a href="#FNanchor_323_323"><span class="label">[323]</span></a> <i>Tableau des Progr&#232;s de l'Esprit Humain.</i> <i>Oeuv.</i>, vi.
+pp. 264, 523-526, and elsewhere. [Ed. 1847-1849.]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_324_324" id="Footnote_324_324"></a><a href="#FNanchor_324_324"><span class="label">[324]</span></a> <i>Emile et Sophie</i>, i.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_325_325" id="Footnote_325_325"></a><a href="#FNanchor_325_325"><span class="label">[325]</span></a> For an account of some of these, see Grimm's <i>Corr.
+Lit.</i>, iii. 211, 252, 347, etc. Also <i>Corr. In&#233;d.</i>, p. 143.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_326_326" id="Footnote_326_326"></a><a href="#FNanchor_326_326"><span class="label">[326]</span></a> For the early date at which Rousseau's power began to
+meet recognition, see D'Alembert to Voltaire, July 31, 1762.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_327_327" id="Footnote_327_327"></a><a href="#FNanchor_327_327"><span class="label">[327]</span></a> <i>Louis xv. et xvi.</i>, p. 226.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_328_328" id="Footnote_328_328"></a><a href="#FNanchor_328_328"><span class="label">[328]</span></a> See above, vol. ii. p.
+  <a href="#Page_193">193</a>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_329_329" id="Footnote_329_329"></a><a href="#FNanchor_329_329"><span class="label">[329]</span></a> Hettner, III. iii., 2, p. 27, <i>s.v.</i> Herder.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_330_330" id="Footnote_330_330"></a><a href="#FNanchor_330_330"><span class="label">[330]</span></a> The suggestion of the speculation with which Lavater's
+name is most commonly associated, is to be found in the Emilius. &quot;It
+is supposed that physiognomy is only a development of features already
+marked by nature. For my part, I should think that besides this
+development, the features of a man's countenance form themselves
+insensibly and take their expression from the frequent and habitual
+wearing into them of certain affections of the soul. These affections
+mark themselves in the countenance, nothing is more certain; and when
+they grow into habits, they must leave durable impressions upon it.&quot;
+IV. 49, 50.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_331_331" id="Footnote_331_331"></a><a href="#FNanchor_331_331"><span class="label">[331]</span></a> Author's Preface, x.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_332_332" id="Footnote_332_332"></a><a href="#FNanchor_332_332"><span class="label">[332]</span></a> See an excellent page in M. Joret's <i>Herder</i>, 322.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_333_333" id="Footnote_333_333"></a><a href="#FNanchor_333_333"><span class="label">[333]</span></a> See above, vol. ii. p.
+  <a href="#Page_191">191</a>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_334_334" id="Footnote_334_334"></a><a href="#FNanchor_334_334"><span class="label">[334]</span></a> <i>E.g.</i> pp. 8, 198, 204, 205.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_335_335" id="Footnote_335_335"></a><a href="#FNanchor_335_335"><span class="label">[335]</span></a> <i>E.g.</i> Bk. I. &#167; 5, p. 279. &#167; 6, p. 406, 419, etc. (the
+portion concerning the female sex).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_336_336" id="Footnote_336_336"></a><a href="#FNanchor_336_336"><span class="label">[336]</span></a> Vv. 670-703. We have already seen (above, vol. ii. p.
+41, <i>n.</i>) that Cowper had read Emilius, and the mocking reference to
+the Deist as &quot;an Orpheus and omnipotent in song,&quot; coincides with
+Rousseau's comparison of the Savoyard Vicar to &quot;the divine Orpheus
+singing the first hymn&quot; (<i>Emile</i>, IV. 205).</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">[ii.256]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_V" id="CHAPTER_V"></a>CHAPTER V.</h2>
+
+<h3>THE SAVOYARD VICAR.</h3>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The</span> band of dogmatic atheists who met round D'Holbach's
+dinner-table indulged a shallow and futile hope, if it was not an
+ungenerous one, when they expected the immediate advent of a
+generation with whom a humane and rational philosophy should displace,
+not merely the superstitions which had grown around the Christian
+dogma, but every root and fragment of theistic conception. A hope of
+this kind implied a singularly random idea, alike of the hold which
+Christianity had taken of the religious emotion in western Europe, and
+of the durableness of those conditions in human character, to which
+some belief in a deity with a greater or fewer number of good
+attributes brings solace and nourishment. A movement like that of
+Christianity does not pass through a group of societies, and then
+leave no trace behind. It springs from many other sources besides that
+of adherence to the truth of its dogmas. The stream of its influence
+must continue to flow long after adherence to the letter has been
+confined to the least informed portions of a community. The<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">[ii.257]</a></span>
+Encyclop&#230;dists knew that they had sapped religious dogma and shaken
+ecclesiastical organisation. They forgot that religious sentiment on
+the one hand, and habit of respect for authority on the other, were
+both of them still left behind. They had convinced themselves by a
+host of persuasive analogies that the universe is an automatic
+machine, and man only an industrious particle in the stupendous whole;
+that a final cause is not cognisable by our limited intelligence; and
+that to make emotion in this or any other respect a test of objective
+truth and a ground of positive belief, is to lower both truth and the
+reason which is its single arbiter. They forgot that imagination is as
+active in man as his reason, and that a craving for mental peace may
+become much stronger than passion for demonstrated truth. Christianity
+had given to this craving in western Europe a definite mould, which
+was not to be effaced in a day, and one or two of its lines mark a
+permanent and noble acquisition to the highest forces of human nature.
+There will have to be wrought a profounder and more far-spreading
+modification than any which the French atheists could effect, before
+all debilitating influences in the old creed can be effaced, its
+elevating influences finally separated from them, and then permanently
+preserved in more beneficent form and in an association less
+questionable to the understanding.</p>
+
+<p>Neither a purely negative nor a direct attack can ever suffice. There
+must be a coincidence of many silently oppugnant forces, emotional,
+scientific, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">[ii.258]</a></span> material. And, above all, there must be the slow
+steadfast growth of some replacing faith, which shall retain all the
+elements of moral beauty that once gave light to the old belief that
+has disappeared, and must still possess a living force in the new.</p>
+
+<p>Here we find the good side of a religious reaction such as that which
+Rousseau led in the last century, and of which the Savoyard Vicar's
+profession of faith was the famous symbol. Evil as this reaction was
+in many respects, and especially in the check which it gave to the
+application of positive methods and conceptions to the most important
+group of our beliefs, yet it had what was the very signal merit under
+the circumstances of the time, of keeping the religious emotions alive
+in association with a tolerant, pure, lofty, and living set of
+articles of faith, instead of feeding them on the dead superstitions
+which were at that moment the only practical alternative. The deism of
+Rousseau could not in any case have acquired the force of the
+corresponding religious reaction in England, because the former never
+acquired a compact and vigorous external organisation, as the latter
+did, especially in Wesleyanism and Evangelicalism, the most remarkable
+of its developments. In truth the vague, fluid, purely subjective
+character of deism disqualifies it from forming the doctrinal basis of
+any great objective and visible church, for it is at bottom the
+sublimation of individualism. But in itself it was a far less
+retrogressive, as well as a far less powerful, movement. It kept fewer
+of those dogmas which<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">[ii.259]</a></span> gradual change of intellectual climate had
+reduced to the condition of rank superstitions. It preserved some of
+its own, which a still further extension of the same change is
+assuredly destined to reduce to the same condition; but, nevertheless,
+along with them it cherished sentiments which the world will never
+willingly let die.</p>
+
+<p>The one cardinal service of the Christian doctrine, which is of course
+to be distinguished from the services rendered to civilisation in
+early times by the Christian church, has been the contribution to the
+active intelligence of the west, of those moods of holiness, awe,
+reverence, and silent worship of an Unseen not made with hands, which
+the Christianising Jews first brought from the east. Of the fabric
+which four centuries ago looked so stupendous and so enduring, with
+its magnificent whole and its minutely reticulated parts of belief and
+practice, this gradual creation of a new temperament in the religious
+imagination of Western Europe and the countries that take their mental
+direction from her, is perhaps the only portion that will remain
+distinctly visible, after all the rest has sunk into the repose of
+histories of opinion. Whether this be the case or not, the fact that
+these deeper moods are among the richest acquisitions of human nature,
+will not be denied either by those who think that Christianity
+associates them with objects destined permanently to awake them in
+their loftiest form, or by others who believe that the deepest moods
+of which man is capable, must<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">[ii.260]</a></span> ultimately ally themselves with
+something still more purely spiritual than the anthropomorphised
+deities of the falling church. And if so, then Rousseau's deism, while
+intercepting the steady advance of the rationalistic assault and
+diverting the current of renovating energy, still did something to
+keep alive in a more or less worthy shape those parts of the slowly
+expiring system which men have the best reasons for cherishing.</p>
+
+<p>Let us endeavour to characterise Rousseau's deism with as much
+precision as it allows. It was a special and graceful form of a
+doctrine which, though susceptible, alike in theory and in the
+practical history of religious thought, of numberless wide varieties
+of significance, is commonly designated by the name of deism, without
+qualification. People constantly speak as if deism only came in with
+the eighteenth century. It would be impossible to name any century
+since the twelfth, in which distinct and abundant traces could not be
+found within the dominion of Christianity of a belief in a
+supernatural power apart from the supposed disclosure of it in a
+special revelation.<a name="FNanchor_337_337" id="FNanchor_337_337"></a><a href="#Footnote_337_337" class="fnanchor">[337]</a> A pr&#230;ter-christian deism, or the principle of
+natural religion, was inevitably contained in the legal conception of
+a natural law, for how can we dissociate the idea of law from the idea
+of a definite lawgiver? <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">[ii.261]</a></span>The very scholastic disputations themselves,
+by the sharpness and subtlety which they gave to the reasoning
+faculty, set men in search of novelties, and these novelties were not
+always of a kind which orthodox views of the Christian mysteries could
+have sanctioned. It has been said that religion is at the cradle of
+every nation, and philosophy at its grave; it is at least true that
+the cradle of philosophy is the open grave of religion. Wherever there
+is argumentation, there is sure to be scepticism. When people begin to
+reason, a shadow has already fallen across faith, though the reasoners
+might have shrunk with horror from knowledge of the goal of their
+work, and though centuries may elapse before the shadow deepens into
+eclipse. But the church was strong and alert in the times when free
+thought vainly tried to rear a dangerous head in Italy. With the
+Protestant revolution came slowly a wider freedom, while the prolonged
+and tempestuous discussion between the old church and the reformed
+bodies, as well as the manifold variations among those bodies at
+strife with one another, stimulated the growth of religious thought in
+many directions that tended away from the exclusive pretensions of
+Christianity to be the oracle of the divine Spirit. The same feeling
+which thrust aside the sacerdotal interposition between the soul of
+man and its sovereign creator and inspirer, gradually worked towards
+the dethronement of those mediators other than sacerdotal, in whom the
+moral timidity of a dark and stricken age<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">[ii.262]</a></span> had once sought shade from
+the too dazzling brightness of the All-powerful and the Everlasting.
+The assertion of the rights and powers of the individual reason within
+the limits of the sacred documents, began in less than a hundred years
+to grow into an assertion of the same rights and powers beyond those
+limits. The rejection of tradition as a substitute for independent
+judgment, in interpreting or supplementing the records of revelation,
+gradually impaired the traditional authority both of the records
+themselves, and of the central doctrines which all churches had in one
+shape or another agreed to accept. The Trinitarian controversy of the
+sixteenth century must have been a stealthy solvent. The deism of
+England in the eighteenth century, which Voltaire was the prime agent
+in introducing in its negative, colourless, and essentially futile
+shape into his own country, had its main effect as a process of
+dissolution.</p>
+
+<p>All this, however, down to the deistical movement which Rousseau found
+in progress at Geneva in 1754,<a name="FNanchor_338_338" id="FNanchor_338_338"></a><a href="#Footnote_338_338" class="fnanchor">[338]</a> was distinctly the outcome in a
+more or less marked way of a rationalising and philosophic spirit, and
+not of the religious spirit. The sceptical side of it with reference
+to revealed religion, predominated over the positive side of it with
+reference to natural religion. The wild pantheism of which there were
+one or two extraordinary outbursts during the latter part of the
+middle ages, to mark the mystical influence which Platonic studies
+uncorrected <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">[ii.263]</a></span>by science always exert over certain temperaments, had
+been full of religiosity, such as it was. These had all passed away
+with a swift flash. There were, indeed, mystics like the author of the
+immortal <i>De Imitatione</i>, in whom the special qualities of Christian
+doctrine seem to have grown pale in a brighter flood of devout
+aspiration towards the perfections of a single Being. But this was not
+the deism with which either Christianity on the one side, or atheism
+on the other, had ever had to deal in France. Deism, in its formal
+acceptation, was either an idle piece of vaporous sentimentality, or
+else it was the first intellectual halting-place for spirits who had
+travelled out of the pale of the old dogmatic Christianity, and lacked
+strength for the continuance of their onward journey. In the latter
+case, it was only another name either for the shrewd rough conviction
+of the man of the world, that his universe could not well be imagined
+to go on without a sort of constitutional monarch, reigning but not
+governing, keeping evil-doers in order by fear of eternal punishment,
+and lending a sacred countenance to the indispensable doctrines of
+property, the gradation of rank and station, and the other moral
+foundations of the social structure. Or else it was a name for a
+purely philosophic principle, not embraced with fervour as the basis
+of a religion, but accepted with decorous satisfaction as the
+alternative to a religion; not seized upon as the mainspring of
+spiritual life, but held up as a shield in a controversy.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264">[ii.264]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The deism which the Savoyard Vicar explained to Emilius in his
+profession of faith was pitched in a very different tone from this.
+Though the Vicar's conception of the Deity was lightly fenced round
+with rationalistic supports of the usual kind, drawn from the
+evidences of will and intelligence in the vast machinery of the
+universe, yet it was essentially the product not of reason, but of
+emotional expansion, as every fundamental article of a faith that
+touches the hearts of many men must always be. The Savoyard Vicar did
+not believe that a God had made the great world, and rules it with
+majestic power and supreme justice, in the same way in which he
+believed that any two sides of a triangle are greater than the third
+side. That there is a mysterious being penetrating all creation with
+force, was not a proposition to be demonstrated, but only the poor
+description in words of an habitual mood going far deeper into life
+than words can ever carry us. Without for a single moment falling off
+into the nullities of pantheism, neither did he for a single moment
+suffer his thought to stiffen and grow hard in the formal lines of a
+theological definition or a systematic credo. It remains firm enough
+to give the religious imagination consistency and a centre, yet
+luminous enough to give the spiritual faculty a vivifying
+consciousness of freedom and space. A creed is concerned with a number
+of affirmations, and is constantly held with honest strenuousness by
+multitudes of men and women who are unfitted by natural temperament<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265">[ii.265]</a></span>
+for knowing what the glow of religious emotion means to the human
+soul,&#8212;for not every one that saith, Lord, Lord, enters the kingdom of
+heaven. The Savoyard Vicar's profession of faith was not a creed, and
+so has few affirmations; it was a single doctrine, melted in a glow of
+contemplative transport. It is impossible to set about disproving it,
+for its exponent repeatedly warns his disciple against the idleness of
+logomachy, and insists that the existence of the Divinity is traced
+upon every heart in letters that can never be effaced, if we are only
+content to read them with lowliness and simplicity. You cannot
+demonstrate an emotion, nor prove an aspiration. How reason, asks the
+Savoyard Vicar, about that which we cannot conceive? Conscience is the
+best of all casuists, and conscience affirms the presence of a being
+who moves the universe and ordains all things, and to him we give the
+name of God.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;To this name I join the ideas of intelligence, power, will, which I
+have united in one, and that of goodness, which is a necessary
+consequence flowing from them. But I do not know any the better for
+this the being to whom I have given the name; he escapes equally from
+my senses and my understanding; the more I think of him, the more I
+confound myself. I have full assurance that he exists, and that he
+exists by himself. I recognise my own being as subordinate to his and
+all the things that are known to me as being absolutely in the same
+case. I perceive God every<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">[ii.266]</a></span>where in his works; I feel him in myself; I
+see him universally around me. But when I fain would seek where he is,
+what he is, of what substance, he glides away from me, and my troubled
+soul discerns nothing.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_339_339" id="FNanchor_339_339"></a><a href="#Footnote_339_339" class="fnanchor">[339]</a></p>
+
+<p>&quot;In fine, the more earnestly I strive to contemplate his infinite
+essence, the less do I conceive it. But it is, and that suffices me.
+The less I conceive it, the more I adore. I bow myself down, and say
+to him, O being of beings, I am because thou art; to meditate
+ceaselessly on thee by day and night, is to raise myself to my
+veritable source and fount. The worthiest use of my reason is to make
+itself as naught before thee. It is the ravishment of my soul, it is
+the solace of my weakness, to feel myself brought low before the awful
+majesty of thy greatness.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_340_340" id="FNanchor_340_340"></a><a href="#Footnote_340_340" class="fnanchor">[340]</a></p>
+
+<p>Souls weary of the fierce mockeries that had so long been flying like
+fiery shafts against the far Jehovah of the Hebrews, and the silent
+Christ of the later doctors and dignitaries, and weary too of the
+orthodox demonstrations that did not demonstrate, and leaden
+refutations that could not refute, may well have turned with ardour to
+listen to this harmonious spiritual voice, sounding clear from a
+region towards which their hearts yearned with untold aspiration, but
+from which the spirit of their time had shut them off with brazen
+barriers. It was the elevation and expansion of man, as much as it was
+the restoration of a divinity. To realise this, one must turn to such
+a book as Helv&#233;tius's, which was <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267">[ii.267]</a></span>supposed to reveal the whole inner
+machinery of the heart. Man was thought of as a singular piece of
+mechanism principally moved from without, not as a conscious organism,
+receiving nourishment and direction from the medium in which it is
+placed, but reacting with a life of its own from within. It was this
+free and energetic inner life of the individual which the Savoyard
+Vicar restored to lawful recognition, and made once more the centre of
+that imaginative and spiritual existence, without which we live in a
+universe that has no sun by day nor any stars by night. A writer in
+whom learning has not extinguished enthusiasm, compares this to the
+advance made by Descartes, who had given certitude to the soul by
+turning thought confidently upon itself; and he declares that the
+Savoyard Vicar is for the emancipation of sentiment what the Discourse
+upon Method was for the emancipation of the understanding.<a name="FNanchor_341_341" id="FNanchor_341_341"></a><a href="#Footnote_341_341" class="fnanchor">[341]</a> There
+is here a certain audacity of panegyric; still the fact that Rousseau
+chose to link the highest forms of man's ideal life with a fading
+projection of the lofty image which had been set up in older days,
+ought not to blind us to the excellent energies which, notwithstanding
+defect of association, such a vindication of the ideal was certain to
+quicken. And at least the lines of that high image were nobly traced.</p>
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268">[ii.268]</a></span></p>
+<p>Yet who does not feel that it is a divinity for fair weather?
+Rousseau, with his fine sense of a proper and artistic setting,
+imagined the Savoyard Vicar as leading his youthful convert at break
+of a summer day to the top of a high hill, at whose feet the Po flowed
+between fertile banks; in the distance the immense chain of the Alps
+crowned the landscape; the rays of the rising sun projected long level
+shadows from the trees, the slopes, the houses, and accented with a
+thousand lines of light the most magnificent of panoramas.<a name="FNanchor_342_342" id="FNanchor_342_342"></a><a href="#Footnote_342_342" class="fnanchor">[342]</a> This
+was the fitting suggestion, so serene, warm, pregnant with power and
+hope, and half mysterious, of the idea of godhead which the man of
+peace after an interval of silent contemplation proceeded to expound.
+Rousseau's sentimental idea at least did not revolt moral sense; it
+did not afflict the firmness of intelligence; nor did it silence the
+diviner melodies of the soul. Yet, once more, the heavens in which
+such a deity dwells are too high, his power is too impalpable, the
+mysterious air which he has poured around his being is too awful and
+impenetrable, for the rays from the sun of such majesty to reach more
+than a few contemplative spirits, and these only in their hours of
+tranquillity and expansion. The thought is too vague, too far, to
+bring comfort and refreshment to the mass of travailing men, or to
+invest duty with the stern ennobling quality of being done, &quot;if I have
+grace to use it so as ever in the great Taskmaster's eye.&quot;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269">[ii.269]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The Savoyard Vicar was consistent with the sublimity of his own
+conception. He meditated on the order of the universe with a reverence
+too profound to allow him to mingle with his thoughts meaner desires
+as to the special relations of that order to himself. &quot;I penetrate all
+my faculties,&quot; he said, &quot;with the divine essence of the author of the
+world; I melt at the thought of his goodness, and bless all his gifts,
+but I do not pray to him. What should I ask of him? That for me he
+should change the course of things, and in my favour work miracles?
+Could I, who must love above all else the order established by his
+wisdom and upheld by his providence, presume to wish such order
+troubled for my sake? Nor do I ask of him the power of doing
+righteousness; why ask for what he has given me? Has he not bestowed
+on me conscience to love what is good, reason to ascertain it, freedom
+to choose it? If I do ill, I have no excuse; I do it because I will
+it. To pray to him to change my will, is to seek from him what he
+seeks from me; it is to wish no longer to be human, it is to wish
+something other than what is, it is to wish disorder and evil.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_343_343" id="FNanchor_343_343"></a><a href="#Footnote_343_343" class="fnanchor">[343]</a>
+We may admire both the logical consistency of such self-denial and the
+manliness which it would engender in the character that were strong
+enough to practise it. But a divinity who has conceded no right of
+petition is still further away from our lives than the divinities of
+more popular creeds.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_270" id="Page_270">[ii.270]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Even the fairest deism is of its essence a faith of egotism and
+complacency. It does not incorporate in the very heart of the
+religious emotion the pitifulness and sorrow which Christianity first
+clothed with associations of sanctity, and which can never henceforth
+miss their place in any religious system to be accepted by men. Why is
+this? Because a religion that leaves them out, or thrusts them into a
+hidden corner, fails to comprehend at least one half, and that the
+most touching and impressive half, of the most conspicuous facts of
+human life. Rousseau was fuller of the capacity of pity than ordinary
+men, and this pity was one of the deepest parts of himself. Yet it did
+not enter into the composition of his religious faith, and this shows
+that his religious faith, though entirely free from suspicion of
+insincerity or ostentatious assumption, was like deism in so many
+cases, whether rationalistic or emotional, a kind of gratuitously
+adopted superfluity, not the satisfaction of a profound inner craving
+and resistless spiritual necessity. He speaks of the good and the
+wicked with the precision and assurance of the most pharisaic
+theologian, and he begins by asking of what concern it is to him
+whether the wicked are punished with eternal torment or not, though he
+concludes more graciously with the hope that in another state the
+wicked, delivered from their malignity, may enjoy a bliss no less than
+his own.<a name="FNanchor_344_344" id="FNanchor_344_344"></a><a href="#Footnote_344_344" class="fnanchor">[344]</a> But the divine pitifulness <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271">[ii.271]</a></span>which we owe to
+Christianity, and which will not be the less eagerly cherished by
+those who repudiate Christian tradition and doctrines, enjoins upon us
+that we should ask, Who are the wicked, and which is he that is
+without sin among us? Rousseau answered this glibly enough by some
+formula of metaphysics, about the human will having been left and
+constituted free by the creator of the world; and that man is the bad
+man who abuses his freedom. Grace, fate, destiny, force of
+circumstances, are all so many names for the protests which the frank
+sense of fact has forced from man against this miserably inadequate
+explanation of the foundations of moral responsibility.</p>
+
+<p>Whatever these foundations may be, the theories of grace and fate had
+at any rate the quality of connecting human conduct with the will of
+the gods. Rousseau's deism, severing the influence of the Supreme
+Being upon man, at the very moment when it could have saved him from
+the guilt that brings misery,&#8212;that is at the moment when conduct
+begins to follow the preponderant motives or the will,&#8212;did thus
+effectually cut off the most admirable and fertile group of our
+sympathies from all direct connection with religious sentiment.
+Toiling as manfully as we may through the wilderness of our seventy
+years, we are to reserve our deepest adoration for the being who has
+left us<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_272" id="Page_272">[ii.272]</a></span> there, with no other solace than that he is good and just and
+all-powerful, and might have given us comfort and guidance if he
+would. This was virtually the form which Pelagius had tried to impose
+upon Christianity in the fifth century, and which the souls of men,
+thirsting for consciousness of an active divine presence, had then
+under the lead of Augustine so energetically cast away from them. The
+faith to which they clung while rejecting this great heresy, though
+just as transcendental, still had the quality of satisfying a
+spiritual want. It was even more readily to be accepted by the human
+intelligence, for it endowed the supreme power with the father's
+excellence of compassion, and presented for our reverence and
+gratitude and devotion a figure who drew from men the highest love for
+the God whom they had not seen, along with the warmest pity and love
+for their brethren whom they had seen.</p>
+
+<p>The Savoyard Vicar's own position to Christianity was one of
+reverential scepticism. &quot;The holiness of the gospel,&quot; he said, &quot;is an
+argument that speaks to my heart and to which I should even be sorry
+to find a good answer. Look at the books of the philosophers with all
+their pomp; how puny they are by the side of that! Is there here the
+tone of an enthusiast or an ambitious sectary? What gentleness, what
+purity, in his manners, what touching grace in his teaching, what
+loftiness in his maxims! Assuredly there was something more than human
+in such teaching, such a character, such a life, such a death. If the
+life and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273">[ii.273]</a></span> death of Socrates were those of a sage, the life and death
+of Jesus are those of a god. Shall we say that the history of the
+gospels is invented at pleasure? My friend, that is not the fashion of
+invention; and the facts about Socrates are less attested than the
+facts about Christ.<a name="FNanchor_345_345" id="FNanchor_345_345"></a><a href="#Footnote_345_345" class="fnanchor">[345]</a> Yet with all that, this same gospel abounds
+in things incredible, which are repugnant to reason, and which it is
+impossible for any sensible man to conceive or admit. What are we to
+do in the midst of all these contradictions? To be ever modest and
+circumspect, my son; to respect in silence what one can neither reject
+nor understand, and to make one's self lowly before the great being
+who alone knows the truth.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_346_346" id="FNanchor_346_346"></a><a href="#Footnote_346_346" class="fnanchor">[346]</a></p>
+
+<p>&quot;I regard all particular religions as so many salutary institutions,
+which prescribe in every country a uniform manner of honouring God by
+public worship. I believe them all good, so long as men serve God
+fittingly in them. The essential worship is the worship of the heart.
+God never rejects this homage, under whatever form it be offered to
+him. In other days I used to say mass with the levity which in time
+infects even the gravest things, when we do them too often. Since
+acquiring my new principles I celebrate it with more veneration; I am
+overwhelmed by the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_274" id="Page_274">[ii.274]</a></span>majesty of the Supreme Being, by his presence, by
+the insufficiency of the human mind, which conceives so little what
+pertains to its author. When I approach the moment of consecration, I
+collect myself for performing the act with all the feelings required
+by the church, and the majesty of the sacrament; I strive to
+annihilate my reason before the supreme intelligence, saying, 'Who art
+thou, that thou shouldest measure infinite power?'&quot;<a name="FNanchor_347_347" id="FNanchor_347_347"></a><a href="#Footnote_347_347" class="fnanchor">[347]</a></p>
+
+<p>A creed like this, whatever else it may be, is plainly a powerful
+solvent of every system of exclusive dogma. If the one essential to
+true worship, the worship of the heart and the inner sentiment, be
+mystic adoration of an indefinable Supreme, then creeds based upon
+books, prophecies, miracles, revelations, all fall alike into the
+second place among things that may be lawful and may be expedient, but
+that can never be exacted from men by a just God as indispensable to
+virtue in this world or to bliss in the next. No better answer has
+ever been given to the exclusive pretensions of sect, Christian,
+Jewish, or Mahometan, than that propounded by the Savoyard Vicar with
+such energy, closeness, and most sarcastic fire.<a name="FNanchor_348_348" id="FNanchor_348_348"></a><a href="#Footnote_348_348" class="fnanchor">[348]</a> It was turning
+an unexpected front upon the presumptuousness of all varieties of
+theological infallibilists, to prove to them that if you insist upon
+acceptance of this or that special revelation, over and above the
+dictates of natural religion, then you are bound not only to grant,
+but imperatively to enjoin upon all men, a searching <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_275" id="Page_275">[ii.275]</a></span>inquiry and
+comparison, that they may spare no pains in an affair of such
+momentous issue in proving to themselves that this, and none of the
+competing revelations, is the veritable message of eternal safety.
+&quot;Then no other study will be possible but that of religion: hardly
+shall one who has enjoyed the most robust health, employed his time
+and used his reason to best purpose, and lived the greatest number of
+years, hardly shall such an one in his extreme age be quite sure what
+to believe, and it will be a marvel if he finds out before he dies, in
+what faith he ought to have lived.&quot; The superiority of the sceptical
+parts of the Savoyard Vicar's profession, as well as those of the
+Letters from the Mountain to which we referred previously, over the
+biting mockeries which Voltaire had made the fashionable method of
+assault, lay in this fact. The latter only revolted and irritated all
+serious temperaments to whom religion is a matter of honest concern,
+while the former actually appealed to their religious sense in support
+of his doubts; and the more intelligent and sincere this sense
+happened to be, the more surely would Rousseau's gravely urged
+objections dissolve the hard particles of dogmatic belief. His
+objections were on a moral level with the best side of the religion
+that they oppugned. Those of Voltaire were only on a level with its
+lowest side, and that was the side presented by the gross and
+repulsive obscurantism of the functionaries of the church.</p>
+
+<p>Unfortunately Rousseau had placed in the hands<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_276" id="Page_276">[ii.276]</a></span> of the partisans of
+every exclusive revelation an instrument which was quite enough to
+disperse all his objections to the winds, and which was the very
+instrument that defended his own cherished religion. If he was
+satisfied with replying to the atheist and the materialist, that he
+knew there is a supreme God, and that the soul must have here and
+hereafter an existence apart from the body, because he found these
+truths ineffaceably written upon his own heart, what could prevent the
+Christian or the Mahometan from replying to Rousseau that the New
+Testament or the Koran is the special and final revelation from the
+Supreme Power to his creatures? If you may appeal to the voice of the
+heart and the dictate of the inner sentiment in one case, why not in
+the other also? A subjective test necessarily proves anything that any
+man desires, and the accident of the article proved appearing either
+reasonable or monstrous to other people, cannot have the least bearing
+on its efficacy or conclusiveness.</p>
+
+<p>Deism like the Savoyard Vicar's opens no path for the future, because
+it makes no allowance for the growth of intellectual conviction, and
+binds up religion with mystery, with an object whose attributes can
+neither be conceived nor defined, with a Being too all-embracing to be
+able to receive anything from us, too august, self-contained, remote,
+to be able to bestow on us the humble gifts of which we have need. The
+temperature of thought is slowly but without an instant's recoil
+rising to a point when a mystery like<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277">[ii.277]</a></span> this, definite enough to be
+imposed as a faith, but too indefinite to be grasped by understanding
+as a truth, melts away from the emotions of religion. Then those
+instincts of holiness, without which the world would be to so many of
+its highest spirits the most dreary of exiles, will perhaps come to
+associate themselves less with unseen divinities, than with the long
+brotherhood of humanity seen and unseen. Here we shall move with an
+assurance that no scepticism and no advance of science can ever shake,
+because the benefactions which we have received from the strenuousness
+of human effort can never be doubted, and each fresh acquisition in
+knowledge or goodness can only kindle new fervour. Those who have the
+religious imagination struck by the awful procession of man from the
+region of impenetrable night, by his incessant struggle with the
+hardness of the material world, and his sublimer struggle with the
+hard world of his own egotistic passions, by the pain and sacrifice by
+which generation after generation has added some small piece to the
+temple of human freedom or some new fragment to the ever incomplete
+sum of human knowledge, or some fresh line to the types of strong or
+beautiful character,&#8212;those who have an eye for all this may indeed
+have no ecstasy and no terror, no heaven nor hell, in their religion,
+but they will have abundant moods of reverence, deep-seated gratitude,
+and sovereign pitifulness.</p>
+
+<p>And such moods will not end in sterile exaltation, or the deathly
+chills of spiritual reaction. They will<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_278" id="Page_278">[ii.278]</a></span> bring forth abundant fruit in
+new hope and invigorated endeavour. This devout contemplation of the
+experience of the race, instead of raising a man into the clouds,
+brings him into the closest, loftiest, and most conscious relations
+with his kind, to whom he owes all that is of value in his own life,
+and to whom he can repay his debt by maintaining the beneficent
+tradition of service, by cherishing honour for all the true and sage
+spirits that have shone upon the earth, and sorrow and reprobation for
+all the unworthier souls whose light has gone out in baseness. A man
+with this faith can have no foul spiritual pride, for there is no
+mysteriously accorded divine grace in which one may be a larger
+participant than another. He can have no incentives to that mutilation
+with which every branch of the church, from the oldest to the youngest
+and crudest, has in its degree afflicted and retarded mankind, because
+the key-note of his religion is the joyful energy of every faculty,
+practical, reflective, creative, contemplative, in pursuit of a
+visible common good. And he can be plunged into no fatal and
+paralysing despair by any doctrine of mortal sin, because active faith
+in humanity, resting on recorded experience, discloses the many
+possibilities of moral recovery, and the work that may be done for men
+in the fragment of days, redeeming the contrite from their burdens by
+manful hope. If religion is our feeling about the highest forces that
+govern human destiny, then as it becomes more and more evident how
+much our destiny is shaped by the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_279" id="Page_279">[ii.279]</a></span> generation of the dead who have
+prepared the present, and by the purport of our hopes and the
+direction of our activity for the generations that are to fill the
+future, the religious sentiment will more and more attach itself to
+the great unseen host of our fellows who have gone before us and who
+are to come after. Such a faith is no rag of metaphysic floating in
+the sunshine of sentimentalism, like Rousseau's faith. It rests on a
+positive base, which only becomes wider and firmer with the widening
+of experience and the augmentation of our skill in interpreting it.
+Nor is it too transcendent for practical acceptance. One of the most
+scientific spirits of the eighteenth century, while each moment
+expecting the knock of the executioner at his door, found as religious
+a solace as any early martyr had ever found in his barbarous
+mysteries, when he linked his own efforts for reason and freedom with
+the eternal chain of the destinies of man. &quot;This contemplation,&quot; he
+wrote and felt, &quot;is for him a refuge into which the rancour of his
+persecutors can never follow him; in which, living in thought with man
+reinstated in the rights and the dignity of his nature, he forgets man
+tormented and corrupted by greed, by base fear, by envy; it is here
+that he truly abides with his fellows, in an elysium that his reason
+has known how to create for itself, and that his love for humanity
+adorns with all purest delights.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_349_349" id="FNanchor_349_349"></a><a href="#Footnote_349_349" class="fnanchor">[349]</a></p>
+
+<p>This, to the shame of those wavering souls who <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_280" id="Page_280">[ii.280]</a></span>despair of progress at
+the first moment when it threatens to leave the path that they have
+marked out for it, was written by a man at the very close of his days,
+when every hope that he had ever cherished seemed to one without the
+eye of faith to be extinguished in bloodshed, disorder, and barbarism.
+But there is a still happier season in the adolescence of generous
+natures that have been wisely fostered, when the horizons of the
+dawning life are suddenly lighted up with a glow of aspiration towards
+good and holy things. Commonly, alas, this priceless opportunity is
+lost in a fit of theological exaltation, which is gradually choked out
+by the dusty facts of life, and slowly moulders away into dry
+indifference. It would not be so, but far different, if the Savoyard
+Vicar, instead of taking the youth to the mountain-top, there to
+contemplate that infinite unseen which is in truth beyond
+contemplation by the limited faculties of man, were to associate these
+fine impulses of the early prime with the visible, intelligible, and
+still sublime possibilities of the human destiny,&#8212;that imperial
+conception, which alone can shape an existence of entire proportion in
+all its parts, and leave no natural energy of life idle or athirst. Do
+you ask for sanctions! One whose conscience has been strengthened from
+youth in this faith, can know no greater bitterness than the stain
+cast by wrong act or unworthy thought on the high memories with which
+he has been used to walk, and the discord wrought in hopes that have
+become the ruling harmony of his days.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_337_337" id="Footnote_337_337"></a><a href="#FNanchor_337_337"><span class="label">[337]</span></a> See Hallam's <i>Literature of Europe</i>, Pt. I. ch. ii. &#167;
+64. Again (for the 16th century), Pt. II. ch. ii. &#167; 53. See also for
+mention of a sect of deists at Lyons about 1560, Bayle's Dictionary,
+<i>s.v.</i> Viret.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_338_338" id="Footnote_338_338"></a><a href="#FNanchor_338_338"><span class="label">[338]</span></a> See above,
+  <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.223">vol. i. pp. 223-227</a>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_339_339" id="Footnote_339_339"></a><a href="#FNanchor_339_339"><span class="label">[339]</span></a> <i>Emile</i>, IV. 163.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_340_340" id="Footnote_340_340"></a><a href="#FNanchor_340_340"><span class="label">[340]</span></a> IV. 183-185.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_341_341" id="Footnote_341_341"></a><a href="#FNanchor_341_341"><span class="label">[341]</span></a> M. Henri Martin's <i>Hist. de France</i>, xvi. 101, where
+there is an interesting, but, as it seems to the present writer,
+hardly a successful attempt, to bring the Savoyard Vicar's eloquence
+into scientific form.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_342_342" id="Footnote_342_342"></a><a href="#FNanchor_342_342"><span class="label">[342]</span></a> <i>Emile</i>, IV. 135.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_343_343" id="Footnote_343_343"></a><a href="#FNanchor_343_343"><span class="label">[343]</span></a> <i>Emile</i>, IV. 204.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_344_344" id="Footnote_344_344"></a><a href="#FNanchor_344_344"><span class="label">[344]</span></a> <i>Emile</i>, IV. 181, 182. In a letter to Vernes (Feb. 18,
+1758. <i>Corr.</i>, ii. 9) he expresses his suspicion that possibly the
+souls of the wicked may be annihilated at their death, and that being
+and feeling may prove the first reward of a good life. In this letter
+he asks also, with the same magnanimous security as the Savoyard
+Vicar, &quot;of what concern the destiny of the wicked can be to him.&quot;</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_345_345" id="Footnote_345_345"></a><a href="#FNanchor_345_345"><span class="label">[345]</span></a> A similar disparagement of Socrates, in comparison with
+the Christ of the Gospels, is to be found in the long letter of Jan.
+15, 1769 (<i>Corr.</i>, vi. 59, 60), to M&#8212;&#8212;, accompanied by a violent
+denigration of the Jews, conformably to the philosophic prejudice of
+the time.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_346_346" id="Footnote_346_346"></a><a href="#FNanchor_346_346"><span class="label">[346]</span></a> <i>Emile</i>, IV. 241, 242.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_347_347" id="Footnote_347_347"></a><a href="#FNanchor_347_347"><span class="label">[347]</span></a> <i>Emile</i>, IV. 243.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_348_348" id="Footnote_348_348"></a><a href="#FNanchor_348_348"><span class="label">[348]</span></a> IV. 210-236.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_349_349" id="Footnote_349_349"></a><a href="#FNanchor_349_349"><span class="label">[349]</span></a> Condorcet's <i>Progr&#232;s de l'Esprit Humain</i> (1794).
+<i>Oeuv.</i>, vi. 276.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_281" id="Page_281">[ii.281]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VI" id="CHAPTER_VI"></a>CHAPTER VI.</h2>
+
+<h3>ENGLAND.<a name="FNanchor_350_350" id="FNanchor_350_350"></a><a href="#Footnote_350_350" class="fnanchor">[350]</a></h3>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">There</span> is in an English collection a portrait of Jean Jacques,
+which was painted during his residence in this country by a provincial
+artist. Singular and displeasing as it is, yet this picture lights up
+for us many a word and passage in Rousseau's life here and elsewhere,
+which the ordinary engravings, and the trim self-complacency of the
+statue on the little island at Geneva, would leave very
+incomprehensible. It is almost as appalling in its realism as some of
+the dark pits that open before the reader of the Confessions. Hard
+struggles with objective difficulty and external obstacle wear deep
+furrows in the brow; they throw into the glance a solicitude, half
+penetrating and defiant, half dejected. When a man's hindrances have
+sprung up from within, and the ill-fought battle of his days has been
+with his own passions and morbid broodings and unchastened dreams, the
+eye and the facial lines tell the story of that profound moral defeat
+which is unlighted by the memories of resolute combat with evil and
+weakness, and leaves only eternal desola<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_282" id="Page_282">[ii.282]</a></span>tion and the misery that is
+formless. Our English artist has produced a vision from that prose
+Inferno which is made so populous in the modern epoch by impotence of
+will. Those who have seen the picture may easily understand how
+largely the character of the original must have been pregnant with
+harassing confusion and distress.</p>
+
+<p>Four years before this (1762), Hume, to whom Lord Marischal had told
+the story of Rousseau's persecutions, had proffered his services, and
+declared his eagerness to help in finding a proper refuge for him in
+England. There had been an exchange of cordial letters,<a name="FNanchor_351_351" id="FNanchor_351_351"></a><a href="#Footnote_351_351" class="fnanchor">[351]</a> and then
+the matter had lain quiet, until the impossibility of remaining longer
+in Neuch&#226;tel had once more set his friends on procuring a safe
+establishment for their rather difficult refugee. Rousseau's
+appearance in Paris had created the keenest excitement. &quot;People may
+talk of ancient Greece as they please,&quot; wrote Hume from Paris, &quot;but no
+nation was ever so proud of genius as this, and no person ever so much
+engaged their attention as Rousseau! Voltaire and everybody else are
+quite eclipsed by him.&quot; Even Theresa Le Vasseur, who was declared very
+homely and very awkward, was more talked of than the Princess of
+Morocco or the Countess of Egmont, on account of her fidelity towards
+him. His very dog had a name and reputation in the world.<a name="FNanchor_352_352" id="FNanchor_352_352"></a><a href="#Footnote_352_352" class="fnanchor">[352]</a>
+Rousseau is always said to have liked the stir which his presence
+created, but whether this was so or not, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_283" id="Page_283">[ii.283]</a></span>he was very impatient to be
+away from it as soon as possible.</p>
+
+<p>In company with Hume, he left Paris in the second week of January
+1766. They crossed from Calais to Dover by night in a passage that
+lasted twelve hours. Hume, as the orthodox may be glad to know, was
+extremely ill, while Rousseau cheerfully passed the whole night upon
+deck, taking no harm, though the seamen were almost frozen to
+death.<a name="FNanchor_353_353" id="FNanchor_353_353"></a><a href="#Footnote_353_353" class="fnanchor">[353]</a> They reached London on the thirteenth of January, and the
+people of London showed nearly as lively an interest in the strange
+personage whom Hume had brought among them, as the people of Paris had
+done. <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_284" id="Page_284">[ii.284]</a></span>A prince of the blood at once went to pay his respects to the
+Swiss philosopher. The crowd at the playhouse showed more curiosity
+when the stranger came in than when the king and queen entered. Their
+majesties were as interested as their subjects, and could scarcely
+keep their eyes off the author of Emilius. George III., then in the
+heyday of his youth, was so pleased to have a foreigner of genius
+seeking shelter in his kingdom, that he readily acceded to Conway's
+suggestion, prompted by Hume, that Rousseau should have a pension
+settled on him. The ever illustrious Burke, then just made member of
+Parliament, saw him nearly every day, and became persuaded that &quot;he
+entertained no principle either to influence his heart, or guide his
+understanding, but vanity.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_354_354" id="FNanchor_354_354"></a><a href="#Footnote_354_354" class="fnanchor">[354]</a> Hume, on the contrary, thought the
+best things of his client; &quot;He has an excellent warm heart, and in
+conversation kindles often to a degree of heat which looks like
+inspiration; I love him much, and hope that I have some share in his
+affections.... He is a very modest, mild, well-bred, gentle-spirited
+and warm-hearted man, as ever I knew in my life. He is also to
+appearance very sociable. I never saw a man who seems better
+calculated for good company, nor who seems to take more pleasure in
+it.&quot; &quot;He is a very agreeable, amiable man; but a great humorist. The
+philosophers of Paris foretold to me that I could not conduct him to
+Calais without a quarrel; but I think <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_285" id="Page_285">[ii.285]</a></span>I could live with him all my
+life in mutual friendship and esteem. I believe one great source of
+our concord is that neither he nor I are disputatious, which is not
+the case with any of them. They are also displeased with him, because
+they think he over-abounds in religion; and it is indeed remarkable
+that the philosopher of this age who has been most persecuted, is by
+far the most devout.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_355_355" id="FNanchor_355_355"></a><a href="#Footnote_355_355" class="fnanchor">[355]</a></p>
+
+<p>What the Scotch philosopher meant by calling his pupil a humorist, may
+perhaps be inferred from the story of the trouble he had in prevailing
+upon Rousseau to go to the play, though Garrick had appointed a
+special occasion and set apart a special box for him. When the hour
+came, Rousseau declared that he could not leave his dog behind him.
+&quot;The first person,&quot; he said, &quot;who opens the door, Sultan will run into
+the streets in search of me and will be lost.&quot; Hume told him to lock
+Sultan up in the room, and carry away the key in his pocket. This was
+done, but as they proceeded downstairs, the dog began to howl; his
+master turned back and avowed he had not resolution to leave him in
+that condition. Hume, however, caught him in his arms, told him that
+Mr. Garrick had dismissed another company in order to make room for
+him, that the king and queen were expecting to see him, and that
+without a better reason than Sultan's impatience it would be
+ridiculous to disappoint them. Thus, a little by reason, but more by
+force, he was carried off.<a name="FNanchor_356_356" id="FNanchor_356_356"></a><a href="#Footnote_356_356" class="fnanchor">[356]</a> Such a story, whatever <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_286" id="Page_286">[ii.286]</a></span>else we may
+think of it, shows at least a certain curious and not untouching
+simplicity. And singularity which made Rousseau like better to keep
+his dog company at home, than to be stared at by a gaping pit, was too
+private in its reward to be the result of that vanity and affectation
+with which he was taxed by men who lived in another sphere of motive.</p>
+
+<p>There was considerable trouble in settling Rousseau. He was eager to
+leave London almost as soon as he arrived in it. Though pleased with
+the friendly reception which had been given him, he pronounced London
+to be as much devoted to idle gossip and frivolity as other capitals.
+He spent a few weeks in the house of a farmer at Chiswick, thought
+about fixing himself in the Isle of Wight, then in Wales, then
+somewhere in our fair Surrey, whose scenery, one is glad to know,
+greatly attracted him. Finally arrangements were made by Hume with Mr.
+Davenport for installing him in a house belonging to the latter, at
+Wootton, near Ashbourne, in the Peak of Derbyshire.<a name="FNanchor_357_357" id="FNanchor_357_357"></a><a href="#Footnote_357_357" class="fnanchor">[357]</a> Hither
+Rousseau proceeded with Theresa, at the end of March. Mr. Davenport
+was a gentleman of large property, and as he seldom inhabited this
+solitary house, was very willing that Rousseau should take up his
+abode there without payment. This, however, was what Rousseau's
+inde<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_287" id="Page_287">[ii.287]</a></span>pendence could not brook, and he insisted that his entertainer
+should receive thirty pounds a year for the board of himself and
+Theresa.<a name="FNanchor_358_358" id="FNanchor_358_358"></a><a href="#Footnote_358_358" class="fnanchor">[358]</a> So here he settled, in an extremely bitter climate,
+knowing no word of the language of the people about him, with no
+companionship but Theresa's, and with nothing to do but walk when the
+weather was fair, play the harpsicord when it rained, and brood over
+the incidents which had occurred to him since he had left Switzerland
+six months before. The first fruits of this unfortunate leisure were a
+bitter quarrel with Hume, one of the most famous and far-resounding of
+all the quarrels of illustrious men, but one about which very little
+needs now be said. The merits of it are plain, and all significance
+that may ever have belonged to it is entirely dead. The incubation of
+his grievances began immediately after his arrival at Wootton, but two
+months elapsed before they burst forth in full flame.<a name="FNanchor_359_359" id="FNanchor_359_359"></a><a href="#Footnote_359_359" class="fnanchor">[359]</a></p>
+
+<p>The general charge against Hume was that he was a member of an
+accursed triumvirate; Voltaire and D'Alembert were the other partners;
+and their object was to blacken the character of Rousseau and render
+his life miserable. The particular acts on which this belief was
+established were the following:&#8212;</p>
+
+<p>(1) While Rousseau was in Paris, there appeared a <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_288" id="Page_288">[ii.288]</a></span>letter nominally
+addressed to him by the King of Prussia, and written in an ironical
+strain, which persuaded Jean Jacques himself that it was the work of
+Voltaire.<a name="FNanchor_360_360" id="FNanchor_360_360"></a><a href="#Footnote_360_360" class="fnanchor">[360]</a> Then he suspected D'Alembert. It was really the
+composition of Horace Walpole, who was then in Paris. Now Hume was the
+friend of Walpole, and had given Rousseau a card of introduction to
+him for the purpose of entrusting Walpole with the carriage of some
+papers. Although the false letter produced the liveliest amusement at
+Rousseau's cost, first in Paris and then in London, Hume, while
+feigning to be his warm friend and presenting him to the English
+public, never took any pains to tell the world that the piece was a
+forgery, nor did he break with its <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_289" id="Page_289">[ii.289]</a></span>wicked author.<a name="FNanchor_361_361" id="FNanchor_361_361"></a><a href="#Footnote_361_361" class="fnanchor">[361]</a> (2) When
+Rousseau assured Hume that D'Alembert was a cunning and dishonourable
+man, Hume denied it with an amazing heat, although he well knew the
+latter to be Rousseau's enemy.<a name="FNanchor_362_362" id="FNanchor_362_362"></a><a href="#Footnote_362_362" class="fnanchor">[362]</a> (3) Hume lived in London with the
+son of Tronchin, the Genevese surgeon, and the most mortal of all the
+foes of Jean Jacques.<a name="FNanchor_363_363" id="FNanchor_363_363"></a><a href="#Footnote_363_363" class="fnanchor">[363]</a> (4) When Rousseau first came to London, his
+reception was a distinguished triumph for the victim of persecution
+from so many governments. England was proud of being his place of
+refuge, and justly vaunted the freedom of her laws and administration.
+Suddenly and for no assignable cause the public tone changed, the
+newspapers either fell silent or else spoke unfavourably, and Rousseau
+was thought of no more. This must have been due to Hume, who had much
+influence among people of credit, and who went about boasting of the
+protection which he had procured for Jean Jacques in Paris.<a name="FNanchor_364_364" id="FNanchor_364_364"></a><a href="#Footnote_364_364" class="fnanchor">[364]</a> (5)
+Hume resorted to various small artifices for preventing Rousseau from
+making friends, for procuring opportunities of opening Rousseau's
+letters, and the like.<a name="FNanchor_365_365" id="FNanchor_365_365"></a><a href="#Footnote_365_365" class="fnanchor">[365]</a> (6) A violent satirical letter against
+Rousseau appeared in the English newspapers, with allusions which
+could only have been supplied by Hume. (7) On the first night after
+their departure from Paris, Rousseau, who occupied the same room with
+Hume, heard him call out several times in the middle of the night in
+the course of his dreams, <i>Je tiens Jean Jacques <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_290" id="Page_290">[ii.290]</a></span>Rousseau</i>, with
+extreme vehemence&#8212;which words, in spite of the horribly sardonic tone
+of the dreamer, he interpreted favourably at the time, but which later
+event proved to have been full of malign significance.<a name="FNanchor_366_366" id="FNanchor_366_366"></a><a href="#Footnote_366_366" class="fnanchor">[366]</a> (8)
+Rousseau constantly found Hume eyeing him with a glance of sinister
+and diabolic import that filled him with an astonishing disquietude,
+though he did his best to combat it. On one of these occasions he was
+seized with remorse, fell upon Hume's neck, embraced him warmly, and,
+suffocated with sobs and bathed in tears, cried out in broken accents,
+<i>No, no, David Hume is no traitor</i>, with many protests of affection.
+The phlegmatic Hume only returned his embrace with politeness, stroked
+him gently on the back, and repeated several times in a tranquil
+voice, <i>Quoi, mon cher monsieur! Eh! mon cher monsieur! Quoi donc, mon
+cher monsieur!</i><a name="FNanchor_367_367" id="FNanchor_367_367"></a><a href="#Footnote_367_367" class="fnanchor">[367]</a> (9) Although for many weeks Rousseau had kept a
+firm silence to Hume, neglecting to answer letters that plainly called
+for answer, and marking his displeasure in other unmistakable ways,
+yet Hume had never sought any explanation of what <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_291" id="Page_291">[ii.291]</a></span>must necessarily
+have struck him as so singular, but continued to write as if nothing
+had happened. Was not this positive proof of a consciousness of
+perfidy?</p>
+
+<p>Some years afterwards he substituted another shorter set of
+grievances, namely, that Hume would not suffer Theresa to sit at table
+with him; that he made a show of him; and that Hume had an engraving
+executed of himself, which made him as beautiful as a cherub, while in
+another engraving, which was a pendant to his own, Jean Jacques was
+made as ugly as a bear.<a name="FNanchor_368_368" id="FNanchor_368_368"></a><a href="#Footnote_368_368" class="fnanchor">[368]</a></p>
+
+<p>It would be ridiculous for us to waste any time in discussing these
+charges. They are not open to serious examination, though it is
+astonishing to find writers in our own day who fully believe that Hume
+was a traitor, and behaved extremely basely to the unfortunate man
+whom he had inveigled over to a barbarous island. The only part of the
+indictment about which there could be the least doubt, was the
+possibility of Hume having been an accomplice in Walpole's very small
+pleasantry. Some of his friends in Paris suspected that he had had a
+hand in the supposed letter from the King of Prussia. Although the
+letter constituted no very malignant jest, and could not by a sensible
+man have been regarded as furnishing just complaint against one who,
+like Walpole, was merely an impudent stranger, yet if it could be
+shown that Hume had taken an active part either in the composition or
+the circulation of a spiteful bit of satire upon <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_292" id="Page_292">[ii.292]</a></span>one towards whom he
+was pretending a singular affection, then we should admit that he
+showed such a want of sense of the delicacy of friendship as amounted
+to something like treachery. But a letter from Walpole to Hume sets
+this doubt at rest. &quot;I cannot be precise as to the time of my writing
+the King of Prussia's letter, but ... I not only suppressed the letter
+while you stayed there, out of delicacy to you, but it was the reason
+why, out of delicacy to myself, I did not go to see him as you often
+proposed to me, thinking it wrong to go and make a cordial visit to a
+man, with a letter in my pocket to laugh at him.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_369_369" id="FNanchor_369_369"></a><a href="#Footnote_369_369" class="fnanchor">[369]</a></p>
+
+<p>With this all else falls to the ground. It would be as unwise in us,
+as it was in Rousseau himself, to complicate the hypotheses. Men do
+not act without motives, and Hume could have no motive in entering
+into any plot against Rousseau, even if the rival philosophers in
+France might have motives. We know the character of our David Hume
+perfectly well, and though it was not faultless, its fault certainly
+lay rather in an excessive desire to make the world comfortable for
+everybody, than in anything like purposeless malignity, of which he
+never had a trace. Moreover, all that befell Rousseau through Hume's
+agency was exceedingly to his advantage. Hume was <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_293" id="Page_293">[ii.293]</a></span>not without vanity,
+and his letters show that he was not displeased at the addition to his
+consequence which came of his patronage of a man who was much talked
+about and much stared at. But, however this was, he did all for
+Rousseau that generosity and thoughtfulness could do. He was at great
+pains in establishing him; he used his interest to procure for him the
+grant of a pension from the king; when Rousseau provisionally refused
+the pension rather than owe anything to Hume, the latter, still
+ignorant of the suspicion that was blackening in Rousseau's mind,
+supposed that the refusal came from the fact of the pension being kept
+private, and at once took measures with the minister to procure the
+removal of the condition of privacy. Besides undeniable acts like
+these, the state of Hume's mind towards his curious ward is abundantly
+shown in his letters to all his most intimate friends, just as
+Rousseau's gratitude to him is to be read in all his early letters
+both to Hume and other persons. In the presence of such facts on the
+one side, and in the absence of any particle of intelligible evidence
+to neutralise them on the other, to treat Rousseau's charges with
+gravity is irrational.</p>
+
+<p>If Hume had written back in a mild and conciliatory strain, there can
+be no doubt that the unfortunate victim of his own morbid imagination
+would, for a time at any rate, have been sobered and brought to a
+sense of his misconduct. But Hume was incensed beyond control at what
+he very pardonably took for a masterpiece of atrocious ingratitude. He
+reproached<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_294" id="Page_294">[ii.294]</a></span> Rousseau in terms as harsh as those which Grimm had used
+nine years before. He wrote to all his friends, withdrawing the kindly
+words he had once used of Rousseau's character, and substituting in
+their place the most unfavourable he could find. He gave the
+philosophic circle in Paris exquisite delight by the confirmation
+which his story furnished of their own foresight, when they had warned
+him that he was taking a viper to his bosom. Finally, in spite of the
+advice of Adam Smith, of one of the greatest of men, Turgot, and one
+of the smallest, Horace Walpole, he published a succinct account of
+the quarrel, first in French, and then in English. This step was
+chiefly due to the advice of the clique of whom D'Alembert was the
+spokesman, though it is due to him to mention that he softened various
+expressions in Hume's narrative, which he pronounced too harsh. It may
+be true that a council of war never fights; a council of men of
+letters always does. The governing committee of a literary,
+philosophical, or theological clique form the very worst advisers any
+man can have.</p>
+
+<p>Much must be forgiven to Hume, stung as he was by what appeared the
+most hateful ferocity in one on whom he had heaped acts of affection.
+Still, one would have been glad on behalf of human dignity, if he had
+suffered with firm silence petulant charges against which the
+consciousness of his own uprightness should have been the only answer.
+That high pride, of which there is too little rather than too much in
+the world, and which saves men from waste of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_295" id="Page_295">[ii.295]</a></span> themselves and others in
+pitiful accusations, vindications, retaliations, should have helped
+humane pity in preserving him from this poor quarrel. Long afterwards
+Rousseau said, &quot;England, of which they paint such fine pictures in
+France, has so cheerless a climate; my soul, wearied with many shocks,
+was in a condition of such profound melancholy, that in all that
+passed I believe I committed many faults. But are they comparable to
+those of the enemies who persecuted me, supposing them even to have
+done no more than published our private quarrels?&quot;<a name="FNanchor_370_370" id="FNanchor_370_370"></a><a href="#Footnote_370_370" class="fnanchor">[370]</a> An ampler
+contrition would have been more seemly in the first offender, but
+there is a measure of justice in his complaint. We need not, however,
+reproach the good Hume. Before six months were over, he admits that he
+is sometimes inclined to blame his publication, and always to regret
+it.<a name="FNanchor_371_371" id="FNanchor_371_371"></a><a href="#Footnote_371_371" class="fnanchor">[371]</a> And his regret was not verbal merely. When Rousseau had
+returned to France, and was in danger of arrest, Hume was most urgent
+in entreating Turgot to use his influence with the government to
+protect the wretched wanderer, and Turgot's answer shows both how
+sincere this humane interposition was, and how practically
+serviceable.<a name="FNanchor_372_372" id="FNanchor_372_372"></a><a href="#Footnote_372_372" class="fnanchor">[372]</a></p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile there ensued a horrible fray in print. Pamphlets appeared in
+Paris and London in a cloud. The Succinct Exposure was followed by
+succinct rejoinders. Walpole officiously printed his own account of
+his own share in the matter. Boswell officiously <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_296" id="Page_296">[ii.296]</a></span>wrote to the
+newspapers defending Rousseau and attacking Walpole. King George
+followed the battle with intense curiosity. Hume with solemn
+formalities sent the documents to the British Museum. There was
+silence only in one place, and that was at Wootton. The unfortunate
+person who had done all the mischief printed not a word.</p>
+
+<p>The most prompt and quite the least instructive of the remarks
+invariably made upon any one who has acted in an unusual manner, is
+that he must be mad. This universal criticism upon the unwonted really
+tells us nothing, because the term may cover any state of mind from a
+warranted dissent from established custom, down to absolute dementia.
+Rousseau was called mad when he took to wearing convenient clothes and
+living frugally. He was called mad when he quitted the town and went
+to live in the country. The same facile explanation covered his
+quarrel with importunate friends at the Hermitage. Voltaire called him
+mad for saying that if there were perfect harmony of taste and
+temperament between the king's daughter and the executioner's son, the
+pair ought to be allowed to marry. We who are not forced by
+conversational necessities to hurry to a judgment, may hesitate to
+take either taste for the country, or for frugal living, or even for
+democratic extravagances, as a mark of a disordered mind.<a name="FNanchor_373_373" id="FNanchor_373_373"></a><a href="#Footnote_373_373" class="fnanchor">[373]</a> That
+Rousseau's conduct towards Hume was <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_297" id="Page_297">[ii.297]</a></span>inconsistent with perfect mental
+soundness is quite plain. But to say this with crude trenchancy,
+teaches us nothing. Instead of paying ourselves with phrases like
+monomania, it is more useful shortly to trace the conditions which
+prepared the way for mental derangement, because this is the only
+means of understanding either its nature, or the degree to which it
+extended. These conditions in Rousseau's case are perfectly simple and
+obvious to any one who recognises the principle, that the essential
+facts of such mental disorder as his must be sought not in the
+symptoms, but from the whole range of moral and intellectual
+constitution, acted on by physical states and acting on them in turn.</p>
+
+<p>Rousseau was born with an organisation of extreme sensibility. This
+predisposition was further deepened by the application in early youth
+of mental influences specially calculated to heighten juvenile
+sensibility. Corrective discipline from circumstance and from formal
+instruction was wholly absent, and thus the particular excess in his
+temperament became ever more and more exaggerated, and encroached at a
+rate of geometrical progression upon all the rest of his impulses and
+faculties; these, if he had been happily placed under some of the many
+forms of wholesome<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_298" id="Page_298">[ii.298]</a></span> social pressure, would then on the contrary have
+gradually reduced his sensibility to more normal proportion. When the
+vicious excess had decisively rooted itself in his character, he came
+to Paris, where it was irritated into further activity by the
+uncongeniality of all that surrounded him. Hence the growth of a
+marked unsociality, taking literary form in the Discourses, and
+practical form in his retirement from the town. The slow depravation
+of the affective life was hastened by solitude, by sensuous expansion,
+by the long musings of literary composition. Well does Goethe's
+Princess warn the hapless Tasso:&#8212;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i10">Dieser Pfad<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Verleitet uns, durch einsames Geb&#252;sch,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Durch stille Th&#228;ler fortzuwandern; mehr<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Und mehr verw&#246;hnt sich das Gem&#252;th und strebt<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Die goldne Zeit, die ihm von aussen mangelt,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In seinem Innern wieder herzustellen,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">So wenig der Versuch gelingen will.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Then came harsh and unjust treatment prolonged for many months, and
+this introduced a slight but genuinely misanthropic element of
+bitterness into what had hitherto been an excess of feeling about
+himself, rather than any positive feeling of hostility or suspicion
+about others. Finally and perhaps above all else, he was the victim of
+tormenting bodily pain, and of sleeplessness which resulted from it.
+The agitation and excitement of the journey to England, completed the
+sum of the conditions of disturbance, and as soon as ever he was
+settled at Wootton, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_299" id="Page_299">[ii.299]</a></span> had leisure to brood over the incidents of
+the few weeks since his arrival in England, the disorder which had
+long been spreading through his impulses and affections, suddenly but
+by a most natural sequence extended to the faculties of his
+intelligence, and he became the prey of delusion, a delusion which was
+not yet fixed, but which ultimately became so.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;He has only <i>felt</i> during the whole course of his life,&quot; wrote Hume
+sympathetically; &quot;and in this respect his sensibility rises to a pitch
+beyond what I have seen any example of; but it still gives him a more
+acute feeling of pain than of pleasure. He is like a man who was
+stripped not only of his clothes, but of his skin, and turned out in
+that situation to combat with the rude and boisterous elements.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_374_374" id="FNanchor_374_374"></a><a href="#Footnote_374_374" class="fnanchor">[374]</a>
+A morbid affective state of this kind and of such a degree of
+intensity, was the sure antecedent of a morbid intellectual state,
+general or partial, depressed or exalted. One who is the prey of
+unsound feelings, if they are only marked enough and persistent
+enough, naturally ends by a correspondingly unsound arrangement of all
+or some of his ideas to match. The intelligence is seduced into
+finding supports in misconception of circumstances, for a
+misconception of human relation which had its root in disordered
+emotion. This completes the breach of correspondence between the man's
+nature and the external facts with which he has to deal, though the
+breach may not, and in Rousseau's case certainly did not, extend along
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_300" id="Page_300">[ii.300]</a></span>the whole line of feeling and judgment. Rousseau's delusion about
+Hume's sinister feeling and designs, which was the first definite
+manifestation of positive unsoundness in the sphere of the
+intelligence, was a last result of the gradual development of an
+inherited predisposition to affective unsoundness, which unhappily for
+the man's history had never been counteracted either by a strenuous
+education, or by the wholesome urgencies of life.</p>
+
+<p>We have only to remember that with him, as with the rest of us, there
+was entire unity of nature, without cataclysm or marvel or
+inexplicable rupture of mental continuity. All the facts came in an
+order that might have been foretold; they all lay together, with their
+foundations down in physical temperament; the facts which made
+Rousseau's name renowned and his influence a great force, along with
+those which made his life a scandal to others and a misery to himself.
+The deepest root of moral disorder lies in an immoderate expectation
+of happiness, and this immoderate unlawful expectation was the mark
+both of his character and his work. The exaltation of emotion over
+intelligence was the secret of his most striking production; the same
+exaltation, by gaining increased mastery over his whole existence, at
+length passed the limit of sanity and wrecked him. The tendency of the
+dominant side of a character towards diseased exaggeration is a fact
+of daily observation. The ruin which the excess of strong religious
+imagination works in natures without the quality of energetic<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_301" id="Page_301">[ii.301]</a></span>
+objective reaction, was shown in the case of Rousseau's contemporary,
+Cowper. This gentle poet's delusions about the wrath of God were
+equally pitiable and equally a source of torment to their victim, with
+Rousseau's delusions about the malignity of his mysterious plotters
+among men. We must call such a condition unsound, but the important
+thing is to remember that insanity was only a modification of certain
+specially marked tendencies of the sufferer's sanity.</p>
+
+<p>The desire to protect himself against the defamation of his enemies
+led him at this time to compose that account of his own life, which is
+probably the only one of his writings that continues to be generally
+read. He composed the first part of the Confessions at Wootton, during
+the autumn and winter of 1766. The idea of giving his memoirs to the
+public was an old one, originally suggested by one of his publishers.
+To write memoirs of one's own life was one of the fancies of the time,
+but like all else, it became in Rousseau's hand something more
+far-reaching and sincere than a passing fashion. Other people wrote
+polite histories of their outer lives, amply coloured with romantic
+decorations. Rousseau with unquailing veracity plunged into the inmost
+depths, hiding nothing that would be likely to make him either
+ridiculous or hateful in common opinion, and inventing nothing that
+could attract much sympathy or much admiration. Though, as has been
+pointed out already, the Confessions abound in small inaccuracies<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_302" id="Page_302">[ii.302]</a></span> of
+date, hardly to be avoided by an oldish man in reference to the facts
+of his boyhood, whether a Rousseau or a Goethe, and though one or two
+of the incidents are too deeply coloured with the hues of sentimental
+reminiscence, and one or two of them are downright impossible, yet
+when all these deductions have been made, the substantial truthfulness
+of what remains is made more evident with every addition to our
+materials for testing them. When all the circumstances of Rousseau's
+life are weighed, and when full account has been taken of his proved
+delinquencies, we yet perceive that he was at bottom a character as
+essentially sincere, truthful, careful of fact and reality, as is
+consistent with the general empire of sensation over untrained
+intelligence.<a name="FNanchor_375_375" id="FNanchor_375_375"></a><a href="#Footnote_375_375" class="fnanchor">[375]</a> As for the egotism of the Confessions, it is hard
+to see how a man is to tell the story of his own life without egotism.
+And it may be worth adding that the self-feeling which comes to the
+surface and asserts itself, is in a great many cases far less vicious
+and debilitating than the same feeling nursed internally with a
+troglodytish shyness. But Rousseau's egotism manifested itself
+perversely. This is true to a certain small extent, and one or two of
+the disclosures in the Confessions are in very nauseous matter, and
+are made moreover in a very nauseous manner. There are some vices
+whose grotesqueness stirs us more deeply than downright <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_303" id="Page_303">[ii.303]</a></span>atrocities,
+and we read of certain puerilities avowed by Rousseau, with a livelier
+impatience than old Benvenuto Cellini quickens in us, when he
+confesses to a horrible assassination. This morbid form of
+self-feeling is only less disgusting than the allied form which
+clothes itself in the phrases of religious exaltation. And there is
+not much of it. Blot out half a dozen pages from the Confessions, and
+the egotism is no more perverted than in the confessions of Augustine
+or of Cardan.</p>
+
+<p>These remarks are not made to extenuate Rousseau's faults, or to raise
+the popular estimate of his character, but simply in the interests of
+a greater precision of criticism. In England criticism has nearly
+always been of the most vulgar superficiality in respect to Rousseau,
+from the time of Horace Walpole downwards. The Confessions in their
+least agreeable parts, or rather especially in those parts, are the
+expression on a new side and in a peculiar way of the same notion of
+the essential goodness of nature and the importance of understanding
+nature and restoring its reign, which inspired the Discourses and
+Emilius. &quot;I would fain show to my fellows,&quot; he began, &quot;a man in all
+the truth of nature,&quot; and he cannot be charged with any failure to
+keep his word. He despised opinion, and hence was careless to observe
+whether or no this revelation of human nakedness was likely to add to
+the popular respect for nature and the natural man. After all,
+considering that literature is for the most part a hollow and
+pretentious<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_304" id="Page_304">[ii.304]</a></span> phantasmagoria of mimic figures posing in breeches and
+peruke, we may try to forgive certain cruel blows to the dignified
+assumptions, solemn words, and high heels of convention, in one who
+would not lie, nor dissemble kinship with the four-footed. Intense
+subjective preoccupations in markedly emotional natures all tend to
+come to the same end. The distance from Rousseau's odious erotics to
+the glorified ecstasies of many a poor female saint is not far. In any
+case, let us know the facts about human nature, and the pathological
+facts no less than the others. These are the first thing, and the
+second, and the third also.</p>
+
+<p>The exaltation of the opening page of the Confessions is shocking. No
+monk nor saint ever wrote anything more revolting in its blasphemous
+self-feeling. But the exaltation almost instantly became calm, when
+the course of the story necessarily drew the writer into dealings with
+objective facts, even muffled as they were by memory and imagination.
+The broodings over old reminiscence soothed him, the labour of
+composition occupied him, and he forgot, as the modern reader would
+never know from internal evidence, that he was preparing a vindication
+of his life and character against the infamies with which Hume and
+others were supposed to be industriously blackening them. While he was
+writing this famous composition, severed by so vast a gulf from the
+modes of English provincial life, he was on good terms with one or two
+of the great people in his neighbourhood, and kept up a gracious and
+social correspondence<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_305" id="Page_305">[ii.305]</a></span> with them. He was greatly pleased by a
+compliment that was paid to him by the government, apparently through
+the interest of General Conway. The duty that had been paid upon
+certain boxes forwarded to Rousseau from Switzerland was recouped by
+the treasury,<a name="FNanchor_376_376" id="FNanchor_376_376"></a><a href="#Footnote_376_376" class="fnanchor">[376]</a> and the arrangements for the annual pension of one
+hundred pounds were concluded and accepted by him, after he had duly
+satisfied himself that Hume was not the indirect author of the
+benefaction.<a name="FNanchor_377_377" id="FNanchor_377_377"></a><a href="#Footnote_377_377" class="fnanchor">[377]</a> The weather was the worst possible, but whenever it
+allowed him to go out of doors, he found delight in climbing the
+heights around him in search of curious mosses; for he had now come to
+think the discovery of a single new plant a hundred times more useful
+than to have the whole human race listening to your sermons for half a
+century.<a name="FNanchor_378_378" id="FNanchor_378_378"></a><a href="#Footnote_378_378" class="fnanchor">[378]</a> &quot;This indolent and contemplative life that you do not
+approve,&quot; he wrote to the elder Mirabeau, &quot;and for which I pretend to
+make no excuses, becomes every day more delicious to me: to wander
+alone among the trees and rocks that surround my dwelling; to muse or
+rather to extravagate at my ease, and as you say to stand gaping in
+the air; when my brain gets too hot, to calm it by dissecting some
+moss or fern; in short, to surrender myself without restraint to my
+phantasies, which, heaven be thanked, are all under my own
+con<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_306" id="Page_306">[ii.306]</a></span>trol,&#8212;all that is for me the height of enjoyment, to which I can
+imagine nothing superior in this world for a man of my age and in my
+condition.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_379_379" id="FNanchor_379_379"></a><a href="#Footnote_379_379" class="fnanchor">[379]</a></p>
+
+<p>This contentment did not last long. The snow kept him indoors. The
+excitement of composition abated. Theresa harassed him by ignoble
+quarrels with the women in the kitchen. His delusions returned with
+greater force than before. He believed that the whole English nation
+was in a plot against him, that all his letters were opened before
+reaching London and before leaving it, that all his movements were
+closely watched, and that he was surrounded by unseen guards to
+prevent any attempt at escape.<a name="FNanchor_380_380" id="FNanchor_380_380"></a><a href="#Footnote_380_380" class="fnanchor">[380]</a> At length these delusions got such
+complete mastery over him, that in a paroxysm of terror he fled away
+from Wootton, leaving money, papers, and all else behind him. Nothing
+was heard of him for a fortnight, when Mr. Davenport received a letter
+from him dated at Spalding in Lincolnshire. Mr. Davenport's conduct
+throughout was marked by a humanity and patience that do him the
+highest honour. He confesses himself &quot;quite moved to read poor
+Rousseau's mournful epistle.&quot; &quot;You shall see his letter,&quot; he writes to
+Hume, &quot;the first opportunity; but God help him, I can't for pity give
+a copy; and 'tis so much mixed with his own poor little private
+concerns, that it would not be right in me to do <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_307" id="Page_307">[ii.307]</a></span>it.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_381_381" id="FNanchor_381_381"></a><a href="#Footnote_381_381" class="fnanchor">[381]</a> This is
+the generosity which makes Hume's impatience and that of his
+mischievous advisers in Paris appear petty. Rousseau had behaved quite
+as ill to Mr. Davenport as he had done to Hume, and had received at
+least equal services from him.<a name="FNanchor_382_382" id="FNanchor_382_382"></a><a href="#Footnote_382_382" class="fnanchor">[382]</a> The good man at once sent a
+servant to Spalding in search of his unhappy guest, but Rousseau had
+again disappeared. The parson of the parish had passed several hours
+of each day in his company, and had found him cheerful and
+good-humoured. He had had a blue coat made for himself, and had
+written a long letter to the lord chancellor, praying him to appoint a
+guard, at Rousseau's own expense, to escort him in safety out of the
+kingdom where enemies were plotting against his life.<a name="FNanchor_383_383" id="FNanchor_383_383"></a><a href="#Footnote_383_383" class="fnanchor">[383]</a> He was next
+heard of at Dover (May 18), whence he wrote a letter to General
+Conway, setting forth his delusion in full form.<a name="FNanchor_384_384" id="FNanchor_384_384"></a><a href="#Footnote_384_384" class="fnanchor">[384]</a> He is the victim
+of a plot; the conspirators will not allow him to leave the island,
+lest he should divulge in other countries the outrages to which he has
+been subjected here; he perceives the sinister manoeuvres that will
+arrest him if he attempts to put his foot on board ship. But he warns
+them that his tragical disappearance cannot take place without
+creating inquiry. Still if General Conway will only let him go, he
+gives his word of honour that he will not publish <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_308" id="Page_308">[ii.308]</a></span>a line of the
+memoirs he has written, nor ever divulge the wrongs which he has
+suffered in England. &quot;I see my last hour approaching,&quot; he concluded;
+&quot;I am determined, if necessary, to advance to meet it, and to perish
+or be free; there is no longer any other alternative.&quot; On the same
+evening on which he wrote this letter (about May 20-22), the forlorn
+creature took boat and landed at Calais, where he seems at once to
+have recovered his composure and a right mind.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_350_350" id="Footnote_350_350"></a><a href="#FNanchor_350_350"><span class="label">[350]</span></a> Jan. 1766&#8212;May 1767.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_351_351" id="Footnote_351_351"></a><a href="#FNanchor_351_351"><span class="label">[351]</span></a> Streckeisen, ii. 275, etc. <i>Corr.</i>, iii.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_352_352" id="Footnote_352_352"></a><a href="#FNanchor_352_352"><span class="label">[352]</span></a> Burton, ii. 299.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_353_353" id="Footnote_353_353"></a><a href="#FNanchor_353_353"><span class="label">[353]</span></a> The materials for this chapter are taken from
+Rousseau's <i>Correspondence</i> (vols. iv. and v.), and from Hume's
+letters to various persons, given in the second volume of Mr. Burton's
+<i>Life of Hume</i>. Everybody who takes an interest in Rousseau is
+indebted to Mr. Burton for the ample documents which he has provided.
+Yet one cannot but regret the satire on Rousseau with which he
+intersperses them, and which is not always felicitous. For one
+instance, he implies (p. 295) that Rousseau invented the story given
+in the Confessions, of Hume's correcting the proofs of Wallace's book
+against himself. The story may be true or not, but at any rate
+Rousseau had it very circumstantially from Lord Marischal; see letter
+from Lord M. to J.J.R., in Streckeisen, ii. 67. Again, such an
+expression as Rousseau's &quot;<i>occasional</i> attention to small matters&quot; (p.
+321) only shows that the writer has not read Rousseau's letters, which
+are indeed not worth reading, except by those who wish to have a right
+to speak about Rousseau's character. The numerous pamphlets on the
+quarrel between Hume and Rousseau, if I may judge from those of them
+which I have turned over, really shed no light on the matter, though
+they added much heat. For the journey, see <i>Corr.</i>, iv. 307; Burton,
+ii. 304.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_354_354" id="Footnote_354_354"></a><a href="#FNanchor_354_354"><span class="label">[354]</span></a> <i>Letter to a Member of the National Assembly.</i> The same
+passage contains some strong criticism on Rousseau's style.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_355_355" id="Footnote_355_355"></a><a href="#FNanchor_355_355"><span class="label">[355]</span></a> Burton, 304, 309, 310.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_356_356" id="Footnote_356_356"></a><a href="#FNanchor_356_356"><span class="label">[356]</span></a> <i>Ib.</i> ii. 309, <i>n.</i></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_357_357" id="Footnote_357_357"></a><a href="#FNanchor_357_357"><span class="label">[357]</span></a> Mr. Howitt has given an account of Rousseau's quarters
+at Wootton, in his <i>Visits to Remarkable Places</i>. One or two aged
+peasants had some confused memory of &quot;old Ross-hall.&quot; For Rousseau's
+own description, see his letters to Mdme. de Luze, May 10, 1766.
+<i>Corr.</i>, iv. 326.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_358_358" id="Footnote_358_358"></a><a href="#FNanchor_358_358"><span class="label">[358]</span></a> Burton, 313. It has been stated that Rousseau never
+paid this; at any rate when he fled, he left between thirty and forty
+pounds in Mr. Davenport's hands. See Davenport to Hume; Burton, 367.
+Rousseau's accurate probity in affairs of money is absolutely
+unimpeachable.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_359_359" id="Footnote_359_359"></a><a href="#FNanchor_359_359"><span class="label">[359]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i> iv. 312. April 9, 1766.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_360_360" id="Footnote_360_360"></a><a href="#FNanchor_360_360"><span class="label">[360]</span></a> Here is a translation of this rather poor piece of
+sarcasm:&#8212;&quot;My dear Jean Jacques&#8212;You have renounced Geneva, your
+native place. You have caused your expulsion from Switzerland, a
+country so extolled in your writings; France has issued a warrant
+against you; so do you come to me. I admire your talents; I am amused
+by your dreamings, though let me tell you they absorb you too much and
+for too long. You must at length be sober and happy; you have caused
+enough talk about yourself by oddities which in truth are hardly
+becoming a really great man. Prove to your enemies that you can now
+and then have common sense. That will annoy them and do you no harm.
+My states offer you a peaceful retreat. I wish you well, and will
+treat you well, if you will let me. But if you persist in refusing my
+help, do not reckon upon my telling any one that you did so. If you
+are bent on tormenting your spirit to find new misfortunes, choose
+whatever you like best. I am a king, and can procure them for you at
+your pleasure; and what will certainly never happen to you in respect
+of your enemies, I will cease to persecute you as soon as you cease to
+take a pride in being persecuted. Your good friend,
+<span class="smcap">Frederick</span>.&quot;</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_361_361" id="Footnote_361_361"></a><a href="#FNanchor_361_361"><span class="label">[361]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>, iv. 313, 343, 388, 398.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_362_362" id="Footnote_362_362"></a><a href="#FNanchor_362_362"><span class="label">[362]</span></a> <i>Ib.</i> 395.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_363_363" id="Footnote_363_363"></a><a href="#FNanchor_363_363"><span class="label">[363]</span></a> <i>Ib.</i> 389, etc.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_364_364" id="Footnote_364_364"></a><a href="#FNanchor_364_364"><span class="label">[364]</span></a> <i>Ib.</i> 384.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_365_365" id="Footnote_365_365"></a><a href="#FNanchor_365_365"><span class="label">[365]</span></a> <i>Ib.</i> 343, 344, 387, etc.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_366_366" id="Footnote_366_366"></a><a href="#FNanchor_366_366"><span class="label">[366]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>, iv. 346.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_367_367" id="Footnote_367_367"></a><a href="#FNanchor_367_367"><span class="label">[367]</span></a> <i>Ib.</i> 390. A letter from Hume to Blair, long before the
+rupture overt, shows the former to have been by no means so phlegmatic
+on this occasion as he may have seemed. &quot;I hope,&quot; he writes, &quot;you have
+not so bad an opinion of me as to think I was not melted on this
+occasion; I assure you I kissed him and embraced him twenty times,
+with a plentiful effusion of tears. I think no scene of my life was
+ever more affecting.&quot; Burton, ii. 315. The great doubters of the
+eighteenth century could without fear have accepted the test of the
+ancient saying, that men without tears are worth little.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_368_368" id="Footnote_368_368"></a><a href="#FNanchor_368_368"><span class="label">[368]</span></a> Bernardin de St. Pierre, <i>Oeuv.</i>, xii. 79.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_369_369" id="Footnote_369_369"></a><a href="#FNanchor_369_369"><span class="label">[369]</span></a> Walpole's <i>Letters</i>, v. 7 (Cunningham's edition). For
+other letters from the shrewd coxcomb on the same matter, see pp.
+23-28. A corroboration of the statement that Hume knew nothing of the
+letter until he was in England, may be inferred from what he wrote to
+Madame de Boufflers; Burton, ii. 306, and <i>n.</i> 2.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_370_370" id="Footnote_370_370"></a><a href="#FNanchor_370_370"><span class="label">[370]</span></a> Bernardin de St. Pierre, <i>Oeuv.</i>, xii. 79.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_371_371" id="Footnote_371_371"></a><a href="#FNanchor_371_371"><span class="label">[371]</span></a> To Adam Smith. Burton, 380.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_372_372" id="Footnote_372_372"></a><a href="#FNanchor_372_372"><span class="label">[372]</span></a> Burton, 381.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_373_373" id="Footnote_373_373"></a><a href="#FNanchor_373_373"><span class="label">[373]</span></a> A very common but random opinion traces Rousseau's
+insanity to certain disagreeable habits avowed in the Confessions.
+They may have contributed in some small degree to depression of vital
+energies, though for that matter Rousseau's strength and power of
+endurance were remarkable to the end. But they certainly did not
+produce a mental state in the least corresponding to that particular
+variety of insanity, which possesses definitely marked features.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_374_374" id="Footnote_374_374"></a><a href="#FNanchor_374_374"><span class="label">[374]</span></a> Burton, ii. 314.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_375_375" id="Footnote_375_375"></a><a href="#FNanchor_375_375"><span class="label">[375]</span></a> For an instructive and, as it appears to me, a
+thoroughly trustworthy account of the temper in which the Confessions
+were written, see the 4th of the <i>R&#234;veries</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_376_376" id="Footnote_376_376"></a><a href="#FNanchor_376_376"><span class="label">[376]</span></a> Letter to the Duke of Grafton, Feb. 27, 1767. <i>Corr.</i>,
+v. 98: also 118.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_377_377" id="Footnote_377_377"></a><a href="#FNanchor_377_377"><span class="label">[377]</span></a> <i>Ib.</i> v. 133; also to General Conway (March 26), p.
+137, etc.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_378_378" id="Footnote_378_378"></a><a href="#FNanchor_378_378"><span class="label">[378]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>, v. 37.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_379_379" id="Footnote_379_379"></a><a href="#FNanchor_379_379"><span class="label">[379]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>, v. 88.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_380_380" id="Footnote_380_380"></a><a href="#FNanchor_380_380"><span class="label">[380]</span></a> See the letters to Du Peyrou, of the 2d and 4th of
+April 1767. <i>Corr.</i>, v. 140-147.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_381_381" id="Footnote_381_381"></a><a href="#FNanchor_381_381"><span class="label">[381]</span></a> Davenport to Hume; Burton, 367-371.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_382_382" id="Footnote_382_382"></a><a href="#FNanchor_382_382"><span class="label">[382]</span></a> J.J.R. to Davenport, Dec. 22, 1766, and April 30, 1767.
+<i>Corr.</i>, v. 66, 152.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_383_383" id="Footnote_383_383"></a><a href="#FNanchor_383_383"><span class="label">[383]</span></a> Burton, 369, 375.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_384_384" id="Footnote_384_384"></a><a href="#FNanchor_384_384"><span class="label">[384]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>, v. 153.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_309" id="Page_309">[ii.309]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VII" id="CHAPTER_VII"></a>CHAPTER VII.</h2>
+
+<h3>THE END.</h3>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Before</span> leaving England, Rousseau had received more than one
+long and rambling letter from a man who was as unlike the rest of
+mankind as he was unlike them himself. This was the Marquis of
+Mirabeau (1715-89), the violent, tyrannical, pedantic, humoristic sire
+of a more famous son. Perhaps we might say that Mirabeau and Rousseau
+were the two most singular originals then known to men, and Mirabeau's
+originality was in some respects the more salient of the two. There is
+less of the conventional tone of the eighteenth century Frenchman in
+him than in any other conspicuous man of the time, though like many
+other headstrong and despotic souls he picked up the current notions
+of philanthropy and human brotherhood. He really was by very force of
+temperament that rebel against the narrowness, trimness, and moral
+formalism of the time which Rousseau only claimed and attempted to be,
+with the secondary degree of success that follows vehemence without
+native strength. Mirabeau was a sort of Swift, who had strangely taken
+up the trade of friendship for<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_310" id="Page_310">[ii.310]</a></span> man and adopted the phrases of
+perfectibility; while Rousseau on the other hand was meant for a
+F&#233;nelon, save that he became possessed of unclean devils.</p>
+
+<p>Mirabeau, like Jean Jacques himself, was so impressed by the marked
+tenor of contemporary feeling, its prudential didactics, its
+formulistic sociality, that his native insurgency only found vent in
+private life, while in public he played pedagogue to the human race.
+Friend of Quesnai and orthodox economist as he was, he delighted in
+Rousseau's books: &quot;I know no morality that goes deeper than yours; it
+strikes like a thunderbolt, and advances with the steady assurance of
+truth, for you are always true, according to your notions for the
+moment.&quot; He wrote to tell him so, but he told him at the same time at
+great length, and with a caustic humour and incoherency less academic
+than Rabelaisian, that he had behaved absurdly in his quarrel with
+Hume. There is nothing more quaint than the appearance of a few of the
+sacramental phrases of the sect of the economists, floating in the
+midst of a copious stream of egoistic whimsicalities. He concludes
+with a diverting enumeration of all his country seats and demesnes,
+with their respective advantages and disadvantages, and prays Rousseau
+to take up his residence in whichever of them may please him
+best.<a name="FNanchor_385_385" id="FNanchor_385_385"></a><a href="#Footnote_385_385" class="fnanchor">[385]</a></p>
+
+<p>Immediately on landing at Calais Rousseau informed Mirabeau, and
+Mirabeau lost no time in conveying him stealthily, for the warrant of
+the parlia<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_311" id="Page_311">[ii.311]</a></span>ment of Paris was still in force, to a house at Fleury. But
+the Friend of Men, to use his own account of himself, &quot;bore letters as
+a plum-tree bears plums,&quot; and wrote to his guest with strange
+humoristic volubility and droll imperturbable temper, as one who knew
+his Jean Jacques. He exhorts him in many sheets to harden himself
+against excessive sensibility, to be less pusillanimous, to take
+society more lightly, as his own light estimate of its worth should
+lead him to do. &quot;No doubt its outside is a shifting surface-picture,
+nay even ridiculous, if you will; but if the irregular and ceaseless
+flight of butterflies wearies you in your walk, it is your own fault
+for looking continuously at what was only made to adorn and vary the
+scene. But how many social virtues, how much gentleness and
+considerateness, how many benevolent actions, remain at the bottom of
+it all.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_386_386" id="FNanchor_386_386"></a><a href="#Footnote_386_386" class="fnanchor">[386]</a> Enormous manifestoes of the doctrine of perfectibility
+were not in the least degree either soothing or interesting to
+Rousseau, and the thrusts of shrewd candour at his expense might touch
+his fancy on a single occasion, but not oftener. Two humorists are
+seldom successful in amusing one another. Besides, Mirabeau insisted
+that Jean Jacques should read this or that of his books. Rousseau
+answered that he would try, but warned him of the folly of it. &quot;I do
+not engage always to follow what you say, because it has always been
+painful to me to think, and fatiguing to follow the thoughts of other
+people, and at present I cannot <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_312" id="Page_312">[ii.312]</a></span>do so at all.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_387_387" id="FNanchor_387_387"></a><a href="#Footnote_387_387" class="fnanchor">[387]</a> Though they
+continued to be good friends, Rousseau only remained three or four
+weeks at Fleury. His old acquaintance at Montmorency, the Prince of
+Conti, partly perhaps from contrition at the rather unchivalrous
+fashion in which his great friends had hustled the philosopher away at
+the time of the decree of the parliament of Paris, offered him refuge
+at one of his country seats at Trye near Gisors. Here he installed
+Rousseau under the name of Renou, either to silence the indiscreet
+curiosity of neighbours, or to gratify a whim of Rousseau himself.</p>
+
+<p>Rousseau remained for a year (June 1767-June 1768), composing the
+second part of the Confessions, in a condition of extreme mental
+confusion. Dusky phantoms walked with him once more. He knew the
+gardener, the servants, the neighbours, all to be in the pay of Hume,
+and that he was watched day and night with a view to his
+destruction.<a name="FNanchor_388_388" id="FNanchor_388_388"></a><a href="#Footnote_388_388" class="fnanchor">[388]</a> He entirely gave up either reading or writing, save
+a very small number of letters, and he declared that to take up the
+pen even for these was like lifting a load of iron. The only interest
+he had was botany, and for this his passion became daily more intense.
+He appears to have been as contented as a child, so long as he could
+employ himself in long expeditions in search of new plants, in
+arranging a herbarium, in watching the growth of the germ of some rare
+seed which needed careful tending. But the story had once more the
+same conclusion. He fled from Trye, as he had fled <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_313" id="Page_313">[ii.313]</a></span>from Wootton. He
+meant apparently to go to Chamb&#233;ri, drawn by the deep magnetic force
+of old memories that seemed long extinct. But at Grenoble on his way
+thither he encountered a substantial grievance. A man alleged that he
+had lent Rousseau a few francs seven years previously. He was
+undoubtedly mistaken, and was fully convicted of his mistake by proper
+authorities, but Rousseau's correspondents suffered none the less for
+that. We all know when monomania seizes a man, how adroitly and how
+eagerly it colours every incident. The mistaken claim was proof
+demonstrative of that frightful and tenebrous conspiracy, which they
+might have thought a delusion hitherto, but which, alas, this showed
+to be only too tragically real; and so on, through many pages of
+droning wretchedness.<a name="FNanchor_389_389" id="FNanchor_389_389"></a><a href="#Footnote_389_389" class="fnanchor">[389]</a> Then we find him at Bourgoin, where he
+spent some months in shabby taverns, and then many months more at
+Monquin on adjoining uplands.<a name="FNanchor_390_390" id="FNanchor_390_390"></a><a href="#Footnote_390_390" class="fnanchor">[390]</a> The estrangement from Theresa, of
+which enough has been said already,<a name="FNanchor_391_391" id="FNanchor_391_391"></a><a href="#Footnote_391_391" class="fnanchor">[391]</a> was added to his other
+torments. He resolved, as so many of the self-tortured have done
+since, to go in search of happiness to the western lands beyond the
+Atlantic, where the elixir of bliss is thought by the wearied among us
+to be inexhaustible and assured. Almost in the same page he turns his
+face eastwards, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_314" id="Page_314">[ii.314]</a></span>and dreams of ending his days peacefully among the
+islands of the Grecian archipelago. Next he gravely, not only
+designed, but actually took measures, to return to Wootton. All was no
+more than the momentary incoherent purpose of a sick man's dream, the
+weary distraction of one who had deliberately devoted himself to
+isolation from his fellows, without first sitting down carefully to
+count the cost, or to measure the inner resources which he possessed
+to meet the deadly strain that isolation puts on every one of a man's
+mental fibres. Geographical loneliness is to some a condition of their
+fullest strength, but most of the few who dare to make a moral
+solitude for themselves, find that they have assuredly not made peace.
+Such solitude, as South said of the study of the Apocalypse, either
+finds a man mad, or leaves him so. Not all can play the stoic who
+will, and it is still more certain that one who like Rousseau has lain
+down with the doctrine that in all things imaginable it is impossible
+for him to do at all what he cannot do with pleasure, will end in a
+condition of profound and hopeless impotence in respect to pleasure
+itself.</p>
+
+<p>In July 1770, he made his way to Paris, and here he remained eight
+years longer, not without the introduction of a certain degree of
+order into his outer life, though the clouds of vague suspicion and
+distrust, half bitter, half mournful, hung heavily as ever upon his
+mind. The Dialogues, which he wrote at this period (1775-76) to
+vindicate his memory from the defamation that was to be launched in a
+dark torrent<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_315" id="Page_315">[ii.315]</a></span> upon the world at the moment of his death, could not
+possibly have been written by a man in his right mind. Yet the best of
+the Musings, which were written still nearer the end, are masterpieces
+in the style of contemplative prose. The third, the fifth, the
+seventh, especially abound in that even, full, mellow gravity of tone
+which is so rare in literature, because the deep absorption of spirit
+which is its source is so rare in life. They reveal Rousseau to us
+with a truth beyond that attained in any of his other pieces&#8212;a
+mournful sombre figure, looming shadowily in the dark glow of sundown
+among sad and desolate places. There is nothing like them in the
+French tongue, which is the speech of the clear, the cheerful, or the
+august among men; nothing like this sonorous plainsong, the strangely
+melodious expression in the music of prose of a darkened spirit which
+yet had imaginative visions of beatitude.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>It is interesting to look on one or two pictures of the last waste and
+obscure years of the man, whose words were at this time silently
+fermenting for good and for evil in many spirits&#8212;a Schiller, a
+Herder, a Jeanne Phlipon, a Robespierre, a Gabriel Mirabeau, and many
+hundreds of those whose destiny was not to lead, but ingenuously to
+follow. Rousseau seems to have repulsed nearly all his ancient
+friends, and to have settled down with dogged resolve to his old trade
+of copying music. In summer he rose at five, copied music until
+half-past seven; munched his<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_316" id="Page_316">[ii.316]</a></span> breakfast, arranging on paper during the
+process such plants as he had gathered the previous afternoon; then he
+returned to his work, dined at half-past twelve, and went forth to
+take coffee at some public place. He would not return from his walk
+until nightfall, and he retired at half-past ten. The pavements of
+Paris were hateful to him because they tore his feet, and, said he,
+with deeply significant antithesis, &quot;I am not afraid of death, but I
+dread pain.&quot; He always found his way as fast as possible to one of the
+suburbs, and one of his greatest delights was to watch Mont Val&#233;rien
+in the sunset. &quot;Atheists,&quot; he said calumniously, &quot;do not love the
+country; they like the environs of Paris, where you have all the
+pleasures of the city, good cheer, books, pretty women; but if you
+take these things away, then they die of weariness.&quot; The note of every
+bird held him attentive, and filled his mind with delicious images. A
+graceful story is told of two swallows who made a nest in Rousseau's
+sleeping-room, and hatched the eggs there. &quot;I was no more than a
+doorkeeper for them,&quot; he said, &quot;for I kept opening the window for them
+every moment. They used to fly with a great stir round my head, until
+I had fulfilled the duties of the tacit convention between these
+swallows and me.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>In January 1771, Bernardin de St. Pierre, author of the immortal <i>Paul
+and Virginia</i> (1788), finding himself at the Cape of Good Hope, wrote
+to a friend in France just previously to his return to Europe,
+counting among other delights that of seeing two<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_317" id="Page_317">[ii.317]</a></span> summers in one
+year.<a name="FNanchor_392_392" id="FNanchor_392_392"></a><a href="#Footnote_392_392" class="fnanchor">[392]</a> Rousseau happened to see the letter, and expressed a desire
+to make the acquaintance of a man who in returning home should think
+of that as one of his chief pleasures. To this we owe the following
+pictures of an interior from St. Pierre's hand:&#8212;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>In the month of June in 1772, a friend having offered to
+take me to see Jean Jacques Rousseau, he brought me to a
+house in the Rue Pl&#226;tri&#232;re, nearly opposite to the H&#244;tel de
+la Poste. We mounted to the fourth story. We knocked, and
+Madame Rousseau opened the door. &quot;Come in, gentlemen,&quot; she
+said, &quot;you will find my husband.&quot; We passed through a very
+small antechamber, where the household utensils were neatly
+arranged, and from that into a room where Jean Jacques was
+seated in an overcoat and a white cap, busy copying music.
+He rose with a smiling face, offered us chairs, and resumed
+his work, at the same time taking a part in conversation. He
+was thin and of middle height. One shoulder struck me as
+rather higher than the other ... otherwise he was very well
+proportioned. He had a brown complexion, some colour on his
+cheek-bones, a good mouth, a well-made nose, a rounded and
+lofty brow, and eyes full of fire. The oblique lines falling
+from the nostrils to the extremity of the lips, and marking
+a physiognomy, in his case expressed great sensibility and
+something even painful. One observed in his face three or
+four of the characteristics of melancholy&#8212;the deep receding
+eyes and the elevation of the eyebrows; you saw profound
+sadness in the wrinkles of the brow; a keen and even caustic
+gaiety in a thousand little creases at the corners of the
+eyes, of <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_318" id="Page_318">[ii.318]</a></span>which the orbits entirely disappeared when he
+laughed.... Near him was a spinette on which from time to
+time he tried an air. Two little beds of blue and white
+striped calico, a table, and a few chairs, made the stock of
+his furniture. On the walls hung a plan of the forest and
+park of Montmorency, where he had once lived, and an
+engraving of the King of England, his old benefactor. His
+wife was sitting mending linen; a canary sang in a cage hung
+from the ceiling; sparrows came for crumbs on to the sills
+of the windows, which on the side of the street were open;
+while in the window of the antechamber we noticed boxes and
+pots filled with such plants as it pleases nature to sow.
+There was in the whole effect of his little establishment an
+air of cleanness, peace, and simplicity, which was
+delightful.</p></div>
+
+<p>A few days after, Rousseau returned the visit. &quot;He wore a round wig,
+well powdered and curled, carrying a hat under his arm, and in a full
+suit of nankeen. His whole exterior was modest, but extremely neat.&quot;
+He expressed his passion for good coffee, saying that this and ice
+were the only two luxuries for which he cared. St. Pierre happened to
+have brought some from the Isle of Bourbon, so on the following day he
+rashly sent Rousseau a small packet, which at first produced a polite
+letter of thanks; but the day after the letter of thanks came one of
+harsh protest against the ignominy of receiving presents which could
+not be returned, and bidding the unfortunate donor to choose between
+taking his coffee back or never seeing his new friend again. A fair
+bargain was ultimately arranged, St. Pierre receiving in exchange for
+his coffee some curious root<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_319" id="Page_319">[ii.319]</a></span> or other, and a book on ichthyology.
+Immediately afterwards he went to dine with his sage. He arrived at
+eleven in the forenoon, and they conversed until half-past twelve.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Then his wife laid the cloth. He took a bottle of wine, and
+as he put it on the table, asked whether we should have
+enough, or if I was fond of drinking. &quot;How many are there of
+us,&quot; said I. &quot;Three,&quot; he said; &quot;you, my wife, and myself.&quot;
+&quot;Well,&quot; I went on, &quot;when I drink wine and am alone, I drink
+a good half-bottle, and I drink a trifle more when I am with
+friends.&quot; &quot;In that case,&quot; he answered, &quot;we shall not have
+enough; I must go down into the cellar.&quot; He brought up a
+second bottle. His wife served two dishes, one of small
+tarts, and another which was covered. He said, showing me
+the first, &quot;That is your dish and the other is mine.&quot; &quot;I
+don't eat much pastry,&quot; I said, &quot;but I hope to be allowed to
+taste what you have got.&quot; &quot;Oh, they are both common,&quot; he
+replied; &quot;but most people don't care for this. 'Tis a Swiss
+dish; a compound of lard, mutton, vegetables, and
+chestnuts.&quot; It was excellent. After these two dishes, we had
+slices of beef in salad; then biscuits and cheese; after
+which his wife served the coffee.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>One morning when I was at his house, I saw various domestics
+either coming for rolls of music, or bringing them to him to
+copy. He received them standing and uncovered. He said to
+some, &quot;The price is so much,&quot; and received the money; to
+others, &quot;How soon must I return my copy?&quot; &quot;My mistress would
+like to have it back in a fortnight.&quot; &quot;Oh, that's out of the
+question: I have work, I can't do it in less than three
+weeks.&quot; I inquired why he did not take his talents to better
+market. &quot;Ah,&quot; he answered, &quot;there are two Rousseaus in the
+world; one rich, or who might have been if he had<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_320" id="Page_320">[ii.320]</a></span> chosen; a
+man capricious, singular, fantastic; this is the Rousseau of
+the public; the other is obliged to work for his living, the
+Rousseau whom you see.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_393_393" id="FNanchor_393_393"></a><a href="#Footnote_393_393" class="fnanchor">[393]</a></p></div>
+
+<p>They often took long rambles together, and all proceeded most
+harmoniously, unless St. Pierre offered to pay for such refreshment as
+they might take, when a furious explosion was sure to follow. Here is
+one more picture, without explosion.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p style="text-align: center"><i>An Easter Monday Excursion to Mont Val&#233;rien.</i></p>
+
+<p>We made an appointment at a caf&#233; in the Champs Elys&#233;es. In
+the morning we took some chocolate. The wind was westerly,
+and the air fresh. The sun was surrounded by white clouds,
+spread in masses over an azure sky. Reaching the Bois de
+Boulogne by eight o'clock, Jean Jacques set to work
+botanising. As he collected his little harvest, we kept
+walking along. We had gone through part of the wood, when in
+the midst of the solitude we perceived two young girls, one
+of whom was arranging the other's hair.&#8212;[Reminded them of
+some verses of Virgil.]....</p>
+
+<p>Arrived on the edge of the river, we crossed the ferry with
+a number of people whom devotion was taking to Mont
+Val&#233;rien. We climbed an extremely stiff slope, and were
+hardly on the top before hunger overtook us and we began to
+think of dining. Rousseau then led the way towards a
+hermitage, where he knew we could make sure of hospitality.
+The brother who opened to us, conducted us to the chapel,
+where they were reciting the litanies of providence, which
+are extremely beautiful.... When we had prayed, Jean Jacques
+said to me with genuine feeling: &quot;Now I feel what is said in
+the gospel, 'Where several of you are gathered together in
+my name, there <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_321" id="Page_321">[ii.321]</a></span>will I be in the midst of them.' There is a
+sentiment of peace and comfort here that penetrates the
+soul.&quot; I replied, &quot;If F&#233;nelon were alive, you would be a
+Catholic.&quot; &quot;Ah,&quot; said he, the tears in his eyes, &quot;if F&#233;nelon
+were alive, I would seek to be his lackey.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Presently we were introduced into the refectory; we seated
+ourselves during the reading. The subject was the injustice
+of the complainings of man: God has brought him from
+nothing, he oweth him nothing. After the reading, Rousseau
+said to me in a voice of deep emotion: &quot;Ah, how happy is the
+man who can believe....&quot; We walked about for some time in
+the cloister and the gardens. They command an immense
+prospect. Paris in the distance reared her towers all
+covered with light, and made a crown to the far-spreading
+landscape. The brightness of the view contrasted with the
+great leaden clouds that rolled after one another from the
+west, and seemed to fill the valley.... In the afternoon
+rain came on, as we approached the Porte Maillot. We took
+shelter along with a crowd of other holiday folk under some
+chestnut-trees whose leaves were coming out. One of the
+waiters of a tavern perceiving Jean Jacques, rushed to him
+full of joy, exclaiming, &quot;What, is it you, <i>mon bonhomme</i>?
+Why, it is a whole age since we have seen you.&quot; Rousseau
+replied cheerfully, &quot;'Tis because my wife has been ill, and
+I myself have been out of sorts.&quot; &quot;<i>Mon pauvre bonhomme</i>,&quot;
+replied the lad, &quot;you must not stop here; come in, come in,
+and I will find room for you.&quot; He hurried us along to a room
+upstairs, where in spite of the crowd he procured for us
+chairs and a table, and bread and wine. I said to Jean
+Jacques, &quot;He seems very familiar with you.&quot; He answered,
+&quot;Yes, we have known one another some years. We used to come
+here in fine weather, my wife and I, to eat a cutlet of an
+evening.&quot;<a name="FNanchor_394_394" id="FNanchor_394_394"></a><a href="#Footnote_394_394" class="fnanchor">[394]</a></p></div>
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_322" id="Page_322">[ii.322]</a></span></p>
+<p>Things did not continue to go thus smoothly. One day St. Pierre went
+to see him, and was received without a word, and with stiff and gloomy
+mien. He tried to talk, but only got monosyllables; he took up a book,
+and this drew a sarcasm which sent him forth from the room. For more
+than two months they did not meet. At length they had an accidental
+encounter at a street corner. Rousseau accosted St. Pierre, and with a
+gradually warming sensibility proceeded thus: &quot;There are days when I
+want to be alone and crave privacy. I come back from my solitary
+expeditions so calm and contented. There I have not been wanting to
+anybody, nor has anybody been wanting to me,&quot; and so on.<a name="FNanchor_395_395" id="FNanchor_395_395"></a><a href="#Footnote_395_395" class="fnanchor">[395]</a> He
+expressed this humour more pointedly on some other occasion, when he
+said that there were times in which he fled from the eyes of men as
+from Parthian arrows. As one said who knew from experience, the fate
+of his most intimate friend depended on a word or a gesture.<a name="FNanchor_396_396" id="FNanchor_396_396"></a><a href="#Footnote_396_396" class="fnanchor">[396]</a>
+Another of them declared that he knew Rousseau's style of discarding a
+friend by letter so thoroughly, that he felt confident he could supply
+Rousseau's place in case of illness or absence.<a name="FNanchor_397_397" id="FNanchor_397_397"></a><a href="#Footnote_397_397" class="fnanchor">[397]</a> In much of this
+we suspect that the quarrel was perfectly justified. Sociality meant a
+futile display before unworthy and condescending curiosity. &quot;It is not
+I whom they care <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_323" id="Page_323">[ii.323]</a></span>for,&quot; he very truly said, &quot;but public opinion and
+talk about me, without a thought of what real worth I may have.&quot; Hence
+his steadfast refusal to go out to dine or sup. The mere impertinence
+of the desire to see him was illustrated by some coxcombs who insisted
+with a famous actress of his acquaintance, that she should invite the
+strange philosopher to meet them. She was aware that no known force
+would persuade Rousseau to come, so she dressed up her tailor as
+philosopher, bade him keep a silent tongue, and vanish suddenly
+without a word of farewell. The tailor was long philosophically
+silent, and by the time that wine had loosened his tongue, the rest of
+the company were too far gone to perceive that the supposed Rousseau
+was chattering vulgar nonsense.<a name="FNanchor_398_398" id="FNanchor_398_398"></a><a href="#Footnote_398_398" class="fnanchor">[398]</a> We can believe that with admirers
+of this stamp Rousseau was well pleased to let tailors or others stand
+in his place. There were some, however, of a different sort, who
+flitted across his sight and then either vanished of their own accord,
+or were silently dismissed, from Madame de Genlis up to Gr&#233;try and
+Gluck. With Gluck he seems to have quarrelled for setting his music to
+French words, when he must have known that Italian was the only tongue
+fit for music.<a name="FNanchor_399_399" id="FNanchor_399_399"></a><a href="#Footnote_399_399" class="fnanchor">[399]</a> Yet it was remarked that no one ever heard him
+speak ill of others. His enemies, the figures of his delusion, were
+vaguely denounced in many dronings, but they remained in dark shadow
+and were unnamed. When Voltaire paid his famous last visit <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_324" id="Page_324">[ii.324]</a></span>to the
+capital (1778), some one thought of paying court to Rousseau by making
+a mock of the triumphal reception of the old warrior, but Rousseau
+harshly checked the detractor. It is true that in 1770-71 he gave to
+some few of his acquaintances one or more readings of the Confessions,
+although they contained much painful matter for many people still
+living, among the rest for Madame d'Epinay. She wrote justifiably
+enough to the lieutenant of police, praying that all such readings
+might be prohibited, and it is believed that they were so
+prohibited.<a name="FNanchor_400_400" id="FNanchor_400_400"></a><a href="#Footnote_400_400" class="fnanchor">[400]</a></p>
+
+<p>In 1769, when Polish anarchy was at its height, as if to show at once
+how profound the anarchy was, and how profound the faith among many
+minds in the power of the new French theories, an application was made
+to Mably to draw up a scheme for the renovation of distracted Poland.
+Mably's notions won little esteem from the persons who had sought for
+them, and in 1771 a similar application was made to Rousseau in his
+Parisian garret. He replied in the Considerations on the Government of
+Poland, which are written with a good deal of vigour of expression,
+but contain nothing that needs further discussion. He hinted to the
+Poles with some shrewd<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_325" id="Page_325">[ii.325]</a></span>ness that a curtailment of their territory by
+their neighbours was not far off,<a name="FNanchor_401_401" id="FNanchor_401_401"></a><a href="#Footnote_401_401" class="fnanchor">[401]</a> and the prediction was rapidly
+fulfilled by the first partition of Poland in the following year.</p>
+
+<p>He was asked one day of what nation he had the highest opinion. He
+answered, the Spanish. The Spanish nation, he said, has a character;
+if it is not rich, it still preserves all its pride and self-respect
+in the midst of its poverty; and it is animated by a single spirit,
+for it has not been scourged by the conflicting opinions of
+philosophy.<a name="FNanchor_402_402" id="FNanchor_402_402"></a><a href="#Footnote_402_402" class="fnanchor">[402]</a></p>
+
+<p>He was extremely poor for these last eight years of his life. He seems
+to have drawn the pension which George III. had settled on him, for
+not more than one year. We do not know why he refused to receive it
+afterwards. A well-meaning friend, when the arrears amounted to
+between six and seven thousand francs, applied for it on his behalf,
+and a draft for the money was sent. Rousseau gave the offender a
+vigorous rebuke for meddling in affairs that did not concern him, and
+the draft was destroyed. Other attempts to induce him to draw this
+money failed equally.<a name="FNanchor_403_403" id="FNanchor_403_403"></a><a href="#Footnote_403_403" class="fnanchor">[403]</a> Yet he had only about fifty pounds <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_326" id="Page_326">[ii.326]</a></span>a year
+to live on, together with the modest amount which he earned by copying
+music.<a name="FNanchor_404_404" id="FNanchor_404_404"></a><a href="#Footnote_404_404" class="fnanchor">[404]</a></p>
+
+<p>The sting of indigence began to make itself felt towards 1777. His
+health became worse and he could not work. Theresa was waxing old, and
+could no longer attend to the small cares of the household. More than
+one person offered them shelter and provision, and the old
+distractions as to a home in which to end his days began once again.
+At length M. Girardin prevailed upon him to come and live at
+Ermenonville, one of his estates some twenty miles from Paris. A dense
+cloud of obscure misery hangs over the last months of this forlorn
+existence.<a name="FNanchor_405_405" id="FNanchor_405_405"></a><a href="#Footnote_405_405" class="fnanchor">[405]</a> No tragedy had ever a fifth act so squalid. Theresa's
+character seems to have developed into something truly bestial.
+Rousseau's terrors of the designs of his enemies returned with great
+violence. He thought he was imprisoned, and he knew that he had no
+means of escape. One day (July 2, 1778), suddenly and without a single
+warning symptom, all drew to an end; the sensations which had been the
+ruling part of his life were affected by pleasure and pain no more,
+the dusky phantoms all vanished into space. The surgeons reported that
+the cause of his death was apoplexy, but a suspicion has haunted the
+world ever since, that he destroyed himself by a pistol-shot. We
+cannot tell. There is no inherent improbability <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_327" id="Page_327">[ii.327]</a></span>in the fact of his
+having committed suicide. In the New Helo&#239;sa he had thrown the
+conditions which justified self-destruction into a distinct formula.
+Fifteen years before, he declared that his own case fell within the
+conditions which he had prescribed, and that he was meditating
+action.<a name="FNanchor_406_406" id="FNanchor_406_406"></a><a href="#Footnote_406_406" class="fnanchor">[406]</a> Only seven years before, he had implied that a man had
+the right to deliver himself of the burden of his own life, if its
+miseries were intolerable and irremediable.<a name="FNanchor_407_407" id="FNanchor_407_407"></a><a href="#Footnote_407_407" class="fnanchor">[407]</a> This, however, counts
+for nothing in the absence of some kind of positive evidence, and of
+that there is just enough to leave the manner of his end a little
+doubtful.<a name="FNanchor_408_408" id="FNanchor_408_408"></a><a href="#Footnote_408_408" class="fnanchor">[408]</a> Once more, we cannot tell.</p>
+
+<p>By the serene moonrise of a summer night, his <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_328" id="Page_328">[ii.328]</a></span>body was put under the
+ground on an island in the midst of a small lake, where poplars throw
+shadows over the still water, silently figuring the destiny of
+mortals. Here it remained for sixteen years. Then amid the roar of
+cannon, the crash of trumpet and drum, and the wild acclamations of a
+populace gone mad in exultation, terror, fury, it was ordered that the
+poor dust should be transported to the national temple of great men.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_385_385" id="Footnote_385_385"></a><a href="#FNanchor_385_385"><span class="label">[385]</span></a> Streckeisen, ii. 315-328.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_386_386" id="Footnote_386_386"></a><a href="#FNanchor_386_386"><span class="label">[386]</span></a> Streckeisen, ii. 337.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_387_387" id="Footnote_387_387"></a><a href="#FNanchor_387_387"><span class="label">[387]</span></a> June 19, 1767. <i>Corr.</i>, v. 172.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_388_388" id="Footnote_388_388"></a><a href="#FNanchor_388_388"><span class="label">[388]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>, v. 267, 375.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_389_389" id="Footnote_389_389"></a><a href="#FNanchor_389_389"><span class="label">[389]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>, v. 330-381, 408, etc.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_390_390" id="Footnote_390_390"></a><a href="#FNanchor_390_390"><span class="label">[390]</span></a> Bourgoin, Aug. 1768, to March, 1769. Monquin, to July
+1770.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_391_391" id="Footnote_391_391"></a><a href="#FNanchor_391_391"><span class="label">[391]</span></a> See above,
+  <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#CHAPTER_IV.">vol. i. chap. iv</a>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_392_392" id="Footnote_392_392"></a><a href="#FNanchor_392_392"><span class="label">[392]</span></a> The life of Bernardin de St. Pierre (1737-1814) was
+nearly as irregular as that of his friend and master. But his
+character was essentially crafty and selfish, like that of many other
+sentimentalists of the first order.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_393_393" id="Footnote_393_393"></a><a href="#FNanchor_393_393"><span class="label">[393]</span></a> <i>Oeuv.</i>, xii. 69, 73.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_394_394" id="Footnote_394_394"></a><a href="#FNanchor_394_394"><span class="label">[394]</span></a> <i>Oeuv.</i>, xii. 104, etc.; and also the <i>Pr&#233;ambule de
+l'Arcadie</i>, <i>Oeuv.</i>, vii. 64, 65.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_395_395" id="Footnote_395_395"></a><a href="#FNanchor_395_395"><span class="label">[395]</span></a> St. Pierre, xii. 81-83.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_396_396" id="Footnote_396_396"></a><a href="#FNanchor_396_396"><span class="label">[396]</span></a> Dusaulx, p. 81. For his quarrel with Rousseau, see pp.
+130, etc.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_397_397" id="Footnote_397_397"></a><a href="#FNanchor_397_397"><span class="label">[397]</span></a> Rulhi&#232;res in Dusaulx, p. 179. For a strange interview
+between Rulhi&#232;res and Rousseau, see pp. 185-186.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_398_398" id="Footnote_398_398"></a><a href="#FNanchor_398_398"><span class="label">[398]</span></a> Musset-Pathay, i. 181.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_399_399" id="Footnote_399_399"></a><a href="#FNanchor_399_399"><span class="label">[399]</span></a> <i>Ib.</i></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_400_400" id="Footnote_400_400"></a><a href="#FNanchor_400_400"><span class="label">[400]</span></a> Musset-Pathay, i. 209. Rousseau gave a copy of the
+Confessions to Moultou, but forbade the publication before the year
+1800. Notwithstanding this, printers procured copies surreptitiously,
+perhaps through Theresa, ever in need of money; the first part was
+published four years, and the second part with many suppressions
+eleven years, after his death, in 1782 and 1789 respectively. See
+Musset-Pathay, ii. 464.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_401_401" id="Footnote_401_401"></a><a href="#FNanchor_401_401"><span class="label">[401]</span></a> Ch. v. Such a curtailment, he says, &quot;would no doubt be
+a great evil for the parts dismembered, but it would be a great
+advantage for the body of the nation.&quot; He urged federation as the
+condition of any solid improvement in their affairs.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_402_402" id="Footnote_402_402"></a><a href="#FNanchor_402_402"><span class="label">[402]</span></a> Bernardin de St. Pierre, xii. 37. Comte had a similar
+admiration for Spain and for the same reason.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_403_403" id="Footnote_403_403"></a><a href="#FNanchor_403_403"><span class="label">[403]</span></a> Corancez, quoted in Musset-Pathay, i. 239. Also
+<i>Corr.</i>, vi. 295.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_404_404" id="Footnote_404_404"></a><a href="#FNanchor_404_404"><span class="label">[404]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>, vi. 303.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_405_405" id="Footnote_405_405"></a><a href="#FNanchor_405_405"><span class="label">[405]</span></a> Robespierre, then a youth, is said to have invited him
+here. See Hamel's <i>Robespierre</i>, i. 22.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_406_406" id="Footnote_406_406"></a><a href="#FNanchor_406_406"><span class="label">[406]</span></a> See above,
+  <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.16">vol. i. pp. 16, 17</a>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_407_407" id="Footnote_407_407"></a><a href="#FNanchor_407_407"><span class="label">[407]</span></a> <i>Corr.</i>, vi. 264.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_408_408" id="Footnote_408_408"></a><a href="#FNanchor_408_408"><span class="label">[408]</span></a> The case stands thus:&#8212;(1) There was the certificate of
+five doctors, attesting that Rousseau had died of apoplexy. (2) The
+assertion of M. Girardin, in whose house he died, that there was no
+hole in his head, nor poison in the stomach or viscera, nor other sign
+of self-destruction. (3) The assertion of Theresa to the same effect.
+On the other hand, we have the assertion of Corancez, that on his
+journey to Ermenonville on the day of Rousseau's burial a horse-master
+on the road had said, &quot;Who would have supposed that M. Rousseau would
+have destroyed himself!&quot;&#8212;and a variety of inferences from the wording
+of the certificate, and of Theresa's letter. Musset-Pathay believes in
+the suicide, and argued very ingeniously against M. Girardin. But his
+arguments do not go far beyond verbal ingenuity, showing that suicide
+was possible, and was consistent with the language of the documents,
+rather than adducing positive testimony. See vol. i. of his <i>History</i>,
+pp. 268, etc. The controversy was resumed as late as 1861, between the
+<i>Figaro</i> and the <i>Monde Illustr&#233;</i>. See also M. Jal's <i>Dict. Crit. de
+Biog. et d'Hist.</i>, p. 1091.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_329" id="Page_329">[ii.329]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="INDEX" id="INDEX"></a>INDEX.</h2>
+
+
+<p>
+<span class="smcap">Academies</span> (French) local, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.132">i. 132</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Academy, of Dijon, Rousseau writes essays for, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.133">i. 133</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">French, prize essay against Rousseau's Discourse, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.150">i. 150</a>, <i>n.</i></span><br />
+<br />
+Actors, how regarded in France in Rousseau's time, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.322">i. 322</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Althusen, teaches doctrine of sovereignty of the people, <a href="#Page_147">ii. 147</a>.<br />
+<br />
+America (U.S.), effects in, of the doctrine of the equality of men, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.182">i. 182</a>.<br />
+<br />
+American colonists indebted in eighteenth century to Rousseau's writings, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.3">i. 3</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Anchorite, distinction between the old and the new, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.234">i. 234</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Annecy, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.34">i. 34</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.50">50</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's room at, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.54">i. 54</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's teachers at, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.56">i. 56</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">seminary at, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.82">i. 82</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Aquinas, protest against juristical doctrine of law being the pleasure of the prince, <a href="#Page_144">ii. 144</a>,
+<a href="#Page_145">145</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Aristotle on Origin of Society, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.174">i. 174</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Atheism, Rousseau's protest against, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.208">i. 208</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">St. Lambert on, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.209">i. 209</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Robespierre's protest against, <a href="#Page_178">ii. 178</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Chaumette put to death for endeavouring to base the government of France on, <a href="#Page_180">ii. 180</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Augustine (of Hippo), <a href="#Page_272">ii. 272</a>, <a href="#Page_303">303</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Austin, John, <a href="#Page_151">ii. 151</a>, <i>n.</i>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">on Sovereignty, <a href="#Page_162">ii. 162</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Authors, difficulties of, in France in the eighteenth century, <a href="#Page_55">ii. 55</a>-61.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Baboeuf</span>, on the Revolution, <a href="#Page_123">ii. 123</a>, <i>n.</i><br />
+<br />
+Barbier, <a href="#Page_26">ii. 26</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Basedow, his enthusiasm for Rousseau's educational theories, <a href="#Page_251">ii. 251</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Beaumont, De, Archbishop of Paris, mandate against Rousseau issued by, <a href="#Page_83">ii. 83</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">argument from, <a href="#Page_86">ii. 86</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Bernard, maiden name of Rousseau's mother, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.10">i. 10</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Bienne, Rousseau driven to take refuge in island in lake of, <a href="#Page_108">ii. 108</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his account of, <a href="#Page_109">ii. 109</a>-115.</span><br />
+<br />
+Bodin, on Government, <a href="#Page_147">ii. 147</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his definition of an aristocratic state, <a href="#Page_168">ii. 168</a>, <i>n.</i></span><br />
+<br />
+Bonaparte, Napoleon, <a href="#Page_102">ii. 102</a>, <i>n.</i><br />
+<br />
+Bossuet, on Stage Plays, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.321">i. 321</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Boswell, James, <a href="#Page_98">ii. 98</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">visits Rousseau, <a href="#Page_98">ii. 98</a>, also <i>ib.</i> <i>n.</i>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">urged by Rousseau to visit Corsica, <a href="#Page_100">ii. 100</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his letter to Rousseau, <a href="#Page_101">ii. 101</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Boufflers, Madame de, <a href="#Page_5">ii. 5</a>, <i>ib.</i> <i>n.</i><br />
+<br />
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_330" id="Page_330">[ii.330]</a></span>Bougainville (brother of the navigator), <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.184">i. 184</a>, <i>n.</i><br />
+<br />
+Brutus, how Rousseau came to be panegyrist of, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.187">i. 187</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Buffon, <a href="#Page_205">ii. 205</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Burke, <a href="#Page_140">ii. 140</a>, <a href="#Page_192">192</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Burnet, Bishop, on Genevese, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.225">i. 225</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Burton, John Hill, his <i>Life of Hume</i> (on Rousseau), <a href="#Page_283">ii. 283</a>, <i>n.</i><br />
+<br />
+Byron, Lord, antecedents of highest creative efforts, <a href="#Page_1">ii. 1</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">effect of nature upon, <a href="#Page_40">ii. 40</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">difference between and Rousseau, <a href="#Page_41">ii. 41</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Calas</span>, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.312">i. 312</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Calvin, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.4">i. 4</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.189">189</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau on, as a legislator, <a href="#Page_131">ii. 131</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">and Servetus, <a href="#Page_180">ii. 180</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">mentioned, <a href="#Page_181">ii. 181</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<i>Candide</i>, thought by Rousseau to be meant as a reply to him, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.319">i. 319</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Cardan, <a href="#Page_303">ii. 303</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Cato, how Rousseau came to be his panegyrist, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.187">i. 187</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Chamb&#233;ri, probable date of Rousseau's return to, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.62">i. 62</a>, <i>n.</i>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">takes up his residence there, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.69">i. 69</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">effect on his mind of a French column of troops passing through, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.72">i. 72</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.73">73</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his illness at, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.73">i. 73</a>, <i>n.</i></span><br />
+<br />
+Charmettes, Les, Madame de Warens's residence, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.73">i. 73</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">present condition of, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.74">i. 74</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.75">75</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">time spent there by Rousseau, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.94">i. 94</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Charron, <a href="#Page_203">ii. 203</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Chateaubriand, influenced by Rousseau, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.3">i. 3</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Chatham, Lord, <a href="#Page_92">ii. 92</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Chaumette, <a href="#Page_178">ii. 178</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">guillotined on charge of endeavouring to establish atheism in France, <a href="#Page_179">ii. 179</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Chesterfield, Lord, <a href="#Page_15">ii. 15</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Choiseul, <a href="#Page_57">ii. 57</a>, <a href="#Page_64">64</a>,
+<a href="#Page_72">72</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Citizen, revolutionary use of word, derived from Rousseau, <a href="#Page_161">ii. 161</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Civilisation, variety of the origin and process of, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.176">i. 176</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">defects of, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.176">i. 176</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">one of the worst trials of, <a href="#Page_102">ii. 102</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Cobbett, <a href="#Page_42">ii. 42</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Collier, Jeremy, on the English Stage, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.323">i. 323</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Condillac, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.95">i. 95</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Condorcet, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.89">i. 89</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">on Social Position of Women, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.335">i. 335</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">human perfectibility, <a href="#Page_119">ii. 119</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">inspiration of, drawn from the school of Voltaire and Rousseau, <a href="#Page_194">ii. 194</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">belief of, in the improvement of humanity, <a href="#Page_246">ii. 246</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">grievous mistake of, <a href="#Page_247">ii. 247</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Confessions, the, not to be trusted for minute accuracy, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.86">i. 86</a>, <i>n.</i>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">or for dates, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.93">i. 93</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">first part written 1766, <a href="#Page_301">ii. 301</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">their character, <a href="#Page_303">ii. 303</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">published surreptitiously, <a href="#Page_324">ii. 324</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">readings from, prohibited by police, <a href="#Page_324">ii. 324</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Conti, Prince of, <a href="#Page_4">ii. 4</a>-7;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">receives Rousseau at Trye, <a href="#Page_118">ii. 118</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Contract, Social, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.136">i. 136</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Corsica, struggles for independence of, <a href="#Page_99">ii. 99</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau invited to legislate for, <a href="#Page_99">ii. 99</a>-102;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">bought by France, <a href="#Page_102">ii. 102</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Cowper, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.20">i. 20</a>; <a href="#Page_41">ii. 41</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">on Rousseau, <a href="#Page_41">ii. 41</a> <i>n.</i>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">lines in the Task, <a href="#Page_253">ii. 253</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his delusions, <a href="#Page_301">ii. 301</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Cynicism, Rousseau's assumption of, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.206">i. 206</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">D'Aiguillon</span>, <a href="#Page_72">ii. 72</a>.<br />
+<br />
+D'Alembert, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.89">i. 89</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Voltaire's staunchest henchman, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.321">i. 321</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his article on Geneva, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.321">i. 321</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">on Stage Plays, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.326">i. 326</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">on Position of Women in Society, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.335">i. 335</a>;</span><br />
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_331" id="Page_331">[ii.331]</a></span><span style="margin-left: 1em;">on Rousseau's letter on the Theatre, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.336">i. 336</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">suspected by Rousseau of having written the pretended letter from Frederick of Prussia, <a href="#Page_288">ii. 288</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">advises Hume to publish account of Rousseau's quarrel with him, <a href="#Page_294">ii. 294</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+D'Argenson, <a href="#Page_180">ii. 180</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Dates of Rousseau's letters to be relied on, not those of the Confessions, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.93">i. 93</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Davenport, Mr., provides Rousseau with a home at Wootton, <a href="#Page_286">ii. 286</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his kindness to Rousseau, <a href="#Page_306">ii. 306</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Deism, Rousseau's, <a href="#Page_260">ii. 260</a>-275;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">that of others, <a href="#Page_262">ii. 262</a>-265;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">shortcomings of Rousseau's, <a href="#Page_270">ii. 270</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Democracy defined, <a href="#Page_168">ii. 168</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">rejected by Rousseau, as too perfect for men, <a href="#Page_171">ii. 171</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+D'Epinay, Madame, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.194">i. 194</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.195">195</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.205">205</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">gives the Hermitage to Rousseau, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.229">i. 229</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his quarrels with, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.271">i. 271</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his relations with, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.273">i. 273</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.276">276</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">journey to Geneva of, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.284">i. 284</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">squabbles arising out of, between, and Rousseau, Diderot, and Grimm, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.285">i. 285</a>-290;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">mentioned, <a href="#Page_7">ii. 7</a>,
+<a href="#Page_26">26</a>, <a href="#Page_197">197</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">wrote on education, <a href="#Page_199">ii. 199</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">applies to secretary of police to prohibit Rousseau's readings from his Confessions, <a href="#Page_324">ii. 324</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+D'Epinay, Monsieur, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.254">i. 254</a>; <a href="#Page_26">ii. 26</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Descartes, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.87">i. 87</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.225">225</a>; <a href="#Page_267">ii. 267</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Deux Ponts, Duc de, Rousseau's rude reply to, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.207">i. 207</a>.<br />
+<br />
+D'Holbach, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.192">i. 192</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's dislike of his materialistic friends, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.223">i. 223</a>; <a href="#Page_37">ii. 37</a>,
+<a href="#Page_256">256</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+D'Houdetot, Madame, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.255">i. 255</a>-270;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Madame d'Epinay's jealousy of, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.278">i. 278</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">mentioned, <a href="#Page_7">ii. 7</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">offers Rousseau a home in Normandy, <a href="#Page_117">ii. 117</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Diderot, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.64">i. 64</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.89">89</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.133">133</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">tries to manage Rousseau, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.213">i. 213</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his domestic misconduct, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.215">i. 215</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">leader of the materialistic party, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.223">i. 223</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">on Solitary Life, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.232">i. 232</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his active life, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.233">i. 233</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">without moral sensitiveness, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.262">i. 262</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">mentioned, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.262">i. 262</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.269">269</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.271">271</a>; <a href="#Page_8">ii. 8</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his relations with Rousseau, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.271">i. 271</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">accused of pilfering Goldoni's new play, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.275">i. 275</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his relations and contentions with Rousseau, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.275">i. 275</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.276">276</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">lectures Rousseau about Madame d'Epinay, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.284">i. 284</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">visits Rousseau after his leaving the Hermitage, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.289">i. 289</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's final breach with, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.336">i. 336</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his criticism, and plays, <a href="#Page_34">ii. 34</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his defects, <a href="#Page_34">ii. 34</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">thrown into prison, <a href="#Page_57">ii. 57</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his difficulties with the Encyclop&#230;dists, <a href="#Page_57">ii. 57</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his papers saved from the police by Malesherbes, <a href="#Page_62">ii. 62</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Dijon, academy of, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.132">i. 132</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<a name="Discourses">Discourses</a>, The, Circumstances of the composition of the first Discourse, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.133">i. 133</a>-136;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">summary of it, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.138">i. 138</a>-145;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">disastrous effect of the progress of sciences and arts, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.140">i. 140</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.141">141</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">error more dangerous than truth useful, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.141">i. 141</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">uselessness of learning and art, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.141">i. 141</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.142">142</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">terrible disorders caused in Europe by the art of printing, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.143">i. 143</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">two kinds of ignorance, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.144">i. 144</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">the relation of this Discourse to Montaigne, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.145">i. 145</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">its one-sidedness and hollowness, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.148">i. 148</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">shown by Voltaire, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.148">i. 148</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">its positive side, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.149">i. 149</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.150">150</a>;</span><br />
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_332" id="Page_332">[ii.332]</a></span><span style="margin-left: 1em;">second Discourse, origin of the Inequality of Man, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.154">i. 154</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">summary of it, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.159">i. 159</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.170">170</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">state of nature, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.150">i. 150</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.162">162</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Hobbes's mistake, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.161">i. 161</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">what broke up the &quot;state of nature,&quot; <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.164">i. 164</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">its preferableness, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.166">i. 166</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.167">167</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">origin of society and laws, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.168">i. 168</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">&quot;new state of nature,&quot; <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.169">i. 169</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">main position of the Discourse, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.169">i. 169</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">its utter inclusiveness, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.170">i. 170</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">criticism on its method, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.170">i. 170</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">on its matter, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.172">i. 172</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">wanting in evidence, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.172">i. 172</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">further objections to it, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.173">i. 173</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">assumes uniformity of process, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.176">i. 176</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">its unscientific character, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.177">i. 177</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">its real importance, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.178">i. 178</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">its protest against the mockery of civilisation, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.178">i. 178</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">equality of man, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.181">i. 181</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">different effects of this doctrine in France and the United States explained, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.182">i. 182</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.183">183</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">discovers a reaction against the historical method of Montesquieu, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.183">i. 183</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.184">184</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">pecuniary results of, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.196">i. 196</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Diderot's praise of first Discourse, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.200">i. 200</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Voltaire's acknowledgement of gift of second Discourse, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.308">i. 308</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">the, an attack on the general ordering of society, <a href="#Page_22">ii. 22</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">referred to, <a href="#Page_41">ii. 41</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Drama, its proper effect, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.326">i. 326</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">what would be that of its introduction into Geneva, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.327">i. 327</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">true answer to Rousseau's contentions, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.329">i. 329</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Dramatic morality, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.326">i. 326</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Drinkers, Rousseau's estimate of, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.330">i. 330</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Drunkenness, how esteemed in Switzerland and Naples, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.331">i. 331</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Duclos, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.206">i. 206</a>; <a href="#Page_62">ii. 62</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Duni, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.292">i. 292</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Dupin, Madame de, Rousseau secretary to, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.120">i. 120</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">her position in society, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.195">i. 195</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's country life with, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.196">i. 196</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">friend of the Abb&#233; de Saint Pierre, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.244">i. 244</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Education</span>, interest taken in, in France in Rousseau's time, <a href="#Page_193">ii. 193</a>,
+<a href="#Page_194">194</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">its new direction <a href="#Page_195">ii. 195</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Locke, the pioneer of, <a href="#Page_202">ii. 202</a>,
+<a href="#Page_203">203</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's special merit in connection with, <a href="#Page_203">ii. 203</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his views on (see <a href="#Emilius">Emilius</a>, <i>passim</i>, as well as for general consideration of) what it is, <a href="#Page_219">ii. 219</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">plans of, of Locke and others, designed for the higher class, <a href="#Page_254">ii. 254</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's for all, <a href="#Page_254">ii. 254</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<i>Emile</i>, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.136">i. 136</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.196">196</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<a name="Emilius">Emilius</a>, character of, <a href="#Page_2">ii. 2</a>,
+<a href="#Page_3">3</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">particulars of the publication of, <a href="#Page_59">ii. 59</a>,
+<a href="#Page_60">60</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">effect of, on Rousseau's fortunes, <a href="#Page_62">ii. 62</a>-64;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">ordered to be burnt by public executioner at Paris, <a href="#Page_65">ii. 65</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">at Geneva, <a href="#Page_72">ii. 72</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">condemned by the Sorbonne, <a href="#Page_82">ii. 82</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">supplied (as also did the Social Contract) dialect for the longing in France and Germany to return to nature, <a href="#Page_193">ii. 193</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">substance of, furnished by Locke, <a href="#Page_202">ii. 202</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">examination of, <a href="#Page_197">ii. 197</a>-280;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">mischief produced by its good advice, <a href="#Page_206">ii. 206</a>,
+<a href="#Page_207">207</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">training of young children, <a href="#Page_207">ii. 207</a>,
+<a href="#Page_208">208</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">constantly reasoning with them a mistake of Locke's, <a href="#Page_209">ii. 209</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's central idea, disparagement of the reasoning faculty, <a href="#Page_209">ii. 209</a>,
+<a href="#Page_210">210</a>;</span><br />
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_333" id="Page_333">[ii.333]</a></span><span style="margin-left: 1em;">theories of education, practice better than precept, <a href="#Page_211">ii. 211</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">the idea of property, the first that Rousseau would have given to a child, <a href="#Page_212">ii. 212</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">modes of teaching, <a href="#Page_214">ii. 214</a>,
+<a href="#Page_215">215</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">futility of such methods, <a href="#Page_215">ii. 215</a>,
+<a href="#Page_216">216</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">where Rousseau is right, and where wrong, <a href="#Page_219">ii. 219</a>,
+<a href="#Page_220">220</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">effect of his own want of parental love, <a href="#Page_220">ii. 220</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">teaches that everybody should learn a trade, <a href="#Page_223">ii. 223</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">no special foresight, <a href="#Page_224">ii. 224</a>,
+<a href="#Page_225">225</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">supremacy of the common people insisted upon, <a href="#Page_226">ii. 226</a>,
+<a href="#Page_227">227</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">three dominant states of mind to be established by the instructor, <a href="#Page_229">ii. 229</a>,
+<a href="#Page_230">230</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's incomplete notion of justice, <a href="#Page_231">ii. 231</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">ideal of Emilius, <a href="#Page_232">ii. 232</a>,
+<a href="#Page_233">233</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">forbids early teaching of history, <a href="#Page_237">ii. 237</a>,
+<a href="#Page_238">238</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">disparages modern history, <a href="#Page_239">ii. 239</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">criticism on the old historians, <a href="#Page_240">ii. 240</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">education of women, <a href="#Page_241">ii. 241</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Rousseau's failure here, <a href="#Page_242">ii. 242</a>,
+<a href="#Page_243">243</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">inconsistent with himself, <a href="#Page_244">ii. 244</a>,
+<a href="#Page_245">245</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">worthlessness of his views, <a href="#Page_249">ii. 249</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">real merits of the work, <a href="#Page_249">ii. 249</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">its effect in Germany, <a href="#Page_251">ii. 251</a>,
+<a href="#Page_252">252</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">not much effect on education in England, <a href="#Page_252">ii. 252</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Emilius the first expression of democratic teaching in education, <a href="#Page_254">ii. 254</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's deism, <a href="#Page_258">ii. 258</a>,
+<a href="#Page_260">260</a>, <a href="#Page_264">264</a>-267,
+<a href="#Page_269">269</a>, <a href="#Page_270">270</a>, <a href="#Page_276">276</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">its inadequacy for the wants of men, <a href="#Page_267">ii. 267</a>-270;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his position towards Christianity, <a href="#Page_270">ii. 270</a>-276;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">real satisfaction of the religious emotions, <a href="#Page_275">ii. 275</a>-280.</span><br />
+<br />
+Encyclop&#230;dia, The, D'Alembert's article on Geneva in, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.321">i. 321</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Encyclop&#230;dists, the society of, confirms Rousseau's religious faith, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.221">i. 221</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">referred to, <a href="#Page_257">ii. 257</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Evil, discussions on Rousseau's, Voltaire's, and De Maistre's teachings concerning, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.313">i. 313</a>, <i>n.</i>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.318">318</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">different effect of existence of, on Rousseau and Voltaire, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.319">i. 319</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">F&#233;nelon</span>, <a href="#Page_37">ii. 37</a>,
+<a href="#Page_248">248</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's veneration for, <a href="#Page_321">ii. 321</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Ferguson, Adam, <a href="#Page_253">ii. 253</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Filmer contends that a man is not naturally free, <a href="#Page_126">ii. 126</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Foundling Hospital, Rousseau sends his children to the, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.120">i. 120</a>.<br />
+<br />
+France, debt of, to Rousseau, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.3">i. 3</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau the one great religious writer of, in the eighteenth century, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.26">i. 26</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his wanderings in the east of, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.61">i. 61</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his fondness for, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.62">i. 62</a>-72;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">establishment of local academies in, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.132">i. 132</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">decay in, of Greek literary studies, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.146">i. 146</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">effects in, of doctrine of equality of man, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.182">i. 182</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">effects in, of Montesquieu's &quot;Spirit of Laws,&quot; <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.183">i. 183</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">amiability of, in the eighteenth century, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.187">i. 187</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">effect of Rousseau's writings in, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.187">i. 187</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">collective organisation in, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.222">i. 222</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">St. Pierre's strictures on government of, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.244">i. 244</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau on government of, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.246">i. 246</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">effect of Rousseau's spiritual element on, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.306">i. 306</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">patriotism wanting in, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.332">i. 332</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">difficulties of authorship in, <a href="#Page_55">ii. 55</a>-64;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">buys Corsica from the Genoese, <a href="#Page_102">ii. 102</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">state of, after 1792, apparently favourable to the carrying out of Rousseau's political views, <a href="#Page_131">ii. 131</a>,
+<a href="#Page_132">132</a>;</span><br />
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_334" id="Page_334">[ii.334]</a></span><span style="margin-left: 1em;">in 1793, <a href="#Page_135">ii. 135</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">haunted by narrow and fervid minds, <a href="#Page_142">ii. 142</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Francueil, Rousseau's patron, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.99">i. 99</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">grandfather of Madame George Sand, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.99">i. 99</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's salary from, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.120">i. 120</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">country-house of, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.196">i. 196</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Franklin, Benjamin, <a href="#Page_42">ii. 42</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Frederick of Prussia, relations between, and Rousseau, <a href="#Page_73">ii. 73</a>-78;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">&quot;famous bull&quot; of, <a href="#Page_90">ii. 90</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Freeman on Growth of English Constitution, <a href="#Page_164">ii. 164</a>.<br />
+<br />
+French, principles of, revolution, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.1">i. 1</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.2">2</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.3">3</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">process and ideas of, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.4">i. 4</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau of old, stock, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.8">i. 8</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">poetry, Rousseau on, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.90">i. 90</a>, <i>ib. n.</i>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">melody, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.105">i. 105</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">academy, thesis for prize, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.150">i. 150</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">philosophers, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.202">i. 202</a>,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">music, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.291">i. 291</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">music, its pretensions demolished by Rousseau, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.294">i. 294</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">ecclesiastics opposed to the theatre, <a href="#Page_322">ii. 322</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">stage, Rousseau on, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.325">i. 325</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">morals, depravity of, <a href="#Page_26">ii. 26</a>,
+<a href="#Page_27">27</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Barbier on, <a href="#Page_26">ii. 26</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">thought, benefit, or otherwise of revolution on, <a href="#Page_54">ii. 54</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">history, evil side of, in Rousseau's time, <a href="#Page_56">ii. 56</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">indebted to Holland for freedom of the press, <a href="#Page_59">ii. 59</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">catholic and monarchic absolutism sunk deep into the character of the, <a href="#Page_167">ii. 167</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+French Convention, story of member of the, <a href="#Page_134">ii. 134</a>, <i>n.</i><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Galuppi</span>, effect of his music, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.105">i. 105</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Geneva, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.8">i. 8</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">characteristics of its people, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.9">i. 9</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's visit to, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.93">i. 93</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">influence of, on Rousseau, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.94">i. 94</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">he revisits it in 1754, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.186">i. 186</a>-190,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.218">218</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">turns Protestant again there, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.220">i. 220</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">religious opinion in, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.223">i. 223</a> (also <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.224">i. 224</a>, <i>n.</i>);</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau thinks of taking up his abode in, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.228">i. 228</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Voltaire at, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.308">i. 308</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">D'Alembert's article on, in Encyclop&#230;dia, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.321">i. 321</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's notions of effect of introducing the drama at, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.327">i. 327</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">council of, order public burning of Emilius and the Social Contract, and arrest of the author if he came there, <a href="#Page_72">ii. 72</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">the only place where the Social Contract was actually burnt,
+<a href="#Page_73">ii. 73</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Voltaire suspected to have had a hand in the matter, <a href="#Page_81">ii. 81</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">council of, divided into two camps by Rousseau's condemnation, in 1762, <a href="#Page_102">ii. 102</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau renounces his citizenship in, <a href="#Page_104">ii. 104</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">working of the republic, <a href="#Page_104">ii. 104</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Genevese, Bishop Burnet on, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.225">i. 225</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's distrust of, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.228">i. 228</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his panegyric on, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.328">i. 328</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">manners of, according to Rousseau, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.330">i. 330</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">their complaint of it, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.331">i. 331</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Genlis, Madame de, <a href="#Page_323">ii. 323</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Genoa, Rousseau in quarantine at, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.103">i. 103</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Corsica sold to France by, <a href="#Page_102">ii. 102</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Germany, sentimental movements in, <a href="#Page_33">ii. 33</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Gibbon, Edward, at Lausanne, <a href="#Page_96">ii. 96</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Girardin, St. Marc, on Rousseau, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.111">i. 111</a>, <i>n.</i>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">on Rousseau's discussions, <a href="#Page_11">ii. 11</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">offers Rousseau a home, <a href="#Page_326">ii. 326</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Gluck, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.291">i. 291</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.296">296</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau quarrels with, for setting his music to French words, <a href="#Page_323">ii. 323</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Goethe, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.20">i. 20</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Goguet on Society, <a href="#Page_127">ii. 127</a>, <i>n.</i>;<br />
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_335" id="Page_335">[ii.335]</a></span><span style="margin-left: 1em;">on tacit conventions, <a href="#Page_148">ii. 148</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">on law, <a href="#Page_153">ii. 153</a>, <i>n.</i></span><br />
+<br />
+Goldoni, Diderot accused of pilfering his new play, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.275">i. 275</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Gothic architecture denounced by Voltaire and Turgot, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.294">i. 294</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Gouvon, Count, Rousseau servant to, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.42">i. 42</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Government, disquisitions on, <a href="#Page_131">ii. 131</a>-206;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">remarks on, <a href="#Page_131">ii. 131</a>-141;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">early democratic ideas of, <a href="#Page_144">ii. 144</a>-148;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Hobbes' philosophy of, <a href="#Page_151">ii. 151</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's science of, <a href="#Page_155">ii. 155</a>,
+<a href="#Page_156">156</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">De la Rivi&#232;re's science of, <a href="#Page_156">ii. 156</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">federation recommended by Rousseau to the Poles, <a href="#Page_166">ii. 166</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">three forms of government defined, <a href="#Page_169">ii. 169</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">definition inadequate, <a href="#Page_169">ii. 169</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Montesquieu's definition, <a href="#Page_169">ii. 169</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's distinction between <i>tyrant</i> and <i>despot</i>, <a href="#Page_169">ii. 169</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his objection to democracy, <a href="#Page_172">ii. 172</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">to monarchy, <a href="#Page_173">ii. 173</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">consideration of aristocracy, <a href="#Page_174">ii. 174</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his own scheme, <a href="#Page_175">ii. 175</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Hobbes's &quot;Passive Obedience,&quot; <a href="#Page_181">ii. 181</a>,
+<a href="#Page_182">182</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">social conscience theory, <a href="#Page_183">ii. 183</a>-187;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">government made impossible by Rousseau's doctrine of social contract, <a href="#Page_188">ii. 188</a>-192;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Burke on expediency in, <a href="#Page_192">ii. 192</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">what a civilised nation is, <a href="#Page_194">ii. 194</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Jefferson on, <a href="#Page_227">ii. 227</a>,
+<a href="#Page_228">228</a>, <i>n.</i></span><br />
+<br />
+Governments, earliest, how composed, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.169">i. 169</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Graffigny, Madame de, <a href="#Page_199">ii. 199</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Gratitude, Rousseau on, <a href="#Page_14">ii. 14</a>, <a href="#Page_15">15</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">explanation of his want of, <a href="#Page_70">ii. 70</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Greece, importance of history of, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.184">i. 184</a>, and <i>ib. n.</i><br />
+<br />
+Greek ideas, influence of, in France in the eighteenth century, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.146">i. 146</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Grenoble, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.93">i. 93</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Gr&#233;try, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.292">i. 292</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.296">296</a>; <a href="#Page_323">ii. 323</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Grimm, description of Rousseau by, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.206">i. 206</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's quarrels with, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.279">i. 279</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">letter of, about Rousseau and Diderot, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.275">i. 275</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">relations of, with Rousseau, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.279">i. 279</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">some account of his life, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.279">i. 279</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his conversation with Madame d'Epinay, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.281">i. 281</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">criticism on Rousseau, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.281">i. 281</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">natural want of sympathy between the two, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.282">i. 282</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's quarrel with, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.285">i. 285</a>-290; <a href="#Page_65">ii. 65</a>,
+<a href="#Page_199">199</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Grotius, on Government, <a href="#Page_148">ii. 148</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">H&#233;bert</span>, <a href="#Page_178">ii. 178</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">prevents publication of a book in which the author professed his belief in a god, <a href="#Page_179">ii. 179</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Helmholtz, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.299">i. 299</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Helv&#233;tius, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.191">i. 191</a>; <a href="#Page_65">ii. 65</a>,
+<a href="#Page_199">199</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Herder, <a href="#Page_251">ii. 251</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's influence on, <a href="#Page_315">ii. 315</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Hermitage, the, given to Rousseau by Madame d'Epinay, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.229">i. 229</a> (also <i>ib.</i> <i>n.</i>);<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">what his friends thought of it, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.231">i. 231</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">sale of, after the Revolution, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.237">i. 237</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">reasons for Rousseau's leaving, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.286">i. 286</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Hildebrand, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.4">i. 4</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Hobbes, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.143">i. 143</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.161">161</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his &quot;Philosophy of Government,&quot; <a href="#Page_151">ii. 151</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">singular influence of, upon Rousseau, <a href="#Page_151">ii. 151</a>,
+<a href="#Page_183">183</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">essential difference between his views and those of Rousseau, <a href="#Page_159">ii. 159</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">on Sovereignty, <a href="#Page_162">ii. 162</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's definition of the three forms of government adopted by, inadequate, <a href="#Page_168">ii. 168</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1.5em;">would reduce spiritual and temporal jurisdiction to one political unity, <a href="#Page_183">ii. 183</a>.</span><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_336" id="Page_336">[ii.336]</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Holbachians, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.337">i. 337</a>; <a href="#Page_2">ii. 2</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Hooker, on Civil Government, <a href="#Page_148">ii. 148</a>.<br />
+<br />
+H&#244;tel St. Quentin, Rousseau at, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.106">i. 106</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Hume, David, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.64">i. 64</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.89">89</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his deep-set sagacity, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.156">i. 156</a>, <a href="#Page_6">ii. 6</a>,
+<a href="#Page_75">75</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">suspected of tampering with Boswell's letter, <a href="#Page_98">ii. 98</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">on Boswell, <a href="#Page_101">ii. 101</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his eagerness to find Rousseau a refuge in England, <a href="#Page_282">ii. 282</a>,
+<a href="#Page_283">283</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his account of Rousseau, <a href="#Page_284">ii. 284</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">finds him a home at Wootton, <a href="#Page_286">ii. 286</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's quarrel with, <a href="#Page_286">ii. 286</a>-291 (also <a href="#Page_290">ii. 290</a>, <i>n.</i>);</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his innocence of Walpole's letter, <a href="#Page_292">ii. 292</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his conduct in the quarrel, <a href="#Page_293">ii. 293</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">saves Rousseau from arrest of French Government, <a href="#Page_295">ii. 295</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">on Rousseau's sensitiveness, <a href="#Page_299">ii. 299</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Imagination</span>, Rousseau's, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.247">i. 247</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Jacobins</span>, the, Rousseau's Social Contract, their gospel, <a href="#Page_132">ii. 132</a>,
+<a href="#Page_133">133</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">their mistake, <a href="#Page_136">ii. 136</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">convenience to them of some of the maxims of the Social Contract, <a href="#Page_142">ii. 142</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Jacobin supremacy and Hobbism, <a href="#Page_152">ii. 152</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">how they might have saved France, <a href="#Page_167">ii. 167</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Jansen, his propositions, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.81">i. 81</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Jansenists, Rousseau's suspicions of, <a href="#Page_63">ii. 63</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">mentioned, <a href="#Page_89">ii. 89</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Jean Paul, <a href="#Page_216">ii. 216</a>, <a href="#Page_252">252</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Jefferson, <a href="#Page_227">ii. 227</a>, <i>n.</i><br />
+<br />
+Jesuits, Rousseau's suspicions of the, <a href="#Page_64">ii. 64</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">the, and parliaments, <a href="#Page_65">ii. 65</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">movement against, <a href="#Page_65">ii. 65</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">suppression of the, leads to increased thought about education, <a href="#Page_199">ii. 199</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Johnson, <a href="#Page_15">ii. 15</a>, <a href="#Page_98">98</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Kames</span>, Lord, <a href="#Page_253">ii. 253</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Lamennais</span>, influenced by Rousseau, <a href="#Page_228">ii. 228</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Language, origin of, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.161">i. 161</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Latour, Madame, <a href="#Page_19">ii. 19</a>, <i>ib. n.</i><br />
+<br />
+Lavater favourable to education on Rousseau's plan, <a href="#Page_251">ii. 251</a> (also <i>ib.</i> <i>n.</i>)<br />
+<br />
+Lavoisier, reply to his request for a fortnight's respite, <a href="#Page_227">ii. 227</a>, <i>n.</i><br />
+<br />
+Law, not a contract, <a href="#Page_153">ii. 153</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Lecouvreur, Adrienne, refused Christian burial on account of her being an actress, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.323">i. 323</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Leibnitz, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.87">i. 87</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his optimism, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.309">i. 309</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">on the constitution of the universe, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.312">i. 312</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Lessing, on Pope, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.310">i. 310</a>, <i>n.</i><br />
+<br />
+&quot;Letters from the Mountain,&quot; <a href="#Page_104">ii. 104</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">burned, by command, at Paris and the Hague, <a href="#Page_105">ii. 105</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Liberty, English, Rousseau's notion of, <a href="#Page_163">ii. 163</a>, <i>n.</i><br />
+<br />
+Life, Rousseau's condemnation of the contemplative, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.10">i. 10</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his idea of household, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.41">i. 41</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">easier for him to preach than for others to practise, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.43">i. 43</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Lisbon, earthquake of, Voltaire on, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.310">i. 310</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's letter to Voltaire on, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.310">i. 310</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.311">311</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Locke, his Essay, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.87">i. 87</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his notions, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.87">i. 87</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his influence upon Rousseau, <a href="#Page_121">ii. 121</a>-126;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">on Marriage, <a href="#Page_126">ii. 126</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">on Civil Government, <a href="#Page_149">ii. 149</a>,
+<a href="#Page_150">150</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">indefiniteness of his views, <a href="#Page_160">ii. 160</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">the pioneer of French thought on education, <a href="#Page_202">ii. 202</a>,
+<a href="#Page_203">203</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's indebtedness to, <a href="#Page_203">ii. 203</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his mistake in education, <a href="#Page_209">ii. 209</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">subjects of his theories, <a href="#Page_254">ii. 254</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Lulli (music), <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.291">i. 291</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_337" id="Page_337">[ii.337]</a></span>Luther, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.4">i. 4</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Luxembourg, the Duke of, gives Rousseau a home, <a href="#Page_2">ii. 2</a>-7,
+<a href="#Page_9">9</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Luxembourg, the Mar&#233;chale de, in vain seeks Rousseau's children, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.128">i. 128</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">helps to get Emilius published,
+<a href="#Page_62">ii. 62</a>-64, <a href="#Page_67">67</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Lycurgus, <a href="#Page_129">ii. 129</a>, <a href="#Page_131">131</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">influence of, upon Saint Just, <a href="#Page_133">ii. 133</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Lyons, Rousseau a tutor at, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.95">i. 95</a>-97.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Mably</span>, De, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.95">i. 95</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his socialism, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.184">i. 184</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">applied to for scheme for the government of Poland, <a href="#Page_324">ii. 324</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Maistre, De, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.145">i. 145</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">on Optimism, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.314">i. 314</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Maitre, Le, teaches Rousseau music, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.58">i. 58</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Malebranche, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.87">i. 87</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Malesherbes, Rousseau confesses his ungrateful nature to, <a href="#Page_14">ii. 14</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his dishonest advice to Rousseau, <a href="#Page_60">ii. 60</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">helps Diderot, <a href="#Page_62">ii. 62</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">and Rousseau in the publishing of Emilius, <a href="#Page_62">ii. 62</a>,
+<a href="#Page_63">63</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">endangered by it, <a href="#Page_67">ii. 67</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">asks Rousseau to collect plants for him, <a href="#Page_76">ii. 76</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Man, his specific distinction from other animals, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.161">i. 161</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his state of nature, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.161">i. 161</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Hobbes wrong concerning this, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.161">i. 161</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">equality of, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.180">i. 180</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">effects of this doctrine in France and in the United States, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.182">i. 182</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">not naturally free, <a href="#Page_126">ii. 126</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Mandeville, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.162">i. 162</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Manners, Rousseau's, Marmontel, and Grimm on, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.205">i. 205</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.206">206</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau on Swiss, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.329">i. 329</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.330">330</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">depravity of French, in the eighteenth century, <a href="#Page_25">ii. 25</a>,
+<a href="#Page_26">26</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Marischal, Lord, friendship between, and Rousseau, <a href="#Page_79">ii. 79</a>-81;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">account of, <a href="#Page_80">ii. 80</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">on Boswell, <a href="#Page_98">ii. 98</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Marmontel, on Rousseau's manners, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.206">i. 206</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">on his success, <a href="#Page_2">ii. 2</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Marriage, design of the New Helo&#239;sa to exalt, <a href="#Page_46">ii. 46</a>-48, <i>ib.</i> <i>n.</i><br />
+<br />
+Marsilio, of Padua, on Law, <a href="#Page_145">ii. 145</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Men, inequality of, Rousseau's second Discourse (see <a href="#Discourses">Discourses</a>),<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">dedicated to the republic of Geneva, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.190">i. 190</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">how received there, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.228">i. 228</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Mirabeau the elder, Rousseau's letter to, from Wootton, <a href="#Page_305">ii. 305</a>,
+<a href="#Page_306">306</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his character, <a href="#Page_309">ii. 309</a>-312;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">receives Rousseau at Fleury, <a href="#Page_311">ii. 311</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Mirabeau, Gabriel, Rousseau's influence on, <a href="#Page_315">ii. 315</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Moli&#232;re (Misanthrope of), Rousseau's criticism on, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.329">i. 329</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">D'Alembert on, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.329">i. 329</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Monarchy, Rousseau's objection to, <a href="#Page_171">ii. 171</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Montaigu, Count de, avarice of, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.101">i. 101</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.102">102</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Montaigne, Rousseau's obligations to, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.145">i. 145</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">influence of, on Rousseau, <a href="#Page_203">ii. 203</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Montesquieu, &quot;incomplete positivity&quot; of, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.156">i. 156</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">on Government, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.157">i. 157</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">effect of his Spirit of Laws on Rousseau, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.183">i. 183</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">confused definition of laws, <a href="#Page_153">ii. 153</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">balanced parliamentary system of, <a href="#Page_163">ii. 163</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his definition of forms of government, <a href="#Page_169">ii. 169</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Montmorency, Rousseau goes to live there, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.229">i. 229</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his life at, <a href="#Page_2">ii. 2</a>-9.</span><br />
+<br />
+Montpellier, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.92">i. 92</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_338" id="Page_338">[ii.338]</a></span>Morals, state of, in France in the eighteenth century, <a href="#Page_26">ii. 26</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Morellet, thrown into the Bastile, <a href="#Page_57">ii. 57</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Morelly, his indirect influence on Rousseau, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.156">i. 156</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his socialistic theory, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.157">i. 157</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.158">158</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his rules for organising a model community, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.158">i. 158</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his terse exposition of inequality contrasted with that of Rousseau, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.170">i. 170</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">on primitive human nature, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.175">i. 175</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his socialism, <a href="#Page_52">ii. 52</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">influence of his &quot;model community&quot; upon St. Just, <a href="#Page_133">ii. 133</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">advice to mothers, <a href="#Page_205">ii. 205</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Motiers, Rousseau's home there, <a href="#Page_77">ii. 77</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">attends divine service at, <a href="#Page_91">ii. 91</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">life at, <a href="#Page_91">ii. 91</a>,
+<a href="#Page_93">93</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Moultou (pastor of Motiers), his enthusiasm for Rousseau, <a href="#Page_82">ii. 82</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Music, Rousseau undertakes to teach, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.60">i. 60</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's opinion concerning Italian, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.105">i. 105</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">effect of Galuppi's, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.105">i. 105</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau earns his living by copying, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.196">i. 196</a>; <a href="#Page_315">ii. 315</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rameau's criticism on Rousseau's <i>Muses Galantes</i>, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.211">i. 211</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">French, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.291">i. 291</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's letter on, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.292">i. 292</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Italian, denounced at Paris, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.292">i. 292</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau utterly condemns French, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.294">i. 294</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">quarrels with Gluck for setting his, to French words, <a href="#Page_323">ii. 323</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Musical notation, Rousseau's, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.291">i. 291</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his Musical Dictionary, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.296">i. 296</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his notation explained, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.296">i. 296</a>-301;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his system inapplicable to instruments, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.301">i. 301</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Naples</span>, drunkenness, how regarded in, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.331">i. 331</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Narcisse</i>, Rousseau's condemnation of his own comedy of, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.215">i. 215</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<a name="Nature">Nature</a>, Rousseau's love of, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.234">i. 234</a>-241; <a href="#Page_39">ii. 39</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">state of, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Hume on, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.156">i. 156</a>-158;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's, in Second Discourse, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.171">i. 171</a>-180;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his starting-point of right, and normal constitution of civil society, <a href="#Page_124">ii. 124</a>. See
+<a href="#State">State of Nature</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Necker, <a href="#Page_54">ii. 54</a>, <a href="#Page_98">98</a>, <i>n.</i><br />
+<br />
+Neuch&#226;tel, flight to principality of, by Rousseau, <a href="#Page_73">ii. 73</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">history of, <a href="#Page_73">ii. 73</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">outbreak at, arising from religious controversy, <a href="#Page_90">ii. 90</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">preparations for driving Rousseau out of, defeated by Frederick of Prussia, <a href="#Page_90">ii. 90</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">clergy of, against Rousseau, <a href="#Page_106">ii. 106</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<a name="New">New Helo&#239;sa</a>, first conception of, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.250">i. 250</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">monument of Rousseau's fall, <a href="#Page_1">ii. 1</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">when completed and published, <a href="#Page_2">ii. 2</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">read aloud to the Duchess de Luxembourg, <a href="#Page_3">ii. 3</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">letter on suicide in, <a href="#Page_16">ii. 16</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">effects upon Parisian ladies of reading the, <a href="#Page_18">ii. 18</a>,
+<a href="#Page_19">19</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">criticism on, <a href="#Page_20">ii. 20</a>-55;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his scheme proposed in it, <a href="#Page_21">ii. 21</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">its story, <a href="#Page_24">ii. 24</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">its purity, contrasted with contemporary and later French romances, <a href="#Page_24">ii. 24</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">its general effect, <a href="#Page_27">ii. 27</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau absolutely without humour, <a href="#Page_27">ii. 27</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">utter selfishness of hero of, <a href="#Page_30">ii. 30</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">its heroine, <a href="#Page_30">ii. 30</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">its popularity, <a href="#Page_231">ii. 231</a>,
+<a href="#Page_232">232</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">burlesque on it, <a href="#Page_31">ii. 31</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">its vital defect, <a href="#Page_35">ii. 35</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">difference between Rousseau, Byron, and others, <a href="#Page_42">ii. 42</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">sumptuary details of the story, <a href="#Page_44">ii. 44</a>,
+<a href="#Page_45">45</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">its democratic tendency, <a href="#Page_49">ii. 49</a>,
+<a href="#Page_50">50</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">the bearing of its teaching, <a href="#Page_54">ii. 54</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">hindrances to its circulation in France, <a href="#Page_57">ii. 57</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Malesherbes's low morality as to publishing, <a href="#Page_61">ii. 61</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Optimism</span> of Pope and Leibnitz, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.309">i. 309</a>-310;<br />
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_339" id="Page_339">[ii.339]</a></span><span style="margin-left: 1em;">discussed, <a href="#Page_128">ii. 128</a>-130.</span><br />
+<br />
+Origin of inequality among men, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.156">i. 156</a>. See also <a href="#Discourses">Discourses</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Paley</span>, <a href="#Page_191">ii. 191</a>, <i>n.</i><br />
+<br />
+Palissot, <a href="#Page_56">ii. 56</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Paris, Rousseau's first visit to, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.61">i. 61</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his second, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.63">i. 63</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.97">97</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.102">102</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">third visit, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.106">i. 106</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">effect in, of his first Discourse, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.139">i. 139</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">opinions in, on religion, laws, etc., <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.185">i. 185</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">&quot;mimic philosophy&quot; there, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.193">i. 193</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">society in, in Rousseau's time, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.202">i. 202</a>-211;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his view of it, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.210">i. 210</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">composes there his <i>Muses Galantes</i>, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.211">i. 211</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">returns to, from Geneva, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.228">i. 228</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his belief of the unfitness of its people for political affairs, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.246">i. 246</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">goes to, in 1741, with his scheme of musical notation, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.291">i. 291</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">effect there of his letter on music, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.295">i. 295</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's imaginary contrast between, and Geneva, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.329">i. 329</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Emilius ordered to be publicly burnt in, <a href="#Page_65">ii. 65</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">parliament of, orders &quot;Letters from the Mountain&quot; to be burnt, <a href="#Page_295">ii. 295</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">also Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary, <a href="#Page_295">ii. 295</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Danton's scheme for municipal administration of, <a href="#Page_168">ii. 168</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">two parties (those of Voltaire and of Rousseau) in, in 1793, <a href="#Page_178">ii. 178</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">excitement in, at Rousseau's appearance in 1765, <a href="#Page_283">ii. 283</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">he goes to live there in 1770, <a href="#Page_314">ii. 314</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Voltaire's last visit to, <a href="#Page_323">ii. 323</a>,
+<a href="#Page_324">324</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+P&#226;ris, Abb&#233;, miracles at his tomb, <a href="#Page_88">ii. 88</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Parisian frivolity, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.193">i. 193</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.220">220</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.329">329</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Parliament and Jesuits, <a href="#Page_64">ii. 64</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Pascal, <a href="#Page_37">ii. 37</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Passy, Rousseau composes the &quot;Village Soothsayer&quot; at, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.212">i. 212</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Paul, St., effect of, on western society, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.4">i. 4</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Peasantry, French, oppression of, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.67">i. 67</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.68">68</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Pedigree of Rousseau, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.8">i. 8</a>, <i>n.</i><br />
+<br />
+Pelagius, <a href="#Page_272">ii. 272</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Peoples, sovereignty of, Rousseau not the inventor of doctrine of, <a href="#Page_144">ii. 144</a>-148;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">taught by Althusen, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.147">i. 147</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">constitution of Helvetic Republic in 1798, a blow at, <a href="#Page_165">ii. 165</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Pergolese, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.292">i. 292</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Pestalozzi indebted to Emilius, <a href="#Page_252">ii. 252</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Philidor, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.292">i. 292</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Philosophers, of Rousseau's time, contradicting each other, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.87">i. 87</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's complaint of the, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.202">i. 202</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">war between the, and the priests, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.322">i. 322</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's reactionary protest against, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.328">i. 328</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">troubles of, <a href="#Page_59">ii. 59</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">parliaments hostile to, <a href="#Page_64">ii. 64</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Philosophy, Rousseau's disgust at mimic, at Paris, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.193">i. 193</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">drew him to the essential in religion, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.220">i. 220</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Voltaire's no perfect, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.318">i. 318</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Phlipon, Jean Marie, Rousseau's influence on, <a href="#Page_315">ii. 315</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Plato, his republic, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.122">i. 122</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his influence on Rousseau, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.146">i. 146</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.325">325</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Milton on his Laws, <a href="#Page_178">ii. 178</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<a name="Plays">Plays</a> (stage), Rousseau's letter on, to D'Alembert, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.321">i. 321</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his views of, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.323">i. 323</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Jeremy Collier and Bossuet on, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.323">i. 323</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">in Geneva, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.333">i. 333</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.334">334</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau, Voltaire, and D'Alembert on, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.332">i. 332</a>-337.</span><br />
+<br />
+Plutarch, Rousseau's love for, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.13">i. 13</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Plutocracy, new, faults of, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.195">i. 195</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_340" id="Page_340">[ii.340]</a></span>Pompadour, Madame de, and the Jesuits, <a href="#Page_64">ii. 64</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Pontverre (priest) converts Rousseau to Romanism, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.31">i. 31</a>-35.<br />
+<br />
+Pope, his Essay on Man translated by Voltaire, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.309">i. 309</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Berlin Academy and Lessing on it, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.310">i. 310</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">criticism on it by Rousseau, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.312">i. 312</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">its general position reproduced by Rousseau, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.315">i. 315</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Popelini&#232;re, M. de, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.211">i. 211</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Positive knowledge, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.78">i. 78</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Press, freedom of the, <a href="#Page_59">ii. 59</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Pr&#233;vost, Abb&#233;, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.48">i. 48</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Projet pour l'Education</i>, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.96">i. 96</a>, <i>n.</i><br />
+<br />
+Property, private, evils ascribed to <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.157">i. 157</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.185">185</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Robespierre disclaimed the intention of attacking, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.123">i. 123</a>, <i>n.</i></span><br />
+<br />
+Protestant principles, effect of development of, <a href="#Page_146">ii. 146</a>-147.<br />
+<br />
+Protestantism, his conversion to, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.220">i. 220</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">its influence on Rousseau, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.221">i. 221</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Rameau</span> on Rousseau's <i>Muses Galantes</i>, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.119">i. 119</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.211">211</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">mentioned,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.291">i. 291</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Rationalism, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.224">i. 224</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.225">225</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">influence of Descartes on, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.225">i. 225</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Reason, De Saint Pierre's views of, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.244">i. 244</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Reform, essential priority of social over political, <a href="#Page_43">ii. 43</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Religion, simplification of, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.3">i. 3</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">ideas of, in Paris, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.186">i. 186</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.187">187</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.207">207</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.208">208</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's view of, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.220">i. 220</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">doctrines of, in Geneva, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.223">i. 223</a>-227, also <i>n.</i>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">curious project concerning it, by Rousseau, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.317">i. 317</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">separation of spiritual and temporal powers deemed mischievous by Rousseau, <a href="#Page_173">ii. 173</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">in its relation to the state may be considered as of three kinds, <a href="#Page_175">ii. 175</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">duty of the sovereign to establish a civil confession of faith, <a href="#Page_176">ii. 176</a>,
+<a href="#Page_177">177</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">positive dogmas of this, <a href="#Page_176">ii. 176</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's &quot;pure Hobbism,&quot; <a href="#Page_177">ii. 177</a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">See <a href="#Savoyard">Savoyard Vicar</a> (Emilius), <a href="#Page_256">ii. 256</a>,
+<a href="#Page_281">281</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Renou, Rousseau assumes name of, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.129">i. 129</a>; <a href="#Page_312">ii. 312</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Revelation, Christian, Rousseau's controversy on, with Archbishop of Paris, <a href="#Page_86">ii. 86</a>-91.<br />
+<br />
+<i>R&#234;veries</i>, Rousseau's relinquishing society, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.199">i. 199</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">description of his life in the isle of St. Peter, in the, <a href="#Page_109">ii. 109</a>-115;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">their style <a href="#Page_314">ii. 314</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Revolution, French, principles of, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.1">i. 1</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.2">2</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">benefits of, or otherwise, <a href="#Page_54">ii. 54</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Baboeuf on, <a href="#Page_123">ii. 123</a>,
+<a href="#Page_124">124</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">the starting point in the history of its ideas, <a href="#Page_160">ii. 160</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Revolutionary process and ideal <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.4">i. 4</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.5">5</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Revolutionists, difference among, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.2">i. 2</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Richardson (the novelist), <a href="#Page_25">ii. 25</a>, <a href="#Page_28">28</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Richelieu's brief patronage of Rousseau, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.195">i. 195</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.302">302</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Rivi&#232;re, de la, origin of society, <a href="#Page_156">ii. 156</a>,
+<a href="#Page_157">157</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">anecdote of, <a href="#Page_156">ii. 156</a>,
+<a href="#Page_157">157</a>, <i>n.</i></span><br />
+<br />
+Robecq, Madame de, <a href="#Page_56">ii. 56</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Robespierre, <a href="#Page_123">ii. 123</a>, <a href="#Page_134">134</a>,
+<a href="#Page_160">160</a>, <a href="#Page_178">178</a>, <a href="#Page_179">179</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his &quot;sacred right of insurrection,&quot; <a href="#Page_188">ii. 188</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's influence on, <a href="#Page_315">ii. 315</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Rousseau, Didier, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.8">i. 8</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Rousseau, Jean Baptiste, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.61">i. 61</a>, <i>n.</i><br />
+<br />
+Rousseau, Jean Jacques, influence of his writings on France and the American colonists, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.1">i. 1</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.2">2</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">on Robespierre, Paine, and Chateaubriand, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.3">i. 3</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his place as a leader, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.3">i. 3</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">starting-point, of his mental habits, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.4">i. 4</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">personality of, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.4">i. 4</a>;</span><br />
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_341" id="Page_341">[ii.341]</a></span><span style="margin-left: 1em;">influence on the common people, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.5">i. 5</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his birth and ancestry, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.8">i. 8</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">pedigree, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.8">i. 8</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">parents, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.10">i. 10</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.11">11</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">influence upon him of his father's character, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.11">i. 11</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.12">12</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his reading in childhood, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.12">i. 12</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.13">13</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">love of Plutarch, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.13">i. 13</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">early years, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.13">i. 13</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.14">14</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">sent to school at Bossey, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.15">i. 15</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">deterioration of his moral character there, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.17">i. 17</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">indignation at an unjust punishment, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.17">i. 17</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.18">18</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">leaves school, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.20">i. 20</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">youthful life at Geneva, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.21">i. 21</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.22">22</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his remarks on its character, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.24">i. 24</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">anecdotes of it, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.22">i. 22</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.24">24</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his leading error as to the education of the young, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.25">i. 25</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.26">26</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">religious training, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.25">i. 25</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">apprenticeship, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.26">i. 26</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">boyish doings, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.27">i. 27</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">harshness of his master, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.27">i. 27</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">runs away, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.29">i. 29</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">received by the priest of Confignon, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.31">i. 31</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">sent to Madame de Warens, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.84">i. 84</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">at Turin, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.35">i. 35</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">hypocritical conversion to Roman Catholicism, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.37">i. 37</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">motive, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.38">i. 38</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">registry of his baptism, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.38">i. 38</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his forlorn condition, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.39">i. 39</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">love of music, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.39">i. 39</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">becomes servant to Madame de Vercellis, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.39">i. 39</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his theft, lying, and excuses for it, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.39">i. 39</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.40">40</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">becomes servant to Count of Gouvon, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.42">i. 42</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">dismissed, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.43">i. 43</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">returns to Madame de Warens, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.45">i. 45</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his temperament, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.46">i. 46</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.47">47</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">in training for the priesthood, but pronounced too stupid, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.57">i. 57</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">tries music, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.57">i. 57</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">shamelessly abandons his companion, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.58">i. 58</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">goes to Freiburg, Neuch&#226;tel, and Paris, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.61">i. 61</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.62">62</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">conjectural chronology of his movements about this time. <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.62">i. 62</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">love of vagabond life, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.62">i. 62</a>-68;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">effect upon him of his intercourse with the poor, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.68">i. 68</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">becomes clerk to a land surveyor at Chamb&#233;ri, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.69">i. 69</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">life there, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.69">i. 69</a>-72;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">ill-health and retirement to Les Charmettes, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.73">i. 73</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his latest recollection of this time, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.75">i. 75</a>-77;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his &quot;form of worship,&quot; <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.77">i. 77</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">love of nature, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.77">i. 77</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.78">78</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">notion of deity, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.77">i. 77</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">peculiar intellectual feebleness, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.81">i. 81</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">criticism on himself, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.83">i. 83</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">want of logic in his mental constitution, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.85">i. 85</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">effect on him of Voltaire's Letters on the English, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.85">i. 85</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">self-training, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.86">i. 86</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">mistaken method of it, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.86">i. 86</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.87">8</a>7;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">writes a comedy, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.89">i. 89</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">enjoyment of rural life at Les Charmettes, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.91">i. 91</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.92">92</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">robs Madame de Warens, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.92">i. 92</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">leaves her, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.93">i. 93</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">discrepancy between dates of his letters and the Confessions, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.93">i. 93</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">takes a tutorship at Lyons, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.95">i. 95</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">condemns the practice of writing Latin, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.96">i. 96</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">resigns his tutorship, and goes to Paris, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.97">i. 97</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">reception there, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.98">i. 98</a>-100;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">appointed secretary to French Ambassador at Venice, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.100">i. 100</a>-106;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">in quarantine at Genoa, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.104">i. 104</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his estimate of French melody, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.105">i. 105</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">returns to Paris, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.106">i. 106</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">becomes acquainted with Theresa Le Vasseur, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.106">i. 106</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his conduct criticised, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.107">i. 107</a>-113;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">simple life, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.113">i. 113</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">letter to her, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.115">i. 115</a>-119;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his poverty, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.119">i. 119</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">becomes secretary to Madame Dupin and her son-in-law, M. de Francueil, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.119">i. 119</a>;</span><br />
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_342" id="Page_342">[ii.342]</a></span><span style="margin-left: 1em;">sends his children to the foundling hospital, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.120">i. 120</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.121">121</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">paltry excuses for the crime, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.121">i. 121</a>-126;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his pretended marriage under the name of Renou, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.129">i. 129</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his Discourses, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.132">i. 132</a>-186 (see
+<a href="#Discourses">Discourses</a>);</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">writes essays for academy of Dijon, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.132">i. 132</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">origin of first essay, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.133">i. 133</a>-137;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his &quot;visions&quot; for thirteen years, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.138">i. 138</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">evil effect upon himself of the first Discourse, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.138">i. 138</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">of it, the second Discourse and the Social Contract upon Europe, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.138">i. 138</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his own opinion of it, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.138">i. 138</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.139">139</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">influence of Plato upon him, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.146">i. 146</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">second Discourse, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.154">i. 154</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his &quot;State of Nature,&quot; <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.159">i. 159</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">no evidence for it, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.172">i. 172</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">influence of Montesquieu on him, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.183">i. 183</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">inconsistency of his views, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.124">i. 124</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">influence of Geneva upon him, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.187">i. 187</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.188">188</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his disgust at Parisian philosophers, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.191">i. 191</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.192">192</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">the two sides of his character, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.193">i. 193</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">associates in Paris, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.193">i. 193</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his income, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.196">i. 196</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.197">197</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">post of cashier, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.196">i. 196</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">throws it up, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.197">i. 197</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.198">198</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">determines to earn his living by copying music, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.198">i. 198</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.199">199</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">change of manners, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.201">i. 201</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">dislike of the manners of his time, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.202">i. 202</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.203">203</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">assumption of a seeming cynicism, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.206">i. 206</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Grimm's rebuke of it, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.206">i. 206</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's protest against atheism, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.208">i. 208</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.209">209</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">composes a musical interlude, the Village Soothsayer, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.212">i. 212</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his nervousness loses him the chance of a pension, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.213">i. 213</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his moral simplicity, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.214">i. 214</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.215">215</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">revisits Geneva, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.216">i. 216</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">re-conversion to Protestantism, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.220">i. 220</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his friends at Geneva, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.227">i. 227</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">their effect upon him, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.227">i. 227</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">returns to Paris, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.227">i. 227</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">the Hermitage offered him by Madame d'Epinay, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.229">i. 229</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.230">230</a> (and <i>ib. n.</i>);</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">retires to it against the protests of his friends, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.231">i. 231</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his love of nature, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.234">i. 234</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.235">235</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.236">236</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">first days at the Hermitage, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.237">i. 237</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">rural delirium, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.237">i. 237</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">dislike of society, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.242">i. 242</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">literary scheme, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.242">i. 242</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.243">243</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">remarks on Saint Pierre, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.246">i. 246</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">violent mental crisis, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.247">i. 247</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">employs his illness in writing to Voltaire on Providence, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.250">i. 250</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.251">251</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his intolerance of vice in others, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.254">i. 254</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">acquaintance with Madame de Houdetot, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.255">i. 255</a>-269;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">source of his irritability, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.270">i. 270</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.271">271</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">blind enthusiasm of his admirers, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.273">i. 273</a>, also <i>ib. n.</i>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">quarrels with Diderot, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.275">i. 275</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Grimm's account of them, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.276">i. 276</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">quarrels with Madame d'Epinay, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.276">i. 276</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.288">288</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">relations with Grimm, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.279">i. 279</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">want of sympathy between the two, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.279">i. 279</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">declines to accompany Madame d'Epinay to Geneva, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.285">i. 285</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">quarrels with Grimm, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.285">i. 285</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">leaves the Hermitage, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.289">i. 289</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.290">290</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">aims in music, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.291">i. 291</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">letter on French music, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.293">i. 293</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.294">294</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">writes on music in the Encyclop&#230;dia, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.296">i. 296</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his Musical Dictionary, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.296">i. 296</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">scheme and principles of his new musical notation, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.269">i. 269</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">explained, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.298">i. 298</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.299">299</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">its practical value, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.299">i. 299</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his mistake, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.300">i. 300</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">minor objections, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.300">i. 300</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his temperament and Genevan spirit, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.303">i. 303</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">compared with Voltaire, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.304">i. 304</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.305">305</a>;</span><br />
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_343" id="Page_343">[ii.343]</a></span><span style="margin-left: 1em;">had a more spiritual element than Voltaire, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.306">i. 306</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">its influence in France, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.307">i. 307</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">early relations with Voltaire, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.308">i. 308</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">letter to him on his poem on the earthquake at Lisbon, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.312">i. 312</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.313">313</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.314">314</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">reasons in a circle, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.316">i. 316</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">continuation of argument against Voltaire, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.316">i. 316</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.317">317</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">curious notion about religion, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.317">i. 317</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">quarrels with Voltaire, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.318">i. 318</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.319">319</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">denounces him as a &quot;trumpet of impiety,&quot; <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.320">i. 320</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">letter to D'Alembert on Stage Plays, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.321">i. 321</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">true answer to his theory, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.323">i. 323</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.324">324</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">contrasts Paris and Geneva, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.327">i. 327</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.328">328</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his patriotism, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.329">i. 329</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.330">330</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.331">331</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">censure of love as a poetic theme, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.334">i. 334</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.335">335</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">on Social Position of Women, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.335">i. 335</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Voltaire and D'Alembert's criticism on his Letter on Stage Plays, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.336">i. 336</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.337">337</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">final break with Diderot, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.336">i. 336</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">antecedents of his highest creative efforts, <a href="#Page_1">ii. 1</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">friends at Montmorency, <a href="#Page_2">ii. 2</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">reads the New Helo&#239;sa to the Mar&#233;chale de Luxembourg, <a href="#Page_2">ii. 2</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">unwillingness to receive gifts, <a href="#Page_5">ii. 5</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his relations with the Duke and Duchess de Luxembourg, <a href="#Page_7">ii. 7</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">misunderstands the friendliness of Madame de Boufflers, <a href="#Page_7">ii. 7</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">calm life at Montmorency, <a href="#Page_8">ii. 8</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">literary jealousy, <a href="#Page_8">ii. 8</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">last of his peaceful days, <a href="#Page_9">ii. 9</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">advice to a young man against the contemplative life, <a href="#Page_10">ii. 10</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">offensive form of his &quot;good sense&quot; concerning persecution of Protestants, <a href="#Page_11">ii. 11</a>,
+<a href="#Page_12">12</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">cause of his unwillingness to receive gifts, ii.
+<a href="#Page_13">13</a>, <a href="#Page_14">14</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">owns his ungrateful nature, <a href="#Page_15">ii. 15</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">ill-humoured banter, <a href="#Page_15">ii. 15</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his constant bodily suffering, <a href="#Page_16">ii. 16</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">thinks of suicide, <a href="#Page_16">ii. 16</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">correspondence with the readers of the New Helo&#239;sa, <a href="#Page_19">ii. 19</a>,
+<a href="#Page_20">20</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">the New Helo&#239;sa, criticism on, <a href="#Page_20">ii. 20</a>-55 (see
+<a href="#New">New Helo&#239;sa</a>);</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his publishing difficulties, <a href="#Page_56">ii. 56</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">no taste for martyrdom, <a href="#Page_59">ii. 59</a>,
+<a href="#Page_60">60</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">curious discussion between, <a href="#Page_59">ii. 59</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">and Malesherbes, <a href="#Page_60">ii. 60</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">indebted to Malesherbes in the publication of Emilius, <a href="#Page_61">ii. 61</a>,
+<a href="#Page_62">62</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">suspects Jesuits, Jansenists, and philosophers of plotting to crush the book, <a href="#Page_63">ii. 63</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">himself counted among the latter, <a href="#Page_65">ii. 65</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Emilius ordered to be burnt by public executioner, on the charge of irreligious tendency, and its author to be arrested, <a href="#Page_65">ii. 65</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his flight, <a href="#Page_67">ii. 67</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">literary composition on the journey to Switzerland, <a href="#Page_69">ii. 69</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">contrast between him and Voltaire, <a href="#Page_70">ii. 70</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">explanation of his &quot;natural ingratitude,&quot; <a href="#Page_71">ii. 71</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">reaches the canton of Berne, and ordered to quit it, <a href="#Page_72">ii. 72</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Emilius and Social Contract condemned to be publicly burnt at Geneva, and author arrested if he came there, <a href="#Page_72">ii. 72</a>,
+<a href="#Page_73">73</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">takes refuge at Motiers, in dominions of Frederick of Prussia, <a href="#Page_73">ii. 73</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">characteristic letters to the king, <a href="#Page_74">ii. 74</a>,
+<a href="#Page_77">77</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">declines pecuniary help from him, <a href="#Page_75">ii. 75</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his home and habits at Motiers, <a href="#Page_77">ii. 77</a>,
+<a href="#Page_78">78</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Voltaire supposed to have stirred up animosity against him at Geneva, <a href="#Page_81">ii. 81</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Archbishop of Paris writes against him, <a href="#Page_83">ii. 83</a>;</span><br />
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_344" id="Page_344">[ii.344]</a></span><span style="margin-left: 1em;">his reply, and character as a controversialist, <a href="#Page_83">ii. 83</a>-90;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">life at Val de Travers (Motiers), <a href="#Page_91">ii. 91</a>-95;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his generosity, <a href="#Page_93">ii. 93</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">corresponds with the Prince of W&#252;rtemberg on the education of the prince's daughter, <a href="#Page_95">ii. 95</a>,
+<a href="#Page_96">96</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">on Gibbon, <a href="#Page_96">ii. 96</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">visit from Boswell, <a href="#Page_98">ii. 98</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">invited to legislate for Corsica, <a href="#Page_99">ii. 99</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">urges Boswell to go there, <a href="#Page_100">ii. 100</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">denounces its sale by the Genoese, <a href="#Page_102">ii. 102</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">renounces his citizenship of Geneva, <a href="#Page_103">ii. 103</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his Letters from the Mountain, <a href="#Page_104">ii. 104</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">the letters condemned to be burned at Paris and the Hague, <a href="#Page_105">ii. 105</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">libel upon, <a href="#Page_105">ii. 105</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">religious difficulties with his pastor, <a href="#Page_106">ii. 106</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">ill-treatment of, in parish, <a href="#Page_106">ii. 106</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">obliged to leave it, <a href="#Page_108">ii. 108</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his next retreat, <a href="#Page_108">ii. 108</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">account in the <i>R&#234;veries</i> of his short stay there, <a href="#Page_109">ii. 109</a>-115;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">expelled by government of Berne, <a href="#Page_116">ii. 116</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">makes an extraordinary request to it, <a href="#Page_116">ii. 116</a>,
+<a href="#Page_117">117</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">difficulties in finding a home, <a href="#Page_117">ii. 117</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">short stay at Strasburg, <a href="#Page_117">ii. 117</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">decides on going to England, <a href="#Page_118">ii. 118</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his Social Contract, and criticism on, <a href="#Page_119">ii. 119</a>,
+<a href="#Page_196">196</a> (see
+<a href="#Social">Social Contract</a>);</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">scanty acquaintance with history, <a href="#Page_129">ii. 129</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">its effects on his political writings, <a href="#Page_129">ii. 129</a>,
+<a href="#Page_136">136</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his object in writing Emilius, <a href="#Page_198">ii. 198</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his confession of faith, under the character of the Savoyard Vicar (see
+<a href="#Emilius">Emilius</a>), <a href="#Page_257">ii. 257</a>-280;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">excitement caused by his appearance in Paris in 1765, <a href="#Page_282">ii. 282</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">leaves for England in company with Hume, <a href="#Page_283">ii. 283</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">reception in London, <a href="#Page_283">ii. 283</a>,
+<a href="#Page_284">284</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">George III. gives him a pension, <a href="#Page_284">ii. 284</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his love for his dog, <a href="#Page_286">ii. 286</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">finds a home at Wootton, <a href="#Page_286">ii. 286</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">quarrels with Hume, <a href="#Page_287">ii. 287</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">particulars in connection with it, <a href="#Page_287">ii. 287</a>-296;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his approaching insanity at this period, <a href="#Page_296">ii. 296</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">the preparatory conditions of it, <a href="#Page_297">ii. 297</a>-301;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">begins writing the Confessions, <a href="#Page_301">ii. 301</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">their character, <a href="#Page_301">ii. 301</a>-304;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">life at Wootton, <a href="#Page_305">ii. 305</a>,
+<a href="#Page_306">306</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">sudden flight thence, <a href="#Page_306">ii. 306</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">kindness of Mr. Davenport, <a href="#Page_306">ii. 306</a>,
+<a href="#Page_307">307</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his delusion, <a href="#Page_307">ii. 307</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">returns to France, <a href="#Page_308">ii. 308</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">received at Fleury by the elder Mirabeau, <a href="#Page_310">ii. 310</a>,
+<a href="#Page_311">311</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">the prince of Conti next receives him at Trye, <a href="#Page_312">ii. 312</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">composes the second part of the Confessions here, <a href="#Page_312">ii. 312</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">delusion returns, <a href="#Page_312">ii. 312</a>,
+<a href="#Page_313">313</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">leaves Trye, and wanders about the country, <a href="#Page_312">ii. 312</a>,
+<a href="#Page_313">313</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">estrangement from Theresa, <a href="#Page_313">ii. 313</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">goes to Paris, <a href="#Page_314">ii. 314</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">writes his Dialogues there, <a href="#Page_314">ii. 314</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">again earns his living by copying music, <a href="#Page_315">ii. 315</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">daily life in, <a href="#Page_315">ii. 315</a>,
+<a href="#Page_316">316</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Bernardin St. Pierre's account of him, <a href="#Page_317">ii. 317</a>-321;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his veneration for F&#233;nelon, <a href="#Page_321">ii. 321</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his unsociality, <a href="#Page_322">ii. 322</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">checks a detractor of Voltaire, <a href="#Page_324">ii. 324</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">draws up his Considerations on the Government of Poland, <a href="#Page_324">ii. 324</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">estimate of the Spanish, <a href="#Page_324">ii. 324</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his poverty, <a href="#Page_325">ii. 325</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">accepts a home at Ermenonville from M. Girardin, <a href="#Page_326">ii. 326</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his painful condition, <a href="#Page_326">ii. 326</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">sudden death, <a href="#Page_326">ii. 326</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">cause of it unknown, <a href="#Page_326">ii. 326</a> (see also <i>ib. n.</i>);</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his interment, <a href="#Page_326">ii. 326</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">finally removed to Paris, <a href="#Page_328">ii. 328</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_345" id="Page_345">[ii.345]</a></span><span class="smcap">Sainte Beuve</span> on Rousseau and Madame d'Epinay, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.279">i. 279</a>, <i>n.</i>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">on Rousseau, <a href="#Page_40">ii. 40</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Saint Germain, M. de, Rousseau's letter to, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.123">i. 123</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Saint Just, <a href="#Page_132">ii. 132</a>, <a href="#Page_133">133</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his political regulations, <a href="#Page_133">ii. 133</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">base of his system, <a href="#Page_136">ii. 136</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">against the atheists, <a href="#Page_179">ii. 179</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Saint Lambert, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.244">i. 244</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">offers Rousseau a home in Lorraine, <a href="#Page_117">ii. 117</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Saint Pierre, Abb&#233; de, Rousseau arranges papers of, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.244">i. 244</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his views concerning reason, <i>ib.</i>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">boldness of his observations, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.245">i. 245</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Saint Pierre, Bernardin de, account of his visit to Rousseau at Paris, <a href="#Page_317">ii. 317</a>-321.<br />
+<br />
+Sand, Madame G., <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.81">i. 81</a>, <i>n.</i>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Savoy landscape, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.99">i. 99</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">ancestry of, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.121">i. 121</a>, <i>n.</i></span><br />
+<br />
+Savages, code of morals of, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.178">i. 178</a>-179, <i>n.</i><br />
+<br />
+Savage state, advantages of, Rousseau's letter to Voltaire, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.312">i. 312</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Savoy, priests of, proselytisers, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.30">i. 30</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.31">31</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.33">33</a> (also <i>ib.</i> <i>n.</i>)<br />
+<br />
+<a name="Savoyard">Savoyard </a>Vicar, the, origin of character of, <a href="#Page_257">ii. 257</a>-280 (see
+<a href="#Emilius">Emilius</a>).<br />
+<br />
+Schiller on Rousseau, <a href="#Page_192">ii. 192</a> (also <i>ib.</i> <i>n.</i>);<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's influence on, <a href="#Page_315">ii. 315</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Servetus, <a href="#Page_180">ii. 180</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Simplification, the revolutionary process and ideal of, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.4">i. 4</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">in reference to Rousseau's music, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.291">i. 291</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Social conscience, theory and definition of, <a href="#Page_234">ii. 234</a>,
+<a href="#Page_235">235</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">the great agent in fostering, <a href="#Page_237">ii. 237</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<a name="Social">Social Contract</a>, the, ill effect of, on Europe, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.138">i. 138</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">beginning of its composition, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.177">i. 177</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">ideas of, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.188">i. 188</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">its harmful dreams, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.246">i. 246</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">influence of, <a href="#Page_1">ii. 1</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">price of, and difficulties in publishing, <a href="#Page_59">ii. 59</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">ordered to be burnt at Geneva, <a href="#Page_72">ii. 72</a>,
+<a href="#Page_73">73</a>, <a href="#Page_104">104</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">detailed criticism of, <a href="#Page_119">ii. 119</a>-196;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau diametrically opposed to the dominant belief of his day in human perfectibility, <a href="#Page_119">ii. 119</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">object of the work, <a href="#Page_120">ii. 120</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">main position of the two Discourses given up in it, <a href="#Page_120">ii. 120</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">influenced by Locke, <a href="#Page_120">ii. 120</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">its uncritical, illogical principles, <a href="#Page_123">ii. 123</a>,
+<a href="#Page_124">124</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">its impracticableness, <a href="#Page_128">ii. 128</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">nature of his illustrations, <a href="#Page_128">ii. 128</a>-133;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">the &quot;gospel of the Jacobins,&quot; <a href="#Page_132">ii. 132</a>,
+<a href="#Page_133">133</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">the desperate absurdity of its assumptions gave it power in the circumstances of the times, <a href="#Page_135">ii. 135</a>-141;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">some of its maxims very convenient for ruling Jacobins, <a href="#Page_142">ii. 142</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">its central conception, the sovereignty of peoples, <a href="#Page_144">ii. 144</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau not its inventor, <a href="#Page_144">ii. 144</a>,
+<a href="#Page_145">145</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">this to be distinguished from doctrine of right of subjects to depose princes, <a href="#Page_146">ii. 146</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Social Contract idea of government, probably derived from Locke, <a href="#Page_150">ii. 150</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">falseness of it, <a href="#Page_153">ii. 153</a>,
+<a href="#Page_154">154</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">origin of society, <a href="#Page_154">ii. 154</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">ill effects on Rousseau's political speculation, <a href="#Page_155">ii. 155</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">what constitutes the sovereignty, <a href="#Page_158">ii. 158</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's Social Contract different from that of Hobbes, <a href="#Page_159">ii. 159</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Locke's indefiniteness on, <a href="#Page_160">ii. 160</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">attributes of sovereignty, <a href="#Page_163">ii. 163</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">confederation, <a href="#Page_164">ii. 164</a>,
+<a href="#Page_165">165</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his distinction between <i>tyrant</i> and <i>despot</i>, <a href="#Page_169">ii. 169</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br />
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_346" id="Page_346">[ii.346]</a></span><span style="margin-left: 1em;">distinguishes constitution of the state from that of the government, <a href="#Page_170">ii. 170</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">scheme of an elective aristocracy, <a href="#Page_172">ii. 172</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">similarity to the English form of government, <a href="#Page_173">ii. 173</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">the state in respect to religion, <a href="#Page_173">ii. 173</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">habitually illogical form of his statements, <a href="#Page_173">ii. 173</a>,
+<a href="#Page_174">174</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">duty of sovereign to establish civil profession of faith, <a href="#Page_175">ii. 175</a>,
+<a href="#Page_176">176</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">infringement of it to be punished, even by death, <a href="#Page_176">ii. 176</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's Hobbism, <a href="#Page_177">ii. 177</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">denial of his social compact theory, <a href="#Page_183">ii. 183</a>,
+<a href="#Page_184">184</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">futility of his disquisitions on, <a href="#Page_185">ii. 185</a>,
+<a href="#Page_186">186</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his declaration of general duty of rebellion (arising out of the universal breach of social compact) considered, <a href="#Page_188">ii. 188</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">it makes government impossible, <a href="#Page_188">ii. 188</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">he urges that usurped authority is another valid reason for rebellion, <a href="#Page_190">ii. 190</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">practical evils of this, <a href="#Page_192">ii. 192</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">historical effect of the Social Contract, <a href="#Page_192">ii. 192</a>-195.</span><br />
+<br />
+Social quietism of some parts of New Helo&#239;sa, <a href="#Page_49">ii. 49</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Socialism: Morelly, and De Mably, <a href="#Page_52">ii. 52</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">what it is, <a href="#Page_159">ii. 159</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Socialistic theory of Morelly, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.158">i. 158</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.159">159</a> (also <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.158">i. 158</a>, <i>n.</i>)<br />
+<br />
+Society, Aristotle on, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.174">i. 174</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">D'Alembert's statements on, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.174">i. 174</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Parisian, Rousseau on, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.209">i. 209</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">dislike of, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.242">i. 242</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's origin of, <a href="#Page_153">ii. 153</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">true grounds of, <a href="#Page_155">ii. 155</a>,
+<a href="#Page_156">156</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Socrates, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.131">i. 131</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.140">140</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.232">232</a>; <a href="#Page_72">ii. 72</a>,
+<a href="#Page_273">273</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Solitude, eighteenth century notions of, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.231">i. 231</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.232">232</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Solon, <a href="#Page_133">ii. 133</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Sorbonne, the, condemns Emilius, <a href="#Page_82">ii. 82</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Spectator, the, Rousseau's liking for, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.86">i. 86</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Spinoza, dangerous speculations of, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.143">i. 143</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Sta&#235;l, Madame de, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.217">i. 217</a>, <i>n.</i><br />
+<br />
+Stage players, how treated in France, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.322">i. 322</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Stage plays (see <a href="#Plays">Plays</a>).<br />
+<br />
+<a name="State">State of Nature</a>, Rousseau's, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.159">i. 159</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.160">160</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Hobbes on, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.161">i. 161</a> (see <a href="#Nature">Nature</a>).</span><br />
+<br />
+Suicide, Rousseau on, <a href="#Page_16">ii. 16</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">a mistake to pronounce him incapable of, <a href="#Page_19">ii. 19</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Switzerland, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.330">i. 330</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Tacitus</span>, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.177">i. 177</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Theatre, Rousseau's letter, objecting to the, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.133">i. 133</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his error in the matter, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.134">i. 134</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Theology, metaphysical, Descartes' influence on, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.226">i. 226</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Theresa (see Le <a href="#Vasseur">Vasseur</a>).<br />
+<br />
+Thought, school of, division between rationalists and emotionalists, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.337">i. 337</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Tonic Sol-fa notation, close correspondence of the, to Rousseau's system, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.299">i. 299</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Tronchin on Voltaire, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.319">i. 319</a>, <i>n.</i>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.321">321</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Turgot, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.89">i. 89</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his discourses at the Sorbonne in 1750, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.155">i. 155</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">the one sane eminent Frenchman of eighteenth century, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.202">i. 202</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his unselfish toil, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.233">i. 233</a>; <a href="#Page_193">ii. 193</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">mentioned, <a href="#Page_246">ii. 246</a>,
+<a href="#Page_294">294</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Turin, Rousseau at, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.34">i. 34</a>-43;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">leaves it, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.45">i. 45</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">tries to learn Latin at, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.91">i. 91</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Turretini and other rationalisers, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.226">i. 226</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his works, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.226">i. 226</a>, <i>n.</i></span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_347" id="Page_347">[ii.347]</a></span><span class="smcap">Universe</span>, constitution of, discussion on, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.311">i. 311</a>-317.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Vagabond</span> life, Rousseau's love of, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.63">i. 63</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.68">68</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Val de Travers, <a href="#Page_77">ii. 77</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rousseau's life in, <a href="#Page_91">ii. 91</a>-95.</span><br />
+<br />
+<a name="Vasseur">Vasseur</a>, Theresa Le, Rousseau's first acquaintance with, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.106">i. 106</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.107">107</a>, also <i>ib.</i> <i>n.</i>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">their life together, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.110">i. 110</a>-113;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">well befriended, <a href="#Page_80">ii. 80</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">her evil character, <a href="#Page_326">ii. 326</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Vauvenargues on emotional instinct, <a href="#Page_34">ii. 34</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Venice, Rousseau at, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.100">i. 100</a>-106.<br />
+<br />
+Vercellis, Madame de, Rousseau servant to, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.39">i. 39</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Verdelin, Madame de, her kindness to Theresa, <a href="#Page_80">ii. 80</a>, <i>n.</i>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">to Rousseau, <a href="#Page_118">ii. 118</a>, <i>n.</i></span><br />
+<br />
+Village Soothsayer, the (<i>Devin du Village</i>), composed at Passy, performed at Fontainebleau and Paris, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.212">i. 212</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">marked a revolution in French Music, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.291">i. 291</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Voltaire, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.2">i. 2</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.21">21</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.63">63</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">effect on Rousseau of his Letters on the English, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.86">i. 86</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">spreads a derogatory report about Rousseau, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.101">i. 101</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his &quot;Princesse de Navarre,&quot; <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.119">i. 119</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">criticism on Rousseau's first Discourse, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.147">i. 147</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">effect on his work of his common sense, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.155">i. 155</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">avoids the society of Paris, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.202">i. 202</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his conversion to Romanism, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.220">i. 220</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.221">221</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">strictures on Homer and Shakespeare, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.280">i. 280</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his position in the eighteenth century, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.301">i. 301</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">general difference between, and Rousseau, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.301">i. 301</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">clung to the rationalistic school of his day, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.305">i. 305</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">on Rousseau's second Discourse, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.308">i. 308</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his poem on the earthquake of Lisbon, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.309">i. 309</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.310">310</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his sympathy with suffering, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.311">i. 311</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.312">312</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">entreated by Rousseau to draw up a civil profession of religious faith, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.317">i. 317</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">denounced by Rousseau as a &quot;trumpet of impiety,&quot; <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.317">i. 317</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.320">320</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his satire and mockery irritated Rousseau, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.319">i. 319</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">what he was to his contemporaries, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.321">i. 321</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">the great play-writer of the time, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.321">i. 321</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his criticism of Rousseau's Letter on the Theatre, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.336">i. 336</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his indignation at wrong, <a href="#Page_11">ii. 11</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">ridicule of the New Helo&#239;sa, <a href="#Page_34">ii. 34</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">less courageous than Rousseau, <a href="#Page_65">ii. 65</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">contrast between the two, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.99">i. 99</a>, <a href="#Page_75">ii. 75</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">supposed to have stirred up animosity at Geneva against Rousseau, <a href="#Page_81">ii. 81</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">denies it, <a href="#Page_81">ii. 81</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his notion of how the matter would end, <a href="#Page_81">ii. 81</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his fickleness, <a href="#Page_83">ii. 83</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">on Rousseau's connection with Corsica, <a href="#Page_101">ii. 101</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his Philosophical Dictionary burnt by order at Paris, <a href="#Page_105">ii. 105</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">his opinion of Emilius, <a href="#Page_257">ii. 257</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">prime agent in introducing English deism into France, <a href="#Page_262">ii. 262</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">suspected by Rousseau of having written the pretended letter from the King of Prussia, <a href="#Page_288">ii. 288</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">last visit to Paris, <a href="#Page_324">ii. 324</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Walking</span>, Rousseau's love of, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.63">i. 63</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Walpole, Horace, writer of the pretended letter from the King of Prussia, <a href="#Page_288">ii. 288</a>, <i>n.</i>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">advises Hume not to publish his account of Rousseau's quarrel with him, <a href="#Page_295">ii. 295</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+War arising out of the succession to the crown of Poland, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.72">i. 72</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Warens, Madame de, Rousseau's introduction to, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.34">i. 34</a>;<br />
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_348" id="Page_348">[ii.348]</a></span><span style="margin-left: 1em;">her personal appearance, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.34">i. 34</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">receives Rousseau into her house, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.43">i. 43</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">her early life, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.48">i. 48</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">character of, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.49">i. 49</a>-51;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">goes to Paris, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.59">i. 59</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">receives Rousseau at Chamb&#233;ri, and gets him employment, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.69">i. 69</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">her household, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.70">i. 70</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">removes to Les Charmettes, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.73">i. 73</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">cultivates Rousseau's taste for letters, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.85">i. 85</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Saint Louis, her patron saint, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.91">i. 91</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">revisited by Rousseau in 1754, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.216">i. 216</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">her death in poverty and wretchedness, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.217">i. 217</a>,
+<a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.218">218</a> (also <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.219">i. 219</a>, <i>n.</i>)</span><br />
+<br />
+Wesleyanism, <a href="#Page_258">ii. 258</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Women, Condorcet on social position of, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.335">i. 335</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">D'Alembert and Condorcet on, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.335">i. 335</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Wootton, Rousseau's home at, <a href="#Page_286">ii. 286</a>.<br />
+<br />
+World, divine government of, Rousseau vindicates, <a href="rousseau1-htm.html#Page_i.312">i. 312</a>.<br />
+<br />
+W&#252;rtemberg, correspondence between Prince of, and Rousseau, on the education of the little princess, <a href="#Page_95">ii. 95</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">becomes reigning duke, <a href="#Page_95">ii. 95</a>, <i>n.</i>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">seeks permission for Rousseau to live in Vienna, <a href="#Page_117">ii. 117</a>.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 35%;" />
+
+<h3>THE END.</h3>
+
+
+<p style="text-align: center"><i>Printed by</i> <span class="smcap">R. &amp; R. Clark, Limited</span>, <i>Edinburgh.</i></p>
+
+<p style="text-align: center">[<a href="rousseau1-htm.html">Go to Volume 1</a>]</p>
+
+
+
+
+</body>
+</html>